American Scoundrel (20 page)

It happened that at that second of threat there were many people in the environs of Lafayette Square, but Dan’s fury transcended that reality. Most of these witnesses would say later that Dan mentioned a dishonored bed. Butterworth claimed that before anything else happened, Barton Key’s hand flashed into his vest or side coat pocket, and that he took a step in the direction of Dan Sickles. As Barton stepped forward, Dan produced a gun from his overcoat pocket and fired from close range. That first shot produced little more than a contusion on one of Barton Key’s hands. When Dan raised his arm to fire again, Barton jumped at him, seizing him by the collar of his coat with his left hand. Dan backed from the sidewalk into the street and dropped the gun he held, a derringer, onto the sidewalk. Some said he jettisoned it deliberately; others, accidentally. Barton grabbed him from behind when Dan turned as if to leave, though that was not his intention. All this untoward grappling between two eminent servants of the Republic was occurring on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue, the corner of the square and of the little pathway called Madison Place, connecting Pennsylvania and H Street. Had the President been at any of the front windows of the White House, he would have had a clear view of the untoward struggle between Key and Sickles. But he was in his office on the south side, looking—if he had time to—over the unseemly swamp that is now the Ellipse, toward the Washington Monument and the Potomac.

At last, Dan pulled himself from Barton’s hold, swung around, and hauled another gun from his overcoat pocket. Barton backed a few steps
up Madison Place toward the Clubhouse, crying, “Don’t murder me!” He reached inside his own coat, took out the opera glasses, and threw them at Dan. They hit the congressman, who thought the gesture contemptible, and fell to the ground. Butterworth said that at this moment he was still sure Key was armed, and that Dan must have believed it too. In any case, this show of ineffectual aggression from Barton occurred just before Dan fired again, from a distance of a few feet.

The second bullet struck Barton in the upper leg. Perhaps the wound which resulted reflected the fact that Key was taller than Dan, though Dan was accustomed to using a pistol. His friends in the Tammany target clubs said his eye was accurate. So it may have been that the wound was also a near-miss symbolic injury, for the bullet entered Key’s trousers just two inches below his groin, high enough that it exited in the fold between buttocks and upper leg. The inflicting of this wound was witnessed by at least seven people, one of them a young White House page from South Carolina, J. H. W. Bonitz, who had just left the staff quarters of the White House and was emerging through its gateway on to the avenue. Behind Barton as he backed into Madison Place, Thomas Martin, a Treasury Department clerk, was leaving the Clubhouse, where he had been chatting with three colleagues. On top of that, a Mr. McCormack, of the corner house—the Maynard house—on Pennsylvania Avenue and Madison Place, saw the whole thing from his seat at a second-floor window.

“I’m shot,” Barton announced and staggered toward the sidewalk. He asked Dan not to fire again. Dan still shouted, calling him a villain, ranting about his dishonored marriage. Barton leaned against a tree outside the Maynard house, but he could not hold on to it and slid to the pavement, where he lay on his right side, with his hand over the hole near his groin.

Had Dan stopped, with a nonfatal blood debt having been paid— the coroner would find that the bullet missed the main artery of the thigh—he would have been easily vindicated. The presumption that Key was carrying a gun would have been considered reasonable not only in terms of the culture of Washington, but from assertions Key had
made to other people. But Dan’s nature required the extreme sacrifice. The witnesses heard Barton cry, “Don’t shoot me. Murder! Murder!” When Dan pulled the trigger again, the gun merely made a snapping noise, and did not fire. He cocked the weapon again, placed the barrel close to Key, and fired.

This time the bullet entered beneath Barton’s heart, passing between the eleventh and twelfth ribs. The bullet entered the large lobe of the liver, punctured the right cavity of the chest, and hit the ribs at Barton’s back, lodging under the skin. Immediately, the left side of his chest began to fill with blood.

Either because they were too far away or because they were stunned, the witnesses had not intervened. Even Sam Butterworth, who would be depicted in the illustrated papers as either standing coolly by or leaning easefully on the railings of Lafayette Square, did not step in. The young Treasury man, Thomas Martin, who had just come from the Clubhouse, was the most active witness, and rushed back inside the building to mobilize his three friends.

Dan now moved close to Key’s body for the
coup de grâce
. The gun, its barrel close to Key’s head, again misfired. Thomas Martin, back on the street, was able to get between the two men. Dan asked him, “Is the scoundrel dead?” Martin took Barton Key in his arms and looked up at Dan. “He has violated my bed,” Dan said as justification for what had just happened. One of Martin’s friends, who put his hand on Dan’s shoulder and begged him not to fire again, was offered the same justification.

