<i>Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime that Captivated a Nation</i>. By Bruce Dorsey.

In the tradition of Patricia Cline Cohen's The Murder of Helen Jewett and Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz's The Kingdom of Matthias, Bruce Dorsey's Murder in a Mill Town is a microhistory that uses a single story to illuminate transformations in American culture in the early American republic. On the one hand, this is the book about the murder of a young woman and the trial that (spoiler alert!) saw her accused killer acquitted. But describing it that way would grossly oversimplify the story. It is also about the anxieties and possibilities surrounding women's work in cotton mills; the growth of Methodism and the upheavals created by religious revivalism; changes in American print culture; and popular fascination with tales of scandal, crime, and murder. Dorsey describes the murder as a “social drama” that forces a community to ask: “Why did this happen? and What does it tell us about who we are?” (3).The crime at the heart of Dorsey's work was dramatic indeed. Farmers found the dead, pregnant body of Sarah Maria Cornell tied to a cold fence in December 1832. While initially assumed a suicide, the death became suspicious once a note was found in the woman's effects. If anything happened to her, the note said, ask Reverend Ephraim Avery. In Dorsey's able hands, the story of Cornell's death and Avery's trial is a microcosm for exploring a nation in the midst of profound transitions in economy, religion, print culture, and gender roles.Dorsey's study features three sections: Murder, Trial, and Scandal. The opening chapters trace the discovery of Cornell's murder and the identification of Avery as a suspect, followed by his arrest. In flashbacks, Dorsey introduces Cornell and Avery, as well as the momentous transitions of their time. Avery was a man troubled by the changes wrought by the market revolution, which seemed to close off the avenues to respectable manhood that were available to his father and grandfather. In the Methodist church's itinerant ministry, he found a new path that depended upon his mobility and his power to persuade. Cornell, too, embraced Methodism with a passion. She was driven by a desire to find religious community as well as economic independence through work in the new mills. Finding both proved a challenge. The mills and the church claimed the role of moral police, and Cornell struggled to live up to expectations of feminine behavior. The freedom to move and seek her independence in this new cultural context carried dangers. As Cornell confided to her sister, it was at a camp meeting that Avery coerced her into the sexual encounter that left her pregnant. Dorsey paints vivid pictures of the lives of factory girls and itinerating minsters alike. The chapters’ shifting chronology effectively elevates the readers’ sense of impending dread. We know from the beginning where the story will end—with violent death—and it is with that ending in mind that we enter into Cornell's world.The book's second section focuses on the trial. Reporters followed the case closely and shared breathless updates with readers far beyond New England. I particularly appreciated chapters on medical expertise and the competing claims of the women who prepared Cornell's body for burial and the doctors who examined her body for the court. For readers of Laurel Thacher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, the general context of the dismissal of women's knowledge and authority in favor of the professionalization of male doctors will be familiar. In Avery's case, we see one of the tragic outcomes of that transition. Women's testimony of seeing evidence of violent attacks on Cornell's body was dismissed in favor of doctors’ explaining away bruises. Assumptions like this resulted in the jury's decision to acquit. But not everyone was satisfied with the trial's outcome—or with the Methodist church's separate determination that Avery was innocent. The third section of the book, “Scandal,” traces the trial's afterlife. Mobs protested and formed conspiracy theories in the streets, in the press, and on the stage. If Americans at the time understood democracy to depend on the will of the people, then the jury's unpopular verdict presented a crisis: How could the people ensure that justice would be delivered?As word of the murder circulated, the stories that people told about who Cornell and Avery were—and what happened between them—reflected their preconceptions. As Dorsey explains, people used “an assortment of labels” to describe Cornell. Their storytelling implied an existing narrative: Methodist, prostitute, crazy, pious, wayward, and a “factory girl” (12). At various points and from various pens, the story of Cornell's death was a seduction narrative with an inevitably tragic ending, or a murder mystery featuring the budding tropes of detective fiction. Whether you believed the prosecution or the defense depended on whether you chose to imagine trusting a woman of “sexual indulgence, wild fanaticism, and violent passions” over the “seemingly unblemished reputation of a clergyman” (184).What her contemporaries were reluctant to understand—and what Dorsey invites his readers to consider—is that this was a story of sexual assault and violence. Cornell's sexual history was used to present her as unstable or disreputable. This allowed her contemporaries to ignore Cornell's own description of her encounter with Avery as forced. I appreciated Dorsey's approach to this topic, quietly but firmly assuming the truth of Cornell's claim and interpreting the rest of the story with curiosity and openness. He asks his readers to imagine Cornell's previous sexual encounters as potential evidence of “a young woman's genuine sexual pleasures and desires,” ones that “provided sexual autonomy similar to the independence that mill wages and Methodist spirituality offered, the type of autonomy enjoyed by young working men” (175). Autonomy, after all, seems to be what Sarah Maria Cornell wanted in her short life.In Murder in a Mill Town, Dorsey has given us a beautiful book about a terrible story that will be of interest to a broad range of readers. Cornell's death and her killer's trial serve as a point of entry into a period of American history when cultural changes created tremendous anxieties about the roles of women and men, sometimes resulting in tragic outcomes.