Notorious Victoria

by Mary Gabriel

  “Did you in Indianapolis announce yourself there as a medium to treat patients for the cure of disease?” he asked.

  “In Indianapolis I was earning my living in supporting husband and children by my own efforts.”

  “Was that announcing yourself as a medium to treat patients for the cure of disease?”

  “To tell the truth I do not remember it.”

  “Did you receive during that time by direction of the spirits as much as 700,000 dollars?”

  “As I tell you this is what I shall say—I supposed when I came here to this room . . .”

  “Did you give yourself out to be a medium in the cure of disease?”

  “I was an educated doctoress.”

  “Did you give yourself out to be a spiritual agent for the cure of disease?”

  “To tell you the truth I do not remember. . .. It is 25 years ago. I shall have to refresh my memory.”

  Sir Charles pursued another course. “I think for a short time you were on the stage? . . . In San Francisco?”

  “I was not so—I should have to refresh my memory. It could not have been so unless it was in some dreadful stress.”

  “You afterwards in conjunction with your sister set up the business of stockbrokers in Wall Street.”

  “Yes.”

  “For how many years did you conduct business?”

  “Perhaps five or six years. Without referring to my books I could not be quite certain of it.”

  “That is quite enough. Was it during the same period or was it a later development that you had carried on the business of bankers?”

  “It was during that time that we had what you call the Bank.”

  “In connection with your stockbroking business.”

  “At 44 Wall [sic] Street [New] York City.”

  “Were you connected with any publication at that time in connection with your stockbroking business?”

  “I think you have just been told we had a weekly, what we called Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.”

  “Dealing with political and social questions?”

  “With the questions of the day.”

  “And also financial questions,” he answered for her before moving on. “You were also the acknowledged leader, for brevity I will call it, of what was known as the movement for women’s rights?”

  “I do not want to say I was the acknowledged leader.”

  “Well say leader if your modesty is too much for the other, but you were a prominent person in the advocacy of it.”

  “I was a person in the advocacy of it.”

  Sir Charles then asked Victoria about her presidential candidacy and her imprisonment in connection with the Beecher case.

  “You were held to bail?” he asked.

  “We were in prison four weeks before we were released.”

  “The government rightly or wrongly,” he speculated, “insisted on having bail and there was some delay in getting it?”

  “Not a bit of it.”

  “How did it happen?”

  How did it happen? This was the question Mrs. Martin was eager to answer. From 1872 on, her career had been dominated by the Beecher scandal. All the historic work she had done previously had been buried under the mass of newsprint on the Beecher case and the part she had played in it. Twenty-two years later it still cast a shadow over her life and threatened to obscure the place in history she believed she deserved. But to answer that question, Mrs. Martin would have to go back long before the Beecher case broke in 1872.

  “Will you allow me a few words of explanation?” she asked the court. “I think Sir Richard Webster told you that I was married at 14 years of age and that my first child was an imbecile. . ..”

  Victoria Woodhull Martin went on to explain her strange life, and Sir Charles Russell countered with more questions. The pair sparred continually during Victoria’s two days on the witness stand in the oak-paneled courtroom, which not infrequently reverberated with laughter. Sir Charles tried to trick, cajole, ridicule, and force Victoria into delineating her views and admitting her liberal practices in love relations to the jury, but she would not be drawn out on any point. At the close of the first day of her testimony, weary but still in control, she summed up her position: “It may not be necessary, but I am quite willing to state what I do believe quietly. Women are struggling for their freedom from sexual slavery. It may be ridiculous, but all the same the time will come when a woman will stand before the Judge just as you are now, cross questioning a man perhaps, & she will have just as good a right to do it, & to know whether she is a pure woman or impure from her position, as the men now take it upon themselves to judge of women.”

  That said, Baron Pollock announced, “I think we had better adjourn, I will not say this cause, but this discussion.” His call to close was met with great laughter and the room emptied.

  Victoria returned to the stand the next day and again faced Sir Charles, who questioned her about her famous social freedom speech at Steinway Hall in 1871, the scandal issue of the Weekly in November 1872, and whether, prior to arriving in England and publishing Woodhall & Claflin’s Journal in 1881, she had ever denounced the November 2 article on Beecher. In response to questions on the Steinway lecture, she said she did not remember much about it; as to the scandal issue, she said Stephen Pearl Andrews and Joseph Treat were responsible for it; and on her denunciations of the Beecher exposé, she said she had frequently and repeatedly repudiated it on the lecture circuit but may not have done so in print.

  Sir Charles was frustrated in every attempt to prove that there was no libel on the part of the museum on the basis that Mrs. Martin had written and done everything of which she was accused. She had successfully fended off his assault and was invited to step down out of the witness box.

  After John Martin briefly took the stand to say he agreed entirely with his wife’s testimony, and after testimony was read from a Mr. Washington Moon, who had first alerted the Martins to the books’ existence, the plaintiffs’ case rested.

