FREEMAN’S CHALLENGE with ROBIN BERNSTEIN (052)

LINDSAY BRANDON HUNTER: Hello—this is Lindsay Brandon Hunter. I'm Associate Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at the University at Buffalo, and you are at the Point of Learning with Peter Horn. This past summer, I invited Pete to hear Robin Bernstein talk about her new book, Freeman’s Challenge, and I’m delighted that it led to this podcast conversation about the book, and also about why and how we learn about history. I admire Robin Bernstein a lot—not only because she's a superstar historian in my field, but also because of her commitment to mentorship. It's not only her students and her readers who learn a lot from Robin, but a whole generation of teachers and scholars for whom she's been a model, and a guide, and an extraordinarily generous colleague. I feel sure that those of you listening will get a taste of that, too, in addition to hearing about her incisive and necessary book. Enjoy the show!  

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, pop quiz! In what part of the U.S. was the idea of selling the labor of prisoners invented—the North or the South? And was that after the Civil War, or before it?

ROBIN BERNSTEIN: In fact, convict labor, profit-driven incarceration, was actually invented by the North, not the South. And it was invented half a century before the Civil War. It was invented specifically in New York State at the Auburn State Prison.

HORN [VO]: That’s Robin Bernstein, the Dillon Professor of American History at Harvard University and author of a riveting new book.

BERNSTEIN: What I wanted to do in Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit was put the North back on the hook. I wanted to tell the story of Northern slavery, of Northern convict leasing, and I wanted to tell it in a way that was so vivid that nobody would ever forget it. And the way I chose to tell that vivid story was through one individual, and that was the teenager William Freeman.

[VO]: You’re about to hear how a city in central New York State and one of its citizens became central to the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism in the U.S.

BERNSTEIN: The criminalization of Black people is something that's very familiar to us now, but that particular form of racism was actually new in the 1840s. And one of the roots of that form of racism was actually in the trial of William Freeman.

[VO]: All that, and much more on today’s episode of Point of Learning! Let’s get to it!

[03:19]

[VO]: Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. A former freelance journalist with over 100 pieces in the New York Times and other publications, Bernstein garnered widespread recognition following the publication of her book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, which won five awards. With sixteen years of teaching experience at Harvard, Bernstein has received three teaching awards, including being voted a “favorite professor” by Harvard students. Her guiding principle is to never underestimate students’ intelligence; never overestimate students’ knowledge, a mantra that informs her writing for general audiences as well. Today we’ll be discussing her latest book, Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit. Published by the University of Chicago Press in May, it led Professor Bernstein to—among other places—a packed fellowship hall at North Presbyterian Church in Williamsville, New York, where I got to to hear her give a talk about it in July. I bought a copy of the book 5 minutes later, immediately certain that this story would captivate the Point of Learning audience just as it had me. It’s a compelling example of a mantra I used with my students: if you pursue any single area of interest far enough, you’ll see that it’s connected to everything else. In this case, “Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Robin Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism.” To set the table for our discussion, here’s a bit more from the book jacket: “In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison that enclosed industrial factories. There, “slaves of the state” were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system. In Freeman’s Challenge, Robin Bernstein tells the story of an Afro-Native teenager named William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit and sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s prison. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a quadruple murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back—with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman’s unforgettable story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery ‘except as a punishment for crime’—and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom.” Our interview was conducted via video call on December 20, 2024.

[06:54]

HORN: I wonder if we could start with just the thumbnail of the story of William Freeman himself.

BERNSTEIN: Sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here. William Freeman was an African American and also Native American child originally who was born in Auburn, New York, which is in Central New York State. He was born into the most prominent Black family in town. His grandparents, who had been enslaved, had been forced to build the town from its very beginning. And while they were being forced to build the White town, they also established the Black community of Auburn. So he was born into a prominent and beloved Black family in New York State. And his life was in some ways really difficult, and in some ways it was full of love and it was full of community. He was part of a very vibrant community in Auburn, and his life was in a lot of ways a difficult but livable life with plenty of joy in it. But all of that changed in 1840. William Freeman was accused of stealing a horse. There was no evidence against him, but it didn't matter. He was tried, he was convicted, and he was sentenced to five years’ hard labor in the Auburn State Prison. Now, the Auburn State Prison happened to be in the town where William Freeman was growing up. That was a coincidence. And the Auburn State Prison was the prison that came up with a radical new idea, which has become common sense to us. But the radical new idea that the Auburn State Prison invented was that a prison can exist primarily, fundamentally, at its core, as an economic force. And to us, this is really obvious that a prison provides jobs, for example, that a prison can change a local economy. But the only reason that is self-evident to us is because these people in Auburn came up with this idea, and what they did was they embedded private factories inside the prison. So William Freeman was 15 years old. He was sentenced to five years’ hard labor in the prison, and that's where his story begins.

HORN: May I ask, did it start—it seemed to start almost from the recognizing that this prison had to be built and recognizing that there weren't enough laborers to actually complete that. And so the idea was either as it was being built or expanded, that maybe we could get some of these people who are incarcerated to help with the actual building of it.

