Although it has gone unacknowledged in literary studies, it is quite likely that E. D.E.N. Southworth wrote more about death penalty than any other American novelist in nineteenth century. In many of her best-selling works, Southworth offers her readers plots that illustrate injustice, immorality, and inefficacy of capital punishment and that argue for its abolition through their sentimental depictions of characters--both guilty and innocent--facing gallows. In this essay, I explore role that Southworth's fiction played in this reform effort in order to make two central observations. First, I argue that Southworth's fiction demonstrates how common sentimental arguments used by movement against capital punishment could be incorporated into such popular narratives. For example, Southworth repeatedly depicts characters moving from apathy about or even support of death penalty to active opposition to it because of a sympathetic experience with a condemned figure, dramatizing many of arguments made by antigallows reformers and attempting to effect a similar change in her audience. Second, I assert that recognizing Southworth's serious interest in this subject will provide scholars new insight into her most famous work, The Hidden Hand, which I read here as her most sophisticated foray into debate over death penalty, one in which she imagines not just citizens being transformed by sentimentalism, but rather justice system itself, State, becoming a sentimentalized subject--a subject, moreover, that, because of its strong emotional identification with condemned, rejects capital punishment as immoral and unjust. The movement against death penalty in nineteenth-century America reached its height in 1840s, as Southworth was beginning her literary career. Though public opposition to capital punishment existed as early as eighteenth century, organized opposition to executions (part of era's broader reform efforts) did not arise until 1830s. A national society for abolition of death penalty and local societies in each state aggressively pursued change in capital punishment laws by lobbying legislatures, circulating petitions, and publishing pamphlets and books. Antigallows writers and editors, such as John L. O'Sullivan, Charles Spear, and Robert Rantoul, became nationally known for their strident opposition to capital punishment. These reformers were able, in decade or so of movement's heyday, to achieve substantial progress, reducing number of crimes that were considered capital, ending public executions in most states, and abolishing death penalty in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island. Arguments against gallows assumed a number of forms, but generally follow one of two forms: logical challenges to efficacy of death penalty and sympathetic appeals on behalf of condemned. Most arguments fall into first group. Reformers argued that capital punishment was ineffective: It did not deter crime; it provoked additional crime (due to effect of public executions on observers); and it was responsible for deaths of innocent people. The arguments that departed from this approach asked citizens to think, instead, about souls of condemned men and women--to consider whether reforming criminals rather than murdering them should be object of society and its laws. For example, O'Sullivan, emphasizing the future state of soul, noted that future happiness or misery of human spirit depends upon character it sustains when it leaves present state of being, which ... ought to prevent our so punishing crime of murder, as to produce or risk such irretrievably awful results, since souls are of equal value in sight of God, and at his disposal only ... By what authority do we limit space ordained by Almighty, to exemplify triumphs of divine grace? …