The Scarlet Sisters (28 page)

Tennie saw Challis and another man with two young girls “not more than fifteen or sixteen years of age,” schoolgirls from Baltimore who had “fallen in with these middle-age roués, and had in their innocence been led by them in the ways that lead to ruin.” Tennie knew Challis, and they all gathered in one box. The girls “were plied” with drink. “I remonstrated and begged them not to drink anymore. My effort… was met with an insulting request from the men to let them alone… they were seduced by them… They were taken (along with two other young girls) to the house of a woman we will call Molly [Molly de Ford, who was a client of the sisters’ brokerage firm], a first-class house of prostitution.”

There the young girls “were robbed of their innocence by each of these scoundrels.” The next sentence in the
Weekly
would astound, disgust, and become the center of a court battle: “And this scoundrel Challis, to prove
that he had seduced a maiden, carried for days on his finger, exhibiting in triumph, the red trophy of her virginity. After a few days these Lotharios exchanged beds and companions, and when weary of this they brought their friends, to the number of one hundred and over, to debauch these young girls, mere children.”

The
Weekly
vowed “every word here written can be proven.” As for a skewed standard, the sisters did not indict the madam for the heartless, criminal if true, gang rape of underage girls by more than a hundred men. Rather than utter a horrified word about Madame de Ford, Tennie continued: “The children he [Challis] has seduced and debauched have now no way open before them than the prostitute’s road to hell.” She reasoned that the young women would have had no chance in court; “had a woman brought this case to court, he would have been believed and she would have been considered a perjurer no matter the truth. And this is the justice that is meted out to women, this case being the rule and not the exception.” Tennie added a personal indignity. While the trustees of the Academy were aware of such “scenes of lechery, the manager now refuses to lease it for the performance of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ because Miss Claflin, in connection with it, is to make her debut as Portia.”

The sisters were clairvoyant enough to foresee the commercial appeal of their story, initially printing 31,000 copies of the issue, dated November 2, 1872, which hit the newsstands on October 28. “I crowded my way through the army of newsboys and news dealers which actually blocked up Broad Street for hundreds of feet… Hundreds of dollars per hour were flowing into their coffers,” recounted a
Chicago Times
reporter. “The sisters were “jubilant—the terrible expose had gone off like buttered hot cakes.” The first run of 100,000 sold out, the sisters said, adding that copies sold for as much as forty dollars.

The sisters scarcely had time to savor their success. They were quickly carted off to jail and faced court battles over two charges—one for obscenity, the other for libel—that would drain them financially, physically, and spiritually for nearly two years.

As soon as the shocking
Weekly
issue appeared, members of the Plymouth Church leapt into action. Either they contacted a young former dry goods salesman, Anthony Comstock, or he contacted them. Either way, it was a happy marriage as Comstock, who had made a small name for himself as a police informant exposing booksellers dealing in erotic literature, was aching to be the czar of vice. He instructed two clerks associated with Plymouth Church to buy copies of the
Weekly
, specifying they be sent through the mail. When the issues arrived, the United States district attorney for the Southern District of New York, Noah Davis, another powerful Beecher friend and Plymouth Church parishioner, quickly issued an arrest warrant for the sisters. Although federal law made it illegal to send obscene material through the mail, it was up to the courts to decide what was obscene, thus the sisters had to wait for a trial.

News of the sisters’ arrest tore through Wall Street, and bankers, brokers, and clerks all rushed from their busy Wall Street offices to see the police escort Victoria and Tennie into their carriage. In his haste, one officer stumbled into the carriage, plunking down on Tennie’s lap. Some three thousand copies of the damning issue of the
Weekly
were reportedly found in the carriage and destroyed.

