THE ANTECEDENT OF PROGRESS

“That paint after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor, and turn aside the way of the meek.” -Amos 2:7 King James Bible   

   

    It didn’t take long for word to spread in Newgate as to who these new convicts from upstate were. The New York papers had covered the Goshen trials, and word always filtered inside the walls of any notorious new inmates. A last minute reprieve from the gallows for “an ignorant and poor, negro sailor,” along with a rich white farmer, was real news inside prison walls. Pardons were not unusual for an inmate once incarcerated, to ease over population; but for a black man to be spared the rope from the foot of the gallows, for murdering a white man, while two other white men hung? That was unheard of. It was a victory of sorts for the underclass. The inmates could not wait to meet the old, wet, black man, they had watched being dosed with cold water in the yard. Rev. Ansel Eddy noted that Hodges was singled out for harsh treatment by Newgate’s guards, because of his notoriety. In his 1842 Sunday School Union publication Black Jacob, A Monument of Grace, Eddy wrote: 

    “Towards Jacob Hodges, a miserable African murderer, there may have been more severity, owing either to his own refractory temper, or the character of his keepers….He was treated as an ignorant, abandoned, wretched murderer, who, though he had escaped the gallows, was undeserving of the ordinary kindness and sympathy usually extended to the less flagrantly guilty. We can easily imagine, too, that Jacob’s prison- dress, the necessary associations with his past history; his strongly marked, dark African features, together with his stately, resolute carriage, may have all served to turn away all sympathy and to excite far other than charitable feelings towards him.”

   Celebrity could be a double edged sword in prison. And once again, Jack’s “flagrant guilt,” and “color” elicits special attention, as the possible reason for the guards’  “other than charitable,” treatment of the black inmate. Blacks were in the minority in prison. Among it’s many inadequacies, Newgate was horribly overcrowded, causing more radiating problems like sanitation, feeding, moving and working almost seven hundred hair triggered, desperate, men, women, and children, of all shapes, sizes, ages, colors, and intent, in a confined space. How to house and exploit the prison population hadn’t quite caught up with, the much easier task of arresting, and confining so many. The American penal system was a work in progress, and Jack Hodges would be a pioneer on this frontier; a witness to radical shifts in policy, and revolutionary reactions to early mass incarceration, and penal violence. This was his border war, and for whatever reason, from here on in, Jack Hodges convict, would be on the front lines.

    Like the interaction that Hodges and Conklin had both enjoyed with the Revs. Jonathan Fisk and  Richard Cadle in the Goshen gaol, the administers of New York’s first penitentiary also recognized the value of religion within the institution. Architectural plans set aside a large hall in Newgate’s north wing, “for religious instruction, and Sunday services,” initially  led by the lay minister Thomas Eddy, and later, part time clergy. When Director Eddy was removed, a Baptist preacher, by the name of Rev. John Stanford was hired on as chaplain. “Rev. John Stanford—“ William Coffey wrote, was “a venerable and eminently pious man.” at the same time, cynically pointing out, “If the reading of a clerical lecture, were capable of estranging the mind of a bad man, from the odious pursuit of vice….the angel of Christianity long ago would have wept…” 

    John Stanford looked on the inmates’ collective experience of pain, suffering and seclusion, at the hands of the state, as evidence of God’s redemptive “grace.” The penitentiary would provide a time and place, (if one took advantage) for the incarcerated individual to re-form his or her essential being. Much like Thomas Eddy’s hope for the inmate to reflect in the controlled environment of the metaphorical garden, embracing the “inner-light,” Stanford also preached transmutation of the convict through submission to “enlightened despotism.” The clergy now had a firm and official foothold inside prison walls. The only question was—whose side were they on?