American Scoundrel American Scoundrel American Scoundrel

by Thomas Keneally

  Before the day was out, Henry Wikoff called in. Not only was the chevalier still a favorite of Mary Todd Lincoln’s, but, although he was too old now for military service, his entrée to the various embassies of Washington inevitably made him a useful source of intelligence to the Union. In Dan’s sickroom, he almost certainly asked if Dan at last wanted Teresa at his side. For whatever reason, Dan still didn’t. Wikoff sent off telegrams to the Herald and to Teresa so that she would not have the shock of reading the first definitive news of Dan’s wound in the next day’s paper. Other visitors to Dan were War Secretary Edwin Stanton and James Topham Brady, of Dan’s old legal team, and General Thomas Francis Meagher, who came down from New York bringing confections and wine. Dan asked Brady’s help with a fund to buy delicacies, medicines, and comforts for the nearly three thousand wounded of the Third Corps. Brady returned to New York and made a speech in the Stock Exchange, raising a considerable sum, which was sent to General Birney, who had inherited Dan’s corps.

  Dan had become more subject to depression and anxiety. He blamed them not on his wound or on what he had witnessed, but on his having been anesthetized. One of his recurrent concerns was how he and his men would survive the controversy over the forward position he had taken at Gettysburg. He was also haunted by the feverish idea that the remains of his corps had been involved in a new military disaster following Gettysburg. He must have expressed this concern to Stanton and others, who told the President about it, so that, on July 10, Lincoln took the trouble to write a note of reassurance to him. “I understand you are troubled with some reports that the Third Corps has sustained a disaster or a repulse. I can only say that I have watched closely, and believe I’ve seen all the dispatches of the military telegraph office up to a half hour ago . . . and I have heard of no such disaster or repulse. I add that I do not believe there had been any such. Yours truly, A. Lincoln.”

  Indeed, Lincoln wished that the Third Corps and all the other corps had been involved in some military expedition. For on July 14, Meade let Lee recross the Potomac unmolested and go home. When the President visited Sickles the next day, Tremain heard Lincoln groan and tell Sickles that this failure to get Lee was the greatest disaster of the war.

  As Dan’s health improved, Teresa may have harbored a hope that this new incapacity would make her husband dependent on her. That he had not sent for her certainly cast doubt on the idea, but, with only one leg, he would have to lead a less restless and peripatetic life and a more domestic one. So she might yet become what she passionately desired to be: a helpmeet. Dan did not seem averse to going back to New York and Bloomingdale. He was practicing on crutches in his room for a train journey there. On July 22, he turned up by slow carriage at the White House and went in. He was moving without the approval of his doctor, and an erratic motion, like that of a coach, could cause agony in his only partly healed wound. But he managed to look dashing on crutches and would all his life prefer them to any prosthetic device. Cynics said that he preferred to proceed in this painful manner, with his trouser leg pinned up, to ensure that no one who met him could forget that he had placed his body in intimate peril for the Union.33

  Having said goodbye to the President, Dan went home by train. The journey caused him difficulties, but he and his aides safely reached Jersey City, where a revenue cutter waited to take him in triumph to New York. As he tottered toward the gangplank, bystanders cheered. His New York friends Brady and Meagher, Hart and Wikoff, were aboard the cutter, as were many others. The cabin had been laid out as a dining room, and a splendid meal was served while the cutter made directly for Ninety-first Street on the Hudson. On the way, speeches were made, with Brady acting as toastmaster.

  This was a dangerous time for the city, since in the days following Gettysburg there had been a crisis over conscription. It had begun on Monday, July 13, when German and Irish rioters had organized a protest against the draft. The situation had degenerated, so that at the climax of a week of riot and resistance, masses of New Yorkers fought a force of the Union Army, with high but unspecified casualties among the civilians. The Board of Councilmen thought that legless Sickles might serve as a chastening example to the rebellious city, and they were quick to proffer thanks to him and to order a gold medal struck in his honor.34

