The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

Above: A newspaper cartoon of Victoria and Tennie as Wall Street traders

Excerpted from The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age by Myra MacPherson. Published in March 2014 by Twelve Books. Copyright © 2014. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reprinted, reproduced, posted on another website or distributed by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

On a crisp February morning in 1870, the most dazzling and flamboyant sisters in American history made their debut. Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin had plotted, cajoled, and advertised and had been written up with besotted fervor in major New York newspapers by male reporters stunned by their beauty and daring.

As their open carriage turned the corner at Wall Street and Broad, the sisters could see the mob moving toward their brand‐new Woodhull, Claflin and Co. brokerage firm. Estimates of the crowd reached two thousand and up. One hundred policemen were called out to keep order. Here they were! The first lady stockbrokers in the world! Wall Street had never seen anything like it. Nor would it again for nearly a hundred years.

The buzz on the Street, abetted by the sisters, was that the coarse, ruthless, and immensely rich—in fact, the richest man in America— Cornelius Vanderbilt had bankrolled the young beauties.

Males eagerly grabbed the reins of the high‐stepping horses and, as the sisters descended lightly from the carriage, shouts, cheers, jeers, and catcalls shattered the air. The sisters pushed their way through the boisterous crowd held back by policemen, opened the door, and went to work. All day, men peered in the windows and doors of Woodhull and Claflin and whooped with surprise and pleasure if they caught a glimpse of one of the sisters. A doorkeeper guarded the entrance. Nailed on the door was a sign: GENTLEMEN WILL STATE THEIR BUSINESS AND THEN RETIRE AT ONCE.

The mysterious sisters, who seemed to have stepped out from nowhere, had made the splash they wanted. Everything had been staged “to secure the most general and at the same time prominent introduction to the world that was possible,” Victoria later admitted.

They had carefully picked their outfits, gambling correctly that a large crowd would scrutinize them on the most crucial day of their lives. Everything matched, as if they were twins, although Victoria, at thirty‐one, was seven years older than Tennie. Their skirts were shockingly short, touching the tops of their shiny boots, unlike fashionable dresses that trailed through the muck and manure of Manhattan’s streets. Their suit jackets were deep blue wool nipped at the waist but mannishly wide at the shoulders. Rich velvet embroidered the jackets, adding a feminine touch. But gone were the tightly laced corsets that warped a woman’s insides and made breathing difficult. Absent, too, were bustles, those steel half‐cages filled with horsehair that were strapped to petticoats and draped with heavy brocade and silk that could weigh a woman down by twenty pounds. One cartoon likened the woman who wore one to a snail, with the bustle forming the curlicue shell dragged behind. Instead of ruffles or jewelry, the sisters wore silk bow ties. Their light brown hair had been cut boyishly short; Tennie derided the fashionable nest of curls and chignons as “vile bunches of hair, tortured into all conceivable unnatural shapes.” They’d added a rakish final touch: each had tucked a solid gold pen behind an ear, to flash in the noonday sun or catch the gaslight’s glow.

The sisters were showstoppingly beautiful, and their unique costumes only added to their allure. Victoria was willowy and gazed at the world through luminous, intensely blue eyes. High cheekbones gave her broad face character, and her proud, chiseled profile could have graced an ivory cameo. Tennie, at twenty‐four, was the epitome of the term “pleasingly plump,” with a bosom that threatened to burst from her jacket and a sensuous, full mouth that curved into flirtatious smiles. There was mischief in her blue eyes, and she had the exuberance of an untamed colt.

Reporters gushed endlessly about the “Bewitching Brokers” and the “Queens of Finance.” They mentioned “their exquisite figures.” Reporters seemed astounded that women could be articulate: “They display remarkable conversational powers, Mrs. Claflin [Tennie] in particular talking with a rapidity and fluency that are really astonishing.” The gold pens behind their ears were the talk of the “gouty old war horses on the street.” The two women were praised, albeit as though they were a P. T. Barnum oddity: with one paper remarking that, at the end of their opening day, the ladies drove away “without any signs of headaches.”

