The Scarlet Sisters (35 page)

Woodhull excoriated Tracy in the
Weekly
, then took on the embarrassed lawyer in person. Subpoenaed by Beecher’s lawyers to produce private (and innocuous) letters at the trial, Woodhull went unwillingly. Tracy came forward and began an apology for his prostitute reference.

“I shall accept no apology from you, sir,” said Woodhull. “The only one that you could make should be made as publicly as was the insult that you offered.”

“But,” protested Tracy, “I knew of you only from what I had read in the newspapers…”

“That will do, sir! I wish to hear no more. You grossly maligned me without cause, and I can accept no apology.” She turned her back on him, leaving the voluble Tracy speechless for once.

This one appearance of the infamous Woodhull created a sensation. Many rose to their feet to gawk. Counsels on both sides swiveled in their chairs to stare. Jurymen whispered to one another, casting curious glances at her. As she pushed through the crowded aisles, Woodhull appeared to shrink from the universal notice she had attracted. She had been ordered to turn over letters in her possession. She bowed and addressed Judge Neilson. “Your honor… they are letters, which are entirely creditable to myself as well as the gentleman who wrote them.” She spoke of having been “imprisoned several times for the publication of this scandal. During that time my office was ransacked, and all my private letters and papers taken away. I have reason to believe that some of my letters are in the hands of the defense, as well as of the prosecution.”

Woodhull opened her purse and turned over the letters. As the lawyers pored over them, in obvious disappointment, she waited in a chair. Tilton “pursed his lips and peered at Victoria in an inquiring way as though he was puzzled to see her in the courtroom at all.” At one point Woodhull and Tilton “looked steadfastly at each other for nearly a minute, and
Victoria’s face flushed slowly but vividly.” In another account, “Mr. Tilton turned his face toward Mrs. Woodhull and watched her intently with an anxious, half despairing look.” All reporters searched Eunice Beecher’s face. “Insensibly her mouth closed firmly as she surveyed the woman… and then her lips curled and a bright glitter grew in her eyes.” When Woodhull was excused, she quickly strode through the crowd.

A new dilemma—the presence of women in the courtroom—had emerged for the all-male jurors, counselors, and the frowning judge. Several women were “listening eagerly to words that no woman should hear without a blush,” declared the disapproving (Mobile)
Alabama Register
. Beecher’s lawyers, however, needed to shore up their client with these respectable women from Beecher’s church. Some reporters felt that Eunice Beecher’s delicate ears should not be subjected to such words as
sexual intercourse
, but she was the prize sideshow for Beecher’s lawyers—a steadfast, daily reminder of a faithful wife, seated in an oak chair, her snow-white hair surrounding her grim, thin-lipped face.

When Elizabeth Tilton arrived on the second day, the crowd craned their necks to see. Tilton looked nervously at the door as his wife entered wearing a black silk dress, a dark velvet cloak, and a black velvet hat ornamented by an ostrich feather. Removing her veil, she glanced at her husband for a moment. Eunice Beecher pointedly walked over to Elizabeth Tilton in a show of solidarity. As spectators gawked, the wife and the alleged adulteress talked congenially. At other times, Beecher, who kibitzed easily with lawyers on both sides and greeted spectators with smiles, boldly walked his wife over for a chat with Mrs. Tilton.

Spectators and reporters warmed to soft-eyed, petite Elizabeth, the perfect Christian woman who would not cause any man trouble unless he deserved it. Yet they were more intrigued by a puzzling specimen of a good Christian matron. A member of Beecher’s church since age sixteen, Emma related that she could not bear to attend church ever since her favorite minister had confessed to her his adultery.

More than any witness, Emma presented an unwaveringly impressive
denunciation of Beecher. Despite the attempt to tar Tilton with his Woodhull association, the heart of the matter centered on damaging actions and letters Beecher had written. Emma recounted a meeting with the distraught preacher, whom she repeatedly vowed had confessed to her his adultery with Lib Tilton and then threatened suicide, which enforced the concept of his guilt. In fact, her story of Beecher’s unfettered morbidity was similar to the hysterical meeting Woodhull had described two years before, in which the preacher knelt on her sofa, tears streaming down his face, and begged her not to ruin him. But Victoria was a dreadful free lover peddling “gossip,” while Emma was a good Christian. So the whole courtroom listened in respectful, jaw-dropping silence.

