Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Thursday morning opened to one of the smallest crowds since the trial started, with some no doubt put off by Judge Bradley’s scorching rebuke of the spectators at the close of Wednesday’s session, likening them to buzzards sitting on a fence waiting for a horse to die. Butterworth recalled Madeline to the stand and asked her about the baby she said was born in 1888. Madeline said the baby was born at noon on February 3 and two hours later the “old colored midwife named Aunt Mary” took him to the Protestant foundling asylum. She said she pinned a slip of paper to the baby with the name “Dietz Carlyle” on it because she was reading Thomas Carlyle and one of his heroes was named Dietz. Butterworth then called Susan Leidy, the matron of the Washington City Orphan Asylum, to the stand. She said the records showed that a colored woman had brought a newborn baby boy to the asylum on February 3, 1888, but that it had the name Dietz Downing pinned to it. She said the baby died on April 18. Shelby asked if any other child born in February died that month. “They die so fast and so rapidly that I cannot keep track of them,” she answered flatly.

  After a local health inspector testified that Dr. Parsons hadn’t recorded any births in February 1888, which would be expected with an illicit pregnancy, the defense rested. The afternoon brought a devastating succession of rebuttal witnesses for Madeline. Dr. William Cowan, the superintendent of the Western Pennsylvania Hospital, who identified himself as Madeline’s first cousin, said that Madeline had lived with his family near Pittsburgh continuously from just after her father’s death in 1876 until the summer of 1880, which disproved Mollie Shindlebower’s assertion that Madeline had been living a fast life in Bridgeport in 1877. Another cousin, Charles Sawyer, testified that he had lived with Madeline’s aunt Keene from 1880 until 1883 and during all that time Madeline was away from home overnight only once, when she visited her uncle in Graefenburg for ten days over Christmas in 1882. Her cousin George Keene testified that Madeline went into Lexington only with other family members in a carriage, which meant she couldn’t have frequented assignation houses, as testified to by Brand, before she left for school.

  Then Martha McClellan Brown, the former vice president of Wesleyan College and a well-known suffrage and temperance leader, came to the stand escorted by Sarah La Fetra, the head of the local Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Taking the stand “as coolly as if about to deliver a temperance address,” she removed her veil, handed it to La Fetra, and proceeded to demolish Rossell’s testimony about kissing Madeline in the parlor. She said young women at the college were only allowed to receive visitors on Friday evenings and that they were never left alone with young men in the parlor, which often had up to twenty guests, so it would have been impossible for Rossell to visit several times a week and for Madeline to sit on his lap and let him kiss her as he claimed.

  Louise Lowell was recalled as a rebuttal witness so she could be asked about the contents of the letters she typed. “The writer spoke of the great love between the two and the disparity in their ages; that no two persons in the same family with so great a difference in their ages could love each other so dearly,” she said. Breckinridge also frequently wrote “in very glowing words” of “his pleasure in meeting with the person addressed” and his impatience with his duties that kept him away.

  The last witness was Mary Yancey, a heavyset black woman who identified herself as the cook at Mrs. Thomas’s house, where Madeline had lived in the winter of 1893 to 1894. Breckinridge had denied Pollard’s claim that he was so pleased with a lunch that Yancey made for them that he asked her to be their cook when they got married. Yancey said the day after the luncheon, Colonel Breckinridge told her it was “one of the nicest lunches” he ever had and asked her to “come and cook for us when we go to housekeeping next fall.” She said the colonel came frequently to visit Madeline, sometimes twice a day, often brought flowers or sent telegrams, and that he was very affectionate toward her. She said she had seen them sitting together in the parlor while Madeline had the willow sewing basket with the blue ribbon trim that Breckinridge had denied giving her on her lap.

  The courtroom had a languid air on Friday morning, April 6, for what was expected to be the last day of testimony. Dr. Parsons identified the slip of paper found pinned to the infant with the name Dietz Downing on it as written in her handwriting. Mary McKenzie, the midwife known as “Aunt Mary,” testified that Madeline was the “Mrs. Hall” who delivered a baby at her house in February 1888 and that she brought it to the foundling asylum. Madeline came back on the stand and denied knowing Mollie Shindlebower or Lena Singleton or John Brand or Hiram Kaufman. She emphatically denied having sexual intercourse with old Rhodes or telling Breckinridge about it, or accepting money from Breckinridge the night of their fateful carriage ride. She said that when Breckinridge stayed at Mrs. Ketchum’s house, she crept into his room every night by a prearranged signal—he slammed the front door when he got in. She denied telling him she had miscarried her first two pregnancies. And she denied ever threatening to shoot him or agreeing to a sham engagement to fool Mrs. Blackburn.

  Breckinridge, for his part, denied giving Madeline his wife’s sewing basket or the ribbon to trim it, giving Louise Lowell any love letters to type, and Madeline being in his room at Mrs. Ketchum’s. Just before three o’clock he stepped down from the stand, concluding the testimony in what was now being widely referred to as the celebrated case of Pollard v. Breckinridge. The trial had been going on for a solid twenty-one days; winter had turned to spring. The jury, and by extension the public at large, had heard accusations of abortion, and about lying-in homes and infant asylums and assignation houses, and steamy late-night rides through foothills in closed carriages with esteemed men—things that heretofore didn’t make it into polite conversation or the newspapers. Maybe some wished they still hadn’t. But it appeared that a page had been turned, and all anyone could do now was see where it would lead.

  16

  The Front Parlor and the Back Gate

  To Willie Breckinridge, it must have seemed that the world had turned upside down. He found the women he had long taken for granted—the cook, the nameless typist in the hallway, the former slave who ran the assignation house where he had his trysts—not only aligned against him but also being taken seriously over his own word. To friends, he claimed that it was a pile of “perjured testimony … both black and white” manufactured to destroy him. He railed against “women doctors who are abortionists, women type-writers who are treacherous,” the “fat conscienceless cook,” and Martha McClellan Brown, one of those “ladies who attend conventions, deliver speeches and shriek for all sort of things which they call reform.” How dare she swear to “what she knows is untrue, and in favor of a prostitute and against a man who is honest and clean.”

  This, for Breckinridge, was the crux. He thought that as a woman, Madeline should be defined and disgraced by her sins, but as a man, he should have his sins excused as just a blip in an otherwise blameless life. After all, he told a friend, he had atoned for his “secret sins” by “doing labors which knew no cessation” and by making the “lives of those who loved me as happy as I could.” In his mind, he had suffered for his sins, had been crucified, and had died a kind of death; people would surely see, he thought, “my weakness, my sin, my punishment and my deliverance.”

  And now, as the lawyers prepared to make their case for the charges to the jury, his fate was in the hands of a man he believed to be against him. Indeed, people couldn’t help noticing how Judge Bradley turned away whenever Breckinridge testified, like he had caught a whiff of something foul. But Bradley had made rulings that favored both sides; he had allowed most of Breckinridge’s depositions to be admitted, as well as the disputed letter that Madeline claimed was a forgery. It seems that what the defense considered partiality was the fact that Madeline was being given a hearing at all. Butterworth told reporters the weekend after the testimony concluded that the judge should never have let such a case come to trial, saying that Madeline had “impregnated
the homes of the land … where we have our pure wives and mothers and sisters” with “a foul, pestilence-breeding contagion.”

  At the hearing on Saturday about the charges for the jury, Carlisle argued that the burden of proof was on Breckinridge to show that Madeline was in on what he said was a pretend engagement, while Shelby argued that it was the plaintiff’s responsibility to prove that the two parties had entered into a valid marriage contract. Beyond these dry legal questions, however, most of what the men on the jury were asked to examine poked deep into the intimate details of Madeline’s life. Carlisle argued that it made no difference if Madeline had carnal knowledge of Breckinridge or any other man before she met him if he knew it when the marriage contract was made. Shelby asserted that if Pollard was guilty of “lewd and lascivious conduct” with other men, it would release Breckinridge from a contract to marry. Bradley asked exactly what he meant by “lewd and lascivious.” Shelby said no man could be expected to marry a woman who wasn’t chaste. “Suppose he knew of such conduct with five parties, and knowledge of it with a sixth afterward came to him?” asked Bradley, questioning whether that would change the legal aspect of the case, as Shelby fumbled to explain the exact mathematical calculation of a woman’s chastity.

