The Book of Bastards (10 page)

Democratic Congressman Dan Sickles was already a nationally notorious figure when he pulled strings to get appointed as a brigadier general of volunteers at the beginning of the Civil War. In 1859 Dan Sickles became the first person in American history to successfully employ the “temporary insanity” defense in order to beat a murder charge.

The son of a New York City attorney who dabbled in local politics, Sickles followed in his father's footsteps, securing a scholarship to study law at New York University. While a student there he first met his future wife Teresa when he rented a room from her family. She was three years old. He was twenty.

The two of them eloped thirteen years later; Teresa was sixteen and pregnant.

By the late 1850s Sickles had been elected to Congress, and the couple had relocated to Washington, D.C., moving into a house on Lafayette Square, less than a block from the White House. Isolated from her family and by then aware that Sickles drank too much and chased women habitually, it comes as no surprise that Teresa eventually began an affair of her own.

Teresa's lover wasn't just anyone; he was Philip Barton Key, son of the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Key was also district attorney for the District of Columbia, and every bit as much a womanizer as Teresa's husband.

When Sickles found out about his wife's infidelity his reaction was typically Victorian: he flew into a rage and insisted his wife write out a detailed confession. She did so. It wasn't enough.

In February 1859, Sickles confronted his wife's lover on a street corner down the block from his house; right across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Sickles shot Key twice, once in the groin. Key died the next day.

On trial for murder, Sickles hired an expensive legal defense team, including future Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Their strategy was for Sickles to claim that learning of his wife's infidelity had so enraged him that he could not control his own thoughts, that he was literally “temporarily insane.”

Sickles began his trial as the butt of much public scorn, but his defense was so sensational and so successful that he was acquitted on all charges. He was even seen as something of a hero, having rid the innocent women of Washington of a predatory rascal like Key.

Teresa Sickles never reconciled with her husband. She died profoundly sad and lonely in 1867. Sickles for his part went on to lead a long political career in spite of losing his leg. He served as U.S. Minister to Spain from 1869 to 1874. In 1871 he married the daughter of a Spanish nobleman who eventually bore him three children.

Sickles received the Congressional Medal of Honor for losing his leg at Gettysburg, and money was appropriated to erect a statue in his honor on the spot in the Peach Orchard where he was wounded. But the statue was never cast or placed.

Rumor has it that Sickles stole the money.

Over the course of its two-hundred-plus years of history, the United States has been served by hundreds of senators. A few score of them have died in office. But only one serving U.S. Senator was ever killed in a duel: that bastard out of California, David C. Broderick.

The son of an immigrant Irish stonecutter who came to America in order to work on the U.S. Capitol building, Broderick was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in New York City. While still a young man, he became the proprietor of a public house where customers discussed politics over beer and made political deals in the back room.

Broderick headed west in 1849, and once he landed in California began a highly lucrative business casting gold and silver coins. He had a talent for making his coins just a bit light, so that a $10 gold piece would be full of about $8 worth of actual gold, and so on. Within a year he was a millionaire. He employed both his new-found wealth and the political acumen he had learned from his time running that pub in New York to get himself elected to the California State Senate as a Democrat. Within another year he was serving as that body's president.

And he had already established himself as the uncrowned king of San Francisco.

Broderick ruled the city with an iron fist, receiving kickbacks from every officeholder in need of his political muscle to get elected. He could be vindictive, even cruel, and he had a terrible temper.

By the mid-1850s the California Democratic Party faced a huge rift between Southern Democrats (many of whom wanted to see slavery introduced into the state) and the Free Soil Democrats. In 1857 Broderick's unchallenged leadership of the Free Soilers led to his election to the U.S. Senate, fulfilling one of his lifelong dreams. He was only thirty-six years old.

For two years Broderick served in the Senate. He returned home in 1859 during the Congressional late summer recess and helped defeat his former friend David Terry's bid for reelection as chief justice of the State Supreme Court. They were after all political opponents: Terry was a Southerner and a pro-slavery Democrat.

At the state convention in Sacramento later that year Terry made some cutting remarks regarding Broderick's character. Broderick was livid when he read Terry's speech in a newspaper, and sent off an incendiary note in reply. In no time Terry had challenged Broderick to a duel and the latter had accepted.

These two political titans fought at Lake Merced, outside of San Francisco's city limits on September 13, 1859. Broderick's pistol discharged prematurely. Terry's shot pierced Broderick's lung. Broderick lingered for three days before dying on September 16, 1859, not forty years old.

There are all kinds of bastards, but some just rise above (or, if you prefer, “sink below”) most of the others. These include, but are in no way limited to, rapists, murderers, and slave traffickers. Right there in the pit with them are people who profit by stealing from the soldiers protecting their country. People like Simon Cameron, President Lincoln's first secretary of war.