BERNSTEIN: Yes, that's exactly right. So what happened was when the prison began to be built, this was a massive undertaking funded by the state. This was a state prison. It was never a private prison. And the architects employed every laborer in the area, and at a certain point, they ran out of laborers. So what they started to do was bring in local prisoners from jails. They didn't bring in prisoners from other prisons because at this point there only was one other prison in New York State, and that was in New York City. So they didn't have access to other people who were in prison, but they did have plenty of access to other people who were in jail. So they brought in people who were in jail and forced them to start building this prison. So yes, you're absolutely right. The prison was built in part by prisoners.

HORN: The reason I wanted to kind of double-click or slow down on that point was that it seemed from your account, which was fascinating, that there was a realization made that between the free people working on the prison and those people who had been jailed who were not being paid, there was a little bit of fraternizing and collaboration and a kind of understanding that this was unjust, that some people were getting paid to build this new prison, some people weren't, and so it was kind of an innovation, in order to keep them from siding with each other and joining forces, that speech was forbidden among anybody working there, that this was a way to prevent them from organizing, essentially.

BERNSTEIN: That's exactly right. So you're right, they were fraternizing and they were actually forming alliances. They were seeing themselves as having a lot in common as all being working people, some of whom were prisoners and some of whom were free, but they saw their similarities more than they saw their differences. And everything came to a head at one point when one of the jailed workers refused to do something, and a free worker was told to whip the prisoner and the free worker refused. And then another free worker said, I'll do it. So he jumped in and he did in fact whip the prisoner who was his coworker. And at that point, the free workers rose up against the free worker who had whipped the prisoner, and they tarred and feathered him. So this was the point where there was enormous solidarity, and the solidarity was interrupting the productivity, the building of the prison. That was the point when the prison organizers hired a very evil man named Elam Lynds, who was a veteran. He had been in the war of 1812, and he came in and he started imposing a militaristic kind of discipline among the incarcerated workers and the free workers. And you're exactly right. What Elam Lynds did was he forbid any kind of speech at all. And the purpose of this was to destroy worker solidarity. And the purpose of destroying worker solidarity was to increase productivity.

[13:44]

HORN: And then seeing how well that worked, that became, because Lynds, as you write, came to be the—I don't know if they said “warden”—but overseer. He came to be in charge of the Auburn Prison as it was established. And he found that to maintain order, and I guess I don’t want to get too far into the weeds, but I guess solitary confinement was already being practiced in some institutions in Pennsylvania, but the idea of adding solitary confinement at night to silence throughout the day seemed to be an innovation of Auburn, principally based on the idea of the profit motive.

BERNSTEIN: Yes, that's exactly right. So maybe I should just back up and kind of describe this prison system, because it was a radical invention at the time. What they did, so they had this radical new idea that a prison could and should function primarily as an economic force. The purpose of the prison, the reason the prison was built was not to administer justice. It was not to create public safety. It was not even to punish people. That was not the goal of this prison. The goal also was not to redeem people, to help people reform themselves and become better. Those were some of the goals of some other prisons at the time. This prison, the Auburn State Prison, threw out all of that. They did not give a darn about any of those things. What they cared about was profit. So they were taking money from the state for the purpose of building this prison, which then was going to receive money from the state every year forever. Meanwhile, they built these factories inside the prison with the concept from the beginning that prisoners were going to be forced to work. They were going to be forced to work without any pay, and they were going to be making consumer goods. And those consumer goods were then sold throughout New York State at a profit, and not one cent went to the prisoners. Now it's very hard to get somebody to work for no pay and also no other kinds of benefits. They weren't working for special privileges or for early release or anything. They were getting literally nothing. Now it's really hard to get somebody to work for no benefit to themselves. And really the only ways to do it are through extreme violence and through extreme social control. Otherwise, people won't do that. And so that's exactly what happened at this prison. So it was a very violent prison. And we can get back to William Freeman in his experience in this prison, remembering that he's a teenager and he's being subjected to this. So it was a very violent place. Prisoners were whipped, they were waterboarded, they were beaten—horrible. Meanwhile, they were subjected to extreme social control. And you're exactly right: one of the hallmarks of the prison was that every single prisoner was put into solitary confinement every single night. And let's name this very clearly: solitary confinement is torture. So every single prisoner was tortured every single night. But the purpose of this—and this is very counterintuitive to us—the purpose of this torture was not punishment. The purpose was productivity. The purpose was to prevent worker solidarity in order to enhance productivity. This was all about capitalism. This had very little or nothing to do with justice. And so they were put into solitary confinement every single night. They could not communicate with each other. The prison was built in such a way that prisoners could not see or hear each other at night. And then during the day, they were forced to work in these factories, but to prevent them from talking to each other and communicating in these factories during their labor, they were not permitted to speak to each other at all, ever. And that is so hard to take in. I mean, let's really pause with that. They were not permitted to speak at all, ever. Not with words, not with gestures. They actually weren't even allowed to look at each other's faces. Again, it's very hard to take that in. So when William Freeman was incarcerated in the Auburn State Prison when he was 15 years old to serve out a five year sentence, what he was essentially told was You are not going to speak another word until you are 20. You are not going to look at another human face until you are 20. And that is what William Freeman confronted.

