As the efforts to hold accountable the leaders of the lynch mob foundered, a parallel legal drama was unfolding, involving the charge John and Theresa McMahon had leveled against Philip Foley for blackmail. Foley dismissed the accusation as baseless, as he had Theresa’s earlier attempt to have him run in as a vagrant. His “threats” to Lena, he insisted, were nothing more than the playful scolding that might feature in any romance. If his tone seemed forceful, it stemmed from his deep feelings for her, and as for any exchange of money, she had voluntarily given him some when he needed it—the kind of casual borrowing of small sums common to any friendship. One of his letters to Lena, from Friday, May 20, introduced by the McMahons as evidence, read:
Dear Friend: I waited until the clock struck 12. Why did you not show yourself—some good excuse, I suppose. Well, I will tell you what I will do, as it seems impossible for you to let me in. If you will come out this afternoon and stay one, two, or three hours, I will leave here tomorrow (Saturday). You can meet me on the Matamoras bridge at 2 o’clock sharp. Answer. Phil
P.S. You may think you can keep this farce up right along, but you will find out your mistake. Why did you not write me and let me know your reason for not meeting me? By meeting on Matamoras bridge at 2 o’clock sharp you will save yourself a great deal of trouble. Phil
A second addendum read in part:
Friday afternoon—I have sent to your house four times since Tuesday. The party saw you at the window. Why did you not come down? I find that the only way for me to do is to show things up just as they have transpired. It will make a nice talk for the colored population in your section. You will find your mistake trying the racket with me, as I won’t have it. I will look for you on Fowler Street Saturday afternoon at 2 o’clock without fail; if not, I will be obliged to give you a sample of what I can do … I will talk for business.
Despite Foley’s innocent characterization of the letter, its manner is hardly kind; rather it sounds anxious and, yes, threatening—perhaps a sign that by late May her parents’ campaign against him was succeeding and that Lena had begun to push him away. It is also possible that this was simply the most aggressive-sounding of the large batch of Foley’s letters to which the family had access. All love affairs consist of retreats and advances, ultimatums and surrenders. Taken out of context by outsiders—the press and the courts—a private correspondence between lovers could certainly give rise to some false impressions. Foley at one point asserted that fourteen letters he had received from Lena, which had been entrusted to Constable Patrick Burns, his court-appointed bodyguard, would prove that they had agreed to marry. Indeed, on June 10, Foley from jail sent a letter to John McMahon asking formally for Lena’s hand.
As for proving the charge of blackmail, Lena and Foley concurred in separate comments that she had probably given him over the course of their relationship no more than ten or fifteen dollars. “She is … quoted as saying that I threatened her with all manner of things unless she furnished me with money,” Foley objected. “This she knows to be a falsehood … as all the money she ever let me have she gave to me willingly, and I can’t understand now why she makes such false statements. She also states that there was nothing to expose in her conduct. I think the best place to discuss this point is when she is under oath on the stand as that is where honest people tell the truth.”
It was this last, more menacing element in Foley’s writing, as well as in some of his freely given remarks to the press, that most alarmed the McMahons. The exact nature of these threats to expose Lena remain mysterious, although it can be assumed that they related to behavior that both partners knew would be perceived as immoral and/or transgressive, and that would damage her reputation permanently.
It is telling that for how frequently Foley’s insinuations—those about Lena and those suggesting he had embarrassing information to disclose about other unnamed people in the town—were reprinted, the local press remained disinclined to probe for details, instead content to note occasionally, as if from a great and incurious remove, how baffling some of the reported “facts” leading up to the lynching appeared. But what were these potent secrets that threatened so much harm? Editors may have been inclined to discredit anything Foley said, but in general they didn’t hesitate to quote him at length, and he tended to be forthcoming with his opinions, so it is difficult not to understand their failure to follow up certain leads as negligence by design.
Foley conceded to reporters he had erred in angering George Lea and alienating Lena’s parents, and that he regretted some of his other actions, but insisted he would not be railroaded on a bogus blackmail charge. The local courts, he feared, would “shove him up whether he was guilty or not.” His warning that he would share scandalous intelligence about members of the community was his attempt to immunize himself. If the blackmail case went against him, the town would in effect be calling his bluff. Who knew what cards he held?
He did seek the return of the letters Lena had sent to him prior to June 2, which had been seized by the court, but it’s unclear if he ever got them or what became of them. It may have been in several people’s interest that they disappear. Their absence is especially unfortunate, as it is hard to read Lena’s proclamations following the Lewis tragedy without hearing the voice of someone else, most likely Wilton Bennet, the McMahons’ legal representative, who would have had an interest in framing her public statements. For example, her earlier insistence that she had spent Tuesday night who-knew-where in New York City and Wednesday night in Laurel Grove Cemetery in Port Jervis, and had not met Foley until Thursday morning, seemed designed to cover up something; the lost night in the cemetery, after all, was actually the night she spent in Foley’s embrace on a hill above Carpenter’s Point and, later, on the banks of the Neversink. And while her efforts to retrieve her trunk suggest a determination to leave town, her recollection that she had risen that morning at her parents’ house and then gone down to the riverside to “wait for the train to Boston” strains credulity. She didn’t awaken in her parents’ house, and her and Foley’s remote refuge by the river would have been an inconvenient place to wait for a train, as it was a considerable walk from there to the Erie Depot on Jersey Avenue. “I will leave it to all intelligent persons,” Foley wrote, “if it is reasonable that a person would go that distance out of his or her way.”
