FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY.
Many of Barbara Goldsmith’s early drafts for Other Powers (available in the Barbara Goldsmith Papers at the New York Public Library) read more like sensational fiction than rigorous biography. Multiple anachronisms appear, including a jaw-dropping chronological impossibility: Jim Fisk assaulted a teenager who later took the stage as Evelyn Nesbit.
The problem? Fisk was murdered in 1872; Nesbit wasn’t born until 1884. For this story to be true, Fisk would’ve had to attack her from beyond the grave like a poltergeist!
Unfortunately, this type of unspeakable assault was a recurring theme in Goldsmith’s drafts. Without sufficient evidence, she accused:
- Jim Fisk of violating Evelyn Nesbit.
- Buck Claflin of violating his daughter Victoria Woodhull.
- Richard Warren of violating his stepdaughter Josie Mansfield. (Note: Josie’s stepfather was actually J. Q. A. Warren, not Richard Warren, and he wasn’t even married to her mother at the time Goldsmith says he committed this act.)
- Union soldiers of violating Annie Wood during General Sherman’s occupation of Savannah, Georgia. (Note: Annie Wood was from Nantucket not Savannah.)
There is zero historical evidence that any of these women were assaulted in the manner Goldsmith described. While Theodore Tilton in 1871 did describe Buck beating Victoria Woodhull — a claim Buck and his other children disputed at the time — he didn’t even hint at the more serious charges Goldsmith dreamed up.
THE TWISTING OF THEODORE TILTON
Speaking of Canning Woodhull’s marriage proposal Tilton wrote: “But the parents, as if not unwilling to be rid of a daughter whose sorrow was ripening her into a woman before her time, were delighted at the unexpected offer.”
Goldsmith twisted that sentence into a salacious: “Years later, Vickie would say that Buck made her ‘a woman before my time.'” Because of this misquote, someone left a hostile comment on Buck Claflin’s FindAGrave memorial accusing him of a criminal act there’s no evidence that he committed.
That’s thanks to you, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. You published myths — like the baseless claim that Buck Claflin starved his daughters — without a single source citation. And Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House repeated these baseless claims in 2025. But this time, you put Barbara Goldsmith’s baseless claims in quotation marks, attributing them to Victoria Woodhull’s testimony in the 1894 British Museum lawsuit and leading people to believe they were reading an accurate court transcript. In doing so, you layered new falsehoods onto a man whose reputation was already burdened by the 1892 arson libel, and helped turn fiction into public condemnation.
For readers who want to verify the record themselves, a complete transcript of Victoria Woodhull’s two-day testimony from the 1894 British Museum case can be accessed here:
You will see that none of this alleged testimony attributed to Victoria Woodhull by Eden Collinsworth exists in the court record:
My father was a con man, who never passed up an opportunity that didn’t require him to work himself. He was a swindler,
Improbable Victoria Woodhull by Eden Collinsworth, page 17-18. Not in the record.
who used black paint to cover the flaws of the horses he sold. He was a cheat who, after losing at the card table, paid his debts with
counterfeit money. Not only did my father force me to perform as a child clairvoyant, he would starve me for days at a time to enhance my performances.
REAL WORLD CONSEQUENCES
The myths published by Alfred A. Knopf and Doubleday don’t just stay in the pages of books. They spill out into the real world. Many years ago Jack Neworth of the Santa Monica Daily Press emailed me about Victoria Woodhull. He knew my great-great-grandmother Isabell Morrill Fogg married Col. Blood after Victoria Woodhull divorced him. I mentioned that while researching her family tree, I discovered Victoria and I descend from Rev. Roaring John Rogers (1571-1636) of Dedham, Essex, England.
The next thing I know, I get an email from Susan Florence who accidentally hit Reply All when emailing Jack. She was insulting me behind my back, suggesting I was inbred. It turns out it was Susan Florence Anspach, the mother of Jack Nicholson’s son, Caleb Goddard. When confronted with her insult, she apologized. She didn’t know why she said it, but I do. It’s because biographers portray the Claflins as white trash.
