On June 13, 1890, in a Paris house, a woman watched from an upstairs window as her husband drove away in a carriage with their children. She was locked inside, the windows were sealed, and two doctors had climbed the stairs to examine her. One of them, Jean-Martin Charcot, the most famous neurologist in Europe and a mentor to Sigmund Freud, concluded that any woman who treated a kind husband the way she had must be insane. The only instruction the husband gave the coachman, while she screamed from the window, was: “Drive on.
” She later testified under oath: “That was my last glimpse of my children, and I have never seen them since. ”
The woman at the window was Margaret Laura Astor Carey, a granddaughter of William Backhouse Astor Sr. , a niece of John Jacob Astor III, and one of the wealthiest heiresses in America during the Gilded Age. The children she lost that day grew up in Europe without her.
When she died 19 years later, she left them nothing, writing in her will that her daughter had not shown the love and respect expected of a daughter. The Astor fortune began with a German immigrant named John Jacob Astor, who arrived in New York with almost nothing and built the first great American fortune through the fur trade and the American Fur Company, then more enduringly through quiet purchases of Manhattan real estate while the city was still mostly farmland north of what is now midtown. By the time of his death in 1848, his fortune was estimated at $20 to $30 million, equivalent to roughly three-quarters of a billion to over a billion dollars today, making him certainly the richest man in the United States. His will set the pattern that shaped the family for the next century, because the core of the fortune, the Manhattan real estate empire, was not divided equally among his children.
His eldest son, John Jacob Astor Jr. , was described as frail and mentally unstable, so the bulk of the estate went to the second son, William Backhouse Astor Sr. , while a sufficient amount was placed in trust to care for John Jr. for the rest of his life.
The daughters, Magdalena, Dorothea, and Eliza, were never mentioned in the surviving records of the will’s provisions regarding the properties. The first data point in a pattern that repeats throughout family history: women received income, and men received control. The Astors used a recurring legal tool to preserve the integrity of their fortune. Property was placed in a trust for one generation, generating income for a designated beneficiary, then passed entirely to the next generation upon the death of the trust holder.
At that point, it was often placed in a new trust again. A 1912 New York Times report on the family’s properties showed how Astor real estate alternated between being in trust or fully owned from generation to generation, a structure used to circumvent American common law restrictions on perpetual ownership. This structure had a decisive consequence for the women of the family. A daughter or granddaughter of the Astors might have a legal right to income from a trust, but she rarely had sole control over the underlying capital.
Objecting relatives could also, and did, attempt to exclude her from future distributions through the terms of subsequent wills. The clearest example of how harshly the family enforced this control is the case of Henry Astor, the son of William Backhouse Astor Sr. , who married a gardener’s daughter against his family’s will. William’s will explicitly disinherited Henry and his descendants from any share of the Astor Library, stating that his son or his descendants should receive no part of his property.
When Henry died childless in 1918, 125 Manhattan properties included in that trust, valued at an estimated $10 to $20 million at the time, passed directly to the descendants of Henry’s brothers, an event that intersects directly with the story of Margaret Laura Astor Carey’s children. The machine was built to outlast everyone who touched it. The woman born into its inner circle in 1853 was about to discover the high price of challenging it. Margaret Laura Carey was born on January 19, 1853, in New York, the daughter of John Carey and Mary Alida Astor, who was in turn the daughter of William Backhouse Astor Sr.
and Margaret Rebecca Armstrong. This made Margaret Laura a granddaughter of one of the two men who had inherited and expanded the original Astor real estate fortune. Her mother’s brother was John Jacob Astor III, making him her uncle, not her father. This is an important distinction because popular accounts of this story consistently get it wrong.
She grew up within the inner circle of New York’s old-money elite at the precise moment that elite was cementing its traditions: Fifth Avenue brownstones, Newport houses, and the rigid social calendar overseen by her aunt by marriage, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, known simply as “Mrs. Astor,” whose famous list of 400 people defined who counted as New York society during the Gilded Age. This was a world where a young woman’s primary currency, regardless of the size of her family’s trust fund, was the marriage she made. By the 1870s, a transatlantic marriage market had emerged, exchanging American industrial and commercial fortunes, such as the Astors, Vanderbilts, and Golds, for European titles.
