William Freeman was destitute, disabled, nearly friendless and without future prospects, all before his 21st birthday.
He’d just served five years in Auburn State Prison for stealing a horse; he swore he didn’t do it. Unceasing prison labor had brought him debilitating injury but not even nominal compensation. All he got when he left the prison in September 1845 was two dollars, ideally to catch a stagecoach or train out of the city.
Freeman had few advantages, but he was determined.
“I have worked five years for nothing, and they have got to pay,” he said over and over. What may have sounded at the time like empty muttering soon proved to be the kernel of a gruesome quadruple murder and the subject of a new book, “Freeman’s Challenge.”
Author Robin Bernstein, a historian at Harvard University, uses Freeman’s case to interrogate the economic and racial foundations of the early Northern carceral system. The state prison in Auburn, founded in 1817 and operated continuously to the present, was one of the most influential prisons in the United States.