Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Suddenly, in Madeline Pollard, these women reformers had a visceral representation of the ideas they had been promoting for nearly twenty years: that the double standard not only allowed but encouraged men to prey on young women, and that the only way to end it was for men to be held to the same moral standard as women were. The resolutions against Breckinridge were widely covered in the press, which suggested a consensus coalescing around the issue, as did pointed condemnations from preachers like J. F. Carson of the Central Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, who called for stamping out “that creeping worm of licentious doctrine” that the “man is not to be judged by the same high standard by which the woman is judged.” No longer was it the disgraced woman who was a “creeping worm,” but the mores that allowed men to prey on her.

  The missing piece of the efforts to eradicate the curse of the fallen woman was getting a broad segment of women to publicly rebel against men who preyed on women. Now, this appeared to be happening—in the most unlikely of places. As Breckinridge was testifying, reports surfaced from Lexington that some of the most prominent women in the city—from the Clay, Hunt, and Goodloe families—had been “secretly circulating a petition praying Congress to impeach” Breckinridge. “The feeling against Breckinridge is rapidly changing,” warned the Enquirer, which reported that if the petition failed, the women would “try to defeat his renomination.”

  * * *

  When the trial resumed on Monday, Breckinridge looked tired, and the Post reporter thought he had “an unusual pallor on his countenance.” It had been a long weekend. The newspapers had been merciless in their anti-Breckinridge editorials and cartoons. One showed the portly congressman trying desperately to keep a door shut while Madeline Pollard dragged a skeleton out of it. There were reports that his church in Lexington as well as his Mason lodge were looking to expel him. Someone had started a rumor as an April Fools’ prank that he would be at the Burnet House in Cincinnati on Sunday to meet with supporters, and constituents showed up from far and wide only to go away angry when he wasn’t there. He spent the weekend writing to supporters, railing about the “nefarious conspiracy” against him, which now included not only “unworthy and ignoble people” who “control the newspapers” but also “some most excellent ladies”—a reference to the petition circulating against him. He decried the failure of “cowardly” men “of whom better things ought to have been expected”—meaning Congressman Allen and Secretary Carlisle—to come to his aid and provide much-needed testimony.

  There was more bad news for the defense. On Friday morning, Martha McClellan Brown, the wife of the former president of Wesleyan College, who was preparing to come to Washington to testify on Madeline’s behalf, found the register for the school year of 1883–84 in an old sideboard. In it, Madeline Vivian Pollard, “aged sixteen,” was recorded as entering as an irregular sophomore on November 20, 1883, which would confirm her contention that she was seventeen when she met Breckinridge the following April.

  Breckinridge spent the closing hours of his testimony revisiting the final rocky weeks of his relationship with Madeline. He denied that he stayed at the Hoffman House with Madeline after he had married Louise. He also denied her story about his manic claims of big business deals or impending trips to Europe, and he claimed that he and Madeline didn’t have any sexual relations after March 31. He asserted that he told Major Moore he would marry Madeline only because she threatened to shoot him and later she promised to leave the city if he gave Moore the impression they were to be married to salvage her reputation.

  Much of the story had been told already. The spectators seemed to have lost interest; there were a number of empty seats and those who were there read newspapers and talked among themselves. After lunch, the courtroom filled back up for Wilson’s cross-examination. He had a reputation as a blunt, merciless interrogator. Clasping his hands behind his head, he began by having Breckinridge recite his church memberships and the various Christian societies he had addressed over the years. He showed him an invitation addressed to Madeline inviting her to a reception in his honor at the Norwood Institute, an exclusive girls’ school, in February 1893, which confirmed Madeline’s contention that he included her in events he attended. He had Breckinridge tell again about the meeting at Wesleyan and his purported advice to Madeline to marry Rhodes because they’d had illicit relations. “What advice would you give a young man under the same circumstances?” asked Wilson. “I believe that the girl who had had improper sexual relations—and they have been made public—is ruined for the balance of her life; a young man under similar circumstances, who is young and unmarried, is injured, but he may recover,” Breckinridge said.

