American Scoundrel (49 page)

General Grant approved of him and came down to Charleston in the summer of 1867 to see his protégé. For the occasion, Sickles invited to dinner a number of eminent Charlestonians—James Orr; Trenholm, the former Confederate Secretary of Treasury; McGrath, the last Rebel governor of South Carolina; and a man named Truscott, a former Confederate diplomat. A former South Carolina governor and former U.S. congressman named William Aiken wrote that he did not possess a coat in which to attend the dinner. He, once the owner of a thousand slaves, had only a suit of homespun. Thus he sent his regrets. But Sickles assured Aiken that Grant would be happy to meet him in his everyday suit, and indeed Grant himself, knowing how much damage the war had done to Southern fashion, accommodatingly came to dinner wearing no epaulettes and with his coat unbuttoned.
²

Differences between Grant and Johnson over the treatment of the South ripened. Johnson had begun his presidency as an advocate of severe measures in the South, but his regard for small farmers made him a contradictory patchwork of moderation and severity. He came to consider Dan both too severe and too arbitrary. There were similar complaints
about a range of military governors, including Generals Philip Sheridan and John Pope. Three months after Teresa’s death, when Johnson returned to his birthplace at Raleigh, North Carolina, and was met by the military governor Sickles, Johnson mentioned that he had been requested by a delegation of farmers to intercede with the general to allow them to use firearms to shoot crows in their cornfields. Sickles implied that the President had been taken in: “Your Excellency, no formal permission is necessary. Shooting crows in cornfields is not being prohibited.”

But Johnson was certainly angry with Sickles for having issued, in the spring of 1867, General Order Number Ten. This edict imposed a twelve-month moratorium on imprisonment and foreclosure for debt. It was not so much the wise measure itself, which saved many of the smaller farmers. It was that Dan had issued the order without consulting Washington. Governor James Orr would praise this order for keeping “the small means of farmers and planters … from the process of the courts. They were thereby enabled to subsist their families, and grow the present crop.” Dan had also wisely taken a measure that his late friend Meagher, recently drowned in the Missouri while serving as acting governor of Montana, had earlier urged upon the British government at the time of the Irish Famine. That was, he restricted the manufacture of liquor to keep more grain available as food. It was, again, not the content of these decrees, though that was considered serious enough in some quarters, but rather the absolutist style in which they were issued which raised alarm in sections of Johnson’s Cabinet. General Pope and General Sheridan were criticized for similar decisions in their departments. The unease created by these edicts of military governors was compounded by criticism of their having superseded the courts. Johnson demanded Dan’s, Sheridan’s, and Pope’s resignations, and on August 12 dismissed Dan before Dan offered to go.
³

At the time, opinion in New York was against what had happened. “General Sickles’s resignation as a District Commander is premature in every respect,” announced the
New York Times
. “Nothing has yet
occurred that warrants it.” Johnson himself was more disapproved of than Sickles, and Dan was yet again celebrated, the remarkable widower returned to New York. But, political beast that he was, he also went down to Washington to work with some of the Radical Republicans, former enemies, for the impeachment of Johnson in March 1868. The movement to impeach the President would fail by one vote.
⁴

A passionate supporter of his Republican friend and old commander Grant, Sickles, when Grant came to the presidency, was offered the post of minister to Mexico but refused it, with his accustomed directness, as an inadequate reward. So he was now appointed minister to Spain—for Cuba had revived as an issue, and Grant hoped Dan would at last bring it to the United States. This was an important and senior post, but the
New York World
was able to destroy a civic reception planned for Sickles at the Everett House by publishing an account of “his career as rowdy, mail robber, spy, murderer, confidence man, ‘general,’ satrap, politician, etc.” President Grant was not, however, dissuaded from appointing Dan to the post.

In the U.S. legation near the Prado in Madrid, Dan was presented not to Queen Isabella II, to whom he had been presented as a legation secretary in 1854 but who had been driven into exile by the uprising, but to the new president, General Juan Prim. Dan was able to convince Prim of the wisdom of the sale of Cuba, but wondered whether the general’s cabinet would support it. They did not do so.

