American Scoundrel American Scoundrel American Scoundrel

by Thomas Keneally

  As in the Jarboe case, the issue was the degree of provocation. At the second when Mr. Sickles sighted Key that Sunday, Mr. Sickles already knew about the house on Fifteenth Street, and he knew that Key used the Clubhouse for refuge. And Key should have known he knew. Dan had not invited him to the square that fatal afternoon. Key had arrived of his own cold deliberation. Lord Erskine, the renowned British jurist, had divided insanity into intellectual and moral, and on the fatal Sunday Sickles was acting under the influence of moral mania, said Graham. Deane’s Medical Jurisprudence, to which Graham referred the learned judge, explained the condition.34

  Judge Crawford would need to consult that tome overnight, since, sadly, the day was consumed, with Graham still not finished delivering his blazing defense speech. Throughout, the elegantly but neutrally dressed Dan had remained in the dock near Graham, looking exactly like a man who did in fact need the most extreme provocations to act beyond reason. He was exhilarated to know that his friend Graham, though a sinner himself who maintained a colored mistress in New York, had overpowered the defense, at least for the moment. And now there was a rest in prospect, because the Sabbath would intervene before Graham again took up the thread of his potent argument.

  Visits to Dan by Haley and other clergymen occupied a large portion of that Sunday, and he met his counsel, spiritual and legal, at a cramped table, fourteen by twenty inches. He took it well when nonexperts, clergymen, the Chevalier Wikoff, his father, tried too hard to assure him he would be found not guilty. For though his Tammany brother was arguing brilliantly, there was no certainty that he could make palatable to judge and jury the fact that this defense plea had never been used before. Old Crawford might find it too dangerous a defense to condone and release into the judicial system, and might therefore direct a guilty verdict.

  By this Sunday, Dan’s letters had given Teresa purpose, and she was enough recovered to be in the process of moving up to Bloomingdale and resuming her role as head of that house. At the Bagioli house at East Fifteenth Street, in the sometimes raw, sometimes charming April weather, Mrs. Bagioli minded the forthright child Laura, who pleaded with her grandmother to be taken for a walk along Fifth Avenue and uptown toward the fringes of the work-in-progress park her father had told her about. Possessing her father’s relentlessness, Laura could not be put off by excuses. Mrs. Bagioli had to sally forth with her, and on the street Laura became aware, on a different level from that of an adult, of the whispers behind hands, of the women with expressionless faces who snubbed her grandmother.

  That Sabbath, John Graham enjoyed dinner with other members of the legal team at the National Hotel. Visitors came by continually to congratulate Graham on his magnificent address to the jury. His spellbinding day-long speech would be reprinted the next day in all the major newspapers of the nation.35

  On Monday morning, a little after ten, when he rose again in court, having exchanged compliments with his client, Graham promised that he was close to concluding. He said that if no other reason admonished him to finish, his own exhaustion would serve. Yet the truth was that he took hours more to come to an end. In Britain, he told the jury, in one of the founding common law cases in the area of moral insanity, a man named Fisher killed the sodomizer of his son, and since the father deliberately committed the killing, the judge charged the jurors that they must convict him of murder. But the jury convicted him only of manslaughter. Fisher had spent all night pursuing the offender before killing him, an indication that in such a crime, a night was insufficient cooling period—indeed, a lifetime was.

  Graham was not done yet with heaping blame on Key either. Key, as prosecuting officer of the District of Columbia, had been selected to conserve the cause of public morality and decency. In this court he had hunted down “the mere worms that crawl upon the face of the earth,” while he himself, “a full-grown man of crime,” walked through the community unpunished. Dan Sickles had interceded to have Mr. Key appointed to the very position that Key’s private life disgraced. Mr. Sickles had even sent Key private clients, and at one time, when Mr. Sickles had occasion himself to employ professional services, “he secured those of this Mr. Key.”

