Tennessee Celeste Claflin

• Tennessee Celeste Claflin
• Born: October 26, 1845
• Died: January 18, 1923

Spiritualist healers, journalists, stockbrokers, and sex reformers, were born in Homer, Ohio, the seventh and ninth of the ten children of Reuben Buckman Claflin and Roxanna (Hummel) Claflin. In 1849 Reuben Claflin was accused of burning down his grist mill to collect the insurance money, and the family left Homer to wander about the Midwest as healers and spiritualists.

In 1853 the fifteen-year-old Victoria Claflin married a ne’er-do-well physician, Canning Woodhull, in Chicago. They soon moved with their retarded son Byron to San Francisco, where Victoria Woodhull supported the family by sewing, and then to New York City, Indianapolis, and Terre Haute, Indiana, where she worked as a spiritualist healer. A second child, a daughter named Zula Maud, was born in 1861.

Woodhull divorced her husband in 1864. She then joined her sister Tennessee, and the two toured the Midwest as healers and clairvoyants. In 1864 Tennessee Claflin was indicted in Ottawa, Illinois, for manslaughter in the case of a woman who had died of cancer. The sisters fled to Cincinnati, where they were accused of running a house of assignation and asked to leave. They returned to Chicago and continued to travel as healers in the West.

In 1866 Claflin married a gambler, John Bartels; he soon disappeared. That same year, Woodhull married—perhaps not legally—a Civil War veteran and St. Louis city auditor, Colonel James Harvey Blood. He introduced her to a number of reform ideas of the time, including socialism, greenbackism, and free love. They and the entire Claflin family moved to New York City in 1868, instructed in this move, according to Woodhull, by the spirit of Demosthenes, who appeared to her in a Pittsburgh hotel room.

The move to New York marked the beginning of the sisters’ rise to notoriety, a rise that had its start in a healing massage given by Tennessee Claflin to the seventy-five-year-old financier Cornelius Vanderbilt. With funds and coaching provided by Vanderbilt, the sisters conducted successful financial speculations,, and in January 1870 announced the opening of their brokerage firm in New York City’s financial district, which was then the exclusive domain of males. Vanderbilt’s unofficial backing gave Woodhull, Claflin & Company credibility. Soon wealthy, the Woodhull and Claflin entourage moved into a mansion in the Murray Hill district.

Woodhull at this time met Stephen Pearl Andrews, a fifty-eight-year-old abolitionist, linguist, and physician. Like Blood, Andrews was attracted to many liberal reforms. Of special interest to Woodhull was his vision of Pantarchy, a utopia in which free love replaced marriage and children and property were held in common. Inspired by his ideas about women’s independence, on April 2, 1870, she announced her candidacy for the American presidency in the 1872 election, becoming the first woman ever to run for that office.

To support her candidacy and promote Andrews’s theories, the sisters, Andrews, and Blood published the first issue of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly on May 14, 1870. Printed on high-quality paper, the Weekly had as its motto “Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives!” It ran a serial by the French writer George Sand, advocated vocational training for girls, woman suffrage, and inspection and licensing of houses of prostitution, muckraked financial and political scandals, and published articles on free love, birth control, and abortion. In 1871 the Weekly published Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto in English, its first American appearance.

On December 21, 1870, Woodhull presented a memorial to Congress for woman suffrage. The following month, with the influence of General Benjamin F. Butler in Congress, she addressed the House Judiciary Committee. Caught by surprise by this development, the leaders of the women’s-rights movement delayed the start of their National Woman Suffrage Association convention in Washington, D.C., in order to attend the session. Impressed by Woodhull’s presentation, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton invited Woodhull and her sister to share their platform that afternoon. Her presence there and at the association’s May convention in New York City allowed the opponents of feminism to claim that woman suffrage would, indeed, lead to free love and the breakdown of the family, as male supremacists had long claimed. Despite the criticism, Stanton and, for a while, Anthony remained committed to Woodhull’s position that the state has no right to interfere with love between individuals.

In November 1871 Woodhull stated her position in a New York speech entitled “The Principles of Social Freedom.” From a text probably written by Andrews, Woodhull departed to say: “I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please.” The audience hissed.

In May 1872 Anthony stopped the National Woman Suffrage Association from organizing a political party with Woodhull as its presidential candidate. Woodhull’s supporters at once formed the Equal Rights party and chose the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass as Woodhull’s running mate. He ignored the designation and, like Anthony, gave his support to Ulysses S. Grant.

Accusations of scandal against Woodhull mounted, and her campaign foundered. She and her large household, by then including her former husband, Canning Woodhull, were evicted from their mansion, and the rent on their office space was raised so high that they were obliged to leave. The Weekly suspended publication on June 22, 1872. In August Woodhull was sued for her debts. In September a delegate to the National Spiritualists’ Association convention in Boston accused her of obtaining money under false pretenses. Furious, she made a speech that gave the details of the love affair between the Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, an eminent orator in behalf of liberal causes, and his parisioner, Elizabeth Tilton, wife of Theodore Tilton, a reformist newspaper editor and almost certainly one of Woodhull’s lovers. The story of this affair had been told her in confidence by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Woodhull said that she made it public in order to expose Beecher’s hypocrisy in preaching the sanctity of marriage while practicing free love. The spiritualists were impressed with the story and reelected her president of their association.

