Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Wesleyan had been a pioneering institution in the advanced education of women at a time when “the liberal education of women was largely an experiment.” When it opened in 1843, it was only the second women’s college in the country. These early women’s colleges were designed to improve on women’s seminaries by providing an academic liberal arts education for women and granting degrees, although many, like Wesleyan, had only a three-year program and fairly lax admissions standards. Wesleyan had been popular with the daughters of wealthy planters before the war, when it had an enrollment of some five hundred students. It was famous for having graduated Lucy Ware Webb Hayes, the popular wife of President Rutherford B. Hayes and the first First Lady to go to college. By 1884, it was past its heyday. Now-impoverished southerners could no longer afford to send their daughters, and competition from the first real women’s colleges, like the academically rigorous Vassar and Smith Colleges, founded in 1861, and Wellesley College, founded in 1870, eclipsed the early women’s colleges. Still, it was a coup for Madeline to finagle herself into Wesleyan.

  Madeline was supposed to enter Wesleyan at the start of the new term in January 1884, but she was impatient to get started and headed to Cincinnati on her own at the end of November. She looked up Rankin Rossell, a friend of her cousin Nellie’s who was a clerk at Shillito’s, a popular downtown dry goods store, and had him escort her to Wesleyan, with the promise that Rhodes would be along the next day to pay her tuition. On November 20, 1883, Madeline officially entered Wesleyan as a sophomore studying literature, Latin, French, rhetoric, arithmetic, and elocution.

  At first Madeline struggled academically—her lack of formal education showed—but she worked hard to catch up. “I never saw a person who studied with such avidity as she did,” remembered the Reverend Brown, who was then the president of the college. Apparently it didn’t take her long to come up to speed, because in the winter of 1884 she won a dramatic victory in a debating contest “before a large and brilliant audience.” What many in the audience remembered best about the evening was Madeline’s theatrics: whenever her opponent scored a good point, Madeline would “pluck a flower from a bouquet and gracefully toss it to her, to the applause of the audience.” Socially, however, Madeline struggled in an environment of privileged, more cosmopolitan young women. She was remembered as a “poor, ambitious, delicate girl” who was unfashionably dressed and had a “nervous temperament” and a flair for the dramatic. One of her classmates remembered that Madeline had a habit of “always looking downward,” yet she had the feeling that she was “ever watchful.”

  A picture taken at that time shows a serious, slender young woman with long, dark hair in a plain dress that ends just at her ankles—the length that denoted a young woman not yet of age. Her best friend, Wessie Brown, the daughter of the president of the school, found her socially awkward, especially around men. “She had never lived in a city,” she recalled, and said that Madeline had “considerably less experience of the ways of the world than the average young woman who came to college.” It appears, though, that she was eager to master her new circumstances. Another classmate recalled that Madeline “always seemed anxious to raise her social position.” She said Madeline “seemed to push herself forward. She insinuated herself in the good graces of people in good society, and by her charming manners made them her warmest friends.”

  Despite her relief at finally getting an education, Madeline was haunted by her deal with Rhodes. In January, she wrote a long letter to Wessie telling her about the agreement and her fear that she would have to marry Rhodes. “When I think of the debt of gratitude as well as the debt I owe him I almost die of pain. How can I marry the old wretch when I hate him so?” she wrote. “I must crawl out from under these miserable clutches.” Rhodes, whom Madeline said was her guardian, sometimes visited her at the college on the evenings when the girls were allowed to receive guests in the school’s front parlors. Rossell, the young store clerk who had escorted her to Wesleyan, also visited. By the holidays, he had become smitten and was talking marriage. Once, Madeline found herself juggling her young and old suitors on the same night in a game of musical front parlors.

