On the 17th of June, while Willis was walking in Washington Square, near his own residence in Fourth Street, Forrest came up to him quickly and knocked him down with a blow from his fist. He then stood over him, and, holding him down by the coat collar with one hand, beat him with a gutta-percha whip till the police came up and interfered. To the group of spectators which had rapidly assembled, he said, “That is the seducer of my wife.” Willis would at no time have been physically the equal of his antagonist, who was a man of powerful frame; but when this assault was made it was doubly safe from the fact that the victim of it had been ill for months with a rheumatic fever, and was in an unusually feeble condition of body. Two days after this heroic action, Forrest met Bryant and Godwin walking down Broadway and furiously demanded who had put the account of it into the “Evening Post,” in which he was represented as having struck Willis from behind.
“I told him,” said Mr. Godwin, in his testimony, “I was responsible for the article. He then turned round to me in a very ferocious way, and said there were several things that he was going to hold me responsible for; he said the article was a damned lie from beginning to end; he said he meant to attack Mr. Willis, and he believed that he had told me so formerly. I replied that these were not just the terms that he used, and that he told me formerly that he meant to cut his damned heart out; to which Mr. Forrest muttered something in reply—I don’t know what it was distinctly; I think he said something about what he would have done if they had not taken him off.”
Willis brought an action against Forrest for this assault, in the superior court of the city of New York, and secured a verdict in March, 1852, for $2,500 and costs. The case was appealed on exceptions, and, upon the new trial which was ordered, the damages were reduced to one dollar. Forrest sued Willis for libel in the “Home Journal” article, and got $500 damages. But in the mean time the suit for divorce had come to trial, in December, 1851, and had been decided in Mrs. Forrest’s favor. The jury found the defendant guilty of adultery, found the plaintiff innocent, and granted her the decree prayed for with $3,000 a year alimony. This was one of the causes célèbres of the last generation. The trial occupied the then extraordinarily long period of six weeks, and the printed testimony fills two large volumes. Charles O’Conor, who was Mrs. Forrest’s counsel, dated his great reputation as an advocate from his conduct of this case. For eighteen years he fought the battle for his fair client relentlessly and triumphantly. The case was appealed five times, and judgment affirmed every time with an increase of alimony. It was not till 1868 that the defendant tired of resistance, and paid over to the plaintiff the sum of $64,000. His costs and expenses of litigation, additional to this, were of course enormous. It is unnecessary to review the evidence given at the trial, by which it was sought to incriminate Willis in this affair, further than to say that it consisted almost solely of the testimony of servants, who were thoroughly discredited in their cross-examination. One of these witnesses was a man who had been discharged from Willis’s employ. Another was an ex-chambermaid in the Forrest household, who was brought all the way from Texas to testify, and who was shown to be a thief, and the mother of an illegitimate child by a friend of the defendant. Public opinion, it is needless to say, was divided about the verdict. Forrest was the idol of the Bowery, and the asserter of the American stage against the “dudes” and “Anglo-maniacs” of that day. “The boys,” who had stuck by him in his quarrel with Macready till its upshot in the bloody Astor Place riot of May 10, 1849, stuck by him now in his domestic tribulations, and gave him a rousing ovation on his first appearance at the Broadway Theatre, following the close of the trial. A number of people in society, too, of those who “demen gladly to the badder end,” made up their minds to Mrs. Forrest’s guilt. But it is not unfair to say that the great majority of the decent people and respectable newspapers greeted the verdict with acclamation. A large party maintained that Forrest was a selfish and licentious brute, who was tired of his wife and wanted to be rid of her; that, knowing he had no valid cause of action against her, he trumped up charges and suborned witnesses. It is not necessary to go so far as this in order to assert the innocence of Mrs. Forrest and of those who were made parties to the accusations against her. Alger, in his big “Life of Edwin Forrest,” after acknowledging that “the innocence of Mrs. Forrest is publicly accredited, and is not here impugned;” that she “was believed by her intimate and most honored friends to be innocent, was vindicated by a jury after a most searching trial, and is now living in modest and blameless retirement,” simply urges in Forrest’s behalf that he honestly believed himself a wronged man, and acted with his usual fury and unforgivingness upon that conviction. Willis and his brother were both among the witnesses for the plaintiff on the trial, and both, of course, denied peremptorily the charges against them. But the one circumstance which more than all else influenced the decision of the jury was the constant presence in court of Mrs. N. P. Willis, side by side with Mrs. Forrest, and the brave, clear, and simple way in which she testified in her friend’s behalf. No one could believe that a spirited and refined lady, like Mrs. Willis, would have consented, for an instant, to put herself into such a position, without a full assurance of her husband’s innocence; and no one who listened to her testimony could have thought her a woman likely to be deceived. John Van Buren, who was Forrest’s lawyer in all these cases, was quite generally censured for the needlessly abusive way in which he handled the witnesses for the other side. In the trial of the assault and battery case, “Willis v. Forrest,” his personalities went so far beyond the limits usually set to the licensed insolence of the bar, that on the termination of the suit Willis, who was about starting on a trip to the South, and had learned from an item in the “Herald” that Van Buren was going South too, sent him a letter demanding an apology. In case he should decline to make such apology, the letter proposed a hostile meeting at Charleston or any other convenient point in the Southern States. This note the recipient returned (after carefully making a copy of it) with a short reply, describing it as a “silly and scurrilous communication.” This it certainly was not, but, on the other hand, a very dignified and gentlemanly letter; rather too long, it must be owned, for on these occasions Willis’s pen generally ran away with him. However, on the receipt of this answer to it, which was forwarded to him at the South, he replied with sufficient brevity: “I now pronounce you a coward, as well as a proper companion for the blackguards whose attorneyship constitutes your career.”
