The Richest Woman in America (11 page)

As the war turned for the North, New York enjoyed another flourish. At Tiffany’s, customers demanded egg-sized pearls and diamonds. At A. T. Stewart’s, they made a monstrous rush for thousand-dollar camel’s-hair shawls. On Thirty-fourth Street opposite Caroline Astor’s new mansion, Mr. Stewart paid $100,000 for a house that he razed and replaced with a million-dollar marble palazzo. Farther uptown the thriving abortionist Madame Restell was planning a gilded French palace. On Madison Square, the Wall Street speculator Leonard Jerome built a brick house with a mansard roof, paneled walnut stables, and a private theater that seated six hundred guests. All around the city, middle-aged boys were building sand castles of marble and brownstone and lining their walls with landscapes freshly painted by artists such as Frederick Church and Thomas Cole.

Whatever others spent, Edward Robinson remained true to himself, as cautious as ever with every penny. While showy men stuffed their homes with flamboyant furnishings from France, he equipped his rooms with brown furniture from his house in Massachusetts. While speculators wagered on puts and calls and gambled heavily on thin margin, he invested cautiously in stocks and bonds, purchased parcels of real estate, including land outside Chicago, and put money in mines out west.

Thrifty to the point of stinginess, he was not so different from the man of whom Mark Twain wrote: “
he dried snow in his oven in order to sell it for salt.” His frugality showed in his support for the Illinoisborn Abraham Lincoln. With the presidential campaign picking up steam, the Republicans asked for Robinson’s help, and he proudly
pledged $500 for Lincoln’s reelection. Then he turned to his partner William Coleman, a Democrat, and announced what he had done. He advised the man to pledge the same amount for Lincoln’s opponent, McClellan. “I told them the Democrats would expect $500 from you, and I was going to pair off. So mind,” he said to Coleman, “you stick to that arrangement. It will be all the same to both parties, and it won’t cost either of us a cent.”

“He was a good fellow in the main,” Coleman later remarked. “But he exceeded any man I ever knew in ingenious expedients for saving a dollar.”

As much as Edward worried over saving money, Hetty agonized over her inheritance. With Aunt Sylvia becoming more sickly, the physician, William Gordon, hovered over her more closely. He had moved out of his house, where he lived with his wife and daughters, and established himself with Sylvia at Round Hills. The longer he remained, dulling her pain with opium, the more she relied on him, not just for medical care, but for advice of every sort. His influence grew by the day.

News of Sylvia’s ill health and other activities traveled fast through the town of New Bedford and reached as far as New York. A letter to Hetty informed her that her aunt, now under the constant care of the doctor, had secretly drawn up a new will. Distraught, Hetty suffered again from headaches and turned to her father, who wrote to Thomas Mandell, the estate’s trustee: “I am indifferent myself,” Edward told his former partner, “strange as that may seem to you.” But Hetty was “much troubled about it—made sick.” In a lengthy letter back, Mandell reassured his friend, venturing an opinion that “Hetty has no cause to fear … her aunt will leave to her all the property she will ever need.”

It may not have been much of a surprise that her aunt was growing more feeble, but Hetty was shocked when, in early 1865, her strong and healthy father took ill. Serving as his nurse, a role she always played with pride, she held the thermometer and recorded his fever, kept track of his nourishment, and noted the times of his medication. At his request, she worked closely with him on his portfolio of stocks, bonds, and real estate and on his shipping business, which demanded extensive daily attention to commodities prices and futures trading, shipping rates, banking rates, worldwide credit, and politics. After years at his side, Hetty felt more than competent to analyze the news, assess the financial markets, and keep her father abreast of changes. Yet she worried over her father’s will and hounded his assistant to make sure she would receive all his money.

H
etty’s calling card announced she would be at home on Thursdays at 19 West Twenty-sixth Street. There, in the brownstone she shared with her father, Mr. Edward “Ned” Green arrived like a burst of fresh air. Well over six feet tall and weighing over two hundred pounds, with blond hair and blue eyes, he had a robust personality and a generous bent. Fluent in several languages, Edward Henry Green was a businessman who had ventured far and wide, a conversationalist who amused his audience with fantastical anecdotes, a gourmand who feasted on life.

Born and brought up in Vermont, he had trained in business in Boston and lived abroad for twenty years, representing firms in the Far East. He had worked for Solon Goodridge in Hong Kong and was a partner with Russell Sturgis & Company, a major merchant firm in China and Manila. Trading in tea, silk, and opium in China, and in sugar in the Philippines, Russell Sturgis used William T. Coleman & Company to carry some of its cargo.

Edward Green’s travels had taken him across the Pacific and tested his personal skills. On a voyage with a colleague from Hong Kong to Macao and Canton, he came face-to-face with pirates and major storms, the common dangers of Chinese waters. Caught in a typhoon, with their boat forced to anchor close to an island, they found themselves surrounded by seven pirate ships. As the two American men looked out from their boat, they could see the cold eyes of a dozen men, the ugliest ruffians they had ever encountered, staring straight at them. While
his friend shivered nervously at the sight, Edward Green sat in front of the window, his legs stretched out on the table, making faces at the wretched-looking crew. “
He was the coolest man I ever saw. Nothing moved him out of his imperturbable calm,” his friend later recalled.

