Notorious Victoria Read online

  NEW YORK CITY, AUGUST 1871

  Tennie was nominally a leader in the labor movement with Victoria, a member of the brokerage firm, and an editor of the Weekly, but she was actually casting around for something to do. Perhaps it was Tilton’s appearance that upset the balance at Woodhull, Claflin & Co. The Co.—Colonel Blood—maintained a heroic silence about his wife’s new paramour and continued to work behind the scenes, operating the businesses and contributing to the speeches that bore his wife’s name. Tennie, however, feeling unsatisfied with her position, announced in late June that she was looking for an occupation. In a bylined article in the Weekly she wrote: “I will tell you confidentially that since Mr. Andrews is chief of the Pantarchy and Victoria is chief of the Cosmopolitical Party, I have taken it into my head to be chief of something, and so I shall take it on my hands to carry out this special enterprise. I may perhaps want the help of my friend the Commodore, Rothschild, or whoever else has a few hundred thousands to spare, but I can’t consent to touch a dollar on any terms that would trammel me in the least in my operations. I just want the privilege of showing what my own genius can design and realize. I will have a grand city home, such as the world has not seen, where men and women of letters and genius, great artists and the like, and especially the great leaders of reform of all sorts, shall be as much at home as myself, and shall form the nucleus of a social circle which shall be filled in from every rank in life, according to merit.... What I contemplate is to obtain the lease of one of the large hotels and make it the headquarters of the new ‘Republican Court,’ the focus and centre of the intellect, science, taste, religion, fashion and representative excellence, in all spheres, of this country, and to some extent of the world, as the nucleus of the higher and better style of the society of the future.”

  Tennie may have been making a pitch for new quarters in part because the family’s days on 38th Street were numbered. As early as May they had been asked to move but had managed to hold on, barring some new and unfortunate scene that would raise the eyebrows of their highbrow neighbors. But Tennie’s call for a few hundred thousand went unanswered and so, in early August, she went looking for another occupation.

  On Friday, August 11, Tennie declared herself a candidate for the seat of the largely German Eighth District in Congress. Surrounded by a host of Wall Street notables, local politicians, and reformers, Tennie appeared on the stage at Irving Hall. After a long introduction in German by Dr. Ehrenberg, the president of the German American Progressive Association, Tennie stood amid American and German flags and a large lithograph bearing her image to address the gathering. On page one the following day, The Sun ran the headline “Tennie and the Germans”: “Miss Claflin appeared smiling her acknowledgments of the vociferous cheers and deafening applause that greeted her. She was dressed in a dress of black organdy with a small figure in colors, made en train, and very plainly trimmed. Her hair, which she wears short, hung loose and bushy about her forehead and temples. She wore no jewelry or ornaments. As soon as the applause had subsided she proceeded to speak in a clear, strong voice, using the German language.”

  Tennie opened her address by warning the group, as Victoria frequently did before her speeches, that she was not used to public speaking. She then delivered much the same speech that Victoria had been giving since January: Tennie delineated her position on women’s suffrage and the suitability of women for elected office, she attacked both existing political parties as infringing upon the rights of citizens, and she offered herself as an agent for change. But in Tennie’s hands the call for change stopped well short of the revolution her sister advocated. Tennie’s congressional bid was essentially a caricature of Victoria’s political aspirations.

  Standing at the center of the stage she told the gathering, “So long as I shall represent you in Congress—if by your votes you shall send me there—I shall at least insist that the personal freedom of every individual shall remain untouched. Just as the religious American has the privilege of going to his church on Sunday, so must the right be equally secure to you to seek your recreation on Sunday just where you can find it, and to drink your glass of lager beer in peace and quietness so long as you do not disturb the public order.”

  This lager “right” was met with cries of “Bravo,” cheers, and prolonged applause. The Sun further reported: “At the conclusion of the speech the hall rang again with cheers and applause, in the midst of which Miss Claflin was presented with an elegant basket of flowers, arranged with exquisite taste, the initials ‘T.C.C.’ being formed in monogram in the centre, with ‘M.C. 8th Dist.’ around the outside. On receiving this beautiful token, which was understood to be the gift of her Wall street friends, Miss Claflin retired from the stand. . ..

  “At a later hour in the evening the German admirers of Miss Claflin favored her with a serenade at her palatial residence on Murray Hill. A full military band, one of the best in the city, was provided, and performed some choice selections of operatic airs. Miss Claflin appeared upon the balcony and very briefly returned her thanks for the compliment.”

  There was no report on the reaction of her neighbors to the serenade, but Tennie’s candidacy—like so many of her activities—would inevitably work to undermine Victoria. For people wondering whether the Woodhull, as Victoria was known, was a serious political candidate, Tennie’s congressional bid would have been viewed as ample evidence that she was not.

  TROY, SEPTEMBER 1871

  In September, Victoria was invited to address a spiritualist convention in Vineland, New Jersey. The spiritualists had become more interested in her after one of their ranking members, John Gage, received an advance copy of Tilton’s biography, which detailed the extent to which Victoria relied on spiritual communication for direction. Tilton was invited to attend, but he declined. Colonel Blood accompanied Victoria to Vineland.

