Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Breckinridge was essentially asking his constituents to relitigate the trial and reject the more progressive ethic, lest it pollute their more traditional understanding of men, women, and sex. It was, as one of Breckinridge’s friends told him, “a case of the Cavalier being tried by a lot of hypocritical Puritans,” a “shining light in the Democratic firmament” under attack by the “short-haired women of Boston” and “that Willard Hotel gang of powdered, broken-down, she fanatics.”

  * * *

  The rejoinders to Breckinridge came quickly. On May 8, the National Council of Women, which had been formed by activists like Susan B. Anthony and Frances Willard of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to unite reform-minded women’s organizations under one umbrella, took time off from condemning corsets to declare that “there should be the same standard of moral purity for men and women.” Three days later, the International Federation of Women’s Clubs, which represented the local women’s clubs that had exploded around the country in the past two decades, bringing middle-class women into contact with new ideas and allies, weighed in. They said that “moral purity should be equally binding on men and women, and that conduct which debars one from social life shall also debar the other.”

  In Lexington, word began circulating of an anti-Breckinridge rally planned for the following Monday afternoon at the Opera House. “Many Women” published another letter urging women to attend, telling them to put aside their housekeeping for the “higher obligation” they owed their family. They assured them that many of the city’s most respectable women would be there, and warned women that by “your attendance or your non-attendance you are setting up your own history—a history to be stereotyped and preserved.”

  The anti-Breckinridge rally had been advertised for only a few days, but on Monday morning, trains into the city were packed. The Opera House was full to the balconies an hour before the rally began; the aisles were crammed and hundreds of latecomers were turned away. And although Breckinridge’s backers had asserted that “outside a few women’s suffrage cranks” no respectable women would be there, nearly half the seats were occupied by women. J. W. McGarvey of the Ministerial Union gave the main address. When he warned the audience that “just as the whole civilized world rendered a verdict” in the Pollard case, it would also judge them, “the ladies fairly shook the house clapping their hands and rapping on the floor with their umbrellas.”

  Not every woman was against Breckinridge. Mrs. Cuthbert Bullitt, who had recently married into the prominent Bullitt family, led the women’s defense of Breckinridge and traditional morality where fallen women were concerned. “Miss Pollard knew from the beginning that Col. Breckinridge was married,” she wrote to the Louisville Times, therefore, she was a “brazen brute” to become involved with him. Bullitt insisted that Breckinridge “was the victim of a smooth-tongued siren,” and was not to blame because “with man’s passion, which is different from women’s he could not tear himself from her.”

  But Bullitt was in the minority, and the groundswell continued to build against Breckinridge. Despite this, he was nowhere to be found after the big women’s meeting. He had returned to Washington, summoned by another desperate letter from Nisba, who warned him that Louise was “in grave danger, not of death, but worse than death.” She was consumed with anxiety about her husband’s well-being; even the telegram he sent every day no longer seemed to soothe her. Nisba was at her wits’ end dealing with her increasingly deranged stepmother. “I fear I cannot stay here longer than this week,” she warned her father, yearning to escape to Ella’s house in Staunton for the summer, even as she knew there was no one to take her place.

  Jennie remained in Lexington for another week and a half. She never did get a chance to ride a thoroughbred, discovering for herself that the last horse the Breckinridges owned was a fat white pony back in the days of crinolines. Although, right before she left on May 20, she did get “one great treat.” Stoll took her to visit a stock farm in the Lexington countryside, where she marveled at a black stallion worth the unimaginable sum of thirty-seven thousand dollars. Jennie planned to stop in Washington only long enough to change trains for New York, but when she arrived in the city, she found Breckinridge snowed under with preparing documents for the new trial, so she stayed a few days to help out. Working side by side with Nisba, she told her mother, it “seems almost like home to come back here,” and for Jennie it was the only home she had known in quite a while.

