The Scarlet Sisters (6 page)

Despite her vaunted prosperity, Victoria was feeling “inwardly wretched” in the weeks leading up to the Civil War. “The dismal fact of her son’s half-idiocy so preyed upon her mind that, in a heat of morbid feeling, she fell to accusing her innocent self for his misfortunes,” wrote Tilton. “The sight of his face rebuked her… she prayed to God for another child—a daughter, to be born with a fair body and a sound mind. Her prayer was granted, but not without many accompaniments of inhumanity.”

The wandering Woodhull couple had migrated to 53 Bond Street in New York. There, on April 23, 1861, their healthy daughter, Zulu Maud, was born. (Later her name was changed to Zula Maud.) Once again Canning is described as a drunken beast: he kicked pregnant Victoria and assisted her in childbirth with the “feverish and unsteady hands” of a
drunk, who “only half in possession of his professional skill, cut the umbilical cord too near the flesh and tied it so loose that the string came off,” and soon left mother and child alone. “Nor did he remember to return.” But he must have remembered to lock the door, as the following account shows. Despite her claims of wealth, inexplicably no servants were in the house. Victoria’s head was lying in a “pool of blood” that had accumulated from “a little red stream oozing drop by drop from the bowels of the child,” whose umbilical cord had been so badly tied. Victoria grabbed a “broken chair-rung which happened to be lying near” and pounded for several hours against the wall to summon help. Finally a neighbor, hearing the noise but unable to open the locked front door, removed a grate in the basement window, climbed in, and rescued “the mother and the babe” upstairs. Three days later Victoria, propped up in bed and “looking out of the window, caught sight of her husband staggering up the steps of a house across the way, mistaking it for his own.”

At that point Victoria thought, “Why should I any longer live with this man?” Her anti-marriage position began: “after eleven years of what, with conventional mockery, was called a marriage—during which time her husband had never spent an evening with her at home, had seldom drawn a sober breath, and had spent on other women, not herself, all the money he had ever earned—she applied in Chicago for a divorce, and obtained it.”

But this stance did not take hold as immediately as Tilton states. Before the divorce, Victoria had set up shop in Chicago, while Tennie migrated to Cincinnati with the Claflins. Victoria had found a soul mate in Colonel James Harvey Blood, a Civil War hero with several bullet wounds to show for it. He was the commander of the Sixth Missouri Regiment and in postwar St. Louis was elected city auditor and was also president of the Society of Spiritualists. The handsome twenty-nine-year-old, with dark eyes, a trim beard, and a soldier’s stance, was quiet, intelligent, and content to let Victoria take center stage. His radical beliefs and superior education were guiding forces in Victoria’s transformation into a woman of substance. She craved knowledge, and he provided it.

In 1871, Tilton wrote that Blood’s “civic views are (to use his favorite designation of them) cosmopolitical; in other words, he is a radical of extreme radicalism—an internationalist of the most uncompromising type—a communist who would rather have died in Paris than be the president of a pretended republic whose first official act has been the judicial murder of the only republicans in France.” Here Tilton was referring to the Paris Commune uprising of 1871.

There is considerable confusion as to when Victoria and Blood began living together, but it was before she divorced Woodhull. In 1871, Victoria related that she had lived with Blood for eleven years, but that would have been before Zula Maud was born in April of 1861. On whatever date Victoria met Blood in St. Louis, he was a free lover, an ambiguous appellation that had a racy connotation of discarding partners, even though many “free lovers” were merely advocates of divorce reform to favor wives in abusive marriages. Whether Victoria understood the term or the cult at the time is doubtful, but her independent thinking and sour marriage propelled her to follow Blood’s belief wholeheartedly. How much better it would be to live with a true mate, rather than in a wretched relationship sanctified by a piece of paper, she thought. Blood was, “like Victoria, the legal partner of a morally sundered marriage,” wrote Tilton. Victoria had advertised herself in St. Louis, and Blood called one day “to consult her as a spiritualistic physician and was startled to see her pass into a trance, during which she announced, unconsciously to herself, that his future destiny was to be linked with hers in marriage.”

No time was wasted. “Thus, to their mutual amazement, but to their subsequent happiness, they were betrothed on the spot by ‘the powers of the air,’ ” an unexplained state of togetherness that sounded like the ultimate act of free love.

