University of Chicago Press
Review by Brian Tanguay
When William Freeman, a young Black man, stabbed four white people to death in Cayuga County, New York in March 1846, the question on everyone’s mind was why? What motive did Freeman have for killing four people in their own home? What was the connection between Freeman and his victims? People sought a rational explanation for such a heinous act.
In fact there was an explanation, just not one the white residents of Cayuga County were willing to accept.
At the age of fifteen, William Freeman was incarcerated in the Auburn State Prison for grand larceny. Allegedly, he stole a horse, a charge he denied. Auburn was different from other prisons in that it represented a philosophy of incarceration that merged state and private interests for the purpose of making money. Auburn was a prison-for-profit and the economic foundation of an entire town, touching, in one form or another, every resident.
As the historian Robin Bernstein explains in Freeman’s Challenge, the men who conceived the idea of establishing a prison in Auburn began with specific aims. “They viewed a prison as a vehicle by which to soak up state funds, build banking, stimulate commerce, manufacture goods, and develop land and waterways. In short, they reimagined the prison as an infrastructure for capitalism.”
Unlike prisons in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, where labor was thought to counter the sin of idleness and transform sinners into redeemed Christians, neither reform or rehabilitation were concerns in Auburn.
Enclosing industrial factories and leasing prisoners to private companies for the manufacture of everything from furniture to silk was profitable — for the prison. Inmates received no compensation because it was believed that incarcerated men had no inherent right to benefit from their labor. At Auburn men were regarded as slaves, machines, resources to be exploited until their bodies, or minds, gave out.
Work in the prison was performed under a uniquely rigid system of rules, the first of which was silence. Prisoners were prohibited from speaking or signaling, from running, whistling, dancing or singing, and spent every night in solitary confinement. Discipline, order and quality work were enforced by violence, beatings, whippings with a cat-o-nine-tails. When such corrective actions failed, some inmates were subjected to shower-baths, a form of water-boarding.
As if this regime wasn’t harsh enough, the prison was also a tourist attraction, open to the public for an admission fee of $.25 for adults, half price for children. In 1840, an average of 62 people a day toured the prison and watched the inmates at work. Inmates were prohibited from making eye contact with guests.
When William Freeman was incarcerated, Black people accounted for just two percent of the population of New York State. Yet Blacks comprised nine percent of all those serving sentences at Auburn. Freeman refused to adapt to the harsh rules and rigid routines imposed on him. He danced and was punished. He disobeyed orders and was again punished. He fought with other prisoners. In one skirmish Freeman was clubbed in the head with a board. The blow broke Freeman’s ear drum, gave him a concussion, and damaged his left temporal bone. Freeman’s hearing would never return, and his mental faculties were forever impaired.
Upon his release from prison, Freeman did something audacious for an African American in the nineteenth-century: he attempted to use legal means to demand compensation for the labor he performed while incarcerated. Freeman believed he was owed for five years of forced labor, and nothing would dissuade him from this notion. While there was precedent for his claim, local authorities refused to take him seriously.
It was then that Freeman began contemplating violence. Somebody had to pay.
Bernstein, the Dillion Professor of American History at Harvard University, connects Freeman’s story to the broader social and economic dynamics in play at the time, including the organizing African Americans did to secure measures of racial equality. Because she couldn’t access Freeman’s individual psychology or emotional life, the book focuses on external factors, news reports, court proceedings, what Freeman said and did, and “how white and Black people responded to his actions.”
White fear of the inherent menace and criminality of Black men was amplified in newspapers and by showmen like George Mastin, who staged a melodrama about the Freeman murders. Through meticulous research Bernstein shows the impact of this commonly held belief. But Bernstein also focuses on the threat Freeman’s demand for compensation posed to the Auburn system, which had by that time been replicated in other states. Auburn was a company-town, the prison its economic lifeblood, and any threat to it roused vigorous opposition.
William Henry Seward, later to become a United States Senator and Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln, defended William Freeman at trial. Seward argued that Freeman was innocent by reason of insanity, a novel concept at the time. The argument failed to persuade a jury and Freeman was convicted and sentenced to hang. Citing irregularities in jury selection and other technicalities, Seward successfully petitioned for a new trial. But Freeman would never again see the inside of a courtroom; he died of a respiratory illness on August 21, 1847.
He was twenty-two years old.
William Freeman’s short, tragic life is a reminder that prisons don’t foster justice. Today the Auburn Correctional Facility holds nearly thirteen hundred prisoners, and, as Bernstein notes, is the oldest continually operating maximum security prison in the United States. Among other items, inmates manufacture 2.5 million pairs of license plates annually for which they are paid $.65 an hour.
