To Willie Breckinridge, it must have seemed that the world had turned upside down. He found the women he had long taken for granted—the cook, the nameless typist in the hallway, the former slave who ran the assignation house where he had his trysts—not only aligned against him but also being taken seriously over his own word. To friends, he claimed that it was a pile of “perjured testimony … both black and white” manufactured to destroy him. He railed against “women doctors who are abortionists, women type-writers who are treacherous,” the “fat conscienceless cook,” and Martha McClellan Brown, one of those “ladies who attend conventions, deliver speeches and shriek for all sort of things which they call reform.” How dare she swear to “what she knows is untrue, and in favor of a prostitute and against a man who is honest and clean.”
This, for Breckinridge, was the crux. He thought that as a woman, Madeline should be defined and disgraced by her sins, but as a man, he should have his sins excused as just a blip in an otherwise blameless life. After all, he told a friend, he had atoned for his “secret sins” by “doing labors which knew no cessation” and by making the “lives of those who loved me as happy as I could.” In his mind, he had suffered for his sins, had been crucified, and had died a kind of death; people would surely see, he thought, “my weakness, my sin, my punishment and my deliverance.”
And now, as the lawyers prepared to make their case for the charges to the jury, his fate was in the hands of a man he believed to be against him. Indeed, people couldn’t help noticing how Judge Bradley turned away whenever Breckinridge testified, like he had caught a whiff of something foul. But Bradley had made rulings that favored both sides; he had allowed most of Breckinridge’s depositions to be admitted, as well as the disputed letter that Madeline claimed was a forgery. It seems that what the defense considered partiality was the fact that Madeline was being given a hearing at all. Butterworth told reporters the weekend after the testimony concluded that the judge should never have let such a case come to trial, saying that Madeline had “impregnated the homes of the land … where we have our pure wives and mothers and sisters” with “a foul, pestilence-breeding contagion.”
At the hearing on Saturday about the charges for the jury, Carlisle argued that the burden of proof was on Breckinridge to show that Madeline was in on what he said was a pretend engagement, while Shelby argued that it was the plaintiff’s responsibility to prove that the two parties had entered into a valid marriage contract. Beyond these dry legal questions, however, most of what the men on the jury were asked to examine poked deep into the intimate details of Madeline’s life. Carlisle argued that it made no difference if Madeline had carnal knowledge of Breckinridge or any other man before she met him if he knew it when the marriage contract was made. Shelby asserted that if Pollard was guilty of “lewd and lascivious conduct” with other men, it would release Breckinridge from a contract to marry. Bradley asked exactly what he meant by “lewd and lascivious.” Shelby said no man could be expected to marry a woman who wasn’t chaste. “Suppose he knew of such conduct with five parties, and knowledge of it with a sixth afterward came to him?” asked Bradley, questioning whether that would change the legal aspect of the case, as Shelby fumbled to explain the exact mathematical calculation of a woman’s chastity.
On Monday, Bradley ruled that while the burden of proof was on the plaintiff to show that a contract of marriage existed, the burden was on the defense to show that both parties were in on what Breckinridge said was an engagement ruse. Bradley also said that the only way Madeline’s sexual conduct could be used as a defense was if Breckinridge found out after the marriage contract was made that she’d had illicit relations with men other than Rhodes.
For the rest of the day and into the next morning, Carlisle summarized the case. Standing before the jury in his white linen suit, a gold tiepin placed just so, he asked why, with all the knowledge Breckinridge had gained from being intimate with Madeline for nine years, the only depositions he could produce questioning her character were from disreputable people. He showed the jury the tintype of Madeline in her schoolgirl dress and asked if she appeared to be “the woman of experience on whom this defendant wishes to place more than half the burden of their intimacy.”
Phil Thompson, portly and ruddy-faced, summarized for the defense in “florid Kentucky oratory,” taking the tack that the “members of the jury would probably have done about what Mr. Breckinridge had done under the same circumstances.” He called Madeline a “self-admitted wanton looking for revenge” and said that finding for her would “encourage every strumpet to push her little mass of filth into court.” He appealed to deep-seated sentiments about women and purity, telling the jury that “every decent man knows the defendant was right in refusing to put [Madeline] at the head of the table with his daughters.” He compared her to a dog in heat in a story an “old darky” used to tell. Even then, there was an audible gasp when Thompson, while discussing Dr. Belle Buchanan’s testimony, said he didn’t “take much stock in female physicians” because he “always noticed that whenever there is an abortion case, a secret birth or any case that a reputable and respectable physician will not touch, you will usually find the hand of a female physician in it somewhere.”
Ben Butterworth’s closing argument was tamer in rhetoric and better in oratory, with his sonorous voice that seemed to rattle the courtroom windows. He practically brought the spectators to their feet with his stirring testament to the manly bonds of friendship between himself and Breckinridge. He said that Madeline was no innocent country girl like those he had known back in the Miami Hills, “honest and virtuous” girls who went to spelling bees and log rollings. He said that if Madeline had been “high-minded,” she would have repelled Breckinridge’s advances and insisted that he drive her home. “And I say to you,” he boomed, turning toward Breckinridge, “that you would not have taken her twenty feet further; I care not what they say of your blandishments, your silver tongue, your destructive eloquence and all that!”
He called Madeline an “unnatural” woman for abandoning the babies she claimed were “born along the way, and buried in unknown or forgotten places.” He urged the jury to forgive Breckinridge for what many a great man had done, but to repudiate a woman who corrupted public morals when she “deliberately turned from everything that man or woman could desire, and proclaimed her shame.” It was so late in the afternoon when Butterworth finished—with his words still reverberating through the old courtroom from what the Enquirer called “a superb effort,” the kind of hair-tingling oratory that held people spellbound in the nineteenth century—that Wilson wisely asked the judge if he could begin his closing argument in the morning.
