Prostitution in the Gilded Age
Page 5
Immediately after Hartford established a city police court in 1851, Judge Bulkeley prosecuted Julia Ann Harlow “for keeping a house of ill fame on Ferry Street.”[60] This particular street, along with Kilbourn, State and Commerce—the streets closest to the Connecticut River—supported flop houses and flag taverns for decades before prostitution really blossomed in Hartford after 1850. However, Judge Eliphalet Bulkeley was not known for the hardness of his heart and simply discharged Julia Ann Harlow—ostensively because she did not have an established reputation as a madame. Though not always the case, sometimes a single close brush with jail saved a young woman from a life of vice and degradation.
The Julia Ann Harlow case, contrasted with similar cases of the time, highlights an enormous change that took shape in the last part of the Gilded Age. In the early 1850s, these cases were rare and disposed of quickly without even a Jonathan Edwards-style tongue-lashing. Prostitution had been around forever and its effect on society or the development of the city did not present a case of vile and intolerable criminality. A dozen years later—after Judge Bulkeley’s oldest boy, Capt. Charles Bulkeley, died in the Civil War—undoubtedly the judge would have cared even less about prostitution or petty vice. Charles’s passing left the judge a broken man and hastened his departure from this world in 1872. As with Judge Bulkeley, the nation cared little about vice in the aftermath of the War of the Rebellion. It would be the judge’s second son, Morgan—coupled with an entirely different city and social milieu—who brought an end to the city’s prostitution. However, even as Morgan marched around Suffolk, Virginia, with a Springfield musket on his shoulder in 1862, he hadn’t a clue that the city’s battle with vice would ultimately wind up in his lap.
It wasn’t just in Connecticut that vice became an implacable force embedded deep in the social fabric of the land. During the Gilded Age, every city and town in America employed some type of armed truce with the social evil. As the nation grieved its Civil War losses, vice continued to blossom. At long last, in the first decade, or so, of the new century, “legalized” prostitution—thanks mostly to civic pride and the twin horrors of white slavery and social disease—disappeared from the American landscape forever.
Following the new police court system, the time quickly arrived for Hartford to establish a real police force. Most towns around the country had some combination of constables, sheriffs, marshals and night watchmen. Hartford’s network of constables grew out of its first officer in 1636 and its night watch system took wing in 1815. The huge move forward—where a legitimate police force actually had uniforms, badges (and, surreptitiously, guns)—came in July 1860.[61]
The new city police force rented space on the second floor of the Union Hall building in Statehouse Square, a location that lawmen enjoyed because of its centralized location. By 1865, they were forced to move to the first floor of a building on Pearl Street, near Main. Unfortunately, a few years later, Connecticut Mutual bought the whole neighborhood for its new headquarters, so the police moved again to the corner of Main and Kingsley Streets—above Talcott Brothers market. At last, in 1898, the city built a new police station on Market Street and the police enjoyed a permanent headquarters for the next few decades.[62]
The men who brought Jennie McQueeney to the police rooms at City Hall in 1858 were not members of an organized police force. They were merely constables—men hired to keep the peace. The constables took the day shift, and while citizens slept, a night watch patrolled the streets on the lookout for criminal activity. Someone arrested during the night wound up in the watch-house until morning when the courts could dispose of the matter.[63]
The decade from the mid-1850s to the mid-1860s set public opinion, state statutes, police responses and the general intrigues of the prostitution business until about 1910. The methods and practices of the sex industry varied in the United States, but were influenced profoundly by the advent of organized police forces and the inability of these new departments to gain a solid footing at the outset.
As one would expect, the largest cities in America were the first to organize police forces. In New York, a municipal police department—closely allied with the Democratic Party and the Tammany Hall political machine of William Magear “Boss” Tweed—came together in 1845. However, the state legislature at Albany was Republican and itched to gain power over Boss Tweed and his political puppets. To crush New York City’s Democratic government, the General Assembly forced a Metropolitan Police Department on the city in 1857. Thanks to New York’s 7th Regiment, the denizens of New York learned to love the Metropolitan Police apace.
