American Scoundrel (8 page)

A few weeks after the July Fourth Peabody incident, John Van Buren, called by his friends “the Prince” because of the courtly epicurean habits he had acquired from Martin Van Buren, came to London on the way to visit his father in Italy. A remorseless Dan tracked him to the Queen’s Hotel in the West End and sent around a Californian friend as a second to present a letter demanding an explanation and apology, or else recourse to the instruments of honor, that is, to a duel. Van Buren hurriedly explained himself and stated, in writing, that he had had no intention of using the language emanating from the Negro, Mr. Downey, as applicable to Dan Sickles.
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Always publicly buoyant, Teresa was privately bewildered by the Van Buren affair and its references to Fanny White. Despite the frankness with which she sometimes questioned Dan, it was true that in her eyes her husband was an older and important man, with reasons to seek women who supplied some mysterious element she was not able to. And then, both her parents and the nuns had raised her to obey the authority of her husband. He could always claim, at the threat of discussing personal matters, that he was engaged and distracted by the huge game he and the others were playing for Cuba.
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Before Dan’s challenge to the Anglophile banker Peabody, he made a quick visit to Washington to inform President Pierce and Secretary of State Marcy of the strategy devised by the U.S. ministers in Europe for acquiring Cuba. He also told the President that in the Spain of Isabella II, a revolutionary republican party was forming, some members working within the Spanish constitution and some devoted to violent overthrow. Both sets of radicals, he suggested, should be supported with American funds, not least because sufficient trouble at home would keep the Spanish army too stretched to hang on to Cuba. Spain would then sell the island, but perhaps a $5 million bribe to the Queen Mother, Maria Christina, would help smooth the way. Pierce asked Dan to stay on at the White House and produce a report, which was ultimately entitled
On the State of Europe: Its Bearing upon the Policy of the United States
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Pierce was impressed by the energy and speed with which this considerable report was produced. Dan was able to return to Europe by the same steamer that had brought him. He carried approval from both Marcy and Pierce for the American ministers in London, Paris, and Madrid to meet at a central and neutral point in Europe with a view to releasing a statement on the future of Cuba and the proposed role of the United States.
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When Dan went off to Madrid, almost immediately after his arrival in London, he left behind a surmising London and a rumor that would acquire credit in New York. Unprovable in itself, and perhaps started or
implied by the embittered Mrs. Thomas, it cast a belittling stain over Teresa’s future and Dan’s. The imputation was that, with Dan’s consent, Teresa was engaged in an affair with the entranced Buchanan, despite his supposed homosexuality. But if there was any truth to the matter, the experience must have induced in Teresa a cynicism about the value her husband placed on her. Her later actions would be thereby colored.
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A meeting place for Buchanan, Mason, and Soulé was at last chosen in Ostend, the Belgian port city. This was a supreme and exciting moment for Dan. When the three ministers and their aides convened in a grand Ostend hotel that autumn, hostile antislavery papers reported that Dan drove the agenda—to the ultimate embarrassment of Buchanan— but it was the slaveholder Soulé who dominated the proceedings. He was such a fire-eater when it came to acquiring Cuba that he did not need any assistance in folly from Dan, and his vivid personality swamped the sobriety of Mason the Virginian and Buchanan the Pennsylvanian. Soulé argued throughout the meeting that the best way to shake Cuba free from Spanish domination was to let all Europe know that, as an established principle, the United States was ready to invade Cuba if Spain would not agree to a deal. If Europe became alarmed, to hell with Europe and all its hypocrisies! If not, consent would be implied.

Talking at great length and with great eloquence in the meeting room, Soulé persuaded Buchanan and Mason to help him in preparing and signing a memorandum which would gain notoriety as the Ostend Manifesto. It is believed that Dan had a large role in drafting it. The manifesto declared that if the United States decided that its security depended on acquiring Cuba, and if Spain would not pass on sovereignty in the island to the United States by peaceful means, including sale, then, “by every law, human and Divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain.” Soulé and Dan had made sure that a large contingent of the European press was waiting in a lounge at the conference hotel to receive copies of the startling manifesto and to send them out to London, Paris, and Madrid.

