“Then,” Dan depicted himself as saying, “I would advise you to give your Negroes a good example to imitate. For instance, if you don’t want them to burn their huts, don’t burn your own house. . .. If you don’t want them to carry double-barreled shotguns, don’t carry a doublebarreled shotgun yourself when you drive out.” The planter remarked, “If other Yankee generals didn’t know more than you do, I don’t understand how the South got licked.” The story—and perhaps it is a parable—is indicative of the style Dan tried to bring to his administration of South, and later of North, Carolina.19
Dan was also visited in his office, and wherever he traveled, by the minority of anti-secession, pro-Union men who had remained loyal to the United States and had been severely persecuted throughout the war. Such men existed in every Southern state, though there were more in North Carolina and Tennessee than in South Carolina. In some cases it was the widows, harrowed by years of suffering, who came to him. Some of these loyal Union folk took to demonstrating that there was a new order in place by breaking the old shibboleths of race. As one Southern writer complained, they “ate and drank, walked and rode, went to public places and ostensibly affiliated with Negroes.” This incited a range of savage retaliations by former Rebels, and a corresponding law-and-order challenge for Dan and his men.
A journalist who visited the Carolinas recorded a sense that Dan, too, must have recognized—that the rural Southerners lived in a far more primitive condition than their counterparts in Maine or Vermont. “Thus, Charleston has much intelligence, and considerable genuine culture; but go twenty miles away, and you are in the land of the barbarians. . .. In South Carolina there is very little pretense of loyalty. I believe I found less than fifty men who admitted any love for the Union.” A state convention of pro-Union or, at the very least, realistic Southerners had already elected a civil governor with whom Dan would need to collaborate. Fortunately, he was a competent man of the realistic kind, a former Speaker of the House and a neighbor of Dan’s from Lafayette Square, James L. Orr, who, before the cataclysm and prior to Dan and Teresa’s occupation, had rented the Stockton Mansion. Orr had been a Confederate, had served the entire war with increasing doubt in the Southern Senate in Richmond, and had now—treasonably, according to the fire-eaters; sensibly, according to the less rabid—taken the oath to the United States again and brought his considerable gifts to rebuilding his state. By and large he got on well sharing power with Dan, and he remembered the day of Dan’s acquittal, when he had been one of his congratulators.
To keep order from the Citadel in this prime rebel province, as of January 1, 1866, Dan had a force of 352 officers and 7,056 men. They were scattered throughout this triangle of a state, in one restive little town after another, as far as the foothills of the Appalachians. His mandate was that this force should be deployed to protect the freed black men and women, and loyal whites, from the anger of disaffected rural populations and veterans. He wanted to show that in this regard a new era had dawned, and a general order he issued, appropriately, on January 1, 1866, declared the state’s Black Code null and void, and decreed that “all laws shall be applicable to all inhabitants.” Negroes were to have the same judicial recourse as whites, and all occupations were to be opened to them. They were also to possess a novel freedom for ex-slaves: freedom of movement, exemption from any special taxes, and immunity from arrest on the basis of the poor and vagrancy laws.20
His general order created, as he expected, howls of outrage in the South Carolina hinterland, let alone in Charleston and Columbia. Dan had earlier warned Stanton and President Lincoln that there was an intractability of feeling in the South. And as his first summer in Charleston began, he told Stanton again that the Southern people yielded to the United States only a reluctant and sullen allegiance. “In my Department, I have not seen the American flag raised by a Carolinian. If it floated over a dwelling, or a hotel, or a shop, the population would avoid the place as they would shun a pesthouse filled with lepers.”
