American Scoundrel (36 page)

On February 5, 1862, Mary Todd Lincoln had organized an extraordinary night at the White House—the highest night of her career as First Lady. Dan, invited perhaps as reward for his discreet services in regard to the leaked speech, found that he was one of five hundred invited to the all-night dinner. Mary and Abraham Lincoln received guests in the East Room while the Marine Band played in the hall. At midnight the doors of the dining room swung open on a magnificent buffet. Dinner was served until three, and even duty-bound generals like Dan did not leave until daybreak. The only cloud on Mrs. Lincoln’s horizon that splendid night was that upstairs her son Willy, eleven years old, was suffering from a high fever. He did not recover from it in coming days; it became more acute, and Willy died on February 20, the second child Mary had lost. Willy was almost certainly a victim of the sewage swamp behind the White House, the evil canal and the polluted stream derisively named the Tiber. At that time, too, the military population of Washington was so great that the sewerage mains had burst and fouled the capital and the Potomac. People of the era were reticent about publishing causes of death, and some speculated that Willy had died of “bilious fever,” whatever that might have been. Others thought malaria had taken him, though the symptoms appeared to be very like those of typhoid fever from fecal pollution of the water.

Whatever the cause of Willy’s death, Mrs. Lincoln was unable to fit it into an endurable scheme of the world. General Sickles saw Willy, embalmed, laid out in the Green Room, a sprig of laurel on his breast. Dan gave his condolences to Mary Todd Lincoln, who did her best, as good Victorian women were meant to, to hide her grief. Nineteenth-century manuals of mourning advised her against excessive grief. Tears are not for the gaze of others, advised one such book. Mary behaved as well as she could but became ill herself, and her younger remaining son, Tad, took sick with exactly the same sort of fever as his brother. The superintendent of women nurses, an experienced army nurse named Rebecca Pommeroy, came to look after the desperately afflicted Lincoln family. Rebecca was thought of as a good example to Mary; she had lost her husband and three sons. Even so, Mary Lincoln’s indiscreet but favorite dressmaker, a former slave named Elizabeth Keckley, claimed that one day Lincoln led his wife to the window, pointed to the Washington Lunatic Asylum, and said, “Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try to control your grief or it will drive you mad and we may have to send you there.”

Tad recovered, but Mary, after three months of devastation, began again to talk to such friends as Dan about spiritualism and the chance of getting in contact with Willy and her other dead child, Eddie, through séances.
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In the meantime, on March 20, down the road from Washington to Budds Ferry had come a letter from the Adjutant General, dated March 20, 1862, and addressed to Dan.

Dan’s sense of the man he was becoming had been so thoroughly invested in his chieftainship of his brigade that, in taking it from him, the
Senate had stolen his validity, and the decision induced in him a panicked energy to make them change their minds. It was a heady experience to watch his five thousand men in review, as he had that day outside the White House. The ordered passage of young males of all sizes and colorings, of varying handsomeness and nobility of spirit, but bonded by their shared oath, took a great time, and gratified and invigorated the soul. To imagine leading them in battle was a martial delight. Dan had been stripped of that possibility by malign men in the Senate. He was angered that when the news of the nonconfirmation came through, Hooker at once appointed Dan’s former junior but a professional soldier, Colonel Nelson Taylor of the 72nd New York, to take command of the Excelsior Brigade. It seemed that Hooker considered Taylor a reasonable sort of fellow, but Dan was infuriated. He described Hooker’s offending Special Order No. 132 as “illegal, unauthorized and unjust,” and said he meant to protest to General McClellan. He got a curt note back from General Hooker that Special Order No. 132 had been issued advisedly.

Naturally, Dan wrote at once to the President, who, after all, owed him a favor. He asked to be allowed “to vindicate at the head of this column of brave and loyal men, the justice and fitness of your generous confidence.” But the President could not directly impose his will upon the Senate, and Dan’s friend Colonel Charles Graham of New York was himself reduced to resigning in protest over the Senate’s decision.

