In a year when the U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule on two major abortion cases, and the U.S. Presidential election in November has put abortion rights firmly on the ballot, comes a new book that is a timely reminder of what we need to learn from history if we hope to see progress in the future. Out May 15, 2024 from Cornell University Press is R.E. Fulton’s ‘The Abortionist of Howard Street: Medicine and Crime in Nineteenth-Century New York’ which explores the life of Josephine McCarty, who had many identities, but in Albany, New York, she was known as “Dr. Emma Burleigh,” the abortionist of Howard Street.
On January 17, 1872, McCarty boarded a streetcar in Utica, New York, shot her ex-lover in the face, and disembarked, unaware that her bullet had passed through her target’s head and into the heart of the innocent man sitting beside him. The unlucky passenger died within minutes. Josephine McCarty was arrested for attempted murder and quickly became the most notorious woman in central New York.
‘The Abortionist of Howard Street’ was, however, far more than a murderer. In Maryland she was “Johnny McCarty,” a blockade runner and spy for Confederate forces. New Yorkers whispered of her as a mistress to corrupt Albany politicians. So who was she?
The prosecution in her murder trial claimed she was a calculating and heartless operative both in the bedroom and in her public life. Or was she the victim of ill fortune and the systemic weight of misogyny and male violence? The answer, of course, was not as simple as either narrative. In this absorbing and rich history, R.E. Fulton considers the nuances of Josephine McCarty’s life from marriage to divorce, from financial abuse to quarrels with intimate partners and more, trying to decipher the truth behind the stories and myths surrounding McCarty and what ultimately led her to that Utica streetcar with a pistol in her dress pocket.
In ‘The Abortionist of Howard Street’, Fulton revisits a rich history of women’s experience in mid-nineteenth century America, revealing McCarty as a multifaceted, fascinating personification of issues as broad as reproductive health, education, domestic abuse, mental illness, and criminal justice.
Below we are featuring an exclusive excerpt from ‘The Abortionist of Howard Street: Medicine and Crime in Nineteenth-Century New York‘, by R. E. Fulton, a Three Hills book published by Cornell University Press. Copyright (c) 2024 by R. E. Fulton. Excerpted by permission of the author and publisher.
On the morning of January 17, 1872, the city of Utica, New York, sat under a cold winter sun. Along the central artery of Genesee Street, streetcars led by steaming horses ferried commuters across dry snow. By mid-morning, as eighteen-year-old John Dodd, driver for the Utica and New Hartford Line, piloted his streetcar up Genesee Street, the horses’ hooves had churned the fresh powder into brown mud.
It was nearly 10 a.m. when the car reached Oneida Square, heading for its final destination at the downtown terminal. As they passed through the intersection, John Dodd noticed a tall woman in a heavy veil and a warm muff on the east side of the street. He got ready to slow the horses, but the woman made no signal for the car to stop, so John passed on.
A few hundred yards past the square was John’s next stop: 321 Genesee Street. It was the home of Milton Thomson, a respected insurance agent and a regular passenger of the Utica and New Hartford line. As the car approached the house, John heard a shout from the other side of the street. It was the woman from Oneida Square; evidently, she’d changed her mind about waiting out in the cold. He slowed the horses, let her on, and carried on again to stop outside the Thomson house.
When Mr. Thomson emerged from the house, he wasn’t alone. He boarded the streetcar with another man, both settling themselves comfortably near the central wood stove that kept the car warm through the bitter cold of an upstate January. The strange woman sat across from them. While the conductor took their fares, John got the horses moving again, and they proceeded along Genesee Street.
A few minutes later, a gunshot shook the streetcar.
While John brought the horses to a halt, chaos broke out in the car behind him. A minute later, the woman with the veil jumped off the back of the streetcar and started walking along Genesee Street in the direction the car had been headed. The conductor followed, clutching the woman’s muff and calling after her. Accompanied by one of the passengers, he chased the stranger down the street.
Turning back towards the passenger compartment, John saw what had happened. Mr. Thomson was still seated on the bench, blood pouring from his face. But his friend was on the floor, dragging himself through the straw that covered the bottom of the car, leaving a messy trail of gore behind him. Horrified, John turned back to the horses and spurred the car faster down the street, toward the Butterfield Hotel. There were doctors there who could help the injured passengers. But by the time the car pulled up outside the hotel just minutes later, Milton Thomson’s friend was dead.
