UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CONCLUSION: “DON’T FEAR MY MANHOOD”, continued ...
But inextricably tied to these issues was the fact that Cole had been away from his home for five years trying to make a name for himself in combat.
And, as many contemporaries understood, his trouble at home extended to trouble in the fields.
Still coping with the return of nearly two million soldiers who served for various stretches in the Union Army (over a third of a million Union soldiers, of course, never returned) many northerners must have viewed Cole as an aberration even as he represented the collective malaise and private upheavals of returned soldiers: the son who couldn’t hold a job; the neighbor with half a leg; the morose brother; the husband troubled with war secrets.
Over a period of eighteen months the two trials (the first trial had one juryman who would not budge from his position that Cole was guilty of murder), would prove, not so much that Cole was innocent or guilty, but that his peers and a sizable slice of society cared more for impassioned accounts of war heroism and the prerogatives of husbands, than legalistic niceties.
The proceedings in both trials bordered on farcical as no amount of warnings from the judges nor objections from the prosecutors could stymie the defense’s lionization of the troubled soldier and constant revisiting of imputed sexual acts that drove him to murder.
Cole, after all, never caught the two “in actual coition.”
He never found love letters.
He never caught Hiscock making gestures or calls to Mary.10
Instead, after suspecting something foul, the veteran methodically took interviews, confirmed his suspicions, mulled over his options for nearly three days, shopped for a dependable second handgun, and acquired (with evidently a good deal of coercion and strategy) multiple confessions from his wife.
These apparent technical hitches, though, would only play into Cole’s hands.
If his frenzied insanity did not come from finding his wife in bed with another man, his attorneys would argue, then he must have been dragging something from his past.
Latching on to the relatively new legal strategy of temporary insanity, his attorneys repeatedly traced lines from Cole’s momentary loss of bearings to his anguished war experience.
What ensued then was a legal strategy that continually linked Cole’s disrupted sexual relations, war-time predators, and heroic struggles on the battlefields.11
10 About the only event that might have agitated Cole happened several months before the murder while at a fundraising bazaar. Cole — who was dressed up as an Indian Chief for entertainment — caught Hiscock and Mrs. Cole arm in arm inside the latter’s booth. Cole half-jokingly warned, “Take care, I am watching you.” See: Syracuse Journal, April 30, 1868 and April 27, 1868.
11 Dunphy, "Remarkable Trials of all Countries with the Evidence and Speeches of Counsel, Court Scenes, Incidents, &c. Volume II", 194-420
TO BE CONTINUED ...
GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CONCLUSION: “DON’T FEAR MY MANHOOD”, continued ...
With all their demonization of Hiscock, and gender baiting, however, Cole’s attorneys were on to something.
Though they regularly painted Cole into romanticized narratives of military struggle, they were forced to tell another story about the war — one that would make Cole appear like a victim of a chaotic orgy of violence, primed for “frenzy.”
Here the trial only touched upon a fraction of the convoluted history of Cole and the war he hoped would remake him.
It partially revealed how the “fog of war” followed soldiers’ bodies home, rolling into bedrooms and workspaces all over the Union.
As contemporaries consumed the unfolding drama, mourned the slain, and pored over trial reports, they unavoidably engaged in contemporary debates over the meanings of purity, manhood, honor and the family and how all these things had been altered by war.
After half a decade in the war fields, trying to make something of himself in the way that men were supposed to do, Cole returned home hoping he was playing the game of life to its fullest.
But he soon tripped through others’ wires.
This time, though, he found that the wires reached into his own bedroom.
Cole became a hero by killing a fellow “self-made man” who had committed the cardinal rule of tampering with the delicate relations between wife and man-on-the-make.
To Cole, and his many sympathizers, Hiscock had attacked the final refuge of purity and safety to which all self-made men would eventually turn.
If Cole’s schooling and professional ambitions were integral to making new middle-class families, so was the indispensable prescription that wives must create a domestic refuge for their market grizzled husbands.
Not only was the wife supposed to offer safety and love to her husband instead of seeking worldly preferment, her body was not supposed to be subject to like passions.
Her monopoly on domestic virtue rested in her claim to sexual purity.
