A Fresh Look at the Character of Andrew Borden

by Denise Noe

First published in May/June, 2006, Volume 3, Issue 2, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.

The general perception of Andrew Borden is of a singularly unpleasant man. He is frequently written of as a cold, tyrannical patriarch and, most especially, a miser. Like the tight-fisted fictional characters of Silas Marner and Ebenezer Scrooge, he is believed to have been constantly scrounging for money and pathologically vigilant in holding on to it.

An overview of various descriptions of the elder Borden will help frame the mythology that defines our modern understanding, and hopefully, allow us the opportunity to explore the historical Andrew Borden in ways not yet attempted.

Ann Jones in Women Who Kill writes that Andrew “made money—lots of it—for the sake of making money. Yet, as a Christian, Andrew Borden knew that money could be the root of all evil—if one took pleasure in money and used it as a source of enjoyment. The trick then, for a good Christian capitalist, was to make money but to enjoy it not at all. And that skill Andrew Borden had perfected.” Andrew’s tightwad ways, she continues, meant the Borden house lacked “those amenities one might reasonably expect in the household of a man who was well on his way to becoming a millionaire” including “even a toilet.”¹

Frank Spiering in Lizzie defines Andrew’s character in terms of his thrift, declaring that his saving money “became his obsession, and with it a dread of ever falling into debt. He boasted that he had never signed a promissory note or borrowed a penny.” Spiering later elaborates, “He was considered brusque, dour and tight-fisted.” Using an inaccurate understanding of Andrew’s business, Spiering states that Andrew Borden began his career as an undertaker and that his reputation for penny-pinching triggered some truly macabre stories: “It was rumored that he cut off the feet of corpses so that he could cram them into undersized coffins that he got cheap.” Spiering also claims that Andrew showed a peculiarly penny-pinching fanaticism on the day of his death. Seeing a broken lock on the floor of his business, he “picked up the broken lock and slipped it into his pocket.” The author sardonically notes, “It was Andrew’s final act of thrift.”²

Arnold R. Brown, in Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter, also portrays Andrew as an extraordinary tightwad. His Andrew likewise was maniacal about saving his money, and Brown states that thrift may be a virtue, but Andrew “made it a vice.” Andrew’s penurious ways meant hardship for his family: 

Andrew refused to have his home connected to gas mains (the primary use of gas at that time was illumination—cooking and heating quickly followed). Kerosene was good enough for his household, and he sternly restricted its use. Electricity was not yet commonly available, but telephones were. Andrew did not have one because he could see no use for it nor for the added expense.

There was no hot water in the house other than what a teakettle or pot could produce. The better wood and coal burning kitchen ranges had water-warming reservoirs built in; the range in the Borden kitchen did not. When Andrew bought the house, it had running water. He declared the running water on the second floor an unnecessary luxury and had the plumbing changed to cut it off and limit the running water to a sink room off the kitchen and one in the basement.³

David Kent, in Forty Whacks, also writes of Andrew as a cheapskate and says that Andrew’s “penurious thrift was practiced in 14 hour days of saving this, reselling that, and hoarding the other.” Like Spiering, he sees Andrew’s actions regarding the lock as symptomatic of an obsessive concern with saving: “How typical it was that on the morning of the day he was murdered, he had picked up a broken, discarded lock, wrapped it carefully in a bit of paper, and taken it home with him.”⁴

A hysterical stinginess is not the only failing attributed to Andrew. Brown also accuses him of adultery and claims that when Andrew Borden was still married to his first wife Sarah, mother of Emma and Lizzie, he had an affair with Phebe Borden, wife of Charles Borden. Brown never says what the relationship of Charles and Andrew was, but claims a child was born of the doubly adulterous union between Andrew and Phebe.

