The Poison Plot: A Tale of Adultery and Murder in Colonial Newport

By Elaine Forman Crane

An accusation of attempted murder rudely interrupted Mary Arnold’s dalliances with working men and her extensive shopping sprees. When her husband Benedict fell deathly ill and then asserted she had tried to kill him with poison, the result was a dramatic petition for divorce. The case before the Rhode Island General Assembly and its tumultuous aftermath, during which Benedict died, made Mary a cause célèbre in Newport through the winter of 1738 and 1739.

Elaine Forman Crane invites readers into the salacious domestic life of Mary and Benedict Arnold and reveals the seamy side of colonial Newport. The surprise of The Poison Plot, however, is not the outrageous acts of Mary or the peculiar fact that attempted murder was not a convictable offense in Rhode Island. As Crane shows with style, Mary’s case was remarkable precisely because adultery, criminality and theft, and even spousal homicide were well known in the New England colonies. Assumptions of Puritan propriety are overturned by the facts of rough and tumble life in a port city: money was to be made, pleasure was to be had, and if marriage became an obstacle to those pursuits a woman had means to set things right.

The Poison Plot is an intimate drama constructed from historical documents and informed by Crane’s deep knowledge of elite and common life in Newport. Her keen eye for telling details and her sense of story bring Mary, Benedict, and a host of other characters—including her partner in adultery, Walter Motley, and John Tweedy the apothecary who sold Mary toxic drugs—to life in the homes, streets, and shops of the port city. The result is a vivid tale that will change minds about life in supposedly prim and proper New England.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781501721328

Elaine Forman Crane

Colin Leys is Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at Queen's University, Canada. His previous books include Politics in Britain, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory and, with Leo Panitch, The End of Parliamentary Socialism.

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THE POISON PLOT

A Tale of Adultery and Murder in Colonial Newport

ELAINE FORMAN CRANE

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

For Wil

CONTENTS

The Author’s Tale

Prologue

Part I. The Story

1. A Town on Narragansett Bay

2. A Case of Poison

Part II. The People

3. Mary’s Tale

4. Benedict’s Tale

5. The Physician’s Tale

6. The Apothecary’s Tale

Part III. Cultural Coordinates

7. Age

8. Adultery

9. Arsenic

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

THE AUTHOR’S TALE

It is a chance encounter at the Rhode Island State Archives, where aged characters, detained for decades, congregate and clamor for attention. Some of those confined in the record boxes and leather-bound volumes have commanding stories to tell, although few can spin tales compelling enough to capture a historian’s attention. Yet the saga of Benedict and Mary Arnold has such an appeal. In some ways the couple’s narrative evokes The Canterbury Tales, stories told by voyagers that still echo more than six hundred years after their pilgrimage. As the medieval travelers trudge toward their destination, they while away the time by sharing stories that capture the underside of human nature. In just such a way, the drama surrounding Mary Arnold’s alleged attempt to poison her husband in 1738 invites a modern raconteur to share the Arnolds’ foibles with a contemporary audience.

Benedict Arnold’s unexpected intrusion into the present is followed by an introduction of sorts, in which he urgently bares his soul to a stranger who becomes captivated by his distressing circumstances. Benedict’s tone convinces his audience-of-one that he is torn between vengeance and remorse. As the fifty-five-year-old Newport cooper airs his suspicions and denounces his spouse, Benedict’s accusations express long-standing grievances that, he believes, could be resolved only by divorce. His considerably younger wife, Mary, the object of his fury, remains silent. She neither admits nor denies her efforts to terminate his life.

