On the morning of February 27, 1859, Daniel Sickles saw the man standing in Lafayette Square, directly across from his Washington home. He saw the handkerchief in the man’s hand, raised and waved, and he understood it instantly as the signal that had been passing between his wife and her lover for nearly a year. Sickles armed himself with several pistols and walked out into the square to confront Philip Barton Key, the son of the man who wrote the Star-Spangled Banner. Within minutes, Key would be dying on the grass, and Sickles would be on his way to becoming both a free man and the architect of a legal defense that would echo through American courtrooms for generations.
The story that led to that fatal morning began more than two decades earlier, in a New York household filled with music and foreign tongues. Teresa Bagioli was born in New York City in 1836, though no one has ever pinned down the precise day or month. Her father, Giuseppe Antonio Bagioli, was a wealthy Italian-born composer and opera director who had come to New York in 1832 at the head of an Italian opera company. While in the city, he met Lorenzo Da Ponte, the famed librettist who had once worked with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and had since reinvented himself as a music teacher in America.
Giuseppe began socializing with the Da Ponte family and grew close to Maria, likely Lorenzo’s adopted daughter, though some accounts have suggested she was the product of an extramarital affair. He was in his mid-thirties; she was barely a teenager. A relationship was nevertheless allowed to develop, and the two most likely married in 1834, when Maria was just fifteen. Teresa was born two years later.
She grew up in deeply musical and cosmopolitan surroundings, spending much of her youth in the home of her grandfather, Lorenzo Da Ponte, a man whose name was still associated with some of the most celebrated operas ever written. Surrounded by artists, languages, and ideas, Teresa was described as highly intelligent. By her teenage years, she spoke several languages and played multiple musical instruments with ease. It was a cultured, carefully nurtured world, but it would not shelter her for long.
Daniel Sickles had entered that world long before he met Teresa, though the two had never met as anything more than acquaintances. Daniel was born on October 20, 1819, the son of a New York lawyer and local politician. He followed his father into the law, but in the late 1830s and early 1840s he worked in the city’s publishing industry, which brought him into contact with cultural figures like Lorenzo Da Ponte and Antonio Bagioli, some of whose musical notations he published. He was also friendly with Da Ponte’s son, a professor in New York.
Daniel’s parents, however, worried that he was unsettled and in need of guidance, and they reportedly placed him in the scholarly household of Lorenzo Da Ponte. He lived there for about a year in the late 1830s, when he was roughly twenty years old, studying French and Italian. Teresa was still an infant then, and years would pass before either of them would remember the other. By 1851, Daniel had established himself as a local politician in the New York Assembly, and when he renewed his acquaintance with Teresa, who was by then in her teenage years and already noted for her striking beauty and charm, he quickly became enamored.
He proposed soon after. Even with his social standing and his long association with her family, the Bagiolis initially refused their consent. Daniel went ahead anyway, marrying Teresa in a civil ceremony on September 17, 1852, and the union was later formally recognized in a religious ceremony once her family gave their approval. The exact age difference between them is uncertain.
Daniel is generally understood to have been born in 1819, though he later claimed 1825, likely to minimize the visible gap between himself and his young wife. If the earlier date is accepted, he was just shy of his thirty-third birthday, while Teresa was widely believed to be about sixteen. Their marriage began in a fairly conventional way. Teresa gave birth to a daughter, Laura Buchanan, in the late spring of 1853.
It is hard to determine whether the couple suspected Teresa was pregnant when they married the previous September, though it seems likely they had planned to marry anyway. Beyond that initial appearance of normality, however, the marriage was troubled from the very start. Daniel was a known womanizer, and rumors followed him. He had once been censored by the New York Assembly for keeping company with a known prostitute and bringing her into the Assembly chambers.
He was also frequently away from home. Shortly after Laura was born, Daniel left for Britain as part of a trade delegation on behalf of the government of President Franklin Pierce. He brought the same prostitute from New York, a woman named Fanny White, with him to England, and even introduced her to Queen Victoria in London. After returning home, Daniel was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1856 and took his seat the following year.