  Sir Charles began his case for the defense by calling the entire charge absurd. He said that, contrary to the plaintiffs’ claims, the books were not widely circulated. In fact, he said only four people had ever even requested them the entire time they had been available. He said he would show the jury that the case was brought not to win a verdict against the trustees of the museum, “but to allow this lady to make a statement in the box to contradict a number of publications offensive to her.” He said the museum had gone so far as to remove the books from circulation, but still the suit was brought. It was a strange and alarming supposition, he warned, “that by allowing a man to take down a book from the shelves the trustees were, in fact, publishing a libel because it might contain libelous matter.”

  He hypothesized, “Suppose his Lordship had a copy, and one of you gentlemen asked to look at it, and he ascended his library steps and handed it down, would he be guilty of publishing a libel?”

  The judge, Baron Pollock, asked, “Why not, Mr. Attorney?”

  “Unquestionably not, my Lord, because there is a little common sense left in our law,” Sir Charles responded to peals of laughter from the spectators.

  The defense ended by asking the jury to consider several questions: Did the trustees of the museum or their servants, in buying, cataloguing, and producing the books in question for inspection, do so in the belief that they were acting in discharge of their statutory powers and duties? Did the defendants or their servants know that the books contained libels on Mrs. Martin, or ought they have known? And finally, were the defendants guilty of negligence or of any want of reasonable and proper care?

  Sir Charles said he assumed in all these questions that the publications were in fact libelous, but what he questioned was whether the museum was in any way responsible for that libel.

  On the final day of the case, the pensive judge, Baron Pollock, addressed the jury. At seventy, he was nearing the end of his career on the bench and that fact, coupled with
his general appearance, lent weight to his words when he said, “The case which has occupied and received our attention for four days is of great importance to both sides, and is, in many ways a remarkable case. To the plaintiff and her husband, important, as nothing could be graver than anything affecting her character; on the other hand, a great national institution like the British Museum has a high duty imposed upon it to guard over the interests of the public.”

  He reinstructed the jurors as to the legal questions at hand and they retired for nearly two hours of deliberation before reaching their verdict.

  On the question of whether the documents libeled the plaintiff, Mrs. Martin, the jury responded, “Yes.”

  On the question of whether the museum thought in buying the books and making them available for inspection that it was doing its duty, the jury replied, “Yes.”

  On the question of whether the defendants knew that the books contained libels, the jury answered, “No.”

  On the question of whether the museum was negligent in this case, the jury said, “No.”

  On the question of whether the museum had discharged its duties with proper care, caution, and judgment, the jury answered, “No.”

  Because the jury found that the museum had not executed its duties with care, Baron Pollock said that damages could be assessed. He proposed a damage award of five pounds. After consideration, however, the jury decided that the British Museum owed damages to the Martins of just twenty shillings.

  The judge also ruled that Mr. and Mrs. Martin should pay the cost of the defendant’s case. Lawyers for the Martins indicated they might appeal that ruling, but by May 12 museum records noted the case was resolved: “The Principal Librarian reported, in reference to the recent lawsuit ‘Martin v. British Museum’ . . . that notice of appeal on the part of the plaintiffs was served on the Solicitor to the Treasury: but that on the case coming before the Court of Appeal on 19th April, the plaintiffs’ counsel stated that Mrs. Martin having cleared her character did not desire to proceed further with the appeal, which was consequently withdrawn, with costs to the defendants.”

  John Martin paid £508 to the museum for its court costs, and the books in question were permanently withdrawn from the museum’s shelves.

  The case was costly, and inconclusive at best, but Victoria declared it a victory. She had set out to clear her name, and not only the lawyer for the museum, but the judge and the jury as well, had all agreed that the descriptions of her in the offensive texts were false and libelous. A court had finally ruled that she was not the woman the press maintained she was. Her great fight for vindication was over.

  VICTORIA’S LIFE FOLLOWING the British Museum case was positively serene in comparison with what had preceded it. It was as if the demons of slander had been exorcised by the court, leaving her free to enjoy her life with her husband and her work as a writer and publisher. She still suffered bouts of bad health, and there were family troubles involving Tennessee and her daughter, Zula, as well as concerns about the care of Byron, but she was no longer debilitated by her problems as she had been in the past. Due in great part to the devotion of her third husband.

  Despite the years of turmoil and the cost of doing battle in England and America on behalf of his wife, John Martin never seemed to question Victoria’s story or, if he did, he loved her too much to let her know. His letters to her ten years after they were married were as passionate and protective as they had been when he was in the throes of young romance. In the fall of 1894, John wrote to Victoria in New York:

  Dearest little wife, keep up your heart, let it not be afraid, & all will be well; our hearts are not separated by a few miles of water. God bless & keep you safe now & ever your loving boy.

  Dearest little wife, I have been following you in my heart hour by hour, first as you left the dock at New York, then past Sandy Hook, then through the cold on the [Banks?], & now as you are nearly, I hope across the ocean. God keep you safe to land & to home & me. Do you know that it is four weeks since we parted, & I have been all alone ever since. All is well at home, if there is any home without the little wife in it. I cannot write, I must wait till you come, hurry, hurry, hurry.

  By sheer strength of will he would not allow her to fail. As long as he was there, Victoria was safe.

