American Scoundrel (10 page)

It is interesting to note how much, apart from Dan’s absences, Teresa found pleasure in the semirustic life. After all, she had entertained notables at the heart of the British Empire, and here she was among the oak trees on the Hudson. But she was an adaptable young woman, and would soon adapt yet again to a more public existence. She did not convey in her letters, and certainly did not brag about, how hectic a year it had proved to be. When James Buchanan returned from England, in April 1856, his friend and aide Dan had a resonating welcome ready for him in New York, where he intended to present his old friend with the combined resources of Tammany. Buchanan’s ship having docked, he was met by a splendid carriage and driven up Fifth Avenue to the Everett House on Union Square. There, waiting for him, was one Senator John Slidell of Louisiana, an enormously powerful Democratic kingmaker from Louisiana and a great advocate of acquiring Cuba. Senator Slidell had raised a considerable amount of money for Buchanan’s campaign from his contacts in Wall Street, to whom Slidell
held out the prospect of the ruin of American commerce if the Republican candidate, John Charles Frémont, was elected.
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But Dan himself was persuaded by Tammany to run for the United States Congress in those elections of 1856. If he won, together with Old Buck, they would be a team reunited in Washington. Old Buck went into the Democratic convention in Cincinnati with a powerful number of Democrats in his camp. Given the temper of the times, he had an important advantage over Stephen Douglas, the hugely talented, diminutive powerhouse from Illinois, and over President Pierce and Secretary of State Marcy. He carried no blame for the bloody territory of Kansas a thousand miles to the west, a region for control of which pro- and anti-slavery forces were competing. The national imagination was unsettled and fevered by Kansas. The previous year a posse of eight hundred proslavery men had poured into Lawrence, Kansas, the antislavery Free-Soilers’ chief town, demolishing newspaper offices, burning public buildings, including the home of its antislavery governor, shooting males, and looting shops. In response, in the spring of 1856, the abolitionist zealot John Brown had kidnapped five proslavery settlers from their homesteads near Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas, and, in God’s name, hacked them to death with broadswords. The nation believed that the conflict in Kansas was a form of civil war, begun at the peril of American society, its culture, its commerce, and its remarkable Constitution. People yearned for an unspectacular but wise figure who bore no responsibility for bleeding Kansas, someone who seemed safer than sparkling Douglas and less fallible than the charming incumbent, Franklin Pierce.

In the North, Buchanan was up against Frémont, but in the South, he was opposed by the Know-Nothing anti-immigrant, and anti-Catholic candidate Millard Fillmore, a former President. Here too he was helped by events, for Fillmore’s warnings about the threat to American culture from the Irish did not measure up in most Americans’ minds to the central issue: the question of preservation or abolition of slavery, and the capacity of either to break the nation asunder. Though young
Republicans marched in vast torchlit processions, chanting, “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, Frémont,” many former Whig voters, the party from which the Republicans had grown, chose Buchanan for the sake of the peace his gravity of manner seemed to offer. Frémont’s own father-in-law decided that Buchanan was the safer bet.

On the day, Buchanan carried Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, Illinois, and California, and nearly the entire South. He was a minority President, achieving only 45 percent of the vote. It was undeniable, though, that the majority of Americans felt relief at patriarchal Buchanan’s success, a return to a platform on which the national debate might proceed to a peaceful rather than a rancorous, radical conclusion.
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Dan Sickles was not only the political prodigy who brought the New York vote to the Democratic presidential candidate James Buchanan. The same day, he himself was elected as representative for the Third Congressional District of New York, as easily as, the previous year, he had been elected to the state senate. The Third District covered much of the older section of Manhattan south of Houston Street and was bounded on the east by Broadway. It embraced the city’s financial center and a long stretch of wharves with a population of just under 100,000, almost half of whom were foreign-born, either German or Irish, though predominantly Irish; it was an area in which hard-line Tammany Democrats could not lose. Dan Sickles was one of fifty-three Northern Democrats elected to the House, where he joined seventy-five Southern Democrats and ninety-two Republicans.
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And so it was now Representative Sickles who returned to Teresa in Bloomingdale. At the age of barely twenty, she had achieved the considerable eminence of being a federal legislator’s wife. By contrast, the energetically political Mary Todd Lincoln had to wait until she was twice that age to see her husband serve one unsuccessful term as an unimpressive congressman from Illinois. But the price of being Mrs. Congressman Sickles would be severe. To her friend Florence, Teresa confessed herself so distressed by the growing periods of separation from Dan that
she begged Florence not to show anyone her letters about being alone. She did not want to give others license for gossip or gratification.

