American Scoundrel (6 page)

James Buchanan’s lack of a spouse had been, since his early manhood, a source of gossip. His closest relationship had been with Senator William Rufus King, a courtly Democrat from Alabama who was in the Senate when Buchanan arrived there in 1834. Buchanan the Pennsylvanian and King the Southerner roomed together and for over twenty years attended Washington events as a team, until Senator King’s death. People referred to King as “Old Buck’s wife” and “Mrs. Buchanan,” and to the two of them as “the Siamese twins.” In 1852, King had been offered the chance to serve as Vice President with Pierce, but, afflicted with tuberculosis, lacked the strength to do so.

It could certainly be said that James Buchanan had had a lot of bad luck with women. The fiancée of his Pennsylvania youth had suddenly called off their engagement, separated herself from him, and soon thereafter died. For such a solid and levelheaded man, he grieved excessively then and later, and perhaps in some way he thought he had provoked her grief and the death that followed it. The conclusion some came to was that the fiancée had discovered or been fed information about Buchanan’s liking for other men, and that the news had undermined her. Then, in the 1830s, he was confidently expecting to marry Mary Kittera Snyder, a prominent Philadelphia woman who spent much time in Washington, but when he went to Philadelphia to pay court to her, she snubbed him by going to Baltimore.

Rufus King had died just a few months before Pierce offered Buchanan the State Department’s most senior diplomatic post, minister to the Court of St. James’s.
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Accepting the post, Buchanan asked a famous journalist friend, Colonel John W. Forney, whether he could recruit a suitable Democrat to serve as first secretary to the American legation in London. On the lookout, Forney had to go to New York, and at a dinner, as he described it, “met a gentleman whose talents and address seemed to fit him for the post.” The gentleman, of course, was Dan Sickles, a so-called Hardshell Democrat like James Buchanan, and a man of great promise within the
New York party machine. But a problem had arisen. When Dan asked Forney what his pay would be, Forney answered that the post paid $2,500 a year. At this, Dan explained that his annual income was more than fifteen times that amount. “I could not think of such a sacrifice,” he told the illustrious Forney.

Later in the day, Dan thought again. Perhaps his income was not really the sumptuous $37,500 or more per annum of which he had boasted. Perhaps various friends also pointed out how well this federal appointment would look on his
curriculum vitae
, and what an enriching and vigorous new challenge it might be to convey to the British government the policy of the United States on the freedom of the seas and on American claims to Central America and the Caribbean. Under the previous President, the Whig Millard Fillmore, the foreign policy of the United States had become, in both Dan’s and Buchanan’s eyes, too lenient toward Britain. So Buchanan and his secretary of legation would have a new agenda to pursue in London. If Dan went, he would be serving under a minister who in 1812 had worn the uniform of the United States, and the prospect of overcoming British diplomatic suspicions of American ambitions toward Cuba in the same spirit as the British had been militarily overcome by Andrew Jackson at New Orleans was something Dan savored.

The day after meeting Forney, Dan boarded a train to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and took a carriage out to Buchanan’s country estate, Wheatland. Buchanan was delighted to have the energetic young New Yorker come to his house. Forney said Buchanan knew of Dan as a brilliant lawyer and politician, a man of the world who had an army of friends and a counterbalancing army of enemies, “like all men of force and originality.” During the meeting at the large though austere house at Wheatland, Dan’s imagination was no doubt inflamed by Buchanan’s plans for the mission they would run in London, and, with a typically sudden shift of ardor, Dan now wanted the post of first secretary as he wanted few other things. Buchanan sent Dan’s name to the Department of State for confirmation. Though Pierce’s Secretary of State, William Marcy, a Barnburner New Yorker, objected to Dan’s appointment,
President Pierce intervened at Buchanan’s request to make sure that it went through.
²

