The condemned were placed in a cart and driven through the streets of Salem Village to the place of execution. All eyes were on Burroughs as he stood on the scaffold and spoke his final words. They were so simple and moving that some in the gathered crowd wept. Burroughs concluded by reciting the Lord’s Prayer, which caused a loud murmuring among the assembled. Everyone knew a witch wasn’t supposed to be able to say this prayer. Was an innocent man about to hang? Responding to the crowd’s mounting agitation, one of the accusers yelled out that she had seen the devil at the condemned man’s shoulder whispering the prayer into his ear. This would have explained it, except the girl apparently forgot that the devil couldn’t say the prayer either. The crowd surged forward as Burroughs mounted the ladder, almost as if they were preparing to seize him away.
Fortunately, Cotton Mather, the authority on the ways of the devil, was there to save the day. He reminded the people that Satan is never so subtle than when he appears like an angel of light. Besides, Burroughs was not even an ordained minister. Though the point was irrelevant, and Reverend Mather failed to explain why the condemned wizard was able to recite the Lord’s Prayer, his words quieted the crowd and the execution proceeded. Still, George Burroughs haunted the people for years to come, and Cotton Mather later wrote that he wished he had never heard “the first letters of his name.”
The executions of Burroughs and the rest were followed a month later by eight more, including those of Martha Cory, whose husband Giles had been pressed to death three days earlier for having “stood mute” in the face of the charges against him, and Rebecca Nurse’s younger sister, Mary Esty. After her condemnation, Mary Esty made a final appeal to the judges: “I petition to your Honours, not for my own life, for I know I must die, and my appointed time is set, but . . . that no more Innocent Blood be shed, which undoubtedly cannot be avoided in the way and course you go in. I question not by your Honours do to the utmost of your pains in the discovery and detection of witchcraft and witches; but by my own Innocency I know you are in the wrong way.”
Mary Esty and the others executed with her on September 22 were the last to die in the insanity that swept over Massachusetts in 1692. Others would be tried, but reason was slowly returning. Spectral evidence was abolished as a basis for accusation, resulting in mass acquittals, and Governor Phips freed the remaining suspects, numbering more than a hundred, the following spring. “Such a jail delivery,” wrote Thomas Hutchison, “has never been known in New England.” Freedom came at a price, though. The released prisoners were expected to pay all the expenses of their incarceration, and those who couldn’t remained behind bars.
Gradually, life in Salem returned to some semblance of normalcy. “The afflicted ones” quietly withdrew from the deadly spectacle they had created. Some repented; others reportedly went on to lead lives of ill repute. Farms neglected for much of that unquiet year were sown again, while severed relationships and damaged reputations were slowly restored. Yet few could ever forget what had happened. “We walked in clouds and could not see our way,” wrote Reverend John Hale. “And we have most cause to be humbled for error . . . which cannot be retrieved.”
2
The Man Who Would Be Queen
Prior to the Revolution, most Americans were still loyal to the British crown. But Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, the royal governor of New York, seems to have taken his allegiance to the queen a bit to the extreme. By some accounts, Lord Cornbury, who governed from 1702 to 1708, believed that since he was the colonial representative of Queen Anne (Britain’s monarch of the time), he bloody well ought to look like her. The result wasn’t pretty. A portrait on display at the New-York Historical Society identified as Lord Cornbury shows him dressed in all his female finery. The image of majesty is marred somewhat by the five o’clock shadow, but otherwise the governor looks every bit the queen.24
In 1786, Sylvester Douglas, Lord Glenbervie, recorded in his diary a conversation he had with Horace Walpole, son of the great English statesman Robert Walpole, a contemporary of Cornbury’s. “[Lord Cornbury] was a clever man,” Glenbervie was told. “His great insanity was dressing himself as a woman. [Walpole] says that when Governor in America he opened the Assembly dressed in that fashion. When some of those about him remonstrated, his reply was, ‘You are very stupid not to see the propriety of it. In this place and particularly on this occasion I represent a woman and ought in all respects to represent her as faithfully as I can.’ ”
Some of Lord Cornbury’s contemporaries failed to appreciate his extravagant displays of loyalty. “Tis said he is wholly addicted to his pleasure . . . ,” Robert Livingston wrote to London in 1707. “His dressing in womens Cloths Commonly [every?] morning is so unaccountable that if hundred[s] of spectators did not daily see him it would be incredible.” New York catechist Elias Neau had something similar to say: “My Lord Cornbury has and does still make use of an unfortunate Custom of dressing himself in Womens Cloaths and of exposing himself in the Garb upon the Ramparts to the view of the public; in that dress he draws a World of Spectators about him and consequently as many Censures, especially for exposing himself in such a manner all the great Holy days and even in an hour or two after going to the Communion.”
