American Scoundrel (51 page)

As disenchanted as Caroline de Creagh remained with her marriage, she ensured that her children dutifully and affectionately wrote to Dan. Eda and George Stanton Sickles (Stanton to friends) were cultivated Euro-American children who could correspond easily in French, Spanish, and English, and their letters told him of leg injuries, colds, and the travails and enthusiasms of childhood. In 1897, Eda, whom he had not seen for seventeen years, arrived in New York with her new husband, a British diplomat. She was very beautiful, twenty-two years of age, and any trace of Laura that showed in her face did not depress the general at all. He took her down to Old Point Comfort, Virginia, where the Third Corps was having its reunion, and showed her off to all his old comrades, then took her to Washington, introduced her to dignitaries, and attended a reception at the British embassy with her. He would not, however, see Caroline or son Stanton until eleven years later, in 1908, a fact that bespoke no urgency on his part.
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In that time, at the end of one century, with the beginning of an apparently limitless one imminent, Dan’s sense of association was strongest not with his children but with men like former Confederate general
James Longstreet. In Atlanta one year early in the 1890s, the two old men were guests at the Irish Society’s St. Patrick’s Day banquet. Afterward, unable to get a cab, they walked together to Sickles’s hotel, Dan still on his preferred crutches. At the hotel, a somewhat tipsy Sickles said, “Longstreet, the streets of Atlanta are very dark and it is very late, and you are somewhat deaf and rather infirm; now I must escort you to your headquarters.”

Longstreet said, “All right, come on and we’ll have another handshake over the bloody chasm.” So they returned to Longstreet’s hotel, hobbling along together and perhaps enjoying a libation at the end of the journey. Then Longstreet said, “Sickles, the streets of Atlanta are very dark and you are lame, and a stranger here, and do not know the way back to your hotel. I must escort you home.” And so they struggled out into the night again.

“Old fellow, I hope you are sorry for shooting off my leg at Gettysburg. I suppose I will have to forgive you, for it’s Sunday.”

“Forgive me? You ought to thank me for leaving you one leg to stand on, after the way you behaved to me.”

Many were deeply touched at the Gettysburg reunion of 1893 when these two old generals helped each other up one of the hills named Roundtop, arriving, despite their age, with an alacrity Longstreet had not shown on the day itself. “Sickles,” said Longstreet, “you can well afford to help me up here now. If you had not kept me away so long … on the 2nd July 1863, the war would have lasted longer than it did….”
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The two were iconically matched again in March 1901, at the second inauguration of President McKinley, then at the West Point Centennial, and in 1902, on May 30, reviewing the veterans of the Spanish-American War from the same platform as President Theodore Roosevelt. It was their last meeting, for Longstreet would die of old age in 1904.

Sickles remained an ally of the Confederate general’s young second wife, Helen Longstreet, acquiring for her a postmastership in Georgia and providing several Longstreet-redeeming quotations for her book on the relationship between Lee and Longstreet. Indeed, said Dan improbably,
given General Meade’s uncertainty, if Longstreet had delayed another hour before making his attack, he might have found the Union Army pulled out to Pipe Creek, the position chosen by General Meade on June 30. Even in defending Longstreet, Dan raised the old proposition he had been uttering for forty-one years—that Meade meant to retreat and did not intend to fight at Gettysburg, and that it was his subordinates, including Dan, who made the battle occur!
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In the early twentieth century, Dan was looked after at his home in New York by two black servants, Moseley and Sarah, and by a middle-aged widow, Eleanor Wilmerding, who was said to have loved the general “with a jealous, undying, and devoted affection.” Though there seems to have been a sexual component in the relationship, there was, as in all Dan’s relations with women, a lack of reciprocated devotion from Dan. The aging general’s meals were cooked by a former soldier named Captain Denton, and it was Denton who explained Dan’s lack of total emotional dependence upon Mrs. Wilmerding. He would tell a researcher nearly four decades later that he had seen in the general’s chamber dresser a whole drawer filled with lady’s black stockings and another with lady’s gloves. They had been left behind over time by lovers and were testimony to Dan’s erotic capacity in his advancing years. But his gastronomic tastes were shrinking, for in those last years, said Denton, he liked plain, wholesome meals, not the Delmonico and Maison Dorée style of food he had relished for most of his life. Now it was oyster stew, lamb stew, fried oysters, rice pudding—the straightforward, the sustaining.
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But he was not done yet with entertaining notable Americans. Through the Reverend Joseph Twichell, formerly of the Excelsior Brigade, and pastor of the fashionable Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford, Mr. Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, began to hear Twichell’s colorful tales of Dan Sickles. When Twain later moved to New York, just across Ninth Street from where the general lived, and got to know him personally, he brought his incisive whimsy to his description of Sickles’s house. “You couldn’t walk across that floor anywhere without stumbling over the hard heads of lions and things … it
was as if a menagerie had undressed in the place…. It was a kind of museum, and yet it was not the sort of museum which seemed dignified enough to be the museum of a great soldier—and so famous a soldier. It was the sort of museum which should delight and entertain little boys and girls. I suppose that that museum reveals a part of the general’s character and make. He is sweetly and winningly childlike.”

