with John Wood Sweet
Crafting this narrative from the existing historical record required an enormous amount of research and detective work. Can you describe your research process, as well as the way you approached weaving these details into a cohesive story?
John Wood Sweet: In this book, I explore the momentous period after the American Revolution not through the eyes of the so-called Founding Fathers but rather through the eyes of an ordinary New Yorker: a seventeen-year-old seamstress named Lanah Sawyer. Today, most people have never heard of her. And if she hadn’t responded to a sexual assault in a really unusual way, she might have left no trace at all. For historians, accessing the perspectives of ordinary people—working people, women, youths—is notoriously difficult. It takes perseverance and patience, and luck. But I’ve spent my entire career trying to tell stories that others used to say could not be told.
For The Sewing Girl’s Tale, I wanted to do more than figure out what actually happened. I wanted readers to be able to visualize the city Lanah Sawyer inhabited, to understand how her world worked, and to appreciate the challenges she faced, her fateful decisions, her courage, her heartbreak.
What emerged was a story not from the top down but from the bottom up: a story of a young woman looking to make her own way in a city full of possibility and danger; a story of working men fed up with being disparaged and dismissed; and a story of early feminists making bold new arguments about human rights at a time when the only way most single women could earn a living wage was by working as a prostitute.
What was the most surprising detail you uncovered while researching the book?
JWS: I’ve spent my career studying and teaching early American history, but this project kept throwing me for a loop.
I was surprised by what I learned about Lanah Sawyer’s family. I was surprised by the big business of prostitution. I was surprised by the disparity between how romance was idealized in the novels of the day—and how courtship actually worked in real life. I was surprised by the audacity of the defense lawyers during the rape trial and by their blatant efforts to rewrite the law. I was surprised by the public response to the jury verdict–which included riots in the streets. I was surprised by the forceful feminists who raised their voices to call out sexual double standards. I was surprised that Lanah Sawyer ended up securing meaningful legal recourse. I was surprised that the perpetrator, Henry Bedlow, ended up in debtors’ prison. I was surprised by the scurrilous tactics employed by his attorney, Alexander Hamilton.
And, call me naive, but I was surprised every time I caught someone lying.
What was most surprising, in the end, was that the more I learned about the dynamics of sexual assault today, the more modern and tragic this story became. So much of this story could have taken place on a college campus today. We still live in a startlingly similar culture of sexual predation and impunity. This immediacy is part of what makes Lanah Sawyer’s story so inspiring and gut-wrenching.
This story feels unsettling and disorienting now, I think, because in this time so long ago, in this case, so much of our modern gender system and legal culture were being created.
Alexander Hamilton plays a significant role in this account. How do you expect readers will react to the information about him you’ve revealed here? In your eyes, does his role in the case complicate or alter his legacy? Are his actions here consistent with other historical depictions of him?
JWS: In The Sewing Girl’s Tale, we see Alexander Hamilton just after his stint as secretary of the treasury, back in New York, working as a practicing attorney—and what we see is pretty ugly. At a crucial turning point in this story, Hamilton was hired by the family of the perpetrator, Henry Bedlow, to get him out of a serious pickle. And, as an attorney, Hamilton was clearly smart and effective. But the methods he used in this case were, frankly, fraudulent and cruel.
Anyone familiar with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant musical or Ron Chernow’s engrossing biography knows that Hamilton was involved in a scandal called the Reynolds Affair—involving sex and crime, money and secrets, betrayal and fraud. Hamilton’s work for Henry Bedlow puts that scandal in a new light. Ultimately, I think in their willingness to defend their own honor at any cost either to themselves or others, Hamilton and Bedlow fed each other’s darkest impulses.
In the book’s appendix, you mention several experts on clothing and sewing in the Early Republic who offered insight as you pieced together Lanah’s story. How did they add to your understanding of what Lanah experienced?
JWS: The gown Lanah Sawyer wore on the evening she was raped is an example of how consulting with experts opened my eyes and led to stunning revelations. During the trial, the dress was the only piece of forensic evidence. The prosecution used it to support Lanah’s testimony about how Bedlow had torn it during the assault and how, the next morning, she had sewn it back together.
