With more than three thousand men recruited by mid-May, Dan and Wiley were suddenly punished. Governor Morgan himself was at the time under a peculiar pressure from county officials, who were faced with the imperative to raise their own quota of men, and the Excelsior Brigade had cut into their capacity to do so. Morgan telegraphed Dan to disband all but eight of his forty companies. An astonished Dan saw this as a Republican plot. And the waiting men of the Excelsior, in the lofts and walk-ups he visited off Broadway, indicated that they did not want to be disbanded to return to Pittsburgh or Boston or upstate New York as rejected warriors.
Sickles now made an extraordinary decision, one as interesting from the point of view of ideology as of personality. While a congressman, he had been a defender of states’ and even cities’ rights. Obviously, Sumter had changed all that. The present emergency—and, the unkind would say, the desire for rank—drove him to a new vision.
He went again to Washington, but with the proposition of meeting that very different being Lincoln. A gulf of politics and nature divided him from the new President. For a start, the President was if anything a conscientious family man; some said a family-dominated and wife-dominated man. Whereas Dan had barely been home for a month. To Lincoln, his emotionally uncomfortable domus, including his difficult wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, constituted nonetheless a guide to a national order and a unit of the national fraternity, the great polity of America writ small. The reality of family was thus for President Lincoln not disconnected from the public man he was. Whereas Dan saw little connection between the public and the private.
A man re-creating himself as an acting brigadier general and with something to offer, Dan reached a Willard’s full of officers in new blue uniforms and, through appointment, the White House. This was probably managed because of the Union’s hunger for personnel, or there may have been an interest in rural Lincoln to see the great urban scalawag who had shot Key dead, just down there on the corner of Lafayette Square. To Dan, and to many other Easterners, Abraham Lincoln was a strange figure, a creature from the frontier, hewn—it seemed—out of the knotty wood of some primeval forest. He pretended to none of Dan’s urban polish, but he proved genial and he heard Dan out. Dan’s proposition was that since his men were responding to a federal emergency, the federal government should accept them directly, without state intervention, as United States volunteers. This was a heretical idea even for Lincoln. The raising of militias had always been a state matter, and it was peculiar that Lincoln should attempt to negate a proposition to the contrary from a Tammany Hall Hardshell lawyer.
According to what Dan later told his chaplain, Twichell, the Republican Lincoln saw the peril more quickly than Sickles did. “What will the governors say if I raise regiments without their having a hand in it?” he asked. Dan, never without a constitutional reference, urged Lincoln to consider the authority contained under the head of the Power to Raise Armies.
It was a confusing and frantic time for Lincoln, but he was attracted to the worldly little New Yorker who wanted to bring his men into action for the Union. Lincoln called in his Secretary of War, Simon Cameron (a man derisively called the Winnebago Chief because he was alleged to have cheated an Indian tribe in a supply contract). Lincoln and Cameron ordered that Dan keep his men together until they could be inducted by United States officers.21
Dan and Wiley both had reason to hope that would occur soon, since the War Department would then pick up the expense of the brigade. The bills already accumulating would take years to settle. Wiley had commandeered cooks for the brigade from among the chefs at Delmonico’s, and, working in inadequate kitchens in side streets, they tried to turn out enough food for the men. The pressure on sanitation was enormous; many of the men lacked a change of clothing, or even soap and razors, and became so hairy and bedraggled that the citizenry were frightened of them. Drunkenness was common, since saloons abounded. But Dan made an arrangement with the owner of a bathhouse-cum-barbershop on Crosby Street, who agreed to bathe, shave, and cut the hair of the recruits for ten cents per man.
