Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  If they had hoped to shift public opinion by smearing this decorous lady with sensational depositions, they had miscalculated. All they accomplished, said the Enquirer, besides increasing the “already absorbing interest” in the case, was to demonstrate that “Miss Pollard’s life has been romantic and remarkable.” Importantly, ideas about engagements were changing as marriage became more about love and less about economics. A woman who had one or two before she settled down was likely to be seen as popular and flirty, not necessarily debauched. Furthermore, the more sensational depositions were immediately discredited. Alex Julian had denounced Catesby Hawkins as a liar under oath. Kaufman’s deposition had the “glamour of improbability,” said the Enquirer, while Dr. Greene had crumbled under cross-examination, “growing so very hazy and inaccurate that his evidence was largely speculative.” Mollie Shindlebower, the former prostitute who testified to Madeline’s wild ways, was caught in a mini-scandal of her own. She reportedly lured a tourist to her hotel room and attempted to blackmail him by threatening to “claim he attempted to take advantage of her,” although the Breckinridge people claimed it was a setup to impugn their witness.

  Breckinridge had ignored the advice of one of the lawyers he had contacted about taking Totten’s place: don’t rely on prostitutes or the men who frequent them as your key witnesses—they lack credibility. Breckinridge was so eager to discredit Pollard that he took whatever he could get in terms of testimony. One local wrote to the Enquirer saying, “The character of the Immaculate Son of God could be smirched” with such witnesses.

  An even bigger problem with the rush to smear Madeline was the backlash it provoked. When Breckinridge’s people began investigating the reports of the mock marriage, Squire Tinsley, who hosted the party, wrote to Breckinridge as “your friend and admirer” to tell him that the report was “false.” He later met personally with Breckinridge to tell him that the story was incorrect. Regardless, Breckinridge’s lawyers pressed ahead with the Hawkins deposition. When Tinsley asked to give a deposition to correct the record, they refused to allow him to testify. A furious Tinsley sent a letter to the Courier-Journal that was reprinted around the state averring that Hawkins’s testimony was an “unmitigated, contemptible lie.” He said that Hawkins was never at his house, and the “alleged mock marriage was a mere joke and a farce which has been distorted into a scandal.” As a result of the insult to Tinsley, a man many considered “one of the most sober and highly respected residents” of Frankfort, locals were “severe in their denunciations” of Breckinridge, according to the Courier-Journal.

  Likewise, the attempt to pin Madeline’s first pregnancy on Colonel Swope, a dead man who couldn’t defend himself—much like Cleveland’s allies blamed the late Oscar Folsom—“aroused a storm of indignation throughout the Blue Grass,” said the Enquirer. Dr. Lewis’s testimony was largely discounted when Swope’s brother William said that it was a matter of record that his brother had been in Mexico during the fall of 1884 and hadn’t returned to Lexington until December 10, which didn’t give him much time to have made Madeline’s acquaintance and frequently called on her if he was seeking an abortion for her in early February 1885. “I can not find anybody who ever saw them together, or who knows that they were acquainted with each other,” said William. Furthermore, he said that his brother was in Europe in the fall of 1885, when Dr. Lewis claimed Swope told him about the child being born.

  Breckinridge was increasingly desperate to link Madeline to another man. He believed that during the summer she worked for the Lexington Gazette, which was in 1887, right before she came to Washington, “she was on illicit relations with H. [Howard] Gratz,” the Gazette’s publisher, who was a widower with grown children. He also contended that “there was an engagement to marry” between Madeline and Gratz. According to the local gossip, the engagement was short-circuited when Mrs. Captain Morgan—Nellie Morgan, the wife of Rhodes’s former supervisor at the state asylum—sat next to Mrs. Judge Morton—Mary Morton, who was Gratz’s daughter—at a luncheon and spilled the beans about Madeline’s relationship with Rhodes. Gratz, according to the Morning Transcript, “was heartbroken and wanted … to marry her anyhow, but was prevented” from doing so by his children. Now, Breckinridge hoped to prove that Gratz was likely the father of the child that Madeline said was born in February 1888. He planned to assert that a riding accident Madeline had in late June of that year, which caused several broken ribs, would have ended any pregnancy resulting from their spring liaison, even though Desha consulted a physician who told him that the timing of the accident meant “such a fall would have had no such effect on the embryo.”

