The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America by Adam Jay HirschReview by: Nicole Hahn RafterThe American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 5 (Dec., 1993), pp. 1681-1682Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2167222 .

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United States 1681

laid stone walls, however, Garrison notes that most stone fences were simply piles of rocks at the edge of the field. Although such fences may not make good neighbors, to paraphrase the old adage, they certainly make fine history.

HAL S. BARRON Harvey Mudd College

PATRICIA TYSON STROUD. Thomas Say: New World Naturalist. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1992. Pp. xv, 340. $24.95.

Patricia Tyson Stroud presents a straightforward, chronologically organized biography of one of Amer- ica's pioneer naturalists. Thomas Say set a standard for the transition from nature reportage in America to natural science. To trace his progress is to be introduced to the intellectual and artistic establish- ment of Philadelphia, the "Athens of America" (p. 28), during the first decades of the eighteenth cen- tury, and to the patriotic tenor of natural history following the War of 1812. Say and others believed Americans should name and describe their own flora and fauna rather than cede the authority to English and French virtuosi.

Say greatly expanded his horizons and practical field experience in his early thirties by signing on as naturalist with Major Stephen H. Long's expeditions into the Missouri and the upper-Mississippi water- sheds (1819-20, 1823). The particulars of lost bun- dles of specimens, of stolen scientific instruments, and of all-too-human colleagues put into perspective the achievements of Say in the field and later in Philadelphia as he described his specimens and com- pared them with those in the literature. Say deserves more recognition than he has gotten, and Stroud strives to bring him and his work alive. Say the scientist dominates the middle portion of Stroud's book; Say the man comes to the fore in the final 100 pages.

On the way to Mexico with his patron, William Maclure, in 1826, Say stopped at New Harmony, Indiana, a community of social visionaries, educa- tional reformers, artists, and naturalists. There he wed Lucy Sistare, who became his partner in publish- ing by engraving and tinting illustrations of shells for his American Conchology (1830, 1838). Stroud details the couple's struggles and joys, the bizarre clashes of personalities, and the hurdles to scientific productiv- ity their residence so far from the center of things entailed.

Over fifty illustrations, many of them portraits by the Peales (Charles Wilson, Raphael, and Titian Ram- say), enrich Stroud's biography, especially the sketches and watercolors by Karl Bodmer. There are also small errors; Ft. Snelling is mislocated as being in St. Paul, Minnesota (p. 141), and the prairie dog is misglossed as a marmot (p. 119). And whereas in one place (p. 121) Stroud erroneously claims that no one

had written on American insects before Say did, she reveals later thatJohn Bartam and Mark Catesby had (p. 161). These mistakes an editor should have caught.

More disturbing is Stroud's willingness to attribute psychological motives where no documentation sus- tains their plausibility: she asserts Say's "unconscious transference of filial duty" (p. 24), his "feelings of insecurity" (p. 41), and that his "self-mastery" was the "object of his self-denial" (p. 100). Stroud's command of primary sources is fine, indeed sweeping; but her grasp of symbolic significance is less firm. For exam- ple, she takes the lumping of Indians with other animals in early natural history as a sign only that zoology was "so all-inclusive in the early nineteenth century" (p. 78). That cultural construction antedates Say's time and stretches beyond well into twentieth- century museological conventions.

DAVID SCOFIELD WILSON University of California, Davis

ADAM JAY HIRSCH. The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America. (Yale Historical Pub- lications.) New Haven: Yale University Press. 1992. Pp. xvi, 243. $30.00.

Adam Jay Hirsch's book offers a persuasive new interpretation of the origins of the U.S. prison sys- tem. Dense with detail, it is nonetheless highly read- able, for Hirsch has relegated technical discussions to footnotes and writes in a style that is at once crystal- line and witty.

Hirsch combines economic, institutional, intellec- tual, legal, and social history to investigate the emer- gence of the penitentiary and its cultural meanings. He focuses on Massachusetts, the state that led the penitentiary movement by turning the Castle Island fortress into a prison in 1785. This focus provides a much-needed corrective to accounts that locate the movement's origins in the Jacksonian period and the celebrated debate between advocates of the Pennsyl- vania and New York ("Auburn") systems of incarcer- ation. This is one key respect in which Hirsch's analysis differs from that of David Rothman, whose The Discovery of the Asylum (1971) has been the stan- dard work on the subject for two decades.

Hirsch's thesis contrasts with Rothman's in four ways. First, Hirsch argues that Americans' ideology of punishment "did not go through two distinct stages, the first emphasizing deterrence and the second rehabilitation" (p. xiv). Even colonial Americans aimed at rehabilitation. Hirsch usefully distinguishes, however, between their "rehabituative" approach to punishment and the Jacksonians' goal of "reclama- tion"; the latter, aimed at deeper, personality changes, formed the basis for the penitentiary. Sec- ond, Hirsch contends that the ideological roots of incarceration lay not in eighteenth-century Italian rationalism nor (as Rothman argued) in a nineteenth-

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1993

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1682 Reviews of Books

century American social crisis but rather in sixteenth- century English thinking about rehabilitation and in Puritan theology.

