American Scoundrel (42 page)

But Lee could not be persuaded. Instead, the older general had this morning wanted Longstreet to make a march, concealed by the woods,
and attack the Union left flank—that is, Sickles’s corps. Longstreet, who possessed a vengeful and mean-hearted streak that some believed would be demonstrated that day to the disadvantage of his own side, was affronted. Over coming years, Dan and James Longstreet would become companions, anchored together in a conspiracy to diminish the reputations of their commanding officers—Sickles with somewhat more justice in Meade’s case than Longstreet in Lee’s.

Longstreet executed his marching orders sulkily on the morning of July 2, and with as much delay as he could manage. Had he struck Dan’s men early, when everything was uncertain, when Meade and Dan were arguing, and staff officers without the power to make the final decision were offering advice to Dan, he could have swept Dan’s Black Diamonds away, put cannon on the Roundtops, and driven the entire Union Army off its ridge in bleeding confusion—which was the very thing Lee had envisaged him doing. But Longstreet remained slow. “Thus passed the forenoon of that eventful day,” one of his generals would write. As noon passed, one of Lee’s staff heard Lee ask, in an uneasy tone, “What
can
detain Longstreet? He ought to be in position now.”

Here, said some then and later, was a general who, from pure peevishness, was willing by a chosen delay to play with the lives of his soldiers and bring down death upon them on an immense scale. One of Longstreet’s strongest divisions, that of John B. Hood, could now see Dan’s line strung out along the Emmitsburg Road and down along the lane past the peach orchard and the wheatfield. It did not stretch to the Big or Little Roundtop, and Hood urged Longstreet to “allow me to turn Roundtops and attack the enemy in flank and rear.” Longstreet replied that General Lee’s orders were to attack the line along the Emmitsburg Road and that Hood’s proposed flanking of Dan could not be permitted. As one modern writer put it, Hood could taste the victory, but Longstreet felt that if he permitted Hood to take it, General Lee would not receive the lesson Longstreet believed he needed to learn. Because Lee had refused the idea of a flanking movement, which would put his army between General Meade’s army and Washington,
Longstreet was pretending that this prevented him from outflanking the Union here as well.

While Longstreet tarried, Dan had until after two o’clock to get his men into line. Dan’s newly assigned West Point divisional general, Humphreys, had his division along the road, north to south, facing the woods, and here a young woman from the Rogers farmhouse brought out batches of biscuits to feed the men. But by three o’clock, even Dan and his staff, waiting on their horses near the Trostle farmhouse, with the wheatfield to their left, were wondering why it was taking so long for Longstreet’s soldiers to begin the day’s action.

At that hour, General Meade chose to send for his corps commanders. Dan believed the commanding general had no idea of the imminence of events down along the Emmitsburg Road and along the lane. In fact, Meade had just sent a telegram to Secretary of War Stanton stating that the army was fatigued, and that if he, Meade, found it hazardous to attack, or was satisfied that the enemy was endeavoring to move to his rear and get between him and Washington, “I shall fall back on my supplies at Westminster.” Dan would later scathingly write that this telegram showed “that at the supreme moment—3 P.M. July 2— when the enemy was advancing to attack, we had no plan of action, no order of battle. For Meade the battle of July 2 is a surprise, like the battle of July 1.”

Unable to reply in writing to the summons from Meade, Dan pointed out to the officer who brought the message that surely he could hear an exchange of fire along the road, the introductory compliments of battle. But Meade insisted, and a second order came for Dan to attend, so he galloped up to headquarters. General Meade, waiting at the door of his farmhouse headquarters, cried, “You need not dismount, General. I hear the sound of cannon on your front. Return to your command. I will join you there at once.” Dan was exhilarated to hear those guns—it meant the Union would have to fight here.

By the time he got back to his men, there was quickening fire along the line, and the Confederate cannon beyond the road were beginning to
tear terrible holes in Dan’s blue lines. General Meade himself arrived on Dan’s heels. Dan was waiting not far from the wheatfield, near the creek called Plum Run, when Meade rode up and said succinctly, “General, I am afraid you are too far out.”

“Yes,” Dan replied. “But I can hold him until reinforcements arrive. I will contract my line, or modify it, if you prefer. My men are easily maneuvered under fire.”

General Meade said it was too late, but that he would support him on the left, where Birney’s men held the line, and on his right and center, held by Humphreys, with men from neighboring corps. Then Meade galloped away, and Dan heard nothing more of him that day. Meade had left dangling the question of whether Dan had done a good or bad thing. Had Dan also played, in a different and less deliberate sense than Longstreet did, with his men’s lives by advancing so far? Or would they have been destroyed had they stayed where Meade wanted them to be? One observer would say that on this would be spilled “a Caspian Sea of ink.”