Chicago’s first police department came together in 1855 under Captain Cyrus P. Bradley. After a nasty political fight, Mayor John Wentworth fired the entire force. When cooler heads finally prevailed, the officers were rehired and the police department began to function well. By 1861, a detective division was added and Cyrus Bradley was returned as superintendent of the whole department.
San Francisco and Los Angeles had similar stories of organization, missteps, and finally, a uniformed police force in 1856 and 1869, respectively. San Francisco got the jump on Los Angeles due to the madness created by the 1849 gold rush.
These early police forces had a number of things in common: manpower shortages, lack of training, poor understanding of the law, a certain amount of public distrust—and, in some cases, poor leadership and corruption.
After Hartford’s new police court had been in operation for almost a decade—and considered a well-oiled machine—the time came to eliminate the constables and watchmen. The new Hartford Police Department was composed of Chief Walter Chamberlin, Captain Charles Nott, Lieutenant Charles Brewster, and five patrolmen—Clinton, Peck, Butler, Keegan, and Brown. The real standout, Officer John Butler, was a huge, powerful man—and completely without fear.
Chamberlin and Nott were both Vermonters, who as $10-a-month raftsmen, found their way down the Connecticut River in 1831 and 1843, respectively. Both men planned to build new lives in Hartford, but their plans were vague. For a first job, Walter Chamberlin ran the engine at Burgess’s Sawmill in the Dutch Point shipbuilding area. To make extra money, Chamberlin joined the night watch. In those days, the watch warden, Normand Granger, supervised only four watchmen—Walter Chamberlin; Henry Moore; and two brothers, Westell and William Russell. For $1, the night watchmen went on duty at ten p.m. and finished up at four a.m. the following morning.[64]
At the time, most of the town’s mercantile trade transpired in the river district. At night, the raftsmen and sailors gathered in the streets in large numbers. Because stagecoaches handled so much of the town’s business, on Saturday nights at least fifty stage drivers roamed about town, making noise and spoiling for trouble. The raftsmen and stage drivers rarely agreed on anything and fights were the usual outcome. In sum, the night watch had its hands full just preserving order.[65]
Walter Chamberlin, a wonderfully imaginative character, accepted an increasing amount of work as a constable over time. He left town regularly to work up cases and transfer prisoners. Chamberlin loved disguises and used them extensively to amuse himself. In 1859, Chamberlin went to New York to collect Samuel Jones, the Colchester bank defaulter, and deliver him to Norwich. Chamberlin and Jones changed trains several times and Sam Jones continually introduced Walter Chamberlin as his prisoner! Of course, Chamberlin loved it, and with his head bowed in mock shame, played it to the full.[66]
After Charles Nott found his way to Hartford, he worked on farms for a couple of years. Then, during the period of legendary fires, Nott got a job on the night watch. During Charles Nott’s time as a watchman, there were major conflagrations at Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, New York, Toronto and Quebec. Half of London, England, burned to the ground. In July 1845, a conflagration consumed 300 buildings in Rochester. A fire in Brooklyn destroyed more than 300 houses and 3 churches. Fire wiped out half of Saint Louis. San Franciscans witnessed a fire that destroyed 1,500 buildings—three-fourths of the city![67]
During this distinctively bad time—when municipalities grew out of control and water systems were still futuristic fantasies—a city’s only real hope lay with its night watch. It was a race against time. Could a few poorly paid watchmen sound the alarm soon enough to save a city? Hartford had one huge advantage. In 1800, the legislature passed a bill outlawing the construction of wooden buildings in the city; everything had to be built of stone or brick. Add slate roofs to the preferred building materials list and the chances of an all-consuming conflagration were vastly diminished.[68]
Meanwhile, prostitution and the nascent Hartford police were almost complete strangers. In October 1860, Walter Chamberlin’s first quarterly report read as a monotonous collection of arrests: drunkenness, 343; breach of the peace, 80; assault, 55; stolen property (including horses), 21; and keepers of houses of ill fame, 1. The report includes one statistic germane to our discussion of prostitution. In the final paragraph, the account states flatly that, at the time, Hartford had ten houses of ill repute.[69]
