Behind the Book: Q&A with Wendy Gamber

JHUP goes Behind the Book with Wendy Gamber, author of fascinating new book The Notorious Mrs. Clem: Murder and Money in the Gilded Age.

Q: Why did you decide to write this book?

I’m a nosy person.  Several years ago I thought it might be fun to research something about the history of Indiana, where I live.  I was scrolling through Indianapolis newspapers from the late 1870s and kept coming across tantalizingly vague references to a Mrs. Clem.  Clearly she had been in some kind of trouble, but the reports I stumbled upon assumed the reader knew who she was and what she’d done.  I didn’t and I wanted to find out.  Once I started digging, I began to uncover an absolutely fascinating story. Who could resist a confidence woman who supposedly invented the Ponzi scheme, allegedly orchestrated a double murder, and ended up peddling a “tonic” that euphemistically promised to treat “female complaints”?  I certainly couldn’t.   

Yet the more I researched, the more I became convinced that, yes, this was a compelling story, but also one that offered a historian many opportunities—and many challenges.   Because she generated incredibly rich trial rhetoric and extensive local and national newspaper coverage, Nancy Clem gave me a shot (no pun intended) at unraveling the tangled histories of business, gender, marriage, race, class, and politics in Gilded Age America.  In short, Nancy Clem’s alleged crimes made it possible to illuminate a larger culture. And Clem gave me a chance to try my hand at writing a narrative, something I’d never done before.

Q: What were some of the most surprising things you learned while writing/researching the book?

There were lots of fun little surprises.  Future US president Benjamin Harrison, who was one of the attorneys who prosecuted Nancy Clem, lived just up the street from her.  Only a few days before Clem’s alleged accomplice purchased one of the murder weapons, none other than the Indianapolis Chief of Police had considered buying that very same gun.  Hence he immediately recognized the shotgun left behind at the crime scene—bad news for the man suspected of making the purchase and for Clem.  And there are two characters in The Notorious Mrs. Clem named Pet.  One was a teenage girl, the other . . .  a horse.

As for bigger surprises, I knew that gender would matter a great deal, but I was surprised at how it mattered.  I could almost see the wheels turning as attorneys on both sides worked out their strategies for opening and closing arguments.  Murderesses were supposed to be at least slightly disreputable, so prosecutors tried to vilify Clem by hinting at an illicit sexual relationship with one of the victims.  Harrison’s closing statement included remarks like this:  “She, a married woman . . . is found frequently visiting the house of Jacob Young, and going into a room with him privately and apart from others. What does this mean?” The defense, for its part, tried to convince potential witnesses that a prostitute named Cal Prather, not the respectable Mrs. Clem, was the woman they had seen riding in Jacob and Nancy Jane Young’s carriage.  But Clem’s case had everything to do with money and nothing to do with sex, and all of the lawyers involved knew it.  Both prosecution and defense had to come up with new cultural scripts and they did—by focusing on whether or not married women should engage in business.  The interesting thing is that defense attorneys’ praise for income-generating wives probably resonated more strongly with the farmers who dominated successive juries than did the prosecution’s condemnation of Clem’s “self-reliance.”   These different arguments, I discovered, reflected partisan divisions, but not in any simple or straightforward manner.  All of the attorneys for the state were Republicans.  So were all of the attorneys for the defense (that is, until Clem’s fourth trial, when “ultra-Democrat” Daniel W. Voorhees, aka the Tall Sycamore of the Wabash, joined her team).  I initially found this puzzling, because Clem’s lawyers sounded so much like nineteenth-century Democrats, especially when they talked about gender and race.  Turns out that at least two had been Democrats; they were men who left the party, but not its social attitudes, behind.

Q: What is new about your book/research that sets it apart from other books in the field?