Two dandies constantly dropped by the offices of Woodhull and Claflin on opening day, changing hats and outfits to mock the women brokers. Once, the men sauntered in wearing matching dress coats with polished blue buttons, pearl‐colored pantaloons, and green kid gloves. When they tried to trap the sisters by asking “‘how Central stood,’ Claflin sprang to the [Teletype ticker] and shouted ‘Before call 94 1⁄2.’” Remarked the Herald, these jokesters “realize for the first time that young ladies can be wise and discreet, and young men rash and foolish.” When one visitor told the sisters they would lose money, Woodhull tartly replied they had not come to Wall Street to “lose money, but to make money.”

The sisters told the eager Wall Street reporters a disarming tale of fortitude and spunk. Unable to penetrate the exclusive male Stock Exchange, Woodhull said that “solely through agents in the street,” they had parlayed business earnings to make about $700,000 before they opened their firm. In today’s dollars, that would have made them multimillionaires, if their claim was true. She then remarked with an air of nonchalance, “‘What do present profits amount to when it costs us over $2,600 a month to live?’” The reporter never asked what these staggering expenses could be, in a bad economic period when working‐class poor made $200 a year.

Tennie said that “natural aptitude” and early training in business management had equipped her for finance. “I studied law in my father’s office six years. My father was once a very successful merchant, and possessor of a large fortune. He lost it mainly in speculation.” Their father’s financial ruin had made it necessary for them to earn a profitable living, but their “very good education” and legal skills made it impossible to “settle down into the common course of life” of other women. Victoria wove tales of spectacular success in land deals, followed by investments in oil and “railroad stocks,” mentioning, among others, Vanderbilt’s New York Central and Hudson River Railroad.

The stories told by the sisters made for sympathetic reading: learning law at the knee of a spectacularly rich father, obtaining an education unusual for women at that time, starting a business at a young age. All gave an image of great enterprise.

There was just one problem. Most of it was false.

Victoria and Tennie’s father, Reuben Buck Claflin, was a one‐eyed snake oil salesman who posed as a doctor and a lawyer. By the time Victoria and Tennie were born, he was not professional at anything but thievery, black‐mailing, and forcing his youngest to join the family quack cure scam. Earlier he had studied some law, but in an era when rigorous policing of the legal profession was unknown, anyone could hang a sign outside his door. Aside from offering legal advice, he also ferried timber down the Susquehanna River and worked in saloons. In 1825, Buck married Roxanna Hummel, known as Annie. She has been identified in books as the niece of a prosperous tavern owner or the illegitimate maid in that establishment. When they moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1830s, construction of the Ohio and Erie Canal brought hopes of real estate riches.

Rough workmen may have gambled in a saloon owned by Buck, but there seemed no legitimate way to make the fortune he claimed to have made. He bragged about making half a million dollars, an incredible fortune, in frenzied real estate speculation. He supposedly lost it all in the 1837 depression, which makes him either a liar about owning this sum in the first place or a very poor manager of money. When Buck settled in obscure Homer, Ohio, some neighbors reckoned he was escaping the law. One legend claims that after selling some horses, he had to race out of one town before it rained and destroyed the horses’ shiny coat—of black paint. Buck was approached by a lawman, went another story, while trying to pass counterfeit money. To avoid arrest, Buck ripped the bills up, stuffed them in his mouth, and ate them.

By the time his wife, Annie, had borne ten children—two boys and eight girls, although three of the girls died young—Buck’s idea of heavy lifting was making his daughters do the work. As luck would have it, in one of the curious miracles of genetic mutation, the one‐eyed Buck and his slattern wife, described by all who met her in later life as an unpleasant old hag, spawned three beautiful daughters among the five living. Buck saw riches in his daughters, starting with the least beautiful and eldest, Margaret, and then her sister, Mary (known also as Polly). There were rumors that he pimped for these two and for Utica, the most beautiful of all the sisters, who was born between Victoria and Tennie.

He touted Victoria and Tennie as fortune‐tellers, faith healers, and clairvoyants who spoke to the dead. The sisters themselves professed clairvoyant powers, but Tennie later admitted that she was forced to “humbug” in order to get enough money to feed the family. Throughout her life, Victoria clung to her claim of communion with famous ghosts such as Demosthenes and assorted angels, and of the odd chat with Napoléon, Joséphine, and, when she needed to impress, the spirit of Jesus Christ. An intriguing legend vested mother Roxanna, who could not read or write, with a remarkable gift of memory; it was said that after the Bible was read to her, she could recite entire passages, chapter and verse, from memory.

