American Scoundrel American Scoundrel American Scoundrel

by Thomas Keneally

  It was merely the beginning of Beekman’s embarrassment. Sickles—in what could nearly be called naiveté—organized a meeting with Key and told him of the gossip attributed to Beekman. Despite his own notable sins, he knew that gentlemanly honor would forbid him to seduce the wife of a man who had done him the sort of notable favors he had done Key! Dan was thus gratified to see that, according to the best tradition of his haughty, gentrified family and class, Key was outraged for his own sake and Dan’s. He told Dan, “This is the highest affront that can be offered to me, and whoever asserts it must meet me at the point of a pistol.” He was immensely more at home than Beekman with the idea of a contest of honor, for about the time of his marriage Key had been willing to fight a duel with a Colonel May, one of the other suitors of his betrothed, Ellen Swann. His older brother, Midshipman Daniel Key, had been killed at the Bladensburg dueling grounds over twenty years before, and now Bladensburg had again risen to impute the honor of a Key.

  Key assured Dan that he would be in touch directly with the three young men involved—Wooldridge, Beekman, Bacon. He used his old friend and coadjutor Marshal Jonah Hoover as his messenger. In answer to a request for information on the content of the rumors, George Wooldridge was quite forthcoming in what he had heard from Bacon: “that they stopped at a house on the road towards Bladensburg, and that Mrs. Sickles had a room there and remained one hour and a half; also that she took off her habit, and that he had no doubt there was an intimacy between Mr. Key and Mrs. Sickles.” Another alleged remark of Beekman’s conveyed to Key, and taken exception to, was that Key had boasted that he asked only thirty-six hours with any woman to make her do whatever he pleased.

  The heat was back on Beekman. He “disavowed” that he was the author of the imputations. He denied that the statements of Mr. Bacon came from him. Philip Barton Key put all the replies—Beekman’s, Bacon’s, Wooldridge’s—in an envelope and sent them by way of Jonah Hoover to Dan Sickles. “My Dear Sir, I send by Jonah Hoover a copy of the correspondence had today, and you will perceive any attempt to fix the ridiculous and disgusting slander on me as the party concerned was unsuccessful.”

  Key had taken a great deal of trouble to lie to Dan, and it seemed that Dan was willing to attribute the accusations against Teresa and Key to boyish cowardice or malice on Beekman’s part. Marshal Jonah Hoover would later remember that Dan said to him, “I like Key. This thing shocked me when I first heard about it, and I am glad to have the scurrilous business cleared up.” Key himself went again to Congressman Haskin and declared, “I regard her almost as a child. It is ridiculous to suppose I could have anything but honorable intentions towards her.” He asked Haskin please to pass on to Dan what he had said.28

  A wiser man than Key, or perhaps a man who was merely toying with Teresa Sickles, would from then on have kept his distance from her. It was not as if Key lacked for other female company. There were a number of women he had paid occasional court to, some of whom had ambitions to marry him. He must surely have realized that if one of Teresa’s admirers had embarrassed him this time, one of his own might embarrass him next. He and Teresa possibly both engaged in a temporary resolve to end the affair. If so, a more powerful mutual obsession, combined with Teresa’s need of intimacy and affection from a mature male, quickly reestablished their relationship as it had been.

  This season of Key’s temporary embarrassment and renewed passion for Teresa was not marked by any fresh surge of brotherhood between North and South in the legislature. But as much as fraternity had been eroded on the floor of the House, it was still observed in society, and the rich Gwinns of California decided to stage a massive fancy-dress ball, in part to restore amity in the capital. Senator Gwinn, as host, claimed the right not to wear a costume. The President was also unlikely to be a costume wearer. But most of Washington engaged enthusiastically in hunting for fancy apparel.

  The night of the ball, April 8, 1858, was a mere week after the House had refused by eight votes to admit Kansas as a slave state. Dan had been in New York on business for a few days, and had brought a buccaneer costume back with him for the ball. But he was ill with flu on the night of the event, so Teresa took the carriage, alone except for the driver, John Thompson, and the footman, McDonald, to the Gwinn house. At that moment she may have wished that she had spent more care on her own costume—she was dressed as Little Red Riding Hood and ran the risk that there might be other Riding Hoods at such a huge ball. She had, however, gone to the trouble of equipping herself with a basketful of good things to distribute among the guests.

