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Winter 2012, Volume 11, Number 3
Hiking Partners,
Mountain Stewards
Suzanne Lance
From three adventurers to
a club of thousands, the Adirondack 46ers has grown
to encompass both accomplishment
and preservation.
FDR’s Fistfight
Daniel J. Demers
Did our thirty-second president-to-be really punch out two
Tammany men at the 1920
Democratic Convention? Historians are divided on
what happened.
A Gilded Age Murder (article in PDF; article in HTML)
Geoffrey O’Brien
A Saratoga Springs family
had it all: wealth, connections,
influence—and ultimately
murder.
Saving Monticello
Marc Leepson
If not for two members of
a wealthy New York Jewish
family, Thomas Jefferson’s
dream house would be just that today.
A Vast and Fiendish Plot
Clint Johnson
Confederate saboteurs
wanted to set New York City
on fire. How easy it would
have been—if only they’d been better at it.
Caesar’s Ghost
Scott Christianson
His is the face of the age of
slavery. But he was also a
man who lived long enough
to transcend it.
Featured Article: A Gilded Age Murder
At around six in the
morning on June 3,
1873, a fashionably
dressed middle-aged man,
powerfully built despite his
portly appearance, entered
New York’s Sturtevant Hotel
at Broadway and 29th Street
and was ushered up by the
bellman to see the guest in
Room 267, a young man who
had checked in the day before.
Before the bellman even had
time to get back to the lobby,
he heard four shots fired in
rapid succession. Moments
later, the young guest came
down and spoke to the hotel
clerk, calmly declaring, “I
have shot my father in my
room, and want a policeman.” When the clerk and others
rushed upstairs, they found
the middle-aged visitor breathing his last on the
blood-spattered floor.
The young guest was Frank
Walworth, a seventeen-year old
law student who lived
with his mother in Saratoga
Springs, New York. The victim—
whom Frank had invited
to his room for a discussion
of family problems—was his
estranged father, Mansfield
Tracy Walworth, known to the
public as the prolific author of a series of lurid and fantastic
novels of no literary prestige
but which had begun to
enjoy some popular success.
Mansfield’s notoriety, however,
had more to do with his
being the son of one of the
most distinguished figures in
New York State.
Notable Father,
Dissolute Son
Mansfield’s father, Reuben
Hyde Walworth, had for
twenty years been Chancellor
of New York until the post, which amounted to one-man
control of the state’s system
of equity law, was abolished
in 1848. In the decades before
the Civil War, Chancellor
Walworth had been a jurist
and politician of wide-ranging
influence in New York, a
founder of the state’s Bible
and Temperance Societies, and a model of civic virtue
and moral probity. From
his home in Saratoga
Springs, which he had transformed
into his courthouse,
Chancellor Walworth radiated
a benevolent but unquestioned
authority. By the time of his
death a few years after the Civil War, he had become a
symbol of a vanished era that
seemed to embody surer
codes of personal and public
conduct.
His son, Mansfield, could
not have had more promising
connections. Mansfield’s elder
brother, Clarence, had shocked
his Presbyterian family by
becoming a Roman Catholic
priest, and had gone on to
become a significant figure in
the American Catholic hierarchy.
Mansfield’s wife, Ellen,
was the daughter of Colonel
John J. Hardin of Kentucky, a
Whig congressman who had
been a political associate of Abraham Lincoln’s before dying
heroically in the Mexican War.
But for all these connections,
Mansfield failed to find a path
to eminence and respect. As
a teenaged boarding school
student, he had earned a
reputation as a dissolute,
violent bully. Despite his law
degree from Harvard, he never
became more than his father’s
resentful clerk. His career in
the Civil War consisted of
being detained in Washington
as a Confederate spy and
sitting out the war under house
arrest in Saratoga Springs.
Only in his fiction—a string
of improbable melodramas
that provided an outlet for
grandiose fantasies of heroic
suffering and ultimate world dominating
triumph—did he
find a degree of public success.
But if the novels sold, they
did not earn him the respect
of the writers and intellectuals
he hoped to impress. Although he managed to pass himself
off in some social circles as a
literary gentleman, a reviewer
for Harper’s wrote of his novel
Delaplaine that “if it is intended
as a burlesque…it is admirable.
If it is intended as a novel, it is
the wildest, craziest, freakiest,
maddest performance that an
untrained imagination…ever
put on paper.”
A Marriage Made in Hell
As for Mansfield’s marriage
to Ellen Hardin, with whom
he would have eight children,
it started on a note of high
poetic courtship but rapidly
descended toward nightmare.
For two decades, the couple
had repeatedly separated—
once, during the Civil War,
for several years—as Ellen
sought to distance herself from
her erratic and menacing
husband. Their periodic reunions became shorter as
Mansfield unleashed into
their domestic life a reign of
terror that culminated in a
series of brutal attacks—he
gnawed one of Ellen’s fingers
to the bone on one occasion—
that ended only when
she walked out on him and
filed for divorce in 1871.
Even when physically
separated from her, however,
Mansfield found a way to
continue the torment by sending
a stream of obscene and
blasphemous letters threatening
to kill her, the children,
and other family members.
Mansfield’s obsessive theme
in these letters was money.
