A few weeks after the first meeting between Sickles and Key at the inaugural ball, Marshal Jonah Hoover held a stag whist party for sensible and sportive Democratic gentlemen. Teresa and Mrs. Hoover absented themselves and were accompanied by one of Dan’s many friends to the theater while a number of congressmen, journalists, and eminent Washingtonians convened in Hoover’s house on Pennsylvania Avenue, east of the White House. During the evening of cards and brandy, a number of men overheard genial Dan mention to Key that he had spoken to the President about Key’s likelihood of being reconfirmed in his post, and that the President sounded positive that Key would be asked to continue as federal DA. Key expressed his gratitude, but this favor was characteristic of Dan’s generosity to men he liked. He had no outstanding service to expect back from Key, unless it was some entrée to the Southern aristocracy. But Dan already had that, by way of his pro-Southern stance in the House. Most of those who witnessed the event, including Congressman John Haskin, considered Dan’s advocacy of Key an act of gratuitous generosity.
Willing as Dan was to intercede for a stranger, Philip Barton Key, he had been doubly willing to intervene for his faithful friends from Tammany. A number of those who had helped him and Buchanan to office were now in profitable situations Dan had effortlessly arranged for them. Manny Hart had become surveyor of the Port of New York, and the recuperated Sam Butterworth, who had attended the inaugural ball with a wounded foot, was head of the federal subtreasury in New York. Loyal Captain Isaiah Rynders of the Dead Rabbits was given the post of U.S. marshal for the Southern District of New York, and, at a humbler level, a young man named Beekman, who had done legwork for Dan in the Third District (and who had met and been smitten with Teresa), was rewarded with a clerkship in the Department of the Interior. Finally, the maimed, intelligent George Wooldridge of Albany, who had been a lieutenant of Dan’s during his time in the New York State legislature, became a clerk at the Capitol. George Wooldridge was a particularly loyal, reliable, and doughty younger friend of the Sickleses. He dealt bravely with a disability—he had suffered infantile paralysis and could move only on crutches—and his intellectual alertness made him a respected official around the Capitol. Dan trusted him absolutely.
Dan was seeking to set up another friend, Charles K. Graham, the young New York civil engineer who had helped with the park proposal, as engineer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This would prove to be a dangerous favor. The man Graham was trying to replace, a man named Murphy, was aggrieved enough to believe that Sickles had spread negative stories about him at the Department of the Navy and elsewhere to smooth the path for Graham.11
Meanwhile, Teresa was setting up her own base. The older and more established women of Washington were intensely interested in her, not least because she needed to be fitted by Mrs. Clay, Mrs. Pryor, Mrs. Slidell, Mrs. Postmaster Brown, Mrs. Rose Greenhow, and Mrs. Senator Gwinn into the unofficial seedings of beauty and wit that members of Washington society carried about in their heads.
Harriet Lane, First Lady and a few years older than Teresa, had been given a respectable but lower ranking on this list. Virginia Clay thought that Harriet possessed a no-nonsense, firm-faced, straight-parted directness, but beauty was made of more complex equations than this. According to Mrs. Roger Pryor, Harriet Lane, though “universally admired . . . lacked magnetism . . . a very handsome, fair, blue-eyed, self-centered young woman.”
One high-ranked beauty who would become a close friend of Teresa’s was Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a woman from a Southern-leaning family in Maryland. Rose was eminently amusing and had what people thought of as a Dixie kind of openness, masking a craftiness more profound than that of Mrs. Clay. She was the widow of a State Department official, and it was believed that some of her income came from keeping foreign embassies abreast of what was said by senior officials and politicians at social events in Washington. She was in her way practicing for what would become a significant and tragic career as a Southern spy. In addition to Rose Greenhow, Mrs. Alicia Pendleton, wife of Ohio congressman George Pendleton and sister of Philip Barton Key, was usually listed among the more beauteous of Washington, as was John Slidell’s wife, a Louisiana Creole woman.
