Prostitution in the Gilded Age

by Kevin Murphy

  New London, Connecticut is a good example of one single industry pulling a town into disrepute. Sailors involved in the whaling business often put to sea for years at a time. When these lusty sailors hit land again, they needed plenty of sleep and the companionship of some hopelessly indiscriminate women. The flophouses and brothels on Bradley, Potter, Water, Prison, and Bank Streets supplied these needs. New London’s tenderloin district held to these streets for more than a century. Another port city, Norwich, Connecticut—resting at the nexus of the Yantic and Shetucket Rivers—and at the headwaters of the Thames River—supported a red light district on Water, Commerce and Market streets, along with a few houses west of the harbor on “Hardscrabble Hill.”[28] Bridgeport’s prostitution crept all around the harbor—Bank, Clinton and Water Streets on the west side and around Pierpont Street in East Bridgeport. New Haven’s prostitution also favored the harbor. To the south and east of Yale College, Chapel, Crown, Worcester, State, Union, Fair, and Prindle Streets were notorious for well-established houses of ill fame during the Gilded Age.

  Almost a universal rule before 1850, prostitution remained in these depraved areas by the waterfront, but also in roadhouses beyond the incorporated limits of cities. Modern police forces were not organized in the cities and towns of the United States until after the mid-1850s. Municipalities depended on constables and night watches. A constable, Samuel Wakeman was hired in April 1636, only six months after the earliest colonists settled at Hartford. The constable system remained in effect until the summer of 1860 when an organized police force began operations. The watch system began as a voluntary service that able-bodied men were expected to perform without pay. Later, the watch morphed into a service whereby townsmen were paid $1 a night to walk the streets from ten p.m. until four a.m. The thinly spread constables were called police, but as stated above, cities and towns did not have actual police forces until after the era of the constable came to a close.[29]

  For the young McQueeney girls, living so close to the Centre Schoolhouse proved a great blessing and they received good primary educations. Jennie McQueeney could read and write well, and always had books in the places where she lived through the years.

  Market Street offered one serious drawback. The McQueeneys were only two blocks from the waterfront, where prostitutes lived in large numbers and their comings and goings could not be ignored. At 12 Market Street, the McQueeneys’ rooms in a small, wooden tenement were only one door from State Street. Achingly poignant, Jennie McQueeney grew up watching prostitutes openly flaunting their expensive clothes and sparkling jewels on State Street, the busiest thoroughfare in Hartford and fast becoming the core of the city’s tenderloin district. The madames in particular loved to display their diamonds as they sashayed along State Street. As one might expect, the young prostitutes dressed ostentatiously, an obvious but effective means of advertising. According to the Hartford native, Dr. William W. Sanger, who wrote the original groundbreaking study on prostitution while working on New York’s Blackwell’s Island in 1858, the length of time that his patients were prostitutes averaged only two years. In a similar 1913 study of prostitution in Hartford, the girls claimed to have been in prostitution on average for four years. Either way, when they were active, the madames and inmates could make it look attractive—especially the madames. Common wisdom says that we spend our whole lives living out our childhood dreams. For a young girl like Jennie McQueeney, the madames’ lives undoubtedly seemed glamorous and, sadly, this childhood impression had a lasting effect.[30]

  Along the same lines, the Lafayette House—built in 1851 and two doors north of the Centre Schoolhouse—did business at 22-28 Market Street. Its proprietor, Mark Wheeler, tried to run a respectable hotel, but fought a losing battle. Each year, the number of houses of ill repute around State and Market Street increased, as did the dissolute characters of the half-world, bound for ruination. By the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, eighteen-year-old Jennie McQueeney watched as the hotel lost the war. As if to punctuate the obvious, Woodruff Cadwell—arrested for keeping a bawdy house two years earlier on Upper Main Street—purchased the Lafayette House with his nephew, Dorrance Cadwell. A few months after Samuel Colt died in January of 1862 at Coltsville, his one-mile-square manufacturing village in the south meadows, the police arrested Dorrance for keeping a sporting house on the Albany road. Dorrance Cadwell was destined to become the new manager of the Lafayette House.[31]

  If ever there was a shining example of prostitution starting in the remote areas on the outskirts of town and later migrating to the heart of the city, this was it. As the Civil War claimed an ever-increasing number of the healthy, vital young men, people grieved endlessly. Their sensibilities were so numbed by tragedy that they lost the ability to care about a little prostitution, gambling, or drinking. With all this suffering as a backdrop, people like the Cadwells, Connecticut men by birth but illiterate nonetheless, thought nothing of ruining young girls’ lives for profit. Slowly, they crept into the heart of the city and established a solid foothold. The average citizen—if they gave the matter any thought at all—figured that bordellos, gambling halls, and illegal liquor sales wouldn’t last. They were right, but it took more than a half-century for the pendulum to correct.

