Notorious Victoria Page 13

  It was this wounded apparition that visited Victoria in May 1871. Both Victoria and Tilton had been battered by a society that said one thing and did another; that rewarded sinners if they hid their crimes and punished those who owned up to them; that publicly condemned the words “free love” but privately condoned the act.

  Victoria advised the poet to stop “whining” about his situation and she criticized him for his “maudlin sentiment and mock heroics” concerning the affair: “I assumed at once, and got a sufficient admission, as I always do in such cases, that he was not exactly a vestal virgin himself; that his real life was something very different from the ‘awful virtue’ he was preaching . . . that the dreadful ‘suzz’ was merely a bogus sentimentality, pumped in his imagination, because our sickly religious literature and Sunday school morality and pulpit pharaseeism had humbugged him all his life into the belief that he ought to feel and act in this harlequin and absurd way on such an occasion—that in a word, neither Mr. Beecher nor Mrs. Tilton had done anything wrong, but that it was he who was playing the part of a fool and a tyrant.”

  Victoria also said she implored Tilton to “come forward to the front and stand with the true champions of social freedom.” He quickly did so and, she said, with conduct so “magnanimous and grand . . . that it stamped him, in my mind as one of the noblest souls that lived.”

  Within weeks of their meeting, Victoria’s newspaper printed an article declaring Tilton a “rare type of man—almost unique.” For his part, he described Victoria as being one of the “most extraordinary women he had ever met.” By the summer of 1871, Tilton was introducing Victoria on the lecture platform and defending her in print, and Victoria was filling columns in the Weekly with Tilton’s notions on everything from marriage to Mormonism. They rowed together on the Harlem River, bathed in the sea at Coney Island, had late dinners of broiled chicken, cake, and champagne in Victoria’s bedroom, and spent nights alone together on the roof of her house. Victoria later told a reporter that Tilton had been her “devoted lover for more than half a year, and I admit during that time he was my accepted lover. A woman who could not love Theodore Tilton, especially in reciprocation of a generous, impulsive, overwhelming affection such as he was capable of bestowing, must be indeed dead to all the sweeter impulses of our nature. I could not resist his inspiring fascinations.”

  The association with Tilton appeared to invigorate Victoria. Throughout the month of June she became emboldened in print. The Weekly reprinted attacks on Victoria that had appeared in other publications and then, point by point, knocked them down and turned the accusations on the writer or editor responsible for them. To Henry Bowen’s criticism of Victoria in The Independent, the Weekly slammed back, “Does Mr. Bowen keep the whole law? Does he cheat, lie, slander? Does he live up to his own profession? Is his life temperate and chaste? Is he honest and just to his inferiors? Does he fawn and cringe to his superiors? Does the Independent for its own interests countenance and indorse [sic] any persons male or female whom its editors know to be chargeable with the very offenses that the ‘religious paper’ denounces?”

  About society’s double standard in the treatment of women the Weekly asked, “Who ever heard of even a single instance of a man being thrown out of society because he contributed to keep alive houses of ill fame? We have yet to learn of the first case. Society is so one-sidedly virtuous as to thus wink at the infamy of men. . .. Why should a man be tolerated, fostered and recognized as undefiled, even when his whole body is corrupted by the damnable virus of the lowest and most hellish debauchery, when at the same time a woman is utterly proscribed on even the wretchedly flimsy evidence of hearsay?”

  And in response to criticism from Mary Livermore, the editor of the conservative Woman’s Journal and a member of the New England women’s faction, the Weekly stated: “Really, Mrs. Livermore, it is a rather delicate thing for the ‘pot to call the kettle black,’ or for those ‘who live in glass-houses to throw stones,’ and you very well know that most people do live in these brittle tenements. Mrs. Woodhull, however, wishes to most distinctly assert that the freedom she claims for herself she as freely accords to everybody else, and that she will throw no stones, except to protect her own house; and that as she does not assume ‘to be without sin among you,’ she will not throw the first stone at anybody.”

