Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  There was dead silence for a moment, then a shout echoed down the corridor like a shot: “Fifteen thousand for the plaintiff,” setting off a roar from the crowd outside that sounded like breakers on rocks and a scrum among reporters rushing to file their stories. Breckinridge, who had been stretching and twisting an elastic band between his fingers like it was a little ribbon of time that could be made and unmade, turned to Thompson and asked, “How much?” Then he stood up slowly, his face nearly as white as his beard, and gave notice that he intended to file for a new trial before thumping back down and giving Desha a wan smile.

  Wilson reached the courtroom just as Carlisle was leaving; they hurried out trailing a wake of reporters. When they got to the portico, Carlisle pulled out a handkerchief and waved it in the air. The reporters looked up and saw Madeline standing in the fourth-floor window of his office across the street. When she saw the signal, she threw her hands up. “Oh, isn’t it good. Isn’t it good,” she said as she collapsed into a chair. Madeline refused all requests for interviews; she had already packed her trunk and taken leave of the House of Mercy. By the next morning, she was sequestered away in Providence Hospital, reportedly suffering from nervous exhaustion, although she had told Jennie a week ago that she had reserved a room there, where, for ten dollars a week, she could have “room, board, medical attendance, nursing and massage.”

  After the crowds had cleared, Breckinridge and Desha stood alone in front of the courthouse. The barouche pulled up, and Breckinridge clambered in beside Louise. They stopped at a grocer’s and placed an order, then turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue and became caught in the late-afternoon swarm of theatergoers and shoppers and newsboys crying their “Extra!” editions. “Miss Pollard Wins!” proclaimed the World. The driver kept the team close to the sidewalk; pedestrians gaped at the famous silver-haired antagonist. Louise looked straight ahead, seeming to shrink in her seat. Breckinridge met their stares, smiling defiantly, now, said the New York Sun, the “observed of all the observers throughout the ride.”

  * * *

  After nearly six long weeks, front-page coverage from coast to coast, and endless debates about whether Madeline Pollard was right or wrong to air her downfall for the world to see, the verdict was met with widespread approval. The conclusion of the trial “was to the satisfaction of the community generally,” reported the Evening Star. Even in Kentucky, where news of the verdict swept Louisville just minutes after it hit the telegraph office, “not one person in the whole town has been heard to say that the plaintiff should not have recovered anything.”

  Feminist reformers hoped the verdict heralded an end to the double standard that had crippled so many women’s lives, as well as a new day for women’s rights. “All the efforts made by reformers and philanthropists to establish the same standard of morals for both sexes have been crystallized and expressed itself in the verdict of the jury in the Breckinridge case,” wrote the suffragist Clara Colby in the Woman’s Tribune. The suffragist Alice Stone Blackwell said in the Women’s Journal, the official organ of the suffragist movement, that the trial showed not only the “perniciousness of the unequal standard of morality for men and women,” but the need for women’s suffrage because women “will not vote for candidates of notoriously bad moral character.” She said she wondered how long Breckinridge would have lasted in office if “the mothers, wives and sisters of Kentucky had a vote.”

  Aaron Powell, the editor of the Philanthropist, the leading journal of purity reformers, marveled at the wholesale change in attitude regarding a “public man [who] hold[s] immoral relations with a young girl” and the fact that the “strategically indecent” addresses of Breckinridge’s congressional friends Thompson and Butterworth had failed to sway the jury. “A decade or two ago such addresses by two well-known ex-members of Congress, in behalf of an eloquent, and hitherto an honored member of the present House of Representatives, would doubtless have sufficed to turn the scale in favor of the man and against the woman,” he said.

  But it wasn’t just social reformers who hailed the victory. Kate Field, who had a broad audience for her Kate Field’s Washington column, said the trial raised important questions about the “conventional morality” regarding sexually disgraced women and marriage. “Why should society discriminate between a man who has sinned and a woman who has sinned with him? If it is possible for a good woman to marry a man who is not good, why is it impossible for a woman who is not good to marry a man who is at least as culpable morally as herself?” she asked.

