The Scarlet Sisters (30 page)

The YMCA was ridiculed in the press, but no one could match the acid tones of the sisters, who called the organization “the Young Men’s Christian (Christ forgive the connection) Association.” The sisters attacked in the
Weekly
(after managing to restore their equipment). Comstock’s YMCA was fit for the “title of the American Inquisition.” Although, “We should no more think of comparing Comstock… with Torquemada, than of contrasting a living skunk with a dead lion.”

The “living skunk” prevailed for another half year as the sisters nervously waited without a trial until the summer of 1873. Challis’s libel case moved even more snail-like, not reaching a trial until March 1874. In the meantime, the sisters continued to slam Beecher, Comstock, Challis, the YMCA, and Plymouth Church, keeping the scandal alive and causing the public to ask if Beecher was so innocent, why he was keeping silent.

The ordeal of prison and bad publicity had shattered the sisters more than their fierce façade revealed. Without money, backing, or friends, they tried to weave together a semblance of a life. They subsisted on lecture fees as the curious across the country paid to see criminal celebrities. They kept the
Weekly
afloat throughout the spring of 1873, but money was now a constant problem, and Victoria soon became sick in mind and body.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Life and Death

As the months passed with no resolution on their trials, money worries and exhausting efforts to keep the
Weekly
running plagued the anxious sisters. By May of 1873 there seemed no end to the delays to their final days in court in their libel and obscenity trials. Tennie held up better than Victoria. The pressure on Victoria had left her mind in turmoil. Her bondsmen were weary and gave signs that they might desert the sisters. The hearings upon hearings had worn her out. The tension of endless waiting to find out their fate turned into desperation on June 6. The sisters had endured two days of hearings in a stifling, crowded courtroom on Comstock’s obscenity charge. The judge made no decision, and once again the case was set aside.

As Victoria rode home with Tennie that night, she brooded about her constant persecution. As she walked up the stairs to the house, she clutched her chest and told Tennie she was not feeling well. Victoria had a cup of tea with her family in the dining room but said she was tired and scarcely ate. Blood walked with her upstairs toward her bedroom. On the landing, she suddenly fell with such a crash that Tennie and their mother raced from the dining room and up the stairs. Blood, Tennie, and Annie managed to drag Victoria to her bed. She was unconscious and could not be revived. A messenger was sent for a doctor. Woodhull’s face was ashen. A sobbing Tennie telegraphed her boyfriend, Johnny Green, city editor of the New York
Sun
, wailing that she thought Victoria was dead.

The
Sun
had an exclusive the next day, splashed on page one and then across the country on the wire service. Papers flashed the
DEATH OF THE GREAT REFORMER
. At the time of Tennie’s message, the
Sun
had reason to believe Victoria was dead. The family tried everything to revive her. They felt no pulse. They held a mirror to her face, and there were no signs of breathing. Victoria was unconscious for thirty minutes. Then a trickle of blood oozed from her mouth. When the doctors arrived, they saw little hope. As she moved her head slightly, doctors told her to lie absolutely still. Mustard plasters were applied, and her hands and feet were immersed in hot water. The doctors feared she would die before dawn. Tennie and Blood, the only two allowed with her, sat beside her throughout the night. Woodhull remained unconscious and in critical condition all through Saturday. The doctors thought a blood vessel to her lungs had ruptured and that she may have had a concussion from the fall. On Sunday she regained consciousness but was too weak to leave her bed for days.

Two weeks later, the
Weekly
stated, “Tennie, in her grief, telegraphed to an intimate friend that Victoria was dead.” This error was corrected after Woodhull was revived and “it is very much regretted that it occurred.” This did no good with unrelenting foes. The
Chicago Daily Tribune
had announced that the death report was a hoax to garner sympathy.

