Walking the Walk and Compassion for Campers Update for September 26 2026

Look for new opportunities for action, education, community, and solidarity in and around McHenry County here every week.

Early voting in Illinois for the November mid-term elections was Thursday, September 24 at the McHenry County Election Center, 410 South Eastwood Drive, Woodstock.    Vote-By-Mail ballots will be mailed out by the County Clerk to voters who have requested them.  Look to receive yours by September 27.  Call the Clerk at 815 334-4242 if you do not receive yours. Sample ballots should be available on the Clerk's website, as well.

Monday, October 19th -- Early voting begins at Early Voting satellite locations around the county 

Tuesday, October 20th--Have Vote-By-Mail ballots in the mail!  Track your ballot at https://mchenryvbm.ballottrax.net/voter/.  If it is not received by November 2, prepare to vote in person in your precinct or at the McHenry County Election Center on Election Day.  Vote a provisional ballot.

Thursday, October 29th-- Last day to request a mail-in ballot and applications sent by US Mail must be received by the County Clerk by this date.

Saturday, October 31st -- Last day to vote early at most Early Voting Locations. Check with the Clerk for a list and open hours.

Monday, November 2nd -- Last day for early voting at some Early Voting Centers, drop box locations and the McHenry County Election Center.

Tuesday, November 3rd -- General Election Day.  Vote in person, you must vote in your precinct's polling place or at the Election Center, the one universal site on Election Day.  The last day to vote a Vote-By-Mail ballot. DO NOT PUT YOUR BALLOT IN A MAILBOX!  Deposit it in the ballot dropbox in the parking lot at 667 Ware Road, Woodstock, go to a Post Office counter and request a manual postmark, or take your Vote-By-Mail ballot to your precinct's polling place or the McHenry County Election Center, turn it in, and vote in person.

Make a plan to vote now to defend democracy!

The League of Women Voters of McHenry County is sponsoring a series of County Board District Candidate Events.  The final events feature District 5 at the McHenry Library, 809 Front Street, McHenry.  Sunday, Sept 27 from 2-4 pm; and Districts 3 and 9 at the Huntley Library, 11000 Ruth Road, Huntly on Wednesday, September 30, 5:30-7:30 pm.  

The League is a non-partisan organization dedicated to making democracy work through voter education, issue advocacy and citizen participation.  All candidates for each office were invited, but participation is voluntary and not guaranteed.

Women Veteran Symposium sponsored by the Veterans Assistance Commission of McHenry County, Friday, October 2 from 9 am to 3 pm at 667 Ware Road, Woodstock.  "Registration is filling up for the 2026 McHenry County Women Veterans Symposium, a day dedicated to empowering, connecting, and celebrating women Veterans throughout our community. The day will include inspiring presentations by women, Networking and connections, lunch, and resources, fellowship, and community.  Scan the QR code to reserve a spot.

The McHenry County Mental Health Board which generously stepped up to offer a temporary home to the McHenry County Resource Center (MCHC) and Compassion for Campers (C4C) over the summer rented the space to a new tenant effective October 1. New arrangements have not yet been found. An active search for a suitable location is under way, preferably in an accessible spot near public transportation options and space for on sight storage, shower and/or laundry facilities would be a plus.

Pending word on temporary or permanent dates and places, Compassion for Campers does not yet have dates for our next distributions. We are prepared to move quickly. Please monitor this place for news and updates.

Meanwhile, Financial support remains critical to fulfilling our mission. The best thing you can do is offer your critically needed financial support. Money donations are always welcome at     https://tinyurl.com/3bz96axe.   Look for updates here.  Email compassionforcampers@treeoflifeuu.org .

 

A Prophet Came Downstairs With New Word for God on Polygamy Conforming to Protestant Morality

 

Church of the Latter Day Saints President and Prophet Wilford Woodruff said God told him to do it.

On September 25, 1890 Wilford Woodruff, President and Prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints came down to his office looking haggard.  He had not slept much the night before, he told his secretary.  He had been in consultation with God and in the night God had given him a vision of the fate of the church and its people if the practice of polygamy did not end—the Temples would be sized and violated, the President and the Apostles would be imprisoned, and the possessions of all the people confiscated.  With this revelation in hand, Woodruff went to the Apostles—a council of twelve senior members—who approved a Manifesto renouncing plural marriage.  On October 1 the Manifesto was made known to the national press.  It was confirmed, at the insistence of the Federal Government at a Church General Conference on October 4.

