The Scarlet Sisters (19 page)

By May 1871 the “brazen tramp” had had enough. With Stanton’s tale
of the wild Tilton battle over adultery, Victoria now had all the ammunition she needed to fight back. On May 20 she attacked, with a letter to the editor, in the pages of the New York
World
and the
Times
: “I know of one man, a public teacher of eminence who lives in concubinage with the wife of another public teacher, of almost equal eminence. All three concur in denouncing offences against morality. ‘Hypocrisy is the tribute paid by vice to virtue.’ So be it. But I decline to stand up as the ‘frightful example.’ ” She slapped down the gauntlet: “I shall make it my business to analyze some of these lives, and will take my chances in the matter of libel suits.” Woodhull’s obvious threat was publicly to accuse Beecher of an adulterous affair with Theodore Tilton’s wife if nothing were done to stop the blasts from the Beechers or if the reverend did not openly condone Victoria’s free love position, which she said he practiced in secret. The letter instantly hit its target. The Tiltons and Beecher had not figured on Stanton spilling the beans to Woodhull. Tilton rushed into action.

“The day that the letter appeared in the
World
,” Victoria said later, “Mr. Tilton came to my office, and showing me the letter, asked ‘whom do you mean by that?’ ‘Mr. Tilton,’ I said, ‘I mean you and Mr. Beecher.’ ” Victoria said that it was her “mission to bring it to the knowledge of the world.” Tilton begged her not to take any steps now against Beecher—despite the fact that every “impulse urged me to throttle and strangle him,” Victoria quoted Tilton as saying. Tilton did not want his wife “dragged before the public.” After meeting Tilton’s wife, Elizabeth, Victoria agreed to the “propriety of delay.”

Woodhull made no such promise for the future, however. It was her avenging angel “mission” to help “destroy the heap of rottenness which, in the name of religion, marital sanctity, and social purity, now passes as the social system.” She knew of other adulterous hypocrites, clerical and otherwise, but had picked Beecher because “he is a most eminent man” and has a “great congregation.” Woodhull proclaimed, “I am a savior, if you would but see it!”

As in a Greek tragedy, Tilton’s ruination was set in motion the day he walked into Woodhull’s office on the errand to quell this story of
adultery between his pastor and his own wife. The relationship that followed between Tilton and Victoria has been characterized as a steamy love affair. Tilton eventually stated that they were never lovers and that he had been pushed by Beecher to make a friend of this “dangerous woman” so that she would not publicly expose their lurid tale. That task included writing and publishing the fulsome “Victoria C. Woodhull: A Biographical Sketch,” printed by his
Golden Age
magazine.

Woodhull alternately vowed and denied that theirs was a great romance. It seems probable that these two beautiful people had enough chemistry to touch off the “amative” impulse that Woodhull often addressed. Even men who disliked Tilton recognized his outstanding looks. He had a charismatic, irresistible “presence,” wrote one male dinner companion. “I do not wonder that feminine hearts… break beneath his beaming countenance. His smile is as witching as a woman’s, and his laugh hearty and sympathetic.” His blond locks hung “in clustery profusion over his shoulders.” With all that, Tilton was also a splendid companion. Said the same dinner mate, “I was charmed with sparkling conversation between the Scotch and the oysters.”

The sheer audacity alone of taking on the exalted Beechers speaks to the sisters’ fearless defiance. Abraham Lincoln legendarily praised Harriet, whose immensely popular
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
dramatized the horrors of slavery better than any abolitionist tract: “So you’re the little lady who started the war.” Her brother’s pulpit theatricality enthralled the president, and even a religiously skeptical Mark Twain marveled at Reverend Beecher: “sawing his arms in the air, howling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry and exploding mines of eloquence.” When animated, Beecher was a “remarkably handsome man… but he is as homely as a singed cat when he isn’t doing anything,” noted Twain.

By 1868, the time his affair with Elizabeth Tilton allegedly began, Beecher was fifty-five and overweight, an unlikely looking lover, especially in contrast with thirty-three-year-old Theodore Tilton, who did not follow fashion and shaved, the better for others to see his features. Beecher’s
pudgy body, full lips, and hooded eyes notwithstanding, he entranced both women and men with his oratorical brilliance and showmanship as he preached his gospel of love—or, as some cynics called it, “the gospel of gush.”

He was famous for crying, which he did well. He kissed friends, male and female, with abandon and with boyish vigor, and yet he “smashed the stereotype of the wan, effeminate preacher,” wrote Beecher biographer Debby Applegate. Woodhull wrote that he reeked of sensuousness.

