American Scoundrel (23 page)

It took some days before Maria Bagioli saw any improvement in Teresa’s condition. But after a week, Teresa began to respond to the reminders of motherly duty toward Laura. When she seemed well enough to make a journey north to New York, Mrs. Bagioli brought Laura in a carriage on a bright late-winter day to say goodbye to her father. Dan had worried that the prison might create terror in the child, but the little girl passed without a qualm from the clear sunlight into the vaulted room with bare whitewashed walls and brick floor. After greeting her father and telling him excitedly that she and her mother were going back to New York, she explored the room and found in one corner a rack containing antiquated muskets, which had been replaced by the new side arms the guards now carried. She could tell, not least from the bars of the window and the whitewashed walls, that this was a strange place, and she asked her father why he did not come home. Dan told her he had a great deal of work to do at the moment and could not leave. She asked a barrage of further questions, her face becoming more troubled, and finally she began to sob. In the end she was taken away by her grandmother, carrying with her a little bunch of flowers Dan had given her. Dan, according to one observer, hid his face in his pillow and wept the most bitter tears he had shed since being in prison.
¹²

Dan having waived a formal hearing before a magistrate, his hope of soon being in front of the grand jury was thwarted by the sudden death of Postmaster General Aaron Brown. The grand jury could not sit until March 12, after the funeral. Once Mr. Brown had been buried, the
municipal officials summoned a grand jury as quickly as possible rather than let the press frenzy and berserk speculation have an even longer period in which to grow.
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Among the members of the jury was Barton’s relative Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, whose splendid house still stands beside the location of the Clubhouse. Dan’s lawyers decided not to challenge his right to be on the panel.

The grand jury began hearing testimony at City Hall on March 14, two jurors to a desk, placed in an oval around a table at which officials and lawyers sat. The illustration in
Frank Leslie’s
showed a freed black man, probably Mr. Gray, from whom Barton had rented the Fifteenth Street house, in spectacular plaid pants and holding a top hat, sitting in the witness’s chair. Dan was not summoned before this tribunal during its ten days of deliberation; that the killing had occurred and Congressman Sickles’s responsibility for it, were not in dispute, the only question being whether the bill made out by Acting District Attorney Robert Ould would be returned as a true bill of murder. The attendance of the two established Washington attorneys who represented Dan before the grand jury, Daniel Ratcliffe and Allen Bowie Magruder, was little but a necessary formality.

Dan was now given his trial date—Monday, April 4—and his legal team was assembled. In addition to Allen Magruder and Daniel Ratcliffe, considered keen lawyers by D.C. standards, Dan had employed the services of a former Alabama congressman, a Jewish Southerner named Philip Phillips, who had stayed on in Washington after his term in Congress to open a law office and who enjoyed great repute at the Washington bar. Magruder’s elderly but respected partner, Sam Chilton, promised to help with case law and occasional advocacy. Even more eminent a lawyer was Edwin Stanton, who would achieve wide renown as Secretary of War in the coming conflict but who was already well regarded as a jurist and had just returned to Washington from California, where he had successfully settled land claims resulting from the war against Mexico. Like that of the late Mr. Key, Edwin Stanton’s house was on C Street, but unlike Ratcliffe and Magruder, he and his young wife had been intimates of the Sickleses and had attended dinners at the
Stockton Mansion. Stanton was, in an unconventional way, impressive physically, for although he was chubby about the face, his head was titanic, and his eye and his manner piercing. His legal forte had always been civil and constitutional matters, and there were some potential constitutional matters in this trial, since the District of Columbia borrowed much of its statutes and case law on homicide, marriage, and adultery from such states as Virginia and Maryland. Stanton’s very face on the team gave Dan’s defense a seriousness it might not otherwise have possessed.

