Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  William, who was called “Willie” by his family, kept up the family tradition of advantageous marriages. After graduating from Centre College in 1855 and receiving his law degree two years later, he married Lucretia Clay, the granddaughter of “the Great Compromiser” Henry Clay, Kentucky’s most famous statesman. Unfortunately, she died a little more than a year into their marriage, days after giving birth to a son, who also died. Less than two years later, shortly after the start of the Civil War, Willie married seventeen-year-old Issa Desha, the granddaughter of the Kentucky governor Joseph Desha.

  The war divided the Breckinridge family as it did the state of Kentucky, which still thought of itself as a western state, perched between North and South. Willie’s father, Robert, was an outspoken opponent of slavery, one of a handful of prominent southern emancipationists who in the decades before the war promoted the never very popular nor practical idea of gradually ending slavery by having the government compensate owners for their slaves and sending them back to Africa. Robert remained staunchly loyal to the Union. President Abraham Lincoln counted on the influential minister to keep Kentucky from joining the Confederacy, saying, “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor Maryland … We would as well consent to separation at once.”

  Willie’s brothers Joseph and Charles sided with their father and joined the Union army, while Willie and Robert Jr. joined the Confederates. Willie was a somewhat reluctant Confederate. From conversations with relatives already fighting and such family acquaintances as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, he feared the war would be “a bloody repulse.” He also was loath to defy his beloved father. His mother had died when he was young, and he remembered Robert as “a loving, kind, indulgent father” who was “as tender as a mother.” But in his political heart he agreed with his towering, fierce cousin John Cabell Breckinridge, the former vice president and senator who had been expelled from the Senate as a traitor after joining the Confederate cause. Now a general, Breckinridge had opposed Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential race as the pro-slavery Southern Democratic candidate and carried most of the South, arguing that the Constitution gave the southern states the right to set their own course on slavery.

  Willie stalled for more than a year after the war started until the threat of Union arrest forced him to act. “I shall never forget your kindness to me,” he wrote to his father before he slipped off early one morning in July 1862 on one of his father’s thoroughbreds to help raise the Ninth Kentucky Calvary.

  By December, twenty-five-year-old Willie Breckinridge had been elected colonel of the regiment. He spent part of the war riding with Gen. John Hunt Morgan’s feared raiders in Kentucky and Tennessee, harassing Union forces and living off the land. “Morgan on the loose was an object of terror to the countryside,” remembered one woman who was a wide-eyed child when Morgan’s troops neared her family’s farm in Indiana, “ransacking country stores and farmhouses, taking anything he wanted … burning and destroying everything before him.” Eventually Breckinridge’s battalion ended up in Georgia, where he took part in some of the closing battles of the war outside Atlanta and became part of the small contingent of troops that escorted the fleeing Confederate president Davis southward.

  At the end of the war, in early May 1865, Willie and his cousin Gen. John C. Breckinridge, who was now the Confederate secretary of war, were among the handful of men present at the last Confederate council of war at Armistead Burt’s estate in South Carolina. There it fell to young Colonel Breckinridge, Gen. Basil Duke, and three other brigade commanders to convince Davis that the cause was lost. After each man spoke his piece, it was Duke who finally told Davis that the soldiers themselves thought “the war was over.” After Davis staggered to his feet, General Breckinridge helped him from the room, and the Confederacy was no more. Willie took advantage of the general amnesty granted to officers of his rank and below and returned to Lexington, while his cousin fled south through the Florida Keys to Cuba and eventually took refuge in Canada.

  After the war, Willie took over the influential Lexington Observer and Reporter as editor. Within two years, however, his and Issa’s growing family brought him back to the practice of law. Their first child, a daughter named Ella, had been born just before he left for the war. His mother’s namesake, Sophonisba, whom everyone called Nisba, was born the year after his return. Two sons, Desha and Robert, followed. The next two children died in infancy. Curry, born in 1875, would be Willie and Issa’s last child. Even as his law practice grew, he kept his hand in public life, working for the Democratic Party, making a failed bid for district attorney, and building a reputation as an orator. After a particularly stirring speech at the state Democratic convention, the party newspaper noted he had “all the elements of a solid and substantial popularity”: “purity of life and character, a lofty and chivalrous bearing, a matchless eloquence, and a cherished Kentucky name.”

  In 1884, Willie Breckinridge, whom most people called “Colonel Breckinridge” or simply “the Colonel” (or affectionately, but not to his face, “ol’ Billy Breck”), decided to put that cherished name to use and seek the seat in Congress that Joseph Clay Stiles Blackburn—Julia Blackburn’s brother-in-law—had vacated to run for the Senate. Willie was elected easily, taking his place in the constellation of Breckinridges and Blackburns and Clays that defined the Bluegrass region.

  Breckinridge ascended immediately to the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, thanks to fellow Kentuckian John Carlisle, who was elected Speaker of the House. A compact man, he still had the bearing of a cavalry officer and a “thick growth of silver-gray hair, a long beard, and large, ‘brilliant’ blue-gray eyes” that together with his large head “gave him the appearance of a silver-maned lion.” He was, declared his Civil War comrade Basil Duke, “the most gifted and attractive orator I ever heard.”

