Notorious Victoria Read online

  A woman, of course, might not presume to take such a bold step on her own suggestion, but she could hardly ignore the guidance of a spirit.

  NEW YORK CITY, 1868

  Victoria’s spirit guide was very specific. He told her to go to a house at 17 Great Jones Street, which she later claimed was vacant and ready to accommodate her. She further claimed that on a table in the parlor was the book The Orations of Demosthenes, a calling card of sorts from her tunic-clad acquaintance that signaled she was in the right spot. But whatever state the solid brownstone was in when she arrived, and whether or not Demosthenes had been there first, it was exactly what was required for the gaggle of relatives that followed Victoria, Blood, and Victoria’s two children to New York.

  In addition to Tennessee and Victoria’s mother and father, 17 Great Jones Street became home to sister Mary and her husband, Benjamin Sparr, and their four children; sister Maggie and her four children; and sister Utica, who had married a Thomas Brooker in Illinois. But even that great, boisterous crowd of parents, sisters, children, and assorted husbands would likely go unnoticed in their new home. Life in New York City was played out in public—people hung out of windows, fought in the street, and died in the gutter. The Claflins found themselves comfortably in the center of it.

  Great Jones Street was bounded by extremes—on one side by Broadway’s dance halls, brothels, and saloons, where upper-class clients could pay for liaisons, and on the other side by the Bowery, which was crowded with pimps, prostitutes, street gamblers, tattoo artists, and “black-eye fixers” who ministered to and entertained the rest of humanity. A visitor at the time said the dirtiest streets of Glasgow or London were like drawing room parlors compared with the streets of New York. The city’s horse population numbered more than 100,000 and deposited 1,000 tons of droppings a day, along with 300,000 gallons of urine. Pigs roamed the streets freely until 1867, and though banned by 1868 they were still a presence, dodging between ladies’ skirts and gentlemen’s walking sticks in search of garbage that beggars had overlooked. Neighborhoods were owned by gangs of marauders who exacted tithes from businesses for protection, and the bribe and blackmail were as much a part of finance as was banking.

  New York was at once home to the nation’s wealthiest citizens and its poorest immigrants. It was a city of churches but had 621 houses of prostitution, 96 “houses of assignation,” and 75 “concert saloons of ill repute” that were as well attended as places of worship—and often by the same clientele. The children of the rich were pampered and adored, but New York also had the nation’s largest number of child laborers. It was home to some of the country’s most advanced thinkers but had been the scene of the nation’s worst mob violence—the 1863 draft riot that left 105 people dead.

  Even with all this, perhaps because of all this, it was the perfect place for the Claflins. Their antics, which drew notice in the smaller, more genteel cities of the Midwest, would be indistinguishable from normal life in Manhattan. In the early morning, when the distant clatter of horses’ hooves and the hiss of gaslights could be heard above the sounds of the day, Victoria must have felt that she was finally home.

  VICTORIA HAD PLANNED, when she arrived in New York, to take up the fight for women’s rights, and she quickly enlisted her first recruit: Tennessee. But she later said that when they pondered the battle, they discovered they were missing an essential armament—money. Buck Claflin intervened, as he had before, and set out to find customers for his talented daughters, who, in a pinch, could heal the sick and see the future as easily in New York as they could in Missouri. This time he found them a golden goose in the person of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

  In 1868, Vanderbilt was seventy-three, a year older than Buck Claflin. While he was Wall Street royalty, having earned millions in the shipping wars of the 1830s and 1840s, and in the ongoing railway wars, he lacked the social airs that usually accompanied great wealth. He was a no-nonsense, unsentimental man’s man whose regular afternoon refreshment was a glass of beer and a black cigar. He had no mind for fashion; his uniform was a black suit and white cravat, which set off his white hair and black eyes. He was “rugged, profane, barely literate, and supremely arrogant,” according to one writer. The arrogance, like everything else about Vanderbilt, was earned: he had won nearly every fight he had ever entered.

