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

The Sewing Girl's Tale provides a vividly contextualized account of a 1793 New York City rape and its aftermath. John Wood Sweet's title recalls Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning A Midwife's Tale, and he depicts the same era of the Revolution and early republic. But whereas Ulrich focused on a middle-aged woman on the Maine frontier, Sweet provides a microhistory of a skilled New York City “sewing girl.” In contrast to Ulrich, Sweet has no diary on which to base his account. He can, however, mine a sixty-two page pamphlet that reported the trial of Henry Bedlow “for committing a rape on Sawyer.” Sweet's research goes far beyond the trial report. His painstaking inquiry into numerous New York City sources enables him to probe the experience and character of both Bedlow's and Sawyer's families, their dwellings and neighborhoods, as well as the lives of the two principals—both before and...