The Scarlet Sisters (34 page)

Also, it hardly seems that Woodhull would have spoken so rapturously of Tilton in the fall of 1872. Six months before, she had blasted Tilton for rejecting her presidential candidacy and repudiating universal suffrage to campaign for Greeley’s misbegotten alignment with Democratic Southern sympathizers. They had parted angrily and forever.

Beecher’s lawyers, however, crowed at this morsel, a supreme example of a free-loving Tilton. The term
free love
was employed throughout the Beecher scandal as the overarching destroyer of marriages, vilified in newspapers, testimonies, and cross-examinations. Beecher’s lawyer, Benjamin Tracy, grilled Tilton for four days as to whether he had committed adultery with free lover Woodhull or any other women. Tilton refused to answer, and shot back to Tracy, “Have you ever committed adultery?” Tracy said he was not charging his wife with it. Tilton said he would accept the word of his wife on this matter but that it was none of the business of men defending Beecher. Using the
Chicago Times
piece as a springboard, Tracy asked if Tilton had ever lived with Woodhull. “I never lived with her,” he replied. Asked if his wife had been told he lived with
Woodhull, Tilton said, “I never heard about it until now. I saw something about it the day before yesterday in a salacious paper.”

“The
Chicago Times
?”

“Yes.”

Tilton testified that he spent only one night at Woodhull’s mansion, but on a couch, while finishing his biography of her. Victoria’s esteem for Tilton had long curdled by 1874; nonetheless, she declared the same in print, perhaps because she desired to see Beecher convicted. It was a complete repudiation of “he slept every night for three months in my arms.”

Woodhull was a “total stranger to me,” said Tilton, until they met after she had published the “concubinage” threat. He swore that he sought Woodhull’s “goodwill” only to keep her from publishing her “grossly distorted” story and from writing anything that would harm him or his family. Tilton’s wife “had a violent feeling against her. She had a woman’s instinct that Mrs. Woodhull was not safe,” he ruefully testified.

Elizabeth Tilton stuck to her claim of innocence, and said Stanton had misrepresented the 1870 confession of her, Mrs. Tilton’s, adultery. She vowed that she had not confessed, only that her husband had accused her of it. Stanton told the press that Elizabeth was lying, and said she had “not the slightest” doubt that Elizabeth had confessed to Susan Anthony, “Susan always speaks the truth.”

“This was a confession of a criminal intimacy with Beecher?” asked a reporter. “Yes,” Stanton replied, “criminal is the word as generally understood. Mrs. Tilton did not look upon it that way.”

Stanton’s wrath was reserved for Beecher and his church committee, which were determined “to impeach the integrity of every witness against him.” Beecher’s team produced Bessie Turner, a young former servant in the Tilton home, who told lurid tales of being sexually accosted by Tilton. Bessie had been packed off to a school out west because she knew too much about Beecher’s sojourns at the Tilton home when Tilton was away, which terrified Beecher. The preacher professed to have scant knowledge of Bessie’s departure from New York and her schooling, but Moulton’s
records proved Beecher had financially supported Bessie’s schooling. Now she was back to testify for him, painting Tilton as black as possible.

Bessie even tried to tar Tilton’s suffragist friends; the elderly Stanton played chess with Tilton until 3:00 a.m.; stern Susan B. Anthony was “sitting on his [Tilton’s] lap on one occasion and she jumped up pretty quick.” Stanton slammed Turner as a lying “self-confessed tool for whomsoever might choose to use her.” Pursued by reporters, Anthony joked, “Well, that was my only lapse from rigorous virtue. All the men had declared that Susan was so sour and I thought I could show them that I could sit on a young man’s knee just like any foolish girl.” When the reporter pressed her about the scandal, Anthony attacked men in general and Beecher in particular. “When a woman gives herself to a man… he will trample her into the dirt to serve his own ends… Old Adam said ‘The woman tempted me and I did eat.’ Beecher says, ‘The woman tempted me and I did not eat.’ Either way the woman gets blamed.”

The
New York Herald
denounced the committee for allowing Bessie’s testimony. “Whose reputation is safe… when even Miss Anthony cannot escape suspicion… crush Theodore with your scorn, if you wish, but oh! spare us the reputation of Susan.”

