American Scoundrel American Scoundrel American Scoundrel

by Thomas Keneally

  As it was, he had produced in Dan a condition in which “every drop of his blood carried with it a sense of his shame . . . a realization that . . . the future which opened to him so full of brilliancy, had been enshrouded perhaps in eternal gloom.” Insane or not, he was bound to do what he had done, said gentle Brady. “If he had done anything more or less than became a man . . . whatever may have been the intimacy of our past relations, I would have been willing to see him die the most ignominious death before I would venture to raise anything on his behalf but a prayer to Heaven for the salvation which after death might come.” Again, the resonating New Yorker drew vigorous applause from the crowd.

  Yet as apparently justified as Dan was in what he had done, Brady referred to the last report of the lunatic asylums of Pennsylvania, which showed that one of the inciting causes of insanity was domestic affliction. Well, Dan’s friends had such an acute sense of his affliction that many of them had come here voluntarily, and without fee or reward, to offer on his behalf the affection and devotion he had once tendered to them. One in particular, a man from New York, was working as counsel for the defense on that basis. At this stage, Brady nodded to the eminent Thomas Francis Meagher, former prisoner of the Queen of Great Britain, who had given the same dignity to the criminal dock of his native country, where he had been charged for his defiance of British policy during the Famine, as Mr. Sickles gave to this American one. Meagher had recently written a manuscript on the Sickles case, from which Brady now quoted rhetorical measures that dampened many a manly cheek in the court. “Then may we well say to the jury,” Meagher had written and Brady now intoned, “if your love of home will suffer it—if your genuine sense of justice will consent to it . . . if your pride of manhood will stoop to it—if your instinctive perception of right and wrong will sanction it, stamp ‘murder’ upon the bursting forehead. . .. Do this, do it if you can, and then, having consigned the prisoner to the scaffold, return to your homes, and there, within those endangered sanctuaries, following your ignoble verdict, set to and teach your imperiled wives a lesson in the vulgar arithmetic of a compromising morality. And let them be inspired with a sense of womanly dignity by a knowledge of the value you attach to the sanctity of the household, to the inviolability of the wife, to the security of the hospitable roof, and last of all, and above all, to the inherited tradition of an innocent but ruined offspring.”

  A moment of awe, a burst of applause, followed. Now, to the citizens of the District of Columbia, said Brady, Mr. Sickles committed his life, his character, and all that was to elevate and keep him in existence.

  Resuming his seat, Brady covered his face and wept as friends of Dan’s bayed their approval inside the courtroom. Even Dan, amid his tears of gratitude to Brady and Meagher, must still have wondered whether this meant anything. The courtroom provided spectator sport, and many of the spectators were Southern Democrats or men of Dan’s Northern pro-Southern stripe. Republicans had largely stayed away, and as for the jurors themselves, they were sworn before God to dispassion. The defense was particularly worried about one juror, a tinsmith named McDermott, who had not reacted enthusiastically to some of Brady’s argumentation; and about another who had proved to be very pious and was believed to be praying for divine guidance on the verdict.

  Mr. Ould concluded the prosecution case with fewer pyrotechnics than Brady. No great surging forces of rhetoric formed his case, but he did seek in his way to elevate the status of women. “I thank God that the matrons and maids of our land have a surer protection from the pistol or the bowie knife. Sad, indeed, would be their fate if it were not so.” He denied that Key was carrying a pistol at the time. He insisted that he did not need to put to His Honor the argument as to the ease with which insanity could be simulated or feigned, and how wrong it would be to let the party accused escape just punishment. And so, in saying what he would not put, he ended.50

  For whatever cause, Dan had been absent from the court for much of Ould’s speech, and was now summoned back by Judge Crawford. His Honor was remarkably economical, by the standards of both defense and prosecution, in what he told the jury. That there was a legal presumption of malice in every deliberate killing, and the burden of repelling it was on the slayer. That it was for the jury to say what was the state of Mr. Sickles’s mind as regards the capacity to decide upon the criminality of the homicide. But he acknowledged that the insanity of which the defense spoke need not exist for a definite period, but only for the moment of the act of which the accused was charged. Indeed, in this novel case, Judge Crawford’s neat summation of the instructions of both sides, and his glosses upon them, indicated a mind not yet borne down by age. The marshal was instructed to give the indictment to the chairman of the jury, and at half past one, the jurors got up and retired to their consultation room.51

