Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  But when Jennie finally got to see her the next day, Madeline told her that she thought she would accept one of the offers to go on the stage after all, as “forty cents is all I have at this moment in my pocketbook.” When she dithered between going to New York to interview theatrical managers or starting work on her book, Jennie suggested she flip a coin. When the first flip didn’t get the answer she wanted, Madeline flipped again—always the gambler and often the winner at a game of her own making.

  * * *

  Congress, as expected, ignored the petition from the Woman’s Protective League. One of the members of the House Judiciary Committee told the New York Times, “You are safe in saying the House will do nothing. The public, as well as the House, have had all they want of it.”

  Many suspected that the men in Congress were reluctant to throw stones at their particular glass house. After all, hadn’t Breckinridge testified that one evening when he and Madeline were having a heated argument at an assignation house someone knocked on the door and “said we were making a great noise; that my voice was particular, and that there was another member of Congress in the house who might recognize it.”

  Breckinridge plowed ahead with his plans to run for reelection, sure that if he submitted his case to the “generous people” of his district who had known him “as boy, soldier, lawyer, and congressman,” they would vindicate him. And he wasn’t a man to back down, no matter what the odds. When he commanded the Confederate forces at the Battle of Dug Gap near the end of the war, they had been outnumbered ten to one but managed to hold the rocky summit by raining fusillades of boulders on the Union troops below, causing massive casualties. Even at the very end, when most of his company surrendered at the Savannah River, Breckinridge mustered forty-seven volunteers to escort his cousin Gen. John Breckinridge in his flight southward and pledged to march on “until Mr. Davis or Gen. Breckinridge should order us to surrender or disband.”

  What he needed to do, he knew, was get back home and make the silver-tongued speeches he was famous for. Jennie now found herself with a front-row seat for the Breckinridge redemption tour. Stoll invited her to come to Lexington and stay with him and his family so he could oversee her work on the book, which no doubt he hoped would present a different version of Madeline Pollard in time for the appeal. With visions of herself cantering across the famed bluegrass with Nisba, she instructed her mother to get the green riding habit her sister Patty had given her down from the trunk in the attic and send it to her, as “I shall possibly get a chance for a ride on a good horse.”

  Jennie and Stoll arrived in Lexington on April 30. The dogwood and the tulip poplars were in bloom in the city that had been known as the “Athens of the West” since its days as a cultural mecca on a precarious frontier. The denizens of the Phoenix Hotel lobby should have been talking about the promising yearlings in the dazzling green pastures strung along Old Frankfort Pike like emeralds on a necklace and which might be the next Clifford—Clifford Porter’s scrawny colt that astonished the country when he won eighteen of twenty-four races in 1893.

  The talk, though, was of a horse race of a different kind, and the handicappers seemed uncertain as to the odds. On the one hand, Breckinridge controlled the political machinery of the Ashland district and the patronage appointments within. One newspaper calculated they alone accounted for eight thousand of the twenty thousand votes expected to be cast. Breckinridge’s loyalists included his confidant Sam McChesney, who held the politically influential position of Lexington postmaster, and his partner Shelby’s father, who was the even more influential Internal Revenue collector. He commanded the loyalty of the ex-Confederate soldiers within the district, as well as, ironically, of many African Americans, who hadn’t forgotten the stand he took for them in his very first political race. He was also the favored candidate of local businessmen like bloodstock dealers and bourbon distillers, and of what were loosely termed the “public men”—the tax collectors, barkeeps, and hotel clerks who made up the political backbone of the city. On the other hand, Breckinridge was weak among farmers, especially those who grew hemp, because of his stand on tariffs, as well as among what the Morning Transcript termed “the masses”—he had never been much for retail politicking; by his own admission he didn’t “buttonhole the voters, go to the country fairs, kiss the babies.” In addition, the other elites of Lexington—the Clays, Blackburns, Deshas, and McDowells—were reportedly now opposed to him.

  Even beyond these high-profile defections, there was something strange, indefinable, in the air. “I never saw a campaign in which public opinion was so difficult to gauge,” wrote a reporter from the Cincinnati Tribune, adding, “There is something evasive and hidden about it.” What seemed to be driving this undercurrent of reticence was an influence heretofore unknown in the Ashland district: women. “The women of the Seventh District are united in their opposition to Breckinridge,” the Tribune said, noting that in no political contest in memory had “the ladies of Lexington and the surrounding counties taken such an earnest part.”

  Women, it seems, were pressuring their husbands, sons, and suitors to reject Breckinridge. “I couldn’t look my wife and daughters in the face if I were to vote for Breckinridge,” one Lexington man told a reporter. “The womenfolk are determined in this matter,” he avowed. These weren’t just any women. They were the most prominent women of Lexington, women who heretofore concerned themselves only with the Women’s Auxiliary of the Confederate Veterans’ Association, whose main activity was organizing the laying of wreaths and flowers on Confederate graves for Decoration Day. When Kentucky’s famed “Orphan Brigade,” the Confederate brigade commanded by the late general John Cabell Breckinridge, held its annual reunion shortly before the trial began, Willie Breckinridge was disinvited from the event he had always attended as an honored guest at the insistence of “50 ladies—wives and sisters of the ex-soldiers, and many of them personal friends of Mrs. Blackburn,” who threatened to boycott the reunion if he came.

