William Edward Hartpole Lecky Quotes
On the Continent, every attempt to substitute a lighter punishment for death was fiercely denounced as a direct violation of the Divine law. Indeed, some persons went so far as to question the lawfulness of strangling the witch before she was burnt. Her crime, they said, was treason against the Almighty, and therefore to punish it by any but the most agonizing deaths was an act of disrespect to Him. Besides, the penalty in the Levitical code was stoning, and stoning had been pronounced by the Jewish theologians to be a still more painful death than the stake.
Lecky, William Edward Hartpole. History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. Vol. 1, D. Appleton and Company, 1866, p. 104.
These murders were punished by burning at the stake and other gruesome forms of execution as if a king had been murdered.
The colonial American were quite knowledgeable about trials like this one which were occuring all over Europe. The result was the demand for the First Amendment in order to ratify the original Constitution. In this particular case, the major crime that triggered the investigation and trial was the fact that La Barre did not remove his hat in respect as a religiohs procession of Corpus Christi went by. During the investigation, the mayor searched La Barre’s residence and found blasphemous literature the worst of which appeared to be Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary which the Mayor ordered to be burned along with the head and body. The photo is a plaque in Abbeville to the victim reminding all of the danger of mixing religion in civil law.
William the Conqueror. This is one of the first if not the first nationwide abolition of capital punishment in history. Ironically, the two alternatives that the abolition law allowed would both be illegal and repugnant to us today even though we allow capital punishment.
Utah passed a strong law against interracial sex, but the punishment was not death. See {629151}. Young however saw interracial sex as an extremely serious problem. There was nothing in the Bible or the Book of Mormon that would account for this strong animus, so presumably it was personal. For many years Mormons converted and accepted Blacks, but they could not be priests or leaders of churches. That prohibition was ended and the Modern Mormon Church is free from racism in its doctrine.
This has been the case in EVERY jurisdiction that has had capital punishment. Capital punishment does provide vengeance for victims, relatives and society. And in many societies execution is less expensive than prison for life. But it has never curtailed crime despite the example. In London, they used to have public executions as examples to inhibit crime. While the crowd was watching a pickpocket be hung, other pickpockets were relieving many spectators of their wallets and watches.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
In 1786, many veterans of the American Revolution had still not yet been paid the promised wages for their military service by the new national government. The States however had imposed taxes on farms to fund the new state governments and pay the state’s war debts mostly to rich merchants. Many veterans could not pay the taxes and some were thrown into debtors’ prison, and others had their farms foreclosed. Led by Daniel Shays, a small group of Massachusetts men conducted a mini rebellion by closing local court houses and tried to take over the local state armory. The Governor put down the rebellion by force and the rebels were jailed. Adams, the the former governor, recommended the death penalty and several of the rebels were executed. Thomas Jefferson disagreed. See {604839} for his famous quotation on the subject. This was one of the early crises of the new country and it was handled very poorly and unfairly.
When the Confederate Government realized that the Union was planning to arm escaped slaves and induct them into the Union Army, they quickly passed a law that declared any escaped slave who joined the Union Army or wore its uniform was guilty of Treason and would be executed. Most Union Generals one way or another got word to the Confederate Officers that they had better treat all Negro Union Soldiers as prisoners of war. Even President Lincoln warned the South. Butler, however, had a large number of Negro troops in his area and had heard threats of some of the Southerners to execute Black prisoners of war. He had a way of making things very clear, and he was able to prevent murder of any of his Negro troops despite the Treason law.
Albania was another Communist Country that had to use draconian measures to prevent its own citizens from escaping. In this case a person could be executed by trying to leave the country.
“43 Elizabeth” referred to the 43rd Law of her Reign. She instituted this then radical reform.
The Stoning coincidence for adultery between the Old Testament in Europe and the Middle East and the Aztecs of Mexico was probably nothing more. There is no evidence of any kind that the Aztecs of this period knew anything about the Bible.
Queen Boudicca of the Iceni tribe had revolted in Roman Britain. The Romans where particularly harsh in putting down revolts but under Emperor Nero and Caligula after him, they sunk to the deepest of barbarities,
As this quotation demonstrates, capital punishment was approved in the Old Testament for criminals and hanging was a Biblically sanctioned method of execution.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky OM PC FBA was an Irish historian, essayist, and political theorist with Whig proclivities. His major work was an eight-volume History of England during the Eighteenth Century.
