Notorious Victoria

by Mary Gabriel

  Also in the scandal issue, as the November 2 edition of the Weekly would come to be known, was a piece signed by Tennie that detailed the seduction of two young girls by a Wall Street trader named Luther Challis, including how, after giving them wine and having sex with them, Challis boasted the bloody proof of the loss of one of the girls’ virginity on his finger.

  VICTORIA WAS IN Chicago when the paper was printed and by the time she returned to New York City it had already been published. When it hit the newsstands on October 28, the streets around the Broad Street office were clogged with newsboys eager to get copies of the paper, which by nightfall were selling for forty dollars each. Everyone wanted to read the terrible Woodhull’s account of Reverend Beecher. The celebration over the success of the issue was short-lived, however. On Friday, November 1, Victoria learned a warrant had been issued for her arrest.

  The man behind Victoria’s arrest was Anthony Comstock, a former dry-goods salesman turned moral vigilante. Comstock’s first crusade had been in his hometown of Winnipauk, Connecticut, where, armed with a shotgun, he single-handedly sought to rid the town of rabid dogs. His next crusade was against liquor, and in 1868 he turned his sights to pornography: Comstock said a friend had been corrupted and diseased by a filthy book and he set out to avenge him. Comstock became a Christian warrior.

  Despite laws preventing the sale of pornography, the industry was booming in the mid-nineteenth century. Comstock began his fight alone but soon offered his services to the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), which was in the business of protecting people against moral corruption. In 1872, he proposed that the YMCA form the Committee for the Suppression of Vice to destroy “the hydra-headed monster, obscenity.”

  The YMCA no doubt welcomed the notion: one of its earlier and most successful moneymaking efforts had been to document the various forms of vice in New York City, which had quickened interest in the association and earned it $185,990 in contributions from outraged citizens. Comstock’s committee, which was comprised mostly of “upper class businessmen” who worked in the shadows, intended to carry on this work and keep the YMCA in the spotlight of potential donors.

  Comstock was a large man with thick whiskers, a tight mouth, a bull-like neck, and short tree-trunk legs. He bought his shoes at the shop that supplied the police and fire departments with footwear and always wore dark, wrinkled suits with a starched white shirt and a black bow tie. One writer said that the nearest Comstock came to being festive was during the Christmas season, when he exchanged his black tie for a white one. He collected postage stamps and Japanese vases and had married a woman ten years his senior who was described as “inveterate in her silence and always dressed in black.” She was said to weigh eighty-two pounds.

  Just at the time that Comstock needed a big case to make his reputation and curry favor with the YMCA, the November 2 Weekly came into his hands. By his standards, it constituted an obscenity: it contained two words, token and virginity, that violated his standard of decency. He first applied to the state courts for an arrest warrant, but the state declined. Comstock next turned to the federal courts. In June of that year a law had been passed making it illegal to send obscene material through the mail. Because the Weekly was mailed to some subscribers, he convinced a federal court that the proprietors of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly had committed a crime.

  On Saturday, November 2, two deputy marshals arrived at 48 Broad Street looking for Victoria and Tennessee, but were told they were out. “The brace of officers said they would wait, and seated themselves in the office for that purpose,” The Sun reported. “In a few minutes, both Victoria C. Woodhull and Tennie C. Claflin entered, and at the same instant Marshal Colfax informed them that it was his unpleasant duty to take them in custody, as an affidavit charging an offense against the new United States law relating to the posting and sending through the Post Office obscene publications had been issued. Mrs. Woodhull expressed herself at once ready to accompany the officers, but Miss Claflin said that she had some business of a very urgent nature to attend to, which would only, however, occupy her for the space of a few moments. She was permitted to retire into the anteroom, where she remained for a moment only, when she again reappeared, and a carriage being in readiness, the party entered and were driven rapidly to the office of Commissioner Osborne, in the United States court building.”

