Notorious Victoria Page 3

  At the time, some people believed disease was “a dynamic aberration of the spirit,” and it was those ailments that Victoria was best able to treat. She was compassionate and a good listener, as her father had instructed, and she was able to guide her patients through their crises—physical and emotional—on the strength of what she perceived to be her spiritual powers, her own experiences, and a vegetable remedy cooked up by her mother. But, Tilton noted, “during all this period, though outwardly prosperous, she was inwardly wretched. The dismal fact of her son’s half-idiocy so preyed upon her mind that, in a heat of morbid feeling, she fell to accusing her innocent self for his misfortunes. The sight of his face rebuked her.”

  Victoria prayed for a second child and in 1861 she had one. “My mother told me she brought all her faculties to bear on me while carrying me,” her daughter, Zulu Maud, wrote years later, “that I should not be like Byron.”

  Zulu was not like Byron: she was a healthy child and a godsend to Victoria. The small girl with the exotic name, who inherited her mother’s intelligence but not her beauty, would grow up to be Victoria’s anchor and protector. She and her brother, Byron, would be the only constants in Victoria Woodhull’s turbulent life.

  IN LATE 1860, Southern states began seceding from the Union, and by April 1861 President Lincoln had called for militiamen to put down the insurrection. By July the country was torn apart. The eerie, unearthly “rebel yell” mingled with the shots of cannons and rifles and the screams of wounded soldiers. Typhoid, malaria, dysentery, and pneumonia killed many of those who the guns missed. Lincoln himself said the terrible war “carried mourning to almost every home.” It did not directly touch the Claflins, but Victoria and her family were ready to minister to those whom it had.

  Throughout the early years of the war, the Claflins traveled in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, but not necessarily together. Victoria, for example, was not with the family in 1863 and 1864 in Ottawa, Illinois, when Buck, calling himself Dr. R. B. Claflin, the King of Cancers, established an infirmary in a converted hotel. Tennessee’s name had spread throughout the region thanks to advertisements for Miss Tennessee’s Magnetio Life Elixir and her Magnetio Infirmaries in Chicago and Pittsburgh. In those places, Tennessee used magnetism, or the laying on of hands, to help the sick recover from their illnesses. But in Ottawa, Buck’s focus was cancer, and no matter how talented Miss Tennessee was with her hands, she could not cure that. In June 1864, one of Tennessee’s patients succumbed to cancer and the nineteen-year-old healer was charged with manslaughter. Buck packed up the family and fled ahead of the sheriff.

  Shortly after the Ottawa incident, Victoria—along with her two children and her husband, Canning—rejoined the family. Perhaps in an effort to protect Tennessee from their father’s increasingly dangerous ventures, Victoria offered herself as a voice of reason amid the cacophonous Claflin crowd.

  Tilton described the Claflin family as a “circle of cats and kits, with soft fur and sharp claws, purring at one moment and fighting the next.” Buck Claflin may have been the dominant male figure and author of some of the family’s most nefarious schemes, but the house was ruled by its women. Victoria’s mother, Anna, was its irrational center, harboring grudges and imagining conspiracies where none existed. Victoria’s two eldest sisters, Maggie and Mary, added to the chaos of Claflin family life by having a weakness for men other than their husbands. Utica, five years younger than Victoria, shared Victoria’s ambitious spirit, but she possessed neither Victoria’s strength nor her native intelligence, which left her frustrated and resentful. Coupled with her fondness for alcohol, this made her one of the household’s most volatile members. “Such another family circle,” Tilton wrote, “never before filled one house with their clamors since Babel began.”

  Victoria took her youngest and still malleable sister, Tennessee, under her wing and the pair set themselves up in Cincinnati, Ohio, as clairvoyants in much the way their father had a dozen years before in Mount Gilead. Because they were no longer children, though, and because the Claflin women had many male admirers, they were suspected not of communing with spirits but of communing with men. Society in the 1860s often considered mediums and prostitutes to be one and the same. Watchful neighbors had no way of knowing if the men who entered darkened rooms alone to visit a woman were interested in the comfort she might give their souls or the sexual stimulation she might proffer their bodies. The issue was especially clouded if the women looked like Tennessee and Victoria.

  Tennessee was the more beautiful of the two sisters. She was positively bewitching. She had Buck Claflin’s devilish cunning in her eyes, but on her the look translated into a sexual rascality. She was slightly plump, dimpled, and delightful, possessed of a boyish carnality in an altogether feminine body. She’d experienced none of Victoria’s heartbreak—neither a bad marriage nor a damaged child—and was untouched by strain. Her face was that of a young woman who reveled in life, seeing it for the good joke that it was.

  Victoria was less conventionally beautiful. She was more aptly described as stormy: anger, passion, excitement—emotions she wore just below the skin—could transform her. The once soft and full-bodied girl had grown into a slim and elegant woman whose manner was surprisingly refined and reserved considering her family history. She prided herself on not applying makeup or exhibiting cleavage. While most women paraded themselves to their best physical advantage, she chose to hide her beauty, preferring instead to make her mind her most attractive feature. Doubtless some people were put off by her appearance, but there was a lifetime of admirers—men and women—who attested to her intoxicating allure.

