American Scoundrel (28 page)

While Bridget waited, with the disgust of a commonsensical young woman, to resume her testimony, listening to the supposedly learned
gentlemen vapor on, the argument of the admissibility of the confession stretched into the next day. She was summoned back for the next morning’s sitting, and the judge’s ruling was at last made. The confession was indeed testimony from a wife, and since such testimony was excluded, so must be the confession. The document was passed to the AP man instantly, and he began to scribble it out on his forms, transferring Teresa’s demented admissions to the most public of mediums. Along the telegraph wires from Washington to New York the confession rushed in a series of electric impulses, presenting respectable editors with a moral dilemma. They had never published as explicit a sexual confession as this. Those editors who did decide to place the text in the next day’s papers would cover themselves with palavering editorials about their duty to public morals, and how they had been forced with regret to suppress their delicacy of soul and give the document prominence for the sake of the public interest.
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Bridget Duffy was at last recalled. She stood before men who were accustomed to see her type of woman caricatured on the stage and in cartoons in the illustrated papers. They expected Bridget to live up to the stereotype, to be lively, peppery, and unwittingly amusing. Her testimony, the little they had heard so far, had been most engaging, and she now described, even demonstrated with a slow rotary movement, how Mr. Key waved from the direction of the Clubhouse to his beloved at the Stockton Mansion. On that Sunday, when Dandy the greyhound ran to Key and fawned upon him, Key had waved his handkerchief from very close to the house. Mr. Carlisle wanted to know whether Bridget was positive of that. To which Bridget spiritedly answered, “Sure, and you don’t think I would lie?” There was universal laughter, and an indulgent smile from Mr. Carlisle. He said, “Don’t fire up so, Bridget—there is no occasion for it.” Brady helped soothe her.

It was not the last clash Carlisle had with the witness, and reporters were delighted to recount his continued exchanges with Bridget. The waving of the handkerchief was a continuous whirl, said the witness, and again demonstrated. Mr. Carlisle asked, “About as fast as you would
turn the handle of a coffee mill?” To which the witness answered with rustic passion, “I am not in the habit of turning coffee mills.” The court disbanded, chuckling at the prime lines she had given them.

Teresa left no exact record of how in Bloomingdale she passed the next day, the day of publication of her confession. Since the press appeared to consider that the text of the confession spoke adequately for Mrs. Sickles, reporters did not come tumbling up Broadway from town to ask her to elaborate or to inquire how she felt. On such a day, of course, she would have been pleased that she no longer lived in the city, and no doubt her own robust soul and the friends she still had—her parents, Tom Field, a few others—helped her through hours that might have killed other women.

When Dan got to court that morning, he knew that the question of Teresa’s confession was still the chief, though unofficial, issue of the morning. Among the lawyers, as among those who were merely spectators, it was rumored that had the confession been received as evidence, evidence would have been offered by the prosecutor that Mr. Sickles had spent nights with a lady not his wife in Barnum’s Hotel in Baltimore. The register of the hotel was already in court, under the prosecution’s care. It showed Dan’s signature on a particular line, and then, ten lines down, in an unidentified handwriting, the name Mrs. Daniel E. Sickles. The author of the
De Witt’s Special Report
, a transcript of the trial, remarked that had Judge Crawford admitted Mrs. Sickles’s confession, a vast quantity of scandal on both sides would have been brought into the trial, involving people not yet mentioned in the affair. Since these included the President, some on the defense side considered it a good thing that the document had been ruled out of court. Through the press, after all, it had more safely done its best work in the tribunal of public opinion.