But Mrs. Pugh, the wife of Senator George Ellis Pugh from Ohio, topped the rankings, was believed to be the most classically exquisite of Washington women, and had a splendid maiden name, Thérèse Chalfont. Like everyone else, Teresa had heard the tale about the night the Austrian ambassador, Chevalier Hulseman, first saw Thérèse Chalfont Pugh and fell to his knees in front of her, declaring to the company that she was not only the most adorable woman in Washington, not only the most adorable in the Americas, but the most adorable in the world. Though perhaps lacking in the reserved self-confidence of the others, Teresa joined Mrs. Pugh and Mrs. Slidell to become one of a triad of Washington’s splendors. Mrs. Clay told people that Teresa was a double for the renowned, luscious diva of her age, Maria Piccolomini. In all these matters, Virginia Clay was certainly the chief social arbiter. People often called the group of Southern congressmen who lodged at Brown’s Hotel the Clay mess, and it was not entirely to honor the powerful Alabama husband, Senator Clement Claiborne Clay, but also to give credit to the resolute, lively, accomplished, and clever wife.12
Having thus made a splendid range of new friends during the Thirty-fourth Congress, Teresa took Laura back to Bloomingdale, and after Dan concluded his business, he too returned to his law practice, his Tammany haunts, and his retreat at Bloomingdale. But, according to pattern, he was frequently back in Washington, making representations on behalf of New York shipping companies and financial houses to the cabinet and sundry committees on trade and fiscal policy. That spring he could be found quartered again in a suite at Willard’s. There, one morning while he was at breakfast, he received an angry note from a representative of the threatened Brooklyn Navy Yard engineer Murphy, accusing him of having assailed Murphy’s character. Dan wrote an angry note in reply, denouncing Murphy’s letter as “apparently intended to deter me from duty as a representative.”
At Willard’s early on the morning of May 6 occurred one of those Sicklesesque incidents which Bennett of the New York Herald still recorded with derision and other sections of the press were delighted to grab on to as a means of showing that Dan, though he had achieved the gravity of a seat in Congress, was the same old Dan. He had been sleeping when an urgent knocking at the door roused him. Murphy, bearing a cowhide whip, hurled himself into the room, where Dan struggled with him, backed him into a corner, and began throttling him. When he asked Murphy whether he was satisfied yet, Murphy nodded, and Dan let him depart but kept the whip to show that he had won the encounter. He had, however acquired a black eye, and he immediately wrote an account of Murphy’s behavior to the Secretary of the Navy, Isaac Toucey, who dismissed Murphy for his “unwarranted assault on Congressman Sickles.” Two days later, Charles K. Graham was appointed civil engineer of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in Murphy’s place. Murphy’s only vengeance was to write a stinging passage on Dan in the Evening Post. “Graduating from the worst sinks of iniquity in the city,” wrote Murphy, “he has led the life of a professional vagabond. In debt to everybody, a fashionable roué with a degree of acquired smartness that belongs to men who are only ‘bold and bad’ enough to challenge the laws of morality, and to fight the easy virtue of frail women, he stands before the public . . . a disgraced and vanquished man, and as such I take my leave of him.”13
In the saner zone of Bloomingdale, Teresa and Laura enjoyed their first full summer by the river. The banks of the Hudson were a splendid playground where handsome and fond Maria Cooke Bagioli spent time with Teresa and the strong-willed five-year-old girl, who reminded Teresa of Dan. Frequently the two women, the child, and an accompanying maid made a coach or carriage journey down Broadway to shop and visit Laura’s grandfather, Antonio Bagioli, conducting his renowned voice and music classes in the Bagioli house. Teresa may have thought somewhat of her pleasant friend Barton and wished he woul
d visit New York and take her riding, since the Sickles family could not go to the mountains or the country that year, Dan being engaged in a fascinating case. His client was one Charles Devlin, who had been appointed street commissioner by the mayor and aldermen. The state authorities in Albany, however, had already promised the job to a man named Conover. When Conover arrived at City Hall and demanded that Devlin vacate his office and leave behind all the relevant documents and maps, Devlin refused. The state attorney general had Devlin arrested and confined in the Lower Manhattan prison known as the Tombs, whose sinister Egyptian-style façade gave onto a dismal interior. Dan, with his abhorrence of what he saw as Albany tyranny, was employed to get Devlin out of the Tombs and back to his office at City Hall.
