Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [33]
When the service was ended, Reverend Lacey commended Strang to his maker and resigned him to the civil authorities, and the prisoner drew the cap down over his own face. The sheriff bound Strang's legs, pinioned his arms behind his back, and adjusted the noose around his neck. The sheriff gave the signal, the drop fell, and Jesse Strang "was launched into eternity."9
In its formal aspect—the procession, the gallows confession, the prayers—Jesse Strang's 1827 hanging resembled the execution ceremonies in Massachusetts Bay a century before, but the similarities ended there. In his gallows speech, Strang held up a pamphlet titled Confession of Jesse Strang and declared that "every word that it contains . . . is true." The condemned man used the last minute of his life on Earth to plug a lurid account of the romance and murder that led him to the noose. Strang's endorsement delighted the hucksters who were working the huge crowd to sell the pamphlet, along with other goods. Thirty thousand spectators required food and drink, and Albany's tavern keepers and grocers happily supplied rum and ale, bread and meat. Rather than the Puritans' solemn ceremony, hanging day had become a public holiday. In the nineteenth century there was probably no single event that attracted as many spectators as a hanging, and the men and women were not always on their best behavior. According to a newspaper account of Strang's hanging, "scenes of the most disgraceful drunkenness, gambling, profanity, and almost all kinds of debauchery" had occurred around the gallows, "even at the very time the culprit was suffering."10
The type of disorder witnessed at Strang's hanging was not unusual, and it was beginning to make America's ruling classes nervous. Sheriffs were staging hangings as their predecessors had a century before, but the United States had become a very different place. The country's population had grown enormously, from 1.5 million in 1750 to 13 million in 1830. Many of the newcomers crowded into cities, where the nature of work and social life was being altered. Before the Revolution America had been a paternalistic society. Most goods were produced in small shops, and owners worked alongside their employees and kept a close eye on them, both when they were at work and in their leisure hours. The emergence of large factories and the growth of a market economy changed that. By the 1820s the United States was home to tens of thousands of masterless men, who put in their hours at work and could do what they pleased in their free time: get drunk, go to theaters, gamble, visit brothels. They also had a tendency to express their views through group violence. In the years before the Civil War, there were riots over elections, abolition, Catholicism, Mormonism, brothels, race, immigration, working conditions, theatrical performances, and a dozen other issues. The first American police forces were created in these years specifically to address the problems of mob violence.11
The working class revealed a reluctance to behave as their betters wished, and this independent streak revealed itself at public executions. The sheriffs and clergy tried to teach lessons about state power and the price of sin, but members of the audience, bent on drinking and gambling, proved to be reluctant pupils. Sometimes the condemned man chose to "die game"—according to the phrase at the time—refusing to play the contrite role and defying the authorities to the end. In such cases the crowd often treated the condemned man as a hero and the authorities as villains. "An hundred persons are made worse, where one is made better by a public execution," one man wrote in 1826. The mob had wrenched control of the ceremony out of the hands of the authorities and given it a subversive new meaning.12
AUTHORITIES TRIED various methods of reasserting control over hanging day. To limit the size of crowds, New York City officials in the late 1820s tried moving hangings to islands in the harbor, or starting