The wonder being, all the while, as we look at the world, how absolutely, how inordinately, the Isabel Archers, and even much smaller female fry, insist on mattering.
—Henry James, Portrait of a Lady, preface to the New York edition, 1908
On November 1, 1843, a young woman dressed in black and carrying a large fur muff followed a man up the steps of the magnificent new Astor House Hotel on Broadway in New York. After what appeared to witnesses to be a brief conversation, she pulled out a folding knife—and stabbed him.
The reporters who later saw her recognized the horror of what she had done, but they were also quick to conclude that because she was the heroine of a story, she must be beautiful. Over the next two days the New York Express reported that “the wretched female who thus sought to imbrue her hands in blood is an elegant appearing woman, tall and of beautiful figure and form,” wearing a “splendid black dress.” When she appeared in court the following January, James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, made a deeper observation, noting that she was “a girl evidently of no ordinary character. Her hair and complexion are fair, but her eyebrows and eyes are very dark, giving an expression of sternness to a face which otherwise would justly be considered strikingly handsome.” A Herald reporter saw the expression of character that his editor described, but described her physical appearance somewhat differently. According to him, Norman had “very dark brown hair, expansive forehead, heavy eye brows and lashes, with a melancholy but very determined expression of countenance.” In the woodcut portrait the Herald published during Norman’s trial, her hands, face, and body are so obscured by her tiered dress, large fur muff, hat, and veil that it is almost impossible to tell what she looked like, allowing the paper’s readers to imagine whatever they liked best or expected to find.
The woman was twenty-five-year-old New Jersey–born Amelia Norman, a servant, seamstress, and sometime prostitute. The man she tried and failed to kill was thirty-one-year-old Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant originally from Boston. Norman had become Ballard’s mistress in the spring of 1841 during the depression that followed the economic collapse known as the Panic of 1837. After little over a year, during which Ballard moved her from one boardinghouse to another, he left the country, abandoning her and their child. When he returned, Norman pleaded with him to help support them, but Ballard refused. Instead he told her to “go and get her living as other prostitutes did.” It was this rebuff that evidently created the state of mind that pushed Norman to pursue Ballard up the stone steps of the Astor House on the night of November 1, 1843, and put a knife in him. Or, as Bennett put it, “the vengeance of a woman upon her despoiler cannot be checked, when jealousy and desertion goad her to its accomplishment.”
The trial of Amelia Norman attracted the excited attention of the penny press, particularly Bennett’s Herald, which thrived on sensation. Newspaper editors around the country, recognizing the interest the story was generating, republished it for the benefit of their own readers. People daily filled all three hundred seats in the courtroom, crowding the room “to excess,” while as many as a thousand more who couldn’t get in packed the lobby and spilled out the door, down the steps, and into the street. Years after the trial an observer remembered that “so great was the public interest in her that on the night the verdict was rendered, the courthouse was besieged by thousands of our citizens, and when the result was announced, the welkin rang with the plaudits of an excited populace!”
What was it about this would-be murderess that attracted the attention not only of the press and the public, but also of a coterie of influential supporters?What was it about this would-be murderess that attracted the attention not only of the press and the public, but also of a coterie of influential supporters? These supporters included the members of the American Female Moral Reform Society, who had been working since the 1830s to criminalize “seduction,” the concept then current in common law that allowed a woman’s father or master to sue her seducer on the basis of loss of services to himself. After her trial, and probably partly as a result of it, one of Norman’s lawyers, David Graham Jr., attacked the seduction tort from a different angle, seeking to make it possible for a woman to sue on her own behalf. In the age of the movements for abolition and women’s rights, reformers, including legal reformers like Graham, were seeking to jettison the idea that anyone could own the labor of another.
Two very different voices that spoke out in support of Norman belonged to Mike Walsh and George Wilkes, who were in jail when she was and met her there. Walsh, then around twenty-eight years old, was a leader of a radical splinter of New York’s Democratic Party and the editor of a weekly labor paper, the Subterranean, in which he published two editorials on Norman’s plight. He was in jail after convictions for libel, and assault and battery. His lawyer was the same David Graham who represented Norman. His friend Wilkes, twenty-seven, was a journalist who had coedited the Sunday Flash, one of the first examples in New York of the “flash,” or “sporting” press directed at men. In 1843 Wilkes was in jail for violating the terms of the suspended sentence he had received after being convicted for libel and publishing an obscene paper. While in jail Wilkes wrote a prison memoir, Mysteries of the Tombs: A Journal of Thirty Days Imprisonment in the New York City Prison for Libel, in which he recorded his observations of Norman and his feelings about her predicament. Like Walsh, Wilkes was a champion of the small artisans and workingmen who were struggling to maintain their livelihoods and their identities as men in the industrializing economy. Even though the focus of Walsh and Wilkes was chiefly on the difficulties of men like themselves, and even though they narrowly equated manhood with selfhood, both saw enough of their own plight in Norman to sympathize with her, and did so in their writings.
