just. okay. welcome, everyone, to the charles river museum of industry and innovation. my name is steve guerrero and i'm the director of education here at the museum. you are sitting at the site of the world's first modern factory, the textile mill founded by francis cabot lowell, a guy who was born exactly 250 years ago this year. francis cabot lowell believed in efficiency and his textile mill embodied that efficiency of american industry and capitalism. but also, of course, there was a dark side in terms of where the cotton comes from. and a little bit darker when you get into professor dorsey's book, an excellent read. i'm really pleased and excited to welcome you and the mass historical society here for this wonderful event. you are sitting also at the site

of the world's first industrial labor strike when the mill girls walked out for two days in 1821. a momentous place and an immense, momentous occasion. what i would love to do is welcome. kennesaw in one street shot away from the mass historical society to come up, welcome our speakers and speak to the event. i really hope you enjoy your time here. thank you. thank you, steve. and thank you to the staff as well as the director, bob perry here of the charles river museum for co-hosting this program with the massachusetts historical society. my name is kanisorn wongsrichanalai. i am the director of research at the massachusetts historical society. for those of you who do not know us, we are the first historic coal society in the nation. we hold approximately. 14 million manuscripts ages in our library. these are the people. these are the papers of people

from all walks of life, presidents and pioneers and authors and reformers and teachers and soldiers. we are free and open to the public. we hope that you will take the opportunity if you have a chance to visit our headquarters at 1154 boylston street in the back bay and come especially after we open our brand new exhibit on the 27th of march to mark the 250th anniversary of the battles of lexington and concord. the siege of boston and the battle of bunker hill. so that that'll open very shortly after a few brief remarks. it will be my pleasure to award the globe's prize to professor dorsey after that, professor dorsey and professor mannion will be in a conversation about the book. and we'll leave some time at the end for questions from the audience as well. our two special guests today, then, are bruce dorsey, who is professor of history at swarthmore college. his research interests include the history of gender and sexuality, as well as popular

culture, religion and social movements. he is the author of the award winning reforming men and women gender in the antebellum city and the coeditor of crosscurrents in american culture. and of course, now another award winning book, murder in a mill town. he will be joining conversation by jen manion, who is the winckler professor of history and political economy at amherst college. mannion is the author of liberty's prisoners carceral culture in early america and female husbands a trans history professor. mannion has also published nearly three dozen essays and reviews in u.s. in u.s. histories of gender and sexuality, the massachusetts historical society establish the peter j. gomez memorial prize in honor of the late reverend professor peter j. gomez. reverend jones was the plumer professor of christian morals and pusey, minister of the memorial church at harvard university. he was also an overseer, an

honorary fellow, as well as a board member of the massachusetts historic society. a zealous preacher, orator and lover of history. he often quoted from the book of romans and urged people to be transformed by the renewal of your mind. sound historical scholarship written for a broad audience, helps both transform and renew one's mind. and in that spirit, and in the memory of reverend gomes, who passed away in 2011, the nhs presents this award each year to the best nonfiction work in the history of massachusetts, published in the preceding year. this year's competition included 14 works that spanned century of history that covered topics from biographies to memory to global trade. the selection committee, which was made up entirely of judges outside of the us, agreed to award the prize to murder in a

mill town. sex, faith and the crime that that captivated a nation. here is an excerpt from the committee's statement on the book. murder in a mill town is an expertly narrated micro history with a wide historiography. historiographical reach that illuminates important changes in gender, religion and labor. in 19th century massachusetts and new england. drawing on both archival sources and his expertise in the historical period. he professor dorsey, shows how industrialization altered families and communities affect it. religious practice and belief and exposed gender and class prejudices. murder in the mill town updates the story of the dislocations of the first industrial revolution through its application of new scholarly developments with a subtle, nuanced reading of sources, while also demonstrate

reading how national forces affected local events. transcending its tight, narrow new england focus, the book fulfills the promise of intensely focused micro and regional histories to illustrate large themes and national developments. dorsey tells an enthralling story complete with a with major and minor character rising and falling action, engaging dialog and dramatic tension. it's an abc salute, gem remarked one of the committee members. one of the best books i've ever read. professor dorsey, on behalf of president brenda lawson and the members of the board of trustees at the massachusetts this historical society. congratulations on receiving the 2024 peter jacobs memorial book prize. thank you all for being here. just for a moment, i want to

acknowledge the connection of peter gomes to this book and to my my work. peter gomes in particular wanted to reframe the way we think about religion and sexuality. this book is a great deal about those questions, not only in ways that we wouldn't expect to see religion and sexuality in conflict with each other, but in what ways people were striving for a degree of freedom in their lives that they wished could blend together both their religious desires and their and their sexual desires, not necessarily in the ways they could, in a way that even dr. gomez's well had this sort of deal with in his lifetime. it's a pleasure to be in this space. the mill original mill in waltham that sets off the circumstances that make for maria cornell's life experiences end up being the last mill that

