A Woman’s Ruin and Revenge in Old New York
On the evening of November 1, 1843, a young household servant named Amelia Norman attacked Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant, on the steps of the new and luxurious Astor House Hotel. Agitated and distraught, Norman had followed Ballard down Broadway before confronting him at the door to the hotel. Taking out a folding knife, she stabbed him, just missing his heart.
Ballard survived the attack, and the trial that followed created a sensation. Newspapers in New York and beyond followed the case eagerly, and crowds filled the courtroom every day. The prominent author and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child championed Norman and later included her story in her fiction and her writing on women’s rights.
In Cry of Murder on Broadway, Julie Miller shows how a woman’s desperate attempt at murder came to momentarily embody the anger and anxiety felt by many people at a time of economic and social upheaval and expanding expectations for equal rights.
Read on for an excerpt of the book’s prologue.
On November 1, 1843, a young woman dressed in black and carrying a large fur muff followed a man up the steps of the magnificent new Astor House Hotel on Broadway in New York. After what appeared to wit-nesses to be a brief conversation, she pulled out a folding knife — and stabbed him.
The reporters who later saw her recognized the horror of what she had done, but they were also quick to conclude that because she was the heroine of a story, she must be beautiful. Over the next two days the New York Express reported that “the wretched female who thus sought to imbrue her hands in blood is an elegant appearing woman, tall and of beautiful figure and form,” wearing a “splendid black dress.” When she appeared in court the following January, James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, made a deeper observation, noting that she was “a girl evidently of no ordinary character. Her hair and complexion are fair, but her eyebrows and eyes are very dark, giving an expression of sternness to a face which otherwise would justly be considered strikingly handsome.” A Herald reporter saw the expression of character that his editor described, but described her physical appearance somewhat differently. According to him, Norman had “very dark brown hair, expansive forehead, heavy eye brows and lashes, with a melancholy but very determined expression of countenance.” In the woodcut portrait the Herald published during Norman’s trial, her hands, face, and body are so obscured by her tiered dress, large fur muff, hat, and veil that it is almost impossible to tell what she looked like, allowing the paper’s readers to imagine whatever they liked best or expected to find.
The woman was twenty-five-year-old New Jersey–born Amelia Norman, a servant, seamstress, and sometime prostitute. The man she tried and failed to kill was thirty-one-year-old Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant originally from Boston. Norman had become Ballard’s mistress in the spring of 1841 during the depression that followed the economic collapse known as the Panic of 1837. After little over a year, during which Ballard moved her from one boardinghouse to another, he left the country, abandoning her and their child. When he returned, Norman pleaded with him to help support them, but Ballard refused. Instead he told her to “go and get her living as other prostitutes did.” It was this rebuff that evidently created the state of mind that pushed Norman to pursue Ballard up the stone steps of the Astor House on the night of November 1, 1843, and put a knife in him. Or, as Bennett put it, “the vengeance of a woman upon her despoiler cannot be checked, when jealousy and desertion goad her to its accomplishment.”
The trial of Amelia Norman attracted the excited attention of the penny press, particularly Bennett’s Herald, which thrived on sensation. Newspaper editors around the country, recognizing the interest the story was generating, republished it for the benefit of their own readers. People daily filled all three hundred seats in the courtroom, crowding the room “to excess,” while as many as a thousand more who couldn’t get in packed the lobby and spilled out the door, down the steps, and into the street. Years after the trial an observer remembered that “so great was the public interest in her that on the night the verdict was rendered, the courthouse was besieged by thousands of our citizens, and when the result was announced, the welkin rang with the plaudits of an excited populace!”
What was it about this would-be murderess that attracted the attention not only of the press and the public, but also of a coterie of influential supporters?
…
Amelia Norman’s story has significance as a story, but it is also more than that. I am as guilty as any of the people who wrote about her almost two hundred years ago in exploiting it for your pleasure and mine. I hope, however, in reading it you will see that it is also a piece of evidence that shows how change occurs, how history, in other words, is made. Norman’s actions did not, on their own, “change history.” Her dramatic moment on the stage created by the steps of the Astor House was brief. The two changes in seduction law that her actions unintentionally helped bring into being were rooted in the values and preoccupations of the mid-nineteenth century, and they fizzled and died by the early twentieth when the notion of “seduction” became obsolete.
Instead, Norman’s attack on Henry Ballard and its reception by her contemporaries reveal the machinery of history, the way it progresses in twisty and unexpected ways, one step forward and two steps back, enmeshed in contemporary values and circumstances that later become obscure, propelled by chance events and unlikely actors who are unaware that forces of history are working through them. Norman could not write as Lydia Maria Child did, or speak like Mike Walsh did when he stood up in front of roaring political crowds, or effect changes in the law, as the moral reformers and David Graham did, but their words were made out of her experience. Historians want to know what forces, human and otherwise, brought us from there to here. In that story all the moving parts of the machine, even the tiny ones, even the broken ones, matter.