Victoria was born on September 23, 1838, in Homer, an insignificant hamlet, like many frontier outposts. One lurid, unsubstantiated tale describes her mother, in a wild religious frenzy, babbling in tongues at a revival tent meeting, whereupon Buck dragged her to the back of the tent and fell upon her with equal enthusiasm. Thus Victoria was supposedly conceived in a manner that would have been the devil’s handiwork had it not come from passions aroused by religious ecstasy, as some might put it. She was born a few months after Queen Victoria was crowned, so any such consummation was now prettified with the crowning of the child as “Victoria.” When the family was in a good mood the child was referred to as their queen who would someday be famous.

“It is my destiny,” Victoria would say.

Tennie, born seven years later, on October 26, 1845, was the last child to survive.

As an adult, Victoria recounted to her biographer, Theodore Tilton, a writer thought to be her lover, a childhood filled with Dickensian debauchery, far from the fancies told to Wall Street reporters. No one could have predicted any life for the sisters except prostitution, domestic servitude, or marriage to drunken wife beaters, trailed by a passel of children. They had no education or social position to pursue anything else.

“She was worked like a slave—whipped like a convict. Her father was impartial in his cruelty to all his children,” wrote Tilton. He described her mother—whom Victoria claimed was “never wholly sane”—as having “a fickleness of spirit that renders her one of the most erratic of mortals,” and who “sometimes abetted him in his scourgings [sic], and at other times shielded the little ones from his blows.” Buck soaked braided green willow switches in water to produce a sharp sting, and with these weapons “he would cut the quivery flesh of the children till their tears and blood melted him into mercy.” Tilton continued: “Sometimes he took a handsaw or a stick of firewood as the instrument of his savagery.” Coming home late and learning of some offense, he would wake the children and “whip them till morning.” One rebellious son, Maldon, ran away at thirteen and “still bears in a shattered constitution the damning memorial of his father’s wrath.”

Victoria did not spare her mother. Wrote Tilton, “She on occasions tormented and harried her children until they would be thrown into spasms, whereat she would hysterically laugh, clap her hands, and look as fiercely delighted as a cat in playing with a mouse. At other times, her tenderness toward her offspring would appear almost angelic. She would fondle them, weep over them, lift her arms and thank God for such children, caress them with ecstatic joy, and then smite them as if seeking to destroy at a blow both body and soul.”

Victoria dressed up the Claflin home in her adult account, describing it as a white‐painted cottage with a long porch and a flower garden. Homer residents remembered it as an unpainted shack with a porch so rickety the boards rattled when children raced across them.

Neighbors stayed away from the Claflin house, which was ruled by a father with a suspect reputation and a religious fanatic mother given to babbling at a moonlit sky until foam appeared on her lips. Annie claimed distinguished German ancestors. A former neighbor guffawed. “I read of their claims of ancestry: the ‘Hummels of Germany.’ And who were they? The most ignorant country people of the county were the ‘Dutch Hummels’ as they were called.” Another neighbor remembered, “No properly trained child was considered in good company when associating with the little girls of the Claflin family, therefore my visits to their home were always without leave.” She added, “The Claflin house was a little three or at most four room affair… the furnishings and surroundings were of the most primitive possible description.”

Revival meetings transfixed Annie, who would twirl in violent religious ecstasy, speaking in tongues and shouting, “Hallelujah!” She would rise in her pew, beginning with a soft clapping of hands, then sway to and fro for a moment before gliding into the aisle and spinning rapidly round and round, “twirling all the way up the aisle, hollering ‘aglory!!’ She would finally sink down in front of the altar in a state of exhaustion that was called by herself and her family a ‘trance.’”

The sisters were not well educated, as they claimed to Wall Street reporters. Tilton’s sketch described Victoria’s schooling as “less than three years” of broken intervals from age eight to eleven. However, he wrote, she was “the pet alike of scholars and teacher,” with “an inward energy such as quickened the young blood of Joan of Arc… The little old head on the little young shoulders was often bent over her school‐book at the midnight hour.” A few years after Tilton’s biography was printed, Victoria strangely and flatly dismissed this. “I am a self made [sic] woman entirely,” she declared. “Never spent one year in the school room.”

Victoria was not, as Tilton claimed, a popular child. Some in Homer saw her beauty but pitied the fact that she was a Claflin. The woman from whom the children bought milk remembered them running wild, dirty, and hungry, waiting for snacks at her back door. When Buck’s brother joined him in Homer, the two large families lived together “in turmoil. Beds were everywhere; in the cellar, the parlor, anywhere room could be found and were never made and rarely changed.”

