The Richest Woman in America (8 page)

In the past, merchants with accounts receivable could bring their due bills to their bankers, who would take off a percentage of the funds payable and give the rest to the merchant. But now, no matter how strong the creditor’s reputation, banks refused to accept the receivables. Even the credit of reputable merchant princes like Henry Grinnell was questionable, because chances were they had been operating and gambling in stocks and railroad bonds. All those securities were unmarketable and useless.

Old-line conservatives mocked the newly minted millionaires who were agonizing over worthless securities and pleading vainly with the banks in a desperate fight to save their social status. If only they could hold on to their big mansions on Fifth Avenue, continue to entertain their boring friends at outrageously expensive dinners, and maintain their private boxes while they yawned through the opera, they begged. But their pleas did not budge the adamant directors and rigid cashiers.

A congressional banking oversight committee blamed the disaster partially on the lightning speed of the latest tool, the telegraph. What’s more, information from the telegraph now raced across the country and around the world via the new railroads and better-equipped oceangoing steamships. The innovative methods of communication and transportation wiped out “distance and time,” said an observer. Informed depositors worldwide, worried by what they read, rushed to the banks demanding the return of their money immediately in gold.

In October 1857, the banks announced they would no longer pay depositors in specie. They hoped the move would stop the drain on gold and force customers to accept paper money at par. The
New York Times
heaved a sigh of relief and accused the bankers of having created the crisis of confidence in the first place. Their reckless lending and risk taking were irresponsible. “Banks as business concerns must act upon the same principles and be governed by the same laws as individuals,” the newspaper said. It would repeat those warnings a century and a half later.

As often happens in crises of confidence, people panicked and put away their wallets. George T. Strong observed “an epidemic of fear,” blaming it more on crowd psychology than on financial reality. Prices for everything were coming down in the panic; all businesses were affected, and merchants suffered badly. Brooks Brothers, Lord & Taylor, dry goods stores, and small shops on every street declared drastic sales with prices well below cost. Construction came to a halt; unfinished buildings stood naked around the city.

With customers afraid to spend their money and goods piling up on the shelves, manufacturers were forced to close their businesses. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs, and the salaries of many others were slashed. In New York, unemployment rose from 40,000 to 100,000. Men without jobs, but still with families to feed, took to the streets to protest. Major riots broke out. Robberies increased, gangs roamed the streets, and the city, already corrupt, became so dangerous that at night many gentlemen carried guns to protect themselves. “It was,” said one banker, “
the most violent and destructive financial panic ever experienced in the country.”

The panic reverberated on an international scale as the crisis spread from Wall Street to Main Street and then to South America and to Germany, France, and England. A few years later the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli noted the problems brought about by “
all the bubble, blunders and dishonesties of five years’ European exuberance.” The cause of it all, said the
Louisville Courier
, was Wall Street: “Their houses are dens of iniquity. Their aim is financial ruin. Their code of laws is that of the gambler, the sharper, the impostor, the cheat and the swindler.” The bubbles continue to burst; the words continue to echo.

A few places remained untouched. California prospered with its gold mines. In the South, plantation owners profited as European orders for cotton increased and prices rose. The country’s largest export, cotton was king. Southerners looked for more land to plant their crops and more slaves to work them. They turned their attention to the territories out west where they could also grow more sugar, rice, and tobacco. Textile manufacturers in New England and merchant shippers in New York, who exported the goods and benefited from the increased production, supported them. Some New York bankers even accepted receipts from slave purchases as collateral.

Southerners rejoiced at the Dred Scott Decision, in which the Supreme Court declared that slaves were property and could be legally transported either to the North or into the western states. That 1857 decision, along with the deep recession, shook the country to its foundations. Southerners clamored for slaves in Kentucky, Kansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and other states, while Northerners argued against it. In Massachusetts, freed slaves and slaves who had escaped through the Underground Railroad convened in New Bedford to protest.