  News of the arrest spread as quickly as the carriage could make its way to court and by the time the sisters arrived the crowd outside the courthouse was wild with excitement. The New York Times reported that the marshals had found as many as three thousand copies of the scandalous Weekly in the carriage and duly destroyed them. Rumors raced through the crowd about what the wicked sisters had done and raucous laughter greeted each whiff of scandal.

  Inside the courtroom, Victoria was said to look “grave and severe, never smiling and listening with apparent painful interest to the proceedings.” Tennie, on the other hand, “wore an indignant air, and her eyes sparkled with excitement. She smiled affably as something in the remarks of her counsel or the District Attorney struck her as funny.” The sisters, as always, were dressed alike, in black with purple bows and stylish hats.

  “So great was the excitement consequent upon this arrest,” the Herald reported, “that old and able lawyers, who had assembled in the District Court to argue dry questions of law in patent and other abstruse cases before Judge Blatchford, rushed into the Circuit Court, where the Woodhull examination was held to take a look at one of the most extraordinary scenes that has within our memory ever occurred in the federal courts of this city—that scene being no less than two women, who, from their education and intelligence, ought to be models of virtue and purity, charged with sending filthy, vulgar, indecent, and obscene publications through the mails of the United States.

  “Claflin and Woodhull occupied seats inside the bar, and it is a noticeable fact that not a single man spoke to them except their counsel, and only one woman, dressed in black and apparently of the strong-minded class, offered them the slightest recognition. We saw a lady in black come into the court with one of the officials and this lady took a peep at the prisoners as if they were something wonderful and most extraordinary to behold, as, indeed, they really are.”

  As the affidavit was read, the link to Plymouth Church emerged. The complaint was made by a post office clerk named Albert Anderson, a Mr. Wadley of Brooklyn, and T. W. Rees, a clerk at The Independent, the newspaper of Henry Bowen, the founder of Plymouth Church. The prosecutor in the case was General Noah Davis, who was a member of the Plymouth Church board.

  Victoria and Tennessee’s lawyer argued that they should be released, but Davis argued in favor of holding them on ten thousand dollars’ bond, citing the “grave and serious offense.” He argued that the sisters not only had committed an offense against the law but were guilty as well of a “most abominable and unjust charge against one of the purest and best citizens of this state, or in the United States, and they have, as far as possible aggravated the offence by a malicious and gross libel upon the character of this gentleman, whose character it is well worth the while [of] the government of the United States to vindicate.”

  But the charge was not libel against Mr. Beecher, nor would it ever be, because the story the Weekly told was true.

  Commissioner Osborne ordered Victoria and Tennessee held on eight thousand dollars’ bond and committed them in lieu of bail to the Ludlow Street jail. A hearing on the case was scheduled for the following Monday, two days later.

  Also arrested for printing and distributing the Weekly were two young men—Victoria’s nephew Channing Miles and a porter named J. B. Woodley—as well as Colonel Blood and the pressman William Smith. Blood and Smith were charged in state court with libel in connection with the Luther Challis article. Another printer, William Denyse, was arrested later on the same charge. Smith secured bond, but Blood and the two youths were ordered held—the youths at the Ludlow Street jail, Blood at the Jefferson Mark
et prison. Back on Broad Street, all of the Weekly’s presses, types, paper, and office equipment were seized and destroyed.

  “UPON ARRIVING AT Ludlow Street Jail,” a Herald reporter noted, “[Victoria and Tennessee] tripped lightly out of their carriage and were received by Mr. Edward Regan, the jailor acting for Warden Tracey. They appeared somewhat flushed but otherwise appeared cool and collected, and their voices were steady and no womanly exhibition of tears was visible.”

