American Scoundrel (37 page)

Inherent, however, in the question of the unexpected level of wounded was the less exciting question of who would care for them and for their wives and families. One of Dan’s civilian committee members in New York, Henry Lieberman, wrote to Dan about the burial of one Lieutenant Haynes of the Excelsior. It took place “in the most plain and obscure manner,” said Lieberman. If only he had known, he could have turned out two hundred men as escort, and so brought the comfort of military ceremony to the family. This was a task in which many a general wanted his wife to take an interest—the return of the fallen home for burial, and kindly attention to the bereaved. How wonderful if Mrs. Sickles would consent to take a hand, wrote Lieberman. As well, he urged “that it would be advantageous to both you and Mrs. Sickles if she should visit the sick and wounded of your Brigade, who are located in the city. I suggested it to her, but she prefers hearing from you first.”

Clearly Teresa’s instincts told her not to act without Dan’s permission; she assumed that Dan was operating by a set of rules to which she lacked the key. And there is no record of Dan’s response to this genial possibility, the idea of these outgoing and comforting tasks Teresa desired to undertake. For lack of an answer, Teresa wrote to Lieberman, “Upon reflection I think it advisable for me to defer the visit proposed for today, until I hear direct from the General. He will write to me if he desires me to call.” Of course, there was no question that Teresa, already applying herself to calves, gravel, and rats with such expiatory energy, would have made an enthusiastic and generous nurse of the sick and wounded. There were, by the end of May 1862, some hundreds of Excelsior wounded to be visited at homes or hospitals in the city, and the numbers were not likely to decline. To read the letters parents and wives
wrote to Sickles is to trace this aspect of the hidden ruin of the war, which Teresa might have helped assuage. “My son B. W. Hossey is still home and though the wound is still bad caused by the taking of pieces of bone, the chief issue is that he has had an attack of fever.” Another letter to Dan prayed for information on Quartermaster William O’Kell of the 5th Regiment, “from whom his daughter has had no tidings since Williamsburg.” The daughter might have been comforted by Teresa, who awaited only Dan’s word. So too could have been the parents of one of Sickles’s aides-de-camp, Lieutenant Palmer, who, while advancing into the woods late that morning of June 1, ran into a Rebel outpost and was killed by multiple gunshot wounds. His riddled body would be returned to inconsolable parents.
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Olive Devoe of the Union Home School had already written to Sickles, complaining that a number of little ones whose fathers were in the Excelsior Brigade were residents of the home and were there because their mothers rarely got a cent from their husbands. “Last evening application was made from Mrs. Tremain to place three little ones here that she feels greatly interested in. Their mother was placed on the ‘Island’ [the lunatic asylum at Blackwell’s Island] for six months.” Mrs. Tremain was the wife of Harry Tremain, one of Dan’s favorite officers and his aide. How much more apposite might have been an intervention from the general’s wife herself. Through the chaplains of his regiment, Dan raised money for Mrs. Devoe’s Home School to help the children of Excelsior Brigade soldiers, living and dead, who had fetched up there. Why was Teresa not given the appropriate task of presenting it to Mrs. Devoe, and keeping in touch with her?
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The idea must have occurred to Dan, and so again he had his unrevealed but fixed reasons for not accepting it. Though, through the war, Dan had rehabilitated himself and found a way back to the White House, for whatever reason he blocked Teresa’s path to redemption through the exercise of war-induced mercies. There were a number of reasons that even a strong-willed wife like Teresa would not have undertaken such missions without her husband’s consent. First, the code of marriage at that time established the husband as ultimate authority on
what his wife’s public behavior should be. Even more than conventional spouses, Teresa would not have wanted to give Dan any grounds for displeasure or encourage him in any way to deny or renounce her or Laura. She would also have feared that without the authority of Dan, her presence among the wounded, the widowed, and the orphaned might have provoked the sort of taunts with which she had been made familiar through the scandals of 1859, and which she still feared.

