The Auburn Prison System & the Case of William Freeman

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too.

Kelly  0:38  
Around 12,000 years ago, the last of the glaciers receded from what is now New York State, leaving behind 11 glacial troughs, which became the Finger Lakes. For 1000s of years, the region was home to the Haudenosaunee people, whom the French called the Iroquois Confederation. In the summer of 1779, under the orders of General George Washington, Major General John Sullivan, and Brigadier General James Clinton, led a scorched earth campaign against the Haudenosaunee, who had sided with the British, destroying at least 40 villages and driving over 5000 Iroquois refugees to seek protection at the British Fort Niagara. One of the American soldiers, John Hardenbergh, while torching Haudenosaunee towns, noted a site he thought would be excellent for a future mill, at the northern bank of the Owasco Lake. And in spring, 1793, he moved there, having obtained military tract 47 as a bounty for his war service. In 1805, Hardenbergh's Corners became the county seat and took a new designation, Auburn, named after the village described in Oliver Goldsmith's 1770 poem, "The Deserted Village," which opens, "Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain, where health and plenty cheared the labouring swain, where smiling spring its earliest visit paid, and parting summer's, lingering blooms delayed." Presumably though, the town meant to avoid the fate of the abandoned Auburn of the poem, whose "charms are fled," "where, "desolation saddens all thy green." In November of 1797, New York State had opened its first prison, Newgate, in New York City. By 1816, Newgate was overcrowded, and the state was looking for the right spot for a second state prison. State Assemblyman John Beach, who owned many businesses in Auburn, convinced the state that he and his partners should build the prison, and they should do so in Auburn, using the lucrative contract to construct the prison on the same fast flowing river that had drawn Hardenbergh to Auburn in the first place, with the goal of using water power to run machinery in factories that would be housed inside the prison. Auburn Prison opened in 1817, and quickly brought Beach and his friends the profits they desired. In neighboring Pennsylvania, Quaker reformers had developed a method of incarcerating prisoners that became known as the Pennsylvania System, the goal of which was to help prisoners repent and reform. Their method of achieving this goal was to separate prisoners into isolated solitary cells. The prisoners worked in their cells, manufacturing small goods like shoes. The goal of the work wasn't profit, but rather the spiritual transformation of the prisoners. Captain Elam Linz, the first warden at Auburn, had other ideas. Linz viewed the goal of reforming prisoners as hopeless. Instead of trying to rehabilitate the incarcerated, Linz focused on what he and the prison could gain from the prisoners, contracting out the work of the incarcerated to private companies. The prisoners themselves received no benefit from the labor, with all of the profits going to the prison and to Linz. Without wages to keep the prisoners working, Linz relied on violence and psychological torture, dressing prisoners in the now iconic striped uniform, and cutting off communication with their families. To keep the prisoners from rising up in solidarity, Linz forbade them from speaking and locked them in solitary cells at night, not to encourage reformation, but to force compliance. This became known as the Auburn System, silent labor for the profits of the prison during the day, solitary confinement at night, and the ever present threat of violence. In 1840, a man named William Freeman entered Auburn Prison. Freeman was born in 1824, to the most prominent Black family in town. His grandparents were Henry and Kate Freeman, who had been in Auburn from the beginning, when they were enslaved by John Hardenberg, before New York state began the process of gradual emancipation in 1799. By 1824, most of the 115 African American residents of Auburn, including William Freeman, lived in the neighborhood of New Guinea. Freeman, who had been hired out to white employers since he was six years old, started to get in trouble for minor indiscretions. In 1840, though, he was accused of stealing a horse, a grand larceny that came with a sentence of prison time. Although Freeman swore he was innocent, he was, at not quite 16 years old, convicted and sentenced to five years in the Auburn Prison. Freeman's experience in the prison was brutal. When he protested his treatment, a guard beat him so badly that he lost most of his hearing, never to regain it. When Freeman was finally released in September, 1845, he was given four coins, equaling a total of $2. The money was not pay for his prison labor, but rather meant to get him home so he wouldn't linger around the prison. Freeman thought though, that the paltry sum was his payment for five years hard labor, and he demanded more, saying, "I have been in prison five years unjustly and ain't going to settle so." For months, Freeman tried to seek back pay, what he called damages, for his false imprisonment and unpaid labor. But no one would listen. Finally giving up on obtaining back pay, Freeman opted for payback. On March 12, 1846, he entered the home of a white family in town, the Van Nests, and committed a horrific quadruple homicide, before fleeing. When Freeman was arrested and questioned, his answer to why he had committed the crime was that he, "had been five years in prison and somebody must pay for it." When asked why the Van Nests, who had nothing to do with his imprisonment, Freeman replied, "Why did they put me in state prison for nothing?" Freeman was tried and sentenced to hang, but while awaiting retrial, he died in jail of tuberculosis, at just 22 years old, on August 21, 1847. Auburn Prison was renamed Auburn Correctional Facility in 1970, and is still open today, the second oldest operating prison in the United States. Prisoners at Auburn produce all of the license plates in New York state. These days they are compensated for their labor, though, at far below minimum wage, less than $1 per hour. Joining me now to help us understand the history of Auburn Prison, and what the example of William Freeman can teach us, is historian Dr. Robin Bernstein, the Dillon Professor of American history, and professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, and author of, "Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit."