Mark Twain admired Dan’s well-constructed sentences. His talk was full of interest and bristling with points, Twain found, but the delivery had a certain monotonous quality that became oppressive after a time. The great writer and humorist was reminded of what a friend had said about Wagner’s music: “I have been told that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” That seemed to fit the general’s manner of speech exactly. “His talk is much better than it is…. His talk does not sound entertaining, but it is distinctly entertaining.”

Sickles’s other gift, thought Twain, was to talk about nothing but himself and yet at the same time sound modest, inoffensive, and “unexasperating.” “He seemed to me … just the kind of man who would risk his salvation in order to do some ‘last words’ in an attractive way.” If he made ungenerous remarks about any officers from the war, he did so with dignity and courtesy, but Twain percipiently thought that “the general valued his lost leg a way above the one that is left. I am perfectly sure that if he had to part with either of them, he would part with the one that he has got.”
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The son who would eventually come to the United States to meet him, Stanton Sickles, worked in the American embassy in Spain, possessed immense fondness for all members of the Sickles clan, and had a spaciousness of soul like that of his grandfather. When he arrived in America with his mother in 1908, he wrote excitedly in French in his journal, in uppercase letters: “
FIRST INTERVIEW OF MY DEAR PARENTS AFTER 27 YEARS, AT HALF PAST TWELVE AT OUR HOTEL
.”

The second Mrs. Sickles agreed to be reunited with her husband if he would dismiss Mrs. Wilmerding, who so far forgot her position as to constantly refer to the general as “Dear.” Dan, more intractable than
ever at eighty-eight years, would not dismiss her. So Caroline de Creagh Sickles continued to live at the Albert Hotel on Eleventh Street, and Dan remained in his nearby house, enjoying the housekeeping mercies of Mrs. Wilmerding. It was rumored that he had made out a new will, which left everything to that lady. Not that this was necessarily a splendid prospect for her. Dan had lost on the stock market a considerable amount of what he had made from the Gould coup and inherited from his father. He held in trust the inheritance of both Eda and George Stanton Sickles, but was waiting for the right time to sell the chief property of 109 acres in New Rochelle. Yet he was reckless with money, distributing it to veterans who appeared outside his house for handouts on Sunday mornings. When a friend of his, Representative William Sulzer of New York, presented a bill in Congress proposing that Dan be retired with the rank of lieutenant general, a move that would raise his pension to $7,500, it was not simply because this was a worthy honor, but because it would provide Dan with essential income. The attempt to elevate Dan to three-star rank failed in the House in February 1910.
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Dan had lost some of his money to importunate women. Some years earlier he had advanced more than $9,900 to Eleanor Wilmerding. His last great folly of expenditure on women involved a plausible artist named Princess Lenott Parlaghy. She set up a studio in the Plaza Hotel, where Dan often dined, and she asked whether he would sit for her. Dan behaved toward the princess with a breathtaking extravagance. She said she had always wanted a lion cub, so he turned up with a litter of six, acquired somehow from his zoo connections. And after the general had his portrait painted by Princess Parlaghy, he passed on the names of two hundred friends who might like to undergo the same process.