  Wilson asked him about the carriage ride and if Madeline had encouraged him to make advances. “There was something internal that prompted me to put my arms around her. I could not have said that she encouraged me, but I would have been surprised if she had objected,” he said. Breckinridge said that when Madeline talked of wanting to be an author, she mentioned the novelist George Eliot, who was known for her scandalous relationship with a married man, “as an example of all she would like to be.”

  “Up to that time you were a married man; a man who had unbounded advantages in life,” said Wilson, the statement hanging in the air, half question. “There wasn’t a man in America who had less excuse for it than I had under the domestic blessings with which I was surrounded,” admitted Breckinridge. He also confessed that he had “immoral relations” with other women during his marriage and had been to Sarah Guess’s assignation house before going there with Madeline. Wilson asked him what such conduct on the part of a married man meant. “The act happened in the circumstances I have narrated, and the punishment I have received for it is the punishment I shall have to submit to,” he said. “There is but one possible thing which I do not deserve for my punishment and which I did most positively refuse to accept, and that was to marry the woman with whom I had that transaction.”

  Wilson came back to Breckinridge’s insistence that he hadn’t seduced Madeline and asked him what he considered seduction. “I mean to say that I did not seduce her by any protestations of love or reward; that she did not come to me as a maiden or a virgin; that I did not seduce her in the physical sense,” he answered.

  Most observers thought Breckinridge had held his own with Wilson, whom some thought uncharacteristically flaccid in his questioning. The Courier-Journal believed that Wilson had embarrassed himself with his presumption that “the same standard of morality should be demanded of men as of women.” Breckinridge, many deemed, had the bearing of a man who finally had made a clean breast of things. After the court adjourned, Breckinridge told his friends he hadn’t covered up anything and “feared nothing from anything the prosecution could produce.”

  It turned out that he did have two things to fear. Wilson hinted at one as the day drew to a close, when he asked Breckinridge if he had a sister in Lexington named Louise or if he knew a woman in Washington named Louise Lowell. Breckinridge looked puzzled and not at all pleased. The other was on display in his answers to Wilson’s subtle, leading questions. Breckinridge was relying on the legalistic definition of “seduction” to argue that he didn’t seduce Madeline in the sense of a man promising a virgin that he would marry her if they had sex. But what if the idea of “seduction” was changing? What if a man of power and privilege who had sex with a younger, subordinate woman—especially one who was in financial or emotional distress—was now seen as predatory? Then, it seems, Breckinridge might find that it was he, not Madeline Pollard, who was ruined.

  * * *

  Jennie called on Madeline at the House of Mercy on Sunday, April 1, with the excuse of bringing her the New York Herald, which had some sketches of the trial she wanted Madeline to see. The day before, she had taken a boat trip down the Potomac with her friend Max Ihmsen, the Washington correspondent for the Herald, to visit Mount Vernon. Jennie was leveraging her friendship with Ihmsen to try to make inroads for the defense
with the press. Through Ihmsen, she got Stoll introduced to several reporters and thought he had “won them over to Col. B’s side,” as she told her mother.

  Stoll apparently was leaking details of the defense to Ihmsen to bolster Breckinridge’s case in an increasingly skeptical press. On March 24, Ihmsen reported that the defense would provide evidence pertaining to “Miss Pollard’s character.” They would show that “while she was engaged to marry Mr. Rossell she was holding improper relations with Mr. Rhodes in return for her board and education” and that she was the resident of “a disreputable house for a time” before she went to college. On March 26, Ihmsen reported on the comments of a prominent “long time friend of Col. Breckinridge,” who excused his behavior by saying that the congressman was a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde who “can’t help it [because] God gave him the nature. He struggled to control the evil side of it, and he couldn’t.”

  Jennie also apparently encouraged Ihmsen to arrange a photo shoot for Madeline at the city’s most fashionable portrait studio, most likely as an excuse to pump her for information, because on Wednesday, March 28, the Herald paid for a sitting for Madeline at the Charles Bell studio. Two days later, Ihmsen wrote a favorable story about Breckinridge’s testimony regarding his visit to Wesleyan and what Ihmsen dismissed as “a silly adventure with a schoolgirl in a closed carriage” that was accompanied by a photo of the adult Madeline captioned to look as if it were taken when she was at Wesleyan.