  On Monday, Bradley ruled that while the burden of proof was on the plaintiff to show that a contract of marriage existed, the burden was on the defense to show that both parties were in on what Breckinridge said was an engagement ruse. Bradley also said that the only way Madeline’s sexual conduct could be used as a defense was if Breckinridge found out after the marriage contract was made that she’d had illicit relations with men other than Rhodes.

  For the rest of the day and into the next morning, Carlisle summarized the case. Standing before the jury in his white linen suit, a gold tiepin placed just so, he asked why, with all the knowledge Breckinridge had gained from being intimate with Madeline for nine years, the only depositions he could produce questioning her character were from disreputable people. He showed the jury the tintype of Madeline in her schoolgirl dress and asked if she appeared to be “the woman of experience on whom this defendant wishes to place more than half the burden of their intimacy.”

  Phil Thompson, portly and ruddy-faced, summarized for the defense in “florid Kentucky oratory,” taking the tack that the “members of the jury would probably have done about what Mr. Breckinridge had done under the same circumstances.” He called Madeline a “self-admitted wanton looking for revenge” and said that finding for her would “encourage every strumpet to push her little mass of filth into court.” He appealed to deep-seated sentiments about women and purity, telling the jury that “every decent man knows the defendant was right in refusing to put [Madeline] at the head of the table with his daughters.” He compared her to a dog in heat in a story an “old darky” used to tell. Even then, there was an audible gasp when Thompson, while discussing Dr. Belle Buchanan’s testimony, said he didn’t “take much stock in female physicians” because he “always noticed that whenever there is an abortion case, a secret birth or any case that a reputable and respectable physician will not touch, you will usually find the hand of a female physician in it somewhere.”

  Ben Butterworth’s closing argument was tamer in rhetoric and better in oratory, with his sonorous voice that seemed to rattle the courtroom windows. He practically brought the spectators to their feet with his stirring testament to the manly bonds of friendship between himself and Breckinridge. He said that Madeline was no innocent country girl like those he had known back in the Miami Hills, “honest and virtuous” girls who went to spelling bees and log rollings. He said that if Madeline had been “high-minded,” she would have repelled Breckinridge’s advances and insisted that he drive her home. “And I say to you,” he boomed, turning toward Breckinridge, “that you would not have taken her twenty feet further; I care not what they say of your blandishments, your silver tongue, your destructive eloquence and all that!”

  He called Madeline an “unnatural” woman for abandoning the babies she claimed were “born along the way, and buried in unknown or forgotten places.” He urged the jury to forgive Breckinridge for what many a great man had done, but to repudiate a woman who corrupted public morals when she “deliberately turned from everything that man or woman could desire, and proclaimed her shame.” It was so late in the afternoon when Butterworth finished—with his words still reverberating through the old courtroom from what the Enquirer called “a superb effort,” the kind of hair-tingling oratory that held people spellbound in the nineteenth century—that Wilson wisely asked the judge if he could begin his closing argument in the morning.

  So it was on the morning of Friday, April 13, that Jere Wilson began the last address of the trial. It could, most agreed, hardly be called a speech like Butterworth’s. There were no flights of oratory, “few pyrotechnic displays.” Just scathing sarcasm and a dispassionate, point-by-point dismantling of the defense. Wilson stood close to the witness box; at first, his voice was low, as if forcing everyone to lean near, but it grew louder as he went on. He asked why, if Madeline was good enough to be Breckinridge’s companion for nearly ten years, she wasn’t good enough to be his wife. He told the jury to ignore the “clamor and howling” of the defense and focus on the facts: Madeline had proved that a contract of marriage existed. “Her word in this case is as good as his,” Wilson said, noting that it was Breckinridge who had “lived a lie” and a “life of hypocrisy” by pretending to be a faithful husband to Issa and lying about his marriage to Louise. “How can you trust him?” Wilson asked, asserting that if anyone was to take the lion’s share of the blame, it was Breckinridge, who was older, more experienced, and married.

