American Scoundrel (7 page)

When Buchanan visited the palace to present his credentials to the Queen, one Englishwoman, the Honorable Alice Jenkyns, a lady-in-waiting to Her Majesty, reported that Dan was “both elegant and faintly savage. . .. Rather high and mighty for an American, I should say! . . . Really, deerskins would be more becoming, don’t you think?”
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Buchanan later told a story that made clear the disparity of style between him and Sickles. He went with Dan and his military attaché and a party of other Americans to visit a duchess at her country estate. After they arrived, Dan took charge of diverting their coachmen off to a nearby inn for refreshments. At the end of the visit, the coachmen returned to take Buchanan, Sickles, and other members of the party back to London, but on their way called at the inn to allow the ambassador to settle the coachmen’s bill. Buchanan’s Presbyterian rectitude was appalled by the account the men had run up—£5 sterling or $20. He made a typical speech about economy and providence, and Dan good-humoredly offered to meet the bill.

“No, sir,” said Buchanan. “I will pay it myself and will keep it as a souvenir of English extortion and your economy. Why, my dear sir, do you know I could have got just as good a dinner for twenty-five cents apiece at John Michael’s sign of ‘The Grapes,’ in my own town of Lancaster, as this man has charged a pound a head for? No, sir; I will keep this bill as a curiosity of its kind, an autograph worthy of historical mention.” But even here, in conflict with Dan, Buchanan’s tone was one of amused exasperation rather than of condemnation.
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The new U.S. legation began to work at reconciling British opinion to the impossibility of the United States surviving as a union without the peculiar institution of slavery, no matter how strongly Britain disapproved of it. Indeed, there were irradicable British and United States commercial interests, particularly those of the enormous British textile industry, which made the continuation of the institution essential. At the same time an ambassador appointed by a Democratic government was required to make representations on behalf of the Irish. Handsome Thomas Francis Meagher had recently arrived in New York to a prodigious welcome after his escape from the British penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, and had held talks with President Pierce about the fate of other renowned political prisoners still detained there. Buchanan was instructed by Pierce to urge the British to pardon Meagher’s prominent colleagues as a prelude to reform of the British administration of post-Famine Ireland.
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There were also sundry trade matters to negotiate, again involving British preferences for goods shipped on British vessels. But the overriding issue, the grand ambition of Buchanan and Dan’s mission to London, was to convince Britain that the United States should be permitted to acquire Cuba by negotiation with Spain, and to advance the reasons for Britain to be calm about such an outcome. Europe by now harbored a phalanx of American officials who saw it as their prime mission to have Cuba for the United States. In Spain, America had as ambassador the French-born Louisiana slaveholder Pierre Soulé, who would be involved most directly in negotiations with Cuba, since the island was a Spanish colony. The U.S. ambassador in Paris was another former legislator and Southerner, John Mason, of Virginia. And acting as chargé at the embassy at The Hague was August Belmont, Dan’s banker friend from New York. He had represented the Rothschilds in Havana before he moved to New York, and passionately wanted to facilitate the acquisition of Cuba. Dan was impressed that Belmont was capable of running his New York bank from the legation in The Hague.

Dan Sickles’s task in the objective of acquiring Cuba was to serve as liaison among these scattered forces, traveling between London, Paris, the Netherlands, and Madrid, keeping all four missions up to date and working in a concerted manner toward the great objective.

He had time, however, to show Fanny White the sights and to attend the West End theaters. London was the center of the English-speaking world and possessed stars of such magnitude that they did not often consider tours of the United States. Dan’s tastes were broad— Shakespeare, Sheridan, grand opera, opéra bouffe, music hall. He was not inhibited from dining publicly with Fanny, or from even more perilous behavior for a diplomat. For though he liked the British well enough, he despised the monarchy. His presentation of Fanny White at one of the Queen’s receptions at Buckingham Palace, and his introduction of her to the monarch as a Miss Julia Bennett of New York, did not become news in the United Kingdom, but it certainly reached his old enemy, James Gordon Bennett of the
New York Herald
. Perhaps Dan had the satiric intention that it should. Bennett already had sufficient
grievances against Sickles and his friends. Three years before, Dan’s comrades John Graham and his brothers—two lawyers and an engineer—had waylaid Bennett on a New York street over an article he had published excoriating them, and horsewhipped him savagely while his frail spiritualist wife stood by screaming. The little Scots editor had been caused considerable physical harm then, and he now believed implicitly that the widely reported incident had taken place and was not a mischievous fiction. It was an unconscionably reckless act for a diplomat, one involved in such a big game as the acquisition of Cuba. Yet it was consonant with Dan Sickles’s outrageous form of courage, and with his flaunting of Fanny in Albany. It is easy to believe that if Fanny had asked him frequently enough to take her to see the Queen, he would have acceded, and been further tempted by the possibility of making fun of two hated institutions, the
New York Herald
and the British monarchy. If so, he later drew back from the first part of the insult, and would claim that the name Julia Bennett was not designed to offend James Gordon Bennett, but was a regular alias of Fanny White’s.

