Free The Richest Woman in America by Janet Wallach

to New York in the fall of 1860. The city shimmered with news that the Prince of Wales was coming to visit;in his honor, a group of leading citizens wasorganizing a ball. The party committee—including Arthur Leary, Moses and Henry Grinnell, and a fellow member of the Union Club and the Geographical Society, John Cisco, the respected U.S. assistant treasurer at the Sub-Treasury in New York—had enormous amounts of work to do. Guest lists needed to be created, invitations engraved and sent out, and an evening planned down to the very last detail. Everyone clamored to be included. Ambitious mothers and young daughters spent hours daydreaming about the possibilities: the prince was only nineteen, but no more eligible bachelor existed than the heir to the British throne.
    The day of his arrival the city was out in force: businesses closed, Wall Street was deserted, and hundreds of thousands of people thronged the streets. Huge banners welcomed “Victoria’s Royal Son,” as cannons blasted and bands kaboomed in the parade to Twenty-third Street. A short while later, the crowds went wild when the genial prince stood on his balcony at the Fifth Avenue Hotel and waved to the masses.
    The next day, society men trimmed their mustaches and clipped the hairs of their side whiskers, while women spent hours twisting their curls and preparing their toilette for the ball. At 9 p.m. that evening of Friday, October 12, excited couples who had paid ten dollars apiece arrived at the Academy of Music on Irving Place. Men in white tie and tails and women in hoop skirts covered with satins, brocades, and a blaze of jewels gave “aren’t we special” nods to acquaintances and breathless hellos to friends. Gusts of anticipation filled the gigantic hall as everyone waited for the royal guest to arrive.
    Precisely at 10 p.m. the orchestra played “God Save the Queen,” and led by an entourage of lords and dukes, the slight, small prince, dressed in military uniform and sashed with the Order of the Garter, stepped into the room. “The crest of the Prince of Wales blazed out in plumes of diamond like light over the floating folds of a vast tent of pink and white drapery,” gushed the
Times
. For two hours, nearly three thousand of New York’s finest citizens rushed like schoolgirls to meet him, and in the mad crush the wooden floor built specially for the occasion collapsed.
    Never mind. No one was hurt. While the bands played furiously, the prince and his court were led upstairs to a long dais, where theywere seated and served, and the prince sipped his favorite sherry and seltzer water. The guests rushed to follow. At a separate entrance and exit, guarded by such prominent men as John Jacob Astor, fifty people at a time were permitted to enter the room. A horseshoe table around the perimeter welcomed them with a profusion of flowers and food, and with liveried waiters elbow to elbow to serve them, they piled their plates with filet of beef, lobster salad, pâtés, truffles, and grouse, and filled their glasses with champagne.
    At 2 a.m., the dance floor finally fixed, strains of a Strauss quadrille could be heard. As had been carefully planned, Mrs. Morgan, wife of the governor, wearing glowing diamonds and a cloud of crepe, was asked by the prince for the first dance. Eager females, young and old, waited their turn for a waltz or a polka, and finally the young woman from New Bedford was tapped.
    Stunning in her low-cut white gown sashed with pink, her arms covered in long, white gloves, an ostrich feather fluttering in her hand, Hetty was introduced to the Prince of Wales. “And I am the Princess of Whales,” she rejoined. “Ah,” the charming prince replied, “I have heard that all of Neptune’s daughters are beautiful. You are proof of that.” And then he sailed her away on the dance floor.
    “Nothing could ever have been more successful or better done,” declared the social arbiter Ward McAllister after the ball was over.