And so it was now Representative Sickles who returned to Teresa in Bloomingdale. At the age of barely twenty, she had achieved the considerable eminence of being a federal legislator’s wife. By contrast, the energetically political Mary Todd Lincoln had to wait until she was twice that age to see her husband serve one unsuccessful term as an unimpressive congressman from Illinois. But the price of being Mrs. Congressman Sickles would be severe. To her friend Florence, Teresa confessed herself so distressed by the growing periods of separation from Dan that she begged Florence not to show anyone her letters about being alone. She did not want to give others license for gossip or gratification.
And, in any case, there was the promise of a better and more pleasurable time. Dan proposed taking Teresa and Laura with him to Washington, where they would live under one roof during the sessions of Congress.34
III
EARLY THAT WINTER, ELATED BY COMING to Washington as a legislator and lieutenant, Dan took up residence in a suite at the National, where a number of other congressmen, either well heeled or well funded, stayed. Dan’s hotel, together with Willard’s and Brown’s, and sundry respectable boardinghouses, provided accommodation for representatives and senators. The less-than-wealthy Abraham Lincoln and his wife had, during Lincoln’s stint in Congress, stayed at Mrs. Spriggs’s boardinghouse on the present site of one of the Library of Congress buildings and had occupied rooms so small that the indulged youngster Robert Lincoln disturbed other guests with his rowdiness. Often, representatives and senators of the same party or faction lodged together in what were called Messes. The F Street Mess of Southern Democrats was a feared coalition who sat at one table and talked politics all through dinner. Willard’s and the National were used temporarily by congressmen trying to find more permanent domiciles in the capital. As the inauguration of James Buchanan neared, many of the guests at the National were stricken with gastroenteritis, a disease typical in the experience of legislators, Washington having an unsavory reputation.1
Washington in the mid to late 1850s still had some of the character Charles Dickens had seen in the 1840s. The parkland of Washington was “a melancholy piece of waste ground with flowsy grass, which looks like a small piece of country which is taken to drinking, and has quite lost itself,” Dickens wrote. It was a place of “spacious avenues that begin in nothing and lead nowhere: streets, miles long, that only want houses, roads and inhabitants; and ornaments of great thoroughfares which only need thoroughfares to ornament.” Washington was, to Dickens’s and other folks’ jaundiced eyes, despicable for its lack of elegance, the epicenter of that abhorrent American habit of spitting. It was, as the great English novelist said, “the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva.” Congressmen spat on the steps of the Capitol and on its internal surfaces. The carpets of Willard’s did not inhibit the tobacco-chewing spitters; they were splotched with stains. Dan himself had the more urbane, metropolitan manner of chewing on a cheroot, but one met all kinds, from Californians to Appalachian farmers, in the Congress of the United States, and the spittoons were placed in abundance even in Dan’s day.2
Of course, Dickens brought to his descriptions of Washington the hubris of a native of the great city of London, but many of Dan’s contemporaries agreed with him. One Yankee legislator’s wife described the capital as a third-rate Southern city of some 61,000 souls. “Everything worth looking at seemed unfinished. Everything finished looked as if it should have been destroyed generations ago.” But although the capital was so rustic that the eminent Senator Henry Clay was attacked by a large goat in Pennsylvania Avenue, to young congressional wives it was, in its spaciousness and its social opportunities, what the young Southern bride and friend of Teresa’s Mrs. Roger Pryor found it to be: “a garden of delights.”3
With Laura and an Irish maid, Teresa made the rail trip to Washington for the first time late that winter. She was in a heightened state of anticipation. She would be with Dan at the heart of a national festival; she had an invitation to the inauguration of her friend James Buchanan and to the accompanying parties and balls. She, like other travelers, left New York at eight o’clock in the morning and got to Washington’s sooty, inadequate station about seven in the evening, after changing trains in both Philadelphia and Baltimore because of the lack of bridges and a standard railroad gauge. The Southerners had it even harder; some came north by steamer from Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, New Orleans, and Galveston. Congressmen of the Virginia aristocracy caught the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad to Acquia Landing, from where they had to take the steamer, with all their luggage and their black slave servants, to the capital.4
For newcomers like Teresa and Dan, the Southern Democratic gentry constituted the old hands of the Washington scene. Though there were isolated wealthy Northerners among the legislators, the Southerners on average had the higher wealth. They certainly also possessed the higher level of style and self-esteem. To Dan, it was the Southerners who, despite the unfinished dome on the Capitol, the unfinished steps of the Treasury, the still-lacking pillars of the White House, infused Washington with social self-importance. To do well in Democratic Washington, Teresa would need to impress the Southern Democratic brethren.
