Hetty (11 page)

Ironically, the portions of the case that had made it such a crowd-pleaser—the mysterious contents of Aunt Sylvia’s hair-covered trunk, with its yellow and white envelopes being
passed in the dim light after Sylvias funeral; and the star-studded testimony revolving around the forgery issues—had little bearing on the decision.

Clifford did not care whether the documents were genuine or forged, he said, or who passed them to whom and under what conditions, because, “viewed in any light, and assuming all the papers to be genuine, the evidence fails altogether, in the opinion of the court.” But the forgery portion of the trial was not a total waste of time—as Clifford himself predicted in his decision, the voluminous expert testimony would prove “highly important” in establishing rules of evidence in future forgery cases.

Hetty responded to the decision through her lawyers a month later with a notice of appeal to the United States Supreme Court. But before the appeal process began, Hetty and the trustees reached a compromise. Hetty agreed that each beneficiary would receive his or her bequest, plus 6 percent annually from the date of Sylvia’s death. But just when the matter seemed to have been settled, Hetty held up the process over the matter of taxes. She wanted the taxes on each gift deducted from the gift itself, or from the capital of the trust, rather than from the income. In other words, Hetty did not want to be paying the taxes on the gifts from her own income. It was a fairly nit-picking point, and yet the debate kept beneficiaries from getting paid for another year; the court decided that the taxes would be paid from the capital.

With the great battle at last over, the munificence from Aunt Sylvia, stalemated for seven years, began to flow in 1872 and spread around New Bedford like whale oil from a leaking barrel. Electa Montague, the loyal nurse now sixty-eight years old, received her $5,000 in cash, plus accrued interest. Pardon Gray, the old livery driver who had driven poor withered Sylvia on that shaded seven-mile ride from New Bedford to Round Hill, began to receive his modest stipend from the $10,000 placed in trust for him. Widows around town, those who lived to see the
will enacted, saw their lives grow a measure more secure in their old age. In recognition of her $100,000 gift for the New Bedford Free Public Library and other educational purposes, the city erected a marble tablet praising Sylvia’s “enlightened liberality” in “extending to the children and youth of the city the means of wider and more generous culture.” The library placed a bust of Sylvia on its second floor.

Two decades later the city built a red brick schoolhouse and named it Sylvia Ann Howland School. The $50,000 she had left “to be divided among the poor, aged and infirm women of New Bedford, to the most neediest cases,” was used by the trustees to found a private charity. The New Bedford Orphans’ Home found itself with $20,000, and the City of New Bedford received $100,000 to pipe water into the city. Twenty thousand dollars went to establish a sailors’ home, to care for the men whose toil and risk had helped make the fortune possible. Sylvia, who spent so much of her life shut away from others, taking refuge from her tortured body in the pages of romance novels set worlds away from New Bedford, became a benefactress and public figure in death that she had never been in life.

Dr. Gordon, already receiving thousands of dollars each year in commissions as trustee, received a lump sum of $100,000 plus $15,000 for his wife and children, along with 6 percent accrued annual interest. Thomas Mandell, the head trustee, took home $200,000 plus interest. For all those lump payments, there remained a $1.3 million chunk of principal—enough to supply Hetty with an income of $65,000 a year for life. She also received a large up-front payment. Mandell had invested much of the estate in U.S. government 6-percent gold bonds, and reinvested both the interest and dividend. When the estate battle was settled, Mandell handed Hetty’s lawyer, William Crapo, a stack of bonds worth $600,000 face value. Their value on the market was worth considerably more than that. Crapo, who transferred the bonds to Hetty, noted dryly in his introduction
to William Emery’s
The Howland Heirs
, “Mrs. Green apparently had not suffered by the long delay and expensive litigation.”

On January 7, 1871, thirty-five-year-old Hetty gave birth to the Greens’ second child, a girl, named Hetty Sylvia Ann Howland Green. The girl would always be known as Sylvia, rather than Hetty, and Hetty would point to her daughter’s name as proof of the love that had existed between Hetty and her aunt.

When the children were old enough, she took them for walks around London. Hetty prided herself on the Quaker traditions of home healing, and on her own abilities as a nurse. Years after returning to the United States, she recalled an incident that occurred one day as she walked with Ned and Sylvia on Prince of Wales Terrace, a small street on the south side of Kensington Road, near Kensington Gardens. The driver of a passing cart suddenly fell from his vehicle, Hetty told reporter Leigh Mitchell Hodges of
The Ladies’ Home Journal.
As Hetty told it, the man went into seizures and the small crowd that gathered had no idea what to do. Hetty told Ned to watch Sylvia carefully and stand next to a tree. “Mrs. Green sent one man for water and another for a doctor. Then with her handkerchief she washed out the cuts received in the fall, and bandaged them, and ordered the man carried into the shop nearby.”

“‘It wasn’t any more than I would have done for anyone,’” Hetty told Hodges. “‘But those simple folk would have let him bleed to death while they wondered what to do. You can imagine my surprise when, as I started back to the children, a footman in gorgeous livery bowed to me and said “The Marchioness of Something” wished to present her compliments and desired to see me. Curious to know what she wanted I followed him to a great house on the Terrace. The Marchioness came out and greeted me warmly. She said she had watched the whole proceeding from her window and wanted me to know how she admired what I had done. I was just the woman she was looking for. A charity hospital in which she
was interested needed a superintendent. If I would accept the place she would have me appointed, and there was a cottage near the hospital in which my family might live.’”