A far nastier accusation of sexual misconduct has been laid at Andrew’s doorstep by several authors, including Marcia Carlisle, Stephen Kane, and Eileen McNamara—that of incest. Carlisle postulates that Andrew had sexually abused both Lizzie and Emma, and assumes the acquitted woman’s guilt. However, she says the motives of jealousy and greed usually ascribed to her do not adequately “account for the extreme violence of the crime.” Carlisle sees in the sheer physical brutality of the slayings “the awakening rage of the incest survivor.”⁵

The well known lack of warmth between the Borden sisters and Abby suggests to Carlisle that the abused girls may have been jealous of her, seeing her as a usurper of their places in their father’s (however warped and criminal) affections. She also believes that the gold ring a teenaged Lizzie gave her father, which he wore until the day of his death and which was buried with him, may have been a sign of her confusion about being characterized as her father’s special girl.

Carlisle believes Lizzie may have repressed the memory of the incestuous abuse, and then exploded with homicidal fury when it surfaced. Of course, Abby was murdered first and even more viciously than Andrew. Carlisle thinks Abby was targeted “because her stepmother had known about the incest and had been unable to stop it, or worse, had blamed Lizzie for it.”⁶ Another possibility would be that, as sometimes happens in incestuous families, the mother or mother-substitute actually condones the abuse or even assists in it. If Andrew was brutal and perverse enough to sexually abuse his daughters, he may also have intimidated or persuaded Abby into going along with his nefarious doings.

So what, then, is the truth of Andrew Borden’s life and character? We know that Andrew Jackson Borden was born in Fall River on September 13, 1822. He did not grow up rich, but was the son of a yeoman laborer. Andrew started his working life as a carpenter employed by Southard Miller for two years until he left in order to manage his Uncle Thomas Borden’s property. Andrew and William M. Almy formed a business partnership in 1845 at 5 Anawan Street. Apparently, it was a most diverse sort of partnership as the businesses in which they engaged included real estate dealings, furniture and cabinet making and undertaking. Disputing Spiering, Borden historian Leonard Rebello found that “there is no evidence that Andrew Borden engaged in the practice of embalming at his home or business. Records do exist to show that Andrew Borden was an undertaker, that is, supplying coffins, chairs, hacks, horse, clothing for the deceased, and burial assistance.”⁷

The general perception of Andrew Borden’s dour personality, however, does not appear to be completely off the mark. There are no descriptions of him as a gregarious, outgoing, hail-fellow-well-met type. According to Rebello, on the day of his murder the Fall River Daily Globe called him a “dignified, reserved man, courteous in manner and strictly honorable in all his doings.” The Globe also wrote the next day that, “although he had considerable leisure time, [he] was rarely to be found where men are accustomed to congregate.”⁸

Andrew Borden appears to have shared some of his daughter Lizzie’s social views, although perhaps he first influenced her in forming her beliefs. She was a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Boston Advertiser wrote that Andrew “was outspoken in his advocacy of temperance and moral issues.”⁹

Could he have been a hypocrite, pursuing extramarital dalliances despite his public “advocacy of … moral issues”? That is hardly impossible. Many people do. But Brown’s theory of Andrew’s  fathering of an out-of-wedlock son is not backed up by evidence. Brown tells us he had a friend and that this friend claimed his father-in-law knew the Borden murderer—who was not Lizzie. Shortly before his death, the father-in-law, Henry Hawthorne, wrote what he said was the true story of the Borden slayings. Brown got hold of this account, calling it “a collection of disconnected ramblings with events choreographed backwards, with simple timing wrong, and with major characters totally ignored or, at best, moved from their traditional locations.”¹⁰ 

Right there, the wary reader should raise an eyebrow: this is not a recollection to inspire confidence. However, Brown found it compelling and did further research that he says supported the Hawthorne papers in all major claims. Andrew Borden’s mentally ill and mentally retarded son, born to a woman married to another man, was the killer. He writes, “Henry Hawthorne says he spoke with a woman who claimed to be the midwife who delivered Phebe Hathaway of Andrew’s son and to have full knowledge of the affair.”¹¹ This second-hand story is hardly rock-hard proof that Andrew fathered a child out of wedlock and does not even constitute strong evidence of an extramarital affair.

