With some credibility, Dan depicted himself, in a long document now among his papers in the Library of Congress, as catching the train to Albany in the spring of 1853 to argue with politicians he knew for a revival of the scheme. “On my arrival,” he wrote, “I found the Capitol strewn with the remains of defeated Park Bills. . .. The warring champions of each of the old measures were invited to meet me in conference, over a good dinner. The banquet lasted well into the night, and before we separated the Senators interested . . . all agreed to support my consolidated plan for a park.” This was a characteristic Sickles manner of doing business.
The result of the dinner meeting was that a bill was quickly passed in the assembly to authorize the city to proceed with the project, leaving the choice of ground to the municipal authorities of New York. Unfortunately, one senator with whom Dan would later quarrel over other matters in a national war, Edwin P. Morgan, managed to insert an amendment that he knew would cause Governor Horatio Seymour to refuse to sign the bill. When the governor did refuse, Dan promised to get that clause eliminated, even though this was the last day of the session, and there were only three hours left of it. But with the same degree of frenetic energy that had fueled the Broadway post office raid, Dan went off to the Senate chamber and was able to persuade Morgan to yield. Then he called on his personal friendship with a number of state senators to ensure consideration of his park bill that evening. “Unhappily, so many senators were absent during the call of the roll, that the affirmative vote was one or two short of the required constitutional number, but I was able to hurry from the lobby two or three friendly absentees.” So the bill was passed, and hurrying along to the assembly chamber with it, “I obtained the ear of the Speaker and got a hearing for my Bill in the Lower House, where the amendment was promptly concurred in.” It remained only to get the bill once more before the governor, and with the help of the clerks of both houses, this was achieved only half an hour before the final adjournment. The document was sent at once to the office of the secretary of state. Dan wrote that “going there myself soon after, I was enabled to obtain from my friend, Mr. Randall, a certified copy of the Park Bill before taking the seven o’clock train to New York.”
By eleven o’clock on the night of the triumph, he was in Union Square, New York, aglow with excitement, in front of the house of the corporation counsel, his friend Dillon. Dillon answered Dan’s ringing of the front doorbell by appearing at a third-floor window in nightcap and dressing gown to hear the great news, and descended to the ground floor to accept a copy of the enacted bill.
As authorized by the act, Dan hoped, the municipal authorities would include within the park an area named Jones’ Woods, “a considerable tract of native forest, covered by large trees, with contiguous land extending to the East River.” His relations with the Common Council of New York, both professional and personal, led him to expect a favorable reaction. An old friend, the Democratic leader in the Board of Aldermen, however, told him frankly that although the boys on the council wanted to do all they could for his plan, “you know it is formidable and you must let up on Jones’ Woods and the East River frontage. The boys were offered $50,000 to strike out those plots and I can’t control them. The big purse is too tempting to resist.”
Having been raised in Tammany, Dan was not at all outraged by these blatantly venal motives, but possibly regretted that he had no equivalent purse at his command. Still, he was able to arrange a characteristic New York deal for an extra hundred acres, through an understanding with Alfred Craven, “then chief engineer of the Croton Aqueduct, who desired his salary raised to $7,500 per annum. This I agreed to arrange for him, provided he would locate the new Aqueduct just then authorized within the limits of the proposed park.”
