• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Newspapers across America ferociously attacked the George Ball. The New York Post launched a campaign against him that branded his anti-Cleveland letters “filthy and disingenuous.” In a biographical sketch of his life, the Post claimed that Ball had “wandered about a good deal,” making the ludicrous assertion that he had once worked at the U.S. Customs House in New York harbor. As everyone knew, the Customs House was the notorious lair of Republican political hacks, and is rampantly corrupt. The newspaper also claimed that when Ball lived in Owensville, Indiana, he had to “hastily depart, owing to an ‘insult to a Christian lady.’”

“Moreover, he has, we are informed, a remarkable detective love of ferreting out low and disgusting scandals and mysteries.” This was just the beginning.

Four days later, on August 12, the Post resumed its offensive with a vengeance. Ball and his followers were “guttersnipes” and “vampires,” and Ball was a “dynamiter who plants a bomb in the waiting room of a railroad station, thronged with women and children, in order to strike terror in the hearts of other people.” The Post’s editor, Edwin L. Godkin, wrote the articles or personally edited them and had them republished in The Nation magazine, which at that time was a weekly insert owned by the newspaper.

Other newspapers joined in the attack. The pro-Cleveland Boston Herald ran an article under the headline, “The Vile Record of ‘Rev.’ Ball in Gibson County, Ind.”

The “Rev.” Ball, who originated the vile slander on Gov. Cleveland, it has just been learned used to live down in Gibson county, Ind. A Courier-Journal representative who was down in Owensville yesterday interviewed several prominent people, from whom it was learned that a number of years ago this same Ball preached to a small congregation, from whom he filched money under various pretenses. He finally became noted over the county as a great liar, and one in whom no trust could be placed. Ball not only became noted as a liar, but one who imbued [sic] very frequently a little too much bad whiskey for a preacher. He was finally expelled from the church, and he left the county. He is so well known down in Gibson county that Republicans as well as Democrats brand him as one of the monster frauds of the county. These facts are authentic and can be verified at any time.

The Herald later had to sheepishly acknowledge that the pastor in the story was not George Ball at all but a Reverend H. S. Ball, who had been excommunicated from his church for scandalous activities. George Ball had never even lived in Indiana. The Herald did run a correction and apology—two years later.

The Post and Herald articles came as a jolt to Ball and his wife, Maria Benchley Ball. They had been married for thirty-six years and raised five children. Ella, their youngest, had just graduated from Hillsdale College in Michigan, of which Ball was a trustee and benefactor. At Hillsdale, all men indeed were created equal—it was the first American college to prohibit in its charter discrimination based on race, religion, or sex. The depressing reality was that, in the raging national debate over his role in disseminating Maria Halpin’s story, Ball’s many worthy achievements were consigned to oblivion. According to certain newspapers in New York and Boston, he was a monster and a fraud who had finally been run out of Indiana after insulting a woman.

Ball could not let the charges against him stand. On August 10, he announced that he was instituting a $25,000 libel suit against the Herald. The New York Post would be next.

With Maria Halpin still missing in action, Cleveland’s allies geared up their efforts to turn the tide of public opinion. One of these self-appointed sleuths was Kinsley Twining. A mugwump and Congregational minister from Cambridge, Massachusetts, he came from a distinguished New England family whose ancestral history could be traced back to William the Conqueror. The Twinings had arrived in America around 1641 and settled