In the early hours of June 15, 1836,(1) a Black sex worker named Mary Jones was arrested in what is now the Lower Manhattan neighborhood of Soho. Accused of stealing the wallet of Robert Haslem—a client she’d met the evening before—Mary was approached by an undercover police officer as she made her way home around midnight. Feigning interest in her services, the officer followed Mary to her apartment, and asked to meet with her in the street. When Mary obligingly led him to a nearby alley—the same alley her accuser had described to police as the scene of the alleged crime—Mary was seized.

She did not go quietly.

As articles in the New York Herald (2) and New York Sun (3) newspapers would later report, Mary was an experienced pickpocket with great expertise in sleight of hand. While resisting the officer’s attempts to grab her, she used the ensuing “tussle” to divest herself of several wallet-sized pocketbooks so that they could not be found on her person. When police recovered the wallets, however, one was immediately identified as belonging to Mary’s accuser. Finding this sufficient evidence, officers agreed to detain Mary at the nearest watch house for further investigation.

In the meantime, the police searched Mary’s apartment, revealing a trunk containing more stolen wallets. Several banknotes were also recovered. When police showed these notes to Robert Haslem, he could only identify a few as being his own. Thinking that Mary could have hidden the missing money in her clothing, officers decided that a physical examination would be necessary.

Press reports make no mention of the search’s success. Indeed, it is unclear if Haslem’s property was ever returned to him by police. Instead, reporters focused on what the examination revealed to officers about the identity of the accused: beneath Mary’s clothing and “tied around her waist with a belt,” police found a leather prosthesis, “bored open in imitation of a woman’s womb.”(4) Prior to this discovery, neither her arresting officer nor her client had doubted that Mary was “of the sex of the dress of which [she] had assumed.”(5) Afterwards, she was consistently—and disparagingly—referred to as a man masquerading in women’s attire.

During her arraignment interview, Mary was asked to clarify her “right” [or legal] name and sex. In response, she stated “Peter Sewally—I am a man.” A New York City native of about thirty-three years of age, she claimed to have “always dressed [in women’s clothes]” while attending parties among the “people of her own color.” She had also dressed this way in New Orleans, a city to which she may have traveled while “in the state service.” When asked what had “induced” her current presentation, Mary cited the complements of her peers: long in the practice of “waiting upon girls of ill fame,” she had been assured by the women she worked for that she “looked so much better” dressing in feminine attire and was encouraged for this reason to pursue the practice further.

Mary’s testimony is rare, not just because of the details it provides, but because interviews typically focused on the events of the crime. Personal questions like name, occupation, and place of residence were standard, but queries relating to past history, accusations or offenses generally were not permitted. Mary faced charges of grand larceny, but the bulk of her interview transcript concerns her gender history. This is a key detail, as examination transcripts were used as evidence in both the indictment process and subsequent trial. Unlike witnesses, defendants were not often allowed to directly address the court; this testimony was frequently all that a jury would hear of the defendant’s version of events.(6) Records of Mary’s trial before the Court of General Sessions on June 16, 1836, show that this was the case for her. Mary’s accuser, as well as the men who arrested and searched her were able to verbally convey their accounts to the jury; Mary did not receive the same opportunity. Instead, a transcription of her arraignment interview was read as part of The People’s evidence against her. She was ultimately found guilty.

On June 18th, 1836, Mary was formally sentenced to five years hard labor in Sing Sing State Prison—the maximum for her offense. In the weeks following her trial, political satirist H.R. Robinson published “The Man-Monster; Peter Sewally, alias Mary Jones,” a lithograph depicting Mary as she was dressed in court. Despite its salacious title (and many papers’ reluctance to print it), (7) the lithograph portrays Jones as nothing more or less than an elegant black woman. This apparent discrepancy points to an issue seen throughout Mary’s case: It is clear from the attention given to Mary’s gender in court records and in the media that her gender presentation was considered not only unusual, but indicative of some larger character flaw. But it is difficult to determine from these documents exactly what this flaw was considered to be. Was Mary’s “monstrousness” due to her being seen as a man who took an effeminate role in pursuing sex with other men? Or does her case indicate that antebellum anxieties (and thus perceptions) surrounding “gender crossing” existed independently of an association with same-sex sexuality? How might these questions affect how we apply and learn from Mary’s case? These are issues that have only recently begun to be addressed in their full complexity.

