Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  On September 8, some two hundred women packed into the Capital Hotel in Frankfort for an anti-Breckinridge rally. A reporter marveled that the local women were so immersed in the campaign that they had given up their “social duties” and were even leaving their homes on their traditional receiving days. The day before the election, women who just six months earlier would have blanched at seeing their name in the paper began the morning with a ten o’clock organizing meeting at the Opera House. Then they got in their carriages and went door-to-door campaigning for Owens; all day long, the streets of Lexington were thronged with politicking women. Women announced they would be at the polls the next day serving coffee and rolls, an extraordinary declaration at a time when election days were so filled with public drunkenness, swearing, and fighting that women took care to stay home.

  Despite predictions of violence, election day itself was surprisingly quiet. The polls closed at four. Breckinridge awaited the results with Desha at his cramped headquarters on the third floor of a downtown building. Women circled Owens’s headquarters like buzzards well past the hour when respectable ladies should have been home. Crowds gathered around the bulletin board outside the Post’s office in Washington, cheering as each update was posted. The tension was almost unbearable. When someone mistakenly told Maria Hunt that Breckinridge won, she fainted. But it wasn’t so. When the results were tallied, Owens had defeated Breckinridge by some 250 votes out of nearly 20,000 cast. The biggest upset came from Fayette County, the home of Lexington and the place where the Breckinridge name burned brightest. Breckinridge had expected to run up a margin of 1,000 votes or more, but he beat Owens there by fewer than 200 votes, rejected by the very men he spent his life among.

  The headlines trumpeted the defeat: “The Silver Tongue Is Silenced,” said the Leader; “Decency Wins in Kentucky,” said the Times; “The Wages of Sin Paid to the Silver-Tongued Breckinridge,” said the Knoxville Journal; “The Women Triumphant,” proclaimed the Transcript. No one doubted that it was women who made the difference; Owens wasn’t a spectacular candidate and issues hadn’t been important. “Never before in any canvas have the women interpreted the leading role,” marveled the Cincinnati Enquirer, as many wondered what the campaign foretold for the role that women would play in politics in the coming century. Indeed, the slow-burning spark of suffrage had been lit in the South. Julia Hunt, the president of the women’s Owens club in Lexington, became a member of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, convinced that “there is a place for women in politics.” The women’s uprising also bolstered Laura Clay’s contention that the South was the “most promising” place in the country for suffrage organizing. She organized a southern speaking tour for Susan B. Anthony and other suffrage leaders that kicked off in Lexington in January 1895.

  Reporters tracked down Madeline to where she was living on East Thirty-First Street in New York under the name of Mrs. Higgins, but she didn’t want to talk about Breckinridge or the election. She had decided over the summer to go on the stage after all, in a play described as a “comedy-drama with a strong emotional role,” saying it was the only way she could make a living. She was reticent when a reporter asked how her training was coming along, leaving it to her manager to brag that her acting instructor said she was “a finished actress already.” Madeline’s plans were scuttled, however, when professional actors formed the Actors Protective Union of New York to keep her and any other celebrities by dint of notoriety who had visions of going on the stage from dinging their hard-won, and still nascent, respectability. She would, however, shortly assure a reporter that she had “a novel nearly completed, which a leading New York publishing house will put on the market.”

  What no one doubted was that Breckinridge, who had bet his political redemption on the ruin of Madeline Pollard, was now himself ruined. He was “a ruin that is complete and irremediable,” said the Kentucky Leader, condemned by all: “by the religious for his hypocrisy, by the moral for his vice, by good society for what they call his odious treachery to Mrs. Blackburn, by his colleagues in Congress for his folly.” With his cousin Clifton Rhodes Breckinridge having resigned his congressional seat to become the minister to Russia, there would be no Breckinridge in Washington for the first time in living memory. The shock of this, combined with the admission from even those who opposed him that the state was unlikely to see another public servant of his caliber, reverberated with unexpected resonance. “The fall of Breckinridge,” said two noted Kentucky historians, “was like that of an archangel.”