  Inside the warden’s office, Victoria and Tennie met with their new lawyer, William F. Howe. Except for the fire in the warden’s hearth, there was little else in the room that might have made Victoria feel as warm as seeing the portly advocate who had come to her rescue. Howe and his partner, Abraham H. Hummel, were without question the greatest criminal lawyers of their day. During his career, Howe defended more than 650 people indicted for murder or manslaughter alone. The pair also represented major brothel owners, a nationwide syndicate of pickpockets, and one of the toughest of the nineteenth-century gangs, the Whyos. In addition, they were said to have the business of every freelance safecracker, arsonist, confidence man, and panel thief worth representing. One writer said that the firm was the mouthpiece of—if not the brains behind—New York’s organized crime for more than thirty years. It was rumored that Howe knew the ins and outs of crime and the courts so well because he himself was a paroled convict when he arrived in the United States from England in 1858. But Howe and Hummel didn’t limit themselves to the criminal element. They were also called upon to help the ruling class and other high-profile citizens, like Victoria, out of messy scrapes.

  The Herald reporter said that the sisters “engaged in earnest converse with their legal adviser, which lasted for upwards of a half hour; but it was noticed that when he withdrew their faces were radiant with smiles.” No doubt Victoria believed the matter would be resolved when their case went to court on Monday. In the meantime, the sisters were served a lunch of broiled chicken and potatoes and allowed to have visitors in the warden’s office while the jailer Regan tried to decide where to put them on a more permanent basis. The Ludlow Street jail had some “guest” quarters for notable inmates, but they were being used as housing by Warden Tracey’s family, and there was a “citizen” bedroom that was occupied by a merchant. What remained were the sparsely furnished, gaslit cells intended for common criminals. The sisters were eventually shown to one of these in a row called Fifth Avenue, where the other inmates agreed to refrain from smoking while the ladies were in residence.

  On Sunday, the sisters received visitors in their new quarters, including their mother and father; Howe and his partner, Hummel; an artist from an illustrated newspaper; twenty reporters, and Victoria’s daughter, Zulu Maud, who was described as a handsome young girl by one of the reporters crowded into cell no. 11.

  Also visiting the sisters was George Francis Train, who had sent them a note the day before offering to post their bail, which they had declined to accept. Train was a wealthy eccentric who was sympathetic to Victoria and Tennessee’s plight because he too had been a resident of more than a dozen jails without ever having committed a crime. He was a Fenian and a communard who had worked with Susan B. Anthony in Kansas to win women the vote, but he hurt her cause there because he was a well-known anti-abolitionist. In 1872, like Victoria, he was a presidential candidate, having been nominated by his own organization, the Train Ligue. He was said to be “semi-lunatic,” though he described himself in somewhat softer terms as an “aristocratic loafer.”

  Train wrote: “In November, ’72 I was making a speech from Henry Clews’ steps in Wall Street, partly to quiet a mob, when a paper was thrust into my hand. I glanced at it, thinking it had to do with myself, and saw that Victoria C. Woodhull and Tennie C. Claflin had been arrested for publishing in their papers in Brooklyn an account of a scandal about a famous clergyman in the city. The charge was ‘obscenity,’ and they had been arrested at the instance of Anthony Comstock. I immediately said, ‘This may be libel, but this is not obscenity.’

  “From Wall Street I hurried to Ludlow Street Jail, where I found Victoria C. Woodhull and Tennie C. Claflin in a cell about eight by four feet. I was indignant that two women, who had merely published a current rumor, should be treated in this way, and took a piece of charcoal and wrote on the newly whitewashed walls of the cell a couplet suggesting the baseness of this attack upon their reputations.”

  THE NEW YORK TIMES noted that the sisters anxiously anticipated the arrival of Theodore Tilton at the Ludlow Street jail, but he did not come. He was out of town, campaigning for Greeley. In fact, there was no response from either the Tiltons or the Beechers to the Weekly’s charges. The Christian Union was one of the few newspapers that did not splash the story of Victoria’s arrest across its front page; it had an article headlined “Scandal,” which many readers no doubt expected to detail the Beecher-Tilton charges, but instead it offered only this sage advice: “There is perhaps no sin more prevalent among professors of religion and less recognized as sinful than speaking evil of others.” And Tilton’s Golden Age reported that the editor was out of town but that he would have some “interesting things” to say in the next issue.

