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Jason
FAIRBANKS
Classification: Murderer
Characteristics: The
victim would not
consent to marry him
Number of victims: 1
Date of murder:
May 18,
1801
Date of birth:
September 25,
1780
Victim profile: Elizabeth Fales,
19
Method of murder: Stabbing
with knife
Location: Dedham, Massachusetts, USA
Status: Executed by
hanging in Massachusetts on September 10, 1801
Jason Fairbanks (September 25, 1780 –
September 10, 1801) was an early American murderer. Fairbanks came from
a prominent family in Dedham, Massachusetts. He was the son of Ebenezer
and Prudence Farrington Fairbanks and lived in the Fairbanks House,
today the oldest house in the country. He was born with a lame arm. His
sixth cousin, once removed, was Vice President Charles Fairbanks.
History
Fairbanks had been courting Elizabeth Fales, the
daughter of Nehemiah Fales, for a long while but she would not
consent to marry him. Finally on May 18, 1801, Fairbanks was
determined to force her to make up her mind and met with Fales in a
birch grove next to "Mason's pasture" in Dedham, though the exact
location today is not known.
Later, Fairbanks appeared at her parents' house
covered with blood and holding a knife. He told them that their
daughter had committed suicide and he had tried to do the same but
was unable to. She had been stabbed 11 times, including once in the
back.
Fairbanks' wounds were serious; he was in no
shape to be taken directly to jail. He was therefore taken into the
Fales household, where he received medical treatment. On August 8,
1801, after a three day trial and Elizabeth's funeral on May 20, a
jury indicted Fairbanks as an accessory to Elizabeth's death and was
jailed. He was sentenced to death by hanging.
In August, James Sullivan, the Republican
Attorney General of Massachusetts, handled the prosecution. Harrison
Gray Otis and John Lowell, Jr., two prominent Federalist lawyers,
defended Fairbanks. He was found guilty of Elizabeth's murder and
was sentenced to death by hanging.
Escape
Before the execution could take place Fairbanks
escaped with the help of his brother, a cousin, a friend, and his
nephew Nathaniel Davis. A $1,000 bounty was placed on his head, and
a newspaper headline screamed "Stop the Murderer!" This party tried
to make their way to Canada, but stopped to eat in Skenesboro(ugh),
now known as Whitehall, New York, just south of the Canadian border
where Fairbanks was recaptured.
Fairbanks was returned to the Boston jail, for
authorities no longer trusted the Dedham jail, and, on September 10,
1801 Fairbanks was hanged.
It was a massive event. Two Army cavalry
companies and a volunteer militia unit made sure he didn’t escape
again, and the 10,000 people who showed up at the Town Common to
witness the execution were five times the town’s population at the
time.
Within two days of his execution the Report of
the Trial of Jason Fairbanks was published then the entire story was
written up in a pamphlet entitled A Deed of Horror! Trial of Jason
Fairbanks for the Murder of His Sweetheart in 1801, and became the
basis for a novel called The Life of Jason Fairbanks: A Novel
Founded on Fact which is believed to no longer exist.
Source
Freeman, Dale H. Melancholy Catastrophe! The
story of Jason Fairbanks and Elizabeth Fales, Historical Journal
of Massachusetts, Winter 1998
Wikipedia.org
Legal Studies Forum
Volume 17, Number 2 (1993) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum
The Story of Jason Fairbanks: Trial Reports and the Rise of Sentimental Fiction
The story of the rise of American sentimental
fiction at the end of the eighteenth century has often been told. The
first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy,
appeared in Boston in 1789. America's first great sentimental
best-seller, Susanna Rawson's Charlotte Temple, was
originally published in England in 1791 and first reprinted in the
United States in 1794.
In all, more than thirty novels by American authors
were published in the United States between 1789 and 1800, with
hundreds more during the decades that followed. That early blossoming
of American sentimental fiction has been ably chronicled by such
prominent literary historians as Alexander Cowie, James Hart, Herbert
Brown, and, more recently, Cathy Davidson. All of those scholars have
emphasized the controversial character of early sentimental novels,
describing how conservative moralists of the day condemned such
fiction as tending to overstimulate the imaginations and corrupt the
morals of their predominantly young and female readers. Cathy Davidson
has further argued that early sentimental novels were a subversive
genre that empowered women and young people in a still patriarchal and
age-stratified society.1
In contrast to the considerable scholarly attention
that has been paid to the rise of sentimental fiction, cultural
historians have virtually ignored the nearly contemporaneous rise of
criminal trial reports as a popular genre, both as features in
newspapers and as separate pamphlets or larger volumes. Most early
trial reports closely followed the actual order of trial proceedings,
including the indictment, opening arguments, testimony of witnesses,
closing arguments, judge's charge, verdict, and sentence. They ranged
in thoroughness from relatively brief synopses of courtroom
proceedings to complete transcriptions of entire trials, sometimes
running to two hundred or more pages in length.
