On October I, 1792, a household of teenagers (headed by a married pair just out of their teens) set out to visit the home of another young couple. There were screams in the night, and, five months later, there was a murder trial. In a preliminary hearing, the court had to determine the credibility of evidence that infanticide had been committed by a young father on the offspring of an incestuous liaison with his even younger sister-in-law. The court was persuaded by a high-powered defense team that the young woman had not even been pregnant. (A much later admission reveals that this defense was entirely false; indeed, the most important available evidence had not been heard because, under the law of Virginia at that time, blacks could not give evidence against whites even when, as in this case, it was enslaved peoples' reported sightings of an infant body that had brought on the trial.) Still, such a court hearing inevitably intensified rather than dispelled gossip. Had not, for example, an aunt of high social standing testified in court that a glimpse of her niece's undressed body had revealed her to be pregnant? Cynthia A. Kierner's remarkable book follows the further lives of the troubled youngsters; in particular, it comes to focus on the long social death of the unfortunate fallen woman, Ann Randolph. Her doom was decreed by social custom and by the sensational novels of the period. Only after some fifteen years of severe trials did she momentarily escape her fate by an advantageous marriage and the birth of an infant on whom fortune seemed to smile. The reprieve was transient; she soon found her former disgrace hideously revived by a cousin-one of the guest party that fateful night-who conspired with disappointed heirs in a public campaign to impugn her chastity and strip away the legitimacy of her little son. She survived the attack, yet, like Samuel Richardson's Clarissa in the most famous of all the fallen-woman novels, she could only achieve apotheosis in death. Her grateful son eventually erected over her grave a church that bore her name in sainted form. Jefferson's Secrets, by contrast, begins with the famous death of a very old man on July 4, 1826. Thereafter it traces his declining years: the long
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