Women and Gender in the American West

‘Strong Animal Passions’ in the Gilded Age: Race, Sex, and a Senator on Trial

 A T the height of Gilded Age splendor, San Francisco witnessed the fall of one of its wealthiest robber barons,William Sharon, former United States Senator of Nevada. Sharon’s offense,according to a Superior Court judge,stemmed from his inability to control his “strong animal passions.” Two women, an African American entrepreneur,Mary Ellen Pleasant,and an IrishAmerican and purported prostitute, Sarah Althea Hill, orchestrated Sharon’s demise. This racialized and sexualized scandal tantalized San Franciscan and national audiences for years as two lawsuits, Sharon v. Sharon () and Sharon v. Hill (), captured the public imagination. It is no wonder the pundits took such pleasure in the cases.The Sharon trials had all the ingredients for a Victorian drama: voodoo spells, stolen underwear, voyeurism, venereal disease, a secret marriage, a passionate or prurient widower, and unrequited love.The courtroom narratives that surfaced provide ample opportunities to view anxieties about sex, power, color, property, and wealth and their instability in Gilded Age America. This is partly a story about what constitutes marriage and what constitutes prostitution at the end of the nineteenth century. The * Lynn M. Hudson,“‘Strong Animal Passions’ in the Gilded Age: Race, Sex, and a Senator on Trial,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, :– (). ©  Journal of the History of Sexuality, University of Texas Press. Reprinted by permission. ‘Strong Animal Passions’ in the Gilded Age: Race, Sex, and a Senator on Trial Lynn M. Hudson Jensen-Miller Prize 2000  Lynn M. Hudson demarcations between these arrangements appear to blur, not only in this trial, but increasingly so across the nation. Sarah Hill claimed she married William Sharon; Sharon insisted he paid Hill for sex.Whether Hill acted as a wife or a prostitute preoccupied judges, attorneys, and the press. Mary Ellen Pleasant’s high visibility as a key witness for Hill, and the presence of otherAfricanAmericans in the courtroom,ensured that the trials—and the discourse inside and outside the courtroom— would also hinge on issues about race. But more, Pleasant’s capital and her financial support of Hill’s case disrupted dominant assumptions about the place of African Americans in post-Reconsruction America. San Francisco,like other United States cities,rendered many of its black citizens powerless through de jure and de facto segregation and discrimination.The enracing of Pleasant in this case is more complicated than assigning to her the role of mammy, voodoo queen, or madam, though all of these stereotypes applied liberally.The knowledge about white men’s secrets that Pleasant controlled,combined with her wealth, made her threatening in ways that mere blackness does not alone explain. The legal contest between Sharon, Hill, and Pleasant, then, is also about Western wealth and capital; both Sharon and Pleasant had profitted mightily from gold and silver mining and real estate speculation.Their wealth helps to explain why they could afford such a public and lengthy legal contest in the first place.The price of financial success for both Sharon and Pleasant intensified during the trials. But while Sharon’s heirs would eventually reap the rewards of his millions, Pleasant and Hill paid dearly for trafficking in sexual secrets. This article focuses on the  divorce trial Sharon v.Sharon.It also considers the impact of the trial on the culture of San Francisco and the West.The key players in this case inspired myriad narratives about sex and power articulated through headlines, cartoons, editorials, and public speech. Newspapers in particular were preoccupied with the Senator’s sexual behavior.This fascination, however, has obscured the other meanings imbedded in the case: women’s bargaining position in sexual relationships with men,the vulnerabilty of maculinity and robber barons in theWest,the fear of wealthyAfricanAmericans and the power they could acquire.  Strong Animal Passions THE ARREST WhenWilliam Sharon,lounging in his lavish personal suite at the Palace Hotel, was arrested on September ,  for adultery, most wondered how the wealthy widower—who had so successfully manipulated his financial affairs and those of others—could be taken to jail on those charges. In the months that followed, Sarah Hill ‘s original charge of adultery was thrown out of district court on technical grounds,and her attorney George Washington Tyler filed a new suit on November ,  in San Francisco’s Superior Court.This suit, Sharon v. Sharon— which captured the limelight for years—was Sarah Althea Hill Sharon’s request for divorce. Sarah Althea Hill Sharon claimed...