As Sickles, lacking a command but imbued with determination, went back to Washington to fight his cause, General McClellan, who always seemed to covet ground other than that which he presently held, was able to get approval to engage his Army of the Potomac in a massive flanking movement. It would involve transporting his army by steamer down the Virginia coast to the Peninsula—a broad spit of land between the York and James Rivers, and close to Richmond, the seat of rebellion. On the Peninsula, all the east-west roads led into Richmond. If the Union Army suddenly turned up on them, the Rebel capital would be outflanked. To the shallow beaches of the Peninsula, along with the bulk of the Army of the Potomac, went General Thomas Francis Meagher
and his five-thousand-strong Irish Brigade. Meagher, confirmed a brigadier general by the Senate in early February, would be at the core of events, whereas Dan had to fall back on an interview with Rose Green-how’s former admirer Senator Henry Wilson, chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. He also sought a meeting with Senator Benjamin Wade of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, who thought Lincoln too soft for his job, and with other powerful Republicans.

George Sickles admired what his son had accomplished with the Excelsior and knew how hard Dan might take this unjust rebuff. He was thus pleased to get a letter from his son that was “anything but desponding.” George was loyally gathering a petition condemning the Senate’s decision, and had sent it to, among others, Antonio Bagioli, who signed it despite Dan’s neglect of his daughter. Antonio was certainly indulgent and even doting toward Teresa and Laura, but thought that in her loneliness his sad daughter was merely expiating her infidelities. On top of Antonio’s support, George was pleased to report, many New York papers had published editorials condemning the Senate—the “dribbling apes,” as George called them. Horace Greeley of the
Tribune
had signed a petition to have Dan renominated, and so had William Cullen Bryant, the vituperative editor of the
Evening Post
, who had until now routinely mocked Dan. As for Susan Sickles, said George, she did not sleep for fear of bloody dreams, and talked about the war endlessly and nervously.
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On April 25, as the Excelsior Brigade was, without Dan, descending from transports and making its way ashore and into the turpentine forests of the Peninsula, the President renominated Sickles for a brigadier generalship and sent the documents for confirmation by the Senate. While Dan waited, his brigade had its first shocking experience of war, in front of the fortifications of Williamsburg. The rain and wind were in the soldiers’ faces as they defended a road, novices standing up and blazing away at advancing Confederates, and then advancing and finding themselves cut down in bunches from the side by “a sharp, enfilading fire of shot and shell . . . from a field fortification opposite.”

Their ammunition ran out, and in their sundry states of mind, from
hollow to exultant, they filed behind artillery batteries to be resupplied. The losses of the Excelsior that day were 772, which must have shocked Dan. The unimaginable attrition had begun. But Dan was gratified to hear how well the fellows had performed, and the praises they had received from the corps commander, General Heintzelman. On the other hand, Chaplain Twichell would much later speak of wandering through the woods along the Lee’s Mill road, and the tumult he felt, “an emotion that words could not describe,” at seeing the dead faces of young men with whom he had held conversations in recent days. They lay where they had fallen, their faces smudged by powder and death, and he had suffered that universal human impulse which said that surely the dead were capable of some final movement.

Eight days later, on May 13, the Senate confirmed Dan’s nomination by nineteen votes to eighteen. He was finally, by one vote, what he so dearly needed to be—a general. He found a berth at once on a transport steamer for the Peninsula, since it seemed the decisive battles of the war were about to be fought there. Colonel Graham also returned from the protest of resignation to take over his regiment under Dan. In the white-tented encampments outside Williamsburg, Dan enjoyed a resonating welcome from the men of the Excelsior at evening dress parade. As he walked down the line of the New York 71st, the regiment he had originally raised, the tears ran down his cheeks when he noted the vacant places. With a characteristic sense of ceremony and with a sudden emotion, he paused when he came to the regimental colors, took the flag in his hands, and pressed it to his lips.
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McClellan, too slowly for Abraham Lincoln, advanced his army up the Peninsula until men could climb trees and see the distant glitter of the dome of the Confederate Capitol in Richmond. The Excelsior occupied a series of not unpleasant camps on the south side of the Peninsula and below the Chickahominy River. Malaria and other fevers were ever present, however. Dan knew that his friend, former Representative Lawrence Branch, now a Confederate general, had tried to turn the Union flank on May 27 with a sudden attack at Hanover Courthouse. Another former colleague, General Roger Pryor, whose wife had so
often visited the Stockton Mansion, now commanded a Confederate brigade in Longstreet’s division, which was camped in the eastern suburbs of Richmond.

