The Richest Woman in America (9 page)

Her chaperone for the evening was Baroness Stoeckel, wife of the Russian ambassador, and among the distinguished guests were Van Buren’s son John, a brilliant orator; Lord Althorp, the future Duke of Northumberland; the witty Lord Harvey; and Captain Tower, who had fought in the Crimean War with the Coldstream Guards. Eager to show off her wit, Hetty turned to one of the guests and, eyes twinkling, asked: “Do you know how you can see the masses rising?” No, replied the aristocrat. “Go west to the Mississippi and go aboard a high-pressure steam boat,” she said. “You will see masses of people rising on deck.”

      
N
othing could outdo the flurry of excitement that Hetty encountered when she returned to New York in the fall of 1860. The city shimmered with news that the Prince of Wales was coming to visit;
in his honor, a group of leading citizens was
organizing a ball. The party committee—including Arthur Leary, Moses and Henry Grinnell, and a fellow member of the Union Club and the Geographical Society, John Cisco, the respected U.S. assistant treasurer at the Sub-Treasury in New York—had enormous amounts of work to do. Guest lists needed to be created, invitations engraved and sent out, and an evening planned down to the very last detail. Everyone clamored to be included. Ambitious mothers and young daughters spent hours daydreaming about the possibilities: the prince was only nineteen, but no more eligible bachelor existed than the heir to the British throne.

The day of his arrival the city was out in force: businesses closed, Wall Street was deserted, and hundreds of thousands of people thronged the streets. Huge banners welcomed “Victoria’s Royal Son,” as cannons blasted and bands kaboomed in the parade to Twenty-third Street. A short while later, the crowds went wild when the genial prince stood on his balcony at the Fifth Avenue Hotel and waved to the masses.

The next day, society men trimmed their mustaches and clipped the hairs of their side whiskers, while women spent hours twisting their curls and preparing their toilette for the ball. At 9 p.m. that evening of Friday, October 12, excited couples who had paid ten dollars apiece arrived at the Academy of Music on Irving Place. Men in white tie and tails and women in hoop skirts covered with satins, brocades, and a blaze of jewels gave “aren’t we special” nods to acquaintances and breathless hellos to friends. Gusts of anticipation filled the gigantic hall as everyone waited for the royal guest to arrive.

Precisely at 10 p.m. the orchestra played “God Save the Queen,” and led by an entourage of lords and dukes, the slight, small prince, dressed in military uniform and sashed with the Order of the Garter, stepped into the room. “The crest of the Prince of Wales blazed out in plumes of diamond like light over the floating folds of a vast tent of pink and white drapery,” gushed the
Times
. For two hours, nearly three thousand of New York’s finest citizens rushed like schoolgirls to meet him, and in the mad crush the wooden floor built specially for the occasion collapsed.

Never mind. No one was hurt. While the bands played furiously, the prince and his court were led upstairs to a long dais, where they
were seated and served, and the prince sipped his favorite sherry and seltzer water. The guests rushed to follow. At a separate entrance and exit, guarded by such prominent men as John Jacob Astor, fifty people at a time were permitted to enter the room. A horseshoe table around the perimeter welcomed them with a profusion of flowers and food, and with liveried waiters elbow to elbow to serve them, they piled their plates with filet of beef, lobster salad, pâtés, truffles, and grouse, and filled their glasses with champagne.

At 2 a.m., the dance floor finally fixed, strains of a Strauss quadrille could be heard. As had been carefully planned, Mrs. Morgan, wife of the governor, wearing glowing diamonds and a cloud of crepe, was asked by the prince for the first dance. Eager females, young and old, waited their turn for a waltz or a polka, and finally the young woman from New Bedford was tapped.

Stunning in her low-cut white gown sashed with pink, her arms covered in long, white gloves, an ostrich feather fluttering in her hand, Hetty was introduced to the Prince of Wales. “And I am the Princess of Whales,” she rejoined. “Ah,” the charming prince replied, “I have heard that all of Neptune’s daughters are beautiful. You are proof of that.” And then he sailed her away on the dance floor.

“Nothing could ever have been more successful or better done,” declared the social arbiter Ward McAllister after the ball was over. “Brilliant and beautiful,” said the
Times
. Guests recalled the evening for their children and grandchildren. Hetty stashed her memories in a box.

W
ith 60 percent of the electoral college but less than 40 percent of the popular vote, in November 1860 Abraham Lincoln won the election for president of the United States. The following February on his way to Washington, he stopped in New York, where he was less than a favorite: he had won the state handily but lost the city badly. As he rode in his barouche to the Astor House hotel on Broadway, the large crowds inspected the length of him, head to toe in black.

Addressing a dinner group that night, the thin, gaunt Lincoln admitted he had not spoken publicly since his election. With a twinkle in his eye, he said: “I have been brought before you now and required to make a speech, when you all approve more than anything else of the fact that I have been silent.” The crowd murmured in agreement.

The next morning at eight, dressed as always in his stovepipe hat and somber clothes, the president-elect arrived at the home of Moses Grinnell’s daughter to breakfast with one hundred of New York’s most prominent merchants. His lanky body and hard features surprised at least one of the guests, who called him “among the ugliest white men” he had ever seen.