  But in the year Buck paid the business tycoon a visit, the Commodore, as Vanderbilt was known, was on a losing streak. His wife, Sophia, had died in August of that year and he had lost seven million dollars to fellow Wall Street speculators Daniel Drew, Jim Fisk, and Jay Gould in a test of wills and fortunes over control of the Erie Railroad. It was a humiliating and well-publicized defeat for Vanderbilt. Harper’s magazine said interest in the Erie fight “entirely superseded public interest in the impeachment of the president [Andrew Johnson].”

  What Buck, businessman to businessman, could offer Vanderbilt were the services of his two “little girls.” It was well known that Vanderbilt consulted spiritualists to communicate with his dead parents. He also entrusted the treatment of his hernia and heart and kidney troubles to “magnetic” healers rather than to doctors of the medically trained variety. Buck’s daughters could provide both services. Victoria could help Vanderbilt with his spiritual pursuits while Tennessee took care of his body. The Commodore, who was naturally superstitious, must have seen Buck’s arrival at just that time, when he was weary, alone, and defeated, as auspicious, and he agreed to see Victoria and Tennessee. Besides, if nothing else he would have new company. Aside from horses, Vanderbilt liked nothing so well as young women.

  Victoria was thirty and Tennessee just twenty-two when they met Cornelius Vanderbilt. Victoria’s reserve and seriousness would have reassured the old gentleman that the two sisters meant business. But Tennessee was sure to be the healer of whatever ailed him. She was experienced at the laying on of hands, which was supposed to magnetize the patient and act as a kind of electric prod to jolt his system back into shape. No doubt it did. With her full, sensuous mouth, teasing eyes, and expert hands, Tennessee was just the lighthearted hellion to work wonders on the Commodore’s aged body and revive his sagging spirits.

  Vanderbilt began spending more time with Tennessee, even bringing her to his office, where he would sit the “little sparrow,” as he called her, on his knee and bounce her up and down as he talked railroad business. She told him jokes, read him the newspaper, and, pulling on his whiskers, called him “old boy.”

  Victoria was valuable to the Commodore too, but in a different way. She became an adviser to him, using her powers as a seer to help predict stock market trends, telling Vanderbilt when to buy and sell. With her great capacity for compassion, there is no doubt that she also helped him through at least one family crisis. Victoria and Vanderbilt shared a personal tragedy for which they both blamed themselves but were impotent to do anything about: like Victoria, the Commodore had a son whose affliction he blamed on an ill-conceived marriage.

  Tennessee was Victoria’s first recruit in her fight for women’s rights. As a broker on Wall Street, Tennessee was noted for “astonishing” conversational powers and many male admirers.

  (Collection of the New-York Historical Society, ca. 1869)

  Vanderbilt’s son Cornelius Jeremiah was a constant trial to his father, getting out of debt only to fall back into it through gambling and extravagance. He borrowed money from Vanderbilt’s associates on his father’s name but without his father’s permission. The year before, Cornelius Jeremiah had proclaimed personal bankruptcy, an action that disgraced the Vanderbilt name. But while the Commodore publicly lambasted his son, he privately believed he bore responsibility for Cornelius’s failings: his son was epileptic and Vanderbilt was convinced he had caused the illness by marrying his first cousin. He was known to say he would give nearly anything to make his son whole. By backing Victoria, and her belief that parents—particularly mothers—bear responsibility for their children even before conception by making sure that the marriage th
ey enter into is a healthy one, Vanderbilt may have felt he was making retribution for his own painful indiscretion.

  Vanderbilt began paying Victoria and Tennessee generously. He had a reputation, more than any other of the exchange’s financial wizards, for helping his friends make their way—if not their fortune—on Wall Street. He did the same for the sisters. The Commodore opened the tap on stock tips, which they in turn would give to Blood, who would transact their business, and the money began flowing in. Financially armed, Victoria finally could turn to her fight for women’s rights and responsibilities.

