The James Boys

by Richard Liebmann-Smith

  After graduation (with high honors) from Miss Beecher’s, Elena began socializing with the provincial yet pretentious young “artistic” crowd in Hartford, centered in the tony Nook Farm enclave of the city, which harbored such literary luminaries as Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Specifically, she took up with one George Goodwin Stanley, an aspiring painter already in his mid-twenties. To the adolescent Elena, who, despite her manifest beauty and bountiful talents, had always felt uncomfortable in the gilded society toward which her father was propelling her, George Stanley must have seemed a dashing figure indeed: Not only did this handsome “older” man boast impeccable social and financial credentials—his father, Aaron Stanley, was an important early backer of Samuel Colt’s thriving firearms business—the younger Stanley had even been to Paris, where he had studied with Thomas Couture, a neoclassical painter whose scandalous “orgy” picture Romans of the Decadence had been the sensation of the 1847 Salon and who had gone on to instruct Édouard Manet and a number of well-known American artists, including William Morris Hunt, with whom William James later studied at Newport.

  Elena’s association with young Stanley began innocently and properly enough. Together they studied the Old Masters, participated in gay soirées of charades, musicales, and parlor games of the era, and painted in George’s exquisitely appointed north-lit studio, which had been converted from a carriage house on the Stanley estate. She became George’s pupil, displaying a talent with brush and oils that he once graciously intimated promised to eclipse even his own.

  One of Elena’s few surviving canvases from this period treats the classical theme of the Greek goddess of the hunt Artemis (the Roman Diana) surprised while bathing by Acteon, prince of Thebes. Such a subject was of course a highly ambitious undertaking for a fledgling artist, but Elena always took pride in being ahead of herself. (The headmistress at Miss Draper’s once reported to her father that upon counting up to ninety-nine, Elena had proudly blurted out “two hundred,” insisting that she had every right to do so since she had already counted one hundred.) Thanks to her excellent school training in draftsmanship, to George Stanley’s attentive tutelage, and to her own native gifts, Elena’s work demonstrated a precociously keen sense of composition and expression, particularly in her rendering of the human face and form.

  According to the ancient myth, the virgin goddess was so enraged at being spied naked that she transformed her accidental admirer into a stag, which was swiftly and fatally set upon by his own hunting dogs. Conventional treatments of this subject, following Titian’s 1559 masterpiece, depict the prince observing the naked goddess surrounded by her nymphs, usually in a bathhouse setting. But Elena’s canvas tellingly advances the focus of the great cinquecento master’s work by presenting a subsequent moment in the story: In Elena’s painting, based on that of Guiseppe Cesari (“Il Cavaliere d’Arpino,” 1568–1640), Acteon has already been partially transformed into a stag, his hounds hard at his heels. The bloodied prince’s eyes are wide with animal terror, but the fully, proudly naked goddess, to the left and in the foreground, seems to regard the unfortunate voyeur’s suffering with true Olympian detachment, her satisfied smile suggesting nothing so much as smug pride with her divine handiwork.

  Asa Hite at least initially approved—indeed, encouraged—his daughter’s association with young Stanley, pleased by the prospect of the cultural and social advantages she might garner from rubbing elbows (he naïvely assumed it would never be more than elbows) with the scion of such a well-educated, well-heeled, and widely traveled family. He no doubt foresaw a brilliant marriage for his only child.

  But Elena had scant desire to rush into what she saw as “the tyranny of wedlock,” especially in light of the disheartening model of her parents’ own unhappy union. Moreover, during her postbellum adolescence, a new, more assertive—even combative—brand of feminism was rapidly gaining adherents, spearheaded by such militant reformist firebrands as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and, most notably, the colorful and charismatic Victoria Woodhull, whom Elena heard speak at the Hartford Opera House in the fall of 1871. In that year—nearly half a century before women ultimately won the right to vote—Woodhull, who had worked at various times in her life as an actress, a prostitute, a clairvoyant, a stockbroker, and a newspaper publisher, had declared herself a candidate for the presidency of the United States, running on a platform that included not only universal suffrage but free love. (Needless to say, “The Woodhull,” as she was known, found herself at loggerheads with the likes of Catharine Beecher, who once described the self-nominated candidate as “either insane or the hapless victim of malignant spirits.”)

