by Chris DeRose
“The vulgar monotony of partisan passions and political squabbles has been terribly broken in upon today by an outburst of personal revenge,” Stuart wrote, “which has filled the city with horror and consternation—I cannot, unfortunately add with absolute surprise.”
Stuart was not just a gifted writer, he was an intimate of the parties involved. “It was but on Tuesday last that on visiting Mrs. Sickles, Tuesday being her day of reception, I found Mr. Key there, his horse waiting for him at the door. The rooms were filled with a pleasant company, the soft Spring sunlight poured in at the open windows, and Mrs. Sickles herself in all her almost girlish beauty, wearing a bouquet of crocuses, the firstlings of the year, seemed the very incarnation of Spring and youth, and the beautiful promise of life.”
Stuart’s stories were published anonymously, credited to “Our Special Washington Correspondent.” As a theater producer, he knew that the best storytellers were often behind the curtain.
Chapter Sixteen
The Day After
February 28, 1859
* * *
“His future promised to be most prosperous; but l’homme propose, et le Dieu dispose.”
—The New York Herald
Daniel Sickles woke up in jail, and his skin was dark—covered in bed bugs, “so as to be literally black with them.” It wasn’t a nightmare. Not the bugs—not any of it. Teresa had carried on an affair—more or less in public—for over a year. And he had killed his former friend on account of it. Now he sat somewhere in the bowels of a disgusting dungeon, staring out behind iron bars, and at some non-distant date, he would be tried for his life.1
Sickles’s friends tried to keep him company. There was Emanuel Hart, a former Congressman and Supervisor of the Port of New York; Chevalier Wikoff, who was never far from the scene of action; Wooldridge; and Governor Walker. Butterworth was there also, looking “very solemn.” The prevailing rumor, which made the papers, was that he had been an accessory to the killing and would soon be joining Sickles in jail. And Reverend Haley was there too, of course.
The federal district court opened on Monday. James Carlisle stood up to speak. The Bar of Washington, he said, had “called upon [him] to discharge a painful duty,” to “announce to the Court the death of Philip Barton Key, Esq., the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. In doing so, all that was good, all that was attractive in his character came so forcibly before” him, that he felt he “could not do justice to the subject.”
Chief Justice Dunlap responded with praise for Key’s “fine talents,” and “many noble, manly, and generous qualities.” Out of respect to his memory, the court adjourned until Thursday.
After adjournment, the Bar of Washington met as a group and adopted a resolution: Key was a man “endeared to and respected by us while living, and whose sudden death has filled our hearts with the deepest sorrow and regret.”2
Teresa was “confined to her bed by severe illness.” She refused “to see any one”—not that people were beating down her door.3
The Tribune called it “a sad commentary on the shallowness of the friendships in fashionable circles here, that all of the gay throng which crowded the parlors of Mrs. Sickles on Thursday night last at her levee, but very few have condescended to call upon her in her misfortune.”4
At the split second of tragedy in Washington, a race began to see who could most quickly build distance from the sufferer, as if it were contagious. Sources told one newspaper: “Any lady who opened her house and gave good dinners can obtain [Teresa’s] station.” A “Number of gentlemen scoff at the idea that they had ever crossed her threshold. The select circles she did not enter.”5
Stuart set the record straight in the Times. Teresa “certainly did move in the best society, and was generally courted and adored. The idea that she filled a doubtful position in Washington is preposterous. Why is it that poor human nature so loves to shove downhill with accelerated motion every sinning fellow-creature who once is found failing?”
Chapter Seventeen
For the Defense, Part 1
Sickles would need the best defense to have any hope of survival. His legal team gave the outward appearance of being carefully selected. The opposite was true. From the moment of his arrest, Sickles’s friends and family began hiring lawyers to defend him. The first were made public in time to make the next day’s papers: Edwin Stanton, Daniel Ratcliffe, and Allen Magruder.
