‘The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America’
By John Wood Sweet
Henry Holt, 384 pages

‘The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Curse Birth of Tabloid Justice’
By Alex Hortis
Pegasus Crime, 336 pages

‘Free Love: The Story of a Great American Scandal’
By Robert Shaplen
Foreword by Louis Menand
McNally Editions, 264 pages

In 1793, a seamstress, Lanah Sawyer, is raped at New York City. She then becomes the first woman in American history to bring a lawsuit against her gentleman assailant. John Wood Sweet’s book begins with a map of New York City, evoking a vanished world that included a Debtors’ Prison, a Bathing House, and sites familiar to 40,000 New Yorkers on the southern tip of Manhattan as it burgeoned in population after the Revolutionary War.  

Mr. Sweet’s atmospheric book is steeped in the diurnal, the rising and setting of the sun as 17-year-old Lanah relishes the attentions of a 26-year-old gentleman, an “unexpectedly fine beau.” She wakes up in a room with “rough plank walls,” a brothel from which her gentleman has just emerged, a little “disheveled” after a night of debauchery, presuming, as always, that there will be no repercussions.

This is what happens in big cities, Thomas Jefferson might have said, as the sage of Monticello extolled yeoman farmers and blasted his rival, the urbane Alexander Hamilton, and the peculations of his urban cronies. What Jefferson could not imagine was a Lanah Sawyer, forging a new identity in the very citified corruption that would befoul his vision of America.

Closer to Jefferson’s urban dread would have been the fate of the fallen woman, in this case involving gin-soaked, adulterous Polly Bodine, survivor of several abortions, who commands the attention of two young reporters, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, not to mention P.T. Barnum’s exploitation of her fate. 

As in “The Sewing Girl’s Tale,” the differences from today in “The Witch of New York” seem less important than the book’s epigraph, a provocative quotation from Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”: “We should bear in mind that, in general it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation—to make a point—than to further the cause of truth.”

On the high end of the New York City spectrum of criminal biography is the tale of Henry Ward Beecher, renowned Brooklyn Heights preacher, abolitionist, supporter of women’s suffrage, and someone mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. His adultery, an open secret, became public when radical Victoria Woodhall exploited his affair to expose the hypocrisy of monogamy among the politically powerful. 

Like Messrs. Sweet and Hortis, Mr. Shaplen is atmospheric. It so happens that on a “sultry” Brooklyn Heights evening, Elizabeth Richards Tilton, a mother of four children, tells her husband she has committed adultery with their pastor, who had offered her consolation — and then much more — after the death of her young son.

What would Thomas Jefferson have made of such a story? Did it matter that it had occurred in Brooklyn? Does the location of these stories matter, other than to tell us where we are? The bucolic three-part division of Mr. Shaplen’s book raises such questions: “Nesting on the Heights,” “The Overturned Nest,” and “The Broken Eggs” privilege biology over geography.

Louis Menand explains that sermons in 19th century America “were a widely diffused entertainment medium,” meaning they were popular in cities, towns, villages, and, of course, camp meetings. What was special, though, about New York was the story about making it that Frank Sinatra sang. In lieu of having him croon, there was Beecher, in Menand’s words, “a legend in his own time. Manhattanites took special ferries, referred to as Beecher Boats, across the East River to hear his sermons. John Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, later Secretary of State, called him ‘the greatest preacher the world has seen since Saint Paul preached on Mars Hill.’”

“In nineteenth-century America, a celebrity minister was a kind of rock star,” Mr. Menand concludes. So it is that biography about then brings us back to now, and to New York City, where — no matter what Thomas Jefferson thought — so many stories seem to lead.

Mr. Rollyson’s writing about New York City appears in his biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Amy Lowell, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, William Faulkner, and Sylvia Plath.