The Scarlet Sisters (29 page)

Challis then took the stand, and Howe quickly set out to make him the kind of cad who would debauch a virgin. In so doing Howe further ruined what reputation Tennie had by suggesting such a familiarity that Challis gave her a present of underwear. Contemporary accounts never explained or expanded on why Howe would so damage his client in such a way. Apparently Howe was trying to prove that they were on such friendly terms that Tennie could not have blackmailed Challis, as he charged.

As much was deemed “unfit for publication” many newspapers didn’t mention the underwear present. Howe tried to expose Challis’s social habits, but Challis’s counsel objected to his questions as a “violation of the decency of the Court.” The judge agreed. Howe extracted that Challis had seen Tennie at her office and five or six times at her house. If readers
were now salivating, it did not matter; newspapers refused to print “the disgusting scene in the courtroom.”

As soon as Challis said that he had met Claflin “at the French Ball,” Howe pounced.

“French Ball!? Indeed! French Ball did you say, sir?”

Howe forced Challis to admit that he was familiar with the demimonde, and that he saw about fifteen women at the ball whom he had met before. When Challis admitted that there were two young girls in his French Ball box, Howe, grandstanding to make his point, joked that he, himself, certainly “had an interest in these girls.”

Much of the examination fell into a he said, she said contretemps. Challis said Tennie had called him to her cell, begging that if he ceased the prosecution she would swear in an affidavit that the story was false. Woodhull, rather than Tennie, took the stand to defy Challis. Trying to control her emotions, she emphatically denied that Tennie had tried to bargain with Challis. Instead, she said, Tennie had told him “every word of it was truth and could be proven.” Challis had visited their house after the French Ball and boasted about seducing two young girls, Woodhull swore. As she tried to describe in the courtroom the particulars of the “terrible debauchery,” she was repeatedly stopped by the judge for presenting indecent material. “Although both sisters swore that Blood had had nothing to do with the masked ball article, the judge ruled that he was complicit in the publication and would stand trial.

Blood was released on bail, but the sisters were kept in jail, with an inordinately large bail to pay and no sign of a trial, for the entire month of November. They finally made bail, paying $16,000 to walk out on the third of December into fresh air. Thirty days in jail had taken their toll. Broken and in despair, Woodhull had refused to eat for three days. In her weakened, fasting state, she swore that Jesus had visited her; Tennie slept through his appearance. No other women of the sisters’ ilk could have spoken of the horrors of prison conditions: wading in water up to their ankles in cold cells, downing wormy biscuits and foul-tasting coffee. Instead of being cowed by the experience, though, the sisters breathed
fire and were ready for battle again. Comstock, however, was waiting for them, already plotting ways to ship them back to jail.

The sisters, burning to tell their story of life in prison and the injustice meted out to them through “Moral Cowardice,” set up lectures. Victoria planned to speak first in Boston, but Harriet Beecher Stowe used her influence to make sure “those vile jailbirds” were banned from there.

Meanwhile Comstock, who had vowed on New Year’s Day to do “something every day for Jesus,” began his entrapment scheme to nail the sisters once again, on a second charge of obscenity, for sending the same material through the mails. Using the fake name of J. Beardsley, he sent a money order for six copies of the infamous November 2 issue of the
Weekly
from a Greenwich, Connecticut, post office box. He had ridden through snow on a sleigh from New York to rent the box. He then rode to Norwalk and used the name of a friend there to purchase six more. When he had collected the twelve copies he obtained warrants for the sisters’ and Colonel Blood’s arrests for sending obscene material through the mails.

Blood was arrested at the
Weekly
office on the afternoon of January 9, 1873, and that night the sisters were scheduled to speak together at the Cooper Institute. Blood managed to get word to them that Comstock was on the chase. When U.S. Marshals searched their house, they came up empty. Tennie was under their noses, hiding under a large upturned washtub. Victoria had fled with her bondsmen to the Taylor Hotel in New Jersey, as Jim Fisk and his cronies had done back in 1869.

