The Sickleses closed up their Washington house and left for New York on July 1. Key saw Teresa and Dan off and promised to visit them during the summer. Dan would lack Barton’s degree of leisure, because he had a hard reelection contest ahead of him. Fernando Wood had formed his own Democratic machine, called Mozart Hall, and would put up a candidate against Dan. So would the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, more effective on a local level than ever they were on the national scale.
That summer, while Dan campaigned, Philip Barton Key arrived from Washington to visit the Sickleses at their residence on the Hudson. Barton was on his way to the great watering place at Saratoga Springs, where he intended for the sake of his health to imbibe the waters from the local springs and to enjoy the languorous rest the fine white hotels of Saratoga offered. He saw Dan and Teresa before he left and on his return trip. In fact, he was back in Manhattan at an exciting time. On September 1, the successful laying of the telegraph cable between New York and London was greeted with popular enthusiasm as the wedding of Europe and America. Broadway was alive with people, and Daniel Dougherty of Philadelphia, a friend of Dan’s who was in town for the celebration of the event, saw Teresa Sickles sitting in a carriage that had been stopped by traffic. He asked her to give him a lift to the Metropolitan Hotel, where he knew that Dan had gone for a better view of the celebratory procession. Dougherty found Dan and Barton Key in one of the reception rooms of the Metropolitan, from whose window they had a prime view of the parade. The cable would break within three days, but of course no one knew that at the moment, and Dan was one of the laudatory speakers at a banquet to greet the phenomenon. Dougherty would meet Key again as a guest at Bloomingdale.31
Barton was already making plans for the fall when Teresa would return to Washington, but for the present, he and Teresa managed to have assignations in New York. The people of the hotel where Key stayed noticed that “he left . . . at exactly the same time every day, as if for an appointment.” It was later “conjectured what his regular appointment was.” But though his movements and intentions were so obvious, his vanity permitted him to see himself as an accomplished and worldly lover. He told a friend, “French intrigue! A fig for common license! French intrigue and romance, with a good spice of danger in it.”32
Dan’s reelection headquarters were in Gardner’s Hotel. Here, during a busy summer, he received intelligence that Fernando Wood’s Democratic wing had met at Room 49 in the Astor House with Republicans, including Horace Greeley, and with Know-Nothing General Walbridge, to devise ways to beat Dan Sickles. When, on election day, he triumphed, with the help of Tammany’s Captain Wiley and his electoral cohorts, his supporters celebrated by sending up a balloon from whose passenger basket hung effigies of Mr. Fernando Wood and General Walbridge in a most precarious position, “one depending from it by his arms and the other by his legs.” A satin banner, decorated with gold fringe and tassels, hung from the balloon and bore the inscription “The Honorable D. E. Sickles—triumphant over a base combination of moral and political depravity and corruption. . ..”33
By the time this exuberant celebration took place, Dan and Teresa had organized the return of their household to the Stockton Mansion. A new set of congressmen were impressed by the way Dan was able to live. One of the Sickleses’ friends, the North Carolina representative and future Confederate general Lawrence O’Brien Branch, could not afford anything like Lafayette Square, so he rented rooms in a not entirely comfortable boardinghouse. “Board is bad,” he wrote, “but the House sits nearly all day and I make my dinner on ham and tongue at the Capitol.” When he did return to his room, he was kept awake by the endless conversation of “two old maids” who occupied the room next door. Thus, he was delighted to attend a dinner at the Sickleses’ house that winter, a party of about twenty ladies and gentlemen, and to accompany Mrs. Sickles, “young, pretty, and very stylish,” to the table. The aristocratic Branch was astounded that Dan lived “in great style keeping one of the finest carriages etc. etc. in the city.”34
After one dinner, Teresa wrote to her friend Florence that, in the pattern of the social life of the previous congressional session, the entire dinner group went off to a party at Postmaster General Aaron V. Brown’s, where they danced the lancers till three in the morning. “Tomorrow at Mrs. Douglas’ party will be a perfect crush,” but a breathing space was afforded, because a dinner at the Gwinns’ was postponed because of the illness of the Gwinn daughter. All Teresa’s letters to friends spoke with naive excitement about the social pace of Washington, but none of them mentioned or hinted at the existence of a lover. It was Key’s asides to friends, and his boyish carelessness even when he thought he was being cautious, that would most attract the attention of bystanders to the existence of the affair.35
In October, Barton had ridden up Fifteenth Street in his usual white riding cap, which, oddly, he sometimes wore even to social events, dismounted, and stepped onto the porch of a house that belonged to a White House gardener named Thomas Brown and his wife, Nancy. Key asked Nancy Brown whether the house two doors along the street, Number 383, was occupied. Mrs. Brown said it wasn’t. Key asked whether she knew to whom it belonged. A colored man named John Gray, she told him, who lived somewhere on Capitol Hill. The colored people around there, she said, could give him all the information about Gray.