But it was Lincoln’s attitude that was on their minds. Soon after the elections, the state of South Carolina announced its secession from the Union. Lincoln’s refusal to bow to the South’s demands did not lose him the support of Moses Grinnell, but Henry Grinnell and others
were concerned. As the correspondent for the London
Times
wrote about New York, “her conscience choked with cotton, her mouth kankered with gold,” much of the city’s finance depended on the South. If the rest of the South seceded, merchants said, New York business would be destroyed.

A few days later it was Lincoln who was nearly destroyed. On the way to Baltimore, a
plot to derail his train was foiled by Pinkerton detectives who had infiltrated a group of potential assassins. After the president-elect changed from his dress suit into a traveling suit and donned a broad-brimmed hat, Pinkerton smuggled Lincoln into a one-car train and he continued in disguise to the capital.

By the time Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, six more states had sworn to secede from the Union, and the Confederate States of America had seized Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Less than two months later, challenged by the North, they refused to remove their flag from the fort and brazenly fired at the Union garrison. The president arranged his long legs under his White House desk and signed a declaration of war.

“Extra! Extra!” “War has begun!” newsboys shouted on April 12. Looming over New York was the threat that the South would lower its import duties to half the northern tariffs, ship cotton to Europe, and open its harbors to household goods and war matériel. What would happen if southern cotton no longer flowed to New York? If southern loans were no longer paid to the city’s banks? If southern orders for goods were no longer sent to New York?

With visions of ships rotting in the East River and grass growing in the streets, New York businessmen were roused from their neutral slumber. They could no longer afford to rest while another financial panic hit the city. Instead, they rallied to keep the Union intact. The economy rallied with them.

Factories hummed as the city toiled to supply the army with equipment. Brooks Brothers manufactured shoddy uniforms, Squibb and Pfizer produced medicines, Borden’s condensed milk. Eagle produced pencils and steel nibs, Johnson’s Foundry made munitions, Phelps Dodge made marine engines, Starr supplied revolvers and rifles, John Englis provided gunboats, others assembled ambulances, and Pulitzer, Hearst, and Greeley printed newspapers, all of which were
shipped to the Union soldiers fighting in the South. What’s more, the failure of European crops produced a demand for American grain five times the amount shipped in the years before.

The port bustled with activity as two-thirds of the country’s exports and one-third of its imports were transported in and out. At the East River, swarms of people came to see the graceful clipper ships loading in their berths. At Piers 8, 9, and 10, the fleet of seventy ships owned by William T. Coleman & Company, one of the principal shipping merchants in New York, was laden with goods, sailing the seas between East and West. At the helm of the business, along with William T. Coleman, was Edward Mott Robinson. After selling most of his interest in his whaling fleet, in June 1860 he removed his Quaker brim and turned it in for a top hat, investing his money in the New York company. An advertisement in the newspapers announced
he had become a partner in the prominent firm.

      
W
hile New York rallied, New Bedford marshaled its residents. When the former governor of Massachusetts spoke on the steps of City Hall, the citizens united against the Confederates, and despite the Quakers’ resistance to war, New Bedford gave its all. Rachel Grinnell helped organize the Ladies’ Soldiers’ Relief Society and asked her younger cousin Hetty to help collect drugs, cotton cloth and flannel shirts, wool mittens and socks, lemons, apples, jellies, coffee and tea, brandies and wine, and money for the troops.

As the women assembled the goods, 3,200 New Bedford men went off to fight, and the city’s ships sailed out to sea. But two dozen vessels were blown up by the Confederates, and in the summer of 1861 thirty whaling barques were commandeered by the Union Navy to use for a blockade. While the townspeople stood at the wharfs and bade a teary farewell, the ships were loaded with stones and sent off to the southern seaports. When they reached Atlanta and Charleston, they were sunk in the harbor channels. The boats served as a barrier to prevent the South from shipping goods to Europe, and, as Edward Robinson predicted, they were a symbol of the end of whaling.

While New England soldiers fought in the South, Hetty Robinson struggled up north. As the sole heir to the Howland money, she had
been caught for years between her father and her aunt in their tug-of-war over the family fortune. With Sylvia growing more frail, Hetty wanted to be sure that, upon her aunt’s passing, she received her rightful due.

Sylvia’s illness may have made her physically fragile, but as her health deteriorated and her dependence on others grew, her desire for power increased. She wielded her weakness like a witch waving a wand: banishing enemies here, bribing others with gold dust there. In her constant game of manipulation, she threatened to cut off those she could not control and paid off those she needed most.

Sylvia had given her niece a gift of $20,000 in stocks, but as Hetty knew, this was a minor sum for a woman whose wealth ran to many hundreds of thousands of dollars. In theory, all that money would go to her. But after her grandfather left her with nothing, after her mother died intestate, and after her father disputed her claims, Hetty had to protect her Howland inheritance. She had to make certain the money was hers. It wasn’t just a question of finance: it was the only proof she had of her worth and the only sense she had of their love.

Her relationship with Sylvia was complex, even precarious: at times she was her aunt’s closest companion, at other times her contentious prey. Traumatized by rejection, Hetty constantly tested Sylvia’s love, but as much as Sylvia may have tried to give it, Hetty pushed for more. Her behavior confounded her aunt.

Although Sylvia saw herself as a surrogate mother with Hetty’s best interests at heart, her patience ran short and her empathy was limited. She often criticized Hetty, complained about her to friends, and was wary of her ties to her father. Indeed, she rarely confided in the young woman and, to Hetty’s distress, kept her private matters locked in a hair-covered trunk. She never gave Hetty access; only her housekeeper had a key.