American Scoundrel (33 page)

It is not hard to see why, in the spring of 1861, at loose ends and with a limit to options, Dan became sufficiently exhilarated by the great national and fraternal fervor to risk obscure death. For the moment, he had joined Colonel Abram Vosburg’s 71st Battalion of the National Guard. But one day that April, when he and Captain William Wiley of Tammany Hall were in Lorenzo Delmonico’s famous restaurant, at Broadway and Chambers Street, surrounded by men all talking about the war, someone suggested to Wiley that he should get up a company or regiment to aid in the defense of Washington. Sickles declared that if Wiley assembled such a unit, he would enlist as a private. Wiley said he had a better idea. “If you will command a regiment,” he told Sickles, “I will raise, arm, and equip it.”

In those war-naive days, men thought of a regiment of up to a thousand as a huge number of soldiers. They thought of a brigade, made up of three or, in some cases, five regiments, as a massive military entity. In their imaginings, the three brigades that made up a division seemed an absolute host of men; it had been considered so in the war against the Mexicans. Conflict had not yet educated Dan in the quantities of men who would be committed and lost, and in that spring a colonel seemed an exalted commander, a little below the Deity. Dan could be a colonel, but he had to move quickly, since Vosburg’s unit was about to leave New York for the Washington area. Deadlines appealed to Dan, and Wiley and he were able to get quick authorization from Republican governor Edwin Morgan to raise their regiment. The New York Union Defense
Committee seeded the endeavors of Sickles and Wiley with $500, and handbills advertising the new regiment were posted around New York.

Within a fortnight, Wiley and Sickles had raised a regiment of eight companies. Dan was back to working feverishly, which he so loved to do. He was able to recruit through Wiley those robust New Yorkers who made up the muscle of Tammany Hall, the men who, from the waterfront to sanitation to other minor municipal work, owed their initial employment to Dan, Captain Wiley, or their friends. Charles Graham was able to supply four hundred Brooklyn Navy Yard workers. Former assemblyman Dennis Meehan brought in a hundred Tammany men from around the city. Dan looked for some of his officers among the Democratic press of New York, and one of these journalists, the French-born Régis de Trobriand, noted that during the lead-up to Sumter, Dan had been among the conciliatory and the moderate, “but when the sword was drawn, he was one of those most ready to throw away the scabbard.” De Trobriand argued that it was specifically because Dan felt the South had put the Democrats of the North in such a false position that he felt duty bound, more perhaps than others, “to carry on war
à outrance
, unto the complete triumph of the national government.”
¹⁹

War
à outrance
made the domestic idyll Teresa wanted and George Sickles had suggested to his son more unlikely than ever. And in his period of raising men for the Union, it is interesting that Dan did not appeal to Teresa on the recruiting platform as an incarnation of Northern womanhood, or ask her to attend, as Meagher had asked his wife to do. He failed to ask her to appear before the public as an exemplar of the hearths for which the men of the Union would be fighting.

Governor Morgan was pleased that Dan and Wiley had been able to recruit an entire regiment in a few weeks, but then they received an order from him to raise an entire brigade. Since Dan was a semiofficial colonel of militia at the moment, he might become a brigadier general. Finding four thousand men in five regiments, then, became his most urgent summer work. He lodged downtown to attend to this heady business, and, typically, was distracted only by concern that the climactic battle of the season would be fought without any participation from him
and his boys. In May he had seen the 69th New York and Thomas Francis Meagher march to glorious acclaim down Broadway to the steamers at the Battery. The Irish were already in the forts around Washington.

Dan’s brigade was raised not only in New York but also, as a result of recruiting excursions, in the country towns of upstate New York, notably Dunkirk and Jamestown, in Boston, in near New Jersey, and in far Pittsburgh. He named his brigade the Excelsior, to honor the Latin motto of the State of New York, a state he had once declared worth seceding from. Among his soldiers one could find old Dutch and Anglo-Saxon names—Degroot, Dutcher, Graham, Arbuthnot, Hollywood, Dalgliesh—as well as Tammany’s plenteous Irish—Tracey, Nugent, Carney, Carrigan, Hanrahan, McGovern, Driscoll—and notable numbers of Germans—Grecheneck, Grossinger, Berger, Holst. As the men came in, Wiley and Dan’s exuberant headquarters continued to be eccentrically located at Delmonico’s, but the problems of supplying men with food and shelter were prodigious. Dan’s troops were billeted both in the state militia barracks near the Broadway Post Office Dan had once raided for political purposes and in less savory garrets, lofts, and walkups off Broadway.