Though not as consistently outspoken about ending slavery as Tilton, Beecher could move an audience with dramatic symbolism. Fourteen years before he ever heard of Woodhull, parishioners sat slack-jawed as Beecher spoke of a father willing to sell his own daughter “to go south,” adding the unmistakable sexual undertone “for what purposes you can imagine when you see her.” Few in those days (1856) spoke openly of the obvious plight of beautiful young slaves, routinely used as concubines by masters and for breeding healthy babies to become future slaves. Yet Beecher’s message was all too clear.

“Come up here, Sarah,” he beckoned, “and let us all see you.”

A light-brown-skinned pretty young woman dressed in virginal white walked up and sank down into the pulpit chair. Beecher commanded her to loosen her hair, which fell in shining waves far down her back. He turned to his flock and shouted, “What will you do now? May she read her liberty in your eyes? Shall she go out free? Let the plate be passed and we will see. How much for her?” Imitating an auctioneer’s spiel, Beecher shouted, “Who bids?!”

“Tears of pity and indignation streamed from eyes unused to weeping,” recalled Beecher’s wife, Eunice. The scene was like old revival meetings. “Women became hysterical; men were almost beside themselves.” In a fervent frenzy, they heaped money in the contribution baskets and threw coins and banknotes onto the pulpit. Rings, bracelets, brooches were ripped off and tossed. All this time, Beecher never stopped his dramatics. “He dragged out heavy iron slave-shackles and stomped them under foot.”

If Beecher was not a practitioner of free love, as Woodhull charged,
he gave a good imitation. A loving God would accept that “one could be true to one’s desires without feeling guilty or alone,” he preached, “… true love could hurt no one; open your spirits to God’s beauty.” Jesus felt there were “affinities and relationships far higher and wider than those constituted by the earthly necessities of family,” he emphasized. Beecher, who was desperately unhappy with his wife, the mother of ten, pointedly told his flock that there were “true kindred” souls to “love” outside the family.

Manhattanites crushed together on ferries, nicknamed “Beecher Boats,” to hear his feel-good sermons (while underneath the waters, workmen were laying the foundation for the Brooklyn Bridge, some dying in this dangerous task, which would not be completed until 1883). Three thousand on any given Sunday packed Plymouth Church, with its high-domed ceiling and arched windows, to hear Beecher. He reveled in his release from a childhood ruled by his famous fire-and-brimstone preacher father, Lyman Beecher. His stylish eccentricities were aimed directly at and were an “assault on everything he’d ever hated about his father’s religion,” wrote biographer Applegate.

The man who was given no toys as a child craved the good life beyond measure—and could afford it. As his fame grew, so did his pocketbook, and at his height, Plymouth Church offered him an astounding $100,000 a year. For a preacher, he became not only wealthy but worldly, fingering the opals he tucked in the pockets of his velvet jackets and flowing capes. He loved European travel, expensive art, and rare books. His passion for lush living reached hoarding proportions: Oriental rugs were piled on top of one another in his Brooklyn Heights home as he bought with no place to put them. He unselfconsciously sniffed violet nosegays, and there could never be too many flowers overflowing the altar on Sundays.

Beecher had the fanciful idea that it was no sin to make people laugh in church. Like a grand actor, he would glide past the pulpit to sit in a chair, as if ready to converse one on one with parishioners. He would mime a “sailor taking a pinch of chewing tobacco and wiping his hands on his pants, a fisherman casting, or a young girl flirting.” His rolling-thunder
voice moved them, whether he spoke of seeing God at sunset or switched over into a funny anecdote about a horse trader.

At one time, Beecher, Tilton, and Tilton’s wife, Elizabeth, were an extremely happy and close trio. Beecher’s stern and uncompromising wife, Eunice, was not included. Beecher thought of Tilton as a son, and Tilton thought of Beecher as a father. In the fashion of the times, with no homosexual overtones, they expressed their deep love as soul mates.

The year before the mock slave auction, in 1855, Beecher married Tilton and Elizabeth. Tilton was nineteen, and Elizabeth, a few years older. Young unknowns, they were eclipsed by their pastor’s popularity as one thousand guests attended their Plymouth Church wedding. Beecher said they were “one of the fairest pairs that I ever married.” The
New York Times
even covered the wedding, thrilling young Tilton, a shoemaker’s son who was as ambitious as he was gifted. Everyone commented on the striking couple: she, a tiny dark-eyed brunette nicknamed Lib; he, at six foot three, towering above not only her but most of the men around him.

