Notorious Victoria Read online

  THE MID-1800s were an age of possibilities for a man with ambition. Industrialists had penetrated the aristocracy by hard work and ingenuity rather than birth. School textbooks preached the message that, with enough effort or a bright idea, all Americans could become rich and famous. Buck Claflin was looking to sample that success. In the early 1850s, he was torn between a pair of moneymaking schemes discovered at opposite ends of the country: from California came cries of gold and from New York came a new phenomenon called spirit rappings. For a man who preferred to earn his wealth by doing as little actual work as possible, the spirit rappings held the greater promise.

  In 1848, a pair of young sisters in a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, reported hearing strange noises. The rappings themselves may not have surprised anyone, since the farmhouse was said to be haunted by the ghost of a peddler who was murdered there. But what did come as a shock was that the sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, appeared to be able to communicate with the spirit, “Mr. Splitfoot,” who provided responses to their questions in a series of tapping sounds.

  Within a year the Fox sisters were exhibiting their powers onstage before audiences that paid seventy-five cents to see them, and in June 1850 they were set up by P. T. Barnum at his hotel in New York City, holding demonstrations three times a day at a dollar per person. The Fox sisters phenomenon sparked an epidemic of spiritual encounters and by 1851 there were said to be thousands of mediums in every state.

  Two occurrences had primed the United States to accept the plausibility of messages from the beyond. The first, the invention of the telegraph in 1848, showed that thoughts could travel mysteriously from one location to another, which many viewed as scientific proof that there were unseen energies at play in the universe. In fact, the Fox sisters’ ability was often referred to as spiritual telegraphy. The second occurrence, the religious revival in the first half of the nineteenth century known as the Second Great Awakening, gave birth to the notion that a person could communicate directly with God without the intercession of a cleric, and if people could speak to God, surely they could communicate with dead relatives.

  Buck had two daughters of his own who, even before the Fox sisters announced their skills, were exhibiting strange powers. Victoria believed that she could communicate with her dead infant sisters and that, through spirit intervention, she had the ability to heal the sick. And when Tennessee was just five she predicted a fire so precisely she was briefly suspected of setting the blaze. Buck took advantage of his good fortune and hung out a shingle at a Mount Gilead boardinghouse, establishing Victoria, fourteen, and Tennessee, seven, as mediums, for one dollar per visit.

  Perhaps to boost Victoria’s confidence in her first professional undertaking, Buck wrote his daughter a prophetic rhyme that read, “Girl your worth has never yet been known, but to the world it shall be shown.” She later remembered he also gave her a piece of practical advice. He told her, “Be a good listener child.”

  From that time on, Victoria and Tennessee would be the primary breadwinners in the Claflin family, supporting their extended clan, which, rather than thanking them for their efforts, jealously resented their success. Victoria’s friend and first biographer, Theodore Tilton, wrote, “Victoria is a green leaf, and her legion of relatives are caterpillars who devour her.”

  SAN FRANCISCO, 1855

  In the 1850s, popular novels often recounted the tale of a beautiful but poor girl’s encounter with a young man of good birth and wealth who, despite societal pressures against the match, eventually claimed her for his prize in marriage. In rural Ohio at midcentury, it was not an impossible scenario. The opening of the Erie Canal and the extension of the rail lines encouraged many young men from “good” Eastern families to try their luck farther west. One such young man, Canning Woodhull of Rochester, New York, arrived in Mount Gilead to establish a medical practice.

  The twenty-eight-year-old newcomer not only had a profession but he had a pedigree. He claimed to be the son of a judge and the nephew of the mayor of New York City. His path crossed Victoria Claflin’s when he was called by her family to treat the fever and rheumatism with which she had been afflicted off and on since 1851.

  “Coming as a prince, he found her as a Cinderella—a child of the ashes,” Theodore Tilton wrote later. “Before she entirely recovered, and while looking haggard and sad, one day he stopped her on the street and said, ‘My little chick, I want you to go with me to the picnic’—referring to a projected Fourth of July excursion then at hand.”

  After buying herself a new pair of shoes for the occasion by selling apples, Victoria accepted the invitation. Within five months Canning Woodhull had married his young patient. Victoria Claflin became Victoria Woodhull on November 20, 1853, just two months into her fifteenth year. In marrying her doctor, Victoria may have seen herself as one of the heroines glamorized in popular fiction—a damsel rescued from poverty and illness by a handsome stranger—but she was quickly disabused of her fantasy.

  What marriage meant in 1853 was a woman’s legal bondage to the man whose name she assumed—for better but just as often for worse. Her person, her wealth, and her children were his property. He had the right to reclaim her if she left him and in most states he had the right to beat her, “provided he did so with a ‘reasonable’ instrument.” If he prospered she shared in his wealth, but if he were to drink or gamble away the family’s money, she had a legal duty as his wife to follow him obediently into ruin. The law said that the husband and wife were one, and that one was the husband.