  This was the signal for the throwing off of all restraint. Lawyers, officers, spectators, all seemed to think it was time to speak as they pleased. The judge remained at his bench and said that although he could not reduce the audience to silence, he hoped there would be some regard exhibited for the place where they were. But the noise abounded. Many crowded around the dock to cheer and support Mr. Sickles “in this the pregnant moment of his fate.” Dan had slept badly the night before but was in a high state of concentration. He lived, as Teresa had, on a particular axis of possibility no one could share with him. In ten, fifteen minutes, or an hour or two, or a day, he would be restored to light or consigned to the dark. He spoke out of his dispassionate isolation to others. One of the three ministers of religion who attended to comfort Dan, the Reverend Dr. Sunderland of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, took Sickles by the hand and said that “if the voice of the people of this city could speak at this moment, your acquittal would be instantaneous.” But many of Dan’s friends stated their disappointment that the jury had need to retire at all, much less spend so much time in consultation. Just after Sunderland spoke to Dan, a policeman entered the court and took the jury’s chairs out to the marshal’s room, where the jury was conferring. This increased rumors about a jury split or arguing hard. At the moment, standing close to the dock were John Graham’s two brothers, Charles and DeWitt Graham of New York, the Chevalier Wikoff, the Tammany enforcer Captain Wiley, and various other Tammany friends. Mayor Berret was there, with Alderman Francis Mohun, who had seen demented Dan rush past his house the evening before the killing. They had hoped for a sensible fifteen-minute verdict of not guilty. But this was all going on so long that they began to fear a guilty verdict. Dan did not seem oppressed by the thought of his own death by hanging, but his lawyers, staying in or near the court, were taut with anxiety.

  After seventy minutes, just as the clock began striking three, the door nearest the jury box opened, and the jury filed in. Men crowded up to have a look at the jurors’ faces, some climbing on benches and tables. There were pleas from those whose view was obstructed to “get off the benches!” The judge was able to impose order only by having the clerk read the names of the jury members, and by the time the twelfth had been read and been responded to, there was silence. Dan sat, immobile, in his good suit. The clerk told him to stand up and look to the jury, and, without the blood draining from his face, Dan obeyed. The press men noticed that at this second by contrast, James Topham Brady looked acutely pale. The chairman of the jury, Mr. Arnold, had risen also. The clerk asked him whether his jury had agreed on a verdict. Mr. Arnold said they had. Daniel Edgar Sickles was not guilty.

  No doubt Dan’s vigorous blood surged in that second he received the jury’s permission to live on in some honor. The verdict also confirmed his secular rank; he was still the representative for the Third District of New York. Yet he did not weep with gratitude, any more than he would have wept with fear had the verdict gone otherwise. His expression, people thought, did not convey a sense of triumph, but rather a belief that the trial through which he had passed could have had no other result. The clerk asked the jury, “And so say you all?” The jury assented.
Mr. Stanton cried, “I now move that Mr. Sickles be discharged from custody.” Though the judge pleaded, “No noise,” that prohibition went unheeded. Judge Crawford could barely be heard as he ordered Dan’s release, and Dan, in the dock, came under siege from ecstatic friends. Captain Wiley immediately kissed Dan. The normally dour Mr. Stanton cried that he would dance like David before the Ark of the Tabernacle. Scholarly Mr. Phillips gave way and, covering his face with his hands, wept like a child. Meagher clapped people on the back and asked them if it was not glorious. He even extended this courtesy to the district attorney, who turned to Meagher and said, “I thought the verdict would be so.” The jailer, Jacob King, was weeping deeply, and looked bemused when Meagher came up, slapped his shoulder, and consoled him for losing a tenant.52