  On the first day of the event, September 8, Gage nominated Blood to be the convention’s secretary and Blood duly transcribed the unsolicited and unqualified plaudits his wife received during the two-day meeting. By the end of the convention, Victoria had spoken twice, her biography by Tilton had been read aloud, the resolutions relating to her memorial concerning a woman’s right to vote had been adopted, and two more resolutions had been added: “Resolved, That we tender a vote of thanks to Miss Strickland for her excellent service this morning in reading the biography of Mrs. Victoria C. Woodhull.

  “Resolved, That we deeply appreciate the aid we have received in this Convention from Victoria C. Woodhull; that we hereby declare our firm adherence to the principles of the Equal Rights Party, and that we will labor for the success of its able candidate.”

  The spiritualists were the perfect audience for Victoria. Not only did they believe in spirit communications, as did she, but their meetings bulged with reformers of every type and every class whose pet cause was winning the rights of women. The spiritualists were a heavily matriarchal society. Twenty-three years after the first spirit rappings, they continued to place women in prominent positions, in part because they traditionally made the best mediums. The spiritualists were also an idealistic and optimistic group that, like Victoria, believed mankind would eventually evolve to a higher moral, political, and religious sphere. And they were well acquainted with martyrdom. As one writer said, “Spiritualists did not find the labels ‘free love’ or ‘labor radical’ any more damning than the epithets ‘fraud’ and ‘fool’ to which they had grown accustomed.”

  Less than a week after her Vineland appearance, Victoria was invited to Troy, New York, to address another spiritualist convention. Her mere advance toward Troy caused a flurry of excitement. The Albany Times headlined a story on her steamer trip north “Victoria C. Woodhull on the Troy Boat—The Clerk of the Steamer in Danger.” The humorous article detailed Victoria’s alleged pursuit of a hapless clerk who eventually fled the boat in fear of her advances.

  But the spiritualists were not frightened of Victoria. After just two appearances, and in two b
allots, they elected her president of the American Association of Spiritualists. Victoria called the office “the most congenial service which her soul’s ambition could desire on earth.”

  A skeptic in the crowd who also happened to be a journalist visited Victoria after her address at the convention in Troy to determine who this new force was that had captured the spiritualists so quickly and so easily. He admitted that his visit was prompted by “the most vulgar curiosity, just as I might walk a block to see Jim Fisk, Beelzebub, or a two-headed monstrosity. I had never been more violently prejudiced against any person, man or woman. It was not alone that I considered her impure in character. Private immorality may be viewed with pity, sometimes with contempt. But accepting, with Stuart, Mill and Beecher, the principle of Woman’s Rights, I loathed Mrs. Woodhull for disgracing a good cause for brazenly hitching this cause, as I supposed, to the business card of a tramping broker. A thousand things in the general press, and some things in that chaotic sheet, Woodhull and Clalflin’s [sic] Weekly, seemed to justify this conviction.

  “On reaching the lyceum-hall of the spiritualists, I found that Mrs. Woodhull had just finished her remarks to the convention, and had retired with some friends to an anteroom. Seeing an editorial acquaintance, I asked him to stroll with me into the room and point her out. I refused an introduction, thinking at first that, in Mrs. Woodhull’s case, it would answer to forget the manners of a gentleman, and simply stare at her. But, once in the room, this attitude became ridiculous, and so I was presented to her.

  “Doubtless no person in America has lately been so misjudged as this young woman. Everybody has written harshly of her. I have done so with the rest. But as Tilton heads his biography of Mrs. Woodhull, ‘He that uttereth a slander is a fool.’ I had not even taken the trouble to read Mr. Tilton’s article, until after I saw his heroine. But I now think that in telling the sad story of her life, he has done the American people a noble service.

  “Mrs. Woodhull is certainly not what is called a ‘well-balanced mind.’ To use the common word, she is ‘crazy,’—a little so, but in the same sense that Joan of Arc and Swedenborg were ‘out of their heads.’ But she is not coarse, not vain, not selfish; she is not even self-conscious in the meaning of ordinary egotism. She has just the reverse of all these qualities. She is simply an enthusiast—the most wrapt idealist I have ever met. In conversation she never seems to think of herself, and scarcely of her listener: she is entirely lost, absorbed heart and soul, in the ideas she advocates. Her very financial schemes seem a crusade against Wall street, rather than endeavors to prosper by its vicious gambling.

  “Mr. Tilton’s description of her person is accurate. Her face is not sensuously attractive, but its intellectual beauty is much more than remarkable. I know of no other public character with such a transparent expression of impassioned thought. Even Anna Dickinson, whose moral earnestness is almost the whole secret of her power, has an inexpressive face compared with this sibyl of politics and spiritualism.

  “I should hesitate a long time, before joining the ‘Victoria League.’ The country can probably do very well without Mrs. Woodhull for President. She would be scarcely superior in that position to Horace Greeley himself. But that she believes implicitly in her destiny, feels that she was born for a great work, is evident at the glance of an eye.

