Cuckolding, incest and worse: They were the perfect socialite couple, but their sordid sex adventures make The White Lotus look tame

At their wedding, dashing young Peter Strong and his beautiful wife, Mary, seemed the perfect couple. Both came from esteemed old-money, high-society New York families. Both were charming, well-educated, and apparently very much in love.

Twelve years later, the Strongs’ storybook marriage collapsed catastrophically – and very publicly – in the divorce courts. 

It was 1862, and Peter sued Mary on the grounds of adultery, and headlines from Boston to San Francisco reported it all in lurid detail: a secret abortion, child abduction, even incest.

Not only were the allegations shocking – they would be even today; the fictional incest storyline in The White Lotus was too much for many. But almost no one at the time divorced, especially among the Strongs’ elite social circle. Marriage was ordained by God and country, and legally ending a union was a rare, shameful, and difficult process. 

In fact, the only way anyone could divorce in mid-19th century New York state was for one spouse to publicly accuse the other of adultery – and the accused spouse had to be found guilty in order for a divorce to be granted.

That kind of scandal was anathema to the so-called best families of the day, who saw themselves as role models of propriety and dignity. Women were supposed to be pure and genteel; men to be upright and honorable. Whatever disreputable behavior might happen, it was supposed to remain private and hidden.

But nothing remained private and hidden about the Strongs’ marital turmoil. The divorce trial, Strong v Strong, exploded at the end of the Civil War, as the nation was on the cusp of a new era – the Gilded Age. 

Although the Strong trial’s salacious details shocked the nation, they also signaled that times were changing.

At first, the marriage of Peter and Mary Strong seemed to go smoothly, though temperamental differences existed from the start. Peter, a lawyer who managed his family’s rental properties in Manhattan, otherwise lived the leisured life of a gentleman on an inherited income. Genial and good-natured, he was something of a social butterfly and sportsman.

Mary, on the other hand, was more serious and bookish than her husband, and she also had a streak of independence, unusual in a woman of her day. According to law and custom, a married woman was subservient to her husband, her identity subsumed by his. She was not allowed to sign a legal contract, to refuse sex with her husband, or to disobey his lawful wishes and demands.

One of Peter’s wishes, following the couple’s honeymoon, was to abandon bustling Manhattan and move miles away to his family’s rural compound on Long Island. Called Waverly, it was a sprawling country estate that also housed his wealthy, widowed mother and four of his siblings, along with their spouses, children, and household staff.

Within a year, Mary was pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Mamie.

Four years later, she welcomed a second daughter, Allie, and two years after that, little Edith arrived. 

But by then, husband and wife were living increasingly separate lives. Mary was busy with motherhood, and Peter was spending more time than ever in Manhattan, overseeing his family’s properties and visiting his clubs.

Stuck at Waverly with her in-laws – and with Peter’s sisters still treating her like an outsider – Mary also began to long for a home of their own.

There was only one member of the family who welcomed her warmly. 

Peter’s younger, widowed brother, Edward, also lived at Waverly, and was just as lonely as his sister-in-law. The pair shared an interest in books, and spent an increasing amount of time together in Peter’s absences, sometimes strolling Waverly’s fields or riding into the nearby village.

But they were much more than just companions. For two years, they’d carried on a torrid affair – under the very noses of the Strong clan.

It wasn’t until Edward left for war, and tragedy struck the family with the death of little Edith, that their carefully choreographed lives imploded in spectacular fashion.

Feeling guilty and grief-stricken, Mary crumbled and confessed everything to her husband.

Horrified that he was being cuckolded by his own brother, Peter nonetheless knew the scandal of divorce would be even worse. 

Mary, too, wished to avoid public disgrace, and being labeled an adulteress. Most terrifying to her was the knowledge that a wife divorced for adultery almost always lost custody of her children.

So she and Peter agreed to a compromise, sharing living quarters but not a bed. Mary then wrote to Edward, ending their affair.

This truce would be short-lived, however – because a few weeks later, Mary discovered she was pregnant. It was unclear if the father was Peter or Edward.

What happened next is shrouded in claims and counter-claims. It is known that a nurse was called to Mary’s bedroom one night; then a doctor; next, an undertaker.

Peter said that his wife had suffered a tragic miscarriage – not her first.

Mary, however, recounted a much more sinister chain of events. She claimed her jealous husband had forced her to have an abortion, a procedure that was illegal at the time, threatening that she would never see her daughters Mamie and Allie again if she refused.

Peter’s friends sprung to his defense, claiming he would never have forced an abortion, but Mary’s allies pointed to suspicious evidence to the contrary.