In the early 1990s, historian Timothy R. Gilfoyle recovered Mary’s story as part of his research on women and sex work in antebellum New York City. While searching through press reports, he found the articles in the New York Herald and New York Sun that publicized Mary’s 1836 arrest and subsequent trial. Though coverage was highly sensationalized, it provided Gilfoyle with the information necessary to locate the New York District Attorney indictment file in the Municipal Archives corresponding to Mary’s case. Publishing his findings in his 1992 book, City of Eros: New York City, prostitution, and the commercialization of sex, 1790-1920, Gilfoyle presented Mary’s case as part of a discussion of male homosexuality within the brothel culture of early 19th-century New York. Here, he theorized as to the case’s implications for further scholarship by viewing Mary as a gay, cisgender man choosing to dress, work and be addressed as a woman for practical reasons.

Scholar-activist Jonathan Ned Katz would build upon this interpretation in later analyses of Mary’s case. In Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality (2001), Katz presented Mary as a “man who for whatever reason desired sexual contact with other men,” (8) implying that her anatomy negates any sexual/gender ambiguity attached to her behavior. In this context, “acting like a woman”(9) and forming community with other marginalized people are cast as strategic adaptations that may have aided men in seeking sexual connections with one another at a time in which the dominant society criminalized such behavior. Thus—for Katz—Mary’s story is important because it exemplifies how ingenuity and resistance are integral parts of the gay American past.

For more than a decade, Mary’s case continued to be interpreted through this lens. Mary’s gender presentation—how she dressed, acted, and physically expressed her gender—was rarely discussed in its own right, but rather as a proxy for same-sex desire. By the same token, Mary’s gender identity—her personal sense of being a man or woman—was presented as synonymous with her anatomical sex.  This approach was ultimately limiting, allowing only those interpretations which reflected the histories of gay, cisgender men. In recent years, scholars such as Tavia Nyongo (10) and C. Riley Snorton (11) have challenged this, using a Black queer feminist framework to rethink Mary and her case. They acknowledge that effeminacy in men was perceived later in the century as connected to—but not necessarily indicative of—same sex attraction. But (and this is especially true of Snorton’s work) they questioned—for the first time—if Mary should be considered “a man.”

In viewing Mary as a man, past scholars have neglected important aspects of her case, such as the extent to which Mary’s own views of her gender may have shaped the experiences and interactions she describes in her testimony. If Mary viewed herself as something other than a man, the circumstances of her life may not be as applicable to the history of gay cisgender men as past scholars have theorized. How might her own views of herself have impacted the events of her past and the 1836 case? Instead of placing Mary’s anatomical sex at the center of identity discussions, they place her gender and her race in a primary position, questioning how perceptions of Blackness factored in Mary being perceived as a “man in masquerade,” for the purposes of sexual/criminal behavior. These important questions expand our understanding of the roots of misogynoir and anti-sex worker bias. This scholarship is an entry point into the histories of transgender people, a topic that has only recently begun to be explored.

While emergent scholarship regarding Mary’s case makes exceptional use of evolutions in the field, (12) it rarely seems to draw upon original archival documents. Instead, scholars have mostly relied on citations and paraphrasing earlier works. Both Nyongo and Snorton have had success in locating further press reports about Mary, which allow us to trace her life further into the 1840s, but so far, neither appears to have sought out more extensive documentation from court, police, and other institutional records.

