The Best Specimen of a Tyrant: The Ambitious Dr. Abraham Van Norstrand and the Wisconsin Insane Hospital

1. “The Fortune I Desired and Expected”

O N E The Fortune I Desired and Expected By 1877, twelve years after the death of Romulus Kellogg, Abraham Van Norstrand was a banker in Green Bay, successful, comfortable, and well thought of in the business community.1 He lived in a big house in a high-class neighborhood that echoed with grand Yankee names like John Jacob Astor and Washington Irving, who once owned land there, and he had set up his wayward son Fred in the lumber and coal business. Green Bay was far from the acid tongues of Madison. Settled by French missionaries and fur traders, it was the oldest town in the state, and it was prospering anew with lumber and paper mills. On August 25 of that year, his birthday, he opened a leatherbound journal the size of a small gravestone, dipped his pen, and embarked upon a project that would continue to the end of his life. In his own way and at his own pace he was determined to set the record straight: “Today at the age of 52 it may be of use to someone if I should modestly look over some of the events of my modest and uneventful life. To record some of my early thoughts, fancies, expectations and aspirations, together with my experiences as a child, youth, young man, student, teacher, physician, surgeon, speculator, superintendent of Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane, merchant, lumberman, etc. etc.”2 He simply cannot fake it. Time and again—in letters seeking 20฀฀•฀฀The Best Specimen of a Tyrant favors,in speeches to professional colleagues,and in these memoirs— Van Norstrand tries to elicit a scent of lilacs only to fill the air with swamp gas. In the first paragraph of his life story he is at his worst. He strains for humility but what flows from his pen is pure vanity. But gradually the stage makeup is sweated away, and something real emerges. Forget the tin ear and false modesty, because underneath all that the reader detects lingering hurt. The man has been wronged, his reputation grievously wounded, and time is running out. Not that he admits to any such thing in the 154 densely lined pages that follow. Far from it. They are filled with a lifetime of bold risks and narrow escapes. Most of these tales are variations on the David and Goliath theme, the good doctor as the boy with the slingshot, while a succession of great names, roughneck thugs, and infuriating colleagues rotate through the Goliath role. His father had died young—at just fifty-eight—as Van Norstrand men had a history of doing. Abraham protests that in writing his life he intends only to provide a rainy-day pastime for his grandchildren, but the reader is not deceived. Clearly he has serious business to conduct while there is still time. “In writing my opinions and thoughts, especially those of recent occurrences, I may allow my feelings to prejudice my judgment. I will endeavor to keep [this] thought continually in my mind while writing, thus assisting me to avoid recording feelings of hate or envy, still inherent in my nature of strong likes and dislikes, of never failing friendship and slowly ending hate.”3 * * * The Van Norstrands descended from a Jacob Jansen who landed in New York in 1638. Jansen came from an island off Holland called Noorstrandt, the source of the unwieldy and frequently butchered last name, which, ironically, was added in America to distinguish him from other Jacob Jansens. The family spread out along the Hudson River valley, intermarrying with French Huguenots. Abraham Harris Van Norstrand was born August 25, 1825, in a farmhouse among rocky fields on the east side of the Hudson River, near Poughkeepsie. His father, Frederick Frelinghuysen Van Norstrand, was solidly built, steady, and temperate. Raised a Quaker, Frederick had been forced to leave the church for “marrying out,” his wife being a member of the Dutch Reform Church, but he lived the Quaker virtues of hard work, thrift, and patience, scratching enough profit out of a poor farm to eventually trade up to a bigger one, then a bigger one still. About the time of their son’s tenth birthday, Frederick and his wife Elizabeth acquired over four hundred acres in Cayuga County, at the western edge of the state among exotic back-country folk who mistook the bulging parcels of clothes hanging from the family wagon...