American Scoundrel American Scoundrel American Scoundrel

by Thomas Keneally

  “Behold! Adultery couched with Homicide!”3

  Dan, flayed by the newspapers, and perhaps surprised by the fury of friends, sat down to write a measured letter of explanation to James Gordon Bennett, the editor he had once parodied in name at the court of Queen Victoria. Bennett’s Herald was the best-selling paper in New York, and its account of the reconciliation had, Dan said, been “temperate and dignified.” As to the idea that had got about that he and Teresa might have reconciled on the advice of his lawyers, that was entirely erroneous, wrote Dan.

  My reconciliation with my wife was my own act, done without consultation with any relative, connection, friend or adviser. . .. If I ever failed to comprehend the utterly desolate position of the offending though penitent woman—the hopeless future, with its dark possibilities of danger, to which she is doomed when proscribed as an outcast, I can now see plainly enough in the almost universal howl of denunciation with which she is followed to my threshold, the misery and perils from which I have rescued the mother of my child. . .. In conclusion let me ask only one favor of those who, from whatever motive, may deem it necessary or agreeable to comment in public or private on this sad history; and that is, to aim all their arrows at my breast, and for the sake of my innocent child, to spare her yet youthful mother, while she seeks in sorrow and contrition the mercy and pardon of Him to whom, sooner or later, we must all appeal.4

  It was a brave letter, but if the world had been divided in response to his murder of Key, the world was universally outraged by his reconciliation with Teresa. Dan told George he was indifferent to public opinion, but he was a politician by nature. Teresa, who knew him better than he knew himself, feared his ambition would separate them again. The public speculation was whether he would dare turn up in Washington for the congressional session in the fall. But he had a rigorous intent to do so, and in the late summer he received a scatter of letters urging him to “stand by your conscience and let no political demagogues influence your own judgment.” Another letter congratulated Sickles on his forgiveness, since Teresa was “more sinned against than sinning” and “will yield the ‘grateful fragrance of the crushed flower.’”5

  But, though Captain Wiley, Manny Hart, and Chevalier Wikoff remained Dan’s friends, there were few letters of applause from the powerful of Tammany. Dan did turn up in Washington in time for the congressional session, but in spite of the reconciliation, he was without Laura and Teresa, and lived alone in a suite at Willard’s and then in plain lodgings on Thirteenth Street. This took courage on Dan’s part, but the reunion and Teresa’s desperate hopes for its success had somehow not flowered into a genuine marriage of minds. Laura’s interests had been served, so perhaps the rest could be neglected.6

  There was certainly a sense of faded splendor in Dan’s new Washington existence. It would have been interesting to see, had Teresa returned with him, what doors if any would have been opened to her by the city’s society. Perhaps she was pleased not to have to put her acceptability to the test just yet. A journalist noted that even as regarded Dan, there was very little tendency on the part of any of the representatives to establish intimate relations with him. No matter the tumults of feeling of which he was capable, in this circumstance he showed he had a stoic soul. He maintained, according to his solitary sense of self, a characteristic “ease and coolness,” but he was also remarkably retiring and unobtrusive as he turned up in the House each day, about fifteen minutes after twelve. He still dressed in exquisite taste and had grown a large pair of brown whiskers, but he kept his place on one of the benches on the western side of the House, where, resting his head on his gloved hand, he remained seated, taking no part in the discussions, merely voting in a low voice when called upon within a chamber where, if anything, the political furies of the previous year had not been moderated but had grown in scale. In the evenings he ate the plain fare of the congressional dining room, and occasionally dined with a small circle of friends, including Governor Walker. He did not attend many receptions and never went to balls. For the first time in his life, he lived like a reclusive fellow.7