Kelly  11:25  
Hi, Robin, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Robin Bernstein  11:27  
Hi, Kelly, thank you so much for having me.

Kelly  11:30  
Yes. So I want to hear a little bit about how you came to write this book. So I take it this this trial that we'll talk about some was very big news at the time. But of course, it's something I had never heard of. So, you know, how did you come across it? And how did you decide to write about it?

Dr. Robin Bernstein  11:46  
I came across it by accident. And I think that's really common with a lot of books. You stumble upon your story, you stumble upon your material when you're looking for something else. And that was the case with me. In my case, I was I came across a footnote. And the footnote astounded me. So the footnote was referenced a theatrical production in 1846, in which a Black man murdered a white family. Now, this astounded me because I knew that in the mid 19th century, white people absolutely did not want to see representations of Black on white violence. It was too frightening. It was too threatening. White people went to great lengths to avoid seeing spectacles like that in in visual art or in theater. So for example, when they staged "Othello," Shakespeare's play, "Othello," they went through all sorts of double back bends, to avoid showing Black on white violence. So I saw that there was this show that actually centered a Black on white murder, and I thought, "How could that be? Why would that be?" And I saw that it happened in Auburn, New York in 1846. I didn't know anything about Auburn. But I thought to myself, "What happened in Auburn in 1846, to make white people behave so differently from white people in other places, at the same time?" I knew that something tremendous must have happened in Auburn. And it couldn't have simply been the murder because the murder was based on a real murder, which is the murder that I refer to in the title of my book. So I knew that it could be more than just the fact that there was a murder, because there are lots of murders. And it had to be more than the fact that the real murder was in fact, the Black on white murder, because it wasn't the only one in the world. And yet, there was something about this event that was quite shaking, that caused white people to behave very in a very unusual way. And so that was when my initial question, "What happened in Auburn in 1846, to create this strange behavior?" So that's where I started. And then I started learning about the murder itself, learning about the people involved. And that led me to a very big story. I had no idea when I started out just how big the story was going to get and how consequential it was. So that that tiny little footnote just opened up a whole world.

Kelly  14:27  
So let's talk some about Auburn, New York. So this is not a very big city. Still not a very big city. It wasn't at the time. Could you talk some about what Auburn is like in the early 19th century that we're looking at here, and especially what Auburn is like for someone like William Freeman, a Black man growing up in what was not a terribly large African American community, but a very important community. So could you talk some about that to sort of set the stage here? 

