Carceral Codes and the Prison Chronotope in the Early American Republic

At the turn of the nineteenth century, a growing market for humanitarian literature breathed new life into an old (indeed, one of the oldest) American literary genre: the captivity narrative. Rather than the indigenous-held POWs of the colonial past, the new captives were most often slaves and prisoners of various kinds. There was also an important difference in how the stories were told. Borrowing the diurnal form of newspapers and epistolary novels, the new wave of captivity narratives were framed explicitly around the torturous passage for the captive of calendrical time. From John Foss’s “several years’” capture and imprisonment in Algeria in 1793 to Solmon Northup’s late antebellum account of his “twelve years a slave,” the early republican captivity narrative and its slave narrative offshoot deployed duration, precisely measured, as its most affecting element.

This paper explores how the new literary culture served as the background for legislative and popular debates of the first comprehensive carceral sentencing codes. The two trends were connected by more than a general cultural tendency toward temporal precision, for the literary depiction of carceral time – the prison chronotope, as some literary scholars have called it -- became an important reference for both supporters and opponents of fixed-term carceral sentencing. Through a close reading of early republican captivity narratives, prison reform society records, and contemporary newspaper coverage, I argue that the explicit time-consciousness of captivity narratives played an important role in shaping the cultural meaning of carceral codes themselves.