TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

"Is thy white blamelessness accounted blame?"

Fulfilling a previous prophecy, and following a celestial mandate, in 1869 she founded a bank and published a journal. These two events took the town by storm. When the doors of her office in Broad street were first thrown open to the public, several thousand visitors came in a flock on the first day. The "lady brokers," as they were called (a strange confession that brokers are not always gentlemen) were besieged like lionesses in a cage. The daily press interviewed them; the weekly wits satirized them; the comic sheets caricatured them; but like a couple of fresh young dolphins, breasting the sea side by side, they showed themselves native to the element, and cleft gracefully every threatening wave that broke over their heads. The breakers could not dash the brokers. Indomitable in their energy, the sisters won the good graces of Commodore Vanderbilt—a fine old gentleman of comfortable means, who of all the lower animals prefers the horse, and of all the higher virtues admires pluck. Both with and without Commodore Vanderbilt's help, Mrs. Woodhull has more than once shown the pluck that has held the rein of the stock market as the Commodore holds his horse. Her journal, as one sees it week by week, is generally a willow-basket full of audacious manuscripts, apparently picked up at random and thrown together pell-mell, stunning the reader with a medley of politics, finance, free-love, and the pantarchy. This sheet, when the divinity that shapes its ends shall begin to add to the rough-hewing a little smooth-shaping; in other words, when its unedited chaos shall come to be moulded by the spirits to that order which is Heaven's first law; this not ordinary but "cardinary" journal, which is edited in one world, and published in another, will become less a confusion to either, and more a power for both.

In 1870, following the English plan of self-nomination, Mrs. Woodhull announced herself as a candidate for the Presidency—mainly for the purpose of drawing public attention to the claims of woman to political equality with man. She accompanied this announcement with a series of papers in theHeraldon politics and finance, which have since been collected into a volume entitled "The Principles of Government." She has lately received a more formal nomination to that high office by "The Victoria League," an organization which, being somewhat Jacobinical in its secrecy, is popularly supposed, though not definitely known, to be presided over by Commodore Vanderbilt, who is also similarly imagined to be the golden corner-stone of the business house of Woodhull, Claflin & Co. Should she be elected to the high seat to which she aspires, (an event concerning which I make no prophecy,) I am at least sure that she would excel any Queen now on any throne in her native faculty to govern others.

One night in December, 1869, while she lay in deep sleep, her Greek guardian came to her, and sitting transfigured by her couch, wrote on a scroll (so that she could not only see the words, but immediately dictated them to her watchful amanuensis) the memorable document now known in history as "The Memorial of Victoria C. Woodhull"—a petition addressed to Congress, claiming under the Fourteenth Amendment the right of women as of other "citizens of the United States" to vote in "the States wherein they reside"—asking, moreover, that the State of New York, of which she was a citizen, should be restrained by Federal authority from preventing her exercise of this constitutional right. As up to this time neither she nor her husband had been greatly interested in woman suffrage, he had no sooner written this manifesto from her lips, than he awoke her from the trance, and protested against the communication as nonsense, believing it to be a trick of some evil-disposed spirits. In the morningthe document was shown to a number of friends, including one eminent judge, who ridiculed its logic and conclusions. But the lady herself, from whose sleeping and yet unsleeping brain the strange document had sprung like Minerva from the head of Jove, simply answered that her antique instructor, having never misled her before, was guiding her aright then. Nothing doubting, but much wondering, she took the novel demand to Washington, where, after a few days of laughter from the shallow-minded, and of neglect from the indifferent, it suddenly burst upon the Federal Capitol like a storm, and then spanned it like a rainbow. She went before the Judiciary Committee, and delivered an argument in support of her claim to the franchise under the new Amendments, which some who heard it pronounced one of the ablest efforts which they had ever heard on any subject. She caught the listening ears of Senator Carpenter, Gen. Butler, Judge Woodward, George W. Julian, Gen. Ashley, Judge Loughridge, and other able statesmen in Congress, and harnessed these gentlemen as steeds to her chariot. Such was the force of her appeal that the whole city rushed together to hear it, like the Athenians to the market-place when Demosthenes stood in his own and not a borrowed clay. A great audience, one of the finest ever gathered in the capital, assembled to hear her defend her thesis in the first public speech of her life. At the moment of rising, her face was observed to be very pale, and she appeared about to faint. On being afterward questioned as to the cause of her emotion, she replied that, during the first prolonged moment, she remembered an early prediction of her guardian-spirit, until then forgotten, that she would one day speak in public, and that her first discourse would be pronounced in the capital of her country. The sudden fulfilment of this prophecy smote her so violently that for a moment she was stunned into apparent unconsciousness. But she recovered herself, and passed through the ordeal with great success—which isbetter luck than happened to the real Demosthenes, for Plutarch mentions that his maiden speech was a failure, and that he was laughed at by the people.

