Executing Democracy: Volume Two: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1835-1843

by Stephen John Hartnett

Overview

This eye-opening and well-researched companion to the first volume of Executing Democracy enters the death-penalty discussion during the debates of 1835 and 1843, when pro-death penalty Calvinist minister George Barrell Cheever faced off against abolitionist magazine editor John O’Sullivan. In contrast to the macro-historical overview presented in volume 1, volume 2 provides micro-historical case studies, using these debates as springboards into the discussion of the death penalty in America at large. Incorporating a wide range of sources, including political poems, newspaper editorials, and warring manifestos, this second volume highlights a variety of perspectives, thus demonstrating the centrality of public debates about crime, violence, and punishment to the history of American democracy. Hartnett’s insightful assessment bears witness to a complex national discussion about the political, metaphysical, and cultural significance of the death penalty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609173456
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2012
Series:	Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	354
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Stephen J. Hartnett is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver and President of the National Communication Association.

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EXECUTING DEMOCRACY

Capital Punishment & the Making of America, 1835–1843

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By Stephen John Hartnett

Michigan State University Press

Copyright © 2012 Stephen John Hartnett
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-047-4

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Chapter One

The Second Great Awakening and the "Grotesque Sublime" of Antebellum America

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There the law stands all ghastly and bloody! —Charles Spear, Essays on the Punishment of Death

The winter and spring of 1843 found politically minded New Yorkers in an uproar. While the pros and cons of Texas annexation, Martin Van Buren's anticipated return from oblivion to presidential contention, possible war with Britain over Oregon, the "cold water" frenzy of temperance, the fate of slavery, and the rowdy radicalism of local workingmen's associations were all prominent in the news, some of the most passionate arguments in the local papers, oyster bars, and churches concerned hanging, for John L. O'Sullivan, the young cosmopolitan Democrat who edited the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, and George B. Cheever, the right Reverend of Calvinist orthodoxy, had launched the new year with three evenings of heated and sometimes acrimonious debate regarding the death penalty. Held before standing-room-only crowds in the immense Tabernacle Church on the corner of 34th and Broadway on the last Friday night in January and two of the first three Friday nights of February, the debates quickly became a cause célèbre complete with a corresponding culture war carried out in the city's leading papers, the nation's best magazines, and pulpits everywhere.

Charles Spear's gothic charge—"There the law stands all ghastly and bloody!"—in which the law looms before the reader, blood-soaked and horrific, points toward two of the central questions of the debate: What is the function of law in a democracy? And what is the relationship between law and violence? Like Benjamin Rush, William Bradford, and the Revolutionary- and Federal-era reformers addressed in volume 1, Spear and his antebellum abolitionist colleagues approached these questions via a focused query: can democracy coexist with hangings? Spear's graphic answer to this question, while perhaps striking twenty-first-century readers as overwrought, is typical of the rhetoric of the debates considered in this book. For example, we may gather a sense of the main points and measure the rhetorical severity of the arguments involved by considering R. H. Bacon's "The Law of Blood," a poem published in the midst of the O'Sullivan versus Cheever debates. Stanza one depicts "pagan lands" where "Superstition's rod" and "rites accursed" combine; "There human gore drenches the steeping sod!" There "the Priest on high / Lifts up his reeking hands that Heaven may bless / The smoke of sacrifice which dims the sky." In this premodern land of superstition and sacrifice, "Truth has not poured her bright and piercing ray" to "drive away / The mists and clouds that hide her glorious day." Stanza two transports readers away from the horrors of there to "our own shores, the boasted land of light," where we expect the Enlightenment and republicanism to have directed citizens toward "the true worship." Yet even "here man heedeth not the Right," as "the tree of blood"—a gallows—is guarded by "Priests [who] stand by, to bless the horrid crime." The poem ends in a bitter lament that typifies the tone of some of the abolitionists who joined the debates: "Oh! may the time / Come swiftly, when the sacred Book of God / Is read aright with all its truths sublime!" Bacon's "The Law of Blood" thus asks: Is America a land of enlightened modernity or "pagan" "rites accursed"? Shall America follow the benevolent precepts of the New Testament or the merciless "smoke of sacrifice" called for in the Old Testament? Will America mature into a gentle republican land of "true worship," or will it muddle along like some brutal Old World monarchy where the death penalty's "human gore drenches the steeping sod"?

These questions highlight the broad contours of one of antebellum America's most passionately argued political battles. Indeed, the debates regarding capital punishment in New York prompted a series of parallel arguments about how Americans understood democracy and justice, the relationship between church and state, and ultimately the nature of modernity itself. Moreover, because these issues emerged precisely as the nation was undergoing a series of dramatic transformations in the markets, technologies, and practices of mass communication, they became entwined in the period's concerns about persuasion and argumentation. I thus frame the death penalty debates addressed here as windows onto the political and cultural dynamics of what I henceforth call antebellum America's rhetorical culture.

To help readers make sense of that term, consider the trajectory from volume 1 of this study: none of the public punishments or executions discussed in chapter 1 (covering the years 1683–1741) received any public criticism; the events addressed in chapters 2 and 3 (1758–1797) elicited fleeting responses that appear to have had little impact on those in power; and the death penalty debate analyzed in chapter 4 (1787–1793), while producing America's first sustained public argument about capital punishment, was conducted by five elite gentlemen (Benjamin Rush, Robert Annan, William Bradford, and the pseudonymous "Maryland Citizen" and "CATO") and another anonymous author (who may well have been Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson), who clashed in respectful tones while employing rhetorical forms that bespoke the ironclad grip of traditional norms of reason and deference, albeit with sentimental prose beginning to creep into the dialogue. The young nation was therefore moving toward what we might recognize as democracy, but by the time volume 1 concluded, with John M'Kean's execution in 1807, it was still a rich man's republic run by and for elite white gentlemen—the wigs and ruffles class—who fought hard to monopolize cultural and state power. Nonetheless, the Revolution initiated a process of democratization that slowly began to emerge via what Gordon Wood has described as a "network of social associations and organizations" that fed a "sort of associational life or civil society." By the time Andrew Jackson claimed the presidency in 1828, America had, for better or worse, lurched its way toward becoming a rollicking democracy. Political campaigns became riotous, drunken, mud-slinging affairs; public organizations, civic groups, and debate clubs blossomed like wildflowers; newspapers exploded in both number and size; expanding educational opportunities led to increased (but by no means universal) class mobility; loosened suffrage restrictions opened the door to increased participation in elections; and reformers of all stripes took it upon themselves to save the nation by advocating a panoply of causes. As Donald Scott observes, by midcentury Americans had become "untiring inventors of cultural and educational institutions," most of which emphasized the performance of speeches, the distribution of written texts, the staging of sung anthems, and the celebration of other means of public participation. Especially for the downtrodden or marginalized, this new culture of debate, performance, and argumentation, this new rhetorical culture, offered exciting avenues of self-improvement and political empowerment.

For example, Angela Ray has noted that

African American men organized societies such as the New York Philomathean Society (in 1830); the Bonneau Library Society in Charleston, South Carolina (1830); the Phoenix Society in New York (1833); the Philadelphia Library Company of Colored Persons (1833); the Young Men's Mental Improvement Society for the Discussion of Moral and Philosophical Questions of All Kinds in Baltimore (1835); the Rush Library and Debating Society in Philadelphia (1836); the Adelphic Union for the Promotion of Literature and Science in Boston (1836); and the Demosthenian Institute in Philadelphia (1837).

Coupled with the tireless efforts of abolitionist groups, temperance clubs, working-men's organizations, woman's rights activists, and singing radicals of all persuasions, these groups demonstrate how antebellum America was becoming a rhetorical culture, a society where public debate and advocacy were institutionalized aspects of official political life and also much-loved components of the everyday rituals and performances of citizenship. To be an antebellum American meant that you argued publicly about what it meant to be an American and also that you argued publicly about the rhetorical norms of how to engage in such arguments.

