The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler

The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler is a haunting book that will engage the reader at every level--analytical, historical, and above all emotional. With exceptional insight and rare grace, the Browns describe an early republic at least as compelling and perhaps more real than the glamour of the Founding Fathers. -- Jon Butler, author of Becoming America
In small places, a sordid crime, and a shattered family, Irene and Richard Brown find the pieces to craft a haunting and powerful tale that illuminates the dark corners of the early republic. Thoroughly researched and crisply narrated, The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler insightfully explores the interplay of elite journalists, lawyers, judges, and politicians with a hardscrabble family violently wrenched into a tragic melodrama of American crime and punishment. -- Alan Taylor, University of California, Davis
The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler is an absolute gem, through which elemental shafts of human experience are powerfully refracted. Like most microhistories, it spotlights a remarkable story. But, more than most, it touches themes and trends of the widest significance: race, class, and gender; justice and vengeance; love and hate; good and evil. And, perhaps more than any, it discloses the mysterious blend of sharing and difference that underlies all our relations to the past. -- John Demos, Yale University
Irene and Richard Brown tell their chilling story with clarity, drama, and compassion. Melding family history with social and political history, they show how small decisions by ordinary people can reshape public debate, and they show the instability as well as the power of that old triad race, class, and gender. -- Laurel Ulrich, author of A Midwife's Tale
Through the case of Ephraim Wheeler, Irene and Richard Brown give us new entry into the worlds of early nineteenth-century New England: of the laborer Ephraim and his wife, Hannah, a woman of color; of the judges who condemned him for raping his daughter; of the governor of Massachusetts, who refused to pardon him. The Browns' deep digging and careful reconstruction show us family struggles among the poor, sexual disorder, the power of patriarchy, quarrels about the death penalty, and much more. A stunning achievement in family history and the history of law--and a marvelous read. -- Natalie Zemon Davis, author of The Return of Martin Guerre(/otherhuptitle>
History's grand narratives--the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Gold Rush--are always crowd pleasers, but microhistory, on the scale of everyday persons and singular events, draws readers seeking a more intimate encounter. The case unfolded here, of a man executed for raping his daughter, offers such an experience, bringing readers face to face with a family torn by domestic violence and civic authorities struggling with questions of justice. Throughout the book, Brown and Brown...balance a historical perspective on rural Massachusetts in the early 1800s with a sympathetic portrait of each character...Wheeler was hanged two centuries ago, yet the authors effectively demonstrate that there were never uncomplicated solutions to the perennial problems of family violence and criminal justice. * Publishers Weekly *
In a forceful reminder of just how long Americans have debated the morality of capital punishment, two gifted historians revisit a post-Revolutionary Massachusetts community struggling to adjudicate the ugly case of a dissolute sailor and farmhand--one Ephraim Wheeler--accused of raping his daughter. Careful scrutiny of the evidence leaves little doubt about Wheeler's guilt. Still, a community anxious to distance itself from the bloody rigor of contemporary British jurisprudence was troubled about the justice of ending an almost 30-year hiatus of executions for rape...[Brown and Brown] illuminate sufficient humanity to account for the petitions from 103 local residents for clemency. But the governor refused to intervene. And so the taut narrative of Wheeler's last moments--the sudden release of the supporting plank, the jerk of the rope, the frantic death struggle of the suspended man--leaves modern readers wrestling with the same questions that troubled nineteenth-century witnesses of the harrowing event. -- Bryce Christensen * Booklist *
There were hundreds of people filling the church, the Browns write, as Wheeler, his wrists and ankles in chains, "clanked his way forward to the seat before the pulpit on the rough pine coffin he was scheduled to occupy." It is such details--all evoking the hill-country life of early 19th-century Berkshire County--that give The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler color and vibrancy...From contemporary reports, the Browns...have assembled a richly nuanced account...and place the trial in its social and political context. -- Michael Kenney * Boston Globe *
The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler is at once a stark human drama superbly well told and a work of exceptional scholarship. The setting is that of Ethan Frome, and in all the book casts something of the same haunting spell, except that here the story is true in every detail. My admiration for the skillful and consistently fair-minded way Irene and Richard Brown have rendered the story could not be greater. -- David McCullough, author of John Adams
As the Browns sensitively piece together this meticulously researched history, we see how the marginal life stories of the Wheelers clashed with the mainstream ambitions of government officials, lawyers and clergymen. The dynamic interplay of personalities, politics and principles determined not only what happened but also the severity of the punishment. This is a very insightful book. -- Lester P. Lee, Jr. * Times Literary Supplement *
The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler provides a vibrant recreation of the life and death of one convicted felon in an early nineteenth-century New England town. Irene and Richard Brown's thoroughly readable and engaging microhistory is its own case study for the success of the genre… The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler provides significant insights into how capital punishment cases were adjucated and how communities and families weighed in on the ultimate sentencing of convicted felons. Scholars and student of legal history will benefit greatly from the book's realistic re-enactment of the roles played by lawyers, judges, and other legal and community officials in such capital cases…This book is a readable and informative model of how a single incident can be used to illuminate a much broader slice of American life and history. -- Sharon Block * Journal of Social History *
The Browns provide a rich analysis of the various elements of Wheeler's story, and in the telling they provide a micro-history in which issues of gender, race and class, family violence and poverty, theories of punishment, and death penalty politics intersect...The authors even-handedly present the competing perspectives on what "really" happened in 1805 and 1806, from the viewpoints of Wheeler's wife and daughter, the prosecutor and the court, the community and the press, and Ephraim Wheeler himself. From all of the perspectives, it is clear there can be no single "true" version of these events. This uncertainty provides the book with the air of a mystery in the vein of The Return of Martin Guerre, the acknowledged inspiration behind the Brown's work...The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler is a wonderful read, generally persuasive in its interpretations, and likely to become a benchmark book against which other micro-histories of the early republic will be judged. It is also an eloquent reminder of what remains to be done to purge the American judicial system of the vagaries, arbitrariness, and rank injustices associated with the death penalty. Only abolition will do. -- James E. Crimmins * Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews Online *