Throwaway Comment on Wife of George H. Williams Leads to Religious Cult and Fasting Deaths in 1890s

George H. Williams has been on the mind lately. As Territorial Judge, he decided Holmes v. Ford in 1853, which had been brought up by Mary Jane Holmes Shipley Drake. He was also mixed up in stories about a significant banker and Mayor here (and was himself Mayor in Portland a decade later).

• "Black Pioneer Mary Jane Holmes Shipley Drake as seen in 1924"
• "Which George Williams was Mayor and Banker here?"

Oregon Historical Society

When George H. died, the Oregonian called him "15th Amendment Williams." That Amendment is not directly in the news right now, though it is very present as background, but its neighbor, the 14th Amendment, is very directly in the news.

April 5th, 1910

Last year Fergus Bordewich's book, Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction, came out, and it seemed like it might have a good discussion of George H. Williams as Attorney General and his actual relation to the 15th Amendment and the Enforcement Acts.

Bordewich, a writer and popular historian, but not himself an academic historian, focuses on the activities of Williams' predecessor, Amos Akerman. Klan prosecution and Reconstruction itself was losing steam by the time Williams was appointed, and Bordewich doesn't discuss any Williams' authorship of the 15th Amendment. Or indeed very much about Williams at all.

In fact, Bordewich allows himself to be distracted a little by Williams' wife! The parenthetical digression and use of "louche" in the introduction of Williams is odd and may not have been necessary. If the subject was necessary, it should have been developed more and with more seriousness, not merely as a jokey, dismissive remark.

To succeed [Attorney General] Akerman, Grant named former senator George H. Williams of Oregon, an administration stalwart, the first cabinet appointee from the fast-developing West Coast, an asset that weighed strongly in his favor for political reasons. In contrast to the self-contained Akerman, Williams - a handsome man with classically symmetrical features framed by thickets of muttonchop whiskers - was a man about town, though less notoriously so than his louche young wife. (Williams's appointment, one gossipy administration man wrote to another," sectionally may strengthen the administration, sexually also for all I know, & if half that has been said, is true.) With respect to the war against the Klan, Williams seemed a solid choice. Although a Democrat before the war, he had opposed slavery and after becoming a Republican had lent his ardent support to Reconstruction. He urged federal attorneys to act forcefully against the Klan, and promised to vigorously prosecute "every conspiracy against the peace of society and the safety of the unoffending citizens."

Williams overestimated the resources at his command, however....

So while the book was interesting on the Klan prosecutions generally, and on the start of the unwinding of Reconstruction, underscoring the fragility of goodness and ways it is in fact difficult to understand the arc of the moral universe as necessarily bending towards justice, it did not illuminate much about Williams.

NY Sunday World
December 24th, 1893

But let's pursue that digression a little on the "louche young wife," Kate Williams. She may or may not have had a good life, but she had a very interesting one, one that deserves to be taken more seriously as a whole, not as a "hot mess" and an instance of the "Real Housewives of" series, and not as merely some adjunct to her husband's life. We might also see her as someone terribly confined, desperate for fields of accomplishment and ultimately frustrated. One obituary described her as "a very intellectual lady...[whose] great personal magnetism and intellectual power attracted the most notable and accomplished society..."

During debate over Grant's nomination of her husband for Chief Justice, the papers were full of partisan invective. Those who opposed it called Williams incompetent and a stupid country bumpkin. There were some questionable financial dealings that resolved to corruption or no big deal depending on partisan commitments.

New York Herald
January 4th, 1874

Critics employed extra sexism. This collected in a New York paper is from a southern paper  in Vicksburg, captured by the first maneuver to win Grant fame in the Civil War, and certain to be biased.

...now comes a committee of investigation on the part of Congress, with a receipt from William Joyce for $1,600 paid out of the National Treasury for one landaulette or carriage purchased by Mrs. Williams, the ruling power behind the throne, who has already shed tears and bitterness over the coffins of several husbands.

A couple years later a Brooklyn paper offered details on a plot Kate Williams had supposedly cooked up, and by which she had especially upset Julia Dent Grant, wife of President Grant. The letters' authenticity now are not highly regarded, and some think they were forged to derail the nomination and harm President Grant.

Brooklyn Sunday Sun, August 20th, 1876

The report also cranked up the sexism:

She is a woman of abounding but uncultivated beauty, of winning through loud manners—a brunette, ample in all respects, and with a swing in her manner that was acquired in prairie flirtations.

