Red Hannah

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RED HANNAH - Delaware's Whipping Post
by Robert Graham Caldwell
University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1947
142 pp. plus six black & white illustrations; detailed notes; three appendices with tables of statistics; extensive bibliography; index
Review by Robert

Robert Caldwell was a professor of sociology at several American universities from about 1940 to the 1970s. He undertook a study of Delaware's use of corporal punishment, specifically the lash at the whipping post, in the mid-1940s at the urging of his academic mentor, Thorsten Sellin, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Caldwell's stated intention for carrying out his research project into "Red Hannah" (a colloquial name for the whipping post, said to have originated by black convicts who "hugged Red Hannah" -- the red-painted post -- when undergoing their lashings) wasn't in its elimination as such, but in a more general reform of the system of punishment of criminals. His somewhat Utopian goal was "the introduction of a system of scientific treatment" that would include individual psychosocial analysis, rehabilitation, and behavior modification.

Caldwell and similar reformers were well aware of the vast inertia and lethargy of their fellow citizens with respect to any sort of social change, and in particular to their penal system. He provides a detailed history of the evolution of Delaware's criminal law, from the founding of the colony in 1638 up to the most recent codification of Delaware's criminal statutes in 1945. At that time, 24 offenses were made punishable by fines, imprisonment in the New Castle Workhouse at hard labor, and flogging with a prescribed number of lashes using a cat-o'-nine-tails "well laid on the bareback", applied by the superintendent of the county jail or workhouse. Time and again reformers attempted to have the CP penalties removed from the statutes, and time and again they were either ignored or rebuffed.

Reformers of Delaware's anachronistic penal system, and in particular the abolitionists of the "post", realized in the late 1800s that incrementalism would be the only successful approach to modernizing the system and getting rid of Red Hannah. They lobbied successfully first for the establishment of state prison for Delaware, the New Castle Workhouse, which was built around 1899-1901. The reformers thought that by orienting Delaware away from the medieval concept of physical or corporal punishment -- the lash and pillory -- and toward the "modern" concept of doing penitence and useful, rehabilitating work in a monastery-like setting -- the penitentiary -- CP might be abolished in the state. But no! The whipping post remained in active use in Delaware right up through the 1940s.

The second success of CP abolitionists was the removal of the pillory from the statutes in March 1905. The pillory -- a sort of stocks, in which the offender had to stand in public, with his head and wrists enclosed by a wooden yoke -- admittedly was a rather antiquated sort of punishment, popular in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in Europe, but decidedly out of style in the twentieth. Since the convict stood in the pillory for only an hour, and in the prison yard where the public usually wouldn't circulate anyway, I am mystified as to why it was used at all.

The harsh Delaware penalties had also been gradually softened for juvenile and female offenders. In 1883, whipping was made optional (at the judge's discretion) for juveniles, and in February 1889, all CP -- the lash and pillory -- were abolished for female convicts. In 1885, the state built its first reformatory for boys and followed this in 1893 with one for girls.

But try as hard as they could, the reformers couldn't persuade the Delaware legislature to abolish Red Hannah. State demographics had much to do with this. Delaware was a small, mostly rural state, comprised of only three counties, New Castle, Kent, and Sussex. The main urban center was then and is today, the city of Wilmington, in New Castle County in the extreme north of Delaware, near the Pennsylvania border. The state constitution gave equal electoral weight to each county, so representatives of the country folk in Kent and Sussex counties outnumbered and dominated those from urban New Castle County, and they ruled the legislature for decades.

The demographics described by Caldwell in his statistical tabulations remind me of a similar situation in the equally rural state of Arkansas. There, the conservative country population was strongly opposed to the abolition of CP in their state in 1967, when it was attempted by the idealistic young prison superintendent, Tom Murton, with the support of the reformist Governor Winthrop Rockefeller (as recounted in the book, Accomplices to the Crime, The Arkansas Prison Scandal, Tom Murton and Joe Hyams, Grove Press, New York, 1969).

We have to remember that in the first half of the twentieth century CP was generally used much more freely than today. Children were disciplined more severely then than now, as were convicts, who were subject to CP both on conviction from a judge, and as a disciplinary measure while in county jail or state prison. Custodians of dependents, whether of children or prisoners, had little compunction in that era about controlling and disciplining their wards with CP.

