“Are we supposed to admire or condemn Captain Vere for his decision to sentence Billy Budd to death by public hanging?” (337).
Billy Budd “dramatizes each of the crucial arguments and concepts of that movement. And it brings into vivid focus the key issues of the contemporaneous debate” (338):
1. Which offences?
2. Does it deter or encourage?
3. Effect of public executions?
4. Hanging civilized?
5. Judicial murder?
6. Power of the state?
7. Ritual sacrifice?
8. Class oppression?
9. Culture of militarism?
“The time is 1797, the king is George III, and the code to which Vere refers was known in the nineteenth century as the “Bloody Code”” (338).
“during the reign of George III . . . sixty offences were appended to the death-penalty statutes” (339).
“Articles favouring capital punishment published during the late 1880s argued that the death penalty should certainly “be restricted to murder committed with malice prepense, by a sane person, in resisting arrest, or in the commission of another felony”” (339).
“In the midst of the American Revolution against George III’s imperial regime there were some attempts to abolish capital punishment for all crimes except murder and treason” (339).
“in 1794, three years before the action of Billy Budd . . . the state of Pennsylvania became the first to codify into law the innovative concept of “degrees” of murder. Capital punishment was restricted to murder in the “first degree,” defined as “wilful, deliberate and premeditated killing”” (340).
“In the ensuing decades, state after state in the North and West followed the lead of Pennsylvania and New York in reducing capital offences” (340).
“In the slave South, however, George III’s Bloody Code had its distinctively American counterpart in the myriad of offences defined as capital if committed by slaves. Capital punishment as an instrument of class oppression has never been demonstrated more blatantly” (340).
“Virginia had seventy-one crimes that were capital offences for slaves but not for whites” (341).
“In 1848, Virginia passed a new statute requiring the death penalty for blacks for any offence that was punishable by three or more years imprisonment if committed by whites” (341).
“From the mid-1850s through the Civil War, the movement to abolish the death penalty was overwhelmed by the movement against slavery. . . . To maximize shock value, they often focused on what many regarded as the most barbaric aspects of capital punishment as practiced: public execution and hanging” (341).
“From the late 1860s through the end of the century, hanging became the focal point of abolitionist and reformist arguments, and New York State became the pivotal battleground” (342).
“on 6 August 1890, William Kemmler became the first victim of the modern, civilized form of execution by electricity” (345).
“The witnesses, “men eminent in science and medicine,” were so physically “nauseated” by the gory spectacle that “they almost unanimously say that this single experiment warrants the prompt repeal of the law.” The article ended by noting that the witness all acted “as though they felt that they had taken part in a scene that would be told to the world as a public shame, as a legal crime” (345).
“It was in this context that Melville composed Billy Budd, which he began in 1886 and concluded in in April 1891, eight months after Kemmler’s execution” (345-46).
“the story is carefully crafted to keep the means of execution from being a significant issue” (346).
“When he is hanged, Billy evinces none of the hideous agonies familiar to the crowds at public hangings and described with sickening detail in countless nineteenth-century essays and books. There is not even the almost invariable muscular spasm or involuntary ejaculation” (346).
“Billy’s death by hanging clearly transcends not only the surgeon’s scientific understanding but also the debate about the modalities of capital punishment swirling around the composition of the story” (346).
“the terms of the debate about the fundamental issue of capital punishment itself . . . . structures the story” (346).
Two killings: Billy, involuntary. Vere, meditated. “Which of these two acts constitutes murder?’ (347).
“The fact that hangings were conducted by the state under cover of law did not, to opponents of the death penalty, absolve them from being murders. . . . these killings were “legal murders,” “legal killing,” and “murder by law”” (347).
One commentary reads: “all the extenuating circumstances shall be taken into consideration” (347).
“By arguing, especially in such legalistic phraseology, that his court is not to consider extenuating circumstances or motive, Vere is underlining for readers in 1891 the fundamental injustice of the proceedings” (348).
“To late nineteenth-century readers, this would serve as a conspicuous reminder of the horrors of Georgian justice from which nine decades of reform had liberated both the United States and Britain” (348).
Billy must hang, publicly. “mandatory death penalties” were “one of the most universally condemned aspects of the code under which [Vere] operates” AND “This appeal is based solely on the doctrine of deterrence” (349).
“defenders of capital punishment, like Vere, tended more and more to abandon the argument that it was just, fair, appropriate, ordained by God, et cetera, and more and more to rely on belief in its value as a deterrent to crime” (349).
“They appealed not so much to evidence as to the fear of violent crime widespread among the privileged and affluent classes, a fear which they of course encouraged” (349).
“because “we” [the officers] are afraid of “the people” [the crew], “we” have to hang Budd because otherwise “they” would thing “we” are afraid of “them” (351).
From an 1890 article: “It is the old familiar scene of the State doing deeds of violence and blood in the name of law and order, and with the sanction and concurrence of religion” (351).
“Billy Budd strips away the illusions of justice and deterrence to reveal the essence of capital punishment: human sacrifice, a ritual of power in which the state and the ruling class demonstrate, sanctify, and celebrate their ultimate power—the power of life and death—over the classes they rule” (352).
New York Assemblyman Hitt, 1890: “at present there are only two classes of the community who yet favour capital punishment and these are the clergymen and prosecuting attorneys” (352).
“Readers in 1851 would be far more likely to wonder . . . whether Vere is insane” (353).
“As he was writing Billy Budd, the rising tide of imperialism, with its corollary of militarism, was threatening the basic republican and democratic values expressed so passionately in White-Jacket” (354).
Melville “saw that the essence of capital punishment is the state’s power over life and death, a power boundlessly expanded in war” (354).