The pre–Civil War years were a time of revivalist “child preachers,” who allegedly had a special gift of holiness. Victoria copied them, loving the drama, staring down neighbor children with her intense blue eyes. Already a showman, she faced the “sinners” before her, lashing out at their “terrible sins.”

There Was Something Spooky About Those Claflins

Unquestionably Victoria and Tennie were intuitively smart and quick‐witted. Victoria’s later great oratorical skills, which kept thousands spellbound, stemmed from her ability to read a page once and commit it to memory. If her mother’s talent at memorizing large portions of the Bible, which she could not read, was true, Victoria may indeed have inherited the gift of total recall. Tennie’s ebullient street smarts and confidence also won over audiences, well into the thousands. Everyone remarked that the sisters were a decided cut above their squabbling clan, although Tennie was more of a hoyden, and could dip into slang and jokes with ease.

A neighbor recalled that there was something spooky about the Claflins. “The family always bore the reputation and were looked upon by the neighbors as being in some way ‘uncanny,’ the eldest daughter being mesmerized by several traveling professors and relating marvelous tales of things she had seen and known while ‘out of the body.’”

Victoria could not have survived, she claimed, without her visions, her comforting conversations with ghosts during her childhood as a “house‐hold drudge, serving others so long as they were awake, and serving herself only when they slept.” Her version of her childhood as recounted to Tilton made Cinderella’s sound pampered: “Had she been born black, or been chained to a cart‐wheel in Alabama, she could not have been a more enslaved slave.” Later, living with her older married sister Margaret “Meg” Miles and her family, Victoria “made fires, she washed and ironed, she baked bread, she cut wood, she spaded a vegetable garden, she went on errands, she tended infants, she did everything.”

Buck and Roxanna’s “eccentricities” were reproduced in all their children—“except Victoria and Tennie,” wrote Tilton, singling out the sister partners as noble. The others were “leeches.” “They love and hate— they do good and evil—they bless and smite each other… For years there has been one common sentiment sweetly pervading the breasts” of the Claflin siblings, “namely, a determination that Victoria and Tennie should earn all the money for the support of the numerous remainder of the Claflin tribe—wives, husbands, children, servants, and all… Victoria is a green leaf, and her legion of relatives are caterpillars who devour her.”

Tales (not mentioned by Tilton) of the Claflin clan’s sudden departure from Homer depict Buck as the supreme con man, remembered by neighbors as allegedly setting fire to his empty gristmill to get the insurance money. Small‐town folks didn’t take kindly to cheating, and there was talk of tarring and feathering him. He vanished in the night, while Homer residents took up a collection to get the rest of the family out of town. After the departure of Claflin, who had been appointed postmaster, the community found undelivered envelopes on which senders had written, “Money enclosed.” The envelopes had been opened; the money was gone.

In 1853 the Claflins traveled to the town of Mount Gilead, Ohio, where the oldest sister, Meg Miles, was living with her husband and brood. In Mount Gilead, Victoria soon became a child bride. The marriage between her, scarcely fifteen, and her twenty‐eight‐year‐old bridegroom, Canning Woodhull, was a “fellowship of misery—and her parents, who abetted it, ought to have prevented it,” wrote Tilton. “From the endurable cruelty of her parents, she fled to the unendurable cruelty of her husband.”

As Victoria was scandalously divorced from Woodhull at the time Tilton was writing her biography, and embroiled in a front‐page family ruckus involving her current husband, it was prudent to paint her first husband as dark as possible. She needed to portray herself as an innocent child so tormented in marriage that a Victorian‐age divorce would have seemed acceptable.

When fourteen‐year‐old Victoria became feverish one day, “Dr. Canning Woodhull, a gay rake, whose habits were kept hidden from her under the general respectability of his family connections, attended her. Coming as a prince, he found her as Cinderella—a child of the ashes,” wrote Tilton. He invited Victoria to a Fourth of July picnic. She sold apples to buy a pair of shoes for the occasion. On the way home he said to her, “My little puss, tell your father and mother that I want you for a wife.”

