Hetty (5 page)

Some New Bedford whaling men, attached to the city and to their way of life, would ride the industry down to its bitter end in the early 1900s, sending fewer and fewer ships out to hunt ever more elusive whales, for an oil that the world no longer wanted. But sentimentality was never one of Edward Robinson’s traits. To him, whaling had been nothing more than the best way to make money, and New Bedford the best place to do it. When the time came, he cast them both off with the brisk indifference with which another man discards a worn-out pair of shoes. In New York, he joined the New York shipping firm of William T. Coleman and Company, where he found new success in merchant shipping and real estate. Hetty moved to New York with her father, but she returned frequently to New Bedford to keep an eye on things.

Each time she came, Hetty blew into and through the insular, sequestered, quiet world of Aunt Sylvia like a fresh gale. She stayed with Sylvia on Eighth Street or at Round Hill. Hetty had acquired a home of her own, the house on Second Street where Edward and Abby had lived, after her mother’s death. Her father let her have it as a sort of consolation prize, after assuming control of all of Abby’s money. But Hetty preferred to stay with Sylvia. Whether this preference was born of a fondness for her aunt and a desire to be the dutiful niece, or a self-centered desire to keep tabs on the cash cow, depends on who was telling the story.

Though she had as yet no legal claim on any of Sylvia’s money, she felt no compunction about monitoring Sylvia’s spending habits. However unattractive and at times irrational Hetty’s behavior toward Sylvia was, personal greed did not seem to be among her motivations, at least, not greed in the conventional sense. She did not lust after Sylvia’s money in order to one day shower herself with luxury. Indeed, the miserly habits for which she would become famous later in life point to the opposite extreme, an abject unwillingness to enjoy the indulgences that other wealthy people (or even members of the middle class) took for granted. Her concern with Sylvia’s money grew instead out of her own obsession to protect the family fortune at all costs, and from her belief that the money would not be safe until it was in her hands.

What is clear, though, is that Aunt Sylvia’s staff, and Sylvia herself, increasingly came to dread Hetty’s visits. Physically and emotionally, Aunt Sylvia was no match for her energetic, assertive niece. Sitting in a wheelchair or in her bed, her small body curved by the disfiguring spinal condition, she felt at times helpless in Hetty’s presence. And yet it is clear that Sylvia held her own in this complex relationship. Hetty hectored her aunt about expenses she felt were unnecessary. Particularly galling was Sylvia’s plan to add a new section to her Eighth Street house. Hetty believed that the staff was brainwashing
Sylvia into adding extra rooms solely for their own comfort.

“There’s plenty of room in this house!” she cried. “You don’t need to add on just to accommodate some old nurses!”

When Sylvia said she planned to go ahead with the addition regardless, Hetty threw a tantrum, sitting on the floor in front of her aunt, sobbing. When that approach failed, she marched dramatically upstairs to the room where she usually stayed, a spacious bedroom directly over the kitchen. She grabbed her belongings from the closet and bureau and took them by the armload up to the attic. If her aunt was determined to make an addition to the house—if the servants were twisting her withered arms, as she believed they were—Hetty would show by example how little space she herself required.

Heading up the attic steps, she declared, “I’ll never sleep in that old chamber over the kitchen again! I would rather sleep in a cemetery.”

Electa stared evenly at Hetty.

“If you want to sleep in the cemetery, go there.”

“I shan’t go there,” Hetty replied, “until I’m carried.”

With that, Hetty stormed up the steps. She took a mattress from the bedroom and laid it out across her grandfather’s old sea chest and a storage trunk. Hetty’s strike lasted precisely one night. When the house failed to be swayed by her display, she quietly moved her belongings and mattress back to her old room the next morning.

