Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Four days after the second affidavit was published, Grover Cleveland was elected president of the United States. His victory was taken as a vindication of his forthrightness in dealing with the Halpin incident. But Cleveland won one of the closest presidential elections in history because of an historic political blunder by Blaine, who had the momentum going into the final week of the campaign. On October 29, Blaine was campaigning in heavily Irish Catholic New York City when a clergyman named Samuel Burchard, who was introducing him at a rally, denounced the Democratic Party as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion”—booze, Catholics, and Confederates. The Democrats cranked out handbills denouncing Blaine as anti-Catholic and handed them out the following Sunday in front of Catholic churches throughout the city, “blowing hitherto undecided Catholic voters off the fence and into Democratic shelters,” according to Merrill.

  Blaine’s “black Wednesday” continued when he attended a lavish “prosperity dinner” at Delmonico’s that evening that was packed with millionaires and robber barons—Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, Charles Tiffany—at a time when factories across the country were closing down. The dinner was savaged the next day in the press as the worst kind of Gilded Age excess. A week later, Blaine lost New York State, the most critical swing state, by 1,149 votes. It cost him the election. Triumphant Democrats responded to the “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” taunt with the rejoinder, “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”

  Once in the White House, Cleveland married a woman whose respectability was unquestioned because he had personally supervised it since she was a child: twenty-one-year-old Frances Folsom, the daughter of the late Oscar Folsom. He had acted as her informal guardian since Oscar’s death; she called him “Uncle Cleve.” When she was still a child and Cleveland’s sister asked if he was ever going to get married, he said, “I’m only waiting for my wife to grow up.” He had courted her since she was a teenager, sending her roses every week when she was in college. It was “Frank,” as she was known, whom he spoke of wanting to make a “sensible, domestic American wife.” She was married to the forty-nine-year-old Cleveland in the Blue Room of the White House in an ivory wedding gown.

  Meanwhile, Maria Halpin went down in the history books as a whore. King’s slander of the wanton widow Maria was codified in Allan Nevins’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage. Nevins wrote that Maria—“tall, pretty and pleasing in manner”—“accepted the attentions of several men.” When “a son was born to her … whom she named Oscar Folsom Cleveland, she charged Cleveland with his paternity.” According to Nevins, “Those closest to [Cleveland] believed that Mrs. Halpin was uncertain who was the father; that she fixed upon him because she hoped to make him marry her.” But Cleveland himself told Simeon Talbott that King’s story about Maria’s multiple lovers wasn’t true. He even told his friend Bissell when he was bragging about having the whole scandal wrapped up that “King’s intrusion made me trouble,” suggesting that he wasn’t happy about the outlandish tale King concocted.

  Nevins also repeated the explanation from King’s investigation that Cleveland “did not question [Maria’s] charge because the other men in the scrape were married.” Yet during the 1884 Democratic National Convention, Cleveland reportedly told fellow New York politician Alfred Chapin about his “woman scrape”—probably because he knew the Halpin rumors would dog him if he got the nomination—and apparently never suggested it was anything other than what it appeared: he had gotten a woman pregnant. More important, as the Cleveland biographer Denis Lynch notes, one other man in Cleveland’s circle of chums also was unmarried—his junior law partner Shan Bissell. “If a scapegoat was to be chosen, no one more suitable could have been found than Shan Bissell, the youngest of the lot, with the least to lose, and one of the gayest bachelors in town,” Lynch wrote.

  As a final vindication of Cleveland, Nevins offers the assessment of the Reverend Kinsley Twining that after the “preliminary offense,” Cleveland’s “conduct was singularly honorable, showing no attempt to evade responsibility, and doing all that he could to meet the duties involved, of which marriage was certainly not one.” Twining was a Congregationalist minister who conducted another of the sham investigations that in 1884 exonerated Cleveland, this one for the Independent, a weekly Congregationalist magazine that formerly was headed by Henry Beecher. Kinsley was the book review editor of the Independent, and his investigation appears to have been about as thorough as King’s—not very.

