Volume 45, Number 8 · May 14, 1998
Victoria's Secrets
By Millicent Bell
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull
by Barbara Goldsmith
Knopf, 531 pp., $30.00
Notorious Victoria
by Mary Gabriel
Algonquin Books, 372 pp., $24.95
During the first decade after the Civil War what was called the 'trial of the century' opened in New York and became a sensational popular spectacle. It was not even a murder trial—just a husband's suit against the man he claimed was his wife's seducer—but it transfixed the nation, crowding other events off the front pages of the newspapers for the 112 days the trial lasted. The accused was the best-known Christian minister in the country, Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church. From the day the trial opened, on January 11, 1875, thousands tried to get spectator seats at the trial in Brooklyn City Court. Only a few were able to obtain admission tickets, which were sold in the street for ten dollars apiece. Over a million words of testimony were recorded; there were more than a hundred witnesses; the summations took twenty-five days. In households throughout the land Beecher's guilt was debated.
Review, 7191 words
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