Arnold’s dramatic tale inspires other eighteenth-century partisans to believe the worst of Mary and to corroborate the barrel maker’s account of his wife’s duplicity. Boarders in the Arnold household disclose how they stumbled on Mary Arnold and Walter Motley in bed together. John Tweedy, the apothecary, reveals how Mary sought him out for a constant supply of laudanum, which would have led to the death of one spouse, or addiction for the other. Sarah Leach, another druggist, tells of Mary’s attempt to purchase the painkiller from her. One physician after another implicates Mary and her lover in a plot in which mercury or arsenic is the eventual poison of choice. Dr. Nathaniel Corles divulges how he treated the adulterous couple for gonorrhea before rebuffing their proposal that he join the conspiracy against Mary’s husband. Dr. Oliver Arnold, called in to assist his precariously ill relative, reaches an immediate and startling diagnosis: Benedict Arnold has been poisoned.

Other characters linger in the margins of the narrative: Isaac Martin-dale, who witnesses Mary’s admission of adultery and a heated argument between Arnold and Motley; Nurse Hudley, who may have offered the egg dram to Benedict Arnold in Mary’s place; Doctor Hooper, whose order of opiates gives Mary the opportunity to secrete the toxic painkillers; the mysterious Captain Troupe, who acts as a go-between for the illiterate conspirators; Mary’s brother and brother-in-law, who stand by Mary as intermediaries; the lawyer Thomas Ward, who draws up Benedict’s generous will; and Patience Arnold, who is forced to side with either her mother or her father in this sordid affair.

As these narrators spin their individual tales—and take up nearly one hundred manuscript pages in doing so—the spectator-turned-author imagines weaving the various evidentiary threads into something far more substantial than whole cloth. Reinforced by royalty whose low standards are easy to imitate, and by European writers whose scripts are replayed in the colonies, Mary and Benedict Arnold, as well as their entourage, become re-embodiments of the Chaucerian travelers.

But how to tell the story? How to frame the tale as a narrative that more closely resembles fiction than most nonfiction works, while remaining faithful to the historical record? How to compensate for the absence of Mary’s voice when every document corroborates and vindicates Benedict? How can Mary dominate the narrative if she leaves us nothing in her own hand? Her silence conceals the mischief she perpetrates and the characters she manipulates. Or does it?

In some ways the documents affixed to Benedict’s divorce petition counterbalance Mary’s absence, even if they support his side of the story. Whether or not she defends herself in writing, Mary controls the narrative. Legal papers—depositions, witness statements, petitions—situate Mary as the central figure on whom the story depends. Sworn statements made under questioning in court or before a legislative body by ordinary folk suing their neighbors or being prosecuted for felonies—or simply recounting what they saw and heard—reveal a great deal about people who do not leave other records behind. Such integrated accounts offer an opportunity to capture history through a narrative framework—a tale. And in order to emphasize the storytelling aspect of this work, much of the sleuthing on which it depends will be found in the back of this book as endnotes. As such, the notes become stories themselves, informative and entertaining textual partners, yet separated from the main body to preserve the flow of the narrative.

The Poison Plot extracts a small forgotten incident from early America and demonstrates how history can be explored through such episodes. It also aims to contextualize the main event and to expand its implications in time and space: backward to colonial Newport, forward to our own. As a result, this unlikely chronicle of marital duplicity is not only an engaging soap opera to which the reader is privy, but an entrée into the larger community and a window into matters of historical importance. Mary’s voice—her side of the story—requires speculation. But as the old saying goes, Murder will out. Presumably, attempted murder will rise to the surface as well—unless the ambiguity of the evidence leads a skeptical reader to doubt Mary’s culpability.

PROLOGUE

Because, alas! He is both blind and old,

His own sworn man shall make him a cuckold. . . .

Just when his wife shall do him villainy;

Then shall he know of all her harlotry.

THE MERCHANT’S TALE

FROM THE CANTERBURY TALES

Benedict Arnold was despondent and outraged. When he finally petitioned for divorce in December 1738, the irate husband claimed that he was the victim of a thwarted poison plot engineered by his adulterous wife and her lover. For reasons of her own, Benedict’s spouse, Mary Ward Arnold, had tired of her husband and, to his chagrin, was cavorting with other men. Benedict, the grandson of a Rhode Island governor, a prosperous landowner, and a merchant-cooper by trade, was nearly two decades older than his frisky wife, whom he had married some time in the early 1720s, when she was barely twenty-one. How much Benedict knew of his wife’s amorous affairs is unclear, but his confrontation with her latest live-in paramour reveals he feared for his life. He accused the couple of attempting to poison him.

