Reviewed by: Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England Adrian Weimer Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England. By Scott D. Seay. (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2009. Pp. xi, 217. $36.00. ISBN 978-0-875-80402-6.) New Englanders witnessed 460 public executions before the early-nineteenth century, when legal theory, theology, and middle-class sensibilities converged to confine the ritual to a private space. In the able hands of Scott D. Seay the sermons accompanying these executions provide fruitful material for understanding changing attitudes toward criminals and sin in early New England. A study rich in its longitudinal scope and detailed analysis, Hanging between Heaven and Earth mines these sermons for insight into crime literature, religious and political thought, and the historical ethics of capital punishment. Protestant ministers knew their execution sermons would reach an enormous audience. Increase Mather’s sermon on the execution of James Morgan [End Page 611] in 1686 packed the large Old North Church so tightly that “the walls of the gallery began to crack under the weight of the audience.” Instead of canceling the event, the crowd, perhaps numbering 5000, moved to Old South Church and its environs to hear the rest of the sermon (pp. 24–25).What were these kinds of crowds hearing? Seay argues that while the basic literary structure of the execution sermons remained constant, the message changed significantly when ministers considered the reasons for crime, the possibility for dramatic conversions, and the purpose of civil government itself. Espousing a strong view of hereditary sin, early New England ministers encouraged “moral identification” between the condemned and onlookers. For example, in 1721 Cotton Mather asked the crowd if the man to be executed was “the only One that may be charged with Murdering his Wife among us.” No, Mather preached, “all husbands who speak harshly to their wives, fail to provide them with sufficient food, or break their hearts . . . are guilty of murdering them” (p. 54). Seay finds that the early preachers saw noncriminals as restrained from literal murder only by God’s grace, not because of any innate moral difference between a person in the crowd and the murderer on the scaffold. Criminals were providentially denied this restraining grace in a slippery slope of small sins leading to larger ones—a progression into which any citizen could slide. In early New England, ministers and magistrates largely agreed on the efficacy of the “gruesome displays” at the scaffold to communicate a moral warning and to cleanse the community of guilt and discord. In the eighteenth century, communities put increasing pressure on the condemned person to experience an emotional repentance. Laypeople and ministers increased their efforts to facilitate his or her conversion through prison visits and communal prayers, and legislated further delay between arrest and execution. In the context of evangelical revivalism “when the condemned failed to achieve repentance or actively refused to strive after it, the ritual virtually was robbed of its significance entirely” (p. 44).When they did convert, however, these redeemed criminals became exemplars, held up for the entire community to emulate. Seay argues convincingly that execution sermons in New England showed marked change in the early national period as ministers absorbed John Locke and John Taylor’s exegetical and philosophical arguments for humans as “independent moral agents” and for guilt as “nontransferable” (p. 62). Many sermons adopted a new view of human sinfulness which saw crime as a result of individual choice rather than inherited human depravity. This emphasis on individual responsibility led to a qualitative difference between capital criminals and ordinary people. Sermons on the executions of blacks, who led in condemnations for rape and arson, intensified this rhetoric of difference. The trope of the morally “peculiar” criminal accompanied calls for renewed efforts in moral education. God’s restraining grace was no longer so mysterious—it worked through “religious education and proper family government” (p. 74). [End Page 612] Pennsylvania reformers, especially Quakers, led the effort to change how criminals were treated, working to establish penitentiaries as well as to limit the scope of capital punishment and to...
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