Early Women’s History 251.01 1 October 2010
1. The Cornell family didn’t resemble the family ideals propounded in contemporary sermons, literature and the law. “Documents reveal the distance between the New England family of historical imagination and the realities of seventeenth-century domestic life. Instead of the harmony and respect that sermon literature laws and hierarchical/patriarchal society attempted to impose evidence illustrates filial insolence, generational conflict, disrespect toward the elderly, power plays between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, adult dependence on aging parents who clung to purse strings, sibling rivalry over inherited property and discord between stepmother and stepchildren” (Crane 2). In other …show more content…
words just because the laws in this century state that children must respect their elders and parents and in the patriarchal society men dominate the household (father or husband). In the Cornell household Rebecca was the head of the household because her husband had died and he left her with everything, rather than just leaving her with her Widow’s 1/3 and splitting the rest among his children. Thomas was a poor man with a large family, once divorced and now remarried. His mother took him in and gave him most of the house for his family to live, but she still owned everything inside. Thomas was not very respectable of his mother who helped him out but giving him a place to live. Records show that he was mean to his mother and sometimes didn’t offer her dinner or help her out with some of her household chores. He also made her cut and gather her own wood for her fireplace. Thomas did not follow what the Puritan lifestyle was back then, which was ORDER in the family. Puritan children would normally respect their parents or in this case their mother, but he did not do this. Rebecca being a Quaker knew that if Thomas was a bad child it was because she herself was a bad mother, so in turn she tried to fix this. She allowed Thomas to live with her under the conditions that he would pay her $6 rent a year, and when she passed he would have to pay $100 to his siblings over the course of 4 years; Thomas found this to be unfair. Rebecca also didn’t want Thomas off running telling people that she was a bad mother because being a Quaker; she would have been failing as a mother, if people thought this. “The family had not acted toward Thomas’s mother as seventeenth-century New England Guidelines prescribed. They were not respectful of Rebecca’s advanced age, she felt “disregarded” and even worse, and this troubling situation had surfaced three or four years earlier. Rebecca’s Cornell had been unhappy enough to contemplate suicide. Initially. She had resisted hat impulse. But did the Devil ultimately prevail?”(Crane 40).
Thomas’s father left the whole estate, land and all, to his wife Rebecca.
Usually during the seventeenth-century, siblings were very competitive towards each other to later in life acquire their parent’s fortunes and estates. However Rebecca did allow Thomas to move into her house with his family, but she kept the most expensive and valuable thing in the house to herself. “Her possession of the great bed suggests that she keenly aware of her place in this household, although what she claimed by right would have been perceived as self-indulgence by her son and daughter-in-law. Such rivalry only fueled the antagonism between mother and son, as furniture became a symbolic weapon in the contest for control over people and space (Cream 14-15). Clearly Rebecca knew that she was at the head of this household, unlike what usually was known at this time, for the man of the house to be at the head. Thomas probably didn’t feel a sense of manhood living in this house. People around town also knew this and he didn’t like the fact that his mother was the one that had all the power over the family, which in return gave him motivate to kill his
mother.