Despite the widely shared sense of his complicity in the tragic events of June 2, Foley was never officially accused of anything related to the lynching of Robert Lewis. He was briefly jailed for his own protection and as a potential witness for the coroner’s inquest, but was not called to testify. Surely, though, he knew there remained strong public feeling against him, and he was understandably apprehensive when he was brought back from the Goshen jail to Port Jervis for a June 14 arraignment and preliminary hearing on the blackmail charges. Some small boys, in imitation of their fathers, had congregated at the entrance to the Ball Street lockup, calling out Foley by name and tormenting him with choking sounds and the threat he would be hanged. He told a journalist he did not think he would sleep well, as “he did not know but that the mob would come for him in the night,” despite an assurance from the formidable Constable Burns that “the first man who lays a hand on you will be a dead duck.”
An enjoinder to the village that ran in the Tri-States Union may have put him somewhat at ease. “Foley will not be lynched,” it vowed, citing proudly the town’s newfound fealty to the right of due process. “There is not the slightest evidence of any disposition to interfere with the regular and orderly administration of justice. The law will be allowed to take its course.”
The reassurance evidently had an effect, for the next morning, even as hundreds of people gathered for the hearing, Foley “looked as cheerful and serene as a May morning. His countenance, as he coolly read the morning paper, did not indicate that he had even a passing acquaintance with trouble.” He was, as ever, sharply dressed, although even he would admit to being upstaged by Lena, who entered wearing a stunning light-colored outfit and took her seat to applause from the spectators and generous noises of support.
There was a blushing exchange of glances between the lovers, observed with discretion by the room, but the tender moment was shattered almost immediately by the arrival of Lena’s parents. Foley shrank visibly under the intense gaze of Theresa McMahon. Then came a shrill cry of alarm as John McMahon made a determined rush for him. Constable Burns stepped in McMahon’s path and, holding him firmly, announced that Foley was in his charge. “I don’t care whose charge he is in,” Lena’s father roared as he struggled in Burns’s grip. “He is the negro that ought to have been hung.”
From his seat McMahon continued to curse and berate Foley, who had returned to reading his newspaper and made a point of not glancing up. Justice Mulley warned Lena’s father, “I don’t mean any disrespect to you, sir, only we must have order.”
In her testimony, Lena explained that she had known Foley since October and had very much liked him, but in April, after his release from jail, she had begun receiving blackmailing letters from him in which he asked her to meet him and to bring him money, warning that if she did not, he would expose her to her father. “He would tell her father and all the world that she was not a good girl,” according to an account from the Rome Citizen (New York), which claimed the letters were delivered by Robert Lewis or by John Westfall, a Black man who lived across the street from the McMahons.
“This money I gave him from time to time, in small sums,” she testified. “He kept me in constant terror of him.” So frightening were the letters, she said, she immediately burned them or tore them up. Foley, who was representing himself, cross-examined Lena, who appeared visibly nervous under his questioning.
“Wasn’t the first letter you received from me in November?”
“I think it was.”
“Did you ever send me any money?”
“Yes.”
“How many times?”
“Twice. Once to Port Jervis and once to Goshen.”
“Was it received through blackmailing?”
“Yes.”
“Was the money given at all times through threats?”
“It was.”
“Was it so when you met me on the street?”
“It was extorted by fear.”
Theresa McMahon followed Lena to the stand. She related that she had learned from George Lea and others that Foley, however smartly dressed and well-spoken, was no gentleman, but a rake, thief, and degenerate, who stole liquor and peeked in at half-dressed chambermaids, and who kept company with gamblers and hedonists. “Learning that he had visited the house clandestinely afterward, I told Lena to have nothing more to do with him. I made a complaint of vagrancy against Foley before Justice Mulley. Foley has continually annoyed us, inflicting his presence on us. He has been seen at eleven p.m. coming from our cellar. He was around there at all hours. He kept Lena in terror, which was increased by the letters.”
Foley did not cross-examine Mrs. McMahon, but instead read a prepared statement:
I am 32 years of age and was born in Warren, Massachusetts. I am a machinist by trade, and have been an insurance agent and a traveling salesman. I have never prowled around the McMahon residence except when I had an appointment to be there. I never sent threatening letters demanding money. All the money I ever received from Lena was, with two exceptions, given to me in person.