The state authorities in Albany were angry at Dan for going straight to Lincoln, and gave him notice to vacate the militia armory. He moved his men to the Fashion racetrack, near the present-day La Guardia Airport, where they lived in what tents Wiley had been able to find and in the stables and jockeys’ changing rooms. He was next offered a more permanent campsite on Staten Island, near Fort Wadsworth, where he and his men could wait until the issue of mustering-in was settled.22
Even by the standards of politics, Dan found it a prodigiously expensive and time-absorbing operation to move three thousand men, their tents, and their cooking equipment from the racetrack, but he and Wiley attended to it with thorough energy and brotherly cooperation. The camp they found themselves in, as the weather warmed, was a low reedy stretch of shoreline facing east, toward Brooklyn, and south, toward the Atlantic. Dan called it Camp Scott. Here, as the summer of 1861 came on, Dan, with his usual resourcefulness, acquired from P. T. Barnum on credit a large circus tent to accommodate some of his men who still lacked canvas to sleep under. There were disadvantages to the location. This was malarial ground, and the dusk was full of the whine of mosquitoes. The men had a mere three hundred rifles, and companies took turns drilling.
Dan showed a daily enthusiasm for commanding and training his mass of young men, and did not fear being intimately bound to them as he feared being bound to women and their homely yearnings and habits of dependence. He was able to exercise strong command without evoking resentment, and the daily routine of reveille, roll call, morning and afternoon drill, surgeon’s call, guard mounting, evening parade, and retreat was insisted upon. His men began to notice the beauties of this low shore, the lines of linden trees that divided farm from farm, the green fields at the verge of which their rows of white tents stood. Dan grew to like his camp and would later describe the scene as he remembered it: “the exquisite sunset scene in old Camp Scott, the long lines of Union blue in evening’s dress parade, the ever welcome visits of friends.”
The visiting friends did not include his wife and daughter. Some observers thought this was a case of Dan’s having been given back an active life, one by which he might expiate the mess of 1859, of which he did not care to be reminded. Whereas Teresa was still stuck there, tethered to the scandals like an ancient Greek maiden to a rock. As Harper’s Weekly had earlier said of Dan, he could show “a resolution which amounted to sternness.” That degree of resolution meant that Teresa did not belong in the camp. She was not invited even on the national holiday. George Sickles belonged to this new landscape of promise, however, and often visited and undertook legal and business tasks relating to the Excelsior.23
Teresa spent that wartime July Fourth at Bloomingdale. Her father, his friend Mr. Tosticaldi, Mr. Phillips, and a young German gentleman came and remained all day. Teresa entertained them, she told her friend Florence, with walking, “seesawing on the whirligig, pitching, racing, riding.” There was a fine display of fireworks over Bloomingdale in the evening, and then a bonfire. Teresa and her mother played an old game: “I slapped Ma (in fun) and she threw water on me.” A water fight developed. “Mrs. Nesi [a visitor] and myself were drenched—the hall near my door very much like a small lake.” Running to get away, Teresa had slipped near the room they called the Applewood Room, and fallen, and “as for my body it is a mass of black and blue spots.”
In her fondness for animals, around that time she had acquired a new bulldog; she had to be content in large part with animal company. She had as well a black-and-tan terrier on order. “I am also to have two peacocks and a monkey, and what after that I do not know—not a ‘baby’ I promise you.” It seemed she did not see Dan sufficiently for that. The war had claimed him.
Chevalier Wikoff had been down to see the new occupants of the White House himself, and during visits to Teresa, for whom he felt what seemed an avuncular affection, he told her about Mr. Lincoln’s wife, something of a Tartar,
fiery but amusing. Wikoff obviously appealed to Mary Todd Lincoln. Whereas Abraham Lincoln made a virtue out of his gawky, frontier ways, Mrs. Lincoln was somewhat embarrassed by her own unworldliness and looked to cosmopolitan gentlemen like the chevalier to remedy it. There was no question, in the minds of some of the White House staff, such as the President’s secretaries John G. Nico-lay, John Hay, and William O. Stoddard, that she was putting together a salon of disreputable fellows, whom she met and conversed with in the Blue Room at the White House. They considered Wikoff one of the disreputables.
Yet now, when Wikoff visited Teresa, he brought White House gossip. Teresa might have felt some sympathy for Mary Todd Lincoln, who was also socially vulnerable, but with Mrs. Lincoln it was because many Washington women considered her both unpolished and unconventional. Her husband was afraid of her temperament and was always saying, “Now then, Mother.” She was haunted by anxiety about her children’s health, having already lost her second son, Eddie, when he was less than four, to infantile tuberculosis.