  Most importantly, Edward Bok, the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, which was the most popular magazine in the country and an influential arbiter of middle-class standards, hailed the verdict in the magazine. Saying that “the women of the world are suffering to-day from a code of morality which imposes on them all the responsibility for purity and all the penalty for wrong-doing,” he called for a “different moral code among ourselves … a code which will hold a man as strictly accountable for the highest observance of moral principles as it does a woman.” He said, “That which is wrong in a woman should be equally wrong in a man,” and that what “is black for a woman should not be shaded into gray for a man.”

  * * *

  For Breckinridge, the verdict wasn’t the result of his slipshod defense, but of this “supposed popular sentiment,” which he claimed had been inflamed by “the ceaseless clamor and lies and distorted reports of the daily papers.” And he was right. A moral tide had turned, and he had been left stranded on the beach, fuming about “wantons.” But his defense was poorly prepared and was obviously back-fashioned around Madeline’s testimony. One of the jurors said the biggest strike against Breckinridge was his own testimony and his implausible excuse for lying to Blackburn. And there were a number of inconsistences in Madeline’s story that the defense failed to exploit. Dr. Belle Buchanan testified in her deposition that Madeline first came to her in February 1885, months before Madeline said her first child was born, although she said she was unsure of the dates. But when she testified during the trial, she was quite sure Madeline came during “strawberry season,” which was precisely ten weeks after she said she had given birth at the Norwood Asylum. What really happened that summer of 1884? Was Madeline just an innocent young girl when they met? Did Breckinridge actually promise to marry her?

  Madeline was by all accounts a young, inexperienced woman when she met Breckinridge—the tintypes and the recollections of Wessie Brown Robertson and Sarah Guess all paint the same picture. And it’s easy to see how she would have been swept away by meeting a larger-than-life figure like Breckinridge. And it’s likely that he did approach her on the train. Two “reputable society women” in Lexington confirmed that “making mashes on the railroad train was one of his great grand-stand plays,” and, after the trial was over, a local professor who was sitting in front of Madeline on the train came forward and confirmed her version of the story, saying that “Breckinridge introduced himself to Miss Pollard.”

  But it’s also likely that Breckinridge was telling the truth when he said he thought that she was a mature young woman—somewhere around twenty-one, not seventeen as she asserted. While Madeline still dressed like a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, the evidence suggests that she was significantly older. As Madeline testified, when her father died in June 1876, she thought she was about twelve, which means she would have been born in 1864. But she said that later, her mother told her she was born on November 30, 1866, which is why she gave her age as sixteen in the fall of 1884. Breckinridge tried to find some record of Madeline in the U.S. census, but was unsuccessful. The 1870 census, however, shows the Pollard family living in Crab Orchard with five children: Edward, born in 1859, nine months after his parents’ marriage; Mary, born in 1861; Mattie, born in 1863; Rosalie, born in 1866; and John, born in 1869.

  Why would Madeline’s mother tell her she was born in 1866? The key to the mystery of Madeline’s age appears to be her older sister, Mary, who went by Mamie. Mamie was bor
n when the family still lived in Frankfort, and Franklin County birth records confirm that she was born March 18, 1861 (Madeline wasn’t captured in county birth records, likely because of disruptions in recordkeeping due to the Civil War). In the 1880 census, however, when Mamie was living in Bridgeport with her mother and her aunt Mary Stout, she gave her age as eighteen when she was in fact nineteen. Three years later, when she was twenty-two, she married the Reverend Felix Struve, a Methodist minister, who was twenty-one. Given that twenty-two was about the upper age of desirable marriageability for southern brides, the country was still in the midst of the post–Civil War marriage panic, and it was unusual for Victorian grooms to marry women older than them, it seems likely that Mamie, in collusion with her mother, was systematically shaving years off her age to preserve her marriageability, which was probably a common thing to do before birth certificates and driver’s licenses. In fact, Madeline’s mother, Nancy, who may have hoped to remarry, claimed in 1880 that she was thirty-five when she was forty-two.

