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

Reviewed by Carolyn Eastman

It isn’t easy to read the story of a seventeen-year-old girl from a modest family raped by a wealthy and politically well-connected man. Making it even harder to read is the fact that when she chose to charge him with the crime, he and his lawyers accused her of lying, promiscuity, and greed. If those circumstances sound familiar to us in the 21st century, they are harder to find in the late 18th century, when so many rape victims remained silent rather than subject themselves to similar forms of public humiliation. John Wood Sweet’s The Sewing Girl’s Tale doesn’t hold back when laying out the horrific implications of the crime, nor from tracking the painful modern-day resonances of this story for readers. And yet he also manages to tell a powerful narrative about early New York City chockablock with extraordinary details drawn from an enormous range of archival and literary sources, a story that only becomes more compelling over the course of the book. Sweet has landed on a tale that keeps offering up new surprises, one rich with connections to touchstones in American history (among others, it includes a vivid and decidedly unheroic appearance by Alexander Hamilton, himself in the middle of a sex scandal). For those of us fascinated by the history of New York, this book is irresistible.

Henry Bedlow denied the charges, of course, and found others to support his claims, but the book leaves us in no doubt that he raped the young Lanah Sawyer, a seamstress who lived with her mother and stepfather. In 1793, when he was twenty-six, he was already known by reputation to be “a very great rake,” as she explained in her testimony, a term that Sweet clarifies for contemporary readers to mean “a sexual predator.” Bedlow insinuated himself into Lanah’s good graces through subterfuge: he introduced himself as “Lawyer Smith” rather than risk her knowing him by reputation, and asked her to walk on the Battery one evening. Flattered by his attentions, and conscious of the difference in their social standing by his clothing and walking stick, she agreed.

As he delves deeper into the story of Sawyer and Bedlow, as well as the multitude of neighbors, relatives, and the crucial appearance of the notorious Mother Carey, who owned the house of prostitution where the rape took place, Sweet helps us understand the world of late eighteenth-century New York: the French refugees who stood on the corners issuing catcalls to pretty girls, the specific dynamics of how prostitution worked (even how much it cost), how women’s clothes were stitched together and how they might be mended when torn, how a city of approximately 40,000 residents could be alternately intimate and anonymous. He vividly recreates for us a street-level view of Sawyer’s neighborhood, helpfully supported by a detailed map at the front of the volume that he discussed in the book’s fascinating appendix. Anyone who has researched the early history of New York knows how difficult this can be, considering the varying methods used for street addresses. He backs up all of it with references to contemporary diaries, newspaper accounts, and contemporary literature that pondered the problems of women’s reputations, educations, and the sexual double standard, from Susannah Rowson’s Charlotte Temple to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman. If all this context can sometimes slow down the pace of the narrative, it nevertheless reflects a painstaking reckoning with scholarly and contemporary sources. At times, I simply shook my head, marveling at the archival finds he unearthed.

The story accelerates once we get to the leadup to Bedlow’s trial and the twists and turns of its aftermath, starting about a third of the way through the book. Throughout, Sweet seeks to show us the specific challenges that eighteenth-century rape victims faced. The very fact that Lanah Sawyer’s case made it to trial sets it apart from many others, because certain elite white male gatekeepers — lawyers, magistrates, even the city’s mayor—had the ability to nix the case from the outset. Indeed, after meeting with Sawyer and her stepfather to assess the facts, Mayor Richard Varick also met with Harry Bedlow and his father, both of whom were members of the same social elite that often viewed working women and men with skepticism. The majority of the jury, too, was comprised of rich white male property owners inclined to identify with Bedlow rather than sympathize with Sawyer. Understanding more fully her uphill battle to convict her rapist illuminates how much early American law favored established men, even if they had reputations for libertinism.

The trial and the riots that attended it offer up riveting views of class conflict in early New York, especially because they circulated around the contested questions about a girl’s sexuality. The rioters felt so aggrieved because they recognized the possibility that the wealthy Bedlow might not pay for sexually abusing a girl from a laboring family. Others also joined in to comment on the case via print media. Yet as Sweet notes, the upshot of all the talk and violence was that Lanah Sawyer herself became sidelined, as others’ outrage dominated, an erasure that would have serious implications for her.

The narrative doesn’t end with the criminal trial. Sawyer’s stepfather went on to charge Bedlow with seduction, a form of civil suit that grew in popularity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Seduction suits allowed families to seek financial damages from “seducers,” including rapists as well as men who made promises of marriage in order to bed young women, only to renege on those promises. Families came to appreciate the different level of legal scrutiny involved in a seduction suit compared with rape cases. But the prevalence of these suits (and the financial damages the families might win) accompanied a new emphasis on female chastity, an emphasis that would affect women’s lives for generations and would divide the American public by race and class.

One aspect of the book’s analysis left me unsatisfied: the assertion that a girl in 1793 might experience her assault in the same way that women and men in the twenty-first century do. Throughout the book, Sweet draws from current-day understandings of sexual violence and survivors’ psychology to help us appreciate how Sawyer might have felt. In questioning his interpretive choice, of course I don’t mean to suggest that women in the past did not suffer from those assaults, particularly in an era that came to place such heavy emphasis on virginity at marriage. Rather, I feel he missed an opportunity to help us understand more thoroughly the past — the ways that unpacking the different ways that people in other cultures and time periods experienced their world can stop us from seeing them as merely other versions of ourselves (or worse: inferior versions). Historians feel strongly that there are no universal human experiences, from warfare to childbirth to race to understanding one’s own self; I wish Sweet had avoided the implication that the experience of rape is transhistorical.

In laying out just some of the high points of this narrative history, I avoid revealing more — particularly about the twists and turns of the final chapters — lest it ruin the surprises that appear throughout. As these passages indicate, The Sewing Girl’s Tale is ultimately far more than the story of a single case, though Lanah Sawyer’s story drives the book forward and keeps us anchored to a particular moment in time. Readers will find within this fascinating story the richness of New York during a period of incredible growth and change, and a personal story with lasting consequences.

Carolyn Eastman is Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her most recent book, The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity, won the 2021 James Bradford Best Biography Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the 2022 Library of Virginia Literary Award in Nonfiction.

Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Reviews, Race & EthnicityAndrew LangFebruary 22, 2023Comment