HORN: And I just want to interject here because I think part of the thing that's so important, especially for those of us who grew up in the North—I was born in New Jersey, grew up in Buffalo, and I think one of the sectionalist ideas that we can internalize as we think about slavery, and of course, this is Antebellum—we're talking about a period right now in 1840, this is give or take, 20 years before the Civil War. This is happening near Syracuse, New York. I think that's the closest metropolis to Auburn, right? And we would, as school children, read the narratives of enslaved people and find out how Frederick Douglass, for example, contrived to learn how to read. Because of course, literacy was one of the things that slave masters had figured out long ago: it was a good idea to keep people from reading, to keep them illiterate. This is not about literacy, about written language. I mean, this is about even speaking or having any kind of way to communicate at all, and it's happening in the Empire State in 1840. I just think this sort of example and what it's connected to in terms of attitudes, in terms of the social history, the economic history is such a poignant one.

BERNSTEIN: Thank you for saying that. And thank you for bringing up slavery and the South. One of the things that I wanted to bring across in this book is I wanted to take on some of the stories that we—especially in the North, because I'm also a Northerner—some of the stories that we have heard about North versus South, and I wanted to challenge them. One story that a lot of people have received and that frankly I had received before I started doing this research was the idea that convict labor was invented in the South after the Civil War, after the 13th Amendment. That it was basically a way for Southerners, White Southerners to enslave African Americans after Emancipation. And there's a lot of truth in that. The South absolutely did seek out ways to enslave African Americans after the Civil War. But what's false about that story that I just articulated is that in fact, convict labor, profit-driven incarceration, was actually invented by the North, not the South. And it was invented half a century before the Civil War. It was invented specifically in New York State at the Auburn State Prison. And the reason that this is really important is that first of all, it focuses our attention on slavery in the North. In fact, convict leasing, profit-driven incarceration was slavery by another name. It was formed in the wake of slavery, but it was formed in the wake of Northern slavery, not Southern slavery. So this is really important because it reminds us that there was such a thing as Northern slavery, and that some of the evils that we blame the South for—in particular, convict leasing—in fact was Northern in its invention. The South adapted that practice of convict leasing; they did not, in fact, invent it. So when we focus on the 13th Amendment, for example, the problem with that story is that it's starting the story in the middle. And when we start the story in the middle by focusing exclusively on the South after the Civil War, what we're inadvertently doing is we're letting the North off the hook. What I wanted to do in Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit was put the North back on the hook. I wanted to tell the story of Northern slavery, of Northern convict leasing, and I wanted to tell it in a way that was so vivid that nobody would ever forget it. And the way I chose to tell that vivid story was through one individual, and that was the teenager William Freeman.

[23:44]

HORN: So to return to that account, and I know that it wasn't easy to make because I've heard you talk about it a little bit in the talk that I was lucky enough to hear this summer, but also you write a little bit at the end in your Author’s Note about the 40,000 pages of unpublished diaries, letters, genealogical records, the things that you pored over and through in order to tell this story. But it ends up reading like a very compelling account of a murder, of righteousness, of revenge, of a good cause. I mean, it really moves.

BERNSTEIN: First of all, thank you for saying that you found the book compelling. I wanted the book to read like a novel. I wanted it to be the kind of book that a person would start reading and just not be able to put down. I wanted people to be very drawn to William Freeman and to his story. But as you say, it's completely based on historical fact. Every single line in the book is true. I made up nothing. The story just really was that dramatic.

HORN: So we're back to the place where he has been accused of horse theft, sentenced without real corroborating evidence, five years, hard labor, not speaking. But he resists at least a couple of times, very significantly.

BERNSTEIN: Freeman was furious when he was forced to labor. Let's remember that William Freeman was born free and his grandparents had been enslaved. His father had been enslaved, but had become free. And William Freeman's mother had always been free. So he was free. And of course, he was free in a family that when they became free, they chose to name themselves Freeman. They didn't have to do that. Lots of people, when they became free, they named themselves after their former enslavers. But William Freeman's grandparents, they became free and they named themselves Freeman. And that tells you everything you need to know about what this family valued, how this family thought of themselves, what their goals were, what they valued. And so William Freeman, who has always been free, is thrown into this prison where he is told you are now a “slave of the state.” And that is actually the language that the prison used.

So he is told that he is a slave. He is told that he now has to work, as he put it, “for nothing.” And he is furious. So he starts to resist. And very, one of the very first ways he resists while he's in the prison is he tells the officers, he tells the jailers that he does not want to work for nothing. And let's just pause and remember that William Freeman wasn't allowed to speak at all. If he had said “Good morning,” that would have been a punishable offense. And people were punished for things like that. And he doesn't just say “Good morning.” He says, “I refuse to work.” And this is challenging the core of the entire project. It's challenging the logic that is underlying the entire prison, because remember, this prison is all about profit. It's all about profiteering. So when he says, I don't want to work, he isn't just resisting work, he's resisting the core concept of the entire prison. And he must have understood the enormous physical risk that he was taking when he resisted in this way. And indeed, he was met with enormous physical violence. One of the beatings was so severe—a prison officer beat him over the head with a board, and the beating was so severe that the board actually broke on his head, and he sustained a brain injury. And as a result of that beating, he also became deaf.