  Nevins never mentions Maria’s rape allegation. What’s most important about the whole Halpin incident, according to him, is how a mere “transient weakness” on the part of Cleveland “also throws light upon his latent strength.” For women, such a “transient weakness” would be ruinous; but for men, apparently, it was redemptive.

  The idea that Cleveland took responsibility for Oscar to protect his friend Folsom was popularized in the 1894 novel The Honorable Peter Stirling. In it, a fictionalized Cleveland assumes responsibility for his law partner’s illegitimate child to “spare the feelings of his partner’s daughter, to whom he is betrothed.” As Lynch notes, the idea that Cleveland needed to take responsibility for Oscar to spare Folsom makes no sense: “Cleveland and Folsom had not been partners for nearly four years” when Oscar was born and “Cleveland owed nothing to Folsom.” Oscar Folsom was alive and well when little Oscar was born and perfectly capable of making arrangements for him if he was his son. Frances Folsom was only ten at the time, so her betrothal to Cleveland was still over a decade away.

  The idea that Cleveland needed to protect Oscar Folsom to prevent scandal also grossly misinterprets the sexual politics of the time. If Maria Halpin had been having an affair with Folsom—and there is no evidence that she was—she would have been considered a woman of ill repute by definition because she was sleeping with a man she could not marry. As such, she had no social capital. If she had become pregnant by Folsom, she would have had little recourse and would have been unlikely to make a fuss. The best she could have expected was for Folsom to make some provision for the child—many a philandering nineteenth-century husband quietly supported an illegitimate child. A more significant scandal would have occurred if it became public knowledge that Cleveland, an up-and-coming politician, had relations with a respectable woman and failed to marry her when he was able to do so, consigning her to life as a “fallen” woman—hence the motive for squirreling little Oscar away.

  Popular historians compounded the legend of the wanton widow when they picked up on the unfounded assertion of the Reverend Ball that Cleveland and his friends in a club called the “Jolly Reefers” had drunken orgies to assert they passed Maria around like a plaything. Despite the rather satiric-sounding name, the truth of the Jolly Reefers was much tamer. As one of the founding members told Forest and Stream: “Half a dozen of us floated down the river from Buffalo one day fishing for bass … Someone suggested that we float over to Grand Island and eat our dinner on the grass. Before we finished our meal we began to discuss the organization of a permanent fishing club … We became the ‘Jolly Reefers.’” They changed the name, he said, after their wives criticized it because it suggested an “extravagant picture of sociability.” They built a clubhouse on the island that became known as the Beaver Island Club, a proper Victorian sportsman’s club where the members fished and hunted duck. They took fishing so seriously that they had “regular fishing days at which every member was expected to be present” and elected a commodore for each outing. An orgy it was not. Members recalled seeing Cleveland there “leading the chubby little girl, ‘Frankie’ Folsom, by the hand.”

  No one seemed to question why Maria would risk her comfortable, and hard-won, life to have simultaneous affairs with three men when the consequences would be ruinous or why no evidence was ever produced linking her to other men, especially Folsom. Why would she, as Nevins asserted, name the baby Oscar Folsom Cleveland if it would advertise her sexual connection to two men? It seems just as likel
y that Cleveland concocted the name to obscure Oscar’s paternity, perhaps figuring it didn’t matter since he planned to give the baby away anyway and hide his parentage. If Maria was as dissolute as the portrait of her suggested, why hadn’t she taken the money offered by the Democratic Party? Why would she make a false accusation of rape against Cleveland if all she stood to gain was more shame?

  All that mattered was that a powerful man declared Maria a wanton woman after using his position and privilege to strip her of everything she had—her reputation, her job, her home, and her children. And in Maria’s story was a warning for Madeline Pollard about what she stood to lose.

  6

  Not So Easily Handled

  It seemed likely that Madeline Pollard would meet much the same fate that Maria Halpin and Mary Oliver did: she would be dismissed in the court of public opinion before she ever got a chance to make her case. With his illustrious family name and deep political and social connections, Breckinridge seemed unassailable. He also was friendly with many reporters thanks to his stint as editor of the Lexington Observer and Reporter, and like other congressmen, he controlled much of the political patronage in his district, meaning that the livelihoods of many were dependent on his good graces.