In the three weeks of inaction following the battle of Fair Oaks, Dan got to know the young Comte de Paris, pretender to the throne of France; his brother the Duc de Chartres; and their uncle the Prince de Joinville, who had, like Lafayette in the Revolutionary War, offered their services to the Union and had been serving on McClellan’s staff. But the attack and the end to all civility resumed on June 25, when, at eight-thirty in the morning, Joe Hooker sent Dan’s brigade and one other through the woods toward Richmond. Dan’s men this time were split on either side of the Williamsburg Road. They were slowed by encounters with pickets, by the problem of getting through a line of Union timber breastworks, and by the mire of White Oak Swamp. To Dan’s mortification, the Excelsior fell behind the other brigade, that of Cuvier Grover. The 71st New York had not been engaged at Williamsburg or elsewhere, and now as it went forward in its long blue line, heads lowered and jaws set, it was struck from the side by a fury of fire from a brigade of North Carolinians. Fire from the flank raised, in most men, terror, a feeling of helplessness, of being abandoned by God and fortune. Someone in the regiment—Sickles would never learn who—shouted that they were outflanked and must retreat, and a good part of the 71st panicked and ran for the rear. Dan described it as “disgraceful confusion” and felt humiliated because Joe Hooker was watching. At least the rest of Dan’s brigade were firing, advancing shoulder to shoulder, firing again, but an irrational order from McClellan broke off this engagement, named Oak Grove, at ten-thirty.

McClellan would not try for Richmond again. What possessed him now was the desire to save his army and, having moved all his men south of the Chickahominy River, to make it retreat to Harrison’s Landing on
the James River, a position from which his army could be extracted by federal steamers. The retreat to Harrison’s Landing, begun at Oak Grove, would occupy seven days and involve seven battles. Dan’s men, like the entire Union Army, retreated each night until the small hours, slept in that uncomfortable mode described in dispatches as “on their arms” until dawn, and rose to fight and retreat again. Dan had the capacity to function on little sleep, but it was a talent sorely tested in those last days of June. In Washington, Lincoln read the dispatches of this withdrawal, based in part on McClellan’s huge overestimation of the Confederate strength, with bewilderment and depression. As for Dan and his men, at Gaines’s Mill on June 27 they were still defending the Williamsburg Road, but were under orders to retreat back along it. On June 28 they had the job of breaking up their camp and setting a torch to all that could not be carried.
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On June 30, near the village of Glendale, Joe Hooker’s and Sickles’s men were again at the extreme left of the Union line. A parsonage lay off to Dan’s left, and to the front of his lines of blue General Branch was improbably commanding the nearest Confederate brigade, on the far side of a little creek called Western Run. Branch had routed a Union brigade in the middle of the line, and more than a thousand of its men stampeded through Hooker’s lines, actually shooting some of his men dead in their frenzy. The intimacy of that day’s battle, Dan’s foliage-limited view of what his men were engaged in, was indicated by the fact that Dan singled out for special mention in his report a private and a corporal who gave excellent service as vulnerable lookouts in trees.
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It was now the seventh day, July 1, and Dan’s brigade occupied the lee of Malvern Hill, just above Harrison’s Landing, and were in reserve until late in the day, when they were put to work near the low crest supporting some Union batteries. Just one of Dan’s regiments, the 72nd New York, was sent forward in line against some Confederate troops firing from woods farther down the slope of Malvern Hill, and lost sixty-one men. Once again, as the day before, the Union was so successful in repulsing the Confederate attempt to gain the crest of shallow Malvern
Hill that many Union generals wanted to press the attack, but McClellan was fixed on retreat, and that night at Harrison’s Landing steamers landed quantities of new provisions and prepared for the withdrawal of the army. Hooker’s division had suffered 2,589 losses in the battles on the Peninsula. Chaplain Twichell regretted the absurd way the army had been managed—“I could not help a feeling of rebellion against the fate that forces the abandonment of ground that costs so much blood and was made so sacred.” Twichell was convinced that something or somebody was wrong.

During the campaign on the Peninsula, Hooker got to like Dan better, and invited him frequently to visit his headquarters and share his whiskey at Harrison’s Landing. The Irish-American hero Phil Kearny, and the Irishman of Irishmen Thomas Francis Meagher, also dropped by Hooker’s tent for the purpose of drinking spirits. Casualties would ultimately take some toll on Meagher’s imagination, but Dan was fortunate not to be burdened by that melancholy reality. And he was well liked by the majority of his officers and men. One Private Brannigan wrote to his sister, “General Sickles is the very man to treat his soldiers well, and returns in full their attachment to him.”

