The Scarlet Sisters

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In memory of my beloved daughter, Leah, and for her wonderful daughter, Teagan

Cast of Characters

T
HE
S
CARLET
S
ISTERS:
Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee (Tennie) Claflin

C
ANNING
W
OODHULL:
Victoria’s first husband, a doctor and a drunk

B
YRON AND
Z
ULA
M
AUD:
Victoria and Canning Woodhull’s children

C
OLONEL
J
AMES
H. B
LOOD:
Victoria’s second husband, a Civil War hero and free lover

J
OHN
B
IDDULPH
M
ARTIN:
Victoria’s third husband, devoted and rich

The Claflin Clan

R
EUBEN
B
UCK
C
LAFLIN:
Father to Victoria and Tennessee, snake oil salesman

R
OXANNA
C
LAFLIN, A.K.A.
A
NNIE:
Mother

U
TICA
C
LAFLIN:
Victoria and Tennessee’s sister

M
EG
M
ILES AND
P
OLLY
S
PARR:
Two older sisters

D
R.
S
PARR:
Polly’s husband and blackmailer

Suffragists

S
USAN
B. A
NTHONY:
Pushed women’s suffrage at the expense of other freedom

E
LIZABETH
C
ADY
S
TANTON:
Supported Woodhull’s free love position

L
UCY
S
TONE:
Emphatically did not support free love

L
UCRETIA
M
OTT:
The
grande dame
of the movement

P
AULINA
W
RIGHT
D
AVIS:
Rich suffragist and Spiritualist

Tycoons

C
ORNELIUS
V
ANDERBILT:
Thought to be Tennie’s lover

J
IM
F
ISK:
Flamboyant robber baron

J
AY
G
OULD:
Fisk’s dour sidekick

D
ANIEL
D
REW:
The King of Watered Stock

H
ENRY
C
LEWS:
Cashed the famous check that began the sisters’ career

Abolitionists, Anarchists, Radicals, and Communists

F
REDERICK
D
OUGLASS:
Former slave, nominated by the Equal Rights Party to run as vice president with Victoria Woodhull in 1872

B
EN
B
UTLER:
Yankee Civil War general, progressive congressman, friend of Lincoln and Grant, supporter of the sisters

S
TEPHEN
P
EARL
A
NDREWS:
Abolitionist, anarchist, philosopher, linguist, free lover, and mentor to the sisters

K
ARL
M
ARX:
International revolutionary socialist and onetime friend

B
ENJAMIN
T
UCKER:
Well-known anarchist who claimed he lost his virginity to Victoria

G
EORGE
F
RANCIS
T
RAIN:
Eccentric, controversial, racist millionaire who gave money to suffragists

Journalists

H
ORACE
G
REELEY:
Editor and publisher of the
New-York Daily Tribune

W
HITELAW
R
EID:
Succeeded Greeley at the
Tribune

C
HARLES
D
ANA:
Publisher of the New York
Sun

J
OHNNY
G
REEN:
New York
Sun
city editor and Tennie’s boyfriend

The Beecher Dynasty

H
ENRY
W
ARD
B
EECHER:
The most famous preacher in America in the latter half of the nineteenth century

H
ARRIET
B
EECHER
S
TOWE:
Beecher’s sister, author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and of a vitriolic roman à clef about the sisters

C
ATHARINE
B
EECHER:
Spinster sister to Harriet, author, opponent of women’s suffrage

I
SABELLA
B
EECHER
H
OOKER:
Half sister to the Beechers; renegade supporter of Victoria Woodhull

Major Figures in the Tilton-Beecher Scandal

T
HEODORE
T
ILTON:
Handsome abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, thought to be Victoria’s lover

E
LIZABETH
“L
IB
” T
ILTON:
Wife of Theodore, accused of adultery with Beecher

F
RANK
M
OULTON AND
E
MMA
M
OULTON:
Major witnesses in the trial

B
ESSIE
T
URNER:
Former Tilton family servant and paid-off Beecher witness

Rivals to the Sisters

A
NTHONY
C
OMSTOCK:
Self-appointed one-man Victorian vice squad

T
HOMAS
B
YRNES:
The “World’s Most Famous Detective” of the era

H
ENRY
J
AMES:
Victorian-era man of letters, fictionalized the sisters

L
UTHER
C
HALLIS:
Wall Street financier who sued the sisters for libel

B
ENJAMIN
T
RACY:
Beecher’s meaner-than-a-junkyard-dog lawyer

H
ENRY
C. B
OWEN:
Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church president, who hired Beecher and fired Tilton

Royalty

S
IR
F
RANCIS
C
OOK:
Husband of Tennie, one of the richest men in England

S
IR
T
HOMAS
B
EECHAM:
Founder of the London Philharmonic, married to the sisters’ grandniece

His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII

The King and Queen of Portugal, circa 1886

Introducing Two Improper Victorians

Yes, I am a free lover! 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 can frame any right to interfere.

