Two days after she left the House of Mercy, on February 8, Jennie got lucky and ran into Madeline downtown at the Boston Store. Madeline was shopping in preparation for her departure to Cincinnati, where the first round of depositions would be taken the next day. She seemed “a little icy,” but Jennie followed her around the department store nonetheless as she picked out undergarments and a new purse, and then down the street to Morez et Cie, a fashionable millinery shop where Madeline bought a fetching little hat for nearly half the thirty dollars Jennie calculated she had in her pocket. Jennie was curious as to where she got the money, as Madeline appeared completely broke at the House of Mercy. “The day my suit was filed, I hadn’t even my car fare,” she told Jennie. Sister Dorothea had told her that Madeline had no money when she arrived seeking refuge one evening and that Miss Talcott, who was in charge of the house then, “had gone about among Madeline’s lady friends and collected money for her because she did not have a cent for the little necessities of life.” Madeline explained to Jennie that she had gotten the money from her brother, who received an unexpected windfall, although Jennie didn’t buy that explanation. Regardless, there clearly was no shortage of funds to pay for the trial expenses. Madeline bragged to Jennie that she had a private stateroom for the trip to Cincinnati so she “would not have to be stared at,” as well as a nine-hundred-mile train pass.
Meanwhile, the Breckinridge team was scrambling to cover day-to-day expenses, which now included Jennie’s room and board since she had relocated to a boardinghouse on Connecticut Avenue. Stoll had to advance William Worthington, the stenographer in Breckinridge’s law office who was acting as an intermediary with Jennie, thirty dollars for Jennie’s expenses because Breckinridge hadn’t come through with the requested funds. Breckinridge repaid Stoll with a check postdated to his next congressional paycheck because he said he didn’t have “the money to square just now without straining.” Desha wrote to his father, “How are you for money? I am dead broke and I fear you are too,” explaining that one witness needed seventy dollars for travel expenses. As the result of their straitened finances, the defense was relying on the shoestring detective efforts of Desha and Sam McChesney, who were managing an ad hoc crew of party loyalists dispatched to investigate Pollard in various cities, as well as intelligence that came in over the transom from Breckinridge’s network of kin and political allies. A few of the leads proved potentially useful. Breckinridge’s brother Robert wrote to tell him that he had overheard a story from a local doctor that Col. A. M. Swope had “tried to employ him to produce an abortion on Miss Pollard.” But much of the intelligence was a stew of hearsay and rumor: a thirteen-year-old girl known as “Mad Poll” whose father was a Frankfort harness maker supposedly entertained men at the Galt House in Louisville; Pollard’s aunt Mary Stout allegedly ran a secret brothel in a stable behind her house. The team ended up spending a considerable amount of time chasing leads that ended up being dead ends.
Stoll wanted to systematize and professionalize the investigation by hiring proper detectives to investigate Madeline’s life and to direct Jennie’s efforts. Not shy about manipulating women for his own ends, he wanted to hire a female detective to befriend Madeline’s mother and get into her house, “letting her get sick on their hands and having to stay with them ten days or two weeks if necessary” to see if they could get Mrs. Pollard “to talk very freely.” Stoll got a proposal from the local office of the famed Pinkerton Detective Agency that would cost between $1,500 and $2,000. But when he attempted to move ahead with the plan, Robert Pinkerton, who managed the East Coast operations of the firm his father founded, told Stoll that he would need him to personally guarantee the account because the Philadelphia office “did some work on the same case … and there is a balance still due on that account.” Stoll, who like most of Breckinridge’s friends was donating his time to the case, apparently was unwilling to go into debt for his friend, and the Pinkerton plan didn’t come to fruition.
* * *
Madeline Pollard and her lawyer Calderon Carlisle arrived in Cincinnati on the morning of February 9, had a late breakfast, and made their way to the downtown law office where the depositions would be taken. Carlisle was in his early forties, tall, thin, and well dressed, his wavy hair slicked back, every bit the club man. Madeline was dressed in a double-breasted dark-blue coat with fashionable leg-o’-mutton sleeves over a black dress, tan gloves, patent leather high-button shoes, and her new hat, a saucer-shaped black velvet affair with a feather plume.
