The Scarlet Sisters (4 page)

As Victoria was scandalously divorced from Woodhull at the time Tilton was writing her biography, and embroiled in a front-page family ruckus involving her current husband, it was prudent to paint her first husband as dark as possible. She needed to portray herself as an innocent
child so tormented in marriage that a Victorian-age divorce would have seemed acceptable.

When fourteen-year-old Victoria became feverish one day, “Dr. Canning Woodhull, a gay rake, whose habits were kept hidden from her under the general respectability of his family connections, attended her. Coming as a prince, he found her as Cinderella—a child of the ashes,” wrote Tilton. He invited Victoria to a Fourth of July picnic. She sold apples to buy a pair of shoes for the occasion. On the way home he said to her, “My little puss, tell your father and mother that I want you for a wife.”

Victoria is depicted in this sketch as a startled innocent who beseeched her parents to save her. This does not ring true. Canning was a handsome doctor who said he was from a refined East Coast family. Surely to a child who dreamed of power and her own glory, and who fully believed she would one day ride in a fine carriage, he must have seemed a magical escape from her dreary life. Her story continued: “But the parents, as if not unwilling to be rid of a daughter whose sorrow was ripening her into a woman before her time, were delighted at the unexpected offer. They thought it a grand match.” Victoria also admitted that she soon looked at the marriage as “an escape from the parental yoke.”

On September 23, 1853, Victoria celebrated her fifteenth birthday. Two months later, on November 23, she celebrated her wedding—yet, all her life, she would say she was married at fourteen, to throw an even more helpless cast on the union. “On the third night,” her husband “broke her heart by remaining away all night at a house of ill-repute.… she learned, to her dismay, that he was habitually unchaste, and given to long fits of intoxication… She grew ten years older in a single day. Six weeks after her marriage (during which time her husband was mostly with his cups and his mistresses), she discovered a letter addressed to him in a lady’s elegant penmanship, ‘Did you marry that child because she too was
en famille
?’ ” On the day of his marriage, Woodhull had “sent away into the country a mistress” who gave birth to his child.

“He suddenly put his wife into the humblest quarters, where, left
mostly to herself, she dwelt in bitterness of spirit, aggravated… by learning of his ordering baskets of champagne and drinking himself drunk in the company of harlots.” At this point the couple was residing in Chicago, probably because Canning could make a better living in this bustling frontier city, known in those days as far out West. However, his drinking left him incapable of functioning. Wrote Tilton, extravagantly, “Through rain and sleet, half clad and shivering, she would track him to his dens,” compelling him to return. Other nights, she would wait by the window until she heard him “languidly shuffling along the pavement with the staggering reel of a drunken man, in the shameless hours of the morning.”

Somehow Canning had found time to impregnate his wife. In retelling the birth, Tilton poured on the pathos: “In the dead of winter, with icicles clinging to her bedpost, and attended only by her half-drunken husband, she brought forth in almost mortal agony her first-born child.” For icicles to have found their way to bedposts, the temperature would have to have been mighty frigid, but miracle of miracles, Victoria and even the newborn babe survived. A neighbor brought her food and wrapped the baby in a blanket and took it “to a happier mother in the near neighborhood” to nurse the infant.

Her firstborn child became the real sorrow of Victoria’s life, one that would haunt her and spur her lifelong interest in eugenics, her arguments for planned parenting by the most physically and mentally pure, and her fight against loveless marriages. She blamed Canning’s drunkenness, and their empty union, for the son she bore on that last day of December 1854: “Her child, begotten in drunkenness, and born in squalor, was a half idiot; predestined to be a hopeless imbecile for life.” The son, named Byron, would live a long life. In 1871, at the age of sixteen, he was “a sad and pitiful spectacle in his mother’s house… where he roams from room to room, muttering noises more sepulchral than human; a daily agony to the woman who bore him.” Byron also displayed an “uncommon sweetness,” wrote Tilton, that won “everyone’s love, doubles everyone’s pity.”

One visitor to the brokerage office who often witnessed Byron during the period Tilton described said, “He was almost a complete idiot…
although he had the Claflin beauty… Generally he sat on a lounge for a time, and then would rise and walk
very rapidly
about ten feet, back and forth, mumbling, grimacing and drooling. After five or ten minutes of this he would resume his seat, and remain for a short time comparatively quiet. The alternation went on continually. When his mother was in the office, she at times would seat herself beside him and fondle him. I thought then that she did so out of sincere maternal affection.”

Other than Victoria’s martyrdom, and the continuing, vain hope that Canning Woodhull would reform, the rest of their time in Chicago is a blank, except for one melodramatic scene after Canning stayed away for a month. He was “keeping a mistress at a fashionable boarding-house, under the title of wife.” Victoria “sallied forth into the wintry street, clad in a calico dress without undergarments, and shod only with India-rubbers without shoes or stockings, entered the house, confronted the household as they sat at table.” Her tale drew tears from everyone, and the listeners “compelled the harlot to pack her trunk and flee the city, and shamed the husband into creeping like a spaniel back into the kennel” called home.

Victoria no doubt embellished accounts of her husband’s behavior, but he did end up an alcoholic and morphine addict. And she was legally helpless to leave him. Like all married women, she was literally her husband’s property, as were any children she would bear. In most states, he lawfully had the right to beat her. In a divorce, he had the right to take the children. Even if he had had money, she would not have gotten any if she had instituted a divorce. Though the Claflins were hardly of a social class where a divorce scandal would have tainted the entire family, Victoria was nonetheless crushed, and trapped by the rules of the day.

Tilton gives no date for Victoria’s next giant leap: impulsively taking her damaged child and drunken husband with her to San Francisco, during an unspecified time (probably in 1857 or 1858). Victoria was desperate enough, with no money or livelihood, to bravely strike out on a torturous journey that took nearly two months by sea, and more if they went from Chicago in covered wagon through dangerous Indian Territory. Her usually histrionic descriptions are startlingly absent regarding this trip to the
coast and their life there. One can even wonder if she might not have made up the San Francisco journey to hide her Midwest life, as here her story becomes elusive. How the young mother who described her Chicago existence as penniless, her clothes meager, and her lodgings squalid found the money for the trip or how they could afford a place to live, or where they settled in San Francisco, are unmentioned. If true, the venture seems to have been an impulsive disaster that lasted less than a year.

In the wake of the 1849 gold rush, San Francisco had grown up. Miners’ shacks and shanties had given way to substantial brick houses, the U.S. Mint had built headquarters there, vigilante committees fussed about cleaning up crime in red-light districts, mud streets were being paved with cobblestones and earthquake tremors dutifully tracked. Levi Strauss had opened a store to sell his denims to the miners who still flocked to the surrounding hills. San Francisco had its streets of frontier bawdiness; the Barbary Coast, with its bars and brothels, remained a treacherous den of thieves. Newcomers arrived daily on ships that clogged the harbor, hoping to grab their share of gold.

Canning’s drinking continued, and Victoria found herself “supporting the man by whom she ought to have been supported.” Who cared for Byron is not explained by Tilton. Victoria answered an ad for a “cigar girl” in a tobacco emporium, which were notoriously fronts for brothels. Behind the slim sampling of cigars, girls were supposed to sell favors instead of cheroots. These establishments were routine in large cities. To demonstrate just how vulgar cigar stores were considered, an 1870 guide to Manhattan brothels noted that a cigar girl was low on the list. Customers ranged from fatherly judges to toughly aggressive youths. Newspapers warned impoverished women about the “great evil consequent upon very beautiful girls being placed in cigar stores,” where customers “ultimately affect her ruin.”

Why Victoria cited this dubious job in an otherwise meager account of her life in San Francisco seems strange, unless it was an attempt to prove herself innocent of prostitution. Tilton wrote that the “blushing,
modest, and sensitive” Victoria was fired after one day because she was “too fine” for the job. The proprietor in this sordid occupation allegedly gave Victoria a twenty-dollar gold piece, puzzlingly generous compensation for a young woman he had just fired.

