The Square Pegs (18 page)

When Victoria finally appeared at Steinway Hall on the evening of November 20, 1871, it was not Beecher, but Tilton who introduced her. This pacified her sufficiently to make her omit, in her talk on social freedom, any mention of the scandal. As it turned out, her speech proved inflammatory enough. She called marriage laws “despotic, remnants of the barbaric age in which they were originated.” She predicted that free love would be the religion of the next generation. There was considerable heckling from the vast, unruly audience, and during the speech some voice bellowed: “Are you a free lover?” Victoria left her text to shout back: “Yes! I am a free lover!” Half the audience cheered, the other half booed. Angrily, speaking extemporaneously, Victoria went on:

“I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please! And with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere… .”

Tilton continued to conciliate Victoria in every way. He wrote lectures for her. He wrote, and rewrote, from notes supplied by Colonel Blood, a nauseatingly saccharine biography of her entitled “An Account of Mrs. Woodhull,” which was printed as a special
Golden Age Tract
. Finally, after swimming with her at Coney Island and spending long evenings conversing with her, Tilton became Victoria’s lover. Whether this consummation of their intimacy was a studied effort by Tilton to placate her, or the natural result of his proximity to her seductive person, we will never know. But the affair occurred, and Victoria acknowledged it publicly several years later, much to Tilton’s embarrassment and his wife’s distress. A reporter on the
Chicago Times
asked her for an opinion of Theodore Tilton.

“I ought to know Mr. Tilton,” Victoria replied frankly. “He was my devoted lover for more than half a year, and I admit that during that time he was my accepted lover. A woman who could not love Theodore Tilton, especially in reciprocation of a generous, overwhelming affection such as he was capable of bestowing, must be indeed dead to all the sweeter impulses of our nature. I could not resist his inspiring fascinations.”

“Do I understand, my dear Madame,” asked the incredulous reporter, “that the fascination was mutual and irresistible?”

“You will think so,” said Victoria, “when I tell you that so enamored and infatuated with each other were we that for three months we were hardly out of each other’s sight day or night. He slept every night for three months, in my arms. Of course we were lovers devoted, true and faithful lovers.”

However, Victoria disengaged herself from Tilton’s embraces long enough to set in motion a new scheme that might enhance her chances of becoming president of the United States. She mentioned to Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Hooker, and other gullible feminists that the Suffrage Association would be wise to create its own political party and sponsor its own candidates for public office. The idea thrilled the suffragettes, and at once they printed announcements summoning delegates to a convention at Steinway Hall on May 9 and 10, 1872. “We believe that the time has come for the formation of a new political party whose principles shall meet the issues of the hour and represent equal rights for all.” To these announcements, at Victoria’s suggestion, Mrs. Stanton appended the all-powerful name of Susan B. Anthony.

Miss Anthony was lecturing in Illinois when she picked up the latest issue of the
Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly
and read that she was sponsoring a new political party. She perceived, at once, Victoria’s ulterior purpose. Victoria was making a daring bid to reorganize the suffragette movement so that she might take it over. Miss Anthony acted with firmness and dispatch. She telegraphed the association to remove her name from the list of sponsors. She told them that she was coming to New York on the first train to protect their interests. She wrote them: “Mrs. Woodhull has the advantage of us because she has her paper, but she persistently means to run our craft into her port and none other.”

Once in New York, Miss Anthony made it known that none of Victoria’s vast and varied following, which has been organized as the Victoria League, would be eligible to attend the suffragette convention. Mrs. Stanton thought Miss Anthony unreasonable, but Miss Anthony would not budge. If there was to be a suffrage convention, it would be for legitimate suffragettes only.

The suffrage convention began on schedule in Steinway Hall, with Miss Anthony in the chair and Mrs. Stanton delivering the keynote address. Victoria was nowhere to be seen. As the business of the meeting continued into the night, and neared adjournment, there was a sudden commotion backstage. Dramatically Victoria Woodhull materialized, determined to be heard by the great assembly.

