Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845

By Jodi Schorb

Shining new light on early American prison literature—from its origins in last words, dying warnings, and gallows literature to its later works of autobiography, exposé, and imaginative literature—Reading Prisoners weaves together insights about the rise of the early American penitentiary, the history of early American literacy instruction, and the transformation of crime writing in the “long” eighteenth century. 
Looking first at colonial America—an era often said to devalue jailhouse literacy—Jodi Schorb reveals that in fact this era launched the literate prisoner into public prominence. Criminal confessions published between 1700 and 1740, she shows, were crucial “literacy events” that sparked widespread public fascination with the reading habits of the condemned, consistent with the evangelical revivalism that culminated in the first Great Awakening. By century’s end, narratives by condemned criminals helped an audience of new writers navigate the perils and promises of expanded literacy.
Schorb takes us off the scaffold and inside the private world of the first penitentiaries—such as Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison and New York’s Newgate, Auburn, and Sing Sing. She unveils the long and contentious struggle over the value of prisoner education that ultimately led to sporadic efforts to supply prisoners with books and education. Indeed, a new philosophy emerged, one that argued that prisoners were best served by silence and hard labor, not by reading and writing—a stance that a new generation of convict authors vociferously protested.
The staggering rise of mass incarceration in America since the 1970s has brought the issue of prisoner rehabilitation once again to the fore. Reading Prisoners offers vital background to the ongoing, crucial debates over the benefits of prisoner education.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Oct 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813575407

Book preview

Reading Prisoners

Critical Issues in Crime and Society

Raymond J. Michalowski, Series Editor

Critical Issues in Crime and Society is oriented toward critical analysis of contemporary problems in crime and justice. The series is open to a broad range of topics including specific types of crime, wrongful behavior by economically or politically powerful actors, controversies over justice system practices, and issues related to the intersection of identity, crime, and justice. It is committed to offering thoughtful works that will be accessible to scholars and professional criminologists, general readers, and students.

For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.

Reading Prisoners

Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845

Jodi Schorb

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schorb, Jodi, 1966–

Reading prisoners: literature, literacy, and the transformation of American punishment, 1700–1845 / Jodi Schorb.

pages cm.—(Critical issues in crime and society)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–6267–4 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–8135–6268–1 (e-book)

1. Prisoners—Education—United States—History. 2. Literacy programs—United States—History. 3. Prisoners as authors—United States—History. 4. Corrections—United States—History. I. Title.

HV8883.3.U5S36 2014

365’.666097309032—dc23

2014000070

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America, eds. Michele Lise Tarter and Richard Bell (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); thanks to University of Georgia Press for their permission to print this updated version.

Copyright © 2014 by Jodi Schorb

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Is for Aardvark: A Prison Literacy Primer

Part One: Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Gaol

Chapter 1. Books Behind Bars: Reading Prisoners on the Scaffold

Chapter 2. Crime, Ink: The Rise of the Writing Prisoner

Part Two: Literacy in the Early Penitentiary

Chapter 3. What Shall a Convict Do?: Reading and Reformation in Philadelphia’s Early Penitentiaries

Chapter 4. Written by One Who Knows: Congregate Literacy in New York Prisons

Afterword: Good Convict, Good Citizen?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Read More in the Series

Acknowledgments

For their early and sustained interest and fostering of this project, my deepest gratitude goes to the staff of Rutgers University Press, especially Peter Mickulas and series editor Raymond Michalowski. I am indebted to my outside readers, especially Jeannine DeLombard for her rich observations. Special thanks to Lisa Jerry for her editorial assistance. Archival work was made possible through fellowship support from the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, as well as a grant from the University of Florida Humanities Scholarship Enhancement Fund. Special thanks to James Green at the Library Company, Roy Goodman at the American Philosophical Society, Michelle Gauthier at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Felicia Williamson at Thomas Special Collections at Sam Houston State University, Todd Venie at University of Florida Levin College of Law Lawton Chiles Legal Information Center, Nancy Horan at the New York Public Library, and Annie Anderson at the Eastern State Penitentiary Historical Site for their assistance.