A few may have been published primarily for the use
of judges and lawyers but most were clearly designed for a popular lay
audience. Although only occasionally produced during the colonial
period, trial reports began appearing with greater frequency in New
York and Philadelphia during the 1790s and in New England during the
following decade. Thus trial reports had already become a popular
American genre several decades before the rise of cheap,
urban mass-circulation newspapers - the so-called "penny press" -
during the 1830s and 1840s.2
Both sentimental novels and trial reports of the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often dealt with the
interrelated themes of illicit sexuality, sexual violence, and violent
death. In fact, by the early nineteenth century, the public discourse
of crime - both in newspapers and in courtrooms - sometimes drew
heavily upon the language and motifs of sentimental fiction as a way
of framing and explaining social violence, especially violence
directed by men against women.
This essay will examine that intermingling of law,
journalism, and sentimentality by exploring the highly-publicized case
of Jason Fairbanks, a young man from Dedham, Massachusetts, who was
convicted of murdering his sweetheart in 1801.3
Through a close look at a report of Fairbanks's trial and at other
published responses to the case, I will suggest how the authoritative
discourses of law and journalism helped legitimize the birth of a
sentimental culture.
At the outset, it might be helpful to identify the
trial report that provides the basis for much of what follows. The
Boston publishing firm of Russell and Cutler issued their Report
of the Trial of Jason Fairbanks in September 1801, within a day
or two of Fairbanks's execution. It runs to eighty-seven pages,
consisting of verbatim transcripts of trial testimony; third-person
synopses of lawyers' arguments; detailed summaries of the charge,
verdict, and sentence; and supplementary accounts of the prisoner's
escape, recapture, and execution.
The compilation appeared in at least four editions
within a period of several months, making it the first demonstrably
popular trial report published in early national New England. Readers
interested in a more detailed discussion of Russell and Cutler's
Report and of the various other pamphlets and broadsides on the
Fairbanks case can consult my new book on New England crime literature,
from which this essay is largely drawn.4
One afternoon in the spring of 1801, at about the
time that Thomas Jefferson was taking over the presidency from John
Adams, Herman Mann, the editor of a weekly newspaper issued in Dedham
Massachusetts, was called to the scene of a local tragedy. He would
describe the affair at length in the next issue of his paper, under
the headline: "MELANCHOLY CATASTROPHE!"
According to Mann's account, Jason Fairbanks and
Elizabeth Fales, two young Dedham residents of respectable families,
had been engaged in a long but frustrated courtship. On the afternoon
of Monday, May 18, 1801, the couple met by agreement at a thicket of
birch trees not far from the Fales residence in order to reach some
resolution.
Sometime later, at about three o'clock, Fairbanks
appeared at the Fales house, covered with blood, holding a knife,
announcing that Elizabeth had killed herself and that he had tried to
do the same. When the girl's relatives rushed to the grove of birches,
they found Elizabeth lying on the ground with her throat cut and her
body lacerated by multiple stab wounds; the young woman died after "a
few struggles and gasps." As for Jason, he was not much better off,
with a cut throat and various other knife wounds. The following
morning, Mann reported that Fairbanks was "still alive, but in a most
deplorable situation."5
In covering the untimely death of Elizabeth Fales,
Herman Mann did not simply provide an objective statement of the facts
in the case. Rather, he laced his account with language suggestive of
the sentimental fiction that had begun to flood the United States
during the previous ten or twenty years. The editor described the
murder scene as "tragic," "melancholy," and "heart rending"; referred
to his own report on the matter as a "sympathetic effusion"; and
suggested that the event would evoke the "'sympathizing grief of every
one susceptible of the passions of humanity." He concluded by inviting
readers to join in sentimental lamentation: "Ye who have experienced,
or learned from your natural sympathy - come, and with me, drop a tear."
Mann himself was clearly attuned to the emerging "cult of sensibility"
and assumed that at least some of his readers were as well.6
Although Jason Fairbanks barely survived his own
multiple stab wounds, he was brought to trial in August before the
Supreme Court of Massachusetts on the charge of murdering Elizabeth
Fales. So many spectators of both sexes flocked to the trial at Dedham
that the judges were forced to move the proceedings from the usual
courthouse chamber to a nearby meetinghouse.
James Sullivan, the Republican attorney general of
Massachusetts, handled the prosecution; Harrison Gray Otis and John
Lowell, Jr., two prominent Federalist lawyers, stood for the defense.
Otis was one of the most famous of the so-called Young Federalists. In
other words, he was part of a younger generation of Federalist
politicians who were willing to copy the popular political tactics of
the Jeffersonian Republicans. As we shall now see, Otis was also quite
willing to copy the popular literary tactics of sentimental authors.7
During the trial, witnesses provided the jury with
a detailed picture of the background and immediate circumstances of
the tragedy. The two principals were Jason Fairbanks, a sickly young
man of about twenty-one years of age with a crippled arm, and
Elizabeth (or Betsey) Fales, a healthy young woman of about eighteen.
The pair had been courting, at least sporadically, over a period of
several years, despite Jason's poor health and the opposition of
Betsey's family and friends.
