Victoria C. Woodhull by Uriah Smith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 26, 1871

Victoria C. Woodhull.

By Uriah Smith

The career of this woman, planned, and executed thus far, wholly by the spirits, through her as one of the most obsequious and controllable of mediums, has now arrested public attention to such an extent that the readers of the REVIEW will be interested to learn some of the particulars of her history and her pretensions.

This woman some time since, put herself in nomination for the presidency of the United States, for the purpose, especially, it is said, of bringing to an issue before the people the question of woman suffrage and of testing the equality of woman's claim to office, with that of man. She has since become the regular nominee of a rapidly growing association of individuals known as the “Victoria League,” for the purpose, and with the expectation, of actually securing that high office. Our view of the future of spiritualism, prepares us to place within the range of possibilities, and even of probabilities, projects which under other circumstances would be regarded as the wildest chimeras of a shattered brain. We have all the more interest therefore in watching this movement.

From a biographical sketch by Theodore Tilton, who has become an enthusiastic admirer of Mrs. Woodhull, and whose statements, were it not for the evident tokens he gives of sincere admiration, would be taken as a burlesque, we gather the following facts respecting her history.

Her father is represented as a monster of cruelty, exercising his savagery impartially upon all his children. In a barrel of rainwater he kept a number of braided green withes of willow or walnut, and sometimes with these, and sometimes with a handsaw or a stick of firewood, he would cut the quivering flesh of the children till their tears and blood melted him into mercy. “Coming home after the children were in bed, on learning some offense which they had committed, he has been known to waken them out of sleep, and to whip them till morning.”

The mother is represented as from her youth, “a religious monomaniac—a spiritualist before the name of spiritualism was coined.” Respecting her treatment of her children, Mr. Tilton says that on some occasions she has “tormented and harried” them “until they would be thrown into spasms, whereat she would hysterically laugh, clap her hands, and look as fiercely delighted as a cat in playing with a mouse. At other times her tenderness toward her offspring would appear almost angelic. She would fondle them, weep over them, lift her arms and thank God for such children, caress them with ecstatic joy, and then smite them as if seeking to destroy at a blow both body and soul. This eccentric old lady, compounded in equal parts of Heaven and hell, will pray till her eyes are full of tears, and in the same hour curse till her lips are white with foam. The father exhibits a more tranquil bitterness, with fewer spasms. These parental peculiarities were lately made witnesses against their possessors in a court of justice.”

Inasmuch as Heaven never maintains a partnership with hell, and as the elements of hell are very apparent in the character here described, we think Heaven should be excused from the charge of having any part in the aforesaid compound. A child, we know, is not responsible for being the offspring of a particular father or mother, nor is it to be blamed should such father and mother chance to be fiends in human shape; but when such child puts forth claims to a position of vast responsibility, influence, and power, we have a right in weighing his or her probable fitness for the place, to take into consideration the question whether or not a bitter fountain is apt to send forth sweet water.

From her earliest childhood, she claims to have lived and worked by the help of spirits. They are her constant companions. They abide with her night and day. They dictate her life with daily revelations. Her enterprises are their invention. Her writings and speeches are the product of their absolute control of her brain and tongue. She does nothing without consulting them; and she is never disobedient to their decrees. A goodly portion of the time which other people pass in sleep, she spends in communion with spirits of devils. All this her biographer declares, except that he would not admit that the spirits are other than spirits from the heavenly world.

She was born in Homer, Ohio, Sept. 23, 1838, the seventh of ten children, of Roxana and Buckman Claflin. She is consequently now in her 34th year. At the age of 14 she married Dr. Canning Woodhull, aged 28. By this move she withdrew from the cruelty of her parents to enter the more unendurable cruelty of her new domestic relation. Her husband proved to be the most debauched of debauchees, too licentious to do a virtuous act, and too drunken to draw a sober breath. With this man she lived eleven years of unmitigated abuse, deprivation, neglect and misery. The second year after her marriage she bore a son whose antenatal conditions stamped him with semi-idiocy. She undertook, with the aid of the spirits, to reclaim her husband; but he proved more than a match for them all; chiefly owing, we suspect, to the fact that the spirits with whom she had to do, were of that character which made them too willing to have him pursue the course he was pursuing. She took him to California hoping to induce him there to begin a new and better life. Strangers and almost beggars in a strange city, she endeavored to support herself for a while with her needle, but soon brought up in a theater, where for six weeks she earned fifty-two dollars a week as an actress.

