Question 3

Chapter 11

Sexual Desire, Crime, and Punishment in the Early Republic

Mark E. Kann

The American Revolution ushered in a “sexual revolution” that lowered restraints on sexual desire but heightened fears that youths would fail to exhibit republican virtue.1 One indicator of impending failure was the perceived growth of crime in cities such as Boston, New York, and Phila- delphia. Beginning in the 1780s, penal reformers argued that the primary means for preventing crime was to encourage people to discipline desire and the preferred method for curing criminality was to rehabilitate con- victs by incarcerating them for long periods. Importantly, disciplining de- sire meant restraining sexual desire and rehabilitation required enforcing prisoner sexual abstinence.

Penal reformers prided themselves on their enlightened advocacy of liberty and independence but they were uneasy about reduced restraints on sexual desire. They believed that excessive passion was the basis of many crimes, including sex crimes ranging from adultery and bigamy to prostitution and rape. They also identified excessive passion as the source of same-sex desire and sodomy—which they considered particularly sin- ful and subversive of the biological, social, and political order ordained by God, nature, and reason. Where individuals failed to discipline desire, their promiscuous, lawless behavior needed to be punished lest sexual im- punity undermine social stability.

Penal reformers’ recommended punishment was long-term imprison- ment in penitentiaries that were specifically designed to dampen men’s passions, enforce sexual abstinence, and teach redeeming self-discipline. Ideally, penitentiaries were designed so that the sexes were segregated; each man was isolated from other men; and panoptic systems of surveil-

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lance ensured that prison life was passionless. In reality, constant over- crowding in penitentiaries meant that men and women inmates occasion- ally found each other; and male inmates, boys and men, shared cells and beds with one another. Reformers’ main priority was to keep men and women apart, eventually, by calling for the creation of separate institu- tions for each sex. Furthermore, reformers feared that young male inmates were being seduced and raped by older men and, once fallen from virtue, these boys could never be rehabilitated. This fear gradually gave rise to a movement to protect delinquent boys from adult criminals by placing youths in their own facilities. Finally, although reformers complained about persistent sexual behavior among adult male prisoners, prison offi- cials had neither the logistical ability nor the political motivation to pre- vent it. Officials’ grudging toleration of same-sex behavior suggested that the state’s power over prisoners found its limits in same-sex desire.

The Context for Penal Reform

Dr. Benjamin Rush was an early leader in American penal reform. In his medical practice and public service, he dwelled on men’s sexual excesses. He wrote that the “solitary vice” of masturbation fixed “physical and moral evils . . . upon the body and mind.” Additionally, “The morbid ef- fects of intemperance in sexual intercourse with women” ruined male mental and physical health. Moreover, in schools where boys lodged to- gether and shared beds, “the venereal appetite prevails with so much force and with such odious consequences” that youths were permanently dam- aged. Rush claimed that male masturbation, promiscuity, and sodomy produced debilities ranging from insanity to criminality.2 His anxiety about same-sex experimentation among boys in boarding schools antici- pated later reformers’ apprehensions about the sexual vulnerability of young boys in adult prisons.

Rush joined other civic leaders and intellectuals to urge Americans to restrain sexual desire. In her literary study of the early Republic, Karen Weyler observes that fiction, advice literature, and education theory, along with medical writings, routinely prescribed “self-knowledge, self-disci- pline, and self-control.” Liberty had to be wed to self-restraint to sustain an orderly republic.3 Elites agreed that liberty led to licentiousness when- ever self-restraint failed to neutralize excessive desire. Religious realists and enlightenment idealists long recognized that a degree of sexual licen-

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tiousness was predictable. But was it tolerable? The American answer was mixed. In colonial New England, for example, officials legislated capital punishment for sexual deviancy but rarely hanged men convicted of sod- omy. Magistrates even allowed some exhibitions of same-sex desire. Nich- olas Sension’s sexual aggression toward other males was well known to his seventeenth-century Connecticut neighbors, but it did not diminish “the general esteem in which he was held.”4 Overall, post-Revolution officials scaled down the practice of prosecuting sexual offenses. Quiet adultery was usually allowed. Bigamy, often a product of self-divorce followed by remarriage, was rarely prosecuted. Prostitutes plied their trade with little fear of arrest. Sexual offenses sometimes generated less official concern than public gambling and drunkenness.5

Still, civic leaders and leading citizens were ambivalent. They supported individual rights but retained doubts about sexual license. Penal reform- ers fed their doubts by condemning men’s lack of sexual self-discipline as a cause of crimes, ranging from rape and sodomy to theft and murder. They urged public officials to prosecute sexual criminals, particularly those who flaunted sexual improprieties. Such open wrongdoing under- mined respect for law and set a bad example for youths. Urged on by penal reformers and other moral reformers, civic leaders waged culture wars against “sporting-male” youths, who made unregulated sex their “categori- cal imperative.” These licentious youths were most visible in New York City, where they “patronized gambling and animal blood sports, billiards, brothels, gangs, aggressive volunteer fire brigades, political clubs,” but their passions and crimes also wreaked havoc in villages and small towns across the American landscape.6

Thomas Jefferson epitomized this ambivalence. Like other enlightened thinkers, he encouraged self-discipline and civic virtue as the primary means for restraining individual desire and maintaining social order. Fur- thermore, he supported the liberalization of punishments. He advocated the elimination of the death penalty for most crimes, including sex crimes such as sodomy. Simultaneously, Jefferson doubted men’s ability to disci- pline desire, especially sexual desire. Thus, he supported replacing the death penalty with castration for men found guilty of “rape, polygamy, or sodomy with man or woman.” Public vengeance apparently demanded cutting off the member rather than curing the criminal.7 Like many re- formers, Jefferson spoke the language of rehabilitation but nevertheless suspected that men who were moved by excessive sexual desire were more incorrigible than salvageable.

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Passions and Crimes

In the early Republic, ministers and magistrates began to construe crime less as a by-product of innate wickedness than as a result of excessive de- sires unleashed by adverse circumstances. They reported that wrongdoers’ powerful passions first surfaced in childhood. The typical criminal began his career of mischief “as an unfilial child, who throws off the yoke of pa- rental guidance to pursue willfully vicious courses, usually involving sex- ual promiscuity or precocity.”8 For Dr. James Mease, biology was the basis of childhood vice. Criminals sired children “destined to succeed to the hereditary vices of their parents.” Most commentators attributed child- hood offenses to adverse circumstances, particularly bad parenting. John Griscom blamed “the profligate example of parents.” Francis Lieber espe- cially reproached the mother “given to intemperance” or to “violence and immoral conduct” for bringing up “as many vagabonds and prostitutes as she has male and female children.”9 Even in childhood, passion, sex, and crime seemed to come wrapped in a single package.

