Blood & Ivy Read online

  For Richard & Shirley Thick, with gratitude for all your help

  Contents

  A Note on the Text

  Prologue

  I. SCENES OF THE CRIME

  1.THE WAY INTO HARVARD

  2.ON PINS AND CROWBARS

  3.THE SKELETON BOX

  4.THE GREAT WORLD GOES CLANGING ON

  II. THE VICTIM

  5.A BAD BUSINESS

  6.A GENTLEMAN UNKNOWN

  7.THE YELLOW ENVELOPE

  8.SOME ABERRATION OF MIND

  III. THE SUSPECT

  9.THANKSGIVING BY THE FIRE

  10.THE FINAL REWARD

  11.WICKEDNESS TAKES ELEVEN

  12.“I SHAL BE KILED”

  IV. THE ACCUSED

  13.PISTOLS DRAWN

  14.A RUINED MAN

  15.OLD GRIMES IS DEAD

  16.A LIFETIME OF UPRIGHTNESS

  V. THE TRIAL

  17.IN THE DEAD HOUSE

  18.GOOD MEN AND TRUE

  19.THE CATALOG OF BONES

  20.MESMERIC REVELATION

  VI. THE VERDICT

  21.TWELVE MEN IN MASSACHUSETTS

  22.LAW MANUFACTURED FOR THE OCCASION

  23.A MAN IN ERROR

  24.CLOSING HOURS

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Sources

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  And this is good old Boston,

  The home of the bean and the cod,

  Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots,

  And the Cabots talk only to God.

  —JOHN COLLINS BOSSIDY (1910)

  BLOOD & IVY

  A Note on the Text

  THE COVERAGE OF THIS CASE—INCLUDING A MULTITUDE OF newspaper accounts, letters, journals, court transcripts, and memoirs—allowed me to draw on many eyewitness sources. All dialogue in quotation marks comes directly from their accounts; lines rendered without quotation marks are paraphrased. While I have freely edited out verbiage from quotations, not a word has been added.

  —P.C.

  Prologue

  January 5, 1868

  IT WAS A MISERABLE NEW YEAR.

  The holidays should have been a delight for Charles Dickens; he was on a triumphant stage tour of the United States, his first in twenty-five years. To welcome him back to America, Boston threw off all its customary reserve. The city, the poet Henry Longfellow marveled, was “Dickenized,” its streets swept for his arrival and store shelves stuffed with copies of Great Expectations and David Copperfield. The eight thousand tickets for his first four shows sold out in hours. Protected from fans by his entourage—“our men sit outside the room door and wrestle with mankind,” Dickens reported—he paced about a suite at the Parker Hotel, musing at the strangeness of it all. Boston was hardly the place he’d left behind in 1842.

  “The city has increased enormously in five-and-twenty years,” he wrote to his daughter. “It has grown more mercantile—it is like Leeds . . . but for smoke and fog you substitute an exquisitely bright light air.” And it had only one catch: “The cost of living is enormous.”

  This was not for lack of Americans offering to host him. Even after carefully limiting his social engagements to his old literary friends, he spent his days in a whirl of lunches and dinners with the likes of Longfellow, Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. True, their numbers were diminished by the losses of Thoreau and Hawthorne, and Longfellow’s leonine mane had given way to a long white beard worthy of Father Christmas. Yet the poet found Dickens much the same as when he’d last seen him: “So many years—twenty-five! He looks somewhat older, but is as elastic and quick in his movements as ever.”

  Dickens’s manner of coping with his fame also remained unchanged: he walked away from it. As was his habit, during his tour he hiked at least seven miles through the city every morning, often alone, but sometimes with fellow authors struggling to keep up with the fifty-five-year-old. If he paused to look in a shop window—now busily hawking Little Nell Cigars and Pickwick Snuff—crowds stopped to see what had drawn their visiting celebrity’s gaze. Crossing the bridge over the Charles River, Dickens found that, unlike Boston, “Cambridge is exactly as I left it.” Time had stood still around Harvard Square. Just as merchants were the presiding spirit of Boston, so authors were in Cambridge. Here he was just one among many in a town where, Bret Harte joked, “you couldn’t fire a revolver from your front porch without bringing down a two-volumer.”