  It was slow work for a calm, steady Dan and his ecstatic counsel to make their way to the door. He began to feel the shock of the verdict of deliverance. Those near him noticed that there was some tension apparent around his temples. On his way to the door, Dan passed the jury box, where it seemed that all the jurors wanted to congratulate him, although, it was later learned, at least one did not particularly desire to. People in the neighborhood of the court who had heard the news came rushing through the streets and up the steps, expecting a speech as Dan came forth. But Dan was growing faint, and Captain Wiley, the Tammany gang leader, helped him into one of the many carriages waiting. Some enthusiasts for the reprieved congressman tried to take the horses out of the shafts so that they themselves could drag Dan in triumph through the streets, but they were persuaded not to. Dan, dazed yet still dignified, was taken first to the house of John McBlair, the grocery king, who lived at the Decatur House near St. John’s Episcopal, and next went to the Stockton Mansion, some fifty yards away, to collect clothing and toiletries for his stay with McBlair.

  A crowd was already assembled at McBlair’s to cheer Dan, and many people filed through the parlor, shaking his hand. It was this demonstration of warmth that caused Dan now to break into tears. He was touched when a vendor of oranges, a Mr. Scott, rushed into the house and placed a large box of his choicest stock in the drawing room. Several other tradesmen brought gifts. Some of the guests, and the young men in the street, loudly offered to tear down the Fifteenth Street assignation house made so infamous by the trial.

  That night a crowd came to the National Hotel to serenade the counsel who were staying there. Brady and the others requested that the serenaders not go on to the McBlair house, since Mr. Sickles was worn out by the trial and wished to retire to rest undisturbed. By invitation, nine or ten of the jurors went up to Brady’s suite for refreshments and to receive the thanks of counsel. American jurors were always freer with their jury-room confessions than the British were permitted to be; it came in part from the freedom of speech, from an already robust American interest in celebrities, which the jurors were for the moment, and in circuses, which the trial had to an extent been. The defense counsel were surprised to see, among the jurors who did turn up that night, the tinsmith McDermott, the one they had predicted would be a tough nut. Another juror, Henry Knight, a young grocer, brought with him his fiddle, and entertained Brady and the others. Counsel had regarded him also with suspicion throughout the trial, because it had emerged that he was a member of a Know-Nothing lodge, and thus, ex officio, hostile to pro-Irish Democrats like Sickles and to Irish lawyers like Brady and Meagher. “But,” Mr. Brady was quoted as saying, “if we had known that he played the fiddle, we might have made our minds easy, for no fiddler was ever known to find a conviction of murder.”

  The jurors all expressed themselves in an unrestrained manner. They admitted that one of their number had been for a guilty verdict and, in the jury room, had withdrawn into a corner and sought divine guidance. He had got up from his knees, reentered the discussion, again retired to the corner, and finally rose with a divine message in favor of acquittal. Yet another juror, Mr. William Hopkins, the gents’ furnisher and something of a wag and mimic, stated himself so far in favor of Mr. Sickles that in a similar situation he himself would not have been satisfied with a derringer or revolver, but would have brought a howitzer to bear on the seducer! It was interesting that he mentioned the derringer in that way; obviously the jurors did not, despite Brady’s clever arguments, believe Key had been armed. But they could quite correctly have considered that the prosecution had failed to prove he was unarmed.

  At one stage during that overexuberant evening, the Marine Band turned up to serenade the lawyers outside Brady’s suite. Serenaders also went to Philip Phillips’s home on G Street, and Phillips came to the door and told them, accurately, that with Dan’s acquittal and the success of the plea of temporary insanity, a new era had begun in the world of jurisprudence. “An honest, upright, and intelligent American jury,” said Phillips, as reported by the press, “had established a precedent which all civilized nations would henceforth recognize and be guided by.”

  For Robert Ould, however, this was a bitter night. Some morning papers would say he had been outwitted and was “far from being thorough or searching. . .. At no time did he manifest a real lawyer’s ardor or ambition.” One newspaper claimed that, in private, he had admitted more than once that the case fatigued him or gave him migraines.