Although Woodruff insisted he was acting only in accordance with instructions from God and not out of any worldly political considerations, it looked to much of the nation like the Mormons were caving to decades of escalating pressure against them by the Federal government.

Plural marriage, the preferred Mormon term for polygamy, was not part original Mormon practice as reveled to the Prophet Joseph Smith.  It seems to have been introduced through proselytizing and the absorption of a small polygamous sect in rural Maine.  In 1843 Smith received a private revelation approving of plural marriage, at least for himself and the Apostles.  The justification was the need to “rise up the seed of a new priesthood”—rapidly grow the society.

Smith and the Church continued to publicly condemn polygamy and deny participation in it, but it became an open secret in the Illinois settlement of Nauvoo, where the First Temple was built.  Much of the public antipathy to the Mormons grew out of the suspicion that polygamy was sanctioned or practiced and it helped lead to Smith’s assassination and the Mormon exodus from Nauvoo.

Polygamy was not publicly proclaimed until 1852, five years after the Mormons arrived in Utah, and eight years after Smith’s death. Smith’s successor Brigham Young, who led his people halfway across the continent to their promised land, was an open polygamist.

John D. Lee, former right-hand man to Brigham Young, sits next to his coffin at Mountain Meadow, the site of a massacre of an emigrant wagon train he was accused of leading, just prior to his execution by firing squad.  Lee's sacrifice was the cost of ending the Federal Government's Mormon War in 1857, saved the church, and preserved polygamy.

The practice scandalized those back East and political pressure began to build to suppress the practice.  President James Buchannan dispatched the Army to Utah Territory in 1857, beginning the so-called Mormon or Utah War.  The church had over-played its hand in persecuting non-Mormons in the territory when a Mormon militia attacked and massacred an immigrant wagon train from Missouri at remote Mountain Meadows because some of its leaders were thought to have participated in past persecution of them.  The Army eventually occupied Salt Lake City.  Brigham Young was stripped of his post as Territorial Governor and was replaced by an eastern Gentile. Young delivered up Elder John D. Lee as the responsible person for the massacre and continued to run a parallel, shadow government.

The infant Republican Party made the suppression of polygamy an important part of its platform.  When Abraham Lincoln came to the Presidency, however, he needed the support of Young and Mormon power in Utah to keep open the overland route to California and as a bulwark against Confederate ambitions in New Mexico.   When the Republican Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act which outlawed polygamy in States and Territories in 1862, Lincoln privately assured Young that he would not attempt to enforce it if the Mormon’s continued support of the Union cause.  A temporary truce of sorts over the issue was in force.

Then in 1874 Congress passed the Poland Act which facilitated charging individuals with violations of the polygamy ban.  As a show of force prominent Mormon leaders, including Brigham Young’s personal secretary, were arrested and prosecuted for plural marriage.  The Mormons reacted with defiance.  In the 1876 the doctrine authorizing plural marriage was officially published in a revised version of the Church’s Doctrine and Covenants for the first time. 

The Edmunds Act of 1882 made “cohabitating with more than one woman” a crime. Those who believed in polygamy could not try polygamists either as a judge or juror and polygamists and their spouses were banned from holding any office and territorial voting.   With most Utah’s residents thus excluded from voting, anti-Mormons filled the Territorial legislature and took control of the educational system.

Mormon leaders in Federal Prison for polygamy during the period of the Great Raid.

By the mid-80’s authorities, led by Federal Marshalls, began what the Mormons call The Great Raid.  Communities across Utah and adjacent southern Idaho were visited, homes raided at night, and children separated from their parents and questioned about their parents.  Hundreds, probably thousands of men and their families fled to Mexico or Canada.

The aim to actually destroy the church was made clearer in yet another piece of legislation, Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887.  The Territorial Militia, composed mostly of Mormons was abolished and ordered to disarm.  Fornication and adultery became Federal crimes meaning that polygamists could be charged with multiple offences.  Children born to polygamist fathers could not inherit from them.

Most ominously, the legislation disincorporated the Church, confiscated its properties, and even threatened seizure of its Temples without which believing Mormons could not uphold the requirements of the faith.  The Mormons were in disarray and despair.  In Utah alone there were more than 2000 prosecutions for polygamy, adultery, and fornication.  Many men were convicted on multiple counts for each year married to each wife and were essentially held in prison indefinitely.  Courts held the ban against cohabitation even extended to women in separate households if they were financially supported in any way, instantly impoverishing thousands of women.  Much of the church leadership was in hiding and many had active warrants out against them.  President and Prophet John Taylor died while in hiding.

