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Woodhull & Claflin... The Ku Klux Klan...
Woodhull & Claflin... The Ku Klux Klan...
Item # 705690
November 05, 1872
NEW YORK TIMES, Nov. 5, 1872
* Victoria Woodhull & Teenie Claflin indicted
The front page has: "The Ku Klux" "Greeley's Friends at Work in Kentucky--They Hang a Man, His Wife, and Daughter to the Same Tree".
Page 2 has: "Woodhull & Claflin" "An Indictment Found Against Them--A Writ of Habeas Corpus for Col. Blood--Arrest of Stephen Pearl Andrews".
Sisters Victoria Woodhull & Tennie Claflin were activists in the woman's rights movement, and this case was concerning them: "...sending indecent publications through the Post Office...", specifically their newspaper "Woodull & Claflin's Weekly". The mentioned Col. Blood was Woodhull's second husband.
Eight pages, very nice condition.
AI notes: Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee “Teenie” Claflin were indicted in November 1872 on federal obscenity charges after publishing an exposé in their newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, that detailed the alleged adulterous affair between the prominent Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton. The sisters argued that exposing sexual hypocrisy among powerful men was a legitimate act of reform journalism consistent with Woodhull’s advocacy of “free love,” women’s rights, and social transparency. However, under the recently enacted Comstock laws, authorities deemed the publication obscene, and the sisters were arrested, jailed briefly in New York’s Ludlow Street Jail, and formally indicted. The prosecution collapsed in 1873 when the charges were dismissed, but the episode damaged Woodhull’s reputation, disrupted her historic 1872 presidential campaign, and underscored how obscenity laws were often used in the 19th century to suppress radical political speech—especially when advanced by women.
Category: Post-Civil War
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