American Scoundrel (48 page)

Typically, Dan had found other associations. He had been visited in the Sherman-shattered, burned, and ruined Columbia, for example, by a young, forthright Southerner named Allie Grant, a gentlewoman down on her luck, as were most of her Southern sisters. She later wrote to him asking for employment with a Dan-like directness of her own, and requesting that he “write to her as soon as possible, for I long to hear something absorbing and compulsory to fill my head and hands, and occupy my thoughts.” Allie was one of the recipients of the ration certificates Dan distributed from his office, for in some ways, in that hungry landscape, his job resembled that of a modern nongovernmental organization or aid body.
²¹

In the summer of 1866, President Johnson offered Dan the post of Minister to the Netherlands. Dan suspected it was a mechanism to get him out of the Carolinas because of complaints that he was both too soft on Southerners and too tyrannical over them. He immediately approached General Grant and asked whether the offer of the posting
arose from any dissatisfaction with his performance. In conflict with the President over policy in the South, Grant replied that he himself would regret to see Sickles replaced. In the letter refusing the diplomatic posting, Dan pleaded that the $3,500 per year which his wife and family would need to remain in New York would leave him only $4,000 to run an official establishment at a foreign court, and that he would therefore run short.

As another fall came on, Allie Grant of Columbia was still an intermittent friend to Dan. “I really thought you’d entirely forgotten the ‘
beggar
.’ I am very happy to learn that I was laboring under a mistake,” she wrote to Dan. He had set up a post for her, which she intended to accept with great pleasure. “I was inclined to call and see you again while you were up here, but some of the Delegates [to the state convention] were talking already about my first visit. . .. People are generally too pragmatical in Columbia.” She had spotted him talking with a former Confederate general outside the hotel, a fellow she had quarreled with over politics, so she had not stopped to converse. “Columbia is awfully dull,” wrote Allie. “And I do wish I was down in Charleston. P.S. I think you had better come to Columbia for a while, and I will let you see me, not in
disguise
though.” The general, even without a leg, was still a charmer of women, as long as they had a sportive attitude.

But not all Dan’s generosity to Southern women was opportunistic. He was supporting the aging widow of an eminent Southern anti-secessionist judge, Jane Pettigru, who suffered from an abiding disease—perhaps tuberculosis—and who told Dan, “What I would do without the two Rations a day I could not tell.” Perhaps on the basis of his experience with Teresa, Dan had also been kind enough to prescribe opiates for her health problems. “The laudanum you kindly advised me to be supplied with,” said Mrs. Pettigru, “I would die without.”
²²

That fall and winter it was still the turbulent and surly condition of South Carolina that occupied most of his time, though the raids of the Regulators became less common. He was involved in many further arguments, arresting some of the leading citizens of Edgefield, South Carolina, and taking them out of that jurisdiction to Columbia on
charges of complicity in the murder of Union soldiers. He was reduced to threatening the white citizens of Edgefield, Lawrence, and New-berry that their freed slaves would be provided with rations, housing, and protection at the expense of those districts unless they behaved more reasonably.

He felt, too, a deep and visceral offense at continuing demonstrations of disloyalty by people in Charleston, and refused to turn a blind eye to the abuse of the symbols of the Union. He arrested the editor of the
South Carolinian
for commending a war remembrance at which the Confederate flag was displayed. When, in the following spring, the Charleston fire companies marched, he required them to carry the Union flag, and a fireman who mutilated it was held for a month without trial and publicly reprimanded.

In November 1866, the month when President Johnson optimistically declared that the rebellion no longer existed, Dan’s force had been reduced to 2,700 men, for the official end of rebellion meant that he could turn over to the civil authorities all law cases and jails, except on the sea islands off the coast. Not least among Dan’s problems was that Union troops sometimes provoked black freedmen to behave provocatively in front of Southerners, generally with a reaction that fell not upon the Union soldiers, but upon the freedmen. Yet he placed great reliance on his troops as keepers of order and believed that in the case of North and South Carolina, they were the reason for “the fortunate exemption of this Department from the riots and collisions which have occurred elsewhere.” Indeed, by the early winter of 1866–67, civil strife began to diminish, law and order being enforced, not always perfectly but with less public resistance, by law officers people knew to be locals instead of the despised bluecoats. Much of the duty of his men now consisted of exhuming the shallowly buried bodies of Sherman’s men and reinterring them properly.
²³

