The Abolition Classics

The decade the argument almost won. A systematic American theology of abolition, the most quoted journalism ever written against the gallows, Frederick Douglass tying the scaffold to the auction block, and a novel that makes a murderer’s soul the reader’s problem.Between 1844 and 1869 the movement produced everything it would need. Charles Spear made abolition a system and wrote the sentence this volume turns on: the criminal, however degraded, is still a man and a brother. Charles Burleigh compressed the case into something you could hand out on a street corner. Charles Dickens - the most famous writer alive, three weeks removed from editing the newspaper he had founded - sent it three letters, and noticed that every account of every execution records who shook hands with the condemned man and nobody, ever, shakes hands with the hangman.Frederick Douglass, in Rochester in 1858, said what the white abolitionists could not say with his authority: a nation that sells human beings at auction and hangs them in public is running one machine, not two. Fyodor Dostoevsky put the reader inside the head of a man who has done it - reset here in the Mississippi Delta. And Marvin Bovee spent the years after the war carrying Christ and the Gallows from statehouse to statehouse.They were reading each other; the citations run in every direction across the Atlantic. Michigan abolished it in 1846, Rhode Island in 1852, Wisconsin in 1853. Then the country went to war over the question of slavery, England moved its executions behind a wall, and the argument in these six books was never answered in their time.