Ill Fares the Land

Spencer Weinreich reviews Robin Bernstein’s “Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit.”

By Spencer J. WeinreichJuly 29, 2024

• History

• Cultural Studies

A PRISON IS a difficult thing to kill. Consider New York’s Auburn State Prison, the oldest working prison in the United States. Now known as Auburn Correctional Facility, it received its first prisoners in 1817. It was the year Jane Austen died and the year Mississippi became the 20th state. The prison has seen 41 presidents of the United States and 53 governors of New York come and go; it has survived wars, constitutional amendments, and pandemics. There is no sign of its demise. But if prisons endure because we struggle to imagine a world without them, Robin Bernstein’s Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (2024) recovers the extraordinary story of a young man of color who dissented in explosive fashion, culminating in the murder of four people.

The prison takes its name from Auburn, the town in which it stands, whose name derives from an Oliver Goldsmith poem of 1770 with the inauspicious title, “The Deserted Village.” Admittedly, the poem’s first line reads, “Sweet Auburn, loveliest village” (the first chapter of Freeman’s Challenge is titled “Sweet Auburn, Loveliest Prison”), and Goldsmith’s heroic couplets do paint a picture of idyllic rural prosperity. But, as Bernstein notes, the city fathers seem to have ignored the second half of the poem, in which the corruption of commerce leaves Auburn deserted and desolate.

The most well-known line of Goldsmith’s poem is the phrase “Ill fares the land”—the late and lamented Tony Judt, for instance, used it as the title of his final book, which makes a case for social democracy. The full couplet is: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”

The verses might serve as an epigraph to Freeman’s Challenge. For this is very much Bernstein’s story: the titular challenge is leveled by her protagonist William Freeman, a prisoner at Auburn State Prison, against a system of carnivorous greed, the exploitation of captive labor, and the awful human wastage brought about by such profiteering.

But I see a deeper kinship between “The Deserted Village” and Freeman’s Challenge: a shared power to conjure the past. The fictional Auburn of the poem is deserted; its charms exist only in the speaker’s memory. The vividness with which the reader sees them is merely the triumph of the poet’s art—poetry’s voice, Goldsmith writes, “prevailing over time.” Bernstein plies words to the same luminous effect; the virtuosity with which she has made dry bones live again fuels a vital contribution to American history and the history of the prison, even as it poses unsettling questions about how and to what end we confront the past.

The scene of the drama is Auburn, both the town and the prison, to the extent the two can be separated—and Bernstein shows emphatically that they cannot. Politically, culturally, socially, and above all economically, the town was defined by its prison. The reader encounters this world in all its dimensions, from the picaresque (the wooden slats that made up the sidewalks on State Street, which “Auburnites sometimes stole to burn as fuel in the winter”) to the horrific (Sidney Freeman, the uncle of Bernstein’s protagonist, who lost his mind in the prison and wandered the streets ever after, “ranting that Jesus Christ was trapped in his throat, choking him”).

This is not just any prison. Auburn was, in Bernstein’s words, “America’s original prison for profit.” Its prisoners labored for the profit of their jailers and a welter of contractors and middlemen, and they received nothing in return save for a striped uniform, a narrow cell, scant food, and the lash. Now, prison labor, even prison labor for private profit, long predates Auburn. Not a few of the woolen garments worn in ancient Sumer and Babylon were the products of penal workhouses for prisoners of war and slaves. Jeremy Bentham designed the infamous Panopticon as a private enterprise. The keeper (ideally Bentham himself) was a contractor, and every detail of the panopticon, from the lighting to the rations, was geared toward maximizing his profits.

But Auburn had the dubious honor of realizing this vision for the first time, a prison that sought only better margins. The mercenary spirit of the institution, “built for business, not penitence,” ran directly counter to the high moral tenor of 19th-century prison reform. More fundamentally, Bernstein analyzes Auburn’s regimen, imitated across the country, as more than a theory of prison administration. It was a model for a particular kind of “relationship between prisons and state-funded capitalism.” If the 13th Amendment perpetuated slavery for those who were, so to speak, enslaved to the state by virtue of a criminal conviction, Freeman’s Challenge shows that this exception was invented not in the convict-leasing of the late 19th-century South but in the factory-prisons of the early 19th-century North.