  Religion and morality were favored topics of Breckinridge’s speeches. This wasn’t surprising. As a young man, notes the historian Klotter, he “vacillated between the law and theology” and even spent one year at the Danville Theological Seminary. As his reputation as a speaker grew in the latter half of the 1880s, he addressed the Evangelical Alliance of the United States, the Eastern Presbyterian Church, and the Washington Bible Society, where he spoke about “the Bible, book by book, and its relation to the history of man.” He was the featured orator at the dedication of a monument to the Pilgrims in 1889, where he expounded on the importance of “monogamic marriage” and the “sanctity of home.” He was particularly concerned with the strict moral code that constrained women’s sexual behavior, which, like many in Victorian America, he exalted as essential to a well-ordered society. He told an audience at the Bourbon Female College in Paris, Kentucky, in 1872 that female chastity was “the foundation, the corner-stone of human society” and that “pure homes make pure government.” In 1882, at the Sayre Institute in Lexington, he lectured the young women to remain pure and warned them to avoid “useless hand-shaking, promiscuous kissing, needless touches and all exposures.”

  But it was the Great Tariff Debate of 1888—“two days of oratory in which the best gladiators of the House participated,” as the historian Allan Nevins has described it—that made Breckinridge a star. Other than the question of gold or silver currency, tariffs were the biggest political issue of the day. The Democrats generally opposed high tariffs on imported products as impediments to free trade and also because they didn’t want to see the federal government swollen with revenue that it would be tempted to spend. The Republicans supported high tariffs as a means of protecting farming and manufacturing interests from import competition and as a way of raising revenue for what they deemed badly needed infrastructure improvements for the country at a time when there was no income tax, just internal revenue taxes, mainly on tobacco and whiskey.

  When President Grover Cleveland called for tariff reform in 1887, Breckinridge traveled around the country promoting the D
emocrats’ tariff reform plan, casting tariffs as a tax on consumers that would dampen trade and foster a corrupting surplus. “The money in the Treasury is not the money of the Government, it is the money of the people, wrung from them by a false and wrong policy of taxation,” he told a large audience in Philadelphia, who arose “almost en masse and applauded for several minutes” when he finished, before demanding an encore, which, the New York Times reported, Breckinridge obliged, making “another brief address.”

  When the Democrats’ reform measure came to the floor of the House in May 1888, “the galleries were filled” in anticipation of an oratorical showdown, says Nevins. When Breckinridge rose to speak, “a boutonnière in his coat,” applause shook the House chamber; it was several minutes before he could begin. “The surplus continues to grow; the evil effects of it are daily exhibited; schemes without number to squander the public money; to distribute it among the States, to cultivate a habit in the American people of looking to Washington as a great alms-giver can be defeated only by your action on this bill,” he exhorted his colleagues.

  It wasn’t just his ability to simplify a complicated subject that made Breckinridge a star. At the time, writes the historian Robert Wiebe, the tariff and related issues like currency were assuming an “eternal quality that set them apart as touchstones of public morality,” as they encapsulated fears about far-off, unseen forces that increasingly controlled the daily lives of Americans in a rapidly commercializing nation. Breckinridge was now speaking for morality both private and public.

  * * *

  By 1893, W.C.P. Breckinridge was as well known and well liked as any politician in the country. He had been mentioned as a possible Speaker of the House and was eyeing Joe Blackburn’s Senate seat; his future seemed limitless. “Colonel Breckinridge is an idol,” the New York Herald would declare. “His imposing appearance, his dignified, almost fatherly, bearing, his courtly manners, his earnest, warm hearted friendliness, his sparkling appreciative eyes, his ready intelligence, broad cultivation and quick, harmless wit make him a universal favorite.”

  On the June day in 1893 that Madeline Pollard arrived at The Farm in Charlottesville, she appeared to be on the cusp of pulling off a remarkable social coup in marrying Breckinridge. Here was the daughter of a saddler who died so broke that his family couldn’t afford to bury him. Her mother had to take a chattel mortgage on what furniture they had in order to feed Madeline and her six brothers and sisters. Since the age of twelve, Madeline had been shuttled from home to home of a succession of aunts. One of her cousins remembered her as a “remarkably bright girl,” but she spent the better part of her teens trying unsuccessfully to find a relative to pay for her continued schooling at a time when secondary education was a luxury, especially for a girl.

  Now, having broken news of the betrothal, the Washington Post was lauding Madeline in an article headlined “A Bright and Brainy Woman” as a “well-known writer.” The Post gushed that “she early displayed an extraordinary intellect, and is one of the most brilliant women who has ever grown up in [Lexington].” It noted her literary bent and said she had worked as a reporter for the Lexington Gazette and done “literary work” in New York. Although “she was poor,” said the Post, she was “very ambitious, and those who knew her felt that someday she would make her mark in the literary field.”

  The Post also mentioned Madeline’s one brush with notoriety to date: When she was employed as a clerk in the Interior Department, and the death of the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman (who was reviled in the South for his “March to the Sea,” which ravaged the land from Atlanta to Savannah) was announced, Madeline exclaimed, “At last, the devil has got his own!”

