Learning The Wages of Sin

by Patrick Wohlscheid

Looking through the Library of Congress Digital Archives for items related to poetry and early American religious culture, I found a printed broadside entitled “The Wages of Sin; or, Robbery justly Rewarded: a Poem Occasioned by the untimely Death of Richard Wilson, Who was Executed on Boston Neck, for Burglary, on Thursday the 19th of October, 1732.” This page caught my eye not only because it was a poem occasioned for such a specific public event, and an execution no less, but that it is also fairly compact and visually striking. The poem and its illustration, a square printed woodcut depicting a man hanging, with his executioner and judge even larger in the foreground, are not hidden in a volume of other poetry and prose works, nor are they part of a larger everyday text like a newspaper, but is its own self-contained piece of printed ephemera that combines the religious, political, and literary. Under the illustration and title, the poem is divided into two columns, and at the bottom reads “Boston: Printed and Sold at the Heart and Crown in Cornhill,” which I found was a rather popular publisher in the mid to late 18th century. The printed script is easy to read, despite the typical typographical feature of “s” appearing more like a modern “f.” The condition of the page looks quite good for its age, with a minimal amount of smudging and discoloration.

The poem itself consists of 19 rhyming quatrains, and chronicles the specific crime of Richard Wilson—marking a home as a target in the daytime and robbing it at night—and more broadly details the social and religious implications of crime and sin. Against the backdrop of the Great Awakening and the lingering influences of Puritanism in New England, we receive lines like “No human pardon can he get, / by intercession made; / but flee he must unto the Pit, / and by no Man be stay’d” and “there is no Places sure, / where Workers of Iniquity / can hide themselves secure.” Though the speaker of the poem does say that hopefully Wilson may receive a pardon because he grieves his sins and bemoans a life lived immorally, it is more a public lesson for other thieves and sinners before it is too late, like it essentially is for Richard Wilson. This poem, referencing the Bible verse that the wage of sin is death, and that this death is a just reward for robbery, combines Calvinist doctrine and religious fervor with the power of the carceral state to enact punishment on its citizens.

Overall, I think that this text from the archives provides us with a lot of interesting questions about the connections between the state and religion in 18th century America, especially in thinking about the way that the public sphere is a space to display punishment not only for illegality, but immorality, and that poetry is utilized not for its aesthetic value, but as moral/behavioral education and correction. Compared to contemporary times as well, it seems that the American carceral state is often just as harsh in its judgment and punishment, but is able to act “depoliticized” due to the abstracting away from specific moral or religious principles, which seems often just as oppressive in different ways.

Visiting the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon

by Patrick J. Wohlscheid

Walking around East Bay and Broad Streets toward the Old Exchange Building and Provost Dungeon, slipping into Washington Square as a shaded detour, seems to exemplify the historical (and especially architectural) history that Charleston has cultivated for itself. The positioning of the Old Exchange Building, itself centered at the end of the long street, is an appropriate placement for a historical site that served as the center of a great deal of political, social, and cultural activity in the late-18th century—both for South Carolina and the eventual United States.

Though the Provost Dungeon might be the most exciting point of interest for visitors (who doesn’t want to visit a dungeon, one that held prisoners of the British during the American Revolution), I was most struck by the political importance of the second floor of the Exchange. Even before the American Revolution, the “Great Hall” of the Exchange was used as the site for electing delegates to the First Continental Congress in 1774, and the outside steps as a public arena for the Declaration of Independence to be read in 1776. During the early 1780s, the building was primarily used for martial purposes under the control of the English, but again entirely returned to its revolutionary political contexts in the later part of the decade, as in 1788 the US Constitution was ratified in the Great Hall. This space, which is now occupied by some antique furniture and public history banners, struck me primarily by how empty it seemed. In a way, the grand space almost parallels the way that these events and philosophical documents are portrayed in American cultural memory. Though historically situated, things like the Declaration and the Constitution are seen (and for some reasons, I think, rightly so) as documents positioned as universal, existing outside of time

However, I see the large copy of the Constitution sitting in the center of the room, which visitors can sign as if they are part of the ratification. I signed my name, small in the corner, already losing sight of it amidst the swell of other signatures. The material contributions to this document and its ratification in this Great Hall bring it out of the rhetorical vacuum, back into a specific historical moment which the Old Exchange Building particularly conveys. The tensions I think of in this particular space, between particular and universal, historical and timeless, are some of the tensions that I think literary study captures so well, too. The banners that discuss the role of women and enslaved peoples throughout the building also capture the specificity with which we should think about Charleston in the 18th-century. On the second floor, the Constitution and Declaration history is “flashier” or perhaps more interesting to many. But juxtaposed with it the discussions of the leaders who frequented the Exchange Building, many of them slave owners, and most all of them men, greatly complicate the grand narrative of the Great Hall. Writing this, I relate this particularly to our course discussions of Franklin and Jefferson, founding fathers with eccentric and interesting literary lives, but whose actions (and even a great deal of their writing) exemplifies the contradictions of 18th-century American life and literature.