The phenomenon was familiar enough to earn its own classification: “dollar princesses,” American heiresses who married European nobles, trading money for crowns. According to a 1915 reference book titled Americans, there were 454 marriages between American women of the Gilded and Progressive eras and European aristocrats. The Library of Congress notes that American heiresses married more than a third of the members of the House of Lords. Notable early examples include Jennie Jerome, who married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874 and became the mother of Winston Churchill, and Consuelo Yznaga, who married the future 8th Duke of Manchester in 1876, setting a pattern that accelerated over the next three decades until it became a well-known transatlantic industry.
Margaret Laura’s 1875 marriage to a Dutch baron predates the peak of this phenomenon by two decades, making her an early and less famous example of the pattern that would later produce more famous “dollar princesses” such as Consuelo Vanderbilt and Anna Gould. During her marriage, Margaret reportedly received approximately $80,000 per year from her family, equivalent to $2. 87 million today. But this was structured as a material allowance, something granted by relatives, not as independent capital she owned and controlled.
Even as a married baroness in her late thirties, Margaret’s income was a leash that could be shortened at any time, and the family holding the other end of it expected in return a marriage that reflected well on the Astor name. The marriage she contracted in 1875 was supposed to meet that expectation. For nearly 15 years, it appeared to do so. On April 20, 1875, at the family’s imposing New York home at 34th Street and Madison Avenue, Margaret Laura Carey married Baron Alphonse Lambert Eugène Reeder de Steurs, a Dutch diplomat serving as chargé d’affaires in Washington and later as minister plenipotentiary for the Netherlands in Paris.
He was 12 years her senior and already established in European diplomatic circles, the son of Lieutenant General Hubert John Joseph Lambert Reeder de Steurs and his second wife, Hortense Josephine Constance Biance. The guest list read like a register of Gilded Age New York aristocracy. Among the witnesses were John Jacob Astor III, William Astor and his wife Caroline, the future Mrs. Astor who would define society with her list of 400, along with daughters of the city’s finest families.
The wedding, by every outward appearance, conformed perfectly to the kind of marriages the Astor family was designed to produce. As a diplomat’s wife, Margaret’s life followed her husband’s postings around Europe. Divorce case testimony indicates the couple was in Madrid by 1881, then London, and by the late 1880s Paris, where Alphonse held his most senior diplomatic positions. The couple had four children: twins John Hubert and Mary Alida in 1876 in London, Margaret in 1878 in Versailles, and Hubert in 1879.
Mary Alida, the twin daughter, died in Paris in 1884 at age eight, a loss later described in divorce testimony as a turning point in Margaret’s emotional state. The marriage, according to testimony Margaret later gave under oath, was marked by escalating cruelty. Her husband allegedly mocked her as a “savage American” and a “child who doesn’t know how to behave,” was rude to her American friends, and on one occasion in Paris, waved his umbrella over her head 10 or 12 times, in his words, “to frighten her. ” She testified that at a dinner party in Madrid during trade treaty negotiations, he ordered her to flirt with the minister of commerce to help close the deal, telling her to “make him fall in love with you,” but she refused.
She later testified that she would not put her femininity at the service of the state. These are claims made under oath in a courtroom, not independently verified facts. This report treats them as testimony, but they were significant enough to form the basis for a formal cruelty finding by an American judge. The testimony describes a marriage in which the European husband treated his American wife as a social asset to be deployed and a diplomatic accessory to be disciplined.
The pattern it illustrates, humiliation in private coupled with expectations of perfect performance in public, is consistent with what the memoirs of other “dollar princesses” of the era describe. The marriage that began in a Fifth Avenue brownstone was about to collapse inside a locked Paris house. The collapse centered on one dramatic episode in Paris on June 13, 1890. According to Margaret’s later court testimony, she was preparing to go out for a walk when her husband asked her to stay home because the sculptor was coming.
She agreed, then found the house locked, the windows barred, her room guarded, and doctors coming up the stairs. The two doctors were Eugène Cherleau, who had previously treated Margaret for fainting fits, and, remarkably, Jean-Martin Charcot, head physician at the Salpêtrière hospital and the era’s most prominent international authority on hysteria and neurological disorders, the same Charcot who had taught and influenced Sigmund Freud. Charcot examined Margaret and concluded she was mentally disturbed but not hysterical, reasoning that any woman who treated an affectionate husband that way must be insane. He issued a certificate stating she suffered from neurosis and ruled her unfit to care for her children, but he did not go so far as to recommend institutionalization.
The judge who later presided over her divorce case explicitly rejected this episode, calling it a perfunctory examination insufficient to prove anything meaningful about Margaret’s mental state. But at the time, the effect was immediate. Her husband told her he would explain everything after lunch. Instead, she looked out the window and saw him driving away in a carriage with their children.
