Star Spangled Scandal

by Chris DeRose

  Sickles, the mayor, the police chief, and two officers left for their next stop. Walker, frightened over Sickles’s mental state, also went along. People lined the streets as if it were a one carriage parade, hoping to glimpse Sickles on his way to jail. The prisoner stuck his head out the window and waved to one of his friends.13

  The Club House was “surrounded by an immense crowd, eager to view the body of the ill-fated Key.” Inside, the coroner’s inquest was a straightforward, if macabre, affair. The reporter for the Evening Star thought Key appeared in a “gentle slumber,” but for the blood. Standing over Key’s body, one witness after another testified to the essentials.

  Then Butterworth was sworn. He testified to Key’s final conversation and what followed. Were you aware of Mr. Sickles’s intentions? Butterworth refused to answer. The inquest was to determine the cause of death, he said, and nothing more. “It is sufficient to state simply that Mr. Sickles shot Mr. Key, who fell dead.”14

  The coroner’s jury reached a verdict. “Philip Barton Key came to his death from the effect of pistol balls fired by the hands of Daniel E. Sickles.”15

  Washington City did not have a morgue. Key was brought back to his home on C Street to await burial.

  Four blocks to the north, at 4th and G, Sickles could see his destination: “The Blue Jug.” Three stories of badly painted stucco surrounded by a 20-foot wall. Harper’s called it “one of the worst constructed and most miserably arranged in the country.”16

  Congress debated condemning the building for almost a decade. “The miserable structure” was the creation of Robert Mills, who designed the Treasury Building and Washington Monument. It was not his most aesthetic work. It wasn’t meant to be.17

  An “evil smell” and the sound of “howling inmates” announced that you were close to the Jug.

  Sickles was escorted past the wall as the gate shut behind him. He was led inside the building. Another door closed. “The wretched air of the prison is perfectly poisonous.” The Jug was badly overcrowded with petty grifters, runaway slaves, and violent criminals, as many as twelve to a cell, locked away to rot. He could hear their cries bounce off the dark walls as if they were already in Hell.18

  Sickles passed through a labyrinth before arriving at his dirty, dingy cell. Only rats and roaches would choose to live in such as place. And many of them did. There was no sewage, bath, water, or ventilation. Guards slept with their guns beside them.19

  Walker stayed at the jail with Sickles. There were violent sobs and convulsions. His body would get rigid and his hands would go to his head. He sobbed bitterly. In a moment of lucidity, Sickles asked the jailor: “Haven’t you a better room to put me in?”

  “No,” said the jailer. “This is the best place you members of Congress have afforded us.”20

  Octavia Ridgeley had picked the wrong weekend to visit. Teresa wouldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep. She was in a state of constant agony. Octavia thought she might lose her mind or maybe even kill herself. Teresa prayed for oblivion—to simply cease to exist. She would settle for leaving Washington and never seeing the city again.

  Sickles received a surprise visitor at the jail, a “little man” dressed in black. Sickles didn’t know him. It was late. But he wasn’t exactly able to choose his company. And besides, he needed a favor.

  Reverend Haley was a Unitarian minister. Sickles sent him to check in on Teresa. Teresa in turn asked Reverend Haley to carry a letter to her husband. He agreed to wait while she hurriedly wrote down her thoughts. She implored her husband’s pardon and promised better times ahead. “Would he return her wedding ring?” she wondered.

  Haley returned to the jail with the letter.

  Sickles read her note. Teary eyed, voice trembling, he explained: I have no resentment toward Teresa. But too much has happened. Regardless of whether he ever left that jail, he was “determined to see her no more.” Sickles firmly blamed Key for what had happened. Had they not met, she would never have been disloyal. “Poor child,” he said.

