American Scoundrel (29 page)

Rebuffed on the issue of Dan’s sins, Carlisle sought to introduce two last witnesses on the question of insanity. They were the two gentlemen who had been waiting in the back parlor of Attorney General Black’s house when Dan turned up after the murder to hand himself over: the former senator Richard Brodhead and Mr. Haldemar, editor of a Democratic paper in Pennsylvania. The judge agreed to admit these witnesses if they were in court by the next morning.
⁴⁸

Along the broad avenues of Washington, a gale blew, and any hope the jurors might have had of being quit of their responsibilities in time for Easter Sunday dinner were destroyed by the arrival of Brodhead in court on Easter Saturday morning. And though Brodhead recounted the meeting with Dan after the killing, and Dan’s ordinary conversation, nothing was added thereby to the prosecution’s case. Haldemar himself had not arrived, so District Attorney Ould declared the testimony closed on the part of the United States. The jurors had been separated from their Easters at home for no good purpose.

After examination of the instructions the defense wished the judge to give the jury, Carlisle began his strong final speech, asking whether anything could be more irreconcilable with peace and good government than the doctrine that he who is grievously wronged is to take into his own hands the knife. In the middle of Carlisle’s argument, some argumentation developed between prosecution and defense over the famous M’Naghten case in Britain in 1843. M’Naghten was an unstable Scottish woodman who had murdered the secretary of British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel under the delusion that the secretary was Sir Robert. After his twelve judges referred the question of M’Naghten’s mind to the jury, he was acquitted on grounds of insanity, as Brady was pleased to emphasize. Carlisle went on to close his argument by warning the jurors that it was the job of the defense to prove this risky and precedent-setting plea of temporary insanity.
⁴⁹

Edwin Stanton, whom Ould and Carlisle least liked, rose first to
sum up for the defense. In case the jury had heard intimations of Dan’s own philandering, Stanton argued that, by marriage, “the woman is sanctified to the husband, and this bond must be preserved for the evil as well as for the good.” His graphic picture of what adultery implied included the extraordinary argument that “when her [the wife’s] body has been once surrendered to the adulterer, she longs for the death of her husband, whose life is often sacrificed by the cup of the poisoner, or the dagger or pistol of the assassin.” More credibly, he argued that “when an adulterer tears a young wife from her husband, her child is cut off from all kindred fellowship.” Young Laura, though she had no siblings, was certainly suffering from a lack of fellowship as this trial proceeded. Only one final shame had not descended upon Teresa herself, Stanton admitted. Often the sinning wife was “plunged into the horrible filth of common prostitution, to which she is rapidly hurrying, and which is already yawning before her.” The hapless victim could thus be “swept through a miserable life and a horrible death to the gates of hell, unless her husband’s arms shall save her.” Who, knowing these facts and these potentialities, would not rush to save the mother of a child? “Although she be lost as a wife, rescue her from the horrid adulterer; and may the Lord who watches over the home and the family, guide the bullet and direct the stroke.”

Counsel for the prosecution, Stanton continued, had had the daring to suggest that the killing of the adulterer had first been made illegal in the era of Charles I. Why would it not be, asked Edwin Stanton, when, under the government of Charles, “the palace was filled with harlots, and thronged with adulterers and adulteresses.” As for this later and better time, for this capital city and for the District of Columbia, the ethos of the region was a social one, and the habit of officers of the government, and those in public employment, to throw open their doors with wide hospitality was “unprecedentedly common.” But if these social occasions were to serve as a platform upon which the adulterer pursued his lust, “then the doors of family shall be swiftly closed.” When he ended, Stanton was again greeted with an outburst of acclaim, with which the day concluded. For Easter had arrived, and the example of the
tomb doors of Christ opening and releasing death’s divine prisoner was not lost on the counsel or on the prisoner.

Dan ate his splendid Easter dinner that Sunday knowing that, with the prosecution done, the correspondence between Teresa and himself was no longer a legal peril. When his counsel called by to see him, Meagher considered him equally and serenely ready for death or resurrection. That was just as well, since Stanton and Brady were uneasy about what the judge’s instructions to the jury would be. And though eminent Brady was hopeful, he knew something of the unpredictability of juries. In Bloomingdale, Teresa above all yearned for resurrection as she planted painted Easter eggs, earlier harvested from chickens, about the garden and among the rocks on the Broadway side of the property, above the Hudson. In searching for them later in the morning, Laura would not be troubled with competition, since there were no child visitors. To sour Easter, the large facsimile confession had appeared the day before in
Harper’s Weekly
, and Teresa could suppose that it dominated the Easter discourse of the nation’s adults.

