Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Another New Yorker who loomed large in Madeline’s life was Margaret Thorne, the daughter of the wealthy businessman Samuel Thorne. Samuel, along with his wife, was well known for his charitable works, and Margaret was similarly philanthropic-minded. She also was passionate about rescuing morally imperiled working girls. In 1885, when she was just twenty-one, she founded the Columbia Working Girls’ Club as part of the wave of clubs for working girls started by wealthy, civic-minded young women. In December 1893, she folded it into another organization she founded, Hephzibah House, which trained young women to be Christian missionaries—Thorne herself had already gone to China and Japan as a missionary. In February 1894, just as the trial was about to start, Hephzibah House was offering lectures such as “How a Girl’s Life Can Be Transformed.” A year after the trial concluded, Madeline sailed for Europe as the “traveling companion of a wealthy and charitable woman who has taken an interest in her case.” As she and Thorne (who was later Margaret Thorne Tjader, the wife of a big-game hunter turned missionary) would be lifelong friends and travel together, this likely was Thorne.

  Lucia Blount was another wealthy woman whose motive and means suggest she almost certainly backed Madeline. She and her husband, Henry, had, like many midwesterners with Gilded Age industrial fortunes, relocated to Washington. Nonetheless, Blount was “one of the few rich society women who are entirely liberal and progressive” and “holds advanced and independent views,” noted the Washington Post. She was committed to feminist ideals and had hosted Susan B. Anthony at the Oaks, her estate in Georgetown. In addition to being active in the national and local suffrage groups, one of the reasons Blount founded Pro Re Nata was so that women could educate themselves about the legislative process and advocate for social policies to protect the rights of women and children. She was one of the women at the Willard meeting, so she was clearly committed to ending the double standard and was energized by the Pollard case. She even may have been the “noted philanthropist” the Star noticed peeking into the courtroom one day during the trial. Most important, she and her husband were elite Indianans who would have certainly known Jere Wilson. It’s likely that once he decided to proceed with the suit as a test case challenging the double standard, it was Blount who provided the seed money. She was also friendly with Nettie White, the pioneering stenographer who was a mainstay of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and District suffrage groups. White appears to be the link between her friend Louise Lowell, the typist who spilled the beans on Breckinridge’s love letters, and Wilson, who clearly knew White, because that’s whom he sent his thank-you note for the flowers to.

  The Cincinnati Tribune reported after the trial concluded that the suit was organized by women connected to the Woman’s Christian Temperance’s White Cross social purity program, including Mrs. Carlisle; Clara Colby, the editor of the Woman’s Tribune; and Mrs. James R. Hobbs, the wife of the former president of the Chicago Board of Trade, who convinced Madeline to sue as a test case of the double standard. There’s no evidence that any of these women played a role, and of the three, only Hobbs was active in the WCTU. Carlisle’s wife was involved only with proper southern causes like the ex-Confederates. Colby was busy in the summer of 1893 covering the Chicago World’s Fair for the Women’s Tribune, and a review of her extensive correspondence gives no indication she was involved in the suit. If the WCTU had been involved, it would have almost certainly stashed Madeline in its Home for Fallen Women, not the rival House of Mercy. Madeline herself wasn’t sympathetic to activists’ organized efforts to challenge the double standard. She said after the trial that while the motive of the women who formed organizations like the Protective League was good, “Nothing has ever yet been accomplished by such radical movements, and nothing ever will be. The matter must be handled in an entirely different way.”

  A wealthy widower also likely played a role. Jennie told Stoll in March that Madeline’s brother Dudley had met with Woodbury Lowery, “one of the richest men in the city.” Lowery was indeed rich and hailed from an old cave-dweller family. He had the money to assist Pollard, but what was his motive? Love, or long-thwarted love, it seems.

  In 1880, Lowery’s sister Virginia was one of the city’s most desirable debutantes, a tall, brunette beauty. Virginia fell in love with Count Brunetti, the secretary of the Spanish legation. He asked her to marry him, but her parents objected because they didn’t want their daughter to leave the country, and Virginia refused to marry without their permission. So she and the count waited. He was assigned another post and left the country; and then another and another. She turned down numerous offers of marriage, including one from Commodore (later Admiral) George Dewey. The 1880s turned into the 1890s and still they waited, corresponding faithfully.