There was an instant and hostile reaction to the document not only in Europe but in many sections of America. One newspaper called it “the Manifesto of the Brigands.” Antislavery and abolitionist opinion saw the acquisition of Cuba as an extension of Southern power, not as a liberation of an enslaved province. President Pierce had already been punished for supporting legislation that effectively made Kansas a slave territory; he lost nearly two-thirds of Democratic representation in the Congress in the 1854 elections. Now, for the sake of winning back the North, he was under pressure to denounce the work of his three most senior diplomats, and he did so, distancing himself from the manifesto, as much as he would have supported it had the reaction and the times been different.
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Dan was personally disappointed at this failure to seize the grail of Cuba. He never lost faith in the idea, but in the autumn of 1854, with the wrapping-up of the matter for the present, he completed his contracted two years as legation secretary. Again, reports on Dan in the New York press were split. Some journalists claimed that Buchanan was pleased to see the back of his embarrassing legation secretary. A less hostile section of the press gave a more credible reason for Dan’s return to the United States; it was “in order to prepare the way for the subsequent nomination of his warm personal friend, Mr. Buchanan, for the Presidency.” The same newspapers suggested that in Dan, Buchanan had a most competent electoral aide.

In truth, Dan was eager to start on Buchanan’s candidacy. Even if it failed, the process itself would challenge, vivify, and reward him. Not that Old Buck would be easy to promote. Given his white hair, the aged and crooked way he hung his head, and the tremors of his face, he would obviously be having his last tilt at the highest American post. There were a number of younger and more attractive men seeking the nomination—Franklin Pierce himself, and Stephen Douglas of Illinois, as well as Marcy, the aged Secretary of State.
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Back in New York, the Sickleses took a house in Lower Manhattan, to which Teresa welcomed her multitude of friends and had much to tell them about the Court of St. James’s. She must have wondered whether
Dan’s relationship with Fanny White would resume, and may not have known, except through gossip, that Fanny had found a new man-in-chief, a wealthy, older fellow named Jake LeRoy, who appeared with her at the theater and drove up Broadway with her in his “flashy carriage.” Jake had greater resources than Dan, but he also had venereal disease, which he would in the end pass on to both his young wife and Fanny, rendering her no longer “a clean girl.”
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Economic difficulties began to bite soon after the return to New York. Dan had passed on to the U.S. Treasury many of his outstanding British bills, which Secretary of the Treasury James Guthrie refused to pay. This left Dan’s London creditors howling. But Dan did not mind so much; he was beyond their reach. His future was an American one. Slotting back into Tammany politics and into his law offices at Nassau Street, he found “my park scheme dead and all my illusions vanished.” He was anxious to get the report of the park commissioners confirmed by the New York Superior Court. Although Dillon, the corporation counsel, told him he must know it was impossible, and that all the leading members of the bar would be retained to oppose the confirmation, Dan was determined to get both the park and Buchanan on New York’s agenda.

In a characteristic stratagem, he drafted a letter to the governor, pointing out that the calendars of the courts were seriously overcrowded. He asked for an additional judge from rural New York to be detailed to the city for a few months to clear up the backlog. He managed to get his letter signed by thirty or forty leading members of the bar, and the governor indicated that he would designate an additional judge with pleasure, if one could be found. Dan already had one, a friend and future Democratic senator, Ira Harris, judge of the Superior Court in the Albany District. Calling at his house, Dan found him away from home, but Mrs. Harris and the daughters of the family received Dan and were charmed by “the suggestion that the judge might be detailed to sit in New York.” He then chased Judge Harris to the small rustic courthouse in Monticello, in Sullivan County. After the court rose, at the village tavern Dan presented the judge with the proposal, and rushed to
Albany with the judge’s letter of consent. Within a day, Harris was formally designated an additional justice of the court in the City of New York.

Dillon was delighted at Dan’s achievement and said, “Before an impartial judge it is worth while to attempt a hearing.” Dillon gave notice to the city bench that a motion would be made for the confirmation of the commissioners’ report in the matter of the central park. On the day named for hearing the motion, Judge Roosevelt, the senior judge, an opponent of the park, was seated in the largest courtroom in the building, usually occupied by the Superior Court, on the second floor of the western wing of City Hall, ready to hear and dismiss the motion. A great array of counsel, “the most distinguished members of our bar,” were in their places to oppose it. Judge Roosevelt, Dan noticed, looked serenely happy. “I could fancy I saw his blade, freshly sharpened,” wrote Dan with his usual vividness of imagery, “ready to cut out the vitals of the Central Park report and redden the carpets of the sanctuary of justice with the blood of the victims.”

