Star Spangled Scandal

by Chris DeRose

  It had been nearly two months since Sickles mania overtook the nation. Yet Frederick Douglas’s newspaper published one of its first stories on the matter, one that “affects us but slightly.”

  For the many cheering on Sickles, “A million and a half of defenseless women are given up to the vile lusts of not only one seducer, but any number of lecherous libertines who may present themselves.” Enslaved women, even ones who were married, were routinely forced to have sex against their will. It is a “diabolical wickedness which is ever and always being inflicted upon our suffering people. Is there a God that judgeth in the earth and will He not visit upon this nation a penalty adequate to the sin?”1

  The Albany Evening Journal recognized this as well. “Had their skin only been tinged with a shade of African blood,” there “would have been no Sickles case to try . . . no crime to atone for . . . no sin to repent for . . . no wrong to avenge,” and in the eyes of slaveholding Washington, Key’s actions would be “eminently fitting and proper.”2

  Day seventeen began with Charles Winder, a Washington lawyer, attempting to call himself as a witness.

  “It is out of the usual course,” said the judge, “and I do not see how it can be done unless you are put on the stand as a witness.”

  Carlisle said, “Mr. Winder himself feels some desire on the subject. There is none on our part.”

  Judge Crawford seemed to hope someone would object. “Explanations have become so frequent as to be annoying. That is not the object of testimony at all.” But seeing no objections, Winder succeeded in taking the stand.

  He wanted to correct Doyle’s testimony. Doyle “was utterly mistaken in saying that I had told him these papers were found on the person of Mr. Key at the time of the Coroner’s inquest. What happened afterwards I do not know.”

  “I think that fully meets all that was said in respect to you,” Brady said.

  “I desire distinctly to say that at the time the search was made of Mr. Key’s person, during the coroner’s inquest, there was not a scrap of paper found.”

  “No one says there was,” Judge Crawford said.

  “Mr. Doyle says I said there was,” Winder replied.3

  Joseph Dudrow was recalled as the prosecution’s witness. “I did not think Mr. Sickles was any more excited than any other man would be in a fight or anything of that kind. When the last shot was fired, I was thirty-five or forty feet from him.”

  Edward Delafield thought Sickles was “Cool. After he shot Mr. Key, he walked away quietly. He put the pistol in his pocket afterward. I saw nothing strange in his manner before he met Mr. Key,” and “I thought from his firing such a number of shots that he was rather cool.”

  “From that I should think he was rather hot,” Brady said.

  Francis Smith was a reporter for the Congressional Globe. He was examined by Carlisle. Sickles had delivered speeches in the House on the Friday before the killing, around 5:00 p.m., and the following day around 4:00 p.m.

  Carlisle read aloud from Sickles’s remarks and introduced the original transcripts made by the Globe. It was standard practice for members of congress to be allowed to revise their statements before the newspaper was printed. The originals of the Friday and Saturday before the killing reveal that Sickles had taken the time to read them and had made edits.

  Brady, Graham, and Ould went to the bench and whispered. The prosecution had brought the proprietor of Barnum’s Hotel, Baltimore, to testify that Sickles and a woman other than Teresa came in as guests, arguing that the door had been opened.

  “For very obvious reasons, the court will do no more than merely state his opinions on this point. And that opinion is that the evidence is not admissible.” The defense team huddled.

  Brady said: “The gentlemen of the jury have been from their homes and families for now nearly three weeks, and those of us who reside away from Washington have certainly a strong inclination to see our homes, however agreeable our stay here is made by the kindness and hospitality of many of the citizens of this District. We are very anxious, therefore, to have the case finished.”

  “We will accede to it most cheerfully,” Ould said, “and with the greatest gratification on our part.” The prosecution would conclude their testimony tomorrow.4

  Chapter Forty-Four

  “The Testimony Closed”

  * * *

  “There is a graveyard smell about the whole affair.”

  —The Plattsburgh Republican

  DAY EIGHTEEN—Saturday, April 23, 1859

  The Milwaukee Sentinel reported an enterprising man of that city had set forth for Washington to acquire Key’s handkerchief. Pieces would sell for one dollar per thread, and he was accepting pre-orders.1

  There was a vicious gale outside, the end of a cold and raw week.2

  Colonel William Schouler was present, having been subpoenaed to appear as a witness. He was the publisher of the Boston Atlas and Bee, which had printed Sickles’s confession.

  Senator Stephen Douglas entered the courtroom and sat at the counsel table next to Sickles’s lawyers. Presidential candidates needed publicity, and there was little to be had outside this courtroom. Now he would figure prominently in tomorrow’s newspapers across the country.3

  Richard Brodhead, former US Senator from Pennsylvania, took the stand. He and his friend Haldemar, a newspaper editor in Harrisburg, were visiting Washington. They called at the home of the attorney general and were seated in the back parlor. Sickles arrived a moment later. Brodhead introduced his friend. Sickles and Haldemar began a mundane discussion of Pennsylvania politics.