A few days before Victoria fell ill in 1873, astonished
New York Times
readers gasped as they read about an astounding cover-up involving adultery, greed, jealousy, and power within the Plymouth Church that had begun as far back as the mid-1860s. This bombshell would have great bearing on the sisters’ obscenity trial and would finally convince the public that the two women may have been telling the truth about Beecher a year and a half before after all. The article in the
New York Times
was a paid announcement, bought by Beecher’s friend Samuel Wilkeson for the purpose of exposing and tarnishing Henry Bowen, Beecher’s wealthy patron and president of Plymouth Church. Wilkeson, who had bankrolled Beecher’s latest book for a whopping $10,000, used the pseudonym “Suffolk,” but was soon identified.
GALVANIZING A FILTHY SCANDAL
was
the
Times
headline on the Wilkeson story, which depicted Bowen as a two-faced manipulator. “It is high time that the torrent of slander against Henry Ward Beecher be arrested,” wrote “Suffolk,” a.k.a. Wilkeson. He wrote about the trio who had colluded in the great cover-up and who had signed a tripartite covenant: Beecher, Tilton, and Bowen.

Ten years previously, in 1863, Bowen had burned with jealousy and revenge when his wife, Lucy, told him on her deathbed that Beecher had committed adultery with her. Bowen’s sense of betrayal was immense; he had brought the dynamic preacher east in 1847, paid his old debts, and housed and clothed Beecher and his family. In exchange, Beecher had ignited Bowen’s parishioners and became the golden goose Bowen could not afford to alienate. Still, Bowen could not hold his tongue at this revelation from his dying wife, and told young Tilton the sordid tales of Beecher’s adultery with Lucy and with other parishioners’ wives; some possessed private keys to the preacher’s study.

Tilton could not forget Bowen’s lurid tale about Edna Dean Proctor, a budding author who was living in the Bowen mansion during the 1850s. Beecher was alone in Bowen’s home with young Edna, who planted a kiss on Beecher, who then “threw her down on a sofa, accomplished his deviltry upon her and left her.” Bowen charged that “it was ‘no less than rape’ ” or “something very nearly like ravishment.” The ever-charitable Beecher said he was sure Proctor was no virgin anyway, but denied that he had violently assaulted her. Beecher’s relations with “certain ladies of the church” was such common talk in the 1860s, Bowen revealed to Tilton, that congregational leaders had confronted Beecher, who promised there would be no further cause for gossip.

Meanwhile, in the late 1860s, Tilton was acting out as the problematical wunderkind of the church paper, the
Independent
. He printed essays satirizing solemn orthodoxy and advocated women’s rights. He defiantly said his views were the same as Beecher’s, but the preacher, backing influential church factions hostile to Tilton, denied he shared Tilton’s ideas and sharply rebuked him.

With his eyes always on the collection plate, Bowen stalled; he could
not get rid of the popular preacher who may have seduced his wife, but Tilton’s talent and growing fame were also too precious to kill. Relations between Tilton and Beecher had quickly soured after Tilton quarreled violently with his wife, Elizabeth, in the summer of 1870 over
her
alleged affair with Beecher. Tilton stewed, ranted to his female suffragist friends, and penned an editorial (published on December 1, 1870, in the church paper) arguing the free love view that loveless marriages should be dissolved.

A month later, in January 1871, Bowen fired Tilton. Machiavellian money maneuverings, however, necessitated that no more bad blood be spilled, although all three men remained bitter toward one another. Wrangling continued, and like wary nations attempting to avoid all-out war, the three signed their secret “tripartite covenant” more than a year later, in April 1872, in which they agreed to keep mum about their spiteful little secrets. But the snarling did not stop, and just a few weeks before the sisters’ 1873 obscenity trial, the
New York Times
was printing these spicy details of adultery and cover-up. The
Times
tried to have it both ways, publishing prurient details while professing high-minded purity. This “very disgusting controversy” should have been left to “circulate among the organs of the slums with which it originated”—meaning, of course, the
Weekly
. “Slanders upon the character and habits of Mr. Beecher,” wrote the
Times
, first appeared in “an obscene newspaper.”

The tripartite agreement was innocuous compared with the blistering accompanying letter, written by a furious Tilton to Bowen after he had fired Tilton in January 1871, which Wilkeson had obtained. Bowen had sandbagged Tilton by discrediting him to Beecher as a dangerous radical. Tilton’s letter fingered Bowen as the one who had spread the Beecher adultery stories. As the public read the damaging letter, now two and a half years old, Beecher was too scared to face his congregation. He composed a letter of resignation, went to Frank Moulton’s wife, Emma, and wailed that he “might as well go out of life.” As always, Beecher’s theatrical despair faded, and he was soon back at the pulpit.

