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the honor with New Haven for seventy-two years. The city’s literary giant, Mark Twain, gained further national fame with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the first of four major works he wrote while living in Hartford. And sports fans could cheer the winning record (54–28) of the Hartford Dark Blues. Hartford’s entry into the newly formed National Baseball Association was second only to the Red Stockings from Boston. The Dark Blues lasted only a year before moving to Brooklyn, New York. Not everything endures.
The hottest celebrity news of 1875 burned brightly in the land of steady habits for the entire year. It featured the charge of adultery by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, New York. A Protestant leader widely known for his opposition to slavery and his eloquence in the pulpit, Beecher stood accused of being intimately involved with the wife of a friend, an esteemed printer of some of Beecher’s writings. It was by every standard a scandal of immense proportions.
Beecher, simply put, was one of the most famous religious personalities in the nation. Some would have included Europe and the continent. The son of the leading Protestant cleric of the previous generation, Rev. Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward had achieved celebrity status on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks to an extensive lecturing and preaching schedule. But when scandal struck in 1875, the Hartford Daily Courant (like newspapers around the country) printed daily detailed summaries of the charges and refutations of infidelity. A six-month trial failed to reach a conclusion, and interest waned.
But one obscure event in the first quarter of 1875 would endure and would impact Connecticut residents for thirteen decades and more. The event was the creation of a grassroots organization to help inmates at the Wethersfield State Prison. From the date of its formation to the present time, rarely a week has passed without media attention.
Some events have sticking power. This story is about one of them.
THE PRISONERS’ FRIEND ASSOCIATION
According to the Hartford Daily Courant, the winter storms of 1874–75 had been horrendous. Even in the beginning of March the temperature was still well below freezing, the Connecticut River remained frozen from shore to shore, and the snow remained several feet deep where it had not been plowed or shoveled. That winter, a small group of citizens kept warm by holding preliminary meetings on prison reform, an issue that had been gaining attention for over five years along the Atlantic coast, in New England, and across northern states from New York to Illinois. One meeting, held on January 30 (and possibly the first gathering) was chaired by Judge Heman Barbour, then a director of the state prison in Wethersfield. Judge Benjamin Stark of New London, the current chair of the Connecticut Board of State Charities, assisted Barbour and a delegation from Boston, including Dr. John S. Butler, the Honorable Timothy M. Allyn, E. W. Locke, and John F. Augustus. The Augustus name was known throughout New England. John’s father had given almost twenty years to the Boston courts as a volunteer probation supervisor for alcoholic offenders. He had also been the founder and editor of a newsletter called the Prisoners’ Friend, a position that the son now held. It was probably the name of his newsletter that prompted the first name of the CPA, the Prisoners’ Friend Association.2
A second meeting was held in the common pleas court of Hartford on February 16, 1875. The group proposed “Articles of Association” for consideration. There was much discussion but not about whether to organize a new prison reform agency. The only question was when to do it. The unanimous decision was to do so immediately. Judge Barbour tasked Dr. E. K. Hunt, Rev. Elias H. Richardson, Rev. Charles R. Fisher, and Attorney George M. Bartholomew to draw up the legal arrangements. It was also at this February meeting that the original “objects” of the association were compiled. They were five in number and served the agency as its foundation for over one hundred years. They were printed in the charter as follows:
1st—To benefit society by the reformation of criminals,
2nd—To assist prisoners in the work of self-reform,
3rd—To promote reformatory systems of prison management,
4th—To aid discharged convicts in living honorably,
5th—To co-operate in the repression of crime3
The group that gathered on March 9 in the midafternoon was undoubtedly glad to be inside the First Congregational Church on Hartford’s Main Street, if only to get away from the cold. The church was the oldest in town. It was also known as Center Church or the Thomas Hooker Church, so named after the pastor who had led one of the first groups of settlers of the region from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The lecture room gradually warmed up as the people assembled, until at least forty were crowded into the space. They had come from all over Connecticut, this mix of clergy, judges, lawyers, and civic leaders. A Courant reporter added, “There were a number of ladies present who showed much interest in the proceedings.” The women, unnamed, were never mentioned again. However progressive they might be on social issues, most Protestants of the time maintained a patriarchal approach to life. Men made the decisions. Women lent support.4
THE FOUNDERS
The meeting was chaired by the Honorable Timothy M. Allyn, a businessman and mayor of Hartford. Allyn had been a Connecticut delegate to the 1870 National Prison Reform Congress in Cincinnati, which had resulted in the formation of the National Prison Association. He had also been among those who signed the Articles of Association. It was time for the final step to be taken. The key leaders spoke fervently and acted expeditiously to create a group whose purpose would be to address the difficulties being faced by offenders at the time of release from the Wethersfield State Prison.
The reverend Elias Richardson, the current pastor of Center Church, had offered his parish to host the gathering. Richardson was known in the Hartford area as a pastor who was very concerned about the Christian’s obligation to care for the poor and outcast. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, he had absorbed the New England Theology of Dr. Nathaniel Taylor, the leading theologian on the Yale faculty.
The Hartford Daily Courant reports that Reverend Richardson spoke “earnestly and well” to the group while the nominating committee was completing its roster. In the midst of his supportive statements, he referred “to the need of society to organize itself against the criminal class whose emissaries are always waiting at the prison gate to lead back into crime those who have completed terms of imprisonment for crime.” His comments reflected a combination of Christian caring on the one hand and Protestant self-righteousness, class prejudice, and religious compassion on the other. It also reflected old distinctions based on class and nationality that were being sharpened on a daily basis by the realities of the new urban populations.5
A changing society was all too obvious in the years following the Civil War. Connecticut was quickly becoming, with Rhode Island and Massachusetts, a crossroads of change: demographic, industrial, religious, and in many other ways. Most visible was the steady increase in outsiders. Hartford’s population in 1840 had been a little over fifteen thousand. Forty years later it was more than fifty thousand. Families and individuals, freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation ten years before, had emerged from the South to mingle on the streets of Connecticut’s major cities with the flood of European immigrants, chiefly Irish, but also Germans, Italians, and Scandinavians. Hartford’s political and religious leaders, like those of other large Connecticut cities, were especially aware of the resulting hubbub in the streets. The threat of disorder and crime could not be ignored.
Reverend Richardson’s words, no doubt, expressed a genuine religious as well as humanitarian desire to help those imprisoned. He did so, however, from a position of unquestioned moral superiority. Seeing offenders as part of a separate class of people was not a new attitude in 1875, and it has been part of the response to crime and the criminal in every succeeding generation. What mattered most at this meeting, however, was Richardson’s willingness to be part of the projected organization. His desire to confront the whole issue from a moral basis was significant. As the meeting got down to nuts and bolts, Richardson readily agreed to be one of the three Hartford County directors.
The Honorable Heman Barbour also emerged as a leader. Judge Barbour had been head of the probate court for the Hartford district from 1858