The sisters had placed advertisements for their lecture, calling it “Moral Cowardice and Modern Hypocrisy—the Naked Truth—Thirty Days in the Ludlow Street Jail.” Before the doors opened, more than a thousand people, most of them women, clustered around the entrance. Laura Cuppy Smith, their faithful friend and a Spiritualist trance speaker, greeted the audience in their stead.

A carriage drove stealthily down Third Avenue. A lookout slipped past waiting marshals to the carriage and whispered that the passengers would be safe if they mingled with the crowd pressing through the front
door. A little old Quaker lady stepped out of the carriage, her drab silk bonnet projecting several inches beyond her face, which was concealed by a thick gray veil. She huddled under a black-and-white shawl and hobbled down the aisle. People offered to help, but appearing deaf, the woman spoke to no one as she moved closer to the stage.

Then, with a quick, nervous step, she ascended the platform. In an instant, “old age, coal-scuttle bonnet and gray dress disappeared like magic” and Woodhull stood before them, “an overwhelming inspirational fire scintillating from her eyes and beaming from her face.” The Quaker costume lay coiled at her feet. Breathing in heavy gulps, she raised her arms high and threw back her head defiantly, her hair tumbling down. The crowd went wild. Victoria waited for the hollering, shouting, and applause to die down, then created further bedlam with her greeting: “Friends and Fellow-Citizens! I come into your presence from a cell in the American Bastille, consigned by the cowardly servility of the age.” People in the front row instantly put their feet on the iron railing surrounding the stage to prevent any attempt by the marshals to grab Victoria. She disarmed the audience when she apologized for her heavy overshoes, explaining that they would be useful on her trip to Ludlow Street Jail.

“Her voice rose in clear and piercing tones, like a song of love, blended with the war-cry of battle, and the pent-up forces of her soul rushed forth in an impetuous and irresistible torrent of burning, glowing words.” Woodhull marched through a tour de force for an hour and a half, outlining her obscenity defense, ridiculing Comstock, and extolling socialism, free love, and religious freedom. She positioned herself as a First Amendment fighter for free speech and equality in every possible arena—from the boardroom to the bedroom. She sprinkled her speech with historical references to the goddess Diana, to Acts of the Apostles, and to Caligula.

Woodhull mocked the “cowards” who had suppressed the
Weekly
“by violent and illegal seizures,” arrested her and her sister, and ransacked and destroyed files and equipment in their office. She accurately reported that when the “New York
Herald
boldly and unhesitatingly reprinted the ‘most objectional [
sic
] matter’ ” from the
Weekly
, no one, including Comstock,
had lifted a hand to charge the powerful
Herald
with obscenity. Woodhull engaged in a lengthy tirade about how the passage most objected to—“the red trophy of her virginity”—was less inflammatory than many in the Bible. Surely the YMCA fellows should know that, she taunted, or could it be that they didn’t know their Bible? “The fellow Comstock is, I think, too conceitedly egotistic to realize the position into which his action has placed him. He is also, I think, just enough fool and knave combined” for buying the papers and having them addressed and sent to the post office on his account, by a person “having no right or authority to act for my sister and me.”

She tackled the criticism of her free love speech, now a year and a half old, in which “I said something to the effect that I have the right to change my love every day or every night if I choose to do so,” and the response of the press and public was “Mrs. Woodhull confesses that she lives an utterly abandoned life; she lives and sleeps with two or three or five hundred or some other egregious number of men… All this is very absurd.” Nothing she ever said, or that others knew of her life, would show “whether I live the life of a nun, or whether I live as the exclusive wife of one man, or whether I am what the cry [of the public] indicates.” Her friends were eager to “assure the public that I am one of the most exclusive and monogamic [
sic
] of matrons.” As always, Woodhull laced references to her personal behavior with enticing ambiguity: “I have been perfectly willing that the world should think just the other way.” She saw herself in the front lines as a martyred saint, taking the bullets if it would help condition the world for others “who might want a broader social sphere than I do and to give the world just this lesson—it is none of its business.” She could not understand why “affectional [
sic
] as well as religious freedom should not be tolerated in this free government.”

At the close, Woodhull surrendered to the waiting marshals.