Whether the source was nature or nurture, children’s unruly passions matured into adults’ criminal tendencies. Philadelphia’s William Bradford claimed that men sometimes experienced “a violence of temptation” that drove them to crime. Thomas Eddy, a leader in New York penal reform, felt that otherwise innocent men could be “blinded by passion” or “allured by present temptation” only to fall “into the depths of vice and criminal- ity.” Reform warden Gershom Powers felt that “moments of frenzy” moti- vated many crimes. Edward Livingston, who drafted a major revision of Louisiana’s criminal code, attributed numerous offenses to the individual who sought to “gratify the strongest passion of his soul” during an “intox- icating moment.”10

Convicts commonly confessed that intoxication was a catalyst for their crimes. Johnson Green blamed “drunkenness” for his wrongdoing. John Dixon warned spectators at his execution to avoid “hard drinking” lest they end up like him. Counterfeiter William Stuart observed, “All rogues drink. Every vicious man loves rum. Every gross, vulgar man loves the bot- tle. A rogue cannot persist in roguery without it.” Former inmate John Reynolds claimed that a ban on alcohol would leave “half the rooms in our prisons . . . without an inhabitant.” Religious reformers also linked liquor to crime. Quaker Thomas Eddy wrote that “the greater number of crimes originate in the irregular and vicious habits produced by intoxica- tion, and by the idle, low, and dissipated practice encouraged in taverns

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and tippling-houses.”11 The Reverend Nathan Strong was convinced that the overabundance of “tippling houses and dram shops” fostered crime. He wanted “habitual drunkards” confined and liquor sales limited.12

More often than not, penal reformers resisted efforts to decriminalize sexual offenses lest individuals’ inner desires generate outer disorders. For example, Edward Livingston worried that if lawmakers did not punish adultery, “the injured party will do it for himself.” A husband who discov- ered his wife’s infidelity would be driven by rage to seek vengeance by “as- saults, duels, assassinations, [and] poisonings.” Should the husband kill his wife’s lover, most juries would acquit the husband. Livingston argued that outlawing adultery and attaching a modest punishment to it would avert the disorders associated with private vengeance.13 Historian Hendrik Har- tog reports that a man’s “right” to kill his wife’s lover was generally judged by the state of his passions. If a husband discovered another man with his wife and killed him immediately, in the heat of passion, the husband could expect to be exempted from a murder charge.14 Tapping Reeve, a domestic law scholar in the early Republic, argued that the husband’s inflamed pas- sions did not affect his culpability but should mitigate his punishment. He ought to get prison time, not the noose.15

William Bradford applied a similar logic to rape and sodomy. Rape was a crime that arose from “the sudden abuse of a natural passion” and was “perpetrated in a frenzy of desire.” A rapist experienced a momentary lapse in reason, not “irreclaimable corruption.” Sodomy, the “crime against nature,” also stemmed from such excessive sexual desire. Its perpetrator was so enslaved by his passions that he was in no mind to think clearly or reflect on the terrible consequences of his actions. Had he done so, “the infamy of detection” would have been as sufficient a deterrent as the threat of capital punishment. Ultimately, sex criminals acted out of inflamed passions rather than malicious calculation or incorrigible viciousness. They should be punished with prison time rather than with hanging. In prison, Bradford suggested, they should be rehabilitated and reclaimed for law-abiding society.16

The growing belief that “the greater part of crimes against persons are acts committed in rashness” enabled penal reformers to argue that nearly all criminals, including men convicted of sex crimes, could be rehabili- tated to citizenship if they were taught to discipline desire.17 This focus on rehabilitation through education enabled reformers, legislators, and other public officials to rethink the purposes of punishment. They began to claim that it was unrepublican to view punishment as a mode of

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vengeance; it was enlightened to use punishment as a means to teach self- restraint to immature men who had failed to harness their passions suffi- ciently. Reformers began to design penal institutions and punishment reg- imens that would encumber criminals with values and habits conducive to self-restraint. And although reformers rarely spoke openly about the need to teach criminals to tame sexual desire, they did address that need in two ways. First, they used the language of “filth” to speak the unspeak- able. Second, they designed penal institutions and punishment regimens to dampen convict passions by enforcing sexual abstinence among them.

Speaking the Unspeakable

Colonial ministers often employed the language of filth to discuss men’s inability to control sexual desire (lest they suffer debasement to the level of beasts). The Reverend John Cotton referred to deviant sex as “unnatural filthiness.” The Reverend Samuel Danforth described a convicted sodom- ite as a man of “carnal uncleanness” who committed “abominable filthi- ness,” including the “self-pollution” of masturbation.18 Similarly, secular writers tied filth to sexual wrongdoing, for example, by referring to a pros- titute as a “dirty venereal trollop.” The early Republic anticipated a Victo- rian prohibition against explicit public sex talk. In the 1810 case of Davis v. Maryland, for example, the court referred to sodomy as “that most horri- ble and detestable crime (among Christians not to be named).” Justice Nicholson wrote in his commentary, “The crime of sodomy is too well known to be misunderstood, and too disgusting to be defined, farther than by merely naming it.”19

Michel Foucault points out that such reticence to speak about sex did not mean a suppression of expression. Jody Greene explains why civic leaders and public officials in England felt compelled to express their disgust for acts of sodomy. On the one hand, they considered sodomy a crime not to be named or mentioned because it was infectious. Merely speaking about it or drawing attention to it would inflame the passions of audiences. On the other hand, same-sex desire and sodomy had to be de- nounced publicly and made known objects of punishment lest men in- dulge excessive desire with impunity. Sodomy became what Greene calls a “public secret”: officials expressed grave reservations about uttering the word but they then proceeded to do just that.20

Many penal reformers and officials in the United States expressed their

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public secret indirectly, using the language of filth to allude to illicit sex. New York’s Society for the Prevention of Pauperism declared, “Every per- son that frequents the out-streets of this city must be forcibly struck with the ragged and uncleanly appearance, the vile language, and the idle and miserable habits of great numbers of children” engaged in drinking, theft, promiscuity, and prostitution. Street urchins grew up into “uncleanly” delinquents. Reformers wanted a clean republic. Rush announced, “Too much cannot be said in favor of cleanliness as a physical means of pro- moting virtue.” Cleanliness fostered self-discipline and sexual integrity, whereas “uncleanness” signified the “unrestrained passions” that generated social grime and public crime.21