  The Gwinn mansion, at Nineteenth and I Streets, some three blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, sported a ballroom of prodigious scale, comparable with the huge East Room of the White House or the ballroom at Willard’s. The evening was so lustrous that one of the guests, Major John von Sonntag de Havilland, wrote a long narrative poem about it, which would be published in book form and serve better as a snapshot of the Washington community than as literature. Both Key and Teresa were mentioned in widely separated sections of the work, but they were soon together on the large dance floor, talking and engaging in polkas, schottisches, germans, and gallops.

  “To that gay Capital, they congregate,” wrote Major de Havilland in lines not entirely without resonance for either later events or for modern Washington,

  The worst and wisest of this mighty State;

  Where patriot politicians yearly wend,

  The Nation’s fortunes, and their own, to mend;

  Where snobbish scribblers eke the scanty dole

  By telegraphing lies from pole to pole;

  Where bad hotels impose their onerous tax,

  And countless Jehus sport untiring hacks;

  Where Murder boldly stalks, nor cares a straw

  For useless police, or unused Law;

  Where shrieking Kansas whirls her frantic arms

  To fright the country with her false alarms . . .

  Thither, O Muse of Fashion, wing thy flight,

  And shed the radiance of thy varied light. . ..

  There were two other Little Red Riding Hoods on the floor—a Mrs. Hughes of Virginia and Mrs. John Floyd, whose husband was Buchanan’s Secretary of War and a future Confederate general. It was Teresa, however, who attracted the poet’s attention.

  Lo, little “Riding Hood” with artless grace

  Reveals the sweetness of her childish face;

  And if the wolf’s not driven from the door

  She knows precisely how to treat a bore;

  And they who “pull the bobbin, lift the latch,”

  Will find a hostess very hard to match.

  The key to de Havilland’s long poem shows that other women also duplicated costumes. There were five Peasant Girls, and Barton Key had chosen the same costume as two other men. Long after, Mrs. Clay would remember handsome Barton “as an English hunter, clad in white satin breeches, cherry-velvet jacket and jaunty cap, with lemon-colored hightop boots, and a silver bugle (upon which he blew from time to time) hung across his breast . . . a conspicuous figure in that splendid, happy assemblage.” There is something poignant in the image of Key, the widower, the transparent lover, the recklessly innocent liar, the hypochondriac, the Maryland aristocrat, so exuberantly blowing his hunting horn.

  “Here, ‘English hunters’ run their prey to earth,” as de Havilland wrote, “And strike the ‘Key’ note of their jovial mirth.”

  Like all the men here, like the laid-up Dan, Key wore his hair elegantly uncropped but well groomed and had a full mustache. His sandy hair suited his strong features. Mrs. Clay said that when she had first come to Washington with her husband six years before, mustaches had not been seen on fashionable men—they were decorations for Tennessee hog drivers and brigands. But this was the way fashion had recently shifted.

  Key’s sister, Mrs. Pendleton, expressed the transsectarian spirit of the evening by appearing as the Star-Spangled Banner, thus honoring her father’s memory, and Major
de Havilland also celebrated the political spaciousness of the evening.

  No Slavery, but to Beauty, here is seen,

  Nor Abolition, save of Discord’s mien.

  Chivalric sway all hearts and minds maintain

  From sunny Texas up to snowy Maine.

  Virginia Clay, dressed as fictional Mrs. Partington, “the loquacious malapropos dame of American theatre,” had taken the trouble to engage the son of a senator to accompany her and impersonate Mrs. Partington’s simple-witted son. Mrs. Clay had also learned by heart the theatrical lines of Mrs. Partington and intended to amuse the President with them when he arrived. Already she was the hit of the ball, “and was followed everywhere by a crowd of eager listeners, drinking in her instant repartee.”

  At last the aged, embattled, stooping, owllike chief executive entered, dressed plainly in a dark suit.