Dr. Robin Bernstein  14:59  
Sure, so Auburn had been Cayuga territory, the land that we know is Auburn that is today a city called Auburn, was a Cayuga territory. So this was a part of the Haudenosaunee. And it had very recently, this this land, and these people had very recently been subjected to genocide. They had been subjected to genocide upon the orders of General George Washington, shortly after the American, during the American Revolution. So the land had been burned by revolutionary soldiers on the American side. The people had been displaced and killed and the land had been stolen. So this was the pre story immediately before before Auburn started to become Auburn. In 1793, one of Washington's soldiers, who was named John Hardenbergh, he, he had when he had been on this genocidal campaign, he had been fully participating in genocide, but he also had a personal agenda. And the personal agenda was to find an exceptionally swift river, on which he could later settle and build a mill. That was his goal. And his goal was entrepreneurial, as well as genocidal. So he found this, the river that he wanted on what was called the what is called the Owasco Outlet. It's basically the river flowing out of Lake Owasco, which is one of the Finger Lakes in New York State. He decided this is where he wanted to build his land, after the revolution, when the land had been fully seized, and the genocide was as completed as it was going to become. Hardenbergh, in fact, came back to that land he he found, he bought the land that he wanted, he came back to it, and he brought with him two people whom he enslaved. And their names were Harry and Kate. So Harry and Kate were among the earliest non Cayuga residents of Auburn, of what would become Auburn. They were forced to come to the banks of the Owasco Outlet. They started to build and they built a mill, and they built homes. And they established a Black community there. And that Black community was called New Guinea. And as you said, it was a small community. But it was very close knit, it was vibrant, and they built it over about 30 years. Harry and Kate eventually became free. They had four children, and the four children eventually became free, although it was a very slow and agonizing process. And they became the nucleus of this community, New Guinea. One of Harry and Kate's sons was named James. James married a woman who was both African American and Native American, her name was Sally. And they had a son, his name was William Freeman. And William Freeman grew up in this community of New Guinea. But while he was growing up, something else was growing in the city. And that was a new kind of prison. 

Kelly  16:01  
Yeah. So then let's talk about this prison and what what makes it at the time unique, not at all unique anymore, as it turns out, it was very influential. And it you know, it's really I've done several episodes on histories of prisons and have thought a lot about incarceration and, and in fact, the relationship between incarceration and unfree labor, but hadn't realized this piece of the story, this very intentional piece of the story. So tell me some about this Auburn System as it came to be known and in the intentionality behind it.

Dr. Robin Bernstein  18:55  
Auburn was home to a unique prison, unique at the time, though, as you pointed out, it has become widespread, it has become a global phenomenon. But in Auburn in the very early 19th century, a group of entrepreneurs had a unique idea. And that idea was that a prison could be an economic force. To us, that's a very obvious idea. To us, the idea that a prison can create jobs, for example, is self evident. But at the time that was not at all self evident. At the time, prisons existed for some combination of three reasons. The three reasons prisons existed, were to punish, and or to redeem to help prisoners become better people and often to Christianize them, and or to control people, which is to say, to basically get them off the street. So control, punishment, redemption, those were the reasons prisons existed, but this group of white entrepreneurs, businessmen in Auburn, they had a radical new idea, which was that the purpose of a prison, the central foundational purpose of a prison could be to grow a local economy. The way they wanted to do this was by taking money from the state. So the state offered a contract, offered it for for bidding, where the contract would give $20,000 to build a state prison in a local area. And the entrepreneurs of Auburn got this idea that what they could do is take this $20,000, use it to build a prison, but that the $20,000 itself would radically transform Auburn. At the time, Auburn had about 2000 people, and $20,000, this was 1816, was the equivalent of half a million dollars today. So if you think about it, if you imagine a tiny little village of 2000 people,suddenly being infused with a half a million dollars in state funds,with additional money to come each and every year, in perpetuity, to run the prison, that's going to completely transform the village. And that's exactly what happened. So the prison was planned for the purpose of sucking up state money, for the purpose of transforming a village into a city, and furthermore, it was imagined itself, the prison was imagined as a center of manufacturing. So the prison was built on the banks of that Owasco Outlet, the same river that Harry and Kate built that mill on. It was actually built right next to the Hardenbergh land. It was built on the second swiftest part of the river. And the reason that the prison was built on the river was the exact same reason that Hardenbergh built his mill there, which is to say, water power. Its purpose was to drive factories inside the prison. The prison was imagined from the beginning as having factories inside the prison. The whole system was imagined that prisoners would be forced to work in these in-prison factories, powered by the river, for the purpose of manufacturing consumer goods that would be sold at a profit. So the prison was going to be sucking money from the state. It was going to be extracting labor from incarcerated people. It was going to be manufacturing goods for private companies to sell. All of this was going to completely transform the economy of Auburn. And that is exactly what happened.