Sending criminals to filthy jails was no solution. Reformers complained that New Hampshire’s jails exposed inmates to “lasciviousness.” Many jails were “half-way houses of drunkenness and ill fame.” In New York City’s municipal jail, individuals awaiting trial, vagrants, and petty offenders re- sided in a state of filth and intoxication. Inmates suffered an exacerbation of “bad passions,” rendering them “an hundred-fold more vicious and un- tractable.”22 In a Pennsylvania jail, inmates included “the disgusting object of popular contempt, besmeared with filth from the pillory—the unhappy victim of the lash, streaming with blood from the whipping post—the half naked vagrant—the loathsome drunkard—the sick suffering from various bodily pains.” A former convict described the accommodations in one Connecticut jail in this way:

The rooms were only lighted with a small heavily grated window pane,

overstocked with lice, fleas and bed bugs, and the floor five inches deep of

slippery stinking filth. . . . Loathsomeness and putridity, united with billions

of entomological living specimens, shower the senses of a man uninured to

filth, and he instinctively feels that in such cases nothing but fire can act

successfully as a purifier and health preserver. . . . Armies of fleas, lice and

bed bugs nightly covered every inch of this polluted prison.23

Boston’s Prison Discipline Society reported an instance “in which an old negro, who was covered with sores, whose clothes were filthy rags, and on whom were seen afterwards swarms of vermin, was thrust into . . . prison, and locked up, night after night, and week after week, in a narrow and filthy dungeon, with blacks and whites, old and young, and made their constant companion.”24 Traditional jails were physically and morally un- healthy. They caged men but uncaged men’s most pernicious passions.

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Reformers were particularly dismayed to discover men and women co- habiting and fornicating in jails. A 1787 Philadelphia County Grand Jury denounced the “general intercourse between criminals of the different sexes” in the local jail. It also condemned the prostitutes who plied their trade inside that facility. The Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons demanded that this “mixture of the sexes” be remedied. Reformers succeeded to make the separation of the sexes a typical expectation but not a pervasive reality. In the 1820s, Boston reformers reported several cases “in which men and women have been found in the different prisons confined in the same apartment, whose guilty countenances indicated their character and habits.” In one jail in Charleston, South Carolina, “The necessities of nature must be done by both sexes in the presence of each other.” Some reformers promoted the separation of female inmates from male guards, who were prone to abuse and prostitute the women.25

On rare occasions, penal activists expressed concerns about young ser- vant and slave girls who were confined by their masters and mistresses only to be “seduced from their original innocence” by “the most aban- doned of the sex.” Reporting that young female inmates were being cor- rupted by older female felons, New York’s Society for the Prevention of Pauperism condemned the women’s quarters at Bellevue as a “great school of vice.” This condemnation more likely indicated reformers’ concern for girls’ fall from virtue rather than grave anxiety about their seduction or rape by older women.26

More frequently, reformers vocalized agreement with the Chief Magis- trate of Massachusetts who, in 1827, examined the presence of “unnatural crime” in the state’s penitentiary system and found that the “horrible offense is here committed between wretches, who are alike destitute of moral sentiment, and without the reach of physical restraint. Nature and humanity cry aloud for redemption from this dreadful degradation.” The same year, commissioners appointed by the Connecticut legislature ob- served “that in some of our penitentiaries, if not all, in which the convicts are placed in large numbers together in the cells, the crime of sodomy has been perpetuated, in numerous instances, with entire shamelessness and notoriety.” Commissioners attributed this “shamelessness and notoriety” to “hoary headed convicts condemned to long imprisonment . . . whose passions and principles have been corrupted and degraded to the lowest point of debasement, and who are at night, in numbers from four to thirty-two persons, locked together in cells which are not subject to offi- cial inspection.”27 These reports indicated that officials recognized same-

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sex desire as a problem for prison administration, blamed older convicts for instigating sodomy in prisons, but identified overcrowding as the main obstacle to eradicating same-sex encounters and enforcing abstinence be- hind bars.

Penitentiaries and Punishments

From the 1780s onward, penal reformers persuaded legislators to replace traditional punishments such as hanging, whipping, and detention in jails with long-term incarceration in penitentiaries — with new institutions specifically designed to encourage and teach inmates to restrain their pas- sions. Penitentiaries were expensive. New York built its first penitentiary in 1799 for $208,846, the state’s largest expenditure. Pennsylvania’s Eastern Penitentiary, which opened in 1829, was the most expensive structure in the nation.28 These institutions were costly for two reasons. First, they had to accommodate growing numbers of inmates serving long prison sen- tences. Second, they were designed to keep inmates separated from one another. Traditional jails housed many men in a single cell; the new peni- tentiaries were to house one man in each cell.

Reformers demanded clean penitentiaries. South Carolina’s Robert Turnbull praised Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison, where cleanliness was “a very principal physical cause in correcting the vices of [prisoners].” Thomas Eddy, who ran New York’s first penitentiary, claimed that the ef- fect of cleanliness on physical health was well understood “but its less striking but equally certain effect on the mind has been nowhere more fully experienced than in this prison.” Cleanliness tended to “soften the temper, meliorate the disposition, and produce a regard to temperance, order, and industry and . . . conduce to [prisoners’] future amendment.” Dissipated, sickly inmates became sober, healthy men. Boston’s Prison Discipline Society praised the New York State Prison at Auburn for being “a specimen of neatness from the gate to the sewer.” Penitentiaries in Con- necticut and Maryland prided themselves on housing inmates who exhib- ited “cleanliness in their persons, dress, and bedding.”29

Enforcing physical and mental hygiene demanded extensive control over inmate lives. Incarceration prevented male inmates from experienc- ing further corruption from bad parents, vicious friends, and fallen women as well as vices associated with taverns, theaters, gambling halls, and brothels. Warden Gershom Powers felt that sequestering inmates in

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penitentiaries forced them “to reflection and communion with their own hearts.” Enforced silence helped. Inmates who were “free from the sound of a human voice” were also free from the crude language that inflamed men’s passions. Ideally, penitentiaries were stripped of “everything calcu- lated to inflame the passions and sharpen the evil propensities of men.”30

To this end, Sean McConville writes, officials sought to control “every as- pect of daily life: sleeping, eating, working, associating with others, read- ing—and in religion, dress, and exercise.”31 Every aspect of daily life in- cluded sexual desire and behavior.