HORN: So what is the move from having this horrendous time in prison, being released, and then the next step that leads to the murders that really shock the conscience of not just the state, but it seems the nation?

BERNSTEIN: Yeah. So when William Freeman was released from prison, his perspective was that he had labored for five years, and the state owed him money for that. The state owed him back wages. The state had stolen his labor, and in fact, the state had stolen his labor while accusing him of being a thief. And he always insisted that he had not committed the horse theft for which he was sent to the prison. This is a very astute critique of his experience. What he did was he tried to pursue legal means to recover what he saw as back wages that had been stolen from him. So he went to magistrates and he tried to get them to take his case. He also spoke to anybody. He spoke to people on the street, he spoke to his family, he spoke to his friends, he spoke to everybody about his perspective, that his wages had been stolen and he was owed money for six months. He did this, and he was laughed at and he was dismissed. And then he changed his goals. At first, he was seeking back pay. And then at a certain point, in his anger, he changed his goal to payback, and he committed a murder. And when I say that, I'm not giving away anything in the book! The murder is in the title of the book, Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit. William Freeman does commit a murder, and it is a horrific murder. And it terrified White Auburn. It terrified New York State. It terrified the nation. And it led to a very high profile trial where celebrities got involved. And so this became really an inaugural moment in making up racist stories about so-called Black criminality, because Freeman was very clear why he committed the murder. He committed the murder as a strike against the state that had stolen his wages. And yet, in his trial, the trial lawyers, both for the defense and for the prosecution, made the murders all about race because William Freeman did kill White people. They made the murders all about race, and they created an opportunity to tell newly racist stories about crime and about the nature of violence. And these were stories that are very familiar to us. Now, the criminalization of Black people is something that's very familiar to us now, but that particular form of racism was actually new in the 1840s. And one of the roots of that form of racism was actually in the trial of William Freeman.

[31:37]

HORN: So you had, of course, White men for the prosecution, White men for the defense, including William Henry Seward, who becomes even more famous later on. They have different tacks that they're taking, but neither one of them, neither side wants to approach this critique of the Auburn institution that's implicit at the root of Freeman's Anger and Furious act in the first place. They come up with different reasons that he's guilty or that he should not be held punished for this act, but they don't touch on the Auburn institution, which by this point connects to everyone in town and everybody in the area.

BERNSTEIN: That's exactly right. And this is really important in the book, and I'm really glad that you brought this forward. The Auburn State Prison became a kind of company in that it was the economic engine of Auburn in a lot of ways. It was the economic engine of New York State, and it was a political engine for New York State. And I spend a lot of time in the book explaining why the Auburn State Prison was such a fulcrum for economics and for politics throughout the entire state and really throughout the nation. So in Auburn, Auburn itself, the town, became a kind of company town where every single person in Auburn was economically connected to the prison in one way or another. And it didn't matter if you were directly employed by the prison or not. It didn't matter if you even were employed or not. It didn't matter if you were a baby. Every single person in the area was connected in one way or another, directly or indirectly, to this prison that was driving the economy. So very few people actually got wealthy off of the prison, but everybody in the town one way or another was benefiting economically. And that included people in William Freeman's own family. And a great example of that is William Freeman's uncle Luke. So Luke was a barber, and he had a barbershop in the American Hotel. He owned this barbershop. He was a private entrepreneur and very successful and apparently very talented at what he did. The American Hotel was created in order to serve people who were coming to visit the Auburn State Prison. And this of course could mean family members of people who were incarcerated there, but it also meant, believe it or not, tourists, because the Auburn State Prison became a tourist attraction. People came from all over the Northeast. They came from Boston, they came from New York City. They came from points south. There were actually tunnels inside the prison where tourists could come and peep out through little peepholes at the spectacle of men working in factories silently. So there were tourists coming into town and staying at the American Hotel and getting haircuts by Luke Freeman. So this is a perfect example of somebody who was benefiting economically from the prison. In fact, he was dependent on the prison. Luke was, even though he was never employed by it, and he never got a penny directly from the prison. But it didn't matter. And this was typical. This is how everybody in Auburn was, in one way or another. So when William Freeman challenged the Auburn State Prison, in a way, what he was challenging was the entire economy of Auburn, his hometown of New York state. So this was very, very threatening to White people, but also to everybody in Auburn and in New York State.

[36:03]

RAJ BHANDARI: Hello, my name is Raj Bhandari. Like you, I'm a fan of Point of Learning. I first met Peter as my high school teacher. I was thoroughly impressed by his ability to play with language. There was one of his lessons, writing pastiches on the novel Invisible Man that still, dare I say, haunts me. So imagine how thrilled I was to have the opportunity to hear podcasts from Peter and to feel that magic. Even now, it's a moment of joy to get that drop notification and hear Peter and a guest riff. It brings me back to the time of exploration and reaching for insight. That's why I contribute, and I invite you to join me. Contributors are part of a community that can say We voluntarily stand up and support! You can make a $5, $10, $30, or any amount recurring contribution and feel like you're part of all of this. Or you can make a one-time donation of support, making Point of Learning something that you put your power behind.