Born poor in Pennsylvania in 1799, Cameron charmed his way into a series of lucrative political posts. He then helped found the Northern Central Railway, sold it, and started a bank. Cameron was a wealthy man by the time he turned to politics full-time in his forties. By the election year of 1860 Cameron had been a Whig, a “Know-Nothing,” a Democrat, and of course, a Republican. He had also served two separate terms in the U.S. Senate and wanted to be president.

At the Republican National Convention in Chicago Cameron didn't have the votes to get the nomination, so he parlayed his control of a substantial number of Pennsylvania votes into a place in the cabinet of the eventual nominee, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. In return for his support Cameron was only too happy to take over the War Department. He had barely taken his oath of office when the Civil War broke out.

Cameron served as secretary of war for a little less than a year. During those ten months Northern newspaper after Northern newspaper reported widespread graft involving contracts given for both goods and services intended to support the Union war effort. Over-aged muskets were purchased that didn't fire. Blankets were purchased, paid for, and never received. Uniforms were threadbare. Horses were sold to the government, only to be found to be blind or lame, or some combination thereof. Barrels of salt pork were purchased and when opened, found to be empty, filled with salt water, half-full, or outright spoiled. And on top of all of this, the War Department was spending millions.

How did Cameron avoid seeming as if he were personally profiting from this national disgrace?

Railroads. Everything the government bought and shipped to the troops in the field went via rail.

And if it ran through Pennsylvania, because of his railroad contracts, Simon Cameron got a piece of it. Merchants and traders Cameron rewarded with such lucrative contracts all overpaid for shipping on railroads in which he'd invested, creating Cameron's “cut.”

By December 1862, Lincoln had seen enough. He unceremoniously told Cameron that he had decided to honor Cameron's previously expressed “desire for a change of position,” and was nominating him to serve as the new ambassador to Russia. Cameron had expressed no such desire. Regardless, he was out within a month.

Cameron was eventually censured by the House of Representatives for his part in the scandal. It could have been worse. After the House Committee on Contracts made public the number of unfit horses and faulty weapons that were sold to the War Department on Cameron's watch, the House itself passed a bill making it tantamount to treason to pull these sorts of swindles.

Cameron didn't stay in Russia for long. He was back in the United States within a year, and by 1866 was once again in the Senate, serving a third term. He held on to his office until he had received assurances that his son Donald would succeed him. J. Donald Cameron served in the Senate for twenty years.

Simon Cameron himself lived to be ninety years old. He died of natural causes, rich and by any measure, successful. And he never spent a day in jail for his part in profiteering from the republic's darkest hour.

Bastard.

Ulysses S. Grant: master strategist who turned the tide of the American Civil War by re-writing the book on military strategy and tactics; two-term Republican president of the United States (more on
that
later!); bestselling author whose Civil War memoir stands up to comparisons to the work of such heavy-hitters in the field as Julius Caesar and Tacitus.

Drunk.

That's right: the man who would one day partner with President Abraham Lincoln to help preserve the Union was once drummed out of the same army he would later command as General-in-Chief for drunkenness. Not officially, of course. Officially he resigned his commission.

As a young man, Grant had attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point at the behest of his successful businessman father, who worried that Grant had no ambition and felt that the security of a military career might be good for his “unfocused” son.

Stationed in Missouri, Grant quickly met the love of his life, Julia Dent. He courted her ardently for years. The entire time he was away fighting in the Mexican War in the mid-1840s the young lovers exchanged frequent letters.

During this time, Grant developed a reputation for having an affinity for the bottle. His appreciation for alcohol was unremarkable for the time: most soldiers in the mid-nineteenth century drank as often as they could get their hands on a supply of liquor. It's a truism that is nearly a cliché. Aside from notations about the generally unkempt manner of his uniform (one of his biographers has likened Grant's “military bearing” to that of a sack of potatoes, and in the spit-and-polish regular army, that could be the kiss of death for an officer's career), Grant's record was spotless during the Mexican War.

After the war Grant went back to Missouri and at long last married his beloved Julia. By 1854 he had been promoted to captain (one of about fifty left in the army after the Mexican War). His new rank took him to Ft. Humboldt in California, and forced Grant to leave a very pregnant Julia behind in Missouri. His officer's salary was so low that they could not afford for her to join her husband on the West Coast. It was here that Grant — pining for his wife, worried about her health, and serving as the fort's paymaster — ran into trouble as a result of his drinking.

Grant's commanding officer in California was a by-the-book career solider named Robert C. Buchanan. One evening Buchanan found Grant drunk on duty and offered him the chance to resign in lieu of being kicked out for his offense. Grant quit and remained in good standing, officially. In many ways it was probably a relief to him, as he never cared for garrison life anyway. He returned home to Julia and their children, and he set about being a failure at every single professional venture to which he turned his hand.

But history was not finished with Grant. Opportunity knocked with the out-break of the Civil War in 1861. Within a month of volunteering Grant was a general.