It was then that the Sickles moved to Washington, D. C. , settling near Lafayette Square at the heart of political life. There, Teresa quickly became a standout figure in elite society, renowned for her beauty, charm, and skill as a hostess, earning the nickname the Queen of Washington Society.
Together, the couple appeared perfect. Behind the scenes, Daniel’s repeated affairs told another story. In March 1857, Teresa met a man named Philip Barton Key II. Philip was the son of Francis Scott Key, the well-known American poet and lawyer whose greatest claim to fame was writing The Defense of Fort McHenry, a rousing nationalist work about the defense of Fort McHenry in Baltimore against the British during the War of 1812.
The poem was set to music and later became known as the Star-Spangled Banner. Philip, born in 1818, served as the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. He was eighteen years older than Teresa, who was then about twenty-two, and he was a widower with four children. He was widely regarded as one of the most handsome men in the city.
In Washington, Philip and Teresa moved in the same social circles and frequently saw each other at gatherings and events. With Daniel often absent on political business, Teresa regularly attended these events alone, and Philip was never far from her side. Still very young and increasingly isolated, she appeared to have grown disillusioned with her marriage. By the spring of 1858, about a year after the Sickles had settled in Washington, her friendship with Philip turned into an affair.
The affair lasted for the better part of a year, largely hidden from public view. Despite their efforts at secrecy, Philip’s growing attachment became difficult to disguise. He was often seen lingering near her home or appearing wherever she might be. The two met frequently, sometimes in the street or in her carriage, and eventually arranged more private encounters.
Philip rented a small house just minutes from the Sickles residence, where the pair could meet in secret. As he passed Teresa’s home, Philip would signal with a wave of his handkerchief, and if Teresa responded in kind, they would meet at the house. It was this very signal that would ultimately lead to his undoing. Despite their attempts to keep the relationship secret, Daniel was informed of the affair through an anonymous letter he received on February 24, 1859.
Enraged, he confronted Teresa. She initially denied the affair, but under pressure, she broke down and gave a detailed written confession describing her meetings with Philip. Daniel forced her to promise she would never see him again. It is not known exactly who sent the letter, though the affair was apparently common knowledge among the staff of the Sickles house, so it could have been someone who had simply seen Philip coming and going.
Three days later, on February 27, 1859, Philip Barton Key II was murdered at Lafayette Square. Philip had been anxious, as he had not heard from Teresa for several days, and he had rented a room at the Cosmos Club on the opposite side of the square, directly across from the Sickles residence. Unaware that the affair had been discovered, he waited in the square, exposed and unsuspecting, waving his handkerchief toward the Sickles home to signal Teresa. Daniel saw him.
According to Samuel F. Butterworth, a close eyewitness and attorney, Daniel burst outside and approached Philip, shouting, You scoundrel, you have dishonored my house. You must die. Philip retorted, What for?
Then Daniel pulled out a gun and fired. The first shot grazed Philip’s hand, and a scuffle followed. The pair wrestled, during which Daniel managed to fire off another shot, hitting Philip below the groin. Wounded, Philip staggered away and tried to hide behind a nearby tree.
As he did, he shouted, Murder! Don’t kill me! Daniel, intent on killing him, moved closer and fired two further shots from point-blank range. One misfired.
The other hit Philip square in the chest, a fatal wound. Daniel fled, while Philip was dragged into a nearby house, where he died shortly afterward. Later that day, Daniel was arrested after taking refuge in the home of Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black.
But his circumstances were far from ordinary even in custody. Though he was held in a notoriously grim, rat-infested prison, he was granted unusual comforts, including meals from home and a heated room, and he received a steady stream of visitors, from family to prominent figures in Washington society. As he sat in custody, newspapers across the country seized on the story and laid out the scandal in extensive detail. The trial opened on April 4, 1859, before a huge crowd outside the courthouse.