She threw the window open and screamed at the coachman to stop. Her husband’s only response was: “Drive on. ”
That night, at midnight, Margaret fled the house with only her maid Maria and her jewelry, leaving behind a wardrobe of approximately 200 dresses and tens of thousands of dollars in other possessions. She traveled first to the German spa town of Wiesbaden under the pretext of treating a shoulder pain, then to Hamburg, effectively disappearing from society columns for nearly a year.
Before the final separation, the Astor family had already tried to intervene. In March 1890, months before the Charcot incident, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor traveled personally to Paris to try to reconcile Margaret and her husband, seeing divorce as social suicide. The reconciliation lasted no more than a month, and when it collapsed again, the collapse was final. The June 1890 incident was the end of the marriage.
Everything that followed, the midnight escape, the year of hiding, the South Dakota hotel room, and the 90-day residency requirement, was the legal and logistical aftermath of a decision Margaret made at the moment she saw her husband’s carriage driving away with her children inside. A woman diagnosed by Charcot himself as insane, locked inside her own home and separated from her children by a carriage receding beneath her window, was about to do the very thing the Astor family feared most. Margaret reappeared in public records on June 1, 1891, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The destination was not random at all.
In the 1880s and 1890s, South Dakota’s unusually short residency requirement, only 90 days compared to years in states like New York, made it a magnet for wealthy unhappy Americans seeking a quick divorce. Margaret checked into the Cataract House hotel, rented a four-room suite on the upper floor, and redesigned it to her taste, furnishing it with new furniture, a large bathtub, and a piano. She donated three stained-glass windows to the local Episcopal cathedral, but the bishop in charge refused to accept them entirely, saying he would not install them and would rather paste up cheap circus posters instead, so the windows were hidden in the basement. She was not alone at the Cataract House.
She was accompanied by her maid and her dog, and a man she introduced as her second cousin, William Elliott, born William Elliott Morris Zabriskie, known simply as Elliott, who had rented rooms at the other end of the hallway. Elliott had met Margaret while she was vacationing in Newport. Their relationship developed and became serious, and a lawyer asked her directly during a court examination whether she intended to marry Elliott in the event of a divorce, a question Margaret and Elliott both answered with laughter. The formal divorce trial began in Minnehaha County before Judge Frank Aikens, and Margaret spent nearly four hours on the witness stand describing years of psychological cruelty, verbal humiliation, and the traumatic June 1890 incident.
In a moment that captured the extent of the family division the case caused, Arthur Astor Carey, Margaret’s younger brother, gave testimony supporting the baron, testifying that he had never treated his wife cruelly or inhumanely and had been deliberately kind and considerate to her. Judge Aikens granted Margaret a divorce on grounds of extreme cruelty causing severe mental suffering, dismissed the Charcot examination as perfunctory, and awarded her custody of her youngest daughter, Margaret. Although the child was reportedly hidden in a French convent, and never returned to her mother’s custody. The South Dakota decree had no authority in Europe, and Dutch courts refused to recognize it.
The baron retained custody of the children under Dutch law, and Margaret found herself trapped between two incompatible legal systems. An American court granted her freedom and custody on paper, while a European court and a European father simply refused to respect either. The daughter, Margaret, whom the South Dakota judge had placed under Margaret’s custody, was reportedly hidden in a French convent. No available records indicate that Margaret ever regained actual custody of any of her children from her first marriage.
The divorce freed her from the baron and cost her everything else. On the Monday morning immediately following the divorce decree, in her private parlor at the Cataract House hotel, Margaret married William Elliott Morris Zabriskie, with only the couple’s attorney from New York and one other friend as witnesses. She signed the marriage certificate under the name “de Steurs” for the last time, swearing she was single, unmarried, and of sound mind. Elliott gave generous tips to the hotel staff upon leaving.
The couple waited about two weeks in Sioux Falls, reportedly due to Margaret’s health, before departing to Chicago and then Europe, despite the risk that the baron still considered Margaret his wife under Dutch law. Elliott Zabriskie came from his own fortune and his own passions. The passion that defined his life was the emerging sport of automobile racing. He died on April 1, 1903, in a crash during the La Turbie hill-climb race in France, making Margaret a widow for the second time and the mother of her surviving son Louis, who was 8 years old.
