Fair became a political symbol. Traditionalists denounced her as a crazy, radical slut; women’s rights activists supported Fair’s appeal, holding her up as a warning of the dangers of unchecked male power; and anti-suffragists used her as an example of women’s rights ruining society. Mark Twain would build the character of Laura Hawkins, in The Gilded Age, on an impression of Fair, writing: “About nine o’clock a lady deliberately shot a man dead in the public parlor of the Southern Hotel, coolly remarking, as she threw down her revolver and permitted herself to be taken into custody, ‘He brought it on himself.’” Laura Fair later wrote a pamphlet in her own defense, railing against her “revilers and enemies” in the press, and died in San Francisco in 1919, at the age of 82.
Not to be discouraged by disrepute or the passage of time, Daniel Sickles continued to live a bold and outsized public life into his nineties: he served as military governor in South Carolina until President Johnson gave him the boot; flattered Ulysses S. Grant into giving him an ambassador’s post in Spain; married a young Spanish girl; and engaged in an affair with the deposed Queen Isabella II in Paris, leading French papers to chuckle about the “Yankee King of Spain.”
As commander of the Third Army Corps at the Battle of Gettysburg, Sickles made the controversial decision to disobey orders and move his unit away from the Union line at Little Round Top to a more forward position, where it took a thrashing. (Depending on who you ask, Sickles’s insubordination either screwed the Union forces, or saved the day by taking the brunt of Confederate attack.) In the fighting at Gettysburg, an errant cannonball shattered Sickles’s lower right leg. The general promptly boxed up his amputated leg in a neat little miniature coffin and shipped it with his handwritten regards to the Army Medical Museum, where he would later visit it annually.
Today the insanity defense won’t get a defendant released but committed, and despite the public perception that insanity is an easy escape valve for those accused of crimes, it only succeeds in less than one percent of cases. After a claim of insanity acquitted John Hinckley of his 1981 attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan, Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act in an effort to limit the circumstances in which the defense might be raised. Even so, after the “irresistible impulse” test was famously used to acquit Lorena Bobbitt of separating her husband from his penis in 1994, a study found that when the insanity defense is successful, it is more often so for women than men – perhaps because, as Laura Fair experienced, the perception of women’s inherent mental weakness and emotional fragility persists.