The Square Pegs (20 page)

When a friend found two pamphlets on the Beecher-Tilton scandal, with ample references to the part played in it by Victoria Woodhull, on the shelves of the British Museum, and reported it to Victoria, she begged her husband to act. On February 24, 1894, Martin brought suit against the trustees of the British Museum for libel. The trial, such as it was, lasted five days. Defended by a peer of the realm, Victoria was described as a victim of constant persecution married by force to “an inebriate” at an early age, unjustly incarcerated merely because she had taken “a strong view” of Reverend Beecher’s adultery, maligned because she had bravely sought to elevate the status of her sex. The British Museum, which had never before been brought to court for libel, was represented by a renowned attorney who was also one of its trustees. Though his cross-examination of Victoria was relentless and detailed, her answers were so discursive and vague as to make the usually attentive London
Times
confess to its readers that it could not grasp her testimony. In the end the jury agreed that libel had been committed, but with no intent at injury, and awarded Victoria twenty shillings in damages.

Ever vigilant, Victoria continued to incite her husband to defend her good name even when foul aspersions were cast from great distances. Time and again, Victoria took Martin from his coin collection and from the history of his family’s bank that he was preparing, and induced him to accompany her to America to have justice done. When the Brooklyn Eagle featured a series of popular articles by the stern and exacting Thomas Byrnes, celebrated police inspector, on infamous female intriguers, and when one of these intriguers turned out to be Victoria Woodhull, she hastened to New York with Martin for a showdown with Byrnes. Despite her protests of “a great injustice,” despite Martin’s demands for retraction, Byrnes would not budge. Facts were facts, and he had published facts. Martin was dismayed. “I’m very sorry you will do nothing.” Byrnes was stone. “I am sorry, too, but I am a public official and any statement I make I may be held responsible for. And you have the courts to which you can have recourse at once.” Whereupon Victoria and Martin retreated to finish their battle in the press. They told reporters that Byrnes had been cordial and apologetic. Byrnes heard this with “no little surprise” and announced that he had been neither cordial nor apologetic.

But not all of the Martins’ married life was spent commuting to America in Victoria’s defense. There were happier days in the English years when Victoria sponsored brilliant dinners and evenings at Hyde Park Gate for her growing number of London friends and followers. And, while she occupied herself by again running for president of the United States in 1892 (mostly by correspondence), by planning an autobiography she never wrote, and by publishing a proper monthly called
The Humanitarian
, John Martin basked in the reflected pleasure of her activity, stirring himself only to fulfill his obligations as head of the Royal Statistical Society.

In his fifty-sixth year Martin fell ill. After a slow recovery he was advised to vacation at Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, off Africa. There, in a weakened condition, he contracted pneumonia, and on March 20, 1897, died. Victoria’s daughter, Zulu Maud, wrote his obituary for
The Humanitarian
. “Theirs was a perfect union,” she concluded, “marred only by persecution.”

Four years later, Victoria, possessed now of an inheritance valued at over $800,000, sold her home at Hyde Park Gate and moved to her late husband’s country manor at Bredon’s Norton, Worcestershire. Her ancient valley-residence, thickly populated with servants, looked out upon a vast estate and the river Avon. Without her husband’s restraining influence, she quickly reverted to form. While he was still alive she had in her monthly denounced socialism and all advanced ideas. Now, at sixty-three, insisting that a “charming woman has no age,” she plunged into a whirl of reform.

Victoria gave over a portion of her estate to an amazon project called Bredon’s Norton College, in which young ladies were invited to study agriculture. She flayed the English school system as outmoded and opened her own progressive kindergartens for village youngsters in the vicinity. She again patronized spiritualism and presided at a salon for those who believed as she believed. In 1912 she offered an antique silver trophy and $5,000 to the first person who would successfully fly the Atlantic Ocean. In 1914 she contributed $5,000 toward the purchase of Sulgrave Manor, the home of George Washington’s English ancestors, built in 1531, which was presented to the Anglo-American Association. In 1915, with World War I under way, she worked for the Red Cross and at fund-raising campaigns for Belgians and Armenians, and sent Woodrow Wilson a stiff cable reading: “Why is Old Glory absent from shop windows in England today when other flags are flying?”

