July 14, 2025
Madeleine Pollard, Jane Tucker, and the Sex Scandal that Brought Down a Congressman
In August of 1893, Madeleine Pollard sued Congressman William C.P. Breckinridge of Kentucky for breach of promise, claiming that he had promised to marry her but then had married another woman. By the time of the trial, Pollard and the much-older Breckinridge had been involved in an affair for nearly a decade. Breckinridge’s legal team attempted to paint Pollard as an “adventuress,” going so far as to hire an undercover detective – Jane Tucker – to get dirt on Pollard, but it was Breckinridge’s reputation that suffered as a result of the revelations in the trial, especially with the women of Kentucky. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Elizabeth DeWolfe, Professor of History at the University of New England in Maine and author of Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Wait until you see my Madeline,” composed by Albert Von Tilzer with lyrics by Lew Brown and performed by Billy Jones; the audio was recorded in Camden, New Jersey, on May 4, 1921 and is in the public domain and available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is a photo of Madeleine Pollard, by C.M. Bell, produced between 1873 and ca. 1916; the image is available via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, and there are no known restrictions on publication.
Additional Sources:
- “The Celebrated Trial, Madeline Pollard vs. Breckinridge, The Most Noted Breach of Promise Suit in the History of Court Records,” American Printing and Binding Company, 1894, via the Internet Archive.
- “The Court Case That Inspired the Gilded Age’s #MeToo Moment,” by Annie Diamond, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2018.
- “Sex, politics and broken promises grabbed headlines in Lexington in 1893,” by Liz Carey, The Lexington Herald-Leader, April 23, 2025.
- "“Not Ruined, but Hindered”: Rethinking Scandal, Re-examining Transatlantic Sources, and Recovering Madeleine Pollard," by Elizabeth DeWolfe, in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 31 no. 2, 2014, p. 300-310.
- “BRECKINRIDGE, William Campbell Preston,” United States House of Representatives History, Art, and Archives.
- “W.C.P. BRECKINRIDGE DEAD.; Ex-Congressman's Public Career Ended After the Pollard Suit,” The New York Times, November 20, 1904.
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WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_03]: This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I'm your host, Kelly Theresa Pollock.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In August of eighteen ninety-three, a woman named Madeline Pollard, sued Congressman William CP Breckenridge of Kentucky for breach of promise.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Claiming that he had promised to marry her,
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[SPEAKER_03]: But then, had instead married another woman.
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[SPEAKER_03]: William Campbell Preston Rackenridge was born on August twenty-eight, eighteen thirty-seven, in Baltimore, Maryland, to a prominent Kentucky family.
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[SPEAKER_03]: His grandfather was a U.S.
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[SPEAKER_03]: senator, and his cousin would later be elected Vice President.
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[SPEAKER_03]: After graduating from Center College in Danville, Kentucky in eighteen-fifty-five, Breckenridge earned a JD from the University of Louisville in eighteen-fifty-seven and practiced law in Lexington.
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[SPEAKER_03]: During the Civil War he fought with the Confederate Army, having risen to the rank of Colonel by war's end.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In eighteen eighty-four, Brecken Ridge was elected to the U.S.
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[SPEAKER_03]: House of Representatives.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Shortly before he was elected though, he met Madeline Pollard, a student at the Cincinnati Wesleyan female college.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Madeline had spent her childhood in Crab or Church in Kentucky.
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[SPEAKER_03]: but her father died in eighteenth seventy-six when she was thirteen years old.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And she was sent to live with her aunts, first in Pittsburgh and then near Lexington.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Madeline wanted to pursue a college education, but she had no money for tuition or books.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So she made a deal with James Rhodes.
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[SPEAKER_03]: a family acquaintance, twenty years older than her, who promised to fund her education if she would marry him at the end of her schooling.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Madeline agreed but with the caveat that she could instead pay him back.
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[SPEAKER_03]: After two senusters, Rhodes decided that Madeline had studied long enough and pressed her to marry him.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Madeline who had recently won the annual school debate had no interest in marrying a man who was practically illiterate, and she turned for help to eluxington lawyer she had met on a train, Breckenridge.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In response to her letter asking for his help, Breckenridge, who was a married father of five, and three decades older than Madeline, came to visit her.
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[SPEAKER_03]: On an August night in eighteen eighty four, Breckenridge arrived at Cincinnati Wesleyan female college in a chauffard carriage, closed to the outside.
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[SPEAKER_03]: According to Madeline, it was on that first carriage ride that Breckenridge took liberties with her.
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[SPEAKER_03]: He did not, however, solve her problem with roads.
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[SPEAKER_03]: That was just the beginning of what would become a lengthy affair between Breckenridge and Pollard.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Breckenridge impregnated Madeleine twice forcing her to give up the children who sadly then did not survive infancy.
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[SPEAKER_03]: When Madeleine decided to move to DC in eighteen eighty seven to be closer to Breckenridge, he helped secure her employment.
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[SPEAKER_03]: She worked for the Department of Agriculture and the Census Bureau.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Breckenridge's second wife, Isa Desha, died in eighteen ninety-two, and Breckenridge then proposed to Madeline.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Although he insisted that they keep the engagement secret as, by custom, he would have to wait a year before remaring.
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[SPEAKER_03]: He continued to drag his feet, even after society would have accepted news of the engagement.
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[SPEAKER_03]: By spring of eighteen ninety-three, Madeleine was pregnant, again, and rumors were swirling about them.
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[SPEAKER_03]: To quell the rumors, Madeleine convinced Breckenridge to admit the engagement to a Kentucky society woman, Julia Blackburn.
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[SPEAKER_03]: On June twenty-third, eighteen ninety-three, the Washington Evening Star announced their engagement at Madalyn's request.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Brackenridge was furious.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And on July third, the Louisville commercial printed his denial of the engagement.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Two weeks later, Brackenridge wed Louisville Widow and his distant cousin, Louis Wing.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Just three weeks after that, Madeleine's attorneys, Calderon Carlisle, and Jeremiah W. Wilson filed the breach upon his suit.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Breckenridge, of course, hired his own attorneys.
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[SPEAKER_03]: One of them, Charles Stoll, devised a plan to give their side an edge.
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[SPEAKER_03]: He reached out to a former employee of his stenographer, Jane Tucker.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Jane, the daughter of a ship captain, was born in eighteen sixty-six in Maine, and had studied at the Hickawks School of Shorthand and Typrotein in Boston before working for stole.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In January, eighteen ninety-four, Jane took on a new job as an undercover detective for Breckenridge and stole.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Using the alias Agnes Parker, she'd be Friend at Madeline, who was living in a home for fallen women.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And then used that friendship to learn information about the legal strategy of the prosecution, which she passed on to the defense.
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[SPEAKER_03]: despite Jane's best efforts, and despite the defense's attempts to paint Madeline as, well, utterly depraved where morality is concerned.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Breckenridge and his team lost the trial.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In April, eighteen, ninety-four, a jury, deliberated for just ninety minutes before deciding in Madeline's favor.
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[SPEAKER_03]: awarding her fifteen thousand dollars.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The equivalent of about half a million dollars today.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Jane Tucker trying to capitalize on the sensation of the trial.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Quickly wrote a book about her experiences that was produced on the cheap.
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[SPEAKER_03]: However, the real Madeline Pollard, a diary of ten weeks association with the plaintiff in the famous Breckenridge Pollard suit, was a flop.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In Jane returned to Maine.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Breckenridge reportedly never paid any of the money awarded to Madeline, but the trial still cost him dearly.
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[SPEAKER_03]: When he ran for reelection to Congress in
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[SPEAKER_03]: The women of Kentucky united to defeat him.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Staging protests and boycotts.
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[SPEAKER_03]: A letter signed many women ran on the front page of the Kentucky leader declaring, quote, let him sink into the oblivion of his guilt, let his voice be silent."
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[SPEAKER_03]: Reckon-Ringe lost the primary and never served in public office again.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Joining me in this episode is Dr. Elizabeth DeWolf, professor of History at the University of New England in Maine, and to author of Alius Agnes, the notorious tale of a guilty age spy.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Before that, though a quick note about our programming
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[SPEAKER_03]: Going forward on Sun History episodes will be posted every other week on Mondays.
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[SPEAKER_02]: We can tell you say my bad ol' line.
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[SPEAKER_02]: We don't say any hornies of the line.
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[SPEAKER_02]: When he's my boss, we lead you'll be one completely.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You'll remember, you'll remember, you can't help thinking of her way until the day I make her mind.
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[SPEAKER_02]: That one day the sun will shine.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I got a home for tour and present that will do for me at the better time.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Hi, Beth.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks so much for joining me today.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, and thank you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's a pleasure to be here.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, so this was a fantastic book.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I'm excited to be talking to you about it.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I want to hear first a little bit about how you got into writing this story.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I ended up writing this book in a rather roundabout way.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I had started with a project on Madeleine Pollard, at a rare book show I encountered what's called the salesman sample.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's basically a sample of a few non-contiguous pages of a proposed book, and this sample was advertising a book about the Madeleine Pollard Congressman Breckenridge notorious breach of promised trial of eighteen ninety-four.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I was very intrigued by this trial of the moment that then disappeared from history, and especially by Madeleine Pollard.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I did buy the salesman sample at this bookshelf, but I, it, it nagged at me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I did a little research found out that really no one had written about Madeleine.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Other than to say, she ruined Breckenridge's career.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I wanted to know more about her.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's how the project started with the idea of writing about Madeline's life before and after her fifteen minutes of national notoriety.
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[SPEAKER_01]: but a lot of the way.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As I was reading the congressman's papers, I started to get hints of this scheme.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, secretive that his lawyer wouldn't put details in writing only promise, I will tell you more this evening.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so that really picked my curiosity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I discovered that the Congressmen and his lawyer hired a young woman who I knew only as Agnes Parker, and she was to be an undercover detective to spy on Battle and Pollard.
