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Sex in the Witness Stand: Erotic Sensationalism, Voyeurism, Sexual Boasting, and Bawdy Humor in Nineteenth-Century Illinois Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2014

Melissa A. Hayes
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Twenty-something John Dunn remembered July 17, 1872 well. A witness for the defense in both a bastardy trial brought by 15-year-old Mary Morgan and a later seduction suit brought by her father, John would recount that summer day by drawing on the rough, sexual slang he likely used in conversations with male friends. After he was sworn in, John informed the legal participants and curious local spectators gathered at the Perry County Circuit Court that the July 17 buggy ride with young Mary had presented him with the opportunity to “feel of her titties and monkey.” John's testimony was hardly the most vulgar given during the proceedings. Another character witness, Robert B. Ward, disclosed a particularly salacious conversation he had overheard while in the “privy” behind a DuQuoin general store. Eavesdropping, Ward listened to two young men discuss Mary Morgan's “condition” with one another. The man Ward recognized, Thomas Williams, told his friend he would leave the state rather than marry a girl who “ran around screwing this one and that one,” if Mary did happen to “swear the child on him.” Thomas's buddy agreed that dodging the law would be preferable to matrimony with Mary for she had not “behaved herself.” “I have screwed her as often as I have fingers and toes, or oftener, and you know it,” he confided to Thomas. “Yes I know that,” Thomas replied, “She don't know more than a hog whose child it is.”

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Law and History Review , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 149 - 202
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2014 

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References

1. Woodside v. Morgan, File No. 10558 (1879), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 4–6, 13.

2. For recent scholarship on the effects of legal culture on nineteenth-century sexual mores see, for example, Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002)Google Scholar; Duggan, Lisa, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (London: Duke University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Bardaglio, Peter, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Berry, Mary Frances, The Pig Farmer's Daughter and other Tales of American Justice: Episodes of Racism and Sexism in the Courts from 1865 to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1999)Google Scholar; Carroll, Mark, Homesteads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race, and the Law in Frontier Texas, 1823–1860 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Odem, Mary, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Robertson, Stephen, Crimes Against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Wood, Sharon, The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

3. See Lyons, Clare, Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar for a discussion of the rising import of erotic print culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For an overview of the democratization of pornographic literature in eighteenth-century Western culture, see Hunt, Lynn, The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity 1500–1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993)Google Scholar. See Sigel, Lisa, International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography 1800–2000 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005)Google Scholar for a discussion of pornography in modern European societies.

4. Passet, Joanne, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Schroer, Sandra Ellen, State of 'the Union': Marriage and Free Love in the Late 1800s (New York: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar.

5. Fuller, Wayne, Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003)Google Scholar, Beisel, Nicola, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and Parker, Alison, Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873–1933 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

6. The goals and tactics of sex radicals and those producing and peddling commercial representations of sex were, of course, vastly different. Moral reformers, however, tended to lump these groups together, a quite effective way of marginalizing sex reformers' efforts to expand the limits of public sexual discourse.

7. This article draws from every seduction, breach of promise of marriage, and bastardy suit appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eighty-nine cases in all. These suits fall in between the years 1842 and 1906. For a more complete picture of these legal actions, I have examined another eighty-five suits from the northern Illinois counties of Kane and Will and the central Illinois counties of Logan and Shelby. Because of the nature of local county court research in Illinois, these suits do not reflect all of the cases heard in these counties. I chose counties where at least one local court systems' records had been indexed by case type. These proceedings came from the Kane County Circuit Court, the Will County Court, the Logan County Circuit Court, and the Shelby County Circuit Court. Bastardy actions were the easiest to locate because the compilers of the index generally labeled these suits as such. Seduction and breach of promise of marriage suits, in contrast, were usually designated with the general modifiers, “trespass” and “assumpsit,” respectively. I was able to find some of the latter suits by putting the names of the defendants found in bastardy actions into the search index (seduction, breach of promise, and bastardy actions were often complementary undertakings, with one young woman and her family bringing multiple causes of action against a former lover). Because Illinois counties had multiple jurisdictions that could hear these proceedings (county courts, circuit courts, and some city courts), again, the suits researched for this article do not reflect all of the possible cases brought in a particular county. This article draws primarily on records from the Illinois Supreme Court because they often include full trial transcripts, allowing for an analysis of the language used over the course of the trial. Illinois county and circuit court records, in contrast, do not generally include full trial transcripts. See footnote 24 for a lengthy discussion of procedural developments in seduction, breach of promise, and bastardy law during the nineteenth century. My periodization covers the era in which these proceedings reached their popular heyday. See Vandervelde, Lea, “The Legal Ways of Seduction,” Stanford Law Review 48 (1996): 817–901Google Scholar for a further examination of the rising importance and prevalence of seduction and breach of promise torts during the second half of the nineteenth century. There was some criticism of these common law actions throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, but sustained pressure against the use of these suits did not gain ground until the early twentieth century. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, social pressure mounted against civil litigation measures, particularly seduction and breach of promise cases. “Anti-heart balm” reformers argued that placing legal penalties on breached engagements or deceitful sexual machinations the same as one would on breached or fraudulent mercantile agreements debased and trivialized intimate relationships. As women made strides in the workplace and women's rights activists adopted more radical policies, the lexicon of female victimization simply appeared more and more discordant with early twentieth-century women's rising independence. For more on these proceedings' gradual decline in terms of legal and social importance see Grossberg, Michael, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 33–63Google Scholar; and Berry, The Pig Farmer's Daughter, 143–51.