Perhaps acknowledging his self-redeeming energy on behalf of the Union, a number of chaplains presented themselves to serve with Dan’s Excelsior Brigade. One was an urbane young man named Joseph Hopkins Twichell, of Connecticut, who had distinguished himself at Yale as an oarsman. Another was Dan’s old school friend from NYU, the Reverend C. H. A. Bulkley, who had been at his side during part of the trial, and a third was a muscular Jesuit, Father Joseph O’Hagen.
²⁰

With more than three thousand men recruited by mid-May, Dan and Wiley were suddenly punished. Governor Morgan himself was at the time under a peculiar pressure from county officials, who were faced with the imperative to raise their own quota of men, and the Excelsior Brigade had cut into their capacity to do so. Morgan telegraphed Dan to disband all but eight of his forty companies. An astonished Dan saw this as a Republican plot. And the waiting men of the Excelsior, in the lofts and walk-ups he visited off Broadway, indicated that they did not want
to be disbanded to return to Pittsburgh or Boston or upstate New York as rejected warriors.

Sickles now made an extraordinary decision, one as interesting from the point of view of ideology as of personality. While a congressman, he had been a defender of states’ and even cities’ rights. Obviously, Sumter had changed all that. The present emergency—and, the unkind would say, the desire for rank—drove him to a new vision.

He went again to Washington, but with the proposition of meeting that very different being Lincoln. A gulf of politics and nature divided him from the new President. For a start, the President was if anything a conscientious family man; some said a family-dominated and wife-dominated man. Whereas Dan had barely been home for a month. To Lincoln, his emotionally uncomfortable
domus
, including his difficult wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, constituted nonetheless a guide to a national order and a unit of the national fraternity, the great polity of America writ small. The reality of family was thus for President Lincoln not disconnected from the public man he was. Whereas Dan saw little connection between the public and the private.

A man re-creating himself as an acting brigadier general and with something to offer, Dan reached a Willard’s full of officers in new blue uniforms and, through appointment, the White House. This was probably managed because of the Union’s hunger for personnel, or there may have been an interest in rural Lincoln to see the great urban scalawag who had shot Key dead, just down there on the corner of Lafayette Square. To Dan, and to many other Easterners, Abraham Lincoln was a strange figure, a creature from the frontier, hewn—it seemed—out of the knotty wood of some primeval forest. He pretended to none of Dan’s urban polish, but he proved genial and he heard Dan out. Dan’s proposition was that since his men were responding to a federal emergency, the federal government should accept them directly, without state intervention, as United States volunteers. This was a heretical idea even for Lincoln. The raising of militias had always been a state matter, and it was peculiar that Lincoln should attempt to negate a proposition to the contrary from a Tammany Hall Hardshell lawyer.

According to what Dan later told his chaplain, Twichell, the Republican Lincoln saw the peril more quickly than Sickles did. “What will the governors say if I raise regiments without their having a hand in it?” he asked. Dan, never without a constitutional reference, urged Lincoln to consider the authority contained under the head of the Power to Raise Armies.

It was a confusing and frantic time for Lincoln, but he was attracted to the worldly little New Yorker who wanted to bring his men into action for the Union. Lincoln called in his Secretary of War, Simon Cameron (a man derisively called the Winnebago Chief because he was alleged to have cheated an Indian tribe in a supply contract). Lincoln and Cameron ordered that Dan keep his men together until they could be inducted by United States officers.
²¹

Dan and Wiley both had reason to hope that would occur soon, since the War Department would then pick up the expense of the brigade. The bills already accumulating would take years to settle. Wiley had commandeered cooks for the brigade from among the chefs at Delmonico’s, and, working in inadequate kitchens in side streets, they tried to turn out enough food for the men. The pressure on sanitation was enormous; many of the men lacked a change of clothing, or even soap and razors, and became so hairy and bedraggled that the citizenry were frightened of them. Drunkenness was common, since saloons abounded. But Dan made an arrangement with the owner of a bathhouse-cum-barbershop on Crosby Street, who agreed to bathe, shave, and cut the hair of the recruits for ten cents per man.