Under cross-examination, Emma Moulton never flinched: “[H]e told me very positively that he should take his life and I believed him when he said so.” She said Beecher told her, “I have a powder at home on my library table which I have prepared, which I shall take, and shall sink quietly off as if going to sleep without a struggle.” She testified that Beecher came to her in June 1873, following the exposure of the tripartite agreement, sobbing that he was utterly without hope and relayed his suicidal plans.

Everything Emma Moulton said was “pure invention,” Beecher countered, but Tilton’s lawyers showed that just days before this alleged meeting, Beecher had written that Emma was “noble… one of God’s comforters.” Why would this noble woman tell lies? It made no sense. In this letter praising Emma Moulton, Beecher had also hinted at suicide: “I have a strong feeling… that I am spending my last Sunday and preaching my last sermon.”

In one correspondence, famously tagged the “Ragged Edge Letter,” written in 1872, Beecher had written that “to live on the ragged edge of anxiety, remorse, fear, and despair, and yet to put on all the appearance of serenity and happiness, cannot be endured much longer.” He wrote that Tilton had begged him “with the utmost earnestness and solemnity not to betray his wife, nor leave his children to a blight.” Asked the
Times,
“Supposing Mr. Beecher to be innocent how could he have betrayed Tilton’s wife? What was there to reveal?” William Fullerton, one of the best trial
lawyers in New York and head of Tilton’s legal team, set a trap for the unwary Beecher, who had stated that such written agonies were due to his fear of apoplexy attacks. He had denied having suicidal thoughts or possessing poison powder. Tilton’s lawyers had to show the opposite: that Beecher’s “remorse” and “fear” and suicidal thoughts were tied to a dreadful act of adultery with Elizabeth Tilton. Fullerton let Beecher expound on what he stated were recurring attacks of apoplexy, then triumphantly whipped out for exhibit a policy of Beecher’s life insurance. Beecher was in full health, the policy stated, and had “no tendencies whatever toward ailment or disease of any kind.” The
New York Herald
editorialized, “Here was contrast of fiction and fact that was most striking.”

Attitudes in the press changed sharply after a stumbling Beecher took the stand for several days in April. He resorted nearly nine hundred times to phrases of “uncertainty, forgetfulness, or evasion,” according to one source. His temporary amnesia included not remembering the term
nest hiding
, which he had coined in his novel,
Norwood
, and which Elizabeth Tilton had used as an expression for secret meetings in a letter to him.

The conservative
New York Times
, which would have given the benefit of the doubt to a famous man of the cloth against a free-loving Tilton, thundered, “Every theory advanced by Mr. Beecher during the trial is expressly contradicted by his own former admissions and letters.” Other papers were tougher: “Beecher penned his own condemnation” (
St. Paul Dispatch
); “He is a hypocrite and a criminal of the first water” (
Petersburg
[Virginia]
News
); Beecher has fallen “beyond the hope of resurrection” (
Dayton
[Ohio]
Journal
); “He is as guilty a man as walks the earth” (
Bloomington
[Illinois]
Pantagraph
). The sisters happily reprinted these opinions in the
Weekly
. Even the president of the
Brooklyn Eagle
had had enough of his paper’s sycophantic coverage and yelled at his editor that his coverage was making the paper look ridiculous “in the eyes of every man of sense.” Crowed the
New York Times
, “It is a remarkable fact that yesterday afternoon’s issue of the
Eagle
did not contain a word that might be construed in favor of Mr. Beecher or adverse to Mr. Tilton.”

Central to this disbelief were the “Five Memorable Days” that set the
entire scandal in motion. After listening to Beecher’s response to questions about these days, the
New York Times
editorialized that Beecher was guilty of perjury and probably adultery. The Five Memorable Days began the day after Christmas in 1870 and ended on New Year’s Day. On Monday, December 26, 1870, a stewing, cuckolded Tilton sent his letter to Beecher demanding that he immediately quit the church “for reasons you explicitly understand.” Three days later, Thursday, December 29, Elizabeth wrote an adultery confession. She testified that her husband forced her to write it. The next day, December 30, hearing of the adultery confession, Beecher immediately slogged through a snowstorm to Elizabeth in her sick bed and forced her to “retract her charge.” The next day, Saturday, New Year’s Eve, Frank Moulton went to Beecher’s house and demanded he hand over the forced retraction. Beecher handed it over, stating at the trial that Moulton had threatened him with a pistol. Tilton’s lawyers caught him in this lie by producing an adulatory “Dear Friend” letter Beecher wrote to Moulton just weeks after Moulton had supposedly threatened him at gunpoint.