Charles Stoll and Desha Breckinridge, who had been dispatched to handle the Cincinnati depositions, met them at the law office to take the depositions of the three women doctors who, Pollard said, attended her after she gave birth at the Norwood Foundling Asylum in Cincinnati the first time she was pregnant. Breckinridge’s strategy, as he told one of his supporters, wasn’t to deny a relationship with Madeline but to prove the “absolute falsity of all the more serious charges”: that he seduced Pollard when she was a girl, that he was the father of her children, and that he introduced her into society. The first two got to the heart of the case against him; the latter was a point of pride for Breckinridge, who was eager to refute the widespread notion it was he who had given Pollard a toehold into Washington’s upper-class society.
The three doctors were Dr. Belle Buchanan; Dr. Mary Street, who was now married and retired and went by Mrs. Logan; and Dr. Kate Perry, who also was married and now Mrs. Cain. All three were graduates of the Pulte Medical College, a local homeopathic school of medicine. Both Dr. Buchanan and Dr. Perry recognized Madeline as a former patient. Dr. Buchanan testified that Dr. Street brought Pollard to the practice she shared with Dr. Perry sometime around February 1885, although she was unsure of the exact dates, and that she treated her for a “disorder consequent upon child-birth.” Madeline said in her autobiography that her first delivery was difficult. Dr. Perry testified that she recognized Madeline as Louise Wilson, who was introduced to her as a widow who had suffered a miscarriage but who she later found out was unmarried. When it was Dr. Street’s turn to be deposed and she was brought into the room, however, she didn’t recognize Madeline at all. “The name Louise Wilson means nothing to me. I don’t know you,” she said when she was introduced to Madeline.
For his part, Stoll was convinced that Street did know Madeline but had pretended not to recognize her because, as he told Breckinridge, “she and the Buchanan woman had performed an abortion on Louise Wilson, who I am satisfied is Miss Pollard.”
The taking of depositions next moved to the Norwood Asylum, the charity home for unwed mothers where Madeline said her first child was born in 1885. Madeline and Carlisle went there in December seeking proof of her stay but hadn’t been able to find any record of a Louise Wilson, the name Pollard said she used. When Carlisle examined the records, however, he did find an Alice Burgoyne who gave birth on a nearby date, which Pollard then said was the name she had used but forgotten in the haze of all the aliases she had used over the years. Sister Augustine, who was the nun in charge of the asylum, said in her deposition that she never saw Madeline before she came in December, although she noted there were some one hundred girls there every year and most used aliases. She said that Madeline asked her what had happened to the baby she left there and that Madeline “went into hysterics” when she told her the baby born to the woman named Burgoyne died in July 1885.
Sister Augustine also said Madeline didn’t seem familiar with the home. However, as the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, at one point Madeline went directly to a bookcase and “took therefrom a copy of Washington Irving and found among the leaves a card she had placed there when an inmate.” Madeline explained that she had left a three-volume set of Irving’s works at the home as a gift for the sisters and found in one of the books a Christmas card that she had used as a bookmark. Sister Augustine then pressed Madeline as to why she wanted to ruin Breckinridge, telling her that “she must be a bad woman to make such a show of herself before the world.” Madeline replied: “Oh no. I was a bad girl, but I am a good woman.”
Despite this heated exchange, the Cincinnati and Kentucky papers reported that the depositions had been “decidedly in favor of Colonel Breckinridge.” Madeline returned to Washington irritable with how the depositions had gone. “She could not bear to talk of it,” Jennie reported. While working on the bookkeeping at the House of Mercy, Jennie had overheard that Madeline was going out on a walk and followed her. She tried to talk Madeline into dropping the suit, since she wasn’t expecting any money anyway. “I cannot give this up now; it is part of my life,” she told Jennie. “This man has ruined my life … and he shall suffer what he has made me suffer.”
