Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Breckinridge was an early backer of Cleveland’s bid to become the first president to serve nonconsecutive terms, and with the Democrats back in power was now a key ally and “close friend of President Cleveland,” according to the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. There had been “much gossip connecting his name with a cabinet position under Cleveland.” Breckinridge and Cleveland had a natural affinity, as they “shared common traits as sons of ministers, as Presbyterians, and as men with similar views on the nature of mankind,” notes the Breckinridge biographer James Klotter. Both revered the tenets of Jeffersonian democracy, believing that government was naturally corrupting and that the strength of the country lay in a hardworking, self-sufficient populace that didn’t look to the government to solve its problems. When he vetoed a popular bill to provide government-funded seed to drought-stricken farmers in 1887, Cleveland wrote: “I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering … though the people should support the government, the government should not support the people.”

  Jeffersonian Democrats like Breckinridge and Cleveland believed in a weak, decentralized government because they viewed a properly functioning society as largely self-ordering. Underpinning this belief was a fundamentally patriarchal, hierarchical worldview in which everyone knew their place and fulfilled their assigned role: employers and laborers, whites and blacks, men and women. Just as Cleveland dismissed a law to reduce sixteen-hour workdays for streetcar conductors as “class legislation,” Breckinridge asserted in one of his famous tariff speeches that the labor strikes increasingly plaguing the country weren’t a symptom of the need for great protections for working people, but of a “system [that] must be wrong,” of a disequilibrium between employers and the “laboring people” that prevented them from being “content.” Of course, this worldview also suggested that anyone who stepped outside his or her proper role—such as a woman who left the domestic sphere—deserved society’s censure, not its protection.

  With the Democrats in control of both the House and the Senate for the first time since the war, Breckinridge was now an acknowledged party leader and was rumored to be in consideration for the speakership. While he declined to challenge Georgia congressman Charles Crisp for the job, one paper noted that it “looks very much as if Congressman Breckinridge … will be the real leader on the floor of the house.” In addition to demonstrating a “thorough command of parliamentary maneuver,” Breckinridge, it said, had “made the best impression on the public of all the Democratic Representatives.” There also were rumors he would seek a Senate seat when Senator John Carlisle resigned to join Cleveland’s cabinet as treasury secretary. Breckinridge also was more in demand than ever as a speaker. He was selected to deliver the dedication address at the opening of the Chicago World’s Fair, the biggest event of the decade, although his appearance was scuttled when controversy arose over the fact that he had, as a good Bourbon Democrat, opposed a congressional appropriation for the fair. By March 1893, Breckinridge was boasting that things in Washington were “running very smoothly” with the Democrats in charge, likening the “conservative and business-like” Cleveland administration to one of the “best regulated families.”

  Then, on May 3, “Industrial Black Friday,” the stock market crashed. There had been rumblings all winter that the economy was in trouble. Many of the railroads had overexpanded in a fit of competitive euphoria and were heavily leveraged; crop prices had plummeted; exports were declining; and the banking system, lacking a central bank, was struggling to absorb the shocks as credit tightened. After the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad went under, panicked investors rushed to buy gold, which streamed out of the Treasury. The nation’s gold reserves dipped dangerously low. The Bourbons blamed the Silver Act because the government notes that were used to buy silver could be redeemed for either silver or gold. They also were philosophically opposed to silver because it inflated the value of the dollar, putting more money in circulation, which tended to help farmers and other small businessmen who were often strapped for capital. They considered gold-backed currency “honest money,” but it also helped keep the money supply constricted and interest rates high, which favored eastern financial interests. Cleveland staked his presidency on his belief that the answer to the financial crisis was the repeal of the Silver Act, which is why Congress had been called back to Washington in August 1893. Breckinridge was supposed to put his oratorical firepower behind the repeal with a speech in Congress on August 22, a little more than a week after Madeline filed her suit. It should have been another star turn for the “silver-tongued” orator. For two days people packed the galleries waiting for him to appear, but to no avail. Breckinridge had ducked out of the city and gone to his daughter Ella’s home in Staunton, Virginia, to avoid the curious crowds. “There is one distinguished member of the House of Representatives whose mind just now is occupied with other thoughts than the ratio of gold and silver. There are some double standards even more difficult to maintain at parity,” the Republican Philadelphia Times said with glee.

  Breckinridge couldn’t stay away for long. On August 28, he returned to Washington to help pass the repeal of the Silver Act. With the repeal bill off to the Senate, a late-summer hush settled on the capital. Undoubtedly Breckinridge thought interest in the scandal would die down. Friends wrote him letters assuring him of vindication and of their “undiminished confidence” in him and his “spotless honor.” A lawyer he consulted advised him to enter a brief formal plea and predicted Breckinridge “would not be further annoyed about the matter for a year; possibly longer; possibly never.”