But a crier mounted the bench and, “in the stereotype twang of those officials,” announced, “All persons interested in the matter of the application of the Mayor, Aldermen, and Commonalty of the City of New York for the confirmation of the report of the Commissioners of the Central Park, draw near before Mr. Judge Harris of the Supreme Court in Room One, in the City Hall, and be heard.”

The company rose as one man and found their way downstairs into Room One, the smallest courtroom in City Hall. Judge Harris sat for a month on the commissioners’ report, with Dillon and Dan arguing in its favor, and in that time Mrs. Harris and her daughters were courted with invitations to parties, receptions, theaters, balls, in the hope that they would influence Judge Harris to reject the report. But after a month, he confirmed it. “Then for the first time,” wrote Dan, “New York was assured of a great public park within its boundaries.”

But Dan encountered a further bar to his plans. The city itself lacked the authority to appropriate money to improve the site of the park,
which was “one of the roughest and most forbidding spots on the face of the globe. It was a vast mass of rocks and boulders, variegated here and there by an irredeemable swamp.” The New York State legislature would have to grant approval for the city to make the necessary appropriations.
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In the meantime Dan was driven by his own shortage of money to take private briefs. One client was a Dr. David Jobson, a Scots dentist, formerly surgeon dentist to the royal family of England and author of a well-known textbook on teeth. Dr. Jobson had met in New York an American dentist named John Allan, who had sued yet another dentist for infringement of a patent for artificial teeth. Allan had employed Job-son as a consultant and put him on a retainer of $100 a week to serve as an expert at the trial. Having disastrously lost his trial against his rival, Dr. Allan had not paid Jobson, who employed Dan to retrieve the sum of $1,500 owed to him.

But shortly afterward, when visiting Dan’s law offices, Jobson found the defendant, Dr. Allan, privately closeted with Sickles’s clerk and, later, with Sickles’s father. Jobson sued both Allan and Dan Sickles, saying that Dan Sickles’s conduct was “so extraordinary, to say the least of it,” that he felt constrained both to institute the legal proceedings against him and to appeal to the Supreme Court of New York for his disbarment.

Jobson told the court that “as a foreigner and a stranger,” he was well aware of the risk of Tammany vengeance for making this appeal— “a blow from the cowardly sling-shot or the nocturnal knife.” Fortunately for Dan, neither the legal proceedings nor the disbarment hearing came to anything. Jobson always maintained that he did not pursue his case against Dan Sickles because his new lawyer was also bribed by Allan and Sickles! Poor Dr. Jobson got a sound education in the ethics in power of the New York bar, particularly the side associated with Tammany.
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But the Jobson incident barely delayed Dan in his organizing of rallies, Democratic orators, and speeches to support Buchanan’s candidacy,
and in the autumn of 1855, the dominant Hardshell wing of Tammany nominated Dan for the state senate. They and Dan knew that his candidacy would serve as a litmus test in New York for Buchanan’s candidacy. During Dan’s service to two campaigns, his own and Buchanan’s, Teresa and Laura received less than his already limited attentions to domesticity. In his efforts to be elected he was helped out by all the old gang—by the Grahams; by the charming and universally loved Irish-American lawyer James Topham Brady; by the Irish icon and escaped political prisoner handsome and oratorical Thomas Francis Meagher; by a handsome friend named Sam Butterworth, who had every reason to hope for a profitable post out of a Democratic victory; by the best-selling Chevalier Wikoff, who had now written a book on his courtship and Italian imprisonment; and by perhaps Dan’s most reliable friend and ally, Emmanuel (Manny) Hart, a former New York alderman and U.S. congressman. Dan was pleased to see that his much-publicized tweak-ings of Britannic dignity during his stay in London had done him no harm with passionate Irishmen like Judge Charles Daly and Meagher and those who shared their attitudes. And he was elected to the senate in Albany. He did not choose to take Teresa with him; indeed, she may not have wanted to go to the capital, since the railroad offered Dan the chance of adequate access to his wife and daughter and his friends in New York.
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