Assisted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Paulina Wright Davis, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Susan B. Anthony, and other staunch and able women whom she swiftly persuaded into accepting this construction of the Constitution, she succeeded, after her petition was denied by a majority of the Judiciary Committee, in obtaining a minority report in its favor, signed jointly by Gen. Benj. F. Butler of Massachusetts and Judge Loughridge of Iowa. To have clutched this report from Gen. Butler—as it were a scalp from the ablest head in the House of Representatives—was a sufficient trophy to entitle the brave lady to an enrolment in the political history of her country. She means to go to Washington again next winter to knock at the half-opened doors of the Capitol until they shall swing wide enough asunder to admit her enfranchised sex.

I must say something of her personal appearance although it defies portrayal, whether by photograph or pen. Neither tall nor short, stout nor slim, she is of medium stature, lithe and elastic, free and graceful. Her side face, looked at over her left shoulder, is of perfect aquiline outline, as classic as ever went into a Roman marble, and resembles the masque of Shakespeare taken after death; the same view, looking from the right, is a little broken and irregular; and the front face is broad, with prominent cheek bones, and with some unshapely nasal lines. Her countenance is never twice alike, so variable is its expression and so dependent on her moods. Her soul comes into it and goes out of it, giving her at one time the look of a superior and almost saintly intelligence, and at another leaving her dull, commonplace, and unprepossessing. When under a strong spiritual influence, a strange and mystical light irradiates from her face, reminding the beholder of the Hebrew Lawgiverwho gave to men what he received from God and whose face during the transfer shone. Tennyson, as with the hand of a gold-beater, has beautifully gilded the same expression in his stanza of St. Stephen the Martyr in the article of death:

"And looking upward, full of grace,He prayed, and from a happy place,God's glory smote him on the face."

"And looking upward, full of grace,

He prayed, and from a happy place,

God's glory smote him on the face."

In conversation, until she is somewhat warmed with earnestness, she halts, as if her mind were elsewhere, but the moment she brings all her faculties to her lips for the full utterance of her message, whether it be of persuasion or indignation, and particularly when under spiritual control, she is a very orator for eloquence—pouring forth her sentences like a mountain stream, sweeping away everything that frets its flood.

Her hair which, when left to itself is as long as those tresses of Hortense in which her son Louis Napoleon used to play hide-and-seek, she now mercilessly cuts close like a boy's, from impatience at the daily waste of time in suitably taking care of this prodigal gift of nature.

She can ride a horse like an Indian, and climb a tree like an athlete; she can swim, row a boat, play billiards, and dance; moreover, as the crown of her physical virtues, she can walk all day like an Englishwoman.

"Difficulties," says Emerson, "exist to be surmounted." This might be the motto of her life. In her lexicon (which is still of youth) there is no such word as fail. Her ambition is stupendous—nothing is too great for her grasp. Prescient of the grandeur of her destiny, she goes forward with a resistless fanaticism to accomplish it. Believing thoroughly in herself (or rather not in herself but in her spirit-aids) she allows no one else to doubt either her or them. In her case the old miracle is enacted anew—the faith which removes mountains. A soul set on edge is a conquering weaponin the battle of life. Such, and of Damascus temper, is hers.

In making an epitome of her views, I may say that in politics she is a downright democrat, scorning to divide her fellow-citizens into upper and lower classes, but ranking them all in one comprehensive equality of right, privilege, and opportunity; concerning finance, which is a favorite topic with her, she holds that gold is not the true standard of money-value, but that the government should abolish the gold-standard, and issue its notes instead, giving to these a fixed and permanent value, and circulating them as the only money; on social questions, her theories are similar to those which have long been taught by John Stuart Mill and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and which are styled by some as free-love doctrines, while others reject this appellation on account of its popular association with the idea of a promiscuous intimacy between the sexes—the essence of her system being that marriage is of the heart and not of the law, that when love ends marriage should end with it, being dissolved by nature, and that no civil statute should outwardly bind two hearts which have been inwardly sundered; and finally, in religion, she is a spiritualist of the most mystical and ethereal type.

In thus speaking of her views, I will add to them another fundamental article of her creed, which an incident will best illustrate. Once a sick woman who had been given up by the physicians, and who had received from a Catholic priest extreme unction in expectation of death, was put into the care of Mrs. Woodhull, who attempted to lure her back to life. This zealous physician, unwilling to be baffled, stood over her patient day and night, neither sleeping nor eating for ten days and nights, at the end of which time she was gladdened not only at witnessing the sick woman's recovery, but at finding that her own body, instead of weariness or exhaustion from the double lack of sleep and food, was more freshand bright than at the beginning. Her face, during this discipline, grew uncommonly fair and ethereal; her flesh wore a look of transparency; and the ordinary earthiness of mortal nature began to disappear from her physical frame and its place to be supplied with what she fancied were the foretokens of a spiritual body. These phenomena were so vivid to her own consciousness and to the observation of her friends, that she was led to speculate profoundly on the transformation from our mortal to our immortal state, deducing the idea that the time will come when the living human body, instead of ending in death by disease, and dissolution in the grave, will be gradually refined away until it is entirely sloughed off, and the soul only, and not the flesh, remains. It is in this way that she fulfils to her daring hope the prophecy that "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."

Engrossed in business affairs, nevertheless at any moment she would rather die than live—such is her infinite estimate of the other world over this. But she disdains all commonplace parleyings with the spirit-realm such as are had in ordinary spirit-manifestations. On the other hand, she is passionately eager to see the spirits face to face—to summon them at her will and commune with them at her pleasure. Twice (as she unshakenly believes) she has seen a vision of Jesus Christ—honored thus doubly over St. Paul, who saw his Master but once, and then was overcome by the sight. She never goes to any church—save to the solemn temple whose starry arch spans her housetop at night, where she sits like Simeon Stylites on his pillar, a worshipper in the sky. Against the inculcations of her childish education, the spirits have taught her that he whom the church calls the Saviour of the world is not God but man. But her reverence for him is supreme and ecstatic. The Sermon on the Mount fills her eyes with tears. The exulting exclamations of the Psalmist are her familiar outbursts of devotion. Fortwo years, as a talisman against any temptation toward untruthfulness (which, with her, is the unpardonable sin), she wore, stitched into the sleeve of every one of her dresses, the 2d verse of the 120th Psalm, namely, "Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue." Speaking the truth punctiliously, whether in great things or small, she so rigorously exacts the same of others, that a deceit practised upon her enkindles her soul to a flame of fire; and she has acquired a clairvoyant or intuitive power to detect a lie in the moment of its utterance, and to smite the liar in his act of guilt. She believes that intellectual power has its fountains in spiritual inspiration. And once when I put to her the searching question, "What is the greatest truth that has ever been expressed in words?" she thrilled me with the sudden answer, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God."

As showing that her early clairvoyant power still abides, I will mention a fresh instance. An eminent judge in Pennsylvania, in whose court-house I had once lectured, called lately to see me at the office of The Golden Age. On my inquiring after his family, he told me that a strange event had just happened in it. "Three months ago," said he, "while I was in New York, Mrs. Woodhull said to me, with a rush of feeling, 'Judge, I foresee that you will lose two of your children within six weeks.'" This announcement, he said, wounded him as a tragic sort of trifling with life and death. "But," I asked, "did anything follow the prophecy?" "Yes," he replied, "fulfilment; I lost two children within six weeks." The Judge, who is a Methodist, thinks that Victoria the clairvoyant is like "Anna the prophetess."

Let me say that I know of no person against whom there are more prejudices, nor any one who more quickly disarms them. This strange faculty is the most powerful of her powers. She shoots a word like a sudden sunbeam through the thickest mist of people's doubtsand accusations, and clears the sky in a moment. Questioned by some committee or delegation who have come to her with idle tales against her busy life, I have seen her swiftly gather together all the stones which they have cast, put them like the miner's quartz into the furnace, melt them with fierce and fervent heat, bring out of them the purest gold, stamp thereon her image and superscription as if she were sovereign of the realm, and then (as the marvel of it all) receive the sworn allegiance of the whole company on the spot. At one of her public meetings when the chair (as she hoped) would be occupied by Lucretia Mott, this venerable woman had been persuaded to decline this responsibility, but afterward stepped forward on the platform and lovingly kissed the young speaker in presence of the multitude. Her enemies (save those of her own household,) are strangers. To see her is to respect her—to know her is to vindicate her. She has some impetuous and headlong faults, but were she without the same traits which produce these she would not possess the mad and magnificent energies which (if she lives) will make her a heroine of history.

In conclusion, amid all the rush of her active life, she believes with Wordsworth that

"The gods approve the depth and notThe tumult of the soul."

"The gods approve the depth and not

The tumult of the soul."

So, whether buffeted by criticism or defamed by slander, she carries herself in that religious peace which, through all turbulence, is "a measureless content." When apparently about to be struck down, she gathers unseen strength and goes forward conquering and to conquer. Known only as a rash iconoclast, and ranked even with the most uncouth of those noise-makers who are waking a sleepy world before its time, she beats her daily gong of business and reform with notes not musical but strong, yet mellows the outward rudeness of the rhythm by the inward and devout song of one of the sincerest, most reverent, and divinely-gifted of human souls.

The Golden Age

A Weekly Journal devoted to the Free Discussion of all LivingQuestions of Church, State, Society, Literature,Art, and Moral Reform.Published every Wednesday at No. 9 Spruce Street,New York City.THEODORE TILTON,Editor and Publisher.

A Weekly Journal devoted to the Free Discussion of all Living

Questions of Church, State, Society, Literature,

Art, and Moral Reform.

Published every Wednesday at No. 9 Spruce Street,

New York City.

THEODORE TILTON,

Editor and Publisher.

TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION.

Single copies, $3 per annum; four copies, $10, which is $2 50 a copy; eight copies, $20. The party who sends $20 for a club of eight copies (all sent at one time) will be entitled to a copyfree. Postmasters and others who get up clubs in their respective towns, can afterward add single copies at $2 50.

THE GOLDEN AGE TRACTS.

No. 1. "The Rights of Women." A Letter to Horace Greeley by Theodore Tilton. Price 5 cents; $3 per hundred.

No. 2. "The Constitution a Title-Deed to Woman's Franchise." A Letter to Charles Sumner by Theodore Tilton. Price 5 cents; $3 per hundred.

No. 3. "Victoria C. Woodhull." A Biographical Sketch. By Theodore Tilton. 36 pages. Price 10 cents.

No. 4. "The Sin of Sins." A tractate on what are called "fallen women." By Theodore Tilton. Price 5 cents; $3 per hundred.

The above pamphlets will be sent to any part of the United States postage paid on receipt of the price.

After you read this notice, and before you forget it, sit down and write a letter to Mr. Tilton, subscribing for the paper and ordering some of the tracts.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTESSilently corrected simple spelling, grammar, and typographical errors.Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

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