Jennie had used Madeline’s time out of town to befriend her brother Dudley in the hopes of gaining some useful intelligence. She spent two afternoons sightseeing with him, visiting Capitol Hill—where she had him point out Breckinridge on the House floor—and the Washington Monument and the Botanical Gardens, all the while pumping him for information about Madeline’s age and her motivations. She found him “unsophisticated” and “not half as bright as his sister” and ended up convinced that Madeline didn’t confide in him.
There was more urgency than ever to Jennie’s work. During a preliminary hearing on February 17, Breckinridge’s lawyers had asked Judge Andrew Bradley, who was scheduled to hear the case, for a postponement until late March because Enoch Totten, Breckinridge’s lead attorney, was ill and recovering in Florida. Pollard’s lawyer Carlisle objected, accusing the defense of obstruction and failing to prepare for the trial. Bradley refused the postponement, noting that Breckinridge had other lawyers, and set the trial date for March 8. Less than a week later, Totten wrote to Breckinridge and said he was still unwell and was “by no means able to undergo the labor of such a trial.” It was a devastating development for Breckinridge. Totten was not only “rather the best lawyer here,” as Breckinridge told a friend, having long defended the Pennsylvania Railroad against lawsuits, but the person who “understood the case better than anybody else.”
The loss of Totten brought home the reality that the Breckinridge team was large but not particularly deep in the expertise needed. Phil Thompson hadn’t practiced law before the District courts for years, Desha was a newly minted lawyer who hadn’t done much more than take depositions, and Shelby and Stoll were primarily corporate lawyers, although Stoll could be devastating on cross-examination. Even as he cast about desperately for another lawyer on short notice, Breckinridge made one last desperate plea to Totten. “I am in a hole,” he wrote, begging him to come back and at least be present in the courtroom. The letter went unanswered. Florida apparently not being salubrious enough for his health, Totten had decamped to Cuba.
On February 15, the taking of depositions moved to Lexington, where a long list of witnesses had been called. For Breckinridge, this was the most critical component of the defense, as many of the witnesses were expected to testify about Madeline’s supposedly immoral behavior as a young woman. With Congress in session, he remained in Washington, however, and sent Desha, Stoll, and his partner John Shelby to take the depositions. The first witness of significance was Catesby Hawkins, a carpenter from Frankfort, who testified that some years ago when she was a teenager, Pollard attended a Christmas party at a Squire Tinsley’s where there was much drinking of whiskey and wine. He said there was “a mock marriage between Miss Pollard and Alex Julian,” and afterward they were “taken upstairs and put to bed,” although he couldn’t say if Julian remained there all night. He said the “talk in the neighborhood was that [Pollard] was very fast.”
Next to testify was Mollie Shindlebower, who was “formerly a sporting woman”—a prostitute. She said that when she was in her teens, she went to live with Madeline’s aunt Mary Stout in Bridgeport after her parents died and that Madeline once visited for three months. Shindlebower said Madeline’s behavior “caused frequent family disturbances” because she “received many young men for visitors whose reputation was bad” and took buggy rides with them until ten or eleven o’clock at night. She said Madeline “bore the reputation of being wild and fast” and that she suspected that “Miss Pollard had attained a woman’s estate”—lost her virginity—because her brother once “made an indecent remark” that she “did not rebuke.”
John Brand then testified that he had met Pollard at the home of Lena Singleton in Lexington in 1883. He alleged that Singleton was “the mistress of James Rhodes” and kept a known “assignation house”—a place where a proprietress rented rooms with no questions asked, whether it be illicit lovers or sporting women and their clients. He claimed that once when he came to the house, “Miss Pollard ran out of the room and disappeared,” and that he saw her at the house after that “in conversation with James Rhodes,” who told him “he was educating Miss Pollard.” Brand also claimed that when Pollard was working at the office of Howard Gratz, the publisher of the Lexington Gazette, “he would frequently take Miss Pollard out buggy riding,” bringing her “several miles into the country,” but had to “quit taking her riding” because he was afraid of his wife, who “was a jealous woman.”
