Ever Victoria!
Part 22
Beecher shudders as he reads the letter. He would call a halt to the persecution of Victoria, but that would require compromising his reputation. He would have to explain—to his sisters, at least, and perhaps to his congregation—his sudden interest in this disreputable character. He would support her stand for personal freedom, but that would jeopardize his position at Plymouth Church and the worldly success that accompanies it. He would ignore her, but if does so she might reveal his dark secret and ruin him all the same.
He pushes the matter off on Francis Moulton. “Will you answer this?” he asks. “Or will you see that she is to understand that I can do nothing! I certainly shall not, at any and all hazards, take a single step in that direction; and if it brings trouble, it must come.”
But then he changes his mind. He decides to answer Victoria himself. “I replied very briefly,” he later testifies, “saying I regretted when anybody suffered persecution for the advocacy of their sincere views, but that I must decline to interfere.”
For a time his refusal to deal with Victoria seems to be working. Events of the summer of 1872 distract Henry Beecher, Victoria and everyone else in America. Scandals in the Grant administration have prompted the liberal wing of the Republican party to rally behind Horace Greeley for president. The Democrats fall into step, thinking Greeley a likely stalking horse for their own ambitions. Reformers of various stripes debate whether to join the Greeley parade. The causes Victoria has embraced seem secondary, at least for the moment, to the quadrennial quest for the presidency. Her own candidacy, initially treated as a statement or a stunt, is now simply a bad joke no one wants to hear. And no one wants to hear her; her lecture opportunities have nearly vanished.
She is deeply disheartened. Nearly everything she worked for has been lost. She ponders simply dropping out of sight. But a feeling of obligation to her first constituency—the spiritualists—prompts her to travel to Boston. The national association of spiritualists is holding its annual meeting there, and she is the president, having been elected the previous year, before her celebrity turned to infamy. “I went there dragged by the sense of duty,” she says later: “tired, sick and discouraged as to my own future, to surrender my charge as president of the association, feeling as if I were distrusted and unpopular, and with no consolation but the consciousness of having striven to do right, and my abiding faith in the wisdom and help of the spirit world.”
When she arrives in Boston the spirits, too, seem to have abandoned her. “I felt around me everywhere, not indeed a positive hostility, not even a fixed spirit of unfriendliness, but one of painful uncertainty and doubt.” She listens to the speeches with little interest.
But then her turn comes, and with it a sudden change. “I rose finally to my feet to render an account of my stewardship, to surrender the charge and retire. Standing there before that audience, I was seized by one of those overwhelming gusts of inspiration which sometimes come upon me, from I know not where; taken out of myself; hurried away from the immediate question of discussion, and made, by some power stronger than I, to pour out into the ears of that assembly, and, as I was told subsequently, in a rhapsody of indignant eloquence, with circumstantial detail, the whole history of the Beecher and Tilton scandal.”
Her enthusiasm renders her unaware of precisely what she is saying. “I know perhaps less than any of those present all that I actually did say. They tell me that I used some naughty words upon that occasion. All that I know is, that if I swore, I did not swear profanely. Some said, with the tears streaming from their eyes, that I swore divinely.”
She has sufficient grasp of her message to expect a resounding impact on the reform world. But her words fall dead outside the hall. “The public press of Boston professed holy horror at the freedom of my speech and restricted their reports to the narrowest limits, carefully suppressing what I had said of the conduct of the great clergyman.” The tenor of the reporting is that the notorious Mrs. Woodhull, from whom nothing better can be expected, has slandered an eminent minister. The papers decline to repeat the charges lest they facilitate the slander and perhaps incur liability.
Victoria finds herself more isolated than ever. The espouser and exemplar of unpopular views is now excoriated as a wrecker of honorable reputations and private lives. She faces a choice: “I must either endure unjustly the imputation of being a slanderer, or I must resume my previously formed purpose and relate, in formal terms, for the whole public, the simple facts of the case as they have come to my knowledge.”
She chooses the latter course. She scrounges sufficient cash to produce a special issue of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, of which the centerpiece is a long article in the form of an interview with Victoria. The unidentified interviewer—a transparent literary device—feeds Victoria questions regarding Henry Beecher. When did she first learn of Beecher’s adultery?
“I had vaguely heard rumors of some scandal in regard to Mr. Beecher, which I put aside as mere rumor and idle gossip of the hour, and gave to them no attention whatever,” she says.
The interviewer inquires as to when the rumors assumed more solid shape.
She responds by describing the experience in Washington when she was preparing to testify to Congress and the stranger volunteered that Henry Beecher preached to a score of his mistresses each Sunday.
The interviewer is surprised that Victoria didn’t pursue the remark. She explains that she was focused on her political causes.