At times Fairbanks became frustrated by the
situation; witnesses testified that he had made threats against both
Betsey and her mother. Still, the couple often met together at the
Fairbanks's residence, at the houses of friends, and out-of-doors,
occasionally spending the night together alone. Although members of
the Fales family denied it under oath, other witnesses, particularly
young acquaintances, testified that Jason and a Betsey's attachment
seemed strong and mutual.8
On Sunday, May 17, the day before the tragedy,
Jason's niece playfully forged a marriage certificate for Fairbanks
and Fales. That same day Jason told a friend, Reuben Farrington, that
he "planned to meet Betsey, in order to have the matter settled,"
explaining that he "either intended to violate her chastity, or carry
her to Wrentham [a nearby town], to be married, for he had waited long
enough."
Farrington saw Fairbanks twice the next morning;
Jason seemed "cheerful, and merry as usual," but claimed to be too
weak to help him with some gardening. At one-thirty that afternoon,
Fairbanks told Farrington that he would let him know in about an hour
what he had decided to do about his courtship.9
In the meantime, Betsey Fales had spent Monday
morning helping with household chores. Both her mother and sister
claimed that she too had appeared "cheerful and merry as usual." After
drinking some milk for lunch, she went between twelve and one o'clock
to a neighbor's house to retrieve a novel, entitled Julia
Mandeville. She stayed there for a bit more than an hour, amusing
herself by reading the book, a melodramatic piece of British fiction
that climaxed with the sudden and tragic deaths of two young lovers
who had been engaged to be married. After laying the novel aside,
Betsey played for a few minutes with a little child and left. At about
three o'clock, two of her friends repeatedly heard Betsey Fales's
voice coming from some nearby woods; at first, one thought she was
laughing, but later both thought they heard cries of distress. Fifteen
minutes later, they learned that Betsey was dead.10
All of the circumstances surrounding the discovery
of Betsey Fales in the birch grove confirmed that Jason Fairbanks had
been with her at the time she received her mortal wounds. Fairbanks
himself directed her relatives to the spot where she lay. In his hand
was the bloody jack-knife with which both of them had been wounded.
Witnesses found Jason's overcoat and wallet near Betsey's body, along
with fragments of the marriage certificate that Jason's niece had
given him the previous day. Although Jason's claim that Betsey had
committed suicide was excluded from trial testimony, it seemed clear
that she had either taken her own life or been murdered by Fairbanks.11
Lawyers on both sides sought to resolve the issue
in their favor by marshalling evidence concerning Betsey's wounds and
Jason's physical condition. The prosecutor, Sullivan, insisted that
Betsey could not possibly have inflicted the more than a dozen knife
wounds on her throat, arms, breasts, side, and even back - the one on
the back was a particular problem for the defense.
On the other hand, the defense lawyers insisted
that the crippled and sickly Fairbanks, with a shrunken right arm that
was completely stiff at the elbow - and who reportedly needed his
mother's help simply to put on his clothes every morning - could not
possibly have subdued the healthy and athletic Betsey Fales.12
Because much of the testimony and evidence was
actually contradictory and inconclusive, both the prosecutor and the
defense lawyers chose to present imaginative reconstructions of what
might have happened in the grove of birches in order to try to sway
the jury. It is noteworthy that those reconstructions sounded a great
deal like scenes from contemporary fiction.
The scenario sketched by Harrison Gray Otis, one
of the defense lawyers, centered on his portrait of Betsey Fales as a
passionate young woman whose head was "filled with melancholy romances
and legendary tales." She was, in short, very much like those
misguided and corrupted female readers described by conservative
critics of sentimental fiction. Otis further suggested that Betsey had
been driven to despair by her love for Jason, a young man whose
courtship was opposed by her parents and whose health was too fragile
to allow him to support her himself against her parents wishes.
Finally, amid the grove of birches, realizing the
hopelessness of their courtship, Betsey had frantically seized Jason's
knife and taken her own life.13
Significantly, Otis sought to bolster the credibility of his
version of events by invoking the authority not of law but of
literature:
This is his simple tale - Is it impossible? Is it
improbable? Has disappointed love never produced despair? Has
despair never induced Suicide? Has the softer sex been peculiarly
exempt from these feelings and these results?
No - Every annal, and every novel writer will establish the
assertion, that no passion has so often terminated fatally as love,
and no circumstances have so frequently given it a fatal
direction as injudicious restraint.14
Otis then tried to clinch his case by sketching
a vignette that might easily have been extracted from a
contemporary romance; the key prop in his little melodrama was the
forged marriage certificate, itself a "fiction" of sorts, whose
fragments had been found at the scene of the crime:
When their conversation turned upon their future
prospects, and the small hopes which they entertained of a happy
union, Jason produced this certificate, and after relating the
history of its origin, with a desperate and melancholy look,
correspondent to their feelings, he observed, "I fear we shall never
be nearer to the gratification of our fond expectations; I fear that
this little fiction is the highest consummation of our
bliss, which we shall ever realize;" and tearing in pieces the
scroll on which their names were united, "thus, said he, our
tenderest hopes are scattered to the winds." Perhaps this little
incident, more than all others, contributed to rouse that
phrenzy and despair, which induced her rashly to terminate, by
her own hand, her own existence.15
Notice that even as Otis invoked the
epistemological authority of novels and adopted their narrative
strategies, his reconstruction tended to confirm the contemporary
critique of fiction as corrupting immature minds and stimulating
unhealthy passions. Like many authors of early sentimental tales
and novels, Otis shrewdly hedged his bets by implicitly condemning
fictive modes even as he employed them.