she works in for a brief period of time when she is hounded by rumors and speculation about her reputation and her sexual history. she tries to work here in waltham, mass. the last location only lasts about a month and time because the boarding houses and the women who ran the boarding houses were excluding her from each and every one of those cases she lived. i think she said, four different boarding houses in an attempt to try to live here. that means once a week she had to give up her her home because somebody was saying something about her life. so it's it's an important place for my story and for this space and and to think about mills and mill towns and what they mean to be in this in this space as well. so thank you all for being here today. and i'm really thank jennifer for coming and talking to me about the book. great. thank you so much. thank you for inviting me to be in conversation and in this

incredible space. and congratulations. thank you for this excellent, really compelling book. you know, i'd love just to ask you to elaborate on what you just said about maria's life as a laborer. you know, she was a seamstress and a weaver tailor and just, you know, so caught up in different aspects of this industry. and i'd love to know more about how it created opportunities for her and, you know, restrictions as well. yeah. so she works for ten years in factory life. she apprenticed to be a tailor or a tailor or a dressmaker right at the moment in which only a handful of women ever have an opportunity to make that a livelihood. by the time she learns the craft of being a tailor or dressmaker, she gets hired in the vicinity of a cotton factory. there's work to be done for four young women to make dresses for other women who now have money

to spend on dresses but no time to make their own. but she soon realizes that most women working in that field would end up just learning the modicum of skills and then be forced to work in what we would call sweatshops. master tailors would give them an opportunity to do a small piece work, and not so. she realized at some point in time that a factory occupies and gave her an opportunity for some other kind of independence and autonomy to live a life that she wanted on her own terms. and so for ten years, she bounces around to 12 different factory towns. some of that because of conflicts, some of that because of stories and punishment for her choices in her personal life and the intimacy she chose, but other times deliberate, at least seeking a way to move up in the possibilities of what would be possible for her. so imagine she's working first

in a place called jewett city, connecticut, where at most, most of the young girls around her and i use that term to be accurate, were probably under 16, lived with their parents, didn't make much money. she eventually makes her way to those type of factories to seeking out a place like this where highly skilled labor, meaning as a power loom. weaver the new machines that could turn so that this is the first location where imagine a bale of cotton arriving from a southern plantation could be delivered here and then turned into full cloth. first time ever that would be the case. instead of mixed out for weavers and she was a skilled weaver, a person who had the full skills of being able to manage those machines. what i oftentimes find most fascinating is they usually manage three or four of them at one time. so imagine two of them in front of you with a high speed looms,

moving back and forth and two behind you that you're also sort of managing and working. she had those skills to be able to do that work and that she saw those as the places where it would be them, have the most sort of opportunities for her own independent life, a life that was a conflict. the times, but not always. yeah, you know, when we read so much about factory girls, a lot of times it's a story of, you know, real hardship, real isolation, sometimes violence. and part of what i hear you telling is a different story, that even though there are these other interpersonal circumstances that are, you know, causing her to move, and there's a lot of like tumult and change throughout her whole life that she sort of always landing on her feet and always able to support herself. is that accurate? and is is she typical or atypical role of other factory girls in this era?

yeah, she does to a point until the near the very end. but i think. she is. i mean, we usually try to sort of say what is typical? what's the sort of myth of the of the factory girl and the sort of story of the lowell, massachusetts factory girl was that they would work for a few months, save enough money, return back, marry and have a domestic life and such. and that story of races, a significant portion of the women who saw that this was going to be a life that they would have for the rest of their lives. and i think that's what probably maria saw in some ways. and that she could at least have the skill to be able to do that. so i try to tell that that story as much as i can, but at the same time, i'm trying some ways to make sense of the complicated world of people policing those women's lives as well. i discovered and this was

particularly the case in the records of the mills that exist in most of them for the mill she worked in were kept at the baker library of business at harvard university, and i found the registers of the overseers to discipline the women who existed and worked in those those mills. and it was fascinating collection to show both the kind of petulance of these overseers and what they asked of of these young women, but also the amount of resistance and control over their own lives that they wished to assert. and in asserting that they were labeled as crazy, insane, mentally ill and dangerous. one of the most graphic of those was a woman who argued with her overseer over whether she could live in her sister's boarding house instead of the company boarding house and go to work at a at her own time. and she was considered and described as a devil in petticoats is the description in

the. so you have to imagine both sides of this this world a world that gave multiple opportunities for women and constrained them as well. and this phrase gets invented in lowell called the moral police to describe the and that involved a role of a host of people from the manufacturers and owners of those mills to the churches and the clergymen, but also to the women who lived, lived there. the boardinghouse, older, often widows who ran the boarding houses and the young women themselves who became, unfortunately, the moral police of this. so to go back to what you were saying, i think, mary had an intimacy of friendships and closeness with a lot of other other women. and it ended up being both the solace for what kept her going and the place where she could be ostracized, excluded. and we learn all about this

