I froze, panic seizing my limbs and rendering me immobile. My eyes darted from the men to the carriage to James and Theodore then to Tennie. A thought passed between us, a shared sense of desperation. There were too many of them. We’d never be able to flee without some sort of altercation.
“You are worth a pretty penny, are you not?” The heckler fondled the gold watch chain hanging from my suit. “Let’s have a look.”
I willed myself not to flinch. If all he wanted to do was rob me, I would not stop him. I could buy another watch. Other far darker dangers threatened in a crowd such as this. As long as I could escape unharmed, nothing else mattered.
James made a move toward me but was quickly restrained by one of the other men. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught another movement, a blur of brown that heaved itself upon my would-be attacker.
The whole group staggered, caught unawares, providing the opportunity we needed. Tennie and I raced for the carriage, followed closely by James and Theodore.
“Go, go!” James yelled to the driver as he shut the door behind us all.
As we sped away from the square, I glanced back just as a mob, much larger than the six original men, descended upon our anonymous savior, raining down blow after blow upon him under the watchful gaze of the police, who did nothing to stop the violence.
My would-be assailant limped on behind the carriage for a few blocks, brandishing a knife at us. “Take care, Madame Presidentess. I am not the only one who would see you silenced.”
JANUARY 1872
The backlash from the parade was swift and harsh. All I could do was watch as, one by one, my remaining allies turned against me.
Shaken by the alarm raised by the New York Times—which compared me to Karl Marx, insinuating I shared his belief that a violent overthrow of the capitalist class was inevitable, if not imminent—many of the firm’s most lucrative clients quietly closed their accounts, leaving the brokerage with barely enough business to keep the collectors from our door.
How we would keep even that small clientele was questionable now that Josie, still our main source of tips after all these years, had abandoned us for Paris. When her lover, Mr. Vanderbilt’s loose-lipped stock market rival, Jim Fisk, was brutally murdered, she didn’t wait around for suspicion to fall on her innocent shoulders.
But that was, in many ways, the least of my troubles. The Unionists and Marxists were accusing me of using the funeral march as a publicity stunt, which was not sitting well with the Section Twelve workers. I couldn’t lose them at such a critical juncture in my campaign. To maintain their loyalty, I would have to make a bold move, one that placed me firmly on the side of the working class, a gesture no one could ignore.
Starting in January, I began calling out the rich and powerful in the columns of the Weekly, especially those who depended on the labor of the poor, and revealing the inside deals that had made them rich, of which we had knowledge thanks to Josie. I hadn’t wanted to go this far, but the aftermath of the parade had forced my hand, and I was tired of the duplicity of the rich.
No one was sacred—not even Cornelius Vanderbilt. That made Tennie nervous, but I no longer cared. If he wished to withdraw his support, that was his decision. But I could not in good conscience shine the light on others while allowing our patron to remain in the dark. I was against hypocrisy in all its forms, and to do so would have made me a practitioner of the worst sort.
I followed up the columns with the most explosive speech of my career, titled “The Impending Revolution.” It was a scathing indictment of the wealthy and the crimes their fortunes allowed them to perpetrate without even a second glance, whereas the average man was jailed for far less.
After I debuted the speech in Boston, James and Tennie begged me to not speak such words again, especially not in New York, where my name was increasingly linked with violence.
“You’re taking a terrible, unnecessary risk,” James said. “Please, as you once asked Stephen, let tempers calm before you set the town on fire again.”
“Why should I cede the tide of popular opinion because of a minority who wish me ill?”
Tennie growled. “Sometimes you can be so bullish, Vickie. Have you forgotten the break-in at the firm or the threats made against your person? Or do you desire to end up a female Abraham Lincoln?”
“No one will shoot me.”
“Can you be so certain?” James asked. “Are a few votes really worth your life?”