  Sickles wrote a four-page letter to Teresa. She was at liberty to return to their home in New York and to take Laura with her as soon as she was able.21

  Sickles’s friends complained to Bejamin Perley Poore, correspondent of the Boston Journal, about Reverend Haley and his “persistent efforts” to “bring himself into notice.” Haley told reporters what he said to Sickles, what Sickles said to Teresa, and what both said to him. “It is astonishing what pains some people take to get their names into the newspapers,” wrote Poore.22

  Pan of streets in Washington connected with the recent tragedy.

  * * *

  I. Bonitz’s grandson, John Bonitz, is alive and graciously made time for the author. He knew exactly why I was calling when I said, “I want to talk about Daniel Sickles.” Bonitz still has the razor given to his grandfather by James Buchanan. He provided me with a copy of his grandfather’s diary and a statement from his father repeating what Bonitz had told him of the shooting and his return to North Carolina.

  Intermezzo

  Chapter Fifteen

  Special by Magnetic Telegraph

  * * *

  “There has been an almost unparalleled excitement in the public mind ever since the news of the shooting down of Philip Barton Key in the street by Daniel E. Sickles spread abroad upon the wings of the telegraph.”

  —Leslie’s Illustrated

  It may have been the biggest story in America’s short history. William Henry Harrison, president of the United States, died after thirty-one days in office. On April 4, 1841, a letter with this sad detail was sent to Cincinnati where it was published. A newspaper across the river in Louisville picked up the story. A copy of that paper was mailed to St. Louis, where the story was printed. Copies of St. Louis newspapers were carried by steamship to Jefferson City. Only then—eleven days after the fact—did the news of the president’s death reach Missouri’s capital.1

  Information made its way slowly across the country. That it traveled at all was in large part due to newspaper exchanges, allowing publishers to share copies of their work without paying postage. Benjamin Franklin, deputy postmaster for the colonies, codified this tradition. In the year Harrison died, there were an astonishing seven million exchanges.2

  In December 1842, Samuel Morse connected two committee rooms of Congress by a wire. He used electric charges to send signals from one room to another, which could then be translated from dots and dashes to English. Morse wanted funding to deploy this technology on a wider scale. Four years earlier, Congress had rejected his request. Now, by a vote of 89-83, with 70 abstentions, they approved $30,000 for Morse’s project. Many members considered it a joke. One introduced an amendment to fund telekinesis instead.

  Morse believed he could win over a skeptical Congress by breaking a political story. His line from Washington to Baltimore was nearly complete when, on May 1, 1844, the Whig National Convention nominated Henry Clay for president. Morse transmitted the news along the wire, beating the train by sixty-four minutes.

  When the line was completed three weeks later, he wrote from the Supreme Court chamber, “What hath God wrought.” The possibilities of this new device were quick to present themselves: people on either side of the line could play chess with one another; a message from the Washington police caught a criminal in Baltimore; a Baltimore merchant verified the creditworthiness of a man who had written him a check; a family was able to dispel a rumor that a loved one had died in Baltimore. It was greeted with a shrug. Most could not imagine news so important that they couldn’t wait for it.

  The Magnetic Telegraph Company was founded in 1845, with 50% of its stock held by Morse and the other inventors and 50% sold to finance construction of lines to Buffalo, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and the Mississippi River.

  Thousands of miles of new lines were opened and maps of telegraph stations were out of date almost as soon as they were printed. By 1850, there were twelve thousand miles of wire. That number had more than doub
led two years later.

  Telegraph operators became skilled and could hear the messages in their heads simply by listening to the machine. Abbreviations were agreed upon: “G A” (dash dash dot, dot dash) meant “Go ahead.” Operators along the same line would tell jokes, stories, and play checkers while they waited for messages.

  As with subsequent inventions, people used the telegraph to improve their dating prospects. Couples met over the telegraph, inspiring a bestselling novel: Wired Love, a Romance of Dots and Dashes.

  A Boston woman was determined to marry a man against her father’s wishes. The father placed the young man on a steamer to London. At his stopover in New York, he found a surprising message waiting for him: present yourself at a telegraph office with a magistrate. They married over the wire, she in Boston, he in New York.3

  Before long, newspapers were carrying “The News by Telegraph,” short snippets with basic details.