because those women by the hundreds came forward to testify at the trial of of of the reverend ephraim avery, who's charged with her murder because they knew everything about her. they knew everything about her work life. her family life as much as they could. and they knew a lot about her sexual life and behavior. now, what we think that most methodist or evangelical or christian women were talking about, but they knew quite closely what that was. and so that's part of what the story i think i wanted to tell was that it isn't as simple as you were either, you know, a moral woman waiting for for for marriage and motherhood or a, you know, loose woman. it was set aside that they actually lived closely, talked to each other, understood and wanted to know about those parts of each other's lives. i'd love to hear you talk more about sex and sexuality. i think that was one of the challenges for me in kind of watching her, you know, conflict

between her real commitment and investment in methodism. and then like the repeated rejections because of her sexual desires and activities. but she kind of couldn't let go of either, even though they were she was usually, you know, put in a position where she had to choose. so what was she engaged in sexually over the years? and i'd love to hear a little bit more about the interplay of those different characters who are policing her. yeah. right. well, i do think that. we often assume that those were two aspects of her life that weren't connected in any particular way, that methodism would be this group of stern folks who would say what the do's and don'ts of her lives and constrain those. and then there would be her desires to to find some other form of pleasure as well. instead of seeing that in part, she was attracted to a religion that was full of desire. on some level, a religion that spoke to the intimacy of

closeness to each other. so when methodists gathered, this was the fastest growing evangelical religion at the moment, in which evangelical christianity starts to spread all over the u.s. and it is by far the largest, fastest growing group. and and they called the gatherings that they would do once a month to be the sort of special times when they would tell each other their personal stories and journeys were called love feasts. the sense of what was happening there. there were actual stories of young men who tried to break into them, one of whom climbs a roof and tries to get in because he assumed something really graphic is happening in a place called love. love feasts as we can imagine. they went off into the woods to the woodstock's of their day to camp meetings by the thousands to gather, live out and hear, sermon or whatever that that one group of people saw as the overflowing of spirituality and religion and others. their critics thought it was the place of the most wild debauchery that might possibly

happen. she wanted she loved both parts of that. she wanted to be in a world of a religious community that embraced that kind of sense of both the individual. i write a lot about how this religion was a very. first time to start to talk about as what ralph waldo emerson called it, the age of the first person personal first the first person pronoun. excuse me that it was i a story about i rather than a god that was doing something. she was coming out of a calvinist world. she'd grown up in all throughout new england. suddenly somebody was saying there's a possibility of a life that was different and that life included some kinds of intimacies that were possible. and so i trace through the stories that are told in the trial about the young women who were fellow methodists, who may not have followed her to to seek

out some love and intimacy that were not sanctioned. but she did. she didn't know where where a marriage would come. it wasn't something she might have been waiting for. she sought out the pleasures of of of that pretty early in her adult life and paid the consequences for it. but what's fascinating is her coworkers are methodists. they listen to those stories. they not only listen to them, but they ask her to repeat them and tell them more about it. they there's this there's a scene in the book, and the book is organized as a as a three act play to point out the dramas that happened. this is the middle of the trial. act two and that the scene is called bad stories. and it's about how these women talked about and described her stories as being bad. and we understood bad meaning that they were illicit. they were something they shouldn't be talking about, but bad was really what they wanted. it was part of the methodist form of confessional.

if you if your life had gotten to a point where it was bad enough, maybe you would be saying, i have a savior who's going to make me something different. and and we don't think of those things as as as generative of the same experience. they're all and thought only to be in conflict with each other. and that's what in part i was trying to explain in this in this book, in a way that i don't think anybody had had done before. no. and i wonder if you would just elaborate a little bit, because part of what you're doing is really challenging some of our long standing takes on the history of sexuality and just even, you know, in current times, like people have a really hard time, you know, holding, you know, religion as a site of, you know, explicit, like sexual desire and that these two things are, you know, not trying to restrict each other, but that they're actually enabling each other. in the early 19 century, right. and in part of that is that we if you think about it at the time of what people's worries

were, the camp meetings and what is what is the fear the camp meetings. the fear was not necessarily too much religion. the fear was that it was a possibility to release the most the deepest of emotional experiences that one could have. the ecstasies that some would seek out, and immediately the fear was that it was about sexuality. and so there was something about that religion that they understood it in this way. but another part of the story i like to tell is the way in which this world, in terms at least sexuality, was this conflict between what was the as anna clark historian calls the kind of twilight moments of the history of sexuality, the things that are in the kind of privacy of the darkness behind the door, we don't know. and the way in which sex in this period starts to come out into the public world, in the writings, in the press, in the stories. maria cornell lived in an era in which there become a the first of those kind of scandals, sheet gossip stories of people's sexualities and and your own

