THE SINEW OF CHIVALRY

“The Great King might send you over to conquer the Indians, but it looks to us that God did not approve of it, if he had he would not have placed the sea where it is, as the limits between us and you.”- Gachradodow (Cayuga chief)

    

       As Auburn and Sing-Sing were added to the archipelago of penitence, these prisons became the model for all U.S. (and the world’s) modern penitentiaries. Thomas Eddy’s well-meaning Quakerism, butted up against the brutal reality of forced labor, corporal punishment, and solitary confinement; highlighting the many complexities inherent in penal reform. I can’t help but think about Nott’s coal stove, and those frozen dead frogs in the road.

     The old Admiral Warren estate where Newgate was built, lay just outside of Manhattan proper in 1796; a country suburb easily accessible by boat from up or down the North River. William Coffey described it as, “occupying one of the most healthy and pleasant spots on the banks of the Hudson.“ By 1819 the new Federal stage line accessed the prison overland, now making the trip through Manhattan’s chaotic streets as easy as taking the ferry. Most of the increasingly diverse prison population had previously resided near the docks, or in the expanding slums of Five Points. This looked like the sticks to them. Convicts were tried, convicted, and sentenced in the courthouse downtown. The newly designated custodial, then sailed “up the river” to Newgate. Early anti-capital punishment advocates like Thomas Eddy predicted and facilitated the rise of today’s prison/industrialist complex. Why execute a man when you can legally contain him for years and work him to death?

    David Conklin—mastermind yeoman and Jack Hodges—sailor assassin, were stripped, doused with buckets of cold water, told to soap up, doused again and issued clownish nightgowns of coarse stripped cloth and pairs of ill fitting shoes, stamped “Prison Made.” The horizontal stripes painted on their gowns identified them as “first timers.” Soon the bloody “stripes” on their backs, from the Keepers’ cat-o-nine-tails would identify them as veterans. Even the most compliant could not avoid a periodic flogging at the hands of a Newgate Keepers, or a stint in the Sunday Cell, if a guard was just having a bad day.   

     Hodges biographer Rev. Ansel Doane Eddy (no relation to Thomas Eddy) observed from his 1842 perch, “at this time [1819] but little attention was paid to the habits, education, or moral improvement of the inmates of our prisons generally. They were regarded more as places of punishment and means of restraint upon the lawless and desperately wicked, than as designed for instruction and moral influence.” Thomas Eddy would take issue with the reverend’s harsh assessment, but Ansel Eddy was right. 

    Thomas Eddy’s lofty experiment in penal reform was slowly mutating into the tumultuous degradation of its London and East Granby, Connecticut namesakes, by the time Coffey, Hodges, and Conklin arrived. Women were barely segregated from the male populace, and as for the insane, and young— when they weren’t being raped and terrorized, they were recovering from it. Designed for 336 individuals, housed in eight person apartment cells, by 1819 Newgate prison housed closer to 700 inmates of all ages and both sexes.

      An increasingly disgruntled and uncooperative prison workforce had rebelled under Thomas Eddy’s experiment in pious reform. Now, larger societal pressures of immigration, slavery and nativism were being “amplified in Newgate’s closed quarters.” Built in 1797, as early as 1799 escapes, fires, work sabotage, and periodic uprisings were not uncommon at Newgate. Even with the return of capital punishment for arson, or the killing of a keeper, Newgate was a simmering battlefield; experiencing full blown riots, that two hundred years later are still erupting in today’s prisons. 

    One Albany Regency member of the NewYork legislature complained of the public being “preyed upon by the convicts who are out of prison, and taxed for the support of those within…” Other angry citizens looked on the state supplying a murderer with a warm cell, three squares and a cot, as coddling and no punishment at all. Like it or not, the war between “us and you,” had started and showed no signs of abating. New prisons were already being built as Newgate was in steady decline. It was the birth of a global industry devoted to confinement, and the two hundred years war that would be waged within the society that created it.