In describing Civil War campaigns of the kind in which Dan was involved and for whose resolution Teresa waited, a writer runs the risk of bamboozling the reader with geographic names and terminology that tell everything except the human feel of events. It is simplest, in the case of this campaign, to say that McClellan’s army was lined out north and south of the Chickahominy River, the swampy artery that, in this sector, ran lengthwise down the Peninsula. Hooker’s division and the Excelsior were in the far south, to the left of the line. On May 31, the Confederates, with their backs up against the edge of Richmond, tried to break McClellan’s army in two. Hooker’s division was in reserve the first day, and impatient Dan must have feared that his experience of large-scale battle, for which he had a keen desire and a furious curiosity, would be long delayed. Then, on the second day, most of Hooker’s men marched up in the predawn to meet the Confederate Army along the Williamsburg Road, which ran into Richmond. The men of Dan’s brigade rushed up breathless and lined themselves out, under the direction of Dan and their colonels, across heavily wooded fields, two regiments forward and the others in reserve. Dan and his young soldiers were exultant and edgy as they waited for sunrise and the outbreak of the contest. Whether they knew it or not, there was nobody behind them or the rest of Joe Hooker’s division, and thus they were part of the vulnerable flank of the entire army. Because of the thick foliage between where Dan waited on his horse and the railway station of Fair Oaks, about a mile away, it was hard to see the enemy, but both sides, to their mutual amazement, immediately filled the humid morning air with a prodigious quantity of shot and shell. Stationed nearby, a young Union general Dan knew, Oliver Howard, a former theological student, had his right arm so badly damaged that it had to be amputated. Many humbler men paid more drastic prices still.
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As Dan now advanced his men across the fields under awful fire from the hidden enemy, the Confederates at last emerged into the open
along the Williamsburg Road, sniffing for the advantage. A previously troublesome Excelsior regiment went screaming at them with bayonets. The enemy were driven back into the woods at eleven-thirty in the morning, and Colonel Hall’s men captured prisoners and a horse-drawn omnibus. Previously in use as a Rebel ambulance, the vehicle declared itself to come from the Columbus Hotel, Richmond, Virginia. Sickles was tickled to see it and whimsically sent it on to his corps commander, old General Heintzelman, with a note that said perhaps the general might like to stay at the Columbus once Richmond fell. In his official report, Dan praised all five regiments, though he said two of them were concealed from his view by heavy forest. But it was apparent that they had driven the enemy from their position. “The dashing charge of the Second and Fourth Regiments, the cool and steady advance of the Third, occurred under my immediate observation and could not be surpassed.” He had now survived his first large-scale battle, and found himself, after all and very conveniently, suited to such events.
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Many generals expected now McClellan would finish off his victory at Fair Oaks by pushing his army up through the Confederate fortifications to capture Richmond. Every soldier wanted it. The Excelsior’s historian, Sergeant Henri le Fevre Brown, wrote, “At this time Richmond could have been taken with small loss.” Union skirmishers, by climbing trees overlooking the Confederate breastworks, could see that they “had a very small force in them.” Dan and others futilely urged General McClellan to authorize the final advance.

At another section of the Union line, Meagher had also had a great success repelling the Rebels. He and Sickles had both become habituated to the furious noise of shells and the audible thud of a ball striking human flesh and invading the body. They had also been presented with the war’s new reality—unimagined levels of casualties produced by the variety of modern artillery shells and the latest in rifles and muskets. There was such a stench from rotting bodies in the woods, so many putrid and inhuman sights, that Dan saw men retching uncontrollably. He reported that in the hot and wet weather, the campground “was literally covered with maggots and for several days the only drinking water was
ground water.” With no safe drinking water, many wounded died of heat exhaustion on their way to the hospital, while many of the healthy were brought down by waterborne diseases. These realities unbalanced sundry other vain men who had previously thought themselves cut out for command. But neither the casualties nor the state of the earth daunted General Sickles. He fancied too that he did not suffer from the fatigue of battle.
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