Enter Electa Potter, a well-known abortionist of the day who also happened to be a tenant of Peter’s. And, around the same time the alleged abortion took place, she happened to receive extremely favorable terms on her rent.

Coincidence? 

Peter and Mary finally gave up any pretense of marriage and separated. 

She retreated to her family’s home, and he remained at Waverly. 

For several months, 10-year-old Mamie and six-year-old Allie, separately and together, were allowed to visit both parents.

Then Peter’s pride got the better of him, and he demanded his paternal rights to full custody of the girls.

Threatened with losing both children, Mary took off with Allie during one of her visits, and the two disappeared.

Peter at last sued his wife for divorce. 

His complaint accused Mary of having frequent and secret ‘carnal connection’ with his brother at Waverly, at her parents’ home, and at other places as the opportunity arose. 

Peter’s lawyer called the lovers’ affair ‘incest’, although no New York law at the time banned intercourse between brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. 

Members of the Strongs’ social circle came down firmly on Peter’s side, but there was one unsurprising exception – Mary’s relatives, including her father, the powerful banker John Austin Stevens, and her beloved sister, Lucretia.

John blamed all the Strongs at Waverly, including Peter’s mother and siblings, for the entire sorry affair.

Where had Mary been living when she allegedly committed adultery? Waverly. Who had seduced her, if indeed adultery could be proved? Edward, Peter’s cad of a brother. Why had no one at Waverly seen what was happening and prevented it?

In his daughter’s absence, John hired lawyers and set out to ruin Peter’s reputation, just as the Strongs had ruined Mary’s. 

Her lawyers countersued Peter for adultery, claiming his lover was none other than Electa Potter, his tenant and Mary’s alleged abortionist.

The strategy of countersuing Peter was a clever one. If he could be proved the adulterous spouse, Mary would be the one to win a divorce and perhaps even gain custody of the children.

But it also was risky. Under New York State law, if both partners in a marriage were found guilty of adultery, a divorce would be denied. In that case, Mary and Peter would be sentenced to remain married.

John had one, even more devastating, trick up his sleeve. Manhattan’s district attorney was a personal acquaintance, and John convinced him to try Peter for manslaughter. The charge was complicity in arranging Mary’s abortion.

However, in a one-day criminal trial, Peter was acquitted of manslaughter for lack of sufficient evidence.

A month later, the long-awaited Strong v Strong divorce trial finally began. It opened on a stormy November day in 1865, the courthouse packed with news-hungry journalists, curious spectators, combative relatives, worried friends, and witnesses for both husband and wife.

The first witness – the Strong children’s governess – was a timid young woman who spoke so softly she could hardly be heard. An elderly, near-deaf servant testified next and shouted every answer. 

The lineup of witnesses came from every walk of life, including a laundress, doctors, policemen, an abortionist, a railroad millionaire, and the uncle of a little boy, Teddy Roosevelt, who would one day be president of the United States.

Peter attended the trial daily. Although Mary was absent, a fugitive, her presence haunted the courtroom. Was she a victim or seductress? Everyone told a different story. Did Mary lure Edward into an affair, or was the situation reversed? Had Peter been a good husband or a brute? Did he force Mary to have an abortion and then commit adultery with the abortionist, or were these false accusations designed to destroy him?

Then, just as it seemed things couldn’t get any more sordid, a deposition given by Lucretia, Mary’s sister, contained a new and even more explosive claim: according to Lucretia, Edward had repeatedly raped Mary.

The trial lasted five weeks and ended on the last day of the year. The jury, as usual in juries of the day, consisted of 12 white men. After deliberating three days, all 12 found Mary guilty of adultery.

However, two jurors – said to have been bribed by John Austin Stevens – found Peter equally guilty of infidelity.

Under New York State law, Mary and Peter were both adulterers and thus condemned to the worst punishment possible: remaining married.

The very public divorce trial did not end the Strongs’ story. The dramatic twists and turns of their relationship continued, affecting not only their own lives but those of their two daughters. Both Mamie and Allie lived on into the Gilded Age, when marital scandal and divorce became more commonplace.

Allie, the little girl abducted long ago by her mother, became embroiled in a tumultuous, very public, breakup of her own.

The renowned American author Edith Wharton – one of Mary’s cousins, only three years old at the time of the trial – became famous for chronicling the transition between what she called ‘old New York’ – with its aura of respectability – and the new New York of the Gilded Age.

As the 19th century drew to a close, it seemed that – much as in our own times – rules increasingly were made to be broken.

Barbara Weisberg is the author of Strong Passions: A Scandalous Divorce in Old New York, a nonfiction account of the lives, times, and remarkable relationship of Peter and Mary Strong, published by WW Norton & Company