How to Arrange an 1890s-Style Shotgun Wedding

By 1893, W.C.P. Breckinridge was as well known and well liked as any politician in the country. He had been mentioned as a possible Speaker of the House and was eyeing Joe Blackburn’s Senate seat; his future seemed limitless. “Colonel Breckinridge is an idol,” the New York Herald would declare. “His imposing appearance, his dignified, almost fatherly, bearing, his courtly manners, his earnest, warm hearted friendliness, his sparkling appreciative eyes, his ready intelligence, broad cultivation and quick, harmless wit make him a universal favorite.”

On the June day in 1893 that Madeline Pollard arrived at The Farm in Charlottesville, she appeared to be on the cusp of pulling off a remarkable social coup in marrying Breckinridge. Here was the daughter of a saddler who died so broke that his family couldn’t afford to bury him. Her mother had to take a chattel mortgage on what furniture they had in order to feed Madeline and her six brothers and sisters. Since the age of twelve, Madeline had been shuttled from home to home of a succession of aunts. One of her cousins remembered her as a “remarkably bright girl,” but she spent the better part of her teens trying unsuccessfully to find a relative to pay for her continued schooling at a time when secondary education was a luxury, especially for a girl.

Now, having broken news of the betrothal, the Washington Post was lauding Madeline in an article headlined “A Bright and Brainy Woman” as a “well-known writer.” The Post gushed that “she early displayed an extraordinary intellect, and is one of the most brilliant women who has ever grown up in [Lexington].” It noted her literary bent and said she had worked as a reporter for the Lexington Gazette and done “literary work” in New York. Although “she was poor,” said the Post, she was “very ambitious, and those who knew her felt that someday she would make her mark in the literary field.”

The Post also mentioned Madeline’s one brush with notoriety to date: When she was employed as a clerk in the Interior Department, and the death of the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman (who was reviled in the South for his “March to the Sea,” which ravaged the land from Atlanta to Savannah) was announced, Madeline exclaimed, “At last, the devil has got his own!”

“The remark made her famous at the time,” reported the Post; it also “was the cause of her losing her situation.”

The paper said Madeline was about 25 and gave her name as Madeline Breckinridge Pollard, which suggested that she was a member of the Breckinridge clan—which many people in Washington assumed, as she clearly was close to Congressman Breckinridge. What the Post didn’t yet know was the extent of that closeness.

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Madeline Pollard had been Colonel Breckinridge’s mistress for nearly a decade. The relationship had begun when she was still in school and he was running for Congress, married to his second wife, and the father of five. Willie always assured Madeline that he would marry her if he ever became free to do so, so when his wife Issa died in the summer of 1892, Madeline assumed she would become the next Mrs. W.C.P. Breckinridge once an acceptable period of mourning passed. After all, they had taken every precaution to ensure that her reputation stayed intact. She lived in a convent school the first two years she was in Washington, and told a woman she considered a friend that Breckinridge “was as careful of me and my reputation as if I had been his daughter.”

Madeline knew that protocol dictated that they couldn’t marry for a year or two, so she was happy to bide her time in the knowledge that their relationship finally would be legitimized. But throughout the spring of 1893, she became increasingly disquieted. Gossip linked Willie to his distant cousin Louise Scott Wing. A friend of her landlady’s told her he had met the couple at a diplomatic reception, but when Madeline confronted Willie, he denied he intended to marry anyone but her. He seemed intent, however, on having her leave Washington—for Europe or New York. She’d go, she said, but only if they announced the engagement. But Breckinridge refused to do so, claiming it was out of consideration for his grown children, who would be shocked at the news of his hasty remarriage.

Still, news of the engagement leaked out. For her part, Madeline hadn’t been exactly circumspect and had mentioned it to at least two or three friends. On June 18, the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, just across the river from Kentucky, published the following tidbit: “There is an apparently well authenticated rumor that Hon. W.C.P. Breckinridge of Lexington, KY., the silver-tongued orator, is to marry Mrs. Madeline Breckinridge Pollard.” The mistake about her marital status aside, Madeline may have been happy to finally have the news public. That is, until days later, when the Kentucky Leader published a denial from Breckinridge of any such engagement.

It was then that Madeline decided to release news of their engagement to the Washington Post. “I am sorry to have announced our engagement before you wished it, but you have driven me to do so,” she wrote to Willie as she prepared to depart Washington for Charlottesville. “I had no thought of putting it into print, but after the Cincinnati Gazette printed it and it was denied in an undignified way in the Lexington Leader, I gave the announcement to the Post.”

Now, here Madeline was with Julia Blackburn and her friends pretending that nothing was amiss, even as increasingly acrimonious letters and telegrams flew back and forth between the couple. Willie, in Lexington and about to embark on a speaking tour of the Southeast, begged Madeline to lie low and let him handle matters. Madeline threatened to come to Lexington to ask his daughter Nisba what they should do about the situation. Breckinridge wrote back on June 27 pleading with Madeline to “control” herself. “I cannot go to Charlottesville, nor you come to Lexington. It would result in an open scandal,” he told her. “As matters now are, your character and reputation are safe.”

