Madame Presidentess

by Nicole Evelina

  A carriage dropped me off at the Cooper Institute as if I were any other patron. Dressed in the gray dress and black coal scuttle bonnet of an old Quaker woman, I made my way into the auditorium. Thanking the spirits yet again for my time on the stage in San Francisco, I hunched my shoulders, pulled my shawl up over my head, and slowly shuffled toward the stage, feigning deafness so I could push ahead of those already claiming a place. Sweat was trickling down my back. I passed several police officers, one of whom even helped me through the crowd of nearly a thousand, never once showing any sign of recognition.

  As we had agreed, Laura Cuppy Smith was onstage, announcing that she would read my speech in my stead just as I reached her.

  “No need,” I called, jumping up onstage, tearing off my disguise, and facing the astonished crowd with a look of triumph. “You have come to hear me, and I shall speak. I was compelled to pass through doors surrounded by five deputy marshals with warrants in their pockets for my arrest, but I eluded them thanks to this disguise. And now, as I am here, I may go on with the lecture, but when it is delivered, I must go to jail.

  “I come into your presence from a cell in the American Bastille, to which I was consigned by the cowardly servility of the age. I am still held under heavy bonds to return to that cell or to meet my trial in a United States court upon a scandalous charge trumped up by the ignorant or the corrupt officers of the law, conspiring with others to deprive me, under the falsest and shallowest pretenses, of my inherited privileges as an American citizen.”

  I painted a picture for the audience of my rise to fame and fall from grace, describing how in a little over two years, Tennie and I had gone from being lauded as the “The Fascinating Financiers” and the “Queens of the Quill” to being satirized as “Political Harlequins.”

  “The change began after I spoke before the House Judiciary Committee in January 1871. That was when I—and with me, all women—became a real threat to men. Soon after, the press began to call Tennie and me humbugs, frauds, prostitutes, and most recently, blackmailers. Now, by these we have been brought into public dishonor and dispute while not a single fact of crime to justify a single one of the various charges has ever been advanced by any journal. Imagine, for a moment, how easy a thing it is to ruin the usefulness of any person by this system of insinuation and innuendo.”

  I paused to allow the audience to envision how their own lives could be ruined by a single false remark. Then I thundered back with more energy than I’d possessed in months. “The old, worn-out, rotten social system will be torn down, plank by plank, timber after timber, until place is given to a new, true, and beautiful structure based upon freedom, equality, and justice to all—women as well as men.

  “Stop our presses they may, but our tongues? Never!”

  AFTERWORD

  At the end of her speech that night, Victoria walked to the edge of the stage and extended her hands to the waiting officers so that she could be arrested. She and Tennie were jailed and rearrested several times over the next several months. In all, more than a dozen charges were brought against them, but Reverend Beecher never sued them for libel. Between court appearances, they managed to survive on lecture fees earned as both women toured the country, taking advantage of the public’s desire to see the “female jailbirds.”

  The trial over the obscenity charges finally took place June 26-27, 1873. The Challis libel case didn’t reach court until March 1874. Victoria and Tennie were found not guilty of all charges in both cases.

  Theodore Tilton went on to sue Henry Ward Beecher for willful alienation of his wife’s affections on January 11, 1875. That trial, which was the O.J. Simpson case of its time, lasted six months, riveting the nation with its tale of sex and scandal. Victoria was originally scheduled to testify, but in the end, she was only called to present evidence in form of letters from Tilton. The trial ended in a hung jury, and Beecher was never convicted. He came out of the matter richer and more popular than ever, with his church members paying for the trial.

  On January 4, 1877, Cornelius Vanderbilt died, and William Vanderbilt finally succeeded in getting Victoria and Tennie to Europe. Afraid they would be called to testify to his father’s belief in Spiritualism—and thus give credence to the idea that his father was not of sound mind and the will should be invalidated—William was rumored to have paid the sisters a large sum to relocate to England.

  Tennie found her confidence there, crusading for women’s suffrage in both England and America. In September 1884, she married Viscount Francis Cook and became a viscountess. She died in 1923.

  Victoria divorced Colonel Blood before leaving for England, the first step in a long quest to reinvent herself. That included distancing herself from and outright denying her earlier radical statements and adopting new philosophies, such as a belief in eugenics. In 1883, Victoria married John Biddulph Martin, a wealthy banker. Though living as an expatriate in England, she ran for President of the United States twice more, in 1884 and 1892, though with far less fanfare and even less success than the first time.

  Both sisters lived to see women get the vote in America on August 18, 1920. Though it would be poetic to be able to say one or both returned to America to cast the votes they had so long fought to achieve, no record of this exists, and failing health made it unlikely for either one.

  Victoria lived to the age of ninety, finally passing away in her sleep on June 10, 1927. At her direction, she was cremated and her ashes scattered over the Atlantic Ocean between the two countries she loved.

