American Scoundrel (11 page)

The following evening, a huge inaugural ball was held in a vast temporary structure in Judiciary Square. Among the guests were many of Dan’s campaign supporters, who had fought for both him and the President. One of them, Sam Butterworth, was not dancing. He had been shot in the foot during a carouse, when, like an omen, a pistol carried by New York’s postmaster, Isaac Fowler, dropped out of Fowler’s pocket and accidentally fired. Considering that Dan was a novice congressman, one commentator noticed how many experienced men approached him for a word: Jeremiah Black, soon to be Buchanan’s Attorney General; Senator Slidell of Louisiana, the Buchanan and Cuba man, and his beautiful Creole wife; the new Vice President, John Breckinridge; wiry Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois; and Colonel Forney of Pennsylvania, who had recruited Dan for the London job. Chevalier Wikoff was there too, still a good friend to Teresa, as he would be to many a woman bearing secret or not-so-secret woes.

When the gray-haired, avuncular President entered, with his awkward gait and crookedly held head, at about eleven o’clock, followed by
Miss Harriet Lane on the arm of a senator, “Hail to the Chief” resonated through the wooden structure.
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A welcome figure at the inaugural ball, District Attorney Philip Barton Key, who had led the Montgomery Guards in the inauguration procession, was already entrenched as a capital favorite by the time Teresa and Dan arrived in Washington. The powerful Mrs. Virginia Clay of Alabama, queen of the Southern Democrats and right-minded people, wife of Senator Clement C. Clay, said that Mr. Key was foremost among the popular men in the capital and that his sister, Mrs. George Pendleton, possessed a classic beauty. Key, wrote Mrs. Clay, “was a widower during my acquaintance with him, and I recall him as the handsomest man in all Washington society.” In appearance he was an Apollo, said Mrs. Clay, and prominent “at all the principal functions; a graceful dancer, he was the favorite of every hostess of the day. Clever at repartee, a generous and pleasing man, who was even more popular with other men than with women.” Whether everyone saw him as an Apollo, out of his militia uniform, Key was a sandy-haired, tall, languid fellow of thirty-nine whom people tended to call by his second name, Barton. In the recent years of his widowerhood, before his meeting that night with Teresa Sickles reinvigorated his life, he had sometimes been careless with dress, occasionally coming to dinner with a riding whip under his arm, or appearing at formal occasions still dressed in the top boots and leather leggings he had worn when riding.

Barton could get away with all that, since he came from an old and enormously renowned Maryland family. His late father, Francis Scott Key, writer of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” had himself held the post his son now occupied. Barton’s uncle was another iconic figure, the elderly and fearsome Chief Justice Roger Taney. But Barton Key attended the inaugural ball not purely for social reasons. He was uneasy about his job. Recently he had argued a difficult court case. A Californian congressman named Philemon P. Herbert, breakfasting in Willard’s dining room, had made an insulting remark about the Irish waiters. One of them, Thomas Keating, objected to the affront, at which Herbert
drew a pistol and shot Keating dead. The ambassador from the Netherlands, who had been eating breakfast at Willard’s at the time, could have been useful to District Attorney Key, but would not permit himself, as a diplomat, to be summoned as a witness. Ultimately, to the disgust of Washington’s Irish community, Herbert was acquitted. To Key’s distress, the question of Herbert’s assumption that Keating himself was armed, in a city where so many were armed, was a factor in the successful defense. Nonetheless, Key had been widely criticized for failing to bring about a guilty verdict, and he feared that Buchanan might share the view. Since the position of federal district attorney was in the granting of the new President, Key was eager to speak to as many intimates of Buchanan as he could, seeking their influence on his behalf. So at some stage in the evening, the tall, elegant Key was seen bowing slightly toward the shorter, dapper, energetic Sickles. And on that night, Key met Teresa.
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Teresa, an enthusiastic horsewoman, admired Key not least for his being an accomplished horseman. She felt enlarged and fortunate in his presence. She may have been informed by other young Washington women about Key’s tragic loss. Barton had grieved intensely for his wife, and had thereby attracted the attention of many sympathetic people, especially young widows and spinsters. He met many of them regularly, since he liked Washington society and attended daytime receptions. Teresa, who admired Dan’s energy, was willing to overlook Barton’s apparent indolence; he had never been the most energetic DA, but in a way his bloodlines and class discouraged too much effort. Besides, he had for some time suffered from a heart condition, or, as one commentator said, imagined he did, “which gave him a soured and discontented look.” Those who knew him best said that his eccentricities of manner covered a kind heart.
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“There was,” said another laudatory commentator on Teresa, “something inexpressibly fascinating and delightful about her fresh girlish face, and her sweet amiable manner. She was as kind to a raw boy just let loose on society as to its Secretary of State; great and small, rich and
poor, Democrat and Republican—she treated all with the same unvarying gentleness and lady-like amiability.” And unlike many Northerners, Teresa had cultivated tastes in music and could speak well at least three languages—Italian, French, and English—and make her way in Spanish and German. No wonder, this commentator added, that she became such a favorite in Washington. And little wonder Key found her a refreshing presence.
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In the first days of his presidency, Buchanan received an astonishing gift from the Supreme Court. The same eminent Southerners who had helped ensure Buchanan’s election, and had danced with Teresa at the inaugural ball, were bringing pressure to bear on the Supreme Court and on Key’s uncle, old Roger Taney. In the face of abolitionist fervor, they were zealous about establishing as a matter of law that Southern slavery had legal force anywhere, in any state, and that if, for example, in the new western territories of the United States, there was a property holder who owned a slave, his right retained full legal force. The status of an aging slave named Dred Scott was then being fought before the Supreme Court, in a case being financed by Missouri abolitionists.