After the hearing Foley told a reporter that the letters held by Constable Burns would prove that he and Lena were engaged to be married, and that if he was indicted in the blackmail case and went to trial, he would introduce them as evidence. But Justice Mulley refused to return the letters, delivering instead a stern reprimand. He reminded Foley that he had made his release from jail in March provisional on the condition that he leave town for good: “Do you remember what you promised me the last time you were in this courtroom? I had sentenced you to four months at Goshen but on your solemn promise never to return to Port Jervis I reduced it to two months. On the day succeeding your discharge you [were] back in Port Jervis again.” When Foley mumbled a sheepish apology, Mulley demanded, “What kind of a man are you, anyway, to break such a promise?”
Foley had a good answer but did not give it. That he had done so because he was in love with Lena McMahon.
On the afternoon of Saturday, June 18, Lena went for a fitting with Miss Hensel, a dressmaker in her neighborhood. She stayed only a few minutes, however, making the odd remark that she might never wear the dress she’d ordered. Two hours later, when Lena had not come home, Theresa McMahon went to check on her, only to learn she’d left Miss Hensel’s long before.
Minutes later, as Theresa anxiously hurried home, she encountered a family friend, John Kleinsteuber, who said he had seen Lena walking on the canal towpath a short time before, and that uncharacteristically she had failed to return his hello but had kept her head down and continued walking. John McMahon, informed of his daughter’s disappearance and strange behavior, immediately rushed out the door, fearing she had gone to drown herself in the canal. Lena had been subpoenaed to testify in a grand jury hearing on Tuesday in Goshen about the lynching of Robert Lewis, and her parents knew she greatly feared what others, particularly Foley, might say.
Helpful neighbor Sol Carley joined John McMahon, and they first walked and then recruited a friend’s buggy to go along much the same route Carley had covered in pursuit of Robert Lewis two weeks before, inquiring about Lena as they went. They passed through Huguenot and Cuddebackville, growing more concerned as the miles passed and the twilight deepened. Finally, as they approached the Sullivan County line, they learned that Lena had been seen going up a little-used mountain road toward Otisville. Hurrying their pace, they rounded and climbed the road’s steep curves and managed to overtake her just below the town. When her father called her name, she collapsed and allowed herself to be taken into his arms.
“From 2 o’clock until 10:30 p.m. she had walked 13 miles,” the Gazette recounted the next day, “the last three miles over the roughest, steepest, loneliest and darkest mountain road in this section.” Asked why she had left Port Jervis without telling anyone, she said she was “merely taking a walk,” but allowed that she had considered catching a train from Otisville to New York. “She is of a delicate constitution,” the article observed, “and it is feared that the fatigue and excitement of the long walk over the rough road may have unfavorable results.”
Dr. Van Etten, summoned to West Street, examined Lena and pronounced her physically sound, but stepping out of her bedroom, he warned her parents in a hushed conversation that recent events—the assault she had suffered, the lynching, all the world’s prying into her private affairs, the demands that she appear in court—inclined him to believe she might “never again be right in her mind.”
A month earlier she’d been a young woman who sold candy and ice cream to neighborhood children in a small railroad town; now her name and intimate details about her appeared in papers across the country. Aspersions were freely made as to her character. The ghastly lynching, to which she was now inextricably linked, had changed forever her hometown, a place of once-happy associations, and she alone was at the heart of the unpleasantness. It was not a role she nor anyone else would wish for, no matter how many times the press remarked that she was smart as well as pretty.
“Miss McMahon’s former companions and friends have endeavored to convince her that she stands as high as ever in the public estimation,” it was reported, “but the young woman has brooded constantly over her misfortune.” Her friends said Lena worried she was losing her mind, feared that Foley would expose her or that her family would send her to an asylum, and spoke of changing her name back to Gallagher, her birth name, and moving far away where no one would know who she was.
The coverage from afar was less sympathetic. The New York Times headlined its write-up LENA MCMAHON’S FREAK. Another out-of-town paper inquired: IS LENA MCMAHON INSANE? While conceding that she had undergone a terrible ordeal, some speculated that her bizarre behavior indicated she was concealing something. “There was, and remains, something mysterious and maddening about this young woman,” it was said. “Reported moments of lucidity are countered by acts of behavior so curious that newspapers hundreds of miles away challenge her sanity.”
Since the lynching, Lena had been pitied as a victim and hailed as a survivor, and her recovery had been watched and prayed for. The public had been supportive, even when the facts as presented seemed vague. But one man was dead, another was in jail, and the town’s good name had been sullied likely beyond repair. Now her erratic behavior had itself become a factor, pumping more air into the story. Those who covered it, or read about it, were beginning to lose patience.
