Notorious Victoria Read online

  Beecher became the first pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn in 1847 and, through the sheer power of his speech and personality, helped fill its expensive pews and raise the value of its property for investors whose tax-free bonds supported the church, ultimately making Plymouth hugely profitable and himself nationally known. For two years, beginning in 1861, he was also the editor of The Independent, a widely circulated religious newspaper that spread his message to people who weren’t able to secure a spot in his church. By 1870 he had taken over editorship of The Christian Union, had written a novel, Norwood, and was embarking on the biography of no less a personage than Jesus Christ.

  Beecher was a fleshy man—jowled, heavy-lidded, with full, sensuous lips. He was a holy hedonist who surrounded himself with flowers, draped himself in fine clothes and capes, and carried opals in his pocket, which he fingered as other men jingle coins. But his wife, Eunice, who the community privately called “the griffin,” was not a hedonist or a lover of fine things, so Beecher secretly sought amorous encounters elsewhere.

  The story of one of Beecher’s affairs had been conveyed to Victoria earlier that year by Paulina Wright Davis and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who told her that Beecher had had a love affair with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of his much younger colleague Theodore Tilton. The gossip had been whispered among reformers and associates of Beecher and Tilton for months and, by the time Victoria learned of it, had already wreaked personal havoc for the two families. But like many other such affairs, it had remained a private scandal, discussed only in select homes behind closed doors. Victoria would often say that she had little interest in the particulars of the affair but that she was irked by the hypocrisy of it all: while Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton were being protected from exposure of their infidelities, she was being pilloried by Beecher’s sisters in Beecher’s newspaper simply for stating her beliefs.

  By the spring of 1871, Catharine and Harriet were busy investigating Victoria’s past in an effort to discredit her. They published anonymous letters in the press and articles in The Christian Union and The Independent that were critical of the woman they saw as capable of great mischief. Isabella Beecher Hooker, who was twenty-two years younger than her sister Catharine, was being pressured to disavow Victoria. She refused. She was so thoroughly convinced of Victoria’s virtue that she believed her sisters would be too—if only they met her. Isabella arranged for her sister Catharine to take a carriage ride in Central Park with Victoria.

  The carriage that rolled through the park that day might as well have held women from different planets, so unlike were Victoria Woodhull and Catharine Beecher. They were not only separated by age—Victoria was thirty-three, Catharine, seventy-one—but they had lived in two separate worlds. Victoria’s women—herself and those she was fighting for—were the wives and mothers struggling to put food on the table and clothes on their children—whether that meant working behind a typewriter or in a brothel. She had no delusions about what women were forced to endure in order to survive.

  Catharine Beecher had never seen those struggles, or if she had, had not been sufficiently impressed by them to consider them worth her while. She once wrote that she agreed with Alexis de Tocqueville’s assessment that American women were privileged because they were never compelled to perform labor or conduct business outside the home and that no families were so poor as to necessitate an exception to that rule.

  Catharine later said of her encounter with the younger reformer: “I accepted an invitation from Victoria Woodhull to ride with her in Central Park. The result was an impression that she was either insane or the hapless victim of malignant spirits. For she calmly informed me that several distinguished editors, clergymen and lady authors of this city, some of them my personal friends and all of them models of domestic purity and virtue, not only held her opinions on free love but practiced accordingly, and that it was only a lack of moral courage that prevented their open avowal of such opinions. I concealed all this excepting from a few personal friends, because it is cruelty and a disgrace to any person of delicacy and refinement, especially to ladies, to have their names and character publicly subjected to injury as to such practices.”

  Victoria later said, “[During the meeting I told Catharine] what I knew about her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, and other eminent men and women. . . . She took it upon herself to vouch for Mr. Beecher’s faithfulness to his marriage vows, though I compelled her to admit she had no positive knowledge which could justify her so doing.” Victoria said Catharine left her with a threat: “Remember Victoria Woodhull, that I shall strike you dead.” To which Victoria said she replied, “Strike as much and as hard as you please, only don’t do it in the dark so that I cannot know who is my enemy.”

