American Scoundrel (24 page)

To define her condition, a poet contributed a better than average verse to the pages of
Harper’s Weekly
. Entitled “Judge Not,” it advised women:

As the carriage set off, Teresa had a chance for last glimpses of the capital, as they turned away from the White House in its misty gardens, past the familiar houses and stores where Teresa was so well known; past Marshal Hoover’s, where Laura liked to go; past the famous Gautier’s; past the Capitol, where Teresa had sat with the First Lady for the most sacred American secular moment: the inauguration of a President. Every scene between Washington and New York, all she had passed with a glad heart last fall, she now saw again, this gloomy day, through reaches of air from which all promise had been sucked.

In New York by evening, Teresa would live for the time being in her parents’ house. Even the humblest residents of a neighborhood not considered to be of the first order looked askance at her. If she went out of the house by day, she faced the sneers of delivery boys, the coolness of grocers and butchers, the turned shoulder of the respectable. She was also a figure of lubricious sexuality to many solitary males whom she would encounter if she dared go walking. She could not therefore consider going riding in the park, the recreation she loved best of all. She was a prisoner of her parents, of a father given to fulsome and baroque moral attitudes, of a mother understandably susceptible to fits of weeping and lamentation. For the Bagiolis and Teresa could all see the future. Ultimately, when she achieved equilibrium, Teresa would move uptown to Bloomingdale, where she would live out the residue of her life, first as a figure of futile and violated beauty, and then as a cracked and spurned village crone. The account of her indelible crimes would be passed from one generation of townspeople to another.

One day later in March, Tom Field of Bloomingdale, having recently returned from visiting Dan in Washington, came to her door with something which for the moment softened the picture. It was an envelope with Dan’s writing on it.

Dan’s behavior in the weeks leading up to the trial is difficult to
make sense of. On the one hand, there was the shameful public fact that, for legal reasons, he or someone near him would choose to leak to the nation’s press both the R.P.G. letter and the details of the confession written by his wife. On the other, there was the secret reality that he began writing dangerously forgiving letters to Teresa. His lawyers, if they knew, must have despaired. For the question would be asked, “If the wife can be forgiven, why did Mr. Key need to be shot?” We do not have the text of the letter Dan sent from prison by his friend Tom Field, but it arrived in time for the desperately excluded Teresa to answer, more or less one month after the killing of Key, with considerable gratitude and pithiness.

Dan had enclosed some verses that she thought were very beautiful. She would always keep them, she said. Perhaps, she wrote, she had spoken hastily of George Wooldridge, whom she had dubbed a scandalmonger and a busybody. She promised not to mention again his name, or Wiley’s or Butterworth’s, in any of her letters. But she was not yet beaten to dust, and she could answer frankly some charges made by Dan’s friends. “One thing I will assure you of, and that is that I did
not
tell Mr. Butterworth to mind his own business or something to that effect. Mr. Butterworth, I think, only needed encouragement from me to flirt. I may be mistaken, but I doubt it. But let all suspicions be forgotten and unthought of—the reality is bad enough without suspecting or supposing things.”

Answering what was obviously a question of Dan’s, as to whether he’d ever denied her anything, she replied that he had not, that “you gave me many things I did not deserve—everyone knows this.” So, as a small gesture of recompense, she would soon begin working on a pair of slippers for him, and she would not stop until they were finished. “Will you wear them for me? Or would you dislike to wear again anything that I have made? God bless you for the two kisses you sent me—and with God’s help and my own determination to be good, true, and faithful to you and myself hereafter, those kisses shall never leave my lips while
I
am called wife and you
husband
. I swear it by Laura.” She resolved to write to a Washington nursery to have flowers sent to the prison for Dan.
¹⁸

This letter, despite its chastened tone, lacked self-pity. But clearly she had been encouraged to foresee a future as a wife. If her protestations are to be believed, she had utterly repented of Key. But surely he came to her in dreams, and surely his caresses were involuntarily remembered with either revulsion or longing.

