The Scarlet Sisters (5 page)

When the Claflin caravan entered Ottawa, Illinois, in 1863, Buck set up an infirmary where he would callously lead Tennie down a terrible path as a “magic healer.”

In presenting his daughters as clairvoyants with supernatural powers, Buck was cashing in on the amazing mania of Spiritualism that transfixed the country from the 1850s through the 1870s. Spiritualists became national celebrities and claimed two million members in a country with a
population (in 1855) of only twenty-seven million. Their number would grow, by some estimates, to four million.

When Buck saw the incredible fame being lavished on the two young sisters who had started the Spiritualist craze, he could not help but think of his own two treasures, just waiting to be pushed into the movement. In 1848, when Victoria was ten and Tennie three, Margaret and Kate Fox, sisters in the small upstate town of Hydesville, New York, would become so famous that P. T. Barnum would hire them and countless thousands come to see them. Prominent observers such as Horace Greeley, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant swore the Fox sisters were authentic. Margaret, in her early teens, and her younger sister, Kate, lived with their parents in an old cottage that groaned with strange noises at night, terrifying their mother. An old peddler had been murdered there and his body was never found, so the story went. One night the mother bolted out of bed when she heard loud rapping noises filling the house. The sisters told their petrified mother that the murdered peddler was speaking to them. If the sisters asked a question, his spirit would rap out the answer. Their older married sister, Leah Fox Fish, brought them to her home in Rochester and charged for their “spirit rapping” sessions. The press and traditional clergy cried fraud, but this only added to the sisters’ fame, and the awestruck lined up to see them perform. Leah, a savvy promoter, took her sisters to New York, where P. T. Barnum cleaned up as crowds stormed Barnum’s hotel.

Greeley—best known today for his admonition to those seeking a fortune to “Go west, young man”—championed the sisters in his
New-York Daily Tribune
. His wife sought their help in reaching her dead son, just as Mary Todd Lincoln would later, in darkened White House parlors, beg mediums to contact her dead son, Willy. In séances across America, spirit rapping, moans, moving tables, weird music, and wispy astral visions ensured the presence of a ghostly power. Printing presses churned out books on Spiritualism at a fast clip. Mark Twain’s editor William Dean Howells, an author in his own right, remembered as an Ohio youth that Spiritualism was “rife in every second house in the village, with manifestations by rappings, table-tipping, and
oral and written messages from another world through psychics of either sex, but oftenest the young girls one met in the dances and sleigh-rides.”

The movement, however, appealed to more than just the gullible who wanted desperately to speak to loved ones on the “other side” or to those who followed it as a popular fad. For progressive reformers, Spiritualism offered something better than the unforgiving hellfire and damnation that thundered from church pulpits. Instead of being terrorized by a wrathful god, they were graced by angels who wanted only good for them. Many humanitarians felt that the “spirits wanted to make themselves felt in earthly affairs and would, in fact, lead mankind to social regeneration.” Utopians, many of whom advocated free love, took up Spiritualism, as did many socialists, abolitionists, and suffragists.

Above all, Spiritualism was a breakthrough for intelligent women who loathed their role as silent partners deemed by society as unfit to speak in public. Spiritualism gave such women a platform, because as mediums, it was acceptable for them to speak, as they were not expressing their own thoughts, but acting as conduits for messages from the dead. Savvy women soon took over the movement. They held forth as lecturers and moved into the homes of the rich and famous to conduct séances.

Spiritualism became a religion, with Spiritualist churches springing up across the country as freethinkers revolted against harsh authoritarian Christian orthodoxy. When no traditional churches ordained women, and many prohibited them from speaking out loud at services, Spiritualist churches embraced women’s rights and considered them as equal members. While the movement was easily dismissed because of the charlatans and their tricks—disembodied voices, music, spirit rapping, parlor “ghosts”—serious followers believed there was a scientific basis for it. They argued that “reason” demonstrates that life, at least the soul, continues on in some fashion. In an era when the mind was a mystery—“phrenology [studying the bumps on one’s skull] and alchemy still passed for science”—the Spiritualist belief in the “science of the metaphysical” seemed rational. Religious Spiritualists believed that there could be genuine manifestations from the other world. This was, after all, just an extension of accepted
religions, which told parishioners that the departed existed in “heaven,” that they would meet them one day in the “great by and by.”