  NEW YORK CITY, LATE MAY 1871

  Victoria had let her family, her friends, and her critics define her, all the while hoping in vain that her work would speak for itself and help her rise above the petty scandals. But the public would always be more interested in personal jealousies and character broadsides than in lofty ideas. The attacks continued. By the end of May, Victoria had decided to defend herself. If she were to be drawn into a fight, she would make clear that she had powerful weapons at her disposal.

  On May 22, 1871, Victoria wrote a letter to The New York Times: “Because I am a woman, and because I conscientiously hold opinions somewhat different from the self-elected orthodoxy which men find their profit in supporting; and because I think it my bounden duty and my absolute right to put forward my opinions and to advocate them with my whole strength, self-elected orthodoxy assails me, vilifies me, and endeavors to cover my life with ridicule and dishonor. This has been particularly the case in reference to certain law proceedings into which I was recently drawn by the weakness of one very near relative and the profligate selfishness of other relatives.

  “One of the charges made against me is that I lived in the same house with my former husband, Dr. Woodhull, and my present husband, Col. Blood. The fact is a fact. Dr. Woodhull being sick, ailing and incapable of self-support, I felt it my duty to myself and to human nature that he should be cared for, although his incapacity was in no wise attributable to me. My present husband, Col. Blood, not only approves of this charity, but co-operates in it. I esteem it one of the most virtuous acts of my life. But various editors have stigmatized me as a living example of immorality and unchastity.

  “My opinions and principles are subjects of just criticism. I put myself before the public voluntarily. I know full well that the public will criticize me and my motives and actions, in their own way and at their own time. I accept the position. I except to no fair analysis and examination, even if the scalpel be a little merciless.

  “But let him who is without sin cast his first stone. I do not intend to be made the scape-goat of sacrifice, to be offered up as a victim to society by those who cover over the foulness of their lives and the feculence of their thoughts with hypocritical mouthing of fair professions, and by diverting public attention from their own iniquity and pointing the finger at me. I know that many of my self-appointed judges and critics are deeply tainted with the vices they condemn. I live in one house with one who was my husband; I live as the wife with one who is my husband. I believe in Spiritualism; I advocate free love in the highest, purest sense, as the only cure for the immorality, the deep damnation by which men corrupt and disfigure God’s most holy institution of sexual relations. My judges preach against ‘free love’ openly, practice it secretly. Their outward seeming is fair; inwardly they are full of ‘dead men’s bones and all manner of uncleanness.’ For example, I know of one man, a public teacher of eminence, who lives in concubinage with the wife of another public teacher of almost equal eminence. All three concur in denouncing offenses against morality. ‘Hypocrisy is the tribute paid by vice to virtue.’ So be it. But I decline to stand up as ‘the frightful example.’ I shall make it my business to analyze some of these lines, and will take my chances in the matter of libel suits.r />
  “I have faith in critics, but I believe in public justice. Victoria C. Woodhull. New York, Saturday, May 20, 1871.”

  Two days later another letter appeared in The Times: “If I be a ‘notorious woman,’ a person with ‘soiled hands,’ and so forth. (I need not sully your columns with the filth and impurity of which I have been the target,) if I be all this, and thereby am rendered unfit to represent and advocate the woman’s cause, how is it with those—my opponents—who are themselves reprobate, and of impure life and conversation? I ask by what equity and justice a woman is to be held accused on the mere imputation of offenses which her accusers may commit without condemnation?

  “Let me ask a question of any one versed in public affairs. What man with sufficient ability and wealth to support a party is ever attacked on the score of his immorality or irreligion; in other words, for his drunkenness, blasphemy or licentiousness? These are his private life. To go behind a man’s hall-door is mean, cowardly, unfair opposition. This is the polemical code of honor between men. Why is a woman to be treated differently? I claim as a matter of justice, by no means as of ‘gentle courtesy,’ that the same rule be observable toward the woman journalist or politician as toward the man.