Wikoff was always welcome at Bloomingdale, even when he reiterated for Teresa’s delight his staple tales as well as his White House impressions. In modern times Wikoff’s confessions might have earned him a reputation as something of a stalker and made him the subject of court injunctions to keep his distance. But the world had been engrossed by the melodrama of his obsession for a young American woman named Miss Jane Gamble, and the places, including the San Andrea prison in Genoa, to which his dedication to her had led him. His courtship had taken place between London and Paris, exotic locations for such yearning American hearts as that of Teresa Sickles and, indeed, that of Mary Todd Lincoln, whose chief experience of life had been her Lexington, Kentucky, childhood and her Springfield, Illinois, married life. Hundreds of thousands of Mary Todd Lincolns had similarly found Wikoff’s story engrossing.
One can well imagine the operatic light in which Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Sickles cast the prison and the malign British consul who had persuaded his beloved to give evidence designed to consign Wikoff there.
These were the tales with which the lonely Mrs. Sickles and out-of-her-depth Mrs. Lincoln were diverted by the chevalier. Of course, they had both read the book and knew that after fifteen months, Wikoff emerged, sadder and enriched by wisdom, but there was nothing like hearing these anecdotes from the mouth of the author. And if such tales did not suffice, whom did he not know in Europe? Why, King Louis Phillippe, Lamartine the poet-president, Thiers, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Louis Napoleon, and Lord Palmerston, all of them his intimates.24 Dan, of course, could have diverted his wife with enriching stories of remarkable Americans and even of love, but his anecdotal expansiveness did not for the moment extend to her.
When he went to see Lincoln a second time, the President cheerfully remarked, “Your camp has gone all to pieces, I hear.” Dan claimed otherwise. His men wanted to come south; that was all. Lincoln said that if Dan could hold the men together for just a few days, a mustering officer would come “and take you all in out of the cold.”
It was mid-July before the quarrel between Washington and Albany over Sickles’s men was resolved. Two regular army officers delighted Dan when they arrived at Camp Scott, where they were made strenuously welcome by the men now mustered in as United States volunteers. Dan’s rank as a provisional general of brigade, subject to confirmation by the Senate, was further bolstered by this event. The cry “On to Richmond!” resonated over the reed beds and linden trees of Camp Scott. The Excelsior men believed they would be just in time. The daily papers reported how Union troops were harrying General Pierre Beauregard’s Rebels south of Centreville, Virginia.
But there was now an economic impediment to their becoming warriors. The total debt of the Excelsior Brigade, to the point where the federal government took it over was, in Wiley’s estimate, $283,000, and writs were beginning to pour in from providers, outfitters, produce merchants. A number of merchants secured judgments against Dan, and he was not permitted to leave New York until they were paid. But he was an expert in debt management. With some confidence, he and Wiley went into conference with these creditors; because the members were officially United States volunteers, the brigade’s debts were to be handled in part by the War Department. But as late as May 1, 1862, a Chamber Street merchant was still urging Sickles to approach the Secretary of War about paying his “fair and reasonable” bill.