What Madeline did not know was that a parallel drama was playing out in Kentucky. Louise Scott Wing’s brother, Dr. Preston Scott, a well-respected Louisville physician, was telling people there that Breckinridge was going to marry his sister, whom, indeed, Breckinridge had been courting all spring. On July 1, Scott had summoned Breckinridge to his home to confront him about the Pollard engagement announcement. A reporter from the Commercial Gazette got wind of the brewing scandal and tracked Breckinridge there. Breckinridge “denied that there had ever been a possibility of him marrying Miss Pollard.” He told the reporter that Louise “has not yet promised to accept me” and that “anything you might say on the subject would injure my suit,” so the reporter kept the story under wraps even as gossip continued to percolate throughout Lexington and Louisville.

After Breckinridge’s letter of June 27, Madeline threatened to make public the details of their relationship if he wouldn’t confirm the engagement. The telegram that reached her at The Farm on July 9 was the response she had been anticipating from Breckinridge for days: “Written [Maj.] Moore. See him before you make publication.”

Major William Moore was the superintendent of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington. He had helped Breckinridge quietly settle matters a few years earlier when the colonel’s troubled son Robert got caught passing bad checks to support his gambling and drinking habits. Now, Breckinridge turned to Moore to serve as an intermediary with Madeline.

Shortly after receiving the telegram, Madeline made the two-hour train ride to Washington to meet with Moore. If she had hoped he would offer some kind of assurance about the marriage, she was sorely let down. In fact, when she got to Washington, she found the following in the July 13 edition of the Lexington Gazette, which, like many politically important out-of-state papers, was available in the busy hotel newsstands of the city: “Col. W.C.P. Breckinridge, about whose marriage with Miss Madeline Pollard, of Washington, a great deal has been written and said, told a friend in this city a day or two ago that there was no truth in the report.” It called the rumors of the engagement to Madeline “mortifying to Col. Breckinridge.”

Madeline returned to Charlottesville and on July 15 wrote a blistering letter to Breckinridge, accusing him of having “said what was false” in denying the engagement and having “repudiated your solemn promise to marry me.” In light of his public denials, she insisted that he send her immediately “a clear statement, over your signature, that the report of our engagement is true.” She went on to say that if he failed to “admit and confirm your promise to marry me . . . I will, without further communication with you, without delay, and without fear of consequence to you or to me, seek redress.” She gave him until the following Saturday to respond.

The next day, Sunday, July 16, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported the “engagement is announced of Hon. W.C.P. Breckinridge, of Lexington, and Mrs. Louise Scott Wing” and said the “marriage will occur during the first week of August.” When Breckinridge denied that announcement as well, Dr. Scott showed up at the offices of the Courier-Journal on Monday and “rather testily” announced that Breckinridge would marry his sister at his home the following day and “insisted upon publication to that effect.”

On Tuesday, July 18, W.C.P. Breckinridge did indeed marry Louise Scott Wing in her brother’s front parlor in Louisville.

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The news of the Breckinridge-Wing nuptials “created a sensation in the capital,” according to the New York Times. And it wasn’t just in Washington that tongues were wagging. In Kentucky, “a great deal of gossip was indulged in by society people and friends of the Scott family,” reported the Cincinnati Enquirer, which mentioned rumors that “the marriage was only hurried up because it was feared that Miss Pollard might give trouble.”

While the dueling marriage announcements certainly fueled the gossip, there was more: the ceremony had all the hallmarks of a shotgun wedding. It was obviously hastily arranged, coming on a Tuesday evening just one day after Dr. Scott’s visit to the Courier-Journal, and it wasn’t in a church, which was odd for so prominent a Presbyterian church man as Breckinridge, who was an elder. It was also “quiet in the extreme,” reported the Courier-Journal, with only family members and a few friends on hand to see Louise, in an “exquisite bridal robe of white chiffon,” marry Breckinridge in a brief ceremony performed by a minister cousin of his, brought in for the occasion because no local clergy was available on such short notice. The whole affair was so rushed that the wedding supper was served at seven and the newlyweds caught the 8:10 south-bound limited to Tennessee for their honeymoon at the Four Seasons Hotel in Cumberland Gap.

Even more tellingly, the Courier-Journal noted archly, Louise had “spent the past three months in Atlantic City, where she had been quite ill.” She had spent last winter’s social season in Washington, advised the paper, “but became of rather delicate health and was not able to go in society as much as her friends would have liked.” Louise’s sudden ill health, and her equally sudden disappearance from society, suggested that she was, or had been, pregnant.

Despite the rumors, it was an advantageous marriage for Breckinridge. Wing, who had just turned forty-eight, was tall, slender, and graceful, with “clear-cut” features and a “captivating and pleasing” manner, said the Courier-Journal. And she was the widow of Edward Rumsey Wing, who had died some twenty years earlier while serving as ambassador to Ecuador. As such, she had excellent social connections and was well known in Washington diplomatic circles.

For Madeline, the news that Breckinridge had married the well-situated Wing was humiliating, devastating. But she had warned Breckinridge she would seek redress if he did not fulfill his promise to her, and that’s exactly what she intended to do.

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From Bringing Down the Colonel. Courtesy of Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright 2018 by Patricia Miller.