  Nisba would never quite get over her father’s loss to a man she considered “a mediocre representative of certain special interests.” She blamed not only his political enemies in the Hemp Trust, but also the “many women who wished to punish my father for his marriage and for the scandal involving [Madeline] Pollard.” She never could bring herself to hold her father accountable for his downfall. By the time the votes were counted, Nisba was in Staunton, having taken a job teaching at a girls’ school for the year. The pay was poor and the work promised to be boring, but she didn’t want to burden her father and knew she needed to make a path for herself. “It is a step toward making a profession of teaching,” she said, assuring him, “I already have quite a schoolmarmish air.”

  Jennie was home in Maine when the news of Breckinridge’s downfall reached her, her optimism of the previous spring tempered by the realities of the summer and fall. Her family, her brother in particular, was shocked when they learned the details of her mission in Washington. Her book The Real Madeleine Pollard: A Diary of Ten Weeks’ Association with the Plaintiff in the Famous Breckinridge-Pollard Suit had been overshadowed by two other quickie books about the trial. One, a sensationalized recounting of the trial cobbled together from newspaper coverage by a woman calling herself “Fayette Lexington,” better mirrored the public mood in its sympathy for Madeline. “To say she did right to call him to account in the way that she chose is only to state the opinion of all fair-minded people,” Lexington wrote. Jennie, influenced by what she believed to be her friendship with the Breckinridge family and her relationship with Stoll, had written a dramatized account of her friendship with Madeline, that while true in its basic facts—Jennie was not one for fabrication—was heavily shaded toward the portrait of Madeline the defense had tried to paint. With no new legal proceedings slated, there was little interest in revisiting the question of Madeline’s character, and Jennie’s hopes for financial success were dashed. By the fall, she still hadn’t been paid by the man she now dismissed as “old Breck,” as she realized she was just another woman to be used, another hireling to be stiffed.

  Despite it all, Jennie’s taste for adventure remained undiminished. Two weeks before the election, she had donned a diving suit, screwed the big brass helmet in place, and descended forty feet under the Sheepscot River. She was, they said, only the second woman to ever do so. She stayed there for fifteen minutes, simultaneously terrified and thrilled, suspended in the murky depths, unable to see a way forward but unwilling to surrender to the surface.

  18

  Refusing to Behave

  As Jennie’s friend Max Ihmsen wrote in the Herald, the emergence of Madeline Pollard “startled the whole country.” This seemingly powerless woman from a backwater in Kentucky took on one of the nation’s most powerful men—and by extension much of Washington—and won. By having the nerve to tell her story in public, she broke the conspiracy of silence that allowed powerful men like Breckinridge to prey on younger and less powerful women. She led Victorian America on a front-row tour of the various subterfuges—the lying-in homes, the orphan asylums, the homes for fallen women—that men used to maintain an underclass of “ruined” women. She showed how men like Breckinridge manipulated their power and social conventions to ensure that it was women, and their unwanted children, who took the fall for men’s behavior. In doing so, Madeline inspired a generation of women to demand change and presaged conversations about powerful men and sexual privilege that resonat
e into the twenty-first century.

  The Pollard-Breckinridge trial didn’t end the double standard, but it did begin its transition to a more realistic sexual ethic that flowered in the twentieth century. Indeed, one of the great ironies of the episode is that the more equal standard of sexual morality wished for so fervently by purity reformers would come to pass—only in the direction of more premarital sexual freedom for women. By asserting that a woman who had lost her virginity outside of marriage should still receive the consideration of society, Madeline Pollard helped break the taboo around women and premarital sex and pave the way for what would be a series of sexual revolutions in the century to come.

