American Scoundrel American Scoundrel American Scoundrel

by Thomas Keneally

  In the oncoming spring, the immutable and unadjustable heating system gave an even more withering feel to the courtroom, but neither this nor all the racket produced by the fights between Stanton and Ould seemed to give Dan discomfort. In the broiling air, more defense witnesses were questioned. It is not recorded how Dan reacted to some of the evidence of Frederick Wilson, who said that he had seen Mr. Key, Mrs. Sickles, and Laura on the Thursday before the killing coming up Pennsylvania Avenue to Green’s Furniture Store, and that Mrs. Sickles and the little girl had gone into the store while Key waited on the pavement, reading a letter that had a yellow envelope, about the same hue as the one already presented that held the letter signed R.P.G. With some embarrassment, Wilson admitted that he had virtually stalked Mrs. Sickles, Key, and the child; his curiosity had been piqued by seeing Mr. Key a number of times outside the Sickleses’ house—nearly every day, the witness declared, to ribald laughter in the courtroom. With the sensitivity of the prisoner in mind, the judge thought the line of questioning and the general laughter in the court improper, but Dan remained sternly unexcited throughout it, calm enough that, the next morning, the court journalist reported that the prisoner “looked less careworn than hitherto.”42

  Early that day, in an argument about the admissibility of what Nancy Brown, wife of a White House gardener and resident of Fifteenth Street, had to say about the adulterers, Magruder asked Carlisle whether, under the Maryland statute, one punishment for adultery was a fine of a hundred pounds of tobacco. Carlisle said he couldn’t say exactly what the punishment was. Brady pursued the matter: “Then the only satisfaction an injured husband could have would be a chew of tobacco.” Again, the entire court guffawed, and no one recorded what Dan’s reaction was.

  The old argument over admissibility continued on through Saturday. With the issue unresolved, the court and its spectators at last scattered in an evening downpour. On Sunday, as Dan’s lawyers met at Edwin Stanton’s house and as George visited his son in jail, Washington socialized. All the talk was of the trial. “It is the sole topic of conversation wherever men meet,” said one observer, “or women either.”43

  Teresa and Mrs. Bagioli and Laura, in a sense the forgotten people of the trial, went strolling that Sunday along the banks of the Hudson, which were miry from spring rain. The breath of the new season washed in on the breeze from New Jersey. Teresa was aware that the prodigiously popular Harper’s Weekly had promised that its next issue would contain a full facsimile, in huge written script—supposedly a reproduction of her crazed hand that night—of her letter of confession. Those godly sections of America that had not read the document—thanks to the moral inhibitions of local newspaper editors—would now have it massively reproduced for them on the magazine’s broadsheet front page. Within the limits of that knowledge, Teresa remained half elated, partly fearful, and wholly hopeful of becoming Dan’s openly acknowledged wife again. Laura had always been the chief issue. Certainly Teresa cringed to think of the afternoon she had been willing to have Key drop off Laura at the Hoovers’. Laura had been lost sight of in the heady urgency of getting to Number 383 Fifteenth Street. In view of that lapse, Teresa was considered not only a scarlet whore but an appalling mother. But she knew herself an essentially decent mother, and knew too that some form of reunion with Dan was essential to her daughter’s future happiness. She was cheered by reassuring notes from dear Manny Hart and the Chevalier Wikoff that Dan seemed well, and so—she concluded—less likely to strike attitudes with her. And she was blessedly busy. There were many chickens on the grounds of the house. Eggs had to be searched out in the thickets and the verdant low ground by the Hudson. Horses had to be fed and curried, gardening done, and servants managed. Teresa was content to lose herself in the minutiae of domestic life in a large country house, and those who visited her were impressed by her energy.