  Then a bombshell dropped. On September 2, the Cincinnati Enquirer published excerpts from a letter that Julia Blackburn had sent to Gen. Basil Duke the day after his remarks about Pollard were published. She told him that if he knew the facts of the case, he wouldn’t be so quick to defend Breckinridge. She said that Breckinridge not only had “told her of his engagement with Miss Pollard,” but had “placed Madeline under her chaperonage, and had specially requested Mrs. Blackburn’s kindest consideration for Miss Pollard on the grounds that she would soon be Mrs. Breckinridge.” As a result, Blackburn “permitted Miss Pollard to share all the social recognition she herself received” and was “indignant beyond expression” when she found out the true nature of their relationship. She was so indignant, said the Enquirer, that despite her “womanly modesty,” she would “not hesitate to respond to a summons for her presence in court.”

  Breckinridge had made a powerful enemy. Along with the Clays and the Breckinridges, the Blackburns were one of the most consequential families of the Bluegrass. Julia Blackburn had met Madeline in 1890 when she boarded with a Mrs. Fillette, whom Julia’s sister Emily Zane had met in Europe. A fast friendship developed between the widowed Blackburn and the young woman from her home state. Julia’s only child, a daughter, had died in infancy, and it’s possible she saw herself as something of a surrogate mother to Madeline, whom she was concerned for as an “unprotected” girl—meaning she had no male relatives to look after her interests. She also knew Madeline’s aunt Mary Stout, the Bridgeport aunt who had taken in Mrs. Pollard and Madeline’s sister Mary after J.D. Pollard died.

  There, too, was a bit of a sacred connection between Julia and Madeline. Julia’s late husband, Dr. Luke Blackburn, had been a public health pioneer, one of the first to recognize the importance of quarantine and basic sanitary procedures in fighting the epidemics of cholera and yellow fever that periodically ravaged the South. When “yellow jack,” as yellow fever was called, broke out in the Mississippi River port city of Hickman, Kentucky, in 1878 during a massive epidemic, he rushed to Hickman to try to halt it before it spread inland. Blackburn put out a call for volunteers to assist him. Madeline’s oldest brother, Edward, who was nineteen at the time and a trained telegraph operator, volunteered, along with three doctors, several nurses, and a pharmacist. Edward filled in for the local telegraph operator wh
o had died, and was for days the town’s only link to the outside world before he, too, succumbed to yellow jack. “He sat with his hand on the key and worked until unconsciousness came,” Madeline told Julia, and “when death was very near, he went from his bed to the instrument and sent a message for another operator to come.” It was Luke Blackburn himself who closed Edward’s eyes and who “brought what was left of his last words” to the Pollard family, said Madeline.

  Ultimately the epidemic was halted, although most of the volunteers perished. The incident was a turning point in Blackburn’s career, which had been marred by ultimately unproven but circumstantially damning charges that he had plotted to infect northern cities with yellow fever during the war by shipping trunks of infected clothing and blankets across the Mason-Dixon Line. The “Hero of Hickman,” as he was known thereafter, received a diamond-studded medal and a gold-headed cane from the grateful citizenry and cruised to election as governor.

  It didn’t take long after their introduction for Madeline to become a regular visitor at Julia’s flat in the fashionable Portland, the city’s first luxury apartment building, where she lived with her widowed sister, Emily. Julia enjoyed the company of the bright young woman who called her “the Duchess.” Madeline read to her and told Julia about the Sunday school she ran at the local penitentiary—Julia was well known herself for having organized such classes at the Kentucky penitentiary when her husband was governor and made reforms at the infamous “Black Hole of Calcutta,” a filthy, overcrowded prison with open sewers, unheated cellblocks, and rampant vermin.

  In January 1893, Julia paid Madeline the ultimate compliment by inviting her to be a co-hostess at an afternoon tea that she and Emily were holding, one in a daily round of receptions that occupied much of the time of both official and unofficial Washington. Such receptions were inevitably packed and surprisingly democratic affairs, with congressmen rubbing shoulders with visiting dignitaries and the latest literary sensation, and someone’s cousin in from Cincinnati chockablock with a legendary Civil War general. One congressman’s daughter, visiting from Indiana, remembered for the rest of her life meeting General Sherman at a reception, with his “keen, penetrating eyes—kind eyes, but with grains of gunpowder lurking in them.”

  On that day in January, Madeline stood with Julia and Emily and the other hostesses in the receiving line and then poured coffee and tea for guests, an honor reserved for unmarried young women who needed to show off their hosting skills. As with all such occasions featuring prominent society ladies like Julia, the event was meticulously detailed in the society columns of the Washington papers, including the names of the sixty-five guests and the “toilettes” of the hostesses: “Mrs. Zane received in a gown of shrimp pink bengaline and flowered brocade,” while Mrs. Blackburn wore “black satin flowered in pink.” For Madeline, seeing her name in the society columns of the Washington Post and the Evening Star alongside those of the Blackburns and Lees and Breckinridges—Willie’s brother Gen. Joseph Cabell Breckinridge was a guest—signaled that her climb from poverty and obscurity into the inner circle of the southern aristocracy was complete.