Were Mary and her lover so motivated? If Mary was the driving force behind such a plot, her reasons never surface. Moreover, by choosing poison, she relied on the cooperation of others and broadened the number of people who would eventually point fingers at her. As the story unfolds, however, it becomes clear that Benedict could also level accusations at people and forces beyond the alleged perpetrators. Successive chapters reveal that apothecaries sold arsenic for the asking, physicians weakened patients with excessive bloodletting, and the most popular transatlantic fiction propagated ideas about spousal murder.

Even if Mary’s role in hastening her husband’s eventual demise is inconclusive, it is still unlikely that Mary Arnold set the marital standard in eighteenth-century Rhode Island. Nevertheless, as a sidebar to the study of traditional marriage and the family in early America, the fine points of the Arnold story remind us that not all early American marriages were made in heaven—or were even heavenly inspired. And although the seamy side of their union is hardly a representative sample of marital disarray, the Arnolds’ failings set in relief a range of social fault lines that extend beyond their domestic circle: infidelity, illegitimacy, abuse of husbands by wives, female dependency, criminal proceedings, and the role of the state as the mediator of such intimate concerns.

Because the authorities hesitated to grant women their freedom in divorce proceedings, approval for the dissolution of a marriage was usually difficult to obtain in the best of circumstances. In defiance—or even desperation—some women engaged in extramarital sex to stimulate a recalcitrant husband to initiate proceedings. Thus, if Mary Arnold wanted out, her admitted infidelity was sufficient cause. Why bother to poison Benedict? Was it because he forgave her indiscretions and initially declined to petition for a divorce that she, in fact, wanted? Or did he threaten to divorce and disgrace her when, in fact, such a move was against her financial interests?

On its most elementary level, this tale is all about property: Benedict had it; Mary wanted it. Mary chafed against a drop in her standard of living during a time of economic distress, and her adulterous activities and murderous proclivities could have been a survival strategy. Because Benedict Arnold was one of many merchants heavily in debt during the economic crisis of the late 1730s, Mary’s liaisons with other men may be seen as a search for security. This is not to say that Mary set an example for scores of women, but her dangerous plan raises questions about how married women with financially insecure husbands protected themselves. Some sought divorce. Others eloped with household goods. (Mary we know accelerated the charges on her husband’s accounts, though we cannot say to what end she meant to use these purchases.) What can be said, however, is that the rise and expansion of consumerism in the 1730s affected the Arnold marriage. In short, no matter how elements of the narrative are construed, the acquisition of real and personal property was part of Mary’s long-range plan. Aside from fancy fabrics, Mary stood to lose her widow’s claim to her husband’s real property unless Benedict died before he divorced her.

Mary’s efforts may be seen as an extreme, albeit inventive, way of circumventing the patriarchal restrictions embedded in coverture, the common-law rules governing married women. Though such restraints were designed with male mastery in mind, Mary exploited them. She might have been limited by her inability to write, but her proficiency in alchemy is not to be doubted. By attempting to convert an allegedly poisonous egg dram into a nest egg, she was hoping to provide for her future. Moreover, if there is a correlation between a failing economy and female adultery, if women who eloped often ran off with marital property, then there is reason to assume that other women, similarly constrained by law (but not quite as aggressive as Mary), developed less radical strategies to evade the dependence that coverture thrust on them.

Every piece of surviving evidence indicates that Mary expected to get away with her gambles and gambols. Nonetheless, even if community mores made room for aberrant behavior, surely on some level she would be condemned. Yet her seeming willingness to accept public censure with equanimity was coupled with a reluctance to defend herself. Perhaps she knew in advance that her family would protect her, although it is difficult to understand why they would come to her rescue.