—Victoria Claflin Woodhull, November 20, 1871, Steinway Hall

For myself I have at least one financial opinion, and that is that gold is cash. To have plenty of it [gold] is to be pretty nearly independent of everything and everybody.

—Tennessee Claflin, 1871

In 2008 everyone was talking about a momentous historic possibility: the Democratic Party nominating a woman, Hillary Clinton, for president, and an African American man, Barack Obama, for vice president. At the time, I read a squib in a newspaper saying it had already been done, back in 1872. An obscure third party had nominated a woman, Victoria Woodhull, with the famed former slave Frederick Douglass as her running mate.

I started to read more about Woodhull and discovered her younger, sassy sister Tennessee Claflin, and I was hooked. Here were the two most symbiotic and scandalous sisters in American history. They rose
from poverty, a trashy family, and a childhood of scam fortune-telling to become rich, powerful, and infamous feminists in the raucous heyday of post–Civil War Wall Street buccaneers and beauties.

Bankrolled by the richest man in America, Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, in 1870 these strikingly beautiful sisters became the first women stockbrokers in the world, a feat not equaled in America for nearly another hundred years. So amazing was this venture that thousands of gawkers mobbed them when they opened their Broad Street office. However, this was just the start.

The sisters could barely write when they first set out on the road to pursue a divine future. Yet Woodhull became one of the greatest lecturers of her time, with Tennie running a close second. Both sisters were so charismatic that as many as ten thousand people rushed to hear their avant-garde lectures on sex, politics, business, race, prostitution, marriage, divorce, and free love. Even at the age of sixty-four, Tennie twice commanded a sellout crowd of seven thousand cheering fans at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

The two shocked the world while racking up amazing “firsts.” Half a century before women could vote, Woodhull made her historic presidential bid. Tennie was the second woman (after Elizabeth Cady Stanton) to run for Congress. Woodhull was the first woman in history to address a congressional committee. The sisters became the first women to publish a successful radical weekly that dealt with finance and muckraking decades before Theodore Roosevelt coined the pejorative term for hard-nosed reporting. They fought for women’s rights, labor issues, sex education, Spiritualism, and “free love”—a maligned term that could mean anything from fighting for divorce reform to choosing a lover whenever one felt like it.
Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly
devoted itself to the person Victoria Woodhull thought most highly of, herself, and to her quest for fame as the first woman to run for president of the United States.

They were the only women who could cavort with capitalists and Communists alike, from Vanderbilt to Karl Marx. They simultaneously operated on Wall Street, exposed the graft of financiers they observed, and then published the first English-language version of
The Communist Manifesto
in America. They formed the English-speaking section of Karl Marx’s New
York International, and Tennie marched at the head of a famed Manhattan parade carrying the flag in honor of massacred Paris Commune leaders.

A bodacious beauty in her early twenties, Tennie stunned audiences when she said that women who married for money were “legalized prostitutes,” no better, and in most cases ethically worse, than streetwalkers. The sisters championed sex education for adolescents, called for testing for sexual diseases in clients as well as prostitutes, and advocated for contraception decades before Margaret Sanger—outrageous concepts in this era of stifling hypocrisy. Now, 144 years after they began electrifying the country, their ideas remain controversial. The sisters railed against the restrictions of everything from corsets to all-male law courts. Tennie advanced a cause that still creates a stir: training women for army combat. During Reconstruction, when violence erupted over the status of freed blacks, Tennie scandalized Manhattan by commanding an all-black regiment as its honorary colonel.

The sisters also swore they had a supernatural gift, communing with the dead, and Woodhull became a leader in the immensely popular Spiritualist movement.

For a brief time they were heroines of the militant arm of the suffrage movement, and Victoria, with Tennie at her side, historically addressed a congressional committee on women’s suffrage in 1871. The first black male voted in March of 1870, a few weeks after the sisters’ historic Wall Street brokerage house opening, but women’s suffrage, threatened by fractious infighting, seemed as distant a goal as it was twenty-two years before, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton began her 1848 crusade at Seneca Falls. The sisters annoyed establishment suffragists by arguing that the right to vote was meaningless if it meant electing the same timid or corrupt white males. Women must be elected, yes, but the vote was nothing if it was not coupled with economic independence. Although some laws had changed by 1870, fathers or husbands still essentially owned women.