The incest accusation is also tenuous. It relies on the Borden household having certain things in common with families in which this type of abuse most occurs. However, many households have absent or sickly mothers without incurring incest. Correlation is not causation nor is it proof of anything in any particular case. It is entirely possible to see Lizzie’s gift of a ring to her father as a wholesome expression of filial devotion (which would not rule out the possibility of her developing hatred for him years later and even murdering him). Perhaps Governor Robinson was on to something when he suggested in his summation at the trial that Andrew wore that ring ever after out of a healthy fatherly love: 

He was a man that wore nothing in the way of ornament, of jewelry but one ring, and that ring was Lizzie’s. It had been put on many, many years ago when Lizzie was a little girl, and the old man wore it and it lies buried with him in the cemetery. He liked Lizzie, did he not? He loved her as his child; and the ring that stands as the pledge of plighted faith and love, that typifies and symbolizes the dearest relations that is ever created in life, that ring was the bond of union between the father and the daughter.¹²

There is little solid evidence concerning the state of Andrew and Abby Borden’s marriage. At the inquest, Hosea Knowlton raised the possibility that the union may have been unhappy or distant. He asked Lizzie, “Were your father and mother happily united?” She answered after a pause, “Why, I don’t know but that they were.” Later he pressed her on whether or not they were affectionate as a “man and woman who are married ought to be?” and she replied, “So far as I have ever had any chance of judging.”¹³ The replies betray a troubling ambivalence. However, even if we knew that Abby was basically in the house as a home manager rather than a true beloved, we could not conclude that Andrew was a child molester because of it or even state with certainty that he was an adulterer.

Neither of the sexual accusations against Andrew Borden is as popularly accepted as the portrait of him as a cheapskate extraordinaire. However, there are good reasons to doubt that he was an ogre of miserliness. The Fall River Daily Herald quoted Southard Miller as calling him “generous.”¹⁴ Emma Borden gave an interview to the Boston Post in 1913 in which she staunchly defended her father: 

Some unkind persons have spread the report that my father, despite his great wealth, was niggardly and that he refused to even give us sufficient to eat. That is a wicked lie. He was a plain-mannered man, but his table was always laden with the best that the market could afford.¹⁵

There is no question that, in some respects, Andrew Borden husbanded his financial assets with great care and that there were ways in which the Borden family lived below its means.

The house on 92 Second Street was not in the most fashionable part of Fall River, which is still commonly called the Hill. It was also a rather modest residence for a family of the Borden’s affluence. The house was originally built as a two-family dwelling by Southard Miller, but was remodeled by Andrew J. Borden as a single-family home. The home had cumbersome aspects with an interior that had no central hallway on either floor. A person had to pass from room to room to get to another part of the house or to go upstairs.

Lizzie may well have wanted to live in the best neighborhood her father’s money could afford. She also may have yearned to hold functions and parties at her home and felt frustrated because the small house in which she lived was so ill suited to entertaining. Andrew’s insistence on the small residence and Lizzie’s desire for a better home could have been the source of family tension. 

Why did Andrew live in such a modest house? Saving money might have been a reason for this choice. Another was that it was close to the business district and Andrew liked the convenience of being able to take a brisk and brief walk to work each day. While the choice of abode may be an example of Andrew’s frugality, it is simply untrue that he deprived his household of indoor plumbing in order to save money as both Jones and Brown write. As recently as 1997, it was discovered that the Fall River Historical Society’s cataloguing of 19^th century ledgers showed that not only did Andrew Borden furnish his Second Street home with running water in 1874, but also his business, Borden, Almy & Co.  Andrew’s application for the convenience and the “subsequent installation in his home were done not six months after the convenience was first made available to the residents of Fall River.”¹⁶ What’s more, Andrew had his home painted on May 10, 1892. These are not the actions of a man determined to avoid all creature comforts and force his family to live in deprivation for fear of spending an unnecessary penny.

