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  NOTORIOUS VICTORIA

  THE LIFE OF VICTORIA WOODHULL, UNCENSORED

  MARY GABRIEL

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  This book is dedicated to

  Owen Stinchcombe

  So after all I am a very promiscuous free lover. I want the love of you all, promiscuously. It makes no difference who or what you are, old or young, black or white, pagan, Jew, or Christian, I want to love you all and be loved by you all, and I mean to have your love. If you will not give it to me now, these young, for whom I plead, will in after years bless Victoria Woodhull for daring to speak for their salvation.

  —VICTORIA WOODHULL

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Homer, 1850

  San Francisco, 1855

  St. Louis, 1865

  PART TWO

  Pittsburgh, 1868

  New York City, 1868

  New York City, September 1869

  New York City, February 1870

  New York City, April 1870

  New York City, May 1870

  New York City, November 1870

  PART THREE

  Washington, D.C., January 1871

  Washington, D.C., February 1871

  New York City, April 1871

  New York City, Early May 1871

  New York City, Mid-May 1871

  New York City, Late May 1871

  New York City, June 1871

  New York City, July 1871

  New York City, August 1871

  Troy, September 1871

  Hartford, October 1871

  New York City, Early November

  New York City, Late November 1871

  New York City, December 1871

  Washington, D.C., January 1872

  New York City, May 9, 1872

  New York City, May 10, 1872

  Boston, September 1872

  PART FOUR

  New York City, November 2, 1872

  New York City, November 5, 1872

  New York City, November 20, 1872

  New York City, January 1873

  New York City, June 1873

  New York City, June 23, 1873

  Chicago, September 1873

  New York City, Late September 1873

  New York City, March 1874

  New York City, August 1874

  New York City, April 1875

  New York City, May 1875

  New York City, October 1876

  PART FIVE

  London, August 1877

  London, October 1883

  London, October 1885

  New York City, April 1886

  London, January 1893

  London, February 1894

  London, January 1895

  Las Palmas, March 1897

  London, December 1901

  Bredon’s Norton, August 1914

  Bredon’s Norton, June 9, 1927

  Cosmopolitical Party Platform

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  On February 5, 1870, Woodhull, Claflin & Co. formally opened its doors to the public, sending the perfumed scent of a new breed of broker wafting through the halls of finance then dominated by the masculine odors of cigars and champagne. In a front-page story, the New York Sun sounded the warning that change had come to Wall Street with the headline “Petticoats Among The Bovine and Ursine Animals.”

  At the stock and gold exchanges, the news of a brokerage firm operated by women was greeted with a frenzy of speculation. The presence on Wall Street of Victoria C. Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin created a commotion only slightly less dramatic than a crash. From early morning until the close of business, men and boys crowded the sidewalk outside their office at 44 Broad Street, peering through the windows and doors to get a look at this new creature—the female broker. Jostling for a view they shouted to each other. “They know a thing or two.” “When will this end?” “Two thousand visitors for two ladies within eight hours.” “Stocks will go sky high.”

  Inside, shielded from the crowds by a doorkeeper and a sign that read GENTLEMEN WILL STATE THEIR BUSINESS AND THEN RETIRE AT ONCE, the sisters were busy making history. It would be another century before a woman would hold a seat in her own name on the New York Stock Exchange, and possibly never again would a pair of female financiers cause such a stir.

  A steady stream of visitors mounted the stairs to the sisters’ office that day, including elderly women hoping to invest their life savings. And young women, “fresh and fair as pippins . . . bewitched by curiosity and afterwards delighted with all they saw and heard, left the premises bethinking themselves that there were other things to live for besides cosmetics, the toilet, fashion and vanity,” reported New York’s Herald. But most of the estimated four thousand visitors that day were men. Old war veterans “who [had] been stumping it for a long time on short legs” and aristocrats with “silver beards and golden memories” made the climb. The representatives of every banking and brokerage house in the city paid the new firm a call, as did scores of posturing young dandies eager to make the acquaintance of the lady brokers.

