Hetty (4 page)

During these times, Hetty received the closest thing to warmth and approval that she would ever get from her father.
More than a half century later, in a March 1900 article for
Harper’s Bazar
about women and money, she recalled fondly: “When quite a child I was required to read the reports of the stock markets and of various business transactions to my father who would carefully explain to me those things I did not understand. I was also obliged to keep a strict account of personal and household expenses. All these things were most useful in forming the mind for business responsibilities when it became necessary to assume them.”

She could not have had a better teacher than Edward Robinson. He may have married into money, but he was hardly a dandy looking for an easy life. He seized the opportunity and brought Isaac Howland Jr. and Company to its greatest heights. He was feared along the docks but always respected. His nickname, “Black Hawk,” owed itself to his dark whiskers and a certain hawklike arrangement of his features; but it also gave an effective description of a man who was dark by nature and observant of everything around him. Gideon Howland, Hetty’s grandfather and Edward’s father-in-law, died in 1847, when Hetty was thirteen years old. With the exception of minor bequests to some relatives, Gideon passed along his estate, including his interest in the whaling company, to his daughters, Abby and Sylvia. This not only enriched Robinson, it consolidated his control. Thomas Mandell, a longtime employee, was a minor partner. As a woman and an invalid, Sylvia, despite her considerable financial interest in the company, had no role in its daily operations. Edward Robinson had virtually full control over the most powerful whaling company in the country. An anonymous New Bedford writer, quoted by Howland genealogist William Emery, called Robinson “the very Napoleon of our little business community” in 1852. “If his life and faculties are spared to him to old age, he will be one of the richest men in New Bedford, and his daughter will be an heiress of immense wealth, both from her father’s and the Howland side.”

TWO
AUNT SYLVIA

F
or a figure who would one day garner the title “Witch of Wall Street,” Hetty was a particularly lovely young woman. She was tall and full-figured, with large blue eyes, a long, straight nose, prominent chin, and generous brown hair. Her favorite place was still with her father in the counting house or on the docks, and at times she used waterfront language that shocked genteel souls. Aunt Sylvia, in particular, fretted over Hetty’s lack of preoccupation with feminine things, and worried that, even by the modest standards of Quaker dress, she stood out as unfashionable.

When she was about twenty, perhaps at Sylvia’s urging, Hetty spent a month in New York as the guest of Henry Grinnell, her mother’s cousin. New Bedford’s prosperity was well known throughout the country, and the wealthy of New Bedford found access into the upper circles of New York business and society. Born in 1799, Grinnell had left New Bedford for New York as a young man, joined a mercantile business started by his brother, and established himself as one of the city’s most
prominent merchants. A worldly man and an adventurer at heart, Grinnell financed several Arctic expeditions and served as the first president of the American Geographical Society.

Theirs was a lively house of six children (three more had died young). Daughters Sarah and Sylvia instructed Hetty on New York society and introduced her to their friends. Despite Aunt Sylvias misgivings, Hetty had picked up a thing or two at Mrs. Lowell’s school and could behave like a lady when she wanted. She attended balls, luncheons, parties, and concerts, and she turned the heads of young men, not just because of the money she stood to inherit, but because of her beauty. By all appearances she enjoyed herself enormously. In later years she remembered in particular one glittering affair—a dinner at Saratoga Lake, at which Martin Van Buren, the former president, and his son honored visiting English royalty, including Lord Althorp, who later became duke of Northumberland.

In 1860, Hetty wore a low-cut white ball gown with a pink sash and lace trim to a ball held at the New York Academy of Music. She wore pink slippers, long, white, kid gloves, and gold earrings. She carried an ostrich feather fan. The reason for the ball was a visit by the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII of England, who was in the midst of an extended tour of North America. At the ball, Hetty had herself introduced to the prince as “the Princess of Whales.” The prince appreciated the joke. He laughed and told her, “I’ve heard that all of Neptune’s daughters are beautiful. You are proof of that.” They danced twice.

