During the mid-1780s and throughout the following decade, Americans launched a polemic attack upon English criminal codes. England's rapidly proliferating capital statutes were, however, anything but a comprehensive legal code. These were a disparate collection of laws passed by Parliament over an extended period. Using Blackstonian lenses that saw legal systems as coherent, Americans nevertheless united England's capital statutes into a common “code” with bloodshed as its centerpiece. Moreover, American legal imagining borrowed comparative readings of legal systems to see these capital statutes as representational of society as a whole, claiming that the power of English elites rested upon legalized bloodshed.

It will be suggested in this chapter that Americans imagined an English code before they rewrote their own statute books. Not surprisingly, then, Americans saw the recasting of criminal statutes in the 1780s and 1790s as having representational meaning. American codes were intended as a countercode to what might be found in England. To a significant extent, American state criminal codes abolished sanguinary punishment, and replaced the punishment of public executions with prison sentences. Like early-twentieth-century revolutions, which legitimated themselves through land reform or literacy programs, America intended these codes as an outward representation of the fledgling republic.

The final section of this chapter explores American responses to the French Revolution. Imagining the terror meant coming to terms with law as popular violence. Here again, Americans found themselves faced with a countermodel of radical participatory justice.