The proposed livestream of Nidal Hasan’s execution by a U.S. military firing squad gives an old question a new audience. Hasan, an Army psychiatrist convicted by a military court of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3, 2026.

Explaining the plan to make his death public, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that “people need to understand … there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

Whether the broadcast will proceed remains uncertain. But as a historian of the early American republic, I recognize a familiar expectation behind it: that watching someone die will teach a useful lesson. Americans at the republic’s founding debated that premise — and doubted what the lesson might be.

The power of government

On Aug. 17, 1797, New Yorkers gathered to watch John Young hang.

An English musician and music publisher struggling with debt, Young had shot and killed Robert Barwick, a deputy sheriff taking him into custody. Barwick left a widow and nine children.

Young’s conviction by a jury brought him to a scaffold surrounded by soldiers, before an immense crowd.

Governor John Jay, a leading Federalist who placed greater faith in firm government than in popular judgment, had authorized the military presence after the sheriff reported fears of a rescue. But Jay also wanted the execution to impress its witnesses with the power of the government carrying it out.

Writing to James Kent, New York City’s chief municipal legal officer, two days before the hanging, Jay stressed that the authority of law should prevail visibly. The occasion should be “particularly solemn and impressive,” he said. The “authority of the law should be seen to bear down (on) all opposition.”

Solemnity, however, proved difficult to arrange. The military escort played lively music as the procession made its way to the scaffold. One newspaper critic thought an uninformed passerby might mistake the spectacle for “the celebration of some........

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