Now quiet! The teacher's about to talk!

HORN: This is a very, very current intersection here, right, in December [2024]. But for you when listening to the early accounts of this slaying of this healthcare CEO and people's initial speculation, unlike the Auburn situation, people were very quick to read into it and some of the statements of the perpetrator of the killing of the CEO, this motivation: well, this is about the healthcare system and this larger behemoth of an economic engine that has roots throughout the country. I know this is very new, but were there any resonances or points of stark contrast, or are you, as somebody who is a trained cultural historian—is your wont to kind of hold back and wait a little bit longer? I wonder if there was anything that kind of popped for you, because you were familiar, having read newspaper accounts, with what people, what the conversation, what the discourse was at the time, in the 1840s around Freeman, and then how people were talking about this case right now.

BERNSTEIN: Yeah, that's a really interesting connection. I hadn't thought about that at all. To me, the distinctions seem very useful to point out the differences. So one difference is that this person who is alleged to have killed this CEO this year immediately received a lot of support and a lot of—I mean, I would go so far as say fandom. A lot of people are celebrating this act. Rightly or wrongly, the celebration exists. And that is a very big difference from William Freeman. William Freeman did not have any widespread support at all. His family, certain members of his family supported him and continued to love him and did the best they could by him. But there was no groundswell of support for him at all. And I think one of the really important reasons for that is that William Freeman was ahead of his time at the time. This is 1840s. New York State mass incarceration did not exist. The numbers of people who were incarcerated were infinitesimal compared to the numbers now. We're talking about a few thousand people in all of New York State. Now, there are many, many more than a few thousand people. And as a result, there was not this kind of widespread suspicion toward the prison. And even people like Frederick Douglass, who you have mentioned several times—Frederick Douglass, who was an American genius. Frederick Douglass: nobody could be smarter than Frederick Douglass. And yet Frederick Douglass did not ever lead any kind of opposition against prisons. Frederick Douglass did not have a strong critique of prisons. And we could ask, why was that? And there are a couple of answers that I offer in the book. One is that Frederick Douglass was not clairvoyant. He was a genius, but he couldn't tell the future. He had no way of imagining. Nobody could possibly have imagined mass incarceration, mass racialized incarceration. It did not exist at that time. So nobody understood, and this includes Frederick Douglass, who did not understand that prisons were going to become a major form of unfreedom in the United States: a major force, a major technology by which people would lose their freedom. Nobody understood that then. And even William Freeman, he couldn't see the future either. Of course not. But what William Freeman understood was the present. What William Freeman understood was that forcing people to work for no pay is simply wrong and refused to work for well. He did everything he could to resist being worked for no pay.

HORN: There is, of course, just throughout our national history, a relationship between the quality of our prisons and the quality of our schools. And I was first thinking about this as a young teacher. In some sense, you could say that prisons are the shadow side of the education system and that everything that we failed to do right [in schools] has some kind of reflection in [prisons], including that profit motive. But I wonder if you could reflect a little bit on the connection between the prison system and the education system, maybe even just focusing on Auburn and what the ramifications were as a result of that trial.

BERNSTEIN: Yeah, this is the argument that William Henry Seward made. So William Henry Seward at the time was famous for having been the two-time governor of New York State. He was also a lawyer who was living in Auburn at the time of Freeman's incarceration. Later, of course, William Henry Seward would become the Secretary of State for Abraham Lincoln, and he would broker the sale of Alaska, or rather the purchase of Alaska. So if you've ever heard of “Seward's Folly,” that's him. This is William Henry Seward. And what William Henry Seward argued in the case was that William Freeman was not guilty by reason of insanity. And by the way, there was no doubt that William Freeman did commit the murder that's in the title of my book. But Seward was arguing that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, and that therefore he should be remanded to a mental hospital rather than go back to prison. And one of the ways that Seward made this argument was that he blamed Freeman's crimes on the fact that Freeman had not been permitted to attend White schools, the White-only schools in Auburn. At the time, the only schools that were open in Auburn were restricted to White children only. And Seward made the case that Freeman committed murder, not because of the prison, which is what Freeman had said, but Seward instead basically blamed segregation. And he blamed segregation for preventing Black children like Freeman from getting an education. And he argued in a sense that murder was the only logical outcome of segregation. Now let's follow this logic through: Seward was yes, he was criticizing segregation. He was saying the segregation is wrong, which is certainly something that I believe, that segregation is wrong. At the same time, what Seward was arguing was that violence was the only possible result of segregation. And that therefore, if all Black people in New York State at the time were subjected to segregation, which was the case, then Seward was making an argument, a false and libelous argument that Black people had a kind of propensity toward violence, not necessarily for any sort of inherent reason, but because of the experience of racism. William Henry Seward’s argument boiled down to people who experience racism are more prone to committing violence. This is itself a racist idea. This is itself a really dangerous idea. It's the idea that a century and a half later would be called “social pathology.” It shows up in the Moynihan report in the 1960s, 120 years later, with this idea that there is something wrong with how Black people deal with the problem of racism, that somehow the response to racism is somehow imagined by White people to be not the proper response. This is a specific racist idea that has origins in William Freeman's trial.

