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“The place is full of rumors about Mrs. Cleveland,” wrote Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, a British diplomat stationed in Washington. According to the gossip, Sir Cecil was hearing Frances Cleveland had “fled” Washington because of the president’s loutish behavior. Frances’s maid, so the story went, had been hit on the head with a broomstick when she stepped between Frances and the president. Sir Cecil found the gossip mongering hard to believe. In his opinion, Cleveland was the victim of a political smear campaign.

In December 1887, accounts of domestic violence in the White House started to show up in print. Chauncey Depew, a Yale-educated lawyer who represented Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroad interests, went public with a story claiming that Frances had gone to the theater one night escorted by a dashing former congressman from Kentucky, Henry Watterson. Supposedly, President Cleveland simmered with jealousy, and when Frances returned to the White House, he went berserk—“called her wicked names and finally slapped her face.” When Watterson was asked about the episode, he begged to differ. By his account, the president had been very gracious and even thanked Watterson for taking the First Lady out to the theater.

Five months later, the Reverend C. H. Pendleton, a Baptist minister from Worcester, Massachusetts, returned from Washington, where he had gone to attend the national Baptist convention, and delivered a shocking sermon. He had had heard stories about President Cleveland, he said, that his congregation needed to hear.

“Mrs. Cleveland had been forcibly abused by her husband,” claimed Pendleton. What’s more, the president’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Folsom, had been “driven from the White House and had gone off to Europe to prevent a further scandal.” Pendleton’s sermon, published in the Worcester Telegram, went nationwide. Cleveland must have felt cursed. Once more, a Baptist clergyman was leading the charge, and this time, the accusation was that he was a wife beater.

Margaret Nicodemus, a factory worker from Worcester, wrote the First Lady, asking whether the stories were true. In the envelope, she enclosed Pendleton’s sermon and an interview he had given the Worcester Telegram. On June 3, Frances sent the following stinging rebuke:

Dear Madam:

I can only say in answer to your letter that every statement made by the Rev. C. H. Pendleton in the interview which you send me is basely false, and I pity the man of his calling who has been made the tool to give circulation to such wicked and heartless lies.

I can wish the women of our country no better blessing than that their homes and their lives may be as happy, and that their husbands may be as kind, as attentive, considerate and affectionate as mine.

With Election Day 1888 just five months off, the last thing Cleveland needed was another reminder of Maria Halpin. Cleveland’s proxies went on the attack. Pendleton found himself depicted as a clueless dandy, said to wear “stylish” layman’s clothes. He was unmarried and “giddy.” According to The New York Times, his “tongue is considerably longer than his judgment.”

Pendleton got the message and quickly began to backpedal. “Of course, I don’t believe these rumors and had no desire to circulate them,” he declared. “I have only the most humble apology to make if I have innocently been the cause of doing the President and Mrs. Cleveland an injury.” He said he had not voted for Cleveland in 1884 but would support him in 1888, but only as penance for having made a “grievous sin.”

Grover Cleveland was renominated by acclamation at the Democratic National Convention in St. Louis. Frankie Cleveland Clubs held rallies across the United States to bring out the vote. The First Lady’s popularity was certainly one of the president’s great political assets. Cleveland’s opponent was Indiana’s Benjamin Harrison, the grandson of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, who died in 1841 after serving just