Richardson was one of the best known reporters of his age, due to his abilities as a writer and his services (during the American Civil War) as a Union spy.

McFarland claimed to be a major businessman and politician, but basically he was a violent husband and alcoholic with connections with Tammany Hall.

Sage McFarland and Richardson got advice from his friend Vice President Schuyler Colfax on using Indiana divorce laws for the fastest results.

But on November 25, 1869, McFarland shot Richardson in the offices of the New York Tribune in front of the night clerk Daniel Frohman (later a famous Broadway producer).

Yet even sixty years later the historian Claude G. Bowers in his partisan history The Tragic Era (1929) showed a mean comfort in the fate of Richardson, and the tarnishing of Beecher, Colfax, and Greeley by the scandal (as though they were responsible, not McFarland).