Star Spangled Scandal Read online

  The house was plainer than many of the guests expected, with the exception of some mahogany furniture upstairs. The walls of Key’s bachelor residence were unadorned except for a single print on the wall—Fanny Elssler, the world famous ballerina. It seems strange, at first, for Key to have only one picture, and that of a ballerina. On closer inspection, however, the dark, thin, beauty in her gorgeous gown looked remarkably like Teresa Sickles.

  The States newspaper had a name for it: Sickliana. There was a “greater rush for it by far than for the newest translation of the Bible or a rigmarole about the last ball or in fact anything else. With most persistent and indefatigable industry, people are hunting up items about this Sickles affair as if the fate of the nation depended on it.” Leslie’s agreed: “The people crave after information, and the newspapers seize hold of the slightest rumor to form a paragraph, which is eagerly devoured by millions of readers.”2

  Laura Jones, daughter of the Mayor of Georgetown, wrote in her diary of a popular new game played by her little brother and his friend. Her brother waved his handkerchief at the house, and the friend ran outside and pretended to shoot him.3

  The Henry Clay Debating Club of Louisville, Kentucky, rented a local courtroom to settle the question “Was Sickles justifiable in Killing Key?” An ad in the Louisville Courier invited the public to attend, “the ladies particularly.”4

  Law students in Gallatin, Tennessee, were re-enacting the events of the case when the man playing Sickles accidentally shot his best friend, killing him. The student had to be stopped from committing suicide three times.5

  Foreign correspondents fed the hysteria overseas. The London Examiner wrote: “Murder in America has not only its apologists but its admirers. We have long been struck with the theatrical turn which crime takes in the United States. When an American sets about a murder he prepares his part as for a scene in a drama.”6

  The French correspondent of the New York Times wrote: “The Sickles Tragedy is the prominent topic of discussion in the cafes of Paris. The French theory (and the correct one) is that the really guilty party in the sad affair is the writer of the anonymous note—the meddlesome informer—who is presumed to be a woman, jealous of Mrs. Sickles.” He concluded “The society of Washington seems to have all the recklessness of Paris, without the refinement.”7

  Crime stories had been fodder for the penny press and its audience, but they had usually been limited to a few paragraphs. The murder of prostitute Helen Jewett in 1836 had foreshadowed Sickles’s case. Jewett was asleep in her brothel when she was struck in the head three times with a hatchet and lit on fire. James Gordon Bennett went to the crime scene and wrote about it with a level of detail that hadn’t been seen before.

  Robert Robinson, Jewett’s sometime paramour, was charged. For the first time, readers saw detailed accounts of witnesses and their testimony. Souvenir hunters had taken her charred bedframe or shavings from her furniture. Working class men wore white hats, called “Robinson cloaks” to show their belief in his innocence. The judge ordered the jury to disregard the testimony of other prostitutes, and the case against Robinson collapsed.8

  The Massachusetts Spy detected the start of a new era in crime reporting. “No such stories of crime can leave us as they find us,” they wrote. “While we listen to them and are stirred by their exciting details, we take impressions from them; they are felt in our blood and along our nerves, as well as in our thoughts and sympathies; they leave their traces everywhere, and add greatly to the influences whereby men become either better or worse. Therefore, such contact with great and scandalous crimes is a very serious matter. It is unfortunately the fashion of the present time to give very minute reports of all cases of exciting wickedness as soon as they get public attention; but the fashion is not a good one. It is sustained now by a popular taste for such things. Popular influence can change it, and we trust that the day is not distant when the change shall be effected.” This was wishful thinking.9

  Leslie’s Illustrated advertised “a very large and accurate engraving occupying two pages of that paper,” complete with pictures of the courtroom. Leslie promised “the greatest engraving ever published in this country” as well as “the most accurate and beautiful engraving ever issued in this country. This paper should be taken by every family.”10

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  For the Defense, Part 2

  * * *

  “The array of talent in the case would fill the Court House to overflowing, even if the very deep interest taken in it, and the high position of the parties involved, did not.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  A young woman stood on a crowded street in New York and desperately begged for money. “They are going to hang my brother,” she said. Most passed without acknowledging her. Now and then, people gave her small bills, fives, and tens. When it equaled $250, she took the money to the law office of James Topham Brady on Broadway.

  She “timidly approached his desk,” knowing it was a fraction of his fee. “Mr. Brady, they are going to hang my brother, and you can save him. I’ve brought you this money. Please don’t let my brother die!”

  “They sha’nt hang your brother, my child,” he said, taking her case and refusing her money and telling her to “Take it to your mother.” Brady secured her brother’s release but never asked for a fee. Days earlier, he had turned down a $2,500 retainer in another case. Brady’s pro bono representation was the type of kindness that people associated with him from his earliest days.

  Brady had been born in America, in accord with his father’s ambitions. His parents came to New York from Ireland during the War of 1812 after “a narrow escape from a British privateer.” Brady was born three years later.