Remarkably, considering her trek up a mountainside in the dark on Saturday night and what appeared to have been a serious emotional collapse, Lena was in Goshen on Tuesday, June 21, dressed in a neat black dress with a black hat to match and a few pieces of attractive jewelry, having been assured she would not be required to testify before the grand jury considering indictments in the Lewis lynching. Minutes before the procedure began, she was handed a letter from Philip Foley about the blackmail charges her family was bringing against him:
Dear Miss McMahon: As my thoughts have run in the same channel since I saw you last Tuesday in court and sat and charged me with blackmail, I wondered that day, as I have ever since, if that could be the same girl whom I spent a Wednesday night with ten days before under the trees at Carpenter’s Point, who on the night we were in the woods together considered ourselves as man and wife to prove your love for me, and that she would stand by me no matter what her people said.
I can’t bring myself to believe that you did this with your own free will and brand me a criminal and deprive me of my liberty for the next ten or fifteen years. You perhaps had little idea what the penalty is for the charge you have brought against me. You know that I never made any threats that if you did not give me money, I would ruin you. You know that all I ever was mad about was when you would not meet me, but let me say little girl if it is any satisfaction to you to put me in state’s prison and, knowing as you do in your heart, that I am innocent of any crime against you no more than I would against my own sister. Now for the wrong you have been doing me I pray God forgive you as fully as I do. I will leave my case in the hands of Him who regards the good and punishes the guilty and, in years to come, when you are happy, think kindly of the one you branded as a convict to be pointed out by his fellow man for all time …
No matter what becomes of me, my feelings for you remain the same and will while life lasts … The letter I wrote your father [in which Foley offered to marry Lena] was in good faith, but I see by the paper you scorned it. Well, I forgive you but never can forget. Now, little girl, as this is probably the last time my hand will trace your name, will you write me and tell me if it is true that you are doing this, or, better than that, come here and see me. Good bye, Phil
Foley’s letter was eloquent and expressive, with a grace note of religiosity. Was this Foley the slick pretender casting a spell, or was he, as he represented it, simply a good man in over his head? The offer of marriage he sent from his jail cell was not insincere, nor do his expectations of Lena’s reciprocal feelings seem inappropriate or imagined. The proposal was rejected in Lena’s name by her parents, but as the Gazette reported of her receipt of his letter of farewell, “it was a very affectionate appeal from him. Miss McMahon was very much agitated when reading the letter and it was hard for her to keep from crying. That the girl has an affection for Foley there seems to be but little doubt.”
Later that week Lena was back in her shop, tending to customers as usual. She told a visitor she had little recollection of her wandering up the mountain toward Otisville, but that she did feel a bit sore from all the walking. She had resumed attending services at St. Mary’s Church with her parents, at least once appearing dressed entirely in white, and, on June 24, in response to Foley’s written plea (which had been printed in a local newspaper), published a contrite yet firm statement of her own, one likely crafted with the aid of her attorney Bennet and with input from her parents. In it she sought her parents’ forgiveness for disobeying them and asked the town to respect her dignity. The letter is well written, even as the overly repentant tone and many of its claims seem substantially out of character:
As my name has been so freely circulated throughout the press of the country during the past few weeks in connection with the infamous scoundrel Foley, who has been airing his ignorance and viciousness in frequent letters from the County Jail, I wish, once and for all, in justice to myself, to refute and brand as malicious falsehoods the statements this person has seen fit to utter.
I first became acquainted with Foley when he assumed to be a gentleman, through the introduction of a mutual friend. He paid me some attention and I was foolish, as other young girls have been, to believe in his professions of friendship, and when I, in the indiscretion of youth, having had some trifling difficulty with fond and loving parents who endeavored to give me wise counsel and advice, resolved to leave home, this inhuman monster egged me on and endeavored to carry into execution his nefarious schemes to ruin and blacken my reputation forever.
When I discovered “the wolf in sheep’s clothing”—the true character of [this] parody of manhood—I at all risks and perils resolved to prosecute him as he so richly deserves. I assure the public that the maudlin, sentimental outpourings from this person, who, relying upon the fact that I was once his friend, has seen fit to make me the victim of extortion and blackmail, have no effect whatever on me, and it will not be my fault if he does not receive the punishment he so richly deserves. There is nothing to prevent this man writing letters, and I do not consider it wise or discreet to pay any attention to them. I simply desire to say that his insinuations and allegations are falsehoods; that my relations with him have only been those of a friend. God only knows how much I regret that.
I cannot have my reputation as an honest, chaste and virtuous girl assailed by this villain without a protest, and I ask all right-thinking people who possess these qualities to place themselves in my position and then ask if they would act differently than I have done. The evil fortune that has overtaken me has been no fault of my own, and I trust that the light of truth will reveal this man as he truly is—the author of all my misfortune.
I do not intend to express myself again to the public concerning this matter, nor pay any attention to what this man may say or do. All I desire is peace and the consideration and fair treatment that should be extended to one who has suffered untold misery and whose whole life has been blighted by one whose heartiness and cruelty are only equaled by his low cunning and cowardice.
