by Mary Gabriel
The gathering adjourned, according to one reporter, in a “perfect hubbub.” The following morning, the headlines announced “A Piebald Presidency, The New Party of ‘Human Rights’ Nominate Victoria C. Woodhull (White) for the Presidency and Frederick Douglass (Black) for the Vice Presidency, Vic Says ‘I Will Stump the States with Tennie C.’”
WHILE VICTORIA WAS celebrating her triumph, her colleagues in the women’s movement who had remained loyal to Anthony continued their spring meeting at Steinway Hall. A headline said the group had concluded that “All the Women are Angels, and Man is Totally Depraved.” But the numbers of women reaching that conclusion were few and the atmosphere of the convention was flat. As Victoria was being nominated for president of the United States, the NWSA women were discussing what role a “strong-minded” woman might play in current society.
Isabella Beecher Hooker had not dared leave Anthony and Stanton to defect to Woodhull’s meeting, but on the day after Victoria’s nomination she wrote to Stanton, “Apollo Hall was a success and through it the suffrage army moves in three columns instead of two—and each wing is a host. . .. Now by the absolutely deferential tone of the Press toward Apollo and by the red flags and communistic mottoes there displayed we must recognize the powerful aid that new party brings to suffrage. They will not dare repudiate us, for they want the prestige of our social position and we want the vague shadowy honor that haunts politicians the moment that bloody revolution is threatened by the ignorant, though often good hearted leaders of the oppressed working classes. So we are the binding link between the extremes of respectability and mobocracy.”
She added, “I do wish that our Suffrage friends who think the cause has lost through the advent of Victoria and our advocacy of her would show us where the money and brains and unceasing energy . . . would have come from if she had not been moved to present her Memorial and follow it up with the prodigious outlays of the last year and a half. I verily believe she has sunk a hundred thousand dollars in Woman suffrage besides enduring tortures of soul innumerable—let us never forget this.”
The Equal Rights Party nominated Frederick Douglass to be Victoria’s running mate in the 1872 election, saying it behooved the party to nominate a man “out of the race lately in bondage.” (Alberti and Lowe Collection, ca. 1884)
BY THE END of May 1872 there were political realignments other than those in the women’s movement. A group of Republicans opposed to the reelection of Ulysses S. Grant met in Cincinnati to nominate Horace Greeley as an alternative candidate. Theodore Tilton was among Greeley’s staunchest supporters, partly for personal reasons: Tilton hoped to succeed Greeley as the editor of The Tribune if Greeley won the White House. The Liberal Republicans attracted not only mainstream party members appalled by the corruption of the Grant administration but also reformers not previously aligned with either major party. This movement stole some of the support from lesser candidates, including Victoria, and narrowed the field for the upcoming election in November.
At the same time, there was a growing consensus among capitalists, politicians, and police that something must be done to rein in the labor radicals. By May, a national strike for the eight-hour workday had grown to involve at least 100,000 workers in thirty-two states. The business leaders, many of whom had amassed huge fortunes in the post–Civil War Reconstruction grab, were willing to do almost anything to retain their power and privilege; they began working on a plan to counter the increasingly powerful labor unions and the International Workingmen’s Association and to crack down on strikers. Victoria would gain powerful enemies in this budding “Bosses International,” as the collaboration came to be known, just as she was losing supporters to Greeley’s political party.
BOSTON, SEPTEMBER 1872
Victoria’s presidential dream lasted less than a month. She was nominated on May 10, and on June 6 that nomination was ratified at a boisterous meeting at the Cooper Institute. But while she had achieved her goal of organizing a broad spectrum of people under a new political party with herself as the presidential candidate, she had lost nearly everything else. She was broke. She had been asked to leave the 26th Street house where she and her family had been living. She was unable to keep her eleven-year-old daughter, Zulu, in private school because the other parents objected to the possible taint of a young Woodhull. She had fallen out with Tilton over his nomination of Greeley and also over a threat she had made to expose the hypocrisy within the women’s rights movement by publishing details of some prominent suffragists’ private lives. In short, she was desperate.
After a long search, Victoria finally found lodging for herself, Tennie, Blood, and her children at the Gilsey House, but they were later evicted—due in part to Tennie. On May 15, Tennie had announced in The Sun that she was interested in becoming the colonel of the National Guard’s Ninth Regiment, a post that had become vacant following the murder of the Wall Street trader Jim Fisk. When no invitation to lead the Ninth was forthcoming, Tennie found another military group in need of a leader, the 85th Regiment, known as the Veteran Guards. It was a unit of black soldiers. Her bid for notoriety in this case was not unlike her run for Congress in the German district, but this time it illustrated just how strained the Woodhull-Claflin finances were and how little support they had among their former backers.
On June 13, a ceremony was arranged during which Tennie was to take command of the unit. It was held at a dimly lit armory on 27th Street. Ten oil lamps provided the only illumination in the sparsely populated hall because a forty-five-dollar gas bill had not been paid. Tennie took her place in a large chair on the stage, with Colonel Blood seated next to her. A drum corps of thirteen young men was called to perform, but it was some time before the drum major could make them understand what to do. When they did begin their lackluster march around the room, the din was horrible. Their performance was followed by a series of military maneuvers by seven men who kicked up a terrible dust. Eighteen members of the famous Spencer Grays also marched several times in front of the platform, and then it was time for Tennie to make her speech.
