The Scarlet Sisters (8 page)

Late in the summer of 1869, Gould began buying up massive amounts of gold, causing prices to rise and stocks to plummet. When Grant realized what was happening, the federal government swiftly sold $4 million in gold. On Black Friday, September 20, 1869, Gould and Fisk were foiled. When the government gold hit the market, the premium plummeted within minutes. Panicked investors scrambled to sell. But many were too late. Hysterical sobbing filled the Street and the Gold Exchange as ruined speculators saw their lives collapse in one day.

The sisters were cool customers through it all, relying on Vanderbilt’s tips. Woodhull sat in her carriage for four days, from morning until night, operating heavily, a small smile playing on her lips as she watched the frantic movements of men coping with the crisis. At the end of the panic, Woodhull exclaimed, “I came out a winner!” She did not reveal the amount, but the sisters had pocketed a large sum, which Victoria often declared brought their accumulated wealth to the staggering, probably exaggerated, figure of $700,000.

Four months later, on February 5, 1870, they opened their brokerage firm.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Bewitching Brokers

To ensure that the grand opening of their Woodhull, Claflin and Co. brokerage and banking firm would be a sensation, the sisters invited a
New York Herald
reporter for an interview a few weeks before, in their temporary headquarters: two parlors in the posh Hoffman House at Twenty-Fourth and Broadway. The sisters showed startling aplomb by doing business in a hotel, the domain of visiting male politicians, magnates, and financiers.

Nearby was the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which was dubbed handsomer than Buckingham Palace when it opened in 1859. Ridiculed for being built too far uptown, it was the first New York hotel to feature a “vertical railway intersecting each story.” This new invention, the elevator, would forever change fashionable urban living. Soon higher floors were prized, paving the way for penthouse clientele. Now, five years after the end of the Civil War and the rush to move uptown, both the Hoffman House and the Fifth Avenue Hotel boasted princes and presidents as residents. Fifth Avenue and Broadway swarmed with potentates and high-priced prostitutes, wealthy matrons visiting Tiffany & Co., theatergoers and diners who patronized elegant Delmonico’s, and madams who ran brothels in mansions beside brownstone palaces owned by newly minted millionaires. This circus would soon be the playground for Victoria and Tennie.

The
Herald
reporter eagerly appeared at the sisters’ Hoffman House
parlor, which was “profusely decorated with oil paintings and statuary.” Commodore Vanderbilt stared down from the wall in a large photograph so prominent that the reporter enthused “his spirit is there… as though the mantle of the genial old Commodore had descended upon their shoulders.”

When a smiling and buoyant Tennie sailed into the room, she drew her chair close to the reporter’s and expressed surprise that he should honor her with a visit, despite the fact that the sisters had orchestrated it. At this point, Tennie needed to appear respectably wed. Her short-lived marriage as a teenager, to John Bortel, was either dissolved legally or simply forgotten. Now she billed herself as a wife: “Mrs. Claflin, though married eight years, is still a young lady of some twenty-four years of age.” The reporter termed her “a business woman—keen, shrewd, whole souled, masculine in manner, and apparently a firm foe of the ‘girl of the period’ creation or those who questioned her novel career.”

Asked if she didn’t find, as a woman, her new venture “rather awkward,” Tennie retorted, “I don’t care what society think… Were I to notice what is said by what they call ‘society’ I could never leave my apartments except in fantastic walking dress or in ballroom costume; but I despise what squeamy, crying girls or powdered counter-jumping dandies say of me… I think a woman is just as capable of making a living as a man… My mind is on my business and I attend to that solely.”

When the reporter questioned her experience, Tennie shot back, “I know as much of the world as men who are older. Besides we have a strong [backing]. We have the counsel of those who have more experience than we have, and we are endorsed by the best backers in the city.”

“I have been told that Commodore Vanderbilt is working in the interest of your firm,” said the reporter. “It is stated that you frequently call at his office about business. Is this true?”

“I know the Commodore and frequently call to see him on business but I am not prepared to state anything as to whether he is working with us.” A later story would ridicule the “Queens of Finance” and Commodore Vanderbilt as their “Prime Minister.” At that time, Tennie was less discreet, saying outright that Vanderbilt had inspired the “new undertaking.”