It was fortunate that Teresa, accompanied by Laura and Maria Bagioli, arrived in Grosvenor Square in the spring of 1854, before the controversy over Fanny White reached the pages of the
Herald
. She no doubt heard its echoes in correspondence with American friends, yet she was saved some of the ornate malice and some of the inventions with which Bennett embellished the story. And by the spring of 1854, Fanny had vanished from the scene, having returned to New York to resume management of the Mercer Street establishment. Teresa had Dan to herself in the great city of the British Empire, the city to which even New York made its obeisance.

Teresa was quickly a great London success. Her multilingual gifts were rare among American diplomats’ wives. She became very friendly with Buchanan’s niece and ward, Harriet Lane, five years older than the eighteen-year-old Mrs. Sickles, but perhaps less worldly and less experienced in life’s disappointments. Teresa continued utterly to enchant Buchanan himself. Tidy Dan, spectacular Teresa, and Buchanan, tall in his saddle, rode together companionably and regularly in Rotten Row,
where elegant riders went to watch other elegant riders. When Harriet Lane returned to Pennsylvania early in the summer to attend to some family business, Buchanan appointed shining Teresa, despite her extreme youth, as legation hostess. So, with Dan’s willing consent, she stood in the reception line with stooping Old Buck as the great of the empire were received to dinner or levees or balls. Among the women she made friends with and was applauded by were Lady Clarendon and Lady Palmerston. Mrs. Lawrence, the wife of the military attaché, together with Harriet Lane and Teresa, were referred to as the “Three American Graces.”
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An incident that showed how firm was Buchanan’s friendship— some even went so far as to say infatuation—with Teresa was the arrival of Assistant Secretary of State John A. Thomas. Thomas’s wife asked Buchanan to arrange for her to be presented at court, and Buchanan organized a time and appointed Teresa, as first lady of the legation, to escort and present Mrs. Thomas. Mrs. Thomas declined, however, to be escorted by one so young. There may have been other reasons that she did not want to state to Buchanan. She was a New Yorker, and had no doubt read of Sickles and Fanny White, and now observed that one rumor was right—that Buchanan
was
under the enchantment of Sickles’s young wife. When Mrs. Thomas asked for a more suitable sponsor, saying that she “decidedly declined to go to court with Teresa,” it caused a quarrel, and Mrs. Thomas was never presented at court.
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Throughout these squabbles, Dan continued his shuttle diplomacy. He particularly liked the French-American Soulé. Soulé believed not only that Cuba should be liberated from a decadent and cruel Spanish regime, but that it could be divided into two slave states to counterbalance the ever-expanding free states of the North. The Democrats of Louisiana, including and perhaps particularly Soulé and the governor of the state, John Quitman, had willingly supported a number of unofficial military expeditions to Cuba. With their backing, and in one of many foreshadowings of the twentieth-century Bay of Pigs, a Cuban refugee named Narcisso Lopez recruited an army of Cuban exiles, adventurers, and Mexican War veterans for an invasion of the island in 1849. Lopez’s
troops acquired the name “filibuster” from the Spanish
filibustero
, meaning freebooter or pirate. Lopez had established a briefly held beachhead on Cuba before being driven out by Spanish troops. Escaping to Key West on his expeditionary ship, Lopez was greeted by Southerners as a hero, and the port officials of New Orleans conspired in mounting a further expedition, which departed in the late summer of 1851. This time Spanish troops were waiting for Lopez and his filibusters. They shot down some hundreds of them, sent 160 off to dungeons in Spain, garroted Lopez publicly in Havana, and lined up fifty American nationals, including the nephew of U.S. Attorney General John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, and executed them.