  Breckinridge told Shelby he believed that if Gratz was “approached right … he can be of great service,” so Desha and Stoll scheduled him for a deposition. But Gratz pleaded to be excused because he was going to be married and didn’t want the publicity. He said that “he couldn’t prove anything of any consequence, except that he was engaged to [Madeline].” Despite the fact that his confirmation of the engagement appeared to belie Madeline’s contention that she always had been faithful to Breckinridge, they let Gratz off the hook and canceled the deposition.

  Throwing caution aside and now writing directly to Jennie instead of using Stoll as an intermediary, Breckinridge pressured her to try to find out something about Madeline’s relationship with Charles Dudley Warner. He said Warner “was in her room at the Elsmere”—a hotel in Washington where Madeline briefly stayed—“pretending to be writing.” But Jennie had been unable to get anywhere near Madeline. “You don’t know how discouraged I’ve been,” she wrote to Stoll. Breckinridge told her not to give up, reminding her that it was a “delicate and difficult undertaking.” He stressed that any little piece of information she got could be the key to the defense, likening it, perhaps a little too aptly, to the strand that fabricates a rope by which a “sinking ship” is winched “to the shore.”

  As what many were describing as the “trial of the decade” drew near, it seems that W.C.P. Breckinridge increasingly was aware that no rope may be at hand, at least not in the form of another man he could pin Pollard on. There was only one last thing he could do to prepare for the trial. His wife, Louise, it appears, was now mentally unhinged. On top of the widespread impression that her marriage to Breckinridge had been of the shotgun variety, the Blackburn deposition had made it clear that while Louise was swooning around Washington last spring imagining herself as the next Mrs. W.C.P. Breckinridge, her Willie was still running around with the woman who had been his lover for the past nine years. She had been made a fool of and was now displaying what Willie told Nisba was an “unnatural state of mind” caused by “these constant newspaper attacks.” He confided to his daughter, who was at Ella’s house in Staunton, that he was afraid to leave Louise alone in the house he had rented on Q Street while he was in court dealing with this “unfortunate and malignant trial,” but said, “I do not know where to turn to find somebody to be with her.” He said he knew it was “more than I ought to ask,” as Nisba had “done so much and done it so heroically … that I am utterly without excuse to ask more of you,” but ask he would. “Do you think you would have the strength to come down and be with her?” he wrote to Nisba the day before the trial started.

  So as the world tilted on its axis toward the twentieth century, with speeding streetcars and electric lights and telephones blurring the old distances and darknesses, with new questions being asked about old ideas, Nisba Breckinridge made her way to Washington.

  12

  Miss Pollard’s Ruin in Lexington

  Thursday, March 8, dawned unseasonably warm in Washington, as if nature herself was trying to hurry the city past the dreary winter of 1894. President Cleveland’s promised silver bullet—the repeal of the Sherman Silver Act—still hadn’t revived the economy. Unemployment remained high, morale was low; the administration seemed paralyzed, “mired in outdated doctrine,” with Cleveland perceived as “rigid and uncaring,” according to the
historian Hal Williams. There were rumors from the west that a businessman named Jacob Coxey who believed he possessed the “reincarnated spirit of Andrew Jackson” was gathering an army of one hundred thousand unemployed men to march on Washington to demand jobs. Unrest and uncertainty were in the air. “Everywhere,” said Williams, “older assumptions gave way to newer patterns and nagging doubts.”

  The opening of Pollard v. Breckinridge brought an air of fervid expectation to the Greek-revival building on Fourth and D Streets that was still called Old City Hall even though the city government hadn’t had offices there since 1863. The anticipation was due in no small measure to the expected sensational nature of the testimony, which would be a welcome break from the relentlessly downbeat financial news. There was also the specter of seeing a prominent moralist defend what appeared to be indefensible. But the real attraction was seeing Madeline Pollard take the stand and testify to things that no woman had talked about in public—her ruin by a powerful man. Already there was a sense that the trial might be about more than just the facts of the case.