Though his lasting fame was in the (near) future, Stanton was considered among “the foremost men in America,” and “honest as steel,” possessing “an energy to which relaxation is almost pain.”
Stanton was thirteen years old when his father, a small-town doctor who excelled at charity but lacked in collecting fees, died. Stanton was pulled from school and apprenticed to a bookbinder. After a grueling three-year apprenticeship, he went to Kenyon College in Ohio. When finances were low, he was forced to drop out and spend another year working for the bookbinder. He finally convinced the guardian of his father’s estate to take him on as a legal apprentice.
Like many successful men, he charged ahead as though a return to poverty was chasing him. He assumed more work in the face of family tragedy. When his daughter died, Stanton had her remains sealed in a metal box that he kept in his room. When he lost his wife to tuberculosis, he wandered the house “in a daze carrying a lamp.” “Where is Mary?” he asked.
Stanton was known as a lawyer for railroads and major corporate interests. But his rarefied appearance concealed his years as a county prosecutor in Ohio. In private practice, he represented Joseph Thomas against a charge of poisoning his wife, taking a dose of mercuric chloride before the jury to prove it wasn’t fatal. He also defended John Gaddis, who had killed his wife with a brick. In that case, he did not attempt a similar demonstration.
Stanton gained the notice of Washington as the lawyer for Caleb McNulty, Clerk of the House of Representatives, charged with stealing $50,000. Stanton’s surrogate father, a senator for Ohio, had vouched for McNulty’s good character and paid his $20,000 bond. The senator faced a ruined reputation and finances unless Stanton could clear McNulty. Stanton shredded the state’s main witness in the “severest” cross-examination one reporter had ever heard. In his closing, he called trial by jury America’s most precious asset. McNulty was acquitted and Stanton returned to Ohio.
A lawyer of his talent and ambition could not resist the pull across the river to Pittsburgh. He was soon tasked with a case impacting the future of the city. A planned bridge across the Ohio River to Wheeling threatened to redirect commercial traffic south, cutting off Pittsburgh. He sued on behalf of Pennsylvania, charging that the bridge interfered with interstate commerce because its height would not allow the tallest smokestacks on ships to pass. Stanton took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, where he won. Congress later passed a law allowing the bridge.
Stanton remarried, and he and his young wife decided to move to Washington. He wanted to increase his practice before the Supreme Court, and she looked forward to the excitement of the capital city.
President Buchanan appointed Jeremiah Black as attorney general. Black knew Stanton from his appearances before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where he had served as a justice. Black offered Stanton the biggest challenge of his career. Who owned what in California was hardly a federal concern . . . until gold flakes were found in the river near Sutter’s Mill. Someone was needed to sort through the patchwork of Spanish land grants, Mexican titles, and American deeds and determine the true owners of priceless property rights.
Stanton wasted no time after his month-long steamer ride. He traveled to the old capitals of Benicia and San Jose, inspecting dusty records in Spanish and English and collecting nearly 400 folio volumes from throughout the state. He exposed one of the largest claimants as a fraud and quickly restored the rule of law. It had been a task for Stanton’s unique talents: an endless capacity for work, a painstaking attention to detail, total incorruptibility,
and sheer perseverance. After fifty weeks, he returned to Washington to an increasingly impatient wife and the biggest case of his career.1
Sickles’s supporters initially tried to hire Jeremiah Black as his lawyer (it was not unheard of for an attorney general to handle private cases). Black declined, but he referred the case to Stanton.
Other friends of Sickles hired Daniel Ratcliffe of Alexandria, Virginia, a seasoned lawyer in the District. When Pierce became president, 9,000 residents petitioned for Ratcliffe to be named US Attorney. Only 2,000 did the same for Key. But Key had the support of the people who mattered and won the job. Ratcliffe served as the solicitor of the court of claims before resuming his private practice.2
Allen Magruder had spent most of his twenty-year legal career in Charlottesville, Virginia, before moving north. He joined the case by virtue of his partnership with Ratcliffe.
