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The Lesson of the Gallows Crowd, Two Centuries of Witnesses at the Scaffold
In Brief
- As early as 1725 Mandeville proposed putting malefactors to death in private. His reason was not pity but the failure of the terror the scaffold was supposed to inspire.
- The first retreat of the London gallows, from Tyburn to Newgate in 1783, owed more to the westward spread of fashionable London than to any moral reform.
- Witnesses from Wollstonecraft to Dickens reported that the crowd learned curiosity, amusement and sympathy for the condemned rather than fear, and that frequent executions bred indifference to guilt.
- Hiding executions left deterrence in a bind. Seen, the gallows taught cruelty. Unseen, as Darrow observed, it could deter no one.
Main authors
The public execution rested on a wager about its audience. The condemned would die, but the person the ceremony was really meant for stood below the platform: the crowd, which was supposed to go home chastened. Bernard Mandeville, writing on Tyburn in 1725, put the logic without ornament. The death of the condemned was secondary, and the terror struck into others was the real purpose [1]. Andrew Peabody's manual of moral philosophy, written in a far more measured register, made the very right to take a life depend on that dissuasive effect [2]. Once punishment is defined this way, as teaching aimed at onlookers, it can be judged by what the onlookers actually learn.
That judgement was made, and recorded, by an unusually long line of witnesses who watched the watchers more closely than the hanged. Travellers, physicians, novelists and pamphleteers reported curiosity, amusement, hardened hearts and, often, sympathy for the man on the rope, where fear and contrition had been expected [3, 4, 5, 6]. The record is not unanimous, though. Essayists such as Alexander Smith, John Timbs and Ambrose Bierce disputed the diagnosis, its remedy, or both [7, 8, 9], and the first walls raised around the London gallows had causes that the moralists did not always name [10]. What emerges is less a simple verdict against the spectacle than a dilemma that its withdrawal from view did not resolve.
A Punishment Addressed to the Onlookers
Mandeville's argument carries the seed of its own undoing. If an execution is justified only as a sacrifice to public safety, it becomes what he bluntly calls barbarity, a frivolous waste of the lives of those he terms the "indigent Vulgar," the moment it fails to frighten . The deterrent theory therefore comes with a test of its own failure built in. Mandeville draws the conclusion himself. If no remedy can be found for the disorder at Tyburn, he would rather see malefactors put to death in private . Private execution thus first appears in 1725 as a consequence of deterrent reasoning that has lost its audience, and owes nothing to humanitarian feeling.
Peabody's version of the same reasoning is conditional from end to end. Society may confiscate the murderer's right to live only if the dread of the gallows really reduces violence among what he calls the dangerous classes, and his calculus openly weighs "comparatively worthless" lives against valuable ones . A writer in the Knickerbocker in 1837, more than a century after Mandeville, drew the theatrical consequence. If executions are carried out to awe the multitude, they should be staged as terror, with the hangman dressed as the devil and no romance or softening allowed [11]. Both writers take for granted that the scaffold is a performance. Their only disagreement is over what kind.
The visual culture of the period rehearsed the intended script. In John Trusler's commentary on Hogarth, the cart that carries the idle apprentice to Tyburn, with his coffin behind him, closes a moral story of sloth and vice in a death meant to read as shameful [12]. The engraving shows the lesson as the authorities hoped it would be received, a straight line from idleness to the rope. The procession through the streets was the real-life counterpart of that narrative, and it depended entirely on spectators reading it the right way.
Looking back on the history of Hyde Park, Mrs. Alec-Tweedie recorded how far the reading went astray. The high gallows was built to strike awe, yet human nature, which she calls perverse, turned the spectacle into a source of glory, and a fitting end at Tyburn gave lasting fame to rogues who would otherwise have been forgotten [13]. What failed here was not the severity of the punishment but its legibility. The crowd took the ceremony's meaning and reversed it, so the institution's own stage gave the condemned a distinction that the law had meant to deny him.
Alfred Marks's history of Tyburn adds a necessary complication. When the procession was abolished, Samuel Johnson protested that executions are meant to draw spectators and that the old method had satisfied everyone, and Marks concedes that Johnson was consistent from the point of view of the moral lesson . But Marks attributes the change to something more prosaic: the best quarter of the town had spread out as far as Tyburn, and from 1783 hangings took place in front of Newgate . The first retreat of the London gallows was a matter of urban geography and the comfort of the propertied. Any account that explains the closing of the scaffold solely by its pedagogical failure has to allow for this more material cause.
