Then they were on the train to Lexington again and at Sarah Guess’s house three blocks from Breckinridge’s own. Butterworth asked if she knew she was at an assignation house. “I never heard that word before—I did not know what it meant until Mr. Breckinridge had accomplished his purpose. Then he told me of it and a great many other things I did not know,” she said. Madeline said when they got there, Breckinridge took off her hat and stayed for half an hour before going home. “Didn’t you know whose house it was and what kind of house it was?” demanded Butterworth again as Madeline dropped her head, flushing bright red for the first time. She raised her head and said defiantly, “During that half hour, sir, that I was with Col. Breckinridge I agreed to give myself, heart and soul and body and life, to that man, and I had myself ready to do that when he came back.”
“Then you were not misled or disappointed as to the object of the visit?” asked Butterworth. “Not after that, Mr. Butterworth,” she said. “I never claimed to be after that.” Butterworth asked if she knew he had a wife and children. “Yes, he told me,” said Madeline. “What relation did you propose to sustain with him?” he asked. “How could I know? How could I think?” she replied, her voice tinged with desperation. “Didn’t you know this was wrong?” asked Butterworth. “Yes,” she said, “but Mr. Breckinridge is such a man that he can make it all seem right to love in that way.”
Butterworth persisted. “You of course appreciated all the dishonor and disgrace the relations embraced?” he asked, less question and more statement—didn’t she know she would be ruined? “No, I did not, and only now do I,” said Madeline, looking at him “half fiercely, half sadly,” according to the Enquirer. “What do you mean by only now?” he demanded. “I have never realized it fully until now, when I am an outcast,” said Madeline. Now her lips quivered and tears flowed down her face; she clasped and unclasped her black-gloved hands. “Since he has made it too hard for me to live. I was under his control then just as much as I was years later. I loved him then with all my heart and soul, and a single wish of his was religion to me,” she sobbed.
Butterworth moved to the Norwood Foundling Asylum, asking if it was true that Sister Agnes had told her she was a bad woman. “She said to me ‘Why on earth do you want to ruin that poor old man in his old age?’” Madeline said. “I asked her why should that poor old man have wanted to ruin me in my youth?” She said Sister Agnes pleaded with her to consider Breckinridge’s daughters. “I said he did not consider me, and I was somebody’s daughter, and that he did not consider the little daughter of his and mine whom he had compelled me to give away,” she said, the words now coming in a torrent like some long-dammed stream had burst. “I said there was such a thing as justice, and it should be done. He should have his share and I should have my share, and I believed there was a principle involved as to whether a man had a right to do as he chooses without suffering the consequences, while the woman must be bowed down with her shame. I said I believed the time would come when there would be a change of feeling on that part, and I said the time was near and it must come.”
Then, turning pointedly toward the jury, Madeline added, “I believe these men are going to help me.” A murmur went through the courtroom. The jurors looked at one another, then back at Madeline.
Still Butterworth persisted, even as the absolute stillness in the courtroom, the very change in the air, should have told him that something had shifted. “Had you no thought of your future?” he asked. “I knew I was always to be in Col. Breckinridge’s life, for the night before I went to Norwood I promised him to give the baby up and he promised to marry me should he become a widower, and he said should he never become a widower he would keep me in his life and do all for me that could be done,” she said.
With that, Bradley adjourned the court. The reporters rushed to file their stories. Madeline was a sensation. “Miss Pollard is probably as intelligent a witness as has sat in the old courtroom for many a day,” said the Evening Star, crediting her “individuality” and a “remarkable story, told in a remarkable way” for the overwhelming interest in the trial. It wasn’t just the story she told, but the way she handled herself that astounded. “More than once she turned the tables on the counsel and the distinguished defendant, which made everyone marvel that a lone woman in the presence of a roomful of men could conduct herself with such skill and daring,” said the Post. Gath wrote that even lawyers “sat still in silent surprise and admiration at the soft, subdued, earnest, truthful little woman, who was fighting single-handed a crafty, powerful Congressman of the United States.” The Courier-Journal, which initially dismissed the case as “the same old story of the discarded mistress,” now praised Madeline’s “intelligence, her quick perception, and her effective command of words.” Madeline, it would seem, had just elevated the “ruined” woman, the “fallen” girl, from an outcast into a sort of heroine, intelligent and earnest, fighting the powers that be.
