American Scoundrel (47 page)

On the steamer home, Dan was accompanied by his crates full of riverine and Andean animals for the Central Park menagerie—tree sloths, anteaters, monkeys, tapirs, agoutis, and a jaguar. As he approached New York, Dan grew more uneasy about his potential reception by the new President, Andrew Johnson, who had come to the White House after barely six weeks in the post of Vice President and as a result
of his chief’s assassination. Dan had got to know Johnson in Tennessee the previous year, knew that he was proud of his humble origins as a former tailor, self-educated—a history for which others mocked him. Being one of those Democrats severely alienated by the ferocity of the rebellion, Johnson had at one stage said that the South should be managed after the war with fire and rope. Those Radical Republicans who wanted to see the South humiliated in every sense were hopeful that he would introduce more rigorous policies toward the conquered areas than they had seen prefigured in the case of Lincoln.
¹⁷

That summer, following the established pattern of earlier ones, Dan visited Teresa and Laura. He was conscious that by now Teresa’s problems had worsened, and his friends later indicated that he was resolved to arrange for her the best care. She was possessed of the listlessness and flushed face typical of her disease, and she went about the house, still trying to attend to domestic matters, with a glazed eye and a rasping breath that the humidity exacerbated. She was also possessed by what the tubercular Brontë sisters’ physician called a “tinge of religious melancholy.” She had become a more devout Catholic, and her bedroom was strewn with rosaries, missals, scapulars, holy cards, and medals, all alien to Dan’s tradition, and her bed was sprinkled by Mrs. Bagioli with holy water. Friendly doctors still jovially misinformed Dan and Laura about the prospects of Teresa’s recovery. After all, the medical journals, including the
Lancet
, carried news of a number of new treatments under consideration in England, including mixtures of quinine and beef tea, and the pumping of various mixtures into patients’ mouths, the most common ingredients for such forcible pumping including hydrogen, coal gas, iodine, creosote, and carbolic acid. Teresa was, after all, naturally robust, and if the right treatment could be hit upon, the disease would withdraw quite quickly.
¹⁸

Bloomingdale seemed secure from a forced sale, and would be rendered more secure if Dan was given yet another post. And at the end of the summer, Secretary of War Stanton nominated him for one—the military governorship of South Carolina. This state, which had been the mother of the rebellion, would be a turbulent province to administer, but
Dan was exhilarated by the prospect. He had fought off the tag of immobility and uselessness that the loss of his leg had encouraged people to plant on his forehead. No doubt his Andean journey had helped prove that he was not ready to be made inactive. By early September, he was on his way to Charleston, to the harbor where the entire calamity had been introduced by the firing on Sumter. There were valid reasons for not taking Teresa this time, even had he decided to. The task in Charleston and in Colombia, turned to ashes by Sherman’s order, would give Dan even less time for a sick wife than he had previously been able to provide. As well, though Charleston was warmer than New York, it had been tried by other consumption sufferers, who found that its moist winters and heavy-aired summers were not notably helpful. And then the region had been reduced by war to a primitive economy in which most goods, including medicines, were scarce.

Arriving by steamer with his staff, Dan found Charleston a demoralized city, with a bitter sense of its own debasement. Parts of the town were in rubble from Union bombardments by land and sea, but despite the damage that had been done to it, General Sickles could tell it had not yet been cured of its hubris. Nonetheless, the harbor was empty—there was nothing to export, and the traditional aristocracy, who possessed town houses or lived in mansions around the verge of the city, had been reduced to wearing the homespun clothing previously worn by poor farmers and slaves. The only wealthy people on the landscape were the war profiteers and those Yankee investors looking for cheap property, markets that could only improve. Derisively, they were called carpetbaggers. Resenting them, willing to beat them to death, the remnants of the Southern army loitered in the streets in tattered gray or butternut. As well, the former slaves who milled around town often seemed disoriented and displaced by freedom—a point the advocates of slavery did not fail regularly to make to visiting Northerners.

