Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845 9780813562681

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Reading Prisoners

C ritical I ssues

in

C rime

and

S ociety

Raymond J. Michalowski, Series Editor Critical Issues in Crime and Society is oriented toward critical analysis of contemporary problems in crime and justice. The series is open to a broad range of topics including specific types of crime, wrongful behavior by economically or politically powerful actors, controversies over justice system practices, and issues related to the intersection of identity, crime, and justice. It is committed to offering thoughtful works that will be accessible to scholars and professional criminologists, general readers, and students. For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.

Reading Prisoners Lite rature, Lite racy, and the Transf ormation of Ame rican Punishme nt, 170 0–­1845

Jodi Schorb

Rutg e r s U nive r sity P re s s New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Schorb, Jodi, 1966–­ Reading prisoners: literature, literacy, and the transformation of American punishment, 1700–­1845 / Jodi Schorb. cm.—­(Critical issues in crime and society) pages Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–­0–­8135–­6267–­4 (hardcover : alk. paper)—­ISBN 978–­0–­8135–­6268–­1 (e-­book) 1. Prisoners—­Education—­United States—­History. 2. Literacy programs—­ United States—­History. 3. Prisoners as authors—­United States—­History. 4. Corrections—­United States—­History. I. Title. HV8883.3.U5S36 2014 365’.666097309032—­dc23 2014000070 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America, eds. Michele Lise Tarter and Richard Bell (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); thanks to University of Georgia Press for their permission to print this updated version. Copyright © 2014 by Jodi Schorb All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

Conte nt s

Acknowledgments vii Introduction  A Is for Aardvark: A Prison Literacy Primer 1

Part O ne   Lite rac y i n the E i g hte e nth -­C e ntury “ G aol ” 1

Books Behind Bars: Reading Prisoners on the Scaffold 19

2

Crime, Ink: The Rise of the Writing Prisoner 48

Part Two  Lite rac y i n the E ar ly Pe nite nti ary 3

“What Shall a Convict Do?”: Reading and Reformation in Philadelphia’s Early Penitentiaries 89

4

Written by One Who Knows: Congregate Literacy in New York Prisons 139 Afterword  Good Convict, Good Citizen? 182

Notes 187 Bibliography 221 Index 237

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Ac k nowle dgm e nt s For their early and sustained interest and fostering of this project, my deepest gratitude goes to the staff of Rutgers University Press, especially Peter Mickulas and series editor Raymond Michalowski. I am indebted to my outside readers, especially Jeannine DeLombard for her rich observations. Special thanks to Lisa Jerry for her editorial assistance. Archival work was made possible through fellowship support from the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, as well as a grant from the University of Florida Humanities Scholarship Enhancement Fund. Special thanks to James Green at the Library Company, Roy Goodman at the American Philosophical Society, Michelle Gauthier at the Andover-­Harvard Theological Library, Felicia Williamson at Thomas Special Collections at Sam Houston State University, Todd Venie at University of Florida Levin College of Law Lawton Chiles Legal Information Center, Nancy Horan at the New York Public Library, and Annie Anderson at the Eastern State Penitentiary Historical Site for their assistance. An early version of this project was presented at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the “Incarceration Nation: Voices from the Early American Gaol” symposium. The project was enriched by the shared spirit of inquiry of outstanding organizers Michele Lise Tarter, Richard Bell, and Dan Richter and seminar participants, notably Jeannine DeLombard, Philip Gura, Jen Manion, Michael Meranze, Leslie Patrick, Ivy Schweitzer, Caleb Smith, and Dan Williams. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America, eds. Michele Lise Tarter and Richard Bell (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); thanks to University of Georgia Press for their permission to print this updated version. My abiding appreciation goes to my colleagues in the Society of Early Americanists, including Kristina Bross, Lorrayne Carroll, Gabriel Cervantes, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Emily García, vii

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Acknowledgments

Lisa Gordis, Tamara Harvey, Julie Kim, Lisa Logan, Anne Myles, Michele Tarter, Karen Weyler, Edward Watts, Ed White, Dan Williams, and Hilary Wyss, for their stimulating feedback at conferences and their support and mentorship across the years. I am grateful to the University of Florida Department of English and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for supporting this project from origin to completion. Heartfelt thanks go to Jeff Adler, Marsha Bryant, Melissa Davis, Kim Emery, Pamela Gilbert, Laurie Gries, Terry Harpold, Susan Hegeman, Sidney Homan, Kenneth Kidd, Elliott Kuecker, David Leverenz, Wayne Losano, Barbara Mennel, Janet Moore, Amy Abugo Ongiri, Judy Page, David Pharies, Leah Rosenberg, Raúl Sánchez, Malini Schueller, Stephanie Smith, Anja Ulanowicz, and Phil Wegner; I am also thankful for the members of the Crime, Law, and Governance in the Americas Working Group at University of Florida, including Ieva Jusionyte, Richard Kernaghan, Katheryn Russell-­Brown, and Joe Spillane.While the project was composed at University of Florida, the English Department at Hamilton College supported early research through an Emerson Grant for study at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum. I am indebted to Hamiltonians past and present, including Celeste Friend, Gillian Gane, Tina May Hall, Jenny Irons, Doran Larson, Michelle LeMasurier, Dana Luciano, John O’Neill, Jenn Sturm, Margaret Thickstun, Julio Videras, and Steve Yao, for their friendship and intellectual sustenance. My interest in this topic began with research on the cultural work of colonial American execution sermons under the guidance of David Van Leer at University of California at Davis. David passed before seeing this project take new direction and shape. For his keen intellect, creative vision, and unwavering support, I am ever grateful. Many faculty at University of California at Davis, especially Elizabeth Freeman, Linda Morris, Karen Halttunen, Alan Taylor, Margaret Ferguson, Joanne Diehl, and Sandra Gilbert, inspired and supported my studies; in addition, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Graduate Fellowship program, and the David Miller Travel Fellowship enabled research at the American Antiquarian Society. And one could have no better partners in crime than Michael Borgstrom, Tania Hammidi, Emily Hoyer, and Laura Konigsberg. While in graduate school, I served as a volunteer English literature instructor at California State Prison, Solano; President Bill Clinton and Congress had

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recently eliminated funding for prison higher education programs. At the time I did not perceive the many connections between my research on New England execution sermons and my work as volunteer prison instructor; this book begins to fill that gap. Danielle DeMuth radically inspired and sustained me during the long evolution of this project. Thanks to my family, including Judy and Brian Schorb, Chris Schorb and Heather Thomson, Mike Christopher, Karen Zeller, and the Davis family. Chris passed in winter 2012, and he is always in my heart.

Reading Prisoners

Introduction

A Is for Aardvark A Pris on L ite racy Prime r The power of literacy rests in its associative promises: to acquire literacy is to gain access to something more, some wider hope or possibility. Contemporary literacy outreach programs commonly associate learning to read and write with coming into power or gaining a voice. The slogan of the United Nations Literacy Decade, for example, imagines “Literacy as Freedom.” The National Literacy Project aspires to “help students develop literacy skills necessary for success in college, in the workplace, and as citizens.” The Literacy Project of Western Massachusetts seeks to “keep the doors of opportunity open for all adults.”1 The refrain is familiar: learning to read opens a world of knowledge and possibilities. Learning to write entails finding one’s voice. Becoming literate marks one’s entrance into citizenship and belonging. Contemporary prison literacy programs draw upon and adapt these associative promises, most often by linking literacy acquisition to rehabilitation and positive personal change. The prestigious PEN Prison Writing Program “believes in the restorative, rehabilitative power of writing.” The Seattle Books to Prisoners initiative hopes “to foster a love of reading and encourage the pursuit of knowledge and self improvement.” The Massachusetts-­based Prison Book Program asserts that “education is a powerful tool that reduces the likelihood that a prisoner will return to the prison system.” A few literacy programs strive to foster transformative social dialogue about the causes and effects of mass incarceration. For example, Pennsylvania’s Books Through Bars program “sends quality reading material to prisoners and encourages creative dialogue on the criminal justice system, thereby educating those living inside and outside of prison walls.”2 But most frame their mission through the rhetoric of personal transformation, either by arguing that literacy reduces 1

2 I n t r o d u c t i o n recidivism and helps inmates develop necessary skills (good decision making, enhanced moral judgment) or by advancing a more activist vision that assumes the basic dignity of inmates and reaffirms their right to knowledge and information. Prisoners have also fueled this narrative by making the transformative literacy journey a powerful theme in modern prison autobiography, most memorably in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Regretting his limited knowledge and bad penmanship, Malcolm Little requested a dictionary, tablet, and pencils from the prison school at Norfolk Prison Colony. Many years later, he remembered the discomfort he felt, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of unfamiliar words, while fondly recalling an illustration of an African aardvark on the dictionary’s first page. Through his amanuensis, Alex Haley, Malcolm X recollected the start of his journey: I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages. I’d never realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying. In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks. I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d written on the tablet. Over and over aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting. . . . Funny thing, from the dictionary first page right now, that “aardvark” springs to my mind.3 His encounter with the dictionary was at first paralyzing and terrifying. But in that singular statement, “I read my own handwriting,” X articulates the power of finding his voice. Copying the dictionary word by word, line by line, initiated X’s literacy journey and soon, as he explained, reading “had changed forever the course of my life.”4 He read voraciously from then on, using his prison reading to assemble the disparate experiences of his life into a cohesive history and philosophy of racial oppression. Such dramatic literacy moments conform to a central autobiographical motif of journey and self-­discovery, resonating with modern readers who share the assumption that literacy acquisition facilitates self-­ expression and even personal liberation.



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Contemporary studies of prisoners’ reading practice lend nuance to this rhetoric by demonstrating how prisoners use reading to “counter forces of isolation, abandonment, and dehumanization” and to “gener[ate] possibilities  .  .  . to reenvision and rescript their lives.”5 It’s no wonder, then, that prisoner writers—­from Angela Davis’s near-­futile search for revolutionary reading in An Autobiography (1974) to Jimmy Santiago Baca’s journey into language in A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet (2001)—­are drawn to the theme of the socially, racially, and politically empowering literacy encounter. In these and other modern prison autobiographies, reading and writing help inmates negotiate the experience of imprisonment and counter the prison’s most brutalizing effects. By contrast, the colonial American prison appears an inhospitable place to analyze the purpose, definition, and associative promises of prisoner literacy, for early “gaols” were designed for neither education nor reform. Well into the 1790s, correction was swift; to enforce order and enact justice, authorities relied primarily on fines and public punishment—­stocks, pillories, whipping posts, scaffolds. The eighteenth-­ century jail served largely as a holding cell, built from scratch or modified from an existing structure with the express purpose of detaining prisoners awaiting trial or sentencing, debtors, convicts awaiting execution, and occasionally prisoners of war.6 As a result, keepers and magistrates had sparse inclination and little motivation to devote resources to providing those behind bars with books or instruction. Moreover, scenes where prisoners encounter texts and mediate their incarceration experience through books, writing, or literacy acquisition are less pronounced in the literature that emerged out of the eighteenth-­century American jailhouse. Consequently, scholarship on both the history and the literature of colonial-­era imprisonment has been largely silent about the role of reading, writing, and literacy to the history of American punishment and the development of early prison literature. Across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even as the early jail transformed into the modern penitentiary, literacy remained a minor refrain in reformist discourse and the public debates over the purposes, best practices, and social good that might come of the prison. In the mid-­eighteenth century, a rising culture of sensibility placed new emphasis on prison relief efforts. Educating prisoners, however, was a low priority: early reformers were instead motivated by dire reports of corruption,

4 I n t r o d u c t i o n filth, and neglect. The first formal relief society, the Philadelphia Society for the Relief of Distressed Prisoners, was organized in 1776 in response to the city’s notorious, overcrowded, and disease-­r idden jails. Philanthropists supplied desperate men and women with blankets, clothing, and soup and petitioned on behalf of the wrongfully imprisoned.7 Reconstituted in 1787 as the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, the group fought against corrupt and disruptive penal practices, lobbied for sweeping changes to the penal code, and promoted the benefits of solitary confinement at hard labor, but the group initially made no efforts to either educate prisoners or supply books. Moreover, education was not central to the discourse on the early penitentiary that emerged after the mid-­1780s; instead prison reformers debated how to effectively separate and classify prisoners; analyzed the best practices of labor, discipline, diet, and hygiene; and advanced new theories of prison space, architecture, and design.8 As a result, scholars have devoted far more attention to dissecting the goals of the early prison reform movement and the prisons’ techniques of discipline, labor, and punishment than they have to exploring the history and purpose of literacy in the early penitentiary. Beyond a brief mention that inmates were given Bibles or allowed to attend Sabbath schools, most histories of early American prisons do not treat the role of education or literacy instruction in any depth.9 This cursory treatment typically illustrates early punishment’s heavy-­handed religious emphasis or the penitentiary’s interest in the moral reformation of the convict. Library historians, by contrast, have tended to overstate the early penitentiary’s commitment to literacy education. In the Encyclopedia of Library History, their overview of library outreach efforts from 1798 to 2000, Larry E. Sullivan and Brenda Vogel argue that prisons “have attempted to improve character through reading since the inception of the penitentiary in the late eighteenth century. . . . Education played a major role in an offender’s reformation. Ideally, reading materials would induce an ethical and moral change in the convicts.” Elsewhere Sullivan argues that “since the creation of the penitentiary there have been prison libraries”; he adds, “The penitentiary carried with it the idea of the rehabilitation and moral improvement of the prisoners committed to its care. Character reformation included a regimen of reading. This necessitated the building of collections of reading materials in each prison.”10 These claims help Sullivan



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and Vogel emphasize the longevity and appeal of an ideology that books and reading should be carefully controlled. They ultimately contrast this moral ideology to the emergent prisoners’ “right-­to-­read” movement in the 1960s and to the 1980s shift to retributive incarceration when prison authorities and courts imposed stringent limitations on prison classrooms and libraries. Sullivan and Vogel’s research is invaluable for placing contemporary debates about prisoners’ educational rights in a historical framework and for elevating the role of librarians in the nation’s ongoing debates about the value and purpose of prisoner education. Yet their arguments that the birth of the penitentiary “necessitated the building of [library] collections” and that reading was central “since the inception of the penitentiary in the late eighteenth century” are misleading and elide the struggles that accompanied (or delayed) the introduction of libraries and the implementation of reading and writing instruction in America’s formative penitentiaries. Alternately, in his controversial history Libraries in Prison, William Coyle contrasts the cohesive reading curriculum of the early penitentiary to the lack of “systematic provision of books and other reading material” in colonial American prisons and jails.11 Coyle ultimately asserts that prison libraries work best when they operate in tandem with the goals of corrections, and he builds this argument by refuting penologist Austin MacCormick’s contention that there were no properly defined prison libraries before the twentieth century. Coyle challenges MacCormick’s claim that the limited reading selection and religious emphasis of early prison libraries rendered them ineffectual models for thinking about how contemporary prison libraries should be run. Coyle counterargues that the early penitentiary was focused on moral improvement, not religious indoctrination, and he insists that nineteenth-­century reformers should be commended for the way they consciously selected nonsectarian books and created a carefully controlled reading environment in the early penitentiary. Coyle contrasts this philosophy with the later prisoners’ right-­to-­read movement of the 1960s, which, he argues, prioritizes prisoners’ wishes and tastes over the best interests of the institution. Coyle is no fan of the twentieth-­century prisoners’ right-­to-­read movement; he contends that it has led to contemporary prison libraries being run like public libraries, while ignoring the penal library’s distinct clientele and function. Yet in his eagerness to refute MacCormick, Coyle overstates the early penitentiary’s commitment

6 I n t r o d u c t i o n to libraries and education. Although much less invested in prisoners’ right to read than Sullivan and Vogel, Coyle perpetuates the assumption that bibliotherapy was an indispensible part of the everyday practice of the penitentiary from its late eighteenth-­century inception. We have yet to fully acknowledge and comprehend the wariness, indecisiveness, and occasional hostility toward prison libraries, prisoner education, and literacy acquisition in the first half-­century of prison reform. From the birth of the penitentiary in the late 1780s to its expansion in the 1820s and 1830s, the literate prisoner remained an ambivalent figure: potentially better suited for penitence and reform, yet still a possible discipline problem, especially as institutions worked increasingly to limit contact between prisoners and restrict communication between inmates and the outside world. Seeking to amend this scholarly gap, this study traces the ways that prisoners entered print as readers and writers during the colonial and early national eras. Tracing the origins, purpose, and development of reading, writing, and education behind bars, I analyze what kinds of “literate” prisoners entered print and why, and I connect this print history to the wider promises and perils that accompanied the spread of mass literacy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This book spans the period from 1699, when Cotton Mather published Pillars of Salt. An History of Some Criminals Executed in this Land, for Capital Crimes.With some of their Dying Speeches; Collected and Published . . . , which adapted the British genre of criminal biography to the spiritual, communal, and educational needs of Puritan New England, to the mid-­1840s, when inmate authors, prison schools, and prison libraries gained new prominence. By analyzing the uses and function of literacy—­including when, how, and why those convicted of crimes were given access to books, reading instruction, and writing instruction in colonial jails and early penitentiaries—­I trace how and why interest in cultivating and promoting prisoners’ literacy practices shifts from the colonial era through the rise of the early national penitentiary. In sum, I help construct a narrative that has heretofore only been told in fragments: the literacy history of early American jails and the nation’s formative penitentiaries. Reading Prisoners brings together three disparate strains of scholarship: the rise of the early American penitentiary, the history of early American literacy instruction, and the transformation of crime writing in what is



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often referred to as the “long” eighteenth century (1690s–­1830s). Three core questions drive my study: What value did ministers, prison reformers and administrators, and prisoners themselves ascribe to literacy—­to giving those convicted of a crime the tools and skills to read or write? To what use was the literate prisoner put in the “long” eighteenth century, a period that witnessed the transformation of the colonial jail into the early American penitentiary? And how did reading and writing prisoners enter print? Merging these disparate scholarly traditions allows me to analyze the social, spiritual, disciplinary, and private dimensions of prisoners’ literacy practices. Ultimately, my book radically revises two common arguments about early imprisonment: first, before the development of the penitentiary in the 1790s there was little use for a literate prisoner; and second, the early American penitentiary considered education central to its rehabilitative mission. In part one, I argue that the eighteenth century, an era assumed to devalue jailhouse literacy, launched the literate prisoner into public prominence and even compelled audiences to envision the prisoner as a new reader or writer, much like themselves. By emphasizing the role of eighteenth-­century public execution in shaping early encounters between prisoners, literacy education, and print culture, I highlight the important role that prisoners played in an expanding culture of reading and writing, and I foreground how prisoners, who often came from poor and marginalized populations, used the gallows to negotiate their entrance into print. In part two, I argue that the period known for ushering in instrumental ideas about prison reform (the early national period) struggled to articulate the good that could come of prisoner education and literacy. As defenders of the penitentiary began debating whether it was possible to remake criminals into productive members of society, there was little consensus that education should be central to the regimes of labor and solitude that defined the early national penitentiaries, even though an abstract belief in literacy’s moral function endured. While numerous inmates and some reformers and authorities argued that reading and writing instruction could help inmates cope with imprisonment, reflect on their crimes, embrace a convenient doctrine of Christian submission, or prepare them for life after release, others perceived little benefit to educating prisoners and saw no reason to either devote money and resources to education or divert inmates’ time from hard labor.

8 I n t r o d u c t i o n Because men and women of color were disproportionately executed on the gallows and disproportionately imprisoned, Reading Prisoners also demonstrates how the history of prison literacy is continuously entwined with arguments about race and rehabilitation, including debates over what associative promises literacy held, whether prisoners should be instructed in reading and writing, and whether prisoners should be ushered into print.12 Colonial missionary societies, the urban and charity schools movement, African colonization schemes, the antislavery press, the fear of black uprising, the impact of phrenology and scientific racism, and the efforts of the unfree to read and write when expressly prohibited—­all leave their marks on this literacy history. Reading Prisoners demonstrates how wider debates around black education and citizenship permeated the discourse of crime, punishment, and imprisonment in the colonial and early national eras. This study also contributes to ongoing inquiry into how so-­called outsiders entered early American print culture through genres dismissed as formulaic in expression or suspect in intent or ideology. Since its inception, prison literature, from its origins in last words, dying warnings, and other forms of execution (or gallows) literature to its later adaptation into autobiography, exposé, and imaginative literature, was a highly mediated genre. Ministers and magistrates, and later wardens and prison defenders, had a stake in promoting a certain brand of penitence and conformity and in restricting how, when, and through what channels prisoners entered print. Despite and often because of these literary and ideological conventions, some prisoners readily inserted themselves into print by adapting their lives and experiences to the genre’s horizons of expectations. Those who brought prisoners’ lives to press sought to instill confidence that readers could access prisoners’ private thoughts and struggles, hear prisoners’ perspectives on the justice (or injustice) of their fates, and witness prisoners’ often emotional responses to their confinement. As such, one of the most insistent questions of interpretation is also largely impossible to answer: who is speaking in criminal confession accounts, historical figure or literary character? Prisoner or amanuensis? Scholars differ widely in how they attribute authorship to execution literature; some unquestioningly embrace the criminal as author, and others eagerly dismiss the gallows genre as fictive or ventriloquized. Both positions are problematic and limited: the former neglects



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the nuanced art of literary representation, and the latter neglects the long history of how minority writers entered print. The richness of this often limiting and contradictory genre lies in the elaborate ways that prisoners, printers, and authorities uniformly worked to persuade readers that their testimony was authentic. Published accounts reveal the crucial role that literacy played in the performance of authority and the cultivation of credibility.13 Because the literature of the gallows and penitentiary emerges from disparate conditions of power, it is best conceptualized through a model of what Karen Weyler calls “collaborative literacies”—­forms and practices of collaborative authorship that allowed outsiders to work with editors and patrons to enter print. “To gain access to print,” Weyler demonstrates, “outsiders collaborated with amanuenses and editors, inserted their stories into popular genres and cheap media, tapped into existing social and religious networks, and sought sponsors and patrons.”14 Collaborative authorship was neither new to the eighteenth century nor confined to that century alone. David D. Hall has effectively traced the longer tradition of what he calls “sponsored writing (or literacy)” in seventeenth-­century New England and refers to “statements made by ordinary people, especially women, that ministers who were learned saw through the press and framed with an introduction.”15 The eighteenth century galvanized the use and proliferation of collaborative literacies: during this time, “even the minimally literate and the illiterate understood the potential for print to be life changing,” notes Weyler, “and outsiders shrewdly employed strategies to assert themselves within collaborative dynamics.”16 Scholars of early Native and African American literature have long grappled with both the potential and the limitations of literature produced through disparate conditions of power and expanded our definitions of both literacy and authorship to account for the complex ways that minority writers entered early American print culture.17 For example, Dickson D. Bruce Jr. has documented the intricate “webs of interaction” between 1680 and 1865 through which black and white writers and activists collaborated “to create a credible black voice and to assert the authoritative possibilities for that voice” in antislavery and abolitionist discourse, a claim that resonates with the aims of early gallows literature. These collaborative processes, observes Bruce, “made

10 I n t r o d u c t i o n authorship as such less important than authority and credibility, as white and black writers alike worked to develop forms of representation that would appear to describe convincingly a perspective that was credibly and identifiably black primarily by evoking experiences only people of African descent could have.”18 This argument has advanced our understanding of how outsiders enter print while also moving us past the stultifying debates over the fictive versus factive nature of mediated texts. More recent scholarship has extended this process to writing by prisoners: for example, Jeannine DeLombard argues that formulaic gallows confessions granted black criminals a civic presence and a political voice, while Caleb Smith analyzes the forms of collaborative literacy that allowed Eastern State Penitentiary inmate George Ryno to publish his poetry collection, Buds and Flowers, Of Leisure Hours (1844), under the literary persona “Harry Hawser.”19 Reading Prisoners shares common cause with these projects: offering an earlier and broader analysis of prisoners’ early participation in print culture; dissecting the ways that prisoners, printers, and authorities cultivated the impression of an authentic prisoner voice; and analyzing the ways that men and women behind bars explored and exploited the possibilities of collaborative authorship. I am also indebted to pioneering scholarship on the origins, history, and development of early American criminal confession literature. The genre’s mixed form, shifting purposes, and print evolution have been richly documented by Daniel E. Williams, Daniel A. Cohen, Karen Halttunen, Sharon Harris, Jeannine DeLombard, and others, who have traced the function of gallows accounts in relationship to the development of American crime literature and print culture, to the gothic and sentimental traditions, and to race, gender, and the law.20 Cohen’s and Williams’s attentive and painstaking overviews of how the genre developed from a dozen execution sermons in the late seventeenth century into a divergent genre of more than two hundred published sermons, confessions, narratives, lives, sketches, last words, dying speeches, crime ballads, and trial accounts by the end of the eighteenth century undergirds this study and provided me with the framework to conceptualize the dynamic role of literacy within this literary history. Most overviews and anthologies of American prison writing are usually either confined to the twentieth century or trace the growth and development of prison



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literature since either the mid-­nineteenth century or the Reconstruction.21 By emphasizing the importance of criminal confessions in the eighteenth century and by analyzing an array of lesser-­known inmate literature from the early national era, my study builds on the work of gallows literature scholarship to emphasize prisoners’ more enduring participation in American literary history. My arguments about how print culture cultivated and represented the literate prisoner are also informed by scholarship on the history of reading and writing in America and the field of New Literacy Studies, both of which have transformed how we define and analyze literacy. The field of New Literacy Studies, which developed in the mid-­1990s, challenged the dominant definition of literacy as a “set of cognitive skills possessed (or lacked) by individuals” and highlighted literacy as a social practice.22 The field advanced the use of new terminology, including “literacy practices,” defined as “the general cultural ways of utilising written language which people draw upon in their lives” (in other words, what people do with literacy), and “literacy events,” defined by Shirley Heath as observable occasions “in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes” or “any action sequence, involving one or more persons, in which the production and/or comprehension of print plays a role.”23 Advocates of New Literacy Studies vociferously reject the traditional definition of literacy as a quantifiable capacity that one either possesses or lacks and instead shift attention to “how literacies are implicated in the operations of social power” by emphasizing the social relationships and institutions that undergird a culture’s understanding of literacy.24 Such redefinitions are particularly useful for examining the contours of early American literacy, when reading and religious instruction were highly intertwined, when much reading and reading instruction were done aloud in groups, when writing instruction was considered a more specialized field designed especially to facilitate men in trades of commerce, and where women, servants, blacks, and American Indians had more restricted and regulated access to reading and writing instruction. My analysis of prisoners’ literacy practice is also informed by the history of books and printing. Traditional social histories, such as Kenneth Lockridge’s pioneering study Literacy in Colonial New England (1974), distinguished the literate from the illiterate by using signature counts: an individual’s ability to sign a will or deed with a signature made him or

12 I n t r o d u c t i o n her “literate,” while making a mark made the individual “illiterate.” Book historians have challenged and revised this methodology; notes Cathy Davidson, “literacy is never simply a ‘rate’ that can be quantitatively measured, but is an exceptionally complicated social process as well as the embodiment of significant social ideas.”25 Amplifying this claim, E. Jennifer Monaghan cautions, “there is no strict demarcation between literacy and illiteracy, as signature/mark counts imply, but numerous grades of variation between total illiteracy and the most accomplished literacy.”26 By redefining what counts as literacy and by foregrounding whose definitions of literacy are privileged and whose literacies are disregarded, these scholars shift our attention to the relations of power that shape literacy acquisition. David D. Hall has persuasively demonstrated that even our most standard definition of literacy—­possessing the ability to read and write—­is “misleading,” much like traditional distinctions between “oral” versus “literate” cultural practice. According to Hall, Literacy is akin to orality in being not a fixed term or condition but a practice that was mediated by different frames of meaning and social circumstances.The polarity of literacy and illiteracy or of literacy and orality must give way, therefore, to a contextualized description of the uses—­discursive or ideological as well as practical or social—­to which literacy was put. Otherwise, we run the risk in early American history of representing literacy as hierarchical and excluding, labels that overlook the important distinction between reading and writing literacy and that ignore the possibilities for knowledge and participation among the so-­called illiterate.27 Hall’s contextual definition of literacy is especially valuable for reassessing the literacy practices of those who write in heavily mediated genres such as criminal confession accounts, with their composite mix of amanuensis, self-­authored narrative, and third-­party reporting, where print participation is made possible through intense scrutiny and disparate conditions of power. Rather than classifying a prisoner as literate or illiterate or relying on early prison authorities’ assessments of inmate literacy, I instead identify and analyze the distinct ways that prisoners (including prisoners classed as “illiterate” by their contemporaries) integrate reading and writing into their lives, their experience behind bars, and their published narratives.28 Even narratives “taken from the



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mouths” of prisoners can offer rich representations of prisoners’ literacy practices. The staggering rise of mass incarceration in America since the 1970s has generated a tremendous scholarly response focused on the causes of mass incarceration, its lingering racial and gender disparities, the widespread effects and social costs of a culture of punishment, and the modern prison’s cultural iconicity. By proposing that we study the transformation of punishment alongside the history of literacy instruction, Reading Prisoners offers a relevant back story to ongoing debates about the purpose and benefits of prisoner education. The book is arranged chronologically, with each chapter focusing on an era or a site that catalyzed debates over education and crime. The first two chapters examine the literate prisoner in the colonial and late eighteenth-­century jail. The final two chapters, examining attitudes toward literacy and education in the early penitentiary (1790–­1840s), juxtapose literacy’s development in the “Pennsylvania” model (a “separate system” of solitary confinement, which came to fruition at Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829) to its evolution under the “Auburn” model (or “congregate system” of group labor, pioneered in the New York State Prison at Auburn in the 1820s). The two models are foundational to scholarship on American punishment. The first two chapters challenge the assumption that there is no story to tell about jailhouse literacy in the eighteenth century. In chapter 1 I argue that criminal confessions published between 1700 and 1740 were crucial “literacy events” that demonstrate widespread public fascination with the reading habits of the condemned. During this era ministers solicited and published dying warnings, confessions, and personal narratives of prisoners to satisfy reader demand for tales of piety under duress consistent with the evangelical revivalism that culminated in the first Great Awakening. Analyzing criminal confessions published by or about condemned criminals, including Cotton Mather’s interview with Joseph Hanno, the “Miserable African,” in Tremenda (1721), and Samuel Moody’s full-­length personal narrative, Account of the Life and Death of Joseph Quasson, Indian (1726), I demonstrate how interest in prisoner literacy was shaped not only by enduring Protestant literacy practice but also by competing approaches to missionary education in the colonies; these debates fueled interest in soliciting and circulating narratives by black and American

14 I n t r o d u c t i o n Indian prisoners. Hence, “reading prisoners” rose to prominence because they not only facilitated the pedagogy of the colonial execution ritual but also helped stage the benefits and illustrate preferred methods of educating blacks and Indians in the colonies. The cultural work of “reading prisoners” shifted after midcentury in response to an emergent print sphere that increasingly valued literacy for its commercial and mercantile value as well as its utility in facilitating a transatlantic culture of sentiment. Chapter 2 traces the emergence of a new figure, the “writing prisoner,” analyzing the development of criminal confession accounts alongside the commercialization and regulation of writing instruction in the late eighteenth century. The published confessions of black prisoners such as Abraham Johnstone and counterfeiters such as Owen Syllavan reveal how the writing prisoner took on new public meaning at this time, largely as a means of exploring the perils and promises associated with the expansion of literacy. The condemned continued to function as cautionary tales, yet they also instructed in other ways, modeling epistolary practice, embracing the tools of expanding written literacy, and helping new writers meditate upon the relationship of writing to trust and credibility. Together, both chapters demonstrate how eighteenth-­century print culture facilitated a vibrant, sustained, and evolving interest in prisoner literacy well in advance of the American penal reform movement. By the 1790s, gallows literature faced opposition, in part due to fear of what Michael Meranze calls “mimetic corruption,” that is, the corrupting contact between prisoners and between prisoners and the public.29 Despite (and in part in response to) the flourishing antebellum market of gothic and sentimental crime literature, a new philosophy emerged, arguing that prisoners were best served by silence. Prison advocates and defenders insisted that not only should the prisoner’s speech be regulated but his or her access to the public should likewise be restricted. This had a profound impact on the prisoner’s role as pedagogue and infused the debates over reading, writing, and education in the nation’s first penitentiaries. Therefore, part two shifts attention from the better-­understood market of antebellum crime and gallows literature and toward the less-­explored history of education in the nation’s most influential penitentiaries. Chapter 3 challenges the widely asserted belief that education was a central component of the new-­ model penitentiary inaugurated in



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Philadelphia after 1787. My analysis of published accounts and inspector reports, unpublished inspector minute books, Pennsylvania prison reform society records, and prison admissions ledgers unearths a long and contentious struggle over the value of prisoner education. This struggle originated in debates over whether to supply books to prisoners in the Walnut Street Prison and culminated in the hostility of Eastern State Penitentiary’s moral instructor toward the institution’s emphasis on what he dismissively called “literary instruction.” While the moral instructor saw little connection between teaching prisoners to read and write and reforming them, prison authorities, under pressure to demonstrate that inmates were not suffering from the debilitating effects of solitary confinement, began promoting basic literacy education over religious reformation. Many reformers, sharing the moral instructor’s skepticism, argued that certain “types”—­immigrants and blacks, in particular—­were incapable of sufficient reflection to warrant much investment in their educations. The mixed and mostly doubtful attitudes over whether education aided the reformation of prisoners help explain the sporadic and halting efforts to supply prisoners with books and education in the city that has been widely credited as the birthplace of the modern prison. Only a few former inmates from Walnut Street or Eastern State Penitentiary published accounts of their imprisonment; this small archive of writing prisoners sheds light on the challenges that inmates faced when seeking to participate in public debates and publicly document their experiences in Philadelphia’s early penitentiaries. Chapter 4 considers the role of education in New York’s “congregate” (or “Auburn model”) prisons by drawing from a small but significant archive of inmate-­authored literature that emerged after 1820: William Coffey’s Inside Out: An Interior View of the New-­York State Prison . . .Together with Biographical Sketches of the Lives of Several of the Convicts . . . By One Who Knows (1823); John Maroney’s Narrative of the Imprisonment of John Maroney in the Prisons of New-­York and Auburn from 1821 Until 1831 . . . Written by Himself (1832); and James Brice’s Secrets of the Mount-­Pleasant State Prison, Revealed and Exposed (1839). The chapter overviews the efforts of Thomas Eddy, the Reverend John Stanford, the Reverend Louis Dwight, Jared Curtis, and Eliza Farnham to promote congregate education in Newgate, Auburn, and Sing Sing prisons, while analyzing how convicts themselves wrote about the opportunities for reading, writing, and education

16 I n t r o d u c t i o n in New York’s formative penitentiaries. While prison defenders often used literacy success stories to promote the “Auburn” model, inmates’ accounts remain more circumspect and critical of the alleged opportunities for reading and writing behind bars. Exploring the cultures of reading and writing described and created by inmates at Newgate, Auburn, and Sing Sing, I demonstrate how some inmates adapted the principles of “congregate learning” (whereby experienced students instruct the less experienced) to inspire and propel their own narratives to print. In a brief afterword, I synthesize my findings, foregrounding the ways that authorities and prisoners differed in their assessments of prison education and the meaning and purpose of reading and writing behind bars. In his pioneering anthology of American prison writing, Prison Writing in Twentieth-­Century America, H. Bruce Franklin identifies eras when prisoners emerged as influential artists with broad and appreciative audiences (pre–­World War I, the 1970s) and identifies periods of suppression, when inmate writing was silenced (the 1930s, the 1980s). Throughout the twentieth century, Franklin observes, the American public periodically drew ideas and inspiration (artistic and political) from prisoners.30 While my intent is not to produce a companion narrative, my project does highlight the ways that an earlier era, in successive generations, looked to prisons and prisoners for something more than a reassuring spectacle of law and order and instead invested prisoners with elusive knowledge and mysterious authority. Prisoner perspectives were not always welcomed or solicited, but inmates, too, perceiving a world of possibly sympathetic listeners, partnered with sponsors, printers, ministers, reformers, and authorities to create a complex literary legacy.This project looks backward in order to foster a wider understanding of prisoners’ enduring literary legacies.

C hap te r 1

Books Behind Bars R eading Pris one r s on th e Scaffold Before the 1790s, there were no prison classrooms, no prison libraries, and no formal programs to educate prisoners. When available, readings were carefully chosen, highly regulated, and religious; they remained so well into the nineteenth century, even after the birth of the penitentiary and the subsequent development of prison libraries and schools. Yet the porous nature of eighteenth-­century jails did facilitate a range of exchanges, both licit and illicit, allowing frequent contact between prisoners, between prisoners and ministers, and between prisoners and local community members. Ministers and visitants offered comfort and spiritual counseling; they also brought books, Bibles, and religious pamphlets and read with (or read to) condemned prisoners. In this way ministers and visitants helped facilitate a specific form of prisoner literacy and, in turn, helped popularize the “reading prisoner”—­a figure central to the pedagogy of punishment. At first glance it seems counterintuitive to foreground the relation between early print culture and literacy efforts in colonial American jails. After all, early jails were designed for neither educating nor reforming prisoners; sentencing lawbreakers to time behind bars as punishment was a late eighteenth-­century invention. By contrast, colonial-­era corrections relied on fines, whipping, branding, the pillory, and execution, usually by hanging. Jails held men and women until their trials, public punishment, or execution date. Because punishment was public and generally swift, there was presumably little reason to give books to prisoners, teach prisoners to read, or foreground prisoners’ acts of reading or writing acquisition.1 Nevertheless, prisoner literacy was crucial to the meaning-­making power of public punishment in colonial America, particularly but not 19

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exclusively in New England.The public nature of punishment meant that prisoner literacy mattered—­precisely because of the expectations and demands of execution’s public and print rituals. By the late seventeenth century, an emergent body of literature emerged to explore the social cost of crime and disobedience, a genre variously referred to as “gallows literature,” the “execution narrative,” or the criminal confession genre, which initially sought to transform public execution into an occasion for spiritual pedagogy and communal introspection. Although individual narratives varied widely in form, tone, structure, and message, the most orthodox narratives offered advice to the living through the cautionary example of the dying criminal (honor the Sabbath, obey your parents, don’t steal, don’t fornicate, and so on). As such, early American execution rituals bound the pedagogy of punishment to print. Most crucially, they created and disseminated a certain kind of literate prisoner, one whose reading habits (and later, his or her acts of writing) lent drama and social purpose to early American punishment. Put bluntly, executing criminals triggered early America’s interest in prisoner literacy. This book is certainly not the first to explore the central role of execution narratives to the rituals and meaning-­making of colonial punishment. As Daniel E. Williams, Daniel A. Cohen, and Karen Halttunen have richly demonstrated, execution narratives constituted a popular and widespread part of eighteenth-­century print culture. Literary historians, tracing the cultural work of execution literature, have documented how the genre adapted from its earliest origins in seventeenth-­century Puritan New England to the diverse and sensational antebellum print sphere.2 Above all, these scholars emphasize the central role that print culture played in negotiating the meaning and representation of punishment in early America, particularly the genre’s shaping influence on the literature of crime, sensation, and the gothic. But no work yet illuminates how the meaning and associative promises of literacy first propelled a diverse array of prisoners into print. I argue that reading prisoners shaped the drama and the pedagogical function of colonial execution rituals. I employ the term “reading prisoners” because of its twofold significance as noun and verb phrase, signaling both the agent (the prisoner who reads) and the act of interpreting the prisoner who reads. I begin by calling for a renewed emphasis on the role execution literature played in shaping the “era of spectacle”—­the



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extended period of public punishment before the rise of the penitentiary. I then examine why “reading prisoners” figured so heavily in execution accounts during the first half of the eighteenth century. This chapter demonstrates what we might call the “public labor” of literacy in colonial America, a function that I contrast in part two of Reading Prisoners with the place of books, reading, and instruction within the private regimes of labor and solitude that later came to define the early modern penitentiary. In this later era, reading, when allowed at all, was reserved for an inmate’s idle times and distinct from (and secondary to) the hard labor that served as the backbone of a new approach to discipline and punishment. By contrast, the colonial era made prisoners’ reading practice central to the labor of punishment and penitence. Prison Writi ng and the E i g hte e nth -­ Ce ntury C om muni cati ons Ci rc uit Before the development of the modern penitentiary, Michel Foucault influentially argues, public punishment operated as a field of power through the “spectacle of the scaffold.” Following Foucault, Michael Meranze begins his influential study of Philadelphia penal history with a section titled “Display” in which he situates use of the whip, the pillory, and the scaffold as part of a “larger penal system geared toward the public display and seizure of the body.” Public execution in particular, Meranze argues, was a system “predicated on display—­display of the condemned, display of the penalty, display of violence.” Similarly, Louis Masur describes antebellum punishment as a “theater of execution.” These scholars emphasize how the visual economy of pain, punishment, and penitence served as an effective though hardly foolproof means of social control, privileging the tropes of theater and visual performance to analyze punishment’s effects.3 None of these studies argues that public punishment shaped social behavior solely through spectacle; Foucault himself makes rich use of the print archive in Europe and North America to document public punishment’s discursive power. But by too readily embracing Foucault’s classification of execution as spectacle, we run the risk of downplaying the role of eighteenth-­century print culture in facilitating the performative power of the scaffold and in shaping the conditions for certain types of prisoners to emerge in print as occasional and provisional voices of authority.

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Cotton Mather offers an instructive example of how the “theater of execution” linked spectacular punishment, pedagogy, and print. Directing reader attention to two prisoners condemned to die for murder in 1693, Mather transforms the bodies of two condemned prisoners’ into textual “commentaries,” prompting his audience to “Behold a very doleful Commentary! You have before your Eyes, a Couple of Malefactors, whose Murderous Uncleanness, has now in their Youth brought upon them, a most miserable Death. May your Hearts now give a profitable Attention unto the Use that should be made of such a dismal Spectacle.”4 Foregrounding the relationship between visual display (“before your Eyes”) and affective response (“May your Hearts”), Mather commands his audience to bear witness to the dismal fate of the two condemned malefactors and to reassess their own sinful behavior, thereby transforming the terror of witness into heartfelt introspection. But Mather’s theater of execution was as much literacy event as public spectacle. Dramatically unveiling a hand-­written confession by one prisoner, Mather uses the confession as pedagogical prompt and theatrical prop: “Give Ear unto the Dying Speeches of the young Woman, whose Execution you are to see this Afternoon. She has put into my Hand, and sign’d with her own, these Dying Expressions of her Distressed Soul; which it will not be unprofitable, for me to publish this Day among you.”5 Asking audiences to behold not merely the prisoner’s compliance but her putative literacy acts (penning a confession, signing her name, handing her text to a minister), Mather draws attention to the textual exchange that leant dramatic immediacy to the execution. Text in hand, Mather proceeds to “publish” the prisoner’s warning, first through oral performance and then through print. In his Diary Mather, reflecting upon audience hunger for this new genre with satisfaction, noted that the text “was immediately printed . . . and it was greedily bought up”; he added, “T’was afterwards reprinted at London.”6 Thus, the “Dying Expression” of an otherwise unremarkable prisoner morphed into a public pamphlet and in the process gained the “profitable Attention” of a transatlantic audience. Mather relied on this mixed form of publication repeatedly, incorporating the dying expressions of prisoners into his public execution sermons and his printed criminal confessions. As such, he was an early innovator in disseminating the “theater of execution” by harnessing the power of printed prisoner testimony. For example, the title page of Pillars



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of Salt (1699), his pioneering compilation of criminal confessions, promised access to the “Dying Speeches” of the condemned. Mather used the printing of Pillars of Salt to boost interest in the emergent genre of execution literature by appending an advertisement for Increase Mather’s forthcoming execution sermon, The Folly of Sinning (1699). In any given year Cotton Mather distributed hundreds of execution sermons and criminal confession accounts to booksellers, ship captains and officers, and potential readers in England.7 Intent on guiding prisoners through the expectations of genre and sentiment that would shape and generate future confession accounts, Mather also gave copies directly to prisoners. In one revealing episode, Mather offered condemned pirate William Fly a copy of his 1724 sermon The Converted Sinner, which contained an interview between Mather and two pirates. Mather hoped that Fly’s reading of the text might prompt his religious conversion. But the text was old news to Fly, who informed Mather, “I read that Book before ever I was brought hither!”8 Fly’s retort revealed that prisoner confessions circulated among a diverse reading public–­–­even as Fly ironically revealed the pamphlet’s limited effectiveness in deterring him from piracy. By the early eighteenth century, New England ministers routinely published “execution sermons” as separate print publications. These occasional sermons quickly evolved to include interviews with prisoners, accounts of prisoners’ miraculous conversions before execution, descriptions of the prisoners’ state in the days and hours leading to their execution, and the final warnings and last words of prisoners on the scaffold. The accounts were advertised in newspapers and pamphlets, priced cheaply, and distributed by numerous booksellers. Dozens of execution sermons, miraculous conversion accounts, dying warnings, and prisoner confessions circulated by midcentury; these all contributed to transforming the visual pedagogy of punishment into a diverse and evolving print genre.9 Others imitated Mather’s practice of giving prisoners published execution narratives and then soliciting these prisoners to offer up their own printed confessions, a method used to disseminate still more texts in the same genre. Printers who had once worked in close collaboration with Puritan ministers, such as Boston’s Samuel Kneeland, began soliciting confessions, accounts, and speeches directly from prisoners. Before Rebekah Chamblit was executed in 1733, for example, Kneeland solicited her narrative, appending “The Declaration, Dying Warnings and

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Advice of Rebekah Chamblit” to Thomas Foxcroft’s execution sermon with the inscription, “Taken from her own mouth, and carefully drawn up as near as possible in her own words, by me, Samuel Kneeland, Printer.” Kneeland, emphasizing the prisoner’s interest in circulating her own account, noted that Chamblit signed the document “with an express and solemn desire that it might be Publish’d to the World.” The printer also published Chamblit’s declaration as a broadside, independent from the execution sermon, reiterating her “desire that it may be publish’d to the World, and Read at the place of Execution.”10 Timely, cheap, and appealing in visual style, broadsides made the words and advice proffered by prisoners affordable and available in many colonies, from New England to the mid-­Atlantic.11 Printers also made available longer biographical “lives” of prisoners alongside the increasingly familiar “dying speeches.” This development originated with the notable Great Awakening-­Indian missionary accounts of miraculous conversion, including Samuel Moody’s Summary Account of the Life and Death of Joseph Quasson, Indian (Boston: S. Gerrish, 1726) and the eight-­page Confession, Declaration, Dying Warning and Advice of Patience Sampson (Boston: Kneeland and Green, 1735). After 1750, “confessions,” a literary format with an implicitly narrow focus (the recounting of transgressions), increasingly morphed into “last speeches” or “accounts,” a literary format amenable to more autobiographical impulses and wider-­ranging content. Printers everywhere—­from New York to Philadelphia to Charleston—­f acilitated the expansion and diversification of the genre. Dispensing with ministers’ involvement altogether, many printers solicited accounts directly from prisoners or jail keepers and disseminated to an eager public a steady stream of prisoner-­penned narratives and as-­told-­to accounts.12 Despite their heavy use of third-­party amanuenses, the narratives, intended to be read as the authoritative speech of condemned prisoners, sought to cultivate reader confidence that they were gaining intimate access to the sentiments of prisoners. For example, in the Last Speech and Confession of Henry Halbert (Philadelphia, 1765), Halbert, a discontented periwig maker and indentured servant convicted of murder, signed his confession and proclaimed, “I gave this Copy from my own Mouth” to jail keeper William Crisp, “to have it published to the World”; the Last Speech features a letter from Halbert written in a Philadelphia jail to Jacob



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Woolman, the father of the murder victim, in which Halbert laments his confinement “in the Dungeon in Irons, for the barbarous and willful Murder I have committed on your Son” and seeks forgiveness by inviting readers to witness his “private” act of atonement.13 These longer “lives” and “accounts” blended warnings to the living with a fuller treatment of the prisoner’s life and experiences, changes that ensured a steady stream of semiautobiographical accounts by or about executed prisoners would continue to enter the eighteenth-­century print sphere. Together, this diverse genre of sermons, prisoner-­penned narratives, as-­told-­to accounts, and third-­party biographies facilitated what Robert Darnton has elsewhere theorized as an eighteenth-­century “communications circuit” that linked authors, printers, suppliers of ink and paper, booksellers, prisoners, readers—­and future writers.14 The extent of this circuit is evident by 1773, when a Boston bookseller used the execution of Levi Ames to publicize not only Bibles and testaments but also spelling books, writing paper, quills, and ink powder (see figure 1). Printer E. Russell’s advertisement for “A. Ellison, Bookseller, Stationer, and Binder” demonstrates a new understanding of a reading public comprised of both readers and writers (a development I examine in depth in chapter 2). As such, the advertisement both reveals how rituals of public punishment mobilized the eighteenth-­century communications circuit and demonstrates how booksellers used prisoners’ confessions to market the expanding tools of early American literacy. The ritual of public punishment thus served as a literacy event, an observable episode or activity of daily life in which literacy plays an active role.15 A single execution in colonial America became the catalyst for a series of literacy events, from the sermon delivered to audiences (which itself was grounded in scriptural exegesis), to the confessions “taken from the mouth” of prisoners (which promoted prisoners’ literacy practices), to the published texts that recorded the prisoners’ final moments (which frequently advertised the tools of colonial literacy while promoting the genre of criminal confession literature). Darnton clarifies that “reading and associating with other readers and writers” helps authors “form notions of genre and style,” which helps the communications circuit “[run] full cycle.”16 For example, in 1726, prisoner Joseph Quasson recounted reading “The Declaration and Confession of Esther Rodgers” (Boston, 1701) from his cell; in 1738, as she narrated her

Figure 1  Execution as Literacy Event: Bookseller advertisement for writing paper, quills, ink powder, slates, spellers, primers, pencils, Bibles, and Testaments, in Samuel Stillman, Two Sermons . . . Delivered the Lord’s Day Before the Execution of Levi Ames, 4th ed. (Boston: E. Russell, 1773). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.



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own confession, Patience Boston recollected the “many Malefactors that I had read or heard of, and many Examples that were read to me, out of Dr. Cotton Mather’s Church History.”17 Published confessions facilitated this threefold cycle directly. By using criminal confession accounts to market Bibles, spellers, pens, and ink, eighteenth-­century booksellers and printers turned the criminal confession genre into an important catalyst in the nation’s expanding communications circuit; by giving prisoners the published confessions of other prisoners, ministers likewise helped perpetuate and facilitate this circuit; and by consenting to have their last words and dying warnings published, prisoners fueled the cycle, too. One of the most underexamined aspects of this communications circuit was how criminal confessions, however formulaic and mediated, emphasized prisoners’ literacy practices. By documenting men’s and women’s encounters with books and reading behind bars, colonial execution narratives merged the prisoner narrative with the “ordinary Road” of colonial literacy instruction.18 As a result, prisoners were valued not simply as cautionary tales but also for their potential to educate colonial American audiences about the era’s literacy norms. Understanding the contours of colonial literacy helps us reexamine the era’s execution rituals as encounters with early American reading pedagogy. When a minister or visitant put a primer, testament, or Bible into the hands of a prisoner, or when a prisoner took up a pamphlet or sermon to read, he or she was likely to demonstrate early American literacy pedagogy. Although it is tempting to dismiss moments when prisoners read their Bibles as scenes of religious indoctrination and colonial orthodoxy, this interpretation ignores the more complex ways that the genre elevated prisoners into positions of prominence for their ability to usefully model (and even challenge) early American reading norms and expectations. Th e “Ordi nary Road” to the Sca f f ol d : Colonial L ite rac y and the Pe dag og y of P ri nt Early American attitudes toward books and reading were rooted in Protestant reading practices, particularly the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura (that truth lay in the Bible) and belief that individuals must learn to grasp these truths on their own, “unmediated by priests or clerical authority.”19 One minister noted that “printed books will do little good except Gods Spirit print them in our hearts,” an assertion that

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nicely captures the link between print culture, private reading practice, and affective faith.20 Colonial New England’s exceptional commitment to literacy instruction has been well documented; the region’s high valuation of reading was grounded in the culture’s strong Calvinist emphasis on the “preparation” stage of spiritual development, an emphasis that, according to David Nord, “fostered the culture of literacy and evangelical print.”21 Yet the era’s investment in fostering print literacy was confined to neither Puritans nor New England. David D. Hall and Elizabeth Carroll Reilly have demonstrated the surprising continuities of reading practice across the mid-­Atlantic colonies and across a range of reading communities, whereby “longstanding yet still vital institutions like the family and the congregation, Quaker Meeting, or parish remained, for many, the crucial doorway to books, settings in which family structure, ethnicity, devotional practice, and literacy overlapped.”22 Thus, the religious basis of literacy in the mid-­eighteenth century evidenced less a Puritan holdover than a revived ethnically and regionally diverse Protestantism. Traditional literacy put more emphasis and value on reading literacy than on writing literacy, particularly in the seventeenth century and early decades of the eighteenth century. Readers had contact with a small range of texts—­a Bible, a psalm book, a “steady seller,” and a yearly almanac.23 Instruction was grounded in an alphabet method, and students sounded out syllables and phrases while proceeding down the “ordinary Road” of instruction: hornbook, primer, psalter, New Testament, Bible.24 Most crucially, traditional literacy forbade idle reading and encouraged a reading process marked by diligence, attentiveness, and reflection. Hall notes, “Properly performed, the practices of reading and hearing became spiritual exercises that abetted the ever-­necessary, ever-­continuing process of self-­ examination.”25 Writing, however, “was not necessary for salvation” and “did not have the social cachet it would acquire later.”26 Thus, prior to the mid-­eighteenth century, writing literacy was not a required component of traditional literacy, and everyday men and women were by the era’s standards literate if they could read, regardless of whether they could write. This link between intensive reading and the process of self-­ examination formed the enduring basis of jailhouse reading pedagogy. Ministers and visitants, who worked closely with the condemned to prepare them for death, used reading as a central pathway toward spiritual



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preparation. While accounts of prisoners’ reading practices appeared sporadically in the earliest execution sermons, they became far more visible between 1700 and 1750, when the literary marketplace experienced a surge of demand for tales of piety under duress consistent with the evangelical revivalism that culminated in the first Great Awakening.27 During this period, observes Daniel Williams, ministers sought to awaken “personal, evangelical piety,” and their execution sermons became “less concerned with the excitement of terror and more concerned with the process of conversion.”28 This meant that the inward, reflective process of feeling one’s sin entailed a parallel outward process of verbalizing sin so ministers and printers willingly solicited prisoner accounts that dramatized scenes of spiritual struggle, especially moments when prisoners encountered the power of “the Word” through intense reading practice. As the theme of miraculous conversion came to dominate early eighteenth-­century criminal narratives, prisoners’ reading practices achieved new prominence.29 Because literacy encounters served as barometers for assessing prisoners’ spiritual readiness for death, prisoners were encouraged to read and to monitor their response to their reading, while ministers or other third-­party observers closely documented what and how intently prisoners read. Sudden interest in reading the Bible, revived attention to passages of scripture, or intense meditation on a religious pamphlet as execution day approached were exciting developments that warranted inclusion and emphasis in early criminal confession accounts. For example, a 1701 account notes that, after feeling the “power of the Word” at a Sabbath service, Esther Rodgers returned to her cell and became a focused reader who “set her self to search the scriptures diligently, out of which she collected many Texts, that encouraged her to hope for mercy and pardon.”30 Likewise, in a 1738 account, a witness noted approvingly how Patience Boston sat down on the cart transporting her to the scaffold to read her Bible with “such composure” while a minister delivered “a Paper, at her desire, taken from her Mouth.”31 In both examples observers spoke admiringly of the prisoners’ attentive reading as a sign of their newfound interest in their spiritual condition. The ministers who attended upon these prisoners encouraged disciplined reading practices that could stir spiritual awakening and testify to the direct imprint of God on the heart. By soliciting, recording, and

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circulating accounts of the strained yet often powerfully transformative reading practices of prisoners, they hoped that they could encourage similar spiritual renewal in other readers. For example, a Worcester pastor noted approvingly that James Buchanan, Ezra Ross, and William Brooks, awaiting execution in 1778 for the notorious murder of Joshua Spooner, “spent all their time, even till late at night, in reading the Bible and many valuable books that were put into their hands” and “were wont to make very pertinent observations upon many passages.”32 Despite this edifying lesson, the reason for including such anecdotes was not simply to encourage readers’ spiritual vigilance; these scenes sought to teach colonial readers how to read by imitating the intensive and reflective reading habits of model prisoners. Thus, reading prisoners not only demonstrated the potential for spiritual redemption, but also helped guide the living to emulate their rigorous reading practices while avoiding the vices that led the condemned to the gallows. Consequently, prisoner accounts published between 1700 and 1750 are filled with examples of reading prisoners, most often as the men and women await and prepare for execution. Spiritual advisors and visitors monitored prisoners’ interpretation skills (such as their abilities to locate and apply scripture to their situations), the industry that prisoners devoted to reading (number of hours spent, number of texts read or reread), and the prisoners’ emotional responses to their reading (attentive or distracted, heartfelt or lackluster). For example, Irish-­born Matthew Cushing’s inability to read frustrated his visitors and created “a great hindrance to his progress in knowledge, and made the labour of those that instructed him much the harder.”33 By contrast, Samuel Moody noted in 1726 how spectators were “much affected, perhaps almost beyond Example,” by prisoner Joseph Quasson and offered a detailed account of his literacy practices by praising Quasson’s natural Love to Reading, from first to last, and by his great Diligence therein whilst a Prisoner; together with personal Instructions by a good number of Visitants; who also furnished him with Variety of the most suitable Books, lesser and larger; all or most of which he deliberately read over; and some of them not once only nor twice; Fox of Time and the End of Time, and Mr. Stoddard’s Guide to Christ; with Charnock of Man’s Enmity against God. . . .



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Examples also, peculiarly that of [murderer and jailhouse convert] Esther Rogers [sic] . . . were of special Use to him.34 Quasson not only read the right kinds of spiritually edifying texts, but he also read them in the right way—­that is, deliberately, over and over. Moreover, he read other prisoners’ accounts and took cues from their transformative encounters with “the Word,” making reading practice central to his drama of death and potential salvation. Alternately, bad reading was also useful to document, most often because it helped readers understand the consequences of shoddy spiritual preparation. Thus, Esther Rodgers, a white servant convicted of infanticide, began her 1701 “Declaration” by noting that, after her indentureship at age thirteen, she “was taught to Read, Learned Mr. Cottons Catechism, and had frequent opportunities of going to Publick Meetings; but was a careless Observer of Sabbaths, and Hearer of Sermons; no Word that ever I heard or read making any Impression upon my Heart, (as I Remember).”35 Rodgers’s lack of affective response to “the Word” demonstrated her lack of discipline and her unregenerate spiritual state and thus, by extrapolation, her descent into sexual promiscuity and murder. In 1739, Arthur Browne delivered his execution sermon, Religious Education of Children Recommended, by directing the audience’s attention to Irish immigrant Penelope Kenny, convicted of concealing the death of her bastard child, who was “reduced to this deplorable Condition, chiefly from a want of those Opportunities of Instruction, you so plentifully enjoy.”36 While Browne did not directly advocate the parents’ responsibility to teach children to read and instead argued for their responsibility to teach their children and servants the catechism, the concept of early childhood literacy instruction as a deterrent to crime soon became a common refrain, as would the danger of reading novels or other diversionary materials. In 1772, for example, convicted and condemned rapist Bryan Sheehan confessed to a minister that he “confined his reading . . . to history and books of diversion,” which lead the minister to link Sheehan’s crime of rape to his propensity for reading history books.37 Although authorities emphasized forms of reading that mobilized penitence and conversion, jailhouse confessions revealed a wide array of motivations for highlighting prisoners’ literacy practices. For example, an

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instructive account circulated by “a Molatto Woman at Plymouth” condemns her master for neglect because he kept her from school and also implies that her mother’s (racial?) anxiety contributed to this neglect, despite the young girl’s strong desire for an education. Transcribed from a slip of paper left behind after Elizabeth Colson was executed for murdering her illegitimate child, the piece begins, “I was Born at Weymouth and my Mother put me out to Ebenezer Prat, who was to learn me to read, but I fear they never took that pains they should have done to instruct me, my Mother being School-­Mistress was loth I should come to School with other Children, and so I had not that Instruction I wish I had in my Youth,” and ends by advising readers to “be now advised to take fast hold of Instruction, and let it not go, keep it for it is thy Life.” Boston’s New-­ England Weekly Journal, which printed Colson’s account in 1727, informs readers that the account was “taken from her own mouth by one who was in Goal [sic] with her some time of her Imprisonment, and is here inserted, without the Addition of one Word.”38 The mixed-­race servant’s confession demands that her crime be understood alongside her neglected education and indicts Colson’s master as well as her mother for a dream deferred. By insisting that readers “take fast hold” of opportunities for instruction, Colson’s confession indirectly chastises any readers who might either prohibit or hinder the educational path of their children or servants. Reading could provide more than just spiritual comfort for prisoners biding time in colonial jails. When the Reverend Eliphalet Adams praised local ministers for putting “good Books” into Pequot Indian servant Katherine Garret’s hands, he interpreted her enthusiasm for the texts as evidence of her receptivity to their devotional content. In the dying warning “Left under her own Hand” before her execution, Garret, however, gives thanks for “other good Books I have been favoured with, by peoples giving and lending them to me, which has been blessed to me.”39 Garret’s narrative, which describes reading differently than standard colonial pedagogy, emphasizes how reading offers an opportunity for interpersonal exchange rather than an exercise in solitary contemplation: whenever the narrative documents Garret accepting books, it mentions these consistently in the context of receiving visitors and conversing with advisors in her cell. If we interpret her love of “good Books” as straightforward evidence of her pious deference to authority, then we miss the ways Garret’s narrative repositions literacy’s provisional benefits. Here the



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acts of giving, lending, and conversing contributed to a book’s value. In Garret’s account, reading provides an antidote to isolation behind bars. Garret’s narrative also demonstrates how the literacy journeys of Indian prisoners link the acquisition of literacy with the experience of social dislocation. While many narratives use the prisoners’ last words to testify to the justice of their punishment and even express gratitude for being imprisoned, others, like the confession of Patience Boston and the aforementioned Pequot, Katherine Garret, draw upon scripture to emphasize the enduring effects of colonial encounter. For example, Boston’s account pairs learning to read with being torn from her Native family: “I was born at Menomey on Cape Cod Dec. 26, 1711. My Father’s Name was John Samson, my Mother’s Maiden Name was Sarah Jethro. . . . Mother died when I was but about three Years old: Soon after which my Father bound me out to Mr. Paul Crow, a Religious Family in which I was taught to Read, and learned the Assembly’s Catechism.”40 Garret’s third-­person account is similar: “She was of the Pequot Tribe of Indians & Descended from one of the best Families among them; In her Childhood she was put into the Family of the Reverend Mr. William Worthington, where she was taught to read well and to write & Instructed in the principles of religion.”41 Both accounts indirectly dramatize how encounters with colonial literacy practices accompanied the women’s departure from and loss of their Native communities. Patience Boston and Katherine Garret were exemplary prisoners: they were repentant servants who offered teachable moments to readers, but even this summation elides the ways that both women’s confessions filtered an understanding of Christianity through the experience of colonization. A sense of dislocation, for example, fuels Boston’s response to Christ. Before recounting a series of abject ramblings, Boston observed that “I read in my Testament how cruelly Christ was buffetted[,] scourged and spit upon,” drawing a parallel between her suffering and that of a wandering, isolated, and persecuted Christ; the narrative reasserts its protagonist’s affinity with Christ later by invoking God’s “Long Suffering Patience,” a phrase that serves as both a plea for mercy and a self-­referential articulation of the protagonist’s pain.42 Thus, the era’s interest in devotional reading practice made Boston’s and Garret’s narratives possible, even as their confessions engage with the provocative query posed by Jill Lepore: “Can literacy destroy?

