American Scoundrel (45 page)

The committee members thanked General Sickles. He had helped them to lay some groundwork for the restoration of Joe Hooker and the dismissal of Meade, whom they considered a secret proslaver and a delayer. But they required more from Dan. So he came back the following day, the eve of the anniversary of Key’s death, and opened his second stanza of evidence by mentioning the circular Meade had sent out to his generals on July 1. “Already,” said Dan, “it is no longer his intention to assume the offensive.” Meade intended to back off and disengage. Despite conflicting orders and Meade’s contradictory messages and impulses, Dan “had written a communication to General Meade, begging by all means to concentrate his army there and fight a battle, stating that in my opinion it was a good place to fight.” Dan detailed his movement orders from and meetings with Meade that day. He declared that the order to retreat was already drafted, and that Meade was cemented in place at Gettysburg only by the enemy attack that occurred on that second day and made retreat impossible.

It was when the committee moved to the period after Gettysburg that Dan really enjoyed himself. His answers were not those of a man who had been taken off the field in shock and pain and shipped back to Washington, but were delivered with a certainty that seemed to imply that he had somehow still been there on July 3 and 4 to judge what should happen next. Yet he believed his wound, and the wounds of his corps, entitled him to an opinion.

“Question: In your opinion, as a military man, what do you think of the propriety of again encountering the enemy at the [Potomac] river before he recrossed?

“Answer: He should have been followed up closely, and vigorously attacked before he had an opportunity to recross the river. . .. If we could whip them at Gettysburg, as we did, we could much more easily whip a running and demoralized army seeking a retreat which was closed by a swollen river.”

Then how did General Sickles account for the fact that a meeting of corps commanders had decided by a two-thirds vote not to make such an assault? General Sickles could not say how that happened; he reminded them that he was off the field, wounded.

To the committee’s thanks, Sickles departed in a gray Washington dusk not unlike the one in which he had stamped home from the Capitol with temporary lunacy in his face. Now he went to his dinner in expectation of Meade’s fall. This one-legged man on crutches was more eminently revered than he had ever been derided, and he might rise to any height, military or civil, under the aegis of Mr. Lincoln, who liked combative generals. He had shown both in the White House and on the Capitol steps that he could move with one leg more lithely than the hesitant, delaying Meade.
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Dan’s assault on the dilatory Meade was splendidly reinforced by the evidence of General Abner Doubleday, whose fame in America would be associated with the founding of the national game, baseball, but who at this time harbored serious military ambitions. He came before the committee as a misused officer. On the first day of Gettysburg, he had, as senior surviving officer, taken over command of the First Corps, but had been replaced when Meade appointed instead a less senior officer. “I think there have been proslavery cliques controlling that army,” said General Doubleday, “composed of men who, in my opinion, would have been willing to have a compromise in favor of slavery.” He also argued that early in the battle Meade had singled him out as one of “a couple of scapegoats. . .. In case the next day’s battle turned out unfavorably, he wished to mark his disapprobation of the first day’s fight.”

By March 4, the joint committee felt it had sufficient evidence regarding Gettysburg to call for Meade’s dismissal. Senators Wade and Chandler recorded that they believed it their duty to visit both the President and the Secretary of War and lay before them “the substance of the testimony taken before them and . . . demand the removal of General Meade and the appointment of someone more competent.” They declared they were not advocates of any particular general, even though they nominated Hooker as someone suitable. But if the President considered any general more competent for the command, “then let him be appointed. . .. Unless the state of things be changed it would become their duty to make the testimony public.” They were thus not above threatening President Lincoln with the press.

When Mr. Lincoln delayed on the matter, the idea came naturally to Dan, or to someone close to him, of using the press; of producing a long article on Gettysburg from Dan’s point of view. Its publication may have been deliberately delayed to coincide with General Meade’s appearances before the committee. Dan also helpfully pointed out to Senator Chandler that his friend General Dan Butterfield had turned up at Willard’s. Butterfield had been recuperating from a wound suffered at Gettysburg, and he had lost his position of chief of staff to Meade. He was now to command a mere division under General William Tecumseh Sherman, and such lowly work made him fretful and hostile to Meade. Butterfield did not have permission to be in Washington, but these niceties did not matter much to politicians like Dan and Butterfield. Dan suggested to the committee that Butterfield “be subpoenaed regularly,” which would validate his being in town.

