The Scarlet Sisters (27 page)

Just before their eviction from the Gilsey House, a desperate Woodhull wrote to Henry Ward Beecher: “Dear Sir, the social fight against me being now waged in this city is becoming rather hotter than I can well endure longer, standing unsupported and alone as I have until now. Within the past two weeks I have been shut out of hotel after hotel and am now, after having obtained a place in one, hunted down by a set of males and females who are determined that I shall not be permitted to live even, if they can prevent it.

“Now I want your assistance. I want to be sustained in my position in the Gilsey House, from which I am ordered out and from which I do not wish to go—and all this simply because I am Victoria C. Woodhull, the advocate of social freedom. I have submitted to this persecution just so long as I can endure. My business, my projects, in fact everything for which I live, suffer from it and it must cease. Will you lend me your aid in this?”

Beecher was not in a magnanimous or, for that matter, a very frightened mood. He remained a colossal success, and it had been over a year
since Woodhull first threatened to tell all. Perhaps it was just talk, he may have thought. Still, he appealed to Frank Moulton to make Victoria understand that he would not “take a single step in that direction, and if it brings trouble—it must come.”

Dismissing Woodhull was not the most prudent act. She was “a proud, wounded, unlettered creature with some vigor of mind, the more vigorous for her ostracism,” observed Moulton. Throughout the cover-up, Moulton and his wife, Emma, sympathized with Woodhull, yet eventually felt they could not suppress or control her; she would give way to the “adverse influence” of the “persecution she was to suffer.” The proud Woodhull felt deeply humiliated. Tilton had been mocked unceasingly for his fulsome Woodhull biography, but now he was redeeming his reputation on the lecture circuit while supporting Greeley. Beecher, who had disdained to answer Victoria’s plea, was riding high, named to a teaching post at Yale and celebrated by his adoring flock at Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church.

Forced to temporarily suspend the
Weekly
, the sisters editorialized bitterly in a later edition when they resumed publishing in the fall of 1872. Woodhull complained that the press, “divided between the other two great parties, refused all notice of the new reformatory movement.” This was routine for mainstream journalism: covering campaigns as horse races and dismissing third-party also-rans, no matter their message. Yet it stung Woodhull deeply. Her nomination “seemed to fall dead upon the country; and to cap the climax, a new batch of slanders and injurious innuendoes permeated the community in respect to my condition and character. A series of pecuniary disasters stripped us, for the time being, of the means of continuing” the paper and “forced us into a desperate struggle for mere existence.” Now there was no way to broadcast her broadsides at enemies, her opinions and goals—even to “my own circle of friends.”

All this travail was leading to an eruption of anger, revenge, outrage—and a desire to justify her actions. The American Association of Spiritualists met in Boston in September for its annual meeting. Woodhull was not popular with the conservative faction, and she felt there would be trouble.
Tired but “dragged by a sense of duty,” she was prepared to resign her presidency. She was greeted not by “hostility or unfriendliness” but by a feeling of “painful uncertainty and doubt.” As she faced her audience, “I was seized by one of those overwhelming gusts of inspiration which sometimes come upon me, from I know not where… some power stronger than I”; this power made her “pour out into the ears of that assembly, and, as I was told subsequently, in a rhapsody of indignant eloquence, with circumstantial detail, the whole history of the Beecher and Tilton scandal.” This was the first time Woodhull had uttered the details in public. She added coyly, “They tell me that I used some naughty words. All that I know is, that if I swore, I did not swear profanely.” That they reelected her president was proof she had not “shocked or horrified” her audience, she defensively remarked.

Woodhull was in command of her oratorical genius that night, according to one Spiritualist, Mrs. E. A. Meriwether: “A sort of electric shock swept over the assembly; striking it to a dead stillness… Mrs. Woodhull tossed back her hair, in high tragic style, and poured out a torrent of flame. It made our flesh to creep and our blood to run cold… two crimson dots burned on her pale cheeks and a lurid light filled her eyes… she has all the action and fervor of a tragic actress… Her face, the saddest I ever saw, tells of wrecked hopes and a cruel battle with life.” To Meriwether, Victoria’s speech was not obscene, but “fiercely denunciatory, fiery and scandalous.”

