The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (11 page)

In 1867—the year his father, Eastman, died, in New Haven—he surprised his colleagues by suddenly announcing his engagement to a young woman who lived in Manhattan. Neither she nor her job has been identified, but the suspicion is that she was a dancer or an entertainer, met on one of his Tenderloin expeditions. The girl’s mother, however, was not so impressed with Minor as his Connecticut friends had been. She detected something unsavory about the young captain and insisted that her daughter break the engagement, which she eventually did. In later years Minor refused adamantly to discuss either the affair or his feelings about its forced conclusion. His doctors said, however, that he appeared embittered about the episode.

The army, meanwhile, was dismayed by what seemed the sudden change in its protégé. Within weeks of learning of his extraordinary behavior the Surgeon General’s Department decided to remove him from the temptations of New York and send him out of harm’s way, into the countryside. He was effectively demoted, in fact, by being ordered to the relative isolation of obscure Fort Barrancas, Florida. The fort, which guards Pensacola Bay, on the Gulf of Mexico, was already becoming obsolete. An elderly masonry structure built to protect the bay and its port from foreign raiders, it now housed only a small detachment of troops, to whom Minor became regimental doctor. For a man so well born, so educated, so full of promise, this was a truly humiliating situation.

He became furiously angry with the army. He clearly missed his debauches; his messmates noticed that he became moody and occasionally very aggressive. In his quieter moments he took up his paintbrushes: Watercolors of the Florida sunsets soothed him, he said. He still was a dab hand, his brother officers said. He was an artistic man, said one in particular. He seemed like someone with a soul.

But he then began to harbor suspicions about his fellow soldiers. He said he thought they were muttering about him, glancing suspiciously at him all the time. One officer in particular troubled Minor, began teasing him, goading him, persecuting him in ways that Minor would never discuss. He challenged the man to a duel and had to be reprimanded by the fort commander. The officer was one of Minor’s best friends, said the commander—and both he and the friend later said they were incredulous that they had fallen out so badly, for no obvious reason. Nothing anyone could do to explain—your best friend is not plotting against you, is not scheming, is not wanting to have you hurt—nothing seemed to get through. Minor appeared to have taken a leave of his senses. It was all very puzzling, and to his friends and family, deeply distressing.

It reached a climax during the summer of 1868, when, after reportedly staying too long in the Florida sun, the captain began to complain of severe headaches and terrible vertigo. He was sent with escorting nurses to New York, to report to his old unit and to his old doctor. He was interviewed, examined, prodded, pried into. By September it was perfectly plain to see that he was seriously unwell. For the first time suspicion turns to certainty, with a formal indication that his mind was starting to falter.

A paper signed by a Surgeon Hammond on September 3, 1868, states that Minor appeared to be suffering from
monomania
—a form of insanity that involves a fierce obsession with a single topic. What that topic was Surgeon Hammond does not report, but he does say that in his view, Minor’s condition was so serious that he was to be classified as “delusional.” Minor was just thirty-four years old: His mind and his life had begun to spiral out of control.

The sick notes then begin to pile up, week after week—“He is in my opinion, unfit for duty and not able to travel,” they each declared. By November the doctors were recommending a more drastic step: Minor should in the army’s opinion be immediately institutionalized. He should, moreover, be put in the charge of the celebrated Dr. Charles Nichols, the superintendent of the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C.

“The monomania,” said the examining doctor, in a letter written in suitably magnificent copperplate, “is now decidedly suicidal and homicidal. Doctor Minor has expressed willingness to go to the Asylum, and has said he hoped he would be permitted to go without a guard, which I think he is now fully capable of doing.”

Capable, but ashamed. A letter, begging permission on Minor’s behalf for him to go to the asylum without people knowing, survives. “He shrinks from what he regards as the stigma of medical treatment in a lunatic asylum. He does not know that I write this. He would be grateful to anyone whose influence would place him under medical treatment in the Asylum without its being generally known.”

The letter worked, the influence of the old family, the old school, proved effective. A day later, without a guard and in secret, Doctor Minor took the express train down through Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore to Union Station, Washington. He took a hansom cab to southeast Washington, and to the well-tended grounds of the hospital. He passed through the stone gates, to begin what would become a lifelong acquaintance with the insides of lunatic asylums.