Victoria is depicted in this sketch as a startled innocent who beseeched her parents to save her. This does not ring true. Canning was a handsome doctor who said he was from a refined East Coast family. Surely to a child who dreamed of power and her own glory, and who fully believed she would one day ride in a fine carriage, he must have seemed a magical escape from her dreary life. Her story continued: “But the parents, as if not unwilling to be rid of a daughter whose sorrow was ripening her into a woman before her time, were delighted at the unexpected offer. They thought it a grand match.” Victoria also admitted that she soon looked at the marriage as “an escape from the parental yoke.”

On September 23, 1853, Victoria celebrated her fifteenth birthday. Two months later, on November 23, she celebrated her wedding—yet, all her life, she would say she was married at fourteen, to throw an even more helpless cast on the union. “On the third night,” her husband “broke her heart by remaining away all night at a house of ill‐repute… she learned, to her dismay, that he was habitually unchaste, and given to long fits of intoxication… She grew ten years older in a single day. Six weeks after her marriage (during which time her husband was mostly with his cups and his mistresses), she discovered a letter addressed to him in a lady’s elegant penmanship, ‘Did you marry that child because she too was en famille?’” On the day of his marriage, Woodhull had “sent away into the country a mistress” who gave birth to his child.

“He suddenly put his wife into the humblest quarters, where, left mostly to herself, she dwelt in bitterness of spirit, aggravated… by learning of his ordering baskets of champagne and drinking himself drunk in the company of harlots.” At this point the couple was residing in Chicago, probably because Canning could make a better living in this bustling frontier city, known in those days as far out West. However, his drinking left him incapable of functioning. Wrote Tilton, extravagantly, “Through rain and sleet, half clad and shivering, she would track him to his dens,” compelling him to return. Other nights, she would wait by the window until she heard him “languidly shuffling along the pavement with the staggering reel of a drunken man, in the shameless hours of the morning.”

Somehow Canning had found time to impregnate his wife. In retelling the birth, Tilton poured on the pathos: “In the dead of winter, with icicles clinging to her bedpost, and attended only by her half‐drunken husband, she brought forth in almost mortal agony her first‐born child.” For icicles to have found their way to bedposts, the temperature would have to have been mighty frigid, but miracle of miracles, Victoria and even the newborn babe survived. A neighbor brought her food and wrapped the baby in a blanket and took it “to a happier mother in the near neighborhood” to nurse the infant.

Her firstborn child became the real sorrow of Victoria’s life, one that would haunt her and spur her lifelong interest in eugenics, her arguments for planned parenting by the most physically and mentally pure, and her fight against loveless marriages. She blamed Canning’s drunkenness, and their empty union, for the son she bore on that last day of December 1854: “Her child, begotten in drunkenness, and born in squalor, was a half idiot; predestined to be a hopeless imbecile for life.” The son, named Byron, would live a long life. In 1871, at the age of sixteen, he was “a sad and pitiful spectacle in his mother’s house… where he roams from room to room, muttering noises more sepulchral than human; a daily agony to the woman who bore him.” Byron also displayed an “uncommon sweet‐ ness,” wrote Tilton, that won “everyone’s love, doubles everyone’s pity.”

One visitor to the brokerage office who often witnessed Byron during the period Tilton described said, “He was almost a complete idiot… although he had the Claflin beauty… Generally he sat on a lounge for a time, and then would rise and walk very rapidly about ten feet, back and forth, mumbling, grimacing and drooling. After five or ten minutes of this he would resume his seat, and remain for a short time comparatively quiet. The alternation went on continually. When his mother was in the office, she at times would seat herself beside him and fondle him. I thought then that she did so out of sincere maternal affection.”

Other than Victoria’s martyrdom, and the continuing, vain hope that Canning Woodhull would reform, the rest of their time in Chicago is a blank, except for one melodramatic scene after Canning stayed away for a month. He was “keeping a mistress at a fashionable boarding‐house, under the title of wife.” Victoria “sallied forth into the wintry street, clad in a calico dress without undergarments, and shod only with India‐rubbers without shoes or stockings, entered the house, confronted the household as they sat at table.” Her tale drew tears from everyone, and the listeners “compelled the harlot to pack her trunk and flee the city, and shamed the husband into creeping like a spaniel back into the kennel” called home.