  In Washington, Mrs. Brown began the week in the witness box still listening to the dreary argument about admissibility, but to the delight of the defense, the judge seemed to be leaning their way. Mrs. Brown had met a man, Key, said the judge, who had claimed to rent a house. She had then seen what he used that house for. The jury needed to know what that house renting signified. Take a simpler example, the judge suggested. “The exhibitions of a handkerchief! What do they mean? Have not the jury a right to understand what they mean? . . . I am of the opinion that the evidence is admissible.” There was what one observer called a rare silent expression of satisfaction in the courtroom, as Mrs. Brown was re-sworn. Soon such a level of hilarity was raised by Nancy Brown’s evidence on the affair conducted on Fifteenth Street that the judge was concerned that it could be heard beyond the chamber.44

  The Sickleses’ coachmen were called, and John McDonald, “a smart young Irishman” who had been working as footman for the Sickleses only two weeks when the murder occurred, added new material to what was already known. He described how, on that last Thursday, Key had tracked Teresa through the afternoon from one reception to another. Miss Ridgeley, Mrs. Sickles, and Mr. Key left the last house of call, Rose Greenhow’s, together, and Mr. Key sat half in and half out of the carriage, conversing softly with Mrs. Sickles. On his perch behind the carriage, McDonald heard most of the conversation. Was she going to the hop at Willard’s? Key wanted to know. If Dan would allow her, she said. Key expressed the hope that he would meet her there. He also said that her eyes looked bad, and Teresa told Key she did not feel well. Mr. Key was let down off the coach between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets on K, and Mrs. Sickles, the efficient hostess, and Miss Ridgeley went on to Gautier’s, the confectioners.45

  By April 21, the sixteenth day of the trial, counsel were commenting even to friends and acquaintances in court that they were growing weary. They were momentarily revived by a strange letter that had arrived at the courthouse in the morning, care of the lawyers but addressed to Dan, indicating the extent to which the explicit details of the case had fevered the nation’s young imaginations. A young woman who signed herself Olympia Aiken, and had used the Greek alphabet to write her name, described herself in the letter as “one of the order of frailty—one of the simple waiters for the wave of some masculine pocket handkerchief.” In its combination of longing, febrile hope, and helplessness, this letter so thoroughly reproduced the manner in which society, the court, and the counsel defined womanhood that Dan’s lawyers were more amused than abashed, and passed the pathetic missive, postmarked West Randolph, Vermont, around to reporters.

  Another, more ominous letter that arrived that day was addressed to one of the jurors, the grocer Jesse Wilson, care of the court. It was passed to Dan and his lawyers, who then returned it to the judge. James Topham Brady thought it similar in handwriting to the R.P.G. letter, and the judge reflected only that it was a matter of extreme regret that the author of the R.P.G. letter was not known. But word got around the court that this new letter, which was kept secret and destroyed, had something to do with the scandalous lives of some of the defense counsel, and that it was aimed at enlisting the juror Jesse Wilson to punish these lawyers through punishing their client.

  Of a succession of recalled prosecution witnesses who saw Dan after the shooting and remarked on his apparent calm, Brady now asked whether they had ever been to a lunatic asylum or seen an inmate. None admitted they had. Well, said Brady, he had been to asylums, had been extensively to New York’s Blackwell’s Island, and up to the more rural lunatic asylum to the north of Bloomingdale, and had studied the sometimes “cool and deliberate” demeanor of the certified.46

  The judge, wearied and feeling his years, reminded the court that this was Holy Thursday, the eve of the most solemn day of the Christian calendar, Good Friday, and the jurors were offered a chance to observe the holy day. But after consulting with one another, they declared themselves to have a solemn duty to fulfill. Hence the court reassembled on Good Friday. Catholics like Thomas Francis Meagher and James Topham Brady were exempt, because of the arduous duty of saving Dan, from the full obs
ervance of the Lenten fast, but as true Catholics on this day of days they abstained from liquor, drank black tea, ate only crusts. Fasting, if anything, sharpened the devout Brady’s native intelligence.