What the Witnesses Saw in the Crowd
Mary Wollstonecraft, watching a crowd gather for an execution on her Scandinavian journey, saw idle gazers whose sympathy was quickly erased by curiosity . Her remedy is revealing. She did not ask for executions to be hidden. Until capital punishment was abolished, she wanted them to wear every appearance of horror, so that the spectacle would stop being an entertainment . The physician Benjamin Rush went further: every public punishment, in his view, hardens the hearts of those who watch and blunts the natural horror that crime first inspires, so executions should never be public . Two diagnoses separate here. For Wollstonecraft the spectacle was badly staged. For Rush the act of watching was itself what corrupted.
John Moore's travels supply something close to a comparison. Where public punishments were frequent, he observed a hardened and cruel temper among ordinary people. In Geneva, where executions were rare, a single hanging for murder cast a gloom over every social circle for days before and after . Charlotte Biggs, a prisoner in revolutionary France in the 1790s, described the extreme case. The repetition of judicial killings had destroyed both humanity and the sense of justice, and the guillotine had become close to an amusement, watched with the same indifference whether the victim was guilty or innocent [14]. Taken together, their testimony suggests that the lesson depended on rarity, and that habit drained the spectacle of the meaning it was supposed to carry.
The indifference to guilt that Biggs noticed is the most damaging point for the deterrent theory, because an execution teaches only if its moral content reaches the onlooker. John West, writing on Tasmania, found that it did not. The crowds rushing to the gallows showed insensibility and intemperance, and he judged that they would have run just as eagerly to see a saint put to death [15]. A crowd that is indifferent to who is being punished cannot learn why. West left the question of usefulness to statesmen while allowing himself to detest the practice . His distinction between policy and moral judgement recurs throughout the reformers' writing.
Mandeville's own picture of Tyburn, as his modern editor presents it, confirms this from the inside. The scene is a torrent of bodies, mud, gin, rags, flying refuse and the carcasses of animals, a moving multitude in which there is nowhere to stand still [16]. Nothing in it resembles a congregation or a classroom. The disorder follows from the institution's form: an event designed to draw the largest possible crowd drew a fair rather than a sermon.
The witnesses also noticed a quieter inversion, in the condemned man himself. Alexandre Dumas recalled that executions held in central Paris at the busiest hour gave the doomed man outside support against his own weakness, and turned him from a penitent into a kind of cynical victor whose death testified against the inadequacy of human justice [17]. Victor Hugo denied the power of the example outright and held that the sight demoralized ordinary people instead of edifying them [18]. Winifred Louise Taylor, writing in the vocabulary of evolution and of a "savage instinct" for blood, cited men with no history of violence who left an execution impelled to kill [19]. Charles Dickens drew the institutional conclusion. A law from which everyone instinctively recoils face to face can prevent nothing, and the habitual spectators he calls "the dregs of society" are exactly the public the scaffold must answer to . A piece of street literature recorded the abolition of public hanging on just these grounds, citing the demoralization that attended it and its uselessness for terror or example [20].
The Case for the Open Scaffold
The open scaffold had defenders who had also looked at it closely. Alexander Smith argued that once the law had become merciful, reserving death for murderers, demanding the clearest evidence and making its officials carry out their duty at a personal cost, a public execution stopped being vulgar and became sublime, a shadow felt by the whole city . His argument does not deny what the critics saw. It moves the cause. The crowd, on this view, mirrors the justice it is shown: a law that hanged too readily got a coarse mob, while a law that hanged rarely and solemnly could expect awe.
Smith's second observation cuts deeper. For the criminal, he believed, death inside prison walls with only half a dozen officials present would be far more terrible than death before a curious mob, because daylight and publicity draw a man a little away from himself [21]. This is Dumas's observation with the opposite value attached . Both writers saw the crowd as a support for the condemned. For Dumas that support was a failure of justice. For Smith, taking it away amounted to making the punishment harsher. Closing the doors, then, could be read as severity as easily as mercy.