  “You were unfortunate in crossing the street,” Brodhead said, referencing Sickles’s muddy boots. With more context, he may have been less vigilant over his host’s carpet.

  Sickles looked at his boots and agreed. Yes, he had been unfortunate in crossing the street. He went outside and cleaned his boots. Soon after he returned, they heard the attorney general descending the staircase. Sickles arose, leaving the room to speak to him privately. Black entered the parlor “very much excited.”

  “What’s the matter?” Broadhead asked.

  It was then that they learned that Sickles had come straight from shooting the US attorney. “Is it a bailable offense?” Brodhead asked.

  “I do not know,” Sickles said. “But if all the facts were known, it would be. For God knows I would be justified.” Butterworth soon arrived, having returned to Lafayette Square to retrieve Key’s opera glass.

  Someone asked whether Key was dead. “Yes,” Butterworth answered.

  “One wretch less in the world,” Sickles muttered. Sickles and Butterworth left in a carriage with the police. Brodhead and Haldemar remained.

  The senator would be the final witness.

  “You are closed on both sides?” the judge asked.

  “Yes,” Brady said.

  The jury had now heard every witness and seen all the evidence. They had heard from the inventor of the mechanical reaper, a maid, a coachman, and members of the House and Senate. They had examined anonymous letters and a pistol ball cut out of a man and a bloody vest with a hole in it.

  Now Judge Crawford would instruct them on how to apply that evidence to the law in order to reach a verdict. Before he could do that, both sides would submit proposed instructions and argue them.

  Carlisle began for the United States. “If the homicide were willful and intentional, and was induced by the belief of the prisoner that the deceased had criminal intercourse with the prisoner’s wife, nevertheless it was murder.”

  Nor was evidence of previous adultery a provocation that could reduce the charge to manslaughter. “All authorities confine” such evidence “to the case of instant killing.”

  There had never been a case that held adultery was a justification for homicide. The defense had argued that “every man was the judge, when he finds himself aggrieved, whether the law of the land gives him adequate relief,” and if not, he may “rely on his natural
rights.” Carlisle believed this argument, that there is a government of laws that you may ignore at your convenience, “was its own refutation.”

  “It was also argued that human law must be in accordance with Divine law.” Conceding this “for the sake of argument,” the Divine law never “authorized the taking of a human life for any wrong, by the person wronged. The Divine law did not make adultery as great a crime as murder.” He reminded the court of Jesus’s words to the Pharisees on the adulteress: Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.

  “What could be more shocking, what so irreconcilable with the existence of peace and good government than the doctrine that he who is grievously wronged is to take into his own hands the knife, and to execute summary judgment against the offender? Society could not exist with such a doctrine. If it were established here, in the capital of the nation, the land would present one great scene of violence and confusion—because the principle would not be confined to the single crime of adultery, but would extend to all other wrongs for which the law did not give the offended party adequate reparation.”

  Further, “the defense of insanity is a specific defense, and must be proved affirmatively and beyond doubt. It had been laid down by all authorities, and decided by the twelve judges of England, in M’Naughten’s case, that the defense of insanity must be proven to the satisfaction of the jury.”

  With that, Carlisle turned the floor over to the defense.

  Stanton began: “The event which had brought the jury and the prisoner at the bar into solemn relations, and made the court and counsel participators in this momentous trial, was the death of Mr. Key at the hand of Mr. Sickles, on Sunday, the 27th of February. The occasion of this event was an adulterous intrigue between Mr. Key and the wife of Mr. Sickles. The law rising on the case must depend on the relations each held to the other at the time the occurrence took place.”

  Congress has defined two classes of homicide: murder and manslaughter. Stanton said that three defenses would excuse these crimes. Self-defense, defense of your home, and a third, “arising from the social relation—the law holding family chastity and the sanctity of the marriage bed, the matron’s honor and the virgin’s purity, to be more valuable and estimable in law than the property or of life of any man.” This “principle never came before a judicial tribunal in a form more impressive than now. Here, in the capital of the nation, the social and political metropolis of thirty millions of people, a man of mature age, the head of a family, a member of the learned profession, a high officer of government, entrusted with the administration of the law, and who for years at this Bar has demanded judgment of fine, imprisonment and death against other men for offense against law, has himself been slain in open day in a public place, because he took advantage of a sojourner in this city. Received into his family, he debauched his house, violated the bed of his host, and dishonored his family.”

  Stanton asked Judge Crawford to instruct the jury first that Sickles was justified under these circumstances, and second, he “is free from legal responsibility by reason of the state of the prisoner’s mind.”

  “Eternal discord and violence would ensue if man’s chief object of affection were secured to him by no legal tie. No man could enjoy any happiness or pursue any vocation if he could not enjoy his wife free form the assaults of the adulterer.”

  Key, he argued, was killed in the act of adultery, just as if Sickles had found him in Teresa’s arms. He has “provided a place for the express purpose of committing adultery with another man’s wife” and was using “preconcerted signals to entice” Teresa from her “husband’s house, to besiege her in the streets, to accompany him to that vile den,” “spy glass in hand,” “lying in wait around a husband’s house.” It was “the most appalling” act of adultery “recorded in the annals of shame.”

