The Hangman's Knot: Lynching, Legal Execution, and America's Struggle With the Death Penalty

by Steelwater, Eliza

• ISBN13: 9780813340425
• ISBN10: 081334042X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-07-20
• Publisher: Lightning Source Inc

Summary

Public executions were once commonplace American spectacles. In one instance, Puritan clergymen convicted and executed nineteen people for the "crime" of witchcraft. On the other side of the country many years later, San Francisco's city fathers held "official" vigilante hangings. But today, executions are rigidly controlled bureaucratic procedures authorized by the state. InThe Hangman's Knot: Lynching, Legal Execution, and America's Struggle with the Death Penalty, Eliza Steelwater presents a fascinating history of execution in the United States, from colonial times to the present. With a compelling narrative and gripping personal stories, she documents how this debate became one of the most contentious of our time. The author, a veteran death-penalty researcher and co-founder of Project HAL (Historical American Lynching), shows that the answer to the death penalty's future lies in a discussion of its past. Using information from Project HAL and the authoritative Capital Punishment Research Project - including records of over 15,000 legal executions and 4,500 lynchings nationwide - Steelwater delivers a vivid understanding that America's unparalleled and powerful 200-year-old policy of execution as "punishment politics" is alive and well today. Bringing a fresh perspective to the death-penalty debate, she demonstrates that execution has often had less to do with crimes committed than with the political and economic ambitions of those who controlled the punishment system.

Author Biography

Eliza Steelwater, a native of New Orleans, has researched and written about capital punishment for fifteen years, since receiving a four-year Alumni Federation doctoral fellowship to study at Louisiana State University. One of her study sites was the nearby and infamous Angola penitentiary. She is the co-founder of Project HAL, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to collect and provide information about lynchings and legal executions, with the goal of one day eradicating them. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Table of Contents

Dedication	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: The Hanging of George Woods	1	(10)
1 "The Right Type of Case"	11	(10)
Capital Punishment, Prisoners without Capital, and Public Support for Executions
2 The Worst of the Worst	21	(18)
Puritans, Punishment, and Political Power
3 "A Vast Circle of People"	39	(12)
Authority, Public Execution, and Crowd Control
4 "Darkness, Threatening, Ruins, Terror"	51	(12)
The Penitentiary and Capital Punishment
5 The Will of the People	63	(12)
Early Reactions Against Capital Punishment
6 Legacy of Conquest	75	(12)
Civil War, Slavery, and the First Ku Klux Klan
7 Shivaree	87	(10)
Punishment by Mob
8 "Let Each Man Be His Own Executioner"	97	(12)
Rise of the San Francisco Vigilantes
9 Takeover	109	(12)
Return of the San Francisco Vigilantes
10 Boots, Bullets, and Big Bucks	121	(12)
The Vigilante Myth
11 "Beaten All to Smash"	133	(16)
Labor, the Robber Barons, and the Law
12 "Death and Destruction to the System"	149	(12)
Labor on Trial
13 White on White Terrorism after the Civil War	161	(10)
14 "Serving Your Racial Needs"	171	(14)
Colonel Simmons's Ku Klux Klan
15 "Foreigners and Negroes"	185	(18)
Discrimination, Lynching, and the Penalty of Death
16 A Clean, Well-Lighted Place	203	(12)
Death-Penalty Reform in the Progressive Era
17 "Evolving Standards of Decency"	215	(14)
Civil Rights and Abolition of the Death Penalty
18 The Endless End of Capital Punishment	229	(10)
Photo Credits	239	(4)
Notes	243	(30)
Index	273