On the other side, Sullivan, the prosecutor,
presented a competing image of the relationship between Fairbanks and
Fales and of the tragedy in the grove, one almost as melodramatic as
his opponent's. According to Sullivan's account, Fairbanks was a lazy,
pampered, and lustful degenerate, while Fales was a virtuous young
woman. Sullivan implied that Fairbanks first tried to hoodwink or
seduce Fales by presenting her with the forged marriage certificate;
when she refused his advances, he may have then tried to rape her; he
then finally killed her when he proved unable to consummate his sexual
assault. This is the dramatic scene that Sullivan sketched for the
jury; note, at the outset, the laviryer's explicit appeal to the
imaginations of the jurors:
I now again call your imaginations to an image
from whence the eye turns with horror, and of which language refuses
a description.
When he [Fairbanks] had produced the false
certificate, and she had with a virtuous indignation torn the
imposition in pieces, he became enraged: - Perhaps the knife was
first exhibited to obtain by terror, what he feared he could not
obtain by force. She turned on her face, the stab on her back
altered her position; her shoes and shawl were thrown off in the
struggle. When her arms defended her throat the wounds were given in
her bosom to remove the obstruction, and her arms and hands mangled
to gain access to the neck. Thus far led on, he found no retreat;
but gave the ghastly wound, which more immediately produced her
death. - But I quit the horrid and distressing scene.16
Significantly, Sullivan did not reject Otis's
invocation of fiction as an epistemological authority but resorted
to it as well in order to strengthen his case. To his opponent's
observation that novelists often described frustrated love as
leading to female suicide, Sullivan replied that even fictional
authors confirmed that when women decided to kill themselves, they
did so by drowning or poisoning or strangling, rather than by
stabbing.17
Surely it is significant that both lawyers, at a
trial in which a man's life was at stake, chose to employ fiction as
their standard of what was possible or probable in real life. Whatever
their own views, the lawyers must have assumed that the jurors in the
case - who they were, of course, trying to influence - were already
predisposed to view the real world through the lens of sentimental
culture.
If the jury had any doubts as to which imaginative
reconstruction of the crime to believe, they were probably resolved by
the closing charge of the judges, which was extremely hostile to
Fairbanks. The obedient jurors came in with a verdict of guilty, and
Jason was publicly hanged on Dedham's town common before an enormous
crowd of spectators, estimated at 10,000.18
But the public's fascination with the Fairbanks case did not die with
Jason. Rather, publishers continued to produce a series of broadsides
and pamphlets on the controversial case, some hostile toward Fairbanks,
others sympathetic.19
One of the more interesting of those publications
was entitled The SOLEMN DECLARATI0N of tbe Late
Unfortunate Jason Fairbanks. It featured both an autobiographical
statement by Jason himself, supposedly made in prison while awaiting
execution, and a longer sentimental and very sympathetic biography of
Fairbanks, probably written by Sarah Wentworth Morton, a well-known
Boston socialite and sentimental poet.20
According to his own statement, Jason had been
acquainted with Betsey Fales from "a very early age" and had
eventually become her "favored lover." Although he was initially
treated by her family with "respect and affection," Betsey's sister
and mother turned against Fairbanks, forcing the young lovers to
separate. When a chance meeting led to a renewal of the courtship a
year later, the couple arranged a series of rendezvous in the grove of
birches, in one of her father's outbuildings, and at the homes of
neighbors. As Jason's health deteriorated, Betsey began visiting him
at his father's house, commonly staying until one in the morning and
once even remaining the entire night. On at least one of those
occasions the couple had sexual intercourse. Then in May 1801, with
Jason's health much improved, the couple arranged a meeting in the
thicket of birches in order to discuss their situation.21
Here Jason provided yet another account of the
fatal meeting in the grove, one similar to the version offered by
Harrison Gray Otis at the trial, but differing from it in a few
crucial details. According to Jason, the couple was engaged in a "long
conversation upon the subject of marriage," when he recalled the
fictitious marriage certificate prepared for him by his niece the
previous day. He showed Betsey the spurious document, commented that
it was as close to marriage as they would ever get, and tore the
certificate to pieces. While assuring Fales of his willingness to
marry her instantly, Fairbanks acknowledged that she would even then
have to continue living at her father's house, since he, Jason, had
"no means, nor any place of ... [his] own to carry her to." Betsey
thereupon began to "weep bitterly," saying that such an arrangement
would be impossible since her mother would immediately "turn her out"
of the house. She then questioned Jason's sincerity, noting that her
sisters had told her that Fairbanks did not really love her. Jason's
statement then reached a crucial juncture, recounting an exchange that
had not been included in his lawyer's version of events:
And now with all sorrow, and blame to myself, do
I pursue the remainder of this melancholy history; for I replied
angrily and roughly, that if she were capable, and willing to
believe all that her sisters . . . said upon the subject, she might
go to the devil with them, since she so well knew that I had
already possessed her person, and received the pledge
of her most tender attachment!
