Bringing Down the Colonel
Page 31
In the end, Breckinridge didn’t present a coherent defense because he didn’t have one. Madeline was largely telling the truth about the relationship, at least in its major contours, although she glossed over the periods of genuine contention between them and downplayed her own increasing agency. As one of Madeline’s Wesleyan classmates summed it up: Madeline had her “faults—grievous ones—but that Colonel B. disappointed her there can be no doubt.”
And it’s likely Breckinridge didn’t think he would need a particularly elaborate defense; he thought it was enough to make some smears about Madeline’s purported sexual activity, assuming that the prevailing social mores, and the support of like-minded men, would get him off the hook. In not paying more attention to the details of his defense, however, he seems to have missed his only opportunity to save himself.
Right around the time the trial was starting, Breckinridge received a remarkable series of letters from individuals claiming to have intelligence about Madeline and other men. A Dr. Thomas Hershman, who had owned the St. Clair Hotel in Cincinnati, claimed a woman he thought was Madeline had come there three or four years earlier and stayed several nights with a man named Breckinridge who said he was her husband from Lexington. His wife, however, kicked them out when she found out the man wasn’t her husband but a railroad conductor. A woman calling herself Nannie White said that she was a former chambermaid who worked at both the Gibson House and the Burnet House and that Madeline used to come to the Cincinnati hotels heavily veiled and spend nights there with a Cleveland businessman. She claimed Madeline had left a small purse behind with “Madeline V. Pollard” written on the inside, as well as “some of her visiting cards, 18 Cents, a Small Key and a note from the man.” A salesman named Hall said he met Madeline at the Burnet House with a friend of his who was a traveling salesman for a Louisville liquor company and who bragged that the lady he was meeting was from one of the leading families of the South and was engaged to Congressman Breckinridge. He claimed his friend and Madeline shared a room as “man and wife” for two nights.
Taken individually, any one of the stories seems somewhat improbable, and not all the informants wholly reliable. The good doctor was in prison for stealing a horse and buggy in what he said was a mix-up and a miscarriage of justice. He may have hoped to enlist Breckinridge’s aid in getting a pardon. The chambermaid wanted some money to come to Washington and Breckinridge’s help in getting a job at a hotel, although that was hardly extortion, especially because she also said she had a letter of Breckinridge’s in the forgotten purse. Taken together, though, they paint an intriguing pattern: All three incidences occurred in Cincinnati, two at the same hotel, and all with men who traveled for a living.
Dr. Sinclair got his sister Mrs. Ambrose to send Breckinridge a corroborating statement that only made the story more peculiar. She claimed that late one night she heard the woman “making a very loud noise” and she went to her room, where she delivered a very small, stillborn baby. She told Ambrose she had been “deceived” by a man who turned out to be married. Ambrose said this happened sometime during the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition, a landmark event for the city, which ran from July to late October 1888. This was during the time that Madeline was living at Holy Cross, but the nuns did tell Breckinridge that she was away three or four times for three or four days each. There also was apparently about a year, between the spring of 1888 and the spring of 1889, when she and Breckinridge weren’t together. Breckinridge claimed their relations didn’t resume until around the time of the Johnstown flood in May 1889, the memorable catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam when some two thousand people died. More strikingly, Ambrose said the woman used the alias Josie Pollard, and the fact that Madeline purportedly tried to pass herself off as the poet Josie Pollard hadn’t yet been published at the time she wrote to Breckinridge. And, Josie Pollard fancied herself a singer and “played piano and sang in parlor” for the guests. And, after the miscarriage, when Ambrose asked how she was feeling, she asked her to “get her a whiskey-punch.”
Hall, the salesman, claimed that the incident with his friend happened about a year earlier, which was precisely when Madeline was in Cincinnati, on Breckinridge’s dime, to visit the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, one of the schools she was supposedly considering to take Breckinridge up on his offer to leave Washington. But Breckinridge hadn’t yet testified to this fact when Hall wrote the letter, so there was no way he could have known this.
