American Scoundrel (5 page)

There were stories, perhaps more reliable, that Teresa was in the early stages of pregnancy. Given that the coming child’s birth was not officially recorded, that is not certain. What is certain is that her pregnancy was not the chief reason for the marriage, for Dan was not a man to be dragooned into marriage by such things, and the truth of Dan’s character is that he would have been ruthless enough to arrange his way around an unwanted pregnancy. Though he might marry ill-advisedly, he did not marry lightly. After all, marriage in the Victorian world was an institution from which only tragedy—an epidemic or the death of a mother in childbirth—could liberate a man.

In March 1853, a church marriage took place in the house of Archbishop Hughes, the powerful Catholic prelate of New York. Teresa’s condition was visible, and one Sickles-baiting newspaper claimed the marriage before the archbishop took place only when the pregnancy could no longer be concealed from the two sets of parents. This contradicts all we know of the relationship between Dan and Teresa and their parents.
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The more serious issue was that whatever pieties may have attended Dan’s vows before Mayor Kingsland, and the church marriage the following March, it did not take him long to conclude that the keeping of his marriage vows was beyond him. The problem was not splendid Teresa or her pregnancy; he was simply not designed for conventional marriage and consecrated love. His appetites, whether larger than those of other men or not, were certainly never hedged in by fear of social odium.

In the Bagiolis’ view, however, he was a generous husband, unstinting with gifts of jewelry. The Bagioli parents discounted any gossip about him and accepted his frequent absences as inevitable for a man who ran a law practice and had a frantic political life. Teresa, as she and Dan moved to their rented house a little uptown from the Bagiolis, did become aware, with some bafflement, that he was meeting other, older
women, and she heard occasional rumors of his not having given up Fanny White. She did not possess the meek gift of denial that got other wives through such crises of knowledge, and she questioned him about the matter more than once, along the normal wifely lines of what these other women gave him that was lacking in her. Since he was her all, and since he possessed the gift to make her feel yet again whenever he came home that she was the one lovely and sensible woman on earth, she could not understand the imperatives that drove him on to his infidelities. But the sole authority she could bring to the question was that of a bewildered adolescent. To her credit, she did not become a wronged and wounded harpy; she employed no stridency. Perhaps had she done so, Dan might have behaved marginally better.

And as if there were rewards for acquiring such a presentable and accomplished young wife, Dan had been married barely three months before it became his turn to receive one of the prime fruits of the Tammany system, the appointed post of corporation attorney of New York City. The corporation attorney was the lawyer who went to court on the instructions of the corporation counsel, an elective post held by Dan’s friend Dillon, for whom he had raided the Broadway post office. Dan’s new eminence carried with it a handsome retainer, augmented by generous fees for whatever law work he undertook on behalf of the city. But he was also free to take up any other briefs he chose to.
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Even with his political opportunism, Dan possessed a civic imagination, and one of his pet projects was to enable the New York Corporation to go ahead with creating a great central park. Though Dan would get very little or no mention in most histories of that huge endeavor, he would always argue that he had been one of the prime facilitators. At the time he became attorney to the corporation, there were pending before the assembly in Albany a number of bills appropriating plots of land in the upper part of the island of Manhattan to be used as a series of parks. Conflicts between the opponents and advocates of these projects, based on the desire of various people to develop the land privately, became so violent that all the park bills were doomed to failure. Dan was among the few enthusiasts who argued that this huge public park should reach
as low as Twenty-third Street and stretch all the way up the island to the Harlem River. But the central park, he found, was a scheme that everyone liked in principle but lost interest in because of its difficulties.

With some credibility, Dan depicted himself, in a long document now among his papers in the Library of Congress, as catching the train to Albany in the spring of 1853 to argue with politicians he knew for a revival of the scheme. “On my arrival,” he wrote, “I found the Capitol strewn with the remains of defeated Park Bills. . .. The warring champions of each of the old measures were invited to meet me in conference, over a good dinner. The banquet lasted well into the night, and before we separated the Senators interested . . . all agreed to support my consolidated plan for a park.” This was a characteristic Sickles manner of doing business.

