Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit

“Bernstein balances a keen sense of moral outrage with an impassioned commitment to facts and the historical record. . . . will hopefully add fuel to the contemporary movement for the abolition and the reform of American penal institutions.”

Prisons are among the most powerful and even necessary though abhorrent institutions in all societies, including the USA. They are often located in remote places and are largely invisible to the public.

Auburn Correctional Facility, located in Auburn, New York—a four-and-a-half hour drive by car from New York City—is one of them.

According to Robin Bernstein, a Harvard professor and the author of the new book Freeman’s Challenge, Auburn Correctional Facility, which was originally called Auburn State Prison, “is the oldest continually operating maximum security prison in the US.”

She also writes that it incarcerates about 1,300 men who manufacture all New York State license plates—2.5 million pairs a year—and are paid $.65 cents per hour. Shades of the prison house haunt the nation.

In Freeman’s Challenge, Bernstein explores the history of Auburn State Prison, which was founded in the early 19th century as a for-profit penal institution. Inmates were housed in solitary confinement. They toiled at hard labor without pay. The prison, Bernstein writes, “did not aim primarily to punish, confine, or redeem criminals, but instead to stimulate economic development.” The Auburn “model” was copied and disseminated widely.

It's an early example of what's known today as “state capitalism”—a social nexus created by powerful political interests to stimulate financial growth and to enrich the pockets of investors.

Bernstein tells a vivid story about the life and times of William Freeman, who was unjustly convicted of horse theft and incarcerated at Auburn in 1840 when he was 15 years old. The “freeborn” son of a father who was Black and a mother who was Black and Native American, Freeman resisted his captors.

He insisted that he was a citizen with rights. He demanded to be paid for his labor. When he refused the conditions of his servitude, he was punished. Beaten on the head by prison guards he was rendered deaf and left in a state of confusion. Bernstein tells the story with graphic details.

Released from Auburn, he murdered four white people, including a young boy. None of his victims were directly responsible for his incarceration and his punishment. If they were it was that they were white.

According to Bernstein, Freeman’s crimes “terrified and bewildered white America.” Terrified because they saw themselves as the potential victims of “Black rage.” Bewildered because they didn’t know or understand why he was driven to commit such acts of violence.

Though Freeman is a minor figure in the history of slavery and US jurisprudence—Dred Scott and his case loom much larger—Freeman’s story illuminates the nature of class, sex, race and ethnicity in the 19th century.

It’s no wonder that the courtroom drama that unfolded in Auburn was once called “the trial of the century.”

Bernstein does not use the term “intersectionality,” but it’s the conjunction of the elements that make up that concept that concern her.

A Black man who murdered four whites was bound to inflame public opinion, to attract national attention, as it did and as Bernstein shows. It was bound to provoke debate and discussion about what connections if any existed between insanity and race and the nature of violence

Was Freeman a madman? citizens, politicians and reporters asked. Or was he sane? Found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, he died before his punishment could take place.

Walt Whitman, then the editor and publisher of The Brooklyn Eagle, wrote in 1846 about Freeman, who he noted was condemned to “painful servile labor,” was dressed in “the bondage of degradation,” and who was, in his prison cell, “alone with darkness and silence.”

Why was Freeman largely forgotten for more than a century? Perhaps because his acts were not tied to an organized rebellion against the institution of slavery. Nor did he write about himself or even speak at length at his trial. Perhaps also because his story was eclipsed by that of Dred Scott and because the U.S. hurtled toward Civil War.

Bernstein mentions Angela Davis, the most vocal contemporary advocate for the abolition of prisons, who has endorsed Freeman’s Challenge because it “deftly reveals the deep connections between imprisonment, racism, and the development of the capitalist economy.”

In Bernstein’s telling of the tale, Freeman emerges as an historical figure whose life and actions ought to be remembered and better understood.

Her book shows that the oppression and exploitation of Black people took many different forms in antebellum America and that resistance to slavery inside and outside prisons also found expression in many different ways.

Bernstein balances a keen sense of moral outrage with an impassioned commitment to facts and the historical record. Her book will hopefully add fuel to the contemporary movement for the abolition and the reform of American penal institutions.

Readers of Freeman’s Challenge might keep in mind the words of the abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who wrote “If there is no struggle there is no progress.”

William Freeman’s struggles didn’t directly lead to progress. Still, they likely simmered beneath the surface. They might lead one hopes, to the abolition of the horrific conditions in which prisoners today toil and live and die often, in Whitman’s prophet words, “alone with darkness and silence.”