American Scoundrel American Scoundrel American Scoundrel

by Thomas Keneally

  In the three weeks of inaction following the battle of Fair Oaks, Dan got to know the young Comte de Paris, pretender to the throne of France; his brother the Duc de Chartres; and their uncle the Prince de Joinville, who had, like Lafayette in the Revolutionary War, offered their services to the Union and had been serving on McClellan’s staff. But the attack and the end to all civility resumed on June 25, when, at eight-thirty in the morning, Joe Hooker sent Dan’s brigade and one other through the woods toward Richmond. Dan’s men this time were split on either side of the Williamsburg Road. They were slowed by encounters with pickets, by the problem of getting through a line of Union timber breastworks, and by the mire of White Oak Swamp. To Dan’s mortification, the Excelsior fell behind the other brigade, that of Cuvier Grover. The 71st New York had not been engaged at Williamsburg or elsewhere, and now as it went forward in its long blue line, heads lowered and jaws set, it was struck from the side by a fury of fire from a brigade of North Carolinians. Fire from the flank raised, in most men, terror, a feeling of helplessness, of being abandoned by God and fortune. Someone in the regiment—Sickles would never learn who—shouted that they were outflanked and must retreat, and a good part of the 71st panicked and ran for the rear. Dan described it as “disgraceful confusion” and felt humiliated because Joe Hooker was watching. At least the rest of Dan’s brigade were firing, advancing shoulder to shoulder, firing again, but an irrational order from McClellan broke off this engagement, named Oak Grove, at ten-thirty.

  McClellan would not try for Richmond again. What possessed him now was the desire to save his army and, having moved all his men south of the Chickahominy River, to make it retreat to Harrison’s Landing on the James River, a position from which his army could be extracted by federal steamers. The retreat to Harrison’s Landing, begun at Oak Grove, would occupy seven days and involve seven battles. Dan’s men, like the entire Union Army, retreated each night until the small hours, slept in that uncomfortable mode described in dispatches as “on their arms” until dawn, and rose to fight and retreat again. Dan had the capacity to function on little sleep, but it was a talent sorely tested in those last days of June. In Washington, Lincoln read the dispatches of this withdrawal, based in part on McClellan’s huge overestimation of the Confederate strength, with bewilderment and depression. As for Dan and his men, at Gaines’s Mill on June 27 they were still defending the Williamsburg Road, but were under orders to retreat back along it. On June 28 they had the job of breaking up their camp and setting a torch to all that could not be carried.45

  On June 30, near the village of Glendale, Joe Hooker’s and Sickles’s men were again at the extreme left of the Union line. A parsonage lay off to Dan’s left, and to the front of his lines of blue General Branch was improbably commanding the nearest Confederate brigade, on the far side of a little creek called Western Run. Branch had routed a Union brigade in the middle of the line, and more than a thousand of its men stampeded through Hooker’s lines, actually shooting some of his men dead in their frenzy. The intimacy of that day’s battle, Dan’s foliage-limited view of what his men were engaged in, was indicated by the fact that Dan singled out for special mention in his report a private and a corporal who gave excellent service as vulnerable lookouts in trees.46

  It was now the seventh day, July 1, and Dan’s brigade occupied the lee of Malvern Hill, just above Harrison’s Landing, and were in reserve until late in the day, when they were put to work near the low crest supporting some Union batteries. Just one of Dan’s regiments, the 72nd New York, was sent forward in line against some Confederate troops firing from woods farther down the slope of Malvern Hill, and lost sixty-one men. Once again, as the day before, the Union was so successful in repulsing the Confederate attempt to gain the crest of shallow Malvern Hill that many Union generals wanted to press the attack, but McClellan was fixed on retreat, and that night at Harrison’s Landing steamers landed quantities of new provisions and prepared for the withdrawal of the army. Hooker’s division had suffered 2,589 losses in the battles on the Peninsula. Chaplain Twichell regretted the absurd way the army had been managed—“I could not help a feeling of rebellion against the fate that forces the abandonment of ground that costs so much blood and was made so sacred.” Twichell was convinced that something or somebody was wrong.

