The news consumed Dan. This friend! This wife! So much for Dan’s admiration of stylish Southerners! His political calm was swept away, and he wept freely and without apology. His tears were copious enough that Wooldridge went with him to a “retiring” room, where Dan took a considerable time to compose himself to a degree that Wooldridge felt it safe to leave him.
Dan did not have the patience or peace of mind to wait for a hack at the Capitol; he strode homeward in the early darkness. Francis Mohun, a building contractor and Washington alderman who lived on Pennsylvania Avenue, saw him pass, “in a very excited condition. . .. His whole appearance, though I cannot exactly describe how it affected me, did affect me very seriously at the time.”14
In the Sickles household, both the maid, Bridget Duffy, and the guest, Octavia Ridgeley, could tell that this would be an uncomfortable night. Mr. Sickles’s gloom and suppressed anger seemed of a more distressful order tonight. He did not want to speak to Teresa, did not want to eat downstairs. He asked Bridget Duffy to bring him a tray of food in his bedroom upstairs, and she noticed tears when she delivered it to him. Octavia Ridgeley’s mother was out of town, so she was stuck at the Stockton Mansion, with some terrible domestic explosion likely to occur at any minute. Finding her normally lively friend Teresa pale and distracted, Octavia settled in the downstairs parlor and tried to entertain herself. Like Dan, Teresa wished Manny Hart, from New York, had been there, but he had sent a telegram saying he could not get away from the city. So Teresa inevitably went up to the bedroom at the front of the house to talk to Dan. Along the corridor, the convalescent child, Laura, was playing in the nursery room that she shared with Bridget, and when Bridget went up to see the child, she found the Sickleses’ bedroom door ajar. She heard loud conversation, and listened a moment, for even though she came from the stringently regulated sexual atmosphere of rural Ireland, she could have told Congressman Sickles a thing or two about Key and Teresa.
Dan was giving it to her now! She had begun by denying all but had then broken down and seemed to be fainting. Bridget moved on but came back twenty minutes later and knocked on the door to take Dan’s tray away. As she described it, there was “some unhappy feeling between Mr. and Mrs. Sickles.” Octavia Ridgeley could also hear the conflict. Dan’s noises of grief were, in her opinion, fearful; his groans seemed to come from his very feet.15
The evening ached away on this grim and freezing Saturday night. Some time after eight-thirty, Sickles emerged and called to both Octavia and Bridget to join him and his wife in the front bedroom. If today such a scene of domestic confusion would borrow its tone and even its lines from cinema, in the Victorian era it was a combination of the Bible, Shakespeare, and contemporary theater that influenced the speech and gestures of such crises of love, marriage, infidelity as were to be played here. Dan took into this confrontation with his wife the vivid memory of Edwin Forrest’s portrayal of Othello the Moor, and Othello’s torment at the idea of Desdemona’s infidelity. Though Dan was certainly desolated by all aspects of this business, it was simply not within the code either of the time or of a man like Dan Sickles to be rendered more sad than angry at his wife’s sins. Sadly for Teresa, he was required both by culture and by temperament to rage inordinately, to howl with reproach. At a time like this, as the two summoned women, the guest and the servant, entered, he was required by the conventions of the day to be ruthlessly severe.
Octavia and Bridget, on entering the room, saw a pallid Teresa, with tear-stained, lowered eyes, sitting at her desk in the process of writing or adding to a letter. Bridget was appropriately left standing while Dan pointed Octavia to a sofa by the window. There was silence in the room and a pregnant air of outrage. Teresa finished writing a little before nine, and Dan took the pages from her, scanned them, and laid them down with all but the bottom of the last page covered. He asked the two women to sign as witnesses the last, partly exposed page of the document. They had little idea of its contents, although Bridget knew better than Octavia that this was probably a form of confession of adultery.