At first, I was simply curious about what the gown looked like. But this was a period of transition in women’s fashion and there was only so far published guides could get me, so I turned to a number of leading experts for help.
During one meeting, Linda Baumgarten, the textile curator at Colonial Williamsburg, patiently answered my questions. Then she offered two observations.
First, she said, there was no need for Henry Bedlow to remove Lanah’s gown if intercourse had been his only goal: women in this period did not wear drawers, so he could have just pulled up her skirts. The fact that he wanted Lanah naked says something about his sexual aim.
Second, Baumgarten pointed out, the fact that the gown was torn supported Lanah’s account of a violent struggle. Clothing was expensive; she was probably proud of this gown. If she had removed it voluntarily, she would have been careful. The damage indicates that it was removed against her will.
So, I started out looking for a simple description and ended up with two powerful insights into the very nature of the assault.
So much has changed over the last two centuries. Why is this story still relevant?
JWS: I think we all read stories for a variety of reasons: to get lost in a narrative, to learn about important issues, to cultivate empathy, to make sense of our world, and, most profoundly, to change the way we think and feel.
I have worked on this project for more than ten years, trying to learn about her life, her experiences, her reactions. But I didn’t anticipate the ways it would change me.
Early on, I noticed that at the heart of this project was an uncanny kind of double-vision. At every turn, as I struggled to bring Lanah Sawyer’s long lost world into focus, I saw, at the same moment, the world we inhabit today. In Lanah Sawyer, I see all of the friends, relatives, acquaintances, co-workers, and students who have shared their own stories with me. And I see moments in my own life.
For me, the process of keeping Lanah’s story always in focus, always at the center, for so long has made this project feel intimate and intense and transformative. It has encouraged me to honor my own experience, to recognize moments in my own life that I usually keep compartmentalized and tend to dismiss.
We live with so much exploitation and harassment, so much shame and silence. There is triumph in this story as well as tragedy, and there is also a kind of solace. So maybe this book is an invitation to us all to take our own lives seriously, to trust in ourselves.
What insights do you hope modern readers glean from Lanah’s story? How does her story help us to understand today’s criminal justice system and culture around sexual violence?
JWS: Lanah Sawyer’s story shows the importance of the modern distinction between fear of “stranger danger” and the realities of acquaintance rape—a distinction that this rape trial helped create.
Her story opens with her walking down Broadway: she’s harassed by a group of foreign men but a seemingly gallant “gentleman” steps in to rescue her. He insinuates himself into her confidence and entices her out on a date. Only when it’s too late does she realize that her “fine new beau”—not the strangers in the street—was the real threat.
Today it’s much the same: our fear of strangers helps disguise the fact that most sexual assaults are perpetrated by acquaintances: a cousin, a boss, a teacher, a guy at a party.
During the rape trial, the defense lawyers seized on earlier legal commentaries and exaggerated their implications. Their goal was to redefine rape in terms of physical violence rather than consent and to convince the jury that Lanah Sawyer wasn’t someone who mattered.
The result was to characterize “real” (or stranger) rape as a violent, surprise assault perpetrated by a man of lower social standing—a cultural script powerfully weaponized by American white supremacists against Black men.
Conversely, whatever an acquaintance might do—whatever a date like Henry Bedlow might do—couldn’t be rape. In such scenarios the means of coercion involve so much more than physical force: assailants target victims, misdirect and isolate them to render them vulnerable, leverage their social authority, and exploit their victim’s confusion, fear, and sexual shame. Victims typically don’t report such crimes—in part because they have been rendered agonizingly difficult to prosecute.
Lanah’s story illuminates how this bifurcation of stranger/acquaintance rape came into being—and why it matters.
This is, of course, first and foremost a book about misogyny and violence toward women, but it is also more broadly a book about class. Can you summarize the impact class politics had on the case itself as well as the public response to it?
JWS: In the 1790s, the city of New York was at the forefront of a titanic struggle over the destiny of the American republic.