Taylor’s successor Woodruff was desperately seeking a solution.  In 1887 and 1888 he had asked the Quorum of Apostles if the Church should abandon polygamy.  In both cases Woodruff was told that they could not bend to temporal law in violation of revealed truth. Only the revealed word of the Lord could end the practice.

A polygamous Mormon family circa 1890.

In 1890 the Supreme Court upheld the Edmunds-Tucker Act and legal action to seize church properties, including the Temples, was begun.  Additional legislation was introduced in Congress that would bar all Mormons from holding office or voting whether they practiced plural marriage or not.

It was in this context that God apparently finally spoke to the President.

Even though the Manifesto as approved by the General Convention allowed previously married men to keep their wives and families and skirted the issue of sanctions for violating the ban, it was enough to relieve pressure on the Mormons.  Raids and prosecutions fell off sharply and movement on the suit to seize church property was halted. 

In 1893 Church property was returned and in 1894, exactly four years after Woodruff’s chat with the All Mighty, Democratic President Grover Cleveland issued a general amnesty and the Church replied by the dissolving the Mormon dominated People’s Party.  Although Mormons generally tended to support Democrats because their persecution was spearheaded by the GOP, Church leaders split affiliation with the two parties to assure support for both for the final push to the long-cherished dream of statehood.

In 1896 Utah was finally admitted to the Union and the Church issued another Manifesto, this one supporting the separation of Church and State.

But the controversy was not entirely over.  Senate Republicans blocked seating Senator elect Reed Smoot because polygamy had not been eradicated in Utah.  Indeed, some plural marriages continued to be sanctioned in Utah by some members of the Apostles.  New President Joseph F. Smith, a great-nephew of founder, issued a Second Manifesto on Polygamy which explicitly excommunicating those practicing polygamy.

To this day Church leaders flatly declare that no recognized members of the church, practice plural marriage.  Yet it persists, largely in remote and rural areas.  A tiny Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and other break-away groups have been organized and continue to endorse the practice.  Prosecutions were once again on the rise in Utah in the early 21st Century.

 

Women in polygamous marriages and their children after raids on a break-away Mormon sect in Texas generated considerable sympathy for the families.

Meanwhile some sympathy and tolerance for the practice has grown with reports of suffering caused families in remote areas by occasional continuing raids and arrests.  The best public relations coup of all, however, was the long run of Sister Wives on the cable channel TLC, a reality show that has painted one polygamous family in a mostly positive light before it began to unravel in later seasons.

The long running TLC reality series first portrayed a polygamous family in a mostly favorable and wholesome light.

A general live-and-let-live attitude on sexual and family matters has largely culturally usurped traditional American Puritanism.  In a way, just as the most vocal opponents of marriage equality had warned, tolerance of same gender matrimony, has left the door ajar for other traditionally so-called deviant arrangements, including plural marriage.

Meanwhile the Mormons have carefully burnished a public image of fostering an idealized, if paternalistic, nuclear family life featuring clean living, close relationships, and fervent support for traditional values.  On social issues, particularly abortion and marriage equality, they have sought to make common ground with the Evangelical Religious Right, and conservative Catholics, once sworn enemies.

Can the Saints ever shake the stained heritage of polygamy?  Can they find safety and security from persecution as part of a broader Conservative movement?  Will the Evangelicals who, in their hearts-of-hearts regard Mormonism as a satanic cult long allow political expediency to override their urge to smash heretics and perceived others? Stand by for the results.

Dave Becker's Four Congregation Ordination in DeKalb

This Saturday, September 26, at 3:00 pm, Dave Becker will have a four-congregation ordination to the Unitarian Universalist ministry at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of DeKalb, 158 N. 4th Street, DeKalb, Illinois.  

The DeKalb Congregation is Becker's home church where he heard the call to ministry.  Becker is in his second year of shared ministry at Prairie Circle UU Congregation in Grayslake and Tree of Life UU Congregation which recently relocated to shared space with Ridgefield/Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church.  Before that he was an intern community minister at Third Unitarian Church of Chicago.  Those four congregations jointly ordaining him.

In his time in the Prairie Circle and Tree of Life pulpits he introduced himself at every service "You can call me Chaplian Dave, or Pastor Dave, or just Dave."  With ordination he can finally officially become the Reverand Dave Becker.

The sanctuary of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of DeKalb where the ordination will take place.

