Harry Themal

The 1971-72 legislature saw the birth of the Coastal Zone Act and the death after 350-plus years of the Delaware whipping post.

At the end of the 126th General Assembly’s first session in June 1971, Gov. Russell Peterson signed the landmark Coastal Zone Act.

That day also became known as Black Monday, as political reporter Celia Cohen recalled in her book, “Only in Delaware,” because Peterson’s financial aides had underestimated Delaware’s income and the $250 million budget faced a $5 million deficit,

That 1971 financial crisis is certainly echoed in the current session’s much more massive struggle to balance an unbalanced budget.

Also echoed today are Peterson’s warnings through the years about efforts to weaken or change the Coastal Zone Act, a clarion call the current administration and legislature seem in a hurry to ignore.

One major accomplishment of the 1972 second session stands firm: a new criminal code for Delaware. It’s almost exactly 45 years since Peterson signed the code into law at Buena Vista at 9 a. m. July 1, 1972. The code became effective a year later and meant the end of Delaware’s infamous whipping post.

It is an anniversary worth recalling because the new code should lead to other justice and prison reforms needed today.

Most Delawareans today may not even know about an infamous chapter in the state’s history: the First State had a whipping post on the law books into the 1970s.

One of Peterson’s first moves after his election in November 1969 was to order the three whipping posts in each county prison taken down, even though the law said they must be maintained. By law they could also not be photographed, but many engravings and some photographs of whippings were circulated, including in Harper’s and Scribner’s magazines and even on picture postcards.

Peterson recalled in his Delaware Heritage Commission biography by Chris Perry, “They…put them in a storage room. I got a lot of flack from that, the governor breaking the law. I said, ‘I’m not breaking the law…Come, I’ll show you where we are storing them. No one took me up on that.’”

Before running for office, Peterson, then a DuPont Co. research director, had made his first foray into the public sphere by organizing and directing a statewide prison reform system called the 3-S Citizens Campaign: Salvage people, Save dollars, Shrink the crime rate. Don’t we need another one?

The last lashes were actually imposed 65 years ago. On June 16, 1952, a prisoner tied to a post in the yard of the New Castle County Workhouse at Kirkwood Highway and Greenbank Road received 20 lashes “well laid on” his bare back by the jail warden. I was among several reporters and a few other witnesses to his punishment.

Up to 40 lashes were given over the years for dozens of crimes including robbery, wife-beating, adultery, burglary, horse theft, embezzlement, obstructing train tracks, and showing a false light causing a ship to be wrecked.

A 1947 book, “Red Hanna,” by Robert Caldwell, a Delaware and Pennsylvania professor, traces the history of whipping of a vast majority of men. Caldwell reports that the last lashing of a woman was in New Castle County on Nov. 24, 1865. She was convicted of larceny, lashed 20 times and then sold for five cents for a seven-year term of servitude.

“Red Hannah’s” extensive research of the first 42 years of the 20th century found 1,604 whippings or 22 percent of all convicted prisoners . There’s no total count of whippings from the first record in 1654.

Once previously when I wrote about the whipping post, some readers asked why it was necessary to dredge up such an ignominious part of our state’s history. Unfortunately, for many years, whipping was the one distinction the state could claim that was known to the outside world.

Harry Themal has written a News Journal column since 1989.