Goldsmith - Other powers: the age of suffrage, spiritualism, and the scandalous Victoria Woodhull

Johnson v. Johnson

Little Gloria Happy at Last

The Straw Man

Victoria Woodhull, 1868. At thirty, she was sent by her spirit guide on a great mission.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC .

Copyright 1998 by Barbara Goldsmith

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

www.randomhouse.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goldsmith, Barbara.
Other powers: the age of suffrage, spiritualism, and the scandalous Victoria Woodhull/by Barbara Goldsmith.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80035-0
1. Woodhull, Victoria C. (Victoria Claflin), 18381927.
2. FeministsUnited StatesBiography.
3. WomenSuffrageUnited StatesHistory.
4. SuffragistsUnited StatesHistory. I. Title.
HQ1413.W66G65 1998
305.42092dc21
[ B ] 97-49464

v3.1

To my dearest friend

To preach the doctrine you must live the life.

VICTORIA WOODHULL

Do as I do. Consult the Spirits.

COMMODORE CORNELIUS VANDERBILT

Orthodoxy is my doxy and heterodoxy is your doxy.

THE REVEREND HENRY WARD BEECHER

D O AS I DO . Consult the Spirits! Commodore Vanderbilt told a Tribune reporter in 1870, when asked how hed made his millions. Then he added, concerning the stock of the Central Pacific Railroad, Its bound to go up. Mrs. Woodhull said so in a trance.

Two decades ago I came across this exchange in connection with a book I was writing on the Vanderbilt family. I had no idea what it meant, though it piqued my curiosity. Soon afterward I discovered that the Commodore was a dedicated Spiritualist, one of an estimated to million or so in the United States in the postCivil War decade. Also, I learned that Mrs. Woodhull, another dedicated Spiritualist, was the notorious Victoria Woodhull, whom a tabloid referred to in 1872 as The Prostitute Who Ran for President.

These fragmentary details led me to look further into the connection between Vanderbilt and Woodhull and especially into Spiritualism. From the study of Spiritualism, I was inevitably led to the womans rights movement, both before and after the Civil War, for one of the many ways women managed to relieve the burdens imposed upon their gender was by seeking empowerment through the spirits. Not all members of the womans rights movement were Spiritualists, but womans rights were inseparable from Spiritualism.

What interested me most was how the social and sexual mores, the pressures and events of that time, affected these people, particularly women. I have relied mainly on such primary sources as letters, diaries, conversations recorded in shorthand, the public and private writings of the principals concerned, trial transcripts, and, of course, the newspapers of the day. In 1870, there were thirty-five daily newspapers in New York and another eighteen in Brooklyn. The papers of those icons of the womans movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, are contained in 110 reels of microfilm that I have been fortunate enough to live with for the past few years. Much of the research for this book has been culled from the thousands upon thousands of pages of brittle, yellowing trial transcripts: the Great Vanderbilt Will Contest; the case brought by Roxanna Hummel Claflin, Victoria Woodhulls vengeful mother, against Victorias second husband, Colonel James Blood; the murder trials of Daniel McFarland, Hester Vaughn, Edward (Ned) Stiles Stokes; and, especially, the trial involving the distinguished journalist Theodore Tilton, who sued the leading churchman of his day, Henry Ward Beecher, for having seduced his wife.

Victoria presents The Woodhull Memorial to Congress, January 11, 1871.

The Beecher-Tilton Scandal Trial, as it came to be known, captured the imagination of the American public much as the O. J. Simpson trial has in our time. For two years, it dominated headlines and was exhaustively analyzed in private homes, public auditoriums, and pulpits throughout the nation, as well as in several books. Although the trial seemingly revolved around an alleged seduction, it also raised in the most vivid way the issue of sexual relations at that time and the role of church and state in defining and regulating these relations.

As I was led deeper and deeper into the world of Victorian America, I was surprised to find that many of the books I read, especially the biographies, had little to say about the larger historical context surrounding their subjects. To see how the people and events associated with Victoria Woodhull interacted, I created, with the help of a computer, a chronology that eventually extended to four hundred pages. From this I was able to see what the various characters, whose lives intersected with Victorias, were doing and often thinking at specific times. People who seemed in the books Id read to dwell in separate worlds could now be seen as parts of a larger drama. This inevitably led to a better understanding of the texture of the age and the lives of women than I had previously encountered.

Major events in this book have, of course, been previously recorded. The Civil War draft riots, the collapse of the gold market on Black Friday, September 24, 1869, the impeachment proceedings against President Andrew Johnson, have been treated in numerous books. My contribution, I believe, was to look at these and similar events through the lives of some of the people involved, a process that was both enlightening and arduous because the relevant materials were not easily found.

Some of the documents that proved most valuable to me have only recently become of interest to historians. Lists of household furnishings, descriptions of food, the wardrobe of a woman of society, helped me grasp the quality of these lives. Such details as Catharine Beechers numbingly precise instructions on how to press a shirt, involving the use of some twenty items, brought the ritualistic drudgery of domestic existence into sharp relief.

In many of the books I read, particularly those of the period, important material that revealed the actual character of these people had been expurgated. For example, the letters of Susan B. Anthony were altered by her official biographer, Ida Husted Harper, to make her seem decorous and pure, rather than the direct, insightful person she undoubtedly was. Pages from Anthonys diary relating to the sexual excesses and blackmail schemes of Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, were ripped out and destroyed by Harper, as were the pages relating to the crucial controversy of this book. Harper boasted that she kept a bonfire going for a week with just such unacceptable material. Fortunately, from the letters of Anthonys colleagues and friends that refer to these missing pages, I was able to reconstruct much of what Harper suppressed. Again and again, in the letters I quote, one finds the directive Burn this! Fortunately, we are the beneficiaries of the repeated failure to obey this command.