This challenge was something of a flourish on Willis’s part, and his experience with Marryat might have taught him the folly of such attempts to get “the satisfaction of a gentleman” from railing editors and attorneys. He took little by his motion, which simply gave Van Buren an opportunity to publish the correspondence in a New York morning paper with comments of his own, characteristically ugly and characteristically smart. The fact remained, however, that Van Buren had been challenged to fight and had declined, and the general note made upon the affair by a venal press was to the effect that “Prince John had shown the white feather.” Of the many letters of sympathy and congratulation received by Mr. and Mrs. Willis after the Forrest verdict, the following, from Mr. J. P. Kennedy, the author of “Swallow Barn,” will serve as an example:—
Baltimore, February 2, 1852.
My dear Willis,—I have often resolved during the war—the late war, I hope I may call it—to assume the privilege of a friend and send you the only succor I could supply, a word of comfort and a cheer or two, to let you see that there was some sympathy abroad for your sufferings, which I know were pungent enough to make a very respectable saint, if your ambition lay in that way. Now that you have got through certainly the worst part of your Iliad in the termination of that horrible trial, I think it a good time to redeem my promise to myself, and to say to you that I have felt a friend’s part in the whole progress of your troubles, and the confidence of a friend that the end would bring you a bright sky and a pleasant outlook for the future. I particularly congratulate Mrs. Willis on this result, as I know, or can imagine, the full measure of her griefs. We all here—I mean our household, with whom Mrs. Willis is associated in so many affectionate remembrances—unite very sincerely in this message to her. Your defense in the “Home Journal” of an injured woman, which I noted and applauded from the first, was, at its least, a manly and generous act, and it became the more worthy of your manhood as it grew to be perilous. I use this word much more in reference to the social clamor than to the ruffian assault it brought you. I trust you are now to triumph very signally over both. Present Mrs. Kennedy and her sister very kindly to your wife, as also Dr. Gray, and believe me
Very truly yours,
J. P. Kennedy.
The result of the Forrest trial was, in a sense, a triumph for Willis. Yet in all affairs of the kind, although the charges are disproved, the very fact that they have been made leaves, illogically and unfairly, perhaps, but still inevitably, a sediment of prejudice in the public mind. It is in the nature of such cases that the inmost truth about them can seldom be known to more than two persons. To all others there remains nothing beyond inference and suspicion. Hence the uncertainty which survives the judicial decision of the cause and works injustice to the innocent who have been unlucky enough to be drawn into compromising situations. An impression has always obtained in many quarters that Willis was profligate in his relations with women. Rumors to this effect were industriously circulated by his ill-wishers, and, in one instance, they got into print in the shape of an accusation publicly brought against him by his ancient foe, Colonel James Watson Webb of the “Courier and Enquirer.” It is needless to revive this venerable scandal or any of the less tangible, miscellaneous gossip once afloat on the current of New York society. It is no part of a biographer’s duty to “vindicate” his subject from any and all charges of the kind. I have read the published documents in the Webb-Willis affair with a sincere effort to be impartial, and they left upon my mind no impression of anything worse on Willis’s part than vanity and indiscretion in permitting himself to be drawn into a half literary, half sentimental correspondence with a very romantic young woman, without her parents’ knowledge. He was easily flattered by attentions from female worshipers of genius. He maintained in print and in person a constant attitude of gallantry toward the sex, which doubtless stimulated the rumor of his immoralities, and led the reader to identify him with the Lotharios of his tales. Moreover, it is not to be denied that when a young man in Italy, and in the fast set of his London acquaintances, he was exposed to temptations which he did not always resist, and probably had his share of those adventures which the French indulgently call bonnes fortunes, but less liberal shepherds of Anglo-Saxon race give a grosser name; and which always turn out the reverse of good fortunes for everybody concerned. As to his later life, one who knew him well but had quarreled with him and had small cause to like him, writes: “My belief is that N. P. Willis was, as he said, perfectly free from fault in that business [the Forrest affair], and had no intrigues with women after his marriage.”
The spring of 1852 found him much broken in health. He had a wearing cough, and it was thought that his lungs were diseased. He waited only the termination of his assault and battery case in March, to start on a journey to the South with his father-in-law, Mr. Grinnell. The trip included a cruise to Bermuda and the West Indies, a short stay in Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, a visit to the Mammoth Cave, and a sojourn at the neighboring watering-place of Harrodsburg Springs. His letters to the “Home Journal” from these and other points in the South were reissued in book form as “A Health Trip to the Tropics.” During the years covered by this chapter he published a number of volumes similarly made up of periodical correspondence and miscellaneous contributions to his paper. “Rural Letters” contained his “Invalid Letters from Germany;” a reprint of “Letters from under a Bridge,” with two additional to those in the earlier editions; “Open Air Musings in the City;” letters from Sharon Springs and Trenton Falls in the summer of 1848; and one story, “A Plain Man’s Love.” “Hurrygraphs” comprised a series of letters from Plymouth, New Bedford, Cape Cod, and places on the Delaware and Hudson rivers; besides sketches—often very acute pieces of mental portraiture—of public men, authors, and other celebrities, and a good deal of chit-chat about society, the opera, etc., from the columns of the “Home Journal.”