  The adultery Key had committed involved a woman young enough to be his daughter. Now for the first time, Teresa was subjected to extensive comment by an officer of the court, and although it was comment normal for its time, it had a demeaning ring. “Reasoning from her years, and from our knowledge of the mental structure of woman, it is not too much to suppose that all the frivolity that surrounds a woman at that age environed her . . . that she was susceptible to the attentions of men, and looked upon them as so many offerings passed upon the shrine of her beauty. At her period of life, the marriage vow had not impressed itself with all its gravity upon her mind.” By contrast with Teresa and Key, Dan was the accredited member “of the councils of the nation,” and “in bringing within the precincts of the city of the national capital his wife and his child, he threw them and himself upon you and the laws of this district for protection.”

  In Graham’s scenario, even Key’s illness was a pretense. After all, “he had the strength enough to carry out his designs in reference to the wife of his neighbor.” Why was Mr. Key constantly in the vicinity of the Sickleses’ home when he lived so far away? Why was he in the habit of riding by on horseback, “practicing all those blandishments which adulterers cultivate for the purpose of reaching the target which they have set before them”? He took advantage of Sickles’s house, yes, but not only of Sickles’s. If he encountered Mrs. Sickles in the President’s mansion, he made an assignation with her there. Similarly, if he met her in the mansion of some senator, “she could scarcely go more than a few hundred feet from her house before he was by her side.” What had the servants said? “Here comes Disgrace to see Disgust.”

  Close to an end at last, Graham warned the jurors of the prosecutor’s hint that Sickles might be condemned by the jury but be pardoned by “executive clemency” of the President. It was their task, and no one else’s, to decide whether Sickles was “an involuntary instrument in the hands of some controlling and directing power for putting an effective termination to the adulterous career of Mr. Key.”

  As for those who said that Sickles should have sought monetary compensation to soothe the bleeding wounds he had suffered as a husband, this was a pernicious view. “It opens every house in your city as a brothel. It tells every man that if he will pay the price which the jury may set upon his adultery or his seduction, he can . . . rifle the purest bed . . . of its purest contents. . .. In God’s name, repudiate that principle from your bosom!” Graham reminded the jury, last of all, “You are here at the feet of our Federal government; you are overshadowed by the halo of the name of Washington; let the recollection of that name inspire you with fitting and becoming thoughts.”

  Graham resumed his seat amid cheers and resonating applause, and turned to nod to Dan, who nodded back. He was heartily complimented by other lawyers and supporters of Dan; he was told he had had a triumph. But being hardheaded, he knew that the trial would resume immediately, and on a more banal and technical course.

  And almost at once there arose a dreary but significant argument about the admissibility of the letters Key had written to Sickles, Wooldridge, and others, about the accusation by the clerk Beekman of improper behavior between Teresa and Key at the Bladensburg inn. Brady wanted them accepted by the judge as proof of how cordial and trusting was Dan’s attitude to Key. But only some of the letters were finally admitted by Judge Crawford.36

  That settled, Representative John B. Haskin, an early witness for the defense, confirmed that, at a whist party at Marshal Hoover’s, Dan had promised to intercede with the President in the matter of Key’s appointment as district attorney. The last occasion on which Haskin had seen Sickles and Key together was the night when Piccolomini (who so resembled Teresa) had performed at the capital’s opera. Key, Teresa, Miss Badger of Pennsylvania, and Manny Hart had all been at the opera that
evening, and—delayed in Congress—Mr. Sickles had come in late.37

  Dan began to feel a recurrence of profound and panicked anguish at these recitals of Key’s betrayal. His father and his lawyers could see, beneath his stillness, that the caldron of feeling had begun to overflow. They watched him closely as Governor Walker, one of the men who had come to comfort Dan after the event of blood in the square, approached the witness stand. Walker spoke of Dan’s writhing and convulsions after the killing, and of violent spasms and exclamations during which “he seemed particularly to dwell on the disgrace brought upon his child.” As Walker gave his testimony, Dan—feeling the weight of his lost career, his shamed marriage and ruined child—was not capable of preventing sobs from gushing up within him. Many of the predominantly male spectators were themselves moved to tears as well. Stanton asked the judge that the examination be discontinued to allow Dan to retire. As a recess was granted, Dan’s dearest sources of comfort, Manny Hart and George Sickles, were permitted to help him from the courtroom to a holding room.

