American Scoundrel American Scoundrel American Scoundrel

by Thomas Keneally

  Outside the barbershop at Willard’s, Key ran into two acquaintances, Washington’s mayor, James G. Berret, and a fellow lawyer, Southey Parker, who was also a friend of the Sickleses. Key showed yet again that he was not an accomplished manager of affairs with married women. He went so far as to joke that he might be killed by Mr. Sickles. Berret had himself heard rumors about Key and Mrs. Sickles, but he believed that Mr. Key’s remark was hyperbole.

  Bridget Duffy returned about now from the Catholic church some blocks north. Going into the Stockton Mansion and taking off her shawl, she found her master still given to sobs, “calling on God to witness his troubles.” She went to her upstairs room to put away her hat and shawl, and from the window saw Barton Key walking on Pennsylvania Avenue, seemingly headed toward Georgetown, though she suspected that was just a feint. Downstairs, in the study, Wooldridge also saw Key and watched him cross Pennsylvania Avenue. One of the Reverend Smith Pyne’s homeward-bound parishioners saw Barton stop on the edge of the pavement and look toward the Sickleses’ house. On top of that, a Treasury Department architect walking in the square saw Key, too. And twenty minutes later, from the kitchen window, Bridget saw him yet again, as he crossed the park toward the Clubhouse.

  This building, until recently operating as the National Club, still housed a restaurant and bar and rooms for rent. It had at one time been the home of Chief Justice Roger Brook Taney, Key’s frail, venerable pro-Southern uncle. Obviously Key thought that the position of the Clubhouse, where he was not unknown, gave some credibility to his loitering in the square, yet, hungry for Teresa, he was no better than a schoolboy at hiding his real purpose. So by the time Butterworth was counseling Dan Sickles, Key had been sighted at least eight times in the Sickleses’ neighborhood, including twice by Bridget Duffy and once by Mayor Berret.

  Having given his advice and partially soothed Dan, Butterworth, keeping an arranged appointment, went to meet a friend at the Clubhouse and drink a glass of ale with him. While Butterworth was gone, Barton appeared again in Lafayette Square; among those who saw him were the coachman John Cooney and the groom McDonald. A lawyer from Buffalo, New York, who knew him, spotted him as he walked back and forth near the statue of Andrew Jackson, a memorial made from the metal of British guns captured at the Battle of New Orleans. The man approached him, “passed the time of day with him,” and went off to eat his Sunday dinner at Willard’s, as Barton left the square by its southwest gate, “whirling a handkerchief as he went along.”

  These sightings suggested that Barton Key may have been desperate for a glimpse of Teresa in an upper window or a reciprocating signal from her. He had been reconnoitering the house and prowling into the square, retreating occasionally to the Clubhouse, for well over two hours and had not received any sign. Was she ill? Had her husband given her warnings? An exasperated and yet grimly gratified Bridget observed him a third time. He had run into a young couple he knew, who were crossing the square on their way from an unspecified church. By now Barton was depressed, and he told the young woman, when she asked him how he was, “I am despondent about my health and very desperate. Indeed, I have half a mind to go out on the prairie and try buffalo hunting. The excursion would either cure me or kill me, and, really, I don’t care much which.”

  Now the Sickleses’ dog, an Italian greyhound named Dandy, spotted Barton and ran out into the street to greet him, or, as Bridget Duffy said, “to fawn on him.” As if playing with the dog, Barton again extracted his white handkerchief and whirled it three or four times. Though he may have seen himself as a heroic lover, he had become a figure of bathos. He continued to wave the handkerchief in “a slow, rotary motion,” even after the dog had given up and departed. From the study by the front door, above the kitchen, Wooldridge also saw Barton with the young couple, waving his handkerchief while averting his eyes from his friends and hoping for a signal from Mrs. Sickles.19

  Teresa’s feelings and movements that day would always remain less scrupulously examined by others than those of Sickles and Key. She would not ever be asked, for example, “Did you wish to go to the window and warn Barton away by gesture? Or did you, even this early, curse him as the source of your present misery? Did Octavia Ridgeley urge you not to make any signal, assuring you that Key would in the end go away?” The sad case was that the subtler mixture of feelings of a shamed woman like Teresa would not be considered relevant, and she would never be consulted on them.