So it was on the morning of Friday, April 13, that Jere Wilson began the last address of the trial. It could, most agreed, hardly be called a speech like Butterworth’s. There were no flights of oratory, “few pyrotechnic displays.” Just scathing sarcasm and a dispassionate, point-by-point dismantling of the defense. Wilson stood close to the witness box; at first, his voice was low, as if forcing everyone to lean near, but it grew louder as he went on. He asked why, if Madeline was good enough to be Breckinridge’s companion for nearly ten years, she wasn’t good enough to be his wife. He told the jury to ignore the “clamor and howling” of the defense and focus on the facts: Madeline had proved that a contract of marriage existed. “Her word in this case is as good as his,” Wilson said, noting that it was Breckinridge who had “lived a lie” and a “life of hypocrisy” by pretending to be a faithful husband to Issa and lying about his marriage to Louise. “How can you trust him?” Wilson asked, asserting that if anyone was to take the lion’s share of the blame, it was Breckinridge, who was older, more experienced, and married.
Wilson said it was ridiculous to suggest that the case should have been suppressed to protect the community; only in “sunlight” could wrongs be redressed, especially the wrong of banishing a woman for immorality while sending “the man to Congress.” Eyeing the jury, he declared, “I stand here for womanhood. This defendant proclaimed from the stand that while affairs of this kind only injured a man, they destroyed a woman. I am here to insist that social law should be equally distributed; I stand here to protest against allowing this man to enter my parlor and your parlor, while the basement door and the gate in the back alley are bolted against the woman.”
He called Phil Thompson out for suggesting that women doctors were unsavory. “There was a time when women were drudges and the mere playthings for men. But women are pushing to the front in every walk of life, and the faster they come, the better for the land,” he said, by now so hoarse he had to ask Bradley to adjourn until tomorrow.
By Saturday, spring had come to Washington; the courtroom windows were wide open as Wilson concluded his argument. He dismissed the defense’s witnesses and their allegations about Madeline’s character as disproven by their own more credible witnesses, and Breckinridge’s assertion that he and Madeline had conspired to deceive Blackburn as a “clean-shaven, bald-headed, obese falsehood, manufactured to fit the exigencies of the case.”
By lunchtime tempers were wearing thin. After Wilson insinuated that Stoll might have had a hand in the letter inviting Breckinridge to Wesleyan that Madeline claimed was a forgery, Desha tried to goad Stoll into challenging him to a duel, until Butterworth intervened and got Wilson to apologize. Just as that settled down, a delivery boy arrived with a towering basket of long-stemmed roses for Wilson. The attached note said they were in appreciation for the stand he took for “one code of morals for men and women, and also for the advancement of women in an active part in the world’s affairs,” particularly his support of women physicians. It was signed, rather mysteriously, “twenty-eight women,” but among those who attached their cards to the basket were Mrs. Dan Waugh and Mrs. Nelson Trusler, both the wives of Indiana politicians; the pioneering stenographer Nettie White; Louise Lowell, who had typed Breckinridge’s love letters; and, in a rebuff that was unmistakable, Mollie Desha, Breckinridge’s sister-in-law.
After lunch Bradley reviewed the instructions to the jury and said that despite claims to the contrary, the only question they should concern themselves with was whether a contract to marry had been made, and if it had been broken, was there an excuse to do so. He said abstract principles shouldn’t be vindicated, “nor the country girl, the home and the family.”
The jury filed into the jury room a little after three o’clock and everyone dispersed, the feeling being that the verdict might take some time. Breckinridge’s backers were predicting a hung jury; many of Madeline’s thought they would find for her but award only a token sum. Breckinridge ambled down the courtroom steps just as Nisba and Louise, hoping for some news, drove up in an open barouche. Perhaps it was symbolic, a repudiation of the infamous closed carriage, perhaps their visibility was intended as a show of optimism, or perhaps they just wanted to enjoy the April sun after a long, dismal winter in which they had been stuck at home. Breckinridge chatted with them until they drove off, then stood in the courthouse portico and joked with the newsboys about bringing him the early editions.
Less than ninety minutes later, the jury gave word they had reached a verdict. They already had their hats in hand when Breckinridge, Desha, Thompson, and Butterworth spilled back into the courtroom; it was another ten minutes before Carlisle rushed in, red-faced and breathless. The clerk asked the jury if they had reached a verdict. “If it please the court,” said the foreman, a piece of blue paper quivering in his right hand, “we find for the plaintiff.” “For how much?” asked Bradley. “Fifteen thousand,” he answered.
There was dead silence for a moment, then a shout echoed down the corridor like a shot: “Fifteen thousand for the plaintiff,” setting off a roar from the crowd outside that sounded like breakers on rocks and a scrum among reporters rushing to file their stories. Breckinridge, who had been stretching and twisting an elastic band between his fingers like it was a little ribbon of time that could be made and unmade, turned to Thompson and asked, “How much?” Then he stood up slowly, his face nearly as white as his beard, and gave notice that he intended to file for a new trial before thumping back down and giving Desha a wan smile.
Wilson reached the courtroom just as Carlisle was leaving; they hurried out trailing a wake of reporters. When they got to the portico, Carlisle pulled out a handkerchief and waved it in the air. The reporters looked up and saw Madeline standing in the fourth-floor window of his office across the street. When she saw the signal, she threw her hands up. “Oh, isn’t it good. Isn’t it good,” she said as she collapsed into a chair. Madeline refused all requests for interviews; she had already packed her trunk and taken leave of the House of Mercy. By the next morning, she was sequestered away in Providence Hospital, reportedly suffering from nervous exhaustion, although she had told Jennie a week ago that she had reserved a room there, where, for ten dollars a week, she could have “room, board, medical attendance, nursing and massage.”
After the crowds had cleared, Breckinridge and Desha stood alone in front of the courthouse. The barouche pulled up, and Breckinridge clambered in beside Louise. They stopped at a grocer’s and placed an order, then turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue and became caught in the late-afternoon swarm of theatergoers and shoppers and newsboys crying their “Extra!” editions. “Miss Pollard Wins!” proclaimed the World. The driver kept the team close to the sidewalk; pedestrians gaped at the famous silver-haired antagonist. Louise looked straight ahead, seeming to shrink in her seat. Breckinridge met their stares, smiling defiantly, now, said the New York Sun, the “observed of all the observers throughout the ride.”
