American Scoundrel American Scoundrel American Scoundrel

by Thomas Keneally

  Dan was now given his trial date—Monday, April 4—and his legal team was assembled. In addition to Allen Magruder and Daniel Ratcliffe, considered keen lawyers by D.C. standards, Dan had employed the services of a former Alabama congressman, a Jewish Southerner named Philip Phillips, who had stayed on in Washington after his term in Congress to open a law office and who enjoyed great repute at the Washington bar. Magruder’s elderly but respected partner, Sam Chilton, promised to help with case law and occasional advocacy. Even more eminent a lawyer was Edwin Stanton, who would achieve wide renown as Secretary of War in the coming conflict but who was already well regarded as a jurist and had just returned to Washington from California, where he had successfully settled land claims resulting from the war against Mexico. Like that of the late Mr. Key, Edwin Stanton’s house was on C Street, but unlike Ratcliffe and Magruder, he and his young wife had been intimates of the Sickleses and had attended dinners at the Stockton Mansion. Stanton was, in an unconventional way, impressive physically, for although he was chubby about the face, his head was titanic, and his eye and his manner piercing. His legal forte had always been civil and constitutional matters, and there were some potential constitutional matters in this trial, since the District of Columbia borrowed much of its statutes and case law on homicide, marriage, and adultery from such states as Virginia and Maryland. Stanton’s very face on the team gave Dan’s defense a seriousness it might not otherwise have possessed.

  When it came to counsel from New York, Dan had had no reason to go beyond his concerned friend James Topham Brady. Unlike many Tammany men, Brady was admired and even loved by society in general, but on top of that, though his legal repertoire was wide, he had been involved successfully in more than fifty murder cases. His parents had emigrated from Ireland, and his father had been a progressive schoolmaster in Lower Manhattan who had then studied law. Brady was born in New York, in 1815, but many sentimentally assumed his eloquence came from his Irish inheritance. As soon as he was admitted to the bar, in 1836, people became aware of his unusual forensic ability. He was a tireless student of the briefs he received and left nothing to chance, but he combined this exacting professional attitude with the greatest urbanity and an almost manic politeness to opposing counsel and witnesses. “His addresses to jury and court,” wrote an observer, “flattered the listener by many classical illusions and were extremely seductive.” He had a much gentler demeanor than did Stanton, and, as one commentator said, “What Mr. Brady lavishes in the suaviter [gentle methods], Mr. Stanton makes up for in the fortiter [strong methods].” In 1843, he became at the age of twenty-eight the district attorney for New York City, and two years later was rewarded with the post of corporation counsel. He had been offered the cabinet post of Attorney General in the government of Van Buren, but declined. As a civil lawyer, he had achieved in one case an award that long remained a record: $300,000.14

  More germane in this case was Brady’s record in murder trials, as a result of which he made a special study of pleas of insanity. He had raised the matter of insanity in two famous will cases. And in the murder trial of a man named Cole, he had invoked the defense of “moral insanity,” permanent insanity induced by extreme moral outrage. He had not yet attempted to have a client acquitted on a plea of temporary insanity, nor had any other lawyer in America. But he saw it as the only way to deal with Dan’s case.

  Another New York member of Dan’s team was his old friend John Graham, of the Tammany Hall Graham family. The Graham brothers combined, in the same New York manner as Sickles, toughness and urbanity, and John Graham had already represented Dan in the libel case against Bennett of the New York Herald.

  The last of Dan’s lawyers was something of a darling of Irish and Democratic America, Thomas Francis Meagher, the former Irish convict who had escaped from Australia. He brought Dan’s legal team to eight. Meagher was in his mid-thirties, good-looking, animated, as fashionable a dresser as Dan Sickles—in fact, more of a dandy—and one of the foremost orators of his day. Handsome Tom Meagher was considered the most genial-looking of the lawyers in Dan’s defense, but he may also have been the least experienced, since he divided his time between speaking tours around the United States, Tammany politics, Irish activism, contributing to newspapers and editing one of his own, and sharing the company of his steel heiress wife, Libby Townsend, whose family had the proud claim of having forged the enormous chain the Continental Congress had ordered slung across the Hudson to impede armed British vessels during the Revolutionary War. Smiling Meagher was hopeful that the Key murder case would both save his friend Dan and revive his own intermittent law career, for some potential clients suspected that his earlier admission to the bar had been more a reward for his services to the Irish cause than a recognition of legal scholarship.