The creditors were helped to accommodate Dan by the events of July 21, when the first, disastrous battle of Bull Run was fought and lost. Edwin Stanton, who would be Secretary of War before the year was out, wrote from Washington, “The capture of Washington now seems to be inevitable—during the whole of Monday and Tuesday it might have been taken without any resistance. The rout, overthrow, and utter demoralization of the whole army is complete.”25
The day after the battle, the Excelsior Brigade broke camp, caught ferries to Manhattan, and got on the train for Washington. If Teresa had looked forward to a time when the preparation of the Excelsior was complete and Dan might have some free time, this whirlwind departure put paid to it. Wiley was, by some accounts, left disgruntled. He was quoted as declaring, “So he [Sickles] marched off with three regiments, and paraded them before Lincoln, and said he had done all this out of his own pocket. There were piles of judgments against him in the offices. He had no more to do with the brigade than the receiving of the recruits.” It would be fifteen months before Wiley could get a final settlement with the creditors, which he did by calling a meeting at the Astor House and again referring the bills to the Secretary of War. “I left him on account of it,” Wiley was ultimately reported as saying, “denounced him then, and have done so since.”26
Camped in meadows outside Washington, General Sickles’s men were part of the Third Army Corps, and their divisional commander was a brisk, profane professional named Joe Hooker. Dan observed that Hooker had the customary West Point graduate’s attitude toward civilian and, indeed, political generals, an attitude no doubt compounded by what Hooker knew of Dan’s notorious murder trial. Yet Dan was not easily depressed by contrary opinion and would always remember this early war period as a golden time. It was delightful to be a leader, and he reflected to his men his joyous sense of being a newborn warrior, while they reflected back their combined sense of their identities as members of the legions of righteousness. He was so happy at the way his men settled down in their encampments that he speculated that had they been available for Bull Run, they might have turned the tide. He was becoming a serious student of military affairs, and in his papers are found pages of memoranda that indicate it. He made notes, for example, that a red over a white light displayed at night meant that friendly troops had occupied this place, whereas a white over a red meant “Prepare to disembark,” and a red over a green meant “Move forward to protect the landing.” He noted that the signal flags for B and O signified “These batteries are ours!” while F, L, and R signaled “Fire a little to the right of your last shot.” The signal numbers for Hooker’s headquarters were 1142; for his own, 1132; for the federal balloon that operated in the area, 231.27
Washington, which he regularly visited from the encampment, was in some ways the Washington he had known. The West End still threatened to become “one vast slough of impassable mud.” The Capitol was still unfinished, with no goddess of liberty atop it—only scaffolding and a crane for lifting building materials. Tiber Creek, which, it had been planned, would be pumped to the top of the Capitol and fall in a cascade from near the dome, “stretched,” in the words of one Washingtonian, “in ignominious stagnation across the city, oozing at last through green scum and slime into a still more ignominious canal, the receptacle of all abominations, the pest breeder and disgrace of the city.” Especially so now that the city was crammed with soldiers and their sanitary needs. There were forts on every hilltop. Shed hospitals and camps covered acres in every suburb. Soldiers were entrenched at every gateway. Churches, museums, and private mansions were filled w
ith officers—as they would soon be with the wounded and dying of both armies. Bull Run had been merely a foretaste, and even now the streets were full of ambulances, and people hurried by to escape the noise of groans and screams.28
Wikoff was eager to introduce his friend Dan to the new family in the White House, whom Wikoff now knew well, particularly the President’s wife. Mary Todd Lincoln was, at the time Dan first met her, a volatile woman engaged with varying levels of daring in redecorating the White House. One of Mr. Lincoln’s secretaries named Mary Todd Lincoln the Hell-cat. She had, said another, extreme mood swings, one day being considerate, kindly, generous, hopeful, on another unreasonable, irritable, despondent. She possessed the instability that characterized the child she actually was—one who had felt orphaned by the early death of a mother and by a father’s marriage to a cold stepmother. She was hungry for the world’s approbation, and, like Teresa, she did not have it.
For one thing, she had alienated the capital by failing to buy the refurbishing materials from Washington merchants. She was in a city where she needed tolerant friends when she did absurd things, but her temperament ensured that she did not always have them. When, later in the year, Mr. Lincoln became appalled at the amount she was spending in New York on lamps, carpets, wall hangings, and crystal, she strenuously undertook to economize by selling off old White House furniture. She also sacked White House staff to meet the bills. Driven by a sudden panic over “poverty to come” after the presidency, she decided at one time, in extreme depression, to sell the manure from the executive stables. Throughout 1861, she involved herself in shady financial practices with John Watt, her chief gardener, who controlled the payroll of the outside staff. He padded his expense account and, by kicking back funds to Mary Todd Lincoln, turned her into a co-conspirator. Watt also bought the provisions for the White House, so it was easy for him to sign vouchers for nonexistent purchases, especially after he and the First Lady got away with drawing an inflated $1,000 invoice for buying seeds, fruit trees, and bushes from a Philadelphia nursery. In reality the purchase had cost much less, and Mrs. Lincoln Todd used the spare money to pay for further purchasing expeditions to New York.