Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to address a Congressional Committee and the first woman to run for president. She and her sister were known as spiritualists as well as being the first women to own a newspaper and a stock brokerage. But Victoria Woodhull’s most notorious reputation was her advocacy for free love. Thomas Nast, prolific illustrator, pilloried Victoria as [Mrs.] Satan incarnate because she rejected marriage as an oppressive institution and embraced what she termed sexual freedom.

In the foreground, the viewer sees Victoria wearing her black wings and carrying the banner for Free Love. In the background, the virtuous wife carries her alcoholic husband and her children on the treacherous path of life. The caption beneath reads: “Get Thee Behind Me, [Mrs. Satan]! I’d rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow in your footsteps.”

[Details about Victoria Woodhull’s early career may be found here.]

The Vanderbilt Connection

Thomas Nast’s visual rejection was less harmful to Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennesee Clafflin than the loss of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s goodwill. Cornelius Vanderbilt was one of America’s earliest self-made millionaires. During late 1860s, Vanderbilt became interested in spiritualism and the expertise Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin provided. Some say Tennesee provided more than spiritual services, and after the death of Vanderbilt’s wife, Tennessee became a regular visitor to Vanderbilt’s home and office. Coincidentally, Vanderbilt provided the financing for Woodhull & Claflin’s brokerage and newspaper.

In 1869 Vanderbilt married Frank Crawford Vanderbilt, a cousin Vanderbilt and his first wife had in common. Frank signed a prenuptial agreement that provided her with $500,000 in bonds at the time of her husband’s death. Frank did not approve of the continued relationship her husband had with Victoria and Tenneseee. In 1871, both sisters were denied access to Vanderbilt’s home, and he ceased to send funds to the sisters.

In May 1871 an interfamily lawsuit brought Tennessee to a New York witness stand where she declared: “I am a clairvoyant; I am a spiritualist; I have power and I know my power,…Many of the best men in the street know my power. Commodore Vanderbilt knows my power. I have humbugged people, I know. But if I did it, it was to make money …” [Well, if that’s all it was…]

In February 1872, the same month Nast published “Mrs. Satan,” Victoria delivered a speech criticizing Vanderbilt and other railroad magnates as betrayers of the public trust. Victoria broke the Beecher-Tilton story the same month and in November found herself in the Ludlow Street Jail.

After six months and paying $500,000 in bail and fines, Victoria, her sister Tennessee, and her husband Col. Blood were acquited of all charges.

Funds for a Fresh Start

Essentially destitute, Victoria and her sister tried to restart their newspaper and in 1875 they published an open letter to Cornelius Vanderbilt. “We want our paper endowed beyond fear of disaster . . . [This] would require a paltry sum only when compared to your many millions – a sum whose absence neigher you nor your heirs would scarcely feel; but which for what we ask, it would be salvation indeed.” Vanderbilt did not reply.

[In an unrelated matter, Victoria divorced Col. Blood.]

On January 4, 1877, Cornelius Vanderbilt died, leaving an estate valued at $105 million. Vanderbilt left eleven surviving children: two sons and nine daughters. The eldest son, William, and his sons received 95 percent of the estate. William’s brother and two of his sisters sued, claiming that Vanderbilt was not in his right mind when he made the will. William settled the suit out of court by giving his brother and each of the two sisters who complained $200,000 and a trust fund of $400,000.

Prior to the settlement and worried the sisters might testify on behalf of his siblings, William paid Victoria and Tennessee $1000 to leave the country. The sisters relocated to England where Victoria returned to the lecture circuit.

Victoria Woodhull Martin

On December 4, 1877 Victoria gave a lecture on “The Human Body, The Temple of God” at St. James Hall in London. In the audience, banker John Biddulph Martin fell under Victoria’s spell. The couple married on October 31, 1883. Victoria continued to lecture and also published a magazine, The Humanitarian, which emphasized eugenics as a means of social progress.

Victoria and her husband put Victoria’s controversial American past behind them. Victoria was, apparently, misunderstood. “Free love is not what I asked for nor what I pleaded for. What I asked for was educated love, that our daughters be taught to love rightly.”

In 1894, Victoria and her husband sued the British Museum for libel, because the museum exhibited pamphlets related to the Beecher-Tilton Scandal. They said the pamphlets incriminated Victoria with information that was false. They lost the case, but proved they would not allow Victoria’s reputation to be tarnished.

When Martin died in 1901, Victoria and her sister moved to Bredon’s Nortan, a small village near Worcestershire where they began a life of good works, including a donation of £55 for church renovations, gas street lights, a postal service, and telephone availability.

Victoria also became active in the Sulgrave Movement, an effort to improve relations between the United States and England. Victoria contributed funds to purchase Sulgrave Manor, the home of George Washingtons’ ancestors, located in Northamptonshire, England. [In this photo, the right side of the structure is the original 16^th century manor house.]

In her later years, Victoria enjoyed ‘motor cars’ and dismissed numerous chauffeurs, because they didn’t drive fast enough. Finally, Victoria took her place behind the wheel of her Mercedes Simplex. In 1903, Victoria was the first woman observed driving a motor car in Hyde Park, London. The following year, she founded a Lady’s Motor Club.

