Washington Goode - Debate Over Capital Punishment and Petitions For Clemency

Debate Over Capital Punishment and Petitions For Clemency

Goode's case came about in the midst of a national debate over capital punishment and served as a rallying point for Boston's opponents of the death penalty who hoped to save Goode from the gallows. By most accounts, the community's opposition to the death penalty was solid and widespread. Meetings were held in several Massachusetts cities and towns in support of Washington Goode with a committee being appointed by the Massachusetts Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment to advocate on his behalf. Those volunteering to serve on the committee included his attorneys Aspinwall and Hodges, as well as Wendell Phillips, Charles Spear, Walter Channing, Samuel May, Robert Rantoul, Jr., Ellis Gray Loring, James Freeman Clarke, Frederick Douglass, and other politicians, ministers and reformers. One such meeting was chaired by Amasa Walker and took place on Good Friday April 6, 1849 at the Tremont Temple. Attendees of the meeting were addressed by several prominent figures of the time including Reverend William H. Channing, Wendell Phillips and Reverend James Freeman Clarke. Each speaker implored attendees of the meeting to sign a petition to have Goode's death sentence commuted on the grounds that society, by its neglect, prejudice, and injustice, had in fact made Goode into a murderer and was now using him as an example.

While others who had been given the same sentence had already been pardoned, Goode's sentence was still scheduled to be carried out even though the evidence presented against him was not clear and conclusive. Committee meetings were held in all the principal towns throughout the state to collect signatures from those who opposed Goode's impending execution. More than twenty four thousand signatures were obtained. In all, 130 petitions from Massachusetts communities were compiled.

One such document entitled the "Protest of 400 inhabitants of Concord against the execution of Washington Goode" is being preserved in the materials of the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods as a document of vital historical interest in the history of human rights. In the effort to save Washington Goode from execution, 400 citizens of Concord, Massachusetts-including Henry David Thoreau, two of his sisters-Sophia Thoreau and Helen D. Thoreau, his mother-Cynthia D. Thoreau as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson signed the petition now known as the "Protest of 400...against the execution of Washington Goode."

William Lloyd Garrison editor of The Liberator also became involved in the debate over the commutation of Goode's death sentence. In The Liberator Garrison argued that the verdict relied on "circumstantial evidence of the most flimsy character..." and feared that the determination of the government to uphold its decision to execute Goode was based on race. As all other death sentences since 1836 in Boston had been commuted, Garrison concluded that Goode would be the last person executed in Boston for a capital offense writing, "Let it not be said that the last man Massachusetts bore to hang was a colored man!" Parker Pillsbury also used the pages of a prominent newspaper, the Semi-Weekly Republican as well as The Liberator to plead for commutation of Goode's sentence. The activists involved in the protest relied heavily on the question of race to play a large role in saving Goode from the gallows. Through his case, reformers not only sought to express their opposition to the death penalty but also to racism.

Despite the powerful and numerous appeals to spare Goode's life including an application by his counsel to commute his sentence, Governor George N. Briggs adamantly refused to commute Goode's death sentence. Washington Goode's execution marked a turning point in the early nineteenth-century campaign to abolish the death penalty in Massachusetts. Since no person had been hanged in Boston since 1836, those opposed to the death penalty thought this showed a shift in the public's attitude away from capital punishment. However, Goode was to be hanged as scheduled on May 25. Distressed and disappointed reformers concluded that Goode was to be executed due to racial prejudice and orthodox religion.