Alison Games: Review of Elaine Forman Crane's "Witches, Wife Beaters, & Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America"

Alison Games is the Dorothy M. Brown Distinguished Professor of History at Georgetown University. Her most recent book is Witchcraft in Early North America (2010).

When Thomas Harris's ghost appeared to his childhood friend William Briggs across a field one March morning in 1792, he set in motion a chain of events that produced a lawsuit. It is easy to understand why Harris's spirit was unable to settle down for eternity. Harris had left four illegitimate children as a result of a long-time connection with a woman named Ann Goldsborough. Eager to provide for their future, Harris instructed his brother James to sell his land and to use the proceeds to support the children. James sold the land, but pocketed the earnings, and Harris's enraged ghost set to work to solve the problem. Six visits persuaded Briggs that this apparition was indeed the specter of his old friend, and Briggs in turn used the information the ghost provided to pressure the living to follow the wishes of the deceased. Like any good friend seeking to redress a grievance in a world saturated with legal knowledge and with relatively easy access to courts, he filed suit in Queen Anne's County, Maryland, in 1796-1797.

Thomas Harris's ghost is just one of the many fascinating characters readers encounter in Elaine Forman Crane's newest book, Witches, Wife Beaters, & Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America. This enthralling, deeply researched work demonstrates vividly that early Americans lived in a world saturated by the law. Crane is interested specifically in the "common folk" of her title; tavern keepers, merchants, a handful of witches, murdered and battered wives, an enslaved black man. To uncover how the law suffused their world, Crane employs the methodology of microhistory, an approach used with great success by historians seeking to discern the lives and mentalities of those often not able to speak for themselves. Crane has undertaken research in challenging sources. Even more impressively, she has taken snippets of information and woven them into engaging, moving, and occasionally riveting stories. Crane demonstrates through her painstakingly recreated life histories just how much "legal culture and the routine of daily life were knotted together in early America" (4)....