In Defense of the Gallows: Justifications of Capital Punishment in New England Execution Sermons, 1674-1825

Abstract

LIKE FAST-DAYS, ORDINATIONS, AND FUNERALS, PUBLIC HANGINGS WERE extraordinary communal events addressed by early New England ministers.1 Sermons dealing with capital cases were typically delivered on the Sunday preceding an execution and on the day of the hanging itself. They were generally directed both to the condemned prisoner and to a wider audience.2 Since few civic occasions seem to have aroused as much popular interest in New England as public hangings, these events provided clergymen with ideal opportunities to speak both to their own congregations and to the broader community. Indeed, judged strictly in terms of attendance, criminal executions were almost certainly the preeminent public events on the regional calendar. Crowds at New England's gallows reportedly numbered well into the thousands, even during the seventeenth century.3 Contemporary accounts further suggest that early execution sermons were almost as well attended as the hangings themselves.4 In addition to the throngs that listened in person, many such sermons reached a still wider audience through their subsequent appearance in print. While discourses to condemned prisoners were frequently delivered in seventeenthand eighteenth-century England, the execution sermon as an autonomous literary genre seems to have been an invention of the New England Puritans.' In contrast to the barely reputable prison chaplains who typically delivered gallows sermons in England, the authors of New England execution discourses included the most prominent and influential of American clergymen, among them such notables as Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, Benjamin Colman, and Charles Chauncy.6 The first execution discourse published in the region was probably Samuel Danforth's The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into