It was a purposeful document. In rejecting Foley’s claims of innocence and his offer of marriage, dismissing him as a “parody of manhood”—a characterization as insulting as it was innovative—she had surrendered fully to her parents’ and the town’s opinion of him as a menace and a rogue. Although she could not disguise her own uncertainty about whether she had been blackmailed, she nonetheless signed on to the charges about which her parents were so adamant. While she made no mention of Robert Lewis, whose life had been cruelly snuffed out, or the implosion of the town itself, by implication these things were laid at Foley’s feet as well.
About this time, a rumor surfaced that Robert Lewis, upon his capture, had said that his own instinct would have been to protect Lena from harm, had Foley not “ordered” him to attack her. This made no sense, as it’s unclear whom he would have protected her from, if not himself. But the rumor, in conjunction with Lena’s published letter, created a useful deflection: two local young people, Lena and Lewis, had in their innocence become playthings for Foley, a malevolent force, knowing and wicked. With Lena’s helpful retrospection, Foley’s character, or lack thereof, made the havoc that had resulted seem almost inevitable. In this calculus, the village’s initial certainty that Robert Lewis had raped a white woman, and paid the ultimate price for his act, was diluted to the considerably milder suspicion that he, like Lena, had been misused by a sophisticated predator. The dapper salesman had toyed with them both, and with the entire town.
Lena’s published letter, it seemed—and this was likely her advisers’ intent—thus served as a kind of public directive. It pointed to a path forward, a way out, inviting all to share in her redemption, a self-absolution sanctified by Lena’s saintly appearances at church. It was a gentle nudge to a still dubious town that the time had come to cease asking unanswerable questions. Put another way, it was time to move on.
Lynching has a perverse relation to recorded history, for obfuscation is central to its purpose. The so-called people’s justice is meant to leave no trace of its operations. It features no lawyers’ arguments, no objections, no trial transcript or rulings from the bench. This determined forgetting has over the years functioned in Port Jervis like a kind of self-winding mechanism; for as each generation remained tight-lipped about what happened to Robert Lewis, there have been ever fewer facts, half-truths, or rumors to pass along, a loss of oral history abetted by the steady exodus of the town’s youths seeking education and opportunity elsewhere. By the early twenty-first century, most residents—Black and white, new arrivals and descendants of older families alike—could honestly profess ignorance of the lynching that had unfolded down the street. The resulting silence makes the efforts of those contemporaries who did try to understand what occurred in the promising village on the Delaware all the more poignant.
T. Thomas Fortune of the New York Age publicly condemned the fate of Robert Lewis, but it was his colleague Ida B. Wells who, having just relocated to New York City, became intrigued by the case and was drawn to examine it. Learning of the accusation that Philip Foley had sent letters to Lena McMahon and her family that could be construed as blackmail, Wells posited that the mystery behind the lynching was likely a consensual relationship between Lena McMahon and Robert Lewis.
The white man [Foley] … had been a suitor of the girl’s. She had repulsed and refused him, yet had given him money, and he had sent threatening letters demanding more. The day before [a court examination] she was so wrought up she left home and wandered miles away. When found she said she did so because she was afraid of [Foley’s] testimony. Why should she be afraid of the prisoner? Why should she yield to his demands for money if not to prevent him from exposing something he knew? It seems explainable only on the hypothesis that a liaison existed between the colored boy and the white girl, and the white man knew of it. The press is singularly silent. Has it a motive? We owe it to ourselves to find out.
Was the liaison Wells described the “something back of the whole affair,” the secret many village residents sensed lay behind the lynching? As Wells knew, if Lena and Lewis had had a consensual sexual relationship, it was not something that would likely be reported in the newspaper. Anti-miscegenation laws had never been enacted in New York or New Jersey, but Northern states such as Ohio, Maine, and Rhode Island had kept theirs until the 1880s. Southern courts would shun acknowledgment of consensual relations between white women and Black men well into the twentieth century, and Port Jervis, in this regard like many a small conservative burg anywhere in America, was probably closer in sensibility to Albany, Georgia, than Albany, New York. Once the report of a sexual assault on Lena became known, and Lewis was named the perpetrator, the suggestion that a “proper” local young white woman who still lived with her parents was complicit in such a relationship would have been unprintable, except from the pen of Ida B. Wells.
In Port Jervis, in 1884, one such case had brought swift condemnation, probably because the white woman was cohabiting with a Black man and had borne mixed-race children. SHE DESERVED HER FATE: THE WHITE CONCUBINE OF A COLORED MAN DIES IN POVERTY, in the Gazette, related that Mary Dobson, partner of Bob Brodhead, had perished from starvation a week after her two Black children had succumbed to the same cause. The daughter of “respectable and well-to-do people,” the paper lamented, Mary “was lost to all sense of shame and preferred the society of colored people to that of her own race.” The mother was to be interred next to her children in the graveyard called “God’s Acre” maintained by the Black settlement at the top of North Orange Street.
