American Scoundrel American Scoundrel American Scoundrel

by Thomas Keneally

In the early twentieth century, Dan was looked after at his home in New York by two black servants, Moseley and Sarah, and by a middle-aged widow, Eleanor Wilmerding, who was said to have loved the general “with a jealous, undying, and devoted affection.” Though there seems to have been a sexual component in the relationship, there was, as in all Dan’s relations with women, a lack of reciprocated devotion from Dan. The aging general’s meals were cooked by a former soldier named Captain Denton, and it was Denton who explained Dan’s lack of total emotional dependence upon Mrs. Wilmerding. He would tell a researcher nearly four decades later that he had seen in the general’s chamber dresser a whole drawer filled with lady’s black stockings and another with lady’s gloves. They had been left behind over time by lovers and were testimony to Dan’s erotic capacity in his advancing years. But his gastronomic tastes were shrinking, for in those last years, said Denton, he liked plain, wholesome meals, not the Delmonico and Maison Dorée style of food he had relished for most of his life. Now it was oyster stew, lamb stew, fried oysters, rice pudding—the straightforward, the sustaining.21

  But he was not done yet with entertaining notable Americans. Through the Reverend Joseph Twichell, formerly of the Excelsior Brigade, and pastor of the fashionable Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford, Mr. Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, began to hear Twichell’s colorful tales of Dan Sickles. When Twain later moved to New York, just across Ninth Street from where the general lived, and got to know him personally, he brought his incisive whimsy to his description of Sickles’s house. “You couldn’t walk across that floor anywhere without stumbling over the hard heads of lions and things … it was as if a menagerie had undressed in the place…. It was a kind of museum, and yet it was not the sort of museum which seemed dignified enough to be the museum of a great soldier—and so famous a soldier. It was the sort of museum which should delight and entertain little boys and girls. I suppose that that museum reveals a part of the general’s character and make. He is sweetly and winningly childlike.”

  Mark Twain admired Dan’s well-constructed sentences. His talk was full of interest and bristling with points, Twain found, but the delivery had a certain monotonous quality that became oppressive after a time. The great writer and humorist was reminded of what a friend had said about Wagner’s music: “I have been told that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” That seemed to fit the general’s manner of speech exactly. “His talk is much better than it is…. His talk does not sound entertaining, but it is distinctly entertaining.”

  Sickles’s other gift, thought Twain, was to talk about nothing but himself and yet at the same time sound modest, inoffensive, and “unexasperating.” “He seemed to me … just the kind of man who would risk his salvation in order to do some ‘last words’ in an attractive way.” If he made ungenerous remarks about any officers from the war, he did so with dignity and courtesy, but Twain percipiently thought that “the general valued his lost leg a way above the one that is left. I am perfectly sure that if he had to part with either of them, he would part with the one that he has got.”22

  The son who would eventually come to the United States to meet him, Stanton Sickles, worked in the American embassy in Spain, possessed immense fondness for all members of the Sickles clan, and had a spaciousness of soul like that of his grandfather. When he arrived in America with his mother in 1908, he wrote excitedly in French in his journal, in uppercase letters: “FIRST INTERVIEW OF MY DEAR PARENTS AFTER 27 YEARS, AT HALF PAST TWELVE AT OUR HOTEL.”

  The second Mrs. Sickles agreed to be reunited with her husband if he would dismiss Mrs. Wilmerding, who so far forgot her position as to constantly refer to the general as “Dear.” Dan, more intractable than ever at eighty-eight years, would not dismiss her. So Caroline de Creagh Sickles continued to live at the Albert Hotel on Eleventh Street, and Dan remained in his nearby house, enjoying the housekeeping mercies of Mrs. Wilmerding. It was rumored that he had made out a new will, which left everything to that lady. Not that this was necessarily a splendid prospect for her. Dan had lost on the stock market a considerable amount of what he had made from the Gould coup and inherited from his father. He held in trust the inheritance of both Eda and George Stanton Sickles, but was waiting for the right time to sell the chief property of 109 acres in New Rochelle. Yet he was reckless with money, distributing it to veterans who appeared outside his house for handouts on Sunday mornings. When a friend of his, Representative William Sulzer of New York, presented a bill in Congress proposing that Dan be retired with the rank of lieutenant general, a move that would raise his pension to $7,500, it was not simply because this was a worthy honor, but because it would provide Dan with essential income. The attempt to elevate Dan to three-star rank failed in the House in February 1910.23