What might be found if we return to the archive with the new, expanded view of Mary in mind? It is with this question in mind that I began my internship at the Municipal Archives in February of 2022. Using press reports, we found eleven additional arrests for Mary. These searches were facilitated using search terms relating to gender and dress in online newspaper databases. Then (à la Gilfoyle) we looked to the Municipal Archives for documentation. For most of the arrests, police recorded only basic data, e.g. name, date, place of arrest, the offense and outcome. These do not contain the extensive documentation found in the felony prosecution files, but still provide key insights into Mary’s experiences. For example, the watch returns show that Mary was usually arrested for vagrancy and disorderly conduct, at night, wearing women’s clothing. Sometimes the arrests occurred almost immediately after she was released from serving time for her last offense. Ultimately, we found that in total, Mary spent over seven years of her life between 1842 and 1858 serving time in some of New York’s most notorious correctional facilities, including Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary, the Tombs, and Sing Sing State Prison.

Mary’s record of frequent arrests, as well as the disparaging press nickname “Beefsteak Pete” used by official record keepers, show that Mary grew increasingly recognizable to law enforcement throughout the 1840s and 1850s. Yet, in spite of the obvious risk, she returned to the same geographic area, continued to use feminine aliases, and dressed in fashionable women’s attire.

Court and census records indicate that these choices were not born of necessity. Mary was a skilled craftsperson (13) who could have chosen to work as a man. She could have also chosen to pursue sex with men as a man—commercially or otherwise, as many in the period did. (14) In antebellum New York, some “female impersonators” achieved great fame as stage performers. (15) This would have been a much safer and more acceptable environment in which to “masquerade as a woman.” To the extent that records can tell us, Mary picked none of these options. The theory that she may not have identified with her anatomical sex goes a long way in explaining these choices, but also raises other questions. The main one being “why not leave the area in order to be less vulnerable to arrest?”

Perhaps the answer lies in a theme that comes up in all interpretations of Mary’s case: community. Newly located records reveal more about Mary’s personal ties than could be gleaned from the 1836 case files alone. In addition to her connections to [cisgender, female] brothel workers and communities of Black people in both NYC and New Orleans, we now know that she had at least two close relationships during her lifetime: one with a white man named John Williams (alias Joseph Lyness), a known thief with whom she was arrested in 1844; and the other with a black woman named Betsy, to whom she was married by 1855 according to census records. An 1858 press report (16) speaks to some of Mary’s other social connections, claiming that she “used to work with an old negro named Bill Thompson who kept a panel crib on the corner of Chamber and Chapel Street, the resort of thieves and prostitutes.” Committed as a vagrant for “dressing himself up as a woman and inducing men to go into alleyways and there robbing them,” Mary reportedly said that she “could get a good many white friends who could get [her] out of the scrape, but that [she] would not call on them” with the paper suggesting that this was because she “believed in honor among thieves.” Could this community of accepting people—fellow outsiders of various kinds—be how Mary survived despite so much negative attention, and thus why she chose not to seek an easier—albeit perhaps less fulfilling—life elsewhere? If Mary did think of herself as something other than male, was this view shared by those in her circle? How might their own status as outsiders have impacted their acceptance of Mary and her identity?

The last of Mary’s actual words regarding her identity come from an 1848 case file detailing her arrest and indictment for the pickpocketing of Michael Bonney. As in 1836, she was accused of soliciting a white male client, only to steal his wallet during the ensuing sexual encounter. In this instance, however, Mary’s arraignment testimony avoided any reference to her birth name, assigned sex, or occupation as a sex worker. She was not asked about these details, and she did not volunteer the information. Instead, she gave her name as Julia Johnson, and stated: “I was born in Jersey, I am twenty-seven years old, I am married, my husband has gone on a trading voyage to New Orleans and other places. I live in the rear of No. 70 or 72 Sullivan Street, and do day’s work for a living.” Her interaction with Bonney was the main subject of the interview and her answers about the events of the previous night make up the majority of the text.