8. For more general treatments on Illinois law and the judiciary see Schlesinger, Keith R., The Power that Governs: The Evolution of Judicial Activism in a Midwestern State, 1840–1890 (New York: Garland, 1990)Google Scholar; Klein, Ronald G., Law on the Prairie, 1830–1900 (DeKalb, Illinois: Gurler Heritage Association, 1982)Google Scholar; and Sublett, Michael D., Paper Counties: The Illinois Experience, 1825–1867 (New York: P. Lang, 1990)Google Scholar. ln'sSamuel H. Treat: Prairie Justice (Springfield, IL: Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 2005)Google Scholar is a biography and history of Treat's career as judge of the Eighth Judicial Circuit and as an Illinois Supreme Court justice. Scholarship on law and legal culture and institutions in nineteenth-century Illinois tends to focus on urban Chicago (particularly its early twentieth-century juvenile justice and family court system) or on the period in which Abraham Lincoln was a practicing lawyer in Illinois. See Willrich, Michael, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Getis, Victoria, The Juvenile Court and the Progressives (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Cahan, Richard, A Court that Shaped America: Chicago's Federal District Court from Abe Lincoln to Abbie Hoffman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002)Google Scholar. For examples of works that investigate law in Illinois as it related to Lincoln's legal practice, see Stowell, Daniel, In Tender Consideration: Women, Families, and the Law in Abraham Lincoln's Illinois (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Bannister, Dan W. and Hughett, Barbara, Lincoln and the Illinois Supreme Court (Springfield, Illinois: Dan W. Bannister, 1995)Google Scholar. Fenster, Julie's work of popular history, The Case of Abe Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder, and the Making of a Great President (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)Google Scholar, examines Lincoln's role as a defense lawyer in a mid-century Springfield, Illinois murder case, which implicated an adulterous wife.

9. For an analysis of the cultural effects of the sensationalistic journalism style see Srebnick, Amy Gilman, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and Cohen, Patricia Cline, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)Google Scholar. Srebnick and Cohen look largely at the coverage of the murder trial of Helen Jewett by the mass media, not sexual sensationalism in the law itself. Grossberg, Michael's A Judgment for Solomon: The D'Hauteville Case and Legal Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar provides an intriguing account of the ways in which popular trials shaped gender norms and patterns of familial governance. Grossberg also explores the ways in which popular interest in a particular trial often depended upon its amenability to sensationalism. However, as the D'Hauteville divorce case did not deal very extensively with issues of a sexual nature, Grossberg does not investigate the social or cultural implications of sexually graphic legal conversations.

10. The Comstock Act, passed by Congress in 1873, banned the distribution of “obscene” publications through the postal system. Material subject to indictment under the law included both erotica and information on birth control and abortions. As such, the Comstock Act was one of the first federal attempts at suppressing the trade in “licentious” print. In recent years, some scholars have begun to challenge the assumption that moral censure efforts originated with the Comstock Laws as well as the idea that these obscenity laws were largely effective. See, in particular, Dennis, Donna, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. For a discussion of obscenity prosecution in nineteenth-century Chicago, see Shirley J. Burton's Obscenity in Victorian America: Struggles over Definition and Concomitant Prosecutions in Chicago's Federal Court, 1873–1913 (PhD diss., University of Illinois-Chicago, 1991); Burton, Shirley J., “Obscene, Lewd, and Lascivious: Ida Craddock and the Criminally Obscene Women of Chicago, 1873–1913,” Michigan Historical Review 19 (1993): 1–16Google Scholar.

11. On the productive possibilities of legal prohibitions on sex, see, especially, Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1978)Google Scholar.

12. The structure of my article is meant to reinforce my argument by modeling the ways in which spectators themselves would have experienced the “obscenity” of court day. I begin with newspaper coverage of incidents of “illicit” sex. Newspapers often kicked off a local community's curiosity about a particular “illicit” sexual incident by following it from the date of the original complaint before a justice of the peace and alerting readers—in sensationalized ways—as to when the examinations of witnesses would occur. The remaining three sections of my article center on the sexual conversations that occurred in the courtrooms. The order in which the sections appear follows the typical pattern by which these civil suits unfolded—the examination of female litigants, rebutting evidence offered by defendants and the male witnesses they subpoenaed to damage the credibility of women's sexual narratives, and, finally, the arguments of attorneys.

13. Although dealing with different kinds of sources and a different subject matter, Karen Halttunen's work on nineteenth-century popular murder literature offers similar insight into the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans sought out venues that allowed them to “imaginatively view” scenes of an illicit nature, in her case “terrible scenes of violence death.” Her chapter, “The Pornography of Violence,” investigates how the genre deliberately used themes of death and violence to provoke readers' pleasure. See Haltunnen, Karen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 60–90Google Scholar. Peter Wagner's work on the transcripts of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century criminal conversation and divorce proceedings in England as a genre of erotica is a similarly useful reference point; see Wagner, “Trial Reports as a Genre of Eighteenth-Century Erotica,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 5 (1982) 22Google Scholar. As this article argues, however, courtrooms themselves, not simply the newspaper articles or published trial reports that sexual legal proceedings generated, functioned as eroticized venues.

14. On a theoretical level, my work draws upon scholarship that stresses the social and cultural importance of the law. My work, for example, emphasizes that the sexual conversations generated by ordinary people were central to legal developments and legal culture. It also establishes local courtrooms' roles in shaping the wider sexual culture and illuminates local courts as sites of public authority as well as social, recreational, and eroticized spaces. For more on the law as an “authorizing discourse,” with the power to shape and to limit the imagination, see Tomlins, Christopher, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Tomlins and Mann, Bruce, The Many Legalities of Early America, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Bourdieu, Pierre, “The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field,” Hastings Law Journal 38 (1987): 814–53Google Scholar. For a discussion of what a law and society centered approach might bring to historical studies of legal sexual proceedings, see Robertson, Stephen, “What's Law Got to Do with It? Legal Records and Sexual Histories,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14 (2005): 161–85Google Scholar.

15. Sexually explicit discourse did not originate in mid-nineteenth-century courts. Both eighteenth and early-twentieth-century trials that dealt with intimate matters also deployed lurid language. However, the social influence of legal sexual conversations in the second half of the nineteenth century was likely more pronounced than in the period preceding and following it. As legal scholars have shown, in the increasingly secular world of the nineteenth century, the legal system became the principle arena for sociopolitical decision making, and garnered widespread spectator participation. Colonial courts, on the other hand, served as only one among several authoritative community spaces, whereas early twentieth-century courts lost wide-scale community involvement. Finally, civil sexual litigation reached its popular heyday in the second half of the nineteenth century, no doubt augmenting the social influence of sexual conversations engendered by these trials. See Mann, Bruce, Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)Google Scholar for a discussion of the gradual decline of alternative dispute-resolution spaces. See Christopher Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology for an analysis of the growing authority of nineteenth-century courts. See Steinburg, Allen, The Transformation of Criminal Justice, Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989)Google Scholar for the argument that a less participatory criminal justice system dominated by the late nineteenth-century.