  Dan was upstairs again as Butterworth strolled back to the Sickleses’ house from the Clubhouse. Somehow he missed seeing Barton Key in the square, but when he went up the outer stairs and through the front door and into the study, Wooldridge told him in a lowered voice that Key had been backward and forward a number of times. Wooldridge then turned in distress to a set of stereoscopic views with which he had been relieving the pressure and lost himself in three-dimensional images of the White House, the Capitol, the Treasury building, the Washington Memorial.

  About then, Dan Sickles, glancing from his window upstairs, also happened to see Key. It was preposterous that the man who had sullied Teresa while denying he was doing so should be so provocative as to present himself openly in Lafayette Square. In a frenzy, Dan rushed downstairs into the library. “That villain has just passed my house,” he cried. “My God, this is horrible!”

  Both Butterworth and Wooldridge knew from the look of Dan’s enraged face, his blood-engorged blue eyes, that he was at his most dangerous. Sam Butterworth said, “Mr. Sickles, you must be calm, and look this matter square in the face. If there be a possibility of keeping a certain knowledge of this crime from the public, you must do nothing to destroy that possibility. You may be mistaken in your belief that it is known to the whole city.”

  But Dan reiterated, “It’s the town talk. The whole world knows it.”

  Butterworth declared that if it was the town talk, “there is but one course left to you as a man of honor. You need no advice.” Sam was proposing a duel between Sickles and Barton Key.

  On the edge of reacting, Dan fell into a dark reflectiveness. He said he was sure that Key had been in the habit of using a room at the Clubhouse from which to signal Teresa. But Teresa had denied it, and he wondered why, since she’d admitted so much else. Without trying to resolve this puzzle, Dan now walked into the hallway. There, according to Butterworth, he suggested that they go to the room of a mutual friend, Stuart, at the Clubhouse, to ask him whether Key had a room there. A little implausibly, Butterworth claimed that he then walked out of the Stockton Mansion, down its sweep of iron stairs, and off toward the Clubhouse, thinking that Sickles was following him.

  In view of coming events, Sam Butterworth had every reason to claim that when he left Dan in the hall he was satisfied that the congressman had no weapons on his person, and that he was without his overcoat. Finding himself alone on the pavement, Sam, instead of returning to the house, claimed to have walked slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue on the south side, the side on which the White House stood, and then crossed to encounter Barton Key from the flank by the railings of the park. His movements would to many bespeak a man partaking in an ambush, for according to his own account, he walked 120 yards or more wrongly thinking Sickles was with or just behind him.

  Since Butterworth was the type of New York Democrat who had strong associations in the capital and with its Southern gentry, Key recognized him as he approached, and greeted him by name. “What a fine day we have!” said Key.

  Butterworth asked in reply whether Key had come from the Clubhouse, and Key said he had. Butterfield then asked whether his friend Mr. Stuart was in his room.

  “Yes; and he is quite well.”

  Butterworth said he was on his way to see Stuart and bade Key goodbye, but now saw Sickles, wearing an overcoat despite the warmth of the day, coming rapidly toward them around the square and down Madison Place to cut off Key’s line of retreat to the Clubhouse. Dan must have ultimately left his house by the basement door, for the stereo-scopically engaged Wooldri
dge did not see him leave by the front door. Now, even at this extremity of feeling, Dan took his lines from contemporary drama. He called, “Key, you scoundrel, you have dishonored my house—you must die!”

