culture in the United States. He is the author of Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (2002), winner of the Philip S. Klein Book Prize from the Pennsylvania Historical Association, and Crosscurrents in American Culture, co-edited with Woody Register (2009). In 2016 he was awarded the LGBT Religious History Award for an article published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality.
Dorsey applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation, and reported the following:
“She took a stagecoach to Lowell at her own expense, making the rounds to friends and former ‘sisters’ seeking their forgiveness.” That’s how page 99 of Murder in a Mill Town begins, near the conclusion of the tenth chapter, entitled “Fornication and Lying.” With this opening, readers are directed immediately to the book’s two main characters: factory worker, Sarah Maria Cornell (called “Maria), and evangelical preacher, Ephraim Avery, who presided over Cornell’s excommunication from the Methodist church in America’s premier industrial city in 1830. Readers then learn that Maria Cornell’s plan to garner forgiveness and a return to her beloved Methodist community in another mill town also meant that she had written explicit confession letters to Avery outlining her sexual “sins” that the preacher kept in his possession. Although Avery offered a tepid verbal promise to forgive Cornell, a few days later he penned a letter to that other mill town’s Methodist minister (reprinted on page 99), sabotaging the young woman’s plan for reinstatement. Near the end of the page readers learn that “The news devastated Maria.”Visit Bruce Dorsey's website.
Page 99 captures a key moment in a spiraling personal crisis that led ultimately to the tragic events that comprised America’s first “crime of the century.” Cornell was unable to regain the faith community that would have ensured her prosperity among the thousands of new women in the industrial workforce in cotton mills. According to her, Avery then used the confession letters to extort Cornell into seeing him alone on the grounds of a camp meeting, where he forced her into sex that resulted in pregnancy. (Yes, the preacher who kicked her out of the church for having sex, subsequently forced her to have sex with him in order to return to that church.) When, four months later, Cornell was found dead, hanging from a stake in a farmer’s haystack outside Fall River, Massachusetts, local mill town residents found a note that she had written on the night of her death, stating: “If I am missing inquire of Rev. Mr Avery Bristol he will know where I am.”
The Page 99 Test works! Murder in a Mill Town is chock full of important days and events behind what became, at the time, the longest trial in American history. Avery’s murder trial in Newport, R.I., in 1833, where hundreds of witnesses testified, lasted thirty days in an era when almost every capital crime trial took merely a single day. The trial covered everything—religion, gender, sex, abortion, venereal disease, the medical profession, and more—and it then provoked a national scandal that continued for a full year after the verdict, veering toward mob violence, conspiracy politics, fake news, and a new sensational popular culture. On page 99, then, Maria Cornell’s personal quest for a measure of independence as a young working woman, and Ephraim Avery’s efforts to assert his authority as a rising star in America’s fastest growing denomination, clashed and set off the spiral of events that culminated in her tragic death two years later.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
