American Scoundrel (30 page)

After seventy minutes, just as the clock began striking three, the door nearest the jury box opened, and the jury filed in. Men crowded up
to have a look at the jurors’ faces, some climbing on benches and tables. There were pleas from those whose view was obstructed to “get off the benches!” The judge was able to impose order only by having the clerk read the names of the jury members, and by the time the twelfth had been read and been responded to, there was silence. Dan sat, immobile, in his good suit. The clerk told him to stand up and look to the jury, and, without the blood draining from his face, Dan obeyed. The press men noticed that at this second by contrast, James Topham Brady looked acutely pale. The chairman of the jury, Mr. Arnold, had risen also. The clerk asked him whether his jury had agreed on a verdict. Mr. Arnold said they had. Daniel Edgar Sickles was not guilty.

No doubt Dan’s vigorous blood surged in that second he received the jury’s permission to live on in some honor. The verdict also confirmed his secular rank; he was still the representative for the Third District of New York. Yet he did not weep with gratitude, any more than he would have wept with fear had the verdict gone otherwise. His expression, people thought, did not convey a sense of triumph, but rather a belief that the trial through which he had passed could have had no other result. The clerk asked the jury, “And so say you all?” The jury assented. Mr. Stanton cried, “I now move that Mr. Sickles be discharged from custody.” Though the judge pleaded, “No noise,” that prohibition went unheeded. Judge Crawford could barely be heard as he ordered Dan’s release, and Dan, in the dock, came under siege from ecstatic friends. Captain Wiley immediately kissed Dan. The normally dour Mr. Stanton cried that he would dance like David before the Ark of the Tabernacle. Scholarly Mr. Phillips gave way and, covering his face with his hands, wept like a child. Meagher clapped people on the back and asked them if it was not glorious. He even extended this courtesy to the district attorney, who turned to Meagher and said, “I thought the verdict would be so.” The jailer, Jacob King, was weeping deeply, and looked bemused when Meagher came up, slapped his shoulder, and consoled him for losing a tenant.
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It was slow work for a calm, steady Dan and his ecstatic counsel to
make their way to the door. He began to feel the shock of the verdict of deliverance. Those near him noticed that there was some tension apparent around his temples. On his way to the door, Dan passed the jury box, where it seemed that all the jurors wanted to congratulate him, although, it was later learned, at least one did not particularly desire to. People in the neighborhood of the court who had heard the news came rushing through the streets and up the steps, expecting a speech as Dan came forth. But Dan was growing faint, and Captain Wiley, the Tammany gang leader, helped him into one of the many carriages waiting. Some enthusiasts for the reprieved congressman tried to take the horses out of the shafts so that they themselves could drag Dan in triumph through the streets, but they were persuaded not to. Dan, dazed yet still dignified, was taken first to the house of John McBlair, the grocery king, who lived at the Decatur House near St. John’s Episcopal, and next went to the Stockton Mansion, some fifty yards away, to collect clothing and toiletries for his stay with McBlair.

A crowd was already assembled at McBlair’s to cheer Dan, and many people filed through the parlor, shaking his hand. It was this demonstration of warmth that caused Dan now to break into tears. He was touched when a vendor of oranges, a Mr. Scott, rushed into the house and placed a large box of his choicest stock in the drawing room. Several other tradesmen brought gifts. Some of the guests, and the young men in the street, loudly offered to tear down the Fifteenth Street assignation house made so infamous by the trial.

That night a crowd came to the National Hotel to serenade the counsel who were staying there. Brady and the others requested that the serenaders not go on to the McBlair house, since Mr. Sickles was worn out by the trial and wished to retire to rest undisturbed. By invitation, nine or ten of the jurors went up to Brady’s suite for refreshments and to receive the thanks of counsel. American jurors were always freer with their jury-room confessions than the British were permitted to be; it came in part from the freedom of speech, from an already robust American interest in celebrities, which the jurors were for the moment, and in circuses, which the trial had to an extent been. The defense counsel were
surprised to see, among the jurors who did turn up that night, the tinsmith McDermott, the one they had predicted would be a tough nut. Another juror, Henry Knight, a young grocer, brought with him his fiddle, and entertained Brady and the others. Counsel had regarded him also with suspicion throughout the trial, because it had emerged that he was a member of a Know-Nothing lodge, and thus,
ex officio
, hostile to pro-Irish Democrats like Sickles and to Irish lawyers like Brady and Meagher. “But,” Mr. Brady was quoted as saying, “if we had known that he played the fiddle, we might have made our minds easy, for no fiddler was ever known to find a conviction of murder.”

The jurors all expressed themselves in an unrestrained manner. They admitted that one of their number had been for a guilty verdict and, in the jury room, had withdrawn into a corner and sought divine guidance. He had got up from his knees, reentered the discussion, again retired to the corner, and finally rose with a divine message in favor of acquittal. Yet another juror, Mr. William Hopkins, the gents’ furnisher and something of a wag and mimic, stated himself so far in favor of Mr. Sickles that in a similar situation he himself would not have been satisfied with a derringer or revolver, but would have brought a howitzer to bear on the seducer! It was interesting that he mentioned the derringer in that way; obviously the jurors did not, despite Brady’s clever arguments, believe Key had been armed. But they could quite correctly have considered that the prosecution had failed to prove he was unarmed.