Maynard F. Bertolet, who edited the Lizzie Borden Quarterly, believes that there are several instances in which Andrew Borden displayed appreciable generosity. “Would a stingy man have sent his daughter to a boarding school?” Bertolet asks.¹⁷ It is known that Emma attended a boarding school because at the inquest she was asked if she had ever lived away from home and replied, “I was away at school about a year and a half.”¹⁸ Bertolet also asks, “Would a stingy man have sent his daughter on a European tour?”¹⁹ Andrew paid for Lizzie to take a trip to Europe in 1890. She was there for nineteen weeks. This had to be fairly expensive and ought to be taken as evidence that Andrew could financially loosen up to indulge his daughters. In a family with three adult women, Andrew hired a full time, live-in maid (Bridget Sullivan). Even granting that household chores took more time and effort in those days before our modern conveniences, this bespeaks a man who was willing to pay quite a bit to lighten the loads of his female family members and provide them with leisure. In Lizzie’s inquest testimony, she states, “I had nothing to do with the work down stairs.”²⁰ Andrew’s generosity meant she had few chores beyond the cleaning of her own room and caring for her own clothes and enjoyed the freedom to be a gentlewoman of good works.

Perhaps most ironically, a well-known incident that caused friction within the Borden household and is sometimes cited as leading to the murders also displays Andrew’s strongly generous side. Abby’s stepmother, Mrs. Oliver Gray, wanted to sell her share of a house that had been left to her and to Abby’s half sister. Andrew purchased the Widow Gray’s share of the building and then gave it to Abby.

This was the occasion for what Lizzie, at the inquest, termed a “difference of opinion.”²¹ She and Emma thought he should be as generous with his daughters as he had been to a stepmother. Soon after they made their feelings known, he was. Lizzie testified that he deeded Emma and Lizzie “Grandfather Borden’s house on Ferry street.”²² Just a few weeks before his death, Andrew bought the property back from them for $5,000. So when his daughters wished to be treated the same as Abby, Andrew had made a gift to them of the house, and later gave them money for it, although it had been free. 

Yet, Andrew could be exacting with his money. Hiram C. Harrington, Andrew’s brother-in-law, gave an interview to the Fall River Daily Globe recounting the following story: “When his father died some years ago, he offered my wife (Lurana Borden Harrington, sister of Andrew Borden) the old homestead on Ferry Street for a certain sum of money. My wife preferred to take the money, and after the agreements were all signed, to show how close he was, he wanted my wife to pay an additional $3.00 for water tax upon the homestead.”²³ 

Andrew may sometimes have given the appearance of being a tightwad due to a lack of interest in certain areas. Rebello also quotes a report by the Boston Globe as describing Andrew as a man who “dressed very plainly, almost to the point of shabbiness.” The same article says he “retained a tie until it was almost thread-bare.”²⁴

There are reports that Andrew lived by the Shakespearean maxim “neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Frank Spiering wrote that Andrew never borrowed money and a Boston Advertiser piece stated that, “during his whole business career [he] never gave a note nor borrowed a cent of money.” However, these reports appear to be simply wrong since, as Rebello notes authoritatively, “Andrew Borden borrowed money to purchase some of his properties.”²⁵

That Andrew picked up an old lock from the floor and put it in his pocket may not have indicated an extreme stinginess. In a newsgroup posting in reply to a query from this writer about the reason for saving a possibly broken lock, Gilles Deacur of the Sunshine Locksmith Team wrote, “If the lock were to be replaced, then keeping the lock would help solve the reason as to why the lock broke in the first place. For instance, locks can break due to a misalignment between the door and the strike plate, or because of a hole that drilled crooked. The broken pieces would show where the stress on the lock occurred, and prevent the replacement lock from breaking again.” It is also possible that saving a broken lock would have saved unnecessary expense. Deacur continues, “If the lock were to be repaired instead of replaced, having all pieces may cut the repair expense down, especially if some pieces are hard to come by, or need to be special ordered in.”²⁶ 

