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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

The ghosts of Washington: "Devil Dan" Sickles other woman

 


Ye who, passing graves by night,

Glance not to the left nor right,

Lest a spirit should arise,

Cold and white, to freeze your eyes...

James Russell Lowell, "The Ghost-Seer"

The ghost of Philip Barton Key II was the son of Francis Scott Key and the nephew of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, is said to haunt Lafayette Square and can be seen on dark nights near the spot where he was shot.

In the spring of 1858, Key, who was the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, began having an affair with Teresa Bagioli Sickles, the wife of his friend Daniel Sickles.



Teresa Bagioli Sickles (Born in New York City as Teresa Da Ponte Bagioli) was the daughter of the wealthy and famous Italian singing teacher Antonio Bagioli. Her mother, Maria was the adopted (But alleged natural) child of Lorenzo Da Ponte, a noted music teacher, who had worked as Mozart's librettist on such masterpieces as The Marriage of Figaro.

 



Maria’s half- brother, a New York University professor, was a teenage friend of Dan Sickles, (Below) the son of Manhattan patent lawyer and politician who had learned the printer's trade but wanted more for his career.



 The Da Ponte family helped Sickles secure a scholarship to New York University.  They also allowed him to move into their home and knew Teresa, his future wife, in her infancy. Sickles, who at age 20 had already been indicted for fraud, was admitted to the bar in 1846 and was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1847 as a Tammany Hall hack.

 


Fanny White (Born Jane Augusta Blankman in 1823) was a successful New York Prostitute, Madam, brothel owner, and courtesan.  She was noted on two contents for her wit, her charm, and her beauty, and her ability to coral powerful and wealthy men. White became Sickles kept woman and kept her in money and jewels. He probably arranged the mortgage on Fanny’s brothel, under the name of his friend Antonio Bagioli and Fanny contributed a portion of the brothel earnings to Sickles’ election campaign.  When he was elected to the New York State Assembly later that year, he had the bad sense to take her up to Albany and introduced her to his fellow legislators and gave her a tour of the Assembly Chamber. 

Most of the legislators knew who Fanny was and were outraged at Sickles indiscretion and was censured by members of the Whig party.  On that same trip, when the couple went out of the town for the evening Fanny dressed as a man, which was illegal at the time, and was subsequently arrested and placed in jail for the night.

In September 1852, when Sickles married sixteen-year old Teresa Bagioli, Fanny was so upset that she followed Sickles to his hotel and beat him with a riding crop. But they made up and in August of 1853, Fanny travelled with Sickles to England, leaving his pregnant wife at home.

 Sickles arranged Fanny’s passport, when Sickles was acting as secretary to James Buchanan, the U. S. Minister to the Court of St. James.  Once in London, Sickles and Fanny cavorted openly, attending theaters, operas, and diplomatic events, arm in arm.

Remarkably, Fanny was even introduced to Queen Victoria at a reception at Buckingham Palace, as “Miss Bennett of New York.”, the name being a slap at the hot-tempered Scot, James Gordon Bennett, founder, editor, and publisher of the New York Herald, whom Sickles despised.  From that point on, Fanny used the last name, Bennett.

James Gordon Bennett

 When James Gordon Bennett learned that Fanny had used his name in the royal court and was now using it as her business name as well, Bennett was furious and would eventually get his revenge in his newspapers, which, at the time, had the highest circulation in America.

Fanny left London in the spring of 1854 when Teresa Bagioli Sickles arrived in the city to join her husband. Fanny reportedly toured the continent and was said to have been tossed out of the Paris Opera by the police after causing a drunken scene. She eventually returned to New York and open more brothels.

In 1859, she met and married noted criminal defense lawyer Edmond Blankman, seven years her junior. Fanny died suddenly on October 12, 1860, at age 37. A rumor swept the city that she had been poisoned by her husband who wanted her fortune (Estimated to be in the range of two to four million dollars, mostly in real estate) for his own.

The City Coroner performed an autopsy and although he found signs of exposure to tuberculosis, syphilis, symptoms of cardiovascular disease, and extensive bleeding in the brain, no poison was found.

 In 1851, Assemblyman Sickles, now thirty-three years old, met the fifteen-year-old Teresa again and, according to him anyway, fell instantly in love with her and proposed marriage. 

Although her parents understandably refused to consent to the marriage, the couple wed anyway, in 1852, in a civil ceremony.  Seven months Teresa gave birth to their child, Laura Buchanan Sickles.  (Sickles later had a falling out with his daughter and they never spoke afterwards.  She died before her father did, of alcoholism in 1891)

 In 1855, Sickles was elected to the New York Senate and served until 1857 when he won a seat in the United States House of Representatives. The couple were deeply involved in Washington society and hosted popular formal dinners every Thursday evening at their rented home on Madison Place. Teresa befriended the difficult Mary Todd Lincoln and was said to have attended séances held by Mary Todd.

