Inside the cracked, leather binding, the handwriting strides over yellowing pages, with fluid but orderly loops of the pen. Each entry bears the date and the name of a man—a man who had battled his demons and lost.

When Philip Gura, professor of American literature and culture, opened the pair of old notebooks, they poured out the stories of hundreds of lives. “This was a kind of document I had never seen before—in any form,” he remembers. “The entries were biographical portraits—not written by the individuals but by someone else.”

That someone else turned out to be the Reverend Jared Curtis, chaplain of the Massachusetts State Prison. From 1829 through 1831, Curtis interviewed each prisoner who would be housed in the prison’s new facility at Charlestown, two miles upriver from Boston. Curtis recorded his accounts of these interviews in his notebooks—notebooks that survived intact, possibly handed down through the Curtis family, finding their way at last to Doug and Maureen O’Dell, owners of Chapel Hill Rare Books. Doug O’Dell called his friend Philip Gura, to see if the notebooks might interest him. They did.

When an historian finds documents like this, it really is the biggest thrill, the biggest reward one can have,” Gura says. “The excitement of this kind of original source is phenomenal.” Gura eventually sent the notebooks to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which purchased them from the O’Dells. The Society, one of the few remaining publishers of historical sources, this winter issued the notebooks, along with Gura’s 72-page introduction, as Buried from the World: Inside the Massachusetts State Prison, 1829-1831.

For Gura, Curtis’s snapshot-like biographies capture the lives of prisoners at a turning point in American history. The Industrial Revolution and a new market economy were creating wealth and leisure for some, misery for others. Young men without strong families, education, or skills for employment were drifting into cities and seaports awash with alcohol, prostitution, and crime. At the same moment, reformers were advancing the notion that criminals could be redeemed, that training and moral instruction would accomplish what punishment could not.

The prison-reform movement in that period was based on the belief that these prisoners were people who had lacked something,” Gura says, “especially a lack of family structure, education, or religious training. So the prison system was meant to provide, in a very sustained, very concentrated form, the kinds of things they had been missing.”

Charlestown imposed a strict and unyielding routine that included hard labor in the prison’s stone-cutting shop, prayers and religious instruction, and long periods of silence in which to reflect and repent. The goal was to recast the characters of these men, many of them wildly undisciplined in an exotic variety of vices, into the disciplined, orderly workers valued by a society retooling itself for the age of machines.

This was at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution, before people like Thoreau and Melville began to criticize the machine,” Gura says. “Conformity really was a value in this new kind of economy—that is, an economy that revolved around the principles of timeliness, of order. So the whole point in rehabilitation was to make a person who could reenter that new kind of world, a world that demanded a certain kind of order.”

As Curtis began his interviews, talking individually with several prisoners a day, several days a week, he probably had more than one purpose in mind, Gura says. Curtis wanted to know how these prisoners would fit into the new system the authorities were establishing at Charlestown. But he also wanted to engage in some elementary sociology, to collect the numbers he would use to chart the success of the system. Just as progressives of the day believed in the power of machines to liberate people from brute labor, they also believed in the power of science and statistics to reveal the truth.

These notebooks illustrate the birth of that statistical mind,” Gura says, “the notion that if you martial your figures you’ll make your argument stronger.”

But the entries yield far more than numbers. Each is a snapshot recording the life of a man in specific, often painfully candid detail. Why did these prisoners—of various races and ages and backgrounds—open up their lives to Curtis this way? Evidence from the notebooks suggests that Curtis knew how to listen, that the prisoners respected and trusted him. But he was also the only person with whom a prisoner was allowed to speak. It is difficult to imagine the burden of absolute silence the inmates endured at the prison, Gura says. The silence must have seemed as heavy as the enormous slabs of stone they were cutting each day in the shop.

You have the haunting sense of this huge, factory-like building,” Gura says. “But in utter contrast to the noise and bustle of people working in a factory, this would have been a place virtually silent except perhaps for the orders of the turnkeys or the overseers who were in charge of the prisoners.” This tomb-like silence, Gura says, inspired the title, Buried from the World.