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. . . Can literacy kill?” Lepore, challenging the common association of literacy with social empowerment by foregrounding the fate of literate Algonquians in seventeenth-­century New England, probes, “If literacy is employed as an agent of assimilation, can one of its uses be the devastation of a society’s political autonomy and the loss of its native language and culture?”43 Although neither criminal confession account answers “yes” outright, both dramatize the heartbreaking consequences of English literacy acquisition for New England Native peoples. As the century progressed and the genre diversified, printers became more willing to foreground prisoners’ more subversive literacy practices. For example, Owen Syllavan (Sullivan) forged bills from inside prison and “for want of a Rolling Press, struck [currency] off by Hand, sign’d it in Goal [sic] and gave it out by Quantities to my Accomplices.”44 Still others wrote to proclaim their innocence; these included Abraham Johnstone, a manumitted slave later executed for murder, whose 1797 narrative was addressed “To the People of Colour” and condemned “the keen shafts of prejudice” against “those of our colour.”45 Such displays of outright rebellion were rare in earlier narratives; nevertheless, even these penitent accounts depict literacy as a tool for articulating both spiritual readiness and social displacement. Prisone r s of H ope : Jo se ph H anno, Jo se ph Quasson, and Coloni al M i ssi onary Educati on The era’s fascination with the reading habits of the condemned was not only driven by Protestant reading expectations. The narratives of Joseph Hanno and Joseph Quasson illuminate the complex literacy effects of colonial-­era imprisonment: by examining their accounts alongside the history of early missionary efforts, we gain better understanding of not only why early prisoners were taught to read but also the significance about how and what they read. Significantly, their accounts contributed to pressing debates over black and Indian education in the colonies. Joseph Hanno was an African-­born former slave who had received a limited education from his New England master before attaining his freedom. Convicted in 1721 for murdering his wife (he later confessed his guilt), Hanno was confined in Boston’s Queen Street jail. There he was visited by Cotton Mather, who, consistent with his innovations in the genre, appended a “Conference between a Minister and the Prisoner” to



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his 1721 execution sermon on Hanno. Within Queen Street jail, the two men engaged in an intense battle over the meaning and uses of prisoners’ reading practices. In their “Conference,” Mather seizes upon Hanno’s reading habits to make the case that the condemned man lacked the proper humility and composure to submit to eternal judgment, while Hanno expresses particular pride in reading as a form of self-­fashioning. Mather’s decision to record the encounter in the form of a conference adds a level of dramatic intensity and wry humor to their ensuing confrontation, as Mather peppers Hanno with questions and challenges about how he has spent his time awaiting execution and then expresses frustration at his responses. “You have been many Months in the Prison; I pray, how have you spent your Time hitherto? I hope, they have not all been Months of Vanity,” Mather queries. Hanno replies, “In Reading and Praying, Sir.” “In Reading!—­” Mather exclaims incredulously, adding that Hanno has no Bible in his cell.46 Provoked by Hanno’s perceived insolence, Mather accuses Hanno of being a “Great pretender,” whose dubious claim to scriptural knowledge is ironically demonstrated by his familiarity with scripture. Accusing Hanno of “always vain gloriously Quoting of Sentences from them wherever you came,” Mather faults Hanno’s scriptural literacy as a form of false pride.47 When Mather later inquires of him, “Do you understand what I say to you?” Hanno gives no ground by responding, “Yes, Sir. I have a Great deal of Knowledge. No body of my Colour, in Old England or New, has so much.” To this comment a frustrated Mather retorts, “I wish you were less Puffed up with it.”48 Hanno’s dexterous literacy, his “vain glorious Quoting of Sentences,” became, in Mather’s eyes, evidence of Hanno’s pride and insolence rather than his enthusiasm for “the Word.” If a good prisoner demonstrated proper self-­composure through reading, Hanno’s “Puffed up” sense of self conflicted with Mather’s conception of a prostrate penitent. Hanno’s assertiveness also threatened Mather’s investment in black submission. Mather hoped that he could make Hanno a positive example, a “Pattern of all Goodness unto other Ethiopians.” But Hanno interpreted his abilities quite differently, fashioning himself as a literate, and thus exceptional, man of color.49 By the end, Mather abandons his hopes of transforming Hanno’s educated exuberance into Christian submission and chastises the “Wretched Ethiopian” by proclaiming that

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“the Sins of your more Ignorant Country-­men, have not such Aggravations as yours.”50 By imagining Hanno’s potential to serve as a “Pattern of all Goodness” to other blacks, Mather foresaw the benefit of using prisoners to advocate for colonial missionary projects. Foregrounding how deeply black literacy instruction and religion were intertwined, Ross Beales and E. Jennifer Monaghan clarify that “the history of African-­American literacy is also one of philanthropic agencies undertaking to introduce slaves and free blacks to Christianity, and putting catechisms, spelling books, the Book of Common Prayer, and Bibles in their hands as part of this program.”51 These missionary projects expanded in the eighteenth century through organized efforts by the Church of England, particularly the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts (or SPG, founded in 1701). The SPG boasted an accessible curriculum targeting blacks, Indians, and the poor while emphasizing a paternalistic doctrine of subordination whose “watchwords were obedience and deference, fidelity and dependence.”52 In an era of revived missionary educational efforts, Joseph Hanno’s literacy became a measure of not merely his conversion but in addition, for authorities, the potential of all blacks to learn proper doctrines of deference. More precisely, Cotton Mather used Hanno’s execution to develop his arguments on the relationship between African American education and black servitude. In an earlier treatise, The Negro Christianized (1706), Mather had argued on behalf of missionary efforts among Africans and African Americans, criticized the “Bruitish insinuation” that blacks lacked rational souls, and advanced the Calvinist argument that the elect might be anywhere.53 Consistent with these beliefs, he arranged for his own slave Onesimus to learn to read.54 In 1717 Mather erected a children’s charity school “for the Instruction of poor Negro’s and Indians” that provided reading instruction in scriptures and catechism but notably lacked any curriculum in writing instruction.55 The school was short-­lived, closing in 1721, the year Mather encountered Hanno. Mark Weiner draws the following conclusion about what is at stake in this narrative: “Joseph Hanno’s crime opened a rift in Mather’s complex views about race, slavery, and Christianity: it put them in tension. On one hand, Joseph Hanno was the product of precisely the kind of spiritual inclusiveness that Mather advocated  .  .  . and yet Hanno’s knowledge of Christ clearly had not made



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this particular African more law abiding, as Mather promised whites it would.”56 Mather was in a compromised position: he needed to account for Hanno’s crime while defending efforts to promote the conversion of blacks through religious education. Mather’s solution was to reject Hanno’s claims of textual and spiritual literacy. This recast the problem not as black education per se, but as Hanno’s misguided, solitary process. Accusing him of having no Bible, of misquoting, of lying about his knowledge, Mather critiqued Hanno’s literacy practices in order to undermine Hanno’s claims to religious and textual authority. If Mather’s encounter with Joseph Hanno revealed the limitations of using the reading prisoner to promote missionary education projects, Joseph Quasson’s experience proved a far more successful example. Quasson, a Native American (most likely Monomoyick), shot John Peter, a “Fellow-­Soldier and Kinsman” in August 1725, while volunteering with an English militia in Maine. For almost a year Quasson languished in York’s Old Gaol until his execution in June 1726. During this time he was visited frequently by Samuel Moody, York’s well-­respected Congregationalist minister, who solicited Quasson’s confession and published it after his death. The forty-­page narrative blends Moody’s observations, Quasson’s first-­person account, and a lengthy interview between Quasson and an anonymous visitant (probably Moody), typical of the composite structure of criminal confession accounts. The Moody/Quasson narrative invokes Quasson’s reading practice to signal his diligence, spiritual readiness, and likely salvation and also to illustrate the painful process of true conversion. Structured like a typical conversion narrative, the text sketches Quasson’s childhood, his descent into crime, and his subsequent imprisonment, as Moody takes careful note of how the prisoner’s “extraordinary Agitations” transform into calm and penitent resignation before his execution.57 To tell this story, however, the narrative traces Quasson’s educational journey before and during his confinement in York’s Old Gaol. Like Mather’s account of Joseph Hanno’s literary life, Quasson’s literacy narrative originated in colonial missionary endeavors. Quasson was born in 1698 in Monomoy, on Cape Cod, where, according to his account, he lived with his parents until he was six years old. In 1698, the Monomoyick Indians (a small tribe considered part of the eastern branch of the Wampanoag) had a recognized tradition of Native Christian education and

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religious instruction, including their own Indian preacher and schoolmaster, John Cosens.58 A quarter century earlier, a missionary reported that of the seventy-­one “praying Indians” at Monomoyick, twenty could read in their own language, fifteen could write in their own language, and just one could read English.59 New England and New York had a long tradition of Indian education projects, and Quasson’s personal story was deeply imbedded in this wider literacy history. For Quasson, as in other published accounts of Native prisoners, learning to read English was accompanied by scenes of communal and family disintegration and profound personal loss. According to the narrative, when Quasson turned six, his father fell into debt and bound him out as a servant to Samuel Sturges of Yarmouth. The economic stress on Quasson’s father propelled young Quasson from the small, tight-­knit Native Christian community into English servitude, where he was kept under “strict and regular Government Night and Day” and taught his catechism, a traditional stage of reading acquisition as well as spiritual education.Years later, Quasson stopped attending the English church and attempted to return to the “Indian Meeting,” but he reported that, after such a long separation, “I understood nothing.”60 The narrative further emphasizes Quasson’s isolation as it traces the events that led to his arrest. After enlisting as a volunteer in an English militia during Dummer’s War, Quasson was sent to Maine. During an argument in August 1725, he shot John Peter, a fellow militia member and Indian from Barnstable; much to Quasson’s dismay, John Peter died days later. Alone and highly conscious of his precarious and unsympathetic position, Quasson sought the assistance of the local minister “because I thought, being a poor Indian and in a strange Place, especially in a Time of War, People would be little concerned about me. However I thought there was a Minister in the Town, and if he were a good Man he would have Compassion on my Soul: I sent for him.” Soon afterward, under the care of Samuel Moody, Quasson, embarking on a course of diligent reading and prayer, noted that “I read more or less, every Day, the whole Time of my Confinement, and for the most part of several Hours in a Day.”61 In jail, Quasson reclaimed a literacy that helped him articulate his struggles. Consisting of just two dungeon rooms in an eighteen-­by-­thirty-­ foot building close to the meeting house, the jail was small yet porous.62



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When Quasson complained about the continuous singing and swearing of a cellmate, he was allowed to leave the jail to attend church services. His narrative recounts his experiences with numerous visitors, including several ministers and a “good Woman” who visited him frequently before his execution and provided the opportunity for Quasson to display his reading practice. During the woman’s visits, Quasson took out his Bible, with its “scores of Leaves turned down,” and read to her those passages that resonated with his personal struggle, illustrating the important interpretive processes of reading aloud. His chosen verse was from Psalms: “I am a stranger in the Earth, hide not thy Commandments from me,” a verse that conveys both isolation and desperation. The blend of confinement and social exchange in York’s Old Gaol turned Quasson into a model penitent, a transformation made possible through a reading process marked by estrangement, grief, and doubt. Quasson reacted with particular agitation to a discourse on Isaiah: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.” Insisting on the unbridgeable gap between two worlds (“my thoughts are not your thoughts”), the line evocatively, perhaps unintentionally, gave voice to the dislocation that Quasson experienced as both Indian convert and condemned prisoner.63 As in Hanno’s text, Quasson’s reading practices formed the drama of the narrative. Earlier in his account, Quasson had lamented, “I have had many Books, and have read much,—­but I don’t see that I’m a lot the better.” The statement captures the ambivalent labor of colonial-­era bibliotherapy: Quasson reads, but he fails to feel assurance; instead, he suffers doubt, futility, and fear of failure. His reaction is entirely orthodox: insecurity and doubt were part of preparationist pedagogy, the rocky road before the spiritual calm that signaled readiness for death. But Quasson’s assertion that he “read much” without improvement still posed a significant threat to Moody’s investment in missionary education. Prisoners’ private dramas of crime and conversion also reflected the larger public debates over how literacy was taught in the colonies. Rather than interpret the prisoner’s assertion as a sign that Quasson was probably on the right course to salvation because he was struggling, as good preparationist pedagogy encouraged, Moody redoubled his efforts to supply texts and monitor the Indian’s response to his readings. Shortly thereafter, Moody reported, the prisoner evinced a “remarkable Alteration” following much diligent reading and interaction with

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visitors. Now marked by a “natural Love to Reading,” Quasson read voraciously, experienced “Awakening, Conviction, Humiliation, Direction,” and shortly thereafter died a model penitent.64 The popularity of “miraculous conversion” accounts by and about Indians and blacks must also be understood as an outgrowth of denominational competition over both literacy instruction and missionary education. This argument lends more scope and context to the scholarly argument that criminal confession narratives flourished because of a rising tide of evangelicalism in the first half of the eighteenth century. Throughout the 1720s, Congregationalists fretted over the success of their missionary efforts among New England Native communities. In 1724, several years after his own charity school for “poor Negro’s and Indians” had met its demise, Cotton Mather wrote a dejected letter to the new governor of the Boston commissioners. In the letter he expressed his “Despondencies” about the “Gospelizing of our Indians” and articulated his hopes that new leadership would “procure something more Effectual” and “inspire a New Vigour into all our Motions.”65 Quasson’s conversion provided an ideal opportunity for such revitalization. Moody, actively promoting Quasson’s case during an annual gathering of Congregationalist ministers in New England, noted the special providence that enabled him to have the “Anniversary Convention of Ministers” pray for Quasson and to bring the condemned prisoner’s “Desires of Prayer to more than an hundred—­the Ministers of four Colonies.”66 Following Quasson’s execution, Moody moved quickly to assemble his forty-­page account of the deceased’s life and death, the first prisoner conversion narrative ever published as a stand-­alone work. He chose as the publisher Samuel Gerrish, a Bostonian with a reputation for “aggressively marketing works of popular piety and adventure.”67 The selection was telling: for readers and Quasson’s Congregationalist allies, Quasson’s story was both a piety and an adventure tale—­a harrowing journey through sin and redemption, marked by doubt, struggle, and ultimately hope. At the time, Congregationalists faced fierce competition from rival missionary groups, particularly the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.While Mather fretted about the dearth of vital and successful Congregationalist missionary work, the SPG was busy funding a massive effort to place hundreds of Anglican clergymen and dozens of schoolmasters in colonies from Maine to Georgia to convert and to



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educate underserved rural, black, and Native communities. Despite widespread hostility toward Anglicanism in the northern colonies, between 1714 and 1763, sixty-­five Anglican schoolteachers established themselves, including thirty-­seven in New York, six each in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and eleven in Congregationalist strongholds in New England.68 Anglicans also enjoyed a “great coup” in 1722, when Yale’s president and six other prominent Congregationalists affiliated with Yale announced their conversion to Anglicanism. Such developments established the Church of England as a “serious intellectual rival in New England.”69 Sensitivity to the differences between Anglican and Congregationalist reading practice further explains why and how reading prisoners like Quasson gained status in the first half of the eighteenth century. Like the Congregationalists, Anglicans were committed to literacy instruction as the basis for spiritual instruction; however, Congregationalists placed far more emphasis than Anglicans on painstaking reading and interpretation as a means to spiritual growth and conversion. Unlike Congregationalists, the SPG preached a more accessible path to faith and conversion: “Theologically far less demanding than the Congregationalists and far more confident that salvation could be won by faith, decent behavior, and steady church attendance,” Monaghan argues, “the Anglicans brought a new vision of what literacy was to accomplish.”70 SPG literacy missions among Native Americans and enslaved and free African Americans were therefore less educationally ambitious, guiding students toward facility with the Book of Common Prayer, a less-­demanding reading curriculum than the Testaments or Bible reading demanded by Congregationalists.71 As a result, Quasson’s jailhouse narrative not only fed the era’s interest in tales of piety but also stressed the superiority of Congregationalist literacy curricula. Obtaining a “Variety of the most suitable Books, lesser and larger; all or most of which he deliberately read over; and some of them not once only nor twice,” Quasson demonstrated the more rigorous practices advocated by Congregationalists.72 Thus, as Anglicans gained ground through their missionary work and free charity schools, Congregationalists like Moody and Mather sought to assert their preferred literacy curricula by gathering and publishing narratives of black and Native American prisoners. As a result, Quasson’s designation as a “Prisoner of Hope” contained multiple resonances; the phrase

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suggested not only his private struggle to maintain hope against crippling feelings of resignation, loss, and despair but also the process by which a “poor Indian and Malefactor” embodied the hopes of New England Congregationalists for the success of their endangered missionary projects.73 This practice continued with Moody’s circulation of the aforementioned Faithful Narrative of the Wicked Life and Remarkable Conversion of Patience Boston (Boston, 1738), with its dramatic emphasis on the Indian servant’s reading of Testaments, the Bible, two sermons by Increase Mather, and several other books. Under Moody’s tutelage, a notorious murder was transformed into a “dear Saint” capable of inspiring the “candid reader.”74 At the end of Quasson’s account, Moody made a final appeal to an imagined audience, a “good Reader,” whom he urged to remember Quasson’s struggles.75 This phrase, “good Reader,” functioned as both an appeal and a challenge. After all, Quasson’s narrative demonstrated that being a “good Reader” took immense discipline and effort. By highlighting Quasson’s literacy journey and its facilitation by a devoted network of visitors, the narrative captured the way that the “labor” of colonial-­era prison literacy was made possible by face-­to-­face encounter and facilitated by both an exchange and a carefully focused discussion of texts. By this definition, reading in the colonial jail was for neither leisure nor “idle times” (as a later generation of prison reformers would contend): colonial reading practice was labor, and “public labor” at that, made visible, regimented, monitored, and explicitly emphasized in written accounts to promote, by example and counterexample, the sort of reformed spiritual practice that “good Readers” might themselves adopt. With its large crowds and corresponding networks of print, the public nature of colonial punishment kept narratives by and about prisoners’ literacy labor in the public eye, thereby ensuring that, by popularizing and proliferating criminal confession accounts, prisoners contributed to the emerging age of mass literacy. Execution Narrative s A dap t to th e “Fir st Ag e of M ass L ite rac y ” William Gilmore argues that, beginning around 1760, the Western world participated in “the first age of mass literacy” when an “extensive communications network and a new series of cultural forms began to enter the homes of most families,” which diffused the printed and written word to more populations.76 Rural communities in the American Northeast, for



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example, witnessed the rise of a “new regional communications environment” as expanding roads, waterways, and commerce made more types of reading materials more readily available.77 In the 1720s, Philadelphia’s Samuel Keimer and Ben Franklin and New York’s John Peter Zenger shook up previous publisher monopolies; across the ensuing decades expanding distribution networks disseminated print more widely throughout the colonies.78 By 1770, Philadelphia rivaled Boston, which had long dominated colonial print production and distribution, while a growing constellation of cities—­from Portsmouth to Baltimore to Richmond to Charleston—­ established news presses and newspapers.79 In addition, newly formed subscription and circulating libraries helped expand the channels by which readers gained access to print.80 In the years leading up to the Revolution, transatlantic ties between colonial and London booksellers strengthened, resulting in brisk sales for colonial booksellers. Meanwhile, despite significant obstacles, including English patent law and taxes on durable goods such as paper, native publishers and printers helped fuel more entrepreneurial forms of publishing across the colonies: the Great Awakening, for example, produced a surge in religious printing in the 1740s, while the American Revolution fueled the publication of numerous political pamphlets, treatises, and proclamations from the 1760s through the 1770s.81 With the increased availability of cheap print—­ almanacs, chapbooks, broadsides, pamphlets, psalters, and newspapers—­a wider range of readers had greater access to more varieties of print than ever before. The print sphere’s expansion was also an inevitable response to population growth: the number of colonists of European origin increased from 265,000 in 1700 to more than two million by 1770 and to nearly three million by 1790.82 With more “acts and occasions” for reading, the practice became more habitual, and, following Gilmore’s oft-­quoted argument, “reading became a necessity of life.”83 Signature literacy rates also rose by century’s end, in part due to expanded writing instruction and schooling opportunities for most men and women, both wealthy and poor. (Later I discuss a significant exception, black literacy.) The percentage of people who could read was even higher than the signature rates suggest, particularly because many who had no formal writing instruction had still received reading instruction.84 Writing was not yet a “necessity of life,” but, for a significant portion of the population, writing became a part of everyday literacy practice.

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This changing print sphere transformed the form and function of prisoner writing. Daniel Williams observes that “despite the evangelical fires they ignited during the Great Awakening, the ministers were unable to stem the tide of worldliness,” for “those initially responsible for [prisoners’] characterizations were unable to retain sole control of their creations.”85 Printers remained committed to publishing Bibles, testaments, primers, and other steady sellers; in fact, many invested in new print technologies to secure a greater share of the market for religious literature from London publishers. But the fragile collaborations between ministers and printers loosened as printers also sought ways to adapt the Flys, Hannos, and Quassons into figures that could capture readers in an increasingly secular and commercial marketplace. The genre became more heterogeneous in form and more autobiographical in content, by documenting prisoners’ exploits, describing crimes before incarceration, painting distinct personalities, and shaping social environments in more scrupulous detail. For Williams, the “religious drama of sin and salvation gave way to melodrama” while the forces shaping the criminal confession genre shifted “from the pulpit to the market.” The genre maintained its pedagogical purpose (offering lessons to the living) and ideological impulse (regulating social behavior), but its emphasis changed, “maximiz[ing] the sensational aspects of the criminal’s life and minimaliz[ing] the functions of repentance and justification.”86 For Cohen, the century-­long shift transformed “pious confessions to largely secular autobiographies.”87 By the 1780s, notes Cohen, some execution texts even embraced the sentiments of the Revolutionary era and facilitated a “literature of social insurgency” when prisoners refused to frame their crimes as regrettable and often exhibited hostility to both secular and religious authorities.88 Two examples illustrate the familiar form of prisoner writing after the 1750s.The single-­sheet broadside The Dying Speech and Confession of William Linsey . . . for Burglary (Boston, 1770) devotes the bulk of its three columns to documenting Linsey’s actions: numerous thefts and forgeries, whippings and brandings, stints in Windham, Ipswich, Portsmouth, and Worcester jails, and daring jailbreaks. Offering picaresque exploits and a detailed inventory of Linsey’s criminal career, the broadside ends with a conventional plea for forgiveness, as Linsey, held in Worcester Gaol while awaiting execution for burglary, thanks the judges and all God’s people for his just trial and sentence.89 His account, in which a brief moral introduction and conclusion



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serve as bookends to a lengthier (and livelier) autobiographical account, is a template for many criminal biographies published after 1750. Printers also began issuing longer pamphlets based on the “Dying Warnings,” “Lives,” and “Accounts” of prisoners facing execution for capital crimes, a shift that facilitated the genre’s autobiographical impulse. These longer texts, blending warnings to the living with a fuller treatment of the prisoners’ life experiences, criminal histories, and trials, frequently incorporated a cornucopia of source material, some supplied by the prisoner and some by third parties. The Account of the Trial of Joseph Andrews for Piracy and Murder (New York, 1769), begins with a trial report, shifts to a minister’s account of Andrews’s life and notorious crimes, and then concludes with his (ostensible) dying speech, an illustrative example of the genre’s multiple forms. Remarking upon the integration of legal vernacular into the criminal confession genre, Steven Wilf argues that “formulaic language was pushed aside by a newfound sense of the contending voices that swirled around the criminal law” and that such increasing autonomy meant that “felons [would] leave a firm imprint of authorial control upon the production of their biographies.” As a result, prisoners’ presence in the public sphere expanded, as did the opportunities for prisoners to supply personal details and to shape the sentiments of their narratives.90 In the decades after the Revolution, reading maintained its connection to moral edification, in part through enduring Protestant and evangelical assumptions about reading’s ability to imprint “the Word” upon the heart to prompt moral and spiritual transformation. This meant that, unlike the more secular reading revolutions in France and England, religious titles still dominated the British-­North American book trade and American readers remained steady purchasers of religious and devotional texts. Beyond an enduring religious influence, reading practice was shaped by an emerging culture of sentiment that emphasized the role of the senses in shaping sociability. Reading honed the capacity to moderate temperament, contain destructive passions, and facilitate the exercise of reason—­provided, of course, the right texts were read in the right way. From this cultural development, the middle class could use its reading practice to demonstrate its moral sentiment, resulting in lively debates between novelists and their detractors over whether novels themselves honed or threatened the moral faculties.While opinions differed on what constituted “idle” reading, few doubted its dangers, and consensus emerged among secular rationalists,

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moderates, and evangelicals that reading could usefully discipline the passions and assist in moral formation.91 Thus, moral reading was not only prominent, but it was also popular, conducive to the spread of evangelical print alongside the early nation’s more secular and democratic cultures of sentiment. This helps explain the enduring popularity of pious criminal confessions alongside their more insurgent counterparts. As more sensational and secular prisoner accounts flourished, ministers who wished to pen execution sermons and solicit criminal confessions were thus forced to adapt to the times. While some sermons reworked older strains of the New England jeremiad or revived New Light evangelical appeals, many execution sermons advocated new ideas about how to understand and interpret the criminal.92 These sermons offered different theological arguments than their precursors about the reasons for crime. Unlike an earlier era’s emphasis on original sin as an explanation for crime, later execution sermons offered reasons besides God’s withdrawn grace or man’s fallen nature to explain why crime happens and why people do bad things; some sermons proposed instead that the appetites or passions often usurped the powers of reason while other sermons pondered environmental or social causes of crime. For example, Aaron Bancroft posited that a lack of religious education and neglected schooling contributed to Samuel Frost’s murder of Captain Elisha Allen in his sermon The Importance of a Religious Education Illustrated and Enforced (Worcester, 1793). Ministers continued to use public executions as an occasion to highlight the costs of disobedience, the need for increased vigilance, and the link between individual transgression and communal responsibility. But they increasingly incorporated newer Enlightenment theories of crime, as “environmental determinism” replaced the “spiritual determinism of original sin” and highlighted, per John Locke and others, the role of negligent parents, faulty education, and poverty in creating a propensity for vice and criminality.93 By century’s end, even execution sermons integrated many autobiographical impulses of criminal confession narratives as well as emergent forms of crime writing, such as journalism and trial reports. For example, a sermon by Enoch Huntington blended high moral sentiment with sensationalism; its title begins generically enough—­A Sermon Preached at Haddam, June 14, 1797. On the day of the Execution of Thomas Starr, Condemned for the Murder of his Kinsman, Samuel Cornwell—­but continues with



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forensic precision, . . . by seven wounds given him, by a penknife, in the trunk of his body, July 26th, 1796, of which he languished a few days and died: with a sketch of the life and character of said Starr (Middletown, 1797). The catch-­ all nature of the sermon—­part criminal biography, part news report, part religious message—­appealed to readers seeking moral edification, sensational entertainment, or insight into what drove a fellow countryman to repeatedly drive a penknife into his kinsman’s torso.94 Now competing with prisoners for audiences, ministers actively sought to maintain their print presence, to assert their relevance, and to often defend public execution against both its detractors and a public that at times struck them as too sympathetic to the plight of the condemned. The changes to the genre had profound consequences for how prisoners’ literacy was valued, imagined, and represented. As ministers ceded some authority over the shape and contents of criminal confession narratives, reading literacy diminished as a subject of emphasis and a desired measure of reform. Execution narratives maintained their status as morally edifying literature, proffering words of advice for the living through the example of the condemned—­albeit through livelier, picaresque, and more sensational detail than did an earlier era of prisoner accounts arranged by catalogs of common sins and universal spiritual dramas. Simultaneously, the genre’s new focus on exploring the prisoner’s early history and criminal career ushered in a newer emphasis on alternate literacy practices, including expanded attention to vernacular and subculture literacies as well as illicit modes of prisoner writing. If Joseph Quasson spoke to the hopes of the first generation to promote criminal confession accounts, the notorious counterfeiter Owen Syllavan spoke to their fears.

C hap te r 2

Crime, Ink The R ise of the Writing P risone r “Without the art of writing, and without the modern system of commercial credit,” insisted the German American reformer and educator Francis Lieber in 1835, “mankind would have been spared two of the most numerous classes of crime—­fraud and forgery.”1 Lieber’s purpose, echoed by a host of philanthropists and social reformers, was to advocate for early education as a deterrent to crime. Yet Lieber’s observation—­here invoked as a provocation—­also revealed the fearful consequences of mass literacy: once technologies expand, noted Lieber, so do their abuses. Highlighting the links between credit, commerce, fraud, and “the art of writing,” Lieber modified the common narrative that associated literacy with social progress, instead linking the expansion of written literacy to social upheaval. Criminal confession accounts usefully illustrate literacy’s dual function, particularly when we analyze the genre alongside the transformation of writing instruction in the eighteenth century. As the confession genre adapted to new forms and markets, it represented prisoners’ use (and misuse) of literacy in compelling ways. Near 1750, a new literary persona emerged—­a “writing prisoner,” pen in hand, writing from prison as the day of execution loomed, composing letters from prison to family or supporters, constructing a confession or last words for an imagined readership. Published accounts increasingly dramatized not just prisoners’ often-­sensational crimes but also their striking attempts to get their narratives into print—­from writing late at night with hands bound by iron, to demanding the inclusion of specific information in their narratives, to establishing conditions for printing their manuscripts. Whether copying fake bills while on the run, adding a signature or mark to a text, penning her autobiography from her cell, or handing an account “written by himself ” to a third party, this 48



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prisoner usurped the figure of the jailhouse sufferer who poured over good books for signs of God’s mercy. Publishers and printers, emphasizing the prisoner as writer, modified title pages to emphasize an account was “written by himself ” and often appended prisoners’ letters to friends, family, supporters, or even victim’s families—­letters that readers could themselves peruse and assess for proper demeanor and feeling; thus, publishers helped create a participatory process of determining truth shaped by the epistolary practice of a rising culture of sentiment. These additions expanded the repertoire of prisoners’ literacy practices far beyond modeling the intensive reading that formed the basis of colonial spiritual practice and educational pedagogy. Although the rising interest in prisoners as writers did not yet result in concerted or organized efforts to offer prisoners writing instruction, the genre’s changing form and function lent some prisoners new forms of cultural authority. By penning their last words or by collaborating with an amanuensis, prisoners hoped to reach an eager and sympathetic readership. Many envisioned this audience, expanded in size and diversity by century’s end, as an alternative court of opinion.2 Others attempted to influence their fate by consenting to publish a narrative. For example, the pirate and murderer Joseph Andrews, described by observers as a “daring resolute Fellow,” offered to supply a detailed account of his life, but only if his executioner would forgo displaying his body posthumously in chains. Andrews “was very Desirous to know if his Body realy [sic] was to be hung in Chains, if not, he would give a particular account of the Transactions of his Life,” but if they insisted on hanging his body from chains, “the World should have little Satisfaction from him.” Andrews’s calculation was bold, albeit unsuccessful; his body was, in fact, publicly suspended in chains as a deterrent against piracy. As promised, he kept his final words brief, advising his jailhouse visitant merely to “say there Hangs the Body of ANDREWS, the Pirate, who being a Roman Catholick, would make no confession.”3 By imagining a wider “World” that sought the “Satisfaction” of his “particular account,” Andrews reveals that, by 1769, some prisoners perceived the potential impact of their published accounts and sought to use their participation as a negotiation tool. In the colonial era, ministers served as not only spiritual authorities but also cultural arbiters deemed most suitable to assess the veracity of prisoners’ testimony. As the century progressed, however, a diverse field

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of execution narratives relied on a more versatile truth-­producing apparatus to facilitate the pedagogy of punishment.4 While some accounts still used a minister as authenticator and framer, most relied on a blend of printers, ministers or spiritual advisors, third-­party observers, court and trial records, and prisoners’ own testimony; all of these offered pronouncements about the credibility of the testimony, the accuracy of the expressions contained in the confessions, and the utility or moral value readers might glean from the text. Some prisoners used their narratives to proclaim different truths: the evidence used against them was faulty; their sentences were unjust; they deserved pardon. These developments placed more interpretive demands on readers, who were increasingly called upon to sort through the details and draw their own conclusions about a heterogeneous narrative that asserted its truthfulness and reliability.5 Thus, the rising prominence of the prisoner as writer in the eighteenth century cannot solely be attributed to either the individual agency or the advanced literacy of the condemned. Rather, this development had multiple points of origin, including the secularization of the genre and its interest in the environmental causes of crime, which led to more interest in criminals as distinct individuals with their own precise history.6 The development also had less obvious catalysts. As I demonstrate in this chapter, the emergence of the writing prisoner was fueled by what has been identified as a wider “eighteenth-­century crisis in authenticity” and made possible by the spread of written literacy and writing pedagogy through print.7 We can best conceptualize prisoners’ new prominence by not associating writing too strenuously with either creative control or agency; in the mid-­to late eighteenth century, these terms were not yet synonymous with the definition of writing.8 The prisoner instead becomes most legible as a writer if we century execution literature alongside the examine late eighteenth-­ spread of writing instruction and the emerging tools and technologies of literacy. By tracing the emergence of the prisoner as writer in the late eighteenth century and by examining in more depth narratives of those whose relationship to writing was particularly fraught—­blacks and counterfeiters—­this chapter highlights how prisoners embraced the promise of print while dramatizing the perils that accompanied the spread of mass literacy.



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“Writ te n by H i m se l f ” In the early Republic, the “writing prisoner” helped articulate the complex relationship between writing and trust. During this time, execution accounts remained the dominant means by which prisoners participated in the eighteenth-­century print sphere, but a new generation of printers determined that the public wanted to read writing by prisoners, and, in response, they expanded and adapted the genre in ways that sought to make readers feel confident that prisoners were actively penning their own accounts. (No doubt, many did.) The changing form of the genre had curious consequences: the push to offer more autobiographical details and to recount some prisoners’ long catalogs of crime meant that more and more publications documented prisoners’ illicit and resistant literacy practices, including forging documents and developing distinct slang, coded language, and vernacular expressions. As a result, the rising prominence of prisoners in print helped the era imagine writing’s potential as a tool for both deception and social resistance. The declining emphasis on the “reading prisoner” at first seems counterintuitive, given the early Republic’s well-­documented anxiety over the pleasures and perils of reading (particularly novel reading) as well as its persistent concern for the moral education of youth. The central reason for the shift lies in the changing function of execution accounts; because the genre was less focused on dramatizing prisoners’ spiritual transformations and triggering audiences’ own spiritual development, the literature was noticeably less focused on documenting prisoners’ encounters with books and literacy behind bars or using prisoners to foster the intense labor of early American reading practice. The value of the “ordinary Road” of religious reading as a path to traditional literacy did not entirely disappear. However, because narratives concerned themselves less with prisoners’ spiritual states and more with prisoners’ lives of crime, the pressure to document when, how, what, and why prisoners read during their time behind bars faded. Documenting intensive reading thus became less crucial to the execution narrative’s drama and pedagogy. The traditional literacy narrative became compressed: accounts typically offered a few details about the prisoner’s education in order to predict the conditions that led him or her to commit crime consistent with the era’s emerging interest in the shaping role of environment on behavior. For example, in the account of John Jubeart, executed in New York in 1769

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for passing counterfeit currency, Jubeart explained that his “parents were industrious honest People, and gave him as Genteel an education as their circumstances would allow,” but he was later reduced to poverty. Recalling the desperate measures that forced him to pass counterfeit money, Jubeart died lamenting “that poverty had urged him to deviate from the paths of virtue.”9 Likewise, demonstrating promise and “youthful genius,” Thomas Starr “manifested a taste for books. In writing and penmanship he excelled” (attributes made possible by the expansion of print and literacy) until his “capricious conduct” toward his fiancée destroyed his engagement, and he sunk into intemperance and debauchery, eventually committing a murder.10 Both accounts posited that intemperance or poverty could overwhelm the moral discipline and self-­control instilled by early childhood education. Barnett Davenport, executed in Litchfield in 1780 for murder, recalled how he was apprenticed at age nine and “had but little opportunity of going to school,” thus “very little proficiency was made in learning to read”: in turn, he ran away from his master. Davenport’s neglected education was thus linked to his lack of discipline and his subversion of authority.11 In Thomas Powers’s account, new ideas about the shaping influence of early childhood education competed with an emergent racial discourse that posited blacks’ “natural” viciousness. Powers, a black indentured servant executed for rape in Norwich in 1796, purportedly acknowledged that his early childhood literacy curriculum was no match for his “naturally vicious” instincts; after being bound out by his religious father, he was “taught to read and write a tolerable good hand” by a “pretty kind master” but “being naturally vicious I improved my talents, (or rather misimproved them) to very bad purposes,” eventually “committing a number of crimes, which black as I am, I should blush to repeat.”12 Powers’s education was for naught because he was unable to overcome his inherently criminal nature. In a related example, black literacy acquisition precipitated black criminality: Arthur, executed for rape in Worcester in 1768, recounted that he was born a slave and “was learned to read and write,” only to run away after becoming dissatisfied with his situation, which, noted the broadside, was “the beginning of my many notorious Crimes, of which I have been guilty.”13 In these heavily mediated examples, attention to early childhood literacy was a generic expectation and convention. Whether genteel or neglected, early education was



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important to document, insofar as it helped shed light on the prisoner’s woeful descent into crime. A popular broadside on Levi Ames, the “most widely publicized criminal in early America,” further illustrates the shrinking role of the traditional literacy narrative.14 Ames’s last words were ostensibly structured around his religious conversion. Yet unlike earlier accounts, such as Joseph Quasson’s in which his reading practice comprises the central action of the narrative, the drama of the Last Words and Dying Speech of Levi Ames (Boston, 1773) resides in Ames’s notorious and lively history of thefts and robberies. The narrative’s only literacy encounter revealed the young thief ’s state of mind as his execution date approached; after lackluster attempts to attend to his soul while behind bars, Ames recounted, “On Friday evening, . . . I turned over a little book which was put into my hands, in which I saw Ezek. 30. 26, 27. A new heart will I give you, and a new spirit will I put upon you. . . . This at once surprised me: I knew that I wanted this new heart.”15 But this classic example of traditional literacy, marked by the “intense relationship between book and reader,” is neither the text’s dramatic center nor its thematic emphasis.16 Instead, the narrative’s energy lies elsewhere: in Ames’s long history of thefts, break-­ins, and run-­ins with the law. Ames’s lengthy career, particularly given his youth, was eye opening and riveting. He was highly adept at his trade, and the narrative energetically recounted his great success at opportunistically pilfering broadcloth, silver spoons, silk mitts, sugar tongs, tankards, and knee buckles from unsuspecting New Englanders. While Ames’s broadside contained a spiritual lesson, illustrated by a scene of reading that prompted desire for a “new heart,” the narrative’s pedagogy was secular: “And now as a dying man I mention the following things, viz. 1. To keep your doors and windows shut on evenings, and secured well to prevent temptation. And by no means to use small locks on the outside.” Ames’s warning shrewdly targeted a reading public as anxious to secure their property as their souls. An even more illustrative text is the Narrative of the Life of Francis Uss (1789), which opens by explaining that “the Substance of the following Narrative was taken from a manuscript of the unhappy FRANCIS USS, and which he gave to a visitor a day or two before his suffering.”17 This brief note positions the prisoner as active producer of his text and emphasizes Uss’s concerted efforts to ensure his manuscript’s

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publication. The otherwise first-­person narrative, recounting Uss’s life of hardship, peril, and competing loyalties, documented his enlistment in a French regiment to fight the British, his capture by British soldiers, his escape from a British prison camp in Pensacola, a stint in a Philadelphia debtor’s prison, and the series of petty thefts that led him to the gallows. Anticipating the horror of having the executioner’s rope tightened to his throat, Uss appealed to his audience and to God to “Deal gently with me.”18 Save for its clarifying frame that the text was “taken” from Uss’s manuscript (a term with a distinctly more literary bent than “taken from his mouth,” despite the fact that both terms provide little explanation of who did the “taking” and what, if anything, was left out), the entire narrative was presented as unmediated access to Uss’s thoughts, conveyed entirely through his jailhouse writing. It is plausible that Uss wrote this manuscript: its details, language, and sentiments are often distinct. More crucial is the shared role of editors and printers in crafting the narrative as the final, unmediated expression written directly by the prisoner. Uss’s manuscript, begging the public to “Deal gently” with the unlucky Uss, circulated too late to win him reprieve, but it did invite early Republic readers to sympathize with Uss’s fraught response to wartime and economic insecurity and to better comprehend his life of flux and poverty. Replacing the conventional disclaimer “taken from his own mouth” with the more forceful expression “written by himself ” or (as with Uss) “taken from his manuscript,” many title pages dramatically conveyed this new authorial impulse. Whereas “Taken from his mouth” sought to justify the use of amanuensis by reassuring readers of the accuracy of sentiment and the honorable intentions of the amanuensis, “written by himself ” declared not only the text’s authenticity but also the prisoner’s active composition of the text. For example, The Last Speech, Confession, and Dying Words of John Smith (Hartford, 1773) was “Contained in Two Letters, written by himself and addressed to the Printers.” The title page of a New Haven reprint maintained this same phrasing but altered the typeface, placing additional emphasis on Smith’s acts of writing: “Contained in TWO LETTERS, written by HIMSELF, and addressed to the Printers” (see figure 2). The descriptor “Written by Himself ” signaled a literary repertoire that far exceeded penning a confession. For example, the Narrative of the Life and Conversion of Alexander White (Boston, 1784) was published

Figure 2  The Prisoner as Writer: The Last Speech, Confession, and Dying Words of John Smith . . . Contained in TWO LETTERS, written by HIMSELF, and addressed to the Printers (New Haven, 1773). Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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with the subtitle, “Containing extracts from his manuscripts, and some letters written by him a short time before his execution” (see figure 3).19 The publication featured “an extract from Alexander White’s papers, written by himself, while imprisoned in Plymouth goal [sic], on a charge of Murder, Sept. 5, 1784. Taken from the originals” along with “Further extracts from Alexander White’s papers—­written to a friend while in Plymouth goal [sic]” as well as numerous other extracts from jail, including “another letter, &c. written in Cambridge goal [sic], just after his trial and condemnation, to a friend in Plymouth.” According to an anonymous contributor, White’s narrative was ostensibly a spiritual narrative that could usefully demonstrate “the state of White’s mind when he was first imprisoned at Plymouth, viz. ignorant of God and religion.” Although White’s narrative embraced an earlier era’s emphasis on jailhouse conversion, its arrangement was still uniquely new: structured, shaped, and authenticated through letters, White’s narrative demonstrates the emergent value of epistolary practice as a favored technique for conveying a prisoner’s “views and exercises of mind.”20 The format of White’s 1784 narrative is itself notable: thirteen pages of White’s letters comprise the bulk of the narrative; a three-­page amanuensis introduces the work; a three-­page report on White’s execution follows his letters; and the pamphlet concludes with a note about how White’s letters were transcribed. An anonymous editor explains that the letters were transcribed from manuscripts White penned while awaiting trial in Plymouth and execution in Cambridge. To underscore the central relationship between the writing prisoner and narrative veracity, the printer also appends a note from the man who transcribed White’s letters after his death: “That the authenticity of the preceding Narrative may not be doubted,” the footnote asserts, “the Printers have permission to insert the following paragraph of a letter, written by the Rev. Gentleman who transcribed it from White’s papers.” The transcriber, Plymouth minister Chandler Robbins, assures White’s reading audience that “I have faithfully transcribed what I send you, from the originals, written with his own hand—­I have not in any instance, made the last alteration of a single sentiment. The only liberty I have taken is, to rectify words that were spelt wrong, or a sentence that was not expressed quite grammatically.” The once-­powerful minister seeks to reassure readers of his negligible role as minor style editor.21

Figure 3  The Prisoner as Writer: A Narrative of the Life and Conversion of Alexander White . . . Containing extracts from his manuscripts, and some letters written by him a short time before his execution (Boston: Powars and Willis, 1784). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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Published accounts included dramatized scenes of writing to lend urgency to the condemned’s plight.White’s letters, for example, increased in frequency as his execution day neared. Writing from Plymouth jail, White begged his friend to “excuse my short answer to your last [letter]; it was from want of opportunity.” Writing later from “Cambridge, October 30, 1784,” White’s tone is calm and collected; another letter, dated “Cambridge, November 15, 1784” and addressed to the Reverend Robbins just prior to White’s scheduled execution, is more anxious. “My trembling hand I set to paper, to set forth the sentiments of my heart, and to point out where the ground of my hope lies”; White thanked Robbins for writing to him, but he noted that the impending nightfall forced him to suspend his response because “it is growing dark, and opportunity will not permit me to say any more.”A final letter, also dated “Cambridge, November 15, 1784,” prefigures the end of the writing prisoner: “—­My feeble hand, bound with cold iron will not allow me to write so long a letter as I would wish. So I conclude, and remain your dying friend, ALEX. WHITE.” Thus, this last missive crafts White as a would-­be writing prisoner hindered by his cell’s material conditions (fetters, darkness). Throughout, White’s letters reflect the rising interest in epistolarity as dramatic device, anticipating the popularity of the epistolary novels that soon dominated early American fiction.22 A Brief Account of the Life and Abominable Thefts of the Notorious Isaac Frasier (New Haven, 1768) even transforms a prisoner who could not write into a writing prisoner. The account opens with the notorious thief and prolific jailbreaker Frasier lamenting his own childhood poverty and lack of education. Being in “low circumstances,” noted Frasier, “I was learned no more than just to know my letters and write my name, which I have since intirely [sic] forgot.”23 Despite this proclamation, the narrative’s title page proclaimed that it was “penned from his own Mouth, and signed by him, a few Days before his Execution.”The phrase “penned from his own Mouth” eschews the more common “taken from his Mouth,” which was meant to assure readers of its truth but still possessed the implication of coercion or inaccurate transcription. By contrast, the phrase “penned from his own Mouth” highlights the confluence between Frasier’s oral delivery and its third-­party transcription: Frasier’s mouth functions like a pen. To emphasize Frasier as writer, the document concludes: “Isaac Frasier, New Haven Prison, September 5th, 1768,” and adds Frasier’s signature mark, invoking



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the not-­quite-­writing prisoner as inscriber of his text. Below the signature mark is a short addendum indicating that Frasier, who was hanged for burglary, “says that he was never addicted to drunkenness, [pr]ofane swearing, and never guilty of m[urde]r.”24 An important literacy event, inscribing his mark (a cross) here, became an occasion for Frasier to challenge the justice of his sentence, qualify his confession, and question some of the evidence presented against him. Putting ink to paper, the prisoner used the occasion to literally “cross” (in legal parlance, to counter or oppose) the testimony that convicted him: his act of resistance, figured at the moment when the prisoner stood poised with a pen to sign his own document, transformed him into a variant form of writing prisoner—­despite his own admission that he had long forgotten how to write. Signatures and signature marks were common features on colonial American legal documents such as jury inquests, deeds, wills, court depositions, and marriage registers and began appearing with more frequency on execution accounts.25 Functioning as written performatives, they typically signaled the signer’s general agreement with the document’s content. The broadsides The last Speech & Dying Words of William Welch (1754) and The Last Speech, Confession, and Dying Words of John Wall Lovey (1773) conclude with Welch’s and Lovey’s marks, as does the pamphlet, Last Words and Dying Speech of Edmund Fortis, a Negro Man (1795). While many accounts contain multiple forms of authentication (editor’s prefaces, testimonies by visitors or ministers), in these texts, the prisoner’s signature mark serves as the sole authenticating apparatus.26 Ostensibly the prisoner’s signature or mark legitimated the confession and, by extension, the law that imposed the sentence. But, as Frasier demonstrated, the act of signing or marking the text could also serve a more complex function by becoming an occasion for a prisoner to offer “cross” testimony and even to proclaim his innocence. As complex signs, signatures and marks functioned as temporal registers: that is, the prisoner was there, in this particular jail, on this specific date, just prior to their execution. The signature mark thus asserts the confession’s legal function while also calling attention to the prisoner’s complex position as Subject/subject (as authorizer of his text, as “Dead in Law”). Yet, per Derrida, the signature or mark, through its future iteration in print, also highlights the absence and commodification of the signer, forever gesturing to the unreachable, historic person behind the inscription.27 Signifying multiple truths, Frasier’s

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mark asserts the authenticity of his printed confession, authorizes his countertestimony, and reminds us of the gaps and ellipses in his account. By dramatizing scenes of writing, narratives most often sought to cultivate the sort of credibility that could help readers determine a prisoner’s ultimate guilt or innocence. For example, in the Faithful Narrative of Elizabeth Wilson (1786), Wilson’s jailhouse writing is used not only to heighten the melodrama of her final days (a technique also used in Alexander White’s account) but also to establish her innocence after her 1786 execution for the murder of her ten-­week-­old twin boys. Daniel Williams, classifying the Philadelphia text as “one of the more elaborate of criminal narratives,” observes that it was consciously commodified to compete in a market fueled by “the masterplot of the early republic”—­ seduction.28 The drama of Wilson’s fate was enhanced by the tragedy of her death: her brother arrived minutes after her death carrying official paperwork delaying her execution. Due to the case’s “singular nature” and “various reports circulating respecting her,” the printers were eager to circulate the Faithful Narrative quickly, publishing it just two days after her execution. They clarified that Wilson’s account was “drawn up at the request of a person unconnected with her,” which established Wilson’s lack of agency over the text (and her fate). Significantly, they also reprinted letters ostensibly penned by Wilson and recovered in her cell to support the conclusion that she was “innocent, we believe, of the crime for which she suffered.”29 Thus, the Faithful Narrative of Elizabeth Wilson positioned the printers and editors as alternative arbiters of justice, illustrated through the anonymous “we” who proclaims Wilson innocent of murder and introduces letters presumably penned by Wilson as counterevidence and belated proof of her innocence. The anonymous “we” that asserts Wilson’s innocence bases its judgment not on the evidence presented at trial, but on Wilson’s performance of credibility after her conviction.30 Blending third-­party testimony with Wilson’s private writing to make its case, the narrative appends Wilson’s jailhouse confession, “taken from her own mouth” by a minister (and attributing the murder to the twins’ father), a third-­party account of her affecting behavior during imprisonment and upon the scaffold, and a series of prayers for mercy “from papers written by her own hand in the latter part of her Confinement” as well as a note “in her own hand writing, [which] was found on her table” pleading for a reunion with



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her brother.31 Had Wilson’s missives only reached the public sooner, the narrative suggests, the tragedy of her death may have been avoided. Wilson’s fate mirrors the seduced and abandoned protagonists of the sentimental novel, observes Williams. But this is not merely because she was seduced and wronged by her lover, a stock device of the sentimental plot. Like the fictional protagonist Charlotte Temple, whose letters to her English parents keep getting intercepted as she lies pregnant and abandoned in America, Wilson’s letters, published confession, and reprieve failed to circulate quickly enough to save her, with tragic consequences. While the Faithful Narrative of Elizabeth Wilson constructed Wilson as a tragically thwarted writer to drum up public sympathy for a woman who conformed to the tragic plotline of the sentimental heroine, other accounts placed more elaborate interpretive demands on readers. Narrative of the Life and Dying Speech of John Ryer (1793) included letters purportedly written by Ryer to help discerning readers distinguish an authentic from a falsified account. Ryer’s publishers explain the two main obstacles to publication—­a skeptical public that doubted Ryer’s sincere repentance and a competing “Last Speech and Confession of John Ryer” that “contains many falshoods [sic] and is entirely fictitious.” To “satisfy the minds of those who were in doubt,” the publishers append notes by Ryer to his wife, children, parents, and others. They also include a copy of a letter to Ryer from his anguished mother.32 With the potential for false narratives, prisoner-­penned letters sought to make readers feel confident that they were accessing the real sentiments of the condemned. In this way, marketplace competition (and the threat of competing or false accounts) also fueled demand for the writing prisoner. Finally, the new prominence of the writing prisoner must be understood alongside the rising popularity of letter writers and correspondence guides. After midcentury, British letter writers were reprinted widely, enjoyed huge popularity, and helped would-­be writers navigate the murky culture of ink. Guides like Crowder’s Complete Letter-­Writer, or Polite English Secretary (1755) and Dilworth’s Complete Letter-­Writer, or Young Secretary’s Instructor (1783) familiarized audiences with various forms of correspondence and the conventions of style, spelling, mechanics, and sentiment that a potential writer should strive to adopt. For example, Benjamin Franklin repurposed George Fisher’s The Instructor; or Young Man’s Best Companion

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(London, 1735) into the best-­selling vade mecum, American Instructor; or, Young Man’s Best Companion (Philadelphia, 1748); the American Instructor tutored readers in the art and craft of letter writing and penmanship as well as other useful life skills, such as bookkeeping, pickling cucumbers, and brewing raspberry wine.To guide readers on the mechanics and sentiments of letter writing, Franklin reproduced Fisher’s “Familiar Letters on several Occasions, and on divers Subjects,” including letters such as “A Letter from a Son to his Father,” “A Letter from a Youth at School to his Parents,” and “A Daughter to a Mother, in relation to Marriage.”33 These guides performed an important ideological function by “providing examples of, and laying down rules for, the improvement of the household-­family’s conduct and interactions,” including choices of husband or wife.34 Most significant, these guides helped writers cultivate the era’s treasured virtues—­credit and credibility. As Sarah Pearsall observes in her survey of transatlantic correspondence, “Letter-­writers, men and women, measured each other’s credit, in domestic and economic terms, as much through their letters as through their behavior.”35 Thus, cautions Pearsall, letters were unreliable indicators of “‘real’ or ‘private’ feelings,” but instead they were “dialogic,” seeking equally to fashion others’ behavior along with a self. Above all, letters expressed the writer’s insistent desire to establish credibility during an era of intense anxiety over whom to trust, an anxiety itself generated by the spread of print.36 Read alongside this history, letter writing became a way for prisoners’ to assert authority, similar to the warning tone and monitory function of letters in the era’s increasingly available and popular letter-­writing guides. For example, prisoners’ letters to spouses and children sought to offer advice, express proper affection, and guide the moral behavior or marital prospects of the household. An absent husband might attempt to reassert his authority by mimicking the monitory structure of conventional epistolary guides: “My dear beloved Child and only Daughter,” pens Solomon Goodwin from Falmouth jail in 1772, “I beg that you would endeavor to live in the fear of God, . . . to keep you out of bad company” while advising his daughter to improve her time wisely. In a separate letter, Goodwin instructs his wife to forgo “wicked company” and to exercise caution should she need to place her children in service (“if you put out any of your children, put them to good people”).37 However artificial and conventional such advice and admonition, the expressions likely felt



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credible and persuasive to eighteenth-­century readers. Because “‘dealing by Ink’ was a risky prospect,” observes Pearsall, “Those who wrote letters, paradoxically, often resorted to artifice and convention in order to capture the natural truth of their experience.”38 In this way, even the most conventional exchanges between prisoners and their spouses, children, or supporters could function as conveyors of truth and models of authenticity to a reading public familiarizing themselves with the new art of letter writing. Prisoners also modeled the art of letter writing as a response to family dislocation and separation. Pearsall’s analysis of transatlantic correspondence demonstrates how “invocations of ‘family feeling’” enabled the era to “nurt[ure] ties in the face of disruption”;39 thus, by including letters to and from families, prisoners and publishers promoted this emergent epistolary practice, using letters to articulate the pain of separation, to express grief over lost futures, or to advise loved ones to avoid a similar fate: “[T]o my true and loving wife, my children and my friends,” advises Goodwin, “I leave you these few lines to look upon when I am dead and gone,” offering what little advice he can to offset the dissolution of his family.40 Other accounts dramatized prisoners seeking to remedy, through epistolary practice, the rift caused by their crimes: “I now take in hand my pen,” writes murderer Whiting Sweeting to his wife, “to sooth the heart-­breaking situation to which you are reduced.”41 The wife or intended recipient’s reaction to the prisoner’s letter was far less important than the reader’s response: Elizabeth Wilson’s aforementioned missive about her absent brother articulates the grief of family separation (“O could I but see my own brother! to speak just a few words to him to ease my broken heart, that is so distressed. Oh how hard a thing it is that I cannot see him!”), while also relying for its emotional impact on reader knowledge that Wilson’s brother arrived minutes late to save her from the scaffold.42 Such strategies of representation enabled the prisoner to function as an aspirational literacy model alongside his or her more traditional role as a cautionary moral tale. Documenting their (real or purported) epistolary practices inscribed the prisoner into an emerging culture of sentiment. This is particularly significant, given Karen Halttunen’s influential argument that, after midcentury, popular literature increasingly imagined the criminal as a “moral alien,” monstrously different from audiences.43 Execution literature no doubt facilitated the image of murderer as monster,

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but it also countered this trend by repositioning the condemned not as stranger but as husband, father, friend, sister, and advisor. Readers might recoil in horror at the crimes that put men like Goodwin or Sweeting on the scaffold, but through the act of reading a prisoner’s letters of loss, longing, and family separation, audiences could exercise socially useful sympathy and come to their own assessment as to whether the condemned was alien or brethren. As a result, prisoners demonstrated new authority by facilitating the era’s “letteracy.” The term, coined by Eve Tavor Bannet, signals “the collection of different skills, values, and kinds of knowledge beyond mere literacy” that involved being a competent writer or reader of letters.”44 Published accounts remind us that authenticity was not located in the printed word as a truth passed on to the reader; it was instead cultivated through the reading process itself, as readers perused texts for signs of credibility and reliability. Of course, editors and printers often sought to shape readers’ interpretations by inserting their own assessments. But the criminal confession genre did not insist on monolithic interpretation: prisoners might dispute the evidence presented, trial reports might provide conflicting details, and prisoners might contradict themselves, all of which left open the question: on what did a reader ultimately fix the credibility of any given narrative? In what and whose words did readers place their trust? This question became particularly urgent when prisoners disputed their sentences or when a printed account declared a verdict unjust, for these gestures of protest reveal how prisoners’ literacy (and letteracy) could be used to cultivate an alternative court of justice. “I must do by let te r ”: A b raham John stone and B lac k L et te rac y One of the most significant confessions of the era, Address of Abraham Johnstone, A Black Man  .  .  . To the People of Color (Philadelphia, 1797), employs letteracy as a technique to establish Johnstone’s authority and to persuade readers of his unjust and racially biased sentencing. Johnstone’s Address is comprised of four distinct but interrelated parts—­a brief anonymous preface (“To the Public”), his longer address to his “Brethren,” his “Dying Words,” and his “Letter to his Wife” penned from Woodbury jail. This work—­part history of the slave trade, part treatise on the ongoing prejudice and disenfranchisement faced



