Notorious Victoria

by Mary Gabriel

  Blood followed a Captain Jackson to Africa in the spring or summer of 1885 after Jackson sent back his accounts of diamond or gold mining. He was with Jackson at Winnebah, West Coast of Africa situated on Gold Coast between Sierra Leone and Lagos. Jackson wrote saying he and Blood “were in a bad condition and were living on husks.” They were after gold. Jackson wrote “Col. Blood has arrived with three pumps and a machine but he is now down in bed with the fever. . . . We have not a da.. n cent.”

  Blood died December 29. He had been working in the drenching rain barely escaping being buried up by the caving in of a mine [and] was so exhausted mentally and physically by the excitement and exposure that upon his return to his house he took [to] his bed. From which he never rose.

  The report also included a note from Captain Jackson, who wrote, “The business here is thus fairly successful but success will not bring back the honest fellow whose life was sacrificed.”

  Colonel Blood, one of Victoria’s imagined pursuers, was dead. It seems impossible that she felt no pity or remorse for the man who had taught her so much.

  AROUND THIS TIME, Victoria retreated from her attackers and became reclusive. Her life revolved around her children, her husband, and her home. As much as she hated to be separated from her husband, she refused to join him when he traveled to the country to see his parents. Increasingly his letters were ones of entreaty, pleading with Victoria to be well, to be happy, to join him in Worcestershire. But she no doubt feared what she perceived to be the continuing disapproval of the Martin family and chose instead to remain, however forlorn, within her ivy-and-brick fortress.

  “I am lonely tonight love . . . my heart cries aloud for your kiss,” she wrote her husband when he was away. “Sometimes I think I shall end it all before you return. This cold unsympathetic atmosphere has at last chilled me through and through. Deception low cunning trickery all going to make up what this world calls life—I am indeed weary of it all my heart turns to you darling husband and longs for the sympathy which I know lies stored up for me when all else fails, Mizpah.”

  Victoria had reason to feel beleaguered. It was now fifteen years since the infamous scandal issue and her imprisonment, but people still refused to allow her to retire into private life. Martin was burdened with letters filled with rumors about his wife’s past, and the press in New York and in England revived the issue periodically, whenever any of its players made the news. With each new accusation or article, Victoria and Martin would be dragged into the old and seemingly hopeless battle for her good name.

  Some of Victoria’s persecutors were familiar: Detective Byrnes mentioned Victoria and Tennessee in a New York newspaper article on adventuresses at the end of 1889, and the suffrage leader Belva Lockwood made derogatory statements about Victoria in an Evening Journal interview in New York. But other critics claiming intimate knowledge of the wicked Woodhull were virtual unknowns to Victoria. A Miss Schoenberg authored a story titled “Two Sirens of New York” about Victoria and Tennessee, and a Mrs. Warner circulated rumors in London that Victoria had ruined her marriage back in New York.

  In most cases, Martin secured an apology or confession from the attackers that they had misspoken or outright lied about his wife, but in the case of Byrnes, Martin finally gave up. Even after meeting the policeman in New York and threatening a suit, he could not get Byrnes to retract his stories about Victoria. Martin received a note saying, “Don’t you think you are following a will of the wisp that you are making a mistake. Stop these nonsensical interviews with the press. It is their profession and you become their food and raiment. Stop it short and the subject will die of inattention. . . . You cannot expect to get any satisfaction out of Byrnes, it would kill him to apologize.” Martin accepted the advice and returned home to London.

  Through it all, Martin remained remarkably patient and committed to his wife. He was naturally shy and reserved and suffered the blows in silence, though a writer said of him later that they wounded his pride, the honor of his house, and the honor of his name. But far from feeling burdened by his job as chief protector, Martin steadfastly defended Victoria with quill and bankbook. He wrote to her, “Be strong & brave, little wife, and trust in God and your husband whose love will bat down all that would do you evil.”