2. The supernatural world was used to explain what had happened to Rebecca because God only came to punish people who in return didn’t worship him to do what he wanted them to do. When Sarah Cornell gave her testimony in the trails against her husband Sarah stated that she sent one of her boys up to Rebecca’s room that night to see if she wanted some dinner and when Edward opened the door to his grandmothers room a large dog jumped over him. This was an unlikely happening however it could have been the work of the devil coming to bring bad luck to the family. “Common belief held that God sent such simister apparitions to “terrify” people and confirm his power. In the Cornell case, Sarah Cornell’s slyly disguised accusation insinuate that this great dog was real an imp or devil, a “familiar,” long associated with witches in English popular thought” (Crane 38). The Devil could have come in the shape or form of this great dog to claim Rebecca’s soul, which implicated that Sarah thought her mother was into Witchcraft. Also because the clothing that Rebecca was wearing some parts of her clothes were burnt while other remained whole, in the natural world this is not likely to happen which leads people to believe other unnatural forces were involved with Rebecca’s death. When Sarah gave her testimony she knew that if she made it look like Rebecca was into Witchcraft then it would exonerate Thomas in her death because Witches were going against god and all would be done away with. Rebecca had also admitted to her daughter that she too felt possesd by an evil spirt and she felt like she wanted to kill herself buy God had stopped her from doing so. So could this have been the evil doings of the devil, and God’s punishment to her for being a Witch? If it was then Thomas could have been exonerated in the death of his mother. But many people didn’t believe that this could have happened. People in the seventeenth-century also thought that if a body purged after death it meant that they were trying to purify themselves. “It freed the body from defilement or evil; cleared a person’s character of a charge or suspicion of guilt” (Crane 42). However Rebecca’s body did not purge, so therefore she was not guilty of any wrong doings. She was not a bad mother, she did not commit suicide so God did not strike her own for wrong doings. Rebecca’s body did however have signs of fresh blood and “her son “had beene in the roome. In 1673 people knew that a corpse might bleed at the touch or even approach of its murder. Such belief reinforced the idea that even in the absence of human witnesses, God saw all and would reveal the guilty party through providential means (Crane 42). So because Rebecca’s body had fresh blood when her brother was in the room with her dead body people thought that he could have killed her. Two nights after Rebecca’s murder on February 12th, Rebecca Cornell’s ghost paid an unexpected visit to her brother, John Briggs. During this time period many Protestant’s that were in the Protestant reformation began to scrutinize and reinterpret the nature of such apparitions. “Protestants denied purgatory in the belief that human souls went directly to either Heaven or Hell without delay or a return ticket, it followed that ghosts could not be the souls of dead people. According to this reform thinking, ghosts were the spirits of the dead who always had a reason for their appearance. Usually their presence was designed to correct an injustice that might not be detected by other means” (Crane 19-20). This means that Rebecca came back to tell her brother what had happened to her because there wasn’t enough evidence to convict her murderer. Ghosts during this time period also “reinforced moral standards by warning potential perpetrators that even in the absence of human witnesses, a victim could seek retribution. God after all had seen the crime, and God sent ghosts as His representatives” (Crane 20). The Devil could also send ghosts to trick people into thinking that it was God’s doings, so puritans had to try to distinguish between the two. So Rebecca’s ghost came back to tell people of the wrong doings of her brother in hopes people would believe her.
3. Quakerism was a strong and religious force in Rhode Island’s culture and politics. The Quakers played a role in punishing Thomas for Rebecca’s death because if the whole jury in the trial was Quakers then they would have punished Thomas solely on the fact that he went against what they believed in and killed his mother. If people that believed that Thomas was guilty before they even heard the trial, then Thomas could have been convicted just on basis that the jury was stacked against him. While many of the Quakers believe that Thomas was guilty of this sin, many of the Congregationalists agreed that Rebecca and Quakers alike were under the influence of Satan and God will punish them as He sees fit. The counterargument fired by the Quaker’s said that it was not God that struck Rebecca but rather a non-Quaker, her own son. “This was an act of filial disrespect beyond toleration- a son who stabbed his mother, burned her body and set the room on fire” (Crane 168). The worst fears of all Anglo-Americans can true: One of their own had been reduced to savage behavior, that of an Indian. What is God going to do to punish them? Did he already punish them? Quakerism played an important role in the reason why Thomas saw the fate he did. He was punished for committing one of the worst crimes known to man, matricide. He killed his own mother and he deserved the verdict he got. 4. Elaine Forman Crane suggests that if Rebecca Cornell was not murdered by her own son, Thomas Cornell, then should could have been the victim of a brutal Indian crime, her own doings, or accidental causes. Crane states that there were a lot of reasons and evidence that worked against Thomas Crane and his long-term relationship with his mother but there was also evidence that worked in his favor. Thomas Crane has means, motives and opportunity to commit the crime against his mother if Thomas did kill his mother he took “such precautions to assure that he made Rebecca’s death appear accidental without endangering the rest of the house or family” (Crane 110).
