Maria had experience working as a seamstress and lived near her in-laws in Jersey City, so she was able to leave Frederick and Ada with them and get a job at Stewart’s, the first department store in the city, a six-story, cast-iron monument to retailing straddling Ninth and Tenth Streets on Broadway in lower Manhattan. While well-heeled Victorian ladies prowled the lower floors of the “Iron Palace,” with its “tasteful frescoes” and “gilded chandeliers” and “graceful Corinthian columns,” for camelhair shawls, silk capes, merinos from Scotland, and the latest housewares in a “gayly dressed, restless, ever-changing throng,” Maria would have labored on the top floor with some nine hundred other seamstresses employed in Stewart’s in-house factory. A visiting reporter from Godey’s Lady’s Book described a “flock of women and girls” sewing away at long worktables that sat 250 making “finished garments, cloaks, sacques” and “hundreds of dozens of sheets, pillow-cases, towels and napkins, dozens of blankets, counterpanes, etc.”
Within a few years, Maria had risen to what she would tell a friend was a “responsible position” at Stewart’s, perhaps as one of the “careful matrons” who, as Godey’s described, supervised the workers. Unfortunately, Stewart’s was known for paying the “lowest market rate” for employees, and with even the best-paid women of the time making one-third to one-half of what men made, it’s doubtful she obtained even a measure of financial security.
Sometime around 1870, Maria moved to Buffalo, New York, with Frederick in search of better opportunities, possibly with some of her late husband’s family, leaving Ada with her in-laws. Buffalo was a busy, thriving city—the tenth largest in the country at the time. Maria got a job making mourning collars, an essential part of the elaborate Victorian mourning dress that she herself had recently worn, with Flint & Kent, an up-and-coming dry goods store that was the Buffalo equivalent of Stewart’s.
By 1872, Maria had been promoted to sales clerk. It was an extraordinary opportunity for a woman at the time. Traditionally retail clerks were men; only a fraction of the 320 or so sales clerks at Stewart’s were women. The explosion in retailing at the time created a tremendous demand for clerks, and, as it was quickly realized, women were better at selling things to other women. With women still largely barred from office jobs, department store clerking was by far the most genteel, semi-professional job available to native-born white women like Maria (department stores wouldn’t hire immigrant, black, or Jewish women as clerks). Women clerks were expected to dress fashionably, be knowledgeable about the latest styles and trends, and project a refined persona that mirrored the mannerisms of their customers. Many rejected the English term “shopgirl,” with its connotations of “inferior class position, poor taste in dress and speech, and possibly low moral state,” says the department store historian Susan Porter Benson, in favor of “saleslady.”
By 1873, Maria was the head of the cloak department at Flint & Kent. The cloak department was one of the busiest in the store, and Maria felt she had “the confidence and esteem” of her employers. An acquaintance remembered her as “ladylike, intelligent and fine appearing.” Tall and slender, she spoke fluent French, thanks to some Huguenot-descended relations she’d spent time with as a child, and possessed, according to one local man, “unusual intelligence, modesty, neatness and business tact.” Like all women moving into formerly all-male workplaces in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Maria walked a fine line no matter how ladylike she was. In the eyes of society, a woman who was self-supporting “no longer owed her sexuality to one man alone,” notes historian Sharon Wood. The very act of working, as well as the traversing of public spaces alone, “implicitly compromised her sexual reputation.” The fact that women were poorly paid engendered the suspicions that they were easily compromised. As one Buffalo department store clerk noted even thirty years later, “You have to dress well or you can’t keep your place, and there’s always somebody ready to be your ‘friend’ and put up for your clothes. Still most of the girls keep straight, though I know lots of folks think they don’t.”
Maria walked that line as well as any woman of her time. By 1873, she had what was by any measure an excellent life for a woman who had been a struggling widow five years earlier. She had a good job; she was living in a fashionable boardinghouse, Mrs. Randall’s on Swann Street; and she attended the equally fashionable St. John’s Episcopal Church. With a “remarkable sweetness of manner and a liberal share of personal magnetism,” Maria “drew about her the better class of people, and numbered among her friends some of the very best” of Buffalo’s citizens, according to one local man who remembered her.