  A nasty example of the type of places the Cadwells and their ilk ran was the “Bull Run” on the Windsor Locks-Granby road in northern Connecticut. The Bull Run House was a typical roadhouse sitting at the four corners created by the intersection of the aforementioned Windsor Locks-Granby road and the Suffield-Poquonnock road. The Bull Run was another squalid roadhouse with the obligatory saloon, and a backroom operation for customers with an itch. The saloon sat two miles west of Windsor Locks—a village of only 2,332 residents—and four miles south of Suffield, another small hamlet. On the night of Sunday, January 2, 1881, two illiterate half-brothers from Feeding Hills, Massachusetts, David Scott and Mitchell Cherest, tried to rob the place. During their clumsy attempt to snatch some easy cash, they killed the owner, Timothy Billings, his wife Delia, and an inmate, Julia Harris. Eventually, Scott and Cherest were apprehended, convicted of second-degree murder, and sentenced to life in the Connecticut State Prison at Wethersfield. Scott hanged himself a year later, while Cherest served forty-four years and was paroled when he was sixty-two.[32]

  Roadhouses were popular because they operated far enough outside of town to obviate police intervention, but they had their own problems. Sad to say for society in general, bringing vice into the cities brought down the most egregious violent crime, while prostitution, gambling, and drinking skyrocketed. The social evil could be thought of as society’s Gilded Age balancing act.

  In 1850, Jane McQueeney’s brother, Alexander, emigrated from Ireland and settled in Hartford near the McQueeneys. Jane and Bernard McGuire birthed eight children, and even though Alexander was fourteen years younger than Jane, the two got on well. Young Jennie did not always get along with her mother, but she did manage to cement a strong bond with her uncle, Alexander McGuire. Like so many of the McGuires and McQueeneys, he was a hostler, working all day with horses in livery stables. Alexander didn’t stay in Hartford long though. Instead, he joined other McGuire family members in Providence. Just like his brother, Frank McGuire, he never married, drank too much, and died in his late sixties.[33]

  While Jennie and her sisters were in school, Timothy McQueeney continued his work as a coachman at the United States Hotel. At the beginning of March 1852, McQueeney got into a scrap with another hackman, Hooker Clapp. Timothy McQueeney could “get his Irish up” faster than most and Hooker Clapp was just the type of person to start something with a snide remark or a crude gesture.

  Hooker Clapp had carved out a niche as one of Hartford’s most outrageous characters. Clapp was a morbidly obese giant whose only exercise was the lifting of a food-laden fork. Hooker’s weight usually hovering around 375 pounds. How he ever got up into the driver’s seat of a coach presented as a great mystery to everyone. While passengers were
counting out bills to pay their fare, Clapp had the obnoxious habit of snatching the bill he wanted. On one occasion, Samuel Tuttle, a bald-headed Hartford seed dealer with a flowing white beard, stood in front of the Allyn House on Asylum Street counting bills, when Hooker Clapp grabbed a $5 note for his tip. Tuttle wasn’t amused and had Clapp arrested. In court, Clapp pleaded guilty to “extortionate charges while ‘plying his vocation as a hack driver,’ and agreed to pay back the money illegally obtained.” He also received a fine of $3 plus court costs.[34]

  Hooker Clapp claimed that he was the only Democrat in his family, so when New London Democratic attorney, Tom Waller, outpolled Lt. Gov. Billy Bulkeley—Judge Bulkeley’s son—in the November 1882 gubernatorial race, Clapp headed a huge post-election parade, smoking a big fat cigar and hungrily gobbling up the kind of excitement designed for a much slimmer man. At the height of the festivities, Hooker Clapp suffered a massive coronary and died within the hour. Even if Clapp had not passed away in the early going, he would never have survived Billy Bulkeley’s resurrection after the election, as 7,000 illegal Democratic “black ballots” were tossed out in New Haven. However, instead of accepting this incredibly lucky break, in January 1883, Billy Bulkeley did the unthinkable. He handed it all to the Democrat Tom Waller, by sending a letter to the Republican legislature, averring “he would not take the office on a technicality, when clearly the voters had chosen another.”[35]

