American Scoundrel American Scoundrel American Scoundrel

by Thomas Keneally

  In another way, it was an extraordinary task to ask of a one-legged man, given the extent to which donkeys, canoes, and sampan-like craft were used for travel in Central and South America. Some thought it a make-work mission devised to pacify or even neutralize Dan, more than to meet any national need. The malicious believed rumors of a sexual relationship between Mrs. Lincoln and Dan. In their version, Abe was getting a rival out of town. Whatever the case, Dan was hungry for the mission and suffered no doubts about his capacity, whether diplomatic or physical. He may have thought that if he made this journey into the Andes, no one could ever say he was not fit to campaign. George Sickles, of similar rugged soul, was proud of his son’s having been offered such a potentially important task.

  Chevalier Wikoff went to the Herald office in New York to talk up Dan’s mission and to correct an impression that Mr. Lincoln wanted Dan to lay the groundwork for a pan-American alliance against the European powers. The Herald did not mention a significant sidebar to Dan’s mission. The commissioners of Central Park, which was these days heavily covered with hospital tents full of wounded, had authorized him, in view of his continuing interest in the park’s zoo, to acquire from professional trappers in Colombia whatever items of South American fauna he could.

  Wikoff was in place to accompany Teresa and Laura to the midwinter dock for Dan’s departure. The young wife was winter-pale and had an ethereal air. She was fortified with laudanum to help her negotiate the freezing wharf and the gangplank. Since she had lost a little of her rounded desirability, Bogotá was precisely the dry mountain locale she might have benefited from, but even if Dan had contemplated inviting her on the journey, there lay between her and the Andean height at which Bogotá was located a belt of potentially fatal tropics. She may nonetheless have daydreamed of going, remembering that when Meagher had gone on a mission to Costa Rica and Panama on the eve of the war, to try to negotiate a railway across the Panamanian province of Chiriqui, and lucky Libby Meagher had seen the splendid forests and spectacular birds of Central America, and had resided for a time in the presidential palace in San José, Costa Rica.

  Though the men at the wharf knew Teresa was run-down, in an age when a woman’s premature decline could have many causes, they did not yet know with certainty that she had consumption. Nor did Wikoff mention any such condition in his friendly letters to the traveling general. He did notice that at the ship, “Thérèse,” as he always called her, was unusually affected by Dan’s departure. “The tears came streaming down her face the whole time she remained on the pier.” Like Mrs. Lincoln, she was full of “sad presentiments” and, as Wikoff noticed, was not in the habit of showing her feeling as fully as did the First Lady, and thus she “must be deeply stirred for it to escape in tears. Laura, too, was crying, the first time I ever knew her to do so.” Wikoff had heard that there was an argument about the house at Bloomingdale, involving the Bagiolis and Teresa. Perhaps the parents had partially underwritten the original purchase, and now, having fallen on tougher times, and needing to take in lodgers at their recently acquired house on Thirty-second Street, may have wanted to realize their money from Bloomingdale. It was typical that Wikoff should be attuned to the argument taking place between Teresa and Mrs. Bagioli, whom he described to Dan as “vulgar and coarse . . . complicated and unfeeling.” Hence, Dan’s importuning of the President for a job, something that would put him back on full pay, may have arisen from economic causes as well as ambition. “It will be a dreadful blow if you are obliged to lose it [Bloomingdale],” said the genial Wikoff to Dan. He assured Dan that he would go up there on the Sunday after Dan’s departure on the mission “and do all I can to alleviate your absence. . .. Write fully and often to Terese.”

