The Scarlet Sisters (21 page)

Woodhull’s evening was marred by Utica, who stayed to have the last word. Stepping to the front of her box, she bowed to the cheering audience and shouted, “I would ask her,” looking at her sister, “how can we reform the Greene Street women she speaks of, and at the same time teach them to live promiscuously with men?” Prolonged cheers for Utica followed, and it was hopeless for Victoria to continue. Tilton came forward to halt the evening as the gaslights were turned out.

Throughout Victoria’s career, the curious were never able to find out about her private life regarding free love. There was never any proof except her union with Colonel Blood before her divorce from Woodhull was final. No lovers ever came forth; no one found any love letters. The Tilton relationship remains a probability, not fact. Only after Victoria’s death did one ancient alleged lover, Benjamin Tucker, surface with a tale that was a half-century old; at nineteen he had sex with thirty-four-year-old Victoria.

Woodhull’s “I Am a Free Lover” anthem made an indelible impression on Tucker, then an eighteen-year-old MIT student, who watched her from the front row when she delivered the same line to a packed Boston Music Hall in early 1872, shortly after the Steinway Hall sensation. (This was proof, wrote Tucker, that reviewers of her Steinway speech were wrong to label it an extemporaneous remark.) A year later, in February 1873, Tucker helped a radical group find a Boston hall for Woodhull’s lecture when respectable halls refused to rent to her. As she raced for the train afterward, she realized she had left behind her shawl. Tucker caught up with the train, dashed along the corridor, and handed her the shawl, whereupon Victoria “kissed me squarely on the mouth.” Tucker leapt off
the train “a much excited and wondering youth.” Months later, he ran into Colonel Blood in the reading room of Boston’s Parker House, and Blood invited the eager youth to help manage Victoria’s New England lecture tour. Tucker’s subsequent meeting with Victoria left him a virgin no longer.

Tucker demurred that, despite the money he had been paid to tell all, he was not “striving to damage Mrs. Woodhull’s character… She deserves, not injury, but honor. It was part of her doctrine, as it is a part of mine, that in cases of sexual attraction, the initiative may be taken as properly by the woman as by the man” and to be done so “frankly, modestly and unmistakable, rather than by arts and wiles and coquetry.”

The evening of their first intimate moment, when Tucker was visiting Woodhull and Blood in their Parker House suite, Woodhull “came forward, her face wreathed with cordial smiles, and her two hands, both outstretched, clasped mine, and shook them warmly.” When Blood left the suite, Woodhull turned the key and artfully “hung a wrap upon the knob to cover the key-hole. Then, always in a quiet, earnest, charming manner, she marched straight to the chair in which I was seated, leaned over, and kissed me, remarking then: ‘I’ve been wanting to do that so long!’ ”

The next day’s meeting progressed to the point that “after some conversation, Victoria said ‘Do you know I should dearly love to sleep with you?’ Hereupon any man a thousandth part less stupid than myself would have thrown his arms around her neck and smothered her with kisses.” Yet Tucker only replied, “It would be my first experience in that line. She looked at me with amazement… ‘How can that be?’… Soon ‘my ruin’ was complete, and I, nevertheless a proud and happy youth.” With the acceptance of Colonel Blood, Tucker said he had sex twice with Victoria, including a night when Blood “pulled the lounge into the bathroom… and went to bed, leaving the sleeping room to Mrs. Woodhull and myself. At one o’clock in the morning I left, in order that Col. Blood might not be obliged to pass the entire night so uncomfortably.”

After that, Tucker joined the Woodhull-Claflin-Blood entourage for more than a year, until late in 1874, but his accounts never referred to any
more sex with Victoria. When Victoria’s biographer Emanie Sachs fished for dirt about Victoria’s love life, Tucker said, “She showed no tendency to promiscuity.” She was “not vulgar in her love-making, simply enraptured and happy… She was never very gay, but almost always cheerful and charming… Her interest in Free Love was sincere and intelligent.”

If Tucker was telling the truth, Blood seemed comfortable with an open marriage. “I never saw the least evidence of ill-nature in the relations of Vicky and the Colonel.” Tucker underlined,
“I always found Col. Blood to be an honest, whole-souled, open hearted, open-handed, generous gentleman.”

