The Scandalous Hamiltons: A Gilded Age Grifter, A Founding Father's Disgraced Descendant, and a Trial at the Dawn of Tabloid Journalism

It's a story almost too tawdry to be true-a con woman prostitute who met the descendant of a Founding Father in a brothel, duped him into marriage using an infant purchased from a baby farm, then went to prison for stabbing the couple's baby nurse-all while in a common-law marriage with another man. The scandal surrounding Evangeline and Robert Ray Hamilton, though little known today, was one of the sensations of the Gilded Age.



When the salacious Hamilton story emerged during Eva's trial f...