What a life
Aren’t people the best? Sometimes I come across a story that makes me marvel at what is possible, how much bravery and love and… well, life, that can be crammed into a life.
Some lives seem like fairytales, one of those is the story of Tennessee, Tennie, Claflin.
She was born in Homer, Ohio in October 1845, the youngest of eight. Her father was a confidence trickster, her mother was illiterate and everyone in the family was very good looking. The Claflins were constantly on the move and during their wanderings they decided that their third daughter, Victoria, was a psychic who could communicate with the angles and the dead. Soon it turned out five-year-old Tennie also showed signs of having psychic gifts.
The two sisters were taken on a tour around the US and Canada. Tennie, aged fourteen, sat in a booth for thirteen hours at a stretch and worked as a “healer and clairvoyant”.
By the time she was in her early twenties she had married and divorced and her sister Victoria received a message from the spirits telling the family to go to New York. Their new neighbour was one of the richest men in America, the old robber baron, seventy-six year old Cornelius Vanderbilt.
His wife had died and he was lonely and bored. The sisters supposedly knew how to communicate with the dead. Soon Tennie was a regular in the Vanderbilt house. “She would pull his side-whiskers and perch on his knee”. The pair engaged in “magnetic healing sessions”. Vanderbilt’s personal physician thought it was excellent, his children were less impressed.
Eventually Cornelius Vanderbilt did what his children feared and proposed to Tennie. She turned him down. She didn’t need a marriage, she only wanted his advice.
Due to his mentorship Victoria And Tennie Claflin were growing very wealthy by playing the stock-market. Soon they became the first women to start a brokerage house. One hundred policemen had to keep the crowds back when they entered their office on Wall Street for the first time.
But that wasn’t enough. What they wanted wasn’t just money, they wanted female suffrage and, even though they later tried to deny it, free love.
Victoria became the first woman to run for president. Tennie ran for congress. The sisters started their own newspaper.
They travelled the US to speak up for women’s rights. The backlash was enormous. They were banned from lecture halls. They were sued. They lost their money. They were briefly thrown in jail.
So they moved to England. And there Tennie met the widowed Francis Cook, one of the richest men in Britain. He was sixty-three and he had heard about her psychic powers and wanted to contact his late wife. After a couple of sessions she told him the message was “marry Miss Claflin”.
And marry they did. They lived in England and in Portugal. They hosted parties. Then Francis Cook died and left Tennie a healthy inheritance. She spent the rest of her life travelling the world, lecturing and speaking up for women. In 1907 she told President Roosevelt to support women’s suffrage.
What a life.
– Facts and quotes from The Husband Hunters by Anne de Courcy.
– Photo of Tennie from the internet.