by Mary Gabriel
“These privileged classes of the people have an enduring hatred for me, and I am glad they have. I am the friend not only of freedom in all things, and in every form, but also for equality and justice as well. These cannot be inaugurated except through revolution.
“I am denounced as desiring to precipitate revolution. I acknowledge it. I am for revolution, if to get equality and justice it is required. I only want the people to have what is their right to have—what the religion of humanity, what Christ, were he the arbiter, would give them. If, in getting that, the people find bayonets opposing them, it will not be their fault if they make their way through them with the aid of bayonets.
“Don’t flatter yourselves, gentlemen despots, that you are going to escape under that assumption. You will have to yield, and it will be best for you to do it gracefully. You are but one to seven against them. Numbers will win.”
Victoria turned and left the stage as abruptly as she had entered. The applause was deafening. Several bouquets of flowers were thrown after her and lay on the stage unretrieved. The crowd called for “Tennie” and “Tilton” and continued to applaud for as long as ten minutes after Victoria had disappeared. Not until the gaslights were lowered did the throng begin to disperse.
Two days after the speech, The New York Times, which had not covered it, printed an editorial in which it expressed the disdain and trepidation many of Victoria’s critics probably felt following her address: “Mrs. Victoria C. Woodhull has been married rather more extensively than most American matrons, and hence it might be deemed inappropriate to style her a foolish virgin; yet the characteristics which have made the foolish virgins of the parable famous for nearly nineteen centuries were mental rather than physical and in her inconsequential methods of reasoning, Mrs. Woodhull closely resembles them. . ..
“She is therefore capable of mischief in inflaming the unthinking hostility of the poor to the rich, and in fostering in the minds of the working men who applauded her during her recent lecture, the conviction that capitalists have no rights which working men are bound to respect.”
On March 14, proof that the workers had indeed been inflamed came in the form of a mass meeting for the unemployed, organized by Victoria’s faction in the International and held in Tompkins Square Park in New York City. The red flag was everywhere.
Ironically, at the very time Victoria was gaining momentum in the labor movement, her Section 12 of the IWA was formally expelled by the general council in London. The split among the American groups, brought about by Victoria’s section and disagreements over what constituted a labor issue, had threatened to rupture even the council. Finally the matter was settled by the expulsion of Section 12. Karl Marx himself said it was inevitable, because the group was spreading discord among the IWA ranks.
Victoria was not deterred by the setback. She didn’t need the International. She was gearing up her run for the nation’s highest office, with the help of the women, the workers, and the spiritualists who looked to her to help them secure a better future.
NEW YORK CITY, MAY 9, 1872
In early April, the Weekly announced the upcoming People’s Convention, which would bring disparate reformers together under one banner to consider the nomination of candidates for president and vice president of the United States. Victoria was not mentioned as a candidate, but she needn’t have been: in the past year she had not attended any convention without emerging a winner. The announcement invited all citizens “who believe in the idea of self-government; who demand an honest administration; the reform of political and social abuses; the emancipation of labor, and the enfranchisement of woman; to join with us and inaugurate a political revolution.” Under the announcement were the names Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Isabella B. Hooker, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage.
Separate, and signed by Victoria and twenty-three other people, was a list of charges the People’s Party made against the current government. They included failure to protect its citizens’ freedom; political despotism; financial and military despotism; gross and wicked neglect of children; and a “conspiracy of office-holders, money-lenders, land grabbers, rings and lobbies, against the mechanic, the farmer and the laborer, by which the former yearly rob the latter of all they produce.” It concluded that “as a whole” the government was “unworthy of longer toleration.”
