by Chris DeRose
Judge Crawford turned next toward the defense for their opening. Brady reserved their statement for the conclusion of the prosecution’s case. The public, anxious to know Sickles’ defense, would have to wait a little longer.
Ould called James Reed, a buyer and seller of wood and coal, to the stand. He had been walking near Madison Place when he “heard loud talking.” He turned to see two men “four to six feet apart. One of the men raised his arm gradually and steadily” with a pistol pointed “at the other man, who was trying to avoid the aim. He fired, and the parties moved forward some twenty feet.” Then “the man shot at retreated, the other following him, and the former running ’round a tree crying ‘murder, murder . . . don’t shoot me.’ ”
The second shot didn’t seem to have any effect. At the same time, the man being shot threw something at the man with the pistol, hitting him and falling at his feet. Another shot was fired, “and the man shot at twisted round on the pavement and fell,” crying out “Murder!” He landed on his side with his elbow facing the shooter. The man on the ground was shot once again as he cried out “Don’t shoot!” Reed counted two misfires after the final shot.
Brady would handle cross-examination. He was “studiously polite,” even to witnesses trying to hang his client, as well as to the judge and opposing counsel.
Did he see the features of either man, Brady asked, “so as to recognize them?”
Reed had not.
Had he seen other witnesses to the first and second shots?
Reed didn’t think that anyone on Pennsylvania Avenue could have seen what happened. He believed it had lasted one and a half to two minutes, but he wasn’t sure.
On redirect questioning by Ould, Reed testified that the shot sending the man to the ground was fired from five or six steps, while the last shot, and the two misfires, were fired from two or three feet away.
Philip Van Wyck, a clerk in the Treasury Department, was on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue. He saw two men talking and then maneuvering around the street, saw and heard shots fired, and lost sight of them behind a house. He ran toward the scene, and as he came closer, the two men came back into view. One man lay on the pavement motionless while the other stood between him and the fence of the Gurley House, on the northeast corner of Madison Place and Pennsylvania Avenue. Van Wyck saw Daniel Sickles point the gun at the head of the man on the ground and attempt to fire. He saw also Samuel Butterworth resting on the railing of the house.
On cross examination, Van Wyck said that he was fifty yards away when the first shot was fired and that two minutes had elapsed until the final misfire. He saw a single barrel pistol on the ground, stocked to the end of the muzzle.
Edward Delafield was the third witness. He was on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House and walking toward Madison Place. He saw Sickles walk south on Madison Place and address a man on the corner. Delafield thought nothing of it until he heard a pistol shot. He saw both men move into the street, heard Key beg for his life and saw him retreat behind the tree. Sickles followed, and Key reached out from behind the tree and grabbed his hand. “Sickles threw him off and fired.” Delafield saw Key fall to the ground. Sickles shot again, followed by his attempted coup de grâce.
Joseph Dudrow heard the first shot from Pennsylvania Avenue while headed west and corroborated previous testimony.
Richard Downer was on 15th Street and New York Avenue, close enough to hear shots, and ran toward the sound. He was about to turn a corner to see when he heard a snap and decided “that he was near enough.” When the shooting had finished, he turned the corner and saw Key “lying on the pavement.” He saw Sickles with a revolver in his hand and heard him ask, “Is the damned scoundrel dead?” Or maybe it was “damned rascal.” Nearly a half hour later, Downer saw a Derringer pistol in the street. It was unloaded, and an exploded cap was on the nipple. He picked it up and turned it over to the coroner.
Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper, was the next witness. Stanton had done brisk business defending inventors against his patent claims. McCormick was in Washington again fighting a patent lawsuit, living in the third house from the corner on Madison Place. He was on the second floor when he heard the first shot and, rushing to the window, saw the remainder. Over the years, Stanton had brutalized him on the stand. McCormick was grateful not to be cross-examined.
Thomas Martin, a clerk in the Treasury Department, had left the Club House and was heading toward H Street to the north when he heard a gunshot. “Sickles had apparently just fired a pistol. Butterworth was leaning against the railing. Sickles and Key had moved out towards the middle of the street, and then came back towards the pavement.” Martin ran back toward them, darting into the Club House to announce that Sickles was shooting Key. He returned to the street to see Sickles pointing a gun at Key’s head and the final misfire.
Martin testified that he placed himself “between Key and Sickles, took hold of Key, and looked up inquisitively into the face of Mr. Sickles.”
“He has dishonored my bed,” he replied. Or maybe “violated my bed.”
Ould interjected. “No matter about that, sir.” Ould was careful not to open the door to evidence of the affair. Sickles was on trial, not Key.
“The witness had a right to continue his narrative unmolested,” Brady said.
The judge ruled that having been “sworn to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, it was his duty to tell everything he knew in regard to the transaction.”
Martin continued. He placed his hand over Key’s heart “and found that it was still pulsating” and his lungs were still working. Martin asked whether he had anything to say, perhaps to his children. There was no response.
Francis Doyle, the next witness, had been inside the Club House during the shooting. He ran outside in response to Martin’s alert. Doyle put his hand on Sickles’s shoulder “and begged him not to fire.” Sickles turned on him and said, “He has defiled my bed.” Or maybe “dishonored.”
