That was quite a statement for the man who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner,” perhaps even sincerely believed. He went on to warn that the prosecution of Houston was but a pretext for creeping tyranny.
“A free Constitution can be nowhere safely written but in the heart of virtuous and vigilant people, who shall watch and restrain the first step of power or privilege that passes the limits assigned to it,” Key declared. “Surely the men who framed the Constitution would have thrown their unfinished work with indignation from their hands, if they could have foreseen that a day like this was so soon to come.”
Even Key’s most sympathetic biographer lost patience with this performance.
“As a matter of fact, a ruffian had brutally assaulted a Congressman for words which he had spoken in debate on the floor of the House,” scoffed Edward Delaplaine a century later, “and the House has the right to protect its members. Nevertheless, the ruffian’s lawyer continued to ramble on for two hours, trying to make the Congressmen believe they had no jurisdiction in the matter.”
Key and Houston’s allies in the House forced several more days of tendentious debate. The galleries drained and the exhausted lawmakers yearned for a roll call vote. Finally, on May 11, a motion to declare Houston guilty of a breach of House privileges was put by the Speaker. The vote was 106 to 89 in favor of guilty. Then came the question of punishment: censure or reprimand? Censure would send the stronger message of disapproval to Houston and the Jackson administration. But the motion to reprimand, the milder rebuke, passed 96–84.
Thus Sam Houston departed from the Capitol claiming vindication for pummeling poor Stanbery. Thanks to Key’s obfuscations and the loyalty of the Jackson faction in the House, he had obtained leniency.
The president would not forget Mr. Key’s service.
Yet Frank Key had little time to savor his triumph, if that’s what it was. Just a few days later, he was working in his office when he received a note from his son Frank Jr., asking to see him. Twenty-five years of age, Francis Scott Key Jr. was his father’s oldest son. He lived the life of a young gentleman with his wife and two children on the West River near Annapolis. Less religious and self-sacrificing than his father, Frank Jr. was generous, impulsive, and fond of lavish entertainments. He dressed in colonial style, wearing knickerbockers, a blue coat with brass buttons, a buff vest, buckled shoes, and a powdered wig. Like Sam Houston, he walked with a stout cane.
When they met, the father thought the son looked wretched and ashamed. Frank Jr. admitted why: He had just been charged with rape. The younger man told his mortified father a convoluted story about a woman who was new to the West River area. She charged that he had used threat of force to have his way with her in someone else’s house. She had gone to the local magistrate seeking his arrest.
The son expressed contrition for his sin and shame but denied he had used force with the woman.
“Acknowledge your guilt,” said the wounded father. “Repent and submit to all the consequences of your sins.”
Key sent his sixteen-year-old son, Daniel, to West River with a rather adult mission: to talk to a friend of Frank Jr.’s who knew the woman involved. Key did not want to believe his son was guilty of rape, but he did not flinch from the possibility. “I have thought it my duty to have every effort made to ascertain the truth,” Key wrote to his son-in-law Charles Howard. “I must bear this state of suspense a few days—trusting that God, who alone can help in such extremity, will order such events to these appalling circumstances as shall ultimately be best for my poor boy + for us all.”
Two days later, Daniel Key returned from Annapolis with merciful news: The charges would be dropped.
“Everybody is satisfied that our poor child has been falsely accused,” Key explained to Howard. The woman was brought before the magistrate and “is proved to be a vile and infamous prostitute of the lowest character. Frank’s account of the transaction is fully confirmed. It is a shameful exposure on his part but she is shown to be equally guilty.”
Key’s God-fearing faith survived. So did his reputation and his ambition.
11
AFTER HIS REELECTION in November 1832, President Jackson was ready to pay off a standing political debt. Roger Taney had proved a welcome addition to the cabinet. As attorney general, he worked tirelessly in the four-story office building on the west side of President’s Square, or from his home in Baltimore. Jackson had quickly come to trust Taney with the national government’s legal policies on everything from maritime law to Indian removal. Now he wanted the same kind of efficiency and loyalty in the court of Washington City. On Tuesday, January 29, 1833, Jackson sent the clerk of the Senate a message: “I nominate Francis S. Key to be Attorney of the United States for the District of Columbia.” Key, well known for his good deeds, law practice, and song, was approved by unanimous consent the same day.
