SLUMBERING HUMANITY

“MURDER, MURDER, MURDER, hell and damnation, take the devil away! Murder, murder, bring that infernal wretch to me that I lay him cold and senseless at my feet! Do you hear me? Bring him to me. He slayed my father, and with one stroke of his bloody hand he laid my sister cold at his feet.”-Austin Reed The Life and Confessions of a Haunted Convict

    That pink-eared devil clicks and wobbles, teeters on his heels. Of his habits I’ve made a study of what it is he feels. In the morning it’s blood for breakfast, dripping down men’s backs, mixed in with the tears of angels after 40 whacks. Then he goes about his business, no one gives a damn down at that bar -he’s never far from God’s almighty hand. Those palmy days out by the lake, a plate that’s piled high, the blood-neck buzzard’s ringers gone I miss those days gone by. I caught my breath when hit the river, her charms were always right, for the moment I couldn’t guess how we got through the night.

  “My name is Samuel Yaple.” the convict stated from the witness stand. “They say I stole a horse. Don’t know how old Gordon was, should judge between 25 and 30; short, rather below normal height, quite thick set. I should think the scissor-blade was made of steel. The tip broke off. Looked quite fresh. I knew the man Gordon. We both worked in the hame shop. Never spoke to Wyatt. I heard Gordon say Wyatt was in prison with him in Ohio. Said he got in a scrape in Pittsburgh, killed a sheriff and was sent down a river in a raft. There was an alternative about it. I think there was others involved who all died and then he was picked up by the Indians. He had considerable gab about him.”

John Chadderdon (keeper) sworn:

     “They came down in the basement to form in line, to go to chapel. I saw no disturbance, until I saw a move in the ranks at that spot. I mean in the spot where Wyatt and Gordon stood…..I saw Gordon the deceased jump from that spot, and heard him halloo. He was facing me…..When Gordon hallooed, he squalled out like a man in distress. I cannot imitate him. I saw Wyatt standing when Gordon jumped from the ranks. I think when I saw him he stood looking right at me. I saw the instrument in his hand, with the point up against his sleeve, or by the side of his arm, parallel with his arm. The instrument is the pointed blade of a tailor’s shears. He immediately dropped it out of his hand. He came right forward to where I stood and went in his cell. I followed after, closed the door and locked it. I then went on with the men to the chapel.” 

     William Freeman was determined to attend every day of the Wyatt trial; just in case his name came up. When asked by a local farmer if he wanted a day’s work, Bill scowled and shook his head. Because he could hear little in the courtroom Bill couldn’t sit still. He would get up, move over by the wood box and stove, then back to the window, then return to the side of the bailiff, trying not to miss anything. A vacant look on his face, his mouth smiling but eyes dull and blank, Freeman tried in vain to hear whatever the witnesses were saying; ever on the alert in case someone mentioned his name or that goddamned horse. No one ever did.

      As the Wyatt trial proceeded, Henry Seward eloquently pointed out that a constant diet of “fear,” was not part of the bargain when a citizen was taken into custody by the state. Atrocities committed by state employees could not simply be excused, ignored and written off, as merely part of the many occupational hazards that the guards faced on a daily basis, “just doing their job.” By breaking the law, Henry reasoned, the inmate did relinquish some, but not all, of his rights guaranteed under the Constitution. “Liberty” and the “pursuit of happiness” may have been forfeited, but not sanity or “life,” itself. 

    While still governor, on April 16, 1839, Hon. William H. Seward delivered a critical report on New York’s prisons to the state senate. One mentally ill convict received a thousand lashes within a three week period. Quoted in Rev. Louis Dwight’s 14th annual report to the Prison Disciplinary Society of Boston or PDSB, Seward pointed to the many abuses at Sing-Sing and Auburn; citing profit motive, punishment, and the fact that inmate control superseded any hope of individual reform. The relatively new American penal system was now in dire need of reform itself. 

    By the end of 1839 Governor Seward  had removed infamous agents Elam Lynds at Auburn, and Robert Wiltse at Sing-Sing. It had little effect. Inmates were consistently beaten, broken, driven mad or killed themselves. By the 1840’s the goal of the prison chaplain had mutated from aspirant forger of men’s souls, to being satisfied with turning out a law-abiding citizen, with hopefully a low rate of recidivism. As the bar was lowered once again, more abuse took place in the shadows. A ethos of violence and restrictive control had overwhelmed any thin facade of reform that remained within the Auburn System. As the British author Charles Dickens put it, after a visit to Pennsylvania’s Eastern State:

    “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.”