Before Tennie could say anything more about Vanderbilt, Victoria entered the parlor: a woman with a “keen, bright eye… very plainly dressed, with a single rose tastefully inserted in her hair.” Although Victoria wove with ease her false tales of being well educated and a veritable child prodigy in the financial world, the prescient reporter spied a “nervous temperament” beneath her regal control. “It might be apprehended that a serious financial shock would not tell well on her constitution.”

Two weeks later, on February 5, their opening day, the sisters joined rush-hour traffic as private carriages, horse-drawn omnibuses, carts, wagons, and horseback riders clogged the way. Everyone in New York complained of gridlock, and accidents occurred regularly—200 horses died daily in traffic accidents—as crowded horses shrieked and reared in panic at the screech of train whistles, the shouts of drivers, and the noise of rumbling carriages. Third Avenue omnibuses built to carry twenty-two passengers bulged with sixty. It could take an hour and a half to get to Wall Street. The first L train (elevated steam locomotive) was not operational until 1871, its ashes falling on pedestrians below, but it helped to allay the congestion.

Underneath the pounding hooves and rolling carts something very new was being inaugurated. The first New York subway, a huge round car propelled by the pneumatic pressure and vacuum created by a giant fan, ran under Broadway from Warren Street to Murray Street at a top speed of ten miles an hour. It closed three years later due to lack of riders.

So New Yorkers continued to rely on horses. By the 1860s, New York’s horse population had reached amazing numbers. Some 100,000 horses, said one source, deposited a thousand tons of manure and three hundred thousand gallons of urine a day. Boss Tweed’s lackluster sanitation system made a ride on the streets of the city especially fragrant on a sweltering summer’s day. Luckily the sisters’ big event was taking place on a crisp winter’s morning.

Among the mob that watched the sisters drive into Broad Street were many lesser Wall Street regulars, who scorned the women’s invasion into this man’s world. The sisters, however, had an affinity for the major titans, who, like them, often started poor and had never looked back—men such
as the semiliterate Vanderbilt, who began by ferrying small craft in his teens and fought, bribed, and plundered his way to the top of America’s shipping and railroad dynasty. Vanderbilt and other gamblers had wrestled one another in fierce financial battles, and in so doing, had created a new America—a land webbed with railroads and teeming with industrial progress and manufacturing might. These men were unquenchable risk takers, addicted to gambling, and they often succeeded with astounding verve, willing to lose it all one day and regain it the next. The game and the power propelled them as much as the money. The Claflin sisters had more in common with these men than they did with the upper-class women who would never accept them or with the middle-class suffragists who, for a while, fancied the sisters, enjoying slumming, as it were, with low-life upstarts.

The sisters had lived a tough enough life to cope with men such as Vanderbilt, Gould, Drew, and Fisk, who was just twenty-nine when he formed his alliance with Vanderbilt’s occasional friend but more often enemy, crusty Daniel Drew. Nearly illiterate, Drew habitually used a broken umbrella as a cane, and mopped his face with a red bandana. He seemed unfamiliar with a smile, his thin lips perennially drawn downward. It was said that under that ragman’s guise and pious Bible reading there beat “the heart of a shark.” Drew is also credited with this ditty: “He who sells what isn’t his’n, must pay it back or go to prison.”

The other young man partnering with Fisk and Drew, Jay Gould, was a brooding, dark genius who grew up poor and sickly. Gould lived on greed alone at this stage of his long career, fleecing his partners and others. Only the triple-cross bested the double-cross.

For his part, Fisk overshadowed by far all others on the Street with his diamond-studded, mistress-flaunting flamboyance, but he was “no isolated phenomenon; rather, a splendid reflection of the immorality of his time.”

Reporters who poured into the sisters’ elegant offices at 44 Broad Street throughout their opening week in February 1870 praised the “Bewitching Brokers.” Tennie was regarded as the spokesperson; it was said that “Tennie was the Jim Fisk and Victoria the Jay Gould” of the firm.

No matter their reservations, Wall Street’s old guard was drawn by the Commodore’s name and came out for the sister’s opening day. Major brokerage firms sent august representatives to welcome the sisters, including Peter Cooper, for whom Cooper Union is named, and the esteemed Jay Cooke. Bankers had come to laugh, but they left impressed.