Not everyone in his circle thought that Dan was doing the right thing. He would have to surrender his work as corporation attorney, and a friend from Tammany advised him, “You’d better think well over it before you surrender up that which would give you
a competency
for life.” But Dan was set on the project. Teresa, “the female child,” was more ambivalent. There was an immediate problem in that Baby Laura was as yet too young, according to conventional wisdom, to make an autumn journey across the Atlantic. In that era, there were great dangers for mother and child in the event of bad weather or an outbreak of fever. Also, Teresa wanted to stay close to her mother, Maria Bagioli, for a time, even though her letters showed that she loved Dan thoroughly and had a forthright hunger to see him more than his busy life as an instrument of Tammany and attorney to the New York Corporation allowed. In her pleas to him, sometimes written on official corporation paper Dan had brought home with him, she never struck a dismal pose; she did not chide or harangue. One cannot but wish that the generosity of her tone had evoked an answering generosity in charming Dan. In a typically un-reproving letter of August 1853, she wrote simply because she longed for his company, though she said she had not a great deal to report. She filled up the letter by telling him frankly and in explicit detail about the buying of a new dress—“it’s white silk to be trimmed up with ribbon.” Obviously Dan did not stint her on clothing, a saving grace, since he certainly did not stint Fanny White. The occasion for the dress was that she was going in a day or so to August Belmont’s house for dinner. It is not hard to imagine the lushness and air of Italian-American wholesomeness with which she must have emerged from her carriage outside Belmont’s splendid house on Fifth Avenue, near Fourteenth Street, and entered a mansion opulent enough to possess a picture gallery of masters that some considered one of the finest private collections in the world.

As for the sun-filled August day on which she wrote this letter about longing, a dress, and August Belmont, she had many visitors at home. A Mrs. Phillips had called in, a Mrs. McClenehan, a Ginger Clark, and Ma,
Mrs. Bagioli. Teresa loved to fill her house with friends who fussed over the infant Laura and conversed with her. But nothing compensated for Dan’s absence, and she pleaded with him to come home to dinner and stay the night. “I want to be as much with you as possible . . . should you go [to England] without me. Come, do. I wish to be near and with you.” The imminent separation haunted her. “I hate the idea of your going away without me, and know that I would not have you [do so] if it were in my power. You know what is best—and I shall act as you wish me to however much I may dislike it. God only knows how I can get along without you—and still I think it would be cruel to leave Ma entirely alone. She seems wrapped up in the baby. . .. Come home as early as you can. God bless you my own dear darling pet. May God bless you is my prayer.”
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Dan had meanwhile been busy at his offices in Nassau Street in organizing cash flow and credit, both for himself and for others. To note the scale of his indebtedness, one has only to look at the loans he took in a period of less than a year, from December 3, 1852, to August 4, 1853, amounting to more than $3,500. Not only that, but he had claims upon his own generosity. A note written on August 18, 1853, and inscribed “To the aid of A.B.,” Antonio Bagioli, was for $750 at six months. Perhaps the scale of these borrowings can be put against the reality that a skilled shoemaker earned $7 a week in 1853, a factory laborer earned $5 to $6, and three-quarters of female workers earned less than $3. The claims on Dan were broader than those of family and Fanny White, and he had his own supplicants. Mrs. Mary Ellwill wrote to him pleading that George Ellwill, her husband or son, be permitted to do secretarial work for Dan to pay off a family debt. Dan also made a loan of $150 to Daniel E. McClenehan, no doubt the husband of the Mrs. McClenehan who was, about the same time, visiting Teresa. In an attached note, McClenehan offered Dan “many thanks for the very kind and warm interest you have taken in my case.”
⁴

An amusing friend to Dan and Teresa as the date of Dan’s departure for London neared was an extraordinary American adventurer named Henry Wikoff, often referred to as the Chevalier Wikoff. He was a man
in his mid-forties, fashionable, elegant, and young in spirit. Although tending toward the Democratic Party, he seems to have enchanted most social and political leaders and their womenfolk, and he made himself comfortable with a succession of White House families. It was a coup to have him at a dinner table in Washington or in New York, and people spoke of his “captivating manners” and of there being no other American who knew so many European notables. He always turned up at the tables of the great as an unattached male, which added to his air of worldly mystery. Wikoff’s origins were suitably mysterious; he had no identified parents, although he was commonly said to be the son of a Dr. Henry Wikoff of Philadelphia. In 1836, he had served in the same position in the United States mission in London that Dan was now about to take up, and during his time there he had traveled to Paris and secured some of the personal effects of Napoleon to return to Joseph Bonaparte in his exile in London. For some obscure service to the Spanish government he was made a knight—hence, the Chevalier Wikoff. But after his stint as a diplomat, in 1840 he had turned entrepreneur and brought the most famous exotic dancer of the era, Fanny Elssler, for a U.S. tour. The tours he managed for the lusty Miss Elssler were famously turbulent, and his relationship with her was complicated by the extremely volatile affair they embarked on. He not only refused to marry Elssler; for whatever reason, he published a number of her letters.