  Key had “grown so bold as to take the child of the injured husband, his little daughter, by the hand, to separate her from her mother, to take the child to the house of a mutual friend while he leads the mother to the guilty den, in order there to enjoy her…surpassing all that has ever been written of cold, villainous, remorseless lust.

  “The death of Key was a cheap sacrifice to save one mother from the horrible fate, which on that Sabbath day, hung over this prisoner’s wife and the mother of his child. You may also plant on the best and surest foundations the principles of law which secure the peace of the home, the security of the family, and the relations of husband and wife, which have been in the most horrid manner violated in this case.”

  Stanton deferred the remaining points to Brady.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  “Address of Mr. James T. Brady for the Defence”

  DAY NINETEEN—Monday, April 25, 1859

  The doors of the courtroom were “besieged” by “a large number of persons” for a full fifteen minutes after Judge Crawford opened court.

  Brady picked up where Stanton had left off. “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 us shall have passed away, and when each shall have taken his chamber in the silent halls of death, and while some of us would have been totally forgotten but for this unfortunate incident, the name of everyone associated with this trial, from your Honor who presides in the first position of dignity to the humblest witness that was called on the stand will endure so long as the earth shall exist.

  “The whole world, I say, is watching the course of these proceedings, and the nature of the judgment, and I believe I know what kind of a pulsation stirs the heart of the world. I think I know, if the earth could be resolved into an animate creature, could have a heart, and a soul, and a tongue, how it would rise up in the infinity of space and pronounce its judgment on the features of this transaction.”

  Brady refused to drop the self-defense argument. “In view of the facts of that collision, that pistol [found in the street] belonged to Key and as used by him in that encounter, this is made conclusive.

  “Did not Mr. Sickles accuse him of having dishonored his house and may not Mr. Key have replied, ‘I have, and you can make the best of it,’ and this reply may have been accompanied by profanity. Who can say anything I have stated is inconsistent with the testimony adduced? The bullet which killed Mr. Key came out of the revolver. What then became of the bullet from the Derringer, which was found to be exploded?”

  The waving of a handkerchief, Brady argued, a white cloth, was the symbol of purity and peace and truce. “I hope I may be pardoned by my learned brethren for this remark, in passing, made not in anger, but sorrow, with all the feelings which belong to me. It would have been well if Mr. Key had attached as much importance to the dignity of a banner as did his distinguished sire, and had always within him a fresh recollection of those lines which identified him with the flag of our country wherever seen on earth. If he had remembered that the star-spangled banner has been raised everywhere, in the wilds of Africa, and on the mountain high, by the adventurous traveler, he would never have chosen that foul substitute for its beautiful folds. He would never have forgotten these two lines:

  And thus be it ever when freeman shall stand.

  Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation!

  “If his noble father inculcated in lines imperishable the duty of the American people to protect their homes against the invasion of a foe, how does it become less a solemn duty of the American citizen to protect his home against the invasion of the traitor, who, stealing into his embraces under the pretext of friendship, inflicts a deadly wound on his happiness, and aims also a blow at his honor?

  “All the emotions of his nature charged into one single impulse. Every throb of his heart brought distinctly before him the great sense of his injuries. Every drop of his blood carried with it a sense of his shame, an inextinguishable agony about the loss of his wife” and “the dishonor to come upon his child. A rea
lization that the promise of his youth must be forever destroyed. That the future, which opened to him so full of brilliancy, had been enshrouded perhaps in eternal gloom by one who, instead of drawing the curtain over it, should have invoked from the good God his greatest effulgence in the path of his friend.”

  Brady cited the testimony of Reverend Pyne and Francis Mohun, who saw Sickles’s vacant eyes, his altered “countenance,” and “some great affliction, some great change affecting his whole nature.

  “What are the incidents of the Saturday night? In feverish earnestness he paces that chamber of suffering more ferocious than the caged and starved tiger, thinking through the whole night of nothing but these reflections to which I have alluded, and which darkened the past, the present, and the future.

  “Think how, on that Sunday morning, he made this exhibition to which the witnesses have referred, when he saw Mr. Key with his opera glass for inspection or for spying, with his handkerchief to make the adulterous signal, and with the keys in his pocket of the house in Fifteenth Street, to which he was about to take Mrs. Sickles at that moment, if he could obtain her person.”

  The “realization of all these facts” were “pressing down with terrific weight on his mind, heart, and soul, thus meeting Mr. Key and understanding thoroughly the vile purpose of his heart, was not to shoot him, I ask my learned brother to tell me what he was to do. I would like to ask all assembled humanity what he was to do. To bid him good morning, to pass him silently by, to avert his eye?

  “Daniel E. Sickles, a man of unblenching and unvaried courage, as I know from the past associations of our lives, let Philip Barton Key believe that he could not only seduce his wife, but cow him? If he had done anything more or less than became a man, under these circumstances, 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 in his behalf, but a prayer to Heaven for the salvation which after death might come.