  In Bloomingdale with her mother, Teresa had received with some joy the telegram announcing Dan’s acquittal. Key was perhaps a remote personage in her affections by now, if indeed her early fondness had not been transmuted by suffering into hostility. Again, her primary impulse was to rehabilitate Laura as a normal daughter and herself as a normal wife. There was no chance of this if, as well as killing her lover through her folly, she was to bear blame for the hanging of her husband.

  Dan slept soundly at the Decatur House and intended to return to New York in a week’s time for the summer. In the interim, one day he passed Lafayette Square with two friends—Captain Wiley and the Chevalier Wikoff—and walked out the scene of the crime with them, recounting how he had struggled with Barton Key. Plainly, he said, he had had every intention to kill Key.53

  But he would be forever an acquitted killer.

  VI

  RETURNED TO NEW YORK, DAN UNDERSTOOD too well that, despite Democratic joy over his acquittal, he was expected to live quietly for a time. With half his soul, he wanted to. He tried to do so that summer at the house of his friend Thomas C. Field, in Bloomingdale. Many would later consider that by doing that he had put himself in lethal proximity to Teresa. Cynics believed that, in light of his notorious trial and because many of the respectable women he liked to seduce now looked askance at him, Teresa was perhaps too sexually available to a man of such marked appetite. She was still there, though, the girl his profoundest instincts had prompted him to marry. Bloomingdale’s summer flush lay on her face, and as she threw herself into her rustic chores, she looked like someone who inhabited a better world. As well as that, Laura—who even as an infant was charmed and dazzled by a father so like herself in nature—and her future standing were now the chief concerns for him.

  Dan commuted from Bloomingdale to town, however intermittently, to his father at their Nassau Street law offices, where he was welcome. But in the councils of Tammany he was quiet. Though he was still a congressman, considerable time had to pass before he could be looked at again as a Democratic power.1

  In semi-idleness, then, which suited him badly, Dan began to visit Teresa. It was not a casual impulse, as his enemies would say it was. In all his relations with Teresa from then on there would be a deliberate-ness. Appropriate rumors about a reunion of the scandalous couple were heard around New York and caused people in Dan’s circle to shake their heads. One version of the tale had the two fathers, George Sickles and Antonio Bagioli, working at the reconciliation, and if that was so, the two older men were stricken by the same delusion as Teresa—that reconciliation would be tolerated by society. The first scornful news of the resumption of “marital relations” appeared in the New York Herald on July 12, three and a hal
f months after the killing of Key. It had been decided by both families for “Mr. Sickles and his wife to live together again in peace and mutual affection, burying the past in the grave of oblivion. Both parties have agreed to this step, and it is said that their love is greater than ever.”

  Even journals that had in the past supported Dan took a hostile view. There were leading personal and political friends of Mr. Sickles, said the New York Times, who honestly believed him to be a man maddened by intolerable wrong, and who in that belief stood between him “and the hasty rage of public feeling at the time of his trial in Washington,” and were not responsible for this step taken entirely on the impulse of Mr. Sickles. In fact, James Topham Brady was said to be outraged.2

  As for those who had never liked Dan, there was now nothing but scalding contempt. George Templeton Strong declared confidently, “Teresa had a hold upon him and knew of matters he did not desire to be revealed. Some say he had promoted her intrigue with Key; others that our disreputable old Buchanan’s interest in his welfare was due to relations with her which her husband had encouraged. He must have been in her power somehow, or he would not have taken this step and sacrificed all his hopes of political advancement, and all his political friends and allies. He can hardly shew himself in Washington again.” Horace Greeley’s newspaper, the Tribune, said it was sure that in taking this remarkable step Mr. Sickles had alienated himself from most if not all of his friends, personal and political. Basically, then, everyone was baffled, and nearly everyone disapproved.

  Hail! Matchless pair! [a newspaper poet wrote]

  United once again

  In newborn bliss forget your bygone pain . . .

  What though the world may say, “with hands all red

  Yon bridegroom steals to a dishonored bed.”

  And friends, estranged, exclaim on every side: