The Poison Plot: A Tale of Adultery and Murder in Colonial Newport
272
The Poison Plot: A Tale of Adultery and Murder in Colonial Newport
272eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
An accusation of attempted murder rudely interrupted Mary Arnold’s dalliances with working men and her extensive shopping sprees. When her husband Benedict fell deathly ill and then asserted she had tried to kill him with poison, the result was a dramatic petition for divorce. The case before the Rhode Island General Assembly and its tumultuous aftermath, during which Benedict died, made Mary a cause célèbre in Newport through the winter of 1738 and 1739.
Elaine Forman Crane invites readers into the salacious domestic life of Mary and Benedict Arnold and reveals the seamy side of colonial Newport. The surprise of The Poison Plot, however, is not the outrageous acts of Mary or the peculiar fact that attempted murder was not a convictable offense in Rhode Island. As Crane shows with style, Mary’s case was remarkable precisely because adultery, criminality and theft, and even spousal homicide were well known in the New England colonies. Assumptions of Puritan propriety are overturned by the facts of rough and tumble life in a port city: money was to be made, pleasure was to be had, and if marriage became an obstacle to those pursuits a woman had means to set things right.
The Poison Plot is an intimate drama constructed from historical documents and informed by Crane’s deep knowledge of elite and common life in Newport. Her keen eye for telling details and her sense of story bring Mary, Benedict, and a host of other characters—including her partner in adultery, Walter Motley, and John Tweedy the apothecary who sold Mary toxic drugs—to life in the homes, streets, and shops of the port city. The result is a vivid tale that will change minds about life in supposedly prim and proper New England.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501721328 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Elaine Forman Crane is the author of Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America and Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Town on Narragansett Bay
Despite the slurs heaped on Rhode Island by its callous neighbors, Newport, the colony's most important town, displayed the usual urban contradictions. On the one hand, the existence of dancing schools, the proliferation of expensive consumer goods, and the 1733 visit by Lord Augustus FitzRoy, a member of the extended royal family, conjure up visions of civility, gentility, and prosperity. On the other hand, disease, accidents, disasters, and crime competed with the good life on a daily basis, all of which would have become familiar to Mary Ward once she left home to marry into Newport's gentry — and one of Rhode Island's founding families. Her husband-to-be, Benedict Arnold III, was heir to considerable acreage in Rhode Island as well as to shares in the Taunton, Massachusetts, ironworks. Mary was undoubtedly aware of her prospective spouse's assets and had calculated the financial advantages of this alliance even though it meant a commitment to a man almost two decades her senior.
Mary Ward of Middletown, Connecticut, was no stranger to a bustling community that depended on waterborne traffic for both the necessities and luxuries of life. A move from the banks of the Connecticut River to the shores of Narragansett Bay would not have been particularly unsettling for the young woman, since the towns were roughly the same size. Both numbered in the low thousands, and members of the extensive Ward family populated each place. The fractious and ongoing boundary disputes between Connecticut and Rhode Island engaged the political leaders of both colonies and probably stimulated some chatter, but they would have had little effect on Mary's customary routine. In Newport even religious friction was usually limited to nothing more than heated debate over doctrine — despite the many Christian factions and a small Jewish congregation. Anti-Semitic incidents occurred from time to time, and Catholics were less welcome than other Christian denominations, but in general Rhode Island practiced the toleration it preached. Newport may have been more cosmopolitan than Mary's former home — and thus an enticement to her — but existing documents do not divulge Mary's assessment of her new surroundings one way or the other.
These small urban centers were also ethnically diverse, although Newport's black population would have been proportionately greater, thanks to the increasing importance of the slave trade and the rising price of enslaved laborers. Mary's resettlement took her to a town that was heavily engaged in the slave trade, but if she developed a position on this execrable commerce, the records remain silent on this matter as well. Yet as long as she dwelled in Newport, Mary could not have avoided scenes of men and women being traded as commodities. During the summer of 1729, the brigantine Charming Betty arrived with "a parcel of fine Negro Slaves, to be sold for ready Money, or Credit ... by Godfrey Malbone, Merchant, at his Wharf in Newport, where the said Slaves may be seen." Many of the enslaved were routed through the West Indies, although by 1730 Rhode Island merchants had established a direct trade with Africa. 3 Newport's traffic in slaves increased during Mary's residence in the town and became inextricably intertwined with commerce in general: "To be Sold by Augustus Lucus in Newport ...; Garlix, and sundry other Goods, lately imported from London (at a reasonable price). As also a young and strong Negro Man, born in the Country, of about five or six and twenty Years of Age."