16. See Dennis, Licentious Gotham. As Dennis shows, nineteenth-century obscenity indictments reveal that authorities generally found “representations of female sexual desire or pleasure, narrated by women in the first person” to be the most offensive, and, therefore, indictable. See, especially, pages 93–126 and 167–98.

17. The growing social concern for seduced women during this era led many states to criminalize seduction in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. These states, however, often continued to allow civil seduction proceedings. Illinois fathers, for example, continued to bring civil seduction proceedings even after the state had criminalized seduction. See the following works for further explanations of developments in seduction law during the nineteenth century: Berry, Mary Frances, “Judging Morality: Sexual Behavior and Legal Consequences in the Late Nineteenth-Century South,” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 835–56Google Scholar and The Pig Farmer's Daughter, 127–51; and Vandervelde, “The Legal Ways of Seduction,” 817–901. For Canadian developments, see Brode, Patrick, Courted and Abandoned: Seduction in Canadian Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

18. Although Illinois was not the first state to rule in favor of allowing evidence of seduction to increase award allotments to breach of promise plaintiffs, its rulings were widely cited as precedent by other states adjudicating similar proceedings. See Century Edition of the American Digest, Vol. 43 (St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1903), 2830–926; Vol. 8 (1899), 910–66; Vol. 6 (1899), 1802–2050.

19. Bastardy law in mid-to-late nineteenth-century Illinois bore no penalties (monetary or otherwise) for the women involved, and it was up to the discretion of unmarried mothers whether they would bring proceedings against putative fathers. Illinois courts regularly dismissed bastardy actions when brought by individuals other than unmarried mothers. Although overseers of the poor could bring paternity proceedings against purported fathers in instances where the child was likely to become a burden on public coffers and the mother refused to sue for support, in Illinois, poor-law-administered bastardy proceedings seem to have been quite rare. No official-administered bastardy proceedings have been found in any of the four county courts examined (Shelby, Logan, Kane, and Will) or in the suits appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court. For a discussion of changes in late eighteenth-century bastardy law, see Dayton, Cornelia Hughes, Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 157–230Google Scholar; Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 147–61Google Scholar; and Lyons, Sex among the Rabble. See Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 196–233, for developments in nineteenth-century bastardy law.

20. Nearly all of the prosecuting lawyers in bastardy suits appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court used literary templates of seduction to argue their cases. For some of the most colorful examples see Roberts v. People, File No. 21729 (1881), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 93–104; and Scharf v. People, File No. 11209 (1890), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, People's Brief 4, 25.

21. Nearly half of the breach of promise suits heard on appeal in the Illinois Supreme Court referenced seduction and/or bastardy proceedings pending in other courts. Likewise, more than half of the Illinois Supreme Court seduction cases referred to coterminous breach of promise or bastardy proceedings.

22. Anderson v. Ryan, Supreme Court of Illinois, at Springfield, 8 Ill. 583; 1846 Ill. Lexis 83; 3 Gilm. 583, Lexis Nexis case report, 1–3.

23. For a discussion of the difficulties defendants involved in breach of promise suits and bastardy actions had in trying to prove their innocence, see Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 40–43 and 217, 226–228. See Lea Vandervelde, “The Legal Ways of Seduction, 885–90 for a discussion of skyrocketing damage awards rendered in seduction suits during the second half of the nineteenth century. For an examination of the profitability of mid-century seduction suits for Canadian young women, see Patrick Brode, Courted and Abandoned, 70, 97, 108–9, 113–14. Beyond trial outcomes that were favorably advantageous to female litigants, there is evidence to suggest that families and communities sometimes reacted to particular acts of seduction with outrage and violence. David Huftalin spent the year following his daughter's alleged kidnapping and seduction repeatedly damaging crops and farm tools belonging to the man he claimed brought about his daughter's “ruin.” David also enlisted the assistance of his neighbors. In the middle of the night, David and several of his friends proceeded to blow horns and shoot at the house of the purported rogue. It would seem that David recruited his comrades to perform a kind of shaming ritual on his daughter's seducer. David himself described his actions as type of “chivareeing,” claiming he was protecting his neighborhood from the maneuverings of a dissolute man. A central Illinois community similarly supported a local young woman whom they believed had been seduced. These residents nearly started a riot in their Scott County courthouse. They swarmed the witness stand when a migratory farm worker from Kansas began to falsely—in their minds—testify to intimacy with the local girl. See Peak v. People, File No. 5356 (1875), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 68–74; and Huftalin v. Misner, File No. 18002, Illinois Supreme Court Case Files, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 23–30.

24. The following 1851 judicial opinion stands as an example of the common belief that men were the chief culprits behind out-of-wedlock sex acts: “Nor is it true, that illicit intercourse is usually an act of mutual imprudence. In a vast majority of cases, the female is imposed upon, and the consequences attending such intercourse are visited upon her with ten-fold severity.” Tubbs v. Van Kleek, Supreme Court of Illinois, at Ottawa, 12 Ill. 446; 1851 Ill. Lexis 33, Lexis Nexis case report, 1–3.

25. Some of the more popular American seduction novels include Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple, A Tale of Truth, (London: Minerva Press, 1791; Repr. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010); Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette, or The History of Eliza Wharton (Boston: Printed by Samuel Etheridge for E. Larkin, 1797; Repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Wood, ––Sally S.B.K., Julia and the Illuminated Baron (Portsmouth, NH: Oracle Press, 1800)Google Scholar. Contemporaries' appetite for reading material that considered the particular hardships young women of courting age might experience can be seen in the number of times seduction novels were reprinted. Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth was first published in London in 1791; it became the first American best-selling novel when it was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1794. It has been estimated that the sentimental classic reached an audience of as many as 500,000, and went through 152 editions before 1905. Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette likewise reached a mass audience. The novel first appeared in 1797, and during the 1820s was published eight times in only 5 years. New editions of the novel appeared with striking regularity throughout the nineteenth century. The American public was so enamored with the characters Susanna Rowson created that wax effigies of Charlotte Temple and her seducer, Captain Montraville, were displayed in novelty museums throughout the northeast. For more on the genre, see Hessinger, Rodney, “Insidious Murderers of Female Innocence,” in Sex and Sexuality in Early America, ed. Smith, Merril D. (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 262–66Google Scholar; Stabile, Susan M., “Still(ed) Lives,” American Literary History 22 (2010), 390–412Google Scholar; Bontatibus, Donna, The Seduction Novel of the Early Nation: A Call for Socio-Political Reform (East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Lutz, Deborah, The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth Century Seduction Narrative (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; and Godbeer, Richard, The Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 264–334Google Scholar.

