Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Madeline returned to Charlottesville and on July 15 wrote a blistering letter to Breckinridge, accusing him of having “said what was false” in denying the engagement and having “repudiated your solemn promise to marry me.” In light of his public denials, she insisted that he send her immediately “a clear statement, over your signature, that the report of our engagement is true.” She went on to say that if he failed to “admit and confirm your promise to marry me … I will, without further communication with you, without delay, and without fear of consequence to you or to me, seek redress.” She gave him until the following Saturday to respond.

  The next day, Sunday, July 16, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported the “engagement is announced of Hon. W.C.P. Breckinridge, of Lexington, and Mrs. Louise Scott Wing” and said the “marriage will occur during the first week of August.” When Breckinridge denied that announcement as well, Dr. Scott showed up at the offices of the Courier-Journal on Monday and “rather testily” announced that Breckinridge would marry his sister at his home the following day and “insisted upon publication to that effect.”

  On Tuesday, July 18, W.C.P. Breckinridge did indeed marry Louise Scott Wing in her brother’s front parlor in Louisville.

  * * *

  The news of the Breckinridge-Wing nuptials “created a sensation in the capital,” according to the New York Times. And it wasn’t just in Washington that tongues were wagging. In Kentucky, “a great deal of gossip was indulged in by society people and friends of the Scott family,” reported the Cincinnati Enquirer, which mentioned rumors that “the marriage was only hurried up because it was feared that Miss Pollard might give trouble.”

  While the dueling marriage announcements certainly fueled the gossip, there was more: the ceremony had all the hallmarks of a shotgun wedding. It was obviously hastily arranged, coming on a Tuesday evening just one day after Dr. Scott’s visit to the Courier-Journal, and it wasn’t in a church, which was odd for so prominent a Presbyterian churchman as Breckinridge, who was an elder. It was also “quiet in the extreme,” reported the Courier-Journal, with only family members and a few friends on hand to see Louise, in an “exquisite bridal robe of white chiffon,” marry Breckinridge in a brief ceremony performed by a minister cousin of his, brought in for the occasion because no local clergy was available on such short notice. The whole affair was so rushed that the wedding supper was served at seven and the newlyweds caught the 8:10 southbound limited to Tennessee for their honeymoon at the Four Seasons Hotel in Cumberland Gap.

  Even more tellingly, the Courier-Journal noted archly, Louise had “spent the past three months in Atlantic City, where she had been quite ill.” She had spent last winter’s social season in Washington, advised the paper, “but became of rather delicate health and was not able to go in society as much as her friends would have liked.” Louise’s sudden ill health, and her equally sudden disappearance from society, suggested that she was, or had been, pregnant.

  Despite the rumors, it was an advantageous marriage for Breckinridge. Wing, who had just turned forty-eight, was tall, slender, and graceful, with “clear-cut” features and a “captivating and pleasing” manner, said the Courier-Journal. And she was the widow of Edward Rumsey Wing, who had died some twenty years earlier while serving as ambassador to Ecuador. As such, she had excellent social connections and was well known in Washington diplomatic circles.

  For Madeline, the news that Breckinridge had married the well-situated Wing was humiliating, devastating. But she had warned Breckinridge she would seek redress if he did not fulfill his promise to her, and that’s exactly what she intended to do.

  By the end of July, Washington was again abuzz. Madeline’s brother John Dudley Pollard, a Kentucky newspaper editor, had joined Madeline in Washington. To the nineteenth-century mind, that could only mean one thing—violence. The resort to violence to protect a woman’s honor was unexceptional at the time, especially among southerners. Just the previous spring, a young clerk named Henry Delaney had been abducted at gunpoint from behind a drugstore counter in Sturgis, Kentucky, by the parents of Abbie Oliver, whom, according to the local paper, he had “ruined about eight months ago.” When he refused to marry Abbie when she became pregnant, Mr. and Mrs. Oliver took the matter into their own hands. They drove the couple to nearby Morganfield, secured a marriage license, and presided over if not a shotgun wedding, then at least a pistol-point one. Unfortunately, the impromptu wedding party was intercepted on the way home by four of Delaney’s friends, who also were armed. Abbie was shot in the ensuing melee and died the following morning, but at least her honor was restored.

