The Square Pegs (15 page)

Victoria’s mother, who believed in fortunetelling and the spirit world, conducted her unruly household after the precepts of that Austrian mystic, Friedrich Mesmer, who preached that human cures could be accomplished by occult force. Mrs. Claflin preferred Mesmer to the local physician, and three of her children died in their infancy. When Victoria was three years old, a housekeeper also died. Victoria saw her lofted on high by several muscular angels, and promptly swooned. Thereafter she was in constant touch with supernatural beings. Angels were her only friends, excepting the visions of two sisters who had died in childhood and with whom she continued to play. “She would talk to them,” a friend reported, “as a girl tattles to her dolls.” By her eleventh year she had had only three years of formal education. Her teachers found her uncommonly intelligent. Before she could continue her learning, a painful episode forced her abruptly to leave school and Homer, Ohio.

Buckman Claflin, a man who ordinarily had little interest in his possessions, suddenly had a change of heart one day in 1849. He took out insurance on his wooden grist-mill. As he had hardly funds to feed his family, and since the mill lay rotting of disuse, the precaution seemed oddly extravagant. One week later, when he was on a business trip ten miles away, the grist mill went up in flames. Claflin returned to collect his insurance. He was met not by an agent bearing the benefits of his premium, but by a vigilante committee of leading citizens. He found himself accused of arson and fraud. He was given the quick choice of the hemp or exile. Within the hour he departed for Pennsylvania. In the week following, the town raised money for the rest of the family and sent them packing.

Thus, necessity forced Roxanna Claflin, and Victoria and the rest of the hungry clan, to call upon their resources of invention. They formed a medicine show and sold a complexion oil made of vegetable juice. In the community of Mount Gilead, Ohio, where they were evicted from their first boardinghouse because Victoria evoked spirit music, they prospered briefly. And there, in 1853, when she was sixteen years of age, Victoria married Dr. Canning Woodhull.

She had met him two years earlier, at a Fourth of July picnic, and had seen him more or less steadily thereafter. He has been referred to as a “young dandy” and a “gay rake” and a “brilliant fop” who treated Victoria “abominably.” Most latter-day judgments have been derived from a biased biography of Victoria written by Theodore Tilton after he had become her lover. Tilton declared that Victoria had been forced into the marriage by her parents. “Her captor, once possessed of his treasure, ceased to value it. On the third night after taking his child wife to his lodgings, he broke her heart by remaining away all night at a house of ill-repute. Then for the first time, she learned to her dismay that he was habitually unchaste, and given to long fits of intoxication.”

As a matter of fact, Dr. Woodhull was anything but the cloven-footed devil depicted by the prejudiced Tilton. He came from a respectable Rochester, New York, family. He had been well educated in Boston. He had planned to acquire great riches during the gold rush to California, but had fallen ill in Ohio, and had remained there to resume his practice of medicine. When the Claflins rode into Mount Gilead he was

a bachelor who dreamed of a peaceful home and a large family. He thought Victoria would help him fulfill that dream, but he miscalculated the character of his mate, and the mistake ruined his life. The problem in Dr. Woodhull’s eleven years of discordant marriage was that he had bargained for a wife and had gotten a self-absorbed St. Joan who, like the Maid, heard voices and had a destiny (inspired by excessive devotion to the writings of George Sand) higher than that of the kitchen. Nevertheless, the restless and ambitious Victoria spent sufficient time with Dr. Woodhull to bear him two children a boy, Byron, who lost his wits when he stumbled out of a second-story window, and a girl, Zulu Maud, who was to be the comfort of Victoria’s later years.

Soon after her marriage Victoria decided that Ohio restricted her natural abilities. She induced her befuddled husband to abandon his practice and take her to California. There, through the recommendation of an actress named Anna Cogswell, she obtained a small role in a stage comedy entitled
New York by Gas Light
. This play led to others. But Victoria’s progress was slow, and soon enough she realized that her future lay in a different form of entertainment. For in the East two other performers, Margaret and Katherine Fox, of Hydesville, New York, had attained a meteoric rise without ever once appearing in grease paint.

The Fox sisters had heard weird rappings at night “as though someone was knocking on the floor and moving chairs.” Addressing overflow audiences that included such reputable personages as Horace Greeley, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant, the sisters were interpreting the rappings as communications from the spirit world. Though a conclave of conservative medical men in Buffalo announced that the so-called rappings were created by the sisters themselves by cracking their knee and ankle joints, lay audiences refused to be so easily disillusioned. Seances became the rage, and accomplished mediums were much in demand. In California this need finally reached the ears of Victoria Woodhull, who had long before communed with spirits for mere pleasure, but who now determined to forego her amateur status for an opportunity to share the large sums being offered to expert spiritualists.

Victoria, trailed by her sodden husband, caught up with her family in Cincinnati, where they were treating the gullible with a new cancer cure. When Victoria explained her plan the entire family was in agreement. A house was rented. A sign was posted, reading: “Tennessee Claflin, and Victoria Woodhull, Clairvoyants.” The sisters gave noisy seances, at a dollar a head, and even attracted so famous a client as Jesse R. Grant, the father of Ulysses S. Grant. To the conjuring up of good spirits, the ladies added fortunetelling and magnetic healing. Their youth and attractiveness brought in a preponderance of male customers, who were prepared to pay far more for closer communion with their mediums. Apparently Victoria and Tennessee were not above practicing prostitution. The combination of soothsayer and whore might have enriched Victoria enormously had not Tennessee crudely spoiled the game. When Tennessee began to employ for the purposes of blackmail information gained as seer and strumpet, she was sued.