  To the impressionable and irrepressible Elena Hite, however, Woodhull’s radical creed arrived as a revelation. Freshly liberated from the strictures of Miss Beecher’s seminary, she was brimming with a youthful sense of her own artistic and personal possibilities. Above all, she wanted experience. She yearned for a Paris of her own, and with characteristic impatience, if she couldn’t have the one on the banks of the Seine, she was determined to create one for herself on the banks of the Connecticut.

  Her posing with George Stanley became increasingly daring: While his early portraits of Elena depicted her in such quaint and modest guises as that of a mock-shepherdess Marie Antoinette, in time the pair were painting each other, as the delicate Victorian euphemism had it, “from life.” (In her Artemis study, Elena used her own likeness for the naked goddess and that of a naked and antlered George Stanley—with facial features somewhere between those of a stag and a socialite—as the model for the young prince.) Such artistic liberties led, perhaps inevitably, to those of a more carnal nature, which, given a wishful “continental” and free-love gloss, somehow evolved into dalliances with others in their circle. (Elena once proclaimed that she was like a man in all things save love, but it appears that in love, especially, her behavior could be masculine in the extreme.) Like Daisy Miller, Elena—upon whom Henry James may have partially based the eponymous heroine of his wildly successful 1878 novella—came to enjoy “a great deal of gentlemen’s society.” And while in her own mind, she may have been living out a daring bohemian fantasy of free love, the sordid truth, from the perspective of proper Hartford society, was that she was being “passed around” among George Stanley’s coterie of overprivileged, overheated young bucks. When one of them, apparently consumed by residual Puritan guilt, confessed these raunchy goings-on to his minister, Elena came to learn that, as Victoria Woodhull’s biographer Barbara Goldsmith pointedly noted, “it was one thing to believe in the theory of free love and quite another to practice it.” Suddenly, everyone in Hartford, it seemed, was talking about her, while no one would talk to her.

  Finding herself to have become, like Daisy, “a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect,” Elena reacted with alternating bouts of shame and rage—shame not so much for having behaved badly as for having so grossly miscalculated the public consequences of what she had naïvely assumed to be private acts, and rage at knowing that the “crimes” for which she was being shunned were no more heinous than those for which the young men of her acquaintance were summarily exonerated, not to say tacitly applauded.

  Most of all, she bridled at the notion that she might be thought of as a victim. Though accepting such a judgment could have provided her with something of a moral “out” from her dire predicament, she refused to allow herself to be seen as the pathetic protagonist of a classic Victorian fallen-woman narrative in which an innocent young girl, usually of lower birth, is led astray by a heartless upper-class rogue. She determined she would rather be treated as an object of scorn than one of pity; indeed, as William James later astutely remarked of her downfall, she seemed “not so much to have fallen as to have leapt.”

  Her mother, however, proved far less resistant and resilient in the face of the scandal; in fact, it may have killed her. In the wake of the shocking revelations about her daughter’s comportment, Amelia Hite
took to her bed and never left it, dying—possibly from an overdose of laudanum—within a week.

  Elena’s father responded to the double blow of his daughter’s disgrace and his wife’s demise by throwing himself into grim business mode, retreating into his oak-paneled library and occupying himself day and night with railroad investment affairs. He was unwilling or unable to share his anger, disappointment, and grief with his wayward daughter, though all were painfully apparent to her from the distance he put between them. (Besides, sexual misconduct was hardly a subject Asa Hite could have broached with Elena, and not merely out of a sense of Victorian propriety. For years, it was rumored, he had been a regular client at a number of the tonier “sporting houses” of New York City.) Certainly, the easy camaraderie of their surrogate-spouse relationship was gone: There would be no more lavish dinner parties to be arranged chez Hite. Elena and her father rattled around in the big Lord’s Hill house in stony silence.

  Local gossips, the “Hounds of Hartford,” as Elena called them in her diary, chastised her as a heartless and remorseless Jezebel—doubly so for having “driven the final nail into her mother’s coffin.” Hartford, having demonstrated its intolerance of Elena, soon became intolerable to her.

