A Treasury of Great American Scandals (32 page)

Sickles turned himself in immediately after the murder. At about the same time, President Buchanan was receiving the news from a young page, J. H. W. Bonitz, who had witnessed the killing. After hearing the report, Buchanan told a bold lie intended to help his old pal Sickles. He warned Bonitz to get out of town quickly. Otherwise, he would be jailed and held without bond as a witness to the crime. Perhaps the president was unaware that plenty of other people had seen Sickles kill Key, but his tactic worked on Bonitz at least. The page took some money offered by Buchanan, packed his bags, and left Washington immediately.

Before being taken away to jail, Sickles was permitted a brief return home. A large crowd was gathered outside. Inside, Teresa was lying on a bedroom floor stricken with despair. Coming upon her, Sickles uttered one terse sentence: “I've killed him.” Then he left. News of the murder, meanwhile, was spreading all over the city. Ridiculous rumors abounded. Some said Teresa was pregnant with Key's child, others that the congressman had tried to kill himself after killing Key. The truth was juicy enough, though, and the story soon dominated the front pages of the nation's newspapers. Editorials on the greater significance of the murder flourished. It reflected the moral decay of society in general, it was said, as well as an ever-increasing lawlessness, especially in Washington. “Can any of us be surprised?” asked
Harper's Weekly.
“When the newspapers declare, and private testimony asserts, that no capital in the world is more rotten than ours, is it remarkable that a wife should be faithless and her husband shoot her seducer?”

Sickles, indicted for murder, assembled a nineteenth-century version of “The Dream Team”—eight of some of the nation's best lawyers—to defend him. The prosecution, on the other hand, was hamstrung from the beginning. Robert Ould, who was appointed by President Buchanan to replace Key as Washington's district attorney, was an inexperienced trial lawyer and a poor choice to handle such an explosive case, especially by himself. Yet despite pleas from the Key family, the president—still doing his darnedest to help Sickles—refused to assign Ould an experienced assistant. So Key's family and friends decided to hire an assistant themselves. It was a futile gesture.

The trial, which began on April 4, 1859, and ended three weeks later, was a spectacle. The courtroom was crammed with curious spectators—all men, as the case was considered too scandalous for the tender sensibilities of women—while those left outside resorted to climbing windows to get a peek at the proceedings. The case itself should have been simple. Sickles, whom the prosecutor described as “a walking magazine” who stalked and killed Key in an act of “remorseless revenge,” had done the deed in the wide open, with plenty of people watching. But the defense complicated the issue by arguing that Congressman Daniel Sickles had been temporarily insane at the time, and that Key's defilement of his wife had made him so. While the insanity defense had been well established in American jurisprudence, there was no precedent at all for what the defense called an “irresistible impulse.” Sickles, the defense declared, had acted “in a transport of frenzy” that was ultimately fleeting in nature. “Was Mr. Sickles, at the time of the homicide, such a creature of instinct, of impulse, that he could not resist, but was carried forward, like a mere machine, to the consummation of that so-called tragedy?” asked defense attorney John Graham. The jury thought the answer was yes and acquitted Sickles after deliberating for little more than an hour.

Jury foreman Reason Arnold later expressed gratitude that he had “lived to render such a verdict,” adding that he “hoped and believed the great God would acquit as the jury has done.” Another juror, William Hopkins, also felt the homicide was justified, punctuating his opinion by saying he “would not for himself have been satisfied with a derringer or revolver, but would have brought a howitzer to bear on the seducer.” The
New York Times
summarized the temper of the jurors, which mirrored that of the public at large, reporting that “they gave their verdict on the principle that, in the absence of any adequate punishment by law for adultery, the man who violates the honor and desolates the home of his neighbor, does so at the peril of his life, and if he falls by the outraged husband's hands he deserves his doom.”

