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Butchery on Bond Street - Sexual Politics and The Burdell-Cunningham Case in Ante-bellum New York

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Fascinating social history of New York City in the pre-Civil War era and an intriguing portrait of a woman's tribulations in maintaing not only social class but the basic means of survival. The book is also an excellent portrayal of the criminal "justice" system of that era.

As far as Emma Cunningham was concerned, Dr. Harvey Burdell could not have been murdered at a worse time. When the affluent dentist's mangled corpse was found in his study in January 1857, New York was in a state of displacement. Dignified and benevolent Old Money was being trampled under by the brash Nouveau Riche, and violent crime was on the rise if you believed what you read in James Gordon Bennett's `New York Herald'. Mrs. Cunningham was therefore a public nightmare come to life when she was arrested for Burdell's murder. She was a mistress who schemed to become his wife and acquire both money and respectability. When he rebuffed her plans, the prosecution charged, she and a male confederate killed him.

Although the Burdell-Cunningham case has been covered in other crime tomes, "Butchery on Bond Street" is the first thorough examination of the murder and the social factors that contributed to it. This is not a book to be read quickly: it's not just a whodunit but a `whydunit' too. It's well-rounded in the manner of Patricia Cline Cohen's `The Murder of Helen Jewett' and Albert Borowitz's `The Thurtell-Hunt Murder Case'.

Benjamin Feldman is to be commended. He has done a masterful job of recreating 1850s New York City and resurrecting this forgotten but significant murder case. I agree with a previous reviewer who described `Butchery on Bond Street' as being like a gaslight-era episode of `Law and Order'.

An excellent historical review of a sensational murder in the early/mid 19th century. Well written and will hold your attention as well as most novels. Also, for this story, you can see where the bodies are buried in Greenwood Cemetery.

Baby-Mamma Drama is Not Just A Phenomenon Of Modern Times: Book Review of Butchery on Bond Street Sexual Politics and the Burdell-Cunningham Case in Ante-Bellum New York by Benjamin Feldman The Green-Wood cemetery Historic Fund in Association with the New York Wanderer Press 2007

When you think about the times of past history, when the 19th century comes to mind, you tend to picture an environment in which an extreme version of propriety if not lived morality permeated daily existence and interpersonal interactions.
At worst, enforced ethical and moral norms repressed spontaniety, felt emotion and desired actions between individuals, as in The Remains Of The Day. At best, they supported a modus vivendi closer to Judeo-Christian values and a lifestyle in which not only the buildings, decor, and clothing styles were more elegant and formal, but so were expectations of human behavior.
NOT! The 19th century looks elegant on the outside, seen from the distance of history and the filter of high-class literature, but it was seething with passions and improprieties beneath the surface, unsaid expectations and unacknowledged abuses, sins and crimes.
Reading this book reveals that behind the ornate building facades and along the cobblestoned streets of the 19th century in New York City, there were goldiggers, playas, hoes, and any number of people who hoped to get something for nothing, sexually or otherwise. 31 Bond Street, in which was situated Harvey Burdell's dentist's office and a boardinghouse which he agreed to The hustle was not just a way of life in the lower-class world, but existed sotto voce in the higher orders as well; books like Five Points and The Gangs of New York reveal an underworld where criminal activity and sexual impropriety were common currency; more subtle and personal manipulations were the order of the day for those further uptown who qualified as middle-to-upper class and those who wished to aspire to that status. Whole genres of respectable 19th century literature (such as the works of Jane Austen) wouldn't have existed without the latter. Women were encouraged to cultivate the attentions of suitors who could benefit them financially, indeed, a major factor in relationships and marriages was the man's ability to provide. May-December matches were recieved with more nonchalance than is the case today because of the advantageous financial situation for the woman. Emma's pursuit of a marriage for money to a man who had sex outside of marriage, took advantage of her in other ways, and with whom relations later turned from presumably romantic to fractious, in spite of the obvious defects it produced in the future of the marriage, nevertheless promised to secure her place in the middle class and improved the prospects for her teenage daughters, in a legal and social climate in which men who seduced women and were reluctant to take on the legal responsibilities of marriage could be sued for breach of promise, and most women lacked the potential to be in career situations in which they could become self-supporting.
When Emma became a suspect in Harvey Burdell's murder, there was a great deal of personal interest in the case, especially on the part of what were then known as "the fair sex":
"Women were barred by law from serving on the jury, but formed an unusually large proportion of the gallery spectators at the trial". (Butchery On Bond Street, 2007, p.XV.)

