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Hanging offenses in England  in the
18^th century reached considerably far down into common crime.   The practice of printing a broadside detailing
the crime with the prisoner’s lament below was also a common practice—it fueled
public introspection/fear about keeping the laws of the King, provided them an
entertainment (as the hangings were public), and helped to sustain a minor
industry of grubby little Grub Street presses that produced such things. Very
early on in my bookselling career I sold a collection of upwards of 500 of
these broadsides—I remember clearly that young boy(s(!) were hanged for the
theft of handkerchiefs,  men hanged for
the theft of a goat, a chambermaid for stealing some tableware; people were
hanged for house breaking, “threatening”, shooting a stag, fraud, damaging
public buildings, and the like.  Under
James I in 1603 there were 50 crimes with punishments of death; by 1783 there
were 200. As James Briggs (et al) wrote in Crime
and Punishment in England ,
an Introductory History, “the death penalty was a leading feature of penal
thinking”. 

 Adultery was another crime for which one
could swing, and the broadside that I’ve reproduced here details just one such
criminal.  It is the hanging confession
of Mary  Baker , who was convicted  of defrauding “several” men of money, and
also of the sin of multiple marriages, and adultery.  The case was quickly heard and the sentence
quickly delivered

Mary was interviewed and she allowed that she had taken two
husbands; but the legal representative convinced her to tell the whole story,
as she would be soon be judged by god. 
This was sooner than she thought, evidently, because she was convicted
on these two admitted counts (though she was suspected of many more).  Convicted and sentenced, and sentenced to
death.  It was after she received the
death warrant that she confessed to more than the original two.  As the broadside states: “She seemed to
entertain some serious Thoughts, but withal discover’d a great deal of Uneasiness
in her Mind, which visibly enereas’d, after the dead Warrant was come, and she
found she was in it”.  Finding yourself
in a death warrant would increase your uneasiness, I’m sure. 

I’ve got no idea why Mary would go into
such detail; perhaps it  was a natural
reaction, trying to rescue the soul by confession; maybe she was enticed by the
legals, somehow (threat against her, threat against family, a more “pleasant”
(i.e. less painful, immediate) death at the hands of the hangman.  I don’t know. ) But this is the list of the
men she married, or didn’t marry, outlined in her confession. 

 She starts with a general appeal to her readers:

“GOOD People give good head to what I Confess, for by
Subtile Inven-
tion, alyis GOD’s Laws I have transgressed: for by Falsehood and
cunning I have betrayed several Young Man, alias I Tremble for to declare
my wretched Life, which was as follows:

I seemed to be a Woman of a great Fortune, and forged Deeds
of an Estate, and showed it where ever I came, by which I betrayed twenty three
Men, which now is to my great Shame, Their Names are as follows:

[And making a list of these names, we have:]

David John’s a Farmer living in Wales,
Robert Gard’ner, a plugh-man of that Country,
John Bird in Wapping,near Flece,
Harry Dicks of Shadwel-Dock, from whom I ran away with Sixty  Guineas
Peter Downs, living near Pell-Mell, from whom I took Forty
Pound
William Brown living in the Stranda Baker from whom I took
near a hundred Pound,
and after Thomas
Harrison, a Farmer in Essex, who Clothed me in
Coastly Apparel, and Ralf Rogers, from him I took his Rings and Plate, he
living in East-Smithfield
William Davis who lives near Clerkenwell
Thomas Young, a Grasier in Northamptoun Shire
Daniel Frazier in the same Shire, from them two I took three
hundred Pound
James Barns the Maltner, living near Canterbury, whom I ruined,
Peter Hob a Carner,from whom I took twenty Pound,
Quaker called John Trueman, living in Tower-Hill I took
fifty Guineas
Abraham Johnston, I got a Hundred Poud
George Strange a Goldsmith near Rederiff,
Petter Lang, a Shoemaker, I got Forty Pound from each just
John Fox another Baker, and after a young Squire living in Oxford, which makes in all
three and Twenty.

I don’t know anything about Mrs. Baker.  It does seem as though she was out and up to not-much-good, an defrauded a bunch of guys.  Seems that she met a very stiff end for what harm she actually caused.  Then again, when kids were hanged for plucking two hankies from a gent’s pocket, her crimes seem large in the redded eyes of the Bloody Code.  