  NEW YORK CITY, SEPTEMBER 1869

  In January 1869, Victoria traveled to Washington, D. C., to attend the first National Female Suffrage Convention ever held in the nation’s capital. It’s easy to imagine the excitement she must have felt in anticipation of hearing in public the ideas she had long held in private. She would also be able to use the convention to assess, from the comfortable distance of the audience, the players in the national women’s movement.

  During the Civil War, the women’s movement had temporarily abandoned its quest for equal rights for women to focus instead on the abolition of slavery. The various great reformers—William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass among them—were united in the cause and the women leaders believed that when the war was over and the slaves had been freed the reformers would remain united and shift their focus to women’s rights. But when the war ended, the reformers dispersed like the soldiers, going home after a long and bruising battle. They left the women standing alone to fight on their own.

  That fight would have been less difficult had the women themselves remained united, but they were not. By 1869 the movement was divided between the radicals on the one side, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the moderate New England women’s rights advocates on the other, led by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Mary Livermore, and the powerful Beecher family. The split began to form when, in 1860, Elizabeth Cady Stanton introduced a resolution at the tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York that said in some cases divorce was justified. Sounding a theme that was uncomfortably similar to one propounded by the most radical utopians, Stanton said the marriage license was a civil contract that should be nullified if both parties did not live up to it. Susan B. Anthony backed her friend’s position and went even further. She said, “Marriage has ever been a one-sided matter, resting most unequally upon the sexes. By it, man gains all—woman loses all; tyrant law and lust reign supreme with him—meek submission and ready obedience alone befit her.” The two women drew the wrath of the more conservative elements in attendance.

  The gap between the so-called radicals and the moderates widened still farther over the best way to achieve women’s suffrage. Stanton and Anthony proposed a sixteenth amendment to the Constitution to secure women the right to vote. The moderates thought the vote should be won gradually, state by state. To outsiders the dispute seemed trivial, but it represented a much bigger issue to the women reformers, a basic difference in philosophy and approach. Stanton and Anthony were ready to confront—head-on and swiftly—the problems that faced women. The moderates supported a more delicate approach. Stanton and Anthony’s methods were viewed as decidedly unwomanly.

  By the time Victoria attended the 1869 convention in Washington, the two factions were teetering on the verge of a split. In 1868, against the wishes of the more moderate faction, the Stanton and Anthony group had presented the first proposals for women’s suffrage to Congress. Now they were in Washington to make their demands heard. At the convention, Stanton, Anthony, and Lucretia Mott delivered addresses. Also on the stage was Virginia Minor of St. Louis, whose husband, Francis Minor, had come up with the notion that women did not need a sixteenth amendment to secure the vote because they were already given that right as “citizens” under the just-adopted Fourteenth Amendment, which protected the rights and privileges of all citizens, without regard to sex or race. The debates were vigorous. But as had been the case at the previous national suffrage conventions, the women spoke largely to each other. The press labeled the activists “mummified and fossilated females” and suspected them of “laboring under the feelings of strong hatred towards male men.” The women and their demands were easily dismissed.

  Victoria too came away from the meeting unimpressed. What she saw there, she told a writer later, were “teacup hurricanes.” To Victoria, the fight for enfranchisement was a mere skirmish in the much larger battle to secure for women the right to the same economic and social freedom enjoyed by men. Unlike the women reformers she heard in Washington, Victoria believed the fight for equality started not in the voting booth but in the bedroom, where polite society refused to go. She held that anything less than a revolution in domestic relations—taking away a husband’s ownership of his wife—would not change women’s status in society. If women remained wives under the laws then governing marriage, they would remain slaves, whether or not they had the vote.

  Surprisingly, Victoria was noted in the crowd of reformers, though she did not take part directly in the proceedings. The Evening Star in Washington called her “The Coming Woman” and said she represented the next generation of reformers: “Mrs. W. possesses a commanding intellect, refinement, and remarkable executive ability, and will undoubtedly play a conspicuous part in such changes should they come; that she is creating an impression is apparent from the fact that several leading papers contain articles regarding her. . .. She will certainly form a prominent character in coming years.”

