Notorious Victoria

by Mary Gabriel

  NEW YORK CITY, OCTOBER 1876

  Throughout the summer of 1875, the Weekly featured articles on “The Human Body—The Holy Temple,” “Inspiration and Evolution,” “The Garden of Eden,” and “The Bible of Jesus Christ.” Under its masthead, instead of a quotation from John Stuart Mill, it ran a Bible verse. Victoria had gone wholly over from politics to religion.

  After being jailed, harassed, condemned and impoverished, Victoria took refuge in the one place that was sure to offer her safe haven—established religion—and abandoned the quest for political reform that had raised her from obscurity to infamy. But while her critics condemned her decision to embrace Christianity as hollow and opportunistic, it was not, in fact, a radical departure for her. Much of the theory of social freedom she had previously preached was founded in the Paulist socialism of the 1850s, but during her earlier years on the platform she had abandoned Bible rhetoric for radical political language. Now she shifted her emphasis from politics back to religion, from public reform to personal redemption.

  Like her politics, her religion was idiosyncratic. Based on Christianity, it also included such elements as double-triangle symbols and a reinterpretation of the biblical verses on Eden to explain the body’s reproductive system. Victoria’s Christianity was a death-defying religion that, like the spiritualism it replaced, offered ways to escape that inevitable end.

  Victoria’s lectures were now geared toward purity of soul and body, but they failed to draw the crowds that the fire and brimstone of her social freedom and labor speeches had attracted. She was applauded in the press for her efforts, but nearly every story described a “respectably” sized audience or a “good house” or an “audience of goodly numbers.” Gone were the days when people clamored to hear her speak and had to be turned away from the door for lack of standing room.

  The sparse audiences were due in part to Victoria’s new direction but also to her divorce from the spiritualists. In September, Victoria officially resigned her presidency of the group and further severed her ties with her followers by exposing spiritualist frauds in the Weekly. Since 1873, the group had been so divided between the pro-Woodhull and anti-Woodhull forces that by 1875, when Victoria gave up her leadership, no one thought of trying to keep the association alive. The scattered factions returned to their haunted furniture and séances. They no longer turned out to hear Victoria speak and they no longer subscribed to the Weekly.

  In November, Victoria published another signed appeal to save the paper: “Pecuniarily the paper has, save for a few months after the attempt to suppress it was made, always been a tax upon us; but the truths for which it has been the medium were deemed to be of sufficient magnitude and importance to demand of us whatever pecuniary sacrifices [were necessary]. . . .

  “We have been doing and shall do all we can; but the lecture field is not so fruitful a source of revenue as in years before. It requires greater exertions and more expensive advertising to get the people out. . . . Moreover, we were driven into the field early by the necessities of the situation, and were lecturing nightly during the hottest term of the summer, the exhaustion from which has caused a continued annoyance from the weakened lung of our last year’s sickness. This weakness not only detracts from the effectiveness of speech, but actually interferes with the flow of inspiration . . . so we must ask our friends to make good what we fall short from these several causes.”

  The appeal, as usual, apparently went unanswered. On June 10, 1876, the Weekly was forced to close. It had survived six years, longer than most papers of its kind, but Victoria’s continued physical weakness, her lack of money, and a general financial depression in 1876 (which hit the newspaper industry especially hard) forced its closure.

  One of Victoria’s most popular speeches during this period, “The Garden of Eden: or, Paradise Lost and Found,” speaks to her despair during that summer of 1876: “The soul of the weary pilgrim when traveling the tangled paths of life’s tempestuous journey, sometimes sickens and faints by the way. It looks to the right and to the left; to the front and to the rear, and in every direction it is all the same hard, hard way that stretches out its view before him. In its contemplation he droops into indifference to the world, and fain would cease to think. But there is that within the soul that will not repose.”

