Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [127]
Too Many Weddings
Another reflex of mobility was the apparent rise in the incidence of bigamy in the late nineteenth century. We have already met one of these bigamists, in the introduction. Bigamy, of course, was not a new crime in the nineteenth century. The common law had disapproved of bigamy for a very long time. In colonial Maryland, for example, we read about a certain Anne Thompson, who was “burnt in the hand for having two husbands.”16 Sarah Forland suffered the same punishment for the same crime in 1756.17
Every state code made bigamy a crime. In Tennessee, for example: “If any person, being married, shall marry another person, the former husband or wife then living, or continue to cohabit with such second husband or wife in this State, such person shall be imprisoned in the penitentiary not less than two nor more than twenty-one years.”18 Comparative figures are difficult to come by, but there seemed to be a growth spurt in bigamy prosecutions in the nineteenth century, especially the last part of the century and into the early twentieth century. It was never a particularly common crime, as far as we can tell, compared to ordinary property offenses; but there is a constant drumbeat of newspaper accounts, and a small but definite number of arrests: twelve in Philadelphia in 1897, sixty in New York in 1913, seventeen in Los Angeles in 1914—15.19
Bigamists can be divided into two broad categories. The first is a group of swindlers, plain and simple—men like the bounder J. Aldrich Brown, who (according to detectives) had a rich career as a serial husband in the 1880s. He married at least seventeen times, staying no more than ten days with each wife. Brown was forty-five, “handsome, intelligent-appearing,” and six feet, two inches tall. He specialized in “sewing girls in wealthy families”; he robbed them of “their little savings, their valuables and wearing apparel,” which he sold before disappearing.20 A less flamboyant example of this type was James Dougherty, who in 1869 married a young “domestic” in Darby, Pennsylvania. She had a nest egg of about six hundred dollars. Dougherty wormed most of it out of her, claiming he needed the money to buy a house; then he eloped to New Castle, Delaware, with another woman.21
Another group consisted of men who were not swindlers so much as restless or faithless husbands. These men found marriage number one unfulfilling for one reason or another; so they decamped without bothering to get a divorce and started over again, often in a different locale. Philip A. Mitchell, said to be a “leading clothier” of Bridgeport, Connecticut, fled his home in September of 1888 when a woman arrived from New York claiming to be his real wife. She produced photographs and a marriage certificate. He had dumped her after nine days of marriage. 22 John Wilgen had a wife and two children in Minneapolis, where he worked for a printer. He corresponded with Rena Mead of Bradford, Pennsylvania. Wilgen married Mead on August 18, 1897, in Limestone, New York. He passed himself off as a “man of wealth and position” and told people he had to go to Minneapolis “on important business.” Mead’s family ultimately became suspicious and began to investigate; Wilgen’s double life fell to pieces.23
Dr. John W. Hughes, whose trial for murder was one of the sensations of 1865, had been bom in the Isle of Man. He emigrated with his first wife to the United States in 1862, served as a doctor in the Union Army, and then settled in Cleveland, where he practiced medicine. There he met young Tamzen Parsons. The doctor described what happened in these words: “a wild mad love took possession