The deposition of Madeline’s old Wesleyan classmate Wessie Brown, who was now Mrs. Robertson, was taken the same day in Cincinnati. She testified that soon after Madeline came to the school “she told her that her father was a great admirer of W.C.P. Breckinridge” and that after her absence to attend her sister’s funeral, Madeline told her that “W.C.P. Breckinridge had introduced himself to her on a train, and that she seemed much elated that so prominent a man should notice her so kindly.”
There was only one witness the next day, but his testimony caused “a sensation of great magnitude,” reported Louisville’s Courier-Journal. The Courier-Journal had been invited by Stoll to cover the Lexington depositions in retaliation for Carlisle allowing a reporter from the Cincinnati Enquirer to cover some of the Cincinnati depositions and leaking the contents of others, which meant that the public was able to follow the opening rounds of testimony more or less in real time—and that the battle for public opinion already had begun. Dr. T. M. Lewis testified that Col. Armstead M. Swope had in early February 1885 requested to meet with him and told him that “he had become seriously compromised in his relations with a young lady by the name of Pollard, who used to live in Crab Orchard.” He didn’t mention the woman’s first name, but told Dr. Lewis that “he had been a frequent caller upon the young lady in Lexington,” and as a result of an encounter one night in the parlor, which Swope intimated that she had initiated, “she was in a delicate condition.” Swope supposedly asked Lewis to “produce an abortion” for Pollard, which he refused to do. Swope later told the doctor that “the child had been born and now had a good home.”
The sensational charge that Swope, the well-known former Internal Revenue collector and Union officer who had been killed in the infamous Swope-Goodloe duel of 1889, had tried to procure an abortion for Pollard swept through Lexington and reverberated in Washington like a “bombshell.” It was quickly replaced by even more sensational testimony from an even more prominent witness: Julia Blackburn, who was so annoyed at Breckinridge that she had agreed to give a deposition, going against every ideal of southern propriety to do so. Her deposition was “intensely favorable to Miss Pollard,” reported the Cincinnati Enquirer, which had been leaked a copy of the testimony that had been taken two weeks earlier at Julia’s apartment in Washington.
According to Blackburn, Madeline and Breckinridge called at her flat on the evening of Good Friday, March 31, 1893, and insisted on seeing her. Breckinridge “came into the parlor and said he had come to ask my protection of Miss Pollard” because “he expected to make her his wife as soon as the proper time had elapsed after the death of the late Mrs. Breckinridge.” She said that Madeline called him “Willie” and put her arms around him and that in general their manner was what she “would take to be that of engaged people.”
She said that after that first meeting, Breckinridge came back on his own and said he could tell that Julia “looked shocked” when he announced his engagement. It wasn’t the age difference that bothered Julia, although she said Breckinridge acknowledged that the engagement probably appeared “absurd” because he was “quite old enough to be [Madeline’s] father.” She herself had had a whirlwind courtship with a widower nearly twenty years her senior. She met her beloved husband, Luke, in the spring of 1857, when she was twenty-four and touring Europe with her sister and he was forty-one and taking a trip to recover from the death of his wife Ella. They were married the following November. What bothered Julia was Breckinridge engaging himself to marry so soon after his wife’s death. “This seems to me to be a very poor return for so much devotion as you received—you have forgotten your wife so soon,” she said. Breckinridge told her that he had “discovered Miss Pollard’s feelings toward” him, and “being a man of honor there was nothing left for me to do.” Blackburn found this excuse, which belonged in an early nineteenth-century romance novel, absurd and told him that he took “a very high view of the case” that most men would not.