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[SPEAKER_01]: befriended her and in their heart to heart talks, steal her secrets, and give them to the congressman's legal team so that the congressman could use them against her in this notorious trial.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Then the task became, well, who is Agnes Parker, and through some complicated research and lucky breaks, I figured out she was a stenographer from Maine, named
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[SPEAKER_01]: Jane Tucker.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's how this project started.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So, talk to me about the sources that you used because, you know, as you've just mentioned, you were reading the congressman's papers, but there's a whole bunch more that you had to do to piece together to be a detective yourself and piece together this story.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in many women's history research projects, especially researching ordinary women, you often have to start with the papers of men.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so that led me of course to the congressman's papers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was a prominent man.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His papers were saved.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So within those papers I extracted every detail I could about Madeline Pollard and eventually about Jane Tucker and built timelines.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Places, dates, people that they interacted with and from there could move out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, one great source that I found was Madeleine Pollard's Employment Records in the National Archives, which he first arrived in Washington, having followed Breckenridge there during their nine-year affair.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I learned that Madeleine worked in the civil service, both for the Department of Agriculture and later for the Department of the Interior.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so those records were readily available at the National Archives, and they revealed fascinating information, including Breckenrich's letters of support, trying to help Madeleine get a job.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And when that failed,
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[SPEAKER_01]: I found a letter from Breckenbridge the following year, reminding the same future employer that Breckenbridge served on the House Appropriations Committee.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Committee which funds your endeavor surprised the price badly got a job.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so that was fascinating too.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I also had to use
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[SPEAKER_01]: records that were quite buried in history.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One of the best things I found about Madeline Pollard was a newspaper article from eighteen eighty four, recording her time at Cincinnati Wesley of female college.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Madeline was on the debate team.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And there was this huge annual debate in Cincinnati over five hundred people attended.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And Madeline won and this newspaper recounts her performance.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What's key about this is this is a report on Madeline before she encountered Breckenridge.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So we're getting close to her true identity, pre-mistress identity, however you want to phrase it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So the sources that I looked for started with a man and then built out in webs.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I just tried to think through every possible place that Madeline or Jane could appear in the historical record and just kept digging.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And how did you decide on the format to present this book in?
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[SPEAKER_03]: You, at several points, it almost reads like a novel because, you know, it's moving through kind of in real time what's happening with our mean characters, so to speak.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So, what, what was your process behind putting that together, figuring out how to write it in that way?
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's a great question because I went through several iterations on this, and this script, including at one point writing about two thirds of it, and then ditching it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And my original plan was, this is courtroom drama.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is Madeleine versus Breckenridge.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And Jane was in the background.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But as I wrote that first version, I realized one courtroom dramas, despite our long TV shows, aren't really that exciting.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that is true.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There were high, there was a big excitement at moments in the Breckenridge trial.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But a lot of it was lawyers fighting about process.
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[SPEAKER_01]: again and again and again and that was boring so boring metal and didn't bother to attend so that I realized was also not only not very interesting but it was doing metal in a disservice because these this moment of notoriety in the spring of eighteen ninety four did not define her life popular wisdom would say oh she was a mistress
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[SPEAKER_01]: as if that explains her entirety.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It didn't.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So when I started to uncover Jane, I realized, no, the story here is the women behind the scenes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's what led me to really flip the narrative and privilege, battle in and Jane as two ordinary women interacting in extraordinary circumstances.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and push Breckenridge, and the courtroom really to the background.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that, to me, was much more interesting.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I did try to write it as like a novel with a narrative arc, a protagonist, and an antagonist, because history is dramatic.
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[SPEAKER_01]: History is a story.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And part of my process is an author.
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[SPEAKER_01]: is to try to imagine the seed to put myself there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What do I see?
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[SPEAKER_01]: What do I hear?
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[SPEAKER_01]: What do I smell?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I went to every location in Kentucky, in Washington, and not to spoil the end of the book, other places to Jane's family home, which happens to be in Maine, where I live, huge surprise when I discover that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I try to go to these locations
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[SPEAKER_01]: For example, when I was in Washington, I called up the courthouse where this was tried at the librarian of that courthouse said, Sure, come on, buy I'll give you a tour.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One thing that I gleaned that I think made it into the book was as we were walking across the lobby to go to the courtroom.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Her heels were clicking on the marble floor.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I realized that's what it would have sounded like as Madeline walked alone across that floor.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So those little details I think can help bring the past to life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I read what they read.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I try to eat what they ate.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I go to the places they went to.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it's also for me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's also a privilege to hold on to the door knob of a school.
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[SPEAKER_01]: that Madeline would have opened that door every day and go into the classroom.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So there I'm trying to feel or essence.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that really happens, but still it was a privilege for me to walk in Jane and Madeline's footsteps.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The story, of course, and what brought you to it initially is this breach of promise, stout.
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[SPEAKER_03]: could you talk some about what that was certainly not something that people still do in the same way?
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[SPEAKER_03]: What does Madeline trying to do by bringing in a suit?
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[SPEAKER_01]: By bringing this suit, Madeline is trying to demonstrate that she is a respectable woman despite her life choice to be a mistress.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Another way to say that is despite her life choice to wait for Breckenridge to be good on the promise that he had made every year for nine years.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So breach of promise was a legal remedy used by women primarily of the leisureed classes, the middle and elite class, as a way to protect a daughter who was jilted in an engagement or left at the altar.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's a way to reassure future suitors that she is respectable and was not to be blamed for this social faux pas.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, when the scandal erupts, you know, reckon-rich thinks that Madeline will simply, the slink away in shame, but she doesn't.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As we know, she's Susan for breach of promise, and so her big mission in court is to demonstrate.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I am respectable, he made a promise, words matter.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Despite my sexual history, despite my past, he promised he needs to be good on it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Breaker Bridge, of course, is trying to show the opposite that Madeleine was sexually deviant and therefore not marriageable material, and thus any promise he made, he can't hold him to it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's what Breaker Promise was used for.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But by the World War I period, it's already falling out of use, and it's mocked in literature often, and starts to be called heart bomb cases, you know, that women's broken hearts are being sued.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And by the nineteen twenty's at all, but disappears,
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[SPEAKER_01]: Primarily because women have more options in the nineteen twenties at least in some parts of the world and to be jilted at the altar is no longer the life destroying act that it would have been in a in a previous century you know and in fact in by the nineteen twenties it's the women who can jilt somewhat at the altar
22:33.994 --> 22:41.306
[SPEAKER_01]: So it has this little window at the tail end of the nineteenth century, and Madeline takes a vantage of it.
22:42.373 --> 22:44.134
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's talk about the Brecken ridges.
22:44.274 --> 22:51.319
[SPEAKER_03]: Colonel Breckenridge, you mentioned, is not just a congressman, but a prominent congressman from a very important family.
22:51.839 --> 22:58.764
[SPEAKER_03]: Long time listeners of this podcast will remember an episode on Sofiniz, but Breckenridge who shows up in this story as well.
22:59.264 --> 23:05.488
[SPEAKER_03]: So can you talk some about Colonel Breckenridge's position before all of this happens?
23:05.888 --> 23:08.490
[SPEAKER_03]: And why Madeline would have been drawn to him?
23:08.730 --> 23:11.112
[SPEAKER_03]: And what's going on with that story?
23:12.428 --> 23:22.231
[SPEAKER_01]: In the moment that Breckenridge and Pollard meet, Breckenridge is running for his first term in the House of Representatives.
23:22.631 --> 23:25.292
[SPEAKER_01]: He's an attorney living in Lexington.
23:25.572 --> 23:32.134
[SPEAKER_01]: He was somewhat of a civil war hero served honorably for the South.
23:32.954 --> 23:40.819
[SPEAKER_01]: And his family was incredibly prominent, the men in local and state and even national politics.
23:40.859 --> 23:45.041
[SPEAKER_01]: So Breckerbridge is following right along in that regard.
23:45.542 --> 23:55.488
[SPEAKER_01]: So when he empowered meat, hollered has made this deal with a Kentucky bachelor and older man.
23:56.008 --> 24:20.685
[SPEAKER_01]: who will pay her tuition for her to achieve one of her dearest dreams and that's a higher education and since her family she's all but in orphan her family is separated due to the death of her father she accepts this deal and goes to Cincinnati Wesleyan female college of very good institution for young women who were intellectually curious
24:21.485 --> 24:32.079
[SPEAKER_01]: But she is barely there for two semesters when her benefactor announces, I'm out of money, you have to live up to your end of the deal, which was married.
24:33.008 --> 24:35.690
[SPEAKER_01]: Madeline had also said, or I'll pay you back.
24:36.391 --> 24:37.471
[SPEAKER_01]: She didn't want to marry.
24:37.972 --> 24:51.983
[SPEAKER_01]: She wrote the more she engaged in education, the more she realized that this deal instead of freeing her was going to draw her back to what she was trying to escape in the first place, a rural domestic life.
24:52.663 --> 25:01.972
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, by chance, Madeleine met the handsome young Colonel Brocked Ridge ought to train in the exchange Pleasantries.
25:02.313 --> 25:07.097
[SPEAKER_01]: He was very well-known, so that was not an unusual occurrence by any means.
25:07.998 --> 25:18.161
[SPEAKER_01]: When her benefactor announced it was time to marry, she remembered that encounter and wrote to Breckenridge and asked for his legal help.
25:18.842 --> 25:29.425
[SPEAKER_01]: He came to Cincinnati and then what happens next becomes one of the big cruxes of the breach of promise trial that will occur ten years into the future.
25:30.630 --> 25:41.856
[SPEAKER_01]: They take a carriage ride, a closed carriage ride, on a hot night in Cincinnati, yaddy-yaddy-yadda three days later, they are lovers.
25:43.737 --> 25:49.139
[SPEAKER_01]: Breckenridge insists that what they did in the carriage was consensual.
25:50.640 --> 25:55.803
[SPEAKER_01]: My read is that it was gaslighting, and that he was
25:56.837 --> 25:58.597
[SPEAKER_01]: grooming, Madeline.
25:59.138 --> 26:03.159
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, Madeline, of all the girls I've known who go to college.
26:03.199 --> 26:04.419
[SPEAKER_01]: You're clearly the brightest.
26:04.679 --> 26:07.300
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, you have a big future in writing.
26:07.980 --> 26:09.100
[SPEAKER_01]: I could guide you.
26:09.500 --> 26:11.681
[SPEAKER_01]: So it reads very differently.
26:11.781 --> 26:14.582
[SPEAKER_01]: I think in the twenty first century.
26:15.242 --> 26:17.643
[SPEAKER_01]: So, but it's a great question though.
26:17.703 --> 26:19.063
[SPEAKER_01]: So why does Madeline
26:20.613 --> 26:22.874
[SPEAKER_01]: Why does Madeline consent?
26:23.174 --> 26:29.317
[SPEAKER_01]: And I believe she did eventually consent consent to this relationship and stay with him for nine years.
