Authors: Charles Slack
The piece of physical evidence upon which Hetty pinned her highest hopes was the now-notorious “second page”—the addendum to Sylvia’s 1862 will. Introduced into evidence, the page read:
Be it remembered that I, Sylvia Ann Howland, of New Bedford, in County of Bristol, do hereby make, publish and declare this the second page of this will and testament made on the eleventh of January in manner following, to wit: Hereby revoking all wills made by me before or after this one—I give this will to my niece to shew if there appears a will made without notifying her, and without returning her will to her through Thomas Mandell as I have promised to do. I implore the Judge to decide in favor of this will, as nothing would induce me to make a will unfavorable to my niece, but being ill and afraid if any of my care-takers insisted on my making a will to refuse, as they might leave or be angry, and knowing my niece had this will to show—my niece fearing also after she went away—I hearing but one side, might feel hurt at what they might say of her, as they tried to make trouble by not telling the truth to me, when she was here even herself. I give this will to my niece to show if absolutely necessary, to have it, to appear against another will found after my death. I wish her to shew this will,
made when I am in good health for me, and my old torn will made on the fourth of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty, to show also as proof that it has been my lifetime wish for her to have my property. I therefore give my property to my niece as freely as my father gave it to me. I have promised him once, and my sister a number of times, to give it all to her, all excepting about one hundred thousand dollars in presents to my friends and relations.
In witness whereof I have set hereto my hand and seal this eleventh of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two.
Sylvia Ann Howland.
Whenever (and by whomever) this document was conceived, it was painfully obvious that the author sought to allay not Sylvia’s fears, but Hetty’s. The wording is almost comically inept. A skilled con artist would have made the document more general, more ambiguous and sweeping. As written, it is difficult to read the second page and see it as anything other than a rather pathetic last-minute response to Aunt Sylvias final will. The ham-handed appeal to the judge anticipated too closely the court case. The reference to $100,000 for friends and relations seemed an obvious component of Hetty’s campaign to sway Electa and others to her side. Beyond the wording, Hetty’s explanation of how the will was written and signed stretched credulity, to say the least. Why had the contents of the second page not simply been written into the will? As presented into evidence, the papers had pinholes around the edges. Hetty suggested that she and Sylvia sewed the sheets together so as to keep prying eyes away from the contents. They had written the second page as a separate document in order to spare embarrassment if, upon Sylvia’s death, her caretakers had not succeeded in forcing her to write a new will. “If they did not get the advantage of her, then I could detach it, only showing it to Mr. Mandell, and perhaps the Judge,” Hetty explained.
It took the defense no time at all to label the document a fake. But what occupied a lions share of the case was not the document itself, but Aunt Sylvia’s signature at the bottom. Nobody questioned the authenticity of Sylvia’s signature on the 1862 will—which, after all, had been made in the presence of three witnesses. But Hetty was the only witness as Sylvia supposedly signed two copies of the second page, one for each of them to keep. The signatures on all three items looked almost exactly alike, indicating that someone had copied or traced the two “second page” signatures from the signature on the will. Was Hetty Robinson a forger?
Rarely had such a collection of scientific celebrities been assembled for one case. In their zeal to top one another, both sides sought the greatest names they could find for their professional opinions—among them Louis Agassiz, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Benjamin Peirce, and John Quincy Adams, grandson and namesake of the sixth president of the United States. Their depositions were taken separately over several months, mostly in the Boston office of Special Examiner Francis W. Palfrey. But the collective star power, combined with the lure of the wealth involved, made the case one of the most watched civil cases of the century.
Of all the expert witnesses called, Louis Agassiz, the eminent Harvard naturalist, seemed to take the greatest pleasure in the assignment. The Swiss-born Agassiz had published groundbreaking works on zoology and geology in Europe, including a study of glaciers that first shed light on the existence of the Ice Age. His work had made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic, and in 1846 he had come to America to lecture and study. By 1848 he was in place as chairman of the Department of Natural History at Harvard, where he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was at the height of his fame, and just a month shy of his sixtieth birthday, when Sidney Bartlett, lead council for Hetty’s side, delivered Sylvia’s signatures to Agassiz at his office at the museum on a spring day in 1867.
