Victoria's father and mother, growing still more fanatical with their advancing years, had all along subjected her to a series of singular vexations. And the elder sisters had joined in the mischief-making, outdoing the parents. Sometimes they would burst in upon Mrs. Woodhull's house, and attempt to govern its internal economy; sometimes they would carry off the furniture, or garments, or pictures; sometimes they would crown her with eulogies as the greatest of human beings, and in the same breath defame her as an agent of the devil.
But their great cause of persecution grew out of her younger sister Tennie's career. This young woman developed, while a child in her father's house, a similar power to Victoria's. It was a penetrating spiritual insight applied to the cure of disease. But her father and mother, who regarded their daughter in the light of the damsel mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, who "brought her masters much gain by soothsaying," put her before the public as a fortune-teller. By adding to much that was genuine in her mediumship more that was charlatanry, they aroused against this fraudulent business the indignation of the sincere soul of Victoria who, more than most human beings, scorns a lie, and would burn at the stake rather than practise a deceit. She clutched Tennie as by main force and flung her out of this semi-humbug, to the mingled astonishment of her money-greedy family, one and all. At this time Tennie was supporting a dozen or twenty relatives by her ill-gotten gains. Victoria's rescue of her excited the wrath of all these parasites—which has continued hot and undying against both to this day. The fond and fierce mother alternately loves and hates the two united defiers of her morbid will; and the father, at times a Mephistopheles, waits till the inspiration of cunning overmasters his parental instinct, and watching for a moment when his ill word to a stranger will blight their business schemes, drops in upon some capitalist whose money is in their hands, lodges an indictment against his own flesh and blood, takes out his handkerchief to hide a few well-feigned tears, clasps his hands with an unfelt agony, hobbles off smiling sardonically at the mischief which he has done, and the next day repents his wickedness with genuine contrition and manlier woe. These parents would cheerfully give their lives as a sacrifice to atone for the many mischiefs which they have cast like burrs at their children; but if all the scars which they and their progeny have inflicted on one another could be magically healed to-day, they would be scratched open by the same hands and set stinging and tingling anew to-morrow.
There is a maxim that marriages are made in heaven, albeit contradicted by the Scripture which declares that in heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. But, even against the Scripture, it is safe to say that Victoria's second marriage was made in Heaven; that is, it was decreed by the self-same spirits whom she is ever ready to follow, whether they lead her for discipline into the valley of the shadow of death, or for comfort in those ways of pleasantness which are paths of peace. Col. James H. Blood, commander of the 6th Missouri Regiment, who at the close of the war was elected City Auditor of St. Louis, who became President of the Society of Spiritualists in that place, and who had himself been, like Victoria, the legal partner of a morally sundered marriage, called one day on Mrs. Woodhull to consult her as a spiritualistic physician (having never met her before), and was startled to see her pass into a trance, during which she announced, unconsciously to herself, that his future destiny was to be linked with hers in marriage. Thus, to their mutual amazement, but to their subsequent happiness, they were betrothed on the spot by "the powers of the air." The legal tie by which at first they bound themselves to each other was afterward by mutual consent annulled—the necessary form of Illinois law being complied with to this effect. But the marriage stands on its merits, and is to all who witness its harmony known to be a sweet and accordant union of congenial souls.
Col. Blood is a man of a philosophic and reflective cast of mind, an enthusiastic student of the higher lore of spiritualism, a recluse from society, and an expectant believer in a stupendous destiny for Victoria. A modesty not uncommon to men of intellect prompts him to sequester his name in the shade rather than to set it glittering in the sun. But he is an indefatigable worker—driving his pen through all hours of the day and half of the night. He is an active editor of Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, and one of the busy partners in the firm of Woodhull, Claflin & Co., Brokers, at 44 Broad street, New York. His civic views are (to use his favorite designation of them) cosmopolitical; in other words, he is a radical of extreme radicalism—an internationalist of the most uncompromising type—a communist who would rather have died in Paris than be the president of a pretended republic whose first official act has been the judicial murder of the only republicans in France. His spiritualistic habits he describes in a letter to his friend, the writer of this memorial, as follows: "At about eleven or twelve o'clock at night, two or three times a week, and sometimes without nightly interval, Victoria and I hold parliament with the spirits. It is by this kind of study that we both have learned nearly all the valuable knowledge that we possess. Victoria goes into a trance, during which her guardian spirit takes control of her mind, speaking audibly through her lips, propounding various matters for our subsequent investigation and verification, and announcing principles, detached thoughts, hints of systems, and suggestions for affairs. In this way, and in this spiritual night-school, began that process of instruction by which Victoria has risen to her present position as a political economist and politician. During her entranced state, which generally lasts about an hour, but sometimes twice as long, I make copious notes of all she says, and when her speech is unbroken, I write down every word, and publish it without correction or amendment. She and I regard all the other portion of our lives as almost valueless compared with these midnight hours." The preceding extract shows that this fine-grained transcendentalist is a reverent husband to his spiritual wife, the sympathetic companion of her entranced moods, and their faithful historian to the world.
