The Tenuous Connection Between Frank W. Garmon Jr’s Account of Charles Cowlam’s Infamous Masquerades, the Present Author, and Geoffrey Robinson’s Hedingham Harvest

Charles Cowlam. Charles Family Photographs, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina.

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by Peter Cowlam

The full title of Frank W. Garmon’s sweeping account of the career of Charles Cowlam is A Wonderful Career in Crime: Charles Cowlam’s Masquerades in the Civil War Era & Gilded Age. Garmon explains in his preface to the book that its conception is owed to the 2020 pandemic, when lockdown forced him to look for a project that, with the help of his undergraduate research assistants, he could complete remotely. A point of entry in that search was the digitised pardon records among the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, material consisting of incredible stories, most of which remained unpublished. One such story was of Charles Cowlam, whose date of birth is approximated to 3 November 1837, in Saline, Michigan. That coincided with the start of rapid urbanisation of the Midwest, and as Garmon points out, ‘[r]apid urbanization created a world of strangers’, making it ‘difficult to establish trust and evaluate […] new acquaintances’, and ‘easy to start a new life in a nineteenth-century city’.

Charles Cowlam took full advantage of that state of national flux, always prepared to integrate into each new environment and associate himself with its leading power brokers. His career is summarised as ‘convict, soldier, secret agent, revenue detective, congressional candidate, adventurer, con artist’ over a period spanning the American Civil War (1861–65) and both the succeeding Reconstruction (1865–77) and Gilded Age (roughly, an era from the 1870s to the 1890s). The start of his chequered career in crime is pinpointed to Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1857, which would have made him about nineteen or twenty. During that era it was not unusual for citizens to commit money with their correspondence to the American mail system. While in Virginia, working as a post office clerk, Cowlam stole the contents of several mail items, amassed not inconsiderable takings, was found out eventually and was given a ten-year sentence. His older sister, a member of Congress, took up his case, to the point that President Lincoln agreed to pardon him, but this happened a month after Virginians had voted to secede from the Union in favour of the Confederacy. For that reason Cowlam now appealed to Jefferson Davis, who from 1861 to 1865 was President (in fact the only president) of the Confederate States. Cowlam protested loyalty to the Confederate cause, eager to prove himself on the battlefield, resulting in Davis, like Abraham Lincoln before him, pardoning him. Thereafter, having been mustered into the Confederate army, Cowlam deserted, spending the remainder of the conflict as a drifter and wartime speculator. From there he bluffed his way into the position of federal investigator probing Lincoln’s assassination, and went on to ingratiate himself with both Canadian and British authorities anxious about the Fenian movement and the activities of Irish rebels. With no success there he became a contract detective for the IRS in Georgia and Florida, entered Reconstruction politics in the latter, and was at one point on the ballot for a seat in the House of Representatives. He later received a commission from President Ulysses S. Grant as a US marshal. In 1873, in New York City, he embarked on newspaper publishing, with the Scythe, which he ran from the third floor of a seven-storey building in the financial district, and also ran a bogus secret society, fleecing its members of cash with nothing in return. After exposure at that enterprise, he turned to bigamy, enlisting several marriage partners whom he relieved of much of their wealth before fleeing to pastures anew. Cowlam finally disappears from the scene altogether having claimed to be a veteran army colonel and a former Secret Service agent in Dayton, Ohio. However, there was no record of his military service according to extensive Washington files, and nothing more is recorded either of him or his exploits.

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There the matter does not rest, at least with me, because at this point I declare a personal interest. Garmon tells us that Charles Cowlam’s father, another Charles Cowlam, ‘was born in the tiny hamlet of Market Rasen, in Lincolnshire, England, in 1810 to a family of Roman Catholics’. English Catholics were by that time in a minority, and it is clear that, subject perhaps to continuing prejudice or oppression, Charles Sr emigrated to America. From there we fast-forward to 1884, when he served ‘as an officer of the Michigan State Antislavery Society’ and ‘ran for the State House of Representatives in Livingston County’. Like Charles Sr, Lincolnshire is where my own family of Cowlams originates. Both my grandfather William Thomas Cowlam and his wife Sarah (née Howlett) were born and raised in Waddingham, Lincolnshire, about eleven miles from Market Rasen. They were married in 1907. Their family tree is traced to at least 1665, when one William Cowlam of Nettleton, Lincolnshire, married one Francis (maiden name not known). Nettleton is about eight miles north of Market Rasen. Furthermore, I recall from my own childhood that in the early weeks of December my mother began to think about Christmas cards for relatives abroad, with ‘cousins’ of my father in Michigan prominent on her list. It seems therefore not improbable that I am related in some way to entrepreneurial all-round scoundrel and confidence man Charles Cowlam, of Saline, Michigan. We can choose our friends, but not our relatives.

