American Scoundrel (13 page)

But so many Southern senators such as Clay and Slidell denounced the decision that, as Southern newspapers grew thick with long editorials threatening secession, Buchanan gave way. A proslavery convention meeting in Lecompton devised a citizen referendum question crafted so as to produce a Kansas in which present slaveholders were allowed to retain their slaves. Stephen Douglas, the famous Democratic senator from Illinois, denounced this grossly skewed referendum question and warned Old Buck that if he insisted on this version, he, Douglas, would oppose the issue on the floor of the House. “Mr. Douglas,” Buchanan told the little senator from Illinois, “I desire you to remember that no Democrat ever differed from an administration of his own choice without being crushed.”

The two men represented the schism in the Democratic Party between those who wanted to placate the South, and save the Union that way—men such as Buchanan and his young acolyte Dan Sickles—and those who, like Douglas, while not seeking to abolish slavery in the South, could not stomach its extension, by stealth, threat, or the sort of chicanery resorted to in Lecompton.

The proslavery referendum question was put forth in Kansas and was passed, because antislavery men refused to participate in it. Again the thunder of Southern fury and secessionist threat was heard from the Southern legislators, aimed at getting Kansas admitted on their terms. “If Kansas is driven out of the Union for being a slave state,” asked South Carolina’s Senator Hammond, “can any slave state remain in it with honor?” This style of rhetoric always worked with James Buchanan, whose chief dread was that he might be remembered as the President under whose administration the Union was destroyed. Responding to graphic Southern warnings, he sent over to the Capitol for ratification by Congress the proposal that Kansas be admitted to the Union as the sixteenth slave state.

On the floor of the House, Dan Sickles gave his voice and vote to
Buchanan, that is, to the admission of a slave Kansas, as a means of—in his eyes—preventing a constitutional and economic calamity for the United States and of putting bloody Kansas to rest.

In the Senate, Stephen Douglas was the chief Democratic denouncer of the admission of Kansas. By this brave show of principle, he sacrificed the support of Southern Democrats and their Northern allies in his bid for the presidency. He was praised hugely in the North for his principled stand, and denounced eloquently in the South for the “filth of his defiant recreancy.” During an all-night session of the House, a Republican named Grow of Pennsylvania crossed to the Democratic side to talk with a few Northern Democrat allies. A friend of Dan’s, Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina, shouted at Grow, “Go back to your side of the House, you black Republican puppy!” Grow answered with a jibe about slave drivers, and then began wrestling with Keitt and knocked him down. Now men from both sides joined the mêlée. “There was some fifty middle-aged and elderly gentlemen pitching into each other like so many Tipperary savages,” said one observer, “most of them incapable, from want of wind and muscle, of doing each other any serious harm.” But it was fortunate that no weapons were produced, for the fury was such that they might have been used. Dan, with his augmented sense of statesmanship, did not figure in this fracas.