  Now her friendship with Julia was proving critical. Julia’s condemnation of Duke’s remarks relit interest in the scandal and gave new gravitas to Madeline’s charges. If it weren’t for “those utterances of Mrs. Blackburn the problem would be much more easily handled,” Breckinridge’s law partner John Shelby wrote to him gloomily from Lexington. Stuck in Washington dealing with legislative matters, Breckinridge had outsourced much of the scandal management and preparation of his defense to an ad hoc team that included Shelby; his son Desha; former congressman Phil Thompson, who was a close friend and lawyer; Charles Stoll, who, despite being the only Republican in the bunch, was a longtime friend; and Maj. William “Sam” McChesney, a local political operative who was his late wife’s uncle and served as a fixer of sorts for Breckinridge.

  In 1888, McChesney had warned Breckinridge that “a scandalous report … calculated to do you great injury” was being circulated. Supposedly Senator Joe Blackburn told someone that a couple of years ago, a young Kentucky woman from a “good family” came to Washington and pestered him to help get her a government job. He told her to see Breckinridge, as he was her congressman and as a matter of courtesy had first dibs on such appointments. She refused, and when he asked why, she burst into tears and said that she already had seen Breckinridge and he had offered to get her a position “upon certain conditions; and these conditions were that she should submit to [his] desires.”

  As a result of McChesney’s warning, Breckinridge was able to run damage control. He got Blackburn to send a letter to one of the men who was repeating the story that, while not exactly denying it, at least denied that he had ever talked to the man who was repeating it, and saying the story was “not true in many essential particulars.” The other senator from Kentucky, James Beck, who happened to be the former law partner of Breckinridge’s cousin John Cabell Breckinridge, also came to Breckinridge’s defense. He said that Blackburn told him the young woman said that Breckinridge “had not treated her well (or properly),” but he thought that Blackburn “may have in a joking way intimated that Col. B. had said something improper to her.” Having passed the whole thing off as a joke, Beck assured one of the men who had heard the rumor that Colonel Breckinridge was a “man of honor, morality, [and] integrity” and that “no man has a higher standing in Washington.” With the elite men of Breckinridge’s circle closing rank, the story that Breckinridge was trading political patronage for sexual favors was snuffed out.

  Now, McChesney was again helping Breckinridge manage another scandal. “It seems that the publication in reference to Mrs. Blackburn has done you more harm than all the rest, and something should be done at once to counteract its effect,” he warned Breckinridge. For men like McChesney, counteracting unfavorable stories usually involved reaching out to other influential men and friendly reporters. Shortly after, a correspondent from the Kentucky Leader reported that he had learned “on the best of authority that the letter to General Duke from Mrs. Luke P. Blackburn … was never written,” even as Breckinridge and his team fumed in private about how the letter—which Shelby had seen—got leaked.

  Breckinridge’s team also previewed his defense to the Leader and the Courier-Journal. Breckinridge would “deny absolutely every one of” Pollard’s charges and “his denials will be supported by the strongest sort of proof that he was never engaged to Miss Pollard,” who would be shown to be “utterly depraved where morality is concerned.” Breckinridge would take the stand in his defense and “vigorously deny that he is the father of Miss Pollard’s children.”

  It was this charge, that he had fathered children—whose fate was unknown—with Pollard that “has touched womankind so that they have rallied to Miss Pollard’s support,” reported the Leader. The abandonment or murder of unwanted, often illicit children either at birth or shortly thereafter was rarely discussed, but haunted Victorian society. In Philadelphia alone in the nineteenth century, “thousands of dead newborns were found in alleys, ash heaps, privies, rivers and so on”—tiny ghosts of women’s shame. In 1868, the New York Times railed against the “horrible crime of infanticide” that prevailed in the “great cities” after a young servant named Hester Vaughn, who was convicted of crushing her newborn’s skull, became a cause célèbre among suffragists concerned about the rampant sexual predation of young women on their own in the cities. The Albany Law Journal reported in 1876 that the “laws of infanticide must be a dead letter in the District of Columbia” because, according to local officials, “hundreds” of “dead bodies of infants, still-born and murdered … have been found during the past year, scattered over parks and vacant lots.”

  Some of these abandoned, or aborted, or smothered, or strangled infants were the unwanted children of married women, a crude form of birth control, but many were, as Susan B. Anthony asserted in 1876, the castoffs of “seduced deserted unfortunates, who can
no longer hide the terrible secret of their lives.” It was concern—and a certain prurient curiosity—about what happened to Madeline’s baseborn children that drove much of the female interest in the story.

  Breckinridge’s team gave another, more hard-nosed version of the defense to C. E. Sares, a reporter from the New York World, the widely popular and sensational tabloid, who had come to Breckinridge’s Lexington law office looking for a scoop. According to the World, the “chief effort of the defense will be to prove that Miss Pollard was unchaste … before Col. Breckinridge formed her acquaintance” and that “she had been discovered in compromising relations with two or three young men before she left for school.” They would also show that Pollard was “a mature woman and not a giddy young school-girl when he met her on the train.” In other words, Breckinridge hadn’t ruined an innocent girl; Madeline Pollard was already “ruined” when Breckinridge met her.