The visitor who meant the most to Woodhull, however, was the great writer and poet Walt Whitman, who also paid his respects. She saved for years a scrap of paper on which were written the words he supposedly said to her that day: “You have given an object lesson to the whole world.”

Even Drew showed up, growling that he had not aided the sisters and had never met them until opening day. Everyone assumed that his nemesis, Vanderbilt, had bankrolled the sisters. Henry Clews, president of the Fourth National Bank, confirmed that the sisters had deposited a $7,000 check bearing Vanderbilt’s signature. Seven thousand dollars was but a teaspoon’s dip into Vanderbilt’s honeypot, but for the sisters it was a fine sum—worth a good $150,000 or more today—with which to help start Woodhull, Claflin and Co. It could have been just the proceeds from stocks in which Vanderbilt had invested their own money, but the Street thought it was, as Clews wrote, money to put them in business. “Very soon after the Commodore had aided to set up these two women as brokers in Broad Street the firm was known all over the land,” recalled Clews.

Delicious rumors circulated about Vanderbilt and young Tennie—even though he had recently taken a second wife with the unusual first name of Frank. Only eight years older than Tennie and forty-three years younger than Vanderbilt, Frank was bent on leading the swearing, womanizing Vanderbilt onto a path of righteousness.

The sisters’ friendship with Vanderbilt illustrates how truly pragmatic they were in dealing with anyone who could help them. Vanderbilt could hardly be viewed in the vanguard of feminist support, which the sisters so strongly championed. His womanizing was legendary, and when his first wife, the mother of his thirteen children, balked at leaving Staten Island for his Washington Square home, he had her committed to an insane asylum until she came to her wits and moved to Manhattan.

Vanderbilt’s famous signature on their check meant everything to the sisters. More than the money, his power led to their tumultuous renown and notoriety, as did the role Tennie had allegedly played in securing Vanderbilt’s support, even though she would later be eclipsed by her older sister’s fame. Vanderbilt’s biographer Stiles sees the sisters as fleeting diversions in the tycoon’s long life, and points out that Vanderbilt soon shunned them and that their brokerage firm did not last. However, without his initial push, the sisters would have been unknown trifles in a class-conscious world. Without Vanderbilt, their ride on Wall Street and their subsequent fame as suffragists, Spiritualists, sex radicals, authors, lecturers, and players in Henry Ward Beecher’s adultery scandal would not have happened.

When Clews announced that he had deposited the Commodore’s check for the sisters, the Street listened. Jay Gould, the great manipulator, acknowledged that one speculator “paid Victoria and sister Tennie $1,000 a day commission through quite a warm summer spell. I don’t happen to know the ladies myself, but in their office things certainly do move smoothly; and I don’t doubt at all that it is because of that—exclusively for that—that Commodore Vanderbilt stands for them.” Gould did not buy “all this sugary stuff” about a love affair, and he revealed that the sisters had been unwitting foils during his bid to oust Vanderbilt in one scheme: “I picked the ladies’ firm myself—without them realizing it—because, you see, The Street when Woodhull and Claflin sold would just naturally jump to the conclusion that the principal was Cornelius Vanderbilt, getting shorter and shorter. Rather neat finesse I thought.”

In 1652 the Dutch government of then Nieuw Amsterdam built a wall to keep out English settlers who sought land near a strategic harbor. The wall never kept anyone out, as the Dutch settlers found out when the British invaded in 1664, but the wall gave the Financial District its alternate name. In the seventeenth century, Broad Street was a fetid waterfront canal, and residents were commanded to pave it over. As this rank inlet metamorphosed into the Financial District, the foulness never left; without any regulation, unfettered pillaging made many a war-profiteering scoundrel
fabulously rich. The sisters roared onto the Street in this era of wild speculation, where an unknown shoe polish manufacturer one day might become a millionaire the next, suddenly striking it rich in a market complete with easily bought politicians and judges. George Francis Train, an eccentric millionaire, wrote a poem that mirrored the easy come, easy go spiral.

Monday: I started my land operations;

Tuesday: owned millions, by all calculations: