Capital punishment and public hanging

Capital punishment and public hanging appear in Washington Black as punishment enacted before a crowd: the state’s authority is made visible through the scaffold, while spectators gather to watch, react, and disperse. The execution of Louis Hazzard and John Francis Willard at Newgate brings Washington face to face with the end of Willard’s pursuit, but the shared sentence does not erase the racial and personal asymmetries that brought the men there. For Washington, witnessing the hanging closes a long period of fear and revenge while unsettling his belief that he had previously chosen mercy.

A public sentence

Washington and Tanna decide to attend the hanging because he cannot accept Willard’s death without seeing it for himself. The report names two men due to be executed: Louis Hazzard, a Black man convicted of theft and arson, and Willard, a Scotsman convicted of murdering a free man. Washington wonders whether Willard killed another person while pursuing him, mistaking the victim for Washington, or whether he attacked a Black man because that man’s freedom offended him. The narrative presents those possibilities as Washington’s unanswered speculation, not as established facts about the murder.

The execution takes place outside Newgate Prison, in front of a large crowd. Washington estimates that at least four hundred people have gathered. The gallows stands on a raised platform behind a low wooden fence, and vendors and fiddlers contribute to an atmosphere that resembles a public holiday as much as a solemn legal proceeding. The scene makes punishment communal and visible: the audience is not simply present for the sentence but turns the condemned men’s deaths into a spectacle.

The scaffold and its audience

At noon, Hazzard is led out first. Washington sees a man whose appearance is unfamiliar, yet the sight still startles him. Willard follows. Washington recognizes the damaged eye behind Willard’s spectacles and his carefully maintained prison clothes, and sees him searching the crowd. The men stand on the same scaffold, but Washington’s response makes clear that their shared fate does not mean they have occupied comparable positions in life: Willard had hunted Washington, while Hazzard’s separate conviction is named but not connected to that pursuit.

The execution is carried out in a sequence of public acts. The hangman positions the prisoners, places bags over their heads, and releases the platform. After they stop moving, he checks each man and holds him for two minutes to ensure he is dead. A preacher has spoken beforehand, but Washington cannot hear the words. The crowd first jeers and then, after the deaths, erupts in cheering, laughter, and song. Fights break out as people turn from the scaffold toward one another. The spectators’ shift from anticipation to celebration and disorder gives the legal ritual a second life as mass entertainment.

Washington’s reckoning with Willard

Seeing Willard alive at the scaffold changes the meaning Washington assigns to their earlier encounter in Nova Scotia. Washington had understood his decision not to kill Willard as evidence of his decency. At Newgate, he recognizes that fear, rather than moral restraint, had stopped him. He also sees that Willard may have wanted to die at Washington’s hands, casting his pursuit as a quest for a death that would fit his own ideals of martyrdom. This remains Washington’s interpretation of Willard’s imagined desire, but it overturns Washington’s account of himself as the merciful victor.

As the execution reaches its conclusion, dread overtakes Washington. He draws Tanna against him so she will not have to watch the deaths. He nevertheless sees Willard’s moment of panic before the hood covers his face. The contrast between his earlier bloodlust and his present distress does not yield a simple declaration of forgiveness: Washington had wanted Willard dead, yet witnessing the execution exposes the violence and self-deception contained in that desire. His final response is to recognize that the pursuit and its consequences are over.

Meaning and limits of the law

The scene places two Black men in proximity to the same machinery of punishment: Hazzard is condemned alongside the man charged with killing a free man. Washington calls attention to the irony of Willard’s indictment for killing his double and of his execution alongside another Black prisoner. The juxtaposition makes the law’s public claim to punish crime visible, while preserving the distinct circumstances under which the two men enter the spectacle. The evidence does not establish that their cases are legally identical or that the execution corrects the broader injustices Washington has endured.

Public execution also contrasts with the private and plantation authority over enslaved bodies that Washington has known. At Faith Plantation, Erasmus Wilde’s violence includes the killing of James before the enslaved people and the branding of them afterward; later, he refuses an escape plan because he cannot lose fifteen enslaved workers from the fields. At Newgate, by contrast, punishment is performed under the formal apparatus of a prison, scaffold, hangman, and preacher, before a crowd. These forms of violence are not interchangeable, but their juxtaposition shows that legal procedure does not, by itself, make death humane or resolve the inequalities that shape whose lives are exposed to violence.

The hanging ends the immediate story of Willard’s pursuit without offering Washington a clean moral triumph. His decision to attend makes him a witness to both the official procedure and the audience’s response; his recognition that he had misread his own earlier restraint leaves the ending emotionally unsettled even as he accepts that the chase is finished.