The Subterranean Brotherhood by Julian Hawthorne

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The City of Brotherly Love flickered by and was left behind, like the
sentiment which it once stood for. We were headed for Washington, where
the will and conscience of the nation take form and pass into effect.
Government of the people by lawyers, for lawyers; did they know what
they were doing? The Constitution, bulwark of our liberties; the letter
of the law, technicalities, precedents, procedure, the right of the
individual merged in the public right, and lost there! The House--five
hundred turbulent broncos, each neighing for his own bin; the
Senate--four score portentous clubmen, adjusting the conservative
shirt-front of dignity and moderation over the license of privilege and
"the interests"; the Executive--dillydallying between nonentity and the
Big Stick; the Supreme Court--a handful of citizens and participators in
our common human nature, magically transmuted into omniscient and
omnipotent gods by certificates of appointment! And the rest of our
hundred millions, in this era of new discoveries and profound upheavals,
on this battlefield of Armageddon between Hell and Heaven, in this
crumbling of the old deities and the looming of the Unknown,--are we to
lie down content and docile and suffer this hybrid monster of
Frankenstein, under guise of governing, to squat on our necks, bind our
Titan limbs, bandage our awakening eyes, gag our free voices, sterilize
our civic manhood, and debase us from sons of divine liberty into the
underpinning of an oligarchy?

My friend and I--while our licensed proprietors napped with one eye
open--smiled to each other perhaps, recognizing how the prick of
personal injury and injustice will arouse far-reaching rebellion against
human wrongs and imperfections in general. But our famous American sense
of humor may be worked overtime, and, from a perception of the
incongruity and relative importance of things, be insensibly degraded
into pusillanimous indifference to everything, good or bad. The soberest
observer may concede that there is a spiritual energy and movement
behind visible phenomena, whose purport and aim it is the province of
the wise to understand. The peril of Armageddon lies in the fact that
evil never fights fair, but ever masks itself in the armor of good. Not
only so, but good may be changed into evil by hasty and misdirected
application, and do more harm--because unsuspected--than premeditated
evil itself. Public endowment of chosen persons with power is good and
necessary in our form of civilization, and the chosen ones may accept it
in good faith. But in a community where everybody has business of his
own to mind, and is put to it so to conduct it as to keep off the poor
rates, deputed powers, designed to be limited, always tend to become
absolute. It is heady wine, too, and intoxicates those who partake of
it. And it is only a seeming paradox that absolute and irresponsible
power is more apt to develop in a democracy than under any other form of
human association. Holders of it, moreover, instead of fighting for
supremacy among themselves, and thus annulling their own
mischievousness, as would at a first glance seem likely, soon learn the
expediency of agreeing together; each keeps to his own area of
despotism, cooperating, not interfering with the rest. But the system
inevitably takes the form of rings within rings, each interior one
possessing progressively superior dominion. At last we come to a central
and small group of men who are truly absolute, and are supported and
defended in their stronghold by the self-interested loyalty of the rest.
But they do not proclaim their supremacy; on the contrary, they hide it
under clever interpretations of law, and, at need, by securing the
enactment of other laws fitted to the exigency of the occasion. If there
is remonstrance or revolt among their subjects, they subdue it partly by
pointing out that it is the law, and not themselves, that is
responsible; and partly by employing other legal forms to put down the
resistance. You cannot catch them; they vanish under your grasp as
principles, not men. Their voice is never heard saying, "I will!" but
always, "The law requires." And these autocrats--this oligarchy--are
only men like ourselves, with like passions, limitations and sinful
inheritance. They were not born to the purple--they just happened to get
to it. But being possessed of it--and apart of course from any crude and
obvious malfeasance in office--they cannot be "legally" dislodged; and
if they step aside, it is only to let alter egos take their place. The
King of England--the Emperor of Germany--can be deposed by the people,
and his head cut off; but the free and independent--but
law-abiding--citizens of the United States cannot throw off this subtle
tyranny, because it is identified with legal provisions which we have
insensibly allowed to creep into the inmost and most personal fibers of
our lives. As for modifying or abolishing the law itself--that would be
anarchy!