However Crane also states that because Indian Wickhopash’s burnings of buildings after Rebecca’s death, he too could have somehow been involved in the killing of Rebecca. He too was linking to the Cornell family and had motives, just as well as Thomas, to want to kill Rebecca Crane. “Evidence suggests that Native Americans often sought revenge by attacking those perceived to the most vulnerable victims- among whom were lone women. If revenge was Wickhopash’s motive, therefore, Rebecca Cornell was a likely target. Native American mutilation involved symbolism as well” (Crane 119). To Crane Wickhopash was surely a more reasonable explanation than Thomas Cornell for burning Rebecca’s body because “Native Americans were know to burn houses to drive their victims outside in the open” (Crane 120). Thomas Cornell may not have risked burning down his house in order to hid his mothers death and because there was a new moon on the night of her murder, Wickhopash would have been in total darkness to commit the crime without anyone seeing him. On the other hand though, there was no sign of breaking the latches on the back doors that would have shown an intruder breaking in, so how would Wickhopah have gotten into the house without breaking the latches? Thomas Cornell was very aware of the crime arson and how to commit and make it look like an Indian had committed the crime.
“It is possible that Rebecca’s death was an accidental and she sustained her injuries while engaging in her usual activities. Rebecca was seventy-three years old ,but she was not incapacitated. By hear-say testimony, she ran after pigs, prevented her daughter-in-law from striking a child with an axe and collected wood for her own fireplace. And some of her allegations of ill-treatment were at odds with corroborated details” (Crane 126”).
Could Rebecca just have died of natural causes, she was at a pretty old age for back in the 1650’s. She could have at any moment lost her balance and fallen into her lit fireplace where she landed in a lit fire and that is how she caught on fire. She could have then dragged herself across her room to try and get help but because she was weak and ill that night she didn’t have the strength to make it and get help. This could also be the reason why when her family had called her for dinner she didn’t come down to eat. Rebecca could have already been dead shortly after her son left her that evening. The suspicious stomach wound could have been from her falling onto the fire that evening, rather than from someone stabbing her with some sort of weapon. The fireplace a not like many of the ones we see today, but rather large in size and is very easy to fall into if you tripped. The wound could have never existed also because he body was over ten days old after they dug it up for a second autopsy the body could have been just purging or could have never been there. Finally Rebecca Cornell could have committed suicide, which was all too common during this time period. Puritan ministers preached against suicide because it means you were giving into the devils evil-doings (Crane 128). Rebecca however, wasn’t the most stable person around the time she was murdered. Her self-esteem was under attack and she “wrestled with her “sad condition”(Crane 129). Being a Quaker convert, Rebecca, like other Quakers, thought that it was a parents job to keep them on the path of “Inner Light” and help them preserve and cultivate this. If parents failed, then their children became rebel against their parents. To Rebecca, she thought “she was guilty of some parental dereliction because Thomas was rebellious and he dishonored god. In her last moment of despair, Rebecca may have felt remiss and assumed at least partial responsibility for Thomas’s character flaws. If Thomas was a bad son it was because she had been a bad mother” (Crane 129). Rebecca was known to have wanted to commit suicide twice so it could have been likely that this third time she went through with it.
Elaine Crane also states in her book that William, Thomas’s brother, was convinced that Thomas’s wife, Sarah Cornell, had played a role in Rebecca’s death. October 1675, Sarah was arrested for the “murtheringe of Mrs. Rebecca Cornell, or beinge abettinge or consenting thereto” (Crane 122). It is not known to this day whether or not she did indeed help her husband murder his mother or not, but I do think that there was no way she didn’t know that something was going on. Thomas Cornell himself was the last one who visited his mother on the night of her death, so I am lead to believe he did it. Thomas Crane was definitely guilty of killing his mother I think because he was angry at this mother was having a higher status of authority and power in the household. He also didn’t like that his mother was making him pay rent and pay $100 to his brothers and sisters. The evidence points back to Thomas and how he always mistreated his mother, so that is why I believe he killed his own mother.
Crane believes that there is a possibility that genetics played a role in Rebecca’s death. “Modern studies do not link genetics and violent behavior directly, although aggression and antisocial behavior may be connected in some tenuous way to genetics. Some studies conclude that genetic factors can, under certain conditions, strongly influence aggressive behavior” (Crane 133). Crane also goes on to say that most sociologists and psychologists would agree to the fact that criminal behavior can be inherited, and some families are more at risks than others to surface certain aggression (Crane 133).