Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
North America, early modern, colonial/imperial, motherhood, reproduction, violence
Abstract
In 1742, John Hallowell, a Pomfret, Connecticut doctor, performed a surgical abortion on Sarah Grosvenor, who was unwed and who had been trying to end her pregnancy via abortifacients. Two nights after the operation, Sarah miscarried a stillborn child, and her sister and cousin buried it. Sarah died soon afterwards. Three years later, in 1745, an investigation into her death led to an indictment of murder for Hallowell and one of accessory for her sister, cousin, and boyfriend. Eventually, only Hallowell was tried by the colony’s Superior Court for a lesser charge of misdemeanor and on March 20, 1747, was found guilty.
Using Sarah’s case as an example, this paper will focus on two related issues: the need for a case to have a binary of perpetrator and victim, and the particular blind spot in legal documents where evidence in a case does not fit the fixed narrative in which the court is invested. Specifically, it will address the deposition of Sarah’s cousin, who filled her story with infanticide tropes. And yet, the court and the Pomfret community (and most historians who study the case) bought that Sarah was a victim, as the rest of the evidence overwhelmingly paints her that way. Looking at these two issues together through this lens, this paper proposes that viewing Sarah as an agent rather than an object forces us to reconsider the consequences of historical research when we fail to view legal cases outside of their prescribed frameworks, while it also shows how much there is to gain when we read legal cases against the grain of the familiar perpetrator/victim trope.
Keywords
abortion, law, infanticide, victim, colonial America
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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The Perpetrator and Victim in a Colonial Case of Abortion and Murder
In 1742, John Hallowell, a Pomfret, Connecticut doctor, performed a surgical abortion on Sarah Grosvenor, who was unwed and who had been trying to end her pregnancy via abortifacients. Two nights after the operation, Sarah miscarried a stillborn child, and her sister and cousin buried it. Sarah died soon afterwards. Three years later, in 1745, an investigation into her death led to an indictment of murder for Hallowell and one of accessory for her sister, cousin, and boyfriend. Eventually, only Hallowell was tried by the colony’s Superior Court for a lesser charge of misdemeanor and on March 20, 1747, was found guilty.
Using Sarah’s case as an example, this paper will focus on two related issues: the need for a case to have a binary of perpetrator and victim, and the particular blind spot in legal documents where evidence in a case does not fit the fixed narrative in which the court is invested. Specifically, it will address the deposition of Sarah’s cousin, who filled her story with infanticide tropes. And yet, the court and the Pomfret community (and most historians who study the case) bought that Sarah was a victim, as the rest of the evidence overwhelmingly paints her that way. Looking at these two issues together through this lens, this paper proposes that viewing Sarah as an agent rather than an object forces us to reconsider the consequences of historical research when we fail to view legal cases outside of their prescribed frameworks, while it also shows how much there is to gain when we read legal cases against the grain of the familiar perpetrator/victim trope.