  Victoria’s friends also regained their voices in June and began risking reprisal by publicly defending her against powerful detractors. On June 21, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote to Victoria: “I left New York after our May Conventions sad and oppressed with the barbarism, falsehood and hypocrisy of the press of our country, knowing that when liberty runs into license the reaction that must come is tyranny. . .. It may be a light thing for the press of the country to hold up one frail little woman to public ridicule and denunciation, but this reckless hashing of individual reputations is destructive of all sense of justice and honor among our people, and will eventually force on us a censorship of the press. The grief I felt in the vile raking of your personal and family affairs was three fold—sympathy for you, shame for the men who persecuted you and the dangers I saw in the abuse of one of our greatest blessings, a free press.

  “Why did our editors all over the land dip their pens in gall to crush the one woman whom the Congress of the United States honored, for the first time in the history of our government, with a hearing before the Judiciary Committee of the House and an able report on her memorial? Was it because they so loved purity and principle, and felt the cause of woman’s suffrage too sacred to be advocated by any one not as pure and chaste as Diana? Nay, nay, but because they hated the principle of equality, and could not answer her able argument. . .. When they cannot answer the arguments of reformers, they try to blacken their characters, and thus turn public thought from principles to personalities.”

  Tilton also vociferously supported Victoria and he included her in “A Legend of Good Women” in his journal The Golden Age, along with the veteran reformers Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Livermore, Lucy Stone, and Paulina Wright Davis. In fact, he devoted more space to Victoria than to any of the others: “Victoria C. Woodhull is a younger heroine than most of the foregoing—having come into the cause after some of her elders had already become veterans. But her advocacy of woman’s right to the ballot, as logically deduced from the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, has given her a national notoriety. If the woman’s movement has a Joan of Arc, it is this gentle but fiery genius. She is one of the most remarkable women of her time. Little understood by the public, she is denounced in the most outrageous manner by people who do not appreciate her moral worth. But her sincerity, her truthfulness, her uprightness, her true nobility of character are so well known to those who know her well, that she ranks, in the estimation of these, somewhat as St. Theresa does in the admiring thoughts of pious Catholics. She is a devotee—a religious enthusiast—a seer of visions—a devout communionist with the other world. She acts under spiritual influence, and, like St. Paul, is ‘not disobedient to the heavenly vision.’ Her bold social theories have startled many good souls, but anybody who on this account imagines her to stand below the whitest and purest of her sex will misplace a woman who in moral integrity rises to the full height of the highest.”

  Victoria’s new suitor brandished a pen in a way that must have thrilled her. He was just the man to tell the world who she was, and Victoria asked him to write her biography. During long nights that summer, Victoria recounted for Tilton the story of her childhood and early womanhood. Parts of the story were fiction, but as in everything she said and did there were nuggets of truth. She painted her childhood home in Ohio as a beautiful, high-peaked wooden cottage set in a flower garden, but described the goings-on inside as shameful and cruel. Tilton recorded these facts as related by Victoria and added his own observations: “I shall swiftly sketch the life of Victoria Claflin Woodhull; a young woman whose career has been as singular as any heroine’s in a romance, whose ability is of
a rare and whose character of the rarest type; whose personal sufferings are of themselves a whole drama of pathos; whose name (through the malice of some and the ignorance of others) has caught a shadow in strange contrast with the whiteness of her life.”

  Tilton’s biography also offered insights into Victoria’s reliance on spirits. He wrote, “I must now let out a secret. She acquired her studies, performed her work, and lived her life by the help (she believes) of heavenly spirits. From her childhood till now (having reached her thirty-third year) her anticipation of the other world has been more vivid than her realization of this. She has entertained angels, and not unawares. These gracious guests have been her constant companions. They abide with her night and day. They dictate her life with daily revelations; and like St. Paul, she is not disobedient to the ‘heavenly vision’. . .. Like a Greek of olden times she does nothing without consulting her oracles. . .. In pleasant weather she has a habit of sitting on the roof of her stately mansion on Murray Hill, and there communing hour by hour with the spirits.