  Several elements of Pollard’s suit gave people pause, however. One was that the charge of blackmail—or any kind of financial motive—didn’t add up. “Col. Breckinridge’s friends say the money could not be collected for the simple reason that he does not possess it,” noted the Washington Post. As Charles Stoll told Jennie Tucker in his brief to her, Breckinridge had offered Madeline “a liberal allowance for such length of time as might be necessary to fit her for some honorable vocation.” Stoll also assumed that if Madeline could be persuaded to take a lump-sum settlement, Breckinridge had “many warm, devoted friends” who would be happy to lend him the money to keep the matter out of court. But Madeline didn’t seem interested in a settlement at all.

  Another was the reputation of the attorneys representing Madeline—Jere Wilson and Calderon Carlisle. “No members of the legal fraternity are better known” in Washington than Wilson and Carlisle, said the Post. Wilson was a former congressman and brilliant litigator who had been “identified with nearly half of the most important cases fought in District courts during the past five years.” Carlisle was primarily an international lawyer, having successfully represented the British legation in the high-profile Bering Sea seal-fisheries dispute between the United States, England, and Russia before the Supreme Court. He came from a well-known Washington legal family and was a bona fide “cave dweller,” which was what the locals called the oldest Washington families for their devotion to antiquated social forms. He was also a “club man” and a regular on the high-society social circuit.

  Ironically, Mary Oliver had tried to hire Carlisle’s father, James Mandeville Carlisle, who was at the time one of the city’s leading lawyers, to take her case but had to settle for out-of-town lawyers, which was a major strike against her credibility in her breach of promise suit. It also was reported that Wilson and Carlisle had the evidence and witnesses to back Madeline’s charges, as “men of their reputation would not undertake a suit of the grave character of this without a careful scrutiny of the grounds on which it was to be brought,” noted the Philadelphia Press.

  In addition, one of Madeline’s classmates from Wesleyan wrote to the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette and affirmed that everything Madeline claimed about Breckinridge’s visit to Wesleyan could be “corroborated by a number of students, boarders and professors,” and that she herself was sitting across from Madeline when a servant handed her Breckinridge’s calling card. She said that Breckinridge came back around seven that evening and they went to the “hill-tops and did not return till near morning” and the next day Madeline “showed a sum of money.”

  Four days after the suit was filed, the public heard from Madeline for the first time when a reporter from the Washington Evening Star tracked her down to a boardinghouse in an out-of-the-way neighborhood. By that time, the Duke interview as well as the interview about her set of multiple calling cards had been reprinted in papers around the country. Madeline received the reporter in the parlor wearing a “stylish ecru-colored” dress. She said she was reluctant to talk to the press on the advice of her attorneys. “My position is public enough without making it any worse,” she said, but then continued, “I am not by any means all the sorts of a woman I have been described. When I go on the stand I think that many people will change their views about me and my position in this whole affair.”

  Madeline made it clear that she didn’t intend to settle and planned to testify in court. “Anyone can see from the character of the lawyers who have undertaken my case that I have a good case. They would not have taken it if it had not been such,” she assured the reporter. Still, she understood the precarious position she had put herself in by going public. “What could I say that would not be open to misinterpretation?” she asked. “The publicity I have already had thrust upon me has not been pleasant or welcome, and the less you say about me in the Star the more I shall like it.”

  As others had, the Star reporter described her as “not exactly a beautiful girl”—although tall and slender “with an excellent form”—but one with “something extremely attractive and winning about her.” It was, he decided, “when she begins to speak that one realizes the charm. She has a clear, musical voice, and talks earnestly and with the best use of language.” He said that Madeline showed “education and breeding” and was “the last person one would ever take for an adventuress.” He concluded, “She does not even look the part well enough to play it in amateur theatricals.”