[46:07]

HORN: How did you come to this particular story as an area of interest and fascination?

BERNSTEIN: Well, I came upon it by accident, and that's I think very often how historians find their stories. I stumbled upon William Freeman's story in a footnote, and I was very surprised by a number of things in this footnote. And one of the things that surprised me that initially drew me in was when I learned that William Freeman had been forced to work in factories inside the prison in Auburn, that his labor had been leased. And at the time I thought, Wait a minute, there's convict leasing in New York State in 1840? What? Because a lot of people I associated convict leasing with the South after the Civil War. So this was surprising to me, and I felt like I needed to learn more. And I thought, Well, if I was surprised that there was convict leasing in New York state in 1840, I bet a lot of other people would be surprised too. If I didn't know this. I bet a lot of other people don't know this either. And so that was the initial impulse where I just started learning more and more and more. And the more I learned, the more fascinated I was by William Freeman's bravery, by how incisive his critique was, and by the power that he was resisting. I just became more and more fascinated by this story, and I knew it was a story that I had to bring to readers today.

HORN: And if you could tell a little bit of this story of George Mastin, who finds out about this and immediately turns it into a show.

BERNSTEIN: Yeah. George Mastin was a White impresario who lived close to Auburn, New York. He lived just to the south of it. And when William Freeman committed this crime and went on trial, George Mastin decided to make a stage show about it, which is really shocking. And part of the reason this is so shocking is that at the time in the 1840s, most White people absolutely did not want to see representations of Black on White violence. And they actually would go to enormous lengths to avoid images of Black on White violence. And a great example of that is William Shakespeare's play Othello. This was a moment in American history when people who staged Othello, which does involve Black on White violence, would actually alter Shakespeare in order to avoid that spectacle because White people simply did not want to see it. So the fact that George Mastin hears about this murder happening in his own community, and he thinks, I'm going to stage that—that is really shocking. And what it shows right away is how eager people were to avoid William Freeman's critique of the prison, that they were actually willing to be distracted by something that under normal circumstances they absolutely would not have wanted to see. That is how badly they wanted to avert their eyes and their ears from the point that William Freeman was actually making. So George Mastin did a special kind of performance. The technical word for it is a cantastoria. And what a cantastoria is, it's a performance; it's a stage performance involving large-scale paintings. So George Mastin had four enormous paintings. These paintings are like the size of a wall. They're like eight feet by ten feet. They're huge! He had these paintings made of the murders. So this is a visual image in life size of William Freeman committing the murder that's in the title of my book, Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit. Mastin had paintings made. And then what Mastin would do is he would get on stage, and this was a nighttime performance, he would have a candelabra in his hand and he would hold the candelabra up to the paintings and there was music playing. He had family members who were playing music during this, he would hold up the candelabra and he would narrate the murders. And the four paintings still exist. They are in Cooperstown, New York; although, as I said, they're not on display, they're in a warehouse. I had to go into the warehouse to see them. And the script that Mastin used, it still exists, and it's in an archive, and I was able to examine it. So there's a lot of documentation of this performance, and there were also advertisements for it that I was able to find. So this was an amazing performance and it was deeply racist. Let's be very clear: this is a racist performance. And the way that it was racist was that George Mastin, like many other people in Auburn at the time, was making the claim that Freeman committed this violence not as an act against the prison, but as an inherently racial act that he did. I mean, Mastin was claiming that Freeman did what he did because he was Black, and this is a racist idea.

HORN: And the thing that was so remarkable to me—so when I used to teach, for example, Native Son or Invisible Man, or even Their Eyes Were Watching God, to a lesser extent—this was starting in the ‘90s. I would use the 1986 documentary by Marlon Riggs, Ethnic Notions, as just a way to give us some shared vocabulary. And one of the things that that documentary does is walk through these characters, the tropes of Mammy and Sambo and Uncle, and so on, to introduce them, but also to say that these were very helpful or useful culturally for White people trying to present Black people in a particular way to say in the period of slavery, Look at how happy Sambo is. He really enjoying this. He's docile out there. He really enjoys doing the work that he's being asked to do. There's no problem, there's no threat—this is a very culturally useful image. But then by the time of Reconstruction, things start to get a little scary and for White people, the order is changing. And so now are introduced gradually these images of more threatening images. And of course, the quintessential example for a lot of people would be The Birth of a Nation in 1915. You have these kinds of rapacious images that come up. I recognize this is a 57-minute documentary; it's not telling the whole story, but it was providing some touchstones. But I think I had also kind of internalized or had in my head for a while, up until this period, that these images were very useful and very helpful, but that period would change at the end of the Civil War. So we're saying 1865. This is the 1840s now that Mastin is doing this, that he's presenting what would be frightening images. And I thought when I was reading that, well, Boy, that really is breaking the rules as I understood them. But of course, maybe the rules were different in New York State because you didn't have legal slavery any longer in this area.