Both women signed at once, anxious to be dismissed from the charged air of this bedroom. Dan thanked them and said they could go. What they had put their names to, a document in Teresa’s handwriting, which tonight had been rendered irregular by the pressures of guilt and recrimination, read as follows:
I have been in a house in Fifteenth Street, with Mr. Key. How many times, I don’t know. I believe the house belongs to a colored man. . .. Commenced going there the latter part of January. Have been in alone and with Mr. Key. Usually stayed an hour. There was a bed in the second story. I did what is usual for a wicked woman to do. The intimacy commenced this winter, when I came from New York, in that house—an intimacy of an improper kind. Have met a dozen times or more, at different hours of the day. On Monday of this week, and Wednesday also. . ..
Teresa went on to admit that she and Key would arrange assignations when they met in the street and at parties. “Never would speak to him when Mr. Sickles was at home, because I knew he [Sickles] did not like me to speak to him [Key].” Indeed, she said, she had not seen Mr. Key for some days after arriving in the city for the winter session of Congress. But when Key approached her and said he had rented the house, she agreed to meet him there. They did not eat and drink in the house, she declared, obviously in response to a question from Dan. The room was warmed by a wood fire. Key would go first, though sometimes they walked there together—“four times—I do not think more.” She had gone on her own the Wednesday before, between two and three, to meet Key, who was inside.
A detail that would in some eyes make Teresa appear more culpable was that Laura, recently ill but in perfectly renewed health, had been minded at the house of a friend, Mrs. Hoover, wife of the recently retired federal marshal, while Teresa was with Key. Teresa admitted—a detail that rankled with Dan—that it was Mr. Key who had dropped Laura off there, “at my request.” After Barton left Laura at the Hoovers’, he went to meet Teresa at a reception at the house of Senator Stephen Douglas, where Teresa had been communing with Mrs. Douglas and others while waiting for Barton. From this apparently chance meeting, Teresa and Key left separately. Key went first to light the fire in the house on Fifteenth Street, and Teresa followed. “Went in by the back gate. Went in the same bedroom, and there an improper interview was had. I undressed myself. Mr. Key undressed also. This occurred on Wednesday, 23rd February, 1859.”
What Dan had elicited from her were the sort of appalling details that no woman of Teresa’s class would voluntarily surrender except when overwhelmed by the savage disappointment of a wronged husband. And obviously she did not intend that this document should become public, though it might end up in the hands of a divorce lawyer. Even that prospect left her stupefied with humiliation.
One question Dan must have asked was something like “Did anything happen here, in Lafayette Square?” Teresa admitted Key had been in the Stockton Mansion not merely as Dan’s friend, but for erotic purposes. “Mr. Key has kissed me in this house a number of times. I do not deny that we have had connection in this house, last spring, a year ago, in the parlor, on the sofa. Mr. Sickles was sometimes out of town, and sometimes in.” But Teresa said she had not thought it right to go on meeting there, “because there are servants who might suspect something.” Then, under further pressure, she confessed that the affair had started long before the beginning of this congressional session. “I think the intimacy commenced in April or May, 1858.”
Generally, for her meetings at the house in Fifteenth Street, she further admitted, she had worn a black-and-white woolen plaid dress and a beaver hat trimmed with black velvet. But then she remembered that she had also worn a black silk dress, also a plaid silk dress, a black velvet cloak trimmed with lace, and a black velvet shawl trimmed, as the Baylises of Fifteenth Street had said, with a fringe.
Had Key ridden in the Sickleses’ carriage? Dan asked. Yes, he had, the written confession admitted. Had he called at the house rece
ntly, without my knowledge? asked remorseless Dan. Yes, said Teresa. “And after my being told not to invite him to do so, and against Mr. Sickles’ repeated requests.”
This part of the document, like other sections of the confession, was signed “Teresa Bagioli,” not “Teresa Sickles.”
For there were two postscripts to the main body of the document. The lawyer in Dan foresaw that in the case of a divorce, which in his present state he believed to be the sole course open to him, a lawyer for Teresa might say the confession had been forced from her. Thus, she had appended, at Dan’s demand, the assertion: “This is a true statement, written by myself, without any inducement held out by Mr. Sickles of forgiveness or reward, and without any menace from him. This I have written with my bed-room door open, and my maid and child in the adjoining room, at half past eight in the evening. Miss Ridgeley is in the house, within call.”