  “Moreover, I may as well mention here as later, that every characteristic utterance which she gives to the world is dictated while under spirit-influence, and most often in a totally unconscious state. The words that fall from her lips are garnered by the swift pen of her husband, and published almost verbatim as she gets and gives them.”

  He concluded, “To see her is to respect her—to know her is to vindicate her. She has some impetuous and headlong faults, but were she without the same traits which produce these she would not possess the mad and magnificent energies which (if she lives) will make her a heroine of history.”

  Tilton’s tribute to Victoria severely damaged him. Hearth and Home magazine’s response was typical of the reactions his encomium received. It ran an obituary on Tilton, that said, “The brave Theodore Tilton is dead and replaced by a ‘pseudo-Tilton,’ who uses the graces of rhetoric to gild the character of a woman about whom it is enough to say that she edits a paper abominable in morals and coarse in its utterances! There is a Tilton who writes insane things about spirits of ancient Greek orators inspiring the meretricious rhetoric of a woman who advocates free love!”

  Tilton, however, remained forever gallant. He responded, “you chide me for vindicating a lady who has suffered more private sorrow, and more public obloquy, than fall to the lot of ordinary mortals. This criticism I accept with pride. When I know a woman well, and believe her to be honorable and pure, and she is attacked by the ‘mob of gentlemen who write with ease,’ and is reviled by slanderers who strike at her from the safe shelter of an anonymous press, I hope I shall never be coward enough to withhold my own poor pen from her defense.”

  NEW YORK CITY, JULY 1871

  My Dear Davis,

  I have been in such a rush of matters that my brain really whirls with their admixture. Late last week some new affairs began to develop themselves which have kept me continually engaged ever since. That was the cause of my sudden change in going to you. I cannot tell you all about what is going on now, but watch for next weeks [sic] paper which will give you a clue to it.

  Political matters are developing so fast that we must not let a single thing slip without use. I endeavor to make the most of everything, and expect something from the Labor Convention which meets in St. Louis Aug. 7th. I want to go there but fear it will be impossible.

  With ever so much love I am always Yours

  Victoria C. Woodhull

  The “political matters” that Victoria breathlessly mentioned in her letter to Paulina Wright Davis included the formation of two new International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) sections in New York City that month and her decision to align herself with the international labor movement. As she had with the women’s movement, Victoria took a front seat among the American communists: she and Tennie were named the heads of the IWA’s Section 12 in New York City.

  In March 1871, the Commune of Paris had been reestablished as an opposition government to the Third Republic in France. The revolutionaries were linked to Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association, which had been founded in London in 1864 and by 1871 had sprouted branches in various European capitals and every large city in the United States. Ben Butler, Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Colonel Blood were all sympathetic to the French communards, despite the fact that the mainstream U.S. press portrayed the revolutionaries in shrieking head lines as guardians of the gates of hell. The very notion of the communards occupying Paris sent shudders up and down Wall Street and Fifth Avenue, whose residents saw themselves as the potential victims of a similar uprising by restless American workers, who had begun to agitate for an eight-hour workday.

  In the second half of the nineteenth century, the profile of American labor changed dramatically. Many workers went from being independent tradesmen to being wage laborers, with more and more of them concentrated in large factories. At the same time, millions of immigrants swelled the population of U.S. cities, particularly New York, and began to compete for jobs. Women joined this new labor force, whether through choice or necessity, filling the textile mills in Massachusetts, the sewing factories in New York, and, increasingly, the offices of companies throughout the nation. The three Ts—the telephone, the telegraph, and the newly redesigned typewriter—all played a key role in opening the workplace to women.

  This mass of workers, many of whom were dislocated and dissatisfied, was viewed as a powerful beast that needed restraining. What the upper class feared most, one historian of the period wrote, was the potential for “unbridled democracy.” On the other side, labor unions and the International Workingmen’s Association also saw the vast potential of these workers and offered to win the roiling mass its rights.