As Miss Anthony rushed to block her way, Victoria faced the audience and made a motion that the convention adjourn and reconvene the following day in Apollo Hall, which she had leased for her supporters. From the floor, someone seconded the motion. Hastily Victoria called for a vote, and was answered by a scattering of ayes. But Miss Anthony was equal to the crisis. She spoke rapidly and strongly. There could be no vote, for there had been no motion by a legitimate member of the Suffrage Association. “Nothing that this person has said will be recorded in the minutes,” she cried. “The convention will now adjourn to meet tomorrow at eleven o’clock
in this hall
.” Victoria tried to be heard again, but Miss Anthony overrode her, shouting to the janitor to turn down the gas lights. In a matter of minutes the hall was darkened, emptied of delegates, and Victoria was alone. Defeated at her own game, she had lost the support of the suffrage movement forever.

The following morning, when the Suffrage Association, cleansed and chastened, met again, it unanimously elected Susan B. Anthony as its leader. Elsewhere, a determined Victoria Woodhull and her aides were busily herding 660 followers defected suffragettes, spiritualists, socialists, members of Section 12 of the International, free lovers, and freelance cranks into Apollo Hall for the purpose of creating a vigorously new political party.

Judge Reymart, of New York, presided. He introduced Stephen Pearl Andrews, who moved that the new convention call itself the Equal Rights Party. His motion was carried. Then other orators took over. There was a speech in favor of a minimum wage. There was a poem that deplored bribery and corruption. And, by evening, at last there was Victoria.

To thunderous applause she spoke against the corporations, against the Vanderbilts and Astors, against the two-party system, against the republic of men. With evangelical fervor she reached the climax of her address:

“From this convention will go forth a tide of revolution that shall sweep over the whole world. What does freedom mean? The inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What is equality? It is that every person shall have the same opportunities to exercise the inalienable rights belonging to the individual. And what justice? That the alienable rights belonging to individuals shall be jealously guarded against encroachment. Shall we be slaves to escape revolution? Away with such weak stupidity! A revolution shall sweep with resistless force, if not fury, over the whole country, to purge it of political trickery, despotic assumption, and all industrial injustice. Who will dare to attempt to unlock the luminous portals of the future with the rusty key of the past!”

The moment had come. Judge Carter, of Ohio, leaped to the edge of the platform. “I nominate Victoria C. Woodhull for president of the United States!” he shouted. “All in favor of the nomination say aye!” Apollo Hall trembled under the roar of ayes. Hundreds were on their feet, screaming, cheering, waving hats, handkerchiefs, as Tennessee Claflin, herself a candidate for Congress, led four hundred Negro soldiers and a band up the chaotic aisles.

When the tumult had been stilled, and order restored, Victoria made a short, modest speech of acceptance and thanks. The chair then opened nominations for vice-president. A man in the audience offered up the name of a prominent redskin, Chief Spotted Tail. An emancipated woman shouted that Colonel Blood belonged on the ticket with Victoria. Moses Hull, of Kentucky, nominated Frederick Douglass, a onetime fugitive slave who had acquired an international reputation as a reformer, author, and lecturer. “We have had the oppressed sex represented by Woodhull,” stated Hull. “We must have the oppressed race represented by Douglass!” The candidates were put to a vote, and it was Douglass for vice-president by an overwhelming majority.

Later, when ratification of the ticket occurred, Tennessee’s band played again. The music was “Comin’ thro’ the Rye.” But the words, boomed forth by hundreds of hoarse voices, were new and exciting:

Yes! Victoria we’ve selected

For our chosen head:

With Fred Douglass on the ticket

We will raise the dead.

Then around them let us rally

Without fear or dread,

And next March, we’ll put the Grundys

In their little bed.

But the flush of recognition was only briefly enjoyed by Victoria. Though a Kentucky congressman soberly announced that female agitation might give Mrs. Woodhull his state by twenty thousand votes, the Suffrage Association made it clear that their female members and their members’ husbands were going to boycott the Equal Rights Party. Though Colonel Blood estimated that the shrewd nomination of Douglass might give Victoria the lion’s share of the four million Negro votes, Douglass himself quickly shattered this dream. According to Mrs. Blake’s diary, “Douglass knew nothing of the performance until, horrified, he read about it in the morning papers.” At once he wrote an open letter to the press declining the nomination. The New York papers, as one, ridiculed Victoria in cartoon and print. Official sources were even less tolerant. The Governor of Massachusetts made it clear that he would not permit Mrs. Woodhull to campaign in Boston. “You might as well have the undressed women of North Street on the stage there.”