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(All images are expandable)

Slave-catchers were busily and profitably at work in Washington right up to the last moments before the issuing of the abolition of slavery in the District on April 16, 1862–this coming several months before the Emancipation Proclamation. (Congressman Abraham Lincoln, R-IL, sought the abolition of slavery in the District in 1849 but was shot down, mainly by a coalition led by Democrat J.C. Calhoun.)  Historically D.C. had a relatively small slave population, around 6800 in 1830 and  3800 in 1860–Maryland, its neighbor, did not, having upwards of 100,000 slaves at the beginning of the war, making it one of the most densely-slaved state by area in the South.,  “Absconders” from the counties of Maryland surrounding D.C. often made their way to the District, perhaps thinking that it would be a friendlier place:  and it was, comparatively, but the escaped slave was not immune to being hunted and prosecuted, recoverable like any other piece of stolen personal property, the slave in this case basically stealing themselves.

D.C. was a small place, and the slaves were concentrated mainly in what we would today call downtown.  There was in fact a slave pen right there on the Mall, very close by the entrance to the Smithsonian. (To this day there is no marker.)  So the slave population in the District was highly visible.  As Charles Ball writes:

“…I generally went up into the city to see the new and
splendid buildings; often walked as far as  Georgetown , and made many new acquaintances
among the slaves, and frequently saw large numbers of people of my color
chained together in long trains, and driven off towards the South.” –“Fifty Years in Chains or The Life
of an American Slave,” 18-19,in First-Person Narratives of the
American South, 1860-1920.

This all comes to my mind after bumping into this government-printed document at right—it was keeping track of its part of eternity in the bottom of one of my boxes of pamphlets, shaking its way into a disturbing consciousness. 

This unhappy pamphlet details the intolerable conditions of the D.C. Jail, which at the time (February, 1862)  housed 300 prisoners, nearly five times the amount it was designed for.  Aside from bad/no food, hot/cold conditions, physical torment, and not-discernible terms of imprisonment, the prisoners were desperately overcrowded, sometimes ten to an 8×10 cell. 

Conditions were worse for the blacks in the jail—these men were often arrested and imprisoned on no real charge, kept by the DC jailer, in prisoner, at their own expense. 
The report states:

“Mr. Amon Duvall, a witness already mentioned, testifies that he has known of a number of colored persons being retained in jail (no offence being alleged against them) after they were known to be free, and of attempts being made to hire them out to secure the marshal his fees. The case of John Waters is particularly referred to. This person was retained in the jail more than a year, and when it was ascertained that he was free a bargain was made with a man in Prince George county, Maryland, to take him and work him for the years’ jail fees.”

The longer they stayed, the more they owed. Of course, if you had no money, and you were kept in jail a year—even by fraud—you accumulated quite a debt to the prison.  At this point the blacks were “hired out”, enslaved if free, to work for a year or whatever appropriate time to pay for their own (undeserved) incarceration. When these men ran from this service, they were further pursued, now doubly-damned: 
“…absconded and ran away from said Prince George County, and are now fugitives from service and labor lawfully due to said affiant in said Prince George County and has reason to believe and does believe that all of the said slaves are now in the District of Columbia; he prays for process and that said slaves may be taken and delivered up to him by order of this court receiving & the statute in such cases made and provided.”[ George Duvall, Dist. Court of the U. S. for the Dist. of Col. Clerk of the Court “Fugitive Slave Cases, 1862,” May 15-19, 1862.]

It was an insidious system that provided strong income for those with the power to demand it. 

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This pamphlet is the address by the philanthropist Alfred Lewisohn–a German immigrant who made many dozens of millions of dollars and with his brother became Copper Kings–to the national Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor.  Lewisohn was a major contributor and the honorary president of this group–a very liberal, very convincing group with a large measure of outrage with the way in which American crime was addressed and criminals imprisoned.

Lewisohn was enraged with the prison system in the U.S.,though he did have hope for the Federal system, which he hoped would (soon) become the template for the successful treatment of criminals. Everything else below the Federal level was a mess, a mistake, wrong–he thought it absurd that such vast amounts of money would be spent on systems which were milled in deceit, harmful to almost everyone involved, and utterly broken.  He saved his greatest vituperative for the county jail, which was beneath contempt.

Lewisohn’s complaints, condemnations and suggestions seem, unfortunately, pretty modern–he would also be spinning QUASAR-like in his grave if he had any idea of what was going on now, 80 years after the publication of this paper.  Corporal punishment by corrections officers is probably almost entirely gone, replaced by that which is administered by other prisoners; the obscene labor requirements from the prisoners is also pretty much gone, as are other things. The spending, the enormous incarceration rates, the idleness and waste–those are all still there.  Except that the incarceration rates–those are far beyond anything that Lewisohn could have imagined.   For example, when Lewisohn was writing the incarceration rate that he complained about went from 110,000 people in jail in the U.S in 1920 to 180,000 in 1930.  The numbers rose to 272,000 in 1940 , down to 252,000 in 1950, then up again to 332,000 in 1960 and 338,000 in 1970.  Things get really bad in the 1980’s with the war against drugs:  the American prison population rises from 474,000 in 1980 to 1.18 million only ten years later.  In 2000, the total rose to 1.9 million, and by 2009 the figure topped 2.4 million.  I should also point out that this is a figure for people actually in prison–for those in the criminal justice system, the number balloons to 7.8 million.  