Sickles continued to his love affairs with other women in both New York and Washington (at a leased room in a Baltimore hotel) and badly neglected his wife and child.  In the meantime, in the spring of 1858, Teresa started an affair with Georgetowner Phillip Barton Key who said to follow Teresa at social gatherings and was often seen leaving her home while her husband was away. The charming and flirtatious Key, said to be the most handsome man in Washington, was a widower and a father to four children. 

Key

The affair between Teresa and Key was widely known in Washington’s gossipy social circles and on February 26, 1859, someone sent Dan Sickles a letter telling him about his wife’s affair with young Mister Keyes. Sickles showed the note to a friend, George Wooldridge, and then “put his hands to his head and sobbed in the lobby of the House of Representatives” although the accuracy of that event is highly doubtful.



Teresa in later years

Sickles probably knew what was happening. Friends of Sickles had warned him about Keys reputation as a lady’s man and in March of 1858, Sickles confronted Keys over the allegations that he was carrying on an affair with Sickles wife.  But keys was a silver-tongued lawyer and Sickles walked away from the meeting absolutely sure that Keys could be trusted around his wife. Sickles looked into the matter and found evidence that the claims were true. He learned that the pair often slipped away to a vacant house on 15th Street, then a poor area, that Key rented. 

Sickles confronted Teresa on Saturday night, February 26th, in her bedroom (They had separate sleeping arraignments, on different floors) with the facts, she broke down and admitted to the affair and wrote a confession, by force, saying as much.

 


Teresa's handwritten confession

 The letter was later reprinted on the front page of Harper’s Weekly, a national yellow sheet newspaper.  In part, the letter read, “I did not think it safe to meet (Phillip) in this house, because there are servants who might suspect something….He then told me he had hired (a) house as a place where he and I could meet. I agreed to it. There was a bed in the second story…. The room is warmed by a wood fire. Mr. Key generally goes first… I went there alone. I did what is usual for a wicked woman to do”. 

A coachman later testified that Key and Teresa would take carriage rides to various cemeteries, where, according to him, “They would walk down the grounds out of my sight, and be away an hour or an hour-and-a-half.”

The next day, in the afternoon, Samuel Butterworth, a friend of Sickles who had arrived to Sickles house to comfort him, spotted Key in Lafayette Square sitting on a bench outside the Sickles home, allegedly signaling to Teresa with a handkerchief.  Sickles sent a friend outside to delay Key while Sickles armed himself with several pistols, a revolver and two derringers, placed on an overcoat and left the house, and confronted Key at the corner of Madison Place N.W. and Pennsylvania Avenue, across the street from the White House.

 Sickles yelled “Key, you scoundrel, you have dishonored my home; you must die.” Pulled out a derringer and shot at the unarmed Key’s groin but missed. (Other accounts say he reached his hand to his breast for his weapon).  Keys and Sickles struggled for a few moments while a dozen witnesses watched. Key broke loose and ran across the street, pitching a pair of opera glasses at Sickles and then hid behind a tree.

Sickles slowly walked across the street, pulled out a second derringer and shot Key in the thigh forcing him to drop to the sidewalk and beg, “Don’t shoot me”, and shouting, “Murder.”

 Sickles then pulled out his revolver and fired, hitting the tree.  He walked up to Key, who was laying prone on the ground, and standing over him fired a shot point blank into his chest.  A fifth shot misfired and bystanders wrestled the gun away from him before he could deliver the ‘coup de grace’ bullet.  Key died moments later after being carried into the nearby Benjamin Ogle Tayloe House. Key is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington.

“He deserved it” Sickles said when he was told Key was dead.

Of course, there was no need to shoot Key to get justice.  Key and Teresa had committed what the courts then called criminal intercourse, adultery, a crime in the 19th century.  Sickles could have had Keys arrested and jailed, especially in light of the evidence he held. Sickles walked to the home of Attorney General Jeremiah Black, a few blocks away on Franklin Square, and confessed to the murder and surrendered his weapons. 

He was taken to jail, but as a Tammany Hall politician in Washington, life as a prisoner wasn’t altogether terrible. Sickles was allowed to see as many visitors as he wished, and he saw dozens of them and was allowed to use the head jailors apartment as a receiving room. He was also allowed to carry a weapon inside the jail. He also kept Teresa’s wedding ring in his cell, having taken it from her after he killed Key.

A rather dramatic view of Sickles in jail.

The government half-heartedly indicted Sickles for murder.  Sickles hired a dream team of lawyers, most of them leading politicians including Edwin M. Stanton, (later Secretary of War) and James T. Brady, another Tammany Hall upstart.

Sickles plea was historic.  He pled insanity in the first use of a temporary insanity defense in the United States. His argument was that he had been driven insane by his wife's infidelity and was out of his mind when he shot Key.



