Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [109]
The lion’s share of Sylvia’s estate was divided into 140 shares, worth more than $600,000 each. These she doled out to some of the nation’s most elite and least needy universities and private schools—Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Groton, and Vassar—despite having little personal connection to any of them. Some of her bequests were personal. She left money to some friends, such as the now-elderly Mary Nims Bolles. She left money for the construction of a new hospital in Bellows Falls, and for the library in New Bedford. It was the same library to which her namesake, Aunt Sylvia, had given money in her own will.
The great fortune that Hetty had spent her lifetime acquiring, saving, and guarding against interlopers real and imagined slipped quietly out of the family’s grasp. Time and death did what no Wall Street shark, meddling trustee, or tax collector could—it dispersed the great fortune among people and institutions who were strangers to Hetty. Hetty, who had set out to win at a man’s game, and played it ferociously, courageously, brilliantly. Perhaps, she had played it a bit too well.
SOURCE NOTES
There have been two previous mainstream nonfiction books dealing with Hetty: Hetty Green: The Witch of Wall Street, by Boyden Sparkes and Samuel Taylor Moore, published in 1935, and The Day They Shook the Plum Tree, by Arthur H. Lewis, published in 1963. The Sparkes and Moore book, first published in 1930 as Hetty Green: A Woman Who Loved Money, and reprinted in 2000 by Buccaneer Books, was well researched, and the authors were able to interview some acquaintances of Hetty’s who by now are of course no longer living. In a few cases I have used anecdotes that could only have come from their interviews, and I have cited these instances in my chapter notes. The Lewis book dealt mainly with the fortune as it was handed down to Hetty’s children. The author’s research papers, on file at the Temple University archives in Philadelphia, yielded many magazine articles, newspaper articles, and other leads.
PREFACE
John Steele Gordon’s concise and highly readable history of Wall Street, The Great Game, was a great help to me here and elsewhere in terms of understanding the evolution of finance in America and placing Hetty in the context of her times. Other useful books included Charles R. Geisst’s Wall Street: A History, and Charles P. Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics, and Crashes.
CHAPTER ONE: NEW BEDFORD
For presenting the history of New Bedford and of the Howland family, I drew on many resources, ranging from whaling books and old city directories to a physician’s handwritten diary from the cholera outbreak in 1834, the year of Hetty’s birth. But two volumes deserve particular mention. The first is William M. Emery’s The Howland Heirs, a monumental genealogical work written in 1919 by the historian who after Hetty’s death was assigned to untangle the enormous list of Howland descendants in line for a portion of Aunt Sylvia’s trust fund. More than just a genealogical table, The Howland Heirs is loaded with family history and colorful anecdotes, and was a constant reference guide for me during the writing process. The second is Leonard Bolles Ellis’s History of New Bedford and Its Vicinity, an enormous, kitchen-sink history that always seemed to yield just the fact or detail I needed.
CHAPTER TWO: AUNT SYLVIA
Outside of trial lawyers, historical researchers are among the few people who think litigation is great. Old court records, when you can find them, yield wonderful details. Records of the 1867 lawsuit filed by Hetty against Aunt Sylvia’s estate are especially revealing. Lengthy testimony by Aunt Sylvia’s domestic staff helped me to re-create in Chapters