American Scoundrel (21 page)

Either now, or on the evening before, when the confession was signed, Dan had asked for her wedding ring and a few gifts of jewelry associated with the marriage. He would take them in his pockets to prison with him, since she was no longer entitled to them. He would also take the signed confession.
²³

When he went downstairs again, Mayor Berret told him to compose himself, because he had to go to jail for a preliminary examination. Dan agreed but, suggesting he needed a drink first, offered spirits to everyone in the room. Only Butterworth accepted. Dan poured both himself and his associate brandies from the sideboard.

As Dan drank, the police chief and his officers conferred on how to handle the transfer. Key had many friends and relatives in Georgetown and Washington. Mr. Sickles might be shot as he got into the carriage. The police officers pledged themselves to protect him, and decided to keep their hands inside their jackets on the handles of their pistols as they walked in the dwindling afternoon light down the stairs from the front door to the crowded pavement of Lafayette Square. Hedged in by policemen, by the mayor, by Robert Walker, and by the eminent Senator Gwinn, Dan came down to the carriage and recklessly waved to some of the crowd. Mayor Berret told him it was best not to signal to anyone, and helped him into the carriage. Thus, the crowd saw, there were eminent men on a local and national level, Gwinn and Walker, who were willing to protect Dan with their presence. The route to the prison was along
H Street, and a large crowd of shouting men and boys followed the carriage all the way.

The jail to which Dan was taken was usually referred to as the Washington Jail or county jail. Due east of the Lafayette Square and the White House and near City Hall, it was a Gothic Revival building, and its facade was august, but all else about it had been done on the cheap. It was ill-lit, ill-drained. One journalist who would visit it to interview Dan said that it combined “all the disadvantages which have been gradually removed from every other place of confinement in Christendom.” It had plentiful vermin, more than white lime and insecticide could deal with. It had no sewerage and thus only the most primitive privies, no bath, no running water, and poor ventilation, and it often contained twelve prisoners in each of its close, narrow cells.

The warden led Dan to a white-limed cell in which the late-afternoon cold and damp of a winter Sabbath had dismally pooled. Though he had it to himself, it was a severe space, with a semicircular ceiling, one of the walls being entirely a set of bars letting in every draft and giving Dan no privacy. According to one of the illustrated papers, Dan asked the warden whether there was a chance of anything better. “This is the best place you members of Congress have afforded us,” the warden told him.
²⁴

Dan was examined by a magistrate in the prison office, the fact of the killing was established, and Dan was committed to his cell. Locked in now with his clean linen and toiletries, he would fall into tears, but they were not tears of remorse. He had no sense of guilt for what he had done to Key. Dan, like the gentlemen who accompanied him to his cell, was a child of armed America, a society in which men habitually carried pistols, swordsticks, and canes and felt an unquestioning right to deploy them at any dishonorable word uttered against them. A few years past, a young congressman from South Carolina named Preston Brooks had walked into the Senate with his gold-topped cane and attacked the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner, who had spoken about South Carolina’s “shameful imbecility from slavery.” Brooks told Sumner that his recent speech had been a libel on South Carolina and on Brooks’s
relatives. He had then beaten Sumner fifty times over the head and shoulders with the cane, seriously injuring him, but he was lionized in the South as a hero and never faced discipline. South Carolinians sent Brooks dozens of new canes, inscribed with such mottoes as “Hit Him Again!” and “Use Knock-Down Arguments.”

And early in 1859 there had been the supreme example of the capital’s bloody tendency—the public murder at Willard’s Hotel by Congressman Philemon P. Herbert of Thomas Keating, the Irish waiter. Herbert had not, however, shot Keating three times, nor attempted to deliver a
coup de grâce
.
²⁵

Even so, the phantoms that afflicted Dan during the night in his cell at the Washington Jail did not arise from any sense of legal culpability; they arose from the loss of Teresa, and intimate, public, and political humiliation. Even in his hour of death, Key had contributed to the humiliation. Had Key been armed, and been good enough to draw a pistol, all propositions would now be different. But Key had drawn something more treacherous, something that trivialized, condemned, and caricatured Dan’s righteous anger: a dainty pair of opera glasses.

