The Scarlet Sisters (33 page)

The next morning, a large crowd waited for the verdict. The exhausted sisters and Blood, friends, and family whispered anxiously. The jury filed in to a breathlessly silent courtroom. The sisters stared at the jurors.

“How say you: do you find the prisoners guilty or not guilty?” asked the clerk.

The foreman answered in a clear voice heard throughout the room: “Not guilty.”

The crowd leapt up, and tumultuous applause continued for several minutes while court officers yelled for silence in one of the most extraordinary scenes ever enacted within that courtroom. After all the waiting, the fear in response to the judge’s instructions, the public displays of fortitude, the nights in jail, the destitution, the sisters broke down completely, sobbing so hard that they could not speak for several minutes. “Blood appeared scarcely less agitated.” The judge was not pleased. It was the “most outrageous verdict ever recorded,” he sputtered. “It is shameful and infamous, and I am ashamed of the jury who rendered such a verdict.” The jurors agreed, stating they had been loath to vote for acquittal but had reasonable doubt.

The
Brooklyn Eagle
had assumed the sisters would be convicted, and it lashed out at “these notorious women” who “seem to have reached the end of their crazy career.” The lesson was that “sufferings will ever attend the woman that unsexes herself.” But the sisters had won, and continued to say and write more about the famous preacher whom the
Brooklyn Eagle
had so assiduously befriended.

After the trial, Victoria and Tennie rented a floor, furnished, in a house on the East Side, where they lived with Byron and Zula; somehow Colonel Blood and feisty Annie also coexisted in this dwelling. At this point Buck was not around, but his absence went unexplained, and there was no indication of where he was. The six lived in a condition of bohemian disorder.
During hot weather, one of the family members routinely carried a large pitcher to a Third Avenue tavern to fill it with beer. Callers were few; friends had deserted them.

At that time, publishing the paper was a struggle. They begged for donations in each issue. George Blood, Colonel Blood’s loyal brother, did some of the writing along with Blood and also undertook the care of Byron. A professor, Robert W. Hume, a “stout and mild-mannered Scot,” wrote editorials on economics. Although the sisters were briefed on what was running in the paper, Benjamin Tucker, who was present during these days, contended, “Not once did I ever see Victoria have a pen or pencil in her hand. Tennie could scrawl a page or two, but on serious subjects nothing in the least worthy of attention.” However, they were clear advocates of the free love position and women’s issues. The ability for extemporaneous speech lifted their thoughts with eloquence, but their court ordeals and prison sentences had drained that spark from both.

Suddenly, Victoria suggested a vacation in Europe for the entire brood, a trip that raised great suspicion that Beecher had paid them to leave the country just as the Tilton-Beecher scandal was exploding again. Victoria issued a notice that Beecher had nothing to do with the trip. With their having little money, however, it was hard to believe they were paying their own way. Tucker said, “Tennie, who was always chosen for such errands… visited the various steamship offices to ask reduced rates for the trip as journalists, and finally succeeded in engaging passage… at half the regular fare” for him, Blood, the sisters, Annie, and Zula. However they worked it, the sisters were out of the country in July 1874, when the Beecher fireworks began in earnest.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Star Chamber

Beecher was finally frightened deep in his soul, and the most famous reverend was collapsing. His friend Wilkeson, in his foolish public ploy to wreck Bowen, had done Beecher incredible harm the previous May by exposing the tripartite agreement and Tilton’s revelations. The follow-up meeting instigated by Bowen with the sisters had also been a publicity disaster for Beecher and Plymouth Church. The press and public clamored for explanations. Something was decidedly sour about the tripartite agreement, cried newspapers. Beecher “hugs to his breast the two men who have pronounced him the ravishers” of their wives, while Bowen and Tilton, “self proclaimed cowards… promise never to allude to his crimes again… Verily a sweet-savored trio, this.”

Hoping to end this “filth,” church leaders expelled Tilton from the church for “slandering” Beecher. Then, in April 1874, a preacher friend of Beecher’s lit everything on fire by delivering a parable aimed at Tilton using the words
knave
and
dog
. Tilton finally went public, accusing Beecher of committing an unspeakable “offense” and demanding that Beecher clear his, Tilton’s, name.

In the summer of 1874 the desperate but ingenious Beecher staged an investigation loaded with six handpicked church leaders who would surely clear him of this volcano of erupting gossip. Tilton, Stanton, and many others called this investigation a “star chamber,” a reference to the
sixteenth-century English court that meted out brutal punishment without a right of appeal or juries.