After the Williamses returned to Portland, there is not very much on her in the papers until the very end of her life. But what an end it was!

Washington, DC Evening Star, Dec. 9th, 1893

East coast papers ran multiple features on her. She was sensational, national news.

NY Sunday World, Dec. 24th, 1893

The New York piece is particularly interesting as it highlights the political dimension to her religiosity and sense of apocalypse.

Mrs. Williams predicts the early end of the earth. She claims God has told her that dire calamities are to precede the final event, of which the present "hard times" are a mild beginning. Before the close of winter there will be a bloody war between labor and capital. Anarchy will triumph. Society will be overthrown and evil will succeed evil until the end comes in the spring.

Was she a parlor socialist? By the looks of their house, they were wealthy. Maybe she detested and wished to discipline labor instead.

NY Sunday World, Dec. 24th, 1893

As the headline, "Starvation was her creed," suggests, she fasted and called on others to fast.

Here's a piece from The Dalles, itself reprinted from a Kansas City paper. It also is from December, 1893, and there was a wave of coverage nationwide.

December 23rd, 1893
The Dalles Weekly Chronicle

It too is dismissive, but we can read between the lines and strike through at least some of the misogyny.

The Kansas City Star has this to say: A strange, story is that which comes from Oregon of the virtual madness of Mrs. George H. Williams, who has been seized by a strange religious mania which induces her to undergo fasts of forty days in a struggle to attain the condition of communication with the Holy Spirit. Mrs. Williams has had a very strange and eventful history. One of the beautiful daughters of an old river man of Keokuk, Ia., she was unfortunate in her first marriage and went to Oregon, where she employed as her counsel in her divorce case a young lawyer whom she had known in Iowa. The lawyer married his fair client, and doubtless supported by her ambition, rose to be attorney-general of the United States. The attorney general's wife, a woman of superior beauty and talent, made rivals and enemies, and it will always be believed that it was those enemies who prevented the husband from being confirmed chief justice of the superior court. [Supreme Court]

After a brilliant reign and a fall from power, such as, perhaps, no other woman ever experienced in Washington, Mrs. Williams disappeared, returning to Oregon. Now she reappears, a religious fanatic, the leader, it Is said, of a little company of fanatics, putting aside the lumps and vanities and ambitions of the world and seeking with tears and prayer and vigils long to attain to the knowledge of the Holy One, and so come to know the end of the world. There have been in American society but few such transformations as this.

The reason for the coverage follows immediately:

Another alleged disciple of Mrs. George H. Williams has succumbed to the inexorable law of nature. In other words, Mrs. Alice Wells, of 595 Madison street, is lying dead at her late home, the result, it is claimed, of starvation brought about by religious fanaticism.

The deceased had gone through the "wilderness," as the "prophetess," Mrs. Williams, terms it, once, abstaining from nourishment 40 days, and during the second attempt to make the foodless journey the vital spark in her body fled.

The death of Alice Wells made the paper here in Salem.

December 22nd, 1893

At a glance we can understand this against notions of purity and diet in the 19th century, like those of Sylvester Graham and the Kellogg brothers. It also has some kinship with fasting among medieval nuns and mystics, like Catherine of Siena. 19th century Spiritualism and also Christian Science are in the background too. She might have been a colleague or rival to Lucy Mallory, even. There's a lot going on in all that.

Mental illness is possible too. 

The Dalles Daily Chronicle, July 21st, 1893

Earlier that summer she had apparently said, "I am the greatest power in the city of Portland today....My power now is nothing compared to what it will be." A religious visionary might not have made such claims to grandeur. Later, in December, in that piece of December 9th, 1893, the writer quoted her as saying, 

"He's a newspaper man, dear Lord. If he writes a line about me, curse him. If he even now contemplates writing a line concerning me and Thy work, kill him; or paralyze him. Destroy and bankrupt the newspapers which shall attempt to publish his—"

He fled.

Salem papers also called her crazy.

December 10th, 1893

Less than a year later, Kate Williams herself died from starvation.

April 18th, 1894

For whatever reasons, Kate Williams did not throw herself into advocacy for Suffrage or for Temperance, two fields where ambitious women could exercise some measure of leadership and accomplishment. Instead, she formed a cult.

Maybe we'll come back to this another time. There's definitely more to read on George H. Williams and Reconstruction, and Kate Williams deserves more consideration also.