  “No Mrs. Woodhull is not nicely cultivated in her diction, and Demosthenes loses elegance when she speaks English for him. She is such an intense nature, however, that I presume she sees visions—as many angels as Saint John perhaps, as many devils as Luther. Had she been carefully trained from childhood, I must think she would have been a wonderful scholar, poet and thinker. As it is, she is an abnormal growth of democratic institutions—thoroughly sincere, partly insane, and fitted to exaggerate great truths.”

  HARTFORD, OCTOBER 1871

  Henry Ward Beecher and his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe held an emergency meeting in October, 1871. Harriet, now sixty, had persevered in her attacks against Victoria in The Christian Union, which Beecher, as editor, duly published. Not only had Audacia Dangyereyes reappeared in “My Wife and I,” but Stowe also authored scathing articles, signed and unsigned, about Victoria. Beecher had learned from Tilton that the attacks were only adding fuel to the fire, however, and that he was the one who risked being burned, so brother and sister met at a hotel resort in New Hampshire’s White Mountains called Twin Mountain House, where Beecher tried to persuade Harriet to stop her assault on Victoria.

  She agreed insofar as her serial was concerned. “My Wife and I” was about to be published as a book; during her stay at Twin Mountain House, Harriet wrote a preface disclaiming any intent to represent a real person in the story: “During the passage of this story through The Christian Union it has been repeatedly taken for granted by the public press that certain of the characters are designed as portraits of really existing individuals.

  “They are not.

  “For instance, it being the author’s purpose to show the embarrassment of the young champion of progressive principles, in meeting the excesses of modern reformers, it came in her way to paint the picture of the modern emancipated young woman of advanced ideas and free behavior. And this character has been mistaken for the portrait of an individual drawn from actual observation. On the contrary, it was not the author’s intention to draw an individual, but simply to show the type of class.”

  This halfhearted and transparent attempt did little to turn back Victoria’s fury or to persuade the fifty thousand readers who purchased the book that’ Dacia was anyone other than Woodhull.

  VICTORIA’S CALENDAR WAS filled with lectures during the late summer and fall of 1871. Increasingly the audiences were labor groups or spiritualists, in part because the women’s convention season had not yet begun. Victoria traveled by train, usually accompanied by Tennie or Blood, if not both, to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, and Buffalo where she usually delivered her standard speech on a woman’s right to vote. It was a speech that had been widely reported in the press and that she had been reciting for more than half a year. Audiences still welcomed it, though, and its appeal widened.

  In Cleveland, five thousand people turned out to hear Victoria during a Spiritualists of Northern Ohio meeting. Hundreds of gas jets lit up the Cleveland Rink, where the Banner of Light reported that the elite of the city, if not all of northern Ohio, was in attendance: “Mrs. Woodhull holds her manuscript in one hand, and, in tones firm, and at times musical, delivers her message to the people. We wish we could portray the scene in the Rink during Mrs. Woodhull’s oration. It was a sight never to be forgotten to see that vast assemblage under the magic spell of the eloquent speaker—not of eloquence technically so called by the schools, but that eloquence which comes from earnest conviction, wherein the look of the eye, the expression of the face and the quiver of the voice all go to show that things superficial have been laid aside, and that the domains of earnestness, sincerity and fidelity have been fully entered upon. Mrs. Woodhull may well feel proud of her effort in Cleveland. She came, she saw, she conquered. Prejudice melts before her genial presence; scandal flees away into oblivion when in her own impressive way she talks to you—you see the light, yes, the light of honor and truth shining in her eyes, and all who are friendly to those that have been friendless rejoice to know that Victoria C. Woodhull is slowly but surely marching on to peace, harmony and prosperity.”

  On October 18, Victoria wrote to a Mr. Howland, asking him to arrange a lecture for her in Connecticut: ‘I would like above any other place to go to Hartford. I want to face the conservatism there centered and compel it into decency, I would go there on any terms. If the few friends there would get up the lecture and see all about it I would speak free, if they thought that would be the best. Or if any one sees fit to take active steps to push it, I will speak for ½ net proceeds. Either one will suit me. . .. Let me hear at once.” Victoria had a special interest in Hartford: it was the home of Harriet Beecher
Stowe.

  When Victoria finally appeared in enemy territory in Hartford, she was received with much less enthusiasm than she had been elsewhere. Victoria was preceded to the platform by a flurry of articles in the local press that condemned her positions and her principles in no uncertain terms. The articles were signed “A Lady of Hartford” or “A Citizen of Hartford,” but Victoria suspected Catharine Beecher. One of the letters admitted that while the crimes of immorality with which Victoria was charged could not be proven, what was known of her life was evidence enough of her corruption. The letter reminded readers that Victoria lived with two husbands and that she was in business with, and sought to introduce into society, “a sister who exceeds her in indecencies.”

  Seven hundred people, perhaps intrigued by the warnings, turned out to hear Victoria, who, after delivering her speech, responded directly to Catharine Beecher. She said she would not return the blow that Miss Beecher had struck but would turn the other cheek, “with the hope that even her conscience will not smite her for speaking so unkindly of me as she has. . .. She may profess Christ, but I hope I may exceed her in living his precepts.”