Rules of engagement

BRINGING DOWN THE COLONEL 

A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age and the ‘Powerless’ Woman Who Took On Washington 

Author: Patricia Miller 

Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Price: $28

Pages: 368

It was on a fateful train ride in 1884 that Col. William Breckinridge, a Kentucky congressional candidate described by his supporters as a silver-tongued orator with presidential prospects, met Madeline Pollard, a student with literary ambitions. She asked for his help in a personal matter. He visited her at school. They went on a carriage ride. Then stuff happened, including the birth of two children, and a breach of promise suit that made headlines in 1893. In her history of the Breckinridge-Pollard affair, Patricia Miller revisits a mostly forgotten saga that changed the way many Americans felt about women and sex.

What better time for a story about a prominent man taken totally aback when he discovers that the rules about what he can get away with have changed? During Breckinridge’s trial for breach of promise — a legal concept until the early 20th century enabling a woman to sue a man for breaking his engagement to marry her — one of his lawyers warned the jury that giving Pollard a victory would “encourage every strumpet to push her little mass of filth into court”. Flash-forward to President Trump announcing, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, that all this talk about sexual assault was making it a “very scary time for young men in America”.

When Breckinridge and Pollard first met, he was a middle-aged married man. She was younger. How much younger would be one of the many subjects of dispute in a trial that riveted Gilded Age America. Was she an “experienced woman” of nearly 21 or a confused girl of 17?

Whatever her age, Pollard was not a hapless innocent. Her education, at one of the best women’s colleges in the nation, was being paid for by another much older man, who definitely expected her graduation to be followed by their wedding. After meeting Breckinridge on the train, she wrote to him asking for advice on how to get out of the arrangement. Soon came Breckinridge’s visit to her school in Cincinnati and the carriage ride that launched a thousand headlines. She became his mistress, gave up their children to foundling asylums at his demand and was pregnant again shortly after Breckinridge’s wife died. Pollard assumed their legal union would come next, allowing for a decent period of mourning. When the congressman instead married a socially prominent widow, Pollard was enraged and went to court.

The trial over Pollard’s lawsuit provided a near-perfect presentation of 19th-century sexual mores. Breckinridge’s team, in a preview of his defence in Kentucky newspapers, claimed Pollard was fair game and “utterly depraved where morality is concerned”. Pollard, countering with her own version of events in The New York World, claimed she was a naïve girl betrayed: “With this man alone have I ever been guilty of a single impure thought or act.”

Well, that was an overstatement. At one point when Pollard was being supported by Breckinridge, she was engaged to another man, and still taking money from James Rhodes, the patron who had paid her college tuition under the impression they were going to be married.

But what drove many observers crazy was the way Breckinridge confidently assumed he had the right to seduce any woman who was not “a maiden” and bore no responsibility for the relationship that ensued. 

It took the jury less than 90 minutes to award Pollard her moral victory — plus the hefty sum of $15,000. Breckinridge became the emblem of everything that women hated about men’s sexual behaviour. When he ran for what should have been an easy re-election the nation watched in fascination as opposition mounted. Female students at a Kentucky college vowed not to accept Breckinridge supporters as suitors. Women in Lexington held a monster picnic for his opponent, with a parade, banners and 30,000 attendees, who devoured refreshments made from 80 sheep, 11 cows and 40 hogs.

Breckinridge gave a weepy speech apologising for his weakness and citing his talents as a legislator. But, Miller notes, the real combatants in the election “were two worldviews about women and sex”. The reformers won. “The Silver Tongue Is Silenced,” announced one of the many, many headlines.

© 2018 The New York Times