Kelly  22:48  
And it's important to note, of course, this is before the 13th Amendment, which says that slavery is illegal, except in cases for punishment for crime. But it is after the state of New York has outlawed slavery or has gradually emancipated people.

Dr. Robin Bernstein  23:07  
Yes. So when we hear about the 13th Amendment, there's a there's a concept that many people have that prison for profit, convict leasing, was instituted by the south after the Civil War, after the 13th Amendment, as a way of reinstituting slavery. Now, that's not wrong. But it only tells half a story. In fact, prison for profit, profit driven prison did emerge in the wake of slavery. But it emerged in the wake of northern slavery, not southern slavery. And since northern slavery, specifically New York State, ended half a century before southern slavery, roughly half a century, depending on what state you're talking about, carceral labor, profit driven carceral labor labor actually began in the north, not the south, half a century before it began in the south. Now, this is something that's surprising to a whole lot of people. And frankly, it was surprising to me when I first started this research. I always associated profit driven prison with slavery by another name, the south. So I had images in my mind of southern chain gangs, and agricultural labor. So it was very eye opening to me that, in fact, when folks in the south instituted post Civil War chain gangs, they were actually imitating the north, and they were doing it completely consciously. They were using what was became known as the Auburn System. This was entirely explicit. So what some people think that the 13th amendment which outlawed forced labor, except as a punishment for crime, that's the famous quote, some people think that what that did was enable a new form of slavery. It's not true. What it actually did, was it enabled an existing form of carceral slavery to continue. That's what it did. So this all matters a lot. This difference matters, because when we focus on the south after the Civil War, of course, that's an incredibly important subject. And we must focus on it. And we have to understand the terrible oppression that was enacted in this moment. But if we only think about that, we are leaving out the first half of the story, we're leaving out the north. And by doing that, we're inadvertently letting the north off the hook. What I wanted to do in this book was put the north back on the hook. 

Kelly  25:47  
So William Freeman, we've mentioned grows up in Auburn. He's in an important Black family in the town. And he's sent to prison. He adamantly denies any wrongdoing, since he was not the person who stole the horse that gets him sent to prison in the first place. But prison itself, as we've said, it's a for profit system, and it is a terrible experience and really transforms his life. Can you talk some about what what that experience was like? They're not just there and working, but they are set up so that they will not unionize, they will not revolt. You know, what is going on in this prison? 

