CHAPTER VI.
THE NEW YORK TOMBS.

Dickens may fairly be said to have begun his sight-seeing in America by going to jail. He commenced with those in Boston, and wherever else he found a prison he had a look at it. The interest he took in penal reform, which rendered him familiar with nearly every gaol in England, did not desert him when he made his first voyage across the Atlantic. In the “American Notes,” among a number of minor and comparatively unimportant observations, most of which are, in fact, long out of date, and lost in the changed conditions of jail construction, discipline and government, there are two descriptions, which retain their interest. The first in order of occurrence in the book, relates to a prison as famous throughout America as Newgate is in Great Britain, and which, indeed, is the closest approach we have to the gloomy criminal cage of London. You may find it in a description of a walk about New York in Chapter 6:

“What is this dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama? A famous prison called the Tombs. Shall we go in?

“So. A long, narrow and lofty building, stove-heated as usual, with four galleries, one above the other, going round it, and communicating by stairs. Between the two sides of each gallery, and in its center, a bridge for the greater convenience of crossing. On each of these bridges sits a man, dozing or reading, or talking to an idle companion. On each tier are two opposite rows of small iron doors. They look like furnace doors, but are cold and black, as though the fires within had all gone out. Some two or three are open, and women with drooping heads bent down are talking to the inmates. The whole is lighted by a skylight, but it is fast closed; and from the roof there dangle, limp and drooping, two useless windsails.

“A man with keys appears to show us round. A good-looking fellow, and in his way civil and obliging.

“‘Are those black doors the cells?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Are they all full?’

“‘Well, they’re pretty nigh full, and that’s a fact and no two ways about it.’

“‘Those at the bottom are unwholesome, surely.’

163

“‘Why, we do only put colored people in ’em. That’s the truth.’

“‘When do the prisoners take exercise?’

“‘Well, they do without it pretty much.’

“‘Do they never walk in the yard?’

“‘Considerable seldom.’

“‘Sometimes, I suppose?’

“‘Well, it’s rare they do. They keep pretty bright without it.’

“‘But suppose a man were here for a twelve-month? I know this is only a prison for criminals who are charged with some grave offenses, while they are awaiting trial, or are under remand, but the law affords criminals many means of delay. What with motions for new trials, arrest of judgment and what not, a prisoner might be here for twelve months, I take it, might he not?’

“‘Well, I guess he might.’

“‘Do you mean to say that in all that time he would never come out at that little iron door for exercise?’

“‘He might walk some, perhaps—not much.’

“‘Will you open one of the doors?’

“‘All, if you like.’

“The fastenings jar and rattle, and one of the doors turns slowly on its hinges. Let us look in. A small, bare cell, into which the light enters through a high chink in the wall. There is a rude means of washing, a table, and a bedstead. Upon the latter sits a man of sixty, reading. 164 He looks up for a moment, gives an impatient, dogged shake, and fixes his eyes upon his book again. As we withdraw our heads the door closes on him, and is fastened as before. This man has murdered his wife and will probably be hanged.

“‘How long has he been here?’

“‘A month.’

“‘When will he be tried?’

“‘Next term.’

“‘When is that?’

“‘Next month.’

“‘In England, if a man is under sentence of death even, he has air and exercise at certain periods of the day.’

“‘Possible?’

“With what stupendous and untranslatable coolness he says this, and how loungingly he leads on to the woman’s side, making, as he goes, a kind of castanet of the key on the stair rail.

“Each cell-door on this side has a square aperture in it. Some of the women peep anxiously through it at the sound of footsteps; others shrink away in shame. For what offense can that lonely child, of ten or twelve years old, be shut up here? Oh, that boy? He is the son of a prisoner we saw just now; is a witness against his father, and is detained here for safe keeping until the trial, that’s all.

“But it is a dreadful place for the child to 165 pass the long days and nights in. This is rather hard treatment for a young witness, is it not? What says our conductor?

“‘Well, it ain’t a very rowdy life, and that’s a fact.’

“Again he clinks his metal castanet and leads us leisurely away. I have a question to ask him as we go.

“‘Pray, why do they call this place the Tombs?’

“‘Well, it’s the cant name.’