His opening statement to the court had an elegance and, in its finer arguments, a scholarship that showed quite clearly why, despite his sins, he was a figure worthy of serious attention. Devlin “is imprisoned, I will take the liberty of saying . . . for a political offense, as the result of a conflict between the state and the city authorities, as to which of them has the right to fill a certain office.” He took the trouble to refer the judge to the case of James II, before the Revolution of 1688, when the King attempted to appoint the president of Magdalen College, Oxford, and backed up his appointment with bayonets, “to enforce his mandate by violence. . .. And the history of that time tells us that no Crown lawyer could be found so recreant to the teachings of his profession, and the first principles of public liberty, as to defend this usurpation of the King in the court of justice.” A string of similar case histories would stretch his defense out to forty-two printed pages. “We invoke for Mr. Devlin all the powers of this great writ of liberty—the writ of habeas corpus—a writ which arose in an age when these acts of tyranny were common and frequent. . .. Let us not, in this enlightened age, imitate those follies which history has recorded as the parent of revolutions.” But even with so strong an advocate, Devlin lost, and Dan’s former baiter Bennett fully reverted to enmity by claiming that Dan had stooped to “betray the cause of Devlin, and . . . play the spy on behalf of the Conover party.” George Sickles was outraged for Dan’s sake and urged his son to take legal action. So Dan started a time-consuming civil libel case, claiming $150,000 in damages, and persuaded the district attorney to let him sue Bennett for criminal libel. For this enterprise, Dan’s lawyer was John Graham, who seven years earlier, in the company of his brothers, had participated in the horsewhipping of Bennett.
For whatever reason, neither case reached a conclusion, and within a short time, a truce was reached between the acid-penned Bennett and roguish Dan, and in the future, Mrs. Bennett, between her attempts to talk to the dead at séances, would be a guest at the Sickleses’ table in Washington.14
Fall brought a close to what had been a turbulent New York summer, and Dan returned to Washington for the new congressional session. He was looking for a house in the capital this time, so that he could accommodate his family and avoid the tedium of living in hotels, boardinghouses, and rooms borrowed from friends. Previously, Dan had visited a house in Lafayette Square often referred to as the Stockton Mansion. “Mansion” was perhaps an overstatement. It was a white stucco residence, with basement windows almost on street level, two stories above that, and attic dormer windows protruding from the roof. A sweeping iron-railed staircase ran down to the street from the front door. It was less than a hundred paces from Pennsylvania Avenue, and from its windows one could look out diagonally across the young trees of Lafayette Square to the White House. The same ailanthus trees that grew along Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the presidential mansion and the Treasury, each tree set in a whitewashed little pen reminding some people of a sentry box, were planted on the pavements around Lafayette Square. The rent of the Stockton Mansion was high, $3,000 a year, the entirety of Dan’s congressional salary. Nor would his domestic establishment come cheaply; the house was to have a nursemaid-cum-maid for Laura and Teresa, a coachman for the expensive carriage Dan ran, a footman, and a cook. But Dan pursued the lease on this property and asked his new friend District Attorney Barton Key to act for him in the matter. A powerful and unnamed set of financial, manufacturing, and transport interests in New York wanted Dan to have a house of this nature—one commentator believed the entire costs were absorbed by a New York steamship company whose executives frequently visited.
One gets a view of the sort of people eager to see Dan situated close to the White House from a friend of his named Samuel Mitchell Barlow. Barlow, a lawyer and the brother-in-law of Dan’s dear friend the Irish patriot Thomas Francis Meagher, had married into a steel-manufacturing family named Townsend. He served on the board of a number of north-south rail companies, and thus had the normal New York Democratic interest in preserving the Union, and a respect for Buchanan for having seemed to achieve that goal. Barlow’s father-in-law, Peter Townsend, at one stage asked him to approach Dan Sickles and plead with him to use his good influence to ensure that U.S. steelmakers would not have to compete with foreign steelworks for navy contracts. Whether Barlow and Townsend directly supported Sickles with cash subscriptions is not clear, but they certainly stood for the interests that had the resources to make Dan’s life in Lafayette Square a sumptuous one.