Since he and his soldiers could not prevent every outrage, Dan began to intervene, personally or through officers, in district court hearings to protect former slaves and those who were sympathetic to them. When a district court headed by Judge A. P. Aldridge sentenced a white man to flogging for his association with blacks, Dan sent a company of troops to intervene, clear the court, and prevent the punishment. This caused Judge Aldridge to complain to Washington about assaults on the independence of the judiciary. Then two Northern visitors, suspected carpetbaggers, were beaten up in a Columbia shanty barroom, and a magistrate released on bail the young men who had done it. Dan removed the Columbia magistrate from office and sent the culprits before a military court, which sentenced them to six months in Fort Macon. He knew his actions would once more unleash a torrent of complaints from Southerners to the Attorney General in Washington. He and other military governors were in an impossible situation. The Realpolitik of America then was that Radical Republicans wanted the South crushed, while Southerners, who had inherited intact their judicial system, did not like to see it interfered with at all.
Dan had traveled so far since his pro-Southern days as to see the South Carolinians who attacked the new social order as incarnations of an intolerance that, “illustrated in countless affrays, was long permitted in Southern communities, to hunt down with cruel violence persons venturing to maintain opinions not in harmony with local sentiment.” To him the incarnations of this “cruel violence” were a pre-KKK group named the Regulators, who rode over the countryside to combat the “Negro menace.” During 1866 and into the new year, as Dan’s military force was reduced in strength, so did the Regulators roam more widely and demonstrate throughout the farmlands of South Carolina.
The daily stream of petitioners who came to Dan’s office at the Citadel did not diminish, and he treated them courteously and became socially friendly with some. By June 1866, his power had been increased; he was placed in command of the newly created Second Military Department, which included both North and South Carolina. He could hardly get to New York at all, for although North Carolina was easier to administer than its sister, the spring and summer resonated with the deeds of the hooded Regulators. In North Carolina the governor he collaborated with was a principled Quaker named Jonathan Worth, who had throughout opposed the rebellion and whose desire was to see North Carolina return to such a degree of loyalty and prosperity as once again to be a sovereign state in the nation. North Carolinians were more willing to declare themselves pro-Union, and to tell visitors that they “had always prophesied the downfall of the so-called Confederacy and had always desired the success of the Union arms.”
The news from New York was that Teresa continued poorly. To outsiders, though, sometimes the disease seemed to bring its own consolation. One French author declared that in contrast to “diseases of crude and baser kind which clog and soil the mind, phthisis is an illness of the lofty and noble parts: it calls forth a state of elevation, tenderness and love.” Edgar Allan Poe had written of “the terrible beauty of consumption,” from which his wife, Virginia, suffered. It made her, he recorded, “delicately, morbidly angelic.” The forms of sensuality were being eroded from Teresa. She had become more angular; that sumptuous, full-fleshed look so admired by Victorian men was gone, but she smiled like an angel, not least in Laura’s direction. As Teresa rested from the efforts of mounting the stairs and attempts at managing the house in the way she had so easily done in the past, her thirteen-year-old daughter watched and made her judgments about her father. If one wanted to be harsh, one could say that Dan had, since their reconciliation, avoided every notable chance to acknowledge Teresa as his wife. And Laura wanted to be harsh. As for Teresa, had she wanted to go to Charleston that winter, she was too proud to be importunate and demand to be brought there, however temporarily. She knew she could not fulfill the functions of the general’s consort as she could have a few years back. But in her clear hours, even for a sunny soul like hers, the rustication i
n Bloomingdale, the purdah of the suburbs, must have seemed connected to her interminable decay; body and spirit were in perverse conspiracy against her.
Typically, Dan had found other associations. He had been visited in the Sherman-shattered, burned, and ruined Columbia, for example, by a young, forthright Southerner named Allie Grant, a gentlewoman down on her luck, as were most of her Southern sisters. She later wrote to him asking for employment with a Dan-like directness of her own, and requesting that he “write to her as soon as possible, for I long to hear something absorbing and compulsory to fill my head and hands, and occupy my thoughts.” Allie was one of the recipients of the ration certificates Dan distributed from his office, for in some ways, in that hungry landscape, his job resembled that of a modern nongovernmental organization or aid body.21
In the summer of 1866, President Johnson offered Dan the post of Minister to the Netherlands. Dan suspected it was a mechanism to get him out of the Carolinas because of complaints that he was both too soft on Southerners and too tyrannical over them. He immediately approached General Grant and asked whether the offer of the posting arose from any dissatisfaction with his performance. In conflict with the President over policy in the South, Grant replied that he himself would regret to see Sickles replaced. In the letter refusing the diplomatic posting, Dan pleaded that the $3,500 per year which his wife and family would need to remain in New York would leave him only $4,000 to run an official establishment at a foreign court, and that he would therefore run short.