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by blacks, part advice to free blacks on moral improvement, and part appeal to his absent wife—­explicitly invites its readership to draw connections across its four distinct parts. This means that readers had to reconcile the text’s contradictions, including Johnstone’s assertion that “after a candid and impartial trial I have been convicted of a jury of my peers” (?) when just a page earlier, an anonymous preface directly challenged the evidence used to find Johnstone guilty and demanded that he be given an overdue opportunity to offer a “full and impartial account of himself.” By including all the various documentation, the preface asserts the hope that readers will use the Address to “form an opinion of the true character, and guilt of the man independent of the malignant assertions, and innumerable falsehoods that have been propagated on this occasion by prejudiced persons.” Lest readers doubt the black man’s testimony, the preface tells us, “it must also be remarked that the account of his life is strongly corroborated by a Mulatto man and his wife, both of respectable characters.”45 The Address thus pits the legally binding verdict of an all-­white, all-­male jury against what it insists is the credible testimony of a black freeman, a mulatto man, and a mulatto woman. Functioning as a form of extralegal testimony (because blacks were unable to serve on juries and prohibited from testifying against whites), the Address asks the public to put confidence in Johnstone and his mulatto endorsers instead of the white male jury that condemned him. According to his “Dying Words,” Johnstone was born a slave named Benjamin in Delaware, then sold from master to master until he was eventually manumitted. His owner unfortunately “died drunk” before making the manumission paperwork official. Having escaped capture by slave traders, Johnstone eventually secured his manumission; still fearing for his safety, he traveled to Philadelphia and then New Jersey, where he changed his name, leased land to farm, and was “improving the place fast, and doing well for myself.” Shortly afterward, he was charged with the murder of “Guinea Tom” Read. Johnstone posited that white jealousy over newly prospering free blacks precipitated the false charge. After Read went missing, Johnstone was accused by nearby landowner Samuel Huffsey along with William Nicholson of Read’s murder. Johnstone maintained his innocence throughout, arguing that Huffsey and Nicholson had been plotting with Tom to “steal my lease”

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and have “long persecuted me with the utmost rancour and malice.”46 The Address thus urges readers to connect the dots, linking Johnstone’s fate to the racial climate of the era and calling attention to the fact that his trial and execution occurred “at a time when every effort” is being made “for a total emancipation of all our brethren in slavery within this state.”47 Long neglected by literary historians, Johnstone’s Address has garnered recent attention for its “multivocal” construction and its “forward-­looking” arguments about black citizenship. Steven Hartnett, emphasizing the text’s collaborative composition, hypothesizes that it was written jointly by Johnstone and Quaker publishing allies; for Hartnett, the text’s “multivocality suggests that it was a team effort, and hence among the nation’s first sustained cross racial attempts to abolish slavery, oppose the death penalty, and imagine a New World free from racism.”48 Hartnett suggests that making Johnstone take the fall for probable-­runaway Tom was convenient (and profitable) for white neighbor Huffsey, and he highlights the backdrop of racial unrest preceding Johnstone’s 1797 trial: the omnipresent fear of black insurrection in Haiti, the heated debates in 1790s New Jersey over the abolition of slavery, and the overall climate of white fear “triggered by a rising culture of black eloquence and leadership.”49 This emergent culture of black leaders included Philadelphians Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and Cyrus Bustill, who, among many other accomplishments, founded the Free African Society in 1787. Mindful of this rising culture of black leadership, Jeannine DeLombard asks that we pay careful attention to the portion of the text where Johnstone addresses his brethren; here Johnstone “reproduces and radically reconfigures” another text, To the Free Africans and other Free People of Color in the United States (Philadelphia, [1796]), a white abolitionist broadside that offered newly freed black citizens advice on how to build “credit” in the eyes of the world. Placing passages from the broadside alongside Johnstone’s text, DeLombard reveals how Johnstone’s text mimics and alters the language of white abolitionists; for example, while the white abolitionist text advises blacks to earn respect and inclusion by being punctual in contracts, Johnstone’s text urges blacks to get legal advice so as to avoid exploitation. The total effect



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of Johnstone’s alterations, argues DeLombard, is that they “expose the exclusionary logic at the heart of the patron-­client politics of respectability.”50 Johnstone’s Address thus supplants the white abolitionist call for black surveillance with a call for black self-­sufficiency and civic participation. The result is a “hortatory, forward-­looking” argument that “calls into question his contemporaries’ assumption that African American civic membership was conditional upon exemplary black deportment.” Acting respectable was no guarantee of success, warned Johnstone, urging African Americans to stay vigilant over how the law precludes and forecloses black aspirations to citizenship and belonging.51 Because fears of black literacy hinged in large part on arguments about forgery—­that slaves would copy passes and such—­I suggest that this portion of Johnstone’s Address also functions like a forged pass: copying the language and phrasings of the white abolitionist document while adjusting the sentiment to protest restrictions on black social mobility, Johnstone advances a vision of wider social movement to his free black readership.52 Scholars have yet to consider the crucial role of Johnstone’s brief “Letter to his Wife,” which draws on the common purpose of letter writing as a response to familial disintegration, a theme serving the Address’s wider social critique. In this letter, Johnstone reasserts his innocence, potently observes that he is resigned to die “like a lamb led to the slaughter house,” and regrets leaving wife Sally “behind in the world without husband to protect you.”53 Pained by his wife’s unwillingness or apprehension to enter Woodbury jail, Johnstone laments that he must “do by letter.” He apologizes for his marital infidelities but focuses more on the obstacles that have prevented his wife from seeing him: her fear of being “molested” by others (the sheriffs?) while visiting the jail and the “busy-­ bodys” that sought to turn her against him. After meditating on the pain of separation, he proceeds to offer Sally monitory advice: she should avoid “frolicing” and remarry, being careful to “chuse [a husband] that will love and protect you, and whom you will neither fear nor despise when you are a wife: rather than a pretty baby to look at who might through a rage of novelty and ill nature break your heart. Ah! Sally!” He ends by calling attention to his letter as the last thread linking the prisoner to his family: “I’ve kissed this paper—­and bid it convey . . . not the farewel of a day month nor year—­But an eternal—­Farewel.—­”54 Johnstone’s

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intimate and halting prose not only conveys emotion in the sentimental style of his day, but it also links writer to reader by asking print audiences to imagine the letter as the paper that the prisoner touched, kissed, and passed on to the wife he was about to lose. Such letteracy calls attention to Johnstone’s foreclosed future as husband and, per DeLombard, would­be citizen, unabashedly attributing Johnstone’s fate to “the keen shafts of prejudice” against “those of our colour.”55 Ultimately Johnstone’s Address demonstrates the power of black letteracy and the subversive effects of black literacy, both of which elevate the black prisoner as writer amid widespread efforts to restrict African Americans’ access to education. The text was published in 1797, a transitional era in the history of black literacy. While mid-­eighteenth century citizens argued over whether African Americans and Africans possessed the ability to read or write, observes Karen Chambers Dalton, “With the rise of the abolitionist movement, debate centered more on the advisability of blacks learning to read and write, especially since it was forbidden by law in many slaveholding colonies and states for slaves to acquire this knowledge.”56 Debates over the intellectual capacity of blacks, long fueling theories of racial difference and race hierarchy, positioned literacy as “the ultimate measure of humanity” and used blacks’ capacity for literacy to assess their claims to personhood and citizenship.57 With a rising discourse cautioning the inadvisability of teaching blacks to read or write, black literacy was intensely monitored and often denied outright, despite the larger cultural push toward mass literacy. At the time of Johnstone’s trial, Pennsylvania and New Jersey were expanding black literacy, while a growing countermovement argued against educating blacks. New Jersey, the state where Johnstone leased land, had recently passed legislation requiring slaveowners to teach slave children to read.58 Philadelphia, where Johnstone’s account was published, had an established tradition of African American education: since 1750 Quaker educator Anthony Benezet had run an evening school for blacks that offered instruction in reading, arithmetic, and writing, as did the “Society for the Free Instruction of the Black People” after 1789.59 But not all northerners who advocated expanding black education shared a commitment to black writing instruction: many schools sponsored by the London-­based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Associates of Dr. Thomas Bray offered no



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writing instruction, including both so-­called “Negro Schools” in Philadelphia (1758) and New York (1760) and those schools that education advocate (and slaveholder) Benjamin Franklin actively promoted while serving as advisor to Dr. Bray’s Associates.60 Explaining the lack of writing curriculum in many black charity schools, E. Jennifer Monaghan credits the “unstated but deeply held belief  .  .  . that writing acquisition was somehow the hallmark of the free.”61 William Knox, Anglican missionary to Virginia and the West Indies, proclaimed the dangers of black literacy and warned that blacks were more likely to “teach each other mischief than to profit by the catechist’s instruction.”62 This logic drove southern colonies and states to prohibit outright forms of black literacy. In the wake of the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina in 1740 banned teaching slaves to write or employing them as scribes, protesting the “great inconveniencies” that would result if blacks learned how to write. Georgia followed suit in 1755.63 Johnstone’s Address, one of the most distinctive and most sustained uses of the execution narrative as protest literature, illuminates the potential for a prisoner to speak with authority to an audience of sympathetic whites, the family he left behind, and “the people of colour” for whom he feels kinship and concern. That such a publication appeared in the late 1790s, as the writing prisoner peaked in visibility and prominence, is significant. With an apparatus designed to encourage and facilitate readers’ trust in Johnstone’s authority and reliability, the Address reveals the potential of writing prisoners to repurpose confession narratives into platforms for radical social critique. Together, these late eighteenth-­century texts—­with their emphasis on pens, manuscripts, letters, signatures, and signature marks—­show how pervasively an era worked to consolidate the link between writing and the promise of credibility during a period when writing expanded its influence as a means for establishing credit and trust between strangers. Yet this link between trust and writing was dubious at best. A more sustained examination of what it meant “to write” in the eighteenth century complicates any tidy narrative that the eighteenth century popularized the writing prisoner because the era possessed an unshakeable faith in the link between the act of writing and the performance of trust. Instead, the popularity of the writing prisoner arose from his or her ability to dramatize the promise and perils of the pen, linking writing to both sociability and social upheaval.

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Maste r Pe nm e n: Counte r fe ite r s and th e Subve r si on of W riti ng Pe dag og y How often I have falsely wrote; These willing hands of mine, Have counterfeited, note by note, And lied in ev’ry line. —­Cooke’s Speech from the Pillory (1770)64 Excoriated as “the greatest Villain of the Age,” the counterfeiter deserves special recognition in American literary history as an influential early adopter of the era’s emergent writing pedagogy.65 During the same period that writing instruction expanded in the colonies, a proliferating trade in counterfeit currency caused large-­scale upheaval. While these have traditionally been analyzed as separate and distinct developments, this section explores the confluence between the spread of literacy and the rise of the counterfeiter, paying particular attention to the work of Owen Syllavan and Joseph Bill, who flooded communities with fake bills and later published first-­person criminal confession narratives.66 While the expansion of written literacy was imagined as a way to spread sociability, the counterfeiter occupies the flip side of this coin (or bill), literalizing the links between writing, commerce, and iteration, while upending the association of writing, social credibility, and trust. In an earlier era, “writing was taught second, and then only to some”: instruction targeted clergymen, physicians, lawyers, and other members of the learned professions, along with elite men and women who wished to cultivate sociability and fine breeding.67 To meet the needs of a rising mercantile class and commercial economy, writing instruction spread rapidly in the eighteenth century.68 The commercialization of writing instruction expanded both audience and emphasis, a development signaled by Thomas Watts’s 1716 declaration, “Whoever would be a Man of Business, must be a man of Correspondence.”69 American writing masters soon enjoyed brisk business teaching writing along with bookkeeping and arithmetic, a sign of how “the increasing secularism, commercialism, and affluence of eighteenth-­century America” would continue to fuel the expansion of writing literacy.70 A large part of what made a writing teacher masterful was his knowledge of a wide variety of scripts. One master, for example, advertised



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for curious students who wished to learn “besides the usual Hands, Roman, Italian Print, all the black Hands; as old English, German-­ Text, and every other, even to old Court Hand.”71 The mercantile class favored the round hand, a style that evolved from the Italian hands that had replaced older Gothic scripts. Skill measured success through gifted penmanship, not originality of expression: “Few members of society ever went beyond an understanding of writing as copying or transcribing to the practice of original composition,” argues Tamara Plakins Thornton, adding that “those who did were people with social power and cultural authority—­ literary wits, elite letter writers, statesmen, clerics, and scholars—­and it was fitting for their pens to produce works that were qualitatively different from those of lower status.”72 The rest of society achieved writing proficiency by mastering the appropriate scripts. A sample penmanship exercise from 1750 captures this sentiment; William Baker had his students repeatedly copy the maxim, “A Man’s Manners Commonly Form his Fortune”:73 the master’s lesson emphasized the connections between imitation, skilled penmanship, good impressions, and worldly success. A growing transatlantic market in copybooks, penmanship manuals, and other published writing guides facilitated the spread of writing literacy and emphasized the link between writing, iteration, commerce, and credibility. Letter writers and copybooks, for example, offered examples of handwriting that readers should strive to imitate. Like writing masters, published manuals taught aspiring authors to write by careful imitation. The American Instructor, Ben Franklin’s reprint of George Fisher’s Young Man’s Best Companion, celebrated the utility of imitation, noting that the “Art of striking Letters, &c. is gained by frequent practicing after good Examples.”74 In an earlier era, copybooks were initially expensive to import and difficult to print, particularly because of their use of copperplate engraving, but after 1750 advertisements for imported copybooks grew more common. Writing materials also became more widely available: before midcentury paper had to be imported by the sheet, inks ground by hand, and pens laboriously cut and crafted. By the 1770s, however, a range of writing implements, inks, and paper types were readily available in port cities in all the colonies. Given this proliferation of tools and advice, George Fisher’s American Instructor, whose title page promised “to qualify any Person for Business,

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without the Help of a Master,” resonated with the era’s rising ambitions and resources.75 Despite the democratic rhetoric of Fisher’s American Instructor or James Wallace’s Every Man his Own Letter-­Writer (London, 1782), writing literacy was widely regulated. For example, black literacy and slave literacy were highly circumscribed, and many elites insisted that not all could be “trusted to use their ability to write in socially beneficial or innocuous ways.”76 Writing masters in particular targeted instruction to the occupation, needs, and gender of their pupils; types of hand, observes Thornton in her cultural history of American handwriting, were so distinct that “a fully literate stranger could evaluate the social significance of a letter—­from a male? a female? a gentleman? a clerk?—­simply by noting what hand it had been written in,” a regulation that sought to ensure that “literacy would carry neither socially promiscuous meanings nor culturally disruptive uses.”77 The era’s well-­documented concern over the anonymity of print and typeface meant that script became an even more crucial indicator of one’s class and character, for “tagging handwriting with the social identity of its producer prevented any potential confusion of social status that would have occurred had all handwriting been executed in the same script.”78 At the heart of writing pedagogy, then, was a twin impulse: teach men and women to copy multiple handwriting styles with precision, and urge writers to employ the pen consistent with their occupation, status, and purpose. Through his masterful imitation of multiple scripts, the currency counterfeiter (much like the forger) modeled the era’s writing pedagogy while at the same time flouting writing pedagogy’s regulatory intent. Prolific counterfeiter Samuel Weed “could imitate any man’s handwriting,” bragged his brother, and Owen Syllavan was known for copying the currency of almost all the neighboring governments “so masterfully that even the best judges could hardly tell his imitations from the true bills.”79 In addition to being proficient imitators of script, many counterfeiters also demonstrated astute entrepreneurship, assembling and availing themselves of the newest tools and technologies for writing, from pens, to ink, to paper. For example, John Potter, a prominent Quaker entrusted with signing Rhode Island currency in the 1740s, concocted a masterful scheme to reproduce twenty-­shilling bills. Potter joined forces with a blacksmith (who made a roller) and a goldsmith (recruited to cut



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plate); he arranged for his brother to send to Rhode Island a ream of paper purchased in Boston and acquired another ream of writing paper from a prominent local gentleman. In his official position as bill signer, Potter learned what types of ink were used, how the inks were made, and why some bills dried lighter than others. Together with a team of accomplices, Potter struck off stunning counterfeit bills from his home press and signed the bills himself.80 In this way, the money-­maker gleefully embraced the American Instructor’s promise to “qualify any Person for Business, without the Help of a Master.” Stephen Mihm has productively argued that “the promise of paper” fueled the eighteenth-­century counterfeit currency crisis, a phrase that also signals the possibilities afforded by writing literacy. Counterfeit coin was a persistent problem in the early colonies, but, after 1690, with the first release of paper money, counterfeiting escalated, causing enormous problems and confusion that threatened the stability of governments, banks, and local communities. Often unable to pay their debts through coin, anxious colonies each issued their own currency; the result was a staggering array of notes, “with each of the colonies issuing notes in denominations, sizes, and patterns of their own choosing,” which produced by midcentury an “anarchic and unstable” currency.81 Counterfeiters were quick to take advantage of the newness of paper currency, the lack of uniform standards and variable penalties, and the naiveté of merchants and the public. Just as they had once exploited the scarcity of coin by melting pewter and other metals into bogus currency, counterfeiters now profited from the increasing availability of paper, ink, and copperplate. They formed expanded networks across the provinces; as “enterprising forgers also began engraving counterfeit plates and imitating paper money,” they pumped an enormous amount of bogus currency into circulation.82 Laws against making and passing false currency differed from one colony to the next, discrepancies that allowed counterfeiters to exploit the gaps; some even printed bills overseas. Throughout the century, counterfeiters operated with widespread impunity, taking advantage of underground networks, limited policing, weak sentencing, variable sentences (from fines to death), generous pardons, and notoriously insecure jails. The problem grew so great that many colonies revisited their legislation to enhance the punishment for counterfeiting or

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make the crime capital, which in turn fueled the number of published execution accounts by or about counterfeiters. The crisis reached a crescendo during the Revolutionary War, when counterfeit currency challenged efforts to fund the war and lowered the value of Continental and colonial currency. The economic chaos caused by counterfeiters led to widespread changes in legislation, including a 1773 act imposing the death penalty on anyone passing counterfeit paper currency in the colonies. That same year, the New York Assembly even weighed a proposal to add an illustration of a counterfeiter on the scaffold directly onto its paper currency together with the proclamation, “Let the name of a Money Maker rot.”83 While the Assembly ultimately rejected the design, many bills did bear the warning “Tis Death to Counterfeit.” (These bills were promptly counterfeited.)84 The Short Account of the Life of John ***** Alias Owen Syllavan, published in Boston in 1756, dramatized the rising power of the counterfeiter, emphasizing not only how difficult it was to bring counterfeiters to justice but also how easily money could be made by enterprising fraudsters. Before being caught and executed in New York in 1756, Syllavan was head of the “Dover Money Club,” which set up operations in a remote area of New York and deluged Connecticut and Rhode Island with fake bills.85 Published in Boston by Green and Russell (who launched the Boston Weekly Advertiser the following year, promising “the newest and best intelligence”), Syllavan’s twelve-­page narrative is presented as a first-­person, ostensibly autobiographical account of the Irish-­born indentured servant turned soldier, silversmith, and counterfeiter. The account documents Syllavan’s peripatetic life, from indentured servant in Ireland then Boston, to henpecked husband, to notorious counterfeiter and jailbreaker. First arrested for coining a Spanish dollar, Syllavan pled guilty but was acquitted when the dollar turned out to be real silver. After taking up as an engraver in Boston, Syllavan was approached by two men and asked to engrave a plate of New Hampshire currency; he complied. When asked why he agreed to engrave the plate, Syllavan explained, “I thought it was an easy Way of getting Money.”86 Despite being apprehended on suspicion of counterfeiting, Syllavan was acquitted because “they had no Law for that Money.” Arrested after a different batch of bills was discovered, Syllavan escaped to Rhode Island, where he proceeded to print and pass massive



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sums of false currency. Caught, branded, ears cropped, he escaped jail numerous times before being sent to the gallows in New York in 1756. From the scaffold he admitted his guilt but refused to name his accomplices, not wanting them to “die on a Tree as I do,” and warned them to burn the money and destroy the evidence.87 Just as Syllavan exploited the economic categories of credit and trust, he likewise pursued the commercial success promised by eighteenth-­century writing pedagogy. Counterfeiters were a diverse bunch in terms of their trades of origin and social position. They came from “all social classes: farmers, sailors, weavers, carpenters, cordwainers, perukemakers, boatmen, tailors, victuallers, bakers, schoolmasters, millwrights; well-­to-­do merchants, doctors, deacons, justices of the peace, and even members of the legislature.” Moreover counterfeiting demanded tools and skill: it required ink, paper, copperplate (or some other way of engraving), pens for drawing, and a press for printing. Given the technical skill involved, the crime also appealed to printers, blacksmiths, engravers, and silversmiths.88 In terms of improvisational skill, Syllavan was particularly ingenious. While once in jail for forgery, Syllavan proceeded to make false currency by hand from his cell: “During my Confinement,” he recollects in his Account, “I engraved three sorts of Plates, two of New-­Hampshire money, and one for Boston Currency, and for want of a Rolling Press, struck it off by Hand, sign’d it in Goal [sic], and gave it out by Quantities to my Accomplices,” an act that seems to have passed undetected until revealed in his narrative.89 Not surprisingly, many counterfeiters had careers as writing instructors or schoolmasters, including Joseph Bill Packer, who claimed that he served as schoolmaster in a Quaker settlement in Virginia for a year in 1755, and the notorious Stephen Burroughs, who taught school in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York, and whose 1798 Memoirs was popular antebellum reading.90 In 1730, the Pennsylvania Gazette warned of a “School-­master on Staten Island [who] was apprehended and put in Prison there, for Counterfeiting the 30s and 3£ Bills of New-­Jersey,” noting, “He did the whole with his Pen, and so exact that the Difference was not easily discovered.”91 Likewise, when the town of Dover, New Hampshire, invited William Byrn to teach writing instruction to its youth, Byrn so impressed Tamsen Tibbits with his skill that she put the “gifted penman” to use counterfeiting bills.92 Others combined their knack for penmanship

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Figure 4  Master Penmen: Counterfeit note attributed to Joseph Bill Packer. Counterfeit three-­pound note dated May 1740 and October 1744 taken from the case of Rex v. Samuel Ingham (New London County, Superior Court, March 1749 term), Counterfeit Currency taken from counterfeiting cases in the files of the Connecticut Superior Court, 1712–­1816, State Archives, Connecticut State Library.

with their skill in domestic arts; for example, between 1716 and 1723 the enterprising and clever Mary Peck Butterworth ran a thriving counterfeiting business from her kitchen. Placing a piece of damp starched muslin over a legitimate bill, Butterworth pressed the muslin with a hot iron to transfer the ink from the bill to the cloth. She then ironed the transfer onto blank paper and tossed the incriminating piece of muslin into the fireplace. Her brother assisted, crafting an array of fine quill pens of different sizes that both Mary and her brother used to fill in and fine-­tune the paper bills. When suspicious authorities searched her home for engraving plates, they came up empty handed, and Butterworth ultimately avoided prosecution.93 To see many of the hallmarks of eighteenth-­century writing pedagogy, one need look no further than the spurious bills that flooded the colonial



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Figure 5  Handwriting specimens (Round Hand, Secretary Hand) from George Fisher, The American Instructor; or, Young Man’s Best Companion, 9th ed. (Philadelphia: B. Franklin and D. Hall, 1748). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

marketplace. For example, on a counterfeit three-­pound note attributed to Joseph Bill Packer and seized by Connecticut authorities in 1749, the aspiring penman attempted to demonstrate his proficiency by replicating the original script with the care of the master, from the round hand that comprised the body of the note to the more ornate secretary hand framed by scrollwork near the top. While not as elegant as the samples in writing manuals, Packer’s handwriting was still able to fool many (see figures 4 and 5). Bills were often full of misspellings and other blatant errors, but even less polished penmen succeeded by exploiting those with more limited literacy or those unfamiliar with new currencies. Packer, who also went by the names Joseph Bill, James Bill, and Dr. Joseph Bradford, had a lengthy career as an engraver and passer of counterfeit currency.94 Arrested numerous

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times, he broke jail or otherwise evaded punishment until his 1773 arrest and execution in Albany. Passing bills and, before his death, penning a memorable execution narrative that expressed pride in his engraving skill, Packer disrupted the regulatory impulses of writing instruction, particularly by refuting the belief that handwriting could accurately convey the identity or character of its writer. A Journal of the Life and Travels of Joseph Bill Packer (Hartford, 1773) fully embraces the trope of prisoner as writer, particularly when read with Packer’s counterfeit currency in mind. With its telling opener, “To the Printers,” Packer positions himself as an aspirational writer curtailed by the threat of execution and exigencies of form: “If I were to write the whole of my transactions they would fill a large volume; but in this my journal, I only mean to give a concise and true narrative of my proceedings.”95 The Packer of the Journal declares his eagerness to put his writing into circulation as quickly as possible, a likely attempt to rouse public interest long enough to forestall or delay his execution.The account opens with Packer declaring his “desire that these my transactions may be published for the satisfaction of the public; for that reason, Messrs. Printers, I have sent these manuscripts to you; print them with all convenient speed.” At the end of the account, Packer appends a note taunting printers and readers by claiming that he carefully considered whether to “communicate my recipe for curing cancers to the world” but, for now, has “strong reasons, to be silent on that topic.” Holding out for the possibility that more writing might save his life, he attempts one last time to forestall his fate, adding an amusing postscript about some more of his life adventures and miraculous cures and positing, “I would willingly write a more minute detail of the various vicissitudes of my life; which would [make a] large volume, but my time is much too short for [such] an undertaking; if I could obtain a reprieve for two months, the work might be finished.”96 Execution ended Packer’s career as writing prisoner, although, of course, his published writings (like his currency) circulated long after his death. Just like his handwriting conveyed little sense of his identity, Packer’s first-­person account, which makes no mention of his previous arrests or his many jailbreaks, diverges sharply from his notorious representation in newspaper and trial records. Instead his Journal testifies to the insatiable “thirst after knowledge” that drove Packer to adopt many roles: benevolent citizen, cancer-­curing country doctor, gifted schoolmaster, would-­be



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alchemist, and aspiring artisan. His “thirst after knowledge” also made him the unfortunate dupe of charlatans who “brought me a ten shilling bill and asked if I could imitate it. I answered him in the affirmative.” Packer explains that his crime was curiosity, not malevolence, and he ends his account by condemning authorities for making him, a man with so much to offer his fellow citizens, an “escape goat.”97 Eschewing the standard form of the confession account, Packer’s Journal becomes what Steven Wilf has elsewhere described as a pardon petition, a form of counternarrative independent of official legal texts that seeks to both change the story and present a different self to a hopefully sympathetic audience.98 Linking the crime of counterfeiting with the capacity for self-­ invention and reinvention, Packer’s charismatic self-­f ashioning anticipates the later Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs (1798), a favored text of the mythos of self-­making through print and precursor text of the antebellum confidence men. A college dropout and prolific identity thief who presented himself variously as a doctor, minister, schoolteacher, would-­be prison reformer, and lending-­library founder, Burroughs declared himself “so far a republican that I consider a man’s merit to rest entirely with himself, without any regard to family, blood, or connexion.”99 The particular social anxieties and aspirations evoked by Burroughs have secured him a privileged place in early national literary history. Stephen Mihm describes Burroughs as a symbol of a “new ethos” of self-­fashioning, an “extreme incarnation of the self-­made man, one who thrived in a society where identity was increasingly malleable and imitable and where capitalism and counterfeiting could coexist as two sides of the same coin” and a man “who counterfeited with equal ease both bank notes and identities.”100 Likewise, Daniel Williams argues that Burroughs “declared his independence” by rejecting reputation as a core definer of identity and insisting on his own internal “self-­righteous self-­conception.”101 While scholars have productively argued that Burroughs symbolized early national aspiration and anxiety, none have considered his rise as a distinct outgrowth of the transformation of writing instruction: Burroughs the counterfeiter followed the footsteps of an earlier generation of master penmen. Ultimately, the popularity of their accounts supports Meredith McGill’s influential claim that American literary history is defined by its “exuberant understanding of culture as iteration and not origination.”102 Analyzing the decentralized literary marketplace of the 1830s and 1840s,

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McGill clarifies that literary piracy was neither illegal nor aberrational but instead a “cultural norm”: expensive books printed in England “reappeared as filler in local newspapers”; essays from elite British magazines “were reassembled into regionally published eclectic magazines”; science, legal, religious, law and educational tracts and textbooks were “freely excerpted, imitated, plagiarized, and reissued”; and “author’s rights” had a very narrow legal interpretation in copyright law.103 McGill unearths the legal backdrop that helped produce this culture, namely a particular set of republican ideas, flourishing in Jacksonian America, that justified the repurposing of British texts as thwarting the elite and that considered the widespread dissemination of pirated literature a form of cultural nationalism and early national pride. We can better comprehend this literary development by locating its catalyst long before McGill’s Jacksonian thesis, in the spread of writing instruction and the rising popularity of counterfeiters’ narratives in the mid-­eighteenth century. The writing prisoner thus became an important catalyst for American literature, broadly conceived. “To G rati fy the P ubl i c ”: Criminal I nti mac y and the P ri sone r i n P ri nt Come ye prigs, and scamps full bold, I’ll sing you of a lad of fame, Who in Newyork town once did dwell, And Thomas Mount it is my name. As I was going out on the scamp, Void of any dread or fear, I was surrounded by the traps, And to the quod they did me steer. . . . Ram’d into his closest gaol, I had some bits, his traps well know, I sent some bits to fetch me suck, And then to cracking we did go. And now I’ve crack’d the quod again, Away to thieving I will go . . . —­“Mount’s Flash Song” from the Confession of Thomas Mount (Newport, 1791)



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A robust call to fellow thieves and highwaymen, Thomas Mount’s “Flash Song” proclaimed his notoriety and recounted a fateful night when, preparing for a robbery, Mount was surrounded by lawmen (“the traps”) and tossed into jail. After a bribe of money (“bit”) for rum (“suck”), Mount “crack’d the quod”—­broke out of jail—­and rejoined his merry gang. An infamous thief and notorious jailbreaker, Mount was finally executed in Newport in 1791. The Confession . . . of Thomas Mount, containing the above ballad, was published by Peter Edes shortly after his execution; three other editions were released that year. The account’s popularity testified to the ever-­adaptable criminal confession genre, the print market’s fondness for commercial and roguish accounts, and the early Republic’s culture of reprinting, whereby printers repackaged and reissued competing (often identical) publications. Mount’s Confession most crucially promised late eighteenth-­century readers an unparalleled inventory of the criminal vernacular by publishing and circulating the expressions and songs of the Flash gang, an organized company of thieves, originally from London, that had purportedly spread across the United States. The Confession offered readers an expansive inventory of prisoners’ literacy practices, including a dictionary of the “Flash Language,” “Flash Phrases,” the Oath of Admission into “Flash Society,” and a collection of “Flash Songs.” Here readers learned several inventive phrases: “queering the quod” meant breaking out of prison; a criminal was “ready to be topped” when he was going to be hanged; and a jailhouse visit from a clergymen meant that “a dull-­gown’s-­man” had arrived.104 Decrying the gang’s influence in North America, the Reverend William Smith made the (dubious) claim that “almost all of the persons who have been hanged of late in North-­America, have belonged to this company” and that the influence of Thomas Mount was “sufficient to contaminate all the unwary youth upon the continent.”105 And who collected, published, and promoted this dangerous text? The Reverend Smith, of course. One might reasonably assume that the Reverend Smith, so concerned that Mount could “contaminate . . . the continent,” would have been highly averse to promoting and circulating the illicit language of prisoners and unrepentant thieves, but Smith saw his role differently. Reasserting his ministerial authority in a culture of print that gave the prisoner increasing power and presence, Smith sought instead to position himself as invaluable intermediary. Smith explained that, through

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“constant attendance” on the convicts, he hoped that “my opportunities of discovering their language, &c. are equal, if not greater, than any other persons; and the public may depend upon their authenticity.” Combing through British magazines and culling information from prisoners, Smith purposefully crafted an account “to gratify the public.”106 According to Smith, by proliferating this subcultural vernacular, he not only raised public awareness, but he also calmed public anxiety by assuring readers that the government was hard at work getting unruly criminals under control. Put succinctly, Smith argued that through his annotated distribution of the Flash Gang’s language he could diminish their influence. As an illuminating example of how thoroughly prisoners’ illicit literacy practice, slang, codes, and quod-­cracking ballads had permeated the culture of print by the end of the century, the Confession . . . of Thomas Mount fed public desire for prurient and detailed knowledge about how prisoners and criminals lived and spoke, while simultaneously attempting to subvert their newfound authority. Published in 1791, the Confession . . . of Thomas Mount contrasts strikingly with Smith’s other contribution to prison literature, his religious catechism The Convict’s Visitor, or Penitential Offices, a collection of “Prayers, Lessons, and Meditations” for use by convicts and ministers, published the same year in Newport by the same printer, Peter Edes. The eighty-­five-­ page pamphlet was intended for distribution to ministers and prisoners by guiding them through a carefully scripted dialogue of prayers, conversations, and daily lessons. Unlike the Confession . . . of Thomas Mount, which gives ample space to Mount’s slang and songs, The Convict’s Visitor insists upon the condemned’s conformity and silence. The minister’s line-­ by-­line script for convicts to follow suppresses the criminal vernacular in favor of rote penitence. His catechism instructs the convict when to stand and when to kneel and even supplies the intonation and punctuation to guide the prisoner’s performance (“I die !—­I die !—­I die !—­tremendous thought!”; “Oh horrible! horrible! horrible!!!”).107 The text relocates the performative pedagogy from the scaffold to inside the prison by guiding prisoners through what to say, think, and feel while they sit in their gloomy cells awaiting execution. (Smith’s imagined catechism is so comprehensive that he even provides a set of exhortations, confessions, and lessons just for murderers, complete with a parting prayer: “God bless the United States of America.”108) Although heavy-­handed and highly scripted catechisms were



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nothing new, the simultaneous publication of such disparate texts—­written by the same person, distributed from the same publisher—­was distinct, as was Smith’s anticipation of a budding market of prisoners that might benefit from a pamphlet designed specifically for the nation’s jails, prisons, and, after 1790, quite possibly its penitentiaries. The concurrent publication of The Confession of Thomas Mount and The Convict’s Visitor illuminates the uncertain attitudes toward both prisoner literacy and prisoners’ print authority by century’s end. The tension between these two documents, one spreading and the other suppressing convicts’ speech, highlights a late eighteenth-­century quandary: did prisoners have too much access to the public? Too much influence and power in the print sphere? It’s hard not to conclude that Smith’s hasty printing of The Convict’s Visitor within weeks of publishing Mount’s Confession was an attempt to curtail a threat that Smith himself helped facilitate. Though he changed strategies, Smith understood both texts as having a similar goal, reducing what Michael Meranze has described as the “contaminating contact” between prisoners and the public. This early Republican fear helped drive a rising reform discourse, which argued that criminals, if properly isolated and disciplined, could subsequently be reformed; this discussion led many prominent citizens to call for the end of public punishment in the early Republic and the imposition of restrictions on prisoner/public interaction. In Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Society to Alleviate the Miseries of Public Prisons was formed in 1787 to protest all forms of public punishment. Armed with new theories of the Enlightenment, these reformers argued that the penal system itself was the problem. Across the 1780s, Philadelphia newspapers railed against the breakdown of social control; editorial after editorial blamed rising crime and social disruption on the laws and systems of punishment themselves for failing to protect citizens and turning criminals “loose upon the poor defenseless country people.”109 Reformers who sought a better way to control criminals, deter crime, and ensure public safety prompted furious debates over whether public punishment deterred or encouraged crime. Amid these larger debates, the public execution ritual came under renewed scrutiny. Many worried that condemned criminals were becoming folk heroes and that the ritual inflamed the overly sympathetic masses to adopt anti-­authoritarian sentiments. The

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French Revolution and its discomforting spectacle of bloody guillotines, observes Steven Wilf, further “underscored the dangers of involving the common people in questions of criminal justice.”110 In an oft-­quoted 1787 treatise against public punishment, leading Philadelphia citizen and reformer Benjamin Rush laid out his case that all forms of public punishment “tend to make bad men worse, and to increase crimes, by their influence upon society.”111 Rush, fretting over what criminals might say or do on the pillory or scaffold, argued that they can indulge in “profane or indecent . . . conversation” with spectators and plant ideas about crimes in the minds of those who would otherwise have “passed through life in total ignorance.” Rush also condemned what witnessing public punishment did to spectators; he determined that the “pernicious effects of sympathy” encouraged spectators to feel a natural, spontaneous urge to relieve the suffering criminal from distress.112 In his treatise Rush struggled to balance the need for republican sympathy, society’s moral obligation to the criminal, and a strong social order. He concluded his address by making the case for the “safety and advantages” of private punishment and calling for a new architecture, approach, and regime for punishing prisoners—­the penitentiary, although he did not use this specific word.113 Rush gave voice to what Karen Halttunen has influentially identified as a central contradiction of the emergent humanitarian discourse of pain: reformers relied on winning public support by eliciting sympathy for their cause (including criminals, animals, slaves, and the insane), but decried sympathy’s wayward effects: Humanitarian reformers were caught in a contradiction largely of their own making. To arouse popular opposition to the evil practices they sought to eradicate, they deemed it necessary to display those practices in all their horror: “civilized” virtue required a shocked spectatorial sympathy in response to pain scenarios both real and willfully imagined. But, by their own line of argument, viewing the spectacle of suffering could inflict terrible moral damage on the spectator, turning him or her into a “savage” with an “atrocious passion” for cruelty.114 This is the terrain Rush tried to navigate in his essay, which grapples with what happens when the public consumes and witnesses scenes of prisoners’ pain and suffering. Humanitarian reformers like Rush did not argue against execution accounts or writing prisoners per se; instead,



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Rush argued against public punishment and public execution. But he also contended that others, not criminals, should assume the responsibility of imagining and representing the experience of incarceration. In decrying the “public-­ness” of punishment, Rush implicitly advanced the argument that all forms of communication between the prisoner and the public should be restricted and that silence—­not speech, not writing—­ benefitted the criminal and assisted in his reformation. Attempts to curtail corrupting influences permeated all aspects of early national prison reform. From the structure of cells to the thickness of walls to the daily regimes of labor and silence, reformers and administrators retooled the design of jails and prisons to reduce contact between prisoners and to eliminate the easy flow of communication between prisoners and the outside world. Reformers imagined a new system, one that securely protected the public from criminals and protected prisoners from each other. Recently, Regina Kunzel reanimated the antiquarian phrase “criminal intimacy” (meaning illicit sexual relations) to signal the wide-­ reaching fear of sexual contact between prisoners that later emerged in reports from the nineteenth-­century penitentiary.115 Yet the term also captures the relationship between prisoners and readers fostered by the eighteenth-­century culture of sentiment: was gallows literature facilitating “criminal intimacy” between prisoners and their audiences? Were readers shaped by the demands and expectations of a culture of sentiment too willing to put trust in the writing prisoner? The shift toward private punishment meant that the prisoner’s role as public pedagogue would be significantly revised and reassessed.

C hap te r 3

“What Shall a Convict Do?” R eading and R e f ormation in Phi lade l phia’s E arly Pe nite ntiarie s In 1795 Joseph Price was sentenced to eight years in Philadelphia’s Walnut Street prison for counterfeiting a ten-­dollar bank note. A decade earlier, Price might have been sentenced to death; instead, Price was ordered to “undergo an Imprisonment in the Jail & penitentiary house of Philadelphia for the term of eight years, . . . be kept in the solitary cells of the said Prison for eight Months of the time” and to compensate the state for the costs of his prosecution. Pardoned after two years, Price was discharged “on condition of leaving the state not to return.”1 No printers, editors, or ministers published his narrative, and he was released on the condition that he exit Pennsylvania. His final instructions were similar to those received by many of the 114 other men and women on Walnut Street’s 1795 sentencing docket; most were convicted of larceny, or less often, horse stealing, receiving stolen goods, or issuing or passing counterfeit currency. The message upon release was clear: depart quickly and quietly. In Walnut Street’s first decade as a penitentiary, one prisoner refused the imperative of a hushed and humble exit. A year after his exoneration, Patrick Lyon, a skilled mechanic confined at Walnut for three months while awaiting trial on suspicion of a massive bank heist, published a fiery seventy-­six-­page account of his arrest and confinement, The Narrative of Patrick Lyon, who suffered three months severe imprisonment in Philadelphia gaol, on merely a vague suspicion . . . with his remarks therein (Philadelphia, 1799). In the pamphlet, Lyon took his accusers to task, excoriated the “too much boasted of Philadelphia prison,” and lamented that its passionate defenders refused to believe “that the Philadelphia prison is as bad as any other prison.”2 Because Lyon was not a convict (indeed, he was never convicted 89

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of anything), his testimony garnered additional authority by highlighting the injustice of his long confinement and drawn-­out acquittal. Lyon provided valuable testimony concerning the limitations on speech and writing, restrictions that directly threatened his ability to write an account, imposed by places like Walnut. He protested having nothing to write on and repeatedly begged the jailer to allow him some paper to prepare an adequate defense for his trial. After finally obtaining some paper and recording “my travail and defense,” he attempted to pass the papers to a visitant, only to have “my writings debarred [from] going beyond the confines of the prison door.” Furious that the prison had “stopt my writings,” Lyon protested the seizure of his papers while insisting that “every prisoner has a right to write to any friend.”3 Upon his release, Lyon refused to leave until his confiscated writings were returned to him. After a battle of wills, Lyon prevailed, using his prison notes to compose much of his Narrative.4 Lyon’s case provides an illuminating example of why prison authorities sought to limit inmate correspondence, for he used his correspondence and documentation to undermine Walnut Street prison’s reputation as an enlightened bastion of reform. Nor was this the end of Lyon’s very public protest: he later brought a civil case against the bank’s president, a constable, an alderman, and others for malicious prosecution and false imprisonment; in 1805, a jury awarded him a stunning twelve thousand dollars, an amount reduced to nine thousand dollars upon appeal, but still an astounding sum.5 When Benjamin Rush enthusiastically fantasized in 1787 about a future genre of carceral writing, Lyon’s narrative was not what he had in mind. Dreaming of his imagined penitentiary, Rush posited that literature could terrify the mass public with visions of the prisons’ imagined horrors and thus serve as a deterrent to crime. Rush explained the powerful effects of the literary prison: “Children will press upon the evening fire in listening to the tales that will be spread from this abode of misery. Superstition will add to its horrors; and romance will find in it ample materials for fiction, which cannot fail of increasing the terror of its punishments.”6 Here, Rush called for a particular genre of prison literature, a strain of gothic sensationalism and romantic fiction that relied upon invented horrors. While Rush’s own plan for the penitentiary’s interior departed from this gothic representation, he welcomed exaggerated fictions for their capacity to terrify the public as a form of deterrence. Lyon,



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by contrast, had no need to exaggerate or invent the suffering he experienced. He composed a decidedly nonfiction account meant to expose the injustice of the state and the misery of unjust punishment. His pamphlet and his court case were very public performances that enacted reformers’ worst fears, for Lyon successfully aroused public sentiments against Philadelphia’s elite and refuted their vision of Philadelphia’s prized institution. Despite the public sympathy and publicity that Lyon’s case generated, more than two decades passed before another inmate published a sustained account of her experience in Walnut Street prison: Ann Carson, who in 1822 published The History of the Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson . . . and of her Sufferings in the Several Prisons in that State . . . Written by Herself (Philadelphia: Published by the Author, 1822). Despite the title, the account was not written by Carson, but by Mary Clarke. Clarke and Carson’s 1822 literary collaboration was crafted as florid entertainment, tracing Carson’s colorful life and her (simultaneous) marriage to two men, one of whom (Richard Smith) murdered her first husband, for which Smith hung on the gallows; Carson described numerous stays in Walnut Street prison, first held (and acquitted) as accessory to the murder of her first husband, then confined (and again acquitted) for attempted kidnapping in a brazen attempt to free Smith from prison, and finally convicted in 1821 for receiving stolen goods. The text’s primary purpose was to turn Carson’s notoriety into profitable literary entertainment, but Carson’s History also cast a satirist’s eye at the “sovereign lords of this American Bastile,” mocking Walnut Street prison’s reputation as an enlightened and humane institution.7 While Carson’s sensational and self-­ promoting narrative was well suited to the era’s growing antebellum marketplace in sensational crime literature, the History also offers an instructive lesson on the difficulties faced by convicts looking to publish their accounts. Much of this publishing history would have gone unrecorded had Clarke not published Memoirs of the Celebrated and Beautiful Mrs. Ann Carson (Philadelphia, 1838) after Carson’s death. In the Memoirs, Clarke reveals herself as the ghostwriter of Carson’s earlier History and details the adventures and obstacles she and Carson faced trying to publish the first and second editions of Carson’s History. After her 1822 release from prison, Carson, determined to profit from her notoriety, sought out Clarke and proposed that she write Carson’s memoir.8 A struggling Philadelphia author, songwriter, and magazine publisher,

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Clarke, intrigued by the proposed collaboration, informed Carson that “no doubt that if the book was well written it would command a sure and rapid sale,” but she also warned Carson of “all the difficulties” of bringing such a work to press. Eventually Clarke agreed to ghostwrite Carson’s history under the mutually beneficial stipulation that Clarke would not “appear in the affair.”9 Thus, the 1822 History would appear as Carson’s own, with no mention of Clarke’s involvement. And indeed it did, with Clarke declaring on the title page that Carson’s History was “Published by the Author” and “Written by Herself.” The terms suited Clarke, who would split half the profits while protecting her own reputation from association with the notorious Carson. At a loss for a publisher, Carson suggested that the women persuade prominent Philadelphia printer and bookseller Robert Desilver to publish the account. Desilver had actively published Richard Smith’s trial in 1816,10 and he also held Carson’s father in great regard. But he expressed tremendous fear over the repercussions of publishing Carson’s history, going so far as to hire a lawyer to read the manuscript for potentially libelous content before it went to press.11 When he informed Carson that her history “contained libellous [sic] matter,” Carson countered, “it contains truth sir,” to which a gentleman auditor retorted, “the truth is a lible [sic].” Desilver’s lawyer agreed with the gentlemen, advising both women that telling the truth could get them in trouble: “Remember, that truth is a libel.”12 After a protracted battle and other publishing complications, Clarke agreed to some small changes, “merely inserting initials, and changing one or two phrases,” after which Desilver consented to proceed with publication after resetting seventy pages.13 The first edition sold well; Clarke reported at least fifty sales a day in Philadelphia along with plentiful sales in New York, adding that “the President, vice President, Gov. of Pennsylvania, and great numbers of members of Congress, of both Houses” all requested copies upon its release.14 But Carson’s notoriety made securing a publisher for a new edition nearly impossible. Desilver “positively declined” to print a second edition and “absolutely declined any further interest in the affair,” despite the potential for profit. Clarke surmised the reason: “so powerful was the popular prejudice predominating against [Carson], that I could never induce any respectable bookseller to publish a second edition for me.”15 The following year, Desilver served on the grand jury that helped convict Carson



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for passing counterfeit notes. Just a year before, Desilver felt obliged to help Carson out of respect for her father; now, he had grown disenchanted with her failure to reform. It did not help, observes Susan Branson, that the very class of people Carson often attacked in her 1822 History—­artisans and mechanics—­also served as her 1823 jurors.16 Thus, Carson’s wide readership and notoriety actually came back to haunt her. Carson’s amanuenses and her publisher sought to reap profit from Carson’s tale but had to calculate their advantages against their costs; Desilver, mindful of his standing in Philadelphia and hard-­earned public reputation, ultimately opted out, leaving Clarke to lament her inability to publish a second edition.17 Given early national audiences’ deep curiosity with the era’s new and fascinating penitentiaries, one might assume that printers and other collaborators fought to publish convict authors. After all, the market in criminal confession accounts flourished in the early decades of the nineteenth century, fueled by the growing influence of newspapers and a penny press that enthusiastically covered scandals, crimes, and trials. Publishers marketed crime literature using sensational titles such as Mutiny and Murder (New York, 1831) or Confessions, Trials, and Biographical Sketches of the Most Cold Blooded Murderers (Boston, 1837). These sensational titles, serving a deep psychological need, helped nineteenth-­century readers navigate the era’s competing demands for self-­control and self-­interest. Accounts of criminal excess, argues Daniel Cohen, “exposed some of the darker contradictions of a moralistic consumer culture that alternatively mandated self-­discipline and self-­ indulgence.”18 As such, reading sensational tales of crime provided a safe outlet for readers to imagine what it might be like to let their desires run wild, particularly for those educated on a steady diet of moral fiber celebrating the virtues of industry and restraint. Karen Halttunen extends Cohen’s thesis by arguing that an emergent literature of horror encouraged readers “to give free play to their illicit desires in the realm of the imagination. In so doing, [it permitted] readers to triumph over forbidden impulses by suppressing them again.”19 Popular crime literature thus unsettled liberal Enlightenment beliefs that mankind was knowable, rational, and sane. An emergent “cult of horror” replaced the “sympathetic view of the condemned criminal as moral exemplum with a view of the murderer as moral alien.” Therefore, the popularity of crime literature and the rise of the penitentiary went hand in hand:

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recasting murders as moral aliens helped bolster support for the penitentiary, “for the criminal’s moral otherness was deemed to require his or her full separation from normal society.”20 Such heavy antebellum competition for tales of truth could work to prisoners’ benefit, too, argues Ann Fabian. Modifying Halttunen and Cohen’s claims, Fabian argues, “Even as readers turned to [sensational tales of horror and violence] to learn the dangers of a wayward life or to indulge passions forbidden in a public culture based on liberal humanitarianism, they promoted a market where a confession could be exchanged for food, comfort, or a gravestone.”21 Observing that proximity to death and the legitimating apparatus of a trial lent convicts authority, Fabian identifies a range of techniques used by the condemned to craft tales that antebellum readers would find authentic. In a market obsessed with truth and authenticity, “a murderer’s uninstructed voice was more valuable than a polished sermon.”22 As such, Fabian’s work suggests the writing prisoner’s potential role as valuable voice of witness in an era that actively debated the meaning of crime, punishment, and redemption, and together these literary histories help explain why one specific class of prisoners—­those condemned to die for sensational crimes—­maintained a print presence in the antebellum era.23 But tales by everyday inmates of the nation’s new penitentiaries—­ those thousands of men and women sentenced to five or ten years for larceny, horse thievery, arson, or other noncapital, nonsensational offenses—­ are strikingly absent from our literary histories.24 This absence is particularly true in Philadelphia, the energetic hub of prison discourse, where only a handful of first-­person accounts by former convicts came to press in the first half century of prison reform. While publishers competed to secure the dying confessions of the condemned, few vied to solicit the story of a female servant incarcerated for seven years for robbery . . . unless, by chance, she just happened to die a dramatic and penitent death behind bars; then her tale could be adapted into a tract about a reformed fallen women for distribution by a female benevolence society (as happened to Julia Wilt).25 Dying in prison or upon the scaffold lent drama, immediacy, and authenticity to the published accounts of prisoners: their proximity to death gave them authority while their deaths contained that authority and sent a (mostly) reassuring message that justice had prevailed. But from what



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authority could a former horse thief sentenced to three years at Eastern State Penitentiary speak? And who would even listen? In chapters 1 and 2, I demonstrated how print culture encouraged eighteenth-­century readers to look to prisoners to negotiate their relationship to reading, writing, and print. As punishment shifted from the public pillory and scaffold to the privacy of the penitentiary, the widely held belief that prisoners benefitted from isolation, labor, and silence directly affected the convict’s role as public pedagogue as well as the rationales for prisoner education. In chapters 3 and 4, I deliberately turn away from the literature of the public scaffold and toward the archive of the penitentiary to explore how the birth of a new form of imprisonment created new logics and rationales for educating prisoners, as well as new justifications for promoting or obstructing prisoners’ literacy practices, including their writing. Prison defenders now posed several questions: What did it mean to reform an inmate for release? What roles (if any) did reading and writing literacy play in this process of reform? And how might reform be measured and assessed? Published reports and pamphlets, unpublished inspector notes and philanthropic society records, and the admissions records of Philadelphia’s two most influential penitentiaries refute any consistent narrative linking prisoner education to prison reform. From the start, Pennsylvania reformers and prison authorities lacked consensus about whether reading—­even Bible reading—­did any good. Inmates remained eager to obtain books, to write, and to correspond with family, but authorities and philanthropists placed little weight on prisoners’ opinions about how best to occupy their idle time. Reading literacy maintained its connection to inward spiritual reflection and moral reform, yet prison administrators and reformers struggled to decide if it was advisable that prisoners learn to read and, if so, what constituted appropriate reading. Still fewer offered persuasive arguments on behalf of writing instruction, for the last things an inmate needed were more opportunities to absorb (or spread) bad influences through correspondence. Even the widespread belief that education prevented crime did not generate a call for schools in prisons. The sustained integration of libraries and basic education (reading, writing, arithmetic) did not take hold in Pennsylvania until the 1840s, some fifty years after the penitentiary’s birth, and this shift occurred in large part because moral reform no longer seemed plausible or measurable.

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Although I argue that oft-­repeated claims—­such as “since the creation of the penitentiary there have been prison libraries,” or prisons “have attempted to improve character through reading since the inception of the penitentiary in the late eighteenth century”26—­demand scrutiny, my intent is not to simply replace a claim of education’s central function with an exposé of neglect. The prison’s wariness about offering or expanding prisoners’ access to books, libraries, or reading and writing instruction is just as instructive as its various efforts to expand libraries and education. By analyzing when, how, and why prisoners were given access to reading, writing, books, and instruction in Walnut Street prison and Eastern State Penitentiary, this chapter clarifies what “reform” meant (and did not mean) while also analyzing the new meaning attached to reading and writing prisoners in an era described as a “key century for literacy.”27 I end the chapter by returning to the public role of the literate prisoner, examining how two writing prisoners—­one from Walnut Street, the other from Eastern State Penitentiary—­accomplished the near impossible: partnering with prison authorities to publish their writing (one a letter, the other a poetry collection) and, in doing so, insert a prisoner’s perspective into the public debates concerning the best practices—­ and the experiential effects—­of imprisonment. Prison R e form i n the “Key Ce ntury f or L ite rac y ” In February 1776, the Philadelphia Society for Assisting Distressed Prisoners formed in response to the “miserable situation” of prisoners in what was then the Walnut Street jail. The jail had only been open a month, yet already the society described the new jail as a “house of variegated misery.”28 For nineteen months, until British troops arrived in Philadelphia, its members, pushing a wheelbarrow while declaring “VICTUALS FOR THE PRISONERS” through Philadelphia’s streets, collected donations of food and clothing.29 Reformers not only sought to improve the deplorable conditions of local jails, but they also demanded that society rethink the entire architecture, organization, and function of the prison itself. Convinced that its jails and workhouses were schools of vice, spreading rather than alleviating crime and disorder, reformers sought to make punishment more consistent and effective by reexamining laws governing sentencing and pardons and by repealing the sanguinary codes in place since 1718.



