Notes from my Knapsack 2-26-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 2-26-2026
Jeff Gill

The triumphs and tragedies of Victoria Woodhull
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Buckman and Roxanna Claflin are in the December 1853 property records of Licking County, buying and quickly selling the property on the north edge of Homer, along the North Fork, which they had long leased. Some historic accounts say they were in Mount Gilead by that year, or it could be an older daughter was living there (married to the Morrow County sheriff), and they were back and forth, ending up as residents there for certain by 1855.

We do know that in the fall of 1853 their 15 year old daughter Victoria, born here in Homer, was by that time married to 28 year old Dr. Canning Woodhull in Cuyahoga County, quickly moving from Cleveland to Chicago by the start of 1854. Things would not go well for them there, though they would have a son, Byron by the last day of the year; after sojourn across the country from New York State to California (which by the way was her middle name at birth), they would end up in New York City by April of 1861 where she would have their daughter, Zulu (later Zula), and at some point afterwards divorce back in Chicago.

This divorced and largely uneducated mother of two could easily have become just another story of the American west, struggling to get by during and after the Civil War. Instead, she will by 1870 have become one of the most remarkable characters in New York City, with her sister Tennessee the first women to hold seats on the New York Stock Exchange, publishers of a pioneering newspaper (first to publish in the US the English text of "The Communist Manifesto" among other things), leading suffragist to become the first woman to address a Congressional committee, the Judiciary Committee, on the record, and in 1872 a candidate for the presidency of the United States.

And the leading public speaker of her day, second only, perhaps, to Henry Ward Beecher, noted preacher across the East River in Brooklyn, whom Woodhull would accuse of adultery and worse days before the 1872 election. Her editorial would launch three years of hearings, testimony, lawsuits, and legal proceedings which would put Woodhull, not Beecher, in jail twice… and in a way lead to her departure for England in 1877, having divorced her second husband, Col. James Blood, the previous year.

Deeper scholars than I, including some in Granville under the auspices of the Robbins Hunter Museum, have tried to sort out the complicated records of the Claflin family, of which I've only located a few small parts on my own. But there is a through line in Victoria C. Woodhull's story I think worth re-telling, even if it takes a few installments to set the stage, a narrative which is all too relevant in 2026 as we watch hearings and testimony and legal proceedings play out over power, permission, sex and gender issues.

Why did Buck & Anna let their 14 year old daughter go out with, and soon after her 15th birthday marry, a man a decade and more older? The fact that he was a doctor (and he was by the standards of the era, if not a good one) doesn't justify it; if you think "well, in the 1850s?" you would be incorrect. Records before 1890 are notoriously spotty, but many historians have taken a shot at figuring out things like average age of first marriage for women & men, and in the 1850s it was around 19, edging up into the 1860s. 15 wasn't illegal, but it wasn't usual.

It is hard to read the fragmented narratives around Victoria's early life and not think money and security loomed large as rationales for this otherwise impossible situation, for her parents if not for her.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got two more installments planned, so here's hoping you're interested. Tell him if you are or are not at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 2-20-2026

Kelly --

I will need your help here for one last step! What follows is 802 words of body text in total, which is long. If you clip the first three paras, that brings me down by 137 words, to a perhaps more tolerable 665 words (not counting title and colophon). If you can run it all, do so with my blessing, but also if you just have to chop those first three paras. If I felt better and started sooner, I might find 150 words elsewhere, but as it is 2 pm, here ya go, and may your editorial discretion work well for both of us...
Pax, Jeff

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Faith Works 2-20-2026
Jeff Gill

A preacher with a particular portfolio

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There are times when it is tempting to do memorial tributes, and I've not done so. Hardly a week goes by when someone, somewhere, with a connection to the life of faith and to religious practice more generally, does not pass away, and so you can lapse into a near-obituary format.

Local figures of note, personal connections, and deaths in my own family: I've done some of each, I hope with judicious attention to how the loss is of even possible interest you, the reader.

Big names with major attention already paid don't tend to tempt me. Their eulogies are usually tended to sufficiently on platforms for everyone to hear or read or react to. But learning of the death at age 84 of Jesse Jackson made me remember, and reflect, knowing his legacy is… complicated.

Rev. Jesse Jackson was a pivotal figure in the Chicago of my youth. He came from the South, having been briefly at the University of Illinois as a football prospect; returning to North Carolina he found his footing, led protest marches against segregation, finished college, and married, then came back to Chicago Theological Seminary in 1964.

Soon he was leading students at this UCC seminary en masse to Selma, Alabama, and famously he never finished his M.Div. receiving a "D" in his last class: Preaching. His faculty mentor said later Jesse never turned in his written work, "he just preached."

From 1965 Jackson was a part of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s work through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, his primary representative in Chicago; after King's assassination in April 1968, an act for which he was present, Jackson returned to Chicago and continued to open up the work he had begun under King's auspices and began to carve out his own path towards seeking justice.

That path was at times a rocky and controversial one. He made surprising alliances such as with Mayor Richard J. Daley, before famously not endorsing his son, Richard M., in 1989, in favor of a black third-party candidate. But by that time Jackson had run for president not once but twice himself, and had put himself forward as not just a leader for African Americans in the United States, but as an American leader in the world, negotiating for hostage releases in Syria and talking to foreign heads of state as a near-peer.

To say he was not popular in some circles is to say little, to say more requires an unpacking of the history of racism, let alone of race and politics. But in the fall of 1991 he was hinting at a third run for the presidency, and Bill Clinton was still the Arkansas governor who had spoken too long at the 1988 Democratic convention. Jackson had a shot.

And in that fall I was minister of a church in Fairmont, West Virginia. Jackson was scheduled to give a speech downtown on a Sunday morning, at 8:30 am, and our service wasn't until 10:30 so I decided to chance it, thinking I could always slip away if it started late or went long.

Unique in my political experience, such as it is, Rev. Jesse Jackson got to the podium at exactly 8:30, and finished as scheduled. It was a cold, grey, wet morning, in a town with its own vexed history around segregation; despite strong union support in a coal mining region, the crowd was expected to be small. It was not. Speaking from a platform near the corner of the courthouse, underneath the looming limestone of the business district, to people standing on the pavement growing damp from a steady drizzle, Jackson started soft, and slow.

His passion and his message grew and echoed in that open area, barely needing the amplification. Many in the crowd there were present more out of curiosity than support, as I was, but he gathered us up in his message about opportunity, and fairness, and justice… for all.

Rev. Jackson came to a logical end in his sermon, and concluded with all but a benediction, then left. There was another speech to give in Morgantown at 10 am.

We may not all have voted for him had he run, but he had our attention, and in a sense, our support. For what mistakes he may have made in his life, and they were real ones, I come back to that morning, and the power of his message, and how well he delivered it.

Jesse Jackson never pastored a church. He got a D in his preaching class. But he knew how to deliver a sermon. And telling the underprivileged and dispossessed to believe "I am somebody" is a message very close to the gospel. So Godspeed, Jesse. I'm glad to have heard you.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's heard a variety of good preachers in his life, some of them ministers. Tell him who has preached well in your hearing at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.