Jack Wynn of Allied Lock & Security, Inc., seconds that perception: 

If this is a lay person without knowledge of such things, then yes, if that person was to call our office, we would dispatch a technician with the hopes of repairing the old lock and saving them some money. The technician would be armed to replace the lock if such repair is not viable. Sometimes the hardware that is previously existing on a door is not available on the open market and it is helpful to know what WAS on the door to purchase the closest replacement.²⁷

Thus, the fact that Andrew did not immediately discard the old lock if it was broken was not an act of extraordinary thrift but an act of simple common sense.

The popular portrait of Andrew as frugal and sometimes penny-pinching is incomplete—misleadingly and unfairly so. He seems to have been quite divided in how he treated his money, strictly husbanding even tiny amounts here and willingly spending a great deal there. He probably spent little on his own clothes simply because that was something that did not much matter to him. Indeed, the pattern that emerges when examining both his frugality and his generosity is that of a man who was tight-fisted when spending on himself but generous when spending on his wife and daughters.

A fresh look at the life of Andrew Borden shows a flawed, reticent, and, yes, “austere” man who worked hard to provide comfort and enjoyment to the women about whom he cared. 

Just how much did Andrew care about his wife and daughters? The money spent on them supports the hypothesis that he cared deeply as does the way he spent his time. The Globe wrote that, “although he had considerable leisure time, [he] was rarely to be found where men are accustomed to congregate.” Thus, it must be deduced that he spent much time at home with Abby, Emma, and Lizzie. Ironically, Andrew Borden, believed by many people to have been the victim of a patricide, may have been a man with an especially strong and abiding love for his adult children. 

Endnotes

¹ Ann Jones, Women Who Kill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 210-211.

² Frank Spiering, Lizzie (NY: Pinnacle Books, 1984), 11, 15, 44.

³ Arnold R. Brown, Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter (Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 1991), 49. 50-51.

⁴ David Kent, Forty Whacks (Emmaus, PA: Yankee Books, 1992), 2.

⁵ Marcia R. Carlisle, “What Made Lizzie Borden Kill?” American Heritage, (July/August 1992).

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Leonard Rebello, Lizzie Borden Past & Present (Fall River, MA: Al-Zach Press, 1999), 23.

⁸ Ibid 25.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Brown 13-14.

¹¹ Ibid 315-16.

¹² Frank H. Burt, The Trial of Lizzie A. Borden. Upon an indictment charging her with the murders of Abby Durfee Borden and Andrew Jackson Borden. Before the Superior Court for the County of Bristol. Presiding, C.J. Mason, J.J. Blodgett, and J.J. Dewey. Official stenographic report by Frank H. Burt (New Bedford, MA, 1893, 2 volumes; Orlando: PearTree Press, 2001), 1689.

¹³ Inquest Upon the Deaths of Andrew J. Borden and Abby D. Borden, August 9-11,1892, Volume I. (Fall River, MA: Fall River Historical Society; Orlando: PearTree Press, 2004), 52-53.

¹⁴ Rebello 25.

¹⁵ Ibid 27.

¹⁶ Jamelle Tanous, Lizzie Borden Quarterly (July 1997, Vol. IV, #3): 18.

¹⁷ Maynard F. Bertolet, 7 August 1997, e-mail to Denise Noe.

¹⁸ Inquest 107.

¹⁹ Bertolet email.

²⁰ Inquest 86.

²¹ Ibid 51.

²² Ibid 48.

²³ Rebello 25.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Gilles Deacur, “Found a broken lock: what should be done?” Online posting, 23 December 2005 <alt.locksmith>.

²⁷ Jack Wynn, 26 December 2005, email to Denise Noe.