A Rape in the Early Republic: Gender and Legal Culture in an 1806 Virginia Trial

On January 14, 1806, Sidney Hanson was raped by John Deskins on a rough gravel path in the woods in Tazewell County, Virginia. In the early nineteenth century, trials for rape were rare. Scanty court records typically lacked the detail needed to reconstruct the lives of those involved and evaluate the social and physical setting of the crime. Yet the events on that fateful day in 1806 would be the exception.

In A Rape in the Early Republic, Randal L. Hall reproduces the complete trial testim...