“No. But I spent my childhood in fear of my father and my maidenhood in fear of my husband. I will not succumb to fear of what may or may not occur in my adult life. I will speak the truth, and the spirits will guard me.”
Three days before I was due to give the speech in New York, Harper’s Weekly got wind of it and published a cartoon depicting me with the caption “Get thee behind me (Mrs.) Satan.” It showed me in the foreground as a winged creature with horns coming out of my short hair, gesturing to a page that read, “Be saved by Free Love.” Behind me was a woman in rags, saddled with dirty, crying babies and carrying on her back a drunkard of a husband.
I stared at the image, unsure whether to laugh or cry. In truth, I wanted to do both. On one hand, the drawing was absurd, but on the other, its message was clear: I was equal to Satan for suggesting Free Love could save woman from her circumstances. Any God-fearing female was better off enduring her circumstances than following me to perdition.
I dropped the paper in the rubbish bin. Either way, worrying over it wouldn’t do any good. What was done was done; now I needed to show the public that the press was wrong.
On February 20, I waited backstage at the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street, watching the crowd grow larger and larger until they were squashed together like bound firewood. One of the janitors mentioned I was so in demand that the sold-out venue was still admitting patrons who held scalped tickets. According to him, the fifty-cent tickets were being sold for as much as ten dollars. Well, if nothing else, the damned cartoon had drawn people to see for themselves if I had horns. Smiling, I patted my hair and hoped they wouldn’t be disappointed.
Thirty minutes remained until I was scheduled to take the stage, but the audience was growing unruly as profit trumped safety. I had asked the building manager not to admit anyone else, but he clearly wasn’t listening. As patrons pushed in from the back, the women in front were crushed up against the stage. Three women had to be carried out after they fainted in the muggy, sweat-laced air of the ground floor.
The manager may have had no problem treating his patrons like cattle, but I did not wish to see my audience penned in like animals. It was time to put a stop to this nonsense before it set off a chain reaction of hysteria. I straightened my black jacket and tie and stepped onto the stage.
My notoriety negated the need for an introduction, so I began straightway, my voice strong and powerful. “A Vanderbilt may sit in his office and manipulate stocks or make dividends, by which in a few years, he amasses fifty million dollars from the industries of the country, and he is one of the remarkable men of the age. But if a poor, half-starved child were to take a loaf of bread from his cupboard to prevent starvation, she would be sent first to the Tombs and thence to Blackwell’s Island.
“An Astor may sit in sumptuous apartments and watch the property bequeathed him by his father rise in value from one million to fifty million, and everybody bows before his immense power and worships his business capacity. But if a tenant whose employer discharged him because he did not vote the Republican ticket fails to pay his month’s rent to Mr. Astor, the law sets him and his family into the street in midwinter.
“Is there any common justice in such a state of things? Is it right that the millions should toil all their lives long, scarcely having comfortable food and clothes, while the few manage to control all the benefits? A system of society which permits such arbitrary distributions of wealth is a disgrace to Christian civilization.
“But it is asked, how is this to be remedied? I ans
wer, very easily. Since those who possess the accumulated wealth of the country have filched it by legal means from those to whom it justly belongs—the people—it must be returned to them. When a person worth millions dies, instead of leaving it to his children, who have no more title to it than anybody else’s children have, it must revert to the people who produced it.”
I continued on in a similar vein for two hours. When my speech ended, instead of the usual laudation, I was greeted with stunned silence followed by polite applause. Unlike in Boston, where I’d been treated to both cheers and jeers, this audience was oddly subdued upon leaving the theatre, mumbling to one another but otherwise unmoved.
I mentioned this to James afterward.
“My love,” he replied, “you have just declared war on not only their heroes but their neighbors and colleagues. It is far easier to scoff at the tycoons of Wall Street and Fifth Avenue from the safe remove of several states away. It is far different to do so when you will see them at church on Sunday.”
For the next two days, the same silence I experienced from the audience extended to the press. But then the New York Times found the courage to speak out against my speech, accusing me of inflaming the poor against the rich and being a hypocrite.