  Timothy McQueeney wasn’t one of Hooker Clapp’s admirers, and after one of the obese man’s little stunts, McQueeney “jumped onto Hooker’s hack, and made an aggravated attack on him.” The stolid constable, Charles Nott, arrested Timothy McQueeney for assault and battery on a complaint from the city attorney. The court, “to learn him [McQueeney] better fashions and make an example of such conduct, fined him the snug little amount of $35, which together with court costs . . . amounted to $42.74. He paid it over and was discharged from custody.”[36] (In 2014 dollars, Timothy McQueeney’s fine and court costs would be over $4,000.)

  The way the McQueeneys ran their lives, saving a little money for a rainy day wasn’t possible. Many of Hartford’s immigrants never had a run-in with the police, but the McQueeneys drank too much and never sidestepped trouble; they were a fight looking for a place to happen.

  That same year, Jane McQueeney had a fifth child, a girl named Catherine. Everyone called her Katie. By this time, Jane McQueeney’s drinking was out of control. Since it could never be said with a straight face that Jane McQueeney did a good job raising her children, one would have to conclude that she didn’t pay much attention to little Katie. It’s also clear by future events that Jennie McQueeney did an extraordinary amount of work in rearing her kid sister. Jennie and Katie developed a powerful bond. That said, while in the care of her parents, Katie died in 1875 at the age of twenty-two. Jennie hired a Hartford artist to paint an oil portrait of Katie, which she kept hanging in her bedroom until her own death in 1900.

  Jennie never forgave her parents for Katie’s death, and her mother’s name does not appear on any of Jennie McQueeney’s documents after Katie passed away. Even after Jennie McQueeney outlived all the members of her family and died at the turn of the century, her friends knew enough not to include her mother’s name on Jennie’s death certificate. “Timothy” is written as her father’s name, but there is no “Jane” on the document.[37]

  The 1850s were a difficult time in America. In the great manufacturing centers like Hartford, the population more than doubled during the decade, but pre-war tensions constantly undermined financial stability. As the general public searched for someone to blame for the bad economy, blacks and immigrants quickly became objects of scorn. Slavery consumed more newsprint than could be imagined and Irish immigrants became scapegoats for the great downturn in the economy—particularly the Panic of 1857. Even the Hartford Courant— rudderless by the mid-1850s after the Whig Party went into an irreversible death spiral—became the organ for the Know-Nothing Party. The Know-Nothing Party represented institutionalized bigotry and prejudice of the worst sort. Later, the former Whigs slowly drifted into the Republican Party, but only after Gideon Welles, Joe Hawley, and seven fellow travelers organized the Connecticut chapter of the Republican Party in February 1856.[38] The movement toward Republicanism was a slow but steady shift, aided by the fact that the merchant-banker class had no alternative.

  As the economy limped along, Timothy McQueeney lost his job as a coachman at the United States Hotel. In the years that followed, he had to settle for jobs as a day laborer, further jeopardizing the family’s finances. The McQueeney girls did not attend Hartford Public High School after they finished their studies at the Centre Schoolhouse. The high school—in a two-story, wooden structure at the northwest corner of Ann and Asylum Streets—represented a merger between an English Course of Study, and the Classics Department of the private Hartford Grammar School. The city’s leaders and educators dedicated the new high school in late 1847, planning to educate 250 students from the city’s finest families. The McQueeney girls did not qualify.

