The Trial of Lizzie Borden(3)
Andrew Jackson Borden, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society
A tall, gaunt, and severe-looking man, Andrew Borden was a walking advertisement for the then-popular “science” of physiognomy: his character was an exact match for his appearance. As the Bordens’ former neighbor Alice Russell put it, “He was a plain-living man with rigid ideas, and very set.” His brother-in-law Hiram Harrington remarked, “He was too hard for me.” In some respects, this was not surprising. Andrew Borden was a self-made man. He had earned his more than quarter-million-dollar fortune through a combination of financial acumen and hard work, but he had maintained that position through a determined frugality. As one newspaper reported, “He was what is called close-fisted, but square and just in his dealings.” He liked to boast that in his years of business he had never borrowed a cent. Andrew Borden had begun his career as a cabinetmaker, providing furniture for the dead as well as the living. An 1859 advertisement in the Fall River Daily Evening News read: “Keep constantly on hand, Burial Cases and Coffins, Ready-made of all kinds now in use in this section of the country.” Borden and his partner William Almy sold furniture “at lower prices than can be bought elsewhere in this city.” Andrew parlayed his interest into more diverse commercial endeavors, ultimately serving as president of the Union Savings Bank, a member of its board of trustees, a director of the Merchants Manufacturing Company, the B.M.C. Durfee Safe Deposit and Trust Company, the Globe Yarn Mill Company, and the Troy Cotton and Woolen Manufactory. But his most significant holdings were in real estate, and “he never made a purchase of land for which he was not ready to pay cash down.” He owned farmland across the Taunton River in Swansea, and in 1890 he built what was described as “one of the finest business blocks in the city located at the corner of South Main and Anawan streets.” It was to this, the A. J. Borden building, a physical manifestation of his standing in Fall River, that he directed his steps every morning.
A. J. Borden building, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society
His own domestic arrangements were much more modest. In 1871, the Bordens moved from 12 Ferry Street, Andrew’s father’s home, to the house on Second Street. It was a step over, not a step up. Andrew Borden turned the former two-family house with separate floors for each family into a two-story residence for his family. During this renovation, he removed the upstairs faucet, leaving only the large soapstone sinks in the kitchen and cellar serviced by a cold-water tank. The following year, he connected the house to the city water supply, giving the occupants a flushable water closet in the cellar. But that was the extent of the house’s luxuries. Everyone in the Borden household, as the reporter Julian Ralph later put it, “was his or her own chambermaid.”
Andrew Borden married twice. His first wife, Sarah Morse Borden, had grown up on a farm. They married on Christmas evening in 1845. She brought him no dowry but bore him three daughters, two of whom—Emma and Lizzie—survived infancy. She herself died of “uterine congestion” and “disease of spine” in March 1863. Two years after Sarah’s death, Andrew married Abby Gray. As a couple, they resembled the fairy-tale Spratts—Andrew long and lean, Abby short and plump. Andrew Borden needed a housekeeper and a mother for his children. Abby’s feelings for Andrew were never recorded, but his offer must have been tempting to a thirty-seven-year-old spinster from a family continually skirting financial distress. Or perhaps it was her own father’s remarriage to a comely widow and the subsequent birth of a daughter that prompted her decision to leave the increasingly crowded family home.
Borden house on Second Street, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society
If she imagined a new life as the matriarch ensconced in a fond family circle, Abby made a poor bargain. Emma, fourteen at the time of her father’s remarriage, resisted any maternal overtures: she always referred to Abby by her first name and never as “Mother.” Perhaps her grief foreclosed a warmer relationship with the woman she viewed as her mother’s replacement. Mary Ashton Rice Livermore, a friend of the first Mrs. Borden and later a pioneering suffragist, believed that Emma “had never ceased to regard Abby D. Borden as in some sense a usurper in the household in which at least one member cherished with jealous regard the sweet memories of a sanctified mother.” Emma may have felt she served as mother to Lizzie and resented Abby’s intrusion. Much later, Emma explained: “When my darling mother was on her deathbed she summoned me, and exacted a promise that I would always watch over ‘Baby Lizzie.’?”
Abby Borden, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society
Abby may have hoped for more from her younger stepdaughter, but there, too, she experienced a certain froideur. Lizzie did call Abby “Mother,” but she confided only in her older sister, Emma. As Lizzie herself put it, she “always went to Emma.” Lizzie also had a special rapport with her father. Andrew Borden wore no ring to commemorate his marriage to Abby, but when his favorite daughter, Lizzie, gave him a thin gold ring, he promptly put it on his finger and wore it until his death. Lizzie was Andrew’s namesake—christened Lizzie Andrew Borden—and it suited her. Like her father, she was forthright—a friend called her “a monument of straightforwardness”—and resolute. Lizzie later said that Andrew may have been “close in money matters, but I never asked him for anything that I wanted very much that I didn’t get, though sometimes I had to ask two or three times.”