A Dirty Year

New York, 1872, was a city convulsing with social upheaval and sexual revolution seven years after the Civil War. As the year began, the New York Times headlined four stories that symptomized the decay in public morals the editors so frequently decried: financier Jim Fisk was gunned down in a love triangle; suffragist and free love advocate Victoria Woodhull was running for president; vice hunter Anthony Comstock battled smut dealers poisoning children's minds; and abortionists were thriving—and killing. Through the year these stories intertwined in ways unimaginable, pulling in others famous and infamous—suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Brooklyn's beloved preacher Henry Ward Beecher, the nation's richest tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, and William Howe, preeminent counsel to the criminal element. Through the lives of these larger-than-life characters, the issues of the day played out—rigged elections, everyday shootings, attacks on the press, sexual impropriety, reproductive rights, the chasm between rich and poor—issues that resonate today. Political parties split over a bitterly contested election, suffragist battled suffragist over bettering women's place in society, and pious saints fought soulless sinners, until at year-end this jumble of conflicts exploded in the greatest sensation of the nineteenth century.