Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 42, number 1, autumn, 1958

              A Farmer Halts the Hangman: The Story of Marvin Bovee
by Elwood R. McIntyre
"From the newspaper accounts of every exe¬ cution, I learned how Mr. So and So and Mr. Somebody Else and Mr. So On shook hands with the culprit. But I never find them shak¬ ing hands with the hangman. All kinds of attention and consideration are lavished on the one, but the other is universally avoided like a pestilence. Is it because the hangman exe¬ cutes a law which all men instinctively abhor?" —Charles Dickens.'
A SINGLE TERM in the legislature of 1853, -^*- as leader of a hard-fought but successful drive to abolish capital punishment in Wis¬ consin, turned Senator Marvin H. Bovee, Waukesha County farmer, into a zealous and resourceful penal reformer. Brought suddenly into prominence, his aid was sought in many antigallows campaigns across the nation dur¬ ing the ensuing thirty-five years. At times he was praised and victorious; often he was de¬ rided in defeat.
Bovee's heritage foreshadowed his life of public usefulness. His parents, both natives of New Amsterdam, New York, where Marvin Bovee was born on January 5, 1827, had sym¬ pathetic association with Quakers and Uni¬ tarians. The father, Matthias J. Bovee, a Jack- sonian Democrat with a flair for progressive liberalism, was elected to the New York state assembly in 1826, and ten years later, at the age of thirty-four, was elected to Congress as a Democratic Representative from New York.
He served in the 25th Congress, and when the second session opened in 1836, Speaker Polk put him on the Committee of the Whole on Expenditures of the War Department.^ To his mother Marvin gave credit for a happy child¬ hood in which she "taught me to hate nothing but injustice and cruelty."^
Marvin's youthful plans to enter Union Col¬ lege at Schenectady, New York, were aban¬ doned when the family of eleven persons moved to Wisconsin Territory in 1843. They settled on a farm in Eagle township, Waukesha County, where Matthias acquired over a thou¬ sand acres of land, some of which he turned over to his children.* The Eagle township cen¬ sus of seven years later shows Marvin and his five brothers and three sisters living with their parents on a prosperous forty-acre farm valued at $6,000, having machinery worth $250, two teams of horses, a yoke of oxen, a dozen milch cows, forty hogs, and a flock of sheep. In that year, 1850, Eagle township had 125 farms, with only twenty of them valued at more than $3,000. The Bovees' close neighbors were the Pittmans, Spragues, Hinkleys, and Thomases.
Waukesha County was a hotbed of anti- slavery sentiment and advanced political ideas, and in their new home the Bovees took a keen interest in school and lodge affairs as well as politics. The organization of School District No. 9 at Eagle Center, December 6, 1846, found Matthias, his son William, and his brother Phillip taking part. His son Marvin taught school for four winter terms in the vi¬ cinity. Father and son were charter members of Robert Morris Lodge, F. & A.M., of Eagle Center, and together joined the Democratic "Granite Club."
Apparently the elder Bovee never held pub¬ lic office in Wisconsin. He tried, however, to contest the seat of Charles Burchard as a con¬ stitutional convention delegate in 1P46. His claims of miscounted votes and expense bills were   rejected  by  the  credentials  committee.
' London Daily News, March 14, 1846.
' Biographical Dictionary of the American Congress (Washington, 1950), 179; Register of Debates in Congress (Gales & Seaton, Washington, 1836), 12:1,941.
' Marvin H. Bovee, Christ and the Gallows; or. Reasons for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (New York, 1870), iii.
¦" James F. Bovee, Eagle, Wisconsin, to the author, October 16, 1956.