  How did Madeline Pollard manage to bring down Col. W.C.P. Breckinridge? For one, the timing of her suit was critical. Societies often are only able to confront deeply embedded, systemic issues—like the sexual predation of women—at times of cultural change and instability. The historian and ambassador James Bryce called the period during which the Breckinridge-Pollard scandal took place the “shattering Nineties”—and shattering they were, as economic and culture pressures created fissures that allowed for the exploration of new ideas about women, sex, and shame. Madeline Pollard came along at a moment of profound cultural transition, as women flooded into formerly all-male workplaces and public spaces and society was forced to grapple with new questions about women’s respectability. The widespread entry of women into the workforce between 1880 and 1900 was “the most significant event in the modern history of women,” says the feminist historian William O’Neill. By the early 1890s, even well-off families had daughters and sisters working outside the home. They were worried about them being taken advantage of by predatory men, but were ready to rethink old rules about women, sexual respectability and were the responsibilities and standards held by men.

  One of the most significant things Madeline Pollard accomplished was making it acceptable to talk openly about sex, which was necessary to confront sexual predation. There was a marked increase in public discourse related to sex in the years following the trial—so much so that in 1913, one editor famously declared it “Sex o’clock in America.” William Marion Reedy wrote, “A wave of sex hysteria and sex discussion seems to have invaded the country. Our former reticence on matters of sex is giving way to a frankness that would even startle Paris.” A year later, the essayist Agnes Repplier complained in The Atlantic about “The Repeal of Reticence,” saying that the open discussion of sex had gone too far, with “teachers, lecturers, novelists, story-writers, militants, dramatists, social workers, and magazine editors” now “chatt[ing] freely” about sex and sexual vice.

  Just as timing was essential to Madeline’s success, so, too, was the awakening among women and the explosion of new networks for women, especially in Washington, that helped build a groundswell of public opinion against Breckinridge. Organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the various reform and professional societies lifted women beyond their traditional segregated domestic spheres and allowed them to voice their displeasure with the status quo about men and sex across class and sectional lines. The rich networks undergirding the women who staged the Willard protest illustrate the new ways that women were interacting with one another, as working women, society leaders, reformers, and organizers all came together.

  One woman stood at the intersection of all these groups and the Lexington women who delivered the final blow to Breckinridge: Mollie Desha. Her testimony, brief as it was, was a powerful rebuke of her brother-in-law and an early sign that polite society was massing against him. She likely helped foment the anti-Breckinridge sentiment that percolated throughout Washington during the trial into a broader movement—she knew not only the truth about his relationship with Madeline, but nearly half the women at the Willard gathering knew Desha through either the Daughters of the American Revolution or Wimodaughsis, the networking organization she founded. Her letter about Kentucky men in Washington landed at exactly the right moment during the Battle of Ashland and helped push the pendulum over the edge. When Breckinridge was looking for someone to blame for his downfall, he should have looked to his own family.

  Only one other woman used her social capital as effectively on Madeline’s behalf, and that was the indomitable Julia Blackburn. Breckinridge himself knew it was Blackburn he had to blame for his ruination. As he wrote to a friend, “There would have been no scandal but for Mrs. B. The girl would have gone away from Washington and behaved herself.” That Madeline refused to behave was due partly to her own anger at being discarded by Breckinridge in favor of a woman of higher social standing and in part to what Breckinridge called her “insane belief in Mrs. B’s power and influence.” As it turned out, Madeline’s belief in Julia’s influence wasn’t so crazy after all. As the Washington Post noted even months after the trial, Blackburn’s “testimony as a woman of social standing and unimpeachable character went far to influence the jury in awarding damages to the plaintiff,” not to mention that her letter to Basil Duke helped Madeline reframe the narrative of the predatory fallen woman at a critical time.

  What Breckinridge called the “support and encouragement” Madeline got from Julia likely was critical in another way. Madeline was with Julia in Charlottesville when Breckinridge’s marriage to Wing was announced, and it was clear Madeline had been jilted. Madeline said she told Julia that her “honor was involved,” and she would remove herself from her protection as she prepared to head back to Washington. It’s likely that it was Julia who convinced her to see a lawyer and pursue a legal settlement, not knowing the full extent of her relationship with Breckinridge. Calderon Carlisle was exactly the type of society lawyer to whom Julia would refer Madeline; likely, he was the only lawyer she knew. Carlisle’s wife and mother were members of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Ex-Confederate Aid Society along with Julia Blackburn and Mollie Desha—who, naturally, had helped organize the society when it became clear there were a number of destitute Confederate veterans in the capital. Madeline told Jennie that Carlisle was “the first one I talked to about my suit.” Because Carlisle specialized in international law, he had reason to bring in Jere Wilson for his skills as a litigator. If Madeline had talked to Wilson first, he wouldn’t have had any reason to bring in Carlisle. After the trial, when a Washington Post reporter was chasing down ultimately false rumors that Madeline’s lawyers would try to attach the proceeds of Breckinridge’s speeches to pay for her settlement, Wilson referred him to Carlisle, averring that “he had the case in his charge.”