  On Sunday, an immense congregation gathered at Plymouth Church to hear whether the Reverend Beecher would mention the case during his sermon. The Sun reported that the eyes of the congregation were fixed on the door by which Beecher was expected to enter. Precisely at 10:30 that morning he did. The organ music swelled as he approached the platform. Serenely he passed a half dozen girls and boys sitting on the steps leading up to the communion table, and, smiling at them, paused to stroke the head of one of the boys. He then sat down in his preferred large upholstered chair (he shunned the proper pulpit, constructed of wood from Gethsemane), threw his soft felt hat under the table, unbuttoned his cloak, and flung it off his shoulders. He surveyed the congregation with sparkling eyes, a smile playing on his lips, his face flushed. The room was silent in expectation.

  Suddenly the chorus behind Beecher burst into song. He waited for them to finish before he began to read from Luke: “In the meantime, when there were gathered together an innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they trod one upon another, Jesus began to say unto his disciples first of all, Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.

  “For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.

  “Therefore, whatsoever you have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.”

  Either the reverend was confessing to his congregation that his secret had been revealed or he was telling his flock to wait for the truth to set him free. Beecher did not mention the charges directly or even deign to darken his pulpit with the name Woodhull. After the service, a reporter asked a deacon of the church what the congregation thought of the apparent slander and whether Beecher intended to refute the charges: “Deacon Hudson—‘No, I don’t think Brother Beecher will take the trouble. You see we know him, and we don’t purpose to take anything that a woman like Woodhull says against him. I know Victoria Woodhull as well as Brother Beecher does, and she never told me anything about it. I think it is blackmail. She wanted him to preside at that free love meeting and he wouldn’t so she came down on this Tilton thing.’”

  Asked whether the congregation would pursue the case, Deacon Hudson said, “Not a bit of it.”

  NEW YORK CITY, NOVEMBER 5, 1872

  On Monday morning, Victoria, Tennessee, and their lawyers prepared to go before Commissioner Osborne to plead that there was no basis for the obscenity charge, that everything allegedly objectionable in the Weekly could also be found in Shakespeare, Lord Byron, and the Bible, and that the women believed that in publishing their paper they were “actuated by a higher power to carry out their high designs.”

  When they arrived in the commissioner’s hearing room, where spectators were k
icking and thumping on the door to get in, they were told a federal grand jury had already met that morning and, within less than half an hour, indicted Victoria and Tennessee on charges of sending obscene material through the mail. Victoria, with her daughter, Zulu, at her side, and Tennessee listened while the prosecutor explained that the women were indicted individually, and also jointly on one charge, and that they faced a maximum of a year in prison and a five-hundred-dollar fine. They were remanded once again to the care of Warden Tracey at the Ludlow Street jail and ordered back to court before Judge Shipman the following day to enter a plea.

  Meanwhile, Stephen Pearl Andrews had also been arrested in connection with the November 2 issue. He told the court that he had had nothing to do with the Weekly for a year and that he had never heard of Luther Challis until he read the scandal issue. It was a lie. Andrews, who had been harboring a hatred for Beecher for nearly twenty years and had threatened to expose the reverend when he first joined the Weekly, had rewritten and edited the scandal issue based on Victoria’s Boston speech. He would admit his role in the case years later, but for the moment he wanted nothing to do with it or jail; he was working on his most ambitious book yet, The Basic Outline of Universology, which included 80 pages of vocabulary, 764 pages of text, and a 120-page index. The court looked kindly upon the sixty-year-old Pantarch; Justice Fowler said he did not want to incarcerate a person of Andrews’s advanced age and he was released later that day when he made bail.