Abstract
Elaine Forman Crane's The Poison Plot tells an intriguing true crime tale from the 1730s that is not only a highly engaging, well-written microhistory, but also a challenge to historical expectations about good wives exhibiting wifely obedience in a peaceful, law-abiding New England setting. The book centers on Mary Ward Arnold and her husband Benedict Arnold (an ancestor to his more famous revolutionary-era namesake) and their marital, personal, and legal woes in Newport, Rhode Island. Benedict and Mary (almost 20 years his junior) married in the 1720s, but wedded bliss had broken down, to say the least, by 1738, due to her extramarital affairs, her overspending, and an alleged plot that Mary and her lower-class lover Walter Motley had designed to poison her husband. This is a story of betrayal and alleged attempted murder. Mary neither admitted nor denied the poisoning but did admit to adultery, claiming that she had not done anything worse than many other women had done. Eighteenth-century prescriptive literature has long inferred that New England wives were good wives, or at least tried to be, to meet the expectations of their community and church. Mary Ward Arnold does not fit that pattern, and although she has left no documents to explain her perspective, Crane has carefully reconstructed events and walks the reader through the historical evidence and its possible implications.
Although a real pager turner, this book is not exactly a narrative that lays out all the details of the alleged crime. There are too many gaps in what is known from the evidentiary record to reconstruct events with that precision. Instead, Crane offers as many factual details as possible and fills in gaps with precise and telling questions, even where the answers cannot be known. In the endnotes the reader can find even more details about the historian's craft, or how the sleuthing was done. The book is not organized chronologically, but around a series of themes that first link the little-known tale of Mary and Benedict Arnold to their community. It then explores the differing perspectives of Mary, Benedict, the physician, and the apothecary. Beyond these relationships, the book articulates what this story can tell us about eighteenth-century cultural conventions, such as a substantial age gap between spouses, adultery as a form of wifely resistance to coverture and possible strategy for financial stability, and arsenic as a poison associated both in the popular imagination and in actual European cases with deceitful women killers. The epilogue considers other cases of poisoning in the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to reveal patterns of prosecutions (increasing in the later century) and the challenges of securing convictions for poisoning; it also demonstrates that the Arnold case fits well with the narratives of other spousal murders. As a microhistory this book depicts a unique family situation, but Crane also makes a significant argument about the connections between this local Newport tale of adultery and alleged poisoning and the transatlantic consumer revolution. As she puts it, “commerce, culture, and crime were intimately related.” (11)
Newport emerges as a prominent character in this book. By the 1730s, it was a cosmopolitan town, shaped by the slave trade. The importation of transatlantic goods in higher quantities stimulated not only gentrified purchasing and overspending, but also criminal activities, such as smuggling, thievery, counterfeiting, and anti-Semitic opposition to Jewish merchants. John Tweedy, the apothecary, adulterated his drug products to maximize his profit as other merchants might dupe their customers with counterfeit goods. When Mary proposed to give Dr. Corless £100 to poison her spouse, she must have presumed that he would agree, or at least give it some thought, and surely, though mistakenly, she expected him to keep her secret. Yet perhaps this was not because of any assumed criminality on his part, but because he had treated her and her lover for gonorrhea. In showing Newport to be a community that was accepting of some criminal behavior, Crane raises “doubts about the morality of the 1730s and challenge[s] the accepted wisdom of early America's low crime rate….” (5) Crane offers a corrective by describing the criminal underbelly of Newport as well as the dark side to the professionalization of doctors and pharmacists.
The primary sources for this research include legal records, such as wills and land records; genealogical information mainly to reconstruct Mary's life; and nearly one hundred manuscript pages that accuse Mary of poisoning her husband, collected as part of Benedict's divorce proceedings against her, his retaliation for the suspected conspiracy to kill him. There is no record of Mary's defense, if it ever existed. Without any written statements taken from Mary, the extant record is unbalanced. Crane must read the silences. Mary likely did not know how to read and write, but statements from other uneducated folks and witnesses who supported Benedict's case were taken down. There are other silences too, since Benedict's adult children from his first marriage did not appear to denounce Mary, or at least not in the surviving written record. Other mysteries remain also. Crane explains that contemporary legal understandings meant that since Benedict had not died (there was no murder), they could not legally be sure of Mary's intent, and so she was not charged. Yet she received a generous settlement in the divorce, and she later managed to marry two other older men who somehow must have gotten over her uncomfortable reputation as a husband poisoner. Crane wonders why her Connecticut family supported her, and readers must wonder about her likely defense and whether she had Newport supporters whose opinions have not survived in the historical records.