  During meetings in the home of Edwin Stanton, and in the National, where Brady wanted the defense team to dwell, Dan’s lawyers devised a defense strategy based on the plea of temporary insanity. Brady had certain problems of personal principle to sort out, as well. Deprived of his parents when still a boy, he had become the head of his family and had never married, yet for a celibate, he had spoken a great deal about women’s affairs. In a case involving marital rights, he was interpreted as justifying the husband’s absolute bodily control of his wife. A number of newspapers and the women’s rights movement had denounced him. So he accepted an invitation to give an address on the issue, along with the famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Like Beecher, Brady attacked much apparent gallantry toward women as “enlightened selfishness” on the part of men. And, like Beecher, he expressed the view of the era that woman was either noble, “in her own sphere . . . a wife, a mother and a companion,” or else “the most wretched thing that ever was expressed on earth this side of perdition.” In an age in which syphilis, tuberculosis, and other horrifying diseases commonly struck underfed, underpaid, and underprotected women, it was true that the woman who lost or spurned her marriage did tend to express in her body the physical signs of perdition. So, a progressive male for his era, Brady believed that the true chivalry of manhood consisted in genuine help to women. This help was most needed by a woman when “the world has pronounced against her a dreadful sentence of outlawry.” It was at that stage that a man should step from the “common ranks of his fellows, though this step might subject him to suspicion and censure,” and, taking the fallen woman by the hand, raise her “from the degradation to which she has been assigned, and restore her to humble comforts, if not indeed to happiness.” It was presumed that his lecture had had no small effect on the state legislature in Albany, which had, at the time of the trial, just passed measures acknowledging women’s right of ownership to property even within marriage.

  In the prison, when Brady sat with Dan and acquainted him with the defense he intended to run, he may have been tentative, expecting that Dan would consider a plea of momentary insanity vaguely insulting and dishonorable. But either by persuasion or as a result of Dan’s belief that he had been reduced to an Othello-like temporary madness by Key’s behavior, Dan accepted Brady’s strategy. Brady could thus give practical form to his beliefs concerning temporary insanity in the trial of Dan Sickles, his friend and client, but he would need to violate his tender feelings toward so-called fallen women. For though Dan no longer had vengeful feelings toward Teresa, the more of a pariah Brady could make her out to be, the more likely he could prove deranging provocation of his client.15

  Tasks were allocated around the legal team. Mr. Phillips, the former Southern congressman, was to be in charge of jury selection. Thomas Francis Meagher would be the creator of imagery and oratory, especially for use in the speeches of John Graham and James Topham Brady, who much admired his eloquence. Graham, as friend and counsel, would address the jury to open Dan’s defense, but not until the prosecution had completed its initial examination of witnesses. Brady would then lead the examination and cross-examination of witnesses. But Stanton’s job would
be to argue matters of law with elderly Judge Crawford, who was considered his intellectual inferior, and would summarize the case toward the end of the trial, before Brady made the address-in-chief to the jury. Ratcliffe and Magruder would serve in a junior capacity on matters of both fact and law.16

  As the opening day of the trial neared, Barton’s brother-in-law George Pendleton gave the enciphered letter found on Key’s body to another brother-in-law, Charles Howard, who took it home to Baltimore and tried to decode it. Pendleton had already searched the house on Fifteenth Street with the owner, John Gray. According to Pendleton, they found nothing belonging to Barton, but Dan’s lawyers would suspect, or pretend to suspect, that some evidence had been removed, just as items had been removed from Key’s body.