General Meade, still in command, was summoned to begin his testimony on March 5. He knew he would be given a hard time. As good as accused by Senator Wade of intending, on the morning of the July 2, to order the retreat of the army from Gettysburg, Meade denied any recollection of having issued such an order. He had, he said, made great efforts to mass his army on Gettysburg on the night of July 1, so it was improbable that he would order it to retreat unless the enemy did something to require him to. He also argued that the defenses the enemy had
put in place strengthened his opinion that any renewed attack on Lee after the battle “would have resulted disastrously to our arms.” He believed that Lee had ten to fifteen thousand men more than he himself had.

On March 12, an extensive article on the battle of Gettysburg, signed Historicus, appeared in the
New York Herald
. This long item, whoever wrote it, described the enterprising General Sickles making his wise decision to leave Emmitsburg and advance to help Howard, who had greeted him with the flattering statement “Here you are, General— always reliable, always first.” Historicus declared that he had seen a circular of General Meade’s, issued on the morning of July 1 to his corps commanders, stating that his advance had accomplished all the objects he had contemplated—namely, the salvation of Harrisburg and Philadelphia. Now he would desist altogether from the offensive. Gettysburg had become a great and holy incident in the American imagination by the winter of 1863–64, when the article appeared, so it was a grave matter to imply that Meade had not wanted his army to be there. Almost at the moment when Sickles’s left flank was struggling with the right flank of the enemy, said Historicus, Meade was planning to retire, and this was the only plan he had. Historicus, as partial justification for Dan’s move forward, quoted Meade’s throwaway line to Dan: “Oh, generals are all out to look for the attack to be made where they are.” At the time, the entire right wing of the enemy was concentrated on the devoted Third Corps, wrote Historicus, and Meade could not have cared less for the thunder that was about to descend upon them. Only later did Meade begin “to pour in reinforcements whose presence in the beginning of the action would have saved thousands of lives.”

Historicus went on to describe what had happened on July 3 and 4 in the manner of an eyewitness, so perhaps the writer was an officer friend of Dan’s who had been present on the battlefield on those two days. He concluded scathingly, “Had General Meade been more copious in his report and less reserved as to his own important acts, the necessity for this communication would not have existed.”

Reading this long piece, Meade had no doubt that it and “other articles of the same kind in the New York papers were written or dictated by General Sickles; nevertheless, you will not be able to fix on him the authorship, and nothing would suit him better than to get into a personal or newspaper controversy.” Meade asked Stanton and Lincoln to set up a court of inquiry, but Mr. Lincoln replied, “It is natural you should feel some sensibility on this subject, but I am not impressed . . . with the belief that your honor demands, or the public interest demands, such an inquiry.”
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Dan’s agitation against Meade was to have massive and not quite expected results for the nation. Mr. Lincoln did not yield to the importuning of the Committee on the Conduct of the War or of Dan, that is, not in the terms in which they hoped he would. He was weary of that committee, and, as much as he might listen to Sickles man to man, he did not choose to hear his views as filtered through Wade and Chandler. Meade continued in command of the Army of the Potomac, so, for all the permanent damage he did Meade, Dan might as well have spent the winter with Teresa. On the other hand, he and the committee did cause Lincoln to come up with another plan. Lincoln would supersede Meade by bringing in a supreme, newly created three-star general, a man not given to timidity or to flights of imagination, a fellow who had operated with great success in the West, General Ulysses S. Grant. Grant would have ultimate responsibility over Meade’s Army of the Potomac.

Dan showed every sign of being satisfied with this result; his contempt for Meade was genuine. Dan met Grant at a White House levee in the East Room, where Grant, a socially awkward and strangely reticent man, was forced to stand on a sofa so that the crowd could get a view of him. When Secretary of War Stanton introduced Sickles, Dan told Grant, “Besieged by friends, even you must surrender, General.”

