Apush Dbq Research Paper

During the nineteenth century, public executions were frequently used as a form of punishment for crimes committed by the public. In the eighteenth century before the emergence of newspapers and when a small number of the population were literate, public executions served as a practical purpose of giving the people of a town the opportunity to see justice done and as a result, potentially be deterred from committing similar crimes or crime in general. Hanging people for minor crimes along with serious crimes, the Bloody Penal Code was at its most active between 1770 and 1830. According to Gatrell, between 1770 and 1830, approximately 35,000 men and women were given death sentences in England and around 7,000 people were executed on public scaffolds, viewed by thousands. Hanging was specific

In many counties in Britain, public executions were held on market days to ensure that a great number of the public could attend, and schools would organise trips to the executions as a moral lesson for pupils. Executions were often scheduled around noon to ensure that the locals would have time to make it to executions. The organisation of public executions triggered adverse comment long before end of public executions in the nineteenth century. Henry Fielding, in mid-eighteenth-century London, complained that hangings lacked dignity, ‘They were poorly staged, too much like carnival rather than solemn and frightening. The condemned became objects of admiration for their boldness in the face of death.’ McGowen then draws reference from the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1784, where a contributor claims that the problem with these public executions is that they did not incite fear in the public anymore perhaps due to their