Jeanne Winston Adler - The Affair of the Veiled Murderess: An Antebellum Scandal and Mystery

THE AFFAIR OF THE
VEILED MURDERESS

An Antebellum Scandal and Mystery

JEANNE WINSTON ADLER

Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, ALBANY

2011 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

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Production, Ryan Morris

Marketing Fran Keneston

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Adler, Jeanne Winston, 1946

The affair of the veiled murderess : an antebellum scandal and mystery / Jeane Winston Adler.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4384-3547-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Robinson, Henrietta, b. 1827. 2. MurderNew York (State)Troy. I. Title.

HV6534.T76A35 2011

364.152'3092dc22 2010031626

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks go to Lady Frances Eliott of Haworth, Scotland (of the Eliott family) and to Dennis Apedaile of Calgary, Canada, and William Reeve of Dunmow, Essex, England (of the Wood family) who kindly answered queries about William Francis Augustus Eliott and his wife Charlotte Wood Eliott (the alleged-by-some Murderess) and also shared their own family research and papers with me. In the same generous way, Kim Burdick of Wilmington, Delaware, a descendant of John C. Mather, supplied me with historical materials on the Mather family. And Charles Rommelt of Probst Investigations, Albany, donated his important handwriting analysis to the projectas a gift to Albany-Troy history.

Independent researcher Sylvie Tremblay of Quebec City, Canada, and the librarians of the Troy Public Library, Sage College Libraries, Emma Willard School, Rensselaer County Historical Society, Rensselaer County Court House, New York State Library and Archives, Albany Hall of Records, Albany Public Library, and Family Research Center of the Church of Latter-Day Saints in Loudonville all helped in tracking down the long-ago people and events described here.

A New York State Writer's Institute workshop, led by poet and non-fiction writer Ed Sanders, taught me to organize my information chronologically and present the story mainly that way. This approach allowed me to write up my research (mainly gathered in the 1990s!) at last. Thanks also go to Stacy Pomeroy Draper of the Rensselaer County Historical Society, Troy, and to Lucinda Carnahan of New York City for both reading several manuscript versions of the current book and offering valuable advice, and to James Peltz and Ryan Morris of SUNY Press for persevering with the publication of The Affair of the Veiled Murderess through many revisions. Finally, I must express my gratitude to author and editor Field Horne for his early confidence in this work. His continuing belief that it contains interesting and valuable material quite outside the mystery of Henrietta Robinson's life has been a special support.

INTRODUCTION:
TROY, NEW YORK, 1853

The city is in the early summer of its prosperity and industrial might. Located on the east bank of the Hudson River, six miles north of Albany, Troy faces the great river's meeting point with the Champlain and Erie canals. Since completion of the canals in 1825, raw produce from the North and West flows to Troy where it is milled and then re-shipped.

The Hudson itself and two tributaries, the Poestenkill and the Wynantskill, power many of the city's manufactures. There are planing mills for lumber, flouring mills for grain, and plastering mills that process chalky mounds of gypsum and lime. Live cattle disappear into Trojan packinghouses and reappear as barrels of salt beef bound for the warehouses of Troy's provision merchants. The hides head to the city's tanneries, and later to its boot and shoe factories. Animal pelts from Canada and the West supply factories devoted to the making of fur caps alone.

The endless stream of raw materials creates an almost endless number of industries in the city, though by 1853, Troy already takes its chief fame from two: iron and textiles. Troy's foundries, fed by canal barge-loads of coal and iron ore, make stoves, steam engines, railroad spikes, safes, iron fences, and many other things. The cotton and woolen factories get their bales of wool and some cotton from the canal route, too, though cotton also comes up the Hudson from New York City's seaport.

Visitors admire Troy's wide, straight streets and new brick and stone buildings. Reservoir water runs through iron pipes beneath the streets to corner hydrants as well as to fountains in private gardens and public squares. And after a disastrous experiment with an explosive substance called camphene, the Troy Gas Company now supplies a reliable coal gas light to street lanterns and some houses in the central wards. But most visitors, and residents too, save their greatest admiration for the sheer bustle of the streets, in particular the riverfront commercial district forming the western edge of the Second and Third Wards. Here, canal-boat goods, Troy manufactures, and luxury imports are all offered up for sale along a six-block stretch of River Street. Storefronts and warehouses deal in coal, cotton, wire, rope, ploughs, shovels, ready-made clothing, sheetings, shirtings, and rich calicos, looking glasses, feather beds, cornhusks and straw, French and Indian china, German violins and microscopes, gold watches, silver pens, and much more. Grocers and provision merchants dispense almonds and Madeira Nuts, grapes and figs, oil, pickles, flour, salt meat and fish, butter, cheeses, tea, sugar, rum and whiskey. They crowd the sidewalks before their stores with boxes and barrels and hams hung from awning posts. Rafts of logs, tied up along the docks, make a floating lumberyard of much of the river, while steamboats and other craft disembark crowds of passengers at the Ferry Street and State Street boat landings, including parties of dazed Irish and Germans led along by emigrant runners.

The mill-owners join with an older elite of Dutch merchants and landowners to support important educational and cultural ventures: the Rensselaer Institute, a college devoted to the sciences; Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, the nation's first academic high school for girls; and the Troy Young Men's Association, a lecture and debating society that also maintains an impressive lending library and art collection.

The new elite is very proud of the city's success, which they generally attribute to special qualities in their own Yankee blood. The fact of Troy's location at one end of the Erie Canal often seems to escape them. But they are not a complacent elite. They worry in print over the future of Troy's boom and urge fellow citizens to strive onward with unwearied perseverance, constant activity, and untiring vigilance.

Yet all their efforts can't prevent a period of crisis from overtaking the city in 1853. It's partly a crisis born out of success, the creaking and shifting of a growing community's tectonic plates, for Troy will go on to even more industrial and commercial achievements in the 1860s and 1870s. But the creaking and shifting, shared by other antebellum cities too, is definitely unpleasant. In Troy it means a bad cholera epidemic in the spring and summer of 1853a direct result of overcrowding caused by a bounding populationoff-and-on-again strikes by ironworkers from the summer of 1853 through the fall of 1855, and a factory fire in the summer of 1854 that destroys eight city blocks as undisciplined volunteer fire companies fight each other at the scene. It also means tensions between the old and new elites, evident in a bitter January 1853 struggle for leadership of the Young Men's Association.