Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Full download Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation 1st Edition Bruce Dorsey file pdf all chapter on 2024
Full download Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation 1st Edition Bruce Dorsey file pdf all chapter on 2024
https://ebookmass.com/product/murder-in-the-mill-race-e-c-r-
lorac/
https://ebookmass.com/product/murder-in-the-mill-race-e-c-r-
lorac-2/
https://ebookmass.com/product/a-murder-in-hollywood-the-untold-
story-of-tinseltowns-most-shocking-crime-casey-sherman/
https://ebookmass.com/product/paint-me-a-murder-a-steamy-small-
town-murder-mystery-mystery-she-wrote-book-3-delta-james/
John Stuart Mill - Sobre o Progresso e a Educação 1st
Edition John Stuart Mill
https://ebookmass.com/product/john-stuart-mill-sobre-o-progresso-
e-a-educacao-1st-edition-john-stuart-mill/
https://ebookmass.com/product/secrets-lies-and-consequences-a-
great-scholars-hidden-past-and-his-proteges-unsolved-murder-
bruce-lincoln/
https://ebookmass.com/product/children-young-people-and-the-
press-in-a-transitioning-society-1st-ed-edition-faith-gordon/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-crime-scene-a-visual-guide-1st-
edition-massey/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-detectives-companion-in-crime-
fiction-a-study-in-sidekicks-1st-edition-lucy-andrew-editor/
Murder in a Mill Town
Murder in a Mill Town
Bruce Dorsey
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
ISBN 978–0–19–763309–0
eISBN 978–0–19–763311–3
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197633090.001.0001
For Martha, forever
What think you of Ephraim K. Avery? Is he guilty, or not guilty? Read, try, judge
and determine for yourselves.
Act I: Murder
1. The Haystack
2. A Troubled Marriage
3. Native Sons
4. Useful in This World
5. Factory Girl
6. A Methodist Family
7. Moving Planet
8. Circuit Rider
9. Moral Police
10. Fornication and Lying
11. “If I Am Missing”
12. Manhunt
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Murder in a Mill Town
New England towns where Sarah Maria Cornell and Ephraim Avery lived and
worked.
Disputed routes taken by Ephraim Avery on December 20, 1832.
Prologue
Before the Curtain Rises
LONG BEFORE THE DOORS OPENED, a crowd gathered outside the theater.
Noisily, they bustled in, country folk and urban dandies alike, to find
themselves good seats. The old mansion’s walls reverberated with
their footsteps on the hardwood floors, spirited greetings, idle
gossip, and talk of politics.
The playhouse had once been the country home of Aaron Burr,
who nearly thirty years earlier returned across the Hudson River to
his Richmond Hill estate from the New Jersey palisades after his
notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton. As Burr’s fortunes waned
and the growing city encroached from the south and east, John
Jacob Astor purchased the mansion, lifted it and rolled it a few
blocks closer to the center of Manhattan, and converted it into the
Richmond Hill Theatre.
Earlier the same summer a teen-aged Walt Whitman had
described feeling mesmerized by the dark green curtain of a New
York theater. Transfixed when it lifted, with “quick and graceful
leaps, like the hopping of a rabbit,” Whitman knew that behind the
drapery lay a “world of heroes and heroines, and loves, and
murders, and plots, and hopes.” As the Richmond Hill’s curtain rose
this September night, a cotton factory at sunrise came into view.
Young women conversed as they commenced their work, beginning
the night’s feature, Sarah Maria Cornell: or, The Fall River Murder.1
Surely the audience erupted as Matilda Flynn entered as the title
character. Playing opposite drama’s biggest male stars the previous
autumn in New York, the twenty-something actress found herself
now headlining a company full of amateurs and unknowns.2 As
Sarah Maria Cornell, she breaks into the factory-floor gossip of her
co-workers:
“Good morning sisters. I have been a lazy girl; you have got a-head of me.”
“What detained you Sarah? You are not usually behind us at work.”
“I have had such a dreadful dream . . .”
As Cornell relays her premonition that she will die a violent death
at the hands of another, the girls gather around, occasionally
interrupting her to remind the audience that, no matter her fate,
Cornell is a “good, virtuous, and industrious” woman.3
And so an onstage whirlwind began, carrying the audience from a
cotton mill with its “factory girls” to a farmhouse of guileless Yankees
—familiar stock characters—to an isolated, wooded glade where a
camp meeting and a Methodist minister evoked chaos, sex, violence,
ambition, and greed, before drawing to a close at a haystack with
the killing foretold in the play’s title.
None of this surprised the Richmond Hill audience. Entering the
theater, they passed enormous posters depicting in graphic detail the
scene of a man strangling a woman. They had seen similar images
in handbills plastered on street corners, with smaller versions
adorning their playbills.
They knew the characters and the story before the curtain rose
because it mirrored a real-life drama that played out in newspapers
for months in 1833. By summer’s end, the factory girl and the
preacher had become cultural celebrities, immortalized in at least
two plays and in songs about the affair that were performed in
Broadway revues for months on end.