This time, she and Blood were allowed to sleep together, in cell 12 at the Ludlow Street Jail.

While briefly out of jail and awaiting trials on the charges of libel and obscenity, Victoria and Tennie tried to reconstruct their ransacked office and wrecked equipment in order to resume publishing. Less than two
weeks after Woodhull’s “Naked Truth” speech arrest, they were stunned when they were arrested for a third time. Everyone seemed dazed by now.

“I thought we had been arrested often enough to satisfy everyone,” said a caustic Woodhull to the two deputy sheriffs. “What have we done now?”

They were told that it was “for libel,” but no one knew who had sought it. The indignant sisters sent messengers to their lawyer and bondsmen before entering the carriage with Blood. When they arrived at the district attorney’s office, they discovered that he and his clerks had gone for the day. Their lawyer learned that Challis was arresting them, again on charges of libel, because the masked ball issue of the
Weekly
was still in circulation. Their bondsmen were ready to sign the bail bond, but no one was in the office to accept bail. Woodhull angrily railed at the “outrage” of being arrested so late in the day, obviously “so that they could not give bail.” This time the trio was sent to a prison worse than the Ludlow Street Jail, the massive, foreboding prison known to all as the Tombs because its architecture resembled an Egyptian mausoleum. Charles Dickens called it a “dismal fronted pile of bastard Egyptian.”

By now their frequent incarceration had taken its toll on the sisters; even Tennie wore no smiles. Howe was a studied performer, but he was also genuinely livid at the numerous arrests. He challenged the “persecution of his clients by an obscene person, one Comstock.” He had twice caused their arrest, and while they were clamoring in vain for a trial, Comstock had arrested them for a third time, all to “satisfy the malice of this man [Beecher] who won’t come into Court to make his charges good.” Howe also attacked the excessive bail—“these women simply for an alleged misdemeanor, are under $60,000 bail [because of the accumulated arrests] which was more than bail set for the infamous and recently arrested Boss Tweed.”

After many delays, Howe was finally allowed to quiz Comstock, in a hearing to ascertain whether the charge should be taken to trial. Howe blistered Comstock in court, reading, line for line, from the masked ball article and pausing repeatedly to ask Comstock, “[I]s this obscene?” “No,” replied Comstock to all the passages.

Then came the crux of the challenge, the three-line sentence in the Challis article containing the “red trophy of her virginity” phrase. The hyperbole of the writing—the disgusting implication that Challis would not have washed his finger “for days”—notwithstanding, Howe declared that the phrase was not obscene. When asked, Comstock declared it was. Howe triumphantly opened the Bible to Deuteronomy 22:15 and read, “Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel’s virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate.”

Now, asked Howe, “Is this portion of Holy Scripture obscene?” Comstock said no, he didn’t think so. “Even if they say the same thing?” pressed Howe. “Yes, even so,” said Comstock.

Comstock’s case was severely weakened. Howe and the sisters continued to protest loudly against their enemies and the cowards who had hounded two women, destroyed their business, and suppressed their newspaper. Howe demanded a lowered bail and, after so many outrageous delays, an immediate trial. The judge lowered the bail to $2,000 for Blood and $1,000 each for the sisters. But a trial was still far off, delayed by the prosecution for months.

By now the sisters were garnering defenders who saw something terribly wrong in their treatment. In her “Naked Truth” speech, Woodhull flatly charged that Comstock, Beecher, Bowen, and other members of Plymouth Church, the district attorney, and the commissioner, backed by Challis and the judge, had engaged in “personal and vindictive persecution.” People were beginning to believe it.

Even a
Brooklyn Eagle
editorial attacked the sisters’ long incarceration as an outrageous act of the U.S. government. In fact, the paper saw their persecution as a dangerous erosion of free speech, when they were first thrown in prison: “Without having generally known it, the people of this country are living under a law more narrow and oppressive than any people with a written Constitution ever lived under before.” Why had the law continued “to play with Woodhull and Claflin as a cat plays with a mouse? If they are to be prosecuted, let the suit be pressed,” demanded
another New York City editorial. Papers throughout the country showed more spunk and skepticism in denouncing Beecher and Comstock.