She then, with great quickness, demanded of me -
"if I had evertold any one of our connection?' I
rashly, but sincerely, answered, that I had indeed entrusted our
secret to my intimate friends, Reuben Farrington
and Isaac Whiting. - Upon which she violently exclaimed,
Oh! you are a monster!" - and looking on me, as I sat
whittling a smallpiece of wood with a pen-knife, she cried out, "give
me that knife, I will put an end to my existence, you
false-bearted man! - for I had rather die than live!"
At the same time, stretching out her hand, she
took the knife, and began, as if in a state of distraction, to stab
her breast and body - screaming out, and walking violently from me -
. . ; while I, struck with astonishment, remained without power, and
in a cold state of insensibility; but was too - too soon awakened
from this dreadful stupefaction, by her coming, and either falling
or sitting down by me.
- Her throat was cut - which seeing, I
immediately seized that cruel knife which had robbed me of all my
fond heart held dear! and while it yet remained wet with her blood,
stabbed myself in many and repeated places; only leaving off when I
had finished cutting my own throat,and when I believed all was over
with me!22
After Jason's own dramatic statement, the pamphlet
continued with a sympathetic biography that portrayed Fairbanks as a
gifted, industrious, and sensitive young man. As for Betsey Fales, she
was described as a sentimental and impressionable young woman who
spent much of her spare time reading works of fiction and moral
amusement, in which the passion of love was generally transcendant."
According to the account, her reading of sentimental fiction helped
shape and arouse her love for Fairbanks and, by implication, may have
finally led her to take her own life.23
What really happened in the grove of
birches on May 18, 1801? Did Betsey Fales cut her own throat in
romantic despair over Jason's inability to marry and support her, as
suggested by the defense lawyer, Harrison Gray Otis? Did Jason
Fairbanks stab Fales to death while trying unsuccessfully to rape her,
as postulated by the prosecutor, James Sullivan? Or did Betsey slay
herself in a fit of rage over Jason's indiscretion in revealing their
sexual relationship to his male friends, as Fairbanks himself claimed
in his last statement in prison? We will almost certainly never know
for sure, but for the purposes of this essay it really does not matter.
What does matter is the way that sentimental fiction pervaded
the tragedy of Jason Fairbanks and Betsey Fales from beginning to end.
To better understand the significance of that pattern, it may be
helpful to set fictive aspects of the Fairbanks case into
historiographic perspective.
The classic account of fiction's stunning rise to
literary predominance during the last decades of the eighteenth
century was formulated by the American jurist and author, Royall Tyler,
in The Algerine Captive, first published at Walpole, New
Hampshire, in 1797. The picaresque hero of the novel, Updike Underhill,
was imprisoned abroad during a seven-year period stretching from 1788
through 1795.
In the preface to his tale, Tyler described the
transformation in literary culture that had occurred in New England
during his protag- onist's absence. When Underhill left his home
region in 1788, several modern types of literature, including "books
of Biography, Travels, Novels, and modern Romances," were still
confined to the inhabitants of coastal towns or to ministers, doctors,
and lawyers in rural districts. On the other hand, Tyler explained,
the typical "farmer's library" was largely restricted to religious and
didactic publications. But by the time of the captive's return in
1795, that traditional regime had been demolished by an influx of new
literary forms and the establishment of circulating libraries in
inland towns. "No sooner was a taste for amusing literature diffused,"
Tyler explained, "than all orders of country life with one accord
forsook the sober sermons and Practical Pieties of their fathers for
the gay stories and splendid impieties of the Traveller and the
Novelist.24
Although not the view of a disinterested observer, Tyler's assessment
was still being echoed and endorsed by literary historians 150 years
later.25
However, two recent studies of book production and
diffusion in rural Massachusetts have challenged the notion that
fiction rapidly conquered the New England countryside. In a perceptive
survey of the printing and bookselling business of the Merriam family
of Brookfield, Jack Larkin notes the relative scarcity of fiction in
the output and sales of that firm. "Fiction could be found on the
country bookstore's shelves, but up to the early 1830s it seems to
have played no transforming role in the cultural lives of ordinary
rural people," Larkin generalizes. "Fiction moved slowly, in minuscule
numbers, against the predominantly orthodox cultural grain of central
Massachusetts, where Puritan-bred suspicions of novels remained
powerful.26
That view has been reinforced by the skillful
reconstruction of two early social libraries in Concord by Robert A.
Gross, who finds that fewer than seven percent of the volumes in a
collection assembled between 1795 and 1820 were works of fiction.