  Now that it was clear that the case would come to trial, speculation about who was funding Madeline’s suit reached a fever pitch. The “wonder has been all along how two such successful attorneys could be induced to take hold of a case where there was no money in site,” noted the Courier-Journal, as such able and distinguished attorneys rarely take such cases “out of sympathy for their clients.” The paper estimated that even without attorney’s fees, the case had cost $2,500 so far and the “burning question is who is putting up the cash.” There was no shortage of possible suspects: Breckinridge’s political enemies back in the Ashland district; disgruntled Presbyterians who felt he had disgraced the church; a wealthy widower in Washington; a “well-known literary man”; even the New York World itself. The mystery only served to heighten interest in the trial, and the Ionic-columned portico of Old City Hall was thronged with hopeful spectators seeking entry into the courtroom.

  Judge Bradley called the court to order at precisely 10:00 a.m. He was a precise man, a Republican, lean and taciturn, with his gray hair parted in the middle and a brown walrus mustache. The courtroom he was presiding over in the east wing of the building was known as the Old Criminal Court, and its dingy appearance, with tired olive paint rising from nondescript blue baseboards to a soiled white ceiling, belied the drama the chamber had seen. Francis Scott Key had defended Sam Houston here in 1832, when he was tried for assault after he beat Congressman William Stanbery with his cane for accusing him of defrauding the government. The abolitionist Daniel Drayton and Edward Sayres, the captain of a schooner called the Pearl, were tried here in 1849 for attempting to spirit seventy-seven runaway slaves out of the city, down the Potomac, up the Chesapeake, and to freedom in New Jersey through the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal. In one of the most famous antebellum scandals, Congressman Daniel Sickles was acquitted here in 1859 of murdering Philip Barton Key—Francis Scott Key’s son, who, coincidentally, prosecuted Drayton and Sayres—despite having shot him on Pennsylvania Avenue in broad daylight after he found out Key was having an affair with his wife. John Surratt faced trial in the same room for his alleged role in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but avoided his mother’s fate, being hung in the yard of the Washington Arsenal Penitentiary, because of an ironically “hung” jury. And most famously in the memory of those gathered that March morning, Charles Guiteau was convicted here in 1882 of assassinating President James Garfield.

  Judge Bradley’s bench, with its big red leather chair, was nestled under an arch on the front wall; the court clerks and the marshal were seated just below. The jury box, a platform with twelve chairs in two neat rows, was to the judge’s right, with pegs for the jurors’ hats and coats on the wall behind. There were two tables, one behind the other, in the front of the courtroom for the plaintiff and defense teams, over which hung two lamps “pulpit like.” That, and what light streamed in from three large, arch-topped windows on each side of the courtroom, was the only illumination. The members of the press—which included reporters from the New York Times, and World and Herald; the Washington Post and Evening Star; the Chicago Daily Tribune; the Philadelphia and Boston papers; and the wire services—were off to one side of the courtroom, seated at an assortment of desks and tables procured for the occasion. The famous Washington correspondents of the great Ohio River cities—George Alfred Townsend of the Cincinnati Enquirer, known to all by his pen name of Gath; Fred Mussey of the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette; and O. O. Stealey of the Louisville Courier-Journal—ended up crammed together at a table of such diminutive proportions that they looked like hobbledehoy giants. The rest of the courtroom was taken up with rows of benches and cane chairs for the lucky spectators granted admission, who would soon include members of Congress, noted ministers, famous actors, and, rather inexplicably, the Princeton basketball team.

  Jere Wilson and Calderon Carlisle arrived first and selected the table in front. The Breckinridge team drifted in in waves. First was Stoll and Totten’s partner William Mattingly, who had agreed to assist with preliminary matters but warned Breckinridge he couldn’t afford to work for free. Then came former congressman Benjamin Butterworth, most recently general counsel to the Chicago World’s Fair, whom Breckinridge had hired only the day before. A few minutes later Desha Breckinridge, who looked like a younger, slighter version of his father, with close-cropped dark hair and a beard, entered the courtroom. Finally the defendant himself arrived. He looked, said the Post, like “a man who had slept well and enjoyed his breakfast.” He went up and down the press row shaking hands and greeting reporters by name, then took his place with his counsel, his thumbs hooked casually under his armpits and one leg hoisted on his knee, with only the nervous jiggling of his foot suggesting anything other than total nonchalance. Gath thought he looked like a country parson: portly, in an old-fashioned vest and frock coat, with profuse, silky white hair, a bushy beard of the same color, and a florid face, “shrewd and roguish in expression—a snowy Cupid still shooting arrows out of his blue eyes and warm skin.”

  Phil Thompson hurried in late and the teams began wrangling over depositions, with Wilson arguing to block those he said were unrelated to the trial—namely those about Madeline’s purported past relationships—and Breckinridge’s team arguing to exclude depositions that they said had been taken without proper notice. Bradley said he would rule on the depositions later, and jury selection began. Twelve white men were selected from a pool of twenty-one white men and five black men: two carpenters, a housepainter, a paint dealer, a steamfitter, the owner of a produce stand, a farmer, two bookkeepers, a banker, a merchant, and one man who gave his profession as “agent.” With the preliminaries over, Butterworth asked if the trial could be delayed until morning so he could familiarize himself with the case. When Carlisle didn’t object, Bradley acquiesced and the onlookers began dispersing, resigned to having to wait one more day to hear from Madeline Pollard.

  * * *

  It’s hard to know which would have been worse for Nisba: the silence in the house once Breckinridge and Desha had left for the courtroom, leaving her alone with Louise, or the raging when her stepmother became agitated, which tended to happen mostly when her father was around. It had been a precipitous decline for Louise. In the fall of 1892, Louise Rucks Scott Wing appeared to be a perfectly healthy forty-seven-year-old woman. She had been a widow for nearly twenty years. Her late husband, Edward Rumsey Wing, was the youngest-ever U.S. ambassador, taking charge of the U.S. mission in Ecuador when he was just twenty-four. He was, unfortunately, a disaster as a diplomat, best remembered for an ill-fated scheme to annex Ecuador, and drank himself to oblivion within four years, leaving twenty-nine-year-old Louise a widow in 1874. She returned to Washington and lived a comfortable life, a fixture in diplomatic social circles. When the Breckinridges first came to the capital in the mid-1880s, it was “Cousin Louise”—she was a distant Preston cousin of Willie’s on her mother’s side—who introduc
ed the family around and saved them “from the drab existence that awaited the family of many unknown congressmen,” recalled Ella.

  Louise remained close to the family after Issa’s death, writing to the Breckinridge children and seeing Willie in Washington. Sometime in the fall or winter of 1893, their relationship turned romantic. By mid-February 1893, she was regularly writing to “Cousin Willie” thanking him for wonderful evenings and anticipating their next outing. “I am in such a mood this morning—like champagne,” she wrote in one. Her letters were effervescent; she wrote of “a time of new delight” in early March; soon after that she was “pining” for him.

  It’s not improbable, of course, that Breckinridge should have struck up a romance with a longtime friend after his wife’s death, and Issa had been unwell for years. But the timing was awkward. Issa had passed away only the previous July, and becoming seriously involved with another woman so soon after her death was a transgression of protocol that, as Julia Blackburn noted, risked being seen as an insult to his dead wife. Only a man who had a passel of young children who needed a mother could be forgiven for replacing his wife so precipitously. And with the financial crisis looming and his prominent role in Congress, Breckinridge was especially hard-pressed for time. In early March, right about the time his courtship of Wing appears to have gone into high gear, he wrote to Nisba, “I have no leisure moments—my time is whole occupied and I am growing very tired.” It seems that a new romance would have been the last thing on his mind—unless he hoped to replace Issa as quickly as possible to avert another woman who believed she was to be the next Mrs. W.C.P. Breckinridge. One of Louise’s friends said that he was insistent, telling Louise that “no other woman had ever claimed his love as she had” and pressuring her to “promise him her hand” in marriage, a tempting prospect that Louise knew would “place her among the social queens of America.”