Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Even just a few years earlier, the story might have ended there, with the assertions that Madeline was unchaste releasing Breckinridge from culpability. It was hard to push back on such an entrenched narrative. The newspapers already were squeamish about publishing the details of the affair and rarely interviewed women about such matters, which meant the overwhelming majority of voices weighing in were men’s. Luckily for Madeline, however, upstart media outlets were reshaping the landscape of what stories, and voices, the public heard, as tabloids like the World pushed aside old strictures about propriety in search of audiences eager for sensational news.

  On September 17, the six hundred thousand readers of the World’s popular Sunday edition opened their papers to find the multipage, self-penned story of Madeline’s life. She wrote it sitting at a desk in her room at the boardinghouse, as a reporter watched as her hands “glided to and fro over the paper with wonderful rapidity.” Madeline said she decided to take her story directly to the public, sensing that if the allegations made against her were allowed to stand “in the weary interval which must elapse before the case can be tried in court,” she would have no chance to prevail. “It is because I am determined in the few ways left open to me to redeem my life that I feel an irresistible impulse to tell the story of my life,” she wrote, noting the “atmosphere of falsehood and deception in which I have been forced to live for nine years by my infatuated devotion to Col. Breckinridge.”

  Madeline denied that she was the desperate orphan of a lowly saddler, telling the story of her happy childhood as the daughter of a respected local merchant who was both a Mason and an Odd Fellow. She told of how she “very much wanted to study for a degree for music or a literary course” and how she met Rhodes and came to an agreement to borrow money for school, and said, “Though my wish to pay back the money was as strong as his wish that I should marry him, we both perfectly understood each other.” She denied that she had been sexually intimate with Rhodes or any man other than Breckinridge. “With this man alone have I ever been guilty of a single impure thought or act,” she wrote. “The miserable reward of my fidelity is a sermon in itself to show how low the highest devotion the human soul is capable of may fall.”

  Madeline acknowledged that she had “claimed to be engaged in literary work when I was not … for I disarmed suspicion and curiosity with whatever weapon was necessary.” She denied, however, that she had three sets of calling cards or misrepresented herself to Julia Blackburn or anyone else. She said that more than five years ago, “Mr. Breckinridge and I decided that I should take his name for my middle name, drop Valeria and say my father admired John C. [Breckinridge] and had me christened Breckinridge … Tiffany and Brentano made my cards, and they have records of the plates.”

  Most important, she upended the traditional narrative of the predatory fallen woman by asserting that she and Breckinridge had a long-term, companionate relationship. “Mr. Breckinridge knew each day the events of my life,” she said; they were in constant contact, and her life was “full of work with him”: “I read books, papers, magazines, speeches and whatever he was interested in, with him and for him, and we discussed together whatever plans he had and he always gave me the rough draft of his speeches and proof of paper or magazine articles. I undertook anything he wished me to, and found my greatest pleasure in doing intellectual work for him. I always sat in the gallery to hear his speeches on the floor, and signed to him if his voice was too weak or if his attention waned. He never made a speech that there was not a message direct to me in it.”

  Madeline also appended her original statement to her lawyers, filling in the details of her life and giving readers a firsthand account of how a powerful, older man seduced a young woman and held her in his thrall for nearly a decade. She told of meeting Breckinridge on the train and of the carriage ride in which Breckinridge had attempted to take liberties. She told how she had agreed to meet Breckinridge the following morning at the Cincinnati public library because he had yet to give her any concrete advice about her situation with Rhodes and because “he had succeeded in fascinating me so that I believed his assurances that I had nothing to fear from him.” Once there, he told her “he could not talk with me there, because the rules prohibited conversation, and suggested that I go with him in the [street]cars to the house of a friend” who lived on George Street. When they arrived, they sat in the front parlor talking until a woman came in and announced that “the upstairs room was ready.” Breckinridge asked her to go upstairs “pretending that it was for the purpose of talking over my matter.” Madeline said she “had not the faintest comprehension of the character of the house to which he had taken me, but I steadily refused to go with him.” She said Breckinridge then left the room, “locking the door after him.” He returned with the woman, who “endeavored to persuade me to go to the upper room with Col. Breckinridge, but still I refused, and after being detained there for a long time he took me away, doing and saying everything in his power to re-establish his fascination and control over me.”