  LONDON, JANUARY 1893

  One way to rouse Victoria from her doldrums was to get her back to work. At fifty-four, she had been solely a wife and mother for nearly ten years—a prolonged period of convalescence after her ordeals in America. By 1892, though, she had regained her fire and was anxious to get back to publishing and the platform. With the help of Martin and her daughter, Zulu, who by then was thirty-one and had changed her first name to Zula, Victoria began planning another newspaper that, like the Weekly, would mix politics, women’s rights, finance, and fiction. It would be called The Humanitarian. She also planned yet another presidential bid after word had reached her in London that there was a new call for her leadership in America.

  By this time, a new generation of women had heard of her, read her memorial and other writings on women’s rights, and found her philosophy to be exactly what they were looking for. The Equal Rights Party was reconstituted and a convention planned for April 1892 in Louisiana, at which the new party members were urged to vote for Victoria Woodhull Martin, “the grandest woman of the nineteenth century for President.”

  Victoria was thrilled by the prospect, writing of the experience: “Shattered in health, reduced in pocket, almost heart-broken, she came to England, with the instinct of a wounded deer, to hide in solitude. Victoria Woodhull found the heart and the home of a great souled English gentleman open to receive her, and afford her a haven of rest and peace.” But after those years of repose she was ready to return to the United States and “accept the ovations awaiting her, not as a personal tribute but as homage to her mission.”

  Victoria began giving a series of interviews and invited journalists into her home in London to discuss her ideas, which had evolved yet again. The principles were basically the same as those she had espoused for two decades: namely, only in a society in which women are equal with men in every way will mothers be spared the heartache of giving birth to a lunatic or a criminal and be saved from a life sentence of misery in a bad marriage. But unlike her position in 1877, the year she left New York, she no longer pinned her hopes on religion. Victoria now looked to social science as her savior.

  Like most of Victoria’s notions, her new philosophy was born in the American reform communities of the 1850s. Its fundamental tenet was that in order to perfect society, breeding had to be controlled. This concept was given the name “stirpiculture” in 1869 by John Humphrey Noyes, the reformer who founded the Oneida community. Throughout most of her career, Victoria had proposed that women be given the right to determine by whom and when to have a child—a sort of personal stirpiculture—but by the 1890s she apparently abandoned her hope that women could be persuaded to assert their rights in the bedroom and proposed instead that society intervene.

  In a piece called The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit, Victoria wrote, most likely with the help of her daughter, “The first principle of the breeder’s art is to weed out the inferior animals to avoid conditions which give a tendency to reversion and then to bring together superior animals under the most favorable conditions. We can produce numerous modifications of structure by careful selection of different animals, and there is no reason why, if society were differently organized, that we should not be able to modify and improve the human species to the same extent.”

  Among other things, she proposed better education for young women to prepare them for motherhood and also improved prenatal and neonatal care. Her ideas raised eyebrows, not because of their eccentricity or their implications for social engineering, but out of fear that the poor would be made strong to the detriment of the wealthy. But the controversy only increased Victoria’s eagerness to be back in the battle of ideas.

  “She was busy with manuscripts,�
�� one interviewer wrote of Victoria after visiting her in 1892 at 17 Hyde Park Gate. “Mrs. Martin is still handsome, though time has now slightly touched her brown hair with grey. Her features are regular, and her face is an index to her feelings. She enters into the spirit of her words with warmth and earnestness, yet she so controls her voice that one is impressed not only with the argument, but the eloquence which accompanies it. She is so full of her subject that her words come rapidly, her face lighting up as she speaks, and her eyes sparkling with enthusiasm.”

  Victoria and her third husband, John Biddulph Martin, tried to insulate themselves from the attacks that continued to be directed against her after she moved to England. Their home was a sumptuous sanctuary south of London’s Hyde Park. (Holland-Martin Family Archives, ca. 1893)

  John Martin must have been delighted to see his wife so happy and energized. He eagerly wrote her of The Humanitarian’s success: “Hum on display at Paddington, 3 or 4 copies, the man said it was selling well, & that he had ordered a larger supply this month. At Reading it was very well shown, & the man said it was selling, but neither of them would give exact figures.”

