The Burden of Proof: Sex, Power, and Patriarchy in the Eighteenth-Century Connecticut River Valley

ON August 8, 1750, in Northampton, Massachusetts, Joseph Hawley penned an apology to Martha Root. Root had engaged in an extramarital affair with Hawley's brother, Elisha, in 1747, which resulted in the birth of twins and a community scandal for the affluent Hawley family. The episode concluded with a church council that Northampton's pastor, Jonathan Edwards, convened in June 1749. Joseph took the lead in defending his brother's and his family's reputation. Perhaps feeling remorseful of his conduct or seeking to document a penitent confession for posterity, he wrote to her that “before the Ecclesiastical Council which sat at Northampton” he “represented y^e matter beyond y^e truth and reality.” Hawley explained that he “so far wronged y^e truth” to “prove y^t you had been industrious in seeking my brother's Company for some time before you charged him with being unlawfully familiar with you.” He outlined all the testimony that he had exaggerated to demonstrate to the council that Root had seduced his brother. His false statements vindicated Elisha at Root's expense, “for which,” he attested, “I am heartily sorry . . . and humbly ask y^r pardon and forgiveness and shall be always ready to Own what is above written.”¹ Although Joseph did not publicly apologize for defaming Root, that he acknowledged his wrongdoing and assured Root that he “shall be always ready to Own” his fabricated deposition makes clear that Root achieved some justice for the wrongs the Hawleys committed against her. That she did so within a legal culture and society that disadvantaged women makes receiving the apology all the more remarkable.

Hawley's private admission that he lied in the church hearing had no consequences for the rest of his life and career. In 1751, he was elected to serve as a representative for Northampton in the General Court, and in 1762 he was admitted to the Hampshire County Bar. These two positions proved springboards to his leadership in the patriot movement during the American Revolution. Similarly, Elisha Hawley emerged unscathed. He married Elizabeth Pomeroy, niece of one of Northampton's leading citizens, Seth Pomeroy, in 1751, and was appointed captain of a regiment in the Crown Point Expedition of 1755. He died a hero at the Battle of Lake George, and one of his widow's brothers named a son after Elisha. That Joseph and Elisha had such success after the incident was in large part due to their gender, whiteness, and family status as “River Gods.” The River Gods, a network of interrelated gentry families connected by birth and marriage, earned a deified moniker during their mortal lives because they monopolized religion, defense, law, politics, and culture in Connecticut River Valley society. Root, meanwhile, a woman whose family was less prosperous than the River God Hawleys, largely disappears from view, aside from the Bay Colony's vital records.² She was, however, white, so her race gave some legitimacy to her accusation against Elisha. Eighteenth-century law and society barred Black and Indigenous women from seeking legal redress through institutional avenues available to white women like Martha, though many would not have dared to bring such a charge against an elite white man in the first place due to legal and societal restrictions and stigmas.³

Root's and the Hawley men's divergent fates represent how patriarchy, race, and class were interconnected in eighteenth-century New England. They likewise illustrate the related accountability standards changing at mid-century that varied by gender, class, and race. Class, white privilege, and patriarchal power dynamics that underlay sexual relationships shaped the outcome of the affair between Elisha and Root. That Elisha's privileged status emboldened sexual irresponsibility and left his family to deal with the fallout and Root to take the blame makes clear that the intersection between patriarchy, class, and race is critical to understanding the Hawleys’ and their River God kin's power in western Massachusetts. While vital to introducing a holistic portrait of the River Gods, the Hawley and Root case study can also shed light on issues of gender, class, and race in colonial New England that historians have addressed in recent scholarship. The limited victories Root secured in the course of the trying case also exemplify how women, particularly white women, were able to exercise agency as historical actors.

The existing scholarship on the western Massachusetts River Gods has not taken an intersectional approach to analyzing how the Valley deities solidified and exercised their power over the region. Nor have historians sufficiently established how the River Gods, much like their fellow New England elites, perpetuated inequitable power structures to uphold their regional dominance. Compounding these shortcomings is the lack of recognition of women in the River God clan and how their marriage to men outside the network inverted the patriarchal line of descent. In numerous instances, women proved to be the matriarchs of the River God line, though they are sparsely regarded as such. This absence is part of a larger pattern of neglect in analyses of the River Gods of the interconnected perspectives of gender, race, and class.

To fill these gaps and contribute to the body of literature on intersectionality, the Hawley family's River God status and how it shaped the course of the Elisha Hawley and Martha Root affair serves as a revealing case study. The Hawleys provide a glimpse into how the sources of elite wealth and power in colonial New England were rooted in the connection between patriarchy, race, and class. In turn, this case study, specifically an analysis of the Elisha and Root scandal, sheds light on the evolution of gendered accountability standards and how women alone came to shoulder the burden of proof in substantiating accusations of consensual and non-consensual sexual offenses. The episode also demonstrates how some women were, to varying degrees, successful in holding men accountable for sexual behavior that the legal system and society at large tended to excuse. Lastly, this case shows how the Hawleys were partly indebted to women for earning their River God prestige. Overall, the Hawleys’ story and the structures in New England society it illuminates contradict the view of colonial New England as more socially equitable than other colonial regions. Patriarchy, racism, and classism were entrenched in New England like elsewhere in the wider Atlantic world.