Dan knew that Judge Robert Barnwell Roosevelt of the New York Supreme Court, in common with other large landholders, was opposed to the park. So even though the court had appointed commissioners to produce a report on the project, it let it be forgotten. Events prevented Dan for the time being from pursuing the vision of a park through the maze of New York City’s special interests, but it was a matter to which he would return.28
Dan the civic-minded attorney was simultaneously fascinated by the problems of New York public transportation. Conscientiously trying to create a better city for his soon-to-be-born child, he applied his rambunctious intelligence to establishing a crosstown system of horse-drawn omnibuses in Manhattan, noting the receipts from similar services in Brooklyn, and devising equations for traffic. Certainly, by the start of the Civil War, eight years later, New York was full of the stubby, roofed, bathtub-style omnibuses that moved New Yorkers along the tracks and contributed to its traffic jams. But in 1853, Dan was in a position of being their advocate. “Omnibuses do not choke up the streets,” he boldly declared for the sake of doubters in the Common Council, and he backed up the assertion with mathematical formulae based on the speed, mass, and carrying capacity of the vehicles.29
In view of Dan’s notable political gifts, Robert Dillon offered some advice, almost certainly on the matter of his continued association with Fanny White, among other indiscretions. Dan was quick to plead in reply, “I cannot play the courtier to the multitude, much less to individuals.” He had never done it and never would, he said. Indeed, his approaches to President Pierce contained no note of sycophancy. So as for Dillon’s hope for his reform, he sternly rebuffed the idea: “You waste your own time and pain me by requesting it. . .. I know all the consequences of yielding to this idiosyncrasy, and have many a long year since resolved to enjoy it even at the price which must be inevitably paid. I have said to you before that I do not deem it a wise course, nor approve it, nor recommend it to any friend; but I’ve adopted it: it is mine, and I will follow it come what may.” He concluded with a Latin saw: “Video melior protoque, deteriora sequor” (“Though I see what the better things are, even so I follow the worse”).30
He was dutiful to his father, to whom he wrote regularly, even while he was in Washington pursuing his objectives within the presidential ambience. He had been taken to the Congressional Gardens by a friend, and found that the outing, and a dinner he had eaten, redeemed Washington from being “dull and wearisome—and as hot as ever.” He said he would rather be with “the female child and her child.” For by now Teresa, “the female child,” had joyfully come to term and given birth to a daughter, Laura, to the vast excitement of the Bagiolis and their Italian-American friends. Given his busy-ness, Dan was not present for the birth, but he sent Teresa a poem, which she cherished. “As I entered the room,” wrote an Italian friend to Dan, “Teresa was calmly sleeping, the worst was all over. . .. I then looked at your babe. Oh, what a delight! . . . To find it so perfect—although not a boy.”
His frank father did his best to get Dan to come back from his lobbying in Washington, regretting that he was still there “in neglect of every matter in which you have an interest.” Dan’s relationship with George would survive many such hearty statements of disapproval. Two of Dan’s notes were due that week, George warned, one for $475 and another for $250. “Now it is hardly fair you should entirely neglect your personal affairs to help out others—and to ask me to fill the breach.” George reminded him that as generous as it was to help out Gus Schell, his friend who wanted to be appointed collector of the Port of New York, this should not be achieved at the cost of sacrificing his own name and that of his father.31
President Pierce may have been lucky to have such busy importunings as those of Dan to distract him. For on January 5 that year, before the inauguration, he had been traveling with his wife and his thirteen-year-old son, Benny, on the Boston & Maine Railroad, going home to Concord, New Hampshire, when the axle of their passenger car broke. The carriage fell down an embankment, dragging other coaches with it, and although President-elect Pierce and Mrs. Pierce suffered only bad bruising, they saw as they picked themselves up in the splintered and chaotic wreckage that part of the superstructure of the car had crus
hed Benny’s head. Mrs. Jane Pierce had thus come to the White House as a ghostly, inconsolable figure, and although she dutifully fulfilled the official functions of a President’s wife, she did so with a smile that contained all the dolorous weight of bereavement. The death weighed obviously but less visibly on the President himself, but he had the duties of office to absorb his conscious mind.32
This charming but desolate President, Franklin Pierce, was indirectly about to involve the Sickleses in international diplomacy.
II
IN MAY 1853, PIERCE CAST ABOUT FOR someone to represent the United States in Great Britain, and approached that Democratic notable from Pennsylvania Senator James Buchanan, known affectionately in the party as Old Buck. Buchanan had enjoyed an august career as Secretary of State for four years under Presidents Jackson and Polk, and before that as a representative and a senator, as well as the minister of the United States at the Court of St. Petersburg. He had sought the presidential nomination in 1852, but it had gone to Pierce. Most people thought it was his last chance. Though Buchanan was in many ways still impressive—he had a clear complexion and large blue eyes, and stood over six feet—he might prove to be too old for that ultimate prize, which he had sought for a quarter of a century. Some physical defects had already begun to assert themselves: he had a nervous twitch that caused his head to jerk more visibly and frequently the older he got, and he was crotchety.
James Buchanan’s lack of a spouse had been, since his early manhood, a source of gossip. His closest relationship had been with Senator William Rufus King, a courtly Democrat from Alabama who was in the Senate when Buchanan arrived there in 1834. Buchanan the Pennsylvanian and King the Southerner roomed together and for over twenty years attended Washington events as a team, until Senator King’s death. People referred to King as “Old Buck’s wife” and “Mrs. Buchanan,” and to the two of them as “the Siamese twins.” In 1852, King had been offered the chance to serve as Vice President with Pierce, but, afflicted with tuberculosis, lacked the strength to do so.
It could certainly be said that James Buchanan had had a lot of bad luck with women. The fiancée of his Pennsylvania youth had suddenly called off their engagement, separated herself from him, and soon thereafter died. For such a solid and levelheaded man, he grieved excessively then and later, and perhaps in some way he thought he had provoked her grief and the death that followed it. The conclusion some came to was that the fiancée had discovered or been fed information about Buchanan’s liking for other men, and that the news had undermined her. Then, in the 1830s, he was confidently expecting to marry Mary Kittera Snyder, a prominent Philadelphia woman who spent much time in Washington, but when he went to Philadelphia to pay court to her, she snubbed him by going to Baltimore.
Rufus King had died just a few months before Pierce offered Buchanan the State Department’s most senior diplomatic post, minister to the Court of St. James’s.1
Accepting the post, Buchanan asked a famous journalist friend, Colonel John W. Forney, whether he could recruit a suitable Democrat to serve as first secretary to the American legation in London. On the lookout, Forney had to go to New York, and at a dinner, as he described it, “met a gentleman whose talents and address seemed to fit him for the post.” The gentleman, of course, was Dan Sickles, a so-called Hardshell Democrat like James Buchanan, and a man of great promise within the New York party machine. But a problem had arisen. When Dan asked Forney what his pay would be, Forney answered that the post paid $2,500 a year. At this, Dan explained that his annual income was more than fifteen times that amount. “I could not think of such a sacrifice,” he told the illustrious Forney.
Later in the day, Dan thought again. Perhaps his income was not really the sumptuous $37,500 or more per annum of which he had boasted. Perhaps various friends also pointed out how well this federal appointment would look on his curriculum vitae, and what an enriching and vigorous new challenge it might be to convey to the British government the policy of the United States on the freedom of the seas and on American claims to Central America and the Caribbean. Under the previous President, the Whig Millard Fillmore, the foreign policy of the United States had become, in both Dan’s and Buchanan’s eyes, too lenient toward Britain. So Buchanan and his secretary of legation would have a new agenda to pursue in London. If Dan went, he would be serving under a minister who in 1812 had worn the uniform of the United States, and the prospect of overcoming British diplomatic suspicions of American ambitions toward Cuba in the same spirit as the British had been militarily overcome by Andrew Jackson at New Orleans was something Dan savored.
The day after meeting Forney, Dan boarded a train to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and took a carriage out to Buchanan’s country estate, Wheatland. Buchanan was delighted to have the energetic young New Yorker come to his house. Forney said Buchanan knew of Dan as a brilliant lawyer and politician, a man of the world who had an army of friends and a counterbalancing army of enemies, “like all men of force and originality.” During the meeting at the large though austere house at Wheatland, Dan’s imagination was no doubt inflamed by Buchanan’s plans for the mission they would run in London, and, with a typically sudden shift of ardor, Dan now wanted the post of first secretary as he wanted few other things. Buchanan sent Dan’s name to the Department of State for confirmation. Though Pierce’s Secretary of State, William Marcy, a Barnburner New Yorker, objected to Dan’s appointment, President Pierce intervened at Buchanan’s request to make sure that it went through.2
Not everyone in his circle thought that Dan was doing the right thing. He would have to surrender his work as corporation attorney, and a friend from Tammany advised him, “You’d better think well over it before you surrender up that which would give you a competency for life.” But Dan was set on the project. Teresa, “the female child,” was more ambivalent. There was an immediate problem in that Baby Laura was as yet too young, according to conventional wisdom, to make an autumn journey across the Atlantic. In that era, there were great dangers for mother and child in the event of bad weather or an outbreak of fever. Also, Teresa wanted to stay close to her mother, Maria Bagioli, for a time, even though her letters showed that she loved Dan thoroughly and had a forthright hunger to see him more than his busy life as an instrument of Tammany and attorney to the New York Corporation allowed. In her pleas to him, sometimes written on official corporation paper Dan had brought home with him, she never struck a dismal pose; she did not chide or harangue. One cannot but wish that the generosity of her tone had evoked an answering generosity in charming Dan. In a typically un-reproving letter of August 1853, she wrote simply because she longed for his company, though she said she had not a great deal to report. She filled up the letter by telling him frankly and in explicit detail about the buying of a new dress—“it’s white silk to be trimmed up with ribbon.” Obviously Dan did not stint her on clothing, a saving grace, since he certainly did not stint Fanny White. The occasion for the dress was that she was going in a day or so to August Belmont’s house for dinner. It is not hard to imagine the lushness and air of Italian-American wholesomeness with which she must have emerged from her carriage outside Belmont’s splendid house on Fifth Avenue, near Fourteenth Street, and entered a mansion opulent enough to possess a picture gallery of masters that some considered one of the finest private collections in the world.
As for the sun-filled August day on which she wrote this letter about longing, a dress, and August Belmont, she had many visitors at home. A Mrs. Phillips had called in, a Mrs. McClenehan, a Ginger Clark, and Ma, Mrs. Bagioli. Teresa loved to fill her house with friends who fussed over the infant Laura and conversed with her. But nothing compensated for Dan’s absence, and she pleaded with him to come home to dinner and stay the night. “I want to be as much with you as possible . . . should you go [to England] without me. Come, do. I wish to be near and with you.” The imminent separation haunted her. “I hate the idea of your going away without me, and know that I would not have you [do so] if it were
in my power. You know what is best—and I shall act as you wish me to however much I may dislike it. God only knows how I can get along without you—and still I think it would be cruel to leave Ma entirely alone. She seems wrapped up in the baby. . .. Come home as early as you can. God bless you my own dear darling pet. May God bless you is my prayer.”3
Dan had meanwhile been busy at his offices in Nassau Street in organizing cash flow and credit, both for himself and for others. To note the scale of his indebtedness, one has only to look at the loans he took in a period of less than a year, from December 3, 1852, to August 4, 1853, amounting to more than $3,500. Not only that, but he had claims upon his own generosity. A note written on August 18, 1853, and inscribed “To the aid of A.B.,” Antonio Bagioli, was for $750 at six months. Perhaps the scale of these borrowings can be put against the reality that a skilled shoemaker earned $7 a week in 1853, a factory laborer earned $5 to $6, and three-quarters of female workers earned less than $3. The claims on Dan were broader than those of family and Fanny White, and he had his own supplicants. Mrs. Mary Ellwill wrote to him pleading that George Ellwill, her husband or son, be permitted to do secretarial work for Dan to pay off a family debt. Dan also made a loan of $150 to Daniel E. McClenehan, no doubt the husband of the Mrs. McClenehan who was, about the same time, visiting Teresa. In an attached note, McClenehan offered Dan “many thanks for the very kind and warm interest you have taken in my case.”4