The People’s Convention was scheduled for May 9 and 10 in New York City, the same dates as the National Woman’s Suffrage Association meeting. Victoria most likely never imagined she would be elected president of the United States. She often said she announced her candidacy merely to make the point that women should have a voice in the political process, all the way to the White House. But in the spring of 1872 she was moving ahead as if she were a serious contender. She was strong and healthy and was either so blind to the dangerous course she had taken or so sure of the correctness of her path that she pushed on despite the personal turmoil around her. After many threats of eviction, Colonel Blood, Tennessee, Canning Woodhull, Victoria, her parents, and her two children finally left the Murray Hill mansion on 38th Street and took up residence with Victoria’s eldest sister, Maggie Miles, at her Magnetic Institute on West 26th Street, where Mrs. Miles practiced spiritualist healing. At the same time, the Weekly was scrambling for ads and subscribers and the brokerage firm was floundering. Even Vanderbilt had withdrawn his support. The rumor was that the new Mrs. Vanderbilt had seen him with his arm around Tennie and forbidden him further association with his “little sparrow.” Any money coming into the Woodhull-Claflin household was now largely earned through Victoria’s constant, and Tennessee’s occasional, lectures.
To make matters worse, on April 9 sordid details surrounding her family again made front-page news. The Sun headline read, “The Death of Dr. Woodhull. A Scene in the Home of the Women Brokers. The Sisters’ Recent Troubles. The Doctor’s Intemperance in the West.” Victoria’s first husband had died, the newspaper reported, “being much addicted to the use of opium and liquor.” That revelation would have been bad enough, but Victoria’s sister Utica surfaced once again to exacerbate the situation. It appeared that Utica and Canning Woodhull had shared an appetite for drugs and alcohol and she was convinced that the doctors who attended him before his death had erred in not giving him the drugs he craved. Utica demanded an autopsy, which determined that Canning Woodhull died of “congestion of the lungs” and that he had been intemperate for many years.
A reporter visited the Woodhull household after the inquest and was greeted by Victoria’s sister Maggie, who said: “‘Oh, it’s all over. The doctor died of pneumonia of the lungs. . .. I hope there won’t be much of this in the papers. It’s all through family differences.’
“Reporter—‘So there have been family differences, Mrs. Miles?’
“Mrs. Miles—‘O, yes, too many of them. She came last night and raised a great fuss. I had to call a policeman before she’d leave.’
“Reporter—‘May I ask to whom you refer?’
“Mrs. Miles—‘To Mrs. [Utica] Booker [sic]. She wanted to give the doctor morphine. She takes it herself—as much as 30 grains a day.’
“Reporter—‘Were Mrs. Woodhull and Miss Claflin in attendance on Dr. Woodhull during his sickness?’
“Mrs. Miles—‘Of course. People will find out sometime that Tennie and Victoria are the two best girls in the world. They are only boarding with me now. They are going to Europe soon.’
“Reporter—‘Was Dr. Woodhull a practicing physician?’
“Mrs. Miles—‘Oh, no, he was attached to the Infirmary.’
“Reporter—‘Which Infirmary, Mrs. Miles?’
“Mrs. Miles—‘This Infirmary. You know I have a Magnetic Healing Institute here. Would you like to see the body; he makes a beautiful corpse.’”
The article went on to describe Victoria and Tennie as tender nurses and Colonel Blood as an “angel of charity.” It also detailed how Canning Woodhull had found his way back into Victoria’s life: “
Many years after Mrs. Woodhull was divorced from the doctor and some time afterward she was married to her present husband, Col. Blood, she chanced to pass through Cincinnati on business. Col. Blood was with her. They were quartered in a hotel, and late one night, after both had retired, a rumor reached them that a man named Woodhull was dying with delirium tremens in a neighboring establishment. They hurried from their bed and visited the sufferer, who was Dr. Woodhull. The divorced wife cared for her late husband for days, until he recovered and was able to go his way alone. For years he was lost sight of, until one day the scene in Cincinnati was reenacted in Chicago. A man had delirium tremens, and his name was Woodhull. From the time of his recovery for this last excess, Dr. Woodhull lived almost entirely in Mrs. Woodhull’s family.”
The press coverage of the doctor’s death added drugs to the mix of free love and political anarchy that was advocated, and apparently practiced, in the Woodhull household. Victoria, who had been caricatured as “Mrs. Satan” by the cartoonist Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly earlier in the year, was now added to a rogues’ gallery at Bunnell’s Museum on the Bowery: Bunnell’s featured a “Dante’s Inferno” of wax figures writhing in hell, and Victoria C. Woodhull had earned a spot among them.