  Some minutes later Dan was brought back into court, and a court reporter noted that his countenance still indicated extreme mental suffering, and “the desolateness of his whole appearance” evoked sympathy in a number of the males in court.38

  The members of the court looked sideways at Dan, hoping that he would not reach such depths now. But his emotional breakdown was not the only point of interest in the argument and testimony that Tuesday. For now appeared the first female witness, the Irish maid, Bridget Duffy. James Topham Brady knew how to interview an Irish domestic. He would have read well her suppressed moral outrage and resentment of the lady she served, and would play upon it subtly to influence the jury. He passed a paper to the witness: the confession of Mrs. Sickles. One of the signatures was certainly her “hand write,” said Bridget. She had signed the document at the request of Mrs. Sickles, not of Dan’s, she insisted. So Mrs. Sickles’s confession was handed by James Topham Brady, New York’s universal gentleman, to the prosecution, with the proposition that it be admitted into evidence. This was a task that many of Brady’s friends must have known he could not, as a man of sensibility and broad compassion, have enjoyed. Through whatever means, news of this document had already reached the press and public, but not its precise text, and now Brady was trying to enter into the least erasable of records an account, from Teresa’s own pen, of her shame. He believed his profession demanded this sacrifice: that he should seek to reconfirm her moral death sentence.

  There was an immediate objection from the district attorney to the document’s being placed in evidence. It was hearsay; it was a communication between husband and wife, who were excluded from being witnesses for or against each other. If the husband was thrown into a state of insanity by this letter of confession, the document itself was not needed. Its impact could be proved by the movements and conduct of the prisoner. While this argument went on, an unnamed member of Dan’s counsel had an Associated Press journalist positioned near the defense table. If the judge ruled against admissibility, the journalist would copy out the confession on telegraphic slips and have it transmitted to New York. Even a newspaper that had enmity for Dan said later it was true that he would not have chosen to have his wife’s confession published. So one wonders whether Dan was unaware that his lawyers had decided to publish the letter if the judge did not admit it, or chose to be unaware. It was said reasonably enough afterward that Mr. Sickles and his counsel were not remarkably alert in arresting the publication of the document, and yet there was his life at stake to justify it.39

  Brady argued that only the jury could decide how the confession would act on the prisoner’s mind, and they couldn’t decide that without having it read to them. Brady warned Judge Crawford that the confession was important because it showed that the time that elapsed between the Saturday night, when Teresa wrote it, and the Sunday afternoon, when Dan shot Key, was irrelevant. Although written in the Stockton Mansion the night before the killing, the document “loaded every breath that came from the defendant from the time he first saw or heard of it, down to the moment when the act was committed. . .. Time in no way took from the freshness of the provocation.” If the confession of the night before the killing came too early in the sequence of events to form the basis of any actions, what hour on that Sunday morning would His Honor consider germane to the case? “Will Your Honor, as a matter of law, say that we shall take the hour of ten o’clock on that Sunday morning, that we shall question up to that time, and shall not go beyond it? Why shall we not go to the hour which stood before that . . . and so on until we travel back through the vigil of the night, and come to the very moment when the contents of the document were poured into the ears of that afflicted and distressed husband?”

  While Bridget waited, with the disgust of a commonsensical young woman, to resume her testimony, listening to the supposedly learned gentlemen vapor on, the argument of the admissibility of the confession stretched into the next day. She was summoned back for the next morning’s sitting, and the judge’s ruling was at last made. The confession was indeed testimony from a wife, and since such testimony was excluded, so must be the confession. The document was passed to the AP man instantly, and he began to scribble it out on his forms, transferring Teresa’s demented admissions to the most public of mediums. Along the telegraph wires from Washington to New York the confession rushed in a series of electric impulses, presenting respectable editors with a moral dilemma. They had never published as explicit a sexual confession as this. Those editors who did decide to place the text in the next day’s papers would cover themselves with palavering editorials about their duty to public morals, and how they had been forced with regret to suppress their delicacy of soul and give the document prominence for the sake of the public interest.40

