American Scoundrel (38 page)

Sometimes the silver-locked Massachusetts senator, Charles Sumner the abolitionist, would visit, even though he did not often go to receptions in anyone’s house. This occasional blessing indicated that he too agreed that Mary Lincoln had surrounded herself with fascinating people. And at other times, though not routinely, women were admitted. “Gov.” Newell brought his wife, Joanna, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Fox, on one occasion, brought Virginia Fox. Not only was it Dan’s policy that Mrs. Sickles never come, but her absence was not considered notable and would more likely have haunted Wikoff than Dan. And here again, and for whatever failures of hers and principles of Dan’s, Teresa was becoming a woman who, when defined at all, was defined by absences—from the camp, from the capital, from social events at the White House.

Chiefly, it was the fellows and Mary Todd, and the fellows acquired nicknames: “Gov.,” “Pet” for Halsted, “Chev” for Wikoff, “Cap” for Sickles, and for Mary herself, “La Reine.”
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Though capable of manic gaiety, the Queen was barely out of mourning for Willy, and still marked by grief in all she said and did. She was not alone in seeking séances. Many prominent Washingtonians, under the pressure of the huge losses of the war and the considerable infant mortality of their times, had consulted clairvoyants—Mary Jane and Gideon Welles, Senator Ira Harris of New York (whom Dan had once tempted to sit in New York City on the matter of Central Park), and Mrs. James Gordon Bennett. Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker, Lizzy Keckley, was another influence on Mrs. Lincoln. Keckley’s only son had been killed, and she was confident that through mediums, a Georgetown husband and wife team named the Lauries, she held conversations with her son’s disembodied spirit. Earlier in the summer, while Dan Sickles’s brigade was fighting on the Peninsula, Mary Lincoln’s black carriage was often seen outside the Lauries’ house. In fear for his wife’s sanity, the President tolerated all this exorbitant behavior. Even so, the Lauries were not the only clairvoyants she had faith in. Lincoln even put up with his wife rushing these people to the White House to tell him about intended Confederate battle plans. For sometimes, when Willy or
Eddie could not be contacted, Mary was able to reach the spirits of deceased Union officers, who sent their advice via the medium to her and Lincoln. The President dared not take the comfort of spiritualism from her.
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Mary had, that same summer, consulted a specious medium who claimed to be an English peer, Lord Colchester, newly come across the Atlantic and down to Washington to spread his blessings. Mrs. Lincoln admitted him to the Red Room of the White House for a séance, and also asked him to hold a séance at the Soldiers’ Home, where she and the President were staying for part of the summer. Though Willy spoke through Lord Colchester and Mrs. Lincoln was delighted, Dr. Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian claimed Colchester made tapping noises by an apparatus that reacted to the tensing of muscles even when others held his arms and hands. At another séance Colchester ran in the Red Room, an invited journalist had grabbed Colchester’s arm and been punched for his trouble. Colchester felt that he had been exposed, though Mrs. Lincoln’s belief in the process remained absolute. Not even a letter from Colchester implying that unless she gave him money to go to New York he “might have unpleasant things to say to her” frayed her belief. In the end, Lincoln himself told Colchester that if he was still in town by the following afternoon, he would end up in the Old Capital Prison.

Many surmised that Dan Sickles was driven to take part in séances with Mrs. Lincoln because of his guilt over Key; he wanted to contact the ghost and be given absolution. But this life, with its tests and glories, was adequate to Dan, and he attended with Mrs. Lincoln purely out of a duty of friendship, and possibly at Lincoln’s request—to keep an eye on vulnerable Mary.

One of Mary’s favorite mediums was diminutive Miss Nettie Colburn, whom the Lauries of Georgetown had introduced at a séance that included Mrs. Lincoln and Caleb B. Smith, the Secretary of the Interior. Nettie herself told of a séance she held in the “Red parlor” of the White House in December 1862. That night, as she entered her trance, sudden ghostly band music filled the room, and the heavy end of the piano in the corner crashed up and down in grotesque time to it. In the midst of this
row, Mr. Lincoln appeared and received Nettie kindly. Whereupon she fell again into a trance, and from her mouth, in a male voice, emerged advice on the President’s future, a foreshadowing of the Emancipation Proclamation. A gentleman present pointed to a full-length picture of Daniel Webster hanging on the wall. The voice that had emerged from Nettie, the man was sure, was that of Webster.