The district attorney position was a hard-earned reward for Key and an easy decision for President Jackson. Key had obtained the conviction of Tobias Watkins and talked down the egregious Reverend Campbell. He had proven his acumen in showing out Berrien and bringing in Taney. And he displayed real fortitude in the grueling defense of Sam Houston. Jackson left no record of why he appointed Key, but the increasingly contentious issue of slavery in the District of Columbia probably played a role too. With northern congressmen trying to make an issue of slavery in the capital, the administration needed a district attorney certain to share the president’s understanding of the white man’s constitutional rights.
The district attorney job, said one Key biographer, was “not altogether to his taste because he had to prosecute and he was an unvindictive man.” But Key would overcome this reticence for the sake of his vision of justice. He had no difficulty identifying the city’s crime problems. Some were eternal, like fighting and thieving. Some were new, like gambling. The proliferation of gaming establishments—card parlors, faro banks, and roulette tables—had rendered the city’s system of small fines ineffective. In 1830, the common council had increased the fines for gambling houses and required operators to post a bond, the latter on penalty of a stay at the workhouse. Then the council made running a gambling house a penitentiary offense, and the pastime became more discreet but no less prevalent. Not long after Key took office, the Intelligencer admitted, “There is no city in which gambling is carried to a greater extent than the metropolis of the country.”
To combat such ills, Key had a weak constabulary. The city employed twelve magistrates who could bring criminal charges and order arrests, along with ten constables who patrolled the city’s six wards. The constables received a wage of fifty dollars a year, which they supplemented with reward money for capturing runaway slaves and the illicit proceeds of kidnapping free Negroes and selling them to slave traders.
In September 1833, Key made his mark. In an effort to clear the court’s backlog of cases, the new district attorney called a special early session two months before the circuit court traditionally opened. He came back early from Terra Rubra and proceeded to prosecute seventy-two assault cases and twenty-six larceny cases in just a few weeks. He stepped up prosecution of gambling houses, closing down five different establishments, most of them on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Most of all, Key went after the bawdy houses, otherwise known as houses of ill fame or whorehouses. Once ignored, these enterprises became a target of Key’s constables. No longer would authorities tolerate women selling their favors to men, a trade well known to the locals. In his 1822 comic novel, The L——Family in Washington, George Watterston, the writer who served as the Librarian of Congress, depicted the forthright beauties who openly trolled for customers in the galleries of the House and Senate “dressed in the extreme of fashion … their cheeks possessing a beautiful red and the rest of their face a most delicate white.” When a newcomer expressed shock at their brazen style, his guide shrugged and said, “This is a free country, and such things must be tolerated for the sake of freedom.” Watterston called
the customers of these working girls the “worshippers of Venus” and observed their temples “appeared to be more devoutly and better attended in this than any other city he had seen, especially in the winter.”
In the fall of 1833, Key brought charges against the proprietors of seventeen of these “temples of Venus.”
The demimonde of the Washington bawdy houses, documented mostly in court records, was a world of male pleasure controlled by women. Of the thirty-one people whom Key charged with running a sex business, twenty-nine were women. White and black women participated roughly in proportion to their numbers in the city. About a third of Washington’s population was black at the time. Of the seventeen bawdy houses Key sought to shut down, white women ran thirteen and black women ran four. Some of these “houses” may have consisted of no more than a room or two; others occupied whole buildings and had elaborate food and beverage service.