An early version of this project was presented at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the Incarceration Nation: Voices from the Early American Gaol symposium. The project was enriched by the shared spirit of inquiry of outstanding organizers Michele Lise Tarter, Richard Bell, and Dan Richter and seminar participants, notably Jeannine DeLombard, Philip Gura, Jen Manion, Michael Meranze, Leslie Patrick, Ivy Schweitzer, Caleb Smith, and Dan Williams. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America, eds. Michele Lise Tarter and Richard Bell (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); thanks to University of Georgia Press for their permission to print this updated version. My abiding appreciation goes to my colleagues in the Society of Early Americanists, including Kristina Bross, Lorrayne Carroll, Gabriel Cervantes, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Emily García, Lisa Gordis, Tamara Harvey, Julie Kim, Lisa Logan, Anne Myles, Michele Tarter, Karen Weyler, Edward Watts, Ed White, Dan Williams, and Hilary Wyss, for their stimulating feedback at conferences and their support and mentorship across the years.

I am grateful to the University of Florida Department of English and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for supporting this project from origin to completion. Heartfelt thanks go to Jeff Adler, Marsha Bryant, Melissa Davis, Kim Emery, Pamela Gilbert, Laurie Gries, Terry Harpold, Susan Hegeman, Sidney Homan, Kenneth Kidd, Elliott Kuecker, David Leverenz, Wayne Losano, Barbara Mennel, Janet Moore, Amy Abugo Ongiri, Judy Page, David Pharies, Leah Rosenberg, Raúl Sánchez, Malini Schueller, Stephanie Smith, Anja Ulanowicz, and Phil Wegner; I am also thankful for the members of the Crime, Law, and Governance in the Americas Working Group at University of Florida, including Ieva Jusionyte, Richard Kernaghan, Katheryn Russell-Brown, and Joe Spillane. While the project was composed at University of Florida, the English Department at Hamilton College supported early research through an Emerson Grant for study at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum. I am indebted to Hamiltonians past and present, including Celeste Friend, Gillian Gane, Tina May Hall, Jenny Irons, Doran Larson, Michelle LeMasurier, Dana Luciano, John O’Neill, Jenn Sturm, Margaret Thickstun, Julio Videras, and Steve Yao, for their friendship and intellectual sustenance.

My interest in this topic began with research on the cultural work of colonial American execution sermons under the guidance of David Van Leer at University of California at Davis. David passed before seeing this project take new direction and shape. For his keen intellect, creative vision, and unwavering support, I am ever grateful. Many faculty at University of California at Davis, especially Elizabeth Freeman, Linda Morris, Karen Halttunen, Alan Taylor, Margaret Ferguson, Joanne Diehl, and Sandra Gilbert, inspired and supported my studies; in addition, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Graduate Fellowship program, and the David Miller Travel Fellowship enabled research at the American Antiquarian Society. And one could have no better partners in crime than Michael Borgstrom, Tania Hammidi, Emily Hoyer, and Laura Konigsberg. While in graduate school, I served as a volunteer English literature instructor at California State Prison, Solano; President Bill Clinton and Congress had recently eliminated funding for prison higher education programs. At the time I did not perceive the many connections between my research on New England execution sermons and my work as volunteer prison instructor; this book begins to fill that gap.

Danielle DeMuth radically inspired and sustained me during the long evolution of this project. Thanks to my family, including Judy and Brian Schorb, Chris Schorb and Heather Thomson, Mike Christopher, Karen Zeller, and the Davis family. Chris passed in winter 2012, and he is always in my heart.

Introduction

A Is for Aardvark

A Prison Literacy Primer

The power of literacy rests in its associative promises: to acquire literacy is to gain access to something more, some wider hope or possibility. Contemporary literacy outreach programs commonly associate learning to read and write with coming into power or gaining a voice. The slogan of the United Nations Literacy Decade, for example, imagines Literacy as Freedom. The National Literacy Project aspires to help students develop literacy skills necessary for success in college, in the workplace, and as citizens. The Literacy Project of Western Massachusetts seeks to keep the doors of opportunity open for all adults.¹ The refrain is familiar: learning to read opens a world of knowledge and possibilities. Learning to write entails finding one’s voice. Becoming literate marks one’s entrance into citizenship and belonging.