Victoria no doubt embellished accounts of her husband’s behavior, but he did end up an alcoholic and morphine addict. And she was legally helpless to leave him. Like all married women, she was literally her husband’s property, as were any children she would bear. In most states, he lawfully had the right to beat her. In a divorce, he had the right to take the children. Even if he had had money, she would not have gotten any if she had instituted a divorce. Though the Claflins were hardly of a social class where a divorce scandal would have tainted the entire family, Victoria was nonetheless crushed, and trapped by the rules of the day.

Tilton gives no date for Victoria’s next giant leap: impulsively taking her damaged child and drunken husband with her to San Francisco, during an unspecified time (probably in 1857 or 1858). Victoria was desperate enough, with no money or livelihood, to bravely strike out on a torturous journey that took nearly two months by sea, and more if they went from Chicago in covered wagon through dangerous Indian Territory. Her usually histrionic descriptions are startlingly absent regarding this trip to the coast and their life there. One can even wonder if she might not have made up the San Francisco journey to hide her Midwest life, as here her story becomes elusive. How the young mother who described her Chicago existence as penniless, her clothes meager, and her lodgings squalid found the money for the trip or how they could afford a place to live, or where they settled in San Francisco, are unmentioned. If true, the venture seems to have been an impulsive disaster that lasted less than a year.

In the wake of the 1849 gold rush, San Francisco had grown up. Miners’ shacks and shanties had given way to substantial brick houses, the U.S. Mint had built headquarters there, vigilante committees fussed about cleaning up crime in red‐light districts, mud streets were being paved with cobblestones and earthquake tremors dutifully tracked. Levi Strauss had opened a store to sell his denims to the miners who still flocked to the surrounding hills. San Francisco had its streets of frontier bawdiness; the Barbary Coast, with its bars and brothels, remained a treacherous den of thieves. Newcomers arrived daily on ships that clogged the harbor, hoping to grab their share of gold.

Canning’s drinking continued, and Victoria found herself “supporting the man by whom she ought to have been supported.” Who cared for Byron is not explained by Tilton. Victoria answered an ad for a “cigar girl” in a tobacco emporium, which were notoriously fronts for brothels. Behind the slim sampling of cigars, girls were supposed to sell favors instead of cheroots. These establishments were routine in large cities. To demonstrate just how vulgar cigar stores were considered, an 1870 guide to Manhattan brothels noted that a cigar girl was low on the list. Customers ranged from fatherly judges to toughly aggressive youths. Newspapers warned impoverished women about the “great evil consequent upon very beautiful girls being placed in cigar stores,” where customers “ultimately affect her ruin.”

Why Victoria cited this dubious job in an otherwise meager account of her life in San Francisco seems strange, unless it was an attempt to prove herself innocent of prostitution. Tilton wrote that the “blushing, modest, and sensitive” Victoria was fired after one day because she was “too fine” for the job. The proprietor in this sordid occupation allegedly gave Victoria a twenty‐dollar gold piece, puzzlingly generous compensation for a young woman he had just fired.

Victoria then became a seamstress, her needle being the “only weapon many women possess wherewith to fight the battle of life,” continued Tilton. There are no clues as to how long she performed this job, an exhausting process of hand‐stitching, before sewing machines were in general use. One day, “She chanced to come upon Anna Cogswell,” an actress, who wanted a seamstress. Victoria complained that she could not make enough money sewing, so Cogswell told her she should go on the stage. Just like that, Victoria was “engaged as a lesser light to the Cogswell star.” In those days, actresses were considered part of the shady demimonde, with stage door Johnnies waiting for a trophy in exchange for a late supper.

With Victoria’s quick memory, she learned the part, and for six weeks earned fifty‐two dollars a week. “Never leave the stage,” admiring fellow performers urged. Victoria allegedly said she was meant for something higher. Then, while “clad in a pink silk dress and slippers, acting in the ballroom scene in the Corsican Brothers, suddenly a spirit‐voice told her ‘Victoria, come home!’” In her vision, she saw Tennie, “then a mere child—standing by her mother,” calling her to return. She raced out, still in her “dramatic adornments, through a foggy rain to her hotel. She packed up her few clothes, Canning, and Byron and grabbed the morning steamer for New York.” On board, her “spiritual states” produced “pro‐ found excitement among the passengers.”

Mother Annie, wrote Tilton, had told Tennie—at the same time Victoria saw the vision—“to send the spirits after Victoria to bring her home.”

The spirits may have been calling, but it was their mother who wanted Victoria back, to help support the family. With Victoria home, they now had another golden goose to put to work.