  During the campaign on the Peninsula, Hooker got to like Dan better, and invited him frequently to visit his headquarters and share his whiskey at Harrison’s Landing. The Irish-American hero Phil Kearny, and the Irishman of Irishmen Thomas Francis Meagher, also dropped by Hooker’s tent for the purpose of drinking spirits. Casualties would ultimately take some toll on Meagher’s imagination, but Dan was fortunate not to be burdened by that melancholy reality. And he was well liked by the majority of his officers and men. One Private Brannigan wrote to his sister, “General Sickles is the very man to treat his soldiers well, and returns in full their attachment to him.”

  Dan intended next to go to New York to recruit replacements. Many soldiers had also been struck with illness, and some of those, together with the wounded, had been left behind with volunteer surgeons to be overrun by the Confederates. Twichell later put the number of Dan’s effectives in Harrison’s Landing as low as two thousand men. There had been mayhem on the Peninsula.47

  VII

  AFTER A FEW WEEKS IN THE CAMP AT Harrison’s Landing, Sickles returned to New York on a steamer with General Meagher and one of Meagher’s favorite young officers, Lieutenant Emmett, who had been wounded. Dan and Meagher were in a febrile state, flushed with a devout pride in their men, the living and the numerous dead. But, arrived back home, Dan was warned even by his father that the casualty lists from the Peninsula would be a drag on New York recruiting. And if one of Dan’s purposes in visiting New York was to test the political environment for a possible return to Congress that fall, he found that politics had become complicated. Mayor Fernando Wood and Dan’s old friend Sam Butterworth were now what the Republican press called Copperheads, proponents of calling off the war and letting the South go its way. Since Dan was thoroughly in favor of that same war, consecrated by the blood of his young men, he could not countenance their position, but it was widely represented in New York and strongly held by some of the Irish. To them, Dan had become a Lincoln man, a crypto-Republican. So he could not expect the broad Democratic support he had once enjoyed.

  Dan Sickles had in fact achieved a certain éclat with moderate Republicans. Horace Greeley of the Tribune had started a public subscription to present him with an ornamental sword. Greeley had been particularly impressed with a speech Dan gave at the Produce Exchange, where, praising the steady nerve of Abraham Lincoln, Dan confronted the talk of inevitable conscription. “A man may pass through New York, and unless he is told of it, he would not know that this country was at war. . .. In God’s name, let the state of New York have it to say hereafter that she furnished her quota to the army without conscription— without resorting to a draft!”1

  Dan took Chaplain Twichell and some of the brigade wounded to an enlistment rally at the 7th Regiment Armory, above Tompkins Market in Lower Manhattan. The audience was made up of the city’s volunteer firemen, and Dan spoke to them for an hour and a half, but did not do much better than Meagher had in the same venue. It would be from the fire companies that much of the resistance to conscription would, in a year’s time, derive.

  There were sweeter experiences. In the Wintergarden Theatre a performance of The Hunchback of Notre Dame was given for the benefit of the Excelsior Brigade, and Dan, a thin, cock-sparrow figure with sword and general’s sash, rose in his box to be applauded. Teresa was not at his side. Called on to speak, he told the crowd of the heavy-drinking prewar Southern legislators, sometimes so drunk in the House bars and committee rooms that they passed out on sofas in the anterooms. Others, however, fueled with fire, made it into the chamber and rose to threaten and spread rumors of coming secession at full throat. And the memory of these false former friends of his rose in him
that night. He called the war a “Whiskey Rebellion,” a rebellion fueled on spirits. “Whiskey everywhere—in the committee rooms, private houses, at a hundred saloons. There never was a state that seceded that did not secede on whiskey. The debate reeked with whiskey. The solemn resolves of statesmanship were taken by men whose brains were feverish from whiskey.”2

  Meanwhile, the Excelsior Brigade arrived at Alexandria near Washington in time to be engaged, almost as soon as it landed, at Bristoe Station, Virginia; and, though not put into the line, the men were under such heavy shellfire that by now barely more than fifteen hundred made up the brave Excelsior. The entire Hooker division was rested and was blessed that it, with Dan and the Excelsior as part of it, was thus not employed in heading off Lee’s invasion of the North. For it ended in mid-September with the bloodiest day of all American history, at Antietam Creek, in rural western Maryland. There, for example, Meagher’s Irishmen took 550 casualties in a quarter of an hour.