And so with the war on drugs, we find ourselves in this country with 1.2 million non-violent people in prison.  According to the Justice Policy Institute (and the Bureau of Justice statistics), it costs something like $50 billion to keep these people in jail, or about the cost per year of schooling at an A-school for 1.2 million kids.  That figure is also twice the total amount of money spent on the Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which services something like 8 million people.  With food.  The total bill for keeping people in prison in the U.S. is around 100 billion.  Its harder for me to calculate the total-total for dealing with the other 5 million somewhere in the criminal justice system–but it is a pretty big figure, coming to some large chunk of a non-wartime military budget. And all that money on something that doesn’t work all that well. 

[Other social expenditures dwarfed by 50 billion in the continued reading section below…]

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 611

The creation of international incidents to bring/drag countries into open war against one another is quite ancient–just in our own recent times we have seen the Tonkin Gulf “Incident” and the Iraqi WMD scenarios play out to long and disasterous (and continuing) results.  And so too with the so-called beginning of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945.  There is a little trouble with the beginning date of this war–1937–since the Japanese had already invaded and militarily punished China beginning in 1931.  But no matter to the author of The Sino-Japanese Conflict, a Short Survey (published in English in Japan in October 1937).   The unnamed
correspondent centered his attention on what the Japanese contended was open rebellion and hostility to Japan, which was supposed to be the attack by Chinese army elements upon garrisoned Japanese troops at the  Lugou Qiao (“Marco Polo”) Bridge in the suburbs of Beijing in June/July 1937.  He doesn’t mention why the Japanese troops were there, but so it  goes. 

What happened before the Bridge Incident was this:  the Japanese attacked and occupied Manchuria in 1931, establishing a puppet government there in the form of Manchuko Province.  In 1932 the Japanese armed forces invaded Chahar Province, and in 1933 Rehe–this meant that all of China north of the Great Wall was in Japan’s steely hands.  The Japanese forces were exceptionally well-equipped, their air force finding virtually no resistance and its tanks finding no response from anti-tank weapons.  There was a fair amount of use of sabres by Chinese troops. (Reminds me somewhat of the Nazi/Poland fight in September 1939.)

So, quickly told, what happened at the bridge was that a Japanese soldier went missing, and the Japanese forces responded in full force.  Weeks later, the fighting was all over, the Chinese sent into retreat, and Japan was in control of Beijing and just about everything else north, west and east.  The missing soldier eventually showed up This wasn’t on the level of Tonkin or WMD, as the Japanese were already entrenched in China for years; but the so-called “incident” at the bridge marks (for most) the real beginning of the Sino-Japanese War.  At least that’s when the armies made no pretense about not-fighting.  Millions of Chinese lives later, the Japanese were defeated.

The challenge to the writer of this pamphlet was to deal with the affront of China to the Japanese forces in their country without mentioning that Japan was an invading force.  Happens all the time. 

The photo of the bridge is benign, showing workers, kids at play, a roaming pig; symbols of peace on the 400-year-old structure.  The scene was painted to make it appear that the Chinese showed up, manouevered around the “garrisoned” Japanese troops, and attacked.

The bombing (and “Rape”) of Nanjng was also, incredibly,  the fault of the Chinese. “The conduct of Japanese planes calls for no reproach” we read.  This was the beginning of a major atrocity, with 300,000 Chinese in Nanjing murdered by the spring of 1938. 

The pamphlet ends on the note that the hostilities and fighting were firmly in the hands of the Chinese.  “Protracted hostilities is much more China’s problem than Japan’s” it reads, and then, somehow, explaining it all in terms of the Japanese government being more capable of funding a war and, therefore, should.  This pamphlet was supposed to make the Japanese invasion and decimation of China as invisible to the consciousness of the West as possible–it was being done in a series of handy hearts-and-minds engines like this one, the hope being that the conflict would be viewed as an internal affair, and that Japan would be left alone, and that China “had it coming” anyway.  Pretty convincing stuff if you didn’t think about it too hard, or, well, if you didn’t think about it at all.    But, as we’ve seen again just recently, if you repeat a falsehood often enough, it becomes part of the cognitive landscape, a misty fog of possibilitiy; which means it might as well be true.