Since the 1990s, scholars have provided significant insights on gender in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England institutions.⁴ The law is a point of interest because of the frequency with which women appear in court records.⁵ Cornelia Hughes Dayton, for instance, traces the transformation of societal gendered norms and expectations in her analysis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Connecticut court records. Dayton's identification of a sexual double standard is especially relevant to Elisha Hawley and Martha Root's story.⁶ Puritans, she argues, held both men and women accountable for illicit sexual activity. By the 1740s, as the legal system shifted away from Puritan rule of law towards the English model—a process John Murrin dubs Anglicization—authorities prosecuted only women for premarital sex.⁷ Abby Chandler applies Murrin's Anglicization thesis to the evolution of laws governing sexuality and prosecutions of sexual misconduct in colonial New England from the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century. Chandler, like Dayton, argues that the Anglicization of the legal system had a significant impact on how New England courts approached trying sex offenses and that women were disproportionately charged for violating certain statutes intended to regulate sexual behavior.⁸

Ava Chamberlain identifies the double standard at work in an incident that occurred in the Hawleys’ and Root's native Northampton in 1744. Labeled the “bad book affair,” a group of local boys read medical textbooks as pornography, sexually harassed women and girls in the community, and engaged in lewd and sexually explicit speech but faced no serious penalty.⁹ The town likewise opposed Northampton First Church's public handling of the situation, instead preferring to resolve the conflict in private. Chamberlain places facts of the case within the context of the literature on the emergence of more distinct public and private spheres and the related “incipient double standard” of sexual conduct.¹⁰ That gendered accountability standards excusing male sexual irresponsibility were at work in Northampton prior to the Hawley and Root controversy informs the resolution of the scandal.

Eighteenth-century patriarchy cannot be fully appreciated without establishing the intersection between gender, class, and race.¹¹ Scholars have also extended the focus on intersectionality to New England. In Abby Chandler's aforementioned study, she notes that “racial issues” were intricately tied to the “economic and class issues” pertaining to cases of premarital sex.¹² Emily Jeannine Clark published a compelling examination of the story of Nanny, an enslaved woman in the small community of Barnstable, Massachusetts, who gave birth to a child out of wedlock that was potentially fathered by one of two white men occupying opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.¹³ Nanny's experience reveals the salience of gender, race, and class in eighteenth-century New England, a region not typically associated with the sexual exploitation of enslaved women.¹⁴ So too do the case studies Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck feature in their volume on Black women in colonial and Revolutionary New England, such as that of an unnamed “Ethiopian” woman who, with the support of her white mistress, brought a rape charge against Zebulon Thorp, a white man of disgraced social status, in 1717 that resulted in a conviction. Adams and Pleck attribute the outcome to the whiteness and class of the “Ethiopian” women's mistress and Thorp's lowly character, which highlights “importance of gender and reputation.”¹⁵

Despite this rich historiography, analysis of patriarchy, especially as it intersects with class and race, is notably absent in the existing literature on the western Massachusetts River Gods. The most comprehensive study of the River Gods remains Kevin Sweeney's 1986 doctoral dissertation.¹⁶ He focuses on the Williamses and their relationships with immediate and extended family to cast the River Gods as a kinship group. By tracing this familial network, Sweeney finds that the Connecticut Valley River Gods occupied the pulpits of almost every town, controlled the region's defense, and governed the Hampshire County bench and bar. As magistrates, the River Gods had jurisdiction over appointments to local offices, which they exploited to install kin into positions of power. The River Gods also held cultural sway in the Valley. Their less affluent neighbors emulated River God house designs to express their aspirational gentility as embodied by the River Gods’ expressions of status through material culture.¹⁷ In short, the River Gods controlled virtually every aspect of western Massachusetts society from the late-seventeenth century through the American Revolution.

It also must be noted that the River God moniker is inherently masculine. The dominant narrative of the River Gods has solely focused on patriarchs. These male-centered interpretations have excluded women who were part of the River God class, even though some of the leading men could not have claimed River God status without the women they married. Failing to acknowledge the role women played in expanding River God prestige perpetuates the notion that men were the sole proprietors of familial power and status in colonial New England, a misconception that scholars of women and gender history have dismantled.

Land was the foundation of the Hawley family's affluence and ascent to River God status. The trend of land accumulation began with the acquisitions of David Wilton of Windsor, a prominent fur trader for John Pynchon.¹⁸ Pynchon was the son of William Pynchon, who founded Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1636 as a fur trading post.¹⁹ Following William's departure from Massachusetts after he was accused of heresy, his son, John, took over his fur trading business and was granted the rights to all the land William had acquired. In the ensuing decades, Pynchon became the largest landowner in the Connecticut Valley through various transactions with other white colonists and the Valley's Native people, chiefly the Norwottucks and Pocumtucks.²⁰ By his death in 1703, Pynchon possessed land in every Valley town and shares in the West Indies that totaled upwards of eight thousand acres and valued at over eight thousand pounds.²¹ Pynchon was also an enslaver who derived his status from the exploitation of enslaved labor, and Springfield's strategic location along the Connecticut River directly connected Pynchon's trading activities to networks instrumental in abetting the trans-Atlantic slave trade.²² These extensive sources of power established Pynchon as the founding patriarch of the Connecticut Valley River Gods, and it was from his legacy that power continued to flow up and down the Connecticut River to settlements his River God scions dominated (Fig. 1).

Likely because of business connections with Pynchon, David Wilton relocated from Windsor, Connecticut, to Northampton, Massachusetts, sometime around 1659, just a few years after the Massachusetts General Court granted Pynchon's repeated petitions to secure a deed from the Norwottuck Indians to found the township of what became Northampton.²³ A leading settler in Windsor with sizable landholdings, Wilton appears to have amassed the same wealth and status in Northampton.²⁴ Wilton continued his association with the River God patriarch Pynchon and on his upward socioeconomic trajectory until his death in 1678.

In his will, Wilton distributed the many acres of land to which he held rights in Northampton. Among the beneficiaries was Joseph Hawley I—Joseph and Elisha Hawley's grandfather—who signed his name as a witness on Wilton's last will and testament. It was not Hawley's own savviness that introduced him to his benefactor, but his wife, Lydia Marshall, Wilton's granddaughter. Wilton specified the marriage in his will as the explanation for his bequest: “M^r Joseph Hawly hath marryed Lydia my grandchild & is now living at Northampton . . . my will is that hee shall have my pasture on parcell of Land which lyes betweene Eld^r Jn Strongs home lott & my owne provided hee build on it & live there four yeares then it Shall be to him & his wife & their heyres for ever.”²⁵ It was primarily for Lydia's welfare that Wilton transferred rights to the land, since he was restricted by the law of coverture from bequeathing land to Lydia directly.

