sister, Tennessee Celeste Claflin, a gay, somewhat coarse girl aged twenty-two, was even more beautiful, less intelligent, and certainly less inhibited.
In her own person, and in that of her younger sister, Victoria Woodhull saw sufficient assets for the founding of a fortune and a national reputation. The question was: where to begin? The answer came immediately: begin at the top. For in New York in 1868 the one person at the top was Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in the United States, whose principal interests in his seventy-fourth year were females of sexual appeal who were not too swift of foot and anyone else of mystical experience who would give him assurance of health and longevity. To reach him required only unlimited audacity.
Undoubtedly, the idea of meeting the bluff, bewhiskered old Commodore originated in Mrs. Woodhull’s fertile brain. She decided to effect the introduction through her male parent, Buckman Claflin, who, though a disreputable, one-eyed monster, was still her father and would lend the entire enterprise an air of respectability. Thus, Mrs. Woodhull and her hoydenish sister were chastely escorted to the mansion in Washington Place and announced as famous miracle-healers from the Midwest.
It is not surprising that they were promptly admitted. Commodore Vanderbilt was an ailing man who had become impatient with conventional medicine and was now employing the services of a Staten Island seer and an electrical wizard to give him hope and comfort. He was ready to listen to almost anyone. Mrs. Woodhull quickly explained that she was a successful medium, and that her sister Tennie was a magnetic healer who gave patients strength through physical contact. This last, as well as the provocative appearance of his fair guests, convinced the blasphemous old Commodore that he must put himself in their hands.
However, let it be remarked at once that Commodore Vanderbilt was neither an easy nor a pliable patient. He was
tough, he was ruthless, and he was nobody’s fool. He had pyramided possession of a single sailboat, purchased when he was sixteen, to the ownership of a hundred steamers servicing the East Coast and to the final control of the New York Central Railroad. Through instigating price wars, indulging in stock-market trickery, and bribing courts and legislatures he had accumulated $100,000,000 in his prime, and almost doubled the sum before his death. “Law?” he once bellowed. “What do I care about law? Hain’t I got the power?”
Obviously such a man would not be easy to please. Yet, by some miracle of understanding, Victoria Woodhull reduced this blustering giant to the position of intimate friend and patron. When she realized his need for sex indeed, few housemaids escaped his lust she fed him the willing and vigorous Tennessee. The magnetic treatments, whereby Tennessee laid her hands on the Commodore’s hands and passed electrical energy from her body into his, proceeded magnificently. Tennessee was soon in his bed, installed as his mistress. He called her his “little sparrow” and she called him “old boy.”
A year and a half of Tennessee’s special brand of magnetic healing softened the Commodore for Victoria Woodhull’s special purposes. The idea of how she might best use the Commodore came to Mrs. Woodhull from her lover of four years, a bemused Civil War veteran and fellow spiritualist named Colonel James H. Blood. It was the astute Blood who realized at once that the Commodore might aid his protegees in that art at which he was past master the art of making money by speculation. The Commodore possessed great stock holdings, manipulated shares by the thousands, dominated Wall Street as no other man did. Might he not be of greatest value in support of a brokerage firm?
On January 20, 1870, the New York Herald announced, incredulously, the opening of a new brokerage house Woodhull, Claflin and Company operated solely by two pretty and fashionable lady partners. Their headquarters, the newspaper continued, were in parlors 25 and 26 of the Hoffman House. Parlor 25 was furnished with reception chairs and piano, and decorated with oil paintings and a photograph of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, beside which hung a framed inscription reading, significantly: “Simply to Thy cross I cling.” To its description the Herald added a comment: “The notion prevails among the lame ducks and old foxes of Wall Street that Vanderbilt, the oldest fox of them all, is at the bottom of the experiment.”
If this announcement created a furor, it was as nothing compared to the excitement generated among investors and members of the exchange when Victoria Woodhull and her sister invaded Wall Street itself. For soon enough Hoffman House was found too confining, and the ladies opened new business quarters at 44 Broad Street. Seven thousand visitors, fascinated by the oddity and by the silent partnership of Vanderbilt, flocked to their offices in the first week. When the traffic did not abate, the proprietors were obliged to post a notice in their vestibule reading: “All gentlemen will state their business and then retire at once.” Gentlemen were admitted by a uniformed doorman to a front office furnished with leather sofas and walnut desks, which was separated by a glass-and-wood partition from a rear cubicle reserved for female customers. Mrs. Woodhull and her sister, fresh roses in their hair and gold pens cocked jauntily on their ears, were cordial to legitimate customers, but evasive with the press. They were in business for themselves, they said. They would not discuss their patron. “Commodore Vanderbilt is my friend,” said Tennessee, “but I will not say anything more concerning that matter.” The press was, for the most part, generous in its praise, and headlines referred to the sisters as the “Lady Brokers,” the “Queens of Finance,” the “Bewitching Brokers,” the “Vanderbilt Protegees.” Banks and financial firms respectfully came calling, and were impressed, and the new business boomed.