At the dinner tables of the capital, many wives heard their husbands say they wished to attend court the next day to hear the great advocate James Topham Brady speak for Dan Sickles. And next morning the court was crowded to the limit a quarter of an hour before the judge appeared, and the doors remained besieged all morning by people trying to get in. Soon, Brady was called on by Judge Crawford, and, in his usual honeyed way, hoped for the polite attention of the court, which he was grateful to have hitherto received. “The whole world, Your Honor, has its eye on this case, and although there may seem to be egotism involved in the remark which I make, I cannot help saying, because I am here in the discharge of my duty, that, when all of this shall have passed away, and when each shall have taken his chamber in the silent halls of death . . . the name of everyone associated with this trial, from Your Honor who presides in the first position of dignity, to the humblest witness that shall be called on the stand, will endure as long as the earth shall exist.”

At the end of the killing, what remained on the street? He asked. The opera glasses and a derringer pistol. To whom did the pistol belong? No one had asked whether the derringer had been in Key’s possession. No witness had been brought into court to say whether Key had such a pistol, not even those servants who attended his domestic affairs and who brushed his clothes, not even his friends and associates had been asked whether this pistol might have belonged to Key. So who was to say it was not Key’s? “In this case a revolver was in the hands of Mr. Sickles, and a derringer in those of Mr. Key, and there was no mortal to gainsay it. . .. The bullet which killed Mr. Key came out the revolver. What then became of the bullet from the derringer?” The prosecution must have now realized what a mistake it had made in not pursuing more thoroughly the question of the derringer. Brady declared that there were four shots fired in this case, and from the evidence as it stood, only three were fired from the pistol of Mr. Sickles. As to the fourth shot, “I am not called on to say or know who fired it.” On the basis of the evidence, a reasonable doubt arose as to whether Dan had been a walking arsenal.

So what about the provocation offered—that of the white handkerchief? Had Key been thoughtful of his father’s anthem, had he not chosen his own “foul substitute for its [the flag’s] beautiful folds,” the white handkerchief, he would never have forgotten two lines in particular:

As it was, he had produced in Dan a condition in which “every drop of his blood carried with it a sense of his shame . . . a realization that . . . the future which opened to him so full of brilliancy, had been enshrouded perhaps in eternal gloom.” Insane or not, he was bound to do what he had done, said gentle Brady. “If he had done anything more or less than became a man . . . whatever may have been the intimacy of our past relations, I would have been willing to see him die the most
ignominious death before I would venture to raise anything on his behalf but a prayer to Heaven for the salvation which after death might come.” Again, the resonating New Yorker drew vigorous applause from the crowd.

Yet as apparently justified as Dan was in what he had done, Brady referred to the last report of the lunatic asylums of Pennsylvania, which showed that one of the inciting causes of insanity was domestic affliction. Well, Dan’s friends had such an acute sense of his affliction that many of them had come here voluntarily, and without fee or reward, to offer on his behalf the affection and devotion he had once tendered to them. One in particular, a man from New York, was working as counsel for the defense on that basis. At this stage, Brady nodded to the eminent Thomas Francis Meagher, former prisoner of the Queen of Great Britain, who had given the same dignity to the criminal dock of his native country, where he had been charged for his defiance of British policy during the Famine, as Mr. Sickles gave to this American one. Meagher had recently written a manuscript on the Sickles case, from which Brady now quoted rhetorical measures that dampened many a manly cheek in the court. “Then may we well say to the jury,” Meagher had written and Brady now intoned, “if your love of home will suffer it—if your genuine sense of justice will consent to it . . . if your pride of manhood will stoop to it—if your instinctive perception of right and wrong will sanction it, stamp ‘murder’ upon the bursting forehead. . .. Do this, do it if you can, and then, having consigned the prisoner to the scaffold, return to your homes, and there, within those endangered sanctuaries, following your ignoble verdict, set to and teach your imperiled wives a lesson in the vulgar arithmetic of a compromising morality. And let them be inspired with a sense of womanly dignity by a knowledge of the value you attach to the sanctity of the household, to the inviolability of the wife, to the security of the hospitable roof, and last of all, and above all, to the inherited tradition of an innocent but ruined offspring.”