Using funds from a still unknown source, she revived Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly on November 2, 1872, to print the entire account of the Beecher-Tilton scandal. By evening, that issue of the paper was selling for forty dollars a copy. Anthony Comstock, of the Young Men’s Christian Association committee for the suppression of vice, complained about the paper to authorities, and on November 4—the day before the presidential election—United States marshals arrested the two sisters and charged them with transmission of obscene literature through the mails. They went to jail for more than a month, also under suit for libel from a stockbroker whom they had charged with the seduction of a young woman.

Released on bail, Woodhull put out another issue of the Weekly on December 28, 1872, was reindicted on Comstock’s complaint, and went into hiding. Two weeks later she emerged at the Cooper Union in New York City, dressed as an old Quaker woman, to give a dramatic speech for freedom of the press and against society’s repressive attitudes toward sex. Rearrested and again released on bail, she went on a lecture tour, retelling the Beecher-Tilton story and gaining considerable notoriety and some sympathy. The stockbroker’s libel case was dropped when the account was proved true, and in June 1873 she was acquitted of the obscenity charge.

Woodhull continued her lectures, and Tilton, whose wife had left him as a result of the publicity, finally sued Beecher for alienation of his wife’s affections. The trial lasted from January to July of 1875; neither side called on Elizabeth Tilton to testify, and the jury could reach no decision. Tilton dropped the suit, and his wife later published a full confession of the affair.

Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly continued publication until June 1876, edited and largely written by Blood. In September 1876 Woodhull divorced Blood. Shortly after Vanderbilt’s death in 1877, his son William Henry Vanderbilt encouraged the sisters to leave the country and go to England to prevent their testimony in a contest over the will.

At a speech she gave in London, Woodhull met John Biddulph Martin, a wealthy banker, who courted her over his family’s objections. After considerable effort on Woodhull’s part to establish her respectability, they were married in October 1883. Henry James probably used the saga of this courtship in his tale “The Siege of London,” about an American adventuress who forces herself into an honorable English family. In October 1885 Tennessee Claflin married an English dry-goods merchant, Francis Cook, who was even wealthier than Martin. After endowing a home for artists, he was made a baronet, and she became Lady Cook. They lived for a while at his castle in Portugal, near Lisbon. Charges of past scandals continued to dog the sisters; they regularly responded with public threats of libel litigation.

From July 1892 to December 1901, Victoria Woodhull Martin published the Humanitarian, a monthly journal concerned mainly with stirpiculture, or eugenics, the improvement of hereditary qualities through planned breeding programs. Her daughter, Zula Maud Woodhull, was the associate editor. In 1892 Woodhull declared herself a candidate for president of the United States, as she had done in 1872 and again in 1884. The Martins made frequent trips to America, where she lectured on such issues as woman suffrage, public health reforms, and national encouragement of the arts and sciences.

Martin died in 1897, and in 1901 Woodhull left London to spend the rest of her life on the extensive Martin estate in Bredon’s Norton, Worcestershire. She soon became influential in village affairs and gave the town considerable funds. For a time she rented out part of her estate to women to give them training in farming on their own. She also endowed a school and sponsored early aviation efforts. During World War I she organized sewing efforts and patriotic pageants. Her son and daughter, who never married, lived with her.

Tennessee Claflin Cook was widowed in 1901. Keeping more in the public eye than her sister, she lived in London but made frequent lecture trips to America. She advocated women’s rights, registration of prostitutes’ customers, and the legitimization of children born out of wedlock. During World War I she called for an “Amazon army” of 150,000 female troops. She was seventy-seven when she died in London, and was buried in West Norwood Cemetery. Victoria Woodhull Martin died at Bredon’s Norton four years later at the age of eighty-eight, following several years of heart disease; her remains were cremated. Had her daughter not survived her, her estate would have gone to the Society for Psychical Research.

One year after her death, Woodhull was the subject of a detailed biography by Emanie Sachs, “The Terrible Siren”: Victoria Woodhull, 1838-1927, still the best single source of information on both sisters’ lives. The biography includes a detailed description of Woodhull’s cheerful seduction of a young man with the relaxed consent of her husband, James Blood, the description having been relayed to the author by the young man in his later years; it portrays the two women as a colorfully opportunistic pair who viewed a sexually repressive society from the underside.

With the financial and intellectual help of key men in their lives, the sisters were able to articulate a critique of the current ideology of women’s confinement to the home and sexual constraint, an ideology that in their view led to a booming industry of prostitution. Whether their exploits in the long run helped or hindered the women’s rights cause, Woodhull and Claflin succeeded in making explicit issues concerning sex that few others were willing to take on, and the publicity they received may have contributed to a gradual lessening of restrictions on women’s lives and sexual conduct.

A collection of Victoria Woodhull’s papers is at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Woodhull’s published works include A Speech on the Great Social Problem of Labor and Capital... May 8, 1871; The Elixir of Life; or, Why do We Die? (1873); The Garden of Eden: The Allegorical Meaning Revealed (1890); (with Tennessee Claflin) The Human Body, the Temple of God (1890); and The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit (1891). Works by Claflin include Constitutional Equality a Right of Woman (1871); Illegitimacy (188-?); and Essays on Social Topics (1895?). Woodhull’s and Claflin’s lives have not yet received thorough scholarly treatment. Since Sachs’s 1928 biography, there have been two book-length studies, J. Johnston, Mrs. Satan: The Incredible Saga of Victoria C. Woodhull (1967), and M. M. Marberry, Vicky: A Biography of Victoria C. Woodhull (1967). See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1936) and Notable American Women (1971).