The verdict was followed by spontaneous celebrations in the streets of Washington, including an impromptu parade down Pennsylvania Avenue led by the U.S. Marine Band. And if Daniel Sickles wasn't quite acclaimed as a hero, he was certainly absolved of the crime in the minds of most. The congressman had taken appropriate action after being grievously wronged, and the public was prepared to welcome him back to his proper place in society.

But then Sickles did the unthinkable. He reconciled with Teresa.

All the goodwill that had been generated suddenly evaporated, and a furious uproar ensued. “If Mrs. Sickles was herself guilty before the death of Key she is guilty still, and if one can be forgiven now, Key ought to have been forgiven in February,” wrote the Washington correspondent of the Philadelphia
Press,
again reflecting the general public sentiment. “All the feeling for poor Key has been revived,” the writer continued, “all the grief suppressed by the verdict in favor of Mr. Sickles has been called forth anew by the forgiveness extended by Mr. Sickles to his wife, and Heaven knows where it will end.” The congressman's friends “have been completely disgusted by the announcement of the fact that he has taken the polluted female again to his bosom as a wife,” reported the Sunday
Atlas,
while the Washington
Evening Star
noted that Sickles had now shown “his true colors” and “opened the eyes of the dupes of his late melodramatic programme, so as to enable them to realize the facts that the aspersions showered upon Key, for [Sickles's] benefit, were . . . baseless.” The
Star
concluded by stating that “this
denouement
. . . will do some good, we trust, in teaching District of Columbia juries their duty between law and justice on one side, and vulgar bastard public opinion manufactured for the moment by theatrical appliances to cheat law and justice, on the other.”

Daniel Sickles was ruined not for murder, but for reconciliation. The public reaction was so virulent that the congressman was compelled to justify himself in a lengthy statement published in the New York
Herald
and reprinted in newspapers across the country. In it, he made no apologies for murdering Key or for taking back Teresa. Instead, he appealed for the right to conduct his personal family life in private. “I am not aware of any statute, or code of morals, which makes it infamous to forgive a woman,” he wrote defiantly, “nor is it usual to make our domestic life a subject of consultation with friends, no matter how near and dear to us. And I cannot allow even all the world combined to dictate to me the repudiation of my wife, when I think it right to forgive her, and restore her to my confidence and protection.”

The open letter did little good. Sickles remained a pariah, ostracized by his colleagues in Congress and rendered virtually impotent there. “He was left to himself as if he had smallpox,” observed Mary Chestnut, wife of Senator James Chestnut of South Carolina. Despised and rejected, he decided not to run for reelection. But the colorful career of Daniel Sickles was far from finished.

His reputation was gloriously revived during the Civil War, in which he served as a major general and lost his leg after being hit by an artillery shell at the battle of Gettysburg. (The amputated limb is still on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., where for years Sickles used to visit it on the anniversary of its removal.) After the war, Sickles was appointed by President Andrew Johnson to be the military governor of the Carolinas during Reconstruction. The position made him, as he wrote, “a sort of Sultan, a sort of Roman Consul. I was not only the military commander, I was the Governor of those two states; I was the legislature of those two states; I was the Court of Chancery of those two states. I was a sort of Poobah.” He was also way too full of himself, from the president's point of view, and was relieved of his duties in 1867.

Earlier that year, Teresa died at age thirty-one. Sickles was remarried four years later to Carolina Creash, whom he met while serving as the American minister to Spain. He was apparently a bit big for his britches in this position too, earning the sobriquet “the Yankee King of Spain.” He was forced to resign in 1873, but not before reportedly carrying on a torrid affair with the deposed Queen Isabella II. His second marriage was a failure, as he and his wife were estranged for nearly three decades because she refused to return with him to the United States. Sickles kept busy though, serving another term in Congress and taking his maid on as a mistress. Even into his nineties he was still chasing the ladies. In 1914, more than half a century after killing Philip Barton Key in cold blood, Sickles died a natural death at age ninety-four.