The result of the dinner meeting was that a bill was quickly passed in the assembly to authorize the city to proceed with the project, leaving the choice of ground to the municipal authorities of New York. Unfortunately, one senator with whom Dan would later quarrel over other matters in a national war, Edwin P. Morgan, managed to insert an amendment that he knew would cause Governor Horatio Seymour to refuse to sign the bill. When the governor did refuse, Dan promised to get that clause eliminated, even though this was the last day of the session, and there were only three hours left of it. But with the same degree of frenetic energy that had fueled the Broadway post office raid, Dan went off to the Senate chamber and was able to persuade Morgan to yield. Then he called on his personal friendship with a number of state senators to ensure consideration of his park bill that evening. “Unhappily, so many senators were absent during the call of the roll, that the affirmative vote was one or two short of the required constitutional number, but I was able to hurry from the lobby two or three friendly absentees.” So the bill was passed, and hurrying along to the assembly chamber with it, “I obtained the ear of the Speaker and got a hearing for my Bill in the Lower House, where the amendment was promptly concurred in.” It remained only to get the bill once more before the governor, and with the help of the clerks of both houses, this was achieved
only half an hour before the final adjournment. The document was sent at once to the office of the secretary of state. Dan wrote that “going there myself soon after, I was enabled to obtain from my friend, Mr. Randall, a certified copy of the Park Bill before taking the seven o’clock train to New York.”

By eleven o’clock on the night of the triumph, he was in Union Square, New York, aglow with excitement, in front of the house of the corporation counsel, his friend Dillon. Dillon answered Dan’s ringing of the front doorbell by appearing at a third-floor window in nightcap and dressing gown to hear the great news, and descended to the ground floor to accept a copy of the enacted bill.

As authorized by the act, Dan hoped, the municipal authorities would include within the park an area named Jones’ Woods, “a considerable tract of native forest, covered by large trees, with contiguous land extending to the East River.” His relations with the Common Council of New York, both professional and personal, led him to expect a favorable reaction. An old friend, the Democratic leader in the Board of Aldermen, however, told him frankly that although the boys on the council wanted to do all they could for his plan, “you know it is formidable and you must let up on Jones’ Woods and the East River frontage. The boys were offered $50,000 to strike out those plots and I can’t control them. The big purse is too tempting to resist.”

Having been raised in Tammany, Dan was not at all outraged by these blatantly venal motives, but possibly regretted that he had no equivalent purse at his command. Still, he was able to arrange a characteristic New York deal for an extra hundred acres, through an understanding with Alfred Craven, “then chief engineer of the Croton Aqueduct, who desired his salary raised to $7,500 per annum. This I agreed to arrange for him, provided he would locate the new Aqueduct just then authorized within the limits of the proposed park.”

