The Richest Woman in America (4 page)

It was not to the delight of Hetty’s mother, however. The dour Abby Robinson frowned at such frivolities. On a day when Abby was
well enough to join the family and attend a Seventh Day meeting, Hetty invited some friends to gather at the house. While one of the girls played the piano, they all sang the words to a popular song:

Laughing uproariously, the girls heard no hint of Hetty’s mother when, unexpected and fresh from the meetinghouse, she stamped up the stairs and rushed into the room. Her dull Quaker coat buttoned neck to hem, her hair parted flat, wrapped in buns capped in white crochet, she fixed her piercing blue eyes on Mary Swift and demanded that she stop. “Take thy music, thy person and thy furbelows and be gone!” she ordered. “When next we want music, we will call thee.” Flabbergasted, the girl grabbed the music, gathered up her petticoats, and fled, the two other girls racing down the stairs behind her. Hetty suffered her mother’s displeasure alone.

At least she could laugh with Grandfather Gideon. He joked with the local youths, teased them to catch him and tie his shoes, and tippled a little too much. But the laughter stopped when the old man took ill and died. They laid him to rest and wished him peace. But his Quaker daughter and mother-in-law, far from coexisting in the manner of Friends, wanted to live apart. With money from her inheritance, Sylvia bought Ruth’s share of the house, the furnishings, and the horses and said farewell. The widow who had brought up Abby and Sylvia moved to a nearby town. Faced with the idea of living alone with her aunt, Hetty returned to her parents’ house for school vacations.

The two main beneficiaries of Gideon Howland’s estate were his daughters, Abby and Sylvia; Hetty’s portion went to her mother. While Abby sobbed in her bed, Sylvia collected her share of the profits and, through her adviser Thomas Mandell, the third partner in the Isaac Howland firm, cannily invested some of her funds. When her cousin Joseph Grinnell, a congressman and successful merchant shipper, created Wamsutta Mills, she was one of his major backers. The first company to manufacture cotton textiles in New Bedford, it became one of the largest cotton producers in the country.

Intelligent and aware, Sylvia showed a concern for women and an
interest in business and books. But confined primarily to her home, she resented her debility and used it as a means of control. Hetty rebelled against the restraints imposed on her and wrestled constantly for her independence.

The one who gained the most from Gideon’s death was his son-in-law, Edward Robinson. The man whom one local called “the very Napoleon of our little business community” not only became the head partner of the Howland whaling firm, he also controlled his wife’s money and her share of the business. With unrelenting aggression and astute investing, he increased their assets enormously.

For all her good works, Sylvia’s dreary existence hardly served as inspiration for a young girl in search of a way of life. Instead, Hetty turned to her father. Though it was said he “squeezed a penny till the eagle squawked,” he was known for his cunning and boldness. Called by the nickname “Black Hawk,” Edward Robinson ran the company and controlled its affairs, and presided over the Bedford Commercial Bank. He was the one Hetty chose to emulate.

Despite his frugality, he took part in local activities and won the town’s respect. When Joseph Grinnell ran for a third term in Congress in 1848, it was Edward Robinson who nominated him at the Whig convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. Following the convention, it was Edward who helped welcome Congressman Abraham Lincoln to New Bedford when he spoke at Liberty Hall. After they dined, Lincoln slept at Joseph’s home.

As her father’s anger subsided, the adolescent Hetty stayed closer to his side. Sometimes she nestled next to him in his sleigh, a buffalo blanket covering them both as they ripped around New Bedford, her father making their horse go faster than any other in town. Other times, dressed in worn old clothes with nary a hint of their riches, they walked together through the warehouses. She watched him closely as he assessed the inventory, inspected the ships, dealt with the captains, and heard the rough talk of the crews. She listened to him bargain with merchants and berate them when he thought they were charging too much. She followed along when he took her to the countinghouse and showed her how to read the ledgers, or brought her to the brokers and taught her how to trade commodities. She paid attention when he repeated again and again that property was a trust to be taken care of
and enlarged for future generations. She obeyed when he insisted that she keep her own accounts in order and later praised the experience. “There is nothing better than this sort of training,” she said. A girl “acquires the habit of keeping track of every cent and gets the most value for every dollar she spends.” Knowing how frugal and fond of money he was, she imitated her father’s ways. Slowly, she flourished and felt she was gaining his approval.

She joined him as a regular for lunch at the Central Union co-op, where the floor was covered in sawdust and the air smelled of strong food. With little regard for her clothes, she plunked herself on one of the wooden barrels and munched on pickles and chunks of yellow cheese. While her father traded stories with the other men, who all owned shares in the store, the attractive young girl with intense blue eyes and red lips laughed along with them. Her long limbs and buxom figure drew their admiring glances.

At her father’s house, when his eyesight began to fail, she read him the evening news from the
Boston Herald
and
New York Tribune
. When she asked questions, he took the time to explain, teaching her the meaning of stocks and bonds, bulls and bears, commodities and market fluctuations. With more to gain in New Bedford than at the school in Sandwich, at the age of fifteen, Hettie H. Robinson (as she spelled her name at the time) enrolled in the summer session at the local Quaker school.

The principal design of the Friends Academy was “to diffuse useful knowledge,” “to guard the morals of the youth,” and “to encourage piety and religion in their progress in literature.” It was only recently that the Quaker students had won permission to read Shakespeare and Rousseau, but Erasmus Darwin’s
Botanic Garden
, Locke’s essays, and Gibbon’s
Roman Empire
were all required, along with spelling, composition, penmanship, and calisthenics. For two years, Hetty joined the girls in her class as they sat through tedious lessons, took turns ringing the bell, swept the floors, and kept the fires kindled.