Victoria then became a seamstress, her needle being the “only weapon many women possess wherewith to fight the battle of life,” continued Tilton. There are no clues as to how long she performed this job, an exhausting process of hand-stitching, before sewing machines were in general use. One day, “She chanced to come upon Anna Cogswell,” an actress, who wanted a seamstress. Victoria complained that she could not make enough money sewing, so Cogswell told her she should go on the stage. Just like that, Victoria was “engaged as a lesser light to the Cogswell star.” In those days, actresses were considered part of the shady demimonde, with stage door Johnnies waiting for a trophy in exchange for a late supper.

With Victoria’s quick memory, she learned the part, and for six weeks earned fifty-two dollars a week. “Never leave the stage,” admiring fellow performers urged. Victoria allegedly said she was meant for something higher. Then, while “clad in a pink silk dress and slippers, acting in the ballroom scene in the Corsican Brothers, suddenly a spirit-voice told her ‘Victoria, come home!’ ” In her vision, she saw Tennie, “then a mere child—standing by her mother,” calling her to return. She raced out, still in her “dramatic adornments, through a foggy rain to her hotel. She packed up her few clothes, Canning, and Byron and grabbed the morning steamer for New York.” On board, her “spiritual states” produced “profound excitement among the passengers.”

Mother Annie, wrote Tilton, had told Tennie—at the same time Victoria saw the vision—“to send the spirits after Victoria to bring her home.”

The spirits may have been calling, but it was their mother who wanted Victoria back, to help support the family. With Victoria home, they now had another golden goose to put to work.

CHAPTER TWO

Tennie

When the newly married Victoria moved away in 1853, she had left behind eight-year-old Tennie, who would never know a normal childhood or a schoolroom. Tennessee Celeste Claflin, born on October 26, 1845, was reportedly named after one of the many states the wandering Claflins visited. Or, as another legend has it, Buck named her for the state his favorite president, James Polk, represented while in Congress. As the baby, she was alternately coddled and neglected in this sprawling, squalling family of parents and older sisters who returned with their children, extended families, and assorted husbands between divorces. None of the Claflin clan seemed congenitally able to stay married for long. The fighting continued when the family moved to the home of older sister Margaret Miles. Soon after the Claflins arrived, Margaret’s marriage ended when her husband, Enos, the town druggist, caught her in a hotel with another man and chased her down the street with a butcher’s knife.

Without Victoria by her side, Tennie became the cash cow for Buck and her mother, whom she later said was “insane on spiritualism.” Mary (nicknamed Polly) Sparr, an older sister who picked fights often with Victoria and Tennie, would say that the relationship between their mother and Tennie was “something I cannot explain; something mysterious, unnatural. There is a different feeling between Tennie and my mother than between any child and her mother I ever knew.” All her life, Tennie
seemed unable to break the bond, even when her mother’s outrageous acts threatened to ruin the sisters’ lives. She would cry out at her mother’s crazy meddling, but say, “I love her dearly anyway.”

This strange bonding occurred when Tennie was sold by her mother and father to the public as Buck’s “Wonder Child.” “Since I was eleven years old I used to tell fortunes with her,” Tennie said of her mother. Tennie hated her life, and felt trapped and alone without Victoria. By 1860, when Tennie was fourteen, Buck decided that she should be a solo act in his snake oil “shows.” The family rode into midwestern frontier hamlets in a painted wagon, baubles dancing on the bright canopy as the wagon lurched through mud and dirt. Tennie was prominently displayed, sitting up front by her father’s side, so villagers could see the smiling blue-eyed girl with golden brown curls and rosy cheeks. Ads were placed in local papers inviting the public to meet
A WONDERFUL CHILD! MISS TENNESSEE CLAFLIN
.

Born with “supernatural gifts,” as the ad read, Tennie could ascertain a person’s “former, present and future partners,” and “when required will go into an unconscious state.” Only a snake oil salesman could have invented the list of ills Tennie could cure: from cold sores to cancer and any disorder that had “baffled the best physicians for years. She may be consulted at her room from the hours of eight a.m. to nine o’clock p.m. Price of consultation, $1.00.” Tennie sat there for thirteen long hours a day, learning the art of listening to people, picking up clues, and spinning fortunes that would please. Buck collected the money and sold “Miss Tennessee’s Magnetio Life Elixir,” a worthless concoction with a picture of Tennie on the label, at two dollars a bottle.