Victoria Woodhull died on June 9, 1927. There is a cenotaph in her honor at Tewkesbury Abbey in Worcestershire. In 2001, Victoria was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls NY.

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Illustrations

Thomas Nast. Mrs. Satan. Harper’s Weekly, Feb. 17, 1872.

Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Frank Armstrong Crawford Vanderbilt. 1906.

Victoria Woodhull, 1880.

John Biddulph Martin, 1886.

Lane in Bredon’s Norton. Attribution: Lane in Bredon’s Norton by Peter Whatley.

Photo of Sulgrave Manor. Attribution: Cathy Cox.

Photo of Mercedes Simplex 40 PS by Triple-green.

Sulgrave Manor.

Edward Renehan.”Strange Bedfellows: Commodore Vanderbilt and the Woodhull/Claflins.” History News Network. Dec. 2, 2007.

Sulgrave Manor, Ancestral Home of George Washington.

The post The Rehabilitation of Victoria Woodhull first appeared on Sandra Wagner-Wright.

Illustration at left stresses Henry Ward Beecher’s hypocrisy in his relationship with Elizabeth Tilton. Center drawing of Mrs. Tilton seated in Beecher’s lap; a reference in the bottom left to Beecher and a Mrs. Moulton, and other negative references to Beecher.

On May 22, 1871 the New York World printed a letter written by Victoria Woodhull. Without naming names, Victoria referred to the hyporcisy of a man who spoke out against her doctrine of free love while also privately engaging in the practice. Most readers did not know the subject of her attack, but more than a few did.

The morning her letter appeared, Victoria invited Theodore Tilton to her office and informed him that the man she accused of hyprocsy was Henry Ward Beecher, the famous pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights and one of Tilton’s long time associates. Victoria informed Tilton she knew of the affair between Beecher and Tilton’s wife Elizabeth. Tilton was not in a position to deny Victoria’s allegations, because he himself had pressured his wife’s confession to the affair in July 1870. In December, Elizabeth made a written confession in which she declared that Beecher had made ‘improper advances’ and tried to seduce her. After Beecher saw Elizabeth’s written confession, he pressured her to write a retraction, and then her husband forced Elizabeth to retract her retraction.

Initially, Beecher and the Tiltons were close friends. In fact, Beecher had married the couple in 1855. Beecher edited a religious newspaper called the New York Independent. In 1861, he stepped back as editor and gave the job to Tilton. All was well until the late 1860s when Tilton’s editorials became more radical, including support for the concept of free love. As Tilton’s career took off with lecture tours that took him away from home, Beecher continued to call, and Elizabeth Tilton received him without a chaperone. Beecher later said he came to support Elizabeth at a time when she needed religious guidance in the face of her husband’s increasingly unorthodox beliefs. She said she formed an emotional attachment.

Besides the three people most directly affected, others were aware of the situation. One was Martha Bradshaw, a deaconess at Plymouth Church and a friend of Tilton’s. Others included Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Laura Curtis Bullard. All were friends of the Tilton’s as well as campaigners for women’s right to vote. It appears that when Henry Ward Beecher wavered in his support of women’s rights, Stanton shared information about Beecher’s affair at the 1871 National Women’s Suffrage Association in Washington, which may have been where Victoria heard the rumor.

When Theodore Tilton realized Victoria knew about the affair, he wrote about her in a journal he edited, calling Victoria a “gentle but fiery genius.”* Victoria enjoyed the accolade but was interested in more tangible benefits. With Tilton’s support, Victoria suggested that Beecher introduce her lecture at the Steinway Hall in Manhattan. As Victoria reported the conversation, Beecher “got up on the sofa on his knees beside me, and taking my face between his hands, while the tears streamed down his cheeks, he begged me to let him off.”* In the end, Tilton made the introduction.

Victoria’s animosity increasd when Beecher’s sisters attacked her. Catherine Beecher, the well-known author of the Treatise on Domestic Economy and other publications stressing the central role women played as mothers and educators, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, impugned Victoria’s character, as did other members of the women’s rights movement. Victoria also fell out with Tilton. At that point, Victoria made the scandal public on November 2, 1872 by exposing details on the front page of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.

On the one hand, Victoria wrote, she believed “in the right of privacy and in the perfect right of Mr. Beecher, socially, morally and divinely, to have sought the embraces of Mrs. Tilton”* Victoria went on to say that she “conceive[d] that Mrs. Tilton’s love for Mr. Beecher was her true marriage . . . and that her marriage to Mr. Tilton is prostitution.”

The scandal’s effect electrified the country. Victoria Woodhull and her sister were notorious for their views on free love, women’s rights, spiritualism, vegetarianism, and all manner of radical social causes. Henry Ward Beecher was a renowned abolitinist, preacher, and pillar of society. Legal reaction was swift. On November 2, 1872, Anthony Comstock arranged for Woodhull, her husband Col. Blood, and her sister Tennessee Clafllin to be arrested and charged with publishing an obscene newspaper that they distributed through the mails. That was the end of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. The sisters were held in the Ludlow Street Jail for a month, denying Victoria the chance to vote for her own candidacy as president. Six months after their arrest, the three were acquitted.