Despite the school’s attempts, Hetty’s interest in academics, as well as her terrible spelling, showed no sign of improvement. The language she heard on the docks rolled from her lips as easily as from a sailor’s; what’s more, her appearance was scruffy, and her clothes, approved by her father, were disheveled and shabby. In the judgment
of the neat and resolute Sylvia, the Howland/Robinson family’s only heir required some refinement. Hetty was reaching the age of marriage, and with the family fortune at stake, her aunt was concerned that she lacked the ability to attract the right kind of man. If Sylvia could not enjoy a better life herself, at least she could help her niece attain it.

Anna Cabot Lowell gave considerable thought to the education of girls. Religion and fulfillment of the soul, she said, deserved equal time with the scholarly pursuit of algebra, astronomy, Cicero, and Milton. But a young woman also had an obligation to learn how to run a household, nurture children, and engage in social intercourse. At the finishing school she ran for fashionable girls in Boston, Hetty’s family paid twenty dollars per quarter to give her the chance to engage in her studies, develop her penmanship, practice the piano, and perfect her needlework. The school was given the chance to turn a rough mollusk into a cultured pearl.

In part it worked. From nine in the morning till two in the afternoon there were sessions in geography, English history, and biography, and discussions, too, about new novels. If they read
Moby-Dick
, Hetty could enlighten her classmates with her personal knowledge of whales and whaling ships. But when they studied
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, it was the tragedy of one particular girl that really brought home the plight of the slaves.

It took a long time before the girls stopped talking about
their classmate who had gone home for her father’s funeral in the South. Unbeknownst to her fellow students, the girl was a mulatto who passed for white; she had been sent north by her slave-owning father to live as a member of his family. After her father’s death when she went back south, she assumed she would be accepted as a freed slave. But her father’s brother thought otherwise: he claimed her as his legal inheritance. Devastated at the thought of being a slave, the girl committed suicide. It was a tragedy that tore at the hearts of her classmates.

Nonetheless, as adolescents do, the girls put aside their sadness and managed to amuse themselves. They took walks in the Boston Commons, just a few blocks from school, and paid visits to Faneuil Hall. They heard arias by the Swedish opera star Jenny Lind at the Boston Musical Hall and went to teas at the homes of friends. Hetty’s
brusque manner showed through in
her reply to an invitation from the wife of her father’s business associate. “Shall we have the pleasure of your company to tea this afternoon to meet some of your young friends,” asked Lydia Swain, adding, “A happy New Year to you—and to your Aunt and Mother.” Hetty dispatched her response with little grace: “I can not expect to accept your kind invitation on account of sickness. Mother and Aunt’s regards,” she wrote.

Along with the city’s most proper youth, Hetty took classes at Lorenzo Papanti’s Dance Studio, where the thin, glossy-wigged count, wearing patent-leather pumps, taught them how to move and how to comport themselves. Under his wary eye, the students stifled a giggle now and then and learned to dance. “Point your toe, Miss Robinson!” Papanti might call out, and if Miss Robinson did not point her toe properly, the fiery teacher would rap her foot with his fiddle bow. “Back straight, Mr. Cabot!” he might say to another, and if the student did not draw himself up with his back erect, Papanti would drum the bow on his spine.

Not only were the students taught to dance, they learned how to conduct themselves at parties and balls. The rules were strict: a gentleman must bow when asking a lady to dance; he must not ask the same girl to dance twice; he should not take a seat next to a young lady he did not know; if he walked someone home after a ball, he must not enter her house, but should call on her the following day.

As for the ladies, they must remember not to hold hands or fraternize with favored men; must not refuse to dance with any gentleman; must not dance more than once with the same partner. The worst, as one woman complained, was the rule for moving about the room: “
A woman, old or young, may not stir from her seat to get supper, or avoid a draught, or change places for a better view, without being annexed to the arm of some member of the selecting sex for whom she must wait or whistle.”

Hetty polished her etiquette, pointed her toes, and stiffened her spine. Dressed in her best frock, dancing shoes, and long white gloves, she held her partner lightly as they stepped across the ballroom floor in a polka, a waltz, or a quadrille. Over the months the studio’s big mirrors reflected her progress from a stomping adolescent to a graceful young woman.

It showed when the effulgent New Bedford debutante first appeared in public in 1854. With a wreath of flowers in her curly hair, a black velvet ribbon around her neck, and filigreed gold balls dancing at her ears, she held her hooped petticoats and curtsied in a white muslin dress. Her twinkling eyes and rosy complexion, robust figure and quick retorts dazzled the eligible young men.

Hetty did little to encourage them. When a starry-eyed suitor came to the family hardware store where she sometimes worked, he cast an eager glance as she lifted her skirts to climb the stairs, hoping for a glimpse of her graceful ankles. But the stars in his eyes nearly turned to tears when he beheld the sight of her ragged stockings hanging about her calves.

She may have been unmoved by the smitten young man, but the choice of husbands was slim in New Bedford and their bank accounts were even slimmer, compared to those of Hetty’s family. No daughter of Edward Robinson and no niece of Sylvia Howland would marry beneath herself. Her mother’s cousin Henry Grinnell, Joseph’s brother, had moved with his wife to a bigger city where the chances of meeting the right man were far greater. Arrangements were made, and with a deposit of $1,200 placed in a special bank account, her father took her down to the waterfront and wished her well. Giving her orders to embellish her wardrobe, he waved goodbye as she climbed aboard an overnight steamer and set off alone for New York.