The Scarlet Sisters (53 page)

Introducing Two Improper Victorians

1.
gold is cash:
Lois Underhill,
The Woman Who Ran for President
(Bridgehampton, NY: Bridge Works Publishing, 1995), p. 128, mentions it was a Tennie comment in the
New York Herald
, n.d.

2.
families of the dead cannot sue:
Sachs’s comment in private correspondence with Benjamin Tucker, 1927–28, New York Public Library collection.

3.
Two recent biographies of the sisters’ friend:
Edward J. Renehan Jr.,
Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
(New York: Basic Books, 2007). Renehan made the charge, and T. J. Stiles skewers it in
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). For further details see chapter 24 in this book,
The Scarlet Sisters
, endnote on pp. 383–84: “Stiles skewers Renehan’s unreliable claim.”

4.
Henry James and Harriet Beecher Stowe:
Richard Wightman Fox,
Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal
(Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 302–5, also takes on Barbara Goldsmith,
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), for her “fictionalized storytelling,” especially her unsubstantiated premise that Elizabeth Tilton had an abortion: “It is worth examining this story… about the possible abortion,” Fox writes, “since it illuminates the ongoing process of mythmaking about the scandal… One author draws on and extends the already inventive work of earlier writers… Goldsmith’s assertion of a Beecher pregnancy and possible abortion is false.” Although Fox terms Woodhull’s 1872 account of the scandal “scattershot allegations,” she merely says that Tilton told her there was a “great probability” that Elizabeth was “enceinte by Mr. Beecher instead of himself.” In light of Lib Tilton’s testimony of her husband saying he doubted he was the father, Woodhull probably accurately repeated Tilton. She never hinted at an abortion.

Opening Scene: Arriving

1.
Nor would it again:
In 1965 Julia Walsh became the first woman to enter the American Stock Exchange. Muriel Siebert became the first woman to earn a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, in 1967.

2.
GENTLEMEN WILL STATE THEIR BUSINESS
:
(NY) Sun
, Feb. 13, 1870, p. 7.

3.
vile bunches of hair:
Arlene Kisner,
Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly: The Lives and Writings of the Notorious Victoria Woodhull and Her Sister Tennessee Claflin
(New York: Times Change Press, 1972), p. 24.

4.
exquisite figures:
New York Herald
, Feb. 6, 1870, p. 3.

5.
talking with a rapidity and fluency:
(NY) World
, Feb. 8, 1870, p. 5.

6.
gouty old war horses:
New York Herald
, Feb. 6, 1870, p. 3.

7.
“without any signs of headaches.”:
Ibid.

8.
‘Before call 94 ½.’:
(NY) Sun
, Feb. 7, 1870.

9.
ladies can be wise and discreet:
Ibid., Feb. 13, 1870, p. 7.

10.
Woodhull tartly replied:
Ibid.

11.
What do present profits amount to:
New York Herald
, Jan. 22, 1870, p. 10.

12.
working-class poor made $200:
An average worker’s annual salary in a good year in the 1870s was about $375 for a sixty-hour week. See http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/us26.cfm. Americans in the manufacturing labor force who participated in the census of 1870, following 1869’s Black Friday, reported they earned $129 per year.

13.
lost it mainly in speculation:
From Susan B. Anthony interview, quoted in the women’s rights journal
The Revolution
, Feb. 24, 1870.

Chapter One: Vicky

1.
construction of the Ohio and Erie Canal:
The most thorough information on the Claflin parents is in Underhill,
The Woman Who Ran for President
. I have used historical information given on pp. 12–15.

2.
To avoid arrest:
Sachs,
The Terrible Siren
.

3.
after the Bible was read:
Underhill,
The Woman Who Ran for President
, p. 16.

4.
passions aroused by religious ecstasy:
Goldsmith,
Other Powers
, p. 17. As in several disturbing instances, Goldsmith cites no original source. She states that Buck dragged his wife “to the back of tent, where he threw her down and forced himself into her… Thus,
according to her own account
, was Victoria Woodhull conceived.” However, there is no such description or account in Woodhull’s autobiography dictated to Tilton. Goldsmith offers no other source. The tale should therefore be considered questionable.

5.
damning memorial of his father’s wrath:
Unless otherwise indicated, the information in this chapter is from Theodore Tilton’s “Victoria C. Woodhull, A Biographical Sketch” (New York:
The Golden Age
, 1871).

6.
the ‘Dutch Hummels’:
Chicago Daily Mail
, May 9, 1892.

7.
The Claflin house:
Ibid.

8.
sink down in front of the altar:
Ibid.

9.
Never spent one year:
Atlanta Constitution
, 1876; mentioned in a website dedicated to facts on Woodhull, http://www.victoria-woodhull.com/index.htm.

10.
Beds were everywhere:
Chicago Daily Mail
, May 9, 1892. Also Sachs,
The Terrible Siren
. Sachs does not attribute any of her accounts, but the description of unmade beds probably came from Thankful Claflin, a cousin who lived with the family. Sachs wrote a friend (see Tucker-Sachs) that Thankful was “willing to spill the beans.”

11.
“terrible sins.”:
Sachs,
The Terrible Siren
, p. 4.

12.
‘out of the body.’:
Chicago Daily Mail
, May 9, 1892.

13.
the money was gone:
Ibid.

