Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  “Just a case of illicit love?” prompted Butterworth. “That was it, Butterworth,” said Breckinridge. Breckinridge said Madeline made no objection to what happened and when they got back to the college, he put some money in an envelope and handed it to her, saying, “There are a great many little things you need.” She refused the money, but he pressed it into her hand anyway as she got out of the carriage. Butterworth asked what was in the envelope. “My recollection of it is that it was a $10 bill,” he said. At that, Bradley, who had sat through Breckinridge’s entire testimony with his head averted toward the ceiling and his eyes closed, interjected, “Adjourn the court.”

  Breckinridge picked up the story on Friday morning. He said that after the carriage ride he went back to his hotel and had no further communication with Madeline. He denied that he met her at the Cincinnati Public Library or took her to Mrs. Rose’s assignation house. He said he didn’t arrange to return to Lexington with Madeline—that he wasn’t even sure himself which train he would take home. He said when he got on the train on Saturday, he found Madeline already on it, and “their conversation resulted in an agreement to meet in Lexington that evening.” According to Breckinridge, it was Madeline’s idea to go to Sarah Guess’s house. She said that she had gone there once as far as the front gate with Rhodes. He said when he returned to Guess’s after having dinner with his family, he wasn’t sure she would still be there and that it was her decision to spend the weekend there, instead of going to a “more respectable place.” He said that she appeared to be a young woman who “understood matters pertaining to the sexes that a young girl would not know.” Breckinridge said he thought Madeline was at the time a “young woman of twenty, or twenty-one, or twenty-two … She was a full grown young woman.”

  Breckinridge also said that Rhodes tracked him down at his office the following Monday morning to discuss Madeline, claiming that he—Rhodes—“ought to marry her—he not only intended, wanted, hoped, but that he ought to marry her.” “I say he never did,” Madeline suddenly interjected in a weak, half-broken voice as she rose from her seat. “He’s not telling the truth about anything,” she cried as Carlisle shushed her. Breckinridge denied that he arranged for Madeline to go to the Sayre Institute and said the first time he knew she was attending the school was when he saw her standing outside the gate. He said the next time he met Madeline was in October when he was going to Cincinnati to hear a speech and ran into her at the train station, and it was then that they arranged to go to Mrs. Rose’s assignation house.

  He denied knowing about Madeline going to the Norwood Asylum or paying her expenses or helping to deceive Rhodes. He said he had no idea at the time she was pregnant but that later she told him she’d had a miscarriage. He said that after the October visit to Mrs. Rose’s house they had no further relations throughout 1884 or 1885. He claimed to have not seen Madeline at all in 1886 or to have had any communication with her. He said when he went to stay at Mrs. Ketchum’s boardinghouse in the spring of 1887 it was because the Phoenix Hotel was too noisy, and that while he might have known that Madeline was there, he was never in her room. He said their relations didn’t resume until later that summer. He denied that he told Madeline to come to Washington in the fall of 1887, when she said she was again pregnant by him; he said that she came at the suggestion of the late Senator Beck.

  He denied knowing that she had given birth in February 1888, although he admitted paying Dr. Parsons’s bill. He said the relationship didn’t resume until some time after Madeline went to live at the Academy of the Holy Cross in the spring of 1888, after which it continued until the fall of 1890, when he told her that they should separate because only “scandal and destruction” could come from their relationship. He said he got her to promise to leave Washington and agreed to pay her expenses to help fit her for some respectable employment. “The plaintiff I knew to be a woman of very considerable talent. I felt entangled with her to some extent through my belief in her statement that she had had an unfortunate miscarriage, caused by me, and again another miscarriage,” he said. But when he returned from campaigning later that fall, he found that she had gotten a job with the Census Office and was still in the city.

  In the fall of 1891, he said, Madeline agreed to go to Cambridge and went for a period of time, but returned to Washington “in distinct violation of our agreement.” He said he tried to break it off with her, but she threatened him with “exposure” if he did. He denied Madeline ever helped him with his speeches or went with him to events, as she claimed she did. Finally, in the spring of 1892, he said, she went to Vermont, supposedly to work on a newspaper, but returned after the death of his wife. He denied that he had met with her at any time in August 1892, much less proposed marriage to her. He said he told her that “marriage between them was an impossibility” because he could not respect her since he “had not seduced her, and she had not come to me a maiden,” which caused another half-broken outcry from Madeline. He denied he gave her Issa’s sewing basket, which he said she took from his boardinghouse without his knowledge. He denied begging her not to leave him, as Madeline said he did, and said she followed him about, haunting him with her demands: “She would come to the Capitol, to the rooms of the committee of which I was a member, and to the library. She would meet me on the street.”

  He claimed Madeline told Mrs. Blackburn that they were engaged because she was upset that Mrs. Fillette said that she was an adventuress who was inviting scandal by her behavior. He said Madeline told him that she would commit suicide and kill him “before she would allow the scandal to fall upon her alone.” He said he told Blackburn that Madeline was an imprudent girl, and he and Blackburn finally convinced Madeline to go to New York. But, he said, Madeline was concerned that Blackburn was still suspicious. So he said he agreed to go to Blackburn’s with her and “pretend that there was an engagement between us,” and in return Madeline promised to “go away and gradually drop out of Mrs. Blackburn’s life and not come into mine again.”

