Madame Presidentess

by Nicole Evelina

  Susan B. Anthony was by far the worst offender, spewing bile whenever she could. The sudden change of heart she had displayed at the conference in January had taken permanent hold. I couldn’t know for certain, but I suspected my former friend was jealous I was eclipsing the power it had taken Susan twenty years to gain. Be that as it may, it was no excuse for intimating Tennie was an adulteress and I a practitioner of humbuggery.

  I raised my head, peering out the rain-streaked windows at the gray New York streets. An idea was forming, one that might put an end to the worst of the slander. From a young age, Ma had taught me that secrets were the most valuable currency, so for some time, I had quietly been collecting tidbits about the indiscretions of these very women in case I ever needed to use them.

  God knew I didn’t want to use the information, but there were only six months left before the election and I was losing supporters faster than the clouds could loose the rain. I certainly didn’t need help from the suffragists in that regard. I had spent nearly two years of my life and the balance of my fortune in my bid to become president. It was my birthright, preordained from the moment I was named; I wouldn’t let it slip away because of a few spiteful tongues.

  Setting pen to paper, I combined my information into a single damning article that would expose all of their secret sexual relations—some outside of marriage, others with members of their own sex—if they didn’t end their abuse. If they ceased their hateful speech, no one ever need know. The beauty of it was that with all of my own skeletons already exposed, they would have nothing to use against me. Even if one of them was brave enough to reveal my threats, she couldn’t do so without taking herself down at the same time.

  A weight slowly lifted off my chest. Tomorrow, five of the most powerful women in the suffrage movement would receive unsolicited envelopes, and within a matter of minutes, their tongues would be silenced.

  MAY 1872

  The arrival of summer brought with it sunshine and a sense of optimism to my life. Why shouldn’t I have been happy? I was the unofficial leader of the Suffragist Convention taking place at Steinway Hall—site of some of my most momentous speeches—later that day. Not only that, I’d succeeded in getting permission to have the audience expanded again to include Spiritualists and laborers. Plus, though Elizabeth was irritated I had signed her name to a call to join the Equal Rights Party without her permission, she’d privately endorsed the party. Susan was spitting mad about all three things, not to mention the threatening article that no one spoke of publicly, but there was little she could do. All signs pointed toward a successful event, both for women’s rights and my campaign.

  I was scheduled to speak early, and for that I was glad. I could get my message out before Susan had a chance to co-opt the meeting for her own ends, which were always solely focused on suffrage. I, however, was more interested in getting the crowd to support the broader range of reforms that working-class women sought.

  “The eyes of the world are upon this convention,” I declared proudly from the podium, beaming at the crowd of enraptured faces. “Its enemies have sneered and laughed at the idea of combining reformers for any organized action. They say that women don’t know enough to organize and, therefore, are not to be feared as political opponents. I have even heard some confessed reformers say they don’t want anything to do with those who belong to ‘our clique,’ but I trust this policy may not succeed. I hope all friends of humanitarian reform will clasp hands with each other.”

  With a final glance at Susan—who was studiously studying her lap—I steeled myself and played my trump card. “Now, I move that the convention adjourn and meet jointly with the Equal Rights Party at Apollo Hall.”

  Susan’s head shot up. “You cannot move for such a thing without a vote of the members, and as president, I refuse to call one. You, madame, are out of order.” Susan shuffled toward me, no doubt intent on forcing me off the stage.

  I clung to the podium and called out my own motion. “All in favor of the parties meeting jointly at Apollo Hall, say aye.”

  Hundreds of cheers of “aye” rose from the assembly.

  Scowling like a startled hen, Susan yelled over them, “Most of you are not members of our organization. You have no right. You can’t vote. The meeting is adjourned. We will meet in the same space tomorrow.” Susan doggedly pried my fingers one by one from the podium.

  “We shall do what the spirit of freedom moves us to,” I shot back, fighting to keep my hold. “In this case, that is to come together, despite our varied interests, as one party focused on equal rights—suffrage, labor reform, and women’s rights. For until such time as true equality is granted, women will still be seen as slaves in this great land.”

  Clapping and waving their arms in agreement, the crowd chanted, “Woodhull! Woodhull! Woodhull!”

  Susan finally gave up trying to forcibly remove me and disappeared backstage. I grinned. She finally realizes I am younger, stronger, and possibly even more stubborn. But my triumph quickly faded when Susan returned with a smug smile. Moments later, all the gas lights in the hall went out with a soft whoosh, leaving the crowd to grope in darkness for the exit.

  Susan may have put a dramatic end to the meeting, but many of the attendees of the National Women’s Rights Convention—including Ada Ballou, Laura Cuppy Smith, and a shining new star of the women’s movement, an attorney named Belva Lockwood—defected to Apollo Hall to see how I would follow up my stunning performance.

  The hall carried a festive atmosphere, with joyous voices shouting to one another and laughter ringing out. Nearly seven hundred delegates from over half of the states in the Union rubbed elbows with another six hundred fifty suffragists, Spiritualists, and other reformers. This crowd was little like the staid, conservative audience gathering across town at Steinway Hall. While a fair number of suits and fashionable gowns were spotted among the participants, there were also women in the pantaloons and short hair of sex radicals, men with the long hair and loose coats of free lovers, and quite a number of women who made their living in the streets of the Bowery.

