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The Power of Sympathy

2004; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rah.2004.0066

1080-6628

Jane Kamensky,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown. The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. xii + 388 pp. Maps, figures, notes, and index. $26.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). In the history hero business Martha Ballard is a natural. To be sure, excavating the story of this eighteenth-century Maine midwife, the title character of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's deservedly lauded A Midwife's Tale (1990), required heroic feats of research and storytelling. But if writing the book wasn't easy, embracing the eponymous Midwife is a cinch. Ballard—no, a reader wants to call her Martha—is self-effacing and hardworking, fearless and principled. At her best she exudes skill and strength, fording icy rivers to deliver healthy babies in impossible circumstances. At her worst, Martha exhibits little more than crankiness. No wonder readers from college classrooms to Internet chatrooms have embraced this humble woman as an iconic figure in American history. (A Google search on Ballard's name yields nearly 11,000 hits, including a site in which "Martha Ballard, Enlightenment-Era Midwife, Reviews Mötley Crüe."1 ) Whether they know her from the prize-winning book, the popular website http://www.DoHistory.org, or the acclaimed 1997 documentary film version of Ulrich's Tale, Americans agree: everybody loves Martha. If we like our early Americans plucky and stalwart, Irene Q. Brown and Richard D. Brown face a daunting task in The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler. Like Martha Ballard, Ephraim Wheeler was an ordinary American toiling on the margins of the early republic. Unlike Ballard, Wheeler lost his battle to wring competence from the rocky soil of the New England frontier. A failed patriarch, he visited his pain on people weaker and more vulnerable than himself, his children most of all. A life of struggle left Wheeler both unloved and unlovable. A poor, angry, and sometimes vicious man, Wheeler entered the historical record not by leaving a heroic if laconic diary, but by committing an act of nearly incomprehensible horror: he raped his daughter and suffered the legal consequences. Wheeler forbids us even the meager satisfaction of his repentance for such a hideous act. He denied his crime, defied his minister, [End Page 499] and accused his accusers with his dying breath. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen: we know Martha Ballard, and Ephraim Wheeler is no Martha Ballard. Yet despite Wheeler's almost singular repellence, the Browns treat him with understanding and even respect. By doing so, their affecting study—as deeply humane as it is deeply researched—forces us to reckon with Ephraim Wheeler not as a transhistorical monster, but as a creation of his particular time and place, an emblematic if disquieting figure. Now as in his own day, nobody will love Ephraim. But the Browns' careful narrative insists that readers of The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler extend him a measure of understanding and even, perhaps, of charity. The facts of the case that briefly made Ephraim Wheeler's otherwise obscure life a cause celèbre in the year 1806 are straightforward. On June 8, 1805, Wheeler raped his thirteen-year-old daughter Betsy, threatening her life if she revealed the assault. The girl, against all odds, told her mother Hannah, a hardscrabble farm wife of mixed racial descent. And Hannah Wheeler, also against all odds, called the authorities. In rapid succession Ephraim Wheeler was arrested, jailed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to die. His execution seemed, on its face, unlikely. Massachusetts had not carried out the death penalty for rape since 1779; Berkshire County authorities had never convicted a man of this capital office. And scores of Wheeler's neighbors—along with his wife, his son, and even his daughter and victim—had petitioned the governor to commute his sentence to life in prison. Nonetheless, on February 6, 1805, before a crowd of some five thousand Berkshire farmers, Wheeler hanged. All this the reader of The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler learns...