26. Although a few African-American families in Illinois sought out criminal law in the aftermath of occurrences of rape, there were no black plaintiffs in the seduction, breach of promise, or bastardy proceedings appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court. As other scholars have intimated, common law remedies to the problems of out-of-wedlock intimacy appear to been primarily the province of whites. The infrequency with which African-Americans brought these civil suits speaks volumes. The newfound legal and cultural sympathy to certain women's stories of sexual misfortune reflected and reinforced the racial hierarchies of the period. See Mary Frances Berry, “Judging Morality: Sexual Behavior and Legal Consequences in the Late Nineteenth-Century South,” 835–56 and The Pig Farmer's Daughter, 127–51. There was more diversity in terms of the class and ethnic backgrounds of women involved in civil sexual litigation. Both American-born and European immigrants found legal success in these common law actions. Likewise, the monetary means of plaintiffs in seduction, breach of promise, and bastardy cases varied considerably. A few women reaped the benefits that came with several hundred acre farms or from fathers with lucrative professional careers; others made do with smaller tracts of land, and still others came from families facing irregular employment or barely squeaking by on land they rented from more well-to-do neighbors. The pecuniary resources of young women's sexual partners similarly varied widely. Here too, however,, many beaus, at least, grew up on farms. In terms of professional pursuits, Illinois men followed national economic trends. Many farmed only on a part-time basis (either on familial land, their own land, or as farmhands), and practiced other vocations to supplement their incomes, including teaching, law, medicine, store clerking, functioning as a small-time merchant, or working the mines that peppered the central and southern parts of the state. The evidence of litigants' pecuniary resources comes both from information in the cases themselves as well as from my census research on litigants. For further discussion of the varied class and ethnic backgrounds of litigants, see Lea Vandervelde, “The Legal Ways of Seduction,” 887–90; and Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 53–56.

27. See Mary Frances Berry, The Pig Farmer's Daughter, 127–51, for a similar discussion of the rural cast of these litigations. The research for this piece suggests that although not many urban civil sexual suits were appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court, such suits were routinely heard in the Chicago courts system during the second half of the nineteenth century, as evidenced by an examination of the Chicago Tribune during this period. The greater anonymity of urban environs, therefore, seems to have offered city men options other than appeals to the higher court (i.e., running away, moving to a different community, refusing to pay legal settlements).

28. For more on life in nineteenth-century Illinois, see Biles, Roger, Illinois: A History of the Land and its People (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 121–47Google Scholar; Meyer, Douglas K., Making the Heartland Quilt: A Geographical History of Settlement and Migration in Early-Nineteenth-Century Illinois (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Faragher, John Mack, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

29. See Fox, Richard Wightman, Trials of intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Korobkin, Laura, Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories of Adultery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

30. If nineteenth-century rape victims could not prove they had resisted “to the utmost,” their resistance would often be legally interpreted as “half-hearted” enough to signify sexual assent. Unsuccessful rape prosecutions, then, also brought up assumptions about female sexual acquiescence. For our purposes, the important distinction between these criminal and civil proceedings is that seduction suits presumed female sexual consent, but nonetheless rendered verdicts on behalf of female litigants. See Moore v. People, File No 11375 (1894), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 51, for an example of an Illinois rape case in which the defense raised questions about the prosecuting witness's “feeble” attempts at resistance: “If the Jury believe from the evidence that the resistance used by the prosecutrix at the time of the commission of the alleged rape were so feebly exerted by her as to have invited rather than discouraged the advances of the accused, they may well doubt whether the rape was committed.”

31. Lea Vandervelde, “The Legal Ways of Seduction,” 883–84. It should be said that these proceedings document a range of sexual behaviors. Although the majority of sexual encounters discussed in this article appear to have been consensual, some were unambiguously coercive, and others occupy a range of positions in between. For example, some men undoubtedly convinced their partners to bestow out-of-wedlock sexual favors under false pretenses, indicating their willingness to marry lovers at some point in the future in return for sex, or suggesting that they would marry their sexual partners in the event of pregnancy, but without actually intending to honor these promises. Others made promises to intimate partners, assurances that were not fulfilled, but not because of calculated tactics to persuade female partners to agree to intimacy. Rather, then as in contemporary society, matters of the heart and of sexual passion were often fickle things. Romantic and sexual attachments sometimes simply soured. In still other instances, men used physical and psychological forms of intimidation as way of coercing their female partners to have intercourse with them. Because these suits document a range of sexual behaviors across the spectrum from consensual to coercive, it is necessary to consider the range of legal avenues open to those seeking legal solutions for sexual acts and their consequences. In some ways, nineteenth-century Illinoisans do not seem to have made huge distinctions between rape and seduction. In several suits involving parties who knew one another well (neighbors, employers, and domestic servants) but who were not in a courtship-type of relationship, the young woman or her family first spoke of making a complaint of rape. Fifteen-year-old Mary Lavinia Snell's stepfather and mother originally charged Mary's former employer, Israel Heaps, with rape. The young woman worked as a domestic at Israel's Henry County farm; when she became pregnant she claimed her former employer was the father of her baby. Later, the family worked toward a settlement with Israel for seduction and bastardy. Heaps v. Dunham, File No. 21133 (1877), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 33–46, 108–41. To give a sense of the incidence of criminal cases of sexual violence in comparison with civil sexual suits, I have also examined twenty rape cases and twenty-two assaults with intent to commit rape suits that were appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court between the years 1852 and 1905. These proceedings had high conviction rates at the lower court level—98%—but the higher court only affirmed 36% of these verdicts. For a general overview of rape in American history and culture, see the edited collection Smith, Merril, ed., Sex without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America, (New York: New York University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Sielke, Sabine, Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790–1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar. For further reading on rape prosecutions in early America, see Block, Sharon, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar. See Sommerville, Diane Miller, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar for an analysis of rape law in the South. For further reading on rape law and prosecutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Odem, Delinquent Daughters; Stephen Robertson, Crimes against Children; and Sharon Wood, The Freedom of the Streets.

32. Using the search term “seduction,” this article considers the Chicago Tribune's coverage of seduction tales from the paper's beginnings in the late 1840s through the first few years of the twentieth century.