Meanwhile, the press was hounding Bowen so fiercely for scandal details that he frantically sought the very sisters he had so often attacked.
A strange gathering occurred on the night of June 25, 1873, when several dignitaries and Plymouth Church brethren trooped up the stairs of a Manhattan brownstone and were met by Woodhull, Tennie, their mother, sister Utica, lawyers, and a newspaperman.

With grim satisfaction, the sisters faced the humbled Puritan potentates. Assailed by newspapers for trying to wreck Beecher and certain that Beecher was planning revenge, Bowen desperately needed evidence. Woodhull had claimed she possessed damaging letters, and Bowen now wanted her treasure trove. He had hoped to keep the meeting secret, bringing his own stenographer, but the sisters had made sure that it would make the next day’s papers.

An
Eagle
reporter grilled the sisters after the meeting. Bowen said he had come for “corroborative evidence against Mr. Beecher… to vindicate his honor,” recalled Woodhull. “I said to him that I was astonished that he should come to me to vindicate his character… ‘you knew of some of these facts years ago, and yet you have kept silent’ she scolded him.” Despite Bowen’s admission that he was scrambling for evidence to save himself, Woodhull suspiciously thought this was a trick. “I believe that you are here in the interest of that gigantic fraud, Henry Ward Beecher,” she told Bowen, and denounced him for abetting in her harassment. Tennie spoke up: “If you had no hand in my persecution how is it that you sent for those papers which were used against me?” Bowen weakly responded that he had purchased the scandal issue that led to the obscenity arrest because, when he saw “anything interesting or spicy in our paper he was in the habit of sending for three or four copies.”

When Bowen asked for letters, Woodhull teasingly told him, “after several month’s [
sic
] intimacy with Mr. Beecher, being with him frequently and alone, that our correspondence was not one of mere platonic affection.” She knew from “personal experience that Mr. Beecher is a free lover.” She had no “personal enmity” against Beecher, whom she had just called a “gigantic fraud.”

She also referred to the crux of Bowen’s revenge: “I said to him that I could not understand how he could go to church Sunday after Sunday,
and look in the face of this man who was reported to have debauched his wife, and then sit with sealed lips.” Bowen replied that he had “felt in honor bound to keep silent” then, but now “his lips were unsealed.” She gave Bowen a swift peek at Beecher’s signatures on two letters, but not the contents. (The letters were a bluff, relating only to Beecher’s not attending a suffrage convention and to her Steinway Hall speech.) Woodhull’s game contained an underlying quid pro quo: if Bowen could swing the obscenity trial in their favor, she might cooperate with him.

Five days after the meeting, the sisters won their startling victory in court against Comstock. The sisters, who had claimed all along that the church was behind their persecution, now felt sure that it was the Plymouth Church lawyers who had pulled strings to settle the long-overdue trial. The judge suddenly ruled that the statute under which the women had been arrested did not specify newspapers—a decision that certainly could have been reached months before had not the prosecution presented roadblocks. Even the
Brooklyn Eagle
excoriated the prosecution as an “Inglorious Failure.”

Ironically, Comstock had defeated himself. Earlier in 1873 he had succeeded in getting a tougher federal obscenity law passed, one that
included
newspapers. This new provision was proof that the law had
not
covered the sisters at the time he arrested them in 1872.

Comstock lost his big prey but was able to escalate future convictions, severely damaging free speech and tyrannizing the literary world well into the twentieth century. He confiscated works by Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, and George Bernard Shaw. When he stalked Shaw’s plays, the playwright blazingly attacked him, coining the word “Comstockery.… it confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all.” Comstock referred to the Nobel Prize laureate as the “Irish smut dealer.” In 1914, birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger fled to Europe when Comstock tried to arrest her. Comstock died the next year, but his law, particularly as it pertained to curbing contraceptives, lived on for decades.

As for Beecher, the public humiliation—disclosures of alleged adultery, church leaders trudging to the scandalous sisters seeking Beecher sex
secrets—finally forced the scared preacher to print a public denial a few days after the sisters’ obscenity trial victory. All the “stories and rumors” are “utterly false,” he wrote.