“I believe in capital punishment,” Samuel Clemens announced in a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune in the spring of 1871. “I believe that when a murder has been done it should be answered for with blood. I have all my life been taught to feel in this way, & the fetters of education are strong.”1 To be sure, he concluded the letter tongue-in-cheek by urging anyone who disagreed with him to recruit a volunteer to take the place of a condemned killer; and to avoid confusing the public with his comic pseudonym he concealed his identity by signing the letter “Samuel Langhorne.” The next year, his views on capital punishment had begun to shift. As Jarrod Roark observes, Clemens “wove his anti-gallows and anti-jury sentiment” throughout the travelogue Roughing It (1872),2 especially in the lynchings of the highwayman Jack Slade by vigilantes in chapter 11 and of the bully Bill Noakes by Captain Ned Blakely in chapter 50. Clemens indulged in a bit of gallows humor in chapter 69 of Following the Equator (1897), where he morbidly joked that when the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes received his just desserts “I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.”3Clemens’ mature opposition to capital punishment was nowhere more evident, however, than in his answer to an inquiry he received in the fall of 1904 from the Maynard Shipley (1872–1934), a socialist and principal of the Palo Alto academy. Shipley had been commissioned by the Department of Economics at Stanford University to prepare a history of international criminal law in general and a comparative study of how capital punishment in particular is administered across cultures. In the course of his research Shipley sent a battery of letters to such prominent public figures as President Grover Cleveland, President Porfirio Díaz of Mexico, the mikado of Japan and king of Siam, Italian criminologists Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri, physician and author Max Nordau, eugenicists Francis Dalton and Havelock Ellis, historian and political theorist William E. H. Lecky, jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Samuel Clemens. More to the point, Shipley asked Clemens whether in light of his strong views on other social issues he shared the opinion that the death penalty for murder should be abolished and replaced with incarceration or prison detention until a criminal is rehabilitated or “cured” of anti-social behavior.4 In a marginal gloss on Shipley's letter, Clemens has scribbled, “I agree to this S L Clemens.”5 An article about Shipley's project in the San Jose Mercury revises Clemens’ quote to read “I heartily agree with your views as expressed.”6 In any case, Clemens in 1904 explicitly expressed his opposition to capital punishment.Shipley failed to complete, or at least to publish, his proposed four-volume The Development of Criminal Law. However, between 1905 and 1910 he contributed a series of articles on the topic that cast doubt on the death penalty as a deterrent to crime in such magazines as the Annals of the American Academy, American Law Review, Harper's Weekly, Popular Science, and Publications of the American Statistical Association.7My thanks to Robert H. Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project and curator of the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley, for his assistance.
Read full abstract