Even Mrs. Lincoln’s dresses attracted contrary comment. She dressed egregiously—her fashion exemplar was the Empress Eugénie of France—and was as skillful as modern notables are at finding donors for her dresses. In this area as well she built up bills that made Lincoln flinch, but he seemed to avoid more than occasional contrary comment.
To add to her perceived and real improprieties, the gardener Watt was also a Southern sympathizer, as many said the First Lady was. Indeed, a number of her Kentucky brothers and half brothers were fighting for the Confederacy, and her half sister, Emilie, had married a Rebel officer named Helm, who would become a Confederate general.
Such were the domestic realities of the Lincoln White House about the time Dan first became a familiar of Mary Todd’s and Abraham’s. Mary Todd would receive her visitors on her salon evenings in the oval Blue Room on the ground floor, and to this chamber, undergoing redecoration, Wikoff took General Sickles to meet her. Mary Todd Lincoln served as a good example of Dan’s capacity for social charm. She was at once enchanted by his urbane manner and conversation, his exemplary clothing, his well-tended features, and the possibility of danger that he bespoke. To a woman from Kentucky, the idea of what he had done to his wife’s lover was not so great an impediment to friendship— Kentuckians were accustomed to exacting their own justice. And Lincoln was complacent—many believed too much so—about the people Mrs. Lincoln invited to her soirées, so long as they made her happy.
Dan noticed early in his conversations with Mrs. Lincoln that she had quite an interest in spiritualism, séances, and spirit-rapping. This was not considered an abnormal enthusiasm for that era. It was surmised that she had had her first experience of these practices through the voodoo of the household slaves in Kentucky, where she grew up. Then, in Illinois, there had been a string of traveling white prophets, telling the future and getting in touch with the dead from the stage of the Masonic Hall. As well, Henry Wikoff had enchanted her with a full-blooded account of being hypnotized by a seer in Romania, and of the visions he had beheld as a result. This special interest and obsession of Mrs. Lincoln’s would come to be an embarrassment to the President and to have a significance for Dan Sickles.
Lincoln himself would sometimes look in on the Blue Room soirées, entering the parlors of his house somewhat like a lost soul. He made the acquaintance again of General Sickles and took further interest in him and his brigade. The Reverend Joseph Twichell would remember as a golden day the one that summer when the Excelsior marched past the White House to be reviewed by the President and General Sickles.29
Dan and the brigade spent nearly three months, July to October, near Washington, but in that time he did not invite his wife to visit him, even though she could easily have been accommodated at Willard’s. In the meantime, his relationship with the Lincolns continued well, and his relationship with his divisional commander, General Joe Hooker, poorly. And he had still not been confirmed in the rank of brigadier general. In that regard, he went to see Stanton, who was now working down the street from the White House as special counsel to Secretary of War Simon Cameron, and would soon replace him. Dan also asked Wikoff to have his old enemy James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald write a piece on what a suitable fellow he was for confirmation. Dan knew Wikoff was already passing positive news on Mary Todd Lincoln to the Herald, for which the Lincolns were most grateful.
In October, still under veteran Joe Hooker, Dan and his brigade were sent down to the lower Potomac, in Maryland opposite Acquia Creek, Virginia, and on the low shore of the river. Dan got into trouble for having too many ambulance wagons in his line of march, but Hooker resented above all the way Dan could ride up to Washington to see the First Lady. His demeanor always improved when Dan craftily told him that “the President spoke warmly and enthusiastically of you.” The presence of Hooker and Dan’s troops on the lower Potomac made it less possible for the Confederates to attempt a blockade of the S-bent river between Charles County and Rock Point. But it was a tedious and muddy life down there.