  In 1928, the first biography of Victoria, The Terrible Siren by Emanie Nahm Sachs, was published. This highly suspect portrayal was vindictive and brutal, and Victoria received barely a footnote of mention in Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s three volume, 900+ page work on the history of the suffrage movement. These are largely believed to be the reasons why Victoria has all but been written out of the history books, even nearly one hundred years after her death.

  GLOSSARY

  Adventuress – A loose woman, sometimes slang for a prostitute

  Altitudes, in the – The state of being drunk or high

  Big bugs – Important people, aristocrats or leaders

  Bosom friend – An especially intimate friend

  Boat-licker – An ass-kisser

  Bully for you! – Good for you!

  Burglared – To have one’s house or other establishment broken into at night. If committed during the day, it was called “housebreaking.”

  By the horn spoons – An expression of surprise or shock

  Cherry – Vulgar term for a young woman

  Coumarin – A fragrant substance obtained from the tonka bean, sweet clover, and certain other plants used in soaps and perfumes

  Confound it – A mild oath

  Coot – A fool or simpleton

  Cussed – A somewhat acceptable swear word meaning cursed, contemptible, mean, etc.

  Cut a shine, to – To pull a prank or practical joke

  Deadhead – A person who does not pay for services or things but takes a free ride

  Devil – A powerful expletive

  Flâneur – A lazy person, a loafer

  Hornswoggler – A cheat or hoaxer

  Humbug, Humbuggery – A trick or hoax, a person who employs such fakery

  Idiot – Someone who was brain-damaged or mentally retarded

  Lightskirt – A prostitute

  Periauger – A type of sailing vessel

  Pompkin – A colonial term used to refer to a man or woman from the area near Boston or that part of the country. (Victoria purposefully misuses the term to mean any rich woman from a big city; Anna is from Philadelphia.)

  Puss – An endearing term for a woman

  Rotgut – A blend of moonshine, burnt sugar, and tobacco juice

  Seven by nine – Something or someone of inferior or common quality

  Six of one, half a dozen of the other – The same thing

  Tarnation – Euphemism for d
amnation, an oath

  SOURCES:

  Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang by Jonathon Green

  A Nineteenth Century Slang Dictionary, compiled and edited by Craig Hadley

  BEFORE YOU GO…

  Thank you for reading this book. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Word of mouth is crucial for authors to succeed, so even if your review is only a line or two, it would be a huge help.

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  Also by Nicole Evelina:

  Daughter of Destiny (Guinevere’s Tale Book 1) (Arthurian historical fantasy)

  Camelot’s Queen (Guinevere’s Tale Book 2) (Arthurian historical fantasy)

  Been Searching for You (a contemporary romantic comedy)

  Future releases include:

  Mistress of Legend (Guinevere’s Tale Book 3)—2017

  Please visit me at nicoleevelina.com to learn more.

  I love interacting with my readers! Feel free to contact me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Pinterest, or by email. You can also send snail mail to: PO Box 2021, Maryland Heights, MO 63043.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  This story started with a pin on Pinterest. Seriously. I was just fooling around when a black-and-white photo of a woman from what looked like the 1800s caught my eye. The caption said: “Known by her detractors as “Mrs. Satan,” Victoria Claflin Woodhull, born in 1838, married at age fifteen to an alcoholic and womanizer. She became the first woman to establish a brokerage firm on Wall Street and played an active role in the woman’s suffrage movement. She became the first woman to run for President of the United States in 1872. Her name is largely lost in history. Few recognize her name and accomplishments.”

  I knew then and there I had my next book subject.

  As I researched, I became more and more fascinated with Victoria and determined to help restore her name to the history books where it belongs. I also came to learn that history really is stranger than fiction. So much of her family’s antics and Victoria’s own actions are more grandiose than I could ever invent. That’s why this book is extremely historical, with less emphasis on the fiction than one may expect.

  Where possible, Victoria’s words are her own as recorded in letters, speeches, articles, and interviews. When evidence exists, I’ve also used real quotes for other characters, especially Theodore Tilton, Henry Ward Beecher, Catharine Beecher, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other suffragists. Most of Victoria’s speeches, articles, and the testimony of their many trials have been shortened for the sake of the story but are otherwise accurate. If you are interested in the full text, I recommend The Victoria Woodhull Reader (which carries her speeches in their entirety), Notorious Victoria (which offers the most ample quotes of any biography), and actual issues of Woodhull and Claflin Weekly, which can be accessed through certain universities or in a condensed form through the book The Lives and Writings of Notorious Victoria Woodhull and Her Sister Tennessee Claflin by Arlene Kisner.

  Some dates differ by as little as a day or much as a year in various sources (for example, the May 1872 National Womans Suffrage Association Convention can be dated as either May 9 or 10). I’ve chosen to use the dates that are most common among my sources. Other times I have compressed the timeline slightly to make for a better story.