Dan managed to inject a spirit of skepticism into one of Nettie’s sessions in the White House by persuading Mary to allow him to set a test for Nettie Colburn. He concealed himself behind the draperies of the room and asked Nettie, when she arrived, to name who was hiding there. This plot showed that Mrs. Lincoln may, at some level, have begun to doubt. So, while Dan stood hidden there, Mary Todd jovially challenged Nettie to come up with his name. Before Nettie could oblige, Lincoln came into the parlor and apologized for not being able to stay— he had a cabinet meeting, and his cab awaited. At that moment, claimed Nettie, a sudden silence fell upon the group, and she herself was entranced at once. An august male voice emerging from within her slight body counseled Lincoln to amend the condition of the freedmen, the liberated slaves herded together, half clad, on waste ground in the Washington winter. The President thanked the voice and left to go to his cabinet meeting, and Nettie turned her attention to the still-concealed Sickles. As she meditated, one of her familiar voices, Pinky, an Indian maiden, took over Nettie’s body and said that the hidden person’s name was Crooked Knife. This was considered by most of the company a close enough Indian rendition of the name Sickles. Sickles then revealed himself, and the session continued, various voices emerging from Nettie with news from the Great Beyond. As the guests departed at eleven o’clock, Sickles did the honor of host in Abraham Lincoln’s absence, bidding the guests off at Mrs. Lincoln’s side.
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New men were now coming to prominence, for McClellan, having won at Antietam, was considered remiss by Abraham Lincoln for not having captured Lee’s army before it leached away south across the Potomac River. In the wake of what was a fierce disappointment about McClellan’s failure, the President decided to review Sickles’s division in
camp near Fairfax Seminary in northern Virginia. With typical thoroughness, Dan set to work reorganizing his units, recalling most of the men absent on sick leave or in the convalescent camp. He had received a good many fresh recruits, and was glad to declare that his division numbered more than eight thousand infantry.

When the President visited, it occurred to Dan as a military impresario that he could flesh out the ceremony of greeting by borrowing “a few squadrons of cavalry,” and then his command would be almost the same as that of General Scott when it had marched on Vera Cruz and captured Mexico City in the war of 1846–47. To greet the arrival of the President on the Virginia shore, Dan led a hundred mounted officers equipped as an escort, together with a regiment of infantry and a battery. “The President came down in his quiet way,” said Dan. He was accompanied by only one general and a servant, and was surprised to see the horse that Dan had provided for him, caparisoned in the trappings of a general officer. He was equally intrigued to see himself surrounded by a staff appropriate, as Dan had learned by research, to an emperor at the head of a grand army. The President, as the artillery fired a salute, turned to Dan and exclaimed, “Sickles, I’m not going to take command of the army. What is all this for?” The escort proceeded on the march to Dan’s camp a few miles off, and a good many Virginians gathered at the roadside. In an age before newspaper photographs, not one of them knew by sight Lincoln’s face, and the President heard an old farmer saying to his neighbor as the column passed, “I guess from the looks of that tall chap and all this fuss, that the Yanks have captured a big prisoner.” The President gave his creaky grin and called to the man, “That’s so. I’m Jeff Davis!”