Crane uses her deep understanding of early New England to make informed, clear suppositions that have the added benefit of allowing her reading audience to participate in the unravelling of the mystery. This case study is an excellent example of an historian using the tools of the social and cultural historian to fill in gaps with parallel information. At times this approach seems to lead to repetition or tangents, although frequently useful ones. That apothecaries were selling adulterated drugs is taken as evidence of their unregulated business, but that very lack of regulation also facilitated the noteworthy existence of female apothecaries who operated on their own. The use of drugs of limited potency, provided by Newport's apothecary John Tweedy and prescribed by Doctor John Hallowell of Providence (a physician with a complicated past that included involvement in a counterfeit money ring), also likely contributed, Crane argues, to another tragic tale of a Connecticut woman, Sarah Grosvenor, whom other early American historians will know about from an essay by Cornelia Dayton. 1 Rarely are an author's tangents so informative.
In terms of family history and marital relations, this book offers valuable perspectives by looking at the atypical case of a manipulative, adulterous wife, while other more normative themes of familial grief, illegitimate children, stepfamilies, and the impact of spendthrift wives appear as well. Mary Arnold emerges in this book not only as the flawed protagonist around whom all the action seems to flow, but as a shrewd woman whose marital choices seemed flagrantly to defy society's expectations. She is a study on wifely resistance to coverture, a poignant example of a woman whose adultery, overspending, and alleged poisoning undercut patriarchal authority and expectations of wifely obedience and virtue. Crane finds other instances of “female-instigated acts” of violence toward men in Newport that could have taught Mary female assertiveness. (29) She may have been inspired by an “atypical cluster of adultery prosecutions in Newport in the late 1730s…” or by English cases of spousal murder using arsenic, or prominent literary examples of adulterous women like Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. (32) While Mary's actions cannot be directly connected to any of these possible causes, such cultural values may have encouraged her adulterous behavior. Crane is particularly persuasive in suggesting that Mary's actions reflect her calculation of her own economic self-interest. She had married an older man of property, and when Benedict's cooper-mercantile business was in trouble, she ran up his credit and found lovers. Her alleged decision to poison him reflected her rejection of coverture, since she expected to get more than her dower's right as a widow, and far more than if they divorced. Given how rare divorce was, poisoning him might have seemed an easier, surer path to his assets than a divorce.
Crane sees a world of commerce and trade where people calculated what was economically beneficial for them, a plausible world view given the economic uncertainties of the times and married women's dependence on their husbands’ fortunes. Yet other emotions get considerably less attention. Even Benedict's likely anger over his wife's adultery was attributed to his anger about her lover's class (Motley was a mason, and an Irishman), or his anger over having to pay for Mary's medical treatment for gonorrhea. One wonders about Benedict's tolerance for boarders, despite its financial incentives, since that practice gave men like Motley access to his wife, even if it also provided witnesses to her infidelity. To her credit, Crane reconstructs the emotional world of Benedict and Mary's childhoods and the lessons, hopes, and heartbreaks that they may have yielded. Marriage to an older man, a strategy Mary tried three times, may have had financial appeal for her, but such marriages brought eventual responsibilities and labor as a nurse for an elderly, ailing husband, and more immediately as a stepmother and mother to his children. Families contained not only children and stepchildren, but servants to perform necessary labor and boarders to supplement family finances, all of whom could be witnesses to marital disharmony. If “accultured—even captivated” by luxuries, would Mary kill for the means to acquire them? (74) Or did she merely believe her lover when he promised her luxury goods when her husband's business was failing? Was she broken by the death of her son Fenner in 1736 as the marriage collapsed, and by the death of her daughter Patience in 1739, after the divorce? Financial self-interest is a plausible motive for multiple players on this stage, while other long-simmering emotions like betrayal and loss also seem powerful. Then again, as Crane reminds the reader, it is possible that Benedict's illness in 1738 had not been caused by poisoning at all.
Crane's book lifts the curtain on this troubled marriage, on the scheming of a wife, and on the foibles of the community. She ably tells a little-known story from the archive and gives it rich meaning through her elaboration on themes of a consumer revolution characterized by international trade and growth in luxury goods, the professionalization of medical and pharmaceutical practitioners, and an unhappy wife's challenges to her marriage and her personal resistance to common law and coverture. Crane provides the reader with a glimpse at the exceptional and the unusual: adultery and betrayal that may have escalated to an alleged case of spousal poisoning, a situation that yielded no charges to the wife but provided the husband with ample grounds for his divorce petition. Students of early American family history, marital conventions and coverture, and eighteenth-century New England culture will find this a highly engaging and enjoyable book.