There are no surviving accounts of what Queen Anne thought of Lord Cornbury’s homage to her, but given that they were both rather homely, as well as first cousins, she may have been struck by the resemblance—and not especially flattered.
3
Cellar Dweller
“Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry famously demanded on the eve of the American Revolution. His wife, Sarah, might have said the same thing, since she was confined in the basement of the couple’s Virginia estate for almost four years. Not that the accommodations were all that bad. “It was an English-style basement,” insists Edith Poindexter, an historian with the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation. That means it was partially aboveground, letting in plenty of light and fresh air. “Warm in the winter and cool in the summer,” says Poindexter. Yet it wasn’t quite the Ritz, especially when Sarah found herself in a straitjacket. What had driven the poor woman to such an unfortunate state?
It seems her children were part of the problem. She had five of them, starting when she was seventeen, but after the birth of the sixth in 1771, Sarah lost it. She exhibited what Patrick Henry biographer Robert Meade calls “a strange antipathy” toward her children. It might be called postpartum psychosis today. Sarah’s “antipathy” became so dangerous that she had to be kept away from the kids. But Patrick Henry was a loyal husband and knew how horrific insane asylums of the day could be. So, the family lived upstairs while Sarah ranted and raved below. It was in this sad state that she died in 1775 at age thirty-seven.
4
Explorer Off Course
Things were not going very well for Meriwether Lewis after he returned from his epic trek across the American continent with William Clark in 1806. Sure, he was hailed as a hero by President Jefferson and the rest of the nation, but he was drinking too much, suffering from malaria and bouts of mental illness, and, despite his superstar status, unable to find himself a wife.
“I am now a perfect widower with rispect [sic] to love,” he wrote his friend Mahlon Dickerson after one failed courtship. “I feel all that restlessness, that inquietude, that certain indiscribable [sic] something common to old bachelors [he was thirty-four at the time], I cannot avoid thinking, my dear fellow, proceeds from that void in our hearts, which might, or ought to be better filled. Whence it comes I know not, but certain it is, that I never felt less like a heroe [sic] than at the present moment. What may be my next adventure God knows, but on this I am determined, to get a wife.” Alas, he never did.
Meanwhile, Jefferson, to reward Lewis for his great service to the country, appointed him governor of the Territory of Louisiana. But the president was also getting a little annoyed with his old friend, waiting impatiently for the publication of the journals Lewis meticulously kept during his
adventure. With the wealth of information they contained about the previously unexplored West—scientific, geographic, and commercial—the published work would help Jefferson justify his faith in Lewis and the enormous sums of government money spent on the expedition. “We have no tidings yet on the forwardness of your printer,” the president wrote. “I hope the first part [of the proposed three-volume set] will not be delayed much longer.” Lewis didn’t bother to answer, perhaps because he had done nothing to prepare his journals for printing. “It is astonishing we get not one word from him,” Jefferson said to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn.
Dearborn’s successor at the War Department, William Eustus, was less concerned about the journals than he was about the bills Lewis was sending. Under the auspices of the St. Louis Missouri River Fur Company, which Governor Lewis had organized in 1808 (and perhaps joined as a silent partner), a large military expedition was gathered, at government expense. The plan was to travel up the Missouri River and return an Indian chief named Big White—whom Lewis had taken with him to Washington after his travels—back to his people. After dropping off Big White, the expedition would set up a fur trading post at the mouth of the Yellowstone River and there enjoy a monopoly granted by Lewis.