* * *
After nearly six long weeks, front-page coverage from coast to coast, and endless debates about whether Madeline Pollard was right or wrong to air her downfall for the world to see, the verdict was met with widespread approval. The conclusion of the trial “was to the satisfaction of the community generally,” reported the Evening Star. Even in Kentucky, where news of the verdict swept Louisville just minutes after it hit the telegraph office, “not one person in the whole town has been heard to say that the plaintiff should not have recovered anything.”
Feminist reformers hoped the verdict heralded an end to the double standard that had crippled so many women’s lives, as well as a new day for women’s rights. “All the efforts made by reformers and philanthropists to establish the same standard of morals for both sexes have been crystallized and expressed itself in the verdict of the jury in the Breckinridge case,” wrote the suffragist Clara Colby in the Woman’s Tribune. The suffragist Alice Stone Blackwell said in the Women’s Journal, the official organ of the suffragist movement, that the trial showed not only the “perniciousness of the unequal standard of morality for men and women,” but the need for women’s suffrage because women “will not vote for candidates of notoriously bad moral character.” She said she wondered how long Breckinridge would have lasted in office if “the mothers, wives and sisters of Kentucky had a vote.”
Aaron Powell, the editor of the Philanthropist, the leading journal of purity reformers, marveled at the wholesale change in attitude regarding a “public man [who] hold[s] immoral relations with a young girl” and the fact that the “strategically indecent” addresses of Breckinridge’s congressional friends Thompson and Butterworth had failed to sway the jury. “A decade or two ago such addresses by two well-known ex-members of Congress, in behalf of an eloquent, and hitherto an honored member of the present House of Representatives, would doubtless have sufficed to turn the scale in favor of the man and against the woman,” he said.
But it wasn’t just social reformers who hailed the victory. Kate Field, who had a broad audience for her Kate Field’s Washington column, said the trial raised important questions about the “conventional morality” regarding sexually disgraced women and marriage. “Why should society discriminate between a man who has sinned and a woman who has sinned with him? If it is possible for a good woman to marry a man who is not good, why is it impossible for a woman who is not good to marry a man who is at least as culpable morally as herself?” she asked.
Most importantly, Edward Bok, the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, which was the most popular magazine in the country and an influential arbiter of middle-class standards, hailed the verdict in the magazine. Saying that “the women of the world are suffering to-day from a code of morality which imposes on them all the responsibility for purity and all the penalty for wrong-doing,” he called for a “different moral code among ourselves … a code which will hold a man as strictly accountable for the highest observance of moral principles as it does a woman.” He said, “That which is wrong in a woman should be equally wrong in a man,” and that what “is black for a woman should not be shaded into gray for a man.”
* * *
For Breckinridge, the verdict wasn’t the result of his slipshod defense, but of this “supposed popular sentiment,” which he claimed had been inflamed by “the ceaseless clamor and lies and distorted reports of the daily papers.” And he was right. A moral tide had turned, and he had been left stranded on the beach, fuming about “wantons.” But his defense was poorly prepared and was obviously back-fashioned around Madeline’s testimony. One of the jurors said the biggest strike against Breckinridge was his own testimony and his implausible excuse for lying to Blackburn. And there were a number of inconsistences in Madeline’s story that the defense failed to exploit. Dr. Belle Buchanan testified in her deposition that Madeline first came to her in February 1885, months before Madeline said her first child was born, although she said she was unsure of the dates. But when she testified during the trial, she was quite sure Madeline came during “strawberry season,” which was precisely ten weeks after she said she had given birth at the Norwood Asylum. What really happened that summer of 1884? Was Madeline just an innocent young girl when they met? Did Breckinridge actually promise to marry her?
Madeline was by all accounts a young, inexperienced woman when she met Breckinridge—the tintypes and the recollections of Wessie Brown Robertson and Sarah Guess all paint the same picture. And it’s easy to see how she would have been swept away by meeting a larger-than-life figure like Breckinridge. And it’s likely that he did approach her on the train. Two “reputable society women” in Lexington confirmed that “making mashes on the railroad train was one of his great grand-stand plays,” and, after the trial was over, a local professor who was sitting in front of Madeline on the train came forward and confirmed her version of the story, saying that “Breckinridge introduced himself to Miss Pollard.”
But it’s also likely that Breckinridge was telling the truth when he said he thought that she was a mature young woman—somewhere around twenty-one, not seventeen as she asserted. While Madeline still dressed like a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, the evidence suggests that she was significantly older. As Madeline testified, when her father died in June 1876, she thought she was about twelve, which means she would have been born in 1864. But she said that later, her mother told her she was born on November 30, 1866, which is why she gave her age as sixteen in the fall of 1884. Breckinridge tried to find some record of Madeline in the U.S. census, but was unsuccessful. The 1870 census, however, shows the Pollard family living in Crab Orchard with five children: Edward, born in 1859, nine months after his parents’ marriage; Mary, born in 1861; Mattie, born in 1863; Rosalie, born in 1866; and John, born in 1869.
Why would Madeline’s mother tell her she was born in 1866? The key to the mystery of Madeline’s age appears to be her older sister, Mary, who went by Mamie. Mamie was born when the family still lived in Frankfort, and Franklin County birth records confirm that she was born March 18, 1861 (Madeline wasn’t captured in county birth records, likely because of disruptions in recordkeeping due to the Civil War). In the 1880 census, however, when Mamie was living in Bridgeport with her mother and her aunt Mary Stout, she gave her age as eighteen when she was in fact nineteen. Three years later, when she was twenty-two, she married the Reverend Felix Struve, a Methodist minister, who was twenty-one. Given that twenty-two was about the upper age of desirable marriageability for southern brides, the country was still in the midst of the post–Civil War marriage panic, and it was unusual for Victorian grooms to marry women older than them, it seems likely that Mamie, in collusion with her mother, was systematically shaving years off her age to preserve her marriageability, which was probably a common thing to do before birth certificates and driver’s licenses. In fact, Madeline’s mother, Nancy, who may have hoped to remarry, claimed in 1880 that she was thirty-five when she was forty-two.