In New York, Laura had become, in the eyes of her ailing, bemused mother, a model of Dan’s energy and stubbornness, and her inchoate and bewildered taste for life and activity, acquired both from Dan and from the Da Pontes and Bagiolis, expressed itself in her abiding enthusiasm
for painting. This was a testing time for a child who was solitary and both assertive and shy. Teresa intended, if possible, to send her to the nuns at Manhattanville, so that like her—or, at least, like her had she not fallen for the trap of her own luscious and open nature—Laura might grow up with a network of genial friends to absorb and direct her liveliness, and to give her a sense of living a normal, unjudged life.

Even now, Teresa, when feeling well and in remission from languor, tried to go out, wearing heavy boots, inquiring into the health of one of her dogs, or tramping the lanes to visit a sick neighbor. But mainly she was subject to those days of unspecific exhaustion that had become more common during the summer of 1866 and as the autumn began. She had slipped into a near-permanent invalid state by the onset of winter.

But she was still hungry for urbane visitors. Comforted by her Catholic devotions, eased by medicines, and feeling remote from the sins and blood and shame of 1859, she held few grudges, and one of the men who visited her that winter was James Topham Brady, a fellow of such delicacy of feeling that he remained concerned about the harsh treatment to which he had subjected her name during the trial. Brady himself had had uncertain health—indeed, he had only two more winters to live—and typically wished to be at peace with all souls. He gave Teresa and Laura a copy of his
A Christmas Dream
, a takeoff on
A Christmas Carol
published in 1860. Brady’s book was suffused with concern for poor and unfortunate women and with a sense of loss. The tale began with a girl pauper on a busy street who was churlishly refused a coin at Christmas by a man mounting a carriage. Soon after, the same carriage ran her down and careened onward, and the narrator records the injustice of this scene of privileged arrogance, poverty, and misfortune. From there, the scene moves to a New York restaurant, and the storyteller has a dream in which a man, or a spirit carrying a sack, accosts him, telling him that tonight he has seen the “sufferings earned by the heartlessness of bloated avarice,” and taking him back to Christmases past.

Thus it was other and, in many ways, more innocent men than Dan who charmed and diverted Teresa that pale winter. Manny Hart, Henry Wikoff, and the bachelor Brady all made the hard, cold journey by coach
up icy Broadway from Lower Manhattan, but since none of them warned Dan urgently of her condition, they may have judged it something chronic, or believed, by the glitter of Teresa’s splendid eyes, that she would recover from it in spring. That was very likely her attitude, too, or her conscious hope. It was hard for anyone to believe that lovely Teresa was seriously vulnerable. “I imagined her as little likely to die as myself,” wrote Emily Brontë, who knew everything about tuberculosis, of the consumptive Frances Earnshaw in
Wuthering Heights
. “She was rather thin but young-complexioned and her eyes sparkled like diamonds.” Just so did Teresa’s, especially in lively company.
²⁴

But Teresa became totally bedridden at the height of that winter, in January 1867. Over a week, she declined unexpectedly and at a fierce rate. Maria Bagioli nursed her anxiously, and the ineffectual doctors of Bloomingdale came and went. Though newspapers and friends in that time were always delicate about naming an exact cause of death, in case the squalor of symptoms detracted from the nobility of the deceased, she was said to have caught a pulmonary infection that made her condition suddenly more acute. Bloodstained discharges came from her mouth. The features were “cyanosed,” to use the doctors’ term, blue and pinched, and the flesh seemed to fall away from the bones of her face, as if gravity were winning the battle against her. She endured strong chest pains, and her heart palpitated wildly. Poignantly, it was often during these more extreme phases of the disease that reputable doctors would open a vein in the patient’s arm and bleed her, in theory to reduce the symptomatic pressure in the system, but managing to reduce the patient’s capacity to struggle against the disease. A priest came, bidden by Mrs. Bagioli, and gave Teresa the last rites, the sacred oil on eyes, nose, mouth, hands, feet. This scandalous woman Teresa, whose name still burned in the American imagination, her vivid eroticism only partly erased by the calamities of the Civil War, all at once lost consciousness of the world for which she was well fitted, and became, in one vast, tormented, but unknowing breath, a cold-weather corpse, an eroded landscape.

She was laid out in her coffin in Bloomingdale’s Applewood Room,
awaiting the arrival of her husband, who had been summoned by telegram and was already on a train with an alacrity for which she had always hoped in life. The news had stunned him; he had not expected her death so soon, or that she would die of this condition.

The newspapers of New York thought that it would require more bravery and fortitude of Dan to endure this loss heroically than he had needed to oppose the charge of thousands in the roar of battle. Dan was, in his particular way, grief-stricken, and wept unaffectedly. He was not a fellow to wallow in regret, but Teresa’s death was so unfair, not least to Teresa herself. She had just turned thirty-one years, the press recorded, and had been in failing health for some time, and a recent cold “took root in her constitution” and led to the melancholy fact of her death.

The funeral took place at St. Joseph’s Church on Sixth Avenue, near her parents’ house, on the morning of February 9, 1867. She lay in a handsome rosewood coffin, covered with greenhouse flowers. Her pallbearers included the recently elevated Brigadier General Harry Tremain, Major General Alfred Pleasonton, Brigadier General Charles K. Graham, James Topham Brady, and her Bloomingdale friend Tom Field, who had once brought back from Dan’s prison cell in Washington letters Dan had written her. Requiem mass was said by the Reverend Father Farrell, who paid due regard to the devout Teresa, the afflicted husband, the daughter Laura, the aged Sickleses, and Mr. and Mrs. Bagioli. A choir sang plainchant, enriched by selections from Rossi and Caracono, and the anthem “Pray for Me” was rendered under the musical direction of grief-stricken Mr. Bagioli with a touching sweetness and to profound effect. Obviously Father Farrell had known Teresa well, both socially and possibly through the confessional. Here was a woman with the face of a saint, he said, who had lived in patient expiation. He spoke with some tenderness of her, but the surviving husband, the faithful soldier of the Republic, attracted particular comment even from Father Farrell. “Now he was called upon to render unto Him who gave her, the chiefest treasure which had blessed his life. It became him as a man to bow in Christian submission to the decree of Divine Wisdom, and to look for support under this severe trial to the Hand which had sustained
him hitherto.” The newspapers made much of the way in which, accompanied by his daughter, Sickles arose on his crutches and followed down the aisle “all that was mortal of her whom he had loved so well. . .. His feelings now broke forth and he wept, and the large congregation rushed tumultuously from the building after him, testifying in various ways the hold he had upon their hearts, and the extent to which they shared his affliction.” Her coffin was taken to the Catholic cemetery on Second Avenue, now long since built over.
²⁵

B
Y THE TIME OF
T
ERESA’S DEATH
, D
AN
had so redeemed himself that her going did not elicit any press retrospectives on the murder of Key. After so many murders in blue and gray, Key was let rest. Dan now took Laura to Charleston with him, and Southerners would long after remember the handsome girl who sometimes sat at Dan’s table during official dinners and began to attend the Sisters of Mercy. (The nuns had immediately involved Dan in an attempt to get a congressional appropriation for the rebuilding of the Charleston orphan asylum destroyed in the war.)
¹

Dan was still occupied by office, as both North and South Carolina held constitutional conventions selected by all male citizens, excluding those unwilling to swear adherence to the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, granting emancipation and
equal rights to former slaves. The legislatures of both states, when elected, would be required, in drafting their new constitutions, to accept the Thirteenth Amendment. By the time this happened, Dan had got into trouble with the federal Attorney General by interfering with South Carolina’s Judge Bryan, who held him in contempt when he refused to appear in answer to a writ of habeas corpus issued in favor of four men convicted by the military commission for the murder of some soldiers. He had been complained of before for lesser intrusions into the judicial system, and this was the onset of a public quarrel with the Southern judiciary that, in the end, he would not win. One friend described him at this stage as “a wise, sagacious commander, placed in a most delicate and responsible position among a touchy, testy, fiery people,” and praised him for possessing “the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, the astuteness of Talleyrand and the audacity of the Devil.” But even those qualities could not pacify all parties.