As the church tribunal continued, no suffragist voice of protest was louder than Stanton’s. “What a holocaust of womanhood we have had in this investigation!” she declared in a long letter in the
Chicago Tribune
. “What a football the committee, the lawyers, Mrs. Beecher, and her husband, have made of Elizabeth R. Tilton!” She mockingly termed Beecher “The Great Preacher,” who, dismissing Elizabeth “like a wilted flower… casts her aside and tells the world ‘she thrust her affections upon him unsought’—the crowning perfidy.” NWSA members, “in common with the rest of the world… heard and repeated the scandal,” and for that, Beecher “dubs them ‘human hyenas’ and ‘free lovers.’ ” Isabella Beecher was “presented as ‘insane,’ ‘deluded’ and ‘weak-minded.’ ” Stanton did not mention talk of the latter’s “unnatural” attraction to Woodhull, a lesbian inference that Beecher allowed his lawyer to make about his own sister.

Stanton also defended Tilton and Frank Moulton, the urbane merchant
who had acted as mediator. Moulton had balked at spilling all to the church committee “in a last despairing effort for peace.” For this, pro-Beecher newspapers called him a coward. Beecher had once called Moulton a treasure “sent by God,” but now denounced him as a liar, blackmailer, and conspirator. Moulton, a sudden celebrity, proved a feisty adversary, vowing to restore his blackened name. A fastidious fact keeper and an honest man, Moulton had a mile-long memory of his meetings with Beecher and a huge leather satchel full of letters and documents. He dumped his load of incriminating evidence into the newspapers, and readers devoured sensational letters that did great damage to Beecher. So, when a character in a popular New York play delivered the line “What should I do about the letters?” the crowd howled as a joker in the audience shouted, “Give them to Moulton!”

Tilton and Moulton were “not the base, unreliable men represented in Mr. Beecher’s statement,” wrote Stanton. It was a travesty, she said, that as soon as Moulton “opened his mouth to tell the whole truth, he became a blackmailer and conspirator” and that “a refined gentleman and scholar like Theodore Tilton” could “become the target for the jibes and jeers of the nation, without one authenticated accusation of vice.”

Yet Stanton acknowledged that even “in the face of facts… justice is not possible… [Beecher’s] position will be maintained for him, as he is the soul and center” of financially greedy church leaders who would prop up their kingpin. “The whole investment hangs by the eyelids until Mr. Beecher is whitewashed.”

Predictably, the Plymouth Church investigators decided on August 22, 1874, that Beecher was a victim of the “vicious and vengeful actions” of Moulton and Tilton. Elizabeth Tilton was guilty of pestering the innocent preacher with her “inordinate affection.”

One limerick summed up a popular view:

Said Beecher, “the Voice of the Nation

Is Loud for an Investigation

So I say ‘find me six friends’

Who are pledged to my ends

And from them get a full vindication.”

Tilton immediately charged Beecher with alienating his wife’s affections. Finally the open trial that people had clamored for was on the docket, scheduled for four and a half months later, in January 1875.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Wickedness in High Places

Few, if any, Americans could resist the sensational trial that began in January 1875. Manhattan ferries churning through the icy East River to Brooklyn were jammed with spectators hoping to see the greatest show on earth: Step right up! A churchgoing matron swearing on the Bible that the Great Preacher threatened to kill himself with poison! Beecher’s frantic cover-up with two men he now calls liars and blackmailers! Former servants swearing that Tilton spent nights with Victoria Woodhull! Piles of incriminating letters! Husband sees reverend touching his wife’s ankle! It was better than P. T. Barnum’s circus.

Much of the case had been spelled out that past summer in the farcical investigation by the Plymouth Church, but now there was a chance to see the characters before their eyes, in a real trial in the City Court of Brooklyn. The courtroom seated three hundred, but the standing-room crush brought the number to a suffocating five hundred. The trial lasted six months. During the winter, spectators brought blankets to stay warm in the frigid courtroom. In the summer, some fainted in sweltering heat. When the East River froze, ferries could not navigate, stranding counsel and witnesses in Manhattan and halting the trial.