Then, in the Southern-dominated Senate, the admission of Kansas was approved, but in the House, twenty-two Northern Democrats voted with the Republicans to defeat it.
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Through that acrimonious winter of 1857–58, Dan and Teresa had established themselves thoroughly in Washington, finding a place on the roster of notables who opened their houses on a regular basis to visitors. Teresa was delighted to be an active partner in Dan’s political ascent. In preparation for her at-homes and dinners, she shopped in the D.C. markets, accompanied by her servant to do the toting, for brant and canvas-back duck and sora (marsh birds), oysters from the Maryland and Virginia seashore, and terrapin. She kept vats of salt water in her pantry for the storage of oysters and the terrapin used for turtle soup. Between buying fine produce at the market and delicacies at Charles Gautier’s famous
salon of French fancy goods on Pennsylvania Avenue, and applying oneself to the demands of high fashion, life was extremely crowded for women like Teresa. Some of the plainest dinners were served in the White House, where “Mr. Buchanan set an example of republican simplicity.” But Teresa had to try harder than the eccentric Buchanan, and preparing for such dinners as she offered visitors each Thursday evening was a demanding process, to which Dan contributed nothing but his company.
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Tending her personal appearance and hairstyle—the toilette, as people called it—took a woman hours, whether she was going out or entertaining at home. Virginia Clay gave in detail a typical process she had herself either endured or enjoyed. The hair in the front was stiffened with a beltlike device, called the bandolier, and formed into a sleek, smooth bandeau, framing the face. Behind, all the hair was tightly tied, low at the nape, and then divided into two parts, each woven with many strands into a single braid. Simple fashion, said Mrs. Clay, such as wearing one’s hair with apparent informality,
à la grecque
, with flowers wreathed over it, or a golden dagger or arrow to secure it, gave way to far more ornate and demanding hairstyles as the decade neared an end, with heavy braids wound like a coronet over the head, often topped with a tiara of velvet and pearls. As for dresses, ornate “basques with postilion backs became the order of the day.” The dressing done, and the coach brought around to the sweeping stairs at the front of the house, Teresa was ready to go forth to enchant and, in some cases, ravish the sensibilities of the people of Washington.
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For when not preparing for her own Stockton Mansion events, Teresa was on most weekday afternoons driven in her enclosed carriage by the Sickleses’ Scots coachman, John Thompson, to the receptions held by the wives of other legislators. There she would hear further details of the history of Philip Barton Key, who himself frequently visited these at-homes. The consensus in the drawing rooms was that he had been very much in love with his wife, Ellen, who had died in 1855 of unspecified causes. Since the time of her death came not long after the birth of the Keys’ youngest child, Lizzie, it may have been caused by some
lasting postpartum malaise. Though he was a large muscular man, a good horseman, a militia captain, and a public official with a relatively demanding job, Key behaved as if his health were frail. He would often excuse himself from the office, and some of his work fell onto his deputy and his chief clerk. But he was rarely absent from the social rounds, which, his friends indulgently agreed, he needed in view of the grievous loss of his beloved Ellen. On many occasions, Mr. Barton Key would arrive at the same reception as Teresa. Some of the older women began to ask one another, amusedly, whether Barton was following Teresa around. They thought it, at first, a harmless and gallant way for a gentleman to behave. At the time Key began to feel a potent attraction to Mrs. Sickles, the same feeling as had been observed in a number of younger men, his eldest child, Alice, was nearing twelve years. The two middle children were Mary and James, and Lizzie was nearly four. The sentimental liked to say that Key lived separately from his children— they in K Street, Washington, near the courts, under the care of a genteel former relative; he in Georgetown—because they reminded him too acutely of his lost Ellen. This made him a suitable escort for the wives of legislators who were too busy with daytime and evening sessions to attend receptions and balls, or who were forced to arrive at them late.
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Early that winter, before Teresa’s association with Key became a habitual matter, the eighteen-year-old Henry Watterson, whose father was a newspaperman in Washington, and a friend of the Clays, would be called on to escort Teresa to dinners and dances. Later in the season, when he was ill, Teresa became one of his nurses, visiting Willard’s, to which his parents had moved, to sit with the boy at the cost of social engagements. As a child, Henry had been a playmate of President Pierce’s ill-fated son, Benny, and the Watterson parents feared that Henry might follow Benny into the shades. They need not have done so—he would live until 1921, and at the end of his life claimed to have had close personal contact with every President from Andrew Jackson to Warren G. Harding. Teresa also had her place in his memoirs, as the nurse and the exquisite wronged presence. But then, to the savage disappointment of Henry Watterson and the young clerk Sam Beekman, Key took over
the role of squiring Mrs. Sickles as a permanent task. Chevalier Wikoff had occasionally escorted Teresa to social events, and accepted Teresa’s predilection for Key with a greater composure than did the younger men.
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Commentators would later say that it was treacherous of Key to take advantage of the task of escort to Teresa which Dan entrusted to him, but many, including Virginia Clay, thought that Sickles, by design or neglect, “forced his wife into Barton’s company.” There may have been some justice in this observation. A later letter of Teresa’s to her friend Florence mentioned wistfully that a second Sickles baby was unlikely. In any case, Barton and Teresa began spending a great deal of time with each other that winter of 1857–58. People often noticed Key’s gray horse, Lucifer, tethered outside the Stockton Mansion and were aware that, since Key generally mixed with Southern Democrats, this was the most intense friendship he had ever developed with Northern ones.
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Unlike Key, who gave many visible indications of his affection for Teresa, Dan, except for his follies with Fanny White, did not so egregiously wear his heart on his sleeve. Despite his capacity for tears at the loss of friends and his fervid loyalty to his brothers-in-faction, he was careful in his love affairs. He conveniently caught the train and met one of his lovers at Barnum’s Hotel in Baltimore, neutral ground, since the woman he met was perceived as being married and had herself probably traveled south from Philadelphia for the assignations.