As another fall came on, Allie Grant of Columbia was still an intermittent friend to Dan. “I really thought you’d entirely forgotten the ‘beggar.’ I am very happy to learn that I was laboring under a mistake,” she wrote to Dan. He had set up a post for her, which she intended to accept with great pleasure. “I was inclined to call and see you again while you were up here, but some of the Delegates [to the state convention] were talking already about my first visit. . .. People are generally too pragmatical in Columbia.” She had spotted him talking with a former Confederate general outside the hotel, a fellow she had quarreled with over politics, so she had not stopped to converse. “Columbia is awfully dull,” wrote Allie. “And I do wish I was down in Charleston. P.S. I think you had better come to Columbia for a while, and I will let you see me, not in disguise though.” The general, even without a leg, was still a charmer of women, as long as they had a sportive attitude.
But not all Dan’s generosity to Southern women was opportunistic. He was supporting the aging widow of an eminent Southern anti-secessionist judge, Jane Pettigru, who suffered from an abiding disease—perhaps tuberculosis—and who told Dan, “What I would do without the two Rations a day I could not tell.” Perhaps on the basis of his experience with Teresa, Dan had also been kind enough to prescribe opiates for her health problems. “The laudanum you kindly advised me to be supplied with,” said Mrs. Pettigru, “I would die without.”22
That fall and winter it was still the turbulent and surly condition of South Carolina that occupied most of his time, though the raids of the Regulators became less common. He was involved in many further arguments, arresting some of the leading citizens of Edgefield, South Carolina, and taking them out of that jurisdiction to Columbia on charges of complicity in the murder of Union soldiers. He was reduced to threatening the white citizens of Edgefield, Lawrence, and New-berry that their freed slaves would be provided with rations, housing, and protection at the expense of those districts unless they behaved more reasonably.
He felt, too, a deep and visceral offense at continuing demonstrations of disloyalty by people in Charleston, and refused to turn a blind eye to the abuse of the symbols of the Union. He arrested the editor of the South Carolinian for commending a war remembrance at which the Confederate flag was displayed. When, in the following spring, the Charleston fire companies marched, he required them to carry the Union flag, and a fireman who mutilated it was held for a month without trial and publicly reprimanded.
In November 1866, the month when President Johnson optimistically declared that the rebellion no longer existed, Dan’s force had been reduced to 2,700 men, for the official end of rebellion meant that he could turn over to the civil authorities all law cases and jails, except on the sea islands off the coast. Not least among Dan’s problems was that Union troops sometimes provoked black freedmen to behave provocatively in front of Southerners, generally with a reaction that fell not upon the Union soldiers, but upon the freedmen. Yet he placed great reliance on his troops as keepers of order and believed that in the case of North and South Carolina, they were the reason for “the fortunate exemption of this Department from the riots and collisions which have occurred elsewhere.” Indeed, by the early winter of 1866–67, civil strife began to diminish, law and order being enforced, not always perfectly but with less public resistance, by law officers people knew to be locals instead of the despised bluecoats. Much of the duty of his men now consisted of exhuming the shallowly buried bodies of Sherman’s men and reinterring them properly.23
In New York, Laura had become, in the eyes of her ailing, bemused mother, a model of Dan’s energy and stubbornness, and her inchoate and bewildered taste for life and activity, acquired both from Dan and from the Da Pontes and Bagiolis, expressed itself in her abiding enthusiasm for painting. This was a testing time for a child who was solitary and both assertive and shy. Teresa intended, if possible, to send her to the nuns at Manhattanville, so that like her—or, at least, like her had she not fallen for the trap of her own luscious and open nature—Laura might grow up with a network of genial friends to absorb and direct her liveliness, and to give her a sense of living a normal, unjudged life.
