Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  The next witness was Lucretia Minear, who owned the Lafayette Square boardinghouse where Madeline lived for a time. She testified that Breckinridge was a frequent visitor there. A woman named Kate Burt identified Madeline as a “Mrs. Foster,” a pregnant woman who lived for two weeks in October 1887 in the same boardinghouse she did on Thirteenth and F Streets, where a man she recognized as Congressman Breckinridge frequently went to her room on the third floor. A deposition was read from Mrs. Hoyt of the Lexington boardinghouse where Madeline lived, saying Madeline had no older male visitors other than Rhodes, although some schoolboys called on her to “hear her sing and play” piano in the parlor.

  As the first week of the trial drew to a close, Breckinridge appeared rattled by the “mass of testimony” produced by Madeline’s lawyers and fretted to Desha about the “irregularity, insufficiency and inadequacy” of their defense preparation. Rumors of his secret wedding to Louise were now public and, if true, said the Enquirer, would show a “general duplicity of his character.” To make matters worse, the Enquirer was reporting that several years ago, there had been some financial irregularities with Breckinridge’s law practice. Apparently Breckinridge “collected certain moneys” in his capacity as a lawyer but “found himself unable to transfer the funds when required to do so.” There was talk of disbarment proceedings, but “he was so highly esteemed by wealthy men at his home that they advanced cash” to cover the debt.

  Nevertheless, Breckinridge continued to see himself as the victim of persecution. He fumed that the papers criticized him for building his defense around impugning Pollard’s chastity yet “did not hesitate to publish every nasty and scandalous charge against me, wounding my wife and daughters.” In a letter to one supporter, he complained that his enemies “have been hauling me around on a spike team”—a crude little team of a donkey and a cow used to break rough ground—“consisting of Sallie Guess and Ed Farrell.” He mocked Farrell for having the temerity to bring Guess to Washington, telling one supporter he wished he had a camera to take a picture of him “meeting Sallie at the depot, driving her in a cab through the streets of Washington to a colored boardinghouse, and escorting her to introduce her to the family.” The world seemed to be shifting under his feet, as were ideas about who was fit to sit in judgment of whom.

  13

  Somebody’s Daughter

  The “gusty spirit of Saint Patrick” blew into Washington a day early on Friday, March 16, rattling the still-bare trees and blowing away any hint of spring. Just after 10:00 a.m., word began spreading around town that Madeline Pollard had taken the stand. Many had doubted that she would, even up to the last minute. Some believed that her lawyers thought her too emotional to take a chance on letting her testify. Still others couldn’t imagine a woman telling a story “that very few women would care to relate in public.” As word spread, spectators packed into the old courthouse, filling the halls. They “struggled with the bailiffs in the corridor and told of their exalted government positions, their newspaper connections, or their personal relations to the participants or counsels.” Those not lucky or connected enough to get in crowded on tiptoe around the windows in the hall that looked across the courtyard to the courtroom windows.

  Madeline took the stand dressed in the same black dress and blue coat she had worn all along, her black velvet hat with its little feathered plume dancing like a question mark over her head. Miss Ellis sat stoically next to her. As Carlisle questioned her, she told about her father’s death, how the family had been left destitute, and her years spent with her aunt in Pittsburgh and then with her other aunt outside of Lexington. She told about her arrangement with Rhodes and about meeting Breckinridge on the train and about how he came to Wesleyan and the paper he had in his hand and the concert in the heights and the closed carriage and the bad throat. She told how he brought her to Sarah Guess’s and how she stayed until Monday morning and how she eventually went to Cincinnati “not because I wanted to, but because I had to.” She told of the room over the mattress store and the Norwood Foundling Asylum and Drs. Perry and Buchanan. She said it was Breckinridge who told her to go to Cincinnati and find a woman doctor and Breckinridge who gave her money and Breckinridge who was the father of the baby born on May 29, 1885. “Had you ever before meeting Mr. Breckinridge had sexual relations with any man at any time or place?” asked Carlisle. “No, never,” she replied emphatically. She told of more visits to Sarah Guess’s and how Breckinridge came to her room at night when he boarded at Mrs. Ketchum’s. “Were you ever at Sarah Guess’s house with any other man than Mr. Breckinridge?” asked Carlisle. “Certainly not,” she answered.