Again, the late-twentieth-century idea that there was ever a capital in which special interests lacked leverage is at odds with the complex net of interests in Washington during the 1850s.15
Here, in his rented house, Dan could entertain and charm Cabinet members and even the President. The Stockton Mansion had spacious downstairs rooms; the parlor or drawing room on the ground floor ran for some eighty or eighty-five feet. The square as Dan prepared to live there boasted many renowned and wealthy householders. Speaker James Orr found it adequate to his needs to occupy one floor of the Decatur House, barely a hundred steps up the square. The wealthy retired grocery millionaire John McBlair occupied another apartment in the Decatur House. St. John’s Episcopal, virtually the parish church of the White House, was just across H Street from the square. At the corner farther from the White House, Captain Charles Wilkes, who would leave his name on a huge slice of Antarctica, had the old Dolley Madison house. In the years in which President Madison was survived by his august wife, her home had been such a center of Washington social life that people claimed it more important for the wives of congressmen to be presented to Dolley here than to the President on Pennsylvania Avenue. Hard up for cash but not for social credit, Dolley had died eight years past, in 1849—hence the presence of the famous explorer in her old house. Partway along that block, and closer to the White House, was the Washington Club, also known as the National Club or Clubhouse. From the windows of the Clubhouse there was less intervening foliage than in modern times, and one could have a direct view of the Stockton Mansion, the Sickleses’ new home. This line of vision would have an extreme impact on the Sickles family, and the most fundamental one possible on Barton Key.16
Here, in Lafayette Square, the Sickleses established their social pattern—Teresa held receptions on Tuesday afternoons, and the couple staged weekly dinners for invited guests on Thursday nights. To Teresa’s at-homes came the eminent women of Washington, together with sundry officials and bureaucrats. Though young, she spoke to them as a peer, and they were impressed that she possessed the complex gifts required to maintain a fine house, a corps of servants, and a good dinner table. Some of the younger male visitors became moonstruck over her superior gifts of body and temperament. They included a sickly young man, Henry Watterson, who lived at Brown’s Hotel with his parents, and Samuel Beekman, the young clerk of the Interior Department who had been an election aide to Dan. Later, when he was a renowned newspaperman, Henry Watterson would say significantly that he both admired Teresa and sympathized with her on the matter of “her husband’s neglect.” To a young man who saw Teresa as all that was wholesome and exquisite, Dan’s absences must have seemed willful and inexplicable. In any case, Teresa’s much-praised ease of mann
er and general charm led Beekman and Watterson to hope that she would accommodate them romantically. They might have been well advised to take account of her already obvious interest in men twice her age.17
Often the women of the capital would be back at the Stockton Mansion on Thursday nights, bringing their famous husbands with them. “The President,” said one who was in Washington at that time, “was always fond of Mr. Sickles and his wife and was a frequent visitor at their house.” Their dinners and parties were “irreproachable.” Even Dan’s old enemies at the Herald acknowledged that Dan, whether at home in Bloomingdale or in Washington at the Stockton Mansion, was distinguished “for an agreeable and pleasant social manner. . .. The hospitalities common to society were elegantly dispensed by himself and Mrs. Sickles. There were all the surroundings of wealth, taste and fashion.” The Herald too confirmed the universal view that Teresa was a great social favorite. “She dispensed the hospitalities of Mr. Sickles’s house with a charming grace which lent them a double attraction.” Nor was anything deficient in Teresa herself. “Mrs. Sickles,” wrote an occasional visitor to the Stockton Mansion, “was famous for her jewelry and toilettes.”
Young Mrs. Stanton, for example, brought to these dinners her husband, Edwin Stanton, cherubic-faced but skilled in constitutional law and civil law; Mrs. Gwinn of Texas came with her prodigiously wealthy husband, Senator William Gwinn. It was reported that the Gwinns spent $75,000 a year on their annual Washington sojourn; that is, twenty-five times a congressional salary. Marshal Hoover was often at the Stockton Mansion, as were Representative Haskin and his wife, Representative Pendleton and his. And frequently one or two cabinet members would add an air of august statesmanship to the table of this tyro congressman and his young wife.18