AMERICAN
SCOUNDREL
THE LIFE OF THE NOTORIOUS CIVIL WAR GENERAL DAN SICKLES
By Thomas Keneally
380 pp. New York:
Nan A. Talese. $27.50
By
Kevin Baker
"How
splendidly they march! It looks like a dress parade," onlookers
cried as they watched General Daniel Sickles, with full military
pomp—flags flying, bugles blowing, and drums beating—lead
10,000 men of his Third Corps out of the Union line on the second,
critical day of Gettysburg, and plant them a good half-mile ahead
of the rest of the army.
"Wait
a moment," replied a less impressed Winfield Hancock, a general
who actually knew his business, "you’ll see them tumbling
back."
It
was a typical Sickles gesture—impetuous, headstrong, and
ultimately disastrous for everyone in the immediate vicinity.
Within a few hours, the Third Corps did indeed come tumbling back,
through those blood-soaked patches of ground soon to be immortalized
as the Peach Orchard and the Wheat Field. Sickles himself was
carried from the field on a stretcher, smoking a cheroot so that
his men could see he was still alive (they must have been overjoyed),
and leaving behind most of his right leg and this exquisitely
dry epitaph from Shelby Foote: "Thus did Old Dan Sickles
leave the war, to proceed in time to other fields of endeavor,
including a well-publicized liaison with the deposed nymphomaniac
Queen of Spain."
Yet
there was more, so much more, as Thomas Keneally recounts in his
mesmerizing new biography, American Scoundrel. Mesmerizing, that
is, in the sense of watching an automobile accident. A Medal of
Honor winner, a U.S. congressman; ambassador, military governor
of the Carolinas, and the protagonist in the greatest sex-and-murder
scandal of his age, Dan Sickles was as ubiquitous and seductive
as the devil, and just about as scrupulous.
Hire
him on as a lawyer, and you might discover him conferring secretly
in his Nassau Street offices with the man you were suing, as at
least one plaintiff did. Bring a mortgage to him to be registered
and he was liable to keep it, as a creditor found out. While still
a teenager, he was accused of stealing $100 entrusted to him by
the saintly philanthropist Peter Cooper, the most beloved man
in New York City.
Sickles’s
remarkably indulgent parents packed him off to the Manhattan household
of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s old librettist, in the hopes
that young Dan would get an education there. He certainly did.
Before long, he was rumored to have seduced Da Ponte’s adopted,
married daughter, Maria Cooke Bagioli, and blackmailed her husband.
Not so many years later, he would seduce Maria’s fifteen-year
old daughter, Teresa; bringing her before the formidable, Catholic
bishop of New York, "Dagger John" Hughes, to be married
only when she was visibly pregnant.
These
audacious beginnings would set the pattern of Sickles’s life.
Willful nearly to the point of madness, he was nonetheless able
to win over an astonishing number of men and especially women,
thanks to his good looks, dashing manner, and penchant for grand
gestures. Wisely, he decided to become a lawyer, since it was
unlikely he would ever go very long without being hauled into
court, and as a rogue it was natural that he should join the rogues’
own political machine at Tammany Hall.
Sickles
rose quickly at Tammany, which was not surprising, since he was
good stump speaker and capable of anything. On one occasion, he
led a bunch of gang boys in burning the circulars of a rival faction
on the floor of a U.S. post office. Appointed first secretary
to our legation in London, he distinguished himself by introducing
a notorious New York prostitute and madame to Queen Victoria.
This
was reckless in the extreme—but Dan’s poor, Irish constituents
responded by electing him to Congress where, by the eve of the
Civil War, he was a rising young star in the "Hardshell,"
pro-slavery wing of the Democratic party. A confidant of President
James Buchanan, Dan and his beautiful young Teresa cut a wide
swathe through Washington’s social scene.