Dred Scott and his wife had been owned by an army surgeon, who had taken them from the slave state of Missouri to a military post in Illinois, and then to the northern section of the Louisiana Purchase that became Minnesota. The two slaves had lived for such a long period in free territory that they now claimed freedom. Abolitionists had helped them get the case as far as the Missouri High Court, where it had been defeated, and then encouraged them to take an appeal to the United States Supreme Court to confirm their condition as free people.

Unhappily for Scott and his supporters, there were five Southern justices on the Court. If Dred Scott lost his case, as expected, along regional lines, it would mean that Congress had no power to ban slavery from new territories, including Kansas. The Southern institution would be triumphant and unassailable. According to the grand Southern strategy, the Supreme Court did find against Dred Scott, by a vote of seven to two. Taney and his fellow justices thus decided that Scott’s sojourn for
many years in Illinois and for a similar period at Fort Snelling did not make him free once he returned to Missouri, or wherever he went. For the federal government to try to regulate slavery, ruled Justice Taney, was unconstitutional, since it denied the property rights granted citizens under the Fifth Amendment. In addition, seven of the justices found against Dred Scott because, they averred, no slave or descendant of a slave could be or ever had been a U.S. citizen.

Though Dan approved the general tenor of the findings, he must have found some aspects offensive. He did not practice the peculiar institution of slavery, had no desire to do so, but, in a way, he had grown up with it; legal slavery had existed in New York until 1827, when he was eight. Many of his congressional associates practiced slavery, and he was at ease with that as, at worst, a necessary evil. Most of his Southern friends possessed apparently contented, well-disciplined, and well-fed slaves, and some, like the Clays and Slidells, owned plantations based on the labor of supposedly smiling hundreds of African slaves. Slavery was a normal institution in Washington, too; slave sales occurred functionally and without fuss in the capital.

As most American schoolchildren are taught, the Dred Scott decision would achieve a reputation for judicial infamy in American history, but at the time it gave Buchanan massive temporary aid. It denied the right of Congress to decide on the very issue—slavery in the West—that had created so much argument and division in the Democratic Party and the nation. President Buchanan saw himself, at the beginning of his incumbency, as liberated by the Supreme Court to get on with other business. But the implications of the Dred Scott case, instead of putting the North in its place, terrified many reasonable people. Abe Lincoln, a purely local and previously obscure political figure in rural Illinois, would soon delineate the crisis with what would become a famous prophetic image: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He would, even more accurately, say that advocates of slavery were trying to push the institution forward “until it shall become lawful in
all
the States. . . North as well as South.”
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A few weeks after the first meeting between Sickles and Key at the inaugural ball, Marshal Jonah Hoover held a stag whist party for sensible and sportive Democratic gentlemen. Teresa and Mrs. Hoover absented themselves and were accompanied by one of Dan’s many friends to the theater while a number of congressmen, journalists, and eminent Washingtonians convened in Hoover’s house on Pennsylvania Avenue, east of the White House. During the evening of cards and brandy, a number of men overheard genial Dan mention to Key that he had spoken to the President about Key’s likelihood of being reconfirmed in his post, and that the President sounded positive that Key would be asked to continue as federal DA. Key expressed his gratitude, but this favor was characteristic of Dan’s generosity to men he liked. He had no outstanding service to expect back from Key, unless it was some entrée to the Southern aristocracy. But Dan already had that, by way of his pro-Southern stance in the House. Most of those who witnessed the event, including Congressman John Haskin, considered Dan’s advocacy of Key an act of gratuitous generosity.