As the date of the trial neared, Barton Key’s relatives and friends decided to employ John Carlisle, a prominent Washington lawyer and a friend of Key’s who had spoken at his memorial service. Carlisle would work with Ould and represent the family’s interests at the trial.

It was undeniable that, though Dan could weep like a child, his morale was high, and that he found the resources to behave with dignity and energy in prison. Dan had become his old practical and improving self. He sent the jail gardener to the Patent Office for some seeds, and set him to work in the prison yard making flower beds. Unlike other prisoners, on Sundays he often went walking in the stone yard next to the jail, where during the week masons worked on the marble columns for the Treasury building and the Post Office. He was not accompanied by
a guard, and could have walked out to the street and into Pennsylvania Avenue had he chosen. Instead, since there was but one true escape for him, he contemplated the august carved stones and the oncoming spring. He knew he might be executed before the summer was out, and he was aware of the hard facts of that, of the degrading idea of the noose, of how an ill-tied one might cause minutes of anguish for the hanged man, of how a desperate, dangling man whose neck had not been broken in the fall through the trapdoor might soil himself, of how his blood—in a last attempt to avert the deadly effects of strangulation— would rush to his penis and produce an erection, which the surgeons primly called priapism. None of that seemed to weigh on him or influence his mental state. If it did, it was when others were not present.

The journalist from the
Herald
who visited Dan the evening before the trial began found three gentlemen sitting quietly with the prisoner, one of them, of course, his fond father, George. Dan conversed in a pleasantly natural manner on politics and foreign affairs. He was still what he had been, a man who sought to save the Union by appeasing the South. Abolitionists were still, to him, fanatics, and George and others were pleased to pass on to Dan tales of their latest follies. Dan’s relations with George were open and manly, and smacked more of fraternity than of the more conventional filial quality. With Dandy sitting on his knee, he looked so easeful “that no one would imagine that he bore a great and abiding grief in his heart.” The
Herald
writer might have been fascinated to know that Dan was corresponding warmly with Teresa, to the great and reckless peril of his own neck.

The opening of the trial was attended by representatives of both the American and the foreign press. One journalist reflected on the reason the British were taking so much notice of the case. It was, he concluded, because the elements of the murder—the openness of the killing, the prisoner’s immediate surrender, the intolerable provocation, the beauty of Mrs. Sickles—“combined to take it out of the ordinary catalogue of criminal crimes and to render it one of the
causes célèbres
of history.”
¹⁹

The venue for the trial was City Hall, where Barton had had his offices; it was barely more than a block from where, a little more than a
month before, his body had lain in state. The room in which elderly Judge Thomas Hartley Crawford was to hear the murder case had high, arched windows with louvered blinds and candelabra lacking candles. Because the weather had turned cold again, the furnaces were fired up. From his seat on the bench, the bespectacled Judge Crawford peered down through a fog of uncomfortably humid air at a court to whose atmosphere those gentlemen who were not as fastidious with their washing as Dan Sickles added their malodor. The temperature within the chamber would indeed become so stifling one afternoon that the judge adjourned the trial.
²⁰

When the doors of the court were opened at nine-thirty that first day, gentlemen of the public, including diplomats and members of the Washington bar not directly involved in the trial, came rushing in, and some were forced to invade the courtroom through a window and stand on tiptoe against the wall to witness events. The only women to attend during the course of the trial would be women witnesses. Because of the numbers of accredited journalists, the court attempted to accommodate them on stools and at a long bench brought in from the lobby, but some complained that they had no surface on which to write, and more seats and desks were needed. Near the defense table, Dan’s father sat beside Antonio Bagioli. People considered George youthful-looking despite his gray beard, and he had in his hand the copy of
Harper’s Weekly
that contained an illustration of Dan, which he showed to people nearby. Touchingly, he seemed gratified when they said it was a good likeness.
²¹

Judge Crawford entered the courtroom at 10:15 a.m., had the case— Docket Number 124—called, and asked both teams of lawyers if they were ready to proceed. When the lawyers said they were, Crawford had the law clerk, Erasmus Middleton, a young man to whom Barton had given a gold pen at New Year’s, call out the names of the witnesses for the prosecution.