It
was here, though, that Sickles’s hubris finally got the better
of him. His compulsive womanizing drove Teresa into the arms of
Philip Barton Key, a handsome, romantic young widower who was
Washington’s district attorney, and the son of the author
of The Star-Spangled Banner.
The
affair—and its tragic denouement—is the heart of American
Scoundrel, and Keneally’s reconstruction of it is riveting,
and filled with foreboding: The naïve young lovers, their
secret trysts increasingly obvious to everyone in Washington’s
small, close society. Sickles thundering around the capital with
his usual, demonic energy.
There
is an implication that Sickles deliberately turned a blind eye
on the affair at first, hoping to capitalize on Key’s considerable
political connections. Once this became impossible, Dan wept and
raged impressively—but took care to obtain a signed, witnessed
confession from his poor wife, describing herself as "a wicked
woman." He then recruited a pair of cronies to help him ambush
the unarmed Key out on Lafayette Square, shooting his rival three
times and deliberately firing the fatal shot as Key lay bleeding
on the ground, begging for his life.
It
was the O.J. Simpson case and the Clinton scandals, all wrapped
up into one—and like Simpson, Sickles assembled a legal "dream
team" that overwhelmed an incompetent public prosecutor.
He was acquitted, and briefly became something of a hero. The
grieving, penitent Teresa was packed off to purdah with their
daughter in a lonely country house where, until her death from
tuberculosis at the age of 31, he visited her when he chose, returning
in between to his usual dalliances.
This
was a little too cold-blooded, and Sickles suddenly found himself
a pariah along with his wife. The war saved him; almost overnight
he became a staunch, pro-Union man, raising a brigade of volunteers
and even insinuating himself into Mary Lincoln’s White House
salons and seances.
Before
long, Sickles had his corps. This was was rather like giving Al
Sharpton an armored division in the Gulf War, with predictable
results. After the fiasco at Gettysburg, Sickles would be lauded
for his bravery, but he would never have a battlefield command
again.
Instead,
he stumped through the world more furiously than ever, as if trying,
in Tennessee Williams’s phrase, to make up in motion what
was lost in space. There followed the ambassadorship, the aforementioned
romp with the former Isabella II of Spain; a fortune snatched
from the labyrinthine struggles for control of the Erie railroad,
another term in Congress at the age of seventy-five—even
a new, European family.
Near
the end, though, the prey had begun to turn on him. Dan was bilked
out of much of his money by a portrait-painting princess with
the unlikely name of Lenott Parlaghy. He lobbied incessantly to
rescue his military reputation, even getting himself appointed
chairman of the New York State Monuments Commission. Unsurprisingly,
some $28,000 of the commission’s funds went missing, and
for a time it looked as if the 93-year-old Sickles was going to
end up in Ludlow Street jail.
Eventually,
it all came to seem rather monstrous. Even as he was lavishing
thousands of dollars upon the art of the Princess Parlaghy, for
instance, Sickles allowed his own daughter to waste away in poverty
and alcoholism—making what little living she could by painting
miniatures.
It
makes his a difficult story to tell, and Keneally struggles with
it at times. He tries too hard to be fair to his subject in places—such
as at Gettysburg, where no serious military historian doubts that
Sickles’s advance was a blunder. A more fruitful line of
inquiry might have been to explore what part it played in convincing
Lee that the Union defenses could be breached—thereby tempting
him into Pickett’s disastrous charge on the third day of
the battle.
Keneally’s descriptions of the events leading up to and culminating
in the murder of Barton Key, though, are spellbinding. They give
his story a nearly tragic sweep, that of an American Anna Karenina,
or Madame Bovary—a perspective he underscores by returning
regularly to Teresa, wasting away with her daughter in Bloomingdale
while she waits in vain for her husband. Indeed, one wonders at
times why Keneally, the author of twenty-one previous works of
fiction, including Schindler’s List and The Chant of Jimmie
Blacksmith, did not simply choose to write American Scoundrel
as a novel.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