Margaret also lost a child from her second marriage in infancy in 1893, meaning she had now buried two children, been separated from two others by foreign court decrees, and lost two husbands, one to divorce and one to a racing accident, all before she turned 50. Her personal fortune, likely built from Astor trusts and properties that came to her individually and separately from any allowances controlled by the larger family, proved durable despite the social ostracism the family imposed. The Astor family’s response to Margaret’s divorce and quick remarriage was permanent social exclusion that lasted for the rest of her life. When Margaret’s old friend Sally Delano traveled to Chicago during that period, her husband asked her not to meet Margaret.
Sally wrote that it was not easy for her to make that decision, and it appears she did not visit. A bitter irony lies at the heart of the way the family treated Margaret. Just a few years later, in 1896, Charlotte Astor Drayton, the daughter of Caroline Schermerhorn Astor herself, divorced her husband amid a public adultery scandal. The following year, Mrs.
Astor threw a party in Charlotte’s honor and became one of the first leading ladies to formally welcome divorced women back into New York society. The conversion was strikingly selective. She did it for her daughter. But she never extended the same grace to her disgraced niece.
Margaret Laura Astor Carey de Steurs Zabriskie died on July 9, 1911, at age 58, and the most concrete and demonstrable part of the inheritance drama in the entire story is what she herself did in her will. A New York Times article dated June 9, 1918, covering the distribution of the Henry Astor trust estate, the same $10 to $20 million trust discussed earlier, stated clearly that Margaret’s daughter Margaret, by then the Countess Oberndorff, had been excluded from her mother’s will, and her brother Hubert was also disinherited. Margaret’s will stated that her daughter had not shown the love and respect expected of a daughter, a phrase that echoes across a century of family grief. The daughter she disinherited was the same daughter a South Dakota judge had awarded her custody of in 1892, the same daughter her father had hidden in a French convent, the same daughter who grew up in Europe far from her mother.
Margaret had been separated from her children by her first husband and a foreign court. She used her testamentary power to disinherit those same children from her personal estate, holding a grudge at her death that dated back 19 years. This detail complicates the simple narrative that the Astor family deprived her of her inheritance, because the disinheritance that remains in the legal record is something Margaret did to her children. She left her only surviving son from her second marriage, 16-year-old Louis Zabriskie, a vast fortune.
Contemporary genealogical sources describe him as becoming the fourth richest person under 21 in the world, inheriting approximately 11 million pounds sterling in cash along with real estate including 7 acres in Manhattan and several Fifth Avenue apartment buildings. Margaret died extremely wealthy in her own right, and any account suggesting she was left destitute or completely cut off from her family contradicts what she left behind. What the family clearly constrained was her social standing and, most painfully, her relationship with her children. The social ice never melted, and the maternal estrangement lasted even longer because the children Margaret lost in 1890 never came back to her.
The will she wrote in the years before her death turned that loss into a formal legal rupture. The woman separated from her children by a foreign court used the one tool she controlled completely, her will, to make that separation permanent. The fate of the children after her death completes the story. Louis, Margaret’s surviving son from her second marriage, inherited his mother’s fortune at 16, and following in the footsteps of his late father, became a leading figure in automobile racing.
He built the famous racing cars “Chitty Bang Bang” at Higham Park, his estate near Canterbury in Kent, enormous machines powered by aircraft engines capable of speeds considered suicidal by the standards of the time. These cars later inspired Ian Fleming’s 1964 children’s novel Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, although Fleming changed the spelling and fictionalized the story. Louis raced across Europe during the early 1920s, winning the Brooklands 200-mile race among other events, and by 1924 was one of the most famous racing drivers on the continent. On October 19, 1924, during the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, his Mercedes left the track at a curve called “Lesmo” and struck a tree.
He was 29 years old, and with him on the track died the fortune his mother had left him, a fortune derived from the Astor family that she had accumulated over three decades of her independent life. Two generations of this family, father and son, died in automobile racing accidents 21 years apart, a chilling and rarely discussed coda to Margaret’s dramatic life. Elliott died at La Turbie in 1903, and Louis died at Monza in 1924. Between the two accidents, the fortune Margaret had assembled from Astor trusts, her own properties, and any settlements arising from divorce and remarriage was spent on engines, fuel, and speed.
Louis’s death without surviving children meant that the personal fortune Margaret had left him, an Astor fortune she had accumulated and managed independently, passed entirely out of the direct line of heirs. The fortune the machine was created to preserve had reached a dead end through the only branch Margaret chose to favor. The Chitty Bang Bang cars Louis built at Higham Park survived his death as museum pieces and literary inspiration, and the Canterbury estate was eventually sold. But the Manhattan real estate and Fifth Avenue properties his mother had left him went to the estate of a 29-year-old racing driver with no wife and no children.