Contrasting Victoria with the rest of the Claflins, Tucker wrote, “I never heard V. utter a coarse or profane word. Meg Miles was a case… The Claflin cleverness, the Claflin perversity, the Claflin vulgarity were there in full bloom.” Victoria was mortified when one day Miles “broke into a noisy and violent quarrel” with Tennie, Victoria, Colonel Blood, and Zula, “which ended in her dashing out of the room, slamming the door and shouting: ‘you can all kiss my ass, everyone of you!’ ”

CHAPTER TWELVE

From Spirit Ghosts to Karl Marx

When the American Association of Spiritualists met in September of 1871, in Vineland, New Jersey, just two months before Victoria’s “I Am a Free Lover” declaration, portions of Victoria’s biography by Tilton were read aloud at the meeting. Whatever her actual Spiritualist beliefs, Victoria had a calculated reason to wildly exaggerate her power, leading Tilton to write that “she straightened the feet of the lame; she opened the ears of the deaf.” Cynical readers hooted, but Victoria scored with the audience she was targeting. Losing ground with suffragists, she turned to other radical groups to push her presidency—among them, Spiritualists. Enthralled by Tilton’s sketch, the Spiritualists elected her president of their association at a second September meeting, in Troy, New York.

The sketch attributed everything she had ever thought, written, said, or accomplished to messages from the Other World. From early childhood, “angels” were her “constant companions. They abide with her night and day. They dictate her life with daily revelation… she goes and comes at their behest.” Victoria was but a vessel. Colonel Blood, the “reverent husband of his spiritual bride,” recorded what Victoria said in her trances, when a “mystical light irradiates from her face… Her enterprises are not the coinage of her own brain, but of their divine invention.” Trances took the place of sleep: “Seldom a day goes by but she enters into this fairyland, or rather into this spirit-realm.” In good weather she sat on the roof
of her stately mansion “communing hour by hour with the spirits… her simple theology being an absorbing faith in God and the angels.”

For someone who professed to remember nothing she dictated in a trance, Victoria was an adamant editor. She refused to let Tilton cut what he knew would make him the butt of cynical journalists’ jokes, if the rest of his florid outpouring had not already done so. He fought, she resisted, and what she said ran—most notably, the story of resurrecting her son when he was declared dead. According to this account, Victoria exclaimed, “ ‘No! I will not permit his death.’ And with frantic energy she stripped her bosom naked, caught up his lifeless form, pressed it to her own, and sitting thus, flesh to flesh, glided insensibly into a trance in which she remained seven hours; at the end of which time she awoke… the child that had been thought dead was brought back again to life.” The spirit of Jesus Christ wrought this miracle, wrote Tilton.

Her primary muse was Demosthenes, who came to her almost daily for years, wearing a Greek tunic, but never telling her his name until he wrote it on the table that miraculous day at Great Jones Street. It was, she vowed, Demosthenes, not Senator Butler, who helped craft her famous memorial to Congress. Apparently in the throes of something himself, Tilton wrote, “If Demosthenes could arise and speak English, he could hardly excel the fierce light and heat of some of the sentences which I have heard from this singular woman in her glowing hours.”

Hoping to appeal to moderate social reformers as well as free lovers among Spiritualists, Tilton wrote, “her theories are similar to those which have long been taught by John Stuart Mill and Elizabeth Cady Stanton… that marriage is of the heart and not of the law, that when love ends marriage should end with it.” Tilton added: “finally, in religion, she is a spiritualist of the most mystical and ethereal type.”

Woodhull’s announcing herself as candidate for president the year before was “mainly for the purpose of drawing public attention to the claims of woman to political equality with man,” wrote Tilton. But now the “Victoria League” (organized by Victoria) was clamoring for her. Tilton linked Vanderbilt to the cause—although the sisters’ former mentor
had recently publicly castigated them following the family feud scandal. Nonetheless, wrote Tilton, the league was “popularly supposed, though not definitely known, to be presided over by Commodore Vanderbilt, who is also… imagined to be the golden corner-stone of the business house of Woodhull, Claflin, & Co.”

The New York press mercilessly mocked Tilton’s screed. The
World
headlined its tirade “The Queen of Quacks” and Tilton’s words “hideous rubbish.”
Harper’s Weekly
hooted: “If apples are wormy this year, and grapes mildew, and duck’s eggs addle… it may all be ascribed to the unhallowed influence of Mr. Tilton’s Life of Victoria Woodhull.”

Many critics saw Tilton hopelessly besotted over Victoria—yet his biography of her reads almost as if he was deliberately damning her with so much overwrought praise that it could be seen as a satire. Whatever the reason for such extravagance, Tilton never lived it down.

Nonetheless, the biographical sketch served Victoria well with the American Association of Spiritualists, for whom praising Jesus Christ, God, and a belief in a spirit’s living on after death were movement touchstones. She also won the hearts of dedicated Spiritualists when her
Weekly
took on the charlatans with their spirit tapping and table lifting as tarnishing the religious-oriented movement. As their elected leader, Woodhull quickly sought their aid in her presidential campaign. While not expressly political, Spiritualists were reformers and humanitarians who could garner support.

While embracing the Spiritualists, the sisters simultaneously sought the support of laborers, joining up with Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) in the spring of 1871. The following December the
Weekly
became the first American publication to print the English version of
The Communist Manifesto
, translated by Stephen Pearl Andrews. Their support of radical labor unions, the bête noire of America’s ruling capitalists, solidified the end for the sisters among influential Wall Streeters and the establishment press, even more so than their free love advocacy.

One could argue a possible hypocrisy in the sisters’ ardent support of
labor. They had gained their own financial independence on the same Wall Street they were now vilifying. However, Victoria consistently said that they had pursued riches in order to finance their humanitarian causes, which included downtrodden laborers. Additionally, they had more recently faced extreme ridicule from mainstream wealthy quarters, and Woodhull pragmatically realized she had to find a new base of support. Also the sisters were still under the influence of Andrews, and by the summer of 1871, Tilton was a constant presence, touting the cause of laborers. For the sisters and other Victorian radicals, the labor movement was indeed a natural extension of their democratic causes. Furthermore, as underdogs for most of their lives, with the exception of the last few years, the sisters sympathized with the working poor. As Woodhull explained, “I never objected to the accumulation of wealth… but I always shall, until it is remedied, object to a certain few holding all the wealth, while the producing multitudes barely escape starvation.” After their brokerage firm had failed, Victoria cast the venture as a symbolic mission: “We went unto Wall Street, not particularly because I wanted to be a broker… But because I wanted to plant the Flag of women’s rebellion in the very center of the continent.”

With Andrews leading the way, the sisters—“this pair of enigmatic and remarkable radicals”—within a year became the hub of the major IWA Section 12, labeled “The Yankee International,” for its broad-based egalitarian departure from other IWA sections that were controlled by and comprised mostly immigrant laborers and trade unionists. Dominated by the “independent political activities of the sisters,” the Yankee International held its meetings in the offices of the
Weekly
, which became the official English-language organ of the American IWA.

At first, the sisters’ relations with IWA founding member Karl Marx were cordial. They published an interview with Marx, who wrote back, thanking them for sending an edition of their “highly-interesting” paper.

The sisters’ unique section attracted “some of the most eccentric and garrulous personalities to ever call themselves Internationals.” Crusaders of abolition, feminism, socialism, and Spiritualism saw Section 12 as a “beacon of reform.” But to traditional labor organizers, the two women
were an embarrassment. This constituency may seem disparate at first glance, but they were natural allies. Spiritualists were found among abolitionists, suffragists and in Free Love communes. “Nearly the entire leadership of the abolition movement espoused Spiritualism at some point in their careers.” Suffragists were not so receptive to Spiritualism, but there were many among them, including Isabella Beecher and Paulina Wright Davis. Stanton and Anthony wrote favorably, the “only religious sect in the world… that has recognized the equality of women is the Spiritualists.”

Like many in their eclectic following, the sisters fought for a socialist form of democracy that included equality for women, freed slaves, American Indians, and anyone else excluded from the privileged white male order. Once again the sisters behaved uniquely and historically, pushing for reform for blacks and women and fighting for the eight-hour day and equal pay for women in factories.