The original record of Mamie and Felix’s marriage was destroyed in the Cincinnati Courthouse riots of 1884, so it’s not possible to know what age she gave when she married. But the next time Mamie shows up in census records, in the 1900 census (the 1890 census records were damaged in a fire and eventually destroyed), she gives her age as thirty-six, two years younger than her husband, which means she was claiming to have been born in 1864. (Her 1920 death certificate gives her birthday as March 18, 1863.) It’s reasonable to assume that when Madeline showed up in Bridgeport in 1880, Mamie was already passing herself off as a couple of years younger than she was, so Madeline couldn’t have been born the same year. Therefore, her mother told her she was born in 1866, which was the year of Rosalie’s birth. Frail little Rosalie, who spent most of her life in an orphanage, probably didn’t know the difference.
So Madeline, who thought she was about sixteen in 1880, was told she was fourteen, when in fact she was seventeen. No wonder she had so much interest from men and created so much tension during her brief stay in Bridgeport. She had the rapidly maturing body of a seventeen-year-old, yet was dressing and passing herself off as a fourteen-year-old. That means when she met Breckinridge on the train in 1884, she was about twenty or twenty-one, which doesn’t excuse his predatory behavior—but does make him technically correct about his perception of her age.
Mamie also explains the rumors about Madeline’s purported “fast” behavior in Bridgeport. Madeline wasn’t in Bridgeport at the time Mollie Shindlebower claimed she was causing disruptions in the family with her loose morals. But Mamie was, and even Madeline said that all the boys liked her best. When Shindlebower contacted Breckinridge, she wrote that “Miss Pollard … received company at unusual hours and went buggy riding the same.” But she also wrote “at that time then (Mamie) Pollard claimed to be 17 years of age.” Shindlebower was talking about Mamie, a fact that the defense misrepresented and that Wilson correctly surmised in his closing argument. In fact, a woman who knew the Pollards wrote to Breckinridge that “Mary Pollard was considered fast & did not bear a good reputation,” and said she had to kick her out of the choir because she was “unladylike & I considered her a designing and untruthful girl.”
What about the supposedly forged letter and the question of whether Madeline invited Breckinridge to Wesleyan? It seems unlikely that the letter was a forgery. If it was, it would have been an extremely clever one, not only because Madeline’s handwriting was copied well enough to fool an expert, but because it was written on black-bordered mourning paper, which Madeline would have been using because of Rosalie’s recent death, a touch that Breckinridge’s team would have been unlikely to replicate. In a September 1893 letter to his father, Desha confirmed that Worthington found a letter from Pollard in Breckinridge’s files and sent it on to Washington. It seems that Madeline was surprised by the letter and denied it at first blush—then had to stick to her guns. Some reporters thought it was her biggest misstep. And, the signature of “Madeline B. Pollard” seems to confirm that she was using Breckinridge as her middle name even then.
Madeline had demonstrated a penchant for soliciting prominent men. When she lived in Lexington, she gained a bit of notoriety for approaching James Lane Allen, the well-known local novelist, on the street and asking for advice about becoming a writer. Of course, if a young man had done the same thing it wouldn’t have attracted notice, but it was considered improper for a young lady to approach a man she didn’t know in public. Nor was she shy about contacting other famous men. She told Jennie that she met Charles Dudley Warner after he called a short story she sent him “remarkable” and insisted on meeting her. But he told a reporter that he “first heard from her while visiting Washington,” when Madeline “invited him to call at the Convent of the Holy Cross” and “asked for instruction about writing for the press.”
Warner wasn’t the only well-known writer Madeline solicited for advice. In 1890, Madeline wrote to John Hay, statesman, author, and confidant of Henry Adams, with a similar request. “I wonder how impertinent you would think me if I were to ask you to come to the Convent to see me on Friday or Saturday evening next week?” she wrote. She told him there were “some questions I wish to ask you, and would go to you but do not know when I might disturb you least” and averred that they were questions best not asked in writing “for some things must be talked as ‘slanting grass and snowy daisies’ must be seen.”
Madeline reaching out to Breckinridge for advice wasn’t an invitation for a sexual encounter, although Breckinridge, steeped in the ways of southern women’s respectability, seemed to think it was. It also seems inconceivable that she would have told Breckinridge that she had engaged in sexual intercourse with Rhodes; a girl was only “ruined” to the extent that her sexual activity became public. It’s likely that her unconventional arrangement with Rhodes, her admiration of the equally unconventional George Eliot, and the fact that she didn’t have a father to watch over her led Breckinridge to conclude that she wasn’t a virgin and was sexually available. As for the carriage ride, Breckinridge never substantially disputed Madeline’s account of what happened, including the fact that his advances were uninvited. The evidence also largely squares with Madeline’s account of what happened in the days that followed. While there’s no proof one way or another regarding Madeline’s claim about his attempted seduction of her at Rose’s assignation house, there’s little doubt that they went to Lexington together by prearrangement and that it was he who took her to Sarah Guess’s house.
It’s unlikely, however, that Breckinridge was the reason Madeline left Wesleyan and went to Sayre, as she asserted. By the time Breckinridge came to Wesleyan in early August 1884, she already knew that she would have to leave because Rhodes hadn’t paid her tuition—which only reinforces what a vulnerable position she was in at the time. It’s likely she talked Rhodes into sending her to school in Lexington, which was cheaper and where he could see her more often. The former Wesleyan president William Brown told the Courier-Journal that Rhodes said the school was “too expensive for him” and “believed he would get his ward educated at Sayre Institute.”
What about the other central claim of Madeline’s story, that she gave birth to the two children that Breckinridge tried so hard to deny? There’s little doubt given the testimony of Dr. Belle Buchanan and the other doctors that Madeline gave birth in the spring of 1885. The inconsistencies with their recollections appear to have had more to do with the various subterfuges she employed to hide the illegitimate pregnancy than whether it occurred. There was no reason for her to lie about going to the Norwood Foundling Asylum, because the records could be checked. She could have just as easily said she had the baby at one of the private lying-in homes that could be found in any city and were impossible to trace. And it does appear that she left the Washington Irving volumes there. In addition, both the principal of Sayre and Mrs. Ketchum testified that she was absent from Lexington from January 1885 until the following fall.
