Another Elopement of the Familiar Sort

Brian: In the late 19th century, elite families from the United States were in the grips of a moral panic. Daughters from the upper classes were abandoning their inheritances and running away with their families’ coachmen. One after the other, these scandalous stories were featured in newspapers around the country.

Brian: An heiress elopes with the family coachman. A mysterious romance with apparently no love in it. Wealthy New Yorker seeks in vain to locate his young and beautiful daughter. A strange infatuation, a beautiful maiden runs off and marries a negro coachman. Eloping couple are chased my motorcar. Clergyman’s daughter runs off with coachman but is captured by parent. The coachman again, another elopement of the familiar sort.

Carolee: It was called an epidemic. People called it a sensation. Some people even called the coachmen the personage of the era.

Brian: That’s scholar Carolee Klimchock. I spoke with her at the Organization of American Historians Conference last year. She says these elopement scandals were a result of new conceptions of love an marriage in the gilded age.

Carolee: He appeared in songs and jokes and cartoons because so many wealthy women were running off with their paid coach drivers and it was usually a live in coach driver so someone they had gotten to know over time and they were even hired for their looks. They wanted to have people who had chiseled good looks, who had good bodies, good physiques, because people wanted to show up to a party and be known to sort of have this coachman that appeared beautiful and represented them well. It was all about surfaces in the gilded age.

Brian: You could say it’s kind of a trophy servant.

Carolee: Absolutely. Many of the coach drivers were African American but then it became more trendy to have European coachmen. I think the accent became trendy, the fact that they were sort of imported and could play the part of a British servant.

Brian: It is perfectly clear in families where there are daughters to marry, that the present style of coachmen is a mistake. He is too fascinating. His horse sense is too magnetic. He must be reformed. Now, how is this to be done? It is the swell thing to have a handsome coachman with sweet whiskers and an [inaudible 00:37:13] cut. Old and bald headed coachmen would inevitably lower the tone of the family and automaton horse engineer must be invented. An equine apollo on wheels. This coachman might be wound up, like a clock and so constructed that if any young lady attempted to run off with him, he would explode or bolt to Canada.

Brian: So let’s talk a little bit about this group of women first. Presumably there’s not like Avis, rent a coachman for the night to look good. You presumably have to have a lot of money to coachman.

Carolee: A lot of money ’cause these were, usually they had full-time, not only the coachmen but they had a whole staff to take care of the horses, they had many carriages, so these were extremely wealthy people usually. They were well educated, a lot of them had gone to women’s colleges and had new ideas about modernity. They were budding suffragettes perhaps. These women were reading novels that were romantic novels that were often considered to be sort of taboo and so people were getting some new ideas about what marriage should mean, that it wasn’t necessarily a partnership among families and businesses, that there was a new idea that romance could be involved. That they were not passive sexual actors but they could have more of an active role in their personal lives.

Speaker 10: I know it’s hard for you but as you know, the LORD will guide us. And you be careful about telephoning and don’t come again ’till I tell you. I’m doing my best and try to keep up. My papa said about running off he would put me in jail and then take the children so all will go for the best. Goodnight and be good until I have you for good. You promised if I would leave him you would be true and wait for me and now is the time to show how much you care. I will never care for anyone but you and you know it. Only we must take our time and do it just right.

Brian: If you were to generalize about the coachmen, what else could you say about them as a group?

Carolee: I’ve got to imagine that they were very bold and almost fearless because they knew that there was danger. I mean, sometimes the men were threatened with violence, sometimes the men were African American and they were threatened with lynching. There was a lot of fear and outrage, and threats. It’s a story of love overcoming adversity in some ways.

Brian: How many instances of this do you think there were in a 20 or 30 year period?

Carolee: I found about 70 or so-

Brian: Wow.

Carolee: But I imagine there must be more, obviously, that I couldn’t find and that these families often tried to keep them out of the newspapers so.

Brian: Yes, nondisclosure acts.

Carolee: Absolutely. There’s one case of this woman Ella Tice in New York and she was interviewed by the New York times saying I’m the happiest woman in Westchester County. You can tell all your readers. He, you know, also said I love this woman, she loves me. It’s nobody’s business but our own so it was really interesting to see people not running away and hiding a lot of them were owning it and that particular couple had to leave town. Her own brother threatened her life.

Brian: Never was the peaceful village of Williamsbridge Westchester County so stirred to its depths as is now the case over the wedding of pretty Ella Tice to the colored coachman James Randolph. And never were the good people of the Baptist Church more deeply agitated than over the announcement made by Mrs. Randolph herself in the Herald that her husband and herself, regardless of what anybody might think, would walk boldly up the main aisle at the service yesterday evening and take their places as if nothing had happened. If that darky dares to show his face in the Baptist Church tonight, exclaimed one hotheaded youth, there are men in this place who would just as soon, and little sooner, give him a coat of tar and feathers.