Abel Usher, a clerk in the Navy Department, was in the Club House along with Doyle. “Murder!” was Key’s last word.
Edward Tidball, the last witness of the day, had also come from the Club House. He testified that Sickles was wearing a long brown overcoat, light pantaloons, and hat.
Eleven witnesses had taken the stand. Their recollections differed, but they were in accord on what mattered: Sickles was the aggressor, firing numerous shots, and Key, unarmed, begged for his life.7
Watterson contrasted the styles of Brady and Stanton: Brady “submits gracefully when the judge is wrong on small matters” and was “decidedly the most popular counsel for the defense.” Stanton was as forceful as Brady was graceful. “There is no ceremoniousness about him . . . he comes up to the point with a sledge hammer of earnestness which stands out in contrast to his colleague’s extreme politeness.”
As the trial neared the end of its first week, it continued to set historic standards for news: a daily average of 15,000 words had been telegraphed to New York and Boston alone. “Such an amount of telegraphic transmission never was heard of in Europe and is unprecedented in this country,” wrote one paper. The Associated Press was spending $1,000 a day to distribute news of the trial.8
Chapter Thirty-One
The Implements of Death
* * *
“This dreadful affair is the theme of conversation in every social community in the country. No event of a similar kind in our remembrance has excited so much comment.”
—Louisville Daily Courier
DAY FIVE—Friday, April 8, 1859
Coroner Thomas Woodward was the first witness. He produced the Derringer pistol that he had been handed the day of the shooting.
In Key’s pockets, he’d found a handkerchief, the case for the binoculars he had thrown at Sickles, and two brass door keys “about three inches long.” He held them up. Every neck in the courtroom stretched forward.1
Woodward testif
ied to Key’s wounds. “One ball had entered his side; another the thigh, near the great artery; and there was a bruise on the right side; also, a slight wound on the hand.”
Woodward then unfolded a bundle, holding up a blood-stained white shirt and gray striped pantaloons. “There is where the ball entered the right thigh,” he pointed. “The place is stiffened and stained with blood.”
He continued. “This sir, is the vest. There is the hole made by the ball, on the left side.”
“Is there any other mark in the vest?”
“Yes. Here is another hole on the right side.”
The bloody vest was handed to the jury.
Woodward then produced Key’s overcoat. It was tweed with a brownish hue. He held up the coat to the light so that it could shine through the bullet hole. A reporter thought he resembled “an old clothing auctioneer in a dingy shamble in Chatham Street.”2
“I do not see the materiality of this examination,” Brady objected.
“We are through with this witness,” Ould replied.
Dr. Coolidge was the Army surgeon who had been the first to examine Key at the Club House. Key had been wounded on the left side, between the tenth and eleventh ribs, he said. Two inches below the groin was another wound, passing through the thigh and exiting “in the groove of the buttock and the thigh.”
The wound to the chest was fatal. At least a quart of blood had filled the cavity. Coolidge had examined Key’s heart, and it was healthy.
Ould asked: “From the course and direction of the ball, please state what was the position of the descendant at the time the shot was fired.”
“The course of pistol balls is at times very tortuous and difficult to trace, but my opinion” is “that the body must have been in a semi-recumbent posture. In other words, that Mr. Key must have been lying on his right side, the body turned a little over to the right, and the shoulders a little higher than the hips.” The spleen and liver had also been damaged.
Brady asked Sickles to stand. Was the prisoner about the same height as Mr. Key? Coolidge thought he was. “If Mr. Key was falling, and his body was in the same position that the witness assumed,” the result would be the same. Coolidge agreed that Key could have been falling at the time of the shot.3
Ould handed the witness a pistol ball. Was this the one he had removed from Key?
“To the best of my knowledge and belief, it is. It has the mark made on it, in my presence.”
“To what particular classification of pistols does that ball commonly belong?”
Brady objected. A doctor is not an “expert in the manufacture of firearms.”
“Certainly if he is a physician in the army. If not, he cannot discharge his duty.”
“I think he can discharge his duty without discharging his firearm,” Brady said to laughs.
Dr. Coolidge continued. “This is the ball we extracted from the right side. It is the only ball we found. The ball in the groin passed through.”
There was then an in-court comparison between the ball cut out of Key and the Derringer found at the scene. It was too large and did not fit. That meant there was another, missing gun that had fired that ball into Key.
James Reed was recalled to the stand. Ould wanted to head off any attempts to claim that the Derringer belonged to Key. “You stated yesterday that when you saw these parties at the corner that you saw a pistol in the hand of the party at the south. Was any pistol in the hands of the other party?”
“No, sir. Nothing in his hand.”4
Charles Wilder was the final witness for the prosecution. He was with the body of Key until the mayor took charge.
Ould moved to admit the Derringer pistol and ball into evidence.
“On what ground do you offer these as evidence?” Brady asked.
“Because they are the implements of death.”
After some wrangling, Judge Crawford admitted the ball, since it had been removed from Key, and the Derringer found nearby. “Whether the prisoner used the pistol or not is a matter for the jury to decide.”