Blackburn also said that Breckinridge had sung Madeline’s praises, telling her “she was a woman of a great many talents”—she “sang and played and drew” and was a prodigious reader, “devouring everything that came out.” She said, “He said she was one of the most magnetic and agreeable women he had ever known.” She also claimed, as she had in her letter to Basil Duke, that it was largely on Breckinridge’s recommendation that Madeline became “a recognized friend” of hers and was “seen many places with her on public occasions.”
Breckinridge, who attended the deposition, was “appalled” at Blackburn’s testimony, according to the Enquirer. He apparently had hoped “the memories of old time relations” between the Blackburns and the Breckinridges would “preclude any vigorous attempt on her part to prove that the statements of Miss Pollard are predicated on facts,” but instead she had thoroughly “scored the Congressman.” Breckinridge personally handled the cross-examination in an attempt to get Blackburn to admit that it wasn’t he who had introduced Pollard to her but her landlady, Mrs. Fillette, and that Madeline’s character had come into question because she had allowed Charles Dudley Warner to stay overnight at Fillette’s house when she wasn’t there. In fact, as Blackburn admitted, Fillette had taken the unusually harsh step of “withdrawing” her introduction to Madeline sometime the previous winter, predicting there would be a “terrible denouement” regarding the young woman. But Blackburn refused to be cowed. She “wheeled in her chair” and with eyes flashing “turned every query of the defendant to the strength of the plaintiff” and then “stated with much vigor that she thought he had not acted right in the matter, and that Miss Pollard had been irreparably wronged.”
The spectacle of two of the Bluegrass’s finest dueling it out in the “star-chamber,” as the Enquirer termed it, as well as Blackburn’s robust defense of Madeline, ensured that her deposition was front-page news. Breckinridge was practically apoplectic, especially since the leaked version of the deposition conveniently omitted much of his cross-examination, which he promptly provided to friendly newspapers. He complained to a friend that “Blackburn put things into my mouth which the plaintiff said when I was not present and she colored everything against me.” He called the attorney who prepared the deposition a “shyster” and claimed the testimony had been “doctored.”
Increasingly, Breckinridge looked to pin the blame for his predicament on others, including, as he told one friend, “a gang in Lexington who are my enemies.” Breckinridge had earned the enmity of one of the most powerful political interests in the state: the Blue Grass Hemp Trust. Hemp, which was widely used in the making of rope for ship riggings, was one of Kentucky’s key agricultural products and was a particularly important crop for the Bluegrass region. Bluegrass hemp, however, was facing stiff competition from imported hemp, even as overall demand sagged as steam replaced sails. Still, as a Bourbon Democrat, Breckinridge opposed protective tariffs—even for an industry based in his own district. He also blamed “those who have been disappointed in getting [political] appointments,” and in letters to friends, rehashed obscure, internecine battles over postmaster and tax collector positions going back a decade. “That my enemies are using this poor woman I am perfectly certain,” he told a friend.
The Kentucky depositions resumed on February 20. The first witness was Alex Julian, who had been a crush of Madeline’s when she was a young woman. Julian denounced Catesby Hawkins’s testimony about the “mock marriage” at Squire Tinsley’s as “unqualifiedly false” and asserted that Hawkins wasn’t even at the party. He said that after the consumption of some eggnog on Christmas morning in 1881, when the company was “feeling good,” he performed a mock marriage between Madeline and Owen Tinsley, the squire’s brother. He said that afterward someone made a joke about people going to bed after being married, and that he and Madeline, who was “very drunk,” went upstairs and lay on a bed, but came back downstairs when they heard people asking about them. What Breckinridge had hoped he would testify to was what he had reportedly told his friend Omar Thomas: “that he had pulled up the plaintiff’s clothes and was about in the act of entry when he was interrupted.” Under questioning, however, all he admitted to was kissing Madeline one afternoon while they sat near a bridge and a few other times. When he was asked what he thought about her morals, he said, “I mean no disrespect to the people of my community when I say that I thought her to be as pure and chaste as other girls living in my neighborhood.”