  For their opening day, the sisters dressed alike, wearing dark blue walking suits elaborately trimmed in black silk and jockey hats (also of black silk) set jauntily on their heads. The Herald noted, “The gold pens poised on their pretty ears formed a topic of unusual interest for the gouty old war horses of the street.” The elder partner in the firm, thirty-one-year-old Victoria, was elegant, reserved, and intelligent. Tennessee, at twenty-four, was voluptuous, vivacious, and quick witted. The mischievous younger sister fairly burst out of her business costume.

  “The ladies received their visitors with a coolness and an eye to business that drew forth the plaudits and the curses of old veterans,” the Herald reported. “Hosts of friends with advanced ideas put forth their opinions and proffered their counsels, and hosts who came to scoff and to mock the gentle lionesses, who dared to take a stand in the most stormy and uncertain arena of life, pressed forward, but the blandishments and the opinions of all comers were received with an amount of dare-devil self-possession that indicated to the ‘Street’ that Woodhull, Claflin & Co. appreciated the situation, that they knew their business, and that they proposed to take the stand like men.”

  The remarkable sisters had arrived in New York City two years earlier, after amassing a small fortune traveling caravan-style through the fallow fields and ruined towns of the Civil War, offering their services as clairvoyants and spiritualist healers. Their path to Wall Street was made easier by the legendary tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, who, at seventy-three, had been one of the sisters’ “patients” before becoming young Tennessee’s lover and patron. But while Vanderbilt’s assistance was helpful, it was the sisters’ own ingenuity that won them praise and publicity, and it was Victoria’s ambition that propelled them.

  The uneducated daughter of a petty criminal, Victoria Claflin Woodhull nonetheless envisioned for herself a brilliant future. From the time of her miserable first marriage at age fifteen to a man twice her age and the birth of her mentally retarded son a year later, Victoria had vowed to become a leader in the fight for women’s rights. She was determined that no woman should be forced to endure her early heartache, to offer her body—in marriage or on the street—in exchange for financial security. For Victoria, the fight for women’s equality was not simply a matter of gaining access to the ballot box—it was a matter of winning the much more basic right of self-ownership.

  The opening of Woodhull, Claflin & Co. was a crucial step toward Victoria’s goal. It would provide the financial backing she needed to wage war on Victorian sensibilities and thrus
t her into the public spotlight, where she would begin her crusade for women’s rights. The firm’s successful debut left Victoria exuberant and appeared to prove her often expressed belief that women could advance, support themselves, and prosper—if only they dared to try: “I tell you that men will always respect women when they compel it, by their actions; and if women to-day would rise en masse and demand their emancipation the men would be compelled to grant it,” Victoria wrote several years later. “The women of the country have the power in their own hands, in spite of the law and the government being altogether of the male order. Let women issue a declaration of independence sexually, and absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equals in everything, and the victory would be won in a single week.”

  Using the proceeds from her brokerage business and advice from a host of radical thinkers, Victoria would set about attacking in print and on the lecture circuit the hypocrisy and corruption she found in the worlds of finance, politics, and religion. She would also boldly live the life of social freedom that she preached. Men and women who would not attend a lecture by any of the other upright women reformers—Susan B. Anthony or Lucretia Mott, for example—gladly parted with a few coins for a ticket and braved the crushing crowds when Victoria was in town. Whether they agreed with her or not, the intelligent and comely woman with flashing blue eyes was sure to shock with her frank discussion of sexuality, and equally sure to captivate with her fearless muckraking. She became the most notorious and polarizing woman of her day, hailed by admirers as “Queen Victoria” and denounced by critics as “Mrs. Satan.”

  After she made history with her brokerage firm, Victoria quickly added a series of other “firsts” to her name. Her newspaper Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly was the first American publication to reprint the Communist Manifesto. In 1871 she became the first woman in history to address a committee of the U.S. Congress, and in 1872 she became the first woman to run for president.