  Barton’s family was distressed by the official appointment of Barton’s deputy, Robert Ould, to the post left vacant by Key’s death. Ould was a younger, florid man of straightforward industry and intellect who had studied in a theological seminary and had something of a clerical air still. He had been a member of the commission that codified the laws of the District of Columbia, but he was a friend of Buchanan’s—indeed, he owed his post to him—and therefore might be less assiduous in searching out matters that could embarrass the White House. He also lacked prosecutorial experience. The Key family went to the White House to appeal to President Buchanan, and asked him to appoint a special prosecutor to work with Ould and give him guidance. But Buchanan had his reasons for not complying, one of them being that he considered that Key had been a fool and had courted a bullet.

  As foreshadowed by Laura’s visit to Dan, ten days after the murder Teresa rose early in the cold dark of March 10 to dress for departure for New York and the new order of her life. She had reachieved an air of dignity, though her confident youthfulness was not as evident as it had been. She knew her task now was to be the limited but crucial one of contrite shelterer of her exuberant five-year-old daughter. Polite people did not rise to see her leave for the train at an hour when the sleepy servants of Lafayette Square had just begun sweeping the front steps of neighboring houses. One artist from an illustrated paper had arrived at his post early and was near the railings of the square, sketching the house. He was rewarded with the visual scoop of Mrs. Sickles’s departure from the Stockton Mansion to catch the six-o’clock train north. She was dressed darkly, wore a veil, looked neither to the right nor left. The wider scene as depicted by the artist is a tragic one—Manny Hart beckoning Mrs. Bagioli, Teresa, Bridget Duffy, and the child, Laura, down the curved steps to a carriage. The women are heavily cloaked, and the only apparently happy personage in the scene is a black servant, sweeping the pavement beneath the steps and pausing for a minute to see the white women go on their way in grief. Teresa walked as she ever would from this point on, guardedly in her cone of shame, with always the proximate risk of someone shouting an insult.

  To define her condition, a poet contributed a better than average verse to the pages of Harper’s Weekly. Entitled “Judge Not,” it advised women:

  Bridle your virtue,

  Tether the tongue;

  Pity the fair vine

  Blighted so young!

  Why not the tomb?

  Sad, shattered life;

  Think of her doom—

  Widow yet wife!17

  As the carriage set off, Teresa had a chance for last glimpses of the capital, as they turned away from the White House in its misty gardens, past the familiar houses and stores where Teresa was so well known; past Marshal Hoover’s, where Laura liked to go; past the famous Gautier’s; past the Capitol, where Teresa had sat with the First Lady for the most sacred American secular moment: the inauguration of a President. Every scene between Washington and New York, all she had passed with a glad heart last fall, she now saw again, this gloomy day, through reaches of air from which all promise had been sucked.

  In New York by evening, Teresa would live for the time being in her parents’ house. Even the humblest residents of a neighborhood not considered to be of the first order looked askance at her. If she went out of the house by day, she faced the sneers of delivery boys, the coolness of grocers and butchers, the turned shoulder of the respectable. She was also a figure of lubricious sexuality to many solitary males whom she would encounter if she dared go walking. She could not therefore consider going riding in the park, the recreation she loved best of all. She was a prisoner of her parents, of a father given to fulsome and baroque moral attitudes, of a mother understandably susceptible to fits of weeping and lamentation. For the Bagiolis and Teresa could all see the future. Ultimately, when she achieved equilibrium, Teresa would move uptown to Bloomingdale, where she would live out the residue of her life, first as a figure of futile and violated beauty, and then as a cracked and spurned village crone. The account of her indelible crimes would be passed from one generation of townspeople to another.

  One day later in March, Tom Field of Bloomingdale, having recently returned from visiting Dan in Washington, came to her door with something which for the moment softened the picture. It was an envelope with Dan’s writing on it.