  Dan was gratified to find himself caught in the updraft of Hooker’s reputation as a fighter. Hooker was elevated to command of the Third Corps, and thus Sickles, his most successful brigade commander, inherited, with Hooker’s blessing, the command of the division, its entire three brigades.3 During much of the time the division was refitting and recuperating in Alexandria, Dan had time to attend Mary Lincoln’s salon, what she called “my beau monde friends of the Blue Room.” Wikoff had by this time been readmitted. Another member was Oliver Halsted, the wild but conversationally accomplished son of a rich New Jersey family. Mary wrote to him on one occasion, “I fancy ‘the Blue Room’ will look dreary this evening, so if you and the Gov. are disengaged, wander up and see us.” The “Gov.” referred to was Governor Newell of New Jersey. Another member was Nathaniel Willis, editor of the Home Journal, who tried to run counter to the general Washington opinion of Mrs. Lincoln by writing about her as the “Republican Queen in her White Palace.” The Blue Room conversation concerned itself with “love, law, literature, war, rulers and thinkers of the time, courts and cabinets, the boudoir and salon, commerce, the church, Dickens and Thackeray.”

  Sometimes the silver-locked Massachusetts senator, Charles Sumner the abolitionist, would visit, even though he did not often go to receptions in anyone’s house. This occasional blessing indicated that he too agreed that Mary Lincoln had surrounded herself with fascinating people. And at other times, though not routinely, women were admitted. “Gov.” Newell brought his wife, Joanna, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Fox, on one occasion, brought Virginia Fox. Not only was it Dan’s policy that Mrs. Sickles never come, but her absence was not considered notable and would more likely have haunted Wikoff than Dan. And here again, and for whatever failures of hers and principles of Dan’s, Teresa was becoming a woman who, when defined at all, was defined by absences—from the camp, from the capital, from social events at the White House.

  Chiefly, it was the fellows and Mary Todd, and the fellows acquired nicknames: “Gov.,” “Pet” for Halsted, “Chev” for Wikoff, “Cap” for Sickles, and for Mary herself, “La Reine.”4

  Though capable of manic gaiety, the Queen was barely out of mourning for Willy, and still marked by grief in all she said and did. She was not alone in seeking séances. Many prominent Washingtonians, under the pressure of the huge losses of the war and the considerable infant mortality of their times, had consulted clairvoyants—Mary Jane and Gideon Welles, Senator Ira Harris of New York (whom Dan had once tempted to sit in New York City on the matter of Central Park), and Mrs. James Gordon Bennett. Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker, Lizzy Keckley, was another influence on Mrs. Lincoln. Keckley’s only son had been killed, and she was confident that through mediums, a Georgetown husband and wife team named the Lauries, she held conversations with her son’s disembodied spirit. Earlier in the summer, while Dan Sickles’s brigade was fighting on the Peninsula, Mary Lincoln’s black carriage was often seen outside the Lauries’ house. In fear for his wife’s sanity, the President tolerated all this exorbitant behavior. Even so, the Lauries were not the only clairvoyants she had faith in. Lincoln even put up with his wife rushing these people to the White House to tell him about intended Confederate battle plans. For sometimes, when Willy or Eddie could not be contacted, Mary was able to reach the spirits of deceased Union officers, who sent their advice via the medium to her and Lincoln. The President dared not take the comfort of spiritualism from her.5

  Mary had, that same summer, consulted a specious medium who claimed to be an English peer, Lord Colchester, newly come across the Atlantic and down to Washington to spread his blessings. Mrs. Lincoln admitted him to the Red Room of the White House for a séance, and also asked him to hold a séance at the Soldiers’ Home, where she and the President were staying for part of the summer. Though Willy spoke through Lord Colchester and Mrs. Lincoln was delighted, Dr. Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian claimed Colchester made tapping noises by an apparatus that reacted to the tensing of muscles even when others held his arms and hands. At another séance Colchester ran in the Red Room, an invited journalist had grabbed Colchester’s arm and been punched for his trouble. Colchester felt that he had been exposed, though Mrs. Lincoln’s belief in the process remained absolute. Not even a letter from Colchester implying that unless she gave him money to go to New York he “might have unpleasant things to say to her” frayed her belief. In the end, Lincoln himself told Colchester that if he was still in town by the following afternoon, he would end up in the Old Capital Prison.

