Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman--and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-century America.(Review)

Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman--and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-century America By Alan Pell Crawford Simon & Schuster, 333 pages, $2Z50

How Nancy Randolph, "the fetching daughter of one of the greatest of the great planters," became "the Jezebel of the Old Dominion," a woman variously accused of adultery, infanticide, murder, prostitution, and miscegenation (and that's just what her family said about her), is the subject of Alan Crawford's entertaining and often poignant new book.

Nancy's fortune, both good and ill, flowed from her bloodline. "Only a Randolph is good enough for a Randolph," went a Virginia adage, and the resultant intermarriage and madness and mossy languor rivalled Poe's House of Usher. Nancy's saturnine sister Judith married cousin Richard Randolph, a dreamy young laird with antislavery convictions, and Nancy soon came to live with them on a plantation felicitously named Bizarre.

Richard and his brothers acted as young men sometimes will when a pretty 18-year-old girl whose motto is "I must be sought" drops into the house. Nancy "liked to use such words as `tautology' and `ecclairissement' and she sometimes used them properly," writes Crawford, but she seems not to have learned the meaning of "chastity," for an ominous swelling of the belly soon distended Nancy's pleasing form.

On a visit to a cousin's plantation, Nancy woke the household with her nighttime screams; the ladies rushed to her door and managed but a peek at blood-stained sheets before their ministrations were discouraged by Richard. Rumors spread immediately through the network of slaves that "the corpse of a white baby" had been found buried nearby.

In such circumstances, tongues will wag, and Richard was arrested for "feloniously murdering a child said to be borne of Nancy Randolph." He was tried before a packed Cumberland Court House in April 1793, with Randolph testifying against Randolph.

Richard's defense was conducted by an Old Dominion dream team of Patrick Henry and John Marshall, and despite abundant evidence of displays of public affection between Nancy and Richard that transcended the usual in-law pecks on the cheek--and despite the revelation that Nancy had discussed abortifacients with Patsy Jefferson Randolph, Thomas Jefferson's daughter--the charges against Richard were dismissed. Whereupon the defendant stiffed Patrick Henry for his legal fee, and Henry had to sue to get paid.