SOURCE: "Notes and Documents: Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Capital Punishment," in The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 3, Summer, 1990, pp. 237-42.

In the following essay, Masur comments on a letter by Stanton expressing her views against capital punishment.

In the winter of 1860, Marvin Bovee, a Wisconsin legislator and social activist, began to solicit the opinions of prominent authors, politicians, and reformers on the subject of capital punishment. He had in mind the publication of a book detailing the position of opponents of the death penalty. He hoped that the work would appear in the fall of 1861 but before he completed the manuscript the Civil War intervened. Many volumes of course were published during the war, but Bovee thought it self-defeating to press for the abolition of the gallows at a time when violent, retributive feelings ran so high. In a letter to Wendell Phillips, Bovee explained, "I am quietly...