Agassiz set about examining them under a microscope. He was delighted with the opportunity to demonstrate his skills.
Agassiz basked in his reputation as a scientific genius. Testifying for Hetty’s side, Agassiz said, “I have been devoting my whole life to the study of natural history. I began as a child, and have pursued it to this day; I am studying now; I am a student; that pursuit involves the use of the microscope very extensively.” Asked if he would consider himself an expert with a microscope, Agassiz replied, dryly, in his heavily accented English, “He that has had long training is a master, if he brings the proper application, proper care, to his work.”
In this case, Agassiz had been asked specifically to check for signs of pencil marks underneath the ink in the two signatures in question. Pencil, of course, would be a dead giveaway that the signatures were traced first.
Agassiz testified:
I have examined these papers very carefully, in the way in which I generally examine objects submitted to various magnifying powers. First, with my naked eye, and with spectacles, and with simple lenses of various powers from one half to two diameters. Such a preliminary examination I always make, in order to become acquainted with the object in its totality, when the low power permits to see the whole object at one time, and ascertain its general appearance. I next examined it with the compound microscope, with three-inch power, when entire letters or even words might be seen simultaneously. I then applied higher powers, half-inch, and four-tenths. Handwriting does not admit of higher than these powers, because then only small parts of the letters can be brought under the focus.
Then, with the excitement of a child seeing for the first time a tiny world enlarged to the gigantic, Agassiz described the structure of the paper like some foreign landscape of dips and hills, transversed by rivers of ink frozen in time:
The highest powers used disclosed clearly the texture of the paper, and the manner in which the materials used for writing—the material—is distributed in its structure. With such a power, it appears that the paper consists of fibers felted together, intercrossing each other in every direction, not unlike a pile of chips, pressed together. It is easy to trace with the microscope the fibers that lie at the surface, and distinguish these with those at successive greater depths. Into this felt the ink has penetrated, and penetrated unevenly, the thicker parts of the ink being accumulated along the more superficial fibers of the felt, the more fluid part penetrating deeper, and here and there both merging together.
The ink, Agassiz said, lay in varying thickness on the paper; “under the microscope, the thicker clots of ink resembled mud, caught up under brush on a riverbank, after a spring freshet.” All of this indicated to Agassiz that the signatures had been composed in a natural hand. With regard to pencil marks, he said, his examination “did not disclose the slightest indication of materials foreign to the ink as seen in any part of the signature. Pencil not being a fluid substance, if used in this case, would have left its mark on the superficial fibers of the paper, and remained there, while, in every part of the letters which look lighter than the others, the lighter color is deeper in the substance of the paper, and the accuracy with which the focus of the microscope may be made to bear in succession from the surface deeper, leaves no doubt upon this point.” He added, “I have carefully compared the three signatures, besides examining them singly, and in not one of them can I detect indications of the use of two kinds of materials tracing the letters.”
Three weeks after Agassiz’s testimony, Bartlett delivered the signatures for examination to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous author and Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the Harvard Medical School. Trained in both law and medicine, Holmes was at fifty-seven one of the most revered figures in Boston, indeed, in the country, a true Renaissance figure.
He was equally at home writing light verse, psychological novels, or disquisitions on “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever.” He was a founder of and one of the most prolific contributors to the Atlantic Monthly. As a twenty-one-year-old law student at Harvard, he had written the poem “Old Ironsides”—which was credited with saving the historic ship
Constitution
and remains a staple in anthologies of nineteenth-century poetry. But it was his expertise with a microscope that attracted the attention of Hetty’s lawyers.
“With the mechanical arrangements of the microscope, not the optical, I have made certain improvements, I think,” Holmes modestly told a questioner the morning after his examination of the signatures. Holmes had examined the paper using simple and compound microscopes, by both daylight and gaslight. His analysis essentially corroborated that of Agassiz. “I found nothing to show that either was traced,” Holmes declared.