Laura, now aged seven, wrote to her father in late October, somewhat in the adoring mode Teresa herself generally adopted. Teresa may, in fact, have influenced the child’s handwriting, which was firm, intelligent, and determined. “I hope dear Papa that you will write just as often as you can, since we are all so happy when your letters are received.” The child said that he would be amused by the new dog, Jack; he was so playful and funny, and could not be spared to be sent to Dan. As for the aged dog Nero, said Laura, they hadn’t seen him for five days and feared he had died. The child recorded that she and her mama and grandmama had spent the day with Grandma Sickles on Wednesday; Mrs. Sickles and George were very fond grandparents. “How very fine your Soldiers and Horses must appear and how glad I should be to see them. Will you let us all come to see you one of these days? Grandma Sickles says she intends to make you a visit. Oh how happy we shall be if you can come to us at Xmas! Accept an affectionate embrace and 10,000 kisses dear good Papa from your Laura.”
His mother, Susan Marsh Sickles, had sent a locket with her miniature in it to serve as his protection and shield, and wished that he would write to his father and persuade him to take both of them to visit him in Washington. Teresa had been amply forgiven by that good Christian and loyal mother Susan Sickles, in part because of grandparental concern for Laura, and in part because of Teresa’s own character. “Teresa tells me you have not the shirts, I mean the nightshirts I made for you,” his mother accused him. “I think you had better send for them. They will be so warm for the winter.”30
About the only contacts with the enemy Dan’s men experienced were shouted exchanges of insults when on picket duty on the riverbank. Early in November, Hooker’s division was ordered a considerable distance upriver nearer to Washington, to an area named Budds Ferry. Dan martially called his brigade’s area Camp Stanton, but the men thought they were having less and less to do with the war. To enable New York State to meet its quota, Dan’s 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th United States Volunteers were handed back to Governor Morgan and renamed by the War Department the 70th, 71st, 72nd, 73rd, and 74th New York Regiments.31
Dan’s camp was enlivened that month by the arrival of the federal balloonist Professor Lowe, aboard a naval tug on which sat his balloon and all its paraphernalia. Dan was absolutely enchanted with this apparatus, and so stimulated that one evening he himself took off in the huge machine with the portrait of George Washington on its side, and observed the mass of enemy campfires on the south bank of the river around Dumfries and Occoquan. In following days he took a number of other flights, and was particularly pleased when the Rebels fruitlessly fired at the craft, having become overexcited at seeing his general’s epaulettes through telescopes.32
It was cold and misty on this stretch of the Potomac when Dan’s friend Edwin Stanton was appointed Secretary of War, replacing Cameron. Dan knew better than most how to handle Stanton’s brusqueness, and hoped for good things from it. But he was nervous enough about his coming confirmation to approach his friend Wikoff.
My Dear Wikoff:
What is the news? Of course I am exceedingly anxious to know what the Senate is doing. . .. Did Mrs. L. [Lincoln] think of the senators? Remember me to her very cordially.
As for the soldiers he commanded, Dan assured the chevalier that the Excelsior definitely wanted him for their general. Except for a fraction of his 3rd Regiment, “there is the sharpest, possible solicitude from my confirmation, a feeling that is shared by the [Naval] Squadron in the river near me. When the news comes their bunting will be all out for a holiday & my camps will ring with huzzas.”
But he was uneasily aware of Republican newspapers that suggested that the troops raised by him and other Democrats would march over to Jefferson Davis in the first battle in which they were engaged. There were certainly senators who agreed with this proposition. He had done his homework and knew, for instance, that the abolitionist Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts would probabl
y oppose him because he thought Dan occupied himself and his soldiers in hunting for runaway slaves in Maryland, whereas Senators Kennedy and Pearce of Maryland would probably vote against him because he refused to send his men Negro-catching. To hell with the slaveholders, was his attitude. He agreed with the sentiments of Hooker. “I am a brigadier general of United States Volunteers,” Joe Hooker complained about the sullen farmers, the border secessionists whose land surrounded his camp, and who came looking for their contraband slaves, “and no nigger catcher.” Dan Sickles’s own dislike of slave-owning, pro-secessionist Marylanders made them less willing to supply produce and comforts to the camp. So be it! These days he had no time for the institution or its participants, on either side of the Potomac.