  Before the Paris Commune, the IWA had been of some concern to governments and business because of its involvement in strikes and labor agitation, but after the commune, brief though it was, the IWA was seen as a more direct threat because of its part in the violent French revolt. U.S. newspapers reported that the country was not safe from class warfare because the same conditions that sparked the Paris Commune existed in American cities. The New York press seized on the IWA’s habit of referring to its members as “citizens,” which was also the moniker employed by the communards. The New York Evening Telegraph warned that the city’s communists could easily become “the same repulsive monsters” as the Paris revolutionaries. The New York Times wrote that the IWA was a “refuge of political agitators, paupers, philosophers, and the least reputable elements in all countries.”

  The IWA had only several thousand members in the United States in 1871, but the press put the number at 300,000. By July 1871, Victoria Woodhull counted herself among them. Victoria may have viewed the move as protective: her new constituency of workers would be a symbolic army to protect her against attack from the privileged class that continued to heap scorn upon her. It was that very class of critics that had the most to lose if the grubby mass of workers, whose labor subsidized their champagne and terrapin soup, demanded its rights.

  Section 12, which Victoria headed, became the leading American section of the IWA, having both a personality at its head and instant publicity at its disposal. In July, the Weekly began to feature prominently news on the Internationals; it financed a thousand printed editions of the text “The Civil War in France”; and in August the paper reprinted an interview with Karl Marx. Under the guidance of its philosopher-in-residence, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Section 12 endorsed the IWA platform on wages, workdays, strikes, and support of the Paris Commune, and added to that support of women’s suffrage, free love, and, ever Andrews’s pet project, a universal language.

  The other political matter that Victoria had hinted at in her letter to Mrs. Davis was the establishment of a new organization to support her presidential bid. With the addition of the labor movement, and more support among spiritualists following the release of Tilton’s biography of her, Victoria’s audience was growing. Her critics might have been surprised by her re
siliency. Their efforts to discredit and stifle her had failed and by midsummer she was an even more formidable foe. On July 4, a mysterious group calling itself the Victoria League announced that it was supporting Victoria Woodhull for the presidency in 1872 under the Equal Rights Party, which was open to both men and women. The group said that it hoped to draw members from the Republicans and the Democrats and that its platform had only one objective: the equal civil and political rights of all American citizens, without regard to sex. The group’s return address was a post office box in New York City and no names were attached to its announcement, but it was rumored to have Vanderbilt’s backing.

  The Golden Age sent a “special reporter” to Vanderbilt to investigate The “Victorines.” The reporter asked the Commodore if it was true that he was president of the group. “At this bull’s eye remark,” the reporter noted, “the aged man appeared suddenly to renew his youth. He was evidently pleased—possibly even flattered . . . but with rare self possession, he suddenly recollected that he was in the presence of a newspaper reporter, and as he hates ‘interviewing’—he became superbly reticent and majestically dumb. He would neither confess nor deny the presidency of the Victoria League; but simply said that there were two other presidencies in which he was somewhat interested, the New York Central to which he confidently expected a renomination of himself and the other the presidency of the United States, an honor which, he trusted, would fall upon his brave, brilliant and cosmopolitical friend Mrs. Victoria C. Woodhull.”

  Victoria accepted the Equal Rights Party’s nomination. In a published response to the Victoria League, she said that if, after being acquainted with all her faults and all the scores of other women able to lead the party to the White House, the league still chose her as its candidate, she would accept the challenge. She also said, “I have sometimes thought, myself, that there is, perhaps something providential and prophetic in the fact that my parents were prompted to confer on me a name which forbids the very thought of failure; and, as the great Napoleon believed the star of his destiny, you will at least excuse me, and charge it to the credulity of the woman, if I believe also in fatality of triumph as somehow inhering to my name.”