Liberty's Prisoners. Jen Manion
elite and middling men and women.
When botanist and future Massachusetts senator Manasseh Cutler visited Philadelphia in 1787, he met with many local luminaries, including Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Willson Peale. Cutler stayed at the well-appointed Indian Queen on Third Street between Market and Chestnut, along with several men attending the Constitutional Convention. Cutler’s hosts wined and dined him, canceling other appointments to spend time with him and show off the best of what their city had to offer. Cutler was part of a new generation of men who asserted themselves as leaders in the revolution’s wake.1 Humanitarian sensibility required that Cutler cultivate an awareness of everything around him. On his walk around the area of the State House and over past Walnut Street Jail, Cutler’s senses were awakened in ways both positive and negative. He described the walk around the State House as being full of “beauty and elegance,” only to have his own experience of “pleasure and amusement” diminished by “one circumstance that must forever be disgusting.” Cutler contrasted the elegance of the prison building with “its unsavory contents.” He seemed appalled that it was impossible for him to escape the sights and sounds of the inmates, complaining, “In short, whatever part of the mall you are in, this cage of unclean birds is constantly in your view and their doleful cries attack your ears.” Cutler was made very uncomfortable by the prisoners’ disruption. He claimed, “Your ears are constantly insulted with their Billingsgate language, or your feelings wounded with their pitiful complaints.” His remarks expose the limits of the sentimental project. Though sensibility required that he intervene in social matters and mitigate the suffering of others, Cutler seemed more rattled by his own discomfort than that of those imprisoned.2
The cultivation of sensibility was a central value for this generation of elite and learned men. They embraced sensibility—“human sensitivity of perception”—as a way to improve themselves and transform society.3 Late eighteenth-century sensibility combined both reason and feeling in what could be an uneasy balancing act.4 Men aspired to balance between the embrace of feeling and a fear of the effects of too much feeling in themselves and others. The expansion of penal authority was rooted in this tenuous quest. Early American culture privileged sentiment as a valued individual pursuit. Sensibility had its roots in eighteenth-century England and later “broadened the arena within which humanitarian feeling was encouraged to operate.”5 Reformers targeted many different groups with their efforts, including the poor, the enslaved, alcoholics, immigrants, and prisoners.
The legacy of European punishment and popular perceptions of inmates together made prison an implicitly degraded, vile, and hardened place. When public punishment brought the degradation of the prison into the city streets, Pennsylvania’s leading statesmen were moved to action. The sentimental project would face its ultimate test in working with liberty’s prisoners. Far from politically neutral, however, it became a vehicle for the naturalization of sexual differences while imposing white upper- and middle-class family values on predominantly African American and Irish working and poor people. By reaching out to men and women in prison, offering assessments of their progress and assistance in securing pardons from the governor, male reformers could cultivate a refined, controlled, and benevolent masculinity. They stood in contrast to the brash, aggressive, unfeeling keepers and guards who maintained ultimate authority over inmates. They sought to differentiate themselves from men of lower classes who were “hardened” while encouraging gendered notions of work and dependency among those imprisoned.
The sentimental family became an important idea in punishment, as it was in larger social discourses.6 Punishment called for imprisonment and total isolation from one’s family. This manipulation of family ties and dependencies was dynamic, contradictory, and violent, though done in the name of enlightenment and progress. Visitation with loved ones was restricted while reformers inserted themselves forcibly into the lives of the imprisoned, asserting their own ideas of proper visitation. When given the chance to articulate their needs and dreams in petitions for pardons, inmates crafted stories of love, loss, and family that were highly gendered and sentimental. Ideals such as virtue that had long been cast outside the reach of immigrants, African Americans, and poor native-born whites were embraced by these very groups as they sought to establish themselves as worthy of respect, pardon, and even citizenship. Women in prison claimed a feminine subjectivity for themselves that was anchored not only in family and motherhood but also in work.
Pardons
Several of Pennsylvania’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention—Benjamin Franklin, James Wilson, Jared Ingersoll, and Thomas Mifflin—would play key roles in redefining and enforcing the penal laws of Pennsylvania. PSAMPP was incorporated in 1787 and became the nation’s leading prison reform organization. Reformers of relatively modest means, including artisans, ministers, and shopkeepers, joined with political leaders, merchants, and local elites in devising a revised system of punishment. White men collaborated across class in doing this work, to some extent. Quaker Caleb Lownes, an ironworker by trade, and shopkeeper John Connelly devised the organizational structure of the Board of Inspectors while elite men including Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush held the spot-light.7 One justification of the need for visits by PSAMPP was that keepers were insufficiently feeling and not tending to the basic needs of prisoners. The powerful group of men who came together through PSAMPP had no problem blaming the workingmen employed as jailers and turnkeys for the problems that marked the jail. When Quaker merchant Samuel Rowland Fisher was imprisoned by the British during the war, he had harsh words for the keeper of Philadelphia’s Old Stone Prison. Fisher described Stokeley Hossman as “the most unfeeling Man that I remember to have met with … a rough, hard-hearted Man.”8 Fisher criticized the actions of lesser, working-class men using the language of feeling—something Philadelphia’s elite began to do more and more after the war. The jailor who oversaw Walnut Street Jail in the 1780s, Mr. Reynolds, also resisted imposition of politicians and reformers. He ignored the demands of the Supreme Executive Council on a number of issues by refusing to admit ministers to preach and by not releasing pardoned prisoners who still owed fees. Reynolds claimed he took orders only from the sheriff—not from the state’s governing body and certainly not from a group of self-righteous humanitarians.9 For many years, Reynolds did a job no one wanted, for very little pay. He resented the half-hearted meddling and micromanagement offered by his betters. But right or wrong, they would ultimately prevail. Reynolds was accused of exploiting the broken system to the detriment of inmates for his own wealth, extorting extra fees for luxuries such as alcohol. By most official counts, he was corrupt and eventually removed from his position.
Inspectors wanted a keeper who embraced their ideas and gave up the penal ways of old. Reynold’s replacement, Elijah Weed, was popular among Inspectors because he supported their efforts. The keeper, long an officer charged with being tough and hard in superintendence of criminals, was now expected to embrace an authority anchored in sensibility and feeling. This partly explains why upon his death, Mary Weed, Elijah’s wife, was appointed to his position for a brief period despite the widespread disapproval of women’s involvement in prison work at that time.10 One visitor claimed, “The office of gaoler cannot be repugnant to the feelings of a well-inclined individual.”11 And so Inspectors felt it was a vital part of their job to instate a man of feeling at the top. One thing was clear to them: while a feeling man might become more feeling, and a hardened man might become more hardened, the two did not switch places. Even with a new keeper in place, they visited regularly.
Male reformers who served on the Visiting Committee of PSAMPP visited the prison weekly. While their official mission was to “alleviate the miseries” of the prison, the visits fulfilled other needs as well. Miseries were defined in terms of lack and excess: lack of clothing, bedding, food, and medical care along with too much freedom of movement, interaction with outsiders, and access to alcohol. Most obviously, the visits provided crucial emotional experiences for the men that enhanced their ability to feel sympathy and compassion for others. Progressive elite men believed that reform work gave them the opportunity to demonstrate sensitivity, generosity, and humanitarianism—in addition to cultivating their own sensibility.12 Benjamin Rush shared this sentiment in a letter to fellow reformer John Coakley Lettsom, “I have the pleasure of informing you that, from the influence of our Prison