  Wilson said it was ridiculous to suggest that the case should have been suppressed to protect the community; only in “sunlight” could wrongs be redressed, especially the wrong of banishing a woman for immorality while sending “the man to Congress.” Eyeing the jury, he declared, “I stand here for womanhood. This defendant proclaimed from the stand that while affairs of this kind only injured a man, they destroyed a woman. I am here to insist that social law should be equally distributed; I stand here to protest against allowing this man to enter my parlor and your parlor, while the basement door and the gate in the back alley are bolted against the woman.”

  He called Phil Thompson out for suggesting that women doctors were unsavory. “There was a time when women were drudges and the mere playthings for men. But women are pushing to the front in every walk of life, and the faster they come, the better for the land,” he said, by now so hoarse he had to ask Bradley to adjourn until tomorrow.

  By Saturday, spring had come to Washington; the courtroom windows were wide open as Wilson concluded his argument. He dismissed the defense’s witnesses and their allegations about Madeline’s character as disproven by their own more credible witnesses, and Breckinridge’s assertion that he and Madeline had conspired to deceive Blackburn as a “clean-shaven, bald-headed, obese falsehood, manufactured to fit the exigencies of the case.”

  By lunchtime tempers were wearing thin. After Wilson insinuated that Stoll might have had a hand in the letter inviting Breckinridge to Wesleyan that Madeline claimed was a forgery, Desha tried to goad Stoll into challenging him to a duel, until Butterworth intervened and got Wilson to apologize. Just as that settled down, a delivery boy arrived with a towering basket of long-stemmed roses for Wilson. The attached note said they were in appreciation for the stand he took for “one code of morals for men and women, and also for the advancement of women in an active part in the world’s affairs,” particularly his support of women physicians. It was signed, rather mysteriously, “twenty-eight women,” but among those who attached their cards to the basket were Mrs. Dan Waugh and Mrs. Nelson Trusler, both the wives of Indiana politicians; the pioneering stenographer Nettie White; Louise Lowell, who had typed Breckinridge’s love letters; and, in a rebuff that was unmistakable, Mollie Desha, Breckinridge’s sister-in-law.
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  After lunch Bradley reviewed the instructions to the jury and said that despite claims to the contrary, the only question they should concern themselves with was whether a contract to marry had been made, and if it had been broken, was there an excuse to do so. He said abstract principles shouldn’t be vindicated, “nor the country girl, the home and the family.”

  The jury filed into the jury room a little after three o’clock and everyone dispersed, the feeling being that the verdict might take some time. Breckinridge’s backers were predicting a hung jury; many of Madeline’s thought they would find for her but award only a token sum. Breckinridge ambled down the courtroom steps just as Nisba and Louise, hoping for some news, drove up in an open barouche. Perhaps it was symbolic, a repudiation of the infamous closed carriage, perhaps their visibility was intended as a show of optimism, or perhaps they just wanted to enjoy the April sun after a long, dismal winter in which they had been stuck at home. Breckinridge chatted with them until they drove off, then stood in the courthouse portico and joked with the newsboys about bringing him the early editions.

  Less than ninety minutes later, the jury gave word they had reached a verdict. They already had their hats in hand when Breckinridge, Desha, Thompson, and Butterworth spilled back into the courtroom; it was another ten minutes before Carlisle rushed in, red-faced and breathless. The clerk asked the jury if they had reached a verdict. “If it please the court,” said the foreman, a piece of blue paper quivering in his right hand, “we find for the plaintiff.” “For how much?” asked Bradley. “Fifteen thousand,” he answered.