Willing as Dan was to intercede for a stranger, Philip Barton Key, he had been doubly willing to intervene for his faithful friends from Tammany. A number of those who had helped him and Buchanan to office were now in profitable situations Dan had effortlessly arranged for them. Manny Hart had become surveyor of the Port of New York, and the recuperated Sam Butterworth, who had attended the inaugural ball with a wounded foot, was head of the federal subtreasury in New York. Loyal Captain Isaiah Rynders of the Dead Rabbits was given the post of U.S. marshal for the Southern District of New York, and, at a humbler level, a young man named Beekman, who had done legwork for Dan in the Third District (and who had met and been smitten with Teresa), was rewarded with a clerkship in the Department of the Interior. Finally, the maimed, intelligent George Wooldridge of Albany, who had been a lieutenant of Dan’s during his time in the New York State legislature, became a clerk at the Capitol. George Wooldridge was a particularly loyal, reliable, and doughty younger friend of the Sickleses. He dealt bravely
with a disability—he had suffered infantile paralysis and could move only on crutches—and his intellectual alertness made him a respected official around the Capitol. Dan trusted him absolutely.

Dan was seeking to set up another friend, Charles K. Graham, the young New York civil engineer who had helped with the park proposal, as engineer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This would prove to be a dangerous favor. The man Graham was trying to replace, a man named Murphy, was aggrieved enough to believe that Sickles had spread negative stories about him at the Department of the Navy and elsewhere to smooth the path for Graham.
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Meanwhile, Teresa was setting up her own base. The older and more established women of Washington were intensely interested in her, not least because she needed to be fitted by Mrs. Clay, Mrs. Pryor, Mrs. Slidell, Mrs. Postmaster Brown, Mrs. Rose Greenhow, and Mrs. Senator Gwinn into the unofficial seedings of beauty and wit that members of Washington society carried about in their heads.

Harriet Lane, First Lady and a few years older than Teresa, had been given a respectable but lower ranking on this list. Virginia Clay thought that Harriet possessed a no-nonsense, firm-faced, straight-parted directness, but beauty was made of more complex equations than this. According to Mrs. Roger Pryor, Harriet Lane, though “universally admired . . . lacked magnetism . . . a very handsome, fair, blue-eyed, self-centered young woman.”

One high-ranked beauty who would become a close friend of Teresa’s was Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a woman from a Southern-leaning family in Maryland. Rose was eminently amusing and had what people thought of as a Dixie kind of openness, masking a craftiness more profound than that of Mrs. Clay. She was the widow of a State Department official, and it was believed that some of her income came from keeping foreign embassies abreast of what was said by senior officials and politicians at social events in Washington. She was in her way practicing for what would become a significant and tragic career as a Southern spy. In addition to Rose Greenhow, Mrs. Alicia Pendleton, wife of Ohio
congressman George Pendleton and sister of Philip Barton Key, was usually listed among the more beauteous of Washington, as was John Slidell’s wife, a Louisiana Creole woman.

But Mrs. Pugh, the wife of Senator George Ellis Pugh from Ohio, topped the rankings, was believed to be the most classically exquisite of Washington women, and had a splendid maiden name, Thérèse Chalfont. Like everyone else, Teresa had heard the tale about the night the Austrian ambassador, Chevalier Hulseman, first saw Thérèse Chalfont Pugh and fell to his knees in front of her, declaring to the company that she was not only the most adorable woman in Washington, not only the most adorable in the Americas, but the most adorable in the world. Though perhaps lacking in the reserved self-confidence of the others, Teresa joined Mrs. Pugh and Mrs. Slidell to become one of a triad of Washington’s splendors. Mrs. Clay told people that Teresa was a double for the renowned, luscious diva of her age, Maria Piccolomini. In all these matters, Virginia Clay was certainly the chief social arbiter. People often called the group of Southern congressmen who lodged at Brown’s Hotel the Clay mess, and it was not entirely to honor the powerful Alabama husband, Senator Clement Claiborne Clay, but also to give credit to the resolute, lively, accomplished, and clever wife.
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