Of all Norman’s supporters the closest and most steadfast was the abolitionist and popular author Lydia Maria Child. Child helped find Norman a lawyer, accompanied her in the courtroom, took her home when the trial was over, and tried to help her get back on her feet afterward. Child wove elements of Norman’s story into her fiction, and she devoted a newspaper column, one in a series titled “Letters from New-York,” to her. Child’s writings about Norman were an avenue for her to develop her position on the cause of women’s rights, just then starting to coalesce into a movement. They were an outlet for her anger at what she called the “false structure of society” that allowed men to dominate women. In her “Letter from New-York No. V,” published in the Boston Courier immediately after Norman’s trial, Child erupted so angrily, and veered so close to condoning Norman’s violence, that fearing for her literary reputation, she excised six particularly heated paragraphs when the column was reprinted two weeks later in the National Anti-Slavery Standard.
What these supporters had in common, disparate as they were, was that they all read into Norman’s predicament a parable ready-made for their own use. Storytelling is central to understanding what made Norman matter to so many people. Her crime and trial unfolded at a period of heightened interest in narrative, whether written or spoken. In the 1830s and 1840s in the United States, crowds eagerly listened for hours to political speeches, abolitionist lectures, and revivalist sermons. The mystery novel and investigative journalism are both products of these decades. Rising literacy, mechanization of the processes of papermaking and printing, and spreading democracy all meant that more people read novels and newspapers.
In this atmosphere the boundaries between fiction and factual reporting sometimes blended. Lydia Maria Child, who inserted real people and events (including events from the life of Amelia Norman) into her stories, titled a book of them Fact and Fiction. Novelists, including Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, borrowed elements of their stories from the news. Poe, for example, based The Mystery of Marie Roget on the story of Mary Rogers, a young cigar seller who disappeared from her boardinghouse and then reappeared floating in the Hudson several days later, an apparent murder victim. During the period of Amelia Norman’s crime and trial, New Yorkers were fascinated by Eugène Sue’s novel The Mysteries of Paris, newly translated from French. George Wilkes read and admired it and was influenced by it when he wrote his Mysteries of the Tombs. Some let their excitement about Sue’s fictional heroine, Fleur de Marie, color how they understood Norman.
The penny press, which was central to these developments, was born in New York City in 1833 when Benjamin Day founded the New York Sun. In 1835 Scottish immigrant James Gordon Bennett quickly followed with the New York Herald. The newspapers that came before, many of them party organs, were directed at well-to-do men who paid an annual subscription of eight to ten dollars so they could follow the political and business news and keep up with the shipping columns and public notices. Penny papers were different. Sold cheaply on the streets by newsboys, they were written to attract a wide audience. The penny papers introduced local news and, above all, sensational stories, many of which were found in the city’s courtrooms by a new species of journalist, the investigative reporter.
Bennett of the Herald was one of the earliest to use the techniques of the investigative reporter. In 1836, his paper just a year old, Bennett rushed to one of the city’s exclusive brothels to see the just-murdered prostitute Helen Jewett. After viewing Jewett’s body, Bennett constructed for his readers an eroticized vision of the murdered woman, “a beautiful female corpse—that surpassed the finest statue of antiquity.” (Although he tried, he was unable to do the same for Norman, who was the aggressor, not the victim—alive, and, in Bennett’s own words, “determined.”) Investigating Jewett’s past, Bennett presented his readers with a young woman from Maine who, in a story that was similar to Norman’s, had worked as a servant, then migrated to New York, where she became a prostitute.
Bennett at first chose to believe in Richard P. Robinson, the man who was acquitted of the murder of Jewett, but who most likely did commit the crime. Bennett, who was probably swayed by the crowds of young men who supported Robinson, came around after Robinson’s trial, when presented with better evidence. Bennett’s Herald led the rest of the city’s press in pursuit of Jewett’s story, and his paper’s circulation jumped as a result. He learned from this experience, and his paper again took an aggressive lead when he learned of Amelia Norman’s attack on Henry Ballard in 1843.
