Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Capital Punishment

Abstract

In the winter of 1860, Marvin Bovee, a Wisconsin legislator and social activist, began to solicit the opinions of prominent authors, politicians, and reformers on the subject of capital punishment. He had in mind the publication of a book detailing the position of opponents of the death penalty. He hoped that the work would appear in the fall of 1861 but before he completed the manuscript the Civil War intervened. Many volumes of course were published during the war, but Bovee thought it self-defeating to press for the abolition of the gallows at a time when violent, retributive feelings ran so high. In a letter to Wendell Phillips, Bovee explained, am quietly resting on my oars waiting for the American conflict to cease that I may resume my labors on penal reform. ... It is useless to talk of saving life when we are killing by thousands.' Nearly twenty years after he began his survey, Bovee published Reasons for Abolishing Capital Punishment (1878), the first comprehensive work on capital punishment to appear after the Civil War. Bovee's volume drew upon a tradition of writings in opposition to the death penalty dating to the Revolutionary era. In 1787 Benjamin Rush, Philadelphia physician and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, published An Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments Upon Criminals and Upon Society, a pamphlet that in many ways marked the beginning of a movement to abolish capital punishment in America. In the succeeding decades, scores of volumes both opposed to and in favor of the death penalty appeared. Among the most prominent were John L. OSullivan's Report in Favor of the Abolition of the Punishment of Death by Law (1841)