“‘I know it is. Why?’

“‘Some suicides happened here when it was first built. I expect it came about from that.’”

It did not “come about from that” by any means. The Tombs was a comparatively new prison when Dickens saw it first. It was erected under an authorization of the Common Council of the city of New York, issued in 1833. At that time, Mr. John L. Stevens, of the Hoboken family who still keep up seigneurial state on the bank of the Hudson, having recently returned from an extended tour through Asia and the Holy Land, issued an account of his travels, with many illustrations of the rare and curious things he had seen. Among these was a representation of an ancient Egyptian tomb, accompanied by a full and accurate description. The 166 majestic proportions and sombre beauty of this mortuary structure so impressed the committee of the Common Council who had the selection of plans for the new jail that they adopted it as their model, and the general appearance and construction of the building was made to conform as closely as the necessities of its use permitted to Stevens’s design. As it stands it is probably the finest specimen of Egyptian architecture of its order to be found outside of Egypt itself, and the filth, squalor and grimy ugliness that hem it in only serve to accentuate its architectural beauty. Its official title is the City Prison, but the one by which it is best known was derived from the character of the edifice in “Stevens’s Travels,” after which it was planned.

From an artistic point of view the selection of a site for the Tombs was singularly unfortunate. At the date of its erection its location was upon the upper outskirts of the city. Now the town has grown beyond it miles upon miles. For years it stood in the heart of the lowest and most dangerous criminal district. Even now its surroundings of tenement-houses, workshops, dirty streets harboring dirty shops of the 167 basest order, are anything but inviting to the sightseer. Through Leonard and Franklin streets, which bound its lower and upper ends, one catches eastward glimpses of Baxter street festooned with the sidewalk displays of the old clo’ shops, and westward sees the passing life of Broadway. Elm street in the rear and Centre street in front of it abound in sour-savored groggeries and the shabby hang-dog offices of the lower order of criminal lawyers who practice at the bar of the Tombs court. The streets swarm with the children of the tenements, which line them with towering piles of unclean brick and mortar; and the pedestrians who navigate them, and who hang about the outside of the prison, as if held there by a spell and only awaiting their turn to pass within its walls, are for the most part of that skulking, evil class which knows the interior of the jail quite as well as its outer barriers, and the ways which lead to its frowning gate. For many years the passenger traffic of the New York Central Railroad was embarked at a depot occupying the block above the Tombs. Travelers were here taken on board cars which were dragged by mules or horses up to Fourth avenue 168 and Twenty-sixth street, where the locomotive replaced the teams as a motor. As the town grew the railroad removed its station to the site of the present Madison Square Garden building, and converted the old depot into a freight-house, in and out of which lines of cars drawn by long tandems of mules clanked day and night the year round. Now the freight depot is gone, and an enormous granite structure, which accommodates the various criminal courts, rises on its site. Between this building and the Tombs an enclosed bridge for the passage of prisoners to and from court spans the street.

The Tombs itself was built in the basin of a little lake which was once one of the romantic spots of Manhattan Island, and a favorite resort of the angler and the pleasure seeker. The lake was known as the Collect Pond, a corruption of the Dutch title “Kalckhoek,” or Shell Point, from a beach of shells which existed on its margin. The Collect was a fresh-water pond, fed by natural springs, and having an outlet by small streams into both the North and East rivers. Thus the pond and its creeks actually cut Manhattan Island in half and made 169 two islands of it. There were pleasure houses on the hillocks around the Collect, and on an island, in its centre, the city powder house was erected. The course of time worked the usual changes upon it for the worse. Tanners set up their tan pits near it, the city garbage was dumped into it, and among the marshes to the eastward the criminal colony, since infamous as the Five Points, commenced to form itself. There was still water enough in it in 1796 for John Fitch to experiment in navigating the first steamboat America ever saw, but a few years later, to give employment to clamorous and starving labor, at a period of industrial and commercial stagnation, the city ordered the hills around it to be leveled and the pond filled up with the earth removed from them. In spite of the reduction of the ground to the westward, the site remained much lower than the grade of Broadway, and the Tombs roof is scarcely above the line of that thoroughfare. To support the ponderous mass of Maine granite, which constituted the prison, a forest of piles was sunk deep in the sodden soil. The work of construction occupied five years, so that the prison had been in use scarcely four years when 170 Dickens made his visit to it—and, while its outer walls remain substantially the same, its internal construction has been vastly augmented and improved. When he saw it the city watch-house occupied part of the building; and he makes a record of a night visit to “those black sties” where “men and women, against whom no crime is proved, lie all night in perfect darkness, surrounded by the noisome vapors which encircle that flagging lamp you light us with, and breathing this filthy and offensive stench.” The watch-house was on the Franklin street side of the jail, and was long kept up as a police station. Now it is used as a common room for the confinement of vagrants and drunkards picked up on the streets, pending their confinement to the penal institutions.