Carolee: Nancy Carnegie’s also an interesting one and an unusual one in the sense that Andrew Carnegie himself sort of sanctioned the relationship.

Brian: What was the relationship to Andrew Carnegie?

Carolee: She was his niece, apparently his favorite niece, and she ran off with her coachman who was also her riding instructor. The mother disowned her and was very upset about it but Andrew Carnegie himself had said well I came from nothing and I respect this man. He doesn’t drink, that was always often a thing and he said this is better than if she were to marry a worthless duke. That’s an unusual case but it’s one that stands out because it’s so high profile.

Carolee: Victoria Moricini’s another interesting character. Her father worked for J. Gould.

Brian: This is the railroad magnate?

Carolee: Yes.

Brian: Much hated by large sectors of the upper-class, not to mention working people.

Carolee: Yes. When she eloped with her coachman, he sent Pinkerton detectives to try to find them and try to arrest her for so called stealing some jewelry that was her jewelry but since the parents had bought it it was sort of like a thievery.

Brian: My Victoria was the light of this home, the delight of her mother, the very pride of my life, and she has disgraced us all. My God, if I could put my hands on that villain I would tear him to pieces. Oh sir, you do not know how happy we were. I gave her $200 a month, horses, diamonds, anything she wanted. I supposed she would marry but I did not think my beautiful Victoria would marry a dirty stableman who washed his clothes in a horse trough.

Carolee: And they escaped the Pinkerton detectives but that was actually something that other families did too, they sent detectives out to try to find some way to rustle the woman back or send her to an insane alyssum, that was another thing that commonly happened but Victoria in that case, she went to New York City, of course, which a lot of people did where it was a little bit easier to live across class or interracial relationship. She became a Vaudeville singer and dancer and she apparently, according to reviews anyway, did not have the best singing voice but she got great crowds because she was this wealthy woman who ran off with her coach driver and the coach driver would often walk her up to the stage so they sort of reenacted their relationship for a paying audience.

Brian: She has grown somewhat stouter since the days when she danced in tights with mandolin and song at the casino while her German husband made $2 a day as a sixth avenue conductor. Her hair, the glimpse of it one can see behind her black veil, is still brilliant and without a trace of age or grief. She is an enigma and she will so remain unless she chooses to surrender her secret.

Brian: Okay so you’re trained in American studies, we pay you the big bucks to explain why things like this happen, what’s going on?

Carolee: You know I think there was a lot of intimacy between these people that sort of leveled their relationship in a way and sort of leveled their almost class position. Women were, of course, lower in status than their male counterparts.

Brian: And what about close proximity in an intimate space?

Carolee: Yes, they both had closed carriages as well as open carriages so you would have a conversation and the coachman would often help the people into the carriage, they would take their goods if they went shopping, so they had a lot of personal interactions and there was also the coaching hour which was 5:00 PM in Central Park so for New Yorkers, going coaching and being seen in your fancy coaching clothes, coaching dresses, coaching hats…

Brian: The coaching hour.

Carolee: Yes. So it was during the coaching hour the coachmen and the heiress spent a lot of time together sort of seeing and being seen so there was a lot of genuine intimacy that grew between them because of this proximity.

Brian: And do you think it’s possible that because of that there was more natural, what we call honest conversation than some of these women would have with their fiances or their whatever you call them back them dates, I don’t know.

Carolee: Yes, and if they had gone on a date it would have been chaperoned. The parents never thought the coachmen would be a threat so they could travel alone, they could go horseback riding alone in a park or in the woods.

Brian: The coachmen, so, was supposed to be a chaperone of sorts?

Carolee: Yes, yes, definitely.

Brian: This is also an era in which photography, which has been around for a while, really begins to make its way into the newspapers.

Carolee: Absolutely.

Brian: Did that play a role in your story at all?

Carolee: Well coaching becomes a huge aspect of newspaper layouts and so coaching scenes, coaching parades that happened, and as I mentioned the coaching hour in Central Park, what the coachmen looked like, and what women looked like in their coaching gear was a big part of sort of the gilded aristocracy and so the average person couldn’t go to a debutant ball or something like that or go to Del Monicos and the fancy restaurant but they could see people in their carriages, in their fancy gear so this was like reading US magazine. You were seeing the celebrities in view here.

Brian: Carolee Klimchock is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her forthcoming book is titled, Aris Wade’s Coachman: Scandals in 19th Century America.

Joanne: That’s it for us today but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org or send an email to BackStory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Brian: Funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is helping Virginia Humanities and BackStory change the narrative of race and representation.

Nathan: BackStory’s produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost office at the University of Virginia, the Johns Hopkins University, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 11: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.