At the very same time, religious and civic-minded citizens across America were taking the law into their own hands. In Cleveland, men called “regulators” visited houses of ill fame, breaking all the furniture and daubing it with coal tar. At a riot in St. Louis, “between 20 and 30 houses of ill fame were entirely cleared out, and the furniture was burned in the streets.” A year later in Terre Haute, Indiana, a mob destroyed eight houses of ill repute. This is only a tiny sample of the great divide in opinions on prostitution during the Gilded Age.[70]
Despite the weightiness of the subject, funny things did happen. In early 1862, seven police officers descended on a house of ill fame on Mercer Street in New York and arrested the madame and five of her girls (the prostitutes were all under sixteen). The old man playing the piano threw himself on his knees and wailed, “Officer, for God’s sake, spare me the disgrace of arrest. I am a member of an uptown church, and get a salary as an organist.” The police were so amused by the decrepit pianist that they left the old guy alone.[71]
In a Connecticut case, “Nelly Adams (an assumed name) was arrested in Hartford for being a common prostitute. On her promise to go to her home in North Adams, Massachusetts, she was let off. Nelly was a rather good-looking girl and was infatuated with the son of a well-known citizen. Upon her arrest she sent for the son, but the messenger mistakenly arrived with the father. The ugly scene that ensued must be left to the reader’s imagination.”[72]
Lastly, from Washington, “A drunken man was taken from a house of ill repute to a lock-up, and upon him was found a bankroll of $3,000 and a paper showing that he was a judge of the U.S. court in a western state. The awed policemen took him home.”[73]
When Jennie McQueeney’s family relocated to Providence, this stubborn, eighteen-year-old beauty fell under the influence of Bridget Creed, another Irish immigrant from Providence who lived in Hartford at the time. In 1861, this connection between Providence and Hartford wasn’t considered extraordinary or even peculiar. After two New England railroads merged to form the Hartford, Providence, and Fishkill Railroad—with the connection to Providence completed in 1854—an enormous amount of passenger and freight business jostled between these two small cities.[74] While central Connecticut became famous for rifles, revolvers, leather industrial belting, silk manufacture, thread production, hardware and precision tools, the environs of Providence had a rich manufacturing history too. Providence’s cotton and woolen textile production became the largest in the nation. Brown and Sharpe became the country’s largest producer of machine tools and the Corliss Steam Engine Company towered as the granddaddy of all engine manufacturers.
Bridget Creed had adopted the name Angelina—which later morphed into Angeline—making it fairly obvious that she began her working life as a prostitute. She worked in a roadhouse in Providence owned by an entrepreneur, William L. “Billy” Prentice. Billy’s wife, Delila, had been married before and had a five-year-old girl, Ann. Billy Prentice operated like most men in the prostitution business; driven by money, often they got derailed by beautiful and treacherous women. For these men, temptation was their handmaiden, and drama and chaos followed them everywhere.[75]
By 1861, Billy and Delila were divorced, and Angeline and Billy were married. Born in Connecticut, Prentice probably thought Angeline was a Rhode Island native since she claimed that all her life. Angeline’s father, Peter Creed, and her mother, Bridget Creed, were hardworking, illiterate Irish immigrants, but lived quietly and within the law. Angeline was the outlier. Though not much of a fib during the Gilded Age, Angeline lied about her roots and birth date as circumstances dictated. When Angeline married thirty-eight-year-old Billy Prentice, she was twenty-four despite her claims to twenty-one. Her last husband, the National League baseball player Joe Start, thought Angeline was only six years older than him, while eight years represented the truth![76]
Billy Prentice may have been in a dirty racket, but he took the business seriously. As such, he scouted constantly for the opportunity to open another bawdy house. He wanted a place for Angeline to run while he tended the roadhouse in Providence. The house he chose sat on a lonely stretch of the New Britain road just outside of Hartford. The location seemed perfect—far enough from Hartford’s incorporated limits for the police to dismiss it and yet easily accessible to patrons. By keeping low profiles and arranging their affairs just so, neither Billy nor Angeline Prentice ever suffered a prostitution arrest. In business matters, they were extremely careful.
