American Scoundrel (34 page)

Yet now, when Wikoff visited Teresa, he brought White House gossip. Teresa might have felt some sympathy for Mary Todd Lincoln, who was also socially vulnerable, but with Mrs. Lincoln it was because many Washington women considered her both unpolished and unconventional.
Her husband was afraid of her temperament and was always saying, “Now then, Mother.” She was haunted by anxiety about her children’s health, having already lost her second son, Eddie, when he was less than four, to infantile tuberculosis.

Wikoff was always welcome at Bloomingdale, even when he reiterated for Teresa’s delight his staple tales as well as his White House impressions. In modern times Wikoff’s confessions might have earned him a reputation as something of a stalker and made him the subject of court injunctions to keep his distance. But the world had been engrossed by the melodrama of his obsession for a young American woman named Miss Jane Gamble, and the places, including the San Andrea prison in Genoa, to which his dedication to her had led him. His courtship had taken place between London and Paris, exotic locations for such yearning American hearts as that of Teresa Sickles and, indeed, that of Mary Todd Lincoln, whose chief experience of life had been her Lexington, Kentucky, childhood and her Springfield, Illinois, married life. Hundreds of thousands of Mary Todd Lincolns had similarly found Wikoff’s story engrossing.

One can well imagine the operatic light in which Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Sickles cast the prison and the malign British consul who had persuaded his beloved to give evidence designed to consign Wikoff there.

These were the tales with which the lonely Mrs. Sickles and out-of-her-depth Mrs. Lincoln were diverted by the chevalier. Of course, they had both read the book and knew that after fifteen months, Wikoff emerged, sadder and enriched by wisdom, but there was nothing like hearing these anecdotes from the mouth of the author. And if such tales did not suffice, whom did he not know in Europe? Why, King Louis Phillippe, Lamartine the poet-president, Thiers, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Louis Napoleon, and Lord Palmerston, all of them his intimates.
²⁴
Dan, of course, could have diverted his wife with enriching stories of remarkable Americans and even of love, but his anecdotal expansiveness did not for the moment extend to her.

When he went to see Lincoln a second time, the President cheerfully remarked, “Your camp has gone all to pieces, I hear.” Dan claimed
otherwise. His men wanted to come south; that was all. Lincoln said that if Dan could hold the men together for just a few days, a mustering officer would come “and take you all in out of the cold.”

It was mid-July before the quarrel between Washington and Albany over Sickles’s men was resolved. Two regular army officers delighted Dan when they arrived at Camp Scott, where they were made strenuously welcome by the men now mustered in as United States volunteers. Dan’s rank as a provisional general of brigade, subject to confirmation by the Senate, was further bolstered by this event. The cry “On to Richmond!” resonated over the reed beds and linden trees of Camp Scott. The Excelsior men believed they would be just in time. The daily papers reported how Union troops were harrying General Pierre Beauregard’s Rebels south of Centreville, Virginia.

But there was now an economic impediment to their becoming warriors. The total debt of the Excelsior Brigade, to the point where the federal government took it over was, in Wiley’s estimate, $283,000, and writs were beginning to pour in from providers, outfitters, produce merchants. A number of merchants secured judgments against Dan, and he was not permitted to leave New York until they were paid. But he was an expert in debt management. With some confidence, he and Wiley went into conference with these creditors; because the members were officially United States volunteers, the brigade’s debts were to be handled in part by the War Department. But as late as May 1, 1862, a Chamber Street merchant was still urging Sickles to approach the Secretary of War about paying his “fair and reasonable” bill.

