152 Years Ago, This Woman Ran for President

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out who’s singing about a presidential campaign with a woman at the top of the ticket. We’ll also get details on the latest resignation at City Hall.

Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president on a nationally recognized ticket.Credit…Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

This is about a presidential campaign — not the one that will end on Nov. 5, but the first one with woman at the top of a ticket. One 152 years ago.

She was Victoria Woodhull, who was a suffrage leader in New York in the late 1860s and early 1870s and is the subject of the opera “Mrs. President.” The soprano Amy Justman will sing two arias from “Mrs. President” tonight at Symphony Space on the Upper West Side during a performance for the Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival, a series organized by Victoria Bond, who wrote the music for “Mrs. President.”

The Woodhull story is “a messy story,” Bond said, with considerable understatement. The original title of “Mrs. President” was “Mrs. Satan,” the name that the cartoonist Thomas Nast gave Woodhull. Her story simmers with scandal, sex and politics — and Bond sees parallels to former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican candidate this year.

“Mrs. President” has two main characters. One is Woodhull, who had been a stockbroker (bankrolled by the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt) and a newspaper publisher. The other is Henry Ward Beecher, the spellbinding preacher who led the prosperous Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. “It was a who’s who of New York,” Bond said.