  By the time Madeline brought her lawsuit, Woodbury’s sister had been waiting thirteen years for her beloved. Did he see in Madeline’s decade-long wait for the day she could marry Breckinridge an echo of his sister’s devotion? He certainly would have known Carlisle, another high-society cave dweller. Furthermore, Carlisle was the attorney for the Spanish legation, which meant that he knew Count Brunetti, who was now, with the death of his father, the Duke of Arcos. And it appears that the duke and Woodbury also maintained a relationship. In the spring of 1895, after the death of the objecting Archibald Lowery, the duke came to Washington and stayed with Woodbury and Virginia. When the duke was appointed the minister to Mexico, Woodbury accompanied him to Mexico, and shortly thereafter, in October 1895, he and Virginia were finally married.

  One hundred and twenty-five years later, no cashed checks, no receipts exist to prove exactly who gave what to Madeline’s cause. Because so many of those involved were women, who at the time left a scant trace in the official historical record, inferences of their involvement must be made by tracing relationships, circles of influence, motive, and means. All the evidence suggests that Belle Buchanan was on the mark when she said that Madeline told her that the “expenses incurred by my witnesses in this trial are all paid by a fund raised for me in Washington” and that the key contributors were Morgan, Blount, Lowery, and perhaps Thorne. Guy Mallon, the Cincinnati attorney who handled some of the depositions, confirmed to Buchanan that “some society people of Washington had quietly raised a fund for [Madeline] to carry on her case with.” Madeline herself told Sister Dorothea the money for her travel expenses was “furnished her by lady friends who were interested in her case,” although it’s likely that she didn’t know who her benefactors were since the money went through her lawyers. It appears that this fund was overwhelmingly raised by women to make a statement about Breckinridge’s behavior. How many of them had seen young women “ruined” under similar circumstances and felt powerless to do anything? How many were tired of seeing hypocrites like Breckinridge parade around Washington while their mistresses sat in the House galley?

  The women who supported Madeline didn’t need her to be the perfect victim; they just needed her to do what no other woman in her shoes had done—not be ashamed to tell her story. Maybe Madeline was a fabulist; maybe every word she said wasn’t the absolute truth. But who wasn’t hustling in the hurly-burly world of the crashing Gilded Age? Breckinridge, who was living on his august family name while he fleeced the people who brought his ice and typed his letters? Jennie, with her mothballed riding habit and her new dress for the “quality”? The daughters of the broke cave dwellers, who were selling their services as “social secretaries” to the ambitious wives and daughters of the nouveaux riches who flooded Washington looking to make a splash in high society? Everyone was on the make in one way or another. Madeline, who had more to gain and more to lose, was just more audacious. It was a unique confluence of timing, networks, and, above all else, determined and impassioned women, that made Madeline’s unlikely victory possible. In the end, it wasn’t one woman who brought down Colonel Breckinridge. It was all of them.

  19

  Redemption

  In the years following the Breck
inridge-Pollard scandal, most of the participants, like the rest of the depression-bound country, struggled. Coxey’s march to Washington to demand a public works program for the unemployed fizzled. A ragtag army of five hundred men reached the Capitol two weeks after the conclusion of the trial and was met by a phalanx of mounted police under the command of Major Moore. The marchers were beaten and Coxey was arrested for trespassing on the Capitol’s grass. Still unrest percolated, exploding into the violence of the Pullman railroad strike in the summer of 1894.

  Under the weight of the depression and grasping for solutions, the Democratic Party splintered into a populist silverite faction and an old-guard Bourbon faction and went into eclipse. The 1894 midterms and the 1896 presidential election ushered in an era of progressive Republican ascendancy. The country had changed; the Panic of 1893 showed that it needed complex solutions to modern problems. Politics had changed as well. Willie Breckinridge had warned about the rise of a new class of “troublesome voters upon whom party ties sit lightly”—of political independents unmoved by the parades and picnics and hoopla of nineteenth-century politics and more concerned with issues. “We lost zest after that for explaining everything with silver-tongued oratory and brass bands,” explained Julia Foraker.