On the banks of the Hudson at Bloomingdale, the same endless, humid afternoon that prevailed at Gettysburg pended over the city and outer parts of Manhattan. It was a promising day for Teresa and Laura to be on Bloomingdale business—visits to animals and to ill neighbors, and preparations for the visits by her parents and others on July Fourth. The child had inherited the salutary interest in domestic animals that was so strong in her mother—a happy circumstance, since Teresa had not recently had the same energy she once did.
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The newspapers Teresa had seen that morning were full of late June news, some days out of date, of threatening Confederate movements in Pennsylvania. She had found them hard to read. She was these days possessed of an increasing melancholy and languor. The recently departed Dan was still on her mind and on Laura’s. Even though, of all the family, only Susan Sickles seemed to have extreme fears of Dan’s death, the possibility of harm coming both to the polity and society of the North and to Dan hung over the day, adding weight to the humid air.

Teresa’s feelings—or, more exactly, symptoms—that day were indications that she, like her husband, lay under danger of a great flanking—in her case from one of the pervasive diseases of the era. Tuberculosis, also called consumption or phthisis (a Greek term meaning “wasting away”), was famous, at least in the theater and literature, for attacking the young, the fair, the exuberant, the talented. In fact, it was a predominant disease among Irish immigrants and blacks, arising from the poverty in which they lived, the foulness of the surroundings, the scarcity of warmth and food. Teresa was far from the usual venues of this disease, from the Fourth Ward, where toilets spilled into streets and courtyards, where bacteria from human excrement and urine and from the animal offal of slaughterhouses, all contributing to high mortality. Tuberculosis was, above all, a disease of the lower East Side, the middle East Side known as the Gas House district, and the middle West Side, Hell’s Kitchen. Archbishop Hughes, the Catholic archbishop of New York, said, with perhaps too much resignation, that tuberculosis was “the Irish death.” Nearly twice as many immigrants as native-born contributed to the city’s yearly death toll from the disease of three thousand souls. The working class, having contracted the disease, had no clear mountains, no sun-drenched sanatoria to resort to for a cure. In fact, the use of sanatoria had yet not come into vogue as a means of treating the disease. It was a mercy that laudanum and opiates were freely available across the counter of drugstores to patients who had no other succor. A brown tincture of macerated opium in diluted spirits was imbibed by people of all classes who suffered tubercular symptoms. It was the only effective medicine available, and though it did something for pain and for suppressing the cough, one of its chief influences was to make the patient less fearful and more resigned.

In sylvan Bloomingdale, Teresa would in one sense have been considered by the doctors of the day to be relatively secure from the infection, for the leading experts furiously denied until 1882, when the bacterium was isolated, that tuberculosis was a contagious disease. One important contributor to the disease was, the experts of Teresa’s time
proclaimed, a hereditary disposition, and though Teresa’s parents and grandparents were or had been healthy and long-lived and had never been troubled by tuberculosis, her uncle Lorenzo Da Ponte had died of a form of it. Despite talk of heredity, the unrealized fact was that organisms of the disease were everywhere in the city. If a tubercular person sneezed or coughed, minute droplets containing hundreds of tubercule bacilli would float in the air for hours and even attach themselves to food. For the affluent, it was often the servant who brought the disease out of the squalor of Lower Manhattan into the uptown residences. The early stages of the disease were difficult to detect. One conclusive sign was the fearful cough and the spitting up of blood from ulcerations in the lungs. This expectoration of blood was not uncommonly seen on the streets, and in eating houses and theaters. Once the bacillus found a bridgehead within the body, it entered an alliance with any discontent or ambiguity of soul and, more obviously, with unsuitable domestic arrangements. The chief unsuitable elements in the house at Bloomingdale were its demanding size and draftiness.

Again, however, the baffled experts put less stress on cold drafts in the case of a tubercular gentlewoman, which Teresa was on her way to becoming, than they did on flaws of character in the sufferer. Religiosity and sexual hysteria—“an incontinent search for pleasure”—were other causes they uncomprehendingly invoked. For, apart from religious excess and celibacy, said a leading British specialist, other primary causes were an early addiction to horse riding continuing into young womanhood, inducing habitual masturbation and “paving the way for phthisis.” Hence, as Teresa’s incipient symptoms developed, the doctors would be predisposed to shake their heads sadly. A horse-riding, sexually notorious soul whose husband had abandoned her to whatever solitary solace she could achieve.