As demonstrated by the jeremiad-like tone of Bacon's "Law of Blood," questions about crime, violence, and the death penalty need to be situated within their local New York contexts, and as part of an emergent rhetorical culture, and also as part of the sweeping moral discourse that marks the Second Great Awakening. By the 1820s, churchgoing citizens in much of the United States were immersed in the nation's most theologically radical and institutionally turbulent realignment of religious power in its young history; by the 1830s, it appeared that the spiritual fate of the nation was up for grabs. For example, speaking before the graduating class of Harvard's Divinity School in July 1838—the audience consisted of the six graduating students, their families, and some teachers and friends—Ralph Waldo Emerson announced that "the soul of the community is sick and faithless." But instead of seeking startling personal truths, Emerson scolded, old-school preachers had taught generations of Americans to seek solace in the safe and familiar; hence the nation "wants nothing so much as a stern, high, stoical, Christian discipline, to make it know itself and the divinity that speaks through it." Emerson was mocking this stick-in-the-mud need for a return to "Christian discipline," for his version of transcendentalism was steeped in disdain for those who sought shelter in tradition rather than reveling in their own epiphanies. Once the speech was published, Emerson was attacked by conservatives, notably Unitarian Minister Andrews Norton, who called the speech "the latest form of infidelity." Harvard's thin-skinned blue bloods were so offended by the speech that they pouted for thirty years before extending another speaking invitation to Emerson! Regardless of how antebellum Americans responded to Emerson's proposed remedies for the problem—he took so much heat that he began calling himself "the naughty heretic"—most observers agreed with his diagnosis: the soul of the community is sick and faithless. George B. Cheever's bravura defense of the death penalty, O'Sullivan's searing critique of it, Bacon's gothic attack upon conservatism, and Emerson's controversial call for renewal all need to be read as enmeshed within these heart-wrenching worries and controversial proposals regarding the spiritual condition of the nation.

Thus, before turning in chapters 2 and 3 of volume 2 to a detailed analysis of O'Sullivan's and Cheever's contributions to our national history regarding capital punishment and the making of America, I offer in the rest of chapter 1 an overview of the status, driving concerns, and rhetorical norms of religion in antebellum America. This will entail engagements with the speeches of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalist reformer and proto-pop star; John Quincy Adams, the vanquished one-term president who remade himself into a brilliant slavery abolitionist and moralizing orator; and the Reverends E. H. Chapin and Albert Barnes, men of the cloth who celebrated America's greatness while foretelling its imminent collapse into chaos. Then, having outlined the rhetorical parameters of antebellum debates regarding the "soul of the community," I turn to a strikingly different America, one where sex, booze, and violence were peddled as the stuff of consumer pleasures, mass-produced fantasies, and creeping nightmares. While the leaders of religious revivals—to say nothing of Chapin, Barnes, and their more traditional allies—stormed across the land hoping to save souls with the help of the Good Book, and while Emerson and Bacon dreamed of a New World of enlightened spiritualism, a new class of entrepreneurial print capitalists, following the lead established in 1784 by the American Bloody Register (see chapter 2 of volume 1), blanketed the nation with materials concerned less with seeking salvation than with selling sin. With titles such as Annals of Murder, or Daring Outrages, Trials, [and] Confessions, or the National Police Gazette, or The Lives of the Felons, or American Criminal Calendar, publishers packaged gruesome tales of violence, often laced with racy sexual subplots and explicit graphics, and they sold like fresh hotcakes on a winter morning. To focus my comments on this aspect of antebellum America's rhetorical culture, I address The Quaker City, George Lippard's best-selling 1845 portrayal of Philadelphia as a city of epic sinners, comic hypocrites, bogus preachers, debauched women, and monstrous criminals. Complete with two of the period's most blistering critiques of the death penalty, and written as a gritty rebuttal to the parlor-room fancies of men like Emerson and Cheever, Lippard's bizarre novel portrays antebellum America as a carnival of moral ambiguity and senseless violence. Finally, the histories of capital punishment in antebellum America cannot be told without also addressing how racism, slavery, and abolitionism influence our national narratives regarding crime, violence, and punishment. In the third and final section of chapter 1 of volume 2 of Executing Democracy, I therefore move from discussing the Second Great Awakening and the rise of the antebellum culture industry to analyzing both the pyrotechnical savagery of slavery's supporters and the brave rebuttals of abolitionists. I focus my discussion here around the violence-laced speech of the Reverend John Breckenridge before the New York City Colonization Society in May 1835, and the fiery execution of Francis McIntosh in St. Louis in the troubled spring of 1836. And so we will proceed into my analysis of the 1843 Cheever versus O'Sullivan death penalty debates with the understanding that the histories of capital punishment in antebellum America are entwined with the period's multifaceted attempts at religious renewal, its bare-faced capitalist opportunism, and its tortured arguments regarding racial consciousness, the norms of human bondage, and the ever-shifting boundaries of inclusion in and exclusion from the nation's always-evolving democratic experiment.