Newport's coastal location encouraged the coexistence of slavery and piracy during the first decades of the eighteenth century. Members of the first group suffered brutality; members of the second extended it to others. Mary's attitude toward both was shaped by what she saw and heard. Her response to slavery would have been tested by the well-dressed escapee from Massachusetts who fled with "an Iron Horse Lock on the small of one of his Legs." Similarly, Mary's reaction to the execution of twenty-six pirates on July 19, 1723, would have been indicative of her attitude toward piracy. One can only wonder whether her excessive desire for material goods, not to mention her willingness to flout the law, was stirred by piracy's daring challenge to social norms. Mary's environment might have validated her behavior in unsuspected ways.
Whatever was going on in Mary's mind, however, by 1723 she was already familiar with capital punishment. During her childhood and teenage years in Middletown, four hangings took place either in Hartford or Fairfield, eighteen miles and forty-eight miles distant by land, respectively. A water route shortened the trip. As an adult, Mary would have been unlikely to recall the 1708 execution of Abigail Thompson for killing her husband with a pair of tailor's shears, although aspects of the case might have resonated in 1738 with people whose memories of regional atrocities lingered for decades. Abigail had been the second wife of the tailor, Thomas Thompson. She was thirty-seven at the time of the murder, and thirteen years younger than her husband.
If the Thompson execution was distant enough in time and place to elude Mary's memory, more recent news of spousal murders, attempted murders, and public executions closer to home would surely have captured her attention. A report that Jeremiah Meecum was executed for killing his wife and sister-in-law with an axe in 1716 spread quickly with all the grisly details intact. News would have reached a wide audience when William Dyre broke his wife's neck and was hanged in 1719 — surely a case in which the punishment fit the crime. That same year John Hammett threatened to murder his wife, and Elizabeth Barber fled from the husband who battered her. Thousands of Newporters attended the Meecum and Dyre executions, and the abuse that Sarah Hammett and Elizabeth Barber suffered became common knowledge in a community that relied on street talk in the absence of a local newspaper. As Mary Arnold became acclimated to her new home, she learned that several local households were theaters of misogynistic violence rather than peaceable kingdoms.
The Arnold family resided somewhere along Thames Street in Newport, which was the town's main thoroughfare and ran on a north-south axis along the harbor. Several windows would have faced Goat Island, and the home was bounded on the south and east by Benedict's own land. To the north the Arnolds had a neighbor, the heirs of Benjamin Belcher, a shipwright. The Arnold property stretched eighty-eight feet from north to south and one hundred feet from front to back. His house was probably two stories high with one or more fireplaces on each floor. Perhaps there was a third-floor attic. A quick count of family, servants, and tenants means that household members would frequently rub elbows as they passed each other in hallways or on stairs. Privacy was nonexistent.
In many ways Newport was much like any other New England town dependent on the sea, and Mary would have been all but oblivious to the familiar sounds of an eighteenth-century port: the shrieks of seagulls, rumble of cart wheels, clack of horse hoofs, chime of church bells, and occasional thwack of a carpenter's hammer or strike of a blacksmith's anvil. One way or another, she learned about Newport by walking. Perhaps the babble of African dialects and Indian tongues caught her attention as she passed the colorful two-story wood-frame houses on her various errands. Perhaps she peered through bookshop windows as she circled what is now Washington Square or as she sauntered along the harbor. As early as 1721, the Post Rider, Peter Belton, delivered books from Boston every week, assuring Newporters of a steady stream of reading material. Continuing her stroll, she would have paid no mind to street names such as King, Queen, and Duke because she took for granted Newport's place in the British Empire.
Depending on her route, Mary would have passed churches, schools, and taverns. Schools outnumbered churches, and taverns outnumbered both. Between 1720 and 1729 Baptists, Quakers, and Anglicans built houses of worship. The town school offered classes in writing and Latin by 1720, and the Great School House was in operation under the tutelage of the wife beater John Hammett. The Reverend John Comer established a Baptist school and in 1730 ordered four hundred sets of verses from the printer James Franklin, presumably for his students. Although Franklin sold a variety of printed verses, he advertised only one such publication in 1730: "The Oxfordshire Tragedy; or, The Virgin's Advice," a poetic narrative of sex and murder. Why the minister would have chosen this particular work to demonstrate morality is unclear, but surely none of his students complained about the assignment.