Butterworth, who some would believe was pleased to stand by while Key was punished, stepped up, took Dan by the arm, and led him away toward the corner of H Street and Madison Place. As he walked, Dan put the gun in his overcoat pocket. Dr. Coolidge, an army surgeon who lived on H Street and who had heard the unmistakable and successive sound of gunshots, was on his way, running to Lafayette Square with his surgeon’s bag. Martin and his fellow federal employees were engaged in carrying Barton Key into the Clubhouse. They placed him on the floor in one of the first rooms inside the door, and someone tilted a chair
upside down so that Key could lean his head and shoulders against its legs and rungs. When Martin felt for the pulse and found it thin, he asked Barton if there were any messages he would like passed on to his children, but Key, drowning in his own blood, did not seem to grasp the question. Dr. Coolidge, entering the scene, found Key “pulseless.” Key “partially breathed twice,” but when Dr. Coolidge opened Barton’s shirt and trousers, looking for his wounds, he decided that nothing could be done. His initial assessment was that the chest wound would prove fatal, and even as he inspected it, Barton died.
²⁰

Young Bonitz, the White House page, ran back to the White House at once. In the informal presidential household of the day, he was able to get immediate access to the office and tell the President that Congressman Sickles had just shot District Attorney Key. Bonitz knew, from the tremors of Old Buck’s head, that the news had nearly felled the gray and aged President. “I was afraid it would happen!” said the President. “I must see Sickles—I must see him at once!” As the page detailed for the President the sequence of events he had just witnessed, it became apparent to Buchanan that Dan, who, according to Bonitz, had vanished across Lafayette Square, could be in great peril. Even apart from personal affections and sadness, the President believed that such a serviceable and promising Democrat needed to be saved. Clearly there would be a trial, and that meant a risk that certain details of his own connection with the Sickleses would emerge.

The President did not spend much time considering the law-enforcement aspect of Dan’s act. No message was sent from the White House to the federal marshal. No message went to Attorney General Jeremiah Black. President Buchanan had other priorities. Quite inaccurately, he warned the relatively unworldly Bonitz, a young man from rural South Carolina, that as an eyewitness he was in a difficult situation; he could be held in jail without bail pending his being called as a witness. He should leave Washington straightaway, and return home on indefinite leave. Hence an American President, often referred to as the Chief Magistrate of the Republic, urged a witness—for all he knew
the only witness to the murder—to flee from his legal responsibility. The President searched around to give Bonitz a personal memento, and came up with a new razor, handing it and some money to the young man. Bonitz packed his valise and rushed off to the Potomac to cross to the far side and take the Wilmington train homeward. In an age when the press believed it impolite to keep watch on a Sabbath, or any other day, on the White House lawn, the description went utterly unobserved.
²¹

As Barton Key breathed his last in the Clubhouse, Dan, still accompanied by Butterworth, was walking resolutely toward the house of Attorney General Black, a few blocks northeast on Franklin Park. Once there, he went inside alone, for he had decided on reflection to send Butterworth doubling back to Lafayette Square to collect any helpful evidence, especially the opera glasses, which could credibly have been mistaken for an instant for a drawn pistol or something else of danger. At the Attorney General’s door, Dan spoke to a servant, who led him to a back parlor, where two other gentlemen were waiting to see Mr. Black. One was a man named Haldemar, editor of a Democratic paper in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the other a former senator named Richard Brodhead. With surreal politeness, Dan began to discuss Pennsylvania politics with Haldemar. Brodhead mentioned that Dan had some mud on his boots, which he might want to remove. Dan got up without a protest and left the room to attend to the problem, the mud on his boots being the only clue to the disorder that now claimed his life. Returning from outside, he ran into Attorney General Black in the hall, calmly explained his situation, and surrendered his gun. To his visitors, Black appeared to be far more distraught than Congressman Sickles as he came into the parlor and informed the editor and the former senator. Then Dan strolled in and joined them. Both visitors offered to go with Dan to a magistrate, and one of them surmised that the offense might be a bailable one. Dan said, “If all the facts were known, it would be. For God knows I would be justified.”

Butterworth, returned from Lafayette Square, was admitted to the house by Black’s servant and presented to Dan and the company the
opera glasses with mud on their rims. One of the men asked what was the news of Barton. Was he dead? Butterworth said that he was. Dan muttered, “One wretch less in the world.”

