And Sumner had even more to say. “The Senator from South Carolina,” he continued, “has read many books of chivalry and believes himself a chivalrous knight. . . . Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight. I mean the harlot, Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this Senator. The frenzy of Don Quixote, in behalf of his wench, Dulcinea del Toboso, is all surpassed.”
Butler might have beaten up Sumner for his pomposity alone, but he wasn’t actually present to hear the screed. His kinsman and fellow Carolinian, Representative Preston S. Brooks, was there, however, and he didn’t appreciate Sumner’s lofty insults one bit. Three days after the speech was delivered, Brooks quietly entered the Senate chamber and found Sumner working at his desk. “I have read your speech twice over carefully,” Brooks announced. “It is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler who is a relative of mine.” Without warning, Brooks then started whacking Sumner with a cane until it splintered and his victim fell from his chair in a bloody heap.
Northern reaction to the assault was one of horror. “The crime is not merely against liberty but civilization,” editorialized the Boston Evening Transcript, while the Albany Evening Journal noted that “For the first time has the extreme discipline of the Plantation been introduced into the Senate of the United States.” In the South, though, Brooks was hailed as a hero. “Sumner was well and elegantly whipped,” gloated the Charleston Mercury, “and he richly deserved it.” Southerners sent Brooks commemorative canes, with HIT HIM AGAIN inscribed on them. It was all an ugly preview of the Civil War to come.
Sumner’s injuries kept him out of the Senate for three years, and his empty chair became a symbol of the antislavery movement. Several weeks after the attack, a House investigation committee concluded that it was a breach of congressional privilege, and said in a report, “This act cannot be regarded by the committee otherwise than as an aggravated assault upon the inestimable right of freedom of speech guaranteed by the Constitution . . . and, if carried to its ultimate consequences, must result in anarchy and bring in its train all the evils of a reign of terror.” As debate raged in the House over whether or not to expel Brooks, he decided to resign on his own. His exile was brief, however. He ran for office again, and was sworn in just two weeks after his resignation. Five months later, Brooks was dead of liver disease. Sumner, after his long convalescence, served in the Senate until 1874.
Of course, not all congressional brawls were physical. There were plenty of lacerating tongues to keep things lively, especially that of Senator John Randolph of Virginia. Though a childhood illness rendered him beardless and impotent, with a high-pitched voice, he was capable of knocking an opponent out cold with words alone. When one congressman, freshly elected to fill the vacancy left by the death of another, attacked Randolph, the senator remained uncharacteristically quiet. Several days later, though, during a discussion on a bill that the deceased congressman had been sponsoring, Randolph had his say: “This bill, Mr. Speaker, lost its ablest advocate in the death of my lamented colleague, whose seat,” he added caustically, “is still vacant.”
Randolph often used his facility with language to withering effect. Andrew Jackson’s secretary of state Edward Livingston, he said, “is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.” Randolph’s colleagues Robert Wright and John Rae, he remarked, exhibited two anomalies: “A Wright always wrong; and a Rae without light.”
2
Sexcapades
For many congressmen, forbidden sex has been one of the most avidly pursued perks of office, but it’s gotten them into heaps of trouble—especially the hypocrites. Representative William Campbell Preston Breckinridge, for one, was as righteous as Moses come down from the mountain (and almost as hammy as Charlton Heston playing him). The congressman from Kentucky liked to play the part of moral crusader, often lecturing on the evils of sex and the virtues of purity. He cautioned one audience of teenage girls to avoid “useless handshaking, promiscuous kissing, needless touching, and all exposures.” To another group of girls he declared, “Chastity is the fountain, the cornerstone of human society. . . . Pure home makes pure government.” But, alas, Breckinridge’s lessons seem to have been lost on his teenage mistress. When young Madeline Pollard slapped the father of five with a $50,000 paternity suit in 1893, one observer noted that “The fall of Breckinridge was like that of an archangel.”
Several forces gathered to destroy the congressman, not the least of which was his own stupidity. Breckinridge tried to convince the court that he had no idea Madeline had three children by him. Yes, he admitted, they had often had sex, sometimes several times a day. Yes, he had recommended her for a government job and paid her oodles of cash. But kids? Who knew? The jury, not surprisingly, found in Madeline’s favor. Breckinridge was wounded, but not yet out of the game. He wanted to be reelected, and in a tearful performance he confessed, “I know the secret sin; I tried to atone for it.” But, he said, “I was entangled by weakness, by passion, by sin, in coils which it was almost impossible to break.”
Unfortunately for him, Breckinridge’s redemption was derailed by the emerging feminist movement. Susan B. Anthony and other activists were first testing their political power, and though they didn’t yet have the vote, they rallied hard against the wayward congressman. His “exposed and confessed unchastity,” Anthony insisted, rendered Breckinridge unfit for office. He lost by a landslide.
William Sharon’s fling with Althea Hill was not entirely improper, even if he was twice her age. The senator from Nevada was a wealthy widower and free to pursue whomever he pleased. Nevertheless, the affair did have some unpleasant consequences, including assault and murder charges. It also resulted, directly and indirectly, in three U.S. Supreme Court decisions.
