This article focuses on the exceptional mildness of criminal punishments for alleged traitors in the wake of the American Revolution. American leaders were disinclined to inflict the death penalty on loyalists who supported British rule in the revolutionary war or on insurgents in the Shays, Whiskey, and Fries rebellions shortly after independence. In fact, the Founding Fathers and other first-generation officials commonly showed remarkable mercy. Numerous “traitors” readily rehabilitated themselves by recognizing their faults, swearing an oath of allegiance to the new American republic, and promising to refrain from further wrongdoing. These revolutionary punishments were a striking prefiguration of modern penal practices: guilty pleas, probation sentences, and rehabilitation policies aiming to reintegrate wrongdoers into society. While American revolutionary punishments comprised stark racial inequities and did not constitute a lost utopia, they were particularly mild for the period. In contrast, the contemporary French Revolution led to wide-scale executions of purported traitors. Besides shedding light on historic events that criminal justice scholars have neglected, the article’s findings are relevant to ongoing debates about American exceptionalism and the peculiar harshness of modern American justice, including originalist and non-originalist interpretations of the Eighth Amendment. The rise of mass incarceration in the United States and its retention of the death penalty can foster cultural essentialism about how American culture traditionally lacks humanistic sensibilities. In reality, the revolutionary criminal punishments of the late eighteenth century demonstrate how America was once a trailblazer in embracing humane conceptions of justice.

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革命性的刑事处罚：叛国罪、怜悯和美国革命

本文重点关注美国独立战争后对被指控叛徒的刑事处罚异常温和。美国领导人不愿对在革命战争中支持英国统治的效忠者或独立后不久的谢斯、威士忌和弗里斯叛乱中的叛乱分子判处死刑。事实上，开国元勋和其他第一代官员普遍表现出非凡的仁慈。许多“叛徒”欣然改过自新，承认自己的错误，宣誓效忠于新的美利坚共和国，并承诺不再犯下错误。这些革命性的惩罚是现代刑罚实践的一个惊人的预兆：认罪、缓刑和旨在让违法者重新融入社会的改造政策。虽然美国革命的惩罚包括明显的种族不平等，并不构成失去的乌托邦，但在那个时期它们特别温和。相比之下，当代法国大革命导致大规模处决所谓的叛徒。除了揭示刑事司法学者忽视的历史事件外，本文的研究结果还与正在进行的关于美国例外论和现代美国司法的特殊严酷性的辩论相关，包括对第八修正案的原始主义和非原始主义解释。美国大规模监禁的兴起及其对死刑的保留可以促进关于美国文化传统上缺乏人文主义敏感性的文化本质主义。事实上，