  LONDON, JANUARY 1895

  In 1895, Victoria again plunged into publishing, this time venturing into areas she previously had not entered. The Humanitarian featured articles on madness, in one of which a writer stated, “It is not always easy to draw the line between a hero and a lunatic. Practically we dub him sane if he succeeds and the reverse if he fails.” It tackled the penal system: “Seriously, what a mockery the whole prison system is. We must not only allow our convict population to be bred, but we must pamper and pet them, send them to prison to recruit their health, let them out at intervals to propagate their kind and commit the same crimes, then lock them up again, and continue the same weary round ad infinitum.” It considered the influence of violent books on children, saying that “the imitative instinct is no where more developed than in the tendency to crime. Hundreds of cases of juvenile depravity have been traced to the poisonous influence of penny novelettes and sensational serials, bristling with deeds of burglary and blood.” And the paper questioned whether posters on the street had the same ill effect: “Since these coarse and glaring posters—from the artistic point of view—are abominations, and from the moral aspect calculated to familiarize our street Arabs with crime, and to invest it with a halo of romance, it is difficult to see on what grounds vigilance committees and social purity crusaders (who are always meddling in the morals of other people) suffer its continuance without protest.”

  The Humanitarian attacked the cruelty of a society that cares more for its pets than for its children. It noted that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had a reserve fund of eighty thousand pounds, while the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children had no reserve at all: “This statement of fact is an eloquent comment on the apathy with which many people regard the mental and physical health of the rising generation . . .. A woman will lavish love and care, and attention on a pet cat or a ‘prize’ poodle, and yet draw her skirts aside from the starving children in the gutter. The mew of the cat and the howl of the dog, to say nothing of the squeal of the ‘tortured rabbit’—that figment of anti-vivisectionist imagination—are far more potent to loosen the purse-strings of the sentimentalists than the wail of children.”

  On the women’s movement, she wrote that the suffragists had not kept pace with the general advance of women because of “internal dissensions, divisions, and jealousies” among its leaders, which had “been the bane of the suffrage movement from the beginning. Those who would govern others, must first learn to govern themselves.”

  On health, The Humanitarian said that cigarettes were “undoubtedly the most injurious of all forms of tobacco smoking,” and it cited a coroner who believed that smoking-related deaths were reaching “epidemic” proportions.

  The Humanitarian even dared criticize Parliament: “Thus it comes about that (with some few exceptions) we have a House of Commons composed of a number of mediocrities who are content to echo the shibboleths of their party, to vote like sheep and to respond to the crack of the party whip.” The journal was as bold as the Weekly had been, the only difference being that it stayed away from personal attacks.

  In addition to publishing her newspaper, Victoria had also been pondering her autobiography, and in 1895 she decided to write it. Reams had been written about her, including Tilton’s romanticized version of her life, but no one had told either the full story or the true story, though it was questionable whether Victoria was prepared to do either herself. She was consumed by the project, however, and hinted that publishers were clamoring to produce it. In notes scribbled on bits of paper, she jotted down her memories, snippets recalling details of her life from Homer to New York and then on to Great Britain.

  Victoria to
ld Martin in a note, “[I am] working hard to undo the wrongs that have been put on me and mine by ignorant bad diseased people and God helping one I will not rest until I am known for what I am not what others have made me out to be.”

  In the end, Victoria produced two “autobiographies,” neither of which satisfied readers anxious to understand her. One was bound in heavy stock paper and on its cover, written in a flourishing hand, were the words “Autobiography of Victoria C. Woodhull Brave Sower of Seeds,” but inside the book was empty except for four brief newspaper clippings glued to the cover. The other autobiography was issued in pamphlet form, but aside from its opening it sounded much like a reworking of Tilton’s biography of Victoria. It began: “Sitting here today in this north room of 17, Hyde Park Gate, London—dreary, smoky, foggy, insulated as you are in customs and prejudices of centuries—I am thinking, with all the bitterness of my woman’s nature, how my life has been warped and twisted out of shape in this environment, until, as I catch a glimpse of my haggard face in the mirror opposite, I wonder whether I shall be able to pen the history of this troubled existence.”

  In the end, she could not.

  LAS PALMAS, MARCH 1897

  Victoria’s life began to crumble in 1896. She was sick, her father-in-law was ill, and her husband, who had been so resilient, was suffering from an undiagnosed ailment. In May, he wrote her from his family’s home at Overbury, in a hand so shaky as to be nearly illegible, that he was sick with a headache and fever, “mouth like a furnace & I am coughing so much I cannot write.”

  In October, he was still sick and was diagnosed with “muscular neuralgia,” but he remained in good spirits. He wrote his father, “I am glad to hear from you this morning that your nights have been good lately. I do not seem to get on much, though last night I slept till four o’clock, and then with a great struggle got out of bed & took a sleeping draught, which I think is hanging about me still; but they have persuaded me to stay in bed—a thing that I have not done for a good long time. I am alright as long as I am perfectly quiet, but the least movement is very painful. Our friend Dr. Black is going to bring with him this afternoon another Ch. C. Doctor Green, their patient will fill up scale of colour for he is decidedly blue.”