It’s also possible that the nuns at Norwood went out of their way to not recognize her. Breckinridge had pulled some strings to get an introduction to Sister Mary Sebastian, the nun who was in charge, from the local archbishop. She told Breckinridge she would be “glad to do anything in her power that [he] may suggest” to help him. That the nuns would be eager to maintain conventional standards of sexual morality comes as no surprise. But there also appears to have been some animosity between Pollard and the sisters. One of Breckinridge’s associates who was acting as a go-between told him that the “nuns are very careful what they write, but they cordially dislike Miss Pollard,” and advised him to destroy the enclosed letter from Sister Sebastian. What was in that letter and why did the nuns so dislike Pollard if, as they claimed, they didn’t know her? It seems likely that Pollard was there, but as was her wont, and much like she had at the House of Mercy, she had acted in such an imperious manner that she had made an enemy of the sisters.
If so, it was a trait she shared, and perhaps learned, from her female relatives. The same woman who wrote to Breckinridge with the intelligence that Mamie Pollard had been a fast girl also recounted that Madeline’s mother had “tried hard” to get into the Louisville Masonic Widows and Orphans Home that took in the three youngest Pollard children. However, she “could not, as she was not liked by the Board of Directors, she being ‘highly strung’ and over-bearing.” The woman also recalled Madeline’s Pittsburgh aunt Mrs. Cowen visiting the home to see a grown daughter who presumably worked there and found her “very high toned … calling for delicacies & demanding as much attention as tho she was at a first class hotel,” which echoed Sister Dorothea’s description of Madeline’s behavior at the House of Mercy. She concluded that the Pollard women were “designing” and “hot-blooded.” Perhaps it was an inborn personality trait, but perhaps also the result of thwarted pride in situations where they were forced to rely on charity.
Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that Madeline would have been able to arrange for and finance her confinement, as well as dupe her mother and Rhodes about her real location, without Breckinridge’s assistance when she was pregnant in 1884–85. And the timing of the birth in late May 1885 tracks exactly with the second of what she said were two sexual encounters with Breckinridge in August 1884. Indeed, Breckinridge’s own investigation confirmed what he denied in court: that he had gone back to Cincinnati a second time that month, staying at the Burnet House on Saturday, August 23.
The apex of their relationship seems to date from the birth of this first child in 1885 through the spring of 1887. It’s during this period that Breckinridge was writing Madeline impassioned love letters. It was the perfect relationship for him. He was busy in Washington, and Madeline was conveniently tucked away in Lexington, where Sarah Guess provided a secure, private place for their assignations. It’s easy to imagine him, in the throes of infatuation, promising Madeline that he would marry her if he ever could. And it’s just as easy to imagine her, as many women had before and after, believing that he meant it.
In early summer 1887, right after Breckinridge stayed in the same boardinghouse as Madeline, their relationship seems to have soured. That summer, Madeline worked for the Lexington Gazette and began a relationship with publisher Howard Gratz that culminated in an engagement to marry. It would have been the answer to all her problems. She would have been the wife of a man from a prominent Lexington family and could have dabbled in writing without being dependent on it for her livelihood. And, it would have legitimized the child that she was already carrying, which, if born in early February 1888, was conceived in early May 1887. But Breckinridge, who was at the time writing love letters to his “Little Spitfire,” likely felt betrayed. When the engagement fell through after Gratz’s daughter found out about Madeline’s past—including, according to Breckinridge, a warning from the family’s African American cook that Madeline “ain’t a good woman” because she “goes to Sara Gess’ [sic] house”—she was stranded. It was then that she took herself to Washington—not likely at Breckinridge’s invitation, as she claimed—but because she needed to get away from Lexington and had nowhere else to turn. Breckinridge begrudgingly took responsibility for the pregnancy, paying Dr. Parsons’s bill, but suspected that he wasn’t the father, as he told Gratz in a letter he wrote just after the trial in which he acknowledged, despite his claims to the contrary, the birth of a “living child” in 1888. And his own investigation confirmed that Madeline did indeed enter St. Ann’s Infant Asylum on November 10, 1887, but left on Christmas Eve because “she would not obey the rules.”
The relationship didn’t resume on a regular basis until sometime after Madeline moved to the Academy of the Holy Cross in March 1888. For a time, things were apparently good between them. Madeline was again sequestered away, and they saw each other three or four times a week, going to assignation houses on Indiana Avenue and H Street. Then something happened that not only altered the dynamic of their relationship but is essential to understanding how Madeline was eventually able to go toe-to-toe with Breckinridge. When Madeline first came to Washington in 1887, she was still “countrified,” according to the Leader. Somewhere along the line, the country mouse turned into a social butterfly. It’s Breckinridge who provides the key to understanding Madeline’s unlikely rise through Washington society. While everyone was busy castigating him for introducing Madeline into society via Blackburn, he protested, to no avail, that Madeline “was not introduced into society by Mrs. Blackburn … but by Mrs. Admiral Dahlgren.” Madeline herself said in her autobiography that Blackburn never introduced her “into other homes” until after Breckinridge asked for her chaperonage. Indeed, the rumor circulating about Madeline’s multiple sets of visiting cards was that she “had become acquainted with Mrs. Admiral Dahlgren and ascertained that some of her ancestors were Vintons.”
Mrs. Admiral Dahlgren was Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, the author of Etiquette of Social Life in Washington and the most socially powerful woman in the city, a woman of substantial, seemingly contradictory accomplishments. The daughter of a congressman, she was the doyenne of society’s labyrinthine rules of etiquette, but was nonetheless fiercely critical of high society, especially the “senseless waste of time involved in the tread-mill routine of social visits” expected of women—the almost daily round of perfunctory social calls that women made on one another, usually between two and five in the afternoon, unless a woman announced in the society column that she would receive on a particular day or at a particular time.
Dahlgren supported her children after her first husband died by writing and translating dense tomes on religion and civil society from French and Spanish, but was an outspoken opponent of suffrage. Her second marriage to Admiral John Dahlgren, the inventor of the famous Dahlgren gun that revolutionized naval ordnance during the Civil War, brought her wealth, but after he died, she kept on writing, most notably A Washington Winter, a satire of the high social season in the very society she policed. Bored with what passed for intellectual engagement in the capital, she established the closest thing Washington had to a French salon, inviting authors, diplomats, and intellectuals to her Thomas Circle mansion. One woman who received a coveted invitation recalled an endless evening in hard-back chairs discussing the “Metamorphosis of Negative Matter.”
