Star Spangled Scandal Read online

  Lo! Little “Riding Hood,” with artless grace,

  Reveals the sweetness of her childish face

  There was a cavalier, matador, and ranchero, mingling with a Quaker and a Tartan. Some went for the abstract, such as sunrise, liberty, winter, night, and the nine of clubs. Some women went for royalty, from a French marchioness to an Indian princess, while others came as an English bar maid, a Spanish peasant girl, or a gypsy. There was some amusing overlap in costumes: four of the diplomatic corps dressed as the French mime, Pierrot.

  Barton Key was dressed as an English Huntsman:

  Here “English Hunters” run their game to earth,

  And strike the “Key” note of their jovial mirth

  Alice Key Pendleton, his sister, dressed as the Star Spangled Banner itself: a white satin gown, a golden eagle, a tricolor sash, and a crown of thirteen stars.2

  . . . by proud hereditary right, our “Starry Banner” floats in living light . . .

  President Buchanan wore a black suit and white cravat.

  Lo! In the centre, he who calmly bears, Upon that snowy head, the nation’s cares . . .

  He and the senators in attendance, such as William Seward, Jefferson Davis, and Gwin, were among the few out of costume.

  The Huntsman and Little Red Riding Hood danced the fastmoving gallop across the room.3

  Where Impudence and Pertness takes the floor . . .

  Mary Gwin had triumphed.

  The frolic subjects of the sportive Queen, whose kindness rules the gay, fantastic scene . . .

  Descriptions of her ball made their way into newspapers across the country. It figured prominently in memoirs of the time. Many would remember it not for its opulence, but as the last time in history that many of those in attendance met on cordial terms.

  But this is not the time to moralize; the buzz and glitter claim our ears and eyes . . .

  The Huntsman and Little Red Riding Hood left together at 2:00 a.m. Beekman’s loose talk and Key’s desperate epistolary campaign had occurred only three weeks earlier. The situation called for extreme caution. They seemed to have none at all. Key and Teresa waded through a sea of the best carriages in Washington to hers.

  Teresa instructed her coachman, John Thompson, to take them to the National Hotel. “Drive down H or I Street,” she added. It was an indirect route. When they arrived, Thompson sat for what felt like a long time. He had picked up his mistress, who had a man in the coach with her who was not his master. He did not know what was happening inside. Finally, Key exited, bidding her goodnight. Thompson drove Teresa home.4

  . . . pained with beauty, the full heart, oppressed,

  Demands the relief of nature—rest.

  Henry Watterson was a nineteen-year-old reporter, the correspondent of the Philadelphia Press, run by John Forney, who had introduced Sickles to Buchanan.

  He felt awful, and illness was only part of it. In bed at his room in Willard’s, he was reading about Senator Gwin’s ball in the newspapers and staring at his Spanish cavalier costume that, thanks to his severe indisposition, would never be worn.

  Watterson was surprised when Teresa Sickles came to see him just to check in and see what he needed. It was true what they said about her: she would treat a servant with the same kindness and respect as a king.5

  There was speculation that Sickles might not seek a second term. He was under consideration to serve as ambassador to Spain in order to negotiate the purchase of Cuba. It was an issue he cared about and was closely identified with. But there were many reasons to stay. Sickles had distinguished himself as a national star in the six short months that Congress had been in session. He was a force to be reckoned with on issues of consequence, independent of his relationship with the president. He had traveled to Spain and knew they were unlikely to sell. That made it a bad tradeoff for leaving center stage.

  The reason to go, to take his wife and daughter and leave Washington, to return to the world of diplomacy where they had thrived and been happy, had not yet come into focus and would not until it was too late.