  She said Breckinridge persuaded her to leave Wesleyan and go to the Sayre Institute in Lexington, “stating that the school was as good as the one in Cincinnati, and that I would then be near, where he could advise me and keep me out of any difficulty with Mr. Rhodes until my education was finished, when he would assist me to procure a situation as a teacher.” Pollard said Breckinridge sent a false telegram to her at Wesleyan summoning her home to Frankfort, and “that afternoon I left on the train with him.” They arrived in Lexington on Saturday evening. They took a streetcar to a cottage on Short Street where Breckinridge said a friend lived, and he “suggested that it was better I should stay there than at a hotel because I was a girl alone.” Madeline said a “mulatto woman came and opened the door and let us in.” Breckinridge then “resumed his course of conduct towards me, and being controlled by his fascination and now overcome with his persistence, he accomplished my seduction and ruin.”

  She told how Breckinridge kept her at the house until Monday, leaving to go to his home, which was three blocks away, and coming back in the evening. On Monday morning he learned that Rhodes had been at his Lexington office inquiring about Madeline because Rhodes had gone to visit her at Wesleyan and found that she wasn’t there and that Breckinridge had been to see her. Breckinridge then hustled her onto a train back to Cincinnati, where he visited her and again took her to the house on George Street, until “as a result of this course of conduct by him I became pregnant.” Madeline said she returned to Lexington in late August and enrolled at the Sayre Institute. She lived in a boardinghouse run by two respectable women for six months, “doing what I could to conceal my condition.” In mid-February 1885, at Breckinridge’s direction, she went to Cincinnati to “secure a room in some secluded place.” Madeline took a room “over a mattress store and opposite a livery stable,” with Breckinridge paying her expenses, and took her meals “at the Vienna Bakery.” On April 1, she went to the Norwood Foundling Asylum, which was run by the “Black Cap” Sisters of Charity, an order of Catholic nuns, and she “remained there in a private room, with my face veiled” under the name of Louise Wilson. On May 29, when Madeline was “exactly eighteen years and six months of age, a female child, begotten by Col. Breckinridge … was born to me.”

  Madeline said that she wanted to keep the baby and go away somewhere where no one knew her, but that Breckinridge “begged in every way that I should not leave him, and promised me most solemnly that if I would not do so and would leave the child at the asylum, and if he were ever free to do so, he would marry me and give me his protection and his name and in some proper way care for his offspring.” She complied and returned to Lexington in August 1885 and reentered Sayre. For the next two years, “Col. Breckinridge wrote me passionate love letters” and “he having completely won my love … I was faithful and obedient to him in all things.”

  When she became pregnant for a second time in 1887, she came to Washington “by his invitation” and gave
birth to a second child in February 1888 at the home of a midwife, which she again gave up, and “he renewed his promise, so many times made, that if he were ever free to do so, he would marry me.” Madeline said her “only explanation for maintaining for eight years my guilty relations with Col. Breckinridge was our mutual devotion.” She said she had “several times wished to leave him, not because I had ceased to love him, but because I wished to end a life of deception, but he always overcame my desire by his protestations of affection and his begging me not to leave him.”

  Madeline’s account in the World was a compelling story and unlike anything that had been written by a disgraced woman for public consumption. Taking her story directly to the public was a stroke of genius that leveraged a growing popular press willing to print sensational material and humanized the trope of the “fallen” woman. Madeline’s tale was an instant media sensation and reprinted in papers around the country. At the same time, the impenetrable facade around Breckinridge cracked a bit, as stories about his rumored past exploits with women began to seep out. “I have been told many things about Colonel Breckinridge which I have never heard before,” said one astonished member of the Cleveland administration who had known Breckinridge for eight years.

