A Treasury of Great American Scandals (31 page)

Explorer Off Course

 

 

 

 

Things were not going very well for Meriwether Lewis after he returned from his epic trek across the American continent with William Clark in 1806. Sure, he was hailed as a hero by President Jefferson and the rest of the nation, but he was drinking too much, suffering from malaria and bouts of mental illness, and, despite his superstar status, unable to find himself a wife.

“I am now
a perfect widower with rispect [sic] to love,
” he wrote his friend Mahlon Dickerson after one failed courtship. “I feel all that restlessness, that inquietude, that certain indiscribable [
sic
] something common to old bachelors [he was thirty-four at the time], I cannot avoid thinking, my dear fellow, proceeds from that
void in our hearts,
which might, or ought to be better filled. Whence it comes I know not, but certain it is, that I never felt less like a heroe [
sic
] than at the present moment. What may be my next adventure God knows, but on this I am determined,
to get a wife.
” Alas, he never did.

Meanwhile, Jefferson, to reward Lewis for his great service to the country, appointed him governor of the Territory of Louisiana. But the president was also getting a little annoyed with his old friend, waiting impatiently for the publication of the journals Lewis meticulously kept during his adventure. With the wealth of information they contained about the previously unexplored West—scientific, geographic, and commercial—the published work would help Jefferson justify his faith in Lewis and the enormous sums of government money spent on the expedition. “We have no tidings yet on the forwardness of your printer,” the president wrote. “I hope the first part [of the proposed three-volume set] will not be delayed much longer.” Lewis didn't bother to answer, perhaps because he had done nothing to prepare his journals for printing. “It is astonishing we get not one word from him,” Jefferson said to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn.

Dearborn's successor at the War Department, William Eustus, was less concerned about the journals than he was about the bills Lewis was sending. Under the auspices of the St. Louis Missouri River Fur Company, which Governor Lewis had organized in 1808 (and perhaps joined as a silent partner), a large military expedition was gathered, at government expense. The plan was to travel up the Missouri River and return an Indian chief named Big White—whom Lewis had taken with him to Washington after his travels—back to his people. After dropping off Big White, the expedition would set up a fur trading post at the mouth of the Yellowstone River and there enjoy a monopoly granted by Lewis.

The only snag was, Secretary of War Eustus wasn't buying it. He rejected a number of Lewis's claims for reimbursement for the project, writing, “As the object and destination of the Force [beyond getting Big White home] is unknown, and more especially as it combines commercial purposes, so it cannot be considered as having the sanction of the Government of the United States, or that they are responsible for the consequences.” In other words, Lewis was stuck with the bill. This was not good news for the governor, who was already in debt and now adding opium and morphine to his malaria medicine. Furthermore, his champion and protector, Thomas Jefferson, was no longer in office and could not help him. Besides, Jefferson was still nagging him about the journals, which Lewis had
still
not prepared for publication.

“I am very often applied to know when your work will begin to appear,” the former president wrote in 1809 from his retirement at Monticello, “and I have so long promised copies to my literary correspondents in France, that I am almost bankrupt in their eyes. I shall be very happy to receive from yourself information of your expectations on this subject. Every body is impatient for it.” Lewis, once again, failed to reply. Instead, he decided to go to Washington and justify the St. Louis Missouri River Fur Company to President Madison.

Lewis had been stung by Secretary Eustus's letter rejecting his claims, believing it implicated him in some dirty dealing. “The feelings it excites are truly painful . . . ,” he wrote Eustus. “I have been informed Representations have been made against me.” What these representations might have been is unclear, though it appears a story was circulating that the St. Louis Missouri River Fur Company intended to go outside of U.S. territory, and that Lewis was seeking to establish a new country for himself, not unlike Aaron Burr.
²⁵
“Be assured, Sir, that my Country can never make ‘A Burr' of me—She may reduce me to Poverty; but she can never sever my Attachment from her.” Sadly, Lewis never got to prove his patriotism, or at least justify his expenses, for the journey to Washington was his last voyage.

