by Mary Gabriel
Those sitting in front put their feet along the iron railing to prevent the authorities from moving in, and those in the rear shouted for silence so that Victoria could begin. She spoke for an hour and a half without any interference from the visibly stunned police. After delivering much the same speech she had in Springfield, detailing her imprisonment, the social question, and threats to justice in general, Victoria surrendered herself “gracefully,” as one reporter noted, to a deputy marshal. She kissed her lady friends good-bye and was driven by carriage to the Ludlow Street jail, where Blood was also being held. They were placed in cell no. 12 together. Tennie remained in hiding.
For the next several days, Victoria and Blood were in and out of court while Howe argued forcibly, waving his diamond-bedecked hands, that they had already posted tens of thousands of dollars’ bond against the same charges and should be not only released immediately from jail but also given a speedy trial to prove their innocence. The prosecution, at Comstock’s prompting, argued just as vehemently that the dangerous pair “with soiled hands” belonged in jail.
By January 14, Tennessee finally surrendered to authorities and joined Victoria and Blood in her familiar seat at the defendants’ table. Victoria was described as “pale” and Blood as “seedy,” but Tennie, one reporter said, “did not seem to be in the slightest concerned at her position.”
Finally bail was set at an additional five thousand dollars each and the three were released, but not for long. One week later they were arrested again for the Challis libel: “About half past four yesterday afternoon, as Mrs. Woodhull, Miss Claflin, and Col. Blood were preparing to depart from their office in Broad street for their home, Order of Arrest Clerk Judson Jarvis, with two deputy sheriffs, entered. Mr. Jarvis told Mrs. Woodhull that he had a bench warrant for the arrest of the firm. Mrs. Woodhull hastened to inform her sister and Col. Blood, who were in the office, and then returned to where Mr. Jarvis stood. Mrs. Woodhull said to Mr. Jarvis, ‘I thought we had been arrested often enough to satisfy every one. What have we done now?’ Mr Jarvis displayed a document signed by District Attorney Phelps and replied, ‘This is for libel.’ Each of the firm asked whom they had libelled, but Mr. Jarvis did not know.”
The arrest occurred near 5:00 P.M., when it was too late to find the district attorney or anyone to accept bail if it were posted. Victoria said that the arrest was an “outrage” and that it was accomplished at that hour to ensure that no bail would be set and that they would be imprisoned again. In fact they were, but this time they were taken to the Tombs.
The Tombs, officially called the Halls of Justice, was a grim place modeled after an Egyptian mausoleum. Charles Dickens said it looked like an “enchanter’s palace in a melodrama.” It had an inner and an outer building separated by a yard where executions were carried out by a man identified only as Monsieur New York or George. The imprisonment of the threesome at the Tombs was at once an indignity and a threat.
Victoria and Tennessee did make bail the next day, bringing their total bond for the numerous charges against them to about sixty thousand dollars each, but Blood was not so fortunate. He could not secure the additional two thousand dollars and so remained in the Tombs for a short while longer.
NEW YORK CITY, JUNE 1873
By late January, the repeated arrests had begun to work against the establishment. Around the country, newspapers said that while they had no sympathy for Victoria or her beliefs, her harassment by the courts of New York was unprecedented and smacked of censorship. Even some of Victoria’s former supporters began to rally again to her cause. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said that, despite reports in the press, she had never denied the truth of Victoria’s story on Tilton and Beecher. And Amelia Bloomer, the famous fashion reformer, said she had been told of the Beecher affair a year earlier by one of the very people Victoria cited as a source.
While the moral support must have been reassuring and welcome, the more immediate support Victoria needed was financial. Challis had vowed to spend $100,000 if necessary to secure their conviction, and a Plymouth Church member vowed to spend his entire fortune to keep the Weekly’s staff in jail. Victoria needed money to fight her case, to feed her family, and to keep her newspaper alive to ensure that her side of the story was told.