  As winter turned to spring, Madeline received a telegram telling her to rush to her mother’s home in Frankfort. Her younger sister, Rosalie, was seriously ill with consumption. On the morning of April 1, 1884, Madeline boarded a southbound train to Lexington to make a connection to a westbound train to Frankfort. Just after she had changed trains and gotten settled in her seat, a man got up and approached her. “Your face is very familiar. Do I know you?” he asked. She stood and told him that she thought he did not, but that she knew him. “I know you are Col. Breckinridge,” she said. She had met “the star of Kentucky”—W.C.P. Breckinridge, the noted lawyer and newspaper editor who was running for Congress. At forty-nine, he was still a striking man, with clear blue eyes and a thick head of hair only beginning to silver. He asked about her family and said he knew the Horines, her mother’s family. It was an amazing moment for Madeline; her father had particularly admired W.C.P. among the great men of the Bluegrass. Breckinridge asked if he could call on her in Frankfort. Still standing and still in awe of a man who had, to her, literally just walked off a pedestal, Madeline said her mother and aunt would be pleased to have him call.

  It would be the only bright moment Madeline had for months. She continued on to Frankfort, where she found her sister dying of tuberculosis. She remained in Frankfort until Rosalie died in early June. After the funeral, she made her way back to Wesleyan. The spring term was just ending, but she planned to stay through the summer and make up the work she had missed. She couldn’t wait to tell Wessie about meeting Breckinridge. Wessie recalled Madeline being elated about meeting him and that a “man of his standing should come to her and address her.” She said, “We heard a great deal of this incident.” So much, in fact, that she and her classmates teased Madeline about it, calling her “Madeline Vivian Breckinridge Pollard.” When she was away from school, Wessie even addressed a letter to Madeline by that name, which caused a great deal of consternation with the local post office, which refused to deliver the letter on the grounds that there was no such person at the school.

  Madeline was receiving other, more unwelcome letters at the same time. Rhodes was pressuring her to make good on her debt to him. It seems that his funds were starting to run low and some of his friends were advising him that Madeline was taking him for a ride. He demanded that she either marry him or pay him back and threatened to “compel” her to marry him. Madeline was in a panic at the thought that she could be forced to make good on their contract in the flesh. She needed legal advice, and she could think of only one person to turn to: Breckinridge. Despite their brief meeting, she remembered his warm words about knowing her family, so in July she wrote him a letter outlining her plight and asking if she could be forced to marry Rhodes.

  On Friday, August 1, around four in the afternoon, a servant brought a calling card up to Madeline. Her face flushed when she read it. W.C.P. Breckinridge was in the drawing room. She said she hadn’t expected him to reply to her letter in person. Breckinridge said he was in Cincinnati on business and, having nothing else to do in the late afternoon, took a streetcar from the Burnet House to Wesleyan to answer her in person. When Madeline came down to the drawing room, she was dressed in black, still in formal mourning for her sister. After they exchanged greetings, Madeline settled on a divan; Breckinridge sat on a chair across from her.

  What happened next would be a matter of dispute, even years later. They would both agree that Madeline explained the particulars of her situation with Rhodes and asked if she could be legally forced to marry him. Breckinridge would claim he laughed at the idea of a girl being compelled to marry anyone in that day and age. But then, he claimed, Madeline started sobbing and told him she had already given Rhodes “higher proof” of her intention to marry him—meaning she had slept with him. Hearing this, Breckinridge claimed that he told her she had
no choice but to marry him, but she said she could not. “I do not want to be like Aunt Lou, with a houseful of children and a half-educated woman,” she said. “I want to be educated to make money as a writer.”

  Pollard would deny ever having said that she and Rhodes were sexually intimate. After they talked for a while, Madeline claimed that Breckinridge suggested that they “get up some kind of relationship”—pretend they were related—so they could go out that evening and continue the discussion. She said he was holding a handbill for a local concert and suggested they go to that. Breckinridge, on the other hand, claimed it was Madeline who wanted to go to the concert, saying there was a famous clarinetist performing on Vine Street. Both would agree that Madeline asked for permission from Orvid Brown, the son of the president of the college, who was in charge while his father was gone. He said that Breckinridge led him to understand “he was a relative of Miss Pollard’s,” so he assented to the outing. Breckinridge said he would be back later, returned to his hotel, and had supper.