Contemporary prison literacy programs draw upon and adapt these associative promises, most often by linking literacy acquisition to rehabilitation and positive personal change. The prestigious PEN Prison Writing Program believes in the restorative, rehabilitative power of writing. The Seattle Books to Prisoners initiative hopes to foster a love of reading and encourage the pursuit of knowledge and self improvement. The Massachusetts-based Prison Book Program asserts that education is a powerful tool that reduces the likelihood that a prisoner will return to the prison system. A few literacy programs strive to foster transformative social dialogue about the causes and effects of mass incarceration. For example, Pennsylvania’s Books Through Bars program sends quality reading material to prisoners and encourages creative dialogue on the criminal justice system, thereby educating those living inside and outside of prison walls.² But most frame their mission through the rhetoric of personal transformation, either by arguing that literacy reduces recidivism and helps inmates develop necessary skills (good decision making, enhanced moral judgment) or by advancing a more activist vision that assumes the basic dignity of inmates and reaffirms their right to knowledge and information.

Prisoners have also fueled this narrative by making the transformative literacy journey a powerful theme in modern prison autobiography, most memorably in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Regretting his limited knowledge and bad penmanship, Malcolm Little requested a dictionary, tablet, and pencils from the prison school at Norfolk Prison Colony. Many years later, he remembered the discomfort he felt, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of unfamiliar words, while fondly recalling an illustration of an African aardvark on the dictionary’s first page. Through his amanuensis, Alex Haley, Malcolm X recollected the start of his journey:

I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages. I’d never realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d written on the tablet. Over and over aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting. . . .

Funny thing, from the dictionary first page right now, that aardvark springs to my mind.³

His encounter with the dictionary was at first paralyzing and terrifying. But in that singular statement, I read my own handwriting, X articulates the power of finding his voice. Copying the dictionary word by word, line by line, initiated X’s literacy journey and soon, as he explained, reading had changed forever the course of my life.⁴ He read voraciously from then on, using his prison reading to assemble the disparate experiences of his life into a cohesive history and philosophy of racial oppression. Such dramatic literacy moments conform to a central autobiographical motif of journey and self-discovery, resonating with modern readers who share the assumption that literacy acquisition facilitates self-expression and even personal liberation.

Contemporary studies of prisoners’ reading practice lend nuance to this rhetoric by demonstrating how prisoners use reading to counter forces of isolation, abandonment, and dehumanization and to gener[ate] possibilities . . . to reenvision and rescript their lives.⁵ It’s no wonder, then, that prisoner writers—from Angela Davis’s near-futile search for revolutionary reading in An Autobiography (1974) to Jimmy Santiago Baca’s journey into language in A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet (2001)—are drawn to the theme of the socially, racially, and politically empowering literacy encounter. In these and other modern prison autobiographies, reading and writing help inmates negotiate the experience of imprisonment and counter the prison’s most brutalizing effects.

By contrast, the colonial American prison appears an inhospitable place to analyze the purpose, definition, and associative promises of prisoner literacy, for early gaols were designed for neither education nor reform. Well into the 1790s, correction was swift; to enforce order and enact justice, authorities relied primarily on fines and public punishment—stocks, pillories, whipping posts, scaffolds. The eighteenth-century jail served largely as a holding cell, built from scratch or modified from an existing structure with the express purpose of detaining prisoners awaiting trial or sentencing, debtors, convicts awaiting execution, and occasionally prisoners of war.⁶ As a result, keepers and magistrates had sparse inclination and little motivation to devote resources to providing those behind bars with books or instruction. Moreover, scenes where prisoners encounter texts and mediate their incarceration experience through books, writing, or literacy acquisition are less pronounced in the literature that emerged out of the eighteenth-century American jailhouse. Consequently, scholarship on both the history and the literature of colonial-era imprisonment has been largely silent about the role of reading, writing, and literacy to the history of American punishment and the development of early prison literature.

Across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even as the early jail transformed into the modern penitentiary, literacy remained a minor refrain in reformist discourse and the public debates over the purposes, best practices, and social good that might come of the prison. In the mid-eighteenth century, a rising culture of sensibility placed new emphasis on prison relief efforts. Educating prisoners, however, was a low priority: early reformers were instead motivated by dire reports of corruption, filth, and neglect. The first formal relief society, the Philadelphia Society for the Relief of Distressed Prisoners, was organized in 1776 in response to the city’s notorious, overcrowded, and disease-ridden jails. Philanthropists supplied desperate men and women with blankets, clothing, and soup and petitioned on behalf of the wrongfully imprisoned.⁷ Reconstituted in 1787 as the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, the group fought against corrupt and disruptive penal practices, lobbied for sweeping changes to the penal code, and promoted the benefits of solitary confinement at hard labor, but the group initially made no efforts to either educate prisoners or supply books. Moreover, education was not central to the discourse on the early penitentiary that emerged after the mid-1780s; instead prison reformers debated how to effectively separate and classify prisoners; analyzed the best practices of labor, discipline, diet, and hygiene; and advanced new theories of prison space, architecture, and design.⁸