He had Wikoff inquire of Stanton whether Stanton would give him a chance at some action. “My men have been looking at the enemy and living in the mud for three months. I cannot endure it much longer.”33 As, on the Potomac, Dan yearned for validation and for action, in New York Teresa awaited her validation, the other form of confirmation which only Dan could give her, perhaps in the form of an invitation to Washington. One day at the general’s side would restore her and bring social benefits to Laura. In her rustic lassitude in Bloomingdale, Teresa must have half envied her former Washington friend and hostess Rose O’Neal Greenhow, as a woman who, though considered a traitor by some, had at least had an effect upon events. Even before the war, Mrs. Greenhow had been a Southern secret agent, to the extent of being an intelligence gatherer for an officer named Colonel Thomas Jordan, who was preparing a Southern intelligence network before the conflict began. It was apparent now why, unlike many Southerners such as Mrs. Clay, who had in the last months before the war come to specialize in cutting Northerners dead, Rose had consorted with so many Northern friends. She was believed to be the lover of the antislavery Senator Wilson of Massachusetts (the same man Dan feared would not vote for him), and certainly had the good senator on a string. Early in the war, Colonel Keyes, General Scott’s military secretary, was cultivated by Rose Green-how, as was Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon, and from the very start of the conflict, she used a Southern cipher to communicate intelligence to Colonel Jordan, now General Beauregard’s chief of staff.
At the time of Rose Greenhow’s arrest, she had been under suspicion by the federal authorities for some time, and General George McClellan had complained, “She knows my plans better than Lincoln or the Cabinet and has four times compelled me to change them.” After the Confederate success at Bull Run, she received an official letter of thanks from General Beauregard for her crucial contribution to the Rebel victory. She would later boast of having sent to Richmond the Senate Military Committee’s map of the Union Army’s proposed route into the South, and her arrest on August 23, 1861, had been due to the capture of a letter of hers with a haul of other papers and maps at Fairfax County Courthouse after a Confederate retreat. Greenhow was detained at the same time as Senator William Gwinn, who had also been something of a recruiting agent on behalf of Southern intelligence, and, after a period of house arrest, was placed with her nine-year-old daughter in the Old Capital Prison. As Teresa waited unregarded in Bloomingdale, Rose Greenhow was a heroine to many and an impressive woman to all, and was now engaged in her much-publicized and defiant ten-month stint in prison. It would enhance her legend but begin to erode her famous beauty. In the end, the government could think of nothing other to do with her than to send her south under a parole. Much later, having visited Europe on a mission for the Confederacy, she would drown when trying to run the Yankee blockade of the South.34
To Teresa, all Dan’s needs seemed to be encompassed for the moment entirely in his desire for a general’s star. And though Wikoff was still a friend and helper in that regard, he was suddenly of less use to Sickles. For Wikoff had embarrassed the Lincolns and was in trouble with the legislators. Late the previous year, James Bennett had been able to publish in the Herald embargoed extracts from a speech Abraham Lincoln intended to give before Congress. The House Judiciary Committee gathered evidence that Wikoff had filed segments of the purloined presidential speech at the telegraph office in Washington for transmission to the Herald. The committee members summoned him to appear before them on February 10, and Wikoff asked General Dan Sickles to come from Budds Ferry and appear as his legal counsel.
He was also less officially representing the White House, since many suspected Wikoff had acquired the speech by way of the President’s wife. Sickles was known to be so popular with Mrs. Lincoln that somehow his appointment as counsel confirmed, in the minds of many, that there was a White House clique around Mrs. Lincoln who would close ranks and protect her from the disgrace some were only too willing to visit on her. Appearing before the committee in the Capitol, Wikoff refused to name his source. He was, he said, “under an obligation of strict secrecy.” So the sergeant-at-arms of the Congress was ordered to arrest him and detain him in the Old Capital Prison with the Confederate spies—to many of whom, of course, he was an old friend. Over the next day, as one journalist described it, Sickles “vibrated” between Wikoff’s place of imprisonment, the White House, and the house of Mrs. Lincoln’s chief gardener, John Watt. Sickles was stitching a deal that was meant to save Mrs. Lincoln. Then he himself was summoned as a witness, disclaimed any knowledge of the source, and was threatened with imprisonment. But he had already arranged that all blame would go elsewhere. He suggested that the Judiciary Committee summon Watt, the White House gardener.