It would be foolish to contend that our rulers are actuated by any
personal malevolence or even, at first, by unlawful personal ambition;
they are, as I have said, for the most part lawyers, and law is their
fetish--their magical cure-all and philosopher's stone. They almost
persuade themselves, perhaps, that we the people make the laws; whereas
not more than one man in ten thousand--even of lawyers--knows what the
law in any given case is, nor would the majority of us approve any
particular law, if we were afforded the chance. Any one of us will
support the law against his enemy, but not, in behalf of his enemy,
against himself. But our legalized sultans and satraps, Councils of Ten
and Grand Inquisitors, keep an easy conscience; the Law is King and can
do no wrong. A few centuries ago it was law in England to kill a man for
taking any personal liberties; there was not much harm in that, for most
of the persons that counted were above the law, being nobles or
gentlemen. But our way is far more injurious; if a man takes a personal
liberty, the cry is, Put him in jail! Death is a penalty which only
disposes of a man forever; but jail is poisonous; the man survives, but
he becomes criminal, and an enemy of society. And this cry for jail does
not appear to emanate from legal tribunals merely, but we the people
ourselves have caught it up, and invoke cells and chains for the
lightest infraction of public or personal convenience; nay, we clamor
for more laws to supplement our already overburdened statute-books. Thus
do we thoughtlessly strengthen the hands of our masters. The nostrum
which they manufactured to govern us withal, and which at first had to
be administered to us willy-nilly, has now become like that notorious
patent medicine for which the children cry. We kiss the rod--as long as
it is laid across our fellows' backs and not our own. And the rule of
Law, by lawyers, for lawyers, shows no signs of vanishing from our
earth. Only convicts and ex-convicts dissent; for they know what they
dissent from. As an unidentified friend wrote to me of late, "No thief
ere felt the halter draw, With good opinion of the law"; but the thief
had reason on his side. And it may yet come to pass that his reasons may
be listened to.

Darkness set in as we entered the sacred soil of Virginia; night lay
before us--our next night would be spent inside penitentiary walls. Was
it a dream, or would some cosmic cataclysm occur in season to prevent
it? No: the ancient routine of one fact after another, of cause and
effect, would keep on with no regard for our sensibilities; however
important we might appear to ourselves, we were but specks infinitesimal
in the vast scheme of things. Miracles and special providences are for
story books; if you are the victim of abuses, be sure that the remedy
will come not through averting them, but by carrying them out to the
finish. On the morning of his execution, it seemed incredible that
Charles I should be beheaded; but he mounted the scaffold, laid his head
upon the block, and the masked man lifted his sword and cut it off. All
that is left for you is not to falter--to keep down that tremor and
sickening of the heart; when Danton of the French Revolution reached the
guillotine, he was heard to mutter, "Danton, no weakness!" And many an
unrecorded Danton, on the night before his appointed death, has lain
down and slept soundly. It recurred to my memory that my father, shortly
before his death, had said to an old friend of his, "I trust in Julian."
On the day following his death, that friend had journeyed to Concord to
tell me those words--returning to Boston immediately. My father's son
had lived to be proclaimed a felon; but I slept sound that night.

All next day we were passing through the raw red soil of the South, with
its cotton plantations, forlorn at this season, its omnipresent idle
negroes, and its white folks, lean and solemn, standing guard over what
fate had left to them. At stopping places we would step out for a few
minutes on the platform of the observation-car, to breathe the air and
feel the sunshine,--the affectionate deputies close at our elbows. Some
of our fellow passengers were bound for Florida or Cuba, to escape the
crudity of the northern March; "May be we'll meet up again there!" some
of them said, innocently unsuspicious of what sort of characters they
were addressing. Paradise and the Pit travel side by side on this earth,
and find each other very tolerable company.

Into Atlanta station the train at last rolled; the journey to oblivion
was all but finished. The restless little city, turmoiling in its boom,
swarmed around us; we had to wait half an hour, our gripsacks in our
hands, for the surface-car to the prison, three miles or more beyond the
town. We awaited it with some impatience--such is the unreasonableness
of our mortal nature. At last we were rumbling off on our trip of twenty
minutes, sitting unnoticed in the midway seats, our considerate but
careful guardians on the watch at the front and rear platforms. The car
took its time; it stopped, started again, stopped, started, after the
manner of ordinary cars; oh, for a magic carpet or pneumatic tube, to
make an end of this! or for a thousand years! It was as if the headsman
were making preliminary flourishes with his sword, ere delivering his
blow. These were difficult minutes.