  Victoria’s independent spirit no doubt recoiled at the reality of married life, but her disappointment did not end with the legal restrictions imposed on her as a wife. The young bride soon discovered that her husband was not the son of a judge, had never met the mayor of New York, and had no idea if he was even a relative. She also learned that her husband had no real medical practice and therefore no steady income. What he did have was a battery of bad habits. Tilton wrote: “Her captor, once possessed of his treasure, ceased to value it. On the third night after taking his child-wife to his lodgings, he broke her heart by remaining away all night at a house of ill-repute. Then for the first time she learned, to her dismay, that he was habitually unchaste, and given to long fits of intoxication. She was stung to the quick. The shock awoke all her womanhood. She grew ten years older in a single day.”

  Victoria’s marriage robbed her of her childhood and threatened to steal her future. The inexperienced girl, whose fantasies soared with the spirits, was legally bound to a drunkard and all the misery that life entailed: “I supposed that to marry was to be transported to a heaven not only of happiness but of purity and perfection,” Victoria said later. “I believed it to be the one good thing there was on the earth, and that a husband must necessarily be an angel, impossible of corruption or contamination. I imagined that the priestly ceremony was perfect sanctification, and that the sin of sins was for either husband or wife to be false to that relation.

  “But alas, how were my beliefs dispelled! Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and the hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife as I was, a great wail of agony went out from my soul, re-echoing that which came to me from almost every one with whom I came in contact. I soon learned that what I had believed of marriage and society was the nearest sham, a cloak made by their devotees to hide the realities and to entice the innocent into their snares. I found everything was reeking with rottenness. Everywhere I was surrounded by men and women who pitied me for my simplicity, and who were loose in what the world called their virtue. I stood a little fragile thing by his side, and with terrified earnestness asked him what all this meant? But I received only this answer: ‘You will learn enough as you grow older without any aid from me.’”

  In a year the situation had only deteriorated. Victoria gave birth to a son, Byron, in December 1854, and though he was a beautiful child physic
ally, she soon realized he was retarded mentally. “When I found that I had given birth to a human wreckage, to a child that was an imbecile, my heart was broken,” Victoria said, “and I went to Mr. Woodhull to explain the reason and I commenced to enquire in different places of different mothers what this meant. My whole heart was involved in the love of my child and I could not bear the thought he was an imbecile. My husband took me to different . . . places and shewed me the phases of life made it possible for mothers to bear imbeciles.”

  The young mother came to the conclusion that her son was retarded as a result of his father’s drinking: “It was that alone that made me feel that I had nothing else to do but to ask from every platform on the face of the earth that woman should awaken to the responsibility of becoming mothers, by any possibility whatever never bearing a child that might be an imbecile or a criminal.”

  And elsewhere Victoria said, “I realized from that day that I should wage war against this seething impacted mass of hypocrisy and corruption, existing under the name of the present social system.”

  It would be years, however, before Victoria would mount any platforms to proclaim the rights of women: her immediate problem was her own survival. Victoria had followed Canning Woodhull to Chicago, but his continued carousing left them penniless. In an early exhibition of the strength and courage that would eventually earn her a place in history, the sixteen-year-old wife and mother bucked societal conventions, took control of the family—and advantage of a steamer fare war initiated by a man named Cornelius Vanderbilt—and set off with husband and child for California.

  SAN FRANCISCO IN the late 1850s would have been difficult for any woman, let alone one still in her teens trying to construct a life with an alcoholic husband and a retarded child in tow. The post–gold rush years left the city swollen with social disease and rotten with crime. One traveler at the time wrote: “I may not be a competent judge, but this much I will say, that I have seen purer liquors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtesans, here in San Francisco, than in any other place I have ever visited; and it is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable in America.” San Francisco was an exotic universe of depravity.

  The echoed cry of “Gold” had first reached the East Coast in late 1848, months after the first nuggets were discovered in January of that year. At that time San Francisco listed 459 residents, but by the mid-1850s it boasted 40,000. Overland and by sea, speculators of every rank and from all parts of the world descended upon the port city to squeeze a living out of gold. The trip from New York to San Francisco via the Isthmus of Panama took thirty-five days; around Cape Horn four to eight months; and overland seventeen weeks. Because of the arduous journey, and the uncertainty awaiting the traveler, the early gold rush immigrants were almost all men. Those women who did arrive were mostly prostitutes and dance hall girls from Mexico and Central and South America. They were considerably outnumbered, though: in 1850, only one of every dozen immigrants to San Francisco was a woman.

  By 1855, just before Victoria arrived, the number of “respectable” women living in San Francisco had grown and the city that greeted them had improved: brick and stone dwellings had replaced canvas and wood ones, cobblestone streets were taking the place of mud roads, and gaslights had been installed to make the streets less treacherous. Even so, the city in which Victoria and her family found themselves bore no resemblance to the civilized farming communities of Homer or Mount Gilead or even to the Midwestern metropolis of Chicago.

