The Square Pegs

by Irving Wallace

  In Pennsylvania she liked the smoke of Pittsburgh, but thought Philadelphia “a den of British Tories, domestic traitors, missionaries and Sunday Schoolism.” In South Carolina she regarded Charleston as “the receptacle for the refuse of all nations on earth the only reputable people there are the Jews.” In Maryland she saw Baltimore as “illiterate, proud and ignorant.” In Virginia she found that the “roads were as bad as its schools.” In North Carolina the ladies took snuff, and in the District of Columbia they did not know how to dress. In Louisiana there was true graciousness, but this very graciousness might lead to disaster. “Their slaves, in the end, instead of being a benefit, has proved a very serious injury… . They have secured nothing to their children but poverty, whilst they have reared those children up, not to industry, but to high notions.”

  Her curiosity was infinite. She tried everything once. She visited the lunatics in a Maine asylum. She smoked a peace pipe with the Cherokee Indians. She boarded a steamer in Virginia to examine the boilers. She forded a river that George Washington had once crossed. She searched for Jefferson relics at Monticello. She stayed at a female seminary in Pennsylvania, and approved, and frequented a barroom in the same state, and disapproved. “There is too much whiskey everywhere,” she decided.

  Relentlessly, she hunted down the celebrated. She interviewed Governor Clinton of New York, found him corpulent and strongly silent, yet “a man of great size, great soul, great mind and a great heart.” She hiked a great distance to meet Dolly Madison, and was delighted when Dolly polished her dusty shoes. “Her face is not handsome nor does it ever appear to have been so. It is suffused with a slight tinge of red and is rather wide in the middle. But her power to please the irresistible grace of her every movement sheds such a charm over all she says and does that it is impossible not to admire her.”

  Besides anti-Masons, only one national group incurred her constant displeasure. She despised all Evangelicals, not only the clergymen who preached the Calvinistic faith, but also their followers. In print she referred to male members of the church as Hallelujah Holdforths, and she called their women Miss Dismals. She accused their missionaries of contaminating the Indians, their lobbyists of trying to control the federal government.

  Anne’s books, at least her earliest books, were well circulated. Her invective was admired and feared, and for a brief period she exulted in a new sense of power. But her persistent attacks on Evangelicalism brought her powerful enemies. They were determined to silence her, and in 1829, when they thought they had their ammunition, they struck. In the Court of the District of Columbia, a unique complaint was filed against her. According to Anne, “there were three counts in the indictment: 1. A public nuisance. 2. A common brawler. 3. A common scold. The first two charges were dismissed. The third was sustained.”

  The actual charges against Anne Royall had been instigated by members of a Presbyterian congregation that met regularly in an engine house near her dwelling. Their peddling of tracts and their singing of hymns irritated Anne. When youngsters of the congregation were encouraged to stone her residence, and when the church’s most prominent member, John Coyle, ostentatiously prayed for her conversion under her window, she became furious. She was especially furious, she said, because this same John Coyle had given her maid a bastard child. At once Anne let the congregation and the entire neighborhood know what she thought of them. Publicly, she berated Coyle, or Holy Willie, as she nicknamed him, for being “a damned old bald-headed son of a bitch.” She called a friend of his Simon Sulphur, and yet another male member of the church Love Lady, because she vowed that he had once been observed in Capital Park trying to convert a pretty colored girl while both were “in a state of nature.” The Presbyterians had had enough. They consulted an attorney. He consulted his legal sources, and he came up with something that they might call her. So they called her a Common Scold, had her arrested, and brought her to trial.

