It was a study, said Dan, to see the men’s faces during the inspection, as the President, an extremely clumsy horseman, rode from right to left of the line. “But,” Dan stated in undisguised affection, “if a smile played on their lips, there was love in their eyes, as they rested on that sad, earnest, good face most of them beheld for the first and last time.” At the end of the review, Dan invited Lincoln to speak to the men. The President was uneasy about that. “These men are going again to battle, where I cannot be with them.” But as he departed he called Sickles aside and said, “Tell them I think I have never seen a better show.”7
Now known as the Second Division of Hooker’s Third Corps, Dan’s eight thousand were sent forward on November 1 into the Virginian hinterland along the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, where they rebuilt bridges, repaired tracks, and guarded the road south. Then they became part of the force that a new general, Ambrose Burnside, moved as far south as the broad Rappahannock, opposite the delightful town of Fredericksburg, nearly halfway between Washington and Richmond. Sickles’s division was used in a support role on a crucial day of conflict there, and could again thank the gods of battle for that. For the Confederates had dug in on the heights above the town, called Marye’s Heights, and would have one of their greatest successes of the war on December 13, repulsing the Union charge. The brigade of Dan’s friend Meagher had a large and tragic part in the fight. “Of the 2,200 men I led into action the day before,” Thomas Francis Meagher would write the next day of his Irishmen, “218 now appeared on the ground that morning.”8
But Dan knew that adequate perils to life and limb awaited him, especially now, when the Union had been so roundly thrashed once more. In a war in which generals commanded troops on a limited front, unaided by such later tools of battle as telephone or wireless, Dan needed to stay close to the action and gain a visual sense of all that was happening in his divisional area. On top of that, he was required by gallantry to expose himself to fire. As one commentator said, generals “carried this aspect of Victorian culture to its counterproductive extreme.” Over a hundred Union generals would die in battle.9
The Union troops occupied the hills by the Rappahannock, Stafford Heights, for the rest of the winter. Gradually, minds accustomed themselves to the awful losses of Fredericksburg, and there was room for socializing. Officers’ wives visited—predictably, Teresa did not. Two of Dan’s favorite associates in the camp were a Westphalian nobleman, Prince Felix Salm-Salm, and his fine-featured, vigorous little wife, Princess Salm-Salm, before marriage a circus or vaudeville performer, Agnes Jory of Vermont. Agnes had met the prince in 1862, when he came to America to fight for the Union, and had been attracted by the old-world bashfulness of the German nobleman. They were married in St. Patrick’s Church on Fifth Street, Washington, on August 30, 1862, and, against the tradition of her upbringing, she became a Catholic. A devoted and spirited spouse, she proved her fidelity to her marriage vows by following her prince through innumerable subsequent wars. In this war he commanded the 8th New York Infantry, and his princess from Vermont had been with him in the most advanced position in the Shenandoah Valley earlier in the year, had retreated to Chantilly with him, and had spent Christmas 1862 with him on the Rappahannock. Indeed, all that in a kinder world Teresa could have been for Dan, and all she might have been with a word, was incarnated in what the Princess Salm-Salm was to Prince Felix. She described herself as living with her husband in a hospital tent trimmed with woollen damask, and decorated with a carpet and sofa and a large mirror. By New Year’s, she said, “there was scarcely the officer who had not his wife, mother, sister or cousin with him.”
Though Dan was one of the officers in camp who lacked a publicly acknowledged woman visitor, an unsigned adoring yet intelligent letter later written by a lover of Dan’s from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, indicated he was not celibate in the winter of 1862–63. The letter came from a woman to whom Dan had been attentive and generous in what was either her spinsterhood or widowhood. She addressed him as “My dearest general” and declared, as a result of some “inclosure” he had sent, “You are goodness itself. . ..” This unnamed gentlewoman would by the spring of 1864 have given birth to Dan’s child—“our little Julia”—but despite this intimacy, she felt the same anxiety as Teresa about her inability to grasp his inner nature. “I would dearly like for you once in a long while to open the door of the inner sanctuary and give me—your dear one—a glimpse of all the wondrous things. . .. I am beginning to want so much to see you—Philosophy lasts weeks but when it comes to months, time drags.” Her care in not signing the letter means that even though it now sits on microfilm in the Library of Congress, she has been able to evade our curiosity as to who she was, and what befell “our little Julia.” But since there is no further reference to the child Julia in the entirety of Dan’s papers, it may be that the child died in infancy. For one thing can be said for Dan, on the basis of reading his correspondence: he tried as a matter of honor to make appropriate financial arrangements for friends and lovers, and a love child who survived would have claimed a space in the documents he left.
