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11. Sex and Other Middle-Class Pastimes in the Life of Ann Carson
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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11 Sex and Other Middle-Class Pastimes in the Life of Ann Carson Susan Branson In 1816 a respectable, middle-class woman named Ann Baker Carson attempted to kidnap the governor of Pennsylvania. Why she performed such a daring deed is a tale of the nineteenth-century world turned upside down and inside out. Carson related her version of the crime in her memoir, the History of the Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson (1822).1 The events described in the History, though unusual, are accurate. Newspaper accounts, trial transcripts, and letters corroborate Carson’s tale. Yet it is Carson’s interpretation of those facts, an interpretation that cannot be verified, that offers a rich source of information about emerging class identity in the nineteenth century. A memoir is a unique opportunity for someone to shape or create an identity. The author can say anything she wants, any way she wants, about herself, including who she believes herself to be (or at any rate, who she wants the reader to believe her to be). Ann Carson was bound by certain facts that were common knowledge, such as her parents’ occupation, and her own occupation, education, and friendships. Carson could not change these things about herself. But how she represented these circumstances and events to her readers—her consciousness of audience, her intentions, and her assumptions about society—all provide an uncommon perspective on North America’s developing middle class and women’s place within it. Her social and economic background placed her squarely within that segment of Euro-American society that promoted a new sense of refinement and adherence to the gendered behavior dictated by the ideology of separate spheres. Carson’s father, Thomas Baker, was a ship’s captain employed by various Philadelphia shipping firms who kept his family in genteel comfort. He sent his daughters, including Ann, who was born in 1785, to some of the first female academies in Philadelphia. But a reversal of fortune in the late 1790s compelled the Bakers to marry off their fifteen-year-old daughter to one of her father’s fellow officers, thirty-nine-year-old Captain John Carson. Carson was the son of the well-known Philadelphia physician John Carson. The captain ’s income and social status should have kept Ann in the comfortable middle-class world she knew.2 But the captain was an alcoholic who could not consistently fulfill his financial obligations. At Ann Carson’s insistence, in 1812 he sailed off to the East Indies. In October 1815, believing that the captain was dead (having not heard from him in three years), Ann Carson married Richard Smith, a handsome but penniless young Irishman several years younger than she. But the captain was alive and well. He returned to Philadelphia a few months after Carson’s marriage to Smith. Upon discovering his wife bigamously married, Captain Carson threatened to divorce her. Before legal action was taken by any of the parties concerned, Richard Smith shot and killed Captain Carson. Smith was convicted of murder and sentenced to die. Ann Carson was tried as an accessory to murder, but no clear evidence surfaced to substantiate the indictment. Carson was acquitted. Though there were mitigating circumstances in Smith’s situation, including Captain Carson’s threats to kill Smith, the governor of Pennsylvania refused to grant a pardon. Carson, as she explained in her memoir, then chose the only means she believed left to her: she acquainted herself with “the fraternity of desperadoes, who keep civilized society in bodily fear for either life or property.”3 Having planned to kidnap the governor and force him to release her condemned lover, Carson accompanied two armed men to the vicinity of Selinsgrove, Governor Snyder’s estate near Lancaster. But once her plan was discovered, Snyder’s friend John Binns wrote to the governor, warning him of Carson’s plot: The infernal Fiend who has caused the murder of her husband and the violent death of him she called her husband is raging with madness and has put all upon the cast of the die. . . . Do this or do anything else your judgment may direct to guard you against this enraged Tygress [sic] for a time. . . . I beseech you to guard against all the machinations of this Fiend of Hell for a little while and all will be over.4 Carson and her men were apprehended as they neared the vicinity of the governor’s residence. Richard Smith’s execution proceeded as scheduled, and Carson stood...