From Exhortations to Exonerations

The recent republication by the University of Massachusetts Press of Daniel A. Cohen’s ground-breaking Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace (originally appearing in 1993 under the imprint of Oxford University Press) will prove a welcome event not only among early Americanists interested in the subject of crime fiction, but among scholars of crime and detective fiction everywhere. For more than a decade, this book has helped both to provoke and to shape a sizable body of work on the topic of the early American culture of criminality and violent death (a topic largely terra inccognita before its publication), and has stood the test of time with few if any scratches on its escutcheon.

Cohen’s book traces, patiently and with painstaking but fascinating thoroughness, antebellum New England’s criminal sensation fiction from its roots in the gallows sermons of Cotton Mather and his Puritan colleagues at the end of the seventeenth century to its first mass-cultural efflorescence in the early nineteenth century. This evolution passed through four principal stages marked by a »succession of genres« (p. 3) rising to dominance in an increasingly secular marketplace for crime literature.

In the first stage, from 1674 to roughly 1730, the gallows or execution sermons delivered in church pulpits the day before public hangings and published immediately thereafter constituted the only recognizable crime genre among the colonies of northeastern America. While entertainment was hardly the point for their authors, the market for gallows sermons reflected less pious tastes among their consumers. The last two decades or so of this period witnessed the ›transplanting‹ of secular crime narratives – conversion narratives, execution accounts, trial reports, newspaper stories, and crime ballads – from British shores to the burgeoning secular presses of Boston, Providence, and other urban centers. This borrowing from British models mirrored a larger, contemporaneous movement among the colonies toward cultural alignment with the Mother Country after the early decades of religious dissent.

The first of these simultaneously transplanted genres to challenge, in any serious way, the popularity of the execution sermon was the execution broadside, both in verse ballads and in prose form as the putative ›dying speech‹ of the condemned. The second stage of Cohen’s evolutionary schema, beginning in the 1730s, is marked by the rise to dominance of this Newgate Calendar off-shoot and its gradual ›drift‹ into the form that came to dominate the New England crime narrative’s third stage in the years immediately after the American Revolution.

This period saw the rapid spread of a new form of criminal autobiography depicting culprits from outside the local community of targeted readers, as well as a separate and increasingly self-sufficient, self-justifying, and relatively well-organized regional criminal underworld. During this third stage Cohen also notes the appearance of an explicit antinomianism directly targeting the kind of religious authority that provided the original execution sermons and conversion narratives with their moral rationale. This »literature of social insurgency« (p. 115) was also marked by a »gradual loosening of the link between crime literature and social reality« (p. 25) as crime pamphlets came to assume less ephemeral book-form (both an incitement and a response to the establishment of a stable commercial readership) and the events in them began to range further and further beyond the circle of well-known local events.

Cohen’s final stage begins approximately in 1800, when »a strikingly new configuration of crime literature emerged in New England« (p. 26) comprising published trial reports, almost daily newspaper coverage of sensational crimes and trials, and widespread incorporation by the literature of crime of the signal devices and themes of popular sentimental and romantic fiction. The spread of this style of writing, which Cohen dubs »Legal Romanticism«, was accompanied by an accelerating literacy rate among the working class population and, after 1830, the vigorous growth of the cheap penny press. It was also saturated with themes of sexual deviance and violence.

These dry bones of Cohen’s argument do not do justice to its intricate historiographical musculature, nor to the concrete details of its gradual incarnation chapter by chapter, and even page by page. Taking on the task of illuminating the long dark shadow of popular literary history cast by David Reynolds’s notorious upending of high cultural versions of America’s mid-century achievements in Beneath the American Renaissance (1988), Pillars of Salt represents the application of a thoroughly informed historical imagination in pursuit of a complex analysis of the compounded and interacting forces – theological, political, technological, cultural, and commercial – that contributed to the triumph of popular crime fiction in antebellum America. If it is a bit light on theory, the book more than compensates with its eye for the fine grain of history. The relative size of typeset in individual words on a title page, the recurrence of generic woodcuts to illustrate disparate executions, the degree of wear and tear on a rare criminal autobiography, all contribute to the argument.

Perhaps the most compelling feature of Cohen’s book consists of his synopses and sociological analyses of particular case histories, spiritual biographies, and sentimental crime narratives. Enlivened by the author’s adroit close readings and comprehensive awareness of their connections to revolutions in printing technology, religious practice, and political culture in the century and half extending from New England’s colonial beginnings to its antebellum apogee as the ›Athens of America‹; these detailed examinations of specimen texts make fascinating reading. Cohen has structured each of the four major divisions of his book around a handful of pivotal cases epitomizing the representational issues at play during the developmental stage under consideration. They range from the hanging of a man who murdered another with a cooking spit to one of the most sensational American trials of the early nineteenth century, in which a wealthy playboy adulterer was tried for slitting the throat of his Boston mistress and trying to destroy the evidence by setting her room afire.

The adulterer, Albert J. Tirrell, was acquitted, thanks to the oratorical flamboyance and ›mesmeric‹ courtroom presence of his defense lawyer, Rufus Choate, who did not hesitate to employ every weapon in the rhetorical arsenal of contemporary sentimental and romantic fiction in order to gain his client’s acquittal. The chapter devoted to the Tirrell trial, entitled »The Prostitute and the Somnambulist«, is alone worth the price of Cohen’s book, demonstrating across the full range of historiographical research fields and analysis, from the interpretation of specific material clues to the deep cultural logic of the popular pseudo-sciences of the day, a mastery of sources and understanding of sociological dynamics that remains as fresh and persuasive as when Pillars of Salt first appeared between covers fourteen years ago.

With its republication, students and scholars of the history of crime fiction have been given a renewed opportunity to get acquainted with Cohen’s seminal book, and his book has gained an opportunity to resume its transformative impact on a new generation of students and scholars. Kudos to the University of Massachusetts Press, and hats off, once again, to Daniel A. Cohen.