  These authors attended Dickens’s first show en masse; the group lacked only Melville, who came to a later show. Longfellow, though admitting that “Boston audiences are proverbially cold,” felt unusually jaunty on a moonlight ride to the theater. So did other Bostonians, as it happened. Dickens’s half-recited and half-acted readings—played out around a stage set of his writing desk—were met with sheer delight. Even the usually reserved Emerson, one spectator observed, “laughed as if he might crumble to pieces.” A correspondent for the New-York Tribune, watching the roaring Boston crowd in amazement, wrote simply, “I thought the roof would go off.”

  The tour was generating so much money that Dickens and his road crew almost didn’t know where to put it all. “The manager,” he reported, “is always going about with an immense bundle that looks like a sofa-cushion.”

  Yet success couldn’t save Dickens from a glum Christmas. He woke up that morning to a fever and a cold—an exotic and punishing American variety he couldn’t shake. “I have tried allopathy, homeopathy, cold things, warm things, sweet things, stimulants, narcotics, all with the same result,” he groaned. “Nothing will touch it.” It even stood up to his hotel manager’s cure: a cocktail dubbed a Rocky Mountain Sneezer, which shook together snow with “all the spirits ever heard of in the world.”

  It was as well, then, that Dickens took Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. as his visitor on the morning of January 5. Though he was famed as a poet and an essayist—and had a promising son who’d just passed the bar exam—Holmes’s daily work was still as a professor at Harvard’s medical school. There was only so much he could do for a cold, yet his company was salutary and bracing amid Boston’s polite gentility. For the job of a physician, Dr. Holmes would muse, made one something of a seer: you could stare into an apparently healthy man’s future and see that he was about to die.

  His old friend Dickens had nothing to worry about—yet.

  With the ailing author as restless as ever, they made their way through the snow to the banks of the Charles River, and to the Massachusetts Medical College. Inexorably, their steps went along Grove Street, tracing those of two men whose history weighed upon them. For a tragedy had passed in Dickens’s long absence, one shared between the authors and society worthies he had met in Boston: a shocking morality play enacted in their burgeoning city, back when their youth and their country were both beginning to darken.

  The murder, Dickens asked. Show me where it happened.

  Part I

  SCENES OF THE CRIME

  1

  THE WAY INTO HARVARD

  JULY 1849 SAW THE BOYS ARRIVING IN CAMBRIDGE AS THEY had for years: coming over the bridge from Boston, down dusty streets shaded by old elms, and disembarking at a sweltering omnibus station. “ice! ice! ice!” promised an ad from a store next to the depot, but even that was no relief. For the boys arriving into town during one of the hottest weeks of the year, there was little else to do but find the local inns or the homes of family friends or relatives, and there, in spare rooms and guest beds, to lie in the oppressive summer night and wait. If they couldn’t sleep, there was staring at the ceiling and out the window to occupy them, wondering if they were ready, and if they were even willing, until exhaustion shut their eyes.

  When they awoke, it was stil
l dark out.

  As the sun rose, they came in from all sides of Cambridge, scores of them, down Harvard Street and Holmes Place, some sauntering across the Cambridge Common, others earnestly keeping to the paths. Harvard’s campus was empty on this early Monday morning, a deceptive calm before the commencement to be held later that week. Soon the bunting would be hung, lecterns positioned for the governor and other worthies to declaim from, the grass flattened by crowds of proud parents, and pitchers lined up for the much-needed tumblers of lemonade.

  All this remained out of reach for now, as the boys seeking admission to Harvard were ushered into University Hall, Room 16. Parents and other family were left outside; the applicants were on their own. In this creaking old room were the others who would become their classmates—and some that wouldn’t. The tableau was the same every year.

  “Young men, some standing, others sitting, in different postures—some full of dread and apprehension, half afraid to meet the eye of others,” one applicant wrote of Room 16. “Some were full of confidence and bold—full of self respect,—observing others,—laughing at the awkward or diffident.”