What happened when it was discovered that Burdell had been murdered, played out initially more like one of those murder-mystery dinner theatre performances: the authorites turned the crime scene into a hearing room, Burdell's dental chair turned into witness stand, and the inhabitants of the boarding house were held under house arrest until further notice. Potential forensic evidence washed off body in favor of getting a closer look at shape and angle of the wounds. Emma Cunningham, being formerly close to the deceased, having designs upon his assets if not his affections, soon became the prime murder suspect. Unflattering details of her relationship with him and suspicions about her past conduct emerged (she had previously married an older man who was initially financially secure, but some news reports had it that his death, after his fortune deteriorated, was suspicious). Emma was pilloried in the press, and the initial investigation made it appear that Emma and a male boarder in the house with whom Emma had developed a romantic relationship conspired to murder Harvey Burdell, who was estranged from Emma (having started to take his meals at LaFarge Hotel instead of his own boarding house), in spite of having previously gotten her pregnant, given her an amateur abortion which she was lucky to have survived, and eventually, begrudgingly, legally marrying her in exchange for her advocating in court on behalf of one of his female relatives who wanted a divorce.
The initial house arrest (Emma and her suspected male co-conspirator were later transferred to cells in the Tombs) and kangaroo court seemed a cruel joke, and though Emma's personal conduct was subjected to the harsh light of media and law enforcement scrutiny, plenty of wrong-doing on the part of the authorities (who had men strip-search Emma at a time when propriety dealing with women was supposed to be stringently observed) later emerged, as did the implication that alternative suspects were not investigated, and the victim had other enemies with less of a capacity for enlightened self-interest and more motive for murder.

There were ultimately no innocents in either this particular shabby little soap opera, or in the larger society which spawned it:
" Unwatched by parents, pastors or employers, young male clerks fraternized with women in theaters, restaurants and ice cream parlors, as well as in venues less open to public inspection, with a degree of openness and sexual expression that would have been unthinkable in previous decades.
A psyche of personal freedom for the young entrepreneurial class, be they shop-clerks, aspiring dentists, or petty criminals, prevailed among a large segment of these youthful urbanites. The advent of the California Gold Rush in 1848 added an immense quantity of libertarian fuel to this fire. Sexual adventure for men and women, independent of regulation, and geared toward the rapid aggrandizement of personal wealth and social status, replaced many of the more stable psychic foundations of marriage that so recently prevailed in what had been a largely agrarian society. But men and women brought different tools to the field in which social mobility was sown, as well as being subjected to different restrictions. Marriage to a well-off man or one with bright prospects provided the only hope of economic betterment to vast numbers of women who lacked substantial family backgrounds. By comparison, men from lower classes could rely on their own entrepreneurial skills to better themselves, free from the bonds of traditional domesticity if they so chose. Laws that put at risk any property owned in a woman's own name at or after her marriage existed side by side with paternalistically administered, common law rights to damages for seduction and breach of promise. Single women who were swindled in the sexual marketplace in these decades could resort to the law, but usually only with the assistance of male family members as their legal representatives. Unsuccessful marriages were difficult to sunder: in New York through the mid-1850s, women such as Margaret Burdell and Dimis Hubbard Vorce who sought divorce could not pursue relief in chancery court in their own names, regardless of the grounds.
A woman seeking divorce had first to secure the assistance of a legally competent individual to act as her 'next friend'. Margaret's father, William Alburtis, satisfied the requirement as an adult male, but widows also qualified under New York statutes to act in such capacity.
Somehow the law considered the mere bereavement of a married woman to instantly invest her with sagacity equal to that of a man. The day before her loss, however, the same woman was deemed incompetent to handle her own affairs, much less represent another woman in court."
(Butchery On Bond Street, 2007, p.141-142.)

There were plenty of unflattering things to be found in the life of Harvey Burdell, if the authorities had cared to dig for them: Feldman does an admirable reconstruction of the circumstances of Burdell's upbringing, his past history of taking unfair advantage of his employers, engaging in open crime and theft, marrying and otherwise developing relationships with women he decieved, only reletively late in life settling into the reletive respectability of dentistry, in which many of his patients were minor celebrities and "ladies of the night", some of whom, it was said, were not just there to have their teeth fixed. The court only explored his proven association with known gamblers, and the possibility that Burdell's gambling habit may have given someone outside the boarding house motive for his murder. Emma had the benefit of a good legal defense team who pointed out holes in the case such as this.
Though the jury was unlikely to be capable of knowing of Burdell's past criminal behavior in other locations at a time in history when modern communications did not exist, they and the law were inclined to be sympathetic to the idea of "a woman wronged" and well aware of the ways in which the legal and social climate of the time gave men a great deal of latitude to engage in actions detrimental to the welfare of women who were financially and socialy dependent on them.
The members of the jury were also most likely well aware that gambling and prostitution were readily available to a man like Burdell, and that the authorities were reluctant to prosecute such so-called "victimless crimes".

"Prostitution, though technically illegal in New York in the late 1850s, was rarely the subject of prosecution. Timothy Gilfoyle's meticulous modern study confirms that in comparison with the previous two decades, (themselves hardly models of Puritanism in terms of police suppression of such vice) "[b]y the 1850s, leniency toward prostitution was even more pronounced. Of the 143 different addresses advertised in the city's leading guidebooks, only 7 were charged with any type of disorderly conduct during the decade". The patronage of many public officials and law enforcement officers in these establishments minimized official scrutiny. Rumor had it that the immediate, intense focus on Emma Cunningham and her boarders as suspects in the Burdell case resulted from the police department and the district attorney's intentional misdirection of the murder investigation so as to avoid disclosure by the true perpetrator of politically embarrassing facts about vice and graft in the neighborhood. Captain Dilks and his men of the Fifteenth Ward seemed to ignore multiple tips passed to them about men and women who had been involved in recent fracases with the obstreperous decedent." (Butchery On Bond Street, 2007, p.155.)