But it would not be sufficient simply to establish the absence of pencil marks. Hetty’s lawyers had to overcome the improbability of Sylvia’s signature appearing almost identical on three separate documents, when even the most consistent penmanship is likely to produce slight variations from signature to signature. With or without the aid of pencils, this stretched credulity to the breaking point. So the lawyers rounded up examples of individuals whose signatures repeated often, demonstrating a capacity for repeating words as well as signature traits. Among these people was one Samuel W. Swett, president of Suffolk National Bank in Boston, who said, “The remarkable uniformity of my signatures has been remarked upon. I should think that if a man was signing his name a good many times a day, his signature would become very uniform…. I suppose this uniformity in my signature arises from my signing my name so frequently.”
Of course, this argument might be seen as just as valuable for Hetty’s opponents, for it threw into stark contrast the image of a hale and hearty bank president signing dozens of documents
per day, and a lonely, disabled shut-in, who had quite literally to be placed in front of a document, at times with a pen inserted between her fingers, in order to sign anything at all. No matter, the complainants charged on.
Lawyers for the estate located a variety of other individuals with consistent penmanship, the most prominent among these being John Quincy Adams. The sixth president had been dead for nearly twenty years, but he became an unwitting participant after his thirty-three-year-old grandson discovered in the president’s old study a chest containing dozens of canceled personal checks. The grandson’s testimony served primarily to establish that the checks were, in fact, in the handwriting of the president, and that the president never used a stamp of his signature on checks, always preferring to sign them individually.
A series of engravers, tracers, and penmanship experts were then enlisted to examine the various multiple copies of signatures of these individuals, to see whether their handwriting might duplicate, or “cover,” as well as or better than the signatures of Sylvia. What followed was a detailed, exhaustive digression into the arts of penmanship, mapmaking, photography, and assorted other fields with ever more tenuous relation to the issues at hand. John A. Lowell, a twenty-nine-year-old Boston engraver, found, upon examining hundreds of sets of signatures, “quite a number … covered quite as well, or better, in my opinion” than the purported Sylvia signatures. No doubt Lowell was an expert in his field but it is difficult to imagine a judge following or paying attention for long to his testimony, a small segment of which serves to represent the overall tone: “I found of the J. Q. Adams lot, No. 24 matched with No. 49, covered as well as the best one, and that No. 51 with 58, did not cover as well as does No. 10 does with No. 1, but better than 15 does with one.”
George Mathiot, head of the electrotype and photographic division of the United States Coast Survey Office in Washington, submitted to no fewer than five days of mind-spinning, posterior-numbing testimony on ever more arcane subjects. An
expert on tracing, Mathiot had devised a method for reducing table-sized maps to standard paper size, for publishing purposes. Hetty’s lawyers had enlisted him to examine signature pairs and testify with authority, as had Lowell, that lots of signatures covered better than Sylvia’s. Mathiot did so, but his testimony, especially under cross-examination, drifted onto subjects ranging from the attributes of various lens types, the manufacturing process of paper, and the type and configuration of clamps used to hold paper to drafting tables at the Coast Survey Office. One excruciating session, covering much of an afternoon and extending into the following morning, concerned the relative merits of the Voigtlander lens. When, nearing the end of his testimony, Mathiot was asked by one of the respondents’ lawyers whether his examination of the signatures had been a long or short one, he replied, “A long and tedious one.” It is safe to say that everyone present could feel his pain.
The respondents’ lawyers, for their part, produced an equal number of witnesses claiming precisely the opposite, that signatures so uniform and precise could be nothing but forgeries. George A. Sawyer, a forty-four-year-old teacher of penmanship and bookkeeping, said of the copies of the second page: “They are not natural; they are studied. They exhibit great effort to make them look exactly like No. 1 [the signature on the will].” Sawyer described his suspicion of fakery as immediate and visceral. “It is my conviction—it was my conviction when I saw it at first. Detectors of counterfeit money and those in the habit of studying manuscript often form an opinion without being able to express the reason in words. It would be impossible for me to express in words all the reasons for not thinking those signatures 10 and 15 [the copies of the second page] were genuine.”