“Devoted in Her Love and Bitter in Her Hate”
The narrative of Texian Exodus: The Runaway Scrape and Its Enduring Legacy leaves Widow Dickinson bereft and homeless after General Houston ordered Gonzales, her hometown, put to the torch. She appeared to have joined her neighbors on their eastward trek, but no documentation supports that supposition. For a brief period, she became lost to history. Readers may feel frustrated not knowing the rest of Susanna’s story. If so, continue reading.
Susanna and Angelina, her infant daughter, disappeared into the chaos of the Runaway Scrape. We know nothing of their location or activities. Certain it is, however, that the weeks and months following Texian victory at San Jacinto were sad and difficult for the Widow Dickinson in October 1836, she petitioned the officials of the Texas Republic for a donation. For reasons that defied all logic, they denied her five-hundred-dollar claim. The destruction of Gonzales had left her without a home; the death of her husband at the Alamo left her without family support, few friends, few marketable skills, and a toddler to feed.
By 1837, desperate for a provider and protector. Susanna had taken up with a seedy fellow named Parker who lived in or around Harrisburg. Gossips whispered that Mrs. Dickinson had become a practitioner of the oldest profession.
A declaration of facts in the Texas State Library and Archives suggests an unpleasant reality behind the rumors. In this document, Sam S. Smith, a resident of San Antonio, testified he was “well acquainted” with Mrs. Dickinson. She was, according to Smith, “living in open concubinage with the said Parker.” Yet, Smith avowed she did not limit her favors to Parker. As the sworn statement says:
Sam S. Smith also says that one occasion he personally witnessed Mrs. Dickinson, in flagrante dilecto [original spelling], with a man boarding at Parker’s house; that the connection took place in a log barn in daylight, and that he (Sam S. Smith) was summoned by another man to see the assignation, which he did by looking between the logs of the barn.
Parker seemed to have hired out his common law wife to boarders, for Smith maintained: “Mrs. Dickinson was generally considered a strumpet.”
By June 1837, Susanna had cut loose from Parker and was living with John Williams. On or about November 27, 1837, the couple made their union legal. The marriage was a catastrophe. Williams was abusive and beat not only the twenty-three-year-old Susanna but also the three-year-old Angelina. Susanna had not saved her child from Santa Anna to have a miscreant assault her. Susanna petitioned the Harrisburg County court for a divorce. The petition (obviously written by her attorney) alleged that Williams had beaten her “to such a degree as to produce or cause an abortion.” The document further avowed, “He also abused and beat the child of your petitioner beyond endurance.” Authorities granted the divorce—among the first in the Republic of Texas—on March 24, 1838.
In short order, the former Mrs. Williams found a new man. On December 20, 1838, she wed Georgia native Francis P. Herring in Houston. The historical record revealed little concerning their union other than it was of short duration. Herring died on September 15, 1843, of what the Telegraph and Texas Register reported as “digestive fever.” The newspaper may have employed a euphemism. One of Herring’s relatives claimed Susanna’s third husband had “died of drink, not water.”
In 1839, the Texas Republic granted Susanna and Angelina rights to 2,560 acres for Almaron’s military service. Susanna held on to the land as a nest egg for her daughter. Yet, as soon as Angelina turned twenty-one years of age, she sold the land for hard cash.
Following Herring’s death, Susanna struggled to survive. That would have been difficult in rough-and-tumble Houston City, which one visitor described as “the greatest sink of dissipation and vice that modern times have known.” Built on a swamp, Houston’s residents included more rats than people. “Thousands of these troublesome guests made sport by night,” recounted immigrant Gustav Dresel, “and nothing could be brought to safety from them. Human corpses had to be watched during the whole night because otherwise these fiends ate their way into them. The finger of a little child who lay alone in his cradle for a few hours was half eaten away.”
On December 15, 1847, Susanna’s fortunes improved when she married drayman Peter Bellows. The couple prospered. The 1850 census valued his real estate at $1,000. The census taker listed Susanna, aged forty-three, and Angelina E. Dickinson, aged sixteen, with real estate valued at $2,000. Mrs. Bellows appeared to have continued her old practice of taking in boarders, for also living in the household was R. E. Goodbaker, a twenty-one-year-old German woman.