Grant showed Sickles his sore hand and said, with an atypical neatness of phrasing, “Yes, I have been surrendering for two hours until I have no arms left.” Later, Dan would plead with Grant to save the Third Corps, but without effect. It was the sort of decision Grant left to Meade.
In the end, the depleted divisions of Dan’s corps were consolidated into the Second Corps under Major General Hancock, and the Black Diamonds of the Third Corps vanished.
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But in April, in an attempt to keep feverish Dan usefully employed, Mr. Lincoln sent him on a swing through the Union-held South to report both on the condition of the army there and on the prospects for reconstruction. He was told particularly to see whether Andrew Johnson, the Union-installed governor of Tennessee, could be checked in his severity against the local people, since Lincoln, unlike many other Republicans, wanted the South to be treated in a conciliatory manner.

In the winter just ending, Teresa had been subject to an increasing number of fevers and colds, and to the loss of appetite whose medical description was anorexia, brought on by appetite-suppressant drugs and by the disease itself. When she had Dr. Payne or Dr. Bradhurst in, the doctor prescribed strong doses of medicinal purgatives, and bleeding or cupping, the application of heated glass cups, “to draw out deep-seated infections,” to carefully chosen sites, cut with a lancet, on the chest or back. As the cup cooled, blood and tissue fluid oozed up and, doctors believed, among other matter voided were the vicious tubercular cells. Like all other sufferers, Teresa continued to take futile infusions of unpalatable cod liver oil, and, of course, the tinctures of morphine either prepared by apothecaries or presented as patent medicines. Mrs. Bagioli was her nurse, and so were Laura and a female servant. Her spittle was streaked with blood.

If the doctors suggested going to the country, she did not do so. Compared to cholera or typhus, tuberculosis was considered a gentle and slow condition. But it brought with it a feverish invigoration of the imagination, as the famous Brontë sisters had shown. Even at this stage of the disease, poor Teresa’s vivid dreams would have evoked a hunger for tenderness and touch, which seemed to be unsatisfied.

Over time, Mrs. Bagioli and visitors such as the loyal Chevalier Wikoff noticed her features becoming sharper, bonier, though not enough yet to cancel her reputation for allure. Just the same, her eyes
were beginning to sink in her face and to resemble flowers bruised by winter’s first frost. Her breasts, famous and fantasized-upon, were slowly sinking, as if the rib cage were collapsing. She was in the hands of what Dickens called “a disease in which death and life are so strangely blended that death takes the hue of life and life the gaunt and grisly form of death; a disease which medicine never cured, wealth never warded off or poverty could cause exemption from.”
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In Memphis, Dan, not yet fully acquainted with the latest reports of his wife’s illness, was greeted with full honors by the occupying Union Army. Whatever others may have once said of his own accommodating morality, Dan found that Memphis was a morass, with many federal officers taking money from Southern profiteers to release certain goods for sale at phenomenal prices into the dwindling Confederacy. He had nonetheless been turned into an absolutist by what he had seen of the rebellion, and was morally appalled that officers would profit by this commerce. He warned the President, “This intercourse enriches a mercenary horde, who follow in the rear of our force, corrupting by the worst temptations those in authority.” Dan visited Sherman’s rampaging army in their lines at Resaca, Georgia. He inspected the city of Helena in Arkansas, New Orleans, then Crescent City, the navy yard at Pen-sacola, and, finally, Charleston. He warned Lincoln and Stanton about the problem of an abiding hatred of the North among the parts of the South that had been captured.
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By the time he returned, the Republicans had just about decided that in 1864 they would again nominate Lincoln, with Dan’s recent host Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a Union Democrat, as his running mate. The Democrats selected General McClellan, but no matter Dan’s political history, he believed there was only one man to bring the war to a successful conclusion, which was the only issue that meant anything. In the peculiar but not unique position of a Democrat who would vote for a Republican, he became a leading figure of the extensive group named Democrats for Lincoln, which included his friend General Meagher. On November 1, 1864, at the Cooper Institute in New York, they held a
massive rally at which Dan was the chief speaker. “As regards to the Chicago Democrat convention which is appointing McClellan as their candidate,” said Dan, those who would rather stay at home, who would rather not pay taxes, were all “accommodated under that platform. . .. Every sneak in the republic who wants a hiding place, can get under that platform. [Cheers and laughter] No man, not even its candidate, has the courage to stand upon it. [Cheers and laughter]”
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