By summer 1892, Wells’s inquiries had given her an appreciation of how intimate biracial relationships struggled against social norms and came to be deemed unpardonable transgressions. She’d learned of a Black coachman forced to flee Natchez when his white mistress gave birth to their child, and of a white woman, accused of receiving a Black man in her home, who had the presence of mind to say she had hired him to install some curtains. It’s unknown whether Wells’s theory of the Port Jervis case was based on her own investigation. Given the proximity of the village to her new base of operations in New York City, it’s tempting to believe she paid it a visit by train. She would not have been recognized, and could have slipped in and out of town in order to make contact with the African American community, a method of incognito fact-finding she was in the habit of employing. It’s an intriguing, if speculative, possibility.
It is telling that the mainstream media at the time of the lynching of Robert Lewis was unable to appear certain about something as central to the case as Philip Foley’s name. In the several weeks that the lynching remained in the news, the papers continued to refer to him as either William, Peter, or occasionally “P.J.” Only when signed letters between Lena and “Phil” surfaced as evidence in Foley’s blackmail hearing did news sources begin to identify him properly. By coincidence, both the surnames “Foley” and “McMahon” would have held significance for the large Irish American population of Port Jervis, as “Foley” in old Irish means “plunderer,” and “McMahon” is a name associated historically with persons of status—chieftains, bishops, and kings. Of course, the paradox about Foley is that while he has always been characterized as disreputable, his letters and his answers to reporters’ questions often appear more credible and consistent with known facts than those of almost any other person involved in the Lewis case, with the exception of Simon Yaple and William Crane. Inebriate or con man though he may have been, Foley nonetheless comes across in history’s documents as grounded, self-critical, and willing to reflect with candor on his predicament.
He managed to remain resolute even when assailed by a determined nemesis, a freelance private eye named Samuel A. Elwell. The detective told the papers he’d been tracking Foley for months before the lynching, and claimed to have a warrant for his arrest, although on whose authority it’s not clear. “Mr. and Mrs. McMahon knew that Foley was utterly worthless,” Elwell told the press, “and that he was wont to boast of his conquests with women, victories that were generally destructive to the vanquished. Why Miss McMahon harbored him is best known to herself. She knew what he was.”
Elwell proffered at least a partial explanation of the connection between Foley and Lewis. “I see that Foley alleges he did not know Lewis. That is very strange in view of the fact that Bob Lewis was a go-between for Foley and Miss McMahon. He carried more than one note for Foley to the young woman.” Elwell insisted he had, with his own eyes, seen Foley hand Lewis a letter to deliver to Lena McMahon and had even glimpsed the envelope with her address on it. If Elwell was right that Lewis was helping Lena and Foley arrange their secret rendezvous, it might explain how Lewis became involved with the couple on June 2, when Lena and Foley were eager to get Lena’s trunk and money from her parents’ house.
Elwell said he believed Robert Lewis was telling the truth when he told Sol Carley that Foley had urged him to assault Lena, although he did not offer any reason why Foley would do such a thing. Like many people, he was inclined to be suspicious of Foley, but also seemed to nurse a special grudge against him, and loudly rued the fact that the lynching had obliterated any evidence “of a clinching sort” that might have been used to ensure his downfall.
The detective was a conspicuous figure in Orange County. In an era when small-town police did not often conduct in-depth investigations, private operators like Elwell, sometimes in the employ of government agencies, the railroads, or large landowners, provided a needed service. He had been in the news as a leading figure in the investigation of the murder of Mrs. Noah Gregory, a Middletown farmer’s wife; for tracking down a bigamist who married and eloped with “young Nellie McGill” to Jersey City; and for taking part in “a bloody affray” in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, a gunfight with two tramps in which a policeman was wounded.
His career thrived to a considerable degree on his being glamorized in the press as a crimefighter, but he was unfortunately also known for using his skills in less acceptable ways, such as impersonating special deputies and falsely imprisoning suspects. A Newburgh paper took joy in lampooning him as “the Orange County Pinkerton,” “the Sleuth-Hound,” and “the Man Who Never Sleeps,” while in Middletown he was thought “good at a good many other things than paying his bills.”
But Elwell’s theory about Foley and Lewis was not illogical. The two men would have met at the Delaware House, where Foley lived and Lewis worked. They shared common interests—liquor, gambling, and young women—and, for Foley, Lewis would have been an asset, educating him about the town, the police, and the “opportunities” one did not find advertised in newspapers. The Black man’s knowledge of the area’s backstreets and secluded places would have been invaluable to Foley, once it became necessary for him and Lena to meet in secret.
Was Detective Elwell trying to help clear up a mystery or simply looking to attach his name to a case receiving national attention? Foley took the latter view, and in a public letter sent from jail called Elwell a liar, pointing out that
there was nothing in my actions to warrant this man in shadowing me as he said he did and if it is true, I’m sure I could have been found in Port Jervis any day for the past four months. He further says that Bob Lewis was a go-between between Miss McMahon and myself. This statement I brand as a bare-faced lie. The young lady can testify to the truth of this. I defy this man Elwell or any other to come and prove that I had even speaking acquaintance with this man Lewis. If my memory serves me right this same Elwell was shut up last winter for trying to beat a hotel bill at Elmira. I mention this so your readers may know that his character is not above reproach.