  Jennie McQueeney’s lack of a high school education, considering the era, should not be seen as a significant factor in her entering the world of prostitution. In Commercialized Prostitution in New York City, a 1913 publication of the New York Bureau of Social Hygiene, author George J. Kneeland introduced some very important statistics. Of 1,106 street cases, approximately 12 percent were illiterate and only about 5 percent had a grammar school education. Kneeland also found that, generally, the first sex offense was between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two years, with the average at seventeen. This suggests, as have many other reports, that the most dangerous stage of a girl’s life is in late adolescence. In almost 40 percent of these cases, the first sexual encounter was with a stranger.[39]

  July 1858 played out as a particularly bad time for the McQueeney family. On Sunday July 4, about 10 o’clock in the evening, Jane McQueeney and a slovenly woman, Celia Webb, were arrested for fighting and “trying to tear each other’s clothes off on the corner of Pearl and Trumbull Streets.” Celia Webb lived on Charles Street in the “old red house” and ruled as matriarch of the notorious Webb family. These people were so completely out of control that the newspapers began calling Celia “one of a renowned web-footed-family.” Strangely enough, though her family represented bedlam of epic proportions—and Celia’s offspring didn’t seem to stand a chance in life—none of her children ever went to prison. They likely did short stretches in the county jail, as did Celia, but were spared the state prison.[40]

  Jane McQueeney and Celia Webb passed the night in the lockup and on Monday appeared before the court, showing a more dignified demeanor. They were each fined $1 and costs, plus a short stay in the county jail. The court suspended judgment, however, when it was learned that each of the women had half a dozen children to support.

  Thieving ran through Celia Webb’s bloodstream. The Courant once wrote, “if Celia Webb, the mother of the Webb family, hasn’t got stealing on the brain, no person ever had. She was bound over to the superior court for theft and was just discharged last week. Last evening, Mr. Cornelius O’Neill, who lives on Front Street, detected her carrying a dress away from his premises. In her company was Mrs. Kathryn Shea. Mr. O’Neill notified the police and an officer soon had the females in custody. On their way to the station house, Mrs. Webb remarked to Mrs. Shea, ‘Now you know if it hadn’t’a been for you, I shouldn’t be in this scrape.’ ‘That’s a lie,’ said Mrs. Shea. ‘No it isn’t a lie either,’ responded Mrs. Webb. ‘And what’s more, you don’t do anything else but steal. I know. Didn’t you steal a tub from Humphrey & Seyms, and a pair of shoes from Chapin & King?. . . And a bag of buckwheat flour from Owen & Parker? . . . And five bars of soap from Charles Burton? There! Don’t you talk to me about not getting me into this scrape.’ And all this was interesting to Officer Wright, who, after securing his charges in the lockup, went in search of the different articles enumerated by Mrs. Webb, and found
them at various places where Mrs. Shea had disposed of them.”[41]

  The following morning Celia Webb and Kathryn Shea, for theft, were fined $1 each and sent to jail for fifteen days. . . .[42]

  Trouble followed Celia Webb everywhere. In March 1864, Deputy Provost Marshal Fenn “found a deserter from the 5th Regiment, John Rafferty, staying with the Webb family. Fenn proceeded to arrest Rafferty, but the deserter resisted with the aid of Celia Webb and her daughter Eliza. The two women were furious, and in their rage, assaulted the officer with all sorts of weapons within reach—knives, forks, kettles, and chairs; they even threw hot water at him. In desperation, Eliza seized a butcher knife. . . . Once Rafferty was in handcuffs, Celia Webb and her daughter were arrested and taken before U. S. Commissioner Erastus Smith, charged with harboring a deserter, to which they pleaded not guilty and were imprisoned to await trial. More degraded women . . . do not exist in this city and Eliza’s conduct gave evidence of it . . . cursing vehemently. . . . If the military authorities succeed in putting these women where they can do no mischief, it will be a great relief to the civil officers, who have some of the family under lock and key most of the time.”[43]

  In this case, Celia Webb and her daughter were in serious trouble. They were brought before U. S. Commissioner Erastus Smith the following morning. . . and were bound over for trial . . . in May. . . . Failing to procure bonds, they were remanded to jail.[44]

  Jane McQueeney’s arrest for fighting with Celia Webb seems to brand her as a woman of easy virtue, but this isn’t necessarily so. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when a woman turned to prostitution, almost without exception she adopted an alias. Almost universally, prostitutes chose names like Lillie, Jennie, Tillie, Lottie, Nellie, and Dottie; never Jane. Since Jane McQueeney did not alter her name, it seems most likely that she was not a prostitute. Instead, it seems that rum was her problem. A meatier matter is the effect that Jane and Timothy McQueeney’s alcohol consumption had on their children. Not to argue that young Jennie McQueeney was driven into prostitution solely because of a bad home life, but it amounted to a serious contributing cause.