  Madeline appeared to have more credibility than Mary Oliver and more willingness to go public with her story than Maria Halpin, who had been irrevocably smeared by the time she tried to take a stand against Cleveland. But the “Star of Kentucky” was at the apex of his political career, and few believed that a penniless girl from Kentucky could end that.

  * * *

  Politically, Willie Breckinridge entered 1893 in an enviable position. Breckinridge’s political fortunes had risen with those of the “Bourbon Democrats,” a faction of conservative Democrats who, according to the historian Heather Cox Richardson, originated in aristocratic southerners who held themselves out as “bastions of old tradition and culture” against the federalizing influence of Reconstruction. Eventually the Bourbons came to encompass the entire pro-business, laissez-faire wing of the Democratic Party that came to power with Cleveland’s election in 1884 on a platform of limited government, “home rule”—shorthand for states’ rights—and low taxes. The Bourbons shared a near-religious faith in the power of the free market and an evangelical belief in a constitutionally limited federal government that, in the words of Cleveland, could not “interfere, beyond the very minimum of absolute necessity, with the economic and social privileges of individuals and businesses.”

  Breckinridge’s affinity with northern business interests may seem odd, but he was a leading advocate of the “New South” movement, which hailed “cheap resources, business opportunities, railroad developments, and commercial enterprise” as the way forward for the region, according to the historian C. Vann Woodward. “They might look like Southern colonels, with goatee and moustaches, and speak like Southern orators, retaining those trappings of the olden days,” noted the historian Edward Prichard, but their agenda was essentially a “surrender” to Eastern financial interests.

  Breckinridge made a name for himself as a leader of the Bourbons. In 1890, when Republicans were in the majority, House Speaker Thomas Reed moved to revitalize a Congress that had taken on “a helpless, inept air” due to years of Democratic obstruction through arcane parliamentary tactics like the “disappearing quorum,” in which Democrats would participate in a debate on a bill but then refuse to answer the roll call, robbing Republicans of the quorum needed to vote. On January 29, early in the second session of the Fifty-First C
ongress, when the quorum again disappeared, Reed instructed the house clerk to record the names of those “members present and refusing to vote” and declared a quorum. As pandemonium broke out, Breckinridge sprang to his feet and roared, “I deny the power of the Speaker and denounce it as revolutionary,” as the Democrats chanted, “Czar! Czar!” at Reed.

  Republicans proceeded to pass a slate of landmark bills that session under the leadership of “Czar Reed,” including the McKinley Tariff Act, the Republicans’ attempt to modernize the tariff schedule by raising some tariffs (notably on crops to aid beleaguered farmers), lowering others, and adding key manufacturing inputs to the “free list” on which no duties were paid. They also passed the historic Sherman Antitrust Act to rein in the monopolies and trusts that even the Democrats admitted were resulting in an unhealthy concentration of wealth and power, and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which doubled the amount of silver the Treasury purchased as backing for currency, moving away from the gold standard that the Bourbons held dear. They passed a long-awaited bill to provide pensions to disabled Union veterans. They even came close to passing a federal civil rights bill to oversee voting in the South, where African Americans were being rapidly disenfranchised through Jim Crow laws and voter intimidation.

  Republican efforts to address so many problems at once, however, created a backlash. Voters in the South rebelled against the attempt to monitor voting rights, which the Democrats labeled the “force bill,” conjuring up visions of bayoneted federal troops reinvading the South. Democrats denounced the increase in federal appropriations for things like pensions, dubbing the Fifty-First Congress the “Billion-Dollar Congress.” They sent speakers around the country to drum up fears of skyrocketing consumer prices under the McKinley Tariff Act. In some places they “paid peddlers to sell household goods at inflated prices, with signs that blamed the McKinley law,” according to the historian Hal Williams. They campaigned against recently passed state laws to prohibit the sale of alcohol or require children to attend school as examples of unnecessary government intrusion into private life and individual liberties. The 1890 midterm elections were a rout; the Republicans lost nearly eighty seats in the House and with them their majority. And two years later, Frances Folsom Cleveland was proved right when she told the servants at the White House in 1885 to leave the furniture just as it was because “we are coming back just four years from today.”