Patricia Miller > Quotes

“This rapacious sexual folkway was carried westward into Kentucky by the fortune-seeking descendants of the Cavaliers, including families like the Breckinridges who married into the Tidewater elite, and southward to the plantations of the Mississippi Delta, where the absolute authority southern planters held over enslaved women and the lack of even the modest civil protections afforded to indentured servants created a culture in which black female sexual victimization was rampant. Elite white women, while being held to exacting standards of female purity themselves, weren’t allowed to complain, or even acknowledge this predation. Popular”
― Patricia Miller, Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "powerless" Woman Who Took on Washington

“one local folk saying defined “a virgin as a girl who could run faster than her uncle.”
― Patricia Miller, Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "powerless" Woman Who Took on Washington

“The notorious conduct of congressmen and public men in Washington is a national disgrace and the women are now thoroughly awakened on the subject and are determined to demand a better order of things.”
― Patricia Miller, Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "powerless" Woman Who Took on Washington

“But it was the Great Tariff Debate of 1888—“two days of oratory in which the best gladiators of the House participated,” as the historian Allan Nevins has described it—that made Breckinridge a star. Other than the question of gold or silver currency, tariffs were the biggest political issue of the day. The Democrats generally opposed high tariffs on imported products as impediments to free trade and also because they didn’t want to see the federal government swollen with revenue that it would be tempted to spend. The Republicans supported high tariffs as a means of protecting farming and manufacturing interests from import competition and as a way of raising revenue for what they deemed badly needed infrastructure improvements for the country at a time when there was no income tax, just internal revenue taxes, mainly on tobacco and whiskey.”
― Patricia Miller, Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "powerless" Woman Who Took on Washington

“When President Grover Cleveland called for tariff reform in 1887, Breckinridge traveled around the country promoting the Democrats’ tariff reform plan, casting tariffs as a tax on consumers that would dampen trade and foster a corrupting surplus. “The money in the Treasury is not the money of the Government, it is the money of the people, wrung from them by a false and wrong policy of taxation,” he told a large audience in Philadelphia, who arose “almost en masse and applauded for several minutes” when he finished, before demanding an encore, which, the New York Times reported, Breckinridge obliged, making “another brief address.”
― Patricia Miller, Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "powerless" Woman Who Took on Washington

“Francis Scott Key had defended Sam Houston here in 1832, when he was tried for assault after he beat Congressman William Stanbery with his cane for accusing him of defrauding the government. The abolitionist Daniel Drayton and Edward Sayres, the captain of a schooner called the Pearl, were tried here in 1849 for attempting to spirit seventy-seven runaway slaves out of the city, down the Potomac, up the Chesapeake, and to freedom in New Jersey through the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal. In one of the most famous antebellum scandals, Congressman Daniel Sickles was acquitted here in 1859 of murdering Philip Barton Key—Francis Scott Key’s son, who, coincidentally, prosecuted Drayton and Sayres—despite having shot him on Pennsylvania Avenue in broad daylight after he found out Key was having an affair with his wife. John Surratt faced trial in the same room for his alleged role in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but avoided his mother’s fate, being hung in the yard of the Washington Arsenal Penitentiary, because of an ironically “hung” jury. And most famously in the memory of those gathered that March morning, Charles Guiteau was convicted here in 1882 of assassinating President James Garfield.”
― Patricia Miller, Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "powerless" Woman Who Took on Washington

“Gentlemen of the jury, take this case and dispose of it,” he said as the courtroom burst into laughter.”
― Patricia Miller, Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "powerless" Woman Who Took on Washington