The Scarlet Sisters (36 page)

Since she couldn’t take the stand, Woodhull defended Tilton in a letter she wrote that was published in the
Herald
. “I owe Mr. Tilton a too great depth of gratitude,” she wrote, to remain “silent when such testimony as this is offered.” “No matter how inconsiderately he has treated himself—not me—in regard to his relations with me, I forgive him heartily all this intended harm, now that the defense are making use of those relations to crush him in this case.”

Her magnanimous view was quickly smashed when the
Herald
next printed a letter Woodhull had intended to destroy. Written during the trial, in the white heat of anger, this furious letter had been impulsively put into type for the
Weekly
. Then, on “mature consideration,” Woodhull had
changed her mind. Obtained “through the treachery or carelessness of a third party,” the letter was now splashed in the
Herald
. Tilton was very lucky that the public, not the jury, was reading this immensely damaging assault.

This letter was written after Tilton had one day during his testimony directly faced the jury and said, “I wish distinctly to say that my relationship with Mrs. Woodhull was a wrong one and a foolish one and I do not ask any man to defend me for it, but to blame me for it.” Then he added, “I say here before God that Mr. Beecher is as much responsible for my connection with Mrs. Woodhull, as I am myself.”

In the letter Woodhull regretted writing, she tore into Tilton. Hiding behind Beecher, he had resembled “a little schoolboy’s sniveling—‘He made me do it; if it hadn’t been for him I shouldn’t have done it.’ To resort to such an escape, and to continue to pretend to retain any of the elements of manhood, ought to make him a laughing stock for every true woman… Mr. Tilton would make quite a man if he should live to grow up.”

Woodhull ticked off “untruths” in his testimony. The most devastating, which lent credence to Beecher’s defense that Tilton had acted out of malice, came close to saying that Tilton had helped with the publication of the Beecher scandal. “He would have consented to aid in its publication in a way that could have made Mr. Bowen responsible; ‘If I should be made to appear as the authority for it, I could not live with Elizabeth afterward,’ was his argument.”

But Woodhull seemed most betrayed as a woman scorned. She came close to admitting that theirs had been a passionate love, and poured out her heartfelt anger like a lover’s lament. She slashed at Tilton’s “strenuous effort” to say their bond was “solely to suppress the scandal”; this was “utterly fallacious, utterly false, and has been concocted by Mr. Tilton.” If he had only been with her to suppress a scandal he would not have been the confidant who would “bare his soul [to her] with all its imperfections as well as its beauties; he would not entrust her with his own inmost secrets… he would not entrust her with the means to ruin his reputation, his honor, his all, as he has done all this with me.” She wrote that they
had laughed at “foolish” women who fashioned he was in love with them. “Such things as I have recounted are not favors. They are bestowed only when and where the most powerful of all motives move men and women to venture everything, transforming the cool, cautious, calculating man into the hot-headed, inconsiderate lover.”

So Elizabeth Tilton was not the only one shattered by a man’s testimony, and Woodhull asked plaintively what she had ever done to make Tilton speak “as if I had been a contemptible creature?” She challenged him to produce a “single thing… This is the deepest infamy that can be cast upon any woman, and were you to live a thousand years and have a thousand lives, every one of which should be devoted to undoing the injury that you have wrought for me, you would still fail to wholly repair the wrong that I have suffered from your erratic course.”

After this letter was published in the
Herald
, and widely publicized, Woodhull had the embarrassing chore of backtracking in a third letter the paper published. When she read Tilton’s words denouncing his relationship with her, “they seared into my soul. I saw myself held up by him to the public gaze as a despicable thing, as an intriguing, treacherous, vulgar, and untruthful woman… it was in this feeling that I wrote the letter.” Just before publishing the letter, Jesus, she wrote, had stayed her hand. She tried to convince readers that the laudatory first letter, meant to establish “the falsity” of her former servants, “was a wholly different affair from that of my personal feelings against Mr. Tilton.” Now in her third letter, Woodhull was trying to explain how she could have written two such different letters about Tilton. The tempestuous second letter “contains nothing but the truth, made sharp and bitter, to be sure by an outraged woman’s soul.” She saw little contradiction. “One was prepared under a sense of personal injustice, the other under the spirit of impersonal justice, with self expunged.”

At least Stanton was back in Woodhull’s corner, chastising Tilton for having derided his association with Woodhull, and championing her bravery. Woodhull “had done a work for woman that none of us could have done. She has faced and dared men to call her names that make
women shudder, while she chucked principle, like medicine, down their throats. She has risked and realized the sort of ignominy that would have paralyzed any of us who have longer been called strong-minded.”

In the end, despite Beecher’s feeble defense, Tilton had little evidence to prove adultery. For the jury, his charge of alienation of his wife’s affections was not sufficient without that. Tilton had but two descriptions of his wife and Beecher exhibiting unusual behavior: Once, while the two sat on the floor looking at a photo album, Tilton said he saw Beecher furtively reach inside his wife’s long skirt and touch her ankle and lower calf. Another time, Tilton came home to find them behind a locked bedroom door with Beecher sitting in a chair with his vest off. Elizabeth told him they had locked the door because the children were making noise and they wanted to talk. Her own brother reluctantly testified that when he entered a room in the Tilton home, an embarrassed Elizabeth hastily jumped back from Beecher’s side.

Elizabeth and Beecher said these incidents never happened. Tilton admitted that the only proof he had was his wife’s confession, which she continued to recant. With both Elizabeth and Beecher standing fast, there was no “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The jury deliberated for eight days and returned deadlocked, unable to reach a decision. The first vote was 8 to 4 in favor of Beecher; the last, 9 to 3. The defense’s closing argument stressed that Beecher, a man of such religious magnificence, could not possibly be guilty as charged. Nine of the jury bought this.

Other lives were ruined, but Beecher kept his pulpit. The grateful church gave him $100,000 to pay for legal expenses. Nothing was settled, but Beecher’s faithful flock declared victory.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Beecher’s Revenge

The reverend was out for retribution, and it came swiftly. Emma Moulton was dispatched with lightning speed, expelled from the Plymouth Church. She demanded a hearing before an ecclesiastical council. Once again, delegates were selected for their allegiance to Beecher. Once again, newspapers called the deliberations a farce. The proceedings sounded like ancient inquisitions. Emma was not allowed to testify or have a representative. The council ignored her husband’s letter that he was prepared to attest that Beecher was guilty of adultery and perjury. Emma fumed that it was a “clerical kangaroo court” with a preordained decision.

Henry Bowen’s head was next. When Bowen demanded a right to speak before the church, the building was packed with Beecher fans. As he rose to speak, Bowen was assaulted with hisses and shouts to sit down. He had built this famous church, hired Beecher, and paid his expenses when Beecher was ill, Bowen reminded them. He reiterated the story he had told for years: the horror of his wife’s deathbed confession of adultery with Beecher. Only, Bowen never mentioned her by name, or other women he alluded to, except for the now-public Elizabeth Tilton. The
Brooklyn Eagle
had viciously attacked Tilton for publicly exposing his wife. Now the paper despicably attacked Bowen for the opposite: his gallantry to a dead woman. “By not naming names, it was clear that Bowen “knows nothing.” Bowen spoke of an anonymous church lady who had a key to Beecher’s
study where they met for trysts. “Then one day she saw another woman coming from Beecher’s study, who also had a key.” The knowledge that she was not alone among his loves eventually “killed her.” If Bowen was referring to his wife, she died at age thirty-nine, having given birth to her tenth child. Bowen said, “My knowledge is so certain that it can never be shaken by any denials or protestations or oaths, past or future.”

Realizing his fate before he faced the church committee Bowen printed for posterity in the
Independent
: “The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, without even a shadow of doubt in my mind, is guilty of the awful crimes of adultery, perjury and hypocrisy.” Winding up a long speech before the committee, Bowen repeated that Beecher was an adulterer, a perjurer, and a hypocrite; he added a “blasphemer for calling on God and heaven so solemnly to be witness to a lie.” For “falsely” accusing Beecher, the church founder was excommunicated in May 1876, in a style worthy of medieval popes banishing heretics. As the
Eagle
intoned: “From now until the coffin lid closes upon his dead face, Henry C. Bowen must go through the world with the finger of scorn pointed at him.”

Elizabeth Tilton’s turn came in 1878. She was living with her mother and, since the trial, had been teaching music to earn money. On April 16, 1878, she addressed a letter to her lawyer and requested that it be published in newspapers across the country. “After long months of mental anguish,” she had told a few friends “whom I had bitterly deceived, that the charge brought by my husband, of adultery between myself and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was true, and that the lie I had lived so well the last four years had become intolerable to me. That statement I now solemnly reaffirm, and leave the truth with God, to whom also I commit myself, my children and all who must suffer. I know full well the explanations that will be sought by many for this acknowledgement; desire to return to my husband, insanity, malice—everything save the true and only one—my quickened conscience, and the sense of what is due to the cause of truth and justice.”

Beecher, to no one’s surprise, pushed the insanity explanation: “Poor woman,” he clucked. He had heard the “rumor” that she was in a “morbid
and self condemnatory state of mind.” His attorney Benjamin Tracy gouged away: “I think there is something radically wrong in her mental operations.” A few weeks before, several papers had printed rumors that the couple was reuniting. Now they editorialized that this confession was proof that Elizabeth was under Tilton’s control again. Snapped Beecher’s lecture agent, J. B. Pond, this “confession is the price she pays for a reconciliation.”

Everyone searched for a pat explanation, because almost no one took this reversal seriously in light of her previous confession and recantations. This would mean that she had lied repeatedly and publicly. Newspapers discredited anything she said and reprinted her previous protestations, her ardent avowals of innocence, including her standing up at the trial and begging that she be heard to clear her name. What had possessed her now to subject her children to the knowledge that their mother was an adulteress, a terrible burden in Victorian times? Frank Moulton provided an interesting theory: her reversal was caused by an ultimate disillusionment with Beecher. “She is a religious fanatic, and so long as she believed she was protecting a saint she could say things that were not true.” This same fanaticism could have caused the confessional “mental anguish” for all those past lies, if she was now telling the truth. Elizabeth stayed with this confession in her letter to the church’s examination committee: “The acknowledgement of adultery with the reverend Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of Plymouth Church, was the truth and nothing but the truth.” Having “previously published a false statement denying the charge, I desired to make the truth as world-wide as the lie had been.” The two hundred parishioners at the meeting voted unanimously to excommunicate Elizabeth.

She never spoke of it again, banished newspapers from her house, and enjoyed a “wide circle of friends.” When she was near death in 1897, newspapers had to explain who she was: “At one time,” wrote the
Brooklyn Eagle
, she and her husband “were more talked about than any other private individuals in the whole civilized world.” Blind for years, a recent operation had restored her sight. During Elizabeth Tilton’s last days, a friend called her a “living exemplification of Christian charity and fortitude.” When she died on April 15, 1897, the
Eagle
was respectful but sparing in its praise,
noting that she “never lost, to her blessed comfort and to their great credit, the loyalty and love of her children.” She and Tilton never reunited.

After the trial, Theodore Tilton spoke at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to a sell-out crowd of three thousand. He had not lost his handsome allure. Many ladies “were present and his clever and witty speech on the Human Mind was interrupted often with laughter and applause.” The audience loved his political references. The body had progressed beyond the mind, Tilton said, cleverly gesturing, painting a picture of gymnastic prowess. When a bouquet was brought onstage, Tilton quipped, “These are the tuber roses which they scatter over graves. Let it be the monument and the sweet memorial of the death and burial forever of the un-American idea of any third term” for American presidents, which had recently been discussed among politicians.

The
Eagle
was astonishingly laudatory, given its past treatment of Tilton: “The lecture is characterized by the felicity of expression, the delicacy of fancy and the oratorical skill” for which Tilton was noted before “the late unpleasantness. It is pleasant to see that Mr. Tilton has lost none of his old time skill.” He need have no fear of “drawing a goodly company together at any time in Brooklyn.”