Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [137]
9. Albany Daily Advertiser, August 25,1827.
10. Quotations from ibid. On public behavior at hangings, see Banner, Death Penalty, 146-51; Philip English Mackey, Hanging in the Balance: The Anti-Capital Punishment Movement in New York State, 1776-1861 (New York: Garland, 1982), 108-11; V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 90-105.
11. Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1813-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 37-61; Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 173-77; 235-64.
12. Quotation from Banner, Death Penalty, 150. Also see Gatrell, Hanging Tree, 32-38.
13. Quotations from Michael Madow, "Forbidden Spectacle: Executions, the Public and the Press in Nineteenth Century New York," Buffalo Law Review 43 (1995): 500.
14. Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776-1863 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 94; John D. Bessler, Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 41-46.
15. Masur, Rites of Execution, 76-84; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; David J. Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); David J. Rothman, "Perfecting the Prison," in Oxford History of the Prison, 111-29; Lane, Murder in America, 79-80; Banner, Death Penalty, 88-111, 231-33; Gatrell, Hanging Tree, 7, 20-21, 201-3; David D. Cooper, The Lesson of the Scaffold: The Public Execution Controversy in Victorian England (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), 27-33.
16. Quotation from Walt Whitman, "A Dialogue," United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (November 1845): 360-64. Also see Masur, Rites of Execution, 153-56; Reverend Charles Wiley, "Retributive Law and Capital Punishment," American Presbyterian Review 20 (1871): 414-31; A. Jacobi, William C. Wey, and B. F. Sherman, "Capital Punishment. Report of a Committee Appointed by the Medical Society of the State of New York at its Annual Meeting in 1891, and Presented Before the Society at the Session of 1892," Sanitarian 29 (1892): 47-57.
17. Quotations from Masur, Rites of Execution, 157; Banner, Death Penalty, 216-17; New York Herald, May 1, 1893. Also see E. S. Nadal, "The Rationale of the Opposition to Capital Punishment," North American Review 116 (1873): 138-50.
18. The Maine law stipulated that a prisoner could be executed no sooner than one year from the date of sentence, and then only by a specific order from the governor. After the law was passed, no executions took place in Maine for twenty-seven years. Philip English Mackey, "Introduction," in Mackey, ed., Voices Against Death: American Opposition to Capital Punishment, 1787-1973 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1976), xxi-xxii; David Brion Davis, "The Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment in America, 1787-1861," in From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 17-40; Banner, Death Penalty, 134-55.
19. Madow, "Forbidden Spectacle," 512-15; Banner, Death Penalty, 157-60.
20. Gatrell, Hanging Tree, 51-54; Banner, Death Penalty, 44-47,171-74.
21. Madow, "Forbidden Spectacle," 530-31. For reports on bungled hangings, see New York Times, May 20, 1882; New York World, October 1, 1885; Buffalo Courier, July 11,1889.
22. Quotations from Edmund Clarence Stedman, "The Gallows in America," Putnam's Magazine 13 (February 1869): 225-35 (reprinted in Mackey, Voices Against Death, 132-40, emphasis in original); New York Times, January 17,1888. Also see Banner, Death Penalty, 220-21; Roger Lane, "Capital Punishment," in Violence in America: An Encyclopedia, ed. Ronald Gottesman (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999), 198-203. Maine restored the death penalty in 1883,