  After one delay on technical grounds, Anne was arraigned before the three judges of the Circuit Court in May 1829. There was wide interest in the trial because the charge of being a scold, a hang-over from early English law, had never before been tried in America, and because the punishment involved tying the accused to a ducking stool and dousing her in a body of water. The case of the United States versus Roy all was played before a packed and noisy courtroom. The prosecution presented twelve witnesses, among them Coyle and Henry Watterson, the chief librarian of Congress (whom she had insulted in one of her books). The witnesses swore that Anne had cursed and berated them in the streets, and in general had made a nuisance of herself. Anne hotly denied the charges. She was followed to the stand by a variety of friends who vouched for her good character. The most prominent of these was Senator John Eaton, of Tennessee. As secretary of War, Eaton would gain notoriety by marrying his former mistress, Peggy O’Neale Timberlake, a lively inn-keeper’s daughter, in defense of whose virtue President Jackson was to fire his entire cabinet. Now on the stand in Anne Royall’s behalf, Senator Eaton acquitted himself gallantly. His testimony, said Anne, “was clear and unequivocal and directly opposed to that of the prosecution.” Despite this defense, the judges found Anne guilty as charged.

  When the moment came to mete out punishment, the judges sent for an actual ducking stool that had been constructed in the Alexandria navy yard and held in readiness. The moment it was displayed they realized that they could not enforce so barbaric a penalty. Instead, they fined Anne ten dollars for being a scold and demanded fifty dollars’ security against her committing the same crime again. The money was supplied by two friendly newspapermen, and Anne was free. In her way she had made history. She was the first woman ever found guilty of being a scold in America and there would not be another until 1947, when three sisters in Pittsburgh were similarly tried and variously sentenced to from three to twenty-three months in jail.

  The rigors of the trial and the humiliations suffered as a result of its outcome brought an end to Anne Royall’s career as author. After one more trip to the South she was too exhausted to travel. Moreover, her books were being taken less seriously and their sales were on the decline. She had no choice but to make Washington her permanent home and to invest her small savings in a business. Obviously, the business would have to be one in which she could make use of her only talent: the ability to observe, to express herself, and to maintain an original point of view. And so, at the age of sixty-three, Anne Royall became the publisher and editor of her own weekly newspaper.

  The first issue of Paul Pry appeared in the streets of Washington on December 3, 1831. Its four pages carried advertising, local news, jokes, excerpts from fiction, political comment, and a vigorous editorial from the pen of the proprietor:

  “Let it be understood that we are of no party. We will neither oppose nor advocate any man for the Presidency. The welfare and happiness of our country is our politics. To promote this we shall oppose and expose all and every species of political evil, and religious frauds without fear, favor or affection. … As for those cannibals, the Anti-Masons … we shall meet them upon their own ground, that of extermination. For the rest, let all pious Generals, Colonels and Commanders of our army and navy who make war upon old women beware. Let all pious Postmasters who cheat the Government by franking pious tracts beware. Let all pious booksellers who take pious bribes beware. Let all pious young ladies who hawk pious tracts into young gentlemen’s rooms beware, and let all old bachelors and old maids be married as soon as possible.”

  The headquarters for this journal of opinion was a small two-story brick building behind a tumble-down house in the shadow of the Capitol dome. Anne pulled the plumbing and fixtures out of the kitchen and replaced them with a decrepit and unpredictable Ramage printing press and several fonts of uneven type. Her staff consisted of a printer, two youngsters from a Catholic orphanage, a porter, and a young editorial assistant named Sarah Stack. Mrs. Stack, whom Anne called Sally, was a serious, unimaginative widow who supported five orphan children. />
  There was no circulation department. Anne, usually accompanied by Sally, would make the rounds of Washington, selling individual copies of the paper and soliciting subscriptions at two dollars and fifty cents a year. As the two women trudged to private residences and businesses, through the halls of the Senate and the House, and into the offices of government buildings, they made a remarkable picture. Anne, her alert face wrinkled and toothy, her voice loud and insistent, was short and dumpy in her shabby shawl and green calash dress. She would disarm potential subscribers with jokes and gossip, then excitedly waving her thickly mittened hands, would admonish them to buy her periodical. Most often harried customers would submit to enlightenment, and would either present her with one dollar as down payment against the full subscription price or merely agree to buy a copy of the paper. Then Sally, lanky, thin, and somber, would emerge from the background with her armful of papers.