As Buchanan’s inauguration approached, Dan and his wife and child moved out of the National Hotel, for the guests fled when many, including the President-elect, fell ill with the gastroenteric infection. There was a rumor that the illness derived from poisoned rats that had fallen into the hotel well. The hotel blamed the outbreak on the city sewers, a regular and well-deserving target of blame. The Sickles family found accommodation and hospitality in the home of Jonah Hoover, the federal marshal for the District of Columbia. It was there that Dan and Teresa dressed for the inauguration.
On March 4, 1857, the day appointed, Dan shared an open carriage in the presidential procession of Washington notables with Representative John B. Haskin from upstate New York. The parade was headed by the Marine Band, which regularly played at the White House receptions, and by eight companies of regulars and militia. The Washington militia’s Montgomery Guard was led by a man who would become a principal figure in the history of Dan and Teresa. It was the popular district attorney of the District of Columbia, Philip Barton Key, wearing a uniform nearly as splendid as the one Dan had worn in London— blue and gold. Barton Key’s favorite mount of the moment was an iron-gray horse named Lucifer, which he rode ahead of his colorful detachment.
A little way along Philadelphia Avenue, the carriage of President Pierce and President-elect Buchanan, having come from the White House by a back way, slotted into the procession behind the militia and a float carrying a dazzling, full-bodied young woman swathed in satin and representing the Goddess of Liberty. Buchanan was pale and thin from the infection he had caught at the National. He had had to dose himself with tonics and anti-diarrhea medicine to be able to get into the presidential barouche and be cheered by the citizenry.
The Capitol, toward which the procession made its way, was in the process of being rebuilt, and the House of Representatives was being enlarged. Here, President Pierce, in the last day of his administration, entered with the new chief executive between the muskets of the honor guard, and the two men took their places by the Speaker’s chair before the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney. Congressmen from both houses entered and crowded into the desks of the chamber. In the gallery, Teresa had a reserved seat beside a friend from London days, Mr. Buchanan’s niece Harriet Lane. Harriet knew that her uncle intended to invite her to be the First Lady—to welcome and entertain guests at the White House, to stand at his side, smiling, and to be the social moderator and focus of the capital. Much of the conversation between the two young women may well have centered on that exciting prospect.
Teresa, looking more a schoolchild than a politician’s wife, clearly attracted the curiosity of other congressional wives in the gallery, who probably had read about Dan Sickles and his waywardness, and to whom the fragrant Teresa offer
ed such a contrast. Innumerable people remarked that she looked girlish and unsullied, as she sat beside Harriet Lane, in a dress of ruffled crinoline and with bare shoulders, which, once outside, she would cover with a shawl. On her head was a hat decorated with jonquils as a symbol of coming spring and of the promise of the era. She seemed to incarnate health, beauty, and virtue, and to reflect the substance of Buchanan’s reassuringly poetic inaugural speech. “The night is departing, and the roseate and propitious dawn now breaking upon us promises a long day of peace and prosperity for our country. To secure this, all we of the North have to do is to permit our southern neighbors to manage their own domestic affairs, as they permit us to manage ours.” At the rostrum, Buchanan was sworn in by Justice Taney, and the Southerners in the gallery and on the floor of the chamber were delighted—a Southern Chief Justice swearing in a southward-leaning chief executive.5
The following evening, a huge inaugural ball was held in a vast temporary structure in Judiciary Square. Among the guests were many of Dan’s campaign supporters, who had fought for both him and the President. One of them, Sam Butterworth, was not dancing. He had been shot in the foot during a carouse, when, like an omen, a pistol carried by New York’s postmaster, Isaac Fowler, dropped out of Fowler’s pocket and accidentally fired. Considering that Dan was a novice congressman, one commentator noticed how many experienced men approached him for a word: Jeremiah Black, soon to be Buchanan’s Attorney General; Senator Slidell of Louisiana, the Buchanan and Cuba man, and his beautiful Creole wife; the new Vice President, John Breckinridge; wiry Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois; and Colonel Forney of Pennsylvania, who had recruited Dan for the London job. Chevalier Wikoff was there too, still a good friend to Teresa, as he would be to many a woman bearing secret or not-so-secret woes.