Different stories are told of their civil marriage, or of whether there was one. Victoria and Blood both gave conflicting accounts of their marital status. Victoria said they were married in a Presbyterian ceremony on July 14, 1866, in Dayton, Ohio. They did file a marriage license before the ceremony, but the minister neglected to file a return, to register the marriage officially. Blood further confused the issue by stating that they were legally
divorced two years later, in Chicago, and then “remarried.” It is not known whether this was a legal act or whether they were endorsing their belief that true love needed no legal sanctions and that they simply considered themselves married. No matter, wrote Tilton, “the marriage stands on its merits, and is to all who witness its harmony known to be a sweet and accordant union of congenial souls.” Victoria saved herself from being Victoria Blood, explaining the avant-garde move to keep the Woodhull name: “she followed the example of many actresses, singers, and other professional women whose names have become a business property to their owners.”

The biography, however, skips over crucial moments in the couple’s entangled life. Blood dropped his last name and became Dr. J. H. Harvey, traveling as a medicine man with Victoria, known as Madame Harvey, trekking through the Midwest—known in those days as out west—in a ball-fringed wagon, advertising their medical prowess. Eventually they returned to Chicago, where Victoria got her divorce from Woodhull.

Victoria, Blood, and her two children had joined up with Tennie and the Claflin clan at some point during the war. They rode across war-torn fields and witnessed suffering and starving families living survivors’ pain. Buck’s ads promised a band of healers to cure the body with medicines and heal the soul with Spiritualism’s “mysterious revelations.”

When the family settled in Cincinnati, in 1865, Tennie advertised as a medium and magnetic healer. By then, at nineteen going on twenty, she had grown into a beauty, her dimpled smile an easy greeting to one and all. Despite the horrors of the manslaughter charge, she remained relatively untouched by life—compared with Victoria, who was then divorced and burdened with a deeply damaged son and an infant daughter. Still, gossip and innuendo followed wherever the Claflins took up residence, and Tennie was soon in the middle of scandalous rumors that she ran a house of assignation and had tried to blackmail one of the clients—who had no reputation to lose, as he was already living with “the most notorious woman in Cincinnati.” Meanwhile, Victoria was asked to vacate her Chicago fortune-telling abode when neighbors complained that it was
actually a brothel. The stories made the newspapers, but no contemporary official records of arrests surfaced.

Whatever happened in Cincinnati or Chicago became a turning point for Tennie. She had long wanted desperately to escape this life. She later emotionally spoke of her undying love for Vicky and Colonel Blood, who “got me away from that life; and they are the best friends I ever had.” She hinted that, in Cincinnati, others came to her rescue: “Some of the first people in Cincinnati interfered to save me.” While Tennie denied accusations of prostitution or running a house of assignation, there seemed a desperate need that transcended fortune-telling scams in this fervent thanks for those who “interfered to save me.” Years later she spoke of having left a life of degradation.

Vagabond Victoria recounted that her next move was propelled by Demosthenes, the ancient Greek orator, her spiritual mentor, whom she always said instructed her in her trances. Demosthenes told her in 1868 to “journey to New York, where she would find at No. 17 Great Jones Street a house in readiness.” Inside, Victoria found it all as she had pictured in her vision, including the table on which the ancient Greek orator had written instructions. In the library, “without knowing what she did,” Victoria picked up a book and saw “to her blood-chilling astonishment” that it was
The Orations of Demosthenes
. Tilton does not explain how Demosthenes could write, in English no less, on the table or tell the uneducated Woodhull his instructions. But what was one to do? Move right in. Whether or not Demosthenes beckoned them, the Claflin family leeches soon descended, moving in with Tennie, Victoria, Byron, Zula Maud, and Colonel Blood at the house on Great Jones Street.

At this point, Tennie and Victoria tried to distance themselves from the family. They began practicing together, Victoria as a clairvoyant and Tennie as a magnetic healer. Colonel Blood helped as business manager. Gone were the magic elixirs and harmful cancer medications.

