The Scarlet Sisters (13 page)

It was a bristly crowd by the time Frederick Douglass rose to speak. A towering presence at age fifty, the former slave who had taught himself to read and write was a dazzling orator and wrote with burning brilliance. His commanding face with its aquiline nose was set off by a profusion of salt-and-pepper hair. His wide-set eyes searched the hall as he kindly and poignantly acknowledged, “When there were few houses in which the black man could have put his head, this wooly head of mine found refuge in the house of Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton.” He said, “There is no name greater” than Stanton’s “in the matter of woman’s rights and equal rights.” Stung and aggrieved, Douglass then criticized her “employment of certain names, such as ‘Sambo… and the bootblack.’ ”

Douglass believed that “the right of woman to vote is as sacred in my judgment as that of man.” Yet there was not the same urgency as “giving the vote to the Negro.” He uttered a chilling comparison that drew thunderous applause: “when women, because they are women are hunted down… when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lampposts, when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn, when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads… then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.” Someone shouted, “Is that not all true about black women?” Douglass answered, “Yes, yes, yes; it is true of the black woman, but not because she is a woman, but because she is black!”

Unity crumbled, and at the end of the convention, Stanton and Anthony refused to support the proposed Fifteenth Amendment, which excluded any mention of women’s suffrage, while Stone joined the majority of members in support. This ensured the final split between Stone and Stanton-Anthony, a relationship that had been rocky ever since Stanton called for divorce reform and seemed to champion free love, which Stone called “Free Lust.”

As moderate abolitionists and suffragists drifted off to join Stone and the Boston conservatives, Anthony and Stanton made up their minds to form their counter National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Theodore Tilton, the blazing abolitionist and Victoria’s future biographer, was their titular president, while Stone chose Reverend Beecher. A half year later, in January 1870—just before the unknown sisters made their Wall Street debut—newspapers happily mocked the “Women’s War”: “in the concededly bitter battle waged between the women of the Revolution and the bucolic Boston cabal headed by Julia Ward Howe, the fight, be it understood, is not for principle, but for position. Lucy Stone and her fast friend, Mrs. Howe, aspire to oust Miss Anthony and Mrs. Cady Stanton from their leadership of the delirium of unreason known as the woman’s cause.” The reporter called Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” the “Battle-him of the Republic.”

Into this messy situation stepped the sisters, committed to free love as well as the women’s vote. Now, in 1871, with Woodhull a prominent force following her historic congressional petition and aligned with Stanton and Anthony, the Boston faction remained hostile.

As she approached her all-important New York lectures in May, Woodhull sought every possible support for her presidential candidacy. She made overtures to Lucy Stone but was rebuffed. Although Woodhull tried to dismiss the suffragist battles as petty “teacup hurricanes,” the eruptions enveloped her and Tennie. That spring of 1871, leading up to Victoria’s Apollo Hall lecture, the sisters and those who championed them were assaulted not only by gossip but by frontal attacks. The long knives were
out, wielded by Reverend Beecher, the titular head of Stone’s conservative camp, and his two sisters, Harriet and Catharine.

They had begun warning Isabella Hooker, their half sister, to distance herself from wicked Woodhull back in January, when Isabella was moonstruck over Woodhull’s congressional triumph. Both Harriet and Catharine were anti-suffrage. Catharine was a fixture among five thousand anti-suffragists who signed a petition to Congress—among them the wife of Gen. William Sherman and wives of senators, representatives, and businessmen. “The Holy Scripture,” they claimed, “inculcates for women a sphere higher than and apart from that of public life because as women they find a full measure of duties, care and responsibilities and are unwilling to bear additional burdens unsuited to their physical organization.”

Catharine Beecher’s national following made her a dangerous enemy of the sisters, as did the attacks leveled by the internationally famous Harriet. Soon gossip about the sisters was rampant. A Midwest AWSA member circulated racy rumors about them and the Claflin family. Disgruntled financiers who had been exposed in the sisters’
Weekly
told more stories. The Reverend Beecher’s
Christian Union
newspaper falsely charged that
Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly
printed malicious libel.

