The Three Graces of Raymond Street , livre ebook

The Three Graces of Raymond Street
The Three Graces of Raymond Street
Murder, Madness, Sex, and Politics in 1870s Brooklyn
ROBERT E. MURPHY
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Murphy, Robert E. (Robert Emmet).
The Three Graces of Raymond Street : murder, madness, sex, and politics in 1870s Brooklyn / Robert E. Murphy.
pages cm. — (Excelsior editions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5562-4 (paperback : alkaline paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5563-1 (ebook)
1. Murder—New York (State)—New York—History—19th century. 2. Women murderers—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 3. Female offenders—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 4. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Biography. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Biography. 6. Insanity defense—New York (State)—New York—History—19th century. 7. Sex role—New York (State)—New York—History—19th century. 8. Women—Legal status, laws, etc.—New York—History—19th century. 9. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Social conditions—19th century. 10. New York (N.Y.)—Social conditions—19th century. I. Title.

HV6534.N5M87 2015
364.152′3092—dc23 2014015550
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I dedicate this book to my sisters and brother and the people they married.
Of all the great cities in the world, one stands pre-eminent in the preservation of public order and in the purity of public morals. That city is Brooklyn.
—William E. S. Fales, Brooklyn’s Guardians (p. III), 1887
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Living Dangerously
City Air Breathes Free
He Told Her Not to Do It
A Terrible Thing to Tell
Lost City
2 Jailhouse and Courthouse
Fanny of Raymond Street
You Have Had Me
Look at Her Now
Adulterous, Militant Brooklyn
3 Her Poor Betsey
Come in Here and See Him
My God, It Is Plain!
The Same Type of Woman
By Other Names
Queer Crime, Queerer Woman
The Positions that They’re In
photo gallery
4 Three Graces
Sarah and Maggie: A Very Strange Ending
A Sealed Confession?
Sarah, Kate, and Lucette of Raymond Street
Brooklyn’s Lesser Scandal, Continued
5 Women and The Law
A Fourth Grace
Last Words
Seems Like a Dream
Remembered and Forgotten
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
A warm thank you to three old companions from Manhattan College who wisely advised me during the writing and rewriting of this book: Peter Quinn, Tom Quinn, and Lou Antonietti. Peter actually read two full drafts of it, which is more than a writer of his magnitude, with many demands for his attention, should be asked to do. But I will probably do it again. I also thank his wife, Kathy Quinn, for some special and important advice.
It will be immediately apparent to any reader that the composition of The Three Graces of Raymond Street depended heavily on newspaper archives. So I salute and thank the New York Public Library for its wonderful microfilm resources and its helpful (mostly quite young) staff, and I am especially grateful to the Brooklyn Public Library for bringing the nineteenth-century Brooklyn Daily Eagle into my workspace. I also send an appreciative shout up to Fulton, New York, where diligent and generous Tom Tryniski has put scores of other New York State newspapers online.
Readers who become interested in the characters and scenes described here will likely be curious to see what those persons and the places where events took place looked like. To present images of a quality suitable for publication, I have been helped immeasurably by my friend and Park Slope, Brooklyn neighbor Tony Spengler, a professional photo-enhancer who enthusiastically donated his time and skill and whom I now designate Illustrations Editor of this book. I am grateful also to another neighbor and graphics professional, Oliver Yourke, for his valuable advice.
Introduction
Unlike the great majority of books, this one began with a title, and I owe the title to the Brooklyn Public Library and its admirable initiative to produce an online archive of all the nineteenth-century pages of the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper. The discovery of the phrase “The Three Graces of Raymond Street” was serendipitous. I was searching that archive for information about the connection between James Jourdan, Brooklyn politician, city official and gas-company executive, and the Standard Oil trustees H. H. Rogers and Charles Pratt, who were partners in a Brooklyn refinery in the 1870s. I found nothing about it, but the computerized pursuit of “Pratt” brought up, in addition to Charles (best known today as the founder of Pratt Institute), Justice Calvin E. Pratt of the Kings County court, who presided over the trial of one of the “three delicate and feeble women” housed at Raymond Street Jail and dubbed “The Three Graces of Raymond Street” by a Brooklyn editor who mischievously compared them to the graces of Greek mythology. Each had been arrested for murder and was “in peril of judicial strangulation.”
Well, what Brooklyn writer with an interest in local history would not want to know everything that could be known about these young woman and what they might have done to land in such vexing circumstances? Not I. So I searched and searched in the Eagle and other Brooklyn and New York newspapers, and wherever else their names could be found. Their alleged crimes, I learned, were local sensations, and at least two drew widespread interest. Their trials or other court hearings were in each case judicially historic—and for that reason I have recounted them at some length.
My searching also became time-travel: into post-Civil-War New York and its very different yet very large and significant bordering city of Brooklyn; into a period of increasing social mobility that contributed to rapid and vast urban growth and concomitant turmoil, danger, violence, sexual license, and predation—in effect, the development of the modern American city. I had entered a pulsating age in which the role and nature of woman was in flux and in dispute, in which members of the professions of law and medicine were laboring to understand better the motivations, complexities, and pathologies of the human mind.
The searching was also an especially fascinating path to what once was Brooklyn, the unique city and borough that in the following centuries would be my lifelong home. Unlike in those later years, 1870s Brooklyn didn’t bow before New York, but it well understood its relation to that greater city while it proudly attended to its own business, struggled to manage its own speedy expansion, and carefully considered and eloquently commented on its identity and problems. It nurtured and attracted an impressive roster of outstanding citizens who operated its courts with distinction, enforced its laws with prudence, led its churches with panache, but also entangled each other in vicious, overlapping political, moral, religious, and ethnic controversies.
This book is not a history, but it is, I hope, historical—a narrative that describes a certain place at a certain time, appealing to the nostalgia that most people in some degree share for the past, even the past that long preceded our own lives. At the center of this picture that I’ve tried to paint are the three female murder suspects who became acquainted with each other at the county jail. And surrounding them, connected to them, directly or peripherally, are the policemen, prosecutors, defenders, journalists, politicians, clergymen, physicians, activists, bigots, and adulterers who formed a small portion of the big city that they lived in. My purpose, then, has been to focus on those killings and their aftermaths as interesting in themselves, while also presenting those events in the rich context of Brooklyn and New York City of the early 1870s, when persons who touched or participated in or commented on those events were living out interesting stories of their own, some of those stories of related nature to those of the imprisoned “Graces,” and likewise reflecting a vital, formative period in American urban history. So I have included passages and full chapters that flesh out the “lost” nineteenth-century city of Brooklyn.
Much of this story, or these stories, depends on the rushed and not always conscientious accounts in those many daily and weekly newspapers of New York and Brooklyn. But I have purposely recounted some events through the eyes and words of the newsmen and very few newswomen of the period. Those words bear the time’s color and flavor, and in many places I have put them in quotes because I cannot improve the phrases and sentences in which those writers described events, such as the reaction of a defendant in a capital trial when the jury foreman announced its conclusion, or the manner in which a police chief whose competence was questioned confronted a commissioner. Those feisty, faulty, sonorous papers are an important strain of the narrative. Because they s