  Behold, in the centre, he who calmly bears,

  Upon that snowy head, the nation’s cares,

  The people’s chosen “Chieftain,” simply great,

  In that proud name, beyond imperial state!

  Years later, witnesses would remind Mrs. Clay “how you vexed and tortured dear old President Buchanan at Doctor and Mrs. Gwinn’s famous fancy party!”

  The evening was, in its way, an extraordinary encapsulation of the time. Mrs. Jefferson Davis, who would one day be First Lady of the Rebel states, appeared as Madame de Staël. Mrs. Stephen Douglas was Aurora, and Mrs. Bayor of Louisiana impersonated a whittling Yankee. Mr. Mathew Brady, who would photograph the battlefields of the coming conflict, appeared appropriately as the painter Van Dyck, and James Gordon Bennett came down from his newspaper in New York and cannily made do for fancy dress with his kilts. Rose Greenhow, Confederate spy-in-waiting, appeared plainly as a housekeeper whose beauty contradicted the dustiness of her clothing. Senator William H. Seward, Republican and abolitionist, managed, like many of the older men in high office, to retain his dignity by wearing a suit, but was seen chatting with Virginia Clay, even though she had once said that “not even to save the nation could I be induced to . . . speak with him.”29 A number of people noticed Key and Teresa leave together about two in the morning. Some were titillated by the sight; others more gravely assessed the peril to the girl and the district attorney.

  Before she entered the carriage with Key, Teresa told Thompson, the coachman, to drive for a while around the streets of Washington. As he drove, he had no doubt that Mrs. Sickles and Mr. Key enjoyed a fumbling, semi-intoxicated sexual episode on the upholstered seat within. After a time, Thompson heard a voice within the carriage tell him to drive to the National Hotel, and there he waited a considerable time until the English huntsman got down with his hunting horn and disappeared inside.

  For whatever reason, Teresa did not see this love affair as tragic and dangerous. She lived within it as in a secret fantasy, as in a virtual and time-consuming experience that lacked any power to inflict damage on other areas of her life. Both she and Barton thought they were taking more care, and being less observed by people, than they were. It was as if, despite his outrage at any imputation of bad behavior, Barton unconsciously courted a certain visibility for his love of Teresa. Teresa may have similarly and ill-advisedly enjoyed the flaunting side of the relationship, the idea that it must come to Dan’s attention eventually, and that he would thereby be chastened and rendered repentant for his previous neglect.

  In a time when servants were considered invisible, when a coachman could not speak in a frank manner to the congressman who employed him, Thompson was acquiring a lot of information his master did not possess on the relationship between Key and Teresa. His servant’s honor forestalled him from selling the news to the press or betraying anything to people of Teresa’s caste. Thompson was a good, earthy Scots Presbyterian, and his attitude to the lovers was one of slightly salacious but definite disapproval. In the end, it would take a subpoena to make him talk, and with that authority, he would talk copiously.

  The other servant who knew more than she was yet saying was Bridget Duffy, Teresa’s competent maid, who spent considerable time attending to Laura and slept near the child’s nursery. The majority of American maids, ninety-two out of every hundred, were, like Bridget, Irish. Though depicted by the anti-Irish Know-Nothing lodges as brutish and suffused with superstition, they often picked up the routines of fine houses in quick order and, for $4 to $7 a month plus board, proved energetic and loyal. When it was taken into account—as it rarely was—that many came from Europe’s rawest hovels in the west of Ireland, their adaptability was astonishing. Their habits were normally what was called “regular,” because most loyally remitted much of their earnings back home to post-Famine Ireland, for the support of parents or to enable their siblings to leave the hopeless Irish countryside, buy steamer tickets, and join them in America. But in some instances their mores differed from those of the Anglo-Saxon and Protestant majority. Raised in the gossipiness of small Irish villages and clachans, they were unabashed about listening in to what they accidentally overheard, and sometimes they passed on news of domestic scandals to one another.