Dan was not bereft of friends and sympathetic presences for a large part of that first night. One was the reporter from the
New York Times
, who could see from Dan’s haggard countenance that he was laboring under strong mental anguish. But the man from the
Times
also noted that Dan’s nerves were steady, that even when he wept there was no whining. Dan himself offered a clinical summary of his motivation: “Satisfied as I was of his guilt, we could not live together on the same planet.” He spent the time alternately sobbing and exhibiting a steely composure, and neglected a good meal brought to him from the kitchens of the National Hotel.
²⁶

During the period it had taken to get Dan to prison, Barton Key’s corpse had lain on the Clubhouse floor, awaiting the arrival of the District of Columbia coroner, Thomas Woodward. By the time he turned up, Woodward discovered more than a hundred people crowding the Clubhouse itself and nearly twenty in the room where Barton’s corpse lay. He swore in a panel on the spot and began hearing testimony from
witnesses of the killing; on being informed that Butterworth was at the Stockton Mansion, he sent for him. The man who had picked up the derringer Dan had thrown into the street now handed it to Woodward. Then Barton’s clothing was searched. A handkerchief, two house keys, the case for the opera glasses, fourteen one-dollar bills, and some coins were found.

But several items had already been removed. Before the coroner arrived, while the site was under the cavalier supervision of one constable, a Treasury Department clerk who knew the Key family was permitted to take from the body a small knife, a memorandum book, a purse, and a card case, and from the fob pocket of the trousers a wad of papers, among them one that might have been of great interest to the coroner, the enciphered letter. These papers were pilfered by the clerk with the intention of passing them on to Barton’s brother-in-law, Representative George Pendleton. The body had also been visited by a wealthy relative, Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, who lived on the square next door to the Clubhouse. Tayloe removed a ring and a pair of cuff links—no doubt to be given to Barton’s children as keepsakes of their father. The coroner thus found Barton’s corpse with the cuffs of its shirt aflap.

Sam Butterworth arrived but refused to answer questions without legal representation. He argued that it was adequate for the coroner’s purpose to say that Mr. Sickles shot Mr. Key, resulting in death. With Barton’s body still present, Coroner Woodward wrote down the finding of his impromptu panel of gentlemen: “That the said Philip Barton Key came to his death from the effect of pistol balls fired at him by the hand of Daniel E. Sickles while standing near the south-east corner of Lafayette Square . . . said wounds causing his death in a few moments.”

The news of the murder traveled on the telegraph and galvanized the newspapers of Dan and Teresa’s home city, the Empire City, New York. It went like a knife through George and Susan Sickles and the Bagiolis, who did not squabble about blame but arranged to leave for Washington and their children as soon as possible. Though Dan was well known and Teresa somewhat celebrated in New York, Teresa’s background was overshadowed to a degree by great figures of European
culture. Teams of journalists were put on the job of searching into the childhood of each of the Sickleses for omens, while the duty editors of the dailies gratefully set in print the first dispatches on the murder from their correspondents in Washington, who had expected to spend Sunday evening as languidly as the day merited but instead passed it writing exhaustively of the behavior of Sickles and of the victim, of the Stockton Mansion and the Clubhouse, and the transaction that filled the space between them.
²⁷

A
S
D
AN WENT TO THE COUNTY JAIL, HIS
Washington lawyers decided to appeal to Judge Crawford by way of a writ of habeas corpus for Dan to be released on bail. But when they informed Dan of this, he told them to desist. If he was a murderer, he said, he did not deserve bail. If justified in his act, he did not want to descend to little legal tricks. Behind the tears, stern logic still worked in him, but his decision against seeking bail would also ensure that the case went to the grand jury as soon as possible. A man from the
New York Times
who saw Dan that first night wondered in print whether in the end the grand jury would ever indict Sickles. This was a view that other papers lined up to condemn. Certainly, it did not prove a reliable prediction.
¹

As, in that unspacious cell, friends pressed close, as lawyers muttered to one another, across the city in
Lafayette Square Teresa still hid and wept in Octavia’s room. In three days her world, her repute as mother, the innocent sportiveness she took even to her encounters with Key, had all collapsed on her and she was in hell. But also under siege. The crowds still milled and stared with feverish surmise at the facade of the Stockton Mansion. The press strove for exact definition of Dan’s mental and spiritual balance on the evening of the killing, but none sought to ask what proportion of Teresa’s feelings was loss and what was shame. She had become, in the words of Bridget Duffy, Disgust Incarnate, a breathing cautionary statue. Isolated in the Stockton Mansion, she may have glimpsed the fuss outside the Clubhouse, where, amid a crowd in the early dark, Key’s body, whose intimate contours she knew, was brought out on a litter to an undertaker’s cart and taken to his home on C Street, the house he had occupied in the days of his marriage, where he was cleansed of his blood and laid out.
²