Reformers’ implicit theory was that male convicts could learn to re- strain sexual desire if they were shielded from sexual stimulation. The first rule for managing prisoner sexual desire was to separate male and female inmates. This rule appeared to be relatively easy to administer because America’s first penitentiaries housed few women. The early Republic had few female felons and, often, they were kept out of penitentiaries because, as William Torrey explained to New York State Prison inspectors in 1814, women prisoners were “very refractory.”32 Worse, their sexuality and filthy language had an unsettling effect on male inmates. Nevertheless, some women resided in most penitentiaries. Officials confined them to isolated quarters to prevent all contact with male inmates. The Massachusetts State Prison locked women in a single room. The New York State Prison at Auburn enclosed them in an attic above the kitchen “to prevent any com- munication with the men.”33 During religious services, the women sat “be- hind wooden grates” to remain unseen by men. Some reformers argued for separate women’s penitentiaries. In 1828, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton called for a state prison for women and, a decade later, the state constructed the nation’s first women’s prison.34

The second rule for managing prisoner sexual desire was to separate male inmates from each other. Although reformers were rarely explicit about male inmates’ same-sex relations, Foucault’s description of eigh- teenth-century secondary schools applies with equal force to early Ameri- can penitentiaries:

On the whole, one can have the impression that sex was hardly spoken of at

all in these institutions. But one only has to glance over the architectural

layout, the rules of discipline, and their whole internal organization: the

question of sex was a constant preoccupation. The builders considered it

explicitly. The organizers took it permanently into account. All who held a

measure of authority were placed in a state of perpetual alert, which the fix-

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tures, the precautions taken, the interplay of punishments and responsibili-

ties, never ceased to reiterate.35

American penal reformers’ constant warnings against mutual contamina- tion among male prisoners and their extraordinary efforts to keep male prisoners separated from each other suggest a concerted strategy to elimi- nate opportunities for sodomy.

Penal reformers regularly complained about the “promiscuous associa- tion” of men incarcerated together in large jail cells. Hardened criminals were able to corrupt the untried prisoners, witnesses, debtors, vagrants, disorderly persons, misdemeanants, and young, first-time offenders resid- ing among them. These jails were “high schools of iniquity,” where a “mas- ter” trained the untutored and plotted “diabolical purposes” with them. Corrupted youths became “intimately acquainted with the arts of villainy,” hastening their graduation from vagrancy to felony. The promiscuous as- sociation of inmates initiated youths “to scenes of debauchery, dishonesty, and wickedness of every sort.” These “scenes of debauchery” likely in- cluded the filth associated with same-sex desire, sodomy, and sexual abuse among male inmates.36

Reformers developed two primary systems of penitentiary architecture and discipline, both aimed at isolating male prisoners from each other. Under the Pennsylvania system, all inmates were confined in solitary cells for the duration of their sentences. Their only human contact was with guards and chaplains. Pennsylvania reformers believed that solitude was the best means to eliminate contact and corruption among vicious men. Under the Auburn system, prison officials isolated prisoners in single cells at night and then enforced (with a whip) total silence when the inmates congregated for work and meals during the day. Separation and silence were meant to prevent all communication and contact, including sexual contact, among the men.37

Reformer rules for managing sexual desire worked better in theory than in practice. The goal of separating men and women housed within the same penitentiary and preventing contact among male inmates was nearly impossible to achieve. Overcrowding defeated virtually all attempts to separate inmates. Men and women inmates devised ways to engage each other. Investigating committees reported that “the means of communica- tion are not entirely cut off between the males and females.” Stories about prison romances were common. Boston’s Prison Discipline Society noted a liaison at the New Hampshire State Prison where, somehow, a male and

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female occupying opposite ends of the building “formed an acquaintance and carried on a courtship.” Occasional pregnancies among long-term fe- male prisoners belied assertions of successful sexual segregation.38

Filth made its way into the cleanest institutions. Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison became an international showcase of enlightened punish- ment but visitors still found “idle, some dirty, and some ragged” inmates in the facility. Warden Gershom Powers sought to keep his Auburn peni- tentiary spotless but complained that new arrivals brought in “filth and vermin” from local jails. Meanwhile, reformers understood that clean bod- ies did not necessarily produce clean minds and good behavior. Prison overcrowding meant that two men often shared a bed. Thomas Eddy com- plained that this unfortunate practice produced poor health and immoral behavior among inmates. Indeed, “the separation of criminals from each other during the night is a matter of so great importance that it is desir- able that an immediate improvement should be made”—regardless of the added expense.39 Overcrowding urged superintendents to assign top pri- ority to prisoner discipline and prison-labor revenues, give lip service to prisoner rehabilitation, and tolerate deviant behavior that did not directly threaten good order or revenue streams.

Where full-time solitary confinement kept men from having sex with each other, the “self-pollution,” “secret vice,” or “solitary vice” of mastur- bation was a concern. Seen as a by-product of “excessive sensuality” and “filthiness,” masturbation was thought to produce physical debility, im- morality, insanity, and death. Decades of warnings resulted in the “mas- turbation scare” of the 1830s. Writers published anti-masturbation tracts that “began by an announcement ritual in which each author proclaims that, moved by a sense of righteous calling, he or she will speak the un- speakable” because the evil was so enormous.40 If inmates indulged sexual desire in solitary confinement, their chances of learning sexual self-re- straint and achieving rehabilitation were reduced if not lost.

Prison chaplain Barrett Gerrish suggested that the problem was not so much solitary sexual activity as it was lascivious thoughts. He explained, “Much the greater portion of convicts are not only ignorant but extremely groveling and sensual. Their prevailing sentiments are sexual and these are extremely gross. They spend hours in the silence and solitude of their cells, forming in their minds pictures of these acts of sin.”41 Rather than dampen men’s sexual desires, solitude invited sexual fantasies. In A Lecture to Young Men, health reformer Sylvester Graham warned that “lascivious daydreams” and “amorous reveries” were sources of “debility, effeminacy,

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disordered functions, and permanent disease, and even premature death” as well as a “current of crime.”42

Knowing that male and female prisoners found each other, male in- mates had sex with each other, and masturbation and sexual fantasies per- sisted, reform wardens devised surveillance regimens aimed at “unceasing vigilance.” They directed architects to design cells “in such a manner as they can be inspected while the prisoner is ignorant of the fact that he is under inspection [and] the keeper can inspect the convicts without be- ing himself inspected.” In some prisons, guards wore socks or moccasins at night, enabling them to move silently, observe inmates, and note in- fractions. The Massachusetts State Prison strategically placed sentinels to “hear a whisper from the most distant cell” and ascertain that “all is order and silence.” Some reformers wanted a matron to supervise female prison- ers because, they believed, a woman would be better able to exercise “un- ceasing vigilance” over female prisoners, perform “a constant inspection,” and communicate to the women that they were always “under her eye.”43

Prisons officials tried to enforce sexual abstinence by enforcing segrega- tion and eliminating privacy.