Dan had another source of income in these years. He had been put on a retainer to inquire into the running of the Erie Railroad by the notorious railroad baron Jay Gould and his partner James Fisk. Dan wrote to his old friend General Alfred Pleasonton, who had defended Hazel Grove with him at the battle of Chancellorsville and was now commissioner of Internal Revenue, urging him to look into the bookkeeping and tax matters of the Erie Railroad. While in Spain trying to buy un-buyable Cuba, he lobbied other old friends from a distance to bring down the notorious Gould. General Prim was in the meantime assassinated, and Prince Amadeo of Savoy, son of the King of Italy, became the new Spanish monarch. But nothing was settled about Cuba.

At one of his weekly ambassadorial parties, Dan met Caroline de Creagh, the dark-haired adopted daughter of an Irish-Spanish family. He began to court her, but on a trip to Paris, when he met the deposed Queen Isabella II, who possessed a sexual appetite to rival his own, he had no inhibition about beginning an affair, and shuttled back and forth between Madrid and Paris on the express. They were a splendid pair. Isabella did not seem to have been rendered any more neurotic by having succeeded as a toddler to a throne under continual attack than Dan had been by his part in the Civil War. It was a splendid validation for an amputee lover to know that he was adequate to a queen, even a deposed one. But in this, as in his relationship with the late Fanny White, he showed that his sense of diplomatic propriety was not acute. He was mocked internationally as
le roi américain de l’Espagne
or, as American papers reported it, the Yankee King of Spain. Seventeen-year-old Laura, who lived with her father in the U.S. legation as she had lived with him in South Carolina and New York, must have heard the rumors.
⁵

Despite all, in the autumn of 1871, it was announced that the U.S. ambassador to Spain would marry Señorita de Creagh. For unspecified reasons, there was a hasty marriage at the legation, performed by the Patriarch of the Indies, the highest dignitary of Catholicism in Madrid. The bride was described as “one of Spain’s fairest daughters,” who had been matched “with one of America’s bravest sons.” Laura Sickles was present for the wedding; indeed, she seemed to like Señorita de Creagh. Susan Sickles had also arrived, and became from that point on a habitual member of Dan’s household.

If his enemies can be believed, Dan showed himself once more an inappropriate fellow for matrimony. A letter written to Secretary of State Hamilton Fish by an outraged anonymous American who had just visited Spain charged that Dan, although supposedly happily remarried, was not a fit person to represent the United States because of his unrepentant depravity. “Can the Department of State be aware, or rather ignorant, of the infamous character of Gen. Dan E. Sickles? While in Madrid his conduct with women has been simply disgraceful. For months before his marriage with Caroline de Creagh, who is heartily
sick of her bargain, poor girl, he lived in open and notorious adultery with Madame or Señora Domeriquy, a Cuban conspirator, even at the U.S. Legation, to the shame of our countrymen abroad. An American by the name of Belknap supplied this creditable Minister with child virgins for the purpose of prostitution. His conduct with lewd women of the town was, and even is, shocking. Are we to have another Philip Barton Key affair in Spain?” If so, Caroline de Creagh was not playing along by seeking a lover of her own, since the only adulterer in her garden seemed to be Dan.
⁶

He was still working on behalf of railroad shareholders to bring down the scandalous Jay Gould. He returned home on leave to show his bride his city and to attend to the Erie Railroad matter. Jay Gould, a slight and soft-spoken man of thirty-six years, had hived off some $60 million from the line, robbed stockholders, consumed smaller railroads, and destroyed competitors. He got his legal immunity from the protection of Tammany Hall, the machine that had once protected Dan, and from its current boss, William Marcy Tweed. Dan had built an alliance of directors who had fallen out with Gould, and had collected interested parties who supplied him with affidavits concerning Gould’s financial crimes. In March 1872, Dan’s allies among the directors tricked Gould into calling a board meeting, and on his crutches, and accompanied by allies, interested parties, and police, Dan entered the headquarters of the Erie Railroad, which were located in the white marble Grand Opera House at Twenty-third Street. With him were a phalanx of famous stockholders, including Generals McClellan and Dix, and Tom Meagher’s brother-in-law, Samuel Mitchell Barlow.

