Goat Castle
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What follows is a historical pilgrimage to Depression-era Natchez and what was arguably its “crime of the century,” a story that captured the nation’s attention. Based on extensive local research, it makes stops at sites pivotal to the case and introduces the key personalities involved. Along the way, it offers historical lessons on how the South’s culture changed, including the conditions that contributed to Jennie Merrill’s death and led to Emily Burns’s incarceration. At the center of the story is Natchez — a character in its own right. Its history and its setting, overlooking the bluffs of the Mississippi River, only add to the crime’s mystique.
The journey begins.
CHAPTER ONE
RECLUSIVE ARISTOCRATS
Jennie Merrill’s life should have played out differently. Women born into the southern planter class, particularly the privileged group to which she belonged, were being prepared for marriage from the time they were young girls. They received an elite education while their mothers taught them the social skills required of genteel women. Once married, young women from well-heeled Natchez families were expected to entertain the members of their elite social circle or risk being the subject of community gossip — or worse, shunned. And it was assumed that they would bear children to preserve bloodlines, as well as the family fortune. The changes wrought by the Civil War, however, complicated those expectations.1
Jennie’s full name — Jane Surget Merrill — signaled her elite status and connections to the world. The Surget and Merrill families were among the wealthiest in the antebellum South. At his death in 1856, Jennie’s grandfather Francis Surget was not only one of the wealthiest planters in the South but also one of the richest men in America. He had amassed a cotton empire that extended across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, and he owned more than a thousand slaves. When his daughter Jane (Jennie’s mother) married Ayres P. Merrill Jr. in 1852, he gave them a home — Elms Court — as a wedding gift. Merrill expanded the 1837 Greek Revival mansion to include decorative ironwork and a double-tiered gallery on the front facade, making it one of the most beautiful of the suburban villas in Natchez. This was the home where Jennie was born, yet the timing of her birth — August 1863 — forever changed her life’s expected trajectory.2
The Civil War, a war so many of Mississippi’s planters hoped to avoid, cast its long shadow over the state in the summer of 1863. Just upriver from Natchez, in Vicksburg, Major General Ulysses S. Grant battled Confederate commander General John C. Pemberton for control of the town and, consequently, the Mississippi River. After suffering severe casualties, Grant laid siege to the town, choking off troops and civilians alike from food and supplies. The siege lasted forty-seven days before Pemberton surrendered, on July 4, effectively ceding the river to Union control.
Photographs of Jennie Merrill near the time of her death do not exist. This one, taken when she was around twenty, illustrates her petite frame. (Courtesy of the Dicks Family Collection, Historic Natchez Foundation, Natchez, Miss.)
One month later — the very month Jennie Merrill was born — federal troops arrived in Natchez. Strategically, the town was not as important as Vicksburg; nevertheless, it supplied the army with food and a place to rest. Many Natchez planters, in fact, held Union sympathies. Jennie’s father, Ayres Merrill, Jr., certainly did. His ties to the North were both personal and professional. He was descended from Merrills in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and he conducted business with cotton factors in New York. Merrill had a lot to lose. A successful planter, the 1860 census showed that he owned nearly one hundred slaves in Adams County and another three hundred across the river in Concordia Parish. He and others opposed the war because they knew it would bring a dramatic end to slavery, the Cotton Kingdom it supported, and the lifestyle to which area planter families had grown accustomed.3
Jennie’s father, Ayres Merrill Jr., n.d. (Courtesy of the Thomas H. and Joan W. Gandy Photograph Collection, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Special Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge.)