  The glowing mention of Victoria may have been Blood’s work. He would prove himself to be an expert propagandist when it came to his wife. When he himself wasn’t the anonymous author of a published notice about Victoria, he would befriend in advance of publication the reporter who was. Blood believed thoroughly in Victoria’s untested ability to take a leadership role in the reform battle and he knew that an important step in helping her realize that goal was publicity.

  VICTORIA SET ABOUT promoting her vision of equal rights by example. At the time, 5 of the 40,736 lawyers in the United States were women, 67 women were among the 43,874 clergymen, and 525 women had penetrated the medical profession, which boasted 62,383 male members. But there were no women on Wall Street. By focusing on finance and taking her place in the male bastion of the stock market, Victoria would earn instant notoriety. She was already acquainted with the activities of Wall Street through Vanderbilt. Now she and Tennessee would set out to take “title to absolute equality”: “When I first came to Wall Street not 100 women in the whole of the United States owned stocks or dared to show independence in property ownership,” she said. “Highest positioned men scowled at any thought of woman investment. For a woman to consider a financial question was shuddered over as a profanity.”

  “This step we were induced to take,” Victoria said elsewhere, “with the view of proving that woman, no less than man, can qualify herself for the more onerous occupations of life.”

  Of course they would need help from Vanderbilt to achieve their goal, but at just this point his status as a backer changed somewhat. With so much wealth at stake, Vanderbilt’s children had been in the habit of procuring young women for their father to feed his appetite and, at the same time, control his associations. Tennessee Claflin was not one of the handpicked few and as such was considered dangerous and unpredictable. As the Commodore’s own discovery, Tennessee was outside the control of his children; they could not possibly offer her as much to leave their father as the old man could offer her to stay. Vanderbilt’s son, William, was especially concerned about the relationship; possibly he had heard that the Commodore was considering marrying Tennessee and he lobbied against it. If Vanderbilt was going to marry a woman young enough to be his great-granddaughter, his family preferred that woman be a thirty-year-old distant relation named Frances Crawford.

  The Commodore had in fact begun seeing Frank, as Frances was called, even before his wife, Sophia, died. F
rank was an Alabama beauty whose looks and strength appealed to Vanderbilt and whose good breeding appealed to his family. In the summer of 1869, the Commodore uncharacteristically bowed to his family’s wishes and married his young bride, despite Tennessee’s understanding that he had promised himself to her. The family may have been shocked by how easily the old man gave in to their suggestion, but the cunning Commodore was once again the winner: in his new arrangement he could have two young women—Frank as his wife and Tennessee as his “little sparrow.”

  If Tennessee and Victoria were concerned that their pipeline to the stock market would be closed by Vanderbilt’s marriage, Black Friday was hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of proof that their fears were groundless. On September 24, 1869, Wall Street crashed with a mighty thud after the investment banker Jay Gould tried to corner the gold market. With advice from Vanderbilt, and with Buck Claflin’s blood running in her veins, Victoria sat in a carriage outside the gold exchange on Broad Street gambling from morning to night while traders around her roamed the streets crying out that they had been ruined. Some of those, she told a reporter, she helped by giving them tips to “regain their own after their prospects in life were nearly swept away.” For herself, she said simply that she had come out a “winner.” Through the months after Black Friday she continued to win, buying up bargains in a deflated market on tips from Vanderbilt.

  By the end of 1869, Victoria was wealthy beyond her dreams. In six weeks she said she netted a profit of more than $700,000 and Vanderbilt paid her the ultimate compliment by declaring her a “bold operator.” But she had lost money too—as much as $100,000 in one day—because Tennessee, as a woman, was not permitted onto the trading floor when she was dispatched there to sell falling gold. This was the very challenge Victoria needed to move from being a presence on Wall Street to being a player.