  There would have been opportunity for Canning Woodhull to practice medicine in San Francisco, but there is no indication that he did. The problem may have been the financial depression that hit San Francisco in 1855, as the gold rush rally began to wane, but Victoria hinted later that it was the city’s welcoming saloons and her husband’s drinking that kept them poor. Tilton wrote, “Doctor Woodhull took his habits, his wife took her necessities, and both took their misery, from East to West. In San Francisco, the girlish woman . . . set herself to supporting the man by whom she ought to have been supported.”

  Victoria faced the same dilemma as did most women looking for work at midcentury: while jobs were plentiful for men, there was little in the way of respectable work for women. Domestic work was available, but that was most often taken by single immigrant women paid the equivalent of slave wages. Some teaching positions were open to women, but Victoria had almost no schooling herself. Reviewing her own marketable skills, Victoria would have found only beauty, a keen—if untrained—mind, tenacity, and ambition.

  There are several stories concerning what Victoria did to earn a living in San Francisco. During a court appearance forty years later she said, “The truth of it was I went with my husband . . . and an innocent child to California. During that time on account of his business and matters he was unable to buy our tickets. I went to a theatrical manager and asked him to allow me to earn money enough on the stage to buy our tickets home. He did.”

  But that was a sanitized and simplified version of her San Francisco experience. Some early biographers said that the young Victoria worked as a cigar girl in the morally fetid port section of the city known as the Barbary Coast, where, among other things, the topless waitress was born. Tilton told yet another story. He said that Victoria worked for one day as a cigar girl before the owner fired her because she was “too fine” for the rough work. He said she then went door to door offering her services as a seamstress and in that way met the actress Anna Cogswell, who eventually suggested the attractive young mother go onstage. Tilton said Victoria’s first acting stint was in New York by Gaslight, for which she brought home a generous fifty-two dollars a week. Her next role, he said, was in The Corsican Brothers. “One night,” Tilton wrote, “while on the boards clad in a pink silk dress and slippers, acting in the ballroom scene in the Corsican Brothers, suddenly a spirit voice [said], ‘Victoria, come home.’” Tilton said that she saw a vision of her sister Tennessee beckoning to her and that she “burst away at a bound behind the scenes,” ran to her hotel, packed up her bags, her husband, and her child, and took the morning steamer to New York and then continued on to Ohio.

  The impressionable Victoria Woodhull no doubt saw herself in the Corsican drama. At the center of the story about supernatural family ties are two brothers who, despite a great distance between them, telepathically communicate their despair to one another. It was all the message Victoria needed to leave San Francisco and return home.

  ST. LOUIS, 1865

  The Victoria who returned to the Midwest with husband and child was not the teenage newlywed her family had last seen. She was a woman with many responsibilities who had witnessed sights in California and travails en route that even old Buck Claflin couldn’t imagine. She was serious, intense, and focused on her duties as breadwinner. While society did not acknowledge her as such, she was the head of the Woodhull household and bore all of its burdens.

  By 1859, Tennessee Claflin had also changed. She was just fourteen but had already been working nearly half her life as a medium. Like a child actress, she had lived in a universe of adults—administering to them in her profession and earning money to support them at home. She was billed in Columbus, Ohio, as a “wonderful child”—“endowed from her birth with a supernatural gift” and available for consultations from eight in the morning until nine at night. Tennessee said she could earn up to one hundred dollars a day, but there was little time left in that day for a childhood.

  Victoria, who took her own spiritualist powers very seriously, berated her father for prostituting his youngest daughter’s skills and adding charlatanry to her natural gifts as a medium: “She clutched Tennie as by main force and flung her out of this semi-humbug,” Tilton wrote, “to the mingled astonishment of her money-greedy family, one and all. At this time Tennie was supporting a dozen or twenty relatives by her ill-gotten gains.” But while Victoria protested her famil
y’s abuse of her youngest sister, there is no indication that Victoria rescued Tennessee or put a stop to her father’s exploitation. In fact, she herself soon joined the family business as a spiritual healer in Indianapolis and Terre Haute, Indiana: “She straightened the feet of the lame; opened the ears of the deaf; she detected the robbers of a bank; . . . she solved psychological problems; . . . she prophesied future events,” Tilton said, and in so doing earned nearly $100,000 in one year.

  For Victoria, her employment was not just a matter of earning money, though, as with anyone born poor, money would always be a major consideration. Perhaps more important, Victoria’s work as a healer gave her a sense of self-respect and power. As a spiritualist and clairvoyant, Victoria could earn a living in a field that was one of the few to give women a voice—because the voice was not her own. In a world where women generally were not heard outside the home, they would be listened to if the message they were conveying was from a “spirit.” A woman offering advice to customers or writing a book or lecturing would be censured if she was promoting her own opinions, but if she was merely the conduit for a message from another realm she was given full freedom to speak. Even Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a best-seller at the time, confided she had merely taken dictation from God when she wrote it.