33. Using the term “seduction,” this article also considers the Quincy Public Library's Quincy Historical Newspaper Archive. The online archive has currently digitized the region's daily newspapers from the years 1835 to 1919. Quincy, Illinois, a southwestern city located on the Mississippi River, was a thriving nineteenth-century transportation center with links by rail and riverboat to destinations along the river and further west. The larger county of Adams, however, was primarily rural. The county's proximity to the Missouri border, particularly Marion and Lewis Counties, meant that the region's papers frequently reported on legal events of interest in both Illinois and Missouri. For more on the early history of Adams County, see People's History of Quincy and Adams County, Illinois: A Sesquicentennial history (Quincy: Jost & Kiefer Print. Co., 1974)Google Scholar; Kay, Ralph and Frye, Ralph, The History of Adams County, Illinois, (Evansville, IN: Unigraphic, 1977)Google Scholar; and Wilcox, David, Quincy and Adams County, History and Representative Men (Quincy: Great River Genealogical Society, 1985)Google Scholar.

34. Again, Illinois newspapers themselves did not often report on local sexual trials in ways that indicated the editors' opinions on the guilt or innocence of the litigants. When viewed as a whole, newspaper coverage of local sexual trials most often only offered brief commentary on the facts of an upcoming or ongoing trial, often with asides regarding the salacious nature of the testimony. It is possible that newspapermen wanted to avoid the possibility of libel charges, and, therefore, limited discussions about the presumed guilt or innocence of parties involved. I have found some noteworthy exceptions to this trend, however. A particularly grievous case of seduction implicating a Knoxville “lady-killer” who had allegedly seduced three local girls under promises of marriage, led a Quincy newspaper to suggest that “lynch law” might well be an appropriate response for the male relatives of the victims to undertake. “The male members of these disgraced families threaten to shoot the unprincipled villain, and it must be confessed, if he receives his due, he will be roughly handled. If lynch law is ever justifiable, it would be under such aggravating circumstances,” the author wrote. In a similar vein, after the editor of the Quincy Journal reported on several seduction and adultery cases that were making their way into the local legal system, an author of a letter to the editor commended the paper for its outspokenness on the matters. This Mt. Sterling resident also took the time to lament the sexual double standard: “Here the brute enters the family circle, desecrates the sacred temple of virtue, blasts the hopes of the parents, throws the mantle of shame over brothers and sisters, and starts a confiding, lovely girl on the downward road to ruin, while silly mamas and silly girls welcome him back to their society with a ‘Oh, he is a little wild, but he will get over that!’” The author went on to offer a solution for ending these “peace-destroying troubles”: “When society learns to ostracize and reject these God-forsaken, hell-deserving, virtue-murdering caricatures of men, the same as it does the girl or woman that has fallen, there will be less of these peace-destroying troubles.” “Galesburg Sensations,” The Quincy Whig, February 25, 1871, 1; “A Commendatory Letter,” The Quincy Daily Journal, November 2, 1883, 4.

35. David Trimble was initially arrested on charges of administering medicines to induce an abortion in Martha Carl; he made bail. A few days later he was arrested again, this time because Martha made a bastardy complaint. The parties settled out of court for the bastardy charge, and David allegedly convinced Martha not to testify in the felony charge. Marshall v. Carl, File No. 17402 (1871), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 1–8.

36. “The Kane County Seduction Case,” Chicago Tribune, February 13, 1866, 0_1; “The Craig Seduction Case,” Chicago Tribune, January 24, 1868,. 0_2; and Marshall v. Carl, File No. 17402 (1871), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 3.

37. “Sad Case of Seduction,” Chicago Tribune, May 7, 1864, 0_4; “Heartless Seduction,” Chicago Tribune, April 1, 1864, 0_4; “Love, Seduction, and Death,” Chicago Tribune, December 24, 1865, 0_1; “Seduction on the Stage,” Chicago Tribune, December 11, 1863, 4; “The History of Shame,” Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1865, 0_4; and “The Trial of Sherman M. Booth,” Chicago Tribune, August 1, 1859, 0_2.

38. “Charge of Abduction and Seduction,” The Quincy Whig, Repub. in Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1871, 0-3; “Circuit Court,” The Quincy Morning Whig, November 22, 1893, 8; and “Breach of Promise,” The Quincy Whig, April 14, 1892, 2.

39. “The Warsaw Scandal,” The Quincy Daily Whig, October 24, 1886, 3; “Crime,” The Quincy Whig, August 17, 1876, 1; and “Galesburg Sensations,” The Quincy Whig, February 25, 1871, 1.

40. How a Wife was Chosen,” Chicago Tribune, November 4, 1877, 6; “A New Edition of Don Juan,” Chicago Tribune, November 19, 1876, 13; “Front Page 8––No Title,” Chicago Tribune, September 21, 1857, 0_1; “Seduction and Death,” Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1858, 0_2; and “A Mysterious Affair,” Chicago Tribune, June 28, 1862, 0_4.

41. “Charge of Abduction and Seduction in Quincy,” Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1871, 0_3; and “Abduction and Seduction,” Chicago Tribune, August 26, 1874, 12.

42. “The Bedford Indiana Tragedy,” Chicago Tribune, May 11, 1866, 0_2; “Rogers against Rogers: Sensational Divorce Case in Progress in Galesburg, Illinois,” Chicago Tribune, December 18, 1887, 16; and “Criminal News,” Chicago Tribune, December 13, 1878, 5. See Michael Grossberg, A Judgment for Solomon, especially pages 89–167 for a similar discussion of the popularity and theatre-esque nature of scandalous litigation. See, also, Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers, especially 61–86 and Rothman, Joshua D., Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)Google Scholar, especially 130–243.