Gura imagines the vast relief a prisoner must have felt, after having been sealed in his silence for months or for years, when at last it was his turn to tell the story of his life. The lives issued forth in astonishing detail. There was Jacob Richmond, a free black man from Wilmington, North Carolina, a whaler convicted of perjury. There were educated men such as G. F. Weems, a landed Virginian and aspiring clergyman whose dissipation as a “gentleman at large” led him at last into thievery. There was the “wild & vicious” John Jourdan, who discovered in prison a talent for art. There were adventure stories, such as the tale of Melzar Hatch, whose long list of captors included Barbary pirates and a British man-of-war. And there was a measure of comedy, as well, as when Alexander Palmer, an inmate working as an upholsterer, escaped, briefly, by concealing himself in a sofa.

Through this tapestry run several common threads. In most of the cases, prison seems to have been the inevitable destination of people handicapped by intemperance, little or no education, and difficult childhoods. In the notebooks, Curtis frequently selects the same poignant phrase to describe the prisoner’s youth—a child “thrown unprotected upon the world.”

But Gura detects another theme that neither Curtis nor the reformers of his time had discerned. For one reason or another, the prisoners were aliens in the new economy, an economy of commerce and manufacturing. “Rather than awakening to the American dream,” he writes, “they languished in the sepulchral silence of Charlestown and other state prisons where they presumably would be made more fit to assume their places in the outside world.” The notebooks “provide a casualty list of those falling by the way as America was transformed into a successful industrial and mercantile power.”

Gura sees some parallels today, as the age of information piles up a casualty list of its own. “I suspect a lot of the frustrations that we see in our current prison population have to do with this same sense of having been left behind, of not having had the opportunity,” he says.

Whatever the book’s implications for the present, its real value, Gura says, is what it reveals about the past. He has indexed each name that appears in the notebooks because his publisher believes that genealogists will use the book to fill in the branches of family trees. Historians and social scientists will mine the notebook entries for data. And the rest of us will discover the voyeuristic thrill of eavesdropping on the lives of men who had failed or refused to conform.

You really do have a sense of seeing individual faces emerge from what was once this faceless mass of incarcerated individuals,” Gura says. “And that’s why the book attracted me so much.”

  

While the notebooks reveal the lives of the prisoners, they say very little about Jared Curtis himself. Fortunately, Gura found much of what he needed to know about Curtis from another source—a source here at home.

I finally realized that Jared Curtis was the father of Moses Ashley Curtis, who was a very famous botanist who lived in Hillsborough,” Gura says.

The papers of Moses Ashley Curtis were ready and waiting in the archives of Carolina’s Southern Historical Collection, just a few yards from Gura’s office. The papers included a great number of letters from Moses Ashley Curtis to his father, a lesser number of letters from father to son, and also Moses Ashley’s journals during the years when he was visiting his father at the prisons where he worked.

The day I found those documents at the Southern Historical Collection I couldn’t believe my good fortune,” Gura says.

The Jared Curtis depicted in these documents is a remarkable man, Gura says. At Charlestown, Curtis organized a school for the inmates and recruited local citizens to teach in it. Over the life of this school, hundreds of prominent citizens volunteered their time, getting to know the prisoners and increasing sympathy for them in the communities nearby.

Did the system work? From various sources, Gura finds evidence that Charlestown may have accomplished, in modest measure, some of its goals. Rates of incarceration and recidivism (men returning to prison) apparently declined, and after a few years of operation the prison contained fewer prisoners than it did when it opened. But however one might judge the merits of the prison itself, Jared Curtis emerges as a man both earnest and sincere, a man steadfast in his allegiance to the ideals of prison reform, to the belief that education and spiritual guidance would help to recover the value of men.

One of the things I like to do in my work,” Gura says, “is to resurrect people from the ‘dustbin of history,’ as the phrase goes. And I think people like Jared Curtis should be recognized for their work. So while this book is a monument to those who used to be nameless prisoners, it’s also a monument to the sincerity of this particular man.”



Neil Caudle was the editor of Endeavors for fifteen years.