  The trial seemed to have awoken something in these women, something that went deep, beyond even the issues aired in Washington. It was a scar left by elite men and sexual predation that ran through the soul of southern women like the limestone that ran beneath Lexington. Even as the sexual folkways of the country evolved in the nineteenth century away from the permissive colonial attitudes and hardened into the Victorian double standard, the South remained in many ways a world apart, with its own folkways. While the descendants of the New England Puritans and the colonists who populated the mid-Atlantic states and eventually the Midwest looked to pure women to temper men’s baser instincts, elite southerners “allowed the open expression of sexual desires”—by men—that “approximated the European libertine ideal,” say the historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman. While in theory these genteel southerners upheld religious proscriptions on premarital and extramarital sex, in reality “young white males of the planter class learned that they did not necessarily have to exert sexual control around female servants and slaves.”

  This white male sexual privilege predated slavery. The Royalist English elite who colonized Virginia in the seventeenth century, the historian David Hackett Fischer’s “distressed Cavaliers,” brought it with them. These lesser sons of the rural gentry established a society that mirrored the aristocratic English families from which they sprang: insular, patriarchal, and fiercely hierarchical, with everyone under the patriarch’s roof falling under his absolute authority. Women were wholly subservient to men and “held to the strictest standards of sexual virtue.” Those found guilty of adultery or bastardy would be hog-tied, stripped to the waist, and flogged in public “until the blood flowed in rivulets down her naked back and breasts.” Elite men, however, were rarely or only lightly punished and “were encouraged by the customs of the country to maintain a predatory attitude toward women.” Almost any woman in their sphere was fair game: indentured servants, slaves, tavern maids, even relatives; one local folk saying defined “a
virgin as a girl who could run faster than her uncle.”

  This culture of aggressive male sexuality spread throughout the Tidewater region as the Cavaliers ascended to economic and social prominence, a cluster of elite families interconnected by marriage, as obsessed with their own bloodlines as they were with those of their horses and dogs. Even before slavery was widespread, the sexual predation of female indentured servants, who were largely exclusive to the southern colonies, was common—between 1650 and 1700, one in five female servants in Maryland gave birth to an illegitimate child, not uncommonly that of her master or one of his sons. And, as D’Emilio and Freedman note, “Masters could abuse the law by impregnating a servant and enjoying not only sexual privilege but an extra year of servitude as well,” which they were entitled to if a servant became pregnant. This provision was so widely abused that the law was changed to specify that “if the father of a bastard was the mother’s master, her extra time was served under another master.”

  This rapacious sexual folkway was carried westward into Kentucky by the fortune-seeking descendants of the Cavaliers, including families like the Breckinridges who married into the Tidewater elite, and southward to the plantations of the Mississippi Delta, where the absolute authority southern planters held over enslaved women and the lack of even the modest civil protections afforded to indentured servants created a culture in which black female sexual victimization was rampant. Elite white women, while being held to exacting standards of female purity themselves, weren’t allowed to complain, or even acknowledge this predation. Popular English advice books that were widely circulated in the Tidewater colonies told women their duties to their husbands were to be “humble, obedient, careful and thoughtful of his person, silent regarding his secrets, and patient if he is foolish and allows his heart to stray toward another woman.”

  For white southern women, then, sexual predation became what the diarist Mary Chesnut called “the thing we can’t name.” Privately she railed against the men who lived like “the patriarchs of old” surrounded by “their wives and concubines” on the prewar plantations. Publicly, women learned to remain silent, creating a kind of pathological incongruence around the fact that their husbands and sons preyed on women in their purview, both black and white. As Chesnut noted of southern women in the antebellum era, “Every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think.”

  That the Breckinridge-Pollard scandal thrust into public view the elite southern male tradition of sexual predation was an irony that wasn’t lost on African Americans. “If the countless thousands of beautiful colored girls who have been ruined in much the same way” as Madeline Pollard “at the South, just since the war, could speak all at once in an ordinary tone of voice, all the artillery in the country could not drown their voices,” said the Cleveland Gazette, an African American newspaper. “None but Southerners and Afro-Americans have any idea as to the extent of this sort of crime, and for which the male ‘chivalry’ of the South will be held accountable at the final judgment.”

  Madeline Pollard gave these elite Kentucky women a chance to talk about what had been unmentionable. “Many prominent society women in Frankfort, Lexington and Louisville tell some racy anecdotes on the Colonel,” reported the Cincinnati Enquirer. No one doubted that these tales had long been told. One society lady questioned why women were suddenly up in arms “when they knew as much about the private life of Colonel Breckinridge the first time he ran for Congress as they do now.” But the code of silence was hard to break, and it took the public outing of Breckinridge to give women the confidence to speak up. Jennie was stunned by the level of opposition to Breckinridge she found among the women of Lexington; even Stoll’s wife was against him. Internalizing Breckinridge’s argument, she told her mother she thought the women opposed to Breckinridge were “fools” because everyone knew that Joe Blackburn “has lived just the same sort of life and yet because Col. B has been found out they do nothing but howl about his sin.”