Sodomy in Prisons

The logistical reality in persistently overcrowded prisons was that men could not be separated from one another and no amount of surveillance could stop the practice of sodomy among inmates. Beginning in the 1820s, the Reverend Louis Dwight, founder and leader of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, became the nation’s most vocal critic of sodomy behind bars. He treated sodomy as a public secret. It was a “crime which is not fit to be named among Christians” as well as a subject “so revolting that we should gladly omit the further consideration of it.” However, because it stood “above all” evils that occurred in prisons, it was necessary to “meet the evil and remove it [and] give our attention to the facts.”44 He chose to speak the unspeakable.

Dwight certainly condemned “the crime of sodomy” when committed among the immoral “wretches” and hardened felons who filled the cells in most state penitentiaries. However, he was especially concerned about the victimization by seasoned prisoners of the young males with whom they shared quarters. Dwight reported, “Children have been found in some of our prisons under twelve years of age . . . intimately associated with the

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most profligate and vile of the human race. The loathsome skin, the dis- torted features, the unnatural eyes of some of these boys, indicate, with a clearness not to be misapprehended, the existence of unutterable abomi- nations, which it were better for the world if they had been foreseen and avoided.” These unfortunate youths were “attentive pupils of old villains by day” and “their injured companions by night.” To make matters worse, when “old offenders corrupt juvenile delinquents,” the next step was for “vicious youths of seventeen [to] corrupt innocent boys of eight or nine.” Like Benjamin Rush before him, Dwight worried that the same spiral of sexual corruption took place in boarding schools, where “impurity” found its beginnings in night chambers occupied by two to five unsupervised boys. There, “idle, profane, and vicious youths” took advantage of the op- portunity to introduce younger boys to sexual vice.45

Still, Dwight’s greatest apprehension was reserved for man-boy sex in prisons, where “Sodom is the vice of prisoners and boys are the favorite prostitutes.” Older, hardened prisoners attempted to seduce and rape one another but they fought especially viciously and violently over a new boy with “a fair countenance.” These “grey headed villains” used bribery and force to get young boys “into the same room and into the same bed.” They fought to keep the boys for themselves or they traded boys as if they were sexual commodities. Dwight reported that it was difficult, if not impossi- ble, for boys to retain their sexual innocence in penitentiaries. He re- counted the story of a former inmate who had witnessed boys so bru- talized that they came to “glory in every species of abomination” and constantly engage in sodomy. Dwight implied that a boy, once sexually corrupted by a man, was forever stained with sin and lost to rehabilitation. That was why it was so urgent to legislate the complete separation of “ju- venile delinquents from hardened offenders.” Only complete separation could prevent the “unnatural crime” of man-boy sex and its terrible, en- during consequences.46

For the first three decades of nationhood, penal reformers repeatedly advised public officials to separate older male criminals from youthful wrongdoers. A 1786 Pennsylvania law directed that “the old and hardened offenders be prevented from mixing with and thereby contaminating and eradicating the remaining seeds of virtue and goodness in the young and unwary.” This injunction was explicitly intended to prevent delinquents from becoming felons; it also was likely meant to thwart sexual relations between men and boys. It was not until the early 1820s that reformers were sufficiently concerned and convinced that incarcerated boys could not be

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protected from adult prisoners unless they did something about it. John Griscom crusaded to save delinquents from further contamination by at- tacking the penitentiary as “an unhallowed abode,” where boys’ innocence was destroyed by “old and fearless offenders.” He led New York’s Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, which made the recommen- dation to legislators that only a separate institution for juvenile delin- quents, a house of refuge, could protect delinquent boys from older, pred- ator inmates.47

Several states heeded the recommendation, built houses of refuge, and gave administrators broad discretion to detain and retrain at-risk children. New York State delegated to refuge managers the authority to take custody of destitute, abandoned, vicious, vagrant, and convicted children. Once in- side the house of refuge, boys remained wards of the state until age 21, girls until age 18. Refuge records indicated that police and commissioners of the poor regularly committed boys for vagrancy and suspicion of theft. Occasionally, refuge managers were proactive. They wanted to take cus- tody of “a young female, who, though well known in the haunts of vice, had never rendered herself absolutely amenable to the criminal laws.” They asked that the police “have her secured and placed in the house of refuge as soon as they could find a lawful occasion.” The police soon found, or manufactured, such an occasion. Reformers’ impulse toward preventive incarceration was strong. Between 1826 and 1829, Boston’s House of Reformation detained 192 children. Few had been convicted of a crime. Forty-nine were committed “for being stubborn and disobedient,” twenty-nine for being vagabonds, eleven for leading idle lives, and four for lascivious conduct.48

Prescribed methods for rehabilitating juvenile delinquents were virtu- ally identical to prison regimens for rehabilitating adult convicts. Youths were removed from free society and sequestered in controlled environ- ments. Males and females were separated. Strict rules about personal hy- giene were followed, with the children being “marched in order to the wash-room where the utmost attention to personal cleanliness is required and enforced.” Solitude, labor, and schooling combined with surveillance were instituted to promote self-discipline, industry, and obedience. A ma- tron supervised female delinquents. She was to “endeavor to unfold to those under her charge the advantage of a moral and religious life.” Phila- delphia’s house of refuge also appointed “twelve judicious females to assist . . . by imparting advice to the youth confined therein and by bestowing their attention and care upon the domestic economy of the establish-

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ment.” Lady visitors tried “to excite in the girls a sense of virtue and piety.” The likelihood of their success was enlarged by the “soothing and persua- sive language which so peculiarly belongs to their own sex.” The authentic female voice was both passionless and regenerative.49

Juveniles remained in custody until placed in apprenticeships. Refuge managers sought placements conducive to virtue. A boy might be sent to the countryside to learn farming or be bound to a whaling ship, where he “is abstracted from his bad associates and has no opportunity of returning to his former habits.” Long voyages and shipboard discipline were to has- ten a boy’s journey “to manhood.” Managers did not allow boys to be ap- prenticed to tavern keepers or distillers of spirits and denied girls place- ments with single men or in boarding houses.50 They did not want to put delinquents into sexually charged environments, where they would be vul- nerable to temptation or abuse.

