The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  Within hours, Poe’s enemies were lining up to heap further indignities on the corpse. On the day after the funeral, an obituary appeared in Horace Greeley’s Tribune. “Edgar Allan Poe is dead,” the article began. “He died in Baltimore on the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. The poet was known, personally or by reputation, in all this country; had readers in England and in several of the states of Continental Europe, but he had few or no friends; and the regrets for his death will be suggested principally by the consideration that in him literary art has lost one of its most brilliant but erratic stars.” The obituary went on to describe Poe variously as a lunatic with a diseased imagination and a crass beggar prone to “vulgar fancies” and “ignoble passions.” The notice concluded with a passage lifted from a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton: “He had, to a morbid excess, that desire to rise which is vulgarly called ambition, but no wish for the esteem or the love of his species; only the hard wish to succeed—not shine, not serve—succeed, that he might have the right to despise a world which galled his self-conceit.”

  Signed by the name of “Ludwig,” the damning article was actually the work of Rufus Griswold, who had lost no time in exacting revenge on Poe, who was not only his literary foe but also his rival for the affections of Fanny Osgood. Although several of Poe’s former friends, including George Graham and Nathaniel Willis, rushed to defend Poe’s memory, Poe himself had already insured that Griswold’s opinions would hold sway in years to come. With his uncanny instinct for self-destruction, Poe had appointed Griswold his literary executor. This afforded his enemy the chance to expand on the hostile obituary in a thirty-five-page “Memoir of the Author,” appended to a posthumous two-volume edition of Poe’s work. Eager to present Poe as morally debased, Griswold put forward a lengthy catalog of sins and offenses, many of them fabricated for the occasion. Griswold accused Poe of having been expelled from the University of Virginia, of deserting the army, of drug addiction, of attempts to seduce his foster father’s second wife, and of making drunken advances on Sarah Helen Whitman that “made necessary a summons of the police.” He concluded that Poe had been a man who exhibited “scarcely any virtue in either his life or his writings.…Irascible, envious—bad enough, but not the worst, for these salient angles were all varnished over with a cold repellent cynicism, his passions vented themselves in sneers.” Privately, Griswold would carry his attacks to even greater extremes, even spreading a rumor that Poe had developed a sexual relationship with his aunt Maria.

  Griswold’s damning “memoir” of Poe was occasionally leavened by grudging praise for the author’s prose and poetry. Griswold had a notably high opinion of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” which he presented as an example of Poe’s great cunning. Griswold even voiced approval of the deceptive footnotes that Poe had appended to the 1845 revision in Tales, praising the manner in which they brought clarity and “verisimilitude” to the story.

  Griswold’s praise for Poe as an artist, however, was all but overwhelmed by his venom for Poe as a man. This astonishing display of character assassination, presented under the guise of official biography, would throw a dark cloud over Poe’s reputation for years to come. Not content to slander his dead rival, Griswold also dealt roughly with his rightful heir. Although Griswold’s edition of Poe’s work sold well and went through seventeen editions, he denied any proceeds to Maria Clemm, who finished her days in a charity home in Baltimore. More than once she railed against Griswold for dragging her “poor poor Eddie’s” faults before the public. “Did you ever feel as if you wished to die?” she asked. “It is thus I feel.”

  It was an impulse Poe himself would have well understood. Four years earlier, as the fame of “The Raven” slipped away at the end of 1845, he had provided himself with a far more fitting, if mournful, epitaph: “I have perserveringly struggled, against a thousand difficulties, and have succeeded, although not in making money, still in attaining a position in the world of Letters, of which, under the circumstances, I have no reason to be ashamed.”

  EPILOGUE

  One Last Wild Cry

  And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

  Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

  In the sepulchre there by the sea,

  In her tomb by the sounding sea.

  —“Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe

  A daguerreotype of Poe taken on November 9, 1848, shortly after an attempted suicide with laudanum.

  Courtesy of The Library of Congress

  Oh! Shield me from that fearful sight—

  That crime of darkest, blackest night,

  Appalling even the brave.

  Wild shriek on shriek, and pray’r on pray’r

  And deepest curses mingle there—

  Oh God! In pity save.

  Who heeds thy shrieks, poor helpless maid?

  There is no arm with strength to aid—

  No heart that has the will.

  One last wild cry that reaches heaven,

  One bitter pray’r for mercy given—

  Tis past!—and all is still…

  Alas! The scene is passing fair,

  Yet foul pollution revels there,

  And crime too black for name.

  Far, far from all whose arm might save,

  Welcome the cold, and bloody grave,

  That hides a wretch’s shame.

  —“Lines on the Death of Mary Rogers,”

  Anonymous (1841)

  AT THE TIME OF POE’S DEATH, the Mary Rogers saga had entered its final act. Poe had survived Mary Rogers by only eight years, but while his reputation now fell into a sad if temporary eclipse, the fame and influence of the cigar girl continued to grow. Her place in the public imagination had undergone a strange transformation in the wake of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” Where previously she had been viewed as a victim of gang violence, and a symbol of a failed and corrupt police force, Mary Rogers now became an emblem of the city’s moral decay. Her name was frequently invoked on the pulpits of New York churches as a sorrowful reminder of the wages of sin.