At war’s end she was very old and very alone. Her daughter was ever beside her, but Tennessee remained her closest friend. Tennessee, brash and amoral as ever, had fared well in the English climate. In 1885, during a seance with a wealthy, elderly English widower named Francis Cook, she disclosed that the late Mrs. Cook was urging her husband to marry his medium. The wedding took place at once. Cook, who amassed his money importing shawls from India after Queen Victoria made them fashionable, possessed an expensive house near the Thames and another in Portugal. When he was knighted, Tennessee became Lady Cook. The title did not inhibit her. Upon her husband’s death in 1901 she was left a fortune of $2,000,000, and she disposed of it with reckless philanthropy. She traveled regularly to the United States, scolding Theodore Roosevelt in person for not doing something about woman suffrage, attempting to establish a chain of homes for reformed prostitutes in the South, trying to build a “school for fathers” on Long Island, and endeavoring to raise a female army of 150,000 in 1915. She died in January 1923, and though she left a tearful Victoria $500,000 richer, she deprived her of the last link to the past.

Victoria knew that her time was near. But she would not accept the fact. She felt most alive during afternoons when in her white sports-car she urged her nervous chauffeur to drive at recklessly high speeds. In her manor house she tried to ward off death with innumerable eccentricities. Like Train, she refused to shake hands with visitors for fear that they might contaminate her. At nights she avoided her bed as she would a coffin, preferring to sleep in a rocking chair.

But on the morning of June 20, 1927, while English women were awakening and American women were going to sleep, all fully possessed of the equal rights for which she had so long fought, death came to Victoria Claflin Woodhull Martin. In three months she would have been ninety years old. Her epitaph had been prepared long years before, by an admiring editor in Troy, New York. He had written history’s verdict in a sentence:

“She ought to be hanged, and then have a monument erected to her memory at the foot of the gallows.”

V

The Forty-Niner Who Abolished Congress

“We do hereby Order and Direct Major General Scott, the Commander-in-Chief of our Armies, immediately on receipt of this our Decree, to proceed with a suitable force and clear the Halls of Congress.”

JOSHUA NORTON

On April 15, 1876, Dom Pedro II, who had the appearance of an Old Testament patriarch and was to be the last emperor of Brazil, disembarked in New York for a three-month visit to the United States. Though Secretary of State Hamilton Fish was on hand to meet him, the studious South American sovereign insisted that he wished no official receptions, but preferred to do his sightseeing as a private citizen.

Within two days, at his own request, Dom Pedro was on a train to the Far West, eagerly peering through his window for glimpses of redskins or Mormon harems. In San Francisco he attended a performance of
King Lear
, visited Chinatown, translated several Hebrew scrolls in a synagogue on Sutter Street, and generally did as he pleased. But when the University of California, across the bay, solicited his attendance at an official reception in his honor, he who had once remarked: “If I were not an emperor, I should like to be a schoolteacher,” found that he could not refuse. As it turned out, it was fortunate that he accepted the invitation. For it was on the California campus that Dom Pedro was welcomed, for the first time since his arrival in the United States, by one of his own rank and station who would give him his best understanding of democracy.

The ceremonies in the University of California assembly hall were about to begin when Dom Pedro, seated beside the institution’s president and most learned professors, was suddenly surprised by the approach of another guest, more royal, more regal, than himself. The visitor, a bearded, stocky, serious, middle-aged man, was attired in a black, high hat surmounted by a green ostrich-plume, a frayed, blue long-tailed coat replete with gold epaulets and brass buttons, a pair of outsized shoes slit at the sides, and a heavy saber dangling from his waist. Soberly, he ascended the platform, and, though uninvited, took an empty seat near the dignitaries. The audience of students buzzed and giggled. Dom Pedro was seen to blink at the newcomer. Hastily an introduction was effected and thus Dom Pedro, to his utter amazement, found himself exchanging formal courtesies with one who was described as “His Imperial Highness, Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.”