* * *
Tuesday was expected to be Madeline’s last day on the stand. The hours of testimony were beginning to wear; she looked paler than before and a bit weary; her answers came more slowly. Butterworth began by reading a bundle of letters to Rhodes from Madeline that had been turned over to the defense by Rhodes’s sister, who never forgave Madeline for the way she treated her brother. It was an area of obvious embarrassment for Madeline. The day before, Butterworth had asked her if it was true that after she came to live in Lexington, she was simultaneously being kept by Breckinridge, was engaged to Rankin Rossell, and was taking money from Rhodes, who believed he was to marry her. “Yes. As bad as it sounds, that was the condition,” she said, adding that she always intended to pay Rhodes back until the relationship with Breckinridge made that impossible.
If Butterworth hoped to embarrass her further by reading the letters, he failed, as the contours of her relationship with Rhodes were already well understood and the letters, noted the Evening Star, seemed “very proper letters for a young lady to write.” She did frequently ask him for money and usually made seeing her contingent on him bringing it. But she also put strict limits on when she would see him. “Please, dear, do let me have $40 by Saturday without fail, for Mrs. Hoyt has asked for it two or three times … Come Saturday evening about 7 o’clock and you can stay until half past eight,” she wrote. Contrary to the defense’s contention that she was running around assignation houses with Rhodes, he appeared to be paying dearly for the privilege of sitting in the parlor with her for an hour and a half. In one letter, she thanked him for the set of Washington Irving books he gave her for Christmas.
The letters also allowed her to explain how when she was in Cincinnati having her first child, Breckinridge cooked up a scheme to make it appear she was traveling with an aunt through the southeast. She sent letters through her mother to Rhodes purporting to be from New Orleans and Mississippi, with the travelogue provided by Breckinridge, to explain her absence, painting Breckinridge as the author of the many deceptions, large and small, carried out over the years to hide their affair.
After lunch, Butterworth began questioning Madeline about her trip to New York around the time of Breckinridge’s April marriage to Wing, apparently trying to establish that she had threatened Breckinridge’s life as an excuse for his breach of contract. But he unwittingly set Madeline up to tell the story of the last tumultuous days of their relationship. “Even her own lawyers could not have brought forth before the jury such convincing testimony, such a startling recital,” said Gath.
Madeline said she was supposed to meet Breckinridge at the Hoffman House in New York on April 29; she registered as his daughter, took a room adjoining his, and waited for him. He didn’t come until the following day, at which point, unbeknownst to her, he was already married to Wing. Butterworth asked Madeline if it was true that when Breckinridge got to his room, she came through the adjoining door with a pistol in her hand and tried to shoot him. Madeline said that wasn’t what happened at all. Taking a deep breath, she said Brecki
nridge showed up that Sunday very much excited and talking wildly about a big business deal. “He said Mr. William C. Whitney and ex-Secretary Fairchild, with others, had formed a big company with $30,000,000 in capital and that he was to be employed by them to visit Europe,” she said. He told her he was going away with them that night on a private railroad car and left in a hurry, saying he would be back the next day. “He acted so queerly my suspicions were aroused,” Madeline said. She phoned the offices of Whitney and Fairchild and found they hadn’t seen Breckinridge. She sent a message to the manager of Grand Central Station, who replied back that there was no private railroad car on the sidetrack at Forty-Seventh Street, which is where Breckinridge said he was going.