The only snag was, Secretary of War Eustus wasn’t buying it. He rejected a number of Lewis’s claims for reimbursement for the project, writing, “As the object and destination of the Force [beyond getting Big White home] is unknown, and more especially as it combines commercial purposes, so it cannot be considered as having the sanction of the Government of the United States, or that they are responsible for the consequences.” In other words, Lewis was stuck with the bill. This was not good news for the governor, who was already in debt and now adding opium and morphine to his malaria medicine. Furthermore, his champion and protector, Thomas Jefferson, was no longer in office and could not help him. Besides, Jefferson was still nagging him about the journals, which Lewis had still not prepared for publication.
“I am very often applied to know when your work will begin to appear,” the former president wrote in 1809 from his retirement at Monticello, “and I have so long promised copies to my literary correspondents in France, that I am almost bankrupt in their eyes. I shall be very happy to receive from yourself information of your expectations on this subject. Every body is impatient for it.” Lewis, once again, failed to reply. Instead, he decided to go to Washington and justify the St. Louis Missouri River Fur Company to President Madison.
Lewis had been stung by Secretary Eustus’s letter rejecting his claims, believing it implicated him in some dirty dealing. “The feelings it excites are truly painful . . . ,” he wrote Eustus. “I have been informed Representations have been made against me.” What these representations might have been is unclear, though it appears a story was circulating that the St. Louis Missouri River Fur Company intended to go outside of U.S. territory, and that Lewis was seeking to establish a new country for himself, not unlike Aaron Burr.25 “Be assured, Sir, that my Country can never make ‘A Burr’ of me—She may reduce me to Poverty; but she can never sever my Attachment from her.” Sadly, Lewis never got to prove his patriotism, or at least justify his expenses, for the journey to Washington was his last voyage.
Twice he tried to kill himself on the boat carrying him down the Mississippi River. When the boat reached Chickasaw Bluffs (now Memphis, Tennessee), the commander of Fort Pickering, Captain Gilbert Russell, was informed of Lewis’s suicide attempts and, as he later wrote, “resolved at once to take possession of him and his papers, and detain them there until he recovered, or some friend might arrive in whose hands he could depart in safety.” For days Lewis ranted disjointedly, drank heavily, and indulged in his narcotic “medicines,” but after about a week Captain Russell reported “all symptoms of derangement disappeared and he was completely in his senses,” though “considerably reduced and debilitated.” He was also ashamed, telling Russell that he was resolved “never to drink any more spirits or use snuff again.” Several weeks later, Lewis seemed fit enough to resume travel. But it was an illusion. Before long he was boozing again and “appeared at times deranged in mind,” as Major James Neelly, who accompanied Lewis, later reported to Jefferson.
While traveling through Tennessee, Lewis came to Grinder’s Inn, about seventy miles from Nashville, and took a room. Mrs. Grinder, the proprietress, served him a meal during which, she said, he started “speaking to himself in a violent manner,” his face flushed, “as if it had come on him in a fit.” Later that night he started pacing in his room, back and forth for hours, talking to himself, Mrs. Grinder said, “like a lawyer.” Then he took a pistol and shot himself in the head. The bullet only grazed him, though, so Lewis took another pistol and shot himself in the chest. This time the bullet traveled down through his torso, emerging low on his back. Surviving this shot as well, Lewis staggered to the door of his room and called out for Mrs. Grinder. “Oh Madam!” he cried. “Give me some water, and heal my wounds.” He then went outside briefly before making his way back to his room.
Terrified, Mrs. Grinder sent her children to find the servants accompanying Lewis on the trip. When they got to his room they found him cutting himself from head to foot with a razor. “I have done the business, my good servant, give me some water,” he said before showing them the second wound. “I am no coward,” he continued, “but I am so strong, [it is] so hard to die.” He then begged the servants to shoot him in the head and put him out of his pain. They refused, but just after sunrise that morning the great explorer finally expired from the wounds he had inflicted upon himself.