  VIII

  BUT ANY RESIDUAL HOPE THAT TWENTY-six-year-old Teresa may have harbored of Dan’s becoming a private man was soon dispelled. At home, he was as restless and irritable as other soldier husbands. He clumped about the house with an absorbed air, and in his postwound edginess, he experienced swings of mood. He had already confessed to one of his officers, in a letter written from Bloomingdale, that he wanted to be back with the corps the very first day his strength would permit. His stump was extremely painful, particularly when a storm approached, and while it was in progress. Because it had not yet shrunk to its natural size, he could not yet be measured for an artificial leg. “Nor has it acquired sufficient hardness to enable me to ride in a carriage faster than a walk over any but a park road.” He still insisted on catching carriages down to the city, either to be feted or to spend time in George Sickles’s office on Nassau Street. Short of his brothers in the field, he felt most at ease with his father.1

  After less than two weeks, he sat down in his study at Bloomingdale and wrote an energetic letter to Edwin Stanton. “It will not be long before I am ready for work again—can you give me a command? . . . Meanwhile, please do not permit General Meade to break up my corps—which I hear he contemplates.” He became obsessed about his friend Charles Graham, captured while wounded in the Peach Orchard, and pleaded with Stanton to expedite the prisoner exchange, since some evil stories had arisen from Confederate prisoner-of-war camps around Richmond.

  Obviously, it would be forever impossible for Dan to become a private man dependent on his wife. He did not especially seek her company, and his pain and her persistent cough and occasional prostrations separated them further. On August 11, he departed Bloomingdale and its humid summer and made for Lake George in the Adirondacks, accompanied not by Teresa but by two young captains, brilliantly accoutered. When Dan turned up, helped in and out of the carriage by his officers, at the Fort William Henry Hotel, the affluent guests fibrillated with excitement. By now, he understood that his old capacity to charm people and to appeal to women sexually had not vanished with his leg. Nor did he fall back upon his disability as a means of avoiding a hyperactive country vacation. He played tenpins and billiards, negotiating his way up and down the green and the billiard table on his crutches, by now familiar implements. He went hunting and fishing almost every day, and shot two deer. He sent the head of a buck to Lorenzo Delmonico, with whom the Excelsior Brigade had built up such a debt in the conflict’s early days.

  In the ballroom of the Fort William Henry Hotel a dance was held in Dan’s honor, and at its close he was required to speak. For the first time, he staked out a position on what the Union’s attitude to the South should be—not vengeance, but magnanimity, justice, and conciliation. “The army will prove that they who are fearless in conflict are generous in victory.” His pleasant, off-the-cuff, modest, but well-reasoned speech, delivered to the glittering faces of the guests, showed that he understood what the great postwar question would be, and it was reported by the New York Times.2

  Dan and his officers moved on to Saratoga Springs, the most fashionable resort in the United States, and on returning to New York in September, he was pleased to welcome General Charles Graham, who had been exchanged, as Dan had recommended. He learned that his personal stock had become even more heightened in the city, and, though he did not know it, an indication of this was that George Templeton Strong was at last moved to mention him well in his journal: “I suppose Sickles, with his one leg, is among our best volunteer officers. His recuperative powers are certainly wonderful. Four years ago he was a ruined man in every sense, a pariah whom to know was discreditable.”3

  On October 18, Dan, determined to take up his career
as a soldier and with his stump three and a half months healed, traveled south to Fairfax Station in Virginia to seek back his command from General Meade and to see the men of the Third Corps. There were rumors about Meade’s having said that if Dan had not lost his leg at Gettysburg, he would have been court-martialed. The meeting between Meade and Dan was thus polite but cool. Dan admitted that he was not up to a full-scale campaign but wondered whether he could have his corps back, if only for the next battle. But even Dan’s friends thought his valor outmatched his physical capacity. He could not ride; he could not march. Meade mentioned the Confederacy’s General Richard Ewell, who had recuperated for nine months from the loss of an arm before taking up his command again.4

  Dan was not satisfied. He was deeply affected, however, to find that the men had pooled their resources to buy him a barouche. It was pulled by two matched pairs of horses, and in it he proceeded along the lines of his men, accompanied by General Birney. One soldier said it was only his weakened condition that prevented the men from lifting him out of the vehicle and carrying him shoulder-high through the camp.