Dan intended next to go to New York to recruit replacements. Many soldiers had also been struck with illness, and some of those, together with the wounded, had been left behind with volunteer surgeons to be overrun by the Confederates. Twichell later put the number of Dan’s effectives in Harrison’s Landing as low as two thousand men. There had been mayhem on the Peninsula.
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A
FTER A FEW WEEKS IN THE CAMP AT
Harrison’s Landing, Sickles returned to New York on a steamer with General Meagher and one of Meagher’s favorite young officers, Lieutenant Emmett, who had been wounded. Dan and Meagher were in a febrile state, flushed with a devout pride in their men, the living and the numerous dead. But, arrived back home, Dan was warned even by his father that the casualty lists from the Peninsula would be a drag on New York recruiting. And if one of Dan’s purposes in visiting New York was to test the political environment for a possible return to Congress that fall, he found that politics had become complicated. Mayor Fernando Wood and Dan’s old friend Sam Butterworth were now what the Republican press called Copperheads, proponents of calling off the war and letting the South go its way. Since Dan
was thoroughly in favor of that same war, consecrated by the blood of his young men, he could not countenance their position, but it was widely represented in New York and strongly held by some of the Irish. To them, Dan had become a Lincoln man, a crypto-Republican. So he could not expect the broad Democratic support he had once enjoyed.

Dan Sickles had in fact achieved a certain éclat with moderate Republicans. Horace Greeley of the
Tribune
had started a public subscription to present him with an ornamental sword. Greeley had been particularly impressed with a speech Dan gave at the Produce Exchange, where, praising the steady nerve of Abraham Lincoln, Dan confronted the talk of inevitable conscription. “A man may pass through New York, and unless he is told of it, he would not know that this country was at war. . .. In God’s name, let the state of New York have it to say hereafter that she furnished her quota to the army without conscription— without resorting to a draft!”
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Dan took Chaplain Twichell and some of the brigade wounded to an enlistment rally at the 7th Regiment Armory, above Tompkins Market in Lower Manhattan. The audience was made up of the city’s volunteer firemen, and Dan spoke to them for an hour and a half, but did not do much better than Meagher had in the same venue. It would be from the fire companies that much of the resistance to conscription would, in a year’s time, derive.

There were sweeter experiences. In the Wintergarden Theatre a performance of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
was given for the benefit of the Excelsior Brigade, and Dan, a thin, cock-sparrow figure with sword and general’s sash, rose in his box to be applauded. Teresa was not at his side. Called on to speak, he told the crowd of the heavy-drinking prewar Southern legislators, sometimes so drunk in the House bars and committee rooms that they passed out on sofas in the anterooms. Others, however, fueled with fire, made it into the chamber and rose to threaten and spread rumors of coming secession at full throat. And the memory of these false former friends of his rose in him that night. He called the war a “Whiskey Rebellion,” a rebellion fueled on spirits. “Whiskey
everywhere—in the committee rooms, private houses, at a hundred saloons. There never was a state that seceded that did not secede on whiskey. The debate reeked with whiskey. The solemn resolves of statesmanship were taken by men whose brains were feverish from whiskey.”
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Meanwhile, the Excelsior Brigade arrived at Alexandria near Washington in time to be engaged, almost as soon as it landed, at Bristoe Station, Virginia; and, though not put into the line, the men were under such heavy shellfire that by now barely more than fifteen hundred made up the brave Excelsior. The entire Hooker division was rested and was blessed that it, with Dan and the Excelsior as part of it, was thus not employed in heading off Lee’s invasion of the North. For it ended in mid-September with the bloodiest day of all American history, at Antietam Creek, in rural western Maryland. There, for example, Meagher’s Irishmen took 550 casualties in a quarter of an hour.

Dan was gratified to find himself caught in the updraft of Hooker’s reputation as a fighter. Hooker was elevated to command of the Third Corps, and thus Sickles, his most successful brigade commander, inherited, with Hooker’s blessing, the command of the division, its entire three brigades.
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During much of the time the division was refitting and recuperating in Alexandria, Dan had time to attend Mary Lincoln’s salon, what she called “my
beau monde
friends of the Blue Room.” Wikoff had by this time been readmitted. Another member was Oliver Halsted, the wild but conversationally accomplished son of a rich New Jersey family. Mary wrote to him on one occasion, “I fancy ‘the Blue Room’ will look dreary this evening, so if you and the Gov. are disengaged, wander up and see us.” The “Gov.” referred to was Governor Newell of New Jersey. Another member was Nathaniel Willis, editor of the
Home Journal
, who tried to run counter to the general Washington opinion of Mrs. Lincoln by writing about her as the “Republican Queen in her White Palace.” The Blue Room conversation concerned itself with “love, law, literature, war, rulers and thinkers of the time, courts and cabinets, the boudoir and salon, commerce, the church, Dickens and Thackeray.”