BERNSTEIN: Well, I think that Mastin was in certain ways ahead of his time. So let's think about the racist idea that there is some sort of biological inherent propensity among Black people toward violence and criminality. Now, that idea is really deep in American culture today. We can turn on the TV any day and see images that are associating violence with Black people. It is a really powerful racist idea, and it's really one of the most powerful racist ideas. Today, what's really important to recognize is that that idea has not always been with us. First of all, there's nothing true about the idea, and because there's nothing true about it, it hasn't always existed. Most scholars date this racist idea to the period after the Civil War, and just as you said, and they dated in particular to the final quarter of the 19th century. So basically post-Reconstruction. But here we're finding it. I find it in Freeman's Challenge, here it is in New York state, full blown in the 1840s. And one of the claims that I make in the book is that Freeman's case is actually one of the origins of this racist idea that this is one very early moment when this racist idea was brought into prominence in William Freeman's trial. Because remember, there were celebrities involved, and Freeman's trial made national headlines. The arguments, the racist arguments that both sides made in the trial were transmitted nationally through the telegraph, and they were printed in newspapers nationally. So these racist ideas immediately went national, and they went on to stages in performances like George Mastin’s stage performance. They went into popular culture. So this was one of the seeds. I argue this was one of the seeds that about 40 years later would really grow into one of the most poisonous plants in American culture. That is to say this racist idea of Black criminality.

[57:19]

HORN: I really appreciated the way that you use Mastin as an example of how this happened and how this was taken up. But I really appreciated—especially because you were able to share these images that are not on display in Cooperstown, so the average person wouldn't otherwise have access to them—how you also kind of walk through the experience of what it was like for people to have that 1840s-level special effect of the flickering candelabra, but then also to be invited to dance, to get up on stage. I guess he was a little bit of a fiddler. He would play some music with the rest of his family members, and then you'd actually dance. The people in the audience would dance among these images. I thought about, if you've ever been to it, there's The Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey with—it's another Seward, it's Seward Johnson of the Johnson & Johnsons, and he has some famous paintings like “The Boating Party” of Renoir that have been brought to life in cast art [life-size sculptures]. So you can kind of go up and sit among the characters in there. But what a ghoulish spectacle that must have been! I want to close with a question that of course you couldn't have dealt with in the book because it deals with the reception of the book by current incarcerated prisoners in Auburn. You had the experience, I understand, this summer of going to talk with some of the people who—I think there were 70 people who maybe read your book who are currently incarcerated in Auburn, and to talk a little bit with them about their experience.

BERNSTEIN: Yes. The Auburn prison still exists. It is still open. Today it is America's oldest continually operating maximum security prison. And one of the features of Auburn today: it is still a center for manufacturing. The factories that were built into the prison, they still exist. And in fact, today the Auburn Prison is where every single New York State license plate is made. Every single one is made in the Auburn Prison, and every single license plate is made by men who are literally walking in William Freeman's footsteps. So yeah, you're right. I went back to the Auburn prison. I had visited several times during my research. I had gone inside. I had spent a lot more time outside the prison, but I also went inside. And after my book was published, I was able to go back in. The reason I was able to go in was through the Cornell Prison Education [Program]. Cornell has a program, the Prison Education Program, whereby men who are incarcerated in Auburn today can earn an associate degree from Cornell if they choose to. So I was able to go and meet with incarcerated men who are studying with Cornell faculty. And my publisher, the University of Chicago Press, was very generous, and they donated 70 copies of the book to currently incarcerated students. And so when I visited in the summer, I met with students who had received my book just a couple of days earlier, and quite a few of them had read the book cover to cover, and it was very powerful. So I spoke for about half an hour about William Freeman and his experience in this prison that these men knew in a way that I will never know. And then I asked them what of William Freeman's experience resonated with their own and also what seemed different. And then we talked for about half an hour, and their responses were amazing. A lot of them said that Freeman's experiences resonated very deeply with their own: the experience of being forced to work, in Freeman's case, for no pay; in the case of the men today, for pennies—a very, very small amount of pay, an amount of pay that is not able to sustain life. So in no way, no adequate pay, that's for sure. What they also talked about was the challenges to their physical health. So unlike in William Freeman's day, there is not a system of whipping. There is not a system of waterboarding in the Auburn prison today, but there is a great challenge to physical health. The factories in William Freeman's day were full of smoke, and the number one cause of reported death in Freeman's day was tuberculosis, which of course is a contagious illness, but it's exacerbated by poor air. And a lot of the men described how their experience in prison was damaging their bodies, was making them less healthy and was shortening their lifespans. And that, of course, was also true of William Freeman. So it was a very moving conversation. I was very honored to be able to speak with people whose lives and experiences have a direct connection to William Freeman's.

HORN: When was the proscription against speaking lifted? I mean, clearly they were able to talk with you.

