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2 Marriage, Manhood, and Murder ON THE EVENING of January 20,1816, Ann Carson returned to her home on the corner of Second and Dock streets. She walked through the china shop on the first floor and went upstairs to the family parlor on the second floor above it. There, her parents, Thomas and Jane Baker, were in earnest conversation with Captain John Carson. Moments later, Ann's brotherin -law Thomas Abbott entered the room, his face of a "deadly paleness." Close behind him followed Lieutenant Richard Smith. Smith strode into the room, flung his hat on the sofa, and sat down. Captain Carson rose and confronted Smith, saying, "By God out of this house you must go." As Carson made an effort to grab Smith by the collar, Smith pulled a pistol from his coat and fired at Carson's face. Carson fell to the floor, and Smith dashed down the stairs with Thomas Baker in hot pursuit. Ann Carson flung open a window and shouted, "Murder" into the street below. These events, which took only a few moments, precipitated two deaths and three court trials, all ofwhich turned Ann Carson into the most wellknown and, in some quarters, most vilified, woman in Pennsylvania. All Ann Carson's subsequent troubles stemmed from one moment-when Richard Smith fired a pistol at close range into John Carson's face. Without that instant of dreadful violence, we would know little of a woman named Ann Carson. There would have been no memoir. But because Smith fired that pistol, the law turned a spotlight on her life. This chapter examines two court trials involving Ann Carson: Richard Smith's trial for the murder of John Carson and Ann Carson's trial as accessory to her husband's murder . Both trials illuminate the dynamics of the married state and the conflicting priorities oflegal and affective ties in the early nineteenth century. The Events In the early spring of 1812, John Carson sailed to Europe. That was the last his wife heard from him, or of him, for almost four years. By the time Marriage, Manhood, and Murder 25 John departed, Ann Carson was already an independent woman. Because of John's problems with alcohol, he repeatedly failed to find steady work. To all intents and purposes Ann Carson was the head of the family. It was her income and her steady presence that kept her three children clothed, fed, and cared for. At the time of John's departure, Ann and the children were still living with her parents on the corner ofDock and Second streets, with a shop on the ground floor where Ann sold her china.l With their combined families and incomes, Ann and her parents lived a cramped existence (the house had at most four small bedrooms on the third floor). Although the War of 1812 curtailed the importation of chinaware, Ann's business had revived enough by the spring of1814- that she could afford the house rent on her own. Thomas and Jane Baker and their two youngest sons went to live with their youngest daughter, Mary Abbott, and her husband , a currier, on South Front Street (between Spruce and Pine streets) a few blocks away. Sometime in the late fall of 1814- or early spring of 1815 (Carson said that her husband had been gone "near three years") she visited Thomas Armstrong, "one of the judges of the court, then a practitioner at the bar," to ask him if it was possible to have her marriage annulled because ofJohn's continued absence and his lack ofmaintenance. Ann had already heard a rumor from a returning sailor that John had died in a hospital in Russia, but with no hard evidence ofhis death she wanted legal confirmation that she was a free woman. Judge Armstrong told Ann Carson two things that had a significant impact on her future: (I) she should assume John Carson to be dead and (2) no legal proceedings were necessary. She could consider herself a widow. This reassured Ann, who had no wish "to expose myself and family in a court oflaw." At age twenty-nine, Ann Carson controlled her own destiny. She had independence; financial security; and, according to her, a certain amount of beauty which attracted "many professed admirers."2 One of these admirers was a young lieutenant, Richard Smith. Smith had recently left the army after serving along the Great Lakes, where he had attained distinction at the Battle of Sacketts...

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