  It happened that at that second of threat there were many people in the environs of Lafayette Square, but Dan’s fury transcended that reality. Most of these witnesses would say later that Dan mentioned a dishonored bed. Butterworth claimed that before anything else happened, Barton Key’s hand flashed into his vest or side coat pocket, and that he took a step in the direction of Dan Sickles. As Barton stepped forward, Dan produced a gun from his overcoat pocket and fired from close range. That first shot produced little more than a contusion on one of Barton Key’s hands. When Dan raised his arm to fire again, Barton jumped at him, seizing him by the collar of his coat with his left hand. Dan backed from the sidewalk into the street and dropped the gun he held, a derringer, onto the sidewalk. Some said he jettisoned it deliberately; others, accidentally. Barton grabbed him from behind when Dan turned as if to leave, though that was not his intention. All this untoward grappling between two eminent servants of the Republic was occurring on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue, the corner of the square and of the little pathway called Madison Place, connecting Pennsylvania and H Street. Had the President been at any of the front windows of the White House, he would have had a clear view of the untoward struggle between Key and Sickles. But he was in his office on the south side, looking—if he had time to—over the unseemly swamp that is now the Ellipse, toward the Washington Monument and the Potomac.

  At last, Dan pulled himself from Barton’s hold, swung around, and hauled another gun from his overcoat pocket. Barton backed a few steps up Madison Place toward the Clubhouse, crying, “Don’t murder me!” He reached inside his own coat, took out the opera glasses, and threw them at Dan. They hit the congressman, who thought the gesture contemptible, and fell to the ground. Butterworth said that at this moment he was still sure Key was armed, and that Dan must have believed it too. In any case, this show of ineffectual aggression from Barton occurred just before Dan fired again, from a distance of a few feet.

  The second bullet struck Barton in the upper leg. Perhaps the wound which resulted reflected the fact that Key was taller than Dan, though Dan was accustomed to using a pistol. His friends in the Tammany target clubs said his eye was accurate. So it may have been that the wound was also a near-miss symbolic injury, for the bullet entered Key’s trousers just two inches below his groin, high enough that it exited in the fold between buttocks and upper leg. The inflicting of this wound was witnessed by at least seven people, one of them a young White House page from South Carolina, J. H. W. Bonitz, who had just left the staff quarters of the White House and was emerging through its gateway on to the avenue. Behind Barton as he backed into Madison Place, Thomas Martin, a Treasury Department clerk, was leaving the Clubhouse, where he had been chatting with three colleagues. On top of that, a Mr. McCormack, of the corner house—the Maynard house—on Pennsylvania Avenue and Madison Place, saw the whole thing from his seat at a second-floor window.

  “I’m shot,” Barton announced and staggered toward the sidewalk. He asked Dan not to fire again. Dan still shouted, calling him a villain, ranting about his dishonored marriage. Barton leaned against a tree outside the Maynard house, but he could not hold on to it and slid to the pavement, where he lay on his right side, with his hand over the hole near his groin.

  Had Dan stopped, with a nonfatal blood debt having been paid— the coroner would find that the bullet missed the main artery of the thigh—he would have been easily vindicated. The presumption that Key was carrying a gun would have been considered reasonable not only in terms of the culture of Washington, but from assertions Key had made to other people. But Dan’s nature required the extreme sacrifice. The witnesses heard Barton cry, “Don’t shoot me. Murder! Murder!” When Dan pulled the trigger again, the gun merely made a snapping noise, and did not fire. He cocked the weapon again, placed the barrel close to Key, and fired.

  This time the bullet entered beneath Barton’s heart, passing between the eleventh and twelfth ribs. The bullet entered the large lobe of the liver, punctured the right cavity of the chest, and hit the ribs at Barton’s back, lodging under the skin. Immediately, the left side of his chest began to fill with blood.

  Either because they were too far away or because they were stunned, the witnesses had not intervened. Even Sam Butterworth, who would be depicted in the illustrated papers as either standing coolly by or leaning easefully on the railings of Lafayette Square, did not step in. The young Treasury man, Thomas Martin, who had just come from the Clubhouse, was the most active witness, and rushed back inside the building to mobilize his three friends.

  Dan now moved close to Key’s body for the coup de grâce. The gun, its barrel close to Key’s head, again misfired. Thomas Martin, back on the street, was able to get between the two men. Dan asked him, “Is the scoundrel dead?” Martin took Barton Key in his arms and looked up at Dan. “He has violated my bed,” Dan said as justification for what had just happened. One of Martin’s friends, who put his hand on Dan’s shoulder and begged him not to fire again, was offered the same justification.

