Review: Julie Miller’s Cry of Murder on Broadway: A Woman’s Ruin and Revenge in Old New York

Reviewed by Lindsay Keiter 

On the steps of the Astor Hotel on a fall evening in 1843, Amelia Norman plunged a small knife into her former lover’s chest. Immediately apprehended, Norman’s subsequent trial for attempted murder caused a media sensation. Championed by an unlikely coalition of middle-class moral reformers, including abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, and working-class political activists, Norman’s story did not “change history.” Rather, Miller contends, it is significant because it “reveal[s] the machinery of history, the way it progresses in twisty and unexpected ways, one step forward and two steps back, enmeshed in contemporary values and circumstances that later become obscure, propelled by chance events and unlikely actors who are unaware that forces of history are working through them.”

Cry of Murder on Broadway: A Woman's Ruin and Revenge in Old New York
By Julie Miller
Cornell University Press, Three Hills, 2020
280 pages

Miller constructs a compelling narrative through meticulous investigation and contextualization.  She thoughtfully mines a fragmented documentary record — Norman’s trial minutes and police records, county court and genealogy records, contemporaries’ diary entries and often sensationalized writings about Norman — augmenting her explanations with detailed descriptions of the city Norman navigated. Opening with a dramatic recounting of the crime, Miller then steps back to detail Norman’s origins in rural New Jersey and eventual move to New York. Born in 1818, by the time Norman was an adolescent the hard-scrabble iron-mining of Sussex County was becoming more respectable, with growing numbers of schools and churches. Yet the Norman family was evidently troubled; Amelia’s mother Rebecca had been abandoned by her first husband when he left for Ohio with their son, soon after which Rebecca married her first husband’s younger brother Peter, giving birth to eight children before dying in 1825. Peter remarried within the year, ultimately fathering eight more children with his second wife. Two of Amelia’s brothers were robbing their neighbors while she awaited trial, and the youngest was in and out of jail repeatedly. As Miller points out, we have no way of knowing if Amelia was eager to leave her limited prospects in Sussex County behind, but she joined thousands of young women flowing into New York City when she accepted a former neighbor’s offer of employment. Six years later, she would cross paths with Henry Ballard, soon to be her lover and eventually, her stabbing victim.

While also an emigrant, Ballard left an affluent family with deep roots in Puritan Massachusetts. In 1837, when he was twenty-five and already a partner in a dry-goods company, he relocated to New York with his mistress of five years, Sarah, who assumed his last name. Sarah would later tell Norman’s lawyers that Henry had seduced her as a teenager in Philadelphia and repeatedly coerced her into having abortions in their nine years together. In 1841, Ballard abandoned Sarah after meeting Amelia Norman. Like any suitor, he treated Norman to entertainments and refreshments, winning her trust. He exploited that trust one day by tricking her into entering a house of prostitution where he convinced, coerced, or forced her to have sex. Initially despondent, a pregnant Norman spent a year moving from one boarding house to another as Ballard’s new mistress. After terminating her first pregnancy, Norman gave birth in 1842 to child whose birthdate, name, and even sex somehow eluded documentation. When Ballard tried to force Norman to deny his paternity, one of her former employers, police clerk William Callender, filed a seduction tort. Seduction torts allowed fathers or masters to sue for damages on behalf of daughters and servants, emerging in England the 17th century to compensate male heads of household for the labor of female dependents lost as a result of pregnancy and childbirth. As Norman was an employee rather than a dependent of Callender, the suit was unlikely to move forward, but Callender withdrew when Ballard promised to provide for Norman and their child. Instead, Ballard deposited her at another house of prostitution and disappeared to England, leaving Norman to support herself and her child, possibly as a dressmaker, likely at least in part through prostitution.

In 1843, Ballard returned from England, and he and Norman resumed their sexual relationship as well as their conflict. Norman even joined forces with Sarah, Ballard’s prior mistress, to confront him, attacking him with her fists and then her parasol when he refused to speak with them. Ballard then reported Norman as a prostitute to the police, who had recently been enjoined to by the mayor to arrest “all loose women,” landing her in jail on charges of vagrancy and disorderly conduct. Ballard’s charge was dismissed when she counter-claimed seduction, even though as the victim Norman had no standing to sue; in a seduction tort, the only victim was the man whose rights to the seduced woman’s labor were compromised. Still desperate for help supporting their child, Norman requested a modest weekly contribution; in response, Ballard told her to “go and get her living as other prostitutes did.” Ballard’s contempt apparently tipped Norman from desperation to murderous rage.