She told the group that she wanted to lead them to victory on the field of battle and that “the time would come when the fight of the eight-hour men would lead to bloodshed and she was ready to be in the advance column, fighting for the right.” The Sun also reported that Tennie assured the crowd she was well versed in military tactics and would rather accept the lead of a regiment of black soldiers because she had more faith in their fighting ability than that of white men. Her brief remarks drew long and continued applause from the small crowd and after some disagreement over her fitness for the post, which brought tears to Tennie’s eyes, she was voted in as commander. She accepted.
Unfortunately, Tennie’s association with the black unit, which was reported on page one of The Sun, coupled with Victoria’s presidential candidacy at the head of a “red” party of “free lovers,” caused the family to be thrown out of the Gilsey House. Victoria saw this as another example of hypocrisy at its worst: “The proprietor,” Victoria said, “would not have objected to the utmost freedom in his hotel; we might have lived there as the mistress of any man; but we ought not to talk out loud in the halls and parlors about social reform. They told me that ‘they admired us for the course we had taken, but to have it known that Woodhull and Claflin were living at the hotel, would frighten away all their family boarders.’”
Out of options, Victoria turned to Henry Ward Beecher for help: “My Dear Sir—The social fight against me being now waged in this city is becoming rather hotter than I can well endure longer, standing unsupported and alone, as I have until now. Within the past two weeks I have been shut out of hotel after hotel, and am now, after having obtained a place in one, hunted down by a set of males and females who are determined that I shall not be permitted to live even if they can prevent it.
“Now I want your assistance. I want to be sustained in my position in the Gilsey House from which I am now ordered out, and from which I do not
wish to go—and all of this simply because I am Victoria C. Woodhull, the advocate of social freedom. I have submitted to this persecution just so long as I can endure. My business, my projects, in fact everything for which I live, suffer from it, and it must cease. Will you lend me your aid in this?”
Beecher later characterized the letter as “whining.” He said, “I replied very briefly, saying I regretted when anybody suffered persecution for the advocacy of their sincere views, but that I must decline interference.”
Victoria, Blood, her two children, and Tennie roamed the street one full night without finding lodging and were finally forced to sleep at the brokerage office. But the landlord there had also tired of his tenants. He raised the rent to one thousand dollars a year, payable in advance, and they were forced to find a cheaper office, at 48 Broad Street. On June 22, Victoria’s pet, the Weekly, suspended publication. In August she was sued for her debts and she declared that she did not even own the clothes on her back.
Victoria recounted later that she was shunned at the time even by the women she was most viciously criticized for defending: “I had occasion to go up town, and took a Broadway stage. As I entered I observed that it contained several gentlemen, evidently respectable business men, going home from their labors, and an elegantly-dressed lady. Without noticing her particularly I seated myself beside her. She immediately attracted my attention by putting her fan to her face and whispering, as she turned near my ear, ‘For heaven’s sake, Mrs. Woodhull, don’t recognize me here; it would ruin my business!’ I then recognized her as the keeper of a fashionable assignation house, to which I had been upon an errand of inquiry. I could not at first comprehend what she meant by being ruined by my recognition; but it soon occurred to me that some of the gentlemen present were her customers, who, seeing that she knew me, would never again dare to visit her house. So you see I am ostracized by those whom the world calls prostitutes almost as fearfully as I am by those whom I call the real prostitutes—those who come before you with a sanctified look, and with meek voice, parading their virtue, which they profess to be in deadly fear of losing should social freedom prevail.”
HORACE GREELEY, WHO as editor of The Tribune had mercilessly hounded Victoria, ended up being nominated for the presidency not only by the Liberal Republicans but also by the Democrats; the supporters of this coalition hoped it would be strong enough to oust Grant. By association with Greeley, Tilton had made something of a comeback, following his ostracism over Victoria and he was once again on the lecture circuit. And Henry Ward Beecher, that bulwark in Brooklyn who so needed protection, was preparing for a triumphal year: he had evaded scandal, had been named to a teaching post at Yale Divinity School, and was to be toasted in October for a quarter century of service at Plymouth Church. He humbly told the organizers in the weeks leading up to the silver anniversary celebration that he wanted to avoid making the occasion one of self-glorification.
Victoria saw that everyone who hid behind lies was making progress, but she was not ready to be martyred because she dared to tell the truth. Victoria described her position that summer: “I was put in nomination as the candidate of the Equal Rights Party for the presidency of the United States. Despite the brilliant promise of appearances at the inception of this movement, a counter current of fatality seemed from that time to attend both it and me. The press, suddenly divided between the other two great parties, refused all notice of the new reformatory movement; a series of pecuniary disasters stripped us, for the time being, of the means of continuing our own weekly publication, and forced us into a desperate struggle for mere existence. I had not even the means of communicating my condition to my own circle of friends.