Mr. Stanton, however, returned to the matter of admissibility of evidence in general. There was a North Carolina case, he said, in which a slave had killed his wife’s lover. Evidence on the man’s frame of mind was admitted, and Stanton “only demanded for the prisoner of the bar
the same right which is accorded to a North Carolina slave.” In pleading his point, Stanton went so far as to accuse DA Ould of having fiercely hunted Sickles and of being driven by desire for blood vengeance. In return, Ould said that there seemed to be different parts assigned to the various counsels for the defense—to some high tragedy; to some comedy; to some, the part of walking gentlemen (Brady); and to one the task of theologian (John Graham by way of the Reverend Mr. Haley). But one of the counselors carried out the part of the bully and the bruiser, and that, he implied, was Stanton. This produced yet another of the courtroom furors the press was so pleased to record, and Haley was particularly offended. Stanton himself cried, “I have not the honor of his [Ould’s] acquaintance and, after his language just uttered, do not desire it.” Many of Dan’s friends in court supported this by stamping their feet on the ground, and the racket was so great that the marshal and the officers of the court had to pass down the rows of spectators to reimpose order.
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In the oncoming spring, the immutable and unadjustable heating system gave an even more withering feel to the courtroom, but neither this nor all the racket produced by the fights between Stanton and Ould seemed to give Dan discomfort. In the broiling air, more defense witnesses were questioned. It is not recorded how Dan reacted to some of the evidence of Frederick Wilson, who said that he had seen Mr. Key, Mrs. Sickles, and Laura on the Thursday before the killing coming up Pennsylvania Avenue to Green’s Furniture Store, and that Mrs. Sickles and the little girl had gone into the store while Key waited on the pavement, reading a letter that had a yellow envelope, about the same hue as the one already presented that held the letter signed R.P.G. With some embarrassment, Wilson admitted that he had virtually stalked Mrs. Sickles, Key, and the child; his curiosity had been piqued by seeing Mr. Key a number of times outside the Sickleses’ house—nearly every day, the witness declared, to ribald laughter in the courtroom. With the sensitivity of the prisoner in mind, the judge thought the line of questioning and the general laughter in the court improper, but Dan
remained sternly unexcited throughout it, calm enough that, the next morning, the court journalist reported that the prisoner “looked less careworn than hitherto.”
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Early that day, in an argument about the admissibility of what Nancy Brown, wife of a White House gardener and resident of Fifteenth Street, had to say about the adulterers, Magruder asked Carlisle whether, under the Maryland statute, one punishment for adultery was a fine of a hundred pounds of tobacco. Carlisle said he couldn’t say exactly what the punishment was. Brady pursued the matter: “Then the only satisfaction an injured husband could have would be a chew of tobacco.” Again, the entire court guffawed, and no one recorded what Dan’s reaction was.

The old argument over admissibility continued on through Saturday. With the issue unresolved, the court and its spectators at last scattered in an evening downpour. On Sunday, as Dan’s lawyers met at Edwin Stanton’s house and as George visited his son in jail, Washington socialized. All the talk was of the trial. “It is the sole topic of conversation wherever men meet,” said one observer, “or women either.”
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Teresa and Mrs. Bagioli and Laura, in a sense the forgotten people of the trial, went strolling that Sunday along the banks of the Hudson, which were miry from spring rain. The breath of the new season washed in on the breeze from New Jersey. Teresa was aware that the prodigiously popular
Harper’s Weekly
had promised that its next issue would contain a full facsimile, in huge written script—supposedly a reproduction of her crazed hand that night—of her letter of confession. Those godly sections of America that had not read the document—thanks to the moral inhibitions of local newspaper editors—would now have it massively reproduced for them on the magazine’s broadsheet front page. Within the limits of that knowledge, Teresa remained half elated, partly fearful, and wholly hopeful of becoming Dan’s openly acknowledged wife again. Laura had always been the chief issue. Certainly Teresa cringed to think of the afternoon she had been willing to have Key drop off Laura at the Hoovers’. Laura had been lost sight of in the heady urgency of getting to Number 383 Fifteenth Street. In view of that lapse,
Teresa was considered not only a scarlet whore but an appalling mother. But she knew herself an essentially decent mother, and knew too that some form of reunion with Dan was essential to her daughter’s future happiness. She was cheered by reassuring notes from dear Manny Hart and the Chevalier Wikoff that Dan seemed well, and so—she concluded—less likely to strike attitudes with her. And she was blessedly busy. There were many chickens on the grounds of the house. Eggs had to be searched out in the thickets and the verdant low ground by the Hudson. Horses had to be fed and curried, gardening done, and servants managed. Teresa was content to lose herself in the minutiae of domestic life in a large country house, and those who visited her were impressed by her energy.