Victoria proceeds to tell how she learned of one of Beecher’s affairs in particular, with Elizabeth Tilton, from Pauline Davis and then Elizabeth Stanton. She relates how she received corroboration from Theodore Tilton. “Mr. Tilton first began to have suspicions of Mr. Beecher on his own return from a long lecturing tour through the West. He questioned his little daughter, privately, in his study regarding what had transpired in his absence. ‘The tale of iniquitous horror that was revealed to me was,’ he said, ‘enough to turn the heart of a stranger to stone, to say nothing of a husband and father.’ It was not the fact of the intimacy alone, but in addition to that, the terrible orgies—so he said—of which his house had been made the scene, and the boldness with which matters had been carried on in the presence of his children. ‘These things drove me mad,’ said he, ‘and I went to Elizabeth and confronted her with the child and the damning tale she had told me. My wife did not deny the charge nor attempt any palliation. She was then enceinte, and I felt sure that the child would not be my child. I stripped the wedding ring from her finger. I tore the picture of Mr. Beecher from my wall and stamped it in pieces. Indeed, I do not know what I did not do. I only look back to it as a time too horrible to retain any exact remembrance of. She miscarried and the child was buried. For two weeks, night and day, I might have been found walking to and from that grave, in a state bordering on distraction.”
Tilton told Victoria that he might have buried the secret of his wife’s betrayal and Beecher’s lechery with their stillborn child had Beecher not taken action that required a response. “Mr. Beecher learned that I had discovered the fact, and what had transpired between Elizabeth and myself, and when I was absent he called at my house and compelled or induced his victim”—Elizabeth—“to sign a statement he had prepared, declaring that so far as he, Mr. Beecher, was concerned, there was no truth in my charges, and that there had never been any criminal intimacy between them. Upon learning this, as I did, I felt, of course, again outraged and could endure secrecy no longer. I had one friend who was like a brother, Mr. Frank Moulton. I went to him and stated the case fully. We were both members of Plymouth Church. My friend took a pistol, went to Mr. Beecher, and demanded the letter of Mrs. Tilton, under penalty of instant death. Mr. Moulton obtained the letter, and told me that he had it in his safe, where he should keep it until required for further use.”
Elizabeth grew deeply distressed at her situation, to the point of considering suicide. “She made no secret of the fact before me,” Victoria says of a visit to the Tilton home. “Mr. Beecher’s selfish, cowardly cruelty in endeavoring to shield himself and create public opinion against Mr. Tilton added poignancy to her anxieties. She seemed indifferent as to what should become of herself, but labored under fear that murder might be done on her account.”
Victoria didn’t want that. She calmed Theodore Tilton by the unlikely method of a lesson in radical social philosophy. “I believe I succeeded in pointing out to him that his own life was essentially no better than Mr. Beecher’s, and that he stood in no position to throw the first stone at Mrs. Tilton or at her reverend paramour. I showed him again and again that the wrong point, and the radically wrong thing, if not, indeed, quite the only wrong thing in the matter, was the idea of ownership in human beings, which was essentially the same in the two institutions of slavery and marriage.” People cannot control their affections, Victoria says, and they shouldn’t try to control other people. “Let it be once understood that whosoever is true to himself or herself is thereby, and necessarily, true to all others, and the whole social question will be solved. The barter and sale of wives stands on the same moral footing as the barter and sale of slaves. . . . Every human being belongs to himself or herself by a higher title than any which, by surrenders or arrangements or promises, he or she can confer upon any other human being. Self-ownership is inalienable. These truths are the latest and greatest discoveries in science.”
Tilton agreed, albeit not without effort. He shed his anger toward Elizabeth and toward Beecher. He introduced Victoria, his new counselor, to Beecher, his old pastor. “I met him frequently both at Mr. Tilton’s and at Mr. Moulton’s,” Victoria says of Beecher. “We discussed the social problem freely in all its varied bearings, and I found that Mr. Beecher agreed with nearly all my views upon the question.”
The interviewer interrupts, astonished. “Do you mean to say that Mr. Beecher disapproves of the present marriage system?”
“I mean to say just this,” Victoria continues, “that Mr. Beecher told me that marriage is the grave of love, and that he never married a couple that he did not feel condemned.”
The interviewer pursues this point. “What excuse did Mr. Beecher give for not avowing these sentiments publicly?”