In a society committed to “countervailing” interests, her propensity for self-denial neutralized her husband’s lusts for power and pleasure.12
No wonder then that the newspapers correctly reported that Cole was equally disturbed with the fact that Hiscock — an estate attorney — had helped Mary Barto Cole protect her recently inherited money from George Cole’s reach.
That she lusted other men’s bodies or other men’s money undermined the same familial strategy.
Hiscock had blown the lid off an ideal of womanhood that was in large part a strategy for families to keep pace in an increasingly market-driven world without feeling they had trampled all over the mores of their parents.
Mary’s sexuality was vital, not just because of the particular commitments made in monogamous Christian marriages, but because a wife’s controlled passions provided the counterweight to the breathless search for station that consumed fathers and husbands like “General” George Washington Cole.
When Cole came to grips with how his wife’s passions had been made public, he calculatedly planned to upstage (and eclipse) her passions with his own.
He knew as did most men, that a public murder would be approved by a jury of male peers, in the name of manly passion and female purity.
12 Coontz, "Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, Or how Love Conquered Marriage", 161-75; Rotundo, "American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era", 120-40
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CONCLUSION: “DON’T FEAR MY MANHOOD”, continued ...
With all their demonization of Hiscock, and gender baiting, however, Cole’s attorneys were on to something.
Though they regularly painted Cole into romanticized narratives of military struggle, they were forced to tell another story about the war — one that would make Cole appear like a victim of a chaotic orgy of violence, primed for “frenzy.”
Here the trial only touched upon a fraction of the convoluted history of Cole and the war he hoped would remake him.
It partially revealed how the “fog of war” followed soldiers’ bodies home, rolling into bedrooms and workspaces all over the Union.
As contemporaries consumed the unfolding drama, mourned the slain, and pored over trial reports, they unavoidably engaged in contemporary debates over the meanings of purity, manhood, honor and the family and how all these things had been altered by war.
After half a decade in the war fields, trying to make something of himself in the way that men were supposed to do, Cole returned home hoping he was playing the game of life to its fullest.
But he soon tripped through others’ wires.
This time, though, he found that the wires reached into his own bedroom.
Cole became a hero by killing a fellow “self-made man” who had committed the cardinal rule of tampering with the delicate relations between wife and man-on-the-make.
To Cole, and his many sympathizers, Hiscock had attacked the final refuge of purity and safety to which all self-made men would eventually turn.
If Cole’s schooling and professional ambitions were integral to making new middle-class families, so was the indispensable prescription that wives must create a domestic refuge for their market grizzled husbands.
Not only was the wife supposed to offer safety and love to her husband instead of seeking worldly preferment, her body was not supposed to be subject to like passions.
Her monopoly on domestic virtue rested in her claim to sexual purity.
In a society committed to “countervailing” interests, her propensity for self-denial neutralized her husband’s lusts for power and pleasure.12
No wonder then that the newspapers correctly reported that Cole was equally disturbed with the fact that Hiscock — an estate attorney — had helped Mary Barto Cole protect her recently inherited money from George Cole’s reach.
That she lusted other men’s bodies or other men’s money undermined the same familial strategy.
Hiscock had blown the lid off an ideal of womanhood that was in large part a strategy for families to keep pace in an increasingly market-driven world without feeling they had trampled all over the mores of their parents.
Mary’s sexuality was vital, not just because of the particular commitments made in monogamous Christian marriages, but because a wife’s controlled passions provided the counterweight to the breathless search for station that consumed fathers and husbands like “General” George Washington Cole.
When Cole came to grips with how his wife’s passions had been made public, he calculatedly planned to upstage (and eclipse) her passions with his own.
He knew as did most men, that a public murder would be approved by a jury of male peers, in the name of manly passion and female purity.
12 Coontz, "Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, Or how Love Conquered Marriage", 161-75; Rotundo, "American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era", 120-40
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CONCLUSION: “DON’T FEAR MY MANHOOD”, continued ...
It is not clear if Cole realized how tightly wound together his own ambitions were with his wife’s sexuality.
But his most significant promotion came — as one newspaper suggested — because “Mrs. Cole was not without her anxious desires and active efforts in this behalf.”