In the Unitarian Universalist tradition rooted in colonial New England Congregational practice, self-governing congregations hold the authority of ordination.  The service will open with a procession of UU clergy, supportive ministers and leaders of other denominations.  There will meditations and music by a special multi-congregation choir, Worship Leader Rev. Matthew Johnson, and an ordination sermon by Rev. Dr. Pamala Lightseu.  

Becker is a graduate of Meadville Lombard Theological School, where he completed dual degrees of Master of Divinity and Master of Arts in Leadership.  He became a credentialed Unitarian Universalist Minister in May of 2023.

In his preparation for ministry, Becker trained and served as a hospital chaplain at Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove and continues to consider chaplaincy and spiritual care as a vital component of his ministry. He also served as an intern minister for three years on Chicago’s West Side at Third Unitarian Church of Chicago, where he was active in community ministry around food justice issues impacting Chicago’s Austin neighborhood.

Prior to entering professional ministry, Becker was active as a lay leader and lay minister at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of DeKalb, serving in areas of finance and fundraising, religious education, worship, and social justice committees for nearly 10 years.

Becker also brings with him a wealth of complimentary experience from his 15+ year career in social services and 27+ year career in informational education, including the past 18 years as the Senior Manager of Learning Experiences at the Brookfield Zoo. For most of his adult life he has been actively involved in issues of environmental justice, racial justice, immigration, child advocacy, and the intersection of those issues with faith formation and community building.

Chaplain Dave at the Broadview ICE facility detention facility last October

In his time serving the two congregations Becker has been very active in social justice work including immigration justice and protests of ICE and Federal aggressive sweeps and violence against citizen activists, bystanders and neighbors.   He has been an outspoken supporter of LGBTQ+ rights and particularly for endangered transgender and nuanced gender youth.  He is also working on building connections with other local churches and faith communities to cooperate on justice, education, and community service projects.

A reception will follow the service.  The service will also be streamed on Zoom at the UUCDK web site.

Daring Victoria Claflin Woodhull Was a Con Artist, Feminist, Broker, and Presidential Candidate Too Hot to Handle

 

Victoria Claflin Woodhull at the height of her fame.

Note—In the 152 years since Victoria Claflin Woodhull became the first woman nominated for president only two women—Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris—earned the nomination of a major political party and despite their fame, long political resumes, and declared status as a prohibitive favorites but lost—albeit by Electoral College smoke and mirrors—to a grafter, grifter and transparent idiot. 

Victoria Claflin Woodhull, born in Ohio on September 23, 1838, was nominated for President of the United States on April 10, 1872 almost 50 years before the passage of the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in all of the U.S. .  Woodhull stood apart from other leaders of the Suffrage movement by her audacity, frank embrace of the most radical social causes, her shocking open challenge to Victorian sexual mores, and her mesmerizing effect on the public and press.

As early as 1870 Woodhull used the pages of Horace Greeley’s New York Herald to announce her candidacy for President in the 1872 election.  It was a bold move.  Not only were women barred from the vote, but she would not even reach the Constitutionally mandated age of 35 until months after the March 1873 inauguration of the next President.  She maintained that while the law forbad women from voting, there was not a statutory ban on women running for or being elected to office.  In the hubbub created by her announcement over the unprecedented distaff candidacy, her age never became an issue.

She used the pages of her own newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly which was founded the same year, and the lecture platform to keep her name and promised candidacy before the public.  Able to command press attention, which then as now liked a sexy and sensational show, she attracted the support of not only the most daring womanists and suffrage supporters, but of radical trade unionists, early socialists, prison and death sentence reformers, some former abolitionists, and Free Thinkers.  She took on a broad range of social issues and took a consistently radical and progressive stance.

On May 10, 1872, a meeting was held at Apollo Hall in New York City where the new Equal Rights Party was formed and announced its intentions to nominate Woodhull.  The meeting consisted almost entirely of Woodhull’s friends and inner circle of supporters.   A formal convention was called and held on June 8 with broader participation.  A platform was announced drafted by Woodhull, and her personal friend, the great Black abolitionist Fredrick Douglass was nominated for vice president.  Douglas, however, was not present at the Convention and never acknowledged or accepted the nomination although he never officially renounced it.  In fact. that fall he would be elected as a Republican New York Presidential Elector. 

                                            Woodhall printed a campaign poster on her own press.

The issue of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly dated the same day as the Convention announced the ticket and platform:

The Equal Rights Party has selected Victoria C. Woodhull for the office of President, because it deems that the demand for the personal, social, legal, and political liberties of woman have been better advocated by her actions and in her speeches and writings than by any other woman. Religious liberty is not mentioned above, because it is held that, in the case of woman, it has not been specially infringed.  It is claimed as a right pertaining to all the people; one which the Equal Rights Party hold itself pledged to maintain against any national or State interference with (or infringement of) in any way whatever.

