Executions

Public Executions

At its outset, public execution emphasized the recuperative effect death might have, not on the criminal, but on the public that he or she had presumably wronged. Along with the public death of the criminal came a promise that civic order would be affirmed and restored. Though accepted as commonplace, the death penalty had early opponents, many of whom identified the [Page 569]use of capital punishment with British rule. The text most responsible for generating arguments among Americans against the use of the death penalty was Cesare Beccaria's 1764 Dei Delitti e delle Pene. Translated as An Essay on Crimes and Punishment, it was published in London in 1767 and in the United States in 1777. In addition, many newspapers serialized Beccaria's essay. As historian Louis Masur explains, “The timing and content of the movement against the death penalty in the early Republic must be examined as a product of a social context shaped by the Revolution and an intellectual context governed by republican ideology and liberal theology.” Thus, though execution was an accepted form of punishment and an ordinary fact of life, postrevolutionary America was ready to abandon executions in part as a way to distinguish republican values from those of European monarchies.

In addition to the death penalty's presence in political and legislative debates, it has been amply represented in the arts. According to historian Stuart Banner, public executions drew larger crowds than any other public gathering. Thus, it is not surprising that executions from the early colonial period generated all kinds of gallows literature—from sermons made on the occasion to conversion narratives and confessions. These were sold on execution day and were circulated broadly throughout the community. Some were more sensational than others, sometimes containing the last words and confession of the convict. Louis Masur points out, however, that many of these stories follow a formula of the cautionary tale, diminishing their value as historical documents.

Yet as attitudes toward capital punishment changed, so too did its literary treatment become more critical of the practice. Perhaps one of the most haunting depictions of a public execution is Herman Melville's poem about the hanging of the abolitionist John Brown. In its sparseness, his 1859 poem “The Portent” captures the eerie quality of a public execution once it has been shorn of the sensational glare created in much of the gallows literature that circulated in broadsides and the penny press. Melville marshals all of poetry's rhetorical power to condemn the act that foretold the war. The poem also emphasizes the absence of redemption, echoing a popular argument against the death penalty for vacating the promise of redemption. Melville further underscores the degenerative social effect of capital punishment as both the title and the poem's last lines indicate that this hanging—John Brown's shadow and then streaming beard—cast a shadow: the harbinger of war.

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