Hetty continued: “‘I didn’t like to hurt her feelings by telling her I didn’t have to work for my living, so I thanked her and said I could not then accept the offer. She insisted, but I declined. As we walked home I noticed her footman following quite a way behind.’” The footman followed her and was stunned to see Hetty enter the Langham. He asked her identity at the front desk. “‘An hour or so afterward a note came from the Marchioness. She begged to apologize; she hadn’t the least idea who I was when she sent for me, and all that. A whole lot of tickets to bazaars and entertainments, of which she was a patroness, were enclosed. I sent these back with thanks, and a day or two after that called on her and told her she needn’t have offered any apology, as I indeed felt highly honored that anyone could consider me at all fitted for such a position as the one she offered me.’”

Edward spent his London years as a gentleman banker, serving on the boards of several London banks, making the rounds of clubs, and enjoying the life of a gentleman. Hetty was already busy tending to her fortune. The extent to which Hetty and Edward worked together on financial matters is unclear, and Edward may well have advised her on investments in the early stages. But she was already establishing the patterns of investment that would define her career, sticking with conservative instruments such as United States bonds, and having the cool head to stay on her course when others panicked. From the time she inherited her first lump from her father in 1865, Hetty had been buying up United States “greenback” notes.

The government had printed large quantities of these notes immediately after the Civil War, to cover its huge expenditures. The Union had won military victory, but people were still quite apprehensive about the prospects, particularly the economic prospects, of the ragged and still-fragile reunified country.
Unease caused a rush to gold, and the greenbacks dropped to as low as forty or fifty cents on the dollar of gold. While others lost their nerve and sold greenbacks, Hetty bought. John T. Flynn, who wrote about Hetty’s career a few years after her death, summed it up nicely in his book,
Men of Wealth:

She continued this strategy in England, claiming in a single year to have made $1.25 million from her bond investments alone. Her income from the two trusts was now very substantial. Her father’s estate of some $5 million, even under management she openly detested, was yielding her several thousand dollars per week in interest and dividends. She was able to put all of this money to work in U.S. bonds, and she began branching out in railroad bonds issued to finance the rapidly expanding rail network. With Edward handling the living expenses, Hetty had nothing to do with all of her money but to keep investing and reinvesting principal and income. Within a few years her fortune doubled, tripled, quadrupled.

“Two hundred thousand dollars is the largest sum I ever made in a single day,” she told Leigh Mitchell Hodges of her days in London, “though I’ve cleared more than that on single deals.” As her cash piled up and she sought new investments, she became a de facto bank. Her holdings, indeed, were growing
larger than those of many banks of the day, in England or America. Banks in need of cash would sell Hetty loans they had made to parties using property as collateral. When inevitably some of the borrowers defaulted on their loans, Hetty began to accrue property. This was the beginning of what would become a real estate empire.

Hetty (and Edward) had also begun to invest in U.S. railroads, expanding rapidly in the wake of the Civil War. It was this interest, probably, that led to their family’s decision to return to the United States after six years in the winter of 1873–74. It was one thing to invest in relatively static U.S. notes from abroad, quite another to keep tabs on the volatile world of railroads, which were as full of potential disaster as of promise. In 1873, the markets were particularly uneasy. Banks had extended loans to hundreds of railroads, in various states of completion—some amounting to little more than grand words in a prospectus. Bonds for these railroads flooded the market. In the fall of 1872, within less than three months, three major U.S. banks—the New York Warehouse and Security Company, Jay Cook and Company, and the Union Trust Company—failed. Other banks soon suspended operations. To stem the panic, the New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days. The distress that lingered through the entire next year became known as the panic of 1873. Before it was over, some eleven thousand companies had failed, and combined losses reached $380 million. Under the circumstances, Edward and Hetty decided they needed to be closer to the seat of their respective fortunes. After a brief stay in New York, they headed north to Edward’s hometown of Bellows Falls, Vermont.

SIX
PRIDE AND PAIN

B
ellows Falls buzzed with the impending arrival of Edward Green and his family in the spring of 1874. Despite its somewhat remote location, thirty miles north of Bratdeboro and tucked away on a bend in the Connecticut River, this was no hayseed town. The name came from an early settler named Benjamin Bellows, but the rather industrial image it conjures is appropriate. The village was founded principally on paper mills and the transportation industry. A man-made canal cut through the heart of town, and by the mid-nineteenth century Bellows Falls was an important railroad junction, connecting Burlington and Montpelier upstate with Hartford, Boston, New York, and New Hampshire. There was a prosperous downtown with good hotels and fine old homes lining a promontory overlooking the river. Visitors were not uncommon. But this was no ordinary arrival.

Edward Green, the scion of a prominent Bellows Falls family, was returning to his hometown as a wealthy man of the world. The Tuckers, on his mother’s side, owned the toll bridge leading from Bellows Falls across the river to Walpole, New
Hampshire. His father, Henry Atkinson Green, had come to Bellows Falls from Massachusetts and established Hall and Green, a large store on the river side of the main town square. Older residents remembered Edward Green as a tall, lanky, affable youth who loved to play along the river with other boys, watching and imitating the river men who guided their craft through the canal that bisected the town. One day, as Edward stood on a wooden bridge watching his hero, Jack Adams, navigate the canal, he leaned so far over the barricade that he fell twenty feet into the water and nearly drowned. Jack Adams added to his local legend by fishing the boy safely out of the water; Edward added to his reputation as a bit of a dreamer.