  Pinning down the real Victoria Woodhull is about as easy as harnessing the wind due to contradictory depictions of her in the press during her life, varying remembrances of her after her death, and most importantly, her constant need to reinvent herself during her life. Victoria often gave conflicting statements about her early years, changed her story to suit different audiences, and flat out denied things she was on record as endorsing. In order to decide how to portray her, I read all of the available sources, and most of the time I went with the prevailing opinion, but sometimes I chose what I believed most likely to be the truth or what suited my story best. After all, as highly historical as this book is, it’s still fiction.

  One quick note on word usage in this book: I’ve chosen to use “Madame” when referring to Victoria, rather than “madam,” to help distinguish her from the madams (a.k.a. brothel owners) who play a role in this book. (However, Madame de Ford is French, so that is the normal mode of address for her.) Technically, the word “Madame” should only be used to refer to a French woman, but I think Victoria, being named after a queen and believing she was destined for greatness, would appreciate being referred to by a more lofty, exotic title.

  PART ONE: THE LITTLE QUEEN

  One subject I want to get out of the way right away is that of abuse. It’s commonly believed that Buck Claflin physically abused his children. The vast majority of biographies agree on that, and really, it was common practice at the time, so it shouldn’t be too surprising. Some also intimate that he sexually abused his daughters. That’s a subject I’m honestly not sure about, so I chose not to include it, though other authors have chosen differently. There is a pretty strong argument that he introduced at least some of them into prostitution, though I don’t believe Victoria was one of them. She appears to have escaped that fate through her marriage to Canning. Tennie, however, does not appear to have been as lucky.

  The personalities and professions of Victoria’s parents are also points of contention. Most portray Buck as the untrustworthy con artist you see in these pages. He may or may not have had a successful, perhaps even lucrative, career in law or real estate before Victoria was born, but most agree that the family was in financial trouble by the time she was four or five. Buck is variously credited with being a school teacher, a farmer, a storekeeper, a tavern owner, a gun dealer, a lumber merchant, a raftsman, a racehorse breeder, a hotel keeper, a gristmill and sawmill operator, a lawyer, a speculator, and a doctor. He is often said to only have had one eye, though I never found an explanation for what happened, whether it was gone completely or blinded.

  His wife, Roxanna, or Annie as she was often called, is commonly credited with being a religious zealot at best, “drunk on Spiritualism” as Tennie would later say, and insane at worst. She is said to have praised her children one moment while cheering on their beating the next. But she was very smart and had an excellent memory. It is said she could recite the Bible backwards.

  The mill fire, the event that opens my story, is recorded in many biographies, though its cause is questionable. Some say it was insurance fraud on the part of the Claflins, while Annie always claimed it was a terrible accident. The citizens of Homer appear to have leaned toward the former because they really did take up a collection to have the family run out of town.

  The spiritualist encounters Victoria has while working at her father’s shop are based on rumored experiences attributed to her, which I dramatized for sake of the story. The methods Buck teaches Victoria and Tennie to get information from clients are detailed in Barbara Goldsmith’s amazing book Other Powers as common among Spiritualist charlatans. The long hours Victoria worked after moving into the shop are actually taken from Tennie’s later time working at her father’s many healing clinics. But I assumed that if he worked her that hard then, it would make sense that he’d done it before and it would be a plausible reason why Victoria fell ill.

  Victoria’s illness is the historical basis for her meeting Canning. (A few sources name him as Channing, but Canning is much more prevalent, so I have used that spelling of his name.) Their rapid courtship is also historically accurate, though we know few details outside of his asking to accompany her to the Fourth of July picnic and his proposal that very night. His nicknames for Victoria of “my little chick” and “my little puss” are also recounted numerous times.

  The stories of Canning’s lover/mistress who bore his child and of his frequenting brothels are commonly recounted in biographies of Victoria, and she even talked about them in the biography she directe
d Theodore Tilton to write. However, I did invent his marital rape of Victoria in the carriage. It is meant to symbolize his brutish treatment of her and also serve as a possible explanation (at least to the 19th-century mind) as to why Byron was born mentally retarded. Some sources say Byron became so as the result of a childhood fall, but I went with the idea that he was born that way.

  I could find no reason given as to why the Woodhulls moved from Cincinnati to San Francisco, so I used the imaginary threat of Canning’s lover. I have condensed the period of time they spent there for the sake of the story. Victoria did work as a seamstress for actress Anna Cogswell and may have been a prostitute (or “cigar girl” as they were called) for a time, but I don’t believe so. The plays Victoria appeared in are real, and her vision of Tennie appears in Tilton’s biography, but her meeting at that time with Josie Mansfield is entirely my own invention.

  Buck ran “cancer clinics” in Columbus, Chicago, and a multitude of other cities while Victoria was suffering through her marriage to Canning. Many of these came with rumors or charges of prostitution, which is how I have portrayed Tennie’s life once Victoria returns to her family. The violent incident with Byron is fictional, intended to give Victoria and Canning a reason to leave her family and go to New York, a motivation whose truth is lost to history. Victoria’s daughter is called both Zulu and Zula in biographies. I have chosen the name Zula because it is the one I prefer. The story of her birth and near death due to blood loss is true according to what Victoria instructed Tilton to write in his biography.