  He returned to Washington in the same carriage, even more determined to have Meade dismissed for his timidity. Visiting the White House two days later, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles found Dan in Abraham Lincoln’s upstairs office, discussing the question of who had chosen the battle site at Gettysburg. Dan argued that the credit should go to General Oliver Howard, who had occupied the ridge of the Gettysburg cemetery on July 1. Then he himself had sent a message to Meade, supporting Howard and recommending the place, though predicting that the lower ground to the south would be the problem. Although Welles admitted that allowance always needed to be made for Sickles when he had an interest, “his representations confirmed my impressions of Meade, who means well, and, in his true position, that of a secondary commander, is more of a man than Sickles represents him.”5

  After Dan’s rebuff by Meade, back in New York, the distancing between Teresa and himself creaked toward finality. Dan took up residence downtown in the Brevoort House, excusing his action by his need to be handy to the factory where he could be fitted for a prosthetic limb. Teresa and Laura bravely repeated the feasible story but knew the truth in their hearts. At the Brevoort, Dan declined an official dinner, but the band of the 7th New York Regiment assembled, and, on the last evening of October, “an eager multitude, of which the gentler sex formed no inconsiderable part,” waited outside the hotel for the serenading of the hero. Knowing Dan’s passion for opera, Signor Graffula, conductor of the band, played selections from Tannhäuser, William Tell, Marta, The Enchantress, and a series of other popular operas, and as Dan appeared on the balcony, “Hail to the Chief” was played. Dan had ascended to a level where, without irreverence, the presidential theme could be performed to honor him. Asked to speak, Dan expressed his contempt for the Copperheads, who would countenance a divided nation. “Rather than see the Republic so degraded, let the last citizen perish; lay waste the continent; recall the red man from his long exile; and give back to the proud lords of the forest and plain the heritage we took from their fathers.”

  Dan retired indoors in the midst of the applause, and without any irony the band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” product of Key’s father.6 It did not seem that Dan was ever haunted at the playing of this anthem, yet if ever the ghost of Key was sent packing from the scene, it was that night. Nor was any citizen profane or curmudgeonly enough to cry, “Remember Key?” or “General, where is your wife?”

  When not at the Brevoort House, Dan spent time in Washington, staying at Edwin Stanton’s house on K Street or at the White House. Mary Todd Lincoln had not been cured of séances since Dan had last seen her. Sometimes, when Willy and Eddie returned to speak to her, they brought with them her dead half brother, Aleck, everyone’s favorite, a Confederate killed in a skirmish near Baton Rouge in Louisiana. She had by now lost three of her Confederate half brothers. Sam Todd died at Shiloh. David Todd, who had for a time run a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp at Richmond, was rumored to have tortured Yankee prisoners and had perished at Vicksburg. And then Aleck. Nor did the embarrassment of her family connections end there. General Benjamin Helm, who had recently been killed at Chattanooga, had been married to Mary’s half sister Emilie. Mary Todd Lincoln could not formally mourn any of these rebels; much of the Republican press thought her too sympathetic to the Confederacy to begin with. But after General Helm’s funeral, Emilie Todd Helm needed to get a pass to cross the Union lines and return to the family home in Lexington. Lincoln had himself sent her a pass, protecting her person and property except for slaves, but it could not be acted upon until Emilie gave the requisite oath of allegiance to the government of the United States. A small fire-eating woman in the tradition of the Todds, she refused to take the oath, and the President broke procedure and ordered that she be brought to Washington by official escort anyhow. In this he was influenced by Mary, both by the force of her personality and by her need for consolation. And so in December 1863, to the astonishment of Dan and other Lincoln friends, the wife of a Confederate general entered the White House as a guest.

  The two women had not seen each other since the war began; since, in fact, the late General Helm had turned down the President’s offer of a high rank in the Union Army. Emilie found her half sister in an anxious condition. Mary Todd obviously feared the descent of more and more sorrows. “Kiss me, Emilie,” said Mary, “and tell me that you love me. I seem to be the scapegoat for both North and South.” Mary and Emilie tried to avoid mention of the war, but Emilie untactfully had an argument with young Tad about who was really President. Emilie’s attention was also drawn to General Sickles, who came clumping in and out of the household in a way that made her remark, “He seems on very intimate terms here.”

