The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice. Gordon S. Bates
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March 24, 1845. His family moved to Bethel, Connecticut, when he was a young boy. Since his army records list him as a resident of Bethel, it can safely be presumed that he spent his adolescence and teen years in that town. The brief biography in the cannon dedication brochure indicates that his first teacher was “ex-Governor George E. Loundsbury” (elected for a one-year term in 1899), who had taught school in western Connecticut before entering Yale Divinity School.10
Taylor was sixteen in the fall of 1861, when the Civil War began. In an act of youthful bravado, he impressed his friends by going to Hartford to sign up for infantry service. Although a volunteer unit accepted him, the U.S. Army turned him down because he was too young. He admits that it was humiliating to return to Bethel. Before the end of the year, he returned to the state capitol and successfully offered his services. He used a common trick among teenagers, writing the number eighteen on a piece of paper, placing it in his shoe and claiming that he was “over 18.” Being able to pull that off indicates that he was big enough physically to handle a man’s work and brash enough in temperament to bluff his way through unusual situations.11
In January 1862 Taylor was assigned to the First Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery, in which he served for the next three and a half years. He mustered out in September 1865, with the rank of sergeant. Working with a regimental colleague, Maj. Samuel P. Hatfield (a college graduate who had written many of the reports of the regiment), Taylor organized and published a compendium of the unit’s activities during the war. It became a “valued book of reference in all military circles,” according to one anonymous opinion, praised for “its careful and laborious accumulation of facts.”12
Reading the history that bears his name is mind-boggling in its detail and in the complexity of the unit’s travels and travails. It is a study in military maneuvering, reversals, and uncertainty, as Lincoln’s generals sought to comprehend and react to Gen. Robert E. Lee’s aggressive strategies. It is also a record of incredible human endurance and unsurpassed valor by combatants on both sides. The daily reports indicate that they did a lot of hurrying up and waiting, as units of the federal army positioned themselves in response to constantly changing orders. They camped or cleaned weapons much of the time and then moved in frantic bursts of energy as they skirmished with elements of the Confederate army in the first half of 1863.
In July of that year, their orders took them next on the five-hundred-mile march from Virginia to the crucial battle of Gettysburg and back. At the end of that critical conflict, still not aware of how important their narrow victory was in the total scheme of events, they hauled their hundreds of cannon and tons of ordnance back to Washington once again over muddy and rutted roads by horsepower and on their backs. Their reward was praise from General George Burnside and a long period of relative rest as part of the defense of Washington. In June 1864 the company was given the opportunity to share in the penultimate battle of the war in Virginia, the siege of Petersburg. When it ended in March 1865, the regiment was disbanded and sent home. Each man probably wondered why and how he had managed to come out alive when so many others had been killed or seriously wounded in body and mind.
Taylor went to California immediately after mustering out in order to “grow up with the country.” He spent at least three years there, according to his interview with a Hartford Courant reporter in 1906, an exchange that brings his personality to life and tells us a little about traveling after the Civil War. A route through the Panama Canal was chosen to avoid attacks by road agents and Native Americans. He disembarked from the steamer in San Francisco and went from there to San Jose, enjoying the “universal experience of immigrants.” While mule packing in the rugged terrain, a major earthquake occurred, which seismologists later said was marked by larger land movement than the famous 1906 quake that almost destroyed San Francisco. The fact that he had survived the “Great California Earthquake of 1868” made Taylor a source of widespread interest almost forty years later, as the nation followed the newspaper reports of the even greater earthquake of 1906. To the city folk of Hartford, his words must have seemed exotic and fascinating. The report of one of his speeches in the Hartford Courant indicates a man able to describe a harrowing situation with precision, humor, and an offhand allusion to Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist:
We were staging along the western slope of the Sierras, and stopped to change horses and get a meal at an adobe building used as a stage station…. Without warning the house began to rock and quiver, clocks and other loose articles tumbled to the floor…. We were in a steep ravine, precipitous mountain cliffs on either side, overhanging masses of rock, and everything in sight … rolling and pitching…. It seemed as though the mountains would come together like a vice and crush everything shut in the narrow ravine…. I certainly thought it was all over in that range of hills in ’68 and have no Oliver Twist appetite for more…. When it comes to choosing between war and earthquake, I promptly rise to remark, give me Hartford.13
Taylor was a solid member of the community. The Farmington Avenue Congregational Church listed Taylor as a member, and he was also active in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. He rose through the offices of the Robert O. Tyler Post of the Grand Army of the Republic to serve as its commander. Taylor had much going for him at the time of his selection: he was a seasoned veteran, an honored historian, a man who had experiences on both coasts of the United States.14 He enabled the Prisoners’ Friend Association to gain at once an image of patriotic heroism, solid judgment, authoritative leadership, unblemished reputation, and a no-nonsense approach to problems.
John Taylor was not without limitations. Based on his reports and other writings, he was neither philosophical nor ambitious. While he eventually became involved in the reform of the sentencing system and supported the creation of a probation program, he did not look much beyond his particular job of helping the individual inmate or speculate much about the causes of crime.
When John Taylor first walked onto the Wethersfield State Prison grounds in the spring of 1875, however, he brought with him much the same combination of attitude and knowledge that characterized many of the founding members of the Prisoners’ Friend Association. He was absolutely confident in the mission he was undertaking, and he was almost completely ignorant of the prison culture he was entering. He had a massive learning curve ahead.
THE SECOND CRITICAL CHOICE: FRANCIS WAYLAND AS PRESIDENT
Like many another fledgling group, the CPA started with great enthusiasm only to discover two facts: one, that funding for the work was not easy to come by; and, two, that a consensus about the direction of a new organization was not easy to maintain. Leadership was turning over rapidly. The Prisoners’ Friend Association was also being questioned as unwieldy. The ability to pay John Taylor his meager salary was becoming more and more doubtful. In the fall of 1875 a special collection of five dollars per board member provided some assurance for a few months “in case the treasury should not be replenished.”15
Yale University’s president, Rev. Noah Porter of New Haven, called a meeting at Center Congregational Church in New Haven in December 1875 to garner further support for the agency by creating a local auxiliary to the Prisoners’ Friend Corporation. Within a few weeks citizens in Hartford summoned a similar meeting in January 1876 at an unspecified location. They would create another auxiliary to focus on the Hartford Jail. Ideas for solidifying the work of the new reform group were plentiful, and the interest was intense. They needed a leader that would commit for a long period, one who could reshape the original organization into an agency that people across the state would rally around. That leader proved to be the dean of Yale University Law School, Francis Wayland.
Wayland was born in Boston on August 23, 1826. His father, also named Francis, served as president of Brown University from 1827 to 1855. The younger Wayland graduated from Brown, attended Harvard Law School, and practiced law in Massachusetts from 1850 to 1858 and then in New Haven for four years, before acting as judge of probate in that city. After one year as lieutenant governor in 1869–70 on the Republican ticket with Marshall Jewell, he returned to the probate court until 1873, when he agreed to join the Yale Law School faculty.
The Yale Law School had just been upgraded from a one-room department of the university. The room had served as the library, classroom, debate room, and lounge. There had been only