Giveaway: Martyrs and Murderers, Oh My!

I still find myself astounded by the exploits of a true American scoundrel, General Daniel B. Sickles of New York. Sickles, at 33, seduced then married the 15 year old granddaughter of his mentor, Lorenzo de Ponte. As a New York city assemblyman in the Tammany Hall machine, he needed her family to establish a higher social standing. However, Sickles just couldn’t control his ‘wanderlust’, and his extra curricular activities would put Tiger Woods’ to shame. He scandalized the NY legislature by bringing a known prostitute as his guest into the chamber. He notoriously even took that prostitute, one Fanny White-bordello operator, on a tour of England, leaving his pregnant wife at home. Unbelievably, he presented her to the Queen, introducing her to Her Majesty with the false name of a political enemy.
But the most astounding of Sickles acts came on February 27, 1859. Allegedly unbeknown to Sickles, his wife had been receiving the attentions of Philip Barton Key, a United States Attorney General and son of Francis Scott Key, whom Sickles had befriended after being elected to Congress and moving to Washington. An anonymous letter was sent to Sickles detailing the locations of the liaisons, which were arranged by Key walking past the Sickles house giving a prearranged signal with a wave of a handkerchief. With that signal Teresa Sickles was supposed to give a return nod from a window, and then meet him on the street. Dan Sickles, however, was at home that day, and seeing his nemesis outside allegedly shouted, shouted, “That villain has just passed my house! My God, this is horrible!” He grabbed his hat and overcoat, and, interestingly, before leaving the house remembered to arm himself with two derringers and a pistol.
Confronting Key on a corner of Lafayette Square directly across from the Buchanan White House, Sickles yelled out that he had been dishonored, and that Key “must die”. He pulled out the pistol, fired point blank, and barely missed. The men struggled, Key attempting to beat off Sickles with a pair of opera glasses. The pistol fired again, hitting Key in the groin. Sickles then pulls the trigger at the head of the now prostrate Key- a misfire. He puts the barrel on Keys chest, cocks the hammer, and pulls the trigger a fourth time, shooting Key below the heart, the fatal wound.
Sickles defense team includes soon to be Secretary of War, Edwin B. Stanton. His defense was that his mind was “affected” by the discovery of infidelity, and there was not sufficient time for his “passions to cool”. The final argument from his defense attorney, John Graham, lasted two days, and was later printed in book form. By the end of the lengthy trial, newspapers had printed his wife’s confessional letter of her infidelities alongside their daily pro Sickles editorials, and the jurors read every word. The verdict- Not Guilty, the first use of the “temporary insanity” defense.
To the public of antebellum America, Sickles was the victim of a fallen woman. But months after the trial he made another one of the many public relations faux pas of his life, he reconciled with his wife. By taking her back, it was thought he condoned her adultery, and he suddenly went from innocent victim to shunned co-conspirator in the eyes of his 19th century contemporaries. Ostracized by colleagues, he was driven out of Congress and would have faded into disgrace if not for that serendipitous day in April of 1861 when shots fell on Sumpter.

For me it’s not Bat Boy or the world’s tallest man marries the world’s shortest woman, as you’d likely see in the National Enquirer, but that the band continued to play as the unsinkable Titanic slipped under the dark frigid Atlantic waters.

I’m fascinated by the book ‘The Devil in the White City’. The book is about the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and tells the true story of two men, Daniel Burnham and H. H. Holmes. Burnham was an architect and the force behind the Exposition. Holmes, one of America’s first serial killers, used the Exposition as a way to find victims. It’s really interesting.