26:30.258 --> 26:35.020
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe Madeline when she says that she indeed loved him.
26:36.334 --> 26:36.834
[SPEAKER_01]: that.
26:37.395 --> 26:42.517
[SPEAKER_01]: Whether that love was misplaced, you know, we can debate that, but she says she loved him.
26:42.637 --> 26:43.597
[SPEAKER_01]: She trusted him.
26:44.358 --> 26:49.880
[SPEAKER_01]: She had no male protector, no father, no older brother in her life.
26:51.781 --> 26:57.804
[SPEAKER_01]: She knew that she didn't want the future her mother and her aunt's hat, a very hard-scrabble life.
26:58.244 --> 26:59.945
[SPEAKER_01]: And she saw how the death
27:00.825 --> 27:06.629
[SPEAKER_01]: or disability of the father or husband in your life was devastating to a family.
27:07.670 --> 27:16.956
[SPEAKER_01]: She knew that her half to her dreams, a literary life, a life of culture, a life of art, a life of the intellect.
27:17.776 --> 27:26.262
[SPEAKER_01]: For her, could only come through two paths, a higher education, or a really good marriage, break a marriage promised both.
27:27.782 --> 27:28.383
[SPEAKER_01]: She believed a
27:29.632 --> 27:37.117
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's interesting when people ask me, well, wasn't she just out for gold?
27:37.257 --> 27:38.939
[SPEAKER_01]: Wasn't she an adventurous?
27:39.459 --> 27:41.580
[SPEAKER_01]: Wasn't she always a gold digger?
27:42.461 --> 27:45.403
[SPEAKER_01]: Am I response to that is nine years?
27:46.384 --> 27:47.685
[SPEAKER_01]: She's playing a long game.
27:47.705 --> 27:53.629
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe Madeleine when she says initially, she loved him.
27:54.429 --> 27:56.571
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that cooled over time.
27:57.365 --> 27:57.786
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
27:58.107 --> 28:05.884
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, and, you know, gold digger, I think has a little bit different connotation in a time where, as you say, there's limited options for women.
28:06.781 --> 28:08.101
[SPEAKER_01]: This is one of the options.
28:08.862 --> 28:09.142
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
28:09.282 --> 28:17.063
[SPEAKER_01]: And, and, and, and, you know, Marilyn was moving in in elite, uh, Washington Southern Society.
28:17.203 --> 28:22.285
[SPEAKER_01]: She was somewhat of the, protege of the season for a couple of years.
28:22.805 --> 28:27.386
[SPEAKER_01]: She was known as a charismatic young woman.
28:27.506 --> 28:29.566
[SPEAKER_01]: She was incredibly well read.
28:29.706 --> 28:31.447
[SPEAKER_01]: She was a conversationalist.
28:32.227 --> 28:38.032
[SPEAKER_01]: She hopped up with William Dean Howell's and Augusta St.
28:38.072 --> 28:46.438
[SPEAKER_01]: Gaudins and all sorts of literary light Charles Dudley Warner, all sorts of literary lights of the period.
28:46.859 --> 28:50.982
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, none of that society are few.
28:51.242 --> 28:54.685
[SPEAKER_01]: We should say in that society new of her secret life.
28:55.205 --> 28:55.545
[SPEAKER_01]: And so
28:56.646 --> 29:12.749
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Madeline getting a good marriage was no different from the daughters of any of the other social lights who were pushing very young girls forward at these elaborate teas and gatherings and so forth.
29:13.289 --> 29:24.871
[SPEAKER_01]: So the one difference that would condemn, so to speak, Madeline, is she was engaged in sex before her assumed marriage?
29:25.966 --> 29:26.186
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
29:27.687 --> 29:34.453
[SPEAKER_03]: How do we understand the motivations of Jane, then, and what she chose to do?
29:34.653 --> 29:51.827
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, this is quite daring, but also quite, you know, she may have felt justified, but quite underhanded that she spends all this time befriending Madeline, Madeline thinks that she's a true friend, and all the time Jane is working for the enemy.
29:53.842 --> 30:08.330
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an interesting scenario, and one of the surprises to me as people are reading the book is exactly this debate about Madeline and Jane's friendship and to Jane feel any remorse.
30:08.770 --> 30:13.593
[SPEAKER_01]: Did she just throw her under the bus to, as Jane said, grab the gold?
30:14.622 --> 30:24.426
[SPEAKER_01]: So Jane, it's beginning of eighteen ninety four, has lost her job in the horrible economic times of the eight, early eighteen nineties.
30:25.146 --> 30:29.388
[SPEAKER_01]: And much against her wishes she has returned to the family home at Maine.
30:29.928 --> 30:31.449
[SPEAKER_01]: She is exhausted.
30:31.929 --> 30:38.292
[SPEAKER_01]: She has kind of chronic digestive complaints and her mother is nursing her back to health.
30:38.812 --> 30:43.414
[SPEAKER_01]: Please, the Jane has returned to where she should be, right, in the domestic fold.
30:44.434 --> 30:58.022
[SPEAKER_01]: And when Jane starts to get letters from a favorite former employer, begging her to undertake a job, he can't, and again, with the secrets, he can't give details.
30:58.062 --> 31:01.204
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you can meet me in Boston, I'll reveal all.
31:01.924 --> 31:05.746
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was Jane's favorite employer by far.
31:05.926 --> 31:09.428
[SPEAKER_01]: And so she goes to Boston and has a conversation.
31:09.489 --> 31:12.710
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is when she learns about record rich and
31:14.473 --> 31:17.536
[SPEAKER_01]: and this position isn't undercover detective.
31:18.396 --> 31:32.808
[SPEAKER_01]: She tells her parents not a lot of the details but says I'm going to Washington and she basically says I'm just going to be a stenographer to to help out in the background.
31:33.528 --> 31:34.568
[SPEAKER_01]: of illegal case.
31:34.728 --> 31:36.189
[SPEAKER_01]: No details at all.
31:36.629 --> 31:41.730
[SPEAKER_01]: But she later says she has to take this job because it's her only chance to grab the gold.
31:42.210 --> 31:43.991
[SPEAKER_01]: And she doesn't mean that in a greedy way.
31:44.191 --> 31:48.352
[SPEAKER_01]: She means that as the means to her slice of the American dream.
31:48.832 --> 31:50.753
[SPEAKER_01]: She didn't want to marry her wealth.
31:51.213 --> 31:52.913
[SPEAKER_01]: That wasn't the life she wanted.
31:53.473 --> 31:55.554
[SPEAKER_01]: She wanted financial independence.
31:56.074 --> 32:06.760
[SPEAKER_01]: She wanted agency to run her own life because she saw her parents' marriage in the same way that Madeleine saw what happened to her mother on the death of her father.
32:07.601 --> 32:13.905
[SPEAKER_01]: Jane looks at her parents, a father who is twenty-five years older than his mother.
32:14.805 --> 32:18.949
[SPEAKER_01]: who was a sea captain, so he's going up and down the Atlantic sea board.
32:19.049 --> 32:32.482
[SPEAKER_01]: He's out doing all sorts of business things, leaving his young wife in a old home, which has the usual sorts of weather problems, and with a whole bunch of kids.
32:33.403 --> 32:38.507
[SPEAKER_01]: and Jane's mother was so unhappy that she contemplated divorce.
32:38.867 --> 32:46.071
[SPEAKER_01]: She even checked herself into a, what today we would say, a mental health facility because she needed a break.
32:46.612 --> 32:52.736
[SPEAKER_01]: Jane sees that as do her sisters and all three say, nope, not for us.
32:53.356 --> 32:58.380
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's the sisters who leave the family homestead and for Jane
32:59.160 --> 33:01.701
[SPEAKER_01]: Jane's pride and joy is her work ethic.
33:02.301 --> 33:05.163
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is going to be the key to her success.
33:05.343 --> 33:09.925
[SPEAKER_01]: So when her former employer says, you name the salary, Jane does.
33:10.365 --> 33:16.148
[SPEAKER_01]: And she believes that this will get her out of a financial hole.
33:16.268 --> 33:22.291
[SPEAKER_01]: She was in debt and even helped propel her to that life that she wanted.
33:22.651 --> 33:24.812
[SPEAKER_01]: So Madeline and Jane are both
33:26.038 --> 33:32.441
[SPEAKER_01]: seeking the same thing, agency in their own lives, and picking the American dream they want.
33:32.921 --> 33:40.064
[SPEAKER_01]: Not the one that was automatically handed towards women, as nice as that dream is, but not every woman wanted it.
33:40.724 --> 33:48.447
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they are making very different decisions, but trying to get to that same independent agency.
33:49.536 --> 33:57.222
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure that listeners are thinking these women seem totally out of alignment with what I thought of the guilty age.
33:57.902 --> 34:04.067
[SPEAKER_03]: How much do you think they really are sort of different or, you know, what can they tell us about the guilty age?
34:05.287 --> 34:13.531
[SPEAKER_01]: They tell us that women were ambitious in the gilded age, even when ambition was a bad adjective to be applied to a woman.
34:14.411 --> 34:32.579
[SPEAKER_01]: What I learned at what surprised me in researching this topic was the various stories of women who took whatever opportunities they could wrangle and found creative ways around the challenges that society placed before them.
34:33.696 --> 34:41.039
[SPEAKER_01]: In the trial itself, most of the people who testified on Madeleine's behalf were women.
34:41.759 --> 34:48.962
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were everyone from the very elite Julia Churchill Blackburn of the Churchill Downs.
34:49.914 --> 35:00.358
[SPEAKER_01]: Churchill's, she was the widow of the governor of Kentucky, and she was pretty much the grand-dom of the southern contingent in Washington, society.
35:01.278 --> 35:06.200
[SPEAKER_01]: She gets up on the stand, and she is going to testify.
35:07.564 --> 35:31.478
[SPEAKER_01]: As a way, not to support Madeleine, her say, but to defend her own hard-won reputation against the egregious act that Breckenridge perpetrated on her by, as Blackberry testified, stating that Breckenridge in her parlor on good Friday.
35:32.418 --> 35:56.704
[SPEAKER_01]: admitted he was going to marry Madeleine Pollard and so she's protecting herself and she's protecting her family name and she is not going to shy away in a court of law and again the Kentucky lawyers like oh Mrs. Blackburn oh Mrs. Blackburn treating her with kid gloves and she's not taking she is not shy in a way she's not playing the ho ho ho
35:57.204 --> 35:57.905
[SPEAKER_01]: routine.