Mr. Watt testified that he had seen the document on the President’s desk, had perused it, remembered it—for he claimed to have an extraordinary memory—and recounted it to Wikoff the next day, word for word. Nobody believed his story, and everyone believed he had been levered by Dan into making this preposterous claim so that blame could be deflected from the President’s wife.
The hearing had reached an embarrassing stage for Mr. Lincoln, who wrote to the members of the committee and asked them not to bring any further disgrace on him. Wikoff was instantly released. Mary had always been loyal to Watt, even though one of his gardeners sported the blue cockade of the Confederacy while he tended to the White House vegetables. But during his visits to her during the committee hearings, Dan had persuaded her to give him up. With the First Lady’s help, Dan gathered evidence of Watt’s frauds and used them to intimidate him and offer him a choice of prison or the army. He took the latter, lost his job, and, despite his Southern sympathies, was made to enlist in the Union Army.35
One upshot of all this was that Wikoff was no longer as welcome at the White House—this was probably Lincoln’s rather than Mary’s desire—though Dan Sickles was, if anything, closer to both of them. Lincoln and his wife could not, however, directly vote for his confirmation, and many senators so disliked Mrs. Lincoln that Dan’s saving of her could hurt him with the men who would either confirm or deny his rank as a general officer.
Fixing the presidential speech crisis was the sort of work Dan was excited by, but back at Budds Ferry he was full of a restless energy that the regimen of daily parades and drills could not satisfy. Dan went across the river one night in a boat supplied by the naval squadron to land on the opposing shore and observe the enemy. “Although myself rather near-sighted, I soon became sufficiently accustomed to the darkness to distinguish groups of men. . .. They did not seem to be fulfilling the ordinary duty of pickets.” Perhaps as a result of this initial probe, Dan was at last asked by Hooker’s command to lead a thousand-man reconnaissance in force across the river. Having made the crossing by dark in a flotilla of Union boats, Dan found it possible to set off inland. Near Stafford Courthouse, as day broke, the thousand-man force ran into an outpost of James Longstreet’s corps—Dan would often be paired with General Longstreet in the future—and heard the racket of an exchange of angry shots. Two of Dan’s scouts rushed back up the road to tell him that he was up against two regiments, but he ordered a continued advance. “A dense column of smoke was seen,” he would rep
ort, “and it was soon learned that the enemy in retreating through the town had set fire to some buildings which contained their stores.” Satisfied with his foray, Dan retreated back to the river. Private Alexander Christ of Company F of the 70th New York was the only man wounded, “and the poor fellow had a hard time in the improvised ambulance over the rough roads to the landing,” and—like most wounded NCOs and privates—a hard life ahead. Dan wrote an interesting comment on the effect of this first skirmish upon him. “This was the first time that I or any of my men had been under fire. . .. I was surprised that I’d taken it so coolly. Mind you, I do not say this boastingly, but simply as a man reviewing his sensations under certain conditions.” He was well on his way to becoming what a small proportion of soldiers became, to becoming what Hooker already was: a lover of war as the highest state of malehood, as a measure of himself and his young men.36
In late winter, Camp Stanton, to which Dan always returned from his adventures into Virginia, his Washington trial, his visits to the White House, had been reduced by downfalls of rain to mud. It requires little imagination to foresee the civilized services Teresa could have rendered such a camp: her irrepressible jolliness at sharing the general’s tent, with its board floor; her willingness to emerge at dawn like an Italian-American version of Columbia in a shawl, taking coffee through the Potomac miasmas to the men. Other officers would frequently employ their wives in such roles throughout the war—Libby Meagher was, in the inactive winters, to be found in Virginia, at Brigadier General Meagher’s side. Of course, no shred of compounding scandal attended Mrs. Meagher. But it is unlikely that the men of the Excelsior Brigade, in their quagmire encampment on the Potomac, would have been mortified to see Teresa walking the duckboards, her skirts lifted to avoid the mud. If ever the Excelsior needed Teresa, it was in the ennui of January and early February of 1862.