BERNSTEIN: Oh, yes, absolutely. That is a really important difference, although the prisoners actually saw similarities there too. So you're absolutely right. People are permitted to speak in the Auburn prison today. That was after William Freeman's lifetime, but it was lifted in the 19th century, in the late 19th century. But what one man pointed out was that silence can be imposed at any moment in prison. And this isn't true only of the Auburn prison. This is true of many prisons, if not most prisons. At any moment, basically, a guard can cause an entire room full of prisoners to stop speaking. They can call for silence at any moment for any reason or no reason at all. And they do in fact do this. So silence is not imposed in a totalizing way the way it was in William Freeman's day. But silence is still a weapon of incarceration. That's actually a really important continuity.

HORN: You do a little bit of work as well with 13th Forward, is that right?

BERNSTEIN: Yes. I'm really glad you brought that up. So 13th Forward is an organization that is working to end forced labor in New York in any setting, including prisons. So if you go to the website 13thforward.com, you'll get plugged into this organization that's doing really wonderful work. So yeah, this is an organization that I've been working with and that a lot of people have been doing terrific work with. There's, there's a bill that's under consideration right now called the No Slavery in New York Act, and if it passes, it will prohibit forced unpaid labor in any setting in New York State, including prisons. It will amend the state constitution to get rid of the so-called “loophole clause,” which allows for forced labor as a punishment for crime. It would take away that aspect of the New York State Constitution. So this is a terrific organization. I encourage people to reach out and find out more about it.

[1h:05:38]

HORN: I know that you wrote a piece on Nikki Giovanni and the response with the convocation after the awful killing at Virginia Tech. I just wondered if you had a thought, because of course she passed just a few weeks ago—if you had either a connection or a memory of Nikki Giovanni that you wanted to share.

BERNSTEIN: Oh, thank you so much for that. Yeah, that's right. I did write a long time ago an article about Nikki Giovanni, the poet, and her performance at the Convocation at Virginia Tech after a terrible shooting that occurred there. And what I wrote about in this article was how Nikki Giovanni created a sense of unity on a campus that was very fractious at that moment. That shooter had been Asian American, and there was an enormous amount of anti-Asian and anti-Asian American racism being spoken at that moment, immediately following the murders. And Nikki Giovanni was so brave and so brilliant, and what she did at the convocation was perform a poem that got everybody to feel a sense of unity in a moment where things could have gone very differently. And the Asian and Asian American community at Virginia Tech had been very, very frightened of racist violence at that moment of racist retribution at that moment. And after that poem, after that performance by Nikki Giovanni, many people reported a huge change in how it felt to be at Virginia Tech at that moment. And many people felt an enormous sense of healing that they connected to that poem and there was no anti-Asian or anti-Asian violence in the wake of that act of violence of the murder. And of course, we can't say for sure that something didn't happen because of something that did happen that we can't say for sure that Nikki Giovanni's poem prevented violence, but a lot of people who were there and who witnessed it felt that it prevented violence, and that is a truly beautiful, extraordinary thing. Nikki Giovanni was a shining light on this planet, and I miss her already, and I know that many, many other people do as well.

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to Robin Bernstein for joining me to talk about her new book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit. A link to the book is available on the show page, as well as links to Professor Bernstein’s website and 13thforward.com. Thanks also to Shayfer James, who just authorized my use of a cache of instrumental versions of songs from his 2023 album Shipwreck on Christmas Day, and I still feel light as a feather about that. To find dates for Shayfer’s spring tour for his brand new album, including its kickoff right here in sunny Buffalo on April 8th, visit his website shayferjames.com. Thanks also to you for listening, subscribing, rating (5 stars) and reviewing this show on your podcast app of choice. If you have just one friend you think would dig today’s content, please share it up! It will mean most coming from you. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered by me in sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back to brave 2025 alongside you with brand new episodes I know you’re going to love. Finally, if you’re still hanging out, you probably know that I usually append a light outtake after these credits. For this episode, what feels right is audio from Nikki Giovanni’s poetic address to the thousands of students, faculty, staff, and friends of Virginia Tech who gathered after the campus shooting that left 32 people dead and more than a dozen wounded on April 16, 2007. This is the address Professor Bernstein wrote about in the piece we just discussed, and it includes several references to “Hokies,” the name for loyal Virginia Tech fans. The poet, activist, and educator Nikki Giovanni died December 9th, at the age of 81.

VIRGINIA TECH EMCEE: Ladies and gentlemen, Virginia Tech University Distinguished Professor of English and celebrated author Nikki Giovanni will deliver closing remarks.

[1h:10:54]

NIKKI GIOVANNI:

We are Virginia Tech.

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while.

We are not moving on; we are embracing our mourning.

We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly;

We are brave enough to bend to cry

And sad enough to know we must laugh again.

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does the child in Africa dying of AIDS; neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by a rogue army; neither does the baby elephant watching his community be devastated for ivory; neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water; neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid. We are better than we think, and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibility we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness. We are the Hokies.

We will prevail!

We will prevail!

We will prevail!

We are Virginia Tech.