But the Revolutionary promises—life, liberty, happiness—were quickly foreclosed by a revised penal system that disguised its violence under the rubric of humanitarianism, replaced slavery as the disciplinary authority in African American lives, and prized the property rights of the few over the human rights of the many. A diverse class of white men, from ruling elites to middling artisans, cast their lot with the penitentiary system, hoping it would make them better men, bring back the gender roles of old, cultivate industrious habits, contain the threat of free blacks and immigrants, and regulate illicit sex. It was a tall order, made more challenging by the resistance of lower-class men working as watchmen, keepers, and guards who refused their orders, African Americans who fought back against unjust laws and people who claimed possession of them, Irish immigrants who stole items of small value to survive after serving out or abandoning their indentures, and working women who refused to give up their jobs and retreat from public life into the domestic fantasy of republicanism. When economic depression struck and crime rates spiked, the underclasses seemed more threatening than ever before.3 Elites did not stand idly by but rather invoked the authority of enlightened justice to reassert hierarchy and order. They used punishment to classify and segregate people along lines of difference—crime, class, gender, race, and age—in order to identify those who might one day stand as citizens if properly reformed.
Women were both marginal and yet immensely important figures in this process. In 1784, President of the Pennsylvania Supreme Executive Council John Dickinson argued that punishments in general should be “less severe” for everyone than previously enforced under British rule, but especially those “inflicted upon women.”4 In 1785, public debate over the role of punishment in society focused on the plight of one particular woman—Eleanor Glass. She caught the eye of a member of the Pennsylvania grand jury who visited the county jail. He was outraged that people convicted of minor offenses and unable to pay their fees might face indefinite confinement.5 The juror felt that Glass—a white woman—was being cruelly incarcerated beyond reason and endured great suffering that was more than any person should bear. Glass’s case was part of a larger debate about punishment in the young nation. Women—and ideas about them—played a crucial role in the social and political life of the early republic.6
Eleanor Glass was no republican mother; nor were the thousands of women whose lives serve as the basis for this book.7 Glass and women like her stand at the center of the evolving story of the impact of the post-Revolutionary expansion of punishment on the lives of the poor. Her situation was not terribly unusual for the anonymous and forgotten masses that lived beyond the borders marked for citizens in the new republic. She was convicted of assault and battery on another woman, Mrs. Evitt, and fined six pence. Glass was confined to the prison because she could pay neither the fine nor the court fees. The juror noted that Glass’s case was “unparalleled” and that through the denial of her liberty, the “rights of human nature [were] villainously violated.”8 Accusations that punishment violated human rights would quickly fade away in the coming years as the orderly, controlled penitentiary became the premier emblem of American democracy.9 Glass and others like her became liberty’s prisoners.
The cultivation of sensibility was at the heart of the refinement of punishment, much as it was to the entire nation-building project.10 The language of feeling helped early Americans distance themselves from British barbarity. The juror who wrote on behalf of Glass described her situation as something that should “Excite our commiseration, abhorrence, and contempt.”11 In doing so, he focused not on questions of legality but on the emotions her situation compelled him to feel. Feelings were fragile—and could be manipulated. In the outcry over Glass, others took a less sympathetic approach, blaming Glass for her own troubles and warning the public not to worry about her. Under the pen name Veritas, one man wrote, “There was no danger that a stroller, without home and without character, (and such she appeared to be) would be injured in her morals by remaining in goal.”12 Writing for those aspiring to cultivate their humanitarian sensibilities, Veritas explained his aim was to prevent unnecessary worry or concern on the part of the “generous public, whose feelings are always roused by a tale of inhumanity and distress.” He rejected the idea that Glass was mistreated in any way, and felt the other juror’s letter would elicit inappropriate compassion, concern, and sympathy on the part of the public. The struggle to determine the line between reasonable and excessive feeling as well as appropriate and misdirected compassion defined both penal reform and masculinity. The expansion of punishment was not a cold, calculated gesture of distant hands but rather a messy, intimate, and contested process that unfolded over time. Reformers, judges, Inspectors, and lawyers enjoyed the highly charged and emotional meetings they had with society’s most vulnerable women, as it enabled them to recalibrate the tension and reach of patriarchal authority into something more elastic and broadly shared—appropriate for democracy.13
This diverse group of elite white men had a great deal at stake in reestablishing social order and hierarchy in the aftermath of the American Revolution. By defining themselves against an increasingly vocal and growing group of others—free blacks, laborers, immigrants, and women—they aspired to define an American national identity with themselves at the center.14 But men from diverse social ranks would also publicly jockey with each other for power and authority. From the attorney general to one of the nameless prison guards, accusations of incompetence, wrongdoing, or inhumanity were never more than a turn of the newspaper page away. In the public discussion of the Glass case, two other members of the 1785 grand jury, Francis Wade and Francis Gurney, felt the need to defend the attorney general, William Bradford. They asserted that the problems discovered by the grand jury in prison were “not owing to a want of attention or humanity” on his part. They also defended the keeper in his decision not to put Glass forward for a pardon.15 Guards, keepers, reformers, Inspectors, judges, and jurors would all be subjects of praise and contempt, sometimes unexpectedly, as the rules and expectations for punishment changed.
The burgeoning press played a vital role in publicizing these controversies. The official report of this grand jury was overseen by chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, Thomas McKean, and published alongside the letters. It called for the introduction of public punishment for prisoners as a way for them to earn money to pay off fines and fees.16 The first great wave of penal reform began in publications like the Freeman’s Journal, the Pennsylvania Packet, and the Pennsylvania Gazette, which brought the question of incarceration and human rights to early national audiences. The press thrust questions of punishment and democracy onto the table: What was the purpose of punishment? To which class of prisoners should it be tailored? Could labor be used to generate revenue in punishment? Should those unable to pay fees be pardoned? Would women be disciplined and punished in the same ways as men, or be judged with consideration of their sex? How could one system produce diverse and at times competing aims, such as reform, deterrence, punishment, justice, and profit? Women occupied a central place in these debates, yet have been overlooked by generations of historians. The question of women’s role in punishment is a significant one, tied to nothing less than the question of women’s place in the nation.
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The refinement and expansion of punishment has been the focus of many important historical studies.17 Once celebrated as the pinnacle of Enlightenment thought, the penitentiary has been exposed as a powerful tool of social and individual manipulation.18 Historian David Rothman’s classic study The Discovery of the Asylum placed the penitentiary alongside the poorhouse, hospital, and asylum on a continuum of institutions that advanced the state’s effort to establish order and assert greater social control in the unstable decades of the early nineteenth century. His critical approach to institutions designed by well-intended reformers—and long heralded as safety nets for the sick and poor—laid the foundation for numerous studies to follow. Foucault’s sweeping treatise Discipline and Punish identified the ever more subtle mechanisms of control and punishment that came into fashion, culminating in the development of a hardened “criminal identity” for those imprisoned.19 The prison became a brilliant companion to industrialization, training the ordered,