  Divided into smaller groups by proctors, they were called out, one at a time, into the two adjoining exam rooms. A tutor began with a simple request: State your name, age, month born, and the name of your father.

  John Quincy Adams, said one. I am fifteen years old. Born September. My father is Charles Francis Adams. An unnecessary introduction, perhaps; his namesake grandfather had been president, and his father was on the university’s Board of Overseers.

  Moses Henry Day. Heir to a twine and a cordage manufactory—one of two twine heirs that day, in fact. I am seventeen. Born in May. My father is Moses Henry Day Sr.

  William Dorsheimer, boomed an improbably sonorous voice. The boy had the beard and bearing of a man of forty. I am seventeen years old. Born in February. My father is Philip Dorsheimer. A German immigrant’s son from New York; new money.

  Nathan Henry Chamberlain. I am twenty years old, born in December. My father is Artemas White Chamberlain. A Cambridge policeman’s son. No money.

  The rolls continued with each group as they came through the exam rooms. There was Samuel Shaw, whose father was the state’s chief justice and another university overseer; there was Albert Browne, a thirteen-year-old abolitionist firebrand in the making—and, as if to balance him out, John Daves, an equally fiery young North Carolinian. Scores more passed through the room, and once the tutor had finished conducting each roll, a printed sheet of sentences in English was placed before every boy.

  Translate those into Latin, they were told.

  In the next room, more exercises—this time translating Latin into English. Then the same exercises, but with Greek. One could also expect to face a professor of Greek for one or two sudden point-blank questions: What cases do verbs of admiring or despising govern? The genitive and the dative, sir. Or, perhaps, a wildly long-haired professor, by turns bemused, distracted, and then remarkably intense, suddenly pouncing: What is (a + b) times (a - b)? It’s a squared minus b squared, sir. As evening fell, the exhausted boys went back to their lodgings. Then, staggering awake in the predawn hours, they got up and did it all again. The most meaningful difference of the second day was that the number bothering to show would be noticeably diminished.

  This went on until two in the afternoon, when suddenly, remarkably, the admissions exams were finished.

  The boys lingered outside University Hall, shuffling and unsure. And then, one by one, the names were called out. Walking inside, each boy found a room full of faculty before them: there was the poet Longfellow, familiar from the engraved portraits in their books at home; the famed mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Peirce, recognizable as their wild-haired interrogator in algebra; and the kindly visage of Jared Sparks, newly appointed that summer as Harvard’s president. Sparks had gone through the admissions exams nearly forty years before, a poor and largely self-taught carpenter’s apprentice. It was said that he’d been so flustered that he very nearly failed to get in; of the boys gathered in Room 16 the day before, President Sparks would have been numbered among the anxious. So the words were all the more significant coming from him.

  Welcome to Harvard.

  As each young man emerged, the count of the Class of 1853 edged steadily upward. By the end of the day, there were eighty-seven of them, the largest incoming class the college had ever known.

  AND THEN, for six weeks every year, the town fell into dead silence.

  “The average number of people that pass for twelve hours from 6 to 6, per hour, is 1/12,” came the droll report of John Holmes, whose house lay on a street bordering the town common. “The only amusement we have is the burglaries.”

  Cambridge was hot, empty, and dusty. The students were away on their break, and the faculty afield to procure new specimens, dig into archives, deliver learned speeches, or just stroll the beach in Nahant. But by the end of August, the common began to fill again with new students. Some came across the quad, trunks stuffed and wagons piled, their fathers pointing out old dorms and former glories; others arrived alone, lugging trunks up unfamiliar stairs; and all of them poked their heads into their neighbors’ rooms in the manner of new students from time immemorial. It was at about this time that the Cambridge Furniture & Carpet Ware Rooms could expect a run on the store; students had to provide their own enameled washbasins, their own rugs, and hang their own curtains in the dormitory rooms.

