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.
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.)
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.
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.
