Mrs. Wharton's House-Party

How a Gay and Bibulous Weekend With a Baltimore Hostess Ended Most Unhappily

EDMUND PEARSON

ONE cheerful Saturday in June, nearly sixty years ago, General William Scott Ketchum left his home in Washington for a week-end visit at the house of his old friend, Mrs. Elizabeth Wharton of Baltimore. He was a retired officer of the Army, both hale and hearty after his Western campaigns. But he was now on a more dangerous expedition than any foray against the Indians or the Mormons. Like Dr. Parkman of Boston, he was bent on collecting a debt.

The General had lent the widow of a brother officer, the late Major Wharton, the sum of $2600, and taken her note. He told his friends that he was going to get the money, and also wish Mrs. Wharton a pleasant voyage to Europe. She was preparing to sail in a week or two.

Something has been said about a number of very fatiguing business affairs attended to by General Ketchum on that warm morning before he took the train. There is also a rumour about a slice of watermelon which he ate. (People always love to blame watermelons.) Nothing, however, really appears about this, and it is a matter of historical record that there is always much loose talk about the dietary indiscretions and drug-taking habits of gentlemen who, under the ministering care of ladies, have perished mysteriously.

WHEN Mrs. Maybrick of Liverpool was convicted of poisoning her husband with arsenic, there was some foundation for this talk. Doubt was expressed about the verdict, and justly, since Mr. Maybrick not only took noxious drugs for his own peculiar pleasures but was also experimented upon, by his puzzled physicians, with nine more or less deadly substances—almost the whole pharmacopoeia—in their vain efforts to bring him back from the valley of the shadow.

With General Ketchum, however, all chatter about water-melons, opium, and other things so bad for retired brigadier-generals, is beside the point. He arrived in good shape and spirits, as attested by a Mrs. Chubb who came with him.

He was received by Mrs. Wharton as cordially as he could expect, since she knew that it was his purpose to cast some gloom over her European plans by murmuring, at the first opportunity:

"About that matter of the $2600 . . . ?" Mrs. Wharton's menage seems to have been extensive. I do not know whether she kept a boarding-house, or whether she was exercising the justly-famed Southern hospitality, but her place was full of guests and callers. There were Mr. and Mrs. Van Ness, Mrs. Hutton, Mrs. Loney and others. Soon they 'were all merrily chattering and shaking up drinks.

Mrs. Wharton proposed to General Ketchum a glass of lemonade. He blanched at the suggestion of this acid beverage, but said that he believed that "if it had a stick in it," he might undergo the risk. At a later date an explanation had to be made for the benefit of the Judge, who could not be expected to know what a "stick" was. It took the form of brandy.

The history of the following few days is one of milk punches, sangaree, brandy concoctions, and beer. It was not that these gentlefolk devoted themselves to getting tipsy with alcohol: it might have been better if they had. But someone was forever mixing for someone else a drink, homely enough in its name and appearance, but toxic, indeed, in its result.

General Ketchum was violently ill the evening of his arrival. He could not go to church on Sunday, nor return to Washington on Monday. Mrs. Wharton continued to ply him with drinks, and to preside over the medicines which were given him. He recovered, and arose from his bed; and then became ill again.

At last, after some extremely painful scenes, which always followed the administration of any new draught by the hostess, he died— one week after his arrival in Baltimore.

On one occasion he remarked—

"Mrs. Wharton has poisoned me with a glass of lemonade."

This, of course, was officially waved aside as "a jocular remark of the old gentleman." If that was its correct description, it was the only jocularity in which he indulged during the last seven days of his life. I have seldom read of a more depressing week-end party than this festival of Mrs. Wharton's.

Not one of the ladies was ill, but Mr. Van Ness, who was a banker, and familiar with Mrs. Wharton's financial affairs, very nearly expired, under the same distressing symptoms which marked the illness of General Ketchum. In a glass of beer offered to Mr. Van Ness by his hostess, but declined by him (he had already had some of her drinks) there were found, it was asserted, fifteen grains of tartar emetic—which contains the poison, antimony.

The same drug was found in a milk-punch thoughtfully mixed for General Ketchum by Mrs. Wharton. Now, it was rather embarrassing for Mrs. Wharton that she had to admit having bought tartar emetic during the week. She used it, she said, for some ailment of her own, as an external application.

Whatever one may think of Mrs. Wharton, she is entitled to our gratitude for this variation from the classic excuse for the possession of poison. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, ladies in her difficult situation, make use of one of two well-worn explanations: either they have needed it to destroy rats, or else they wished to enhance the beauty of their own complexions.

In some families, the opposite results have been obtained: the husband has been destroyed, and the rats have had their complexions improved.

