American Scoundrel (44 page)

In the ballroom of the Fort William Henry Hotel a dance was held in Dan’s honor, and at its close he was required to speak. For the first time, he staked out a position on what the Union’s attitude to the South should be—not vengeance, but magnanimity, justice, and conciliation. “The army will prove that they who are fearless in conflict are generous in victory.” His pleasant, off-the-cuff, modest, but well-reasoned speech,
delivered to the glittering faces of the guests, showed that he understood what the great postwar question would be, and it was reported by the
New York Times
.
²

Dan and his officers moved on to Saratoga Springs, the most fashionable resort in the United States, and on returning to New York in September, he was pleased to welcome General Charles Graham, who had been exchanged, as Dan had recommended. He learned that his personal stock had become even more heightened in the city, and, though he did not know it, an indication of this was that George Templeton Strong was at last moved to mention him well in his journal: “I suppose Sickles, with his one leg, is among our best volunteer officers. His recuperative powers are certainly wonderful. Four years ago he was a ruined man in every sense, a pariah whom to know was discreditable.”
³

On October 18, Dan, determined to take up his career as a soldier and with his stump three and a half months healed, traveled south to Fairfax Station in Virginia to seek back his command from General Meade and to see the men of the Third Corps. There were rumors about Meade’s having said that if Dan had not lost his leg at Gettysburg, he would have been court-martialed. The meeting between Meade and Dan was thus polite but cool. Dan admitted that he was not up to a full-scale campaign but wondered whether he could have his corps back, if only for the next battle. But even Dan’s friends thought his valor outmatched his physical capacity. He could not ride; he could not march. Meade mentioned the Confederacy’s General Richard Ewell, who had recuperated for nine months from the loss of an arm before taking up his command again.
⁴

Dan was not satisfied. He was deeply affected, however, to find that the men had pooled their resources to buy him a barouche. It was pulled by two matched pairs of horses, and in it he proceeded along the lines of his men, accompanied by General Birney. One soldier said it was only his weakened condition that prevented the men from lifting him out of the vehicle and carrying him shoulder-high through the camp.

He returned to Washington in the same carriage, even more determined to have Meade dismissed for his timidity. Visiting the White
House two days later, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles found Dan in Abraham Lincoln’s upstairs office, discussing the question of who had chosen the battle site at Gettysburg. Dan argued that the credit should go to General Oliver Howard, who had occupied the ridge of the Gettysburg cemetery on July 1. Then he himself had sent a message to Meade, supporting Howard and recommending the place, though predicting that the lower ground to the south would be the problem. Although Welles admitted that allowance always needed to be made for Sickles when he had an interest, “his representations confirmed my impressions of Meade, who means well, and, in his true position, that of a secondary commander, is more of a man than Sickles represents him.”
⁵

After Dan’s rebuff by Meade, back in New York, the distancing between Teresa and himself creaked toward finality. Dan took up residence downtown in the Brevoort House, excusing his action by his need to be handy to the factory where he could be fitted for a prosthetic limb. Teresa and Laura bravely repeated the feasible story but knew the truth in their hearts. At the Brevoort, Dan declined an official dinner, but the band of the 7th New York Regiment assembled, and, on the last evening of October, “an eager multitude, of which the gentler sex formed no inconsiderable part,” waited outside the hotel for the serenading of the hero. Knowing Dan’s passion for opera, Signor Graffula, conductor of the band, played selections from
Tannhäuser
,
William Tell
,
Marta
,
The Enchantress
, and a series of other popular operas, and as Dan appeared on the balcony, “Hail to the Chief” was played. Dan had ascended to a level where, without irreverence, the presidential theme could be performed to honor him. Asked to speak, Dan expressed his contempt for the Copperheads, who would countenance a divided nation. “Rather than see the Republic so degraded, let the last citizen perish; lay waste the continent; recall the red man from his long exile; and give back to the proud lords of the forest and plain the heritage we took from their fathers.”