At the beginning of 1868, Vicky was twenty-nine and Tennie twenty-two. They had already lived most of their lives by their beauty, wits, strength, and humbuggery. They could not escape their past fast enough. They had known poverty, the degradation of being unacceptable child
pariahs in small-town America, the humiliation of living as drifting outsiders, making a living fleecing people—and they had seen the promise of money. With it, life could change dramatically. Yet the sisters had higher ambitions than being two beauties searching for gold. With their looks, they could have been courtesans to wealthy men who would have kept them in mansions and jewels. They were certainly beautiful enough to become rich men’s darlings. But they had more on their minds, a lot more.

Theirs was a deeper drive, an almost impossible one to achieve from their low station in life. They wanted riches, but in order to be independent. They wanted power, especially Victoria. They also wanted to do something meaningful. It would mean using men to serve them, but they wanted to be among the small band of Victorian women who could command their own lives. Like many politicians and public figures, they had competing desires. Altruistic beliefs about changing the world, especially for women, vied with raging ambition. Victoria promised to drive herself until she reached her “Divine Destiny.” And Tennie vowed to be there for the sister she felt had saved her from a life of hell. Despite Victoria’s messianic peculiarities, self-absorption, and manic fervor, Tennie would devote much of her life to her.

Their horrid childhood and poverty, with its meager pleasures, had been good training, just as it had been for so many of the uneducated men born in poverty whom they would join on Wall Street. The sisters had learned cunning and had known con artists, albeit on a penny-ante scale. Now they were prepared for the big time, unafraid of running with the high-rolling bandits who were forging Wall Street’s emergence as the center of the financial world. The sisters headed for their new future with a consuming fierceness that made them an unstoppable force.

ACT TWO

CHAPTER THREE

Wall Street Warriors

The Hudson River was buried in darkness on an icy March night in 1868. No gaslight illumined the shore as a small boat circled wildly. Its two passengers had lost all sense of direction. One was corpulent enough to nearly sink the boat; the other was thin, with a perpetual look of gloom. A ferry loomed out of the curtain of fog, almost capsizing the boat, swamping the passengers with a huge swoosh of water. Then they heard the ominous sound of a paddle wheeler too close for comfort. Clutching at the guardrails of the steamboat as their small boat capsized, they were hauled aboard and soon deposited on the New Jersey shore. They were nearly drowned but were safe now. The two men quickly joined the rest of the directors of the Erie Railroad who had already dashed to the safety of New Jersey—along with $8 million in greenbacks, bonds, and stocks they had hastily stuffed into satchels.

The drenched passengers could have fled Manhattan earlier with the others, but hubris led them to down champagne and oysters at Delmonico’s while being chased by the law. The portly and soaked Jim Fisk, who at only thirty-two had scrambled to the top on Wall Street, retold with gusto this farcical moment—among many in the great “Erie War.” His companion, Jay Gould, a year younger than Fisk, burned with a great desire to make money and lots of it. Together they had teamed up with the venerable Daniel Drew, swearing to ruin Vanderbilt, who had dared them to a fight by launching a full-throated raid to steal their control of the Erie Railroad.

Drew headed the Erie Railroad board and had made fortunes manipulating the company’s stock (long before rules against what today we delicately call “insider trading”). Recently, he had recruited to the board a Boston contingent and the brash unknowns Fisk and Gould.

Vanderbilt, for his part, in 1868 viewed Erie as competition and wanted it either out of the way or under his thumb. (Before Vanderbilt gobbled up multiple railroads to combine them into one system, a passenger could make seventeen changes before getting from New York to Chicago.) By the time of the Erie battle, Vanderbilt already owned the Long Island Railroad, the New York and Harlem and the Hudson River Railroads, and in 1867 had acquired the Central, merging them all later as the New York Central. Still, the Erie line remained competition for passage from New York City to Buffalo, Lake Erie, and Chicago—potentially the single most lucrative line of the era.

Vanderbilt, to weaken his prey for the kill, had taken the preemptive step of procuring a New York judge, the easily bought George Gardner Barnard, a crony of Boss Tweed’s, to issue injunctions restraining the Erie crowd from issuing new capital stock. This way, Vanderbilt only had to buy a majority of the shares already circulating to win control, which he had more than enough money to do. He thought he had crafty Drew and his two young partners hog-tied. The Commodore quickly bought up Erie stock, thinking Drew was thwarted, by the injunction, from issuing new stock.