The chancellor, long aware of
Mansfield’s drastic shortcomings,
had disinherited him,
leaving him only an allowance
doled out by the eldest son,
Clarence. The idea that
Mansfield’s destiny was now
in the hands of the brother he
envied and the abused wife
who had finally freed herself
from his control seemed to
drive him even deeper into
the paranoid sense of personal
aggrievement he nurtured
for many years. And in his
mind, the root of it all was
his dead father: “Reuben H.
Walworth always hated me
from my cradle. He always
hated any one who was
high-spirited and would speak
out their thoughts.” The
vengeance with which he
threatened his children in his
letters was ultimately directed
toward his own father: “I
will kill your boys,” he wrote
to Ellen, “and defeat the
damned scoundrel in his
grave and cut off his damned
name forever.”
Patricide
It was the letters, son Frank
said, that drove him to take
action. He had intended, he
told police, to exact from
Mansfield a promise to stop
harassing Ellen and his brothers
and sisters, and had only fired
his weapon when he saw his
father reaching into his coat
as if for a gun—a claim that
made little impact, especially
since Mansfield turned out to
be unarmed. In any case,
Frank felt he had done the
right and noble thing in
defense of his mother, and
expected public acclaim for
his act. Instead the city papers
portrayed him as an arrogant
aristocrat whose emotional
detachment was frightening.
His youth made him an object
of horror to some:“The
coolness and deliberation,”
wrote the New York Herald, “displayed by the youthful
parricide…reveal a depth of
depravity that we shudder to
contemplate,” while according
to the Evening Post, “[m]odern society has produced
a monster.” However, in
Saratoga, where the facts of
Mansfield and Ellen’s marriage
were better known, Frank
was largely seen as having
acted in understandable
temporary madness against
the brute who had sworn to
kill his mother.
The two-week trial that
followed only a few weeks
later was brief but intensely
dramatic, and turned around
at its midpoint when Frank’s lawyer, Charles O’Conor, a
veteran attorney known for his
displays of courtroom theatrics,
was granted the right to read
aloud Mansfield’s letters to his
wife—not just a few excerpts,
but hours and hours of letters
read in full, with all the shocking
intemperance of their language
washing over the jury.
The New York Times, which
had displayed no sympathy
for Frank’s case, devoted an
editorial, titled “Idiocy as a
Profession,” to the effect of
these letters, describing
Mansfield as “the most successful
and incontestable idiot
of the age.” The revelation of
his father’s personality probably
saved Frank’s life, although it
did not spare him conviction
on July 5, 1873 or incarceration,
first at Sing Sing and
ultimately in the asylum for the
criminally insane at Auburn.
A Family Torn Apart
The fact that he finally became
a free man again is another
story—about his mother,
Ellen Hardin Walworth. After
the years of marital torment,
Ellen recovered and finally
achieved wide public recognition
as an educator, a historian,
and a founder of the Daughters
of the American Revolution.
Her energetic campaign to
get her son released drew on
all the political connections
available to her through her
family ties as both a Hardin
and a Walworth. She was not
interested in exonerating Frank
in the court of public opinion,
but rather among those
powerful enough to make a
difference. She succeeded in1877, when Governor Lucius
Robinson issued Frank a
pardon, citing as justification
a summing-up by the poet
William Cullen Bryant: “The
meeting between the father
and the son would be regarded
as an encounter between two
insane persons, in which one
of them was slain.”
But depression, mania,
suicide, and early death tracked
the rest of her offspring. If
Frank’s crime was largely forgotten
by the public, none of
his siblings ever got out from
under its shadow. As for
Ellen, she soldiered on through
one personal catastrophe after
another, while continuing to
amass civic honors and acclaim.
In a late journal she wrote, “I
cannot work. I cannot think—
there is only the intense
desire to get through with
what is necessary—and to lie
down and die.” But her sense
of personal discipline overrode
the calamities, in a final affirmation
of the values she
believed had been entrusted
to her by her father, Colonel
John J. Hardin, and her father-in-law, Chancellor Reuben
Hyde Walworth.
The Walworth family
residence in Saratoga Springs,
which the chancellor purchased
in 1825 and which Ellen
expanded into a fifty-five-room
boarding school, became the
home of the last direct
descendant of Mansfield and
Ellen: Frank’s daughter, Clara,
born just before her father’s
untimely death, lived there
alone until the early 1950s.
After her death, the dilapidated
house was razed to make
way for a gas station.
The Walworths hoped that
their accomplishments would
earn them a place in the
American record. Nearly all of
them wrote: the chancellor
his orations, legal judgments,
and epic genealogies; Clarence
his sermons and memoirs of his
early religious life; Ellen her
historical and patriotic articles
and, more revealingly, her
extensive journals and diaries;
Frank his poems, written during
his years of confinement; and
Mansfield the mad outpourings
of his novels and his cruel,
frightening letters. Because so
much of this writing has been
preserved, we can get a sense
of both how they wished to
be seen by the world and how
the world seemed to them. In
the end, the glorious chronicle
they wanted to leave behind
was essentially forgotten, and
they may be best remembered
for the strain of mania and
uncontrollable violence that
finally tore their world apart.