When the gray-haired, avuncular President entered, with his awkward gait and crookedly held head, at about eleven o’clock, followed by Miss Harriet Lane on the arm of a senator, “Hail to the Chief” resonated through the wooden structure.6
A welcome figure at the inaugural ball, District Attorney Philip Barton Key, who had led the Montgomery Guards in the inauguration procession, was already entrenched as a capital favorite by the time Teresa and Dan arrived in Washington. The powerful Mrs. Virginia Clay of Alabama, queen of the Southern Democrats and right-minded people, wife of Senator Clement C. Clay, said that Mr. Key was foremost among the popular men in the capital and that his sister, Mrs. George Pendleton, possessed a classic beauty. Key, wrote Mrs. Clay, “was a widower during my acquaintance with him, and I recall him as the handsomest man in all Washington society.” In appearance he was an Apollo, said Mrs. Clay, and prominent “at all the principal functions; a graceful dancer, he was the favorite of every hostess of the day. Clever at repartee, a generous and pleasing man, who was even more popular with other men than with women.” Whether everyone saw him as an Apollo, out of his militia uniform, Key was a sandy-haired, tall, languid fellow of thirty-nine whom people tended to call by his second name, Barton. In the recent years of his widowerhood, before his meeting that night with Teresa Sickles reinvigorated his life, he had sometimes been careless with dress, occasionally coming to dinner with a riding whip under his arm, or appearing at formal occasions still dressed in the top boots and leather leggings he had worn when riding.
Barton could get away with all that, since he came from an old and enormously renowned Maryland family. His late father, Francis Scott Key, writer of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” had himself held the post his son now occupied. Barton’s uncle was another iconic figure, the elderly and fearsome Chief Justice Roger Taney. But Barton Key attended the inaugural ball not purely for social reasons. He was uneasy about his job. Recently he had argued a difficult court case. A Californian congressman named Philemon P. Herbert, breakfasting in Willard’s dining room, had made an insulting remark about the Irish waiters. One of them, Thomas Keating, objected to the affront, at which Herbert drew a pistol and shot Keating dead. The ambassador from the Netherlands, who had been eating breakfast at Willard’s at the time, could have been useful to District Attorney Key, but would not permit himself, as a diplomat, to be summoned as a witness. Ultimately, to the disgust of Washington’s Irish community, Herbert was acquitted. To Key’s distress, the question of Herbert’s assumption that Keating himself was armed, in a city where so many were armed, was a factor in the successful defense. Nonetheless, Key had been widely criticized for failing to bring about a guilty verdict, and he feared that Buchanan might share the view. Since the position of federal district attorney was in the granting of the new President, Key was eager to speak to as many intimates of Buchanan as he could, seeking their influence on his behalf. So at some stage in the evening, the tall, elegant Key was seen bowing slightly toward the shorter, dapper, energetic Sickles. And on that night, Key met Teresa.7
Teresa, an enthusiastic horsewoman, admired Key not least for his being an accomplished horseman. She felt enlarged and fortunate in his presence. She may have been informed by other young Washington women about Key’s tragic loss. Barton had grieved intensely for his wife, and had thereby attracted the attention of many sympathetic people, especially young widows and spinsters. He met many of them regularly, since he liked Washington society and attended daytime receptions. Teresa, who admired Dan’s energy, was willing to overlook Barton’s apparent indolence; he had never been the most energetic DA, but in a way his bloodlines and class discouraged too much effort. Besides, he had for some time suffered from a heart condition, or, as one commentator said, imagined he did, “which gave him a soured and discontented look.” Those who knew him best said that his eccentricities of manner covered a kind heart.8