  “This is natural equity; it is over and above the abuse of speech by lying and slanderous imputation.

  “I think you will acquit me of egotism in alluding to Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly; the same argument applies to the Weekly that applies to its editors. If the Weekly happen in the exercise of its critical functions, to trench on the conduct or management of trading or corporate bodies, a howl resounds through the street, ‘Those women! those adventuresses! Black-mail!’ If, without naming any one, notorious spots or blemishes are alluded to, whispers come round how Scrooze & Dickhoff intend to squelch those women, and drive them out of Broad-street. Let us see!

  “Woman suffrage will succeed, despite this miserable guerrilla opposition, and the Weekly is strong enough to take care of itself. But I only repeat: Is it fair to treat a woman worse than a man, and then revile her because she is a woman?”

  And later, in response to an assault on her domestic arrangements in The Tribune by Horace Greeley, Victoria responded: “I was divorced from Dr. Woodhull for reasons which to me were sufficient, but I was never his enemy. He continued to need my friendship, and he has had it. My children continued to prize and to need his affection and presence, and they have had them.”

  But Victoria’s critics were ready with their pens in response. On May 25, The New York Times ran a letter signed “A Wife and Mother” that read: “I was both surprised and pained to read a communication in your edition of last Monday, from a woman who not only lives a life of infamy, but has had the unblushing effrontery to uphold and justify her conduct in the sacred name of ‘charity’. . .. A publication of that kind, although couched in decent language, is so disgusting in its details as to be offensive in the highest degree to the mortal sense of the respectable portion of the public.

  “She must, indeed, be lost to every sense of virtue and decency who can make the acknowledgment to the world that at the time of all others when a husband most needs a true wife’s care, during sickness or incapacity of any kind, he is thrown aside, like so much rubbish, and another, for the nonce, substituted in his place.”

  Victoria could not defend herself in the face of a public so biased against her. Blood certainly couldn’t defend her—he was caught up in the scandal. Vanderbilt had become more distant under the influence of his new wife. Andrews was no help—he was the embodiment of free love. Butler had his own problems, fighting an uphill battle to become governor of Massachusetts. Victoria needed a new defender. As if on cue, in May of 1871, one arrived.

  NEW YORK CITY, JUNE 1871

  There are three accounts concerning how Theodore Tilton came into Victoria Woodhull’s life. One is that he was summoned on the morning of May 22, 1871, by Victoria herself after her first letter appeared in The New York Times. In that scenario, Victoria threatened Tilton with exposure unless Beecher called off his sisters. The second version of the encounter is that Tilton was sent by Beecher and another man, Henry Bowen, to meet Victoria, befriend her, and prevent her from publishing what she knew of the Tilton-Beecher affair. A third is that Stephen Pearl Andrews introduced the pair. However he arrived at the Broad Street office, the meeting between Victoria and Tilton was remarkable in that it brought together the “poet knight-errant of reform” and the most controversial and alluring women’s rights advocate in America.

  Both of them were in a vulnerable state that spring. Victoria had been undergoing merciless attacks and, following her family’s messy court case, had been asked by an agent for the owner to vacate her 38th Street home. Tilton said of himself at that time that he was “a man utterly broken down in every one of the points in which a successful life might have continued a success.”

  From Victoria’s battered perspective, however, his beleaguered state wouldn’t have been immediately obvious. Tilton, at thirty-five, was described as a “perfect Adonis with whom any woman of sentiment and refinement would fall in love.” He was tall, handsome in a delicate way, with expressive eyes and thick, wavy auburn hair that he wore long. He was described in the St. Louis Globe that year as “unquestionably the most popular young man in America . . . dashing, fearless, truculent, clear-visioned and not a theological slave.” He was a poet and a journalist who was equally comfortable in the realms of sentiment or vitriol. After he took over the editorship of The Independent in 1863, its readership swelled to sixty thousand and it became the most profitable religious journal in the world. It was more radical than Greeley’s Tribune and more influential than Beecher’s Christian Union, though its circulation was the smallest of the three. But in July 1870 Tilton’s charmed life began to disassemble. His timid wife, Elizabeth, confessed that she had been having an affair with their minister, the man who had married them fifteen years before, Henry Ward Beecher.