As a result, scholars have devoted far more attention to dissecting the goals of the early prison reform movement and the prisons’ techniques of discipline, labor, and punishment than they have to exploring the history and purpose of literacy in the early penitentiary. Beyond a brief mention that inmates were given Bibles or allowed to attend Sabbath schools, most histories of early American prisons do not treat the role of education or literacy instruction in any depth.⁹ This cursory treatment typically illustrates early punishment’s heavy-handed religious emphasis or the penitentiary’s interest in the moral reformation of the convict.

Library historians, by contrast, have tended to overstate the early penitentiary’s commitment to literacy education. In the Encyclopedia of Library History, their overview of library outreach efforts from 1798 to 2000, Larry E. Sullivan and Brenda Vogel argue that prisons "have attempted to improve character through reading since the inception of the penitentiary in the late eighteenth century. . . . Education played a major role in an offender’s reformation. Ideally, reading materials would induce an ethical and moral change in the convicts. Elsewhere Sullivan argues that since the creation of the penitentiary there have been prison libraries; he adds, The penitentiary carried with it the idea of the rehabilitation and moral improvement of the prisoners committed to its care. Character reformation included a regimen of reading. This necessitated the building of collections of reading materials in each prison."¹⁰ These claims help Sullivan and Vogel emphasize the longevity and appeal of an ideology that books and reading should be carefully controlled. They ultimately contrast this moral ideology to the emergent prisoners’ right-to-read movement in the 1960s and to the 1980s shift to retributive incarceration when prison authorities and courts imposed stringent limitations on prison classrooms and libraries. Sullivan and Vogel’s research is invaluable for placing contemporary debates about prisoners’ educational rights in a historical framework and for elevating the role of librarians in the nation’s ongoing debates about the value and purpose of prisoner education. Yet their arguments that the birth of the penitentiary necessitated the building of [library] collections and that reading was central since the inception of the penitentiary in the late eighteenth century are misleading and elide the struggles that accompanied (or delayed) the introduction of libraries and the implementation of reading and writing instruction in America’s formative penitentiaries.

Alternately, in his controversial history Libraries in Prison, William Coyle contrasts the cohesive reading curriculum of the early penitentiary to the lack of systematic provision of books and other reading material in colonial American prisons and jails.¹¹ Coyle ultimately asserts that prison libraries work best when they operate in tandem with the goals of corrections, and he builds this argument by refuting penologist Austin MacCormick’s contention that there were no properly defined prison libraries before the twentieth century. Coyle challenges MacCormick’s claim that the limited reading selection and religious emphasis of early prison libraries rendered them ineffectual models for thinking about how contemporary prison libraries should be run. Coyle counterargues that the early penitentiary was focused on moral improvement, not religious indoctrination, and he insists that nineteenth-century reformers should be commended for the way they consciously selected nonsectarian books and created a carefully controlled reading environment in the early penitentiary. Coyle contrasts this philosophy with the later prisoners’ right-to-read movement of the 1960s, which, he argues, prioritizes prisoners’ wishes and tastes over the best interests of the institution. Coyle is no fan of the twentieth-century prisoners’ right-to-read movement; he contends that it has led to contemporary prison libraries being run like public libraries, while ignoring the penal library’s distinct clientele and function. Yet in his eagerness to refute MacCormick, Coyle overstates the early penitentiary’s commitment to libraries and education. Although much less invested in prisoners’ right to read than Sullivan and Vogel, Coyle perpetuates the assumption that bibliotherapy was an indispensible part of the everyday practice of the penitentiary from its late eighteenth-century inception.

We have yet to fully acknowledge and comprehend the wariness, indecisiveness, and occasional hostility toward prison libraries, prisoner education, and literacy acquisition in the first half-century of prison reform. From the birth of the penitentiary in the late 1780s to its expansion in the 1820s and 1830s, the literate prisoner remained an ambivalent figure: potentially better suited for penitence and reform, yet still a possible discipline problem, especially as institutions worked increasingly to limit contact between prisoners and restrict communication between inmates and the outside world.