Mrs. Brown saw him again about three weeks later. He tied his horse, the gray, to her tree and knocked on her door. Mrs. Brown, a forthright woman, asked whether he was aware that it was against the law to tie horses to people’s trees in Washington. Key obligingly said he would no longer tie it there, and told her that he had rented Number 383 for a friend, implying that the friend was a member of the Senate. He then untied his horse and rode away. John Gray would later say that he rented the house to Mr. Key on November 25, 1858, for occupation by a gentleman from Massachusetts named Wright.
Mrs. Brown did not see all the arrivals and departures of Key and Teresa, but she observed a number of them. Indeed, an increasingly excited group of both white and black people in the neighborhood observed the parties to the affair. Key would often turn up first, let himself in through the front door, and reappear in the yard at the back of the house to get armfuls of wood. The thread of smoke from the chimney would unleash knowing and risqué comments from the observant neighbors. Sometimes Teresa would enter the house by the back way, down the alley and through the muddy yard. Perhaps an hour later, Key would let her out the front door, though occasionally she would both arrive and leave via the back door and the muddy side lane to the street.
For one of the assignations, said Mrs. Brown, the woman she would come to learn was Teresa Sickles wore a little plaid silk dress, a black raglan cloak fringed with bugles, and a black velvet shawl with lace. On another occasion she wore a brown robe, like a traveling dress. She was always well cloaked and shawled. Her observations of Teresa accorded with those of a freed colored woman named Mrs. Baylis and her son, Crittenden, from across the street. Once, passing Mrs. Brown’s house, Mrs. Sickles, the congressman’s wife, looked with darksome unease at the gardener’s wife. Mrs. Brown noticed that generally Mr. Key would hang a ribbon or string from one of the upstairs shutters as a signal to his lover that he was there and that it was safe for her to come on. One day, however, as Mr. Key and Mrs. Sickles arrived simultaneously, they saw two policemen speaking together on the corner of K and Fifteenth Streets, and were so inhibited by the police presence that they walked right past the house and continued up the street, as if on their way to somewhere else.
Other observers, apart from the Baylis mother and son, were Mr. Seeley, a housepainter, his wife, and their sixteen-year-old daughter, Matilda. All the Seeleys admitted to being engrossed in, and voyeuristic about, the appearances of Key and Mrs. Sickles. Having lived in Georgetown, they recognized Key, though they depended on local gossip from such people as Nancy Brown to let them know who the young woman was.36
Perhaps Key’s greatest achievement was his capacity to
retain the loyalty and respect of his staff at City Hall when his desk went unoccupied on most afternoons. He assigned much of his work to an earnest young assistant district attorney, Robert Ould, and spent nearly every weekday afternoon, when he was not actually meeting with Teresa in an intimate setting, trailing her around Washington. John Cooney, who succeeded John Thompson as coachman, first met Key the second day he went to work for the Sickleses. “I met him on the avenue, on the coach; I was on the box, driving Mrs. Sickles in the coach; Mrs. Sickles rang the coach bell; I drew up, and Mr. Key got in; I drove them to Douglas’ green-house, and from there down the avenue.”
Like John Thompson before him, Cooney saw Mr. Key nearly every day. The carriage would meet up with him in the back streets, and he would get in. “He never went from Mrs. Sickles’s house in the coach, or returned with her; he would join her on some part of the journey; he met her pretty much at Douglas’ green-house or at Taylor and Maury’s Bookstore; she was generally there before he was, and then he would enter her coach.” Cooney remembered taking Teresa to the house of Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson, whose wife was receiving visitors. Within a few minutes, Key also appeared at Mrs. Thompson’s reception. A half hour passed, and Teresa emerged, asking Cooney to drive her to the next stop, Mrs. Postmaster General Brown’s. Within ten minutes Key was at the Browns’ as well. The next stop for Teresa was Rose Greenhow’s, and Key turned up there and, later, rolled on as far as Fifteenth Street in the Sickleses’ carriage, alighting before it covered the last few blocks to the home in Lafayette Square. It is more than likely that the polite people whom Key and Teresa visited knew well enough that an affair was in full progress. They may have thought, given Key’s lack of discretion, that Dan had given at least an implied consent, for surely a husband of average attentiveness, one who took even a benign interest in his wife’s movements, must have had certain suspicions.37
Barton had by now developed the strategy of signaling from the direction of the Clubhouse toward Teresa’s window in the Stockton Mansion. Bridget Duffy, seeing him one day, remarked, with a pithiness that betrayed that in another life she might have been a wordsmith, “There is Disgrace, waiting to meet Disgust.”