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In 1787, prominent reformer Benjamin Rush spoke out against public punishment and convict street labor; in his influential address (mentioned briefly in chapter 2), Rush laid out his vision of a wholly new institution: Let a large house be erected in a convenient part of the state. Let it be divided into a number of apartments, reserving one large room for public worship. Let cells be provided for the solitary confinement of such persons as are of a refractory temper. . . . Let the name of this house convey an idea of its benevolent and salutary design, but let it by no means be called a prison, or by any other name that is associated with what is infamous in the opinion of mankind.30 Two months later, intent on thoroughly reforming the city’s prisons and reducing “the undue and illegal sufferings” of prisoners, the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (PSAMPP) formed. The Philadelphia Society had an immediate and lasting impact, spearheading a series of significant efforts to improve the state’s laws and penal institutions and transforming Walnut Street jail into the first American penitentiary.31 The Philadelphia Society first persuaded the state legislature to enact a series of reforms, including the 1789 repeal of the unpopular “wheelbarrow law” that put convicts to public labor in the city streets. The society also sponsored a series of acts between 1789 and 1794 that penologists consider the birth of the American penitentiary, for these acts reclassified the city jail into a state prison for those sentenced to one year or longer at hard labor, permitted the prison to erect a new building comprised of solitary cells on its existing grounds, and established a state board of inspectors empowered to oversee its operations. Moreover, in 1794 the legislature reduced the number of capital offenses to one: murder in the first degree. Now those convicted of formerly capital offenses (including burglary, robbery, rape, counterfeiting, and arson) could be sentenced to imprisonment and hard labor in Walnut’s solitary cells; keepers could also confine Walnut’s general population to these solitary cells for committing infractions. Other successful reforms driven by the Philadelphia Society included changing how keepers were compensated, eliminating liquor sales to prisoners, closing the dungeons, improving the treatment of debtors, and attempting to separate inmates by type in different wings (men from women and convicts from untried prisoners, vagrants, runaway servants, and debtors).32

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The group drew inspiration from transatlantic correspondence with European reformers, with whom they exchanged ideas about the best practices of legal reform, prison design, and prison management. The Philadelphia Society’s efforts became further known after 1792 when Philadelphia Society charter member and Walnut Street prison inspector Caleb Lownes published an Account of the Gaol and Penitentiary House of Philadelphia, which, according to one 1796 account, “found its way through every part of North America.”33 In 1794, Rush toured Philadelphia’s Walnut Street prison with Lownes and reflected with satisfaction in his diary that the prisoners were busy carving marble, grinding plaster, weaving, shoemaking, tailoring, spinning, and turning and cutting wood.34 In 1796 state inspectors celebrated the salutary effects of order, cleanliness, and steady work, as did visitors such as Robert Turnbull, who toured the prison and deemed it a “WONDER of the world.”35 Publications such as A Visit to the Philadelphia Prison; Being an Accurate and Particular Account of the Wise and Humane Administration Adopted in Every Part of the Building (Philadelphia, 1796) and On the Prisons of Philadelphia, By a European (Philadelphia, 1796) spread Walnut Street prison’s fame and proclaimed that “harshness and injustice . . . have happily been banished from the [gaol] of Philadelphia,” and author La Rochefoucauld-­Liancourt attributed much of the success to Philadelphia Society member Caleb Lownes, a “visionary” and “the principal agent in this respectable work of reason and humanity.”36 Between 1796 and 1812, numerous states patterned their laws and prisons on Philadelphia’s example. By the 1820s and 1830s, two distinct models of prison management contended for primacy: the “Pennsylvania” (or “separate”) system and the “Auburn” (or “congregate”) system. Under the Pennsylvania system, prisoners were confined at all times in individual cells at manual labor. Conversely, the Auburn system put inmates to work in silent congregate work areas during the day before confining them to separate cells at night. Defenders of the Pennsylvania system argued that separate cells shielded prisoners from the influence of other inmates, prompted reflection, and eliminated the need for brutal discipline; confined to single cells, prisoners only came into contact with a carefully selected group of keepers and visitors chosen for their benevolence and humanity. Critics of the Pennsylvania system countered that separate confinement was the highest form of cruelty and that Auburn prisoners escaped the gloom



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of solitary confinement and performed a more versatile and profitable array of labor. Meanwhile defenders of the Pennsylvania system decried the “frightful catalogue of abuses” that went into maintaining silence and order in Auburn’s congregate workspaces.37 Across the early decades of the nineteenth century, many prisons organized under one model or shifted from one to the other with the majority of prisons settling on the more cost-­effective Auburn model.38 Despite differences in organization and design, the rival systems shared a common philosophy: inmates needed to be removed from contaminating contact; communication between inmates should be restricted or eliminated altogether; and inmates had to be taught new habits of industry, labor, cleanliness, and discipline. That is, “by combining a regulated life with constant work, cleanliness, silence, and religious instruction, prison officials believed, imprisonment could reform individuals and make them dutiful and dependable citizens.”39 With few exceptions, authorities shared the consensus that inmates, while deserving humane treatment, were imprisoned because they were diseased and idle, the products of faulty environments and bad choices that the prison would try to supplant and correct. Observed Philadelphia reformer Roberts Vaux, prisoners possessed an “unrestrained licentiousness [that] renders them unfit for the enjoyment of liberty.”40 Because defenders of the Pennsylvania model became convinced that confining prisoners in single cells at labor was the most viable path toward prisoner reformation, this arrangement de facto eliminated congregate schooling as a desirable or workable option. Persuaded that crime was a result of a weak or diseased character, that poor moral character resulted from bad environments, that contact with all but the most select and chosen few was contaminating, and that a great many inmates were hardened beyond reach, reformers struggled to devise a feasible educational model. The Pennsylvania system’s defenders, with their increasing philosophical commitment to confining inmates full time to individual cells, reduced the number of viable avenues to a few challenging or impractical options: self-­directed reading within a cell, one-­on-­one instruction by a visitor to every single inmate, and amassing collections of carefully selected books for distribution by staff to individual prisoners. This meant that education behind bars had a decidedly different cast than in the urban charity schools that were rapidly expanding just outside

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Philadelphia’s prisons. Harvey Graff has called the 1800s “a key century for literacy” because of how complexly the forces that spread literacy interacted with the forces of cultural change, particularly through the growth of mass education.41 The diffusion of literacy took shape in response to sweeping social, economic, and political transformations that increasingly imagined literacy as a key instrument of social cohesion: “Literacy was expected to contribute vitally to reordering and reintegrating the ‘new’ society of the nineteenth century. . . . Formal education, through the structured provision of literacy, was intended to elevate and assimilate the population to insure peace, prosperity, and social cohesion. An efficient and necessary substitute for deference, education would produce discipline and aid in the inculcation of the values thought required for commercial, urban, and industrial society.”42 Certainly some beneficiaries of mass schooling took from their experience a radical sense of liberation or personal satisfaction, notes Graff, but teachers of rural children and the urban poor viewed the “instillation of restraint” as the main purpose of education. Modifying Graff ’s thesis, Carl Kaestle observes that “local school committees and other writers on education” strongly emphasized crime prevention and “the training of intelligent and acquiescent citizens.”43 Unlike the eighteenth century, which emphasized literacy as a tool of sociability and social belonging (even as it urged control and restraint), nineteenth-­century mass literacy was a more mechanized affair, promoting a more unified, homogenized, and compliant citizenry and workforce. Reformers expressed similar goals for the penitentiary, a sign of the institutions’ shared historical moment. As scholars from David Rothman to Michel Foucault have asserted, mass education and the penitentiary movement emerged as distinct but interrelated responses to capitalism and modernization. In the United States, the twin calls for educational and prison reform emerged most forcefully after the American Revolution, especially in Philadelphia. In the decades after the Revolution, Philadelphians “reorganized their poor-­relief system, developed new institutions to control juveniles and prostitutes, constructed a system of free public education, strove to regularize and order the city’s streets and parks, and transformed the mechanisms of class relationships and the government of the city’s laboring classes” between the 1780s and 1830s.44 Michael Meranze emphasizes the common strategies, practices, and results of these efforts:



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Whether the target was poverty, criminality, delinquency, prostitution, or idleness, reformers and officials believed that problems could best be contained through the transformation of individual character, that individual character could best be transformed through careful supervision of individual regimen, and that the supervision of individual regimen could best take place within an environment where time and space were carefully regulated. These laboratories of virtue assembled spaces separate from daily life, arranged according to carefully specified rules and overseen by hierarchical organizations. They sought to inculcate the habits of labor, personal restraint, and submission to the law.45 As concurrent social experiments, mass education imagined a population trained in a literacy controlled by morality while the penitentiary envisaged a population (re)trained in self-­discipline, controlled by labor and solitude.46 The era’s obsession with transforming character suggests that literacy acquisition, including reading good books, would occupy a central place in Pennsylvania prison reform; in reality, education had a more tangential role as a potentially helpful but less pragmatic method of inculcating the virtues of industry, restraint, and discipline. E ducation i n “The Cradle of the Pe nite nti ary ” Because Walnut Street prison was both a source of inspiration and a documented disaster, its more sympathetic historians tend to overstate its commitment to education in an effort to highlight its unique accomplishments despite its many failures.47 For example, in his book-­length history of Walnut Street prison, criminologist Negley Teeters, commending the prison for its attention to the educational needs of prisoners, notes that it offered schooling, lectures, and books “at a time when [books] were not plentiful.” Likewise archivist LeRoy DePuy argues that, in addition to profitable experiments in prison labor and successful efforts to improve the health of inmates, “educational opportunities for prisoners were provided, and religious services were held regularly” at Walnut Street. Rex Skidmore goes so far as to proclaim, “Walnut Street Prison was a pioneer institution in sponsoring education for inmates.”48 None of these accounts anticipates the odd trajectory of literacy education in Philadelphia’s first penitentiary, nor do these accounts signal reformers’ cautious

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stance toward literacy and education behind bars, a reticence that appears in high relief when contrasted with more expansive educational experiments occurring in Philadelphia during that same time. Ironically,Walnut Street’s literacy efforts were least pronounced during what has been called the prison’s “halcyon days” or “golden age” between 1790 and 1799 with one notable exception: a short-­lived school in Walnut Prison in 1798.49 Of the three periods that I identify in Walnut’s history as having undergone concerted efforts to supply books, build library collections, or educate prisoners, only one took place during Walnut Street prison’s so-­called “halcyon days.” The other waves occurred later during Walnut Street’s troubled decades of decline (or period of “colossal failure”).50 The second sustained effort occurred between 1809 and 1810 when Philadelphia Society members attempted to supply and distribute books to prisoners after a decade-­long debacle of overcrowding and doubtful evidence of reform. A final unlikely effort occurred in 1822–­1823, long after the persuasive case had been made that Walnut Street had outlasted its utility and that appropriations were in place for a better-­designed penitentiary, Eastern State. Walnut Street prison’s more limited emphasis on libraries and bibliotherapy bears the mark of pioneering English prison reformer John Howard, a favorite of early Pennsylvania reformers.51 Howard spoke occasionally (albeit approvingly) of the distribution of Bibles in prisons but did not strongly emphasize the educational aspect of prison reform, nor did Howard promote evangelical print as actively as did many of his contemporaries, such as Dr. Bray’s Associates.52 Walnut Street’s reticence may also reflect the institution’s Quaker influence, which left its mark most firmly in reformers’ increasingly vocal arguments on behalf of solitude and labor, twin pillars of prison reform that reflected two tenets of Quaker belief: “affirmation of the Inner Light, along with [a] concern for disciplined living.”53 The Quakers still valued the Bible, for the authority of scripture assisted the Quakers in their solitary reflection while affirming the value of external controls. But Friends also believed that “no one should exalt the letter of the Scriptures above the Spirit that gave them,” a view that cautioned against privileging printed authority over the “still, small voice” of God’s indwelling spirit. For example, the Bible Association of Friends formed in 1829 to offset a “perception of a widespread lack of Scriptures among Friends.”54 As Quakerism shifted from quietism



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to an identity more consistent with mainstream Protestantism across the nineteenth century, believers increasingly relied on Bible study and tract distribution. In addition to these shaping influences, the diverse demands in the 1790s of prison oversight and administration most assuredly restricted opportunities for education. Laws adopted between 1789 and 1795 authorized the twelve state prison inspectors to set prison rules and policies.The inspectors divided themselves into a vast and ever-­evolving array of committees: the visiting committee, the committee on the nail factory, the sick committee, the committee to oversee books and accounts, the committee to wait on the mayor and alderman, the committee appointed to confer with commissioners, the committee to superintend stone sawing, the committee to revise and amend rules, the committee to investigate alterations in the construction of the kettles in the kitchen, and so on.55 Those appointed to the “visiting committee” had an array of obligations: report on the general order of the prison and supervise the keepers; monitor the health, cleanliness, and employment of prisoners; ensure that prisoners had sufficient bedding, clothes, and food; make recommendations about how to keep classes of prisoners better segregated; address prisoners’ grievances; and advise authorities on granting inmate pardons. Near the bottom of their long list of duties was seeing “that proper means be used to promote religious and moral improvement, by the introduction of useful books, and procuring the performance of divine service, as often as may be.”56 This final vague mandate, “as often as may be,” left ambiguous the form and frequency of religious and moral improvement. Inspectors’ duties were thus threefold: ensure public safety, improve the conditions of prisons, and reform prisoners. To these ends, inspectors took a wide view of what “reform” meant. In a 1791 report, the inspectors defined their duty to reform prisoners through “moral and religious instruction, by promoting habits of industry, by a separation of the sexes, by the prohibition of spirituous liquors, by exclusion of improper connexions from without, and by confining the refractory to solitude, low diet, and hard labour.”57 Not only was the meaning of reform broad, so was the definition of moral and religious instruction. Caleb Lownes described a typical example of such instruction at Walnut Street: on Sundays the prisoners gathered for public worship led by ministers of diverse Christian denominations; afterward, if possible, the minister conversed

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with prisoners in their cells while the “afternoon of the day, is mostly spent, by many of [the prisoners], in reading: proper books being furnished for that purpose.” Lownes modestly appraised the effect of public worship by noting that the prisoners “are generally desirous of attending” and that “some appear to be benefitted.”58 While this description could be considered evidence of bibliotherapy’s early emphasis, Lownes’s own language was more circumspect: many (but not all) prisoners spent part of one afternoon per week mostly reading. Lownes’s own example left most prisoners’ Sabbath-­day time and activities unaccounted for. In his A Visit to the Philadelphia Prison (1796), an oft-­quoted account of Walnut State prison’s golden age, Robert Turnbull observed that “all means are used by the inspectors to promote moral and religious improvement in the prison, by the introduction of useful books among those who request them, and the procuring the regular performance of divine service.” But in this passage, Turnbull merely reproduced the language of the 1792 “Directions for Inspectors” by substituting the language of an official report as if it were his own eyewitness account.59 Elsewhere in his visitor’s report, Turnbull observed that the prison’s everyday routines structured all the prisoners’ waking hours, from daily labor in the manufacturing shops to evening respite. After the “dusk bell is rung,” he recounted, they “leave off labour, immediately repair to their rooms” and await a roll call from the keeper, after which he “locks them up in their apartments, but without candle or fire, except in extreme cold weather. From this time half an hour is allowed them to adjust their bedding, after which they are not permitted to converse aloud or make a noise.”60 While Walnut’s designers passively approved the idea of reading the Bible during idle times, they did their best to ensure no idle times, particularly after dark. Members of the Philadelphia Society provided the driving force behind most efforts to supply Bibles, Testaments, and other books to Walnut Street prison and later to Eastern State Penitentiary. Members joined the society by paying an annual subscription rate, met monthly, and volunteered on various committees; officers were appointed by annual election. Member dues helped offset the group’s expenses, which included clearing the debts of prisoners awaiting release and purchasing clothing and other necessities for prisoners. The six members appointed to the philanthropic society’s Acting Committee were expected to visit prisons



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multiple times a month, meet with prisoners, report on conditions in the cells and wings, relay any accounts of abuse or mistreatment, and call on member physicians if they encountered serious health or sanitation problems. They also reported on the moral progress of the prisoners. When the mayor drew up his list of twelve inspectors to oversee Walnut Street prison’s reforms, he chose a majority of men from the ranks of the Philadelphia Society, including Caleb Lownes. The close relationship between the first generation of philanthropists of the Philadelphia Society and the state inspectors helped the Philadelphia Society advocate on behalf of the society’s principles.61 Walnut Street prison’s first educational experiment developed rapidly in 1798 and disappeared from the records just as swiftly. The school came about after state inspectors demanded that a committee be formed to arrange a plan for “disposing of ” prisoners’ spare time and placed Caleb Lownes in charge. An ambitious Lownes reported weeks later that a school had been established.62 The inspectors were impressed when he “produced a specimen of the Writing executed by some of the prisoners (that are formed into a School) which affords a pleasing prospect of our rendering them essential service in this Way.”63 The inspectors encouraged “the committee” (of one) to continue its efforts and referred to his duties in future meeting entries as the chairman appointed to “find employment for the prisoners at hours not interfering with their daily Labour.”64 Rather than cementing Walnut Street prison’s status as “a pioneer institution in sponsoring education for inmates,”65 the school usefully illustrates how far one man was able to make change, albeit briefly, in a large and often chaotic institution. Little is known of either Lownes or his educational methods. One historian suggested that nothing in Lownes’s professional life would have “prepared [him] for the task” of being such an influential reformer, but Lownes did come of age during a very active time in Quaker educational reform.66 Between 1742 and 1782 Quaker educator Anthony Benezet taught reading, writing, arithmetic (and French) to the city’s poor; Benezet then taught at a school for blacks until his death in 1784.67 By 1784, just six years before the redesign of Walnut Street prison, the city had at least ten Quaker-­led schools for girls and boys, many of which taught poor children free of charge. Although we know little of the devout Quaker’s educational history or pedagogy, we do

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know that Lownes was surrounded by a host of small-­scale experiments in urban education. Tasked with “disposing” of prisoners’ time, he did what so many other Quakers were doing: he started a school. This process is notable in a number of respects. First, the inspectors did not decide that Walnut Street prison needed a school; they merely demanded that prisoners do something and appointed Lownes a one-­man committee to dispose of the inmates’ time; inspectors made it clear that any program should not “interfere” with inmates’ “daily Labour.” Thus, the society rejected the notion that reading, writing, or literacy acquisition was a viable form of prison labor, a marked shift from the previous century. Nevertheless, the inspectors acknowledged Lownes’s claim that a school was an important obligation of Walnut Street prison to its prisoners (“of our rendering them essential service”), a rare albeit fleeting sentiment among inspectors. Second, Lownes never approached the state for money but instead went to the Philadelphia Society (of which he was a member) to underwrite the financial support for his school. Only after he had secured funds from the Philadelphia Society did Lownes return to the prison inspectors with a glowing report of the school’s success, a move that suggests that Lownes anticipated state resistance to funding a prison school. Finally, the Philadelphia Society struggled to decide whether supporting a school was consistent with their mission; after being approached by Lownes, the Acting Committee questioned their authority to support a school and called a special meeting of the society. The society agreed to provide Lownes “compensation for past services” for his efforts to establish the school and also granted permission to the Acting Committee to render aid to the project “as they in their discretion shall judge useful and proper.”68 In their careful response to Lownes’s request, the Philadelphia Society did not fully commit to the school; rather, they left the decision to financially maintain a school up to their Acting Committee’s discretion. (Authorized to act, the Acting Committee did no such thing: after six months, they never mentioned the school again.) While Lownes’s teaching methods and textbooks remain unknown, his experiment demonstrated that it was possible to mobilize a group of motivated prisoners to “write well” in five months without resource-­ intensive training, state funds, or diverting inmates’ time and labor from Walnut’s manufacturing workshops. His report is worth quoting at



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length because it offers a rare description of one the nation’s earliest prison schools and because of the mystery that surrounds the short-­ lived experiment: The most beneficial employment which appeared to your committee was to establish Schools for learning some and improving others of the Prisoners in the first Principles of reading writing and Arithmetic,—­the necessary Desks with Books &c was procured & every attention paid for carrying into effect a plan which afforded a hope would be productive of the greatest advantage, in addition to the necessary School Books, your Committee added a small collection which comprised Moral & religious Subjects.69 The curriculum that Lownes put in place departed from the expected course of religious catechism and instead emphasized basic education (reading, writing, and arithmetic); it even required “School Books,” which his report carefully distinguished from the moral and religious reading that he also thought useful to provide. Throughout his report Lownes praised the school for its many benefits to students and to the prison: many of the prisoners who were totally ignorant in every respect, who began with their Letters now write well & Cypher, whose who had heretofore acquired some knowledge in Reading Writing &c are much improved; the Zeal and inclination manafested [sic] by almost all the prisoners to acquire knowledge & become perfect evince at one view the double effect of securing their time in obtaining what will be always of infinite service to them as individuals, and the benefit derived to the institution.70 Clearly, between February and July Lownes honed his pitch to his fellow inspectors: the school did far more than keep prisoners occupied. It improved the students and the institution as a whole. Lownes’s portrayal of the eager convict aspiring to “become perfect” blended a Quaker philanthropist’s enthusiasm with a prison inspector’s pragmatism. Most notable was Lownes’s attention to the school’s impact on black prisoners, who were disproportionately incarcerated at Walnut.71 Lownes saved discussion of “the improvement of the Blacks” for the culminating drama of the 1798 report: first, he described black prisoners’ progress and

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engagement, then he linked this progress to public debates over black mental and moral capacity: “& the improvement of the Blacks is however a source of high gratification & evinces at once how futile those opinions are, which attempt to impose a belief that endeavors for their improvement [do] in a great measure prove unsuccessful. All of them (who have been any length of time at School) can spell—­& Read, & many of them write & are in a fair way of great improvement.”72 Many inspectors and prison reformers would note the presence of black prisoners with alarm, often blaming the prisons’ high percentage of black and immigrant populations for its problems. But Lownes instead emphasizes the convict school’s utility for challenging biased arguments about blacks’ moral and mental capacities (the “futile” opinions of detractors). Lownes’s forceful defense of the prison classroom and his celebration of black prisoners’ written literacy are rare in the early prison archive. The more typical argument, made in 1830 by the New York African Free School, claimed that early childhood education prevented blacks “from becoming inmates of the Bridewell, penitentiary, or State Prison,” a tactic that drew upon the fear of black criminality to secure public support for black charity education. To highlight the urgent need for black education, the Free School reminded supporters that “at every term of the court of sessions, many blacks, generally from twelve to twenty, are convicted of crimes, and sent to the state prison or penitentiary. This school has now been in operation several years, and several thousand scholars have received the benefits of a good thorough English education. And but three persons who have been educated here, have been convicted in our criminal courts.”73 By asserting the commonly accepted link between lack of education and crime, supporters of the New York African Free School sought to bolster public and financial support for black education and mass schooling. By contrast, Lownes posited a limited yet important public role for the black prisoner while refuting common arguments about black capacity for moral and intellectual improvement. Pleased by his success, the committee authorized Lownes to continue his present plan without alteration, a gesture that suggests their passive receptivity to Lownes’s optimistic arguments on behalf of the capacity of black inmates and the advisability of educating blacks. The records are frustratingly silent on the fate of the school. In June 1798, a fire set by inmates destroyed some of the prison’s workshops and



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meeting house. Skidmore hypothesized that the fire probably disrupted the school (for space was now at a premium, particularly space that could serve as a manual labor workshop), although the glowing report Lownes gave in July left open the possibility that the school survived the fire. Neither the inspectors nor the Philadelphia Society make any mention of the school in 1799. Although it was granted discretion to support the school as it saw proper, the Acting Committee also took no action. All evidence of the school’s demise points to Lownes’s departure from board of inspectors in 1799 over a financial dispute; after that, discussion of books and education vanishes from inspectors’ reports, despite the argument that the school provided inmates with an “essential service.” Through 1810, inspectors settled accounts, secured pardons, procured blankets, glazed the windows, scrutinized death reports, and—­as ever—­ appointed men on and off committees; never once did they revive the idea of a school and made only brief mention of procuring books or Bibles.74 The failure to revive the school is just as important as its success: the school launched because one individual was given wide authority to innovate and because prisoners appeared to support the effort; however, without a clear and abiding philosophical commitment from inspectors, wardens, or the Philadelphia Society, the prison school was abandoned. The subsequent history of Walnut Street’s prison library reveals a similar pattern. When the idea of assembling books into a lending library was finally proposed, the idea came not from the inspectors but from the Philadelphia Society’s Acting Committee. More precisely, the impetus came from even further away: the trigger was an 1808 letter to the society from a private citizen, Samuel Harvey, inquiring about the possibility of expanding the book selection in the prison. Harvey’s query arrived as the Philadelphia Society was responding to various crises and problems in the prison; Acting Committee records document the disappointing effects of overcrowding and riots, the lack of a consistent classification system for prisoners, and the prison’s overall decrepit conditions (“Kitty Spencer almost naked in the Dungeon”).75 But they took up Harvey’s letter and (no surprise) appointed a committee to consider the feasibility of Harvey’s inquiry. The committee’s response was comprehensive and detailed: it conceded that prisoners’ time might be “usefully” spent by reading “religious Books,” which suggests not that religious reading was essential but

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that the issue was not itself obvious and required time for discussion. The committee also reported that the inspectors commit to providing “a place for a Book Case,” a first step in assembling a collection that could circulate—­a comment suggesting that previously no provision existed other than depositing Bibles or other reading directly in cells and letting them deteriorate until someone requested a replacement. The committee also proposed that another committee be formed to superintend selecting the books and to determine “suitable regulations” for loaning the books to “the Convicts and others” (meaning vagrants and other classes of prisoners) and stipulated that “no new Books be added without the approbation of this Committee,” ensuring that committee members kept firm control of the process.76 To guide a future committee, they also furnished a preliminary list of book titles and urged the society to purchase the recommended books. Besides Bibles and Testaments, the recommendations included John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Life of Colonel James Gardiner (1747) by the Nonconformist divine Philip Doddridge, Thoughts in Prison (1777) by Anglican minister and convicted forger William Dodd, Night Thoughts (1742–­1745) by British poet Edward Young, and, notably, one copy of Murray’s English Reader (1799), a popular schoolbook in elocution and reading instruction for more advanced readers.77 Reflecting on this list of book recommendations, Teeters concluded that the selection was “no doubt typical” of the types of religious reading offered to prisoners and that “it is obvious that no convict could be demoralized by the selection.”78 However the most important thing about this book list is neither its regularity nor its orthodoxy; rather, the list is illustrative because the committee uniformly rejected it. Replying to the committee’s request, the Philadelphia Society instructed the Acting Committee to purchase only “a sufficient number of Bibles and Testaments” and report on the effects of distributing them to prisoners.79 Thus, even mild efforts by a Philadelphia Society subcommittee in 1809 to expand the prison’s selection of “religious books” were rebuffed; only Bibles and Testaments made the cut. Thomas Wistar and Roberts Vaux immediately purchased six dozen Testaments, which they labeled, numbered, and delivered to the keepers to distribute to prisoners.80 The second charge of the committee—­to offer an opinion on the effects of religious reading—­dragged on



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endlessly. By the end of the year, Wistar and William Rogers could report only that the keepers charged with distributing books reported that “some of the prisoners [manifested a disposition] to peruse those volumes”; as to the wider impact of introducing religious reading to prisoners, “the committee are still unprepared to furnish an opinion in respect to the utility of the plan.”81 In other words, even the philanthropists of the Philadelphia Society struggled to articulate the benefits or describe the effects of giving prisoners Bibles and Testaments to read. They also offered no opinion on expanding the library to vagrants and untried prisoners. In future meetings, the committee, now called the “Committee on Religious Instruction,” was unable to report on the effect of religious reading; as a result, the committee discontinued its work in 1816.82 By contrast, Philadelphia prison reformers’ reticence distinguishes Walnut Street prison from England’s Newgate prison, which since 1702 had a relationship with Dr. Bray’s Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge to regularly distribute Bibles, religious tracts, and even novels such as Robinson Crusoe. The English Gaols Act of 1823 soon required that all prisons provide instruction in reading and writing for male and female prisoners, reforms aggressively promoted by Elizabeth Fry and the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline.83 The halting pace of prisoner education efforts in Philadelphia during the penitentiary’s first quarter-­century of reform (1790–­1815) also contrasts sharply with the vigorous public education efforts of Philadelphia’s Quakers. Among their many philanthropic causes, Friends actively promoted urban charity schools while also advocating for a “religiously guarded” education for their own children, “participat[ing] in urban charity schooling because they viewed it as an expression of practical piety inspired by the Inner Light” but also motivated by a desire to “isolate the children of Friends from those non-­Quaker youths who were also educated by the society, most notably the poor and blacks.”84 The Adelphi School emerged from these twin impulses. The “Philadelphia Association of Friends for the Instruction of Poor Children” established the Adelphi School in 1808 to correct the “idle habits and neglected education” of the city’s urban poor.85 The association was founded by influential minister Thomas Scattergood, who later served as warden at Eastern State Penitentiary. The school was organized on the congregate educational philosophy of the English educator Joseph

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Lancaster, whose experiments providing low-­cost urban public education by using experienced students as teachers were rapidly gaining traction. The Adelphi School’s success mobilized Quakers to expand their already notable charity school efforts in Philadelphia, particularly a young Roberts Vaux, who later oversaw the movement for public education in Philadelphia by promoting the ideas of Lancaster.86 Vaux joined the Philadelphia Society and its Acting Committee in 1808, the year that the Adelphi School was founded and the year before Samuel Harvey proposed that the prison develop its library. Vaux remained an active member of the Acting Committee and later published a history of the Philadelphia Society and helped supervise the erection of Eastern State Penitentiary.87 Despite many Philadelphia Society members’ wide involvement in urban and poor education and despite sharing common cause with the Adelphi school (namely, a focus on correcting the so-­called idle habits and weak moral character of its charges), the Philadelphia Society remained wary of exposing inmates to any wider educational experimentation, even wider reading. In fact, Roberts Vaux, together with Thomas Wistar, declined to offer an opinion on the effects of religious reading in Walnut Street prison in 1810.88 While the surging movement in urban charity education likely encouraged the philanthropists to consider Harvey’s letter and agree to “superintend the business of providing proper books” to prisoners, by 1810 the society was unconvinced that a more ambitious educational plan for prisoners was warranted. None proposed bringing Lancastrian education to Philadelphia’s prisons, despite the fact that Walnut Street had both congregate workshops and congregate night rooms. Philanthropic reformers instead opted for a much narrower educational experiment: let keepers distribute Bibles and Testaments to motivated prisoners and watch and wait for results. The society also lacked the incentive that Lownes had to promote prisoners’ educational success: by the 1800s philanthropists were convinced that a better prison was needed so even dismal reports from Walnut on its conditions or its prisoners’ miserable state helped fuel their argument that only a new institution arranged fully on the separate system would cure Walnut’s ills. By this logic, part of philanthropists’ limited interest in education at Walnut stemmed from what became the utility of using Walnut’s failures to advocate for a new institution more aligned



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with their philosophies. In 1820, the Philadelphia Society reported defeat: “It is with deep regret the Visiting committee feel themselves obliged to state, they have not been able to perceive any reformation among the prisoners.” By 1821, state inspectors also concurred that Walnut was a “school of vice,” failing to reform inmates.89 Their criticisms fueled existing calls to erect a new prison organized from the ground up on the core principles of separation at labor for all inmates. Construction at Eastern State Penitentiary began in 1821 and finished in 1829; in 1835, Walnut Street formally closed its doors. In 1822, however, just as Eastern State began construction, the Philadelphia Society again revived efforts to restore and expand the Walnut Street prison library. The prison had suffered a spate of dismal inspection reports and bad publicity: riots in 1817, more riots following the murder of a black prisoner in 1819, and exposés critical of the institution. The anonymous True and Correct Account of the Prison of the City and County of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1820) branded the once-­heralded prison a “place of misery” inhabited by a “motley crew” of inmates, “white, black, mullatto [sic] and very little distinction made as to colour or crime” overseen by swaggering keepers who behaved like “petty German princes.”90 Soon afterward, the History of the Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson (1822) advertised itself as an account “of her sufferings in the several prisons in that state” and excoriated Walnut Street prison for its strict rules, its vermin-­filled cells, and its indiscriminate placement (she was in a cell with vagrants and criminals “of the lowest class”).91 The sensational History sold more than fifty copies a day during the first weeks of its 1822 release. At the height of this bad publicity, the Philadelphia Society decided to appeal to a tract society for “religious and other suitable tracts” and also purchased more Bibles and Testaments. They appointed a committee to inquire into the state of the pilot library established in 1810, and they emphasized the “expediency” of acquiring more books and expanding its holdings, as if by flooding the institution with religious reading they might curtail the prison’s descent.92 Eastern State had already begun construction, evidence of winning the battle to erect a new prison, so they no longer drew benefit from negative reports. In July 1822, the committee reported that the collection was in shambles, that books were “destroyed or lost,” and that “the utility of a large appropriation [for

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books] is questionable.”93 Despite the severity of this perceived crisis, they allocated a modest ten dollars to the library committee to purchase some suitable and proper books. By August, the subcommittee determined that the collection had not in fact been destroyed: the keeper had possession of the books. The subcommittee’s findings pointed to yet another educational obstacle: keepers unwilling or unable to distribute books to prisoners. The committee subsequently purchased “sundry books in addition”—­ the first substantial effort to expand the library collection beyond Bibles and Testaments.94 Their 1822 decision to devote attention to the Walnut library appears puzzling unless we consider the main force behind the effort: James J. Barclay, a lawyer who recently joined the society in 1819 and helmed the library committee together with long-­term member A. M. Garrigues. Barclay was also a prolific bookworm: a later portrait depicted him seated serenely amid mounds of books in cluttered piles stacked many feet deep, and his friends fondly remembered him “buried in his books.”95 Barclay remained an advocate for the prison library and expanding its collections throughout his tenure in the society. Barclay authorized an illuminating and surprising list of “sundry” titles for purchase for the prison: Popular Tales, Parents’ Assistant, Harriet Newell, Humphries’ Memoirs, Mental Improvement, Alphonso and Almira, Beauties of Nature, Moral Tales, Evenings at Home, Elements of Morality, Trimmer’s Introduction, Dupuis’s Instructions, and Two Narrations of a Soldier.96 While assuredly proper, the list demonstrates Barclay’s informed and pragmatic interest in curating juvenile reading for young offenders as well as entry-­level readers.97 This is evident in his selection of Quaker educator and Lancaster affiliate Priscilla Wakefield’s Mental Improvement: Or, the Beauties and Wonders of Nature and Art Conveyed in a Series of Instructive Conversations (1794) and conservative educator Sarah Trimmer’s Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature, and Reading the Holy Scriptures, Adapted to the Capacities of Children (1780), texts designed for the moral improvement of less-­advanced readers. The list also reveals Barclay’s deep interest in the latest experiments in juvenile education and his astute knowledge of the “fireside education” or “domestic education” movements, which instructed parents in methods for home schooling and promoted a more engaging reading pedagogy than rote memorization.98 For example, he recommended what appear to be three titles by Maria Edgeworth: Parent’s Assistant: Stories for



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Children (London 1796; Philadelphia 1814), Moral Tales for Young People (London 1801; Philadelphia 1810), and Popular Tales (London 1804; Philadelphia, 1804); along with Evenings at Home: The Juvenile Budget Opened (1792) by Unitarian innovators John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld; and Mary Wollstonecraft’s translation of Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children (1790) from the German text of Christian Salzmann. Through his choice of juvenile home schooling titles, Barclay perhaps imagined less-­experienced prisoners teaching themselves to read. Besides bearing the mark of the domestic education movement, the Philadelphia Society’s library acquisition efforts also demonstrate the increasing power of urban tract societies, which surged in Philadelphia and New York between 1814 and 1817—­a response to social anxiety about the purported vices and weak moral character of the unskilled workers who flocked to growing manufacturing centers and the cities’ ever-­g rowing urban immigrant and black populations.99 By 1822 the Philadelphia Society expressed interest in “procuring from the Tract Society  .  .  . religious and other suitable tracts  .  .  . for the use of the prisoners.”100 These cheap and mass-­produced tracts were distributed everywhere the urban poor or immigrants might be found, from orphanages, to poorhouses, to Sunday Schools, to prisons. Many were structured as appeals from a benevolent stranger to an urban unfortunate and recited short moral tales about the dangers of pursuing pleasure or self-­ interest.101 Frequently set in distant villages, the tracts sought to “revive the moral authority of communal order that for many was no more than a memory,” observes Paul Boyer, while exhibiting an “anachronistic preoccupation with a village world far removed from the actual life of many readers.”102 As such, the tracts responded with unease to rapid migration and demographic change. Reformers expressed similar distress over the disproportionate number of immigrants and blacks in Philadelphia’s cities and prisons, which they frequently attributed to recent migration from slave states. In 1821, the society’s visiting committee issued a long report condemning the state for not keeping its prison growth in line with the state’s expanding population and argued that the state’s high population of blacks and immigrants made public safety a particular challenge, for the state had become an asylum for “Free Blacks and runaway Slaves, many of whom, being ignorant (a concomitant of vice) and profligate, soon fall

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into temptation.”103 Blaming urban demographics and slavery allowed prison defenders to avoid addressing the hardships faced by the city’s urban black populations, including changes to the city’s legal system that impacted black sentencing, the increasing job competition that tightened employment opportunities for Philadelphia’s black mechanics and tradesmen, and the widespread economic upheavals that drove so many to low-­level property crime; it also allowed reformers to avoid reflecting on their abiding investment in arguing for the idleness and faulty moral character of the poor.104 Around this time, some advocates for prison reform began to draw inspiration from the American Colonization Society (ACS). In 1828 Dr. James Mease, a Philadelphia doctor, opponent of slavery, and fervent defender of the Pennsylvania system of separate confinement, outlined a convict transportation plan directly inspired by the ACS. The society, formed in 1816, sought to reverse the demographic tide by encouraging a free black exodus to Africa as an alternative to emancipation. While an emergent and formidable black public sphere linked black literacy acquisition to personhood and argued that education should train blacks for American citizenship, the ACS promoted an alternative rationale for educating blacks; in the words of the Parsippany School in New Jersey: “we are not instructing them—­for our society—­not to form our magistrates or legislators—­but preparing them to go home.”105 The movement garnered support from some African American leaders but also prompted massive and vocal opposition from a large assembly of free blacks when proposed at a gathering at Richard Allen’s Bethel Church in 1817.106 Yet the discourse around the colonization movement popularized a rhetoric contending that troublesome black populations might be removed, a rhetoric that fed the concurrent call for more robust and stricter prisons. (See a parallel appeal in New York when building Auburn prison in chapter 4.) In his 1828 treatise, Mease lamented Philadelphia’s failed attempts at prison reform, defended the practice of separate confinement, and proposed that the system could be successful if it could eliminate its most incorrigible offenders, which included a great many first-­time offenders whose crimes, according to Mease, demonstrated forethought and malice.107 To this end, Mease proposed sending the incorrigible male offenders to a remote island, preferably in the South Atlantic, with some farm



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animals, potatoes, seeds, rudimentary tools, clothing, and tents capable of sleeping six men, to let the convicts learn industry. Not only would transportation eliminate prison overcrowding and improve the chances of reforming those prisoners that remained, but his “proposed mode of disposing of certain convicts” would also “relieve the country of the vicious part of the free BLACK POPULATION, the increase of which, and the evils thereof, are obvious to all.” To persuade readers, Mease highlighted the disproportionate number of blacks in Philadelphia’s prisons and noted with alarm that one of every sixteen blacks in the city was committed to prison, compared to one in sixty whites; Mease asserted that blacks were an incorrigible class and claimed (without irony) that blacks lacked basic understanding of the value of hard and steady labor cultivating the land.108 To demonstrate the cost-­ savings of exporting rather than rehabilitating convicts, Mease cited the American Colonization Society’s 1827 statistics on “the cost per head of the blacks sent to Africa.”109 The pamphlet was heralded by Pennsylvania-­system advocate Thomas McElwee as a “judicious work,” although the Philadelphia Society neither responded to nor endorsed Mease’s proposals. Philadelphia Society records, however, reveal the faint imprint of ACS influence in a late, rare, and final mention of literacy efforts among prisoners at Walnut Street in 1829. The note in the Philadelphia Society’s records is brief, recounting an appeal for help with a Sunday School: “The secretary laid before the Committee a letter from Mr(s). E. McElwee, Directress of the Sunday School in the female department of the Walnut Street prison, requesting the Society to furnish some spelling books (&c) for the use of the female prisoners and on motion of Dr. Coates it was resolved that the Secretary be instructed to procure such books as he may deem proper for the use of the female prisoners in the Walnut Street prison an amount to be laid out not to exceed six dollars.”110 A local female benevolence organization had begun offering a Sunday School for female prisoners and was appealing for help. Like Lownes before her, McElwee did not petition the state but instead went to the local philanthropic group for financial assistance to purchase schoolbooks and supplies for her pilot school. McElwee was very precise about the kinds of texts she wanted for her students: spelling books, not Bibles or religious tracts. Few made forceful demand for skills-­based education in Walnut Street prison. Still fewer made them

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on behalf of the black and white women confined in Walnut Street’s female ward, where black women comprised nearly 70 percent of the female prison population.111 The Philadelphia Society, responding cautiously to a request that no doubt struck them as radical, rejected McElwee’s request for spellers for her female students. Instead, Benjamin Coates made a motion to let the society determine the “proper” book selection. Coates’s attempt to curtail black female literacy is notable, for Coates, a prominent advocate of African colonization, would later author the racialist treatise, Effects of Secluded and Gloomy Imprisonment on Individuals of the African Variety of Mankind (Philadelphia, 1843), in which he argued that blacks’ constitution made them unfit for reflection and poor candidates for prison reform.112 Refusing to provide spellers to the black and white female prisoners at Walnut, Coates rejected the logic behind McElwee’s more ambitious literacy curriculum. He did not block her request outright, but he rejected her authority to choose her own texts, appointed a group of men to determine what texts would be most suitable, and restricted the society’s investment in female education to a paltry six dollars. These records of Walnut Street reveal that, across three decades of reform in what has been called “the cradle of the penitentiary,” Pennsylvania’s prison defenders, administrators, and philanthropic reformers did little to promote education: they rejected spellers for women, had only recently warmed to the idea of allowing books such as Mental Improvement and Moral Tales, were unable to offer a firm report on the effects of moral education, and (since 1798) made no further attempts to offer schooling to Walnut Street’s inmates, despite maintaining congregate workshops and night rooms for those not confined in the penitentiary cells. This history, however reticent, reveals traces of a rising antebellum moral reform culture that put increasing faith in reading as a tool of self-­discipline and in urban charity schooling as a corrector of vice and a tool for social order. In the decades to come, scientific racialism increasingly advanced pessimistic arguments about the difficulties of reforming blacks, and these arguments competed with more optimistic strains of Enlightenment humanitarianism that emphasized the capacity of all mankind to improve. Touring Walnut in its final days in 1835, a writer for the United States Gazette observed a prisoner reading with “peculiar interest” while “another prisoner who had been in an adjoining cell, had taught him to



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read by opening his Bible and reading slowly, while the other looked at the same place on his Bible.”113 While the Gazette noted this example of peer education approvingly, Philadelphia Society members and Pennsylvania system defenders would have blanched at this spectacle of two men helping each other read and communicating between adjoining cells. They had already begun shifting Walnut’s population to a new, total institution, Eastern State Penitentiary, designed from its inception to prohibit prisoners from seeing, hearing, or speaking to one another. “Difficulti e s of the M oral I nst ruc tor” : Education i n E aste rn State Pe nite ntiary The opening of Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829 revitalized defenders of the Pennsylvania system, for they had long sought an institution whose form and function were designed for separate confinement at labor. Now their ideas about reformative incarceration could be more fully tested by an institution whose architecture and regime were built upon those twin philosophies. Its cells were sparse yet advanced for their time; each contained a rudimentary flush toilet, a small outdoor exercise yard, central heat, and enough space to hold equipment required for the inmate’s daily labor (such as a loom or shoemaking bench). Speech between inmates was prohibited; instead, they conversed with only a select group of philanthropic visitors and salaried staff who in turn were expected to reinforce the virtues of temperance, industry, and discipline. The cells were carefully designed so that inmates could neither see nor hear each other (although inmates found ways to communicate through the plumbing pipes). Eastern State Penitentiary was the cornerstone of the prison reform movement: “a purpose-­built response to some of the problems endemic to earlier penal schemes.”114 As supporters of the Pennsylvania model united around the concept of separating inmates perpetually in their own individual cells, they elevated, at least in theory, the importance of a certain form of reading prisoner. Inspectors of the separate system predicted that the prison’s architecture and regime would prompt a revitalized model of transformative reading: “The first object of the officers of this institution is, to turn the thoughts of the convict inwards upon himself and to teach him how to think; in this solitude is a powerful aid. The character of the convict is generally social to a fault . . . and, when, deprived of the society of

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his companions in vicious indulgences and guilt, he reads and listens with eagerness, because he is relieved by the variety from the weariness of his solitude. There he can only read and hear, what is calculated to make him industrious and virtuous.”115 Anticipating the ameliorative and corrective effects of separate confinement upon consciousness and behavior, the description captures the early optimism of a second generation of prison reformers. While the prison—­that is, its architecture and its regimes—­ were calculated and elaborate, education appeared a simple process, as predictable and automated as the convict’s daily routine: just isolate the prisoner in a cell at labor, weary him with boredom and repetitive work, and he would soon be reading avidly and purposefully. To catalyze this process, prisoners were kept in total isolation the first days of arrival—­no Bible, no labor—­an immersion meant to awaken them to their guilt and prepare them for the new routine that awaited them.116 Once removed from bad influences and left alone with their thoughts, the prisoner received a Bible. Correspondence was prohibited. For the duration of his or her sentence, family or friends could neither visit nor write, and prisoners neither socialized nor even saw the faces of fellow inmates. Only periodic conversation with ministers and suitable visitors was allowed. Blending sola scriptura with a violent form of tabula rasa, Eastern State Penitentiary relied upon the power of “the Word” to help rebuild inmates once all their bad habits and influences had been radically stripped away. Shaped by Jonas Hanway’s Solitude in Imprisonment (1776) and the Reverend William Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), advocates of separate confinement emphasized the twin effects of solitude and prison architecture as the catalysts most likely to “turn the thoughts of the convict inwards upon himself ” and “teach him how to think.” Caleb Smith has aptly identified this as “a mystical hypothesis connecting prison architecture and the structure of consciousness”: “Somehow the walls of the solitary cell would present the prisoner with an undistorted picture of his guilt. Revealed to himself, no longer distracted by vice and bad company, he would struggle to repair his flaw—­precisely because the flaw, apparent all around him, made his confinement a torment. The prisoner would see his guilt as the cell that bound him; he would work to rebuild his soul as if rebuilding his chamber, repairing a cramped and ruptured dwelling place into a comfortable and solid one.”117 Like the tools that built Eastern State Penitentiary, reading would help the



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prisoner rebuild the prison chamber of his own conscience. “Self-­binding and self-­correcting,” asserts Smith, this “penitent, cellular soul” became the “dominant image” of the antebellum prison reform movement.118 However, even the staunchest defenders of the separate system questioned whether inmates could handle its reflective and mental demands. In an 1835 letter concerning prisoner discipline addressed to the state committee charged with overseeing the affairs of Pennsylvania’s flagship prison, Francis Lieber posed the central question that informs this chapter’s title: “What shall a convict do? Read? He who has not been imprisoned does not know how difficult it is, even for a cultivated mind, to read the whole day: how much more difficult, then, must it not be with convicts, who generally belong to the least educated classes? [Solitude without labor]  .  .  . would return the convict upon society as an incensed felon, panting for revenge.”119 Arguing that the ameliorative effects of imprisonment were best cultivated through separate confinement at steady manual labor, Lieber denounced the idea of a reading prisoner (or, more precisely, a fervidly reading prisoner). Like most reformers and defenders of the prison, Lieber viewed prisoners as members of an uneducated class, lacking the capacity and discipline for self-­corrective reading. His belief that prisoners’ imaginations overpowered their capacity for reflection led him to advance hard labor, not rigorous reading, as the more suitable regime of self-­correction. In other writings, Lieber surveyed prison wardens and amassed data showing that the majority of criminals lacked instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, religion, and morality, yet he neither offered nor advocated a plan for schooling prisoners.120 Instead, he reiterated the familiar argument that to prevent crime, the nation should expand children’s education and common schooling. He, like many others, believed that the promise of common education rested on reaching children while they were young; by contrast, prisoners, particularly older convicts, were less impressionable and assumed to be well formed in their habits and idleness. Despite his lifetime of advocacy on behalf of public education, even Lieber puzzled over whether reading was a help or a hindrance inside prison walls. The need to modify the image of the self-­laboring, self-­correcting reading prisoner became evident soon after Eastern State Penitentiary’s opening, as authorities and defenders of the system were forced to reconcile their idealized figure with the real men and women sent to

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Eastern State. Most of the men were, on average, first-­time offenders in their twenties sentenced for crimes against persons and property, such as assault during a robbery. The first prisoner, Charles Williams, was a black man sentenced to two years for burglary; the first two women, Amy Rogers and Henrietta Johnson, arrived in 1831, were also black and had both been convicted of manslaughter; they were serving sentences of three and six years, respectively.121 Wardens and inspectors expressed surprise and dismay at prisoners’ low levels of basic reading and writing proficiency, a puzzling response, given longstanding arguments about the lack of early childhood education among criminals. As early as 1833, warden Wood reported that “the deficiency in common school learning is greater than is generally supposed: of the 142 prisoners which have been received here from the commencement, only four have been well educated, and only about six more who could read and write tolerably; and we rarely meet with a prisoner who has had attention paid to moral and religious instruction.”122 The following year Wood offered a follow-­up report on the low levels of common school learning that, he surmised, affected nearly half the population: On a more minute examination of this subject, I find that of the whole number received into this penitentiary from the opening, viz: two hundred and nineteen, that forty-­two could neither read nor write, fifty-­nine could read, but not write, and one hundred and eighteen could read and write; of the latter class, one had been educated at an [sic] university, one had a good English education and is a tolerable Latin and French scholar, one understands English, Dutch, and Hebrew; besides these, there are . . . not more than two others who could read and write tolerably, leaving ninety-­eight who could read or write indifferently, many of these, as well as most of those who could read only, were not able to read a sentence without spelling many of the words.123 Although most inmates could read, nearly one in five could not, which begged the question: what were these men and women supposed to do when not at labor in their solitary cells? Even worse, the prison was desperate to find a way to make in-­cell labor profitable, yet many inmates demonstrated “ignorance of trades and occupations to qualify



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them for useful citizens.”124 Training was taking longer than anticipated; profits were low. Wood felt confident that he could offset prisoners’ ignorance concerning labor, but he seemed flummoxed at how to offset their lack of education, especially without a paid instructor on staff. Even in the above passage, the warden valued labor and education differently: learning a trade could prepare an inmate to become a “useful citizen.” By contrast, learning to read and write helped make inmates better prisoners by giving them skills to tolerate the emotional rigors of separate confinement. The warden’s report demonstrates that the rhetoric supporting prisoner education (making inmates better prisoners) differed from arguments on behalf of common education (making men better citizens). As a result, the “dominant image” of the self-­ laboring prisoner soon gave way to a new figure: an anxious convict dependent upon the benevolent ministrations and repeated guidance of the moral instructor. The redefinition of the reading prisoner wed older threads of Christian monasticism to the emergent discourse of urban charity by emphasizing the prisoner’s moral and mental deficiency and need for a benevolent guiding hand rather than the prisoner’s isolation-­induced capacity for intensive reading and reflection. A quick synthesis of the inspectors’ annual reports clarifies how Eastern State was forced to adjust its vision of the idealized “reading prisoner,” an adjustment made especially visible through the reports’ changing rhetoric seeking to persuade the state to fund a position for a “moral instructor.” For nearly a decade, the position was unfunded and relied on volunteers. The initial job description appealed to men willing to “attend to the moral and religious instruction of the convicts, in such manner as to make their confinement as far as possible the means of their reformation, so that when restored to liberty, they may prove honest, industrious, and useful members of society.”125 Inspectors struggled to find volunteers willing to devote the time to such a demanding task without receiving any compensation from the state. Therefore, the third annual report of 1832, raising the stakes, argued that “moral and religious instruction form one of the most important features of the system” and thus require the undivided time of a “chaplain or religious instructor, whose duty it is to pass from cell to cell . . . to remain with [the prisoner] a considerable time, teaching him his duty to his creator.”126 Inspectors

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and wardens, repeatedly urging the state to fund the position, revised the moral instructors’ duties in the process. Inspectors adopt new language by 1834: the warden’s report called for “a religious instructor, to go from cell to cell . . . while giving [prisoners] the rudiments of schooling.” The warden advocated that the prison “commence the instruction of each prisoner in reading, immediately on his reception” and added that reading provides comfort as well as instruction,127 an appeal that expanded the purpose of reading (as a source of personal comfort) and modified the duty of the moral instructor (who would now provide the “rudiments of schooling”). In 1835, now arguing that he could tend to the “intellectual and religious improvement of the prisoners,” inspectors again begged the state to fund the position of moral instructor.128 Early reports rarely invoked prisoners’ intellect, unless to report it deficient. By 1837 the report’s even more pragmatic language asked the state to fund a position for an instructor that “might combine with his task of religious instructor, many of the duties of an ordinary teacher,”129 a phrase that appears rarely if ever in early inspectors’ reports, which made no mention of prisoners’ “intellectual improvement.” By broadening their definition of moral reform, inspectors sought new strategies for persuading a skeptical legislature. State officials approved the model of separating prisoners and keeping them busy at hard labor, but many doubted that much “moral reformation” was possible. In 1828, the year before Eastern State opened, the legislative committee charged with assessing approaches to prison management argued that “our view of the character of convicts is, however unfortunately, a different one [than that of benevolent reformers].” Maintaining that any theory appealing to the “reason or consciences” of inmates would prove “utterly ineffectual,” the legislature advocated making inmates suffer and work hard.130 The report, striking in its cynicism, suggested that reforms relying on prisoners’ capacities for reason were doomed to fail: better to focus on disciplining their body and give up on reaching their minds. Not all elected officials shared the committee’s pessimism, but the report does give insight into the widespread and competing belief that prisoners were too far gone to reform. Thus, inspectors and wardens repeatedly argued on behalf of education, but they did so because the prison was failing to provide it and because the state was failing to fund it. Moreover, their newfound concern for either the “intellectual” growth of prisoners



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or the “comfort” reading might provide did not emerge from a philosophic commitment to literacy’s broader social purpose. Rather, the plea for paid moral instruction emerged from twin impulses: a nervous hope that separate confinement might prompt more visible moral reformation if prisoners could read, and the penitentiary’s ever-­present need to justify its carceral philosophy and demonstrate its viability to a skeptical legislature. In 1838, the prison finally got its wish to hire a moral instructor and employed the Reverend Thomas Larcombe, a Baptist minister and former schoolteacher, who served in the position for decades. His first report, emphasizing how effectively he had performed his divided duties, claimed that he made more than a thousand visits to inmates, distributed “ten thousand pages of tracts and other useful publications,” and taught all but a handful of the prisoners to spell, “and a large proportion of them can read in the New Testament.”131 The following year, his tone was less celebratory and his report more routine. Every prisoner who could read had a Bible and prayer book and a library of “nearly one thousand volumes, containing some choice and valuable books,” was now available by request to inmates. He complained, however, that black inmates were making his job arduous, for the “numerous and degraded class of coloured persons drawn from the precincts of the city,” he lamented, were “besotted by gross sensuality” and possessed “little relish for literary instruction.” Despite these obstacles, he commended himself for visiting sixteen to twenty prisoners a day and circulating “fifty-­six thousand pages of tracts and useful papers” (a fivefold increase from the previous year).132 Year after year, solitary cell by solitary cell, Larcombe taught prisoners—­black and white, male and female—­to read and write while he dutifully tallied how many inmates he instructed in his annual reports. Larcombe’s admission ledgers, however, reveal his belief that there was no relation whatsoever between literacy acquisition and moral reform, despite public reports that measured his successes through careful statistics and tracking. In his ledgers, he recorded some brief demographics for each prisoner (information on the crime and sentence, religious affiliation, propensity for drink, and, later, date of release); periodically he added brief notes and updates. Mulatto Caroline Henry, he recorded, reads but “is incurably vicious”; likewise Eliza Smith—­ twenty-­ three, black, imprisoned for larceny, according to Larcombe, is “ignorant and

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stupid, no disposition to repent. Discharged,” adding in the margin: “has learned to read in prison.” Occasionally a prisoner appeared “deeply affected” or “possesses hope of reformation,” but the vast majority of inmates received either no comment or the damning assessment, “n.h.” (no hope). One was a “real rowdy . . . no hope,” and another “learned to read” but was “very stupid, half witted, cannot learn & never could.”133 Approached differently, the admission ledgers convey prisoners’ independent determination to read or write despite the moral instructor’s dismissive assessment of their capacity or potential. Many rejected Larcombe’s brand of education, adding a level of dark humor to his often bitter record-­keeping. John Day has “no wish to have intercourse with me on religious subjects,” lamented Larcombe, adding that Day has “learned to read while in prison.” Larcombe protested that Ann Johnson, twenty-­two, mulatto, imprisoned for assault, “Seems perfectly indifferent to the guilt connected with her crime and prepared to repeat it. Not sorry for what she has done,” adding in the margin, “can now read.” Larcombe commented that Frank Jones, a young mulatto laborer incarcerated for three years for burglary and larceny, “appears to have no desire for religious conversation,” but he dutifully updated Jones’s records and noted in his margin “Cannot read or write”; then he added, “Spelling,” and a later note, “Learning to read,” and finally “Reads Now.” Prisoners’ motivated efforts to read or write meant little to Larcombe unless accompanied by both religious conversion and suitable deference. Thus, John McNamee, a shoemaker convicted of larceny, a “very wise man in his own esteem, has read the Bible much, needs no one to instruct him,” thus earned the dismissive assessment, “Discharged. N.H.” Larcombe also found Joseph Waldron, a black male incarcerated for larceny, offensively insensitive to his fate upon intake; Larcombe noted with disapproval that Waldron “seemed quite happy, heard him whistling and drumming upon his stool” and added that Waldron “thought it a good place because he could learn something.” Later, Larcombe, appending Waldron’s entry, commented that Waldron “Learned to read in prison” and recorded his curt and final assessment of the optimistic and motivated prisoner: “Discharged, nh.”134 The records testify to the wide gap that men like Larcombe perceived between literacy and reformation as well as the ways prisoners, black and white, steered their educational agendas in their own ways to the dismay of the moral instructor.



