Good Morning POU! Today’s post is part 2 of the story of Hannah Elias from the book Black Fortunes, The Stories of the First Black Millionaires.
Frank P. Satterfield had been courting Hannah Elias before she was jailed. He worked in a drugstore near Hannah’s father’s home in Philadelphia and had been calling on her frequently until her arrest. He was poor but well regarded, the neighbors describing him as “a bright young negro.” Unfazed by the scandal, Satterfield planned to continue his pursuit of Hannah when she returned from prison. He went to the Elias residence after her release but was told that she had been banned from the house by her father and her whereabouts were unknown.
The news seemed to increase his determination to be with her, and he enlisted the help of her twin brother, David, to search for her. After three months, Satterfield and David found Hannah Elias living in a “resort” in New York’s Tenderloin district. When David and Satterfield arrived, they pleaded with her to leave. She refused at first but later consented when Satterfield suggested that she move in with him in Philadelphia.
Satterfield lived in a room that he rented in an alleyway house on one of east Philadelphia’s poorer streets. The house itself was falling apart. Elias found that unacceptable and began to badger the house’s mistress to repair the place. After weeks of squabbling, the police were summoned to the house one night, when a fight broke out between the mistress and Elias. The boardinghouse’s proprietor was arrested and jailed for thirty days as a result of the incident.
In March 1885, Elias became pregnant. The news left Satterfield distraught. He told her he could not support the child and urged her to apply for aid from the city. In the winter of 1885, Elias was given a place in the maternity ward of a Philadelphia almshouse. There, in early 1886, she delivered a baby girl whom she named Clara. While she was giving birth, Satterfield skipped town. Abandoned and penniless, Elias decided to give the child up for adoption.
After her daughter had been placed with another family, she began to search for Satterfield. She discovered that he was in New York, working as a clerk at a drugstore in Greenwich Village.
In September 1887, she traveled to New York to confront him. She showed up at the drugstore where he worked and was thrown out almost immediately by the owner of the store after she caused a scene. Undeterred, she waited outside for Satterfield for several hours and followed him home, screaming at him, while he refused to engage with her. When he arrived at his home, Satterfield summoned the police and had her arrested for harassment. On September 18, 1887, Elias went before a judge at the Mercer Street police station in Manhattan to answer Satterfield’s complaint against her.
She told the judge that Satterfield had fathered a child with her and abandoned her. Satterfield did not show up in court that day but instead sent a sworn affidavit. The document stated that he had known Hannah Elias for ten years and that she was a “common woman.” Taking Satterfield’s implication that Elias was a prostitute into consideration, the judge found her guilty of disorderly conduct and sentenced her to a month in the prison on Blackwell’s Island.
After thirty days, Elias left Blackwell’s Island, on October 16, 1887, relieved to be gone. She found lodging in East Midtown, a neighborhood of tenement homes, slaughterhouses, and factories populated by working-class blacks and European immigrants. Once she was situated, she decided to contact her former admirer, John R. Platt, from the Tenderloin. Elias and Platt had once come up with a system to find each other if they lost track of each other. Using their pet names for each other—Bessie and Popper—one would post an ad in the paper inquiring where the other was. “Bessie, it’s Popper, where are you?” it might say, to which the other would respond with a location: “Popper, it’s Bessie, Dime Savings Bank 8:30.”
When Platt laid eyes on Elias again in 1887, his eyes traced her curves and breasts, and he thought to himself that “the pretty little octoroon girl had now grown into full womanhood.” Platt was married, but he would sneak away from his family as often as he could to rendezvous with her in the room she rented in a run-down tenement house near the East River.
Platt lived off of Fifth Avenue near the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies on “Millionaires’ Row.” He was the owner of a plate glass manufacturing company and had captured a number of the region’s most lucrative accounts over the years, including the glass contract for the New York State Capitol in Albany and the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan. According to tax records, he took home an annual salary of just under a million dollars.
As Elias was getting reacquainted with her wealthy admirer, movements against the economic elite were sweeping the nation. In Washington, D.C., federal officials were vowing to crack down on big business by enacting “trust-busting” laws. Meanwhile, in industrial cities and mining towns, labor groups were organizing strikes and protests, and in New York anarchists were publishing essays maligning the wealthy and even beginning to plot assassination attempts on industrialists and aristocrats.
It was the beginning of what would later be called the Progressive Era of the 1890s, and it meant increased scrutiny of the lives and practices of the rich by the public, journalists, and the government. Men like Platt feared that any transgression, if revealed, could grow into a scandal.
Platt told Elias that their affair would have to remain secret, but, perhaps as a consolation, he offered to support her financially. After she agreed to carry on with him covertly, Platt began wiring her between $2,000 and $6,000 (between $58,000 and $175,000) every month. He made sure she invested some of the money in bonds and real estate, reminding her that she needed to make the money last. “He said that he could not remember me in his will on account of his relatives,” Elias recalled.
In 1890, Elias married Christopher Smith, a black railroad worker in his twenties. After her marriage, her arrangement with Platt went for the most part unchanged. Platt and Elias continued seeing each other whenever they could slip away from their spouses. It seemed to be a workable arrangement for both of them until early in 1893, when Platt’s wife died.
A few months after her death, Elias recalled that Platt visited her, wanting to commit himself to her. As a token of the occasion, he presented Elias with a purse and watch that had belonged to his dead wife. Elias initially told him she couldn’t accept them and suggested that he give them to his daughters. Platt was insistent; “he told me he loved me best of anyone in the world,” she recalled him saying before she accepted his offering.
That year Platt helped Elias go into business as a boardinghouse operator. With his help, she purchased a house near his family residence where she could rent out rooms. The business would help her generate additional income and also provide Platt and Elias with a meeting place close to his home.
One night in 1895, Platt showed up to visit her and one of her tenants, a black man named Cornelius Williams, answered the door. Williams was preparing to go out when Platt rang the buzzer asking “if the folks were in.” The question provoked anger in Williams for some reason.
“I didn’t like his style”, Williams remembered thinking, “I didn’t want him around here”. Williams slammed the door in Platt’s face. Still incensed, Williams asked one of the servants at house about the man. She told him it was Mr. Green, an alias Platt used when visiting the home. Elias evicted Williams a few weeks later after the incident. Williams left but did so swearing that Elias had bad mouthed him and he swore revenge.
In 1897, Christopher Smith decided he had enough of Elias and Platt’s affair and sued Platt for “alienating the affections of his wife.” Platt gave Smith $500 ($6,863) to settle the suit and helped Elias file for a divorce. During the course of the proceedings, a lawyer whom Elias hired, August C. Nanz, demanded “legal fees” of $20,000 ($274,520) to keep Platt and Elias’s affair secret. Platt paid the “fee,” and Elias’s divorce from Smith was finalized that year.