Following Julian, a man named Taylor Parrent testified that he had refused to rent a portion of a house in Bridgeport to Madeline’s mother “on account of the reputation borne by Miss Madeline Pollard.” Then Dr. James Robertson testified that he had known the Pollard family in Crab Orchard, where he “had attended Mrs. Pollard when her youngest child … was born in 1865.” He said that the little girl known as Mattie “was about three years old” then, which would mean that Madeline was born around 1862 and was in her early twenties when she met Breckinridge.
Mrs. Ketchum and Mrs. Hoyt, the two ladies who ran the boardinghouse in Lexington where Madeline lived when she attended the Sayre Institute, testified on February 22. The Breckinridge team hoped to get Ketchum to say that Colonel Swope had visited Madeline at the house, but she testified that Swope had never visited Madeline, only Rhodes once or twice a week, always in the parlor, and that they “generally quarreled all the time.” She said that Madeline’s behavior was “above reproach” when she lived in the house, and that when she first came in September 1884 she was still a schoolgirl in short dresses. She also testified that Madeline left in February 1885—which is when Madeline claimed she left because she was pregnant—and didn’t return until the fall of 1885, when she had started wearing long dresses, the mark of womanhood. She did say that while Madeline was away, she heard a story that “Col. Breckinridge had called on Miss Pollard in Cincinnati, and that she had gone driving with him in a closed carriage.” When she asked Madeline about it, she laughed it off and said, “Why, that was my uncle, Henry Oliver, of Cincinnati. He is the very image of Colonel Breckinridge and is so often taken for the Colonel. The very idea!”
Ketchum also testified that at one point when Madeline was living in the house, Col. Breckinridge came to board there for several weeks, “saying that he had an important case in court and he did not care to stay at the hotel, which was not convenient.”
That afternoon Rankin Rossell, the clerk at the Cincinnati dry goods store Shillito’s, testified that one November afternoon in 1884 Madeline came in and introduced herself, saying that she knew of him through her cousin Nellie Oliver. She asked him to take her to Wesleyan College and introduce her to Dr. Brown, the president, whom he knew, and told him that her guardian Mr. Rhodes would be along the next day to pay her tuition. He said he called on Madeline at the school frequently after that and that their “friendship led to an engagement to marry, which was made during the Christmas holidays” of 1884. Rossell claimed that when he called on Madeline at Wesleyan “she would throw herself into his lap” and that he would kiss her. He said he broke off the engagement because she “permitted him to take liberties with her,” although he said he did not think she was a “bad” girl, just “forward in her actions.”
The two witnesses who testified the following day were the most critical for Breckinridge. Building on John Brand’s testimony that Madeline frequented Lena Singleton’s assignation house, Breckinridge hoped to prove that while she was living in Lexington with Mrs. Ketchum and attending Sayre, Madeline was living “a double life, one in high and the other in low society,” as the Morning Transcript put it. Dr. R. D. Greene testified that he had been summoned in 1882 or 1883 to an assignation house in Lexington to treat Rhodes and that he returned several times thereafter and that Rhodes pointed out a young woman “he said he was educating” and at another point told him “the young woman was a Miss Pollard and that he was engaged to marry her.” He said he later met the same young woman at the house of Mrs. Ketchum.
Then Hiram Kaufman, who worked at the lunatic asylum with Rhodes, testified that Rhodes invited him to go with him to see “his girl” at Singleton’s house, where he was introduced to Madeline. He said they got drunk on beer, and “Miss Pollard later retired to a room with Rhodes.” He also claimed to have seen Pollard out buggy riding with John Brand and that on “one occasion he had seen Brand and Miss Pollard coming out of one of the rooms” at Singleton’s assignation house.