In February 1866, just as Cole was set to return home from Texas for good, L.H. Hiscock --- with the help of his powerful political ally from Syracuse --- telegraphed an urgent message to the region’s congressman in Washington: “GET GENERAL COLE BREVETTED MAJOR GENERAL IMMEDIATELY BEFORE MUSTERED OUT IF POSSIBLE.”13
No doubt that Mary’s sexuality and probably even events that took place in George W. Cole’s bed, were part of a complicated game of passion and wirepulling that ultimately exposed the often masked connections between intimacy and power in the Civil War Era.14
That Cole returned a general and a cuckolded husband were tied together in ways that probably only Mary Cole and Hiscock appreciated.
Killing rebels and gaining rank was not enough for Cole; commanding black troops got him nothing except a position in which he basically re-enslaved them, shipping them southward, to basically build railroads against their will.
His own drive for rank made him blind to his black soldiers’ desires to take care of their wives and children.
When he returned home from war, his search for gainful employment was fraught with humiliation.
He was finally recognized as a sensational hero only after he “protected” his wife from her so-called seducer.
There was some talk in the press and among Cole’s family that the prisoner would retain General Butler to defend Cole’s actions.
Actually, Cole’s camp did approach Butler but was turned down as the tireless Massachusetts General, recently elected Congressman, was thoroughly consumed in the first stages of what would be his own political ascent.15
When he was finally acquitted in the winter of 1868, Cole’s backers stood atop their seats, giving “deafening cheers” in the courtroom.
The judge futilely banged his gavel, calling for “Order!” amid the pandemonium created by those who believed that Cole had just vindicated another kind of “order.”
For two minutes, Cole’s supporters “threw their hats upwards, waved their handkerchiefs and continued cheering.”
As Cole moved outside he was surrounded by elated persons “striving to grasp his hands.”
After the verdict, the jurymen were also anxious to congratulate him.
Cole addressed them, saying “I thank the Jury for restoring me to the guardianship of my children.”
13 Syracuse Journal, June 13, 1867.
14 Telegraph message found in microfilm #173CB1866, NARA, Washington, DC. Interestingly, the other politician who signed his name to the request, Thomas Alvoord, was the same powerful Syracuse politicians who Henry Barto recommended Cole should see, just before Cole left the interview with Barto and killed Hiscock.
15 Syracuse Journal, June 6, 1867. Olive Cole to Cornelius Cole, June 15 and June 20, 1867, in Cole family, "Papers" Nash, "Stormy Petrel: The Life and Times of General Benjamin F. Butler, 1818-1893", 230-63
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CONCLUSION: “DON’T FEAR MY MANHOOD”, continued ...
It is not clear if Cole realized how tightly wound together his own ambitions were with his wife’s sexuality.
But his most significant promotion came — as one newspaper suggested — because “Mrs. Cole was not without her anxious desires and active efforts in this behalf.”
In February 1866, just as Cole was set to return home from Texas for good, L.H. Hiscock --- with the help of his powerful political ally from Syracuse --- telegraphed an urgent message to the region’s congressman in Washington: “GET GENERAL COLE BREVETTED MAJOR GENERAL IMMEDIATELY BEFORE MUSTERED OUT IF POSSIBLE.”13
No doubt that Mary’s sexuality and probably even events that took place in George W. Cole’s bed, were part of a complicated game of passion and wirepulling that ultimately exposed the often masked connections between intimacy and power in the Civil War Era.14
That Cole returned a general and a cuckolded husband were tied together in ways that probably only Mary Cole and Hiscock appreciated.
Killing rebels and gaining rank was not enough for Cole; commanding black troops got him nothing except a position in which he basically re-enslaved them, shipping them southward, to basically build railroads against their will.
His own drive for rank made him blind to his black soldiers’ desires to take care of their wives and children.
When he returned home from war, his search for gainful employment was fraught with humiliation.
He was finally recognized as a sensational hero only after he “protected” his wife from her so-called seducer.
There was some talk in the press and among Cole’s family that the prisoner would retain General Butler to defend Cole’s actions.
Actually, Cole’s camp did approach Butler but was turned down as the tireless Massachusetts General, recently elected Congressman, was thoroughly consumed in the first stages of what would be his own political ascent.15
When he was finally acquitted in the winter of 1868, Cole’s backers stood atop their seats, giving “deafening cheers” in the courtroom.
The judge futilely banged his gavel, calling for “Order!” amid the pandemonium created by those who believed that Cole had just vindicated another kind of “order.”
For two minutes, Cole’s supporters “threw their hats upwards, waved their handkerchiefs and continued cheering.”
