The Scarlet Sisters (37 page)

Tilton ignored Beecher and the scandal in his lecture, but “he turned an Arabian proverb at the expense of the editor of the
Eagle
.” Obviously referring to the editor’s closeness with Beecher and his minions, Tilton quoted a proverb: “A wise man keeping the company of the vicious at last becomes an idiot.” The
Eagle
, in response, could not resist a dig at Woodhull: Tilton “ought to lay the Arabian proverb in question of his own heart… when the Woodhulls… of the future crowd around him.”

Tilton continued to lecture, but he was no longer the firebrand reformer of old. He made enough money to afford a life of contented self-imposed exile in Paris, moving there in 1883 and living on the Isle de France for years, then moving to more fashionable quarters. Authors have characteristically portrayed him as a lonely recluse writing, as one said, “bad poetry.” Far from it. In 1894 he was described as “one of the most alive men in Paris. You are sure to see his massive head” towering above
everyone at every opening art exhibit. “He is considered one of the finest looking men in Paris. The lines in his face give him character and his white hair makes a fitting frame for his face,” wrote an obvious admirer.

He wrote essays, published books of his poetry, and entertained some of the most remarkable figures of the nineteenth century, among them Stanton and Frederick Douglass. Civil War animosities were forgotten as he frequently played chess with the former secretary of state for the Confederacy, Judah P. Benjamin. Tilton “has become quite a man of the world in Paris, and is often seen in the most fashionable salons.” Even the
Eagle
gushed in awe over the former “Brooklynite,” now respectable as an exotic Parisian, who sat for his portrait by a well-known artist. Tilton died at seventy-one, in 1909, outliving Beecher by twenty years. His page-one obituary in the Paris
Herald-Tribune
had to explain to a different generation who he was, once a major force in politics and letters who had figured in the most infamous trial of a different century.

The sisters were struggling to survive both during and following the trial. Despite the many who thought Beecher guilty, few were in the mood to embrace the women who had first exposed the scandal. In addition, they were bludgeoned in a scurrilous tract that accused everyone in the family, including their old mother, of prostitution. In the summer of 1874, in the midst of the Tilton–Beecher–Plymouth Church uproar, Joseph Treat, a disgruntled former writer for the
Weekly
, self-published a venomous rant that should have been ignored as the incoherent ramblings of a deranged mind. In it, he admitted his unrequited love for Woodhull and said that she “gave herself to the embraces of others” when she needed money.

Treat later admitted that he was broke and wrote the pamphlet for money “to make a living.” His sensational story included Buck taking Tennie to Greene Street, which was lined with the worst brothels, “and bade her get her living there”; Tennie’s “most painful illness last spring,” he declared, “was a result of a sexual disease.” The malicious Polly Sparr allegedly told him the far-fetched tale that Tennie “has had ten men visit her in one night and after each, she had bathed her, given her a new
night-robe and prepared her for the next”—and that Woodhull and Colonel Blood “made Tennie do it!” The mother and Meg Miles had also “lain under the piano, while Tennie has had a man in bed with her in the same room.”

Perhaps because this calumny was so ludicrous, Woodhull decided to take the high road and not attack Treat, contrary to her custom when criticized. Although she vigorously wrote denials, a charge of libel and a subsequent rehashing in a trial would have been beyond their financial means and would only spread the story. Yet it was a mistake. While some major papers pummeled Treat, others gave the pamphlet currency and flogged the sisters. They were called “black as ravens” by the
New York Herald
and advocates of “harlotry” by the
Chicago Times
. Hundreds of Treat’s pamphlets, a gift to Beecher’s supporters, Woodhull claimed, turned up outside the halls where she was speaking. Eventually Colonel Blood brought libel charges. Treat was arrested in August 1876, but the courts took so long that he died before the trial, in February 1879. As Treat’s tirade spread across the land and even to Europe, it became the final blow to the sisters’ reputation. Woodhull cried out, “They [the press] follow me up and down the earth as if I were a pestilence to combat, willfully misrepresenting all my acts and views.” She was weary of the fight. “I am worn out. Constant drippings wear the hardest stones.”

Woodhull spoke no longer of free love, instead reaching more and more for the Bible and enveloping her speeches in religious passages. Her religiosity had a Spiritualist bent: she studied the Bible looking for “secrets she believed she could decipher through her Spiritualist aspirations,” wrote biographer Underhill. She left the American Association of Spiritualists and came down hard on quacks in the field, but retained the belief that legitimate phenomena occurred: “Manifestations are accepted as evidence that there is life beyond the grave.” She now embraced the Bible as a wondrous adjunct to her spiritualism, with its mutual message of life after death.

Tennie and Victoria once again became vagabonds, traveling with their mother and Victoria’s daughter, Zula, and forced to make a living on the grueling lecture circuit. Woodhull’s sedate performances played well
in the South, but those who came out of curiosity drifted away. The Bible was no match for free love.

Colonel Blood showed up less and less on these journeys. In June of 1876, the
Weekly
folded, and with it, Woodhull’s marriage to Blood. It was amazing that a radical paper had lasted six years, through arrests and jail, trials and destroyed presses, illness and financial strain, and a nationwide depression. Now the very backbone of Victoria and the Colonel’s relationship was gone.

If Woodhull no longer loved Blood, she practiced what she preached, and dissolved a loveless union. She applied for a divorce in September 1876 on the grounds of adultery, and later critics sniffed at the fact that she, of all people, was claiming adultery. But that was the only ground possible in New York—and remained so far into the twentieth century.

Blood moved on, remarrying a woman wealthy enough to help him on a misguided adventure to Africa in search of gold. He disappeared into the wilds and was pronounced dead on December 29, 1885. No one ever heard him say a bad word about Woodhull, and he once remarked, “The grandest woman in the world went back on me.”

As for Tennie, there is little record of her private life in 1876. At the end of the trial the sisters advertised duo performances, lecturing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on the “Prophetic Vision of the Destiny of the World,” with Zula reciting Shakespeare. Busy lecturing and orchestrating her sister’s lecture career, she may not have had much time to herself. Whether she continued her relationship with Johnny Green, the
Sun
editor, is unknown.

Of all those involved in the scandal, Beecher fared the best, continuing his profitable life of lecturing, preaching, greeting his flock, jaunting to Europe, holding forth in unperturbed fashion. He died on March 8, 1887. Flags across Brooklyn were dropped to half-staff, City Hall was draped in black crepe, businesses closed, and fifty thousand stood in line to view his casket. One wonders if Tilton and Woodhull smiled when they heard him eulogized as “America’s Demosthenes.” Many thought that a “Great Man” had died, but the shadow of the trial absorbed future generations more than his
genius, so he is remembered mostly as the brother of the woman who wrote
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and as the preacher who probably committed adultery.

Mark Twain moaned to a friend at the time of Beecher’s death, “What a pity that so insignificant a matter as the chastity or unchastity [
sic
] of an Elizabeth Tilton could clip the locks of this Samson and make him as other men, in the estimation of a nation of Lilliputians creeping and climbing about his shoe-soles.”

While that was a popular outpouring at the time of his funeral, history shows that there was far more to it than the “insignificant matter,” as Twain put it. It has been described nearly a century and a half later as one of those transformative trials that serve as a “barometer” for cultural anxiety and change. The trial revealed a national preoccupation and social upheaval, with factions violently disagreeing over proclaimed moral values and what others saw as pretenses. Endless fascination in “this page of domestic history,” as Elizabeth Cady Stanton termed the trial, went beyond prurience and the specific cast of characters. Those battling for a religious and marital status quo needed to retain a belief in the Great Preacher. Even though he had disturbed religious orthodoxy by espousing a relaxed gospel of love, those fearing further cultural upheaval had to believe he was innocent. On the other hand, reformers such as Stanton looked at the exposure as a way of defining “great principles of social ethics. The true relations of man and woman,” Stanton wrote, “the foundation of the family and home, are of more momentous importance than any question of State, or Church, can possibly be.” A “fearless investigation of our present social evils,” rather than the Beecher travesty, was needed, she said. Although no one was making this parallel at the time, there were indeed quieter echoes of the sisters’ outspoken call for openness and social revolution.

As for Beecher, his discredited legacy was not because of adultery charges but his shameful conduct when cornered: his willingness to sacrifice everyone and everything to save himself, and to live the rest of his life without an apparent moment of guilt. Despite Beecher’s genius and forceful leadership in transforming religion into a more progressive force, he could not escape, as author Paxton Hibben termed it, his “shabby and obscene compact with dishonor.”

ACT FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Siege of London

By the end of 1876 the sisters were desperate for a new beginning. Lecture demands were scarce, and the death of the
Weekly
had left them voiceless. Even the scandal sheets seemed to have forgotten them. They were back living hand to mouth in the squalor of a family home that included their dreadful and battling sister Polly Sparr. In 1875, after their successful acquittals, they had appealed to Congress for $500,000 in compensation for damages, citing their wrecked printing operations, the loss of income from the
Weekly
and from lectures while incarcerated, and damaging publicity that kept them from continuing to earn money. Their statement charging that these damages had caused their complete collapse, while certainly a major factor, was not entirely true. The sisters’ decline had started before their Beecher publication and imprisonment, noticeably in their having to suspend the
Weekly
and give up the mansion in the spring of 1872. Yet they had a fair argument about the unlawful wreckage of their office and damages, including extended imprisonment and financial loss. However, they were awarded nothing.

Vanderbilt died on January 4, 1877, and the world heralded his monumental role in creating America’s transportation revolution as if a head of state had died: a “self-made chief executive of a country that he himself had invented, rather like a cross between George Washington and Genghis Khan,” wrote biographer T. J. Stiles.

As the Commodore was laid to rest, his heirs squabbled sensationally, contesting the will in a very public trial that went into years. When Vanderbilt left 97 percent of his fortune to his eldest, William, the latter’s nine seething siblings brought into court anyone who would testify that Vanderbilt was senile when he signed his will. Among these were magnetic healers, Spiritualists, a felon, and two men willing to say that Vanderbilt had reneged on a promise to marry Tennie. One was a Cincinnati book dealer and the other was good old, reliable Buck. They never testified, as the judge ruled such testimony irrelevant to any senility charge.

The sisters were far away in London when the trial began in November 1877, having set sail in August. Rumors buzzed through Manhattan that William Vanderbilt had paid them $100,000 to forget about testifying at the trial. Woodhull denied any such payment, but they did not travel steerage. Tennie, Victoria, mother Annie, Zula, and Byron took over six first-class double staterooms, trailed by a “bevy of newly hired servants.” One distant Vanderbilt descendant, author Arthur T. Vanderbilt, stated flatly that William Vanderbilt “gave them more than $100,000 on condition they make themselves scarce during the trial.”

In May, Tennie had made headlines when she demanded $100,000 from William, claiming that the $10,000 she had given Vanderbilt in 1871 to operate within railroad stocks and securities was now worth $70,000 plus compounded interest. She alleged that through the years, whenever she or Victoria wanted to acquire some of that money, Vanderbilt had treated them “like children,” saying he could handle their money better. “There were some facts that I knew, and that he [William Vanderbilt] did not wish to be made public,” Tennie hinted. Victoria added her threat: “If I was to tell you all I know, it would be worse a great deal than the Beecher case… but our lips are sealed.” William Vanderbilt called Tennie’s claim “too ridiculous to seriously discuss.” Whatever had happened, by the end of 1877, they were comfortably settled in England, far away from the trial.

After their arrival in London, Tennie was still pursuing her Vanderbilt claim. Hearing that William was arriving in London, she wrote him a letter requesting to see him, and ended it with a warning: She was certain
that “when I have satisfied you of the justice of my claim it will not be necessary for me to return to New York as advised by Scott Lord”—one of the high-powered lawyers retained by William’s siblings. When she tried to corner William on a London street, he brushed her off, saying he was about to leave for New York. She wrote her father, who was still in New York, asking him to continue her fight. Whether she received any money from William Vanderbilt is unknown, but in a few years Tennie’s life would change so drastically that she would never have to hound anyone for money again.