Breckinridge returned on Monday, she said, and came and went several times over the next two days, claiming he was meeting his new partners. At one point, she said, he asked her how quickly she could be packed and ready to marry him, saying he might be sent abroad at any minute; at another, he “talked about going to Havana and then about going to Samoa.” She said he “was nearly wild, having done what he had done, having made the promise that he had.” It was while he was out and she was folding some of his clothes that, she said, she found a pistol in his bag, which she removed and put in her bureau drawer. When he came back, she confronted him about his lies, which he denied, and he told her it was never in his heart to marry anyone but her. She said she half believed him in the way that she always did. “If you break your promise to marry me I am going to kill you and myself,” she said. That’s when she told him about the pistol in her drawer and when he promised to marry her on May 31. She said he took the pistol and she never touched it. After that, he took her to meet Mrs. Blackburn, who was in New York on business, and they returned separately to Washington.
Madeline said that after Breckinridge came back she confronted him again because she had heard that Wing was with him in New York. She said she doubted that a “worthy woman” like Wing would do that without some “understanding”—meaning an agreement to marry. She said Breckinridge “denied indignantly” any intention to marry Wing and “maligned Mrs. Wing in the most abusive manner,” telling Madeline that Wing was planning to marry someone else and that “she was not a woman he wanted to marry.”
Butterworth asked if she had ever threatened to kill him before that, and she said she hadn’t—but she said she had threatened to kill herself after she received anonymous letters “telling of his conduct with colored women.” There were murmurs and titters in the courtroom at the seeming confirmation of rumors that had long circulated in Lexington that “the colonel does not draw the color line” and could sometimes be found chasing after a “good-looking colored girl.” This, as well as the “revelations of the defendant’s conduct after his secret marriage, his fervent promise to marry Miss Pollard, even when he was already married, caused a subdued surprise and even a sensation among the hardened lawyers,” said Gath.
Butterworth pressed on: Hadn’t they gone to see Major Moore the first time because she threatened to shoot Breckinridge? Again she said that’s not what happened. Madeline said that a week after they returned from New York, she found out that Breckinridge was at Wing’s residence on Jefferson Place. She went there and through a window saw them duck behind a curtain. When she went in, she found them huddled in a corner. “Come Willie, come with me. I want to see you,” she said she told him. “Did he come?” asked Butterworth. “He did,” she said, as a barely suppressed commotion swept the courtroom and the bailiff rapped desperately for order. It was then, she said, that they went to see Major Moore. “I did not have a thing in my hand except a parasol,” she said. There were no threats, she said, but she was excited and had been crying a great deal. “My heart was broken that morning, for I had seen in that man that I had loved and trusted for nine years his absolute falsehood,” she said.
Didn’t Breckinridge beg you to break the relations off? asked Butterworth. Didn’t he promise to give you $125 a month if you would go to Germany to study? he asked. “I should have liked the court to hear him plead for me to stay,” she averred. “I made an absolute sacrifice of me and mine … He made his promise to marry me. I never released him from that promise.” She continued, her voice growing tremulous, “On that last day that I talked with him, that 17th day of May 1893, he made me believe that he would keep his promise. He talked of our unborn child and what we would name it.” Now her voice was choked with sobs: “I gave up my babies for him … A woman can’t do more than that, she can’t do more than give up her child. I laid my baby in its coffin because it needed a mother’s care, which I had not been able to give it, because he made me put it away from me. I—never—let—him—see—me—cry—over—it. I—never…”
At that, Madeline broke off and collapsed on the rough boards of the desk in front of her, sobs shaking her slender frame. For a long minute, her crying was the only sound in the courtroom. Three of the jurors fumbled for handkerchiefs; Bradley stared at the ceiling. When it became clear she couldn’t continue, he adjourned the court. “If there was a man among the curious hundred in the courtroom unmoved,” said the World, “he was inconspicuous in the majority of sympathetic faces.” Breckinridge left the courtroom ahead of his posse of counsel. He strode down the street, hat in hand, “head bent in a dejected way,” said the Enquirer, “letting the cool breeze strike his silver locks” as the passersby stared.
14
A Man of Passion
Madeline was on the stand for only half an hour the morning following her dramatic breakdown over the death of her children before Butterworth concluded his cross-examination with a few desultory questions about Rhodes. When Carlisle announced that the plaintiff rested her case, satisfied with Madeline’s testimony and seeing no need for redirect questioning to clarify anything, Breckinridge’s team was caught off guard. They had to ask Bradley for time to prepare and hastily retreated to a nearby office, which caused one spectator to scoff, “The delegation from Kentucky retires for conference.”