In Canton, the two men received so many invitations to dinner, they didn’t know which to choose. Never perturbed, Edward Green solved the problem by walking in the alleyways behind the kitchens of their acquaintances’ homes. He surveyed the duck, the quail, the pheasants, and fish laid out by the cooks and chose the house that had the most tempting food. “He had a great way of taking care of himself,” said his friend. He also took care of his family, and sent magnanimous gifts to his mother.

After two decades of overseas adventure, EH Green, as he signed his name, accumulated a fortune. A millionaire at the age of forty-four, he had decided recently to come home. It was time to marry, have a family, and settle down. He had taken up residence at the fashionable Union Club and found New York, as he wrote to a friend, “
rather a pleasant place for a stranger. Lots of balls, dinners, parties going on all the time.”

His money, ensured by his bankers, his background, vouched for by Mr. Goodridge, and his affiliation with the Union Club, where Henry Grinnell and William Coleman were also members, struck the right chord. Although his religion was Episcopalian and his attitude was extravagant, his heritage as a New Englander and his reputation for hard work held him in good stead. He may have indulged in too much good food and wine, but he had a keen sense for business and a proper respect for wealth. In the eyes of Edward Robinson, he was a suitable beau for thirty-year-old Hetty.

With her father’s encouragement, Edward courted her. At the parties and dinners they attended and in conversations everywhere, they could not escape the latest news of the war. When the Union captured Richmond and the Confederate army withdrew in April 1865, New York went wild in celebration. Even as the fighting sputtered on, the war that had torn the country apart, destroyed the lives of more than 600,000 people, and shredded the South to bits was coming to an end. The city cheered with a sea of flags, bursts of cannon fire, and hundred-gun salutes.

How quickly the joy disappeared. Only a few days later, the headlines shrieked,
LINCOLN ASSASSINATED
. The flags that had waved so brilliantly were now lowered to half mast. The crowds that had cheered so noisily were now eerily quiet. The city that glittered in gold was now shrouded in black crepe.

Death was descending, too, in the Robinson household. As he lay in bed growing weaker, Edward Robinson worried over his daughter’s spinster state and the state of her finances. When her suitor asked permission for marriage, Hetty’s father eagerly agreed. He had told his associates he did not believe Hetty was capable of taking care of her money herself. His daughter needed a clever man to advise her and he was satisfied that Edward Green could do the job. Along with his shrewdness and abilities, the man had plenty of money to support her, and, Edward Robinson felt sure, Hetty’s fortune was not his aspiration. Just to be certain, he made a stipulation in his will that the couple would have to live on her husband’s money.

Edward Green would have no claim to Hetty’s inheritance, her father said. That would be hers alone: “separate and apart from any husband she married and free from the debts, control or interference of any such husband,” he wrote. In addition, his advisers informed Hetty, while he was dictating his will at home in March 1865, that he was leaving his daughter an amount equal to Edward’s, but placing the rest of his estate for her in the hands of trustees. Two months later, as Edward Robinson’s health declined, the couple announced their engagement.

Ordinary fetes were forgotten as Hetty watched her once-vigorous father waste away. Their relationship had been as tangled as a sailor’s knot: wounded by his early rejection of her as a female, she felt healed somewhat by his reliance on her in his illness. As he lay dying and delirious, he told her he had been poisoned and warned her that she might be next. On June 14, 1865, she bade him an ambivalent farewell. The sixty-five-year-old man who made the bulk of his money from the Howland whaling business was buried beside his wife and father-in-law in the fading light of New Bedford’s fortunes.

Edward Mott Robinson died rich by any standard, worth almost $6 million, but Hetty was as tense as a harpooner taking aim as she listened
to the reading of her father’s will. He bequeathed to his daughter $1 million: $919,000 in cash plus ownership of a San Francisco waterfront warehouse. The rest was to be kept in trust. She would receive the income but would have no control of the principal. Upon her death, all of the principal would go to her children. Hetty was crushed, diminished by the sweep of a pen. The prior knowledge of her father’s will did not prepare her for the lightning bolt of reality: her father was dead and most of her money would be managed by others. Once again she felt betrayed.

For years she had apprenticed at her father’s side. For years she had shown her father how skillful she was at finance. For years she had proved she was as smart as any man. Yet, gone was the respect she thought she had earned. Gone was the confidence. Gone was the proof of love.

This time, at least, she had her fiancé to give her comfort; she had confidence in him and was content to take his advice. The following day she dispatched a letter to her father’s associates announcing that any financial decisions would have to be made with the consent of Mr. Green.

Years later, they would show the note as evidence that she was crazy.

Grieving over the loss of her father, angry at her lack of control over the money, and enraged over his lack of confidence in her, Hetty was taken aback when, less than three weeks later, on Sunday, July 2, she received a summons to come to New Bedford. Aunt Sylvia was dying. Stunned by the news of the double deaths, and facing a battle over another will, she girded herself and made the trip once more.

The family and friends assembled at the Howland house on Eighth Street hardly welcomed Hetty. The physician William Gordon transfixed
her with a stare and said, “Really, Miss Robinson, I am very sorry to see you looking so miserable. At best, you cannot hold out longer than a year.”