Notorious Victoria Page 6

  (Hamilton College Library, Special Collections, ca. 1870)

  On that first day of business, Victoria and Tennessee handled themselves well, “without any signs of headache,” noted one reporter, and earned many admirers. In fact, Woodhull, Claflin & Co. was not prepared for the volume of work it received in its first week of operation. Among other things, it did not have adequate clerical assistance for the rush. But observers in the press noted that the sisters handled it all calmly: “Their extraordinary coolness and self-possession and evident knowledge of the intricacies of the difficult role they have undertaken is far more remarkable than their personal beauty and graces of manner, and these are considerable.”

  In less than four months, Victoria had gone from being just another obscure woman, living on the edge of financial ruin with only her wits to help her survive, to being in a position of prominence and wealth in the greatest metropolis in the United States. She must have felt invincible, or at the very least charmed.

  AMONG THE VISITORS to the firm in its first months of operation was a gentleman who identified himself as an agent for the Broadway grocers Park & Tilford’s; he wished to buy gold through Woodhull, Claflin & Co. with a check from the grocers for $4,355. The check was neatly drawn, bore Park & Tilford’s signature, and had the correct stamp. The gentleman turned the check over to Tennie, who in turn shared it with Victoria, both pleased that the grocers had decided to do business through their brokerage firm. But the sisters noted that the check had not been certified, so they sent it to the Greenwich Bank. It came back approved and the gold was purchased.

  Several days later another man appeared with a check from Park & Tilford’s for $6,600, from which he wanted $5,500 to go toward the purchase of gold and the remainder in cash. Once again the check was not certified and once again the sisters sent the check to a bank for approval. But this time the New York County Bank was suspicious and presented the check to the grocers, who said they had never written it. By the time a bank representative arrived at Woodhull, Claflin & Co., the forger had fled. The investigating detective determined that the forgers had also victimized other brokerage houses, including Fisk & Hatch.

  The press applauded Victoria and Tennessee’s quick action. The New York World, under the headline “They Prove Too Smart for the Forgers,” said that the “ladies of the firm have come out of the affair with flying colors. Their shrewd management and business tact was equal to the emergency, and the precautions they took in regard to certification guarded them from all loss.”

  Left unsaid was the fact that the sisters may have been acquainted with the forger’s art by their father. No one suspected that the venerable old Buck Claflin, who seated himself in the brokerage office that bore his name, was anything other than the lawyer the sisters claimed him to be. Victoria and Tennessee had gone to some lengths to reinvent their history in talking with the press, perhaps in response to criticism already arising from some quarters—most notably other women and also the widely circulated religious newspapers in Brooklyn—about the scandalous pair who conducted themselves like men on Wall Street. There were tantalizing elements of truth in the story the sisters told for “Sketch of the Company” in the Herald, for example, but they were buried under mounds of misinformation designed to bolster their positions as respectable businesswomen. Victoria and Tennessee told the Herald reporter: “[We were] early thrown upon our own resources, not only for our sustenance, but also for the maintenance and education of a number of younger children made dependent upon us by the general financial ruin in which the family became involved. It became, in a manner, absolutely necessary for us to adopt some other method of carrying our responsibilities than the usual ones presented to young ladies at that time in Central Ohio. . ..

  “Naturally possessed of keen intuition and quick perception we had obtained a very good education, besides considerable knowledge of the world and some familiarity with the theory and practice of law in the office of our father before his financial disasters.

  “Thus educated we could not settle down into the common course of life woman had already too long considered her only sphere of action. Our course obtained for us considerable notoriety and called down the anathemas of prudish dames and sharp comments from some of the opposite sex. Sometimes, under the spur of such anathemas or comments, we undertook and accomplished things we would not otherwise have attempted, just to show our independence of Mrs. Grundy.”

  Victoria and Tennessee went on to describe becoming “acquainted with real estate operations” and having at one time a million dollars in land titles. They said their next early business venture had been in oil stocks, which resulted in losses, so they turned to railway stocks. But, the lady brokers failed to mention spiritualist healing, clairvoyance, or the manslaughter charge that Tennessee, the “wonderful child,” had fled.

  Despite their efforts, glimpses into the unedited version of Tennie’s past soon began to surface. In March 1870, several small debts from Tennie’s time in Chicago caught up with her. A number of Chicago merchants had received a description of her and were convinced that the Tennessee Claflin who owed them money was the same Tennie C. Claflin who was operating on Wall Street and the object of such glowing reports in the press. But when a lawyer representing the grocer James Blake visited Tennessee at her office, she denied ever having been in Chicago. The lawyer took a piece of paper from his pocket and read it out loud: “Miss Tennessee Claflin is a charming woman of medium height, brown hair, gray eyes, dark complexion, decidedly plump, and about 30 years of age.” He added, “That answers your description exactly.”

  The Sun reported, “With a smile which would have rivaled Cleopatra’s, she acknowledged the correctness of the description but remarked that there was a lady in St. Louis who had often been mistaken for her and for whom she had frequently been obliged to pay debts.”