work as well, talks about about this this era is filled with this tension between them. the pride that in the public or the publicity of of something and and that's a hard, hard for us in some ways to think we think those things are are in contrast, but they're oftentimes feeding off of each other. it's the difference to dialectic of it that was what made people that so fascinated about it. well, and just to follow up about the press, you know, because i worked with the newspapers a lot and in my work, i found that a lot of times they were like actually very accurate accounts. and i was reading your book and the beginning, you know, the first account, you know, about what happened, you say it was filled with inaccuracies and, you know, widely circulated. so i'd love to hear more about how you kind of, you know, sort it through all of these different accounts to figure out what was really happening and what the reputation of the press was. right? yeah. the historian's greatest dilemma

in a oftentimes what there's two dilemmas. historians have not enough information about something. and far too much information of people saying completely opposite arguments. and in this case, in many moments, i have both of those experiences, but i definitely have the sense in which there are far too many conflicting accounts to be reconciled. so this is like any historian, this is my interpretation of it. this case generated more pages impressive of material than any other murder case had ever had before. this and for a long time afterwards. there's about 21 different sort of a original pieces of work that come out in addition to newspaper columns are just filled with this war for months and months on on end. so there's no doubt there's going to be a great deal of difference in accuracy and so on, so i had to engage in a very interesting process of of

reconciling between what could i confirm from other sources, what could i also see as closest to the multiple sources? would rely on? and that's what i had to sort of do in this process of figuring out. but did i always know what was going on in the know? there's a great deal of a lot of mysteries that continued to be on and discovered in that process, and we could talk maybe some more about that as we asked the other parts of your life. yeah, well, in addition to all of the accounts, you know, contemporary initially, then this story took on a life of its own right. and i want to know why you know, like, what is it about this that just kind of captivating artists, creators, performers and audiences so far into the future? yeah. so as i said, the the book is organized around three acts and the third act is the happens after the trial is over in a head to spoil it he is a jury

finds him not guilty of this murder and it sets off a yearlong scandal that becomes a nationwide event. it's it spreads everywhere. you could spread in the earlier means. you have stories out as far as ohio and kentucky. you have them all the way down to south carolina where people are fascinating. you could buy the books, read the newspaper accounts in its spreads and and in that form. well, remind me again, what so why did it live on? and you think it's because he was found not guilty? yes. no, not just because he was found. not guilty, though. i think that's part of it. what happened was, is that this catches the attention and of people who want to produce something beyond just newspaper accounts. so it produced two long running plays are produced about this, a blockbuster broadway hit is a play that runs in in new york city for months on end. it's unheard of to have a play run for months. usually an actor might put on a few performances, but not the same play for a time. and again, we're familiar with it now. cats can run 4 hours long.

it is, but this is really the first one before the civil war. that's the case. and i make the suggestion that what people kept coming back for, they knew this story. they knew who was there was everyone. read this account, read the trial as if they were almost there. it was packed courthouse, but it was even more packed in the materials. but they kept coming back because the character was spoke to and the experiences that people knew. i think they saw their neighbors, their family, their sisters, their daughter's experiences, as in the characters that they saw in these plays. they there were multiple brothers, at least almost a dozen songs that were created as popular balance sheets that you could buy and there were broadway reviews where people would sing these songs, call them out from the audience to sing the songs, like with a song

called the factory maid, you know, it would tell you to sort of listen to the ballot. you know, the story of maria, who's been so basically betrayed as they're describing it and i think it was because they could see that the world around them that they understood. and in some times they thought they didn't really have a sense of why the world was changing. so rapidly in front of their eyes. but this seemed to embody that. i think we're familiar with that in a way that wouldn't be otherwise. we have lived through both the sort of changing digital revolution that marks our lives and the significant sort of political shifts that that we think we want to know something more about this. and we don't not don't want to know what? just in an abstract way. we want to know it in a personal way of the people that we saw. and i think that's what drives this. i don't think it was purely did he do it or not do it kind of question that they were focused

on since most of the discussion. so not always, always about that. yeah. so as i'm reading through the book, i think, oh, this could go either way, you know, like and then of course he's found not guilty. and then i read about the methodist ministers convening in which they, you know, exonerate him. and that section, i think. why did i ever think that he might have been found guilty like, you know, the world that she's living in with these ministers? everyone's a white man, basically, you know, the jury, it's an all white male jury. all the lawyers, the doctor was the judge, the minister. so this whole world is controlled by a group of people who are, you know, really unsympathetic and actually detest women like her and so i think why did i think that she ever possibly could have gotten a fair shake, but also did he do it?