Officials issued tickets, which were often scalped for five dollars apiece. As many as three thousand people a day were turned away, to the delight of neighboring saloon owners. The well-heeled arrived in carriages
lined up as if in front of an opera house, while working-class men trudged on foot. With many New York laborers still unemployed following the Panic of 1873, they ruled the upstairs gallery in rowdy disorder, spitting peanut shells and tobacco juice on the floor, laughing, and applauding as if at a Bowery saloon performance. Politicians, diplomats, bankers, and social leaders fought for grander seats below and, like the common folk, either brought lunches or purchased sandwiches from vendors; no one risked losing his seat at lunchtime. Opera glasses were sold for close-up viewing of the expressions of witnesses.

When Mark Twain appeared, the crowd shoved and ogled. A friend who accompanied Twain chuckled that many in the audience mistook him for the star witness, Frank Moulton, as both sported shocks of red hair hanging down their foreheads and large handlebar mustaches. It was “a good joke on Mark,” who had disliked Moulton’s looks “exceedingly.” Under different circumstances the satirical friend of Beecher may have enjoyed Moulton’s savoir faire: “He lived up to his reputation as a man of the world by discussing Beecher’s adultery with what was described as ‘the manner of a listless gentleman giving his verdict upon a novel brand of champagne.’ ” When asked if he had said Beecher was a “damned perjurer and a libertine,” Moulton answered, “I don’t know whether I told him he was a damned perjurer and a libertine. I may have told him he was a perjurer and a libertine, which he is.”

The stale air of sweating crowds was partially perfumed by the large banks of flowers that daily covered Beecher’s table. Like an Elizabethan duke warding off the plague, Beecher often pressed a small bouquet of violets to his nose. Tilton’s fans one day presented him with large and elegant bouquets, putting him “upon a horticultural equality with Mr. Beecher, at last.” Far more alone than Beecher, often contemplative, Tilton blushed at this attention.

The crush of reporters was unprecedented. European newspapers reported eagerly, if sometimes in baffled confusion.
Le Journal de Marseille
headlined
L’AFFAIRE BEECHER-STITON, ET VICTORIA VODULL
[
sic
]. The culprit was “Madame Breechertow,” said to be “the mother of Uncle Tom.”
In Atlanta, tavern arguments became so violent regarding Beecher’s guilt or innocence that bar owners banned all discussion of the trial. Cartoons flooded newspapers; one pictured a man in a top hat stuffing his wife into a large bank vault. The caption read “one man in Brooklyn who was determined to find his wife at home when he returned from business.” Newspaper coffers filled rapidly, with the New York
Graphic
selling as many as four hundred thousand copies of key printings.

Although Victoria Woodhull made but one brief appearance during the six-month trial, her name, reputation, and actions were “woven into the warp and woof” of the proceedings, and the word
prostitute
was flung at her in the opening remarks of Beecher’s lawyer, Benjamin Tracy. As they had already shown in the Plymouth Committee sham investigation six months before, the main goal of Beecher’s lawyers was to smear Tilton and Moulton—as blackmailers, liars, conspirators, and participants in all things nefarious, especially due to their relationship with Woodhull. Thus, they argued, Beecher had to be innocent of adultery with Elizabeth Tilton because nothing her libertine husband and friend said could be credible.

Although Tracy had warned the legal team that this tactic might backfire—that “painting Tilton black can’t make Beecher white”—he nonetheless decided that Woodhull was his trump card. Tracy needed to show that Moulton, the avowed “heathen,” had bonded with Tilton to attack Beecher in pursuit of revolting “new social theories” promulgated by “loose women,” particularly Woodhull. Moulton and Tilton had compelled their own wives “to become the mere ministers to their lust,” expounded Tracy. It was Moulton, not Tilton, who sent “his wife to bring home in a carriage the most notorious prostitute the world has ever known.” Emma Moulton’s lips “were smurched [
sic
] by the filthy kiss of Victoria Woodhull.” Although the
Brooklyn Eagle
, New York
Sun
,
World
, and
Herald
all quoted the words
prostitute
and
filthy kiss
, the final printed text sanitized the phrase. Instead, Woodhull became the “most notorious
preacher and practitioner of free love
,” not a “prostitute.” The
Brooklyn Eagle
had received advance copies containing the words
prostitute
and
filthy kiss
, and dispersed them to other papers that used this version. Other newspapers that were not privy to the advance copy used the final version with the words
prostitute
and
filthy kiss
expunged.