Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [41]
A Scientific American illustration of Southwick and Fell's dog-killing cage, used in Buffalo in the summer of 1887.
THE DEATH PENALTY commissioners completed their work in January 1888 and submitted a report to the New York legislature. Although the report did, at the end, propose a new method of capital punishment, the bulk of it was devoted to a catalog of death, in which the commissioners described—in alphabetical order and exquisite detail—every method of execution they had discovered.
Southwick and his colleagues began with auto da fe (literally "act of faith," the Spanish Inquisition's ceremonial execution of heretics, usually by burning), then proceeded to beating with clubs and beheading, duly noting national differences in decapitation practice among the English, Chinese, and Japanese. Next came blowing from a cannon, in which the victim was either lashed to the cannon's mouth or stuffed into the barrel: "Here is no interval for suffering," the report stated, because "no sooner has the peripheral sensation reached the central perceptive organ than that organ is dissipated on the four winds of heaven." Executions by boiling employed not only water but also melted sulfur, lead, and oil. Breaking on the wheel, in which the victim was lashed to a large wheel and beaten viciously with clubs, was common for a time in western Europe (a blow to the head that brought death and ended suffering was known as a coup de grace—"stroke of mercy"). Death by burning was familiar to students of European history, but the commissioners did not content themselves with such pedestrian examples. They discovered a Persian practice known as "illuminated body," in which the victim was bound to a slab and "innumerable little holes were bored all over his body. These were filled with oil, a little taper was set in each hole and they were all lighted together."
The death commission's report marched on, through burying alive, crucifixion, decimation, dichotomy (splitting the body in two), dismemberment, drowning, exposure to wild beasts (in some cases a victim was sewn "in a sack alive, venomous serpents with him, and sometimes a dog, a monkey or the like were added"), flaying alive, flogging, gar rote, guillotine, hanging, hara-kiri, impalement, iron maiden, poisoning, pounding in mortar, precipitation (throwing the victim off a cliff), pressing to death, the rack, running the gauntlet, shooting, stabbing, stoning, strangling, and suffocation.21
The commissioners were aware that there was something strange about their exhaustive inventory of death. They explained apologetically that "brief mention of these monstrosities" was included to "indicate the thoroughness of the research." But the descriptions were not brief, and they indicated more than the researchers' desire to display their industriousness. In part, the commissioners hoped that compared to such barbarism, their own mercy would shine all the brighter.22
The catalog of death also revealed the dark underbelly of the humanitarian sensibility. During the same years that pain became unacceptable, the public grew more fascinated with violence and death. Edgar Allan Poe was only the most famous of hundreds of nineteenth-century writers who dwelled with delight on blood, murder, dissection, and the putrefying corpse. At dime museums, catchall repositories of nineteenth-century popular culture, the public could see waxwork reproductions of famous murder scenes and jars containing body parts of executed murderers. The anticruelty movement may have curtailed public executions and blood sports, but it only fed the public's appetite for violent death. Horror writing had not existed in the premodern world, when physical torment was an accepted part of everyday life. But when suffering became obscene, the stage was set for a pornography of pain.23
The death commissioners made great efforts to present themselves as thoroughly rational, but they had