This eye-opening and well-researched companion to the first volume of Executing Democracy enters the death-penalty discussion during the debates of 1835 and 1843, when pro-death penalty Calvinist minister George Barrell Cheever faced off against abolitionist magazine editor John O’Sullivan. In contrast to the macro-historical overview presented in volume 1, volume 2 provides micro-historical case studies, using these debates as springboards into the discussion of the death penalty in America at large. Incorporating a wide range of sources, including political poems, newspaper editorials, and warring manifestos, this second volume highlights a variety of perspectives, thus demonstrating the centrality of public debates about crime, violence, and punishment to the history of American democracy. Hartnett’s insightful assessment bears witness to a complex national discussion about the political, metaphysical, and cultural significance of the death penalty.
Table of Contents:
Contents
Illustrations
Preface: “What Follies and Monstrous Barbarities”
Acknowledgments
Chapter One. The Second Great Awakening and the “Grotesque Sublime” of Antebellum America
Chapter Two. O’Sullivan and Cheever’s Death Penalty Debate, 1835–1842, and “The Highest Interests of Humanity”
Chapter Three. O’Sullivan and Cheever’s Death Penalty Debate of 1843 and “The Great Merciless Machine of Modernity”
Conclusion. Capital Punishment and the Dilemmas of Antebellum Modernity
Appendix. The Liberator Attacks the Death Penalty, 1842–1843
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Stephen John Hartnett is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado–Denver, USA. He is the author of several books, including Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America, winner of the National Communication Association’s James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address.
Review :
Having missed his calling as a writer for the Police Gazette, Stephen Hartnett has settled for documenting American democracy’s perplexing relationship with capital punishment. This second volume provides rigorous scholarship and nuanced readings of diverse texts, but it’s also a page-turner. Hartnett understands how public culture can be both sensationalistic and deliberative, and how in public discussion of capital cases democracy itself is on trial.
—Robert Hariman, Professor and Chair, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University
The historical relationship between democracy and the death penalty in America is vexed and bloody. Stephen John Hartnett faces it without blinking. In Executing Democracy, past meets present in a profound combination of learning, experience, eloquence, and passion.
—Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor, University of Pittsburgh
