DAN SICKLES — Edgcumb Pinchon —Doubleday, Doran ($3.50).
In the winter of 1859, Washington was rocked by the greatest scandal in its history. Negroes living on slovenly West 15th Street reported that a white gentleman, handsomely dressed in riding clothes, had rented one of their houses, and that when he flew a white string from one of the top windows a heavily veiled lady soon came tripping down the street and slipped into the house by the back door.
Before long, everybody knew that the signaling gentleman was U.S. District Attorney Philip Barton Key, son of the famed composer of The Star-Spangled Banner. They knew, too, that the lady was Teresa Sickles, daughter of an Italian opera conductor and lovely wife of the distinguished young Daniel Edgar Sickles, U.S. Representative from New York, lawyer, "Father of Central Park," Tammany man, former First Secretary of the U.S. Legation in London, and a descendant of one of New York City's most respected Dutch families.
Teresa's lover was Dan Sickles' dearest friend. But when the rumor of the affair was confirmed, Sickles sought out Key in a Washington park and methodically shot him to death with a pistol, a Derringer and a revolver.
"The Washington Tragedy," as it came to be called, kept the name of Sickles green for a generation; the tragedy and its actors have been long forgotten. Edgcumb Pinchon revives them again, in the first biography of one of the 19th Century's most eccentric and notorious U.S. characters. Like many recent biogra—phies, Dan Sickles is partly straight fact, partly imaginary reconstruction of likely facts (especially in the bedroom scenes). It suffers from writing so thick with emotion that Hero Sickles often emerges from obscurity only to be buried in gush. But it leaves clear the fact that Daniel Sickles is the season's rarest historical find.
In a day when Congressmen brandished pistols on the floor of the House, Representative Sickles' trial for murder was more than a dramatic sequel to a romantic tragedy. It also raised the crucial question of whether U.S. law was ready to condone the savage, individualistic law of the frontier. The nation was beside itself with debate. New York's famed criminal lawyer James T. Brady sped to his friend's defense with a battery of assistants. Two hundred talesmen were examined before twelve unprejudiced jurymen could be found. "You are here to fix the price of the marriage bed!" roared Associate Defense Attorney John Graham, in a speech so packed with quotations from Othello, Judaic history and Roman law that it lasted two days and later appeared as a book. The jury gave little heed to the prosecution's plea that the case before the court was not adultery but murder. Sickles was acquitted—a national hero.