A Washington contractor named Albert Megaffey, who had warned Key the previous summer about his indiscreet mode of proceeding with Mrs. Sickles, met him again at the ball to send off the British ambassador, Lord Napier, held at Willard’s on February 17, 1859. Key used his normal lines on Megaffey: that he had a great friendship for Teresa, that he considered her a child, that he had paternal feelings toward her. He repelled angrily the idea of having anything but kind and fatherly feelings, said Megaffey. But Megaffey raised the matter again a few days after the Napier ball, suggesting to Key that he might be in danger or difficulty. Key raised his hand to the left breast of his coat and said, “I am prepared for any emergencies.”
On the Tuesday of Key’s last week, Teresa gave what would prove to be her final daytime reception as a congressional wife, and the Washington correspondent of the New York Times was a guest. The rooms were full of company, including Mr. Key, his familiar horse tethered outside the house. Soft spring sunlight poured in through the windows, and Mrs. Sickles displayed to wonderful effect “her almost girlish beauty, wearing a bouquet of crocuses, the firstlings of the season; [she] seemed the very incarnation of Spring and youth, and the beautiful promise of life.”38
Dan, distracted by the affair he was conducting with the unknown married woman who met him occasionally in Baltimore, had returned to Washington from a Baltimore assignation on the morning of the Napier ball and was also absorbed by the business of the Thirty-sixth Congress. He was serving on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, but domestic American issues engrossed him and all his colleagues. That winter, on the floor of the House, some of the matters of conflict had included the question of a Northern versus a Southern route for the Pacific railroad. Rather than authorize a Northern route, the Senate voted down yet another transcontinental railroad bill. Southern opposition to pressure for tariffs to protect Northern industries from foreign competition was a severe test for Dan, but he stuck faithfully with Southern and with transportation interests—with the President, too—in opposing tariffs. The South still expected its Northern supporters to oppose a western homestead act, which would open up new territory above the slavery line. This vote divided the Democratic Party along the same lines as the question of the admission of Kansas. And then, in what was a last flutter of interest in acquiring Cuba, Dan supported, with the rest of his party, the annexation of the island. Buchanan had pushed for renewed negotiations with Spain to purchase Cuba, and Dan voted for the bill of Senator Slidell of Louisiana for an appropriation of $30 million as a down payment. Dan’s committee had already approved the idea earlier that February. But Senate Republicans delayed the bill, as revenge for the Democrats’ delay of the homestead bill. Abolitionist Senator Ben Wade of Ohio asked, “Shall we give niggers to the niggerless, or land to the landless?” Ultimately both parties decided to take the issue of Cuba to the voters in 1860, but internal American peril would rob it of any visibility.39
These were the preoccupying issues for Dan as Teresa and Key made love in the Sickleses’ carriage and in the house on Fifteenth Street. On the last Wednesday night of February, the Washington correspondent for the New York Times saw Teresa, Barton, and Henry Wikoff at the theater together. The story told after the coming tragedy was that a man closely muffled in a shawl questioned a colored woman on Fifteenth Street about Number 383, and then waited for Key to emerge, when, muffling his face still closer, he spoke to Key. It was not Dan, for Dan had not yet been informed about Number 383. To the man from the Times, Key did not appear to be burdened by any worries as he, Teresa, and the chevalier laughed and applauded at the theater.