  She was clear and direct as she spoke, recalling dates and facts without hesitation, discussing the details of her relationship with Breckinridge unflinchingly; she didn’t blush or avert her eyes when she said “pregnant.” The reporters in the courtroom were impressed by her testimony, “the rising and falling of her plaintive voice, the tone of her demure little acknowledgements about her early life,” although the World thought her a bit “stagy … as if every word, action and gesture had been rehearsed.”

  Madeline then told how she had to leave Lexington a second time after Breckinridge’s visits to her bedroom at Mrs. Ketchum’s and how she came to Washington, where she stayed at a boardinghouse at Thirteenth and F as a “Mrs. Foster.” She told how Breckinridge came there to see her, but someone recognized him and knew he wasn’t her husband, so she had to leave. She told how she then went to St. Ann’s Infant Asylum, but had to leave there too because she went out at night to meet Breckinridge, so she went to a private lying-in home, where Dr. Parsons delivered her second child. From there, Madeline filled in the story of the last few years of her life. After the baby was born and sent to an orphan asylum, she lived at the Academy of the Holy Cross, a Catholic girls’ school on Thomas Circle, from March 1888 until the fall of 1890. From there, she went to live at Mrs. Fillette’s boardinghouse, and then in the fall of 1891, after she lost the government job Breckinridge got for her, she went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for six months. She came back to Washington in the spring of 1892, then spent six weeks at the Bread Loaf Inn in Vermont. Finally, she told how Breckinridge met her on the last day of August 1892, after his wife had died, at the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station and on a carriage ride told her that his children were grown and settled and “he had thought it over and had determined to marry me if I would marry him, and I told him I would marry him.” She said he thought a year was too soon after Issa’s death to remarry—he had waited fourteen months after the death of his first wife—so she said she “told him we ought to wait two years.”

  Carlisle showed her tickets to the World’s Fair and Issa Breckinridge’s little willow sewing basket and asked if Breckinridge had given those to her, and she said he had. She identified the letters and the telegrams that had gone back and forth between them the previous spring regarding arrangements for her to leave Washington when she was again pregnant. He asked her to tell about arrangements they discussed for her to go to a lying-in establishment. For the first time, Madeline lost her composure. “I don’t like to state these things before so many men,” she said tearfully. Wilson chimed in and told her she didn’t have to answer. Carlisle then read the spate of letters that had passed between her and Breckinridge when she was in Charlottesville, where she threatened to make their engagement public if he didn’t make good on his promise to marry her and he begged her to avoid a scandal. Finally, she testified that from that first night at Sarah Guess’s until he left her on May 17 of last year there was “never one single suggestion of discontinuing that miserable sin until he left me.”

  Ben Butterworth, big and beefy with muttonchops just going to gray, began the cross-examination with the air of a man handling a package he thought might contain nitroglycerin. It was when the fireworks were expected and when many people assumed that Madeline might crumble. But they underestimated just how much Madeline relished the opportunity to tell her
story. When Jennie had visited her the previous evening, she had told her that she wasn’t “one bit afraid” to take the stand and said that she told Carlisle not to try to stop the cross-examination, no matter how rough it got. “I wanted them to go ahead and ask all the questions they could think of,” she told Jennie as she drank a hot toddy of whiskey, hot water, and lemon to prepare her for her big day. “People do not know what I can do, and I will surprise them all,” she said.