Documentation of Mary Jones’ interactions with the criminal justice system in antebellum New York City provides a rare glimpse into the life of a nineteenth-century American whose gender presentation and anatomical sex failed to align with the cultural norms of the period. While such individuals often self-identify as transgender or gender-nonconforming in the present, it is unclear whether Mary would have chosen to do so had she been given the opportunity. This does not negate the intellectual value in exploring her story through a transgender lens. Just as a cis gay reading did in its day, a trans or otherwise gender-focused reading can be used to interrogate the archival materials more critically, and their capacity to reflect on the inherent intersectionality of the queer past. Because case records have been difficult to find, people like Mary are sometimes treated as existing in a vacuum, “popping” into existence and then fading into obscurity.

While we are pushing ourselves to interrogate our assumptions about the mechanisms of Mary’s persecution, we must also ask how she was able to survive as she did in spite of that. Reevaluating our view of Mary as a man is key in opening ourselves up to the multitude of possibilities presented by cases in which gender identity has long been overlooked. Hopefully, the additional source materials recovered as part of this project will assist in this important work.

Riah Lee Kinsey just completed a special research internship project at the Municipal Archives as part of their Queens College, Graduate School of Library Science degree.

Footnotes:

1. According to the New York Sun and New York Herald press reports, Mary’s interaction with Robert Haslem took place around 10PM on Tuesday, June 14, 1836. The next morning, on Wednesday June 15, Haslem reported Mary to the police. By 11PM that evening, police had located Mary. She was arrested in the early hours of Thursday, June 16th, 1836. Her examination, arraignment, indictment and trial all occurred on this same day, with news reports of the ordeal being published the morning of June 17th, 1836. Official sentencing appears to have taken place on June 18th-which is the date put forth in police and court records.

2. General Sessions, Thursday: A Good One. (1836, June 17). The New York Herald. 2(84).1. Courtesy NYPL [Online Database].

3. Court of Sessions: Yesterday. (1836, June 17). The New York Sun. (869). 2. Courtesy NYPL [Microfilm].

4. Sun, June 17, 1836, pg. 2. Originally in Latin: “Bowyer had also discovered that the prisoner, to sustain his pretensions, and impose upon men as sexus femineus, fabrefactus fuerat portio bovillis, (cara bubulu) terebratus et apertus similis matrix muliebris, circumligio cum cingulum!!!”

5. Herald, June 17, 1836, pg 1.

6. For this paragraph, see pages 65-71 “Examination of the Accused;” pages 110-112, “Voluntariness of Evidence;”pages 120-121, “Privilege Against Self Incrimination;” and page 187, “The Defendant's Statement” in McConville, M., Mirsky, C. L. (2005). Jury Trials and Plea Bargaining: A True History. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

7. (1836, June 22). The New York Herald, 2(88). 2. Courtesy NYPL [Online Database]: “Robinson, 48 Courtland street, sent us two fresh prints. One of them he calls Mary Jones, the man monster. When improper words are spoken in the hearing of a virtuous and beautiful woman, she hears nothing-when improper prints are exhibited, she sees nothing. Thus it is with us.”

8. Katz, Love Stories, pg. 86

9. Katz, Love Stories, pg. 86

10. Nyong’o, T. A. O. (2009). The amalgamation waltz: Race, performance, and the ruses of memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

11. Snorton, C. R. (2017). Black on both sides: a racial history of trans identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

12. [theoretical, technological, etc.]-elaborate

13. See 1848 Bonney Case-General Session Minutes and the 1850 US Federal Census; both records list Mary as being trained in wood turning. This was perhaps a skill set she acquired while imprisoned.

14. Between 1842 and 1846, the New York “sporting press” frequently reported on sodomy cases, as well as all-male brothels and known “cruising spots.” Literature of the period, including Herman Melville’s Redburn (1849) and George Thompson’s City Crimes (1849) also included references to spaces around the city that were popular with men seeking sexual connections with other men.

15. See examples such as D. Wright, a “celebrated falsetto melodist” known as “The American Giantess” and Ricardo, a “negro female impersonator” who gained notoriety as during this period. Mahar’s Behind the Burnt Cork Mask (1998) provides additional analysis of the role of race in this phenomenon.

16. “Beefsteak Pete Arrested.” National Police Gazette (1858, April 3). Courtesy the Transgender Digital Archive.