After explicitly challenging one of Tyler's extravagant claims, Gross
notes that "only a handful of novels, and all of those highly moral,
made it onto the shelves.27
Although Larkin and Gross make a strong case
against the Tyler thesis, many of the circumstances surrounding the
Dedham tragedy of 1801 tend to support the idea that a revolution in
literary culture had already been accomplished in eastern
Massachusetts by the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Trial testimony indicated that Betsey Fales had
shared at least one melodramatic novel with her neighbors during the
spring of 1801.28
Supporters of Jason Fairbanks argued that romantic fiction played a
crucial role in shaping Betsey's love for Jason and in precipitating
her violent demise.29
Herman Mann's initial newspaper report of the tragedy was interspersed
with evocative phrases drawn from sentimental discourse, which
suggests that he expected local readers to be attuned to the language
of literary sensibility.30
Various other published treatments of the affair
were also infused with sentimental motifs.31
Lawyers on both sides of the case not only adopted narrative
strategies suggestive of fiction in their reconstructions of events
but also invoked the epistemological authority of imaginative
literature in their arguments.32
In short, fictive themes pervaded cultural responses to two of the
most serious events that could ever confront a community: a murder (or
suicide) and a capital trial. The readers of Dedham and vicinity had
not simply found a new literary diversion; sentimental fiction offered
them a new language, a new sensibility, and a new way of perceiving
the world around them.
There are several ways to reconcile the striking
cultural pattern exposed by the Fairbanks case with the findings of
Larkin and Gross. First, sentimental values and motifs could be widely
diffused through the culture by vehicles other than fiction. As
suggested by the Fairbanks case, even readers who scrupulously avoided
novels might still be exposed to the new discourse in newspapers,
trial reports, and other publications.33
Second, there may have been a significant time lag in the diffusion of
the "fiction revolution" across the
state of Massachusetts. Sentimental novels may have reached Dedham, a
community within the cultural orbit of Boston long before they arrived
in substantial numbers at inland Brookfield. Third, the relatively
genteel social libraries of Concord were probably not representative
of popular reading habits throughout eastern Massachusetts. As Jesse
H. Shera has demonstrated, the commercial circulating libraries that
flourished in the region during the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries actually specialized in novels and other works of
fiction.34
Fourth, Larkin and Gross provide evidence suggesting that some young
people in both Brookfield and Concord ignored literary proscriptions
and embraced novel reading despite the disapproval of their elders.
According to Larkin, purchases by apprentices in
the Merriam printing office accounted for more than half of the firm's
total sales of fiction.35
It is only reasonable to assume that the literary tastes of those
young men were shared (along with the actual novels) by at least some
of their local friends.
Similarly, Gross reports that one Mary Wilder Van
Schalkwyck, a well-conneced young widow in her early twenties, read
fiction with enthusiasm in Concord during the 1790s and early 1800s.
Van Schalkwyck not only owned novels herself but also lent them to and
borrowed them from her friends and regaled her companions with vivid
renditions of fictional plots.36
In short, the reading habits of young working men
in Brookfield and young women of leisure in Concord, along with the
reported literary interests of the social circle of Fairbanks and
Fales in Dedham, all suggest that locally flourishing "youth cultures"
in early national Massachusetts were committed to the consumption of
novels, whether their elders approved or not.37
But there was more to the fiction revolution than
that. Herman Mann highlighted sentimental motifs in his newspaper
account (presumably directed for the most part at adult male readers)
and lawyers on both sides of the Fairbanks case incorporated fictional
themes into their arguments (certainly directed at adult male judges
and jurors), suggesting that young people were not the only ones being
seduced by the new literary forms. Editors and lawyers not only used
sentimental language themselves but seemed to assume that their mature
neighbors were attuned to fictive discourse as well. As they struggled
to retain power and influence in an increasingly egalitarian public
culture, young Federalists like Harrison Gray Otis were at least as
willing to employ fashionable literary motifs as they were to embrace
innovative political tactics.38
Literary sentimentalism was not merely a resource
for the socially powerless - as emphasized by scholars like Cathy
Davidson - but was becoming an effective tool of established elites.39
In fact, some of those elites may have themselves been seduced by the
new ethos. Chief Justice Dana of the Massachusetts Supreme Court
reportedly sobbed while imposing the death penalty on Jason Fairbanks.40
And John Lowell, Jr., Otis's high-strung co-counsel, was supposedly so
distraught by the outcome of the Fairbanks case that he suffered a
nervus breakdown and never again resumed the practice of law. Surely
those are signs of true sensibility.41
Whether manipulative cynics or sincere proselytes,
the authors of sentimentalized crime coverage and commentary were
active agents of cultural change, carrying new values to those outside
the still limited circle of commited fiction readers. The presence of
sentimental themes in courtroom proceedings was particularly
significant. As Lawrence M. Friedman has observed, arguments presented
in trials are often important clues to what stories count as good, or
true, or compelling stories, within a particular culture."42
Indeed, the arguments of Otis and Sullivan suggest
that sentimentalism had successfully filtrated the "spontaneous
philosophy" of early nineteenth-century popular culture.43
While old-fashioned moralists, who feared and despised novels, may
have taken grim satisfaction in the tragic ending to the Fairbanks
story, they could only have been alarmed by the many fictive versions
of the tale that were told and retold by the cultural arbiters of
Dedham.44
Their trepidation was entirely justified: By integrating the motifs of
imaginative literature into the authoritative discourses of law and
journalism, published responses to the deaths of Betsey Fales and
Jason Fairbanks legitimized, even as they critiqued, the birth of a
sentimental culture.
