The Sewing Girl's Tale by John Wood Sweet

The Sewing Girl's Tale by John Wood Sweet

Author:John Wood Sweet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.


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68 BROADWAY, NEW YORK. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1793. BEFORE 9 P.M.

Women, too, were shocked and disturbed by the Bedlow trial—and they, too, struggled to make their voices heard. A few days after the trial, the forty-six-year-old defense attorney Richard Harison decamped for Albany, leaving his twenty-seven-year-old wife, Frances, in charge of their imposing town house on Broadway, her teenaged stepchildren, her own young daughter, her aged mother-in-law, and a staff of servants that included at least two free people of color and two enslaved people. In his absence, she was besieged by ugly gossip about the trial—and then came the riots. By Wednesday, she was upset enough to write her much older husband an uncharacteristically forceful letter.

A fashionable dresser with an abundance of curly auburn hair, a long face, and penetrating blue eyes, Frances Harison typically filled her letters to her husband with affection, deference, and self-deprecating humor. She would ask for advice about minor business matters and report on her endless rounds of social visits, including sewing circles at which she and her friends sat “at our work” while “chattering about Furniture, Politics, [Dances], and Deaths.” But, in the aftermath of the Bedlow trial, their “chatter” was neither idle nor amusing. With her cousin Edmund Ludlow also facing rape charges that fall, it was hard not to take reaction to the Bedlow trial personally. And members of her social circle were shocked by what they had seen and heard about the trial—particularly, it seems, about the defense team’s tactics. Shamed by the gossip about her husband and shaken by the two nights of street protests, she sat down to compose a letter to him about the riots and what their friends had been saying. Frances Harison was clearly anxious about the letter’s implied criticism of her husband’s professional conduct—and for good reason.

Richard Harison didn’t keep his wife’s letter, but she kept his response—which began by acknowledging that she had been “truly frightened” by the riots, which he went on to ridicule before dismissing everything else she had written. “I could hardly refrain from laughing,” he wrote, at your “tragicomical Description of the Mob,” the dragoons, and “the vast Effusion of Feathers.” For Harison, the rioters were nothing more than members of “an uninformed & unsteady Populace.” Even so, he was aware that the trial had been ugly—and that Bedlow wasn’t exactly innocent. It was his professional duty to defend his client to the best of his ability, Harison explained, “whatever might be the Indecency of the Trial, or the Criminality of the Prisoner.” Nonetheless, he went on, “I have not disgraced myself by uttering a Sentiment favorable to Vice, or occasioning a Blush in the Cheek of Modesty, which could possibly be avoided.” This rebuke, it seems, had the desired effect; a week later, he wrote back to accept his wife’s apology.

This was pretty much the response Abigail Adams had gotten to her 1776 letter asking her husband to remember the ladies. John Adams treated his “saucy” wife’s letter as a joke.



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