John E. P. Doyle, Henry Ward Beecher and His Accusers, 1874:

And how, finally, shall the thunderbolt fall on the Woodhull herself? I have never seen the dreaded ogress of Broad Street but once--a year or two ago--when I conversed with her a few minutes in a public hall. Her sister, Miss Claflin, I have never seen at all. But having taken a deep interest in great principles victimized through these two women, and having honestly sought nothing but truth in scrutinizing the Beecher-Tilton Scandal, this attitude has drawn to me many people, and has opened various sources of information on all sides. I know persons who admire Mrs. Woodhull, those who hate her, those who think her nature distorted but her work necessary, and those who have watched and studied her, with the care of detectives, for both public and private purposes.

On seeing her myself, I said (in the Troy Whig of September 25th, 1871,) that she struck me as a rapt idealist--"out of her head" in the sense of "enthusiasm," a nature "so intense that she might see visions of angels or devils," and as many as St. John or Luther. "Had she been carefully trained from childhood," I added, " I must think she would have been a wonderful scholar, poet, and thinker. As it is, she is an abnormal growth of democratic institutions, thoroughly sincere, partly insane, and fitted to exaggerate great truths." As precisely this opinion has been reflected back to me by several very acute minds-both men and women--I have no doubt today, that it describes the "Woodhull," in one mood, pretty closely. But I know, from facts in my possession, that she has other moods, in which she loses her remarkable sweetness of voice and all touch of the heavens, to swagger like a pirate and scold like a drab.

This phase of her character has been so conspicuous at times, before close judges of human nature, that they regard her as an ingrained liar and a complete quack. At one time she sinks every vestige of egotism in the absorbed expression of ideas; and at another she would steal the genius of a friend to aid her in "putting on airs." It seems as if she loves notoriety more than any other being on earth; yet she loves her notions of duty even more than notoriety. She is ignorant; and her strong signatures in letters and on the backs of photographs, is commonly the handiwork of Col. Blood. It is probable that she never wrote, unaided and alone, any of her "great speeches" or her stirring editorials--the "Beecher Tilton Scandal" being no exception. Yet she is the inspiration, the vitality and the mouthpiece of her clan and "cause." Her organ, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, has voices from the "seventh heaven" and the gabbling of a frog-pond. Its advertisements are gratuitous "blinds;" and its proprietors have lately had the kindness to publish my own circular without request or leave; yet the amazing journal is crowded with thought, and with needed information that can be got nowhere else. And to-day it stands as the test of a free press, and the possibility of a better breed of men than now make the city of New York a vast immoral improvement on Sodom and Gomorrah. Mrs. Woodhull, in short, is like Daniel O'Connell, as judged by "Bobus Smith": She ought to be hanged, and then have a monument erected to her memory at the foot of the gallows.

Does all this seem like a contradiction or a joke? Very likely--to the puny-souled babes, suckled on the dish-water that is now-a-days called "religion," " theology," "morality." The Sunday-school and the Young Men's Christian Association divide mankind into two classes--the good and the bad. But their Jesus said: "There is none good but one--the Father; and the Son went down to sympathize with publicans and harlots.

The world should have done, once for all, with expecting to find a saint who is all sanctity, or a sinner who is all sin. The conception is an old humbug, clasped to the bosom of snobs to double their natural hypocrisy. God made the world--every thought and every thing--out of two opposites. Philosophy, in a Hegel, analyzes them into abstracts, calls them "being" and "nothing," poses these abstracts in necessary evolution, and then synthesizes the whole solid world back again. Common sense sees the same thing in every human being, and calls it good and evil. In strong people, especially, it is stiffly mixed. "Every literary man," said Landor, "has the spice of a scoundrel in him." The most useful American writer, during four or five years of our "Great Rebellion," is a natural miser and bummer, and "dead-beat:"--and he is my friend, and I love him heartily. If Beecher himself would only be honest, and not try to garrote the prospects of his race to cover his own frailties, I could hug him in ten minutes. But he prefers the "orthodox" embraces of "twenty mistresses" and a few millions of fools. But of all incarnate mixtures of Manna and Helebore that are now going "to and fro on the earth and walking up and down in it," the Woodhull appears to be the most extreme. According to her own story (Tilton's biography) she was conceived in the frenzy of a Methodist revival, and born in a treacherous nest of human catamounts. She was marked from the womb with preternatural excitement. The baby played with ghosts. She dug in the garden with the devil's foot on her spade, to hurry her up. The child of fourteen married to please a rake's whim, and lived fifteen years with a man she ought to have left in a week. She was a little of every thing to earn hard bread--handmaid and shop--girl, actress and clairvoyant healer of general aches. What else, poor soul, they tell me, is not down in the book. She was crushed and cursed in motherhood with an idiot-boy. She was taunted with marital fidelity by a husband who was himself the popinjay of strumpets.

This poor, imp-ridden, heart-burnt woman turned at last against the social fate that had crushed her; and, having been its manifold victim, she knew all its sores and all its weapons. Her treatment of its diseases are new: SHE CURES SEDUCTION BY KILLING REPUTATION, AND LANCES ADULTERY WITH A "SOCIAL REVOLUTION."

She is accused of levying black mail, and special detectives of Wall street claim to hold indictments against her, hidden in their safes. But if such papers were of any effect, when New York would pay a million dollars for a legal pretext to send the woman to Sing Sing, the detectives must have blackmailed somebody for two millions in the interest of burning the indictments up. That Mrs. Woodhull is at all nice in business honor, I doubt. If she would use the name of Mrs. Paulina Wright Davis falsely, to strengthen even an essential truth, she would suborn a friend's purse to carry out some other "mission."