*****
ENDNOTES
* A somewhat shorter version of this essay was
delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
held at Washington, D.C., December 27-30, 1992. Both versions are
largely abstracted from my book, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of
Grace. New England CrimeLiterature and the Origins of
American Popular Culture, 1674-1860 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993). I am grateful to Oxford University Press for permission
to reprint material here that has already appeared in that publication.
I would also like to thank Morris L. Cohen, Patricia Cline Cohen,
David R. Papke, and Amy Gilman Srebnick for their comments, criticism,
and encouragement.
1. See Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the
Word. The Rise of the Novel in America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 38-150; Herbert Ross Brown,
The Sentimental Novel inAmerica, 1789-1860 (New
York: Pageant Books, 1959); James D. Hart, The Popular Book: AHistory of America's Literary Taste (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1950), pp. 51-57; Alexander Cowie, The Rise of
the American Novel (New York: American Book, 1948), pp. 9-28;
Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes. The Story of Best Sellers in
the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 35-40.
2. See Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of
Grace, pp. 14-15, 26-31, and 167-246, passim; Cohen, "Pillars of
Salt: The Transformation of New England Crime Literature, 1674-1860" (Ph.D.
diss., Brandeis University, 1989), pp. 19-20, 31-37, 319-529, passim.
For two other scholars who have discussed trial reports, see David S.
Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance. The SubversiveImagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), pp. 171-18 1; David Ray Papke, Framing the
Criminal: Crime, Cultural Work, and the Loss of Critical Perspective,
1830-1900 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1987), pp. 19-32. On the
rise of the "penny press," see Papke, Framing the Criminal,
pp. 33-74; Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The
Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), pp. 12-75; Michael Schudson,
Discovering The New: A Social History of American Newspapers
(New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp 12-60; Frank Luther Mott,
American Journalism: AHistory of Newspapers in the United
States Through 260 Years: 1690 to 1950, rev. ed. (New York:
Macmillan, 1950), pp. 215-52; Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, Main
Currents in the History of AmericanJournalism (Boston:
Houghton Mifflinv 1927), pp. 47-51; Frederic Hudson, Journalism in
theUnited States, From 1690 to 1872 (New York- Harper &
Brothers, 1873), pp. 155-84.
3. For other modern accounts of the Fairbanks/Fales
case, see Robert Brand Hanson, Dedham,Massachusetts
1635-1890 (Dedham: Dedham Historical Societyv 1976), pp. 176-89;
Edward Rowe Snow, Piracy, Mutiny and Murder (New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1959), pp. 80-94; Ferris Greenslet, The Lowells and Their
Seven Worlds (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), pp. 95-111;
Charles Warren, Jacobin and Junto or Early American Politics as
Viewed in the Diary of Dr Nathaniel Ames1758-1822 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1931), pp- 127-45. In regard to my own
treatment of the case, I would like to thank Robert B. Hanson of the
Dedham Historical Society for kindly sharing his wealth of knowledge
on the subject.
4. See Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace, pp.
167-94.
5. Columbian Minerva (cited hereafter as Minerva],
May 19, 1801, p. 3.
6. Ibid.
7. Report of the Trial of Jason Fairbanks, on
an Indictment for the Murder of Miss Elizabeth Fales, 4th ed.
(Boston: Russell and Cutler, 1801) [cited hereafter as Fairbanks
Report], p. [5). For biographical information on Sullivan, see
DAB, vol. 18, pp. 190-91; Thomas C. Amory, Life ofJames Sullivan: With Selections from his Writings, 2 vols.
(Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1859); on Otis, see Samuel Eliot Morison,
Harrison Gray Otis, 1765-1848. The Urbane Federalist (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1969); DAB, vol. 14, 98-100; on Lowell, see
Greenslet, Lowells, pp. 88-111 and passim; DAB, vol.
11, pp. 465-66. On the Young Federalists, see David Hackett Fischer,
TheRevolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist
Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York. Harper &
Row, 1965); on Otis and Lowell in particular, see Fischer,
Revolution, pp. 38-41 and 268.
8. Fairbanks Report, pp. 15-36, passim.
9. Ibid., pp. 18 and 25.
10. Ibid., pp. 16-17 and 20-22; on the plot of Julia Mandeville,
see Greenslet, Lowells, pp. 101-2.
11. See Fairbanks Report, pp. 12-18.
12. See ibid., pp. 15, 19, 21, 25-27, 30-31, and 33-36.
13. See ibid., pp. 43-47. Although Otis is
not identified by name as having given the closing argument for the
defense recorded in the published report, both Greenslet and Morison
agree that it was delivered by Otis rather than Lowell; see Greenslet,
Lowells, p. 105; Morison, HarrisonGray Otis,
pp. 54 and 528.