  On this deepest of holy days, with the air darkening beyond the court’s dim, tall windows, Carlisle had introduced into court what Brady called “corpulent rolls of print galleys of the Congressional Globe.” They showed that Dan had made a congressional speech under the five-minute rule on both Friday and Saturday, when, according to such witnesses as Wooldridge, he was supposed to be in agony of spirit. These galleys had handwritten corrections by Dan, and so he obviously had had enough presence of mind to want himself accurately reported in the permanent record of Congress. Dan and his lawyers spent more than half an hour examining the rolls, and also considering something else Carlisle was seeking to introduce—what Carlisle would tell the judge was “an offer of evidence.” Everyone in the court, according to one observer, seemed to know what this evidence was. The matter of “his visits with a lady to Barnum’s Hotel, Baltimore,” was about to achieve visibility—if the prosecution had its way. The manager of Barnum’s was waiting in the corridor to be called. As Brady, Graham, and Ould conversed at the bench in a low tone, the judge made a preliminary statement that he did not think the evidence admissible. But Ould took a seat beside His Honor and entered into a deep consultation with him, while the audience was agog at the legal and titillatory possibilities that might be about to be revealed. But as Judge Crawford had ruled the confession out as evidence of provocation to Dan, so now too evidence of Dan’s adultery was ruled out. The hotel manager was free to catch the train back to Baltimore.47

  Rebuffed on the issue of Dan’s sins, Carlisle sought to introduce two last witnesses on the question of insanity. They were the two gentlemen who had been waiting in the back parlor of Attorney General Black’s house when Dan turned up after the murder to hand himself over: the former senator Richard Brodhead and Mr. Haldemar, editor of a Democratic paper in Pennsylvania. The judge agreed to admit these witnesses if they were in court by the next morning.48

  Along the broad avenues of Washington, a gale blew, and any hope the jurors might have had of being quit of their responsibilities in time for Easter Sunday dinner were destroyed by the arrival of Brodhead in court on Easter Saturday morning. And though Brodhead recounted the meeting with Dan after the killing, and Dan’s ordinary conversation, nothing was added thereby to the prosecution’s case. Haldemar himself had not arrived, so District Attorney Ould declared the testimony closed on the part of the United States. The jurors had been separated from their Easters at home for no good purpose.

  After examination of the instructions the defense wished the judge to give the jury, Carlisle began his strong final speech, asking whether anything could be more irreconcilable with peace and good government than the doctrine that he who is grievously wronged is to take into his own hands the knife. In the middle of Carlisle’s argument, some argumentation developed between prosecution and defense over the famous M’Naghten case in Britain in 1843. M’Naghten was an unstable Scottish woodman who had murdered the secretary of British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel under the delusion that the secretary was Sir Robert. After his twelve judges referred the question of M’Naghten’s mind to the jury, he was acquitted on grounds of insanity, as Brady was pleased to emphasize. Carlisle went on to close his argument by warning the jurors that it was the job of the defense to prove this risky and precedent-setting plea of temporary insanity.49

  Edwin Stanton, whom Ould and Carlisle least liked, rose first to sum up for the defense. In case the jury had heard intimations of Dan’s own philandering, Stanton argued that, by marriage, “the woman is sanctified to the husband, and this bond must be preserved for the evil as well as for the good.” His graphic picture of what adultery implied included the extraordinary argument that “when her [the wife’s] body has been once surrendered to the adulterer, she longs for the death of her husband, whose life is often sacrificed by the cup of the poisoner, or the dagger or pistol of the assassin.” More credibly, he argued that “when an adulterer tears a young wife from her husband, her child is cut off from all kindred fellowship.” Young Laura, though she had no siblings, was certainly suffering from a lack of fellowship as this trial proceeded. Only one final shame had not descended upon Teresa herself, Stanton admitted. Often the sinning wife was “plunged into the horrible filth of common prostitution, to which she is rapidly hurrying, and which is already yawning before her.” The hapless victim could thus be “swept through a miserable life and a horrible death to the gates of hell, unless her husband’s arms shall save her.” Who, knowing these facts and these potentialities, would not rush to save the mother of a child? “Although she be lost as a wife, rescue her from the horrid adulterer; and may the Lord who watches over the home and the family, guide the bullet and direct the stroke.”