And, in any case, there was the promise of a better and more pleasurable time. Dan proposed taking Teresa and Laura with him to Washington, where they would live under one roof during the sessions of Congress.
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E
ARLY THAT WINTER, ELATED BY COMING
to Washington as a legislator and lieutenant, Dan took up residence in a suite at the National, where a number of other congressmen, either well heeled or well funded, stayed. Dan’s hotel, together with Willard’s and Brown’s, and sundry respectable boardinghouses, provided accommodation for representatives and senators. The less-than-wealthy Abraham Lincoln and his wife had, during Lincoln’s stint in Congress, stayed at Mrs. Spriggs’s boardinghouse on the present site of one of the Library of Congress buildings and had occupied rooms so small that the indulged youngster Robert Lincoln disturbed other guests with his rowdiness. Often, representatives and senators of the same party or faction lodged together in what were called Messes. The F Street Mess of Southern Democrats was a feared coalition who sat at
one table and talked politics all through dinner. Willard’s and the National were used temporarily by congressmen trying to find more permanent domiciles in the capital. As the inauguration of James Buchanan neared, many of the guests at the National were stricken with gastroenteritis, a disease typical in the experience of legislators, Washington having an unsavory reputation.
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Washington in the mid to late 1850s still had some of the character Charles Dickens had seen in the 1840s. The parkland of Washington was “a melancholy piece of waste ground with flowsy grass, which looks like a small piece of country which is taken to drinking, and has quite lost itself,” Dickens wrote. It was a place of “spacious avenues that begin in nothing and lead nowhere: streets, miles long, that only want houses, roads and inhabitants; and ornaments of great thoroughfares which only need thoroughfares to ornament.” Washington was, to Dickens’s and other folks’ jaundiced eyes, despicable for its lack of elegance, the epicenter of that abhorrent American habit of spitting. It was, as the great English novelist said, “the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva.” Congressmen spat on the steps of the Capitol and on its internal surfaces. The carpets of Willard’s did not inhibit the tobacco-chewing spitters; they were splotched with stains. Dan himself had the more urbane, metropolitan manner of chewing on a cheroot, but one met all kinds, from Californians to Appalachian farmers, in the Congress of the United States, and the spittoons were placed in abundance even in Dan’s day.
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Of course, Dickens brought to his descriptions of Washington the hubris of a native of the great city of London, but many of Dan’s contemporaries agreed with him. One Yankee legislator’s wife described the capital as a third-rate Southern city of some 61,000 souls. “Everything worth looking at seemed unfinished. Everything finished looked as if it should have been destroyed generations ago.” But although the capital was so rustic that the eminent Senator Henry Clay was attacked by a large goat in Pennsylvania Avenue, to young congressional wives it was, in its spaciousness and its social opportunities, what the young Southern bride and friend of Teresa’s Mrs. Roger Pryor found it to be: “a garden of delights.”
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With Laura and an Irish maid, Teresa made the rail trip to Washington for the first time late that winter. She was in a heightened state of anticipation. She would be with Dan at the heart of a national festival; she had an invitation to the inauguration of her friend James Buchanan and to the accompanying parties and balls. She, like other travelers, left New York at eight o’clock in the morning and got to Washington’s sooty, inadequate station about seven in the evening, after changing trains in both Philadelphia and Baltimore because of the lack of bridges and a standard railroad gauge. The Southerners had it even harder; some came north by steamer from Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, New Orleans, and Galveston. Congressmen of the Virginia aristocracy caught the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad to Acquia Landing, from where they had to take the steamer, with all their luggage and their black slave servants, to the capital.
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For newcomers like Teresa and Dan, the Southern Democratic gentry constituted the old hands of the Washington scene. Though there were isolated wealthy Northerners among the legislators, the Southerners on average had the higher wealth. They certainly also possessed the higher level of style and self-esteem. To Dan, it was the Southerners who, despite the unfinished dome on the Capitol, the unfinished steps of the Treasury, the still-lacking pillars of the White House, infused Washington with social self-importance. To do well in Democratic Washington, Teresa would need to impress the Southern Democratic brethren.

As Buchanan’s inauguration approached, Dan and his wife and child moved out of the National Hotel, for the guests fled when many, including the President-elect, fell ill with the gastroenteric infection. There was a rumor that the illness derived from poisoned rats that had fallen into the hotel well. The hotel blamed the outbreak on the city sewers, a regular and well-deserving target of blame. The Sickles family found accommodation and hospitality in the home of Jonah Hoover, the federal marshal for the District of Columbia. It was there that Dan and Teresa dressed for the inauguration.

On March 4, 1857, the day appointed, Dan shared an open carriage
in the presidential procession of Washington notables with Representative John B. Haskin from upstate New York. The parade was headed by the Marine Band, which regularly played at the White House receptions, and by eight companies of regulars and militia. The Washington militia’s Montgomery Guard was led by a man who would become a principal figure in the history of Dan and Teresa. It was the popular district attorney of the District of Columbia, Philip Barton Key, wearing a uniform nearly as splendid as the one Dan had worn in London— blue and gold. Barton Key’s favorite mount of the moment was an iron-gray horse named Lucifer, which he rode ahead of his colorful detachment.

A little way along Philadelphia Avenue, the carriage of President Pierce and President-elect Buchanan, having come from the White House by a back way, slotted into the procession behind the militia and a float carrying a dazzling, full-bodied young woman swathed in satin and representing the Goddess of Liberty. Buchanan was pale and thin from the infection he had caught at the National. He had had to dose himself with tonics and anti-diarrhea medicine to be able to get into the presidential barouche and be cheered by the citizenry.

The Capitol, toward which the procession made its way, was in the process of being rebuilt, and the House of Representatives was being enlarged. Here, President Pierce, in the last day of his administration, entered with the new chief executive between the muskets of the honor guard, and the two men took their places by the Speaker’s chair before the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney. Congressmen from both houses entered and crowded into the desks of the chamber. In the gallery, Teresa had a reserved seat beside a friend from London days, Mr. Buchanan’s niece Harriet Lane. Harriet knew that her uncle intended to invite her to be the First Lady—to welcome and entertain guests at the White House, to stand at his side, smiling, and to be the social moderator and focus of the capital. Much of the conversation between the two young women may well have centered on that exciting prospect.

Teresa, looking more a schoolchild than a politician’s wife, clearly
attracted the curiosity of other congressional wives in the gallery, who probably had read about Dan Sickles and his waywardness, and to whom the fragrant Teresa offered such a contrast. Innumerable people remarked that she looked girlish and unsullied, as she sat beside Harriet Lane, in a dress of ruffled crinoline and with bare shoulders, which, once outside, she would cover with a shawl. On her head was a hat decorated with jonquils as a symbol of coming spring and of the promise of the era. She seemed to incarnate health, beauty, and virtue, and to reflect the substance of Buchanan’s reassuringly poetic inaugural speech. “The night is departing, and the roseate and propitious dawn now breaking upon us promises a long day of peace and prosperity for our country. To secure this, all we of the North have to do is to permit our southern neighbors to manage their own domestic affairs, as they permit us to manage ours.” At the rostrum, Buchanan was sworn in by Justice Taney, and the Southerners in the gallery and on the floor of the chamber were delighted—a Southern Chief Justice swearing in a southward-leaning chief executive.
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