Hall also claimed he saw Madeline at a Chicago hotel the previous summer after the scandal broke and confirmed her identity, and one of Breckinridge’s sleuths had reported that she was in Chicago at that time. It was the second time she had been in Chicago that summer. Mollie Desha testified that she met Madeline at the World’s Fair with Treasury Secretary Carlisle, who was touring the fair in early July with his wife and some friends from Kentucky. It was on the Fourth of July, the day Carlisle left Washington, that Breckinridge first heard the rumor that Madeline had propositioned Carlisle. So if the rumor was true, it appears that Madeline was trying to arrange a liaison in conjunction with the trip, although it’s not surprising it didn’t come to fruition. Carlisle was a “shy, absent-minded, kindly man” who was “absolutely dominated by a forceful, ambitious wife.” Taken with the claim of Congressman Allen, however, that Madeline was trying to arrange a rendezvous with him, it seems that she may have been trying to find a replacement for Breckinridge. And, it also seems that Madeline may have on several occasions traveled from Washington to meet with men in the anonymous hustle-bustle of busy hotels in the crossroad city of Cincinnati.
This would explain another enduring mystery. Where did Madeline get the money for the lifestyle that she led? Mrs. Fillette, in fact, first became suspicious about Madeline because she lived well but didn’t have any visible means of earning a living. Her dressmaker Miss Coffey said she had given her a “good deal of work” over the past three years, and she charged forty dollars for a dress, which was a full month’s board in Washington. Madeline showed Jennie an exquisite silk gown she said was from Mathilde of New York, a fashionable dressmaker. A young woman who visited Madeline after receiving a letter of introduction from Charles Dudley Warner said her closet was full of an “array of costly dresses and other finery,” which she found suspicious because the boardinghouse she was living in was a dump.
Breckinridge said that he supported Madeline once she came to Washington but gave her only “irregular amounts,” and Madeline appeared to be chronically short of money; she left Holy Cross owing two hundred dollars. Earlier that year, she wrote to Rhodes apologizing for not repaying him: “My expenses are very heavy and my salary so small that it is utterly out of the question to send even five dollars a month.” And Breckinridge was in especially dire financial straits in the early 1890s, when he was simultaneously shelling out for all his children. This was around the time that one of his clients’ money reportedly went missing, although he denied it.
Did Madeline occasionally entertain gentleman friends who would show their gratitude with some money for a new dress or other bit of finery? If she did, she wasn’t alone; casual prostitution was not uncommon among women on their own in the cities at the time, whether to afford luxuries or to make ends meet. As Frank Carpenter noted, Washington was full of the “demimonde”—of women on the fringes; not quite prostitutes, but not wholly respectable either. “Many a female clerk, losing her position, devoid of family and friends, drifts into their ranks in order to keep body and soul together,” he wrote.
Is that how Madeline kept body and soul together? If Breckinridge could have proved that she had liaisons with other men, it would have released him from his contract of marriage. But he had already spent much of the fall chasing down leads that didn’t pan out and, immersed in trial preparation, didn’t connect the dots, which, though circumstantial, suggest that while he may have started out as the exploiter, as time went on, it was unclear just who was using whom.
17
As Breckinridge and Louise made their torturous way home along Pennsylvania Avenue the evening after the verdict was delivered, a group of women were headed in the opposite direction, rushing excitedly toward the Willard Hotel—the traditional political gathering place of men. The momentum had been building for weeks, ever since Judge Bradley had kicked a group of women out of the courtroom during the trial. It began as a “social conversation” among a few women in a Washington parlor. Why, the women asked, if they were being excluded as spectators from the trial in the name of morality, weren’t men likewise excluded? They started talking with friends about public perceptions of women’s sexual morality. Soon a dozen women who dubbed themselves the “Silent Jury” had convened. First they wrote to Bradley and asked him to “deal with men as he had dealt with women” and disallow male spectators from the trial. He replied that “he would be glad to do so if he could find an excuse for it,” but left little hope he would find such an excuse. Then they wrote to Julia Blackburn, thanking her for appearing on Madeline’s behalf.