Belief in Spiritualism’s power was strengthened by the amazing—some would say miraculous—changes made by the “culture of invention” during the Industrial Revolution. In just twenty years, from the 1840s to the 1860s, machinery and other inventions transformed Manhattan from a nearly medieval hellhole of no sewers, open-hearth cooking, and outdoor privies into homes with running water, stoves, iceboxes, and central heating. After such changes, anything could be believed. For those who could afford it, that is. Poor immigrants and blacks lived in crowded rat-infested wooden firetrap tenements, with stinking outdoor privies; human waste and horse manure mingled in open sewers that spread lethal diseases. Conditions in New York’s slums remained appalling for decades.

Radicals among the young, such as the Claflin sisters, were ready for “any sort of millennium, religious or industrial, that should arrive.” The invention of the telegraph, which sent unseen messages long distance, floating by seeming magic through the air, bolstered the belief in the supernatural. One leading Spiritualist journal was even called
The Spiritual Telegraph
.

Tennie believed she had the power, but not to the extent promised to the gullible by Buck. One newspaper carried a story about an injured Civil War soldier with a bullet embedded in his foot who sought her services. As she felt his toes, she blurted out, “Why Captain, you were not wounded in battle,” and announced that he had been shot by a rebel sniper. The astounded soldier swore that only he had known this.

Spiritualism eventually withered after large-scale fraud was exposed in the 1880s. At that time, Maggie Fox—descending with her sister into alcoholism, drug addiction, and poverty—hastened the movement’s death when she told a large crowd at the New York Academy of Music in 1888 that she and Kate were frauds. They had started their rapping as a gag to rattle their superstitious mother, she admitted, achieving the sound by knocking their toes on wood. Despite such assaults on Spiritualism, the federal census in 1890 listed 334 Spiritualist churches in the United States.

Tennie’s expertise, she always claimed, lay in her power to heal the sick magnetically by the laying on of hands. The concept of magnetic healing began in the 1770s, when the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer—whose name was the origin of the word
mesmerized
—articulated a “form of psychic healing that included both magnetic healing and hypnotism.” He believed that a force or magnetic fluid linked all beings. “This was not so different from Hindu prana or Chinese chi. His method of laying on of hands and giving suggestions to patients led to the development of therapeutic hypnotism.” Mesmer presciently believed that mental attitudes often accompanied physical illnesses and that it was vital for physicians and patients to be in sympathy with one another. He used the French word
rapport
—not then common in the United States—to connote “harmony” or “connection.”

The prophetic Mesmer has modern-day psychoanalytic and magnetic healing followers. In his times, however, as with most medical pioneers, envious colleagues called him a fraud, and they persuaded the Viennese Medical Council to oust him. But in more liberal Paris, Mesmer treated the wealthy for large sums and the poor for free. He believed that the laying on of hands “had the power to make the fluid flow from themselves into the patient.” He claimed that water immersed in iron rods provided magnetic fields. Despite widespread skepticism in America, magnetic healing became popular among Spiritualists.

Tennie believed in her power as a “clairvoyant physician”—saying that she passed positive and negative magnetic waves through her hands as she rubbed patients—and once bragged to America’s leading feminist, Susan B. Anthony, that “I was a very good doctor, I cured a much larger percentage than the regular M.D.’s.”

Spiritualism became a nationwide craze and a form of solace throughout the sisters’ youth. The specter of death was everywhere then: women dying in childbirth; diseases taking infants, children, and adults. In the 1850s, children under five made up more than half the deaths in New York City. When Tennie was fifteen, Civil War slaughters began. Some 750,000 soldiers were butchered or died of diseases and poor medical treatment. Grieving widows and mothers turned to mediums and
Spiritualism in an aching attempt to commune with lost loves. Into this morass of Civil War grief stepped Buck Claflin, with Tennie at his side.

Tennie ran away at fifteen, but the family found her and dragged her back. She briefly married a flashing dandy named John Bortel, but Buck swiftly ended that. By 1863, Tennie was seventeen, soon to be eighteen in October, but in the ads Buck placed in the newspapers, he shaved off three years, gauging that a child administering his treatment would be more trusted. And he had transformed himself into a doctor: the “King of Cancers,” to be exact.