Only the Spiritualist group heard this first public revelation of the scandal. The Boston press said her words were too obscene to print. Woodhull attacked them for suppressing what she’d said and for insulting her as a “slanderer.” She threatened that she would now have to unveil the complete facts for all to read. Thus the long-private Beecher-Tilton scandal was born in a special edition of the
Weekly
. This time it would be a story heard around the world.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Unmasking Beecher and a Masked Ball Rape

The
Weekly
’s staid format buried what most papers would have blazed on page one, if they’d dared print it at all. The Beecher “thunderbolt” began on page 9, and then only with a singular headline,
THE BEECHER-TILTON CASE
, this in an era when papers routinely stacked run-on headlines that consumed a good quarter of an article. Small type followed: “The Detailed Statement of the Whole Matter by Mrs. Woodhull.”

The article promised to expose “one of the most stupendous scandals which has ever occurred in any community.” She roundly slammed the esteemed Beecher as “a poltroon, a coward and a sneak.” The tale had been whispered “for the last two or three years,” and now, wrote Woodhull, “I intend that this article shall burst like a bomb-shell into the ranks of the moralistic social camp.”

But first she announced her central theme: that marriage “as a bond or promise to love another to the end of life, and forego all other loves or passional gratifications, has outlived its day of usefulness.” Woodhull then jumped into her role as the aggrieved bearer of free love truth and claimed to be astounded that she was “denounced by the very persons” who privately followed her doctrines: “astonishing disclosures” about these lives were “laid open before me” and “included spiritualistic and social reformers… leading lights of the business and wealthy circles, and
of the various professions, not excluding the clergy… It was nevertheless from these very quarters, that I was most severely assailed.”

Ignoring the threats she had used for months, Woodhull claimed to have “wholly abstained” from responding to such abuse. She was now acting on a reluctant but deep sense of duty, she assured readers. Those who snatched up the
Weekly
at every newsstand had to wade through an exhausting twelve-thousand-word treatise on love and adultery, written by Stephen Pearl Andrews, proving that even sex in the abstract can be boring.

For the first time, the public was reading the account of the stormy night when Elizabeth Tilton raced to her bedroom after allegedly confessing an adulterous relationship with Reverend Beecher, followed by her husband’s hair-tearing jealous rage, his pounding on her locked bedroom door with Susan B. Anthony standing guard.

Woodhull now wrote that Tilton was struck by “the terrible orgies—so he said—of which his house had been made the scene, and the boldness with which matters had been carried on in the presence of his children—‘these things drove me mad,’ said he, ‘and I went to Elizabeth and confronted her with… the damning tale she had told me. My wife did not deny the charge nor attempt any palliation. She was then
enciente
, and I felt sure that the child would not be my child. I stripped the wedding ring from her finger. I tore the picture of Mr. Beecher from my wall and stamped it in pieces. Indeed, I do not know what I did not do. I only look back to it as a time too horrible to retain any exact remembrance of. She miscarried the child and it was buried. For two weeks, night and day, I might have been found walking to and from that grave, in a state bordering on distraction… I stamped the ring with which we had plighted our troth deep into the soil that covered the fruit of my wife’s infidelity.’ ”

What shocked many of America’s “good citizens” was not so much that Woodhull had charged the famous preacher with committing adultery as that she was using free love reasoning for exposing him: it was not the adultery, it was the hypocrisy! It was only normal that the
Reverend—with his “demanding physical nature” and “immense physical potency,” coupled with enduring a harpy wife—should seek love elsewhere, wrote Woodhull. His “physical amativeness” is what “emanates zest and magnetic power to his whole audience.” There was no reason to condemn him and Lib Tilton for their passion; Woodhull’s reasoning was “indeed the exact opposite” of that for which “the world would condemn him.” Theirs was adultery; hers was hypocrisy.

Beecher had “helped to maintain for these many years that very social slavery under which he was chafing, and against which he was secretly revolting, both in thought and practice… he has, in a word, consented, and still consents to being a hypocrite… failing, in a word, to stand shoulder to shoulder with me and others who are endeavoring to hasten a social regeneration which he believes in.”

The unanswered question is whether Woodhull would have publicly exposed Beecher had he introduced her at Steinway Hall, given her money when she was destitute, or prevailed upon his sisters to stop vilifying her. Would her sense of a crusade have been so keen? Despite her noble reasons, Woodhull’s revenge for being dismissed by Beecher did play a part. She later admitted that she was operating with the vengeance of the old bromide “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

In this fashion, she also took on Theodore Tilton, saying his display of jealousy and wounded manhood were caused by “bogus sentimentality” driven by the inculcation of “sickly religious literature and Sunday School morality, and pulpit phariseeism” [
sic
] which had “humbugged him” into thinking he “ought to feel and act in this harlequin and absurd way.”

In the same issue, sister Tennie weighed in with an even more salacious article of seduction at a French masked ball by a Wall Street banker named Luther Challis. But first she scathingly assailed the double standard of courts and the public. “Put a woman on trial for anything—it is considered as a legitimate part of the defense to make the most searching inquiry into her sexual morality, and the decision generally turns upon the proof advanced in this regard.” Defending her duty to expose male sexual conduct, Tennie
wrote, “even the President of the United States, a governor of a state and a pastor of the most popular church, president of the most reliable bank, or of the grandest railroad corporation, may constantly practice all the debaucheries known to sensualism [
sic
]—many of which are so vicious, brutal and degrading as to be almost beyond belief—and he, by virtue of his sex, stands protected and respected, so much so that even the other sex cry shame on the exposer [
sic
]… and the newspapers pretend not to know that anything detrimental to public morality has transpired.”

Again Tennie defended prostitutes: “But let a woman even so much as protect herself from starvation by her sexuality… and everybody in unison cries out, ‘down with the vile thing’ ” while newspapers make it their “special business to herald her shame… utterly forgetting that there was a man in the scrape.”

There was only one solution to this man-made hypocrisy: “The tables that have so long been completely subsidized in favor of immunity for men must be turned upon them.” It was no “light matter to be pioneers in any reform,” but someone had to vindicate women’s rights and redress “their wrongs.” Her next sentence filled many a Manhattan male reader with dread: “We propose to take leading personages from each of the several pursuits of life and lay before the world a record of their private careers, so that it may no longer appear that their victims are the only frightful examples of immorality.” First out of the box was “Mr. L. C. Challis,” a rich broker. A lawyer in his celebrated fight against Tennie would nickname him This Poison Challis.

The annual masked French Ball, organized by the Société des Bals d’Artistes, was held at the distinguished Academy of Music. Newspapers described it in a jocular “men will be men” fashion as a bacchanal filled with “three thousand of the best men and four thousand of the worst women.” In the
Weekly
, Tennie said their account came from an anonymous participant: “We have her name and can command her affidavit at any moment.” Once again, Tennie resorted to the ruse of claiming her information came from another person. In actuality the sisters were the witnesses at the ball. Unknown to Colonel Blood, the two had dressed as
shepherdesses, wearing white masks, and repaired to a red damask-draped box, remaining “closely dominoed,” as they observed the action.

This was in December 1869, just before they had become famous stockbrokers. By exposing the incident three years later, the sisters revealed yet another unsavory past, admitting that they had attended this orgy, shared a personal association with prostitutes, and, as Tennie put it, their “whoremongers that may marry a pure woman, move in good society and be generally respected.” For three years this had bothered her conscience, she wrote. It was time to let the world know of the “wrongs these women suffer and the men who inflict them.”

Men smoking cigars and guzzling champagne in boxes watched a mob of scantily clad dancers below. As midnight approached, the scene grew wilder. “One of the women is caught up by the crowd and tossed bodily into a proscenium box, where she is dragged over the sill.” Her dress flew up, and the men roared with laughter as they looked at “what small vestige of raiment” showed. Another pretty young woman is “thrown up, tossed over, her skirt flying up, and then thrown again.” A hefty woman was not so lucky; thrown from a box, she fell “heavily on the floor” and was picked up and carried out by the police. “There is not a whisper of shame in the crowd, it is now drunken with liquor and its own beastliness.”