  One day a young South Carolina woman, Mary Miller Chesnut, the wife of the newly elected Senator James Chesnut of South Carolina, visited the House gallery with some other congressional wives. Looking down, she noticed Dan Sickles seated alone on a bench, and remarked that she had seen two men in all her life who had been sent to Coventry thoroughly and deliberately. One was a young naval officer who played the gigolo to a “rich old harridan.” The other was Dan. He was left strictly to himself, she noticed, “as if he had smallpox.” Mrs. Chesnut discussed the matter with a friend sitting nearby. The woman explained that though he had killed Philip Barton Key, “that was all right. . .. A fellow could survive such a thing. The real reason he was ostracized was because he condoned his wife’s profligacy and took her back.”8

  In the House, at a remove from the other legislators, he listened to debate that would normally have vexed him. John Brown’s body was still swinging from a rope in Virginia, the famous abolitionist having been tried and executed for attempting to seize the armory at Harpers Ferry and unleash a slave rebellion. Henry David Thoreau had declared Brown “a crucified hero,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson prophesied that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the Cross.” This was exactly the sort of abolitionist oratory that, before the murder, was set to outrage Dan and cause him to rise urgently to his feet and attempt to rebuild North-South fraternity. A Baltimore newspaper had asked the question Dan’s Southern allies were asking, whether the South could any longer live under a government “the majority of whose subjects or citizens regard John Brown as a martyr and a Christian hero.” Every Northern representative and senator who did not explicitly condemn Brown was considered his ally and sympathizer; Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois said as much in the Senate. Yet Dan was able to keep silent and wait in his isolation, as if he were the one legislator who lay outside the bubble of national frenzy. And when he listed his name with the Speaker and rose in the House on December 13, 1859, he commenced with an air of apology for speaking at all, declaring it would be more agreeable to him if some other gentleman had taken the floor. As it was, he had reluctantly decided to accept “the duty of a just expression of the sentiments of the national men of the North.”

  By the time Dan gave this, his first speech of the session, many Southern regions had grown so alarmed that they had begun to form militia companies and, in a number of communities, to ride Yankees out of town. Dan was willing to protect the Union, and complained that to listen to some Republicans in the House, one would think “the irrepressible conflict is not in the distant future—it is here. It is no longer a prophecy; it is a fact.” But the truth was that in the North there beat millions of hearts devoted not only to the Union but to the Constitution upon which it rested, and thus amenable to peace with the South.

  This speech was one of a series Dan would give from within his political isolation, and as a record they would successively mark out the path many Northern Democrats would follow over the next eighteen months, beginning—as Dan did now—with a complete defense of the South’s position in the Union on questions of representation, on the fugitive slave law, on taxes, on Southern exports, and on the slave trade itself.

  Attempts to extinguish the slave trade, argued Dan in this first speech, had run up not against Southern intransigence, but against hypocritical Northern capitalists who invested in ships for the enterprise. There was now in transit in Washington, or had been the day before, a Captain Farnham of the Wanderer, arrested in New York City by Marshal Rynders (Dan’s old friend) for the violation of the law prohibiting the import of new slaves. The requisition for Farnham came from the authorities of a Southern jurisdiction, Georgia, which meant to try him.

  The doctrine of coming irrepressible conflict “encouraged fanatics and traitors to invade homes and communities in our sister States; led to scenes of such excitement and danger as we have witnessed upon the floor of the
House; led to Southern citizens having no security at home; led to Virginia—the mother of States—standing at her frontiers to protect herself from the uplifted blade.” There was certainly a danger to the Union. That danger arose whenever a Republican proclaimed on this floor “that there is a conflict between the South and the North, that it is ‘as deep as the foundation of the mountains and as pervading as the atmosphere.’” Many sensible Northerners, said Dan, knew that the results of disunion for Northern laborers would be catastrophic, because the Southern states were the best customers of the North. “Without the Southern staples, what have we got to sell to Europe?” asked Dan. And without the South, the North would become a nation of traders without customers.