Dan retired indoors in the midst of the applause, and without any irony the band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” product of Key’s father.
⁶
It did not seem that Dan was ever haunted at the playing of this
anthem, yet if ever the ghost of Key was sent packing from the scene, it was that night. Nor was any citizen profane or curmudgeonly enough to cry, “Remember Key?” or “General, where is your wife?”

When not at the Brevoort House, Dan spent time in Washington, staying at Edwin Stanton’s house on K Street or at the White House. Mary Todd Lincoln had not been cured of séances since Dan had last seen her. Sometimes, when Willy and Eddie returned to speak to her, they brought with them her dead half brother, Aleck, everyone’s favorite, a Confederate killed in a skirmish near Baton Rouge in Louisiana. She had by now lost three of her Confederate half brothers. Sam Todd died at Shiloh. David Todd, who had for a time run a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp at Richmond, was rumored to have tortured Yankee prisoners and had perished at Vicksburg. And then Aleck. Nor did the embarrassment of her family connections end there. General Benjamin Helm, who had recently been killed at Chattanooga, had been married to Mary’s half sister Emilie. Mary Todd Lincoln could not formally mourn any of these rebels; much of the Republican press thought her too sympathetic to the Confederacy to begin with. But after General Helm’s funeral, Emilie Todd Helm needed to get a pass to cross the Union lines and return to the family home in Lexington. Lincoln had himself sent her a pass, protecting her person and property except for slaves, but it could not be acted upon until Emilie gave the requisite oath of allegiance to the government of the United States. A small fire-eating woman in the tradition of the Todds, she refused to take the oath, and the President broke procedure and ordered that she be brought to Washington by official escort anyhow. In this he was influenced by Mary, both by the force of her personality and by her need for consolation. And so in December 1863, to the astonishment of Dan and other Lincoln friends, the wife of a Confederate general entered the White House as a guest.

The two women had not seen each other since the war began; since, in fact, the late General Helm had turned down the President’s offer of a high rank in the Union Army. Emilie found her half sister in an anxious condition. Mary Todd obviously feared the descent of more and
more sorrows. “Kiss me, Emilie,” said Mary, “and tell me that you love me. I seem to be the scapegoat for both North and South.” Mary and Emilie tried to avoid mention of the war, but Emilie untactfully had an argument with young Tad about who was really President. Emilie’s attention was also drawn to General Sickles, who came clumping in and out of the household in a way that made her remark, “He seems on very intimate terms here.”

And Dan noticed Mary’s Emilie, who wore the black garments of widowhood. One day, Emilie was summoned to the Blue Room because, as one of the White House servants told her, there was a visitor inquiring after an old friend in the South. By now, she confessed, she was sick of people looking sideways at her, but this sounded innocent, and she went down to the Blue Room, where she found Senator Ira Harris of New York and the one-legged general sitting with Mary. Senator Harris wanted to ask after former U.S. Vice President Breckinridge, who was now a Confederate general—indeed, the divisional general under whose command her husband had died. Widow Helm told the senator that since she had not herself met General Breckinridge, she could give him no news of the general’s health.

Harris went on pressing her, and—according to combative Emilie Helm—a contest developed. “Well, we have whipped the rebels at Chattanooga, and I hear, madam, the scoundrels ran like scared rabbits.” It was hardly a sensitive reference, given that Chattanooga had widowed Emilie, but genial old Northern Democrats like Harris had been rendered less forgiving by the brutal level of casualties and by anxiety for relatives serving in the army. Emilie responded, “It was the example, Senator Harris, that you set them at Bull Run and Manassas.” Mary tried to change the subject, but Harris turned to her and asked, “Why isn’t Robert in the army?” Mary Lincoln went “as white as death.” She had already confessed to Emilie that this was the coming threat she most feared—the loss of Robert to the war. He was a twenty-year-old undergraduate at Harvard who until now had been able with some credibility to claim that an astigmatic eye prevented him from volunteering his services.

A tremulous Mary replied to Harris, “Robert is making his preparations now to join the army, Senator Harris; he is not a shirker as you seem to imply, for he has been anxious to go for a long time. If fault there be, it is mine. I have insisted that he should stay in college a little longer, as I think an educated man can serve his country with more intelligent purpose than an ignoramus.”