Through Lydia's relationship with her grandfather, Hawley acquired Wilton's connections to John Pynchon that had initially been established through the Connecticut Valley fur trade. Wilton thus set Lydia and her husband up to enjoy a life of affluence that stemmed from his collaboration with Pynchon. Had Lydia not taken Hawley as her spouse, the Hawleys may never have become River Gods, for successive generations traced their prosperity back to Joseph I. Contrary to the typical narrative, it was from a woman that River God power was transferred in the Hawleys’ case.

Beyond Wilton's penned bequest of land, few official deeds in which Joseph Hawley I is listed as a grantee survive. It may be surmised that he augmented territorial holdings following receipt of Wilton's lands. That Hawley I obtained additional acreage is evidenced in a deed in which Ebenezer and Joseph Hawley II, both sons of Lydia and Joseph I, “Agree to share and Divide those Lands that were left us in the Will of our Honoured Father.”²⁶ The deed offers a more comprehensive blueprint of Hawley I's landholdings than his will, which simply stated that Joseph was to receive “two parts in three of all my housing & Lands” and Ebenezer the remaining third without demarcating exact bounds.²⁷ The two men registered an official deed to partition their portions in accordance with the will's prescription and personal motivations to increase the value of their respective estates. Both brothers achieved accruing extensive amounts of property in the Northampton area beyond Hawley I's possessions. Upon his untimely death in 1735, the inventory of Joseph II's landed estate valued about £1,758, and Ebenezer's probate detailed the limits of numerous sizable tracts that he imparted to his nephews, Joseph and Elisha.²⁸

The Hawley boys followed in the family tradition of amassing propertied wealth, as the copious amount of land deeds that bear their seals attest.²⁹ Even their mother, Rebekah Stoddard-Hawley, who deserves the title of River God in her own right, took advantage of her upper-class status as a white woman and acquired her own land.³⁰ Her engagement in the enterprise, though, was restricted to after her husband's death when she again became feme sole, free of coverture's constraints.³¹ That she engaged in property accruement exemplifies how class opened some doors, but her gender restricted full access to such opportunities.

By the time of Joseph III's death in 1788, he claimed ownership of four generations’ worth of land grabbing. The Hawleys, therefore, represent the River Gods as landed gentry, a generous title that obscures the consequences of hoarding vast amounts of property: the displacement of Native people, upholding patriarchy, and solidification of socioeconomic inequality. The River Gods thus ushered in a capitalist economic system predicated on the exploitation of labor, the culmination of their own exploits that preserved their dominance over western Massachusetts for a century.³²

That the River Gods laid the groundwork for rural capitalism is evident in their participation in the colonial New England precapitalist economy. The River Gods’ impact on the Connecticut Valley's economic system and creation of solidified socioeconomic classes, however, cannot be fully understood without acknowledging how patriarchy facilitated these developments. The colonial New England economy was inherently patriarchal because it was a household economy built upon male property ownership that gave patriarchs control over the labor of their household dependents.³³ The concept of patriarchal economy illuminates the inequality of domestic relations between husbands and wives and fathers and children, as well as how the exploitation of enslaved people's and indentured servants’ labor was interconnected with patriarchy. Although not commanding nearly as much bonded labor as their southern counterparts, New England elites like the Hawleys nonetheless rooted their authority in the control of labor within the patriarchal socioeconomic system as the southern gentry did.³⁴ Joseph I likely enslaved a boy named Peter, and Joseph III indentured a young girl named Deborah Clap.³⁵ Because both men anchored their wealth in land, Peter's and Deborah's work was primarily in the domicile, which Joseph I and Joseph III reigned over as patriarchs. Joseph I's probable enslavement of Peter likewise exemplifies how race was intertwined with the patriarchal economy and the River Gods’ predicating their superiority on whiteness.³⁶ To own a slave in colonial New England, as elsewhere, was to display power and status.

It was within this patriarchal power structure that the Hawleys augmented their authority through patronage. The Hawleys’ and their River God kin's chief benefactors were the Massachusetts royal governors. Seated in Boston and far removed from the interior, royal governors required an effective means to enforce imperial policies in the distant counties. Equally motivating was the necessity of forging close political relationships with the West's leading men who were well-situated to do the governor's bidding. Recognizing the sway the River Gods held, royal officials made the River Gods their chief advisors in western matters and conduits of the imperial government. The River Gods were eager to be mediators between east and west because it solidified their regional dominance. The arrangement was enacted through the formation of what Robert Taylor calls a “patronage machine” in which royal governors awarded the River Gods judicial, political, and military appointments, as well as land grants, for their services.³⁷ The River Gods’ receipt of these instruments of power linked them not only to the Massachusetts seat of imperial government in Boston but also to their elite eastern Massachusetts counterparts. Although there were marked differences between the interior River Gods and coastal elites, shared interests in retaining gentry hegemony and enhancing wealth and status transcended geographical boundaries in colonial Massachusetts.

The Pynchons were the catalysts for both the patronage machine and establishing crucial economic ties between western and eastern Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Bay government provided the Pynchons incentives in the mid-seventeenth century to expand the fur trade and promote economic development in the Connecticut Valley, enabling the Pynchons to procure and transport loads of pelts and skins to merchants in Boston while firmly establishing themselves as the government's western spokesmen.³⁸ Historians tend to classify Colonel John Stoddard, son of Reverend Solomon Stoddard and Rebekah Stoddard-Hawley's brother, as Pynchon's most influential successor as the River God patriarch. Solomon and John, therefore, easily earned the River God moniker, but Rebekah and her sisters, two of whom married into the Williams clan, were excluded from adorning the masculinized title. Yet Rebekah's marriage to Joseph Hawley II tied the Hawleys to one of the most widely recognized River God surnames in the Valley and incorporated them into the extensive River God kinship patronage network. Prior to marrying Rebekah, Hawley II did not serve in any appointive or elected offices. Following the union, Hawley II appears in the Hampshire County Court of General Sessions records as Northampton town assessor, clerk, and treasurer, and he received a committee appointment to survey highways.³⁹ Not surprisingly, though likely not coincidentally, Stoddard was present at the sessions where Hawley II served as a justice.