  Theodore Tilton, the “poet knight-errant of reform” who became Victoria’s lover in 1871, was described that year as “unquestionably the most popular young man in America.”

  (Collection of the New-York Historical Society, date unknown)

  From 1866 to 1868, Tilton had been away lecturing much of the time, leaving his wife at home in Brooklyn. During that time, he himself had succumbed to adultery, but he confided his transgression to his wife in 1868 and worked that year to rehabilitate his marriage. But before the two were completely reconciled, Tilton was once again called out of state on a lecture tour, leaving his wife and four children to be looked after by their good friend Reverend Beecher.

  At the time, Beecher was trying, not very successfully, to write a novel for which he had been given a generous advance of $24,000. He normally read his drafts to Tilton (who also ghostwrote material for him), but because Tilton was away, he turned to Elizabeth for her opinion. She was flattered by the attention, which her absent husband rarely gave her even when he was at home, and Beecher began to visit every day.

  In August, Elizabeth and Theodore’s son died of cholera, and by October, still alone except for Beecher, Elizabeth was disconsolate. The fifty-five-year-old preacher offered himself in an expression not unlike a bodily “handshake,” as he would later say, to the thirty-two-year-old mother and wife, and the two became lovers. By January 1869, Beecher, who was notorious for not paying his parishioners house calls, had made a dozen “pastoral” visits to Elizabeth, taking her for rides and giving her gifts. But by July 1870 Elizabeth could no longer bear the deception: she cut short a summer holiday and returned home to Brooklyn to confess to her husband.

  Tilton’s immediate response was muted. He and Elizabeth agreed to keep the affair a secret in order to protect her and their children, but also to protect Beecher, who was more than a religious leader to the Plymouth Church circle—he was an investment upon whom many church members’ livelihoods depended. Beecher’s lawyer best summed up the reverend’s importance t
o Brooklyn when he said, “Better were it for the inhabitants of this city that every brick and every stone in its buildings were swallowed by an earthquake, or melted by fire, than that its brightest ornament, its most honored name, should sink into deep infamy.”

  But neither Theodore nor Elizabeth could keep the story secret for long. In December Elizabeth either miscarried or aborted (depending upon who was telling the story) a child Tilton believed was Beecher’s, and by then both Elizabeth and Tilton were unburdening their souls to friends. The story eventually made its way to Victoria.

  By the time Tilton appeared at Victoria’s door, his professional life was also in shambles. Both of his jobs depended upon the largesse of Henry Bowen, who was the financial brains behind Plymouth Church. It was Bowen who had first brought Beecher to Brooklyn, and Bowen who employed Tilton at The Independent and The Brooklyn Union, where Tilton was also listed as editor. But the two men were increasingly at odds over Tilton’s radical positions on social questions and his reluctance to support the Grant administration and a Bowen-backed political candidate involved in a Custom House scandal in New York City.

  In the fall of 1870, Tilton had signed a five-year contract with Bowen making him the highest-paid journalist of his day, but Bowen broke the contract soon after when Tilton, possibly reflecting on his own situation, went too far in an editorial by declaring that “marriage without love is a sin against God.” The concept smacked of free love—too radical for a religious newspaper. Tilton was fired from The Independent but remained at The Brooklyn Union, although he soon lost that job as well, on December 31, 1870, after he told Bowen about Beecher’s affair with Elizabeth. It wasn’t that the publisher was surprised by the revelation—in 1862 Bowen’s own wife made a deathbed confession that she had an affair with Beecher—but eighteen years later Bowen was less interested in doing right by wronged women than he was in protecting Plymouth Church. He sided with Beecher and took away Tilton’s platform in the press.