But that holy horror should grip the bowels of the whole New York press at the two-peachy corruptions of the Woodhull and Claflin, is enough to make the memory of Bennett wink with its cock-eye. The Herald was born in smut and libel, and now keeps a regular assignation-house in its columns. Yet perhaps 'tis the most manly of all the great city dailies. How many times was the World blatant with threats at the Tammany Ring, and then sopped into silence. Whitelaw Reid has lately elected himself editor and publisher of the Tribune, with half a million dollars behind him. Who owns the dog now that nosed Greeley into the grave? When the Tribune truckles to Jay Gould, calls for the hanging of Stokes, and plays into the hands of David Dudley Field, a little black-mailing would dignify its character. Faugh! the American press has been the mere skunk of the Church, bribed by its subscription-list to save Beecher in a universal stench of black-mail. But the Woodhull's doctrine of Free Love, the one thing "beastly and abominable " that now inhabits the earth! Well, I praise the Lord that I have never had any personal use for this doctrine. The "effete system of marriage," as Woodhull and Claflin sometimes call it, has always been good enough for me in spirit and in letter. And there can be no possibility that the love of average human beings will ever fall into chaotic license--the common misunderstanding of "free-love"--and which the poet Wordsworth once described to Emerson as "the crossing of flies in the air." But for even the earnest opponents of a theory, it is well to know what the theory is.

Such, however is not the current method of opposing "social freedom." The rule in this case is to shut both eyes, strike out with all your might, and hit--nothing. That is, the fops and dolls--the nincompoops in general--who make up what is called "society," are without the mental capacity to understand what free-love means. The whole world is a big brothel--that is their conception. And they can't be cured of it. The true idea would burst open their little heads. With them too "free love" is now the last rotten egg they can find to throw at people who do know something. Though enlisted for the war against free-love in the sense of unchained lust, and though distrusting and opposing any departure from monogamy in marriage, I have no desire to stand in an infant class of idiots, who answer our argument, first by misconceiving it, and then by turning up the end of a pug nose.

Besides, there is much in the movement called "social freedom" that should be admitted at once, as simple justice, in the practical application do rights and morals

In a recent article, for instance, by Tennie C. Claflin (to take an authority sufficiently obnoxious) she claims this:

"If the loss of purity-is disgrace to unmarried women, then the same should be held of men; if the mother of a child out of legal wedlock is ostracized, then the father should share the same fate. If a life of female prostitution is wrong, a life of male prostitution is equally wrong. If Contagious Diseases Acts are passed, they should operate equally on both sexes."

The Young Men's Christian Associaton, of New York, have endeavored to present the equal chastity of the sexes by suppressing Miss Claflin's article as "obscene." But there is more of the Christian religion in it, and more good sense, than in Dodge and Comstock's entire band of theological Hessians.

But directly in regard to the doctrine of "free love" again, it is necessary for our intelligent opponents to acknowledge that 'tis not merely a Woodhull that believes in "new social relations" for men and women, but 'tis many of the most capacious minds and hearts on earth, from John Stuart Mill to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Woodhull is only a tremendous horn, and Col. Blood is now blowing in front of Jericho.

When Mrs. Stanton stood up in New York, after the trial of McFarland for killing Richardson, and said that no brute should be the dreaded owner of a woman's soul and body, she stated the principle of social freedom, as understood by its own expounders. Mrs. Stanton felt no statute in a book was so sacred as that which crushed woman's right to her own individuality.

"Social freedom," then, from one view, is merely the extreme logical end of democracy--absolute individual sovereignty--simple self ownership. No bond, no custom, no law can righteously deny it. Yet this truth, after all, is only half a truth, and the other half is the duty which every individual--every self sovereign--owes to his neighbor--that is, to society.

"Love," says the Woodhull, should be "free" precisely like "worship." The world has outgrown laws to govern religion and leaves conscience unfettered. The fetters of constraint should be broken from marriage, and the parties allowed to mind their own business.

Such is the argument. But the world has not outgrown all laws concerning worship. It prevents one congregation from disturbing another, or taking possession of their church. And in regard to marriage has society no "undeniable rights?" Marriage is not a relation of two individuals solely, but of their children as well. And has any neighbor no right to protect himself against the enforced support of my children? Undoubtedly there is no mysterious sacredness in the relation of sex; it is a human affair, amenable to human justice...

Here is the Oneida community let loose--free love for the saints without even the advantages of material communism. Fourier himself puts Ninon de L'Enclos, Beecher, and the Woodhulls in a separate "phalanx "of their own kind, though he insists that some such people will always exist as exceptions to the race. They have got out of their "phalanx," it seems, and have gone to "reforming things."

But, as Mrs. Paulina Wright Davis says, "the Woodhull" is not to be befooled. The woman's bitter experience has taught her all the sickness of the times. "Free love" and "stirpiculture" are rather striking remedies for it. But in an age of Tweed, and Oakes Ames, Challis, Comstock, and God in the constitution; Oakey Hall, model artists and Rosenweig; industrious fleas and D. W. Huston; Bowen, Beecher, the Tombs, and the Police Gazette--in such an age the world can't change for the worse. Free love may be its last hope. At any rate, if a young woman of thirty-four ears and another of thirty, with one Missouri Colonel behind them, can frighten the whole American people out of free speech, a free press, and an honest court house, "stirpiculture" is needed at once for the begetting of some tolerable race of men.