Then, in the late 1840s, Wikoff published a biography of his exiled friend in London:
Napoleon Louis Bonaparte, First President of France.
In England in 1850 he was approached by Lord Palmerston to become a British agent with the particular objectives of persuading the French papers to moderate their tone toward Britain and of promoting an alliance between the United States and Britain. But he was so indiscreet in the approaches he made that Palmerston gave up on him.

At that time, Dan and Teresa were getting to know the Chevalier Wikoff well, after his recent imprisonment in Italy, where he had served time on the accusation of abducting an American heiress, Jane C. Gamble. He was to have married her in London, but she fled to Italy to avoid him, and he pursued her and was accused of abducting her in Genoa.
The fifteen months he had spent imprisoned were still fresh in his memory when he met the Sickleses, and they enriched his anecdotal liveliness.

The case leading to his imprisonment had indeed achieved international notoriety, and had at first subjected Wikoff to considerable social odium. But he was a close friend of the owner of the
New York Herald
, James Gordon Bennett, who had reported on his movements and adventures extensively and flatteringly, and made him a national figure.
⁵

Teresa delighted in Wikoff’s company, his capacity as a raconteur, and the added bonus that she could speak Italian with him. As can happen with any child of immigrants who has not beheld the land that served as background for the stories of her immigrant father and grandparents, Italy, in Teresa’s imagination and as Wikoff portrayed it in the tales he told her, was a place of baroque extremes—elegance and repressive barbarity; high art and extreme squalor; fragrance and evil airs; coruscating democracy and crude tyranny.

Wikoff’s attitude toward Teresa was that of a loyal friend, but he may have felt a chivalric sexual enchantment as well. He became one of Teresa’s chief consolers when Dan sailed off in September with the understanding that the following spring Teresa and Laura would follow. Buchanan and Dan left for London on August 6, 1853, and Buchanan, who had spent an hour with Teresa the night before, swelled the chorus of those who praised her. “She is both handsome and agreeable,” he wrote to his niece Harriet Lane.
⁶

Having accepted Dan’s invitation to visit London, Fanny White had talked a friend, Kate Hastings, into moving into and managing the brothel at 119 Mercer Street. Like Fanny, Kate was an entrepreneurial prostitute of spirited disposition.
⁷

The grievous possibility is that Fanny traveled on the same ship that Teresa waved off from the port of New York. It was the sort of arrangement that made even a worldling like the Chevalier Wikoff shake his head, but those who knew Dan always found forgiving fatally easy.

In the American legation in London’s West End, the elderly and dour Buchanan and the youthful and sometimes flamboyant Dan got on
surprisingly well. Dan had his own suite within the embassy, and though he probably visited Fanny’s lodgings rather than she his, at some point Buchanan must have found out about her. But contrary to the pontifications of late-twentieth-century demagogues on “traditional values,” gentlemen tended to consider the sexual arrangements of their fellows as private business, unless political capital could be made of it. Buchanan reported to John Forney that Dan was “a very agreeable and able man, possessed of much energy of character, and likely to make a favorable impression here. . .. I am warmly and strongly attached to him.” Buchanan believed that Teresa, “only a child,” would soon arrive.

He did tell Forney that Dan “spends a great deal of money . . . but I find him a very able lawyer, and of great use to me.” Yet the two men had sharply different styles. James Buchanan lived and dressed with a republican austerity. Secretary of State Marcy had told all diplomats to do so—to wear and be proud of the plain suit of a citizen. The problem was that at one diplomatic levee, an English guest mistook the elderly, slightly trembling Buchanan for a footman and handed him a hat, coat, and cane for cloaking. From then on, to distinguish himself from servants, Buchanan took to wearing a plain dress sword. Dan by contrast always wore to civil events the uniform of the 12th New York State Militia, of which he had been a studious member, absorbing many military manuals and achieving the rank of major. For the purposes of his English sojourn, Dan had the permission of the colonel of the regiment to assume the informal rank of colonel himself. The 12th was one of Tammany Hall’s militia regiments, but its uniform had not been designed with republican austerity, it was based on the uniform of the Austrian Imperial Guard, to the extent that while Buchanan might be mistaken for a servant, Dan was sometimes mistaken for a military attaché from Vienna.