One day, Hetty visited the home of a cousin in New Bedford during a snowstorm. Sylvia sent a carriage to bring her home. Hetty refused the ride as wasteful—she insisted on walking. Another time, Hetty decided to have a party for some New Bedford friends and relatives. Sylvia agreed to host the party, but only on the condition that Hetty would agree not to pinch pennies on the food and decorations. But the two were soon arguing over the number of chickens and the quantity of ice cream required to adequately entertain guests. “That’s too
much!” Hetty shouted. Sylvia wanted expensive lace doilies; Hetty put out cheap cotton ones. Instead of hiring a waiter for the occasion, Hetty wanted to borrow a servant girl from another family. Mortified, Sylvia declared that she would never again allow Hetty to entertain in her home.

For her part, Sylvia carped at Hetty over her unbecoming clothes, and her less than astute attention to her appearance. If Hetty paid half the attention to her appearance that she did to financial matters, Sylvia reasoned, her niece would be a charming young lady. As it was, Sylvia complained to her nurses, to Hetty herself, and to Pardon Gray, the driver, who was raising daughters of his own. Once, Sylvia said wistfully to Gray, “I’d give a great deal if Hetty was like other young ladies, like your girls, or a great many others. Her dress plagues me, going down the street looking so. It’s the talk of the town.”

Letters from Electa to Hetty, written in rough grammar and spelling when Hetty was in New York in early 1864, reveal both Sylvia’s concern over Hetty’s hygiene and a genuine love sometimes overlooked in accounts of their relationship: “Dear Hetty, your not[e] cam[e] safe. Very glad to hear of your safe arrival your Aunt is so very glad that you have got such nice rooms[,] to have them
warm
to[o] we can talk about you almost see you made comfortable it gives us great joy. She thinks of that nice warm quilt you have to[o] it is [a] great pleasure to think of you and to have you dress nice and clean.”

Four months later, Electa wrote another letter, expressing Sylvia’s concern that Hetty had neglected to take with her a cashmere shawl that Sylvia had hoped would spruce up Hetty’s wardrobe:

“Your Aunt gave you that bleak
[sic]
Cashmere shall
[sic]
that you wore last fall, expected you to take it, found you had not[;] it is such nice suitable shall for you to wear, she wants you to have it and wear it and look like a lady in your place not keep it she says she never shall wear it. She has not been as quite well since you left nearly the same. I hope to carry her
out doors soon. She sends her love to you with all the rest of us and hope you are getting house cleaning setting down your things finely write soon and very often.”

The letter included a postscript that constitutes one of the few hints that this insular, self-absorbed world was even aware of events raging beyond their doors: “O this awful war Oh how many are killed.”

Hetty’s letters, which would emerge years later as evidence in a court battle over Sylvia’s estate, profess love for Sylvia, Electa, and Eliza Brown, another nurse. But they also show the conflicts and bitterness seething through the relationships. There is one letter, undated but written by Hetty presumably from New Bedford to Round Hill. From the content of the letter, it appears that Sylvia has decided to proceed with the addition to the house, and that the carpenters have shown up on Sylvia’s orders, much to Hetty’s consternation. The letter shows that she feels remorse, after a fashion, for her outburst, though it is couched in self-pity. “Dear Monte,” she wrote, using a nickname for Electa Montague, “I am almost crazy I have my old head aches and so discourage. I had tried to be so good—and to be deceived as well as have it done was too bad. I cared more about her not telling me…. give my love to Aunt and tell her the carpenters are here as it will make her happy although it will take me two years at least to get over the shock. Why did you let her tell me so sudden you would scold me if I treated her so…. I never wanted her to give it up if it would give her pleasure but she hardly told anything about it when I had been so good. With love, Hetty.”

But the warm feelings between Hetty and Sylvia’s servants rarely lasted for long. One night, while visiting Sylvia, Hetty told Fally Brownell to “take your duds and clear out!”

Hetty said, “I don’t want you here! My aunt doesn’t want you here either. You should just go away.”

“I won’t,” Fally said. “Not till I see Miss Howland and talk to
her. Miss Howland hired me. You don’t have the right to turn me away.”