  Although Poe’s story had helped to dispel the notion that Mary Rogers fell prey to a gang, the initial furor over “blacklegs and ruffians” had touched a nerve with the public, and would serve as a catalyst for a series of sweeping reforms. James Gordon Bennett had declared, in the weeks following that murder, that New York had been “disgraced and dishonored in the eyes of the Christian and civilized world.” The subsequent revelations about the case did nothing to derail Bennett’s campaign for “a truly great moral movement” to revitalize the city’s law enforcement. The forces set in motion at the Committee of Safety meeting in August of 1841 would result, the following year, in a blistering city council report on the sad state of the New York police, complete with an unmistakable reference to the death of Mary Rogers: “The property of the citizen is pilfered, almost before his eyes,” the document stated. “Dwellings and warehouses are entered with ease and apparent coolness and carelessness of detection which shows that none are safe. Thronged as our city is, men are robbed in the street. Thousands that are arrested go unpunished and the defenseless and the beautiful are ravished and murdered in the day time, and no trace of the criminal is found.”

  It would take three more years and two changes of city administration before concrete action was taken, but in May of 1845, the New York state legislature finally passed a Police Reform Act, abolishing the old network of night watchmen and marshals, and creating a full-time, salaried police force. The Police Reform Act emphasized the need for crime prevention, as opposed to the detection of crimes already committed, and finally did away with the untenable system of rewards for the return of stolen goods and other police services. “Rigid rules were made for the appointment of policemen,” wrote the Reverend Matthew Hale Smith. “A vigorous and efficient body of men became guardians of the city…and the dignity of her keepers was restored.” For Bennett, there was an a
dded, personal satisfaction in the fact that the upheavals at City Hall also brought about an end to the judicial career of his rival Mordecai Noah, who retreated from the bench into a successful tenure as president of the Hebrew Benevolent Society.

  Several of the proposed additions to New York’s revised criminal code of 1845 clearly showed the influence of the Mary Rogers murder. A series of laws were proposed to govern acts of adultery and “other forms of seduction,” with particularly harsh punishments mandated in cases of “abduction for immoral purposes.” Easily the most significant addition was an 1845 statute known as “The Abortion Law,” which strengthened the city’s existing statutes to a degree that effectively outlawed the “still and lost” treatments practiced in the city’s many commercial abortion parlors. As it happened, the passage of the Abortion Law received a strong push from a New York attorney by the name of Frederick Mather, who was serving a term in the state senate at the time. Mather, who kept an office on Nassau Street not far from the Rogers boardinghouse, was a cousin of Mary’s through a Hartford branch of the Mather clan—the family of Phoebe Rogers’s first husband.

  The new abortion law was pressed into immediate service as a tool against Madame Restell, whose abortion empire continued to flourish in spite of unrelenting attacks in the city’s editorial pages. Although the police never found evidence to link Restell to the death of Mary Rogers, several newspapers took the abortionist’s guilt to be a matter of established fact. “The wretched girl was last seen in the direction of Madame Restell’s house,” reported the Police Gazette in February of 1846. “The dreadfully lacerated body at Weehawken Bluff bore the marks of no ordinary violation.…These are strange but strong facts.…Such are these abortionists! Such their deeds, and such their dens of crime!” The Gazette went on to list a number of other, better-established accusations against Restell, followed by a characteristic call for “some sudden application of popular vengeance.”

  The article produced an immediate and dramatic result. On Monday, February 23, 1846, two days after the Police Gazette published its inflammatory statements, an angry mob formed outside Madame Restell’s Greenwich Street residence. The Morning News reported that “not a few apparently came with the intention of being actors in some scene of violence and popular outbreak.” The crowd was no ordinary band of troublemakers and hooligans, the paper observed. “There were very many of our most respectable citizens noticed among the mass—a result unlooked for, and certainly ominous of a deep and abiding feeling of abhorrence and detestation among the better classes for the practices of this miserable female.”

  As the crowd pressed against the gates of Restell’s mansion, a shout was raised of “Hanging is too good for the monster!” The angry mood deepened as the size of the mob swelled. “Curses loud and deep upon Restell and her coadjutors were rife amid the crowd,” reported the Morning News, along with cries of “Haul her out!” “Where’s the thousand children murdered in this house?” and “Who murdered Mary Rogers?” Soon the mob had pushed through the gates and was pounding at the doors of the mansion. As the crisis mounted, it became clear that “the strong feeling of popular indignation was about to be manifested in an outbreak of serious character, and that the unhappy object of their dislike was about to realize that there is in this land a power above all law, whose mandates would—when the arm of justice became paralyzed and insufficient, was daringly sneered at by those who depend upon their ill-earned wealth and certain peculiar influences for immunity from the just reward of crime—be suddenly executed in violence and confusion.”