This was the ideology challenged by William Freeman, the son of a Black father and a Black and Stockbridge-Narragansett mother, who spent five years as an inmate at Auburn himself. “His claim was simple,” Bernstein writes, “but it threatened Auburn’s defining idea: he insisted he was not a slave but a citizen with rights, a worker.” Freeman, in his way no less a wordsmith than Bernstein, compressed this critique into two words: “For nothing.” The phrase recurs, again and again, a verbal drumbeat that keeps the tempo of Freeman’s Challenge. To the officers overseeing the prison workshops, he protested that he “didn’t want to stay there and work for nothing.” Emerging from Auburn after five years of what he insisted was false imprisonment, five years of toil and physical abuse that had cost him his hearing and his health, he told his brother-in-law, too, that he “didn’t want to stay there and work for nothing.” After Freeman murdered four members of the Van Nest family, one prominent Auburnite asked him why he had killed a family who had done him no harm and from whom he had taken no money. The captive replied, “Why did they put me in the State Prison for nothing?”

What did Freeman mean by “for nothing”? That he had done nothing that merited incarceration? That he had received nothing in payment for his labor? Even that there was no deeper meaning or justice to his ordeal, that it was all for nothing? Bernstein infuses her entire book with the profound ambiguities of this phrase. She attends, closely and compassionately, to Freeman’s own words. She takes him seriously—and this is no small thing.

Freeman’s words have a solemn dignity, a powerful counterpoint to Bernstein’s fluid, vibrant narration. The fourth chapter of Freeman’s Challenge ends with the quiet, almost mystical explanation Freeman gave for how he reached the Van Nest farmhouse on the fateful evening of March 12, 1846: “The world rolled me there.” The fifth, titled simply “Work,” hurls the reader headlong into the violence of the night, breathtakingly dramatized. The events unfold on the page with all the dispatch of the original killings, which took a matter of minutes. Each time I read that chapter, it seemed to hurtle by faster and faster, paced like a paperback thriller yet woven with striking detail—when Freeman stabbed Sarah Van Nest, he “dragg[ed] the knife from left to right.” These are fearful events, fearfully told, yet never lurid or sensationalized. For Freeman, it may have been “work,” and Bernstein uses and respects that frame, but she confronts the reader with the violence at which her protagonist worked so methodically.

Bernstein demonstrates the same masterful sense of timing throughout, disposing of the events that brought Freeman into Auburn, his 1840 arrest and conviction for horse theft, in the space of a page. Freeman always maintained his innocence, and this brevity prevents the “fact” of guilt from absolving punishment of its violence, as it so often does. The book as a whole is elegantly written, wearing its learning lightly and offering some brilliant turns of phrase (my favorite is the description of the minister John Austin’s “jutting hypotenuse of a nose”).

If anything, the storytelling of Freeman’s Challenge is too vivid, Bernstein’s prose almost too seamless, giving the impression of more immediate access to Freeman’s words, thoughts, and deeds than readers actually have. Early on, for instance, Bernstein reconstructs the exchange between Freeman and the clerk processing new inmates at Auburn. The officer’s questions are given in quotation marks: “‘And what’s the crime you are charged with?’” Freeman’s replies are italicized: “They said ’twas for stealing a horse, but I didn’t do it.” And so on. An endnote explains that this dialogue has been stitched together: the questions are from the memoir of Austin Reed, a fellow prisoner and contemporary of Freeman’s, while the answers “reflect factual information or lightly paraphrase Freeman’s answers to similar questions.” The actual register in which the clerk would have recorded the encounter has disappeared.

There is nothing at all amiss in this: it is a most effective piece of reconstruction. A greater clarity that it is a reconstruction, however—that these are ultimately Bernstein’s words, not Freeman’s—would have done no harm. Bernstein reflects upon the challenges of the kind of history she has written—most of all, the virtual monopoly of white authors upon the extant archive—in a thoughtful author’s note. But revealing more of the machinery behind the prose as it unfolded only would have enhanced the power of Freeman’s Challenge.