  There was one last thing Jennie wanted to do before she left Washington. She went to see Madeline. It’s not clear what more she thought she could discover; she seemed to be looking for answers to a riddle she couldn’t quite solve. She found Madeline living in a cheap room in a small brick cottage on the same block as the House of Mercy. Madeline told Jennie she had taken up a “systematic course of English literature” to prepare herself to go abroad and study and that a sympathetic friend had lent her brother the money to pay her board. Her plans, as always, were up in the air, although she did tell Jennie she was having two new dresses made—a blue gown trimmed in white watered silk and a green linen one—which, she said, would have to do “unless she went away for the summer.” She said she didn’t care whether Breckinridge was reelected or not, as he was “dead, practically, in Congress” and would “never amount to anything here in Washington.” Jennie left feeling that Madeline “was as great a mystery to me as when I first saw her”—gifted and magnetic, yet by her reckoning, vain and idle.

  It was Monday, May 28, when Jennie finally left Washington, reversing her hurried journey of what must have seemed the long-ago winter. She sent Breckinridge her bill of $191 for some five months of dogged work and asked him to send her check on to New York, where she planned to stay with a friend while she finalized her manuscript.

  As Jennie’s train steamed toward the Mason-Dixon Line, Breckinridge and his lawyers were meeting with Judge Bradley to present their bill of objections as grounds for their appeal. But there was a hitch. They were required to give the opposing counsel three days’ notice, not counting Sundays. That meant they needed to get the bill to Madeline’s lawyer Carlisle the previous Thursday. But they hadn’t delivered it to his office until Friday, and Carlisle had refused to accept it. Shelby begged for an exception, explaining that Breckinridge had been delayed on account of his wife’s illness, but Bradley was unmoved. Breckinridge had blown the appeal; there wouldn’t be another trial. The case of Pollard v. Breckinridge was officially closed.

  Jennie spent a week in New York working “like a gally [sic] slave.” She was exhausted and eager to get home, but bursting with optimism. “I wish I could tell you that we would not need to take any more boarders all our lives,” she told her mother, but assured her, “I am some shakes now.” Her friend Max had arranged an interview with the Sunday editor of the New York Herald, and she thought she had “made a hit with him.” But as she prepared to take the Fall River Ferry to Boston, she still hadn’t gotten paid by Breckinridge, and she was about out of money. Getting desperate, she wrote to Nisba and asked her to intercede. Mortified, but deferential as always, Nisba wrote to her father in Kentucky and asked him to send at least partial payment right away, reminding him that Jennie was “very faithful and helpful that last week here” and saying she couldn’t “bear to think of her out of money in New York.”

  As usual, however, Breckinridge was snowed under with bills. He owed Louise’s cousin two months’ rent on the house in Washington. He owed the stenographer who prepared the trial transcripts $250 and the handwriting expert who authenticated Madeline’s letter $50. But his biggest balance of all, the debt he owed Nisba, continued to accrue; through some alchemy of firmness and love she seemed to be the only person who could manage Louise. Desperate to relieve her, he wrote to Louise’s brother Dr. Scott and asked him to look after his sister while he campaigned. But Scott declined, saying that Kentucky wasn’t the right place for Louise. He believed she needed “prolonged brain rest” and prescribed th
e “Rest Cure,” a Victorian treatment for “hysteria” and other ill-defined nervous disorders thought to plague women that involved complete social isolation, strictly enforced inactivity, and the consumption of copious amounts of milk and other fatty foods—by force-feeding if necessary. He recommended a place nearby where she could “rest and hear and see nothing of the outside world,” but fortunately for Louise, whether through compassion or his strained finances, Breckinridge didn’t follow through. Now, both Nisba and Jennie were in limbo, waiting on Breckinridge for deliverance.

  * * *

  The battle of Ashland raged throughout the summer. It was like no primary contest anyone could remember. Newspaper correspondents from all over the country swarmed to Lexington to cover a campaign the New York Herald called the most famous political fight in the country. The Washington Post said it “had no parallel in our history”; in “intensity of feeling it was like a civil war.” And indeed, many of the old loyalties of the war were tested and transposed. Basil Duke said he would stump for Major Henry McDowell—Nisba’s friend Madge’s father—who was a Republican and a former Union officer, if he sought the Republican nomination if Breckinridge won the Democratic primary. The vice president and the secretary of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Confederate Veterans’ Association resigned when the organization refused their request to boycott Decoration Day activities if the CVA didn’t kick Breckinridge out, which was especially embarrassing since Issa Breckinridge had been president of the organization.

  It was the active role that the normally reticent southern women took in the campaign that drove much of the interest. At first, many assumed the uprising against Breckinridge was the work of suffragists eager to prove the power of the women’s vote. But Laura Clay said the Kentucky Equal Rights Association wasn’t involved and that the anti-Breckinridge uprising was a spontaneous, grassroots effort largely driven by women who hadn’t been active in progressive movements. “The women are aroused as never before, and the most conservative are those who are most active,” she said.

  The fervor of the anti-Breckinridge meeting at the Opera House gelled into a widespread, women-led economic and social boycott of anyone who supported Breckinridge. Female students at the Agricultural and Mechanical College announced they wouldn’t accept the attentions of suitors who supported him, and the mothers of some of Lexington’s most popular young women let it be known that Breckinridge men wouldn’t be invited to the debutante dances come fall. Women refused to shake hands with men who wore Breckinridge buttons and boycotted the stores of merchants and fired doctors who backed him. A woman who ran the only hotel in New Liberty, Kentucky, refused to allow Breckinridge to stay there on a campaign swing.

  The prominent role of women also attracted other, less desirable kinds of attention. The two women who emerged as leaders of the anti-Breckinridge effort, Mrs. Judge Jere Morton and Mrs. Colonel A. L. Harrison, received “insulting” anonymous letters that—in the nineteenth-century equivalent of trolling—had been routed from Lexington through Pittsburgh and back to make them impossible to trace. The letters demanded that the women cease their “detestable proceedings against Colonel Breckinridge” and contained “insulting insinuations and obscene innuendoes” and threats of a “bloody character.” Morton, however, assured the press that the women were not intimidated and would redouble their efforts.

  As the women organized, Breckinridge hopscotched across the Ashland district, focusing on his strongholds of Woodford and Bourbon Counties, carrying a little notebook in his pocket in which he scribbled the names of the men in each city and town and hamlet who were for him. In mid-July, he got another grim letter from Nisba. Stuck with Louise in a city that now felt like someone had thrown a wet rag over it, Nisba decided it was time to level with her father, who believed that Louise eventually would recover from the ordeal of the last eighteen months. But Nisba told him that Louise was a “feeble woman, feeble in body” and in mind. Nisba believed her “brain has certainly suffered from a long use of sedatives,” most likely laudanum, a tincture of opium that was a popular nerve tonic for women. Nisba told her father that he needed to make long-term plans for Louise. “I don’t believe … that you can hope for these attacks to cease,” she said, essentially confirming that Louise had gone mad under the strain her father had put her through.

  As the summer wore on, the primary contest turned rancorous. “The Breckinridge business floats in the air like a buzzard,” complained a Chicago reporter. Desha almost got into a duel with an Owens supporter after he called Owens a coward, traitor, liar, and gambler. Breckinridge lashed out publicly at the men he thought had betrayed him. He accused Judge Jere Morton, whose wife had emerged as a leader of the anti-Breckinridge effort, of using his friendship with him to dissuade him from compelling Morton’s father-in-law Howard Gratz to testify about his relationship with Madeline. When Gratz published an editorial in the Gazette savaging his candidacy, Breckinridge threatened a retaliatory attack, saying he knew “what your relations with Miss Pollard were when you had her as the guest of your own daughter under your roof; when she was nominally in your office in your employ, when you were together late at night.”