  A week later, Madeline entered the House of Mercy, a home for fallen women run by Episcopalian nuns, saying she planned to devote herself to a life of charity work. “My purpose in entering the institute was to compose and discipline myself and to devote myself for the remainder of my days to the work of educating and uplifting fallen women,” she told a reporter from the Post, who found her a woman of an “intense nature,” refined manners, and “brilliant” conversation. “It is the quality of her mind that first impresses one who meets her,” he wrote, noting how impressed he was with her sincerity in committing to help other disgraced women—as well as how comely she looked in the “well-fitting but severely plain dress of dark blue serge” that appeared to be the dress of the house.

  Entering the House of Mercy also allowed Madeline to reframe the purpose of the suit, which had been widely reported as revenge for Breckinridge’s discarding of her for Wing. “Revenge!” she scoffed. “Not at all. I have no such feeling. I thought it unjust that I should bear all the burden alone.” The suit, then, wasn’t about a ruined woman looking to even the score. It was about challenging the double standard that created ruined women in the first place.

  7

  What Shall We Do with Our Daughters?

  On the September day that Madeline Pollard entered the House of Mercy, Jennie Tucker still hadn’t even heard of the institution and didn’t know that she would play a role in the infamous Breckinridge-Pollard scandal. She was in Chicago, attending the World’s Columbian Exposition, where she surely would have visited the Maine State Building, a great granite octagon full of “relics and historic treasures,” and perhaps the Kentucky State Building, “a southern colonial mansion,” with “cool parlors and verandas.” She would have strolled the Midway, six hundred feet wide and sprawling over eighty acres, with its exhibits of cultures from around the world—a Javanese village up against a replica of a Donegal castle, a feudal German landscape giving way to the streets of “Old Cairo,” with its mosque and camel drivers and “Little Egypt” doing her belly dance as scandalized mothers hurried their children past. She would have most certainly ridden the Ferris wheel, “260 feet above terra-firma,” and thrilled at the mechanical and scientific exhibits: the giant Yerkes telescope, the intramural railway with its trains gliding above the crowds, and the “caged lightning,” as the journalist Marian Shaw called it, of the first large-scale electricity exhibit, as the fairgrounds lit up at night with “8,000 arc and 130,000 incandescent lamps.”

  Jennie had to borrow the money to attend the World’s Fair from her mother, since she had lost her job with Stoll the previous spring, but she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit the biggest attraction of the era. It seemed like everyone was going to the fair, and that wasn’t far from the truth—some twenty-seven million people attended the World’s Fair between May 1 and October 30, 1893. “I am very glad I did go,” she wrote to her father, “for I have seen so little of the world that it was a great treat and an education in a way.” By October she was back to reality, back to her old employer in Boston, the West End Street Railway, and back to counting pennies. “It has been hard to get along until pay day,” she wrote to her mother as she gloomily repaired yet another torn hem on a dress that had seen better days.

  It hadn’t always been that way for the Tucker family. Jennie had been born into the mercantile elite of Maine. Her family made a fortune in the shipping business founded by her grandfather, conveying bales of cotton from the South to New England and Liverpool on a fleet of four-masted schooners in the years before the Civil War, one of many northern families that prospered from the labor of enslaved African Americans. Jennie’s father, Richard Tucker, followed his father into the business, first captaining the Othello on its transatlantic runs and then working as an agent for the Tucker family vessels out of Charleston, South Carolina. In 1857, Captain Tucker married sixteen-year-old Mary Geraldine Armstrong and the following year returned home to Wiscasset, Maine, and purchased a federal-style brick mansion on a bluff overlooking the Sheepscot River and set about remaking it in high Victorian fashion. He added a dramatic three-story glass-enclosed piazza to the front and a large two-story addition to the back and painted the whole house, including the two turrets that flanked the piazza, a creamy white, which gave the house the effect of a bonsaied Italianate castle, earning it the moniker Castle Tucker. Tucker bought furniture and carpets and art, and a full-size billiards table, from the best stores in Boston, shipped them up the coast, and had everything hauled up Windmill Hill in wagons to what was now a thirty-three-room mansion.