For one thing, one of the book’s finest features is the extent of that machinery. Bernstein has uncovered a dazzling array of sources to tell Freeman’s story: to offer one marvelous example, there were newspaper advertisements across New York boasting that “Dr. Denton’s Hair Invigorator” enjoyed the endorsement of William Freeman’s uncle, Luke Freeman, a celebrated barber in Auburn. Bernstein weaves these precious threads into a vibrant whole, embedding Freeman’s story in the very heart of 19th-century American history. Freeman’s challenge implicates Haudenosaunee creation myths and Frederick Douglass’s North Star, the purchase of Alaska and popular theatrics. History is a rare case in which knowledge of the sausage-making adds to the savor.

For another, Bernstein’s respect for those words of William Freeman’s that are recorded is the lifeblood of Freeman’s Challenge. It sets her apart from the many other storytellers who have sought to explain the violence of March 12, 1846. Lawyers, activists, family members, politicians, journalists, artists, and novelists have all told the story of William Freeman; none paid much attention to what the man himself had to say. Bernstein does, and the result is a reconstruction that Freeman might have recognized. For, as Bernstein points out, “William Freeman clearly stated his reason for killing four people: he wanted back pay or, failing that, payback.” Unwilling to hear Freeman’s challenge, his contemporaries crafted more palatable replacements. The latter part of the book explores many of these theories, including the dueling narratives of the prosecutor (the son of former president Martin Van Buren) and the defense attorney (former governor of New York and future secretary of state William Henry Seward); the arguments of anti–death penalty advocates, prison reformers, and evangelical Christians; and the racist fantasies of popular culture.

Of course, Bernstein, too, has an agenda. She concludes Freeman’s Challenge by linking Freeman to the thousands of unfree laborers entrapped in modern mass incarceration. He thus becomes a forerunner of modern prison abolition activism, a trailblazer who, in Bernstein’s telling,

challenged the triangulation of incarceration, capitalism, and slavery [and] demanded fair payment along with everything that it conferred: economic stability, dignity, justice. Self-definition as a free man—his name itself. In short, he sought a foundation on which he could build his life. Today, these values comprise a vital part of the prison abolition movement.

This is a ventriloquism that I suspect William Freeman would not have objected to overmuch. Freeman’s challenge defied the vampiric greed and racist violence of the prison, and what was unjust in the 19th century is no fairer in the 21st. But I remain uneasy about the lineage being drawn here, because there is a danger of reducing Freeman’s actions to an ideological proposition. The murder of four people does not invalidate his critique, but the validity of his critique does not erase the murders either. The point is less about the legitimacy of political violence than the meaningfulness of it: can the content of Freeman’s critique be separated from the means by which he prosecuted it? If we are to take Freeman’s words seriously, we must also take his actions seriously. They need not disqualify him as an abolitionist, any more than John Brown’s violence disqualified him, but they matter to any reckoning with the meaning of his challenge.

Violence makes history, in the very literal sense that people tend to record it. This is as true for the violence of the state as it is for that of the individual. Every prison created archives of fragments of lives, names and stories we know only because they had a brief “encounter with power,” as Michel Foucault put it. Bernstein shows us that the historical cupboard is not quite as bare as that—these harried lives were also documented in advertisements and cartoons, deeds and pamphlets. And yet the fact that Freeman’s story reached so many places has everything to do with violence, both his “work” and society’s retaliation.

The system Freeman challenged endures, as Auburn does. I have a vivid memory of a primary school classmate informing me that our desks had been made by prisoners. I do not know if this was true in the specific case of Rosemary Hills Primary School, but public school students from California to New York do indeed write on desks and sit on chairs made by prisoners. A dollar an hour is at the higher end of the wages paid to such laborers. For nothing, or something close to it.

Ill fares our land indeed. Oliver Goldsmith ends “The Deserted Village” with an invocation to poetry itself, which must rescue a land drowning in its own greed: “Aid slighted truth with thy persuasive strain, / Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain.”

There is a great deal of work for Bernstein’s book to do.