The children Margaret had disinherited from her first marriage were about to discover what the broader Astor trust structure had preserved for them despite their mother’s wishes. Margaret’s eldest son from her first marriage, John Hubert de Steurs, died in The Hague on January 17, 1907, at age 30, four years before his mother, meaning Margaret outlived him. Her daughter Margaret, Countess Oberndorff, lived until April 6, 1930, dying in Bordeaux. Her son Hubert lived until November 22, 1946.
Both Margaret and Hubert were excluded from their mother’s personal will, but they remained entitled to shares of the broader Astor family trust distributions. This is the essential distinction the machine imposed. A personal will could disinherit a child from one generation’s property, but the foundational trust instruments, written decades earlier by John Jacob Astor and his sons, operated independently of any individual descendant’s grievances, and no personal will could override them. The trusts were designed to withstand family disputes, and they did.
In 1918, when Margaret’s uncle Henry Astor died childless, the 125 Manhattan properties in the 1834 trust, valued at an estimated $10 to $20 million, passed directly to the descendants of Henry’s brothers, and Margaret’s children, as descendants of William Backhouse Astor Sr. , were among the beneficiaries. However, Margaret’s share was seized by the American Alien Property Custodian under the wartime Trading with the Enemy Act, because her husband, Alfred Graf von Oberndorff, was a German diplomat and the United States was at war with Germany. She was isolated twice in the same year, excluded from her mother’s will and then barred from receiving a separate Astor trust distribution because of federal wartime policy and her consequent choice of husband.
The coincidence was unplanned and the result was devastating. In 1918, Margaret was simultaneously deprived of her mother’s personal property and prevented from collecting her share of the family trust, all because of decisions other people had made about her life, her marriage, and her nationality. The pattern that had defined every generation of this family repeated itself. A woman’s access to wealth was determined by whom she married and whether the family approved of that marriage.
Baron Alphonse de Steurs continued his diplomatic career in the Netherlands after the divorce, serving as grand chamberlain to Queen Wilhelmina and as an advisor on properties, and died in 1919. The machine built by John Jacob Astor in 1848 was still operating 70 years after his death, continuing to distribute pieces of Manhattan real estate to his descendants, ignoring their personal grievances, and punishing those who married wrongly. Margaret could disinherit her children from her own property. But she could not disinherit them from the “Astor machine,” because that machine was built to outlive mothers and fathers, barons, and grievances alike.
Margaret’s story fits into a much larger pattern of Gilded Age heiresses whose marriages were transactions between American capital and European status, and whose subsequent unhappiness revealed how little legal and financial independence even the richest women of that era possessed. The most famous dollar princess marriage is Consuelo Vanderbilt’s 1895 marriage to the 9th Duke of Marlborough, a marriage Consuelo was explicitly forced into by her mother Alva, who locked her daughter in her room when she tried to escape with her real lover and later told the court with chilling clarity: “I forced my daughter to marry the Duke, and I have always had absolute power over my daughter. ” The financial structure of that marriage was explicit: a settlement of $2. 5 million in railroad stock, equivalent to roughly $92 million today, ensuring the Duke an annual income of at least $100,000.
Anna Gould’s 1895 marriage to the French Count Boni de Castellane embodies the other fundamental risk. A titled husband who systematically drained the Gould family fortune, spending an estimated $10 million of family money, equivalent to $387 million today, on Paris parties before Anna divorced him in 1906. Margaret’s case predates both by two decades and lacks the documented maternal coercion of Consuelo or the spectacular financial exploitation of Anna, but it shares the same underlying structure: an American heiress trading her fortune for a title, finding herself trapped between incompatible legal systems when the marriage failed, and being punished by her own family for leaving. The opposite extreme of the heiresses is the Wendel family of New York, fur-trading partners of the original John Jacob Astor, whose patriarch devoted his life to preventing his six sisters from marrying at all, reportedly to avoid endangering the family real estate empire.
The sisters lived in near-total seclusion in their Fifth Avenue mansion, were barred from attending church regularly, and were denied modern conveniences. The sister who escaped was committed to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital. Marriage was a trap, and not marrying was a cage, and the structure of Astor wealth ensured that women who inherited its income could never escape the control of men over its capital. Margaret’s story is the most detailed case study of this system operating on one woman’s life throughout her adulthood.