Dan knew that Judge Robert Barnwell Roosevelt of the New York Supreme Court, in common with other large landholders, was opposed to the park. So even though the court had appointed commissioners to produce a report on the project, it let it be forgotten. Events prevented
Dan for the time being from pursuing the vision of a park through the maze of New York City’s special interests, but it was a matter to which he would return.
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Dan the civic-minded attorney was simultaneously fascinated by the problems of New York public transportation. Conscientiously trying to create a better city for his soon-to-be-born child, he applied his rambunctious intelligence to establishing a crosstown system of horse-drawn omnibuses in Manhattan, noting the receipts from similar services in Brooklyn, and devising equations for traffic. Certainly, by the start of the Civil War, eight years later, New York was full of the stubby, roofed, bathtub-style omnibuses that moved New Yorkers along the tracks and contributed to its traffic jams. But in 1853, Dan was in a position of being their advocate. “Omnibuses do not choke up the streets,” he boldly declared for the sake of doubters in the Common Council, and he backed up the assertion with mathematical formulae based on the speed, mass, and carrying capacity of the vehicles.
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In view of Dan’s notable political gifts, Robert Dillon offered some advice, almost certainly on the matter of his continued association with Fanny White, among other indiscretions. Dan was quick to plead in reply, “I cannot play the courtier to the multitude, much less to individuals.” He had never done it and never would, he said. Indeed, his approaches to President Pierce contained no note of sycophancy. So as for Dillon’s hope for his reform, he sternly rebuffed the idea: “You waste your own time and pain me by requesting it. . .. I know all the consequences of yielding to this idiosyncrasy, and have many a long year since resolved to enjoy it even at the price which must be inevitably paid. I have said to you before that I do not deem it a wise course, nor approve it, nor recommend it to any friend; but I’ve adopted it: it is mine, and I will follow it come what may.” He concluded with a Latin saw:
“Video melior protoque, deteriora sequor”
(“Though I see what the better things are, even so I follow the worse”).
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He was dutiful to his father, to whom he wrote regularly, even while he was in Washington pursuing his objectives within the presidential
ambience. He had been taken to the Congressional Gardens by a friend, and found that the outing, and a dinner he had eaten, redeemed Washington from being “dull and wearisome—and as hot as ever.” He said he would rather be with “the female child and her child.” For by now Teresa, “the female child,” had joyfully come to term and given birth to a daughter, Laura, to the vast excitement of the Bagiolis and their Italian-American friends. Given his busy-ness, Dan was not present for the birth, but he sent Teresa a poem, which she cherished. “As I entered the room,” wrote an Italian friend to Dan, “Teresa was calmly sleeping, the worst was all over. . .. I then looked at your babe. Oh, what a delight! . . . To find it so perfect—although not a boy.”

His frank father did his best to get Dan to come back from his lobbying in Washington, regretting that he was still there “in neglect of every matter in which you have an interest.” Dan’s relationship with George would survive many such hearty statements of disapproval. Two of Dan’s notes were due that week, George warned, one for $475 and another for $250. “Now it is hardly fair you should entirely neglect your personal affairs to help out others—and to ask me to fill the breach.” George reminded him that as generous as it was to help out Gus Schell, his friend who wanted to be appointed collector of the Port of New York, this should not be achieved at the cost of sacrificing his own name and that of his father.
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President Pierce may have been lucky to have such busy importunings as those of Dan to distract him. For on January 5 that year, before the inauguration, he had been traveling with his wife and his thirteen-year-old son, Benny, on the Boston & Maine Railroad, going home to Concord, New Hampshire, when the axle of their passenger car broke. The carriage fell down an embankment, dragging other coaches with it, and although President-elect Pierce and Mrs. Pierce suffered only bad bruising, they saw as they picked themselves up in the splintered and chaotic wreckage that part of the superstructure of the car had crushed Benny’s head. Mrs. Jane Pierce had thus come to the White House as a ghostly, inconsolable figure, and although she dutifully fulfilled the
official functions of a President’s wife, she did so with a smile that contained all the dolorous weight of bereavement. The death weighed obviously but less visibly on the President himself, but he had the duties of office to absorb his conscious mind.
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This charming but desolate President, Franklin Pierce, was indirectly about to involve the Sickleses in international diplomacy.

I
N
M
AY 1853
, P
IERCE CAST ABOUT FOR
someone to represent the United States in Great Britain, and approached that Democratic notable from Pennsylvania Senator James Buchanan, known affectionately in the party as Old Buck. Buchanan had enjoyed an august career as Secretary of State for four years under Presidents Jackson and Polk, and before that as a representative and a senator, as well as the minister of the United States at the Court of St. Petersburg. He had sought the presidential nomination in 1852, but it had gone to Pierce. Most people thought it was his last chance. Though Buchanan was in many ways still impressive—he had a clear complexion and large blue eyes, and stood over six feet—he might prove to be too old for that ultimate prize, which he had sought for a quarter of a century. Some physical defects had already begun to assert
themselves: he had a nervous twitch that caused his head to jerk more visibly and frequently the older he got, and he was crotchety.