  However temporarily strained her relationship with her mother, Teresa had a reliable backup in George and Susan Sickles. They continued to be doting grandparents, and George would always be loyal to Laura’s interests even when she clashed with Dan. But he was a dutiful father, and saw to it that as Dan made his way south, at every stage there would be a paternal letter waiting. Still addressing Dan as “My dear General,” the letters included admiring news, such as the rumor in the Times that Dan would be nominated for the mayoralty of New York. George also included such details as “Laura visits her grandma as a general thing on Saturday.” Occasionally the little girl stayed overnight, and her general health—George was pleased to report—was good.15

  Dan and his aides concluded their consultations with the local authorities in Colón, Panama, by March. As Secretary Seward had instructed him to do, he made clear to the Panamanians that the United States would intervene to keep the route open, but the Panamanians told him horror stories of the behavior of drunken gringos along the railway route across the isthmus. He concluded that these stories were not opportunistic complaints, for the Panamanians were sympathetic to the United States. The Panamanian and other New Granada ministers and bureaucrats with whom he met had a sense that the prosperity of the United States was a direct result of the liberal institutions of that nation, and they wanted their region to flourish by the same means. Dan was authorized to offer, in principle, damage compensation for the behavior of Americans on the isthmus, and the Panamanians considered that just. Some time after Dan’s visit, the amount due was settled at $14 million.

  Having crossed to South America by steamer, Dan wrote to George describing, for his entertainment, the important Colombian port of Cartagena, with its old Spanish forts. From there, he and his aides caught the steamer up the coast and into the broad mouth of the Magdalena, the river path to the capital. The river’s lower reaches were steamy, swampy, and dangerous to health, an appropriate environment for malaria and yellow fever. The general went untouched by these perils. As well as possessing a strong constitution, he had none of the hypochondria of Barton Key and many others of his contemporaries. More than four hundred miles along the river, against a strong tide, lay not the capital Bogotá but the final approaches to it. Dan, of course, cigar at lip, and adroit and athletic on his crutches, took enthusiastically to life on the steamer, and was fascinated at every river stop it made to take on produce and tobacco.

  New Granada was, in the 1860s, an immensely more hopeful place than some of its constituent parts became in the late twentieth century. It had liberated its slaves as early as 1851, and its constitution acknowledged a full range of civil liberties. A revolution led by the renowned progressive Tomás de Mosquera confiscated much church property and radically separated church and state. In terms of the racial politics of the day, Colombia made a good harbor for former slaves, particularly because such a high proportion of its people were mestizos (Indian-white), mulattos (white-black), and zambo (black-Indian).

  The Magdalena’s rapids near the town of Honda required passengers to transfer either by mule or by jaunting carts, and Dan managed the mules by strapping on his prosthetic leg. He and his party left the ascending river and traveled by mule and cart a spectacular seventy miles to Bogotá, climbing passes in the cordilleras, from which they could see mountains stretch away an eternity to the west, and descending at last into the valley where the capital was located. Dan got an impression of a mass of tiled roofs, and saw above the city the potent local mountains of Monserrate and Guadalupe.

  The president, Manuel Murillo, as well as having been the Colombian ambassador in Washington, had visited it as late as the winter of 1863–64, negotiating recognition of the new Colombian government and looking for guarantees against the possibility that clients of Colombian companies might sue the country for nondelivery because of the federal blockade of the South. Murillo authorized a considerable number of ceremonial events to honor the famous visiting general. In meetings at the presidential residence near the cathedral, Murillo explained to Dan that New Granada’s various regional components had such power that they could, as in the case of Panama, make decisions bearing on foreign relations, such as banning the transit of Americans and American troops. It was an issue, said Murill
o, on which Bogotá could not give absolute guarantees or dictate Panama’s policies. But important advice and reports could be prepared in collaboration with Dan to minimize future problems. Dan found, too, that in principle Murillo was open to the concept of American freed-slave immigration to Colombia. But the matter would need to be discussed in his cabinet and subjected to the advice of the Colombian bureaucracy. In the end, no final arrangement was ever reached, and little came of the concept. Yet representing its virtues and arguing its value occupied Dan and his staff for three months.