Of another old and hideous institution which one cannot disassociate with the Tombs, in spite of the abolition of it which has been decreed by law, Dickens wrote:

“The prison yard, in which he pauses now, has been the scene of terrible performances. Into this narrow, grave-like place men are brought out to die. The wretched creature stands beneath the gibbet on the ground; the rope is about his neck; and when the sign is given a 171 weight at its other end comes running down and swings him up into the air—a corpse. The law requires that there be present at this dismal spectacle the judge, the jury, and citizens to the amount of twenty-five. From the community it is hidden. To the dissolute and bad the thing remains a frightful mystery. Between the criminal and them the prison wall is interposed as a thick and gloomy veil. It is the curtain to his bed of death, his winding sheet and grave. From him it shuts out life and all the motives to unrepenting hardihood in that last hour, which its mere sight and presence is often all sufficient to sustain. There are no bold eyes to make him bold; no ruffians to uphold a ruffian’s name before. All beyond the pitiless stone wall is unknown space.”

At the time of Dickens’s visit (1842) London was still the scene of public hangings, and the privacy with which the executions in the Tombs were conducted furnished him with a text for one of his protests against the existing state of things at home. The Tombs hangings were private, as he stated, but they were not unattended by morbid interest on the part of the mob. On the morning of an execution, the obscene streets all about would swarm with obscene life. From their festering dens in the Five Points, and from the remoter haunts of 172 vice and crime which had grown up with the growth of the town, the social banditti came in a scowling, ribald and revolting legion. They camped on doorsteps before dawn, and all the groggeries drove a roaring trade. They beguiled the time with gloating reminiscences of their criminal lives, and watched the jail roof for a signal that the ghastly work within was done. Curiously enough, nature had provided them with a sign as certain as the running up of the black flag upon the wall of Newgate. A great number of pigeons had found lodgment in the Tombs yard, nesting in cotes which had been put up for them along the inner jail walls and in the eaves of the buildings themselves. Long immunity from human aggressions had rendered them fearless, and when the audience gathered for an execution, under the gray shadow of the jail walls, the pigeons were equally certain to assemble, cooing and pluming themselves in the sunlight above. When, at the fatal moment, the heavy thud of the executioner’s axe denoted the severing of the cord which supported the counterweights and sent the victim whirling to his death, the birds, startled by the sound, would rise upward in 173 flurried flight, circle about a couple of times and settle at their perches again. It was by this confused and frightened movement of the pigeons above the walls that the waiting rabble knew the unseen tragedy of the law was done.

A moment later the race of reporters and messenger boys from the prison gate to the newspaper offices close by would begin, and in half an hour all the ghastly details of the event, described with such circumstantiality and such sensational exaggeration as the horror-hungry public was expected to crave for, would be hawked at every street corner and carried by swift runners and overdriven wagons to the most distant quarters of the town. To such extreme was this practice stretched that, on the occasions of later executions in the Tombs, reporters would actually be sent to spend the night in prison, and to record the last hours of a worthless brute whose just doom should have been a swift death and complete oblivion. Evil as the influence of a public hanging may have been, it may be doubted if it was any worse than the practice of the press in investing the attendant circumstances of a vile and dangerous 174 wretch’s end with the mock heroism of cheap bravado and the clap-trap sentiment of literary fustian. The law providing for the execution of criminals by electricity, and in secret, has performed one public service, at least, in doing away with these outdoor gatherings at the Tombs on hanging day.

