"You shall be hanged by the neck till you be dead" were the final words pronounced by the judge in capital cases where the jury delivered a guilty verdict. Newspapers recounted scenes of the individual, followed by a coffin, marched through town, often past crowds assembled for the public spectacle. The condemned ascended the steps of the scaffold, where a clergyman offered absolution before the noose was placed around the neck, and the floor dropped from beneath the feet of the hapless individual. The still-living body jerked and choked; the bladder and bowels evacuated upon death. Broadsides and pamphlets completed the execution, warning what awaited anyone who transgressed the rules of the new social order.
Capital punishment continued, despite the new nation's claims to a successful revolution that resulted in, among other things, independence from England's sanguinary penal code. Although the new states used the death penalty for fewer offenses than England, it continued in a nation that prided itself on being a republic ruled by reason and law. In virtually all cases, states, not the federal government, determined under what circumstances capital punishment was appropriate.
Some of the founding generation loathed seeing a body swinging from the gallows, and though they could not bring themselves to advocate its complete abolition, their voices prevailed in diminishing its use. The primary proponents of the death penalty were the clergy, who quoted the Old Testament in justifying it. The Society of Friends, however, was the first and most visible group to oppose capital punishment. In 1792 Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, published a treatise of considerable importance in the movement to reduce the use of capital punishment. He was followed in 1793 by William Bradford, attorney general for Pennsylvania, who wrote that hanging was an unnecessary deterrent. These thinkers and the Society of Friends had been influential in establishing the first prison in the United States, designed to replace corporal and capital punishment with rehabilitative incarceration.
After independence, there were fewer crimes for which an individual could be executed. After 1783 adultery, sodomy, and witchcraft were no longer capital crimes. Pennsylvania was at the forefront of the movement to reduce the number of capital offenses. In 1790 it started punishing lesser crimes with imprisonment instead, and in 1794 Pennsylvania became the first state to use the death penalty for first-degree murder only. Northern and Midwestern states followed Pennsylvania's lead, while southern states continued the death penalty for many offenses, especially those committed by enslaved people.
While every state provided for capital punishment, Virginia outstripped all other states in its use, officially executing 521 people, most of them enslaved, between 1754 and 1829. Through the colonies and then the states more men than women, and more black women than white women, received the ultimate punishment. Women were most frequently executed for committing murder, arson, and infanticide. Also executed were some of the few remaining Native Americans.
Every state inherited designated crimes for which only enslaved people could be executed. In the North, death penalty codes drew sharp distinctions along racial lines until 1780, when Pennsylvania began the process of abolishing slavery and in the process eliminated racially specific penal practices. In southern states, such as Virginia, whites were not usually condemned to death for theft, but enslaved people accused of the same crime fell victim to the hangman until 1785. Between 1785 and 1829 enslaved people constituted the vast majority of Virginians put to death.
Literature about the condemned came in a variety of forms. A few convicts sentenced to death told their stories from the gallows, though most did not. Their narratives were posthumously published and distributed by those desiring to ensure social order and assert the power of government in the new Republic. Execution sermons, which originated in colonial Massachusetts, initially served to edify congregations assembled in church on Sunday, or gathered on the day of the hanging where the condemned person stood before them. By the time the new Republic was established, execution literature had become increasingly secular and rather formulaic: the condemned confessing sins, thanking judges, warning others not to follow in their footsteps, praying for salvation, and describing tragedies they had encountered in life. The purpose of these tracts was to make available to readers of the early national period the authorities' perspectives on social conditions and social order. Unfortunately, one cannot know with certainty the true thoughts of the condemned, but recently some of their stories have been salvaged from court records and other documents.
Capital punishment continues into the twenty-first century, but by the end of the nineteenth century it had disappeared from public view, to be carried out only behind penitentiary walls and before a selected audience.