His greatest indulgence was, however, to stand as guarantor for the princess’s debts. In the spring of 1910, the managing director of the Plaza advised Dan that the amount Princess Parlaghy owed the hotel “stood at a little over $5,500, and as her business manager informs me it may be three to eight days before she receives her remittance. I thought I would let you know the amount of her indebtedness covered by your guaranty.”

The Knickerbocker Trust Company told Dan six months later that the princess had deposited with it a sum of $750 for him—a repayment against this or some other advance by Dan. It was not enough to count. A year after covering the princess’s debt, he was pleading with one August Hecksher of Fifth Avenue for an extension on two notes Hecksher held for $7,700 plus interest. In 1912 the Bowery Savings Bank initiated foreclosure proceedings against the general, and the Bank of the Metropolis attached his property for his failure to pay $5,050.
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Caroline Sickles, still living in the hotel close to Dan but not as his wife, came to his aid. She paid a judgment for $8,200, and took a second mortgage on the general’s house to save him from eviction. She pawned her jewels to pay the debt of $5,050. But Dan demonstrated no gratitude; instead he cast bitter doubt on Caroline’s motives. “I pawn my jewels to save his treasures,” an affronted Caroline was quoted in the
Times
as saying. “The general has his pension to live on, and I can do nothing further for him.” As for the rest, she said, she would welcome him if he wished to make his home with her. “But I will not put up all my money to save his house to have it occupied by him and his housekeeper to the exclusion of me.”
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A worse and final financial crisis hung over Dan. State Controller William Somer discovered, late in 1912, that there was a discrepancy in the books of the New York State Monuments Commission: $445,641 had been budgeted to the commission, of which Sickles was the chief, but the general’s expense vouchers amounted to only $417,165. Missing was more than $28,000. Loyal Stanton Sickles offered $5,000 as a gesture against the missing funds, but that did not stop the state attorney general from taking action against the entire commission, including its ninety-three-year-old chairman. The court order for the civil arrest of Dan was issued on the last Saturday of January 1913. General Sickles nonetheless had a quiet Sunday at home, and took care to have the curtains raised so that he could sit at the window by a little table containing a large vase of flowers. An American flag was draped on either side of him, and to show that he was still a man to be reckoned with, he smoked a cigar. A police patrol wagon from Mercer Street stood outside the house most
of the afternoon, and a lieutenant of police had a conference with Dan, but no arrest was made.

The city sheriff, Harburger, told the press that he would not bully the old man, that the general would be treated as an honored guest rather than as a prisoner. The sheriff nonetheless declared that, with great regret, he would arrest Dan the following morning and place him in the Ludlow Street Jail. “Do you really expect to put him in a cell?” asked a journalist. “My goodness, no,” said the sheriff. The general would have all the comforts of a good home.

Controller Somer, who had discovered the discrepancy, started a subscription to help Dan pay the debt, and donated the first $100 himself. A telegram came to Dan from Gainesville, Georgia, from Helen B. Longstreet: “Am wiring the Attorney General of New York that I will raise money among the ragged, destitute, maimed veterans who followed Lee, to pay the amount demanded if the New York officials will allow us sufficient time…. The Republic, whose battles you fought, will not permit your degradation.” Sheriff Harburger spent another day trying to be busy to escape the necessity of arresting Dan Sickles, and in the state Senate there was a motion calling on the attorney general to suspend action against the old general. Dan’s friend Sulzer, now governor of New York, expressed his concern for what awaited Dan, but said that he could do nothing to prevent an arrest.

“Fifty years ago,” declared Senator Murtaugh in Albany, “the name of General Sickles was one to conjure with. Fifty years hence our children, and our children’s children, will stand with uncovered heads before monuments erected to the memory of General Sickles, for which this State will spend far more money than now is required to extricate the hero of Gettysburg from his trouble.”
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But even among Dan’s allies there was dissent. Mrs. Longstreet was outraged by a statement of Stanton Sickles that his father had procured the position of postmaster of Gainesville for her, that in “passing the plate in the South” she was merely repaying a favor, and that the money collected would benefit only Mrs. Wilmerding. She did not know Stan-ton, said Mrs. Longstreet. She did not know Wilmerding. All she knew
was that General Sickles was her husband’s best friend among all the Union generals after the war was over “and we became one nation again.”