“Not Ruined, but Hindered”: Rethinking Scandal, Re-examining Transatlantic Sources, and Recovering Madeleine Pollard

Abstract

In the spring of 1894, American newspapers captivated their readers with intense coverage of the latest political scandal. Madeleine Pollard, around thirty years old, had sued Kentucky congressman William C. P. Breckinridge for Breach of Promise for failing to marry her. Court testimony revealed Pol-lard's brief course of study at Cincinnati Wesleyan Female College, her acceptance into Washington DC society, a summer at Vermont's Bread Loaf Inn, and her relationships with Charles Dudley Warner, William Dean Howells, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, among others in the arts and literature. Pollard's lawyers used all of this as evidence of her nascent intellectual gifts and her dream of a literary life, thwarted by the congressman's seduction and betrayal; Breck-inridge's lawyers used this same history as evidence that Pollard was an adventuress, manipulating a host of powerful men to suit her own ambitious desires. (1) Pollard had learned early on the necessity and the challenges of relying on men. When she was ten years old, her father died suddenly, leaving her mother with scant financial resources and a houseful of children. The family was split up, and Madeleine spent her childhood with a succession of aunts with whom she witnessed unending domestic labor on top of what she had seen of her own mother's struggles to raise her family. At an aunt's near Lexington, Kentucky, Pollard began to focus her attention on higher education but knew that without financial resources she had little hope of formal schooling. She needed means, and that meant men to pay her way. She found an ingenious way to achieve her goal: she convinced a local farmer, James Rodes, to pay her tuition, and in exchange she promised to repay or marry him. But very early in her college career she had a change of heart and sought extrication from this agreement. In 1884, recognizing the prominent lawyer and soon-to-be elected US congressman on a train, the then twenty-one-year-old Madeleine Pollard engaged Breckinridge in conversation, following up this chance encounter with a letter seeking his advice on resolving her dilemma. He came to Cincinnati to discuss the matter; a few days later, their illicit relationship had begun. For Pollard the relationship was perhaps a mixed blessing: she left school and endured three pregnancies, but Breckinridge eventually provided entree to the life she wanted to lead. In 1887 she moved to Washington, worked for the Department of Agriculture and the Census Bureau, and hobnobbed with the well-to-do and the literati until the summer of 1893, when she learned that Breckinridge, despite his promise of marriage, had married another woman. (2) Pollard sued Breckinridge and won--and then disappeared. As a historian interested in the lives of women who come to short-lived fame and then are swept away into a domestic dustbin of history, initially I imagined Pollard's narrative as one in which she survived the trial but, ruined, spent the rest of her life in obscurity. My first look at Pollard's post-trial history seemed to confirm this early impression. She did not take to the stage, as newspaper commentary suggested she would, and in fact, with her former lover absolutely broke, she never received a penny of the $15,000 awarded her by the court. Her Washington socialite friends abandoned her. Beyond 1894, newspapers that had once covered Pollard's every move failed to mention her. Twentieth-century scholarship gives brief attention to the scandal that ended Breckinridge's political career and little attention to Pollard (Fuller, Congressman Breckenridge and An Early Venture; Klotter, Sex, Scandal, and Suffrage). In these works, Pollard represents a type: the mistress who seeks revenge and whose complaints bring an otherwise good civil servant to public shame. While neither condemning nor supporting Pollard, such scholarly accounts of the scandal offer little information on or insight into her background beyond what was reported in the newspapers. …