Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America by Kelly A. Ryan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America by Kelly A. Ryan Anna Mae Duane (bio) Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America kelly a. ryan New York University Press, 2019 400 pp. When Abigail Adams asked her husband to "remember the ladies" as he drafted the laws for the new nation, John Adams scoffed, arguing that loosening the controls on one aspect of "our Masculine systems" threatened to set off a dangerous chain reaction. Already, he worried, there were reports that children and apprentices had grown disobedient, that schools had become turbulent, that Native Americans disrespected their guardians, and that enslaved people had grown rebellious. If even one group was to advance, Adams suggested, the shift in power would topple the order of society. In the years surrounding the American Revolution, a large part of the population was included in one of the legally disempowered groups that Adams describes, and it is this population that Kelly A. Ryan analyzes in Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America. As Ryan uncovers the multiple tactics people in these groups deployed in order to escape the violence that dominated their lives, the book chronicles how the sporadic and uneven advances made by one group sometimes emerged in competition against, but often came in tandem with, others who also sought to convince the public that the brutality they endured was unacceptable. Ryan has gathered a remarkable archive of legal records from New York and Massachusetts, supplemented by print literature, diaries, and letters of people seeking relief from abuse. Even as the geography of the study is largely circumscribed to New York and greater New England, the demographic scope of the inquiry itself is ambitiously diverse. Ryan draws from several different, but sometimes overlapping, categories of legally disempowered [End Page 580] people in this capacious study, including white wives, child servants and apprentices, and enslaved African Americans. As Ryan leads us through a harrowing archive of court cases and newspaper accounts, we learn the names of people like Katherine Naylor, a seventeenth-century Massachusetts wife who sought help to escape marital violence so severe it threatened her life (47). We are introduced to an enslaved eighteenth-century trio known only Mark, Phillip, and Phoebe, who conspired to kill their brutally cruel enslaver (77). We are confronted with the fate of a fourteen-year-old white servant boy named John Walker whose abuse at the hands of his employer did not merit any judicial notice until his beaten and frostbitten body scandalized the town (30). As extensive as Everyday Crimes's collected archive of cases is, Ryan readily admits its limitations. Not everyone suffering as Naylor, Phoebe, and Walker did sought outside help in ways that would become legible. People isolated in rural environments and people prevented by mental or physical disability from making powerful allies rarely appear in such records. Even as we read of the horrific violence visited on individuals like Katherine Naylor or Mark, Phillip or Phoebe, Everyday Crimes reminds us that there were thousands upon thousands whose situations were still more dire, and whose stories we will likely never know. Drawing from such a wide swath of the population is a bold and, arguably, a risky strategy. Scholars have often separated the study of enslaved people from the study of white women and children to avoid the possibility of diminishing the unique atrocities attributable to slavery by conflating it with other disempowered positions. As nineteenth-century authors including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs demonstrated, white women often deployed their (admittedly circumscribed) power to harm the enslaved people under their control. Ryan's own case studies indicate that white children were fully capable of doing the same. In one striking case Ryan documents, an enslaved man was pushed to retaliatory violence as his enslaver's young son mimicked his father's cruelty, taunting and hitting the enslaved man as he went about his work. In recent years, critics including Karen Sánchez Eppler, Martha Jones, and others have demonstrated how white women made metaphorical alliances with Black people for political advantage, while refusing to include Black women in the gains. While there...