Moral codes and legal provisions buttressed assumptions about women’s place in the home, the body politic, the world. But, asked the radicals, were these assumptions divinely ordained? The freedom to love was a human right, wasn’t it, and as such, greater than statutes devised by fallible men eager to preserve the status quo? Lucy Stone and the American Woman Suffrage Association wanted to sidestep the issue and distance themselves at all costs from Woodhull and the specter of free love. “Be not deceived,” the Woman’s Journal admonished in 1870, “—free love means free lust.”
Free love routed the church, the state, the home, the family—although when Woodhull rose to speak at a National Woman Suffrage Meeting, she assured her listeners that “I have asked for equality, nothing more.” Again Woodhull was clear, unfaltering, and strong, but the audience outside Steinway Hall in New York, where she spoke, was not ready for her or the resolution read aloud after she left the stage: “All laws shall be repealed which are made by Government to interfere with the rights of adult individuals to pursue happiness as they may choose.”
That statement was evidently written by Woodhull’s friend or lover, the anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews. An abolitionist and pioneering free-love radical who supposedly invented the word “scientology” in 1871, Andrews had once run a commune in a New York City brownstone where Edmund Stedman, the war journalist and poet (now a banker) had briefly lived. He had also presided over a free-love discussion in antebellum New York and had crossed swords on the topic with Horace Greeley and Henry James, Sr., who, despite their own radicalism, were bested by this progressive and amazing man, whose views were considered noxious.
Andrews and Woodhull would not be silenced. As seductive as she was lucid and poised, Woodhull announced in The New York Times in the spring of 1871, “I advocate free love in the highest, purest sense, as the only cure for the immorality, the deep damnation by which men corrupt and disfigure God’s most holy institution of sexual relations.” Republicans were fast falling away, again accusing women who agreed with her as unsexed suffrage shriekers or of being as uncouth and uncultivated as Woodhull. Former supporters such as Republican representative James A. Garfield made sure to distance themselves from suffrage. Horace Greeley advised dumping “the Woodhull,” as his Tribune called her. “Sooner or later she will resign the craft to the bottom,” the paper said, “if she is not thrown overboard.” The San Francisco Chronicle, usually temperate in its disagreement with “those respectable women who spend their lives in agitation for political privileges,” exploded in a white heat: “For these brazen Amazons of the Victoria Woodhull type,” the paper fulminated, “we have only the contempt and disgust which is due the exhibition of their vile doctrines and worse practices.”
Sexuality had been a troubling issue for reformers, who had nonetheless been adept at using it strategically. Abolitionists had publicized the rape of black women by their white masters to inflame the North and more recently white supremacists (and George Train) claimed that in a free society black men would be free to rape white women. Lucy Stone, who believed the mere mention of sex could bring down the suffrage movement, sought to keep it locked in her bourgeois house. She knew her enemies: not just male egoists or defenders of the status quo but women like another of the reverend’s sisters, Catharine Beecher, who for years taught women the art of genteel domesticity to keep them safe from the suffrage movement and all its nasty, undomestic, sexually powerful implications.
Catharine Beecher happily signed a petition against female suffrage and asked “is woman suffrage contrary to common sense?” to which she replied with a resounding yes. Harriet Beecher Stowe, her sister, was also offended by Woodhull, whom she mocked as the short-haired, loudmouthed character in her novel, My Wife and I. Woodhull was Audacia Dangyereyes, a bully who “cuts the very ground from under the whole woman movement; for the main argument for proposing it was to introduce into politics that superior delicacy and purity which women manifest in public life.”
Woodhull refused to be intimidated. And she was happy to retaliate. “Two of your sisters have gone out of their way to assail my character both by means of the public press and by numerous private letters,” she notified the Reverend Beecher. “You doubtless know that it is in my power to strike back.” She made her meaning quite clear in her paper. “One man, a public teacher of eminence, lives in concubinage with the wife of another public teacher of almost equal eminence,” she wrote. “All three concur in denouncing offenses against morality.” She could incriminate the lot of them.