  Dan’s behavior in the weeks leading up to the trial is difficult to make sense of. On the one hand, there was the shameful public fact that, for legal reasons, he or someone near him would choose to leak to the nation’s press both the R.P.G. letter and the details of the confession written by his wife. On the other, there was the secret reality that he began writing dangerously forgiving letters to Teresa. His lawyers, if they knew, must have despaired. For the question would be asked, “If the wife can be forgiven, why did Mr. Key need to be shot?” We do not have the text of the letter Dan sent from prison by his friend Tom Field, but it arrived in time for the desperately excluded Teresa to answer, more or less one month after the killing of Key, with considerable gratitude and pithiness.

  Good morning, dear Dan, Mr. Field has just left. He brought me a kind, good letter from you. Thank you many times for all your kind expressions and God bless you for the mercy and prayers you offer up for me. Do not ask if I never think about the events of the past month. Yesterday, at each hour by the clock I thought “one month ago this day, at this hour, such and such things were going on in our once happy home.” That fearful Saturday night! . . . If I could have foreseen the scenes of the following day I would have braved all dangers, all things, to have prevented them. Oh that Manny Hart could have been with us! . . . I have been out of the house but three times since I came home; and you know how much exercise I have been in the habit of taking. . .. One night I walked with Manny Hart; but my body trembled, my legs seemed to give way under me and my heart beat violently.

  Dan had enclosed some verses that she thought were very beautiful. She would always keep them, she said. Perhaps, she wrote, she had spoken hastily of George Wooldridge, whom she had dubbed a scandalmonger and a busybody. She promised not to mention again his name, or Wiley’s or Butterworth’s, in any of her letters. But she was not yet beaten to dust, and she could answer frankly some charges made by Dan’s friends. “One thing I will assure you of, and that is that I did not tell Mr. Butterworth to mind his own business or something to that effect. Mr. Butterworth, I think, only needed encouragement from me to flirt. I may be mistaken, but I doubt it. But let all suspicions be forgotten and unthought of—the reality is bad enough without suspecting or supposing things.”

  Answering what was obviously a question of Dan’s, as to whether he’d ever denied her anything, she replied that he had not, that “you gave me many things I did not deserve—everyone knows this.” So, as a small gesture of recompense, she would soon begin working on a pair of slippers for him, and she would not stop until they were finished. “Will you wear them for me? Or would you dislike to wear again anything that I have made? God bless you for the two kisses you sent me—and with God’s help and my own determination to be good, true, and faithful to you and myself hereafter, those kisses shall never leave my lips while I am called wife and you husband. I
swear it by Laura.” She resolved to write to a Washington nursery to have flowers sent to the prison for Dan.18

  This letter, despite its chastened tone, lacked self-pity. But clearly she had been encouraged to foresee a future as a wife. If her protestations are to be believed, she had utterly repented of Key. But surely he came to her in dreams, and surely his caresses were involuntarily remembered with either revulsion or longing.

  As the date of the trial neared, Barton Key’s relatives and friends decided to employ John Carlisle, a prominent Washington lawyer and a friend of Key’s who had spoken at his memorial service. Carlisle would work with Ould and represent the family’s interests at the trial.

  It was undeniable that, though Dan could weep like a child, his morale was high, and that he found the resources to behave with dignity and energy in prison. Dan had become his old practical and improving self. He sent the jail gardener to the Patent Office for some seeds, and set him to work in the prison yard making flower beds. Unlike other prisoners, on Sundays he often went walking in the stone yard next to the jail, where during the week masons worked on the marble columns for the Treasury building and the Post Office. He was not accompanied by a guard, and could have walked out to the street and into Pennsylvania Avenue had he chosen. Instead, since there was but one true escape for him, he contemplated the august carved stones and the oncoming spring. He knew he might be executed before the summer was out, and he was aware of the hard facts of that, of the degrading idea of the noose, of how an ill-tied one might cause minutes of anguish for the hanged man, of how a desperate, dangling man whose neck had not been broken in the fall through the trapdoor might soil himself, of how his blood—in a last attempt to avert the deadly effects of strangulation— would rush to his penis and produce an erection, which the surgeons primly called priapism. None of that seemed to weigh on him or influence his mental state. If it did, it was when others were not present.