In three years, by Victoria Woodhull’s public estimate, the
new brokerage house “made seven hundred thousand dollars.” Where did these huge profits come from? One historian has been unkind enough to remark that “it is to be suspected they sold much more than railroad shares.” But even the Everleigh sisters of Chicago, more expert at handling fleshly commodities, had never been able thus to make almost three quarters of a million dollars profit in three years. It may be said with some certainty that the great bulk of the profits earned by Woodhull, Claflin and Company came not from sex, but from brains. And the brains belonged to Commodore Vanderbilt. For during those exciting financial years he constantly provided the eager sisters with inside market information. In 1857, the Commodore, having disposed of his steamships, became a director, and later president, of the New York and Harlem Railroad. The stock in this line, which went from central Manhattan to Albany, the Commodore purchased at $9 a share. By bribing the City Council to extend the line, then by outwitting Daniel Drew, who was selling short, the Commodore sent the stock rocketing up to $179 a share. Mrs. Woodhull, lady broker, was his spiritual solace during this coup, and her own profits in the Harlem were almost half a million dollars.
When the Commodore determined to acquire control of the Erie Railroad, which ran from New York to Chicago and competed with his own New York Central, he took Mrs. Woodhull along for the ride. It was a rocky road. Gould and Fisk reached the directors of the Erie first, had them issue $10,000,000 worth of bonds, had these converted into 50,000 shares of stock, and dumped the lot on the market. The Commodore bought and bought, while Fisk joyfully chortled: “We’ll give the old hog all he can hold if this printing press holds out.” When the Commodore learned that he had been tricked, he forced Gould and Fisk to make the stocks good and to buy back $5,000,000 worth of them.
Finally, on that September day in 1869 known as Black Friday, Mrs. Woodhull was able to profit once more with the Commodore’s assistance. Gould, after encouraging President Grant to keep the nation’s large gold-reserve locked up in Treasury vaults, bought $47,000,000 worth of free gold and drove its price up from the $132 required in greenbacks to purchase $100 in gold to $150 and to $162.50. The Exchange was in a panic. Angrily Grant released $4,000,000 in government gold, and Wall Street had its Black Friday as the price of gold plummeted down to $135. On that terrible day, the Commodore handed out loans of a million dollars to help
settle the market. Through his advice, Mrs. Woodhull had sold at $160, and at enormous profit, before the final panic took place.
As time passed, the Commodore was being subtly, gently drawn away from the influence of Victoria Woodhull by his second wife, Frank C. Vanderbilt, a tall, dignified, religious Alabama girl. She barred entrance to all spiritualists, and surrounded her sickly husband with orthodox physicians and a Baptist pastor. Mrs. Woodhull did not mind. She already had what she wanted from the Commodore. She had wealth. Now she went after that which she desired even more power.
On April 2, 1870, in the pages of the New York Herald, she made a proclamation that amazed the metropolis and would soon enough make her a national figure. “While others argued the equality of woman with man,” she declared, “I proved it by successfully engaging in business. … I therefore claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised 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.”
It is unlikely that there ever existed, before the advent of Victoria Claflin Woodhull, a presidential candidate with a background so unstable, chaotic, and scandalous. She was born September 23, 1838, in the squalor of the frontier town
of Homer, Ohio. She was the seventh of ten children, and she was named Victoria in honor of Great Britain’s new queen. Her father, Reuben Buckman Claflin, was an uncouth conniver who earned a poor living as a surveyor and a postmaster. Her mother, Roxanna, was a strange, martial creature, probably of German-Jewish descent, probably conceived out of wedlock by a governor of Pennsylvania. Long years later, Victoria told the Philadelphia Press that she was raised “in a picturesque cottage, white painted and high peaked, with a porch running round it and a flower garden in front.” She was raised in a broken-down shack on an unkempt hill, and every room of the shack from basement to parlor was filled with beds for the squalling children and relatives.
Victoria’s mother, who believed in fortunetelling and the spirit world, conducted her unruly household after the precepts of that Austrian mystic, Friedrich Mesmer, who preached that human cures could be accomplished by occult force. Mrs. Claflin preferred Mesmer to the local physician, and three of her children died in their infancy. When Victoria was three years old, a housekeeper also died. Victoria saw her lofted on high by several muscular angels, and promptly swooned. Thereafter she was in constant touch with supernatural beings. Angels were her only friends, excepting the visions of two sisters who had died in childhood and with whom she continued to play. “She would talk to them,” a friend reported, “as a girl tattles to her dolls.” By her eleventh year she had had only three years of formal education. Her teachers found her uncommonly intelligent. Before she could continue her learning, a painful episode forced her abruptly to leave school and Homer, Ohio.
Buckman Claflin, a man who ordinarily had little interest in his possessions, suddenly had a change of heart one day in 1849. He took out insurance on his wooden grist-mill. As he had hardly funds to feed his family, and since the mill lay rotting of disuse, the precaution seemed oddly extravagant. One week later, when he was on a business trip ten miles away, the grist mill went up in flames. Claflin returned to collect his insurance. He was met not by an agent bearing the benefits of his premium, but by a vigilante committee of leading citizens. He found himself accused of arson and fraud. He was given the quick choice of the hemp or exile. Within the hour he departed for Pennsylvania. In the week following, the town raised money for the rest of the family and sent them packing.