The state authorities in Albany were angry at Dan for going straight to Lincoln, and gave him notice to vacate the militia armory. He moved his men to the Fashion racetrack, near the present-day La Guardia Airport, where they lived in what tents Wiley had been able to find and in the stables and jockeys’ changing rooms. He was next offered a more permanent campsite on Staten Island, near Fort Wadsworth, where he and his men could wait until the issue of mustering-in was settled.
²²

Even by the standards of politics, Dan found it a prodigiously expensive and time-absorbing operation to move three thousand men,
their tents, and their cooking equipment from the racetrack, but he and Wiley attended to it with thorough energy and brotherly cooperation. The camp they found themselves in, as the weather warmed, was a low reedy stretch of shoreline facing east, toward Brooklyn, and south, toward the Atlantic. Dan called it Camp Scott. Here, as the summer of 1861 came on, Dan, with his usual resourcefulness, acquired from P. T. Barnum on credit a large circus tent to accommodate some of his men who still lacked canvas to sleep under. There were disadvantages to the location. This was malarial ground, and the dusk was full of the whine of mosquitoes. The men had a mere three hundred rifles, and companies took turns drilling.

Dan showed a daily enthusiasm for commanding and training his mass of young men, and did not fear being intimately bound to them as he feared being bound to women and their homely yearnings and habits of dependence. He was able to exercise strong command without evoking resentment, and the daily routine of reveille, roll call, morning and afternoon drill, surgeon’s call, guard mounting, evening parade, and retreat was insisted upon. His men began to notice the beauties of this low shore, the lines of linden trees that divided farm from farm, the green fields at the verge of which their rows of white tents stood. Dan grew to like his camp and would later describe the scene as he remembered it: “the exquisite sunset scene in old Camp Scott, the long lines of Union blue in evening’s dress parade, the ever welcome visits of friends.”

The visiting friends did not include his wife and daughter. Some observers thought this was a case of Dan’s having been given back an active life, one by which he might expiate the mess of 1859, of which he did not care to be reminded. Whereas Teresa was still stuck there, tethered to the scandals like an ancient Greek maiden to a rock. As
Harper’s Weekly
had earlier said of Dan, he could show “a resolution which amounted to sternness.” That degree of resolution meant that Teresa did not belong in the camp. She was not invited even on the national holiday. George Sickles belonged to this new landscape of promise, however, and often visited and undertook legal and business tasks relating to the Excelsior.
²³

Teresa spent that wartime July Fourth at Bloomingdale. Her father, his friend Mr. Tosticaldi, Mr. Phillips, and a young German gentleman came and remained all day. Teresa entertained them, she told her friend Florence, with walking, “seesawing on the whirligig, pitching, racing, riding.” There was a fine display of fireworks over Bloomingdale in the evening, and then a bonfire. Teresa and her mother played an old game: “I slapped Ma (in fun) and she threw water on me.” A water fight developed. “Mrs. Nesi [a visitor] and myself were drenched—the hall near my door very much like a small lake.” Running to get away, Teresa had slipped near the room they called the Applewood Room, and fallen, and “as for my body it is a mass of black and blue spots.”

In her fondness for animals, around that time she had acquired a new bulldog; she had to be content in large part with animal company. She had as well a black-and-tan terrier on order. “I am also to have two peacocks and a monkey, and what after that I do not know—not a ‘baby’ I promise you.” It seemed she did not see Dan sufficiently for that. The war had claimed him.

Chevalier Wikoff had been down to see the new occupants of the White House himself, and during visits to Teresa, for whom he felt what seemed an avuncular affection, he told her about Mr. Lincoln’s wife, something of a Tartar, fiery but amusing. Wikoff obviously appealed to Mary Todd Lincoln. Whereas Abraham Lincoln made a virtue out of his gawky, frontier ways, Mrs. Lincoln was somewhat embarrassed by her own unworldliness and looked to cosmopolitan gentlemen like the chevalier to remedy it. There was no question, in the minds of some of the White House staff, such as the President’s secretaries John G. Nico-lay, John Hay, and William O. Stoddard, that she was putting together a salon of disreputable fellows, whom she met and conversed with in the Blue Room at the White House. They considered Wikoff one of the disreputables.