Adding to the imponderables of this story is the relevance of the wide age gap between Mary and Benedict. By the time Benedict was in his mid-fifties, Mary was seeking the company of other, presumably younger men. The age difference between some eighteenth-century couples may have something to do with such extramarital relationships, and speculation about the implications of this disparity, along with data to show its prevalence, gives new meaning to the marital bond in early America. However Mary interpreted that bond, and whether she liked it or not, as Benedict’s wife she was her husband’s first line of defense when ill health trumped his former well-being. As his caretaker, she prepared medicinal remedies, and she was a familiar figure at the local apothecary shop. If Mary knew which cures would restore Benedict to health, she also knew which poisons might abruptly terminate her unwelcome role as nurse. As a practical matter, however, little is known about how she learned to prepare toxic potions. English recipe books included instructions for mercury pills and arsenic compounds, but that presupposes she could read such books. It was probably common knowledge that laudanum contained enough opium and alcohol to kill in large doses, but how much was too much?

There is, however, another way of reading this story. What if Mary’s lovers, Turff the Bayman and Walter Motley, who were caught up in the same economic downturn that ate into Benedict’s profits, saw a way of lining their pockets through Mary Arnold? What if they wooed and seduced her in the hope of siphoning off some of her husband’s assets? This is not to say that Mary was merely a victim or pawn, but rather to question whether Mary made overtures to the two men or they seized an opportunity to raise their own status at a time when Mary was particularly vulnerable. Neither Turff (a mariner) nor Motley (a mason) could be counted among the Newport elite, which makes one wonder why Mary, a seemingly calculating person, didn’t seek out wealthier lovers. If Turff and Mary parted company amicably when his ship left port, it is possible that Motley abandoned Mary once he learned that she would not inherit her portion of the Arnold fortune. The records merely tell us that Mary returned to Connecticut without him. Perhaps it was his choice rather than hers.

The story told here complicates America’s master narrative by revealing a culture of corruption that competes with the positive messages delivered by Ben Franklin and other early advocates who posited one would do well. Mary Arnold, John Tweedy the apothecary, and several other actors in this tale did well, but their success was not built on good works. One might even compare Mary’s adulterous liaisons to John Tweedy’s adulterated drugs. Just as Tweedy’s corrupted prescriptions rendered them less effective, Mary’s promiscuity diluted the strength of her marital bond. Indeed, her adultery poisoned the Arnold marriage long before she handed her husband the supposedly toxic egg dram. Furthermore, the masks she bought—and presumably wore—counterfeited her person. The Bard was right: Nothing is but what is not.

In this book I raise doubts about the morality of the 1730s and challenge the accepted wisdom of early America’s low crime rate, a notion based on estimations of attempted crimes. The evidence also suggests that historians have had an exaggerated faith in trust as a positive force in early American mercantile transactions. Nothing in the documents relating to the Arnolds and their associates hints that trust was a partner of commerce. Quite the contrary: the expectation seems to have been that the equilibrium between deceit and trust favored the former.

The chapters that follow also upend current perceptions about gender roles and recast women as far more assertive and far less submissive than common law and prescriptive literature allowed. Men, on the other hand, were often loving and compassionate. Given such transgressive behavior, the twists and turns of the tale demonstrate how women successfully challenged the authoritarian nature of coverture and in so doing reaped financial advantages for themselves. A corollary of such a challenge was legal acumen, knowledge that didn’t necessarily demand literacy. Women were acculturated in many ways, and the transmission of ideas was just as likely to occur through what they saw and heard as it was through book learning. Indeed, the number of women who acted as family accountants suggests we have underestimated their knowledge of business practices and, by extension, their role in the early urban economies of North American ports.

Privacy—or the lack thereof—weaves in and out of these chapters, making witnesses of the nonfamilial boarders who come and go even in the homes of the most affluent. Mary Arnold and her lovers carry on their affairs indiscreetly in the crowded Arnold household, while tenants and servants wander into rooms unannounced. Unconcerned and seemingly oblivious to their surroundings, the lovers carry on their adulterous relationship in the clinic of the doctor who is treating them for gonorrhea. Such behavior raises questions not only about personal morality, but also about the definition of family. Tenants such as Turff the Bayman and Walter Motley might have had expectations about the perks included in housing arrangements that historians have not yet explored. Moreover, given the surge of extramarital mergers in the late 1730s, the enthusiasm of the Great Awakening takes on a whole new meaning—one that embraces sexual passion.

The Poison Plot is not only a story about a family that unravels over time. It is also a story of wily physicians, apothecaries, and merchants whose machinations created a community ethos on which the narrative revolves. More than peripheral to the unfolding events, the supporting players are as critical to the story as Mary and Benedict. Nevertheless, the corruptive culture that our perpetrators advanced was a by-product of a common self-interest rather than deliberate collusion. Mary’s provocative comment that she was not the only bad woman was less a nod to collective promiscuity than a reminder of a broad-based willingness to tolerate corruption. Thus, John Tweedy adulterated his drug products in the interest of personal profit without fear of public censure. And since no document indicates otherwise, it also appears that he showed no remorse, regret, or guilt about using such devious tactics. When Mary offered Dr. Corles one hundred pounds to poison her husband, she must have expected he would, at least, consider the proposition. ¹ In a less underhanded (but still dubious) practice, profit-seeking merchants charged unwary customers double the wholesale price of medicinal remedies. Personal gratification, satisfying to some, had less positive effects on others. Mary’s behavior shamed Benedict. Adulterated drugs undermined alleged health benefits. And counterfeit products were only as good as the counterfeit currency with which they were purchased. Taken together, these consequences were a surrender of community values that (at least in the abstract) gave honest dealings priority.

Transatlantic literature stimulated and reinforced an amoral underside to life. Corruption not only surrounded Mary as she went marketing, but also acculturated her through newspapers, broadsides, journals, novels, and pamphlets from abroad. Literature that circulated in the Atlantic world in the 1730s was replete with vivid accounts of sexual escapades. As Mary absorbed these antisocial messages either through personal experience or the written page, she may have begun to see adultery as an exciting alternative to a constrictive marriage that contained fewer lucrative opportunities than she had originally expected.

If the Arnolds’ story begins as a local incident, it is one that eventually stretches thousands of miles beyond Newport and forces the couple’s immediate distress to play out amid the trappings of global trade. Because Benedict Arnold’s casks and barrels carried goods to distant ports, his trade as a cooper gave him foreign credentials. Because his prescription drugs originated on one continent and were compounded on another, his medical treatments depended on transatlantic shipping. Because the fashion-conscious Mary Arnold coveted imported fabrics and (deliberately or not) absorbed European culture, and because her attempted murder weapon, which was most likely arsenic, had Euro-Asian origins, the narrative is infused with international dimensions. From a literary perspective, the story of Mary’s attempt to poison her husband becomes an allegory in which a woman was seduced by global commerce and succumbed to her craving for imported luxuries during the consumer revolution, only to be thwarted by circumstances she did not foresee. Considered through another lens, Mary’s material and cultural milieu played a role in her devious scheme to poison for profit. The effect of that environment confirms the power that external forces have on behavior. If context isn’t everything, it is surprisingly influential.

Finally, the story is about history and memory. Because Mary could not compose a written document, because she did not defend herself, no personal or public papers survive to explain the events from her perspective. There are no portraits of her, no way of seeing her other than through the words of others. Benedict’s version is all that remains. That version includes words attributed to her and filtered by those who testified for him. His petition, his witnesses, his lawyers—these become the evidentiary basis for this narrative. Inasmuch as Benedict created his own persona in a way that cast Mary as a demon, our image of Mary derives from his words and the words of his supporters. And because this is so, Mary’s silence—and the silence of those sympathetic to her—condemned her to the scarlet column in history’s ledger. Her apparent reticence is all the more puzzling because she was present each time someone added to the mounting evidence against her. One could argue, of course, that she wasn’t reticent; that her wanton adultery was an unspoken taunt and an intentional embarrassment to Benedict. Indeed, there is something to be said about embarrassment as a vicious weapon when in skilled hands. Yet Mary took great risks when she engaged in casual sexual encounters and shamed her husband. How did provocations or incentives cloud her better judgment? Surely there is more to the story, even if it was not recorded with quill and ink. What would she, her sister, brother, brother-in-law, friends, and stepchildren have said about the sequence of events? Alas, tempting though it may be, historians are forbidden to claim words that were never spoken or written.