By April 1871 the rumors had escalated to the extent that worried suffragists who had backed Woodhull were writing concerned letters to Stanton. She ignored them and gave crucial support to Woodhull, writing to the esteemed elder leader Lucretia Mott that she had “thot [
sic
] much” of “our dear Woodhull, and all the gossip about her and had come to the conclusion that it is a great impertinence of any of us to pry into her affairs. How should we feel to have everyone overhauling our antecedents? Woodhull stands before us today one of the ablest writers and speakers of the century.” It was a male trap to pit women against one another, Stanton wrote. The male “creates the public sentiment, builds the gallows, and then makes us hangman.” Women had “crucified” outspoken women in the past, and “now men mock us and say we are cruel to each other. Let us end this ignoble record and henceforth stand by womanhood. If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the nails and plait the thorns.”

“If all ‘they say’ is true, Mrs. Woodhull is better than nine tenths of our Fathers, Husbands and Sons,” Stanton stated to a male who asked about Woodhull’s reputation. She added, “Now if our good men will only trouble themselves as much about the purity of their
own
sex, if they will make one moral code for men and women the world would be much ‘nobler’… When our soldiers went to fight the battles of freedom in the late war, did they stop to inquire into the antecedents of everybody by their side? The war would never have been finished if they had.” Stanton believed Victoria to be a “grand woman,” but even if she were not, “I should be glad to have her work for her own enfranchisement.”

In April, as her lecture dates neared Victoria sent a long letter to Isabella Hooker, revealing both anguish and defiant resolve. “Under all the curse and imprecations which are being heaped upon me, strong though I feel, I need some little kindness… I went to Washtn. [
sic
] entirely upon my own account. I did not desire to arouse all the petty fiendishness that has developed.” Smarting from the slurs about her “anticedents,” Victoria wrote she would not change her course even though “those who assume to be better than I desire it.”

At forty-nine, Isabella Hooker at times sounded frantic. Her sisters “nearly crazed” her with letters imploring her “to have nothing to do with [Woodhull],” she wailed to Anthony, asking her or Stanton to “make some examination of this mysterious family.” Anthony replied with characteristic sharpness, stabbing the paper with her pen, underlining word after word for emphasis. “Not until we catechize and refuse men—will I consent to question women—And it is only that Mrs. Woodhull is a woman… all of us enslaved class—that we ever dream of such a thing.… what would have been thought of those men [Jefferson and Washington] stopping to trace out every gossip of every revolutionist?”

To another friend, Anthony wrote, “When we women begin to search individual records and antecedents of those who bring influence, brains or cash to our work of enfranchising women—we shall begin with the men. Now I have heard gossip of undue familiarity with persons of the opposite sex”—here she named the reverends Beecher and Thomas W. Higginson,
senators Benjamin Butler and Samuel C. Pomeroy, and journalist Frank George Carpenter. “Before I consent to an arraignment of Woodhull or any other earnest woman worker… I shall insist upon the closest investigation into all the scandals afloat about those men.”

Anthony’s explosive response to Hooker stiffened the younger woman’s resolve to carry on her Woodhull support. Yet as Woodhull prepared to take New York in May of 1871, as she had taken Washington with her memorial petition and rousing speech just a few months before, Isabella Hooker worried that Woodhull did not distance herself enough from “Free Lust”: “The trouble with Mrs. W is she uses it with a meaning of her own different from this hateful one as she will one day explain I hope.” She nervously sought to round off the rough edges on Woodhull, her “darling Queen.” Isabella admonished her to stop using “mannish” envelopes from her business stationery, and to “use nice note paper hereafter.” As an “accepted standard bearer,” Woodhull must be “perfect—exquisite in neatness, elegance and decorum. A lady in every sense of the word.” (She also worried about rambunctious Tennie.)

In an era when American class distinctions were locked in place, all the polishing in the world would not have made the sisters acceptable. Suffragists came overwhelmingly from a middle-class WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) background—the same demographic of women who opposed the movement, such as Catharine Beecher. Woodhull could reinvent herself all she wanted—and indeed she did, to portray a more genteel life—but to most in the movement, Victoria and Tennie would always be déclassé. And they would soon be punished for it.

In May, as Woodhull enthralled her audiences, first at the Cooper Union labor meeting and then, a few days later, at the suffrage convention at Apollo Hall, a personal time bomb was ticking in the shape of her “never wholly sane mother.” That she delivered her lectures brilliantly was a testament to how Woodhull could compartmentalize her feelings. The
New York Times
uncharacteristically raved about her Cooper Union Labor Reform League speech, in which she dazzled the audience with statistics
and quotations and hammered away at political and business corruption. She was clearly broadening her base for her presidential campaign to include underpaid and overworked laborers.