Immediately, it became apparent that by legitimizing her candidacy for president, Victoria had weakened her position. Before the nomination, she had been regarded as a progressive, if somewhat bold, eccentric. With the nomination, and a following that did not include the more stable suffragettes, she was regarded as a potentially dangerous radical. The rent on her brokerage house was raised $1,000 a year, and it had to be shut down.
Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly
, neglected and already in debt, lost the support of Commodore Vanderbilt. Financial advertising was withdrawn, and the periodical was temporarily suspended. The landlord of the house on Thirty-eighth Street, hinting outside pressure, asked Victoria and her family to leave the premises. Neighbors were muttering about prostitution, and certain people had objected to Victoria’s muckracking against the “rottenness of the social condition.” No hotel or boardinghouse would take her in, and one night she and her family were forced to camp in the street. At last, relatives located a residence, but Victoria’s troubles continued to mount.

Theodore Tilton had had enough of pacifying and loving the presidential candidate, and he was through. He said that he broke with Victoria because he resented her public remarks against suffragettes who were his old friends. She said that she broke with Tilton because he preferred to support Horace Greeley, rather than herself, for the presidency. Meanwhile, two of Beecher’s most respected sisters savagely fought Victoria in print. Earlier Catharine Beecher, resentful of Victoria’s hints at scandal, had warned her: “Remember, Victoria Woodhull, that I shall strike you dead.” She struck through her more famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had become wealthy and world renowned twenty years before on the publication of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. The puritanical Mrs. Stowe, who had only recently raised a storm of protest in England by charging Lord Byron with incest (in defense of Lady Byron, who was her friend), now set her sights on Victoria. She published a series of sharp articles against Victoria in
Christian Union
, and she published a novel in which a thinly disguised Victoria was portrayed in anything but a flattering light. Victoria was stung. Angered by defeat and persecution, she decided to retaliate in such a way as to wound her enemies and regain her position of national prominence on the eve of the elections.

It was September 11, 1872, and Victoria, despite the Governor’s ban, was in Boston to address the American Association of Spiritualists. Though she was president of the organization, she wished to speak about something more earthly than spiritualism. For the first time naming names, she revealed the adulterous affair between Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton. “Henry Ward Beecher suffered severely,” wrote the
Memphis Appeal
. “She said … he preached every Sunday to his mistresses, members of his church, sitting in their pews, robed in silks and satins and high respectability!” Though Boston and New York papers covered her speech, only one dared mention it in print. The
Boston Journal
reported that a “prominent New York clergyman was personally accused of the most hideous crimes.”

Met by this conspiracy of silence, Victoria took matters into her own hands. If the popular press would not be honest, then she would “ventilate the scandal” in her own periodical. With the assistance of Blood and Tennessee she revived
Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly
, and on the morning of October 28, 1872, she had her sensation at last. She headlined the entire issue, dated five days later: “THE BEECHER-TILTON SCANDAL CASE. The Detailed Statement of the Whole Matter by Mrs. Woodhull.”

She wrote: “I intend that this article shall burst like a bomb-shell into the ranks of the moralistic social camp.” She pretended that her story had been originally given to a Boston paper, which had suppressed it She repeated everything that she had heard from Mrs. Stanton and from Tilton. She made it plain that she did not disapprove of Beecher’s affair with Elizabeth after all, she was an advocate of free love. What she objected to was his sanctimoniousness. But she tried to be understanding of Beecher’s passion. “With his demanding physical nature, and with the terrible restrictions upon a clergyman’s life,” she could not see fit to condemn him entirely. She even went so far as to praise “the immense physical potency of Mr. Beecher … Passional starvation, enforced on such a nature, so richly endowed … is a horrid cruelty… . Every great man of Mr. Beecher’s type, has had in the past, and will ever have, the need for and the right to, the loving manifestations of many women.”