  Many surmised that Dan Sickles was driven to take part in séances with Mrs. Lincoln because of his guilt over Key; he wanted to contact the ghost and be given absolution. But this life, with its tests and glories, was adequate to Dan, and he attended with Mrs. Lincoln purely out of a duty of friendship, and possibly at Lincoln’s request—to keep an eye on vulnerable Mary.

  One of Mary’s favorite mediums was diminutive Miss Nettie Colburn, whom the Lauries of Georgetown had introduced at a séance that included Mrs. Lincoln and Caleb B. Smith, the Secretary of the Interior. Nettie herself told of a séance she held in the “Red parlor” of the White House in December 1862. That night, as she entered her trance, sudden ghostly band music filled the room, and the heavy end of the piano in the corner crashed up and down in grotesque time to it. In the midst of this row, Mr. Lincoln appeared and received Nettie kindly. Whereupon she fell again into a trance, and from her mouth, in a male voice, emerged advice on the President’s future, a foreshadowing of the Emancipation Proclamation. A gentleman present pointed to a full-length picture of Daniel Webster hanging on the wall. The voice that had emerged from Nettie, the man was sure, was that of Webster.

  Dan managed to inject a spirit of skepticism into one of Nettie’s sessions in the White House by persuading Mary to allow him to set a test for Nettie Colburn. He concealed himself behind the draperies of the room and asked Nettie, when she arrived, to name who was hiding there. This plot showed that Mrs. Lincoln may, at some level, have begun to doubt. So, while Dan stood hidden there, Mary Todd jovially challenged Nettie to come up with his name. Before Nettie could oblige, Lincoln came into the parlor and apologized for not being able to stay— he had a cabinet meeting, and his cab awaited. At that moment, claimed Nettie, a sudden silence fell upon the group, and she herself was entranced at once. An august male voice emerging from within her slight body counseled Lincoln to amend the condition of the freedmen, the liberated slaves herded together, half clad, on waste ground in the Washington winter. The President thanked the voice and left to go to his cabinet meeting, and Nettie turned her attention to the still-concealed Sickles. As she meditated, one of her familiar voices, Pinky, an Indian maiden, took over Nettie’s body and said that the hidden person’s name was Crooked Knife. This was considered by most of the company a close enough Indian rendition of the name Sickles. Sickles then revealed himself, and the session continued, various voices emerging from Nettie with news from the Great Beyond. As the guests departed at eleven o’clock, Sick
les did the honor of host in Abraham Lincoln’s absence, bidding the guests off at Mrs. Lincoln’s side.6

  New men were now coming to prominence, for McClellan, having won at Antietam, was considered remiss by Abraham Lincoln for not having captured Lee’s army before it leached away south across the Potomac River. In the wake of what was a fierce disappointment about McClellan’s failure, the President decided to review Sickles’s division in camp near Fairfax Seminary in northern Virginia. With typical thoroughness, Dan set to work reorganizing his units, recalling most of the men absent on sick leave or in the convalescent camp. He had received a good many fresh recruits, and was glad to declare that his division numbered more than eight thousand infantry.

  When the President visited, it occurred to Dan as a military impresario that he could flesh out the ceremony of greeting by borrowing “a few squadrons of cavalry,” and then his command would be almost the same as that of General Scott when it had marched on Vera Cruz and captured Mexico City in the war of 1846–47. To greet the arrival of the President on the Virginia shore, Dan led a hundred mounted officers equipped as an escort, together with a regiment of infantry and a battery. “The President came down in his quiet way,” said Dan. He was accompanied by only one general and a servant, and was surprised to see the horse that Dan had provided for him, caparisoned in the trappings of a general officer. He was equally intrigued to see himself surrounded by a staff appropriate, as Dan had learned by research, to an emperor at the head of a grand army. The President, as the artillery fired a salute, turned to Dan and exclaimed, “Sickles, I’m not going to take command of the army. What is all this for?” The escort proceeded on the march to Dan’s camp a few miles off, and a good many Virginians gathered at the roadside. In an age before newspaper photographs, not one of them knew by sight Lincoln’s face, and the President heard an old farmer saying to his neighbor as the column passed, “I guess from the looks of that tall chap and all this fuss, that the Yanks have captured a big prisoner.” The President gave his creaky grin and called to the man, “That’s so. I’m Jeff Davis!”