Hawley II's River God perks—courtesy of Rebekah's companionship—appear modest when compared to those of his sons, Joseph III and Elisha. John Stoddard eagerly spurred Elisha's militia career by commissioning him command of Fort Massachusetts as a lieutenant. Joseph wrote to his brother when Elisha was stationed at Fort Massachusetts in an inferior command to inform him of the ease with which this lieutenancy appointment was accomplished: “[Stoddard] gave me to Understand that there was to be two officers there this winter viz. a Cap^t and L^t and that he had not then determined who should be y^e L^t but that if you would tarry, you should have that Birth, and that he would write to you upon it. I told him that if he pleas^d [I] would also write to you advising you to accept y^e offer for this winter, to which he agreed.”⁴⁰

Though on a different path, Joseph also enjoyed his uncle's patronage. After graduating from Yale, Governor Shirley appointed twenty-two-year-old Joseph to be a chaplain for the 1745 Louisbourg Expedition, likely at Stoddard's behest.⁴¹ Though this is Joseph's only appointment that Stoddard was probably directly involved in, having died in 1748, Israel Williams inherited his uncle Stoddard's social standing and political connections. Employing Stoddard's legacy, Williams was probably behind his cousin Joseph's 1749 justice of the peace commission. Williams assuredly secured Joseph a major rank in the militia in 1754, despite the fact that Joseph had no military experience.⁴² River God patronage thus propelled both Joseph and Elisha towards success and continuous affluence. Both brothers could christen themselves River Gods through their mother's Stoddard ancestry, rendering their generation's River God lineage maternal and inverting the traditional patriarchal paternal line of descent.

Joseph's justice of the peace commission inaugurated a long tenure in the Massachusetts Bay legal system. His justice of the peace position was the first step many River Gods took in assuming an enhanced public profile and installing themselves in an advantageous station to receive more distinguished commissions. Hawley consistently retained the seat for decades, but he immersed himself more fully in the provincial courts than other men in his family by studying law and attaining admission to the Hampshire County Bar as a barrister in 1762.

Hawley's formal legal education that facilitated his rise as an attorney was part of the Anglicization of the Bay Colony's legal system.⁴³ The process of the Anglicization of the law matured as the eighteenth century progressed. By the time Hawley started his practice in the 1750s, an extensive knowledge of English common law was required to enter what was now considered an established profession. While the departure from the informal and unschooled legal practices of the seventeenth century in favor of professionalized proceedings was an important improvement in the maturation of law, many analyses of the Anglicization of the legal system do not include the adverse effects the transition had on New England women. Still, some New England women, to varying extents, overcame the gendered legal barriers Anglicization erected to reach a settlement or win a conviction. Martha Root's story is an example of the successes women, particularly white women, were able to achieve under a patriarchal rule of law in eighteenth-century New England.

Anglicization raised burdens of proof, erected barriers to court accessibility, and bolstered male authority to strengthen patriarchy in the legal system. Under the more strictly adhered to common law, a woman's word no longer carried much weight, and navigation of the legal system to fulfill their needs was hindered. Men dominated prosecutions, juries, witness testimony, and verdicts to enforce male authority, a stern reversal from the more equitable—though not entirely equal—seventeenth-century Puritan law. That the law was predisposed to privilege men over women instilled a legal gendered double standard, which translated into New England society.

Race and class, however, complicate this rather blanket statement about male sexual license. Because the structure of racism was a critical component of the political, legal, economic, and cultural fabric of colonial New England, law and society emboldened white men to act out sexually without discretion and policed Black men's sexuality, making New England much like the broader Atlantic world. Still, among white men, there was class stratification in sexual license. Elite white men like Elisha Hawley had few barriers between them and unrestrained sexual gratification, while poorer white men had more checks on their behavior.

The effects of Anglicization also had class and race components for women. Poorer women felt the consequences more heavily than middling and elite women, since they did not have the resources or connections to maneuver through the law. Further, prosecutions weighed heavily towards poorer women, especially in fornication cases towards the end of the eighteenth century, inserting a class bias into an already prejudiced legal system.⁴⁴ Even poor white women, though, had an advantage over Black women in seeking legal redress as victims of sexual offenses. Among the reasons the legal system took a white woman's word more seriously were Anglo-American cultural perceptions of female bodies. White women's bodies tended to be regarded as virtuous and chaste, and Black women's bodies were seen as promiscuous and impure.⁴⁵ These Anglo-American racial tropes fundamentally shaped women's experiences in eighteenth-century courts of law in New England and beyond, as did the race and class of the man involved in consensual sex or sexual violence.

Hawley's legal training, therefore, was professionalized and vested him with the knowledge to uphold patriarchy and the interrelated systems of race and class. Because his and his family's prestige was predicated on those systems, he had a personal interest in defending their hold on New England society. The young lawyer seized the opportunity to do so when Martha Root, a white woman from a yeomanry family, accused his brother of fathering her twins in 1747. Hawley, likely having just concluded his legal training, proved eager to defend Elisha and the Hawley family at Root's expense. Through his exploitation of the legal system, Hawley rescued his brother's reputation from being plagued by the scandal, Elisha's engagement in which was initially empowered by the sexual license he enjoyed as an elite white man. While Root was certainly a victim of the Hawley family, their River God kin, and the patriarchal legal and social system from which they derived power, she nonetheless earned a semblance of justice in the form of a civil settlement and an apology from Joseph in 1750. The Elisha and Root affair thus reveals the intersectionality of class, gender, and race upon which the River Gods established their authority and the basis of New England society as a whole, as well as how women found ways to wield agency in proceedings pertaining to sexual misconduct.