CHAPTER VII.
PHILADELPHIA’S BASTILE.

In Philadelphia Dickens made a special request for permission to visit the great prison of the State, remarking that it and the Falls of Niagara were the two objects he most wished to see in America. Exceptional facilities were afforded him to gratify his desire, and make his investigation as thorough as he chose. Nothing was concealed from him, and his account and opinion of the Eastern State Penitentiary (“American Notes,” Chapter 7) created a vast deal of comment in their day. He put himself on record as a violent opponent of the solitary system, and while he intended to make this chapter the strongest, it was really one of the weakest in the book. He had assailed the outrages of the debtors’ prisons of London manfully. Over the Philadelphia system he became almost hysterical. In the former he had actual evils and wrongs and outrages to combat. In the latter his grievance 178 was largely founded on sentimentality and purely personal feeling. He describes his visit:

“In the outskirts stands a great prison called the Eastern Penitentiary, conducted on a plan peculiar to the State of Pennsylvania. The system here is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong.

“I was accompanied to this prison by two gentlemen officially connected with its management, and passed the day in going from cell to cell and talking with the inmates. Every facility was afforded me that the utmost courtesy could suggest. Nothing was concealed or hidden from my view, and every piece of information that I sought was openly and frankly given. The perfect order of the building cannot be praised too highly, and of the excellent motives of all who are immediately concerned in the administration of the system there can be no kind of question.

“Between the body of the prison and the outer wall there is a spacious garden. Entering it by a wicket in the massive gate, we pursued the path before us to its other termination, and passed into a large chamber, from which seven long passages radiate. On either side of each is a long, long row of low cell-doors with a certain number over every one. Above 179 a gallery of cells like those below, except that they have no narrow yard attached (as those in the ground tier have), and are somewhat smaller. The possession of two of these is supposed to compensate for the absence of so much air and exercise as can be had in the dull strip attached to each of the others, in an hour’s time every day; and, therefore, every prisoner in this upper story has two cells, adjoining and communicating with each other.

“Standing at the central point and looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails is awful. Occasionally there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle or shoemaker’s last, but it is stilled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth until his whole term of imprisonment has expired. He never hears of wife or children, home or friends; the life or death of any single creature. He sees the prison officers, but, with that exception, he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive, to be dug out in the slow rounds of years, and, in the meantime, dead to everything 180 but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.

“His name, and crime, and term of suffering are unknown, even to the officer who delivers him his daily food. There is a number over his cell-door, and in a book, of which the governor of the prison has one copy and the moral instructor another, this is the index to his history. Beyond these pages the prison has no record of his existence; and though he live to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the building it is situated; what kind of men there are about him; whether in the long winter nights there are living people near, or he is in some lonely corner of the great gaol, with walls and passages, and iron doors between him and the nearest sharer in its solitary horrors.

“Every cell has double doors—the outer one of sturdy oak, the other of grated iron, wherein there is a trap through which his food is handed. He has a bible and a slate and pencil, and, under certain restrictions, has sometimes other books, provided for the purpose, and pen and ink and paper. His razor, plate and can, and basin hang upon the wall, or shine upon the little shelf. Fresh water is laid on in every cell, and he can draw it at his pleasure. During the day his bedstead turns up against the wall and leaves more space for him to work in. His 181 loom, or bench, or wheel is there, and there he labors, sleeps and wakes and counts the seasons as they change, and grows old.”

Over the inmates of this Philadelphia gaol Dickens exuded a great deal of sympathy and sentiment. He invested each man he wrote about with a pathos that made good reading at any rate, and no doubt sincerely believed all that he wrote. To a man of a convivial and companionable nature like himself the idea of a life of solitude was naturally horrible. To a man fond of long walks among other men the enforced absence of exercise as well as of companionship was naturally dreadful. To Charles Dickens, in short, a term of imprisonment in the Eastern Penitentiary would unquestionably have been the cruelest torture. He would, in all likelihood, have worn his life out speedily here, like a wild bird in a cage, or have laid violent hands upon himself, or have become a madman. To the felons whom he visited, men for the most part of blunt sensibilities and brutal natures, he credited the same qualities as belonged to his own refined and sensitive composition, and he put himself in their place and spoke for them from his own standpoint. How 182 far he was led astray by this was shown by the case of the character long known as “Dickens’s Dutchman.” Of this fellow he wrote:

