|
|
|
Book Review
| Elaine Forman Crane, Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp. 248. $24.95 (ISBN: 0-8014-4002-5).
|
| Historians once used to argue about application of the term "Puritan" to describe many of the sects that arose in England and New England during the early seventeenth century. It became popular to show that the people ordinarily identified as Puritan by their residence in Massachusetts or Connecticut were not always so. The unconventional and puzzling use of "Puritan" to describe late seventeenth-century Rhode Islanders is the only rub in an otherwise gripping account of the death of Rebecca Cornell, a Quaker, whose son was hanged for her murder. |
1
|
|
Rebecca Cornell's death in 1673 occurred under strange circumstances. While her family dined in another room, her charred body was lying in her bedroom. No one heard her cry out or smelled anything. The murderer, if there was one, managed not to burn down the entire house. Her son, Thomas, was the last to see her alive, and folks knew they did not get along well. He resented her for holding out on his inheritance. In his forties and with a family he was forced to live at home with his mother, giving her the "master bedroom." She accused him of abuse. |
2
|
|
The problem of the delayed inheritance is familiar to historians of New England. A great many sons in Massachusetts resented the control of their fathers, who were living longer, even into their seventies, at a time when men in England died in their early fifties. The reason that the scenario of parent/child tension is such a persistent theme in the community studies of Massachusetts has to do both with the arguably severe nature of its patriarchy and with the scarcity of land in its eastern towns in the early eighteenth century. Thomas Cornell's father was dead, and there were land opportunities. In Rhode Island, Thomas seems to have been a fellow afflicted with a mother who would neither let him go nor give him the approval and love he craved. |
3
|
|
Did he kill her? The author presents several possibilities about how Rebecca Cornell may actually have died. What killed Thomas was the testimony against him, including one man who had seen Rebecca's specter in a dream. Thomas protested his innocence to the end. As a murder investigation reconstructed from records of long ago, Crane does a good job of keeping the reader interested. She shows in diagrams where the body was found, describes the evidence at the scene, reviews witness accounts. All of these details are fascinating. |
4
|
|
If the author had matched her knowledge of historical criminal investigation with a reliable analysis of the religious and legal climate of Rhode Island at the time, the importance of the book would be irrefutable. Murder charges were rare in colonial times; death by accident, especially women falling into fires, more frequent. The author intended the case, with generational conflict and religious differences, to be a vehicle for a larger story. It is not, though, because Crane examines the environment as a "Puritan" one and relies heavily on studies of Massachusetts to interpret the cultural patterns surrounding the crime. Moreover, she uses Cotton Mather's writings as a basis for understanding Puritan ideas of womanhood, forgiveness, and the ritual of execution, and then imputes these ideas to Rhode Islanders. Mather became Boston's most famous preacher, but in 1673 he had not yet produced one of his great sermons. He was ten years old. |
5
|
|
This loose application of the history of ideas allows Crane to label her subjects Puritans. In 1673 those who wished to escape Puritan justice, still dependent on biblical law, ran to Rhode Island, which had a secularized legal system. The chronology of ideas and the geography of ideas are forgotten in this study. In old England, the perjorative "Puritan" was by 1673 replaced by "dissenter," but previously it would have included Quakers, Baptists, Antinomians, Familists, and all of the sects that the "Puritans" of Massachusetts could not stand. Historians of American Puritanism have not applied "Puritan" so generously. In a day when historians are under fire for their cliometrics, the history of culture that evades counting seems a safe bet. Nevertheless, the histories of religion and law still have timelines and defined spaces. |
6
|
|
There are problems with denying Rhode Island's strangeness among the other New England colonies, including the real religious climate that invented it and the legal system its residents chose. When Rebecca's family emigrated from England they arrived in Massachusetts in the midst of the Antinomian Controversy. Their associations with the Hutchinsonians created discomfort, and they removed to Rhode Island. By the time Anne Hutchinson reached Portsmouth she had become truly radical in her beliefs. Rebecca, like many women who lived in Rhode Island after the controversy, became a Quaker. If Crane could stop time, the Rhode Island of 1637 could easily be "Puritan." In that first migration, the exiles were certainly only variants of their Massachusetts counterparts. Quickly, though, Rhode Island became a hotbed of dissent from the dissenters in Massachusetts. |
7
|
|
Crane calls Rhode Island's legal culture "the curious blending of past and present." She says it was "far ahead" of its "sister colonies" because it had greater protection of defendants' rights (29). Her assessment is half-right. Rhode Island, a despised step-sister of the colonies that had ejected her residents, elected to have an English system, complete with lawyers and the common law. Its courts were formalistic and gave civil litigants and criminal defendants the kind of procedural due process recognizable today as fair. The Puritans of Massachusetts and Connecticut set up legal systems without lawyers. In a time of legal reform and contested ideas concerning the common law, Rhode Island took one path, and its neighboring colonies another. Massachusetts was more experimental if not progressive. In 1673, when Rebecca died, Massachusetts had not yet been made over into a royal colony, and it was practicing law using Puritan principles of justice. By 1647, Rhode Island had already adapted English law to its colonial situation. The testimony of a specter, certainly an oddity to the modern eye, raises itself another tempting specter, this time of the Salem witch trials. Before the Salem trials, most jurisdictions in the Anglo-American world would have accepted spectral evidence in limited situations. Crane uses the Salem witch trials to discuss the spectral evidence in Rebecca's case, but it is a hazardous comparison. |
8
|
|
Killed Strangely is a seductive book. The mystery surrounding the death, the interplay of family dynamics, the local politics that make the verdict both surprising and certain, add to our understanding of colonial history. Any reader would be intrigued by this case, and the book is satisfying in its forensic examination of evidence. The analysis of the culture it is trying to describe is more questionable. |
9
|
| Katherine A. Hermes
|
| Central Connecticut State University |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|