And then occurred an incident which shows the blind impetuosity with which she follows the bidding of the spirits. While on the stage, one evening, a spirit voice told her to go home to Ohio. Whereupon she broke from the scenes, and without even stopping to change her theatrical wardrobe, rushed to her hotel, packed her trunk in the hours of the night like a criminal hard pressed by the officers of justice, and early in the morning, started with her husband and child, for Ohio. Whether she owned the “pink silk dress,” &c., with which she quitted the theater, or whether she left the place with some of the property of the theater in her possession, we are not informed.

Reaching home, the spirits directed her to repair to Indianapolis, announce herself as a medium, and treat patients for the cure of disease. In this she succeeded in creating so remarkable a stir that up to 1869, when this work was discontinued by the direction of the spirits, her receipts had reached the enormous figure of seven hundred thousand dollars. She and her sister Tennie Claflin, are now carrying on the business of brokers in the city of New York, and publishing a paper entitled Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, a paper which Mr. Tilton says “is edited in one world, and published in another;” and which makes “free love” the burden of its unhallowed mission.

In 1863, she applied in Chicago for a divorce from her husband, and obtained it. Some time subsequently she was called on by Col. J. H. Blood, who came to consult her as a spiritualistic physician, having never met her before. She immediately went into the trance state and made to him the startling announcement that his destiny was to be linked with hers in marriage. They were married according to due form of law; but afterward deeming the legal tie a yoke upon that freedom to which they aspired, they were divorced according to the statutes of Illinois. To this man she still retains the relation of wife, so far as a relation can be called such which has the sanction of no law either human or divine.

The chief among her spiritual visitants, her guardian from her youth up, she describes as a stately and mature man clad in a Greek tunic. This spirit for a long time refused to divulge his name, but finally declared it as “Demosthenes.”

Some remarkable cures claim to have been performed through her mediumship; and this incident is related respecting herself and son: “One day, during a severe illness of her son, she left him to visit her patients, and on her return was startled with the news that the boy had died two hours before. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I will not permit his death.’ And with frantic energy she stripped her bosom naked, caught up his lifeless form, pressed it to her own, and sitting thus flesh to flesh, glided insensibly into a trance in which she remained seven hours; at the end of which time she awoke, a perspiration started from his clammy skin, and the child that had been thought dead was brought back again to life, and lives to this day in sad half-death. It is her belief that the spirit of Jesus Christ brooded over the lifeless form and re-wrought the miracle of Lazarus for a sorrowing woman’s sake.” On another occasion she undertook the case of a woman who had been given up to die and had received extreme unction by a Catholic priest. She is said to have stood over her constantly, neither eating nor sleeping for ten days and nights, and at the end of that time found the woman recovered, and herself, instead of weary and exhausted by the loss of sleep and food, more fresh and bright than at the beginning. Such is the woman who now bids for the highest office in the gift of the nation.

The spirits have in past years made many prophecies respecting her; such as that she would emerge from her poverty and live in a stately mansion; that she would amass great wealth in a maritime city; that she would found a bank and publish a paper; that she would speak in public, and that her first speech would be delivered in the capital of the nation. All these have been realized. And the spirits added, as the climax of their predictions, and the crowning event of her career, that she would finally become the ruler of her people. To this position she now aspires, and in this aspiration is backed by the myriads of demons that swarm the land, and will no doubt be seconded by Spiritualists who can wield the more tangible weapon of the ballot. Respecting her success in this thing, we make no prediction; but inasmuch as things as strange have happened, it will perhaps do the reader no hurt to try for a moment to imagine what the condition of our country will be when a woman more familiar with familiar spirits, and a more fanatical devotee of the unhallowed intercourse, than even the witch of Endor, shall sit in the chair of its chief executive. U. S.