The Poison Plot is organized somewhat differently from most nonfiction historical works. It is not an ongoing narrative like my previous work, Killed Strangely, because none of the central characters tells us enough in his or her own words to construct a continuous or unbroken story line. Instead, the book develops themes around the major protagonists, Mary and Benedict Arnold, as the tale advances. But if The Poison Plot is not Killed Strangely in structure, it is still a microhistory involving perfidy and malevolence.

Chapter 1 sets the scene and places Newport within its economic and social context. The expansion of consumerism was a major development during Mary’s residence in Newport and apparently conditioned her to accept property acquisition as a desirable goal. As the pace of transatlantic trade increased, Mary became a witness to the proliferation of luxury goods, a development that appears to have paralleled a rise in crime. Mary also observed Newport become a crossroads of ethnic and religious diversity and a town in which profits from the slave trade lined merchants’ pocketbooks.

Chapter 2 contains the essentials of the plot and the outcome of the alleged conspiracy. To secure her prospects, Mary had consigned her future to a wealthy man who was considerably older than she was. But because of common-law restrictions, Newport’s burgeoning market economy offered married women little opportunity to amass property on their own. The financial crunch of the late 1730s that resulted in her husband’s mounting debt threatened the economic advantage she had acquired by marrying up, and Mary turned to adulterous relationships to maintain her status or even to advance her aspirations. Mary excused herself by pointing to the influence of a bad sisterhood, women who engaged in extramarital liaisons. Yet it does not necessarily follow that Mary, even as a self-proclaimed adulteress, would attempt to poison her husband. Nothing in the records suggests what would have motivated her to engage in such treachery after more than a dozen years of marriage—nothing, that is, other than Benedict’s assets and Mary’s sense of entitlement. Benedict himself offers no other clues; no legal records indicate he mistreated Mary physically or failed in his marital obligations. But as competition for resources and desire for consumer goods increased in the eighteenth century, long-standing values and morality were challenged, or even transformed. Benedict was convinced that his wife and her lover Walter Motley were conspirators linked together in a poison plot to acquire his estate.

Figure 1. John Potter and Family, an overmantel painting of John Potter and his family (ca. 1730–1750). The blue-and-white porcelain tea service is a nod to commerce, consumerism, and gentrification. (For a detailed description of the objects necessary for a tea ceremony, see Christina Hodge, Consumerism and the Emergence of the Middle Class in Colonial America: The Genteel Revolution [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014], 112–114.) The young servant in the foreground suggests that Potter took advantage of Newport’s traffic in slaves. Courtesy of the Newport Historical Society, object 53.3.

Chapters 3 and 4 are biographical and explore the lives of the two central characters, Mary and Benedict Arnold. These pages contain as much personal background about the couple as it was possible to uncover, since nineteenth-century genealogists (and dare I say the Arnold family?) went to great lengths to conceal the various scandals attached to the Arnold clan, just as the Cornell family (of Killed Strangely) attempted to cover up the alleged matricide of Rebecca Cornell by her son. In the current case, some authors deleted Mary’s name from the genealogical charts, and others erased a younger Benedict, the one known as a traitor, from the historical records. Conversely, this only emphasizes the fact that historians benefit greatly from the work of professional genealogists who uncover data that enriches—and complicates—the personal narratives of the main characters. The genealogical trail in this account suggests that General Benedict Arnold may not have been an Arnold at all.

