Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that Madeline would have been able to arrange for and finance her confinement, as well as dupe her mother and Rhodes about her real location, without Breckinridge’s assistance when she was pregnant in 1884–85. And the timing of the birth in late May 1885 tracks exactly with the second of what she said were two sexual encounters with Breckinridge in August 1884. Indeed, Breckinridge’s own investigation confirmed what he denied in court: that he had gone back to Cincinnati a second time that month, staying at the Burnet House on Saturday, August 23.

  The apex of their relationship seems to date from the birth of this first child in 1885 through the spring of 1887. It’s during this period that Breckinridge was writing Madeline impassioned love letters. It was the perfect relationship for him. He was busy in Washington, and Madeline was conveniently tucked away in Lexington, where Sarah Guess provided a secure, private place for their assignations. It’s easy to imagine him, in the throes of infatuation, promising Madeline that he would marry her if he ever could. And it’s just as easy to imagine her, as many women had before and after, believing that he meant it.

  In early summer 1887, right after Breckinridge stayed in the same boardinghouse as Madeline, their relationship seems to have soured. That summer, Madeline worked for the Lexington Gazette and began a relationship with publisher Howard Gratz that culminated in an engagement to marry. It would have been the answer to all her problems. She would have been the wife of a man from a prominent Lexington family and could have dabbled in writing without being dependent on it for her livelihood. And, it would have legitimized the child that she was already carrying, which, if born in early February 1888, was conceived in early May 1887. But Breckinridge, who was at the time writing love letters to his “Little Spitfire,” likely felt betrayed. When the engagement fell through after Gratz’s daughter found out about Madeline’s past—including, according to Breckinridge, a warning from the family’s African American cook that Madeline “ain’t a good woman” because she “goes to Sara Gess’ [sic] house”—she was stranded. It was then that she took herself to Washington—not likely at Breckinridge’s invitation, as she claimed—but because she needed to get away from Lexington and had nowhere else to turn. Breckinridge begrudgingly took responsibility for the pregnancy, paying Dr. Parsons’s bill, but suspected that he wasn’t the father, as he told Gratz in a letter he wrote just after the trial in which he acknowledged, despite his claims to the contrary, the birth of a “living child” in 1888. And his own investigation confirmed that Madeline did indeed enter St. Ann’s Infant Asylum on November 10, 1887, but left on Christmas Eve because “she would not obey the rules.”

  The relationship didn’t resume on a regular basis until sometime after Madeline moved to the Academy of the Holy Cross in March 1888. For a time, things were apparently good between them. Madeline was again sequestered away, and they saw each other three or four times a week, going to assignation houses on Indiana Avenue and H Street. Then something happened that not only altered the dynamic of their relationship but is essential to understanding how Madeline was eventually able to go toe-to-toe with Breckinridge. When Madeline first came to Washington in 1887, she was still “countrified,” according to the Leader. Somewhere along the line, the country mouse turned into a social butterfly. It’s Breckinridge who provides the key to understanding Madeline’s unlikely rise through Washington society. While everyone was busy castigating him for introducing Madeline into society via Blackburn, he protested, to no avail, that Madeline “was not introduced into society by Mrs. Blackburn … but by Mrs. Admiral Dahlgren.” Madeline herself said in her autobiography that Blackburn never introduced her “into other homes” until after Breckinridge asked for her chaperonage. Indeed, the rumor circulating about Madeline’s multiple sets of visiting cards was that she “had become acquainted with Mrs. Admiral Dahlgren and ascertained that some of her ancestors were Vintons.”

  Mrs. Admiral Dahlgren was Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, the author of Etiquette of Social Life in Washington and the most socially powerful woman in the city, a woman of substantial, seemingly contradictory accomplishments. The daughter of a congressman, she was the doyenne of society’s labyrinthine rules of etiquette, but was nonetheless fiercely critical of high society, especially the “senseless waste of time involved in the tread-mill routine of social visits” expected of women—the almost daily round of perfunctory social calls that women made on one another, usually between two and five in the afternoon, unless a woman announced in the society column that she would receive on a particular day or at a particular time.

  Dahlgren supported her children after her first husband died by writing and translating dense tomes on religion and civil society from French and Spanish, but was an outspoken opponent of suffrage. Her second marriage to Admiral John Dahlgren, the inventor of the famous Dahlgren gun that revolutionized naval ordnance during the Civil War, brought her wealth, but after he died, she kept on writing, most notably A Washington Winter, a satire of the high social season in the very society she policed. Bored with what passed for intellectual engagement in the capital, she established the closest thing Washington had to a French salon, inviting authors, diplomats, and intellectuals to her Thomas Circle mansion. One woman who received a coveted invitation recalled an endless evening in hard-back chairs discussing the “Metamorphosis of Negative Matter.”

  According to one reporter, Breckinridge said that Madeline met Madeleine at “a charitable institution” in Washington. If that’s so, it’s unlikely it was St. Ann’s Infant Asylum. Although it was a Catholic institution and Dahlgren was one of the few Catholics in high society, Madeline was there only a short time, and Dahlgren was a deeply religious and fundamentally conservative woman; it’s hard to imagine her admitting a fallen woman into her social circle. However, Dahlgren was also a patron of the Academy of the Holy Cross, which was just across Massachusetts Avenue from her home and which she visited frequently. In February 1888, right before Madeline entered, she took Baltimore’s Cardinal James Gibbons, who was staying at her home, to the school to meet the students. However, another reporter at the same interview transcribed what Breckinridge said as “a charitable ball,” which would mean that Madeline was already dipping her toe into high society and had wrangled an invitation to one of the many balls held in the capital, where she met Dahlgren.

  Regardless of how they met, Dahlgren and Madeline shared a common interest: a love of literature. Dahlgren was a cofounder of the Literary Society of Washington and often hosted readings with well-known authors. It’s not hard to imagine Madeline striking up a conversation with her about her ambition to be a writer and Dahlgren taking an interest in a bright young woman—who may have claimed to be a Vinton—and inviting her to attend a reading.

  It was through Dahlgren, according to Breckinridge, that Madeline met one of the most socially connected young women in Washington: Florence Bayard, the daughter of former secretary of state Thomas Francis Bayard, who became ambassador to Great Britain in 1893. Madeline claimed to be about twenty-two at the time, which made her the same age as Bayard and Dahlgren’s daughter Ulrica, one of the highest-profile debutantes of 1888. Riding on the coattails of these young women with impeccable social credentials, “Miss Pollard worked her way right in to Washington’s best society,” according to Breckinridge’s account. She undoubtedly learned the finer points of etiquette from the Dahlgrens and the Bayards, like how to leave a calling card with the upper right corner turned down if you called on a woman but she wasn’t home—or the lower right corner if you were leaving town and wouldn’t be available to receive her return call.

  Dahlgren was also Madeline’s springboard into the literary elite. In the spring of 1890, Charles Dudley Warner visited Washington and gave a talk at one of Dahlgren’s literary evenings, which is likely when Madeline met him. John Hay and his wife also often entertained Warner when he was in town, and Madeline used that connection to introduce herself to Hay. “If our good frie
nd Mr. Warner were nearer than California I am sure he would give me a letter of introduction,” she assured Hay when she wrote to him in May 1890.

  The following spring, Madeline made her first appearance in the society columns, when the Washington Post reported that “Miss Madeline Pollard will sail for Europe July 1 with a party of friends for a brief stay on Richmond-on-the-Thames, where among the guests will be Charles Dudley Warner.” The trip to England never happened and appears to be an early example of Madeline’s social bragging gone awry. It’s likely this is what she complained about to Jennie when she said she once told a society reporter something “in strict confidence” only to find it written up in the paper—unless, of course, she was referring to the news of her engagement to Breckinridge.

  By the fall of 1890, Madeline found her living situation at Holy Cross too restricting. She went first to the fashionable Elsmere Hotel, where, Breckinridge told Jennie, Warner visited her. Then she went to the boardinghouse of Mrs. Fillette, through whom she met Blackburn, who introduced her into the southern circle of polite society. Madeline hired Miss Coffey the dressmaker and cultivated a distinctive style of rich, unembellished fabrics and muted tones that highlighted her figure. Madeline understood that for women in the Gilded Age, clothes were a form of currency; the right clothes enabled one to move around in certain social circles. “Clothes were really clothes then,” remembered Julia Foraker about her years atop Washington’s social hierarchy, and “ballgowns were our poetry,” she said.

  Thus, Madeline Breckinridge Pollard, a refined young lady of somewhat hazy but seemingly respectable Kentucky antecedents, was born. Madeline thrust herself into the city’s intellectual life with a fearless audaciousness. She told Jennie she knew Henry Adams “quite well.” One afternoon, she said, she and Adams and Charles Dudley Warner and some friends drove out to Rock Creek Cemetery to see the allegorical bronze statue Grief that Adams had commissioned from the Beaux-Arts sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens after the suicide of his wife, Marian “Clover” Adams. Many believed Marian was the author of the anonymous, sensational political novel Democracy that was later credited to Adams and whose heroine—the formidable, wealthy widow Madeleine Lightfoot Lee, with her intellectual pretentions and impatience for receiving lines—many thought was modeled on Madeleine Dahlgren. Adams did like to visit the mysterious shrouded statue, which, he noted, “seemed to have become a tourist fashion, and all wanted to know its meaning.” Madeline said Adams told her “it represented a figure wrapped in meditation on Chinese theosophy,” although she told Warner it reminded her of “The Sphinx.”

  Madeline’s Zelig-like social ascent posed a problem for Breckinridge, however. It became more difficult for them to hide their relationship; they tried renting a room in an out-of-the-way part of town, but quickly gave it up because they feared they had been recognized. It was around this time that Breckinridge apparently decided Madeline should leave Washington, contrary to her assertion that he never tried to end the relationship. The fact that Mollie Desha told Issa and Nisba about the affair in the fall of 1890 means it was current gossip in Washington. Especially after Madeline lost her government job, Breckinridge had to face the reality that she might remain dependent on him. Like a bird that hopes desperately its fledgling can fly, he pushed her into the world, first to Cambridge with some funding and the hope she would find gainful employment. That was wishful thinking. How could Madeline, with her spotty education and vague ambition to be a writer, earn a living when his own daughter, with a college education and a famous family name, could only get employment as a teacher? Madeline, who was more socially ambitious than Nisba, wasn’t inclined to eke out a living as a spinster schoolteacher.

  After a winter in Cambridge when she was supposed to be studying but apparently spent most of her time leveraging her relationship with Warner to expand her circle of literary acquaintances, she returned to Washington. And for a time she did attempt to do some work as a writer. She wrote several articles about literary subjects for the Washington Post. One, a fawning profile of Ella Loraine Dorsey, the “pioneer of Catholic light literature,” allowed her to not only insinuate herself with a well-known writer but also polish her own origin story. She wrote that she was first introduced to Dorsey’s work “some years ago” when she was “one of those twenty girls who attended one of those very ‘select’ schools … where the elevating of one’s brow can go just so far.” Most of the genteel female writers, like Dorsey and Dahlgren, whom Madeline admired, however, had fortunes or husbands to fall back on. Few women earned a living as writers at the time, and Madeline remained dependent on Breckinridge.

  Again in June 1892, Breckinridge got her to agree to go away, this time to work on a newspaper in Vermont. Then Issa died, and suddenly he was on the spot to make good on his promise. What really happened between them on the carriage ride in August when she returned to the city? It seems unlikely that he proposed, as Madeline claimed, although some of his friends thought he really did intend to marry her but backed away when it became clear that to do so would cause a scandal. “I honestly believe that he was infatuated with the Pollard woman, and that his intention and desire was to marry her,” one of them told the Enquirer. It does seem likely, however, that Madeline, believing in his long-ago promise, came home and threw herself into his arms, thinking they would finally be together. Not knowing how to extricate himself, and knowing that Madeline had an excitable temper, Breckinridge played along.

  Things were relatively calm until the rumors that Breckinridge was seeing Wing reached Madeline, who was pregnant, and she became increasingly distraught and more determined to push her claim. Eventually, she told Julia Blackburn they were engaged, partly to bolster her reputation in the wake of the Fillette scandal. This created a crisis for Breckinridge—but also an opportunity. When they went to see Blackburn on Good Friday, he knew he couldn’t deny the engagement outright. Instead, he asked Blackburn to put Madeline under her chaperonage, with the idea of using Blackburn to get Madeline out of the way for the summer, preferably to Europe, so he could marry Wing, assuming that once the deed was done, Madeline would have no recourse but to slink away.

  Shortly after, Blackburn asked Breckinridge to arrange an introduction for her and her sister to Frances Cleveland. Breckinridge arranged the visit to the White House, but then Madeline told him “she was to be one of the party.” There was no way he could let that happen. He told her she couldn’t go, which would have confirmed Madeline’s suspicions that he didn’t intend to marry her because she wasn’t respectable enough. A certain pathos hangs over her entreatments at the time. She told Breckinridge that if she “went away and had the advantage of travel and refined society, she could return in two years and be fitted to become [his] wife.”

  It’s surprising then that after their second visit to Major Moore, Madeline agreed to go to New York for the duration of her pregnancy. She came back to Washington after a couple of days though, and a few days after that, she miscarried. It’s possible the miscarriage was brought on by stress. It seems just as likely that Madeline, now more knowledgeable about the ways of the world than the girl who allowed herself to be shuffled off to a room over a mattress store, went to New York for the purpose of obtaining an abortifacient potion from a pharmacist or someone else who sold such compounds illegally.

  It turned out that Breckinridge’s instincts that marrying Madeline would be political suicide were correct. As soon as news of the engagement became public, “scandal was current about him and Miss Pollard,” according to one of Wing’s friends. When an associate of Breckinridge’s went to see President Cleveland about a government appointment, Cleveland told him: “I see you are endorsed by Col. Breckinridge; if he disgraces himself by marrying the woman to whom he is reported to be engaged, I can no longer respect him or a candidate he is backing.” With his political career imperiled and Wing’s brother pressuring him, Breckinridge had little choice but to move forward with the public marriage to Louise and to face the
consequences.

  Struggling with his own family drama and political problems, Breckinridge was blind to the relationships and depth of support that Madeline had amassed in the city. For instance, another person whom Madeline likely met through Dahlgren’s circle was Dr. Nathan Lincoln, the doctor who confirmed her pregnancy to Breckinridge—and offered to perform an abortion. His wife, Mrs. Nathan Lincoln of the “pink and gold” Valentine’s luncheon, was Jennie Gould Lincoln, a well-known author. She and her husband were frequent guests at Dahlgren’s literary evenings—she read a poem the night in 1890 that Charles Dudley Warner was a guest and Madeline likely got her first taste of literary society. Jennie Lincoln was active on the board of Children’s Hospital with her husband and Madeline’s lawyer Calderon Carlisle. The Children’s Hospital board had, in June 1893, just as the Pollard-Breckinridge-Wing engagement kerfuffle was blowing up, held a charity garden party that featured among its volunteer hostesses Julia Blackburn, who possessed the knowledge that Madeline and Breckinridge were supposedly affianced.

  A week later, Mrs. Carlisle and Jennie Lincoln were at the Smith-Judson wedding. Then, as now, Washington was a small, gossipy town. “In Washington gossip and great men are the leading subjects,” said Frank Carpenter. The Breckinridge-Pollard scandal had both. It’s not hard to see how by the time the scandal exploded in mid-July 1893, a good slice of the upper class of the city had some idea what Breckinridge was up to and was inclined to take Madeline’s side. “It is said that the story which was brought out in the suit has been in the possession of some persons in this city for some time,” reported the Evening Star.