of security, and brought the entire system to its knees. Only one outer gate stood between them and freedom on Sixth Street before the military started firing, killing one and injuring a few others.59 The great chronicler of Pennsylvania penal history, Negley Teeters, reflected on the significance of the cornerstone dedication for Eastern State on May 22, 1823, “At last the dream of a quarter century was on the threshold of realization.”60 After nearly four decades of disappointment, frustration, and conflict, many looked to the new building as a final chance to turn the system around. Even the penitentiary’s most ardent supporters would struggle to maintain a fraction of the hope and idealism that defined reformers of earlier decades.
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Liberty’s Prisoners focuses on the chaos and messiness that marked the first two generations of penal reform, from 1785 to 1835. The first two chapters focus on the central principles of reformative incarceration: work and sentiment. Intense debate over eighteenth-century penal theory resulted in a plan for the penitentiary that privileged labor over corporal or capital punishment, cherished sentiment and the cultivation of feelings, and identified the family as a source of both negative influence and positive leverage. Each of these components of punishment advanced white supremacist and highly gendered ideals that positioned national belonging far outside the reach of poor, immigrant women and nearly all African Americans.
Chapter 1 examines the central role of labor in punishment. The rigid sexual division of labor was exposed in 1786 by the introduction of public punishment, as men were sent to clean the streets and women were left behind in the workhouse. Though women were excluded as formal subjects of reform, they proved exemplary workers and model inmates, providing reformers with inspiration and hope as men—true subjects of reform—failed their charge at every turn. Women in prison might begin to carve out the expectation that women, too, could be model citizens by submitting to expectations. The prison served as a disciplinary tool for masters who chose to imprison runaway or disobedient servants or slaves for as long as they wished. When indentured servants or the enslaved ran away, stole household goods, or both, their masters went crazy. Threatened by their own inability to control the behavior of those bound to them by law, elites turned to the state for help. But servants and the enslaved used this punishment to their own aims as well; some refused to leave the prison, preferring their communal containment in jail to whatever abuse or mistreatment awaited them back at home. Chapter 2 shows the powerful and manipulative force of feeling in driving reform efforts. Reformers placed themselves between inmates and the callous arm of the state, claiming an incredible amount of authority and hoping to improve themselves as much as anything. Family was an important part of sentimental reform. Isolating the guilty from their families was a key component of punishment. Prisoners revealed the value of family in their lives in requesting pardons. They knew the language of feeling and the value of gender norms as well, presenting themselves in particular ways that were most likely to elicit compassion and recommendations of pardons. For those devastated by being estranged from their families, imprisonment would serve as leverage to provide incentive to reform.
Women and men of the lower sorts understood social and economic hierarchy better than anyone. They were subject to the orders and whims of those who provided them with food, shelter, or money in exchange for work. Already living on the edge, they were incredibly vulnerable in times of greater economic instability, as was the case in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Chapter 3 charts the efforts of women who were inspired by social chaos, political rhetoric, need, or want to claim something for themselves: a voice, a valued object, a night on the town, community, and yes, even freedom. Women in public refused to be invisible and contained within the domestic sphere. Women were punished for things that men did without a second thought: walking the streets at night, drinking in public, and exchanging sex and money. Poor women were arrested just for being in the streets at the wrong time or in the wrong place—especially if they were African American. The prison was filled with people held under the highly subjective and loosely applied vagrancy law. As law enforcement efforts increased, there were always women who refused to relent. Colonial vagrancy statutes were modified to criminalize the early national poor just as African Americans rushed to the city in search of freedom.
The penitentiary was designed to facilitate a strict ordering and classification of people along lines of difference. Sloppy at first, the process of using sex, race, age, and criminal classification to categorize and separate people was nearly perfected by the 1820s. In place of real opportunities for personal transformation, skill development, and even religious conversion, authorities relied on segregation and isolation as a way to establish order, setting a dangerous precedent. Chapters 4 and 5 explore the role of sex and race in prison, two ideas that dramatically shaped punishment and ultimately served as justification for its failures. Chapter 4 charts the impact of the abolition of slavery on the expansion of the penal system and the role of punishment in making race. Debates over the constitutionality of slavery, the place of free blacks in society, and the root causes of racial difference all shaped punishment. As early as 1780, the state modified its oppressive regulation of African Americans in form, but not substance. Chapter 5 interrogates the significance of sex and sexuality in the expansion and refinement of punishment. If concerns about heterosexual sex defined the 1780s, by the 1820s they gave way to fears of same sex—or at least sodomy. Generating public alarm about sex was the single most effective political strategy in getting new laws passed and budgets approved for the expansion of punishment. Prisons were spaces for inmates to learn from each other, experiment consensually, or even assault each other—away from the watchful eyes of masters, parents, and keepers.
The expansion of punishment had major and lasting implications for African Americans, immigrants, and the poor.61 Leading jurists and progressive elites used the penal system to discipline and punish diverse citizens in ways that advanced social hierarchies rooted in race, gender, class, and sexual differences. This process helped to justify and stabilize liberalism’s exclusionary framework.62 None of this was beyond the understanding of regular people, who knew better than most the forces that limited their own upward mobility. Women and men who eventually ended up in prison might embrace or flout the conventions expected of their race, class, or gender as it served their needs or desires at any given moment. Liberty’s Prisoners shows that those who were subject to surveillance and regulation were not blank canvases for social experimentation but rather played an active part in instigating, manipulating, resisting, and shaping these forces.
CHAPTER 1
Rebellious Workers
EARLY AMERICAN CULTURE was rife with contradictions. The War for Independence upset long-standing social hierarchies among white men while leaving white women, African Americans, and laboring people with little to show for their efforts. Victory ensured that the economic interests of Anglo-American merchants would no longer be thwarted by the political or economic whims of the British, making the war little more than a lateral move. When British aristocrats and elites went packing, wealthy and learned Anglo-American men took their places as heads of state, industry, and society. The working poor, indentured, enslaved, and even middling men and women whose efforts proved vital to the war’s success expected something more: a leveling of old social and political hierarchies, greater economic opportunities, and freedom from bondage. But only a few conditions changed. The passage of the 1780 Gradual Abolition Act made Pennsylvania the first state to legislate against slavery while preserving the institution for another generation, as the Act famously did not free a single enslaved person.