35:57.965 --> 36:01.006
[SPEAKER_01]: She, she is cutting and savvy in smart.
36:01.467 --> 36:09.371
[SPEAKER_01]: Jane sees this from afar and even writes to breakfast as attorneys and says basically take off the kid gloves.
36:09.972 --> 36:12.293
[SPEAKER_01]: She's running the courtroom, not you.
36:12.833 --> 36:14.454
[SPEAKER_01]: So we see her story.
36:14.995 --> 36:22.459
[SPEAKER_01]: And in her story is one where she, this is the second scandal she was involved in, perpetrated by men.
36:22.479 --> 36:24.961
[SPEAKER_01]: And so she is going to protect herself.
36:25.901 --> 36:37.047
[SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, we see testimony from formerly enslaved woman, Sarah Gist, who provides key testimony in the trial.
36:37.728 --> 36:46.913
[SPEAKER_01]: Sarah Gist is sitting in a courtroom of all white men, and just, Manel and Pollard and the woman who attended her.
36:47.613 --> 36:49.915
[SPEAKER_01]: And most of these Southern men, to boot,
36:50.988 --> 36:51.788
[SPEAKER_01]: same thing.
36:52.649 --> 37:01.991
[SPEAKER_01]: She is going to tell her story and show how she has made a good and respectable living.
37:03.112 --> 37:19.377
[SPEAKER_01]: And when she, when she testifies as to some of the things, Breckenridge asked her to do such as lie on the stand, she is quite determined to say, no, I will not do that.
37:19.397 --> 37:19.417
[SPEAKER_01]: I
37:21.253 --> 37:22.213
[SPEAKER_01]: will obey the law.
37:23.114 --> 37:25.615
[SPEAKER_01]: And the implication there is not you.
37:27.256 --> 37:43.963
[SPEAKER_01]: I. And so we see, you know, in their testimony, how they have carved lives for themselves, whether formally enslaved or at the top of Kentucky society, here again a women who are
37:45.934 --> 37:51.858
[SPEAKER_01]: taking opportunities, fighting those challenges to make the lives they want.
37:51.978 --> 37:56.701
[SPEAKER_01]: That to me was absolutely fascinating in this trial.
37:57.521 --> 38:09.169
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the wonderful things, again, what it teaches us is that women despite portrayals in popular culture and perhaps in some literature that
38:10.089 --> 38:17.733
[SPEAKER_01]: Victorian women were not, Victorian women were not these weeping, weeping need, parlors setting women.
38:17.753 --> 38:34.941
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, these were women with plans, these were women with ambition, these were with smarts and all you have to look at is what went on in those parlors during these T rituals to know that these were women in charge.
38:36.907 --> 38:41.428
[SPEAKER_03]: And those smart, ambitious women, of course, included Colonel Breckenrich's daughter.
38:41.548 --> 38:42.248
[SPEAKER_03]: So, for Nizpa.
38:43.248 --> 38:44.268
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, very much.
38:44.408 --> 38:54.430
[SPEAKER_01]: What's fascinating to be about the Breckenrich family is that in the nineteenth century, it's mostly the men who are the prominent ones and in the twentieth century, it's the women.
38:55.090 --> 39:00.511
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, for Nizpa is right there, of course, in the mix.
39:01.091 --> 39:04.872
[SPEAKER_01]: At the time of the trial, she is being the doodleful daughter.
39:05.652 --> 39:09.094
[SPEAKER_01]: to her father who was, you know, naturally humiliated.
39:09.154 --> 39:11.915
[SPEAKER_01]: She was crushed by these revelations.
39:12.376 --> 39:18.619
[SPEAKER_01]: She has a new stepmother with whom she and her siblings have a very fraught relationship.
39:19.740 --> 39:24.502
[SPEAKER_01]: And she has other things that she wishes to do yet.
39:24.702 --> 39:35.088
[SPEAKER_01]: She is there in Washington helping her father, both with his new wife and with the business of being on trial.
39:36.448 --> 39:38.249
[SPEAKER_01]: a remarkable remarkable woman.
39:39.430 --> 39:43.492
[SPEAKER_03]: If listeners would like to get a copy of this book, how can they do that?
39:44.992 --> 40:01.480
[SPEAKER_01]: The book is available from major online retailers, and also from the press, the University Press of Kentucky, and I would also urge listeners to ask at their local independent bookstore as the wife of a rare book dealer.
40:02.061 --> 40:04.822
[SPEAKER_01]: I urge people to support their local businesses.
40:06.101 --> 40:12.210
[SPEAKER_03]: I think this book could be a movie, so if you've got any filmmakers out there listening.
40:13.492 --> 40:14.133
[SPEAKER_01]: Please do.
40:14.734 --> 40:15.455
[SPEAKER_01]: Please do.
40:16.797 --> 40:19.201
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?
40:21.239 --> 40:26.808
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a story I think that tells us why women's history matters.
40:27.288 --> 40:30.754
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not a story about famous women.
40:31.775 --> 40:35.381
[SPEAKER_01]: And while it's wonderful to have new scholarship on famous women,
40:36.262 --> 40:47.025
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's also important to remember that ordinary women's lives, whether they encounter something extraordinary or not, is still worth reading.
40:47.865 --> 40:54.928
[SPEAKER_01]: We are all makers of history, our daily life is history, and the women who
40:56.588 --> 41:13.151
[SPEAKER_01]: cross paths with Madeleine and Jane, who appear in the court records, who are part of the story, all have interesting things to contribute, not necessarily in a legal sense, but just their daily lives, again, telling us about
41:13.672 --> 41:20.354
[SPEAKER_01]: women's hopes and dreams and challenges and obstacles and the way they navigated their lives.
41:20.795 --> 41:28.297
[SPEAKER_01]: And those are lessons and inspirations that we can still be proud of, be astounded by and make use of today.
41:28.798 --> 41:40.582
[SPEAKER_01]: Women's lives matter and reading about them is a way to is a way to give prominence and remembrance to those who came before us.
41:41.787 --> 41:43.708
[SPEAKER_03]: That's thank you so much for speaking with me.
41:44.588 --> 41:45.609
[SPEAKER_01]: It is my pleasure.
41:45.669 --> 41:46.429
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much.
42:12.002 --> 42:14.249
[SPEAKER_00]: or on Facebook at unsung history podcast.
42:14.811 --> 42:18.482
[SPEAKER_00]: The contact is with questions, corrections, praise, or absolute suggestions.
42:18.943 --> 42:21.471
[SPEAKER_00]: Please email Kelley at unsung historypodcast.com.
42:22.233 --> 42:26.185
[SPEAKER_00]: If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know.
42:26.546 --> 42:26.767
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye.
00:00.111 --> 00:08.813
[SPEAKER_03]: This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention.
00:09.693 --> 00:11.774
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm your host, Kelly Theresa Pollock.
00:12.534 --> 00:19.416
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do.
00:20.556 --> 00:25.998
[SPEAKER_03]: Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode.
00:26.858 --> 00:27.278
[SPEAKER_03]: And please,
00:27.758 --> 00:32.799
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen to.
00:37.540 --> 00:49.982
[SPEAKER_03]: In August of eighteen ninety-three, a woman named Madeline Pollard, sued Congressman William CP Breckenridge of Kentucky for breach of promise.
00:51.363 --> 00:53.723
[SPEAKER_03]: Claiming that he had promised to marry her,
00:54.574 --> 00:57.495
[SPEAKER_03]: But then, had instead married another woman.
00:59.616 --> 01:10.719
[SPEAKER_03]: William Campbell Preston Rackenridge was born on August twenty-eight, eighteen thirty-seven, in Baltimore, Maryland, to a prominent Kentucky family.
01:11.840 --> 01:13.520
[SPEAKER_03]: His grandfather was a U.S.
01:13.600 --> 01:17.902
[SPEAKER_03]: senator, and his cousin would later be elected Vice President.
01:19.842 --> 01:34.169
[SPEAKER_03]: After graduating from Center College in Danville, Kentucky in eighteen-fifty-five, Breckenridge earned a JD from the University of Louisville in eighteen-fifty-seven and practiced law in Lexington.
01:35.970 --> 01:42.753
[SPEAKER_03]: During the Civil War he fought with the Confederate Army, having risen to the rank of Colonel by war's end.
01:44.412 --> 01:48.353
[SPEAKER_03]: In eighteen eighty-four, Brecken Ridge was elected to the U.S.
01:48.393 --> 01:49.694
[SPEAKER_03]: House of Representatives.
01:51.915 --> 02:00.398
[SPEAKER_03]: Shortly before he was elected though, he met Madeline Pollard, a student at the Cincinnati Wesleyan female college.
02:03.138 --> 02:07.460
[SPEAKER_03]: Madeline had spent her childhood in Crab or Church in Kentucky.
02:08.990 --> 02:14.174
[SPEAKER_03]: but her father died in eighteenth seventy-six when she was thirteen years old.
02:15.554 --> 02:21.218
[SPEAKER_03]: And she was sent to live with her aunts, first in Pittsburgh and then near Lexington.
02:23.120 --> 02:30.685
[SPEAKER_03]: Madeline wanted to pursue a college education, but she had no money for tuition or books.
02:32.146 --> 02:35.308
[SPEAKER_03]: So she made a deal with James Rhodes.
02:35.952 --> 02:47.637
[SPEAKER_03]: a family acquaintance, twenty years older than her, who promised to fund her education if she would marry him at the end of her schooling.
02:49.437 --> 02:54.199
[SPEAKER_03]: Madeline agreed but with the caveat that she could instead pay him back.
02:56.720 --> 03:03.523
[SPEAKER_03]: After two senusters, Rhodes decided that Madeline had studied long enough and pressed her to marry him.
03:05.190 --> 03:20.721
[SPEAKER_03]: Madeline who had recently won the annual school debate had no interest in marrying a man who was practically illiterate, and she turned for help to eluxington lawyer she had met on a train, Breckenridge.
03:22.982 --> 03:34.330
[SPEAKER_03]: In response to her letter asking for his help, Breckenridge, who was a married father of five, and three decades older than Madeline, came to visit her.
03:36.327 --> 03:48.569
[SPEAKER_03]: On an August night in eighteen eighty four, Breckenridge arrived at Cincinnati Wesleyan female college in a chauffard carriage, closed to the outside.
