Bringing Down the Colonel by Patricia Miller

When it didn't, she sued Breckinridge for breach of promise-and thereby revealed their affair, her past pregnancies, and her now-sullied reputation. Breckinridge, a handsome, married, moralizing lawyer running for Congress, called on Madeline Pollard, a young student at the Wesleyan Female College, thus beginning a lengthy affair, one Pollard thought might someday end in marriage. It was the culmination of a scandal ten years in the making. The Cincinnati Enquirer declared, 'Nothing in recent years has created such a social agitation.' In, journalist Patricia Miller unveils and explores the unknown story of Madeline Pollard, whose suit illuminates a crucial moment in the history of women's rights. 'In the summer of 1893, headlines across the United States screamed of one thing: a virtually unknown woman was suing a well-respected congressman for fifty thousand dollars. Miller tells the story of one of the earliest women to publicly fight back- and became an unlikely nineteenth-century women's rights crusader. With premarital sex considered irredeemably ruinous for a woman, Pollard was asserting the unthinkable: that the sexual morality of men and women should be judged equally. Pollard sued Breckinridge for breach of promise in a shockingly public trial.

After the death of his wife, Breckinridge asked for Pollard's hand- then broke off the engagement to marry another woman. Madeline Pollard and the married Colonel Breckinridge began their decade-long affair when she was just a teenager. Pollard won the suit, and the mystery of who helped her pay the extravagant legal expenses in order to bring Breckinridge down illuminates a shift in the sexual politics of the Victorian era'. 'The story of the 1890s scandal in which a young woman named Madeline Pollard sued congressman William Campbell Preston Breckinridge for breach of promise.

Bringing Down the Colonel by Patricia Miller