Ghosts, Trysts, and Colonial Courts: Micro-History and Legal History in Early America

Elaine Forman Crane. Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. 248 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, and index. $24.95.

John Ruston Pagan. Anne Orthwood's Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Map, notes, and index. $50.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Legal historian John Ruston Pagan has recently revealed that Anne Orthwood and John Kendall first had sex on a Saturday night in 1663. Meanwhile, early American historian Elaine Forman Crane has recounted for the curious that the weather was fine on the wintry day Rebecca Cornell met a mysterious death in 1673. So go the opening lines of their new contributions to early American legal history. Who were Anne, John, and Rebecca, and why have Pagan and Crane unearthed and related such seemingly insignificant details of their lives and deaths? In a win for the genre of micro-history, Pagan's Anne Orthwood's Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia and Crane's Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell each spin engaging yarns that tie together the best of recent scholarship on the colonial Chesapeake and colonial New England respectively while also interweaving their tales with fresh historical questions and issues. Best of all, because both books are brief and compulsively readable, they offer the kind of work tailor-made to grip and hold the imaginations of undergraduates in early American survey courses everywhere.

Crane's offering, published first in 2002, tells the tale of Rebecca Cornell, a colonial Rhode Island widow burnt to death at her own fireside in uncertain circumstances. Indeed, Cornell's contemporaries were so struck by the fact that she had been "killed strangely" that they tried three different people for her murder, even after the first trial resulted in a capital conviction and execution. Following the hanging of Cornell's son, Thomas, his wife, Sarah, and their Native American servant, Wickhopash, were subsequently brought to the bar and acquitted. Even still, their neighbors engaged in prolonged speculation about the possibilities of suicide and accidental death. In Crane's able hands, the legal cases arising from Cornell's demise become a window onto family life in colonial New England, alerting us to the possibility of widespread domestic violence and abuse within what have often been portrayed as peaceable little commonwealths.

Crane warns in the book's introduction that, "readers looking for a thesis. . . will be disappointed" (p. 7). And, in a sense, this is true. Since this is a real-life historical whodunit, there is only so much Crane can do by way of providing satisfactory answers to the questions surrounding the strange death of Sarah Cornell. Yet, ultimately, this disclaimer is misleading. Crane comes to focus the great bulk of her analysis on uncovering the intricacies of the relationship between Rebecca and Thomas Cornell because she believes that the two most likely explanations for Rebecca's death are either that the widow died by her own hand or by the hand of her son. Either scenario allows Crane to argue that greater attention should be paid to the depths to which intergenerational tensions could sink in colonial New England as well as the degree to which the experience of old age was shaped by such stresses. The links between this study and decades of scholarship, from Edmund Morgan to John Demos and Phillip Greven to Carol Karlsen and through to Jane Kamensky, are deliberate and will leap out to Crane's fellow historians. One reason this legal case makes such an effective case study for use with students is because of its potential to provide a vivid and easy introduction to a great deal of scholarship on early New England. But, at the same time, Crane has also offered early American scholars what should prove an irresistible invitation to pursue the historical topics of old age and domestic...