Beecher’s friends, on the other hand, saluted the public venting. Months before, Mark Twain had written a friend, “I think the silence of the Beechers is a hundred fold more of an obscene publication than that of the Woodhulls and the sad silence is a thousand-fold more potent in convincing people of the truth of that scandal than the evidence of fifty Woodhulls could be.” A concerned Twain wrote, “the nation will gradually form itself into the verdict that there is
some
fire somewhere in all this smoke of scandal.”

The church tribunal gathered in secret in July, but it was a leaky crew: six clergymen and two of Beecher’s counselors fed details to newspapers, read by a hungry public across the nation. No fiction or theatrical production could match the racy tales of illicit sex and mangled marriage involving the Great Preacher, handsome Tilton, and “Lib,” his dark-eyed, petite wife. “This most marvelous of human dramas” was, of course, compared to Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
, written in 1850, but one paper judged this real story as “greater in plot, development and effect.” Victorian readers had never seen anything like this verbal slugfest between a Good Christian Woman and her husband. Elizabeth portrayed Tilton as insanely jealous as Othello and as manipulative as Svengali.

Elizabeth was now living with friends of Beecher’s and had so joined his side that Benjamin Tracy, the preacher’s lawyer with a cutthroat reputation, coached her on her testimony. She dutifully gave the church committee rich fodder: Tilton was a vain and cruel narcissist, so insanely jealous that he would lock her in a room for hours while accusing her of infidelity “with one and another, and with Mr. Beecher particularly… many times, he had said that he did not know whom his children belonged to.”

Elizabeth was spilling her venom to millions of spellbound readers. Tilton’s “morbid jealousy” came at a time he was “giving up his religious faith,” in 1870. He “laid the cornerstone of free love” in their house; it was a “godless” atmosphere, “impure for my children.” She said Tilton confessed to having affairs with “several” women and that “he wished me
to understand that… if he desired the gratification… he would do it.” He mocked her in the presence of his women’s rights friends and told her at one gathering, “ ‘I would give $500 if you were not by my side,’ meaning that I was so insignificant that he was ashamed of me.” Her friendship with Beecher grew: “With Mr. Beecher I had a sort of consciousness of being more; he appreciated me as Theodore did not.”

Elizabeth said Tilton had a mesmerizing evil power over her: “I never had any will around him.” She concluded: “I affirm myself before God to be innocent of the crimes laid upon me; that never have I been guilty of adultery with Henry Ward Beecher in thought or deed.” Nor had the pastor ever offered her an “indecorous or improper proposal.”

Tilton fashioned himself as noble; concern for his family had kept him from telling the truth. Now, because Beecher has publicly affected “ignorance and innocence,” and Elizabeth, “lately my wife” now sides with Beecher in “denying the truth,” he had no obligation to remain silent. He dumped 208 letters of passionate devotion between him and his wife into the pages of the
Chicago Tribune
to show he was not the monster Elizabeth depicted. Newspapers around the country picked them up. A riveted public now read breathless love letters written by his wife to Tilton while he was gone for weeks lecturing: “Ah, did man ever love so grandly as my Beloved?” she gushed. She loved Theodore “with the fervency of my whole being.” “My beloved… my waking thoughts last night were of you. My rising thoughts this morning were of you. I bless you; I honor you; I love you.” Tilton noted that the date of this last letter, January 28, 1868—was “only a few months before her loss of honor.”

Many mainstream papers belted Tilton for “parading before the world these sacred treasures of wifely affection” to “enhance the picture he would paint of his own magnanimous moral beauty.” They eagerly printed them, however. The letters, including Tilton’s sending his wife endless affection, proved that the couple had at one time been in love and gave some credence to Tilton’s case that Beecher had wrecked a loving marriage. In fact, Elizabeth’s testimony slaughtered her husband to such a degree that, in the face of this demonstrated past devotion, it seemed
exaggerated for Beecher’s sake. Elizabeth told the committee, “The implication that the harmony of our house was unbroken” until Beecher became a frequent visitor “is a lamentable satire.” Tilton “lived to crush out Beecher.”