The Weekly, which had resurfaced despite efforts to bury it by destroying the paper’s equipment, ran constant appeals for money: “It must not be forgotten that our resources are now confined to the income from the Weekly and that to it we are compelled to look for all the means required to publish it, and therefore that the delay of even a single week in remitting dues or sending on remittances for new clubs and subscriptions, may endanger our ability to send out the strong ailment of the new social dispensation.”
While the Weekly waited for money to come in, Victoria, though tired and ill, went back out on the lecture circuit. She had been popular before her arrest, but her recklessness and martyrdom in recent months made her irresistible to audiences: “Husbands forbade their wives to hear her, but went themselves,” an early biographer wrote. “She was the glamorous scarlet woman for adolescents everywhere. . . . She dramatized womanhood on every platform and in every newspaper of her time.”
Nevertheless, Victoria was not invited to attend that year’s women’s suffrage convention in Washington; in fact, a published card for the event stated specifically that she would not be there. But there were other audiences eager to hear her speak. Victoria, Zulu, Blood, and Tennie set out to earn money delivering lectures throughout the United States. Victoria’s son, Byron, who was now nineteen, remained in New York City with her family, and she left the Weekly in the hands of Joseph Treat, a man who had wandered into her circle.
Treat, like Andrews, had been an early proponent of free love. He was one of the founders of the Berlin Heights community, which, after 1857, was considered the “cesspool of sexual experimentation in America.” Treat was among the community’s most extreme members, but his philosophy did not involve physical intimacy. He believed that intercourse should be indulged in only for the purpose of procreation. He embraced equally freedom and repression. He was thoroughly eccentric in every way, even in his dress: he wore a white linen suit summer and winter and carried a hot brick in his pocket when the weather turned cold.
Under his directorship, the Weekly was filled with page after page of reports from the Tombs, where George Francis Train, the wealthy eccentric who had offered to post bail for Victoria, had been sent for publishing obscene material in an effort to demonstrate the absurdity of the charges against the Weekly. Train had been elected president of a group of twenty-two inmates on murderers’ row and he issued rambling tracts from prison that were signed “of unsound mind, though harmless” and duly printed in the Weekly. He wrote primarily about himself, the prison conditions, and his plan to become the dictator of a new government he was going to form. Train was finally tried in May and acquitted by reason of insanity. He was ordered institutionalized but refused to surrender. He left the courtroom, hailed a carriage, and caught a ship to England.
In May, under Treat, the November 2 Weekly was also reissued, along with a piece by the journalist Edward H. G. Clark called “The Thunderbolt,” in which he detailed the findings of his own even more damaging investigation into the Beecher-Tilton affair. In fact, questions were being raised throughout the country about the truth of the charges against Beecher and the complicity of Tilton and the Plymouth Church financier Henry Bowen in the cover-up of the case.
In the early months of 1873, great efforts had been made to squelch the story so that the main players could emerge with their dignity intact—even if it meant sending Woodhull, Claflin & Co. to jail. But Tilton, Bowen, and Beecher’s “tripartite agreement” to keep the particulars of the affair secret began to fall apart by that spring. The men began devouring each other. All three started changing their stories and making statements to various newspapers hinting at crimes the others had committed and then retracting them. The press and
the public began to grow suspicious that the truth was a changeable commodity in Brooklyn.
ON JUNE 2, Victoria, Tennessee, and Blood were back in court to stand trial on the Luther Challis libel charge. When they arrived at court, a familiar face greeted them. General Noah Davis, the Plymouth Church member who had been the prosecutor when they were first arrested, had ascended to the bench and was to be the judge in their case. William Howe, the sisters’ flamboyant advocate, cried foul, and while Davis said he was sure he could hear the case without prejudice, he agreed to turn it over to another judge. A man named Barrett took his place. Howe then moved to adjourn for one day because several material witnesses were missing. A decision on his request was delayed until the following day, when Victoria and her co-defendants returned to court only to learn that the case was to be postponed until June 16.