  It was dusk when Breckinridge returned. There were a handful of people, mostly professors and their wives who lived at the school, sitting on the front porch, hoping to catch either a breeze or a glimpse of the famous Kentuckian. But the intense, liquid heat of the day had only congealed into a dense, breezeless warmth, which made it all the more surprising when Breckinridge pulled up in a carriage with a closed cab—an open carriage would have been much more comfortable on a stifling night. The wife of one professor even “protested about a student going off that way with a married man.” Madeline said she was surprised to see the carriage, as there had been no mention of driving. “Are we going in a closed carriage on so warm an evening?” she said she asked. She said Breckinridge said he had throat trouble and the night air was bad for him. Breckinridge said he decided to drive because he wasn’t exactly sure where on Vine Street the concert was and merely engaged the first carriage in line at the hack stand near his hotel.

  They started in the direction of the concert hall. After they had driven for about fifteen minutes, Madeline said Breckinridge claimed to have a headache and asked if she minded if they drove into the cool of the foothills rather than going to the concert. Breckinridge remembered complaining of a headache, but said when they came to a fork in the road that it was Madeline who suggested they skip the hot, gaslit concert hall and instructed the driver to take the left-hand road leading into the countryside. As they drove, Breckinridge said Madeline told him about her ambition to be a writer. She said she preferred living the life of George Eliot to “being an ignorant Kentucky country woman, raising a house full of children and churning butter.” They drove for close to an hour. Madeline remembered that Breckinridge said she should take off her hat because it was so hot; he remembered her leaning forward and placing it on the front seat. She said he took her hand and, when she objected, told her he was old enough to be her father and that “such an act on his part was entirely proper.” He said he put his arm around her and, finding no resistance, started to kiss her. Madeline said he then attempted to take “further liberties” with her, which she didn’t “fully understand but vigorously resisted.” She said she “wrenched” herself away from him, and after that he “tried to take her mind off his bad actions” by talking of “when he was a little boy and how much he loved his first wife.”

  As they drove back to Wesleyan, Madeline said Breckinridge explained that she was too young to understand that his “conduct had not been improper” and told her she was “foolish and prudish.” He said it was near ten o’clock when they returned; Madeline thought it was closer to midnight. He claimed to have pressed some money into her hand—ten dollars—as he dropped her off. She said there was no money involved, but that she returned home “nervous and excited.”

  * * *

  Now, ten years later, going public about her relationship with Breckinridge would open Madeline’s whole life and her unconventional past up for examination. The arrangement with Rhodes in particular didn’t portray her in the most favorable light. Rhodes, it turned out, wasn’t the “uncouth farmer” that Madeline had made him out to be, but a member of “one of the best families of the Bluegrass,” and the family was still angry at the “cruel manner” in which Madeline had used Rhodes, who died heartbroken—and broke—over the relationship. The husband of her old friend Wessie Brown leaked to the press Madeline’s long-ago letter to Wessie about Rhodes, serving up a humiliating look not only at Madeline’s desperate arrangement but also her peripatetic upbringing and her teenage romantic angst. Soon, the papers were reporting that she had “a penchant for rich and gay old men and had several in her string.”

  History didn’t suggest that Madeline’s suit would turn out well. Sixteen years earlier, in 1877, a woman named Mary S. Oliver, a “lady clerk in the Treasury Department,” sued the former senator Simon Cameron for fifty thousand dollars for breach of promise. She acknowledged that the two had begun a relationship in Washington while Cameron’s wife was still alive, but she claimed that after Mrs. Cameron’s death, the now-widowed senator promised to make her his wife after the two had an “improper meeting” at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans in 1875. Over the course of four years, however, he failed to make good on his promise. Oliver did have a colorful personal history—and by her own admission wasn’t a virgin when she met Mr. Oliver, who may still have been married—so it was easy for Cameron’s lawyers to paint her as a scheming woman out to make a buck. Nonetheless, her attorney argued that as she had letters from Cameron attesting to his marriage pledge, it was for the jury to “say whether or not he had made the promise.” Cameron’s attorney said the letters were forgeries and vilified Oliver for having the temerity to “disgustingly and without shame” testify about the details of the affair. He said that when a woman “departs from her sphere, then she descends to the depths of the devils.”