The Elisha Hawley and Martha Root affair has received inadequate attention from historians since a suggestive but now dated essay by Kathryn Kish Sklar in 1978.⁴⁶ While literature beyond Sklar on eighteenth-century fornication trials in Hampshire County is limited, historians have dedicated attention to uncovering fornication cases elsewhere in Massachusetts and New England. The Essex County Court of General Sessions of the Peace, which convened in Salem on Massachusetts's North Shore, heard 154 fornication cases between 1730 and 1770.⁴⁷ According to David Hackett Fischer's analysis of court records in the nearby Middlesex County Court, 57.6 percent of criminal prosecutions between 1760 and 1774 were for what he labels “crimes against sexual mores,” namely fornication and bastardy.⁴⁸ Kelly Ryan surveyed fornication cases in the court records of Middlesex, Plymouth, Worcester, and Suffolk Counties and found that between the 1740s and 1760s, 331 women were prosecuted for fornication in Middlesex County; 146 in Plymouth; 276 in Worcester; and 133 in Suffolk. By contrast, the number of men prosecuted for the same crime was significantly lower. Across all four counties, only forty-one men were charged in the 1740s, five in the 1750s, and none in the 1760s.⁴⁹ Similarly, in New Haven County, Connecticut, there were ninety-two fornication cases brought to the New Haven County Court between 1730 and 1769, the majority of which prosecuted only women.⁵⁰ In her study of women in New England seaports, Elaine Forman Crane contends that “fornication reached epidemic proportions from time to time” in the region, and women were the primary offenders tried and held responsible for what Crane describes as an apparent “spirling fornication rate,” which only saw a decrease in the second half of the eighteenth century.⁵¹

The Martha Root and Elisha Hawley episode follows the broad pattern in other Massachusetts counties in reflecting the gendered and patriarchal biases underlying the New England legal system. The case began sometime around September 1747. From extant documentation, it is clear that Root gave birth to twins. Although the birth records of the children have eluded historians, the death of Esther, one of the twins, was recorded in the Northampton First Church Records on September 14, 1747: “Esther Root Daug^r of Martha Root died it being one of her Twins.”⁵² It appears that Root named Hawley as the father between Esther's death and a letter Joseph Hawley wrote to Elisha on February 16, 1748, in which Joseph referenced “y^r Affair y^t I was to manage.”⁵³ In the interim, Root presented herself before the Hampshire County Court of General Sessions and “Confess'd her Self Guilty of the Crime of Fornication,” for which she was “ordered to pay a fine 25/.”⁵⁴

That Elisha was omitted from the proceedings and Root alone was charged is illustrative of the legal shift in fornication prosecutions, which dropped men from the docket and punished only women. The legal system required women to make a penitent confession while discouraging men from publicly claiming fault, a stark departure from Puritan legal practices. So too was Root's being charged with fornication emblematic of the excusatory legal system functioning by and for elite white men. Per mid-eighteenth-century legal culture that placed the onus of blame on women, Root would have had her name read out to those gathered at the court session and been obligated to confess to a justice of the peace.⁵⁵ This might have been quite an ordeal for her because the justice she faced was very likely one of Elisha's River God kinsmen. Of the six justices present at the session she confessed at, five were River Gods, and two counted themselves among the most powerful men in western Massachusetts: John Stoddard, Elisha's uncle, and Israel Williams, Elisha's cousin.⁵⁶ In this context, Root's confession may be seen as an act of immense courage.

Whether Root had named Elisha as the man she had a sexual relationship with by the time she was brought before the Court of Sessions is not known. If she had, she may have rightly felt intimidated by the presiding Valley deities, who would have been bent on protecting their kinsman at all costs. She was fully aware of the relationship between the father of her twins and the justices before whom she was confessing. Root knew that it was her word against Elisha's and that hers would never overpower a River God's. Elisha's socioeconomic status even complicated the relative legal privilege she possessed as a white woman. In either case, Root faced one of the most powerful families in Northampton in a society that held women to a higher standard of sexual morality than men. Indeed, Elisha may have already had a reputation for acting on sexual impulses with women of a lower socioeconomic status. Ernest Francis Brown, Joseph Hawley's biographer, contends that Elisha was “a too frequent visitor at the home of a girl socially inferior of the Hawleys.” Rebekah, his mother, supposedly followed her son one night and “resolutely took him home,” but the affair with Root proved that Rebekah's “vigilance and supervision were to no purpose.”⁵⁷ Elisha's liaison with Root was part of this alleged pattern of behavior enabled by a society complicit in upholding patriarchy, racism, and class that endowed elite white men with unchecked freedom to fulfill their sexual impulses.

Being from a yeoman family, Root's gender and class were against her in seeking fair arbitration, though her accusation carried some weight because of her race. Shortly after her confession, the Roots brought a civil suit against the Hawleys for financial compensation and child support. It is likely that the middling Roots took this path because Martha had already been charged and fined, so bringing a civil settlement would not criminally implicate her in the fornication offense. This action reflects the broader pattern of white yeoman fathers initiating civil litigation to overcome the gendered obstacles barring their daughters from seeking justice in criminal court, a pattern that proved a conduit to women asserting their rights and protections under the law.⁵⁸ Though inferior in socioeconomic status to the respondent, Hezekiah's male status would help combat the patriarchal system that prevented his daughter from achieving equal access before the law.

Although the exact date of the litigation's commencement is not specified, by February 1748, the Hawleys had grown alarmed at the progress of Root's case. At that point, Joseph Hawley had probably just completed his legal training and mastered the tenets of English common law. Consequently, he was tasked with resolving the matter and knew that there were more far-reaching implications than damage to Elisha's personal reputation should he fail to suppress the scandal. The very foundation of his family's affluence was at stake. For Elisha to be held accountable and for the middling Roots to circumvent the biased legal system by winning the civil suit would be to strike a blow to the patriarchy and undermine one of the Hawley family's, the River Gods’, and, by extension, the New England elite's sources of power. Swiftly acting on these concerns, Joseph informed his brother that the Roots “insisted on £150 down which I thought was too much,” so he obtained a recognizance for Elisha to buy himself time until the next session to “accommodate y^e affair upon easier Terms than they Seem at present to insist upon.” Joseph justified his assertion that £150 was too much in his letter to Elisha by “Considering what risque there is of y^e Ch^dr life,” but hidden underneath that legal explanation were ulterior motives, not to mention that Joseph disregarded what, for Martha, must have been the devastating loss of her daughter, Esther.⁵⁹