When she did her marketing, Mary sidestepped the traffic in poultry and pigs while walking along Thames Street, but she could not have avoided taverns, dramshops, groggeries, and distilleries, all testimony to the importance of molasses and rum to Newport's economy. No one went thirsty in this town, although the 1732 law forcing innkeepers to limit customer credit to twenty shillings surely dampened business and enraged regulars who were accustomed to unlimited tankards of rum. Nevertheless, patrons forced to move on could easily spend their extra pounds and shillings on trinkets displayed in the many shops that lined Thames Street. Food carts tempted passersby as well. Turning up Marlborough Street, Mary might have wished Weston Clarke a good afternoon; she might even have curtseyed to John Coddington as she passed his mansion and stopped to admire the carved shell hood above his front door. It was a short walk from Marlborough to Pelham Street and the Arnold cemetery, where Mary's ten-year-old son was buried. He had drowned, by all appearances accidentally, in the frigid waters of Narragansett Bay just before Christmas 1736. Wherever Mary lived on Thames Street, the cemetery was close enough for frequent visits.
Because Mary lived on Thames Street, close to the water, on quiet summer nights she could have fallen asleep to the sound of waves lapping at the shore and tree frogs chirping in the distance. Winter days promised the pleasant smell of chimney smoke, whiffs of which drifted from street to street, mitigating — one hopes — the pungent odors of animal excrement, rotting food, unwashed bodies, and decaying fish that greeted her nose as she walked. With no structures high enough to block them, shafts of sunlight splashed Newport's streets. Closer to the shore, bright sunshine and blue sky were interrupted by white sails and the inescapable sight of water — water so clear that even at great depths it appeared shallow. On warm days Mary could have shed her shoes and dipped her toes into a saltwater cove that no longer exists. Twilight shut down the day's activities as dusk and night reduced vision to the flickering whims of candlelight.
If all this speaks to the ordinary, peaceable, and civil, there was excitement enough in Newport to pique Mary's interest from time to time. One such incident occurred when a woman purporting to be Eunice Williams, the "unredeemed captive" from Deerfield who had converted to Catholicism, had married an Indian, and was living in Canada, came to town. The memory of the Deerfield massacre of 1704 was still fresh enough in February 1734 for her arrival to create a buzz and a desire, no doubt, to observe this woman who had been captured as a seven-year-old child and inexplicably (at least inexplicably to the English) had refused to return to New England despite decades-long entreaties from her family. It turned out the woman was a fraud, thus dissipating the fervor kindled by anticipation of her visit.
Trade was the raison d'être for Newport's existence. Such commerce was at once local, regional, and global, touching coopers (such as Benedict Arnold) whose casks and barrels carried products from one side of the ocean to the other, and tempting housewives (such as Mary Arnold) who purchased cutlery delivered after the return leg of a voyage. Trade dictated the daily routine. Men and women exchanged goods that were produced as near as an adjoining shop or as distant as Europe, Africa, Asia, or South America. Although such items may have been routed to Newport via England, it is not impossible that American ships, already familiar with the coast of Africa, extended their voyage around the Cape of Good Hope and traded directly with Goa or even Guangzhou.
The global reach of its square-rigged sailing vessels meant that Newport was anything but a backwater town in the 1730s. Some of its international cargo arrived via Boston, although often enough ships bound from London made Newport their first port of call. By 1730 a newspaper advertisement referred to "the Great Road from Boston to Rhode Island," a reminder that land transportation was an essential ingredient of Newport's commerce as well. If it is unfair to say that Newporters embraced smuggling, it is still true that townspeople tolerated it with equanimity. Merchants and shopkeepers, who were the immediate beneficiaries of trade, sold a wide variety of imported goods, although by the third decade of the eighteenth century a few risk takers had begun to specialize: Stephen Ayrault dealt in ironware; John Bennett, in leather goods. In the early 1730s, Dr. Oliver Arnold, a physician who attended his cousin Benedict after the alleged poison attempt, bought an item described as "Purpal Calf" from Bennett. Was it a case, perhaps, for his medical instruments? A cover for his thick ledger?
Since luxury goods from the Far East had been available for over a decade, Mary was probably drinking Bohea tea out of fine china cups for at least that long. Expensive fabrics, such as "flowered Venetian Silks of the newest Fashion," would have caught her eye as she acclimated herself to Newport's social scene. In the warm weather Mary might have been attracted to Indian calico — especially if she remembered to wet the hem before cooking at the fireplace. But Mary probably did not expect to cook.