As Cole moved outside he was surrounded by elated persons “striving to grasp his hands.”
After the verdict, the jurymen were also anxious to congratulate him.
Cole addressed them, saying “I thank the Jury for restoring me to the guardianship of my children.”
13 Syracuse Journal, June 13, 1867.
14 Telegraph message found in microfilm #173CB1866, NARA, Washington, DC. Interestingly, the other politician who signed his name to the request, Thomas Alvoord, was the same powerful Syracuse politicians who Henry Barto recommended Cole should see, just before Cole left the interview with Barto and killed Hiscock.
15 Syracuse Journal, June 6, 1867. Olive Cole to Cornelius Cole, June 15 and June 20, 1867, in Cole family, "Papers" Nash, "Stormy Petrel: The Life and Times of General Benjamin F. Butler, 1818-1893", 230-63
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CONCLUSION: “DON’T FEAR MY MANHOOD”, concluded ...
A crowd then followed the wounded veteran to the hotel where they continued to fete the “hero of a domestic tragedy.”16
The hero, though, did not return to his children.
Soon after the trial he made one last fruitless trip to Washington in attempt to lay pipe for his future — despite the help of his brother.
Within a few years Cole was in New Mexico, raising sheep in hopes of entering a lucrative wool trade.
He remained there until his death in 1875.
But the sick General did not come to the margins of “civilization” to herd sheep alone.
He dreamed of building a railroad and tying the territory to Nevada.
Cole left little record of his doings in New Mexico.
But one of the last letters we have from Cole reveals a broken “man of force” — thousands of miles from his abandoned wife and daughters — looking for one last shot.
But Cornelius, for some reason, had finally turned cold on his younger brother’s dreams.
“I seem to have a faculty of making others believe I can be somebody far more readily that I can you…,” George wrote with marked desperation.
George promised that he would repay Cornelius for the remaining trial debts with the certain profits that would come from the railroad investment.
I’ll in time make it up to you — as I am out of work, out of money, out of clothes to appear creditably even, and I cannot push my fortunes thus….It makes me curse to sit here (nailed fastly, want of a little) and see progress coming like a RR train [moving] along to leave me by the wayside as it now looks.17
In 1875 Cole’s jumbled bowels laid him down and finally took his life.
There is some evidence that his old war chum, Edwin Fox — who had become a borderlands drifter and something of a cutthroat — continued paying visits to his sick “captain,” and perhaps, as he had done in the North Carolina army tent, nursed his commander.18
Away from his daughters, financially broke, with ragged clothes and dreams of railroad investments eating his mind, Cole died an unmade man.
It is in this pitiful way that he had come to experience how the Lincolnian vision of merit transformed the meaning of human life into a race with no finish line.
For every “winner” in Lincoln’s “race of life” many more ended their lives defeated, licking their wounds — and like Cole — anxiously eyeing their next main chance.
Even if “the General” failed to see what his pursuit of manhood had done to himself and those around him; Mary Barto Cole fully understood.
In 1879, with all her money gone, and her two daughters still living with her, she began applying for a widow’s pension.
With obvious trepidation she wrote Cornelius, asking him if he could, one last time, pull the well-worn wires and gather testimonies from friends who knew of George’s war injuries.
“I am now going to trouble you again,” she wrote.
Then…“I believe women are nothing but trouble….”
By 1881, Mary expressed fears that her daughter Alice’s health was “permanently injured by hard work and anxiety about our affairs.”
Fanny, her other daughter, was also at home and had “taken entire charge of her grandmother who is 94 years old….”
These few glimpses depict a broken Mary Cole, living in financial need with her two daughters (one of them quite troubled) and their aged grandmother — a house of wives and children left behind by self-made men.
And though Mary confessed that she needed “that pension very much,” she would eventually be rejected in the mid 1880s, and learn how well General Cole had kept the extent of his injuries from official war records.
In this “the General” had finally “made” himself by erasing his own brokenness and by extension his dependence on those who nursed him.19
16 Dunphy, "Remarkable Trials of all Countries with the Evidence and Speeches of Counsel, Court Scenes, Incidents, &c. Volume II", 419-420 Cornelius to C.K. McClatchy, December 9, 1868 XXXX UCLA; Syracuse Journal, December 7, 1868.