In Houston, Susanna experienced a religious conversion. She was a reputed Episcopalian but upon hearing the message as preached by Dr. Rufus C. Burleson, she became a Baptist. The “Messenger of the Alamo” was a prize catch for the Baptists; Burleson crowed “at least 1,500 people crowded the banks of Buffalo Bayou on Sabbath evening to see her baptized.” In his memoirs, Burleson described Susanna’s conflicted personality: “I found in her a great bundle of untamed passions, devoted in her love and bitter in her hate.” Nevertheless, he recalled her with affection and admiration. “During all my pastorate in Houston,” he lauded, “and especially during the cholera epidemic, she was a zealous co-laborer of mine in every good work.”
Despite Susanna’s conversion, in 1854 she abandoned Bellows and the marriage. In 1857, he finally filed for divorce and, if one can believe the petition, his estranged wife had returned to the one vocation that had proven consistently profitable:
[The petitioner] charges and alleges that in the City of Houston [the defendant] was guilty of adulting with several persons, whose names to your petitioner is unknown. He further charges and alleges that on or about the 1st day of October A D. 1854, she took up her residence in a house of ill fame, in the City of Houston, and remained therein, as one of it inmates for the accommodation of the public, and whilst in said house, great numbers of men were in the habit of visiting said house, and he charges and alleges, for a space of three months, whilst in said house, she was in the constant habit of committing adultery with various persons, whose names to your petitioner was unknown.
On June 15, 1857, a jury found Mrs. Bellows guilty of adultery and the judge granted a divorce on those grounds.
By then, Susanna had moved on—both from Bellows and Houston City. Later that same year, in Lockhart, she met and wed Joseph William Hanning, a native of Germany and twenty years her junior. For Susanna, the fifth time was a charm. The couple soon moved to Austin and according to all accounts lived in happiness and prosperity. Hanning operated a cabinet shop, a furniture store, and a funeral parlor. He also owned a store in San Antonio.
Now comfortable in her domestic and business life, Susanna suffered another heartache. Notwithstanding her mother’s efforts to provide financial and emotional support, Angelina grew into a troubled woman. On July 8, 1851, she married farmer John Maynard Griffith, and the union produced three children. When the marriage ended in divorce, Angelina left two offspring with Susanna and one with an uncle. Then she wandered to New Orleans, where she made her living as a lady of pleasure. In 1864, she married Oscar Holmes and gave birth to a fourth child in 1865. Yet, that marriage failed as well and Angelina drifted to Galveston Island, where she was a well-known harlot. In 1869 Susanna learned that her daughter had died in Galveston of a uterine hemorrhage—likely the result of a botched abortion. Mrs. Hanning faced this sorrow as she had all previous ones.
She endured.
Her remaining years in Austin were happy ones. By the time of an 1878 interview, she and Hanning lived in a “beautiful home” on the “corner of Duval and East 32nd Street.” When she died on October 7, 1883, her community mourned her as a respected businesswoman and frontier heroine. Hanning laid her to rest in Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery. He married again but directed that upon his passing he was to lie beside his first wife. Now in death, as in life, Susanna and her beloved Joseph are together.
What relevance does the story of Susanna have for modern Texans?
She was not a major player in the affairs of her time; she was simply a frontier woman struggling to survive from day to day. Pious moralizers will fume that we have no business commemorating the life of an old hooker. And they would be correct—if that’s all that she had been. We honor her memory not because she was a prostitute but rather for all her other contributions. Now, as in times past, we all fall short of God’s glory. I hope we have achieved a public maturity that allows us to value folks who were—and are—less than perfect. Otherwise, I fear we’re all out of luck.
Susanna Dickinson Williams Herring Bellows Hanning teaches valuable lessons. She reminds us that literacy is essential and without it one can expect a life of degradation and exploitation. She instructs us that travail and misery enter every life, but a person of character takes the hit and perseveres. She tells us that despite life’s hardships, we can be happy—if we work hard and maintain a hopeful spirit. To provide for her daughter, her spouses, and her grandchildren, Susanna endured calamities few of us will ever know.
Hers is an impressive legacy.