  Butterworth, who some would believe was pleased to stand by while Key was punished, stepped up, took Dan by the arm, and led him away toward the corner of H Street and Madison Place. As he walked, Dan put the gun in his overcoat pocket. Dr. Coolidge, an army surgeon who lived on H Street and who had heard the unmistakable and successive sound of gunshots, was on his way, running to Lafayette Square with his surgeon’s bag. Martin and his fellow federal employees were engaged in carrying Barton Key into the Clubhouse. They placed him on the floor in one of the first rooms inside the door, and someone tilted a chair upside down so that Key could lean his head and shoulders against its legs and rungs. When Martin felt for the pulse and found it thin, he asked Barton if there were any messages he would like passed on to his children, but Key, drowning in his own blood, did not seem to grasp the question. Dr. Coolidge, entering the scene, found Key “pulseless.” Key “partially breathed twice,” but when Dr. Coolidge opened Barton’s shirt and trousers, looking for his wounds, he decided that nothing could be done. His initial assessment was that the chest wound would prove fatal, and even as he inspected it, Barton died.20

  Young Bonitz, the White House page, ran back to the White House at once. In the informal presidential household of the day, he was able to get immediate access to the office and tell the President that Congressman Sickles had just shot District Attorney Key. Bonitz knew, from the tremors of Old Buck’s head, that the news had nearly felled the gray and aged President. “I was afraid it would happen!” said the President. “I must see Sickles—I must see him at once!” As the page detailed for the President the sequence of events he had just witnessed, it became apparent to Buchanan that Dan, who, according to Bonitz, had vanished across Lafayette Square, could be in great peril. Even apart from personal affections and sadness, the President believed that such a serviceable and promising Democrat needed to be saved. Clearly there would be a trial, and that meant a risk that certain details of his own connection with the Sickleses would emerge.

  The President did not spend much time considering the law-enforcement aspect of Dan’s act. No message was sent from the White House to the federal marshal. No message went to Attorney General Jeremiah Black. President Buchanan had other priorities. Quite inaccurately, he warned the relatively unworldly Bonitz, a young man from rural South Carolina, that as an eyewitness he was in a difficult situation; he could be held in jail without bail pending his being called as a witness. He should leave Washington straightaway, and return home on indefinite leave. Hence an American President, often referred to as the Chief Magistrate of the Republic, urged a witness—for all he knew the only witness to the murder—to flee from his legal responsibility. The President searched around to give Bonitz a personal memento, and came up with a new razor, handing it and
some money to the young man. Bonitz packed his valise and rushed off to the Potomac to cross to the far side and take the Wilmington train homeward. In an age when the press believed it impolite to keep watch on a Sabbath, or any other day, on the White House lawn, the description went utterly unobserved.21

  As Barton Key breathed his last in the Clubhouse, Dan, still accompanied by Butterworth, was walking resolutely toward the house of Attorney General Black, a few blocks northeast on Franklin Park. Once there, he went inside alone, for he had decided on reflection to send Butterworth doubling back to Lafayette Square to collect any helpful evidence, especially the opera glasses, which could credibly have been mistaken for an instant for a drawn pistol or something else of danger. At the Attorney General’s door, Dan spoke to a servant, who led him to a back parlor, where two other gentlemen were waiting to see Mr. Black. One was a man named Haldemar, editor of a Democratic paper in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the other a former senator named Richard Brodhead. With surreal politeness, Dan began to discuss Pennsylvania politics with Haldemar. Brodhead mentioned that Dan had some mud on his boots, which he might want to remove. Dan got up without a protest and left the room to attend to the problem, the mud on his boots being the only clue to the disorder that now claimed his life. Returning from outside, he ran into Attorney General Black in the hall, calmly explained his situation, and surrendered his gun. To his visitors, Black appeared to be far more distraught than Congressman Sickles as he came into the parlor and informed the editor and the former senator. Then Dan strolled in and joined them. Both visitors offered to go with Dan to a magistrate, and one of them surmised that the offense might be a bailable one. Dan said, “If all the facts were known, it would be. For God knows I would be justified.”