With her social connections, her looks, and her family wealth, Hetty, had she chosen to do so, could have shed the straitlaced provincialism of New Bedford and entered seamlessly into a life of ease in New York society, of summers at Newport and winters on Fifth Avenue. After a short stretch as a debutante she might have married a steel prince or a railroad king and spent her life raising her children with the help of French nannies. She might have organized fashionable balls to
benefit the poor, held choice seats at the opera, and ridden elegant carriages around New York and, when her beauty faded, taken her place among Edith Wharton’s gallery of proper New York dowagers.

But something in Hetty Robinson drew her home, back to her dour family and the seat of her family’s money. Her father sent her $1,200 with instructions to properly outfit herself with dresses and gowns for the social season. Hetty spent only $200 of the money. She put the rest into the bank upon her return to New Bedford.

Between her schooling on Cape Cod and in Boston, Hetty had lived periodically with her parents in a house they had purchased on Second Street. But Hetty always maintained a bedroom in her aunt Sylvia’s home, and stayed there much of the time. As Abby and Edward’s marriage froze over, Abby herself spent much of her time at her sister’s home, seeking refuge from her cold, ill-tempered husband. But even when Abby and Hetty shared a house, Abby was little more than an adjunct parent to her own daughter. And when Abby died, intestate, on February 21, 1860, the effect on Hetty seems to have been something akin to losing a close but not particularly vital relation—a spinster aunt, perhaps. Edward took over virtually all of her $128,000 fortune, with the exception of a house valued at $8,000 that went to Hetty. Abby’s relatively modest holdings at the time of her death, given that she was one of two natural heirs to a whaling fortune, only underscored the extent to which Edward had dominated his wife. From what little is known of Abby’s personality, she handed down almost nothing in the way of personality traits to Hetty; they all came from her father.

It is the actual spinster aunt, Sylvia, Abby’s sister, who occupies a far greater position of importance in this story. Sylvia suffered for decades from a spinal disorder that had apparently started when she was very young. Born into wealth, she never had the health or energy to derive much enjoyment from it. Her
condition precluded marriage and travel, and so she found refuge in books. She sat for hours as nurses read to her, carrying her to distant shores with the works of popular authors of the day such as Frederika Bremer and Bayard Taylor. Nurses kept her apprised of world events by reading to her from her favorite newspaper, the
Boston Journal.
She tried her hand at poetry. A poem handwritten by Sylvia survives in the collection of the New Bedford Free Public Library, in small, delicate cursive:

The poem is dated December 4, 1845, when Sylvia Ann was thirty-nine years old. The Esther of the title remains a mystery. The poem is signed “Sylvia Ann Howland”—a signature that, on different documents and a couple of decades later, would lie at the center of a raging controversy.

As she aged, and especially after the death of her sister in 1860, Sylvia lived a life of Gothic loneliness. She shuttled back and forth between her large house on Eighth Street in New Bedford and Round Hill farm, the family estate. Her world consisted of a few friends and relatives who called on her at the farm or in town, Thomas Mandell, the minor partner in Isaac Howland Jr. and Company who managed her estate, and the round-the-clock attentions of a few loyal servants and nurses.

She was obsessively needy of these paid friends. When they
left her for even a few moments, she became ill at ease and implored them to return They were her companions, her world. Gradually, at her request, a small coterie of them gathered around her, gave up their outside work, and built their own worlds around hers. It was a clean trade of full-time attention in exchange for steady, full-time employment. Pardon Gray, a New Bedford livery stable owner and hack driver, was by 1855 driving exclusively for Aunt Sylvia. Pardon’s most frequent route was the seven-mile journey from New Bedford to Round Hill, which took two hours over country roads. In the summer, Pardon and his charge would leave New Bedford by eight-thirty in the morning to beat the heat. In other seasons they would leave at ten. When they arrived at Round Hill, they would eat at the same table together, along with the nurses. There was little pretension in this household.