14.
escape from the parental yoke:
Despite Buck Claflin’s many faults, one uncorroborated inference regarding sexual abuse of Victoria reveals how a phrase can be stretched and miscast into a leap of sensationalism: Goldsmith, in
Other Powers
, writes, “Vickie
often
intimated that he sexually abused her” (pp. 51–52). This comes only from a half sentence. Wrote Goldsmith, “Later Victoria would say that Buck made her a ‘woman before her time.’ ”—hence the incest. Not only did Victoria not say this, but there was no “often” involved, nor was it about incest. In his biography of Victoria, Tilton surmises that both her parents were willing to marry off a daughter “whose sorrow was ripening her into a woman before her time.” Her “sorrow” and “woman before her time,” phrases penned by Tilton, not quotes from Victoria, were never described as having to do with incest. Both parents championed a child-bride marriage because they wanted one less mouth to feed and saw Canning as a “catch.” Victoria also told suffragist Lucretia Mott, “All that I am I have become through sorrow.” Goldsmith cites this as clinching her incest assumption. But this was Victoria’s mantra, stemming from Tilton’s creation of her “sorrow-stricken” childhood and early bad marriage, not from incest.

15.
sincere maternal affection:
Tucker-Sachs.

16.
“ultimately affect her ruin.”:
When a beautiful Manhattan cigar girl, Mary Rogers, was brutally murdered in 1841, her death became a journalistic and literary cause célèbre. Her customers included famed literary giants James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe. Daniel Stashower,
The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and the Invention of Murder
(New York: Dutton, Penguin Group, 2006).

Chapter Two: Tennie

1.
Margaret’s marriage ended:
Goldsmith,
Other Powers
, p. 50; no original attribution.

2.
“insane on spiritualism.”:
New York Herald
, May 17, 1871; and the
(NY) Sun
, May 16, 1871.

3.
“I love her dearly anyway.”:
New York Herald
, May 17, 1871.

4.
Ads were placed in local papers:
The “Wonderful Child” ad was first published in an 1859 Columbus, Ohio, paper; it was used for years as Buck fudged on Tennie’s age.

5.
the Fox sisters were authentic:
Ann Braude,
Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).

6.
her younger sister, Kate:
Different sources say that Maggie was either fourteen or thirteen and that Kate was either ten or twelve. Ibid. See also Howard Kerr,
Mediums and Spirit-Rappers and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972).

7.
crowds stormed Barnum’s hotel:
Ibid.

8.
Mark Twain’s editor William Dean Howells:
Howells,
Years of My Youth
(New York, Harper and Co. 1916 BiblioLife reproduction, 2008), p. 106.

9.
Utopians, many of whom advocated free love:
Braude,
Radical Spirits
, p. 296.

10.
They held forth as lecturers:
Ibid.

11.
Spiritualist churches embraced women’s rights:
Ibid., p. 3.

12.
“science of the metaphysical”:
Timothy Messer-Kruse,
The Yankee International, 1848–1876: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 15n21.

13.
inventions transformed Manhattan:
John Steele Gordon,
The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Erie Railroad Wars, and the Birth of Wall Street
(New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988).

14.
any sort of millennium:
William Dean Howells,
Impressions and Experiences
(Ulan Press reprint of pre-1920s books, Unlimited Publishing LLC, Vantage Press), p. 11.

15.
The Spiritual Telegraph
:
Todd Jay Leonard,
Talking to the Other Side: A History of Modern Spiritualism and Mediumship
(Bloomington, Indiana: iUniverse, 2005), p. 216.

16.
The astounded soldier swore:
J. E. P. Doyle,
Plymouth Church and Its Pastor, or Henry Ward Beecher and His Accusers
(St. Louis, MO: Bryan, Brand and Co., 1875), p. 440.

17.
334 Spiritualist churches:
Leonard,
Talking to the Other Side
, p. 222.

18.
development of therapeutic hypnotism:
Leonard,
Talking to the Other Side
.

19.
magnetic healing followers:
Google “magnetic therapy” and more than 12 million results come up, including many advertising modern day practitioners, ads for magnetic bracelets, and other paraphernalia.

20.
magnetic healing became popular:
Talking to the Other Side
, pp. 55–57.

21.
I was a very good doctor:
Quoted in “The Working Woman,”
Revolution
, March 10, 1870. LoC vol. 5 (Jan-June 1870): pp. 154–55.

22.
children under five:
Gordon,
Scarlet Woman
, p. 45; additional period background is from Lloyd R. Morris,
Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last Hundred Years
(New York: Random House, 1951).

23.
Some 750,000 soldiers:
In April 2012, the
New York Times
reported that historian and demographer J. David Hacker, using newly digitized census data, had recalculated the death toll and increased it by 20 percent from the time-honored statistic of 618,222. Guy Gugliotta, “New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll,”
New York Times
, April 3, 2013, p. D1, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

24.
a flashing dandy named John Bortel:
Underhill,
The Woman Who Ran for President
, p. 49; some biographers misspell his name as Bartels.

25.
a self-proclaimed doctor:
Goldsmith,
Other Powers
, p. 104; no original attribution.

26.
Cancers killed and extracted:
Ottawa, Illinois, newspaper ad, 1863.

27.
“recommends” her cancer treatment:
Chicago Daily Mail
, May 9, 1892.