Elwell was quick to denounce this stain on his escutcheon, vowing, “Before the Grand Jury I will connect [Foley] so closely with Lewis that the odor of the African will be perceptible.” But as Theresa McMahon and Detective Elwell had both, in their own ways, observed, there was only so much “connecting” of Foley and Lewis that could now be had. The papers might continue to malign Foley, but in lynching Lewis the town had destroyed whatever testimony “of a clinching sort” it might ever have had against him.
So it may be that the persistent disinclination of the white press to explore the reasons behind the lynching, or to ask Black residents of Port Jervis what they knew or thought about it, had prompted Wells to visit the town. She understood that mainstream media selectively lied, glossed over or ignored details, and neglected to pursue facts they feared white readers would not tolerate. But because it’s unclear whether she ever did make the trip, it’s probably safest to assume she made her judgment by comparing what few facts she knew about June 2 in Port Jervis with the details of numerous Southern lynchings she had reported on. And there are some contingencies that might support Wells’s theory. Two sources—George Lea and Detective Elwell—said Foley and Lewis knew each other, with Lea reporting that Lewis had stolen food for Foley, and Elwell suggesting that he had helped Foley arrange his meetings with Lena. And Lewis, if reports of his confidence in his ability to court white women are true, may have begun to covet Foley’s role over his own in the triangle.
There are other ways in which we might begin to ascribe more agency to Lena McMahon than the mainstream media was willing to do. What if, for example, Theresa’s violent argument with Lena on May 31 had been escalated by some single piece of explosive news: that Lena was pregnant? This could suggest an alternative to the story Lena told of the scene at the McMahon house that Tuesday morning before the lynching, when Foley had appeared wanting to talk. Theresa forbade Lena from coming downstairs to speak with him and chased Foley away, the latter angrily muttering a threat as he left. Say Lena then lost her temper with her mother and perhaps announced her intention to leave town to have the pregnancy aborted, causing Theresa, a devout Catholic who, evidence suggests, may as a young woman have given birth to a child out of wedlock, to strike her daughter. While Lena would later explain her trip to New York City as a spontaneous response to her mother’s severity, the reverse may have been true: that the trip was not to New York but to Middletown or somewhere nearby and had been planned with the objective of obtaining an abortion. Theresa may have learned of this plan and sought to intervene. While there is no evidence or record of a pregnancy, it could be one explanation for why Lena ginned up so bizarre and unbelievable a yarn about her visit to New York, her loss of memory over the course of two days, and her lie about having spent a night in a cemetery. It might also explain the degree of near-murderous anger expressed by both the older McMahons for Foley.
But assuming Wells was close to the truth in citing a relationship between Lena and Lewis, what, then, had brought things to a head on June 2? If there was a romantic link between Lewis and Lena, Foley would have become aware of it upon his release from jail in March. It was around that time that the parents’ campaign against Foley began in earnest, ultimately inducing Lena to start keeping him at arm’s length; Lewis would have been encouraged by such a development. Whether, as Foley claimed, he and Lewis had no more than a nodding acquaintance or, as George Lea asserted, they had been collaborators in petty crimes at the Delaware House, in this particular pursuit they would have been competitors. On the morning of June 2, Lewis then would have been incensed to learn that, without his knowing, Lena had returned from “Middletown” and had spent the night with Foley in the woods. Lewis, on his way to confront Lena, may have encountered Foley by the Monticello tracks and expressed his anger, at which Foley could have defensively told him to go make his own case to the girl—the origin of Lewis’s contention that Foley had urged him to try to seduce Lena. Lewis’s claim of Foley’s influence, in this scenario, would have been a deflection from his own infatuation.
Theresa told a news correspondent she was convinced “that the plot to ruin her daughter must have been laid, as Lewis seemed to know her movements,” and that Foley had something to do with it. But this possibility seems inconsistent with Foley’s attentive behavior toward her in the days and hours before the alleged assault. If the attack on her was something he had encouraged, as the McMahons believed, what could have been the reason for it? Did Foley resent Lena’s intention to go away and abandon him? Would he have subjected Lena to a violent sexual attack by another man simply to punish Theresa for having chased him from her door, making good on his parting threat to “get square with you yet”? Foley was a too-smooth operator, and a shady dude, but his arranging for a physical attack on Lena out of vengeance seems unlikely, given what we know.