yeah, those are two quest to separate questions. let me start with the did did he do it question? the fact that jen is asking that question implies there's a conscious, deliberate choice in the way i wrote this story that i it's true. i do not say anywhere in the book my opinion of whether he did it or not. and i think that was deliberate because even though it was the pressing question of the day for a year at a time, was this preacher guilty of murdering the factory girl? i didn't think it was the most important question of why this case matters and why it's significant to us. so i didn't necessarily rest my energies in that. i thought there were other questions that are more important, meaning why was this of such great fascination to that period of time? why should it be so fascinating to us still today? but let me take my hat off this

is the first time i've ever in all of the talks i've given about this book, answered this this question. did maria cornell commit suicide, which is the argument that avery's defense attorneys make? and that's the primary reason for why he was acquitted and that people wrote in and reams and the vast majority of those men you're describing make this argument about it. absolutely not. there's no possibility that that's the case. there's a scene in which i describe the arguments. it's called the clove hitch, not so. i'll give you a graphic description of what? this is the case. she's found hanging from a stake, a cord around her neck. next to a haystack in a farm outside of fall river, massachusetts. but she is around her neck, is tied and not that's called a clove hitch, not it's a sailor's knot. most of us don't know anything about this. even that time they didn't do it, but they described it. it's a knot that one has to pull

with two hands and come to a conclusion. it's not a noose or a slipknot in which the weight of one's body would pull, tighten it and then endure own life. so in order to kill herself would have had to either strangle herself first the entire self on to the stake or tie yourself under the stake and then strangle herself in the process of that. it's it's impossible to do that. and and the prosecution makes that argument. and the vast majority of all the other arguments that are made about her, her reputation, his reputation and her sanity or insanity prevail. so no. did he have the means of and the method motive and, the opportunity to commit this crime? absolutely. was the case. he leaves his home in bristol, rhode island, at about two in the afternoon, takes a ferry across mount hope bay, arrives at portsmouth with rhode island

about six, eight miles from fall river. and does not see anyone for the next 8 hours of time, doesn't meet anyone, doesn't see anyone. although a strange man who looks like a methodist preacher is seen in various parts near fall river. there are no eyewitnesses. there's a man with no face that they might have seen, but he can't account for where he was at that moment in time. he clearly has some motive to do so. the evidence in the letters that are there written to to her implicate to a preacher who lived in bristol, massachusetts, and bristol, rhode island, and all of those things. so, so there isn't any doubt that he's the father of the child that she's carrying when she's killed and that the most likely suspect to commit that crime now killing someone and and convicting a person of murder are two different things as well. i can see why a jury would not necessarily convicted of murder.

i write in the book about the brilliance of this argument from the best legal team you could ever have, and the argument essentially makes this case that maria cornell was crazy. she and the craziness is a gendered argument. she's crazy because she's a woman who wants the independence and freedom of a man. she wants the act in those particular ways, in everywhere. she's described as being outside the norm, not talking like a woman usually talks, setting up the dilemmas of what would be her case. and once you make that point, then any of the illogical arguments that the the prosecution's going to say about why this happens, how it makes no sense that a woman would actually plot to kill a man and recreate then john him and actually take her own life to do so. why would anyone not just, you know, if you're manufacturing these letters? signy his name to him instead of leaving them unsigned, stand up in a public and say that this is

the case. so this there's no reason why that would be the case. but it's the perfect defense because you can say a crazy woman could do anything or any thing. so there's enough reasonable doubt to so could you elaborate on the role of doctors in know support that that argument that she was insane and also this is you know it is an important part of the book about what the transformation that's happening in medicine in this time in the professionalization of medicine, the rejection of you, older methods and ways of caring and really to what extent some of these doctors who are testifying, you know, are really using this case to kind of bolster their own professional credibility, their own political agenda, things like that. yeah. yeah. to the murder trial itself spends a lot of time on describing and making conflicting testimony. her body becomes the object of

describing this and the contrast is between a group of about six women who were responsive, both for laying her body out for burial, who were? the only ones to physically see her body without clothing on it. and, well, actually looking at it in the fall, they depicted they saw were the prints of a hand marks of of of bruises and violence on her body. and they thought some act of violence had taken place. they come to testify in the most intimate, difficult thing. imagine the sort of sense of early 19th century victorian culture to talk about that in a courtroom, not in a private space, but they're the defense team brings an army of professional physicians, including the most renowned physician of of obstetrics and of medical jurists, prudence in the country. doctor walter channing, who thankfully to the massachusetts historical society, his papers are at mhc. and i, i was able to sort of

look at those as well as the hope it becomes this story that we're familiar with. and male doctors took over the healing work that women had done for four generations. and we knew that story that all of us who were students of early american history since law or older wrote her book a midwife's tale. but no, i never others in that scene it ever played in a public setting like this. and this is the place where they they over it. and we realized that those doctors is very poor. curiously, we're trying to hold on to their professional status and grounds by using a courtroom arm to fight a battle that was about their assertion of their own profession. and that's what they were doing in this particular sort of case. that's only the beginning of the doctors who show up. and in this i have a scene that's called doctor's visits that is really the most experimental part of this book. right in the beginning of it, where i talk about two different stories that are told about

maria's visit to a doctor in lowell to be eventually diagnosed and treated for venereal disease and and it's a fascinating tale between a story that she tells that we only know because another young woman who worked alongside her retells that story for us. she saw it as a visit to a doctor who tried to use the occasion for for sexual assault on her. and he tells it as a story where she was insane and suicidal. and so forth. and i want people to see the combination of that. this is dr. william graves from lowell, who who ultimately eventually is tried for murder himself, an abortion case that happens. and there are many surprises in this story. i could hear that the size in the audience. yeah. i also just want to thank you for, you know, humanizing her and giving her agency kind of honoring her free spirit and