My personal interest doesn’t end there, slight as the next connection might be. In the 1970s my father made the long journey each day from just outside Tunbridge Wells, where we lived, to Greenwich, where he worked. On the drive home, over a series of several days, listening to the radio, he must have heard the Radio 4 adaptation of Geoffrey Robinson’s personal memoir, Hedingham Harvest. It prompted him to buy the book, not at all the kind of material he usually read. He was a science-and-technology man, and a linguist, and he did not venture far from those disciplines when stocking his library. The book, published in 1977, passed from him to me, and is still in my possession. The author, Geoffrey Robinson, according to a Guardian obituary written by his son, Tom Robinson, was born in a Lincolnshire farmhouse, had a career that took him as a lawyer into the Treasury, married twice, raised two families, and had a very active retirement. He died in 2010 at the age of ninety-two, making him slightly longer lived than, and more or less a contemporary of, my father. His book Hedingham Harvest is a raunchy, candid, and never judgemental account of rural life in nineteenth-century Lincolnshire, centred on three prominent families, and as told to him by various relatives who lived that life. The book’s landscape is peopled by blacksmiths, cobblers, tenant farmers, labourers, men of the church, high-street solicitors, servant girls. Tales are of a grandfather who slept with his servant girls, with a niece, and with a cousin; of a rector who slept with his maids, but who ensured their financial security should they need pensioning off after pregnancy. Then there are the routines and traditions of country life, from poaching to bull-baiting, to love among the haystacks, to parlour entertainments, to killing the pig. There is too careful, sensitive attention paid to the ambitions of these lesser privileged, lesser advantaged country folk carving out their niches in that Victorian era.

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All that aside, Robinson states at an early stage of his book that although the story is set in Hedingham, ‘there is, of course, no such village in Lincolnshire. Those who know the district will recognize similarities with Waddingham’, the place where the present author’s paternal grandparents were born and brought up. Only adding to that intrigue, Robinson supplies at the end of his book family trees of the Fishers, the Maitlands, and the Millsons, the three families whose lives and fortunes are the material of his memoir – all, however, fictitious names. Perhaps unique to me and my copy of Hedingham Harvest, is the chance fact that before it was passed to me it was handed to my grandmother, Sarah Cowlam, who read the book and recognised many of its characters and their biographies, and went so far as to translate some of those fictitious names to their actual names, adding them in as addenda to those family trees. It appears many of Geoffrey Robinson’s characters were intimately known to her.

I don’t know how much of this my father related to Geoffrey Robinson, whom he contacted, probably through his publisher. I do know Geoffrey Robinson, perhaps wisely, didn’t reply.

Notes Frank W. Garmon Jr’s A Wonderful Career in Crime: Charles Cowlam’s Masquerades in the Civil War Era & Gilded Age was published in 2024 by the Louisiana State University Press. It’s a compelling slice of US microhistory. Garmon gives us a comprehensive survey of his book in a YouTube video you can find easily with the search term ‘Charles Cowlam’. Geoffrey Robinson’s Hedingham Harvest was published by Constable, London, in 1977. It is now out of print, but used copies can be found on Amazon. It’s a highly pleasurable read, with all the poignancy of a vanished world.

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Peter Cowlam’s latest novel, That Was Hugo Blythe MP, a political satire, is published in both hardback and paperback by AN Editions. His latest collection of poems, Ghosts in the Machine, is a CentreHouse Press parallel text, original poems in English alongside Angela D’Ambra’s translations into Italian.