  Most of Washington officialdom from congressmen to government clerks was bullied into reading Paul Pry. Within a year, agents were soliciting subscriptions in every major American city. Those readers who purchased the paper but forgot to pay the balance of the subscription fee were reminded of their delinquency in print, their names and debts being detailed in the paper under the heading “Black List.”

  Actually, few who read Paul Pry did not want to read it again. In its five turbulent years of existence the journal, while not the most physically attractive newspaper in America the pulp was cheap, the printing an eyesore, the proofing an adventure in myopia was certainly one of the liveliest in the land. As in her books, Anne continued to assail anti-Masons, Evangelicalism, political corruption, birth control, flogging in the Navy, and the Bank of the United States. She advocated free speech, open immigration, improved labor conditions, justice to the Indians, territorial expansion, nondenominational public schools, sound money, states’ rights, Andrew Jackson and her own pension.

  There were items of scandal, but they were always carefully researched and edited before publication. As Anne explained in one editorial: “We have received a shocking story of abuse toward an unprotected female by a prominent man who is a Presbyterian. But we must refuse to print it for several reasons: It came in too late. It is too personal. It bore no signature. It is against a private man. Public men are fair game.” There were other diversions for the light-minded: excerpts from The Pickwick Papers, capsule biographies of well-known women, progress reports on Sally’s erratic health, and execrable verse.

  In 1836, when Anne was sixty-seven and Paul Pry in the last year of its life, she had a fascinating visitor in the person of the youthful Phineas T. Barnum. The gaudy entrepreneur had been in show business only one year having sponsored a wizened colored woman named Joyce Heth, who was, he claimed, 161 years old and George Washington’s former nurse she had just died and been found to be eighty years old and therefore not George Washington’s former nurse) and his great years with Tom Thumb, Jenny Lind, and Jumbo the Elephant were still ahead of him. Barnum, accused of hoax and faced with failure, was grateful for stories Anne had published in his defense. He came to pay his respects, and left to record in his diary a striking portrait of this “celebrated personage … the most garrulous old woman I ever saw.”

  According to Barnum, Anne mistook him for Congressman Claiborne of Mississippi. When his identity was straightened out, Anne explained that she had been expecting several members of the House of Representatives.

  “All the congressmen call on me,” she said with pride. “They do not dare do otherwise. Enemies and friends all alike, they have to come to me. And why should they not? I made them every devil of them. You see how I look, ragged and poor, but thank God I am saucy and independent. The whole government is afraid of me, and well they may be. I know them all, from top to toe I can fathom their rascality, through all its ins and outs, from the beginning to the end. By the way, Barnum, whom do you support for president and vice-president?”

  Cheerfully Barnum replied that he thought he would vote for Martin Van Buren and Richard M. Johnson. Anne turned purple. “I have seen some fearful things in my day some awful explosions of tempestuous passion,” Barnum recalled later, “but never have I witnessed such another terrible tempest of fury as burst from Mrs. Anne Royall.”

  Sputtering, she fell upon him. “My God! my God! is it possible? Will you support such a monkey, such a scoundrel, such a villain, such a knave, such an enemy to his country, as Martin Van Buren! Barnum, you are a scoundrel, a traitor, a rascal, a hypocrite! You are a spy, an electioneering fool, and I hope the next vessel you put foot on will sink with you.”

  Bewildered by the terrible onslaught, Barnum forced an uneasy laugh, as if to tell her she was teasing him. But she was not teasing him.

  “Oh, you villain! laugh, will you? when your country is in danger! Oh, you don’t believe it, but let me tell you, the conspirators know too much to let you foolish Yankees into their secret. Remember, I was once with them, and I know all about it.”

  “Why, Anne, you must acknowledge there are some good people in our ranks.”

  “No, I don’t. There’s not one devil of you who cares a cent for his country. You would not give a farthing to save it from destruction. See how I live! see how I work to save my country! I am at work every moment see my house see, I have no bed to lie on no anything and then you tell about loving your country! Oh, you deserve to be lynched, every devil of you!”