When Lanah Sawyer faced off against Henry Bedlow in court, many saw it as part of a larger conflict between champions of democracy and defenders of aristocracy. At the time, many of the Founding Fathers considered democracy a dangerous idea; they argued that elite men should run the country and everyone else should know their place. But by 1793, the French Revolution had presented a much more radical vision of equality—which some saw as an inspiration and others as a nightmare.
This story was set in motion by a miscalculation on Henry Bedlow’s part. He clearly assumed that he could use his elite status to attract the attention of Lanah Sawyer and that she, given her modest social standing, wouldn’t dare stand up to him. But she did.
During the trial, Bedlow’s lawyers also used Lanah’s class status to disparage and dismiss her. “What else,” one of them sneered, “did she imagine a gentleman like him wanted with a sewing girl like her?” They seemed to judge the jury correctly. But no one could have anticipated that their elitism and scorn would provoke such widespread outrage.
And so this case became not just about women and their rights but also about working men and their right to dignity, and respect, and justice.
Even as justice is sought, Lanah is never granted much agency; it is her stepfather who pursues charges on her behalf. Do you think Lanah was in agreement with her stepfather throughout the process? Do you expect that, if she’d had legal autonomy to do so, she would have pursued the same charges herself?
JWS: I think that when Henry Bedlow decided to target Lanah Sawyer he underestimated not just her but also her family. And I think he assumed that her working-class stepfather wouldn’t have the gumption, or the resources, to take on a rich and well-connected man like himself. But he was wrong. Lanah’s stepfather, John Callanan, turned out to be a man of remarkable grit, determination, and legal savvy.
At the same time, Callanan was not simply Lanah’s ally. After she was assaulted, Lanah desperately wanted to go home but was afraid that he would beat her without listening to what had happened. And it’s clear that her fear was well-founded. In the end, she managed her return home in a way that did get him to listen to her story and got him on her side. And he turned out to be a remarkably effective champion.
This same process was repeated over and over. Time and again she had to win over potential allies. And time and again she did. So I think she did exercise a lot of agency in shaping how her story unfolded. At the same time, alliances always involve some loss of control.
And there’s a fine line between alliance and appropriation. I think Lanah always faced the danger that others might not just take on her cause but also take it over.
Lanah is a compelling and important historical figure. Yet—despite the explosive national dialogue in recent years around sexual violence and the way it’s addressed in the legal system—her story has remained largely unknown. Why do you think this is?
JWS: First, in American history, working-class heroes like Lanah Sawyer are rarely remembered.
To me what is most extraordinary is that we can recover as much of her story as we can—because she, unlike most survivors of sexual assault then and now, came forward, pressed charges, and made her story so compelling that one of the spectators at the trial decided it was worth publishing a detailed account of the proceedings. It was the first such report of a rape trial in American history. Without it we would know little more than Lanah Sawyer’s name.
Of course there is so much we don’t know—she didn’t leave behind a portrait that would tell us what she looked like; she didn’t leave behind letters that tell us something of her inner emotional turmoil. In part that was because of her age and her class and her gender. But it was also, clearly, because she didn’t seek the spotlight.
At the same time, one of the most troubling aspects of rape culture then, as now, is that the cases that attracted public attention were almost always those that involved elite men. “Life of a citizen is in the hands of a woman,” cried one of Henry Bedlow’s attorneys. As though a rapist’s social standing should protect him from consequences. As though a woman didn’t deserve legal recourse.
Recently, the philosopher Kate Mann described this phenomenon as “himpathy.” Lanah Sawyer’s story is an opportunity to pause and reflect.
Why do we focus so much on what elite male perpetrators stand to lose if they are held to account—rather than on what their victims have already lost? How does a sexual assault, how does sexual harassment in the workplace, change a woman’s life? We know remarkably little about those stories.
CW:
My work sits at the crossroads of creative nonfiction and interdisciplinary scholarship, exploring the ways in which residues of state violence and historical trauma permeate the intimate spaces of the here and now. As a sociologist, I approach storytelling as an opportunity to broaden the lens through which readers see personal experience. I teach full time as a professor of sociology, food studies, gender studies, critical criminology, and disability studies at the City University of New York.
(National Institute of Mental Health)Also in Spanish