It wasn’t surprising, then, when a friend of Mrs. Oscar Folsom, one of Maria’s customers, “persistently sought” to make Maria’s acquaintance. His intentions seemed “honorable” according to Maria—he had followed the proper procedure of seeking an introduction through a mutual acquaintance—and his character was, by all accounts, very good. He had been Oscar Folsom’s law partner and was just finishing up a term as the sheriff of Erie County. Maria was in her early thirties at the time, and her suitor was thirty-six, so remarriage, which would have put her on sounder financial footing, probably seemed like a very real possibility. Maria and her suitor saw each other for a few months, and he paid Maria what she called “very marked attention.” One evening in mid-December 1873, Maria was on her way to the Tifft House, the city’s most prominent hotel, to call on her friend Mrs. Johnson, when she ran into her beau. He asked her “to go with him to dinner, which invitation I declined because of my prior engagement,” Maria said, but “by persistent requests and urgings he induced me to accompany him to the restaurant at the Ocean House, where we dined.” After dinner at the Ocean Dining House and Oyster Hall, said Maria, he “accompanied me to my rooms at Randall’s boarding house … as he had quite frequently done previous to this time, and where my son lived with me.” It was there in her rooms “by the use of force and violence and without my consent,” she later asserted in an affidavit, that Grover Cleveland raped her.
Maria said that after Cleveland had “accomplished my ruin,” he told her he had been determined to “secure my ruin if it cost him $10,000, or if he was hanged by the neck for it.” Perhaps it was her independence, her temerity to go about unescorted in public, to earn her own wages, which suggested she was available sexually. Cleveland later spoke of wanting his wife to be a “sensible, domestic American wife”—clearly he didn’t approve of working women. Maria said she “told him that I never wanted to see him again, and commanded him to go away.”
Six weeks later she changed her mind and summoned him back to Swann Street. Maria was pregnant and in despair and nearly hysterical at the thought of what an illegitimate pregnancy would mean for her. “What the devil are you blubbering about? You act like a baby without teeth,” she said Cleveland told her. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, as if he didn’t know. What Maria wanted him to do was what was “honorable and right.” She wanted Cleveland to marry her.
It’s an indication of how devastating unwed pregnancy, and the social rejection that would follow it, was to a nineteenth-century woman that Maria’s biggest concern was getting her rapist to marry her. To her, it likely seemed the only practical solution. It would have been nearly impossible for Maria to prevail in court on rape charges. According to Mary Block, a historian of rape law, the courts at the time “made it virtually impossible for a mature, healthy woman to prove she had been raped.” While nineteenth-century law defined rape as “the unlawful carnal knowledge of a woman by a man, forcibly and against her will,” courts tended to adhere to the old common-law standard of rape. This held that in order for a sexual encounter to be classified as rape, a woman had to physically resist the act the entire time and had to give “hue and cry”—to call out during the rape and report it immediately afterward. If at any time during the rape she gave up fighting and didn’t use “utmost resistance,” she was considered to have acquiesced to the act, and it was c
onsidered “seduction”—which in most states was still a civil action reserved for men—not rape. As Block notes, in effect, “consummation meant consent.”
It was also a time when, according to Block, “there was a general assumption that men used a certain amount of force and women showed a respectable degree of resistance in the course of an ordinary seduction.” Damning pieces of evidence, like torn underclothes or physical injuries, were dismissed as evidence of “overly zealous seduction.” In one 1868 case, a judge wrote that “notwithstanding the defendant treated the girl roughly at first, and actually threatened to kill her, yet if she afterwards freely consented to the sexual intercourse, being enticed to surrender her chastity by means employed by him, then the offense is seduction.”