Young America had little experience yet with a phenomenon that
would one day be a defining feature of popular culture in the United
States: sensational criminal cases that garnered the label “crime of
the century”—no matter how frequently such crimes occurred. Here
was the nation’s first spectacular trial, and Americans couldn’t get
enough of it. Theatergoers had come that evening—and would
return night after night—to experience a scandal performed in
accelerated time.4
When theatergoers purchased a ticket in the 1830s, they expected
a smorgasbord of entertainment—Shakespeare plays, farces, a
medley of popular songs, circus stunts, equestrian troupes—
sometimes all on the same night. Or they might be hoping for a
melodrama, a play depicting a morally polarized universe of good
and evil, of innocent virtue and depraved villainy. Audiences sought
out melodramas because, as Herman Melville observed, they wanted
performances that offered “more reality than real life itself can
show.” Yet in Cornell’s story, real life itself resounded with the
unmistakable qualities of melodrama. Passion, virtue, seduction, a
vulnerable young woman, a hypocritical villain, dark plotting, and
irrepressible urges to speak incessantly in order to leave nothing
unsaid, all were on full view in this scandalous murder case.5
Still, Sarah Maria Cornell at the Richmond Hill was not a typical
melodrama. It borrowed from comedies and Gothic horror, and most
important, its virtuous heroine neither triumphed over nor escaped
from her villainous, seducing foe. Instead, this protagonist met her
demise through rape and murder.
The real-life demise of Sarah Maria Cornell and all that followed
illuminate the very essence of a transformative moment in history,
unveiling what anthropologists call a social drama. Such a drama
begins when normal and peaceful means of redressing a crime fail to
satisfy longings for more complete explanations. Social dramas
prompt two questions: Why did this happen? and What does it tell
us about who we are? An ensuing scandal reveals deep cleavages
emanating from the struggle to come to grips with a world seeming
to change before one’s very eyes. Public fascination with the crime
exceeds the bounds of normal curiosity surrounding everyday gossip
and news. In search for answers people look to cherished beliefs
about politics, religion, and family. They turn to familiar stories and
plots to make sense of human actions and their repercussions.
Collectively, they participate in an enveloping drama that, in turn,
transforms the world they sought to comprehend.6
Audiences flocked to the theater or purchased popular reading
about the factory girl and the preacher so they could take part in a
scandal rich in personal meaning. In the stories of the saga’s key
characters they saw the experiences of their neighbors and families,
sensing keenly that issues that mattered in their own changing lives
were being played out in a legal thriller. They understood that
women in a new workplace called the factory had uncharted
opportunities to live independent lives, but they could also be
exposed to sexual threats and to rumors and gossip, threatening
their livelihoods and reputations. They knew too the disparity of
power brandished in sexual violence and its double standard of
culpability. Long before organized movements to confront sexual
harassment and sexual violence, Americans understood and
explained these real dramas with their own ideas about vulnerability
and coercion.
Those who were captivated by this story sensed too what was at
stake when evangelical religion began to take center stage in their
culture and politics. At a dizzying pace, religious beliefs and personal
identities were becoming intertwined with the economic marketplace
and partisan politics of a young democracy. Even if they couldn’t
foresee the long history of a politics that construed personal choices
and a changing society as contests over moral values, Americans
knew the cultural battles exposed by such a scandalous case. They
sensed especially that fast-changing new forms of communication—
an explosion of new print media—mirrored the incessant movement
of individuals into new communities and new professions.
If this shocking tale of a preacher and a factory girl constitutes a
social drama, it is a drama with a multitude of narrators, scripts, and
performers—a contest over stories and storytelling. Stories reveal
what mattered most to people in the past; how they lived their lives;
how they explained their own actions and the behavior of friends,
neighbors, and strangers; and how they communicated their most
deeply prized values. Stories expose as well how little people
understood the historical transformations that shaped their personal
lives, their society, and their culture.
As the curtain rises on the pages that follow, a real rather than an
imagined drama of the preacher and the factory girl begins. It is a
tale in which violence and storytelling expose the personal histories
of two complicated people whose lives intersected amid an ever-
changing world that each of them tried to embrace but could not
control. Although they lived in an exceptional time, they were not
themselves exceptional human beings. Their personal histories
survive as narratives of ordinary people whose experiences
embodied the spirit of a new world taking shape right before their
own—and our—eyes.
ACT I
Murder
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
isomman summan rahaa. Mutta oi inhimillisten toiveiden turhuutta,
niin vaatimattomia kuin ne olkootkin: täsmälleen saapui räätälin
oppipoika asuntooni, käsivarrellaan uusi pukuni.
*****
Muutoin tuo jalo tyylikukkanen: "Minä kysyn vaan", oli juuri näihin
aikoihin ilmestynyt joidenkin pääkaupungin lehtien palstoille ja minä
olin sen nyt ensimäisenä ympännyt kolkkalalaiseen
sanomalehtipuuhun. Se ei antanutkaan Pohjantähden Yskälle
rauhaa, ennenkun hänkin oli saanut tilaisuuden käyttää sitä
petiittipätkässään.
*****
Kolkkalan henkinen elämä oli siis tuntuvasti vilkastunut, sillä nyt
riideltiin kolmikannassa. Alussa olivat Riento ja Pohjantähti hyvän
aikaa yhdestä puolin "virallisen lehden" kimpussa, kuten he
Kolkkalan Sanomain suureksi harmiksi sitä nimittivät, syystä että sen
päätoimittaja oli valtuuston jäsen ja lehti siten onnistui saamaan
viralliset kaupungin uutiset tuoreimpina.
*****
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.