The news of the shooting spread exponentially through the capital during the remainder of the afternoon. At Brown’s Hotel, where Senator Clement Claiborne Clay of Alabama and lively Virginia Clay lived, the senator burst in on his wife and cried, “A horrible, horrible thing has happened, Virginia! Sickles has killed Key; killed him most brutally, while he was unarmed!” Through all the nearby hotels and boarding-houses where legislators lived during their service in Washington, the astonishing information ran, and a large crowd moved up from Willard’s to Lafayette Square. The journalists of the national and capital newspapers arrived and began to interview any witness or servant from the houses around the square, and pressed their way into the overcrowded Clubhouse. All the inquiry and surmise centered on Dan and on the murdered Key. Teresa was more the material of the crime, and no journalist wondered whether, drawn by the sound of gunfire, she had inadvertently seen her lover’s killing, or what state this had left her in. The questions were never answered. Teresa had placed herself beyond inquiry.

One witness to all the excitement, a friend of Dan’s named McClusky, said that a suddenly assembled trail of people, including himself, had followed Dan and Butterworth to the Attorney General’s house and joined the crowd there. First Butterworth left the house, to go back to the Stockton Mansion. Two Washington police officers, summoned by Attorney General Black, went inside, and there was fevered wonderment as Dan came out, accompanied by the police, and got into a carriage with them. Such a press of citizens blocked the carriage that McClusky got back to the Sickleses’ house first and told Wooldridge what had happened. Somehow Wooldridge had escaped seeing the events on the far side of the park, had continued to ease the intensity of the afternoon by looking at his stereoscopic views, sitting by the library window with the westering afternoon light to help augment his enjoyment. He must have seen crowds assembling in the area, but had preferred
not to inquire about them. This orderly, intelligent, maimed young man had retreated from the pace of events. Perhaps, after all, the greensward of Lafayette Square and the trees around its margins had absorbed the shots and screams. Teresa herself was still mercifully unaware. When Wooldridge heard the news, he was overwhelmed. “I never want to see such another day,” he cried, turning his face.
²²

Crowds saw Dan enter the Stockton Mansion’s front door. Others of Dan’s friends turned up, flooding the lower floors. Some may have had a fleeting voyeur impulse to lay eyes on the exquisite Teresa. Two of Dan’s neighbors, the retired grocer John McBlair and Senator John Slidell of Louisiana, arrived. Like everyone else that afternoon, Slidell was taken by the way in which Dan fluctuated between calmness and desperation. The man from whose house Butterworth had come this morning, Senator William Gwinn, a habitual gun-toter himself, brought another friend of Dan’s, former Kansas governor Robert J. Walker. Dan told them all, “A thousand thanks for coming to see me under these circumstances.” Then he threw himself on a sofa, covered his face, and emitted “an agony of unnatural and unearthly sounds.”

On the arrival of Mayor James Berret, who had spoken to Key that morning, and of Chief of Police Goddard, Dan handed over the opera glasses. He then turned to go upstairs, but the two police officers at the door did not know whether to let him, for fear of any vengeance he might take against Teresa. At last they agreed that he could mount the stairs if he promised not to harm his wife. Dan declared he had no such intention.

He found Teresa in Octavia Ridgeley’s room, still lying on the floor, her dress disheveled. Laura was being entertained in the kitchen by Bridget Duffy and Octavia. She was affected by the tumult in the house and the extreme misery of her parents. Yet this day was one that would define her unwitting life. Teresa, having stayed all day in Octavia’s room, stupefied, in a torpor of grief, rose as Dan arrived at the door. Whether she feared for her life, as the men downstairs had, is unlikely, but this was a confrontation editors and presumably readers of the illustrated papers wished to see reproduced. The scene would, reliably or
otherwise, be depicted as a
tableau vivant
, a scene from a play, in the papers, Dan with clenched fists, Teresa looking over her shoulder with her hand to her heart. A New York newspaper report said that Dan uttered merely one sentence: “I’ve killed him.” If there was any accuracy to this, it must have come from friends on the stairs, following him for the purpose of intervening if necessary. Again, given that Teresa herself was beyond the pale, no one bothered passing on any information about her reaction. She had cherished and succored Key as recently as Wednesday afternoon. Was she edified, vindicated, appalled, griefstricken to hear that her seducer—or was it her truest love?—had been fatally punished?