03:50.690 --> 03:56.811
[SPEAKER_03]: According to Madeline, it was on that first carriage ride that Breckenridge took liberties with her.
03:58.391 --> 04:01.212
[SPEAKER_03]: He did not, however, solve her problem with roads.
04:03.540 --> 04:10.062
[SPEAKER_03]: That was just the beginning of what would become a lengthy affair between Breckenridge and Pollard.
04:12.182 --> 04:20.445
[SPEAKER_03]: Breckenridge impregnated Madeleine twice forcing her to give up the children who sadly then did not survive infancy.
04:22.705 --> 04:31.748
[SPEAKER_03]: When Madeleine decided to move to DC in eighteen eighty seven to be closer to Breckenridge, he helped secure her employment.
04:33.213 --> 04:36.896
[SPEAKER_03]: She worked for the Department of Agriculture and the Census Bureau.
04:39.278 --> 04:47.885
[SPEAKER_03]: Breckenridge's second wife, Isa Desha, died in eighteen ninety-two, and Breckenridge then proposed to Madeline.
04:49.146 --> 04:57.794
[SPEAKER_03]: Although he insisted that they keep the engagement secret as, by custom, he would have to wait a year before remaring.
04:59.990 --> 05:05.694
[SPEAKER_03]: He continued to drag his feet, even after society would have accepted news of the engagement.
05:07.395 --> 05:14.780
[SPEAKER_03]: By spring of eighteen ninety-three, Madeleine was pregnant, again, and rumors were swirling about them.
05:16.441 --> 05:25.167
[SPEAKER_03]: To quell the rumors, Madeleine convinced Breckenridge to admit the engagement to a Kentucky society woman, Julia Blackburn.
05:28.870 --> 05:37.632
[SPEAKER_03]: On June twenty-third, eighteen ninety-three, the Washington Evening Star announced their engagement at Madalyn's request.
05:39.272 --> 05:41.132
[SPEAKER_03]: Brackenridge was furious.
05:42.892 --> 05:48.654
[SPEAKER_03]: And on July third, the Louisville commercial printed his denial of the engagement.
05:50.554 --> 05:56.855
[SPEAKER_03]: Two weeks later, Brackenridge wed Louisville Widow and his distant cousin, Louis Wing.
05:58.749 --> 06:07.976
[SPEAKER_03]: Just three weeks after that, Madeleine's attorneys, Calderon Carlisle, and Jeremiah W. Wilson filed the breach upon his suit.
06:10.678 --> 06:13.220
[SPEAKER_03]: Breckenridge, of course, hired his own attorneys.
06:14.321 --> 06:19.885
[SPEAKER_03]: One of them, Charles Stoll, devised a plan to give their side an edge.
06:21.166 --> 06:26.190
[SPEAKER_03]: He reached out to a former employee of his stenographer, Jane Tucker.
06:27.659 --> 06:41.807
[SPEAKER_03]: Jane, the daughter of a ship captain, was born in eighteen sixty-six in Maine, and had studied at the Hickawks School of Shorthand and Typrotein in Boston before working for stole.
06:45.890 --> 06:55.015
[SPEAKER_03]: In January, eighteen ninety-four, Jane took on a new job as an undercover detective for Breckenridge and stole.
06:57.112 --> 07:05.397
[SPEAKER_03]: Using the alias Agnes Parker, she'd be Friend at Madeline, who was living in a home for fallen women.
07:06.958 --> 07:16.864
[SPEAKER_03]: And then used that friendship to learn information about the legal strategy of the prosecution, which she passed on to the defense.
07:19.898 --> 07:30.842
[SPEAKER_03]: despite Jane's best efforts, and despite the defense's attempts to paint Madeline as, well, utterly depraved where morality is concerned.
07:32.282 --> 07:35.403
[SPEAKER_03]: Breckenridge and his team lost the trial.
07:37.224 --> 07:45.067
[SPEAKER_03]: In April, eighteen, ninety-four, a jury, deliberated for just ninety minutes before deciding in Madeline's favor.
07:46.637 --> 07:49.700
[SPEAKER_03]: awarding her fifteen thousand dollars.
07:50.681 --> 07:53.683
[SPEAKER_03]: The equivalent of about half a million dollars today.
07:56.065 --> 07:59.889
[SPEAKER_03]: Jane Tucker trying to capitalize on the sensation of the trial.
08:00.809 --> 08:05.794
[SPEAKER_03]: Quickly wrote a book about her experiences that was produced on the cheap.
08:07.317 --> 08:16.481
[SPEAKER_03]: However, the real Madeline Pollard, a diary of ten weeks association with the plaintiff in the famous Breckenridge Pollard suit, was a flop.
08:17.622 --> 08:19.002
[SPEAKER_03]: In Jane returned to Maine.
08:21.464 --> 08:29.567
[SPEAKER_03]: Breckenridge reportedly never paid any of the money awarded to Madeline, but the trial still cost him dearly.
08:31.428 --> 08:33.969
[SPEAKER_03]: When he ran for reelection to Congress in
08:36.207 --> 08:39.490
[SPEAKER_03]: The women of Kentucky united to defeat him.
08:40.832 --> 08:43.034
[SPEAKER_03]: Staging protests and boycotts.
08:44.355 --> 08:58.610
[SPEAKER_03]: A letter signed many women ran on the front page of the Kentucky leader declaring, quote, let him sink into the oblivion of his guilt, let his voice be silent."
09:01.677 --> 09:06.599
[SPEAKER_03]: Reckon-Ringe lost the primary and never served in public office again.
09:09.660 --> 09:25.765
[SPEAKER_03]: Joining me in this episode is Dr. Elizabeth DeWolf, professor of History at the University of New England in Maine, and to author of Alius Agnes, the notorious tale of a guilty age spy.
09:28.566 --> 09:31.067
[SPEAKER_03]: Before that, though a quick note about our programming
09:31.695 --> 09:36.721
[SPEAKER_03]: Going forward on Sun History episodes will be posted every other week on Mondays.
09:38.033 --> 09:42.076
[SPEAKER_02]: We can tell you say my bad ol' line.
09:42.456 --> 09:46.979
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't say any hornies of the line.
09:47.820 --> 09:52.743
[SPEAKER_02]: When he's my boss, we lead you'll be one completely.
09:53.043 --> 10:02.610
[SPEAKER_02]: You'll remember, you'll remember, you can't help thinking of her way until the day I make her mind.
10:02.650 --> 10:05.011
[SPEAKER_02]: That one day the sun will shine.
10:07.390 --> 10:17.056
[SPEAKER_02]: I got a home for tour and present that will do for me at the better time.
10:17.977 --> 10:18.457
[SPEAKER_03]: Hi, Beth.
10:18.517 --> 10:19.918
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks so much for joining me today.
10:19.938 --> 10:22.219
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, and thank you.
10:22.259 --> 10:23.660
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a pleasure to be here.
10:24.220 --> 10:26.902
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, so this was a fantastic book.
10:27.002 --> 10:29.203
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm excited to be talking to you about it.
10:30.124 --> 10:34.827
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to hear first a little bit about how you got into writing this story.
10:36.825 --> 10:40.570
[SPEAKER_01]: I ended up writing this book in a rather roundabout way.
10:41.351 --> 10:51.282
[SPEAKER_01]: I had started with a project on Madeleine Pollard, at a rare book show I encountered what's called the salesman sample.
10:52.203 --> 11:08.068
[SPEAKER_01]: It's basically a sample of a few non-contiguous pages of a proposed book, and this sample was advertising a book about the Madeleine Pollard Congressman Breckenridge notorious breach of promised trial of eighteen ninety-four.
11:09.268 --> 11:18.055
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was very intrigued by this trial of the moment that then disappeared from history, and especially by Madeleine Pollard.
11:18.395 --> 11:23.479
[SPEAKER_01]: So I did buy the salesman sample at this bookshelf, but I, it, it nagged at me.
11:23.639 --> 11:29.424
[SPEAKER_01]: So I did a little research found out that really no one had written about Madeleine.
11:29.864 --> 11:33.027
[SPEAKER_01]: Other than to say, she ruined Breckenridge's career.
11:33.787 --> 11:35.710
[SPEAKER_01]: So I wanted to know more about her.
11:36.151 --> 11:47.108
[SPEAKER_01]: That's how the project started with the idea of writing about Madeline's life before and after her fifteen minutes of national notoriety.
11:47.957 --> 11:49.499
[SPEAKER_01]: but a lot of the way.
11:50.199 --> 11:56.606
[SPEAKER_01]: As I was reading the congressman's papers, I started to get hints of this scheme.
11:57.227 --> 12:05.415
[SPEAKER_01]: So, secretive that his lawyer wouldn't put details in writing only promise, I will tell you more this evening.
12:05.956 --> 12:08.318
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that really picked my curiosity.
12:09.219 --> 12:25.765
[SPEAKER_01]: And I discovered that the Congressmen and his lawyer hired a young woman who I knew only as Agnes Parker, and she was to be an undercover detective to spy on Battle and Pollard.
12:26.425 --> 12:39.114
[SPEAKER_01]: befriended her and in their heart to heart talks, steal her secrets, and give them to the congressman's legal team so that the congressman could use them against her in this notorious trial.
12:39.814 --> 12:53.904
[SPEAKER_01]: Then the task became, well, who is Agnes Parker, and through some complicated research and lucky breaks, I figured out she was a stenographer from Maine, named
12:54.839 --> 12:55.739
[SPEAKER_01]: Jane Tucker.
12:56.459 --> 12:58.200
[SPEAKER_01]: That's how this project started.
12:58.220 --> 13:12.724
[SPEAKER_03]: So, talk to me about the sources that you used because, you know, as you've just mentioned, you were reading the congressman's papers, but there's a whole bunch more that you had to do to piece together to be a detective yourself and piece together this story.
13:13.635 --> 13:14.976
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
13:14.996 --> 13:24.226
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in many women's history research projects, especially researching ordinary women, you often have to start with the papers of men.
13:24.326 --> 13:27.350
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that led me of course to the congressman's papers.
13:27.710 --> 13:28.871
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a prominent man.
13:29.792 --> 13:31.113
[SPEAKER_01]: His papers were saved.
13:31.494 --> 13:40.623
[SPEAKER_01]: So within those papers I extracted every detail I could about Madeline Pollard and eventually about Jane Tucker and built timelines.