The last of the Five Memorable Days, Sunday, New Year’s Day 1871, was the clincher. Beecher dictated his damaging “Letter of Contrition” to Moulton: “I ask through you, Theodore Tilton’s forgiveness and I humble myself before Theodore Tilton as before my God.” Tilton “would have been a better man in my circumstances than I have been under the circumstances.”

Why on earth would Beecher have begged forgiveness and humbled himself before a man who had just called him an adulterer? Why would Tilton have been a “better man” than Beecher had been? Beecher blamed Moulton; he had distorted what Beecher had dictated to him. Under stiff cross-examination, Beecher weakly admitted that Moulton had “substantially” recorded his views. Why, asked critics, would Beecher have been so contrite if he was so innocent? Even his counselor said any man would be justified in “burying a knife in Tilton’s heart” at an accusation of adultery. And why was he dictating thoughts to Moulton, a man who had threatened him with a pistol? And calling him a dear friend?

Beecher’s reasons for such overwrought repentance were flimsy at best. One, he had guided Elizabeth regarding a separation from Tilton, and two, he had backed Bowen’s desire to fire Tilton. Few could understand his possibly begging Tilton’s forgiveness for these reasons. The
Times
concluded that Beecher “has told a dozen different stories in explanation of his letters and conduct—and every one of them crushes the other.”

Throughout the trial, Woodhull was used as a smokescreen to hide the feebleness of Beecher’s testimony and to damage Tilton. In his testimony, Tilton on occasion showed dry humor. When asked repeatedly about their trip to Coney Island and whether he had been bathing with Woodhull, he replied to laughter, “[N]o sir, I was never in the water with her, except in the hot water in which I have been put these last few years.” Moulton was grilled repeatedly about Woodhull and his friendship with her. Beecher’s lawyers produced a letter of Tilton’s urging a friend and his wife to read his biography of Woodhull, gushing that it “praises and rates Victoria on too low, rather than too high a scale.” The defense’s purpose was to show that Tilton was proud of his biography and had written it “
con amore
,” not as “a matter of compulsion to keep the woman’s nails from the throat of Mr. Beecher.” One of Tilton’s lawyers, William Beach, returned to Tracy’s opening remarks calling Woodhull a prostitute. Slamming Tracy as governed by a “loose principle, and by a looser morality,” Beach berated Beecher’s lawyer for smearing Moulton as a friend of “prostitutes.” Beach did nothing to cast Woodhull in a respectable light; Moulton had met with her only “for the sake of the honor of the church and the good of society” and would not “dream of associating with prostitutes for his own pleasure!”

So once again in this trial she was called a prostitute. Since neither side dared call her to the stand, she was forced to defend herself in the
Weekly
and the
New York Herald
. Woodhull fumed when a former servant testified that Tilton was in Woodhull’s office in the fall of 1872, treating her in a “lover like” manner and telling her that they could get $100,000 in blackmail from church leaders to scuttle the Beecher scandal issue.
Woodhull countered in the
Herald
that the servant had described an office the sisters did not occupy in 1872, that there was no talk of bribes or a “lover like” tableau, as she had not seen Tilton in six months at that time. (Under cross-examination, the servant could not remember even the seasons in which incidents allegedly occurred.) When servants testified that Tilton had slept over, Woodhull countered with specific details; her family filled the rooms, there was “no spare room,” and the house did not even contain the “sofa-lounge” Tilton allegedly slept on.

Everyone knew, wrote Woodhull, “I am my own mistress… and I would not lie either for myself or for anybody else—that is if Mr. Tilton and I had occupied the same bed those two nights I would never deny it.” Woodhull snapped that Beecher’s defense was in dire straits if it had to resort to “supposed ‘amorous glances’ and ‘tender embraces’ and ‘preparations for retiring at night.’ ”

The
Herald
remarked, “There is a charming frankness about this lady, who at least has the courage of her conviction.” The paper clamored for her to take the stand: “In view of the charges she brings” against the servants, “she cannot well be left out of the case much longer.” Beecher’s terrified lawyers made sure she did not testify, except for the brief handing over of harmless letters. Had she been able to testify, her countering of the testimony of the servants would have been crucial for Tilton; if the servants were believed, their testimony would make him a perjurer.