On the eve of the Tanzimat, Mustafa Reşid pointed to “honor” as the starting point of the reform in Ottoman Empire, with the reform essentially meaning a radical change in the notion of political power. This curious idea unique to the mastermind behind the arguably most comprehensive reform project in Ottoman history later culminated in the abolition of torture. While gradually abolishing the practice of torture, the Tanzimat’s criminal law codes justified this policy by declaring torture to be a violation of personal honor. This paper suggests that the abolition of torture was actually the most comprehensive and critical reform of the Tanzimat. It was most dramatically through this policy that the Ottoman reformers conceived and ordinary Ottoman subjects made sense of the Tanzimat as a new beginning. The language of the higher Ottoman bureaucrats in the wake of the Tanzimat put the abolition of torture delicately as the embodiment of all the new principles through which political power now should be exercised. As for the ordinary Ottoman subjects, arguably, they expected the Tanzimat to express itself primarily through a decisive end to the practice of torture, which, I suggest, was due most significantly to that torture had for centuries been the single most common practice through which they closely experienced the arbitrary exercise of state authority. This paper relies primarily on a set of original documents, most significantly a group of orders that the Sublime Porte dispatched to provincial governors over the 1840s and 50s. Through them, the Porte often urged and instructed governors emphatically to not only ensure that the practice of torture was no more tolerable but also about why torture contradicted with the new notion of how the state authority should now be exercised. To further explore the mindset and attitude of the ruling elite as regards the practice of torture during the early decades of the Tanzimat, I read through the legal cases filed against torture and focus on the emphatic statements made by the supreme court, the Meclis-i Vala, while reviewing the provincial court verdicts. Finally, to grasp insights into how Ottoman subjects perceived the abolition of torture from the beginning, I delve into the language of a group of petitions all raising official grievances against torture.