Dr. Robin Bernstein  26:30  
Yeah, so the Auburn System was diabolical. It was so evil. And of course, it lingers in many, many ways, today, so just the fact that, to us, it is obvious that a person can be an economic force. If that is obvious in you, if you if that if that feels like a familiar idea to you, the reason that idea is familiar is because of the Auburn System from two centuries ago. This particular prison invented that idea, and if we have this idea in ourselves, that is the legacy of this specific prison. So the prison did not simply set out to have propped to create profits, because, in fact, it's very hard to get people to work for nothing. The people who are working inside the prison, the incarcerated workers, they received no wages at all. They also receive no benefits, no, no special privileges, nothing for their work. And it's very hard to get people to work for nothing. So the only way to get people to do that is through extreme violence and extreme social control. And that is exactly what this prison did. So it was famous for its social control. And it was also famous for its violence. So the way that it enacted extreme social control, which was itself a form of torture, was the incarcerated people were not permitted to speak at all. And it is so difficult to even take that in. They were not permitted to speak at all, ever. They were only allowed to speak if they were asked a direct question by a guard. But other than that, there was no speech at all. They also were not permitted to look at each other's faces at all, ever. William Freeman was incarcerated alongside somebody that he knew. And he never realized it for all of the time that he was incarcerated. And that makes sense, because he was not allowed to look at other human beings' faces. So while they were working in these factories, they were working silently. And they were not looking at each other in the face. They also were incarcerated in individual cells, they were put into solitary confinement every single night, every single prisoner was in solitary confinement every single night. So all of this, the solitary confinement, the lack of speech, the silence, the refusal, the the refusal of the right to look at another human being's face. All of this was torture. All of this was brutal. But what what I really want to emphasize is that it was not torture for the purpose of punishment. That was the goal of other prisons. This was torture for the purpose of productivity. The goal was capitalist productivity. And that's why all of these extreme measures were put into place. Obviously, there was an enormous callousness and a lack of humanity in the people who designed this this diabolical system. But what's really important to remember is that it was all in the service of capitalism. So what William Freeman did, he was incarcerated for five years for a crime he swore he did not commit. And what he did for five years was work in these print in these factories. He worked in a hame shop. What happens in a hame shop is animal harnesses are manufactured. So he was specifically filing iron with a with a great big rasp. And he was filing iron for to make animal harnesses. He also worked in a dye shop where he was dying silk. And he worked in a couple of other places as well. So he was forced to work every day for 12 hours a day. And in this in this brutal situation. Now, of course, Freeman resisted, and a lot of other people did, too. Of course, people did find ways to communicate. Of course, people did find ways to look at each other's faces. But every time they did that, they were risking immediate and extreme punishment. And William Freeman was punished multiple times. He was whipped. He was waterboarded. One thing that happened at this prison is they developed an entirely new form of waterboarding. And in one instance, he was beaten with a board and he was beaten so terribly, that he sustained a head injury. And as a result of this beating, he became almost entirely deaf. 

Kelly  31:23  
William Freeman has this really lonely existence in the prison and then he loses his hearing as a result of this beating, so has a very lonely existence, once he gets out has trouble relating to people to hearing what they're saying. He is laughed at when he asks for the pay that he believes he's due for the work he has done for five years, seeks legal remedy and is just brushed aside. So can you reflect some on what we don't have direct insight to his mental state because he didn't leave diaries or anything. But what we do know about what what his life was like going into the this terrible event that I'm sort of previewing here that's about to happen?