The creditors were helped to accommodate Dan by the events of July 21, when the first, disastrous battle of Bull Run was fought and lost. Edwin Stanton, who would be Secretary of War before the year was out, wrote from Washington, “The capture of Washington now seems to be inevitable—during the whole of Monday and Tuesday it might have been taken without any resistance. The rout, overthrow, and utter demoralization of the whole army is complete.”
²⁵

The day after the battle, the Excelsior Brigade broke camp, caught
ferries to Manhattan, and got on the train for Washington. If Teresa had looked forward to a time when the preparation of the Excelsior was complete and Dan might have some free time, this whirlwind departure put paid to it. Wiley was, by some accounts, left disgruntled. He was quoted as declaring, “So he [Sickles] marched off with three regiments, and paraded them before Lincoln, and said he had done all this out of his own pocket. There were piles of judgments against him in the offices. He had no more to do with the brigade than the receiving of the recruits.” It would be fifteen months before Wiley could get a final settlement with the creditors, which he did by calling a meeting at the Astor House and again referring the bills to the Secretary of War. “I left him on account of it,” Wiley was ultimately reported as saying, “denounced him then, and have done so since.”
²⁶

Camped in meadows outside Washington, General Sickles’s men were part of the Third Army Corps, and their divisional commander was a brisk, profane professional named Joe Hooker. Dan observed that Hooker had the customary West Point graduate’s attitude toward civilian and, indeed, political generals, an attitude no doubt compounded by what Hooker knew of Dan’s notorious murder trial. Yet Dan was not easily depressed by contrary opinion and would always remember this early war period as a golden time. It was delightful to be a leader, and he reflected to his men his joyous sense of being a newborn warrior, while they reflected back their combined sense of their identities as members of the legions of righteousness. He was so happy at the way his men settled down in their encampments that he speculated that had they been available for Bull Run, they might have turned the tide. He was becoming a serious student of military affairs, and in his papers are found pages of memoranda that indicate it. He made notes, for example, that a red over a white light displayed at night meant that friendly troops had occupied this place, whereas a white over a red meant “Prepare to disembark,” and a red over a green meant “Move forward to protect the landing.” He noted that the signal flags for B and O signified “These batteries are ours!” while F, L, and R signaled “Fire a little to the right
of your last shot.” The signal numbers for Hooker’s headquarters were 1142; for his own, 1132; for the federal balloon that operated in the area, 231.
²⁷

Washington, which he regularly visited from the encampment, was in some ways the Washington he had known. The West End still threatened to become “one vast slough of impassable mud.” The Capitol was still unfinished, with no goddess of liberty atop it—only scaffolding and a crane for lifting building materials. Tiber Creek, which, it had been planned, would be pumped to the top of the Capitol and fall in a cascade from near the dome, “stretched,” in the words of one Washingtonian, “in ignominious stagnation across the city, oozing at last through green scum and slime into a still more ignominious canal, the receptacle of all abominations, the pest breeder and disgrace of the city.” Especially so now that the city was crammed with soldiers and their sanitary needs. There were forts on every hilltop. Shed hospitals and camps covered acres in every suburb. Soldiers were entrenched at every gateway. Churches, museums, and private mansions were filled with officers—as they would soon be with the wounded and dying of both armies. Bull Run had been merely a foretaste, and even now the streets were full of ambulances, and people hurried by to escape the noise of groans and screams.
²⁸

Wikoff was eager to introduce his friend Dan to the new family in the White House, whom Wikoff now knew well, particularly the President’s wife. Mary Todd Lincoln was, at the time Dan first met her, a volatile woman engaged with varying levels of daring in redecorating the White House. One of Mr. Lincoln’s secretaries named Mary Todd Lincoln the Hell-cat. She had, said another, extreme mood swings, one day being considerate, kindly, generous, hopeful, on another unreasonable, irritable, despondent. She possessed the instability that characterized the child she actually was—one who had felt orphaned by the early death of a mother and by a father’s marriage to a cold stepmother. She was hungry for the world’s approbation, and, like Teresa, she did not have it.

For one thing, she had alienated the capital by failing to buy the refurbishing materials from Washington merchants. She was in a city where she needed tolerant friends when she did absurd things, but her temperament ensured that she did not always have them. When, later in the year, Mr. Lincoln became appalled at the amount she was spending in New York on lamps, carpets, wall hangings, and crystal, she strenuously undertook to economize by selling off old White House furniture. She also sacked White House staff to meet the bills. Driven by a sudden panic over “poverty to come” after the presidency, she decided at one time, in extreme depression, to sell the manure from the executive stables. Throughout 1861, she involved herself in shady financial practices with John Watt, her chief gardener, who controlled the payroll of the outside staff. He padded his expense account and, by kicking back funds to Mary Todd Lincoln, turned her into a co-conspirator. Watt also bought the provisions for the White House, so it was easy for him to sign vouchers for nonexistent purchases, especially after he and the First Lady got away with drawing an inflated $1,000 invoice for buying seeds, fruit trees, and bushes from a Philadelphia nursery. In reality the purchase had cost much less, and Mrs. Lincoln Todd used the spare money to pay for further purchasing expeditions to New York.

