"The hanging of Jackson and Jarvis at Jamaica, yesterday, was made the occasion of a general holiday in the County of Queens."

The 1875 hanging of two convicts turned into a vulgar dog-and-pony show for the amusement of the locals in Jamaica, Queens. The January 16th Brooklyn Daily Eagle took everyone involved to task for the horrific spectacle. An excerpt:

“We believe murderers ought to be hanged, but we are opposed to having executions turned into raree shows or neck stretching festivals. The hanging of Jackson and Jarvis at Jamaica, yesterday, was made the occasion of a general holiday in the County of Queens, and a spectacular horror within the confines of the county jail. For this, the Sheriff, the hangman and a vulgar public sentiment are responsible. The accounts given of the proceedings recall some of the Tyburn scenes in the Seventeenth Century.

The victim driven through the streets for the amusement of a vulgar mob, the looming, ghastly form of the gallows, the ugly figures of the hangman, the loathsome rumbling of the cart over the stony street, and the hideous apparel of death of Dick Turpin‘s day were, in several respects exactly paralleled, and others vividly suggested yesterday.

With much mock solemnity, the poor devils were interrogated as to their feelings, badgered to confess their guilt, dressed in black, acquainted with the pressure of the noose, and pinioned for the satisfaction of the vulgar before they were taken out for destruction, while far beyond the jail walls rose the jeers and shouts of the less favored mob who had been excluded from actual contemplation of the spectacle. There is only one term by which such arrangements can be characterized. They are barbarous. It is disgraceful to our civilization that such things are tolerated. There is no good reason why, if a man is to be hanged, the hanging should not, in the presence of official witnesses, without unnecessary torture, be dispatched. It is a question whether exhibitions such as that of yesterday have not a more demoralizing effect upon the public mind than the crimes they are designed to suppress. They, in a coarse way, make heroes of the condemned, they awaken sympathy for them in many minds, they familiarize the mind with horror which is the next thing to making one delight in the infliction of torment, and they serve to awaken an antagonism to the rigid enforcement of the law.

No one who looked yesterday upon the body of Jarvis dangling in the air after having been drawn up and dropped twice from a rotten rope could have felt otherwise than that of the Sheriff and his executive assistant ought to have been strung up, for their bungling, on adjoining trees.”