  Cincinnati grew suspicious of the kind of medicine the two sisters were practicing and in 1865 the family was asked to leave the city when neighbors claimed the Claflins were operating a brothel. Tennessee was once again at the center of the dispute: she was named in an adultery and blackmail suit. The family moved on to Chicago and in that city Victoria was evicted for fraudulent fortune-telling. Having drawn too much attention from the law in the states they had been frequenting, the Claflins left the region for a medical road show tour through Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri. Once again gathering up her children and her husband, Victoria followed her family on the road.

  Rattling caravan-style through the tortured fields of recent battles, the Claflins got rich off the grief sown by the Civil War. The war was nearly over and what was left in its wake was widespread misery, disease, and decay. Three million men had served and 690,000 had died in four years of fighting, with much of the blood spilled on the paths the Claflins traveled. The family joined the flocks that picked what flesh remained off the bones of the Southern and border states. Dr. R. B. Claflin and his entourage of healers sold hope to the hopeless in the form of sham medicine and spirit communications. Their advertisements boasted “wonderful cures and mysterious revelations” and claimed they had traveled for six years through the most important towns in the United States, where they examined “the sick and the afflicted, curing them with unparalleled success.” Among the diseases the family promised to cure were diphtheria, illnesses of the throat and lungs, heart and liver complaints, stomach ailments, neuralgia, dropsy, asthma, fits, cancer within four to twenty-four hours, loss of sight or hearing, and all problems “pertaining to life and health.” They also offered to communicate with dead spirits, find lost items, and generally sort out domestic problems of all types.

  While the war-related injuries and deaths that Victoria encountered en route surely would have disturbed her, it was the tales of domestic horror that she found most haunting. Years later she still recalled the broken men and women who sought her advice on loveless and abusive marriages they were too terrified to end. She remembered the women who confided they were forced to endure sexual relations and bear children by men they loathed. And she raged at the memory of the young women driven into prostitution after being abandoned by men to whom they had given themselves in trust. Victoria’s own domesti
c situation was an unhappy one, but what she learned from her consultations was that grief, mostly linked to bad marriages, apparently knew no bounds.

  BY THE TIME the Claflin caravan arrived in St. Louis, the group had made thousands of dollars. Victoria abandoned the back of a wagon and set up in a hotel to exercise her powers. Among those visiting her was a twenty-nine-year-old Civil War veteran who was president of the St. Louis Railroad and himself a prominent local spiritualist. Colonel James Harvey Blood, scarred by five bullet wounds, had just returned from the battlefield. With his piercing black eyes and military bearing, he possessed all the virility, charm, but most of all drive that Canning Woodhull lacked. Tilton wrote of the encounter: “Col. James H. Blood, Commander of the Sixth Missouri Regiment, who at the close of the war was elected City Auditor of St. Louis, who became President of the Society of Spiritualists in that place, and who had himself been, like Victoria, the legal partner of a morally sundered marriage, called one day on Mrs. Woodhull to consult her as a spiritualistic physician (having never met her before), and was startled to see her pass into a trance, during which she announced, unconsciously to herself, that his future destiny was to be linked with hers in marriage. Thus, to their mutual amazement, but to their subsequent happiness, they were betrothed on the spot by ‘the powers of the air.’”

  It apparently mattered little to either of them that they were both already married and that both had children. Midcentury spiritualists believed in a spiritual affinity stronger than civil bonds. They held that “social bonds should be assumed or abolished according to individual spiritual revelation,” that everyone had a “natural mate” with whom they would have a “love union of equals” and a ‘true marriage.”

  As to whether more than “air” passed between Victoria and Blood at their first meeting in the St. Louis hotel, she never said. But while some spiritualists shunned earthy sexuality for the astral plane, many more, including Victoria, saw sexual relations as the physical manifestation of a pure and holy meeting of two souls. Victoria was twenty-six and had been burdened since she was fifteen with an older husband who had deceived her into marrying him. Canning Woodhull had failed to nurture or provide for her or their children and had failed Victoria both emotionally and physically. Given her empty marriage, and the tales of domestic agony she had heard still fresh in her mind, it would have been unnatural if she hadn’t given herself up to the dashing young colonel.

  BY APRIL 1865, the United States was on the threshold of what promised to be a new beginning. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, officially ending the Civil War. Lincoln had been reelected and his inspiring inaugural address in February, promising “malice toward none, with charity for all,” was a pledge to heal the political and social wounds that had started the war four years before. It was a new spring and the spirit of change and the freedom from the awful bondage of war were palpable. The month even brought a change of status for Colonel Blood, who won the post of city auditor in St. Louis. But in a last cruel convulsion of war, the optimism of that spring was shattered when a gunman opened fire on Good Friday at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. Abraham Lincoln died the next day, April 15.

  Colonel James Harvey Blood, Victoria’s second husband, was an extreme radical who introduced her to the reform movements in which she later played a leading role.

