Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2012
This essay explores the story of Nancy Clem, an outwardly respectable Indianapolis confidence woman and alleged murderess, in the context of changing constructions of class, gender, and criminality. It examines various ways in which lawyers, newspaper reporters, and ordinary citizens struggled to understand a woman who did not fit preexisting conceptions of gender and crime. A series of high-profile cases involving bourgeois criminals and (more than likely) Clem's own social aspirations allowed cultural commentators to portray her as a “genteel murderess.” Upon her release from prison after an abortive fifth trial, Clem could not sustain her newly acquired social identity, in part because her erstwhile refinement was a journalistic creation and in part because the changing nature of class, gender, and space in Gilded Age Indianapolis provided her with fewer opportunities for self-fashioning. Clem's social odyssey from half-literate “Butternut” to genteel murderess to uncultured “capitalist” reflects slippery, yet significant, transitions between social fluidity and relative rigidity, antebellum respectability and Gilded Age gentility.
I wish to thank Will Cooley, Pamela Walker Laird, Scott Sandage, Michael Ayers Trotti, Jocelyn Wills, the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era for their generous comments on previous versions of this essay, and JGAPE intern Seth Isaacson for his careful editing. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians.
2 Indianapolis Sentinel (hereafter Sentinel), Sept. 14, 1868, Dec. 1, 1868; Indianapolis Journal (hereafter Journal), Sept. 14, 1868.
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5 Cold Spring Tragedy, 12. Evidence concerning Clem's age varies; the 1860 census lists her as 26, which would have made her 33 or 34 at the time of the murders, whereas the 1870 census lists her as 31, surely an error. Genealogies suggest she was born in 1830, which would have made her 37 or 38 in 1868. See Federal Manuscript Population Census (hereafter FMPC), Indianapolis, Ward 2, roll M653-279, p. 163, line 26; FMPC, Jeffersonville, Clark County, IN, roll M593-303, p. 414B, line 12; and John Hartman family tree, Ancestry.com: http://trees.ancestry.com/owt/person.aspx?pid=119943854 (accessed March 19, 2006).
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32 Hanna, closing argument, Journal, Dec. 21, 1868. Hanna's paean to “the working classes,” it should be noted, was carefully circumscribed by race. It did not extend to at least one woman who “stood before the wash tub,” Clem's servant Jane Sizemore, who had offered damaging testimony. Hanna described her as “that accursed nigger.”
33 Cold Spring Tragedy, 82; Hanna, opening statement, Sentinel, Feb. 12, 1869; William Wallace Leathers, closing argument, Journal, Dec. 19, 1868.
34 Dorothea Kline McCullough, “‘By Cash and Eggs’: Gender in Washington County during Indiana's Pioneer Period” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2001), 142–65. See Gamber, “Cold Spring Tragedy,” for a more extensive discussion of these issues.
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44 See especially Trotti, The Body in the Reservoir, 44–77, for an incisive analysis of the narratives nineteenth-century newspapers created about criminals and victims.
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59 Ibid.
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