In 1796, as revolutionary fervor waned and the Age of Reason took
hold, an eighty-five-year-old Massachusetts doctor was convicted of
bestiality and sentenced to hang. Three years later and seventy
miles away, an eighty-three-year-old Connecticut farmer was
convicted of the same crime and sentenced to the same punishment.
Prior to these criminal trials, neither Massachusetts nor
Connecticut had executed anyone for bestiality in over a century.
Though there are no overt connections between the two episodes, the
similarities of their particulars are strange and striking.
Historians Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown delve into the
specifics to determine what larger social, political, or religious
forces could have compelled New England courts to condemn two
octogenarians for sexual misbehavior typically associated with much
younger men. The stories of John Farrell and Gideon Washburn are
less about the two old men than New England officials who, riding
the rough waves of modernity, returned to the severity of their
ancestors. The political upheaval of the Revolution and the new
republic created new kinds of cultural experience-both exciting and
frightening-at a moment when New England farmers and village elites
were contesting long-standing assumptions about divine creation and
the social order. Ben-Atar and Brown offer a rare and vivid
perspective on anxieties about sexual and social deviance in the
early republic.
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