13:41.243 --> 13:46.929
[SPEAKER_01]: Places, dates, people that they interacted with and from there could move out.
13:47.529 --> 14:02.334
[SPEAKER_01]: So, one great source that I found was Madeleine Pollard's Employment Records in the National Archives, which he first arrived in Washington, having followed Breckenridge there during their nine-year affair.
14:03.214 --> 14:10.941
[SPEAKER_01]: I learned that Madeleine worked in the civil service, both for the Department of Agriculture and later for the Department of the Interior.
14:11.542 --> 14:26.475
[SPEAKER_01]: And so those records were readily available at the National Archives, and they revealed fascinating information, including Breckenrich's letters of support, trying to help Madeleine get a job.
14:27.096 --> 14:28.737
[SPEAKER_01]: And when that failed,
14:29.718 --> 14:39.840
[SPEAKER_01]: I found a letter from Breckenbridge the following year, reminding the same future employer that Breckenbridge served on the House Appropriations Committee.
14:40.121 --> 14:45.302
[SPEAKER_01]: The Committee which funds your endeavor surprised the price badly got a job.
14:45.962 --> 14:48.302
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that was fascinating too.
14:48.963 --> 14:50.063
[SPEAKER_01]: I also had to use
14:50.783 --> 14:54.264
[SPEAKER_01]: records that were quite buried in history.
14:54.844 --> 15:07.127
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the best things I found about Madeline Pollard was a newspaper article from eighteen eighty four, recording her time at Cincinnati Wesley of female college.
15:07.667 --> 15:09.408
[SPEAKER_01]: Madeline was on the debate team.
15:10.108 --> 15:15.529
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was this huge annual debate in Cincinnati over five hundred people attended.
15:16.049 --> 15:21.310
[SPEAKER_01]: And Madeline won and this newspaper recounts her performance.
15:21.950 --> 15:29.152
[SPEAKER_01]: What's key about this is this is a report on Madeline before she encountered Breckenridge.
15:29.572 --> 15:36.733
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're getting close to her true identity, pre-mistress identity, however you want to phrase it.
15:37.273 --> 15:44.975
[SPEAKER_01]: So the sources that I looked for started with a man and then built out in webs.
15:45.535 --> 15:58.058
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just tried to think through every possible place that Madeline or Jane could appear in the historical record and just kept digging.
15:59.039 --> 16:03.842
[SPEAKER_03]: And how did you decide on the format to present this book in?
16:04.062 --> 16:15.328
[SPEAKER_03]: You, at several points, it almost reads like a novel because, you know, it's moving through kind of in real time what's happening with our mean characters, so to speak.
16:15.408 --> 16:20.951
[SPEAKER_03]: So, what, what was your process behind putting that together, figuring out how to write it in that way?
16:22.533 --> 16:31.461
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a great question because I went through several iterations on this, and this script, including at one point writing about two thirds of it, and then ditching it.
16:32.440 --> 16:36.423
[SPEAKER_01]: And my original plan was, this is courtroom drama.
16:36.843 --> 16:38.684
[SPEAKER_01]: This is Madeleine versus Breckenridge.
16:38.724 --> 16:40.305
[SPEAKER_01]: And Jane was in the background.
16:40.886 --> 16:51.512
[SPEAKER_01]: But as I wrote that first version, I realized one courtroom dramas, despite our long TV shows, aren't really that exciting.
16:52.053 --> 16:52.913
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is true.
16:53.133 --> 16:57.476
[SPEAKER_01]: There were high, there was a big excitement at moments in the Breckenridge trial.
16:57.816 --> 17:01.759
[SPEAKER_01]: But a lot of it was lawyers fighting about process.
17:02.279 --> 17:27.482
[SPEAKER_01]: again and again and again and that was boring so boring metal and didn't bother to attend so that I realized was also not only not very interesting but it was doing metal in a disservice because these this moment of notoriety in the spring of eighteen ninety four did not define her life popular wisdom would say oh she was a mistress
17:28.507 --> 17:30.968
[SPEAKER_01]: as if that explains her entirety.
17:31.449 --> 17:31.949
[SPEAKER_01]: It didn't.
17:32.449 --> 17:38.653
[SPEAKER_01]: So when I started to uncover Jane, I realized, no, the story here is the women behind the scenes.
17:39.233 --> 17:50.019
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's what led me to really flip the narrative and privilege, battle in and Jane as two ordinary women interacting in extraordinary circumstances.
17:50.559 --> 17:55.683
[SPEAKER_01]: and push Breckenridge, and the courtroom really to the background.
17:56.143 --> 17:59.585
[SPEAKER_01]: And that, to me, was much more interesting.
18:00.486 --> 18:10.453
[SPEAKER_01]: And I did try to write it as like a novel with a narrative arc, a protagonist, and an antagonist, because history is dramatic.
18:10.573 --> 18:12.594
[SPEAKER_01]: History is a story.
18:13.295 --> 18:16.137
[SPEAKER_01]: And part of my process is an author.
18:16.937 --> 18:21.280
[SPEAKER_01]: is to try to imagine the seed to put myself there.
18:21.941 --> 18:23.262
[SPEAKER_01]: What do I see?
18:23.342 --> 18:24.182
[SPEAKER_01]: What do I hear?
18:24.282 --> 18:25.243
[SPEAKER_01]: What do I smell?
18:25.423 --> 18:41.535
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I went to every location in Kentucky, in Washington, and not to spoil the end of the book, other places to Jane's family home, which happens to be in Maine, where I live, huge surprise when I discover that.
18:41.995 --> 18:44.237
[SPEAKER_01]: So I try to go to these locations
18:45.327 --> 18:56.596
[SPEAKER_01]: For example, when I was in Washington, I called up the courthouse where this was tried at the librarian of that courthouse said, Sure, come on, buy I'll give you a tour.
18:57.706 --> 19:05.849
[SPEAKER_01]: One thing that I gleaned that I think made it into the book was as we were walking across the lobby to go to the courtroom.
19:06.609 --> 19:10.391
[SPEAKER_01]: Her heels were clicking on the marble floor.
19:10.971 --> 19:16.933
[SPEAKER_01]: And I realized that's what it would have sounded like as Madeline walked alone across that floor.
19:17.613 --> 19:22.898
[SPEAKER_01]: So those little details I think can help bring the past to life.
19:23.378 --> 19:25.800
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I read what they read.
19:25.820 --> 19:27.481
[SPEAKER_01]: I try to eat what they ate.
19:28.062 --> 19:30.204
[SPEAKER_01]: I go to the places they went to.
19:30.544 --> 19:31.665
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's also for me.
19:31.705 --> 19:36.128
[SPEAKER_01]: It's also a privilege to hold on to the door knob of a school.
19:36.889 --> 19:41.712
[SPEAKER_01]: that Madeline would have opened that door every day and go into the classroom.
19:41.772 --> 19:45.575
[SPEAKER_01]: So there I'm trying to feel or essence.
19:45.875 --> 19:51.599
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that really happens, but still it was a privilege for me to walk in Jane and Madeline's footsteps.
19:52.960 --> 19:58.324
[SPEAKER_03]: The story, of course, and what brought you to it initially is this breach of promise, stout.
19:59.057 --> 20:05.001
[SPEAKER_03]: could you talk some about what that was certainly not something that people still do in the same way?
20:05.021 --> 20:07.903
[SPEAKER_03]: What does Madeline trying to do by bringing in a suit?
20:09.643 --> 20:19.567
[SPEAKER_01]: By bringing this suit, Madeline is trying to demonstrate that she is a respectable woman despite her life choice to be a mistress.
20:20.088 --> 20:30.292
[SPEAKER_01]: Another way to say that is despite her life choice to wait for Breckenridge to be good on the promise that he had made every year for nine years.
20:30.912 --> 20:46.543
[SPEAKER_01]: So breach of promise was a legal remedy used by women primarily of the leisureed classes, the middle and elite class, as a way to protect a daughter who was jilted in an engagement or left at the altar.
20:47.083 --> 20:57.090
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a way to reassure future suitors that she is respectable and was not to be blamed for this social faux pas.
20:57.790 --> 21:10.681
[SPEAKER_01]: So, when the scandal erupts, you know, reckon-rich thinks that Madeline will simply, the slink away in shame, but she doesn't.
21:11.121 --> 21:18.347
[SPEAKER_01]: As we know, she's Susan for breach of promise, and so her big mission in court is to demonstrate.
21:19.889 --> 21:24.853
[SPEAKER_01]: I am respectable, he made a promise, words matter.
21:26.196 --> 21:34.080
[SPEAKER_01]: Despite my sexual history, despite my past, he promised he needs to be good on it.
21:34.501 --> 21:48.028
[SPEAKER_01]: Breaker Bridge, of course, is trying to show the opposite that Madeleine was sexually deviant and therefore not marriageable material, and thus any promise he made, he can't hold him to it.
21:48.589 --> 21:51.991
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's what Breaker Promise was used for.
21:52.911 --> 22:06.216
[SPEAKER_01]: But by the World War I period, it's already falling out of use, and it's mocked in literature often, and starts to be called heart bomb cases, you know, that women's broken hearts are being sued.
22:06.796 --> 22:09.837
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the nineteen twenty's at all, but disappears,
22:10.637 --> 22:33.374
[SPEAKER_01]: Primarily because women have more options in the nineteen twenties at least in some parts of the world and to be jilted at the altar is no longer the life destroying act that it would have been in a in a previous century you know and in fact in by the nineteen twenties it's the women who can jilt somewhat at the altar
22:33.994 --> 22:41.306
[SPEAKER_01]: So it has this little window at the tail end of the nineteenth century, and Madeline takes a vantage of it.
22:42.373 --> 22:44.134
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's talk about the Brecken ridges.
22:44.274 --> 22:51.319
[SPEAKER_03]: Colonel Breckenridge, you mentioned, is not just a congressman, but a prominent congressman from a very important family.
22:51.839 --> 22:58.764
[SPEAKER_03]: Long time listeners of this podcast will remember an episode on Sofiniz, but Breckenridge who shows up in this story as well.
22:59.264 --> 23:05.488
[SPEAKER_03]: So can you talk some about Colonel Breckenridge's position before all of this happens?
23:05.888 --> 23:08.490
[SPEAKER_03]: And why Madeline would have been drawn to him?
23:08.730 --> 23:11.112
[SPEAKER_03]: And what's going on with that story?
