On the morning of February 27, 1859, Daniel Sickles, a sitting member of the United States House of Representatives, stepped out of his home in Lafayette Square, Washington, D. C. , and confronted a man named Philip Barton Key II. Sickles shouted that Key had dishonored his house and that he must die.
He fired his pistol, and the shot grazed Key’s hand. A struggle followed, and Sickles fired again, striking Key below the groin. Wounded, Key staggered toward a tree and cried out for mercy. Sickles closed in and fired twice more at point-blank range.
One shot misfired, but the other struck Key in the chest and proved fatal. Key was dragged into a nearby house, where he died shortly afterward. Sickles fled and took refuge in the home of Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black, where he was later arrested.
The murder of Philip Barton Key, a well-known lawyer and son of Francis Scott Key, writer of the poem that became the Star-Spangled Banner, became the most sensational scandal of mid-nineteenth-century Washington. The conflict behind the shooting had begun more than a year before, when Teresa Bagioli Sickles arrived in the capital with her husband. Teresa had been born in New York City in 1836, the daughter of an Italian-born composer and opera director. She spent much of her childhood in the home of her grandfather, Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist who had worked with Mozart.
She grew up surrounded by artists and intellectuals, speaking multiple languages and playing several instruments, and she was regarded as highly intelligent and strikingly beautiful. Daniel Sickles was more than fifteen years older than Teresa and had known her family since the late 1830s, when, as a young man, he had lived in Lorenzo Da Ponte’s household to study French and Italian. In 1851, he renewed his acquaintance with Teresa, who was then in her mid-teens, and he proposed. Her parents refused at first, but Daniel married Teresa in a civil ceremony on September 17, 1852, and the union was later blessed by her family in a religious ceremony.
Their daughter, Laura Buchanan Sickles, was born in the late spring of 1853. The marriage was troubled from the start. Daniel was a known womanizer who had been censured by the New York Assembly for bringing a prostitute, Fanny White, into the Assembly chambers. Shortly after Laura was born, he traveled to Britain on a trade delegation and brought White with him, even introducing her to Queen Victoria.
In 1856, he was elected to Congress, and the following year, the family moved to Washington, where Teresa quickly became a celebrated hostess in elite society, earning the nickname Queen of Washington Society. In March 1857, during President James Buchanan’s inauguration, Teresa met Philip Barton Key II. Key was a widower with four children, considered one of the most handsome men in the city, and he served as the US Attorney for the District of Columbia. He and Teresa moved in the same social circles, and with Daniel often absent on political business, they grew close.
By the spring of 1858, their friendship had become an affair. The affair lasted for the better part of a year. Key rented a small house only minutes from the Sickles residence, and the two arranged secret meetings using a signal: as Key passed Teresa’s home, he would wave his handkerchief, and if she responded in kind, they would meet at the house. The arrangement worked for months, but it also left them exposed.
On February 24, 1859, Daniel received an anonymous letter informing him that his wife was having an affair. Confronted, Teresa first denied it, but she soon broke down and wrote a detailed confession. Daniel forced her to promise she would never see Key again. Three days later, on the morning of February 27, Daniel saw Key waiting in Lafayette Square.
Key had not heard from Teresa for several days and was anxious; unaware that the affair had been discovered, he had rented a room at the Cosmos Club, across the square from the Sickles home. When Daniel saw him, he believed Key was waving his handkerchief to signal Teresa. He armed himself with several pistols and went outside. After the shooting, Daniel was imprisoned, but his circumstances were far from ordinary.
He was given a heated room, meals from home, and a constant stream of visitors from Washington society. The case became a national sensation, and newspapers printed the details of the scandal in full. The trial opened on April 4, 1859, before a huge crowd. Sickles had hired eight lawyers, led by James Brady, a New York attorney known for intimidating witnesses.
The prosecution was led by Robert Ould, a lawyer of limited ability. So popular was Sickles that an estimated 72 of the 75 men considered for jury duty were seen as potentially sympathetic to the defendant. The defense made an unusual argument: that Sickles could not be held responsible for his actions because he had been temporarily insane at the moment of the killing. As one of his lawyers put it, if Sickles had been in a state of white heat at the sight of the seducer of his wife, was that too great a passion for a man to feel?
As the trial progressed, the murdered man seemed to become the one on trial, while Sickles was cast as the victim. Teresa’s written confession was introduced by the defense to justify Daniel’s actions, but the prosecution objected, and the document was ruled inadmissible. Sickles then leaked it to the press himself, and it was published in full. Teresa was vilified daily in the newspapers and avoided appearing in public.
One doctor testified that Daniel’s psychological collapse had been so severe that he had doubted Sickles would ever recover from the insanity that drove him to kill. The judge, however, instructed the jury to consider the three days that had passed between Daniel learning of the affair and the shooting, a clear caution against accepting a crime of passion. The jury deliberated for only one hour before returning a verdict of not guilty on the grounds of temporary insanity. That evening, Daniel held a large party in Washington, attended by some fifteen hundred people, to celebrate his release.
Teresa and Daniel were briefly estranged but did not divorce. Teresa was shunned by East Coast high society, while Daniel returned to his seat in Congress. The couple eventually reconciled, which caused further outrage in the press, but their story soon faded. Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November 1860, South Carolina seceded a month later, and by April 1861, the Civil War had begun.
Daniel Sickles rejoined public life as an officer in the Union Army and fought at several major battles. At Gettysburg in early July 1863, his right leg was mangled by a cannonball. The leg was amputated and sent to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, where its bones remain on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine to this day. Teresa never recovered her standing.
She withdrew from public life and spent most of her remaining years in New York. She died of tuberculosis in Brooklyn on February 5, 1867, at around thirty years of age. Her funeral in Greenwich Village was well attended because of her family’s connections. Their daughter, Laura, struggled with alcoholism and died in 1890 at the age of thirty-eight.
Daniel went on to be appointed US Minister to Spain in 1869, married again in 1871, and held a series of offices in New York before briefly returning to Congress from 1893 to 1895. He died in 1914 at the age of ninety-four. He remains the only senior commander from the Battle of Gettysburg without a statue, an absence that reflects the long shadow cast by the killing, the trial, and the scandal that defined his legacy.