Anticipation had been building over Breckinridge’s defense and the moment when the silver-tongued orator would take the stand. “It is evident that his attorneys place their principal reliance on the story he will tell,” said the Evening Star, “and their sanguine state of mind indicates that they have in reserve resources which have not yet been made known.” Breckinridge had been assuring his backers that he was preparing the case thoroughly and that “the testimony will be overwhelming that I am guiltless of the graver charges,” although he did note he had been hampered by the absence of the lawyer Enoch Totten and “my own comparatively straitened pecuniary needs.”
When the defense team filed back into the courtroom, it was Shelby, still glancing at the papers before him, who presented the defense. Pale and slight, with a sandy mustache and a shiny, balding pate, he seemed the inverse of his fodgel, florid partner. It soon became clear that he lacked his oratorical flourish as well, but Breckinridge thought him the most capable of his lawyers in laying out a defense. It was not the only antipode moment of the morning. Shelby proceeded to describe a version of the relationship in which Breckinridge was the hapless victim, entrapped by a persistent paramour, powerless to end the affair because he was terrified that Madeline would expose him, ultimately bullied by threats of violence into pretending they were engaged. “I am authorized to say,” began Shelby, peering at the jury through his gold-rimmed glasses, “that he never did seduce this woman; that she never, at any time, until the filing of the suit last August, claimed or in any way apprised him of the fact that she had borne him any child.” He said they would prove that Madeline was an “experienced woman” of nearly twenty-one when they met and that she had “enticed and tempted the defendant … and that even his first lascivious propositions were not repulsed, but passively encouraged.”
According to Shelby, it was Madeline who pursued Breckinridge: “She would come to the door of his house; follow him to the House of Representatives; follow him to his r
ooms.” Breckinridge was unable to resist, and time and time again “fell in with” the plaintiff and as a result “inappropriate relations were resumed”—the passive voice mirroring his supposed lack of agency. Shelby acknowledged that the relationship was wrong, but said that “many men had done the same thing and been forgiven,” and that Madeline “had him more or less in her power and she used that in getting money from him and continuing their relationship.” As a result, Breckinridge’s “life was made an intolerable burden.” He tried to get Madeline to go away, “to make something of herself,” but she always returned to Washington. Finally, he said, by “such a pressure as designing women can use, Miss Pollard did induce him to go to Mrs. Blackburn and say to her they were engaged.”
At first, every spectator was “on the tiptoe of expectation” to hear the defense, said the Enquirer. But once he finished summing up the defense, Shelby turned to the reading of depositions, most of which had already been reported on in the press. Soon, the mood of the spectators mirrored the weather: dank and gloomy. It was as if the “romantic character of the drama had left the stage,” complained Gath. All that was left was the phlegmatic Shelby, reading depositions in his monotone.
And so it went, for the remainder of Wednesday and then all of Thursday, when Stoll took up the reading. Sister Agnes and Sister Augustine said they didn’t recognize Madeline as a former inmate of the Norwood Asylum; a nurse and doctor from Norwood said the same thing, although they confirmed there had been a patient there named Wilson. Orvin Brown, the son of the president of Wesleyan, said the other girls teasingly called Madeline “Madeline Vivian Bill-Breckinridge Joe-Blackburn Pollard” for her habit of claiming kinship with the prominent families of Kentucky. He said he found a record of her name as “Madeline V. B. Pollard” in the school’s books. He concurred, however, with Madeline’s account of Breckinridge’s visit to the school and said he was “severely criticized” for letting them go out together in the carriage. He disputed Madeline’s claim, however, that she received a telegram in August 1884 purportedly from her mother, but actually sent by Breckinridge, summoning her home. Brown said she left Wesleyan sometime in August because her tuition hadn’t been paid.
Bringing Down the Colonel Page 24