They ended; "Here we are!" We alighted, and advanced to the entrance of
an expanse of ornamental grounds, with a cement pathway leading up to an
extensive fortified structure--a wall thirty feet high sweeping to right
and left from the tall steel gateway, with the summits of stone towers
emerging beyond. I stepped out briskly, in advance of the others; I
noticed some bright-hued flowers in a bed on the right. In a few moments
I was ascending a wide flight of steps; as I did so, the gateway yawned,
and two men in uniform stepped out. There was a transient halt, a few
words were exchanged; we went forward, and the gate closed behind us.

IV

INITIATION

"Put the fear of God in his heart!"

This phrase, impious and ironic, is used by officials in prisons, and
repeated by prisoners. It has no religious import. The naming of God in
that connection reminds me of a remark I heard from a moonshiner--as the
distillers of illicit whiskey in the mountain regions of the South are
called--who had lately arrived at the penitentiary. He said, "I allus
thought this here Jesus Christ was a cuss-word; but these folks say he
was some religious guy!" His enlightenment was doubtless due to the
first aid to the unregenerate administered by our chaplain.

To "put the fear of God in a man's heart" means to break his spirit, to
cow him, to make him, from a man, a servile sneak; and this is effected
not by encouraging him to remember his Creator, but by instilling into
him dread of the club, the dungeon, and the bullet. He must learn to
fear not God, but the warden, the captain and the guard. He is to be
hustled about, cuffed, shoved, kicked, put in the hole, punished for not
comprehending surly and half inarticulate orders, or for not
understanding gestures without words; all of which encouragements to
obedience are, indeed, specifically forbidden by the rules which were
formulated in Washington and disseminated for the information of the
investigation committees and of the public, but which are disregarded
nevertheless by the prison authorities from the highest to the lowest.
For they risk nothing by disregarding them; there is no one except
prisoners to complain of illegal treatment, and there is no one for them
to complain to except the very persons who are guilty of the
illegalities; and the warden at Atlanta, at any rate, has repeatedly
stated that he would not accept the oaths of any number of prisoners
against the unsupported denial of a single guard. To do otherwise would
be to "destroy discipline." Moreover, these unverified complaints--such
is their inevitable category in the circumstances--are themselves fresh
causes of offense, and productive of the severest punishments--not only
clubbing and close confinement, often in the dark hole, but loss of good
time, which of course is more dreaded than anything else.

But may not the prisoners complain to the committees or inspectors,
appointed precisely to enquire into and relieve abuses of this sort?

I shall have a good deal to say about these agents of humanity
presently. I will only say here that no prisoner who cares whether he
lives or dies, or who possesses common sense or the smallest smattering
of experience of prison affairs, ever is so reckless as to impart any
facts to the persons in question. If he accuses any guard or other
official of cruelty, the entire force of prison keepers can and will be
at need marshaled to deny point-blank that any such thing occurred, or,
if any did, it was because the accused official was at the time quelling
a dangerous revolt, and deemed his own life in peril. If this evidence
be insufficient, it is a pathetic truth that some prisoners can always
be found so debased by terror and abject as to perjure themselves
against their comrades. It is among negro prisoners that such traitors
are commonly sought and found. White men uniformly have a sense of
honor--thieves' honor, if you please--which keeps them loyal. There are
exceptions to this rule, and there are also exceptions to the rule that
negroes betray. I have the pleasure and the honor of the acquaintance of
some negro prisoners at Atlanta who would sooner die than ingratiate
themselves with the officials by a falsehood.

Accordingly, complaints of brutal treatment at Atlanta are not frequent,
either to the officials or to investigators; otherwise, I need not tax
your imagination to picture what happens to the complainants after the
investigators have departed.

