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This study examines the development of anti-capital punishment sentiment in antebellum American Literature. Drawing on republican criminal reform theories, prominent American authors and social reformers advocated for the abolition of the gallows, justice, and criminal reform for the diverse citizens of the young republic.
List of contents
Chapter One
Republican Legal Discourse and Anti-Gallows Sentiment in the Long Eighteenth Century
Chapter Two
Incarceration, the Penitentiary, and the Prevention of Recidivism: Republican Justice and Anti-Gallows Reform in Dr. Benjamin Rush's "An Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments" (1787), The Account of Murder by Mr. James Yates (1781), and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland or
The Transformation (1798)
Chapter Three
The Republican Anti Gallows Protest of the Execution of Major John André in the Federalist Dramas of William Dunlap André (1798) and
The Glory of Columbia Her Yeomanry (1803) and James Fenimore Cooper's
The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821)
Chapter Four
Hawthorne's Ecological Spaces of Moral, Spiritual, and Criminal Reform: The Gallows, The Prison, and The Penitentiary in
The Scarlet Letter (1850) and
The Blithedale Romance (1852)
Chapter Five
Herman Melville's Republican Anti-Gallows Protest:
Billy Budd Sailor and the unfulfilled Criminal Reforms of the Eighteenth-Century American Enlightenment
Chapter Six
Captain Lynds's Lash: Prison Slavery and the Auburn Silent System in Austin Reed's
The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted ConvictChapter Seven
Breaking the Backs of Sailors and Slaves: Flogging, Corporal Punishment, and the Lash in the Anti-Gallows Writings of Herman Melville and Frederick Douglass
About the author
Christopher Allan Black
