Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [140]
These were not the standard ways to seduce a woman. A more humdrum sort of trickery and artifice underlay the crime of seduction—a criminal code entry that supplemented civil suits for seduction, and for breach of promise of marriage, and gave these added bite. Under a New York statute of 1848, any man who “under promise of marriage” seduced or had “illicit connexion with any unmarried female of previous chaste character” could be sentenced up to five years in prison.35 A Georgia statute expressed almost poetic wrath: a man was guilty if “by persuasion and promises of marriage, or other false and fraudulent means” he was able to “seduce a virtuous unmarried female, and induce her to yield to his lustful embraces, and allow him to have carnal knowledge of her.”36
These laws were not dead letters; there is a decent sprinkling of cases among the law reports, some of them of unusual interest. Walter Clark was convicted of seducing Alice J. Morey “under ... a promise of marriage” in Michigan in the 1870s. The state tried to show three separate acts of “illicit intercourse.” But, said the appellate court, sex acts numbers two and three could not be considered seduction, since after sex act number one, Alice was obviously no longer “chaste.”ax Walter also argued that Alice and her parents were plotting to “inveigle” him into marriage. He also disputed her account of the events. One of the acts of “illicit intercourse” took place, supposedly, in a buggy; Walter tried to show, by medical evidence, that sex in a buggy was “highly improbable if not impossible.” He succeeded in winning a new trial.37
The core idea of the seduction statutes pops up elsewhere in criminal codes as well. An Ohio statute, passed in 1886, applied to any “male person over twenty-one years of age” who was a “superintendent, tutor or teacher in a private, parochial or public school, or a seminary . . . or instructor of any female in music, dancing, roller skating, athletic exercise, or any branch of learning.” It was a crime for this “male person” to have “sexual intercourse, at any time or place,” with a “female” who was “under his instruction,” even though the intercourse was “with her consent.” A lustful tutor could serve from two to ten years in the penitentiary. 38 The law, in effect, conclusively presumed that the tutor was a vile seducer, the pupil an innocent victim. Men were, after all, politically and socially dominant. And, in an age of double standards, women suffered far more than men from loss of innocence.
Men could, in short, be sent to jail for seduction, and some few men were. But this was hardly the real point of the laws. A woman could use seduction laws as a crude crowbar to force a man to marry her. This was hardly the way to begin a lifelong romance, but it was sometimes effective, especially if the woman was pregnant and faced social disaster. In 1867, an instructive account in the Police Gazette ran under the heading ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.39 The story was as follows. People in Troy, New York, were “shocked” to learn that young James B. Hoyt had “been playing fast and loose with the affections of a charming young lady, a Miss Law.” Law had allowed herself to be “overcome,” perhaps because of “specious promises of marriage.” The young man “refused to fulfil his promise”; there was nothing left to do but “apply to the young libertine the screws of the law.” He was indicted and put on trial.
The trial, in a crowded courtroom, went badly for Hoyt. In desperation, he proposed “an offer of marriage.” The young lady thought it over—her sisters advised against it—and then said yes. Love “won the victory over reason.” The courtroom