She did, however, expect to amuse herself. Masquerades were becoming the rage in England just as Mary resettled in Newport. Such entertainments originated across the water in 1717, and it is likely Mary was aware of their growing popularity. Moreover, merchants' ledgers hint that we have completely underestimated the New England appetite for amusement on the assumption that colonists eschewed this unseemly form of entertainment until later in the century. The Newport merchant Sueton Grant imported 208 yards of "Masqurads," 30 yards of "Sattin Masqurds," and 52 yards of "Light could Masqd" in August 1737. There can be little doubt that Grant expected to sell the fabric, and it is easy to be persuaded that Mary was lured into the shop by the thought of a satin masquerade gown. The prospect of a ball may even have enticed her to add a mask as an accessory.
In any case, without a local newspaper, it is difficult to know how Mary learned which Newport merchants carried the most recently imported goods. Living close to the harbor, she would have spied the sloops and schooners as they arrived from Boston, or even watched from a distance as the billowing sails of a brigantine gave notice of a long-distance journey safely ended. Once landed, goods might be secured at a convenient warehouse, offered at vendue, or spirited away by merchants eager to claim the latest bolts of fine velvets. In Newport, merchants and shopkeepers noted customhouse entries and advertisements from their counterparts in Boston. One way or another, word spread that new merchandise was available, often at exceptional prices. Bartered goods were as welcome as cash from customers eager to furnish their homes with fashionable wares. Mary had become accustomed to gentility — and was among those in the front lines of an evolving consumer revolution that promised a global exchange of goods. In her study of consumerism in Newport during the 1730s, the historical archaeologist Christina Hodge remarks that "at the individual level consumption is fundamentally about desire and aspiration." If means — the ability to bring desire and aspiration to fruition — is added to the equation, Mary Arnold was a consumer par excellence.
Lotteries were also devices through which merchandise reached potential buyers, and their notices in the short-lived Rhode-Island Gazette indicate one method of advertising. "A good new House and Shop, and the Land thereunto belonging, situated over against the Market-House in King-Street, Newport, with sundry good, new, and vendable Goods, to be sold by Lottery. Conditions of the Sale may be seen at most publick Places in Newport and Boston." With the words "good" and "new" reiterated for effect, the expectations of prospective customers become apparent. In the same column, an entire wharf might be advertised for sale, and the marketing ploy suggests that a heightened interest in real estate was well under way: "A LARGE wharf, measuring 50 Foot on the Main Street in Newport, 12 Lots of Land conveniently situated, and sundry Sorts of European Goods to be sold by Lottery, by John Coddington Esq. of Newport." The conditions of sale were similarly posted about town. Even with the demise of the Gazette, shoppers would find lottery notices affixed to posts or doors in public spaces.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Poison Plot"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Cornell University.
Excerpted by permission of Cornell University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
The Author's Tale
Prologue
Part I. The Story
1. A Town on Narragansett Bay
2. A Case of Poison
Part II. The People
3. Mary's Tale
4. Benedict's Tale
5. The Physicians' Tale
The Apothecary's Tale
Part III. Cultural Coordinates
7. Age
8. Adultery
9. Arsenic
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
It’s an age-old tale that never fails to fascinate—a middle-aged man, a young wife, a lover, and a plot to murder. Elaine Forman Crane brings her formidable skills as a researcher and historian to the telling of the story of Benedict and Mary Arnold. Much more, the narrative is used to explore the colonial society in which the players of this drama acted. An impressive piece of work.
The Poison Plot is a riveting tale, combining my two favorite literary features: a fascinating mystery mixed with little-known history. Elaine Forman Crane’s narrative non-fiction is as compulsively readable as a novel. I loved this book.
Elaine Forman Crane knows Newport, Rhode Island, like no other historian. The Poison Plot is a process of discovery for this author and her readers, and drawing on her deep research Crane has created a vivid, ‘on-the-ground’ feel to this fascinating story, in which the characters are rounded and alive.
Elaine Forman Crane’s wry examination of unanswered questions around the Arnold case opens a wide window onto early eighteenth century Newport, Rhode Island. Replete with adulterated drugs and tainted foods, fake news and racy novels, and counterfeiters and rampant consumerism, The Poison Plot is meticulously documented history that produces the excitement of a gossip column from the colony once called "Rogue’s Island."
"Elaine Foreman Crane, one of the nation’s leading microhistorians, uses a sensational divorce case as a vehicle for exploring law, medicine, and culture in eighteenth-century Rhode Island. With consummate narrative skill and complete mastery of the sources, she takes us into a world of chronic illness, quack physicians, and corrupt druggists, where infidelity and perhaps arsenic poisoned a marriage. By placing her story in a larger historical context, Crane brilliantly enhances our understanding of the harsh realities of life in early America."