The decision didn’t mean they were without court appearances early that month, though. At the same time the civil libel trial was working its way through the system, the obscenity case began in federal court. On June 4, they appeared before Judge Blatchford to face charges brought by Anthony Comstock that they had mailed him the obscene November 2 Weekly. During two days of hearings, defense lawyers employed legal maneuvers to quash the indictment. In the badly ventilated, hot, and crowded courtroom, they argued that the indictment violated every principle of common law and amounted to “trifling with liberty.” The judge issued no immediate decision and the case was concluded for the week.
On Friday, June 6, Victoria visited several newspapers, asking that they write in support of a postponement of the trial to allow the defense to gather more evidence. She told them that she feared she would not be treated fairly by the courts and that if she were convicted she would not survive. Doctors had advised her to stay out of court, she said, and to insist upon a postponement. At the same time, though, she said she was anxious to be tried and done with it because the anxiety was killing her. She also told the papers that some of her bondsmen had shown a disposition to desert her and this, too, added to her misery. She and Tennessee, she said, had worked hard the past few months to make up for the financial losses sustained during their imprisonment, but they had made scarcely enough to pay the current expenses of their office and home. In the end, although the press had turned more sympathetic toward her, Victoria found no editor willing to take her side in the fight.
Tennessee worked with her sister to support their extended family, keep Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly alive, and pay their mounting legal bills—in part through the sale of her portrait. (Alberti and Lowe Collection, ca. 1873)
Riding home in a stage from their Broad Street office that day, Victoria told her sister she wasn’t well. The next morning, newspapers around the country ran dispatches with the headlines “Reported Death of the Great Reformer” and “Mrs. V. C. Woodhull Dying”: “Shortly after 7 o’clock last evening Mrs. Victoria C. Woodhull had an attack of heart disease, and fell unconscious to the floor in her residence at 6 East Thirty-fourth street. She was in her office in Broad street up to 5 o’clock in the evening. Then she and her sister Tennie started for home in a Madison avenue stage. On the way, Mrs. Woodhull complained of illness and told her sister that she feared the excitement she was laboring under regarding their coming trial might result in her death. She ate sparingly at dinner and was on her way with Col. Blood through the hallway from the dining room staircase to her room when she fell,” The Sun reported. “Miss Claflin and her mother, who were in the dining room, heard the fall, and hastening up stairs, saw Col. Blood bending over the prostrate form of Mrs. Woodhull. All three carried her into the bedroom, and laid her on the bed. Her face was ashy pale, and she was seemingly dead. Restoratives were applied, but all were useless. Dr. Cummings and two other physicians were sent for. They, after a careful examination, pronounced her dead.
“Miss Claflin and others of the family could not believe it, and they used every means to ascertain whether life was extinct, employing the looking glass, the feather, and other tests. About a half hour after Mrs. Woodhull was carried into her room, blood began to ooze from her mouth, and she moved her lips as though about to speak. One of the physicians drew close to her ear and said, ‘You must not speak; do not move. Your life depends on your remaining quiet.’ Her hands and feet were put into hot water and mustard plasters were applied to her body. Miss Claflin and Col. Blood sat by her. Although almost distracted they sat as though dumb, with eyes fixed upon her.
“The physicians retired for consultation, and reached the conclusion that their efforts to save her would undoubtedly be fruitless. They thought she might die before morning, but counselled her watchers to continue the application of restoratives without cessation and to permit no one to see her. The venerable mother and father of Mrs. Woodhull were almost overwhelmed with grief. . . . At a late hour last night Mrs. Woodhull was still unconscious. Miss Claflin and Col. Blood were with her throughout the night.”
When Victoria did not die, the incident was reported in the Chicago Tribune as “a dodge to create sympathy for her.”