  After a half hour more of similar harangue, through which Barnum sat benumbed, Anne finally ran out of breath and invective. Her voice reduced to a mere shout, she studied Barnum a moment, and then suddenly apologized.

  “Well, Barnum,” she said, “you are a good fellow, and I am really glad to see you. How sorry I am that we mentioned politics, for I am so nervous. Now, I want a real good talk with you… . Come, Barnum, go with me into the printing office, and there we can talk and work together.”

  In the printing office, where a man and a boy were at the press, a large pile of wrapped newspapers lay in the middle of the floor. Anne commanded Barnum to sit with her and help sort them. “Anne then seated herself upon the dirty floor, and as there was no chair in the room, I sat down beside her, not daring even to spread my handkerchief or in any way remove the dust, lest she should construe it into an insult.” For a half hour more they assorted papers as Anne rattled on, recounting various incidents of her long life. When he could get in a word, Barnum wondered if he might sponsor her on a lecture tour through the East. She was not interested. When he left, she extracted his promise to call again. But thereafter, still shaken, he gave her a wide berth and admitted that he “never again met the eccentric old lady.”

  In November 1836, inexplicably, Paul Pry which, said The New England Religious Weekly, “contains all the scum, billingsgate and filth extant” ceased publication, only to be supplanted a month later by a more conservative weekly called The Huntress. This new conservatism, intended to increase circulation by a decrease in muckracking, did not extend to the treatment of anti-Masons or Evangelicals. The smaller pages did little to confine the editor’s temper. Nor did her advancing years and growing infirmity mellow her opinion. When there was protest against Catholic immigration, Anne saw at once that the real threat lay in the tyranny of the overpatriotic, and she cried out against them in The Huntress: “A Catholic foreigner discovered America, Catholic foreigners first settled it. … When the colonies were about to be enslaved, foreigners rescued it. … At present, we verily believe, that the liberty of this country is in more danger from this native combination than from foreigners.”

  For more than a decade she continued to occupy herself with The Huntress. Circulation was small, and she barely made ends meet. Once, she wrote a three-act play, The Cabinet: or, Large Parties in Washington, and Joseph Jefferson’s father agreed to produce it. On opening night, with tickets already sold, the show was canceled because of pressure brought to bear by church groups and anti-Masons. Though Masons came to her rescue, and gave the play
one performance in their hall, it proved a financial disappointment. Above all, Anne persisted in her pension fight. When, at last, acting on an affidavit supplied by Lafayette, Congress conceded that Captain Royall had served the Revolution and that Anne had indeed been his wife, the petition was rejected because Anne had been married in 1797 and the law provided benefits only to widows who had been married before 1794. But in 1848 Congress liberalized the statute of limitations, and Anne’s excruciating, twenty-four-year struggle was capped by victory. She was offered the choice of a $480 annuity for life or a total payment of $1,200. As she was seventy-nine years old, ill, and in debt, she took the lump sum of $1,200. It was a mistake. She would live six years more. When her obligations were met and a new printing press installed, she was left with three dollars.

  In 1854, aged eighty-five, she was still on the job. When she wanted to interview President Pierce, she was invited to the White House. She may have reflected on how the times had changed. It was a quarter of a century since she had been obliged to trap another president in the nude to obtain her story. Pierce was friendly, and her account of the visit in The Huntress was kind:

  “He looked stout and healthy but rather pale. His countenance used to be gay and full of vivacity when he was a Senator in Congress several years ago, but now it wears a calm and dignified composure, tinctured with a pleasing melancholy… . We could not refrain from dropping a tear when he spoke to us of his lady, after whose health we inquired. The sad bereavement she met with in the sudden loss of her only and beloved boy has shadowed the bright walks which surround the Presidential Mansion.”

  It was her last major story. On Sunday morning, October 1, 1854, she died in her sleep. “To the hour of her death,” noted the Washington Star, “she preserved all the peculiarities of thought, temper, and manners, which at one time rendered her so famous throughout the land.” She was laid to rest in the Congressional Cemetery. There was no money for a gravestone. Her total legacy amounted to thirty-one cents.