  Fortunately, she was not without means to strike out on her own. At twenty-one, even before her mother’s death, she had received a sizable bequest from the estate of her maternal grandfather, Charles Brownlee, a leading Baltimore textile broker. It was a windfall that, under radically different circumstances, might have served as her dowry, but she put it instead toward an extensive cross-country speaking tour. Under the nom de guerre Elena Phoenix, she enlisted as a foot soldier in the “petticoat brigade” of feminist proselytizers then storming the nation’s lecture halls in an oratory assault on the citadel of masculine privilege.

  Though her message appears to have been little more than basic Bloomer Girl boilerplate advocating female enfranchisement, property rights, and higher education (with particular emphasis on women’s sexual prerogatives), Elena’s style at the lectern set her dramatically apart from her speechifying sisters on the lyceum circuit. Her seminary training in rhetoric and elocution, coupled with her youth and striking good looks, brought her stunning success throughout New England and even as far west as Kansas City, her last lecture venue before her fateful encounter with Jesse James & Co. A handbill from that occasion reads:

  TONIGHT!

  THE RISING WOMAN

  Miss Elena Phoenix

  Her views on the Emancipation of Women

  Humanity and Political Equality of Women

  The Sleeping Giantess

  Bonds of Matrimony, Shackles of Dress

  The Natural Rights of Females

  Miss Phoenix: Author and Lecturer

  News of the train robbery at Rocky Cut flashed almost instantaneously across the telegraph wires of Missouri and the entire nation. The bandits—preliminary reports varied as to whether there were six or a dozen of them—had made off with over fifteen thousand dollars from the Adams and United States Express strongboxes aboard the train, then disappeared like will-o’-the-wisps into the summer night.

  When the Number 4 Express finally pulled in to Union Station in St. Louis early the following morning, it was greeted by a clamoring phalanx of reporters, policemen, and detectives. Among the latter were St. Louis chief of police James McDonough and William Pinkerton of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, who, as soon as he had gotten word of the latest James-Younger escapade, had hopped the first train down from his home office in Chicago in the hope of picking up the gang’s trail while it was still warm.

  Not that the seasoned sleuth would have nurtured any serious expectation of gleaning anything useful about the robbery from witnesses aboard the train. He was all too familiar with the depressing propensity of the James Gang’s victims to develop a convenient and global amnesia for their experiences, either out of raw fear of retaliation or from a nostalgic sense of secessionist solidarity with the former Confederate irregulars who made up the gang. Elena Hite, however, being unfamiliar with the mores and bloody history of the region, apparently felt little trepidation about submitting to an interview with the detective. She accepted his offer to escort her to her hotel and invited him up to her room to be debriefed.

  It must have been one of the odder interrogations in Pinkerton’s career. Like many a fashionable young lady of her time, Elena, even in high summer (and despite her rhetorical attack on “the shackles of dress”), sported more layers of apparel than a napoleon pastry. Beneath her frilled mauve frock, she wore three long petticoats: The outermost, a “Balmoral,” was woolen, with red and green stripes; the inner two were of lace-trimmed muslin, stiffly starched, one white and the other—as noted by the perspicacious Henry James—a soft lemon yellow. These, in turn, covered a pair of tubular cotton drawers, also stiffly starched and secured about her waist with tape strings. The drawers, in a shower of elaborately embroidered ruffles, reached well below her knees, covering a pair of burgundy lisle pantalette stockings that were themselves adorned from calf to ankle with three tiers of white flounces.

  After a long hot night toting about this considerable stock of dry goods—she complained to Pinkerton that she felt “rigged up like a schooner in full sail”—Elena was naturally eager to get out of her traveling togs and into a refreshing bath. She proceeded to perform what could only be described as a slow striptease, shedding her garments and laying them one by one atop the flimsy silk-and-bamboo screen that stood between herself and her interlocutor. “So much is made of our so-called feminine modesty,” she asserted breezily from behind the lotus-motif screen (reciting verbatim from her own stump speech), “but I’m certain it’s all just another ruse by which men, under the guise of elevating us, conspire to render us all the more deeply enslaved.”

