Abby Sage Richardson

American writer

• Born: October 14, 1837
• Birthplace: Lowell, Massachusetts
• Died: December 5, 1900
• Place of death: Rome, Italy

Richardson was a successful but far from an important author and playwright. Her fame derives primarily from her central role in the celebrated trial of her former husband for murdering her second husband. The case helped to call attention to laws that unjustly made it difficult for women to win divorces from abusive husbands.

Early Life

Abby Sage Richardson was born Abby Sage, the daughter of William and Abigail Sage. Her father was a member of an established New England family descended from the mid-seventeenth century Welsh immigrant David Sage and his wife Mary Willcox. When Abby was five, the family moved from Massachusetts to Manchester, New Hampshire.

The eldest of three surviving children, Abby had a precocious interest in books and read whatever she could, including a miniature edition of William Shakespeare’s plays. As she grew older, she trained to become a teacher at the Normal School in New Hampshire. After graduating in 1855, she taught elementary school in New Haven, Connecticut.

In the spring of 1857, Abby met Daniel McFarland (1818-1880), an alcoholic land speculator who had had a brief career as a college instructor of elocution and who was a nonpracticing member of the Massachusetts bar. To the articulate but inexperienced Abby, the twenty-years-older McFarland was a sophisticated and learned man who moved in the wealthy, progressive circles that she aspired to enter. Marriage to him seemed to Abby an ideal match of two cultivated minds, and on December 14, 1857, they wed in Boston.

Over the next ten years, during which time Abby had two children, she found that preserving her marriage to McFarland was becoming an ordeal. She traveled constantly with her husband to further his land ventures until 1863, when she drew on her wealthy social connections to get her husband work as a provost marshal for the military draft under the Enrollment Act. During that period, their marriage was strained by McFarland’s heavy drinking, his resentment of the fact that Abby was supporting the family through her paid readings, and by her having to shuttle between her parents’ homes and their own rooming houses in New York and New Jersey as their money ran out.

Life’s Work

Like many other mid-nineteenth century American women who were denied careers and whose economic status was desperate, Abby turned to lecturing and writing to earn money. Private readings that she had begun in homes in the West had been so well received that her husband—whose business schemes almost invariably failed—trained her as an actor. However, no immediate work resulted. Meanwhile, although her husband expressed his resentment of her role as primary provider for the family in invective and abuse, he accepted her money readily.

Abby’s readings from the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and others and from Shakespeare’s plays attracted the attention of some of society’s powerful figures. These included Mrs. John F. Cleveland, a sister of Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, and Charlotte and Samuel Sinclair, the publisher of the New York Tribune. In addition to doing readings, Abby wrote a collection of poems, Percy’s Year of Rhymes , that was published in Boston in 1866.

During that same year, 1866, Abby was befriended by the noted Tribunejournalist Lucia Gilbert Calhoun, who introduced her to the manager of the Winter Garden Theater. In that theater, Abby embarked on a short-lived stage career under the stage name “Miss Cushing.” On one occasion, she appeared played Nerissa opposite the distinguished actor Edwin Booth in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597). Also during that year, she met Albert Deane Richardson, a widowed Tribune journalist and travel correspondent. Richardson boarded in the same house as the McFarlands and unavoidably observed their fractured marriage.

In 1867, Abby continued to write and act and received both moral and material support from the Sinclairs and the Calhouns and professional advice from Albert Deane Richardson. She wrote essays for the Riverside Magazine for Young People and a children’s column for the Independent. The American Publishing company, of Hartford, Connecticut, published her next book of poems, Pebbles and Sunshine .

In February, 1867, Abby finally recognized that her long effort to preserve her marriage to a violent alcoholic had failed and told McFarland that she was leaving him. In March, a drunken McFarland shot and wounded Richardson, as he was escorting Abby home from the theater. Mortified by the publicity that the shooting attracted, Abby resigned from the theater and moved with her two children to Boston. During that same month, McFarland began a custody proceeding that won him custody of Abby’s older son, Percy, in November. Eager to claim his wife again, he sued her for “alienation of affections.”

Meanwhile, Abby continued to support herself and her younger son, Daniel, whom she renamed William Sage. She wrote book reviews and articles for the New York Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Independent. She chose not to divorce McFarland in New York State, whose laws required a claim of adultery, even though McFarland was guilty of that offense. Instead, she moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, where divorce laws were broader. There, in October, 1869, she won a divorce from McFarland on grounds of cruelty.