  In September, Victoria filed for divorce from Blood on the grounds of adultery. She would later say that she had found Blood with another woman. No doubt the reasons for the split were many and complex, but adultery was most likely not among them. Adultery was the charge used to secure a divorce at a time when divorces were not readily granted. Blood himself may have offered the more honest reason for the split. He once said that it was work that bound him and Victoria. By late 1876 that work—the newspaper, the brokerage, and the political campaigns they had waged—was largely dead. And so was their relationship, at least as far as Victoria was concerned.

  Judge J. O. Dykman in Brooklyn sealed their divorce, writing: “It is further ordered and adjudged that the marriage between the plaintiff, Victoria Claflin Woodhull Blood, and the defendant, James H. Blood, be dissolved, and the said marriage is hereby dissolved accordingly, and the parties are, and each of them is, freed from the obligation thereof.”

  The divorce was granted on October 8. As stated in the code of divorce law in New York at the time, Victoria was free to marry again, but it was against the law for Blood, as the offending adulterer, to remarry until after Victoria’s death.

  Victoria and Blood had come together at a time of great social upheaval following the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination. In 1876, the country was once again undergoing a similar reassessment. It was the centennial year of American independence and many viewed it as a time to heal the wounds still festering from the Civil War and from the plunder and corruption of the Reconstruction years. It was an optimistic celebration of renewal, a looking ahead to the next one hundred years. From her perspective at rock bottom, perhaps Victoria was hoping to begin again, too.

  PART FIVE

  And friends at a setting of the sun Will come to look upon my face, And say, “Mistakes she made not few, She wove perchance as best she knew.”

  —THE HUMANITARIAN, APRIL 1901

  Later in life, Victoria became a motoring enthusiast and made history in her sixties as the first woman to drive “from England through France and back again.” (Southern Illinois University, Morris Library Special Collections, Victoria Woodhull-Martin Papers, date unknown)

  LONDON, AUGUST 1877

  Victoria and Tennessee began 1877 much the way they had begun the previous year—hunting for money. They no longer had a newspaper in which to make appeals, so they mailed cards to other papers hoping they would publish descriptions of their ordeals and also their supplications for cash. While they were waiting for their prayers to be answered, money—a considerable sum—came their way from an unexpected source.

  Cornelius Vanderbilt died on January 4, 1877. An examination of his holdings showed him to be worth $100 million—almost exactly what the U.S. Treasury had on hand at that moment. He was the richest man in America, and the richest self-made man on Earth.

  Flags were flown at half-mast throughout the city as news of the Commodore’s death spread. He had been an institution in New York City and his passing, as none other, signaled the end of an era. He was one of the first Americans to make his fortune through his labors and to take his place in society by virtue of his work. He was a legend to the rich man and to the workingman alike.

  The reading of Vanderbilt’s will on January 8 sparked the first major legal battle of the new year. Vanderbilt had left his eight daughters $300,000 each; his way-ward son, Cornelius Jeremiah, $200,000; and the remainder of his $100 million fortune to his son William and to William’s four sons, with minor amounts going to acquaintances. The Vanderbilt children felt they had been cheated out of their rightful inheritance by their brother William and claimed the old Commodore had not been of sound mind when he wrote h
is will. In February, they took their protest over the document to a judge.

  Once again, Victoria and Tennessee were about to figure in a court drama. The protesting children argued that Commodore Vanderbilt was senile when he made his will, that he had been mentally unbalanced for years, and that he’d been addicted to spiritualism for the past decade. Victoria and Tennessee were sure to be brought in to testify to the Commodore’s interest in spirit communications, the mere possibility of which proved too much for William Vanderbilt, who stood to lose almost $100 million. William reportedly gave Victoria and Tennessee more than $100,000 on the condition that they not be available to testify when the trial began in November.

  They were not. In August, Victoria, her two children, her mother, and Tennessee set off for England in six first-class double staterooms, accompanied by a small army of servants.