Remember that Lena herself spoke against the idea that Foley had orchestrated the assault, telling a Union reporter that “if Foley was really guilty of having anything to do with Lewis, she wanted to have him punished, but she did not really believe that he had as far as she could see.” She also reiterated her view that the reason Foley remained hidden while the factory girls aided her was that he feared her parents would learn he was behind the effort to secure her trunk so she could leave town, when they had expressly warned him to stay out of her affairs. As the Gazette asserted, “Miss McMahon … certainly does not believe that Foley was in any way connected with the crime of the negro and possibly she may consent to marry him. It is a curious world.”
Some reported facts may be assumed to have a greater degree of certainty because they were corroborated by others. Clarence McKetchnie saw Lena struggling with a Black man at the riverside, and several other witnesses heard her screams and saw her injuries. The possibility that Lena McMahon was raped cannot be dismissed. However, if it was indeed Robert Lewis that McKetchnie saw, it’s also not out of the question that the dispute the boy witnessed concerned money, and not sex or a broken love affair. As Lena was more financially stable than Foley, she may have been in charge of paying Lewis for his services as go-between, and cash at the moment was not something she’d have been willing to part with.
Immediately after their encounter, Lewis allegedly gathered his fishing gear and went away; Foley helped wash Lena’s face, comforted her, walked back to town along the railroad tracks, and then headed to a favorite saloon. Lena, however, had no such option. She was hurt and bleeding; witnesses had consoled her. Whatever the truth was about the assault she’d suffered, she had no choice but to stick with the story she’d initially told, of a sexual attack by a strange Black man. If Lewis was indeed her paramour, he would have known better than to blurt out that truth to Sol Carley. He would have understood, once in the posse’s custody, for the first time and perhaps in a sudden flash of terror and recognition, what his and Lena’s fight on the embankment looked like to others, and sounded like when described. He seized on the slim chance that, based on some acquaintance he had with John McMahon, the situation could at least be partly explained. That he believed such a thing was possible can suggest only that he knew the incident, as others perceived it, did not fully match the reality—that what had been a spurned advance, a lovers’ quarrel, or an argument over a few dollars was now assumed to be something far worse.
Once Lewis was lynched, three blocks from her home, at an intersection she would walk through nearly every day, a horrified Lena would have had no choice but to double down on what misrepresentations, if any, she had made of a sexual assault. If she were to confess to having lied, it would mean her false story had “convicted” Robert Lewis and sent him to his death. It’s possible that herein lies the key to Lena’s emotional and physical breakdown: that it had nothing to do with fears of what Foley might reveal in court about her promiscuity, but rather something far more damning—that in her weakness she had allowed an innocent man to be killed. She could only pray for absolution, hence the virginal attendance at St. Mary’s and her carefully written public letter casting Foley as the prince of darkness.
Foley knew all of this, and understood his advantage.
Or perhaps it happened even a different way. Perhaps Lena was never attacked in the first place but had instead raised a phony outcry and even faked her injuries as part of a charade, perhaps orchestrated with Foley’s knowledge, and either McKetchnie had believed the performance or else been complicit in its staging. Foley and Lewis, even if they had been privy to or involved in the scheme, may have, like Lena, been so focused on the intended effect on her parents, they failed to think through its potential, far more monstrous consequences.
To what end would have been this subterfuge? Uppermost in Lena’s mind that day was obtaining her trunk and her money. Because she knew her parents would not comply with her wishes, the object of any staged deception would have been either to make herself into a pitiable victim, in order to win back their affection and embrace, or, more likely, to force her mother and father to feel ashamed for their mistreatment of her. How better to guilt-trip her abusive mother than to make her believe that she had driven her daughter from home, only to have her sexually assaulted by a Black man in the woods? Such a fraud on the part of a white woman attempting to throw suspicion onto an innocent Black man, in full confidence that other white men, including police, would automatically believe her, was not unheard of. As was rumored at the time of the lynching, the charade in the Port Jervis case might have indeed been conceived with the aim of softening the McMahons’ opinion of Foley, who, after the “assault,” might appear in a more favorable light, perhaps even as Lena’s protector (although Foley, if that had been the plan’s design, missed his cue to make a heroic entrance). And it may have been Lena, not Foley, who had been the master architect of that plan.
Whether Lena created a false scenario on her own, or had others’ cooperation, the problem then would have been that the protagonists played their parts too well. Once the act was instigated, its features were impossible to reverse. If she’d imagined she could call the public’s attention to the allegation that she’d been violated by a strange Black man and not have people mobilize on her behalf, she was tragically mistaken. And once the saga was unspooled and had engulfed the town, she and anyone else in on the scheme would have been far too abashed to concede it had been make-believe. This may be why Foley appeared to the factory girls unconcerned about Lena’s injuries, why he and Lena stepped aside to have a whispered conversation, and why he then sought to quell the girls’ curiosity and further involvement by telling them to go away and not mention what they’d seen. If, as Dr. Van Etten maintained, Lena was fighting the Negro in her dreams, it was possibly not because she’d been traumatized by her attacker, but because she was haunted by her role in the death of an innocent man, with whom the truth need also perish.