Her response reflected a lack of knowledge about genealogy. If secondary sources are correct, Victoria is my 7th cousin 5 times removed, most definitely not an incestuous relationship. Under Anspach’s bizarre definition, every single member of the Colonial Dames would be inbred.
When publishers circulate unsupported salacious rumors — and fictional stories masquerading as biography — they don’t just distort the historical record. They cause readers to project those falsehoods onto living relatives of the people being defamed. Because the ones being defamed are deceased, their relatives have no legal recourse for libel. And when those relatives do push back in other ways, their objections are dismissed as “whitewashing” rather than recognized as what they are: a demand for accuracy in the face of demonstrable falsehoods.
I know, because it happened to me. A history major once published a paper that said of my web site that “most of the information is full of errors.” Why? Because my web site “does not reflect the research done in the books.” Meanwhile, she regurgitated Goldsmith’s falsehoods by writing, “The story of Woodhull’s life reads like a Hollywood movie plot. A young girl born into poverty was taken on the road by her religious fanatic parents were she was marketed as clairvoyant. Woodhull and her sister supported their growing family as fortune-teller, healers and prostitutes.”
HOLLYWOOD MOVIE PLOTS MASQUERADING AS HISTORY
There’s a reason Goldsmith’s work reads like a Hollywood movie plot. In the 1980s before she wrote her book, she read an MGM movie treatment that contained dialogue from a novel called The Vixens: A Biography of Victoria and Tennessee Claflin. Goldsmith used that novel as a historical source. So did Eden Collinsworth.
Of course, the history student, as well as Eden Collinsworth, may have believed Goldsmith’s research was rigorous because Goldsmith wrote:
In newspaper, family, and court archives, I have been able to obtain such rare documents as the original indictment brought against Tennessee Claflin for manslaughter and the papers of Victoria’s second husband, Colonel James Blood, relating his service in the Sixth Missouri Regiment during the Civil War.
Other Powers by Barbara Goldsmith, p. xiv
I believed Goldsmith, too, until I found out she obtained neither. Don’t believe me? Go the New York Public Library and get Box 89 Folder 14 from her collection. The folder is notated with “original indictments.” Inside the folder are photocopies of 1892 Chicago Mail newspaper articles. There are no court records from the 1864 manslaughter indictment. When I learned she didn’t get the original court records, I got them myself. There are no nine complaints for such things as blackmail or disorderly conduct as she claimed. There was no raid on the cancer infirmary. The only family members mentioned in the records were Tennessee Claflin and Buck Claflin. Contemporaneous records show the Fox River House hotel was a school board polling place during the time Goldsmith claimed they had a side hustle of a brothel there.
As for Col. Blood, she has only two folders labeled Blood. They are in Box 69 Folders 4 and 5. One folder contains what I sent her. The other is significant for what’s not there. There are no pension records, carded medical records, compiled military service records, or correspondence from James H. Blood related to his military service. In her bibliography, she listed “Colonel James H. Blood Correspondence. New York Historical Society.” There’s only one letter at NYHS from the 1870s.
FABRICATED BULLET WOUNDS
I have Col. Blood’s military records. At the time that Goldsmith claimed Col. Blood was fishing out two bullets from his left thigh with a hunting knife at Vicksburg, his carded medical records show he was in the hospital with diarrhea. The only gun shot wounds reported in his record were on December 29, 1862 during the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou. The story of the hunting knife was a complete fabrication.
Or course, I’m not going to pretend that there weren’t any salacious stories about Victoria Woodhull or the Claflin family in the nineteenth century. However, many of the stories are unsupported by evidence. If a biographer is going to share nineteenth-century rumors, they have a duty to demonstrate whether there’s any evidence to support the rumors. If they don’t, the result isn’t history — it’s gossip dressed up as biography.