“In another cell there was a German, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for larceny, two of which had just expired. With colors procured in the same manner (extracted from dyed yarn given him to weave) he had painted every inch of the walls and ceiling quite beautifully. He had laid out the few feet of ground behind him with exquisite neatness, and had made a little bed in the centre, that looked, by the bye, like a grave. The taste and ingenuity he had displayed in everything was most extraordinary, and yet a more dejected, heartbroken, wretched creature it would be difficult to imagine. I never saw such a picture of forlorn affliction and distress of mind. My heart bled for him, and when the tears ran down his cheeks, and he took one of the visitors aside to ask, with his trembling hands nervously clutching at his coat to detain him, whether there was no hope of his dismal sentence being commuted, the spectacle was really too painful to witness. I never saw or heard any kind of misery that impressed me more than the wretchedness of this man.”

This was the Dickensesque of it, and it gave its unfortunate subject an international notoriety. Now mark the plain, unvarnished facts.

The name of “Dickens’s Dutchman” was Charles Langheimer. He was sentenced to the Eastern Penitentiary for the first time on May 15, 1840, and it was while he was serving this term that Dickens saw him. On June 25, 1852, he came back on a year’s sentence, and on Feb. 24, 1855, he was a third time convicted, for two years on this occasion. On April 4, 1861, he came again for a year, on March 12, 1872, he was returned for two years, on Sept. 9, 1875, and on April 4, 1877, he began two terms of a year each. On Sept. 10, 1879, he received a three years’ term, and he was no sooner through with this than he was once more convicted and sent up for a year, in 1882. In the intervals of the sixteen years he spent in this one prison, since his first conviction, he had served five terms in other prisons, three in the County Jail, of Philadelphia, one in the Baltimore Penitentiary, and one in New York. In plain English, the man was a confirmed pauper and thief. He lived by mendicancy, and from time to time he would commit some larceny, for which offense all his sentences were imposed on him, merely in order to be sent to jail to be cared for—just as he might have gone on 184 a vacation from his regular and miserable life upon the chance of charity.

In view of Dickens’s positive and unqualified expression of sentiment in regard to him, the most curious fact of his life remains to be noted. This is that, fourteen years after Dickens’s own death, he returned voluntarily to the penitentiary, where he had ended a year’s term only a few months before, and begged to be taken in. This place, so dreadful to the impressionable novelist, was the only approach to home the poor wretch knew. He was in a deplorable condition, was nearly eighty years of age, and had a horror of the almshouse. The inspectors consented that he should have his wish, and he was cared for for a month, until his death, which occurred on March 14, 1884. It is interesting to know that Dickens died at the age of fifty-eight years. This “picture of forlorn affliction and distress of mind,” this “dejected, heartbroken, wretched creature,” who was born eight years before Dickens, survived him nearly twice that period, and outlived him, in the mere number of his years, by twenty-two. It may be remembered, in connection with the Fleet Prison episode of “Pickwick,” 185 that Sam Weller adverts to the almost identical case of an old prisoner, to whom the jail had become such a home that the fear of being locked out of it eventually deterred him from taking the sly tastes of liberty which the turnkeys were willing to allow him.

The Eastern State Penitentiary is, in this day, admitted to be one of the model penal institutions of the world. When built it was in the northern suburb, but it is now in the heart of Philadelphia. It occupies an entire block, comprising ten or twelve acres, and its site was originally known as Cherry Hill, a name which is often locally applied to the jail itself. The ground is elevated, and from the gateway tower a fine panorama of the vast city, spreading about for miles, may be obtained. All that is visible externally is a massive granite wall, some thirty-five feet high, slightly relieved or buttressed with towers at the angles and on the front. The enclosure is square, and the entrance, in the centre of the front wall, is by a lofty portal, defended by a heavy outer gate, in which there is a wicket, and an inner gate, and dominated by a tower taller than the others. Within the walls the ranges of cells radiate 186 from an octagonal central building, which is crowned with an observatory. To simplify the description it may be said that this central building forms the hub from which branch branch forth the spokes of this enormous wheel. A system of lighting the entire grounds by night is provided in a lantern of special ingenious construction, in the tower below the observatory or lookout. There are some detached buildings on the grounds, used for mechanical and culinary purposes. The living apartments of the warden and his family, offices, etc., are in the front building. The outer and inner gates of the prison are never opened at the same time. Even a visitor or an official becomes in a manner a prisoner when he leaves the street.