23:12.428 --> 23:22.231
[SPEAKER_01]: In the moment that Breckenridge and Pollard meet, Breckenridge is running for his first term in the House of Representatives.
23:22.631 --> 23:25.292
[SPEAKER_01]: He's an attorney living in Lexington.
23:25.572 --> 23:32.134
[SPEAKER_01]: He was somewhat of a civil war hero served honorably for the South.
23:32.954 --> 23:40.819
[SPEAKER_01]: And his family was incredibly prominent, the men in local and state and even national politics.
23:40.859 --> 23:45.041
[SPEAKER_01]: So Breckerbridge is following right along in that regard.
23:45.542 --> 23:55.488
[SPEAKER_01]: So when he empowered meat, hollered has made this deal with a Kentucky bachelor and older man.
23:56.008 --> 24:20.685
[SPEAKER_01]: who will pay her tuition for her to achieve one of her dearest dreams and that's a higher education and since her family she's all but in orphan her family is separated due to the death of her father she accepts this deal and goes to Cincinnati Wesleyan female college of very good institution for young women who were intellectually curious
24:21.485 --> 24:32.079
[SPEAKER_01]: But she is barely there for two semesters when her benefactor announces, I'm out of money, you have to live up to your end of the deal, which was married.
24:33.008 --> 24:35.690
[SPEAKER_01]: Madeline had also said, or I'll pay you back.
24:36.391 --> 24:37.471
[SPEAKER_01]: She didn't want to marry.
24:37.972 --> 24:51.983
[SPEAKER_01]: She wrote the more she engaged in education, the more she realized that this deal instead of freeing her was going to draw her back to what she was trying to escape in the first place, a rural domestic life.
24:52.663 --> 25:01.972
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, by chance, Madeleine met the handsome young Colonel Brocked Ridge ought to train in the exchange Pleasantries.
25:02.313 --> 25:07.097
[SPEAKER_01]: He was very well-known, so that was not an unusual occurrence by any means.
25:07.998 --> 25:18.161
[SPEAKER_01]: When her benefactor announced it was time to marry, she remembered that encounter and wrote to Breckenridge and asked for his legal help.
25:18.842 --> 25:29.425
[SPEAKER_01]: He came to Cincinnati and then what happens next becomes one of the big cruxes of the breach of promise trial that will occur ten years into the future.
25:30.630 --> 25:41.856
[SPEAKER_01]: They take a carriage ride, a closed carriage ride, on a hot night in Cincinnati, yaddy-yaddy-yadda three days later, they are lovers.
25:43.737 --> 25:49.139
[SPEAKER_01]: Breckenridge insists that what they did in the carriage was consensual.
25:50.640 --> 25:55.803
[SPEAKER_01]: My read is that it was gaslighting, and that he was
25:56.837 --> 25:58.597
[SPEAKER_01]: grooming, Madeline.
25:59.138 --> 26:03.159
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, Madeline, of all the girls I've known who go to college.
26:03.199 --> 26:04.419
[SPEAKER_01]: You're clearly the brightest.
26:04.679 --> 26:07.300
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, you have a big future in writing.
26:07.980 --> 26:09.100
[SPEAKER_01]: I could guide you.
26:09.500 --> 26:11.681
[SPEAKER_01]: So it reads very differently.
26:11.781 --> 26:14.582
[SPEAKER_01]: I think in the twenty first century.
26:15.242 --> 26:17.643
[SPEAKER_01]: So, but it's a great question though.
26:17.703 --> 26:19.063
[SPEAKER_01]: So why does Madeline
26:20.613 --> 26:22.874
[SPEAKER_01]: Why does Madeline consent?
26:23.174 --> 26:29.317
[SPEAKER_01]: And I believe she did eventually consent consent to this relationship and stay with him for nine years.
26:30.258 --> 26:35.020
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe Madeline when she says that she indeed loved him.
26:36.334 --> 26:36.834
[SPEAKER_01]: that.
26:37.395 --> 26:42.517
[SPEAKER_01]: Whether that love was misplaced, you know, we can debate that, but she says she loved him.
26:42.637 --> 26:43.597
[SPEAKER_01]: She trusted him.
26:44.358 --> 26:49.880
[SPEAKER_01]: She had no male protector, no father, no older brother in her life.
26:51.781 --> 26:57.804
[SPEAKER_01]: She knew that she didn't want the future her mother and her aunt's hat, a very hard-scrabble life.
26:58.244 --> 26:59.945
[SPEAKER_01]: And she saw how the death
27:00.825 --> 27:06.629
[SPEAKER_01]: or disability of the father or husband in your life was devastating to a family.
27:07.670 --> 27:16.956
[SPEAKER_01]: She knew that her half to her dreams, a literary life, a life of culture, a life of art, a life of the intellect.
27:17.776 --> 27:26.262
[SPEAKER_01]: For her, could only come through two paths, a higher education, or a really good marriage, break a marriage promised both.
27:27.782 --> 27:28.383
[SPEAKER_01]: She believed a
27:29.632 --> 27:37.117
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's interesting when people ask me, well, wasn't she just out for gold?
27:37.257 --> 27:38.939
[SPEAKER_01]: Wasn't she an adventurous?
27:39.459 --> 27:41.580
[SPEAKER_01]: Wasn't she always a gold digger?
27:42.461 --> 27:45.403
[SPEAKER_01]: Am I response to that is nine years?
27:46.384 --> 27:47.685
[SPEAKER_01]: She's playing a long game.
27:47.705 --> 27:53.629
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe Madeleine when she says initially, she loved him.
27:54.429 --> 27:56.571
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that cooled over time.
27:57.365 --> 27:57.786
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
27:58.107 --> 28:05.884
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, and, you know, gold digger, I think has a little bit different connotation in a time where, as you say, there's limited options for women.
28:06.781 --> 28:08.101
[SPEAKER_01]: This is one of the options.
28:08.862 --> 28:09.142
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
28:09.282 --> 28:17.063
[SPEAKER_01]: And, and, and, and, you know, Marilyn was moving in in elite, uh, Washington Southern Society.
28:17.203 --> 28:22.285
[SPEAKER_01]: She was somewhat of the, protege of the season for a couple of years.
28:22.805 --> 28:27.386
[SPEAKER_01]: She was known as a charismatic young woman.
28:27.506 --> 28:29.566
[SPEAKER_01]: She was incredibly well read.
28:29.706 --> 28:31.447
[SPEAKER_01]: She was a conversationalist.
28:32.227 --> 28:38.032
[SPEAKER_01]: She hopped up with William Dean Howell's and Augusta St.
28:38.072 --> 28:46.438
[SPEAKER_01]: Gaudins and all sorts of literary light Charles Dudley Warner, all sorts of literary lights of the period.
28:46.859 --> 28:50.982
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, none of that society are few.
28:51.242 --> 28:54.685
[SPEAKER_01]: We should say in that society new of her secret life.
28:55.205 --> 28:55.545
[SPEAKER_01]: And so
28:56.646 --> 29:12.749
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Madeline getting a good marriage was no different from the daughters of any of the other social lights who were pushing very young girls forward at these elaborate teas and gatherings and so forth.
29:13.289 --> 29:24.871
[SPEAKER_01]: So the one difference that would condemn, so to speak, Madeline, is she was engaged in sex before her assumed marriage?
29:25.966 --> 29:26.186
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
29:27.687 --> 29:34.453
[SPEAKER_03]: How do we understand the motivations of Jane, then, and what she chose to do?
29:34.653 --> 29:51.827
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, this is quite daring, but also quite, you know, she may have felt justified, but quite underhanded that she spends all this time befriending Madeline, Madeline thinks that she's a true friend, and all the time Jane is working for the enemy.
29:53.842 --> 30:08.330
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an interesting scenario, and one of the surprises to me as people are reading the book is exactly this debate about Madeline and Jane's friendship and to Jane feel any remorse.
30:08.770 --> 30:13.593
[SPEAKER_01]: Did she just throw her under the bus to, as Jane said, grab the gold?
30:14.622 --> 30:24.426
[SPEAKER_01]: So Jane, it's beginning of eighteen ninety four, has lost her job in the horrible economic times of the eight, early eighteen nineties.
30:25.146 --> 30:29.388
[SPEAKER_01]: And much against her wishes she has returned to the family home at Maine.
30:29.928 --> 30:31.449
[SPEAKER_01]: She is exhausted.
30:31.929 --> 30:38.292
[SPEAKER_01]: She has kind of chronic digestive complaints and her mother is nursing her back to health.
30:38.812 --> 30:43.414
[SPEAKER_01]: Please, the Jane has returned to where she should be, right, in the domestic fold.
30:44.434 --> 30:58.022
[SPEAKER_01]: And when Jane starts to get letters from a favorite former employer, begging her to undertake a job, he can't, and again, with the secrets, he can't give details.
30:58.062 --> 31:01.204
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you can meet me in Boston, I'll reveal all.
31:01.924 --> 31:05.746
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was Jane's favorite employer by far.
31:05.926 --> 31:09.428
[SPEAKER_01]: And so she goes to Boston and has a conversation.
31:09.489 --> 31:12.710
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is when she learns about record rich and
31:14.473 --> 31:17.536
[SPEAKER_01]: and this position isn't undercover detective.
31:18.396 --> 31:32.808
[SPEAKER_01]: She tells her parents not a lot of the details but says I'm going to Washington and she basically says I'm just going to be a stenographer to to help out in the background.
31:33.528 --> 31:34.568
[SPEAKER_01]: of illegal case.
31:34.728 --> 31:36.189
[SPEAKER_01]: No details at all.
31:36.629 --> 31:41.730
[SPEAKER_01]: But she later says she has to take this job because it's her only chance to grab the gold.
31:42.210 --> 31:43.991
[SPEAKER_01]: And she doesn't mean that in a greedy way.
31:44.191 --> 31:48.352
[SPEAKER_01]: She means that as the means to her slice of the American dream.
31:48.832 --> 31:50.753
[SPEAKER_01]: She didn't want to marry her wealth.
31:51.213 --> 31:52.913
[SPEAKER_01]: That wasn't the life she wanted.
31:53.473 --> 31:55.554
[SPEAKER_01]: She wanted financial independence.
31:56.074 --> 32:06.760
[SPEAKER_01]: She wanted agency to run her own life because she saw her parents' marriage in the same way that Madeleine saw what happened to her mother on the death of her father.