  Given the legalistic language that suddenly appeared in Madeline’s July 15 letter to Breckinridge—and the fact that her lawsuit was filed less than a month later—it seems likely that she first consulted Carlisle on her mid-July trip to Washington. Once Carlisle heard the details of her relationship with Breckinridge, he could have easily walked away. No one had ever successfully argued a breach of promise case in which the plaintiff couldn’t claim she had been seduced under the promise of marriage. Madeline was obviously able to convince him that she had the evidence to back her claims, including letters from Breckinridge and Blackburn’s avowal of the engagement.

  It was likely Jere Wilson, however, who decided to turn the suit into a test case about the double standard and a society that punished women for men’s predation. It’s clear from his impassioned closing argument that he was aligned with the thinking of social reformers about the issue. Wilson appears to have been part of a circle of progressive Indiana Republicans who were committed to moral reform. Three of the women prominent in the anti-Breckinridge efforts hailed from Indiana: Lucia Blount; Mrs. Nelson Trusler, the wife of a former U.S. district attorney for Indiana; and Mrs. Dan Waugh, the wife of Congressman Dan Waugh.

  The enduring mystery of the great Breckinridge-Pollard scandal remains: Who paid for Madeline’s lawsuit? Even if Carlisle and Wilson donated their services, which seems likely as both were wealthy men, the expenses for the trial ran in ex
cess of $3,500—some $100,000 today. Most people assumed that Breckinridge’s political enemies were behind the suit; Breckinridge himself believed it to the end. This seems unlikely. Wilson’s closing argument shows that the suit was brought to make a point about women and the double standard, not to destroy Breckinridge politically. Madeline’s case was just too audacious for a conventional political interest like the Hemp Trust to have attached itself to, although the trust was happy to back his opponent once he was crippled politically.

  The evidence points to more unconventional backers: It’s likely that the shadowy figures behind Madeline’s suit wore corsets. One of the most persistent rumors was that Madeline was financed by a wealthy widow. Many people assumed it was Blackburn, but she explicitly denied giving Madeline money “directly or indirectly.” The Evening Star, however, reported that the money was provided by a woman who was “a widow, a Kentuckian and a near relative of one of the plaintiff’s female witnesses,” which describes Blackburn’s sister Emily Zane, who also was wealthy and who never denied providing any money. If she did, however, she left no record of her involvement. Likewise, there’s no record that another wealthy widow, Madeleine Dahlgren, gave Madeline any money, although she was well known for her views about the sanctity of marriage. By the early 1890s, with her youngest daughter married off, she spent most of her time at her estate in the mountains of western Maryland.

  There are three women who, based on motive, means, and proximity, almost certainly aided Madeline. The New York World, which had the best intelligence on the case, said that Caroline Fellows Morgan, the widow of David P. Morgan, a Wall Street wizard—who hailed from a different branch of the family tree that produced J. P. Morgan and who had made a fortune in Suez Canal and railroad stocks—was Madeline’s primary backer. She reportedly provided five thousand dollars for trial expenses because she didn’t think “a man who made such a profession of Christianity as did Breckinridge during the years he was living a double life should go unrebuked.” Morgan never denied her involvement, and before she and her husband relocated from New York City to Washington because of his health, they attended St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church, where Caroline was known as “an enthusiastic church worker.” As such, she would have been familiar with the New York Episcopal Church’s interest in purity reform. She was also a Kentucky girl, hailing from Louisville, and may have had a natural sympathy toward Madeline.