When it came to counsel from New York, Dan had had no reason to go beyond his concerned friend James Topham Brady. Unlike many Tammany men, Brady was admired and even loved by society in general, but on top of that, though his legal repertoire was wide, he had been involved successfully in more than fifty murder cases. His parents had emigrated from Ireland, and his father had been a progressive schoolmaster in Lower Manhattan who had then studied law. Brady was born in New York, in 1815, but many sentimentally assumed his eloquence came from his Irish inheritance. As soon as he was admitted to the bar, in 1836, people became aware of his unusual forensic ability. He was a tireless student of the briefs he received and left nothing to chance, but he combined this exacting professional attitude with the greatest urbanity and an almost manic politeness to opposing counsel and witnesses. “His addresses to jury and court,” wrote an observer, “flattered the listener by many classical illusions and were extremely seductive.” He had a much gentler demeanor than did Stanton, and, as one commentator said, “What Mr. Brady lavishes in the
suaviter
[gentle methods], Mr. Stanton makes up for in the
fortiter
[strong methods].” In 1843, he became at the age of twenty-eight the district attorney for New York City, and two years later was rewarded with the post of corporation counsel. He had been offered the cabinet post of Attorney General in the government of Van Buren, but declined. As a civil lawyer, he had achieved in one case an award that long remained a record: $300,000.
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More germane in this case was Brady’s record in murder trials, as a result of which he made a special study of pleas of insanity. He had
raised the matter of insanity in two famous will cases. And in the murder trial of a man named Cole, he had invoked the defense of “moral insanity,” permanent insanity induced by extreme moral outrage. He had not yet attempted to have a client acquitted on a plea of
temporary
insanity, nor had any other lawyer in America. But he saw it as the only way to deal with Dan’s case.

Another New York member of Dan’s team was his old friend John Graham, of the Tammany Hall Graham family. The Graham brothers combined, in the same New York manner as Sickles, toughness and urbanity, and John Graham had already represented Dan in the libel case against Bennett of the
New York Herald
.

The last of Dan’s lawyers was something of a darling of Irish and Democratic America, Thomas Francis Meagher, the former Irish convict who had escaped from Australia. He brought Dan’s legal team to eight. Meagher was in his mid-thirties, good-looking, animated, as fashionable a dresser as Dan Sickles—in fact, more of a dandy—and one of the foremost orators of his day. Handsome Tom Meagher was considered the most genial-looking of the lawyers in Dan’s defense, but he may also have been the least experienced, since he divided his time between speaking tours around the United States, Tammany politics, Irish activism, contributing to newspapers and editing one of his own, and sharing the company of his steel heiress wife, Libby Townsend, whose family had the proud claim of having forged the enormous chain the Continental Congress had ordered slung across the Hudson to impede armed British vessels during the Revolutionary War. Smiling Meagher was hopeful that the Key murder case would both save his friend Dan and revive his own intermittent law career, for some potential clients suspected that his earlier admission to the bar had been more a reward for his services to the Irish cause than a recognition of legal scholarship.

During meetings in the home of Edwin Stanton, and in the National, where Brady wanted the defense team to dwell, Dan’s lawyers devised a defense strategy based on the plea of temporary insanity. Brady had certain problems of personal principle to sort out, as well. Deprived of his parents when still a boy, he had become the head of his family and
had never married, yet for a celibate, he had spoken a great deal about women’s affairs. In a case involving marital rights, he was interpreted as justifying the husband’s absolute bodily control of his wife. A number of newspapers and the women’s rights movement had denounced him. So he accepted an invitation to give an address on the issue, along with the famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Like Beecher, Brady attacked much apparent gallantry toward women as “enlightened selfishness” on the part of men. And, like Beecher, he expressed the view of the era that woman was either noble, “in her own sphere . . . a wife, a mother and a companion,” or else “the most wretched thing that ever was expressed on earth this side of perdition.” In an age in which syphilis, tuberculosis, and other horrifying diseases commonly struck underfed, underpaid, and underprotected women, it was true that the woman who lost or spurned her marriage did tend to express in her body the physical signs of perdition. So, a progressive male for his era, Brady believed that the true chivalry of manhood consisted in genuine help to women. This help was most needed by a woman when “the world has pronounced against her a dreadful sentence of outlawry.” It was at that stage that a man should step from the “common ranks of his fellows, though this step might subject him to suspicion and censure,” and, taking the fallen woman by the hand, raise her “from the degradation to which she has been assigned, and restore her to humble comforts, if not indeed to happiness.” It was presumed that his lecture had had no small effect on the state legislature in Albany, which had, at the time of the trial, just passed measures acknowledging women’s right of ownership to property even within marriage.

