CHAPTER 13

Murder and Rebellion

I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia.

—Walt Whitman

Most Tammany men who went to Washington found both the politics and the pleasures there terribly dull compared to New York City. To them the nation’s capital was Podunk, small and Southern and provincial, set in a dismal fen that heated up intolerably in the summer.

Not Dan Sickles. He liked the South and Southerners, and was sympathetic to their cause. He loved involving himself in national and international affairs, hobnobbing with his friend President Buchanan, partying and philandering to his heart’s content. He left Teresa alone at home more and more. As he did, Washington gossips noticed that Philip Barton Key’s much-admired iron-gray horse was often seen hitched to the post outside the mansion Sickles had rented on Lafayette Square. Teresa and Key had started an affair. Key rented a house from a discreet “colored” man where they met in secret, but as two of the most easily recognized figures in town—Key the tall, athletic squire, she like a new doll right out of the gift box—they were inevitably spotted.

The gossip circulated and escalated for two full years before finally reaching Sickles. When he was told by a friend, he played the enraged husband to the hilt, although he must have known how hypocritical he was being. In a stormy scene he confronted Teresa, forced her to sign a tearstained confession, and banished her from his bed.

In February 1859, the hapless and clueless Key stood outside the Sickles mansion and, looking up at a bedroom window, waved a white hanky, watching through opera glasses for a responding signal from his lover. But it was Dan Sickles peeking from behind the curtains. He rushed down to the street, where, according to the Times, he waved a pistol and shouted, “You have dishonored my bed and family, you scoundrel—prepare to die!” The Tribune rendered it more succinctly: “Sir, you have dishonored me; prepare to die!” Key begged him for mercy and, pitifully, used the only weapon he had on him—he tossed the opera glasses at him. Sickles fired, and in a moment Key dropped dying into the gutter, shot three times, one ball piercing his chest and another his groin. According to witnesses, Sickles pressed the pistol to Key’s head to deliver the coup de grâce, but it misfired. Then, standing over him, breathing heavily, he growled, “Is the scoundrel dead?” “Mr. Key’s friends are quite indignant, and talk about shooting Mr. Sickles at sight,” the Tribune noted.

It was one of the most sensational murders of the century. Sickles’s friends and cronies, including President Buchanan, rallied behind him. The public and press largely did as well, “the provocation being deemed ample justification for the deed,” the Times observed. There were a few holdouts. The Brooklyn Times thought that a true gentleman would have called Key out to the field of honor for a proper duel, not murder him like a dog in the gutter. And there was William Cullen Bryant in the Evening Post, who had been denouncing Sickles as a wicked scoundrel for some years by then. Now he railed that Sickles, “a person of notorious profligacy,” “who, in his own practice, regards adultery as a joke and the matrimonial bond as no barrier against the utmost caprice,” had “little right to complain when the mischief which he carries without scruple into other families enters his own.” Bryant was correct, of course, but he leaned into a strong headwind of common antebellum morality, by which it was one thing for a husband to stray, something quite a bit more damnable when the wife did it.

Edwin M. Stanton, later Lincoln’s secretary of war, led Sickles’s defense team in a Washington courtroom that April. The press followed what the Times called the “intensely exciting” and “exceedingly impressive” proceedings in minute daily detail. Scores of potential jurors were disqualified because as married men they couldn’t possibly render an impartial judgment. Stanton used a then novel defense, arguing that his client was not guilty due to temporary insanity. When on the eighteenth day the jury acquitted Sickles after a little more than an hour’s deliberation, “the decorum of the Court went off at once in a most irregular but irrepressible cheering,” the Times reported, and Sickles was “carried off in triumph by his friends.”

Dan Sickles basked in nearly universal approbation for three months; then, as though he couldn’t help himself, he plunged headlong into a pit of infamy once again by forgiving Teresa and taking her back. Now the public and press turned against him en masse. The moral standards of the time insisted that adulterous wives were to be scorned and abandoned; for Sickles to take Teresa back was to condone her actions, a more severe violation of the marriage code than any of his own “mischief.” He would serve out his term in Congress, but his public career, all agreed, was over.

They were very wrong about that.

On the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown led twenty-one followers in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (soon to be West Virginia). He intended to liberate weapons and munitions with which to arm slaves for revolt. While his detachment took the arsenal, he sent John Cook and others to nearby farms to kidnap local slavers. So Cook was away when hundreds of local militiamen came rushing into Harpers Ferry and penned up Brown’s small force at the arsenal. Cut off from Brown, Cook and his raiding party headed for the hills. On the night of the seventeenth, U.S. Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant Jeb Stuart arrived. They took the arsenal back in a bloody siege the next morning. Fifteen people had been killed, including two of Brown’s sons, the mayor of the town, and one local black man Brown’s men mistakenly shot.