William Wood, a carpenter from Lexington, testified that he, too, had been engaged to Madeline, having met her in the spring of 1882 at the farm of her aunt Lou Keene outside of Lexington. He said that she used to sing and play the piano for him on Sunday afternoons and that they “soon fell in love” and he “purchased a handsome plain gold ring,” which he had engraved with their names. He said Madeline broke off the engagement after five or six weeks when he told her he couldn’t afford to take her on a bridal trip to Europe and refused to return the ring, claiming it had been lost.
The Breckinridge team felt they had scored a victory with the last set of depositions. Desha wrote to his father that the depositions “prove every thing we have started out to prove, except direct proof of her having sexual intercourse with any man.” But it soon became apparent that the old scripts weren’t working as they had expected. For one, just by showing her face at the depositions, Madeline had countered the image of the shame-faced adventuress. “At no time in the course of the examinations does she betray any sense of nervousness or of trying to bear up in the playing of a part,” noted the Morning Transcript. In fact, it said, she “gives one the impression of one who has been seared with pain until there is no more sense of suffering.” Just as important, it noted, in an opinion echoed by the Enquirer, “in every word and action she betrays the breeding of a lady, of the polished society woman.”
If they had hoped to shift public opinion by smearing this decorous lady with sensational depositions, they had miscalculated. All they accomplished, said the Enquirer, besides increasing the “already absorbing interest” in the case, was to demonstrate that “Miss Pollard’s life has been romantic and remarkable.” Importantly, ideas about engagements were changing as marriage became more about love and less about economics. A woman who had one or two before she settled down was likely to be seen as popular and flirty, not necessarily debauched. Furthermore, the more sensational depositions were immediately discredited. Alex Julian had denounced Catesby Hawkins as a liar under oath. Kaufman’s deposition had the “glamour of improbability,” said the Enquirer, while Dr. Greene had crumbled under cross-examination, “growing so very hazy and inaccurate that his evidence was largely speculative.” Mollie Shindlebower, the former prostitute who testified to Madeline’s wild ways, was caught in a mini-scandal of her own. She reportedly lured a tourist to her hotel room and attempted to blackmail him by threatening to “claim he attempted to take advantage of her,” although the Breckinridge people claimed it was a setup to impugn their witness.
Breckinridge had ignored the advice of one of the lawyers he had contacted about taking Totten’s place: don’t rely on prostitutes or the men who frequent them as your key witnesses—they lack credibility. Breckinridge was so eager to discredit Pollard that he took whatever he could get in terms of testimony. One local wrote to the Enquirer saying, “The character of the Immaculate Son of God could be smirched” with such witnesses.
An even bigger problem with the rush to smear Madeline was the backlash it provoked. When Breckinridge’s people began investigating the reports of the mock marriage, Squire Tinsley, who hosted the party, wrote to Breckinridge as “your friend and admirer” to tell him that the report was “false.” He later met personally with Breckinridge to tell him that the story was incorrect. Regardless, Breckinridge’s lawyers pressed ahead with the Hawkins deposition. When Tinsley asked to give a deposition to correct the record, they refused to allow him to testify. A furious Tinsley sent a letter to the Courier-Journal that was reprinted around the state averring that Hawkins’s testimony was an “unmitigated, contemptible lie.” He said that Hawkins was never at his house, and the “alleged mock marriage was a mere joke and a farce which has been distorted into a scandal.” As a result of the insult to Tinsley, a man many considered “one of the most sober and highly respected residents” of Frankfort, locals were “severe in their denunciations” of Breckinridge, according to the Courier-Journal.
Likewise, the attempt to pin Madeline’s first pregnancy on Colonel Swope, a dead man who couldn’t defend himself—much like Cleveland’s allies blamed the late Oscar Folsom—“aroused a storm of indignation throughout the Blue Grass,” said the Enquirer. Dr. Lewis’s testimony was largely discounted when Swope’s brother William said that it was a matter of record that his brother had been in Mexico during the fall of 1884 and hadn’t returned to Lexington until December 10, which didn’t give him much time to have made Madeline’s acquaintance and frequently called on her if he was seeking an abortion for her in early February 1885. “I can not find anybody who ever saw them together, or who knows that they were acquainted with each other,” said William. Furthermore, he said that his brother was in Europe in the fall of 1885, when Dr. Lewis claimed Swope told him about the child being born.