  Dan had lost some of his money to importunate women. Some years earlier he had advanced more than $9,900 to Eleanor Wilmerding. His last great folly of expenditure on women involved a plausible artist named Princess Lenott Parlaghy. She set up a studio in the Plaza Hotel, where Dan often dined, and she asked whether he would sit for her. Dan behaved toward the princess with a breathtaking extravagance. She said she had always wanted a lion cub, so he turned up with a litter of six, acquired somehow from his zoo connections. And after the general had his portrait painted by Princess Parlaghy, he passed on the names of two hundred friends who might like to undergo the same process.

  His greatest indulgence was, however, to stand as guarantor for the princess’s debts. In the spring of 1910, the managing director of the Plaza advised Dan that the amount Princess Parlaghy owed the hotel “stood at a little over $5,500, and as her business manager informs me it may be three to eight days before she receives her remittance. I thought I would let you know the amount of her indebtedness covered by your guaranty.”

  The Knickerbocker Trust Company told Dan six months later that the princess had deposited with it a sum of $750 for him—a repayment against this or some other advance by Dan. It was not enough to count. A year after covering the princess’s debt, he was pleading with one August Hecksher of Fifth Avenue for an extension on two notes Hecksher held for $7,700 plus interest. In 1912 the Bowery Savings Bank initiated foreclosure proceedings against the general, and the Bank of the Metropolis attached his property for his failure to pay $5,050.24

  Caroline Sickles, still living in the hotel close to Dan but not as his wife, came to his aid. She paid a judgment for $8,200, and took a second mortgage on the general’s house to save him from eviction. She pawned her jewels to pay the debt of $5,050. But Dan demonstrated no gratitude; instead he cast bitter doubt on Caroline’s motives. “I pawn my jewels to save his treasures,” an affronted Caroline was quoted in the Times as saying. “The general has his pension to live on, and I can do nothing further for him.” As for the rest, she said, she would welcome him if he wished to make his home with her. “But I will not put up all my money to save his house to have it occupied by him and his housekeeper to the exclusion of me.”25

  A worse and final financial crisis hung over Dan. State Controller William Somer discovered, late in 1912, that there was a discrepancy in the books of the New York State Monuments Commission: $445,641 had been budgeted to the commission, of which Sickles was the chief, but the general’s expense vouchers amounted to only $417,165. Missing was more than $28,000. Loyal Stanton Sickles offered $5,000 as a gesture against the missing funds, but that did not stop the state attorney general from taking action against the entire commission, including its ninety-three-year-old chairman. The court order for the civil arrest of Dan was issued on the last Saturday of January 1913. General Sickles nonetheless had a quiet Sunday at home, and took care to have the curtains raised so that he could sit at the window by a little table containing a large vase of flowers. An American flag was draped on either side of him, and to show that he was still a man to be reckoned with, he smoked a cigar. A police patrol wagon from Mercer Street stood outside the house most of the afternoon, and a lieutenant of police had
a conference with Dan, but no arrest was made.

  The city sheriff, Harburger, told the press that he would not bully the old man, that the general would be treated as an honored guest rather than as a prisoner. The sheriff nonetheless declared that, with great regret, he would arrest Dan the following morning and place him in the Ludlow Street Jail. “Do you really expect to put him in a cell?” asked a journalist. “My goodness, no,” said the sheriff. The general would have all the comforts of a good home.

  Controller Somer, who had discovered the discrepancy, started a subscription to help Dan pay the debt, and donated the first $100 himself. A telegram came to Dan from Gainesville, Georgia, from Helen B. Longstreet: “Am wiring the Attorney General of New York that I will raise money among the ragged, destitute, maimed veterans who followed Lee, to pay the amount demanded if the New York officials will allow us sufficient time…. The Republic, whose battles you fought, will not permit your degradation.” Sheriff Harburger spent another day trying to be busy to escape the necessity of arresting Dan Sickles, and in the state Senate there was a motion calling on the attorney general to suspend action against the old general. Dan’s friend Sulzer, now governor of New York, expressed his concern for what awaited Dan, but said that he could do nothing to prevent an arrest.

