Seduced and Avenged

Abstract

Seduced and Avenged Christine Leigh Heyrman (bio) John Wood Sweet, The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2022. 365 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.99 Tales can be true or false, factual narratives or sheer fictions. John Wood Sweet has summoned all his powers of digging and discernment to authenticate the tale of seduction and rape told by a young woman named Lanah Sawyer in the 1790s. The result—a page-turner that might be subtitled "The Me Too Movement Meets True Crime"—deserves an audience reaching far beyond the borders of the scholarly community. Demeaned and diminished by the tales told by others as her case made its way through the courts and into the press, this sewing girl has won belated vindication from an accomplished historian with a genius for recovering the lives of ordinary Americans in the early republic (p. 1). Readers will win the pleasure of exploring the Manhattan of the 1790s, a few decades before the construction of the Erie Canal turned a small town of 40,000 souls into the Big Apple. And they will experience that place and time in the company of a learned guide, one steeped in knowledge about the devastating impact of the British occupation, the booming but dangerous business of prostitution, the vibrant culture and politics of skilled artisans, and the democratic impulse of America's republican revolution. As for John Wood Sweet, he won both the Bancroft Prize and the Parkman Prize. Lanah Sawyer herself presents the greatest challenge to Sweet's powers of historical detection. Aged seventeen at the start of her tale, she was the daughter of a wheelwright and carriage maker now ten years dead and the stepdaughter of another skilled workingman, John Callanan. She lived in his household, assisting her mother with domestic chores and taking in small sewing jobs from neighbors and piecework from tailors. Her other responsibility, well understood even if unspoken, was to preserve her chastity until marriage, something that would attest to her respectability and redound to her stepfather's honor as the household patriarch, a man in full control of all "his" women. But keeping her good name, all the more crucial because Lanah was nearing marriageable age for women of her class, seemed a lost cause when she slipped away from home one September night in 1793. [End Page 115] Less daunting to track through time, even at the remove of more than two centuries, are the two men who would have a profound impact on Lanah Sawyer's young life. The first, Harry Bedlow, was the fellow whom she had agreed to meet on that fateful evening. Unlike many other young gentlemen in Manhattan who were preparing for careers in business or law, he counted on inheriting a windfall in real estate from his relations, old Dutch families who owned substantial portions of the city. Relieved of the dreary responsibility of work, he devoted himself to dressing fashionably, powdering his hair, cheating his creditors, and preying on young women. To meet Lanah, he posed as her protector, intervening when a group of rowdy guys harassed her on Broadway and introducing himself as "lawyer Smith." He escorted her home, and then, a few days later, escorted her away from home. He treated her to ice cream—then a rare and pricey treat—and for hours thereafter they strolled through a park at the Battery. It was past midnight when he forced her inside the bawdy house kept by "Mother" Ann Carey and raped her. By the evening of the next day—with Lanah still missing—another man, sought to recover the control he had long held over her. John Callanan prowled the darkening streets with a neighbor, Samuel Hone, who had spotted Henry Bedlow bringing Lanah back home several days earlier and had warned her that he was not "lawyer Smith" but a notorious rake. Now Hone feared that Callanan, whom he knew to be "a very violent man," might beat his wayward daughter. "If my daughter is [in the] wrong, I will turn her out of doors," he replied. "If...