Order and discipline--as appertaining to prisoners, not to
officials--must be preserved; of course they must, if we are to have any
prisons at all. And since there is no way for the prisoners to compel
the guards to keep within the license accorded to them, we must compel
the prisoners to accept whatever injustice or outrage the unrestrained
despots of the ranges have the whim to inflict upon them. There are
desperate revolts at times--desperate in the literal sense, since they
have no hope of relief in them, but only the tragic rage against tyranny
which will sometimes blaze up in victims--and on the other hand there
are officials who will resign their positions rather than connive at
abuses. But every means is taken to avert this last; for guards know
things, and the System could be shaken by men who not only know, but,
unlike prisoners, have a chance to make what they know believed.

All this time we have been waiting just inside the prison gates. The
difference between just inside and just outside is important; for nine
convicted men out of ten, it would be punishment for their misdeeds more
than sufficient to be taken no further on the way to retribution than
that. Whatever humiliation and disgrace they are capable of feeling or
have cause to feel is at that first moment at its height; it strikes
upon them unaccustomed and defenseless--never so acutely sensitive as
then. Afterward, familiarity with misery and shame renders them
progressively more and more callous, without adding one jot to the
public odium of their position. They can never forget that first clang
of the closing gates in their ears; the whole significance of penal
imprisonment is in that. Many a man, the moment after that experience,
might turn round and go forth a free man, yet with a soul charged with
all the mortal burden that man-devised penalties can inflict upon him.
Moreover, not having been unmanned and his nature violated by physical
insults and outrages, he might find strength and spirit to begin and
pursue a better life thereafter. The "lesson" (word which our shallow
and officious moralists roll so sweetly under their tongues) would have
been taught him to the last tittle, and withal enough of the man remain
to profit by it. Whereas, under the existing conditions, no more than
four or five years in jail destroy any possibility of future usefulness
in most men; they have been hammered into something helpless, dazed, or
monstrous; and even if they have courage to attempt to take hold of life
again, they are defeated by the unremitting pursuit of our spy system,
which depends for the main part of its livelihood upon getting
ex-convicts back to jail--whether on sound or on perjured evidence is
all one to the spies. So, as I said some time ago, most prison sentences
are life sentences, to all practical intents. To the manhood of the man,
prison means death.

Do some of the above statements appear extreme? Read on, and decide.
Meanwhile I will observe that so long as prisons endure, such abuses as
have been hinted at must persist. Whatever reforms have in special
instances ameliorated them, have in so far only gone to show that the
whole system is vicious and irrational.

My friend and I looked at our new masters with curiosity; they looked at
us with what might be termed arch amusement. With such a look do small
boys regard the beetles, kittens, or other animals, power to torment
whom has been given them. It was after prison hours--the men had been
already locked in their cells, and the warden and deputy had gone home.
It was left to the subordinates to put the fear of God in our hearts; we
could only surmise how far they would go in that instruction. We did not
then know that their power was limited only by their good pleasure. But
it is an accepted and reasonable principle with them that the sooner one
begins to take the nonsense out a prisoner, the better. The strangeness
of his surroundings intimidates him at the start, and he more readily
realizes that he has no friends and that he is in prison--not (as one of
the guards afterward took occasion to remark) in a "sanitarium for
decayed crooks." A good scare thrown into him now will bring forth more
fruit than greater pains taken--and inflicted--hereafter.

Our anticipations, however, were the less formidable, because we had
been exhaustively assured during the past ten days that Atlanta
Penitentiary was not so much a penitentiary as a sort of gentlemen's
summer resort and club, where conditions were ideal and treatment almost
foolishly humane and tender. This information came not only from all
court officials with whom we had held communion on the subject, but from
our own counsel at the trial; the judge himself seemed to believe it,
and if you ask the prison authorities at Atlanta, they will earnestly
assure you that prisoners there are treated like gentlemen, are given
every material comfort consistent with their being prisoners at all, are
sumptuously fed and housed, and are helped in all ways to build up their
manhood, maintain their self-respect, and prepare themselves for a
career, after liberation, as valuable and industrious citizens. We were
naturally disposed to credit assertions so emphatically and variously
made,--some basis for them there must be. And it was obvious, at a
glance, that the corridor in which we stood was spacious and airy, with
a clean limestone pavement; that the disorder and shiftlessness of the
Tombs was absent here. The guards who attended us wore neat dark
uniforms of military cut; and if their caps were tilted back on their
heads, or cocked on the northeast corner, that was a pardonable
expression of their authority and importance. I saw no firearms and no
blood, nor were the groans of tortured convicts audible. I remembered
the flowers in the garden outside, and was prone to think that things
might have been very much worse; they were certainly better, at a first
glance, than at Sing Sing, which I had visited on a newspaper assignment
about fifteen years before. I had resolved beforehand to make the best
of everything, and it seemed already possible that I might not have to
make believe very much to do so.