After her union with Col. Blood, instead of changing her name to his, she followed the example of many actresses, singers, and other professional women whose names have become a business property to their owners, and she still continues to be known as Mrs. Woodhull.
One night, about half a year after their marriage, she and her husband were wakened at midnight in Cincinnati by the announcement that a man by the name of Dr. Woodhull had been attacked with delirium tremens at the Burnet House, and in a lucid moment had spoken of the woman from whom he had been divorced, and begged to see her. Col. Blood immediately took a carriage, drove to the hotel, brought the wretched victim home, and jointly with Victoria took care of him with life-saving kindness for six weeks. On his going away they gave him a few hundred dollars of their joint property to make him comfortable in another city. He departed full of gratitude, bearing with him the assurance that he would always be welcome to come and go as a friend of the family. And from that day to this, the poor man, dilapidated in body and emasculated in spirit, has sometimes sojourned under Victoria's roof and sometimes elsewhere, according to his whim or will. In the present ruins of the young gallant of twenty years ago, there is more manhood (albeit an expiring spark like a candle at its socket) than during any of the former years; and to be now turned out of doors by the woman whom he wronged, but who would not wrong him in return, would be an act of inhumanity which it would be impossible for Mrs. Woodhull and Col. Blood either jointly or separately to commit. For this piece of noble conduct—what is commonly called her living with two husbands under one roof—she has received not so much censure on earth as I think she will receive reward in heaven. No other passage of her life more signally illustrates the nobility of her moral judgments, or the supernal courage with which she stands by her convictions. Not all the clamorous tongues in Christendom, though they should simultaneously cry out against her "Fie, for shame!" could persuade her to turn this wretched wreck from her home. And I say she is right; and I will maintain this opinion against the combined Pecksniffs of the whole world.
This act, and the malice of enemies, together with her bold opinions on social questions, have combined to give her reputation a stain. But no slander ever fell on any human soul with greater injustice. A more unsullied woman does not walk the earth. She carries in her very face the fair legend of a character kept pure by a sacred fire within. She is one of those aspiring devotees who tread the earth merely as a stepping-stone to Heaven, and whose chief ambition is finally to present herself at the supreme tribunal "spotless, and without wrinkle, or blemish, or any such thing." Knowing her as well as I do, I cannot hear an accusation against her without recalling Tennyson's line of King Arthur,
"Is thy white blamelessness accounted blame?"
Fulfilling a previous prophecy, and following a celestial mandate, in 1869 she founded a bank and published a journal. These two events took the town by storm. When the doors of her office in Broad street were first thrown open to the public, several thousand visitors came in a flock on the first day. The "lady brokers," as they were called (a strange confession that brokers are not always gentlemen) were besieged like lionesses in a cage. The daily press interviewed them; the weekly wits satirized them; the comic sheets caricatured them; but like a couple of fresh young dolphins, breasting the sea side by side, they showed themselves native to the element, and cleft gracefully every threatening wave that broke over their heads. The breakers could not dash the brokers. Indomitable in their energy, the sisters won the good graces of Commodore Vanderbilt—a fine old gentleman of comfortable means, who of all the lower animals prefers the horse, and of all the higher virtues admires pluck. Both with and without Commodore Vanderbilt's help, Mrs. Woodhull has more than once shown the pluck that has held the rein of the stock market as the Commodore holds his horse. Her journal, as one sees it week by week, is generally a willow-basket full of audacious manuscripts, apparently picked up at random and thrown together pell-mell, stunning the reader with a medley of politics, finance, free-love, and the pantarchy. This sheet, when the divinity that shapes its ends shall begin to add to the rough-hewing a little smooth-shaping; in other words, when its unedited chaos shall come to be moulded by the spirits to that order which is Heaven's first law; this not ordinary but "cardinary" journal, which is edited in one world, and published in another, will become less a confusion to either, and more a power for both.
In 1870, following the English plan of self-nomination, Mrs. Woodhull announced herself as a candidate for the Presidency—mainly for the purpose of drawing public attention to the claims of woman to political equality with man. She accompanied this announcement with a series of papers in the Herald on politics and finance, which have since been collected into a volume entitled "The Principles of Government." She has lately received a more formal nomination to that high office by "The Victoria League," an organization which, being somewhat Jacobinical in its secrecy, is popularly supposed, though not definitely known, to be presided over by Commodore Vanderbilt, who is also similarly imagined to be the golden corner-stone of the business house of Woodhull, Claflin & Co. Should she be elected to the high seat to which she aspires, (an event concerning which I make no prophecy,) I am at least sure that she would excel any Queen now on any throne in her native faculty to govern others.