According to one reporter, Breckinridge said that Madeline met Madeleine at “a charitable institution” in Washington. If that’s so, it’s unlikely it was St. Ann’s Infant Asylum. Although it was a Catholic institution and Dahlgren was one of the few Catholics in high society, Madeline was there only a short time, and Dahlgren was a deeply religious and fundamentally conservative woman; it’s hard to imagine her admitting a fallen woman into her social circle. However, Dahlgren was also a patron of the Academy of the Holy Cross, which was just across Massachusetts Avenue from her home and which she visited frequently. In February 1888, right before Madeline entered, she took Baltimore’s Cardinal James Gibbons, who was staying at her home, to the school to meet the students. However, another reporter at the same interview transcribed what Breckinridge said as “a charitable ball,” which would mean that Madeline was already dipping her toe into high society and had wrangled an invitation to one of the many balls held in the capital, where she met Dahlgren.
Regardless of how they met, Dahlgren and Madeline shared a common interest: a love of literature. Dahlgren was a cofounder of the Literary Society of Washington and often hosted readings with well-known authors. It’s not hard to imagine Madeline striking up a conversation with her about her ambition to be a writer and Dahlgren taking an interest in a bright young woman—who may have claimed to be a Vinton—and inviting her to attend a reading.
It was through Dahlgren, according to Breckinridge, that Madeline met one of the most socially connected young women in Washington: Florence Bayard, the daughter of former secretary of state Thomas Francis Bayard, who became ambassador to Great Britain in 1893. Madeline claimed to be about twenty-two at the time, which made her the same age as Bayard and Dahlgren’s daughter Ulrica, one of the highest-profile debutantes of 1888. Riding on the coattails of these young women with impeccable social credentials, “Miss Pollard worked her way right in to Washington’s best society,” according to Breckinridge’s account. She undoubtedly learned the finer points of etiquette from the Dahlgrens and the Bayards, like how to leave a calling card with the upper right corner turned down if you called on a woman but she wasn’t home—or the lower right corner if you were leaving town and wouldn’t be available to receive her return call.
Dahlgren was also Madeline’s springboard into the literary elite. In the spring of 1890, Charles Dudley Warner visited Washington and gave a talk at one of Dahlgren’s literary evenings, which is likely when Madeline met him. John Hay and his wife also often entertained Warner when he was in town, and Madeline used that connection to introduce herself to Hay. “If our good friend Mr. Warner were nearer than California I am sure he would give me a letter of introduction,” she assured Hay when she wrote to him in May 1890.
The following spring, Madeline made her first appearance in the society columns, when the Washington Post reported that “Miss Madeline Pollard will sail for Europe July 1 with a party of friends for a brief stay on Richmond-on-the-Thames, where among the guests will be Charles Dudley Warner.” The trip to England never happened and appears to be an early example of Madeline’s social bragging gone awry. It’s likely this is what she complained about to Jennie when she said she once told a society reporter something “in strict confidence” only to find it written up in the paper—unless, of course, she was referring to the news of her engagement to Breckinridge.
By the fall of 1890, Madeline found her living situation at Holy Cross too restricting. She went first to the fashionable Elsmere Hotel, where, Breckinridge told Jennie, Warner visited her. Then she went to the boardinghouse of Mrs. Fillette, through whom she met Blackburn, who introduced her into the southern circle of polite society. Madeline hired Miss Coffey the dressmaker and cultivated a distinctive style of rich, unembellished fabrics and muted tones that highlighted her figure. Madeline understood that for women in the Gilded Age, clothes were a form of currency; the right clothes enabled one to move around in certain social circles. “Clothes were really clothes then,” remembered Julia Foraker about her years atop Washington’s social hierarchy, and “ballgowns were our poetry,” she said.
Thus, Madeline Breckinridge Pollard, a refined young lady of somewhat hazy but seemingly respectable Kentucky antecedents, was born. Madeline thrust herself into the city’s intellectual life with a fearless audaciousness. She told Jennie she knew Henry Adams “quite well.” One afternoon, she said, she and Adams and Charles Dudley Warner and some friends drove out to Rock Creek Cemetery to see the allegorical bronze statue Grief that Adams had commissioned from the Beaux-Arts sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens after the suicide of his wife, Marian “Clover” Adams. Many believed Marian was the author of the anonymous, sensational political novel Democracy that was later credited to Adams and whose heroine—the formidable, wealthy widow Madeleine Lightfoot Lee, with her intellectual pretentions and impatience for receiving lines—many thought was modeled on Madeleine Dahlgren. Adams did like to visit the mysterious shrouded statue, which, he noted, “seemed to have become a tourist fashion, and all wanted to know its meaning.” Madeline said Adams told her “it represented a figure wrapped in meditation on Chinese theosophy,” although she told Warner it reminded her of “The Sphinx.”
Madeline’s Zelig-like social ascent posed a problem for Breckinridge, however. It became more difficult for them to hide their relationship; they tried renting a room in an out-of-the-way part of town, but quickly gave it up because they feared they had been recognized. It was around this time that Breckinridge apparently decided Madeline should leave Washington, contrary to her assertion that he never tried to end the relationship. The fact that Mollie Desha told Issa and Nisba about the affair in the fall of 1890 means it was current gossip in Washington. Especially after Madeline lost her government job, Breckinridge had to face the reality that she might remain dependent on him. Like a bird that hopes desperately its fledgling can fly, he pushed her into the world, first to Cambridge with some funding and the hope she would find gainful employment. That was wishful thinking. How could Madeline, with her spotty education and vague ambition to be a writer, earn a living when his own daughter, with a college education and a famous family name, could only get employment as a teacher? Madeline, who was more socially ambitious than Nisba, wasn’t inclined to eke out a living as a spinster schoolteacher.