  By the last, languishing days of August, the contest had boiled down to Breckinridge and Owens. Women formed their own Owens clubs in Lexington and Frankfort, a first in Kentucky politics. On August 23, the Lexington club, under the direction of Julia Hunt of the local Hunt-Morgan dynasty, organized and financed a huge picnic and rally for Owens. After a brass band led a gigantic parade snaking through the streets of Lexington, Owens banners flapping in the breeze, some thirty thousand people, nearly a third of them women, packed into Woodland Park to dip tin cups into vast kettles of burgoo, a stew that was a staple of Kentucky political gatherings and into which went “eighty sheep, eleven [cows], forty hogs, besides two immense wagon loads of corn, twenty bushels of potatoes, six bushels of onions and 1,000 tomatoes.” After everyone had feasted, they heard speeches from Jere Morton and Owens, but the real point was standing publicly against Breckinridge and marveling at the fact that women “who all through the course of their lives have left politics and all such public matters to their husbands and have had a horror of being before the public” had organized it all.

  Into this boiling political cauldron stepped Mollie Desha with a letter to the people of the Ashland district “to tell you some truths which it is necessary for you to know.” She said that the “truth is that of all the immoral delegations in Congress, that of Kentucky has the reputation of being the worst.” She urged the election of a “clean, pure man, with brains enough to know that it is a man’s actions and not his religious twaddle that make for righteousness.” She said that if Breckinridge were reelected, the men of Kentucky would endorse his position that “all men are libertines,” which would “announce to the world the unchastity of your women.”

  The letter was the talk of the town. It was a further reminder, as if anyone needed it, that the same men who zealously policed women’s sexuality ran rout with their own. The fact that Washington was a sexual playground for men was no secret. Frank Carpenter had called it “one of the wickedest cities” in the country because of the large number of “married men away from their wives.” He said that every afternoon the demimonde “parade Pennsylvania Avenue” in “sealskins and silks,” and even sat in the boxes reserved for members’ families in the congressional galleries. Martha McClellan Brown said at the time of the women’s meeting at the Willard Hotel, “It is an open secret in Washington that there are women … whose relations with Congressmen or other public men high in the councils of the nation are either perfectly understood or suspected, who are met at every turn at the most fashionable functions, often in the receiving line [or] presiding over the tea-room … Society knows all this, but so powerful has been the influence of the names [in] back of them that no one has had the courage to drop the woman or rebuke the man.”

  Yet Mollie’s letter wasn’t without risk. Her outspokenne
ss about Breckinridge had already cost her the only family she had and she acknowledged that she risked “shocking her friends”; nonetheless, she persisted. But her friends were anything but shocked. They congratulated her on a much-needed takedown not only of Breckinridge but also of Kentucky’s particular sexual mores. “It has been greatly complemented by all who have read it,” her good friend Julia Blackburn assured her.

  That, as one of Mollie’s friends told her, the feeling in Kentucky “against Breckinridge is so bitter that one is reminded of the condition of things during the war” became apparent just a few days later when the campaign saw bloodshed. John King, a young man from Clay’s Ferry who backed Breckinridge, met on the road near Boonsboro a tobacco farmer named George Cook, who supported Owens. The conversation, inevitably, turned to politics. Cook told King, “Any woman who would go to hear Breckinridge speak is no better than a Megowan Street woman,” referring to Lexington’s red-light district. King replied that his wife and daughters had gone to hear Breckinridge, at which both men sprang from their horses and went at each other with knives. Within minutes, Cook lay dead.

  By now, Lexington was delirious with talk of the race. It began at 6:00 a.m. at the Phoenix Hotel and went on well past midnight. “Everyone looks like he has lost three hours of sleep, and men say ‘no’ and mean ‘yes,’ and forget their umbrellas and canes, and in some cases their names,” said the Courier-Journal. The primary was the talk of the country as well. “What a time you have been having in the old Henry Clay district,” Susan B. Anthony wrote to Laura Clay. “I do hope exposed and confessed unchastity will not win.” Theodore Roosevelt, who had urged his friend Henry McDowell to jump into the race, said he wanted to see Breckinridge retired from public life. “I feel it would be an infamy and something to make every American hang his head to have him continued in public service,” he told McDowell. Julia Blackburn wrote excitedly to Mollie Desha just days before the election, “Like myself I suppose you are watching with intense interest the result of” the race. She thought it “sheer madness” that anyone could “support such filthy immorality.”