  Butterworth began by asking Madeline how old she was. She acknowledged there was some confusion about her age. She said she thought she was twelve when her father died in 1876, which would mean she was born in 1864. But later, her mother and her sister told her she was born November 30, 1866, and thereafter she used that date in good faith. She believed, she said, that she was seventeen when she met Breckinridge. Butterworth continued grilling her, asking how old she was when the family left Frankfort and when they lived in Crab Orchard and how many brothers and sisters she had and when they were born and how far apart in age from her they were, until finally she told him that if he “asked her forty thousand questions” she still couldn’t say for sure how old she was. She also said that she hadn’t been in doubt about her age until after the suit was filed and Breckinridge began questioning it, although, she noted with a smile, he signed her civil service papers attesting that she was born in 1866.

  Butterworth asked her about her childhood and what she did with herself and about her education. He asked if she had ever studied history. “My father taught me some history,” she said. “Of the United States or of Kentucky?” he asked. “Of both, but not as much of the history of Kentucky as Mr. Breckinridge afterward taught me,” she said to laughter. He grilled her about meeting Breckinridge on the train. “I believe you spoke to him on the train,” he asserted. “That is not true,” she answered, saying that Breckinridge “came across the car to speak to me—and, by the way, that’s quite a trick of his, to speak to young girls.” He asked how she knew that. “Since the filing of this suit, when people have dared speak the truth about him,” she said. Finally, he showed her a letter that he said she sent to Breckinridge regarding her difficulty with Rhodes and inviting him to come to Wesleyan, but she looked at the letter and denied she wrote it.

  As Madeline spoke, Breckinridge became more and more fidgety—“now sitting well back in his chair, now sitting well forward, with his elbows on the table before him, his face resting in his hands,” then whispering to Butterworth, then, as Madeline described the fateful carriage ride in Cincinnati, “nervously strok[ing] his beard first with one hand and then with the other,” said the Evening Star. Madeline’s testimony for the day ended with the ride, and the trial adjourned for the weekend. With the papers all reporting on his secret marriage, Breckinridge returned home to deal with the effect of the latest revelations on Louise.

  Jennie spent the weekend in what appeared to be an increasingly fruitless effort to get any useful intelligence out of Madeline. She spent most of Saturday at the House of Mercy doing sewing for the sisters, but Madeline was with her lawyers. She came in just as Jennie was leaving, exhausted from prepping her testimony and upset about a sensational article in the Brooklyn Standard Union by a woman named Helen Bridgman who knew her when she was in Cambridge and claimed she was an “opium eater.” Jennie promised to hunt up a copy of the paper as an excuse to come back the next day. Like everyone on the defense team, she was putting great store in Charles Stoll’s ability as a cross-examiner. “You can expect fire-works this week,” she wrote to her mother. “They are scared to death of Mr. S. and his cross-examinations, if he gets after M.P. herself I expect there will be fun for they will both hit pretty hard and are well matched as to smartness.” She was by now thoroughly invested in the case, both in her own sense of importance to the effort—she bragged that Butterworth had told Stoll that she had “more sense than you and I put together”—and in what she perceived to be her friendship with the principals. Her sister Maude was in the middle of an ugly divorce and she assured her mother that Stoll and Butterworth would be glad to take her case free of charge because “they are so pleased with my work.” She seemed so friendly with everyone involved that her mother wrote to her sister, “I suppose Jane will come home engaged to Desha Breckinridge!”—Desha being a well-known bachelor about town.

  On Sunday morning Jennie returned with a copy of the Standard Union and found Madeline in bed. Madeline read the article quickly, then declared it wasn’t “as bad as I had feared.” She said there was some truth to it, but that the author had provided her “own coloring.” She told Jennie she “never made a confession to her of taking morphine, and I never had the habit.” She also denied that she had ever claimed authorship of work by the popular poet Josephine Pollard, although she allowed that when she was at the Bread Loaf Inn she may have read aloud “Love’s Power,” a poem of Josephine Pollard’s, “as a poem of Miss Pollard’s, but I did not tell them that it was mine or Josephine’s.”