Dan knew the powers he took to South Carolina were prodigious, with the only brake upon them the cabinet in Washington and hostile commentary in South Carolina itself and in the national press. The South Carolinians understood his position, and many resented him accordingly.
He took up residence in a handsome surviving house on Charlotte Street and established his headquarters at the Citadel, the grand Southern military academy, one of the glories of antebellum Charleston, that had largely remained intact, being far from the range of the U.S. naval blockade. Dan was early visited by planters who came with stories of their former power and complaints about the behavior of the Negroes. One planter Dan would remember presented himself with the boast he had spent forty years in the South Carolina legislature, had entertained President Van Buren in his mansion, and had owned hundreds of slaves. He produced, as a sign of his former wealth and intellectual liveliness, a repeater watch, a watch that struck the hour. The man, whom Dan described as “haughty,” even though Dan had enjoyed a considerable and friendly acquaintance with such people before the war, complained that his slaves hung on to their former quarters but refused to work. They were insolent; they carried shotguns; occasionally they burned their own huts. When Sherman’s army was approaching, this much-reduced Southern dignitary told Dan, he had set fire to his ancestral mansion so that it would not be defiled. He said, “I could maintain discipline among my Negroes without coming to you, but you have taken away my authority as a master, and you have substituted nothing in its place.”

“Then,” Dan depicted himself as saying, “I would advise you to give your Negroes a good example to imitate. For instance, if you don’t want them to burn their huts, don’t burn your own house. . .. If you don’t want them to carry double-barreled shotguns, don’t carry a doublebarreled shotgun yourself when you drive out.” The planter remarked, “If other Yankee generals didn’t know more than you do, I don’t understand how the South got licked.” The story—and perhaps it is a parable—is indicative of the style Dan tried to bring to his administration of South, and later of North, Carolina.
¹⁹

Dan was also visited in his office, and wherever he traveled, by the minority of anti-secession, pro-Union men who had remained loyal to the United States and had been severely persecuted throughout the war. Such men existed in every Southern state, though there were more in
North Carolina and Tennessee than in South Carolina. In some cases it was the widows, harrowed by years of suffering, who came to him. Some of these loyal Union folk took to demonstrating that there was a new order in place by breaking the old shibboleths of race. As one Southern writer complained, they “ate and drank, walked and rode, went to public places and ostensibly affiliated with Negroes.” This incited a range of savage retaliations by former Rebels, and a corresponding law-and-order challenge for Dan and his men.

A journalist who visited the Carolinas recorded a sense that Dan, too, must have recognized—that the rural Southerners lived in a far more primitive condition than their counterparts in Maine or Vermont. “Thus, Charleston has much intelligence, and considerable genuine culture; but go twenty miles away, and you are in the land of the barbarians. . .. In South Carolina there is very little pretense of loyalty. I believe I found less than fifty men who admitted any love for the Union.” A state convention of pro-Union or, at the very least, realistic Southerners had already elected a civil governor with whom Dan would need to collaborate. Fortunately, he was a competent man of the realistic kind, a former Speaker of the House and a neighbor of Dan’s from Lafayette Square, James L. Orr, who, before the cataclysm and prior to Dan and Teresa’s occupation, had rented the Stockton Mansion. Orr had been a Confederate, had served the entire war with increasing doubt in the Southern Senate in Richmond, and had now—treasonably, according to the fire-eaters; sensibly, according to the less rabid—taken the oath to the United States again and brought his considerable gifts to rebuilding his state. By and large he got on well sharing power with Dan, and he remembered the day of Dan’s acquittal, when he had been one of his congratulators.

To keep order from the Citadel in this prime rebel province, as of January 1, 1866, Dan had a force of 352 officers and 7,056 men. They were scattered throughout this triangle of a state, in one restive little town after another, as far as the foothills of the Appalachians. His mandate was that this force should be deployed to protect the freed black
men and women, and loyal whites, from the anger of disaffected rural populations and veterans. He wanted to show that in this regard a new era had dawned, and a general order he issued, appropriately, on January 1, 1866, declared the state’s Black Code null and void, and decreed that “all laws shall be applicable to all inhabitants.” Negroes were to have the same judicial recourse as whites, and all occupations were to be opened to them. They were also to possess a novel freedom for ex-slaves: freedom of movement, exemption from any special taxes, and immunity from arrest on the basis of the poor and vagrancy laws.
²⁰

His general order created, as he expected, howls of outrage in the South Carolina hinterland, let alone in Charleston and Columbia. Dan had earlier warned Stanton and President Lincoln that there was an intractability of feeling in the South. And as his first summer in Charleston began, he told Stanton again that the Southern people yielded to the United States only a reluctant and sullen allegiance. “In my Department, I have not seen the American flag raised by a Carolinian. If it floated over a dwelling, or a hotel, or a shop, the population would avoid the place as they would shun a pesthouse filled with lepers.”