  Dan was concerned, however, that the South made too much of the supposed anti-Southern feeling in the North. When John Brown met his fate, a hundred guns were fired in Albany, the capital of New York State, to salute his heroism. “Well, sir, that was a disgraceful, but not an alarming or significant occurrence.” It was an old habit of Northern people to fire pieces of artillery an indefinite number of times. Much-heralded sermons had been preached in sacred Northern pulpits, applauding Brown’s acts of treason, but in the whole state of New York, said Dan, he had heard of only four or five such sermons. There had been strange meetings held in Syracuse, but it was a city that lacked theaters and made up for it with radical speeches. In reality, “there is not an omnibus load of sane men in the North who would wish Texas out of the Union. . .. I say then to the House and to the people of this country, leave this crisis to public opinion. Leave it to the reason and sense of justice and conscience of the North.”9

  His speech brought some restrained respect, but society remained cold to Dan and Teresa throughout 1860, the last year of peace, and Dan’s former second home, the Democratic Party, began to fragment further early in the year, with Southern Democrats and their Northern allies seeking revenge against Senator Stephen Douglas for voting against the admission of Kansas as a slave state. At the Democratic convention at Charleston, not attended by the out-of-favor Dan, fifty delegates from the lower South walked out, leaving Douglas short of the two-thirds majority required for nomination. The delegates met again six weeks later in Baltimore, where another schism occurred. Those who walked out this time, the Southerners and some Northerners, formed their own convention and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, Buchanan’s Vice President, on a platform that would include a slave code to be extended to all new territories. So now there would be two Democratic candidates to divide the vote.

  The Republican convention was held in Chicago, where Senator William H. Seward was expected to be nominated. By the time the convention opened on May 16, the until recently obscure Abraham Lincoln had emerged as Seward’s main rival. Lincoln had come to national renown not for any great success in Washington but because of his Illinois debates with Senator Douglas. Ironically, in view of what would befall Dan in the coming upheaval, though Lincoln was considered a moderate and thus less likely than someone like Seward to create disunion, he was exactly the sort of Illinois bumpkin antislavery a worldly New York Democrat like Dan despised. Seward was worth despising and fearing; Lincoln was merely contemptible. But he succeeded on the third ballot, on a platform that pledged support for a homestead act and federal aid for the construction of a transcontinental railroad. The platform also included a tariff plank “to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country.” Lincoln mentioned, too, the contemplated treason of the South, which it was “the imperative duty of an indignant people sternly to rebuke and forever silence.”10

  As the Republican campaign commenced, Dan was back in New York, living soberly but with sufficient intellectual and emotional room to be appalled by what had happened to his party and by the shadow that had fallen over his nation. He resided at least part of the time at Bloomingdale with a grateful Teresa, who had entered her second year of purdah and must have been a little bemused that this summer was a repetition of the last, with only the most loyal friends and relatives turning up and life continuing in something of a social vacuum. But perhaps, with his work all located in New York, Dan might become a more regular presence in the house at Bloomingdale. He would not be standing for Congress again in November, and would be lost for a time—if not forever—to national politics.

  Not aware how pleasantly and advantageously close he would in time become to the new President, Dan was bewildered when Lincoln was elected as a minority President with 40 percent of the national popular vote but a hundred electoral votes. North of the forty-first parallel, Lincoln won more than 60 percent of the vote.

  Back in Washington for his last session in Congress, though feeling depressed at Lincoln’s election, Dan was beginning to lose faith in some of his former Southern friends as well. All President Buchanan could think of in the crisis of the moment was to call into being a House committee, consisting of one member from each state, to decide the terms on which lasting peace could be established. At least one congressman, Mr. Hawkins of Florida, refused to serve, and this brought Dan to his feet again on December 10, 1860. He wanted to appeal to Mr. Hawkins, in the name of New York. “No man,” Dan promised his Southern friend, “will ever pass the boundaries of the city of New York for the purpose of waging war against any State of this Union. . .. The Union can be made perpetual by justice—it cannot be maintained an instant by force.” He was willing to defend peaceful secession, for after all it was “the last dread alternative of a free state when it has to choose between liberty and justice.”