  Congress adjourned on June 14, and the Sickles returned to New York. It was time to campaign for re-election, and the split in the party assured that he would face a Democrat as well as a Know Nothing opponent. Bob Wood, his Democratic challenger, was noted for being “Successful in business,” “very rich,” “sport[ing] a fine moustache,” and owning a pair of horses.” The newspapers predicted Sickles’s defeat.6

  But on election night, he stood on the balcony of Gardiner’s Hotel, his campaign headquarters, while 3,000 supporters, accompanied by three bands, congratulated him on his victory. Among the banners made for the occasion was this: “The Hon. D. E. Sickles—triumphant over a base combination of moral and political depravity and corruption.” Daniel Sickles acknowledged this impressive display of support. “I thank you for the cordial manner in which you have honored me by your enthusiastic congratulations. We had, indeed, a hot contest. It is gratifying to know that we made no concessions.” Concessions were never really his thing. Every sort of opposition “was openly defied and crushed.”7

  Chapter Twelve

  No. 383 15th Street

  John Thompson drove Teresa to the meeting place. Key was already there, as usual, with his horse, Lucifer, tied to a post. Key helped her down from the carriage. They walked together through the old iron graveyard gate and down the gentle slopes toward the Anacostia River, out of Thompson’s sight.

  Victorians believed in a thin curtain separating the living from the dead. They replaced the austere, square church burial yards with parks, paths, and trees, a place of beauty where people could experience closeness to loved ones or simply pass a pleasant afternoon.

  William Swinton, a stonecutter who helped build the Capitol, became the first permanent resident in 1807, marked by a sandstone tablet with colonial calligraphy. Originally known as the Washington Parish Burial Ground, it was designed for everyday residents like Swinton. But the city was filled with Congressmen months out of the year, Congressmen who frequently died in office, and shipping caskets presented logistical and hygienic issues. Their increasing presence gave the cemetery its name and endowed it with a certain éclat, so that the prominent families of the district built vaults and mausoleums there. Invitations to the best party in Washington, it appeared, mattered even after death. Now there was row after row of cenotaphs, square memorials with pointy tops, one for every congressman who was buried there over the past twenty-five years.

  Surrounded by weeping willows, away from the prying eyes of Thompson and the other servants, Key believed they could finally be alone. Then they saw Congressman Haskin and his wife out for a walk. They would need someplace safer.

  George Brown, the White House gardener, could be sure of one thing. If something out of the ordinary happened in his neighborhood, he would hear about it. Nancy, his wife, made it her business to know. Philip Barton Key had come by earlier that day, asking if the John Gray house was occupied. He had said it was for a congressman. Or maybe a senator. Nancy told him that nobody lived there and told him to contact the owner. She gave him his address at his new place on Capitol Hill.

  It wouldn’t be long before he would see her again, somewhere safer, Key thought.

  John Gray was surprised to find the US Attorney at his door. Was his house on 15th Street still for rent?

  It was. Fifty dollars a month.

  Key said that it was needed for a Mr. Wright, a member of Congress from Massachusetts.

  Gray returned to the house three weeks later to deliver wood. He had not been back since.

  The whole thing was strange.

  The Club House was a private home on the east side of Lafayette Square, across the park from the Sickles. It was “much frequented by fashionable young bloods of the town, statesmen, and literati,” and amply supplied with booze and manly bluster.1

  Albert Megaffey was a member. He was a contractor, didn’t work in politic
s, and had greater liberty to speak frankly with Key. On a night of drinking and storytelling at the Club House, he told him what people were whispering: Key, you’ve been overly attentive to Teresa Sickles.

  Key was indignant. I have a great friendship with her, he replied. I entertain nothing but “paternal feelings toward her,” he said, as with “a child.” Nothing but “kind and fatherly feelings.” He had said the same thing to Jonah Hoover during the Beekman blowup. Megaffey tried another tack as time passed and the situation became more conspicuous: Key, you will “get into danger or difficulty about the matter.”

  But Key seemed impervious to danger.

  As a younger man, Key had gone to great lengths to participate in a duel. Under the headline, “Hold Him Tight!” it was reported: “All Washington city, and a considerable part of creation, were thrown into an excitement,” by rumors of an impending duel between Barton and Captain May of the Navy. May, a disappointed suitor to Key’s then fiancée, had publicly insulted him at a Baltimore hotel.