many desires and persistence like she's a survivor. she's an incredible life. and, you know, many of these narratives, you know, about factory girls are just super derogatory, you know, and really sad. so, you know, thank you for crafting like a powerful human. there's another piece of this that i know i mentioned to you before that struck me, which is she actually comes from a wealthy family, which is incredibly unusual for a factory girl. so her i don't know if i should keep talking here, just let you tell the story, but her grandfather basically doesn't completely but almost disinherited her mother because of her mother's choice in love. and it just blew me away because she started out in life, you know, in a completely different place. yeah. nobody had ever told this this story before. and this case has generated a

certain amount of attention for a long time in the 19th century. and then it's displaced because fall river is also the site for another famous murder. you know about. and and that it was erased in some ways. but i i dug into the material of her grandfather, christopher, laughing. well, who was her grandfather was a pioneering manufacturer to creator or of factories himself and norwich, connecticut. in fact, he's his paper mill was the source for the paper that from the newspapers that generated the first national subscriptions that hamilton and jefferson were writing his his paper was being used for that. he writes to hamilton when hamilton does his report on manufacturing in the first administration, he begs for the fact let's build a cotton factory in norwich it's the ideal location for this. never dreaming that his own granddaughter would be the most notorious cotton mill worker in

the or factory girl in this time period. so he's an incredibly wealthy man. his middle daughter, lucretia, chooses and falls in love and marries his own apprentice, an heir to, well, an aspiring man who wishes to do something else, who engages in some some process. process of seducing, perhaps, or the reasons for why they fall in love are hard to tell. but it's a ill fated marriage that does produce three children, the last of which is maria cornell. but he abandons the family when she's just a little toddler, returns them back to norwich and leffingwell died. one of the wealthiest men around his son, moved to, had already retired by his early forties as a milk. the equivalent of a

multimillionaire moved to new haven is the richest man in new haven. so this is a family with with resources he gives every one of his six children excuse me all five of his six children an equal share in the inheritance, but he only gives a minor fraction of that to to maria cornell's mother, lucretia, for this choice of marriages. and he doesn't even give it to her puts it in a trust in estate that the oldest son gets to get the control and she gets to keep a little bit of this portion. and that decision essentially is the reason why all her children become working class. as i write in the book from that moment on, they were poor cornell was rather than wealthy. laughing, said that would be the choice that would be made and why is it really? he would regret it if he knew happened to them? i don't know. it's really fascinating. i'm trying to think, was it embarrassment about the divorce? i don't think so. he actually is his own wife. briefly separated from him at some point in his life story.

so i don't think he thought marriages had to be perfectly. was it? i think mostly it was. he was shamed and embarrassed that he had been fooled by this working class young man, that had been his apprentice and so on. there's a great story that the last of his apprentices, this is the end of apprenticeship, as we would know it. those of us who know this history is going to come to an end, and we haven't even talked about this before that it's not in the book because i don't know what to do with his last apprentice. he puts in a runaway apprentice ad for and you can tell he's angry about this ran off with his clothes because christopher leffingwell was a dandy of a gentleman who wished to sort of dress in a particular style. and he ran away with another man was described as being a tippy. and that's a code phrase for a dandy or something else. but clearly these were two men who might have run away together to be lovers and sounds like your next book. it's not enough.

not enough to ever tell a good story about it. but i think that those were part of what was driving them, the sense that he drove his middle daughter's family into into poverty. that sets off a story for why she has to so there's a tragedy in her life that starts with the abandonment from her father, the circumstances of her grandfather, the disinherited, her mother. so what she was seeking to be an independent woman comes from that space. it wasn't from a place of comfort and and so on. and she wanted to keep that up. it comes from that struggle. and that's partly what i wanted to tell. and in that story, yeah, you did. thanks. it's great. yeah, i think we should open it up to questions from the audience, please. i'd love to hear your thoughts or questions for bruce.

yes. so thanks for visiting us. i am really interested. i'm really interested in. thank you for your work. i'm really interested in the idea of privacy and public lives in private lives. here we know that the mill girls lived in houses 40 to a house, eight to a room, two to a bed, and is there kind of this popularized idea of privacy and being many of those girls are away from their new england farms? is there a worry about the story getting back home and what's the tension between public and private lives or family in public lives? yeah, yeah. it's a great question. i do write about that in the book as well. that close proximity, it it led to the the intimacy that you can imagine when you're that close. and these are women that they

knew every day they got up and went and worked in the mills and they created a certain amount of intimacy even in the space of the mill itself. as they bustled around, talk to each other, read letters to each other in the mill. we can tell that, but they there's not a lot of secrets you can keep in that. and a certain kinds of myths get told about those spaces as if they're pure and so on. and partly it's because you, maria, learns you have to find another space to to find privacy. and she does try to do that. so she goes off with one of her lovers to a tavern in another town. so in lowell, she's crossing the river to belvedere, posing as husband and wife so that they can have this sort of intimacy. she falls for a man who's a counting house clerk, and they use the off hours of the counting room when it's not inhabited by others for whatever trysts that they might have.

