American Scoundrel (32 page)

Dan was listened to with more interest than during his earlier two speeches. It was apparent that his Southern-leaning philosophy had been rocked by South Carolina’s assault on Castle Pinckney and Fort Moultrie in Charleston. “With all the pomp and circumstance of war, the battalions of South Carolina, duly provided with scaling ladders, battle-axes, and pontoons, march in grim array to the assault of these fortifications—the clear and indisputable property and domain of the United States. . .. These are seditious proceedings.” And Dan had been particularly surprised by the fact that a small body of federal reinforcements and some supplies, sent on an unarmed merchant vessel called the
Star of the West
, had been fired upon by South Carolina artillery. The American flag was flying at the masthead of the ship when “the authorities of South Carolina, through their military forces, opened fire upon that defenseless ship, and compelled her to retire and abandon
the peaceful and legitimate mission in which she was engaged. Now, sir, that was an act of war, unqualified war.” As for his earlier prediction that no man would cross the frontier of New York to employ coercion against the people of a Southern state, that was still the truth. “But the men of New York would go in untold thousands anywhere to protect the flag of their country and to maintain its legitimate authority.”

Representative Sickles was now doing so well that when the Speaker intervened to say that the gentleman’s hour had expired, several members expressed a desire to hear the conclusion of the argument, and an extension of time was unanimously granted. As for the security of the United States, Dan continued, “these fortified places are of a thousand times more importance if secession becomes an accomplished and irreversible fact, than if it had never been contemplated.” If France and Britain were inclined to seek any opportunity offered by American weakness to dismember the Union, these forts were essential to the interests of the United States. “In all the partisan issues between the South and the Republican Party, the people of the city of New York are with the South, but when the South makes an untenable issue with our country, when the flag of the Union is insulted, when the fortified places provided for the common defense are assaulted and seized, when the South abandons its Northern friends for English and French alliances, then the loyal and patriotic population of that imperial city are unanimous with the Union.”
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Dan was moving toward being a Union-dedicated Democrat who had run out of patience with the South, which, after all, had produced the deceiver Key. It was clear that the crisis of the hour had given back to disgraced Dan Sickles some of his voice. After the
Star of the West
was repulsed by gunfire from South Carolina batteries, Dan became passionately concerned that his old friend Buchanan might simply abandon Major Anderson and Fort Sumter to South Carolina. On one of the gloomiest days of the winter, said Dan later, Edwin Stanton, who was now Buchanan’s Attorney General, asked the congressman to go on a mission to the chief Northern cities, particularly Philadelphia and New York, to announce that the President was determined to hold on to
Sumter and to encourage the North to applaud this decision. Stanton told Dan to see to it that militia cannon were primed with some celebratory gunpowder. “A thousand bullets and a bale of hemp would save us from a bloody revolution.” Stanton believed the President would support the men in Fort Sumter if he saw that the temper of the people demanded resistance. Thus, “go and fire some cannon and let the echoes come to the White House.”

On a visit to the White House, Dan got the definite impression that the President was wavering. Hence, Dan visited Philadelphia and asked his friend Daniel Dougherty, who had given evidence at the trial, to muster militia artillery units and fire off a hundred guns in Independence Square to applaud the President’s sturdy resistance. Dougherty was also to go to all the leading merchants of Philadelphia and have them send telegrams—“long ones”—applauding the President’s sturdiness, and to encourage all Philadelphia newspapers to carry congratulatory headlines. In Trenton, Albany, and New York, Dan Sickles used the same strategy, canvassing Wall Street, the bank presidents, the leading manufacturers, all to send telegrams to the same effect. He went to the editors of the
Herald
and
Sun
and had them print double-headed editorials supporting a strong line on Sumter. This was the sort of work Dan was best at, and the stiffness of resolve in his own power base confirmed Old Buck in brave resistance to South Carolina’s demands. The garrison of Sumter would not be withdrawn. Stanton wired,
Victory—we won. Thank you for your kind offices.
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Now, in the Republic’s darkest days, Dan was slowly regaining political credit. His next congressional speech was in support of the bills to suspend the postal services to the secessionist states. He spoke on February 5, when already South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had defected. Many congressmen from the South, however, still sat in the House, as did those from the states that were suspected of having a firm intention to secede soon, such as Virginia and North Carolina. Dan spoke in favor of the suspension of postal services in the South because the government of the United States had no choice—it must either subject the mails to the hazard of every
possible trespass and depredation by the insurgent states, or else withhold them altogether. Specifically, because it did not involve federal coercion, he supported the cancellation of postal services.

The new crisis did not bear merely on the mails, Dan announced. There was an issue that funds belonging to the United States, lying in a number of subtreasuries and mints in the South, were no longer safe to the United States. And here again Dan showed his disappointment with his former friends. The magnanimous policy of President Buchanan, who had solemnly announced to the people of the country that he would not adopt the policy of coercion, “has been followed by insults to our flag; by the expulsion of the United States troops and authorities from navy yards and forts and arsenals; by measures to control the vast commerce of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. . .. While we are here deliberating upon measures of honorable and fraternal compromise, envoys have been sent abroad to request the Cabinets of Europe to sit in counsel . . . upon the paralyzed and impotent United States of America.

“Surely the chivalrous men of the South would scorn to receive the benefits of our postal laws,” said Dan. “They cannot intend to remain, like Mahomid’s coffin, between heaven and earth, neither in nor out of the Union, getting all the benefits that they can secure and subjecting us to all its burdens.” Then Dan traced the gradations of attitude through which his kind of Northerner had passed. In December, the cry had been for “peaceable secession.” In January, the South had forced “the immediate and forcible expulsion of the United States authorities from even the limits of their exclusive jurisdiction—from their custom houses, post offices, treasuries, navy yards, ships, arsenals, and forts.” In February, “secession, despoliation, and war. What next?” He declared, in the presence of this new and latest phase of the revolution, that the action of the South could have no friends or apologists in the North; “and if these aggressive and predatory enterprises are sanctioned by the authorities and the public opinion of the alienated States, it will soon be difficult to find a respectable exception to the general denunciation
which they must encounter from the loyal and patriotic citizens of this country.”
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His very last congressional activity was to propose a resolution in the House calling for the celebration of George Washington’s birthday as a national holiday, and to try to organize, through his reopened lines of communication to the White House, a military parade of regular troops on February 22. The dove had become something of a hawk. But the parade did not happen. Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln were on their way to Washington, and Old Buck yearned for rustic peace at Wheatland. So Dan went home to New York and to political oblivion.

When the guns of South Carolina bombarded Fort Sumter on April 12, Dan was nominally living in Bloomingdale with Teresa. He had adjusted with some success to his new condition. Though no longer a man who could go down to Washington and spend time with the powerful, and though a Nassau Street lawyer of no better than questionable reputation, he still found many reasons to be absent from home. To him, the success of his reconciliation with Teresa was one of the lesser features of the landscape. Teresa herself knew that by now. But she also knew that Fanny White was no longer a part of the Sickles equation. About the time Teresa had begun her secret affair with Barton Key, Fanny was engaged in a highly public affair with wealthy Jake LeRoy, older and richer than Dan. Then she had moved with two of her “boarders” from her industrial-strength brothel on Mercer Street to quieter quarters on Twelfth Street, and she met and married a lawyer, Edmon Blankman. Her retirement from a profitable business had almost certainly been caused by the onset of tuberculosis, a plague in New York, and one not uncommon among prostitutes. But Jake LeRoy had suffered from syphilis, and it was likely that that disease as well made inroads on Fanny’s health. Whichever was the cause of her early death, Fanny perished in 1860. She was said to own “three fine city mansions,” besides other property. The value of her real estate and jewelry was variously estimated at $50,000 to $100,000. She had flourished by sin. But at least she was no longer a distraction for Dan.
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From the day Sumter was shelled and war broke out, Teresa and Laura saw even less of Dan. Someone coming up from the city told Teresa he meant to enlist as a private. She wrote to him, “How true this rumor is you can best tell me.
Please come home dear Dan.
It seems so unsettled [and] so lonely to have you so much away.” Her news echoed the banal limits of her life since Key. She had been to a funeral, that of a local woman, of whom there were rumors that the death was suicide. “James T. Brady was one of the pallbearers.” Teresa had seen Wikoff only once recently—he was on his way to a masked ball at the Bennetts’, precisely the style of event, although she did not say so, she was no longer invited to. As for dear Manny Hart, he was due home from a trip to Europe. Papa Antonio Bagioli, she reported last of all, was going to sell or rent out his house on Fifteenth Street and was thinking of boarding.

This plain letter gave clues to the way she filled her days. She had supervised the setting out of a garden by a gardener named Frederick, whom she also used to fix up the grounds to the easterly, higher part of the property, and the “upper roads,” the one that connected the house with Broadway and the north-south one that ran along the higher ground. She thought the gardener was doing a very good job on all scores. “Your friend Quirk came here on Tuesday . . . he was so
tight
[drunk] he told me about it and apologized. His errand however was to say he was going to send me some gravel to fix the roads and he wished me to superintend the work—to order just what I pleased . . . and ‘God bless my little soul,’ he wanted me to be satisfied and gratified with the work, etc. etc. So a man has been bringing from Manhattanville four loads a day since Quirk was here.” She intended to sell a six-week-old calf, and was hard at work packing away winter clothing in the attic and bringing out the “summer articles.” The hens were laying a lot of eggs, and the horses never looked better, but poor Dandy the greyhound was “a pitiful object to behold.”

Like any picturesque place on the inconvenient edge of a large city, Bloomingdale had a fluctuating population. Dan himself was an indication of this. Dr. Paine, Teresa recorded for Dan’s information, wanted to
give his place up because it was hard to keep. Their friend Tom Field had just come back to Bloomingdale, but his wife was staying downtown in the Everett House. Dr. Bradford had abandoned his place, and Dr. Williams’s family had moved into Fanny Field’s house. As for Laura, on the day Teresa asked Dan whether it was true that he intended to enlist as a private, the child was just back from Sunday school “and would like you to answer her letter. She will spend tomorrow with your mother.” And if Dan would tell her, Teresa, when he was to come, she would endeavor to have the dining aspects of the house in order, although the rats were so formidable as almost to make it unsafe to go into the lower storeroom.

There had been gossip about Teresa’s taking opiates to soothe her unhappy lot, an annoying cough, and a general feeling of malaise, and now she confessed to Dan she had been taking Brandreth’s Pills for her biliousness. The contents of such patent medicines were a mystery, but they commonly contained laudanum and other drugs. Indeed, in the case of Brandreth’s Pills, she said she had been “going it strong on them.” And then there was the final, reiterated plea that he write soon and often, and let her know “when we may expect you home.” She signed it as his “sincerely attached wife.”
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Unlike other women who felt they had a stake in their husbands’ attitudes toward the war, she did not mention the national crisis at all— indeed, both before and after the death of Key, there was little politics in her letters. Thus she did not take the time most Democratic wives did to pillory or satirize hapless Abraham Lincoln’s new presidency.

The firing upon Fort Sumter, its surrender on April 14, and Mr. Lincoln’s call for volunteers on April 15 had all breathed a new spirit into Dan. He was appalled by the cannonades directed at the Union flag over Sumter. Many of Tammany Hall’s children were, like Dan, discovering themselves as a new breed named Union Democrats, men ready to fight for Lincoln’s Union. There was a sort of consistency in their attitude. They had tolerated the blustering of the South, and its peculiar institutions, to keep the Union in existence. By seceding, the South had
relieved them of any further tolerance toward it. Thomas Francis Meagher took only two days to decide that he must fight for the preservation of the Union that had given him and many other Irishmen political asylum. Meagher presented himself to the headquarters of the 69th New York Militia and promised to raise one hundred young Irishmen for the service of the Union. In this military intention, Meagher had the complete support of his wife, Elizabeth, and in years to come, when Meagher was a general, Elizabeth Meagher would become honorary colonel of one of his regiments, the 88th New York, which would style itself “Mrs. Meagher’s Own.”
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