  Jennie was the fifth of five children born in the house. She was a tomboy, all boldness and confidence. She loved to skate and sled in the Maine winters and swim and sail in the summer. She adored horseback riding and was keen to shoot anything the boys were shooting, from bows and arrows to revolvers. She was also a daredevil, climbing trees with abandon. “I used to climb to the topmost branches, and swing there, to the horror of my girl friends but the envy of my boy friends,” she remembered. Her schooling was erratic; she missed a whole year when she was twelve because she was “sick.” When she was thirteen, she was sent away for a year to the Moses Brown School, a boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island, that she called the “Quaker jail” because the food was bad, the girls were mean, and she was stuck inside all the time.

  From 1880 to 1882, the family lived in Boston to avoid a tax that had been levied in Wiscasset, and Jennie attended public school. It was then that many of the seeds of contention that troubled the family sprouted. The cotton trade and the Tucker shipping business never recovered from the Panic of 1857 and the Civil War. Jennie’s father had invested in a number of “high-maintenance, high cost, and low- or no-return enterprises,” from a pilot boat business, to a gold mine, to a new propulsion system for ships that never came to fruition. He traveled frequently to attend to his floundering businesses: Halifax for two weeks here, Europe for a few weeks there. His young wife, Mary, was left at home to care for the children and try to make ends meet. The marriage frayed, and the pressures seem to have gotten the best of Mary, who had seen her own family go bankrupt; she was committed for a time to the McLean Asylum for the Insane.

  Around that time, in 1882, Jennie was sent away to school again, this time to St. Joseph’s Academy in Emmitsburg, Maryland, which her mother had attended when it was a popular seminary for well-off girls before the Civil War. It would be Jennie’s last experience as a privileged, carefree Victorian girl. She studied rhetoric and composition, math, mythology, philosophy, French, music, and fancy needlework, which was her best class. Right before Christmas in 1883, blissfully unaware of the family’s deteriorating financial state, she wrote to her father, “I am very much anxious for a watch of s
ome kind. I should like to have a gold one, but if I can’t have that, one of the silver chatelaine watches would be very acceptable.”

  By 1884, Jennie and her parents were back at home in Wiscasset. Her brothers as well as her two older sisters had already left home to fend for themselves—Maude as an actress and Patty as a journalist. “The old folks have numerous fights & each have disagreeable spells,” she wrote to Maude. “I don’t think I can stand them another winter.” She filled her days with housework and pursuits typical for an unmarried daughter of a well-off family: she painted china and did embroidery. Jennie spent part of 1886 visiting her sister Patty, who was a well-known columnist for a Denver paper. She took vocal lessons at the Denver Conservatory of Music, joined a reading club, and went to balls—and her dance card usually was full. By the time she returned home, however, reality was catching up with Jennie. She was nearly twenty and had no marriage prospects; her parents, like many in the shaky postwar economic climate, couldn’t afford to support her indefinitely. She wasn’t alone. All across the country, marriage patterns were changing. Both men and women were getting married later; for women the mean age of marriage was twenty-three, up from twenty in earlier times. In New England, women weren’t getting married until twenty-five on average. And more women weren’t getting married at all. By 1880, nearly a third of the women living in New England and the mid-Atlantic area hadn’t gotten married by their thirtieth birthday.

  There were several reasons young women weren’t getting married. Both young women and young men were in less of a rush to get married. New forms of entertainment and recreation in cities—amusement parks and dance halls and theaters—and new ways to get there, like streetcars, made young adulthood a time for fun and exploration. As one writer explained in The Nation: “Married life has lost in some measure its advantage over single life.” Young adults also became pickier about their marriage partners. Increasingly, marriage was based on compatibility and romance, not economic need. Even for women who wanted to get married, marriage was becoming more elusive, especially on the overcrowded East Coast, as more and more men set out to seek their fortune in the West and left behind them a trail of would-be wives. The New York Times created a panic about a generation of spinsters when in 1868 it estimated that there were 250,000 “surplus” women on the East Coast. In 1881, the Washington Post noted “the popular belief regarding the number of superfluous women” even though the U.S. census showed an excess of one million men—just not where the single women were. The following year, an essayist in the North American Review suggested that “if women do not marry, and cannot find work, the question must arise whether the Chinese practice of laying a wet cloth on a new-born female child must be legalized.” In 1883, the suffragist Lillie Devereux Blake told a congressional committee what the numbers made obvious: that marriage was “no longer a career for women, nor a means of support for them.”