  * * *

  The courtroom was packed almost to suffocation on Monday morning; the crowds surged against the doors, pressing to get in, as the bailiffs pushed them back; everyone knew what part of the story came next. The trial had, said the Evening Star, reached the “eminence of being the most sensational case ever reviewed in the District courts,” a combustible mixture of sex and scandal and shame.

  Breckinridge came in looking bleary-eyed and with a bit of rag wrapped around what appeared to be an injured index finger; apparently it had been a long weekend. Madeline took the stand immediately. Carlisle began the questioning. Had she ever been married? “No,” answered Pollard. Had her sexual relations with Mr. Breckinridge continued after April 29, 1893, the date of the secret marriage? “Yes,” she said. “How long did they continue?” asked Carlisle. “Up to the 17th of May,” answered Madeline without blinking as her answer reverberated through the courtroom.

  Ben Butterworth returned to the cross-examination, Stoll at his elbow. His tactic was immediately apparent, if not particularly subtle, as he ran through the Victorian markers of morality—religion, impure books. He asked Madeline if she was still an Episcopalian. “Once an Episcopalian, always an Episcopalian,” she answered. He asked if when she lived with her aunt in Pittsburgh she ever read “anything that a pure-minded, virtuous girl should not read?” When Wilson objected, Butterworth countered that it was an appropriate question because Madeline had “put forth the claim of the purity of her character,” which he said was the “soul” of the case. He asserted that there were “three great parties to the suit, the plaintiff, the defendant, and the community,” implying, said the Post, “that a woman of Miss Pollard’s character commits a crime against society in thus thrusting the story of her wrong-doing before the public.”

  Butterworth asked Madeline if when she was at Wesleyan she was “competent” to take care of herself. She answered yes, but Wilson again objected. “The question of whether a girl is able to take care of herself and resist temptation depends largely on the sort of people with whom she is thrown and the character and personality of the man who comes with a silver tongue to fill her mind with fair promises,” he said, as the courtroom broke into snickers and scattered applause. Judge Bradley was having none of it. “I want it understood right now that we are not conducting a show,” he said sternly, threatening to clear the courtroom if there were any more outbursts.

  Rocking casually back in his chair like he was sitting on the front porch, Butterworth ran again over the ground of Madeline’s teenage crushes. He asked her if Alex Julian had ever “made love” to her—in the nineteenth-century sense of wooing—or had ever caressed her. She said he hadn’t, and that while she had liked him, he had liked her sister Mamie “very much.” He read the letters she wrote to Owen Robinson, a student at the Kentucky Military Institute who used to call at her aunt Keene’s. In one, she admitted to a “very unmaidenly bit of conduct,” apparently referring to a Valentine’s letter she wrote, and bemoaned the fac
t that Owen’s friend Henry liked her sister, not her. Butterworth seemed to be trying to show that Madeline was a young temptress, but to most they sounded like the letters of a “sentimental young girl.”

  Butterworth again brought out the letter the defense claimed she had written to Breckinridge asking him to come to Wesleyan. Madeline read it over slowly. “I could have never written that letter,” she said, declaring it a forgery. He asked if Breckinridge claimed to have business in the city when he came to see her. “No, sir,” she answered. “He said he came to see me and he almost overpowered me with a glance as he said so.” Butterworth made her walk again through the story of the carriage ride, how Breckinridge had “taken off her hat; had felt her hands; had kissed her while they were slowly driven through the suburbs.” She tried to explain how even after she had fended off his advances she agreed to meet him the next day. “He was so apologetic for his conduct that he disarmed my fears,” she said.

  Again to the assignation house in Cincinnati, where Madeline said Breckinridge kept her locked in a room. She had threatened to “shriek,” and he said, “Oh, come, come, come: don’t be foolish. Don’t scream.” “How long were you there?” demanded Butterworth. “I don’t know; perhaps it was two hours, surely more than one, and not quite three,” Madeline said. Then she looked abruptly at Breckinridge: “Col. Breckinridge, how long was it?” There was dead silence as the whole courtroom turned toward him. Breckinridge squirmed and looked away.