The prosecution rested.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Atonement of John Graham
* * *
“Great excitement at the City Hall the case of Mr. Sickles takes up all of every man’s time of talking this thing and that thing some think he deserves to be hung for his murder.”
—diary of Lee Aldrich
DAY SIX—Saturday, April 9, 1859
It was a “low drinking shop” and late at night. A sailor was singing a song. John Austin, president of the Empire Club gang, entered with a group of friends.
Timothy Shea, one of the bartenders, asked, “Won’t you take a chair?” Austin declined. Shea repeated himself twice. Then he ordered: sit down and listen to the song. A chair was thrown at the bar. The bartender threw back a decanter.
Austin and his friends were pushed out of the bar. One of them returned and fired a pistol shot that found its mark in Timothy Shea’s chest, killing him.1
John Graham’s first publicized case was in defense of John Austin. He had studied law with his father, and when he died, he completed it with his brother, David. They would try the Austin case together. The trial was a sordid affair, with one of the Shea brothers brought from “the Tombs,” the infamous city jail, to testify. The jury, who brought beds to the deliberation room at 10:00 p.m., reached a verdict a little over an hour later. Not guilty.2
John Graham entered Columbia at age eleven and was valedictorian at fifteen. He’d made a big mark in the Austin trial. Flush with success, he disregarded the advice of older men and took on a libel case against the Herald. No other lawyer would pick a fight with the city’s largest newspaper. James Gordon Bennett would remind them why the following year, when Graham was nominated for District Attorney. “Day after day [Bennett] made violent personal attacks on [Graham’s] character,” even after the election, “exulting in his defeat.” It was a “merciless savagery without parallel.”3
The same could also be said of their next encounter. Bennett and his wife were on Broadway. She went into a shoe store while he remained on the street. Graham, seeing his antagonist, swung a fist at Bennett, a glancing blow that knocked his hat out of shape. The second punch landed on his ear and sent him to the pavement. Graham then grabbed and beat him with a rawhide cowskin.4
While electoral failure stung, it was a success that haunted Graham the most. In a rare appearance on behalf of the state, he won an appellate ruling that voluntary drunkenness was not a defense to a crime. But behind the published opinion was a real person: James Rogers, “a grossly ignorant lad.” After being sentenced to death for a stabbing, he said: “I’ve nothing to say—don’t know that I did it, and if I did it, I don’t know why I did it.” Rogers became a cause celebre among those who understood that he was mentally deficient. The governor was mobbed on a visit to New York by people urging a pardon. But three months before Sickles’s arrest, James Rogers was administered the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church and hanged at the Tombs before an audience of a hundred people. Graham was overwhelmed with guilt for his role in bringing this about. For the rest of his life, he would defend many men without charge, “to clear my conscience of the burden of sending Rogers to the gallows.”
The first would be Daniel Sickles.5
The defense team had tasked him with the opening statement. Some thought brevity was advisable. Not Graham—he had many things to say and would take the time he needed to say them.6
Graham told the jury that he was a friend of Daniel Sickles, a “companion of his sunshine,” now participating “in the gloom of his present affliction.” It had been a “few weeks since the body of a human being was found in the throes of death in one of the streets of your city . . . the body of a confirmed and habitual adulterer.”
His words were greeted with “solemn silence and attention.”
Ould had argued that the killing was especially wrong for having occurred on Sunday. Graham responde
d that it was Key, and not Sickles, who had violated the Sabbath. “On a day too sacred to be profaned by worldly toil—on which [Key] was forbidden to moisten his brow with the sweat to honest labor—on a day when he should have risen above the grossness of his nature” and “sent his aspirations heavenward . . . we find him besieging with the most evil intentions that castle where for their security and repose the law had placed the wife and children of his neighbor.
“Had the deceased observed the solemn precept, ‘Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,’ he might at this day have formed one of the living. The injured father and husband rushes on him in the moment of his guilt, and under the influence of a frenzy executes on him a judgment which was as just as it was summary.
“You are here to fix the price of the marriage bed. You are here to say in what estimation that sacred couch is held by an honest and intelligent American jury. You are favored citizens. You live in . . . the city of our federal government, a city consecrated to liberty above all others, but not of the liberty of the libertine.
“You may feel a pity, in reviewing this occurrence, for the life that has been taken. You may regret the necessity which constrained that event. But while you pity the dead, remember also that you should extend commiseration to the living. That life, taken away as it was, may prove to be your and my gain. You know not how soon the wife or daughter of some one of you would have been . . . marked by the same eyes that destroyed the marriage relations of the defendant.
“An interference with the marriage relations must strike every reflecting mind as the greatest wrong that can be committed on a human being. It has been well said that affliction, shame, poverty and captivity are preferable.”
Graham compared Sickles to Othello, who said that if Heaven had tried him with affliction and rained “all kinds of sores and shames on my bare head,” “poverty to the very lips,” or taken his “utmost hopes,” he could have “found in some place of my soul a drop of patience.” But “the fountain that my children and all my descendants flow from, has rejected” him, “and polluted herself.