  He denied meeting Madeline at the Hoffman House after his marriage to Wing. He said he went back to his room to get some clothes and found Madeline there and that he narrowly averted getting shot by slamming the door between their rooms shut. The next time he saw her was the day she barged in on him and Louise. That’s when they visited Major Moore, when, he said, Madeline again threatened to kill him, and then Dr. Lincoln, which was when he found out she was pregnant. He said he told Madeline, “If it is my child, I will know it when it is born. I will provide for it and will see that it is raised properly.”

  By the time the court adjourned for the weekend, Breckinridge had used every tool at his disposal—his famous, mellifluous voice, “silvery and soft-spoken but insinuating”; pointed denials stuffed with “high-sounding adjectives and nicely wrought sentences”; long soliloquies tinged with pathos. He name-dropped every name he could drop, from President Cleveland to “other great and good people,” until, when he stepped down from the stand, there could be no doubt of his stature, of his importance to the affairs of the nation, of the estimable company in which he traveled. He had denied almost every aspect of Madeline’s story, “save Madeline Pollard’s existence,” said Gath. The two stories, said the Evening Star, were so contradictory that there “was no possible way of harmonizing” them: “One is true and the other is not.” But it remained to be seen whose version would be believed.

  * * *

  Breckinridge’s testimony was not well received. Unlike Madeline’s, little of it was corroborated by other witnesses. Many found it ridiculous that he, powerful and prominent as he was, claimed to be the victim of a designing young woman. “He was, to hear him talk to-day, a passive slave in her hands: he a man of 47, she a girl of 17,” scoffed Gath. His defense also hinged on a remarkable string of coincidences, from just happening to choose a closed carriage, to just happening to find Madeline on the train to Lexington, to her just happening to know an assignation house blocks from his home. Just as remarkable wa
s the string of miscarriages he asserted that Madeline had experienced, which conveniently absolved him from responsibility for any children.

  It was his assertion that he knew of no “living children” born to Madeline that was his most desperate denial. As Breckinridge demonstrated when he said he promised to support the child Madeline was pregnant with in the spring of 1893, the rules about such things were very strict under Victorian morality, even within the context of an illicit relationship. A man was expected to take responsibility for children he conceived illicitly with all but the lowliest of women, such as prostitutes, where parentage was undeterminable. Madeline’s charge that he failed to do this, that he compelled her to abandon their children, was damning. This was because, as the fate of Madeline’s two children attested, leaving a newborn in a nineteenth-century infant asylum was often a death sentence. A combination of overcrowding, disease, a shortage of wet nurses—and only primitive, impure formula substitutes—and a sheer lack of affection, not to mention their shamed mothers’ lack of prenatal care, contributed to an extraordinarily high death rate at these institutions.

  St. Ann’s Infant Asylum in Washington cared for 130 infants in 1895—74 died, for a death rate of nearly 60 percent. Thirty died before they reached one month, and the majority before they reached nine months. Summer was the deadliest time: seven or eight infants died per month in June, July, and August. And private Catholic asylums like St. Ann’s, with a staff of nuns experienced in running such institutions, had better mortality rates than public asylums. In some large public asylums, like the Infants’ Hospital on Randall’s Island in New York, mortality rates were between 85 and 100 percent. “The babies die like sheep, many being deserted so young nothing can be hoped or done for them,” reported Louisa May Alcott—now the successful author of Little Women and long removed from her days as a servant—when she visited Randall’s Island. A doctor who had worked there thought it would be an “act of humanity if each foundling were given a fatal dose of opium on its arrival, since all of them died.”

  And for all Breckinridge’s protestations about making provisions for his child, he told his lawyers in a confidential memo that when he and Madeline visited Dr. Lincoln on May 13 it was because “Lincoln had consented to perform an abortion if I would consent to ask him, and this is the reason why we went.” He didn’t record why he didn’t go through with the request and he certainly didn’t disclose this information during the trial. In the end, whether abortion or its functional equivalent, abandonment in an infant asylum, it was clear that Breckinridge, like many men of the era, preached a public morality denigrating women as “wantons” while taking advantage of a shadow system of infant asylums and secret abortionists that hid their sins—a system the trial was exposing to the light.

  15

  Hindered, Not Ruined

  As Breckinridge struggled to present a credible defense, Jennie was “having a perfect circus” of a time getting into the House of Mercy to see Madeline. She had taken to stalking Pennsylvania Avenue on the streetcar route between the courthouse and the House of Mercy and jumping on the trolley if she saw Madeline. It worked, but it wasn’t a particularly subtle tactic, especially when used repeatedly and especially since Madeline likely already had suspicions that Jennie was spying on her. “Why, Aggie, you are more devoted than a lover,” Madeline exclaimed one morning when Jennie suddenly materialized in the seat behind her. “I never knew anyone to appear in such an astonishing manner. You must spend all your time waiting around on street corners for me.”