The Washington institution, eventually renamed St. Elizabeth’s, would become infamous—Ezra Pound would be detained there, as would John Hinckley, the attempted assassin of President Reagan. For the balance of the nineteenth century, however, the institution would be known more anonymously, as the only government-run site in the country in which soldiers and sailors who had gone certifiably mad could be detained, rehabilitated, locked away. William Minor was to remain there for the next eighteen months. He was a trusted inmate, however: The superintendent allowed him free run of the grounds, then let him go unescorted into the nearby countryside—a century and a half ago Washington was a very different place—fields where now there are slums. He walked into town; he passed by the White House; he visited the pay office each month and drew his salary in cash.

But he remained beset by delusional fears. A team of army doctors visited him the following September. “Our observations lead us to form a very unfavorable opinion as to Dr. Minor’s condition,” they told the surgeon general. “A very long time may elapse before he can possibly be restored to health.” Another doctor concurred: “The disturbance of the cerebral functions is ever more marked.”

The following April his commanders reached an unoptimistic decision: Minor was never likely to be cured, they said, and should be formally placed on the Army Retired List. A hearing was held in the Army Building at the corner of Houston and Greene Streets, in what is now New York’s fashionable, upscale SoHo area, to formalize the soldier’s retirement and to make sure it was justified by circumstance.

It was a protracted, sad affair. A brigadier, two colonels, a major, and a surgeon captain sat on the board, and they listened silently as doctor after doctor gave evidence about this once-so-promising young man’s decline. Perhaps the mental condition from which he was suffering had been caused by exposure to the sun in Florida, said one; perhaps it had merely been aggravated by it, said another; perhaps it was all due to the man’s exposure to war, a consequence of the horrors that he had witnessed.

No matter precisely how the madness was precipitated, the board eventually reached what was the only proper conclusion on how to deal with it, administratively. In the official view of the army, Brevet Capt. Asst. William C. Minor was now wholly “incapacitated by causes arising in the line of duty”—the crucial phrase of the ruling—and he should be retired with immediate effect.

He was, in other words, one of the walking wounded. He had served his country, he had been ruined by doing so, and his country owed him a debt. If the beguiling eroticisms of Ceylon, his tragic family circumstances, his obsessive cravings for whores, his
nostalgie de la boue
—if any or all of these factors had ever played a part in his steady mental decline, then so be it. The line of duty had done for him. The U.S. Army would now look after him. He was a ward of Uncle Sam. He could be designated by the honorific phrase after his name, “US Army, Ret’d.” His pay and pension would remain—and in fact they did so for the rest of his life.

In February 1871 a friend in New York wrote to report that Minor had been released from the asylum, and was on his way to Manhattan, to stay with a medical friend on West Twentieth Street. A few weeks later he was said to have gone home to New Haven, to spend the summer with his brother Alfred, to see his old friends at Yale, and to busy himself in his late father’s emporium—Minor & Co., Dealers in China, Glass and Crockery—which Alfred and his older brother George ran at 261 Chapel Street. The summer and autumn days of 1871 were among the last free and tranquil American days that Doctor Minor was ever to enjoy.

In October, with the red-and-gold leaves of the New England trees already beginning to fall, William Minor boarded a steamer in Boston, with a single ticket to the Port of London. He planned to spend a year or so in Europe, he told his friends. He would rest, read, paint. Perhaps he would visit a spa or two, he would see Paris, Rome, and Venice, he would refresh and reinvigorate what he well knew was a troubled mind. One of his friends at Yale had written a letter of introduction to Mr. Ruskin; he would doubtless be able to charm the artistic demimonde of the British capital. He was, after all—and how many times had he heard the phrase at the army hearings—“a gentleman of Christian refinement, taste and learning.” He would take London by storm. He would recover. He would return to the United States a new man.

He stepped off the boat on a foggy morning in early November. He offered his identification as an officer in the U.S. Army to the officials in the customs shed, and took a landau to Radley’s Hotel, near Victoria Station. He had money with him. He had his books, his easel, his watercolors, his brushes.

And he also had, secure in its japanned box, his gun.

4

GATHERING EARTH’S DAUGHTERS

Sesquipedalian
(se:skwip
d
ⁱ
·li
n),
a. and sb.
[f. L.
sesquiped
lis
: see S
ESQUIPEDAL
and -
IAN
.]