  As the telegraph was opening new and faster channels of communication, a similar revolution was taking place among the press. The entire concept of “news” was being redefined. Commercial papers were focused on ships, their destination and cargo, and the prices of cotton, flour, or gold. These reports were expensive, costing around six cents. They made their money primarily through subscriptions and were obtained at a local office. There were also political papers, financed by parties and other interests and focused narrowly on promoting and polemicizing candidates. For newspapers that appealed to a more general audience, their subject matter was strictly local. One enterprising journalist pitched his editor on covering a speech in a neighboring town. He was turned down: “Somebody will send us something about it in two or three days.”4

  This stodgy regime was challenged by the rise of the Penny Papers. The New York Sun, founded in 1833, candidly staked their fortune on covering “the calamities of others.” There would be “murders, suicides, and crime, [and] stories about animals.”

  The business papers had an average circulation of 1,700. The Sun quickly reached 10,000. Because of its wide readership, it could make its money from advertising and, therefore, sell newspapers for almost nothing. Newsboys appeared throughout the city to move copies. The first generation of American reporters were hired and sent out to find stories. Freedom from political parties or mercantile interests allowed for investigative journalism, targeted at exposing corruption.

  James Gordon Bennett, former editor of a pro-Jackson political paper, entered the fray two years after the Sun. The first edition of Bennett’s Herald featured “a murder and death by suffocation, the explosion of a steamboat, a balloon ascension, horse racing, romantic poetry, and police court reports.” Bennett correctly saw that people wanted more from newspapers: yes, fires and suicides; but also politics, news from abroad, and the price of cotton.

  The “lightning press” arrived in 1846. Paper could be run through cylinders at 20,000 sheets per hour, allowing for larger circulations and later printing. Ten years later, the circulation of the major New York papers was 57,840 for the Herald, 50,000 for the Sun, 42,000 for the Times, and 29,000 for the Tribune.

  Meanwhile, the telegraph had scaled. Mergers and acquisitions of the scattered telegraph companies, increased proficiency of operators, and the advent of better batteries and cables dramatically lowered the cost of transmission.

  Real-time national networks of communication, rapid and inexpensive printing, and the pages of the popular press were dry kindling for a media firestorm.

  Daniel Sickles fired the spark on February 27, 1859, and that evening there was a rush on the Washington telegraph office. William Stuart, correspondent for the New York Times, had spent the day like all his colleagues: darting around town, interviewing witnesses, visiting the scenes of the drama, melding it into a coherent narrative, and doing so in time for tomorrow’s edition. His hard work finished, he did not envy the people on the other end of the wire. They would have to rework the newspaper and set the type for a story that took two entire broadsheet columns and part of a third. The telegraph could process 2,000–2,500 words per hour at a cost of anywhere from 150 to 218 dollars.5

  As Stuart was leaving, he ran into Congressman John Haskin, who was there to notify Sickles’s father in New York.6

  News of the shooting had traveled through Washington by word of mouth, the oldest news network. It would proceed from there to millions by the newest.

  Simeon was in the habit of doing what he had to. He had immigrated from Germany to England and from there to Boston, where his mother and step-father told him, though he was a little boy, that he was on his own. He found a job making walking canes, and once he had saved two dollars, he set out, making his way to New York. He sold papers, blackened boots, and assisted merchants in the marketplace. When he had earned enough for that day’s food and shelter, he went to school. Simeon lived at the News Boys’ lodging house, where he slept on the hard floor near the warm stove rather than the cold but more comfortable bed.