  Dan relished life in that high Hispanic capital. He spent his time in conferences and social visits and in excursions into the surrounding country with trappers. But sometimes he had too much leisure, since the mail came only once a month or even less often, given that the river was full of bars of mud and the steamer schedules problematic. On May 2, he wrote to Stanton that he would be back in Cartagena to leave by steamer for the United States on June 1, unless there were more instructions from the Secretary of State waiting for him in Panama. “I shall have the honor to report to you for duty before the 1st of July. I trust you may then have occasion to employ me usefully in the field. You and I burnt the first powder in this war, on our side, and so I wish to be with you, ‘in at the death’ of the rebellion.” Dan, knowing nothing of the final days of the war or of the national tragedy that had overtaken the people, told Stanton that he would report to him on two legs, because in that mountain capital, he boasted, he had made progress in the use of his prosthetic limb. He had ridden through the mountain passes in every direction out of Bogotá, on Peruvian and Granadian horses and “all sort of mules.” He doubted that even General Meade could now doubt his ability to ride far enough to the front to post a battery or make a reconnaissance. He was heartened by the latest war news he had received, but it was the news of February’s actions, the fall of Charleston and Columbia, in South Carolina, and of Wilmington. He did not know two crucial items of news—that Grant had succeeded in strangling Lee’s army into surrender at Appomattox, and that President Lincoln, to whom he had been close enough to importune and upbraid him, had been killed by a pro-Southern actor named Booth during a night at the theater. While watching a comedy titled Our American Cousin, Lincoln was shot in the back of the head, and Mary, at his side, had screamed, “Oh, my God, and have I given my husband to die?” Had Dan been in Washington, he might well have been in that fatal presidential box at Ford’s Theatre, as was his friend Senator Harris, to see the nation’s noblest heart discharge its blood. As Dan savored Bogotá and conversed with Murillo and his cabinet about emancipation, the isthmus, and the fauna of the cordilleras, his friend Mary Lincoln was a demented, howling widow, so frantic that cabinet ministers, generals, and doctors were shocked by her uncontrolled grief, both as her husband lay dying and afterward.16

  The American consul in Santa Marta, down on the coast, sent notification upriver to the capital of the end of the war, but not of Mr. Lincoln’s death. Receiving the news of peace, Dan may have experienced mixed feelings, but he took a carriage at once to President Murillo’s palace, and Murillo, who had great admiration for Lincoln and his cause, made arrangements to announce and celebrate the victory and the coming peace by means of a banquet for the diplomatic corps.

  Carrying letters for Secretary of State William Seward, Dan left for Honda late in May at the head of wagons laden with captured animals, and there he was handed another American dispatch, one that told him not only that President Lincoln had been murdered, but that there had been a series of attacks on Union leaders. An attempt had been made on the life of Secretary Seward and on that of his friend Stanton, the dispatch said. The report about Stanton was not true, but Secretary of State Seward had been severely wounded, while lying ill at home in Washington, by a fellow conspirator of John Wilkes Booth. The conspirator invaded Seward’s sickroom at the same time that Booth shot Lincoln. Whether Dan learned the details then or later, it must have been, even for such a strong-minded man, a redolent detail to discover that Seward’s wounds had been inflicted in the same building in which Key had died. For during his cabinet career, Secretary Seward stayed in the old Clubhouse on Lafayette Square.

  On the steamer home, Dan was accompanied by his crates full of riverine and Andean animals for the Central Park menagerie—tree sloths, anteaters, monkeys, tapirs, agoutis, and a jaguar. As he approached New York, Dan grew more uneasy about his potential reception by the new President, Andrew Johnson, who had come to the White House after barely six weeks in the post of Vice President and as a result of his chief’s assassination. Dan had got to know Johnson in Tennessee the previous year, knew that he was proud of his humble origins as a former tailor, self-educated—a history for which others mocked him. Being one of those Democrats severely alienated by the ferocity of the rebellion, Johnson had at one stage said that the South should be managed after the war with fire and rope. Those Radical Republicans who wanted to see the South humiliated in every sense were hopeful that he would introduce more rigorous policies toward the conquered areas than they had seen prefigured in the case of Lincoln.17