Dr. Robin Bernstein  32:05  
So, William Freeman gets out of prison, and he has been maimed, he has lost his hearing, he is suffering from this brain injury. And he comes out of prison. He's 20 years old, when he gets out, he has been imprisoned for a quarter of his life. And when he gets out, Auburn itself has changed. And in particular, Black Auburn has changed. So New Guinea, the neighborhood, the Black neighborhood that was established by his grandparents, it has changed and it is dispersing. One of the reasons it's dispersing is that the Black community is growing, and it's actually prospering. So remember, all of Auburn is prospering, because the plan of using the prison to enhance the general economy of Auburn, it has worked. And it has benefited the entire community, including the Black community. Every single business in Auburn is growing, even if it's not directly connected to the prison. So if you sell hats, for example, you might not sell hats directly to the prison, but you're going to be selling hats to people who are working at the prison, people who are coming to Auburn to visit the prison. So whatever your business is, you're going to be prospering. And that was true of Black Auburn, too. And a great example of that is William Freeman's Uncle Luke. His Uncle Luke was a barber. And Luke had a barber shop. Luke owned the barber shop that was in a hotel that specifically catered to people who were coming to visit the prison. And these were not necessarily family members. These were actually often tourists. The prison was a tourist attraction, believe it or not. And people came to the prison and they paid 25 cents to tour the prison and to see the spectacle of silent labor. The Auburn System was getting famous. It was getting world famous, it was being imitated throughout the world, and Auburn was prospering. So when Freeman gets out of prison in 1846, the Black community is radically different from the community that he left in part because he is older, he has changed, but the community itself is different. The community is prospering. The community also includes a large number of self emancipated people from the south. Auburn has become a site on the Underground Railroad. And a lot of people are coming to Auburn who are self freed. And so these new people, they don't know William Freeman. A lot of them never knew his grandparents, never knew his parents, had no particular allegiance to his family and New Guinea itself. People have started to move beyond New Guinea, and are living in more locations throughout Auburn. So there's less of a Black center of town. So he's entering this community that has changed a lot, and no longer has a well established place for him. He's, he's lost. So he tries to he comes out of prison with a very strong idea, which is that he has been robbed of his wages. He believes that he deserves payment for his five years of labor in the Auburn state prison. And he, as you said, one of the first things he does when he gets out of prison is he tries to get legal remedy. He tries to sue basically, for back wages. And he's laughed at and he's dismissed. And he tries and he still tries, he tries for six months. And he tries everything he can think of. He goes to multiple magistrates. He tells everybody in his life, that he wants back pay. He even tells people on the street that he wants back pay, and he is frustrated and dismissed. And at a certain point, he gives up hope.

Kelly  36:12  
So William Freeman, you know, is facing this challenge. Nobody is willing to take him seriously. He thinks, you know, he can't get back pay. So he decides to go for pay back. So he commits this really horrific quadruple murder. And then he goes to prison and he is represented at his trial by William Henry Seward. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why Seward took this case on and what how he was presenting the case, the argument he was trying to make in William Freeman's defense?