5
The Case of the Cuckolded Congressman
“Of course I intended to kill him. . . . He deserved it.”
—REPRESENTATIVE DANIEL SICKLES
Murder has always been a frequent-enough occurrence in the nation’s capital that a single killing does not ordinarily attract much attention—unless, of course, it involves a cuckolded congressman, a famous composer’s son, and an attempted cover-up by the president of the United States. Then, almost everyone will sit up and take notice, just as they did in February 1859, when Representative Daniel Sickles of New York killed his friend Philip Barton Key, son of “Star-Spangled Banner” composer Francis Scott Key, right in front of the White House. Sickles did the deed in broad daylight, with a number of witnesses present, after learning that Key had been sleeping with his wife. But with a little help from President James Buchanan, and the then-novel defense of temporary insanity, he got away with it.
By most accounts, Key and Sickles’s wife, Teresa, conducted their affair with all the discretion of mating elephants. Everyone in Washington seemed to know about it, except Daniel Sickles. Key rented a house near Lafayette Square, where the Sickleses lived, so they could get together whenever they felt like it, which might be as often as three times a day. From the park in front of Teresa’s home, Key would wave his handkerchief when he wanted her to come out and play. “Here comes Disgrace to see Disgust,” servants in the Sickles household would mutter whenever they saw the familiar sight.
The adulterous couple had been sniffing each other out for some time before their affair actually began. Key, Washington’s district attorney (a post Sickles helped him retain after the Buchanan administration came to power in 1857), often escorted Teresa to social events when her husband was too busy with congressional duties—or other women—to accompany her. A widower with four children, Key was pushing forty, almost twice Teresa’s age. He claimed to be like a father to his friend’s wife, regarding her, as he told Representative John Haskin of New York, “as a young person who stood towards him in the relation of a child.” He spoke of how “childlike she was,” Haskin later testified, “and how innocent.” Many people who saw them out on the town got an entirely different impression, though. Key’s attentions seemed far more amorous than paternal, and Teresa’s response to them was hardly one of sweet innocence.
Gossip about an improper relationship betwee
n his wife and his friend filtered back to Sickles, but Key vigorously denied what he called “the vile calumnies” against him. “It is the highest affront which can be offered to me,” Key declared, “and whoever asserts it must meet me on the field of honor, at the very point of the pistol.” Though Sickles accepted Key’s denials, he was still suspicious—just not suspicious enough, as it turned out.
Sickles seemed to miss all the signs of the affair that commenced on a sofa in his own parlor, while Key grew ever bolder, ignoring warnings that violence could result if the affair was ever discovered. “I am prepared for any emergency,” he said defiantly, patting the left breast pocket of his coat where, it was implied, he kept a weapon. Teresa herself maintained a façade of respectability, despite all the chatter swirling around her increasingly brazen trysts with Key. Virginia Clay, one of Washington’s leading hostesses, recalled seeing Teresa at a reception during this time and never forgot the “innocent” impression she made: “She was so young and fair, at most not more than twenty-two years of age, and so naive, that none of the party of which I was one was willing to harbour a belief in the rumours which were then in circulation.” But all the gossip was true, and Sickles couldn’t stay oblivious forever.
The congressman’s cocoon of ignorance finally came apart when he received an anonymous letter advising him of his wife’s infidelity. “I do assure you, [Key] has as much the use of your wife as you have,” the letter stated. And on the night he received it, family friend Octavia Ridgely recalled, “Mr. Sickles had a very wild, distracted look.” He wasn’t fully convinced, however, until further investigation proved the anonymous letter writer’s allegations all true. This “unmanned him completely,” said House clerk George Wooldridge, who had verified the facts himself. The congressman’s “exhibitions of grief ” were so violent, Wooldridge said, that the two men had to retreat to a private room near the House chamber to avoid a public spectacle.
A Treasury of Great American Scandals Page 23