43. Again, we might look at the links between theatre culture and the law. Theaters were often perceived by contemporaries as morally questionable (particularly for women deemed as respectable), in part because theaters did often serve as assignation spots for prostitutes and their clients. See Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood, 96–97, 273; and Hill, Marilynn Wood, Their Sister's Keepers: Prostitution in New York City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 199–206Google Scholar. “Divorces Not Too Free,” Chicago Tribune, October 28, 1888, 27; and “Linnie Sinclair's Case,” Chicago Tribune, February 24, 1888, 9. For scholarship on the links between contemporary law and popular culture see Sherwin, Richard, When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line between Law and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

44. Donna Dennis discusses the ways in which nineteenth-century novelists wrote coyly about sex in Licentious Gotham, 109–17. Dennis contends that the stylistic practice of inviting the reader to a particular sexual scene only to abruptly “draw the curtain” on the event transpiring helped “racy book” publishers avoid prosecution for obscenity, and stimulated the reader's curiosity about the forbidden incident at hand. The “drawing the curtain” examples provided in the abovereferenced text come from her analysis of two mid-century “racy books”: Thompson, George, “City Crimes (1849),” in Venus in Boston and Other Tales of Nineteenth-Century City Life, ed. Reynolds, David S. and Gladman, Kimberly R. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 107–309Google Scholar; and Thompson, George, The Delights of Love (New York: J.H. Farell, n.d.)Google Scholar, quoted in Henry Spencer Ashbee, Catena Liborum Tacendorum (London: Privately Printed, 1885), 203–209.

45. My references to a bolder female sexuality are based in part on the findings of recent works on late eighteenth-century sexual practices and culture. In Sex among the Rabble, Clare Lyons describes in wonderful detail a “pleasure culture” that grew in prominence in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia. For a discussion of premarital sexual activity between young people, see also Godbeer, The Sexual Revolution in Early America. Still, I would argue that the viewpoints that legitimated out-of-wedlock sexuality in the late eighteenth century did not simply disappear as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, similarly discusses the persistence of older “bawdy” strains of thought within the public sexual conversation in her work, Rereading Sex. For treatments of the literary genre of seduction, see Bontatibus, The Seduction Novel of the Early Nation; Lutz, The Dangerous Lover; Godbeer, The Sexual Revolution in Early America, 264–334; ln, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 689–721Google Scholar; Mildred Doyle, Sentimentalism in American Periodicals, 1741–1800 (PhD diss., New York University, 1941); and Hessinger, Rodney, “Seduction Tales,” American Masculinities: An Historical Encyclopedia (New York: Sage Publications, 2003), 408–10Google Scholar.

46. Michael Grossberg's concept of “judicial patriarchy,” that nineteenth-century judges and jurymen functioned as the protectors of women whose husbands or fathers had failed in that regard, offers a useful frame of reference for my discussion of Illinois court participants as the chivalrous “defenders” of womanhood. See Grossberg, Governing the Hearth.

47. See Basch, Norma's Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 147–85Google Scholar for a parallel discussion of the prevalence of the female victimization trope in nineteenth-century divorce proceedings.

48. Scharf v. The People, File No. 11209 (1890) Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 1–68. For a similar female perspective on premarital intimacy, see Wilson v. The People, File No. 13538 (1861), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 15–25. The prosecuting litigant in this suit, 18-year-old Lucy Francis, also identified her beau's marital pledges as the catalyst behind their sexual intimacy. According to Lucy, she became betrothed to the 16-year-old son of her neighbor and employer during her 3 year tenure as a domestic servant. The young man in question, Francis Wilson, made sexual overtures to Lucy in the evenings, while others in the family prepared for bed and she tidied the kitchen. “The first words he said to me were that he would marry me . . . He wanted to do something to me there [in the kitchen],” Lucy apprised the Iroquois Circuit Court. While Francis “wanted his gratification right there,” he asked her “probably half a dozen times” before Lucy would agree to sex. Like other young women of her era, Lucy may have delayed accepting Francis's erotic overtures as a way of measuring his devotion to her. In any case, Lucy justified her premarital sexual activity in terms familiar to her contemporaries. “I was willing for him to have intercourse with me if he would marry me,” she conceded. Unfortunately for Lucy, Francis did not uphold his end of the erotic negotiations and never fulfilled his nuptial promise. Young Lucy's next course of action—enlisting the aid of her local county courthouse—was similarly not an out-of-the ordinary undertaking. Here, Lucy offered a story of courtship betrayal that her community could identify with; she mused to court attendees, “I believed he told me the truth when he said he would marry me.”

49. Historians have long noted that nineteenth-century Americans increasingly associated sex with one's “inner life” or “essential identity.” For the importance of sexual relations to nineteenth-century conceptions of romantic love see Horowitz, Rereading Sex and Lystra, Karen, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 56–120Google Scholar. Mains v. Cosner, File No. 4590 (1872), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 20–28.

50. It is difficult to discern from the case itself what type of reproductive information Charles garnered from physicians. What is clear is that Rena took Charles' affirmations of reproductive knowledge as additional confirmation that “nothing would go wrong.” It is possible that Charles referred to the rhythm method or to withdrawal before ejaculation. The literature on birth control contends that the rhythm method was the birth control routine nineteenth-century physicians most consistently recommended to their patients. See, for example, Reagan, Leslie, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

51. Mighell v. Stone, File No. 27920 (1898), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 23–24; and Mains v. Cosner, File No. 4590 (1872), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 20–28.

52. It seems unlikely that “no harm” language used by men initiating sex with fiancées and short-term partners was a means of convincing women that first sexual encounters were painless. For one, the language used to describe the act of defloration generally centered on the word “pain,” rather than harm. Most commonly, “Did he cause you pain,” or “Did it cause you pain?” Additionally, women in these suits sometimes unwittingly revealed that the harm or hurt that concerned them was social in nature. For example, one young woman, Pleasant Gaye, told her partner her mother “told her it [out-of-wedlock sex] was harm” before agreeing to sex. Another young woman, Elzina Laws, retorted, “You know what such things come to,” after being propositioned by married George Peaks. See Jones v. People, File No. 4210 (1870), Illinois Supreme Court Case Files, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 7-8; and Peak v. People, File No. 5356 (1875), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 1–14. For an Illinois rape cases in which a lawyer directly asks the prosecuting witness if the sexual encounter hurt her, see Coon v. People, File No. 21435 (1880), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 20; and Janzen v. People, File No. 27183 (1895), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 17.