Again, she signed herself Teresa Bagioli, but there was still a last scatter of questions that had occurred to Dan. Yes, agreed Teresa, Key’s sister, wife of Representative Pendleton of Ohio, had dined in the Sickleses’ house “two weeks ago last Thursday with a large party. Mr. Key was also here . . . and at my suggestion he was invited, because he lived in the same house, and also because he’d invited Mr. Sickles to dine with him.”16
That night Dan tried to find sleep in the bedroom, in the bed he considered shamefully dishonored by Key. Teresa shared Octavia’s room, and, in the spirit of Catholic penitence, insisted on sleeping on the floor, her head resting on a stool. Whenever Bridget Duffy woke during the hours of dark, in the same room as young Laura, she heard “exclamations and sobbing” from both Dan’s room and Octavia’s room. Little Laura, bewildered by her parents’ sobs, had at last gone to her father’s room and spent the rest of the night with him. And so a night of polar cold gave way to the temperate morning so praised by the Reverend Smith Pyne’s Sabbath parishioners.
Octavia ate breakfast downstairs with Laura. Even when moving tentatively about the house, she could hear Dan’s grief wherever she was. His groans were unearthly. They would not have astounded his father. Had George Sickles been in Washington, he might have settled his son down. At the same time, Dan, knowing he needed a range of advice, turned, according to his long-held custom, to Tammany friends. He had heard that Sam Butterworth, a lawyer and supporter of his from New York and Tammany, who had worked with Sickles to help James Buchanan win the crucial state of New York, was visiting Washington that weekend, staying at the house of Senator Gwinn. Butterworth, taller than Dan and floridly good-looking, had as a reward for his work on the 1856 ballot been appointed head of the federal subtreasury in New York. He was a hardheaded opportunist and, unlike Manny Hart, was not well respected by Teresa. Nonetheless, Dan sent a message by servant to him: “Dear B. Come to me right away!” Butterworth showed the note to Gwinn, who knew Sickles well, and then to another guest in the house, Robert J. Walker, who had been for a time appointed governor of Kansas by Old Buck. “Sickles wants to see me immediately,” Butterworth told Walker. “What can this mean?”
Dan had also summoned Wooldridge to provide the comfort of familiar companionship and to be on hand for sensitive errands. But to use a term of a later century, it was Butterworth who was to act as his “spin doctor.” Wooldridge was the first to arrive, tired after having been out till midnight. He saw that Dan, in the study at the front of the house, was not himself in a good state. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was pacing up and down in acute distress. He could not even stay in the room for long. He would go upstairs, return down to the study, talk to Wooldridge, drift out again, and go upstairs. Every time he came back into the study, said Wooldridge, “he pressed his hands to his temples and would go over to the secretary and sob,” using the desk to prop himself upright. Because Dan was obviously in need of relief, Wooldridge told him to give vent to his tears.
Butterworth arrived about noon, while Dan was again upstairs. Wooldridge briefed him in the study, because he knew that any recital of the situation by Dan himself would bring on further bouts of tears. Wooldridge had permission to show Teresa’s confession, now on Dan’s desk, to Butterworth. In Dan’s world, a shame shared with a reliable brother was a shame halved. A desolated Teresa no doubt felt otherwise. When Butterworth had finished reading the confession and mounted the steps to the bedroom, he found Dan facedown on his pillow. Having followed on his crutches, Wooldridge witnessed the conversation. “I am a dishonored and ruined man,” Dan told his friend, “and cannot look you in the face!”