“Oh, the moral coward’s inevitable excuse, that of expediency. He said he was twenty years ahead of his church; that he preached the truth just as fast as he thought his people could hear it. I said to him, ‘Then, Mr. Beecher, you are defrauding your people. You confess that you do not preach the truth as you know it, while they pay for and persuade themselves you are giving them your best thought.’ He replied, ‘I know that our whole social system is corrupt. I know that marriage, as it exists today, is the curse of society. We shall never have a better state until children are begotten and bred on the scientific plan. Stirpiculture”—eugenics—“is what we need.’ ‘Then,’ said I, ‘Mr. Beecher, why do you not go into your pulpit and preach that science?’ He replied: ‘If I were to do so I would preach to empty seats. It would be the ruin of my church.’”
“Was Mr. Beecher aware that you knew of his relations to Mrs. Tilton?” the interview asks.
“Of course he was. It was because that I knew of them that he first consented to meet me. He could never receive me until he knew that I was aware of the real character he wore under the mask of his reputation. Is it not remarkable how a little knowledge of this sort brings down the most top-lofty from the stilts on which they lift themselves above the common level?”
Victoria explains how Beecher’s two-facedness paralyzed him, how it prevented him from standing beside her on the platform at Steinway Hall, and how he pleaded that she keep his secret. She says that his cowardice and hypocrisy forced her to go public. “Since then I have not doubted that I must make up my mind definitely to act aggressively in this matter, and to use the facts in my knowledge to compel a more wide-spread discussion of the social question. I take the step deliberately, as an agitator and social revolutionist, which is my profession. I commit no breach of confidence, as no confidences have been made to me, except as I have compelled them, with a full knowledge that I was endeavoring to induce or force the parties to come to the front along with me in the announcement of and advocacy of the principles of social revolution. Messrs. Beecher and Tilton, and other half-way reformers, are to me like the border states in the great rebellion. They are liable to fall, with the weight of their influence, on either side in the contest, and I hold it to be legitimate generalship to compel them to declare on the side of truth and progress. My position is justly analogous with that of warfare. The public, Mr. Beecher included, would gladly crush me if they could—will do so if they can—to prevent me from forcing on them considerations of the utmost importance. My mission is, on the other hand, to utter the unpopular truth, and make it efficient by whatsoever legitimate means; and means are legitimate as a war measure which would be highly reprehensible in a state of peace.”
As it relates to marriage, her mission is to destroy the traditional form of that institution, she says. “I believe that the marriage institution, like slavery and monarchy, and many other things which have been good or necessary in their day, is now effete, and in a general sense injurious, instead of being beneficial to the community.…I mean by marriage, in this connection, any forced or obligatory tie between the sexes, any legal intervention or constraint to prevent people from adjusting their love relations precisely as they do their religious affairs in this country, in complete personal freedom, changing and improving them from time to time, and according to circumstances.”
So why bring Beecher into this? the interviewer asks. What have you against him?
“I have no fault to find with him in any such sense as you mean, nor in any such sense as that in which the world will condemn him. I have no doubt that he has done the very best which he could do under all the circumstances—with his demanding physical nature, and with the terrible restrictions imposed upon a clergyman’s life, imposed by that ignorant public opinion about physiological laws, which they, nevertheless, perhaps, more than any other class, do their best to perpetuate. The fault I find with Mr. Beecher is of a wholly different character, as I have told him repeatedly and frankly, and as he knows very well. It is, indeed, the exact opposite to that for which the world will condemn him. I condemn him because I know, and have had every opportunity to know, that he entertains, on conviction, substantially the same views which I entertain on the social question; that, under the influence of these convictions, he has lived for many years, perhaps for his whole adult life.”
The Beechers are a powerful family, bolstered by public opinion, the interviewer asserts. “Do you not fear that by taking the responsibility of this exposé you may involve yourself in trouble? Even if all you relate should be true, may not those involved deny it in toto, even the fact of their having made the statements?”
“I do not fear anything of the sort. I know this thing must come out, and the statement of the plain unvarnished truth will outweigh all the perjuries that can be invented, if it comes to that pass. I have been charged with attempts at blackmailing, but I tell you, sir, there is not money enough in these two cities to purchase my silence in this matter. I believe it is my duty and my mission to carry the torch to light up and destroy the heap of rottenness, which, in the name of religion, marital sanctity, and social purity, now passes as the social system. I know there are other churches just as false, other pastors just as recreant to their professed ideas of morality—by their immorality you know I mean their hypocrisy. I am glad that just this one case comes to me to be exposed. This is a great congregation. He is a most eminent man. When a beacon is fired on the mountain the little hills are lighted up. This exposition will send inquisition through all the churches through all the churches and what is termed conservative society.”
The interviewer is taken aback. “You speak like some weird prophetess, madam.”
“I am a prophetess,” Victoria says. “I am an evangel. I am a saviour, if you would but see it; but I too come not to bring peace, but a sword.”