THE NATIONAL WOMAN’S Suffrage Association spring meeting began at Steinway Hall on the morning of May 9, 1872. The suffragists planned to stick to their usual topic—winning the vote—but Victoria had billed the session as a forum for nominating political candidates under the new People’s Party. The audience assembled that morning was more numerous and diverse than previous suffrage gatherings: Internationalists and spiritualists who had been promised a discourse on the despotism of the current government were looking for more than a rehash of the suffrage issue. Throughout that first morning, the speakers were frequently interrupted and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was presiding over the event, had to remind the group that the proprietor, Mr. Steinway, had let the hall with the understanding that there should be no political demonstrations. She said the discussion of women’s suffrage was not to be enmeshed in politics.
A Victoria Woodhull autograph, from the self-proclaimed “Future Presidentess.”
(Alberti and Lowe Collection, ca. 1872)
After a series of resolutions were read, including one that said, “We, the woman suffragists of the country, will work and vote with the great national party that shall acknowledge the political equality of women,” a man from Rhode Island stood up and said he had been in the room all morning but as yet did not understand the object of the meeting. Another man rose and asked what kind of meeting this was. Another said he had traveled four hundred miles to attend what he thought was going to be a human rights meeting. The matronly Stanton rose from a green-cushioned chair and tried to calm the group. She asked that they all work together and not forget that the meeting was a “woman’s” gathering. Susan B. Anthony was more direct. She rose and said she was “for woman, for woman alone and her enfranchisement.”
When Victoria announced her People’s Party convention in the Weekly, she had signed the names of the suffragist leaders, but apparently she had not asked them if they were prepared to open their meeting to any subject other than winning women the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony in particular was loyal to this one issue only and had worked toward its achievement for more than twenty years. She refused to allow her goal of women’s suffrage to be diluted by labor and social issues. Perhaps Victoria believed—naively—that her move was so natural she needn’t have discussed it with them. She had in no way hidden her belief that the road to equality included social, educational, and employment reform, but neither had the older women hidden the fact that for them the issue was the vote. Each side had not listened to the other as they crisscrossed the country on the lecture circuit that ended at Steinway Hall.
Faced with the eager audience before her—her audience—Victoria precipitously decided she no longer needed the support of the old guard of the women’s movement: she calculated she had won the loyalty of a sufficient number of women and attracted enough new supporters to abandon the National Woman’s Suffrage Association and head her own organization. Instead of two women’s rights groups, there would now be three, with Victoria leading the third. Her organization would be more radical and more diverse than the others and its issues more universal. Its fight would be for more than women’s rights, it would be for human rights.
Victoria advanced to the edge of the platform and invited those who had come to the meeting to discuss rights for all humankind to meet the following day at Apollo Hall. Her invitation was met with tremendous applause. She left Steinway Hall, taking a majority of the gathering with her, and took a giant step away from one of her last claims to acceptability. Susan B. Anthony was generally considered an odd old bird but she was something of an icon; having Aunt Susan in one’s corner went a long way toward legitimizing a person or a cause. When Victoria left that morning she forever severed her link to Anthony.
The six-volume account of the early women’s movement that Anthony and Stanton compiled, which is considered definitive, recognizes Victoria only for the memorial she delivered to the House committee in 1871, and then only by reprinting the text of her memorial. There are no plaudits, no pictures, no mentions of Victoria Woodhull in the index. And Anthony’s personally sanctioned and closely supervised biography, written by Ida Harper, goes even further in expunging Victoria from the record of the women’s movement: it ignores Victoria’s domination of the January 1871 Washington convention and instead recognizes Isabella Beecher Hooker as the champion of the event. For Anthony, after May 1872 Victoria no longer had a place in the women’s movement, nor in its history.