Senator Sharon, then sixty, met Althea Hill in California in 1880. She had blown her small inheritance on bad investments, and the senator graciously offered to give her some financial advice. He also offered her $500 a month to let him “love her.” The money, he later testified, was the standard fee he offered his mistresses. Althea declined, even after the ante was raised to $1,000. According to her testimony, she immediately rose to depart, saying to Sharon, “You are mistaken in your woman. You can get plenty of women that will let you love them for less than that.” Neither Althea nor the senator ever denied that a love affair did eventually commence. It’s just that she claimed that it occurred within the confines of a secret marriage. Althea said that Sharon was so smitten that he asked her to marry him after she turned down his lucrative offers to become his mistress. But, she said, he insisted the marriage would have to be secret as he had an ex-mistress in Philadelphia who might make trouble if she heard about it. According to Althea, he told her they could be officially married by simply agreeing in writing to do so. She later produced the signed document in court. He called it a fraud and a forgery.
Althea and the senator set up a household of sorts at two adjoining hotels in San Francisco—she in one; he in the other—connected by a passageway. Back and forth they tiptoed for about a year, apparently in complete harmony. Sharon furnished Althea’s room in the style of her choosing and gave her $500 a month spending money (the same amount, incidentally, she would have made as his mistress). For a time they were inseparable. “I used to go everywhere with Mr. Sharon,” Althea later testified. “He scarcely went anywhere that I did not go with him—either riding or driving, or attending to business—that he did not take me with him.” But then things started to sour. Sharon accused Althea of revealing his business secrets, and even of stealing his private papers. Eventually he demanded that she vacate her room at the hotel, underscoring his seriousness
by ordering the door taken off its hinges and all the furniture and carpeting removed. After an abortive reconciliation in 1882, Althea Hill and William Sharon were in court.
In September 1883, Althea made the shocking public announcement that she was Sharon’s lawfully wedded wife. Then she had him arrested for adultery with another woman. Sharon vehemently denied there ever was a marriage and vowed to spend as many of his millions as necessary to prove her a liar. His lawyers filed suit in federal court alleging that Althea’s marriage document was a fake and asked the court to compel her to surrender it for cancellation. She answered with her own suit in the state court, asking for a divorce and property settlement.
Althea was represented by David Terry, a former chief justice of the California Supreme Court and noted duelist who would soon figure prominently in her personal life. Despite some of Althea’s unsavory witnesses, including one who had hidden in Sharon’s room to watch him bed another woman, the state judge ruled that a legally binding marriage existed. He granted Althea a divorce and $2,500 a month in alimony. “I am so happy,” she cooed after the ruling. “I feel just like a young kitten that has been brought into the house and set before the fire.” Sharon promptly appealed, and at the same time pressed his petition in federal court to have the marriage document judged a forgery and nullified.
Althea faced a formidable legal team assembled by Sharon, but she was uncowed. In fact, she was quite feisty—dangerously feisty. During one pretrial examination, while Sharon’s lawyers were questioning one witness, Althea sat stewing as she read the unfriendly deposition of another. Suddenly she exploded, demanding that the examination be halted. “When I see this testimony,” she screeched, “I feel like taking that man [Sharon’s lawyer William M.] Stewart out and cowhiding him. I will shoot him yet, that very man sitting there. To think he would put up a woman to come here and deliberately lie about me like that. I will shoot him as sure as you like.” Several attempts by a court officer to stop Althea’s tirade were unsuccessful. “They shall not slander me,” she shouted. “I can hit a four-bit piece nine times out of ten.” With that she withdrew a pistol from her purse, waved it menacingly toward another of Sharon’s lawyers, and assured him that she was not going to “shoot you just now, unless you would like to be shot and think you deserve it.”
Several weeks after this scene, when all the testimony was completed, circuit judge Lorenzo Sawyer and district court judge Mathew Deadly ruled that the declaration of marriage was a forgery and ordered Althea to surrender it for cancellation. Judge Deadly also gave her a little sermon. Portions of the text bear reprinting here, if only to show that pistol-packin’ Althea wasn’t the only one a little off the wall:
[As] the world goes and is, the sin of incontinence in a man is compatible with the virtue of veracity, while in the case of a woman, common opinion is otherwise. . . . And it must also be remembered that the plaintiff is a person of long-standing and commanding position in this community, of large fortune and manifold business and social relations, and is therefore so far, and by all that these imply, specially bound to speak the truth, and responsible for the correctness of his statements; and all this, over and beyond the moral obligation arising from the divine injunction not to bear false witness, or the fear of the penalty attached by human law to the crime of perjury. On the other hand, the defendant is a comparative obscure and unimportant person, without property or position in the world. Although of apparently respectable birth and lineage, she has deliberately separated herself from her people, and selected as her intimates and confidants doubtful persons from the lower walks of life. . . . And by this nothing more is meant than that, while a poor and obscure person may be naturally and at heart as truthful as a rich and prominent one, and even more so, nevertheless, other things being equal, property and position are in themselves some certain guaranty of truth in their possessor, for the reason, if no other, that he is thereby rendered more liable and vulnerable to attack on account of any public moral delinquency, and has more to lose if found or thought guilty thereof than one wholly wanting in these particulars.
