A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [146]
“This will be an opportunity to see if you can run a household by yourself,” Emma acidly informed her.
Emma had told Frances that her wedding ceremony to Henry Perrine would take place in June 1889, but in May came word that Emma and Perrine had gotten married in Jackson, Michigan. When Frances found out, she took off for Michigan to see the newlyweds. Cleveland chose to stay behind in Manhattan.
“Things are getting into a pretty tough condition when a man can’t keep his mother-in-law in the traces,” Cleveland said. He sounded bemused yet also offended.
Tension escalated between mother and daughter. “Why hasn’t Lena sent my corsets,” Emma wrote. Lena was Frances’s maid. Emma scolded Frances for not writing enough; her new stepdaughter, Cornie, she tartly reminded Frances, “is never neglectful of me.”
Even the little things got between them. Emma complained about the size of the coffee cups Frances had given her as a wedding gift. “They hold so little—only half of what an ordinary after dinner coffee cup holds . . . They are very pretty but not exactly practical.” Emma wondered if Frances wouldn’t mind if she exchanged the gift.
On the third anniversary of the Clevelands’ marriage, Emma failed to send them her best wishes.
As Emma and Frances went on squabbling, Cleveland was plotting his political comeback.
Then everything was put on hold.
Cleveland’s future hinged on the outcome of Ball vs. The New York Evening Post.
Six years after the Reverend George Ball filed his libel lawsuit against the New York Evening Post, which had condemned him for his role in the Maria Halpin scandal, the case finally came to trial. The day was February 4, 1890, Justice Charles Daniels presiding. The Buffalo courtroom was packed. With so much at stake in the outcome of the trial, it was the hottest ticket in town. At the plaintiff’s table sat Ball, now seventy-one, and next to him his lawyers, Adelbert Moot and Frank Ferguson.
Three men sat at the defense table. There was the defendant himself, the fifty-nine-year-old editor of the New York Post Edwin L. Godkin, and his two lawyers, John Milburn and Franklin Locke.
Ball and the Post may have been the named parties in the litigation, but no one had more on the line in Ball vs. The Evening Post than Grover Cleveland. Having been defeated for reelection in 1888, he was contemplating another run for the presidency in 1892. Should he win, Cleveland would become the first American president to serve two nonconsecutive terms in the White House. If the jury found for Ball, Cleveland would in all probability be politically finished.
Jury selection took all morning—an unprecedented length of time for voir dire in a trial that did not involve a capital offense. So many challenges were raised that Moot and Milburn came close to exhausting the pool of potential jurors. Finally, just before noon, the last man was named, and the panel was sworn in.
Moot rose and presented his opening statement. Moot was thirty-six, with a reputation as a plain-speaking and unrelenting advocate for his clients, which may explain his readiness to take on the former president who still commanded so much influence over the Buffalo bar.
Moot began with a brief history of Grover Cleveland’s whirlwind political career—his election as mayor, governor, and then while still a newcomer to the national political arena, his nomination as the Democratic candidate for president. George Ball had learned of “certain charges,” the upshot of which was the publication in 1884 of “A Terrible Tale” in the Buffalo Evening Telegraph. Moot went to the plaintiff’s table and stood over Ball. The New York Post had published wicked and malicious