Dickens’s general description of the prison is good enough, but some of his statements are more picturesque than precise. Prisoners are not shut off from intercourse by letter, or even personally, with their families. They do see various persons connected with the prison, although they cannot see other prisoners. Even this, which Dickens thought so cruel, and the concealment of their faces when they are 187 brought in to the jail, is a precaution born of benevolence and mercy. The idea is that after a man has served a term at Cherry Hill and been discharged he may go where he will, and if he wishes to live an honest life no man can point him out as an ex-convict. Except in the private record of the prison, known only and accessible only to a few responsible persons, John Jimpson never existed in the Eastern State Penitentiary. The keepers, the doctor, the jail attendants only knew him as No. 99. The librarian never issued books to John Jimpson, but to No. 99. The nurses in the infirmary never attended him when he was sick, but cared for No. 99. No one but the warden knew whether the letters sent to him by his wife or family or friends were meant for No. 99 or No. 199. As far as the stigma of his crime and its punishment can be effaced it is effaced. He loses his social identity when he enters the prison, and puts it on when he comes out, like a new suit of clothes.

It is a rule of the prison that each convict, when he enters, shall be taught a useful trade, if he has not one already. He then has a daily task set, and all that he can or cares to produce 188 above this task is credited to him, and the money is paid to him when he departs. The illiterate convicts are taught to read and write. Those who display intelligence are encouraged to cultivate it. Convicts of superior education—such, for instance, as can produce literary work or paint pictures—are permitted the means to do so. The entire system of the prison is reformatory as well as punitive; the idea is not merely to cage a social beast, but to tame him and train him, so that he may be of use to the world when he has served his term of isolation.

The idea of separate confinement—the Philadelphia Idea, as it has been called—originated nearly a century ago. In an admirable sketch of the origin and history of the Eastern District Penitentiary, compiled by Mr. Richard Vaux, president of the board of Inspectors, the history of Pennsylvania’s system of prison discipline and management is given in brief but interesting style. In 1776 the common jail of Philadelphia was as horrible a den as the worst of London jails at its worst. An attempt was made by Richard Wistar, one of the famous family of that name, to reform it, but in 1777 189 the British army occupied the city and the good work was, perforce, suspended. In 1787 it was taken up again, and the Philadelphia Prison Society was formed. The first president of the society was Bishop William White, the first Protestant Episcopal Archbishop of Pennsylvania, and he held the office for forty years. The society’s first work was to have the chain gangs, employed at cleaning the streets and repairing the roads, abolished. The next was to secure a separation of the sexes in the common jail. Then the separation of actual criminals and of persons merely accused but not yet found guilty of crime demanded attention. So, by degrees, the idea of separate confinement took shape. In 1790 a law was passed by which this principle was put to the test, and finally, in 1821, the Legislature authorized the construction of the State Penitentiary for the Eastern district of Pennsylvania.

At this date the site of the present Penitentiary was a farm, remarkable for its grove of fine cherry trees. It belonged to the Warner family. The farm-house was a cheery old colonial mansion, and it is worth noting that when the Warners sold the land they reserved the 190 right to remove the mantels and fireplaces from the house. The place was purchased in 1821. The plans of several competing architects were submitted to the board appointed by the Legislature, and that of John Haviland was selected. The cornerstone of the Penitentiary was laid in 1823, and it was opened for the reception of convicts in 1829. Up to that time about $340,000 had been expended on it, but since then the necessary enlargements and improvements have brought its cost up to probably $1,000,000 or more. If Dickens could revisit it in the flesh to-day he would find it a much more extensive establishment than the one he criticised so severely and unjustly; and his confidence in himself would perhaps be shaken when he read the record of his woebegone “Dutchman.”