The practice of apprenticing boys to seagoing vessels was curious. On the one hand, rigid taskmasters “who demanded disciple, obedience, and even sobriety” governed ships. In theory, such discipline would deny boys the opportunity for indulging sexual desire. On the other hand, middle- class citizens perceived whalers and sailors as “exemplars of vice and de- viance.” At sea, they constituted an all-male subculture with “older and more powerful men initiating sexual relations with younger subordinates.” Ashore, they were given to “whoring, drinking, and drifting about.”51 Re- formers’ willingness to place boys on ships raises a question about how anxious they were about eradicating sexual desire and same-sex relations among delinquent males. Unlike Louis Dwight, who feared that same-sex experiences in prison forever ruined a boy, the child-savers who ran houses of refuge may have felt that illicit sex at sea was rare and, when it did occur, it was situational and therefore temporary. Regardless, refuge officials could not have overlooked the practical reality that placing boys on ships opened up space for new admits to their institutions.52

Passionless Penitentiaries?

Penal reformers believed that undisciplined sexual desire was a primal force that directly or indirectly drove men to crime. They argued that long sentences carried out in passionless penitentiaries offered hope for reha- bilitating criminals to self-control and law-abiding behavior. Officials sought to dampen inmate sexual desire and promote sexual self-restraint

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by requiring sexual abstinence. This requirement was enforced by inmate separation and guard surveillance. The segregation of the sexes, the isola- tion of men from each other by day and especially at night, and proposals to build separate penal facilities for female felons and for at-risk youths and delinquents were part of a systematic strategy to manage sexual desire among the inmates of state penal institutions.

Although the white, middle-class penal reformers who advocated pas- sionless penitentiaries hoped to rehabilitate wayward white males to virtue and citizenship, they had little to say about the disproportionately lower- class, black, and immigrant men who filled penitentiaries in the early Re- public. For the most part, reformers considered these marginal Americans slaves to sexual desire and virtually incorrigible.53 Simultaneously, white middle-class reformers began to elevate the significance of freedom from sexual desire. They attached this freedom to idealized middle-class women, whose exemplary passionlessness served as “the archetype for human mo- rality.”54 Accordingly, penal reformers who demanded that marginal men be sentenced to spend years in passionless penitentiaries, where they would be “forced to be free” from sexual desire, condemned inmates not only to sexual abstinence but also to emasculation and feminization.

Reformers’ commitment to passionless penitentiaries encountered three problems. First, to the extent that officials succeeded to create chaste penal environments, they failed to prepare the prisoner for the moment when he would be released back into free society—where desire, temptation, and corruption were ubiquitous. Reporting on the typical American peniten- tiary prisoner, Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville noted, “He was dead to the world, and after a loss of several years he reappears in so- ciety, to which, it is true, he brings good resolutions, but perhaps also burning passions, the more impetuous, from their being the longer re- pressed.”55 Prison rehabilitation was a false promise to the degree that penitentiaries exacerbated rather than reduced a man’s passions. It was only a matter of time before excessive desire fueled by intoxication and ad- verse influences would again set him on a pathway to crime.

Second, reformers encountered critics who pointed out that tradi- tional punishments such as hanging and beating (which reformers consid- ered cruel and suitable only for monarchies) were in some respects more enlightened, humane, and republican than incarceration. Hangings were quick affairs. Beatings were over in minutes. Neither a hanged man nor a beaten man had to cope with long-term exposure to prison fevers, the psychological terrors of prolonged solitude, or draconian and arbitrary

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prison discipline. Furthermore, traditional punishments did not inflict on wrongdoers long-term sexual deprivation and emasculation enforced by constant surveillance.

Third, by their own reckoning, penal officials never succeeded to create passionless penitentiaries. With constant prison overcrowding, men and women found each other; same-sex relations and relationships persisted; masturbation was unstoppable; and sexual fantasies formed in prisons continued to have unknown but unsettling effects on discharged prison- ers. Reformers and officials lowered their expectations about prisoner re- habilitation and began to develop implicit priorities in managing prison- ers’ sexual desire. Their foremost concern was to separate women and men in prison. Their second concern, emerging in the 1820s, was to remove de- linquent boys from the sexual reach of older inmates by moving them into houses of refuge. Ultimately, preventing sodomy and masturbation within prisons became a tertiary concern. On the one hand, there was not much officials could do to stop sodomy in overcrowded prisons. On the other hand, officials were more interested in maintaining prison order and en- hancing prison revenues than in policing same-sex desire.

This relative neglect of same-sex desire among adult prisoners probably stemmed from a combination of post-Revolution tolerance, lowered ex- pectations, and political paralysis. American ministers and legislators of- ten supported draconian punishments for what they considered deviant sexual acts, but American citizens and officials tended to tolerate discreet expressions of illegal sexuality such as fornication, adultery, bigamy, pros- titution, and sodomy. If Americans did not decriminalize sodomy as some continental European nations did, neither did they emulate the English by vigorously prosecuting sodomy.56 It appears that American prison officials mostly tolerated expressions of same-sex desire among male prisoners and could do so because the new walled-in penitentiaries, like discreet houses of prostitution, were not accessible to public viewing.

Furthermore, the first wave of penal reformers in the 1780s and 1790s, who expressed remarkable optimism about prisoner rehabilitation, gave way to a new generation of reformers with lower expectations. The later group was less likely to expect prisoners to be rehabilitated in their souls and more apt to settle for prisoners’ good behavior upon their discharge. Good behavior could mean being discreet by practicing one’s vices in pri- vate rather than flaunting them in public.57

Finally, reformers faced a political challenge that made it imprudent for them to problematize and publicize same-sex desire in prisons. Reformers’

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argument to legislators and taxpayers was that they should support the expensive new penitentiaries because these institutions provided a clean, controlled environment that would rehabilitate criminals, deter would-be criminals, and thereby prevent future crime. This made imprisonment seem palatable in an otherwise liberty-loving republic. However, reform- ers would have had difficulty promoting the image of clean, passionless penal institutions if they publicized the fact that the men within them en- gaged in “filthy” sex. This might explain why Louis Dwight’s efforts to publicize sodomy within prisons attracted few followers.

Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville observed during their 1831 travels, “While society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism.” Inmate memoirs from the early Repub- lic agreed that stripping men of liberty, incarcerating them, and destroying their privacy constituted despotism. Henry Tufts “incessantly pined after that liberty of which . . . I saw myself so totally divested” and W. A. Coffey “ardently sought a restoration to liberty.” If inmate regrets over lost liberty were in good measure a function of the deprivation and degradation they suffered within penitentiaries that sought to enforce sexual abstinence, it was penal reformers’ obsession with what Michael Meranze calls “the threat of sexual contact”—which “transgressed disciplinary limits and ex- pressed [prisoners’] ungoverned desires”—that encouraged and perpetu- ated despotism but also limited it. Penal despotism could not be complete as long as transgressive, ungoverned same-sex desire persisted and prison personnel were compelled to tolerate same-sex behavior among adult male inmates.58

n o t e s

1. Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); see also John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 44–45, 49–50.

2. Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind (New York: Hafner, 1962 [1812]), 32 – 33, 347, 351; Benjamin Rush to David Ramsay, March or April 1788, in Benjamin Rush, Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 2 vol. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 1:454.

3. Karen Weyler, Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789–1814 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 33.

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4. Rudi C. Bleys, The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behaviour Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750 – 1918 (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 68 – 69; Richard Godbeer, “ ‘The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England,” in this volume, 95; see also D’Emilio and Freedman, 30; Leila J. Rupp, A Desired Past: A Short His- tory of Same-Sex Love in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 31–32.

5. Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 30, 38–40; Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825 – 1880 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Uni- versity Press, 1990), 89, 97 – 98; Michael Stephen Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767 – 1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 52.

6. Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 201; Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creat- ing an American Subculture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 35 – 36; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 23, 27–28; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790 – 1920 (New York: Norton, 1992), 99, 115.

7. Thomas Jefferson, “A Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments,” in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of Amer- ica, 1984), 355–56.

8. Richard Slotkin, “Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675 – 1800,” American Quarterly 25, 1 (March 1973): 7.

9. James Mease, Observations on the Penitentiary System and Penal Code of Pennsylvania with Suggestions for their Improvement (Philadelphia: Clark and Raser, 1828), 29; John Griscom, “The Memorial of the Managers of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the City of New York to the U.S. Con- gress [1826],” in John H. Griscom, ed., Memoir of John Griscom, LL.D. (New York: Robert Carter, 1859), 189–90; Francis Lieber, “Translator’s Preface,” in Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France, tran. Francis Lieber (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964 [1833]), 8–9, 14.

10. William Bradford, An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Neces- sary in Pennsylvania, [1793] in Reform of Criminal Law in Pennsylvania: Selected In- quiries, 1787–1819 (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 8–9; Thomas Eddy, An Account of the State Prison or Penitentiary House in the City of New York (New York: Isaac Col- lins and Son, 1801), 51; Gershom Powers, A Brief Account of the Construction, Man- agement, and Discipline &c. &c. of the New York State Prison at Auburn (Auburn: U. F. Doubleday, 1826), 49; Edward Livingston, A System of Penal Law for the State of Louisiana (Union, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 1999 [1833]), 23.

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11. Johnson Green, “The Life and Confession of Johnson Green [1786],” in Daniel E. Williams, Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narra- tives (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993), 259; John Dixon in “The American Bloody Register [1784],” in Ibid., 251; William Stuart, Sketches of the Life of William Stuart: The First and Most Celebrated Counterfeiter of Connecticut (Bridgeport, CT: W. Stuart, 1854), 13–14; John Reynolds, Recollections of Windsor Prison; Containing Sketches of Its History and Discipline (Boston: A. Wright, 1834), 174; Eddy, 59.

12. Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 1993), 97.

13. Livingston, 173. 14. Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge: Har-

vard University Press, 2000), 218–19, 224–26. 15. Tapping Reeve, The Law of Baron and Femme (New York: Source Book

Press, 1970 [1816]), 300. 16. Bradford, 21, 29. 17. Lieber, 23. 18. John Cotton, “Unnatural Filthiness,” in Jonathan Katz, ed., Gay American

History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 20; Samuel Danforth quoted in Ronald A. Bosco, “Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon,” American Quarterly 30, 2 (Summer 1978): 156–57; See also Godbeer, “The Cry of Sodom,” 284; Thomas Foster, “Antimasonic Satire, Sodomy, and Eighteenth-Century Masculinity in the Boston Evening-Post,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 60, 1 (January 2003): 178.

19. Clerk quoted in Godbeer, Sexual Revolution, 321; Rush, Medical Inquiries, 353; Davis v. State, 3 H & J 154; 1810 Md. Lexis 31.

20. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, tran. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 3 – 35; Jody Greene, “Public Se- crets: Sodomy and the Pillory in the Eighteenth Century and Beyond,” The Eigh- teenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 44, 2–3 (June 2003): 203–32.

21. Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, Report of a Committee Appointed by the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in the City of New York on the Expedi- ency of Erecting an Institution for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents (New York: Mahlon, Day, 1823), 7; Benjamin Rush, “An Enquiry into the Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty,” in Benjamin Rush, Two Essays on the Mind (New York: Brunner/Mazel Publishers, 1972), 22.

22. Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 6 vol. (Montclair, NJ: Pat- terson Smith, 1972 [1855]), 1:438–39; Eddy, 62.

23. Roberts Vaux, Notices of the Original and Successive Efforts, to Improve the Discipline of the Prison at Philadelphia and to Reform the Criminal Code of Pennsyl- vania: with a Few Observations on the Penitentiary System (Philadelphia: Kimber and Sharpless, 1826), 13–14; Stuart, 165–66.

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24. Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:10–11. 25. The Pennsylvania Gazette, September 26, 1787, quoted in Negley K. Teeters,

The Cradle of the Penitentiary: The Walnut Street Jail at Philadelphia, 1773 – 1835 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Prison Society, 1955), 132; Memorial No. 2, “Describes the Terrible Conditions Existing in the Walnut Street Jail, January 12, 1789,” in Ne- gley K. Teeters, They Were in Prison: A History of the Pennsylvania Prison Society (Formerly The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons), 1787–1937 (Chicago: Winston, 1937), 29–30, 449–50; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:11; 37, 64; Report on South Carolina jail conditions quoted in Friedman, 50.

26. Society for the Prevention of Pauperism managers cited in Estelle B. Freed- man, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830–1930 (Ann Ar- bor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 7.