Myths about rape still held sway, including the belief that a woman couldn’t become pregnant as a result of rape because “without an excitation of lust … no conception can probably take place” or that it was “impossible” for a man to rape a healthy woman because she could use her limbs and “the force of her hands to prevent the insertion of the penis into her body,” as Samuel Farr wrote in Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, which purported to be the first forensic treatise on rape law. In 1868, Dr. Horatio Storer, an influential gynecologist who was a vice president of the American Medical Association, wrote that “ordinarily it is impossible for a man without assistance to gain access to the penetralia of an unwilling woman,” likening it to an “attempt to sheathe a sword in a vibrating scabbard.”
As chastity became central to the definition of a respectable woman in the nineteenth century, women found it was their sexual conduct, not the actions of men, that was really on trial. Any indication that the woman “was willing to socialize alone with her attacker … or that she put up little resistance could be taken as consent, even if she believed to the contrary,” writes the historian Barbara Lindemann. If Maria had tried to take Cleveland to court, it likely would have been her independence and her decision to go about the streets unescorted at night that was on trial. Nor would a rape conviction have done anything to provide for her and the child she was expecting or to restore her reputation. Only marriage could do that.
On the day she confronted Cleveland about her pregnancy, Maria said that he “promised that he would marry me.” However, Cleveland, according to the historian Horace Samuel Merrill, cherished his freedom and grew “irritated, rude and rebellious” if it was threatened. He was also, according to the biographer Allan Nevins, a “man’s man” who “noticeably kept his distance from the belles of the city” and was “happiest in a hotel lounge; in a friend’s room full of tobacco smoke, glasses, and cards,” in the back room of a saloon, or “on the duck-marshes with a gun, or on the Niagara River with a rod.” Apparently Cleveland had no intention of giving up his much-loved bachelor lifestyle to be roped into a marriage not of his design, because he showed no sign of making good on his promise.
Lacking a male relative in Buffalo to pressure Cleveland to take responsibility, Maria turned to her pastor, the Reverend Charles Avery of St. John’s, and told him “the circumstances of her intimacy with Grover Cleveland”—although it’s unlikely she told him that she had been raped. He probably assumed that she had been seduced under the promise of marriage, which, as the historian Michael Grossberg notes, “was excusable and understandable” in an otherwise respectable woman. At the time, states were moving to criminalize seduction as “the act of a male person in having intercourse with a woman of chaste character under promise of marriage, or by the use of enticement or persuasion.” New York was the first state to criminalize seduction in 1848. The main purpose of seduction laws, however, according to the legal scholar H. W. Humble, wasn’t to punish men, but “to compel an unmarried man who has had intercourse with a virtuous woman under promise of marriage to keep his promise.”
With the understanding that Cleveland had seduced Maria, Avery said, “He must marry you,” and agreed to talk to Cleveland on Maria’s behalf. When Avery confronted Cleveland, however, he heard a different story. Cleveland didn’t deny that he had been intimate with Maria, but he told Avery that he was unsure if he was the father of the child she was carrying, intimating that Maria had been intimate with another man. Avery said he agreed that marriage “would be impossible” given the “very doubtful paternity” of the child—no upstanding man could be expected to marry a woman whose chastity was suspect. Seduction statutes specifically protected only women “of good repute,” not “lewd women.” Having determined that Maria’s purported unchasteness removed any obligation of Cleveland’s to marry her, Avery said he got Cleveland to “agree to provide for the child” and ended his involvement, convinced that Cleveland had acted “nobly.”
Now Maria was utterly defeated and utterly ruined. No longer able to hide her pregnancy, she gave up her job at Flint & Kent and her comfortable rooms at Randall’s boardinghouse. She sent her son, Frederick, back to Jersey City. She entered St. Mary’s Lying-In Hospital, a charitable institution run by Catholic nuns for the care and seclusion of unwed mothers. It was there, on September 14, 1874, that her son was delivered by Dr. James King, an obstetrician whom one local described as Cleveland’s “friend, employé and father confessor.” Maria said Cleveland insisted on naming the baby Oscar Folsom Cleveland after his former partner and good friend Oscar Folsom.