WITH both gentlemen of the party in convulsions, in their separate rooms, two of the other guests, Mrs. Van Ness and Mrs. Loney, began a campaign of sipping, testing and tasting the beverages which Mrs. Wharton produced, from time to time, from her laboratory. They agreed that whether they were called beer, milk-punch, sangaree or a dose of "yellow jasmine" (the remedy prescribed for General Ketchum by his physician) they were all alike in tasting "like a brass pin."

After General Ketchum had passed from this earthly life, and Mr. Van Ness had recovered, Mrs. Wharton continued her packing and preparations for Europe. The outraged people of the State of Maryland, however, interfered with her trip, and insisted upon bringing her to trial. So aroused against her were the inhabitants of her own city, that in order to safe-guard .her rights, the trial was held in Annapolis, where it was daily attended by officers from the Naval Academy—as was seen by the prevalence of sailor-like side-whiskers upon the faces of gentlemen in the audience.

The New York Sun bluntly referred to Mrs. Wharton as "The Baltimore Borgia", but the law of her own State showed far more delicacy. The total disappearance of General Ketchum's waistcoat, shortly after his death, and with it the disappearance of Mrs. Wharton's note for $2600 were points to be explained. The lady said that she had paid the debt in cash, and then, on the General's advice, torn up the note. She owed the Ketchum estate nothing: on the contrary, they were indebted to her for $4000—the amount of some bonds which the General was keeping for her.

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The bonds were not to be found, and she had no receipt for them. General Ketchum had been fussily exact in his private bookkeeping, yet he had left, in his account books, no entry of the bonds. Mrs. Wharton claimed them, however, and considered herself an ill-used woman.

In any transaction of life, upon which one might be called to make a decision, so interesting a fact as the simultaneous illness of Mr. Van Ness, during the last agonies of the General would be considered both pertinent and essential. But not in a trial of this kind. So tenderly does our law protect persons accused of grave crime that the jury were allowed to hear nothing of the banker's ordeal.

This is one of the many reasons why the sleepless nights endured by tenderhearted people, who disturb themselves about the law's brutal treatment of suspected murderers, seem rather unnecessary; and why the logic of these folk appears slightly anserine.

The trial of Mrs. Wharton dragged on from December 4, 1871 until late in January. The listeners, the jury, and the reporters all became horribly bored. The prisoner sat impassive in Court, shrouded in a heavy black veil. Her husband had died four years earlier; and her son, also an army officer, had died in his mother's house twelve months since, leaving her the amount of his life insurance. No grounds for suspicion attached to her, so far as I know, in these deaths.

The trial developed into a combat, a series of field-days, and an all-round good time for the doctors and other medical and chemical experts. The first of these, the luxuriously whiskered Dr. Williams, may be seen giving testimony in the picture accompanying this article. It was Dr. Williams who prescribed yellow jasmine. Mrs. Wharton had prepared the second dose of this remedy, and insisted on giving it to the sufferer ahead of time—as the first dose "had done him so much goo.d." The effects of this second dose were dreadful to witness. Mrs. Wharton kept the cup and spoon within her own care.

Dr. Williams and four or five other doctors or professors of chemistry agreed that the General had not died from natural causes. They agreed, with more or less certainty, that poisoning by antimony would account for the symptoms. Dr. Williams had expressed his belief, before the death, that his patient had been poisoned. Two qualified analytical chemists testified to antimony in the General's body.

The defense, however, produced an amazing battery of experts. Among them Professor McCulloch and Doctors Genth and Goolrick were impressive. These gentlemen, with seven or eight others, attacked the chemical learning of the witnesses for the State and reenforced their opinion by means of a very attractive little working-model of the stomach of the late General Ketchum, used in place of the original —which they had never seen.

Some of these doctors and professors thought that the General might have died from cerebro-spinal meningitis—then an even more obscure disease than it is now. It was, of course, an odd coincidence that General Ketchum, coming from Washington, and Mr. Van Ness of Baltimore, should each have been so inconsiderate as to bring his case of cerebro-spinal to Mrs. Wharton's house-party. But, owing to the tenderness of the law previously referred to, this strange working of the doctrine of chance did not have to be explained by the defense.

In the end it came to this: the State's analysts felt that their tests established the presence of antimony in the General's body; the opposing analysts said that the tests should have been carried further.

A flat disagreement of experts resulted, as usual, in surrounding the minds of the jury by a dense fog. After some thought, they acquitted Mrs. Wharton. She was still under indictment for trying to poison Mr. Van Ness, but the State decided that it was not worth while to prosecute this charge. So the lady went free—not exactly with the cheers of her fellow Baltimoreans.

She had made a serious blunder in tearing up the note and destroying all evidence that she had squared such a considerable debt. Had she not done this, the Marylanders might have been more gallant toward her. As it was, a number of years had to pass before there was any real rivalry for an invitation to one of her week-end parties.