After a winter in Cambridge when she was supposed to be studying but apparently spent most of her time leveraging her relationship with Warner to expand her circle of literary acquaintances, she returned to Washington. And for a time she did attempt to do some work as a writer. She wrote several articles about literary subjects for the Washington Post. One, a fawning profile of Ella Loraine Dorsey, the “pioneer of Catholic light literature,” allowed her to not only insinuate herself with a well-known writer but also polish her own origin story. She wrote that she was first introduced to Dorsey’s work “some years ago” when she was “one of those twenty girls who attended one of those very ‘select’ schools … where the elevating of one’s brow can go just so far.” Most of the genteel female writers, like Dorsey and Dahlgren, whom Madeline admired, however, had fortunes or husbands to fall back on. Few women earned a living as writers at the time, and Madeline remained dependent on Breckinridge.
Again in June 1892, Breckinridge got her to agree to go away, this time to work on a newspaper in Vermont. Then Issa died, and suddenly he was on the spot to make good on his promise. What really happened between them on the carriage ride in August when she returned to the city? It seems unlikely that he proposed, as Madeline claimed, although some of his friends thought he really did intend to marry her but backed away when it became clear that to do so would cause a scandal. “I honestly believe that he was infatuated with the Pollard woman, and that his intention and desire was to marry her,” one of them told the Enquirer. It does seem likely, however, that Madeline, believing in his long-ago promise, came home and threw herself into his arms, thinking they would finally be together. Not knowing how to extricate himself, and knowing that Madeline had an excitable temper, Breckinridge played along.
Things were relatively calm until the rumors that Breckinridge was seeing Wing reached Madeline, who was pregnant, and she became increasingly distraught and more determined to push her claim. Eventually, she told Julia Blackburn they were engaged, partly to bolster her reputation in the wake of the Fillette scandal. This created a crisis for Breckinridge—but also an opportunity. When they went to see Blackburn on Good Friday, he knew he couldn’t deny the engagement outright. Instead, he asked Blackburn to put Madeline under her chaperonage, with the idea of using Blackburn to get Madeline out of the way for the summer, preferably to Europe, so he could marry Wing, assuming that once the deed was done, Madeline would have no recourse but to slink away.
Shortly after, Blackburn asked Breckinridge to arrange an introduction for her and her sister to Frances Cleveland. Breckinridge arranged the visit to the White House, but then Madeline told him “she was to be one of the party.” There was no way he could let that happen. He told her she couldn’t go, which would have confirmed Madeline’s suspicions that he didn’t intend to marry her because she wasn’t respectable enough. A certain pathos hangs over her entreatments at the time. She told Breckinridge that if she “went away and had the advantage of travel and refined society, she could return in two years and be fitted to become [his] wife.”
It’s surprising then that after their second visit to Major Moore, Madeline agreed to go to New York for the duration of her pregnancy. She came back to Washington after a couple of days though, and a few days after that, she miscarried. It’s possible the miscarriage was brought on by stress. It seems just as likely that Madeline, now more knowledgeable about the ways of the world than the girl who allowed herself to be shuffled off to a room over a mattress store, went to New York for the purpose of obtaining an abortifacient potion from a pharmacist or someone else who sold such compounds illegally.
It turned out that Breckinridge’s instincts that marrying Madeline would be political suicide were correct. As soon as news of the engagement became public, “scandal was current about him and Miss Pollard,” according to one of Wing’s friends. When an associate of Breckinridge’s went to see President Cleveland about a government appointment, Cleveland told him: “I see you are endorsed by Col. Breckinridge; if he disgraces himself by marrying the woman to whom he is reported to be engaged, I can no longer respect him or a candidate he is backing.” With his political career imperiled and Wing’s brother pressuring him, Breckinridge had little choice but to move forward with the public marriage to Louise and to face the consequences.
Struggling with his own family drama and political problems, Breckinridge was blind to the relationships and depth of support that Madeline had amassed in the city. For instance, another person whom Madeline likely met through Dahlgren’s circle was Dr. Nathan Lincoln, the doctor who confirmed her pregnancy to Breckinridge—and offered to perform an abortion. His wife, Mrs. Nathan Lincoln of the “pink and gold” Valentine’s luncheon, was Jennie Gould Lincoln, a well-known author. She and her husband were frequent guests at Dahlgren’s literary evenings—she read a poem the night in 1890 that Charles Dudley Warner was a guest and Madeline likely got her first taste of literary society. Jennie Lincoln was active on the board of Children’s Hospital with her husband and Madeline’s lawyer Calderon Carlisle. The Children’s Hospital board had, in June 1893, just as the Pollard-Breckinridge-Wing engagement kerfuffle was blowing up, held a charity garden party that featured among its volunteer hostesses Julia Blackburn, who possessed the knowledge that Madeline and Breckinridge were supposedly affianced.
A week later, Mrs. Carlisle and Jennie Lincoln were at the Smith-Judson wedding. Then, as now, Washington was a small, gossipy town. “In Washington gossip and great men are the leading subjects,” said Frank Carpenter. The Breckinridge-Pollard scandal had both. It’s not hard to see how by the time the scandal exploded in mid-July 1893, a good slice of the upper class of the city had some idea what Breckinridge was up to and was inclined to take Madeline’s side. “It is said that the story which was brought out in the suit has been in the possession of some persons in this city for some time,” reported the Evening Star.
In the end, Breckinridge didn’t present a coherent defense because he didn’t have one. Madeline was largely telling the truth about the relationship, at least in its major contours, although she glossed over the periods of genuine contention between them and downplayed her own increasing agency. As one of Madeline’s Wesleyan classmates summed it up: Madeline had her “faults—grievous ones—but that Colonel B. disappointed her there can be no doubt.”
And it’s likely Breckinridge didn’t think he would need a particularly elaborate defense; he thought it was enough to make some smears about Madeline’s purported sexual activity, assuming that the prevailing social mores, and the support of like-minded men, would get him off the hook. In not paying more attention to the details of his defense, however, he seems to have missed his only opportunity to save himself.