  About lunchtime on most days, having given Bridget instructions for the afternoon and leaving Laura in her care, Teresa would set out by carriage to visit eminent Washington hostesses. She gave Thompson a “lie-bill” of the houses she wanted to visit, and Thompson would choose the order in which she did so. There was hardly a day, said Thompson, when Key did not meet them, joining Mrs. Sickles either at the destination or, more commonly, beforehand. “He met us at the President’s, Mr. McDonalds’s, Mr. Gwinn’s, and Mr. Slidell’s. Sometimes he would get into the carriage and tell us to drive through back streets.” At other times Key would encounter the carriage in the street near Lafayette Square, where he saluted Mrs. Sickles and called her madam. Sometimes he would remain on horseback and accompany the carriage; sometimes he would dismount and enter it, leaving his mount to be tethered to the back of the carriage. He never got in at the Sickleses’ door, and always but once got out before they returned to the house, generally at the Clubhouse across the square. On only one occasion, when Dan was away from Washington, did he enter the house directly from the carriage. But that did not mean he was not frequently there by other means. On his visits during Mr. Sickles’s absences, said Thompson, Key and Mrs. Sickles would go into the study. “The door was shut while they were there. There was a sofa in that room with its right foot at the door.”

  Thompson had known Key to be in the house one night till one o’clock—this was while Dan was out of town in May 1858. Thompson was going to bed when he thought he heard the front doorbell ring, and he met Bridget Duffy emerging from her room in her nightclothes, under the same impression of having heard the doorbell. Perhaps a young clerk on the way home had mischievously rung it. Perhaps one of Teresa’s young admirers, fueled with liquor in the Clubhouse and knowing what was happening in the Stockton Mansion, was playing a little trick on the lovers. From above, Duffy and Thompson saw Mr. Key and Teresa come into the hall, unlock the inner front door, and look out through the front window to see whether anyone was outside on the step. They obviously saw nobody, and locked up again, reentered the study, shut the door into the hall and locked it, and locked as well the door that led from the study to the parlor.

  “I stood a little while and heard them making this noise on the sofa for about two or three minutes,” the coachman said. He remarked to Bridget that they were making a mysterious noise, and Bridget ran away. “She would not hearken to me—as it was not language suitable for her to hear. I heard them for about two or three minutes. I then went to bed; I knew they wasn’t at no good work.”

  Sometimes Thompson drove Teresa to the old congressional cemetery on the eastern fringe of the city. Mr. Barton Key either joined the carriage on the way or was waiting on his horse among the trees of the graveyard. He would dismount and greet Teresa, and the two of them would vanish for an hour or an hour and a half. They also met a number of times in t
he Georgetown cemetery.

  On one of those visits to the congressional burying ground, Thompson saw Barton elegantly emerge from the trees on his horse, Lucifer, dismount, tie the horse to a railing, help Mrs. Sickles out of the carriage, and walk away with her “down the burying ground.” Another day only Mr. Key’s tethered horse was visible, and a colored man appeared and handed Mrs. Sickles a note. She took it and walked away among the graves, and Mr. Key arrived afterward in a carriage and told the man to take the same carriage home. Then he followed Teresa’s tracks down through the burial monuments toward a supposedly joyous meeting.30

  At least the burial ground meetings were discreet to a certain degree, and the afternoon meetings at polite homes had a reasonable seemliness to them, but in combination with the meetings in the Sickleses’ home, they formed a pattern of recklessness, as if Key and Teresa felt they were pursuing a literary or theatrical version of hopeless yet admirable love. We do not know if Teresa saw Key as a potential partner for life or had fantasies of fleeing with him to California, Cuba, or Central America. There is no evidence. But Key must have been a wonderful lover, with his excellent physique, with—behind his actions—all the energy of his somber temperament, of his desperate, neurotic soul, of his hypochondriacal fear of death and his frenzy to be confirmed as one of the living.

  As the affair became habitual, Dan was operating as one of the more effective Buchanan supporters on the floor of the House. In June he had made what his side considered an able speech in defense of the President’s stand against a recent stint of British “visitation and search” activities against American ships in the Gulf of Mexico. He was pleased that the Secretary of the Navy had sent a fleet into the Gulf strong enough to drive the British squadron from those waters. Dan’s outrage, however, was not as purely republican as it might first have seemed; the British excuse was that the Royal Navy was trying to intercept American ships engaged illegally in the slave trade.