Even now, Teresa, when feeling well and in remission from languor, tried to go out, wearing heavy boots, inquiring into the health of one of her dogs, or tramping the lanes to visit a sick neighbor. But mainly she was subject to those days of unspecific exhaustion that had become more common during the summer of 1866 and as the autumn began. She had slipped into a near-permanent invalid state by the onset of winter.
But she was still hungry for urbane visitors. Comforted by her Catholic devotions, eased by medicines, and feeling remote from the sins and blood and shame of 1859, she held few grudges, and one of the men who visited her that winter was James Topham Brady, a fellow of such delicacy of feeling that he remained concerned about the harsh treatment to which he had subjected her name during the trial. Brady himself had had uncertain health—indeed, he had only two more winters to live—and typically wished to be at peace with all souls. He gave Teresa and Laura a copy of his A Christmas Dream, a takeoff on A Christmas Carol published in 1860. Brady’s book was suffused with concern for poor and unfortunate women and with a sense of loss. The tale began with a girl pauper on a busy street who was churlishly refused a coin at Christmas by a man mounting a carriage. Soon after, the same carriage ran her down and careened onward, and the narrator records the injustice of this scene of privileged arrogance, poverty, and misfortune. From there, the scene moves to a New York restaurant, and the storyteller has a dream in which a man, or a spirit carrying a sack, accosts him, telling him that tonight he has seen the “sufferings earned by the heartlessness of bloated avarice,” and taking him back to Christmases past.
Thus it was other and, in many ways, more innocent men than Dan who charmed and diverted Teresa that pale winter. Manny Hart, Henry Wikoff, and the bachelor Brady all made the hard, cold journey by coach up icy Broadway from Lower Manhattan, but since none of them warned Dan urgently of her condition, they may have judged it something chronic, or believed, by the glitter of Teresa’s splendid eyes, that she would recover from it in spring. That was very likely her attitude, too, or her conscious hope. It was hard for anyone to believe that lovely Teresa was seriously vulnerable. “I imagined her as little likely to die as myself,” wrote Emily Brontë, who knew everything about tuberculosis, of the consumptive Frances Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights. “She was rather thin but young-complex
ioned and her eyes sparkled like diamonds.” Just so did Teresa’s, especially in lively company.24
But Teresa became totally bedridden at the height of that winter, in January 1867. Over a week, she declined unexpectedly and at a fierce rate. Maria Bagioli nursed her anxiously, and the ineffectual doctors of Bloomingdale came and went. Though newspapers and friends in that time were always delicate about naming an exact cause of death, in case the squalor of symptoms detracted from the nobility of the deceased, she was said to have caught a pulmonary infection that made her condition suddenly more acute. Bloodstained discharges came from her mouth. The features were “cyanosed,” to use the doctors’ term, blue and pinched, and the flesh seemed to fall away from the bones of her face, as if gravity were winning the battle against her. She endured strong chest pains, and her heart palpitated wildly. Poignantly, it was often during these more extreme phases of the disease that reputable doctors would open a vein in the patient’s arm and bleed her, in theory to reduce the symptomatic pressure in the system, but managing to reduce the patient’s capacity to struggle against the disease. A priest came, bidden by Mrs. Bagioli, and gave Teresa the last rites, the sacred oil on eyes, nose, mouth, hands, feet. This scandalous woman Teresa, whose name still burned in the American imagination, her vivid eroticism only partly erased by the calamities of the Civil War, all at once lost consciousness of the world for which she was well fitted, and became, in one vast, tormented, but unknowing breath, a cold-weather corpse, an eroded landscape.
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