So there was always a foundation of conservative, often rural-based traditionalists in favor of CP, and a small, liberal, "modernist" minority vociferously lobbying their governments for its abolition. This certainly seems to have been the case in Delaware in the century roughly spanning 1850-1950, and in Arkansas (and other southern states) in the late 1960s. The traditionalists were always in control of the Delaware legislature in that era, so they dictated the CP penalty statutes -- even adding to the number of offenses punishable by whippings, in the revised penal codes of 1893, 1915, and 1935.

Caldwell discusses the issues of race and class only peripherally, but I got the uneasy feeling that these were really the source of the remarkable longevity of Red Hannah over the decades. He provides detailed statistics of the types of convicts whipped, tabulated according to their crimes, home counties, race, etc., and makes an excellent point that the statutes discriminated against the urban poor, and generally were lightened for the middle and upper classes.

His figures show that blacks were whipped much more (at least twice as much, roughly: Chart 1, page 71) in the period 1900-1944; however, African-Americans formed only 13% of Delaware's population in 1940 (Table 1, page 62). On a per-capita basis, we would expect that blacks would have been whipped upon conviction only 13% as much as whites; instead, they were whipped 200% (twice) as much as whites, or 200/13 = 15 times as often as whites, per capita. That looks like racial discrimination to me!

This is easy to understand. The two southern counties of Delaware were rural and predominately populated by whites of Anglo-Saxon heritage. The black population of the state tended to concentrate in the more urban New Castle County and in Wilmington. Also, middle-class citizens were less likely to be affected by the justice system than those of the lower and working classes.

Since western society in general is dominated by the middle class, it may be argued that the legal and penal systems are there to protect the middle class against encroachment by the lower class, who form the bulk of the imprisoned population.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the lash fell almost exclusively on convicts from the lower classes, and was rarely if ever applied to the backs of middle-class "situational" and white-collar criminals. African-Americans, largely confined in poverty-stricken urban slums and ghettos, were the main constituents of the lower strata of society that were affected by harsh, punitive justice and penal systems imposed by a dominant white, mostly rural (in Delaware's case) middle class.

In 1941 the crime of petty larceny was no longer punishable by whipping, and this had the effect of reducing the use of Red Hannah. The frequency of the judicial imposition of the lash on convicts declined from about 70% of convictions in 1900 to around 7% or so in 1942 (Chart 2, page 72). Indeed, I think what eventually caused Red Hannah to be retired to the history books was the gradual "modernizing" of the judiciary in Delaware.

According to John P. Reid, on his website Collecting Delaware Books, the last public whipping in the state occurred in 1952, and the penalty of lashing was removed from the statute books in 1972. In other words, the judges simply let the practice "wither on the vine" by refusing to sentence felons to a whipping.

Caldwell provides numerous graphic eyewitness descriptions of whippings at the post. Here are a few brief accounts:

A large number of persons, much larger than usual …… collected about the New Castle County jail this morning at 10 o'clock …..to witness the whippings ……

The most touching sight was the suffering of the two lads, aged about thirteen, whose contortions and cries while they were being whipped were very pitiful to see.

-- Wilmington Daily Commercial, 22 November 1873, p. 1, col. 6.

The whipping of Thomas Oliver, the negro who pleaded guilty to assault on two white women, was entrusted to the hands of Jim Wingate …. well known for his fiendish hatred of the black people. The punishment was 60 lashes. Thirty of these were inflicted in the morning. The instrument employed was a cowhide, which was used with such fury that the blood flowed at every cut, causing the fellow to utter the most piteous screams …. The man was again brought out in the afternoon, and the lashes were reversed across his back, making crossbars. The wounds were afterward washed with brine ……There is no doubt that Oliver will additionally be convicted, at another Court, of rape, for which, it being a capital offense, he will be hanged. This torture is, therefore, a mere preliminary to his execution.

-- Wilmington Daily Commercial, 7 November 1867, p. 4, col. 1.

