Ever Victoria!

Part 25

Finally, in the early summer of 1873 the trial of Victoria and Tennie begins. The prosecution and forces of conventional morality are confident of victory. Anthony Comstock is already thinking beyond the Woodhulls to other purveyors of vice; the editorials denouncing Victoria again and praising her conviction and punishment are almost set in type—when the judge surprisingly rules that the law under which Victoria and Tennie have been charged does not apply to newspapers. He directs the jury to deliver a verdict of not guilty, and the jury obliges. Victoria and Tennie go free.

            The verdict is deeply disappointing to all those who wish to see Victoria put away. Anthony Comstock gnashes his teeth; Henry Beecher, having begun to breathe easier, starts gnawing his fingernails again.

            But the gendarmes of respectability haven’t finished with Victoria. She hasn’t had time to savor her courtroom vindication before new allegations are leveled against her. The subject of an article in the Weekly, a man named Luther Challis, has taken angry offense at what the paper has said about him and brings criminal libel charges. The case sputters slowly forward. Victoria and Tennie again go to jail, this time to the Tombs, the mausoleum-like structure in lower Manhattan that houses the municipal halls of justice and detention. Challis hopes to find a sympathetic jury among the majority of New Yorkers who equate Victoria with sin and slander, but after a week-long trial the jury delivers a second verdict of not guilty, prompting the judge to lecture the jurors on the outrage they have inflicted on social sensibility and public order.

            As Victoria is leaving the courtroom she is arrested yet again, this time on civil libel charges brought by Challis. Again the wheels of justice grind, again slowly. The summer of 1874 comes and nearly goes, with the suit still pending. Another plaintiff piles on, a Mrs. Truman who contends that she was cheated of four hundred dollars by Woodhull, Claflin & Co. years before.

            But it is a different case that New York and the country now follow most avidly. By the summer of 1874 the conspiracy of silence among Henry Beecher, Theodore Tilton, Frank Moulton and the others with personal knowledge of Henry’s affair with Lib Tilton is falling apart. The refusal of Beecher and his friends to comment on Victoria’s exposé strikes many observers as equivalent to an admission of guilt. An Ohio editor speaks for others in noting exasperatedly: “Of all those whose names were given in the Woodhull publication, not one, from Beecher to Tilton down, has so much as uttered the word ‘False.’”

            Beecher finally feels obliged to do so. “I have committed no crime,” he tells his flock at Plymouth Church, “and if this society”—the congregation—“believes that it is due it that I should reopen this already too painful subject, or resign, I will resign.” But the church elders don’t want him to resign, and they let the matter slide. To the larger public Beecher declares in the Brooklyn Eagle: “The stories and rumors which have for some time past been circulated about me are grossly untrue, and I stamp them in general and in particular as utterly false.”

            Yet the new lies only compound his distress. He grows insomniac, then hallucinatory. “I retire at night and sleep well until about 4 a.m.,” he tells his doctor, “when I am startled from a sleep which has been dreamless by hearing my name called; and I lie awake, hearing, distinctly and with apparent reality, voices calling me in the sweetest and most inviting tones. Nothing of terror is experienced; on the contrary, my moral state is the most blissful and entrancing. I seem to be on the very borders of Heaven. Now, while this is the case, my judicial reasoning self lies there perfectly aware that this is all hallucination, and the outworking of an overwrought and overstrained brain. I seem to have a double existence, as if another self were beside me in the bed, one perfectly sane and recognizing the other as abnormal, and the other under the full sway of these illusionary perceptions, as well satisfied with their reality as if they truly existed.”

            Eventually the Plymouth Church elders feel obliged to address the matter. First they purge Theodore Tilton from the membership rolls, as though he is responsible for the whole scandal. Henry Beecher waxes forgiving: “Mr. Tilton asks if I have any charge to make against him. I have none. Whatever differences have been between us have been amicably adjusted and, so far as I am concerned, buried.”

            Tilton seethes under this treatment. Beecher’s affair with Lib Tilton, and the Beecher family’s successful efforts to make him the scapegoat, have ruined him personally and professionally, costing him his marriage and his career. No one wants to read what he writes; no one will pay to hear him lecture. He makes public a partial version of the story, not directly accusing Beecher of adultery with Lib Tilton but including an excerpt from a Beecher letter of January 1871 to Frank Moulton. “I ask through you Theodore Tilton’s forgiveness,” Beecher says in the letter. “And I humble myself before him as I do before my God. He would have been a better man in my circumstances than I have been. I can ask nothing except that he will remember all the other hearts that would ache; I will not plead for myself. I even wish that I were dead.”

            Beecher’s quoted words compel the Plymouth Church elders to take another look at the scandal. Beecher cooperates but manages to fill the examining board with friends. The board calls Lib Tilton; she lies for Beecher now as she has lain with him in the past. (“You always find the adulteress with the adulterer,” one cynical lawyer observes.) Tilton rebuts Lib, giving chapter and verse of the tale that is coming to seem less scandalous than tawdry. Beecher repeats his denial of anything but pastoral concern for a member of his flock.

            The church board exonerates Beecher and charges Tilton with attempted blackmail. The finding provides cover for the church but little more. “Justice for Mr. Beecher is quite impossible,” Elizabeth Stanton says amid the hearing. Too many powerful people have too much at stake in his exoneration, she explains. Wealthy friends of Plymouth Church hold its bonds, which till now have been valuable but which will plummet should the church’s prime asset, Beecher’s reputation, be destroyed. Beecher’s paper, the Christian Union, will likewise disappoint its shareholders should Beecher be irretrievably besmirched. “You ask if it is possible for Mr. Beecher to maintain his position in the face of the facts,” Stanton writes a friend. He doesn’t have to. “His position will be maintained for him.”