NEW YORK CITY, MAY 10, 1872
The World’s headline about Victoria’s Apollo Hall meeting read, “The Congress of Schisms. The Convention Assemble [sic] Under the Red Flag of the Commune.” The paper reported: “Probably the most heterogeneous gathering that ever assembled in any city in any age met at Apollo Hall yesterday. There were women and men, and those who, so far as dress and appearance went, might be classed with either sex. There were all varieties of color and complexion, there were all shades of religious or political or social opinion, and representatives of nearly every ‘ism’ known to the world. The red banner of the Commune at one end of the hall was faced at the other end by blue banners, bearing in letters of gold texts from the Scriptures.”
The New York Herald said about six hundred delegates were in attendance to join the new People’s Party and to nominate presidential and vice presidential candidates: “Of the three hundred and fifty women about three hundred and ten were more homely in the face than as many nutmeg graters, while here and there a beautiful and fascinating creature, with serious countenance and wavy figure encased in Dolly Varden costume, walked through the aisles, the observed of all observers.
“The old faces that are usually attendant on women’s conventions did not show up on this occasion, and many strange looking people, with green cotton umbrellas and satchels containing large and healthy lunches on their knees, were observable in different parts of the hall. . ..
“Victoria Woodhull, also attired in black silk, with an overskirt, and having at her throat a blue silk necktie, came in late in the day with a smile on her lip, and her sister Tennie C. Claflin, similarly attired, on her arm. Wherever these two amazons went crowds of the delegates clustered around them, and many ladies embraced and kissed Mrs. Woodhull. Tennie Claflin objects to kissing, and would not have it.”
The tall banners in the room read GOVERNMENT PROTECTION AND PROVISION FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE and THE UNEMPLOYED DEMAND WORK OF GOVERNMENT. It was obvious that this was more than a suffrage convention.
The morning was taken up with business, the declaration of a platform, and the issuing of resolutions, which included a new code of civil and commercial law; the abolition of monopolies; direct and equal taxation; uniform compensation for labor; the abolition of capital punishment; employment
for the unemployed by the government; minority representation; and free trade with all nations. The party was also renamed the Equal Rights Party, which had been the name of a political party of mechanics, farmers, and laborers in the 1830s.
In the evening, Victoria was called to the platform to deliver an address on “Political, Social, Industrial and Educational Equity.” Her speech was greeted by tumultuous cheers. When she finished, a Judge Carter of Kentucky leaped upon the stage and shouted, “I believe that in what I am about to say I shall receive the hearty concurrence of every member of this convention. I therefore nominate, as the choice of the Equal Rights Party for President of the United States, Victoria C. Woodhull.”
The entire audience sprang to their feet and cheered for a full five minutes, The Sun reported: “Women waved their handkerchiefs and wept, men shouted themselves hoarse and perfect confusion prevailed.”
A Mr. Wolf objected, but he was overruled. The nomination was put to the convention and carried, with the same scene of wild enthusiasm repeated. Several minutes passed before order was restored and Victoria came forward to accept the party’s nomination. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “I sincerely thank you for the unanimity with which you accord me this distinguished honor. For over a year have I constantly worked, heart and hand, in the good cause, sometimes receiving your approval and sometimes your rebuff, and now that you thus honor me, my gratitude knows no bounds. I shall endeavour to be true to the principles of our party.” The hall erupted in thunderous applause and Victoria retired.
Moses Hull stepped forward to nominate Frederick Douglass as vice president on the Equal Rights Party ticket. He said it behooved the party to nominate a man “out of the race lately in bondage.” But this nomination was not as readily agreed to as Victoria’s had been. A dozen other names were offered for the vice presidential position, with the various groups assembled under the Equal Rights Party banner all vying for a spot on the ticket. Spotted Tail was nominated to represent American Indians; Laura Cuppy Smith was nominated to make the ticket an all-woman affair; Benjamin Butler and George Julian were nominated because of their experience in Congress. In the end, though unbeknownst to him, Douglass prevailed. One delegate suggested that Douglass be telegraphed to see if he would accept the nomination, but that suggestion was shouted down because of the late hour.