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In 1844, fifteen years after opening, inspectors articulated a sudden determination to make reading, writing, and arithmetic instruction a “prominent ingredient in the discipline of the Prison.” An 1846 report recorded a belated account of the shift. The inspectors explained that it had become “increasingly apparent” that education would help the prisoner become a “useful member of society” (this explanation implies that, before 1844, the benefits of education were not apparent).135 To facilitate this change, the prison loosened its ban on correspondence and celebrated the “astonishing” progress of prisoners: many were unable to write upon entrance, but were now “enabled to address letters to their families.”136 (One can only imagine the relief that prisoners’ felt, given the administration’s longstanding prohibition against correspondence between inmates and their loved ones.) The report also touted the prison’s new opportunities for mental engagement, thanks to board of inspector member J. Bacon’s generous library donation the previous year, which raised the library to sixteen hundred volumes. Finally, the report added a lengthy clarification that the separate system was not solitary and that prisoners had plenty of visits with overseers, wardens, physicians, the (new) schoolmaster, the moral instructor, inspectors, visitors from benevolent societies—­a veritable cornucopia of opportunities should the prisoner desire “intercourse.”137 Why the sudden enthusiasm for the convict’s mental development? The report’s emphasis on redressing “misapprehensions” and celebrating inmates’ “mental improvement” (a term not seen since the 1834 report when seeking a moral instructor, but which inspectors began invoking in their 1844, 1845, and 1846 reports) suggests a clear catalyst: Charles Dickens’s damning portrait of Eastern State Penitentiary in his American Notes, for General Circulation (1842). In 1842 officials enthusiastically welcomed their illustrious international visitor: they toured Dickens around the prison, allowed him to converse with inmates through the grates in their cell, and waited for the celebrity author to lavish praise on their institution. But Dickens offered no such admiration; instead, he responded to the spectacles of human isolation and suffering that he witnessed with pathos and ghastly horror: “The system here is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement,” observed Dickens, adding, “I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong.” Dickens proceeded to describe many of the inmates whom he encountered and ended his

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tour account with a long meditation on the pangs and mental agonies of solitary confinement. To add insult to injury, Dickens declared that, despite their no-­doubt-­humane intentions, “those benevolent gentlemen who carry [the prison] into execution do not know what it is that they are doing.”138 The Dickens fiasco put the prison on the defensive and generated a flood of reports and pamphlets seeking to refute the fiction writer for his wild imagination and misleading assessment. Above all, the reports sought to prove that separate confinement did not produce the insanity, disease, debilitating mental isolation, or the suffering that critics contended (including the increasingly prominent and antagonistic Boston Prison Discipline Society). Francis Lieber and British consul-­general William Peter were summoned to the prison to track down and reinterview all the prisoners who appeared in American Notes and publish their counterevidence. Thus, scandal, not an internal rationale or longstanding commitment to prisoner education, provided the main impetus for changing the educational emphasis of the penitentiary. Eastern State’s defenders launched a sweeping and comprehensive response to Dickens. Peter gathered evidence of prisoners’ literacy acquisition to counter Dickens’s accusations, a move that launched the reading and writing prisoner into an unsolicited role as defender of the Pennsylvania system. For example, Peter reported that the three young, beautiful women who had affected Dickens with their sad countenances were grateful to still be in the prison, where they had learned to read, write, and cipher; Peter thus attempted to use the women’s literacy acquisition to invalidate Dickens’s observation that the women were lonely and grieving (as if literacy acquisition and grief were incompatible). The sad and trembling man who so worried Dickens, reported Peter, was released from prison, doing well, and in regular correspondence with the prison chaplain; another prisoner who clutched a pet rabbit with a “wan” and “unearthly” visage was now in “good health and spirits” and living in Canada. Another prisoner described by Dickens as a former mariner and a hard-­working poet who labored in his cell at double shifts, “one for the prison, one for himself,” in order to pen poetry about the “‘maddening wine cup’ and his friends at home” was now, according to Peter, not hoisting a wine cup with bad company but “in respectable business, reconciled to his father, and respectably married,” adding that the poet, “frequently visits the warden.”139 The report, using



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prisoners’ correspondence with officials as evidence of their attachment to the separate system of confinement, continued in this vein. Subsequent reports cited evidence of prisoners’ literacy acquisition to refute the charge that separate confinement made prisoners insane or feebleminded. Inspectors trotted out the schoolteacher, Mr. Williss, to testify that prisoners were as capable, if not more so, of receiving instruction while under separate confinement as they were in a congregate prison.140 By turning skills-­based education into a “prominent ingredient” of prison discipline, inspectors believed that they had a powerful tool to counter critics. After all, could a population of insane, diseased, suicidal inmates be eagerly learning to read and write? Although an earlier generation of reformers struggled to see any evidence that reading led to reformation, later reports began emphasizing literacy acquisition with new fervor. Moral improvement was difficult to quantify, but keeping tabs on how many prisoners learned to read or write was relatively easy; as a result, statistics documenting literacy acquisition gained new prominence as a measurable metric of reform. The shift in policy near 1844 fueled other educational changes, including a decision to hire another schoolteacher and a surge of efforts by the Philadelphia Society to assist with books and materials. Prisoners apparently felt empowered to speak, too, for the 1844 Acting Committee reported that “several prisoners complained that they were not supplied with books.”141 In Eastern State’s early years, the Philadelphia Society’s book and library committees were far less active, largely because of Eastern State’s highly restricted reading. The society periodically supplied tracts and Bibles, much to the chagrin of men like James Barclay, who in 1831 requested adding “suitable books” to no avail.142 As the prison began the process of hiring a moral instructor, the society in 1837 formed a prison library committee, appointing James Barclay and Benjamin Coates to purchase books; the books were read to pieces (or torn asunder) by inmates, which forced the committee to authorize multiple new purchases.143 After 1844, responding to the prison’s stated philosophical commitment to skills-­based elementary education, the Philadelphia Society’s efforts grew far more active. They immediately appointed a committee to purchase books and superintend the Eastern State prison library and helped build the library collection to 1,600 volumes by 1846.144 After Williss and George Neff were hired to teach spelling and

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arithmetic, the Philadelphia Society increased its efforts to supply materials for writing instruction, purchasing slates, copy books, and dictionaries in 1846 and more “books, slates &c” in 1849, a trend that indirectly raised questions about Larcombe’s instructional methods, which never seemed to require slates or writing implements.145 By 1850, Larcombe was at wit’s end, turning to the back of an admissions ledger to record a handwritten lament, “Difficulties of the Moral Instructor.” He complained that his overseers were unduly hostile toward him, misinterpreted him, scrutinized him excessively, and turned the prisoners against him.146 In truth, Larcombe had largely been eclipsed by the secular instructors. A recent report had lavished praise on “the faithful and zealous labours of [educator] Mr. Williss” while noting in passing that Thomas Larcombe “has continued his labours for the moral and religious advancement of his charge,” a slight that no doubt stung the dutiful Larcombe.147 The Philadelphia Society also transferred its enthusiasm from the moral instructor to the schoolmaster, Neff, by reporting that “many of the prisoners are improving in reading and writing, under the care of the excellent teacher Geo Neff. One colored man, who came to the Penitentiary about 3 months since, and who did not know the letters of the Alphabet, can now read very well and is learning to write.”148 Rubbing salt in Larcombe’s wounds, the society also observed, “There is reason to believe that the labors of the Moral Instructor are only useful to a very limited extent.”149 By 1854, Larcombe openly objected in his annual report that “literary instruction is more highly esteemed” than moral reformation.150 While the 1844 effort to emphasize a reading and writing curriculum was an orchestrated public relations move, the effort sustained momentum for at least a decade. New donations of books and other reading came from an impressive roster of evangelical urban reform organizations (the Philadelphia Tract Society, the Philadelphia Bible Society, and the Prison Discipline Society) and signaled a marked shift from the Philadelphia Society’s tentative effort to supply a few tracts in the last days of Walnut Street. By 1856 the library had become the pride and joy of the institution, so “neat and tasteful” that visitors were invited to tour, although prisoners never saw the physical library space; all materials were distributed directly in their cells after they requested items on a slate. Enoch Wines and Theodore Dwight’s monumental 1867 survey of U.S. prisons, situating Eastern State’s efforts as part of a national trend, noted that, by 1847,



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most American prisons had libraries.151 By 1847, Eastern State was neither pioneer nor laggard, instead following the national norm. Catalyzing this change in educational philosophy was the slow and steady impact of mass schooling between 1790 and 1840, decades that “marked a crucial transition in U.S. educational development and laid the groundwork for the more systematic state educational reforms of the 1840s and 1850s.”152 The expansion of public and private schools—­ including Sunday Schools, charity schools, infant schools, and Lancaster schools—­ boosted the supply and demand for education. This trend was especially apparent in the Middle Atlantic region, which had rapidly increased student enrollment between 1840 and 1860.153 Parents warmed to the idea of handing over their children’s education to outsiders while the public became more amenable to the notion of investing funds in public education. Once cautious about whether the expansion of religious reading was warranted, prison defenders were by 1845 more willing (at least publicly) to tout the link between good order, good discipline, and expanded literacy. As a result, the gap between the educational emphases inside and outside the prison finally narrowed, even if the promise of mass schooling to create social cohesion seemed increasingly distant to a nation rapidly advancing toward civil war. “Truth Is a L i b e l ”: Th e Pe nn sy lvani a P ri sone r i n P ri nt Confronting the dearth of inmate perspectives in the literature of the early American penitentiary, Caleb Smith observes: “In the vast archive of texts from the early decades of the U.S. penitentiary system—­the pamphlets, treatises, open letters, architectural plans, rules and regulations, prayer books, travel narratives, records of costs and profits, medical reports, outraged protests, reasoned defenses, and myriad other, sometimes unclassifiable documents—­only a few pieces offer the testimony of the inmates who lived and died in the controversial new institutions.”154 Despite intense curiosity about the lives of those behind bars, few inmates published their experiences of Philadelphia’s formative prisons by 1845. These include the aforementioned Patrick Lyon and Ann Carson and the convict authors of this final section: an anonymous inmate at Walnut whose letter was published and circulated by Roberts Vaux in 1827, and George Ryno, the poet-­mariner observed by Charles Dickens at Eastern

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State, who in 1844 published a poetry collection dedicated to Richard Vaux, Buds and Flowers, of Leisure Hours (1844).155 The pairing illustrates two (literal) generations of inmate efforts to negotiate access to an elite sphere routinely denied them, as both inmates sought to harness authorities’ power and sphere of influence to launch their ideas to the world. To get into print, inmates, like other marginalized and scrutinized populations of would-­be writers, needed access to existing networks of distribution, which were usually out of reach.156 Printers and publishers had helped create a thriving market for criminal autobiography that recognized the “cash value” of criminal confessions.157 Yet as Robert Desilver’s lawyer warned Ann Carson and Mary Clarke, “truth is a libel,” and those who sponsored and published inmate writing risked notoriety themselves. Despite the possibility for profits, some determined that these collaborations were too costly to pursue. Likewise, prison authorities’ and prison reformers’ deep suspicion over inmates’ moral characters made them especially wary of offering their stamp of literary approval. Instead, inspectors and philanthropists preferred a more controlled and selective process of integrating inmate testimony into published accounts. A report might either mention receiving a letter from a former convict who was happily employed or, as we saw at Eastern State, offer up testimony of prisoners’ response to favored initiatives or disciplinary regimes to refute critics (“. . . One colored man, who came to the Penitentiary about 3 months since, and who did not know the letters of the Alphabet, can now read very well and is learning to write.”).158 Favoring anecdotal tales of inmate success or improvement, official records eschewed soliciting written accounts by inmates of their experiences. Despite offering occasional success stories, few of the penitentiaries’ most passionate defenders perceived concrete evidence of prisoners’ changed moral characters. This not only curtailed the penitentiary’s educational efforts and rationales, as previous sections demonstrated, but it also drastically restricted the possibilities for collaborative publication between prisoners and authorities. The histories that I traced in Walnut and Eastern offer abundant testimony of prison authorities’ skepticism over not merely prisoners’ moral character but also their capacity for any but the most elementary forms of reading and writing. A prisoner with more advanced literary ambitions was viewed at best with bemused interest, as evidenced by Dickens’s encounter with the imprisoned



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mariner-­poet, and at worst, with deep suspicion, as supported by Larcombe’s routine dismissals of prisoners’ independent literary or literacy ambitions (“a very wise man in his own esteem  .  .  . needs no one to instruct him”). Despite their skepticism of inmates’ literary ambitions, prison authorities were potentially powerful allies, for they could get inmates’ testimony into the hands of those who were deciding the very policies that impacted inmates’ daily lives behind bars. Roberts Vaux, one of the few authorities to circulate a piece of writing by an inmate, was one of Philadelphia’s leading citizens and philanthropists as well as an early architect and advocate of the separate system of confinement. Responding to charges that separate confinement was a “most inhuman and unnatural” form of tyranny, Vaux appended a three-­page letter “Extract of a Letter from a Convict on the Penitentiary System” as an appendix to his seven-­ page refutation of William Roscoe’s 1827 pamphlet.159 By including the convict’s letter, Vaux deployed the writing prisoner as a voice of authority in transatlantic, national, and local debates over prison reform. Vaux’s Letter on the Penitentiary System of Pennsylvania Addressed to William Roscoe (1827) circulated widely, first published in the National Gazette and “subsequently republished in all the daily journals of Philadelphia excepting one,” distributed to newspapers, and circulated by the Philadelphia Society Acting Committee as a separate pamphlet.160 Whereas defenders of the separate system most often drew their conclusions about the mental and physical effects of separate confinement through the observations and reports of medical doctors, Vaux granted immense authority to his unnamed writing prisoner. Vaux sought to debunk Roscoe’s argument that the “celebrated system of Penitentiary discipline” had become unhealthy and cruelly dependent on solitary confinement. In response, Vaux vigorously defended the Pennsylvania system of separate confinement and disputed Roscoe’s claim that separate confinement “causes the mind to rush back upon itself and drive reason from her seat.”161 The convict’s letter, Vaux assured his readers, was genuine, composed by a current inmate at Walnut and shaped by the prisoner’s “own observations and reflections.”162 Compared to Roscoe’s guesswork, argued Vaux, the convict’s “testimony must outweigh any amount of mere speculation,” thereby positioning the prisoner as a reliable authority “eminently entitled . . . to the attentive consideration

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of philanthropists and legislators.”163 As convincing a case as Roberts Vaux made for the writing prisoner’s emergent public role, few others followed suit. The assumptions that contact with morally defective and diseased prisoners was contaminating made reformers at best reticent, at worst dismissive, of inmates’ authority. (Vaux himself actively circulated that opinion, even in this selfsame publication, clarifying that the “penitentiary is designed for the correction and safe keeping of that portion of society, whose unrestrained licentiousness renders them unfit for the enjoyment of liberty.”164) “Extract of a Letter from a Convict on the Penitentiary System” demonstrates how tricky it could be to call upon the inmate as a voice of testimony in the elite pamphlet wars and emergent public debates over the best practices of imprisonment. The letter, penned in the “Philadelphia Penitentiary, March 14, 1827,” echoes many of the critiques defenders of the separate system made against congregate prisons.Yet the convict’s letter also reveals inmates’ propensity to contradict or undermine official claims, a prime reason why penitentiary inmates were rarely deployed as public pedagogues. The convict begins by asserting his authority over the learned men who comprise his audience, the elite who control discourse “on a subject which has been so fully and ably canvassed by men of respectability, learning, and eminent talents,” by emphasizing that, unlike these elite men who shape discourse, “I have the superiority in one important point,” which is the knowledge gained by his own direct “degradation” and suffering, “of which no man can form an adequate idea save him who suffers.” His letter argues against the brutal discipline of congregate prisons and the harmful effects of putting young offenders in close contact with hardened criminals. Seeking to persuade readers to eliminate the current prison system’s “pernicious and dreadful effects,” the convict argued for penal code revision and lobbied for the erection of a new prison based on the principles of separate confinement; the convict also condemned corporal punishment. Such arguments were all consistent with Vaux’s goals, although the convict’s letter ends with an amplified call for the “humane and impartial treatment” of prisoners, while Vaux ends his response with a defense of the excess cost of the separate system.165 Yet, in making his argument, the convict undermines authorities’ most privileged justification of the penitentiary—­preventing inmates



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from communicating with other inmates. Instead, the convict emphasizes this as the main source of his insight and testimony. The convict begins by arguing that his testimony is far more reliable because inmates are more honest and transparent when communicating with a fellow convict, “for they would be naturally open and free to me, whereas when in conversation with any citizen or officer of the institution, they would deviate from the truth.” The convict’s claim thus demands that readers scrutinize everything that they have heard or learned about prisoners’ perspectives from authorities. The convict clarifies that he has derived his arguments about the degraded state of the prison by having “had fair opportunity of learning” from other convicts at Walnut because he has “been for a long time confined among men of all descriptions, from almost every part of the globe,—­many of whom have experienced punishment in various prisons in the United States, and some parts of Europe.” The prisoner thereby asserts his authority because he has, in his words, “associated with prisoners on the most intimate terms,” which gives him the knowledge to compare and contrast competing international systems of imprisonment. Thus, in a letter that Roberts Vaux positions as “eminently entitled . . . to the attentive consideration of philanthropists and legislators,” a convict proclaims as the source of his authority the very comingling and criminal intimacy that the separate system was organized to combat.166 Vaux lets the prisoner’s letter stand without additional commentary, legitimating the writing prisoner and ignoring the competing messages of their literary collaboration. Nearly two decades later, another (former) inmate got published by managing a successful literary collaboration with Pennsylvania prison authorities. Under the pseudonym “Harry Hawser,” inmate George Ryno published Buds and Flowers (1844) with the financial support of Eastern State Penitentiary. In Ryno’s case, bad publicity worked to his advantage, as he capitalized on the immense interest generated by Charles Dickens’s controversial 1842 visit to Eastern State and the surrounding attention and scrutiny placed upon Ryno, the hard-­working mariner-­poet whom Dickens interviewed and briefly memorialized in American Notes.167 In his preface, “Hawser” explains that his poems were composed “during a period of involuntary seclusion from society” during which time he “devoted his leisure hours to reading and reflection, and  .  .  . composed

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these fugitive pieces, now offered to the reader.”168 Attempting to insert himself directly into ongoing debates about separate confinement, “Hawser” dedicated the collection to Richard Vaux, president of Eastern State’s Board of Inspectors (and son of RobertsVaux), and emphasized his intimacy with the esteemed Vaux by remarking on “the many unequivocal marks of your kind feeling towards me” and thanking him for his “benevolence and counsel.” He proceeded to refute arguments against the separate system by stating that he “is neither morose, imbecile, dispirited, or deranged, and whatever reformation his imprisonment may have produced, he can attribute it to the separate seclusion from evil example and worse precept.”169 (Despite outing himself as a prisoner, “Hawser” insisted on writing under a pseudonym, signaling the risk and stigmatization that comes with such “fugitive” publication.) Like the anonymous convict of 1827, “Hawser” negotiated his entrance into print by positioning himself as a defender of the Pennsylvania system, here offering to the public a writing prisoner whose accomplishments were made possible because of the literacy effects of separate confinement. Buds and Flowers’ publication history originated with Dickens’s controversial visit to the prison, when officials, outraged by Dickens’s conclusions about inmate suffering and clueless leadership, sought to discredit his authority by dispatching William Peter (along with Lieber) to Philadelphia to locate and report on the prisoners that Dickens interviewed; Peter subsequently reported that “the ‘Poet’” who had been “discarded by his father some years before, for intemperate habits” had served three years and “received on quitting prison $30 for extra work, besides $50 for the copyright of his book. He is now in respectable business, reconciled to his father, and respectably married . . . He frequently visits the warden, and is, to all appearance, well in mind, body, and circumstances.”170 Peter’s investigation revealed that Ryno received some compensation from Eastern State toward the publication of his poetry and (inadvertently) validated Dickens’s observation that Ryno had been working double shifts to earn extra money to support his vocation as poet, but Peter noticeably omitted mentioning the title or publication of Buds and Flowers (1844); instead, Peter emphasized Ryno’s steady habits, marriage, and alleged reconciliation with his father—­not his poetry—­as the most persuasive indicators of the Poet’s reform.



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Buds and Flowers, a collection of nearly a hundred poems, blends rousing sailor songs, celebrations of “Columbia’s tars,” and ballads of dying soldiers and beautiful women with sentimental and occasionally introspective meditations on imprisonment. One poem begs the wife of a “humbled felon” for her devotion while others thank a mother for her enduring love despite a son’s disappointment.171 Although many poems in the collection adhere to authorities’ arguments, others eschew the performance of a reformed penitent. One poem lambastes the unfair dispensation of justice, where murderers bribe judges and go free while “childless judges have the power to doom / The friendless prisoner to a living tomb.” Still others imagine heroic fights for freedom: in “The Dying Slave,” Ryno adopts the persona of an African slave heaping curses “upon the white man’s head” and censuring “the chains the white man’s ruffian hand / Put upon my limbs.”172 Despite Peter’s possible hesitation to publicize the poetry collection, Ryno’s poems did circulate. A poem on the follies of drink was reprinted by Joseph Adshead in Prisons and Prisoners (London, 1845) as part of a lengthy report and refutation of Dickens; another was included in Voices from Prison: Being a Selection of Poetry from Various Prisoners Written within the Cell (Boston, 1847), a pioneering anthology of prison poetry edited by influential Universalist and prison reformer Charles Spear. Still another volume signed by the author was owned by illustrious admiral Silas Stringham.173 Whether his indebtedness to Vaux and Eastern State was sincere or shrewdly dissembling, Ryno ultimately managed to proffer his “fugitive verses” to the public. Articulating the rising impact of this mass public on the literature of imprisonment, Caleb Smith observes: “As prison authorities called on inmates like Hawser [Ryno] to testify before a mass public, the prisoner was endowed with new kinds of authenticity, becoming a figure whose formative experience in the prison enabled him to reveal the truth about the hidden, mysterious interior of the institution.”174 Distinct from the spiritual and literary authority performed on the gallows, the inside knowledge of inmates authorized and at times undermined the power of the prison during an era when debate over the purpose and best practices of imprisonment shifted from a small cadre of elite reformers and legislators to the newspapers and wider public sphere.

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While the anonymous Poet was called upon to “testify before a mass public” through Peter’s report, Buds and Flowers demonstrates Ryno’s attempt to insert himself into this mass public. With thirty dollars in his pocket from laboring double shifts and money from the prison toward copyright for Buds and Flowers, Ryno exited Eastern State Penitentiary in 1843 and deposited his poetry collection in the Philadelphia clerk’s office. He thus took a small gesture from Eastern State and turned it into an elaborate performance to get his beloved poems to press; he even appended a preface that made it appear as if authorities were again calling upon him to testify on the good effects of the separate system.This stance enabled him to disseminate a diverse array of verse that he had carefully composed, collected, revised, and preserved throughout his imprisonment. Ryno both practiced a distinct form of collaborative literacy made legible by an emergent “mass public” and exemplified a new breed of writing prisoner, rarely called upon yet determined to interject himself into public debates over imprisonment and its effects.

C hap te r 4

Written by One Who Knows C ong re gate L ite racy in New York Pris ons “These are not the last declarations of a dying thief, nor of a penitent murderer; nor are they the speculations of an ambitious politician,” proclaimed an anonymous former convict, who in 1823 launched a declaration of literary independence from the genres that dominated prisoners in print. As his aptly titled book promised, the inmate author offered the public something new: Inside Out: or, An Interior View of the New-­York State Prison; Together with Biographical Sketches of the Lives of Several of the Convicts. . . . By One Who Knows.1 With his title and preface, the author (widely recognized as William Coffey) sought to radically reorient readers’ expectations by distinguishing the inmate’s knowledge from the discourses of gallows confessions and government reports. The text proposed the inmate as a new voice of authenticity, “one who knows,” a perspective distinct from that of the dying penitent or executed murderer and demonstrably different than that of opportunistic politicians, who, as the account makes clear, lacked meaningful understanding of what really went on inside New York’s controversial penitentiary. As a result, Coffey produced an influential text in an emergent subgenre of literature: the prison exposé. Although a few prisoners, including Patrick Lyon in 1799 and Ann Carson in 1822, had previously testified to their ill treatment behind bars, Coffey’s text offered a singular and sustained exploration of the penitentiary from a former inmate’s perspective. Others soon followed.The 1820s and 1830s witnessed a rise in unsolicited exposé accounts composed by a new breed of writing prisoner: former inmates seeking to interject themselves into the specialized and elite debates concerning prison discipline and prisoner education. These texts include John Maroney, Narrative of the Imprisonment of John Maroney in the 139

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Prisons of New-­York and Auburn from 1821 until 1831 . . . Written by Himself (1832); Col. Levi S. Burr, A Voice from Sing Sing (1833); Horace Lane, Five Years in State’s Prison (1835); William Joseph Snelling’s The Rat-­Trap, or Cogitations of a Convict in the House of Correction (1837); James Brice’s Secrets of the Mount-­Pleasant State Prison, Revealed and Exposed (1839).2 None of these texts were published with the support of prison authorities, as Philadelphian Roberts Vaux’s “Letter from a Convict” (1827) and George [“Harry Hawser”] Ryno’s Buds and Flowers (1844) had been presented. Instead, these exposés, issued by small printing or publishing houses, announced that they were “printed for the author.” Coffey’s publisher, Costigan, distributed only a few religious works; Maroney’s printer, Cushman, published the local newspaper, the Newburgh Telegraph. With the exception of Snelling’s Rat-­Trap, all concerned New York’s influential penitentiaries—­Newgate, Auburn, or Mount Pleasant (better known as Sing Sing). All sought to assert the unique authority of the prisoner. Current accounts don’t adequately account for the hostility that inmate authors faced when seeking to enter the booming and competitive literary marketplace and insufficiently describe the tone and shape of these earliest exposés. For example, Ann Fabian, observing the “cash value of criminal confession” in the antebellum marketplace, analyzes works by the condemned, not by former inmates. Likewise, Karen Halttunen has influentially argued that the prison exposé emerged as part of a flourishing “cult of mystery” in antebellum literature.3 The popularity of sensational literature and gothic novels helped fuel the rise of true crime accounts, which in turn helped proliferate “mysteries of the city fiction” and urban exposés, all of which employed a gothic narrative technique that sought to unveil the “secret evils that lay buried beneath the deceptively serene surface of nineteenth-­century social life.”4 These popular texts promised readers a horrifying descent into the bowels of an institution—­madhouse, asylum, or prison—­to expose the secrets and horrors beneath its mask of respectability.Yet, I insist, the criminal confession and city mystery genres propelled very few former inmates into print, at least by midcentury. Despite the marketability of scaffold accounts and urban exposé tales, convict authors emphasized the obstacles they faced when trying to publish their firsthand accounts. To insert themselves into public debates, the earliest inmate authors instead repurposed the genre of prison writing favored by reformers: the official prison tour account.



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The tour account emerged concurrent with the birth of the penitentiary and introduced readers to the latest developments in prison design and management. Caleb Lownes’s Account . . . of the Gaol and Penitentiary House (1793), Turnbull’s A Visit to the Philadelphia Prison (1796), La Rochefoucauld-­Liancourt’s On the Prisons of Philadelphia (1796), and Thomas Eddy’s Account of the State Prison or Penitentiary House (1801) guided readers through the institution, its daily practices, its foundational principles, and the institutions’ social impact. Michael Meranze argues that these early accounts “framed the prison within the context of expanding reason and humanity” and clarifies their wider cultural effects: “These writings, in effect, enacted punishment’s new structures of distanced perception. In the place of immediate visibility, their authors offered imaginary connection. Presenting the world of punishment to the community at large (or at least to those segments of the community that consumed pamphlet and book literature), they simultaneously maintained and overcame the distance between the public and its punishments.”5 Eschewing gothic tropes, these tour accounts helped readers understand the penitentiary by mimicking its orderly arrangement of time and space and by replicating the “sober prose” and “meticulous regulation” of prison discipline and routine.6 Coffey arranged his exposé on categories familiar to the prison tour account: “Building,” “Officers,” “Convicts, “Internal Punishments,” “Labour,” “Diet,” “Pardons,” and so on. Inside Out thus echoes the arrangement of Eddy’s Account of the State Prison: “Description of the Edifice, Workshops, Cells, & etc.,” “Of the Inspectors,” “Of the Keeper and his Assistants,” “Of the Prisoners; their general treatment, occupations, dress, diet, and means of reformation.” Similarly, Caleb Lownes guided readers through the prison’s “Plan, Construction, &c,” including “Dress,” “Lodging,” “Diet,” “Employment,” and “Rewards and Punishments.” Assuming the position of benevolent reformer, Inside Out, like the tour accounts that preceded it, enumerates the ways that the current system is broken and makes recommendations for improved prison discipline: no pardons, shorter sentences, separate confinement without labor. Coffey positioned Inside Out as a direct refutation of the 1823 “Annual Report of the Inspectors of the New-­York State Prison,” appending the report in its entirely as an appendix and disputing its conclusions about the good order, good discipline, and successful moral reformation in Newgate. Coffey, however,

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omitted the tables, balance sheets, manufacturing statistics, and lists of rules and regulations that often accompanied official tour accounts; he offered no supplemental testimony from physicians, keepers, wardens, or others—­ only the biographies of other convicts that he himself penned. His exposé relies on one authority and one authority alone: the “one who knows,” the prisoner. In this way, the inmate author thus sought to undermine the “distanced perception” of the official tour account: such accounts, Coffey asserts, are “drawn from the storehouse of philosophy—­I have gathered mine in the wretchedness of experience.”7 Levi Burr adopts a similar strategy in A Voice from Sing Sing (1833) by drawing on the prison tour account for his narrative’s form and structure. Incarcerated in Sing Sing for three years on a disputed charge of perjury, Burr sought to assert his innocence and ill treatment, to expose the abuse of power and violations of state law in Sing Sing, and to rouse the public to take action on behalf of the multitudes in bondage, who remained “deprived of the power of self protection.”8 Burr opens his account by creating for his readers a visual map of Sing Sing’s design and architecture: “Mount Pleasant State Prison, situated on the east bank of Hudson river, is about six hundred feet in length from north to south, and about forty feet in breadth.”9 In an objective and distanced tone, he describes its cells, doors, archways, windows, keeper’s house, and garden. He provides a detailed and scientific overview of the “Quality of Stone &c” in the nearby quarry before proceeding with jarring sections that describe Sing Sing’s mechanisms of torture—­jarring because he largely maintains his descriptive, measured prose: “Of the Cat,” “Of the Cudgel,” “General Treatment of New Convicts,” “Starvation.” (The cat-­o-­nine-­tails, he observes, “is generally made of six strands of hard cord, about the size of the small end of a common whip lash.”) In restrained prose, he insists that his purpose is to supply “facts” while chiding inspectors for their willful blindness: “That which they think ought to be right, they suppose is right; and it is not their [inspectors] business to enter into a detailed examination, further than objects are presented by appearances.”10 In this way Burr radically reconfigures the “structures of distanced perception” created by official government reports and reformers’ tour accounts. Both Coffey and Burr, bridging the distance between official accounts and the realities inside the prison, argue that only the inmate is capable of revealing the truth of the penitentiary.



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Inmate authors also had to bridge the gap between their outsider position and that of the elite republican philanthropists and other men of status who narrated official accounts. Thus each inmate adopted a strategy to prepare his readers to listen to a convict rather than a gentleman philanthropist. “I know that I have to combat with prejudice,” asserted Coffey, a disgraced lawyer sentenced to Newgate in 1819 for seven years for passing a forged check. Coffey keenly perceived the consequences of his lost status: “I know that myriads of detractors and calumniators, besides the angry pack of State Prison beagles  .  .  . will swarm and howl around me; some influenced by malevolence, others maddened by shaken interest, and many actuated by the most pitiable revenge.” Anticipating a hostile reception, Coffey claimed that he wrote for one class of person alone, “the genuine philanthropist,” a figure whom he distinguishes from the “politicians” who penned prison inspection reports; the irony was, of course, that state inspectors were chosen because they ostensibly embodied the virtues of philanthropy and republican citizenship. Coffey imagined a counterpublic of benevolent citizens who possessed the sensitivity to appreciate his literate and informed exposé, an audience distinct from this class of politicians.11 Col. Levi Burr adopted a slightly different strategy, justifying his foray into print as his patriotic duty. To prepare readers to trust his perspective, Burr included a one-­page “Publishers Advertisement” penned by supporters that reminded readers of his “gallant and meritorious” military service, expressed dismay over the outcome of his trial, and reminded readers that both Samuel M. Hopkins and an 1832 state investigation had confirmed much of Burr’s account. Whereas Coffey appended a government report to refute it, Burr appended official documents to legitimate his claims. Thus, official reports served a dual function in Voice from Sing Sing, predating yet confirming Burr’s testimony.12 Irked that Hopkins’s report had been widely dismissed by a state legislature that was fiercely supportive of Elam Lynds’s work at Sing Sing, Burr sought to circulate the report directly to the public to “to support the undeniable truth” of Burr’s own observations. Appealing to an imagined public of concerned and sympathetic citizens, Burr worked to rouse the public to hold the prison administrators and the legislature accountable. The law, Burr explained, is public: people can see and judge the nation’s laws for themselves, “But of the manner

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in which [the laws] are executed within the walls at Sing-­Sing, [the public] is wholly ignorant, and can only know from the pen of some unfortunate sufferer who has tenanted that horrid place.”13 Burr and Coffey, anticipating a resistant readership, sought to elevate the writing prisoner over state investigators as the ultimate authority on the law and its internal operations behind bars. Horace Lane’s experience usefully illuminates the public hostility and skepticism faced by would-­be writing prisoners. Incarcerated twice for theft, first in Auburn from 1827 to 1830 and then in Sing Sing from 1830 until 1832, Lane took to the streets of New York to publicize and distribute his account, Five Years in State’s Prison (1835). In a later memoir, Lane reflected on the sustaining fantasy of becoming a writer while he languished behind bars: “I was . . . aware that the testimony of a man like me, or any convict, would be little regarded. But I made up my mind, long before I got my liberty, that when I did get out, I would make an effort, and stick to truth, in publishing nothing but what I had felt and seen.”14 Imagining himself as a future writer helped Lane endure five years of starvation, abuse, and violent beatings in Sing Sing. Upon his release Lane, in his published account of unique experiences in Auburn and Sing Sing, described himself as a “Discharged and Penitent Convict” with “hopes of getting a few shillings, or dimes, or cents.” He anticipated a judgmental public (“I know that greater part will ridicule me, and say, ‘What a vile wretch!’”),15 but nothing prepared him for the string of humiliations that he endured while trying to market his pamphlet. First, Lane dealt with the shame of public exposure after soliciting newsboys to hawk his wares: “It was not long before I could hear the boys in all directions crying out, “‘Five Years in State Prison! here comes Five Years in State Prison!’ This was truly humiliating.”16 Passersby accosted Lane and demanded to know if he was the prisoner in the pamphlet; when he admitted the truth: “Some were so swelled with haughty disdain, that they said (seldom without an imprecation or an oath,) ‘You ought to go back, and stay there for life.’” Further humiliations ensued when two men offered Lane twenty-­five cents to read his pamphlet aloud—­provided he delivered the oratory atop a pile of fish: “I was to mount, and stand on a pile of codfish, and in the form of an orator perform the task. As in the pamphlet the baseness of my past acts was plainly developed, the task was not a small one.” Lane consented, reckoning it a decent wage if he could



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read the pamphlet in less than an hour: he ascended the codfish, endured the taunts of the crowd, and departed with his twenty-­five cents. After 1835, Lane recounted an abject and peripatetic life, plying what he called “my stigmatizing pamphlet” from state to state and barely scraping by: “I sold eleven thousand of these pamphlets,” Lane recounted, “but it took me so long, and my expenses were so great on steamboats, railroads, and other ways, that I did not make much.”17 Lane’s position atop the pile of fish nicely encapsulates the degraded position of the inmate-­author in the first decades of the nineteenth century, where even accounts by condemned prisoners faced rising competition from trial accounts, newspapers, the literature of “legal romanticism,” and the emerging influence of slave narratives.18 Despite public hostility toward inmate-­ authors, other prisoners were paying attention. One of Coffey’s most significant contributions to prison literature has gone unacknowledged—­the sensation that smuggled copies of Inside Out caused among Newgate’s prison population. John Maroney, an inmate at Newgate who avidly read a smuggled copy of Inside Out, testified to Coffey’s influence, which in turn inspired Maroney to become a writing prisoner, penning Narrative of the Imprisonment of John Maroney in the Prisons of New-­York and Auburn from 1821 until 1831 . . . Written by Himself (1832). As this chapter shows, this process of literary influence helped generate the small but significant literary output of New York’s formative penitentiaries. These inmate-­authored accounts not only offered vivid prisoner perspectives on the official rhetoric and discourse of reform, but they also often spoke directly to the educational opportunities (or lack thereof) in New York’s early penitentiaries. Inmate-­authors sought to influence prison policies and public attitudes, inserting prisoner perspectives into ongoing debates over, among other things, the value of reading and writing literacy behind bars and the purpose and utility of prisoner education. As in Pennsylvania, education was neither essential nor central to the Auburn (or “congregate”) model eventually embraced by New York; likewise, authorities were not uniformly committed to the idea of teaching inmates to read or write. But unlike Pennsylvania’s prisons, New York’s penitentiaries were more willing to experiment with congregate learning by allowing inmates to form night schools and by using inmates as instructors. Because of the state’s more sustained experiments with both

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congregate labor and congregate education, New York’s discourses concerning prisoner education and its prisons’ literary legacies diverged notably from those of Pennsylvania. These differences form the heart of this chapter. As convict schools proliferated in Newgate and spread to Auburn, establishing and maintaining support for congregate education required a careful messaging. Quaker warden Thomas Eddy, Baptist prison chaplain the Rev. John Stanford, conservative Congregationalist minister Louis Dwight, and atheist phrenologist Eliza Farnham offered distinct—­ and disputed—­visions of how congregate learning could advance the goals of prison reform. Current and former inmates—­in published exposés, official reports and documents, and unpublished manuscripts—­responded to these changing regimes and rationales, testified to the meaning of reading and writing behind bars, and spoke out against the limited education offered to them.These inmate authors helped create a model of literary influence that I call “congregate literacy effects,” whereby prisoners adopt the forms and conventions of prison accounts by other inmates to authorize their own forays into print. Opponents of congregate prisons uniformly decried the possibility of pernicious communication between inmates.19 Inmates transformed this fear into an instructive and generative process that propelled other writing prisoners to press. From Wor k shop to Classroom : E ducati on at N ewgate Following the lead of Pennsylvania, New York began a process of legal and prison reform in the late 1790s designed to address the state’s harsh sanguinary codes, dilapidated jails, high rates of crime, inefficient and lax patterns of conviction, and excessive reliance on pardons.20 The driving force behind the reforms was Thomas Eddy, dubbed by contemporaries the “Howard of America.”21 Born in Philadelphia to Irish Quaker immigrants, Eddy had once endured a (very) brief stint in a New Jersey jail described as a “miserable dungeon.”22 Now a successful merchant in New York, he carefully followed prison reform efforts in Pennsylvania and Europe. In 1796, Eddy persuaded the prominent General Philip Schuyler to accompany him on a tour of Philadelphia’s Walnut Street prison; subsequently the two embarked on successful efforts to reform New York’s penal codes and establish a state penitentiary. “Newgate” would house all felons convicted under the revised laws for two decades, until the opening of Auburn State Prison in 1817.23



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Convinced that Pennsylvania’s efforts could be improved, Eddy made a number of modifications when crafting legislation and planning New York’s first penitentiary. Among his many innovations was a convict-­led prison school that began two years after Newgate’s 1797 opening. While prison schools were never a top priority in Newgate (or elsewhere), Eddy’s experiments with congregate education in New York’s first penitentiary had rippling effects. Even after Eddy declared congregate discipline a disaster and advocated for reduced sentencing and separate confinement, experiments in congregate schooling resurfaced at Auburn and Sing Sing. New York’s experiments with congregate prisoner education were sporadic, controversial, and always secondary to the congregate labor experiments that were expected to produce significant profits and teach inmates how to work (much like the penitentiary’s cells were intended to teach inmates how to think). New York’s embrace of the wider tenets of congregate discipline produced an educational narrative distinct from that of Pennsylvania, yet both states’ penitentiaries shared a commitment to the principles of hard labor, inmate classification, strict obedience, and character reformation. Like the architects of Walnut Street, Eddy designed Newgate to promote the rehabilitative effects of hard work, discipline, cleanliness, order, and sobriety. He drew heavily on Walnut Street’s design; through correspondence with Caleb Lownes, Eddy persuaded Lownes to help with the planning and construction of Newgate. Yet Eddy also departed from Walnut by insisting that the structure house only felons—­no debtors, vagrants, or individuals awaiting trial.24 Newgate possessed a large room, capable of holding six hundred prisoners, for religious worship; it also had a congregate dining facility, congregate workshops, and, soon after opening, a plan for congregate schooling of inmates. When Newgate opened in 1797, Eddy volunteered to serve as its inspector and agent. Promoting his reforms in an 1801 account, he called his New York plan “the only just and beneficent system yet devised for the punishment and correction of criminals” and expressed hope that the new prison would become “a durable monument of the wisdom, justice, and humanity of its legislators.”25 Eddy, initially less averse to congregate socialization than many reformers, particularly those in Philadelphia, went so far as to design Newgate’s cells to house eight male inmates, two to a straw bed. He

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rejected the idea of confining the general population at night to individual cells except those in a designated solitary wing for refractory prisoners.26 Newgate’s regulations even permitted well-­behaved prisoners to accept visits from their “wives and connections” once every three months.27 Eddy’s faith initially bolstered his support for congregate living; while some Quakers emphasized the spiritual benefits of solitude, others, like Eddy, touted the edifying nature of “communal living and work.”28 Eddy came to regret his support for congregate night rooms and eventually campaigned for what became the Auburn model of supervised congregate labor by day and solitary cells by night, but, in Newgate’s early years, Eddy admired the discipline afforded by regulated forms of group living. The plan for congregate schools first appeared in a 1799 report when Eddy and the other inspectors proposed that inmates “instruct each other in the evenings at writing and arithmetic.”29 Two years later, group education was in place at Newgate. Describing Newgate’s reformative regime in his Account of the State Prison, Eddy explained that the “most meritorious” convicts were “allowed, with the approbation of the keeper, to be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic” during the winter months.30 He made no mention of extending the privilege to female inmates; they were confined to the north wing and had their own separate yard.31 Most significant, prisoners taught the classes. Eddy explained that “teachers are selected from such of them [the inmates] as are competent, and twenty are permitted to meet together daily with one of the keepers [present], and to receive instruction for about two hours in the evening.” He also represented the pilot school’s mission as distinct from religious and moral instruction; in a separate section of his report Eddy added, “As another means of reformation, attention is paid to [inmates’] religious and moral instruction.” Moral instruction, Eddy clarified, was attempted by weekly gatherings in which a convict would read a sermon and prayers and the remaining inmates would sing hymns.32 For Eddy, convict-­led schools and convict-­led religious services were separate but mutually supporting components of Newgate’s early reform philosophy. Admission to the night school was dependent on the inmates’“peaceable, industrious, and regular” conduct, and those selected had to work extra hours for the privilege and contributed four shillings each week to cover the expense of “the implements of writing, light, and fuel.”33



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Despite an inmate uprising in 1799, riots in 1800, and a mass escape attempt in 1803, Eddy maintained his educational experiment as a way to reward select inmates for good conduct. Unlike the short-­lived school in Walnut Street Prison in 1798, Newgate’s school continued for more than two decades, sustained by the investment and labor of inmates, Newgate’s officers, and, after 1807, the decades-­long oversight of prominent minister the Reverend John Stanford.34 The institution allowed these “schools” (small groups of inmates gathered to instruct themselves) to continue in spite of the prison’s well-­documented overcrowding and its financial, manufacturing, and discipline problems.35 Eddy’s approval of convict-­led education was rare for its day, but outside the prison Joseph Lancaster was pioneering a model of large-­ scale education using advanced students as instructors to less experienced students. Lancaster’s experiments in educating the masses of English poor began on a small scale in 1798 and spread after he promoted his methods in Improvements in Education (London, 1803). Yet Joseph Lancaster’s experiments in congregate learning did not inspire Newgate’s convict school. By the time Lancaster published his 1803 treatise, Newgate’s prisoners had been instructing each other for at least two years. Although Lancaster and Eddy shared an interest in good order and discipline and relied on student-­led instruction, their schools bore little resemblance. In Lancaster schools, student monitors led hundreds of students through a carefully choreographed series of commands, maintaining order by distributing small prizes and enacting swift punishment for misbehavior. To enforce strict regimentation and hierarchy, monitors continuously tested and ranked students based on rote memorization and competitive recitation; students’ rank in the class shifted, based on their learning pace.36 Eddy’s description of the evening school, in which “twenty are permitted to meet together daily with one of the keepers [present], and to receive instruction for about two hours in the evening,” eschewed Lancaster’s rigid choreography, incessant testing, and competitive ranking.37 Not until his 1804 departure from Newgate did Eddy become a fervent enthusiast for Lancastrian education.38 After the English police reformer Patrick Colquhoun sent Lancaster’s treatise to Eddy, he wrote to express immediate enthusiasm. Eddy profusely thanked his London correspondent, had a thousand copies of Lancaster’s pamphlet printed in Philadelphia and New York, and expressed confidence that Lancaster’s

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“plan will be adopted in our [public] schools, when it becomes more generally known.”39 Eddy also expressed his interest in establishing a Lancaster school serving the children in New York’s almshouse.40 In 1805 Eddy and his associates began establishing the first American school organized on Lancaster’s principles. The New York City Free School opened the following year, and interest in Lancastrian education grew exponentially in urban areas during the next two decades. Urban education reformers swooned over Lancaster’s methods because they were efficient, economical, and nonsectarian; they also demanded relatively little skill and teacher training to implement.41 Newgate’s workhouses provided a more direct antecedent for the congregate convict school. From the beginning, Newgate’s workshops relied on experienced convicts to instruct inexperienced convicts in the trades. In fact, Newgate’s first industry, shoemaking, was taught by a convict who was formerly a cobbler.42 In 1801, Eddy remarked upon the “surpris[ing]” success of convict-­led instruction in the workshop: “Under the instruction of a prisoner sentenced for life, who was a skillful shoemaker, it was a matter of surprise to observe with how much rapidity those who were before ignorant of the trade, learned to become excellent workmen.”43 Based on this success, Newgate appointed inmates to superintend its manufacturing workshops. These labor experiments helped offset one of the biggest concerns: how to keep inexperienced inmates profitably employed.The inspectors’ 1799 request to have inmates “instruct each other in the evenings at writing and arithmetic” emerged in the wake of the remarkable success of convict-­led instruction in the trades. The prison repeated the experiment with convict-­led schools, and by 1801 groups of up to twenty inmates were instructing each other for two hours a night in reading, writing, and arithmetic. By 1815, inmates had formed at least seven schools in Newgate.44 Eddy’s theory of education was also shaped by his concurrent work as superintendent to the Brotherton Indians. Appointed by New York Governor John Jay in 1796 (the same year as Newgate’s erection), Eddy worked with the tribe to establish a schoolhouse and arranged in 1798 for fellow Quaker John Dean to serve as schoolmaster.45 As superintendent, Eddy settled land claims and oversaw the division and allotment of the Brotherton’s land. While expressing frequent sympathy for the plight of the Brotherton and profuse friendship with his “brethren,”



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Eddy complained of their lack of industry. In an 1804 report to Governor Morgan Lewis, Eddy criticized the lack of improvement among their children and proposed a new school where children would be “kept separate from their parents, to keep them regularly employed at some kind of work, and to be taught Reading, Writeing [sic], and Arithmetic.”46 Eddy’s winter school at Newgate and his imagined Indian boarding school shared similar emphases: separation from bad influences; steady labor, sobriety, and industry; and basic instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Eddy imagined that both the congregate prison and the Indian boarding school could remove sufferers from the poverty, intemperance, and flux of their lives by supplanting an undisciplined life with a model of sober and disciplined living. Despite these hopes, by 1804, dispirited with the Brotherton and the new management at Newgate, he departed the prison.47 Inmate-­run evening schools expanded under the Reverend John Stanford. Stanford, unlike Eddy, was neither a classroom innovator nor a teacher philosophically committed to prison-­based common schooling; however, Stanford’s intermittent supervision of the convict-­led night schools provided the experiment legitimacy, and the number of schools grew under his long tenure at Newgate. An English-­born Baptist who immigrated to America in 1786, Stanford earned a reputation as one of New York City’s leading evangelical social reformers. Appointed city chaplain and funded by the Society for Supporting the Gospel Among the Poor of the City of New York in 1812, Stanford dutifully recorded hundreds of visits to Newgate, the lunatic asylum, the city hospital, the orphanage, the debtors’ prison, the almshouse, and other urban charity institutions; there he preached, ministered to the sick, and distributed Bibles and tracts to the forlorn masses.48 On top of his extensive ministry, he supervised the schools in Newgate, the poor house, and (after 1816) a new penitentiary for minor offenders in Bellevue.49 Stanford’s exhausting schedule meant that his oversight of the prison schools was limited and periodic; in 1814, according to a diary transcription, he spent three hours examining the “schools in the State-­Prison. They were convened in the chapel, amounting in the whole to fifty-­eight scholars. Their examination in reading, writing, arithmetic, catechism, &c. gave great satisfaction to the inspectors, and much credit to the teachers.”50 Little else is known about these schools—­either their readings or

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materials or the convicts selected as teachers—­which, apart from Stanford’s periodic visits and the keeper’s watch, operated by necessity with a fair degree of autonomy. Prisoners seeking to form a school appealed to Stanford’s good name and authority to secure permission to form a school. For example, Stanford preserved one letter signed by a group of prisoners pleading to “let us have a room to ourselves, as there are fifteen of us, who wish to spend our evenings in reading the Holy Scriptures, and other religious books for our mutual edification”; the prisoners specifically requested a private room so that they could “be of service to each other.”51 Whatever the inmates’ motives, whether sincere or illicit, Stanford interpreted their interest in forming a school as a sign of their potential for religious conversion. Despite expanding the number of convict schools, Stanford dedicated time to Newgate in order to save souls, not to teach reading, math, or writing. The fervent Baptist was driven by an unswerving belief in the power of salvation: all were fallen, and grace could manifest itself anywhere. For Stanford, the prison was a useful apparatus, a “furnace of affliction,” argues Jennifer Graber, facilitating redemptive suffering and torment, functioning like an “orderly machine designed to put great pressure on inmates, who would then emerge transformed by the experience.”52 Trusting firmly the alchemy of suffering, Stanford persisted in overseeing the night school and supported its efforts to foster literacy because he felt a school could catalyze spiritual change; after all, “one never knew if God might use a sermon, a visit, or a tract to propel the sinner into the regenerative experience of God’s grace.”53 Stanford’s religious zeal was matched by his enthusiasm for print. As a promoter of the expanding market in evangelical tracts, Bibles, and pamphlets, Stanford could not have been better positioned: New York City was the epicenter of religious publishing. The American Bible Society (1816) and the American Tract Society (1825) selected New York as their home because the city was the undisputed choice “for both its concentration of advanced printing facilities and for its unrivaled proximity to markets”; the city was also the “American incubator of technological innovation in the art of printing” with its many stereotypers.54 Stanford was expertly poised to avail himself of these abundant resources, and he innovatively parlayed certain prisoners into print, adeptly tailoring their tales of suffering into spiritually edifying narratives perfectly suited for



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the expanding evangelical press. From his doorstep Stanford could walk to the state prison, orphanage, almshouse, or hospital, gather an unlimited supply of tales of woe, warning, and redemptive suffering, and then assemble these tales into tracts and pamphlets. He tailored specific tracts to the inhabitants of the poorhouses and prisons, including his Catechism for the Use of Youths in the Schools in the Alms-­House and the Penitentiary, New York (New York, 1819) and The Prisoner’s Companion (New York, 1827). Of the latter, Stanford notes in his diary, “Finished the ‘Prisoner’s Companion,’ and delivered the copy to the committee of the American Tract Society. This interesting publication was immediately stereotyped.”55 Dwelling in the epicenter of urban suffering and evangelical print, Stanford extracted the city’s resources to fuel his “furnace of affliction.”56 Stanford propelled many of the city’s condemned malefactors into the evangelical press, from his unsympathetic arsonist (Rose Butler), to his sympathetic victim of unjust sentencing (George Vanderpool), to a murderer who stubbornly resisted his efforts to solicit his confession (John Johnson).57 Stanford fought successfully to commute the death sentence of Vanderpool, a free black convicted of murder, to life in prison; he then documented Vanderpool’s subsequent years of piety in Newgate prison, using his position as consummate insider to harness the genre of criminal confession to the resurgence of evangelical print. He was particularly drawn to the sickbeds of young and appreciative men, recording in his diary many encounters with what he perceived as vulnerable and potentially receptive beneficiaries of his particular form of grace. For example, Stanford documented the “Conversion of J.W.C.—­A Convict in the New-­York State-­Prison,” in at least seven diary entries, concluding, “This day I visited him three times, and he very affectionately took leave of me in such terms as delicacy forbids me to record. He died shortly after my departure, rejoicing in Christ.”58 By contrast, Stanford neither promoted nor published accounts of those in his convict schools. When it came to administering the “theology of redemptive suffering,” the evening school was no match for the spectacular scaffold or the feverish sickbed.59 He did, however, use the school to publicize the good work of reformation at Newgate and even brought President James Monroe to his examination of Newgate’s convict-­led schools in 1817.60 Reports frequently praised the “spirit of emulation” in the prison school and emphasized the school’s salutary effects, even as Newgate’s

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reputation for disorder and overcrowding grew. Acknowledging this discrepancy in their 1822 legislative report, inspectors noted that “under [Stanford’s] superintendence, the elementary branches of education still continue to be taught—­convicts are employed as teachers, and a spirit of emulation is manifested, worthy of better circumstances.”61 Another report, asserting that “much good, it is believed, has resulted from this arrangement,” explained that “among the convicts, there are always some men of handsome literary acquirements. In the winter season, the most capable of these are employed in teaching the boys, and . . . uneducated men.”62 While the dominant rhetoric praised the prison school students’ “spirit of emulation,” congregate schooling always carried with it the frightening possibility of corrupting influence and promiscuity. Documenting prison officials’ long-­standing fear of “promiscuous intercourse,” Regina Kunzel argues that “the problem of prison populations lay not simply in their heterogeneity but in the troubling associations, seductive appeal, and coercive potential inherent in the intimate association of unequals—­older and younger, criminal and innocent, knowing and naive.”63 Thus, the very emulation that won the school praise also fueled reformers’ anxiety. Prison reformers had long roused the public to action by denouncing the scenario of older inmates “instructing” younger prisoners in crime. From groups of convicts requesting private rooms to “be of service to each other” to accounts of “handsome” men “teaching the boys,” the language used as evidence of the success of the convict-­led school mirrors the language employed by critics to denounce congregate socialization. The Boston Prison Discipline Society, for example, protested the “intercourse of the most dangerous and debasing character” in Newgate’s night rooms and demanded the separation of the “old offenders from the young and inexperienced.”64 Even Eddy’s praiseworthy account from 1801 (“twenty [prisoners] are permitted to meet together daily” and instruct each other “for about two hours in the evening”) shares much in common with the scathing language in a later report, also penned by Eddy, condemning congregate socialization: “In the New-­York Prison, the rooms lodge each about twenty convicts, and owing to so many being brought together every night, they corrupt each other . . . and all chance of reformation is effectually defeated; the older criminals serve as teachers to the younger.”65 As early as 1802, Eddy had abandoned support for



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congregate night rooms.66 He expanded his position by 1819: “No benefit, as it regards reformation, ever has been, nor ever will be produced unless our prisons are calculated to have separate rooms . . . so that every man can be lodged by himself.”67 Despite this heated rhetoric of contamination, Newgate maintained its congregate workshops and supervised evening schools. Because the line demarcating the praiseworthy emulation taught in the school of virtue from the criminal intimacy learned in the seminary of vice was so narrow, both Newgate and its prisoners drew heavily on Reverend Stanford’s authority to lend credibility to the convict-­led schools. Ultimately Reverend Stanford’s reputation—­neither his hands-­on supervision nor his pedagogy—­sustained, spread, and legitimized Newgate’s educational experiments in convict-­led education. Schooling N ewgate : I nmate R e spon se s Whereas Eddy in 1801 proclaimed Newgate a “durable monument of the wisdom, justice, and humanity of its legislators,”68 inmates spoke far more critically of Newgate’s salutary effects and often represented their dissatisfaction in disputes over the purpose of reading, writing, and moral education. Sentenced to life imprisonment in Newgate on a forgery charge, Elizabeth Munro Fisher offered one of the first accounts of incarceration at Newgate. Fisher compressed her five-­year incarceration into a brief episode, one of many tests and trials that shaped the Memoirs of Mrs. Elizabeth Fisher (New York: Printed for the Author, 1810).69 Despite being personally received by Eddy upon her arrival in 1801 and quickly promoted to assistant keeper in the women’s wing, Fisher took little consolation in Newgate’s form of justice. Convinced of her innocence, Fisher transformed her incarceration into a text-­based trial, using her Bible to make sense of what she understood to be her false imprisonment. She read the story of Joseph over and over, “it being so similar to mine”: Joseph was betrayed by siblings, sold into servitude, made the recipient of unwanted amorous attention, thrown into prison on a false charge, appointed a leader among fellow prisoners, and eventually released; the biblical Joseph offered Fisher a powerful narrative to reaffirm her innocence and assure herself that some day she, too, would be delivered.70 For five years, Fisher followed the rules, took

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advantage of the privilege of walking in Newgate’s garden, attempted to reimagine the other female prisoners as “my family,” and served her time until—­as the Bible foretold—­she was pardoned and released in 1806. Summing up the experience, Fisher observed, “I felt nearly as bad coming out, as I did going in.”71 For William Coffey, reading, too, became a “window”—­less as a way to understand his fate than a space from which to see with clarity the prison’s failed rhetoric of moral reformation.72 The former lawyer deliberately reconstructed himself as “a would-­be reading convict” (his own phrase), a prisoner prohibited from reading by a misguided policy that valued tidiness over moral reformation.73 One of Newgate’s worst abuses, noted Coffey, was its “barbarous prohibition” against reading, a prohibition that he felt “severely, for the first year of my imprisonment.” Clarifying his complaint, Coffey explained that the “Inspectors, much more careful of the library tomes, than desirous of inculcating the precepts of morality, have prohibited the lending of any book or books, to any convict, in the prison, however studious or well disposed.” Coffey’s astute understanding of the value that reformers like Eddy placed upon intensive reading practice allowed him to turn the logic of the institution upon itself: “The Library was purchased for the use of the convicts; and the soiling of a book, by a labouring man, for whose express reading it was intended, must have been expected by those, who suggested its expedience.”74 Eddy’s enthusiastic promotion of cleanliness and tidiness was well known and oft celebrated, but here Coffey argued that Newgate’s cleanliness interfered with its godliness: constrained by a ridiculous fear of having prisoners crease the pages of the books they supposedly wanted inmates to read with passion, the prison denied inmates reflective, intensive, and spiritually edifying reading practice. Thwarted as a reading prisoner, Coffey rapidly advanced as a writing prisoner after being promoted from weaver to convict-­clerk, the highest position an inmate could occupy in the prison. The situation afforded him unique insight into the prison’s dysfunction during Newgate’s well-­ documented era of decline: “To-­day I would be a Lawyer, drawing a Village Petition, for a Hog-­Law; to-­morrow a Divine, and, from a Syllabus furnished me, writing a sermon already preached. In one hour I would be a Schoolmaster, teaching the Keeper’s children; in another, the Amanuensis of the Keeper, entering the discovered scars of a convict, in his rubs and



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scratches through life.”75 As convict clerk, Coffey—­providing legal advice to the city, instructing the children of the keepers, revising the stanzas of an agent that prefers writing poetry to doing his job, and even composing sermons for harried staff—­r uled over an upside-­down world.76 As the Keeper’s amanuensis, he chafed at being forced to intrude into the private lives of other inmates, whose “rubs and scratches through life” were excavated and turned into statistics. As for the Reverend Stanford, Coffey described him as pious but ineffective, noting, “If the reading of a clerical lecture, were capable of estranging the mind of a bad man, from the odious pursuit of vice, long ago, had this prison been a scene of penitence, of reformation, and of virtue.”77 Stanford strove to reach prisoners by pricking their consciences with dire warnings of doom and promises of salvation. But Coffey reduced Stanford’s revivalist pedagogy to “the reading of a clerical lecture.” Coffey’s account was substantiated by John Maroney, whose sentence partially overlapped with his in 1821 and 1822. Maroney recounted that “the Rev. Mr. Standford” [sic] spoke often to him, read prisoners many chapters, and delivered numerous exhortations, yet “made no impression on me.”78 Distinctly unimpressed with the convict night schools, Maroney lamented that they served too few and expected too little. “Conducted by convicts,” Maroney explained, the schools served “the unlettered persons,” but no others, helping the less literate attain “the bare reading of scriptures.” While he observed few leaving the schools with “changed hearts,” Maroney surmised that the convict school had other benefits, drawing his authority from hearsay circulated by fellow inmates: “several, from what I know, may have obtained a degree of respect since, as citizens, as I had an opportunity of talking with nearly all, if not every one, that belonged to the yard.”79 Maroney complained that, being already able to read and write, he was denied any meaningful education, but, relying on hearsay gathered from the convict yard, he also testified to the respect and belonging that some convicts gained through their experience in Newgate’s convict-­led schools. What did make him most want to change for the better, Maroney argued, were letters from family. Yet too often family connections were seen as corrupting and dangerous—­the reason inmates were in the prison rather than the motivation for them to get out. Maroney described his

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lowest moment: receiving a letter from his wife conveying the news that one of their children had died. Grieving the loss of his child, he turned to Stanford for consolation but was taunted by fellow inmates; “Maroney is going to be religious, for Daddy Standford [sic] has whispered something in his ear.” A disheartened Maroney pondered the effect of a different prison model altogether, “Had I then been in the Auburn prison, where I would have been confined in my cell alone, it might, for all I know, have had some effect on me.”80 Maroney did not solely blame Stanford for his tepid response to Newgate’s regime of moral reformation; he admitted his lack of strong religious feeling and the undue influence of other prisoners. But as did Coffey, Maroney expressed an earnest desire for change but found little encouragement from his environment. Documenting the “earthly Pandemonium” of Newgate, Maroney recorded numerous examples of the autonomous agency of its prisoners: they established a thriving underground economy in smuggled goods, rum, and newspapers; devised elaborate systems of communication through slang and hand gestures; and spent the Sabbath day playing dice, cards, and checkers. While Maroney lamented the undue influence of prisoners, he made one significant exception. He heralded the effect of Coffey’s Inside Out, “which was read in my room,” and “this book being found on several, brought severe punishment upon them; and was the cause of 30 men being removed to the Auburn Prison.” Convict-­clerks brought in newspapers on a weekly basis (potentially allowing prisoners to, among other things, follow prison debates circulating in the press.) But Coffey’s Inside Out generated an intense response from inmates, who stowed numerous copies in their shared cells. Maroney used his illicit reading practice to validate his negative assessment of Newgate’s reformative regime. He credited Coffey, a “man of talents,” for his far-­reaching effects: after Coffey’s text was “read in the house of Assembly [i.e., the legislature], after which, about 100 convicts, of whom I was one, were transported to Auburn, and the remainder to the new prison at Sing Sing, in the spring of 1825.”81 This illicit text, more than Bibles or other reading, clarified for Maroney his experience and also impacted his fate. From Fisher and her biblical Joseph, to Coffey (the “would-­be reading convict”), to Maroney clutching his smuggled copy of Inside Out, Newgate’s prisoners sought out reading that helped them make sense of their imprisonment. They spoke little of the “spirit of emulation” promoted by



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defenders of its congregate school and more often expressed their desire to stay free from the distracting influence of other inmates. They offered neither a radical vision of inmate solidarity nor an unequivocal attack on the congregate model; instead, they provided their own pained articulations of Newgate’s ineffectual regimes. Auburn R i si ng In 1825, Eddy, the architect of Newgate, called for the institution to be abandoned: “The state prison in this city is so badly contrived, that it can never be successfully used as a Penitentiary; it should be sold, and a new one erected a few miles from the city, constructed on the same plan as the state prison at Auburn, to have separate cells, so that the prisoners might lodge separately.”82 Much like Pennsylvania’s reformers, Eddy used the failure of the institution that he had largely created to lobby for a new and better-­designed penitentiary. Auburn’s fame quickly eclipsed Newgate’s as it became the new frontier of prison design, discipline, and management, just as Jared Curtis would supplant Stanford as New York’s premiere prison educator, despite his short tenure and job dissatisfaction. By 1825, New York prisons needed positive publicity. Auburn had been authorized in 1816 to ease overcrowding at Newgate and to secure political support from upstate voters. When it opened in 1817 its penal techniques largely resembled Newgate’s (and, for that matter, Walnut Street prison’s), but after similar troubles with discipline, management, and poor state funding, Auburn toughened its approach to prison discipline and sought to win back public support.83 Lawmakers and prison inspectors argued that prisoners were being coddled, that victims of crime—­not criminals—­deserved sympathy, and that public safety demanded tougher sanctions against inmates. As happened in Philadelphia, disgruntled prison advocates argued that blacks and immigrants created an undue disciplinary burden upon the state. Drawing directly on the rhetoric of the American Colonization Society, which had formed in 1816 advancing black “emigration,” legislators proposed solutions that ranged from starting a Pacific penal colony to pardoning all black inmates and banishing them to the southern states and territories.84 None of these proposals was adopted, but the pessimism of these debates anticipated the “shift to a more stringent and vindictive philosophy.” Between 1819 and 1821, the New York legislature repealed earlier laws prohibiting

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flogging, irons, whips, and chains, granted turnkeys and lower-­level keepers the authority to whip (male) prisoners, attempted (again) to separate so-­called hardened criminals from the general population, and limited suffrage rights for men convicted of “infamous crimes.”85 Seeking new ways to curtail contact between prisoners, Auburn placed eighty inmates in continuous solitude in their cells in 1821 for a year and a half, forbade them from speaking, refused to let them lay down until nighttime, and denied them anything to do. When the experiment ended in disaster, most of the surviving men were granted full pardons and released.86 A quarter-­century into prison reform, New York was desperate for new ideas. Out of these failures the “Auburn plan” emerged to prevent the solitary confinement debacle by having inmates labor in congregate workshops by day in absolute silence and then confining them to silent and solitary cells by night. Cheaper and potentially more profitable than Eastern State, Auburn became the era’s most influential and copied prison. The Auburn doctrine appealed to western New Yorkers, who, observes David Lewis, had largely migrated from New England in the wake of massive social change and proceeded to prolifically erect stabilizing institutions (churches, schools, etc.). They believed that “strong inner controls . . . would compensate for the wide economic and political freedoms” and “guarantee that conformity without which no orderly society could exist.” Given the close relationship between the rise of Auburn prison and the spread of conservative social reform, it is unsurprising that the Auburn system garnered fervent support from evangelical law-­and-­ order types like Gershom Powers, Samuel M. Hopkins, Stephen Allen, and Louis Dwight as well as unsparing former military men like Elam Lynds.87 Auburn also attracted a strain of populist anti-­intellectualism that cautioned against educating prisoners: Elam Lynds referred to those who advocated mild treatment of prisoners as “benevolent dupes,” while Samuel Hopkins and George Tibbits mocked the opinions of “recluse and studious men about the virtues of felons.”88 When Lynds’s deputy keeper, John D. Cray, started a small school for Auburn’s juvenile prisoners in 1822, Lynds vociferously objected “on the ground, that by teaching them to read, write, &c. it would make them more capable villains when discharged, and that it made too much trouble.”89 Cray was



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an unlikely “benevolent dupe”: a former officer in the British army, he was credited with initiating Auburn’s distinct lockstep walk and other military-­style routines. Yet Lynds wanted no part of any educational regime that would make inmates “more capable” after their release from prison. Lynds forced Cray to discontinue his school, and Cray soon after resigned. Later Lynds looked back in satisfaction upon the time, when, he insisted, “the majority  .  .  . began to be disgusted with all philanthropic ideas, the impracticability of which seemed to be proved by experience.”90 Many of Auburn’s more elite defenders shared Lynds’s skepticism over moral and religious education. Stephen Allen, assigned to inspect Auburn and advise the state legislature on what if any improvements might be made, directly opposed education, even moral education. The convict’s duty, argued Allen, “is briefly, to be silent, obey orders, and labour diligently. . . . How can a man labour hard, and at the same time be taught lessons of morality and religion? It ought not to be expected, because it is unreasonable.”91 Any attempts to divert time and resources from hard labor weakened the purpose of imprisonment; the prison could allot time for prisoners to read or to instruct inmates, but “in either case, time is required; and the time spent in reading or hearing a lecture, cannot at the same time be employed at labour.”92 He also objected to allocating money for moral reformation and argued that sending public money to promote morality infringed upon the separation of church and state.93 The dilemma over whether to allot resources to education and moral reform was mediated in 1825 by Louis Dwight, the influential Congregationalist minister and leader of the newly formed, Boston-­based Prison Discipline Society. Dwight saw an opportunity for giving Boston reformers a stronger role in Auburn-­style reform after Elam Lynds departed to help oversee construction on the state’s newest prison, Sing Sing. Together with new warden (or “principal agent”) Gershom Powers, Dwight arranged for the Reverend Jared Curtis to travel to Auburn and begin work as resident chaplain in late 1825. Curtis’s salary was paid not by New York state but by the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, a move that gave the society a hand in shaping moral and religious education in Auburn.94 Allen conceded that such a plan could work, allowing prisoners to labor all day while allowing some time in the evening or on the Sabbath “for instruction, either by reading his Bible, hearing a sermon,

