Hetty (6 page)

When the Civil War broke out, these budding world-beaters were already demonstrating the combination of intelligence, ruthlessness, opportunism, and greed that would mark their careers. For all of their professed patriotism, they found ways to avoid the fighting. As a teenager in Pittsburgh, Carnegie had written glowing letters to relatives in his native Scotland, extolling the freedom, equality, and opportunity in his adopted country. Yet when war threatened that nation’s very existence, the twenty-six-year-old Carnegie paid a substitute to do his fighting for him. He spent some time in the War Department but really concentrated on amassing the fortune in oil, iron, and, finally, steel that would make him one of the richest men in America. John D. Rockefeller’s younger brother, Frank, served with distinction and was twice wounded during the war. Twenty-two-year-old John, citing the needs of his growing mercantile business, bought his way out of the fighting.

Philip Armour, born in 1834, sent a substitute off to war, then concentrated on building an empire in meatpacking and grain. Armour demonstrated his patriotic fervor by selling pork futures short to a country that had endured several years of scarce provisions. Predicting that pork prices would drop as the war wound down, Armour found buyers willing to commit to paying what seemed like a bargain rate of $30 to $40 per barrel at an agreed-upon future date. When the price plummeted as he had predicted, Armour bought barrels of pork for around $18, then turned around and sold them to the committed buyers for a net profit of around $2 million.

A young J. P. Morgan, born into privilege as heir to a financial dynasty established by his grandfather and father, would seem to have had an especially large stake in fighting to ensure the survival of the United States. Yet he, too, paid someone else to dodge bullets for him. Twenty-three years old when the war started, Morgan demonstrated his patriotism by selling useless
rifles to the Union. He provided the financial backing as his associate, Arthur Eastman, purchased five thousand old, defective carbine rifles for $3.50 at auction from the government. They sold the rifles back to the government for $22 apiece—a neat profit of $18.50 per rifle. When soldiers began to fire them, the rifles sometimes exploded, costing the unfortunate soldier his thumb. When the swindle became public, Morgan not only failed to show remorse or shame for his actions, he sued the government for the balance of the payment, and won. A contract, after all, was a contract.

In later years, Morgan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller would embark on a spectacular spree of philanthropy, building museums, libraries, and universities that still bear their names. In doing so they would prove remarkably successful in transforming their names from symbols of ruthlessness and greed into symbols of benefaction, artistic taste, and concern for the public good. While it is true that Hetty would never turn her millions into libraries or universities, it is also true that she never bilked the government out of tens of millions of dollars, or called out the Pinkerton boys to rough up underpaid immigrant laborers. And, during those formative years of the early 1860s, she sold neither defective carbines nor overpriced barrels of pork. During these years her ruthlessness, such as it was, played out on a more personal scale. Her efforts to get control of the family fortune, which she saw as her natural right, meant focusing on one rich aunt.

In the summer of 1860, a few months after her mother’s death, Hetty approached Sylvia with a proposition. They should prepare mutual wills. Hetty would hold on to Sylvia’s will and Sylvia, Hetty’s. Sylvia had already written a will a decade earlier, when Hetty was sixteen, leaving two-thirds of her estate to Abby, or, if Abby was dead, to Hetty. According to that will, the money set aside for Abby or Hetty would be placed in a trust fund handled by appointed trustees. Hetty would have a steady income, but little practical control over the money. The purpose of a trust fund, of course, is to prevent an
heir from frittering away an inheritance. There is irony in the name since a trust fund’s fundamental message is a lack of trust in the financial abilities and wisdom of the beneficiary. In the nineteenth century, when women were presumed to have no head for money or numbers, trust funds were created for them almost as a matter of course. But a young woman weaned on the financial papers, who started her own bank account at eight, and who stashed away money given to her to buy dresses, was no ditzy heiress. Hetty wanted control of what was coming to her.

Sylvia resisted the idea. She was angry at Hetty for her behavior toward the servants, for hectoring her over the house addition. Her fortune was all she had—she wished to see a sizeable chunk go to New Bedford charities. At last, Aunt Sylvia’s willpower began to crumble. She agreed to compose a new will, if only to buy some peace for herself. Hetty drew up her own will first. It bequeathed half of her estate outright to any children she might have at the time of her death, with the other half to be placed in a trust to be maintained by New Bedford businessmen Edward Mandell, Abner Davis, and Benjamin Irish. In case Hetty should die without children, all of her estate would go to the Home for Children in New Bedford. This bequest, a rare gesture of public charity on Hetty’s part, was obviously included to mollify Aunt Sylvia (the Home for Children was one of her favorite charities). Hetty’s will included no provision for Aunt Sylvia, who hardly needed Hetty’s money.