Key hoped to shutter them all. He indicted a white couple, George and Celia Gray, for keeping a house of ill fame on F Street, not far from the Methodist meetinghouse. He charged Mary Wertz and her daughter with entertaining customers in their boardinghouse on Pennsylvania Avenue between Second and Third streets. Matilda Thomas and Susan Webster allegedly operated bawdy houses in the First Ward. Henrietta and Harriet Jurdine were accused of the same in the Third Ward. Key went after a black couple, Eliza and Henry Butler, who were said to keep a house of ill fame on Twelfth Street. Three Irish women—Sally McDaniel, Patty Pallison, and Kell Simpson—were charged with plying the trade in a house between Pennsylvania Avenue and Tiber Creek, near Fourteenth Street.
So common were these arrests that Key had a standard indictment form printed up. Whereas most criminal indictments up until that time had been written out by hand, these documents could be run off by the dozens. The printed bill gave a feel for what Key found most abhorrent in the bawdy houses. The indictment charged the defendant—a blank space for the suspect’s name—with operating “a certain common bawdy house, situated in the City of Washington … for filthy lucre and gain.” The criminal offense was running a house that attracted “diverse & evil disposed persons … and whores [who] unlawfully and wickedly did receive and entertain … and commit whoredom and fornication.” The bottom of the document identified the charging officer: “F. S. KEY, USA.”
Key’s campaign against the houses of ill fame exemplified his ambition to uplift the city’s morals by force of law. Yet if Key took pride in this effort, he did not mention it in any writings that have survived. His various biographers would never mention it. The city’s newspapers did not report on it. The very correct ladies who chronicled Washington social life in those days—Margaret Bayard Smith and Anna Maria Thornton—did not even allude to such sordid matters in writing.
12
FRANCIS SCOTT KEY had never stood higher in the estimation of President Jackson. In November 1833, Jackson pulled him temporarily from his duties as district attorney and dispatched him on another sensitive political mission: to quell a dispute between white settlers and federal authorities in Alabama. The trip confirmed the newfound force of Key’s personality, fame, and power.
Jackson’s policy of Indian removal across the southern states had encouraged the in-migration of white settlers looking for land. In 1832, his administration had signed a treaty with the Creek Indians to protect the pockets of land to which they had been consigned along the Georgia-Alabama border. Nonetheless, growing settlements of whites encroached on the Creek reservations in violation of the treaty. When federal troops attempted to oust the squatters on the Alabama side, the soldiers shot and killed a local postmaster. The incident escalated into a test of the national government’s authority within the state. Floundering in the middle was Governor John Gayle, an ally of Jackson’s under intense pressure to capitulate to the settlers by putting the federal troops on trial for murder. Gayle wrote to Washington for help, and Jackson sent Key.
The arrival of the famous author of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was an event of no small interest in Alabama, which had become a state only in 1819. Not since General Lafayette had passed through in 1825 had such an illustrious guest stopped by, and the locals were eager to greet him. When Key arrived at Fort Mitchell, he was met by an amateur band that played “The Star-Spangled Banner” over and over again. As the serenaders blasted the autumn air with the tune of the anthem, Key turned to the gentleman with him. “That is a pretty air,” he said quizzically. “What is it?” Key, alas, was tone-deaf.
Politically, he proved more astute. By day, Key shuttled between Governor Gayle, the state legislators, local authorities, and the federal military commander. At night he wrote regular letters to Roger Taney seeking legal and political advice. Over the course of a month, he gradually forged an agreement that all could live by.
Along the way, Key found himself enmeshed in romance. The governor’s wife, Sarah Haynesworth Gayle, was twenty-nine years of age, a high-spirited and observant woman, a loving if frustrated wife, and the doting mother of three children. Alabama’s illustrious visitor intrigued her.
“He is very pleasant—intelligent, you at once perceive, and somewhat peculiar in his manners,” Mrs. Gayle wrote in her diary. “He is a little, nay, a good deal absent in company, not always attending when others converse, and often breaking in with a question, though evidently unconscious of what he had done. His countenance is not remarkable when at rest, but as soon as he lifts his eyes, usually fixed upon some object near the floor, the man of sense, of fancy, and the poet is at once seen.”