  “The remark made her famous at the time,” reported the Post; it also “was the cause of her losing her situation.”

  The paper said Madeline was about twenty-five and gave her name as Madeline Breckinridge Pollard, which suggested that she was a member of the Breckinridge clan—which many people in Washington assumed, as she clearly was close to Congressman Breckinridge. What the Post didn’t yet know was the extent of that closeness.

  * * *

  Madeline Pollard had been Colonel Breckinridge’s mistress for nearly a decade. The relationship had begun when she was still in school and he was running for Congress, married to his second wife, and the father of five. Willie always assured Madeline that he would marry her if he ever became free to do so, so when his wife Issa died in the summer of 1892, Madeline assumed she would become the next Mrs. W.C.P. Breckinridge once an acceptable period of mourning passed. After all, they had taken every precaution to ensure that her reputation stayed intact. She lived in a convent school the first two years she was in Washington, and told a woman she considered a friend that Breckinridge “was as careful of me and my reputation as if I had been his daughter.”

  Madeline knew that protocol dictated that they couldn’t marry for a year or two, so she was happy to bide her time in the knowledge that their relationship finally would be legitimized. But throughout the spring of 1893, she became increasingly disquieted. Gossip linked Willie to his distant cousin Louise Scott Wing. A friend of her landlady’s told her he had met the couple at a diplomatic reception, but when Madeline confronted Willie, he denied he intended to marry anyone but her. He seemed intent, however, on having her leave Washington—for Europe or New York. She’d go, she said, but only if they announced the engagement. But Breckinridge refused to do so, claiming it was out of consideration for his grown children, who would be shocked at the news of his hasty remarriage.

  Still, news of the engagement leaked out. For her part, Madeline hadn’t been exactly circumspect and had mentioned it to at least two or three friends. On June 18, the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, just across the river from Kentucky, published the following tidbit: “There is an apparently well authenticated rumor that Hon. W.C.P. Breckinridge of Lexington, Ky., the silver-tongued orator, is to marry Mrs. Madeline Breckinridge Pollard.” The mistake about her marital status aside, Madeline may have been happy to finally have the news public. That is, until days later, when the Kentucky Leader published a denial from Breckinridge of any such engagement.

  It was then that Madeline decided to release news of their engagement to the Washington Post. “I am sorry to have announced our engagement before you wished it, but you have driven me to do so,” she wrote to Willie as she prepared to depart Washington for Charlottesville. “I had no thought of putting it into print, but after the Cincinnati Gazette printed it and it was denied in an undignified way in the Lexington Leader, I gave the announcement to the Post.”

  Now, here Madeline was with Julia Blackburn and her friends pretending that nothing was amiss, even as increasingly acrimonious letters and telegrams flew back and forth between the couple. Willie, in Lexington and about to embark on a speaking tour of the Southeast, begged Madeline to lie low and let him handle matters. Madeline threatened to come to Lexington to ask his daughter Nisba what they should do about the situation. Breckinridge wrote back on June 27 pleading with Madeline to “control” herself. “I cannot go to Charlottesville, nor you come to Lexington. It would result in an open scandal,” he told her. “As matters now are, your character and reputation are safe.”

  What Madeline did not know was that a parallel drama was playing out in Kentucky. Louise Scott Wing’s brother, Dr. Preston Scott, a well-respected Louisville physician, was telling people there that Breckinridge was going to marry his sister, whom, indeed, Breckinridge had been courting all spring. On July 1, Scott had summoned Breckinridge to his home to confront him about the Pollard engagement announcement. A reporter from the Commercial Gazette got wind of the brewing scandal and tracked Breckinridge there. Breckinridge “denied that there had ever been a possibility of him marrying Miss Pollard.” He told the reporter that Louise “has not yet promised to accept me” and that “anything you might say on the subject would injure my suit,” so the reporter kept the story under wraps even as gossip contin
ued to percolate throughout Lexington and Louisville.

  After Breckinridge’s letter of June 27, Madeline threatened to make public the details of their relationship if he wouldn’t confirm the engagement. The telegram that reached her at The Farm on July 9 was the response she had been anticipating from Breckinridge for days: “Written [Maj.] Moore. See him before you make publication.”

  Major William Moore was the superintendent of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington. He had helped Breckinridge quietly settle matters a few years earlier when the colonel’s troubled son Robert got caught passing bad checks to support his gambling and drinking habits. Now, Breckinridge turned to Moore to serve as an intermediary with Madeline.

  Shortly after receiving the telegram, Madeline made the two-hour train ride to Washington to meet with Moore. If she had hoped he would offer some kind of assurance about the marriage, she was sorely let down. In fact, when she got to Washington, she found the following in the July 13 edition of the Lexington Gazette, which, like many politically important out-of-state papers, was available in the busy hotel newsstands of the city: “Col. W.C.P. Breckinridge, about whose marriage with Miss Madeline Pollard, of Washington, a great deal has been written and said, told a friend in this city a day or two ago that there was no truth in the report.” It called the rumors of the engagement to Madeline “mortifying to Col. Breckinridge.”