32:07.601 --> 32:13.905
[SPEAKER_01]: Jane looks at her parents, a father who is twenty-five years older than his mother.
32:14.805 --> 32:18.949
[SPEAKER_01]: who was a sea captain, so he's going up and down the Atlantic sea board.
32:19.049 --> 32:32.482
[SPEAKER_01]: He's out doing all sorts of business things, leaving his young wife in a old home, which has the usual sorts of weather problems, and with a whole bunch of kids.
32:33.403 --> 32:38.507
[SPEAKER_01]: and Jane's mother was so unhappy that she contemplated divorce.
32:38.867 --> 32:46.071
[SPEAKER_01]: She even checked herself into a, what today we would say, a mental health facility because she needed a break.
32:46.612 --> 32:52.736
[SPEAKER_01]: Jane sees that as do her sisters and all three say, nope, not for us.
32:53.356 --> 32:58.380
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's the sisters who leave the family homestead and for Jane
32:59.160 --> 33:01.701
[SPEAKER_01]: Jane's pride and joy is her work ethic.
33:02.301 --> 33:05.163
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is going to be the key to her success.
33:05.343 --> 33:09.925
[SPEAKER_01]: So when her former employer says, you name the salary, Jane does.
33:10.365 --> 33:16.148
[SPEAKER_01]: And she believes that this will get her out of a financial hole.
33:16.268 --> 33:22.291
[SPEAKER_01]: She was in debt and even helped propel her to that life that she wanted.
33:22.651 --> 33:24.812
[SPEAKER_01]: So Madeline and Jane are both
33:26.038 --> 33:32.441
[SPEAKER_01]: seeking the same thing, agency in their own lives, and picking the American dream they want.
33:32.921 --> 33:40.064
[SPEAKER_01]: Not the one that was automatically handed towards women, as nice as that dream is, but not every woman wanted it.
33:40.724 --> 33:48.447
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they are making very different decisions, but trying to get to that same independent agency.
33:49.536 --> 33:57.222
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure that listeners are thinking these women seem totally out of alignment with what I thought of the guilty age.
33:57.902 --> 34:04.067
[SPEAKER_03]: How much do you think they really are sort of different or, you know, what can they tell us about the guilty age?
34:05.287 --> 34:13.531
[SPEAKER_01]: They tell us that women were ambitious in the gilded age, even when ambition was a bad adjective to be applied to a woman.
34:14.411 --> 34:32.579
[SPEAKER_01]: What I learned at what surprised me in researching this topic was the various stories of women who took whatever opportunities they could wrangle and found creative ways around the challenges that society placed before them.
34:33.696 --> 34:41.039
[SPEAKER_01]: In the trial itself, most of the people who testified on Madeleine's behalf were women.
34:41.759 --> 34:48.962
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were everyone from the very elite Julia Churchill Blackburn of the Churchill Downs.
34:49.914 --> 35:00.358
[SPEAKER_01]: Churchill's, she was the widow of the governor of Kentucky, and she was pretty much the grand-dom of the southern contingent in Washington, society.
35:01.278 --> 35:06.200
[SPEAKER_01]: She gets up on the stand, and she is going to testify.
35:07.564 --> 35:31.478
[SPEAKER_01]: As a way, not to support Madeleine, her say, but to defend her own hard-won reputation against the egregious act that Breckenridge perpetrated on her by, as Blackberry testified, stating that Breckenridge in her parlor on good Friday.
35:32.418 --> 35:56.704
[SPEAKER_01]: admitted he was going to marry Madeleine Pollard and so she's protecting herself and she's protecting her family name and she is not going to shy away in a court of law and again the Kentucky lawyers like oh Mrs. Blackburn oh Mrs. Blackburn treating her with kid gloves and she's not taking she is not shy in a way she's not playing the ho ho ho
35:57.204 --> 35:57.905
[SPEAKER_01]: routine.
35:57.965 --> 36:01.006
[SPEAKER_01]: She, she is cutting and savvy in smart.
36:01.467 --> 36:09.371
[SPEAKER_01]: Jane sees this from afar and even writes to breakfast as attorneys and says basically take off the kid gloves.
36:09.972 --> 36:12.293
[SPEAKER_01]: She's running the courtroom, not you.
36:12.833 --> 36:14.454
[SPEAKER_01]: So we see her story.
36:14.995 --> 36:22.459
[SPEAKER_01]: And in her story is one where she, this is the second scandal she was involved in, perpetrated by men.
36:22.479 --> 36:24.961
[SPEAKER_01]: And so she is going to protect herself.
36:25.901 --> 36:37.047
[SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, we see testimony from formerly enslaved woman, Sarah Gist, who provides key testimony in the trial.
36:37.728 --> 36:46.913
[SPEAKER_01]: Sarah Gist is sitting in a courtroom of all white men, and just, Manel and Pollard and the woman who attended her.
36:47.613 --> 36:49.915
[SPEAKER_01]: And most of these Southern men, to boot,
36:50.988 --> 36:51.788
[SPEAKER_01]: same thing.
36:52.649 --> 37:01.991
[SPEAKER_01]: She is going to tell her story and show how she has made a good and respectable living.
37:03.112 --> 37:19.377
[SPEAKER_01]: And when she, when she testifies as to some of the things, Breckenridge asked her to do such as lie on the stand, she is quite determined to say, no, I will not do that.
37:19.397 --> 37:19.417
[SPEAKER_01]: I
37:21.253 --> 37:22.213
[SPEAKER_01]: will obey the law.
37:23.114 --> 37:25.615
[SPEAKER_01]: And the implication there is not you.
37:27.256 --> 37:43.963
[SPEAKER_01]: I. And so we see, you know, in their testimony, how they have carved lives for themselves, whether formally enslaved or at the top of Kentucky society, here again a women who are
37:45.934 --> 37:51.858
[SPEAKER_01]: taking opportunities, fighting those challenges to make the lives they want.
37:51.978 --> 37:56.701
[SPEAKER_01]: That to me was absolutely fascinating in this trial.
37:57.521 --> 38:09.169
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the wonderful things, again, what it teaches us is that women despite portrayals in popular culture and perhaps in some literature that
38:10.089 --> 38:17.733
[SPEAKER_01]: Victorian women were not, Victorian women were not these weeping, weeping need, parlors setting women.
38:17.753 --> 38:34.941
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, these were women with plans, these were women with ambition, these were with smarts and all you have to look at is what went on in those parlors during these T rituals to know that these were women in charge.
38:36.907 --> 38:41.428
[SPEAKER_03]: And those smart, ambitious women, of course, included Colonel Breckenrich's daughter.
38:41.548 --> 38:42.248
[SPEAKER_03]: So, for Nizpa.
38:43.248 --> 38:44.268
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, very much.
38:44.408 --> 38:54.430
[SPEAKER_01]: What's fascinating to be about the Breckenrich family is that in the nineteenth century, it's mostly the men who are the prominent ones and in the twentieth century, it's the women.
38:55.090 --> 39:00.511
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, for Nizpa is right there, of course, in the mix.
39:01.091 --> 39:04.872
[SPEAKER_01]: At the time of the trial, she is being the doodleful daughter.
39:05.652 --> 39:09.094
[SPEAKER_01]: to her father who was, you know, naturally humiliated.
39:09.154 --> 39:11.915
[SPEAKER_01]: She was crushed by these revelations.
39:12.376 --> 39:18.619
[SPEAKER_01]: She has a new stepmother with whom she and her siblings have a very fraught relationship.
39:19.740 --> 39:24.502
[SPEAKER_01]: And she has other things that she wishes to do yet.
39:24.702 --> 39:35.088
[SPEAKER_01]: She is there in Washington helping her father, both with his new wife and with the business of being on trial.
39:36.448 --> 39:38.249
[SPEAKER_01]: a remarkable remarkable woman.
39:39.430 --> 39:43.492
[SPEAKER_03]: If listeners would like to get a copy of this book, how can they do that?
39:44.992 --> 40:01.480
[SPEAKER_01]: The book is available from major online retailers, and also from the press, the University Press of Kentucky, and I would also urge listeners to ask at their local independent bookstore as the wife of a rare book dealer.
40:02.061 --> 40:04.822
[SPEAKER_01]: I urge people to support their local businesses.
40:06.101 --> 40:12.210
[SPEAKER_03]: I think this book could be a movie, so if you've got any filmmakers out there listening.
40:13.492 --> 40:14.133
[SPEAKER_01]: Please do.
40:14.734 --> 40:15.455
[SPEAKER_01]: Please do.
40:16.797 --> 40:19.201
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?
40:21.239 --> 40:26.808
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a story I think that tells us why women's history matters.
40:27.288 --> 40:30.754
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not a story about famous women.
40:31.775 --> 40:35.381
[SPEAKER_01]: And while it's wonderful to have new scholarship on famous women,
40:36.262 --> 40:47.025
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's also important to remember that ordinary women's lives, whether they encounter something extraordinary or not, is still worth reading.
40:47.865 --> 40:54.928
[SPEAKER_01]: We are all makers of history, our daily life is history, and the women who
40:56.588 --> 41:13.151
[SPEAKER_01]: cross paths with Madeleine and Jane, who appear in the court records, who are part of the story, all have interesting things to contribute, not necessarily in a legal sense, but just their daily lives, again, telling us about
41:13.672 --> 41:20.354
[SPEAKER_01]: women's hopes and dreams and challenges and obstacles and the way they navigated their lives.
41:20.795 --> 41:28.297
[SPEAKER_01]: And those are lessons and inspirations that we can still be proud of, be astounded by and make use of today.
41:28.798 --> 41:40.582
[SPEAKER_01]: Women's lives matter and reading about them is a way to is a way to give prominence and remembrance to those who came before us.
41:41.787 --> 41:43.708
[SPEAKER_03]: That's thank you so much for speaking with me.
41:44.588 --> 41:45.609
[SPEAKER_01]: It is my pleasure.
41:45.669 --> 41:46.429
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much.
42:12.002 --> 42:14.249
[SPEAKER_00]: or on Facebook at unsung history podcast.
42:14.811 --> 42:18.482
[SPEAKER_00]: The contact is with questions, corrections, praise, or absolute suggestions.
42:18.943 --> 42:21.471
[SPEAKER_00]: Please email Kelley at unsung historypodcast.com.
42:22.233 --> 42:26.185
[SPEAKER_00]: If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know.
42:26.546 --> 42:26.767
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye.