  For the Breckinridges, the years after the trial were an exercise in humility, as they learned to do with less—less prestige, less money, less certainty in the future. Willie Breckinridge tried, and failed, to reclaim his seat in 1896 by running as the Gold Democrat candidate, part of the short-lived National Democratic Party of Bourbon Democrats who opposed William Jennings Bryan, who would nab the Democratic presidential nomination on the strength of his famous pro-silver “Cross of Gold” speech and send the Bourbons into political oblivion.

  In 1897, Desha Breckinridge took over the Lexington Herald and made his father the chief editorial writer, where Breckinridge continued to espouse his Bourbon politics while criticizing the increasing disenfranchisement and segregation of African Americans as Jim Crow overspread the South. Still hustling to make a living at age sixty-seven, he was on a speaking tour of the Great Lakes region in September 1904 when he caught a bad cold. He suffered a stroke after he returned home but insisted on returning to his law office within weeks. He suffered a second stroke on November 16 as he sat at his desk. He died on November 19.

  After their father’s death, Desha and Nisba sent Louise, who had never fully recovered her mental equilibrium, back to her family, having recommended that she be institutionalized, although she apparently never was. Louise died in 1920 and was buried not with her husband in Lexington but in Frankfort Cemetery near her brother.

  As he must have feared, Breckinridge was forever linked to Madeline Pollard in his obituaries. As the New York Times noted after recapping his illustrious career, “He was defeated for renomination, largely owing to the notorious Madeline Pollard case, which involved his name in much scandal.”

  The damage he inflicted to the storied family name must have haunted him as his life drew to a close, because just two years earlier he warned Nisba, “The [Breckinridge] name has been connected with good intellectual work for some generations—for over a century—you must preserve this connection.” And he was prescient, because it was the women of the family who ultimately would redeem it.

  * * *

  Jennie Tucker never did get paid by Breckinridge. She wrote to Stoll, and then to his wife, to give “old Col. Billie the devil,” but to no avail. By November 1894, with a bitter cold winter closing in and cash scarce in a frozen economy, she and her parents moved into a few downstairs rooms of Castle Tucker to economize. A brief romance with her friend Max had ended badly. By 1897, she was selling a rose-leaf balm she had concocted to department stores in Boston and New York. When that venture failed, she got a job as a secretary for Mary Morton Kehew, a wealthy Bostonian who was the president of the Women’s Education and Industrial Union, which focused on improving conditions for working women. Despite her own struggles with low wages and her proximity to a pioneering labor reformer, Jennie remained apathetic about organized activity to improve the lot of women. She had dismissed “some woman’s rights gang” she saw when she was in Washington as an “awful queer looking lot.” She referred derisively to Kehew as “Madam Kehew,” and although Kehew was known as a bit of a snob, Jennie’s assessment seemed to stem more out of her own discomfort with her position, and she didn’t take the opportunity to make a career with an organization that was a “regular hotbed” for Wellesley girls like Nisba looking to do good and make a living.

  By 1902, Jennie was again in New York City, living in bedbuggy rooms and using her dressmaking know-how to sell corsets to corpulent matrons trying to squeeze into the latest silhouettes. That lasted until she got into a fight with the management over the quality of the corsets, which she claimed had declined—her customers were literally busting out of them. Her next job as a traveling pattern consultant for McCall’s took her all over the East Coast and Midwest, which was groundbreaking at a time when few women traveled for business. She was often harassed on the road, again finding herself at the intersection of women’s expanding economic opportunities and traditional expectations of respectability.

  Jennie was in Wilmington, Delaware, when she got word that Breckinridge had died. “I’ll bet they were glad to ‘plant’ him every one of his relatives—surely Pollard killed him—didn’t she,” she wrote to her mother. She saw Stoll when her route took her through Lexington in 1905. She found the man who had been mentioned as a possible Republican gubernatorial candidate during the trial “terrible stupid and prosy,” his wife dead, and “out of all his deals” as a result of his involvement with Breckinridge.

