Public Acts of Tennessee 1836: Locating The Source

While researching Nashville Penitentiary convicts, I noted the prisoner Lacy Witcher (and many other prisoners) was “Pardoned under the Act of 1836” (see image 1).

What was this act? Was it simply for good behavior or was there another reason, such as prison over-crowding or perhaps an outbreak of a disease (people who lived through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic may remember prisoner releases).¹

I was able to find the “Act of 1836” at the Tennessee State Library and Archives (TSLA). I had looked every where for this act… WorldCat, GoogleBooks, etc. At the TSLA the wonderful archivist turned around and pulled the book off a shelf behind their desk. VOILA!

The act refers to Tennessee Legislative Act, 1836, Chapter LXIII, section 4. The act is about the commutation of prison sentences: if a prisoner demonstrated good behavior, then the governor could consider shortening the prisoner’s sentence.

[Margin: Commutation of imprisonment]

Sect. 4. Be it enacted, That for the encouragement of the prisoners to conduct themselves with industry and propriety, it shall be the duty of the Governor, whenever it appears from the weekly reports of the agent and keeper that the conduct of a prisoner has been exemplary and unexceptionable for a whole month together, to commute such prisoner’s term of imprisonment for any period of time not exceeding two days for each and every month that he may have so conducted himself.²

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PHOTOGRAPHS: Vanessa Wood, Public Acts of Tennessee, 1835-36 (book), March 2025.

1. E. Ann Carson, PhD, BJS Statistician; Melissa Nadel, PhD, ABT Associates; Gerald Gaes, “Impact of COVID-19 on State and Federal Prisons, March 2020–February 2021,” August 2022, Bureau of Justice Statistics (https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/impact-covid-19-state-and-federal-prisons-march-2020-february-2021). The report shows U.S. prisons released 37,700 prisoners during the period studied.
2. Public Acts Passed at The First Session of the Twenty-First General Assembly of the State of Tennessee. 1835-6 (Nashville, Tennessee: privately published, 1836), 171; Tennessee State Library, Nashville, Tennessee.