A moment of awe, a burst of applause, followed. Now, to the citizens of the District of Columbia, said Brady, Mr. Sickles committed his life, his character, and all that was to elevate and keep him in existence.

Resuming his seat, Brady covered his face and wept as friends of Dan’s bayed their approval inside the courtroom. Even Dan, amid his tears of gratitude to Brady and Meagher, must still have wondered whether this meant anything. The courtroom provided spectator sport, and many of the spectators were Southern Democrats or men of Dan’s Northern pro-Southern stripe. Republicans had largely stayed away, and as for the jurors themselves, they were sworn before God to dispassion. The defense was particularly worried about one juror, a tinsmith named McDermott, who had not reacted enthusiastically to some of Brady’s argumentation; and about another who had proved to be very pious and was believed to be praying for divine guidance on the verdict.

Mr. Ould concluded the prosecution case with fewer pyrotechnics than Brady. No great surging forces of rhetoric formed his case, but he did seek in his way to elevate the status of women. “I thank God that the matrons and maids of our land have a surer protection from the pistol or the bowie knife. Sad, indeed, would be their fate if it were not so.” He denied that Key was carrying a pistol at the time. He insisted that he did not need to put to His Honor the argument as to the ease with which insanity could be simulated or feigned, and how wrong it would be to let the party accused escape just punishment. And so, in saying what he would not put, he ended.
⁵⁰

For whatever cause, Dan had been absent from the court for much of Ould’s speech, and was now summoned back by Judge Crawford. His Honor was remarkably economical, by the standards of both defense and prosecution, in what he told the jury. That there was a legal presumption of malice in every deliberate killing, and the burden of repelling it was on the slayer. That it was for the jury to say what was the state of Mr. Sickles’s mind as regards the capacity to decide upon the criminality of the homicide. But he acknowledged that the insanity of which the defense spoke need not exist for a definite period, but only for the moment of the act of which the accused was charged. Indeed, in this novel case, Judge Crawford’s neat summation of the instructions of both sides, and his glosses upon them, indicated a mind not yet borne down by age. The marshal was instructed to give the indictment to the
chairman of the jury, and at half past one, the jurors got up and retired to their consultation room.
⁵¹

This was the signal for the throwing off of all restraint. Lawyers, officers, spectators, all seemed to think it was time to speak as they pleased. The judge remained at his bench and said that although he could not reduce the audience to silence, he hoped there would be some regard exhibited for the place where they were. But the noise abounded. Many crowded around the dock to cheer and support Mr. Sickles “in this the pregnant moment of his fate.” Dan had slept badly the night before but was in a high state of concentration. He lived, as Teresa had, on a particular axis of possibility no one could share with him. In ten, fifteen minutes, or an hour or two, or a day, he would be restored to light or consigned to the dark. He spoke out of his dispassionate isolation to others. One of the three ministers of religion who attended to comfort Dan, the Reverend Dr. Sunderland of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, took Sickles by the hand and said that “if the voice of the people of this city could speak at this moment, your acquittal would be instantaneous.” But many of Dan’s friends stated their disappointment that the jury had need to retire at all, much less spend so much time in consultation. Just after Sunderland spoke to Dan, a policeman entered the court and took the jury’s chairs out to the marshal’s room, where the jury was conferring. This increased rumors about a jury split or arguing hard. At the moment, standing close to the dock were John Graham’s two brothers, Charles and DeWitt Graham of New York, the Chevalier Wikoff, the Tammany enforcer Captain Wiley, and various other Tammany friends. Mayor Berret was there, with Alderman Francis Mohun, who had seen demented Dan rush past his house the evening before the killing. They had hoped for a sensible fifteen-minute verdict of not guilty. But this was all going on so long that they began to fear a guilty verdict. Dan did not seem oppressed by the thought of his own death by hanging, but his lawyers, staying in or near the court, were taut with anxiety.