  In 1906, she was assigned a territory out West and traveled through Wyoming and Montana. Like Mollie Desha many years before, she found the West a revelation and reveled in the freedom she found there. She was never “sassed” in her travels, she said, as “they enjoyed a woman with brains enough to get around and do that sort of work.” She learned to ride astride and even considered staking a claim and homesteading. But reality drew her back east. She worked for a time selling wholesale for A. A. Vantine & Co., a popular importer of decorative goods from China and Japan, but business was slow—the economy again went into a tailspin in the Knickerbocker Panic of 1907, when the failure of New York’s third largest bank set off a wave of bank failures. Eventually, Jennie returned to Maine and Castle Tucker. She hatched a plan to raise squab for the commercial market and spent three hundred dollars on 150 pairs of supposedly superior breeding stock only to end up with crates full of sickly birds and “such pigeons as one might pick up in the streets of any of our cities or towns.” But through it all, she remained fiercely independent and proud of her ability to make a living. “The world is wide and I have always been able to support myself,” she boasted to her mother during one of their frequent spats.

  When her mother died in 1922, Jennie inherited Castle Tucker, an expensive white elephant with few modern conveniences. But with the advent of the automobile, the once-isolated town of Wiscasset took on new life as a tourist destination. Jennie updated the house with electricity and indoor plumbing and ran Castle Tucker as a popular summer tourist hotel from 1924 until just after the Second World War. Somewhere along the way, Jennie Tucker became a local legend, a flinty survivor of Maine’s seafaring past who credited her longevity to a “hard head” and plenty of food and sleep. She lived to be ninety-seven, dying on April 28, 1964. She left Castle Tucker to her niece Jane Tucker, who lived in it largely untouched until her death in 2003, when she left it to Historic New England. Sitting on a bluff overlooking the Sheepscot River, Castle Tucker is still a perfectly preserved Victorian home where visitors can almost imagine Jennie rushing around the corner, a telegram from Charles Stoll fluttering in her hand.

  * * *

  Nisba Breckinridge lasted one year teaching; she quit at the end of the spring 1895 term. She was twenty-nine, still frail, and still searc
hing. That summer, with “the question of my health and my future” having become “acute,” Nisba went to visit a former Wellesley classmate, May Cook, in Oak Park, Illinois. May took Nisba to see her friend Marion Talbot, who was now the dean of women at the University of Chicago. “I’m not sure how it came about,” said Nisba, but somehow the money was found and by the fall she was enrolled at the university as a graduate student in political science. Despite being “very poor” and having “almost no clothes,” she had a “wonderful year” studying under the eminent legal scholar Ernst Freund, who was exploring cutting-edge questions about the role of the government in providing for the public welfare—although she was so petite that she had to have a janitor shorten the legs of one of the chairs in Cobb Hall because her feet couldn’t touch the floor.

  Unfortunately, when Willie Breckinridge decided to run for reelection in 1896, Nisba wasn’t able to return to finish her degree because the family “did not have the money.” Nisba spent a year at home, keeping house, studying law in her father’s office, and working on her master’s thesis on the evolution of Kentucky’s judicial system. One day in January 1897, when Desha was going to Frankfort, Nisba decided to go along and ask the chief justice of the Court of Appeals, who had been a “mess mate” of her father’s during the war, to give her a bar examination—which was done orally at the time. “He assembled two other justices and we sat in one of their chambers in the beautiful old court building,” she remembered. The exam lasted “three or four hours.” Nisba passed with flying colors. Three days later, on January 25, 1897, after swearing that she had “never fought a duel with deadly weapons,” Nisba Breckinridge became the first woman admitted to the bar in Kentucky—an accomplishment that was remarkable enough to warrant coverage in the New York Times, which noted she “inherits her love for the law from the Breckinridge family.” (The Times had reported erroneously in 1892 that Nisba had taken the bar exam, but according to the records of the Kentucky Bar Association, the only exam Nisba took was on January 22, 1897.)