I'M LOST

    “The little children and dusky slaves all reverent and attentive during the long sermon, which told of more of the wrath to come, the lake which burns of fire and brimstone.”- Jesse Vedder Van Vetchen History of Greene County

“The execution of William North- prostrated homosexual:

      Yesterday morning, at an early hour, a considerable number of spectators assembled before the Debtor’s Door at Newgate, to witness the execution of William North, convicted in September session of an unnatural crime. The wretched culprit was 54 years of age and had a wife living. On his trial he appeared a fine, stout, robust man, and strongly denied his guilt. During the five months he had been in a condemned cell, with the horrid prospect before him of dying a violent death, his body had wasted to the mere anatomy of a man. His cheeks had sunk, his eyes had become hollow and such was his weakness, that he could scarcely stand without support.

   Sunday night he could not sleep, his mouth was parched with fever; he occasionally ejaculated “Oh God!” and “I’m lost”, and at other times appeared quite childish, his imbecility of mind corresponding to the weakness of his body. And when the Rev. Cotton asked if he believed in Christ and felt that he was a sinner? He replied, “I pray, but cannot feel.”

   As St Sepulchre’s church clock struck eight, the culprit, carrying the rope, attended by the executioner, and clergyman, moved in procession onto the scaffold. On his being assisted up the steps of the scaffold, he became aware of the dreadful death to which he was about to be consigned. The signal being given the drop fell, and the criminal expired in less than a minute. The body hung for an hour, and was then cut down for interment.”- New York Morning Chronicle, Feb. 25, 1823

      My grandfather’s namesake and eldest son Wray Osterhout, was a tough character, a thief, heroin addict and much decorated war hero of World War II and Korea. I met him only once, as he tussled with my father in the moonlight, after being caught stealing tomatoes out of my grandfather’s Boyd Street garden. There was no love lost between my old man and his older brother Wray. Uncle Wray was in and out of jail all his life. Dysfunction was rampant in the Osterhout family. Somehow my father escaped that family curse.

     The youngest Osterhout brother John (the Colonel) on the other hand, was a prime example of maladjustment and discontent. John idolized Wray and Wray loved the adulation his Green Beret baby brother lavished upon him. Wray never knew that John was a fraud. They shared their skewed “war hero” status, at the expense of their sister June and my father Dick. When uncle John died I got a shoebox filled with letters between Wray and John. I read them, then drew on them. 

     Both veterans commiserated over the fact that neither Dick, nor June, could ever understand what they had gone through in their respective wars. They portrayed my father as something close to a coward, nothing but a “sailor,” safe on a ship, all during the Korean conflict and June as a religious fanatic, who had never served her country in uniform. Sadly, the joke was on Wray. John may have jumped out of a plane once or twice for fun near the Airport Inn in Montgomery, but never into Vietnam or Laos. He was a lowly corporal in the U.S. Army, stationed in Japan during his stretch in 1963 and never saw combat. My father and I visited John in V.A. hospital in Newburgh, as he was dying of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. I don’t think he recognized either of us. I looked up Wray Osterhout’s arrest record online and only found one conviction for vagrancy in Texas. Maybe he wasn’t as badass as family lore had it. Who knows if Wray ever found out that his brother John was lying.

     

    Inmate insurrections had plagued Newgate Prison since the very beginning. At Rev. John Stanford’s invitation, New York Gov. Dewitt Clinton visited the facility after major rioting in 1818, just before the Goshen prisoners arrived. President James Monroe had taken a similar tour two years earlier, and things had only gotten worse. Rev. John Stanford downplayed the unrest; instead, concentrating on the inmates’ spiritual wellbeing and aspiring literacy. He assured the dignitaries that moral instruction, cleanliness, work, and solitary confinement, along with corporal punishment, was the only way to create a redemptive space. Graber writes, the “spatial mirror,” reflecting the revivalist enthusiasm of the day, “amounted to a place where equally dramatic divine wonders could take place.” You could always pray for a miracle. Sometimes they served unspoiled meat.        

       Like Austin Reed’s much later “confessions,” William Coffey’s book was also an inditement of the institution, written from the perspective of both a objective witness and victim. The lawyer Coffey, who had no mechanical skill, despised manual labor. The “unskilled,” counselor was at the mercy of keepers trying to maintain work quotas, and avoid inmate sabotage. Coffey was sentenced to seven years hard labor, and when he bungled his job at the loom, he was punished severely. He never forgot that experience. After that, all he wanted to do was sit alone in his cell and contemplate his crime, convinced that the other convicts desired the same. The problem was, the other convicts were more predisposed to basic skills, and would much rather work than sit in contemplation. Coffey’s book, published when he was released, after serving only three years of his seven year sentence, was the most accurate, (albeit prejudiced) account of what Newgate was like in the spring of 1819. It did not fly off the shelves.

    Coffey sympathized with many of the same issues that Thomas Eddy, and Rev. John Stanford faced, explaining, “Among them [the inmates] Christianity is a topic of uniform ridicule. The breath of piety, is utterly contemned, and the orisons of devotion, are blushlessly (sic) execrated.” All these men (convict and agent alike) realized the dangers inherent in communal cohabitation and non-separation of classes of criminality. Put a pretty young thief with a hardened highwayman and the results would be predictable. It made little sense to allow experienced, lifelong criminals to socialize and bunk, with impressionable and vulnerable (male and female) first offenders, runaways and vagrants. Victimization, as well as education in the ways of crime, was allowed to flourish, creating not only pathways to recidivism, but a patronage system offering advanced degrees in theft, murder and rape. Coffey’s ready answer was more solitary confinement, less congregation. But additional solitary cells cost money, and Newgate would not benefit from these insights of men on either side of the bars. Solitary confinement or not, Newgate’s days were numbered.