There were other separations. Susan Sickles, who lived with her son in Paris, did not seek to go back to George, and Dan began uneasily to suspect that his father had not remained faithful to his mother. She was in her early seventies when she became ill and died in a Paris sanatorium.9
Through the frenzied shifts of Spanish politics, in 1875 the son of Isabella II, to whom she had abdicated her throne, returned to Madrid to be crowned Alfonso XII. But Dan had no more influence in the affairs of Spain and the United States. He stayed on in Paris for four more years. He helped the French politician Louis Adolphe Thiers prevent a visit by Grant at a time that would have given legitimacy to the conservative Marshal MacMahon in a French presidential election. For his service in persuading Grant to divert through Belgium and Germany and not come near France until after the election, Dan received the office of Commander of the Legion of Honor. Caroline de Creagh was by now seeing perhaps as little of her husband as Teresa used to. Dan, stouter and balder than the lean whippet who had been wounded at Gettysburg, spent some time back in America for an 1878 reunion of the Third Army Corps Union in Newburgh, New York.
He particularly wanted to go to America for the period leading to the election campaign of 1880. He had a temperamental hunger to be involved, and was seeking another government post, having become bored with the role of Yankee in European exile. Caroline refused to go with him. Her mother was ill in Madrid, but on top of that, “I learned that my husband had been untrue to me.” In the early winter of 1879, by mutual consent, Dan said his farewells to Caroline, au revoir to little Eda and George Stanton, and left them in Europe. He had failed yet again as a family man, but since he considered that a lesser fault, it did not burden or delay him.
By then Laura was living in Brooklyn with Mrs. Bagioli, Antonio having died. Laura had married badly and been already “abandoned” by her husband. She was buying drink with the allowance her father sent her, and she painted small pictures and sold them in a Brooklyn market. With a severity he did not show to men, Dan turned his back on hapless Laura.
The native son returning was in his sixtieth year, but unconquered by years, regret, or nostalgia. He settled at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, in a spacious house, and decorated the walls with animal hides from his travels and hunting expeditions, and with the military and political gleanings of a life rich in incident. No record appeared on those walls of what had been lost, unless it was the well-known photograph of his fibula and tibia, a favorite exhibit on display in the Army Medical Museum in Washington, which in the nineteenth century was one of the must-see attractions of the capital. That loss, like all the others, had failed to rob him of efficacy.10
At the Republican convention in Chicago, where Dan’s friend Grant intended to attempt a return to the presidency, an unexpected candidate emerged, James A. Garfield. This was bad news for Dan. He did not know Garfield—the first President since Pierce with whom he was not on close terms. He could expect nothing from the man, not least because he had stuck by Grant to the end. Grant himself was content to begin life as a Wall Street broker, and he could console himself with his private life. The idea that Dan, even in his sixties, should gather together his family and become a paterfamilias was one which simply did not register with him.11
George Sickles, the wellspring of his son’s illimitable vigor, was eighty-one years old. He lived in New Rochelle, where he owned sizable property, and commuted to Nassau Street every day. After meals, he flapped his arms like a rooster and crowed to prove what rude good health he enjoyed. To further demonstrate the issue, he remarried. His bride was a turbulent Irish woman who had perhaps been his mistress for some years. Forty-eight-year-old Mary Sheraton Sawyer brought into the marriage three daughters. Dan did not approve of this union, and never got on well with her. A cousin, William Sickles, felt bound to write to Dan: “I see by this morning’s papers that at the wedding which took place yesterday [was one] William Sickles, and I am happy that it was not me that was present but Uncle Oliver’s son who has always toadied to Mrs. Sawyer. I would not have you think for the world that I would ever be present at a ceremony which placed that party in the position formerly held by your dear Mother.”
Meanwhile, under presidential administrations that knew him not, Dan remained busy with committees, and he attended the opera a great deal with the Vanderbilts, who always reserved a chair for him in their box. One night when Dan was in a private box at the Standard Theatre, he saw below him in the stalls Robert Key, the son of Phillip Barton Key. People noticed when the young man looked up with his father’s eyes at his father’s killer. “They recognized each other undoubtedly,” wrote one commentator, “but neither gave any sign of recognition.”12
It was not reproaches attaching to the Key affair that distressed Dan. It was more the emergence of histories of the Civil War, even those written by friends, that cast doubt on his actions on that famous July 2. De Trobriand, writing his account, Four Years with the Army of the Potomac, declared that after the advance to the Peach Orchard and the Emmitsburg Road, “the new disposition of the Third Corps offered some great inconveniences and some great dangers.” Harry Tremain would be more diplomatic in his book, Two Days of War: A Gettysburg Narrative and Other Excursions, which was hard on Meade. Tremain quoted General Longstreet, who was locked now with Sickles in a comradeship across the lines of enmity to ensure that they did not bear the blame for July 2. Longstreet had written of Dan, “I believe it is now conceded that the advanced position at the peach orchard, taken by your Corps and under your orders, saved that battlefield to the Union cause.”