It had been only recently, in 1854, that Hermann Brehmer, a German sufferer from the disease, had cured himself by spending time in high, dry air in the Himalayas, and had been moved to build the first sanatorium and to recommend altitude, clean air, and good food. But
Teresa, in whom the symptoms were not yet fully visible, was in any case already surrounded by relatively wholesome air and ate wholesome food.
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In Washington that same day, as Teresa by the Hudson felt the onset of the unusual languor that was an early symptom of her disease, and as Dan waited with a warrior exaltation for bloody chaos to begin by the Emmitsburg Road, Mary Todd Lincoln was thrown from her carriage in Washington. It was not known whether the bolts of her carriage seat had been intentionally loosened by a saboteur with Mr. Lincoln in mind or whether it was an accident, but it would lead to serious illness. Lincoln himself was saved from injury because he spent that day in the telegraph office of the War Department, waiting for news from Gettysburg. There, on the field itself, at midafternoon, the pattern of the afternoon’s havoc was established. General Hood’s rebels struck Sickles’s men, or, specifically, David Birney’s men, with a sudden ferocity. De Trobriand, commanding one of Sickles’s brigades, thought the enemy came rushing up like demons from hell, but many of Birney’s men were Pennsylvanians, fighting resolutely for home ground.
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Still, the fury of fire from the Confederate lines, the determination of their advance toward the wheatfield (later to be known as
the
Wheatfield), and their pressure on Sickles’s men at the hinge of their line among the trees of the peach orchard (hereafter, Peach Orchard) were such that Dan had continually to transfer men from Humphreys’s end of the line to reinforce Birney. Dan’s friend Charles Graham, formerly of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was a brigade commander under Birney in the Wheatfield, a triangular parcel of land about four hundred yards on each of its three sides. He rolled back a number of attacks. But a third of all Birney’s men had within an hour been struck and variously shattered by shells or minié balls. Graham, the Tammany engineer, already wounded once, was pitched to the ground in the Peach Orchard when his horse was shot. Stunned and blood-soaked, he could barely see or move as men from Mississippi swarmed over his position and captured him.

Three brigadier generals ordered to help Dan’s men were shot dead
in short order that afternoon. As some of the newcomers wavered, de Trobriand in the Wheatfield was depicted almost in caricature as yelling, “Third Michigan, change front to right! . . . Change quick, or you will be gobbled up. Don’t you see you are flanked? Ze whole Rebel army is in your rear!” Ultimately the position would be tenuously held, and de Trobriand’s brigade, like other men of Sickles’s corps, were ordered to march to the rear for resupplying. They moved across fields in which their reinforcements from the Fifth Corps lay down on the stubbly and stony ground in lines to enable the surviving Black Diamonds to pass among them.

Many of Dan’s units managed an orderly withdrawal back across the creek named Plum Run Creek. Others, he saw, were stampeded. But it cannot be denied that by nightfall the federal line would lie more or less where Meade had that morning envisaged it should lie, with the difference that the Roundtops were firmly held by the Union.
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Before Dan’s troops withdrew (or were driven back, according to which view was accepted), Dan was still astride his horse in the Trostle farmyard, an unlit cigar in his mouth, maintaining without apparent effort a deliberate but tautly aware frame of mind. He later depicted what happened next in the plainest language, leached of all trauma. “I am wounded. I turn over my command to Birney and am carried to the rear, knowing that victory is ours.” Indeed it was, for the Confederates had not managed to turn the Union flank, and it was the Third Corps and its reinforcements that had denied Longstreet’s men the victory. What had happened to Dan, however, was that a twelve-pound cannonball that had failed to explode came visibly lolloping, far too fast to be avoided by Dan and his mounted staff, across the farmyard from the direction of the Confederate artillery on Seminary Ridge and shattered and tore to pulp Dan’s right leg in its blue fabric. Curiously, by one of those anomalies veterans were used to, it left his horse unmarked. Dan was conscious of the damage, yet was not overwhelmed with pain and did not lose consciousness. Already in a heightened, feverish state from the battle he was fighting, perhaps he found it all the easier to marshal the chemicals appropriate to trauma. A captain of the 70th New York,
standing nearby, nonetheless feared that the men still fighting on the Third Corps line might be affected if too many of them heard the rumor that their general had been—as it seemed—mortally wounded. The captain formed a detail of a sergeant and six soldiers, who covered Dan with a blanket and carried him to the shade of the Trostle farmhouse. This was, above all, in the hour of his wound, a moment of which the right sort of general could make a myth of his easy gallantry, and Dan managed it, his cigar still stuck between his lips by grimace or by stubbornness. When he arrived by the wall of the house, he appeared merely moderately upset and told one of the men to buckle a saddle strap tightly over the upper thigh as a tourniquet. Major Harry Tremain then turned up with a message and was filled with horror to see what had befallen Sickles. Dan ordered Tremain, “Tell General Birney he must take command.”
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