  Their friends raced to the magistrate’s office, hoping to have them arrested to prevent a duel. Key traveled to Washington in disguise and took a room at Brown’s Hotel. When the marshals found him there, he announced that he would do violence to anyone who opened the door. Key attempted to leave through a window, then climbed back in once he realized someone was stationed outside. He opened the door and threw a deputy marshal to the floor, along with James Carlisle, his friend and fellow lawyer. Barton ran downstairs and leapt onto his horse, escaping. Yet despite Key’s best efforts—and news stories from Philadelphia to Boston—the duel never happened.2

  Key’s brother had died in a duel eight years earlier. There was an initial round of fire, but he and John Sherburne were unharmed: “Mr. Key, I have no desire to kill you.”

  “No matter,” Daniel Key said, “I came to kill you.” In the second round, Key was shot through the lower part of his chest. He died where he fell, twenty minutes later. The Keys pursued Sherburne, “most vindictively, threatening to assassinate” him. One of their “most influential friends” went to President Jackson to have him dismissed from the Navy. “No, by God!” said Jackson. “I wish he had shot the whole family.”3

  Nearly ten years later, the house of Senator Thomas Hart Benton caught fire. The firemen looked on helplessly, frozen water in their hoses, along with a “vast throng” gathered outside. “Volumes of suffocating smoke drove back all who tried to enter,” wrote Jesse Benton Fremont, his daughter. As people cried out warnings, Barton Key ran into the house to save a portrait of Benton’s deceased wife. When he reappeared, there was a “great shout of relief.” Key emerged, singed and scorched, “his eyes alight with joy.” Instead of a portrait of Benton’s wife, however, he had accidentally saved a painting of the senator as a younger man.4

  Whether it was being shot or burned, Key had long ignored signs of danger. The affair was increasingly “well known” at the Club House and a frequent “topic of conversation.” Key greeted all warnings with an “air of haughty bravado” and refused to listen to “remonstrance from any quarter.”

  Key did, however, drop his denials. “Sickles’s wife is my whore!” he bragged.

  His friends warned, “Something dangerous will grow.”

  “Give me a French intrigue,” Key said. “A fig for common license! French intrigue and romance, with a good spice of danger in it!”

  What if Sickles found out?

  “I am prepared for any emergency,” Key said, tapping the left breast of his coat. Besides, “Sickles is a damned Yankee and would do nothing if he did find it out.”5

  Wednesday, February 24, 1859—The Day before the Letter

  The ritual began early in the New Year. A tall, well-dressed gentleman appeared, conspicuous in a neighborhood of free blacks, poor whites, and their modest houses, mud huts, and stables. He approached the front door of 383 15th Street and opened it with a key. Stuck between K and L Streets, it was among the more presentable brick buildings in the area, two stories tall, its shutters tightly closed as if keeping a secret. No one had lived there for some time. An unseen hand would drop a string below a second story shutter. Smoke would rise from the chimney. As if conjured out of air, the woman in black would arrive and pass through the back gate.6

  John Seeley, his wife, and his daughter watched it all from their second-story window. They saw the woman entering the house. John could see her mouth below her short veil. “She looked like a person badly frightened,” he thought. “Severely threatened.” The neighborhood welcomed this break in the day, peeking out windows and looking up discreetly from yardwork. What happened inside No. 383 was in line with their imaginations.

  This had been going on all winter, but today was different. The neighbors noticed a ghostly figure, tightly wrapped in a shawl, watching silently from across the street. Neither the man nor the woman had seen the specter as they entered the house. But he had noticed them. A woman on the street saw the Man in the Shawl walking quickly toward her: “Is the house occupied or not?” he asked, his face hidden behind the shawl.

  “Yes, sir,” she answered.

  “Very well, that’s all I want.”7

  Teresa could remember when Key had told her about the house and the exhilaration of meeting him there for the first time. There was no chance of being seen by a Stephen Beekman or a gossipy servant. Within these walls, there was no danger of interruption. There were two rooms and a kitchen on the first floor, neither of them in use. It was carpeted, and lightly furnished with some chairs and a bookcase.