Breckinridge was increasingly desperate to link Madeline to another man. He believed that during the summer she worked for the Lexington Gazette, which was in 1887, right before she came to Washington, “she was on illicit relations with H. [Howard] Gratz,” the Gazette’s publisher, who was a widower with grown children. He also contended that “there was an engagement to marry” between Madeline and Gratz. According to the local gossip, the engagement was short-circuited when Mrs. Captain Morgan—Nellie Morgan, the wife of Rhodes’s former supervisor at the state asylum—sat next to Mrs. Judge Morton—Mary Morton, who was Gratz’s daughter—at a luncheon and spilled the beans about Madeline’s relationship with Rhodes. Gratz, according to the Morning Transcript, “was heartbroken and wanted … to marry her anyhow, but was prevented” from doing so by his children. Now, Breckinridge hoped to prove that Gratz was likely the father of the child that Madeline said was born in February 1888. He planned to assert that a riding accident Madeline had in late June of that year, which caused several broken ribs, would have ended any pregnancy resulting from their spring liaison, even though Desha consulted a physician who told him that the timing of the accident meant “such a fall would have had no such effect on the embryo.”
Breckinridge told Shelby he believed that if Gratz was “approached right … he can be of great service,” so Desha and Stoll scheduled him for a deposition. But Gratz pleaded to be excused because he was going to be married and didn’t want the publicity. He said that “he couldn’t prove anything of any consequence, except that he was engaged to [Madeline].” Despite the fact that his confirmation of the engagement appeared to belie Madeline’s contention that she always had been faithful to Breckinridge, they let Gratz off the hook and canceled the deposition.
Throwing caution aside and now writing directly to Jennie instead of using Stoll as an intermediary, Breckinridge pressured her to try to find out something about Madeline’s relationship with Charles Dudley Warner. He said Warner “was in her room at the Elsmere”—a hotel in Washington where Madeline briefly stayed—“pretending to be writing.” But Jennie had been unable to get anywhere near Madeline. “You don’t know how discouraged I’ve been,” she wrote to Stoll. Breckinridge told her not to give up, reminding her that it was a “delicate and difficult undertaking.” He stressed that any little piece of information she got could be the key to the defense, likening it, perhaps a little too aptly, to the strand that fabricates a rope by which a “sinking ship” is winched “to the shore.”
As what many were describing as the “trial of the decade” drew near, it seems that W.C.P. Breckinridge increasingly was aware that no rope may be at hand, at least not in the form of another man he could pin Pollard on. There was only one last thing he could do to prepare for the trial. His wife, Louise, it appears, was now mentally unhinged. On top of the widespread impression that her marriage to Breckinridge had been of the shotgun variety, the Blackburn deposition had made it clear that while Louise was swooning around Washington last spring imagining herself as the next Mrs. W.C.P. Breckinridge, her Willie was still running around with the woman who had been his lover for the past nine years. She had been made a fool of and was now displaying what Willie told Nisba was an “unnatural state of mind” caused by “these constant newspaper attacks.” He confided to his daughter, who was at Ella’s house in Staunton, that he was afraid to leave Louise alone in the house he had rented on Q Street while he was in court dealing with this “unfortunate and malignant trial,” but said, “I do not know where to turn to find somebody to be with her.” He said he knew it was “more than I ought to ask,” as Nisba had “done so much and done it so heroically … that I am utterly without excuse to ask more of you,” but ask he would. “Do you think you would have the strength to come down and be with her?” he wrote to Nisba the day before the trial started.
So as the world tilted on its axis toward the twentieth century, with speeding streetcars and electric lights and telephones blurring the old distances and darknesses, with new questions being asked about old ideas, Nisba Breckinridge made her way to Washington.