  The original record of Mamie and Felix’s marriage was destroyed in the Cincinnati Courthouse riots of 1884, so it’s not possible to know what age she gave when she married. But the next time Mamie shows up in census records, in the 1900 census (the 1890 census records were damaged in a fire and eventually destroyed), she gives her age as thirty-six, two years younger than her husband, which means she was claiming to have been born in 1864. (Her 1920 death certificate gives her birthday as March 18, 1863.) It’s reasonable to assume that when Madeline showed up in Bridgeport in 1880, Mamie was already passing herself off as a couple of years younger than she was, so Madeline couldn’t have been born the same year. Therefore, her mother told her she was born in 1866, which was the year of Rosalie’s birth. Frail little Rosalie, who spent most of her life in an orphanage, probably didn’t know the difference.

  So Madeline, who thought she was about sixteen in 1880, was told she was fourteen, when in fact she was seventeen. No wonder she had so much interest from men and created so much tension during her brief stay in Bridgeport. She had the rapidly maturing body of a seventeen-year-old, yet was dressing and passing herself off as a fourteen-year-old. That means when she met Breckinridge on the train in 1884, she was about twenty or twenty-one, which doesn’t excuse his predatory behavior—but does make him technically correct about his perception of her age.

  Mamie also explains the rumors about Madeline’s purported “fast” behavior in Bridgeport. Madeline wasn’t in Bridgeport at the time Mollie Shindlebower claimed she was causing disruptions in the family with her loose morals. But Mamie was, and even Madeline said that all the boys liked her best. When Shindlebower contacted Breckinridge, she wrote that “Miss Pollard … received company at unusual hours and went buggy riding the same.” But she also wrote “at that time then (Mamie) Pollard claimed to be 17 years of age.” Shindlebower was talking about Mamie, a fact that the defense misrepresented and that Wilson correctly surmised in his closing argument. In fact, a woman who knew the Pollards wrote to Breckinridge that “Mary Pollard was considered fast & did not bear a good reputation,” and said she had to kick her out of the choir because she was “unladylike & I considered her a designing and untruthful girl.”

  What about the supposedly forged letter and the question of whether Madeline invited Breckinridge to Wesleyan? It seems unlikely that the letter was a forgery. If it was, it would have been an extremely clever one, not only because Madeline’s handwriting was copied well enough to fool an expert, but because it was written on black-bordered mourning paper, which Madeline would have been using because of Rosalie’s recent death, a touch that Breckinridge’s team would have been unlikely to replicate. In a September 1893 letter to his father, Desha confirmed that Worthington found a letter from Pollard in Breckinridge’s files and sent it on to Washington. It seems that Madeline was surprised by the letter and denied it at first blush—then had to stick to her guns. Some reporters thought it was her biggest misstep. And, the signature of “Madeline B. Pollard” seems to confirm that she was using Breckinridge as her middle name even then.

  Madeline had demonstrated a penchant for soliciting prominent men. When she lived in Lexington, she gained a bit of notoriety for approaching James Lane Allen, the well-known local novelist, on the street and asking for advice about becoming a writer. Of course, if a young man had done the same thing it wouldn’t have attracted notice, but it was considered improper for a young lady to approach a man she didn’t know in public. Nor was she shy about contacting other famous men. She told Jennie that she met Charles Dudley Warner after he called a short story she sent him “remarkable” and insisted on meeting her. But he told a reporter that he “first heard from her while visiting Washington,” when Madeline “invited him to call at the Convent of the Holy Cross” and “asked for instruction about writing for the press.”

  Warner wasn’t the only well-known writer Madeline solicited for advice. In 1890, Madeline wrote to John Hay, statesman, author, and confidant of Henry Adams, with a similar request. “I wonder how impertinent you would think me if I were to ask you to come to the Convent to see me on Friday or Saturday evening next week?” she wrote. She told him there were “some questions I wish to ask you, and would go to you but do not know when I might disturb you least” and averred that they were questions best not asked in writing “for some things must be talked as ‘slanting grass and snowy daisies’ must be seen.”

