What may appear absurd to-day will assume a serious aspect to-morrow
Gentlemen will state their business and then retire at once
The presidential candidate for the Equal Rights Party spent election day in jail. As such, she was unable to cast a vote for herself. Further complicating matters was the fact that the 19th Amendment was still nearly half-a-century away from passage.
Ultimately, she failed to win any electors and earned a negligible fraction of the popular vote. The incumbent, a popular Union general running on the Republican ticket, secured reelection in a landslide. Victoria Woodhull’s party-selected running mate, Frederick Douglass, never acknowledged any involvement in the campaign.
The candidacy for the first woman to run for President of the United States was ultimately over before it started. Per Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, she was too young by a year to legally hold the nation’s highest office.
Woodhull had declared her intention to run in letter to The New York Herald published under the headline, “The Coming Woman” two years prior. The column, running nearly the full length of the broadsheet, was as much a manifesto as a declaration of candidacy.
“I am well aware that in assuming this position I shall evoke more ridicule than enthusiasm at the outset,” Woodhull wrote. “But this is an epoch of sudden changes and startling surprises. What may appear absurd to-day will assume a serious aspect to-morrow.”
A month after her letter appeared in The Herald, Woodhull launched her own paper with sister, Tennessee Claflin. Funding was never in short supply. Woodhull and Claflin had made a killing on the stock market, pulling in an estimated $700,000 during the 1869 gold panic. Their decades’ long career as spiritual mediums helped amass the fortunes that resulted in their becoming the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street. The launch of their firm in 1870 was announced by The New York Sun in a story titled, "Petticoats Among the Bovine and Ursine Animals.”
Woodhull had claimed an ability to speak to the dead from an early age, believing she communicate with the three of her nine siblings who had died during infancy. It was a skill her snake oil-peddling father was more than happy to cultivate in both she and her sister. The pair amassed a small fortune during the Civil War, promising to contact the dead and heal the sick.
But it was a relationship with robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt that established the pair as financial visionaries.
The railroad magnate was desperate to contact his beloved late-mother. Woodhull and Claflin were more than happy to oblige, and Vanderbilt offered the sisters financial advice for their efforts. In spite of being barred from the stock exchange floor, they earned a king’s ransom capitalizing on the 1869 Black Friday financial panic.
Their firm, Woodhull, Claflin & Company opened on Broad Street the following year, with a sign on the office door reading, “Gentlemen will state their business and then retire at once." Three months later, they launched Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly. The paper served as a platform for the siblings’ progressive ideals, including suffrage, vegetarianism, spiritualism and free love. A year-and-a-half after its launch, the paper became the first outlet in the United States to publish The Communist Manifesto in English. It also frequently served as a platform for Woodhull’s political ambitions.
Among her strongest held beliefs was free love, stemming, in part, from the dissolution of her first marriage at age 26. “Yes, I am a Free Lover,” Woodhull noted in an 1871 speech. “I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”
But she was still more than happy to note the hypocrisy of others when it came to matters of sex. Shortly before the presidential election, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly published a scathing report of adultery by beloved religious figure, Henry Ward Beecher. Soon after, the sisters were charged with circulating obscenity through the United States Postal Service. The paper was raided and Woodhull was arrested.
Seven months after the litigation that landed her in jail on election day, the sisters were acquitted. Firmly believing her spiritual advisors’ prophecies of greatness, Woodhull once again attempted to gain nominations for the presidency in both 1884 and 1892.
Those efforts proved unsuccessful.
Sources:
9 Things You Should Know About Victoria Woodhull https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-should-know-about-victoria-woodhull
The First Woman To Run For President: Victoria Woodhull https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-first-woman-to-run-for-president-victoria-woodhull.htm
"The Human Body the Temple of God; Or, The Philosophy of Sociology" https://archive.org/stream/humanbodytemple00cookgoog/humanbodytemple00cookgoog_djvu.txt