By 1935 the lashings at the post apparently weren't as severe as the two incidents described above. The following is a description of the whippings, which seemed to be only light swattings, of three white teenage boys, each sentenced to ten lashes and three years labor in the New Castle Workhouse for robbery. The warden of the Workhouse, Elmer J. Leach, had publicly gone on the record opposing CP, but he was legally required to administer it to those convicts whose sentences included it:

Delaware's whipping post isn't all it's lashed up to be. By reputation, it's pretty terrible. But in actual practice - well, I saw Warden Elmer J. Leach "lay it on" three youths this morning at the New Castle County Workhouse, at Greenbank, with all the enthusiasm of a gentleman brushing dust off his coat.

The average American boy takes a harder "spanking" when the average American "Pop" gets out the shingle …..

In the hands of a sadist, it could be a punishing instrument. But Warden Leach doesn't use it that way. The punch behind his blows was just sufficient to overcome the force of gravity in raising the whip to drop it across the back of his prisoners. You could almost imagine him whispering to the youth as he whipped him: "Son, this hurts me more than it does you".

The three prisoners were smiling when they reached the infirmary after the "floggings".

-- Mac Parker, Philadelphia Record, 20 January 1935, p.1, cols. 3,4, p. 4, col. 1.

By the way, there were actually four Red Hannahs in Delaware: one each at the three county jails, and the fourth at the New Castle Workhouse. Caldwell doesn't mention if whipping was used as a prison disciplinary method at any of these facilities. The implements used were either like a horsewhip (Kent and Sussex counties), or a cat-o'-nine-tails with a 20-inch handle and nine 20-inch lashes (New Castle county).

The eighth chapter of the book, "The Post in the Forum", is a summary of Caldwell's arguments against the use of CP, and of Red Hannah in particular. He was a devoted penal reformer and CP abolitionist and was in essence preaching against the evils of CP in this book, much as George Ryley Scott was in his books about CP and torture. Caldwell reviews all the arguments for and against the "post", demolishing with philosophy and statistics all the cherished mythologies surrounding CP. He lists the five main "pro" arguments on page 98:

retribution: "paying back" the criminal for the pain and suffering he has caused his victims; economy: CP is a "quick fix"; simple, fast, and effective, which can replace some or all of the more expensive penalties of prison;

public opinion: publicly delivered CP rallies the public -- read "middle-class" -- against the criminal and crime -- read the "lower and working classes";
rehabilitation: harsh punishments help convince the criminal to "go straight" upon release; and,
deterrence: similarly, harsh punishments will act to deter recidivism and generally to frighten people away from crime.

I agree with Caldwell on most of his rebuttal of these five myths, with the possible exception of the second one, "economy". CP could indeed be a "quick fix" penalty; for example, the judge gives you an option of a fine of $135 for driving through a red light at an intersection, or a week in the local jail, or a certain number of strokes of CP. That would be an interesting penalty option, although I can't see it ever being instituted in western societies.

The trend in western countries has inexorably been away from CP in all its forms, and to the more "scientific treatment" advocated by Caldwell and other reformer criminologists. Even so, such humane psychosocial treatment of offenders has a long way to go. The main penalties today are fines, probation, community service, and incarceration; indeed, long-term "warehousing" of the more dangerous criminals is the norm nowadays.

Caldwell argued persuasively for the abolition of CP in Delaware, and by extension, everywhere. However, he is too persuasive; his arguments could successfully be used to lobby for the abolition of any sort of legal sanction or penalty imposed on offenders.

Caldwell stuck to a gradualist approach in the abolition of CP: one small step here and there, gradually solving one problem at a time. Red Hannah disappeared only with the later modernization of Delaware and her judiciary. There would be no revolution in the justice and penal systems in North America, or in western societies generally; only a slow, peaceful, almost unnoticeable evolution away from the harsh, oppressive, and even cruel punishments of the past centuries, into a milder, more moderate regime of bureaucratized "corrections".

Judicially ordered CP has thus disappeared from western countries, to undoubtedly be followed in the next few decades by CP in all remaining "normal" areas of life (i.e. in the home and school). Professor Caldwell's book about Red Hannah will then become of purely historical and sociological interest. However, it will remain one of the most complete and detailed studies of judicial CP available to the student of criminology and penology.

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