After returning to Massachusetts, Abby visited Richardson and made plans to move to New York with him. On November 25, 1869, McFarland shot Richardson again, in the Tribune building lobby, gravely injuring him. Five days later, on November 30, the well-known Protestant cleric Reverend Henry Ward Beecher conducted a marriage between Abby and Richardson on what proved to be the latter’s deathbed, as Richardson died two days later.

McFarland’s ensuing murder trial was a national sensation, setting women’s rights advocates such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton against lawyers and the press, who attacked Abby as an adulterer and used the McFarland case to defend the conservative position on reforms of laws respecting marriage and women’s property rights. McFarland was acquitted, ostensibly because of his insanity plea, but more likely because of the defense’s argument that he had acted on the unwritten biblical law that a man was not a murderer if he killed his wife’s lover in a passionate defense of his patriarchal rights and property, which included his wife. McFarland did not trouble Abby again.

Widowed and left with Richardson’s three children and her own son to support, Abby moved to Chicago, where she continued writing for magazines and newspapers and resumed her public readings. Now using the name Abby Sage Richardson, she edited a collection of her husband’s essays, Garnered Sheaves from the Writings of A. D. Richardson (1871), and wrote a book that she and her late husband had hoped to write together, The History of Our Country from Its Discovery by Columbus to the Celebration of the Centennial Anniversary of Its Declaration of Independence (1875). She also edited and published Stories from Old English Poetry (1872), Songs from the Old Dramatists (1873), and Familiar Talks on English Literature (1881).

During her last decade life, when she was recognized as one of the grand old women of New York’s literary and theater world, she wrote plays. These included Donna Quixote (1890), a bitterly contested adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (1890), and, in collaboration with Grace Livingston Furniss, A Colonial Girl and the highly successful Pride of Jennico (1900). During a tour of Italy with her son William, she died in Rome on December 5, 1900, at the age of sixty-three.

Significance

Abby Sage Richardson retains a minor reputation as one of many “scribbling women” of the nineteenth century, whose earnings were directly determined by audience demand for the sentimental and the domestic, as evidenced by one of her late works, Old Love-Letters: Or, Letters of Sentiment Written by Persons Eminent in English Literature and History (1882). The scandalous crisis of her divorce from Daniel McFarland has earned her far greater renown, particularly in the history of American family law and in the women’s rights movement of her time, when the United States was divided over issues such as the right of women to independence through divorce and was alarmed by the threat that divorce posed to the traditional patriarchal rules of marriage.

Bibliography

Basch, Norma. Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Analyzes the social and cultural anxiety over legal changes in divorce over two centuries. The McFarland-Richardson case highlighted the inflammatory association of divorce and women’s rights with cultural and moral decline in the United States.

Cooper, George. Lost Love: A True Story of Passion, Murder, and Justice in Old New York. New York: Pantheon, 1994. A well-documented narrative of the lives of Abby Sage Richardson, Daniel McFarland, and Albert Deane Richardson, ending with the sensational murder trial. Includes a detailed bibliography, excerpts from contemporary newspaper accounts, trial transcripts, letters, and illustrations.

Demarest, Phyllis Gordon. The Naked Risk. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954. A fictional account of the relationships between Abby Sage Richardson and her husbands.

Fatout, Paul. “Mark Twain: Litigant.” American Literature 31, no. 1 (1959): 30-45. Details the successful lawsuit brought against Abby Sage Richardson, Mark Twain, and producer Daniel Frohman, brought by Edward H. House, who had an agreement with Twain to dramatize the latter’s novel The Prince and the Pauper before contracted with Richardson to dramatize his novel.

Hartog, Hendrik. “Lawyering, Husbands’ Rights, and the ’Unwritten Law’ in Nineteenth-Century America.” Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (1997): 67-96. Places the McFarland-Richardson murder trial within the context of legal-cultural battles over the reform of American divorce laws, especially the threat to patriarchal code of the “unwritten law” that permitted enraged husbands, brothers, and female victims to murder seducers.

Ireland, Robert. “Insanity and the Unwritten Law.” American Journal of Legal History 32, no. 2 (1998): 157-172. Studies the ways in which medical definitions of insanity expanded during the nineteenth century to facilitate acquittals in murder trials involving the unwritten law permitting husbands to kill libertines who seduced their wives.