  Brady was remembered as a schoolboy for his encyclopedic knowledge and oversized head, as if he needed space for the things he was learning. As a trainee lawyer, he routinely stayed overnight in the office. At twenty years old, he tried his first case, a dead bang loser where his client had sued his insurance carrier for far more than he had lost. Brady stood before his first jury, trembling, as his vision faded to black. He steadied himself on the table and delivered an impressive argument. He lost; but he also gained a great deal of credit among those in attendance.

  Brady’s first case of note came a few months later when he defended a newsboy for selling papers on the Christian Sabbath. Although he failed—the law was clear—the Jewish community, who had taken great interest in the case, turned to him in their future legal difficulties. This was no less true among his own people. It was said that “every poor Irish man or woman in the city felt that he had a champion in him.”

  In court one day, the judge asked him to take on a client. “Mr. Brady, the next case is that of a man charged with murder. He has no counsel. Can you defend him?”

  “Certainly.” The scene repeated itself twice that week. Each time, he secured an acquittal.

  A warmhearted, successful lawyer, Brady would have been an ideal husband. But his father’s untimely death made him the head of a family with five unmarried sisters. “All the affection which I could have had for a wife went out to those sisters,” he said. Meanwhile, his work in New York brought him to national attention, and Daniel Webster selected him as his junior counsel in the rubber tire case Goodyear vs. Day. After months of preparation, Brady delivered a two-day opening statement. Webster told him their success would be due to this effort.

  Many of Brady’s clients stood accused of heinous acts. But his own gentle nature prevented him from hunting or fishing. Earlier in his career, Brady was appointed interim district attorney and had to prosecute boys for “borrowing” a boat to pick apples in New Jersey. Brady told the jury that he wanted a verdict of acquittal. “The boys did not intend to commit a crime, they only did what boys always will do, and what, perhaps, you and I have done. They only wanted a little fun and should not be punished for it.”

  On April 3, 1859, a mass of unfamiliar black curls on an oversized head ap
peared in the Washington train depot. Brady, known to people of all classes on the streets of New York, was a stranger in the capital. He made an odd pair with his companion John Graham, tall and built like a bear, another renowned New York attorney. Brady was one of Sickles’s “earliest, and through life, one of his warmest friends.”1

  The defense met at the National Hotel. Sitting around the table, any one of them could make the case to take the lead. Edwin Stanton was a Washington lawyer with a national reputation; Ratcliffe, Magruder, and Chilton tried these kinds of cases, before jurors like these, in the same courtroom, and before Judge Crawford. Philip Philips, a new addition to the team, had been a member of the 33rd Congress from Alabama. Enjoying the excitement of the capital, he stayed to cultivate a law practice before the Supreme Court, with much success. Brady and Graham were the closest to Sickles and two of the best lawyers in New York, which was to say anywhere.

  To make things especially difficult, their client was an excellent lawyer and would have ideas of his own. This confluence of egos and talent should have been a disaster. In the hands of lesser men, it would have been.

  There was no shortage of work to be done in little time. Brady would handle witnesses. Stanton would focus on arguments of law. Graham would deliver the opening statement. Philips and the local lawyers would focus on “the organization of the jury.” Together, they scoured newspaper coverage for interviews or testimony given at the coroner’s inquest that could help or hurt their case.2

  On the eve of trial, the Herald wrote: “The prosecution and defense are, up to this moment, ignorant of the mode of procedure that either will adopt. They stand like two combatants, fully armed, but not knowing where the attack will be made.”3

  The switch to New York and getting out of Washington and that house may have saved Teresa’s life. Emanuel Hart, the former congressman who had accompanied her home, went with her for a stroll. In Washington, she was accustomed to long walks and plenty of exercise. But this was only the third time since arriving in New York that she had mustered the strength to go outside. Her body trembled, she felt her legs giving way, and her heart beating violently. She stared at the clock in her home, contemplating how life had changed: “One month ago this day, at this hour,” of the things that “were going on in our once happy home.”

  Thomas Field, a New York politician who had visited Sickles in jail, brought Teresa a note from her husband. She wrote back to Sickles, thanking him for his “kind, good letter. Thank you many times for all your kind expressions and God bless you for the mercy and prayers you offer up for me.” She also thanked him for the beautiful verses of poetry he had sent. “I will keep them always,” she wrote. “That fearful Saturday night! If I could have foreseen the scenes of the following day I would have braved all dangers, all things, to have prevented them. No, dear Dan, I cannot say you ever denied me what was necessary, and you gave me many things I did not deserve. Everyone knows this.” She offered to make him a pair of slippers. “Will you wear them for me? Or would you dislike to wear again anything that I have made? Can I say or do anything for you? Write when you can, and think and feel as leniently as possible of me and my unhappy position. God bless you for the two kisses you send me and with God’s help and my own determination to be good, true and faithful to you and myself hereafter, those kisses shall never leave my lips while I am called wife and you husband. I swear it by Laura . . . God bless you, pray for me, and believe in the sincerity and gratitude of Teresa.”4

  ACT II

  The Trial of Daniel E. Sickles for the Murder of Philip Barton Key

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Twelve Dispassionate Men

  * * *

  “The trial of Daniel E. Sickles for the killing of Philip Barton Key has been set down by the criminal court at Washington for Monday next, the 4th of April. It will be one of the celebrated causes of the world.”