In many ways Jennie’s family was fortunate. Several days before Union troops arrived in his hometown, the thirty-eight-year-old Merrill joined a group of men from Natchez who traveled to meet with General Grant in Vicksburg. They sought to demonstrate their loyalty in an effort to protect their land from being confiscated. The men also hoped to still be able to hire former slaves to harvest that year’s cotton crop. Going to see Grant was not without its risks, as they might be taken into custody by Union troops or be killed by Confederate guerrillas.4
Merrill also reached out to Brigadier General Thomas Ransom, commander of the post at Natchez, and found him receptive. Ransom defended Merrill to Grant, describing him as “one of the few sound Union men of the region.” As he explained, “During all of his difficulties he has [bravely] maintained his position and, pistol in hand, defied the mob [of Confederate guerrillas] that threatened to burn his residence and hang him.” Ransom also endorsed Merrill’s request to allow him to hire slave contraband — those slaves taken by federal forces — in order to harvest his cotton before it ruined in the fields. As the Natchez commander noted, “Being a young man he has passed through great trials and dangers & suffered great pecuniary loss.”5
While Grant approved Merrill’s request, hiring former slaves who were now considered “contraband of war” was both risky and futile — risky for newly free slaves and futile for planters like Ayres Merrill. According to a Union soldier with the Twelfth Wisconsin, there were “about four thousand contrabands in Natchez” in early 1864, yet “very few have gone to work on the abandoned plantations.” The reason? Confederate guerrillas. They were “so numerous that but few plantations will be worked during the coming season,” the soldier reported. He also warned of the mortal danger of going back to work for men like Merrill. “Already the negroes on two or three plantations have been captured and murdered,” he wrote, adding, “The rebels are determined that if they can’t have the benefit of these plantations, no one else shall.”6
Aside from Merrill’s request to harvest his cotton, Grant also approved his appeal to take his young family north, to New York City, where they waited out the war in a home on Washington Square. While there, Ayres formed a partnership with Walter Goodman, a cousin by marriage, as cotton factors and general commission agents who purchased, sold, and leased southern land as well as plantation-related machinery until the death of both men in 1883.7
Despite his losses in Mississippi in both slave labor and cotton, Merrill’s investments were diverse, and he remained a wealthy man. Even sequestered in New York, he contracted to build a magnificent home in Newport, Rhode Island. The mansion, named Harbor View, was under construction when Merrill’s wife, Jane, died during childbirth at the age of thirty-six. The house had promised a new beginning for the young family, but Ayres, now a widowed father of six young children, would spend little time in Newport after his wife’s death. He sold Harbor View less than five years after its construction.8
In the years immediately following the war, several of the Merrill children were of school age and, as before the conflict, attended the best schools money could buy. Jennie was about eight years old when her father enrolled her at St. Mary’s Hall, a private academy for young girls in Burlington, New Jersey. The school, founded in 1837 by the Episcopal bishop George Doane, offered girls an education as intellectually engaging as that received by their male peers. By providing her with an elite education, Jennie’s father continued the antebellum tradition of preparing daughters for marriage with members of their class. Ayres proved to be an engaged and doting father throughout her boarding school experience, writing her frequently, encouraging her in her studies, and keeping her up to date on her siblings at Elms Court.9
Jennie was not yet a teenager when, in 1876, her father’s Union loyalties paid dividends. During his second term of office, President Grant submitted Ayres Merrill’s name as his choice for U.S. ambassador to Belgium. Be
sides having proven his loyalty, Merrill was also Harvard educated, well traveled, and a French speaker. Congress swiftly approved Merrill’s appointment in January of that year, and by the spring, the family was headed for new adventures in Europe.10
Jennie Merrill enjoyed a brief but very privileged time in Brussels. Because of her father’s status as ambassador, she and her siblings frequently circulated among European elites. Although she was not quite the age of a debutante, Jennie certainly enjoyed the life of one while there, as did her older sisters, Catherine and Minnie. When Grant and his wife, Julia, toured Europe after his second term as president, Catherine and Minnie were involved in their visit to Belgium. The sisters accompanied the Grants on their tour of the Bois de la Cambre, the beautiful park in Brussels adjacent to the Sonian Forest. Known in the press as the “Misses Merrill,” they were guests at a dinner attended by numerous European dignitaries, hosted by the king and queen of Belgium to honor the former president.11
Both Minnie and Catherine grew quite popular in social circles, and wherever they traveled they garnered public attention. In an article titled “The Beauties of America,” a journalist wrote that the sisters “have been poetically called ‘Night and Morning.’ Miss Minnie Merrill, the former, is a perfect brunette of the Spanish type and is spoken of as one of the handsomest brunettes in America.” Catherine, with “hair the shade that Titian loved to paint,” was also considered a great conversationalist. Whether “in the casino or ballroom of Spa, she held undisputed sway.”12
The rest of the family was on its way to Paris when Minnie and Catherine were entertaining in Spa, Belgium. The Merrills’ final destination, however, was the French city of Nice, where they were scheduled to spend the winter months. The family’s true purpose in going there was in hopes of improving the health of Ayres Merrill. Several months before, at the age of fifty-two, the Belgian ambassador had a paralytic stroke that caused him to be bedridden. Its severity not only prevented him from performing his duties as ambassador but also required his children to play an even more significant ceremonial role in his absence. This is why Jennie’s sisters entertained the Grants on their tour of Belgium and why her older brother, Dunbar, was the person to greet the former U.S. president and his wife upon their arrival. Now, as the Merrill family traveled south, her older sisters’ exploits served to distract the public from their father’s condition.13
The ambassador’s health did not improve. U.S. newspapers documented his stroke in April 1877, and by October some predicted he would have to resign. Yet Merrill stayed on, perhaps for his children’s sake, for two years following his stroke. Then, in May 1879, the family — including Jennie, her sister Catherine, and brothers Ayres III, Dunbar, and Frank — boarded the SS Zeeland in Antwerp and set sail for the United States.14 They disembarked in Philadelphia, a common port of entry for ships on the Red Star Line, before returning to New York. Minnie stayed behind in Belgium, where she married and began a family in Antwerp. The following year, Ayres and his young family moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where his father had been born. Then, in September 1883, Jennie’s father died in Ocean County on the New Jersey coast, where he had gone in a final effort to improve his health. He was only fifty-seven years old. He had been gone from Natchez for years, and only in death did he return.15
Jennie Surget Merrill, a young woman of twenty, now found herself in a world without the protection or sage counsel of her father. She was smart and well traveled and had moved in elite circles among royalty in Europe. Her inheritance included plantations in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, and she had the means to live and travel wherever she pleased. And while she could always return to Natchez, which she did from time to time, it would be several years before she returned for good.