The women, many whom had never been active in public life before, decided to address the larger issues raised by the trial and formed the Woman’s Protective League to “combat the enforcement of the [words] uttered on the witness stand by Co. Breckinridge that social sins injure a man but destroy a woman” and to “secure equal rights for both sexes and aid women who have been wronged.” They reached out to the major women’s organizations in Washington: the District Woman Suffrage Association, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Woman’s National Press Association, and Pro Re Nata. “The Washington women have been quietly holding many indignant meetings,” said Martha McClellan Brown, whose friend Sarah La Fetra of the local WCTU was one of the organizers. “The notorious conduct of congressmen and public men in Washington is a national disgrace and the women are now thoroughly awakened on the subject and are determined to demand a better order of things.”
Now on the evening of the historic Pollard verdict, the “Silent Jury” and representatives of the city’s women’s organizations were gathering at the Willard in what was undoubtedly the first large-scale protest by women against the predatory sexual behavior of powerful men. A remarkable number of pioneering women were present. There was Dr. Caroline Brown Winslow, who had helped launch the crusade to end the double standard and founded the Homeopathic Free Dispensary, which was an important nucleus of the early women’s rights movement in the city. Brown had helped organize both the District Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association. There was feisty Nettie White, one of the first stenographers to work for a congressional committee back in the 1870s and a mainstay of both the district and national suffrage associations, who was joined by Louise Lowell, who testified to typing Breckinridge’s love letters. There was the botanist Carrie Harrison, one of the first women scientists to have a leadership position at the Smithsonian Institution, and Ellen Richardson, who was at the time pioneering the systematic study of home economics. There was the lawyer Ellen Mussey, one of the first women admitted to the District bar. There were two well-known women journalists, M. D. Lincoln, who wrote as “Bessie Beech,” and Mary Smith Lockwood, who founded the Daughters of the American Revolution with Mollie Desha. They were the first and second presidents, respectively, of the Woman’s National Press Association, which had been founded to fight for the right of women to sit in the House and Senate press galleries and now had sixty members, including Caroline Winslow and Carrie Harrison. There was Lucia Blount, the wife of millionaire plow manufacturer Henry Blount, who was a member of DAR, the founder of Pro Re Nata, and a devoted suffragist who served as the president of the District Woman Suffrage Association—through which she knew White, Mussey, La Fetra, and Brown. It was a remarkable cross section of women: old and young, northerners and southerners, secretaries, suffragists, and socialites.
The immediate concern of the Woman’s Protective League was trying to force Congress to reprimand Breckinridge. Its members passed a resolution calling on Congress to “take some definite action” against Congressman Breckinridge to strike a blow “against the atrocious double standard which had cursed society so long.” They also called for an end to the punishment of women for the sins of men: “We must have chastity for chastity, under one rule of right, bearing as rigidly in its application upon one sex as upon the other.”
But even the most optimistic among them that evening at the Willard knew that the odds of Congress doing anything were long. They had no formal political power. All they could do was ask and hope.
* * *
Jennie was disappointed in the verdict; up until the very end, she thought that Breckinridge might be vindicated. “I do believe that if Mr. S. and I could have run this case it would have resulted very differently,” she told her mother. And she was right about Stoll being underutilized. One of the big mysteries of Breckinridge’s defense was why he didn’t have Stoll, who was a feared cross-examiner, handle Madeline’s cross-examination rather than Butterworth. “Butterworth’s cross-examination of M.P. was something absurd,” she complained to her mother. Jennie thought they should have “pulled [Blackburn] over the coals” and goaded Madeline “to get her furious” so she would lose “her self-control, but they all acted as if they were scared to death of her.”
Nonetheless, Jennie was optimistic about her future. Breckinridge was planning to ask for a new trial, a request he assumed Bradley would deny, freeing him to appeal the decision, and she told her mother, “We are confident of success next time.” And Stoll had a “scheme for some work” for her. Stoll suggested that Jennie use the notes she had taken of her encounters with Madeline to write a book, and she hoped to make “a good lot of money” from it. Jennie felt so upbeat about her future, with “enough money to my credit to more than pay my debts,” that she had a new black silk dress made. Not only did she feel that she could afford the extravagance, but she had cause to need it. She was now staying with the Breckinridges, helping to get the “testimony and stuff boiled down” for the appeal, and, as she told her mother, “when you are visiting the quality you have to try and look a little respectable.”
Jennie took to Nisba immediately, which wasn’t surprising. They were the same age and both were struggling to make their way as single, professional women in a world that didn’t seem quite ready for them. “Nisba and I have become great friends and she is such a perfectly lovely girl I do enjoy her,” she told her mother. The family was kind to her, but reeling in the aftermath of the trial. Louise and Nisba “have been through a hard trial in every way and have born it bravely but they both show it now,” she said. Louise was “very sick and I think they are afraid she will lose her mind,” Jennie wrote. Nisba put on a brave face, although she was grateful for any “little kindness.” The trial and public humiliation of her beloved father must have been devastating. It would overshadow the rest of her life, leaving a sort of rift in time, a before and after, that would never wholly mend.
Still the intrepid spy, Jennie tried to see Madeline at the Providence Hospital, but the nuns turned her away. Like much of the country, she was dying to know what Madeline planned to do next. Madeline herself seemed torn. One minute she told Jennie she would return to her original desire of being a writer. “I shall cut off my hair, wear flat heels and no corsets, and study and become a literary woman,” she said, predicting that she would “write a great novel and become famous.” But later she told Jennie that while she “might write in a little room away from the eyes of the public, and possibly make a living,” chances were that she “would have to do without all the luxuries of life,” which, she said, was an impossibility for her.
Feminist reformers wanted to claim Madeline for their own. Martha McClellan Brown urged her to go on the lecture circuit to advocate for women’s rights. Others wanted her to devote herself to reforming her fallen sisters, as she already understood, as one woman told her, their “temptations
and sorrows,” but Jennie said she dismissed these women as “religious cranks.” That left the stage. There was a great deal of speculation that Madeline would turn her talents to acting amid reports that several theater managers had offered her one hundred dollars a night. At first, Madeline told Jennie that she couldn’t imagine facing the public and that Jene Wilson had told her she mustn’t make an “exhibition” of herself because she was “a lady in spite of the past.” More recently, she seemed tempted by the offers, telling Jennie she would have a “much easier life” and a “nice little flat in New York” if she went on the stage.
The Monday after the verdict, however, in a letter to her supporters on the front page of the New York World, she said she had no intention of “going on the stage or lecture platform … or otherwise accentuating the publicity which my unfortunate career has had in this trial.” She said she was “deeply grateful for all the kind letters which have come to me and my counsel from all parts of the United States.” And, she wrote, “If the future holds anything for me it cannot be in the direction of publicity and sensation, if my untrained literary ambition is to receive any reward or justification it must come with labor and patience.” Even then, she said she would tell her story only if it could “point to the moral of my misguided life.”
By Tuesday, Madeline felt well enough to sit up in bed and see a reporter from the New York Sun, dressed in a fluffy white peignoir and surrounded by flowers and congratulatory letters and telegrams. She said she would live quietly in Washington with her brother for the rest of her days and that “nothing can induce me to leave” this place—“I shall be buried in Washington cemetery.” She said, “I will try to take up a new life. I shall study as I have never studied before, and then when I am equipped I will take up writing, always over a nom de plume.”