“Why should not Mrs. Woodhull prove her faith in the theory that property is crime?” they wrote after asking, incorrectly, why I didn’t include Vanderbilt in my speech. “Let her kindle a bonfire in Union Square and head a procession of women like-minded with herself, who will cast their wicked wealth into the flame. When her best black silk and her jaunty sealskin jacket, her diamond rings, and her golden necklaces have cracked and burned in the fire, the intelligent working men of the city will, at least, credit her with a desire not to enjoy luxuries which she has not earned by manual labor.”
Furious, I immediately sent a reply, pointing out their errors and defending myself. “I never objected to the accumulation of wealth. I want everybody to have all the wealth of which he can make good use, and if equal conditions are secured, everybody may have that amount. But I did, and always shall until it is remedied, object to a certain few holding all the wealth. One class of people has no right first to monopolize the wealth and afterward to put labor in bondage by its power.
“I do not monopolize either dresses or jewels, since of the first I only possess sufficient to render myself comfortable while with the last I have nothing to do. I believe money should be simply the means to better ends and not the end itself.”
When my reply was returned with a terse message that the paper “cannot possibly afford space for your letter,” I crumpled the note and set to work printing it in the pages of the Weekly.
Once the Times set the standard, other papers followed suit, happily condemning my speech.
Weary of the constant journalistic backbiting, I sequestered myself at the brokerage, only to be surprised by a visit from Mr. Vanderbilt. He had never once visited us there, preferring to remain in the shadows. His connection to Tennie and me had stayed as ephemeral as smoke, especially since our mother’s failed blackmail attempt. His presence spoke volumes, so much so that he needed not speak for the purpose of his visit to be clear. He was gravely upset over my speech.
He declined the seat I offered and instead stood erect as a naval captain, hands clasped behind his back. “I have just been to see Tennie. It should come as no surprise that I am withdrawing my commitment to fund the Weekly. How you finance it, and any of your other ventures, is no longer any of my concern. We shall put it about that my wife caught me embracing Tennie, but we both know the true reason I wish to end our association.” He stared at me pointedly.
I nodded mutely, a lump forming in my throat. This was my doing, was inevitable even, but the loss of our friendship was still a terrible blow. Then there was the financial consideration. It cost three hundred dollars a week to run the paper, more than it made, so we would have to find a new source of backing to keep the presses running.
But more than that, I was affected by the hard tone of finality that colored his words, like a disappointed father disinheriting a persistently unruly child. That was what he had become to me—a surrogate father who had taken in my sister and me when we were but orphans in a strange new city, taught us a trade, and saw to it that we prospered. I began to weep.
“Why did you do it, Victoria?” The commodore’s voice cracked, and his icy blue eyes softened a touch. “Why, after all these years, did you turn on me? You could have given the same speech without using my name, and we would not be where we are today.”
I regarded him, tears streaming down my cheeks, but was unable to find words. How could I explain to this man that I thought what I had done was just, that I was afraid of being called his pet, of being accused of sheltering him while I gleefully snitched on everyone else? How could I justify the hubris that had made me think I no longer needed him?
In the end, I said nothing, shaking my head and praying he would see my sorrow and regret in my wrinkled brow and hear my pleas to forgive me within my sobs.
Mr. Vanderbilt sighed. “Do you remember the first day you came to work for me? You channeled the spirit of my mother. She warned me away from you, said I would rue to the day I took you in.” He shook his head. “God, that I would have listened.”
After Mr. Vanderbilt departed, I left feeling as though I had been run over by a carriage. When I opened the front door to my home, I nearly screamed, not expecting to meet Mr. Langley, my landlord, in the foyer. He was dressed formally, a briefcase resting at his side as though keeping him company while he waited for me. He rose when I entered.