In any case, whatever his amorous arrangements that winter of 1862–63, his sociability lit up the camp in Stafford Heights. On New Year’s Eve, in a huge tent decorated with flags, garlands, flowers, and Chinese lanterns, supper was laid for two hundred people, and Dan sent for Delmonico himself to come down from New York to supervise the banquet. The Princess Salm-Salm declared, “The wines and liquors were in correspondence with the rest, and no less, I suppose, the bill to be paid.” The former journalist and French nobleman Colonel Régis de Trobriand agreed that Dan did things “in great style. . .. The collation which he had ordered from Washington was abundant in choice. The champagne and whiskey ran in streams. I wish I could add that they were used in moderation.” De Trobriand’s comments are a good guide to the way Sickles was estimated as a general. The Frenchman believed his divisional commander was one of the striking figures of the war, “gifted in a high degree with that multiplicity of faculties which had given rise to the saying that a Yankee is ready for anything. . .. Gay, prepossessing, spirituel, he rarely fails to make a good impression, even upon those who may be least prepossessed in his favor.”10
By St. Patrick’s Day, the army was still in its camp by the Rappahannock. It was now the duty of General Meagher’s Irish Brigade to lay on the celebrations for the entire army, and Dan attended that festive day so associated with the Democratic Party. He found Meagher dressed in the manner of a member of the Irish gentry—in a tall white beaver hat, a blue swallowtail coat with brass buttons, white buckskin breeches, and black top boots. Dan joined Hooker and Meagher and other general officers at a prodigious lunch served under a marquee, and then attended the planned race meeting. In terms of entertainment, Thomas Francis Meagher, escaped Irish felon, and Sickles, survivor of trial for murder, had a similar spaciousness.
Meagher had his wife, Libby Townsend, at his side as he acted as clerk of the course while three heats were run for the final of the Grand Irish Brigade Steeplechase. Seeing some of his men beneath the ramshackle grandstand, Meagher warned them to get out from beneath it or be crushed by four tons of major generals. The significant thing is that Dan was numbered in those four tons. For on January 26, Burnside had been removed as commander of the Army of the Potomac and, to the outrage of many temperance officers in the army, Hooker was put in his place. Sickles immediately rose in Hooker’s wake, to become the commander of the Third Corps, with the rank of major general—the highest rank in the U.S. Army, and a triumph for any officer and his spouse and family. George Sickles was particularly ecstatic, and took proudly to addressing his son by letter as “Dear Major General.” Dan had now joined the elevated ranks of seven army corps commanders, of whom only he and German-born Franz Sigel were not graduates of West Point. An equally competent brigade commander, Meagher, remained stuck at the one-star level. He had no profane comet such as Hooker to drag him upward in its tail.11
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A considerable number of the senior officer corps were conscientious Christians and total abstainers, and to them, for various reasons, Hooker and Sickles were abominations. Nor did they like Hooker’s chief of staff, Dan Butterfield, like Dan Sickles a dapper, racy New Yorker, only thirty-two years of age. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., grandson of John Quincy Adams, and a Union cavalry captain, saw Joe Hooker, Dan Sickles, and Dan Butterfield as a trio of depravity, “men of blemished character. During the winter when Hooker was in command, I can say from personal knowledge and experience that the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac was a place to which no self-respecting man would like to go, and no decent woman would go. It was a combination of bar-room and brothel.” The nickname Devil Dan was in frequent use among Dan’s enemies. No doubt not all the women who came to the headquarters were mothers and wives. But one wonders where Adams’s pronouncement put such women as Libby Townsend, the Princess Salm-Salm, one of the most popular of the camp’s social set, and sundry other officers’ wives.