that gives you some sense of where the spaces might have happened to happen. she does not seek out the privacy of a camp meeting for this. this is an important part of the tale that's important to see. she does not have a romantic relationship with reverend avery. she has a hostile, contentious one with him because he's the one who committed to communicate her from the methodist church, sets off her reputation as someone who not to be trusted and so on. and then he extorts the letters of confession that she writes to him, telling him what her life is. and she had to confess that story. and he uses that to to coerce her into having sex at a camp meeting. so it's a its course sex or rape. the at the at the least but but the camp meetings would be a privacy that would be possible for some people to step out into the freedom of those are those spaces. so that's a crucial part of this this story that closeness gives

you intimacy. closeness gives you knowledge, but closeness gives you the danger and vulnerability that is really important to recognize you are you're not as safe as you think among those who were supposedly is the ones who are going to provide you with friendship, sisterhood, a sense of being part of the same spiritual family. so you're you're looking for those spaces. otherwise, you know, i. very much not a person. i know that experience. i read about. but as you speaking, i kept thinking about, oh, here, nobody could hear me right. they can hear you fine. now. i'm okay. so as she was speaking, i was thinking about the scarlet letter a lot and i was thinking about continuity between saying

that, oh, what might have happened around new england or wherever this is happening, but also, are there connections? are there continuities of these women? are. i don't know. like i they do their problems come from being more outspoken or being more sexual. and they were sexual. when you say intimacy i'm thinking here you mean sexuality and things like that, does that question that question ever enter what you were thinking about? because scarlet letter, red flag everywhere and what happened there and the price she paid. yes. so to give it a little sort of sense, a new book has just come out that makes the argument that the scarlet letter, in part was inspired by this case.

this case? well, so, yes, but but it was also, as people have long argued, you know, nathaniel hawthorne is a long time descendant of the hawthorne that sits in this salem witch trials. oh, prosecuted so so creating a story that was about that setting it was a story that resonated more to the 19th century than it did to the to the era of the witch trials. but he used it as the witch trials, as the sort of that era, you know, the era of the long the scarlet letter would be the puritan and so on. so, so that story is there. i do think that the part of what i'm trying to suggest as well is that i'm not separating intimacy and sexuality entirely from that. then intimacy as many dimensions to it, some of it, some of it being the sort of spiritual kinship that people would have, some of it the the sisterly sort

of sense of family. they understood these things together in some particular sort of way. yeah, this might have been my problem, but as you were talking at the beginning, i thought it was originally a story about same sex relationships, and i didn't realize until later on in the talk that it was about this child that was produced. and obviously it's not same sex to produce if you're oh yeah it took on a little different. yes. and i thought her her sin was same sex. no, a star. no, it wasn't. although i have written about a companion case. so the other part of this, this story is that these these are percolating, concentric circles of of of sexual desire and scandal that are part of this era that happen. so there are multiple sex scandals related to evangelical ministers from this point, but

especially in the 19 century, i know of at least six different ones that avery was connected to in one way or another. are the characters in the avery case who were to give you some sense of that and one of which i've written an essay in the in the journal the history of sexuality about a the only known case where minister in this case was was scandalized. he tried for same sex advances. two men in the similar climate. in this case, it was the minister, traveling ministers who slept in the same beds together and and in one person reported about in the trial. this is how i discovered it. that in those intimate spaces that they shared in beds together, he would talk about the avery case and the reasons why he thought avery should not be have been so harshly treated for this murder, even if he thought they might have been complicit in the death in some way. so, yeah. i thought the.

books about birth control, if she was a woman who was clearly having these intimate relationships, she must have known how to avoid getting pregnant. so why? i mean, of course, birth control fails, but was there a promise that she had from the minister? was was there a reason that she maybe. allowed herself to get pregnant or didn't seek an abortion or. yeah, there's no evidence that she ever seeks an abortion. however, it's the knowledge of abortion providers are are there also i'll give you some sense of what the connections are to this story when she confronts avery with the story that he's the father of this child, she suggests that he suggests that she take this abortion face and call it oil of tansy or tansy, which would be a common one to take.