In Washington, Mrs. Brown began the week in the witness box still listening to the dreary argument about admissibility, but to the delight of the defense, the judge seemed to be leaning their way. Mrs. Brown had met a man, Key, said the judge, who had claimed to rent a house. She had then seen what he used that house for. The jury needed to know what that house renting signified. Take a simpler example, the judge suggested. “The exhibitions of a handkerchief! What do they mean? Have not the jury a right to understand what they mean? . . . I am of the opinion that the evidence is admissible.” There was what one observer called a rare silent expression of satisfaction in the courtroom, as Mrs. Brown was re-sworn. Soon such a level of hilarity was raised by Nancy Brown’s evidence on the affair conducted on Fifteenth Street that the judge was concerned that it could be heard beyond the chamber.
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The Sickleses’ coachmen were called, and John McDonald, “a smart young Irishman” who had been working as footman for the Sickleses only two weeks when the murder occurred, added new material to what was already known. He described how, on that last Thursday, Key had tracked Teresa through the afternoon from one reception to another. Miss Ridgeley, Mrs. Sickles, and Mr. Key left the last house of call, Rose Greenhow’s, together, and Mr. Key sat half in and half out of the carriage, conversing softly with Mrs. Sickles. On his perch behind the carriage, McDonald heard most of the conversation. Was she going to
the hop at Willard’s? Key wanted to know. If Dan would allow her, she said. Key expressed the hope that he would meet her there. He also said that her eyes looked bad, and Teresa told Key she did not feel well. Mr. Key was let down off the coach between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets on K, and Mrs. Sickles, the efficient hostess, and Miss Ridgeley went on to Gautier’s, the confectioners.
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By April 21, the sixteenth day of the trial, counsel were commenting even to friends and acquaintances in court that they were growing weary. They were momentarily revived by a strange letter that had arrived at the courthouse in the morning, care of the lawyers but addressed to Dan, indicating the extent to which the explicit details of the case had fevered the nation’s young imaginations. A young woman who signed herself Olympia Aiken, and had used the Greek alphabet to write her name, described herself in the letter as “one of the order of frailty—one of the simple waiters for the wave of some masculine pocket handkerchief.” In its combination of longing, febrile hope, and helplessness, this letter so thoroughly reproduced the manner in which society, the court, and the counsel defined womanhood that Dan’s lawyers were more amused than abashed, and passed the pathetic missive, postmarked West Randolph, Vermont, around to reporters.

Another, more ominous letter that arrived that day was addressed to one of the jurors, the grocer Jesse Wilson, care of the court. It was passed to Dan and his lawyers, who then returned it to the judge. James Topham Brady thought it similar in handwriting to the R.P.G. letter, and the judge reflected only that it was a matter of extreme regret that the author of the R.P.G. letter was not known. But word got around the court that this new letter, which was kept secret and destroyed, had something to do with the scandalous lives of some of the defense counsel, and that it was aimed at enlisting the juror Jesse Wilson to punish these lawyers through punishing their client.

Of a succession of recalled prosecution witnesses who saw Dan after the shooting and remarked on his apparent calm, Brady now asked whether they had ever been to a lunatic asylum or seen an inmate. None admitted they had. Well, said Brady, he
had
been to asylums, had been
extensively to New York’s Blackwell’s Island, and up to the more rural lunatic asylum to the north of Bloomingdale, and had studied the sometimes “cool and deliberate” demeanor of the certified.
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The judge, wearied and feeling his years, reminded the court that this was Holy Thursday, the eve of the most solemn day of the Christian calendar, Good Friday, and the jurors were offered a chance to observe the holy day. But after consulting with one another, they declared themselves to have a solemn duty to fulfill. Hence the court reassembled on Good Friday. Catholics like Thomas Francis Meagher and James Topham Brady were exempt, because of the arduous duty of saving Dan, from the full observance of the Lenten fast, but as true Catholics on this day of days they abstained from liquor, drank black tea, ate only crusts. Fasting, if anything, sharpened the devout Brady’s native intelligence.

On this deepest of holy days, with the air darkening beyond the court’s dim, tall windows, Carlisle had introduced into court what Brady called “corpulent rolls of print galleys of the
Congressional Globe
.” They showed that Dan had made a congressional speech under the five-minute rule on both Friday and Saturday, when, according to such witnesses as Wooldridge, he was supposed to be in agony of spirit. These galleys had handwritten corrections by Dan, and so he obviously had had enough presence of mind to want himself accurately reported in the permanent record of Congress. Dan and his lawyers spent more than half an hour examining the rolls, and also considering something else Carlisle was seeking to introduce—what Carlisle would tell the judge was “an offer of evidence.” Everyone in the court, according to one observer, seemed to know what this evidence was. The matter of “his visits with a lady to Barnum’s Hotel, Baltimore,” was about to achieve visibility—if the prosecution had its way. The manager of Barnum’s was waiting in the corridor to be called. As Brady, Graham, and Ould conversed at the bench in a low tone, the judge made a preliminary statement that he did not think the evidence admissible. But Ould took a seat beside His Honor and entered into a deep consultation with him, while the audience was agog at the legal and titillatory possibilities that might be about to be revealed. But as Judge Crawford had ruled the confession
out as evidence of provocation to Dan, so now too evidence of Dan’s adultery was ruled out. The hotel manager was free to catch the train back to Baltimore.
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