Chapters 5 and 6 pluck distinctive and pertinent themes to develop from the narrative. Since physicians and apothecaries saw Mary and Benedict Arnold from discrete perspectives and in unusual circumstances, their observations are indispensable to the unfolding events and are prominently featured in this story. Thus, the chapters turn from the principal actors to medical practitioners; from local physicians and druggists to the international drug trade. While some doctors were clearly doing the best they could to stem disease, alleviate pain, and repair bodies, it also becomes obvious that others, along with corrupt apothecaries, plied the waves from London to Newport and beyond. Excessive charges passed on to consumers? Disturbing, but hardly surprising. Adulterated drugs? Well, part of a decade rife with counterfeiting. A counterbalance to such negative information about the ethics of the medical profession, however, is the newly uncovered network of female apothecaries that existed in Rhode Island.

Chapters 7, 8, and 9 deal with the intellectual currents that swirled around two continents and became absorbed by early Americans. They suggest that ingredients of European culture—ideas, events, and literature about age and adultery—were powerful enough to affect Mary’s thinking and prompt her to act in a self-destructive manner. Transatlantic culture similarly influenced Benedict. He believed Walter Motley intended to poison him in order to have Mary for himself. The couple inhabited the same English-speaking world that made Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood popular authors.

These chapters also raise questions: How was the transmission of such ideas conveyed across the Atlantic? How do concepts infiltrate our consciousness? How does our brain absorb and translate into action what we hear and read, especially when novels masquerade as accurate or true accounts? Imagine—because that’s all we can do—imagine Mary reading (or sitting with friends as someone reads aloud) from Defoe’s Moll Flanders or Roxanna. Moll was an adulteress and Roxana experimented with illegitimate sex as well.

Finally, the epilogue tosses Mary and Benedict into the vortex of stories about malevolent wives, betrayed husbands, and poisonous solutions—stories that continued to fascinate readers into the nineteenth century and beyond. They contained lessons to be absorbed, lessons to apply.

When nature and nurture collide—which they often do—nurture prevails. On a daily basis, however, Mary was no doubt unaware that she was nurtured by conflicting dynamics. She was a married woman and a mother, subject—at least in theory—to coverture. As Newport’s trade increased in the 1720s and 1730s, however, Mary succumbed to the material culture that was beginning to dominate her environment. Unable or unwilling to resist the tempting goods displayed in the shop windows, she was also unable (or unwilling) to resist the men who promised to satisfy her appetite for the baubles she coveted. Poison seemed a promising solution to Mary’s double quandary: she could rid herself of a bothersome husband and collect the dower portion of his estate. Unfortunately for Mary, the plan collapsed. Benedict survived the poison plot and divorced her.

Could the sequence of events have been different? If Mary’s husband had been younger and in good health, if the array of items deposited in warehouses lining Newport’s harbor hadn’t been so appealing, if early eighteenth-century literary avatars had been more virtuous and Newport’s sexual mores less relaxed, Mary might not have been tempted to obtain material goods by nefarious means. This is not to fault inanimate commodities for Mary’s failings, but rather to assert that commerce, culture, and crime were intimately related.

Part I

THE STORY

If Boston was older and New York bigger, Newport was just as cosmopolitan. The center of town was a compact collection of colorful shops and houses; commercial prosperity brought development and noise. In a town where people sailed as often as they walked, signs of expansion were everywhere. New wharves competed to attract both ships and shops. Not to be outdone, proprietors extended older wharves into the harbor. Before the end of the 1730s, legislators had completed plans to rebuild Colony House, and although they reached agreement on an elegant brick structure in harmony with the chic town itself, their dispute over its axis (north-south? east-west?) fueled bickering and consumed time.

The Arnold home, on Thames Street, gave Mary ample opportunity to take stock of the people in her adopted town. Mary lived in a centrally located neighborhood, one within convenient walking distance of her needs and interests. The records do not disclose whether she took notice of the slaves paving and repairing the streets on which she walked, but whatever her mission on any particular day, urban din accompanied her. In addition to the ordinary sounds of a seaport, mischief makers brazenly fired