Comstock, as a one-man vice squad, preened over his sensational coup, wanting all the publicity to the extent that he said the Plymouth Church was not involved. He would continue to hound the sisters for years, becoming their Inspector Javert and arresting them three times as he sought their conviction. Comstock, a dry goods salesman, aligned himself with the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and named himself the head of his creation, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Comstock was so eager in his pursuit of obscene material sent through the mail that he became an unpaid U.S. postal clerk prior to any knowledge of the sisters. His shiny Vice medal depicts a man, presumably a seller of obscene literature, being arrested on one side; on the other, a man stands over a pile of burning books that are releasing an incendiary swirl of smoke.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jailbirds and the Naked Truth

By the time the sisters’ carriage reached the commissioner’s office for arraignment, dense crowds in a “fearful rush for seats” dashed into the courtroom, while the unlucky piled up in the corridor. The sisters wore matching plain dark suits of alpaca, with silk purple ties and jaunty hats. “Tennie was flushed like a rose” and smiling. Woodhull’s facial expressions were never so predictable as Tennie’s, and could change dramatically depending on her moods. In the throes of a lecture, Victoria radiated an intelligent, rather haughty beauty. Her slightly heavy-lidded eyes could convey a sultry expression or one of noticeable sadness. In repose, not smiling, she could look commonplace, as she did this day in court.

Victoria and Tennie were nearly eclipsed by their famously flamboyant counselor, William F. Howe, who wore plaid pantaloons, a purple vest, a blue satin scarf held in place with an immense glittering diamond pin—just one of his collection of diamond rings, cuff links, vest buttons, and stickpins. Legend followed him everywhere. He once shot at a burglar who had dared enter his home, later quipping that “I don’t object to burglars as clients—they are pretty good clients—but I seriously object to them operating at my house.” Courtrooms were stages, violent death his specialty. He was so versed in courtroom crying that adversaries suspected a newly chopped onion was buried in his handkerchief.

The sisters’ case was a natural for Howe, filled with the theatrics he
craved. Here were “two women, who, from their education and intelligence, ought to be models of virtue and purity, charged with sending filthy, vulgar, indecent and obscene publications through the mails.”

When the sisters’ carriage pulled up to the Ludlow Street Jail after their arraignment, a mob watched as the prisoners tripped lightly out of their carriage and were met by the jailor. “No womanly exhibition of tears was visible” as they passed through the heavy doors. The sisters’ cell was in the ironically named Fifth Avenue block. They were given royal treatment on their first night: dinner of broiled chicken in the warden’s dining room. Visitors poured in, including their father and quarrelsome sister Polly. Zula Maud, now an attractive girl of twelve, sat with her mother on her cot. The sisters affably met other inmates, including a notorious forger. In honor of their presence, fellow inmates refrained from smoking.

The charge of sending obscene matter through the mails was weak in this case—except in the eyes of Comstock, who saw sin in nearly everything written, including great literary works and anatomy drawings in medical books. Only one year older than twenty-seven-year-old Tennie, he seemed like a man who had never been young. His diary is consumed with torturous guilt. While a young soldier in the Civil War, Comstock faced ridicule as he tried to save his drinking, smoking, and swearing companions from perdition. He continually chastised himself in his journal: “Again tempted and found wanting. Sin, sin. Oh how much peace and happiness is sacrificed on thy altar.… Seemed as though Devil had full sway over me today, went right into temptation… how sinful am I. I am the chief of sinners… Sin, that foe that is ever lurking… Today Satan has sorely tried me; yet by God’s grace did not yield… This morning—severely tempted by Satan and after some time in my own weakness I failed.”

These entries and confessions about the “fierce trials” to which the devil made him submit, even while still a farm boy, easily leads one to think that he was speaking of masturbation—or “self-abuse,” as it was termed among Victorians. However, Comstock was reticent in describing
what temptations the devil threw at him. Confessions, even in the privacy of his diary, seem astoundingly innocent: “Spent part of day foolishly as I look back; read a Novel part through.”

Comstock, like the sisters, felt he could further his causes through publicity, and Comstock, like them, felt the ends justified the means. Just as the sisters felt that threatening to expose as hypocrites those who secretly practiced free love was not blackmail, Comstock had no scruples about the entrapment he performed to ensnare his victims. No ruse was wrong in capturing culprits who sold, by his definition, filth. “Obscene literature… breeds lust. Lust defiles the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart, and damns the soul. It unnerves the arm, and steals away the elastic step.”