She also wooed her suffragist allies, winning the support of the esteemed Paulina Wright Davis, who introduced her as the Joan of Arc of the movement, and of Lucretia Mott, the soft-spoken
grande dame
Quaker eminence.

Apollo Hall was jammed to suffocating as people rushed to see the woman who had experienced such a meteoric rise to fame. Nonetheless, windows were shut on this warm May night, the eleventh, because the traffic of horses and carriages crowding in front of Apollo Hall made it difficult to hear speeches. A tremendous mix—politicians, Spiritualists, and laborers—joined NWSA members to listen to Woodhull’s keynote address. If Colonel Blood or Stephen Pearl Andrews, or both, had written her words, the thoughts now belonged to her. In the speech, she confronted detractors who saw rank ambition in her presidential bid, which she cast as a gesture for all women, something that would force people to ask “why not” a woman? She coyly added, “This service I have rendered women at the expense of any ambition I might have had” and repeated her cry of women’s “revolution” against “tyranny.” It was her “firm conviction” that if the major political parties continued to “rule this country twenty years to come as badly as they have for twenty years past, that our liberties will be lost or that the parities will be washed out by such rivers of blood as the late war never produced!” Amid the cheers and handkerchief waving, Woodhull moved to her seat, where she was clasped by Mott. Tears were streaming down the elderly woman’s face.

But then Paulina Wright Davis innocently read Woodhull’s broader political platform positions, written by Stephen Pearl Andrews. Woodhull called for a one-term presidency, monetary and tax reform, an eight-hour workday, welfare for the poor, national education for children, and a repeal of the death penalty. The platform also included a red flag: “All laws shall be repealed which are made use of by Government to interfere with the rights of adult individuals to pursue happiness as they may choose.”
Newspapers quickly labeled this rhetoric on privacy rights as “free love.” The rival AWSA seized on the platform for use in its attacks, and NWSA leaders privately tore into Andrews: “We have pretty squally times ahead,” Martha Wright Coffin wrote to Anthony. Andrews’s “foolish mistimed resolutions have done harm in giving the Philistines a chance to rejoice.” Anthony moaned about Andrews’s “moonshine impracticalities—oh dear dear what terrible rough seas we do have.” The NWSA was incensed that newspapers were falsely implying that the organization had adopted Andrews’s resolutions.

The press piled on its disgust of Woodhull, especially the Beecher-friendly
Brooklyn Eagle
, quoting a
Weekly
free love passage: “Who would compel us to prostitute ourselves by compelling us, through your marriage laws, to remain the legal wives of those who have become detestable to us?” The paper then excoriated Anthony, Hooker, and Stanton, who had put Woodhull “forward as the leader.” Nervous NWSA members hoped to ride out the gossip and the free love ruckus, but they did not count on the Claflin clan.

CHAPTER EIGHT

All in the Family: “Never a wholly sane mother”

An astounding story about Victoria and Tennie’s mother, their sister Polly Sparr, and Victoria’s husband, Colonel Blood, made all the papers on May 16, 1871: “[U]pon affidavits of Annie Claflin, Mary [Polly] Sparr and Benjamin Sparr a warrant was issued for Blood’s arrest, charging that he had threatened to kill Annie or put her in an asylum and had stolen the affections of daughters Victoria and Tennie.”

However, the
Brooklyn Eagle
had a major scoop a week before the trial. On May 7, just as Woodhull was preparing for her Apollo speech, the affidavits from Annie and the Sparrs were read at a pro forma session in the Essex Market Police Court. Surprisingly, Manhattan papers apparently overlooked this, thus sparing Woodhull humiliation before she gave her NWSA keynote address on the eleventh. Blood bowed to the judge. The judge said wryly, “The worst thing specifically charged against you is living with your wife, and not agreeing with your mother-in-law. The complaint is dismissed unless you insist on a trial.” Had Blood agreed, the sisters would have been spared mortifying revelations of the family in screaming headlines as far as San Francisco. But Blood asked that “the complaint be not dismissed.” He wanted to “disprove the charges against me.” With that, the harm done to the sisters’ already questionable reputation was about to be enormous.