  And Dan noticed Mary’s Emilie, who wore the black garments of widowhood. One day, Emilie was summoned to the Blue Room because, as one of the White House servants told her, there was a visitor inquiring after an old friend in the South. By now, she confessed, she was sick of people looking sideways at her, but this sounded innocent, and she went down to the Blue Room, where she found Senator Ira Harris of New York and the one-legged general sitting with Mary. Senator Harris wanted to ask after former U.S. Vice President Breckinridge, who was now a Confederate general—indeed, the divisional general under whose command her husband had died. Widow Helm told the senator that since she had not herself met General Breckinridge, she could give him no news of the general’s health.

  Harris went on pressing her, and—according to combative Emilie Helm—a contest developed. “Well, we have whipped the rebels at Chattanooga, and I hear, madam, the scoundrels ran like scared rabbits.” It was hardly a sensitive reference, given that Chattanooga had widowed Emilie, but genial old Northern Democrats like Harris had been rendered less forgiving by the brutal level of casualties and by anxiety for relatives serving in the army. Emilie responded, “It was the example, Senator Harris, that you set them at Bull Run and Manassas.” Mary tried to change the subject, but Harris turned to her and asked, “Why isn’t Robert in the army?” Mary Lincoln went “as white as death.” She had already confessed to Emilie that this was the coming threat she most feared—the loss of Robert to the war. He was a twenty-year-old undergraduate at Harvard who until now had been able with some credibility to claim that an astigmatic eye prevented him from volunteering his services.

  A tremulous Mary replied to Harris, “Robert is making his preparations now to join the army, Senator Harris; he is not a shirker as you seem to imply, for he has been anxious to go for a long time. If fault there be, it is mine. I have insisted that he should stay in college a little longer, as I think an educated man can serve his country with more intelligent purpose than an ignoramus.”

  She could tell that neither Senator Harris, who sometimes went to the theater with the Lincolns, nor her friend Sickles agreed with this proposition. Dan’s corps had had college boys in its ranks, many servi
ng as enlisted men, who had suspended scholarship for the duration of the war. Sickles was too close a friend to disagree with her openly, however, particularly in front of others. But not so Harris. “I have only one son and he is fighting for his country,” he told Mrs. Lincoln, before turning to Mrs. Helm. “And, madam, if I had twenty sons they should all be fighting the rebels.”

  “And if I had twenty, Senator Harris, they should all be opposing yours,” said Mrs. Helm. She rushed from the room, and Mary Lincoln pursued her and embraced her.

  Sickles had too recent a memory of his own pain and of all the fine young men who had been defaced, disemboweled, or torn apart along the Emmitsburg Road, in the Wheatfield and the Peach Orchard. He was agitated as he went upstairs to tell the unwell Abe Lincoln, who was lying down, about the incident downstairs. Abe laughed and shook his head. “The child has a tongue like the rest of the Todds,” he said. Dan flashed with an irritability that had become more common since his injury. “You should not have that Rebel in your house.” The President absorbed this and said, “Excuse me, General Sickles, my wife and I are in the habit of choosing our own guests. We do not need from our friends either advice or assistance in the matter.”7

  This brush did not seem to sour relations between the Lincolns and Dan Sickles. He frequently escorted Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln to the theater that winter, and later in the season, writing from the Brevoort House in New York, he was confident of being listened to by Mr. Lincoln when he proposed himself for the job of military commissioner, a not-yet-existent post he had devised, aimed at reconstructing the relationship between North and South. The President, in an attempt to accommodate Dan, at the end of January sent him a cable: “Could you, without its being inconvenient or disagreeable to yourself, immediately take a trip to Arkansas for me?” Dan wanted to accept, but he had been summoned to give testimony before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which was, like Dan himself, anxious to prove that General Meade had been a lackluster commander at Gettysburg.8