Hirsch shows, in his third difference from Roth- man, that Americans embraced the concept of incar- ceration as a punishment well before the Jacksonian period. In fact, carceral solutions to crime were seriously considered and in some cases endorsed before the revolutionary war. "Far from precipitating its rise, the Revolution may actually have delayed the penitentiary for a generation" (p. 86). Differing again with Rothman, Hirsch maintains that few Americans other than Louis Dwight expected the penitentiary to serve as a model for other social institutions. "The vast majority of Jacksonian advocates looked nar- rowly upon the penitentiary as an instrument of crime control" (p. 67).

In part 2, Hirsch explores the relationship of the penitentiary to slavery. He devotes one chapter to identifying points of congruence between the two institutions, investigating how proponents of incar- ceration reconciled this position with their opposition to slavery. In his chapter on economic exploitation, Hirsch concludes that, despite the parallels between prison labor and slavery, "Northern captive labor programs were designed to sustain convicts, not to capitalize on their plight" (p. 97).

Given the richness of this ambitious and provoca- tive book, it seems churlish to point to minor flaws. Yet I do wish that Hirsch would have avoided using "prison" and "jail" synonymously (p. 6), an imprecise and confusing usage. Although his study includes over one hundred pages of footnotes and "A Note on the Sources," it would be even more useful to scholars if it listed sources alphabetically. I would have liked to know whether William Penn influenced the adoption of carceral solutions and whether conditions for women convicts differed from those of men. But Hirsch did not set out to write a comprehensive history of the origins and early development of the penitentiary. His goal was to raise new issues and to turn the field in new directions, and in this he succeeds admirably. His book will serve as the defin- itive work on the rise of the penitentiary for some time to come.

NICOLE HAHN RAFTER

Northeastern University

JEFFREY MEYERS. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1992. Pp. xii, 348. $30.00.

The torments Edgar Allan Poe inflicted on himself exceeded what he did to his characters. Plagued by poverty, he went out of his way to alienate a rich stepfather; devoted to his child bride, he failed to extricate her from the squalid conditions that contrib- uted to her death at twenty-six; desirous of female companionship (and financial assistance), he subse-

quently courted various women, some simultaneously and none successfully; desperate for recognition, he denounced the reigning literary figures of his day; hopeful that his work would someday validate his life, he named as his literary executor one of his bitterest enemies. If ever there was a writer whose art can be said to issue from the substance of his life, it was Poe, whose exquisitely imagined horrors scarcely ap- proached what he endured each day.

Jeffrey Meyers tells this story briskly and sympa- thetically-perhaps to a fault. While acknowledging his subject's shortcomings, Meyers shows how other people-the stepfather, the publishers, the fickle public, the literary groupies-contributed to Poe's ordeals by denying him the indulgence due a genius. The point is well taken, particularly at this convenient remove, but Meyers's focus on the insensitivity of others renders Poe's penchant for self-destruction all the more unclear. Poe was no doubt looking within when in "The Black Cat" he describes a man who, after torturing and killing his pet, slays his wife as well. His actions, he explains from his jail cell, had been driven by a "spirit of peevishness"-an "unfath- omable longing of the soul to vex itself-to offer violence to its own nature." So, too, with Poe. But whence this longing? What wound cut so deeply?

And what was the relationship between the social misfit and the society drawn to his tortured musings? It is clear that Poe's work in many ways stroked the romantic sensibilities of his middle-class readers; Poe has long been criticized for his perfervid sentimental- ity. Yet in many respects Poe's art, and indeed his life, constituted a challenge to the emerging Victorian culture. His graphic portrayal of decomposing corpses, for example, came at a time when liberal ministers were describing death as a pleasant release from the cares of life, and obliging morticians effaced as best they could all that might suggest otherwise. Meyers often skims details from the surface of the past, but he shows little indication of thoughtful immersion in deeper social and intellectual currents.

Within the narrow constraints of his argument, however, Meyers is far more successful. He demon- strates that although misery pervaded Poe's art and made it distinctive, his remarkable creativity persisted nevertheless. Despite his faults, Poe was an able editor and a talented writer, if not most of the time, at least enough of the time to have left a deep imprint on twentieth-century literature. Of this, as Meyers shows, there can be little doubt.

MARK C. CARNES

Barnard College, Columbia University

WILBUR R. JACOBS. Francis Parkman, Historian as Hero: The Formative Years. (American Studies Series.) Aus- tin: University of Texas Press. 1991. Pp. xvii, 237. $27.50.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1993

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