In the prison, when Brady sat with Dan and acquainted him with the defense he intended to run, he may have been tentative, expecting that Dan would consider a plea of momentary insanity vaguely insulting and dishonorable. But either by persuasion or as a result of Dan’s belief that he had been reduced to an Othello-like temporary madness by Key’s behavior, Dan accepted Brady’s strategy. Brady could thus give practical form to his beliefs concerning temporary insanity in the trial of Dan Sickles, his friend and client, but he would need to violate his tender
feelings toward so-called fallen women. For though Dan no longer had vengeful feelings toward Teresa, the more of a pariah Brady could make her out to be, the more likely he could prove deranging provocation of his client.
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Tasks were allocated around the legal team. Mr. Phillips, the former Southern congressman, was to be in charge of jury selection. Thomas Francis Meagher would be the creator of imagery and oratory, especially for use in the speeches of John Graham and James Topham Brady, who much admired his eloquence. Graham, as friend and counsel, would address the jury to open Dan’s defense, but not until the prosecution had completed its initial examination of witnesses. Brady would then lead the examination and cross-examination of witnesses. But Stanton’s job would be to argue matters of law with elderly Judge Crawford, who was considered his intellectual inferior, and would summarize the case toward the end of the trial, before Brady made the address-in-chief to the jury. Ratcliffe and Magruder would serve in a junior capacity on matters of both fact and law.
¹⁶

As the opening day of the trial neared, Barton’s brother-in-law George Pendleton gave the enciphered letter found on Key’s body to another brother-in-law, Charles Howard, who took it home to Baltimore and tried to decode it. Pendleton had already searched the house on Fifteenth Street with the owner, John Gray. According to Pendleton, they found nothing belonging to Barton, but Dan’s lawyers would suspect, or pretend to suspect, that some evidence had been removed, just as items had been removed from Key’s body.

Barton’s family was distressed by the official appointment of Barton’s deputy, Robert Ould, to the post left vacant by Key’s death. Ould was a younger, florid man of straightforward industry and intellect who had studied in a theological seminary and had something of a clerical air still. He had been a member of the commission that codified the laws of the District of Columbia, but he was a friend of Buchanan’s—indeed, he owed his post to him—and therefore might be less assiduous in searching out matters that could embarrass the White House. He also lacked prosecutorial experience. The Key family went to the White House to
appeal to President Buchanan, and asked him to appoint a special prosecutor to work with Ould and give him guidance. But Buchanan had his reasons for not complying, one of them being that he considered that Key had been a fool and had courted a bullet.

As foreshadowed by Laura’s visit to Dan, ten days after the murder Teresa rose early in the cold dark of March 10 to dress for departure for New York and the new order of her life. She had reachieved an air of dignity, though her confident youthfulness was not as evident as it had been. She knew her task now was to be the limited but crucial one of contrite shelterer of her exuberant five-year-old daughter. Polite people did not rise to see her leave for the train at an hour when the sleepy servants of Lafayette Square had just begun sweeping the front steps of neighboring houses. One artist from an illustrated paper had arrived at his post early and was near the railings of the square, sketching the house. He was rewarded with the visual scoop of Mrs. Sickles’s departure from the Stockton Mansion to catch the six-o’clock train north. She was dressed darkly, wore a veil, looked neither to the right nor left. The wider scene as depicted by the artist is a tragic one—Manny Hart beckoning Mrs. Bagioli, Teresa, Bridget Duffy, and the child, Laura, down the curved steps to a carriage. The women are heavily cloaked, and the only apparently happy personage in the scene is a black servant, sweeping the pavement beneath the steps and pausing for a minute to see the white women go on their way in grief. Teresa walked as she ever would from this point on, guardedly in her cone of shame, with always the proximate risk of someone shouting an insult.