No resolve, however, could overcome the influence of that locked and
barred gate, nor the realization that I was a convict, and that nobody
inside the penitentiary had any doubt that I was justly convicted.
Friends were remote and helpless; the support of former good repute was
annulled; I stood there impotent, one man against the Federal
Government, with nothing to aid me but the weight of my personal
equation (whatever that might be worth) and my private attitude on the
question of my guilt, which the trial had not modified, but which could
be of no practical benefit to me here. The sensation of confronting
everywhere a settled and hostile skepticism as to one's integrity was
novel, and hard to meet with a firm countenance. And I felt how easily
this sensation might crush the courage of one who was conscious of being
justly condemned. How many men must be sitting yonder in those cells who
lacked the moral consolations that I had! The thought sharpened my
perception of the horror of all imprisonment, but at the same time
stiffened my fortitude; for if these men could live through their
ordeal, how much more could I!

Meanwhile we were being hurried through the handsome corridor, and down
a flight of iron steps to a less presentable region. There was no
aggressive brutality, only a peremptory curtness, entirely proper in the
circumstances. Our only defense against physical severity was a bearing
of cheerful but not overdone courtesy, and we gave that what play we
might. I could not foretell how I might behave under a clubbing, and
would not bring the thing to a test, if I could decently avoid it. In a
long, low, shabby, ill-lighted room we were lined up against a counter,
on the other side of which were two or three of our fellow
prisoners--the first we had seen--whose function it was to fit us with
prison suits. They consisted of a sack coat and trousers of gray-blue
cloth--rather heavy goods, for the warm season had not yet begun--and
this was obviously far from being their first appearance on a convict;
suits are handed down from one generation of prisoners to another until
they are entirely worn out; my own was of an ancient vintage and a good
deal defaced, but I had no ambition to be a glass of fashion in jail. Of
course I could only conjecture what diseases previous wearers of it
might have suffered from; but I hoped for the best. Every new arrival at
the penitentiary is presumed to be dirty until he is proved clean, and
the only way for him to prove his bodily purity is to submit to a bath.
The regulation is commendable, and was welcome to us after our day and
night in the train; but a comrade of mine from the mountain wildernesses
of South Carolina, where bathing is still regarded as a degrading
innovation, described to me long afterward what a sturdy battle he had
put up against the disgrace, and being a lusty youth, it had taken the
best efforts of several guards to hold him under the spout long enough
to wet him--and themselves into the bargain. Though this was the first
time since infancy that I had bathed under compulsion, I complied very
readily, and even said to my friend, "This isn't so bad!" It is not
permitted, under the law, to give out any news about prisoners to the
world without, after they have once passed the portals; nevertheless,
this memorable remark of mine was printed next day in the New York
newspapers, together with the scarlet hue of my necktie, and some other
details,--my registered prison number among them, my own first knowledge
of which was derived from the published paragraph. It was my first
intimation of a fact which afterward exercised no small influence on my
destiny in the prison--that I was a "distinguished," or at least a
notorious prisoner. This influence had its good as well as its bad
aspect, in the long run, but the latter was in the beginning the more
conspicuous. The unidentified press-agent who disseminated to an eager
world the news about the bath and the necktie, continued to be active
during our stay in Atlanta, but his other communications were not even
approximately so accurate as the first one, and nearly all of them were
children of his imagination exclusively, and were more likely to be
gratifying to the officials than to my fellow prisoner and myself.

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