“There was,” said another laudatory commentator on Teresa, “something inexpressibly fascinating and delightful about her fresh girlish face, and her sweet amiable manner. She was as kind to a raw boy just let loose on society as to its Secretary of State; great and small, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican—she treated all with the same unvarying gentleness and lady-like amiability.” And unlike many Northerners, Teresa had cultivated tastes in music and could speak well at least three languages—Italian, French, and English—and make her way in Spanish and German. No wonder, this commentator added, that she became such a favorite in Washington. And little wonder Key found her a refreshing presence.9
In the first days of his presidency, Buchanan received an astonishing gift from the Supreme Court. The same eminent Southerners who had helped ensure Buchanan’s election, and had danced with Teresa at the inaugural ball, were bringing pressure to bear on the Supreme Court and on Key’s uncle, old Roger Taney. In the face of abolitionist fervor, they were zealous about establishing as a matter of law that Southern slavery had legal force anywhere, in any state, and that if, for example, in the new western territories of the United States, there was a property holder who owned a slave, his right retained full legal force. The status of an aging slave named Dred Scott was then being fought before the Supreme Court, in a case being financed by Missouri abolitionists.
Dred Scott and his wife had been owned by an army surgeon, who had taken them from the slave state of Missouri to a military post in Illinois, and then to the northern section of the Louisiana Purchase that became Minnesota. The two slaves had lived for such a long period in free territory that they now claimed freedom. Abolitionists had helped them get the case as far as the Missouri High Court, where it had been defeated, and then encouraged them to take an appeal to the United States Supreme Court to confirm their condition as free people.
Unhappily for Scott and his supporters, there were five Southern justices on the Court. If Dred Scott lost his case, as expected, along regional lines, it would mean that Congress had no power to ban slavery from new territories, including Kansas. The Southern institution would be triumphant and unassailable. According to the grand Southern strategy, the Supreme Court did find against Dred Scott, by a vote of seven to two. Taney and his fellow justices thus decided t
hat Scott’s sojourn for many years in Illinois and for a similar period at Fort Snelling did not make him free once he returned to Missouri, or wherever he went. For the federal government to try to regulate slavery, ruled Justice Taney, was unconstitutional, since it denied the property rights granted citizens under the Fifth Amendment. In addition, seven of the justices found against Dred Scott because, they averred, no slave or descendant of a slave could be or ever had been a U.S. citizen.
Though Dan approved the general tenor of the findings, he must have found some aspects offensive. He did not practice the peculiar institution of slavery, had no desire to do so, but, in a way, he had grown up with it; legal slavery had existed in New York until 1827, when he was eight. Many of his congressional associates practiced slavery, and he was at ease with that as, at worst, a necessary evil. Most of his Southern friends possessed apparently contented, well-disciplined, and well-fed slaves, and some, like the Clays and Slidells, owned plantations based on the labor of supposedly smiling hundreds of African slaves. Slavery was a normal institution in Washington, too; slave sales occurred functionally and without fuss in the capital.
As most American schoolchildren are taught, the Dred Scott decision would achieve a reputation for judicial infamy in American history, but at the time it gave Buchanan massive temporary aid. It denied the right of Congress to decide on the very issue—slavery in the West—that had created so much argument and division in the Democratic Party and the nation. President Buchanan saw himself, at the beginning of his incumbency, as liberated by the Supreme Court to get on with other business. But the implications of the Dred Scott case, instead of putting the North in its place, terrified many reasonable people. Abe Lincoln, a purely local and previously obscure political figure in rural Illinois, would soon delineate the crisis with what would become a famous prophetic image: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He would, even more accurately, say that advocates of slavery were trying to push the institution forward “until it shall become lawful in all the States. . . North as well as South.”10