Dr. Robin Bernstein  36:48  
Yeah, people have been wondering for 150 years why Seward to actually 170 years why Seward took on this case. So let's talk about William Henry Seward. So today, William Henry Seward is best remembered as Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State. He's also really well remembered as having brokered the purchase of Alaska. If you've ever heard of Seward's Folly, that's him, William Henry Seward. So all of that, of course, was 20 years in the future. In 1846, William Henry Seward was not yet Lincoln's Secretary of State. He was best known for having been a recent two time governor of New York State. So he was no longer the governor. He was now a private citizen in Auburn, which is where he lived. He was a lawyer, but he was still a very important politician. And his future, of course, was unclear. He was going to have some sort of future in politics, it was not at all clear what that future was going to be. But he was a person of statewide significance. He was a person of emerging national significance. So when Freeman committed this murder, Seward was working as a lawyer, and he was specifically defending another prisoner in the Auburn prison, who had also committed a murder. This was a white man named Henry Wyatt. And Henry Wyatt had killed another prisoner. And Seward was making the case for Wyatt that he had been not guilty by reason of insanity. So Seward was just coming off of this case, which led to a hung jury, and it did not lead to a conviction at the time. And then Freeman commits this murder, and Seward wants to take it on because he sincerely believes that Freeman is insane. He sincerely believes that Freeman is also not guilty by reason of insanity. So he wants to defend him. Now, most of the people in his life thought that this was political suicide, and that he would never have a future in politics, if he could if he defended William Freeman. So a lot of people tried very hard to get him to just ignore the case and not touch it. But there were a couple of people who really wanted him to take it on. One was his wife, Frances Seward. Frances Seward pitied Freeman. Frances Seward sincerely believed that Freeman was a victim of society, and that he was not responsible for his actions. Now, Freeman clearly was the victim of society in the sense that, of course, racism and enslavement had had a huge effect on his life. He had never personally been enslaved, but his family had been and that had a huge impact. He had been treated miserably by the judicial system and by the prison itself, but what what Frances Seward did, and also what a local preacher named John Austin did was they racialized the story. They believed that William Freeman committed this murder because he was a victim specifically of racism. Now, this is not what William Freeman ever said. William Freeman was very clear that he committed this murder, because he wanted back pay. And if he couldn't have back pay, he would have pay back. He was absolutely explicit that he was committing an act against the state, that he was committing an act of protest against what we now know as prison for profit. But Seward and Seward's wife and Austin decided to racialize this and basically create this idea that is now familiar to us, as the idea of of quote unquote, social pathology. This is the idea that there is something inherently wrong with Black communities, either essentially in and of themselves, or that there's something wrong with the way that Black communities respond to racism. And that that, that this quote, unquote, social pathology, causes things like criminality. So this is an idea that reached its apex in the the Moynihan Report in the 1960s, you know, 120 years later. But at the time, this was a really new idea. And what I want to emphasize is that, whether we whether one agrees with the idea or disagrees with the idea, it was a direct contradiction to everything that William Freeman was actually saying. And the argument that I make in the book, is that one of the motivations for coming up with this novel idea of social pathology, then novel, was that it was a really effective way to shut up William Freeman. William Freeman was challenging the Auburn state prison. He was challenging the economic engine that was driving Auburn, that was making Auburn nationally and internationally famous. The Auburn System was the core of the identity and of the city, the identity of all the people who lived there, white, but also Black, and it was the center of pride. It was he was attacking the pride and the identity and the pocketbook of the town. And this was enormously threatening, and a very good way to silence him again, because of course, he had been silenced while he was in the Auburn state prison. But a really good way to silence him again, was to make up an alternative explanation for why he committed these crimes. And the the, the alternative that that Seward came up with, was that Freeman had been driven insane, by racism, basically, that racism had made Freeman insane. And by extension, all people who are subject to racism, were in danger of insanity, and in danger of violence, of committing violence of committing criminal acts. So this was a way of criminalizing Blackness itself, through this narrative of victimization and pity. This is a really pernicious racist idea that at this time today is pretty embedded in American culture. But this was one of the earliest manifestations of it and one of the earliest articulations of it. The trial got really big really fast, because William Freeman was being represented pro bono by William Henry Seward, who was famous as the immediate past governor, but the prosecutor was also famous. The prosecutor was John Van Buren, who was the son of President Martin Van Buren. So this was a clash of titans with a sensationalist murder. And so as you might imagine, the news coverage was massive, and national. The trial was covered every single day, and transcripts went out over telegraph, and they were printed far and wide. So people were following the trial day by day. And what was happening in these transcripts was the amplification of the arguments that were being made both by the prosecution and the defense. So the defense was arguing that William Freeman was a criminal because of racism and therefore all people subject to racism, were potentially criminals. But meanwhile, the the prosecution was making another racist argument, a different racist argument. which was that William Freeman committed these murders, again, not because he was making a strike against the Auburn Prison, but instead that the the prosecution claimed that Freeman committed these murders because of natural inherent biological violence that was in him because of his race, because of his African American heritage, and because of his Native American heritage. So they were making a biological essentialist argument. So what you had was two different camps, making racist arguments, making different racist arguments, but both arguing that Freeman committed these murders because of race, and both silencing what William Freeman was actually saying, which was that he committed these murders, because the system of prison for profit was inherently wrong.

Kelly  45:56  
Could you talk a little bit about what researching and writing this book did for your own views on prison and prison for profit?