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conversing with the Chaplain, or mentally reflecting on his condition,” but he offered this possibility as a compromise, not as an endorsement.95 Here and elsewhere, Dwight’s partnership with Auburn facilitated “a new level of cooperation between prison officials and Protestant reformers.”96 Dwight’s and Curtis’s entrances into Auburn’s reform transformed the opportunities for education as well as the rhetoric used to justify prisoner education. Auburn proponents celebrated the congregate school’s capacity for demonstrating “rigid discipline,” notably avoiding Newgate’s language that had praised the convicts’ “spirit of emulation.” The resident chaplain position marked a new career direction for Curtis, who arrived fresh from a five-­year stint as preceptor at Stockbridge Academy. In private letters, Curtis described Auburn prison as gloomy, confessed that his heart lacked fervency, and admitted that he saw little evidence that the inmates craved salvation; still, he started a Sabbath School in 1826, soliciting student volunteers from the nearby Auburn Theological Seminary to oversee evening and Sabbath School classes.97 Despite Curtis’s ambivalence and his short tenure at Auburn, Powers, Dwight, and Auburn’s inspectors seized on Curtis as a success story and actively promoted Curtis’s work; an 1826 report gushed over the “constant inspection and rigid discipline” of the Sabbath School: “The Prison Sunday School is in a flourishing state. It consists of a 100 scholars, with a competent teacher from our theological seminary, to each class, of from five to six individuals, under the general superintendence of the resident chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Curtis: and all under the constant inspection and rigid discipline of two vigilant officers of the Prison. A considerable number of the scholars are learning writing, and arithmetic.”98 Partnering with the Boston Prison Discipline Society, Auburn now reframed education as an opportunity to demonstrate “constant inspection and rigid discipline” by merging Dwight’s conservative emphasis on religious submission and suffering with Auburn’s hard-­line penology. The warden, less motivated by inmate salvation than by promoting obedience, embraced the partnership.99 Having a Sabbath School and resident chaplain allowed the warden to present himself as a humane yet forceful leader who had solved the quandary over whether educating prisoners detracted from management’s emphasis on hard labor. The theology students’ involvement pleased the evangelical base while placating those who did not want state resources diverted. By 1828 Powers boasted that the school had 125



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scholars and 25 teachers and was indeed producing a “salutary” influence on the inmates.100 In published reports Powers celebrated the Sabbath School’s successes and proclaimed his hope that the prison school would make inmates “better men, and, eventually, more enlightened and better citizens.” (In 1828 Powers modified his appeal by omitting “enlightenment” as a goal, instead making “better men, and eventually better citizens.”101) With Auburn’s every misstep, scandal, and failure amplified in reports and the press (including keepers’ propensity for the lash, the death of a pregnant inmate in early 1826, and complaints from artisans and merchants about unfair labor competition), opening the prison gates to Dwight and Curtis proved a shrewd strategy.102 When critics accused Auburn of being coercive or brutal, officials could call upon the good discipline and eager students of the Sabbath School as counterevidence, much like Eastern State Penitentiary promoted its literacy efforts and its library when critics accused officials of allowing inmates to suffer in debilitating solitude. The success of the Auburn plan facilitated Curtis’s departure. He stayed for less than three years, recruited by Dwight to serve as chaplain at the Massachusetts State Prison, which had been newly redesigned on the Auburn model. In Curtis’s place the Prison Discipline Society sponsored the Reverend Benjamin C. Smith, a recent graduate of the Auburn Theological Seminary, as Auburn’s new resident chaplain. In 1827 Smith reported 125 “scholars” and 20 student volunteers along with two convict-­led evening schools: one group of prisoners taught writing, and another taught arithmetic.103 Prisoners first completed the Sabbath School reading program under the supervision of the seminar volunteers and Reverend Smith; they could then advance to the math or writing class taught by “competent teachers found among the other convicts.”104 Neither an inspector nor Smith offered explanation of how inmates conducted their classes, given the strict prohibitions against correspondence and talking at Auburn, where even the writing and receiving of letters was prohibited. By 1830, the Reverend Smith jubilantly described an atmosphere where reading and reformation went hand in hand: prisoners, confined to labor by day and silence in solitary cells at night, were so anxious to learn to read they “set their supper aside, and study their book as long as they could see, and then eat in the dark.” By this time, the school

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had expanded to 160 “pupils,” thirty-­one classes, and thirty-­two teachers from the theology school. The convict-­led writing classes were also a rousing success, with more than “two hundred [having] acquired a decent hand” in the writing class.105 Through this partnership Auburn found a way to do the unthinkable: defend the system of “silent labor” yet allow convicts to teach other convicts to write. It did so by emphasizing Auburn’s vigilant oversight and offering a reassuring spectacle of obedient inmates “gaining access to the lively oracles of God.”106 Throughout his twelve years as chaplain, Smith served faithfully and reported on the good discipline afforded by moral reformation and congregate schooling at Auburn, until Elam Lynds returned—­and promptly banished the school.107 Take n M y E ducati on A l l Away: Inmate s on Auburn Inmate accounts diverged sharply from Smith’s effusive assessment of Auburn’s fusion of discipline, education, and religious zeal. John Maroney, who imagined that things would improve once transferring from Newgate to Auburn, contended that Auburn misapprehended prisoners’ educational needs: he did not need discipline; instead he needed materials to write, space for reflection, effective teachers, and a reasonable amount of social intercourse. Auburn, like Newgate, largely refused such tools. By contrast, Austin Reed, imprisoned in Auburn in the wake of Elam Lynds’s return, described a regime of brutal isolation that bore little resemblance to Smith’s rosy accounts or even Maroney’s disappointed assessment of Auburn. Together, Maroney’s and Reed’s accounts document the unendurable pain caused by restricted communication and argue—­among other things—­that reading and writing are necessary tools for survival behind bars, not because they make inmates better prisoners (docile, submissive, accepting of their fate) but because they provide a means to help inmates think, reflect, and resist their dehumanizing condition. Maroney was transferred to Auburn by “Capt. Linds” himself—­just as the Reverend Jared Curtis arrived, the congregate Sabbath School began, and Powers bolstered his rhetoric that moral education could help bring good discipline to the institution. Marching in lockstep by day and confined at night in Auburn’s solitary cell, Maroney described the profound effects of Auburn’s restrictions on writing and communication: “[The prisoners] are not allowed to write or receive communications from any



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of their friends, or articles of any kind; not even chalk, pencils, knives, nails, or strings, without permission from the keeper. I often thought that we were in worse bondage than the children of Israel, when under their Egyptian task-­master. They cut off all intercourse, and made us solitary beings, in the midst of more than five hundred persons.”108 Once lamenting the influence and taunting of inmates in Newgate, Maroney was now mortified by the severe isolation of Auburn. Moreover, Auburn’s restrictions on writing prevented him from reflecting upon his experience effectively: “[as] no paper was allowed, I could not make notes or memorandums of my thoughts and feelings, let alone the keeping of a journal of my experience.”109 The effect of such solitary confinement was a form of ontological limbo, an exile so profound that it produced a jumble of thoughts in the prisoner’s mind but no means to inscribe, sort, or reflect upon the meaning of these thoughts. For Maroney, both Curtis and his Sabbath School provided a welcome antidote, not because they prompted his spiritual growth, but because of their ability to communicate with and call on him as a sentient, thinking being. Whereas Stanford lectured, Curtis conversed. “During many of his visits to me,” Maroney recounted of the minister, “I plainly told him my opinions did not correspond with his, as I did not believe that the Scriptures were the word of God. He reasoned with me on the subject in a candid and ingenious manner.” Curtis’s methods earned Maroney’s attention and respect.110 Maroney also testified to the good effects of the Sabbath School, particularly the theological students’ thoughtful and exciting pedagogy: “It was not taught by convicts, (as was the case in the New-­York Prison,) where I presume the sub-­teachers considered it a drudgery . . . but by young gentlemen from the Theological Seminary in the village . . . acquainted with the most improved methods of conveying instruction, and of exciting the attention of most of the indifferent.”111 For all their talk of reformation, prison officials devoted little attention to teaching methods, focusing more on the strict discipline that the prison schools enforced and rewarded. Although Maroney had little to say about the rewards of such discipline, he had much to say about how it felt to be taught by enthusiastic volunteers who knew something about the art of teaching. Taking his reader inside Auburn during a time of administrative change (from Lynds to Powers), Maroney experienced the institution

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as a space of random cruelty and occasional compassion. He composed poems but lamented that he was given no paper or writing implements to preserve them; he read his Bible but protested that he had no access to the “productions of able and popular writers” to help him comprehend his failings more acutely and to better publish his “shame and dishonor.” Although he responded better to the ministrations of Auburn’s Jared Curtis and his energetic theology students than to the dry proclamations of Newgate’s “Daddy Standford,” neither prison offered Maroney a viable place to reflect and reform. Despite its occasional tributes to Curtis, the intent of Maroney’s Narrative was not to promote the Auburn model over Newgate: instead, the account documented his severe suffering in each institution, a suffering greatly out of proportion to his crime (a misguided and drunken assault). More sinister and brutal, Austin Reed’s incarceration at Auburn left him, by the title of his unpublished manuscript, “A Haunted Convict.”112 Writing under the pseudonym “Robert Reed,” the inmate structured his anguished and increasingly fragmented account loosely as a narrative of youthful rebellion and its consequences. In two bound journals, Reed documented how a bright and creative child, through successive encounters with racist and random violence—­the lash, the cat-­o-­nine-­ tails, and the iron yoke—­had his reason and his education beaten out of him, quite literally. Reed was imprisoned in Auburn in 1840, when Elam Lynds returned to power, shut down the schools, and ruled with the lash (although, as other accounts make clear, Auburn remained violent throughout Lynds’s absence, a fact that reminds readers that his rule was not an aberration). In his manuscript, Reed struggles to survive an unendurable parade of violence, an agony made even more unendurable by Auburn’s restrictions on communications and writing: Reader those was the dark and gloomy days when gross darkness hovered over the prison . . . those was the dark days when no prisoner was allow’d to write a letter to his friends or to make one single mark with a pencil. . . . those was the dark and lonesome days when the convict had no library books to read, nothing but his bible and tract  .  .  . no slate or pencil to kill time with, nor did he dare to have a knife in his possession to whitle time away—­oh Reader those was the dark and cruel days when young Plume was stript stark



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naked and laid across the bench with his hands tied to the floor and received such a severe punishment with the cats that he expired a few days after[,] them was the days when the prisoners backs was cut and lasarated with the cats till the blood came running down there [sic] backs.113 Through lyricism and repetition (“oh Reader, those was the dark days . . .”), Reed asserted himself as a voice of witness, here linking the brutal restrictions on speech to the inarticulable spectacle and lived experience of violence that he endured during his first stay in Auburn. Reed contrasted his treatment in Auburn prison to a more humane regime in the House of Refuge near 1831, when a foreman joked patronizingly, “I think I can make something of that darkie—­he is a smart nig” and the superintendent, recognizing Reed’s youthful promise, agreed to “make a scholar of him.”114 An imaginative and talented boy “panting for knowledge and groaning for an education,” Reed advanced to the top of the class and chased the promise of a college education, only to find himself years later in Auburn, where “these hard and cruel hearted tyrants has beaten me with many stripes and taken my education my good reason wich god had given me all away.”115 While Maroney ended his account by expressing his hope that some will “calmly and candidly listen to me,” Reed closed his manuscript with a vow to haunt and oppress his tormentors, heaping curses on the prison authorities that destroyed his life and stole his reason and his education “all away.” Unpublished in its day and (nearly) forgotten, “The Haunted Convict” reminds readers that many more stories lie buried inside the prisons’ walls. Of Books and Bum p olog y: Farnham at S i ng S i ng Sing Sing’s first decade is most useful for illustrating how fast the pendulum (and politics) shifted between reformist and punitive regimes than for demonstrating any distinct educational theory or approach to reading and writing behind bars. This changed under the 1844 to 1848 tenure of Eliza Farnham in the women’s prison, which was erected in 1835 to house the state’s growing population of female inmates. Farnham ushered in a radical experiment in group learning that put reading prisoners front and center. By emphasizing the brain as a malleable organ capable of explaining human behavior and responsive to manipulation,

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Farnham’s methods animated debates over what role reading, socialization, and the prison library might play in the rehabilitation of inmates. Her experiments also help demonstrate the influence of phrenology on both nineteenth-­century prison reform theory and the emerging field of criminology.116 While female inmates testified to the good effects of her educational experiments, the wide range of inmate testimony throughout this chapter reveals that reformers and authorities failed to comprehend the “mind of the convict,” the interior consciousness of the men and women struggling and suffering behind bars. Authorized in 1825, Sing Sing was built by male convicts under the whip and guard of Elam Lynds, who commanded them to quarry the rock and build the structure that would eventually imprison them. Quarry and build they did, and by 1828 the prison was filled with inmates transported from now-­defunct Newgate.117 Until 1840 Lynds and his successor Robert Wiltse reigned with an iron fist while acting on a philosophy that suffering and pain produced about as much change as could be expected in inmates. Neither supervisor believed in the moral or intellectual reformation of the prisoner: the inmate’s total submission was the primary goal. Nor did either man have much use for Louis Dwight or his young and optimistic appointee, the Reverend Gerrish Barrett. Barrett spent his first years delivering sermons in the hallways amidst the din of construction, trying to teach prisoners to read through the grates on their cell; in the meantime Louis Dwight attempted to stay positive by celebrating a school in 1829 with sixty-­eight men reading and learning. But the experiment was short lived, as was Barrett, whom Lynds unceremoniously seized and tossed from the prison after the distraught minister reported to investigators what he believed to be credible complaints of inmate cruelty.118 The pendulum then swung widely. Elected governor in 1838, William Seward advanced “the most liberal prison regime that had existed in the Empire State since the days of Thomas Eddy” by replacing the inspectors with agents who restricted the use of punishment, established a library, reopened a Sabbath School, hired the Reverend John Luckey as chaplain, allowed inmates to write and receive letters with the chaplain’s supervision, permitted periodic visits from family, and even allowed prisoners to teach in the Sabbath School when part-­time teachers were scarce.119 As a sign of this humanitarian emphasis, Governor William Seward declared in an 1841 address, “I would have the school-­room, in



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the Prison, fitted as carefully as the solitary cell and the workshop.”120 Seward then lost the election. After Democrats swept the Whigs out of the governor’s office in 1842, they appointed Elam Lynds chief disciplinary officer of Sing Sing; he promptly shut down the convict-­led Sabbath School, confiscated all books but Bibles and prayer books, and reinstituted the ban on letter writing. Lynds was ejected in 1844, and a new host of leaders promised to limit flogging, reanimate the library, and reinstitute reforms. Amid these scuffles, the newly formed New York Prison Association demanded less political influence over appointees and more emphasis on inmate rehabilitation—­a shift consistent with the educational initiatives emerging at Eastern State Penitentiary. An 1847 legislative session formalized many of the N.Y.P.A.’s recommendations by restricting flogging, requiring state prisons to hire part-­time teachers, and authorizing prisons to purchase books, writing supplies, and other educational materials. The 1847 session signaled both an achievement and an end to yet another era of reform. (Results were lackluster: each prison received the paltry sum of $100 for education materials, and only five part-­time teachers were hired across the state.121) Eliza Farnham’s arrival at Sing Sing provided rehabilitative-­minded reformers with new arguments in defense of prison schools. Appointed matron with the help of Horace Greeley, his reformist allies, and the support of inspector John Edmonds, beginning in 1844 Farnham instituted a series of educational experiments that won her much initial praise, the support of many staff and prisoners, the ire of Reverend Luckey, and the ridicule of the press.The ensuing controversy over her methods triggered a sustained debate over what sorts of reading materials might prompt the better faculties and whether Farnham’s approach toward prisoner rehabilitation was assisting or undermining prison discipline. Farnham, a staunch phrenologist, approached her position and her treatment of individual prisoners as a means to advance her theories. Heavily influenced by George Combe, Farnham believed that the penitentiary’s emphasis on separate confinement, hard labor, and punishment neither stimulated the moral and intellectual faculties nor adequately prepared prisoners to return to society. She also shared Combe’s optimism that everyone could be improved through proper treatment.122 Farnham believed that all criminals were deficient in “the moral and

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higher intellectual powers” and that a change in discipline could produce meaningful and, in most cases, enduring effects upon inmates’ behavior and temperament.123 She significantly curtailed physical punishment (with some notable exceptions) and encouraged communication among the ward’s seventy-­five inmates; at first she permitted brief whispered conversations, and by 1846 she allowed “all women to talk at all times,” upending one of the most essential components of penitentiary discipline.124 Public and private reading practice was central to Farnham’s educational and spatial experiments. After dispatching an assistant matron to assess the state of the prison library, the assistant conveyed her dismal findings: seventy-­five copies of Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted Sinner. In response, Farnham set up a case to display and sell the female prisoners’ handicrafts to visitors to raise funds for a library.125 She provided novels by Charles Dickens, phrenology texts by George Combe, and her own travelogue Life in Prairie Land (1846); she also solicited library donations from friends and received “bright temperance tales, bound penny magazines, travels, biographies, Miss Edgeworth’s and Miss Sedgwick’s charming tales, etc., etc.”126 She had her assistants restock the available supply of books every afternoon, often using their own private collections to keep more advanced readers active. In reports to the N.Y.P.A., Farnham framed her pedagogy in the more acceptable language of self-­governance and self-­discipline by noting that she had worked with some “distinguished ladies” to put together a small library of “well-selected books” to help in the “strengthening of those better faculties which had hitherto lain dormant.”127 But in reality Farnham conducted a bold experiment in phrenology and advanced a radically different reading curriculum. Adapting and using congregate space was central to Farnham’s methodology. Farnham and her assistants read aloud to prisoners and encouraged the women to read not just in their cells but also in the common room. Farnham rearranged the common area with lamps, maps, pictures, flowerpots, and a rented pianoforte. She even invited Margaret Fuller to deliver a lecture. Janet Floyd notes that Farnham’s transformation of the common room, with its lectures, piano, and novel-­reading, transposed “a version of middle-­class domestic behavior . . . onto a public (and much-­ visited) space” in prison, a no-­doubt jarring transposition for many of Farnham’s curious observers, who were unused to seeing working-­class



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black and white women occupying (together, no less) the position of middle-­class domestic subjects.128 During her time at Sing Sing, Farnham also published an American edition of Marmaduke Sampson’s Rationale of Crime, which argued that crime was linked to various propensities or faculties of the brain. Drawing on her prison experience, Farnham transformed Sampson’s treatise into her own phrenological manifesto. She added copious footnotes and an extensive appendix that offered her own observations on the temperament of prisoners; she solicited young photographer Mathew Brady to take daguerreotypes of prisoners and artist Edward Serrell to compose outline drawings of prisoner’s head formations to help illustrate her ideas. Analyzing the “peculiar conformations of brain” in a young arsonist housed in the prison, Farnham explained that the girl “reads with tolerable correctness, and has some memory of isolated facts, but little capacity to reason,” observing the challenge of treating such a deficient mind (see figure 6). Another inmate, D.M., while “notoriously abandoned and profligate,” still possessed “a good mind, with much shrewdness and quickness of perception,” as evidenced by her “large development of propensity with fair intellect,” but offset by the “scanty development of the coronal region” of her head, signaling a deficiency in moral sentiment (see figure 7). Farnham thought these propensities (mostly) malleable and designed prisoners’ daily regimes to reduce the influence of negative propensities (destructiveness, combativeness, acquisitiveness, resentment) and to cultivate the lesser-­developed or dormant faculties (justice, charity, benevolence, judgment, self denial, and respect). While Farnham embraced Combe’s optimism that everyone possessed the capacity for moral reformation, she also subscribed to Combe’s systems of racial categorization, observing, for example, that blacks were inclined to “benevolence, adhesiveness [friendship], and philoprogenitiveness [parental love],” all traits that facilitated their moral capacity and development.129 She drew on these racial assumptions to support the pardon and release of a black female—­and also to justify torturing a black female whom she deemed incorrigible. The eighteen-­year-­old arsonist, identified only as “J.S.,” captured Farnham’s interest because of her “anomalous character.” After attempts to reason with J.S. to control her noisy and disruptive behavior failed, Farnham “resolved to make a thorough experiment upon her.” An epic contest of wills ensured: J.S.

Figures 6 and 7  The mind of a convict: Illustrations of prisoners commissioned by Eliza Farnham, appearing in M. B. Sampson, Rationale of Crime and Its Appropriate Treatment . . . with notes and illustrations by E. W. Farnham (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1846). Illustrations by Edward Serrell, based on daguerreotypes by Mathew Brady. Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.



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resisted every effort to silence and constrain her despite Farnham’s ever-­ escalating use of the ball, the straitjacket, starvation, and extensive solitary confinement. Unsettled by a case that suggested the limits of her theories, Farnham dismissed J.S. as a “spiteful snake in human form” and “an idiosyncracy of her race,” ultimately diagnosing her condition as congenital insanity.130 Thus, while Farnham’s phrenology ushered in radical reforms, it tacitly endorsed the practice of racialized violence against inmates. Farnham’s interest in phrenology was shared by leading scientists, intellectuals, and educators who considered the discipline especially useful for not only understanding insanity and criminality but also reforming children’s education. By 1840 the United States had nearly sixty phrenological societies devoted to the theories of Combe, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, and others. American common schooling pioneer Horace Mann actively sought to adapt Combe’s Constitution of Man and James Simpson’s Philosophy of Education to the American schoolroom.131 Rejecting a strict Calvinist approach to punishment and the rote learning of the traditional classroom, Mann fought to expand school libraries, reduce sectarian influence, and encourage “teachers to train the mind’s various organs while providing useful knowledge” in science, nature, and art. (Such developments earned Mann the ire of the American Sunday School Union.132) Testifying to the power of this wider movement in American educational and penal thought, Farnham’s educational experiments were part of what Stephen Tomlinson called a “phrenology of education”133 that spread across America and filtered into its prisons. By 1845 Sing Sing’s chaplain, the Reverend John Luckey, tired of Farnham’s liberal reforms and demanded an investigation. Luckey, arguing that her reading curriculum undermined state power, accused Farnham of “the use of improper books,” “mal-­administration of discipline,” “the unlawful use of convict’s time and labor,” and “an indifference to the interest of the State.”134 The N.Y.P.A. dispatched a team of investigators the following year. Luckey’s wife, Dinah, testified that she witnessed prisoners reading improper materials, including Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist and Osgood Bradbury’s Monira, or The Wandering Heiress, all of which produced “a love of novel reading averse to labor.”135 Reverend Morse of the Baptist church went so far as to accuse Farnham of circulating Orson Fowler’s Amativeness; or, Evils and Remedies of Excessive and Perverted Sexuality (although he offered no proof). Farnham’s staff of

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matrons pushed back against these charges and argued that they carefully screened all readings and lent the women only proper books, such as A Kiss for a Blow.136 Everyone agreed that the use of cruel and severe punishments had diminished under Farnham’s rule, but they could not agree on whether Farnham’s lax discipline or her exceptional reforms had produced the change. Just as the prisoners of Eastern State Penitentiary were examined in the wake of Charles Dickens’s American Notes, For General Circulation (1842), the N.Y.P.A.’s 1846 investigation called up Sing Sing’s female prisoners to offer their perspectives on Farnham’s regime. Again, reading prisoners took center stage, now called upon to testify whether a more expansive reading curriculum promoted or undermined order and reformation in the prison. Phoebe Squires, incarcerated for manslaughter, testified that, before Farnham arrived, “we were just locked up like so many cattle, and no advice or anything else given to us,” but now the women were being taught to write and to read interesting books, including “the Bible, D’Aubigne, and Columbus.” Eliza Hunt recalled being “one of the old rioters” but now considered herself a great reader. Mary Smalley, a fifty-­three-­year-­old woman incarcerated for assault with intent to kill, testified that conditions were much improved under Farnham, whereas “Mr. Luckey never asked me anything about my situation; he never seemed to want to converse with me”; Smalley insisted that neither Farnham nor the officers instructed her on what to tell investigators. Lucy Ann Price, the only female prisoner identified in the testimony by her race (white) recalled the sporadic Sunday school run by Luckey’s wife, noting “I never knew anyone to learn to read under this instruction.” She compared Luckey’s poor pedagogy to the strong learning, good discipline, and reduced corporal punishments under Farnham. Catharine Smith concurred, observing, “We are treated more like human beings,” and signing her testimony with her mark.137 It is not clear what punishments the women may have faced if they spoke out against their matron (although they certainly did not hesitate to speak out against Reverend Luckey); all six of the prisoners interviewed testified to the powerful impact of Farnham’s management style and the effectiveness of her educational methods. According to inmate Phoebe Squires, “if the prison had been as it is now, many woman, who have gone out of prison, would have been reformed.”138



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The N.Y.P.A. rested their investigation and took no action against Farnham.Yet Luckey’s many supporters mobilized and attacked her vociferously in the press. One local newspaper described their dispute as a battle between the good minister versus the “‘allied powers’ of Phrenology, Animal Magnetism and Fourierism combined in the modern Joan of Arc, who rules the females” and accused Farnham of trying to run the prison on “the science of bumpology.”139 Phrenology was largely the terrain of medical and other specialists and certainly not embraced by the mass public. Farnham’s reputation suffered, her support waned, and an 1847 senate prison committee comprised of “penological moderates” came out strongly against her phrenological emphasis, concluding that “the State cannot afford to sustain so large an institution for a course of experiments on so baseless a theory.”140 In the wake of the investigation, the rule of silence was restored, the female prisoners were put to work making buttons, and in early 1848 Farnham departed. Unlike the vast majority of prison reformers who questioned whether moral reform was possible or measurable, Farnham asserted that she had scientific proof that an emphasis on reading, public lectures, and a robust librarianship could stimulate the intellectual and moral faculties of inmates. She eschewed orthodox theories of moral reformation and instead believed that, as a class, female prisoners had often been “reared and habituated to scenes of violence and depravity” and thus came to prison defensive, combative, and highly excitable.141 She shared the era’s belief in the power of corrupting influence and used this to refashion the prison’s congregate space as a laboratory, with numerous inmates testifying to the good effects of her system. With Oliver Twist in one hand and a gag and straitjacket in the other, Farnham demonstrated phrenology’s potential to reshape educational theory while also revealing the unsettling ease with which familiar technologies of torture could cohabitate with liberal experiments in rehabilitation. “Th e O lde r Cri m i nal s Se rve A s Teac h e r s to th e Young e r ”: The Cong re gate L ite rac y E ffect s of N ew Yor k ’s P ri sons In their influential 1867 survey, Enoch Cobb Wines and Theodore Dwight laid out a scathing assessment of the nation’s prisons and called for a new era of reform. Lambasting American prisons for their lackluster

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commitment to educating prisoners, Wines and Dwight argued that the purpose of prison education was to launch a wholesale assault on the mind of the prisoner: “It is vain to talk of ignorant, inert, and corrupt minds profiting by their own unaided reflections. . . . No, they must be assailed from without. They must be plied with an external intellectual apparatus, in the form of lessons, lectures, discussions, and books, by which the mind . . . will be stored with ‘better thoughts’ than the disgusting and corrupting images hitherto most familiar.”142 Imagining the mind of the prisoner much like a passive container filled to the brim with waste, Wines and Dwight demanded a robust and aggressive response: an outside force must expel the bad influences and cram the mind with good ideas. Such was the educational philosophy of the antebellum prison; even Farnham advanced a less aggressive version of this theory, plying the inmates with an array of new thoughts in order to stimulate the inert regions of their brains. By contrast, inmates protested the prison’s homogenous approach to reformation and urged a more nuanced understanding of how prisoners responded to incarceration. Coffey, incarcerated in Newgate from 1819 to 1822, argued: “There is a vast difference in the effect of calamities, upon the minds of different men. Some, they scathe and wound, never wholly to recover; others, they barely sting, and leave behind them no impression. The effect, upon a Convict, of a sentence of imprisonment, must, essentially, depend upon the texture of his mind.”143 Positing the mind as a textured and responsive instrument rather than a passive receptacle, Coffey observed that prisoners’ experiences, education, and temperaments all shaped their responses to imprisonment. Elsewhere, he proposed that, as an educated lawyer behind bars, he felt the sting of remorse and shame (at his loss of station, at his personal humiliation) more acutely than most, drawing a distinction between himself and the less literate prisoners that surrounded him at Newgate. But he later reversed course and asserted, “In the breast of every man, educated as well as illiterate, there are chords whose vibration is unutterable anguish.”144 Unlike Wines and Dwight, Coffey insisted that the mind of the prisoner was never “inert.” More than a sympathetic plea for the prisoner’s shared humanity, Coffey’s observation challenged the central premise of carceral education: only an external assault of ideas and information could force the mind of the convict to expel its contents and replace all his old thoughts with new thoughts. No discipline enacted “from without,” Coffey suggested, could touch or



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purge prisoners’ profound and shared experience of suffering. The suffering that Coffey articulated differs markedly from the redemptive suffering forged through discipline and submission, Graber’s “furnace of affliction” celebrated by the Auburn model. Nor does Coffey’s tribulation resemble the solitary suffering hailed by the Pennsylvania model through which the prisoner’s guilt reflects back upon itself until, abject and mortified, a new soul emerges, reborn and redeemed (Smith’s “cellular soul”). Instead, Coffey posited an unreachable, unalterable suffering that none—­not the public, and certainly not those whom he scornfully calls the “State Prison fathers”—­have adequately acknowledged or understood.145 In Prison and the American Imagination, Caleb Smith articulates the central paradox of the penitentiary: “Its founders declare their respect for the convict’s humanity and their wish to lead him towards a new life, yet they invoke the legal fiction of civil death and the ritual practice of mortification. The object of these divided aims, the prisoner becomes a divided figure: a redeemable soul but an offending body; a citizen-­in-­ training but also an exile from civil society; a resurrected life but also an animate corpse,” left unguarded, divested of rights, and “infinitely vulnerable” to violence.146 To the unasked question, “how does it feel?” Coffey tendered a powerful response: unutterable anguish. Little was apt to change unless the state “fathers” were willing to shed their belief that prisoners’ minds were “inert” and “corrupt.” Coffey attempted to speak on prisoners’ behalf, but few sought the wisdom of the living dead. Writing in the wake of Coffey’s instructive example, inmate authors rejected the idea that their minds had to be “assailed from without” and purged of criminal influence; instead they legitimated their writing by citing the influence of a new genre of authorizing texts: published exposés by other inmates. I have already emphasized how inmate authors sought to assert themselves in specialized prison debates, rouse the public, and reshape prison management and education, but inmate authors made another significant contribution to the literary legacy of the early penitentiary: they demonstrated the power and purpose of “congregate literacy effects,” my term for capturing the process by which one convict’s acts of writing teach and inspire another convict to likewise write, teach, and inspire. This model of influence propelled new inmate authors to take up the pen, as demonstrated by the aforementioned influence of William Coffey’s Inside Out (1823) upon John Maroney, who penned the

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Narrative of the Imprisonment of John Maroney (1832). The process repeated when inmate author Levi Burr’s Voices from Sing Sing (1833) inspired prisoner James Brice to compose Secrets of the Mount-­Pleasant State Prison, Revealed and Exposed (1839). Anticipating critics’ response that their insider perspective was the result of contaminating contact, both Coffey and Burr—­while positioning themselves as consummate insiders—­ emphasized their distance from other inmates. Although both accounts placed primary responsibility upon prison officials for facilitating and perpetuating abuse, Coffey and Burr did not dispute the common argument that congregate prisons fostered corruption. Coffey insisted that he remained “a formal and solitary being” behind bars, and Burr explained to readers that he “formed no intimacies with any [convicts], no friendships or associations.”147 Yet Coffey and Burr, who sought to separate themselves from other inmates, ironically but directly influenced other inmates to compose their own accounts. Much like the “older convicts” who were appointed to lead the “less experienced convicts” in the congregate evening schools, Coffey and Burr instructed a rising generation of inmates by their literary example. Both facilitated a form of congregate learning—­despite their express distaste for congregate socialization. Narrative of the Imprisonment of John Maroney speaks powerfully to the effect that Coffey’s narrative had on Maroney and Newgate’s many prisoners. Maroney recalled Coffey as “a man of talents” who was “one of the convict-­clerks” and whose book “was read in my room.” He recollected how inmates smuggled in copies of Inside Out, stashed them in their cells, and read the pamphlet voraciously. As mentioned previously, Maroney claimed that the discovery of contraband copies of Inside Out brought strong sanction: “this book being found on several, brought severe punishment upon them; and was the cause of 30 men being removed to the Auburn Prison.” Maroney credited Coffey’s text for helping shut down Newgate and for removing him to Auburn prison, where under the attentive ministry of the Reverend Jared Curtis, he was better able to reflect upon the good effects of his sobriety. Still, Maroney credited Coffey much more than Curtis for both improving his situation and inspiring his vocation. Like Coffey’s account, Maroney’s text drew little from the “gothic mystery” genre. His narrative is nominally a moral tract about intemperance and the need for a saving faith, but Maroney never experienced a fully transformative faith in either prison and instead



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documented how his sincere efforts to reform were undermined by each prison’s regimes. Instead, Narrative of John Maroney transformed the religious impulse of the conversion genre into a sustained exposé, one strongly inspired by the example of Inside Out. Maroney’s understanding of how the publication of Inside Out impacted his fate and the fate of other inmates is itself fascinating, particularly when juxtaposed to newspaper accounts. While correct in observing that Coffey’s arguments were presented to the legislature, an event widely reported in newspapers (missives possibly smuggled into Newgate), Maroney omits that the legislature rebuffed efforts to forward Coffey’s testimony to the state prison commission. Newspaper accounts reported that Assemblyman McClure attempted to present Coffey’s memorial, which offered to substantiate his claims in Inside Out, to the New York legislature. McClure began reading from Coffey’s memorial, but Legislator Morss cut McClure’s testimony short, objecting that the piece had no bearing as it came “from a pardoned convict.” Legislator Barstow, objecting to Morss’s argument, insisted on Coffey’s right to be heard; he claimed that “if the memorialist was a pardoned convict, yet he was restored by the pardon to all his civil rights, and it was the right of every citizen to be heard.” But Assemblyman Gardiner came to Morss’s defense, arguing it “extremely improper” for the House to listen to attacks on public officers by a person, who, “although restored to most of his civil rights, yet, having been a tenant of the prison, was not competent to give testimony on the subject before any Court” or any legislative committee. McClure was asked to withdraw Coffey’s memorial. Assessing Coffey’s attempt to be heard in the New York legislature, the American reported that “very little business of public importance was transacted in the Assembly to-­day.”148 The press coverage presents a stark depiction of the former convict’s paradoxical position as citizen noncitizen, incompetent authority, and forgotten memorialist. Thus, in reviving Coffey’s text, Maroney also recrafts Inside Out’s sphere of influence, imagining its widespread authority. Maroney’s version of Coffey’s impact in the Assembly is less a deliberate misrepresentation than a fantasy of empowerment. While the legislature denied Coffey’s right to bear witness against the state, Maroney imagines a legislature responsive to prisoners’ appeals; while the legislature established the borders of Coffey’s citizenship, Maroney imagines that a “man of

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talents” might, in fact, be able to effect change. He relies on this sustaining fantasy to propel his own writing into print. Ever mindful of Coffey’s powerful influence, Maroney expressed his cautious hope that, by penning his own narrative, he might “arrest some, if not many.”149 The powerful roles of “congregate literacy effects” are again documented in James Brice’s Secrets of the Mount-­Pleasant State Prison, Revealed and Exposed (1839). To authorize his foray into print and gain audience sympathy, Brice first and foremost embraces the identity of a fervent evangelical, presenting himself as a voracious reader of sermons and tracts whose religious journey was curtailed when he was falsely imprisoned for perjury.150 His account documents the acute hunger, bodily pain, and brutal discipline at Sing Sing and highlights how his attempts to humbly follow Christ were repeatedly thwarted by Sing Sing’s paranoia and cruelty. By the time Brice published his account, Sing Sing’s horrors had been well documented, and, per Halttunen, he utilized this public awareness to craft a stylized and often gothic account of a penitent Christian “doomed to the walls of a gloomy prison for the term of four years!” who is starved, flogged, and tortured, while dreaming of the day when he will “publish my trial and my unjust conviction and a history of [the] prison.” He recasts himself, the injured innocent, as a spy whose “uncommonly retentive memory” holds the power to astonish the public with what he is able to accrue, retain, and convey, all in direct prohibition of the prison’s writing ban: “because a man in his confinement is not permitted to write, with either pen, pencil, or chalk, nor keep any minutes whatever.”151 Brice also draws on upon his own family’s literary legacy to further legitimize his authority to speak about his captivity. Calling attention to their shared experience of captivity and suffering, Brice reminds readers that he is the only son of Robert Brice, the Indian captive whose account of captivity was published by Josiah Priest in 1836.152 He also draws on the form and function of the trial account, appending numerous “affidavits” from esteemed citizens to testify to the truth of his account and his innocence of the charges; he even appends his “restoration to citizenship” signed by Governor William Seward that pardons him of his crime.153 But no authority—­save Brice’s own power of witness—­is more insistent in Brice’s narrative than inmate author Levi Burr. On page after page, Brice references Burr, swearing that his pamphlet “was true



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in all respects, as far as the discipline of the prison fell under my observation.”154 He uses Burr’s pamphlet as a guide to the prison and a talisman that reminds him of his duties to get out and tell his experience. Upon meeting the notorious keeper Marshall, Brice exclaims, “Is this the Marshall I have read and heard so much about?” He explains that he “had reference to Burr’s pamphlet.” He notes that “previous to Col. Levi S. Burr’s publication,” notorious warden Wiltse handpicked his keepers without oversight and that “after Burr published his pamphlet,” the way of rationing prisoners’ food changed. Returning home, Brice, haunted by Burr’s pamphlet, recalled that, because so little had changed since Burr published his account, such neglect required Brice to publish his own exposé.155 Thus, while Brice employs many means to legitimate his account and to assert his rights as citizen, his narrative makes clear that Burr’s pamphlet most directly influenced his decision to write and most shaped his understanding of what he was seeing and experiencing while behind bars. Like Maroney, Brice elevates a former prisoner’s influence as a way to offset what he sees as a great wrong: Burr called attention to these same abuses and outrages many years prior, yet inmates’ suffering and abuse continued unabated. In this way, Brice recasts himself as Burr’s advocate as well as his protégé. Acutely aware of how their perspectives were dismissed, these inmate-­authors found ways to propel themselves into print and demand changes in state policies and public attitudes toward prisons and prisoners. In turn, they also revised and redefined the traditional means by which outsiders entered print. Under the traditional model of collaborative literacy, illustrated at length in the previous chapters, “outsiders collaborated with amanuenses and editors, inserted their stories into popular genres and cheap media, tapped into existing social and religious networks, and sought sponsors and patrons.”156 Yet for many inmate-­authors, this form of collaboration was both impossible and suspect, and a cadre of convicts rejected the stance of cooperation with prison authorities and prison inspectors. Eschewing conventional modes of collaborative literacy, New York prisoners created an alternative model, drawing on writing by earlier convicts to inspire, instruct, justify, and guide their own forays into print; they insisted on not only their own but also each other’s authority. Thus, inmate authors, inspired by Inside Out, sought to reposition their literary legacy from outsiders to insiders.

Afterword G ood C onvict, G ood Citiz e n ? Early penitentiary education discourse departed markedly from contemporary discourse by rarely associating literacy with either “freedom” or access to citizenship. In the early national era, literacy and literacy acquisition sought to make prisoners better convicts, and even this modest benefit was disputed among defenders of the prison. For each authority who praised the “spirit of emulation” or “rigid discipline” or “revival feeling” in a prison school, others chided the efforts as misguided, wasteful, and naive.1 When Gershom Powers proposed, with some hesitation, that Auburn’s prison schools could make “better men, and eventually better citizens,” Elam Lynds counterargued that education instead produced “more capable villains.”2 For many philanthropists and overseers of the penitentiary, books, libraries, and education produced neither moral nor intellectual reform in inmates and could even threaten profits and good discipline. Despite invoking a rhetoric of citizenship, Powers’s definition of prison education is revealing: Powers observed that the goal of prison education should help prisoners feel “pungently, the horrors of their situation,” the necessity of repentance and change, and the value of “humble and strict obedience to all the regulations of the prison”; he added, “This course would tend, powerfully, to make them better convicts, and, whenever restored to their liberty, better citizens.”3 Like many in his day, Powers believed that by making obedient and penitent convicts the prison was simultaneously making good citizens, but he did not probe the gap between the qualities that made “good” prisoners and the forms of belonging, legal rights, and civil recognition that many, particularly former convicts, ascribed to citizenship. Periods of intense idealism occasionally appealed to the transformative power of literacy; for example, Pennsylvania defenders, in building support for a new penitentiary, imagined the “self-­correcting” prisoner who would learn to think inside his solitary cell. Literacy appeals were

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even more pronounced during periods of intense scrutiny, when authorities, facing charges of abuse, neglect, and mismanagement, touted evidence of prisoners’ literacy acquisition to either refute the accusation that inmates were insane or debilitated by their regimes (as did Eastern State in response to Dickens) or to repudiate the assertion that their discipline was lax and a danger to the state (as did Farnham in response to Luckey’s criticism). As the educational histories of both Walnut Street prison and Eastern State Penitentiary reveal, bad publicity could build a prison library as quickly as decades of earnest philanthropy. Moreover, advocates for prison education (with the exception of Farnham) did not draw forcefully on the early national discourse of “good reading” that remained popular outside the prison. The early Republic believed that the proper reading of good books could contain one’s destructive passions, moderate the temperament, cultivate socially useful sympathy, and facilitate the exercise of reason. Although such benefits were largely compatible with the goals of imprisonment, particularly if we modify the phrase “facilitate the exercise of reason” to “refute evidence of insanity,” prison defenders spoke in much vaguer terms about education’s “utility” or “benefit” or “service” to the prisoner upon release. When promoting his 1798 prison school, Caleb Lownes argued that teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic to Walnut Street’s black and white inmates not only benefitted the institution but also promised to be of “infinite service to [the prisoners] as individuals.”4 Years later, Eastern State Penitentiary officials invoked a vague civics argument when seeking state support for a moral instructor: they requested that the instructor make prisoners’ confinement “as far as possible the means of their reformation, so that when restored to liberty, [prisoners] may prove honest, industrious, and useful members of society,” a vision consistent with nineteenth-­century arguments on behalf of mass literacy.5 Nevertheless, of the many reformers, wardens, inspectors, chaplains, and philanthropists who supported some form of prison education, the vast majority touted education’s institutional benefits over literacy’s social promise: “disposing” of inmates’ time while not interfering with their daily labor, helping promote good order, and reinforcing a moral doctrine of submission. Inmates’ perspectives are shrouded and difficult to access, yet, in their solicited testimony, their collaboratively authored texts, and their

184 A f t e r w o r d self-­authored exposés, prisoners articulated the benefits of education and literacy differently than authorities. Inmates most often assessed opportunities for reading, writing, and education as signs of the institution’s recognition of their humanity. “We were just locked up like so many cattle, and no advice or anything else given to us,” until Farnham’s experiments in reading and group learning, observed Phoebe Squires; Eliza Hunt concurred, observing that, under Farnham, “the prison has been as comfortable and quiet as could be expected or desired.” Added Catharine Smith, “We are treated more like human beings.”6 Revising the common Enlightenment trope that used literacy as a measure of humanity (a trope that could alternatively be wielded to deny whole populations their rights of citizenship), prisoners instead used this rhetoric to assess their institution’s interest in their wellbeing. Few prisoners, like James Brice, possessed both the social privilege and the means to publish, nor did they, like Brice, win the legal recognition of a full pardon and a subsequent restoration of citizenship. But even Brice intended his performative act—­ appending to his narrative his 1834 “Restoration to Citizenship” certificate, signed by the governor, declaring “he is hereby restored to all the rights of a citizen”—­as a protest against a public that did not see him as a citizen, a claim to a civic belonging that few were inclined to grant him.7 Inmates, particularly those who came to prison with some rudimentary education, most often felt that their educations were neglected and described a prison population of frustrated “would-­be reading convict[s]” desperate for paper, slates, pencils, and the ability to write and receive letters or record their own thoughts.8 From his cell in Auburn prison, “Rob” Reed testified to “dark days when no prisoner was allow’d to write a letter to his friends or make one single mark with a pencil. . . . when the convict had no library books to read, nothing but his bible and tract . . . no slate or pencil to kill time with . . .—­oh Reader those was the dark and cruel days.”9 Reed perceived bans on correspondence and reading as exercises in random violence and cruelty and spoke of writing as a benefit: a way to reassure himself of loving connections to friends and family, a way to maintain hope, a way to “kill time,” as well as a powerful way to reflect upon and witness the violence and dehumanization that he experienced behind bars. John Maroney, too, recoiled at the profound effects of Auburn’s restrictions on writing and communication: “[The prisoners] are not allowed to write or receive communications from any of their friends, or articles of any



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kind; not even chalk, pencils, knives, nails, or strings, without permission from the keeper. I often thought that we were in worse bondage than the children of Israel, when under their Egyptian task-­master. They cut off all intercourse, and made us solitary beings, in the midst of more than five hundred persons.”10 This enforced silence made it harder for him to reflect upon either his misdeeds or even his “reform”: “[as] no paper was allowed, I could not make notes or memorandums of my thoughts and feelings, let alone the keeping of a journal of my experience.”11 From Sing Sing, Brice determined that such bans, whereby “a man in his confinement is not permitted to write, with either pen, pencil, or chalk, nor keep any minutes whatever,” were deliberate and calculated measures to keep prisons’ abuses secret and vowed to upend them.12 While many prisoners did invoke the common penitentiary rhetoric that contact with other prisoners was contaminating and expressed relief that they were kept separate from other convicts, none ever expressed relief that they were denied books and writing. Despite outright hostility or skepticism or indifference, inmates—­black and white, male and female—­availed themselves of any opportunities for education. At Eastern State, inmates persisted in their efforts, despite the moral instructor’s lack of enthusiasm: Frank Jones, a mixed race, working-­class youth incarcerated for three years for burglary and larceny, “appears to have no desire for religious conversation,” complained Thomas Larcombe, but Larcombe’s periodic admissions journal entries captured Jones’s autonomous quest for literacy: “Cannot read or write,” “Spelling,” “Learning to read,” and finally, “Reads Now.”13 As the last two chapters demonstrate, widespread skepticism over the moral character of convicts in the nineteenth century impacted prisoners’ ability to launch their accounts into press and also shaped inmates’ relationships to their audiences. One after another, inmate authors expressed acute awareness of a hostile, dismissive public and sought to justify their rights to publish and to assert their unique authority as “one who knows.” This wariness marked a (perhaps surprising) departure from the eighteenth-­century’s more idealistic strain, which even an enduring Calvinism could not dissipate: in a previous era, the public was counseled by authorities, including ministers and printers, to look to prisoners to negotiate their own relationship to reading, writing, and print. This provisional interest in their literacy practice afforded limited benefits to the

186 A f t e r w o r d condemned. (No doubt many would likely have seized the opportunity to read their confessions atop a pile of codfish, like Horace Lane, rather than hang upon the gallows.) Yet the eighteenth century’s embrace of the condemned as public pedagogue had far-­reaching literary effects, flooding the market with a host of writings, real and purported, by prisoners—­a stark contrast to the sparser archive that emerged from the nineteenth century’s most formative penitentiaries. In the early eighteenth century, when public execution was widely approved and tightly aligned with colonial religious expression, cooperative prisoners could serve as models of exemplary piety. To usher prisoners into print, printers worked closely with ministers, and both encouraged the view that the condemned could usefully guide audiences’ spiritual growth while modeling the intensive reading practice advocated by many, particularly Congregationalists. As printers’ and publishers’ alliances with religious authorities weakened and as literacy was increasingly understood as a means to participate in society, prisoners attained wider opportunities as public pedagogues; prisoners helped a new nation of writers imagine writing as an instrument of sociability, a possible tool of self-­mastery, and an appealing yet unreliable means of establishing credit and credibility. A later era, while welcoming sensational gallows and trial accounts, looked deeply askance at convict authors, even those who appeared to speak the truth. As Ann Carson’s lawyer cautioned, the “truth is a libel,” and the penitentiary’s early nineteenth-­century literary legacy bears witness to this caution. While a few inmates managed to usher personal accounts to press, others like Reed never published and instead mourned from their cells that the “hard and cruel hearted tyrants has beaten me with many stripes and taken my education . . . all away.”14

Note s Int roducti on   A I s for A ardvar k 1. United Nations Literacy Decade, accessed November 1, 2013, http://www .unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/education-­building-­blocks/liter acy/un-­ literacy-­ decade/; National Literacy Project, accessed November 1, 2013, http://www.nationalliteracyproject.org/About.html; Literacy Project, accessed November 1, 2013, http://www.literacyproject.org/. 2. PEN Prison Writing Program, accessed November 1, 2013, http://www.pen .org/prison-­writing; Seattle Books to Prisoners, accessed November 1, 2013, http://www.bookstoprisoners.net/about/; Massachusetts Prison Book Program, accessed November 1, 2013, http://www.prisonbookprogram.org/ about-­us/mission-­values/; Books through Bars, accessed June 26, 2013, http:// booksthroughbars.org/. 3. Malcolm X and Alex Haley, Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965; rpt. New York: Random House, 1992), 198–­199. 4. Ibid., 206. 5. Megan Sweeney, Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 3. For a debate on whether carceral narratives of self-­discovery and transcendence mask or elide the violence of imprisonment, see Sweeney, Reading, 2–­3. On prisoners’ attitudes about reading and writing, see also Karla F. C. Holloway, BookMarks: Reading in Black and White (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 75–­90; and Bell Gale Chevigny, “‘All I have, a Lament and a Boast’: Why Prisoners Write,” in Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States, ed. D. Quentin Miller (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 246–­271. On autobiography and historically specific notions of individuality and selfhood, see Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, eds., Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 1–­48. 6. Early prisons were variously named “gaols,” “goals,” or prisons; I defer to the term “jail” or “jailhouse” to distinguish the early American prison from its later configuration, the penitentiary. I also follow scholarly convention in referring to criminals in colonial jails as “prisoners” (a broad term distinct from the “inmates” and “convicts” of a later era). On colonial punishment and the limited role of colonial jails before the early Republic, see David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 45–­56; and Adam Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 6–­11.

187

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Notes to Pages 4–9

7. Also known as the Philadelphia Society for Assisting Distressed Prisoners, the group disbanded after nineteen months but served as “parent organization” for the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. Negley K. Teeters, They Were in Prison: A History of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, 1787–­1937 (Chicago: John C. Winston Company, 1937), 14–­17. 8. On the disciplinary regimes of the early modern penitentiary, see Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–­1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press–­Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996), 173–­213; Hirsch, Rise of the Penitentiary, 13–­62; Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum. 9. Notable book-­length accounts of American imprisonment that make little mention of libraries or education as part of early prison reform include Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum; see also Rothman, “Perfecting the Prison: United States 1789–­1865,” in Oxford History of the Prison, ed. Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Hirsch, Rise of the Penitentiary; Rebecca McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–­1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 261, 294–­295. Blake Mc Kelvey, emphasizing the rising influence and dominance of the Boston Prison Discipline Society, briefly mentions the proliferation of Bibles and Sabbath schools after 1825 in American Prisons: A History of Good Intentions (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1977), 20. A brief history of early prison education is offered in Michael V. Reagan and Donald M. Stoughton, eds. School Behind Bars: A Descriptive Overview of Correctional Education in the American Prison System (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1976), 31–­40; Sweeney, Reading, 21-­39. 10. Larry E. Sullivan and Brenda Vogel, “Reachin’ Behind Bars: Library Outreach to Prisoners, 1798–­2000” (2003), in Vogel, The Prison Library Primer: A Program for the Twenty-­First Century (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 1–­2; Larry E. Sullivan, “Prison Libraries,” in Encyclopedia of Library History, ed. Wayne Wiegand and Donald G. Davis Jr. (New York: Garland, 1994), 510; emphasis added. 11. William J. Coyle, Libraries in Prisons: A Blending of Institutions (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 9; see also 1–­13. 12. On disproportionate sentencing, including a quantitative study of black incarceration in Walnut Street Prison, see Leslie C. Patrick-­Stamp, “Numbers That Are Not New: African Americans in the Country’s First Prison, 1790–­1835,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 119 (1995): 95–­ 128. On the disproportionate number of so-­called “outsiders” convicted of capital crimes in early America, including foreign-­born men and women, former soldiers, servants, and blacks, see Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–­ 1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 38–­39. Lawrence W. Towner influentially argues that a majority of New England’s executed criminals in the eighteenth century came from “outside the community”; Towner, “True Confessions and Dying Warnings in Colonial New England,” in Sibley’s Heir: A Volume in Memory of Clifford Kenyon Shipton (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts and University Press of Virginia, 1982), 537. 13. For example, Masur argues that gallows speeches were “formulaic” and most likely “fabricated”; see Masur, Rites of Execution, 33–­35. For a more nuanced debate, see the exchange between Daniel A. Cohen and Daniel E. Williams in Early American Literature. Cohen, a historian, argues against interpreting



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eighteenth-­century criminal narratives as purely fictive; he concludes that the literary productions of criminals were “generally drafted by ministers, printers, or other literary intermediaries using biographical information obtained from the criminals themselves in jailhouse interviews” and that the biographical information is largely accurate and frequently verifiable by outside documentary research, particularly when contrasted with “dying verses,” an “essentially fictive” literary form. Thus Cohen believes that criminals were “integral to the process of narrative construction.” Williams, a literary scholar, advising caution, encourages readers to be mindful of the “complex strategies of selection and arrangement” that undergird these “uniquely dialogical and contextual” utterances. See “Correspondence between Daniel A. Cohen and Daniel E. Williams,” Early American Literature 30, no. 1 (1995): 88–­89, 91. 14. Karen A. Weyler, Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 2. Weyler traces this process through a compelling series of case studies involving captives and prisoners, including Phillis Wheatley, Britton Hammon, John Marrant, and Patience Boston. 15. David D. Hall, “Literacy, Culture, and Authority,” in Literacy: Interdisciplinary Conversations, ed. Deborah Keller-­Cohen (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1994), 183; Weyler, Empowering Words, 6. 16. Weyler, Empowering Words, 2. 17. For example, William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-­ American Autobiography, 1760–­1865 (Champaign-­Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986);Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, eds., Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); Joanna Brooks and John Saillant, eds., Face Zion Forward: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785–­1798 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002); Robert Warrior, The People and The Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss, eds., Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). 18. Dickson D. Bruce Jr., The Origins of African American Literature, 1680–­1865 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), x; see also 65, 212–­220. William Andrews similarly argues that “because the ontology of [black] autobiography is so problematic, it seems to me more fruitful to treat the form more as a complex of linguistic acts in a discursive field than as the verbal emblem of an essential self uniquely stamped on a historical narrative.” Andrews, To Tell, 3. 19. Jeannine Marie DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Caleb Smith, “Harry Hawser’s Fate: Eastern State Penitentiary and the Birth of Prison Literature,” in Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America, ed. Michele Lise Tarter and Richard Bell (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 231–­ 58; see also Caleb Smith, The Prison and the American Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 27–­28. 20. Daniel E. Williams, ed. Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993); Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–­1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic

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Notes to Pages 11–12

Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Sharon M. Harris, Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005); DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows; see also Ronald A. Bosco, “Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon,” American Quarterly 30, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 156–­176 and “Early American Gallows Literature: An Annotated Checklist,” Resources for American Literary Study 8 (1978): 81–­107. Bosco accounts for more than two hundred primary sources prior to 1800. 21. For example, H. Bruce Franklin, ed., Prison Writing in Twentieth-­Century America (New York: Penguin, 1998), which begins with plantation songs and Autobiography of an Imprisoned Peon (1904); see also Bell Gale Chevigny, ed., Doing Time: Twenty-­five Years of Prison Writing (New York: Arcade, 1999); Jeff Evans, ed., Undoing Time: American Prisoners in Their Own Words (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001). One notable exception to anthologies that privilege twentieth-­century writing is Judith A. Scheffler, ed., Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women’s Prison Writings, 200 to the Present (New York: Feminist Press, 2002). Literary studies of the American prison that ground their analysis in the nineteenth century include Jason Haslam, Fitting Sentences: Identity in Nineteenth-­and Twentieth-­Century Prison Narratives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), which begins with Henry David Thoreau and Harriet Jacobs; and C. Smith, Prison, which locates the origins of U.S. prison literature in a range of canonical and noncanonical antebellum texts. 22. Mary Hamilton, “Expanding the New Literary Studies,” in Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context, ed. David Barton, Mary Hamilton, and Roz Ivanič (London: Routledge, 2000), 16. 23. David Barton and Mary Hamilton, “Literacy Practices,” in Situated Literacies, ed. Barton, Hamilton, and Ivanič, 7; Shirley Brice Heath, “Protean Shapes in Literacy Events: Ever Shifting Oral and Literate Traditions,” in Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy, ed. Deborah Tannen (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982), 93. 24. James Collins and Richard K. Blot, eds. Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7. See also Barton, Hamilton, and Ivanič, Situated Literacies, 7–­14. 25. Cathy Davidson, ed. Reading in America: Literature and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 12. 26. Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: Norton, 1974); E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press and the American Antiquarian Society, 2005), 3. On the problems with early methodologies of determining literacy, see John R. Rachal, “Measuring English and American Historical Literacy: A Review of Methodological Approaches,” International Journal of Lifelong Education 6, no. 3 (1987): 191–­195. On Lockridge’s underestimation of female literacy, see Joel Perlmann and Dennis Shirley, “When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1991): 51–­52. On signature count studies and African American literacy, see Leon Jackson, “The Talking Book and the Talking Book Historian: African American Cultures of Print—­The State of the Discipline,” Book History 13 (2010): 259–­260.



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27. David D. Hall, “Introduction,” A History of the Book in America,Vol. 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (2000; rpt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press and the American Antiquarian Society, 2007), 10. 28. On the captivity narrative as “literacy event,” see Andrew Newman, “Captive on the Literacy Frontier: Mary Rowlandson, James Smith, and Charles Johnston,” Early American Literature 38, no. 1 (2003): 31–­39. 29. Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, defines “mimetic corruption” as a process by which “the very presence of embodied criminality overwhelmed spectators’ virtue and led them to identify with and replicate criminality” (8). 30. Franklin, Prison Writing in Twentieth-­Century America.

Chapte r 1  B ook s B e hi nd Bar s 1. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, 45–­56; Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary, 6–­11. Hirsch usefully distinguishes the “segregative” function of confining prisoners of war (to protect prisoners from causing further harm to the community) and the coercive practice of holding debtors in jail (to encourage prompt payment) from the later practice of sentencing and confining criminals to set periods of time behind bars as punishment for crime. He also distinguishes this later practice from the few instances when colonial Massachusetts’s courts did hand down jail sentences for indeterminate periods of time in order to make deference a precondition for release, 7. 2. On the origin and development of execution (or “gallows”) literature, see Bosco, “Lectures at the Pillory”; Towner, “True Confessions”; Williams, Pillars of Salt; Cohen, Pillars of Salt; Halttunen, Murder Most Foul; Jodi Schorb, “From Sodomy to Indian Death: Sexuality, Race, and Structures of Feeling in Early American Execution Narratives” (PhD diss., University of California at Davis, 2006); Scott D. Seay, Hanging Between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). See also introduction to this book, note 20. 3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish:The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 32–­72; Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 22, 3; Masur, Rites of Execution, 26, 42, 105. Influential accounts of the colonial jail that eschew discussion of the relationship between spiritual counseling, the pedagogy of the scaffold, and eighteenth-­century print culture include Rothman’s “Perfecting the Prison” and Discovery of the Asylum and Hirsch, Rise of the Penitentiary. On the limits of Foucault’s concept of spectacle, see also Jodi Schorb, “Hard-­Hearted Women: Sentiment and the Scaffold,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 28, no. 2 (2011): 290–­311. 4. Cotton Mather, Warnings from the Dead.  .  .  . (Boston: Bartholomew Green, 1693), 35. 5. Ibid., 69. 6. Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–­1708, edited by W. C. Ford. Massachusetts Historical Society Collection, Seventh Series (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1911), I:165. 7. Cotton Mather, Pillars of Salt. An History of some Criminals Executed in this Land, for Capital Crimes:With some of their Dying Speeches, Collected and Published (Boston: B. Green, and J. Allen, 1699); Cohen, Pillars, 4–­5.