In that same city the flour mill expanded, and a new candle and oil company was established. The paper money issued by the Mechanics Bank featured a whale, and whaling reached its peak, with more ships, more capital, and more sailors than ever, making New Bedford the richest city per capita in the world. But at the end of 1857, as people switched to kerosene, the price of whale oil seeped down, and the New Bedford Bank went under. Edward Robinson, who made it a practice never to borrow, kept his business buoyant; he even won a bid for election to the town council.

Some of the time Hetty lived with her father as they followed their old routine. Days were spent down at the wharfs and countinghouses, where he watched his pennies with a miser’s eye. Evenings Hetty read him the news. It was hard to ignore the papers’ reports of the Illinois senatorial debates taking place in the summer of 1858 between the Democratic incumbent Stephen Douglas and the Republican upstart Abraham Lincoln. The Howlands, the Grinnells, and Robinson had long supported Lincoln, who, like the Quakers, saw slavery as a moral wrong.

From physical shackles to emotional chains, slavery comes in
many forms. Abby Robinson, enslaved by her psyche, suffered bodily pain and mental anguish. Depressed, she lived for years as an invalid, but when the agony became unbearable, she escaped from Edward’s house and entered her sister’s world. Sometimes Hetty stayed with them too, in the room set aside for her over the kitchen, and heard the angry accusations hurled at her father by her mother and her aunt.

Tortured by fears of her husband, tormented by her own sense of failure, on February 21, 1860, at the age of fifty-one, Abby Howland Robinson died. The motherless woman had never known how to be a mother herself. Her death seemed to mean little to her daughter, who had nothing to mourn but the loss of love she never received. Abby’s only way to express affection was through her money. Yet she died without a will; her entire estate of more than $100,000 went to her husband.

Hurt and angry and urged on by her aunt, Hetty appealed to her father for her share in the inheritance: the Howland fortune, which had gone from her great-grandfather Isaac Howland to her grandfather Gideon Howland to her mother, Abby Howland, should now go to her, the only direct living heir. But Edward insisted he knew how to invest the money and make it grow. Not only that, he had the responsibility to increase it until his death. Then, he reminded his daughter, he would turn the money over to her to do the same.

They took the case to the family’s attorney, B. F. Thomas, in Boston for arbitration. But instead of the Solomonic decision Hetty hoped for, Edward was allowed to keep everything except for a house worth $8,000 that was given to her. Hetty was devastated. Alone and adrift, she sought solace with Sylvia.

Money may have ruled discussions in the Howland and Robinson households, but it was the demands of the South that inundated conversations around the rest of the country. Not only was cotton the nation’s largest export,
the South’s slaves had a dollar value far greater than the money invested in railroads or manufacturing; slavery represented 80 percent of the country’s gross national product.

Along with the continued use of slaves in the established areas and the expansion of slavery in the newer parts of the country, the Southerners had two more demands. In order to encourage the Europeans to purchase more cotton, the South was insisting on lower import duties
to help the English and French sell their own goods in America; in addition, the South wanted to control the railroads going west. These were costly concessions for the North. But if the North would not accede to their wishes, the Southerners would not bend: they believed their strong economy would allow them to survive on their own. The southern Democrats were calling for a break with the Union. Northerners feared their own economy could not be sustained without them.

A few days after the death of Hetty’s mother, the newspapers reported a remarkable speech by Abraham Lincoln. Invited by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher to address an audience at Cooper Union, the new free college in New York, the odd-looking Westerner delivered a stinging attack on slavery. As he traveled through New England over the next few days, on his way to see his son at Exeter, he repeated his ideas again and again.

The tall and gangly “prairie orator,” as he was called by the
Times
, spoke in simple words and held the Cooper Union audience in silent awe as he told them that, without question, slavery was evil. Yet it must be tolerated in the South, he conceded, because it had been granted by the fathers of the Constitution. Nonetheless, like George Washington, he was against the expansion of slavery into the West. And like Thomas Jefferson, he hoped that white labor would slowly replace it, putting the evil condition, he said, “on the course of ultimate extinction.”

