The Baltimore County union. [volume] (Towsontown, Md.) 1865-1909, 1865-08-05
From the Boston Advertise
Female Executions.

A good many travellers, English trav-
ellers too--have remarked upon the great
consideration with which our people, as
rule, treat women. The French keep up
their reputation as the most polite people
upon earth, but still we are told that for
respectful Difference towards the weaker
sex and for gallantry in the best sense,
you must come to the United States. We
are not unwilling to take it for granted
that this is so and it is only by referring
to this habtual regard for the claims OF sex,
that we find ourselves able to explain the
feeling which now and then shows itself
with respect to the execution Of Mrs. Sur-
RATA feeling which has no reference to
the form of trial or the celebrity with which
the sentence was carried out, for then
Payne and Herold and Atzerodt would al
so be the subjects of this sensibiity, but
which rests upon the fact that sUonla,a has
been led to the gallows and has suffered
the extreme penalty of the law, as any male
murderer might
Somebody has taken the pains to hunt
for precedents for the hanging of woman,
and has exhumed two in this State One
Of them is the case of Bathshua Spooner,
hanged in Worcester in 1878 for procuring
the murder Of her husband, the fact be-
ing that she hired some men to push him
into the well. Another case is recalled,
rather too indefinitely where woman was
hanged in this city, sixty years ago, for rob
biDg another on the highway Of a bonnet
and reticue. These two reported cases
are going the rounds to satisfy the demand
which some appear TO feel for q precedent
of this sort 1t is an interesting circum-
stance that inquiry should have discovered
so few instances, and that neither of those
discovered should fall within the present
century. Have there been so few female
malefactors, or has justice been little
more blind than usual, when the sex APP
pealed to its complaisance? The polite
Frenchman, we believe, would find no lack
of cases in any part of his history, where
his gallantry has refused to recognize or
protect q woman on the scah'old; and as
for our English cousin, the record of the
black Mondays at Newgate is dotted all
over with the names of women whom the
law, but not always justice, has brought to
the gallows,- especially in those days when
shoplifting was as serious crime as murder,
in its consequences to the criminal.
3 But why should any mind, which accepts
the idea of. capital punishment in any case,
revolt at the idea of ats infection upon q
woman? The terrible thing is not that
woman should be hanged, but that wo-
man should commit the crime. If one of
that half of creation to whom all look for
every thing that is gentle and merciful and
affectionate, unsexes herself by rushing into
brutal and bloody crime, does she not sac
ri6ce the privilege Of sex when she spurns
its customary restraints? Indeed, as re-
CARDS the offender to whom we now partic-
ularly refer, Mrs. Surratt, we might claim
that she was for a double reason debarred
from any consideration on the ground of
sex. The old saying that fall Of woman
is to greater depth than that of man, be-
cause she falls from greatar height, is more
than ever true of that class of secessi onist
women to whom Mrs. Surratt Belonged
The wickedness and malice Of female reb-
els in this war has far outrun any thing
that men were equal to, and has often slim
uated the last refnements of insult and
cruelty, while their bitter taunts have driv-
en- men to the field and kept them there
long after hope had fed. When criminal
Of this class, who has committed one of
those crimes which Danish all thought of
sex, is brought to justice, we need not look
for precedents to satisfy us that men have
any exclusive right to the gallows.