  That summer, following the established pattern of earlier ones, Dan visited Teresa and Laura. He was conscious that by now Teresa’s problems had worsened, and his friends later indicated that he was resolved to arrange for her the best care. She was possessed of the listlessness and flushed face typical of her disease, and she went about the house, still trying to attend to domestic matters, with a glazed eye and a rasping breath that the humidity exacerbated. She was also possessed by what the tubercular Brontë sisters’ physician called a “tinge of religious melancholy.” She had become a more devout Catholic, and her bedroom was strewn with rosaries, missals, scapulars, holy cards, and medals, all alien to Dan’s tradition, and her bed was sprinkled by Mrs. Bagioli with holy water. Friendly doctors still jovially misinformed Dan and Laura about the prospects of Teresa’s recovery. After all, the medical journals, including the Lancet, carried news of a number of new treatments under consideration in England, including mixtures of quinine and beef tea, and the pumping of various mixtures into patients’ mouths, the most common ingredients for such forcible pumping including hydrogen, coal gas, iodine, creosote, and carbolic acid. Teresa was, after all, naturally robust, and if the right treatment could be hit upon, the disease would withdraw quite quickly.18

  Bloomingdale seemed secure from a forced sale, and would be rendered more secure if Dan was given yet another post. And at the end of the summer, Secretary of War Stanton nominated him for one—the military governorship of South Carolina. This state, which had been the mother of the rebellion, would be a turbulent province to administer, but Dan was exhilarated by the prospect. He had fought off the tag of immobility and uselessness that the loss of his leg had encouraged people to plant on his forehead. No doubt his Andean journey had helped prove that he was not ready to be made inactive. By early September, he was on his way to Charleston, to the harbor where the entire calamity had been introduced by the firing on Sumter. There were valid reasons for not taking Teresa this time, even had he decided to. The task in Charleston and in Colombia, turned to ashes by Sherman’s order, would give Dan even less time for a sick wife than he had previously been able to provide. As well, though Charleston was warmer than New York, it had been tried by other consumption sufferers, who found that its moist winters and heavy-aired summers were not notably helpful. And then the region had been reduced by war to a primitive economy in which most goods, including medicines, were scarce.

  Arriving by steamer with his staff, Dan found Charleston a demoralized city, with a bitter sense of its own debasement. Parts of the town were in rubble from Union bombardments by land and sea, but despite the damage that had been done to it, General Sickles could tell it had not yet been cured of its hubris. Nonetheless, the harbor was empty—there was nothing to export, and the traditional aristocracy, who possessed town houses or lived in mansions around the verge of the city, had been reduced to
wearing the homespun clothing previously worn by poor farmers and slaves. The only wealthy people on the landscape were the war profiteers and those Yankee investors looking for cheap property, markets that could only improve. Derisively, they were called carpetbaggers. Resenting them, willing to beat them to death, the remnants of the Southern army loitered in the streets in tattered gray or butternut. As well, the former slaves who milled around town often seemed disoriented and displaced by freedom—a point the advocates of slavery did not fail regularly to make to visiting Northerners.

  Dan knew the powers he took to South Carolina were prodigious, with the only brake upon them the cabinet in Washington and hostile commentary in South Carolina itself and in the national press. The South Carolinians understood his position, and many resented him accordingly. He took up residence in a handsome surviving house on Charlotte Street and established his headquarters at the Citadel, the grand Southern military academy, one of the glories of antebellum Charleston, that had largely remained intact, being far from the range of the U.S. naval blockade. Dan was early visited by planters who came with stories of their former power and complaints about the behavior of the Negroes. One planter Dan would remember presented himself with the boast he had spent forty years in the South Carolina legislature, had entertained President Van Buren in his mansion, and had owned hundreds of slaves. He produced, as a sign of his former wealth and intellectual liveliness, a repeater watch, a watch that struck the hour. The man, whom Dan described as “haughty,” even though Dan had enjoyed a considerable and friendly acquaintance with such people before the war, complained that his slaves hung on to their former quarters but refused to work. They were insolent; they carried shotguns; occasionally they burned their own huts. When Sherman’s army was approaching, this much-reduced Southern dignitary told Dan, he had set fire to his ancestral mansion so that it would not be defiled. He said, “I could maintain discipline among my Negroes without coming to you, but you have taken away my authority as a master, and you have substituted nothing in its place.”