  Teresa walked to the top of the stairs to a room with a bureau and a bed. It was one piece of furniture too many. After an hour, they left the house, he from the front, she from the back. The Man with the Shawl had watched them leave. He walked toward Key, said something that only he could hear, and quickly walked away.8

  Chapter Thirteen

  An Improper Interview

  Saturday, February 26, 1859—Two Days after the Letter

  Sickles came home in the early evening to a different house than the one he had left. Inside was the wife who had betrayed him—not an accused wife or a possibly unfaithful wife, but a guilty wife. The lovers had met on Wednesday, not Thursday. The words were still ringing in his ears. Only minutes before, he had been at the Capitol with Wooldridge, crying in a private room off the House floor because his entire world had come apart.

  Bridget Duffy was a young, dark-haired Irish maid who worked for the family. She thought it strange that Sickles walked straight upstairs without eating. He eventually rang for food. “His manner and appearance seemed troubled.”

  Teresa was sitting in her room, completely unaware. Everything changed in an instant. Her husband walked in and accused her of betraying him with Barton Key. She denied it. He replied with specifics. Wednesday. Two o’clock. 383 15th Street. A woman in a black velvet shawl with bugle trim.

  “I am betrayed and lost!” Teresa said. She felt dizzy. The image of her angry husband faded to black.

  Teresa came to and realized it was no dream. She was terrified he would hurt her. Sickles assured her that he would not and that he believed her to be the victim of a scoundrel. But he wanted to know everything. A confession. In writing.1

  Teresa might have obliged him anything. There was guilt and shame, but also relief. For the first time in a year, she had nothing to hide. Teresa sat at her desk and stared at the blank page in front of her. Soon it would be covered in ink and all the truth would be out. For how long have you been going to that house? Dan wanted to know. What did you do there? Where was Laura during this time? Has it happened in this house?

  I have been in a house in Fifteenth street with Mr. Key; how many times I don’t know; I believe the house belongs to a colored man; the house was unoccupied.

  Commenced going there the latter part of January; have been in alone, and with Mr. Key; usually stayed an hour or more; there was a bed in the second story.

  I did what is usual for a wicke
d woman to do; the intimacy commenced this winter, when I came from New York, in that house; an intimacy of an improper kind; have met half a dozen times or more at different hours of the day; on Monday of this week, and Wednesday also; we arranged meetings when we met in the street, and at parties; never would speak to him when Mr. Sickles was at home, because I knew he did not like for me to speak to him; did not see Mr. Key for some days after I got there; he told me he had hired the house as a place where he and I could meet; I agreed to it; I had nothing to eat or drink there; the room is warmed by a wood fire; Mr. Key generally goes first; have walked there together, say four times; I do not think more.

  I was there on Wednesday last, between two and three; went there alone;

  Laura was at Mrs. Hoover’s; Mr. Key took her and left her there at my request; from there I went to Fifteenth street to meet Mr. Key; from there to the milk woman’s; immediately after Mr. Key left Laura at Mrs. Hoover’s I met him in Fifteenth street.

  Went in by the back gate; went in the same bedroom, and there an improper interview was had; this occurred on Wednesday, 23 February, 1859.

  Mr. Key has kissed me in this house a number of times. I do not deny that he has had connection in this house, last spring a year ago, in the parlor, on the sofa. Mr. Sickles was sometimes out of town and sometimes in the Capitol. I think the intimacy commenced in April or May 1858. I did not think it safe to meet him in this house, because there are servants who might suspect something.

  As a general thing have worn a black and white woollen plaid dress and beaver hat trimmed with black velvet. Have worn a black silk dress there also; also a plaid silk dress, black velvet cloak trimmed with lace, and black velvet shawl trimmed with fringe. On Wednesday either had a cloak trimmed with lace and black velvet, or a shawl trimmed with fringe. On Wednesday I either had on my brown dress or black and white dress, beaver hat and velvet shawl. I arranged with Mr. Key to go in the back way, after leaving Laura at Mrs. Hoover’s. The arrangement to go in the back was either made in the street or at Mr. [Senator Stephen] Douglas’s as we would be less likely to be seen. The house is in fifteenth street, between K and L, on the left hand side of the way. Arranged the interview for Wednesday in the street, I think, on Monday. I went in the front door. It was open; occupied the same room; undressed myself and he also; went to bed together.