  Neither the press nor those in the courtroom seemed to take Oliver’s case seriously. “Mrs. Oliver was easily shown to be one of the characterless adventuresses who infest the capital and seek a living through dubious relations with public men,” said the New York Times. After a two-week trial, the judge gave the jury such a ridiculously perfunctory charge it became legend in Washington legal circles. “Gentlemen of the jury, take this case and dispose of it,” he said as the courtroom burst into laughter. When the jury asked if they could review a transcript of the proceedings, the judge refused to give it to them. There was little surprise when, after a few hours’ deliberation, the jury found for Cameron. No one even bothered to fetch Oliver for the verdict; she came back to find the court adjourned and spectators streaming out of the courtroom.

  5

  The Wanton Widow

  History suggested consequences more dangerous than being laughed out of a courtroom for women who challenged powerful men on issues of public morality; sometimes they found that more than just the loss of their reputation was at stake. Such was the case of Maria Halpin.

  In 1868, Halpin was a young widow living in Jersey City in the shadow of rapidly urbanizing Manhattan. Her husband, Frederick, the son of a British émigré engraver of some prominence, had died three years earlier of tuberculosis. Her son, Frederick, was six; her daughter, Ada, was four. It was a perilous time to be a widow with young children. The Civil War, which had ended a few years earlier, left many women on their own and looking for work—twenty-five thousand in Boston alone, according to one estimate. Employment opportunities for women were limited and, according to a pioneering study of the women’s labor market by Virginia Penny, most jobs that were available to women at the time paid “a mere pittance, scarce enough to keep body and soul together.” The average wage for a working woman in New York City in the mid-1860s was “about $2 a week and in many instances only 20 cents a day,” according to a government report, at a time when board ran about $3 a week. The majority of the 533 jobs for women that Penny painstakingly curated in The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman’s Work (1863) represent
ed only a handful of occupations: servant, governess, teacher, factory worker, seamstress, milliner, and trades such as bookbinding and cigar rolling, which traditionally employed women.

  At the time, the overwhelming majority of women who worked for wages were servants, mostly “girls of all work”—the sole servant who assisted the lady of the house from dawn to dusk with the heaviest of household tasks for a roof over her head and about $1.25 per week. Before she wrote Little Women and gained a measure of financial security for her genteelly poor family, Louisa May Alcott tried “going into service.” She had already “tried teaching for two years, and hated it.” She tried sewing but “could not earn my bread in that way, at the cost of health.” She “tried story-writing and got five dollars.” Too “proud to be idle and dependent,” she figured service would be “healthier than sewing and surer than writing.” She worked, she recalled, like a “galley slave”: she cooked and cleaned, scrubbed the hearth, mended socks, blackened boots, “dug paths, brought water from the well, split kindling, made fires, and sifted ashes, like a true Cinderella.” She quit after seven weeks, with “grimy, chill-blained hands” and the paltry sum of four dollars in her pocketbook for “the hardest work I ever did.”

  Teaching was more respectable and might net a woman fifty cents more a week. But that was only for the six months or so that school was in session. Most teachers made less than fifty dollars per year, a salary that was geared toward young women living at home who taught for a few years before they married, not a woman living independently or with children to support.

  Factory work was both grueling and poorly paid, as the ever-increasing influx of immigrants drove down wages and working conditions. That left sewing, the last resort for women who needed an income but were too respectable to work in a factory or had young children at home. Women were paid a per-garment “piece rate” sewing for the ready-to-wear garment industry that sprang up as mechanization transformed the production of clothes from something women did at home to a centralized manufacturing process controlled by men who subcontracted sewing out to women, who worked for a pittance either in their homes or in sweatshops. In 1870, the New York Times profiled a widow supporting two young children by sewing fourteen hours a day, seven days a week making “vests at 18 cents apiece for a wholesale house.” She made eight dollars per month, three dollars of which went to the tiny attic she rented. She told a reporter in January that “she had eaten meat only once since Thanksgiving, and then it was given to her.”