On one occasion they shut up all their
keepers in one of the wings before setting fire to it, but according
to the _Chronicle_ "one more humane than the rest released them before
it was consumed."
Hugh Macatamney declares that these mutinies were caused by terrible
brutality toward the prisoners. It is true that no one was hanged in
the jail itself, the Potter's Field being more public and also more
convenient, all things considered, but the punishments in this New
York Bridewell were severe in the extreme. Those were the days of
whippings and the treadmill,--a viciously brutal invention,--of bread
and water and dark cells and the rest of the barbarities which society
hit upon with such singular perversity as a means of humanising its
derelicts. The prison record of Smith, the "revengeful desperado" who
spent half a year in solitary confinement, is probably of as mild a
punishment as was ever inflicted there.
In the grim history of the penitentiary there is one gleam of humour.
Mr. Macatamney tells it so well that we quote his own words:
"A story is told of an inmate of Greenwich Prison who had
been sentenced to die on the gallows, but at the last
moment, through the influence of the Society of Friends, had
his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and was placed
in charge of the shoe shop in the prison.
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