Althea seems to have taken this judicial homily in stride, perhaps because she viewed it as irrelevant. Senator Sharon had died before the court’s decision, and two weeks after it was delivered, she married her attorney, David Terry. As far as the newlyweds were concerned, the judgment had died with Sharon. It was, pronounced Terry, “an ineffective, inoperative, unenforceable pronunciamento,” which he didn’t bother to appeal. Yet though Sharon was dead, his interests lived on with his children who, through his lawyers, appealed the earlier divorce decree and eventually got the California Supreme Court to reduce Althea’s alimony from $2,500 to $500. The court still recognized the marriage as lawful, however, and consequently Sharon’s children asked for a new trial. They also filed a petition in federal court to revive the order that Althea surrender her marriage contract, having waited until her time to appeal the order had expired.
The Terrys had been outmaneuvered, but Althea still had some spit in her. One day on a train she encountered Judge Sawyer, who had ruled against her. Marching up to his seat, she started to taunt him. “I will give him a taste of what he will get bye and bye,” she said as she leaned over and yanked his hair. David Terry laughed and added, “The best thing to do with him would be to take him into the bay and drown him.” Later that summer they met Sawyer again, this time in court, when the petition by Sharon’s heirs to revive the federal order to surrender the marriage license was heard. Sitting with Sawyer was Stephen J. Field, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. (In those days, Supreme Court justices were required to hear cases on circuit when the full court was not in session in Washington.) Justice Field, who had already witnessed Althea’s exploits on an earlier tour of duty, soon got another taste of her volatile temper when he read the judges’ unanimous decision reviving the order against her. Hearing the opinion read, Althea suddenly jumped up and barked at Justice Field: “Judge, are you going to take the responsibility of ordering me to deliver up that marriage contract?”
“Be seated, madam,” Field responded coolly.
But Althea wouldn’t be silenced: “How much did Newlands [Sharon’s son-in-law] pay you for this decision?”
Field had now had about enough. “Remove that woman from the courtroom,” he ordered a marshal. “The court will deal with her hereafter.”
With that, Althea slumped down in her seat and defiantly said, “I won’t go and you can’t put me out.” Then, as the marshal approached her, she sprung up and slapped him in the face with both hands. “You dirty scrub,” she screamed. “You dare not remove me from this courtroom.” As the marshal proceeded, Althea’s husband moved in and punched him in the mouth. A small riot broke out as a swearing David Terry and a scratching Althea were subdued and removed. During the scuffle, a Bowie knife was taken from Terry’s hand and a pistol from Althea’s purse. Both were subsequently found guilty of contempt and ordered to prison, Terry for six months and his wife for one. After a petition to revoke the order was denied by Justice Field, the Terrys made two appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court—one on the order imprisoning them for contempt, the other on the order that Althea surrender the marriage contract. They lost both. Then the California Supreme Court decided that the lower court’s earlier decision favoring Althea and granting her a divorce from Sharon with alimony was not supported by the evidence.
These reversals set the Terrys off on a furious rampage. David ranted in long letters in the San Francisco Call, attempting to smear Justice Field. “He has always been a corporate lawyer, and a corporate judge, and as such no man can be honest,” Terry wrote. In conversation, he called the judges “all a lot of cowardly curs,” and said he would “see some of them in their graves yet.” Terry declared that he would horsewhip Field, “and if [he] resents it, I will kill him.” All this from the former chief justice of the California Supreme Court! Althea, too, vowed she would kill both Justice Field and Judge Sawyer. As it turned
out, the threats were not idle ones.
In August 1889, Field was traveling by train to San Francisco. Midway through the trip, the Terrys boarded. At a stop in Lathrop, California, Field got off the train to eat breakfast at the station there. He was accompanied by a bodyguard, David Neagle, who had been assigned to protect him after the Terrys’ threats reached Washington. Soon after Field sat down to eat, the Terrys walked into the station. Seeing Field, Althea ran back to the train to get her purse. David Terry sat down, whereupon the station manager came up to him and said, “Mrs. Terry has gone out to the car for some purpose. I fear she will create a disturbance.” Terry replied, “I think it very likely. You had better watch her and prevent her coming in.” When the manager left to do so, Terry rose from his table, strode over behind Field, and viciously slapped him on both sides of his face. With that, Neagle the bodyguard sprang up and ordered him to stop. According to Neagle, Terry shot him “the most malignant expression of hate and passion I have ever seen in my life,” while reaching for his Bowie knife. Instantly, Neagle fired his gun twice, and David Terry fell dead. Just then, Althea rushed back into the room, open purse in hand. The manager grabbed her satchel and took a loaded revolver out of it as Althea hysterically screamed for vengeance.
A Treasury of Great American Scandals Page 13