Lincoln appealed to his fellow Republicans for harmony and peace. He denounced the inflammatory actions of John Brown and his band of men who had seized the southern city of Harpers Ferry in an attempt to rally its slaves. The state of Virginia soon hanged Brown, but his mission reverberated around the country. Slavery was an issue that could not be shrugged off, Lincoln warned; we must care, and emancipation must come. “Let us have faith that right makes might,” he said. “And in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” Some men worried his words meant war.

As Lincoln addressed the crowd at Cooper Union, the city was once again enjoying prosperity. Europe’s increasing demand for cotton from the South meant that New York business had come back at a rapid pace; the most thriving business in New York was merchant shipping. More ships were steaming across the Atlantic carrying cotton
to Europe, and more packets were sailing into New York carrying gold.

But boats sailed in and out of the East River harbor more frequently than New Bedford. As always, accidents occurred, like the loss of the steamer
Baltimore
, which sank in a collision, or the demise of the
Shooting Star
, a Howland & Company ship that ran aground outside Portsmouth. In addition, overzealous whaling had diminished the nearby supply and made the giant mammals harder to find, forcing vessels to travel farther and longer before they could harpoon their prey. What’s more, costly whale oil was being replaced by kerosene, which now fueled many lamps in America and Europe.

Worst of all, explorers deep in a well in Pennsylvania discovered a greenish black substance oozing from the earth like a monster rising from the depths of the sea. The discovery of fossil oil in America made it clear to Edward Robinson that the need for whale oil was coming to an end. He was right: within six years Pennsylvania workers would be drilling three and a half million barrels of crude oil a year. A cold, hard look at the industry left him with little doubt the time had come to divest himself of his business. What’s more, the death of his wife not only enriched him, it freed him to rethink his life.

As he made plans, he offered his daughter a change of pace. When the warm weather came she traveled by train to upstate New York. Above Albany, the smart resort of Saratoga served as a gathering place for frenzied Wall Street businessmen, prosperous New England industrialists, and southern plantation owners fluffed with cotton. Wives and daughters in tow, they drank in youth at the bubbling mineral waters of the Congress Spring, cheered the thoroughbreds at the racetrack, and paraded up and down the elm-shaded avenues. Evenings they dined in the hotel dining rooms and attended the informal hops at the Union House, where sharp-eyed mothers surveyed the room and saucy-eyed daughters smiled and hoped they would be asked to dance. In the summer of 1860, young, pretty Hetty Howland Robinson waltzed across the ballroom floor.

Throughout the days in Saratoga, on the wide porches of the grand United States Hotel men lazed side by side in rocking chairs, feet stretched out, straw hats pushed back, Havana cigars in hand, mint juleps at their side. Colleagues in business, northern “lords of
the loom” expressed sympathy for the southern “lords of the lash” lounging next to them; they benefited together from the expansion of slavery. And when their sons and daughters married and their businesses merged, so much the better.

The presidential elections spun through the porches of Saratoga that summer. In May, “Honest Abe,” the “man of the people,” as Horace Greeley, publisher of the
Tribune
, called him, had won the Republican presidential nomination on the third ballot at the Chicago convention. The party platform pledged not to extend slavery and promised a protective tariff, free land for homesteaders, and a railroad to the Pacific Ocean. In August the Democratic opponent, Stephen Douglas, spent a week at Saratoga and was given a reception on the balcony of the United States Hotel. He may have shown more bluster than humor, but his wife charmed all the guests.

Although politics was on everyone’s mind, for Hetty the highlight of the visit was not the coming election, in which women were not allowed to vote, but the dinner party to which she was invited. Former U.S. president Martin Van Buren, a Democrat, asked her to dine at his cottage on Saratoga Lake. For many years a photograph of Hetty, taken on her way to the dinner, rested on her rolltop desk. Visitors who saw it remarked on the striking young woman with the broad forehead, sharp nose, and keen blue eyes.