Dan was capable of evoking the same intense and dedicated affection in his women friends as he had in Teresa, and that accounted for his capacity to attract women of respectable background, only a few of whose names we know. Fixing a woman with his intense, glittering eye, he would utter all the requisite imagery of desperate love. As with other such men, his ultimate failure was that there was never one of them, not even Teresa, to whom he rendered the degree of enduring devotion that the imagery promised. But that each of his lovers believed him to be her own dear Dan (or Edgar, his second name) is shown by an unsigned, undated letter from a married woman with whom he was engaged in an affair.

The scene the letter evokes is clear. A married woman has just come home to her affluent and tedious household to find a note from Dan. Seated in the same parlor as her husband, who has arrived back from his office, she replies to Dan’s (Edgar’s) note while a servant woman waits by, anxious to go back to her tenement but having the task, on the way, of dropping the letter to Dan’s office or house.

People began to notice that Key and Teresa were now together not merely in the locations demanded by a busy social life but in unexpected places. One of the earliest of these observations was made by Dan’s congressional colleague John B. Haskin, of Westchester County. In late March 1858, Dan was going away on business in New York, and he asked John Haskin to “drop up occasionally and see Teresa and inquire if she wanted anything.” The day after this request, Haskin, passing the White House in a carriage with his wife and children on the way to Georgetown to get some shoes, remembered Sickles’s request. (Very likely, too, he saw Lucifer tethered by the house.) Although Haskin was in a hurry, he drove up to the Stockton Mansion, helped Mrs. Haskin down, rushed up the stairs, opened the front door, and, hearing a noise in the little study, opened the door into it without knocking. He found Mrs. Sickles and Mr. Key seated at a round table that held a large bowl of salad, which Teresa was mixing. To compound the compromising aspect of Key and Teresa’s being together here, a bottle of champagne and two partly consumed glasses sat on the table. Haskin knew that Key and Mrs. Sickles were friends—he had seen them together once or twice at
the theater, once or twice riding on Pennsylvania Avenue—but their presence here looked improper enough to cause Haskin and Mrs. Haskin sharp embarrassment.

Haskin excused his abrupt entrance, and Teresa rose, blushed, and invited Mr. and Mrs. Haskin to take a glass of wine with her. The two couples sat together, forcing conversation, until Haskin pleaded that the shoes must be bought, and he and Mrs. Haskin left. On entering the carriage, Mrs. Haskin said to her husband, “Mrs. Sickles is a bad woman.”

Shortly after that, Haskin met the two again, once more in a situation likely to cause comment. Taking a short cut through the old cemetery on the edge of Georgetown, he saw Key and Teresa riding together. Key, either there at the cemetery or at another time, approached Haskin for the purposes of defending Teresa’s honor and girlish innocence and of emphasizing the propriety of his paternal feelings toward her. Men like Haskin would never forgive Barton’s lies on that matter. They lived in a world where their fellows might be guilty of folly but, once discovered, were expected to have too much gentlemanly honor to dissemble.
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The obsessed young Interior Department bureaucrat Samuel Beekman appeared to have observed contacts between Key and Teresa more systematically than anyone else. One night in March 1858, shortly before Haskin surprised Teresa with Key, Beekman met up with another New Yorker and junior official of the Interior department, a man named Bacon, at Willard’s for drinks. The two young public servants, who had often met each other at Dan’s, were devoted to the congressman and looked upon him as a patron. According to Beekman, it was Bacon who raised the question of Mr. Key’s attentions to Mrs. Sickles “in the most confidential tone, making several very indelicate remarks about Mrs. Sickles.”