At one stage during that overexuberant evening, the Marine Band turned up to serenade the lawyers outside Brady’s suite. Serenaders also went to Philip Phillips’s home on G Street, and Phillips came to the door and told them, accurately, that with Dan’s acquittal and the success of the plea of temporary insanity, a new era had begun in the world of jurisprudence. “An honest, upright, and intelligent American jury,” said Phillips, as reported by the press, “had established a precedent which all civilized nations would henceforth recognize and be guided by.”

For Robert Ould, however, this was a bitter night. Some morning papers would say he had been outwitted and was “far from being
thorough or searching. . .. At no time did he manifest a real lawyer’s ardor or ambition.” One newspaper claimed that, in private, he had admitted more than once that the case fatigued him or gave him migraines.

In Bloomingdale with her mother, Teresa had received with some joy the telegram announcing Dan’s acquittal. Key was perhaps a remote personage in her affections by now, if indeed her early fondness had not been transmuted by suffering into hostility. Again, her primary impulse was to rehabilitate Laura as a normal daughter and herself as a normal wife. There was no chance of this if, as well as killing her lover through her folly, she was to bear blame for the hanging of her husband.

Dan slept soundly at the Decatur House and intended to return to New York in a week’s time for the summer. In the interim, one day he passed Lafayette Square with two friends—Captain Wiley and the Chevalier Wikoff—and walked out the scene of the crime with them, recounting how he had struggled with Barton Key. Plainly, he said, he had had every intention to kill Key.
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But he would be forever an acquitted killer.

R
ETURNED TO
N
EW
Y
ORK
, D
AN UNDERSTOOD
too well that, despite Democratic joy over his acquittal, he was expected to live quietly for a time. With half his soul, he wanted to. He tried to do so that summer at the house of his friend Thomas C. Field, in Bloomingdale. Many would later consider that by doing that he had put himself in lethal proximity to Teresa. Cynics believed that, in light of his notorious trial and because many of the respectable women he liked to seduce now looked askance at him, Teresa was perhaps too sexually available to a man of such marked appetite. She was still there, though, the girl his profoundest instincts had prompted him to marry. Bloomingdale’s summer flush lay on her face, and as she threw herself into her rustic chores, she looked like someone who inhabited a better world. As well as that, Laura—who even
as an infant was charmed and dazzled by a father so like herself in nature—and her future standing were now the chief concerns for him.

Dan commuted from Bloomingdale to town, however intermittently, to his father at their Nassau Street law offices, where he was welcome. But in the councils of Tammany he was quiet. Though he was still a congressman, considerable time had to pass before he could be looked at again as a Democratic power.
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In semi-idleness, then, which suited him badly, Dan began to visit Teresa. It was not a casual impulse, as his enemies would say it was. In all his relations with Teresa from then on there would be a deliberate-ness. Appropriate rumors about a reunion of the scandalous couple were heard around New York and caused people in Dan’s circle to shake their heads. One version of the tale had the two fathers, George Sickles and Antonio Bagioli, working at the reconciliation, and if that was so, the two older men were stricken by the same delusion as Teresa—that reconciliation would be tolerated by society. The first scornful news of the resumption of “marital relations” appeared in the
New York Herald
on July 12, three and a half months after the killing of Key. It had been decided by both families for “Mr. Sickles and his wife to live together again in peace and mutual affection, burying the past in the grave of oblivion. Both parties have agreed to this step, and it is said that their love is greater than ever.”

Even journals that had in the past supported Dan took a hostile view. There were leading personal and political friends of Mr. Sickles, said the
New York Times
, who honestly believed him to be a man maddened by intolerable wrong, and who in that belief stood between him “and the hasty rage of public feeling at the time of his trial in Washington,” and were not responsible for this step taken entirely on the impulse of Mr. Sickles. In fact, James Topham Brady was said to be outraged.
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As for those who had never liked Dan, there was now nothing but scalding contempt. George Templeton Strong declared confidently, “Teresa had a hold upon him and knew of matters he did not desire to be revealed. Some say he had promoted her intrigue with Key; others that our disreputable old Buchanan’s interest in his welfare was due to
relations with her which her husband had encouraged. He must have been in her power somehow, or he would not have taken this step and sacrificed all his hopes of political advancement, and all his political friends and allies. He can hardly shew himself in Washington again.” Horace Greeley’s newspaper, the
Tribune
, said it was sure that in taking this remarkable step Mr. Sickles had alienated himself from most if not all of his friends, personal and political. Basically, then, everyone was baffled, and nearly everyone disapproved.

Dan, flayed by the newspapers, and perhaps surprised by the fury of friends, sat down to write a measured letter of explanation to James Gordon Bennett, the editor he had once parodied in name at the court of Queen Victoria. Bennett’s
Herald
was the best-selling paper in New York, and its account of the reconciliation had, Dan said, been “temperate and dignified.” As to the idea that had got about that he and Teresa might have reconciled on the advice of his lawyers, that was entirely erroneous, wrote Dan.

It was a brave letter, but if the world had been divided in response to his murder of Key, the world was universally outraged by his reconciliation with Teresa. Dan told George he was indifferent to public opinion, but he was a politician by nature. Teresa, who knew him better than he knew himself, feared his ambition would separate them again. The public speculation was whether he would dare turn up in Washington for the congressional session in the fall. But he had a rigorous intent to do so, and in the late summer he received a scatter of letters urging him to “stand by your conscience and let no political demagogues influence your own judgment.” Another letter congratulated Sickles on his forgiveness, since Teresa was “more sinned against than sinning” and “will yield the ‘grateful fragrance of the crushed flower.’”
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