Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [34]
Many states took this flight a step farther: They privatized executions, moving them from public spaces to the isolation of the prison yard, where only a select few could watch. Pennsylvania abolished public executions in 1834, and a year later New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey followed suit. By 1845 every state in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region had privatized executions.14
Although the fear of riotous hanging day mobs was the most immediate cause of the new laws, private executions also reflected a more general move away from criminal punishments that involved the public infliction of pain. Over the course of the eighteenth century, American officials gradually made fewer crimes subject to the death penalty and began to be more sparing in their use of corporal punishments such as whipping. The practice of gibbeting—hanging the criminal's body in public for weeks or months after the execution—also stopped. In the 1780s and 1790s American states started building penitentiaries, where, in theory at least, criminals enjoyed the solitude to consider their crimes, grow penitent, and transform themselves into virtuous citizens. Rather than punishing the criminal's body, the state embarked on reshaping his soul.
The United States eased physical punishments earlier than its European counterparts. In the early nineteenth century, England operated under the "Bloody Code," a set of laws that rendered more than 200 crimes capital offenses. People—almost exclusively poor people—were hanged for petty offenses such as forging bank notes or stealing a few spoons. Similar codes prevailed in American colonies for much of the eighteenth century, although executions for these lesser offenses were much more rare in America than in England. After the Revolution most American states abolished the death penalty for crimes such as burglary and sodomy, retaining it only for murder and treason. Having fought a war to be free of the tyranny of King George III, Americans had no desire to institute his brutal system of punishments in their pure young nation. In 1794 Pennsylvania lawmakers invented the concept of degrees of murder, in which only first-degree—premeditated-killing earned the noose. The new ideas about criminal justice also became enshrined in the federal Constitution, in which the Bill of Rights protected accused criminals and banned "cruel and unusual punishments." That phrase, borrowed from the English Bill of Rights of 1689, guarded against a return to such barbarous European practices as burning alive or drawing and quartering. Capital punishment itself was not seen as cruel and unusual.15
Some people, however, believed that the logical conclusion of the move away from physical punishment was the abolition of the death penalty. From the 1820s through the 1850s a vigorous anti-capital punishment movement emerged in the northern states,* supported by, among many others, the poet William Cullen Bryant and the newspaper editor Horace Greeley. The death penalty foes were met by an equally vigorous group of death penalty defenders.
The battle turned on competing views of human nature. Religious conservatives believed that humans were deeply depraved, and that only harsh laws rigidly enforced could keep anarchy at bay. Civil government was the earthly representative of divine government, and biblical justice demanded death for murderers: According to Genesis 9:6, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." Opponents of the gallows emerged from the same school of thought that created the penitentiary. In their view, human nature at heart was moral, reasonable, and capable of reform. People's characters were formed not by the corruption of original sin but by their environments, so convicted criminals needed