On September 19, 1860, Hetty asked Peleg Howland, a storekeeper and relative of Sylvia’s and Hetty’s, along with two other townsmen, to witness the signing. They did so at Peleg How-land’s home.

Hetty turned her attention to the more crucial matter of Sylvia’s will, in which she “gives and bequeaths unto niece Hetty Howland Robinson all of my real and personal estate, goods and chattels of every description including Round Hill farm and everything thereon, house on the corner of Water and
School and First and everything on and belonging land and buildings to her the said Hetty H. Robinson and her children and assigns forever.” In case of Hetty’s death, Sylvia’s money would go to the charities named in the 1850 will. Sylvia’s new will was written in Hetty’s handwriting. Hetty later testified in court that Sylvia told her exactly what to write. “I wrote it down on a slate, at her direction, by her direction, and then, after it was perfectly satisfactory, I copied it.”

Once the will was complete, Sylvia’s resolve stiffened again. To Hetty’s irritation and dismay, Sylvia refused to sign the document.

“I can’t, I’m not able,” Sylvia protested one day, according to Electa Montague.

“Then you never will be able,” Hetty shot back. “You can do it now as well as ever.”

Hetty pleaded. She was alternately harsh and obsequious. But Sylvia, withered and ill and nervous, had found her gumption. She refused to sign. Later, when Sylvia was sleeping, Hetty coolly informed Electa that she, Hetty, would prevail. She said, “I never set out for anything that I don’t conquer.”

Hetty finally won out, by threatening not to leave New Bedford until Sylvia signed the will. On a cold, gloomy January afternoon in New Bedford, Hetty sent servant Frederick Brownell to the home of Kezia R. Price, a widow who had known Aunt Sylvia all of her life. Brownell asked Mrs. Price to come to Sylvia’s home around 4 P.M. to sign a paper. Electa would serve as a second witness. The third was Peleg Howland.

Hetty instructed Peleg to arrive at four, before tea. But Howland, a man of set habits, didn’t relish facing whatever Hetty had in mind on an empty stomach. He went home to tea first. Back at the house, tension built as the little assembly waited for the final witness. Sylvia, waiting in her upstairs bedroom, was wracked with nerves over the prospect of signing her fortune away. Hetty, agitated because she had waited so long for this moment, looked impatiently out the window for signs of the old man.

At 6 P.M., with no sign of Peleg, Electa helped Sylvia down the stairs to tea. She ate little, and very slowly, as Electa stood patiently by. After a time, she signaled to Electa, who helped her away from the all-but-untouched plate, and slowly back upstairs.

At his own house, Peleg Howland calmly finished his tea, either unaware of or unconcerned with the consternation that his delay was causing. It was dark when he arrived at the house on Eighth Street. The little entourage made its way up to Aunt Sylvias bedroom, where she sat in the gloomy glow of an oil lamp.

Aunt Sylvia was visibly agitated, Mrs. Brown recalled. “Her health was very poor. I don’t know if she was more agitated than common, but we said nothing to her because she was so feeble and weak.”

There was a table in the room. Electa fetched a pen and ink from a drawer.

Peleg Howland cut the silence. “What is this I’m going to sign to?”

Hetty said, “A will.”

Sylvia said nothing. Electa pushed Aunt Sylvia’s chair, with Aunt Sylvia in it, toward the table. Hetty placed the will before her. Sylvia paused, took a breath, then, with her feeble, trembling hand, signed her name. Peleg Howland went next, then Mrs. Brown, and, finally, Electa.

The scene following the signing was as uncomfortable as that which preceded it. This odd assortment of people stayed only as long as politeness dictated, then dispersed.

With this goal accomplished, Hetty started to worry in earnest. When she was away in New York, what would prevent Sylvia from drawing up an entirely new will? She returned to New York, regretting every mile she put between herself and New Bedford, for with each mile she made it easier, she imagined, for others to exert their influence over her aunt.