The Equal Rights Party has selected Frederick Douglass for the office of Vice President, because though born a slave, he has himself achieved both his education and his liberty; because he has waged a life-long, manful battle for the rights of his race, in which those of mankind were included; because he has proved that he knows how to assert the liberties of the people, and consequently it is assumed that he knows how to maintain them.

This announcement and its tone of radical defiance were picked up by the press across the country.  And all hell soon broke loose.  The candidate was in for a very bumpy ride.

Woodhull was born in Homer, Ohio on September 23 1838, the daughter of a ne’er-do-well con artist and patent medicine peddler who may have passed on some of his persuasive flair to his beautiful older daughter.

At the age of 15 she married a 28-year-old doctor—and perhaps a quack—Canning Woodhull.  The couple had two children including a boy with an “intellectual disability.” Victoria soon discovered that her husband was an alcoholic, a chronic womanizer, and was abusive.  Unable, or unwilling, to support the family, he relied on his wife to provide income.    In San Francisco she worked as a cigar girl in rough and tumble saloons, and likely at least occasionally as a prostitute.

Later in New York she began her long collaboration with her younger sister Tennessee Claflin presenting themselves as clairvoyants and spiritual healers.  When her husband essentially abandoned the family, the sisters successfully took their act to Cincinnati and Chicago and began touring as spiritualist lecturers.  After 11 years Victoria obtained a divorce from her husband. 

Husband Number 2, Col. James Blood.

Her experience would inform her public rejection of conventional marriage as a form of chattel slavery for women.  She became attracted to the Free Love movement that percolated on the very most advanced frontiers of Free Thinking.  Around 1866 she either married or took up a common law relationship with Col. James Blood, a kind and cultured gentleman who subscribed to Free Love.

They settled back in New York with sister Tennessee and her extended family.  Living in relative comfort and respectability, the sisters established a popular salon where advanced thinkers and practical politicians rubbed shoulders.  Among her admirers was Benjamin Butler, the Radical Republican politician and former Civil War general who espoused both suffrage for women and free love.

Virginia proved a brilliant and daring conversationalist and advocated by turns and in combinations anarchism, socialism, Spiritualism, and racial equality. 

                            

                                              Victoria's younger sister and partner, Tennessee Claflin.

Sister Tennessee caught the fancy of 76-year-old Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who took her for a lover, consulted with her for spiritual advice and returned the favor by offering inside stock tips.  Armed with such information, the sisters invested and reaped fabulous profits.  Vanderbilt helped set them up in the first woman-owned brokerage firm on Wall Street, Woodhull, Claflin & Company.  The press hailed them as Queens of Finance. Susan B. Anthony regarded the venture as “a new phase of the woman’s rights question.”  Victoria, with typical blunt frankness noted that, “Woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.”

A popular men's sporting and gossip newspaper--a competitor of the Police Gazzette--found the Woodhull and Claflin Brokerage house a topic of amusement.

In 1870 the sisters took advantage of their fame by launching their own weekly newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly.  Victoria was the principal editor and writer.  The paper took on and advanced all of the most progressive causes of its day.  But it also pioneered in muckraking and investigative journalism, exposing fraudulent stock schemes, insurance frauds, and shady Congressional land deals.  The newspaper, which was often sold under the counter and was sometimes banned from the mails, had a very respectable circulation of more than 20,000 copies weekly for most of its seven-year run. 

In January 1871 Woodhull personally petitioned Congress on behalf of women’s suffrage.  She argued that the recently enacted 13th and 14th Amendments extended to women the same rights as newly freed slaves. Her argument attracted wide attention and admiration.  Although a majority report rejected her assertions, Benjamin Butler filed a minority report in her favor.  Leaders of the Suffrage movement including Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton invited her to address a meeting of the National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA) the next day. 

Woodhull presented a women's suffrage petition to the House Judiciary Committee.  Benjamin Butler with the balding head and mustache is seen at the top of the table and Elizabeth Cady Stanton is seated directly behind Woodhull.

But the spotlight of the Presidential campaign was thrown soon thrown on Woodhull’s most unusual household, which included not only her present husband, but also her first who showed up penniless and addicted to morphine and was taken in out of charity; her sisters and their liaisons; and her parents including the father who still was running patent medicine scams.  When her mother tried to blackmail Vanderbilt posing as Tennessee, he naturally withdrew his support and advice and turned his significant power against the sisters, who were soon forced out of their mansion ending their Salon.