Exactly three months after Joseph sent that letter to Elisha, the suit was officially settled out of court, in keeping with the emerging trend of adjudicating such matters in private—especially when an affluent white man was involved—rather than in public. Joseph's papers contain the agreement the Hawleys and Roots reached, seemingly written in Hawley's hand and signed by Root. The document definitively states the class differentiation between the two parties, referring to Root with a pejorative term and Elisha a deferential one: “I Martha Root of Northampton in the County of Hampshire in the Province of the Massachusetts Bay in New England Spinster have received of Elisha Hawley of s^d Northampton Gentⁿ One Hundred and fifty five pounds Old Ten^r.”⁶⁰ Notably, the agreement, even though settled out of the public eye, still did not hold Elisha accountable. Though he paid the £155, nowhere in the settlement is Elisha definitively stated as the father of Root's twins. Rather, Root testified that she “Charged upon the S^d Elisha as their father” and swore to “release and remise to the s^d Elisha Hawley all Actions and demands . . . thereof I promise Covenant and agree to and with the s^d Elisha Hawley that I never will . . . Sue or demand any thing.”⁶¹

While Elisha was absolved from any responsibility, Root's pregnant body was regarded as a physical mark of guilt. The agreement stated that Root received £155 “towards y^e Support and maintenance of a Bastard Child born of my Body Now living, which child Another sometime since deceas^d.”⁶² This clause likewise exhibits Joseph's masterful exploitation of the Anglicized legal system and increased burdens of proof. Root had no conclusive evidence to prove Elisha's paternity, while pregnancy proved hers. Her verbal or written charge of “the S^d Elisha as their father” was no longer enough for the court. The societal sexual double standard and her class subordination to the River God Hawleys exacerbated the legal gender bias. That the Hawleys deemed the Roots’ suit cause for concern and took concerted action to resolve the matter, though, speaks to both Martha exercising agency to hold Elisha, at least financially, accountable and the legitimacy Martha's whiteness gave her word. While that racial advantage was relatively marginal because the case involved a River God, it was nonetheless enough to win her a payoff.

The day after Root signed the settlement, the Hampshire County Court of General Sessions discharged Elisha from the recognizance Joseph secured him in February. It does not appear to be a coincidence that the recognizance was dismissed the day following the conclusion of the agreement. That it may not have been a coincidence is strengthened by the fact that of the eight justices sitting at the session Elisha was discharged at, six were River Gods, and Uncle John Stoddard and Cousin Israel Williams were again present. No paper trail exists to support this conclusion definitively, but the lack of evidence signifies the River Gods’ unspoken agreement to defend the social systems that supported their control of Connecticut Valley society. They exploited the provincial institutions they installed themselves in to retain power that safeguarded elite white male patriarchal authority, a strategy that was by no means unique to their kinship network but applicable to pockets of the New England elite. Upon the dismissal of Elisha's recognizance, the Hawleys and their kin likely felt that a breach of their control had been avoided, that is, until Jonathan Edwards sought to make an example out of Elisha and restore Puritan notions of accountability and justice.

Jonathan Edwards (Fig. 2) succeeded his grandfather, Reverend Solomon Stoddard, as pastor of Northampton's First Church and attempted to use his elevated position to enforce his vision of a godly society on one he perceived as morally and spiritually degenerate. As a Great Awakening preacher, Edwards kindled numerous religious revivals throughout the Connecticut Valley in the 1730s, including his base pastorate in Northampton.⁶³ Although emboldened by the zeal his parishioners had shown at the height of western Massachusetts's chapter of the Great Awakening, Edwards soon after found his authority contested. The Great Awakening empowered the “ordinary” folk of western Massachusetts to defy authority, and they applied this newfound agency to challenge their ministers.⁶⁴ The prominent Edwards faced heated opposition, especially from Northampton's youth. Edwards had been convinced that the conversions spurred by the religious revivals had cleansed the town's youth of their sinful predispositions, but, as he quickly discovered, his young congregants had not renounced their vice. The persistence of youth hedonism collided with the transformation of gendered standards of responsibility to produce an unruly adolescent male fraternity that mocked Edwards's authority.

An example of the deterioration of ministerial deference is the “bad book affair.” Boys summoned to an investigative church council Edwards called in response to their sexual reading of medical texts and consequent harassment and lewd speech, occupied themselves while waiting to be interviewed by playing leapfrog. When these activities failed to keep their attention, one boy interrupted the deliberations and informed the committee that “he did not ‘care a turd’ or ‘a fart’” for them and that the boys refused “‘to wait any longer on their arses,’” prompting them to abandon their summons and run off to a tavern.⁶⁵ Edwards felt personally affronted and sought to punish the offenders for their original transgression and abusing the council's authority, but the town proved unwilling to support Edwards. The affair concluded with a second council, but all the boys except for one owned up to disrespecting church authority and did not answer to the initial charge. Edwards disagreed with the outcome. He resolved to restore his deteriorated authority as pastor and repulse the transition from Puritan notions of communal justice to the eighteenth-century separation of public and private spheres and the emergence of a sexual double standard. He saw Elisha Hawley's covert evasion of responsibility as the perfect opportunity.