  With Breckinridge due back in Washington for a special session of Congress, residents of the capital braced to see how Madeline’s honor would be avenged. By early August, Breckinridge was being escorted around the city by two police detectives, detailed courtesy of Major Moore because “he had reason to believe that either Miss Pollard herself or her brother designed to shoot him.”

  Breckinridge spent Saturday, August 12, in Philadelphia with Vice President Adlai Stevenson I launching the USS Minneapolis, the navy’s newest cruiser. He and his new wife, Louise, returned to Washington by train, reaching the Cochran Hotel in time for dinner. As the couple was leaving the dining room, a nervous-looking aide from the marshal’s office handed Breckinridge a pack of legal papers. Breckinridge glanced at them, showed them to his wife, and sauntered over to the elevator. “He betrayed no sign of nervousness and was as courtly as ever in his demeanor,” noted the Washington Evening Star. The nonchalance likely was feigned. Breckinridge already had been tipped off by a well-placed friend that a lawsuit naming him as defendant had been filed earlier in the day in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. Madeline Pollard wasn’t going to have her brother shoot W.C.P. Breckinridge for jilting her; she was suing him for fifty thousand dollars for breach of promise to marry.

  Breach of promise was a Victorian-era legal convention that allowed women to sue for damages from a broken engagement. Breach of promise suits recognized that marriage was a woman’s primary vocation, and if her chances to marry were quashed—either because they passed her by while she waited for her fiancé to make good on his promise, or the broken engagement raised questions about her morals—she suffered a real financial loss. Such suits frequently were scandalous; the intimation was that a woman had given her virginity to the man under the expectation of marriage and now had neither her virginity nor a wedding band to show for it.

  But Madeline’s suit was explosive. She revealed that she and Breckinridge had maintained an illicit relationship for the past nine years—through all of his five terms in Congress—and that she had borne two children by him. Furthermore, she accused Breckinridge, then “a married man of 47 years of age, and a distinguished lawyer and orator,” of taking advantage of her “youth and inexperience” and by “wiles and artifices and protestations of affection” seducing her when she was a seventeen-year-old student. She said Breckinridge had “made her acquaintance by accosting her on a railway train” when she was traveling home to visit her sick sister in April 1884, saying that he knew her family. After he “completed his seduction of her … she became pregnant, and … bore a child begotten by the defendant” and then a second child later on. Madeline charged that Breckinridge repeatedly vowed to marry her if he were ever able to, and in August 1892, after his wife died, he “promised the plaintiff to marry her.”

  She said he repeated that promise most recently in May 1893, after she became pregnant a third time, to “repair the injury that had been done to her and to place her under the protection of his influence, name and family.” Despite these repeated pledges, Breckinridge “disregarded his promise” and “wrongfully and injuriously married another person.” For her part, Madeline said she had “remained unmarried at the request of the defendant” and “being deeply in love with him she was induced by his protestations of affection to remain under his domination and control,” abandoning her “desire and
intentions” to “make a career for herself.”

  The charges were shocking, given that Breckinridge was such a well-respected figure. What was even more shocking, and novel, however, was what Madeline had to sacrifice to bring the suit. She had to reveal herself as a “ruined” woman—a woman who had acquiesced to sex outside marriage. Few things could be more injurious to a woman in late nineteenth-century America. A woman’s chastity was the bedrock of her social capital. Its loss, the specter of the “fallen” woman, haunted society. “Victorian Americans obsessively feared that their unmarried daughters would be sexually disgraced,” says the historian Robert Ireland. Such sexual disgrace meant certain and complete ostracization: no one would hire you or let you a room in a respectable boardinghouse, to say nothing of invite you into their home or marry you. “The fallen woman,” wrote Kate Bushnell of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1886, summing up society’s view, “is an exposed criminal … and she becomes a castaway.”