“Mr. Langley, to what do I owe pleasure of your company?” I asked, forcing warmth into my voice that I did not feel, upset as I was by the afternoon’s events.
I made to shake his hand, but he backed away. So this was not a social call. My smile faltered as I offered him a brandy.
“No, thank you. This will not take long.” He opened his briefcase and removed a long sheet of paper. “I am here to serve notice that you and your family are to vacate the premises at the beginning of next month.”
My jaw dropped. “But why? We have not been late on our payments.” To illustrate my point, I reached into my purse and withdrew a fistful of cash, which I thrust at him. “Here, here. We are not paupers. What is wrong with our money?”
“Nothing. It’s not your money.” He cleared his throat. “There are those who do not wish to have your name associated with this neighborhood.”
“And why not? We have caused no disruption.” But I was a radical, and those with money had no desire to associate with my kind. With more bravado than my frayed nerves would allow me to feel, I added, “You have no legal grounds on which to evict us.”
Mr. Langley dug the toe of his highly polished shoe into the pile of my blue-and-white carpet. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. That is a matter for our attorneys to decide.”
I wasted no time in escorting my landlord to the door. “So it is. Mine will be in touch,” I assured him as I slammed the door.
APRIL 1872
I sat at my desk, head in my hands. It was all getting to be too much. Despite old Mr. Reymert’s best efforts, we’d had to vacate my beloved mansion and sell off all of my lovely possessions. Gone were the crystal chandeliers, the mirrors twice the height of a man, the fine furnishings. Now we were interlopers in my sister Maggie’s modest brownstone—just as when the mill had burned so many years before—stretching it to its limits with the addition of my brood of seven.
Then Canning died. He had been ill for quite some time with a lung ailment, and when the doctor tried to cut back on his dosage of morphine in an effort to end his addiction, his body gave out. No dramatic scene ensued—no deathbed apologies or pithy final words. Canning was too ill and too inebriated for any of that. He simply closed his eyes and, shortly thereafter, stopped breathing.
Grieving for him—little as he deserved it—would have been a strain on its own, but then Utica, Canning’
s consort in all substances legal and illegal, had to go and cry to the coroner that he’d died under suspicious circumstances, blaming the doctor. The press jumped on the story, making it sound as though I or, more popularly, Colonel Blood was implicated in Canning’s untimely death.
Of course, as soon as the coroner did his job, it was proven that Canning died of congestion in the lungs and had been ill for many years. But by then, Maggie had taken it upon herself to host a reporter for tea and give him all the sordid details, including recounting the night Canning came to live with us and revealing that Utica took morphine daily. So now not only was I a pariah, but the entire newspaper-reading world knew my sister was addicted to drugs—yet another spot on my family’s already tarnished reputation. Many people were beginning to ask if I came from the kind of stock they wanted in their president.
I had hoped my run of bad luck would be buried with Canning, but it continued unabated. Earlier that morning, Stephen had informed me that Karl Marx himself had suspended Section Twelve. Stephen tried to make light of it by telling me it was a matter of ideological differences, that Marx and those in London were more concerned with wages, rights, and communal living than the individual rights Section Twelve and I espoused. But no matter how much sugar he poured on it, the stark truth was the same—by failing as the leader of Section Twelve, I had lost the loyalty of its members and, with that, the workingman’s vote. All the risk I had taken on, all the friends I had alienated—it was all for nothing.
“The fact is you’re too much trouble, Victoria.” Stephen was the one to give voice to the unspoken thought we both shared.
Now all I had left were the Spiritualists and the suffragists. But if I faced the truth, the loyalty of the suffragists was questionable. The gossip about me in the papers was relentless, most of it coming from women who were supposed to be my allies. I could understand when it came from the American Woman Suffrage Association and their Boston bluebloods, but lately my sisters in suffrage—Elizabeth Phelps, Laura Curtis Bullard, and Lillie Devereux Blake—were found to be the source of some of the rumors swirling about me.
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