Unwise Passions A True Story of a Remarkable Woman---and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-Century America

In the spring of 1793, eighteen-year-old Nancy Randolph, the fetching daughter of one of the greatest of the great Virginia tobacco planters, was accused, along with her brother-in-law, of killing her newborn son. Once one of the most sought-after young women in Virginia society, she was denounced as a ruined Jezebel, and the great orator Patrick Henry and future Supreme Court justice John Marshall were retained to defend her in a sensational trial. This gripping account of murder, infanticide, prostitution charges, moral decline, and heroism that played out in the intimate lives of the nation's Founding Fathers is as riveting and revealing as any current scandal -- in or out of Washington.

Alan Pell Crawford is the author of Thunder on the Right: The "New Right" and The Politics of Resentment, which The New Republic called "a significant work of political and intellectual history." A vice-president of Emergence Brand Labs, he lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife, Sally Curran, and their two sons, Ned and Tim.