  Not convinced, the lawyer took Tennie to court. The case involved $125.70 worth of “medicines” that Tennie had purchased from James Blake while working as a spiritual healer. These included “blood root, 1 box ley, 1 syringe, ointment prescription, 1 quart alcohol, 1 bottle sherry, court plaster, morphine, bay rum, 1 ley cup . . .and many others of the same nature.”

  One paper reported, “Miss Tennie C. appeared in Court attended by her partner, Mrs. Woodhull, in all her charms of manner and of dress. Her dress was of black silk velvet. She had a fashionable chignon, surmounted by a hat, bonnet, or what not, of the latest Paris style, and her gloves were faultless both in color and fit. She cast upon Judge Curtis one of her most engaging smiles, as she was called into the witness box, but after his instructions to the jury, her face assumed an expression of dignified contempt, and accompanied by her partner, she sailed out of the courtroom with the slightest perceptible shake of her gracefully swaying panier.” The jury found Tennie liable for the claim, plus interest and the cost of the suit.

  Tennessee’s setback did little financial damage to the sisters, but it did raise eyebrows and confirm the suspicions of their critics. It is unlikely that the news article about the case went unseen by those Victoria most hoped to win over. Ironically and unfortunately for her, immediately below The Sun article on Tennie’s court case was a one-paragraph appeal from a woman revered in general, and in particular by the very vocal conservative wing of the women’s rights movement: Catharine Beecher had inserted a squib calling on women to attend a meeting to discuss ways of helping the less fortunate of their ranks “gain honorable independence in various employments suited to her sex.”

  NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 1870

  Victoria had taken radical steps in business in the name of women. Her firm had been visited twice in March of 1870 by Susan B. Anthony for her newspaper, The Revolution, but while the articles were flattering, they did not elevate Victoria in the ranks of the women’s rights activists. Victoria had earlier complained in the press that while she had the backing of the opposite sex, her own had almost “universally thrown dirt at [her].” With an eye towar
d the platform that she had pledged to mount to save other women from domestic misery, she searched for a means to insert herself into the ranks of the women reformers.

  From Wall Street she had watched the endless conventions in Washington, New York, and Boston, where the reformers fought among themselves. She had listened to their endless pleas for funds, asking women to take some of the money given them by their husbands and donate it to the cause. She had watched them try to bluster and cajole Congress into recognizing their right to vote. So far, the effort had earned them nothing but ridicule.

  Victoria decided her place among the women reformers was not in the ranks but at the top. At thirty-two, she declared herself a candidate for president of the United States. It was, at the very least, a precipitous step. No woman had ever been elected to Congress, let alone the White House. Victoria had no political party behind her and no political experience to support her claim that she was a serious candidate. But Victoria’s style had never been measured or deliberate. The Herald had given her a weekly column and she used her first entry, on April 2, 1870, to announce her candidacy for the highest office in the land: “While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence; while others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it; while others argued the equality of women with man, I proved it by successfully engaging in business; while others sought to show that there was no valid reason why women should be treated, socially and politically, as being inferior to man, I boldly entered the arena . . .of business and exercised the rights I already possessed. . .. I therefore claim the right to speak for the enfranchised women of the country, and believing as I do that the prejudices which still exist in the popular mind against women in public life will soon disappear, I now announce myself as candidate for the Presidency. . .. I anticipate criticism; but however unfavorable the comment this letter may evoke I trust that my sincerity will not be called in question.”

  After the paper hit the streets, Woodhull, Claflin & Co.’s Broad Street office was once again inundated by visitors: “The lady brokers of No. 44 Broad Street received many calls yesterday from their friends and from influential and prominent citizens, all desirous to offer their congratulations on the advent of the ladies in the political arena,” the New York Dispatch reported, “Mrs. Woodhull having announced herself in yesterday’s Herald as a candidate for the presidency in 1872.

  “A majority of their visitors were undoubtedly actuated by curiosity but the ladies have many sincere friends and by hook or by crook have managed to rank on their side some of the wealthiest citizens. . ..

  “Mrs. Woodhull announces she plans to spend a fortune, if necessary, in advocating her views on equality and the governmental policy, and will soon begin the publication of a campaign sheet, in which she promises to make some rare disclosures that will both interest and astound the political world.”

  Three days after her announcement, Victoria leased a mansion in New York’s Murray Hill section more befitting a future leader of her people than the overcrowded brownstone sandwiched between Broadway and the Bowery on Great Jones Street. Fifteen East 38th Street was located between Madison and Fifth Avenues, in an area that some of New York’s wealthiest and most aristocratic families called home. It was a massive brownstone, four stories high, and with its American basement and square roof stood taller than any other structure on the block. The patch of front garden was covered in flowers. The home’s massive black walnut door was reached by two staircases of brownstone resting on granite foundations. Two parlor windows opened onto balconies supported by Corinthian columns. And rising up the facade of the house were ten-foot-high windows with black walnut sashes and massive plateglass panes.

  Inside, Victoria created a sumptuous palace, from the frescoed ceilings, chandeliers, and marble-lined walls to the exotic carpets, purple velvet curtains, massive grand piano, and painted glass dome at the top of the grand staircase depicting the loves of Venus. One writer, intoxicated by the colors, smells, and even sounds (there were birds in a greenhouse off the main parlor), said he felt as if a “marvellous magician” had transported the Orient to 38th Street.