  It was a meteoric and, some would argue, reckless ascent that ended in disaster.

  On election day, November 5, 1872, when she should have been focused on her presidential bid, Victoria was imprisoned in New York City on a trumped-up charge of sending obscene material through the mail. She was left discredited, bankrupt, and abandoned. In the end, the woman who had been widely recognized by the press and the public as the leader of the women’s rights movement in the early 1870s did not even earn a mention in the index when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony compiled their six-volume, 899-page account of the early women’s movement. One of America’s most fascinating women was left along the roadside of history to be forgotten. Of course, Victoria herself identified the reason—she was ahead of her time.

  PART ONE

  A thing is only as strong as its weakest link and that family was the weak link.

  —VICTORIA WOODHULL

  Directed by a spirit guide, Victoria arrived in New York City in 1868 ready to realize her dream of becoming a leader of her people.

  (Alberti and Lowe Collection, ca. 1869)

  HOMER, 1850

  Home to young Victoria Claflin was a wooden shack on the side of a hill in a town with one intersection in the middle of the vast state of Ohio. If there was a world beyond the endless rolling hills and fields, it wasn’t apparent. On the south side of Homer’s main street was the large and prosperous Williams Mound Farm with its stately two-story home and twenty-five-foot-high Indian burial mound in the yard. The north side of the street was lined with as many well-painted storefronts as a town of fewer than three hundred could support. And on the back side of the main street, clinging like a barnacle in the shadow of the shops and storefronts, was the Claflin residence.

  In later years, when Victoria was in the business of reinventing her past, she would describe the Claflin home as a crisply painted white structure surrounded by lovingly tended flowers. But in reality Victoria’s birthplace was a twenty-five-foot-long, one-story unpainted frame hovel so rickety that the other children in Homer liked to run along the porch to hear the boards rattle.

  Victoria, born September 23, 1838, was the sixth of ten children, one of whom died before she was born. She was a gifted, lovely, and determined child, a rare jewel in a quarrelsome and indolent family that was considered the town trash. One admiring neighbor remarked that it was a shame the promising young girl had been born a Claflin.

  From her father Victoria learned to bend, if not break, the law, and from her mother she learned to communicate with spirits. Reuben Buckman “Buck” Claflin was a one-eyed, one-man crime spree. The Homer shopkeeper Jacob Yoakam was known to say that Buck Claflin “could see more deviltry to do with that one eye than any two men with their four eyes.” A census report from the time listed Buck’s occupation as lawyer, but his career indicated that any background he may have had in the law was aimed at learning how to get around it. Among his alleged crimes were theft, counterfeiting, and arson.

  Victoria’s mother, Roxanna Hummel Claflin, was a religious zealot who gave birth every two years, on average, over a twenty-year period. Anna, as she was known, was as homely as her daughter was beautiful. Her face was a shriveled triangle punctuated by small eyes and a tiny, tight mouth. She was an abrasive personality given to ecstasies whose nightly constitutional most often included a trip to a nearby orchard where she would pray loudly and tearfully for the sins of her fellow Homerites and in the same hour curse till her lips were white with foam. She was the type of person referred to politely as eccentric but in more honest moments as just plain crazy. Still, there was a streak of brilliance behind that imploded face: Anna’s memory was so good she could recite the Bible backward.