  Bridget Duffy was at last recalled. She stood before men who were accustomed to see her type of woman caricatured on the stage and in cartoons in the illustrated papers. They expected Bridget to live up to the stereotype, to be lively, peppery, and unwittingly amusing. Her testimony, the little they had heard so far, had been most engaging, and she now described, even demonstrated with a slow rotary movement, how Mr. Key waved from the direction of the Clubhouse to his beloved at the Stockton Mansion. On that Sunday, when Dandy the greyhound ran to Key and fawned upon him, Key had waved his handkerchief from very close to the house. Mr. Carlisle wanted to know whether Bridget was positive of that. To which Bridget spiritedly answered, “Sure, and you don’t think I would lie?” There was universal laughter, and an indulgent smile from Mr. Carlisle. He said, “Don’t fire up so, Bridget—there is no occasion for it.” Brady helped soothe her.

  It was not the last clash Carlisle had with the witness, and reporters were delighted to recount his continued exchanges with Bridget. The waving of the handkerchief was a continuous whirl, said the witness, and again demonstrated. Mr. Carlisle asked, “About as fast as you would turn the handle of a coffee mill?” To which the witness answered with rustic passion, “I am not in the habit of turning coffee mills.” The court disbanded, chuckling at the prime lines she had given them.

  Teresa left no exact record of how in Bloomingdale she passed the next day, the day of publication of her confession. Since the press appeared to consider that the text of the confession spoke adequately for Mrs. Sickles, reporters did not come tumbling up Broadway from town to ask her to elaborate or to inquire how she felt. On such a day, of course, she would have been pleased that she no longer lived in the city, and no doubt her own robust soul and the friends she still had—her parents, Tom Field, a few others—helped her through hours that might have killed other women.

  When Dan got to court that morning, he knew that the question of Teresa’s confession was still the chief, though unofficial, issue of the morning. Among the lawyers, as among those who were merely spectators, it was rumored that had the confession been received as evidence, evidence would have been offered by the prosecutor that Mr. Sickles had spent
nights with a lady not his wife in Barnum’s Hotel in Baltimore. The register of the hotel was already in court, under the prosecution’s care. It showed Dan’s signature on a particular line, and then, ten lines down, in an unidentified handwriting, the name Mrs. Daniel E. Sickles. The author of the De Witt’s Special Report, a transcript of the trial, remarked that had Judge Crawford admitted Mrs. Sickles’s confession, a vast quantity of scandal on both sides would have been brought into the trial, involving people not yet mentioned in the affair. Since these included the President, some on the defense side considered it a good thing that the document had been ruled out of court. Through the press, after all, it had more safely done its best work in the tribunal of public opinion.

  Mr. Stanton, however, returned to the matter of admissibility of evidence in general. There was a North Carolina case, he said, in which a slave had killed his wife’s lover. Evidence on the man’s frame of mind was admitted, and Stanton “only demanded for the prisoner of the bar the same right which is accorded to a North Carolina slave.” In pleading his point, Stanton went so far as to accuse DA Ould of having fiercely hunted Sickles and of being driven by desire for blood vengeance. In return, Ould said that there seemed to be different parts assigned to the various counsels for the defense—to some high tragedy; to some comedy; to some, the part of walking gentlemen (Brady); and to one the task of theologian (John Graham by way of the Reverend Mr. Haley). But one of the counselors carried out the part of the bully and the bruiser, and that, he implied, was Stanton. This produced yet another of the courtroom furors the press was so pleased to record, and Haley was particularly offended. Stanton himself cried, “I have not the honor of his [Ould’s] acquaintance and, after his language just uttered, do not desire it.” Many of Dan’s friends in court supported this by stamping their feet on the ground, and the racket was so great that the marshal and the officers of the court had to pass down the rows of spectators to reimpose order.41