Heading into the Plymouth investigation, the sixty-one-year-old Beecher cutely said that his statement would show he had “not been a bad boy.” In his testimony, he attacked Woodhull and Tilton and cast himself as an innocent avuncular figure, beloved by the Tilton children. He was only giving Elizabeth “strength and encouraging her” at a time when Tilton was “sliding into dangerous associations, and liable to be ruined by unexampled self-conceit.” Woodhull—who had become involved in Beecher and Theodore Tilton’s efforts to silence the scandal after threatening that she would tell all—was attacked by Beecher. Tilton’s adoration of her—as “priest of her strange cause”—precipitated Tilton’s fall from grace, making him “bankrupt in reputation, in occupation and in resources.” Beecher ignored the fact that Tilton lost the support of Beecher’s political and religious center well before he met Woodhull.

Beecher blamed everyone but himself. He had once “loved him [Tilton] much,” but he now termed Tilton a disloyal liar, encased in “insatiable egotism,” a man who “starves for want of flattery.” Elizabeth Tilton was not spared, despite her earnest demolition of her husband. The preacher polished her off as a lovesick fool, blaming himself only for “want of prudence and foresight” when she “thrust her affections upon me unsought.” Beecher admitted that he had promised Tilton “not to betray his wife,” but “I meant only that I would not betray the excessive affection, which I had been told, she had conceived for me and had confessed to him. It certainly did not refer to adultery.” Tilton, in turn, vowed that Beecher had aggressively pursued his wife. Beecher’s “criminal intercourse” had happened only “after long moral resistance by her.”

Although Woodhull was among the first, many other observers later asked if Beecher was so innocent, why did he go to tortuous lengths for four years to cover up “nothing”—rather than stoutly deny the charges? Now forced to admit his part in the cover-up, Beecher testified that his
desire to keep a lid on the scandal was because a famous man of the cloth could be wrecked even by false gossip. “The great interests, which were entirely dependent on me, the church, which I had built,” the book he was writing, his family, his good name—everything—“seemed imperiled. It seemed to me that my life work was to end abruptly and in disaster.”

This excuse sounded hollow to many who heard his lawyers consistently declare that Beecher’s sanctified and unblemished past proved his innocence. If that was the case, surely this lofty paragon could immediately and successfully have squelched the “scurrilous” gossip of a “prostitute”—as his lawyers called Woodhull—and a vengeful husband. However, most major papers rushed to denigrate Tilton and Woodhull and to heap praise on Beecher. He was the “victim of a monstrous conspiracy,” wrote one paper, typical of the exoneration by the press.

Beecher’s lawyers grilled Tilton endlessly about his relationship with Woodhull. Backpedaling as fast as he could, he denied having been intimate with her or having told her details for the
Weekly
scandal story. But his wife dropped another gem for Beecher’s defense. Elizabeth said she believed her husband was “the author” of “the shameless slanders against Mr. Beecher,” in collusion with Woodhull, a woman of “that class,” whom she refused to allow in her home on the Sabbath.

During the Plymouth Church investigation, an article for the
Chicago Times
, devastating to Tilton’s case, put him in bed with Woodhull: “He was my devoted lover for more than half a year… A woman who could not love Theodore Tilton, especially in reciprocation of a generous, impulsive, overwhelming affection such as he is capable of bestowing, must be indeed dead to all the sweeter impulses of our nature… for three months we were hardly out of each other’s sight… he slept every night for three months in my arms.” Woodhull always swore that this conversation never happened, but writers nonetheless have passed it down as truth for more than a century. The veracity of the story is questionable because of crucial discrepancies. The alleged interview was two years old. Why was the paper just now publishing this explosive story, linking it to the church
investigation? Two years before, such an interview would have been red-hot copy; the
Weekly
Beecher article was electrifying the country at that time, and the sisters’ trek to Ludlow Street Jail would have ensured a large readership. So why was it not printed then, when it would have caused a sensation? The author of the piece wrote that he had talked to Woodhull just before the sisters went to jail in 1872. He signed himself simply “Historian,” gave no explanation for the two-year delay, and said, “I give you the interview substantially as it occurred, from notes recorded at the time.” Among other errors, he described Victoria and Tennie as living in a palatial mansion while they were in fact hard-luck boarders at their sister’s home. Suspicion rises at a mystifying description of Tennie—something never seen in any other public or private accounts, never remarked upon by reporters covering her speeches, never mentioned by close friends: she lisped. As she supposedly came into the room to break up the interview, “Historian” quoted her thus: “Thister Vic., have you tholen ofth here by yourthelfths for the whole evening?”