That combination of adjectives—“dishonored” and “ruined”— showed that Dan had ceased to think exclusively of what he saw as the wrong done him and had also begun to contemplate what the affair of Key and Teresa might do to him as a public man and as a man of honor. Despite what we would consider his melodramatic line, the fact was that Dan’s friends were profoundly touched by the depth of his feeling, and were convinced that he needed to be saved from a severe derangement of his senses; from lunacy, that is. Sam Butterworth at last persuaded him to come down to the study for a calmer conversation. Dan held an unlighted cigar clamped between his teeth as they descended. Butter-worth advised him to send his wife to her mother’s house in New York. Such a departure was close enough to the end of the session not to excite any remark. Then, “for the honor of his little daughter,” when the season ended and before Congress convened the following December, Dan should take a trip to Europe, distancing himself from a frequently vicious New York press, and his lawyers could arrange a separation in the meantime. This was the advice of Butterworth the lawyer, and it was good counsel.
Dan told him, “My friend, I would gladly pursue this course, but so abandoned, so reckless have Key and my wife been, that all the Negroes in that neighborhood, and I dare not say how many other persons, know all about the circumstances.”17
He had, in the language of the time, been cuckolded in an era when only those radical women known as Bloomers believed marriages to be equal partnerships, when men, even in splendid and contented marriages, were considered to own wives, when marriage was spoken of by most respectable men and women in terms of the husband’s proprietorship and governance of his wife, while women were seen to have been redeemed from degradation by possession of a husband. So Dan’s rights and his kindliness—of which there were many examples—had been violated in a most visible manner. It seemed, too, that Teresa Bagioli Sickles represented for him a zone of luscious, Italianate inviolability, an innocence to which he could return from his political wars, even from his sins. That sanctuary had now been multiply plundered. It was characteristic of Dan that he did not mind Butterworth’s and Wooldridge’s knowing; he would tell them anything, for they were his men. But the knowledge of men not bound to him in Democratic fraternity appalled him. To a greater or lesser extent, Washington knew about the Teresa–Key affair. Even the President must suspect. The Republicans knew! That public shame compounded Dan’s intimate sense of betrayal. In the Congress, he had loyally defended the world for which Barton Key stood, the world of Southern good sense and noblesse oblige. Barton had done much to prove that world an opportunistic stunt, a set of rehearsed manners hiding viciousness at the heart.
Dan did not yet know that Barton Key was that afternoon within a short distance of the place where he sought Butterworth’s counsel. During his affair with Teresa, Key had fluctuated between despair, fatalism, neurosis, and exaltation. But he was dependent on the sight of her, and that bright morning, with the streets turning to a morass from the melt of last night’s storm, and the temperature heading above a pleasant fifty degrees Fahrenheit, Key meant to spend in anticipatory joy of a signal from Teresa, and of a meeting that might be arranged and even achieved by midafternoon. He had come in to Willard’s Hotel from the Pendletons’ house in Georgetown. He must have taken the omnibus or a carriage, since his gray mount, Lucifer, was not to be seen in town that day. A mile or so across the town from Willard’s, in K Street near the courts, his four child
ren—Alice, James, Mary, Lizzie—lived in the house he had once shared with them and their mother. Today, he had no apparent desire to visit them. Nor did any fear of imminent sickness, which had sometimes delayed him in attending to his duties as district attorney, and had sent him last summer to the spas of Saratoga Springs and, before that, on a recuperative journey to Cuba, influence him today.
Key arrived at Willard’s relatively early and in the hotel barbershop had a shave and a hair trim. Then he walked up the hill to Pennsylvania, past the unfinished classic facade of the Treasury, and into Lafayette Square. He was dressed well, though not flamboyantly, in a gray-striped vest and trousers and a jacket of brown tweed and, since it was still cold this early, a brown overcoat. In his pocket, along with other things, he carried two brass keys, both of them crafted for the front door of 383 Fifteenth Street. In the side pocket of his jacket, he had a pair of opera glasses. He had also a coded anonymous letter he had received a few days ago, warning him that people knew about Mrs. Sickles and him. It was not enough to keep him away from Lafayette Square.
Given the existence of this letter, it is a wonder that, even with the sense of invincibility he derived from his love, he was not carrying a pistol in his pocket, for many gentlemen went armed in a city that was both politically and socially turbulent. Within a few days, a New York newspaper would comment, “Washington has for years been a bear-garden, in which most travelers have ventured armed.”18