  —The New York Herald

  DAY ONE—Monday, April 4, 1859

  * * *

  Every word of the testimony will be published and read by hundreds of thousands, if not by millions, of people, regularly every day during the trial, such is the avidity with which curiosity seizes hold of such things—nor less that curiosity in boudoirs than bar rooms, it is mortifying to say.

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  The lawyers of Washington had the privilege of entering the courtroom early, where they took seats and discussed how they would handle the case.

  Reporters were next, scurrying around the room in search of the best position. There were more journalists than seats. The reporter for the Associated Press couldn’t find a place in the “dingy little room,” much less “a desk or table.” William Stuart thought it was “badly aired, looks damp and smells musty.”1

  Henry Watterson, the Philadelphia Press correspondent, described the lawyers: Stanton had an “expansive forehead, impending brows, and flowing beard.” The prosecution and defense were seated at the same table. Ould was to Stanton’s left. On his right “is a head [Brady’s]—one that might be called bulbously massive—negligently covered with a profusion of black and silver curls . . . brightness and playfulness of the steel-blue eye shows the rapidity and vivacity, the force and verve of the mind that speaks through it.” With that head on his small body, Watterson thought he looked like an exclamation point.2

  A large contingent of police were the next to enter. Under the command of Chief Goddard, there were twelve daytime officers dressed in blue alongside eight night officers wearing gray. They were posted at every entrance to the courtroom. The remaining police force was managing an excited mob outside the courthouse.3

  Judge Crawford took the bench at 10:15 a.m., “a venerable old gentleman in gold spectacles.” Finally, the doors to City Hall were opened and the crowd flooded in like water through a broken dam. Some climbed in through the windows. The room soon reached capacity, and the doors were shut in the faces of a “grumbling and swearing” crowd. The spectators looked like “one mass of human heads, belonging to all classes and conditions.” The fathers of Sickles and Teresa sat side by side, as did Key’s brother-in-law and uncle.4

  Reverend Haley accompanied Sickles to court and sat next to him.

  The Reverend had testified in that room just four months earlier in the trial of Winant Streng. Streng, a “swarthy” Prussian immigrant, walked into the Washington Masonic Lodge and opened fire, killing one member. Haley had seen him entering as he was leaving and testified: “this was a person to be avoided,” and he “walked away with unusual haste.” It was learned at trial that Streng had twice met the president and was prepared to kill him if he had treated him harshly.5

  In addition to family members of Sickles and Key, there were prominent members of Congress, “though the great majority of the dense crowd present are every day citizens and hotel loungers of Washington.”6

  Judge Crawford announced, “Case number 124, that of Mr. Sickles, is set for today. Is counsel ready to proceed?”

  They were.

  The panel of prospective jurors was ready. Everyone was ready, finally. Now they needed the defendant. Crawford ordered Sickles brought to the courtroom.

  Sickles was more afraid of listening to evidence of Teresa’s unfaithfulness than he was the possibility of being hanged. Marshals escorted him from the jail to the courthouse as the crowd stared. He entered the courtroom, still the center of attention, returning the acknowledgement of friends. Sickles took his place in the prisoner’s box, which looked “a hen coop with a chair inside.”7

  Journalists scribbled down descriptions of the prisoner. Stuart thought he looked like any other spectator. Sickles was dressed immaculately in a dark coat, vest, and light pants, “[c]alm and self-possessed,” “as easy as if he were sitting in his seat in the House of Representatives.” But he was also “[p]ale and careworn,” losing weight, his face lined with worry. “Confinement has made a visible effect in his general appearance.”8

  The audience p
ushed and jostled to get a look at him, like he was a caged animal. “Where is he?” they asked. Three people were ejected by marshals for the disruption. Sickles did not hide his annoyance.9

  Robert Ould rose and introduced James Carlisle to the court, the man who would assist him as prosecutor. “This association,” he said, “was extremely gratifying to him and he was sure it would also be agreeable to the court.”

  Carlisle had refused a spot on the defense team. He had studied at seminary and military academy before learning the law in the office of William Wirt, attorney general to John Quincy Adams and James Monroe. Carlisle had argued numerous Supreme Court cases and was the legal advisor to a number of diplomatic missions. He was described as “crammed with the tricks of the law, and gifted in the flow of language.” Carlisle had defended Captain Drayton and served as co-counsel with Stanton on his first major courtroom victory. He was also a pallbearer for Barton Key.10

  It was time to pick a jury.

  The judge asked Joseph P. Brien, the first potential juror, “Have you at any time formed or expressed an opinion in relation to the guilty or innocence of the accused?”

  “I have,” he answered.

  “You may retire,” the judge said.

  On it went. Charles Skippen had an opinion and could not “render a fair and impartial verdict.” Joseph Savage had formed and expressed opinions after reading the newspaper. Daniel Ratcliffe, overseeing jury selection for the defense, studied the jury pool carefully, “reading the men instead of their names.”11

  Henry Hurdle cleared the initial barriers to serving when Ould asked him an unexpected question. “Are you worth $800?”