  I took the stage to deafening cheers. “Go where we may in the land,” I said, raising my arms toward the delegates, “we see inequity and injustice, but we will tolerate this no longer.”

  For the next hour, I repeated my call for revolution in business, education, politics, and private life. Before I could end my speech, the crowd charged forward, chanting my name.

  I held up my hand for quiet, ending with the rallying cry, “Let us have justice though the heavens fall!”

  The crowd went wild, women waving their handkerchiefs and crying openly and men tossing their hats in the air while shouting until they were hoarse.

  Judge Carter from Kentucky leapt onstage. “I believe that in what I am about to say, I shall receive the hearty concurrence of every member of this convention. I therefore nominate, as the choice for the Equal Rights Party for the President of the United States, Victoria C. Woodhull.”

  Suddenly, the crowd around me disappeared, and time stood still. I had done it. Despite the ups and downs, the nasty rumors, the lost friendships, and both the odds and the powers that be against me, I had lived to see another step in Demosthenes’s prophecy come true—this was the first time any party had endorsed a woman for president. For the space of three heartbeats, Demosthenes was at my side. Then the whir of the crowd came rushing back, and I was ushered once again to the podium.

  Looking out upon the smiling faces turned up toward me like flowers to the sun, I couldn’t help but shed a few tears of joy. “I feel this honor more deeply and sensibly since I have stood before the world so long, sometimes receiving its approval but oftener encountering its rebuffs. It is with great joy that I accept your nomination. I promise to carry the principles of the Equal Rights Party into governmental practice. I thank you from the bottom of my soul for the honor you have conferred on me tonight.”

  Later in the night, Frederick Douglass was nominated as my running mat
e, uniting an abolitionist and a suffragist, a white woman and a black man, one who had started out poor and the other a slave, on one ticket under the banner of Equal Rights.

  JUNE 1872

  Ma had always said that for every blazing sun in the noonday sky, there was a waning moon waiting; it was the way of the world. I’d dismissed the aphorism as rot until my joy came to a crashing halt in the sweltering heat of summer.

  Things had been going so well. My family moved out of Maggie’s brownstone and into the Gilsey House hotel, and my electoral chances were better than ever. But then as I was packing for a much-anticipated speaking tour out West, I began to shake uncontrollably. I slid to the floor in a heap, and the world went black.

  It was a faint from which I could not seem to wake. I could open my eyes for short periods of time, but when I did, my arms, legs, and head were like lead. I was constantly hot and sweating and could barely choke down the water James poured down my throat as soon as my eyelids fluttered.

  In those brief periods of consciousness, I conceded I was powerless to continue on with my plans.

  “Tennie,” I said, “please take my place out West. You know my positions as well as I do. We can’t afford to pass up the speaking fees. Show Ma she was wrong. Prove to her you are not worthless, as I always knew.”

  As the days dragged on, my periods of consciousness lengthened, though I wished they would not. The news being brought to my bedside was anything but good. While I was ill, James had pulled Zula from school then enrolled her at new one under an assumed name because parents didn’t want their children around her. Elizabeth, who had apparently found out about my springtime scheme to keep the gossips at bay, turned against me. Belva Lockwood, whom I was beginning to see as a spiritual and political daughter, announced her intention to back Horace Greeley for president, while Frederick Douglass—who had never officially accepted his nomination as my vice president but did not ask to have his name removed from the ticket either—came out campaigning for Grant. If that wasn’t bad enough, Ma was suddenly feeling maternal and insisted on staying by my side until I recovered.

  The crushing blow came when Theodore came to visit me one humid afternoon. I was sitting up in bed in only my chemise. He took my hand so warmly that I dared to hope I may be back in his favor.

  “I’m glad to see you are recovering.”

  I gave him a wary smile, sensing reservation in his tone. “Slowly.”

  “But you are, and praise be to God for that.” He kissed the top of my hand as he sank onto the bed next to me. “I came to tell you I’m going to the liberal Republican convention with Whitelaw Reid. He’s asked me to report it for the Tribune. I wanted to tell you myself before you read about it in the papers.”

  My smile evaporated along with my feeling of euphoria. The Tribune was run by Horace Greeley, an open antagonist of mine. But if Greeley got elected, his job as editor would be available, a position Theodore had coveted for as long as I’d known him. He’d finally found a way to get it—by betraying me.

  “You are a liar.” I wrenched my hand from his and moved as far away from him as I could. “Why not be truthful and admit you are going to the convention to nominate Mr. Greeley for president?”

  “Victoria… I—”

  I didn’t hear any more of his protestations. I was suddenly swept into a trance. Before me was Theodore walking behind a wagon that bore a coffin. When I strained to see inside, I almost screamed. It was carrying the body of Horace Greeley.

  Grasping at his lapels as I came back to myself, I told Theodore of the vision in a babbling rush, ending with, “You will be responsible for putting him in that coffin, responsible for his death. Don’t go, Theodore, I beg of you.”