Samuel Chilton, a former Virginia congressman and longtime lawyer in Washington, was retained by other friends of Sickles.3
The group met with Sickles at the jail, wading through the large crowd hanging about outside, “earnestly discussing the sad event.” Sickles and his ad hoc legal team were forced to make their first decision. With the inhuman cries of prisoners as ambient noise and the vile smell of the jail in their noses, they advised Sickles to waive a preliminary hearing, his only option for getting out on bail. But it would also reveal arguments and evidence they were reserving for trial. Moreover, the defense believed that time was the enemy. Cool consideration, they felt, would lead to the conclusion that a man could not simply kill whomever he pleased. Also, with Sickles incarcerated, he would have priority in the criminal docket over defendants on bail.
There was a practical consideration as well. Friends of Key were described as “quite indignant” and talked openly of killing Sickles on sight. Key’s brother planned “a shooting exercise with the honorable Daniel Sickles for a target,” reported one newspaper. “Wonder if he can’t hit him without three shots.”
Sickles’s friends believed he was safer in “The Blue Jug.”4
Chapter Eighteen
Funeral Rites
March 2, 1859
* * *
“If Sickles is guilty, what is Butter worth?”
—Bennington Banner
The role of Samuel Butterworth remained a matter of debate. It had been widely assumed—and reported—that he had known Sickles’s intentions and had distracted Key so that he could be shot. Butterworth had heard the rumors and could read the newspapers. He knew it meant a death sentence if a jury believed them. His detailed defense appeared in newspapers on March 2.
Butterworth wrote of his unexpected summons to the Sickles house on the day of the killing. He explained that Sickles walked into the hall and said, “Come, go over with me” to “the Club House,” to ask “whether Key has a room there, and for what purpose he uses it.”
“I assented,” Butterworth wrote, “and walked out into the street, supposing that Mr. Sickles was following me. I left the house for this sole purpose. When I left Mr. S. in the hall I am satisfied that he had no weapons on his person. He was without his overcoat. He said nothing to me about weapons, or the probability of encountering Key.” Butterworth described the killing in vivid terms, from the best vantage point of anyone. “I took no part in the contest,” he wrote. “I believed them both to be armed. It is not true that I either sought or detained Mr. Key. He first addressed me, and our interview did not last one minute. I have known the late Mr. Key in New York and in Washington during the last ten years, and our relations have ever been of the most friendly character. I did not anticipate a collision on the Sabbath, though I did not doubt that it would take place at an early day. This is the whole of my connection with the unfortunate occurrence.” The statement was accompanied by declarations from Walker and Gwin attesting that this was consistent with what they knew and what he told them on Sunday and from Wooldridge, who was present for the final conversation between Sickles and Butterworth.
The Post was not satisfied. If every word of Butterworth’s story were true, “Did he move hand or foot to prevent this atrocious butchery?”
The Star was skeptical: Sickles was “armed with a five-shooter, every barrel loaded, and at least one, if not two, loaded Derringer pistols. They were of course loaded before Butterworth preceded him from the house.”
The ostensible purpose for which they left the house made little sense. Sickles had proven the affair beyond all doubt. Teresa had signed a confession. What did it matter if Key had a room in the Club House? Even if Butterworth went along to gratify Sickles, where did he think Sickles was during the three-minute walk across the square?
Butterworth, who seemed to be everywhere on Sunday, was now in hiding, possibly to avoid arrest, to avoid being forced testify against Sickles, or both. The Tribune reported, “The most diligent search for him has been made in vain.”1
He wasn’t the only person trying to clear their name. John Gray, owner of the world’s most famous assignation house, wrote a letter to the newspapers denying any knowledge of Key’s purpose in renting his home.2
James Carlisle stood outside Washington City Hall. He and Barton Key had tried many cases in that building, some together, some on opposite sides. They had been friends outside of the courtroom. Now he was there to meet colleagues and court officials and to proceed as a group to Key’s wake and burial. Carlisle and his colleagues arrived to find C street “thronged” with people vying to enter the memorial service. Key had been popular in life, but not this popular.3
Carlisle made his way into the living room. The focus was a mahogany coffin, draped in black cloth and mounted in silver. Inside was his familiar friend Key, dressed in a black coat and pants and with white camellias strewn about him. His expressions were so lifelike that is was “difficult for the spectator to realize that [his] once noble form lay in the stillness of death.”