  A few weeks earlier, he and a group of boys had gone to the Children’s Aid Society searching for additional work for a train ticket west. Selling newspapers, they said, was a bad business.7

  On the morning of February 28, Simeon and the ragtag army of newsboys fanned out through New York, in the markets and crowded streets and squares of the city. “Dreadful tragedy!” they called out. “Shocking homicide at Washington. Philip Barton Key shot dead in the street by Daniel E. Sickles. Sad story of domestic ruin and bloody revenge.” The Times printed “a very large extra edition,” that “was absorbed at an early hour,” and soon, no copy could be found for sale anywhere in the city.8

  The Evening Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton, would find a ready audience for today’s edition. “A dreadful homicide was committed at Washington by a person who, to the discredit of this city, is one of its representatives in congress.”9

  This scene of sensational headlines and newspapers selling as fast as people could buy them played out throughout the country:

  “A Murder at Washington.”

  —Boston Journal

  “A member of congress kills the seducer of his wife.”

  —Daily Pennsylvanian

  “ASSASSINATION”

  —Daily Standard (Bridgeport, Connecticut)

  “Terrible Tragedy.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “Tragedy in Washington”

  —Louisville Daily Courier

  “Terrible Tragedy at Washington.”

  —Cincinnati Commercial Tribune

  “Shooting Affair.”

  —Daily Journal (Wilmington, North Carolina)

  Most newspapers would settle on daily coverage under the headline “The Sickles Tragedy” or “The Washington Tragedy.” The Washington Evening Star sold more copies than at any point previous in its history. The second day of coverage came under the headline “The Homicide,” as if it were the only one in the world. For purposes of their readership, it may as well have been.10

  The initial accounts, thrown together in the late afternoon on Sunday and telegraphed before that evening’s deadline, were surprisingly detailed: there were eyewitness accounts of the shooting; and reports of the affair between Key and Teresa, Key’s handkerchief signals in Lafayette Square, the secret rendezvous house, and the anonymous letter.11

  There were also plenty of errors: Teresa had been arrested, Teresa was pregnant, Butterworth had been arrested, President Buchanan had visited Sickles in prison.12

  The Boston Journal, in their first sentence on the shooting, made sure to mention that Key was the “son of the author of the Star Spangled Banner.”13

  Sickles believed he was the last to know of the affair, and he was not far off. The New York Herald reported: “gossip had made free with Mrs. Sickles’s name in connection with Mr. Key for more than a year.” While Sickles was out of town last week, “the attendance of Mr. Key at his house was even more unremitting than usual.”14

  Laura Crawford Jones, the young daughter of Georgetown
’s mayor, wrote in her diary that the lack of effort to hide their romance reflected poorly on Key. “For my part, I should have been more wary, I think, if I had been engaged in such an affair. His whole conduct shows how little he really cared for her, the recklessness with which he carried on his amours showed he had no real regard for her.”15

  William Stuart was an Irishman who had known both kinds of luck. In the past year, he’d produced a theatrical hit—followed by a major flop. Now he was in Washington, planning his next great play and hoping to get by as a correspondent for New York newspapers. Correspondents in 1859 were exactly that: people who wrote letters. And with Congress leaving town in a week, demand for dispatches from Washington was drying up. But the dramatist would now have the chance to share the most incredible real-life drama with the world. Nobody knew political scandal better than he did. For starters, William Stuart was not his real name.

  Edmund O’Flaherty was born near Galway thirty-eight years earlier. He’d been an elected member of the UK Parliament and had served as income tax commissioner for Ireland. He was famous for his warmth, kindness, and largesse, the source of which no one could seem to figure out. In the spring of 1854, as Daniel and Teresa Sickles were winning over London, O’Flaherty disappeared. One step ahead of creditors, he boarded a steamer at Havre under the name “William Stuart” (Captain William Stuart). He was penniless, but an east side tenement was preferable to an English gaol.16 He wrote articles for the New York Tribune on English politics (the editors found him surprisingly knowledgeable) and theater criticism for five dollars apiece. Stuart longed for Broadway glory of his own. He saved and raised enough money to rent Wallack’s Theatre. There he produced some modest hits and major flops. Now here he was, correspondent for the New York Times in the nation’s capital. With congress on the edge of adjournment, demand for DC stories was drying up, and he faced going broke again. Until the biggest story in the history of the world fell into his lap. How was that for luck? And who better to write about political scandal?17