Sickles was a wealthy enough man by the end of the 1850s, and he had hired a crack team of eight lawyers to represent him, led by James Brady, a New York-based attorney known for having witnesses intimidated. The prosecution was led by Robert Ould, an attorney of limited ability. Sickles was a popular politician, and as the jury was being selected, it was estimated that seventy-two of the seventy-five individuals considered for jury duty could potentially be sympathetic to the defendant. When the trial commenced, the defense laid out their case in an unusual way.
They claimed that Sickles could not be held accountable for his actions because he had been temporarily out of his mind as a result of Philip Key’s affair with his wife. As one of Daniel’s lawyers, John Graham, put it, If he was in a state of white heat, was that too great a state of passion for a man to be in who saw before him the hardened, the unrelenting seducer of his wife? As this temporary insanity argument developed, a bizarre situation evolved in which the murdered Key almost became the man on trial, while Sickles was portrayed as the victim. The defense sought to reinforce its case by introducing Teresa’s written confession of the affair as evidence, hoping to further justify Daniel’s actions.
The prosecution pushed back, and the document was ultimately ruled inadmissible. Undeterred, Sickles took matters into his own hands and leaked the confession to the press, where it was published in full, exposing Teresa’s private life and intensifying the frenzy surrounding the case. Another major moment came when a doctor appeared on the stand and testified that Daniel’s psychological collapse, brought on by the revelations about Teresa’s infidelity, had been so great that he had been concerned Daniel would never recover from the insanity that caused him to kill Philip Key. Teresa was slandered and vilified in the press on a daily basis as the trial went on, and she avoided being seen in public.
When deliberations ended on April 26, the judge instructed the jury that they should bear in mind that three days had passed between the time Daniel learned of the affair on February 24 and the time he killed Philip on February 27. The judge was clearly highlighting the weakness in the argument that the murder was a crime of passion; Daniel had three days to calm down, and the fact that he killed Philip at the end of that time suggested premeditation. The jury decided differently. After just one hour, they returned and declared that Sickles’ temporary insanity plea was legitimate.
They found him not guilty. That evening, Daniel threw a huge party in Washington, attended by fifteen hundred people, to celebrate his release. The aftermath of the trial was perhaps as strange as the events leading up to and during it. Teresa and Daniel were briefly estranged, but they did not divorce.
Teresa was vehemently attacked in the press and shunned by high society on the East Coast, while Daniel resumed his place in Congress. In the end, the couple did reconcile somewhat, a decision that led to further outrage in the papers. Then their sensational story became yesterday’s news. Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November 1860.
South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union a month later, and the American Civil War broke out in April 1861. The trial of 1859 disappeared from the public consciousness. Daniel Sickles now had the opportunity to rehabilitate his reputation. He became an officer in the Union Army and fought at many of the most important battles of the war.
In early July 1863, he was involved in the Battle of Gettysburg, where his right leg was mangled by a cannonball. The leg was amputated and sent to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, where the bones remain on display today in the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Teresa’s marriage was never the same after the scandal, and she largely withdrew from public life. She spent much of her remaining years in New York and died in Brooklyn on February 5, 1867, from tuberculosis.
She was just thirty or thirty-one years old. Despite the scandal years earlier, her funeral in Greenwich Village was well attended due to her family’s connections. In 1869, Daniel was appointed United States Minister to Spain, and some rumors claim he even had an affair with the exiled Queen Isabella II. In Madrid, he began a relationship with a Spanish-French woman named Carmina, and they married in 1871, having two children together.
After returning home in 1880, he held many offices in New York and briefly returned to Congress for a two-year term between 1893 and 1895. By that time, his daughter with Teresa had died. Laura, who had grown estranged from her father and struggled with alcoholism, died in 1890 at just thirty-eight years old. Daniel Sickles lived a long life, dying at the age of ninety-four in 1914.
In a final telling detail, he remains the only senior commander from the Battle of Gettysburg without a statue, an absence that reflects the shadow cast by the scandal, the trial, and the killing that defined his legacy.
