As the Union became, in Abraham Lincoln’s famous phrase, a house divided against itself, Sickles faced a crisis within his own household. In September, he discovered that his young wife was having an affair with Philip Barton Key II—the son of Francis Scott Key, who composed “The Star Spangled Banner.” The affair had been going on for quite some time, and rumors swirled in the political and social circles of Washington DC. One night, after he returned home from a party, Sickles received an anonymous tip-off about his wife’s behavior. Later, he spotted Key in Lafayette Park, signaling to Bagioli through the window of the mansion that she shared with her husband in the capital. Sickles flew into a rage and chased his assailant down, shooting him twice—once in the chest and once in the groin. Key did not survive the altercation. What followed was an outpouring of public support for Sickles. None other than Democratic President James Buchanan wrote a public statement vindicating his heavy-handed response. In court, Sickles was represented by Democrat, and future Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. In the end, he was acquitted—to great delight in the courtroom—on the grounds that he had been rendered “temporarily insane,” unable to control his mind and body on account of his wife’s treachery. This was the first defense of its kind, and was subsequently used as a precedent to excuse “crimes of passion.”
Sickles was, of course, embedded in political networks at the national and state level. Stanton and Buchanan proved important contacts in getting him off the hook. But the defense of Sickles in the court and the press was also overtly political. Many papers tied the breakdown of Sickles’s marriage to those radical movements that threatened to unravel the nation. This time, however, the most obvious target was women’s rights and free love, rather than abolitionism. Many Americans alleged that the women’s movement conjured up the specter of female agency, luring figures like Bagioli to commit all manner of sins. In the nation at large, the breakdown of the household supposedly threatened the stability of the Union—and with it the best hope for republican government abroad. As was the case with antislavery agitation, the women’s rights movement was frequently presented as a European import, which undermined “natural” hierarchies with the help of federal interference.