Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [404]
In 1835 the Bellevue Institution took on one last function, that of serving as Manhattan’s execution ground. This represented a major change for New York’s criminal justice system, which had relied for centuries on highly public hangings, staged, in recent years, at sites around the city. In 1816 Ishmael Frazer, a colored man, and Diana Silleck, a white woman, were hanged at Bleecker and Mercer, for arson and murder respectively. In 1820 Rose Butler, a black servant convicted of arson, was dispatched in the potter’s field at what would become Washington Square.
Until the 1820s these public executions had remained sober communal rituals, in which the condemned, the crowd, and the civic authorities all played their respective roles: the first contrite, the second awed, the third magisterial. One of the last executions to follow the traditional script came in 1825, with the hanging of James Reynolds, a twenty-two-year-old seaman convicted of murdering his ship’s captain with an ax. A vast crowd had already assembled at the old prison near City Hall when, at ten A.M., the high constable and the sheriff, the marshals and ministers, and a battalion of infantry and company of dragoons took their places. At 10:30 the prisoner, wearing white trousers, a white frock, and a white cap trimmed with black, was led out from his cell and seated on a small stage. The Rev. John Stanford (as the Commercial Advertiser recounted) gave a “very solemn and affecting” sermon, which “caused the tear to flow from many an eye.”
Then the procession rumbled off, led by the sheriff on horseback, with Reynolds in an open carriage preceded by a wagon carrying his coffin, the entire convoy surrounded by the military and trailed by the crowd. At the scaffold, two miles out of town, the sheriff read the death warrant, and Reynolds addressed the assembled. He had led a moral life, he explained, until corrupted by drink and the brothels of Corlear’s Hook, and he exhorted youthful onlookers “to take warning by the awful spectacle, and shun the paths of vice.” Finally Reynolds sang a psalm with the minister, the cap was drawn over his eyes, and he was hanged at 12:45 while “earnestly praying to God for pardon.”
Prompted in part by a new delicacy of feeling, however, elites were beginning to turn against such spectacles. Essayists, editors, ministers, and legislators began to denounce them as “disgusting exhibitions,” finding them revolting rather than uplifting. It was not executions that troubled them—few of the critics sought an end to capital punishment—but rather their public character. Hangings summoned up mammoth crowds at a time when crowds (like the Callithumpians) were falling out of favor with the gentry. At a minimum, they clogged public space, wasted time, and were bad for business. Worse, these affairs—increasingly festivals of disorder plagued by drunks and pickpockets—seemed to excite base and brutal passions among the populace, to blunt rather than cultivate moral sensibilities. Formerly awe-inspiring drama was turning into counterproductive farce, more blood sport than solemn ceremony.
Lingering republican convictions that private executions smacked of star-chamber despotism led authorities to seek a compromise by keeping them public but limiting popular access. For the 1829 double execution of convicted murderers Richard Johnson (white) and Catharine Cashier (black), the authorities selected Blackwell’s Island as venue. At eight A.M. the two were whisked from the Bridewell, in separate carriages, “with such rapidity [said the Post] as to prevent the rabble from keeping pace with the cavalcade.” But when the