Awaiting her trial in the gloomy Tombs prison, which Miller vividly details, Norman caught the attention of working-class politician and journalist George Wilkes, who portrayed her sympathetically in his memoir of his imprisonment for libel and assault. It was also in her cell where Norton made the acquaintance of her most dedicated champion, esteemed children’s author Lydia Maria Child. Like the members of New York’s Moral Reform Society, she saw Norton as the victim of a sexual double standard, where men suffered no consequences for engaging in extramarital sex. But Child also resented the inequality that forced most women to rely on promises of material support from men — promises that men like Henry Ballard dangled and withdrew, and men like her own hapless husband David failed to keep. Child’s fiery “Letter from New York No. V,” written while she cared for Norman after the trial, condemned the legal system that left women like Norman no recourse after being seduced and abandoned.

Norman’s trial unfolded in an overflowing courtroom, where an eager audience raucously expressed their support for her. Ballard did his best to conceal himself from the crowd and the jury; though subpoenaed by the defense, neither he nor Norman testified. Despite the efforts of the prosecution to block testimony about Norman and Ballard’s relationship, Norman’s lawyers introduced their history as they sought to prove that Ballard’s seduction had rendered Norman temporarily insane. Though the defense failed to meet the legal definition of insanity, the jury was easily persuaded to accept a narrative already well-established in novels about fallen women. The jurors returned a verdict of not guilty in only ten minutes, prompting cheers and applause from the audience. Amelia Norman was released from prison into the care of Child, who nursed her back to health and found her employment as a housekeeper. In the epilogue, Miller reports on the fates of many of the actors in her story, including Ballard and Child, but Norman’s fate and the fate of her nameless child eluded her. After her sensational trial, Norman was evidently content to fade into obscurity.

While she concedes the case was not a watershed moment, Miller argues that Norman’s trial indirectly had a broader impact: galvanizing the movement to revise seduction laws in New York. While an 1844 attempt to criminalize both adultery and seduction failed, in 1848 reformers achieved a modicum of success due in large part to the efforts of one of Norman’s lawyers. Chaste women seduced under promises of marriage could sue for damages on their own behalf; convicted seducers could serve five years in prison. While New York commissioners decided that women were “separate and equal adult[s]… with just as much right to compensation for fraud as a man,” the law barred the seduced woman from testifying, and classist and racist assumptions about sexuality likely limited its utility for women who were poor, immigrants, or Black. While “the old idea that a woman’s seduction could only be compensated on the basis of loss of services to her father or master was wiped out,” the male lawyers and politicians “legitimized her loss on their own, male terms.” While Miller concludes that “David Graham and his fellow commissioners argued that” a seduced woman “had just as much right to fight her way back from… sexual ruin” as the many men financially ruined in the recent Panic of 1837, it arguably reflected the entrenchment of a capitalist mindset. Sex was still fundamentally transactional — exchanged by women for support through marriage or for monetary damages — and a woman’s reputation as well a labor could be assigned a discrete value.

Concise and engaging, Cry of Murder makes Amelia Norman’s sad story a good read for anyone interested in learning more about 19th-century New York. I expect it will work well in undergraduate courses focused on women, sexuality, or 19th-century urban life. It brings to mind Patricia Cline Cohen’s The Murder of Helen Jewett (New York: Vintage, 1999), which also unspools a compelling tale of sex and violence over roughly twice as many pages. Miller effectively integrates key conclusions on a range of 19th-century subtopics without overwhelming the reader with historiography, creating openings for further investigation in the classroom. For instance, abortion and the appearance of “female physician” Madame Restell at Norman’s trial could set the stage for reading an article on the criminalization of abortion and looking at primary sources like Restell’s advertisements for abortifacients. Through Amelia Norman, Miller humanizes the often-impersonal forces of change that shaped Old New York.

Lindsay Keiter is an assistant professor of history at Penn State Altoona. She specializes in 18th- and 19th-century gender and family history and is currently writing on the financial significance of marriage.