  Just when it seemed inevitable that Madame Restell would be dragged from her home and subjected to mob vengeance, her “peculiar influences” made themselves felt. George Matsell, New York’s chief of police, arrived on the scene at the head of a squad of able-bodied officers, who immediately plunged into the heart of the mob. After arresting several of the “most active spirits,” Matsell’s forces were able to subdue and dispel the remaining agitators. Madame Restell, it emerged, was not actually present at the time, having received advance notice of the threatened disturbance. Her many years of generous payoffs to the police and other officials had done their work.

  Edgar Allan Poe was still living in New York at this time, and it is possible that he was even doing some scattered service as a “mechanical paragraphist” at the Police Gazette. “There is a standing Gazette tradition that Poe, sometime between 1846 and 1849, the year of his death, had been temporarily on the staff of this journal,” wrote Edward Van Every in Sins of New York, a compendium of Gazette writings published in 1930. “How much actual foundation there is to this tradition remains a question.…If such was the case, Poe never attached his name to any scrivening that he may have been driven to do.” It is certainly tempting to speculate that Poe had a hand in the Gazette’s inflammatory article about Madame Restell. Poe’s tenure at the Broadway Journal had ended in failure just one month before the appearance of the article, leaving him at loose ends and desperate for work. His final revision of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” had appeared in Tales the previous year, so the details of the case, and especially the late revelations, would have been fresh in his mind. The anonymity of the Police Gazette would have given him greater freedom to speculate on Mary Rogers’s final fate, and perhaps even to make use of information or theories circulating among his coworkers. The incident at the Restell mansion, however, coincides with one of the more chaotic periods of Poe’s life, giving rise to rumors of drunken binges and confinement in lunatic asylums, and eventually culminating in his removal to the relative tranquillity of the farmhouse in Fordham. It is impossible to say with any certainty whether Poe ever set foot in the offices of the Police Gazette, much less attach his name to a particular piece of “scrivening.”

  In any event, the episode had little effect on Madame Restell. In spite of the new laws and several other outbreaks of public indignation, the “most wicked woman in New York” continued to run her empire for another three decades. Every so often she would be subjected to a public arrest and trial, but in each case she managed to escape without serious or lasting consequences. On the occasion of one arrest she posted bail in the amount of $10,000, which she paid in cash, adding an additional thousand to demonstrate her continued goodwill. “The law has swept every rival from her path, and she remains mistress paramount in the scheme of practical destruction,” wrote the Police Gazette. “We are not led to these remarks with the view of spurring the authorities to bring this woman to justice. That hope is past.”

  At last, in 1878, the many decades at the helm of the “bloody empire” took their toll. Facing renewed criticism from the press and mounting suspicion over the mysterious death of her husband, Madame Restell was placed under arrest following a confrontation with Anthony Comstock, the celebrated antivice crusader. After a brief stint in the Tombs, she once again posted bail and returned home to her mansion on Fifth Avenue. Making her way upstairs, Madame Restell calmly settled back into a warm bath and slit her own throat.

  The New York Times responded with satisfaction to “a fit ending to an odious career.” Even in death, however, Madame Restell cast a long shadow over the city. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., who had taken control of the Herald upon his father’s retirement in 1867, announced that he planned to publish Restell’s client list for the public’s edification. Shock waves spread through the city’s smoking parlors and fashionable clubs. Before the incriminating lists could come to light, however, they disappeared from police custody.

  Thirty-seven years had now elapsed since the death of Mary Rogers, but Madame Restell’s death occasioned yet another surge of interest in the fate of the cigar girl, not least because of the flood of sensational literature that had linked the crime to the notorious abortionist. In life, Mary Rogers had inspired a great deal of leaden poetry; in death, she called forth an entire shelf of badly written novels, beginning with J. H. Ingraham’s The Beautiful Cigar Girl in 1844, the tone of which may be judged by the exc
lamation of young Herman de Ruyter at learning that his sister Maria has taken employment in a cigar store: “But consider, mother, this young, pure girl! Consider Maria is guileless, so beautiful, placed in a situation surrounded with such great dangers. Consider the peril to her reputation! Were she fair as the lily, the breath of slander would blast her fair fame forever! Oh, Maria! Would to God you had reflected ere you had taken this step!”

  The breath of slander also blew hot in Mysteries and Miseries of New York, a novel published in 1848 by Ned Buntline, the pen name of the prolific journalist Edward Zane Carroll Judson. A central episode of the book concerns a young woman named Mary Sheffield, also known as “The Beautiful Cigar Girl,” whose lifeless and battered body is discovered floating in the Hudson River. An account of the crime in the New York Herald attributes the misfortune to “ill treatment and murder by a gang of rowdies at Hoboken,” but it soon develops that the marks of violence on the corpse were inflicted “not by a gang of rowdies,” but by an infamous abortionist known as Caroline Sitstill—“a hag, a she devil, an abortion of her own sex, one whom it would be blasphemy to call a woman.” In lieu of a happy ending, Buntline tacked an appendix onto his novel that included the entire text of the 1845 Police Reform Act.