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Notes to Pages 23–28

8. C. Mather, The Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea. . . . (Boston: Fleet for Belknap, 1726), 17. 9. My overview of the genre is drawn from Cohen, Pillars; Williams, Pillars; Halttunen, Murder Most Foul. 10. “The Declaration, Dying Warnings and Advice of Rebekah Chamblit,” appended to Thomas Foxcroft, Lessons of Caution to Young Sinners. . . . (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1733), [72]; the broadside was entitled The Declaration, Dying Warning and Advice of Rebekah Chamblit (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1733). On printers’ expanding role in soliciting narratives, see Cohen, Pillars, 16–­26. 11. These broadsides included Last Speech and Advice of Poor Julian . . .Written with his Own Hand (Boston: T. Fleet, 1733) and Declaration and Confession of Matthew Cushing (Boston: Kneeland & Green, 1734). Fleet’s innovations, according to Daniel Cohen, made him “a key transitional figure” for illustrating the secularization of the Boston book trade; Cohen, Pillars, 267n80; also 18–­23. 12. Cohen, Pillars, 23; Williams, Pillars, 13–­19. 13. Henry Halbert, The Last Speech and Confession of Henry Halbert (Philadelphia: Anthony Armbruster, 1765), 7, 8. 14. Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books,” in Davidson, Reading in America, 30–­31. 15. On “literacy events,” see my introduction. 16. Darnton, “What Is the History of Books,” 30. 17. Samuel Moody [also spelled Moodey], Summary Account of the Life and Death of Joseph Quasson, Indian (Boston: S. Gerrish, 1726), 10; Samuel Moody, Faithful Narrative of the Wicked Life and Remarkable Conversion of Patience Boston alias Samson (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1738), 18. 18. On the “ordinary Road,” a term coined in 1693 by John Locke to describe the reading sequence of “the Horn-­Book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible,” see Monaghan, Learning, 13, 81. 19. David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 14. 20. Quoted in David D. Hall, “Readers and Writers in Early New England,” in Amory and Hall, Colonial Book, 122. 21. Nord, Faith in Reading, 15. 22. David D. Hall and Elizabeth Carroll Reilly, “Practices of Reading,” in Amory and Hall, Colonial Book, 379. On regional differences in education in the middle colonies, see Edward E. Gordon and Elaine H. Gordon, Literacy in America: Historic Journey and Contemporary Solutions (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 37–­54. 23. David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 164. On New England reading practice, which “took place slowly and with unusual intensity, in contrast to the faster pace and casualness of mid-­nineteenth-­century reading,” see also 57. 24. By 1750, this sequence was primer, speller (spelling book), Psalter (Book of Psalms), the New Testament, and the full Bible; see Monaghan, Learning to Read, 6. 25. Hall, “Readers and Writers,” 122. Proscriptions against idle and cursory reading were still common a century later. In the 1840s, The American Tract Society worked feverishly to instruct readers in the proper habits and manners of readings; see Nord, Faith in Reading, 114–­129, 161–­163.



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26. Monaghan, Learning to Read, 37. On the increased professionalism of writing instruction, see also 273–­293. 27. On “miraculous conversion” narratives during the Great Awakening, see Daniel E. Williams, “‘Behold a Tragic Scene Strangely Changed into a Theater of Mercy’: The Structure and Significance of Criminal Conversion Narratives in Early New England,” American Quarterly 38, no. 5 (1986): 827–­847; Cohen, Pillars, 66–­72. On the Great Awakening’s effects on print culture in the middle colonies, see James N. Green, “English Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin,” in Amory and Hall, Colonial Book, 259–­261. 28. Williams, “Behold,” 830–­831. 29. Reading literacy, it should be noted, was a negligible component of the popular colonial practice known as “benefit of clergy.” Benefit of clergy was widely used in the colonies and later in slave states. Its purpose was to give judges broader discretionary control over harsh sentences for first-­time offenders, similar to pardons. The practice originated in England during the Middle Ages in order to move priests and monks from secular to ecclesiastical courts. By 1603, English courts, for certain felonies, extended the benefit to many first time felons who could read. In 1706, English courts abolished the literacy test; thus, after 1706, literacy was no longer an important determiner over who could plead the clergy. Jeffrey Sawyer, “‘Benefit of Clergy’ in Maryland and Virginia,” American Journal of Legal History 34 (1990): 49–­68; Michael Royster, Shannon M. Barton-­Bellessa, and William Mackey, “Benefit of Clergy,” in Encyclopedia of Community Corrections, ed. Shannon M. Barton-­Bellessa (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012), 23–­24. 30. Esther Rodgers, “Declaration and Confession of Esther Rodgers,” in John Rogers, Death the Certain Wages of Sin to the Impenitent (Boston: B. Green and J. Allen, 1701), 128–­129. 31. Moody, Faithful Narrative, 34. 32. Thaddeus MacCarty, The Guilt of Innocent Blood Put Away: A Sermon Preached at Worcester. . . . (Worcester: Isaiah Thomas, 1778), 33–­34. 33. John Webb, The Greatness of Sin Improved by the Penitent . . . With an Appendix . . . . (Boston: S. Kneeland & T. Green, 1734), [31]. 34. Moody, Summary Account, 27, 9–­10. 35. Rodgers, “Declaration,” 121–­122. 36. Arthur Browne, Religious Education of Children Recommended. . . . (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1739), 13. 37. James Diman, A Sermon, Preached at Salem. . . . (Salem: Samuel and Ebenezer Hall, 1772), 23. 38. “A Short Account of the Life of Elizabeth Colson, a Molatto Woman, who now must Dye for the Monstrous Sin of Murdering her Child,” New-­England Weekly Journal, June 19, 1727. The newspaper’s editor, Samuel Kneeland, later solicited an account directly from prisoner Rebekah Chamblit in 1733 and published an eight-­page narrative of the life and conversion of Indian servant Patience Boston in 1735. 39. Eliphalet Adams, Sermon Preached [at] . . . the Execution of Katherine Garret, an Indian Servant. . . . (New London: T. Green, 1738), 39, 43. For an expanded reading of Garret’s confession, see Jodi Schorb, “Seeing Other Wise: Reading a Pequot Indian Execution Narrative,” in Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology, ed. Kristina Bross and Hilary Wyss (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 142–­161.

194

Notes to Pages 33–39

40. Moody, Faithful Narrative, 1. 41. Adams, Sermon, 38. 42. Moody, Faithful Narrative, 2, 6. For an alternative reading of confession, voice, and authority in the Boston narrative, see Tamara Harvey, “‘Taken from Her Mouth’: Narrative Authority and the Conversion of Patience Boston,” Narrative 6, no. 3 (1998): 256–­270. 43. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998), 27–­28. 44. Owen Syllavan, A Short Account of the Life of John ****** Alias Owen Syllavan. . . . (Boston: Green & Russell, 1756), 8–­9. 45. Abraham Johnstone, The Address of Abraham Johnstone, A Black Man . . . To the People of Color (Philadelphia: Printed for the Purchasers, 1797), 7. 46. Cotton Mather, Tremenda . . . . (Boston: B. Green, 1721), 32. 47. Ibid., 33. 48. Ibid., 38. 49. Ibid., 23. On early black Atlantic authors self-­fashioning through literacy, including John Marrant, who constructs himself as a “literate black man from another world,” see Henry Louis Gates Jr. and William Andrews, Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives of the Enlightenment 1772–­1815 (Washington, DC: Basic Books, 1998), xi, 4, 12. 50. C. Mather, Tremenda, 23, 38. 51. Jennifer E. Monaghan and Ross W. Beales, “Literacy in Schoolbooks,” in Amory and Hall, Colonial Book, 382. 52. Monaghan, Learning to Read, 144. 53. Cotton Mather, The Negro Christianized (Boston: B. Green, 1706), 23. 54. C. Mather, Diary, I:579; II:271–­272. By 1716, he determined that Onesimus had grown “wicked” and “Froward” [sic] and fretted about how to replace him; Diary, II:363. 55. C. Mather, Diary, II:442; Monaghan, Learning to Read, 244. 56. Mark S. Weiner, “This ‘Miserable African’: Race, Crime, and Disease in Colonial Boston.” Commonplace 4, no. 3 (2004), www.common-­place.org/vol-­04/ no-­03/weiner/. 57. Moody, Summary Account, [Title page], 2, 20. 58. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 8 (Boston, 1802; repr., Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1856), 173; Enoch Pratt, Comprehensive History, Ecclesiastical and Civil, of Eastham (Yarmouth: W. S. Fisher, 1844), 39. 59. From a 1674 letter to Daniel Gookin from Richard Bourne, who surveyed the Cape tribes and reported on their literacy rates in detail; reprinted in Jill Lepore, “Literacy and Reading in Puritan New England,” in Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary, ed. Scott E. Casper, Joanne D. Chaison, and Jeffrey D. Groves (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press and the American Antiquarian Society, 2002), 23–­24. On early Indian education, see Margaret Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–­1783 (1988; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 101–­128; Monaghan, Learning to Read, 46–­80, 166–­190. 60. Moody, Summary Account, 3–­4. 61. Ibid., 6–­7. 62. Province and Court Records of Maine (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1928), xxxii. 63. Moody, Summary Account, 18, 14, 20.



64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Notes to Pages 40–45

195

Ibid., 12, 20, 9–­10. Quoted in Szasz, Indian Education, 192. Moody, Summary Account, 29. Cohen, Pillars, 71. Monaghan, Learning to Read, 144. Jeremy Bonner with Anthony George, “Religion,” in New England:The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures, ed. Michael Sletcher (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), 370. Monaghan, Learning to Read, 143. Ibid., 143. Moody, Summary Account, 9–­10. Ibid., 11, 41. Moody, Faithful Narrative, 35, i. Moody, Summary Account, 41. William Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–­1835. 1st paperback ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 20; see also Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–­1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 79–­81. Ibid., 17. Green, “English Books,” 248. David D. Hall, “The Atlantic Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book, 155. Around 1740, a “cosmopolitan alternative” to traditional literacy had emerged, marked by gentlemen’s libraries, coteries and clubs, and subscription libraries. These were facilitated by not only the private exchange of manuscripts but also the importation of genteel books from London; Hall, Cultures of Print, 77. Hall, “The Atlantic Economy,” 153–­162; Green, “English Books and Printing,” 292–­295; James Raven, “The Importation of Books in the Eighteenth Century,” in Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book, 186. The number of African Americans, both free and enslaved, totaled 759,000 by 1790. Hall, “The Atlantic Economy,” 153. Gilmore, Reading, 25. On the difference between the British North American and European “reading revolutions” see Elizabeth Carroll Reilly and David D. Hall, “Customers and the Market for Books,” in Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book, 399. On the difference between the American and French “revolution in print,” see Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book, 480. Monaghan and Beales, “Literacy and Schoolbooks,” 380–­381. Williams, Pillars, 12–­13. Ibid., 51, 43. Cohen, Pillars, 22. Ibid., 115. William Linsey, The Dying Speech and Confession of William Linsey . . . for Burglary (Boston: John Kneeland and Seth Adams, 1770). Steven Wilf, Law’s Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 84, 61.While Wilf explores the “problem of authorship” in a genre with multiple hands, he, too, is persuaded that “literacy was not a prerequisite for access to extraofficial legal knowledge” (63). On vernacular discourse replacing sermons, see Wilf, Law’s Imagined Republic, 61–­65, 82–­87.

196

Notes to Pages 46–50

91. Elizabeth Carroll Reilly and David D. Hall, “Modalities of Reading,” in Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book, 407–­410. 92. Sermon titles foreground this split, from the jeremiad themes of Chauncey Graham’s God will Trouble the Troublers of his People (New York, 1759) and Noah Hobart’s Excessive Wickedness, the Way to an Untimely Death (New Haven, 1768) to sermons emphasizing New Light evangelism, such as Thaddeus Maccarty’s Most Heinous Sinners Capable of the Saving Blessings of the Gospel (Boston, 1770). On the changing nature of explanations for crime in sermons, see Seay, Hanging, 74–­75. 93. Cohen, Pillars, 99. See also Seay, Hanging, 59–­75. 94. Enoch Huntington, A Sermon Preached at Haddam . . .With a Sketch of the Life and Character of said Starr (Middletown, CT: Moses H. Woodward, 1797).

Chapte r 2  Cri m e, I nk 1. Francis Lieber, Remarks on the Relation between Education and Crime . . . (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, 1835), 6. 2. On this readership, see chapter 1; on the eighteenth-­century print sphere as court of vernacular legal culture and opinion, see Wilf, Law’s Imagined Republic, 91–­104; see also Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) and the foundational work of Jürgen Habermas (1962) on the bourgeois public sphere, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (rpt.; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 3. Joseph Andrews, An Account of the Trial of Joseph Andrews for Piracy and Murder (New York, 1769), 8. 4. On the rising autobiographical impulse, and the increasing secularism, sensationalism, ideological insurgency, and commercialism of criminal confession accounts, see Cohen, Pillars, 22–­26, 117–­163; Williams, Pillars, 11–­51. 5. Execution accounts were not the only genre to produce such new demands on readers: for the classic study on novels, fear of unmediated reading, and early national reading practice, see Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), especially “Ideology and Genre,” 38–­54. 6. Cohen, Pillars, 99–­100; Williams, Pillars, 11–­13, 33. 7. Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 35. Stewart’s analysis of the eighteenth-­century forger and counterfeit ethnographer George Psalmanazar situates his literary hoax amidst the changing nature of literary production (away from patronage and subscription models and toward more “entrepreneurial modes” of production), the commodification of literary discourse (including printers need to generate sales), and the new “authenticating apparatus” demanded of these changes; Stewart, Crimes, 36. 8. On the processes of literary collaboration and mutual reinforcement that made “authorship . . . less important than authority and credibility,” see Bruce, Origins of African American Literature, 33.



Notes to Pages 52–59

197

9. John Jubeart, The Confession and Dying Statement of John Jubeart (New York: John Stewart, 1769), [1]. 10. Huntington, A Sermon Preached at Haddam, 23. 11. Barnett Davenport, A Brief Narrative of the Life and Confession of Barnett Davenport ([Hartford?: [N.p.], 1780), 5. 12. Thomas Powers, The Narrative and Confession of Thomas Powers, A Negro . . . for Committing a Rape (Norwich, CT, 1796), 4–­6. Chapter 3 treats the impact of scientific racialism in more depth. 13. Arthur, The Life, and Dying Speech of Arthur, A Negro Man . . . (Boston: [Kneeland and Adams], 1768), [1]. On Arthur and the wider use of catalogs to signal “crimes against property,” see DeLombard, In the Shadow, 92–­101. 14. Williams, Pillars, 186. Ames was the subject of numerous broadsides, ballads, and execution sermons, including, notes Williams, nineteen different texts and editions during a four-­month span in 1773. 15. Levi Ames, The Last Words and Dying Speech of Levi Ames (Boston, 1773), [1]. 16. The definition of traditional literacy is from Hall, Cultures of Print, 66. 17. Francis Uss, The Narrative of the Life of Francis Uss ([Poughkeepsie?]: [N.p.], 1789), 3. 18. Ibid., 7. 19. Alexander White, A Narrative of the Life and Conversion of Alexander White (Boston: Powars and Willis, 1784). 20. Ibid., 6, 11, 16, 19, 5. On how White’s confession, together with “high-­way robbers” Richard Barrick and John Sullivan, launched the first mass market crime periodical, The American Bloody Register (Boston: Ezekiel Russell, 1784), see Williams, Pillars, 252–­257. 21. White, Narrative, 22–­23. 22. Ibid., 14, 16, 17, 18. Other narratives that include the typeset signature, date, and location of the prisoner include The Life and Confession of Herman Rosencrantz (Philadelphia: Chattin, [1770]), which concludes, “Herman Rosencrantz, Philadelphia Goal [sic], May 4, 1770” and Johnstone’s Address, which concludes, “ABRAHAM JOHNSTONE, Woodbury jai[1] July 8, 1797.” 23. Isaac Frasier, A Brief Account of the Life and Abominable Thefts of the Notorious Isaac Frasier (New Haven: T. & S. Green, 1768), 3. 24. Ibid., 16. 25. Rachal, “Measuring,” 191–­192. 26. Welch’s broadside included one additional testimony below his signature mark: “We the Subscribers were present when William Welch acknowledged this to be his last Speech and dying Words”; William Welch, The last Speech & Dying Words of William Welch (Boston, 1754), [1]; John Wall Lovey, The Last Speech, Confession, and Dying Words of John Wall Lovey ([New York?], 1773), [1]; Edmund Fortis, The Last Words and Dying Speech of Edmund Fortis, a Negro Man (Exeter, 1795), 12. By the 1820s, a few accounts included facsimiles of engraved signatures. See Winslow Curtis, The Confession of Winslow Curtis alias Sylvester Colson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1827). Responding to charges that Curtis could not write, the printers include a “Fac Simile of his name, as signed by him at the close of his Confession” and invite readers to come to “No. 4 Exchange Street” to view the original; see also John W. Cowan, The Life and Confession of John W. Cowan (Cincinnati: Kendall and Henry, 1835), which includes a “specimen of his style . . . which appears verbatim, with no change

198

Notes to Pages 59–66

of orthography or punctuation, precisely as Cowan wrote it,” along with a “fac simile of Cowan’s signature” (iii). 27. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context” (1972) in Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 8: “For a writing to be a writing, it must continue to ‘act’ and to be readable even when what is called author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed, be it because of a temporary absence, because he is dead, or, more generally, because he has not employed his absolutely actual and present intention or attention, the plenitude of his desire to say what he means, in order to sustain what seems to be written ‘in his name.’” 28. Daniel E. Williams, “Victims of Narrative Seduction: The Literary Translations of Elizabeth (and ‘Miss Harriot’) Wilson,” Early American Literature 28 (1993): 151, 166n13. The first edition of the Faithful Narrative was published in Philadelphia in 1786; for a detailed publishing history of Wilson’s account, see Williams, Pillars, 279–­281. 29. Elizabeth Wilson, A Faithful Narrative of Elizabeth Wilson (Hudson [N.Y.]: Ashbel Stoddard, 1786), 2, 13. 30. Williams, “Victims,” 154; see also 148–­149. 31. Wilson, Faithful Narrative, 8, 14, 3. 32. John Ryer, Narrative of the Life and Dying Speech of John Ryer (Danbury, CT: Nathan Douglas, 1793), 2. 33. George Fisher, The American Instructor, or Young Man’s Best Companion, 9th ed. (Philadelphia: B. Franklin and D. Hall, 1748), 45–­56. 34. Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter-­Writers and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–­1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 38. Bannet offers an extensive comparison of how American printers retooled and adapted British guides to American tastes and needs. 35. Sarah Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 24. 36. Ibid., 14–­15. 37. Ephraim Clark, Sovereign Grace Displayed . . . (Boston: Boyles, 1773), 23–­24. 38. Pearsall, Atlantic Families, 24. 39. Ibid., 6–­7. 40. Clark, Sovereign Grace Displayed, 23. 41. Whiting Sweeting, The Narrative of Whiting Sweeting (Lansingburgh: Sylvester Tiffany, 1791), 21. 42. Wilson, Faithful Narrative, 3. 43. Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 35, 57–­59. 44. Bannet, Empire of Letters, xvii. 45. Johnstone, Address, 2–­3. 46. Ibid., 32–­33, 39. 47. Ibid., 7. On the status of blacks in New Jersey, the rarity of manumissions, and the severe constructions on rural free blacks in the 1780s and 1790s, see Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey: 1612–­1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 162–­ 186. In the decades preceding Johnstone’s arrest, New Jersey passed numerous laws not only restricting slave importation but also limiting the rights of free blacks and restricting their ability to move or travel to New Jersey on the express grounds that limiting the black population would benefit white



Notes to Pages 66–69

199

laborers; see Gary K. Wolinetz, “New Jersey Slavery and the Law,” Rutgers Law Review 50 (1997–­98): 2236, 2241. 48. Steven John Hartnett, Executing Democracy, Vol. 1: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683–­1807 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 136. On the longer tradition of such cross-­racial collaboration, see Bruce, Origins, 1–­92. 49. Hartnett, Executing Democracy, 154–­155. See also Willie J. Harrell Jr., Origins of the African American Jeremiad: The Rhetorical Strategies of Social Protest and Activism, 1760–­1861 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 21–­22; Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 42–­43. The collection, Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, ed. Philip S. Foner and Robert James Branham (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 52–­56, reproduces a portion of the Address. 50. DeLombard, In the Shadow, 149; see also 150–­151. 51. Ibid., 122. DeLombard more broadly claims that the public figure of the black criminal was increasingly used to mediate debates in the newly constituted nation over abolition, the rights (or lack thereof) of free blacks, and competing visions of African American civic and political life. 52. On African American social mobility, slave literacy, and forging passes, see David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-­Century Mid-­Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (April 1999): 259–­264. For a detailed analysis of runaway slave ads that mention literacy, see Antonio Bly, “‘Pretends he can read’: Runaways and Literacy in Colonial America, 1730–­1776,” Early American Studies 6, no. 2 (fall 2008): 261–­294. 53. Johnstone, Address, 42. 54. Ibid., 43, 44, 46. 55. Ibid., 7. 56. Karen C. Chambers Dalton, “‘The Alphabet Is an Abolitionist’: Literacy and African Americans in the Emancipation Era,” Massachusetts Review 32, no. 4 (1991–­92): 545. 57. Gates, Pioneers, 4; see also DeLombard, In the Shadow, 1–­11. 58. Wolinetz, “New Jersey Slavery,” 2242; New Jersey passed laws in 1788 and 1798 requiring slave owners to teach slave children to read. 59. Monaghan, Learning, 244. On Benezet’s Quaker school large enrollment, see Thomas Woody, Early Quaker Education in Pennsylvania (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1920), 243; see also James Pyle Wickersham, A History of Education in Pennsylvania (Lancaster: Inquirer Publishing Co., 1886), 251–­252. 60. Monaghan, Learning, 258–­272, 376. 61. Ibid., 271. 62. Quoted in Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1997), 69. 63. Quoted in Monaghan, Learning, 254; see also 243–­254. On the range of associations among slave-­owning whites toward black literacy, see Konstantin Dierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 249–­260. On slaves’ efforts to acquire literacy and the varied effects of laws prohibiting slaves from reading and writing, see Janet Duitsman Cornelius, “When I Can Read My Title Clear”:

200

Notes to Pages 70–75

Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991). 64. Cooke’s Speech from the Pillory (Boston, 1770), [1]. 65. Seth Hudson, H-­ds-­n’s Speech from the Pillory (Boston, 1762), [1], a fictional broadside ballad attributed to Hudson, who was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, a stiff fine, and four hours on the pillory; Wilf, Law’s Imagined Republic, 92. 66. Although counterfeiting took various forms, including melting and pressing foreign and domestic coin and passing false bills, I focus on the skills and signifying power of counterfeiters that copied bills by hand or engraved plate. 67. Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1996), 5; see also Monaghan, Learning, 273–­278. 68. Monaghan, Learning, 273–­278; Dierks, In My Power, 61–­81. For example, in 1743, George Bickham condensed his massive writing manual, the Universal Penman, into The United Pen-­Men for Forming the Man of Business, which guided aspiring young men in how to write receipts, business letters, and bills of sale; Monaghan, Learning, 292. 69. Quoted in Thornton, Handwriting, 6; Bannet, Empire of Letters, xiii–­xiv, 26–­36. See also Dierks, In My Power, 61–­81. 70. Monaghan, Learning, 275. 71. Quoted in Monaghan, Learning, 285. 72. Thornton, Handwriting, 18–­19. 73. Quoted in Davidson, Revolution, 136. 74. Fisher, American Instructor, 30. 75. Ibid., [title page]; Monaghan, Learning, 278–­285. See also figure 1. 76. Thornton, Handwriting, 17. 77. Ibid., 23. 78. Ibid., 23. On anonymity as virtue in the early Republican culture of print, see Warner, Letters, 108. 79. Kenneth Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial America (1957; rpt., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 160, 189. 80. Ibid., 106–­110. 81. Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25, 32. 82. Ibid., 33. 83. Quoted in Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial America, 11. 84. This overview of counterfeiting is drawn from Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial America; Kenneth Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1955); Mihm, A Nation, 25–­35; see also Stephen Mihm, “The Alchemy of Self: Stephen Burroughs and the Counterfeit Economy of the Early Republic,” Early American Studies 2 (spring 2004): 123–­159. 85. Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial America, 200; see also 186–­209. 86. Syllavan, Short Account, 8. 87. Ibid., 12. 88. Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial America, 7. 89. Syllavan, Short Account, 8–­9. 90. Joseph Bill Packer, A Journal of the Life and Travels of Joseph Bill Packer (Hartford, 1773), 13; Stephen Burroughs, Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs, foreword by Philip F. Gura (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 44–­46, 182–­196, 247–­267, 276–­281.



Notes to Pages 75-84

201

91. William Nelson, ed., Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey (Paterson: Press Printing, 1894), 215. 92. Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial America, 55. 93. Ibid., 65–­66. 94. Ibid., 140, 168, 173–­186, 220–­222; see also Williams, Pillars, 215–­217. According to Scott, this note was made by Bill Packer and passed by fellow gang members David Wilcox and Samuel Ingham, 181. Two of the counterfeiters imprisoned with Packer delivered published accounts and are also discussed in this chapter: John Lovey, whose signature mark appears at the end of the Last Speech, Confession, and Dying Words of John Wall Lovey (1773) and John Smith, whom printers announce as a writing prisoner on the title page of the Last Speech, Confession, and Dying Words of John Smith (New Haven, 1773). 95. Packer, Journal, 3. 96. Ibid., 11, 12, 15. 97. Ibid., 4, 8, 11. 98. Wilf, Law’s Imagined Republic, 74–­77. 99. Burroughs, Memoirs, 3. 100. Mihm, A Nation, 24. 101. Daniel E. Williams, “In Defense of Self: Author and Authority in the Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs,” Early American Literature 25 (1990): 98, 116. See also Larry Cebula, “A Counterfeit Identity: The Notorious Life of Stephen Burroughs,” The Historian 64, no. 2 (2002): 316–­334, which makes a similar argument as Williams but emphasizes Burroughs’s role as schoolteacher. 102. Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–­1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 4. 103. Ibid., 3, 106; see also 42–­46. 104. Thomas Mount, The Confession of Thomas Mount (Newport: Peter Edes, 1791), 18–­21. 105. Ibid., 2. 106. Ibid., 2, 18. 107. William Smith, The Convict’s Visitor, or Penitential Offices (Newport: Peter Edes, 1791), 71, 78. In a comparable reading of the Smith texts, Wilf contrasts Mount’s “guidebook” to Smith’s “wooden affair”; the latter, he argues, attempts to “reassert a language of subordination that had been shunted aside by assertive felons” and tries to enact “linguistic subordination.” Wilf, Law’s Imagined Republic, 86–­87. 108. W. Smith, Convict’s Visitor, 46, 69. 109. Quoted in Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 95. On the early national movement against capital punishment and public execution, see Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum, 57–­62; Masur, Rites of Execution, 50–­70; Myra C. Glenn, Campaigns against Corporal Punishment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); and Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 62–­72, 138–­150. 110. Wilf, Law’s Imagined Republic, 11. 111. Benjamin Rush, “An Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishment,” in Essays, Literary, Moral, and Philosophical, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Thomas and William Bradford, 1806), 138. 112. Ibid., 141, 146, 144. 113. Ibid., 154; see also 150–­156. Numerous histories of punishment, penology, and early national literature note the influence of Rush’s influential address; see Meranze, Laboratories, 120–­138, on the dangerous embodiment of public

202

Notes to Pages 84–92

punishment and public convict labor; Kristin Boudreau, The Spectacle of Death: Populist Literary Responses to American Capital Cases (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), 19–­35, on the disruptive sympathy fostered by the execution of John Young; C. Smith, Prison and the American Imagination, on Rush’s gothic arguments about mystery and deterrence, 54–­ 59; and Hartnett, Executing Democracy, 179–­187, on Rush’s call for terrifying fictions as tools of social control. 114. Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-­ American Culture,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 330. 115. Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Chapte r 3  “What Shall a Convict Do?” 1. Leslie C. Patrick-­Stamp, “The Prison Sentence Docket for 1795: Inmates at the Nation’s First State Penitentiary,” Pennsylvania History 60, no. 3 (1993): 359–­360. Stamp provides a complete transcription of the 1795 docket, the first complete year for which such records are available. 2. Patrick Lyon, Narrative of Patrick Lyon . . . With his Remarks Therein (Philadelphia: Francis and Robert Bailey, 1799), 72–­73. 3. Ibid., 49. 4. Ibid., 50. 5. Twenty-­five years later, the proud workingman, now a well-­regarded hydraulic engineer, commissioned his portrait from artist John Neagle. Notably, Walnut Street prison’s cupola is visible in the portrait’s background; Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 180. Rigal attributes Lyon’s victory and support to the ways that he embodied “the collective suffering and ultimate vindication” of the city’s Jeffersonian-­Republicans after a bruising decade of yellow fevers and political attacks, 189; see also 179–­182. 6. Rush, “An Enquiry,” 152. 7. Ann Carson, The History of the Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson . . . and of her Sufferings in the Several Prisons in that State  .  .  . Written by Herself (Philadelphia: Published by the Author, 1822), 70, 231. On how Carson manipulated both her text and her personae and “sought vindication” not in the “halls of justice or the cells of Walnut Street Prison,” but in the public sphere (204), see Daniel Williams, “‘The Horrors of This Far-­Famed Penitentiary’: Discipline, Defiance, and Death during Ann Carson’s Incarcerations in Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison,” in Tarter and Bell, Buried Lives, 203–­230. 8. Clarke claimed Carson approached her and expressed familiarity with her work, but another intriguing possibility is that the two met in Prune Street Debtor’s prison: Clarke was in Prune Street in 1815; Carson was there possibly between 1812 and 1815. See Mrs. M[ary] Clarke, The Memoirs of the Celebrated and Beautiful Mrs. Ann Carson . . . Whose Life Terminated in the Philadelphia Prison. Second Edition . . . In Two Volumes (Philadelphia, 1838), 2:82; Susan Branson, Dangerous to Know: Women, Crime, and Notoriety in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 19, 36, 90. Branson’s elegant social history of the two women highlights their many parallels—­one an infamous criminal, the other a borderline-­respectable author. 9. Clarke, Memoirs, 2:83. Branson, Dangerous, 13–­23, 69.



Notes to Pages 92–94

203

10. Trials of Richard Smith . . . for the Murder of Captain John Carson (Philadelphia: Desilver, 1816). 11. Branson, Dangerous, 31, 40, 106–­110. 12. Clarke, Memoirs, 2:99, also 2:94–­99. 13. Ibid., 2:103. Desilver and his lawyers were not the only party nervous about putting Carson in print. A shady associate sent on behalf of Carson’s former partners in crime offered Carson and Clarke $750 to not bring the account to press; after all, the criminal underground had its own secrets to protect; Clarke, Memoirs, 2:95. 14. Ibid., 2:103. 15. Ibid., [I:iii], 2:105. 16. Branson, Dangerous, 121. Carson’s ill-­advised acts of writing also came back to haunt her in other ways; she was severely beaten in prison by female cellmates who were themselves behind bars for passing notes that Carson forged; Carson misspelled the name “Stephen Girard” on the notes that the women had attempted to pass, a mistake that lead Dan Williams to conclude with a wry lesson on Carson’s self-­defeating literacy practices: “Carson’s poor spelling paradoxically contributed to her death.” Williams, “Horrors,” 224. 17. Carson’s counterfeiting spoils may have enabled Clarke to finance the second edition. Before her final sentencing, Carson told Clarke, “I have money to print a second edition, if I live to get out; if I die it is yours, and you can get it out.” Carson died in Walnut Street prison the following year. The second edition was sold in New York and Philadelphia with no printer’s name included; Clarke, Memoirs, 2:166. 18. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, 38; on the adaptation of crime literature to a pluralistic culture of legal romanticism, see 167–­246. 19. Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 46, 82. Halttunen’s influential thesis explores how a later era negotiated its contradictory attitudes toward pain, pleasure, and morality through sensational literature. 20. Ibid., 57, 6. 21. Ann Fabian, Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-­Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 77. 22. Ibid., 66. 23. On the enduring importance of antebellum gallows literature for shaping views of black criminality, citizenship, and personhood in the first half of the nineteenth century, see DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows, especially chapters 4 and 5. 24. For a thoughtful critique of how influential histories of the prison have minimized the testimony and creative resistance of prisoners, see Tarter and Bell’s introduction to Buried Lives, 1–­9. Leslie Patrick-­Stamp has devoted extensive scholarship to uncovering Philadelphia prisoners’ perspectives through unpublished archives such as sentencing docket books; see also work by Simon Newman, Billy Smith, and Jennifer Janofsky in Tarter and Bell, Buried Lives. 25. Account of Julia Moore, A Penitent Female, Who Died in the Eastern Penitentiary of Philadelphia, in the Year 1843, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Joseph and William Kite, 1844) was published by the Female Prison Association of Friends and drawn from the experience of Julia Wilt, who was imprisoned in 1839 for seven years for robbery. The tale documents Moore’s drawn-­out bodily affliction, penitence for her intemperate life, endorsement of the virtues of separate

204

Notes to Pages 96–101

confinement, and her pedagogically useful prison death. Erica Hayden identified Wilt through research at the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg; see Erica Hayden, “‘Plunged into a Vortex of Iniquity’: Female Punishment and Criminality in Pennsylvania, 1820–­1860” (PhD diss.,Vanderbilt University, 2013), 218. See also Rev. Ansel Eddy, Black Jacob: A Monument of Grace.The Life of Jacob Hodges an African Negro,Who Died in Canandaigua (Philadelphia: American Sunday School Union, 1842), which recounts the transformative effect of Jared Curtis’s ministry on Auburn inmate Jack Hodges. 26. Sullivan, “Prison Libraries,” Encyclopedia, 510; Sullivan and Vogel, “Reachin,’” 2. 27. Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 260. 28. Quoted in Negley K. Teeters, “The Philadelphia Society for the Relief of Distressed Persons, 1776–­1777,” The Prison Journal 24, no. 4 (1944): 456. 29. Ibid., 457. 30. Rush, “An Enquiry,” 150. 31. Quoted in Teeters, They Were in Prison, 3. The Philadelphia Society for Relieving the Miseries of Public Prisons (PSAMPP) changed its name to the Pennsylvania Prison Society in 1886 and continues to operate by this name. For brevity, all future references are to the “Philadelphia Society” (or, when clear from the context, the “society.”) 32. Teeters, They Were in Prison, 9, 21–­34, 55; Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 142–­ 157, 167–­189. 33. F. La Rochefoucauld-­Liancourt, On the Prisons of Philadelphia. By an European (Philadelphia: Moreau de Saint-­Mery, 1796), 32. 34. Teeters, They Were in Prison, 52. 35. Robert J. Turnbull, A Visit to the Philadelphia Prison (Philadelphia: Budd and Bartram, 1796), 4. 36. La Rochefoucauld-­Liancourt, On the Prisons, 29, 22. 37. Roberts Vaux, Letter on the Penitentiary System of Pennsylvania Addressed to William Roscoe, Esq. (Philadelphia: Jesper Harding, 1827), 11. 38. My synthesis of this early history is primarily drawn from Norman Johnston, “Evolving Function: Early Use of Imprisonment as Punishment,” Prison Journal 89, no. 1 (March 2009): 10S–­34S; Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue; Teeters, They Were in Prison; Rothman, “Perfecting the Prison” and Discovery; LeRoy B. DePuy, “The Walnut Street Prison: Pennsylvania’s First Penitentiary,” Pennsylvania History 18 (1951). 39. Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 173; see also 253–­265. 40. Roberts Vaux, Letter on the Penitentiary System, 9. 41. Graff, Legacies, 260. See also Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–­1783 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–­1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Rothman, Discovery; Brian V. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 42. Graff, Legacies, 263. 43. Ibid., 348; Kaestle, modifying the conclusion that teachers were training future factory workers, notes that, “while these goals [crime prevention, acquiescence] are entirely compatible with work discipline, they are not unique to capitalism”; Kaestle, Pillars, 68. 44. Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 3. 45. Ibid., 4.



Notes to Pages 101–104

205

46. The phrase “trained in literacy” is adapted from Graff, Legacies, 341. 47. The phrase, “cradle of the penitentiary,” in reference to Walnut Street prison, originated with Prussian visitor Dr. Nicholaus Heinrich Julius and was popularized by Negley Teeters; Orlando Lewis, Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs, 1776–­1845 (New York: Prison Association of New York, 1922), 27; Negley K. Teeters, The Cradle of the Penitentiary: The Walnut Street Jail at Philadelphia, 1773–­1825 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1955). 48. Teeters, Cradle, 55; DePuy, “Walnut Street,” 132; Rex Skidmore, “An American Prison School in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 46, no. 2 (1955): 213. 49. The terms come respectively from Teeters, They Were in Prison, 51, and Rex Skidmore, “Penological Pioneering in the Walnut Street Jail, 1789–­1799,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 39, no. 2 (1948): 168. 50. Criminologist John Lewis Gillin, quoted in Teeters, They Were in Prison, 56. 51. Teeters, They Were in Prison, 34–­41; Howard, State of the Prisons in England and Wales (London, 1777). 52. Janet Fyfe, Books Behind Bars: The Role of Books, Reading, and Libraries in British Prison Reform, 1701–­1911 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 15–­20. 53. Jennifer Graber, Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 24; see also 21–­28. On Philadelphia reformers’ distinct union of “Quaker religion with Locke’s empirically based psychology and the penal ideas of Beccaria and John Howard,” see Andrew Skotnicki, Religion and the Development of the American Penal System (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), 31–­38. Paul Kahan cautions against overstating the Quaker influence and observes that of the Philadelphia Society’s 340 members between 1790 and 1830, just 40 percent were Friends; Paul Kahan, Eastern State Penitentiary: A History (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2008), 19. 54. Thomas D. Hamm, The Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–­1907 (Bloomington: Midland, 1992), 21, 5, 25. 55. Board of Inspectors, Minutes, May 1794 to August 1801, Philadelphia City Archives. Hereafter, Archives abbreviated PCA. 56. George Meade, “Directions for the Inspectors,” 26 February 1792, appended in William Bradford, An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death Is Necessary in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Dobson, 1793), 98. 57. First Report of the Board of Inspectors (1791), rpt. in Roscoe, Observations on Penal Jurisprudence and the Reformation of Criminals with an Appendix (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1819), Appendix 1–­2. 58. Lownes, Account of the Alteration and Present State of the Penal Laws of Pennsylvania Containing also an Account of the Gaol and Penitentiary House of Philadelphia, in Bradford, An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary (Philadelphia: Dobson: 1793), 14. 59. Turnbull, Visit, 53. The original language of the 1792 “Directions for the Inspectors” is as follows: “that proper means be used to promote religious and moral improvement, by the introduction of useful books, and procuring the performance of divine service, as often as may,” in Bradford, Enquiry, 98. La Rochefoucauld-­Liancourt offers a similar account in his 1796 description of Sabbath day at Walnut Street: “In the evening another sermon is preached, and books are given to those who request them, of a nature fitted to recal [sic] them to their duty”; La Rochefoucauld-­Liancourt, On the Prisons, 21.

206

Notes to Pages 104–112

60. Turnbull, Visit, 28–­29. 61. Teeters, They Were in Prison, 48–­50. 62. Board of Inspectors, Minutes, 6 February 1798, 27 February 1798, PCA. 63. Ibid., 27 February 1798, PCA. Unfortunately the writing specimens were not preserved. 64. Ibid., 27 July 1798, PCA. 65. Skidmore, “American Prison School,” 213. 66. Teeters, Cradle, 126. 67. Woody, Early Quaker Education, 57–­60. 68. Pennsylvania Prison Society, Minutes, Acting Committee, 16 July 1798, 24 July 1798, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Hereafter, Prison Society abbreviated PPS, and Historical Society abbreviated HSP. 69. Board of Inspectors, Minutes, 27 July 1798, PCA. 70. Ibid. 71. Black males comprised on average 29 percent of men sentenced to Walnut Street Prison’s between 1790 and 1830, while black women accounted for 47.5 percent of the women sentenced to the prison; see Leslie C. Patrick-­ Stamp, “Numbers That Are Not New: African Americans in the Country’s First Prison, 1790–­1835,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 119 (1995), 111–­112, 98. 72. Board of Inspectors, Minutes, 27 July 1798, PCA. In “An American Prison School,” Rex Skidmore, one of first scholars who recognized the importance of this school, reproduces this passage but curiously excises the phrase: “& evinces at once . . . unsuccessful,” 213. 73. Charles Andrews, The History of the New-­York African Free-­Schools (New York: Mahlon Day, 1830), 114, 46–­47. 74. Board of Inspectors, Minutes, 1801–­1807 (vol. 2), 1807–­1812 (vol. 3), PCA. To clarify, the congregate rooms included a Bible, but how often, if ever, they were replenished is less clear. 75. PPS, Minutes, Acting Committee, 20 February 1809, HSP. The contents of Harvey’s letter were not recorded in the minutes. 76. Ibid., 10 April 1809, HSP. 77. On Murray’s English Reader and other nineteenth-­century readers and rhetorics, see Jean Ferguson Carr, Stephen L. Carr, and Lucille Schultz, Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-­Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 81–­144. 78. Teeters, Cradle, 56. 79. PPS, Minutes, 10 April 1809, HSP. 80. Ibid., Minutes, Acting Committee, 29 January 1810, 8 April 1810, 26 April 1810, HSP. 81. Ibid., 15 December 1810, HSP. 82. Ibid., 13 January 1816, HSP. 83. Fyfe, Books Behind Bars, 4–­10, 31. 84. William C. Kashatus III, “The Inner Light and Popular Enlightenment: Philadelphia Quakers and Charity Schooling, 1790–­1820,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 118 (1994): 95; see also 87–­99. 85. Quoted in Kashatus, “Inner Light,” 98. 86. Ibid., 88, 98, 112.



Notes to Pages 112–116

207

87. For a biography of Vaux and his extensive charity work, see Teeters, They Were in Prison, 152–­160.Vaux’s son Richard served as president of the board of inspectors of Eastern State Penitentiary for forty years. 88. PPS, Minutes, Acting Committee, 26 April 1810, HSP. 89. Ibid., 9 October 1820, HSP; Board of Inspectors, Minutes, 15 January 1821, PCA. 90. Quoted in Teeters, They Were in Prison, 78. On Walnut’s decline, see Teeters, Cradle, 86–­103. 91. Carson, History, 229–­230. 92. PPS, Minutes, Acting Committee, 8 May 1822, 12 June 1822, HSP. 93. Ibid., 10 July 1822, HSP. 94. Ibid., 14 August 1822, 11 Sept. 1822, HSP. 95. On Barclay, see Teeters, They Were in Prison, 372–­73, which reprints a portrait of Barclay surrounded by mountains of books and paper. When appointed Acting Committee member at Eastern State in 1831, Barclay again advocated expanding books beyond Bibles and tracts for its prisoners. Barclay served as president of the Philadelphia Society from 1849 to 1885. 96. The list omits the full title or author of its thirteen choices; PPS, Minutes, Acting Committee, 11 Sept. 1822, HSP. 97. Before the establishment of the House of Refuge in 1828, juvenile offenders were housed with adult prisoners in Walnut Street Prison; Teeters, They Were in Prison, 161–­170. 98. Gordon and Gordon, Literacy in America, 81–­88.The movement would become immensely popular in America in the 1830s and 1840s. 99. On the spread of tract societies, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812–­1870 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 70–­97; Paul S. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–­1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978; first paperback printing 1992), 3–­33; Nord, Faith in Reading, 52–­56. 100. PPS, Minutes, Acting Committee, 8 May 1822, 12 June 1822, HSP. 101. Boyer, Urban Masses, 31, 33 102. Ibid., 29. 103. Teeters includes the reports of the 1820 and 1821 visiting committee in full in They Were in Prison, 84. This remained a common refrain in inspectors’ reports; see also the Eighth Annual Report of the Inspectors of the Eastern State Penitentiary of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: J. Thompson, 1837), 9; Tenth Annual Report of the Inspectors of the Eastern State Penitentiary of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Brown, Bicking, & Guilbert, 1839), 9; Eleventh Annual Report of the Inspectors of the Eastern State Penitentiary of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Brown, Bicking & Guilbert, 1840), 5. Hereafter Eastern State Penitentiary of Pennsylvania abbreviated ESP. On Philadelphia’s high immigrant population and citywide social unrest, see Allen Freeman Davis and Mark H. Haller, eds., The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower Class Life, 1790–­1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973). 104. The abolition of slavery, begun in Pennsylvania in 1780, contributed to racial disparities in sentencing. For statistics and analysis on the causes and extent of African American imprisonment at Walnut Street, see Patrick-­ Stamp, “Numbers.”

208

Notes to Pages 116–119

105. Hilary J. Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 39; on the emergence of white opposition to black education, see 21–­43. Philadelphia had a forceful black-­led effort to improve black education; the Augustine Society for the Education of People of Color was formed in Philadelphia to open its own school for black youth. Prince Saunders, a promoter of black education and black emigration to Haiti, reinforced the society’s call for black-­led schools and reproduced the newly formed Augustine Society’s Constitution in his Address Delivered at Bethel Church . . . Before the Pennsylvania Augustine Society (Philadelphia: Joseph Rakestraw, 1818). 106. James Forten recounted to Paul Cuffee his surprise at the three thousand black Philadelphians who attended the January 15 meeting at Bethel to forcefully reject the idea of colonization: a vote inquiring who was in favor of colonization received no “ayes” or hands raised, while a vote asking who was opposed seemed as if “it would bring down the walls of the building.” See Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community 1720–­1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, 2003), 238. 107. James Mease, Observations on the Penitentiary System (Philadelphia: Clark and Raser, 1828), 26–­29, 92; Thomas McElwee, A Concise History of the Eastern Penitentiary of Philadelphia  .  .  . (Philadelphia: Neall & Massey, 1835), 2:139. Mease began circulating his ideas in 1820; he credits the Philadelphia Society in his 1828 report for its support of separate confinement. 108. Mease, Observations, 37, 34–­36. 109. Ibid., 92. 110. PPS, Minutes, Acting Committee, 11 November 1829, HSP. 111. In 1830, black women comprised 3 percent of the state’s female population and 70 percent of Walnut Street’s female population (up from 52.9 percent in 1820). Stamp’s statistics reveal that, across the decades, 47.5 percent of women sentenced to Walnut Street were black, compared to 52.5 percent white; Patrick-­Stamp, “Numbers,” 111. 112. Benjamin Coates, Effects of Secluded and Gloomy Imprisonment on Individuals of the African Variety of Mankind (Philadelphia: John C. Clark, 1843). Coates argued that “the negro, or even the mulatto, is a very different person, in his physical and psychical conformation. . . . Cheerful, merry, lounging, and careless, the Ethiopian American . . . is, as a general rule, constitutionally free from that deep, thoughtful anxiety for the future, so conspicuous in his paler neighbor,” 96. 113. United States Gazette, 19 September 1835, qtd. in Teeters, They Were in Prison, 88. 114. Jennifer Janofsky, “Hopelessly Hardened: The Complexities of Penitentiary Discipline at Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary,” in Buried Lives, edited by Tarter and Bell, 107. Informative histories of Eastern State Penitentiary include Negley K. Teeters and John D. Shearer, The Prison at Philadelphia: Cherry Hill (New York: Columbia University Press for Temple University Publications, 1957); Norman Johnston, Eastern State Penitentiary: Crucible of Good Intentions (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1994) and “World’s Most Influential Prison: Success or Failure?” The Prison Journal 84 (Suppl. 4): 20S–­40S; Jennifer Janofsky, “‘There is no hope for the likes of me’: Eastern State Penitentiary, 1829–­1856” (PhD diss., Temple University, 2004); Eastern State Penitentiary Task Force of the Preservation Commission of Greater



Notes to Pages 120–128

209

Philadelphia, Eastern State Penitentiary: Historic Structures Report (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Historical Commission, 1994); and Kahan, Eastern. 115. Inspectors of the Eastern State Penitentiary, First and Second Annual Report of the Inspectors of the ESP (Philadelphia: Kite, 1831), 10. This comes from the second annual report. 116. Fourth Annual Report of the Inspectors of the ESP (Philadelphia: Printed for the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, 1833), 9. 117. Caleb Smith, “Emerson and Incarceration,” American Literature 78, no. 2 (2006): 210. 118. Smith, Prison, 97–­98. On the monastic tradition and its impact, see Smith, Prison, 81–­112; on Paley’s influence, see Thorsten Sellin, “The Origin of the ‘Pennsylvania System of Prison Discipline,’” The Prison Journal 50, no. 1 (1970): 20–­21. 119. Francis Lieber to Charles Penrose, 22 January 1835; repr. In Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania, vol. 15, ed. Samuel Hazard (Philadelphia: Geddes, 1835), 544–­545. 120. Lieber, Remarks, 4–­9. 121. The 1830 records did not record race; 43.8 percent of the male inmates were between 20 and 29; Leslie Patrick Stamp, “Prisoners’ Presence and Perspectives (1829–­1865),” “1829 Prison Sentence Docket,” “Women in Eastern State Penitentiary,” Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Structures Report, vol. 1. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Historical Commission, 1994), 18–­23. 122. Fourth Annual Report of ESP, 9. Wood reported this in December 1832; it was published in the 1833 report. 123. Fifth Annual Report of ESP, 7, 6. 124. Ibid., 6. 125. First Annual Report of ESP, 4. 126. [Third Annual] Report of the Inspectors of ESP (Harrisburg: Henry Welsh, 1832), 4. 127. Fifth Annual Report of the Inspectors of ESP (Harrisburg: Welsh and Patterson, 1834), 7. 128. Sixth Annual Report of the Inspectors of ESP (Philadelphia: J. W. Allen, 1835), 6. 129. Eighth Annual Report of ESP, 8. 130. “Report on Punishments and Discipline”; repr. In Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania, vol. 1, no. 14, ed. Samuel Hazard (Philadelphia: Geddes, 1828), 212; see Janofsky, “There Is No Hope,” 92–­93. 131. Tenth Annual Report of ESP, 24. 132. Eleventh Annual Report of ESP, 37. 133. State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Records, American Philosophical Society, Thomas Larcombe Papers, Admissions. 134. Ibid. 135. Seventeenth Annual Report of the Inspectors of ESP (Philadelphia: Ed. Barrington and Geo. D. Haswell, 1846), 12. 136. Ibid., 12. 137. Ibid., 12, 7. 138. Charles Dickens, American Notes, for General Circulation (1842; rpt. New York: D. Appleton, 1868), 43–­44. 139. Letter from William Peter to Job R. Tyson, 25 January 1845, Philadelphia; the correspondence was published as “Mr. Dickens’ Report of his Visit to the Eastern Penitentiary,” in the Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy 1 (Philadelphia: Joseph Tatum, 1845), 85–­88; Dickens, American Notes, 43–­44; for

210

Notes to Pages 129–133

a Londoner’s sustained account of this scandal, see Joseph Adshead, Prisons and Prisoners (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1845), 95–­121. 140. Seventeenth Annual Report of ESP, 12–­13, 22. 141. PPS, Minutes, Acting Committee, 11 July 1844, HSP. 142. In January 1837 the population was 385 inmates, of whom “two hundred and twenty are white and one hundred and forty-­one colored males; seven white and seventeen colored females.” Eighth Annual Report of ESP, 24. PPS, Minutes, Acting Committee, 8 September 1831, HSP; see also Eighth Annual Report of ESP of 1837, which reiterates: “The Bible and some tracts containing edifying anecdotes, form their library,” 6. 143. PPS, Minutes, Acting Committee, 11 May 1837, HSP. 144. Ibid., 12 January 1844, 4 January 1856, HSP. 145. Ibid., 9 October 1846, 11 December 1846, 26 February 1849, 13 March 1849, HSP. 146. State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Records, American Philosophical Society, Thomas Larcombe Papers, Admissions. 147. Seventeenth Annual Report of ESP, 12–­13, 22. 148. PPS, Minutes, Acting Committee, 13 April 1852, HSP. 149. Ibid., 8 June 1852, HSP. 150. Twenty-­Fifth Annual Report of the Inspectors of ESP (Philadelphia: B. F. Mifflin, 1854), 36. 151. E[noch]. C. Wines and Theodore W. Dwight, Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States and Canada (Albany:Van Benthuysen and Sons, 1867), 225–­232. 152. Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, “Schools,” in A History of the Book in America, Vol. 2: An Extensive Republic, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelly (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press and the American Antiquarian Society, 2010), 287. 153. Moran and Vinovskis, “Schools,” 290–­291. Only 50 percent of whites aged 5 to 19 attended schools in the Middle Atlantic states in 1840, significantly less than in New England. Between 1840 and 1860, the Middle Atlantic states “significantly narrowed the gap” (291). 154. Smith, “Harry Hawser’s Fate,” 231. 155. This list of current or former penitentiary inmates that published accounts of Walnut Street or Eastern State Penitentiary prior to 1845 is hopefully not exhaustive; some may have published anonymously; others had their lives adapted into cautionary tales by benevolence societies, including the aforementioned Julia Wilt, whose story was adapted into the Account of Julia Moore (1844). 156. Weyler, Empowering Words, 1–­3. 157. Fabian, Unvarnished Truth, 54. 158. PPS, Minutes, Acting Committee, 13, April 1852, HSP. 159. Roberts Vaux, Letter to . . . William Roscoe, [prefatory note], 6. The pamphlet sought to refute William Roscoe, A Brief Statement of the Causes Which Have Led to the Abandonment of the Celebrated System of Penitentiary Discipline (Liverpool: Harris and Co., 1827). On the transatlantic debates that unified Pennsylvania-­ model advocates, see Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 254–­265. 160. Ibid., [prefatory note]. As evidence that the convict’s letter also circulated, see “Letter from a Convict, on the Penitentiary System,” National Gazette and Literary Register, March 24, 1827.



Notes to Pages 133–140

211

161. Roberts Vaux, Letter to . . . William Roscoe, 8, 7. 162. Ibid., 13. 163. Ibid., 13. 164. Ibid., 9. 165. Ibid., 13–­15. 166. Ibid., 13. 167. On Dickens, Peter, and Ryno, see Patrick-­Stamp, “George Ryno, Prisoner Poet, 1840–­1850,” in Eastern State Penitentiary: Historic Structures Report, 140–­ 142; for a sustained analysis of the Dickens scandal and of Ryno’s entrance into a multiple and divided public sphere, see Smith, “Harry Hawser’s Fate.” 168. Harry Hawser, Buds and Flowers of Leisure Hours (Philadelphia: Printed and Published, for the Author, by Geo. W. Loanni Johnson, 1844), [Preface]. 169. Ibid. 170. William Peter, letter to Job Tyson, dated 25 January 1845, in “Mr. Dickens’ Report,” 87. By contrast, Larcombe, largely unimpressed with Ryno’s potential for moral reform, noted in his admission book that inmate #1292 reads and writes, is serving three years on a second conviction for larceny, had a brother that served two terms in Eastern State prison and died there, and “seems to be reckless and hardened,” possessing “little or no sense of shame,” all signs of his poor prospects at reformation. State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Records, American Philosophical Society, Thomas Larcombe Papers, Admissions. 171. Hawser, Buds and Flowers, 10, 11, 19, 64. 172. Ibid., 56, 27. Notable analyses of Ryno’s poems include Patrick-­ Stamp, “George Ryno,” 140–­142; Smith, “Harry Hawser’s Fate,” 233–­234. 173. Adshead, Prisons and Prisoners, 105–­112; Charles and John M. Spear, Voices from Prison: Being a Selection of Poetry from Various Prisoners Written within the Cell (Boston and London: C. & J. M. Spear, 1847), 51–­54; Ryno’s signed copy to then-­captain Stringham is held by the New York Public Library. Ryno returned to Eastern State Penitentiary in 1848, convicted of larceny and sentenced to two years and one month; his 1848 record lists his vocation as “sailor and barber”; Teeters and Shearer, Prison at Philadelphia, 126–­127. 174. Smith, “Harry Hawser’s Fate,” 234, 248.

Chapte r 4  Writte n by One Who Knows 1. Anon., [Coffey,W. A], Inside Out; or, An Interior View of the New-­York State Prison (New York: James Costigan, 1823), iii. 2. John Maroney, Narrative of the Imprisonment of John Maroney in the Prisons of New-­York and Auburn from 1821 until 1831 . . . Written by Himself (Newburgh, NY: Charles Cushman, 1832); Col. Levi S. Burr, A Voice from Sing Sing, Giving a General Description of the State Prison . . . and a Synopsis of the Horrid Treatment of the Convicts in that Prison (Albany, 1833); Horace Lane, Five Years in State’s Prison; or Interesting Truths, . . . Represented in a Dialogue between Singsing [sic] and Auburn (New York: Luther Pratt and Sons, 1835); William Joseph Snelling, The Rat-­Trap, or Cogitations of a Convict in the House of Correction (Boston: G. N. Thompson, 1837); James Brice, Secrets of the Mount-­ Pleasant State Prison, Revealed and Exposed (Albany: Printed for the author, 1839). See also the anonymously published, A Peep into the State Prison, at Auburn, NY, with an Appendix, by One Who Knows (Auburn, NY, 1839).

212

Notes to Pages 140–146

3. Fabian, Unvarnished Truth, 54; on the continued marketability of accounts by the condemned, see 49–­78; Karen Halttunen, “Gothic Mystery and the Birth of the Asylum: The Cultural Construction of Deviance in Early-­Nineteenth-­ Century America,” in Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History, ed. Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 42. 4. Halttunen, “Gothic Mystery,” 44, 42. Halttunen offers an array of examples, from anti-­Catholic accounts—­Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836) and Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent (1835)—­to crime accounts, such as Jonathan H. Green’s Secret Band of Brothers (1847), to city mysteries, including Ned Buntline’s The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life (1848), George Lippard’s Quaker City; or The Monks of Monk Hall (1845), and George G. Foster, New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (1849); to asylum and prison accounts, featuring Isaac Hunt’s Astounding Disclosures! Three Years in a Mad-­House. By a Victim . . . (1852) and Brice’s Secrets of the Mount-­Pleasant State Prison (1839). 5. Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 205. 6. Ibid., 205. 7. Coffey, Inside Out, ix. 8. Burr, Voice from Sing Sing, 16. 9. Ibid., 6. 10. Ibid., 17–­18, 46–­47. 11. Coffey, Inside Out, v. 12. Burr, Voice from Sing Sing [2]. The extant copy at Sam Houston State Library Special Collections does not contain any appendix. 13. Ibid., 14. Similarly, The Rat-­Trap; or Cogitations of a Convict in the House of Correction (Boston, 1837) exposed ill treatment in Boston’s workhouses and justified publishing on the grounds that the state’s carceral institutions are publicly funded. 14. Horace Lane, The Wandering Boy, Careless Sailor, and Result of Inconsideration: A True Narrative (Skaneateles, NY: L. A. Pratt, 1839), 199. On Lane’s career as a sailor, prisoner, and indigent, see Myra C. Glenn, “Troubled Manhood in the Early Republic: The Life and Manhood of Sailor Horace Lane,” Journal of the Early Republic 26, no. 1 (2006), 59–­93; see also Glenn, Jack Tar’s Story: The Autobiographies and Memoirs of Sailors in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–­2, 20–­36. 15. Preface to Lane, Five Years, [N.p.]. The account is structured as an imagined dialogue between two inmates, Singsing and Auburn, weighing their respective roads to perdition and the very different treatment they received in their respective institutions. 16. Lane, Wandering Boy, 210. 17. Ibid., 210–­211. 18. On the rising literature of legal romanticism, which merged the legal discourse of trial accounts with the literature of romantic sentimentalism, see Cohen, Pillars, 165–­194. After 1830, slave narratives eclipsed gallows literature, as “new models of black selfhood” emerged to represent “individualized black subjects’” encounters with the law; DeLombard, In the Shadow, 4–­6. 19. For attacks on “evil communication,” “destructive communication in the night rooms,” and “unrestrained intercourse” in many state prisons, see the Third Annual Report of the . . . Prison Discipline Society, Boston, 1828, 6, 7, 8.



Notes to Pages 146–148

213

20. My overview of New York prison reform is drawn primarily from W. David Lewis, From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, 1796–­1848 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), 13–­15; Julius Goebel Jr. and T. Raymond Naughton, Law Enforcement in Colonial New York: A Study in Criminal Procedure (1644–­1776) (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1944); see also Graber, Furnace, 24–­25. 21. Samuel L. Knapp, The Life of Thomas Eddy (New York: Conner and Cooke, 1834), 41. The appellation refers to renowned British prison reformer John Howard. 22. Eddy was held for roughly nine days in Monmouth after being accused of being a Loyalist spy during the Revolutionary War; Knapp, Life of Thomas Eddy, 50. 23. In 1796 New York abolished the death penalty for all crimes except murder and treason, forbade corporal punishment, and approved two penitentiaries to house prisoners convicted under the revised codes and serving sentences longer than one year: one in the Greenwich neighborhood of New York City and another, never brought to fruition, in Albany. Public executions continued in New York until 1835, after which they became private. My account of Eddy and Newgate’s early years is drawn from Thomas Eddy, Account of the State Prison or Penitentiary House in the City of New York (New York: Isaac Collins and Son, 1801); Knapp, Life of Thomas Eddy, 42–­74; D. Lewis, From Newgate, 3–­53; Graber, Furnace, 21–­48. 24. Newgate’s population still included a sizeable portion of young offenders and the insane. The question of how best to serve young offenders and the insane would persist and fueled the opening of the House of Refuge in 1824 and the Bloomingdale Asylum in 1825. After numerous reports of riots, the legislature in 1819 made flogging, irons, and stocks legal (with certain restrictions) at Newgate and Auburn; D. Lewis, From Newgate, 29–­37, 46–­47. 25. T. Eddy, Account, 70. 26. D. Lewis, From Newgate, 30–­33. 27. T. Eddy, Account, 32. Eddy does not clarify whether this privilege was extended to female inmates. 28. Graber, Furnace, 28. Graber cites the influence of Quaker ideas about children’s education, “disciplined living,” and serving the needy, but she notes a conceptual blind spot in Eddy’s plan: “Newgate’s inhabitants were not Quaker children. These criminals were not reared in Friends communities and decent schools. They were adults who had experienced traumatic migrations, urban poverty, and a world that offered few possibilities for their material success. They were the city’s newly arrived immigrants and country folk, the poorest of its residents” (44). 29. New York (State) Prison Department, Report of the Inspectors of the State Prison (Albany: Loring Andrews, 1799), 4. 30. T. Eddy, Account, 53. 31. Ibid., 18.The women’s courtyard abutted the congregate worship space, allowing for the possibility of segregating the sexes for divine service. Elizabeth Fisher, incarcerated from 1801 to 1806 at Newgate, makes no mention of a school despite being recognized for good conduct and behavior; Elizabeth Fisher, Memoirs of Mrs. Elizabeth Fisher of the City of New York. . . . Written by Herself (New York: Printed for the Author, 1810), 39–­48. 32. T. Eddy, Account, 54–­55.

