American Scoundrel (16 page)

Other observers, apart from the Baylis mother and son, were Mr. Seeley, a housepainter, his wife, and their sixteen-year-old daughter, Matilda. All the Seeleys admitted to being engrossed in, and voyeuristic about, the appearances of Key and Mrs. Sickles. Having lived in Georgetown, they recognized Key, though they depended on local gossip
from such people as Nancy Brown to let them know who the young woman was.
³⁶

Perhaps Key’s greatest achievement was his capacity to retain the loyalty and respect of his staff at City Hall when his desk went unoccupied on most afternoons. He assigned much of his work to an earnest young assistant district attorney, Robert Ould, and spent nearly every weekday afternoon, when he was not actually meeting with Teresa in an intimate setting, trailing her around Washington. John Cooney, who succeeded John Thompson as coachman, first met Key the second day he went to work for the Sickleses. “I met him on the avenue, on the coach; I was on the box, driving Mrs. Sickles in the coach; Mrs. Sickles rang the coach bell; I drew up, and Mr. Key got in; I drove them to Douglas’ green-house, and from there down the avenue.”

Like John Thompson before him, Cooney saw Mr. Key nearly every day. The carriage would meet up with him in the back streets, and he would get in. “He never went from Mrs. Sickles’s house in the coach, or returned with her; he would join her on some part of the journey; he met her pretty much at Douglas’ green-house or at Taylor and Maury’s Bookstore; she was generally there before he was, and then he would enter her coach.” Cooney remembered taking Teresa to the house of Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson, whose wife was receiving visitors. Within a few minutes, Key also appeared at Mrs. Thompson’s reception. A half hour passed, and Teresa emerged, asking Cooney to drive her to the next stop, Mrs. Postmaster General Brown’s. Within ten minutes Key was at the Browns’ as well. The next stop for Teresa was Rose Greenhow’s, and Key turned up there and, later, rolled on as far as Fifteenth Street in the Sickleses’ carriage, alighting before it covered the last few blocks to the home in Lafayette Square. It is more than likely that the polite people whom Key and Teresa visited knew well enough that an affair was in full progress. They may have thought, given Key’s lack of discretion, that Dan had given at least an implied consent, for surely a husband of average attentiveness, one who took even a benign interest in his wife’s movements, must have had certain suspicions.
³⁷

Barton had by now developed the strategy of signaling from the direction
of the Clubhouse toward Teresa’s window in the Stockton Mansion. Bridget Duffy, seeing him one day, remarked, with a pithiness that betrayed that in another life she might have been a wordsmith, “There is Disgrace, waiting to meet Disgust.”

A Washington contractor named Albert Megaffey, who had warned Key the previous summer about his indiscreet mode of proceeding with Mrs. Sickles, met him again at the ball to send off the British ambassador, Lord Napier, held at Willard’s on February 17, 1859. Key used his normal lines on Megaffey: that he had a great friendship for Teresa, that he considered her a child, that he had paternal feelings toward her. He repelled angrily the idea of having anything but kind and fatherly feelings, said Megaffey. But Megaffey raised the matter again a few days after the Napier ball, suggesting to Key that he might be in danger or difficulty. Key raised his hand to the left breast of his coat and said, “I am prepared for any emergencies.”

On the Tuesday of Key’s last week, Teresa gave what would prove to be her final daytime reception as a congressional wife, and the Washington correspondent of the
New York Times
was a guest. The rooms were full of company, including Mr. Key, his familiar horse tethered outside the house. Soft spring sunlight poured in through the windows, and Mrs. Sickles displayed to wonderful effect “her almost girlish beauty, wearing a bouquet of crocuses, the firstlings of the season; [she] seemed the very incarnation of Spring and youth, and the beautiful promise of life.”
³⁸

Dan, distracted by the affair he was conducting with the unknown married woman who met him occasionally in Baltimore, had returned to Washington from a Baltimore assignation on the morning of the Napier ball and was also absorbed by the business of the Thirty-sixth Congress. He was serving on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, but domestic American issues engrossed him and all his colleagues. That winter, on the floor of the House, some of the matters of conflict had included the question of a Northern versus a Southern route for the Pacific railroad. Rather than authorize a Northern route, the Senate voted down yet another transcontinental railroad bill. Southern opposition to
pressure for tariffs to protect Northern industries from foreign competition was a severe test for Dan, but he stuck faithfully with Southern and with transportation interests—with the President, too—in opposing tariffs. The South still expected its Northern supporters to oppose a western homestead act, which would open up new territory above the slavery line. This vote divided the Democratic Party along the same lines as the question of the admission of Kansas. And then, in what was a last flutter of interest in acquiring Cuba, Dan supported, with the rest of his party, the annexation of the island. Buchanan had pushed for renewed negotiations with Spain to purchase Cuba, and Dan voted for the bill of Senator Slidell of Louisiana for an appropriation of $30 million as a down payment. Dan’s committee had already approved the idea earlier that February. But Senate Republicans delayed the bill, as revenge for the Democrats’ delay of the homestead bill. Abolitionist Senator Ben Wade of Ohio asked, “Shall we give niggers to the niggerless, or land to the landless?” Ultimately both parties decided to take the issue of Cuba to the voters in 1860, but internal American peril would rob it of any visibility.
³⁹

These were the preoccupying issues for Dan as Teresa and Key made love in the Sickleses’ carriage and in the house on Fifteenth Street. On the last Wednesday night of February, the Washington correspondent for the
New York Times
saw Teresa, Barton, and Henry Wikoff at the theater together. The story told after the coming tragedy was that a man closely muffled in a shawl questioned a colored woman on Fifteenth Street about Number 383, and then waited for Key to emerge, when, muffling his face still closer, he spoke to Key. It was not Dan, for Dan had not yet been informed about Number 383. To the man from the
Times
, Key did not appear to be burdened by any worries as he, Teresa, and the chevalier laughed and applauded at the theater.

Somewhere else in Washington, a person using the initials R.P.G. was preparing a letter designed to inform the Honorable Daniel Sickles of the treachery of his wife and of his friend Mr. Key.
⁴⁰

T
HIS WAS THE LAST
S
UNDAY OF
F
EBRUARY
, and the parishioners of Washington’s most fashionable church, St. John’s Episcopal, on H Street across from Lafayette Square, had on entering remarked that, after the ice storm of Friday and a frigid Saturday, this was the warmest Sunday of the year thus far. By noon, some said, given the stillness of the air, people on the street would not need their overcoats. The Reverend Smith Pyne, rector of this national parish, was a considerable pulpit orator, whom the President nonetheless thought talked at too great a length. Invoking the prayers for fraternity and the health of the President, he looked out on his divided congregation in the pews.
¹

Here sat many of the potent Southern legislators and their spouses. Their confident, vivacious features seemed to need little help from the humble Nazarene
who had died for their sins. They prayed to an august God that he might prevent abolitionist fervor from splitting asunder the Republic, which represented the highest political achievement of humankind. But directing their prayers to the same deity were antislavery and abolitionist members of the newborn Republican Party, and some antislavery Democrats as well. All these pleas rose as a confusing incense within this white pure space—twined up its columns, wreathed its galleries. Smith Pyne knew these were plaints that God would indeed need to be omniscient to untangle.

It was thus that, with perhaps more emphasis than realism, Pyne told his congregation to depart in peace, out into the variable light of this Washington morning. Farewelling his parishioners on the steps, he could see, across Lafayette Square, the front of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.

From his position on the steps, Pyne could also see the site of closer problems. Nearby on Lafayette Square stood the house occupied by an amiable if worldly congressman representing the Third District of New York, the Honorable Daniel Edgar Sickles, and his extremely young and accomplished wife, Teresa. Only two weeks earlier, the St. John’s rector had been ready to christen their five-year-old daughter. It would have been a splendid event, for the President had agreed to be the godfather, and the beautiful Mrs. Slidell, wife of the senator from Louisiana, was to have been the godmother. Pyne had been willing to conduct the baptismal ceremony not least because he presumed that Teresa Sickles, being an Italian Catholic by upbringing, had probably, already and secretly, had the little girl baptized into that heathenish religion, and it would be a pleasant thing to induct the child into the civilized Episcopal faith, thus saving her from popery.

The child had, however, caught whooping cough, so the christening had been delayed. If Dan Sickles had been at church, Pyne could have inquired after his daughter’s health. But Dan Sickles was only occasionally observant of the rites at this or any church.
²

Pyne had a more recent reason to think of Congressman Sickles. Just yesterday he had seen him, a small but striking and expensively dressed
man, a man normally possessed of considerable social presence, walking in Lafayette Square. The rector and his son were returning home past the White House, and the boy pointed out to his father Congressman Sickles, striding rapidly in the opposite direction. His posture at the time was not appropriate for one considered a darling of Washington society, at least as far as Democrats defined it. His head was thrown back. Pyne saw a wildness and an air of great trouble about him. He would say, “There was a kind of mingled defiant air about him; a desolate air.” Pyne knew all the rumors of a certain New York Tammany unruliness and lawlessness attached to Dan Sickles, but there was usually no trace of that in the urbane and cultivated demeanor Dan brought with him to Washington.
³

Now, less than a hundred yards from where Pyne had made his congenial farewells to his worshipers, something far more dismal than the aftereffects of whooping cough dominated the Stockton Mansion. It was three days since the last sound of joy had been heard there; Thursday had proved to be the last tolerable day. That evening, though the House was in session, Dan Sickles came home for the customary Thursday-night dinner. The distinguished guests that night included Virginia Clay, wife of Senator Clement Claiborne Clay of Alabama, who went there in a threesome with Thérèse Chalfont Pugh, the beautiful Cajun wife of Senator George Ellis Pugh of Ohio, and a Miss Acklin. The two senators’ wives had been liberated from their extremely busy husbands for the evening. Waspish and amusing Mrs. Clay would always remember how young and fragrant Teresa Sickles seemed that evening; so naive and unspoiled that, said Mrs. Clay, “none of the party of which I was one was willing to harbor a belief in the rumors which were then in circulation.” The hostess was more unaffectedly dazzling than usual. She was obviously happy that her daughter, Laura, had recovered from the recent illness, and on that Thursday evening she wore a filmy muslin gown, decorated with the outline of the crocus, and a broad sash of brocaded ribbon about her waist. Her dark hair was dressed with yellow crocus blooms—the crocus being a favorite flower in Washington. “I never saw her again,” said Mrs. Clay, “but the picture of which she
formed the center was so fair and innocent, it fixed itself permanently in my mind.”
⁴

The chief guest that evening was Mrs. Bennett of New York, the plain little Scots wife of James Gordon Bennett, the powerful editor of the
New York Herald
. Mrs. Bennett was, among other things, a spiritualist; she had attended séances in Washington and didn’t mind telling people about them. She was the guest Dan Sickles would take to dinner on his elbow. But much of the duty of entertaining the table that night would fall on that exceptionally amusing fellow the Chevalier Henry Wikoff. Other guests were the Philadelphia lawyer and Democrat Daniel Dougherty and his wife, and a young woman Teresa Sickles had met on New Year’s Eve and befriended as a fellow spirit, Miss Octavia Ridgeley, who was to stay overnight.
⁵

The meat served that evening came from a Mr. Emerson, at whose stall in the Washington market house Mrs. Sickles had appeared surprisingly early, between eight and nine o’clock. She had been there with the district attorney of the District of Columbia, Philip Barton Key, who was also abroad early, given that he had been to the theater the night before. Emerson the butcher knew the Sickleses well—he had been dealing with them for two Congresses. Teresa gave Mr. Emerson her order that morning, asked him how much it came to, and handed Mr. Key her purse, saying, “Pay Mr. Emerson.” The district attorney had taken out of the purse a ten-dollar goldpiece to complete the transaction. But though he had his part in acquiring the meat, Key was not at dinner at the Stockton Mansion that night.
⁶

The excellent dinner now eaten, the guests sat for a while in the drawing room, and at about ten o’clock began to leave for the Thursday-night hop at Willard’s Hotel. Teresa Sickles pretended to be casual about Willard’s. In fact, she was sick with anticipation. If Dan let her go, she would see Key. At last Dan suggested she go off in a carriage with courtly Henry Wikoff and Miss Ridgeley. He would follow after his last guests left the house. It was only a few blocks from the Stockton Mansion, past the White House and the elegant Treasury Building, to
Willard’s, but a carriage was
de rigueur
, not least because the roads of Washington were notoriously mucky in winter.