Woodhull had learned that Beecher had been having a protracted affair with his parishioner the petite and pious Elizabeth Tilton, who happened to be the wife of Theodore Tilton. Mrs. Tilton had confessed the two-year-long adultery to her astonished husband back in the summer of 1870. Reeling, Tilton had told several friends, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Recriminations, confessions, and retractions were lobbed back and forth between the Tiltons and Beecher. Then the affair was more or less hushed up. But Theodore Tilton, who evidently learned that Woodhull knew of the affair, tried to keep her quiet by writing a biographical panegyric about her of ridiculously flattering proportions. “Such a book is a tomb from which no author again rises,” laughed Julia Ward Howe when the puff piece appeared. It was true; subscriptions to The Independent, his paper, melted away.
But Woodhull hadn’t sufficiently frightened Beecher, and when he refused to introduce her before one of her lectures, she took aim. On October 28, 1872, she and her sister published a special edition of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly and blew the lid off the affair. Woodhull was declaring aggressive moral warfare against such phony reformers as Tilton and Beecher, who, as she said, were really free-lovers.
After Commodore Vanderbilt had presumably stopped supporting it—assuming he ever had—Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly had barely limped along. But now readers were paying as much as forty dollars for one copy of the salacious “Beecher-Tilton Scandal Case,” and by the end of the week more than 150,000 copies of Woodhull’s paper had been sold. Beecher’s Plymouth Church, on the Sunday after the story broke, was brimming with so-called worshippers.
Then down came Anthony Comstock on the sisters. A rising star in the antipornographic crusade that would take hold at the end of the century, Comstock had been a Civil War veteran and loner whose celebrated name would become synonymous with moral priggishness. (George Bernard Shaw, in 1905, said that Comstock would likely ban his play Mrs. Warren’s Profession from the stage because Comstock cringed even at the site of a naked baby.) A New Englander in New York City, among its prostitutes and vile weekly newspapers, only ten cents a copy, and the saloons and bordellos that were, to him, eroding the moral fabric of the city, Comstock was placed at the head of a secret committee for the suppression of vice at the Young Men’s Christian Association, funded in part by the banker and philanthropist Morris K. Jesup. In that capacity, Comstock was able to have Victoria Woodhull and her sister arrested for sending obscene literature through the U.S. mail. George Francis Train rushed to pay the sisters’ bail, but they declined his offer. Woodhull said that from the first she had known that she must suffer for the sake of her conscience, and bail would spoil that.
Though Woodhull and Claflin were exonerated, the scandal further stigmatized the cause of woman’s suffrage as located somewhere between degradation and tomfoolery but something nonetheless to be punished, banned, censored, and at all costs avoided. Even so, in large part The Woman’s Journal, the newspaper of the American Woman Suffrage Association, continued its campaign. Still, when one of its contributors was later invited to write a column about women’s issues for Harper’s Bazaar, he was explicitly told not to mention suffrage.
The Woodhull-Beecher scandal hurt both the National and the American Woman Suffrage Associations; Beecher had been president of the latter, Tilton president of the former, and worse yet, in 1872 Woodhull had campaigned for president of the entire United States on a woman suffrage ticket. Yet while wo
men from both organizations, including Susan B. Anthony, wondered if Woodhull was a confidence artist who had exploited suffrage to aggrandize herself, Elizabeth Cady Stanton noted, with a light touch of irony, that “all the agitation has helped in some way. The free love scandal has made suffrage respectable.”
It did not make it respectable enough. Woodhull continued to supply more grist for the journalists’ mill. Publicized for weeks in Woodhull’s own newspaper as well as papers nationwide, the scandal and its aftereffects precipitated a major retreat from the suffrage ranks. “We need every clean soul to help us, now when such a flood of what is fatal to the peace, and purity of the family, is rolled in on our question,” said the frustrated Lucy Stone. “My one wish in regard to Mrs. Woodhull is, that [neither] she nor her ideas, may be so much as heard at our meeting.” That time Stone’s reason was not prudery, or at least not prudery alone; she knew she had to dissociate suffrage from the inevitable Woodhull backlash to save the cause. “Died of Free Love,” one newspaper announced, “The Woman Suffrage Movement.”
In 1874 a desperate Tilton sued Beecher for alienating his wife’s affections. After a trial that lasted for six gossipy, hysterical months, with the national papers incessantly hawking the story of failed friendship and of free love and lawlessness, the jury could reach no verdict. Tilton moved to France. Elizabeth Tilton was left alone with her children, without money, growing blind, and clinging to spiritualism to see what she could no longer physically see. Beecher returned to the pulpit. Lucy Stone focused most of her attention on the Woman’s Journal though she continued to lecture. In 1879 she registered to vote under the Massachusetts law that allowed women to vote in school elections, but because she registered as Lucy Stone, not Mrs. Lucy Blackwell, her name was erased from the rolls.
Embroiled in lawsuits and evicted from their luxurious East 38th Street townhouse, in 1876 the sisters Woodhull and Claflin sailed to England, where both of them successfully remarried—Victoria Woodhull to a conservative British banker.
Like Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton continued to lecture, but mainly she wrote; she composed a history of the entire suffrage movement and a monumental two-volume Women’s Bible. Susan B. Anthony kept traveling across America as a suffrage speaker. In Rochester, in the fall of 1872, she tried to cast her ballot in the presidential election. Arrested, convicted, and fined, she never served a day in jail and never paid the fine; rather, she trooped on, becoming the mother of us all.
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RUNNING FROM THE PAST
That Susan B. Anthony insisted on voting in the 1872 presidential election could surprise no one who had taken seriously Victoria Woodhull’s argument before the House Judiciary Committee that women already had the vote. Anthony’s subsequent arrest could have come as no surprise either. Nor was Victoria Woodhull’s declaring herself a presidential candidate that year on the short-lived Equal Rights Party ticket a startling event, at least not to anyone who knew Woodhull as an able, strong-minded woman determined to be seen, heard, and counted.
That Horace Greeley would run for president and help to splinter the Republican Party, that he would turn his back not just on women but also on the depredations against the black population of Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana, where blacks were being slaughtered and the whites who sympathized with them were being driven away: that was a surprise. Public schools for black children had been closed, churches and homes set ablaze, poll taxes instituted, and in Georgia, black members of the legislature had been thrown out. In South Carolina, the black legislator Benjamin Randolph was murdered in broad daylight while he waited on a railroad platform one afternoon, and the white ex-Confederate George Garner had been flogged in the middle of the night because he’d taken a job as deputy sheriff for the local Republicans.
Greeley’s candidacy surprised even Democrats, one of whom, the banker August Belmont, called the nomination “one of the most stupendous mistakes which it is difficult even to comprehend.”
Greeley was running as a candidate put forward by Democrats and Liberal Republicans, as they were called, on a platform promising lower tariffs, hard money, limited government, and civil service reform. It was the last—civil service reform—that had moved those Republicans to break with Grant and the regular Republicans. For the country had grown unrecognizable to those men—the elite “best men,” as Carl Schurz called them—the only men fit to govern, who represented rectitude and moral value, who loathed government activism and large corporations and the sticky frauds of the times, and who were willing to reach out to the Southerner and to the Democrat in amity and friendship, letting bygones be bygones. Otherwise, there would be nothing left in America but bread, circuses, and money-grubbing.
“WHAT IS THE chief end of man?” asked Mark Twain in 1871. “To get rich. In what way?—dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.” Even the broadly optimistic Walt Whitman shook his shaggy head at an America “saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration.” Its great cities, he continued, “reeked with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism,” its public officials were hypocrites or liars, and no one trusted anyone. “The men believe not in the women,” Whitman lamented, “nor the women in the men.” Everywhere people were chasing after the almighty dollar, especially in New York City, a place that reflected in miniature much of contemporary America. There, extreme poverty rubbed shoulders with vast wealth, and tricksters and immigrants and gentry walked side by side on city streets where Victoria Woodhull and William Magear “Boss” Tweed had set up shop, the former reading futures and the latter plundering government coffers to the tune of $30 million. “The power of ‘Rings’ in our politics is becoming enormous,” said James Russell Lowell. “Men buy their seats in the Senate, and, of course, expect a profit on their investment.” Bleakly, he added, “We are becoming a huge stock-jobbery, and Republicans and Democrats are names for bulls and bears.”
Lowell’s observation never seemed more accurate than on Friday, September 24, 1869.
The national debt stood at an enormous $2.5 billion. During the war, the government had issued paper greenbacks, or soft money, to fund itself and permit deficit spending. After the war, the Grant administration and especially George Boutwell, its Treasury secretary, were committed to retiring greenbacks by buying them at a discounted rate and thereby returning the country to a specie (coin)-based economy. As a result, Boutwell authorized weekly auctions of the government’s surplus gold to increase revenue and reduce the debt without shrinking the supply of gold. Because the government held a good deal of gold in reserve, the amount of it in circulation was limited. So Boutwell kept secret the amount of gold to be sold, and no one could predict beforehand what the price might be.
The situation attracted a pair of brilliant gamblers who plotted to corner the gold market by learning in advance how much gold Boutwell intended to sell that week. The mastermind of the plan was the undersized, quiet Jay Gould, who had been a schoolmate of the poet naturalist John Burroughs but who, to Henry Adams, “suggested survival from the family of spiders. He spun webs, in corners and in the dark.” (An anti-Semite, Adams also called Gould “dark, sallow, reticent, and stealthy, with a trace of Jewish origin.”) Yet whatever one thought of him, Gould was a financial wizard. With his partners James “Jubilee Jim” Fisk and the financier Daniel Drew, he had already wrested control of the Erie Railroad from Cornelius Vanderbilt with watered stock; the battle between them involved unparalleled shenanigans in the market as well as the bribing of state legislators and judges, and when the buccaneers finished, they were not only in charge of the Erie, they soon managed to expand it.
Gould was far more modest in personal habits than his bravado sidekick, the speculator Jubilee Jim Fisk (also called the Barnum of Wall Street), an outsized peddler and dry goods merchant from Vermont with a long waxed blond mustache and a penchant for prostitutes and dissembling. To Henry Adams, Fisk, with his fat fingers ringed with diamonds, was the more
despicable of the pair: “noisy, boastful, ignorant, the type of a young butcher in appearance and mind.”
To pull off their scheme, Gould and Fisk needed inside men. Fortunately for them, enlisting Abel Rathbone Corbin, President Grant’s brother-in-law, was not hard to do. A speculator and lawyer, Corbin enjoyed Grant’s confidence although, as one of the president’s biographers pointed out, “Grant rarely met a businessman he did not trust.” Corbin’s job was simple; he merely had to provide Gould and Fisk with access to Grant. Gould also enlisted the head of the U.S. subtreasury in New York, Daniel Butterfield. A former Union general with a spotty military record who was best remembered as the creator of the bugle call “Taps” (he’d actually just revised a lights-out bugle call), Butterfield had come recommended by Corbin. He would apparently be paid $10,000 to obtain information about the government’s monetary policy and, in particular, how much gold the government would auction each week. Gould and Fish would buy it and hoard it. Next, if Gould could persuade the Treasury to sell less gold than usual, forcing up its price, he could sell his own stash at a huge profit. To do that, he needed the president’s ear.
Corbin, as planned, arranged social occasions where Grant would happen to be in the company of Gould and Fisk. The men met on one of Fisk’s steamers, the Providence, which was awash in gilded furniture and sparkling mirrors. Fisk wore his diamond breast pin, as big as a cherry, it was reported, and Gould spent the supper hour talking about finance, arguing that the government should not be buying back all the greenbacks but rather should keep gold selling at a high price. That would stimulate trade and in particular help the American farmer, who was paid in gold on the international market. Not coincidentally, farmers would then have to ship their lucrative grain on the Erie Railway.
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