14. Fairbanks Report, pp. 47-48.
15. Ibid., p. 56.
16. See Fairbanks Report, pp. 7-8 and 65-80, quoted at
73-74.
17. Ibid., p. 66.
18. See Fairbanks Report, pp. 81-83 and
85; on the execution, also see Indendent Chronicle, Sept. 10,
1801, p. 3; Sept. 14, 1801, p. 2; Mercury and New-England
Palladium, Sept. 11, 1801, p. 2; Columbian Centinel,
Sept. 12, 1801, p. 2; Boston Gazette, Sept. 14, 1801, p. 2;
Minerva, Sept. 15, 1801, p. 3; Warren, Jacobin and Junto,
p. 134; Hanson, Dedham, pp. 186-87.
19. See Cohen, Pillars of Salt, pp. 178-92, pp. 408-29.
20. For a more complete discussion of this pamphlet
and its probable authorship, see Cohen, "Pillars of Salt", pp.
184-90, pp. 420-29. Jason was almost certainly "assisted" in drafting
his own statement, very likely by Sarah Wentworth Morton.
21. Ebenezer Fairbanks, Jr., comp., The Solemn
Declaration of the Late Unfortunate JasonFairbanks, 2nd
Edition (Dedham: H. Mann, 1801), pp. 3-6.
22. Ibid., pp. 6-8.
23. See ibid., pp. 10-37, quoted at 19.
24. Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive,
excerpted in Robert E. Spiller, ed., The American LiteraryRevolution 1783-1837, pp. [21-23]; also quoted in Brown,
Sentimental Novel, pp. 15-16. For the timing of Underhill's
absence and captivity, see Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive,
2 vols. (Walpole, N.H.: D Carlisle, Jr., 1797), vol. 1, pp. 186 and
205; vol. 2, p. 239.
25. See Hart, The Popular Book, pp. 3-21;
Jesse H. Shera, Foundations of the Public Library. The
Origins of the Public Library Movement in New England 1629-1855
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), pp. 119-121 and 148-153;
Brown, Sentimental Novel, pp. 3-27; Lillie Deming Loshe,
The Early American Novel, 1789-1830 (1907; rpt. New York:
Frederick Ungar, 1958), pp. 2-3; 1 am grateful to David D. Hall for
pointing out to me that Tyler was not a disinterested observer. For
some recent findings that also tend to support Tyler's account, see
William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life. Material
and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835 (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1989), pp. 26, 172, 208, and 220.
26. See Jack Larkin, "The Merriams of Brookfield:
Printing in the Economy and Culture of Rural Massachusetts in the
Early Nineteenth Century," Proceedings of the American AntiquarianSociety 96 (April 1986): 39-73, quoted at 68.
27. See Robert A. Gross, "Much Instruction from
Little Reading: Books and Libraries in Thoreau's Concord,"
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 97 (April 1987):
129-88, quoted at 152.
28. See discussion in text above and Fairbanks
Report, pp. 16-17 and 20; on the plot of the novel, see Greenslet,
Lowells, pp. 101-102.
29. See discussion in text above and Fairbanks
Report, pp. 43 and 47-48; Fairbanks, Solemn
Declaration, p. 19.
30. See discussion in text above and Minerva,
May 19, 1801, p. 3.
31. In addition to Solemn Declaration,
discussed above, see other works discussed in Cohen, Pillars of
Salt, Monuments of Grace, chapter 8.
32. See discussion in text above and Fairbanks Report, pp.
47-48, 56, 66, and 71-74.
33. Along similar lines, Kenneth Silverman has
described the earlier infiltration of sentimentalism into
revolutionary political discourse; see Silverman, A Cultural
History of the AmericanRevolution (New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell, 1976), pp. 82-87.
34. See Shera, Foundations, pp. 127-55.
35. See Larkin, "Merriams of Brookfield," pp.
68-69. Larkin notes that "one of the novel-buying apprentices later
lamented his fiction reading, believing that it had permanently
injured his powers of factual retention and concentration."
36. See Gross, "Much Instruction," pp. 148-49.
37. On the similar appeal of novels to the youth of the Upper
Connecticut River Valley of
northern New England, see Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity,
p. 220.
38. On the adoption of new political tactics by
young Federalists like Harrison Gray Otis, see David H. Fischer,
The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the
Era ofJeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper & Row,
1965).
39. See Davidson, Revolution and the Word, pp. 38-54.
40. See Warren, Jacobin and Junto, p. 128.
41. See Greenslet, Lowells, p. 111.
42. Lawrence M. Friedman, "Law, Lawyers, and Popular Culture," 98
Yale Law Journal 1595
(1989)
43. On Gramsci's concept of "spontaneous philosophy,"
see T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept Of Cultural Hegemony: Problems
and Possibilities," American Historical Review 90 June 1985):
570.
44. For evidence of some such alarm on the part of a social
conservative of Dedham, see Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of
Grace, p. 191.