Her fears, as it turned out, were well placed. About the time Hetty returned to New York, a new rival for influence over
Sylvia entered the scene in the form of a remarkably attentive physician named William A. Gordon. Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1808, Dr. Gordon had graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School and, after nine years of practicing in the town of Taunton, had hung out his shingle in New Bedford. After his first few visits with Sylvia, he gradually began to focus more and more of his attention on her, until she for all intents and purposes became his sole patient, and his sole source of income.

Dr. Gordon, who had a wife and daughters in New Bedford, allayed Sylvia’s neediness and fear of loneliness by spending most of his time at her side. During one stretch of thirteen weeks while Sylvia was at Round Hill, Dr. Gordon remained at the farm around the clock.

There is little doubt that Dr. Gordon provided a great comfort to Aunt Sylvia. “I have heard her say that he had done everything for her comfort, and that she could never think of having another physician,” Eliza Brown, the night nurse, later recalled. The doctor designed special pillows to ease the pain in her twisted spine. He built a special sedan chair in which she could be carried around the house. He designed a bedstead with a spring lounge, so that Sylvia could be raised or lowered into bed without being lifted manually. He closely monitored her diet, and prescribed a regular regimen of swimming to ease her pain. As their relationship intensified, Sylvia began seeking his advice on other matters—including her finances. All the while, he was administering laudanum, a powerful and widely prescribed medicine of the time, whose principal ingredient was opium.

Dr. Gordon always claimed that any advice he gave to Sylvia came at her request. There is undoubtedly truth to this assertion. But it is also clear that Sylvia was susceptible to the influences of stronger people, even under the best of circumstances. In this case, the stronger individual was a physician offering relief from her pain and comfort from her fears, and also prescribing
pain-deadening medicine. Whatever the underlying nature of the relationship, Hetty clearly had a new rival, and this time it was not a maid or servant. Hetty seethed from a couple of hundred miles away as Dr. Gordon became an ever-larger part of Sylvia’s life.

Among Dr. Gordon’s nonmedical acts on behalf of Sylvia was to write a letter to Hetty in New York advising her that she was not to visit Aunt Sylvia. No copy of the letter remains—it survives only in the memory and testimony of Electa Montague. However justified the mandate may have seemed to Electa, Fally Brownell, and others, Hetty could interpret such a letter only one way—as the act of an interloper and gold digger seeking to put distance between Aunt Sylvia and her one rightful heir.

And Sylvia’s estate was growing larger and more attractive every day. Sylvia may have disliked her brother-in-law, but she had prospered mightily under Robinson’s financial direction of Isaac Howland Jr. and Company, as well as his decision to get out before the whaling industry collapsed. For doing little besides signing the occasional form or financial statement, Sylvia saw her stake in the company rise from $244,000 in 1846 to $1.4 million by the time Edward began to shut the business down. Her other investments, handled by Thomas Mandell, prospered as well, from $77,000 in value in 1846 to $508,000 in 1863. On top of that, Sylvia owned real estate with a combined value of $75,000, bringing her total worth to a little over $2 million, at a time when her night nurse was happy to take home a dollar each morning.

On a September evening, a year and nine months after Sylvia had signed the will leaving everything to Hetty, Sylvia prepared to sign yet another will, undoing in one stroke of the pen all of Hetty’s schemes. The location this time was Round Hill instead of New Bedford, and Hetty was nowhere to be found, but the scene carried the same Gothic drama as the earlier signing. Sylvia was now much feebler than before. At 9
P.M.
,
as she lay in her bed, Thomas Dawes Eliot, a prominent New Bedford attorney, read to her the provisions of a new will. Eliot, a kindly faced man with flowing gray hair and a long, white beard, read slowly and evenly so that Aunt Sylvia could understand each word. Eliot had drawn up the new will based on directions provided to him by none other than Dr. Gordon. According to the doctor, he had made up his notes based on detailed discussions with Sylvia.

The will, much longer than its predecessor, due mainly to the long list of beneficiaries now included, took some time to read. Sylvia nodded her head as Eliot read. When he was finished, the will was placed on a board and set across Sylvias lap. Although at times she had been too weak even to pick up a pen, Sylvia now was able to sign her name without assistance. She signed each page of the will separately, to avoid any charges later of pages being added in without her knowledge. Then, all the witnesses in the room signed. They included Eliot, Simpson Hart, and Dr. Jacob Bigelow, a prominent Boston physician whom Dr. Gordon had consulted regarding Sylvia’s condition.