Notorious Victoria by Mary Gabriel

Author:Mary Gabriel
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 1998-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

NEW YORK CITY, NOVEMBER 5, 1872

On Monday morning, Victoria, Tennessee, and their lawyers prepared to go before Commissioner Osborne to plead that there was no basis for the obscenity charge, that everything allegedly objectionable in the Weekly could also be found in Shakespeare, Lord Byron, and the Bible, and that the women believed that in publishing their paper they were “actuated by a higher power to carry out their high designs.”

When they arrived in the commissioner’s hearing room, where spectators were kicking and thumping on the door to get in, they were told a federal grand jury had already met that morning and, within less than half an hour, indicted Victoria and Tennessee on charges of sending obscene material through the mail. Victoria, with her daughter, Zulu, at her side, and Tennessee listened while the prosecutor explained that the women were indicted individually, and also jointly on one charge, and that they faced a maximum of a year in prison and a five-hundred-dollar fine. They were remanded once again to the care of Warden Tracey at the Ludlow Street jail and ordered back to court before Judge Shipman the following day to enter a plea.

Meanwhile, Stephen Pearl Andrews had also been arrested in connection with the November 2 issue. He told the court that he had had nothing to do with the Weekly for a year and that he had never heard of Luther Challis until he read the scandal issue. It was a lie. Andrews, who had been harboring a hatred for Beecher for nearly twenty years and had threatened to expose the reverend when he first joined the Weekly, had rewritten and edited the scandal issue based on Victoria’s Boston speech. He would admit his role in the case years later, but for the moment he wanted nothing to do with it or jail; he was working on his most ambitious book yet, The Basic Outline of Universology, which included 80 pages of vocabulary, 764 pages of text, and a 120-page index. The court looked kindly upon the sixty-year-old Pantarch; Justice Fowler said he did not want to incarcerate a person of Andrews’s advanced age and he was released later that day when he made bail.

Tuesday came and Howe told the court that Victoria and Tennessee were not ready to enter a plea. Now that it seemed the case would not go away without a fight, the sisters and their lawyers needed time to plot a strategy. The ever adaptable Tennessee told a reporter that they were becoming used to their imprisonment and that Warden Tracey and his family were very kind. But there were others who were not so. The New York Sun reported that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had been one of Victoria’s staunchest advocates during previous difficulties, was now disowning her. Stanton was quoted as saying that, concerning Victoria’s assertions that she had heard of the Tilton-Beecher affair from her in May 1871, “Mrs. Woodhull’s statements are untrue in every particular.”

The general consensus of newspapers around the country was that the sisters had finally received what they had long deserved.

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