Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [22]
In the spring of 1865, Edward Robinson, the hale, blustering fellow whom it seemed might live forever out of simply being too stubborn to die, suddenly fell ill. He held on for a few short months, and died on June 14, 1865.
Hetty had spent so much time worrying about her aunt’s will, in part because she assumed it would be years until she saw much from her father. An inventory made after his death showed an estate of nearly $5.7 million. Of that, only $163,350 remained invested in whaling ships, showing the extent to which he had succeeded in extricating himself from the business that had made him rich. The rest was in stocks, bonds, cash, interest in merchant ships, and outstanding claims considered good. Robinson left virtually his entire estate to his only heir, his daughter. Five months shy of her thirty-first birthday, Hetty Robinson found herself a rich woman.
But there was a catch. Robinson had arranged to leave Hetty a little over $900,000 outright, along with some property in California that he owned. The rest, almost $5 million, would be bound up in a trust, with Hetty as beneficiary, but with two associates of her father’s, Henry A. Barling and Abner Davis, as managers.
On one level, Hetty had little to complain about. The bequest was beyond the imaginings of most Americans of her time, ensuring a life of ease and comfort, should she want that. And, certainly, Robinson was free to distribute the estate as he saw fit. And yet Robinson had been wholly aware of Hetty’s consuming interest in money and finances. She had been his eager student, reading to him, following him around the docks, soaking up any and all of his financial wisdom. Had she been a young man, she would without question have been groomed to take over his money and his business concerns. But she was a woman, and Robinson followed the conventions of the day and kept some 80 percent of his fortune in trust for her, so that she would not fritter it away. Hetty could interpret the will as nothing other than a deep and burning insult. She would carry anger over her father’s will throughout her life, transferring her rage from her father to the men he had selected to administer the trust.
Just two weeks after Robinson was laid to rest next to Abby in New Bedford’s Oak Grove Cemetery, Sylvia took a turn for the worse. She lay in her bed in the house on Eighth Street. Her last days underscored the poignant irony of her life. She was rich—probably the richest woman in town—and her fortunes were steadily increasing as her health declined. In just the last year of her life, she earned some $200,000 from her investments. Yet her physical ailments had confined her travels, outside of the well-worn seven-mile path between New Bedford and Round Hill, to the pages of romance novels. Her closest companions in these final days, however sincere they may have been in their affection for her, were largely her paid staff. Even discounting their financial interest in Sylvia Ann, their affection for her seems to have been quite genuine. Electa Montague, the nurse, recalled after Sylvia’s death: “I regarded her as my sincere friend, and felt to love her, and respect her, and do for her, and would do for her anything in my power to comfort her, and relieve her sufferings and her long confinement.” And yet the sad reality of this arrangement seems to have haunted Sylvia right to her deathbed. Nobody knew better than she that her companions were bought and paid for. A few months before her death, she called Fally Brownell