17 George Cole to Cornelius Cole, May, 1874 in Cole family, "Papers"
18 See affidavit of Edwin Fox, March, 1884 in Cole’s Pension File, NARA, Washington, DC.
19 Mary Cole to Cornelius Cole, November 7, 1879 and February 17, 1881 in ibid.; Also see various letters between Mary Barto Cole and the Pension Bureau in George Cole’s Pension File, NARA, Washington, DC.
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CONCLUSION: “DON’T FEAR MY MANHOOD”, concluded ...
A crowd then followed the wounded veteran to the hotel where they continued to fete the “hero of a domestic tragedy.”16
The hero, though, did not return to his children.
Soon after the trial he made one last fruitless trip to Washington in attempt to lay pipe for his future — despite the help of his brother.
Within a few years Cole was in New Mexico, raising sheep in hopes of entering a lucrative wool trade.
He remained there until his death in 1875.
But the sick General did not come to the margins of “civilization” to herd sheep alone.
He dreamed of building a railroad and tying the territory to Nevada.
Cole left little record of his doings in New Mexico.
But one of the last letters we have from Cole reveals a broken “man of force” — thousands of miles from his abandoned wife and daughters — looking for one last shot.
But Cornelius, for some reason, had finally turned cold on his younger brother’s dreams.
“I seem to have a faculty of making others believe I can be somebody far more readily that I can you…,” George wrote with marked desperation.
George promised that he would repay Cornelius for the remaining trial debts with the certain profits that would come from the railroad investment.
I’ll in time make it up to you — as I am out of work, out of money, out of clothes to appear creditably even, and I cannot push my fortunes thus….It makes me curse to sit here (nailed fastly, want of a little) and see progress coming like a RR train [moving] along to leave me by the wayside as it now looks.17
In 1875 Cole’s jumbled bowels laid him down and finally took his life.
There is some evidence that his old war chum, Edwin Fox — who had become a borderlands drifter and something of a cutthroat — continued paying visits to his sick “captain,” and perhaps, as he had done in the North Carolina army tent, nursed his commander.18
Away from his daughters, financially broke, with ragged clothes and dreams of railroad investments eating his mind, Cole died an unmade man.
It is in this pitiful way that he had come to experience how the Lincolnian vision of merit transformed the meaning of human life into a race with no finish line.
For every “winner” in Lincoln’s “race of life” many more ended their lives defeated, licking their wounds — and like Cole — anxiously eyeing their next main chance.
Even if “the General” failed to see what his pursuit of manhood had done to himself and those around him; Mary Barto Cole fully understood.
In 1879, with all her money gone, and her two daughters still living with her, she began applying for a widow’s pension.
With obvious trepidation she wrote Cornelius, asking him if he could, one last time, pull the well-worn wires and gather testimonies from friends who knew of George’s war injuries.
“I am now going to trouble you again,” she wrote.
Then…“I believe women are nothing but trouble….”
By 1881, Mary expressed fears that her daughter Alice’s health was “permanently injured by hard work and anxiety about our affairs.”
Fanny, her other daughter, was also at home and had “taken entire charge of her grandmother who is 94 years old….”
These few glimpses depict a broken Mary Cole, living in financial need with her two daughters (one of them quite troubled) and their aged grandmother — a house of wives and children left behind by self-made men.
And though Mary confessed that she needed “that pension very much,” she would eventually be rejected in the mid 1880s, and learn how well General Cole had kept the extent of his injuries from official war records.
In this “the General” had finally “made” himself by erasing his own brokenness and by extension his dependence on those who nursed him.19
16 Dunphy, "Remarkable Trials of all Countries with the Evidence and Speeches of Counsel, Court Scenes, Incidents, &c. Volume II", 419-420 Cornelius to C.K. McClatchy, December 9, 1868 XXXX UCLA; Syracuse Journal, December 7, 1868.
17 George Cole to Cornelius Cole, May, 1874 in Cole family, "Papers"
18 See affidavit of Edwin Fox, March, 1884 in Cole’s Pension File, NARA, Washington, DC.
19 Mary Cole to Cornelius Cole, November 7, 1879 and February 17, 1881 in ibid.; Also see various letters between Mary Barto Cole and the Pension Bureau in George Cole’s Pension File, NARA, Washington, DC.