  His enthusiasm, Zula’s support, and her own cloistered existence, however, worked to delude Victoria about the significance of her return to public life. She imagined that the time was finally right for her to receive the recognition she believed she deserved. On January 6, 1893, she wrote: “The gestation period is over. The new birth began in 1893. The travail pains are past; the nativity passes into the Epiphany. . . . NIKH—Victoria! The name is prophetic. Already it is on the lips of the vanguard.”

  That said, Victoria prepared a triumphant return to the United States for a lecture tour. She and Martin arrived in New York City in the fall of 1893, where Victoria had booked Carnegie Hall to deliver her lecture on “The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race.”

  She had spoken already that year in London at St. James Hall to a receptive audience and was no doubt eager to be back onstage in the city where she had once attracted record crowds. Those who gathered at Carnegie Hall may have heard her speak when she was still the scandalous high priestess of free love and the frightening labor radical who threatened revolution, but if they went that night expecting to hear that woman again, they were disappointed. The rose that the younger Victoria had worn at her neck was replaced by violets, and the orator who had once pranced up and down the platform engaging the audience in heated debate, not bothering to refer to her written notes, now stood still at the center of the stage, using glasses to read a scholarly and dry printed text.

  The speech fell flat. John persuaded her to cancel her tour and they went on to Chicago, where he was the British commissioner for the Columbian Exposition. Victoria’s speaking career was over. Despite her excitement at the prospect of returning to the platform, the Carnegie Hall address would be her last.

  LONDON, FEBRUARY 1894

  In February 1893, John Martin wrote to the trustees of the British Museum complaining that six books and pamphlets in its holdings were “obscene and defamatory” and had libeled his wife by referring to her as Theodore Tilton’s lover and as a blackmailing queen of the prostitutes during her years in New York. He said that the publications were listed in the museum’s catalogue and asked that they be removed from its shelves and taken out of circulation. He said their mere presence at the British Museum lent them credibility and, in so doing, caused him and his wife “great pain and damage.”

  A month later, Mr. and Mrs. John Biddulph Martin did not feel satisfied by the museum’s response to their request, and a year later, in February 1894, they were in court, having filed a suit based on two of the six publications that they said egregiously libeled Mrs. Martin: The Beecher Tilton Scandal, A Complete History of the Case from Nov. 2, 1872 to the Present and The Story of Henry Ward Beecher and Theodore Tilton and Mrs. Tilton with Portraits.

  The Martins sought damages for libel and an injunction against further circulation of the publications. The museum denied any libel, saying that the books were placed on the shelves under statutory powers and that when they were acquired it was not known that they contained any libelous or scandalous material. On the face of it, the case was an academic dispute of seemingly little interest to anyone beyond those directly involved, but because it involved Victoria and the venerable British Museum, it was reported widely as part tragedy, part farce.

  VICTORIA WOODHULL MARTIN might not have been able to draw a crowd or delight an audience on the lecture circuit any longer, but she could still fill a courtroom. On February 23, 1894, every major London daily newspaper sent a reporter to cover the case of Martin v. British Museum. The oak benches in the amphitheaterlike courtroom were crowded with spectators eager to watch the unprecedented proceedings.

  The case marked the first time in its long history that the British Museum had been sued for libel. If the museum were found guilty, its famous reading room and newspaper room might be closed—at least temporarily—and hundreds of lawyers unleashed in its stacks to sniff out other libelous holdings. The implications for the museum were enormous. For Victoria, the case amounted to nothing less than a final attempt at vindication. The halls of justice in Great Britain were arenas that Mrs. Martin had not previously entered in her long battle to shed the reputation of the person she had been in the United States. The court case might also work to silence the persecutors who continued to try to wreck her happiness.