The Woodhulls and the Claflins left Cincinnati in great haste, and began a spiritualistic tour of Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri. In St. Louis, Victoria found true love. She had been invited to appear before the local Spiritualist Society to defend her doctrines against the attack of a clergyman. As spiritualism, which already had from three to four million followers in the United States, had somehow attracted persons interested in free love, feminine emancipation, and social reform, it was not surprising that Colonel James Harvey Blood was also in the audience. Though ostensibly Blood was covering the debate for the
St. Louis Times
, the real motive for his attendance was his interest in socialism and advanced social theory. Blood, a handsome veteran of the Civil War who had been wounded five times, was married and the father of two children. Disenchanted by his wife’s materialism, by his job, and by the avaricious men it brought him in contact with, he sought comfort in a private vision of Utopia. When Victoria Woodhull on the debate platform spoke of the same Utopia, Blood was impressed. And when she spoke of the slavery of wifehood, when she announced that there was no such thing as sin, he knew he must meet her.

To meet her, Blood pretended to be a client needing advice. His delicacy was not necessary. According to Tilton, it was Victoria who at once saw a soulmate in Blood and seduced him forthwith. “Col. James H. Blood … called one day on Mrs. Woodhull to consult her as a Spiritualistic physician (having never met her before), and was startled to see her pass into a trance, during which she announced, unconsciously to herself, that his future destiny was to be linked with hers in marriage. Thus, to their mutual amazement, but to their subsequent happiness, they were betrothed on the spot by ‘the powers of the air.’”

After that impromptu betrothal, Victoria and Blood lived as lovers. Blood abandoned St. Louis and his family to travel with Victoria to Chicago. Victoria also permitted the cuckolded, unprotesting Dr. Woodhull to accompany her, and assigned him to the task of looking after their children. In Chicago, after much legal difficulty, Victoria divorced Dr. Woodhull on the charge of adultery, and Blood divorced his wife after agreeing to a substantial settlement. Victoria and Tennessee rented a house on Harrison Street and performed as oracles. When neighbors suspected that they were also performing as women of easy virtue, the police were summoned. There being no proof of prostitution, the law accused them of “fraudulent fortunetelling.” Once again the menage was on the road. In Pittsburgh, Victoria saw the light on the marble table which spelled the name Demosthenes and the vision that was to lead her to Commodore Vanderbilt.

Having acquired, through Vanderbilt’s friendship and advice, a profit of $700,000 by stock speculation (though she complained that her business and family expenses amounted to $300,000 a year) and assured of an income of $50,000 annually from her thriving brokerage firm, which recommended investments in subway projects and silver mines, Victoria turned her full attentions to promoting her candidacy for president of the United States. Probably no one, not even Victoria, could properly define her real purpose in competing for the nation’s highest office. In an age when women in America had not even the vote (except in the Wyoming territory) her candidacy was regarded as pure eccentricity. Her real purpose undoubtedly was colored by a need for publicity and attention, and an honest desire to dramatize the rising clamor among women for equal rights and a single moral standard.

However, Victoria’s candidacy would have died stillborn had it not been for the astute direction of two men who cleverly guided her every action. One was, of course, Colonel Blood, who saw in his mistress a mouthpiece for his own ideas on fiat money, female emancipation, and labor reform. The other, a newcomer to Victoria’s growing circle, was the aged, bearded Stephen Pearl Andrews, a brilliant and renowned scholar, philosopher, and anarchist.

Andrews, the son of a Baptist minister, had college degrees in law and medicine. He had taught in a ladies’ seminary in New Orleans, had narrowly escaped lynching in Houston for his abolitionist views, and had become an advocate of Isaac Pitman’s system of shorthand, which he introduced into the United States. An extraordinary linguist, he knew thirty-two languages, including Chinese, on which he published a textbook in 1854. When he had enough of learning languages, he invented one of his own called Alwato, a forerunner of Esperanto based on his own interpretation of the different meanings of sounds. As he grew older, Andrews became more deeply interested in sociology. He conceived an anarchistic perfect state that he called Pantarchy. According to the dictates of Pantarchy the governing body took care of one’s children and one’s property, leaving the individual free to live as he wished. Quite naturally, as the government “had no more right to interfere with morals than with religion,” Andrews’s Utopia advocated free and natural love.

As spiritualism was one more expression of revolt against convention, hundreds of spiritualists subscribed to Andrews’s Pantarchy. But Andrews, a sweet, sincere radical, wanted not hundreds, but thousands to follow his new way. In Victoria Woodhull, with her daring and originality, he saw a useful ally. If she would be president, she must have a platform. Why should her platform not embody the tenets of Pantarchy? Andrews managed to meet her and to enchant her (she thought him the corporeal representation of her beloved Demosthenes). Soon Andrews joined Blood in laying out a campaign that would promote her name and their own ideas.