Fally Brownell did the cooking and housekeeping. She had been with Sylvia Ann since 1842, and hence had known Hetty as well almost all of the girl’s life. Another vital member of Sylvia’s staff was Electa Montague, who had arrived as a nurse for Abby in 1859, when she was staying with Sylvia. Following Abby’s death in 1860, Electa stayed on to care for Sylvia.

With Sylvia unmarried and childless, Hetty was the sole blood heir to the Howland whaling fortune. As such, she saw Sylvia not just as an aunt, but as the caretaker for a fortune that would one day pass on to her. She began to fear the influence that the coterie of nurses and servants might have on Sylvia. Sylvia was weak and often indecisive. How could Hetty be sure that some servant wouldn’t swindle her out of a chunk of the estate? Her gnawing fear quickly developed into an obsession, until she could barely stand the thought of Sylvia being alone with her staff.

In particular, she resented Fally Brownell, the cook and housekeeper. Sylvia trusted Fally implicitly, to the point that she gave Fally the key to a large, hair-covered trunk that Sylvia kept in a closet in her bedroom. The trunk held some clothes,
jewels, and other belongings, but it also held money and financial papers. Sylvia for years had kept the key to herself, retrieving money or papers from the trunk as she needed them. But since she had grown weaker, about 1859, she had turned the keys over to Fally, making Fally, now in her late sixties, the de facto keeper of the household money. Fally kept the keys locked in a trunk of her own, under strict orders not to give them to anyone, including Hetty, without her employer’s specific instruction.

This intimate show of trust between Sylvia and Fally infuriated Hetty and deepened her paranoia. And that paranoia only intensified in 1861, when Edward Robinson decided to move to New York City, asking his twenty-six-year-old, unmarried daughter to join him there. What devious plans might Fally and the rest of them devise with Hetty more than two hundred miles away?

Robinson’s decision to leave New Bedford coincided with his decision that same year to close up operations of the venerable Isaac Howland Jr. and Company. As always, his business timing was impeccable. He had entered the whaling business in the 1830s, just as it was approaching its zenith, and now he quietly but quickly sold off the ships and other assets when he recognized unmistakable signs that the industry was headed for a decline from which it would not recover. The recent discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, combined with new techniques for refining it, promised a new and seemingly inexhaustible supply of oil that didn’t require costly, dangerous voyages on the far seas. But another factor greatly hastened the downfall of whaling—the Civil War.

In New Bedford, the war had started—as wars invariably do—amid a burst of optimism and euphoria. In April 1861, just days after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, former Massachusetts Governor John H. Clifford whipped the citizenry of New Bedford into a patriotic fervor with a speech in front of City Hall, promising “untarnished glory” and “hearty joy and honor”
to enlistees. A Ladies’ Soldiers’ Relief Society was quickly established, collecting flannel shirts, blankets, mittens, quilts, preserved fruits, coffee, tea, cocoa, lemons, brandy, woolen socks, undershirts, and dozens of other goods in bulk to support the troops. The state called on New Bedford, based on its population, to provide 2,100 soldiers to the cause. In the end, New Bedford sent 3,200, several hundred of whom never returned.

Whalers fortunate enough to assemble working crews during the war found themselves besieged by Confederate raiders. Confederates destroyed no fewer than twenty-five New Bedford ships, seizing or destroying a half-million dollars’ worth of oil. But the coup de grace to the whaling fleet came not from the Confederate side, but from the Union. In the fall of 1861, the United States Navy commandeered thirty whalers, most of them from New Bedford, filled them with stone, and sank them in the shipping channels of Charleston and Savannah to blockade Southern shipping. The terrible truism that war is good for the winning side’s economy never played out in New Bedford, which—more like a Southern city than a Northern one—had to swallow economic disaster right along with the human tragedies of battle.