  But in the meantime, argued Dan, there were options for maintaining the Union, and one of them was the President’s committee. No Republican had refused to serve on the committee Mr. Buchanan had proposed, and this was a cheering sign, said Dan. As for New York, if the Union of the United States was torn asunder by abolitionist zeal, “we [New York City] will not consent to remain the submissive appendage of a puritan province. We will assert our own independence. The North will then see and feel that secession, although it may begin at the South, will not end at the South.” And once secession began, “I tell you, that imperial city will throw off the odious government to which she now yields a reluctant allegiance; she will repel the hateful cabal at Albany, which has so long abused its power over her; and with her own flag, sustained by the courage and devotion of her own gallant sons, she will, as a free city, open wide her gates to the civilization and commerce of the world.” With that tempting but improbable vision of New York the citystate, the Venetian Republic of the Atlantic Coast, Dan resumed his seat to some applause, and was done for the year.11

  The Bagiolis and Sickleses visited Bloomingdale for Christmas and watched the solitary child open her presents. They knew that only a gesture of domestic peace had been made in this household. George Sickles took his son aside and urged him to work to achieve a sane, settled life. He knew that there was more potential for a union of souls between Dan and Teresa than between himself and Dan’s earnest and tremulous mother. Like others who raised moral issues with Dan, though, George found once again that any advice on Dan’s private morality made him take on a waspish, intransigent, and angry tone. Waspish, intransigent, and angry tones were echoed in the larger household of the nation itself. During January, six states seceded, led by South Carolina. New York business was provoked by the declaration of Southern clients that they would not pay their New York bills until they could be paid in Confederate currency.12

  At a time of emergency on January 16, 1861, the House being in that emergency mode described as “a Committee of the whole of the States of the Union,” Dan put his name on the speaking list again, and this time his attitude had moved quite a distance from his pre-Christmas speech about peaceful secession and the fanciful concept of the secession of New York. He had by now become affronted by the way the seceding states were behaving toward federal property. He said that perhaps there was now more alienation of feeling and antagonism between the sections of the Unite
d States “than prevailed between the mother country and the colonies in 1774.” Still, he chiefly blamed Republican intransigence for this. But he was willing to admit that secession was the least effectual form of protest for the South. “And now of course, it remained to be shown whether in their interference with forts, arsenals, navy yards, and the common property of the Union, they had not committed a fatal error in the development of their own policy.” In resolving the national issue, “it will never do, sir, for them to protest against coercion, and, at the same moment seize all the arms and arsenals and forts and navy yards, and ships that may, through our forbearance, fall within their power. This is not peaceful secession. These acts, whensoever or by whomsoever done, are overt acts of war.”

  Dan was listened to with more interest than during his earlier two speeches. It was apparent that his Southern-leaning philosophy had been rocked by South Carolina’s assault on Castle Pinckney and Fort Moultrie in Charleston. “With all the pomp and circumstance of war, the battalions of South Carolina, duly provided with scaling ladders, battle-axes, and pontoons, march in grim array to the assault of these fortifications—the clear and indisputable property and domain of the United States. . .. These are seditious proceedings.” And Dan had been particularly surprised by the fact that a small body of federal reinforcements and some supplies, sent on an unarmed merchant vessel called the Star of the West, had been fired upon by South Carolina artillery. The American flag was flying at the masthead of the ship when “the authorities of South Carolina, through their military forces, opened fire upon that defenseless ship, and compelled her to retire and abandon the peaceful and legitimate mission in which she was engaged. Now, sir, that was an act of war, unqualified war.” As for his earlier prediction that no man would cross the frontier of New York to employ coercion against the people of a Southern state, that was still the truth. “But the men of New York would go in untold thousands anywhere to protect the flag of their country and to maintain its legitimate authority.”