Poetic Justice
At the heart of "The Ransom of Red Chief" is the theme of poetic justice, which means a deserved and commensurate retribution for one's actions. As kidnappers hoping to make a quick $2000 by upending the modest lives of a rural family, Sam and Bill find their criminal intention is answered with a punishment befitting their crime. Rather than distressing Johnny and his father to the point that Johnny is begging to go home and his father is willing to pay the ransom to be reunited with his son, Sam and Bill discover that Johnny prefers to be with them, and his father is not at all concerned to have the boy off his hands for a while. The kidnappers endure poetic justice to a further extent as Johnny wears down Bill's sense of sanity and Dorset responds to the ransom demand with a counter-proposition that involves the kidnappers paying him—the boy's father—to take Johnny back from them. Ultimately, the men pay the man his $250 counter-ransom and run out of town because they are traumatized by the boy who should have feared them.
Make-Believe
Another of the story's major themes is make-believe. Early in the kidnapping, Johnny assumes the character of Red Chief, a Native American warrior. In an ironic inversion of the relationship being captors and captive, Johnny imagines he has taken Sam and Bill as prisoners named Snake-eye and Old Hank. The men play along, presumably because they see no harm in the game, and perhaps imagining that it will keep Johnny distracted during the kidnapping. However, Johnny's commitment to the make-believe antagonism with the men proves to be more harmful than expected. Not knowing the line between make-believe and real physical pain, Johnny terrorizes and injures Bill repeatedly with rocks, a hot potato, and an attempted scalping. Johnny's next game involves pretending to be the Black Scout, who rides a horse—played by Bill—ninety miles before rewarding him with oats. However, the exhaustion of pretending to be a horse and the substitution of sand for oats pushes Bill over the edge, provoking him to abandoned Johnny on the road to Summit. By the end of the story, Bill has been so worn down by Johnny's hyperactive and abusive games of make-believe that he convinces Sam they ought to pay Johnny's father to take the boy back.
Hubris
Hubris—excessive pride or self-confidence that leads to an inescapable downfall—is another dominant theme in "The Ransom of Red Chief." At the beginning of the story, Sam and Bill are overly confident in their ability to pull off a kidnapping plot in Summit. They assess the sleepy town and assume they will find success by targeting an area with little in the way of police resources or newspaper reporters to thwart them. They also believe that simple rural folk are more likely than people in cities to be generously disposed toward their children. With no more consideration than this, they set out to abduct the son of a wealthy local man. However, their belief in themselves blinds them to the fact that Johnny is throwing rocks at a kitten when they first meet him—a sign that the boy doesn't exactly fit the profile of an innocent child they can trick into their buggy with the offer of candy. As the story progresses, Johnny reveals more of his rambunctiousness and unwillingness to go back home, yet Sam remains confident the plan will work. Even when Sam looks out over the countryside and doesn't see the townspeople frantically searching for Johnny, Sam convinces himself that news of the kidnapping probably hasn't spread yet, as he is unwilling to consider that maybe Dorset is pleased to have a night off from looking after his son. Sam's excessive self-confidence also leads him to hold on to Johnny long after Bill learns of Johnny's burdensome nature and suggests that no one would pay to have such a rotten kid back. Ultimately, Sam's belief in his plan leads to his own downfall, as it becomes clear that the only way to get himself out of the situation is to pay Dorset to take Johnny back.
Kidnapping for Ransom
The premise of "The Ransom of Red Chief" revolves around the theme of kidnapping for ransom, the criminal act of abducting a person and holding them captive until relatives of the captive pay the kidnappers. Writing in the early 1900s, O. Henry was likely influenced by the highly publicized case of Charley Ross, who was kidnapped for ransom in 1874 but who was never returned to his family, despite the decades the boy's father spent trying to find his son. While the Ross case ended in tragedy, O. Henry repurposes the premise for comedy, conjuring up a scenario in which the kidnappers are punished by becoming terrorized by the boy they abduct and having to pay a reverse-ransom to get the boy off their hands. With this ironic inversion of the reader's expectation of what kidnappings entail, O. Henry finds humor in an otherwise grave theme.
