Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Madeline Pollard was asking the courts to discard this thinking and to award her damages for a broken marriage promise even though she was by definition a “ruined” woman—she had entered into a sexual relationship with Breckinridge that was explicitly outside of marriage. She asserted, however, that she was “without sexual fault” otherwise, and “being a woman of good repute in all respects, notwithstanding her relations to the defendant,” Breckinridge should be held to his promise. In a revolutionary request, she was asking the court to ignore the double standard that considered “ruined” women beneath society’s consideration.

  4

  The Left-Hand Road

  Madeline Pollard’s breach of promise suit made headlines across the country that August 1893. “A Sensational Suit,” said Washington’s Evening Star. “A Congressman in Trouble,” reported the New York Times. “Was Wicked of Him: Breckinridge of Kentucky Sued for Breach of Promise,” said San Francisco’s Morning Call. “The Breckinridge-Pollard case was discussed wherever the publication of the filing of the suit had been read,” said the Chicago Daily Tribune. “Nothing in recent years has created such a social agitation … as the sequel to the brilliant Congressman’s recent marriage,” said the Cincinnati Enquirer.

  The Breckinridge-Pollard scandal was a welcome diversion from what had been relentlessly downbeat news since February, when a run on gold and the bankruptcy of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad kicked off a cascading financial panic that blossomed into the worst depression the country had ever seen, with frenzied days of bank runs and stock market plunges. Banks called in loans and businesses failed: two dozen a day in May alone. Within the year, six hundred banks and fifteen thousand businesses would be gone. The great railroads, the very heart and lungs of the industrial revolution, went bust one after another like faltering bulbs on the string of newfangled electric Christmas-tree lights that would soon debut at the White House: the Philadelphia & Reading, the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, the legendary Erie Railroad, and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe.

  Unemployment stood at close to 15 percent; there were one hundred thousand people out of work in New York City and seventy-five thousand unemployed in Chicago. In Detroit, they planted potatoes in vacant lots. The destitute stood in line at soup kitchens in the cities and roamed the countryside begging to exchange their labor at some menial task for a meal. The head of one Midwestern relief committee warned that “famine is in our midst.”

  “Men died like flies under the strain,” remembered Henry Adams, who himself was “suspended, for several months, over the edge of bankruptcy” in the summer of 1893. August, the very moment Madeline filed her suit, “was the worst month,” says the historian Hal Williams. “Mills, factories, furnaces, and mines shut down everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of workers were suddenly unemployed.” Even Thomas Edison, “the symbol of the country’s ingenuity,” had to lay off 240 of the 355 employees at his Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey. Just a month earlier, Frederick Turner had advanced his bold thesis that the closing of the American frontier had taken with it something fundamental to the American character—the drive and grit and sense of boundless possibilities that made the country. Indeed, the unspoken fear was that America’s best days might be behind it, that something essential had been lost, that the current financial uncertainty might stretch into the distant future. The Panic of 1893, says Williams, was the seminal event of the decade; everything that happened afterward would in some way be a response, as it “reshaped ideas, altered attitudes, uprooted deep-set patterns.”

  Now, according to the Evening Star, the Breckinridge-Pollard scandal had displaced “the financial situation which had engrossed the public,” as the “prominence of the person charged with the offense makes the case interesting from one end of the country to another.” With reporters clamoring for a statement the evening the suit was filed, Breckinridge wasted no time in trying to paint Madeline as a scorned woman out for revenge. He told the press, “These charges are the result of vindictiveness, vexation and perhaps of intention to blackmail” and asked his supporters to “suspend judgment” until he had a chance to make his case.

  His allies joined in to paint him as the victim of a scheming fallen woman. His esteemed Confederate comrade Gen. Basil Duke, who, like Breckinridge, was one of “Morgan’s men,” professed to be shocked at the charges. “Miss Pollard is not the woman that he would engage himself to. She is not his style in any sense,” he told a reporter as the city’s political class—the lawyers and judges and tax collectors and journalists—gathered in the lobby of the Galt House in Louisville and “discussed the matter with as much interest as if they had just received a telegram announcing the noted Congressman’s death.” Duke said, “I am satisfied that the whole matter is a trumped-up charge. I believe it to be only a case of blackmail. Miss Pollard’s life will show that she is an adventuress.”

  Despite the fact that he said he hadn’t been in touch with Breckinridge except “indirectly,” Duke previewed what was to be Breckinridge’s strategy in refuting the explosive charge that he had seduced Madeline when she was a teenager. “In regard to the seduction part of the story, Miss Pollard is thoroughly able to take care of herself. She is nearly thirty years of age, I believe, and she is used to the world and its ways.” Duke was claiming that Madeline was nearly thirty, which would put her age closer to twenty-one when she met Breckinridge nine years earlier, rather than the twenty-six she claimed to be.

  Another “prominent gentleman” painted a picture of Madeline as a scheming social climber from “humble circumstances” to a reporter from the Cincinnati Enquirer. He claimed that after her dismissal from the Interior Department for her remark about Sherman, she “resorted to her wits for a living,” which was a shaded reference to trading sexual favors for sustenance. He said that she “constantly claimed to have in the press, ready for publication, various books” and came to the attention of the well-known Harper’s Magazine editor Charles Dudley Warner, who wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), the book that gave the era its name, with Mark Twain. “Mr. Warner commended her to the social recognition of his friends in New York. She played her cards with considerable skill,” he said, charging that Madeline had “three styles of visiting cards” printed—“Madeline Vinton Pollard,” “Madeline Breckinridge Pollard,” and “Madeline Blackburn Pollard”—and that she would use different cards “depend[ing] upon the popularity of the assumed names in the company she happened to be in.” He concluded that “with her antecedents and considering her past schemes and methods … I do not see how her claims can be recognized in the court … Colonel Breckinridge’s character and standing should not be destroyed by the scheme of a woman who has long been recognized as daring and unscrupulous.”

  It also didn’t take long for reporters to learn about the most embarrassing aspect of Madeline’s past. When she was a teenager hungry for an education, she consented to marry a friend of her uncle’s who agreed to pay for her schooling. James Rhodes was nearly fifty, but he had a steady job and he was her means of getting to the Wesleyan Female College. It was a desperate deal, but Madeline was a desperate girl at the time.

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  Madeline was born Madeline Valeria Pollard, the third of seven children of John Dudley Pollard, who went by J.D., and his wife, Nancy. J.D. was a saddler by trade, but as Madeline recalled, he was “well educated, a constant student and a most omnivorous reader.” In addition to stocking saddles, bridles, and harnesses in his shop on Clair Street in the state capital of Frankfort, he also sold the popular New York weeklies like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, monthlies like Harper’s Magazine, and all the Cincinnati and Louisville daily newspapers. This would have made his shop across the street from the Franklin County Courthouse a hub for local politicians, reporters, and merchants. J.D. also held some minor political offices. He was doorkeeper of the state senate in 1863 and in 1865 was appointed as a local police judge, a sort of justice of the peace who handled
low-level civil disputes and misdemeanor crimes, by Governor Thomas Bramlette.

  Mattie, as she was called, remembered their house being “full of books, papers, and periodicals,” reflecting her father’s love of learning and reading. She was a bright child, and he delighted in teaching her, especially about history. “I could tell you about the great men and women, who they were, why they were great, in whose reign or administration they had lived,” she recalled. She also learned Latin and memorized poems and “whole scenes from Shakespeare.”

  By fall 1865, Pollard had resigned his position as a police judge with no other explanation than he was “about to Engage in a business that will necessarily call me from home,” sold the contents of his shop, and moved his family to nearby Bridgeport, where his wife had family. From there, the family moved to Crab Orchard, a small town about fifty miles south of Lexington, in the summer of 1866. Around that same time, he began styling himself as J.D. Pollard, Esq., and Madeline remembered that in Crab Orchard he “always held some public office … and practised law.” It’s not clear how Pollard obtained a legal education. At the time, there were no formal credentials required for lawyers. Degree-granting law schools wouldn’t become standard for two decades, and bar associations were just getting off the ground; the Kentucky Bar Association wasn’t formed until 1871. Traditionally, most lawyers learned the profession by “reading the law” with an established lawyer, which Pollard doesn’t appear to have done, but that didn’t mean someone couldn’t study law on their own—Abraham Lincoln had done just that. Ten years earlier, Lincoln told a young man, “If you are absolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself the thing is more than half done already … I did not read with any one. Get the books and read and study them in their every feature, and that is the main thing.”

  The Pollard family was never well-off, but Madeline remembered a happy home, with her mother’s “refined influence” and her father spending his leisure hours with the family and “being interested in every detail of our lives.” Mattie was clearly his favorite, and she adored him. “I was constantly with him and my love for him is known by everyone who even slightly knew me,” she remembered. Pollard was an active member of two fraternal associations: the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Masons. These fraternal organizations, which stressed personal development and mutual reciprocity, were important to ambitious nineteenth-century men, creating a brotherhood that transcended religious and class barriers and offered the promise of success and stability in the rapidly industrializing nation. Pollard joined the IOOF in 1845 in his home state of Pennsylvania and became a member of the Kentucky lodge in 1850, when he moved to Kentucky. He was an earnest and active member and moved up through the ranks of the organization, becoming a grand patriarch, the highest of the order’s three degrees, in 1861 and a representative to the Grand Lodge of the United States in 1862. In 1865, he was elected grand master of Kentucky and distinguished himself by visiting every lodge in the state—on foot.

  J.D. also was active in local politics, first as a member of the Kentucky American Party, which was a short-lived, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party, and then as a member of the newly formed Republican Party. In 1876, he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Cincinnati that nominated Rutherford B. Hayes. It was during the June convention, according to a friend, that J.D. “took cold.” He returned home to Crab Orchard and died five days later at the age of fifty-two, a stark reminder, according to one of his fellow Odd Fellows, “that the King of Terrors lays his cold and icy hand not only on those whose hairs are whitened by lapse of years, but as well on the middle aged.”

  His death devastated his family emotionally and financially. Pollard may have been well regarded, but he owned no property and left no estate. One local woman remembered that in the wake of J.D.’s death, the family was “almost on the verge of starvation.” The Odd Fellows paid for J.D.’s burial, erected a handsome monolith on his grave commemorating his service as grand master, and took up a collection for the family. With no means of support and only Edward, the oldest child, able to fend for himself, Nancy Pollard had to disperse the family. She took the oldest girl, Mary, who was known as Mamie, and baby Earnest, who had just turned one, to live with her sister Mary Stout in Bridgeport. The three children born in succession after Madeline—Rosalie, John, and Horatio—were sent to the Masonic Widows and Orphans Home in Louisville. Right after the funeral, still reeling from the shock of her father’s death, Madeline found herself on a train to Pittsburgh with her father’s sister, her aunt Valeria, for whom Madeline had been named, bound for a new life in the North with a family she didn’t know. At the time, she thought she was about twelve years old, which would mean she was born around 1864. Later, when she asked her mother, Madeline was told that she was born on November 30, 1866, and that’s the date she used as her birthday going forward.

  Madeline lived with her aunt and her uncle, William Cowan, who was a bookkeeper, and their six children in the Hazelwood section of Pittsburgh, a leafy but fast-industrializing hamlet along a deep bend of the Monongahela River about five miles south of where it meets the Allegheny and forms the city’s famous “Point.” She attended public school with her cousins, who remembered her as well behaved and very bright. She never adjusted to being away from the people and places she knew, however, and in August 1880 she left Pittsburgh to rejoin her mother in Kentucky. Madeline realized belatedly that she didn’t understand the “advantages of a Northern education” and returning home put her at a significant disadvantage when it came to her schooling. While universal grammar school was well established at the time, public high schools weren’t outside the cities and larger towns of the Northeast and Midwest. Pittsburgh had one, but few places in the South did. Most southern girls who received any kind of secondary education did so at private women’s “seminaries,” which combined an academic curriculum that could range from delusory to surprisingly advanced, including math, the sciences, Latin, and rhetoric, with the skills expected to make a young woman an agreeable and accomplished wife: the ability to speak a foreign language (especially French), music and art lessons, and fancy embroidery. Women’s seminaries were expensive; most cost several hundred dollars per semester. Madeline, who at this point was harboring ambitions to be a writer, hoped that her aunt Mary, who was fairly well off and had paid for her sister to go to school, would also send her to school.

  Unfortunately, that wouldn’t come to pass. As Madeline tells it, one day in October, as the family was sitting on the front porch, a phrenologist came along and asked for some water. Phrenology, the discernment of personality traits through the measurement and shape of the skull, was all the rage at the time. The phrenologist was handsome and, thought Madeline, “charmed with my young, widowed auntie.” Under the impression that Madeline was her daughter, he examined her head and “poured forth such a volume of talents and accomplishment” that Madeline trembled. Unfortunately, when her aunt’s daughter Laura made an appearance, he pronounced her talents only ordinary. “The die was cast and my doom was sealed,” remembered Madeline. Whether this specific incident was the turning point, as Madeline thought, or just emblematic of family tensions exacerbated by the arrival of another dependent niece—or just too many Pollard women living under the same roof—Aunt Mary refused to send Madeline to school, and Madeline left Bridgeport after a few months.

  Madeline next went to live with her mother’s oldest sister, Aunt Lou, and her husband, John, about five miles outside Lexington. She soon found that Aunt Lou “jealously guards every penny” and was even less likely to pay for her education, so she ended up doing what so many dependent nineteenth-century women did: working for her aunt as a housekeeper and governess. Three years went by in a slog of housekeeping and lessons for her cousins. In her spare time, she took horseback rides and read. She started calling herself Madeline Vivian Pollard, having seen the name “Vivian” in a book and deciding that she liked it better than Valeria. Madeline was learning that
names, as well as identities, could be malleable.

  One afternoon in the summer of 1883 she was out riding her favorite horse, a pretty gray mare, when the bridle broke. An “old, gray-faced rough-looking customer” who happened along fixed it for her. It was James Rhodes, who knew her uncle from the war and tended the gardens at the Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum near Lexington. He saw Madeline home, stayed a few days to visit his old comrade, and quickly became besotted with the young woman. After a while, Rhodes asked Madeline to marry him. At first she turned him down, saying she didn’t intend to get married until she had finished her education, but then he said he would send her to school if she would marry him. To Madeline it must have seemed the only way to escape her fate as the poor relation. Rhodes expected them to get married; he envisioned her teaching school and supporting him in his old age. Madeline saw it as more of a loan, intending to pay him back once she got a job. Regardless, a deal was struck and a letter to the effect was drawn up.

  Madeline entered the Notre Dame Convent, a secondary school for girls in Reading, Ohio, on September 1, 1883. Her stay proved short-lived. The nuns read her letters and discovered her unconventional arrangement with Rhodes. Fearing she would be kicked out, Madeline telegrammed Rhodes to meet her and snuck out early one morning while the sisters were at mass. Given her hasty exit, rumors abounded. Her departure proved fortuitous, however, because she then convinced Rhodes to send her to a better school—Wesleyan Female College in Cincinnati.