  Beginning early in life, Victoria was given to ecstasies, perhaps as a way of escaping the small town’s disapprobation of her family or perhaps as a means of escaping the wrath of her father, who was known to beat his children with a willow or walnut tree switch that had been soaking in water in anticipation of the character-building exercise. At various times she described her first encounter with the spirit world as having occurred at birth, at age three, and at age ten. But no matter when she said it happened, each recounting of the experience detailed an escape to the netherworld through the intercession of a spirit guide, and each ecstatic revelation reinforced Victoria’s notion that she was planted on the Earth to do more than multiply: “When I first saw the light of day on this planet,” she wrote about her birth, “it seemed as if I had been rudely awakened from a death-like sleep. How well I remember the conversation between the doctor and my father as they handed me over to the nurse. I remember looking back at my mother’s face at that moment, the look of pain and anguish on it was burnt into my plastic brain, and often during my young babyhood I would watch as she suckled me. Somehow she was impelled to talk to me, not as a child, but as her own heart, pouring out all her woman’s desires and bemoaning her failures. I remember well how the silent prayers, when her lips were moving, would stir my heart, and as I look back over the years from childhood to maturity, I realize that there was some subtle power of transmutation at work, for somehow, from the very first moment, I seemed to know all the future without being able to give any expression in words. . .. I know that my companions from the moment of birth were heaven’s choicest souls. . .. I grew side by side with them, in fact all the education and inspiration came over them.”

  Victoria’s earthly education consisted of a total of three years of elementary school, which she attended off and on between ages eight and eleven. At school she was referred to—possibly mockingly—as “the little queen,” in part because she shared the name Victoria with the British monarch but also because of her regal bearing, despite her squalid roots. But even if her title did derive from sneers, she appeared to take her role as a leader seriously. From a very early age Victoria believed herself destined for great things. She had nothing and wanted much.

  In Homer, residents remembered her at age eleven, crowned by thick uncombed hair, narrat
ing Bible stories from atop the Williams Farm Indian mound, which she renamed the Mount of Olives, and when the children listening grew restless, she abandoned Scripture for Indian stories, with which she held them captive. It was on that mound that the uneducated, unkempt, and dirty child first thrilled to an audience’s approval.

  It wouldn’t be long, however, before a family crisis would force Victoria to leave her audience behind in Homer. Buck Claflin had purchased a gristmill and, as with most of his legitimate enterprises, he was having a difficult time making a go of it. What actually happened was not clear, but given Buck’s reputation and the circumstantial evidence, it was generally agreed that he decided to rid himself of the burden the mill had become by burning it to the ground one stormy night in an attempt to pocket five hundred dollars in insurance money.

  The mill fire was the last straw for the town, which had put up with the rogue in its midst for more than a decade. Buck heard the rumblings before he saw the stampede and managed to escape Homer, leaving his family behind. The locals were not prepared to support the Claflin clan, however, so the Presbyterian church held a fund-raiser to buy Anna and her children a horse-drawn wagon and enough supplies to get them out of town.

  If any Homerites had qualms about ejecting the Claflins, they likely soon disappeared. After the family had gone, the town discovered that Buck had used his brief appointment as postmaster to his own advantage: he had left behind a pile of undelivered mail addressed to Homer residents, and the envelopes that indicated there was money inside had all been opened and the money was gone.

  The Claflin clan, rejoined by Buck, rolled into Mount Gilead, Ohio, not far from Homer, where Victoria’s eldest sister, Margaret Ann, known as Maggie, lived with her husband, Enos Miles, and their three children. By the time the Claflins moved on to Mount Gilead, the family’s composition had changed. Two of the children, Odessa and Hester, had died, but there were two other healthy girls to take their place: Utica, named after a nearby town, was born in 1843, and Tennessee, born in 1845, was named after the home state of President James Polk as a tribute to Buck’s presidential aspirations. Victoria’s second eldest sister, Mary, though not listed in genealogy records as married at the time, had also added a child to the Claflin brood, giving birth in 1850 to a daughter named Zilpha. And Victoria’s two brothers, despite Anna’s appeals that the family remain united, would leave the noisy flock to set out on their own. Maldon married his cousin Corintha Claflin, and Hebern moved to Illinois, where he married Mary Ann Edwards. The remaining crew of Claflins moved into the American House, a hotel that Enos Miles owned. Considering the number of family members under its roof, it’s questionable whether there was any room for guests.