Twice he tried to kill himself on the boat carrying him down the Mississippi River. When the boat reached Chickasaw Bluffs (now Memphis, Tennessee), the commander of Fort Pickering, Captain Gilbert Russell, was informed of Lewis's suicide attempts and, as he later wrote, “resolved at once to take possession of him and his papers, and detain them there until he recovered, or some friend might arrive in whose hands he could depart in safety.” For days Lewis ranted disjointedly, drank heavily, and indulged in his narcotic “medicines,” but after about a week Captain Russell reported “all symptoms of derangement disappeared and he was completely in his senses,” though “considerably reduced and debilitated.” He was also ashamed, telling Russell that he was resolved “never to drink any more spirits or use snuff again.” Several weeks later, Lewis seemed fit enough to resume travel. But it was an illusion. Before long he was boozing again and “appeared at times deranged in mind,” as Major James Neelly, who accompanied Lewis, later reported to Jefferson.

While traveling through Tennessee, Lewis came to Grinder's Inn, about seventy miles from Nashville, and took a room. Mrs. Grinder, the proprietress, served him a meal during which, she said, he started “speaking to himself in a violent manner,” his face flushed, “as if it had come on him in a fit.” Later that night he started pacing in his room, back and forth for hours, talking to himself, Mrs. Grinder said, “like a lawyer.” Then he took a pistol and shot himself in the head. The bullet only grazed him, though, so Lewis took another pistol and shot himself in the chest. This time the bullet traveled down through his torso, emerging low on his back. Surviving this shot as well, Lewis staggered to the door of his room and called out for Mrs. Grinder. “Oh Madam!” he cried. “Give me some water, and heal my wounds.” He then went outside briefly before making his way back to his room.

Terrified, Mrs. Grinder sent her children to find the servants accompanying Lewis on the trip. When they got to his room they found him cutting himself from head to foot with a razor. “I have done the business, my good servant, give me some water,” he said before showing them the second wound. “I am no coward,” he continued, “but I am so strong, [it is] so hard to die.” He then begged the servants to shoot him in the head and put him out of his pain. They refused, but just after sunrise that morning the great explorer finally expired from the wounds he had inflicted upon himself.

The Case of the Cuckolded Congressman

—REPRESENTATIVE DANIEL SICKLES

 

 

 

Murder has always been a frequent-enough occurrence in the nation's capital that a single killing does not ordinarily attract much attention—unless, of course, it involves a cuckolded congressman, a famous composer's son, and an attempted cover-up by the president of the United States. Then, almost everyone will sit up and take notice, just as they did in February 1859, when Representative Daniel Sickles of New York killed his friend Philip Barton Key, son of “Star-Spangled Banner” composer Francis Scott Key, right in front of the White House. Sickles did the deed in broad daylight, with a number of witnesses present, after learning that Key had been sleeping with his wife. But with a little help from President James Buchanan, and the then-novel defense of temporary insanity, he got away with it.

By most accounts, Key and Sickles's wife, Teresa, conducted their affair with all the discretion of mating elephants. Everyone in Washington seemed to know about it, except Daniel Sickles. Key rented a house near Lafayette Square, where the Sickleses lived, so they could get together whenever they felt like it, which might be as often as three times a day. From the park in front of Teresa's home, Key would wave his handkerchief when he wanted her to come out and play. “Here comes Disgrace to see Disgust,” servants in the Sickles household would mutter whenever they saw the familiar sight.

The adulterous couple had been sniffing each other out for some time before their affair actually began. Key, Washington's district attorney (a post Sickles helped him retain after the Buchanan administration came to power in 1857), often escorted Teresa to social events when her husband was too busy with congressional duties—or other women—to accompany her. A widower with four children, Key was pushing forty, almost twice Teresa's age. He claimed to be like a father to his friend's wife, regarding her, as he told Representative John Haskin of New York, “as a young person who stood towards him in the relation of a child.” He spoke of how “childlike she was,” Haskin later testified, “and how innocent.” Many people who saw them out on the town got an entirely different impression, though. Key's attentions seemed far more amorous than paternal, and Teresa's response to them was hardly one of sweet innocence.

Gossip about an improper relationship between his wife and his friend filtered back to Sickles, but Key vigorously denied what he called “the vile calumnies” against him. “It is the highest affront which can be offered to me,” Key declared, “and whoever asserts it must meet me on the field of honor, at the very point of the pistol.” Though Sickles accepted Key's denials, he was still suspicious—just not suspicious enough, as it turned out.