  After Jennie finished pumping Madeline for information about upcoming witnesses, she headed for Breckinridge’s house near Dupont Circle, the need for expediency now trumping the need for secrecy. As she was leaving, Louise Wing Breckinridge stopped her, took her hand, and introduced herself. “I have been so anxious to know you, Miss Parker, and to tell you how thoroughly we appreciate what you have done for us all,” she said. “You are helping to vindicate a good man.” Jennie then met Nisba, who said she was equally grateful for her work on behalf of her father. It had been a brutal few weeks for Nisba and her stepmother. Anonymous letters arrived dripping with vitriol. “Oh, you pitiful cur—scoundrel & coward. Talk about Kentucky honor? Go kill yourself,” read one scribbled on New York World letterhead.

  Despite everything that had been reported, and the obvious way Breckinridge had deceived his family, they remained stubbornly loyal to him. A friend of Louise’s shot down rumors that she intended to seek a divorce, saying that she remained “full of devotion” to her husband. So, too, did Nisba. According to a family friend, both Nisba’s and Desha’s “faith in their father was firm and unshaken,” which was “a great comfort to him” and allowed him to “bear up under his woes.”

  Still, with Louise largely confined to the house by her illness, it must have been painful for Nisba to be out and about doing the family’s marketing, trying to avoid headlines about the man the press now deridingly referred to as “Papa Breckinridge.” Everyone in Washington was talking about the trial; it had become absolutely unavoidable: “It is the talk of all the saloons and hotels. It is the ever renewed theme in the capitol lobbies, smoking rooms and committee rooms and, more than all else, it is the toothsome [morsel] of good society,” reported the Kentucky Leader. Madeline Pollard had made what had been formerly unmentionable in polite society into the very thing that no one could stop talking about.

  * * *

  An air of expectation hung in the courtroom Tuesday morning. Wilson’s questions at the close of the cross-examination Monday hinted that he had a surprise in store. Breckinridge had been combative and cocksure all day, until late in the afternoon, right after he finished asserting that all his assignations with Pollard in 1884 and 1885 were spontaneous, arising from accidental meetings, and insisting vehemently that he had no communications whatsoever with her in 1886. It was then that Wilson asked him if he had ever taken a letter addressed to “My Dear Sister Louise” to a certain Capitol Hill typist named Louise Lowell. “In that letter did you not say that you were looking forward to the time when you would get home, and that you were anticipating with pleasure the meeting of this correspondent?” asked Wilson. And didn’t you, he continued, comment on the disparity in your ages and warn the correspondent not to leave any of your letters lying around? Breckinridge had replied testily that he had “not the faintest recollection of any such letter, and I don’t care to discuss it.” He said he couldn’t recall anyone named Louise Lowell, although “several women or females have done typewriting for me in Washington.”

  Now, all eyes were on a petite woman with gray-streaked hair when she entered the courtroom and sat next to Madeline, who, along with her lawyers, was early, as usual. Breckinridge hurried in at the last minute, it being the habit of the defense team to straggle in like they were going to a particularly poorly reviewed play. At first he didn’t notice the little woman in the green dress and brown hat next to Madeline. When he did, he started whispering urgently to Butterworth. More than one observer thought the normally stern-looking Wilson, with his beaked nose and steel-gray hair and goatee, had a decided twinkle in his eye. Butterworth immediately objected to the admission of any new evidence, arguing that the plaintiff’s case was already closed. Wilson countered that he should be allowed to question the witness in light of new evidence. Bradley ruled that the witness could be questioned to provide secondary evidence as to the existence of a letter that the defense had denied under cross-examination.