That first night in prison, Dan’s cell was filled with chairs so that he could be comforted by the presence of Mayor James Berret, Attorney General Black, an edgy Sam Butterworth, and a local clergyman. They intended to stay with him until they were assured that he could be safely left by himself; that he wished to stand trial. The minister, Mr. Haley, was a Unitarian Presbyterian whose church, near City Hall, was the closest to the jail, and who had early in the evening taken it upon himself to visit the prisoner. In the spirit of Dan’s religious eclecticism, or perhaps indifference, the prisoner took to Haley. At Dan’s request, or because he thought it his duty to achieve reconciliation, Haley went the ten blocks between the jail and the Stockton Mansion on the very night of the killing, and was one of the few callers allowed to see Teresa. He kept shuttling back and forth on foot—since he wore out his coachman and horses by midevening—between Dan and Teresa.

Haley saw that Teresa was most upset and distracted by the same issue that upset Dan: the shame she had brought upon her daughter, Laura. Until last Thursday, Teresa had considered her dalliance with Key something nearly harmless; an adventure in high feeling, tenderness, and sensuality. Now she and her daughter were defined by it forever. Haley spotted at once that she was trying in her way to achieve
either lunacy or death. Only her physical strength and her previously robust soul held her back for the moment from the abyss. She pleaded with the minister to ask Dan to give her wedding ring back as a confirmation of forgiveness, and as a guarantee of her daughter’s social protection. From his interviews with her, Haley had no doubt that the return of the ring had taken on a crucial meaning for the balance of her mind.

Back at the prison some time after midnight, Haley begged Sickles to give back the wedding ring he had brought with him in his pocket. Dan asserted, respectfully, that he was “unalterably determined” never to see Teresa again, but that he would send her back the ring. The ring he sent, however, and which Teresa received, had its band broken. Some said he had broken it at the time of Teresa’s confession; others, that he broke it in prison before passing it on to the Reverend Haley. At least some hoped for Teresa’s sake that it was the former, committed in fury rather than in that state of calm outrage that was one of Dan’s competing phases in prison.
³

All this done, as the warden later told the journalists camped in front of the prison, Dan washed himself with water brought inside and settled to sleep as naturally as if he were settling in a room at Willard’s. During the night, however, he discovered that prison was a serious discipline to undertake and was hostile to all gentlemanly routine. In other cells around him, raucous prisoners were crowded together and spent their time playing cards. Since, according to one commentator, “any smart mechanic could cut his way out with a jackknife,” armed guards patrolled the corridor between the cells to prevent escapes. To deal with the dankness of the place, tin ventilators had been inserted in some of the windows, and night and day made a “merry rattling, which would almost lead one to the belief that the dungeon is part of an immense train jogging uncomfortably along at the rate of twenty miles an hour.” Then, in the small hours, Dan woke to find his body covered with bedbugs, literally black with them. In the morning the jailer, Mr. Jacob King, was apologetic, but even the press would defend the warden, arguing that all the lime in the world and all the vigilance could not prevent the forays of the pests.
⁴

Five-year-old Laura’s wants were briskly looked after by Bridget, who told the child that her father had gone away on business. Laura was a spirited but vulnerable little girl, and asked again and again, but in the end Bridget’s answer made sense to her, since it fitted the established pattern. Teresa had spent such a desolate night that Octavia Ridgeley feared she would die at any second, which might have been a merciful thing, since today she would need to face the indignity of appearing downstairs in the long parlor for identification by such Fifteenth Street witnesses as Mrs. Brown, Mr. and Mrs. Seeley and their daughter Matilda, and Mrs. Baylis, mother of the precocious Crittenden, who were brought to the Stockton Mansion by law officers. As these folk arrived downstairs, Teresa was summoned to descend and show herself to them, one by one. She was the meat in the market, the ogre at the carnival. A little way across the square, souvenir hunters were cutting fragments of wood out of the tree by which Key had fallen, and artists from the illustrated papers set up their easels and began sketching every aspect of the area—the railings, the Stockton Mansion, the Clubhouse.