  “Fifty years ago,” declared Senator Murtaugh in Albany, “the name of General Sickles was one to conjure with. Fifty years hence our children, and our children’s children, will stand with uncovered heads before monuments erected to the memory of General Sickles, for which this State will spend far more money than now is required to extricate the hero of Gettysburg from his trouble.”26

  But even among Dan’s allies there was dissent. Mrs. Longstreet was outraged by a statement of Stanton Sickles that his father had procured the position of postmaster of Gainesville for her, that in “passing the plate in the South” she was merely repaying a favor, and that the money collected would benefit only Mrs. Wilmerding. She did not know Stan-ton, said Mrs. Longstreet. She did not know Wilmerding. All she knew was that General Sickles was her husband’s best friend among all the Union generals after the war was over “and we became one nation again.”

  Attorney General Thomas Carmody in Albany stood against the tide of sympathy for Dan. “General Sickles had appropriated a large amount for his own use. This he has not attempted to justify or to defend.” The sheriff now attended to arresting Dan in the most benign manner. He went to the house, into a back room, where General Sickles was seated in a huge chair, wearing a black suit, an eye shade, and a strip of plaster on his left cheek. Grasping him by the hand, the sheriff placed him under arrest. But then he arranged that Dan be granted bail without having to leave his residence, which would become his de facto prison for a short time. A $30,000 bond was arranged through a surety company official, who produced the papers and had them signed by all parties. Sheriff Harburger apologetically told Dan that a sum of $5.29 was due as a bond fee. “Ah, yes,” the general said. “Eleanor! Please get me $5.29.”

  “Yes, dear,” Mrs. Wilmerding replied, and fetched the money.27 Dan had fought off the state and his wife. But he believed that Caroline and Stanton intended to get control of his house, and that was a battle he would not be able to win from beyond the grave. In July 1913, he went to Gettysburg, accompanied by his valet, Moseley, and by Mrs. Wilmerding, to attend the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the battle. He listened to a speech by a new President, Woodrow Wilson. At a related ceremony, he sat in honor on the porch of the Rogers house, behind the Emmitsburg Road, where a girl had once baked biscuits for some of General Humphrey’s men as they waited for Longstreet’s attack. He watched white-headed men, veterans of the Confederate Army, hobble across the space between Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Ridge, reproducing Pickett’s charge. As they reached Cemetery Ridge, they were not shot down but were embraced by aged survivors of the Union line. Dan’s friend Horatio King was there, and so was the Reverend Joseph Twichell. Helen Longstreet, not yet aged, was writing up the event for a Southern newspaper. She was aware of Horatio King’s verses to Dan:

  I see him on that famous field,

  The bravest of the brave,

  Where Longstreet’s legions strove to drive

  The Third Corps to its grave.

  The fight was bloody, fierce and long,

  And Sickles’ name shall stay

  Forever in the hall of fame

  As he who saved the day.28

  Mrs. Wilmerding perished the next winter of a sudden pneumonic infection. Dan made a new will, naming his three grandchildren—that is, Stanton’s and Eda’s children—as heirs and leaving bequests to his servant Moseley and to Horatio King, who had written the verse representing Dan’s version of Gettysburg.

  He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in April 1914, and Caroline and Stanton at last moved into the house. He died less than two weeks later, on May 3, a little after nine o’clock at night.

  Because of a vanity that had led him to misrepresent his age, the Times confidently but wrongly gave his years as ninety-one. The journalists at the Times fondly remembered the previous March, when a rumor had got around that Dan was at the point of death, and a Times reporter had called his home on the telephone. Dan had answered. “Yes, this is General Sickles. Am I ill? Nonsense. I was never better in my life. There’s nothing to that story.” This time, however, the story was soundly based.

  So now at last he joined Teresa and Key, Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln (who had died of a stroke in 1882), Meagher, James Topham Brady, Wikoff, Queen Isabella II, Laura, and other vivid spirits. But Teresa did not intrude upon his obsequies as he had upon hers. If he got the larger share of mention at her funeral, at his she was barely a whisper. Five days after his death, his body was transported to Washington. He was buried at the Arlington National Cemetery with gun carriage and riderless horse, escort and volleys of rifle fire, and it was his triumphant and militant career that dominated the event.29

  For the sake of his courage, the Republic honored his vivid character and forgave him the failures of his heart.