  This line, usually greeted with appreciative applause when delivered from the podium, was met by her present audience with embarrassed silence. Pinkerton’s nervous smile did little to conceal the intense discomfort occasioned in him by the increasingly extreme state of dishabille of his star witness. Outside of the racy pages of The National Police Gazette, the detective had seldom been exposed at point-blank range to such a thorough catalog of a young lady’s in-expressibles. His dark eyes darted over every detail of the suite, registering the magenta velvet drapes, the oak bedstead, the equestrian chromoliths on the walls—everything, in short, but the provocative silhouette of the room’s current occupant. Elena, for her part, was not in the least unconscious of the discomfiting effect her immodest behavior was having on the detective, any more than she had been of the shocking impression her remark the night before about walking the streets and peddling her favors to the highest bidder was bound to have made on Henry James. In fact, she quite relished her ability to discombobulate the self-proclaimed dominant sex. (“I must confess,” she once wrote, “to deriving an unseemly pleasure from thoroughly confounding the poor creatures at every turn, displaying brashness where they expect reserve and modesty where they anticipate audacity.”)

  Indeed, Pinkerton was thoroughly flummoxed by Elena. She failed to fit into any of his convenient mental pigeonholes: As an attractive young lady of apparent good breeding, she should not have been gallivanting about the countryside unaccompanied, and certainly not casually disrobing in the presence of strange men. Yet as a women’s liberationist, she should have been older, crustier, and far less easy on the eye—more in the mold of that “glorious phalanx of old maids” who “seldom marry and never die” and whom Henry James later skewered in The Bostonians.

  Pinkerton was experiencing both intense erotic provocation and something very much its opposite, an unpleasant sense of being somehow neutered, like a servant whose sex was irrelevant to the transaction at hand. In fact, he need hardly have flattered himself that Elena was out to seduce him; he was distinctly not her type. Though then only thirty, “The Big Man,” as he was known in criminal and law-enforcement circles, had already
become, in the description of British journalist Ben Macintyre, “stout and florid,” with pudgy cheeks and a huge, drooping, bushy mustache—scarcely a hottie even by Victorian standards—and a prime specimen of those portly “prosperous walruses” that Elena always associated, not in the least romantically, with her father and his stogie-puffing business cronies. Under the circumstances, the detective was anxious to get down to business, as much for whatever information he might elicit from this extraordinary young woman as to keep his mind off the titillating proceedings taking place behind the lotus screen.

  By the summer of 1876, hostilities between the James Gang and the Pinkertons had long since achieved the intensity of an all-out war. “I know that the James-Youngers are desperate men,” wrote Allan Pinkerton, William’s father and the agency’s founder, “and that if we meet it must be the death of one or both of us…they must repay…there is no use talking, they must die.”

  The crimes for which the Pinkertons were seeking capital redress were not merely the James Gang’s depredations upon the railroads and express companies controlled by the agency’s wealthy clients. There had been casualties on both sides. In March 1874, a young Pinkerton operative named J. W. Whicher had attempted to infiltrate the gang by passing himself off as a hired hand looking for work on the James farm near Kearney, in Clay County. His body was found bound and gagged, sprawled in a ditch by the side of the road with bullet holes in the temple, neck, and shoulder—some of the shots having been fired at such close range that they left powder burns on his flesh and hair. The twenty-six-year-old Whicher’s face, according to some accounts, had been half chewed off by wild hogs. A week later, another Pinkerton operative, Louis J. Lull, a former Chicago police captain, had met a similar fate (sans hogs) in a showdown with John and Jim Younger. On that occasion, Lull, accompanied by fellow Pinkerton agent John Boyle and local deputy sheriff Edwin Daniels, had been accosted by the two Younger brothers on the road near Monegaw Springs in St. Clair County. When a suspicious John Younger trained a double-barreled shotgun on the trio and ordered them to drop their holsters, Boyle spurred his mount and galloped off. He lost his hat to a blast from the shotgun. Daniels lost his life a few moments later, after Lull drew a small Smith & Wesson No. 2 revolver from his boot and shot John Younger through the neck. Jim, the older Younger, retaliated by blasting Daniels into oblivion with his pistol, while the mortally wounded John Younger pursued Lull on horseback, dropping the detective with two shots before falling dead himself. Lull died three days later. Only Jim Younger and the hatless John Boyle, later castigated as a coward by Allan Pinkerton, had survived the encounter.