  (Alberti and Lowe Collection, date unknown)

  In rural areas, men on horses and driving carts shouted to their neighbors that Lincoln was dead. Flags flew at half-mast in every major city. The carnival colors that had marked the end of the war gave way to black bunting. Stores and shops were closed. In Philadelphia, bells were taken off the horse-drawn streetcars.

  The upheaval of war was over but a moral void was left in its wake. The country suffered a pervasive sense of despair; there was no longer any point in playing by the rules. To Blood, who once said he worked for the good of mankind and not for his own future, a post in city government in a world gone mad must have seemed useless at best and ludicrous at worst. Blood left his family and his office in the courthouse and Victoria abandoned her responsibilities, leaving her extended family, her husband, and her children behind in St. Louis. She and Blood set off together as Mr. and Madame Harvey in a caravan with a ball-fringed top.

  “Henceforth life seemed larger and fuller,” a contemporary later described Victoria as recounting of this period. “The hardness she had endured served only to breed strength for whatever fate held in store for her.” It was unlikely that Blood or Victoria had planned very far into the future or that Victoria had any intimations of the mark she was to make on history. For the moment, they were content to travel throughout the Midwest, telling fortunes and making love.

  PART TWO

  Those who would reform the world must show that they do not speak in the heat of wild impulse; their lives must be unstained by passionate error; they must be serene lawgivers to themselves.

  —MARGARET FULLER

  Victoria Claflin Woodhull (Corbis-Bettmann Archives, date unknown)

  PITTSBURGH, 1868

  Victoria Woodhull and James Blood eventually legalized their marriage—to a degree—after obtaining divorces from their spouses. On July 14, 1866, in Dayton, Ohio, they signed a document stating their “intention” to marry. Victoria and Blood considered that sufficiently legal to call themselves man and wife, though she did not take his name.

  Blood would become Victoria’s first real teacher, and soon after their marriage they got to work on her education. If their partnership was to be a union of equals, as spiritualists believed marriage should be, then she had a lifetime of learning to do.

  While Victoria had been occupied earning a living as best she could, new ideas on women’s rights and economic and social equality were being espoused and experimented with throughout the country. Women had been the backbone of the religious revival movement in the early part of the nineteenth century and had been encouraged during that time to express their beliefs in public. They were invited to discuss subjects, most notably abolition, that previously had been viewed as the domain of men. But when organized religion, with its churches and hierarchies and unpaid bills, began losing followers to this movement, efforts were made to win people back and to take away women’s new voice.

  Having tasted the freedom to speak, however, women would not easily be silenced. In 1848, a group of women led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, to demand their rights. In their “Declaration of Principles,” they called for equal rights in marriage, education, religion, employment, and politics. They also called on the federal government to give women the right to vote.

  The Seneca Falls group was not by any means the first to demand equal treatment for women. Mary Wollstonecraft had sounded the call in England in the 1790s, and in the United States Frances Wright had earned societal damnation as the Princess of Beelzebub for advocating equal rights for women, free education, and birth control in the 1820s. But what set the Seneca Falls women apart was that they were not radicals of the Wollstonecraft or Wright stripe; they were churchgoing women, mothers and daughters, abolitionists and temperance crusaders who had fought for other people’s rights and now were fighting for their own.

  The demand for women’s rights was occurring at the same time that experimental or utopian communities—including the Fourierists, the Owenists, and those who gathered at Berlin Heights, Modern Times, and Oneida—were challenging traditional order in pockets of activity throughout the United States. Some of the communities that emerged were communistic, some anarchistic, and some “free love,” but all shared the notion to a greater or lesser degree that a properly functioning society was not necessarily based on laws created by white males of the monied class. John Humphrey Noyes, a midcentury reform leader, said that while the communities were vociferously diverse, all of them sent “streams” into the gulf of spiritualism after 1847.

  As a spiritualist, Blood was an advoca
te of the new thinking. He was described by one contemporary as an extreme radical of the most uncompromising type. He supported women’s rights and social freedom for all and set about introducing Victoria to the reform doctrines. The lessons would have been easily learned. Victoria had grown up outside the law, she had never been asked to conform to either a rigid family structure or a place in society—she’d too often been on the move for that. In fact, the utopian idea of individual autonomy was the only life she knew. As for the question of women’s rights, as a mother supporting her family, condemned to a life with a man who offered nothing, Victoria had always fought for her rights and in minor ways had defied society to take them from her.

  Victoria devoured the new thinking. She had an insatiable and passionate appetite for ideas that she had not been able to satisfy either through a formal education or during the long years of marriage to Canning Woodhull. Now she had a partner who not only shared the burdens of everyday life with her but who reawakened her intellect as well. Now she could consider the larger issues.

  In 1868, Victoria had a vision: “When staying at Pittsburgh, it came. While seated at a marble table, the guide suddenly appeared to her, writing thereon in English characters which gradually outlined themselves from indistinctness to incandescence so brilliant as to light up the entire apartment and reveal her frightened and trembling, the name Demosthenes. . .. The monitor from another sphere bade her hasten to New York, where at a given address she would find a house swept and garnished for the commencement of the work she had to do.”