  THE GROUP MUST have been nearly giddy with their prospects when they arrived in London and took a home at 45 Warwick Road in South Kensington, but they soon found that the England to which they had fled was dictated by an even stricter caste system than the country they had left behind. They also discovered that the rumors that had hounded them in America had followed them across the Atlantic. Within weeks of their arrival, Tennessee wrote to her father in New York: “God only knows what we have suffered since we have been in England. The lies, slanders & filth were worse here than even in America. It got so bad the air was poisoned & all on account of that rotten moral leper Stephen Pearl Andrews. . . . If Col [Blood] only knew enough to help us dump that damned old rotten free lover Stephen Pearl Andrews’ doctrines he could do something that may help him in the future. Read this letter to him & if there is one thing certain we shall denounce that damnable stinking doctrine. Now tell him what we intend & see if he knows enough to pull back the filth. Victoria never wanted that part of the Beecher article which is so filthy published in the paper all she wanted was the facts.”

  Tennessee also attempted to squeeze more money out of William Vanderbilt before the will hearing. She wrote to Vanderbilt, who was in London at the time, saying she had left seventy thousand dollars in trust with his father and had not received it. In a veiled threat to return to New York before November she said, “When I have satisfied you in the justice of my claims it will not be necessary for me to return to New York. . . . I pray you grant me an interview and after hearing my statement of fact I will leave the settlement there to your honor.”

  Vanderbilt must have ignored her initial request, because she scrawled on the note to her father a message for him to “go to a lawyer & file suit” if Vanderbilt still did not come through with her money. She told her father she wanted principle and interest, which she calculated would come to $100,000, but would settle for the principle. She also said that she had seen Vanderbilt in the street in London but that he had dismissed her by saying he “could not do anything as he was about to leave for New York.” Tennessee told her father that he and her sister Maggie should pay Mr. Vanderbilt a visit when he arrived in America or she would return to New York herself.

  While Tennie was scheming, Victoria was busy arranging a lecture series in her adoptive home. For September she lined up dates in Nottingham and Liverpool, for October in Manchester, and for December she was scheduled to be back in London to deliver a lecture on “The Human Body, the Temple of God” at St. James Hall at eight o’clock the night of the twelth.

  A clergyman who attended the lecture remembered it—and her—years later: “I see a slight woman, who looked ever more petite by comparison with her colossal surroundings, stepping nervously onto that platform, Bible in hand, and I hear her speaking as one inspired during hours which seemed as minutes. . . . All physical attraction has merged with the mental charm. I cannot recall any details of dress or whatnot. But the boldness of that woman’s intuition and the perfect incisiveness of her fervent eloquence have lingered.”

  The Victoria who walked onstage that night was thirty-nine and had added some pounds to her slim figure, which made her appearance less angular. She had also let her short hair grow longer and it hung loosely to her shoulders. She had visibly softened, as had her views.

  Among those that evening watching the latest manifestation of Victoria brave the hisses and graciously accept the applause was a bachelor banker who said he had for years “held precisely the same views as Mrs. Woodhull.” When she announced her intention to offer a lecture series he said he was determined to attend. “I was charmed with her high intellect, and fascinated by her manner,” he said, “and left the lecture hall that night with the determination that if Mrs. Woodhull would marry me, I would certainly make her my wife.”

  His name was John Biddulph Martin—an Oxford graduate, the co-heir to one of Britain’s oldest banks, and an accomplished athlete. He was thirty-six: solid, virile, handsome, wealthy, and sympathetic to the philosophies that Victoria embraced. At middle age, after having survived her ordeals in America, Victoria was ready for the kind of comfort a man like Martin could provide. It was so much the better, then, that she loved him.

  LONDON, OCTOBER 1883

  Martin had been prepared for the likes of Victoria Woodhull by his late younger sister, Penelope, a frustrated writer and women’s rights advocate who married a Church of England vicar named Holland and, after giving birth to a son and a daughter, died in 1873. Her writings, some of which were published by her husband, sounded not unlike Mrs. Woodhull: “As soon as woman raises her voice or uses her pen in defense—however cool and earnest—of her own side of the question, there is an immediate outcry made in order to drown her,” Penelope Holland wrote. “It is so easy for men to talk of ‘the clamour of shrill voices,’ ‘the cackle of female tongues,’ that in the pleasure of so describing them they occasionally forget that they have not answered their opponents’ argument. . . .