Sickles seemed to miss all the signs of the affair that commenced on a sofa in his own parlor, while Key grew ever bolder, ignoring warnings that violence could result if the affair was ever discovered. “I am prepared for any emergency,” he said defiantly, patting the left breast pocket of his coat where, it was implied, he kept a weapon. Teresa herself maintained a façade of respectability, despite all the chatter swirling around her increasingly brazen trysts with Key. Virginia Clay, one of Washington's leading hostesses, recalled seeing Teresa at a reception during this time and never forgot the “innocent” impression she made: “She was so young and fair, at most not more than twenty-two years of age, and so naive, that none of the party of which I was one was willing to harbour a belief in the rumours which were then in circulation.” But all the gossip was true, and Sickles couldn't stay oblivious forever.

The congressman's cocoon of ignorance finally came apart when he received an anonymous letter advising him of his wife's infidelity. “I do assure you, [Key] has as much the use of your wife as you have,” the letter stated. And on the night he received it, family friend Octavia Ridgely recalled, “Mr. Sickles had a very wild, distracted look.” He wasn't fully convinced, however, until further investigation proved the anonymous letter writer's allegations all true. This “unmanned him completely,” said House clerk George Wooldridge, who had verified the facts himself. The congressman's “exhibitions of grief ” were so violent, Wooldridge said, that the two men had to retreat to a private room near the House chamber to avoid a public spectacle.

An ugly scene ensued when Sickles went home and confronted Teresa with what he knew. That same evening she wrote a long, detailed confession. Whether it was dictated by Sickles or written in her own words is unknown, but the document was quite explicit for the prudish era in which it was written—a time when sex and nudity were rarely mentioned, even in private. “I did what is usual for a wicked woman to do,” Teresa wrote. That night she slept on the floor of her friend Octavia's room, while Sickles stayed in the bedroom. Servants later reported loud sobs coming from both bedrooms well into the night.

Key, unaware that the jig was up, showed up at Lafayette Park the next morning looking for a little action. When Teresa failed to respond to his signals, he went away, but he came back a little while later, again waving his hankie in vain. On his third trip to the park that day, Key was greeted by the Sickleses' dog, Dandy, who bounded out of the house upon seeing him. Key made a show of playing with the dog, waving his handkerchief all the while. Still no Teresa. Sickles, though, had seen the less than subtle display out front. “That villain has just passed my house,” he stormed, telling Wooldridge and another visitor, Samuel Butterworth, that he had “seen the scoundrel making signals.” Butterworth tried to placate him, arguing that a public scene with Key would only alert people to the affair. But Sickles brushed him off, snorting that the whole town knew of it anyway. He was right about that. Butterworth persisted, however, telling him to keep calm “and look this matter square in the face. If there be a possibility of keeping the certain knowledge of this crime from the public, you must do nothing to destroy that possibility. You may be mistaken in your belief that it is known to the whole city.” By now, though, Sickles was well past reason and hardly concerned about appearances.

Arming himself with two derringers, he rushed out of the house and into the park. “Key, you scoundrel,” Sickles shouted, “you have dishonored my house—you must die!” As Key thrust his hand inside his coat, Sickles fired. But the shot only grazed him. “Murder!” Key cried. Sickles raised his arm to fire again, but Key seized him by the collar of his coat. The gun fell during the struggle, but Sickles was able to break away and draw his other gun. “Don't murder me,” Key pleaded as he backed away, tossing a pair of opera glasses at his assailant in a desperate bid to ward him off. Sickles fired again. This time the bullet penetrated, striking Key near the groin. “I'm shot,” he gasped, pleading again for his life while falling against a tree. Sickles approached him and pulled the trigger again. It misfired. “Murder! Murder!” Key screamed in desperation as Sickles reloaded his weapon, put it close to his ex-friend's chest, and fired again. This proved to be the fatal one, but Sickles wasn't through yet. He put the gun to Key's head, but it misfired again. “Is the scoundrel dead?” he asked Thomas Martin, a Treasury Department clerk who witnessed the crime. “He violated my bed,” Sickles said over and over while Key was taken to a nearby building, where he died shortly after.