To the dismay of some and delight of others, the Tilton-Beecher scandal continued to escalate. Details in next week’s blog.

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*Quotations taken from Robert Shaplen. The Beecher-Tilton Affair. New Yorker. June 4, 1954.

Illustrations

Testimony in Beecher-Tilton Scandal Case by James E. Cook. 1875.

Victoria Woodhull.

Elizabeth Tilton.

Henry Ward Beecher.

Theodore Tilton.

Henry Ward Beecher & His Sister Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Laura Hanft Korobkin. “The Maintenance of Mutual Confidence.” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. Vol 7. No. 1. 1995.

The post Beecher-Tilton Scandal: Part 1 first appeared on Sandra Wagner-Wright.

Victoria Clafllin Woodhull lived life on her own terms and if her terms were scandalous, all the better. She was the seventh of ten children born to unmarried parents. Her mother, a believer in spiritualism; her father, a some-time lawyer and con man. As a child, Victoria worked as a fortune teller and child preacher, presumably not at the same time. In 1853 at the age of 14, Victoria married Canning Woodhull. It was not a happy marriage. After bearing two children, Victoria divorced her husband (perhaps due to his alocoholism and numerous affairs) and kept his surname.

As a divorced woman and single parent, Victoria, by social definition, lived a scandalous life. She built on her situation later in her career when she became an advocate of Free Love, by which she meant women should have the right to marry, divorce, and have children without any social repercussions. Even more shocking, Victoria believed the choice of whether to have sexual relations should rest with the woman.

Speaking at the Steinway Hall in 1871, Victoria declared: “I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere” 

In 1866, Victoria married her second husband, Col. James Blood, a civil war veteran. Like Victoria, he had ties to spiritualism, a popular religious movement that believed people could communicate with spirits of the dead. Given the devastation of the recent civil war, the movement’s popularity is perhaps understandable. Victoria said she believed in spiritualism because gave her the belief in the possibility of a better life.

With her husband and sister Tennessee Claflin, Victoria moved to New York City where the sisters began careers as spiritualists with an eye to catching Cornelius Vanderbilt’s attention. Vanderbilt believed in spiritualism and had been attending sessions with a Mrs. Tufts on Staten Island. When Tufts retired, Vanderbilt patronized Tennesse Claflin who became his lover.

In 1870, Vanderbilt provided the financing that allowed Victoria and her sister to open Woodhull, Claflin & Company, the first female brokerage firm in New York. On one occasion, Victoria advised Vanderbilt on selling shares – he earned millions. The sisters became known as the Queens of Finance.

That same year, the sisters founded Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, a newspaper that at its height had a circulation of 20,000. With a slogan of “Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives!”, the paper published stories advocating women’s suffrage, spiritualism, vegetarianism, and licencesed prostitution. On December 30, 1871, Victoria printed the first English version of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

In her advocacy of women’s suffrage, Victoria became the first woman to petition Congress in person when she testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the 14^th and 15^th constitutional amendments guaranteeing that all citizens have the right to vote legalized the right of women to vote, declaring “[W]omen are the equals of men before the law, and are equal in all their rights.”

Leaders of the National Woman Suffrage Association postponed the opening of their third annual convention in 1871 in order to attend the hearing. Susan B. Anthony invited Victoria to repeat her speech at their convention and also to join the NWSA. It was a shortlived association after Victoria challenged Anthony for leadership in the organization.

The following year, on May 10 1872, the Equal Rights Party nominated Victoria for president, though technically she didn’t meet the age requirement. Nevertheless, Victoria was the first woman to run for president, facing opponents Ulysses S. Grant and Horace Greeley.

Twelve days after her nomination, Victoria submitted a letter to the editor of the New York World in which she called out her detractors:

“My judges preach against “free love” openly and practice it secretly; their outward seeming is fair [but] inwardly they are full of “dead men’s bones and all manner of uncleanness.” For example, I know of one man, a public teacher of eminence, who lives in concubinage with the wife of another public teacher of almost equal eminence. . . . I shall make it my business to analyze some of these lives. . . . I have no faith in critics, but I believe in justice.”

The repercussions of this letter are the subject of next week’s blog.

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Illustrations

Victoria Woodhull by Matthew Brady.

Col. James H. Blood, 1866.

Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.

Victoria Woodhull Speaking Before House Judiciary Committee, 1871.

Victoria Woodhull Poster, 1879.

Carol Felsenthal. “The Strange Tale of the First Woman to Run for President.” Politico Magazine. Apr. 9, 2015.

Danny Lewis. “Victoria Woodhull Ran for President Before Women Had the Right to Vote.” Smithsonian Magazine. May 10, 2016.

Edward Renehan. “Strange Bedfellows: Commodore Vanderbilt and the Woodhull/Claflins.” History News Network. Dec. 2, 2007.

The post Victoria Woodhull: The First Woman to Run for President first appeared on Sandra Wagner-Wright.