53. Doyle v. Jessup, File No. 8875 (1862), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 2; Newman v. People, File No. 29834 (1906), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 5; and Mighell v. Stone, File No. 27920 (1898), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 30–34. There is evidence that men involved in both courtship and more casual sexual relationships made blanket assertions that they would not harm intimate partners during erotic negotiations. The frequent appearance of this dialogue suggests that whereas cultural prescriptions against out-of-wedlock sexuality made young women, in particular, wary of the social dangers of out-of-wedlock intimacy, they had less effect in changing actual sexual behaviors. See, for example, Jones v. People, File No. 4210 (1870), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 7–8. In this suit, Pleasant Gaye, the complaining witness, revealed that she had had sex with Green H. Jones, her neighbor and former schoolteacher, after he propositioned her. Importantly, she did not make claims that her relationship with Green was one of courtship. According to her testimony, Green had propositioned his onetime student one September evening during a visit at the home of her aunt, where she then resided. During the impromptu reading lesson Green gave Pleasant, he asked her “if she had ever accommodated a man.” Taking the comment as both question and invitation, Pleasant responded, “If it was no harm.” Green then assured Pleasant that “it was no harm.” Still not entirely convinced, Pleasant next referred to the counsel her mother gave her regarding sex outside of marriage, “My mother told me that it was harm.” After Green again asserted that sex was harmless, Pleasant walked with him to the garden where they had intercourse.

54. Judicial rhetoric offers the richest example of this condemnatory perspective. See, for example, the following 1851 breach of promise proceeding. This case involved a plaintiff in her early twenties who had allegedly been seduced under pretense of marriage. The circumstances of the suit led the chief justice delivering the opinion of the court to criticize her seducer in virulent terms: “A man who, under pretense and promise of marriage, gains the affections of an innocent girl, seduces and then abandons her, inflicts an injury, for the recompense of which money is wholly inadequate. Such a man, if he deserves the name, is entitled to no sympathy at the hands of either juries or courts, but should be made to respond in heavy damages, the only recompense which the law allows, for the commission of an act [that inflicts] more real suffering and distress, and brings upon her greater disgrace, than any other which man can commit.” Tubbs v. Van Kleek, File No. 12046 (1851), Illinois Supreme Court of Illinois Case File, Illinois State Archives, misc. court documents, 7–10.

55. White v. Murtland, File No. 5189 (1872), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 38–47; and Bradshaw v. People, File No. 7762 (1894), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 84–109.

56. “Rev. H.O. Hoffman,” The Quincy Whig, October 14, 1875, 2; “Father Leydon's Fix,” The Quincy Herald, July 6, 1894, 1 (front page).

57. The layout and size of many rural and small-town homes hindered personal privacy. Young and old, married and single often slept in the same rooms. In the two-to-four-room homes of many Illinois families, there was simply no space to separate sexuality from youth and children. Young people engaged in amatory activities, therefore, often sought out makeshift areas of privacy. Sex, for example, might occur in general sleeping rooms, on deserted roads, on schoolroom benches, and after mealtimes, in kitchens. See Fidler v. McKinley, File No. 2633 (1859), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 16–17; Mighell v. Stone, File No. 27920 (1898), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 15–30; Roberts v. People, File No. 21729 (1881), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript unnumbered pages; and Johnson v. The People, File No. 25735 (1892), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 2–13, 35–36, respectively.

58. Cox v. People, File No. 26145 (1884), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 37–57. Stephen Robertson's Crimes against Children, 73–204, offers further discussion of nineteenth and early twentieth-century lawyers' efforts to paint their female clients in passive sexual roles.

59. See Sharon Wood's The Freedom of the Streets, 140–43, for a similar discussion of attorneys' tendency to impose the more conventional “missionary position” on young women's sexual narratives.

60. Cox v. People, File No. 26145 (1884), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 37–57.

61. Ibid., Transcript 44–46.

62. Ibid., Abstract 9–11.

63. Ibid.

64. The Illinois Supreme Court would reverse the decisions of both the appellate court and the Livingston County Court. Interestingly, the high court justices' verdict mentions the evidence tending to show that the defendant had a “malformation of the genital organ,” as a circumstantial factor in their decision. See Cox v. People, Supreme Court of Illinois, 109 Ill. 457; 1884 Ill. LEXIS 1448, LexisNexis case report, 1.

65. In a world rapidly transformed by industrialization, contemporaries' often violent encounters with workplace machines and new and rapid means of transportation increasingly secured a place within the legal system. Here, wounded workers and passengers revealed the very real effects technology presented to the human body, usually by exhibiting the physical injury itself. For an overview of the effect of railroad travelers' injuries on American law and culture, see Welke, Barbara, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. See pages 235–46 for an excellent discussion of the nature of injury performance in the courts. See Schmidt, James, Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar for an insightful analysis of the ways in which workers and their families recreated their experiences with industrial violence. On injured laborers and the law see Witt, John Fabian, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. However different from industrial accident law in terms of both legal objectives and physical injuries recounted, common law sexual suits similarly put bodies on display. What needs to be noted here is that the female body, and not the male body, factored more frequently in sexual trials. Performative exhibitions and linguistic representations of the female body no doubt added to the prurient elements of sexual litigation. Young women who claimed that physical force served as the inducement that led them to engage in intimacy often rehashed to the court the bruises or scratches received in the scuffle. If the time gap between the incident and its retelling in court was minimal, they might actually reveal the marks of violence on wrists or arms. More often, mothers, female neighbors, and physicians were called to verbally depict any physical injuries sustained by coercive sex that they observed in the aftermath of the incident. As injuries received from coercive seduction suits more frequently involved internal rather than external wounds, physicians took on the task of graphically illustrating the absence of the hymen or injuries to female genitalia, such as inflammation. See, for example, Heaps v. Dunham, File No. 21133 (1877), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 91-93 (physician testified about checking to see if prosecuting witness's hymen was still intact). Medicalized representations of the female body also emerged in cases of consensual sex, particularly in those suits involving pregnant prosecuting witnesses or recent mothers. In these types of proceedings, doctors again took on the role of translating to the court injuries to female bodies. Displaying intimate body parts was unthinkable, to the legal system and the young woman herself, but explicit descriptions of those parts was legitimate, particularly when related under the guise of medical science. Physicians discussed their physical examinations of expectant prosecuting litigants, indicating to the court the medical markers of pregnancy. See, for example, Malony v. People, File No. 1482 (1865), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript, 15–16. Defense teams, too, called upon medical men to reveal unsavory bits of information about prosecuting litigants. For example, three different physicians testified in an 1875 breach of promise of marriage suit from Vermillion County. When questioned by the defense, the doctors were asked to comment on their diagnosis of a sore located in the prosecuting witness's groin. They were also asked to give their opinion as to whether the child born to the litigants had been syphilitic. Similarly, Elisha Sprague, defendant in another breach of promise suit, arranged for the testimony of a physician who had allegedly performed an abortion on the prosecuting witness several years before the defendant had begun courting her. This evidence was intended to excuse the defendant from his failure to marry his litigious former lover, as it hinted at a licentious past. See, for example, Blackburn v. Mann, File No. 7365 (1877), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 2–3, 59–60, 79–80, 120–22; and Sprague v. Craig, File No. 15964 (1869), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 7–54.