27. Chief Magistrate and Commissioners quoted in Reports of the Prison Disci- pline Society of Boston, 1:64–65.

28. Mark Colvin, Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and Chain Gangs: Social Theory and the History of Punishment in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: St. Mar- tin’s Press, 1997), 42, 55, 80; Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 96, 133; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 34–35; see also William Crawford, Report on the Penitentiaries of the United States (Montclair, NJ: Patter- son Smith, 1969 [1835]), xi.

29. Robert J. Turnbull of South Carolina, A Visit to the Philadelphia Prison (Philadelphia: James Phillips and Son, 1797), 19–20, 22; Eddy, 53; Thomas Eddy to Patrick Colquhoun, June 5, 1802, in Samuel L. Knapp, The Life of Thomas Eddy (New York: Arno Press, 1976 [1834]), 179; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:100–01, 348; Crawford, Appendix, 72, 95.

30. Powers, Brief Account, 1–2, 16; Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in the City of New York, Report on the Penitentiary System in the United States (New York: M. Day, 1822), 46, 58–59; “A View of the New-York State Prison,” in William Roscoe, Observations on Penal Jurisprudence and the Reformation of Criminals [1819], in Reform of Criminal Law in Pennsylvania: Selected Inquiries 1787 – 1819 (New York: Arno Press, 1972), Appendix, 40; Eddy, 36; Gershom Powers, Letter of Gershom Powers, Esq. in Answer to a Letter of the Hon. Edward Livingston in Rela- tion to the Auburn State Prison (Albany: Croswell and Van Benthuysen, 1829), 16.

31. Sean McConville, “Local Justice: The Jail,” in Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 276.

32. William Torrey to the Inspectors of the [NY] State Prison, February 12, 1814, in Roscoe, Observations on Penal Jurisprudence and the Reformation of Crimi-

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nals [1819], in Reform of Criminal Law in Pennsylvania, Appendix, 71; “Visiting Committee of the Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons Report, January, 1799,” in Teeters, They Were in Prison, 59; see also Orlando F. Lewis, The Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs, 1776 – 1845 (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1967 [1922]), 263.

33. W. David Lewis, From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, 1796–1848 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), 162.

34. Powers, Brief Account, 15; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:261–62; Beaumont and Tocqueville, 188.

35. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 27–28. 36. Beaumont and Tocqueville, 48; Memorial No. 2, “Describes the Terrible

Conditions Existing in the Walnut Street Jail,” in Teeters, They Were in Prison, 29– 30; Eddy, 62; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society, 1:11, 61 – 66; Stephen Bur- roughs, Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs (New York: Cornish Lamport, 1852), 177; Memorial No. 5, “A Petition for a Bridewell for Vagrants, January 25, 1803,” in Teeters, They Were in Prison, 454; Vaux, 29.

37. For an early comparison of Pennsylvania and Auburn systems, see Beau- mont and Tocqueville, ch. 2.

38. Crawford, 18, Appendix, 95; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Bos- ton, 1:101–02; Livingston, 695.

39. Powers, Brief Account, 4; “The Visiting Committee of the Society for Allevi- ating the Miseries of Public Prisons Report, January, 1799,” in Teeters, They Were in Prison, 59–60; Eddy, 38.

40. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Vintage, 2003), 86, 94, 100.

41. Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:11; Barrett Gerrish quoted in Lewis, The Development of American Prisons, 185.

42. Sylvester Graham quoted in Horowitz, Rereading Sex, 97. 43. Powers, Brief Account, 3, 7; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston,

1:7, 243, 297, 336 – 37; Crawford, 10, 16; Livingston, 697, 705; see also Michel Fou- cault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tran. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 201.

44. Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:37; Louis Dwight, “The Sin of Sodom is the Vice of Prisoners,” in Katz, 27.

45. Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:11–12, 64, 66, 289–90. 46. Dwight, “The Sin of Sodom is the Vice of Prisoners,” in Katz, 27–28. 47. Law quoted in Harry E. Barnes, The Evolution of Penology in Pennsylva-

nia: A Study in American Social History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927), 119; Griscom, Memoir, 167, 169; Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the City of New York, “Second Annual Report,” in Documents Relative to the House

Sexual Desire, Crime, and Punishment in the Early Republic 301

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of Refuge, Instituted by the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the City of New-York, in 1824 (New York: Mahlon Day, 1832), 76; “Third Annual Re- port,” in Ibid., 132.

48. Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the City of New York, “First Annual Report,” in Documents Relative to the House of Refuge, 47, 57; “Second Annual Report,” in Ibid., 89, 93–95; “Fourth Annual Report,” in Ibid., 175; “Fifth Annual Report,” in Ibid., 187; “Sixth Annual Report,” in Ibid., 240; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:245.

49. Griscom, Memoir, 165; Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the City of New York, “First Annual Report,” in Documents Relative to the House of Refuge, 45–46; “Second Annual Report,” in Ibid., 83, 85, 107–08; “Third Annual Report,” in Ibid., 138 – 41; “Seventh Annual Report.,” in Ibid., 253 – 54; Livingston, 714 – 16; Crawford, Appendix, 150, 154; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:297.

50. Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the City of New York, “Fifth Annual Report,” in Documents Relative to the House of Refuge, 189; “Sixth Annual Report,” in Ibid., 217, 229–30; Beaumont and Tocqueville, 149–50; “Rules of the House of Refuge in Philadelphia,” in Crawford, Appendix, 153.

51. Margaret S. Creighton, “Fraternity in the American Forecastle, 1830–1870,” The New England Quarterly 63, 4 (December 1990): 531–32; Rupp, A Desired Past, 20–21.

52. For a discussion of the concept of “situational homosexuality” in prisons, see Regina G. Kunzel, “Situating Sex: Prison Sexual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth- Century United States,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, 3 (2002): 253–70.

53. See Mark E. Kann, Punishment, Prisons, and Patriarchy (New York: New York University Press, 2005), ch. 9; Rupp, 41.

54. Nancy F. Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ide- ology, 1790–1850,” in Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 165.

55. Beaumont and Tocqueville, 84. 56. See Bleys, 68–69, 81; A. D. Harvey, “Prosecutions for Sodomy in England at

the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” The Historical Journal 21, 4 (December 1978): 939.

57. See Kann, ch. 8. 58. Beaumont and Tocqueville, 79; Henry Tufts, The Autobiography of a Crimi-

nal (New York: Duffield, 1930 [1807]), 284; W. A. Coffey, Inside Out; or An Interior View of the New-York State Prison (New York: J. Costigan, 1823), iii, 67, 92, 98; Mi- chael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760 – 1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 184.

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