  Madeline’s decision to come forth was especially surprising because she could have walked away from her relationship with Breckinridge with her reputation more or less intact and because it appeared she had little to gain financially from the suit. It was, as Charles Stoll told Jennie Tucker, “a complete riddle,” as Pollard had “published to the world her life of shame in order that she might prosecute a suit for damages against a man who is known to her to have absolutely nothing out of which a judgment can be made.” He told Jennie he couldn’t understand why “any woman, whose reputation has not already been destroyed” would “voluntarily offer herself and all that she has, and can ever have, as a sacrifice.”

  It seems that in taking on Breckinridge, and sacrificing her own reputation to do so, Madeline wasn’t challenging just a powerful politician, but also entrenched notions about women and sex.

  3

  A Bastard Catch’d

  Late nineteenth-century attitudes about women and sex might have seemed eternal, but they were of course part of an evolution in how western society regarded marriage and sex—and sought to control the latter outside the former. In the early American colonial world of the 1600s, courtships occurred under the watchful eye of the whole community, which had both religious and practical reasons for ensuring that sex was channeled toward marriage—to prevent sin and the birth of illegitimate children who would be a charge on a still-fragile society. While the Puritans were strict moralists with firm prohibitions against sex outside of marriage, the reality was a bit fuzzier. There was in Plymouth Colony “a steady succession of trials and convictions for sexual offenses involving single persons,” notes the historian John Demos, most commonly for “fornication” between young adults, but also for public masturbation and bestiality.

  Some couples—like one in New England who in 1644 slipped out of a gathering and subsequently were “seen upon the ground together”—were caught in the act. Most instances of fornication, however, were revealed because a baby arrived too soon after the wedding. Many New England churches followed the “seven months” rule, which considered any child born within seven months of the wedding to have been conceived outside of wedlock. While Puritans generally are associated with harsh moral judgments, they actually gave couples a fair chance to repent their sin. In a ritual observed throughout churches in the early colonies, the couple would have to publicly confess to the crime of fornication, express contrition, and accept punishment, which could be a fine, a whipping, or both. In Plymouth Colony, one Thomas Cushman was fined five pounds “for committing carnall coppulation with his now wife before marriage.” Throughout New England in the 1600s, say the historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, “a fine of nine lashes awaited both parents of a child born too soon after marriage.”

  Once the couple admitted the transgression, they would be readmitted back into the church, and by extension, the community, in good standing. It was more important to have them as productive members of society than to continue to shame them. The Puritans were remarkably evenhanded in punishing fornication. After a brief period in the earliest days of settlement when men were more likely to be punished, men and women were punished at the same rate. Furthermore, women had significant leverage over men when it came to enforcing community standards regarding premarital sex. If an unmarried woman uttered a man’s name while in the throes of labor, the local authorities took her word, as related by the midwife, as authoritative and the man was “judged the ‘reputed father.’” Such assignments of paternity were taken so seriously that they were often enough to get a reluctant groom to the altar rather than face a paternity suit that he would almost certainly lose.

  Despite the occasional offenders, this community-based system of sexual control was remarkably effective. According to David Hackett Fischer, in “Massachusetts during the seventeenth century, rates of prenuptial pregnancy were among the lowest in the West.”

  However, with each succeeding generation the fervent religiosity and community cohesion of the early Puritans faded, and alternative sexual folkways crept in, particularly from the British Isles and Dutch- and German-speaking countries. By the mid-1700s, it wasn’t uncommon in much of New England and parts of the mid-Atlantic region for courting couples to be allowed to spend nights together in bed “bundled” up in their cloths, or with the young lady in a “bundling bag” sewn up or tied at the bottom in a tradition traced to the working classes of Wales, Scotland, Holland, and Germany. A Rev. Bingley visiting Wales in 1804 described the practice: “The lover steals, under the shadow of night, into the bed of the fair one, into which (retaining an essential part of his dress) he is admitted without shyness or reserve. Saturday or Sunday nights are the principal times when this courtship takes place, and on these nights the men sometimes walk from a distance of ten miles or more to visit their favorite damsels.”