“At the same time, my health failed from mere exhaustion. The inauguration of the new party, and my nomination, seemed to fall dead upon the country, and, to cap the climax, a new batch of slanders and injurious innuendoes permeated the community in respect to my condition and character. Circumstances being in this state, the year rolled round, and the next annual convention of the National Association of Spiritualists [sic] occurred in September 1872 at Boston. I went there dragged by the sense of duty—tired, sick and discouraged as to my own future, to surrender my charge as president of the association.”
On September 11, 1872, Victoria went to Boston, the heart of enemy territory: “Arrived at the great assemblage, I felt around me everywhere, not indeed a positive hostility, not even a fixed spirit of unfriendliness, but one of painful uncertainty and doubt. . .. I rose finally to my feet to render an account of my stewardship, to surrender the charge and retire.”
But, she said, “standing there before that audience, I was seized by one of those overwhelming gusts of inspiration which sometimes come upon me, from I know not where . . . and made, by some power stronger than I, to pour out into the ears of that assembly . . . the whole history of the Beecher and Tilton scandal in Plymouth Church. . .. They tell me I used some naughty words upon that occasion. All that I know is, that if I swore, I did not swear profanely.”
There was a deafening silence in the press following the speech. A Boston paper said simply that Victoria had slandered a clergyman; others called her speech “obnoxious.” Victoria explained that she found herself “in the situation that I must either endure unjustly the imputation of being a slanderer, or I must resume my previously formed purpose.” In the end, she said, she decided to relate “in formal terms, for the whole public, the simple facts of the case as they have come to my knowledge.”
PART FOUR
You see what a precedent it would be if women of that class could throw into the community such stories about respectable people & call on them to disprove them. What man & woman would be safe from the most loathsome persecution. The impending trials of Woodhull & Co. will be answer enough.
—HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
Photographs of Victoria were sold through Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly and at her lectures in order to raise money for a defense against federal obscenity charges and for a state libel suit. (Alberti and Lowe Collection, ca. 1873)
NEW YORK CITY, NOVEMBER 2, 1872
In October 1872, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly was revived in order to publish, in excruciating detail, what Victoria knew about Beecher. The format was a mock interview with Victoria in which she answered questions about her life and the Beecher case. She began by explaining that she felt no animus toward the reverend himself: “I have no doubt that he has done the very best which he could do under all the circumstances—with his demanding physical nature, and with the terrible restrictions upon clergymen’s lives. . .. the fault I find with Mr. Beecher is of a wholly different character, as I have told him repeatedly and frankly, and as he knows very well. . .. I condemn him because I know, and have had every opportunity to know, that he entertains on conviction, substantially the same views I entertain on the social question; that under the influence of these convictions he has lived for many years, perhaps his whole adult life, in a manner which the religious and moralistic public ostensibly, and to some extent really, condemn; that he has permitted himself, nevertheless, to be overawed by public opinion, to profess to believe otherwise than as he does believe, to help, persistently to maintain, for these many years that very social slavery under which he was chafing, and against which he was secretly revolting both in thought and practice; and that he has in a word, consented, and still consents to be a hypocrite.
“The fault with which I therefore, charge him, is not infidelity to the old ideas but unfaithfulness to the new. . .. Speaking from my feelings, I am prone to denounce him as a poltroon, a coward and a sneak.”
Victoria went on to describe how she first came to learn of Beecher’s behavior, as early as the House hearing in Washington in January 1871: “It was hinted in the room that some of the women, Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker, a sister of Mr. Beecher, among the number would snub Mrs. Woodhull on account of her social opinions and antecedents. Instantly a gentleman, a stranger to me, stepped forward and sai
d: ‘It would ill become these women, especially a Beecher, to talk of antecedents or to cast any smirch upon Mrs. Woodhull, for I am reliably assured that Henry Ward Beecher preaches to at least twenty of his mistresses every Sunday.’ I paid no special attention to the remark at the time, as I was very intensely engaged in the business which had called me there; but it afterward forcibly recurred to me with the thought also that it was strange that such a remark, made in such a presence, had seemed to have a subduing effect instead of arousing indignation. The women who were there could not have treated me better than they did.”
Victoria said she heard of Elizabeth Tilton’s particular affair with Beecher from Paulina Wright Davis, who had heard it from Elizabeth herself. The story was also recounted to Victoria by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in May 1871, and shortly thereafter by Theodore Tilton. In the Weekly exposé Victoria declared: “I have been charged with attempts at blackmailing, but I tell you sir, there is not enough money in these two cities to purchase my silence in this matter. I believe it is my duty and my mission to carry the torch to light up and destroy the heap of rottenness, which, in the name of religion, marital sanctity, and social purity, now passes as the social system. I know there are other churches just as false, other pastors just as recreant to their professed ideas of morality. . .. I am glad that just this one case comes to me to be exposed. This is a great congregation. He is a most eminent man. When a beacon is fired on the mountain, the little hills are lighted up. This exposition will send inquisition through all the churches and what is termed conservative society.” Victoria then detailed the Beecher affair as she had heard it.