Since he and his soldiers could not prevent every outrage, Dan began to intervene, personally or through officers, in district court hearings to protect former slaves and those who were sympathetic to them. When a district court headed by Judge A. P. Aldridge sentenced a white man to flogging for his association with blacks, Dan sent a company of troops to intervene, clear the court, and prevent the punishment. This caused Judge Aldridge to complain to Washington about assaults on the independence of the judiciary. Then two Northern visitors, suspected carpetbaggers, were beaten up in a Columbia shanty barroom, and a magistrate released on bail the young men who had done it. Dan removed the Columbia magistrate from office and sent the culprits before a military court, which sentenced them to six months in Fort Macon. He knew his actions would once more unleash a torrent of complaints from Southerners to the Attorney General in Washington. He and other military governors were in an impossible situation. The
Realpolitik
of
America then was that Radical Republicans wanted the South crushed, while Southerners, who had inherited intact their judicial system, did not like to see it interfered with at all.

Dan had traveled so far since his pro-Southern days as to see the South Carolinians who attacked the new social order as incarnations of an intolerance that, “illustrated in countless affrays, was long permitted in Southern communities, to hunt down with cruel violence persons venturing to maintain opinions not in harmony with local sentiment.” To him the incarnations of this “cruel violence” were a pre-KKK group named the Regulators, who rode over the countryside to combat the “Negro menace.” During 1866 and into the new year, as Dan’s military force was reduced in strength, so did the Regulators roam more widely and demonstrate throughout the farmlands of South Carolina.

The daily stream of petitioners who came to Dan’s office at the Citadel did not diminish, and he treated them courteously and became socially friendly with some. By June 1866, his power had been increased; he was placed in command of the newly created Second Military Department, which included both North and South Carolina. He could hardly get to New York at all, for although North Carolina was easier to administer than its sister, the spring and summer resonated with the deeds of the hooded Regulators. In North Carolina the governor he collaborated with was a principled Quaker named Jonathan Worth, who had throughout opposed the rebellion and whose desire was to see North Carolina return to such a degree of loyalty and prosperity as once again to be a sovereign state in the nation. North Carolinians were more willing to declare themselves pro-Union, and to tell visitors that they “had always prophesied the downfall of the so-called Confederacy and had always desired the success of the Union arms.”

The news from New York was that Teresa continued poorly. To outsiders, though, sometimes the disease seemed to bring its own consolation. One French author declared that in contrast to “diseases of crude and baser kind which clog and soil the mind, phthisis is an illness of the lofty and noble parts: it calls forth a state of elevation, tenderness and love.” Edgar Allan Poe had written of “the terrible beauty of consumption,”
from which his wife, Virginia, suffered. It made her, he recorded, “delicately, morbidly angelic.” The forms of sensuality were being eroded from Teresa. She had become more angular; that sumptuous, full-fleshed look so admired by Victorian men was gone, but she smiled like an angel, not least in Laura’s direction. As Teresa rested from the efforts of mounting the stairs and attempts at managing the house in the way she had so easily done in the past, her thirteen-year-old daughter watched and made her judgments about her father. If one wanted to be harsh, one could say that Dan had, since their reconciliation, avoided every notable chance to acknowledge Teresa as his wife. And Laura wanted to be harsh. As for Teresa, had she wanted to go to Charleston that winter, she was too proud to be importunate and demand to be brought there, however temporarily. She knew she could not fulfill the functions of the general’s consort as she could have a few years back. But in her clear hours, even for a sunny soul like hers, the rustication in Bloomingdale, the purdah of the suburbs, must have seemed connected to her interminable decay; body and spirit were in perverse conspiracy against her.