The Second Great Awakening as "Stone-Blind Custom" or a "Duty to Ourselves, to Others, Towards God"?

Historians tend to agree that the Second Great Awakening's rethinking of theological principles and its reorganizing of religious affiliations and institutions were results of the American Revolution. As Robert Abzug observes, "religious freedom, separation of church and state, and the delegitimation and ultimate disestablishment of official religious authority bred ... an almost dizzying degree of spiritual indeterminacy." As I argued in volume 1 as well, Abzug observes that the birth of American democracy triggered a "spiritual free-for-all." This post-Revolutionary "spiritual indeterminacy" and its corresponding religious "free-for-all" simmered in various stages of intensity for roughly two generations. Then, starting loosely around 1820 (historians squabble about this dating), and fueled by itinerant preachers riding from village to village to lead revivals, tract societies blanketing the countryside with mass-produced religious materials, and the rise of a powerful class of entrepreneurial evangelicals, the Second Great Awakening erupted into a revolution in religious theories and practices. Countering the Old World of hierarchical church structure, clerical elitism, predestination, innate depravity, and obscure scholasticism, populist sects exploded across the land and, much like the more progressive political claims of republicanism, "offered common people, especially the poor, compelling visions of individual self-respect and collective self-confidence." In contrast to the austere Old World of quiet worship, the camp revivals fueling these visions were rollicking affairs, leading to the popular joke that "more souls were bred than saved at camp meetings." Nonetheless, revival-driven groping aside, the consequences of this awakening were profound: Mark Noll reports that as early as 1813, "as many as one million people (or about one out of eight Americans) were attending a Methodist camp meeting each year." As Sean Wilentz observes, "what was, in 1787, a nation of nominal Christians—its public culture shaped more by Enlightenment rationalism that Protestant piety—had turned, by the mid-1840s, into the most devoted evangelical Protestant nation on earth."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from EXECUTING DEMOCRACY by Stephen John Hartnett Copyright © 2012 by Stephen John Hartnett. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Illustrations vii

Preface: "What Follies and Monstrous Barbarities" xi

Acknowledgments xix

Chapter one The Second Great Awakening and the "Grotesque Sublime" of Antebellum America 1

Chapter two O'Sullivan and Cheever's Death Penalty Debate, 1835-1842, and "The Highest Interests of Humanity" 63

Chapter three O'Sullivan and Cheever's Death Penalty Debate of 1843 and "The Great Merciless Machine of Modernity" 129

Conclusion: Capital Punishment and the Dilemmas of Antebellum Modernity 211

Appendix: The Liberator Attacks the Death Penalty, 1842-1843 223

Notes 229

Bibliography 281

Index 307

Editorial Reviews

The historical relationship between democracy and the death penalty in America is vexed and bloody. Stephen John Hartnett faces it without blinking. In Executing Democracy, past meets present in a profound combination of learning, experience, eloquence, and passion.

—Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor, University of Pittsburgh

Having missed his calling as a writer for the Police Gazette, Stephen Hartnett has settled for documenting American democracy’s perplexing relationship with capital punishment. This second volume provides rigorous scholarship and nuanced readings of diverse texts, but it’s also a page-turner. Hartnett understands how public culture can be both sensationalistic and deliberative, and how in public discussion of capital cases democracy itself is on trial.

—Robert Hariman, Professor and Chair, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University

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