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Zusatztext The Washington Post Book World ...an engaging exercise in popular history...[Nancy Randolph] was an extra-ordinary woman...and we are indebted to Alan Pell Crawford for rescuing her from undeserved oblivion. Informationen zum Autor Alan Pell Crawford Klappentext In the spring of 1793! eighteen-year-old Nancy Randolph! the fetching daughter of one of the greatest of the great Virginia tobacco planters! was accused! along with her brother-in-law! of killing her newborn son. Once one of the most sought-after young women in Virginia society! she was denounced as a ruined Jezebel! and the great orator Patrick Henry and future Supreme Court justice John Marshall were retained to defend her in a sensational trial. This gripping account of murder! infanticide! prostitution charges! moral decline! and heroism that played out in the intimate lives of the nation's Founding Fathers is as riveting and revealing as any current scandal -- in or out of Washington. Chapter One Such an unspeakable crime! The accusation was this: A blameless babe had been torn from its screaming mother's womb, either strangled or stabbed (the method of its murder had not been determined), its bleeding body hustled down the cold stairs into the still, starlit night and flung like the contents of a chamber pot onto the nearest trash pile. The defendants were so obviously guilty that people would wonder why the great Patrick Henry would represent such wretches. How could Henry take these monsters' money without bloodying his own hands and good name? And Henry may well have wondered if the esteem in which he was held by his countrymen -- esteem for which he had struggled so hard for so many years - could withstand the sheer tawdriness of it all. Would he not be irretrievably dragged, along with his dishonored clients, through the muck and mire? The girl accused of this awful deed was just eighteen -- a coldhearted young female, if the charges were true. Her family, which included the man she had been with that cold, clear September night, swore that nothing had happened. They claimed that there had been no baby born, so there had been no baby killed. They said ignorant slaves had concocted the tale, which had started in the quarters, then spread with maddening ferocity until it was whispered at every racetrack and dancing academy in Virginia. Before the year was out, the girl had become the Jezebel of the Old Dominion, and the young man who was the alleged father had become its laughingstock. Idlers in taverns made ribald jokes at his expense; in stables and tailor shops, sons of the great planters remembered how they had danced with the little slut but swore they would never make that mistake again. Her name was Nancy Randolph. The fetching daughter of one of the greatest of the great planters, Nancy had surely been one of the most marriageable and evidently desirable girls on the plantations, but no more. Even if she were to be exonerated of the charges, no man would ever look at her the same way again. She was ruined. The young man's name was Richard Randolph. Richard of Bizarre, they called him, after the plantation he owned. He had married Nancy's sister Judith. Nancy had shown up at Bizarre, and they had taken her in. There, the gossips said, Nancy had managed to seduce her own sister's husband and was soon pregnant. Suddenly there was hell to pay. Richard got thrown in Cumberland County jail, on charges of murdering Nancy's baby. In mid-April, shortly after he was locked up, a messenger galloped up to Patrick Henry's plantation with a note from Richard begging the old trial lawyer to take the case and offering him 250 guineas to do so. Richard was no doubt outraged that anyone would dare lay a hand on him, yet terrified he would hang. Henry knew the type. Richard was a Randolph, a member of a...
