(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column on Vermont history.)
[W]hat did Allen Thorndike Rice think when he opened the letter?
This was a private matter, so he may have read it at home. Or perhaps the sender had mailed it to the offices of the North American Review in New York. The magazine was the nation’s first literary publication, and Rice was its famed owner and editor.
The handwriting would have been unfamiliar, but it mustn’t have taken long for Rice to remember the letter’s subject.
The letter was from friends of John Kelley, a prominent merchant in faraway Derby, Vermont. They were asking Rice to help Kelley. They wouldn’t be bothering the editor if Rice’s own mother hadn’t insisted, before she died, that she would help Kelley if he were ever in need. After all, Rice and his mother both owed their freedom to this man who had risked arrest to help strangers.
Rice’s mother, Elizabeth Francis Thorndike Rice, had written her promise to Kelley in a letter that Kelley’s friends enclosed. “If I had a million of money I could not pay you for what you have done for me,” she wrote. “I want you to promise me, on your word of honor, to come to me if you ever get into trouble. I don’t care what your trouble may be, I will never refuse to help you if you have need of help.”
Her son had been about 8 years old, and disguised as a girl, the first time he met Kelley. The strange getup was his mother’s idea. The pair were running from the law, and she was trying to travel incognito. She was wanted for kidnapping. Her alleged victim was her son.
A mother’s determination
By all accounts, Elizabeth Francis Thorndike and Henry Rice Jr. had a bad marriage. They were wed in Baltimore in 1850, when she was 21. A year later their son and only child — who later chose not to use his first name, Charles — was born. She eventually filed for divorce. Things got so bitter between the couple that a lawyer friend of hers advised her not to eat at her husband’s home, for fear she would be poisoned.
Henry Rice is said to have gambled away her family’s money and abused his wife. She won a divorce but in the process lost custody of her son.
In 1861, father and son spent the summer in Nahant, Massachusetts, a town on a rocky peninsula jutting into the Atlantic. Elizabeth Rice had once tried to abduct the boy, so Henry took no chances. He had an armed male servant act as the child’s bodyguard. Elizabeth, however, was not easily deterred.
One summer day, while young Allen was attending school, and the servant was therefore absent, two buggies drawn by powerful horses pulled up near the school. The witness to the event was another boy in town, Henry Cabot Lodge, who would become a prominent U.S. senator. Lodge watched three men dart from the buggies into the building. They emerged moments later carrying the boy and rode off. (Lodge later identified two of the men, who were sentenced to jail time for their roles. The third man was never caught. Lodge suspected it had actually been Elizabeth Rice in disguise.)
It is risky to take sides in a 150-year-old custody dispute, but accounts of the incident portray the boy as a willing captive. Mother and son left the country, traveling to Stanstead, Quebec, but she then decided their best chance was to cross into Vermont and from there try to make their way to Europe.
Thus it was that she and her boyish “daughter” entered Kelley’s store in Derby. Elizabeth Rice came armed with a letter of introduction from a Boston merchant, a mutual acquaintance. She begged Kelley to “do the best you can for us.”
Kelley agreed. Thus began an elaborate shell game during which Kelley shuffled the pair around the Derby area. The town was crawling with detectives Henry Rice had hired. Even many local residents couldn’t be trusted. Henry Rice offered $500 for his son’s return, a hefty reward in those days, which could buy a lot of sympathy.
Kelley knew he couldn’t keep the fugitives at his store or home; both were too centrally located. He arranged to have them stay with his brother south of town. Someone must have seen the strangers in Kelley’s store. Kelley’s yard was soon swarming with detectives, the local sheriff and Henry Rice himself.
Kelley wanted to visit the fugitives but was afraid of being followed. So he hid in the back of his carriage while someone else drove. Once at his brother’s, Kelley gave Elizabeth and Allen blankets and food and escorted them to the nearby woods.
But he wanted to find a safer spot for them. Within days, Kelley returned. With his brother carrying Allen on his shoulders through rough and swampy areas, the group bushwhacked its way to near the farm of Alvin Robbins. Kelley left the others in the woods while he went inside to explain the situation to Robbins. Robbins was reluctant to help, but Kelley proved persuasive.
Soon Robbins was cutting a hole in a bedroom floor. Since the house had no basement, Robbins had to hollow out a hiding place under the floorboards. Mother and son stayed in a room facing the road. If they saw anyone suspicious coming, they would crawl into the hole.
The Robbins farm was one of the sites the detectives were investigating. To throw them off the scent, Robbins made a daring decision. He threw open his house for a big party, inviting farmworkers and many friends. Hardly the sort of thing someone harboring fugitives would do. The ploy worked. No one stumbled upon the hiding place, and the detectives focused their efforts elsewhere.
Still, Kelley was cautious. He arranged to send messages via a local doctor, Dr. Carpenter, who would visit the Robbins farm on the pretext of treating someone there.
Then Kelley concocted a scheme to be rid of the detectives for good. He had one of his male clerks dress as a woman and ride with Dr. Carpenter quickly out of town. Figuring that the passenger must be Elizabeth Rice, the detectives followed, but the doctor managed to stay well ahead and pulled his carriage quickly into a barn. The detectives drove their horses past the barn, suspecting that she was being taken to Island Pond before heading on to Boston.
The next morning, the doctor threw a pail of cold water over the horse and raced it back into town. The horse, steaming and frothing, gave the impression of having been ridden long and hard. The detectives took the bait and headed back to Boston.
A month after arriving in Derby, the situation finally seemed safe for mother and son to make their break. They traveled separately to the coast, where they rendezvoused before sailing to Europe.
A promise from a distant past
How many of those details did Allen Rice recall as he fingered that envelope? Much had happened to him in the years since his month in Derby. He had been educated in Germany and France and then moved to England to study at Oxford. He had begun writing for leading journals. Then, after both his parents died, he had been left in a position to purchase the North American Review.
Kelley had meanwhile lost his small fortune after buying a huge amount of German hops just before the market price plummeted. Kelley was apparently too proud to ask for help, but he did share the letter from Rice’s mother. The friends asked Allen Rice to place $10,000 in an account and let Kelley live off the interest. Upon Kelley’s death, the $10,000 principal would return to Rice.
It was the least Rice could do, the correspondents seemed to think. But Rice managed to do less. He ignored the letter.