Seeking to amend this scholarly gap, this study traces the ways that prisoners entered print as readers and writers during the colonial and early national eras. Tracing the origins, purpose, and development of reading, writing, and education behind bars, I analyze what kinds of literate prisoners entered print and why, and I connect this print history to the wider promises and perils that accompanied the spread of mass literacy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This book spans the period from 1699, when Cotton Mather published Pillars of Salt. An History of Some Criminals Executed in this Land, for Capital Crimes. With some of their Dying Speeches; Collected and Published . . . , which adapted the British genre of criminal biography to the spiritual, communal, and educational needs of Puritan New England, to the mid-1840s, when inmate authors, prison schools, and prison libraries gained new prominence. By analyzing the uses and function of literacy—including when, how, and why those convicted of crimes were given access to books, reading instruction, and writing instruction in colonial jails and early penitentiaries—I trace how and why interest in cultivating and promoting prisoners’ literacy practices shifts from the colonial era through the rise of the early national penitentiary. In sum, I help construct a narrative that has heretofore only been told in fragments: the literacy history of early American jails and the nation’s formative penitentiaries.

Reading Prisoners brings together three disparate strains of scholarship: the rise of the early American penitentiary, the history of early American literacy instruction, and the transformation of crime writing in what is often referred to as the long eighteenth century (1690s–1830s). Three core questions drive my study: What value did ministers, prison reformers and administrators, and prisoners themselves ascribe to literacy—to giving those convicted of a crime the tools and skills to read or write? To what use was the literate prisoner put in the long eighteenth century, a period that witnessed the transformation of the colonial jail into the early American penitentiary? And how did reading and writing prisoners enter print? Merging these disparate scholarly traditions allows me to analyze the social, spiritual, disciplinary, and private dimensions of prisoners’ literacy practices.

Ultimately, my book radically revises two common arguments about early imprisonment: first, before the development of the penitentiary in the 1790s there was little use for a literate prisoner; and second, the early American penitentiary considered education central to its rehabilitative mission. In part one, I argue that the eighteenth century, an era assumed to devalue jailhouse literacy, launched the literate prisoner into public prominence and even compelled audiences to envision the prisoner as a new reader or writer, much like themselves. By emphasizing the role of eighteenth-century public execution in shaping early encounters between prisoners, literacy education, and print culture, I highlight the important role that prisoners played in an expanding culture of reading and writing, and I foreground how prisoners, who often came from poor and marginalized populations, used the gallows to negotiate their entrance into print. In part two, I argue that the period known for ushering in instrumental ideas about prison reform (the early national period) struggled to articulate the good that could come of prisoner education and literacy. As defenders of the penitentiary began debating whether it was possible to remake criminals into productive members of society, there was little consensus that education should be central to the regimes of labor and solitude that defined the early national penitentiaries, even though an abstract belief in literacy’s moral function endured. While numerous inmates and some reformers and authorities argued that reading and writing instruction could help inmates cope with imprisonment, reflect on their crimes, embrace a convenient doctrine of Christian submission, or prepare them for life after release, others perceived little benefit to educating prisoners and saw no reason to either devote money and resources to education or divert inmates’ time from hard labor.

Because men and women of color were disproportionately executed on the gallows and disproportionately imprisoned, Reading Prisoners also demonstrates how the history of prison literacy is continuously entwined with arguments about race and rehabilitation, including debates over what associative promises literacy held, whether prisoners should be instructed in reading and writing, and whether prisoners should be ushered into print.¹² Colonial missionary societies, the urban and charity schools movement, African colonization schemes, the antislavery press, the fear of black uprising, the impact of phrenology and scientific racism, and the efforts of the unfree to read and write when expressly prohibited—all leave their marks on this literacy history. Reading Prisoners demonstrates how wider debates around black education and citizenship permeated the discourse of crime, punishment, and imprisonment in the colonial and early national eras.