For nearly two decades after her father’s death, Jennie spent time in various cities, including New Orleans, Louisville, Memphis, and Baltimore, but she clearly preferred to be in New York. She spent her early childhood there, and friends and family from Natchez either had homes in the city or visited there on vacation. The Merrill name still had cachet, and she used it to her advantage. Though Jennie left no letters detailing her activity, fragmentary evidence from newspapers reveal that, by her late twenties, she found her calling as a member of the King’s Daughters — a philanthropic and religious order founded in New York City in 1886 by women with ties to the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches.16 This was a period of enormous growth for women’s clubs in the United States, and in fact the King’s Daughters grew to 125,000 members in just four years. This “sisterhood of service” was a perfect outlet for young, elite women like Jennie, eager to apply their talents for organization, public speaking, and reform in an era when women were not supposed to have careers. The service-oriented work of the order and the opportunity to maintain a high public profile clearly appealed to her.17
Jennie Merrill was personally moved to assist and improve the living conditions of immigrant mothers living in the slums of New York. She became an acolyte of Jacob Riis, the Danish-born journalist who photographed the conditions of tenement housing in New York and documented the plight of immigrants in his book How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890. He lectured widely and drew people to his cause by sharing his photographs of tenement families in dramatic fashion via a projector known as a stereopticon. Jennie was one of them. After hearing one of Riis’s lectures in Chautauqua, New York, she became a champion of tenement reform.18
As a member of the King’s Daughters, Jennie Merrill ginned up interest in Riis’s work by going on her own speaking tour in several cities. She made speeches in advance of those being given by Riis and personally visited tenement slums in New York. Her concern for immigrant children, in particular, drew her to support the construction of a settlement house that contained a mothers’ training school, a day nursery, and a kindergarten supplied with trained nurses. The Henry Street settlement, as it became known, was a direct response to Riis’s argument that children who were reared in tenements would become an “army [of] tramps” and a burden on society if left to their own devices.19
Jennie was twenty-eight years old when she went on the speaking circuit. She always traveled at her own expense and as a prominent representative of the King’s Daughters. Following her appearance in Baltimore, local papers described her as “a highly cultivated and interesting young lady” and reported that she gave presentations on the subject “with an intelligent and graceful ease that fixed the attention of her audience, which was [also] moved by her personal magnetism.” She called the proposed settlement house a place where “the poor may learn to help themselves” and regarded it as but a small step “towards the complete reform of the tenement-house system in New York.” Her dedication eventually led her to call for an audience with Cardinal James Gibbons — the archbishop of Baltimore — to encourage him to support the King’s Daughters as they reached out to the “degraded, the outcast, and the miserable in the slums of New York, who were living not only in great physical want, but also beyond the reach of spiritual influences.” Merrill told the cardinal that the King’s Daughters sought not to interfere with the work of churches; rather, their “mission is to seek out those who belong to no church, who acknowledge none, and to bring them within reach of saving influences.” Persuaded by Merrill’s visit, the cardinal endorsed the project.20
Jennie Merrill’s career as a reformer, her speaking tours, and her ability to attract attention for her reform work gave her life a purpose. And, while she had her suitors, she chose to live independently, to travel, and to pursue a life of public service during the very years of life when most women considered marriage. However, as the nineteenth century came to a close, Jennie, now in her mid-thirties, returned to Natchez for good where she lived a quiet life — quite the opposite of all she had known before.
Had it not been for the Civil War, Jennie Merrill would have grown up with the expectation of marrying a man who could secure the family’s wealth and land. This custom usua
lly meant marrying a son — who might have been a cousin — from among elite families in Natchez. The tradition of marrying cousins did not die out with the war, and in Jennie’s case, two such men vied for her attention, though neither succeeded in securing her hand in wedlock.21
A few months after burying her father in Natchez, Jennie and her brother Dunbar traveled to Memphis, where they visited with their cousins the Goodmans, who were the children of Walter Goodman, with whom Ayres Merrill had set up his cotton factor firm in New York right after the war. It was during this time that the youngest Walter Goodman, who worked as a clerk in his father’s merchant business, fell for Jennie. During an extended stay with his family, Jennie and Walter became better acquainted, and they later exchanged letters throughout 1884. Though only Walter’s letters survive, they reveal a young man completely smitten with Jennie, who by now was truly a woman of the world. “My Dearest Love,” he wrote her in the fall of 1884, “I miss you more than I can express. . . . Could I follow the dictates of my heart I could write volumes, the substance of which might be told in three words — I love you.” Jennie’s feelings are unknown, but Walter’s last known letter to her provides a clue, as he closed with “yours in devotion, but without hope of your love.”22