The Eva Hamilton Scandal — Part One

In the late summer of 1889, a scandal rocked New York society. Details were contradictory, but the eventual gist was that New York State Assemblyman Robert Ray Hamilton (great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton) had been seeing Miss Eva Steele — aka Eva Parsons, aka Eva Brill, aka Eva Mann — for two years when, in 1888, she told him she was expecting. After months in seclusion, she introduced him to his daughter, and Hamilton did the honorable thing and married her.

Eight months later she was charged with attempted murder of the baby’s nurse.

The story tumbled out. Eva Steele was really an “adventuress” named Eva Mann, as it appears she was already married to Joshua Mann. She’d carried on with both men for years, then convinced Robert Ray Hamilton that she was carrying his child.

To carry out her ruse, she apparently purchased a child, who died. So she bought another, who also died. She bought a third, but that baby didn’t look enough like the first one, so she sent him back. She then bought a fourth child, and passed this off as her’s and Hamilton’s.

She supported Joshua Mann with her “pin money” of $6,000/year, a full third of her husband’s income. In August of 1889, after just eight months of marriage, Hamilton tried to cut some of her pin money. The couple quarreled, and the child’s nurse intervened. Eva…