New York gave America its first woman presidential candidate in 1872 when Victoria Woodhull ran on a platform of radical reform. Professional feminists were aghast: Woodhull, drawn by cartoonist Thomas Nast as “Mrs. Satan,” was many things – but never respectable.

Born in 1838, Woodhull claimed to remember her conception and she began seeing visions during childhood. At 11, she could declaim with ecstatic fervor, and her father, Reuben Claflin, con artist and snakeoil salesman, hauled her around Ohio to preach. Four years later at age 15, she eloped with Dr. Canning Woodhull, an alcoholic whom she soon divorced. By 1858, when she was 20, she was on the San Francisco stage and received paying customers after hours. By 22,Woodhull was a successful spiritualist healer.

In 1868, Woodhull and her sister Tennessee went to New York, where they were introduced to multimillionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt. Tennie became the Commodore’s “therapist” who, as Barbara Goldsmith wrote, provided “magnetic healing. With her left hand acting as a negative magnet, the right as a positive, she claimed to reverse the polarity of his body and to expel negative energy.” Vanderbilt also paid the sisters a 2% commission on his stock market transactions based upon their advice, supposedly from the spirits. In 1869, he financed their brokerage, Claflin & Woodhull. A year later, they began publishing Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.

Meanwhile, suffragist matriarchs Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had been lobbying hard for their cause – to little avail. A Congressman rebuked them in December 1870 for asking the House Judiciary Committee to consider a women’s suffrage amendment.

By contrast, Woodhull easily ob tained permission to address the committee about women’s suffrage on January 11, 1871. That victory resulted in the feminist establishment’s undying enmity toward her due to the manner in which it was procured. Woodhull had charmed a leading committee member, Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts.Their precise relationship is unclear, although she knew him well enough to speak of his midnight snacks of doughnuts

washed down with whiskey. When a reporter asked Butler whether he was helping Woodhull because she had allowed him “to feast his eyes upon her naked person,” Butler replied, “Half truths kill.”

In the midst of her energetic 1872 presidential campaign,Woodhull detonated her greatest scandal: outing a minister as a philanderer. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights, was a popular preacher who proclaimed a vague adherence to the teachings of Christ that he called the “Gospel of Love.” He abused his office by seducing female parishioners.

One of them confessed to her husband, who threatened to expose Beecher. Bonds funded by the collection plate had financed Plymouth Church’s construction. If Beecher, the box-office draw, was driven from the pulpit, bondholders risked losing their money. The incident was covered up. But Woodhull learned a great deal about it, mostly from feminists who knew one or more of the participants.

Woodhull believed the institution of marriage was tyranny and married men and women who no longer loved one another should be free to form other relationships, notions she called “free love.” Because Beecher refused to admit that he practiced it, Woodhull outed him in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly on November 12, 1872. Apparently, her clairvoyance did not foresee our liberal divorce laws.

Although Beecher did not sue for defamation, Anthony Comstock of the Society for the Suppression of Vice charged Woodhull and her sister with obscenity for another article. The offending piece focused on organized prostitution and quoted “red trophy of her virginity” from Deuteronomy.

Comstock, the self-proclaimed “Roundsman of the Lord,”devoted his life to an obsessive pursuit of pornography and sex toys. Fortunately,Woodhull’s lawyer, William F. Howe, found questioning Comstock to be child’s play. In his royal purple frock coats, Howe was so persuasive that he could convince juries that a defendant’s trigger finger had slipped not once, but six times. A contemporary described his courtroom oratory: “Mr. Howe… by a series of… facial gymnastics portrayed every emotion known to human nature, including many that never, perhaps, were before known, or even thought of.”

In Woodhull’s case, Howe demanded the court rule whether Deuteronomy was obscene, asked why the works of Smollet and Byron had not been seized, and won the jury with a rousing summation: “O Liberty, where are thy defenders… Must it be as the poet says: ‘Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne’?”

After the Woodhull sisters discussed the late Commodore’s affairs with his heir, William Henry Vanderbilt, a small fortune was placed at their disposal, provided they left the country. In 1877, they went to London, where Vickie married a banker, John Biddulph Martin. She died there in 1927.