Right around the time the trial was starting, Breckinridge received a remarkable series of letters from individuals claiming to have intelligence about Madeline and other men. A Dr. Thomas Hershman, who had owned the St. Clair Hotel in Cincinnati, claimed a woman he thought was Madeline had come there three or four years earlier and stayed several nights with a man named Breckinridge who said he was her husband from Lexington. His wife, however, kicked them out when she found out the man wasn’t her husband but a railroad conductor. A woman calling herself Nannie White said that she was a former chambermaid who worked at both the Gibson House and the Burnet House and that Madeline used to come to the Cincinnati hotels heavily veiled and spend nights there with a Cleveland businessman. She claimed Madeline had left a small purse behind with “Madeline V. Pollard” written on the inside, as well as “some of her visiting cards, 18 Cents, a Small Key and a note from the man.” A salesman named Hall said he met Madeline at the Burnet House with a friend of his who was a traveling salesman for a Louisville liquor company and who bragged that the lady he was meeting was from one of the leading families of the South and was engaged to Congressman Breckinridge. He claimed his friend and Madeline shared a room as “man and wife” for two nights.
Taken individually, any one of the stories seems somewhat improbable, and not all the informants wholly reliable. The good doctor was in prison for stealing a horse and buggy in what he said was a mix-up and a miscarriage of justice. He may have hoped to enlist Breckinridge’s aid in getting a pardon. The chambermaid wanted some money to come to Washington and Breckinridge’s help in getting a job at a hotel, although that was hardly extortion, especially because she also said she had a letter of Breckinridge’s in the forgotten purse. Taken together, though, they paint an intriguing pattern: All three incidences occurred in Cincinnati, two at the same hotel, and all with men who traveled for a living.
Dr. Sinclair got his sister Mrs. Ambrose to send Breckinridge a corroborating statement that only made the story more peculiar. She claimed that late one night she heard the woman “making a very loud noise” and she went to her room, where she delivered a very small, stillborn baby. She told Ambrose she had been “deceived” by a man who turned out to be married. Ambrose said this happened sometime during the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition, a landmark event for the city, which ran from July to late October 1888. This was during the time that Madeline was living at Holy Cross, but the nuns did tell Breckinridge that she was away three or four times for three or four days each. There also was apparently about a year, between the spring of 1888 and the spring of 1889, when she and Breckinridge weren’t together. Breckinridge claimed their relations didn’t resume until around the time of the Johnstown flood in May 1889, the memorable catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam when some two thousand people died. More strikingly, Ambrose said the woman used the alias Josie Pollard, and the fact that Madeline purportedly tried to pass herself off as the poet Josie Pollard hadn’t yet been published at the time she wrote to Breckinridge. And, Josie Pollard fancied herself a singer and “played piano and sang in parlor” for the guests. And, after the miscarriage, when Ambrose asked how she was feeling, she asked her to “get her a whiskey-punch.”
Hall, the salesman, claimed that the incident with his friend happened about a year earlier, which was precisely when Madeline was in Cincinnati, on Breckinridge’s dime, to visit the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, one of the schools she was supposedly considering to take Breckinridge up on his offer to leave Washington. But Breckinridge hadn’t yet testified to this fact when Hall wrote the letter, so there was no way he could have known this.
Hall also claimed he saw Madeline at a Chicago hotel the previous summer after the scandal broke and confirmed her identity, and one of Breckinridge’s sleuths had reported that she was in Chicago at that time. It was the second time she had been in Chicago that summer. Mollie Desha testified that she met Madeline at the World’s Fair with Treasury Secretary Carlisle, who was touring the fair in early July with his wife and some friends from Kentucky. It was on the Fourth of July, the day Carlisle left Washington, that Breckinridge first heard the rumor that Madeline had propositioned Carlisle. So if the rumor was true, it appears that Madeline was trying to arrange a liaison in conjunction with the trip, although it’s not surprising it didn’t come to fruition. Carlisle was a “shy, absent-minded, kindly man” who was “absolutely dominated by a forceful, ambitious wife.” Taken with the claim of Congressman Allen, however, that Madeline was trying to arrange a rendezvous with him, it seems that she may have been trying to find a replacement for Breckinridge. And, it also seems that Madeline may have on several occasions traveled from Washington to meet with men in the anonymous hustle-bustle of busy hotels in the crossroad city of Cincinnati.
This would explain another enduring mystery. Where did Madeline get the money for the lifestyle that she led? Mrs. Fillette, in fact, first became suspicious about Madeline because she lived well but didn’t have any visible means of earning a living. Her dressmaker Miss Coffey said she had given her a “good deal of work” over the past three years, and she charged forty dollars for a dress, which was a full month’s board in Washington. Madeline showed Jennie an exquisite silk gown she said was from Mathilde of New York, a fashionable dressmaker. A young woman who visited Madeline after receiving a letter of introduction from Charles Dudley Warner said her closet was full of an “array of costly dresses and other finery,” which she found suspicious because the boardinghouse she was living in was a dump.
Breckinridge said that he supported Madeline once she came to Washington but gave her only “irregular amounts,” and Madeline appeared to be chronically short of money; she left Holy Cross owing two hundred dollars. Earlier that year, she wrote to Rhodes apologizing for not repaying him: “My expenses are very heavy and my salary so small that it is utterly out of the question to send even five dollars a month.” And Breckinridge was in especially dire financial straits in the early 1890s, when he was simultaneously shelling out for all his children. This was around the time that one of his clients’ money reportedly went missing, although he denied it.
Did Madeline occasionally entertain gentleman friends who would show their gratitude with some money for a new dress or other bit of finery? If she did, she wasn’t alone; casual prostitution was not uncommon among women on their own in the cities at the time, whether to afford luxuries or to make ends meet. As Frank Carpenter noted, Washington was full of the “demimonde”—of women on the fringes; not quite prostitutes, but not wholly respectable either. “Many a female clerk, losing her position, devoid of family and friends, drifts into their ranks in order to keep body and soul together,” he wrote.
Is that how Madeline kept body and soul together? If Breckinridge could have proved that she had liaisons with other men, it would have released him from his contract of marriage. But he had already spent much of the fall chasing down leads that didn’t pan out and, immersed in trial preparation, didn’t connect the dots, which, though circumstantial, suggest that while he may have started out as the exploiter, as time went on, it was unclear just who was using whom.