  “Since it is undeniably the case that at the present time many women are starving because they are debarred from all professions but one—the overstocked profession of tuition—we think it would have been more generous of men, not to say more humane, if they had treated the latter demand with more consideration. If there have been shrill voices they probably proceed from these starving women.”

  And in words echoing Victoria’s “Scarecrows of Social Freedom” speech, but written before Victoria delivered it, Penelope wrote, “Knowing the horror that most women have of anything approaching irreverence, the Bible has been called out to play the part of a scarecrow on the rich fields of men’s monopolies. . . . Men have had the management of all things human for six thousand years. . . . Has the result been so eminently successful that we need dread a little change?”

  And finally, almost directly quoting Woodhull without ever having heard her, Penelope wrote, “England, we believe, is sufficiently populated, and therefore there can be no duty in needlessly increasing its inhabitants; and we think every woman should be as far as possible induced to abstain from entering into marriages from any other motive than that of sincere and earnest love for the man she marries.”

  John Martin would have heard in Victoria Woodhull’s words in 1877 the echo of his beloved sister. Penelope Holland was not a radical, and neither to John Martin was Victoria Woodhull.

  MARTIN AND VICTORIA’S courtship proceeded slowly. It began in September 1878, nearly a year after he heard her London speech, and did not pick up in earnest until August 1879, after Martin broke off another romance. But his prior involvement was not the only obstacle hindering their developing relationship: Victoria’s past was proving a difficulty.

  In 1878, the Beecher scandal erupted once again in the newspapers in New York and the stories were reprinted in England. After denying for years that she had had an affair with Beecher, Elizabeth Tilton finally wrote a letter to the press saying that everything her husband had said, and by extension everything Victoria had said, was true. Henry Bowen also came out from behind Plymouth Church to accuse Beecher of having had an affair with his first wife. Neither accusation hurt B
eecher, who was more popular than ever, but they did much to revive the scandal. At a time when Victoria least wanted to be associated with it, she was dragged into the press as the scarlet woman responsible for bringing the whole messy business to a head in the first place.

  Victoria was not willing to lose Martin, or have her career once again ruined, over the Beecher imbroglio, so she took the offensive. She issued a statement in the London Times and other journals saying she would give fifty pounds for any letter that contained enough libel to enable her to proceed in court, and five pounds for information leading to the identity of any person circulating slanders about her by word of mouth.

  She also began a furious campaign to reinvent her history—beginning with her name. She began to call herself Victoria Woodhall, in order to conform, she said, to the “old Woodhall family in the West of England,” but it was a transparent attempt to erase her notorious past by changing a vowel. She also published a series of “Life Sketches” that borrowed liberally from Tilton’s flowery biography of her, but she added spicy comments about herself from other writers, including an 1874 endorsement from Elizabeth Cady Stanton that said Victoria’s “acquaintance would be refining to any man.”

  But while Victoria Claflin Woodhull Blood might have convinced her love-struck banker that she was not the scandalous creature who absorbed so much ink in the New York press, she would have a lot of rewriting to do to make herself acceptable to his family. No doubt John Martin was aware of the problems he faced in convincing his parents that this twice divorced, slightly older American woman reformer with two children was a suitable addition to the venerable family’s innermost circle.

  There was also the problem of her family. By 1880, Victoria’s relations had crossed the ocean to join her in London. The raucous brood that had scandalized New York City was now on hand to wreak similar havoc in infinitely more staid London. Martin, who lived at the exclusive Albany in Piccadilly, rented a place in February 1880 next to Victoria’s family’s residence on Warwick Road so he could spend time alone with Victoria. It also saved them both the aggravation of the Claflin clan’s interference.