  But he was already standing, shaking his head. His expression said he thought me either mad or falsifying my vision in a bid to get him to stay. Without another word, my former lover walked out of my life.

  A few weeks later, I was feeling up to getting out of bed, so I paid a visit to the brokerage. After a few hours of work, I returned home for a nap to find Minnie, Zula, and Byron on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, surrounded by our luggage. Before I could ask what was going on, Zula ran to me and burst into tears.

  “Oh, baby girl, what is it? What’s happened?” I wrapped my arms around my daughter and held her close.

  “They said—they said we were no longer welcome here,” Zula hiccupped between sobs.

  “Who did?”

  “The landlords, ma’am,” Minnie answered. “They were all fired up about Tennie’s association with the Spencer Grays, said they ‘don’t want no nigger lovers in their hotel.”

  My shoulders sagged. I had told Tennie not to get involved with the black military regiment, but still smarting from Ma calling her worthless, Tennie couldn’t resist their request to become their colonel.

  “I want to show that women can go to the front of any group,” she had said. “You aren’t the only one who can make a political statement.”

  And now my sister’s stunt had gotten us thrown out of yet another home.

  “They stood there while we packed, but—” Zula dissolved into tears again.

  “We weren’t fast enough, so they threw the rest of our things into the street along with us,” Minnie finished for her. “I gathered everything up once the children were calm.”

  I smiled softly at Minnie. “You did very well.” The best thing I had ever done was take that girl in. I thought for a moment. “Well, we’d better get you back to the firm. At least you’ll have a proper place to sit down while I figure out what to do.”

  Once there, Tennie, James, and I traded ideas. Many of our remaining friends were gone on holiday for the summer and so couldn’t be prevailed upon for a room. There was no way any of us were going to stay with Buck and Annie or any of my half-crazy brothers and sisters. That left Madame de Ford and Miss Wood, but a brothel was not an ideal place to shelter two young children.

  Then Tennie, bless her, remembered Katherine at 17 Great Jones Street. “We can at least ask. She may have two rooms to rent.”

  Katherine rented us two of her rooms but only for a week, as she had additional guests scheduled to arrive. I thanked her profusely, paid in advance, and soon we were back in the same rooms we’d occupied in 1869.

  We were fast running out of options, so I swallowed my pride and appealed to the most powerful man I knew. Reverend Henry Ward Beecher owed me a favor for failing to appear at Steinway Hall. The least he could do was put in a good word with one of the many hotels in New York so my family could have a place to live.

  “Dear Sir,” I wrote. “The social fight against me being now waged in this city is becoming rather hotter than I can well endure longer, standing unsupported and alone as I have until now. Within the past weeks I have been shut out of hotel after hotel and am now, after having obtained a place in one, hunted down by a set of males and females who are determined that I shall not be permitted to live even, if they can prevent it.

  “Now I want your assistance. I want to be sustained in my position, from which I am ordered out and from which I do not wish to go—and all this simply because I am Victoria C. Woodhull, the advocate of social freedom. I have submitted to this persecution just so long as I can endure. My business, my projects, in fact everything for which I live, suffer from it, and it must cease. Will you lend me your aid in this?”

  His reply was swift, brief, and obviously written by someone else. He regretted being unable to help me in this matter.

  “Ungrateful bastard.” I crumpled up the note. We had to be out of Great Jones Street by five o’clock that evening, and I had no idea where we would go.

  The family roamed the streets for a full night without being able to find a place to sleep—hotel after hotel either had no vacancies or refused to serve us. Finally, we went back to the brokerage, where we slept on desks, on couches, in chairs, and on the floor.

  Exhausted and dispirited, I relapsed into my illness. I was not c
onscious when the presses went silent on my beloved Weekly at the end of June due to lack of funds, but I was crushed all the same.

  “It’s because of my candidacy,” I said one day not long after. “No one wishes me to succeed. I know newsmen are being bribed to exclude it from the stands. I’ve seen them tossing bundles into the garbage. It’s the same reason the newspapers won’t cover my plight. All those we’ve called out are banding together against us because we want to change the system.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Tennie said. To our mother, she added, “It must be the fever talking.”

  “That ain’t no fever talking,” Annie said. “It’s her pride. Even an animal knows not to bite the hand that feeds it. But you gone and done it anyway with those articles and speeches. Now you’re surprised at what happens.” She shook her head. “You’ve always been that way, thinking you’re better than the rest of us, what with your airs and all.”

  How dare she? I sat up, overwhelmed by dual waves of dizziness and nausea, and sank back down into the pillows. “My ‘airs,’ as you call them, were fine when they were putting bread in your belly and rum in your cup.”

  Then it hit me. My mother was not the only one with that attitude.

  “Everyone else was the same, friendly only when I had money. Sure, then I was entertaining and useful. Now I’m a pathetic shell of a woman.” I moaned.

  My depression only deepened when the brokerage’s landlord realized we were living there. Seeing an opportunity for profit, he raised the rent by one thousand dollars and demanded we pay immediately. We couldn’t, and so were back out on the streets, the once glorious firm of Woodhull, Claflin, and Company remaining only in name.