Thus, necessity forced Roxanna Claflin, and Victoria and the rest of the hungry clan, to call upon their resources of invention. They formed a medicine show and sold a complexion oil made of vegetable juice. In the community of Mount Gilead, Ohio, where they were evicted from their first boardinghouse because Victoria evoked spirit music, they prospered briefly. And there, in 1853, when she was sixteen years of age, Victoria married Dr. Canning Woodhull.
She had met him two years earlier, at a Fourth of July picnic, and had seen him more or less steadily thereafter. He has been referred to as a “young dandy” and a “gay rake” and a “brilliant fop” who treated Victoria “abominably.” Most latter-day judgments have been derived from a biased biography of Victoria written by Theodore Tilton after he had become her lover. Tilton declared that Victoria had been forced into the marriage by her parents. “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.”
As a matter of fact, Dr. Woodhull was anything but the cloven-footed devil depicted by the prejudiced Tilton. He came from a respectable Rochester, New York, family. He had been well educated in Boston. He had planned to acquire great riches during the gold rush to California, but had fallen ill in Ohio, and had remained there to resume his practice of medicine. When the Claflins rode into Mount Gilead he was
a bachelor who dreamed of a peaceful home and a large family. He thought Victoria would help him fulfill that dream, but he miscalculated the character of his mate, and the mistake ruined his life. The problem in Dr. Woodhull’s eleven years of discordant marriage was that he had bargained for a wife and had gotten a self-absorbed St. Joan who, like the Maid, heard voices and had a destiny (inspired by excessive devotion to the writings of George Sand) higher than that of the kitchen. Nevertheless, the restless and ambitious Victoria spent sufficient time with Dr. Woodhull to bear him two children a boy, Byron, who lost his wits when he stumbled out of a second-story window, and a girl, Zulu Maud, who was to be the comfort of Victoria’s later years.
Soon after her marriage Victoria decided that Ohio restricted her natural abilities. She induced her befuddled husband to abandon his practice and take her to California. There, through the recommendation of an actress named Anna Cogswell, she obtained a small role in a stage comedy entitled New York by Gas Light. This play led to others. But Victoria’s progress was slow, and soon enough she realized that her future lay in a different form of entertainment. For in the East two other performers, Margaret and Katherine Fox, of Hydesville, New York, had attained a meteoric rise without ever once appearing in grease paint.
The Fox sisters had heard weird rappings at night “as though someone was knocking on the floor and moving chairs.” Addressing overflow audiences that included such reputable personages as Horace Greeley, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant, the sisters were interpreting the rappings as communications from the spirit world. Though a conclave of conservative medical men in Buffalo announced that the so-called rappings were created by the sisters themselves by cracking their knee and ankle joints, lay audiences refused to be so easily disillusioned. Seances became the rage, and accomplished mediums were much in demand. In California this need finally reached the ears of Victoria Woodhull, who had long before communed with spirits for mere pleasure, but who now determined to forego her amateur status for an opportunity to share the large sums being offered to expert spiritualists.
Victoria, trailed by her sodden husband, caught up with her family in Cincinnati, where they were treating the gullible with a new cancer cure. When Victoria explained her plan the entire family was in agreement. A house was rented. A sign was posted, reading: “Tennessee Claflin, and Victoria Woodhull, Clairvoyants.” The sisters gave noisy seances, at a dollar a head, and even attracted so famous a client as Jesse R. Grant, the father of Ulysses S. Grant. To the conjuring up of good spirits, the ladies added fortunetelling and magnetic healing. Their youth and attractiveness brought in a preponderance of male customers, who were prepared to pay far more for closer communion with their mediums. Apparently Victoria and Tennessee were not above practicing prostitution. The combination of soothsayer and whore might have enriched Victoria
enormously had not Tennessee crudely spoiled the game. When Tennessee began to employ for the purposes of blackmail information gained as seer and strumpet, she was sued.
The Woodhulls and the Claflins left Cincinnati in great haste, and began a spiritualistic tour of Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri. In St. Louis, Victoria found true love. She had been invited to appear before the local Spiritualist Society to defend her doctrines against the attack of a clergyman. As spiritualism, which already had from three to four million followers in the United States, had somehow attracted persons interested in free love, feminine emancipation, and social reform, it was not surprising that Colonel James Harvey Blood was also in the audience. Though ostensibly Blood was covering the debate for the St. Louis Times, the real motive for his attendance was his interest in socialism and advanced social theory. Blood, a handsome veteran of the Civil War who had been wounded five times, was married and the father of two children. Disenchanted by his wife’s materialism, by his job, and by the avaricious men it brought him in contact with, he sought comfort in a private vision of Utopia. When Victoria Woodhull on the debate platform spoke of the same Utopia, Blood was impressed. And when she spoke of the slavery of wifehood, when she announced that there was no such thing as sin, he knew he must meet her.
To meet her, Blood pretended to be a client needing advice. His delicacy was not necessary. According to Tilton, it was Victoria who at once saw a soulmate in Blood and seduced him forthwith. “Col. James H. Blood … 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.’”
The Square Pegs Page 11