“It was a plot got up to convict me”: The case of Henrietta Cook versus the state of Kansas, 1876

Abstract

In the late spring of 1876, a Kansas farm woman, Henrietta Cook, was brought to trial and found guilty of deliberately and maliciously poisoning her husband with strychnine. A close reading of the evidence today would suggest that the jury could just as easily have found Mrs. Cook innocent of the crime. But they did not. Out of the cultural and ideological materials at hand the jury actively fashioned a truth that allowed them to deal with the heinous crime of marital murder. Drawing on Foucault, the article shows how and why one form of discourse or truth came to triumph at the trial. In the lonely frontier settlement of Osborne, Kansas, people made a clear distinction between nature, which they were trying to overcome, and civilization, which they were trying to impose. The trial demonstrated what happened when nature, in the form of the woman, Henrietta Cook, challenged not only the fragile definition of community that had been constructed, but also the vocabularly of order, rationality, and progress that gave people hope. A voice with another message could not be heard.