This study also contributes to ongoing inquiry into how so-called outsiders entered early American print culture through genres dismissed as formulaic in expression or suspect in intent or ideology. Since its inception, prison literature, from its origins in last words, dying warnings, and other forms of execution (or gallows) literature to its later adaptation into autobiography, exposé, and imaginative literature, was a highly mediated genre. Ministers and magistrates, and later wardens and prison defenders, had a stake in promoting a certain brand of penitence and conformity and in restricting how, when, and through what channels prisoners entered print. Despite and often because of these literary and ideological conventions, some prisoners readily inserted themselves into print by adapting their lives and experiences to the genre’s horizons of expectations. Those who brought prisoners’ lives to press sought to instill confidence that readers could access prisoners’ private thoughts and struggles, hear prisoners’ perspectives on the justice (or injustice) of their fates, and witness prisoners’ often emotional responses to their confinement. As such, one of the most insistent questions of interpretation is also largely impossible to answer: who is speaking in criminal confession accounts, historical figure or literary character? Prisoner or amanuensis? Scholars differ widely in how they attribute authorship to execution literature; some unquestioningly embrace the criminal as author, and others eagerly dismiss the gallows genre as fictive or ventriloquized. Both positions are problematic and limited: the former neglects the nuanced art of literary representation, and the latter neglects the long history of how minority writers entered print. The richness of this often limiting and contradictory genre lies in the elaborate ways that prisoners, printers, and authorities uniformly worked to persuade readers that their testimony was authentic. Published accounts reveal the crucial role that literacy played in the performance of authority and the cultivation of credibility.¹³

Because the literature of the gallows and penitentiary emerges from disparate conditions of power, it is best conceptualized through a model of what Karen Weyler calls collaborative literacies—forms and practices of collaborative authorship that allowed outsiders to work with editors and patrons to enter print. To gain access to print, Weyler demonstrates, outsiders collaborated with amanuenses and editors, inserted their stories into popular genres and cheap media, tapped into existing social and religious networks, and sought sponsors and patrons.¹⁴ Collaborative authorship was neither new to the eighteenth century nor confined to that century alone. David D. Hall has effectively traced the longer tradition of what he calls "sponsored writing (or literacy) in seventeenth-century New England and refers to statements made by ordinary people, especially women, that ministers who were learned saw through the press and framed with an introduction.¹⁵ The eighteenth century galvanized the use and proliferation of collaborative literacies: during this time, even the minimally literate and the illiterate understood the potential for print to be life changing, notes Weyler, and outsiders shrewdly employed strategies to assert themselves within collaborative dynamics."¹⁶

Scholars of early Native and African American literature have long grappled with both the potential and the limitations of literature produced through disparate conditions of power and expanded our definitions of both literacy and authorship to account for the complex ways that minority writers entered early American print culture.¹⁷ For example, Dickson D. Bruce Jr. has documented the intricate webs of interaction between 1680 and 1865 through which black and white writers and activists collaborated to create a credible black voice and to assert the authoritative possibilities for that voice in antislavery and abolitionist discourse, a claim that resonates with the aims of early gallows literature. These collaborative processes, observes Bruce, made authorship as such less important than authority and credibility, as white and black writers alike worked to develop forms of representation that would appear to describe convincingly a perspective that was credibly and identifiably black primarily by evoking experiences only people of African descent could have.¹⁸ This argument has advanced our understanding of how outsiders enter print while also moving us past the stultifying debates over the fictive versus factive nature of mediated texts. More recent scholarship has extended this process to writing by prisoners: for example, Jeannine DeLombard argues that formulaic gallows confessions granted black criminals a civic presence and a political voice, while Caleb Smith analyzes the forms of collaborative literacy that allowed Eastern State Penitentiary inmate George Ryno to publish his poetry collection, Buds and Flowers, Of Leisure Hours (1844), under the literary persona Harry Hawser.¹⁹ Reading Prisoners shares common cause with these projects: offering an earlier and broader analysis of prisoners’ early participation in print culture; dissecting the ways that prisoners, printers, and authorities cultivated the impression of an authentic prisoner voice; and analyzing the ways that men and women behind bars explored and exploited the possibilities of collaborative authorship.

I am also indebted to pioneering scholarship on the origins, history, and development of early American criminal confession literature. The genre’s mixed form, shifting purposes, and print evolution have been richly documented by Daniel E. Williams, Daniel A. Cohen, Karen Halttunen, Sharon Harris, Jeannine DeLombard, and others, who have traced the function of gallows accounts in relationship to the development of American crime literature and print culture, to the gothic and sentimental traditions, and to race, gender, and the law.²⁰ Cohen’s and Williams’s attentive and painstaking overviews of how the genre developed from a dozen execution sermons in the late seventeenth century into a divergent genre of more than two hundred published sermons, confessions, narratives, lives, sketches, last words, dying speeches,