There are several wonderful books on women and crime in the nineteenth century—Patricia Cline Cohen’s The Murder of Helen Jewett and Carole Haber’s The Trials of Laura Fair are two of my particular favorites.  What drew me to Nancy Clem is that she deviated from the usual script. She wasn’t a victim like Jewett, a high-class prostitute; she was an alleged perpetrator.  She wasn’t an “adventuress” like Laura Fair, who killed her married lover.  She was a respectable middle-class housewife who got involved in a nineteenth-century Ponzi scheme that culminated in murder.  So Clem’s case allows me to explore a somewhat different set of issues—the social history of capitalism, the political economy of marriage, the relationship between criminal justice and Reconstruction, to name a few.

Q: Did you encounter any eye opening statistics while writing your book?

I learned from the work of other scholars just how unusual it was for nineteenth-century women to commit murder, and that it was even more unusual for them to kill with guns—only an estimated 5% of nineteenth-century murderesses used firearms.  So if Clem did put a pistol to Nancy Jane Young’s head, she was quite a singular woman on that basis reason alone.  Add that to the fact that murderesses typically killed their lovers and husbands, not their business partners, and you begin to get an idea of why Clem attracted so much public attention.

Q: Does your book uncover and/or debunk any longstanding myths?

Many of my students are convinced that women didn’t “work” until quite recently.  Clem’s story, if nothing else, reveals women’s active participation in nineteenth-century economies.  Clem was by turns a farm girl, respectable urban housewife, boardinghouse keeper, street broker, supposed originator of the Ponzi scheme, prison laundress, peddler of patent medicines, and “female physician.”  Various women workers, including a domestic servant, a dressmaker, a prostitute, a secondhand dealer, the keeper of a jewelry and notions store (“notions” in this case evidently included shotguns), a pioneering “lady” journalist, the proprietor of a major downtown hotel, and the Superintendent of the Indiana Female Reformatory, helped to determine her fate. Nor, as trial rhetoric reveals, was there a single “traditional” belief about women’s economic place.  Prosecutors promoted the concept we now call separate spheres—woman’s sphere was the home, not the marketplace; defense attorneys celebrated married women’s contributions to family coffers; and women’s rights activists advocated legislation that would give married women control over their earnings.

Q: What is the single most important fact revealed in your book and why is it significant?

Actually I found very few “facts.” I can’t say for certain that Nancy Clem plotted the murders of Jacob and Nancy Jane Young or that she shot Nancy Jane.  I can’t say for certain that William J. Abrams bought the gun that killed Jacob.  I don’t even know for certain why the Youngs were killed. And this after reading thousands of pages of trial transcripts and nearly two thousand newspaper articles!  As Clem’s attorney, John Hanna, put it, “You are asked to guess.” Not knowing made my research both frustrating and fascinating.  I will say that my reluctance to take a definitive stand even to what happened is central to historical practice.  (You’ll notice that I frequently resort to modifiers such as “alleged” and “supposed.”) A novelist might make different decisions.  But while historians can speculate—and I do quite a bit of speculating—at the end of the day they’re bound by the limits of their evidence.  I do have a pretty good idea of who gave Peter Wilkins the money, though.

Q: How do you envision the lasting impact of your book?

That’s hard to predict.  I’ve tried to paint a portrait of Gilded Age society in general and Indianapolis society in particular, and I hope I’ve at least partially succeeded.  Certainly I’d want readers to appreciate the nuances of gender and class in nineteenth-century America.  I also hope I’ve shown that many of the issues with which Americans currently grapple are nothing new.  Criminal profiling, witness tampering, and even the sorts of shenanigans practiced by people like Bernard Madoff have histories.   So do debates over capital punishment, clemency, and civil rights.  

Q: What do you hope people will take away from reading your book?

I hope The Notorious Mrs. Clem shows that history can be tragic, but also fun.  I hope it shows that ordinary people can lead extraordinary lives.  Most of all, I hope that I’ve told a good story. 

Wendy Gamber is Robert F. Byrnes Professor in History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America, also published by Johns Hopkins, and The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930.  Her newest book, The Notorious Mrs. Clem: Murder and Money in the Gilded Age, is available now.