The
Other
Assassinations

 

 

 

 

Is it possible for an American president to be murdered in office and have the world forget about it? The millions who remember precisely where they were that November day in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was shot would say no. They would insist that the terrible event would be forever seared into the nation's conscience. Maybe so. After all, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln still remains vivid more than a century later, even with no one alive who would remember it. On the other hand, the national memory is selective. Few Americans can name the other two presidents slain in office. Time has obscured the names of James Abram Garfield and William McKinley, yet their violent deaths once traumatized the nation.

James Garfield never actively sought the presidency. The former Civil War general and college president was content to represent Ohio in Congress. After sixteen years in the House, he was elected to the Senate in 1880. Before he could take his seat, though, events at the Republican National Convention—where Garfield was heading the Ohio delegation—inexorably altered the course of his life. The party was hopelessly divided between the “Stalwart” faction supporting former president Ulysses S. Grant, who was seeking a third term, and the more progressive “Half-Breeds,” who wanted to make Senator James G. Blaine of Maine the nominee. Out of this disunity, the forty-nine-year-old Garfield's name emerged and gathered momentum, much to his surprise and chagrin.

“General, they are talking about nominating you,” a political associate warned.

“My God,” Garfield replied in agitation. “I know it. I know it! And they will ruin me. I am here as a friend of [ John] Sherman [another hopeful Republican nominee] and what will he and the world think of me if I am put in nomination? I won't permit it.” Garfield nevertheless received the nomination and proceeded to defeat his Democratic opponent, General Winfield Scott Hancock, in the election of 1880. The prospect of being president troubled him. “I am bidding goodbye to private life,” he wrote, “and to a long period of happy years which I fear terminate in 1880.”

Presidents at the time faced the awesome task upon entering office of filling thousands of government jobs left open when workers from the previous administration were automatically fired in a well-established spoils system. Most of Garfield's brief time as president was taken up with this task, which he found odious. “My services ought to be worth more to the government than to be thus spent,” he lamented.

Everywhere he went, hordes of eager office seekers harassed the new president. Thousands streamed through the White House, trolling for lucrative jobs. In those days, White House security was almost nonexistent, even though Lincoln had been killed only sixteen years earlier. Almost anyone could walk in and ask to see the president. Job seekers marauded through the mansion and onto Pennsylvania Avenue, making “the sounds of beasts at feeding time,” as the statesman John Hay put it. “These people would take my very brain, flesh and blood if they could,” Garfield groaned.

One of the most persistent hopefuls was Charles Julius Guiteau, a mentally unbalanced drifter. Consumed with a grand vision of himself and his place in the world, this slight, unimposing thirty-seven-year-old was a failure at everything he tried—except, as it would turn out, at killing the president of the United States. He had been frozen out of a semireligious cult he joined as a young man for what was labeled “excessive egoism.” Undeterred and fully intending to run the sect that had rejected him, Guiteau tried to start a newspaper based on the cult's teachings. When that plan quickly fizzled, the tenacious loser tried blackmail, threatening to expose “how nightly innocent girls and innocent young women [in the sect] are sacrificed to an experience easier imagined than described.” Next, Guiteau decided to become a lawyer after passing a less than rigorous bar exam. It appears that he argued only one case, during which he ranted incoherently while invoking God and the rights of man. His client was convicted, and Guiteau settled on a new profession as a debt collector. But he pocketed almost everything he recovered, and business soon evaporated.

After another try at religious revivalism, a failed marriage, and a stint in prison, Guiteau turned to politics. Though he quickly proved himself a nuisance while hanging around Republican Party headquarters, Guiteau became convinced that he was responsible for Garfield's election. The office of consul general in Paris, he decided, was a fitting reward for his services. He sent the president-elect a copy of an unsolicited, disjointed speech that he had written for Garfield during the campaign. “I presume my appointment will be promptly confirmed,” Guiteau wrote in a note. “There is nothing against me. I claim to be a gentleman and a Christian.”