The Scarlet Sisters by Myra MacPherson

Author:Myra MacPherson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Historical, Business & Economics / Women In Business, Family & Relationships / Siblings, History / United States / 19th Century
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

The sisters, burning to tell their story of life in prison and the injustice meted out to them through “Moral Cowardice,” set up lectures. Victoria planned to speak first in Boston, but Harriet Beecher Stowe used her influence to make sure “those vile jailbirds” were banned from there.

Meanwhile Comstock, who had vowed on New Year’s Day to do “something every day for Jesus,” began his entrapment scheme to nail the sisters once again, on a second charge of obscenity, for sending the same material through the mails. Using the fake name of J. Beardsley, he sent a money order for six copies of the infamous November 2 issue of the Weekly from a Greenwich, Connecticut, post office box. He had ridden through snow on a sleigh from New York to rent the box. He then rode to Norwalk and used the name of a friend there to purchase six more. When he had collected the twelve copies he obtained warrants for the sisters’ and Colonel Blood’s arrests for sending obscene material through the mails.

Blood was arrested at the Weekly office on the afternoon of January 9, 1873, and that night the sisters were scheduled to speak together at the Cooper Institute. Blood managed to get word to them that Comstock was on the chase. When U.S. Marshals searched their house, they came up empty. Tennie was under their noses, hiding under a large upturned washtub. Victoria had fled with her bondsmen to the Taylor Hotel in New Jersey, as Jim Fisk and his cronies had done back in 1869.

The sisters had placed advertisements for their lecture, calling it “Moral Cowardice and Modern Hypocrisy—the Naked Truth—Thirty Days in the Ludlow Street Jail.” Before the doors opened, more than a thousand people, most of them women, clustered around the entrance. Laura Cuppy Smith, their faithful friend and a Spiritualist trance speaker, greeted the audience in their stead.

A carriage drove stealthily down Third Avenue. A lookout slipped past waiting marshals to the carriage and whispered that the passengers would be safe if they mingled with the crowd pressing through the front door. A little old Quaker lady stepped out of the carriage, her drab silk bonnet projecting several inches beyond her face, which was concealed by a thick gray veil. She huddled under a black-and-white shawl and hobbled down the aisle. People offered to help, but appearing deaf, the woman spoke to no one as she moved closer to the stage.

Then, with a quick, nervous step, she ascended the platform. In an instant, “old age, coal-scuttle bonnet and gray dress disappeared like magic” and Woodhull stood before them, “an overwhelming inspirational fire scintillating from her eyes and beaming from her face.” The Quaker costume lay coiled at her feet. Breathing in heavy gulps, she raised her arms high and threw back her head defiantly, her hair tumbling down. The crowd went wild. Victoria waited for the hollering, shouting, and applause to die down, then created further bedlam with her greeting: “Friends and Fellow-Citizens!

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