Dr. Robin Bernstein  46:05  
Absolutely, when I started writing this book, I had a non radical view toward prisons. I was not an expert in prisons. When I started writing this book, I was an expert in history of racism, and the history of white supremacy. So that was my entry into this. And what I learned about prisons really shocked me. The first, the first thing I learned was that prison for profit started in the north long before the Civil War. And that was something that I did not know, and a lot of people don't know. So that was very eye opening to me. And that was a moment when I realized that I thought, "Well, if, if I didn't know that, what else don't I know?" So I had a relatively, I think I had a kind of perspective on prisons that a lot of people have, which is that I thought prisons were inhumane, and they should be more humane, and that mass incarceration was an enormous crime, and it was a racist crime, and mass incarceration should not exist. And mass incarceration, while it should not exist, and incarceration, in general, should not be defined through racism. So these were some of the things that I believed, but I wasn't quite able to make the leap, before I wrote this book, into thinking that prisons should simply be abolished. I had the idea that prisons were somehow necessary. Even they even though they were terrible, and there should be fewer of them, and they should be different. But they were somehow necessary. And that was something that I believed when I started this project. I don't believe it anymore. The reason that my perspective has changed is that I saw in the 18teens and the 1820s, when the prison had just been built, it had only just been created. Already, people believed it was inevitable. Already, people believed it was necessary, when it didn't even exist five years earlier. The consent, the sense of inevitability, the sense of necessity, all of that was manufactured, and I was able to watch it being manufactured, watch these ideas being manufactured in historical records. That was very eye opening to me, I thought, "I am watching people being convinced in 1816, 1817, 1820, I am watching people be convinced of things that I am convinced of today. I am watching these ideas become embedded in people. And I know it worked, because these ideas are embedded in me. If they were not true in 1816, 1820, maybe they're not true today." So it was a moment for me of questioning some some of my own beliefs. I also realized the more I researched this book, the more I realized that the prison system, from its very beginning was completely corrupt and never accomplished the things that it claimed to accomplish, including profitability, by the way. The Auburn state prison existed for the purpose of profits, but actually very few people got openly wealthy through the Auburn state prison. What happened more was that a lot of people earned regular and modest income through it, which is how all of that consent was built, that you'd had very few people getting wealthy off of the prison, but you've had many, many people building economic dependence on the prison. And that was a way of manufacturing consent. So what I realized was that the prison was not effective in Freeman's day, and it's not effective today. And the onus should be on prisons to justify their continued existence, rather than the onus being on people who want to abolish them. Prisons are not effective. They don't work. They don't accomplish their own goals. They are notoriously corrupt. And that was something that we haven't even talked about how corrupt the Auburn state prison was. It was a system of organized theft. It was stealing the labor of the prisoners, including William Freeman. But it also existed in part as a piggy bank for the people who were employed there, for guards and for wardens. They were stealing left and right from the state through the prison. So all of these things are still true today. And the onus should be on prisons to justify their continued existence. Why should a prison remain open for one more day, if it does not, in fact, accomplish its own stated goals, and is mainly a site for organized theft?

Kelly  51:17  
I would like to encourage listeners to read the book, how can they get a copy?

Dr. Robin Bernstein  51:23  
They can get a copy through any local bookstore. I would encourage you to go to any local bookstore. If they don't have it on the shelves, they can order it. Certainly, they can buy "Freeman's Challenge: The Murder that Shook America's Original Prison for Profit" through an online bookstore. They can also buy it through your website, Kelly, and I know that, that you sell the books of the people that you interview, which I think is wonderful. I hope that people will buy it and that they will read William Freeman's story. William Freeman was not listened to in his own day. He had something really important to say. He had a critique of prison for profit in its earliest moment. And he was not listened to. He was silenced. He was silenced through the invention of new racist ideas that we are still living with. It is time to listen to William Freeman. It is time to listen to William Freeman's challenge.

Kelly  52:19  
Robin, thank you for listening to William Freeman. Thank you for speaking with me.

Dr. Robin Bernstein  52:24  
Thank you so much Kelly. It's been a pleasure.

Teddy  53:30  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on twitter or instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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