Lizzie Borden on Trial: Murder, Ethnicity, and Gender by Joseph A. Conforti (review)

In 1892, the indictment of a proper Victorian young woman of Fall River, Massachusetts, for the hatchet murders of her stepmother and father shocked and divided the nation. After her trial and acquittal, controversy continued, producing a voluminous literature from scholars, amateur historians, and novelists, as well as a television series, movies, and theatrical productions. But Conforti’s Lizzie Borden on Trial is the scholarly treatment that the subject has been awaiting—not that Borden would approve of Conforti’s assessments of her or of the judges who ensured her acquittal. In his richly texture narrative, the interplay of class, ethnicity, and gender will interest readers of this journal, as will his clear presentation of the legal issues that unfolded in the courtroom.

Conforti’s New England connections, not to mention his recent memoir of growing up in Fall River, uniquely qualify him to provide the definitive account of this enduringly fascinating case. Unlike previous accounts, this one places the case in the context of a small industrial city dominated by Yankee mill owners but undergoing economic, social, political, and cultural changes as French Canadians, Portuguese, and Italians joined the earlier-arriving Irish Catholics. Conforti argues that Irish Catholic control of the city’s politics and police force figured prominently in the conduct and outcome of the trial. His novel perspective weaves into his story how late nineteenth-century class, ethnic, and gender tensions shaped contemporary perceptions of local and national observers whether they believed Borden to be guilty or innocent. Conforti pays close attention to how gendered perceptions shaped the views and actions of lawyers, judges, newspaper reporters, and especially Lizzie’s defenders. Progressive women reformers, such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, saw Lizzy Borden as a persecuted heroine and a symbol of women’s lack of legal rights.

Anyone growing up in New England likely has heard of “forty” and “forty-one whacks.” Abby, Borden’s stepmother—not mother as in the doggerel—received nineteen whacks, and Andrew, her father, the second murder victim, a mere ten. A number of Borden’s defenders actually turned the savagery of the murders in Lizzie’s favor; they could not believe that a church-going, Protestant woman could have committed such a barbarous act.

Conforti devotes his longest chapter to describing the Borden family, headed by Lizzie’s dominating, dour, seventy-year old father, who overcame humble beginnings (despite being related to some of the city’s textile grandees) to accumulate a fortune from property and investments. Nonetheless, he lived well below his means, on a street below “The Hill,” an upper-class enclave, in a peculiar house much less comfortable than he could afford, thus frustrating his daughters, especially the thirty-two-year-old, unmarried Lizzie. His purchase of Abby’s father’s homestead and transfer of the deed to her made Lizzie and her sister Emma highly resentful of their stepmother. Andrew’s subsequent gifts to his daughters failed to placate them. Lizzie’s expensive and well-connected defense lawyers, however, managed to paint a picture of domestic harmony in a household rent with bitterness. According to Conforti, the defense team’s close ties to the presiding judges strongly influenced the trial’s outcome. Besides, the judges were loath to believe that a church-going woman of Lizzie’s caste could commit so heinous a crime. In many ways, the division in Fall River was tribal: Lizzie was a member of a nativist tribe that, besieged in politics and competing with new ethnic groups in the factories, determined to protect one of its own.

Not all of the city’s old elite circled the wagons. District Attorney Hosea M. Knowlton reluctantly but dutifully prosecuted the case, believing beyond a doubt that Lizzie was guilty but entertaining no hope of a conviction. Lizzie’s bravura performance as victim in the courtroom also tipped the scales in her favor; Conforti insightfully suggests that she possessed...