BURN DOWN THE MISSION

   “In May 1819, I was, unfortunately, compelled to an acquaintance with the concern of the prison. Although I had lived all my life time, in the city of New-York, I had never, until then, entered the dreary prison gate.”- William Coffey Inside Out; or An Interior View of the New-York State Prison 

  David Conklin and Jack Hodges, were shackled together and led out the front of the Goshen gaol just before dawn on Monday April 19,1819. The prisoners’ heads whipped left to right in expectation of a lynch mob. But there was none. In the three days between the Teed and Dunning hangings, Hodges and Conklin had all but been forgotten. The town was exhausted, and peacefully desolate. Nobody cared anymore. The two men were taken in a secure black mariah coach, with six armed guards to Haverstraw, and then transferred to a vessel that deposited them on the dock of New York’s first prison—Newgate. 

      We have no first person account from either Hodges, or Conklin at Newgate Prison, but shortly after the pair were admitted, another convict arrived. Under the pen name “George C. Shattuck,” William Coffey, a white New York City lawyer arrested for forgery, wrote of his stretch in New York’s first prison. His perspective published in 1823, INSIDE OUT or An Interior View of the New York State Prison, reveals some jarring surprises, and contradictions at Newgate upon admittance. 

    What Coffey thought would be a solemn and bleak dungeon was not what greeted him upon his arrival at the “dreary gate.” “There was nothing to be seen but unbounded levity.” Coffey wrote of his introduction to incarceration, ”Cheerfulness and contentment played upon their [the prisoners’] cheeks; quietude of mind was visible in their actions. Depraved in the most shocking degree, they evinced everything unmanly, obscene and disgusting.” Coffey is a valuable guide inside this new conspiracy.      

     Although envisioned by the Pennsylvania reformer, Thomas Eddy, as a metaphor for the Quaker Society of Friends’ enclosed “garden,” keeping outside “bad influences” at bay, a world of desolation, degradation, violence and even—“levity,” awaited Coffey, Hodges and Conklin. Newgate Prison in New York, (not its London, or East Granby Connecticut predecessors) was created as a radically different, modern penitentiary, only twenty years old when Coffey and the Goshen inmates arrived. They would be witness to the downfall of Eddy’s Quaker experiment in sanguine redemption. 

     At Newgate, blacks were segregated from whites in their sleeping arrangements, but not unsurprisingly, slave from “free.” Pecking orders developed quickly, inter and intra-racially. Prisons are nothing if not microcosms of society at large. Newgate literally was a cultural melting pot. The races, and sexes, of all ages, were allowed to intermingle in the large yard, returning to large segregated apartments to sleep. The “colored section” of the prison backed up to the woman’s tier, and relationships (consensual and otherwise) between this diverse populous of both sexes were unavoidable. “Here were to be seen,” Coffey writes “people from almost every clime and country: Spaniards, Frenchmen, Italians, Portuguese, Germans, Englishmen, Scotchman, Irishmen, Swedes, Danes, Africans, West-Indians, Brazilians, several Northern Indians, and many claiming to be citizens of the U. States.”    

    In 1819 the black population at Newgate was relatively low. Penology expert Jennifer Graber writes, “Only one out of thirteen inmates was African American and one in five female.” A robust, and increasingly contentious population of immigrants joined the nativists— black and white, free and slave. Language was a garble of pidgin English, whistles, squawks, barks and groans. The silence policy that would later become so popular at Sing-Sing and Auburn hadn’t been thought up yet.   

    Jack dug in his boot for his sailor’s papers and presented them to the keeper. Reading “Boatworker-Free,” the keeper smiled at the irony, handing Jack back his papers, ordering him to squat. 

    “In the north wing is a chapel fitted up with galleries. In the south wing is a dining hall, over which is a large apartment,” described William Coffey, “allotted to prisoners who work at shoemaking. On the second floor of the north west wing, there is a hospital, and on the ground floors, of the first south and north wings, there are two kitchens for the use of prisoners.

   Adjoining the end of each wing, there is a building of stone, two stories high, containing 7 cells on the upper floor for solitary confinement. They measure 8 feet long, 6 feet wide, and 14 high, and the windows are 8 feet from the floor.”    

Welcome to the mission.