he recommends a dose of dosage that would have killed her. and she was fortunate enough that a caring doctor in fall told her not to do so when she chose not to do this as the case. but her life filled with a number of really fascinating stories about about this, their claim and stories that she feigned and faked pregnancies at some point to extort people. those are wild stories that i don't really put much faith in, but it's really important to see how they were told the doctor that she goes to get treated for venereal disease. is a known abortion provider known throughout, not just the local community, but far enough away that the person he's tried for, for murder, for killing or whatever had traveled for hundreds of miles from further up in new hampshire to come and and get treatment there just a couple, few years after that. so there's a circulating knowledge of of the the cons sequences of what would be

possible within this period, the fact that a a doctor who has a practice in lowell massachusetts, who's a specialist primarily in treating not only one of the things he's known for is treating venereal disease and providing abortions indicates in some ways that there's a growing underground knowledge of that, that material. so we do know that that's the case. but for her, there is no promise of of possibility for it. and she isn't really trusting the man who rapes her to be the the the clear guide she she seeks another medical opinion. it saves her life for a few weeks on fortunately it's a i'm sorry this is a tragic story in a lot of ways so i get sad when i when i tell you details. yeah go ahead. yes, i'm really interested in how you came to this story. and also the challenges you face with sources and where how you pulled this all. yes, indeed.

so i completed my graduate training in history at brown university and my graduate advisor, it was one of the first people to rediscover this story. william mclaughlin, as a story of religion and rediscovered the story. but i had the opportunity at that time another professor at brown asked me to co teach a course on this case. and then i think the divine define it as a course that i taught that i called murder in a mill town, that students at at the university of california, santa cruz, where i taught for one year and then for a decade at swarthmore, i taught a course based on this case. i first discovered this as one of the best episodes to teach students about history and how to teach history. that's my first discovery because filled with exactly the question you ask, how do you tell a story when sources are filled with such conflicting evidence? how would you write the biography of maria cornell?

if you see hundreds of people telling you that she's a prostitute, she's crazy, she's she's a spiritual savant. she's a she's a good daughter. she's a all of these kinds of things. what part of that story do you accept or not accept? and i taught that for a long time to allow students to be able to do that. and once i decided to take on that task, i stopped teaching the students that that quest. but that's where i first discovered the case. but it is exactly filled with the the core questions of the discipline of history. and but it's a discipline. and fortunately, in this this case that allows for multiple interests. so it's not just the social history of middle girl workers or mill workers, or it is that story. it's not just that. it's the story of methodism and so on. it's a story of young men in masculinity and how they're doing. but it's also a popular culture. and it's it's medicine and it's a host of other topics. so there's the historical topics that this gravitates on.

it's is, is amazing. there's a scene in the in the in the trial that's called the most extraordinary of all extraordinary cases, which is a phrase from a trial reporter in that case. and he said this was this was a case that hit on every possible topic. there was a law for the lawyer, a medicine for the doctor, watson and for the sailors and and so forth. it was everything. and i think his great phrase was a person could learn more about human nature by attending this trial for one day than you'd get for reading books for a whole year. yeah. so last question. we chatted briefly earlier. thanks. i'm from fall river and and i grew up there into my twenties and i really hadn't heard of this case and the fatal event took place there. you told me exactly where i was. just wondering, to what extent did fall river itself provide you with resources for this? the historical and library

historical society for the community, college or anything what a wonderful question. yes, the fall river historical society has some of the original documents for when maria was working fall river. keep in mind that she moved to fall river for one purpose. she had already been raped and was pregnant and wanted to be close enough to bristol, rhode island, to be able to find out and and get some support for herself in that moment in time. and so then she she moved there for that person, only lived there for three months. but the fall river historical society had that material. and a host of the materials from the from the trial itself. but the spaces themselves are a crucial part of this landscape. so i the it begins on a farm right outside of fall river, massachusetts. a farmer named john durfee owns that. it's his haystack where he finds

the the woman. by the time he ends his life, the city of fall river has grown far enough that his farm is now part of the town of fall river. instead of tiverton, the cross, the state line and everything else. and eventually, when he dies, the family gives it to the town of fall river and they hire frederick law olmstead, the creator of central park and other landscapes, to build a park there. it's now called the first called south park, and now it's named after the assassination that became john f kennedy park. and you can walk those grounds. you can walk same space where this happens. and i walk those grounds and i walk the space where where her remains are in the oak grove cemetery. and in fall river as well. so those those became crucial parts of the of of the story in fact, do we have time for me to read for a moment to know? okay. now we to do that. there's a there's a section of the of the book that comes to the end or i write about the last day of her life, and i write about it in a way that's

about how what was different about, what was avery's actions on that day and her actions on that day. and and i tell the story of her walking out of the boarding house that she lives in, where the only people in her life at that time was a woman named harriet hathaway and her young daughter lucy, who was a coworker in the same factory, same room as maria. and they're the only two people who were waiting around for her to miss her when she doesn't show up the night of her of her death. and that was part of a tale that i had to tell. and the stories, the grounds i had to walk in to see that story. well, thanks for that that question. well, thank you so much for sharing all of these insights about your incredible book. thank you all for attending. and bruce will be signing books and happy to continue the conversation. and for people who want to stick around afterwards. yes. thank you all for being here. thank you.

thank you, jim.

i'm bill harris, the director here, the fdr presidential library museum and it is wonderful to see so many here today because today is important. it's an important every year and it's in as the years pass. even more important i'd like to thank c-span and people who will be joining us through that means for covering this as well as for those who were watching online.