Hetty Green - Marriage

Marriage

At the age of 33, Henrietta married Edward Henry Green, a member of a wealthy Vermont family. She made him renounce all rights to her money before the wedding on July 11, 1867. The married couple moved to Edward's home in Manhattan, but when her cousins tried to have her indicted for forgery based on the Robinson v. Mandell decision, they moved to London and they lived in the Langham Hotel. Her two children, Edward Howland Robinson "Ned" Green and Hetty Sylvia Ann Howland Green, were born there, Ned on August 23, 1868 and Sylvia on January 7, 1871.

As Edward pursued investments as a sort of "gentleman banker", Hetty began parlaying her inheritances into her own astonishing fortune. She formulated an investment strategy to which she stuck throughout her life: conservative investments, substantial cash reserves to back up any movement, and an exceedingly cool head amidst turmoil. During her time in London, most of her investment efforts focused on greenbacks, the notes printed by the U.S. government immediately after the Civil War. When more timid investors were wary of notes put forth by the still-recovering government, Hetty bought at full bore, claiming to have made US$1.25 million from her bond investments in one year alone. Her earnings on that front were to fund her great subsequent rail-bond purchases.

When the Green family returned to the United States, they went to Edward's hometown in Bellows Falls, Vermont. Already something of an eccentric, she began to quarrel, not only with her husband and in-laws, but also with the domestic servants and neighborhood shopkeepers. After the 1885 collapse of the financial house John J. Cisco & Son, in which Hetty was the largest investor, investigation revealed that Edward had not only been the firm's greatest debtor, but that management of the firm had surreptitiously used Hetty's wealth as the basis for their loans to Edward. Hetty, emphasizing that their finances were separate, withdrew her securities and deposited them in Chemical Bank. Edward moved out of their home. In later years, however, they would effect at least a partial reconciliation, and Hetty helped nurse him in the years before his death on March 19, 1902, from heart disease and chronic nephritis. He was buried in Bellows Falls in the graveyard of Immanuel Church.