Even Mrs. Lincoln’s dresses attracted contrary comment. She dressed egregiously—her fashion exemplar was the Empress Eugénie of France—and was as skillful as modern notables are at finding donors for her dresses. In this area as well she built up bills that made Lincoln flinch, but he seemed to avoid more than occasional contrary comment.

To add to her perceived and real improprieties, the gardener Watt was also a Southern sympathizer, as many said the First Lady was. Indeed, a number of her Kentucky brothers and half brothers were fighting for the Confederacy, and her half sister, Emilie, had married a Rebel officer named Helm, who would become a Confederate general.

Such were the domestic realities of the Lincoln White House about the time Dan first became a familiar of Mary Todd’s and Abraham’s. Mary Todd would receive her visitors on her salon evenings in the oval
Blue Room on the ground floor, and to this chamber, undergoing redecoration, Wikoff took General Sickles to meet her. Mary Todd Lincoln served as a good example of Dan’s capacity for social charm. She was at once enchanted by his urbane manner and conversation, his exemplary clothing, his well-tended features, and the possibility of danger that he bespoke. To a woman from Kentucky, the idea of what he had done to his wife’s lover was not so great an impediment to friendship— Kentuckians were accustomed to exacting their own justice. And Lincoln was complacent—many believed too much so—about the people Mrs. Lincoln invited to her
soirées
, so long as they made her happy.

Dan noticed early in his conversations with Mrs. Lincoln that she had quite an interest in spiritualism, séances, and spirit-rapping. This was not considered an abnormal enthusiasm for that era. It was surmised that she had had her first experience of these practices through the voodoo of the household slaves in Kentucky, where she grew up. Then, in Illinois, there had been a string of traveling white prophets, telling the future and getting in touch with the dead from the stage of the Masonic Hall. As well, Henry Wikoff had enchanted her with a full-blooded account of being hypnotized by a seer in Romania, and of the visions he had beheld as a result. This special interest and obsession of Mrs. Lincoln’s would come to be an embarrassment to the President and to have a significance for Dan Sickles.

Lincoln himself would sometimes look in on the Blue Room
soirées
, entering the parlors of his house somewhat like a lost soul. He made the acquaintance again of General Sickles and took further interest in him and his brigade. The Reverend Joseph Twichell would remember as a golden day the one that summer when the Excelsior marched past the White House to be reviewed by the President and General Sickles.
²⁹

Dan and the brigade spent nearly three months, July to October, near Washington, but in that time he did not invite his wife to visit him, even though she could easily have been accommodated at Willard’s. In the meantime, his relationship with the Lincolns continued well, and his relationship with his divisional commander, General Joe Hooker,
poorly. And he had still not been confirmed in the rank of brigadier general. In that regard, he went to see Stanton, who was now working down the street from the White House as special counsel to Secretary of War Simon Cameron, and would soon replace him. Dan also asked Wikoff to have his old enemy James Gordon Bennett of the
New York Herald
write a piece on what a suitable fellow he was for confirmation. Dan knew Wikoff was already passing positive news on Mary Todd Lincoln to the
Herald
, for which the Lincolns were most grateful.

In October, still under veteran Joe Hooker, Dan and his brigade were sent down to the lower Potomac, in Maryland opposite Acquia Creek, Virginia, and on the low shore of the river. Dan got into trouble for having too many ambulance wagons in his line of march, but Hooker resented above all the way Dan could ride up to Washington to see the First Lady. His demeanor always improved when Dan craftily told him that “the President spoke warmly and enthusiastically of you.” The presence of Hooker and Dan’s troops on the lower Potomac made it less possible for the Confederates to attempt a blockade of the S-bent river between Charles County and Rock Point. But it was a tedious and muddy life down there.