NEW YORK CITY, JUNE 23, 1873
The Weekly ran a series of headlines that covered the entire front page the week the obscenity case was scheduled to begin, declaring, “The Great Battle, Grand Concentration of Forces, Woodhull and Claflin to be ‘Railroaded’ in Two Days.” Victoria’s ill health caused the postponement of both of her trials, however. The Luther Challis libel case was put off until the fall, because the civil courts broke for the summer at the end of June, and the obscenity trial was delayed for nearly a month. Finally, on June 23, 1873, jury selection began in federal court for the obscenity case. It took three days, with hundreds of prospective jurors questioned and dismissed. The wheels of justice were creaking and groaning under the weight of the case, but the real action was happening outside the courtroom.
On the night of June 24, Victoria was visited at her home by Plymouth Church’s founder, Henry Bowen, and his two sons; a Plymouth Church investor, H. B. Claflin; and a stenographer. They came ostensibly to seek Victoria’s help in proving a case against Beecher. The twisted logic that brought the group to her door was not lost on Victoria, but if she could gain something from the meeting, she was ready to listen. She had with her two advocates, Judge Reymart and George Ellery.
The Plymouth Church group wanted Victoria to turn over to them any documents she possessed in connection with the “Beecher Scandal.” They said they wanted to vindicate Bowen, who had been maligned by Beecher and Tilton concerning the case. They argued that it was best for all concerned that the documents in Victoria’s possession be given to them “so that they might take such action as they deemed best.”
Victoria turned to them and said that she was inclined to give them what she had but that she had suffered so much already at the hands of Plymouth Church, she did not know whom to trust. Until Bowen and Claflin proved that they were not in league with Beecher to secure any evidence she might have against him, she would withhold the documents—unless, of course, she might expect something in return for proof of the scandal. If she escaped punishment in the obscenity case, she said, she would tell them all she knew of Beecher and Tilton and also turn over to them any documentary evidence she had. But she emphatically declined to give up any evidence until the trial was over.
If there was any doubt that the Plymouth Church forces were pulling the strings behind the obscenity trial, the days following the June 24 meeting dispelled it: following the meeting, the obscenity case somehow miraculously went away. On June 26, jury selection was completed and Judge Blatchford ordered the prosecution, against its will, to proceed. Mr. Purdy began the prosecution’s opening statement but was interrupted repeatedly by a defense lawyer, Mr. Brooke, whose every objection was upheld by the court. Frustrated in his effort, Mr. Purdy ended his opening statement in less than five minutes and the court adjourned until the next morning.
The following day the courtroom was packed. Victoria appeared weary and only somewhat
relieved of the stifling heat after removing her hat. Anthony Comstock was among the first witnesses. Before being sworn in, he used the opportunity to clarify a point of particular displeasure to himself: he said his name was Anthony Comstock, not Anthony J. Comstock, as the records of the court and the newspapers had printed, and he wanted it distinctly understood that J. was in no way part of his good name. That point cleared, he proceeded to testify.
After just two prosecution questions to Comstock, the defense lawyer Brooke began a barrage of objections, all of which Judge Blatchford upheld. It was peculiar for the prosecution to be shot down so consistently in its questioning and it left Mr. Purdy rubbing the left side of his head as he considered what approach might be acceptable to the bench.
Mr. Jordan, a defense co-counsel, then interrupted even Purdy’s thought processes by arguing that, in any case, the defendants had not been indicted under a valid statute of the U.S. legal code. Mr. Brooke added that the statute under which the defendants were charged in 1872 did not cover newspapers. As proof he offered a repeal of that law, passed in 1873, that did include newspapers, thus illustrating that the original law had not.
Judge Blatchford listened to Purdy plead the government’s case on that point and then promptly issued a ruling. He said he was entirely satisfied that the prosecution could not be maintained and said the government had presented no evidence to support the indictment.
As simply as that, the jury returned a not guilty verdict. “There was some kissing and embracing,” the Herald reported, “and in about five minutes the court room was as empty and silent as if its echoes had never been disturbed with the story of the Woodhull & Claflin prosecution.”