The antagonism between the two came to a head one chilly morning in February or March of 1862, when Aunt Sylvia, Electa, and Hetty were eating breakfast downstairs. Fally was upstairs, straightening the rooms and preparing to fill the water pitchers. Hetty excused herself from the breakfast table and went upstairs. A few moments later, Aunt Sylvia and Electa heard crashing and banging sounds.

Aunt Sylvia looked up from her plate. “What’s that?”

Electa sighed. “Miss Robinson. She makes all sorts of noises.”

“Go and see,” Aunt Sylvia said.

In the entry, at the bottom of the stairs, Electa found Fally Brownell, disheveled, shaken, her clothing torn.

“She pushed me, and I fell down the stairs!” Fally cried. Hetty charged down the stairs, silently seething while Fally relayed the story to Electa and Aunt Sylvia.

“I can’t have such goings-on in my house,” Sylvia said. She sent a servant to fetch Thomas Mandell, a partner in Isaac Howland Jr. and Company and perhaps her most trusted advisor. When the servant left on his mission, Hetty’s mood abruptly changed.

“Please, Aunt, don’t tell Mr. Mandell about this. He doesn’t have to know anything about it. Please. It will ruin my character to have this go out around town!” Sylvia reluctantly agreed and sent word to Mandell not to come, after all. But one night not long thereafter, as she lay in bed, she turned to Electa Montague and said of her niece, “How could she be so cruel and treat me so, when I have done everything in my power to make her happy?”

THREE
A TEST OF WILLS

T
hrough the early 1860s the country was consumed by war, that great test of whether, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could long endure. In a war notable for advanced weaponry and crude medical practices, hundreds of thousands of soldiers died particularly horrible deaths serving this lofty ideal. These years were crucial ones in another respect—they nurtured a group of people who after the war would constitute perhaps the most formidable single generation of capitalists in the history of the world.

Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Henry M. Flagler, Philip Armour, the list went on-all of them had been born during the 1830s, the same decade as the lone woman who belongs among their ranks in terms of the financial power she wielded—Hetty Green. They all were in their twenties or early thirties when the war broke out. Their greatest feats lay years ahead of them. In the decades to come, they would transform the landscape and the American (and the
world’s) way of living to such an extent that their names still are synonymous with capitalism. They would build steel mills and railroads and mass production factories. The financiers among them would lend money and arrange multimillion-dollar deals on a scale never seen or even imagined before. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this particular generation created the modern world, or, at least, laid down its blueprints.

Yet even the most ardent capitalist must wince at their methods. The free markets they espoused were often in reality rigged markets that they freely exploited. If they were brilliant and industrious, they were not above manipulation, swindle, and fraud. The toughness and vision of the railroad builders unified a vast nation by giving it a swift means of moving from one coast to the other. Rail tycoons even gave us the concept of standardized time, unheard of until railroad schedules made it necessary for two towns located hundreds of miles apart to keep the same clocks. But the railroad builders also enriched themselves, obscenely, through enormous giveaways of public lands wherever they laid their tracks. They thanked the government for this largesse by setting up shell corporations with such names as Credit Mobilier, and Contract and Finance Company, which bilked taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars in overcharges on construction.

The railroad builders and industrialists treated their workers abysmally, offering low wages in exchange for long hours and terrible working conditions. Andrew Carnegie was off vacationing in Scotland in 1892 when workers in his Pennsylvania mills struck for a modest increase in wages. Carnegie’s lieutenants lost no time calling in Pinkerton men, the private security force, resulting in chaos and bloodshed that became known as the Battle of Homestead. Among J. P. Morgan’s vast holdings were anthracite coal mines, whose fat profits added to his millions. Morgan’s underpaid workforce included boys of eleven or twelve, too young to go into the mines, who earned the colorful nickname “red tips” because they sorted
jagged pieces of coal with their bare hands until their fingers bled.