Introduction

BONES OF CONTENTION

The tale surrounding the theft and ransom of department store magnate A. T. Stewart’s body—told here in Bag of Bones—would be magnificent fodder for today’s “cold case” entertainment industry were the remains those of a contemporary man of Stewart’s astounding wealth. But this crime took place long before co-ed detective units and lab-coat forensics. It remains one of America’s great and enduring mysteries.

Bag of Bones is the third and final installment of my trilogy about New York City during the Gilded Age. King of Heists (2009) told the story of the greatest bank robbery in American history, carried out in 1878 by George L. Leslie, dubbed “King of the Bank Robbers.” The Big Policeman (2010) details the career of Thomas Byrnes, a colorful, sometimes ruthless police officer who rose through the ranks to become superintendent of the New York City Police Department and who is credited as the father of American detective work.

Byrnes is a key player in the A. T. Stewart drama. He is the head cop in the investigation of the gruesome, sensational crime at the heart of the story. I think of the Stewart case as a classic whodunit, yet it weaves together elements of true crime, biography, and Manhattan history and culture, all set against New York City’s decadent social order—the Gilded Age.

Running parallel to the grave-robbing narrative is the story of the Stewart family’s rise and fall, and how the family fortune fared under the questionable stewardship of one of Stewart’s most trusted friends, Judge Henry Hilton. Any reader will be quick to conclude that Bernie Madoff had nothing on Judge Hilton. The tragedy of A. T. and Cornelia Stewart serves as a cautionary tale, one that reinforces how vital study of the Gilded Age is to our understanding of contemporary American society. The Gilded Age was a term coined by Mark Twain and used as the title of a book he wrote with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873, The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day. It encapsulates a period in American history (1870–1890) of enormous greed, the accumulation of great wealth by the so-called robber barons—people who made their great fortunes through ruthless and uncontrolled business practices—and the vulgar display of that wealth.

Gilded Age figures occupy the top tier of the list of the richest Americans in history according to both Forbes and the New York Times. Among them are John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), America’s first billionaire, ranked number one with approximately $190 billion by early twenty-first century currency standards, followed by Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877), who was estimated to be worth about $140 billion, and John Jacob Astor in the number three spot at nearly $115 billion. Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) reached sixth place, and A.T. Stewart (1803–1876), who is considered the father of the American department store, was in the seventh position. The Gilded Age yielded five of the top ten richest men in American history. During this period it was estimated that the richest 2 percent of the people owned one-third of the nation’s wealth, while the richest 10 percent owned three-quarters. If, as stated in the Sermon on the Mount, “the meek shall inherit the earth,” then the celestial courts will surely be clogged with litigation. According to Robert Frank of the New York Times, during the “New Gilded Age” of the 1990s and the early 2000s, “today’s rich barely hold a candle to the Gilded Age titans. … This is partly a measure of the astounding wealth accumulated by Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Astor, and Carnegie.” Count A. T. Stewart among these notable Gilded Age billionaires.

At the time of his death in 1876, before Rockefeller had completed his ascent, Alexander Turney Stewart was considered the third richest man in America behind only Vanderbilt and Astor. He left his wife, Cornelia, an estate estimated at more than forty million dollars, a vast fortune that he had made in the retail sales business and that had earned him the title of the “Merchant Prince of Manhattan.”

An Irish immigrant, Stewart began his career in New York City in 1823, selling linens from the old country. By 1862, he had built the largest department store in the world, the “Cast Iron Palace.” Stewart’s store was six floors tall and located on the corner of Broadway and Ninth Street. It had a cast-iron front and a glass dome skylight. The immense store employed more than two thousand people and had nearly twenty departments, selling everything from burlap bags to women’s calf gloves. He later established department stores overseas, including in London and Paris.

In 1869, Stewart completed his ornate mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street in New York City. Unlike the other luxurious brownstone mansions owned by the Astors and Vanderbilts, all located along what was referred to as “Millionaires’ Row,” Stewart’s was made entirely out of Italian marble, cut exclusively for him and shipped to the United States. Costing approximately two million dollars, it took seven years to build. Constructed in Parisian Empire design, the building had three main floors, an attic with a mansard roof, and a ballroom that ran the full length of its Fifth Avenue frontage. A lighted moat separated the residence from the sidewalks. Stewart filled the mansion with expensive furniture and antiques and a large and valuable art collection. There was no home like it in America.