  Despite her new wealth, stature, and opulent surroundings, the ghost of Victoria’s past haunted her in the form of her son. Byron was a constant reminder of her pledge to work so that women would understand the duties of motherhood and be given the tools to fulfill those duties. He was a sad and pitiful, toothless and blank faced specter. Theodore Tilton said he roamed from room to room in the great house “muttering noises more sepulchral than human; a daily agony to the woman who bore him.” But he “heighten[ed] the pathos of the perpetual scene by the uncommon sweetness of his temper which, by winning everyone’s love, doubles everyone’s pity.”

  IN THE DAYS after her announcement, Victoria’s presidential candidacy was treated as a novelty by the press. It was one more subject to be chuckled over in the clubs and the restaurants frequented by the men who pulled the city’s financial and political strings. They felt no threat from this charming renegade in petticoats. They enjoyed her company, visited her at her magnificent home and at the Broad Street office, and spoke with her on all topics as if she were an equal. And yet she was not an equal. She was allowed to roam Wall Street and dabble in politics in much the way a benevolent husband allowed his wife to exceed her household budget or join the temperance movement. Victoria was treated as a pet. For the moment, the power brokers on Wall Street and in the press were happy to let her have her fun: “Mrs. Woodhull offers herself in apparent good faith as a candidate, and perhaps has a remote impression, or rather hope, that she may be elected, but it seems that she is rather in advance of her time. The public mind is not yet educated to the pitch of universal woman’s rights,” the New York Herald wrote in an editorial. “At present man, in his affection for and kindness toward the weaker sex, is disposed to accord her any reasonable number of privileges. Beyond that stage he pauses, because there seems to him to be something which is unnatural in permitting her to share the turmoil, the excitement, the risks of competition for the glory of governing.”

  Victoria needed a vehicle to broadcast the message that she was a serious candidate, that she would demand her rights until she received them, and that she was a force to be reckoned with, not merely tolerated. She could not count on continued coverage in the press or always control the message when an article did appear—even when Tennie fed stories to her newsmen suitors. She needed to buy herself a voice. Victoria Woodhull, the stockbroker and presidential candidate, would become a publisher.

  NEW YORK CITY, MAY 1870

  Americans had become addicted to newspapers during the Civil War and by the 1870s the press had become a dominant force in the national dialogue. One contemporary social historian wrote, “The newspaper is half the life of an American. Even in some prisons they supply each criminal with the morning prints. A ruffian may be deprived of his liberty, may be locked up in a cell, may be cut down as to his victuals, but to deprive him of the morning papers is too shocking a cruelty for Americans to think of inflicting.”

  In New York City at the time, each political party had its own newspaper; “rings,” or criminal syndicates, controlled others. The news could be bent, bought, or sold to promote a position or person. It could be more editorial than fact and embellished to the point of fiction. Each newspaper had a personality as distinct as its eccentric editor or publisher, who, like potentates, commanded a loyal following.

  The New York Evening Post, edited by William Cullen Bryant, was a favorite among “conservative, cultivated New Yorkers.” Charles Dana’s Sun was considered the “newspaperman’s newspaper,” abusing and ridiculing people the community considered respectable while praising society’s outcasts. The World was the leading Democratic journal in the East. Horace Greeley’s Tribune was “often avant garde and a trifle snobbish,” but it was also the most influential newspaper in the country. The Herald
, under the control first of James Gordon Bennett and then his notorious son, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., was the leading paper on Wall Street but also featured personals that were used as a guide to prostitutes. The Brooklyn Eagle was owned by a Brooklyn ring. The Brooklyn Union was devoutly Republican. The New York Times, staid and straight in its reporting, called The New York Commercial Advertiser “chiefly remarkable for its corrupt politics and atrocious grammar.” The Independent was a powerful liberal religious newspaper under the control of Theodore Tilton. The Christian Union was its more conservative counterpart under the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated newspaper was popular among those hungry for news who could not read. And for non-English-speaking New Yorkers there were scores of papers in various languages to keep their communities informed.

  For women on the East Coast, there were two major newspapers advocating women’s rights. The Woman’s Journal had started in Boston in 1870 with Mary Livermore as its editor in chief, Lucy Stone as assistant editor, and Stone’s husband, Henry Blackwell, as business manager. It was decidedly conservative. The other paper, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Revolution, promoted more radical positions but, by May 1870, was struggling under a ten-thousand dollar debt and had been transferred to Laura Curtis Bullard, who turned it into a literary and society journal. Neither of these two papers had a wide circulation; like the women’s conventions, they primarily preached to the converted.

  Victoria’s newspaper would be something new. It would not be ghettoized—it was not a women’s paper, nor a financial paper, nor a political paper. Rather, it was all of these things. It perfectly reflected her belief that in order to move toward increased rights for women and a generally healthier society, the various interest groups must unite. Women must work alongside men at home, in business, and in politics to achieve their goals; the wealthy must not ignore the poor; the free must not forget the imprisoned.