Soulé had thus brought a number of intense grievances to his appointment to Spain, and to it was added another. In May 1854 the Spanish administration in Cuba seized the American merchant vessel
Black Warrior
. Americans were enraged, and Democrats called for the seizure of what their newspapers called “the Pearl of the Antilles,” Cuba. Soulé actively but surreptitiously offered bribes to the Spanish royal household and supported both Spanish republican activists and Cuban subversives with cash. Dan supported Soulé in his confidence that a little diplomatic cunning and bravery would bring Cuba into American hands, even over the desires of England and France, who had their own interests and ambitions in Central America and the Caribbean.
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After his visits to Paris and Madrid, Dan was back in London to be involved in a further scandal that July 4. He was put on the job of negotiating arrangements, with the expatriate Bostonian banker George Pea-body, for the celebration of the national day. At initial meetings, Dan found that Peabody, a Boston Brahmin and an Anglophile, sought to improve strained Anglo-American relations by inviting the leaders of British business and community to dinner at the Crystal Palace. Buchanan and Sickles both considered the idea repulsive. July Fourth was, after all, a day of republican observance, not an occasion to improve commerce between the two nations. With lack of support from the American legation for the Crystal Palace idea, Peabody planned, with Sickles’s help, a smaller event at the Star and Garter Hotel in Richmond on the Thames.
When Sickles arrived at the celebratory lunch that day in his 12th Regiment uniform, he was outraged to see that a majority of the guests were British and that, at the head of the dining room, a small portrait of Washington was hemmed in between two massive portraits, one of Queen Victoria, the other of the Prince Consort, Albert. According to Dan, Peabody debased himself by asking the Queen to lend these two portraits for a private dinner given at a tavern, and she was foolish enough to comply. On top of that, Dan noticed that, according to the program, the toast to the Queen was to precede the toast to the President, and that the toast to George Washington had been allotted to a Briton, Sir Arthur Tennant. “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hail Columbia” had been printed in the menu, but with all reference to the “British foe” excluded.

When Peabody arose at the appointed time and uttered an exuberant toast to Queen Victoria, praising her generosity for lending her portraits from the palace, everyone stood, even crusty old Buchanan. Sickles, in his splendid uniform, remained seated. That act would be described by Mr. Bennett in the
Herald
as “a sly display of democratic jealousy of royalty.” Perhaps, said Bennett, Dan daydreamed that the Queen would demand that he return home, where he would become the object of “patriotic ovation, leading him straight to the door of the next Presidency.” But other papers applauded him for refusing “to play the fawning minion to Royalty.” In London itself, unlike the presentation of Fanny White at court, Dan’s failure to stand for the royal toast created a great deal of talk and denunciations from Peabody, and put Buchanan to the difficulty of explaining the behavior of his legation secretary. Buchanan argued that Dan had sought not to insult the Queen, but to distance himself from Peabody.
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By September 2, Teresa could tell that Dan was working himself up toward a duel, but Peabody appealed to Buchanan, and the matter, fortunately for Peabody, ended.

It is hard to envisage that Teresa did not try to moderate Dan’s tendency to pick fights that summer, but he remained edgy and combative. While he worked to make Cuba American, smaller men were concerned
only in gossiping about his sins. One of the conflicts he had that season involved Teresa indirectly, since it had to do with Fanny White. Dan had been outraged by a speech given in New York by an old friend, John Van Buren, the former President’s son, now a leader of the Soft-shell Democrats—those who opposed the extension of slavery to new territories and states. At the Young Men’s Democratic Club, Van Buren made some remarks about James Gordon Bennett’s attempt, in revenge for not getting the ambassadorship to France, to destroy the union between Hardshell and Softshell Democrats. Then, in whatever context, he mentioned Dan Sickles, and immediately, from the floor, came the question “Where is Fanny White?” This was followed by general laughter, and John Van Buren himself was laughing as he replied, “I did not inquire.” At this there was more laughter, but Van Buren moved on to say that in 1849 those who tried to make a coalition between Hardshell and Softshell had lost not only Sickles “but some respectable black men, who quitted us on the ground that we united with Sickles.” At this there were roars of laughter. Sickles had never consented to any such reconciliation, but Van Buren had quoted “a respectable colored man, a restaurateur, George T. Downey, as saying, ‘No party ever degraded themselves as they did by uniting with Sickles. . .. He was lower than the beasts; and nothing, surely, was lower than that.’” There were reported to be gales of hilarity at this. Dan, eventually reading the press reports in London, was not as amused. He saw his accusers as causing unnecessary pain to Teresa and debasing his family honor.