Oscar was taken away from Maria shortly after his birth and brought by Dr. King to the home of his sister-in-law Minnie Kendall and her husband, William. Minnie was pregnant and expecting shortly. King pressured Minnie to take Oscar, telling her, she said, he “would pay me … and told me several times that I could call him my twin baby.” The Kendalls finally consented, and Oscar was left with them. “All of his clothing was marked M.H.,” Minnie Kendall recalled. “They told me to call him Jack, and to take all his clothing and replace it with new, and give them back the marked clothing.” This she did. “We virtually had the child hid, and largely at the request of Dr. King. We moved once to hide the traces of the child if any existed,” she said.
Maria was frantic and heartbroken. “I begged Cleveland on my knees to let me have sight of my baby,” she said, but he relented only once and let her see Oscar at his lawyer’s office for a few minutes to prove he was being well cared for. Cleveland installed Maria in a seedy boardinghouse on East Genesee Street. She was “very much depressed and broken down,” according to her neighbor Mrs. William Baker, and she began drinking and railing against Cleveland. The threat of scandal and exposure must have been too much, because after a year, Oscar was returned to Maria. As Minnie Kendall recalled, “They came to me in a hurry one day, apparently alarmed, and told me to take the baby and get its things all together quick and go in a hack and give it to its mother.” Dr. King warned Kendall not to tell Maria where she lived and had the driver take a circuitous route to and from Maria’s home so that Minnie didn’t know where she was. Afterward, said Kendall, King repeatedly told them not to “tell what we knew about Maria Halpin’s child, and used all manner of means to intimidate us.” Shortly after Minnie dropped off Oscar, their house was “broken into and all the baby’s trinkets stolen,” including a little knit cap that Maria had made for Oscar that “had a picture of a man inside which looked just like the picture of Cleveland” and had “Baby’s papa” written on the back.
Kendall said Maria was “overjoyed” to have Oscar back, but she continued to drink and make threats against Cleveland. Cleveland told friends he was concerned she was neglecting the baby and was “apprehensive that she might attempt some injury to him or herself.” Mrs. Baker said he sent Maria letters “in which he demanded that she give the baby up and threatening to take it from her by force.” When that didn’t work, Cleveland “appealed to the Chief of Police, Col. John Byrne, to keep her under surveillance,” apparently with the idea of using Maria’s purported neglect of Oscar to get him away from her. Byrne sent two detectives to Genesee Street, but they reportedly found they “could do nothing with her.�
� Cleveland then turned to a retired judge, Roswell Burrows, to try to reach some kind of agreement with Maria. Burrows told Maria that if she would leave town and surrender Oscar to the local orphanage, Cleveland would pay for his care and establish her in a dressmaking business in Niagara Falls. Maria finally agreed, and on March 9, 1876, left Oscar at the Buffalo Orphan Asylum. That wouldn’t last. She pined for Oscar, and on April 28 she spirited him from the orphanage and ran off.
Cleveland next turned to John Level, who was the overseer of the poor in the city, and, according to the biographer Denis Lynch, an “old crony” of Cleveland’s from the days when he and a little posse of political friends hung out at Level’s livery stable. Cleveland persuaded Level to use his authority as overseer of the poor to sign an order granting him custody of Oscar, while, according to Lynch, “avoiding a court proceeding, and the attendant publicity.” On the night of July 10, Robert Watts, one of Byrne’s detectives, and Dr. King drove up to the Genesee Street lodgings. With “the assistance of Mr. Baker Mrs. Halpin was forced into the carriage and driven to the Providence Insane Asylum.” Watts, who was paid some fifty dollars for his services, said it took all his strength to overpower Maria. “It was a hell of a time,” he told a friend. Mrs. Baker said that Maria “was drunk at the time, and we understood that Mr. Cleveland wanted her put in an asylum to wean her from liquor, but there are those who say he made her condition an excuse to get her out of the way.”
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