What exactly transpired between Edwards and the Hawley boys between the private settling of the civil suit in May 1748 and a letter Joseph wrote to Elisha in December 1748 is not clear in extant documentation, nor is how Edwards interjected himself into what was, on paper, a rectified and secretive situation. What is known is that Elisha was excommunicated from the First Church for refusing to marry Root as atonement for his transgression. Edwards's demand was a common arrangement in seventeenth-century fornication cases, but the eighteenth-century secular legal culture rejected compulsory marriage as a legitimate resolution to fornication cases.⁶⁶

In the December 1748 letter (Fig. 3), Joseph told his brother that Root “declares against taking you . . . as also her father and Mother,” indicating that Edwards issued the marriage demand to vindicate his authority and counter secularized trends, not provide for Root's well-being.⁶⁷ Indeed, Edwards actively defied Root and her family's requests. Still, Elisha was worried that Edwards's order carried some weight and that he would be compelled to marry a woman below his social station and publicly—and eternally—admit responsibility for fathering the twins. The legally savvy Joseph assured his brother, who had resumed his post at Fort Massachusetts, that the law was on their side and that Edwards had no legal standing to force the match. To assuage Elisha's concerns, Joseph relayed to him the tenets of New England's Anglicized legal code:

That Joseph stated that the burden of proof rests solely with the woman blatantly shows both the gendered transformations taking place in eighteenth-century New England law and society and Joseph's investment in sustaining patriarchy and the intertwined structures of race and class.

Similar to the “bad book affair,” a church council convened to hear the matter. Edwards took it upon himself to make Root's predicament a personal crusade, even though she and her family objected to Edwards's proposition that she marry Elisha. So too did Joseph shoulder Elisha's defense as his own, since his brother's fate would befall the Hawley family name. Surviving notes for the council meeting in Edwards's papers indicate the goals of both parties:

For Edwards's part, he turned to scripture to make his case. Passages referenced in his notes were Exodus 22:16 and Deuteronomy 22:28, the latter of which Edwards interpreted as such: “‘Seeing he hath humbled her, and taken the liberty to use her as his wife, and as tis proper none should use any women but a wife; therefore tis FIT & SUITABLE that she should indeed be his wife, seeing as he has made so bold with her, and had her once, tis fit he should have her always.’”⁷⁰ Edwards's citation of biblical verses and application of religious obligations to prove Elisha's enticement and lasciviousness is anchored in his Puritan forebears’ biblical legal code, as well as Anglo-American cultural ideas about white women's bodies. The combination of the two created a perception of Root as a virtuous and innocent maiden who Elisha seduced into sin and violated in order to achieve ungodly sexual gratification. Root's voice is notably absent from the notes Edwards made in preparation for the council convening.

By contrast to Edwards's antiquated approach, Joseph exploited the contemporary legal system to dispute Edwards's assertion of Root's virginity and Elisha's seduction, as his August 1750 confession reveals. Joseph full well knew that the burden of proof rested with Edwards, so all he was required to do was create reasonable doubt, a relatively effortless task considering that the balance of justice was weighted towards the River God Elisha, so long as Joseph was willing to lie. Before the council, he had no qualms about falsifying his testimony. “To prove y^t you had been industrious in seeking my brother's Company for some time”—in other words, to prove Root seduced Elisha—Joseph later confessed to Root that he exaggerated the claim that he “had seen you in our street (as I judged) forty several times, putting a Certain number for an uncertain, and y^t I did not doubt, but that, at least it was so often and further y^t I had seen you in almost all parts of our street, and all Corners or where y^e Paths met.”⁷¹ Joseph's deposition branded Root a temptress who delivered his brother into sin, which suggested to the council that Root was not a virgin, refuting a fact crucial to Edwards's case and rejecting Edwards's characterization of Root as the biblical virgin Mary archetype for white women.

The council took Joseph at his word and rendered their decision on June 29, 1749: “Whether It appears to this Councill to be the Duty of L^t Elisha Hawley to Marry Martha Root . . . [is] Resolved in y^e Negative.”⁷² Undoubtedly, both fraternal and class solidarity influenced the outcome. The five councilors, John Woodbridge, David Parsons, Robert Breck, Edward Billings, and Chester Williams—all of whom were chosen because they were deemed fit to act impartially—were patriarchs of some of the Connecticut Valley's most affluent families, the River God Williamses included. As John Stoddard and Israel Williams may have done for Elisha in May 1748 by discharging his recognizance, these men likely closed ranks around one of their own. The convergence of gender, class, and race in Elisha's not guilty verdict, rendered in a case adjudicated in a church council rather than a courtroom, exemplifies how deeply rooted these structures were in New England by the mid-eighteenth century. The reinforcement of patriarchy was also in tune with developments in the wider eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

To at least veil their bias, the council concluded that “we are far from determining that L^t Hawley is not bound in conscience to Marry Martha Root Tho it donst appear to us in so Clear a light that we dare Say that it is his duty: We therefore determine apprehend It must be left to y^e Determination of his own Conscience.”⁷³ Elisha's conscience, of course, was clean, since he engaged in the affair with Root confident that he possessed a free sexual license to exploit social inferiors. Indeed, he was so unconcerned about facing consequences for his actions that he more than once left Northampton to return to his command at Fort Massachusetts between the birth of the twins in 1747 and the council's verdict in June 1749, including after he had been excommunicated. As for Root, the council's recommendation proved to work in her favor. She was not mandated to marry Elisha against her will, which enabled her to retain control over her own sexuality and permitted her to maintain custody of the surviving child.⁷⁴ Had she been forced into a marriage, custody would have been transferred to Elisha, per the law of coverture, and her sexuality would have been governed at Elisha's discretion.

Elisha was unbothered by his wrongdoing, Joseph was committed to employing his legal training to defend inequitable social structures, and the society in which the brothers lived encouraged these reactions. On August 11, 1749, less than two months after the council issued their decision, Joseph responded to a letter Elisha wrote him from Fort Massachusetts inquiring as to whether Northampton's townsfolk were discussing the scandal. Joseph informed his brother that although there was “a great deal of dissatisfaction” shortly after the verdict, “latterly y^e conversation has almost (as far as I can observe) entirely Subsided.'' One of the council members who had initially been inclined to call a second session to reconsider the matter “has quite given it over,” and Joseph had not even “heard y^t Mr Edwards says much of y^e Aff^r.'' The Northampton community proved no longer “uneasy at y^e Councills determination.” Instead, “the dispute between [Edwards] and y^e people . . . engrosses most of y^e Conversation.”⁷⁵ This bitter dispute between Edwards and his parishioners was the culmination of a decade of dissatisfaction with the minister and ended in Edwards's dismissal from the pulpit in June 1750. That the town's attention was so quickly diverted away from Elisha's conduct shows that the scandal was not a primary concern, and any talk of the incident was drowned out by the clamor of the First Church's discontented congregants. The Hawleys thus walked away from the scandal unscathed.