The first journalist to make it to Harpers Ferry didn’t get there until a few hours after the fighting ended. David Hunter Strother wrote and illustrated for Harper’s Monthly and Harper’s Weekly under the nom de plume Porte Crayon. He was a local, born and raised in Martinsburg, just twenty miles from Harpers Ferry. After moving to New York in the 1840s he’d studied oil painting under Samuel F. B. Morse, then started a long and mutually fruitful association with the Harper brothers’ empire in 1853. Strother happened to be in Martinsburg on the night of Brown’s raid and got to Harpers Ferry by train. By the time he arrived the scene was in deplorable chaos. Many of the victorious marines were drunk and celebrating. Dead bodies strewn on the street had attracted a crowd of gawkers. Strother overheard one young man complain, “Gentlemen, just give room here. Can’t you stand back and let the ladies see the corpses?”

Strother had little love for Brown, abolitionists, or Negroes. The November 19 Harper’s Weekly would print a quartet of his drawings under the rubric “Effect of John Brown’s Invasion at the South”—rude caricatures of male slaves brandishing pitchforks and hatchets, and a mammy wielding a knife. Yet at Harpers Ferry that day he also made sensitive sketches of Brown in defeat.

Because Harper’s was a weekly, Strother’s article didn’t appear until November 5. The New York dailies had been all over the story by then, though much of what they’d reported was wildly inaccurate rumor. The Herald declared that an “Extensive Negro Conspiracy in Virginia and Maryland” was afoot on October 18; nothing like that materialized. As late as October 22, The Sun was still reporting that a mob of Negro insurgents, “all armed,” had taken over the entire town and barricaded all the roads, rails, and bridges, and that “all the principal citizens have been imprisoned, and many have been killed.”

Southerners, whose worst nightmares revolved around the threat of armed slave revolt, denounced Brown as an agent of the Republican Party and its mouthpiece Horace Greeley. The Republicans had made remarkable strides since starting up five years earlier. They had fielded their first presidential candidate in 1856, the abolitionist and explorer John C. Frémont. He ran a respectable second to Buchanan. Republicans had actually achieved a majority in the House by 1859 and were gaining on the Democrats in the Senate as well. The party could look to 1860 with real optimism, and no one in it wanted an association with the mad Brown to derail them. William Seward, the presumed front-runner for the nomination, condemned Brown. So did a dark horse well back in the pack, Abraham Lincoln. In the Times, Raymond decried the raid as “irresponsible anarchy or wild and reckless crime.” Greeley wrote, “The whole affair seems the work of a madman.” Greeley’s enemies, including Weed, accused him of having known and backed Brown’s plan; Greeley lied and denied it.

The state of Virginia remanded Brown to nearby Charles Town and hastily arraigned him on charges of murder, treason, and inciting insurrection, all hanging offenses. He was convicted on all charges and hanged on December 2. As a friend of the presiding judge and the nephew of the prosecutor, Strother got special treatment throughout the proceedings. He was even allowed to climb the gallows after Brown’s body had hung twisting for half an hour, lift the hood that covered the old man’s head, and sketch his face in death. Northern opinion was such that Harper’s decided not to run Strother’s less than worshipful account of the hanging. It would not in fact appear in print until a 1955 issue of the magazine American Heritage.

Another witness to the hanging was the twenty-one-year-old actor John Wilkes Booth. He’d been performing in Richmond when the raid took place. Seeing troops of the Richmond Grays, the city’s elite militia, boarding a train for Harpers Ferry, he convinced a pair of officers to lend him a uniform so he could tag along. As much as he despised Brown’s abolitionism, he was impressed by the old man’s calm courage as he mounted the gallows. He nearly fainted at the sight of the actual hanging.

After the hanging, the governor of Virginia allowed Brown’s wife, Mary, to ship his body out of the state for burial in North Elba. When the train carrying the coffin reached Philadelphia, large crowds, both black and white, had gathered around the station. To avoid trouble, the mayor had the coffin secretly shifted to a steamboat. Theodore Tilton, an abolitionist from Brooklyn Heights and acolyte of Henry Ward Beecher, was sent to ride with the coffin up to its next stop, New York City. It arrived on the evening of Saturday, December 3. Leaving the coffin on board, Tilton crossed over to Brooklyn to meet with Jacob Hopper, a Quaker, abolitionist, and undertaker, who agreed to take charge of the body. Hopper rented a private room at the undertakers McGraw & Taylor at 163 Bowery near Delancey Street and had the coffin quietly moved there. When Hopper opened the rough walnut box he found Brown’s corpse carelessly tossed inside, the noose still around his neck, still wearing the battle-tattered clothing he’d been hanged in. Hopper treated the corpse, gave it new clothes and a more presentable coffin. The undertakers’ staff cut up the noose and snipped locks of Brown’s hair to hand out as souvenirs. Thirty years later, Hopper revealed to the Brooklyn Eagle that he still had Brown’s ragged clothes.

Word got out on Sunday, and a crowd gathered outside McGraw & Taylor wanting to see the corpse. To keep the crowd from getting out of hand, the police decided that if they would form a quiet line they could enter the premises and file past the body. Here several lives weave together in an only-in-New-York convergence. Two journalists joined the line. One was Richard Hinton, the English abolitionist who wrote for the Tribune. John Swinton, an editor at the Times, was the other. Both of them knew Walt Whitman. Viewing Brown’s corpse, Hinton casually remarked on a resemblance to Walt. This stray thought put him in mind to recommend Walt to a new abolitionist publishing house just starting up in Boston, Thayer & Eldridge.

A month later, Thayer & Eldridge published its first title, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown, which James Redpath had hastily thrown together with Hinton’s assistance. A worshipful biography of the “warrior-saint,” it was soon a bestseller.

That May, Thayer & Eldridge published as its second title Whitman’s much-expanded third edition of Leaves of Grass. It was far from a bestseller. In the five years since the first edition, Leaves had grown five times in length, including new sections extolling physical love between men and women and just between men. Encouraged by Henry Clapp, Whitman’s friend from Pfaff’s, Thayer & Eldridge sent review copies to New York papers of all political stripes, on the theory that any review, good or bad, would be useful. Most were bad, though often with a grudging grain of praise buried in them. The white supremacist Day-Book, for example, declared Whitman’s poetry to be “disfigured by the most disgusting beastiality [sic] we remember ever to have seen in print,” and the poet “vigorous, coarse, vulgar, indecent, powerful, like a great strong, filthy bull, delighting alike in his size and his strength, and his filth; full of egotism, rampant.” Then it concluded, “The book is, in many respects abominable; in many respects the maddest folly and the merest balderdash that ever was written; but it unfortunately possesses these streaks of talent, these grains of originality, which will probably preserve the author from oblivion.”

Once again, no bookstore would stock it and sales were terrible. For decades the librarians at Harvard would keep their copy under lock and key with the pornography. Thayer & Eldridge went bankrupt before the year was out. Whitman wouldn’t try again with Leaves until after the Civil War.

After fleeing Harpers Ferry, John Cook, with a thousand-dollar bounty on his head, made it a hundred miles cross-country before he was nabbed in Pennsylvania. Hoping for leniency, he wrote out a twenty-three-page confession but drew a death sentence anyway. He was hanged two weeks after Brown.

His body was also brought by train to Jersey City, then across Manhattan to Brooklyn, where his Haddam family members and his young Harpers Ferry widow had gone to await it. It was taken to the premises of the Brooklyn mortician Dr. Thomas Holmes. Holmes would come to be known as “the Father of Modern Embalming.” Reputedly he’d been practicing phrenology on Egyptian mummies when it occurred to him that the ancients had developed better methods of preserving bodies than were known in his day. He invented what are considered the first effective modern embalming fluid and pump. Cook’s would not be the last famous corpse he preserved.

Cook’s open-casket funeral took place at the Bushwick church where he’d sometimes taught Sunday school. Church elders worried that the service might attract an unruly crowd, but the funeral went off without incident. Cook was buried first in the Cypress Hills Cemetery nearby, then later moved to Green-Wood Cemetery.

When Fernando Wood lost his reelection bid in 1857, he was out but in no way down. Fernando Wood was nothing if not a survivor. Because the Tammany sachems had turned against him, he broke away with his supporters and formed his own rival machine, called Mozart Hall for the Broadway hotel where they held meetings. They fashioned themselves the true friends of the workingman, as opposed to the fat-cat sachems. He bought the New York Daily News (no lineage with today’s paper of that name), which had started up in 1855 and was failing. His brother Benjamin took on the editorship and in a few years would be the principal owner. The News was Mozart Hall’s house organ, sparring with the New York Leader, edited by Tammany sachem John Clancy. Benjamin promoted the wisdom and benevolence of Fernando Wood while railing against Clancy and Tammany’s leadership as “a kid-glove, scented, silk stocking, poodle-headed, degenerate aristocracy.”

Wood ran again for mayor in 1859. To oppose him, the Republicans nominated a wealthy textiles merchant, George Opdyke. Born in New Jersey in 1805, as a young man Opdyke had moved to New Orleans and innovated the mass production of cheap, ready-to-wear clothing, which Louisiana plantation owners bought for their slaves. He brought that expertise with him to New York City in 1832 and built the city’s first large-scale clothing factory, on Hudson Street, continuing to sell mostly to the Southern market. His closest competitors were the Brooks brothers, who were starting out around the same time. By the mid-1840s Opdyke was a millionaire and becoming a power in state politics—interesting, considering how he made his fortune, as a free-soiler and abolitionist. He joined the Republican Party when it started up, was elected to the state assembly, and would be a stalwart Lincoln supporter when the time came.

The shocking news of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in October gave Fernando Wood an excuse to add a strongly pro-South, antiabolition tenor to his speeches. He called Brown a “fiend” and the South the city’s “best customer,” and repeated the by now familiar warning to white workers that abolishing slavery in the South would flood the North with millions of freed slaves competing for jobs. It worked. Fernando Wood was mayor again. He would still be in office when the Civil War began. Opdyke would be heard from again as well.