  Counsel for the prosecution, Stanton continued, had had the daring to suggest that the killing of the adulterer had first been made illegal in the era of Charles I. Why would it not be, asked Edwin Stanton, when, under the government of Charles, “the palace was filled with harlots, and thronged with adulterers and adulteresses.” As for this later and better time, for this capital city and for the District of Columbia, the ethos of the region was a social one, and the habit of officers of the government, and those in public employment, to throw open their doors with wide hospitality was “unprecedentedly common.” But if these social occasions were to serve as a platform upon which the adulterer pursued his lust, “then the doors of family shall be swiftly closed.” When he ended, Stanton was again greeted with an outburst of acclaim, with which the day concluded. For Easter had arrived, and the example of the tomb doors of Christ opening and releasing death’s divine prisoner was not lost on the counsel or on the prisoner.

  Dan ate his splendid Easter dinner that Sunday knowing that, with the prosecution done, the correspondence between Teresa and himself was no longer a legal peril. When his counsel called by to see him, Meagher considered him equally and serenely ready for death or resurrection. That was just as well, since Stanton and Brady were uneasy about what the judge’s instructions to the jury would be. And though eminent Brady was hopeful, he knew something of the unpredictability of juries. In Bloomingdale, Teresa above all yearned for resurrection as she planted painted Easter eggs, earlier harvested from chickens, about the garden and among the rocks on the Broadway side of the property, above the Hudson. In searching for them later in the morning, Laura would not be troubled with competition, since there were no child visitors. To sour Easter, the large facsimile confession had appeared the day before in Harper’s Weekly, and Teresa could suppose that it dominated the Easter discourse of the nation’s adults.

  At the dinner tables of the capital, many wives heard their husbands say they wished to attend court the next day to hear the great advocate James Topham Brady speak for Dan Sickles. And next morning the court was crowded to the limit a quarter of an hour before the judge appeared, and the doors remained besieged all morning by people trying to get in. Soon, Brady was called on by Judge Crawford, and, in his usual honeyed way, hoped for the polite attention of the court, which he was grateful to have hitherto received. “The whole world, Your Honor, has its eye on this case, and although there may seem to be egotism involved in the remark which I make, I cannot help saying, because I am here in the discharge of my duty, that, when all of this shall have passed away, and when each shall have taken his chamber in the silent halls of death . . . the name of everyone associated with this trial, from Your Honor who presides in the first position of dignity, to the humblest witness that shall be called on the stand, will endure as long as the earth shall exist.”

  At the end of the killing, what remained on the street? He asked. The opera glasses and a derringer pistol. To whom did the pistol belong? No one had asked whether the derringer had been in Key’s possession. No witness had been brought into court to say whether K
ey had such a pistol, not even those servants who attended his domestic affairs and who brushed his clothes, not even his friends and associates had been asked whether this pistol might have belonged to Key. So who was to say it was not Key’s? “In this case a revolver was in the hands of Mr. Sickles, and a derringer in those of Mr. Key, and there was no mortal to gainsay it. . .. The bullet which killed Mr. Key came out the revolver. What then became of the bullet from the derringer?” The prosecution must have now realized what a mistake it had made in not pursuing more thoroughly the question of the derringer. Brady declared that there were four shots fired in this case, and from the evidence as it stood, only three were fired from the pistol of Mr. Sickles. As to the fourth shot, “I am not called on to say or know who fired it.” On the basis of the evidence, a reasonable doubt arose as to whether Dan had been a walking arsenal.

  So what about the provocation offered—that of the white handkerchief? Had Key been thoughtful of his father’s anthem, had he not chosen his own “foul substitute for its [the flag’s] beautiful folds,” the white handkerchief, he would never have forgotten two lines in particular:

  And thus be it ever when free men shall stand

  Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation!