Murder in the Shenandoah: Commonwealth v. John Crane and Law in Federal Virginia

Abstract

Murder in the Shenandoah is an experiential history of a 1791 murder in

Virginia's lower Shenandoah Valley. On July 4, 1791, John Crane, son of a prominent Virginia family, killed his neighbor's harvest worker and later invoked a "lunacy" defense. Using narrative, the dissertation tells the story of the case as it wound its way through the various stages of Virginia's court system, recreating that system as Crane saw

it - stage by stage, in the midst of Virginia's battle over law reform. By looking at the law not as case reports and outcomes, but rather as experience, Murder in the Shenandoah uncovers a new Virginia, one that defies the traditional dichotomies that have characterized the history of the region - state and local, east and west, gentry and

non-gentry. Instead, it reveals that new nation's most politically and legally influential state was, in the critical early national era, a world in motion. Murder in the Shenandoah is, in both form and content, a popular history. In form, it experiments with rendering a complex subject in a narrative format. In content, it calls into question entrenched scholarly notions of legal pluralism, arguing that the idea

has increasingly lost its usefulness - and undercut the very ideas of class and protest that it was originally designed to uncover. In Virginia, people of all classes knew the law, and fought to make it work for them. In both these ways, it links law and law's history with the people, broadly construed.