From the allowance during marriage, to the social freeze after divorce, to the loss of her children to a foreign court, to the ostracism by her aunt, to the will she wrote to pass on that punishment, every element of her experience was shaped by the fact that her money came with conditions she never agreed to and could never renegotiate. Any honest account of Margaret Laura Astor Carey’s story must acknowledge the gaps in the documentary record as clearly as it states the confirmed facts. The narrative drawn from detailed reporting on the marriage and trial does not explicitly document the exact inheritance settlement or financial compensation associated with the divorce, the actual division of assets in the decree, or the subsequent financial arrangement between Margaret and Elliott Zabriskie. Popular accounts citing precise financial figures about lump sums at the time of divorce should be treated with skepticism unless they cite a primary source that this research could not find.
What can be documented with confidence is the family income arrangement during the marriage, approximately $80,000 per year, and the fact that this arrangement was an allowance from her relatives, meaning Margaret’s income was something granted, not something she owned. There appears to be no confirmed connection between Margaret and Alphonse and two Dutch estates often associated in popular accounts with their married life, Castle Moorik near Vught and the De Wierse estate in Gelderland. Available records show Castle Moorik passed to the Van Lanschot banking family in 1884, while De Wierse belongs to descendants of Victor de Steurs, a half-brother of Alphonse. The divorce date itself is inconsistent across different sources.
One genealogical database places it in November 1891, while a detailed reconstruction places the proceedings in February 1892, with the divorce decree issued about a month later. This report notes these inconsistencies because a documentary account built on unverified details is less useful than one that names its gaps honestly and lets the documented record carry the burden. The documented record is strong enough to carry the story alone. A locked house in Paris, a midnight escape with a maid and a bag of jewelry, a divorce in a South Dakota hotel, a second marriage the following Monday, social ostracism that lasted the rest of her life, a will that disinherited the children she had lost, and a son from her second marriage who inherited a fortune and died at 29 in a racing car built with Astor money.
The gaps in the record are real, and so is everything else. The woman at the heart of this story spent the first half of her life as one of the Astors, her middle years as a baroness, and her final decade as a racing driver’s widow, leaving behind a will that punished her children for a separation she had not chosen. The documented facts carry the full weight of the tragedy without embellishment. The Astor fortune outlived everyone in this story by generations.
The Manhattan properties John Jacob Astor began acquiring in the early 19th century continued generating income for his descendants into the 20th century. The trust structures he designed survived every scandal, every divorce, every disinheritance, and every foreign war that touched his heirs. Margaret Laura Astor Carey was born into the inner circle of that fortune, married a Dutch baron at a wedding attended by the most powerful names in New York, was diagnosed as insane by Charcot, escaped her locked house at midnight with her maid and her jewelry, obtained a divorce in a South Dakota hotel room, remarried the following Monday, was socially ostracized by her aunt, and died wealthy enough to make her 16-year-old son one of the richest young people in the world. She was granted the freedom the law allowed and denied the children the law could not return to her.
The distance between those two outcomes is the distance the Astor fortune was never designed to close. Her personal fortune, composed of trusts and properties derived from the Astor family that passed to her individually, proved durable despite social ostracism. The fortune survived the family’s rejection, and so did Margaret. But the children she lost in 1890 were gone forever, and the will she would write before her death would make that loss permanent.
She was treated by this system as all its women were treated: given enough income to live brilliantly, denied enough control to live freely, and punished for deviating by isolation, never by poverty. The machine did not care whether she was happy. It cared whether the properties appreciated, whether the trusts survived legal challenges, and whether the family name remained attached to proper marriages. Mrs.
Astor’s list of 400 was the social expression of an economic system, and the economic system behind it, of trusts, their renewal, and the alternation of generations in control and income, survived the list itself by more than a century. Margaret failed that final test, and the family made sure she knew it for the rest of her life. When she died, she passed the punishment forward, disinheriting the children who had been taken from her because they had not shown the love she believed she deserved. The cruelty did not begin with the Astors and did not end with Margaret.
It was inherited like money and continued through trust instruments, wills, disinheritances, and custody battles until everyone in the story had died, and the Manhattan properties kept appreciating. The machine John Jacob Astor built in the early 19th century still operates today in one form or another. The women who passed through it, foremost among them Margaret Laura Astor Carey, left behind a record that tells us precisely the cost of being born inside it and the cost of leaving it.