Reimagining Marriage and Adultery in the Age of Beecher-Tilton

In August 1873, spiritualist Moses Hull used the pages of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly to explain how he and his wife Elvira had created a new model of  “domestic happiness.” After three children and years of discontent, Moses and Elvira had agreed to an open marriage. Though they did not use that term, their arrangement allowed Moses to fully express his sexual desires while freeing Elvira from his unwelcome attentions. Nine months earlier, the newspaper had alleged the adulterous affair of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton. In its wake, Hull argued, adultery needed to be redefined. For Hull, as for Victoria Woodhull and other free lovers and spiritualists, adultery was any sexual act, including those within legal marriages, which did not involve mutual love and desire.

Now eclipsed by the Beecher-Tilton scandal, Moses Hull’s announcement was part of this organized protest against the bonds of marriage. But even more than the volumes of documents produced by the Beecher-Tilton case, Hull’s article offers a window into the sexual history of an individual marriage. The Hulls were united by their interest in both spiritualism and free love (or “social freedom”), and their goal was to live according to their principles. This paper explores the Hulls’ private difficulties in constructing an egalitarian, sexually open relationship, and the public implications of their experiment. In doing so, it reveals the larger debate over love, happiness, and marriage that emerged after the U.S. Civil War.