66. Cox v. People, File No. 26145 (1884), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 9–13.

67. Other scholars have discussed in some detail the prurient aspects of newspaper coverage of sexual trials. See, for example, Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce, 149–52. As Basch notes, literary accounts of trials of sexual misconduct allowed readers vicarious access to real-life stories of infidelity. Authors of the genre, however, invested it with “respectability” by also taking the opportunity to moralize about the “snares of illicit sex.” Still, popular literature of all sorts—in that it was frequently and repeatedly condemned as frivolous and somewhat unwholesome throughout the nineteenth century—did not possess the same elements of necessity and legitimacy as did accounts of sex recounted in courtrooms.

68. For a discussion of urban men's widespread involvement in socializing with peers through erotic disclosures, see Clare Lyons, Sex among the Rabble. For an analysis of the pleasure cultures in part engendered through sexual storytelling, see Gilfoyle, Timothy, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (W.W. Norton & Company, 1994)Google Scholar; and Cohen, Patricia Cline, Gilfoyle, Timothy, and Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

69. See Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham, 199–257; Lowry, Thomas P., The Stories the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1994)Google Scholar; Lowry, Thomas P., Sexual Misbehavior in the Civil War: A Compendium (Bloomington: Xlibris, 2006)Google Scholar; and Whites, LeAnn and Long, Alecia P., Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

70. Abduction statutes were adopted by the Illinois legislature in 1874 and made “enticing” an unmarried female to prostitution or concubinage a criminal offense. In reality, abduction litigations policed behavior very similar to that prosecuted in seduction, bastardy, and breach-of-promise suits.

71. Slocum v. People, File No. 21840 (1878), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 27; and Maynard v. People, File No. 25523 (1890), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 3–12, 35–45.

72. Woodside v. Morgan, File No. 10558 (1879), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 11–13; and Chambers v. People, File No. 10751 (1882), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 30–31, 51.

73. White v. Murtland, File No. 5189 (1872), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 60–62; and Cox v. People, File No. 26145 (1884), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 8–9.

74. Peak v. People, File No. 5356 (1875), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 13–23, 26–30.

75. McCoy v. People, File No. 17442 (1872), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 14–16.

76. Maynard v. People, File No. 25523 (1890), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 4–11, 35–37, 63–67.

77. Woodside v. Morgan, File No. 10558 (1879), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 10–11; Christman v. People, File No. 17516 (1872), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 22; and Maynard v. People, File No. 25523 (1890), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 60–61, 69–71.

78. Peak v. People, File No. 5356 (1875), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 24–25.

79. Sutton v. Johnson, File No. 17216 (1871), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 51–53.

80. For a summary of the increasing professionalization and growing formalism, in technical pleading and architectural makeup, of the early nineteenth-century legal system see Mann, Neighbors and Strangers; and McNamara, Martha, From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture and Ritual in American Law, 1658–1860 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004)Google Scholar. See Edwards, Laura for an analysis of the importance of localized legal practices in the nineteenth century, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation if Inequality in the Post-Reformation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

81. Blackburn v. Mann, File No. 7365 (1877), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 74–75; and Mings v. People, File No. 6468 (1884), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 26–28.

82. Blackburn v. Mann, File No. 7365 (1877), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 74–75; Mings v. People, File No. 6468 (1884), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 26–28.

83. Austine v. People, File No. 26085 (1884), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Transcript 60–70. Stephen Robertson's Crimes against Children offers further discussion of the legal and social concern that girls and women should be ignorant of the meaning of sexual vernacular.

84. Blackburn v. Mann, File No. 7365 (1877), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Abstract 26. Vulgarity might color not only the examination of witnesses in a trial, but also other legal and semilegal processes. An 1864 article from the Chicago Tribune reprinted the affidavit of the plaintiff in a seduction suit in its entirety. According to this reprinted legal document, the Cook County Circuit Court needed to set aside the decision in favor of the defendant that was rendered by a group of arbitrators. The plaintiff's lawyers charged the arbitrators with unprofessional conduct, accusing them of “telling smutty anecdotes and indecent stories” instead of reviewing the facts and law of the case. “The Great Scandal,” Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1864, 0_3.

85. Lawyers' briefs were essentially distillations of both the facts and arguments of particular cases being appealed to higher courts. As such, they were written legal texts addressed to appellate judges and read by these justices as well as the lawyers on the opposing side. While a different kind of source than the oral testimony given during trial proceedings, briefs were important components of Supreme Court cases. Salacious details and bawdy humor permeate these briefs just as they do courtroom testimony.

86. Cox v. People, File No. 26145 (1884), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives Appellant Brief 5.

87. Christman v. People, File No. 17516 (1872), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Appellant Brief 4; Peak v. People, File No. 5125 (1874), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Appellant Brief 7.

88. Slocum v. People, File No. 21840 (1878), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Brief and Argument of Plaintiffs in Error 10.

89. McCoy v. People, File No. 17442 (1872), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Appellant Brief 7; and McCoy v. People, File No. 18434 (1873), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Appellant Brief 2.

90. Hauskins v. People, File No. 10112 (1876), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Reply Brief of Appellant, 1, 5. See Robertson, Stephen, “Signs, Mark, and Private Parts: Doctors, Legal Discourses, and Evidence of Rape in the United States, 1823–1930,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8 (1998): 345–88Google Scholar for a discussion of the legal expectation and cultural belief that women, particularly adult women, should be able to defend their virtue by stopping men from completing acts of sexual intercourse.

91. Cox v. People, File No. 26145 (1884), Illinois Supreme Court Case File, Illinois State Archives, Appellee Brief 7.

92. Allison v. People, File No. 15212 (1867), Error to Woodfield—Brief of Defendants in Error 5–6.

93. See Grossberg, A Judgment for Solomon, especially pages 89–167, for a discussion of scandalous litigation as popular entertainment. See also Duggan, Sapphic Slashers; and Fox, Trials of Intimacy. Laura Edwards' The People and Their Peace sheds light on the informal workings of local law in the nineteenth-century South.