Executing Democracy

Stephen John Hartnett is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado–Denver. He is the author of several books, including Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions ofAntebellum America, winner of the National Communication Association’s James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address.

• Contents Illustrations Preface: “What Follies and Monstrous Barbarities” Acknowledgments Chapter One. The Second Great Awakening and the “Grotesque Sublime” of Antebellum America Chapter Two. O’Sullivan and Cheever’s Death Penalty Debate, 1835–1842, and “The Highest Interests of Humanity” Chapter Three. O’Sullivan and Cheever’s Death Penalty Debate of 1843 and “The Great Merciless Machine of Modernity” Conclusion. Capital Punishment and the Dilemmas of Antebellum Modernity Appendix. The Liberator Attacks the Death Penalty, 1842–1843 Notes Bibliography Index

The historical relationship between democracy and the death penalty in America is vexed and bloody. Stephen John Hartnett faces it without blinking. In Executing Democracy, past meets present in a profound combination of learning, experience, eloquence, and passion.—Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor, University of Pittsburgh