AMERICAN SCOUNDREL
The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles
By Thomas Keneally
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
397 pages
”How splendidly they march! It looks like a dress parade,” an onlooker cried as he watched Gen. Daniel Sickles, with full military pomp— flags flying, bugles blowing, drums beating— lead 10,000 men of his III 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 III 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 that he was still alive (they must have been overjoyed), though without most of his right leg. ”Thus did old Dan Sickles leave the war,” Shelby Foote once dryly observed, ”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 biography, American Scoundrel. Mesmerizing, that is, in the same way an automobile accident is. A Medal of Honor winner, a United States 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 likely 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 15-year-old daughter, Teresa, bringing her before the formidable Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, John J. 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 a 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 United States post office. Appointed first secretary to the American Legation in London, he distinguished himself by introducing a notorious New York prostitute and madam to Queen Victoria.
This was reckless in the extreme — but Sickles’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 proslavery wing of the Democratic Party. Sickles, a confidant of President James Buchanan, and his beautiful young Teresa cut a wide swath 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 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 here 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, Sickles 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 on Lafayette Square, and shot his rival three times, deliberately firing the fatal shot as Key lay bleeding on the ground begging for his life. It was the O. J. Simpson case of the time—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 a life of 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 coldblooded, and Sickles soon 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 séances. Before long, Sickles had his corps— 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 romp with the former Queen 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 75; even a new, European family.
Near the end, though, the prey had begun to turn on him. Sickles 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, Sickles’s exploits all come to seem rather monstrous—even as he was lavishing thousands of dollars upon the art of Princess Parlaghy, for instance, he allowed his own daughter to waste away in poverty and alcoholism — and the monstrousness makes this a difficult story to tell. Keneally struggles at times. He tries too hard to be fair to his subject in places — as with the Battle of Gettysburg, although 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.
However, Keneally’s descriptions of the events leading up to and culminating in the murder of Key are spellbinding. They give the story a nearly tragic sweep—a perspective Keneally underscores by returning regularly to Teresa, wasting away with her daughter while she waits for her husband to visit. Indeed, one wonders at times why Keneally, the author of 21 works of fiction, including Schindler’s List and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, did not simply write American Scoundrel as a novel. The answer probably lies in Sickles himself, who was too lacking in any morally redemptive qualities to rise to the level of tragedy. Instead, Keneally catches him at a telling moment, at the age of 60, returning to set up house in New York after already having estranged himself from a second wife and family: ”No record appeared on those walls of what had been lost, unless it was the well-known photograph of his fibula and tibia, a favorite exhibit on display in the Army Medical Museum in Washington, which in the 19th century was one of the must-see attractions of the capital.”