  Only some lucky freshmen had procured dorm rooms, however. At Harvard, students longed to live on campus; the more senior the student, the more certain he was to be found in a dormitory, especially a desirable one like Hollis or Holworthy. The rooms there, one resident noted admiringly, were “large, with pleasant, high windows, and stout doors, which will defy many a hard kick.”

  Scattered through other dorms and boardinghouses were Harvard’s graduate students, whose population was burgeoning. Along with its three hundred undergraduates, Harvard now boasted nearly as many students attending a divinity school, a law school, a medical school, and a newly formed scientific school. The Medical College started its term last—not until the November snows set in. This was just as well, as professors and interns alike were needed elsewhere to combat the deadly epidemics of an Indian summer. They were not much helped by what one doctor described as that year’s favored cure for Bostonians: “to form groups at the corners of streets, and there boldly maintain that the doctors are all humbugs, and the city government is an anomalous mixture of old women and asses.” More than six hundred cholera deaths later, Boston’s street corners had turned rather quieter, and new students picking up their first issue of the Cambridge Chronicle received an ominous greeting.

  “Death,” it announced, “has been busy in our midst.”

  Still, such ills were largely a problem for Boston, a ten-cent horse-omnibus ride away across the bridge. In a charming town like Cambridge, the evils of the city could seem far away indeed.

  THEY TRUDGED to morning prayers in the early light, across the newly fallen leaves in Harvard Yard, and with the tolling of the bell guiding their way. The bell could not be avoided, even after a mischievous student chemist poured sulfuric acid on it, even after another cut the bell rope and boarded up the tower; all this merely resulted in a janitor busting down the belfry door to ring the bell with a hammer. Morning chapel was not to be denied. The hour was so early that some students simply arrived in their nightgowns, a not entirely satisfactory solution, as the chapel was unheated. But attend they did; monitors kept lists of any backsliding students who slept in, and arriving after the bell stopped tolling lost a student eight points from the byzantine Scale of Merit they were allotted each term.

  Getting written up was an inevitable, if nerve-jangling, rite of passage for freshmen. True, there was the guidance of the Laws of Harvard University booklet, but it ran forty pages, and in any case—up at five-thirty? In time, experience would reveal the merit system for what it was
: a trade-off of cost and benefit. Absence, perversely, only cost two points, so as to prevent disruptions in the service. For a savvy upperclassman carefully tracking his venial sins through the twenty-week term, that meant chapel could safely be skipped once each week.

  After chapel, the students shuffled out to a much-needed breakfast. This autumn, though, was different: they all headed back to their boardinghouses or to eating-houses, or they simply ate in their dorms. It was the first time the students hadn’t gone across the Yard to the dining commons in University Hall. For two centuries, Harvard’s students had dined together on campus, in a tradition as ancient and roundly resented as morning prayers. Commons breakfast—coffee “cooked in a dirty copper boiler and tinctured strongly with verdigris,” a doughy lump of bread, and butter “not fit to grease cartwheels with”—had so often occasioned riots that the tables and chairs in the dining hall were bolted to the floor. Alas, the same preventive measure could not be taken for the college’s crockery, and most of it was smashed in an 1818 student fracas.

  The dining commons had also had the misfortune of being centrally located in University Hall, where it had been hungrily eyed for classroom space. Now it was gone, and it was hardly missed, at least initially: by the previous spring, sympathetic faculty members had been granting so many special permissions to avoid the commons that only one-sixth of the students had been showing up anyway. Yet the end of shared meals hinted that the old college was growing into a new university—into something larger and less intimate than the school their fathers and grandfathers attended.

  Their morning classes, at least, remained recognizable. Despite some short-lived attempts at reform a generation earlier, Harvard’s freshman curriculum remained stubbornly and almost shockingly retrograde. Of the sixteen hours of class time each week, fully eleven were spent in Greek and Latin. For the freshmen, this meant three hourly classes a day; on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, it typically meant math and Latin in the early morning, and then an hour of Greek at noon. On Tuesday and Thursday: more Greek and Latin. The relief of an hour of history on those days proved illusory: it was Schmitz’s A History of Rome. And then, on Saturday morning: more Greek and Latin.