The anti-Gould directors who had conspired with Dan sat down at once in the boardroom and, in Gould’s absence, voted all positions vacant. A new set of reform-minded directors was hurriedly elected. Hearing cheers from the boardroom and fearing some such coup, Gould locked himself in his office, but Dan had the ornate door broken in with a crowbar so that the man could be told of his fall and asked to leave. This was an astonishing operation, and Dan was rewarded with stock and other prizes, and thus achieved the financial substance he had
sought all his life. Some said the British government, an investor in the railroad, had gratefully given Dan the title to the house he occupied on Fifth Avenue. But as much as the
Times
and the
Tribune
praised him for delivering the Erie stockholders from the blight of Gould, the
World
was still attacking Dan, describing him as a pimp—a reference to the old accusation that he had lived or campaigned off the earnings of Fanny White. John Graham published a letter in the
World
, threatening legal action, which brought from George Templeton Strong the memorable line “One might as well try to spoil a rotten egg as to damage Dan’s character.” Caroline de Creagh, unfamiliar with the details of Dan’s past, was particularly abashed to find him attacked so slightingly and with such vituperation.
⁷

In Spain in 1873, another republican uprising caused King Amadeo to flee to Portugal, and again the great chimera of Cuba rose up. Dan felt that the pressure from Washington on King Amadeo had not been adequate to produce the long-desired result. He told the Secretary of State that if, at this promising moment, the President did not intend to initiate a policy of rigorous influence directed at Spain on the matter of Cuba, “I wish you would instruct me to present my letter of recall in January or February. I confess I’m tired of my useless work here and of these vacillating people.”

Dan regained his enthusiasm when he paid a promising call on President Figueres, the new liberal head of state, to carry the pleasant news of America’s recognition of the government. But events betrayed him. For just then the master and fifty-two American passengers and crewmen of the
Virginius
, involved in sneaking arms and revolutionaries into Cuba, were lined up against a wall in Havana and shot. The American press was appalled by the image of Spanish soldiers jamming their guns into the dead men’s mouths and shooting their skulls out. The
Herald
of New York hallooed Sickles on his way when he decided on his own authority to close the American embassy in protest. Unhappily for Dan, his action was read by the Secretary of State as an attempt to make policy and to involve the United States in a war for Cuba. The government of Spain dealt directly with Washington on the matter, bypassing
Dan, and was quick to negotiate compensation for the
Virginius
. Dan felt betrayed that Secretary of State Fish had not apprised him of or involved him in the negotiations for a final settlement of the
Virginius
crisis. Fish, in return, believed that Dan had not informed him of some of the more conciliatory gestures the Spaniards had made.
⁸

Thus undermined, Dan became
persona non grata
to the Spaniards. His career in Madrid ended in 1874, and he left for Paris with his wife, his mother, and his increasingly resentful, knowing, but beautiful daughter. Dan sought to raise money in London and in Paris for a canal across the isthmus of Panama, but he was also close to Queen Isabella, now a Junoesque woman of forty-four years. Before and after she was deposed, she lived apart from her husband, a Bourbon prince. When Dan visited her in Paris, it was at the mansion she had bought and occupied, the Hôtel Basilewski on Avenue Kléber, now the Palais de Castille.

In 1875, while the Sickles family was still living in Paris, Caroline de Creagh bore the general a daughter named Eda, and the following year a son, whom Dan named George Stanton, in honor of both his father and Secretary of War Stanton. The presence of these children delivered Laura from what she thought of as a solitary struggle with her father, the negligent and philandering husband of her dead mother. She embraced Caroline’s son and daughter, had endless patience with them, and was much adored in return by her younger half brother and half sister. She argued, however, both with her stepmother and her father. Dan is rumored to have intervened in a romance between Laura and a young Spanish officer, possibly a love affair undertaken in part as vengeance against her father. The dispute grew to such a pitch, the struggle so primal, that Laura returned to New York on an allowance to live with her grandmother. It seems more than likely, given the depth of her father’s alienation from her, that she may have at the time threatened to inform Dan’s wife of certain Sickles truths.