This episode is illustrative of, to quote Cornelia Hughes Dayton, the combination of “socialized gender roles, community and class solidarity, and legal culture” to “excuse or make invisible certain abuses and crimes against women.”⁷⁶ So too is the affair indicative of the white privilege Elisha and Root enjoyed. Whiteness abetted Elisha's reckless sexuality and evasion of responsibility while also validating Root's word and offering her opportunities, albeit limited, to seek recompense. The intersection of patriarchy, race, and class, supported by the Anglicization of Massachusetts law and the emergence of gendered double standards of behavior, held under such pressure. The Hawleys’ and the River Gods’ commitment to defending these systems solidified the firm grasp they had on eighteenth-century New England society. This entrenchment of patriarchal, racial, and classist power produced shock waves that reverberated far beyond the Martha Root and Elisha Hawley affair of the 1740s.⁷⁷

Martha Root and Elisha Hawley's affair was one episode in a chronicle of similar cases in Hampshire County. Elisha Hawley's status as a River God and the power and prestige his whiteness and class endowed him with made the fallout of his sexual indiscretion with Root higher profile than other related incidents. Root and her family's actions drew further attention to the situation. Root confessed to fornication in the Hampshire County Court, which was held in Northampton and thus made the case even more evident to the town in which Elisha and Martha lived and the sexual relations occurred. Martha and her father, Hezekiah, also negotiated a civil settlement with the Hawleys, in part because as a white yeoman, Hezekiah had the means and social standing available to persuade the Hawleys to provide financial compensation for his daughter in lieu of the improbable event of Elisha being prosecuted for criminal fornication. The settlement then prompted Jonathan Edwards to convene a church council, which, along with Hawley's excommunication, prolonged reaching a resolution. In extant documentation, the case does not come to a definite close until Joseph Hawley's 1750 apology to Root for the lies he told before the church council. While all these factors contributed to the magnitude the affair amassed over three years, Martha and Elisha were not the only ones in Hampshire County to face tribunals for premarital sex, nor was Martha the only woman to shoulder the burden of proof. Yet Martha and Elisha's respective fates differed from others who committed fornication in Hampshire County due to their whiteness and Elisha's affluent socioeconomic status.

A few months prior to Martha Root giving birth to twins in 1747, Jonathan Edwards was dealing with a fornication case between Thomas Wait and Jemima Miller. While the Wait and Miller affair contested his authority as the Root and Hawley scandal would, the incident was of a lower profile because of Wait's and Miller's inferior socioeconomic status. At a sitting of the Hampshire County Court of General Sessions on November 11, 1766, Jemima was identified as a transient in Springfield.⁷⁸ Upon Thomas Wait's death, his estate was insolvent. His wife, Rachel, signed the acknowledgment with an X, indicating a lack of education, which suggests Wait was himself of a lower class.⁷⁹

Miller's accusation that Wait was the father of her child born out of wedlock did not ignite significant ire in Edwards, and Wait, unlike Hawley, was “judged by this Church to be guilty of the sin of Fornication” in February 1747.⁸⁰ Wait objected to the charges in a letter to Edwards, in which he aimed to vindicate himself of guilt, and he was accordingly granted an appellate council a month later.⁸¹ The decision rendered upon appeal is not known, but Wait married Rachel Smith one year after he was found guilty of fornication and falsehood, a development in keeping with male evasion of substantial punishment for sexual offenses.⁸² Even though the council decision did not carry much weight in the community, Wait was still on the record as a convicted fornicator, which vindicated Jemima's word, and felt it necessary to exonerate himself. Wait's case stands in contrast to Elisha Hawley's, who was not held responsible and remained largely unperturbed about Root's accusation injuring his character. Wait did not have Hawley's River God privilege, so while his gender prevented him from facing the full consequences of his liaison, class worked against complete absolution.

In a fornication case in November 1775, over two decades after Edwards's tenure, Northampton's First Church reversed the previous pattern of bringing men like Hawley and Wait up on charges and instead prosecuted a woman for the offense. What spurred this transformation was the race of the offender. The First Church documented that “Lydia Holton a Negro Woman confess'd repeated Instances of fornication” and, despite doing penance, “y^e Chh determined to suspend her forgiveness.” (Fig. 4) While the church deemed Lydia's confession inadequate and called “for a further trial” to determine “the Sincerity of her Repentance & Confession,” that same church had, thirty years earlier, taken Martha Root at her word and had not mandated atonement for her sin.⁸³ Rather, Edwards convened a council to punish Elisha for violating her chastity. Root was treated as a victim of male lasciviousness because of her whiteness, which evoked Anglo-American cultural ideals of the virtue and purity of white women's bodies, and found silver linings in the council's decision, namely avoiding a marriage she did not want and keeping custody of her child. By contrast, the church disregarded Holton's speech as hollow and condemned her as a temptress in accordance with Anglo-American perceptions of Black women's bodies. The double burden placed upon Black women by societal structures of racism and patriarchy prevented Holton from receiving fair consideration in church or court, while Martha's whiteness afforded her some opportunities to compensate for eighteenth-century New England's misogyny.⁸⁴

Comparing the Wait and Holton fornication cases with the Hawley and Root affair and the related attitudes towards sexual accountability reveal how deeply entrenched the intersection between patriarchy, class, and race was in eighteenth-century New England society. The River God Elisha was never held culpable, and his brother Joseph skirted discipline for lying to the church council. The poorer Wait was guilty of fornication on the books but was absolved of responsibility in the Northampton community. The Northampton First Church defended Root's innocence, but the Massachusetts Bay legal system found her solely accountable for the offense. That same church doubted the candor of Holton's admission and resolved to hold an investigative council; her eventual fate in the matter is unknown. Although the race and class of the men and women involved in these fornication cases differed, the commonality in all three is that the burden of proof fell on women.