Caleb Smith
Yale University
Caleb Smith is professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Oracle and the Curse (2013) and The Prison and the American Imagination (2009), the editor of Austin Reed’s 1858 prison memoir, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, and a co-editor of No Crisis, a Los Angeles Review of Books special series on contemporary criticism.
Preaching before the hanging of an African American convict in 1790, one minister prayed, “May he be all attention to the last sermon he will ever hear.” Fifty years later, documenting the spiritual conversion of an... [ view full abstract ]
Preaching before the hanging of an African American convict in 1790, one minister prayed, “May he be all attention to the last sermon he will ever hear.” Fifty years later, documenting the spiritual conversion of an African American inmate at New York’s Auburn State Prison, another minister observed that, in studying religion, “he gave the most strict attention” and, in time, displayed the signs of grace. This paper examines how, in penal reform literature and prison writing, scenes of punishment came to be imagined as sites for the cultivation of a disciplined attentiveness. Distraction, the wandering of the mind, was an ancient problem, but nineteenth-century reformers came to see it in a new way, as a symptom of historical conditions (rather than, say, the unruly passions or the devil’s temptations). As the antidote, they promoted the training of attention as one of the spiritual exercises of a secular age. Black convicts became a controversial test case for the project. Reformers argued that the minds of African American delinquents had been damaged by slavery in the South and segregation in Northern cities, and they promised that reformatory discipline could repair the damage, readying its practitioners for the rigors of freedom. Scholarship on race in the early prison has mainly organized itself around an opposition between subjection and abjection, but this paper shows how a mode of attentive openness to the world, commonly understood in terms of the ethical and therapeutic surrender of subjectivity, could be imposed as a compulsory discipline. Revisiting Stowe’s treatment of Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Austin Reed’s accounts of confinement in The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, the paper focuses especially on the reverend A.D. Eddy’s 1842 conversion narrative Black Jacob, A Monument of Grace.
