The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America

(Holt, $30)

When 17-year-old Lanah Sawyer took her rapist to court in 1793, it “caused worlds to collide,” said Fergus Bordewich in The Wall Street Journal. The accused, Harry Bedlow, was a New York City wealthy rake. Sawyer was a seamstress whose stepfather, a harbor pilot, “represented the rising working and middle classes,” and it was a shock that the family fought back. But Bedlow had persuaded Lanah to join him for a stroll in Lower Manhattan and then dragged her screaming into a brothel and tore off her dress. The resulting trial “became a national sensation,” its outcome triggering rioting. Historian John Wood Sweet has now turned the tale into “a masterpiece of splendidly readable social history” that “opens a window on the tumultuous world of the early republic.”

“To present an accurate depiction of Lanah’s reality,” said Leah Tyler in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sweet

“paints a detailed portrait of America’s 18th-century moral temperature.” Walking to work each day, the teenager was subject to harassing catcalls. After Bedlow attacked her, he was the first gentleman charged with sexual assault in the U.S., and yet the criminal trial became “more about the victim, and society’s perceptions of her morality.” After Lanah bravely testified in court, the all-male jury acquitted Bedlow, but observers were disgusted. Hundreds immediately marched to the brothel and tore it to the ground.

“The acquittal did not mark the end of the story,” said Tali Farhadian Weinstein in The New York Times. Bedlow lost an ensuing civil trial and landed in debtor’s prison after being ordered to pay Lanah’s stepfather “staggering” punitive damages—the legal argument being that Bedlow, by stealing Lanah’s virginity, had robbed her stepfather of the value of her labor. It almost defies belief that Alexander Hamilton entered the case at this point, to argue as a lawyer for Bedlow’s side. “But in the post-Revolutionary New York that Sweet revives,” and whose specters still haunt us today, “it makes all the sense in the world.”