  Regardless, Jennie was having the time of her life running around Washington playing spy. One day she was instructed to come to Enoch Totten’s house at precisely four o’clock—heavily veiled so she wouldn’t be recognized. Another she was to meet a member of the defense team at “the statue in the circle when the clock strikes nine,” most likely a reference to nearby Scott Circle, with its widely ridiculed statue of the towering Gen. Winfield Scott mounted on a petite mare—which was his mount of choice—to which male genitalia had been hastily appended after his relatives complained that a stallion was more appropriate for a man of his stature. It was all so cloak-and-dagger that Jennie imagined her life was in peril. She warned her family to keep her assignment secret: “[It] might cause me my life if the other side discovered my connection,” she said of her link with Breckinridge, adding “the woman concerned in it would just hunt me up at the ends of the earth and kill me.”

  Jennie did manage to talk her way into the House of Mercy the Friday evening after Breckinridge wound up the bulk of his testimony. Jennie found Madeline in bed, happy that Breckinridge had “done so badly for his cause.” She told Jennie that she had “lost all the old feelings” for him, “that sort of going out to him with my whole heart and soul whenever I saw him.” She had another reason to be cheered beyond Breckinridge’s poorly received testimony—she was getting an onslaught of public support. She had received some two hundred letters so far and had gotten fifty just that day. Some were offers for her to tell her story in print or on stage—the manager of a theater company offered her five hundred dollars a week. Some urged her to subscribe to the latest fads like mesmerism and clairvoyance. A number were offers of marriage. But most were applauding her for taking on Breckinridge and fighting what one woman called “this devilish business of seducing and betraying the pure and innocent.”

  Her supporters expressed faith in her vindication, which many said would be a victory for all women. An “ardent suffragist” from Baltimore assured Madeline that she “did perfectly right in bringing this hoary haired villain to court.” She told Madeline that “every one of our sex who stands up for her rights, who refuses to be utterly trampled by men, and who determines that the man who had wrecked her life and blighted every thing for her in this world, shall not, so far as she can prevent it, pursue his pleasant career utterly unpunished and unscathed, is helping the cause of women.”

  Some assured her that society was rethinking how it viewed ruined women. “I do believe every word you uttered on the witness stand is true. I firmly believe you are a virtuous woman to-day. I beg you hold yourself up, you are not a cast-out … These expressions are the expressions of thousands,” said one anonymous supporter from Cincinnati. A man who had “caught a glance” of Madeline in Washington and hoped to open an “honorable” correspondence with her told her, “For past times it has been the rule when a girl went astray to keep her down, but the time for a change is at hand.” A supporter who signed himself simply “A Poet” likewise assured her, “You are not ‘ruined,’ but hindered.”

  The letters to Madeline were only one aspect of a larger groundswell that was building against Breckinridge. On March 25, the National Christian League for the Promotion of Social Purity voted that Breckinridge “ought to be deposed from the high position he has attained.” The following day, the Women’s Rescue League of Boston passed a resolution asking the “chivalrous people of Kentucky to retire [Breckinridge] to a private life of obscurity and oblivion” because a “man old enough to be this school girl’s grandfather, a man who stood high as an orator and lawmaker in legislative halls … a man with a silver tongue as well as silver hair … deliberately deceives, entraps, and betrays a poor, struggling girl,” while “helping to fill up the asylums with his own offspring.” They would soon be joined by a resolution from the Philadelphia Social Purity Alliance.

  The Pollard-Breckinridge trial was a remarkable opportunity for social purity reformers, who for decades had been pushing without much success the idea of a single standard of morality for men and women. Dr. Caroline Winslow, a homeopathic physician who counted herself the fourth American woman to become a doctor, founded the Moral Education Society in Washington in 1877 and had become a national leader in early efforts to eradicate the double standard and the “ruined” woman. The journal she founded, the Alpha, was one of the first to discuss sex in frank terms and to argue that young adults should receive education about matters pertaining to
sex. As early as 1878, the society tried to harness the power of the Washington elite when they voted that, due to “the disrespectful way that many men in power treat women,” members would not “recognize socially … men who are known to be of impure life, and that where they are authentically informed of evil conduct of men towards women, they will endeavor by every means possible to make the character of such men known.” Winslow and other social purity activists like Mrs. John Harvey Kellogg, the wife of the inventor of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, protested against Grover Cleveland’s election in 1884. The Moral Reform Society passed a resolution calling “upon women in every station of life, high and low, rich and poor, the cherished wife and the betrayer’s victim, to do all in their power to prevent Grover Cleveland being made the Chief Executive of the Nation.”

  Their call for solidarity among women fell on deaf ears, however, as did their crusade to end the double standard, hampered, no doubt, by their belief in “intercourse for procreation only”—which was known as the “Alpha Doctrine”—because they believed that sex depleted the vital forces and was best managed by abstinence. Even Susan B. Anthony, while sympathetic to the cause and friendly with Winslow, steered away from the issue after a brief foray in the 1870s because she feared anything related to sex was too controversial and might damage efforts to win the vote for women. By the early 1890s, Winslow had been eclipsed by male reformers like Aaron Macy Powell and Anthony Comstock, who focused less on frank discussions of sex and power and more on suppressing prostitution and information about birth control.