As unpopular as Hooker may have been with the more proper officers, he was popular with the ranks, immediately cashiering corrupt quartermasters, improving the food, cleaning up the camp and hospitals, and granting furloughs. An amnesty brought many soldiers who had overstayed their leave back to the camp. Among his other achievements, Hooker let General Butterfield reform the army’s music. It is claimed that Butterfield was the originator of the bugle call named Taps. Butterfield also devised a system by which each corps had its own fighting patch, worn on the arms of the soldiers. For Dan’s Third Corps, the patch was a black diamond.12
News came of another intended presidential visit, deep in Virginia by this bloody river. Mrs. Lincoln, along with her son Tad, were to visit the camp with Mr. Lincoln in early April. The Lincolns were to stay at Hooker’s headquarters, but the real maître de plaisirs (to use the Princess Salm-Salm’s term) was General Sickles. When Lincoln and his wife and son arrived at Hooker’s headquarters, there was a review of troops, and then the President was led by Major General Sickles to his headquarters tent, where officers’ wives were lined up in their best dresses to greet him. Dan was aware of an extreme melancholy in Lincoln, and so was the Princess Salm-Salm, who said that the President in his angular suit of black cloth reminded her of a German schoolteacher. There was in his face, she said, besides kindness and melancholy, “a sly humor, flicking around the corners of his big mouth and his rather small and somewhat tired-looking eyes.” During the review of the Second, Third, Fifth, and Sixth Corps, sixty thousand men winding over the hills in splendid equipment, their bayonets bristling like a forest, Princess Salm-Salm had—as an accompanying horsewoman—attracted attention for her graceful and dashing riding. Now, in front of Sickles’s headquarters, she told Sickles that Lincoln looked such “a dear good man” that she intended to kiss him. “Would it do any harm?”
“Not a bit of harm,” Sickles is reported as saying. “I am only sorry I am not in his place.” So she flew up to Lincoln and, with her vaudevillian exuberance, planted a long kiss on his cheek. Lincoln drew back in what one observer called “evident discomposure.” Some officers helped the President in his embarrassment by telling him that the princess had made a wager with an officer for a pair of gloves. It happened that Mary Todd Lincoln was not there—she was resting at Hooker’s headquarters—but Tad was, and the tale of the beautiful princess reached Mrs. Lincoln.13
The next day, according to General Dan Butterfield, everybody at headquarters knew that General Sickles was quite out of favor with Mrs. Lincoln. Lincoln himself had the previous evening been subjected to “an unhappy quarter of an hour.” The row could be heard, Butterfield said, outside Lincoln’s splendid tent at headquarters, and the President appealed to his wife, “But Mother, hear me.”
“Don’t ‘mother’ me,” said Mary, in Butterfield’s version. “And as for General Sickles, he will hear what I think of him and his lady guests.”
Despite Sickles’s discomfiture, he was appointed mischievously by Hooker to accompany the Lincolns back to their steamboat at Acquia Creek on the Potomac. On the road, and when the party had boarded the steamer, Mrs. Lincoln would not talk to Dan. He must have been reminded of his times in Coventry during his last session in Congress. As supper was served in the dining room of the steamer, the atmosphere still tense, Lincoln turned to Sickles. “I never knew until last night you were a very pious man,” he told Dan. Quite properly Dan told the President that he believed he had been misinformed. “Not at all,” said the President. “Mother says you are the greatest psalmist in the army. She says you are more than a psalmist, you are Salm-Salmist.” Everybody was grateful to find an excuse for laughter at the President’s homely whimsy, and the good humor disarmed Mrs. Lincoln, and her husband and her general were forgiven.
Of all the criticism aimed at Dan, even by Mary Todd, none of it centered upon his neglect of Teresa. She was an unnoted nonpresence. She had achieved a special level of invisibility.14
Amid the fun and games of that winter camp, Hooker was planning a serious coup, a great outflanking of Lee’s position. While leaving enough troops at Fredericksburg to keep the Confederates locked there, he intended to move the chief part of his army secretly to the northwest, up the Rappahannock in a great right hook, to make a crossing there, and then wheel about and face the enemy. His aim was to end the war, since Lee would need to divide his forces, leaving some in front of Fredericksburg, and so Joe Hooker would triumph by squeezing the split Confederate forces between his main force and the men he left in place at Fredericksburg. Dan, briefed by Dan Butterfield, discussed the movements of his own corps with his three divisional generals, all of them interesting examples of Union generals, and two of them fated to give their lives for Hooker’s great plan. The first was Hyram Berry, a former carpenter, bank manager, and Democratic mayor from Maine, thirty-eight years old. David Birney, also under forty, was a lawyer who had been born in Alabama and came from a Southern abolitionist family. Amiel Whipple was a West Pointer, three years older than Dan, whom both Dan and Teresa had known socially in Washington before the war. He was a brilliant surveyor, and had been chief surveyor of the Canadian–U.S. border in the Pacific Northwest.15
The skillful, stealthy withdrawal of great numbers of men from in front of Fredericksburg began on April 30. Thousands of campfires were kept burning by small remaining details of Union troops, to create an impression with Lee that nothing had changed on Stafford Heights. One corps remained to undertake “a demonstration” against the town and keep in place Lee’s troops there. Dan’s Third Corps marched to the west in what Dan saw as good spirits and, with the ease of veterans, crossed the Rappahannock far to the west at a crossing named United States Ford. They massed with the rest of the army in cramped meadows and tangled woods north and south of the little crossroads hamlet of Chancellorsville, on the edge of that great tangle of brush known as the Wilderness. With total success, they had moved largely undetected except by small and confused Confederate patrols, had outflanked the enemy’s army, and had placed themselves where Lee did not yet know them to be. The surprise pincer attack against Lee needed only to be triggered. Hooker told his men, “The operations of the last three days have determined that our enemy must either ingloriously fly, or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our ground, where certain destruction awaits him.” It had certainly been a maneuver worthy of Stonewall Jackson, but this time the Union had pulled it off, as the President had been waiting so long for it to do.
To fuel what generals considered their duty of gallantry, it was essential to every nineteenth-century general that his men should contribute a dossier of praise on his elegant tranquillity in the face of peril. Dan, of course, recognized his duty to behave with casual valor. Many items of such behavior were contributed to Dan’s dossier that weekend. A soldier would remember that as the division moved along the sheltered plank road in the afternoon from the north toward Chancellorsville, the infantry did n
ot descend into the sunken road “but instead marched in the fields at its side, allowing use of the main road to the ambulance and wagons.” General Sickles, surrounded by his staff, sat chewing his cigar, watching the troops go by, and keeping an eye out to the east. Some enemy batteries in that direction saw his troops and began landing shot among his men. Dan, according to the soldier, without changing his own position, remarked in his peculiar, deliberate tone, “Boys, I think the enemy sees you—you had better take to the road.”
Chancellorsville was as confusing as any Civil War battle, but perhaps the best way to understand the event is by seeing the Union line as a shallow, uneven V, facing south from the river. On the afternoon of May 1, Dan’s three divisions, over fifteen thousand men, were bivouacked in woods near the top of the V, a little north of Chancellorsville. They were happy men, and they expected the best. A combined assault, from General Sedgwick in front of Fredericksburg and from Hooker’s men unfolding like a great hinged machine from the west, like a vast door suddenly unlocked, would certainly have made Lee ingloriously fly. But though Dan did not yet know it, his old friend Hooker, on the edge of these impermeable woods thick with deer, was suddenly stricken by doubt. And that night, an alerted Lee imitated Hooker’s movement. He decided to march half his army under the personally eccentric but militarily brilliant General Jackson even farther to the west from the position where Hooker had put himself—basically around the bottom and to the far side of the shallow V. Lee himself would take on Hooker frontally, while Jackson would attack Hooker from behind. Thus, Lee intended to out-pincer the pincer movement Hooker had already achieved—unless, of course, Jackson was detected in the middle of his secret march to outflank the Union Army.