For the lawyers at Dan’s table there was the excitement of being involved in the most notable murder case of the era, even for those— Edwin Stanton, James Topham Brady, Philip Phillips, Sam Chilton, and John Graham—who already had established legal reputations. But the
eminent Edwin Stanton did not charm the journalists as Brady and Meagher did. Stanton was hard-bitten; he was sour-faced. But he was estimable. As for the younger lawyers, it was perhaps the most exciting trial they had been involved in, the one exception being Thomas Francis Meagher. For, after all, Meagher had been famously charged in Tipperary with the capital offense of high treason for his involvement in the Irish uprising of 1848, and been condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, a sentence later commuted by act of the British Parliament to transportation to Australia for life.
²²

As the names of prosecution witnesses were read that morning, Dan, scrupulously washed and shaven, and soberly dressed in a dark coat and vest, light pants, a frock coat over the lot, and a top hat, left the district jail to walk the three blocks to City Hall. He was led by Marshal Seldon and accompanied by a police guard and by the warden, Jacob King. King was by now a friend and had every reason to be grateful to Dan. Because of his presence the jail was newly provided with water closets and primitive sewerage.

One Washington child who would live well into the twentieth century remembered Dan being escorted to and from the jail on most of the days of the trial, for Dan’s route lay near Washington’s public school on Fifth and F Streets. Dan, this child remembered, marched with head erect, glancing neither to the left nor right, and did not play to the “rabble crowding and running in the streets.”

He was received at the court and, accompanied by guards and several supporters not yet inside, entered the hubbub and the hot air of the court. He was placed in the dock, a cagelike yard a little over waist high and, in the view of some of his friends and counsel, abhorrent to his dignity. They described it variously as a “cattle crate” or as a “chicken coop with a chair placed inside it.” In this demeaning enclosure, its limits jostled by an avid crowd, Dan stood upright and with fixed expression throughout the reading of the curiously worded indictment. It was specifically the second shot that Dan would stand trial for: “. . . and that the said Daniel E. Sickles, with the leaden bullet aforesaid, out of the pistol aforesaid . . . then and there feloniously, willfully and of his malice
aforethought, did strike, penetrate and wound him, the said Philip Barton Key, in and upon the left side of him . . . [giving him] one mortal wound of the depth of ten inches and of the breadth of half an inch; of which said mortal wound, he, the said Philip Barton Key, then and there instantly died.” In response to the question of how he pleaded, Dan declared, “Not guilty.”
²³

Thirty talesmen, or potential jurors, were waiting to be called and examined, chiefly by Mr. Ould and Mr. Phillips. The issues cast up by the questioning of the first talesman, Mr. Joseph B. Bryan, were ones that would cover the whole jury selection. The new district attorney put the question to Bryan: “Have you at any time expressed an opinion in relation to the guilt or innocence of the accused?” The juror said that he had. Phillips, for Dan’s defense, suspecting that this juror might have voiced an opinion in Dan’s favor, argued that the question was not whether the juror had formed or expressed an opinion based upon rumor or newspaper reports or things said by neighbors and friends who had witnessed the killing. The salient question was whether, if the facts made known through the trial turned out to be different from those the juror had expected, he would be able to render an impartial verdict. But Mr. Bryan, the potential juror, said he could not render such a verdict anyhow. “I form my opinion merely upon rumor . . . my mind is biased in favor of the prisoner.” The judge ruled for the prosecution. Mr. Bryan was thanked and discharged. Through all this, Dan maintained his stoic demeanor.