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By Root 900 0

through the relationships. There is one letter, undated but written by Hetty presumably from New Bedford to Round Hill. From the content of the letter, it appears that Sylvia has decided to proceed with the addition to the house, and that the carpenters have shown up on Sylvia’s orders, much to Hetty’s consternation. The letter shows that she feels remorse, after a fashion, for her outburst, though it is couched in self-pity. “Dear Monte,” she wrote, using a nickname for Electa Montague, “I am almost crazy I have my old head aches and so discourage. I had tried to be so good—and to be deceived as well as have it done was too bad. I cared more about her not telling me…. give my love to Aunt and tell her the carpenters are here as it will make her happy although it will take me two years at least to get over the shock. Why did you let her tell me so sudden you would scold me if I treated her so…. I never wanted her to give it up if it would give her pleasure but she hardly told anything about it when I had been so good. With love, Hetty.”

But the warm feelings between Hetty and Sylvia’s servants rarely lasted for long. One night, while visiting Sylvia, Hetty told Fally Brownell to “take your duds and clear out!”

Hetty said, “I don’t want you here! My aunt doesn’t want you here either. You should just go away.”

“I won’t,” Fally said. “Not till I see Miss Howland and talk to her. Miss Howland hired me. You don’t have the right to turn me away.”

The antagonism between the two came to a head one chilly morning in February or March of 1862, when Aunt Sylvia, Electa, and Hetty were eating breakfast downstairs. Fally was upstairs, straightening the rooms and preparing to fill the water pitchers. Hetty excused herself from the breakfast table and went upstairs. A few moments later, Aunt Sylvia and Electa heard crashing and banging sounds.

Aunt Sylvia looked up from her plate. “What’s that?”

Electa sighed. “Miss Robinson. She makes all sorts of noises.”

“Go and see,” Aunt Sylvia said.

In the entry, at the bottom of the stairs, Electa found Fally Brownell, disheveled, shaken, her clothing torn.

“She pushed me, and I fell down the stairs!” Fally cried. Hetty charged down the stairs, silently seething while Fally relayed the story to Electa and Aunt Sylvia.

“I can’t have such goings-on in my house,” Sylvia said. She sent a servant to fetch Thomas Mandell, a partner in Isaac Howland Jr. and Company and perhaps her most trusted advisor. When the servant left on his mission, Hetty’s mood abruptly changed.

“Please, Aunt, don’t tell Mr. Mandell about this. He doesn’t have to know anything about it. Please. It will ruin my character to have this go out around town!” Sylvia reluctantly agreed and sent word to Mandell not to come, after all. But one night not long thereafter, as she lay in bed, she turned to Electa Montague and said of her niece, “How could she be so cruel and treat me so, when I have done everything in my power to make her happy?”

THREE

A TEST OF WILLS

Through the early 1860s the country was consumed by war, that great test of whether, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could long endure. In a war notable for advanced weaponry and crude medical practices, hundreds of thousands of soldiers died particularly horrible deaths serving this lofty ideal. These years were crucial ones in another respect—they nurtured a group of people who after the war would constitute perhaps the most formidable single generation of capitalists in the history of the world.

Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Henry M. Flagler, Philip Armour, the list went on-all of them had been born during the 1830s, the same decade as the lone woman who belongs among their ranks in terms of the financial power she wielded—Hetty Green. They all were in their twenties or early thirties when the war broke out. Their greatest feats lay years ahead of them. In the decades to come, they would transform the landscape and the American