What’s more he was a Christian. Religious thoughts governed Mrs. Gayle’s feelings, and she admired her guest for his spiritual fidelity. When Key wrote a bit of pious verse in the autograph album of her nine-year-old daughter, Sarah, Mrs. Gayle burst into tears. In her diary that night, she wondered why “when a man of talent, of wit, of eminence, of imagination and of honor should name the name of Jesus Christ, my heart should swell with emotions impossible to define partaking of pleasure, pride, veneration and an overwhelming desire to do the same.” Why? Perhaps because she had fallen in love with the man. Key, for his part, gravitated to her parlor and company.
“He has been around frequently,” she noted in her diary, “and sat an hour or two last night (Mr. Gayle absent) chatting to myself and the children.” Mrs. Gayle took the occasion to slip him a poem that coyly confessed her feelings: “A timid girl may yet be bold t’admire / The Poet’s fervor and the Patriot’s fire.” A few days later, Key wrote out his response, a poem to her entitled “To Miss———.” In it, he marveled that his song had won her from afar. He was honored. Key, the poet, knew how to speak to a woman’s heart:
And is it so?—a thousand miles apart,
Has lay [lyric] of mine e’er touched a gifted heart?
Brightened the eyes of beauty? won her smile?
Rich recompense for all the poet’s toil
That fav’ring smile, that brightened eye,
That tells the heart’s warm ecstasy.
This fervent exchange qualified Mr. Key and Mrs. Gayle as lovers at least in the nineteenth-century sense of the word: as romantic suitors. But they needed to act with restraint. Sarah Gayle was a passionate woman. She loved her husband and lamented in her diary that she no longer attracted his attention, or any other man’s. She felt the need to guard against physical temptation. By her own admission, she had run wild in her youth. Now she was wiser. “I will set no wicked things before mine eyes,” she quoted from Psalms in her diary. The potential victim of the libertine, she wrote, “must execrate the first glance of wantonness.”
Key also knew the lure of temptation. In the early 1820s, he joined the Delphian Club, a group of hard-drinking poets in Baltimore for whom he composed an erotic reverie entitled On a Young Lady’s Going into a Show Bath, which lovingly depicted a “trembling blushing maid” whose charms “would fire the frozen blood of apathy.” In tracing the progress of water through the luscious landscape of the lady’s naked self,
Key’s poetic gift for vivid, descriptive verse did not fail him:
Each drop of me should touch
should eager run
Down her fair forehead, down her blushing cheek
To taste the more inviting sweets beneath.
Key, it seems, liked to set wicked things before his eyes.
“Few men were more unfavorably circumstanced for a pious life,” conceded the Reverend John T. Brooke of Maryland, who knew Key when he was a young man. “Few had stronger inward impulses to control or a thicker array of outward temptations to encounter. He was a man of ardent convictions and strong impulses; these he had to grapple with continually.” Not long after his visit to Alabama, Key himself admitted thirst for admiration was a guilty weakness. “The pride of learning, the love of human applause, and the subtle acts of the great adversary of man [i.e., the devil] present powerful temptations, requiring incessant watchfulness,” he said. “It is difficult to be great, and successful and applauded, and humble.”
In mid-December, Key returned to Washington, his mission accomplished. “The Creek controversy which might have bathed Alabama in blood, was over, forgotten, a slight Jacksonian episode,” said one biographer.
But for Sarah Gayle and Frank Key, their “heart’s warm ecstasy” encounter would live on in their thoughts long after they had parted.
Roger Taney’s influence continued to grow in Jackson’s second term. “From the very beginning the gaunt man from Maryland was one of the most trusted advisers of the President,” said one historian. Only Martin Van Buren, now the vice president, and Francis Blair of the Globe had as much sway as the attorney general.
Taney served Jackson faithfully, especially on issues related to slavery. Like Jackson, Taney had no patience for the notion that Negroes could have rights under law, even if legally free. He emphasized the point in May 1832. South Carolina had passed a law authorizing the imprisonment of any free black sailors who came ashore while their ships were in port. During the administration of John Quincy Adams, Attorney General William Wirt had objected to South Carolina’s law, saying it was unconstitutional.
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