She could tell that neither Senator Harris, who sometimes went to the theater with the Lincolns, nor her friend Sickles agreed with this proposition. Dan’s corps had had college boys in its ranks, many serving as enlisted men, who had suspended scholarship for the duration of the war. Sickles was too close a friend to disagree with her openly, however, particularly in front of others. But not so Harris. “I have only one son and he is fighting for his country,” he told Mrs. Lincoln, before turning to Mrs. Helm. “And, madam, if I had twenty sons they should all be fighting the rebels.”

“And if I had twenty, Senator Harris, they should all be opposing yours,” said Mrs. Helm. She rushed from the room, and Mary Lincoln pursued her and embraced her.

Sickles had too recent a memory of his own pain and of all the fine young men who had been defaced, disemboweled, or torn apart along the Emmitsburg Road, in the Wheatfield and the Peach Orchard. He was agitated as he went upstairs to tell the unwell Abe Lincoln, who was lying down, about the incident downstairs. Abe laughed and shook his head. “The child has a tongue like the rest of the Todds,” he said. Dan flashed with an irritability that had become more common since his injury. “You should not have that Rebel in your house.” The President absorbed this and said, “Excuse me, General Sickles, my wife and I are in the habit of choosing our own guests. We do not need from our friends either advice or assistance in the matter.”
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This brush did not seem to sour relations between the Lincolns and Dan Sickles. He frequently escorted Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln to the theater that winter, and later in the season, writing from the Brevoort House in New York, he was confident of being listened to by Mr. Lincoln when he proposed himself for the job of military commissioner, a not-yet-existent
post he had devised, aimed at reconstructing the relationship between North and South. The President, in an attempt to accommodate Dan, at the end of January sent him a cable: “Could you, without its being inconvenient or disagreeable to yourself, immediately take a trip to Arkansas for me?” Dan wanted to accept, but he had been summoned to give testimony before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which was, like Dan himself, anxious to prove that General Meade had been a lackluster commander at Gettysburg.
⁸

Almost five years to the day after he had shot Philip Barton Key, Dan rolled up to the Capitol in a carriage, his trouser leg pinned up. Whatever accommodation he was coming to with his wood-and-leather prosthetic leg, it was not politic to wear it today, when the visible absence of a limb might underpin the earnestness of his answers to the Joint Committee’s questions.

Rising up the Capitol steps on his crutches, attended by Colonel Harry Tremain, Dan attracted the reverent admiration of the legislators, legislative aides, and citizens of the nation who happened to be coming to and going from the Capitol that morning. He entered the lobby and advanced toward the appointed room, where a quorum of the committee, made up of seven members drawn from both chambers, were sitting that morning. It would have been an aberration if both zealous Senators Zachariah Chandler and Benjamin Wade had not been present for the evidence of this potentially crucial ally against a general, Meade, whom they disliked on both political and performance grounds. After a short wait in an anteroom, Dan was invited into the fire-breathing committee’s presence.

The committee began its questioning with an attempt to restore the status of Joe Hooker. What was the condition of the army after the disaster at Fredericksburg, when, down in that wintry camp on the Rappahannock, Hooker was given the command? Dan was pleased to answer that when General Hooker took command, “the condition of the army presented several features indicating demoralization. Desertions were very numerous; the general tone of conversation in the camps was that of dissatisfaction and complaint.” He told the committee how effective
Hooker had been in restoring morale. But the committee, feeding Dan precisely the questions he wanted, asked why, if Hooker was such an accomplished leader of the army, the Chancellorsville campaign had ended badly. Dan obligingly argued that the fault was not Hooker’s. The loss of Chancellorsville was due to “the giving way of the Eleventh Corps on Saturday.” The men of Howard’s Eleventh Corps had come streaming back through the woods as “a mass of fugitives.” Dan asserted that by the time Sunday dawned, General Hooker was already doomed to defense and withdrawal. But wasn’t it true that Hooker had a taste for strong liquor? the committee asked. “I have never known him on duty to be in the least degree affected by intoxicating liquors.”