  LAST WORD

  TYPICALLY, DAN MADE AN UNQUIET GHOST, his life, particularly his actions on July 2, 1863, casting up a legion of disputative voices to ensure that his name still has resonance. A recent dispute can serve as a case in point. In 1993 a report in the Times of 1914 was seized on by two New Yorkers named Davis and Shad, the latter Sickles’s great-great-nephew and only known survivor, to demonstrate that his widow, Caroline de Creagh, had wanted Dan buried near the New York Monument on the Gettysburg battlefield. The battle between the Gettysburg Military Park and Mr. Davis on the issue of moving Dan to Gettysburg continued for some years, with the Gettysburg Military Park conceding that Dan’s remains could go into the Soldiers’ National Cemetery Annex, or his ashes could be strewn in the original cemetery, which had been closed to burials since 1903. Davis was contemptuous of the bureaucrat who gave him this answer, saying, “He wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for Dan Sickles.” The dispute is unsettled and will probably never come to conclusion, and Dan is still in Arlington, beneath his discreet military stone, which mentions merely his name, rank, Medal of Honor, and date of death. But to arise yet again easefully from that place, Dan needs only the invocation of his name at a history seminar, at a Civil War buffs’ meeting, or on an Internet Civil War chat site, and from the heat of people’s breaths he rises again to full and controversial life.1

  The gentler and pleasant spirit of Teresa is not as easily invoked, and insofar as these pages have been able, within the limits of evidence, to commemorate this beautiful, pleasant, and intelligent girl, the author is happy.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER I

  1. Philip Shriver Klein, President James Buchanan, p. 117; John W. Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men, pp. 317, 318; W. A. Swanberg, Sickles the Incredible, p. 92; Marilyn Wood Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830–1870, p. 281; New York World, June 30, 1869.

  2. Ha
rper’s Weekly, April 9, 1859; Joseph Louis Russo, Lorenzo Da Ponte, Poet and Adventurer, passim.

  3. G. W. D. Andrews to Sickles, August 13, 1853, Daniel E. Sickles Papers, Manuscripts Division, New-York Historical Society (hereafter NYHS).

  4. Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, The New York Irish, pp. 122–123; Hill, pp. 77, 82, 110, 134; James Dabney McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life, p. 583.

  5. Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863, pp. 14, 20, 21; Harper’s Weekly, April 9, 1859.

  6. Harper’s Weekly, April 9, 1859.

  7. Russo, pp. 12, 30; Felix G. Fontaine, De Witt’s Special Report: Trial of Daniel E. Sickles for Shooting Philip Key, Esq., U.S. District Attorney of Washington D.C., pp. 54–55.

  8. Russo, pp. 151ff.; Thomas Keneally, The Great Shame, p. 289; Harper’s Weekly, April 9, 1859.

  9. Swanberg, p. 81; Ernst, p. 170; James M. McPherson, The Battle-cry of Freedom, p. 60; Gustavus Myers, The History of Tammany Hall, p. 171; Harper’s Weekly, April 9, 1859.

  10. Harper’s Weekly, April 9, 1859; New York World, June 30, 1869.

  11. Ernst, pp. 163–165; Bayor and Meagher, pp. 88, 102; Keneally, p. 249.

  12. Ernst, pp. 164–166; Thomas Lowe Nichols, Forty Years of American Life, pp. 160–162.

  13. McPherson, pp. 60–62; Myers, p. 171.

  14. Myers, p. 187; New York Herald (hereafter NYH), August 24, 1852; Bayor and Meagher, pp. 122–123; Ernest A. McKay, The Civil War and New York City, pp. 1, 3; Harper’s Weekly, April 9, 1859.

  15. New York World, June 30, 1869; David Graham to Sickles, October 25, 1851, Daniel Edgar Sickles Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (hereafter NYPL).

  16. Hill, pp. 102–103; New York World, June 30, 1869.

  17. New York World, June 30, 1869; George Templeton Strong, Diary of George Templeton Strong: Selections, Vol. 2, p. 438; Swanberg, pp. 83–84.