The graphic written confession that Teresa had written, probably under force, proved to be a pivotal bit of information. When the court ruled it as inadmissible, Sickles legal team leaked the letter to the press who reprinted it in full on an almost daily basis.

Although the jury was told, in detail, that Key was a philanderer and adulterer who sometimes engaged prostitutes and often drank too much, it was never told the truth about Sickles personnel life which was much worse than Key’s.  At the same time, Stanton characterized Teresa, as being unable to give consent to the adultery, in other words, she was raped by Keys.

 In the end, in one of the most controversial trials of the 19th century, twenty days long, in less than an hour the jury found acquitted Sickles on the basis of temporary insanity, a crime of passion.

 The newspapers, which set the tone for public opinion at the time, welcomed the acquittal and declared Sickles a hero who saved the dignity of the ladies of Washington from near-rapist Key.  Then Sickles publicly forgave Teresa and when he did the American public turned on him.  The common opinion was, that if he was upset enough to murder a man over the affair, why forgive her?  Where was his anger towards her?

Teresa died of tuberculosis on February 5, 1867, at the age of thirty-one. She is buried in an unmarked grave in the Sickles family plot in Green-Wood Cemetery in New York.

The outbreak of the civil war may have ripped apart the nation but it saved the politically connected Sickles who raised a brigade of New York regiments, the Excelsior Brigade.  Using his Washington connections, Sickles managed to have himself appointed to the rank of Major General.

By in large, he was a competent commander, especially in light of the fact that he had no military training. However, on July 2, 1863 during the Battle of Gettysburg, Sickles was given command of the Union Army’s Third Corps. Against orders, he redeployed the Corps to the west of the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge. 

In the brief but vicious battle that followed, most of the Third Corps was killed or wounded and Sickles himself was hit in the leg with a cannonball. The lower leg was amputated (it is now in the National Museum of Health. For years, Sickles visited the leg on the anniversary of the amputation.)

Dead horses surround the damaged Trostle House, results of the Battle of Gettysburg, in July of 1863. Union general Major General Daniel Sickles used the farmhouse as a headquarters and Union and Confederate troops fought among the farm buildings during the fierce battle

 At the close of the war, he served as U.S. Minister to Spain from 1869 to 1874, after the Senate failed to confirm Henry Shelton Sanford (Shelton wanted to be ambassador to Spain but didn’t want to move to Spain)

In Spain, Sickles was less than competent at diplomacy but he was rumored to have had an affair with the deposed Queen Isabella II and in 1871 he married Carmina Creagh, the daughter of Chevalier de Creagh of Madrid, a Spanish Councilor of State.

 Creagh, a Maid of Honor to Queen Isabella of Spain was introduced to U.S. Minister to Spain, Daniel E. Sickles at a Court function given by the Queen in 1871. They married soon thereafter and gave all appearances of a happy relationship, until Sickles resigned his position in 1874 and returned to the U.S. Mrs. Sickles declined to travel with him, and remained in Spain.

Despite one brief time when she did live in the United States, and despite having two children, George Stanton and Edna, Mr. and Mrs. Sickles lived most of their 40 year marriage apart.

Returning to the states, he was president of the New York State Board of Civil Service Commissioners, sheriff of New York and once again representative in the 53rd Congress from 1893 to 1895.

Sickles went on to play an important part in the preservation of the Gettysburg Battlefield as chairman of the charity raising money to build a New York State monument at the battlefield.

In an odd twist of fate he is responsible for buying the original fencing used on East Cemetery Hill to mark the park's borders. The fencing came directly from Lafayette Square where he shot Key.

General Sickles, July 2, 1866, visiting spot where he lost his leg at Battle of Gettysburg.

 Almost all of the senior generals who fought at Gettysburg have statues at Gettysburg but there isn’t one of Sickles. When asked why Sickles supposedly said, "The entire battlefield is a memorial to Dan Sickles." 

A memorial commissioned to include a bust of Sickles was appropriated but was said to have been embezzled by Sickles himself.  An investigation found that $27,000 in cash donations was missing.  Some wanted Sickle arrested but the Governor decided that the entire matter was better left alone in the name of the Empire states reputation and Sickles was allowed to resign from the commission.  

  


Daniel Sickles (seated) celebrating with veterans at the Rogers House on the Emmetsburg Road during the 1913 reunion. Sickles died the next year. This view was taken circa July 1913.

 

In March of 1914, a rumor made the news that Sickles had died but a phone call to his fine Fifth Avenue home by a reporter was answered by Sickles himself who said that the rumor of his death was a damn lie and that he was alive and well.  Perhaps he wasn’t as well as he thought he was.

  Two months after that call, he suffered a stroke and died on May 3, 1914, at the age of 94.  He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.