  Madeline reaching out to Breckinridge for advice wasn’t an invitation for a sexual encounter, although Breckinridge, steeped in the ways of southern women’s respectability, seemed to think it was. It also seems inconceivable that she would have told Breckinridge that she had engaged in sexual intercourse with Rhodes; a girl was only “ruined” to the extent that her sexual activity became public. It’s likely that her unconventional arrangement with Rhodes, her admiration of the equally unconventional George Eliot, and the fact that she didn’t have a father to watch over her led Breckinridge to conclude that she wasn’t a virgin and was sexually available. As for the carriage ride, Breckinridge never substantially disputed Madeline’s account of what happened, including the fact that his advances were uninvited. The evidence also largely squares with Madeline’s account of what happened in the days that followed. While there’s no proof one way or another regarding Madeline’s claim about his attempted seduction of her at Rose’s assignation house, there’s little doubt that they went to Lexington together by prearrangement and that it was he who took her to Sarah Guess’s house.

  It’s unlikely, however, that Breckinridge was the reason Madeline left Wesleyan and went to Sayre, as she asserted. By the time Breckinridge came to Wesleyan in early August 1884, she already knew that she would have to leave because Rhodes hadn’t paid her tuition—which only reinforces what a vulnerable position she was in at the time. It’s likely she talked Rhodes into sending her to school in Lexington, which was cheaper and where he could see her more often. The former Wesleyan president William Brown told the Courier-Journal that Rhodes said the school was “too expensive for him” and “believed he would get his ward educated at Sayre Institute.”

  What about the other central claim of Madeline’s story, that she gave birth to the two children that Breckinridge tried so hard to deny? There’s little doubt given the testimony of Dr. Belle Buchanan and the other doctors that Madeline gave birth in the spring of 1885. The inconsistencies with their recollections appear to have had more to do with the various subterfuges she employed to hide the illegitimate pregnancy than whether it occurred. There was no reason for her to lie about going to the Norwood Foundling Asylum, because the records could be checked. She could have just as easily said she had the baby at one of the private lying-in homes that could be found in any city and were impossible to trace. And it does appear that she left the Washington Irving volumes there. In addition, both the principal of Sayre and Mrs. Ketchum testified that she was absent from Lexington from January 1885 until the following fall.<
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  It’s also possible that the nuns at Norwood went out of their way to not recognize her. Breckinridge had pulled some strings to get an introduction to Sister Mary Sebastian, the nun who was in charge, from the local archbishop. She told Breckinridge she would be “glad to do anything in her power that [he] may suggest” to help him. That the nuns would be eager to maintain conventional standards of sexual morality comes as no surprise. But there also appears to have been some animosity between Pollard and the sisters. One of Breckinridge’s associates who was acting as a go-between told him that the “nuns are very careful what they write, but they cordially dislike Miss Pollard,” and advised him to destroy the enclosed letter from Sister Sebastian. What was in that letter and why did the nuns so dislike Pollard if, as they claimed, they didn’t know her? It seems likely that Pollard was there, but as was her wont, and much like she had at the House of Mercy, she had acted in such an imperious manner that she had made an enemy of the sisters.

  If so, it was a trait she shared, and perhaps learned, from her female relatives. The same woman who wrote to Breckinridge with the intelligence that Mamie Pollard had been a fast girl also recounted that Madeline’s mother had “tried hard” to get into the Louisville Masonic Widows and Orphans Home that took in the three youngest Pollard children. However, she “could not, as she was not liked by the Board of Directors, she being ‘highly strung’ and over-bearing.” The woman also recalled Madeline’s Pittsburgh aunt Mrs. Cowen visiting the home to see a grown daughter who presumably worked there and found her “very high toned … calling for delicacies & demanding as much attention as tho she was at a first class hotel,” which echoed Sister Dorothea’s description of Madeline’s behavior at the House of Mercy. She concluded that the Pollard women were “designing” and “hot-blooded.” Perhaps it was an inborn personality trait, but perhaps also the result of thwarted pride in situations where they were forced to rely on charity.