  One of the two lawyers for the Martins opened the case. Sir Richard Webster said his clients were compelled to come to court to clear the character of Mrs. Martin, who was accused of the grossest immorality in the books in question. He said the charge in her case was particularly dreadful because she had spent her life working to emancipate her sex and uphold its purity. He described her early life as a teenage wife and mother, bound in marriage to an inebriate. He spoke of her career on Wall Street, in Washington, and as a publisher. And he described the anonymous pursuers who dogged her to that very day with scandalous tales—printed and spoken—aimed at discrediting her for political reasons. He said that the plaintiffs, from their high position, did not seek heavy damages per se except in the form of an apology or expression of regret on the part of the museum.

  Victoria was the first witness called. After questioning by her own lawyers, which established her history and high standing in London, she was turned over to the counsel for the defense. Attorney General Sir Charles Russell quickly shifted the tone of the hearing from one of solicitude to confrontation. During two days of grilling, Sir Charles played the role—seemingly with great pleasure—of inquisitor, forcing Mrs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull Blood Martin to describe her varied career as clairvoyant, spiritualist healer, banker, stockbroker, newspaper editor, women’s rights crusader, presidential candidate, and Ludlow Street jail inmate.

  The London Times reported, “It is next to impossible to give the effect of the witness’s cross-examination.”

  Sir Charles prodded, “And would it be true to say that you were a public character in America?”

  “It would be,” the witness responded.

  “Taking a very prominent part in all the movements, social and political that were going on in America?”

  “I was.”

  “Or to say that it was a career of what would be called a very remarkable kind?”

  “It was a very laborious career,” she demurred.

  “Do not let your modesty prevent you from endorsing what I am saying,” the lawyer argued, “that it was of a very remarkable kind.”

  In fact, describing her remarkable career, among other things, was exactly what the witness was on the stand to do, but in response she offered only a fatigued “Perhaps you think so.”

  “And at one time were you a clairvoyant?” the defense lawyer asked.

  “Not at one time—all the time.”

  “And still are?”

  “And still am.”

  “Did you state to Mr. Tilton yourself, ‘My spiritual v
ision dates back as early as my third year’?”

  “I have no recollection of stating that to Mr. Tilton, but my spiritual vision does date back further than that. I have no wish to deny that whatever.”

  “Was your spiritual guardian as you supposed Demosthenes?”

  “I do not think I shall tell you who he is or what he was. I do not think I am called upon to do that.”

  “You do not desire to say,” Sir Charles stated before trying another approach. “Did you say that at last, ‘after patiently waiting on this spirit guide for 20 years, one day in 1860 [(sic)] during a temporary sojourn at Pittsburgh, and while [I] was sitting at a marble table he suddenly appeared to [me] and wrote on the table in English letters the name “Demosthenes”?’”

  “I am going to say to you now, you can be as unjust as necessary.”

  “Did you state that occurred to you?” he pressured.

  “As you have read it my memory does not connect it but I furthermore want to say again what my beliefs are. I am willing to state them but to be brought into the witness box to state them . . .”

  “Aye or no?”

  “I say I have no recollection of making such a statement as you have put.”

  “Did Demosthenes appear to you and write to you? . . . Did an apparition appear to you?”

  “There is one appearing to me now.”

  The courtroom erupted in laughter.

  “Not a ghostly apparition I hope?”

  “I do not know,” she said in the direction of the elderly, distinguished judge, Baron Pollock, who sat above her at his bench in a white wig and black robe. “I am waiting to see what your conclusions are.”

  Mrs. Martin had no intention of describing for the delectation of the British press, scribbling in the gloom under the courtroom’s gaslit chandeliers, her intercourse with the netherworld—as vast and as frequent as it may have been. But Sir Charles was not to be put off his line of questioning by evasive responses from the witness.