This is the first of a two-part story about the 19th Century American named Daniel Sickles, a man’s whose scandalous life was especially peculiar.
(I’ll update this page with a link to the second story when I publish it next week.)
Washington, DC, February 27, 1859: Daniel Sickles, a Congressman from Long Island, NY, and his wife of eight years, Teresa, were having a marital crisis. The previous day, he forced her to sign a written confession that she was having an extramarital affair.
On that sunny Sunday afternoon, Sickles looked out the window of his townhouse on Lafayette Square. Across the street he spotted a lawyer named Phillip Barton Key.
Key was the 41-year-old son of Frances Scott Key, the man who wrote “The Star Spangled Banner.”
He was also Teresa’s lover.
Key paced back and forth in front of the home and spun a handkerchief in his hand. Sickles suspected it was a signal to Teresa to join Key for a tryst. Key was unaware that Teresa had confessed to their affair.
Sickles gathered his guns.
He marched to a street corner on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House where Key stood.
Sickles called the man a scoundrel, and Key reached into his pocket. Sensing that Key was about to draw a gun, Sickles then pulled a revolver and fired. Key was only grazed. A fight ensued. Key withdrew opera glasses from his pocket and threw them at his attacker. Then Sickles fired again and again. The fourth gunshot hit Key’s chest at point blank range.
Phillip Key was shot dead in broad daylight just outside the White House before dozens of onlookers.
Sickles told the stunned eyewitnesses that he was justified in killing “the scoundrel” because Key had ruined his marriage.
Shortly thereafter, Sickles surrendered to authorities.
Newspapers referred to it as the Sickles Tragedy. The scandal would dominate headlines across the country.
Daniel Sickles was born in 1819 and raised in New York City. His father was a prosperous attorney and politician. Daniel followed in his father’s footsteps. He, too, became a lawyer and then a state politician.
Sickles led a life rife with scandals.
In 1852, Daniel married Teresa Bagioli, a voluptuous young woman half his age. He was 32, she was 16. Both families disapproved. Sickles didn’t care.
As a state politician, he was censured for bringing a prostitute into New York State’s Assembly Hall.
Later, when he was given a presidential appointment in England, he left Teresa at home and took the prostitute with him instead. He even introduced the woman to Queen Victoria, but he gave his mistress the name of a New York political rival.
Sickles was elected to Congress for the first of two consecutive terms in 1856. He was still serving his second term in Washington when he shot and killed Phillip Key.
Although the crime seemed to be an open-and-shut case, the general public showed support for Sickles. That’s because his defense lawyers leaked Teresa’s written confession of her affair, which appeared in newspapers nationwide. In the mid-1800s, many Americans deemed a crime of passion based on the sin of adultery to be justifiable.
The judge in the case ruled, however, that Teresa’s confession was inadmissible evidence.
The prosecution called 28 people to the stand, all of whom witnessed the murder.
Sickles had hired the best lawyers in the country to mount his defense. They began by asserting that adultery was a crime, therefore Sickles was justified in shooting the man who had “violated his bed.”
Then the attorneys suggested that spotting Key outside his residence that afternoon made Sickles see red and caused him “mental unsoundness.”
This was the first use in the United States of the temporary insanity defense.
It worked. After only an hour and ten minutes of deliberation, the all-male jury gave a verdict of not guilty.
Many Americans were jubilant.
Daniel Sickles returned home to his welcoming wife Teresa as if he were a conquering hero.
But the general public quickly soured on Sickles - because he forgave his wife. How could he do such a thing? She was the person, after all, who had driven him to kill another man. Sickles was unmoved by public opinion.
Despite the scandal, he did not resign from Congress. As a result, Sickles spent the remainder of his term as a Washington pariah.
But his life story and reputation were far from over. More bizarre events were in store for Daniel Sickles.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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