A High Society Murder?

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the show, we’re marking the 15th anniversary of the Clinton impeachment with a look at the way sex scandals have been understood throughout American history.

ED: Let’s turn now way back to the beginning of the Republic when scandalous information moved a little bit differently than it does now.

BRIAN: On a fall night in 1792, screams rang out in the darkness at the elite Virginia home of Randolph Harrison. The screams came from Harrison’s teenage cousin Nancy Randolph, who was visiting the Harrison estate along with her sister and brother-in-law Richard. The whole household woke up and ran up to Nancy’s guest room to see what was the matter.

But the door was bolted. Her brother-in-law Richard and a slave were inside. When Richard came out, he said Nancy was just feeling under the weather.

The next morning, Nancy said that she was better and everything was fine. But it wasn’t. A scandal was brewing.

ED: The Harrison slaves began to spread rumors that Nancy had given birth that night. They said the child had been murdered and that Richard had disposed of the body on a wood pile. Even worse, Richard was pegged as the child’s father, the seducer of his own sister-in-law.

BRIAN: The rumors spread quickly through elite Americans’ letters. It was a tabloid story in a pre-tabloid world– sex, infidelity, and murder. And it threatened the honor of one of the most influential and well-connected families in Virginia.

ED: Clearly the Randolphs needed to do some damage control. BackStory Producer Andrew Parsons tells us what happened next.

ANDREW PARSONS: In the spring of 1793, 22-year-old Richard Randolph had problems. He was struggling to run the plantation he had inherited and prove his worth as an upstanding Virginian. He had already dropped out of three elite universities. And now people were calling him a murderer and an adulterer. Historian Chris Doyle says Richard tried an early version of PR, a letter to the public in the Virginia Gazette.

CHRISTOPHER DOYLE: He said in the newspaper that he would prefer a gentleman to state charges against him publicly and then he could challenge him to a duel. And in the absence of that, he says he’ll even conduct a public debate in letters to the editor of the Virginia Gazette. And he will repudiate any charges that anybody wants to make against him.

ANDREW PARSONS: Honor was everything in the 1790s. And Richard was willing to die to defend it. The problem was no one was accusing him in public. The story was being whispered behind closed doors. So with no one to duel or debate, Richard went to plan B. He’d go down to the county courthouse and turn himself in, trusting he’d be exonerated.

CHRISTOPHER DOYLE: It’s a terrible plan. Yeah, it’s really an awful plan. But he’s not left with a clean solution to this problem.

ANDREW PARSONS: Richard was promptly arrested. And after a week in jail, he was hauled into court to defend himself against the charge of murder and infidelity. By this point, much of elite Virginia had been following the scandal. So there was an audience in the courtroom. And Richard came prepared to dazzle them.

CHRISTOPHER DOYLE: He was lawyered up really, really well when he came into this case, basically assembling a legal dream team in the 1790s– the living legend Patrick Henry. And the other member of his defense team was John Marshall of all people, the guy who would go on to become the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I mean, who wouldn’t kill to have these two guys in your corner defending you?

ANDREW PARSONS: Richard seemed pretty guilty. He was in the room when Nancy was heard screaming. He was seen leaving the house with a baby. And there was even blood on the wood pile where he supposedly dumped the body.

But he had one thing going for him. Who was doing the accusing? One group was slaves. They were considered untrustworthy and were barred from taking the stand in Virginia anyway.

The other was women. And the lawyers made it clear that they were just gossips. When one of Nancy and Richard’s cousins, Mary Page Randolph, took the stand to testify that she knew Nancy was pregnant, Patrick Henry just painted her as a sneak.

CHRISTOPHER DOYLE: She peeked through a keyhole into Nancy’s bedroom to watch her undress to see that, in fact, she was pregnant. And Henry had a field day with this. He asked Page which eye did you look through the keyhole with? And the whole courtroom burst out laughing. And then he said, good God, deliver us from eavesdroppers.

ANDREW PARSONS: It was a bizarre trial, considering Richard never would have been there if he hadn’t turned himself in to clear his reputation. In the end, the judges cleared him of any wrongdoing. But it didn’t change anything. Most people still thought Richard was guilty. Even Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State at the time and related by marriage to the Randolphs, wrote to his daughter Martha that he thought Richard was guilty.

CHRISTOPHER DOYLE: When you have Thomas Jefferson writing letters to his daughter saying that he thinks Richard is a seducer, this is not going to go over well in a state where basically all the elite people know each other. And Thomas Jefferson’s word counted for a lot.

ANDREW PARSONS: Richard Randolph continued to be ostracized and struggled to maintain his plantation. He only lived a few more years and died at the age of 26 after battling a severe fever. In his will, he made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with Virginia’s planter elite. He freed all of his slaves, leaving his wife Judith with almost nothing.

CHRISTOPHER DOYLE: So it’s almost as if Richard can’t get back into the club of elite Virginian slaveholders, he’s going to, as a parting gesture, disassociate with them completely and accuse them of hypocrisy and tyranny.

ANDREW PARSONS: So did Richard actually commit murder and infidelity? In 1814, nearly 20 years after the scandal, Nancy Randolph wrote a very public letter setting the record straight. She confessed she had been pregnant, but not by Richard. It was his younger brother Theo who was the father. And Theo died just months before the incident.

She also said Richard helped cover up not a birth, but a miscarriage on that night in October, 1792. Chris Doyle says it isn’t clear whether this is the final word. But that’s not what really matters anyway.

CHRISTOPHER DOYLE: I don’t think we’re ever going to really know what happened in that manor house in October of 1792. And what matters in this particular case isn’t so much who did what, how the parties tried to create truth.

ANDREW PARSONS: And the truth that leaders like Thomas Jefferson saw was bigger than the scandal itself. An irresponsible spoiled kid like Richard Randolph really represented an uncertain future.

CHRISTOPHER DOYLE: There’s a real question in Virginia about whether the traditional Virginia gentry, those 40 famous families that monopolized politics, whether those families were equipped to rule anymore. And here was a young guy who seemed like he was way out of his depth as a 21-, 22-year-old guy trying to run a tobacco plantation by himself. He didn’t seem to have a good handle on his slave labor force or on the women under his charge.

ANDREW PARSONS: It was a “kids these days” concern. But at the dawn of a new nation, that mattered.

CHRISTOPHER DOYLE: After all, I mean, it’s going to be this young generation of Virginians who allegedly were supposed to solidify the Republic in experiment in Virginia and the United States. You needed a moral, virtuous elite and a moral, virtuous electorate to make a republic run successfully. And Richard was a very disturbing and worrying sign to older people like Jefferson.

ANDREW PARSONS: And if elites like Richard Randolph couldn’t keep it together, then who would run the country after the Founders were gone?

ED: Andrew Parsons is one of our producers.