By Angeline’s own testimony (four decades later), during the time she ran this roadhouse on the New Britain road, Jennie McQueeney—now using the name Jennie Taylor—worked as a prostitute and learned the trade. By Angeline’s account, Jennie took well to the business and became on the whole very astute at the management side of the brothel business.[77]
Angeline and Jennie both started out as prostitutes, and curiously, in an age of large families and no birth control, neither of the two women ever birthed a single child. This could be the result of congenital defects, but it is far more likely that poorly performed abortions, or disease, damaged their reproductive systems. (One simple fact: each successive bout of Pelvic Inflammatory Disease—often brought on by gonorrhea—increased the chances of infertility.) With promiscuous young women, pregnancy was a foregone conclusion in the 1800s and abortions of all types were common. There were doctors who performed abortions in their offices (after hours). Or, if a woman had enough money, she could get an abortion in a hospital under a medical nom mal approprié. Moreover, some women chose self-abortion, though every bit as dangerous as it sounds. In July 1881, a St. Louis resident, Mrs. Kate McClure—a woman who had performed five self-abortions—bled to death. On the autopsy report, the medical examiner noted that “splinters” were found.” (Most women preferred crochet hooks, but in a pinch they weren’t fussy.)[78]
Despite a dubious history, Jennie McQueeney always showed gratitude to Angeline Prentice for giving her a start in the business. Later in life, when the two women traveled together, Jennie McQueeney (Hollister) always paid Angeline’s way. Jennie also gave Angeline clothes. (They were the same petite size.) This closeness between a madame and one of her former prostitutes, beggars belief. Then again, one must consider that the demimonde overflowed with lepers. Perhaps one simple friendship, no matter what the circumstances, offered a small comfort that the average person could never understand.[79]
When it comes to recording the lives of the half-world, the word demimonde has been with us since the close of the eighteenth century. In New
York’s salacious Shaw-Carstang case, it developed ever so slowly that the St. Louis spinster, Miss Effie Carstang, wasn’t a respectable member of society, but a soiled dove of the demimonde. At the last moment, Henry Shaw—Miss Carstang’s wealthy, octogenarian lover—called off the wedding and the couple endured a lengthy legal battle instead of a week of unabashed carnal frenzy. In the first trial, the jury sided with the jilted maiden and awarded her $100,000. But in the second go-round, a different jury found for the skinflint bachelor, Henry Shaw. During the reprise, the world enjoyed a kiss-by-hug chronicle of Miss Carstang’s lusty past. Sadly, the jury had to decide whether or not Miss Effie Carstang belonged among the respectable people or down in the demimonde.
Ah, there’s that lovely French word again. The Herald, one of New York’s sleaziest penny dailies, was kind enough to elaborate. “Demimonde is a French term for a class of women very well known abroad and not altogether unknown in certain circles in the United States. The best definition of the demimonde woman extant is given in Le Demi-Monde, the play of M. Dumas fils, by the famous comparison of the peaches: the fruit as it is exposed to view in the basket looks all alike, but here and there you find a specimen with a spurious spot under the skin—not a large spot, but still a spot. The unsound peaches represent the demimonde women, who are clever, handsome, well-bred, cultivated, agreeable, and so on—but they have the taint.”[80]
“The demimonde woman has no affections—she has only appetites; she has no heart—only a sort of air pump; her rule of life is founded upon interest tables. The question of money is the only vital matter with her. She is a gambler, and her game varies according to the circumstances and the surroundings of her victim. . . .We must do the common street woman the justice to say that she is not acknowledged by the demimonde. That interesting class regards the lorette with a degree of holy terror, compared to which the virtuous indignation of ancient maidens and venerable dowagers is extremely mild. No, the demimonde woman may be found oftentimes at the tables or in the salons of very nice people; not infrequently, she has a pew in a fashionable church and attends to her religious duties with rigid regularity. . . .”[81]