For two hours “a motley crowd” of boy and man, rich and poor, black and white, free and slave “poured through the parlor to take a glimpse of the corpse.” Reverends Pinckney and Butler performed the funeral rites of the Episcopal Church over his body. The coffin lid was closed. Carlisle and seven other pallbearers carried it to a hearse outside. Visible on top of the coffin was a silver plate: “Phil. Barton Key, died Feb. 27, 1859, aged 39 years.”4
Key’s final carriage ride through Washington was to the depot for a trip to Baltimore aboard the three o’clock train. Crowds followed the hearse all the way there. From the train, Carlisle and the pall bearers entered the Green Street Presbyterian burying ground.
Key would be buried with his wife and one of their children among the leaders of early Baltimore, near Edgar Allen Poe, who had died ten years earlier.
Key’s siblings broke the news to their mother gently. Mary Key was not surprised, as they had expected: she had recently dreamed of her son’s death. “Apoplexy?” she asked. The siblings went with it. “Did he die in the street?” They answered in the affirmative. Just as she had seen, Mary said.5
The press reflected the split in public opinion. The Post said the Times “was fertile in finding excuses for a homicide . . . deliberately planned and deliberately executed.”6
The Times said that the Post, “once regarded as a respectable and responsible organ of opinion, has neither the cheap honesty nor the common courage” to explain how Sickles should have handled the situation.7
The Tribune split the difference: “We cannot . . . treat the case as one of cold-blooded murder; but it may nevertheless be one of very culpable, unjustifiable killing. Let us calmly await the result of the legal investigation.”8
The Waltham Sentinel asked whether everyone involved was reading from the “Wicked Bible,” a version from 1714 with a printing error that commanded: “Thou shall commit adultery.” The Archbishop, who hadn’t read the rest of the book, punished the printer for their mistake by fining them into insolvency and sending them to a star chamber.9
/> Chapter Nineteen
Teresa, Part 2
* * *
“Many visitors this evening, everyone still talking of the dreadful murder of young Key.”
—diary of Elizabeth Lomax
Sickles asked Emanuel Hart to stay at the home with Teresa and Laura until they could return to New York. Ratcliffe told him that witnesses would come to identify Mrs. Sickles and requested that he admit them. The first was Nancy Brown, the neighborhood busybody, who clearly identified Mrs. Sickles as the woman she had seen with Key.
Paradoxically, prevailing opinion seemed to deny Teresa’s agency but awarded her the greatest punishment. The Richmond Dispatch lamented that Sickles was celebrated in jail, Key was honored with a grand funeral, and that “at the worst, [Teresa] cannot be more debased than the two criminals who have received such tokens of special honor” while she is “excommunicated as a moral leper.”1
Henry Watterson, the young correspondent for the Philadelphia Press, who had been a close friend of Teresa’s, said: “She was an innocent child. She never knew what she was doing.” Key was “a handsome, unscrupulous fellow who understood how to take advantage of a husband’s neglect.”
The Evening Star blamed Sickles: “Married at the child’s age of sixteen to an experienced man of the world, who knew well all the dangers to which the virtue of a young and intensely fashionable wife might be subjected in an ill-ordered household, we cannot acquit the husband of all blame for her ruin. Such ruin rarely, if ever, invades the threshold of the husband who strictly discharges the duty of a head of a family. Nay, we question whether it ever came into the family of a man really careful at all times to protect the honor of his own household.”2