  Breckinridge arrived in Lexington to much fanfare on Friday evening, May 4; a crowd of five hundred men greeted him at the train station. Breckinridge loyalists were predicting the largest crowd ever assembled in Lexington for his speech the next day. Desha and Shelby had been furiously working the local press, discounting reports of insurrection by the ladies of Lexington and downplaying Breckinridge’s condemnation by local preachers under the banner of the Ministerial Union of Lexington. Their efforts were thwarted when an open letter signed “Many Women” appeared on the front page of the Morning Transcript the next day urging the men of the Democratic Party not to renominate Breckinridge. The women said they were “deeply humiliated” that men excused what Breckinridge had done and furious he was unapologetically asking “with smooth words and hypocritical tears” to remain in public life. “Let him sink in the oblivion” of his guilt, they urged, “let his voice be silent.”

  Smooth words and tears were exactly what the audience at the Opera House got that afternoon. “Clinching his hands with the most intense emotion, his nerves quivering, and tears coming to his eyes,” Breckinridge gave the speech of his life. Looking over the audience of his comrades and constituents, he conjured the ghosts of the past, the “memories that cluster about me and surge upon me,” as he denounced the men he said conspired to destroy him, metaphorically putting them on trial “in the presence of these witnesses and of this district.” He said he had no defense for what he was guilty of; he had been, he explained, “entangled by weakness, by passion, by sin, by coils which it was almost impossible to break.” But he dared them to find someone who could do the job better than he “whose life has been stainless, whose morals young men can imitate with profit, whose ability is ample, whose experience is wide.” Wound up now, with the audience cheering, and some crying, he said: “For a hundred years this district had been represented by men. They have not always been sinless men, and, whether you re-elect or reject me, hereafter when someone comes to write its history, whatever blame may attach to me, he will write of me … he loved the poor, he toiled for his fellow-man, he labored for good causes.”

  Breckinridge’s allies were ecstatic with the speech; even some of his doubters were won over. “Every one says it was the finest speech ever heard and it won over lots to his side,” Jennie told her mother. She spent the afternoon huddled in Desha’s flat with Stoll, transcribing the final draft of the speech for the press. She would have liked to have heard it herself, but didn’t go because she was “afraid there would not be any ladies there.” And there weren’t any ladies there, something the press was quick to note. Not only were there no women at Breckinridge’s speech, but the crowd wasn’t as large as many had expected. The lower level of the Opera House was full, but no one was turned away at the door, and there “was no great swarming of the aisles.” Even some of the press seats were empty. One reporter noticed a great many sunburned faces and carelessly trimmed beards and said the “number of town folks was surprisingly small.”

  And the next day there was an unwelcome development: a Courier-Journal editorial denouncing Breckinridge’s candidacy. It was an unexpected blow. Henry Watterson, the editor of the Courier-Journal, was not only a personal friend of Breckinridge’s but also one of the most prominent supporters of the “New South” ideology. Breckinridge had complained bitterly about the paper’s coverage of the trial, but Watterson had avoided any comment in his influential editorials. Now he called Breckinridge’s plea for support in light of the revelations made during the trial an affront that no Kentuckian could countenance. He said Breckinridge was demanding absolution “upon the plea that his admission of guilt leaves him guiltless; that his sins are no worse than the sins of those to whom he appeals; that he should not be made a vicarious sacrifice for mankind.”

  The mail brought more bad news—a panicked letter from Nisba, who had stayed in Washington to care for Louise, who now appe
ared on the verge of a complete breakdown. She was “very feeble,” wrote Nisba, and rarely lucid—she thought Nisba was her sister Rose; she couldn’t finish a sentence; her eyes were crossed much of the time. The “cruel” things her friends had said to her about Breckinridge haunted her, and she uttered them in her delirium. But, loyal as ever, Nisba had high hopes for her father’s canvas. “I do believe they will understand your position after your speech,” she told him.

  Breckinridge continued his whirlwind speaking tour. The following Monday in Paris, he cast the verdict as the result of public opinion inflamed by feminist purity reformers and a biased media. “Are you to choose your own representative or shall meetings in Boston and Philadelphia or editorials in the Courier-Journal decide for you?” he asked. It was clear that the battle lines had been drawn. Nominally the contestants were Breckinridge and his two primary opponents William Owens, who was a protégé of Watterson’s, and Evan Settle, another former state legislator. The real combatants, though, were two worldviews about women and sex. One was the hierarchical, predatory southern ethic, which held that any woman who wasn’t protected by her father and domestic isolation was fair game and became part of a debauched class necessary to protect the purity of respectable women. Breckinridge warned one of his friends that the “conspiracy to destroy me ought not be permitted to be successful” because it “exalted unchastity” and would tempt “every wanton and adventuress … to do what is possible to entangle a man.” The other was the more egalitarian ethic of the eastern elite—the descendants of the pious but fair-minded Puritans—that increasingly saw men and women as equals and men as responsible as women for upholding high, and nonpredatory, standards of sexual morality. To them, fallen women weren’t social necessities but victims of a skewed male sexuality.