Somewhere else in Washington, a person using the initials R.P.G. was preparing a letter designed to inform the Honorable Daniel Sickles of the treachery of his wife and of his friend Mr. Key.40
IV
THIS WAS THE LAST SUNDAY OF FEBRUARY, and the parishioners of Washington’s most fashionable church, St. John’s Episcopal, on H Street across from Lafayette Square, had on entering remarked that, after the ice storm of Friday and a frigid Saturday, this was the warmest Sunday of the year thus far. By noon, some said, given the stillness of the air, people on the street would not need their overcoats. The Reverend Smith Pyne, rector of this national parish, was a considerable pulpit orator, whom the President nonetheless thought talked at too great a length. Invoking the prayers for fraternity and the health of the President, he looked out on his divided congregation in the pews.1
Here sat many of the potent Southern legislators and their spouses. Their confident, vivacious features seemed to need little help from the humble Nazarene who had died for their sins. They prayed to an august God that he might prevent abolitionist fervor from splitting asunder the Republic, which represented the highest political achievement of humankind. But directing their prayers to the same deity were antislavery and abolitionist members of the newborn Republican Party, and some antislavery Democrats as well. All these pleas rose as a confusing incense within this white pure space—twined up its columns, wreathed its galleries. Smith Pyne knew these were plaints that God would indeed need to be omniscient to untangle.
It was thus that, with perhaps more emphasis than realism, Pyne told his congregation to depart in peace, out into the variable light of this Washington morning. Farewelling his parishioners on the steps, he could see, across Lafayette Square, the front of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.
From his position on the steps, Pyne could also see the site of closer problems. Nearby on Lafayette Square stood the house occupied by an amiable if worldly congressman representing the Third District of New York, the Honorable Daniel Edgar Sickles, and his extremely young and accomplished wife, Teresa. Only two weeks earlier, the St. John’s rector had been ready to christen their five-year-old daughter. It would have been
a splendid event, for the President had agreed to be the godfather, and the beautiful Mrs. Slidell, wife of the senator from Louisiana, was to have been the godmother. Pyne had been willing to conduct the baptismal ceremony not least because he presumed that Teresa Sickles, being an Italian Catholic by upbringing, had probably, already and secretly, had the little girl baptized into that heathenish religion, and it would be a pleasant thing to induct the child into the civilized Episcopal faith, thus saving her from popery.
The child had, however, caught whooping cough, so the christening had been delayed. If Dan Sickles had been at church, Pyne could have inquired after his daughter’s health. But Dan Sickles was only occasionally observant of the rites at this or any church.2
Pyne had a more recent reason to think of Congressman Sickles. Just yesterday he had seen him, a small but striking and expensively dressed man, a man normally possessed of considerable social presence, walking in Lafayette Square. The rector and his son were returning home past the White House, and the boy pointed out to his father Congressman Sickles, striding rapidly in the opposite direction. His posture at the time was not appropriate for one considered a darling of Washington society, at least as far as Democrats defined it. His head was thrown back. Pyne saw a wildness and an air of great trouble about him. He would say, “There was a kind of mingled defiant air about him; a desolate air.” Pyne knew all the rumors of a certain New York Tammany unruliness and lawlessness attached to Dan Sickles, but there was usually no trace of that in the urbane and cultivated demeanor Dan brought with him to Washington.3
Now, less than a hundred yards from where Pyne had made his congenial farewells to his worshipers, something far more dismal than the aftereffects of whooping cough dominated the Stockton Mansion. It was three days since the last sound of joy had been heard there; Thursday had proved to be the last tolerable day. That evening, though the House was in session, Dan Sickles came home for the customary Thursday-night dinner. The distinguished guests that night included Virginia Clay, wife of Senator Clement Claiborne Clay of Alabama, who went there in a threesome with Thérèse Chalfont Pugh, the beautiful Cajun wife of Senator George Ellis Pugh of Ohio, and a Miss Acklin. The two senators’ wives had been liberated from their extremely busy husbands for the evening. Waspish and amusing Mrs. Clay would always remember how young and fragrant Teresa Sickles seemed that evening; so naive and unspoiled that, said Mrs. Clay, “none of the party of which I was one was willing to harbor a belief in the rumors which were then in circulation.” The hostess was more unaffectedly dazzling than usual. She was obviously happy that her daughter, Laura, had recovered from the recent illness, and on that Thursday evening she wore a filmy muslin gown, decorated with the outline of the crocus, and a broad sash of brocaded ribbon about her waist. Her dark hair was dressed with yellow crocus blooms—the crocus being a favorite flower in Washington. “I never saw her again,” said Mrs. Clay, “but the picture of which she formed the center was so fair and innocent, it fixed itself permanently in my mind.”4
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