Neighbors in the small town of Ottawa, Illinois, sometimes heard screams floating out of the Fox River House, an abandoned hotel rented by the Claflins, where Buck set up an infirmary to treat cancer patients. In addition to the infirmary, he placed an ad in the local newspaper stating that the Fox River House also taught lessons in the “Cult of Love.” He never explained his “Cult of Love,” but neighbors looked askance at men who showed up there at night. The two oldest sisters, Margaret and Polly, were there with five children, mother Annie, Tennie, sister Utica, and brother Hebern, who, following his father, had become a self-proclaimed doctor.

Buck Claflin, the “King of Cancers,” had advertised Miss Tennessee’s “Magnetio Life Elixir” at infirmaries in Pittsburgh and Chicago. Until Ottawa, Tennie was treating patients by laying on hands and using the home-brewed magic elixir, thought to contain laudanum, although Buck claimed it was harmless. But Buck was now sliding into criminal territory. Patients came for special treatment from the gifted child. In large type, his ads claimed that “Doctor” Claflin guaranteed a cure—he gave himself an escape clause with this addition: “if patients live up to directions”—and promised “Cancers killed and extracted, root and branch, in from 10 to 48 hours without instruments, pain or use of chloroform, simply by applying a salve of the doctor’s own make.” Only Tennie, with her magic hands, was allowed to apply the salve. Claflin later said it was a mustard plaster. Authorities said the homemade brew, cooked in an iron vat and stirred by Annie, was heavily laced with lye.

As a lure for more patients, Buck printed fake testimonials in the local newspaper, the Ottawa
Republican
. He disclosed the name of a supposedly recovering breast cancer patient, assuming she would stay silent on the topic in an era when “limb” was routinely written instead of the racier-sounding “leg.” The ad read, “Mrs. Rebecca Howe, recovering from a dangerous situation after treatment by MISS TENNESSEE CLAFLIN wishes to thank this remarkable child” and “recommends” her cancer treatment. But Buck did not reckon with the anger of a dying Rebecca Howe. She replied in the
Republican
that her breast had been “wholly eaten away” and that she was in agony, and she called Tennie “an imposter, and one wholly unfit for the confidence of the community.”

Following Howe’s revelation, when two doctors and the local marshals bounded up the steps of the hotel to raid the second-floor infirmary, they gagged. In the filthy, fetid room they discovered dying and unfed patients lying in their own excrement. But they found no Claflins. The real clairvoyant was Buck, an artist in his ability to escape before police could locate him. This time the whole family vanished. Tennie was not around to be arrested for manslaughter.

The state of Illinois charged that Tennie “feloniously and willfully did kill and slay” Rebecca Howe by placing “upon the right side of the breast of one Rebecca Howe divers quantities of deleterious and caustic drugs by means of which a large amount of flesh” of her breast was “wholly eaten away, consumed and destroyed” by the drugs. Howe languished “in mortal sickness and thereby died” on June 7, 1864. A lesser charge was lodged by a John R. Dodge, who claimed that Tennie sought eighty-three dollars from him “with intent to cheat and defraud” by claiming she could cure him.

Why Buck, the instigator and the adult in this sordid enterprise, was not indicted remains unknown. Probably he smartly put the infirmary operation in the name of another family member. Tennie was now on the lam. She was never caught for the Ottawa indictments, but later in life she would not escape this sensational past.

This scandal might have stopped anyone, but Buck Claflin and family
were soon off to newer cities, newer grieving widows and mothers, newer scams, newer charges, and more evictions.

Directed, as she always asserted, by the spirits, Victoria vowed that after returning from San Francisco she was commanded “to repair to Indianapolis, there to announce herself as a medium, and to treat patients for the cure of disease.” She took rooms in the Bates House and published a notice in local papers. “Her marvelous performances in clairvoyance” became so well known that people arrived from far and wide. Her rooms were filled and “her purse grew fat.” In Indianapolis and then in Terre Haute, she performed seeming miracles: “money flowed in a stream toward her.” In city after city, Victoria “supported all her relatives far and near.” Victoria claimed she made vast fortunes—nearly $100,000 in one year, $5,000 in one day alone. This has to be a preposterous lie. Her purse-fattening “spiritual art” that made her $100,000 a year would be equivalent to several million dollars today, and $5,000 is still remarkable today for one day’s work. Tilton wrote that by 1869, the year after the sisters met Vanderbilt, Victoria’s income and the “investments growing out of it” had reached $700,000—many millions in today’s dollars. In that year, she was told to discontinue the practice by “direction of the spirits.” As Tilton so charitably wrote, “The age of wonders has not ceased.”