NOTE ON PENITENTIARIES. 
185 
necessary to resort to the more frequent use of the scaffold. But, as it is stated in a report 
by the late agent of the Mount-Pleasant prison, Mr. Robert Wiltse, made in March, 1834, 
(from which document we have already drawn considerably in the preparation of this narra¬ 
tive,) Capt. Elam Lynds, who was at this time the agent of the Auburn prison, was too wise 
to give up the idea that the beneficial moral influences of solitude might yet be combined 
with some successful system of congregated labor. He felt convinced that this result could 
be attained by a union of the two opposite principles—by confining the convicts to solitary 
cells at night and on Sundays, and compelling them to work during the day in large work¬ 
shops in absolute silence, and under such a vigilant inspection as should preclude, so far as 
possible, all intercourse in any manner between them. 
It has been a subject of some controversy, who was entitled to the credit of having origi¬ 
nated this system; a point necessarily difficult to decide, when it is considered how naturally, 
during the progress of its experimental growth, the suggestions which might proceed infor¬ 
mally from the various minds engaged in and about it, would flow into one general current of 
opinion, common perhaps to several. Capt. Lynds, having unquestionably been the first to 
complete, mature and execut e the plan, has generally received from public opinion the credit 
of its invention; an honor which justice would probably require to be divided with Mr. John 
D. Cray, one of the master-workmen or architects employed in the construction of the building. 
The experiment was tried. Capt. Lynds, a man of remarkable energy and firmness of 
character, who had formerly served in the army of the United States, and who retained all 
the habits of rigid and severe military discipline there to be acquired, assembled the convicts 
together, and giving them the rules by which their conduct must be governed, told them that 
they must henceforth labor diligently, and labor in perfect silence and non-intercourse; and 
that for every infringement of the rules, a swift and summary punishment should follow, of 
corporeal chastisement. This was soon proved to be no unmeaning threat, and in a short 
time, seconded by the able and unwavering exertions of his assistant-keepers, he succeeded in 
establishing this new discipline with a degree of efficiency scarcely conceivable to those who 
had not the opportunity of witnessing it. Inspected in 1824 by a committee of the legisla¬ 
ture, a high eulogium was passed upon it, and it was sanctioned by the formal approbation 
of that body. 
The Auburn system , therefore, in its mature and complete state, may be said to date from 
the year 1824. 
But it was soon found that its adoption must render necessary the construction of another 
prison for the eastern portion of the state, that of Auburn containing, as it was enlarged in 
1824, only 550 cells. An act was therefore passed to that effect on the 7th of March, 1824 ; 
under which three commissioners were appointed, Stephen Allen, Samuel Miles Hopkins and 
George Tibbits, to select a suitable site. The village of Sing-Sing, on the Hudson river, 
thirty-three miles from New-York, was selected, and a piece of ground purchased containing 
an inexhaustible quarry of white marble, which it was designed to make not only the material 
for the construction of the building by the hands of the convicts themselves, but also a profi- 
Intr. 24 