It was a study, said Dan, to see the men’s faces during the inspection, as the President, an extremely clumsy horseman, rode from right to left of the line. “But,” Dan stated in undisguised affection, “if a smile played on their lips, there was love in their eyes, as they rested on that sad, earnest, good face most of them beheld for the first and last time.” At the end of the review, Dan invited Lincoln to speak to the men. The President was uneasy about that. “These men are going again to battle, where
I cannot be with them.” But as he departed he called Sickles aside and said, “Tell them I think I have never seen a better show.”
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Now known as the Second Division of Hooker’s Third Corps, Dan’s eight thousand were sent forward on November 1 into the Virginian hinterland along the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, where they rebuilt bridges, repaired tracks, and guarded the road south. Then they became part of the force that a new general, Ambrose Burnside, moved as far south as the broad Rappahannock, opposite the delightful town of Fredericksburg, nearly halfway between Washington and Richmond. Sickles’s division was used in a support role on a crucial day of conflict there, and could again thank the gods of battle for that. For the Confederates had dug in on the heights above the town, called Marye’s Heights, and would have one of their greatest successes of the war on December 13, repulsing the Union charge. The brigade of Dan’s friend Meagher had a large and tragic part in the fight. “Of the 2,200 men I led into action the day before,” Thomas Francis Meagher would write the next day of his Irishmen, “218 now appeared on the ground that morning.”
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But Dan knew that adequate perils to life and limb awaited him, especially now, when the Union had been so roundly thrashed once more. In a war in which generals commanded troops on a limited front, unaided by such later tools of battle as telephone or wireless, Dan needed to stay close to the action and gain a visual sense of all that was happening in his divisional area. On top of that, he was required by gallantry to expose himself to fire. As one commentator said, generals “carried this aspect of Victorian culture to its counterproductive extreme.” Over a hundred Union generals would die in battle.
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The Union troops occupied the hills by the Rappahannock, Stafford Heights, for the rest of the winter. Gradually, minds accustomed themselves to the awful losses of Fredericksburg, and there was room for socializing. Officers’ wives visited—predictably, Teresa did not. Two of Dan’s favorite associates in the camp were a Westphalian nobleman, Prince Felix Salm-Salm, and his fine-featured, vigorous little wife, Princess Salm-Salm, before marriage a circus or vaudeville performer, Agnes Jory of Vermont. Agnes had met the prince in 1862, when he came to
America to fight for the Union, and had been attracted by the old-world bashfulness of the German nobleman. They were married in St. Patrick’s Church on Fifth Street, Washington, on August 30, 1862, and, against the tradition of her upbringing, she became a Catholic. A devoted and spirited spouse, she proved her fidelity to her marriage vows by following her prince through innumerable subsequent wars. In this war he commanded the 8th New York Infantry, and his princess from Vermont had been with him in the most advanced position in the Shenandoah Valley earlier in the year, had retreated to Chantilly with him, and had spent Christmas 1862 with him on the Rappahannock. Indeed, all that in a kinder world Teresa could have been for Dan, and all she might have been with a word, was incarnated in what the Princess Salm-Salm was to Prince Felix. She described herself as living with her husband in a hospital tent trimmed with woollen damask, and decorated with a carpet and sofa and a large mirror. By New Year’s, she said, “there was scarcely the officer who had not his wife, mother, sister or cousin with him.”

Though Dan was one of the officers in camp who lacked a publicly acknowledged woman visitor, an unsigned adoring yet intelligent letter later written by a lover of Dan’s from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, indicated he was not celibate in the winter of 1862–63. The letter came from a woman to whom Dan had been attentive and generous in what was either her spinsterhood or widowhood. She addressed him as “My dearest general” and declared, as a result of some “inclosure” he had sent, “You are goodness itself. . ..” This unnamed gentlewoman would by the spring of 1864 have given birth to Dan’s child—“our little Julia”—but despite this intimacy, she felt the same anxiety as Teresa about her inability to grasp his inner nature. “I would dearly like for you once in a long while to open the door of the inner sanctuary and give me—your dear one—a glimpse of all the wondrous things. . .. I am beginning to want so much to see you—Philosophy lasts weeks but when it comes to months, time drags.” Her care in not signing the letter means that even though it now sits on microfilm in the Library of Congress, she has been able to evade our curiosity as to who she was, and what befell “our little
Julia.” But since there is no further reference to the child Julia in the entirety of Dan’s papers, it may be that the child died in infancy. For one thing can be said for Dan, on the basis of reading his correspondence: he tried as a matter of honor to make appropriate financial arrangements for friends and lovers, and a love child who survived would have claimed a space in the documents he left.

In any case, whatever his amorous arrangements that winter of 1862–63, his sociability lit up the camp in Stafford Heights. On New Year’s Eve, in a huge tent decorated with flags, garlands, flowers, and Chinese lanterns, supper was laid for two hundred people, and Dan sent for Delmonico himself to come down from New York to supervise the banquet. The Princess Salm-Salm declared, “The wines and liquors were in correspondence with the rest, and no less, I suppose, the bill to be paid.” The former journalist and French nobleman Colonel Régis de Trobriand agreed that Dan did things “in great style. . .. The collation which he had ordered from Washington was abundant in choice. The champagne and whiskey ran in streams. I wish I could add that they were used in moderation.” De Trobriand’s comments are a good guide to the way Sickles was estimated as a general. The Frenchman believed his divisional commander was one of the striking figures of the war, “gifted in a high degree with that multiplicity of faculties which had given rise to the saying that a Yankee is ready for anything. . .. Gay, prepossessing,
spirituel
, he rarely fails to make a good impression, even upon those who may be least prepossessed in his favor.”
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