  Whether it was called bundling, questing, sparking, or tarrying, some form of this night courting was known from Europe to Afghanistan—where it was called namzat bezé—to Borneo, according to the physician and historian Henry Reed Stiles, whose 1871 study of premarital courting traditions was banned in Boston. Often, some type of light was involved to signal a young woman’s availability. In his travels through the upper Mississippi Valley region in the late 1680s, the French baron de Lahontan reported that in Native American villages, a young warrior would steal into the hut of his sweetheart with a sort of match that he lit at the communal fire. “If she blows out the light he lies down by her; but if she pulls her Covering over her Face, he retires,” wrote de Lahontan. This was the opposite of the custom in Borneo, noted Stiles, where a young man would wait until the “family is supposed to be fast asleep” and slip into the room of “the girl he desires to make his wife” to make court. If the girl asked him to “‘light the lamp’ (a bamboo filled with resin), then his hopes are at an end.” There were “districts in New England where the bundling light”—usually a candle in the window—“was a beacon to the farm lad” on Saturday night, according to the folklorist A. Monroe Aurand, Jr., who speculated that such signals were later adopted by “women of a shady reputation,” giving rise to the term “red-light district.”

  What all these customs had in common besides tacit parental approval was the recognition that some form of premarital intimacy among young adults was not only likely, but also beneficial in creating a lasting relationship and was acceptable as long as it was directed toward marriage. In the New World, where, according to Stiles, bundling “prevailed among the young to a degree which we can scarcely credit,” the courting couple would sit up by the fire until the rest of the family had gone to bed, then “having sat up as long as they think proper, get into bed together also, but without putting off their undergarments, to prevent scandal.” Bundling was a way for a courting couple to have some privacy in tiny, crowded colonial homes, which didn’t have much in the way of comfortable furniture, as well as to accommodate suitors who had to travel a distance to woo their intended. Why sit up all night on a hard benc
h by the fire, burning precious firewood and candles, reasoned the pragmatic colonists, when a young man could “pursue his wooing under the downy coverlid of a good feather bed?”

  Bundling also served another important purpose, particularly as the eighteenth century progressed. Young adults in the heady years leading up to the American Revolution were more independent-minded than their parents and grandparents. Part of this was the revolutionary rhetoric that filled the air, with liberty and the pursuit of happiness replacing older values of restraint and self-sacrifice. Part of it was the simple economic fact that many of the farms of the original colonies had been so divided and subdivided among several generations of sons that there was precious little land left to pass along, diminishing the control that parents had over their children. This pre-revolutionary generation was headstrong; they stayed out late “frolicking” and “night walking” in large, raucous groups that met up to shuck corn or piece a quilt. The Reverend Jonathan Edwards of Northampton, Massachusetts, complained in 1738 that the youth of his parish would “very frequently get together in conventions of both sexes, for mirth and jollity, which they called frolics; and they would often spend the greater part of the night in them.” These frolics, he noted in a sermon, often led to “frequent breakings out of gross sin; fornication in particular.”

  Apparently the reverend was correct, because starting around 1700, the colonies’ formerly low rate of premarital pregnancy began to creep up. This increase occurred from the bays of Massachusetts to the tidewater of the Chesapeake, where, in a more diverse and disorderly society, it was already higher—some one-fifth of births in Somerset County, Maryland, in the late 1600s were the result of premarital conceptions. According to Daniel Scott Smith and Michael Hindus’s landmark study of extant church records, fewer than 10 percent of women gave birth to a baby who was likely conceived before they were married in 1680. That number climbed to more than 20 percent between 1720 and 1760—at least for white women. Records weren’t kept of births for the enslaved black population because, according to the historian Robert Wells, “the only social condition that mattered was that the children of slaves were also slaves.”