Stewart’s attempt to outdo his multimillionaire neighbors, like William and Caroline Astor, did not endear him to New York City’s powerful and affluent society. He and his wife found themselves ostracized by high class circles, viewed as millionaire upstarts. Still, their exclusion did nothing to damage his retail empire. Following the death of Cornelia Stewart in 1886, the Marble Mansion was sold, and in 1901 it was torn down.

Stewart did not spend all of his fortune on himself and his wife. Although he was not known as a philanthropist among the ranks of Andrew Carnegie, he was still very generous to those in need. During the Irish potato famine of 1848, Stewart sent a shipload of provisions to his native Lisburn and invited young people to take free passage to America, where he found them jobs within his vast department store complex. He also sent fifty thousand dollars to the victims of the 1871 Chicago fire.

His most lasting philanthropic endeavor was the building of Garden City, New York. In 1869, Stewart bought more than seven thousand acres on the Hempstead Plain on Long Island, where he established the first planned workers’ community in the United States. Garden City included sixteen miles of streets and avenues, a central park, affordable homes, stores, and a hotel. Stewart even built a railroad into the city so his employees could take the train to work at one of his many retail, wholesale, or manufacturing businesses. Stewart had nearly thirty thousand trees planted in his development. He did not, however, offer home ownership. Instead he acted as landlord of the community. Today, Garden City remains one of the country’s most sought after residential locations.

In November 1878, A. T. Stewart’s body was stolen from its resting place at St. Mark’s Churchyard in New York City and held for more than two hundred thousand-dollar ransom. Advised by family friend Henry Hilton,the executor of Stewart’s will, Cornelia Stewart did not comply with the grave robbers’ demands. Several suspects were arrested but were soon released after it was discovered that either a desire for fame or heavy-handed police tactics had motivated their false confessions. The gruesome crime created a media frenzy as newspapers tried to outdo each other in their sensational coverage. The American imagination was captivated. In just one example, the incident was depicted in Mark Twain’s humorous story “The Stolen White Elephant,” published in 1882.

Not only did the grave robbing cause a national sensation, it also led to one of the most notoriously bungled police investigations in New York City’s history.

Finally, in 1881, nearly three years after the body of her husband was stolen, Cornelia Stewart reportedly regained her husband’s remains. The Merchant Prince of Manhattan, now just a burlap bag of bones, was handed over on a dusty road in Westchester County. Cornelia buried her husband for the last time in the family crypt at the Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City—a structure completed in 1885 by Cornelia as a lasting memorial to her husband.

Two great mysteries surround that crypt today. There is no way to know if the bones buried there are truly those of A. T. Stewart. A century before DNA testing, bones were just bones and there was no method to accurately identify if they were Stewart’s or not. The children of Cornelia and A. T. Stewart preceded them in death, and no one has ever sought to exhume the bones for identification. They remain laid to rest in the family crypt on the orders of Cornelia, who claimed without a doubt that the bones belonged to her husband. If it was good enough for her, it appeared to be good enough for everyone connected with the case.

The other enduring mystery is who actually stole the bones? The grave robbers? They were never caught.

But there is much more to this mystery than the gruesome theft of A. T. Stewart’s bones and their questionable recovery. There is Judge Henry Hilton. How did this man get his hands on the forty-million-dollar Stewart fortune? And how was he able to manipulate the grieving widow into allowing him to continue the A. T. Stewart retail business, despite explicit instructions in Stewart’s will to sell the business and give the proceeds to his wife? Hilton’s inexplicable hold over Cornelia Stewart extended even beyond her death in 1886, when she bequeathed him approximately $9.5 million, half of her estate. And there is another head-scratching mystery—how did Hilton, the executor of the vast A. T. Stewart retail empire, manage to run the business into the ground and spend all of the Stewart fortune by the time of his death in 1899?

Except for Garden City and the Cathedral of the Incarnation, there is nothing that remains of the once great and successful A. T. Stewart department store, considered the first such store in America. The unique buildings Stewart constructed to house his retail empire, the Marble Palace and the Cast Iron Palace, are gone. Even his luxurious white marble mansion on Fifth Avenue is gone. His entire forty-million-dollar fortune was depleted at the hands of Hilton. The A. T. Stewart story disappeared along with it. The man who practically invented the American department store has for too long been lost in the annals of American history. Bag of Bones attempts to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding Stewart. Throughout the book, I have included headlines and portions of newspaper articles from the period. These pieces are replicated exactly as they appeared. The typos and misspellings are just as they were in such newspapers as the New York Times, the Brooklyn Eagle, and other historical sources.