An unrelenting radical idealist, Tilton became a friend of Lincoln’s, then denounced him for not being progressive enough on ending slavery, yet finally pragmatically championed him as the Republican standard-bearer. Tilton cultivated the friendship of famed poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, turned Beecher’s religious
Independent
into a lively progressive newspaper, wrote poetry, and lectured with great force.

Much about Tilton was admirable. Beecher was never so bravely outspoken about either slavery or women’s suffrage as his firebrand acolyte. After the war, during the mess of Reconstruction, it became clear that the Republican Party was more interested in being the dominant force in the South rather than revolutionizing the territory for blacks. Few were in a hurry to enfranchise blacks in the North, either; fifteen northern legislatures defeated proposals to expand black men’s voting rights. The Republican Party, at their convention in 1866, refused to welcome the great Frederick Douglass, a delegate from Rochester. (Despite the snub to
this former slave, the
Brooklyn Eagle
sneeringly characterized the gathering as the “Philadelphia Nigger Convention.”) “Only Theodore Tilton, in the face of his Republican colleagues… took his friend’s arm and joined the procession through the city.” This did not assuage the feelings of the snubbed Douglass, who felt like the “ugly and deformed child of the family,” to be kept out of sight. Tilton also led the fight for Andrew Johnson’s impeachment. “Those were days of battle,” an admirer of Tilton’s recalled decades later. “Our present age is one of dazzling decay. He [Tilton] was histrionic; he was vain; he was extravagant; he did love to pose; but, after all, he was an extremely attractive and inspiring man. He did a lot of good.”

No stranger to hubris, Tilton felt his pride wounded over the Beecher affair; this drove him to great lengths trying to redeem his name and reputation. The thought of an unfaithful wife was mortifying, but he was equally shaken that his great friend Beecher could have deceived him. Free lover Tilton brooked no such actions from his wife; free love was easy to embrace by males unless they were cuckolded by it. As Victoria caustically remarked when Tilton jealously raged, he was “no vestal virgin.” Still, if Lib Tilton was telling the truth in her final confession, a shattered Tilton was sacrificed on the altar of Beecher’s respectability. And, as the trial proved, when push came to shove, Beecher had no trouble at all in shifting his gospel of love to the gospel of hate and revenge.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Yes, I am a free lover!”

After Woodhull’s coded attack regarding the “concubinage” of Beecher and the Tiltons was published in 1871, a desperate cover-up followed. The Plymouth Church “Holy Trinity”—Bowen, Beecher, and Tilton—was forged. Although Tilton burned with revenge, and Bowen eventually sought to wreck both Beecher and Tilton, these strange bedfellows continued to scheme in private and to act their roles in public: Beecher preached, Bowen presided over the church, Tilton wrote and lectured (and quietly separated from Lib).

As the suffragists distanced themselves, Victoria and Tennie searched for new support. To that end, Victoria enlisted Tilton, who frantically needed her silence. Tilton, in turn, corralled his close lawyer friend Frank Moulton and his wife, Emma, to help him in his pursuit of Woodhull’s friendship. But if his eagerness was simply to keep Victoria quiet, he certainly performed due diligence. He progressed from formal to intimate notes: “Dear Victoria, Put this under your pillow, dream of the writer, and peace be with you. Affectionately, Theodore Tilton.” A “picnic frolic” in the Moultons’ library, “graced with Frank’s Burgundy,” was planned for that evening. “You will stay all night at Emma’s.” Another indicates that the separated Tilton was staying with the Moultons, but felt it not proper to be there if Frank were absent: “I have a room temporarily at the
Fifth Avenue Hotel, where I shall abide… until Frank’s return. I will ride up with you in your carriage this afternoon at 5 o’clock… Hastily T.T.”

All that summer of 1871, Tilton spent hours with Victoria, boating on the Hudson, frolicking at Coney Island, watching the stars from her rooftop, and spending at least one night—Tilton sleeping somewhere in that spacious mansion filled with Claflins and Woodhulls but not, they vowed, together. She praised him in the
Weekly
and published his writing, and before things between them curdled, he called her the “most extraordinary woman he had ever met.” During his days of bliss with Woodhull, Tilton—who contended in court that it was part of his “services” rendered to mollify Victoria—cobbled together the extravagant morsel called “Victoria C. Woodhull: A Biographical Sketch.” A better image for her was imperative to Victoria in order to counter the scandalous court coverage of her shiftless family, newspaper attacks, and the Stowe satire. While hoping to obscure her family’s sordid public outbursts, it also pushed her presidency and trumpeted her less than credible supernatural skills.