When it came to pursuing Norman’s story, Bennett initially sympathized with Henry Ballard, “a man of credit and standing,” as he had with Robinson. He argued that Ballard, in “the pardonable excesses of youth,” had taken up with Norman, “whose position in society placed her at the command of any one whose purse could satisfy her demands,” until, when feeling “the nature of this connection derogatory to his position,” he wisely cut her off. But Bennett was again swayed by popular feeling, and came to side with Norman, even coming to advocate for the criminalization of seduction.
Some of the audience for crime in the nineteenth century went directly to the source. People attended trials for entertainment, just as they did the theater, and they expected lawyers to have the oratorical and performative skills of actors. Lawyers at Amelia Norman’s trial quoted poetry and Shakespeare because they knew that their reading, theatergoing audience would understand it. New York’s antebellum courtroom was often crowded with spectators who watched what amounted to a serial drama, as one trial after another cycled through it, with lawyers, judges, and sometimes defendants appearing repeatedly in different roles. These stories formed an ongoing pageant of crime, the narrative cycle in which Amelia Norman’s story was set.
On the surface it seems that Norman, preoccupied with the events of her own life, accidentally propelled herself into the center of a set of causes that had nothing to do with her.On the surface it seems that Norman, preoccupied with the events of her own life, accidentally propelled herself into the center of a set of causes that had nothing to do with her. It is hard to know what she thought about the plight of workers in an industrializing society, or the criminalization of seduction, or the just-forming movement for women’s rights. This is because almost none of her own speech survives. Only a few fragments were recorded in writing, and every one of them was filtered through someone else—Lydia Maria Child, the witnesses who gave testimony to the police or at her trial, and the newspaper reporters who took it all down—and then only at the one, highly charged moment when she stepped into the public spotlight. She recorded none of her own thoughts because she did not know how to write. When she was asked to sign the interview she gave after her arrest, she signed with an X, the symbol traditionally used in place of a signature by people who cannot write. Because of that, and unlike her very prolific supporters, she left no letters, diaries, speeches, or newspaper columns.
But as I became more familiar with Norman’s story, I came to feel that her act of violence on the Astor House steps was more than simply a personal act of revenge. She may not have been able to read or write about the careening economy that crushed the poor, and particularly poor women, while it barely clipped the wings of prosperous merchants like Henry Ballard, or the inequalities that the burgeoning movement for women’s rights was beginning to identify. Instead, these things were embodied in the circumstances of her life. Her violence was the wrong mode of expression, but it seems to me that when she attacked Henry Ballard so publicly on the Astor House steps, she, like Henry James’s Isabel Archer, insisted on mattering.
Amelia Norman’s story has significance as a story, but it is also more than that. I am as guilty as any of the people who wrote about her almost two hundred years ago in exploiting it for your pleasure and mine. I hope, however, in reading it you will see that it is also a piece of evidence that shows how change occurs, how history, in other words, is made. Norman’s actions did not, on their own, “change history.” Her dramatic moment on the stage created by the steps of the Astor House was brief. The two changes in seduction law that her actions unintentionally helped bring into being were rooted in the values and preoccupations of the mid-nineteenth century, and they fizzled and died by the early twentieth when the notion of “seduction” became obsolete.
Instead, Norman’s attack on Henry Ballard and its reception by her contemporaries reveal the machinery of history, the way it progresses in twisty and unexpected ways, one step forward and two steps back, enmeshed in contemporary values and circumstances that later become obscure, propelled by chance events and unlikely actors who are unaware that forces of history are working through them. Norman could not write as Lydia Maria Child did, or speak like Mike Walsh did when he stood up in front of roaring political crowds, or effect changes in the law, as the moral reformers and David Graham did, but their words were made out of her experience. Historians want to know what forces, human and otherwise, brought us from there to here. In that story all the moving parts of the machine, even the tiny ones, even the broken ones, matter.
In 1845 a friend of Lydia Maria Child’s, the pioneering feminist author Margaret Fuller, published Woman in the Nineteenth Century. In it she commended Child for supporting Norman. She argued that Child had used Norman’s story to make people see that men as well as women ought to behave with “virtue.” Child, she wrote, “was successful in arresting the attention of many who had before shrugged their shoulders, and let sin pass as necessarily a part of the company of men. They begin to ask whether virtue is not possible, perhaps necessary, to man as well as to woman. They begin to fear that the perdition of a woman must involve that of a man. This is a crisis. The results of this case will be important.” As I write in 2019, the “me too” movement, which calls powerful men to account for their behavior toward women, is evolving. The balance of power between men and women has only now, after many decades of feminist effort, tipped just enough to make this movement effective. Margaret Fuller, it now appears, was right.
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