So my campaign for the Presidency was not entirely in vain. It was something that seemed unavoidable, toward which I seemed pressed by circumstance and fate; and I can rest in the consciousness that it accomplished some permanent good.
CHAPTER XXVII
DECLARED A LUNATIC
1872-1873
I had hardly got out of the Presidential race before I got into jail again. I passed easily from one kind of life to the other. In fact, the last thing I did in connection with my political campaign had been the indirect cause of getting me into the Tombs. The Tombs has the honor of being the fourteenth jail that has given me shelter for purposes of meditation.
In November, '72, I was making a speech from Henry Clews's steps in Wall Street, partly to quiet a mob, when a paper was thrust into my hand. I glanced at it, thinking it had to do with myself, and saw that Victoria C. Woodhull and Tennie C. Claflin had been arrested for publishing in their paper in Brooklyn an account of a scandal about a famous clergyman in that city. The charge was "obscenity," and they had been arrested at the instance of Anthony Comstock. I immediately said: "This may be libel, but it is not obscenity."
That assertion, with what I soon did to establish its truth, got me into jail, with the result that six courts in succession—afraid to bring me to trial for "obscenity"—declared me a "lunatic," and prevented my enjoyment of property in Omaha, Nebraska, which is now worth millions of dollars.
From Wall Street I hurried to Ludlow Street Jail, where I found Victoria C. Woodhull and Tennie C. Claflin in a cell about eight by four feet. I was indignant that two women, who had merely published a current rumor, should be treated in this way, and took a piece of charcoal and wrote, on the newly whitewashed walls of the cell a couplet suggesting the baseness of this attack upon their reputations. It is sufficient to say here that public feeling was so aroused that these women were soon set free; but I got myself deeper and deeper into the toils of the courts.