Though Norton’s true identity was soon revealed to the Emperor, he was no less astonished. For of all the sights he would see and the men he would meet during his 9,000-mile journey through the United States the admirable water-supply system in Chicago, the appalling insane-asylum in St. Louis, the delightful dinner with Longfellow in Cambridge, the gracious interviews with President Grant, the visits to Mammoth Cave and Sing Sing Prison and the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia no one and nothing would prove more memorable than this chance acquaintance with North America’s self-appointed Emperor. Norton I, as Dom Pedro would learn, had publicly abolished both houses of Congress and both major political parties, had printed his own bonds and levied his own taxes, and yet not only had been tolerated by his more democratic Americans, but also had often been sheltered, fed, and clothed at their expense. In the person of this improbable being, Dom Pedro saw perhaps the truest representation of American democracy at work which he was to see in his entire three-month visit.

Emperor Norton had lived fifty-seven years and reigned benevolently seventeen of them before he met, in the Brazilian ruler, the first and last royal personage he was to know in his lifetime. But unlike Dom Pedro, Emperor Norton was of plebeian stock. His father, John Norton, an English Jew, was a farmer. His mother, Sarah, was of humble parentage. Joshua Abraham Norton, the second of two sons, was born in London on February 4, 1819. His only relationship to royalty was that, at birth, he became a subject of George III.

In 1820, when Joshua Norton was two, his family joined four thousand other English colonists in a pioneering migration to Grahamstown, South Africa. There his father bought and tilled a farm, and eventually, helped found Algoa Bay, now known as Port Elizabeth. By the time Joshua Norton was twenty, his father had expanded his interests to part ownership of a general store in Cape Town which specialized in ships’ supplies. Of young Norton’s African years we know little. He enlisted for a short term as a colonial soldier. He worked as a clerk in his father’s store. When his father began to outfit vessels of his own, he took charge of a two-masted brigantine and in 1844 sailed it to Peru and Chile, where he lost money on the venture.

When Joshua Norton was thirty his father followed his mother to an early grave. The business that Norton inherited proved of little value, and he soon liquidated it and sailed for Brazil, where he is thought to have made quick profits on several merchandising investments. Meanwhile, near the city of Sacramento in far-off California, a workman had discovered gold on Captain John Sutter’s properties. Immediately, the great gold-rush was on, and almost a quarter of a million persons were on the way to California. Norton heard the sensational news in Brazil. Without roots, with a normal hunger for sudden wealth, he decided to participate in the gamble.

With $40,000 in savings and inheritance in his trunk, Norton boarded the small German schooner
Franziska
at Rio de Janeiro. He and six other passengers endured 101 monotonous, impatient days at sea. But on the bleak, cold Friday morning of November 23, 1849, their little vessel plodded past the Golden Gate and lay at anchor amid the numerous abandoned and neglected ships dotting San Francisco Bay.

Norton, tall and imposing in his purple cape, joined his fellow passengers in a longboat and was rowed ashore at Montgomery Street, the very center of the business district. The sight that met his eyes as he proceeded into the boom town was unforgettable. Only a year before, San Francisco had been a sleepy village of several hundred inhabitants and fifty adobe huts. Overnight it had been transformed into a bustling, unruly, filthy Mecca for gold diggers. Canvas tents, rude lean-tos, wooden shanties, and brick hotels housed twenty thousand visitors. The muddy, winding streets, filled with rubbish, cluttered with unpacked merchandise, crowded with wagons pushing to the mines, were flanked by an incredible variety of stores, brothels, warehouses, and saloons. In the jammed streets, raucously shoving and pushing, were not only native Americans, white, black, brown, and red, but also pigtailed Chinese, turbaned Hindus, serape-covered Spaniards, Australians, Malayans, Italians, Russians, and Scandinavians. Amid the influx of foreigners the fastidious and very English Joshua Norton was hardly noticed at all. He located a hotel and signed the register, giving his occupation as “traveling merchant.”

If Norton intended to become a forty-niner, he soon enough sensed that El Dorado was more readily accessible in the business life of San Francisco than in the backbreaking and precarious gold-fields of Upper California. As the population increased from 20,000 to 90,000, as the demands for food, clothing, construction material, and mining supplies grew louder, Norton realized that a fortune might be made by shrewd trading. But this was a risk even for an experienced businessman like himself. The commodity market was utterly unpredictable. Importing was a costly business. One’s judgment had to be sound, for lack of storage space required immediate auctioning of goods. If a scarcity existed at the moment, tremendous profits were possible. If the market happened to be glutted, great losses were inevitable. Still, the population was growing, the need was insistent, and Joshua Norton decided to chance it.