By that evening, the papers had the story. The deceased was Henry H. Hall, an Ogdensburg coal merchant and Milton Thomson’s nephew. He’d been in town visiting his uncle for a few days, and was meant to return to his family soon. Nobody believed that Henry Hall, a stranger in Utica, had been the target of the shooting. Just moments after pulling away from 321 Genesee Street, the other passengers on the streetcar had seen the strange woman in the veil aim a pistol at Milton Thomson’s face and pull the trigger. It was Henry Hall’s bad luck that the bullet went directly through Thomson’s face and into his nephew’s chest.
The accidental victim wasn’t the only unusual thing about the incident; so was the gender of the shooter. “For a parallel to the crime now chronicled,” the press proclaimed, “there is no record in local annals. A woman was at the bottom of it all. A woman’s brain devised the murderous plan, and a woman’s nerve coolly executed it.”[i]
That woman’s name was Josephine McCarty—at least, that was her legal name. As the newspapers quickly reported, she’d gone by many over the course of her life. McCarty was her married name, but she’d been divorced for years. She was born Josephine Fagan, but in Albany, where she’d come from, she lived under the name Virginia Seymour. To most, though, she was Emma Burleigh, M.D., a private physician well known to the women of the Albany region. “The Murderess,” the headlines said, was “Said To Be an Abortionist.”[ii]
She was said to be quite a lot of things. Within days of Henry Hall’s death, newspapers throughout the state were circulating rumors about the mysterious—and now briefly infamous—Josephine McCarty. She’d been a kept mistress of Albany politicians, the papers said; she’d been a Confederate spy during the Civil War. One thing was certain: for many years, she’d been Milton Thomson’s mistress, and two of her three children were allegedly his. She’d come to Utica to beg for child support after they were thrown out of their Albany home, and when Thomson refused, she fired the deadly shot.
Arrested just minutes after disembarking from the streetcar, Josephine McCarty was charged with first-degree murder. On May 1, 1872, her trial began. From the beginning, it was an odd case. Multiple people had seen her fire the shot that killed Henry Hall, but everyone agreed that she had no motive to kill him—only Milton Thomson, whom she’d failed to kill. But rather than push for a reduced charge—manslaughter or attempted murder, for instance—Josephine McCarty’s lawyers launched a full defense of their client, arguing that she should not be held responsible for Henry Hall’s death and should go free.
Whether or not she’d killed Henry Hall wasn’t the issue; everyone knew that she had. The question was whether or not she should be punished for it. In practice, this meant that the trial focused heavily on Josephine McCarty’s character—on the question, in other words, of whether she was a good or a bad woman.
In order to sway the jury’s sympathies, Josephine McCarty’s lawyers would have to put before them the whole story of Josephine’s life—not just the days leading up to the killing or even her relationship with Milton Thomson. The testimony covered everything from her tumultuous first marriage to alleged threats of violence by Milton Thomson to evidence from medical experts who insisted that Josephine had been temporarily insane at the time of the shooting. In turn, the prosecution called witnesses to testify to Josephine’s sanity, her shady sexual history, and—last but not least—her career as an abortionist.
But the one thing that both prosecution and defense seemed to agree on was that, good or bad, Josephine McCarty was not unusual. For the defense, she was an ordinary mother who loved her children and was pushed by that very love over the brink of sanity and into violence. For the prosecution, she was ordinary in all the wrong ways: promiscuous, manipulative, and unscrupulous both in her business and her personal life.
When Josephine took the stand in her own defense, she began her testimony by talking about her childhood. And so that is where this book begins: with Josephine’s childhood and early life, not far from the city where she was arrested for murder in 1872. But unlike the testimony for the defense, this story isn’t an attempt to vindicate Josephine McCarty.
Instead, it’s an attempt to unravel the unanswered question of her trial: If Josephine was ordinary, what do her life and crime say about ordinary women in nineteenth-century America? Josephine’s story offers a window into women’s ambitions, their freedoms, and the limits placed on them by a complex legal net of state and federal laws, constantly changing throughout the century in response to the shifting anxieties of a white male professional class: doctors, lawmakers, and journalists.
It’s the story of how single mothers got by in an era where marriage was key to women’s survival; it’s the story of how women endured, and sometimes resisted, a range of abusive treatment from men they loved, or needed, or both; and it’s the story of how, within Josephine McCarty’s lifetime, abortion went from a rarely discussed part of the medical mundane to a flashpoint for middle-class Americans’ anxieties about sex.
[i] “Woman’s Revenge,” New York Herald, January 19, 1872.
[ii] “Woman’s Revenge,” New York Herald, January 19, 1872.
You can get a copy of ‘The Abortionist of Howard Street’ HERE, out May 15, 2024.
R.E. Fulton is a historian of gender, medicine, and crime. They serve as a managing editor for the popular medical history blog ‘Nursing Clio’ and live in New York with their wife and three cats.