214

Notes to Pages 148–151

33. Ibid., 53–­54. 34. The status of the school is less clear between 1804, when Eddy left Newgate, and 1807, when Stanford arrived. 35. A confluence of factors led to Newgate’s demise and 1828 closure: city labor disputes; lack of state funding; the War of 1812; wide-­scale poverty and unemployment, which disproportionately impacted free blacks and immigrants; the economic panics of 1818 and 1820, which strained Newgate’s manufacturing industries; overcrowding; and the wide use of indiscriminate pardons; D. Lewis, From Newgate, 34–­53; see also Graber, Furnace, 48–­54. 36. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 34–­67; see also Carl F. Kaestle, Joseph Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement: A Documentary History (New York: Teachers College Press, 1973). 37. T. Eddy, Account, 53–­54. 38. On Eddy’s departure from Newgate, see D. Lewis, From Newgate, 34–­35. 39. Eddy to Patrick Colquhoun, 20 June 1804, in Knapp, Life of Thomas Eddy, 207; also 206–­216. 40. Eddy to Patrick Colquhoun, 9 September 1805, in Knapp, Life of Thomas Eddy, 216. 41. Free School Society of New York, An Account of the Free School Society of New York (New York: Collins and Co., 1844), 3–­8. Lancaster schools proliferated in New York’s public schools under the fervent advocacy of DeWitt Clinton through the 1820s and well into the 1830s; David Nasaw, Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 19–­25. It is possible that Stanford was familiar with Lancastrian ideas, although his preferred pedagogy was tract distribution and catechism; he was once the invited guest at the annual meeting of trustees of the New York Free School; Charles G. Sommers, Memoir of the Rev. John Stanford, D.D. (New York: Swords, Stanford, & Co., 1835), 187, 179, 188, 217, 184. 42. D. Lewis, From Newgate, 33. 43. T. Eddy, Account, 33. 44. Sommers, Memoir, 176. 45. On Eddy among the Brotherton, see Brad Devin Edwards Jarvis, “Preserving the Brothertown Nation of Indians” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2006), 177–­179, 188; Knapp, Life of Thomas Eddy, 100–­148. 46. Quoted in Jarvis, “Preserving,” 177. The first Lancaster Indian school, Chicamauga (renamed “Brainerd” in honor of the Indian missionary), opened in 1817 in Tennessee under the supervision of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Brainerd, believing Indians were better suited for manual labor than for universal education, quickly shifted emphasis to manual labor training over reading, writing, and arithmetic. On the rise of Lancastrian Indian education after 1810, see Ronald Rayman, “Joseph Lancaster’s Monitorial System of Instruction and American Indian Education, 1815–­1839,” History of Education Quarterly 21, no. 4 (winter 1981): 395–­409. 47. Eddy’s reformist vision clashed with the priorities of the new state-­appointed inspectors and came to a head after the inspectors instituted a contract labor system in the shoemaking workshop; D. Lewis, From Newgate, 34–­35. 48. Sommers, Memoir, 214; see also 125–­126. 49. Ibid., 113, 163; Hywel M. Davies, Transatlantic Brethren: Rev. Samuel Jones (1735–­ 1814) and His Friends (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1995),



Notes to Pages 151–154

215

191–­196; Fabian, Unvarnished Truth, 71–­77; Graber, Furnace, 54–­62; Rosenberg, Religion, 77–­79. 50. Sommers, Memoir, 188. The Memoir blends Sommers’s biography of Stanford, Sommers’s paraphrases and syntheses of Stanford’s manuscript diaries, and direct transcriptions from Stanford’s diary and papers, which Sommers indicates by quotation marks. All quotes are therefore Sommers’s, except the transcriptions, which I indicate as such. 51. Transcribed by Sommers, Memoir, 215. 52. Graber, Furnace, 54–­55. 53. Ibid., 57. 54. David Paul Nord, “Benevolent Books: Printing, Religion, and Reform,” in Gross and Kelly, Extensive Republic, 233, 230. On the market revolution of evangelical publishing in New England, Philadelphia, and New York’s rivalry, see Nord, Faith in Reading. Printing by stereotype plate was an expensive process in which “a plaster-­of-­paris mold was made of a page form of removable type, and in that mold a thin metal plate was cast,” allowing the mold to be used over and over and avoiding the need to reset type for subsequent editions, Faith in Reading, 46. 55. Transcribed by Sommers, Memoir, 280. Stanford’s catechism was later endorsed by city officials for use by minor offenders at Bellevue, the new penitentiary. 56. On Stanford and evangelical efforts to convert the urban poor, see Carroll Smith-­Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812–­1870 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 51–­ 60. Fabian also observes Stanford’s “unlimited access to inmates and their stories,” Unvarnished Truth, 71. 57. An Authentic Statement of the Case and Conduct of Rose Butler, who was Tried, Convicted, and Executed for the Crime of Arson. Reviewed and approved by the Rev. John Stanford (New York: Broderick and Ritter, 1819); The Brand Plucked Out of the Fire: A Discourse on the Death of George Vanderpool (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1821); A True Account of the Confessions, and Contra Confessions of John Johnson . . . ; taken during his confinement, by the Rev. John Stanford (New York: C. Brown and R. Tyrell, 1824); see also Last Dying Words and Confession of James Reynolds . . . confined in Bridewell, waiting his awful doom;Together with notes taken by the Rev. John Stanford (New York: C. Brown, 1825); and The Commutation of the Punishment of William Miller . . . with the notes of the Rev. John Stanford, who attended him during his confinement in the City Prison (New York: Christian Brown, 1828). For a significant account of how condemned murderer John Johnson and his wife tried to resist Stanford’s relentless efforts to solicit Johnson’s confession, see Fabian, Unvarnished Truth, 72–­78. 58. Transcribed by Sommers, Memoir, 158; see also 117–­119, 137–­139, 150–­163, 182, 188–­194, 199–­200, 219–­227, and 235–­240. 59. Graber, Furnace, 58. 60. Sommers, Memoir, 218. 61. Quoted in Sommers, Memoir, 248. 62. Transcribed by Sommers, Memoir, 218, from an undated document “printed by order of the governors of the New York State Prison,” possibly referring to Governor DeWitt Clinton’s 1818 tour of Newgate. 63. Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy, 26. 64. Prison Discipline Society of Boston, First Annual Report of the . . . Prison Discipline Society, Boston, 1826, 5th ed. (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1827), 26.

216

Notes to Pages 154–159

65. Quoted from “an 1825 letter to a legislative committee on State Prisons” in Knapp, Life of Thomas Eddy, 81. 66. Eddy [to Patrick Colquhoun?], 5 June 1802, in Knapp, Life of Thomas Eddy, 180. 67. Eddy to Samual Hoare Jr., 15 November 1819, in D. Lewis, From Newgate, 51. 68. T. Eddy, Account, 70. 69. Fisher and her brother both claimed legal title to land; Fisher claimed her father had given her title, while her brother disputed this, ultimately persuading a judge that she forged her copy of the deed. According to the tables in T. Eddy, An Account, Fisher would have been one of twenty-­three white women and fourteen black women housed in Newgate in 1801; the vast majority of the women were convicted of petit larceny. T. Eddy, An Account, 77–­79. On Elizabeth Munro Fisher (1759–­1845), see Sharon Halevi, ed., The Other Daughters of the Revolution (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 1–­28. 70. Fisher, Memoirs, 40. Fisher refers to Joseph, the son of Jacob; Genesis 37–­42 describes Joseph’s betrayal by his brothers, imprisonment, rise to power, and release from bondage. 71. Fisher, Memoirs, 42. 72. A nod to the similar use of reading by contemporary prisoners is documented in Megan Sweeney’s powerful study, Reading Is My Window, 3. 73. Coffey, Inside Out, 29. 74. Ibid., 29–­30. 75. Ibid., 148–­149. 76. Coffey’s suggestion that the city was poaching free legal services from him during his 1819–­1822 incarceration seems strange but possible. After New York City loosened restrictions in 1816, allowing hogs to roam city streets (in the wake of declining street-­cleaning services), newspaper accounts were full of complaints of hogs gone wild, snatching children and spreading filth and disease. Yet many residents fought to retain the right to let their pigs roam the streets. In 1822, residents of the Seventh and the Tenth wards petitioned the state to seek exemption from the hog law; the petition was accepted, thus allowing hogs to roam the wards as substitute garbage men; John Duffy, A History of Public Health in New York City, 1625–­1866 (New York: Russell Sage, 1968), 216–­218. If Coffey’s petition circulated in the city, then perhaps his sermons did, too. 77. Coffey, Inside Out, 27. 78. Maroney, Narrative, 11. 79. Ibid., 10–­11. 80. Ibid., 11. 81. Ibid., 10. In March 1824, the Assembly erupted in debate over a petitioner’s attempt to read aloud to the Assembly a memorial from Coffey offering to substantiate portions of Inside Out; the motion to read Coffey’s memorial was eventually withdrawn. (I discuss this effort later in the chapter.) “Legislature of New York, Reported for the New-­York American,” American (New York, NY), March 11, 1824; “Legislature of New York (Reported for the Albany Daily Advertiser),” Statesman (New York, NY), March 16, 1824. On porous visitation and widespread graft and smuggling in Newgate, see McLennan, Crisis, 46–­47. 82. Knapp, Life of Thomas Eddy, 88, 91. 83. Lewis, From Newgate, 54–­65; McLennan, Crisis, 43–­54.



Notes to Pages 159–163

217

84. Colonization societies also drew upon the penitentiary to support their deportation arguments. For example, the Massachusetts Colonization Society in 1832 reported that, compared to low crime in the Liberian colony, American prisons are full: “In New York [free blacks] composed one thirty-­fifth of the entire population, and yet had one-­fourth of all the convicts.” Moreover, laments the society, hundreds of thousands of “nominally free” blacks that have “no interests in common with the community—­at liberty to act, yet have no motive for exertion. Instances of emancipation have not essentially benefitted the African, and probably never will, while he remains among us” (14). The convoluted logic suggests that, because the state incarcerates a disproportionate number of free blacks, this proves that blacks have no interest in American citizenship; Massachusetts Colonization Society, American Colonization Society and the Colony at Liberia (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1832), 14. 85. McLennan, Crisis, 53–­57; D. Lewis, From Newgate, 67, also 60–­63. 86. D. Lewis, From Newgate, 54–­69; most of the remaining inmates who survived the experiment with continuous solitary confinement were pardoned and released in 1823 and 1824. 87. Ibid., 72, also 57–­76. Auburn prison’s most fervent defenders, notes Lewis, were guided more by Calvinist belief in inner depravity than by Quaker faith in “inner light.” On the “religiosity of citizenship” that promoted moral behavior and obedience, see Graber, Furnace, 5. 88. Quoted in D. Lewis, From Newgate, 88, 79. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s trading such insults was a stock feature of the pamphlet wars between defenders and critics of the Auburn versus Pennsylvania models. 89. “Statement of Charles Parks, Deputy Keeper,” in Gershom Powers, Letter of Gershom Powers [to] Hon. Edward Livingston: Read in the Legislature, Jan. 23, 1829 (Albany: Croswell and Van Benthuysen, 1829), 30. On Cray, see D. Lewis, From Newgate, 84–­86. 90. “Conversation with Mr. Elam Lynds,” in G. Beaumont and A. Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 161. 91. Stephen Allen, Observations on Penitentiary Discipline, Addressed to William Roscoe, Esq. of Liverpool England (New York: Totten, 1827), 7. 92. Allen, Observations, 34. 93. D. Lewis, From Newgate, 82. 94. Ibid., 102n63. 95. Allen, Observations, 34–­35. 96. Graber, Furnace, 74. 97. Philip Gura, ed., Buried from the World: Inside the Massachusetts State Prison, 1829–­1831 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2001), xx, xxv–­xxxvi; Graber, Furnace, 95–­101. 98. “Extracts from the 1826 Annual Report,” appended to Allen, Observations, 75. 99. Graber, Furnace, 87–­88; Graber notes the distinction between Stanford’s suffering unto rebirth and Powers’s interest in suffering for the sake of institutional order. 100. Powers, Report, 58, 59. 101. Gershom Powers, A Brief Account of the Structure, Management and Discipline . . . At Auburn (Auburn: Doubleday, 1826), 20–­21; Powers, Report, 58, see also 57–­ 61. Powers reproduces most of the 1826 account in his 1828 report. 102. Lewis, From Newgate, 103–­5; Graber, Furnace, 74.

218

Notes to Pages 163–168

103. Third Annual Report of the . . . Prison Discipline Society, Boston, 1828 (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1828), 60–­61. Hereafter, all references to the Society’s reports are abbreviated as PDS. 104. Powers, Report, 60. This pattern repeated in Massachusetts, where Curtis embraced his new position and reproduced his Sabbath School; by 1832 Curtis had enrolled more than a hundred inmates and listed a roster of nearly five hundred volunteer teachers from Cambridge, Boston, and Charlestown. On Curtis in Massachusetts, see Gura, Buried from the World, xxvii–­xxxi. 105. Fifth Annual Report of the . . . PDS, Boston, 1830 (Boston: n.p., 1830), 349–­350. By 1839 Elam Lynds returned and closed the school (“in accordance with his views of the comparative inefficiency of moral means with physical,” lamented the Boston Prison Discipline Society); Fourteenth Annual Report of the PDS, Boston, 1839 (Boston: Published at the Society’s Rooms, 1839), 39. Near 1840, Lynds resigned and a jubilant Smith reported three hundred convicts, fifty teachers, and a “revival feeling” among the teachers, Fifteenth Annual Report of the PDS, Boston, 1840 (Boston: Published at the Society’s Rooms, 1840), 28. 106. Powers, Report, 61. 107. Lynds was brought back in 1838 to restore efficiency when Auburn’s profits dropped; he resigned in 1839 after more accusations of abuse and neglect of inmates; see D. Lewis, From Newgate, 207; on Smith’s defense of Lynds and his willing submission to the dictates of his superiors, see Graber, Furnace, 124–­130. 108. Maroney, Narrative, 17. 109. Ibid., 32. 110. Ibid., 25. 111. Ibid., 24, 36. 112. Robert Reed [Austin Reed], The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, or the Inmate of a Gloomy Prison. With the Mysteries and Miseries of the New York House of Reffuge [sic] and Auburn Prison Unmasked (circa 1858). Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Caleb Smith and Schomburg Center archivist Christine McKay identified Austin Reed as the author and corroborated his manuscript through prison, newspaper, and court records. 113. Reed, Haunted Convict, [132]. 114. Ibid., [21]. 115. Ibid., [74]. 116. For a thorough analysis of how phrenology shaped modern penology and criminology, see Nicole Hahn Rafter, “The Murderous Dutch Fiddler: Criminology, History and the Problem of Phrenology,” Theoretical Criminology 9, no. 1 (2005): 65–­96. 117. The inmates were housed in temporary shelters while they built their own prison, Second Annual Report of the . . . PDS (1827), 65. On Sing Sing’s origins, see D. Lewis, From Newgate, 52, 136–­137. 118. Fourth Annual Report of the . . . PDS, Boston, 1829 (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1830), 25. On Barrett’s assault by Lynds, see Fifth Annual Report of the . . . PDS, Boston, 1830, 347. For biographical and theological background on the young Barrett, see Graber, Furnace, 107–­116. 119. D. Lewis, From Newgate, 213. On Seward and the era’s humanitarian impulse, see Graber, Furnace, 136–­138.



Notes to Pages 169–174

219

120. Sixteenth Annual Report of the PDS, Boston, 1841 (Boston: Published at the Society’s Rooms, 1841), 37. 121. On the Democrats’ rise and fall and N.Y.P.A., see Lewis, From Newgate, 214–­ 225, 253–­254. 122. On this optimistic and rehabilitative strain in phrenology, see Rafter, “Murderous,” 73–­77; Stephen Tomlinson, Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth Century Social Thought (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 164–­172. 123. Eliza Farnham, in her preface to M. B. Sampson, Rationale of Crime and Its Appropriate Treatment  .  .  . with Notes and Illustrations by E. W. Farnham (New York: D. Appleton, 1846), xix. My history of Farnham is drawn from Georgiana Bruce Kirby, Years of Experience (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1887); Janet Floyd, “Dislocations of the Self: Eliza Farnham at Sing Sing Prison,” Journal of American Studies 40, no. 2 (2006): 311–­325; JoAnn Levy, Unsettling the West: Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby in Frontier California (Berkeley: Heyday, 2004), 1–­19; Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women in State Prisons, 1800–­1935 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 17–­20. 124. Floyd, “Dislocations,” 314. 125. Kirby, Years of Experience, 193–­194; D. Lewis, From Newgate, 239–­240. 126. Kirby, Years of Experience, 193. 127. New York Prison Association, Second Report of the Prison Association of New York (New York: The Association, 1846), 38–­42. Hereafter abbreviated as NYPA. 128. Floyd, “Dislocations,” 318. 129. Farnham, ed., Rationale of Crime, 35–­36n, xix, see also 66–­68n. Her views are similar to Combe’s, who departed from Jefferson by arguing that Africans were capable of great improvements, “blessed with large areas of philoprogenerativeness, concentrativeness, veneration, and hope,” but required European guidance because of “deficiencies in ‘Conscientiousness, Cautiousness, Ideality, and reflection’”; Tomlinson, Head Masters, 112. 130. Eliza Farnham, “Case of Destitution of Moral Feelings,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 21 October 1846, 235. 131. Tomlinson, Head Masters, x, 222, 244–­257. 132. Ibid., 50, 234–­264;Tomlinson traces Horace Mann’s sustained interest in phrenology and American educators’ enthusiasm for the theories of Spurzheim and Combe over the theories of phrenologist Franz Josef Gall. 133. Ibid., 244. See also Charles Caldwell, New Views on Penitentiary Discipline and Moral Education and Reform (Philadelphia: William Brown, 1829), although Caldwell took a much dimmer view than Farnham that prisoners could significantly change. 134. NYPA, “Report of the Committee of Investigation,” Report of the Prison Discipline Committee (NY: The Association, 1846), 48–­65. 135. Ibid., 51. Only one former assistant matron, Sarah Knox, testified against Farnham. 136. Ibid., 53–­56, 64. Books read aloud included the Bible, Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, Combe’s Physiology, Life in Prairie Land, The Life of Columbus, and The Conquest of Mexico. 137. NYPA, “Report of the Committee of Investigation,” 59–­61. 138. Ibid., 59.

220

Notes to Pages 175–186

139. “A Prospect of a Storm,” Hudson River Chronicle, June 30 1846; also quoted in Levy, Unsettling the West, 17–­18. 140. Quoted in Lewis, From Newgate, 248; see also 249. 141. Sampson, Rationale of Crime, 63n. 142. Wines and Dwight, Report, 221. Emphasis added. 143. Coffey, Inside Out, 116. 144. Ibid., 124. 145. Ibid., 191. 146. C. Smith, Prison and the American Imagination, 38–­39, 40. 147. Coffey, Inside Out, 67; Burr, Voice from Sing Sing, 4. 148. “Legislature of New York, Reported for the New-­York American,” American (New York, NY), March 11, 1824; “Legislature of New York (Reported for the Albany Daily Advertiser),” Statesman (New York, NY), March 16, 1824. 149. Maroney, Narrative, 36, 38. 150. Brice, Secrets of Mount Pleasant, 11. 151. Ibid., 45, 57. 152. Brice refers to Josiah Priest, Stories of the Revolution (Albany: Hoffman and White, 1836), featuring “The Captive Boys of Rensselaerville.” 153. Brice, Secrets of Mount Pleasant, 9. 154. Ibid., 42 155. Ibid., 41–­42, 47–­48, 59–­60; see also 46 for additional Burr references. 156. Weyler, Empowering Words, 2.

Afte rword 1. Quoted in Sommers, Memoir, 248; “Extracts from the 1826 Annual Report,” appended to Allen, Observations, 76; Fifteenth Annual Report of the PDS, Boston, 1840, 28. 2. G. Powers, Brief Account, 20–­21; “Statement of Charles Parks, Deputy Keeper,” in G. Powers, Letter, 30. 3. Powers, Report, 56. 4. PPS, Minutes, Acting Committee, 27 July 1798, HSP. 5. First Annual Report of ESP, 4. 6. NYPA, “Report of the Committee of Investigation,” 59–­61. 7. Brice, Secrets of Mount Pleasant, 9. 8. Coffey, Inside Out, 29–­30. 9. Reed, Haunted Convict, [132]. 10. Maroney, Narrative, 17. 11. Ibid., 32. 12. Brice, Secrets of Mount Pleasant, 45, 57. 13. State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Records, American Philosophical Society, Thomas Larcombe Papers, Admissions. 14. Reed, Haunted Convict, [74].

Bi bl i og raphy

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Inde x

abolitionist literature, 9–­10, 66–­67 Account . . . of the Gaol and Penitentiary House of Philadelphia (Lownes), 98, 141 Account of the State Prison or Penitentiary House (Eddy), 141, 148 Account of the Trial of Joseph Andrews for Piracy and Murder (Andrews), 45, 49 ACS. See American Colonization Society Adams, Eliphalet, 32 Address of Abraham Johnstone, A Black Man . . . To the People of Color (Johnstone), 34, 64–­69 Adelphi School, 111–­112 Adshead, Joseph, 137 African American literacy: Abraham Johnstone and black letteracy, 64–­ 69; Austin Reed, 166–­167; black prisoners at Walnut Street prison, 107–­108, 117–­118; collaborative literacies, 9–­10; Joseph Hanno, 34–­ 37; in Thomas Larcombe admissions ledgers, 125–­126 Aikin, John, 115 Allen, Elisha, 46 Allen, Richard, 66, 116 Allen, Stephen, 160, 161–­162 amanuenses: African American literature, 9–­10; Alex Haley and Malcolm X, 2; collaborative literacies, 91–­93, 188–­189n13; Mary Clarke and Ann

Carson, 91–­93; veracity and arbitration of execution narratives, 48–­50, 54–­61, 64. See also dying speeches and warnings Amativeness (Fowler), 173 American Bible Society, 152 American Colonization Society (ACS), 116–­117, 159, 208n106 American Instructor (B. Franklin), 61–­ 62, 71–­72 American Notes, for General Circulation (Dickens), 127–­129, 135, 174 American Sunday School Union, 173 American Tract Society, 152, 153 Ames, Levi, 25, 26, 53 Andrews, Joseph, 45, 49 Anglicanism: Anglican views of black literacy, 41, 69; denominational competition over literacy instruction, 40–­42; Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), 36, 40–­42; Thomas Bray’s Associates, 68–­69, 102, 111 “Auburn” model, 13, 15–­16, 98–­99 Auburn prison: anti-­intellectualism at, 160–­161; Austin Reed’s account of, 166–­167; discipline at, 159–­160, 162; history and inmate experiences, 159–­167; Maroney’s Narrative, 164–­166; Sabbath School, 162–­164, 165; use of solitary confinement, 160 authorship. See writing prisoners

237

238 Index An Autobiography (Davis), 3 The Autobiography of Malcolm X (X), 2 Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 3 Baker, William, 71 Bannet, Eve Tavor, on letteracy, 64 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 115 Barclay, James J., 114–­115, 129 Barrett, Gerrish, 168 Baxter, Richard, 170 Beales, Ross, on African American literacy, 36 benefit of clergy, 193n29 Benezet, Anthony, 68, 105 Bible Association of Friends, 102 Bible study and tract distribution, 103, 113–­114, 115 Bible verses: chosen by Joseph Quasson, 39; Cotton Mather’s “Conference” with Joseph Hanno, 35 Bill, James or Joseph (alias of Joseph Bill Packer), 70, 75–­79, 76 black literacy. See African American literacy Books Through Bars program, 1 Books to Prisoners initiative, 1 Boston, Patience, 27, 29, 33, 42 Boston Prison Discipline Society, 128, 154, 161, 162 Boyer, Paul, on urban tracts, 115 Bradford, Joseph (alias of Joseph Bill Packer), 70, 75–­79, 76 Brady, Mathew, 171 Branson, Susan, on Ann Carson, 93 Bray, Thomas, 68–­69, 102, 111 Brice, James, 180, 184, 185 Brice, Robert, 180 A Brief Account of the Life and Abominable Thefts of the Notorious Isaac Frasier (Frasier), 58–­59 Brooks, William, 30 Brotherton Indians, 150–­151 Browne, Arthur, 31

Bruce, Dickson D., Jr., on African American collaborative literature, 9–­10 Buchanan, James, 30 Buds and Flowers, Of Leisure Hours (Ryno), 10, 132, 135–­138, 140 Bunyan, John, 110 Burr, Levi S., 140, 142, 143–­144, 178, 180–­181 Burroughs, Stephen, 75, 79 Bustill, Cyrus, 66 Butler, Rose, 153 Butterworth, Mary Peck, 76 Byrn, William, 75 Call to the Unconverted Sinner (Baxter), 170 Calvinism, 28, 36, 173, 185–­186 Carson, Ann, 91–­93, 131, 132, 139, 186, 202nn7–­8, 203nn16–­17 catechisms: Catechism for the Use of Youths (Stanford), 153; The Convict’s Visitor (W. Smith), 82–­83 Chamblit, Rebekah, 23–­24 charity schools, 99–­100, 105–­106, 111–­112 Church of England. See Anglicanism city mystery literary genre, 140 Clarke, Mary, 91–­93, 132, 202n8, 203n17 Coates, Benjamin, 117–­118, 129 Coffey, William, 139, 141–­142, 143, 145, 156–­159, 176–­180, 216nn76, 81 Cohen, Daniel A.: on execution narratives and criminal confession literature, 10–­11, 20, 188n13; on publishing shift from religious to secular works, 44; on sensational crime publications, 93 collaborative literacies: African American literature, 9–­10; amanuenses, 91–­93, 188–­189n13; described, 9;

Index 239

Ryno’s Buds and Flowers, 138. See also exposé accounts colonization movement: American Colonization Society (ACS), 116–­ 117, 159, 208n106; Massachusetts Colonization Society, 217n84 Colquhoun, Patrick, 150 Colson, Elizabeth, 32 Combe, George, 169, 170, 171, 173 communications circuit and execution literature, 25–­27, 26 Complete Letter-­Writer, or Polite English Secretary (Crowder), 61 Complete Letter-­Writer, or Young Secretary’s Instructor (Dilworth), 61 Confession, Declaration, Dying Warning and Advice of Patience Sampson, 24 confession literature. See execution narratives Confession of Thomas Mount, 80–­83 congregate literacy: “Auburn” model, 13, 15–­16, 98–­99; Burr’s A Voice from Sing Sing, 140, 142, 143–­ 144, 178, 180–­181; Coffey’s Inside Out, 15, 139, 141–­142, 143, 145, 156–­159, 176–­180, 216nn76, 81; congregate literacy effects, 146, 175–­181; John Stanford, 151–­154, 157, 158; Maroney’s Narrative, 15, 139–­140, 145, 157–­159, 164–­166, 167, 177–­181, 184–­185; Newgate prison, 146–­149, 151–­159; Newgate workhouses, 150; night schools and inmate instructors, 145, 148–­ 149, 150, 151–­152, 154–­155, 157; Sing Sing prison, 147, 161, 167–­ 175; Thomas Eddy, 146–­151, 156. See also “Auburn” model; exposé accounts Congregationalists, 40–­42, 186 Constitution of Man (Combe), 173 contaminating contact: discussed in Coffey and Burr accounts, 178;

between prisoners, 99, 118–­119; between prisoners and the public, 83 contemporary prison autobiographies, 2–­3 contemporary prison literacy programs, 1–­2 conversion narratives, 23, 24, 39–­42 The Converted Sinner (sermon), 23 The Convict’s Visitor (W. Smith), 82–­83 Cornwell, Samuel, 46 correspondence. See letter writing correspondence guides, 61–­62 Cosens, John, 38 counterfeiters and subversive literary practices, 70–­80, 76, 77 counterfeiting: counterfeit currency crisis, 73–­74; as cultural norm, 79–­ 80; Joseph Bill Packer, 70, 75–­79, 76; Owen Syllavan, 34, 47, 70, 72, 74–­75 Coyle, William, on prison libraries, 5–­6 Cray, John D., 160–­161 criminal intimacy, 85, 154–­155 Crisp, William, 24 Crowder, Stanley, 61 culture of sentiment, 49, 63–­64 currency counterfeiting, 70, 72–­75 Curtis, Jared, 15, 159, 161–­162, 163, 164, 165–­166, 178 Cushing, Matthew, 30 Dalton, Karen Chambers, on black literacy, 68 Darnton, Robert, on communications circuit, 25 Davenport, Barnett, 52 Davidson, Cathy, on literacy definitions, 12 Davis, Angela, 3 Day, John, 126 Dean, John, 150

240 Index “Declaration” (Rodgers), 31 Defoe, Daniel, 111 DeLombard, Jeannine: on Abraham Johnstone’s Address, 66–­67; on gallows literature and black political voice, 10, 197n13 DePuy, LeRoy, on Walnut Street prison, 101 Desilver, Robert, 92–­93, 132 dialogic letter writing, 62–­63 Dickens, Charles, 127–­129, 135, 136, 170, 174 Dilworth, W. H., 61 display, theater of public executions, 21–­23 Dodd, William, 110 Doddridge, Philip, 110 “domestic education” movements, 114–­115 Dwight, Louis, 15, 156, 160, 161–­162, 163, 168 Dwight, Theodore, 130, 175–­176 The Dying Speech and Confession of William Linsey . . . for Burglary (Linsey), 44–­45 dying speeches and warnings. See execution narratives Eastern State Penitentiary: Charles Dickens’s report on, 127–­129, 135, 136; construction, 113; labor vs. reflection debates, 121; low levels of incoming prisoner education, 121–­ 123; moral and religious instruction of inmates, 123–­126, 129–­130; prisoners’ desire for education, 126; secular education of inmates, 127–­131; separation and solitude of inmates, 119–­121; skepticism about education of prisoners, 15. See also “Pennsylvania” model Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature (Trimmer), 114

Eddy, Thomas, 15, 146–­151, 154–­155, 156 Edes, Peter, 82 Edgeworth, Maria, 114–­115, 118 Edmonds, John, 169 education: access to education and black servitude, 34–­37; American Colonization Society (ACS) and, 116–­117, 159, 208n106; of black female prisoners at Walnut Street prison, 117–­118; black letteracy, 64–­ 69; of black male prisoners at Walnut Street prison, 107–­108; childhood education of writing prisoners, 51–­ 53; and debates over prison reform, 182–­183, 185–­186; denominational competition over literacy instruction, 40–­42; diffusion and growth of mass literacy, 99–­100; in early penitentiaries, 14–­15; literacy education at Walnut Street prison, 101–­111, 112–­115, 117–­119; low levels of incoming prisoner education at Eastern State Penitentiary, 121–­123; mass education and literacy, 99–­101, 131; motivation and prisoners’ literacy practices, 31–­32; night schools and inmate instructors at Newgate prison, 145, 148–­149, 150, 151–­152, 154–­155, 157; prison libraries, 4–­6; rationales for prisoner education, 95–­96; reading instruction, 11, 36, 43, 110; skepticism about education of prisoners, 15, 132–­133; in Walnut Street prison, 15, 89–­90, 101–­111, 112–­115, 117–­119. See also African American literacy; missionary education practices; moral instruction Effects of Secluded and Gloomy Imprisonment on Individuals of the African Variety of Mankind (Coates), 118 Elements of Morality (Salzmann, trans. Wollstonecraft), 115

Index 241

Encyclopedia of Library History (Sullivan and Vogel), 4–­5 English Gaols Act of 1823, 111 English Reader (Murray), 110 the Enlightenment: and emergence of horror literature, 93–­94; environmental determinism and theories of crime, 46; prison reform movements, 83–­84 entrepreneurship of counterfeiters, 72–­73, 196n7 environmental determinism and theories of crime, 46 Evenings at Home (Aikin and Barbauld), 115 Every Man his Own Letter-­Writer (Wallace), 72 execution narratives: authorship and voice, 8–­9, 10; biographical lives of prisoners and dying speeches, 24–­25; communications circuit and literacy events, 25–­27, 26; execution sermons, 22–­24; and first age of mass literacy, 42–­47; miraculous conversion accounts, 23, 24, 39–­42; prison literacy overview, 10–­11, 13–­14; signature marks and veracity of execution narratives, 58–­60; and theater of execution, 22–­24 execution sermons. See execution narratives exposé accounts: Brice’s Secrets of the Mount-­Pleasant State Prison, 15, 140, 178, 180–­181; Burr’s A Voice from Sing Sing, 140, 142, 143–­144, 178, 180–­181; Coffey’s Inside Out, 15, 139, 141–­142, 143, 145, 156–­ 159, 176–­180, 216nn76, 81; “The Haunted Convict” (Reed exposé), 166–­167; Maroney’s Narrative, 15, 139–­140, 145, 157–­159, 164–­166, 167, 177–­181, 184–­185

“Extract of a Letter from a Convict on the Penitentiary System,” 133–­135 Fabian, Ann: on authenticity and voice of witness, 94; on cash value of criminal confessions, 140 Faithful Narrative of Elizabeth Wilson (Wilson), 60–­61 Faithful Narrative of the Wicked Life and Remarkable Conversion of Patience Boston (Moody), 33, 42 family dislocation and separation, 63, 157–­158 Farnham, Eliza, 15, 146, 167–­168, 169–­175, 172, 183, 184 “fireside education” movement, 114–­115 Fisher, Elizabeth Munro, 155–­156, 216n69 Fisher, George, 61, 71–­72, 77 Five Years in State’s Prison (Lane), 144–­145 “Flash Song” of Thomas Mount, 80–­81 Floyd, Janet, on Eliza Farnham, 170 Fly, William, 23 The Folly of Sinning (Mather), 23 Fortis, Edmund, 59 Foucault, Michel: on simultaneous spread of prisons and schools, 100; on the “spectacle of the scaffold,” 21 Fowler, Orson, 173 Foxcroft, Thomas, 24 Franklin, Benjamin, 43, 61–­62, 69 Franklin, H. Bruce, on prison writers as authors and politicians, 16 Frasier, Isaac, 58–­60 Free African Society, 66 Frost, Samuel, 46 Fry, Elizabeth, 111 Fuller, Margaret, 170

242 Index gallows literature. See execution narratives Garret, Katherine, 32–­33 Garrigues, A. M., 114 Gerrish, Samuel, 40 Gibbs, Charles, 93 Gilmore, William, on mass literacy, 42–­43 “good books,” social displacement and prisoner literacy, 32–­33 “good Reader” appeals, 42 Goodwin, Solomon, 54, 62, 63 Graber, Jennifer, on “furnace of affliction,” 152, 177, 205n53, 213n28 Graff, Harvey, on growth of mass literacy, 100 Great Awakening, 13, 24, 29, 43 Greeley, Horace, 169 Halbert, Henry, 24–­25 Haley, Alex, 2 Hall, David D.: on literacy definitions, 12; on Protestant literacy practices, 28; on sponsored writing, 9 Halttunen, Karen: on confession literature, 10, 20; on criminals as “moral aliens,” 63–­64, 94; on emergence of horror literature, 93–­94; on humanitarian discourse of pain, 84; on prison exposés, 140 Hanno, Joseph, 13, 34–­37 Hanway, Jonas, 120 Harris, Sharon, on confession literature, 10 “Harry Hawser” pseudonym, 10, 135–­136 Hartnett, Steven, on Abraham Johnstone’s Address, 66 Harvey, Samuel, 109 “The Haunted Convict” (Reed exposé), 166–­167 Heath, Shirley, on literacy events, 11

Henry, Caroline, 125 The History of the Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson (Carson), 91–­93, 113 home schooling, 114–­115 Hopkins, Samuel M., 143, 160 Howard, John, 102 Huffsey, Samuel, 65–­66 Hunt, Eliza, 174, 184 Huntington, Enoch, 46–­47 “idle” reading, 45–­46, 51, 192n25 The Importance of a Religious Education Illustrated and Enforced (Frost), 46 Improvements in Education (Lancaster), 149 incarceration: “Auburn” model, 13, 15–­16, 98–­99; “Pennsylvania” model, 13, 14–­15, 95–­101 Indians. See Native Americans Inside Out (Coffey), 15, 139, 141–­ 142, 143, 145, 156–­159, 176–­180, 216nn76, 81 The Instructor; or Young Man’s Best Companion (Fisher), 61, 71–­72, 77 intense reading practice: Elizabeth Munro Fisher, 155–­156; jailhouse reading pedagogy, 29–­34, 49, 53; Joseph Quasson, 37, 38–­40; William Coffey, 156 Jay, John, 150 Johnson, Ann, 126 Johnson, Henrietta, 122 Johnson, John, 153 Johnstone, Abraham, 14, 34, 64–­69 Johnstone, Sally, 67–­68 Jones, Absalom, 66 Jones, Frank, 126, 185 A Journal of the Life and Travels of Joseph Bill Packer (Packer), 78 journey and self-­discovery, contemporary prison autobiographies, 2–­3 Jubeart, John, 51–­52

Index 243

Kaestle, Carl, on growth of mass literacy, 100 Keimer, Samuel, 43 Kenny, Penelope, 31 Kneeland, Samuel, 23–­24 Knox, William, 69 Kunzel, Regina, on criminal intimacy, 85, 154 Lancaster, Joseph, 112, 149–­150 Lancastrian education, 149–­150 Lane, Horace, 144–­145, 186 Larcombe, Thomas, 125–­126, 130, 185 La Rochefoucauld-­Liancourt, F., 98, 141 Last Speech and Confession of Henry Halbert (Halbert), 24–­25 The Last Speech, Confession, and Dying Words of John Smith (Smith), 54, 55 Last Words and Dying Speech of Levi Ames (Ames), 53 legal vernacular and dying speeches, 45 Lepore, Jill, on destructive nature of literacy, 33–­34 “Letter from a Convict,” 133–­134, 140 Letter on the Penitentiary System of Pennsylvania Addressed to William Roscoe (Roberts Vaux), 133–­134 letteracy: Abraham Johnstone and black letteracy, 64–­69; and letter writing, 64 letter writing: Abraham Johnstone’s “Letters to his Wife,” 67–­68; bans on inmate correspondence, 164–­ 165, 166–­167, 184–­185; dialogic letter writing, 62–­63; at Eastern State Penitentiary, 120, 127; effect of family dislocation and separation, 157–­158; and letteracy, 64; penmanship manuals, 71–­72; popularity of, 61–­63; and scene dramatization,

58;Vaux’s “Letter from a Convict,” 133–­134, 140; veracity and arbitration of execution narratives, 56 Lewis, David, on discipline at Auburn prison, 160 Lewis, Morgan, 151 libel, truth as, 92, 132 Libraries in Prison (Coyle), 5–­6 Lieber, Francis, 48, 121, 128, 136 Life in Prairie Land (Farnham), 170 Life of Colonel James Gardiner (Doddridge), 110 Linsey, William, 44–­45 literacy: African American literacy and black servitude, 34–­37; congregate literacy effects, 146, 175–­181; definitions and assessments of, 11–­13; denominational competition over literacy instruction, 40–­42; early education of writing prisoners, 51–­53; mass education and literacy, 99–­101, 131; power and promises of, 1, 182–­183, 186; print expansion and first age of mass literacy, 42–­47; as tool for deception and social resistance, 51; as vehicle for self-­expression and liberation, 2–­3; writing vs. reading literacy, 28. See also congregate literacy literacy events: communication circuit and execution literature, 25–­27, 26; confession literature, 13–­14; New Literacy Studies, 11; signature marks and veracity of execution narratives, 58–­60; and “theater of execution,” 21–­23 Literacy in Colonial New England (Lockridge), 11 literacy practices, New Literacy Studies, 11 Literacy Project of Western Massachusetts, 1 Locke, John, 46

244 Index Lockridge, Kenneth, 11 Lovey, John Wall, 59 Lownes, Caleb, 98, 103–­104, 105–­109, 147, 183 Luckey, Dinah, 173 Luckey, John, 168, 169, 173, 174, 175 Lynds, Elam, 143, 160, 161, 164, 166, 168–­169, 182 Lyon, Patrick, 89–­91, 131, 139, 202n5 MacCormick, Austin, 5 Mann, Horace, 173 Maroney, John, 139–­140, 145, 157–­159, 164–­166, 167, 177–­181, 184–­185 Massachusetts Colonization Society, 217n84 mass education and literacy, 99–­101, 131 mass incarceration and prisoner education, 13 Masur, Louis, on “theater of execution,” 21 Mather, Cotton: “Conference” with Joseph Hanno, 34–­37; and denominational competition over literacy instruction, 40; execution literature and theater of execution, 22–­23, 27 McElwee, E., 117–­118 McElwee, Thomas, 117 McGill, Meredith, on iteration as cultural norm, 79–­80 McNamee, John, 126 Mease, James, 116–­117 Memoirs of Mrs. Elizabeth Fisher (Fisher), 155–­156 Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs (Burroughs), 79 Memoirs of the Celebrated and Beautiful Mrs. Ann Carson (Clarke), 91–­92 Mental Improvement (Wakefield), 114, 118 Meranze, Michael: on contaminating contact between prisoners and the

public, 14, 83; on display and public executions, 21; on mass education and the penitentiary movement, 100–­101; on prison tour accounts, 141 Mihm, Stephen: on counterfeit currency crisis, 73; on Stephen Burroughs, 79 mimetic corruption, 14, 191n29 miraculous conversion accounts, 23, 24, 39–­42 missionary education practices: confession literature, 13–­14; Cotton Mather’s “Conference” with Joseph Hanno, 34–­37; and Joseph Quasson’s confession, 37–­42; and reading prisoners, 34–­42; SPG and Anglican views of literacy, 41 “a Molatto Woman at Plymouth” (Elizabeth Colson’s confession), 31–­32 Monaghan, E. Jennifer: on black literacy, 36, 69; on literacy definitions, 12; on SPG and Anglican views of literacy, 41 Monira (Bradbury), 173 Monomoyick Indians, 37–­38 Monroe, James, 153 Moody, Samuel, 30, 37–­42 moral instruction: at Eastern State Penitentiary, 123–­126, 129–­130; and first age of mass literacy, 45–­47; publishing shift from religious to secular works, 45–­47; and skepticism about education of prisoners, 15. See also spiritual preparation Moral Tales for Young People (Edgeworth), 115, 118 Mount, Thomas, 80–­83 Mount Pleasant (Sing Sing) prison, 15–­16, 140, 142, 143–­144, 147, 161, 167–­175 Murray, Lindley, 110

Index 245

Mutiny and Murder (Gibbs), 93 “mysteries of the city” fiction, 140 The Narrative of Patrick Lyon (Lyon), 89–­91 Narrative of the Imprisonment of John Maroney . . . Written by Himself (Maroney), 15, 139–­140, 145, 157–­159, 164–­166, 167, 177–­181, 184–­185 Narrative of the Life and Conversion of Alexander White (White), 54, 56–­58, 57 Narrative of the Life and Dying Speech of John Ryer (Ryer), 61 Narrative of the Life of Francis Uss (Uss), 53–­54 National Literacy Project, 1 Native Americans: Brotherton Indians, 150–­151; education of Monomoyick Indians, 37–­38; Joseph Quasson, 13, 24, 25, 30–­31, 37–­42, 47; Katherine Garret, 32–­33; Patience Boston, 27, 29, 33, 42; prisoners’ literacy acquisition and social dislocation, 32–­34 Neff, George, 129 The Negro Christianized (Mather), 36 New Literacy Studies, 11 New York African Free School, 108 New York City Free School, 150 New York Prison Association, 169, 170, 173–­175 New York prisons: “Auburn” model, 13, 15–­16, 98–­99; Newgate prison, 15–­16, 111, 146–­150, 151–­159; Sing Sing prison, 15–­16, 140, 142, 143–­ 144, 147, 161, 167–­175. See also Auburn prison Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens), 173 Nicholson, William, 65–­66 night schools and inmate instructors at Newgate prison, 145, 148–­149, 150, 151–­152, 154–­155, 157

Night Thoughts (Young), 110 Nord, David, on Calvinist spiritual development, 28 Norfolk Prison Colony, 2 Old Gaol,York, 37, 39 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 173 Onesimus (Cotton Mather’s slave), 36 On the Prisons of Philadelphia (La Rochefoucauld-­Liancourt), 98, 141 “ordinary road” of colonial literacy instruction, 27, 28 Packer, Joseph Bill, 70, 75–­79, 76, 201n94 Paley, William, 120 pardon petitions, 78–­79 Parent’s Assistant (Edgeworth), 114–­115 Pearsall, Sarah, on dialogic letter writing, 62–­63 penitentiaries: “Auburn” model, 13, 15–­16, 98–­99; Newgate prison, 15–­ 16, 111, 146–­150, 151–­159; “Pennsylvania” model, 13, 14–­15, 95–­101; Sing Sing prison, 15–­16, 140, 142, 143–­144, 147, 161, 167–­175; Walnut Street prison, 15, 89–­90, 101–­111, 112–­115, 117–­119. See also Auburn prison; Eastern State Penitentiary; prison reform penmanship manuals, 71–­72 “Pennsylvania” model: described, 13, 14–­15; and extent of prison reform, 95–­101. See also Eastern State Penitentiary PEN Prison Writing Program, 1 Peter, John, 37, 38 Peter, William, 128, 136, 137, 138 Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (PSAMPP): and Eastern State Penitentiary, 129–­130; formation of, 4, 83; and prison reform movements,

246 Index Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (continued) 96–­98; and Walnut Street prison school and library, 102, 104–­105, 106, 109–­111, 112–­115, 117–­118 Philadelphia Society for the Relief of Distressed Prisoners, 4 Philosophy of Education (Simpson), 173 phrenology, 168, 169–­175, 172 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 110 Pillars of Salt (Mather), 6, 22–­23 A Place to Stand (Baca), 3 Popular Tales (Edgeworth), 115 population growth, print expansion, and mass literacy, 43 Potter, John, 72–­73 Powers, Gershom, 160, 161, 162–­163, 182 Powers, Thomas, 52 Price, Joseph, 89 Price, Lucy Ann, 174 Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (Paley), 120 print expansion and first age of mass literacy, 42–­47 Prison and the American Imagination (Caleb Smith), 177 Prison Book Program, 1 The Prisoner’s Companion (Stanford), 153 prison inspectors and prison oversight committees: Eastern State Penitentiary, 123–­125, 127–­129; Walnut Street prison, 103–­106, 112–­113 prison labor: at Eastern State Penitentiary, 119; hard labor and early modern penitentiaries, 21; Newgate workhouses, 150; at Sing Sing Prison, 168 prison libraries: early history of, 4–­6; Eastern State Penitentiary library,

112, 125, 127, 129–­131; Newgate prison library, 156; Sing Sing prison library, 168–­170; Walnut Street prison library, 102, 109–­111, 113–­114 prison literacy overview: and “Auburn” model of incarceration, 13, 15–­16; authorship and voice in prison literature, 8–­10; confession literature, 10–­11, 13–­14; contemporary prison autobiographies, 2–­3; contemporary prison literacy programs, 1–­2; literacy definitions and assessments, 11–­13; mass incarceration and prisoner education, 13; New Literacy Studies, 11; and “Pennsylvania” model of incarceration, 13, 14–­15, 95–­101; prison libraries, 4–­6; public punishment and prisoner literacy, 3, 7, 13–­14; purposes and development of prison literacy, 6–­7; race and rehabilitation debates, 8 prison reform: Benjamin Rush, 84–­ 85, 90–­91, 97, 98; and criminal intimacy, 85, 154–­155; early reform movements, 3–­4, 7; Eliza Farnham, 15, 146, 167–­168, 169–­175, 172; emergence of, 83–­85; idealism and debates regarding, 182–­183, 185–­ 186; inmate perspectives on, 183–­ 185; and Quaker beliefs, 102–­103; and solitary confinement, 119–­121, 127–­129; Thomas Eddy, 15, 146–­ 151, 154–­155, 156. See also Eastern State Penitentiary; Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons Prisons and Prisoners (Adshead), 137 prison tour accounts, 127–­129, 135, 136, 140–­141 Prison Writing in Twentieth-­Century America (H. B. Franklin), 16

Index 247

Protestant literacy practices: Bible study and tract distribution, 103, 113–­114; confession literature, 13–­14, 22–­24; jailhouse reading pedagogy, 27–­34 PSAMPP. See Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons public punishment: and communications circuit of prison literature, 25–­ 27, 26; as literacy event, 25–­27, 26; and prison reform movements, 83–­ 84; and prisoner literacy, 3, 7, 13–­14; “theater of execution,” 21–­23 publishing: penitentiary inmate publications, 132–­138; print expansion and first age of mass literacy, 42–­47; religious publishing in New York City, 152; shift from religious to secular works, 45–­47 Quakers: Adelphi School, 111–­112; and African American education, 68; educational methods and reform, 105–­106, 111–­112; Johnstone’s Address, 66; and prison reform, 102–­ 103; views on solitude, 148 Quasson, Joseph, 13, 24, 25, 30–­31, 37–­42, 47 Queen Street jail, 34–­35 race: Abraham Johnstone and black letteracy, 64–­69; and American Colonization Society, 116–­117, 159, 208n106; and missionary education, 34–­42; phrenology and racial categorization, 171, 173; racial discourse on black prisoners, 52, 125–­126; and rehabilitation debates, 8 Rationale of Crime (Sampson), 171 The Rat-­Trap (Snelling), 140 Read, Thomas, 65–­66 reading vs. writing literacy, 28

recidivism and literacy, 1–­2 Reed, Austin, 164, 166–­167, 184, 186 reformation of prisoners: and American Colonization Society, 116–­117, 159, 208n106; Ann Carson’s narrative, 91–­93, 131; “Auburn” model, 13, 15–­16, 98–­99; dearth of penitentiary inmate publications, 93–­95, 131–­138; Patrick Lyon’s narrative, 89–­91, 131; “Pennsylvania” model, 13, 14–­15, 95–­101; prison inspectors and oversight committees, 103–­105; and prison libraries, 4–­6; rationales for prisoner education, 95–­96; sensational tales of crime and horror, 93–­94; skepticism about education of prisoners, 15; and urban demographics, 115–­116. See also Eastern State Penitentiary; prison reform Reilly, Elizabeth Carroll, on Protestant literacy practices, 28 religion: approved books for Walnut Street prison library, 110–­111; catechisms, 82–­83, 153; and early penitentiaries, 4–­5; Protestant literacy practices and jailhouse reading pedagogy, 27–­34; and reading instruction, 11; Sabbath School at Auburn prison, 162–­164, 165. See also missionary education practices; spiritual preparation; “the Word” Religious Education of Children Recommended (Browne), 31 “right-­to-­read” movement, 5 Robbins, Chandler, 56, 58 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 111 Rodgers, Esther, 29, 31 Rogers, Amy, 122 Roscoe, William, 133–­134 Ross, Ezra, 30 Rothman, David, on mass education and the penitentiary movement, 100 Rush, Benjamin, 84–­85, 90–­91, 97, 98

248 Index Ryer, John, 61 Ryno, George, 10, 128, 131–­132, 135–­138 Salzmann, Christian, 115 Sampson, Marmaduke, 171 Scattergood, Thomas, 111 Schuyler, Philip, 146 Secrets of the Mount-­Pleasant State Prison, Revealed and Exposed (Brice), 15, 140, 178, 180–­181 sensational tales of crime and horror, 93–­94, 140, 180 A Sermon Preached at Haddam, June 14, 1797 (Huntington), 46–­47 sermons. See execution narratives Serrell, Edward, 171 Seward, William, 168–­169, 180 Sheehan, Bryan, 31 Short Account of the Life of John ***** Alias Owen Syllavan (Syllavan), 74–­75 signature marks and counts: and literacy definitions, 11–­12; print expansion and first age of mass literacy, 43; veracity and arbitration of execution narratives, 58–­60, 197–­198nn26–­27 Simpson, James, 173 Sing Sing prison, 15–­16, 140, 142, 143–­144, 147, 161, 167–­175 Skidmore, Rex, on Walnut Street prison, 101, 109 slang, prisoners’, 80–­83 Smalley, Mary, 174 Smith, Benjamin C., 163–­164 Smith, Caleb: on the cellular soul, 120–­121; on Harry Hawser, 10, 137; on penitentiary inmate publications, 131, 137, 177 Smith, Catharine, 174, 184 Smith, Eliza, 125 Smith, John, 54, 55 Smith, Richard, 91, 92

Smith, William, 80–­83 Snelling, Joseph, 140 social displacement and prisoner literacy, 32–­34 social purpose and execution narratives, 19–­21 Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), 36, 40–­42, 68 Society for Supporting the Gospel Among the Poor of the City of New York, 151 Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, 111 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 111 sola scriptura doctrine, 27, 120 solitary confinement, 119–­121, 127–­ 129, 147–­148 Solitude in Imprisonment (Hanway), 120 Spear, Charles, 137 “spectacle of the scaffold,” 21 spelling books, and black female prisoners at Walnut Street prison, 117–­118 SPG. See Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts spiritual preparation: jailhouse reading pedagogy, 27–­34; Joseph Quasson’s doubts and insecurity, 39–­40; writing prisoners and readers’ spiritual development, 51, 53. See also moral instruction sponsored writing, 9 Spooner, Joshua, 30 Spurzheim, Johann Gaspar, 173 Squires, Phoebe, 174, 184 Stanford, John, 15, 146, 149, 151–­154, 157, 158 Starr, Thomas, 46–­47, 52 Stringham, Silas, 137 Sturges, Samuel, 38 subversive literary practices: Abraham Johnstone and black letteracy, 34,

Index 249

68–­69; counterfeiters, 70–­80, 76, 77. See also exposé accounts Summary Account of the Life and Death of Joseph Quasson, the Indian (Moody), 13, 24, 37–­42 Sweeting, Whiting, 63, 64 Syllavan, Owen, 34, 47, 70, 72, 74–­75 tabula rasa, 120 Teeters, Negley, on Walnut Street prison and library, 101, 110 “theater of execution,” 21–­23 Thornton, Tamara Plakins, on cultural significance of penmanship, 71, 72 Thoughts in Prison (Dodd), 110 Tibbits, George, 160 Tibbits, Tamsen, 75 Tomlinson, Stephen, on phrenology of education, 173 To the Free Africans and other Free People of Color in the United States, 66–­67 transformative literacy journey, contemporary prison autobiographies, 2–­3 Tremenda (Mather), 13 Trimmer, Sarah, 114 truth as libel, 92, 132 Turnbull, Robert, 98, 104 United Nations Literacy Decade, 1 urban charity schools, 99–­100, 105–­ 106, 111–­112 urban demographics and prison reformation, 115–­116 Uss, Francis, 53–­54 Vanderpool, George, 153 Vaux, Richard, 132, 136 Vaux, Roberts, 99, 110–­111, 112, 131, 133–­134, 135 A Visit to the Philadelphia Prison (Turnbull), 98, 104, 141

A Voice from Sing Sing (Burr), 140, 142, 143–­144, 178, 180–­181 Voices from Prison (Spear, ed.), 137 Wakefield, Priscilla, 114 Waldron, Joseph, 126 Wallace, James, 72 Walnut Street prison, 15, 89–­90, 101–­ 111, 112–­115, 117–­119 Watts, Thomas, 70 Weed, Samuel, 72 Weiner, Mark, on African American literacy and black servitude, 36–­37 Welch, William, 59 Weyler, Karen, on collaborative literacies, 9 White, Alexander, 54, 56–­58, 57 Wilf, Steven: on language of dying speeches, 45; on pardon petitions, 79; on public punishment, 84 Williams, Charles, 122 Williams, Daniel E.: on Elizabeth Wilson’s narrative, 60; on execution narratives and criminal confession literature, 10–­11, 20, 29, 188n13; on publishing shift from religious to secular works, 44; on Stephen Burroughs, 79 Wilson, Elizabeth, 60–­61, 63 Wilt, Julia, 94 Wiltse, Robert, 168, 181 Wines, Enoch Cobb, 130, 175–­176 Wistar, Thomas, 110–­111, 112 Woolman, Jacob, 24–­25 Worcester Gaol, 44 “the Word”: affective response to spiritual texts, 29, 31; and isolation of Eastern State Penitentiary inmates, 120; and publishing shift from religious to secular works, 45–­47 writing instruction: absent in black charity schools, 36, 68–­69; at Auburn Prison, 162–­163; early American

250 Index writing instruction (continued) literacy, 11; at Eastern State Penitentiary, 127, 129–­130; eighteenth-­ century expansion of, 70–­72; letter writing and correspondence guides, 61–­62; print expansion and first age of mass literacy, 43; at Walnut Street prison, 105, 106–­107 writing prisoners: Abraham Johnstone and black letteracy, 64–­69; authorship and voice in prison literature, 8–­10; Brice’s Secrets of the Mount-­Pleasant State Prison, 15, 140, 178, 180–­181; Burr’s A Voice from Sing Sing, 140, 142, 143–­144, 178, 180–­181; childhood education of prisoners, 51–­53; Coffey’s Inside Out, 15, 139, 141–­142, 143, 145, 156–­159, 176–­180, 216nn76, 81; counterfeiters and subversive literary practices, 70–­80, 76, 77; and culture of sentiment, 49, 63–­64; emergence of, 48–­50; Fisher’s Memoirs, 155–­ 156; and letteracy, 64; as literary persona, 48–­49; Lyon’s Narrative, 89–­91; Maroney’s Narrative, 15,

139–­140, 145, 157–­159, 164–­166, 167, 177–­181, 184–­185; and prison reform movements, 83–­85; prisoner negotiations and assertions, 49–­50, 60–­61, 62–­63, 69; public demand for autobiographical execution literature, 51, 53–­60, 55, 57; and readers’ spiritual development, 51, 53; Reed’s “Haunted Convict,” 166–­167; and the Reverend William Smith, 80–­83; Ryno’s Buds and Flowers, 10, 132, 135–­138;Vaux’s “Extract of a Letter from a Convict,” 133–­135; veracity and arbitration of execution narratives, 48–­50, 54–­61, 64. See also execution narratives; exposé accounts; letter writing writing vs. reading literacy, 28 X, Malcolm, 2 Yale University, 41 York’s Old Gaol, 37, 39 Young, Edward, 110 Zenger, John Peter, 43

About th e Auth or Jodi Schorb is an assistant professor of English and affiliate faculty at the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at the University of Florida. She received her PhD in English from the University of California at Davis.

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Laura S. Abrams and Ben Anderson-­Nathe, Compassionate Confinement: A Year in the Life of Unit C Tammy L. Anderson, ed., Neither Villain Nor Victim: Empowerment and Agency among Women Substance Abusers Scott A. Bonn, Mass Deception: Moral Panic and the U.S. War on Iraq Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin, eds., Race, Gender, and Punishment: From Colonialism to the War on Terror Loretta Capeheart and Dragan Milovanovic, Social Justice: Theories, Issues, and Movements Walter S. DeKeseredy and Martin D. Schwartz, Dangerous Exits: Escaping Abusive Relationships in Rural America Patricia E. Erickson and Steven K. Erickson, Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness: Law and the Behavioral Sciences in Conflict Jamie J. Fader, Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth Luis A. Fernandez, Policing Dissent: Social Control and the Anti-­Globalization Movement Timothy R. Lauger, Real Gangstas: Legitimacy, Reputation, and Violence in the Intergang Environment Andrea M. Leverentz, The Ex-­Prisoner’s Dilemma: How Women Negotiate Competing Narratives of Reentry and Desistance Michael J. Lynch, Big Prisons, Big Dreams: Crime and the Failure of America’s Penal System Corporate Crime: Raymond J. Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer, eds., State-­ Wrongdoing at the Intersection of Business and Government Susan L. Miller, Victims as Offenders: The Paradox of Women’s Violence in Relationships Torin Monahan, Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity Torin Monahan and Rodolfo D. Torres, eds., Schools under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education Leslie Paik, Discretionary Justice: Looking Inside a Juvenile Drug Court Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency, 40th anniversary edition with an introduction and critical commentaries compiled by Miroslava Chávez-­García Jeffrey Ian Ross, ed., The Globalization of Supermax Prisons Dawn L. Rothe and Christopher W. Mullins, eds., State Crime, Current Perspectives Jodi Schorb, Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–­1845 Susan F. Sharp, Hidden Victims: The Effects of the Death Penalty on Families of the Accused Susan F. Sharp and Juanita Ortiz, Mean Lives and Mean Laws: Oklahoma’s Women Prisoners

Robert H. Tillman and Michael L. Indergaard, Pump and Dump: The Rancid Rules of the New Economy Mariana Valverde, Law and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths Michael Welch, Crimes of Power and States of Impunity: The U.S. Response to Terror Michael Welch, Scapegoats of September 11th: Hate Crimes and State Crimes in the War on Terror Saundra D. Westervelt and Kimberly J. Cook, Life after Death Row: Exonerees’ Search for Community and Identity