Woodhull simply replaced the money lost from her business with speaking fees. 

Taking on the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the most influential and popular minister in America, and two of three of his powerful sisters, ultimately took down Woodhull even as it tarred his reputation.

The powerful Beecher family, evangelist Henry Ward Beecher and his sisters Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine began a concerted campaign against Woodhull for her advocacy of Free Love.  A third sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, a leader in the NWSA, supported her.

Woodhull became aware that Henry Ward was carrying on an adulterous affair with the wife of an associate.  She attempted to use that knowledge to get the Reverend not only to back off his attacks, but to introduce her at a major public lecture at Steinway Hall.  Despite the thinly veiled blackmail attempt, Beecher backed out at the last moment, and Woodhull was introduced by Theodore Tilton, the cuckolded husband of Beecher’s lover.

The speech itself went well until Woodhull’s younger sister Utica, bitter over Victoria’s fame and notoriety stood up in a box and directly challenged her sister to publicly proclaim her support of free love.  “Yes, I am a free lover!” Woodhull defiantly retorted, “I have an unalienable, 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 the right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”  

Woodhull was depicted as Satan for her advocacy of Free Love.

The subsequent scandal rocked the country and split the suffrage movement.  None-the-less the NWSA stood by her and even nominated her for President with Fredrick Douglas for Vice President in January of 1872.

Woodhull ran against Republican incumbent Ulysses S. Grant and the Democratic nominee, famed maverick editor and publisher Horace Greeley, a former liberal Republican and erstwhile ally.  Victoria attempted to concentrate her campaign on the highly progressive Woodhull Platform.  But her now considerable enemies beset her at every turn.

Susan B. Anthony broke with other NWSA leaders to support Grant in an attempt to distance the movement from the increasingly scandalous Woodhull.  After the family was evicted from their home, they could not even find a house to rent and for a while had to sleep on the floor of their newspaper offices.  Business deals fell through and speaking engagements were cancelled.  The paper had to suspend publication for four months.  When it returned it ran a full expose of the Beecher/Tilton affair and another on a prominent broker with a predilection for young girls.  While circulation soared, the sisters were sued for libel and prosecuted for pornography.

Woodhull spent Election Day in jail.  No votes were recorded for her, but it is assumed that some of the 4000 or so rejected ballots in the election were for her.

Her legal difficulties dragged on.  In 1874 both sisters were finally cleared of criminal charges.  But they had to pay fines and court costs amounting to an astonishing half a million dollars.  All of the sisters’ assets, including their brokerage accounts, printing press, personal papers, and even their clothing were seized to pay the fines.  By 1876 she was divorced from Col. Blood and her beloved newspaper was silenced.

She turned to the comforts of religion while continuing to eke out a living as a lecturer.  After Cornelius Vanderbilt died unhappy heirs attempted to subpoena the sisters for testimony that he was not of sound mind.  Somehow—and speculation runs heavily to the Vanderbilt estate—money was found to send the sisters to England with a comfortable stipend on which to live.  Victoria lectured there, but her message was subdued.

Both sisters married well and prospered. 

Tennessee married Francis Cook, chairman of Cook, Son & Co., drapers, and also Viscount of Monserrate in Sintra on the Portuguese Riviera. Within months of their marriage, Queen Victoria made Cook a Baronet created a Cook Baronetcy and Tennessee became Lady Cook.  In Portugal she was known as the Viscountess of Monserrate. The couple lived at Doughty House in Richmond Hill, Surrey, now part of Greater London and at Monserrate Palace.

Although she never abandoned her radical viewpoints, Claflin lived the remainder of her life out of the public eye. She died in England on January 18, 1923.

Victoria in her later years as Mrs. John Biddulph Martin as a respectable English lady and humanitarian.

Victoria met a wealthy and conservative banker, John Biddulph Martin, and married him in 1882 and settled into a life of respectability and sponsorship of various humanitarian causes.  On a trip back to the U.S. she joined the tiny Humanitarian Party and was nominated as their candidate for President in 1892.  It was a last hurrah in the United States.

Back in England Victoria divided her husband’s estates after his death and backed a scheme to rent small plots to impoverished women so that they could become self-sufficient, founded an experimental school, and sponsored an annual agricultural fair.  She was active in World War I relief work.  She died in her sleep on June 9, 1927 at the age of 88 at her estate in Bredon, Worcestershire.