  Lowell took the stand. She was so tiny that she was almost obscured by the witness box. At first she sounded timid as she told how she came to Washington from Maine in 1881 to live with her brother and was eventually forced to find employment, but she gained confidence as she went along. She said she got a job as a typist on Capitol Hill in 1886, her first job “in a public place.” Her desk was located in a hallway in the Capitol; she took freelance work from whoever cared to hire her. She said Congressman Breckinridge first brought her work in February 1886—a handwritten letter to be typewritten addressed to “My Dear Sister Louise.” Wilson tried to question her as to the contents of the letter, but Bradley sustained Butterworth’s objections. The jury, however, had already gotten the drift from Wilson’s questions. Lowell said that after she had typed two or three such letters, Breckinridge brought her a packet of small white envelopes, slightly yellowed with age, to address. Wilson asked what she had written on those envelopes. “Miss Pollard, 56 North Upper Street, Lexington, Ky.,” she replied, giving the address of Mrs. Ketchum’s boardinghouse as a murmur swept through the courtroom.

  Wilson asked how she could be sure of the address. Lowell said she had written it on the flyleaf of the notebook she used to keep track of her accounts because it was an unusual request and she felt certain that “sooner or later, I would hear more of Miss Pollard,” as she indicated a little red notebook in her hand. She said she did work for Colonel Breckinridge frequently, typing more letters and addressing more envelopes, until she got a job in the Treasury Department in 1890.

  On cross-examination, Breckinridge said he now remembered Lowell and admitted giving her considerable work over the years, because, he said, she was convenient. But he denied giving her any “Dear Louise” letters to type or envelopes to Pollard to address, although he said he might have written to her once about a civil service exam. After lunch, Madeline was recalled to the stand. She said she had corresponded regularly with Breckinridge when he was in Washington in 1885 and 1886 and that she had received typewritten letters from him addressing her as “My Dear Sister Louise,” “My Dear Sweetheart,” and, in one, “My Little Spitfire.” Breckinridge took the stand again and denied writing any such letters or telling Madeline to mail them from a certain train in Lexington so that they would reach the city in the morning and be delivered to his office at the Capitol instead of his home.

  His protestations seemed to no avail in the face of the quiet certitude of the “little Yankee woman.” It was, many thought, one of the most devastating days of the trial for Breckinridge. Lowell had flatly contr
adicted the key assertion of his testimony: that his relationship with Pollard was unplanned and unsought; not, as Pollard asserted, and the letters seemed to prove, an illicit but serious love affair that he ardently pursued. Lowell seemed an unimpeachable witness. She didn’t know Madeline and she said she didn’t even know how her lawyers found her. Savvy court watchers suspected that she was sniffed out by Wilson, who had a reputation as “a detective lawyer who goes deep into his cases and pulls out evidence of the most startling character.” Now, said the Enquirer, “Everyone is conscious of the fact that an immense amount of mendacity has been brought into the case and no one seems to accuse the plaintiff of it.”

  The following morning, Wilson sprang another trap on Breckinridge. He asked him if he had ever used expressions of love and affection with Madeline. Breckinridge said he had used “expressions that a man would use toward a woman for whose condition he felt partly responsible.” Wilson asked if he had ever done anything to give her the idea that he loved her. “Well,” Breckinridge said, “I took her in my arms and kissed her and did those things which naturally resulted from our relationship.” So, pressed Wilson, “Your expressions of affection and your relations were those of lust, then.” Now trapped into either admitting he loved Madeline or merely used a girl thirty years his junior to sate his desires, Breckinridge admitted that they often met for reasons other than physical intercourse and that she was “a young woman of colloquial talents, sprightly and interesting.”

  Wilson read long passages of Julia Blackburn’s testimony, daring Breckinridge to call her a liar. He denied telling Blackburn he would marry Madeline after sufficient time had elapsed from his wife’s death or asking her to put Madeline under her protection. Wilson asked if that meant Blackburn’s statements were untrue. “I was always leaving Mrs. Blackburn under the impression that I intended to marry the plaintiff,” Breckinridge admitted, saying he was “honestly endeavoring to carry out” the pretend engagement. “You were honestly deceiving her, then?” asked Wilson. And so it went, with the silver tongue becoming more and more tarnished as Breckinridge twisted himself into ever-tighter rhetorical contortions. When asked about his promise to Major Moore that he would marry Madeline on May 31, he answered: “I did not promise to marry her—it was not a promise. I was in a frame of mind that was excited and I said ‘yes, I’ll marry you at the end of the month,’ and I went right on talking.”