The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum Literature

Auteur

Christopher Allan Black is assistant professor of teaching at The University of Memphis.

Texte du rabat

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.

Contenu

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 Convict

Chapter 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