John Timbs offered a different defence, one less dependent on the onlookers. Public executions, he argued, rest on grounds other than their effect on bystanders. They are retributive acts, embodiments of what he calls Eternal Justice, and life for life is a social necessity once death is reserved for murder . Timbs was no less troubled by the scene, however. He complained of the cold, business-like formality of the proceedings, in which only a glimpse of the chaplain's surplice recalled the sacred character of death, and he wondered how the spectacle could be made wholesome [22]. In 1845 Blackwood's conceded that a public execution edified no one, that the coarse minds who sought it out were the worst possible audience, and that a more private method was preferable even at some cost to its terror [23].
Ambrose Bierce mounted the sharpest challenge to the reformers' case. He mocked the claim that the death penalty breeds bloodthirstiness and demanded that its proponents trace the chain of motives running from the knowledge of a hanging to the wish to commit murder . He warned that every softening of punishment weakens deterrence, and that the reformers he called "penologers and philanthropes" might make hanging so agreeable that it deterred nobody but the man hanged [24]. His objection exposes how much the brutalization argument relied on anecdote. It also shows how his own position had changed: Bierce defended deterrence through knowledge of the punishment, not through seeing it, a defence that sits comfortably with execution behind walls.
Behind the Walls, a Lesson Without a Classroom
Moving the gallows indoors meant that deterrence now had to work by report alone. Timbs had already conceded that the bare knowledge of an execution would be less terrible to the criminal population than the sight of it , and Blackwood's accepted that privacy would cost the punishment some of its terror . Clarence Darrow, writing in a much later period, turned this concession into an accusation. The most sensitive supporters of state killing, he observed, now wanted even the newspapers silent and the killing done in darkness, a sign that they were ashamed of it, and in that case nobody could be deterred by the cruelty of the state [25]. In his reading, the retreat from publicity amounted to a confession.
Leo Tolstoy placed the concealment within a broader account of state power. Unable to reconcile lawful killing with the Christian prohibition of murder, governments, he argued, are anxious to hide the dilemma from their subjects instead of resolving it [26]. Edmund Burke, in another context, used the image of the stage on which murders and executions take place behind the scenes for the sake of decorum [27]. The private execution follows that old theatrical convention: what cannot be shown without damaging the authority of the drama is moved offstage, and the play goes on.
For the abolitionists, the lesson did not depend on visibility at all. Robert Ingersoll held that the death penalty, wherever the state inflicts it, is a standing excuse for mobs, which take their example from a government that does not treat life as sacred [28]. Theodore Parker called the gallows, and even the prison as then administered, practical teachers of violence, and he contrasted a penal system built to terrify and destroy with one that might reform [29]. With these writers the brutalization argument moves from the spectacle to the institution. What the public learned came from the principle of the law, not from the rope it could see.
Dickens took the argument onto the ground of numbers. He maintained that wherever executions became rarer, crimes became rarer too, from Tuscany to Belgium, and he pointed to the contradiction of advocates who insisted that the death penalty prevented crime while resisting its abolition on the grounds that it did not [30]. Withdrawing the gallows left deterrent theory in a bind. Seen, the scaffold taught cruelty, or turned the condemned into a hero. Unseen, it taught nothing that a report could not convey. Private execution looks less like a reform than a compromise made by those who had lost faith in the lesson but not in the punishment.
Across two centuries the witnesses converge on one finding. The crowd for which the scaffold was built did not learn what it was meant to learn. Mandeville's terror turned into a fair , Hogarth's moral story into a road to fame , and the solemnity hoped for by Wollstonecraft and Timbs into curiosity and indifference . Yet the withdrawal of the gallows cannot be told only as a moral awakening. Its first move in London followed the spread of fashionable streets , and some of its defenders saw privacy as an added severity toward the condemned . The thesis survives, but in a sharper form. Pity was not the main reason the scaffold disappeared from view, and neither was the failure of its lesson alone. It disappeared because its audience had become an embarrassment, and once that audience was gone, the deterrent argument lost its footing .
The question these witnesses leave open is what a punishment becomes once it no longer has spectators. A ceremony designed as public speech, addressed by the law to the many, turned into an act performed before half a dozen officials , justified to a public that would only ever hear of it. Smith thought a merciful law could make the open scaffold sublime . Tolstoy suspected that the state hid the scaffold because it could not answer for it . Between those two positions lies an older question that the history of the gallows crowd keeps raising: to whom a state that kills owes an account, and whether that account can still be given once nobody is watching.
