In the United States today the death penalty is a contested practice. Executions are hidden behind penitentiary walls, while lawyers, politicians, and activists publicly debate the efficacy, morality, and constitutionality of the “ultimate penalty.” Capital offenders languish for years on death row waiting for the appeals process to run its course. Moments of high drama may at times occur. Occasionally a conviction is overturned and an innocent person is freed, or a last minute reprieve breathes new life into a seemingly hopeless case. But when all legal remedies are exhausted, the execution proceeds as a small and shabby spectacle. The prisoner eats a last meal, makes a last visit with friends and relatives, and says a few last words; a minister may even offer a last prayer. These ritual acts give the final moments of a capital offender's life a modicum of dignity, but when compared to colonial practice, their inadequacy is clearly revealed.
As Scott Seay portrays in Hanging between Heaven and Earth, an elaborate civic and religious ritual marked the execution of a criminal in colonial New England. The centerpiece of this ritual was the execution sermon, which was commonly delivered to the condemned person and a crowd of dignitaries and curious spectators in the hours preceding the hanging. In these sermons, as Seay observes, ministers “warned of the wages of sin, reconciled the convict to both God and the community, and demonstrated the cooperative authority of church and state” (14). Despite this common set of aims, the content of execution sermons did change over time. The central thesis of Hanging between Heaven and Earth is that the “patterns of development in execution preaching specifically mirror developments in New England theology generally” (15). Seay develops this argument in relation to three principal themes.
Having placed the execution sermon in its historical context, Seay first considers how execution preachers employed the theme of human sinfulness. In seventeenth-century sermons, the doctrine of original sin created “a moral identification between the condemned person and the audience” (53). By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the universal depravity of humankind had become a contested doctrine. Reflecting this debate, execution sermons preached in this period increasingly represent the criminal as “morally peculiar,” that is, having a qualitatively distinct moral character. The second theme of conversion likewise underwent change during this time period. Although execution preachers consistently maintained that no one—not even a convicted murderer or rapist—was beyond the reach of God's redeeming grace, they “generally assumed that conversion and ultimate salvation were unlikely for the condemned” (81). With the growth of revivalism in the eighteenth century, Seay argues, this assumption changed. Execution preachers increasingly exhorted condemned criminals to repent of their sins and employed Luke's account of the “penitent thief on the cross” to promote a last-minute gallows conversion (96).
Seay, thirdly, considers how execution sermons represented “the nature and function of civil government” (106). Although ministers universally supported the government's right to execute capital offenders, in seventeenth-century texts “theological justifications for this right” predominated (107). With the acceptance of Enlightenment political theory in the colonies, however, the theological idea of a national covenant was replaced by the secular idea of a social contract. Execution sermons increasingly represented capital punishment as inherent to the government's contractual obligation to protect the public welfare. But the “new moral discourse” introduced by the Enlightenment also placed in question the practice of capital punishment (138). By the end of the eighteenth century, reformers were campaigning for the privatization of punishment and the limitation of capital jurisdiction. As Seay demonstrates, “the traditions of public execution and execution preaching met their demise amidst these debates” (162–63). With the abolition of execution as a public spectacle, the public ritual that solemnized the practice disappeared, leaving the condemned prisoner to meet death unrecognized and alone.
Not until his conclusion does Seay reveal the underlying motivation for this study. “The typical way to tell the history of capital punishment in America,” he writes, “treats the colonial and Early National periods with self-righteous incredulity,” and portrays the continuing use of the death penalty today as “nothing more than a regrettable legacy from a barbaric past” (164). Seay offers his analysis of execution preaching as a corrective to this misguided view. He is correct that these sermons demonstrate that “the people of early New England cannot be accused of imposing the death penalty thoughtlessly” (165). But he provides no evidence that death penalty historians have actually committed the crime alleged against them. Given the already substantial body of literature on both the execution sermon and crime in early New England, Seay's judgment seems unwarranted. Nevertheless, Hanging between Heaven and Earth is a welcome contribution to this fascinating field of study.