Though there were times as the trial dragged on and the media circus ensued, that the outcome seemed in doubt, Emma was eventually exonerated from the murder charges:
"Why would a woman married to a man with a steady and sizable income do him in, queried the defense? Many others had substantial reason to kill Harvey Burdell." (Butchery On Bond Street, 2007, p.188.)

But the story wasn't over. There still remained the disposition of the estate of the deceased, and his previous biological children who stood to inherit. It turns out that Harvey Burdell was not the only one who engaged in gambling with high stakes: in an effort to gain for herself a bigger piece of the pie of the estate of Harvey Burdell, or perhaps additional "insurance" that she was entitled to remain in her position in which she previously had use and control of a significant part of the 31 Bond Street house and its furnishings, while in prison in the Tombs, Emma claimed to be pregnant (Burdell being the presumed baby daddy) and concocted a scheme which came to full fruition after her release from police custody: she continued to fake pregnancy for some time after her release, and later obtained a newborn baby which she claimed to have been the fruit of that (phony) pregancy, her and Burdell's biological child.
In this endeavor, she enlisted the cooperation of a court-appointed doctor whom she thought would be sympathetic, and at least temporarily decieved the second doctor, her previous personal physician, Dr. Catlin, who only some time after Emma had been released from prison discovered that nature of the fraud;
"upon examining the patient, Catlin determined that Emma had contracted cholera morbus, and gave her an emetic. After Emma vomited green bile, further inquiry led Catlin to conclude that she had not given birth, and that he had been tricked by his patient into participating in a fraudulent scheme". (p. 206.) In the meantime, Dr. David Uhl, the court-appointed physician who had gained Emma's confidence, had given her a gynecological exam, discovered that she wasn't pregnant, and consulted a lawyer himself. Dr. Uhl eventually ended up helping the District Attorney set up the highly unusual sting operation in which she was caught, by seemingly helping her with the logistics of the plot, and in the matter of obtaining a newborn baby whose mother was able and willing to give up custody and parental rights:
"As for the baby, the indigent lying-in wards at Bellevue Hospital were a ready source of infants and needy mothers who could be pressed into service in the district attorney's masque. Several Hospital and city Almshouse officials as well as Oakley Hall's long-time personal physician, Dr. De La Montaigne, were enlisted to procure a suitable newborn". (Butchery On Bond Street, 2007, p.202.)
The whole thing was a surprise to the attorney who had defended Emma in the murder case, but not to the DA's inside man, Dr. Uhl. Though a contemporary account in the NY Times had it that so complete was the masquerade on the part of Emma Cunningham that " a fictitious after-birth had been prepared, and a large pailful of lamb's blood" (Butchery On Bond Street, 2007, p.204.) was used to produce convincingly bloody sheets, nevertheless, the police showed up incredibly soon after the elements in the masquerade were brought together, and Dr. Catlin, the midwife, and Emma "were arrested for the felony, under the statute of falsely pretending that Mrs. C. had given birth to the child who would be entitled to inherit the property of the late Harvey Burdell". (Butchery On Bond Street, 2007, p. 205.)
This time around, the courts were less sympathetic, and while her life would go on, her daughters would start on their own paths, and at a much later date, someone else would belatedly be found guilty for the murder, Emma's case for legal rights to any of the deceased man's estate as well as her credibility and public image were ruined:
"a woman who could concoct a scheme to produce a false heir could and probably did fake her marriage to the infant's supposed father. Standing on what could have been the brink of victory, the desperate litigant fell in mortal defeat: Emma's marriage to Harvey Burdell was declared non-existent, and her rights to any share of his estate were totally foreclosed. Never popular among many New Yorkers, Emma Cunningham fell victim to mass ridicule." (Butchery On Bond Street, 2007, p.p. 208-209.)

Feldman has written a book that is part thriller, part history and part social commentary. They are all seamlessly interwoven to create a thrilling narative with an intellectual, almost scholarly underpinning. Feldman, an attorney, writes with the clarity of a legal brief that has found poetry. The author tries to understand the motivations and psychology of the protagonists without sympathizing with their horrible deeds. Even his asides concerning the position of women in the United States at that time, serve to provide a context for the story and never lapse into soapbox rhetoric. This is a book that gives you much to think about and will stay with you long after you have put it down.

Standing upon a masterful analysis of archival materials, Ben Feldman's reconstruction of antebellum New York is alive with teeming streets and the buzz of commerce, the strivings of its warring classes, the machinations of politicians and newspaper editors, and the lures of vice and crime. For this reader, it bridged the gap between the remote beginnings of the city and the one that is familiar today. Only a true love of New York could produce such a work. And remarkably, all of this is accomplished within a story of suspense.