Woodhull dismissed Comstock as an “illiterate puppy,” but his fanatical quest did great damage to free speech and education in America well into the twentieth century. An unknown stalker of sin when he attacked the sisters, Comstock used his notoriety following their sensational publicity to persuade Congress to pass a tougher obscenity act, known as the Comstock Law, which disregarded the First Amendment and censored all manner of literature. Adored by religious extremists, the vindictive Comstock was responsible for at least two suicides, one of them of abortionist Madame Restell. Later becoming an object of ridicule, one cartoon showed the rotund, balding Comstock pointing to a startled woman standing with him before a judge. “Your honor,” said the Comstock figure, “this woman gave birth to a naked baby!”

But at the time he tangled with the sisters, the press and public saw a noble young crusader against evil. The New York press overwhelmingly treated the sisters as if Comstock’s charges were true, calling them harpies and omitting the vital word
alleged
in coverage of their case.

L. C. Challis, stung by Tennie’s masked ball depiction, quickly introduced a parallel indictment, charging the sisters with libel. Henry Ward Beecher, however, remained so silent that even fans wondered why he did
not publicly deny or sue. Some felt he was showing how trivial the sisters were, but others questioned how an innocent man could refrain from defending himself.

As the sisters sat in their cell, Ulysses Grant was celebrating his massive reelection, having swamped Greeley. Victoria wrote an appeasing letter to Susan B. Anthony; the latter did not reply. Stanton, who was one of the few suffragists to have backed Victoria, now lied, trying to save Elizabeth Tilton’s honor, denounced Woodhull, and disavowed passing on the adultery tale: “Mrs. Woodhull’s statements are untrue in every particular.” Woodhull was stunned by her friend’s betrayal at such a crucial time. Too late to help, Stanton later verified the details she had told Woodhull.

Meanwhile, the sisters’ nemesis, Greeley, was very ill, a defeated and humiliated candidate. A group had conspired to wrest control of the
Tribune
from him, and Whitelaw Reid had him committed to an asylum, where he sank into a coma and died. The sisters were in jail when Grant and other dignitaries listened to the effusive-as-ever Beecher eulogize Greeley. Victoria did not share Greeley’s last request: “Be kind to Tilton. He is foolish—but young.”

The sisters had to simultaneously battle two charges, the obscenity matter led by Comstock and the libel suit brought by Challis regarding the masked ball article. Colonel Blood was detained in another prison, awaiting a court decision as to whether he had been a participant in the articles. Stephen Pearl Andrews falsely claimed he had had nothing to do with the articles, and was not charged. When the sisters appeared as witnesses in the examination of Colonel Blood on the libel charge Challis had brought, the
Herald
termed it the “Sensational comedy of free love.”

The courtroom was crowded to suffocation with people curious to experience drama that “has seldom been surpassed for filthiness of detail,” wrote the
Tribune
. Howe’s “shamefully absorbing” questions would “bring a blush to almost any woman’s face.” Spectators stood up to see what effect the words had upon the sisters. They did not flinch, leaning forward to suggest new questions to their lawyer. After this tease, the
Tribune
gave no details, citing the tenderness of its readership.

Comstock took the stand to testify about his arrest of Tennie, the author of the Challis article. When asked to identify Tennie, Comstock pointed to her and said, “The individual at your left, sir.”

“What?!” Howe asked sharply.

“The individual at your left.”

Howe appeared deeply offended. “Your honor, when I represent a lady in the court of law I would like to have her treated as one.” Jeering laughter filled the room until the judge called for order.

Buck Claflin took the stand and, as usual, made the situation worse for his daughters, this time displaying his enmity for Blood. He claimed the Colonel had told him to “shut his venerable mouth” when Buck advised against the
Weekly
’s printing the Challis article. Although the near-deaf Buck cupped his ear to hear in the courtroom, he declared that he had heard through a closed door what he “thought” was Blood talking about “Challis.” Buck said Blood declared, “[W]e believe it and we mean to publish it.” The sisters, who had been trying to save Blood so that one of the trio would be free to run the
Weekly
, were crestfallen. They clutched nervously at Howe’s sleeve, whispering to him. Tennie twisted her gloves restlessly, and her face flushed an intense red. Victoria lost all sense of composure, her face ashen as she listened to her father’s damaging testimony.