Dan at least had the advantage over Meade, in that Meade was more than ten years dead. But Dan knew this argument over his line along the higher ground near the Emmitsburg Road was one that would never go away. On one side, a former officer of the Third Corps, General John Watts De Peyster, came to his aid by giving Dan credit for seeing “that the battle must be fought where it was received” and for hanging on to Longstreet’s wing with such “bulldog pertinacity” and inflicting such losses as to diminish the “maneuvering aggressive power” of the enemy. But an aide of Meade’s, Colonel Benedict, published documents defending Meade in such vigorous terms that Dan felt the need to respond energetically himself. In the course of the eternal argument about the Emmitsburg Road, the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, he was appointed chairman of the New York State Monuments Commission, in charge of the design and erection of monuments to New York regiments on the battlefield of Gettysburg. The earnestness with which he had brought the dinginess and squalor of the battlefield to the attention of the public added credibility to his claims of having earlier been creatively involved in Central Park. A grateful state gave him the job of trying to amend the condition of the Gettysburg battlefield, especially those parts of it on which New Yorkers had fought.13
After a year of turbulent marriage to Mrs. Sawyer, the apparently immortal George Sickles died. Dan, full of the customary sorrow and ambiguity of a son who loved and sometimes quarreled with his father, arranged a fine funeral and bought dinner for 150 mourners at the Huguenot Hotel. His relations with his father was perhaps not only the most enduring of his life, but those marked by the greatest frankness. To his credit, George Sickles had retained a grandfatherly love for Laura, and had sometimes written to Dan on Laura’s behalf, as he did in 1883: “I do not know in what manner the lady has turned your feelings against her, but I do know that whatever the cause may have been in the past, it has continued quite as long as a father can afford to remember anger against his child.” Laura, said George, was suffering for the necessities of life, her health was poor, she had no money to live on except from the few paintings she had taken to doing, from which the income was quite small. Thin from alcoholism and bad diet, she had come to visit the elderly George Sickles, accompanied by a woman servant who had attended to Teresa in her final illness, and her grandfather had given Laura $50 and the nurse $5. If Dan would not help Laura out of fatherly fee
ling, said George in his letter to his son, perhaps he should also be aware that this history could attract a paragraph of print: “General Sickles’s daughter starving—her father at Number 131 Fifth Avenue living on $100,000.” Dan’s reply to such appeals from his father was adamant. “Let me remind you that I wrote you sometime before, in reply to a similar communication, upon the same subject, that my decision was then made, was irrevocable.” The sternness again, and of a tragically iron quality too. “Once more—for all—I repeat, that I have done my whole duty toward the person in whose behalf you write. As far as I’m concerned she is dead and buried. Happily, you have nothing to forgive. You can therefore be generous. As for the reference to paragraphs in corners of newspapers, pray reserve such menaces for others.” His love for his father and George’s for him had always survived such exchanges, but now George’s beloved, admiring, and contrary voice was gone.
Laura also suffered through George’s death. She had always felt a desperate affection for and gratitude to her grandfather, who regularly sent money. “It is very kind, my darling Grandpa, for you to think of me now that you are ill—and I appreciate it deeply and sincerely.” Laura hoped to see George Sickles when he came home from the sanatorium “ready, as you say, to ‘enter upon a new life and a long one.’” She was not well, she told her grandfather often, but in one letter wrote that she was hard at work for Easter and had painted many pretty little pictures for the market. “I shall be pleased on Easter Sunday to offer you one of my little paintings as a token of joy at your recovery.” Laura signed off with “A thousand kisses and bushels of love.”14
It is not known to what extent Laura was helped in George’s will, but unless he was too heavily influenced by his wife, who had three daughters of her own, Laura would have been provided for in some way. As for Dan, the mystery remains as to what young Laura’s crime could have been. Surely it was more than her affair with the Spanish officer. For while, in his letter to George, he was fulminating against Laura, he had jewelry on order at Theodore Starr’s emporium on Fifth Avenue. Starr wrote to ask for his indulgence for a few days further regarding some earrings Dan had on order. “In riveting the onyx for the ear screw, it was broken and a new piece has had to be cut.” The earrings were not a gift for Caroline de Creagh.
When Laura died of alcoholism and, perhaps, tuberculosis in 1891 in her rented room in Brooklyn, her father did not attend her funeral. Whatever wrong he believed she had done him was not absolved by death.15
But that same year, while dedicating a memorial to the 42nd New York Regiment at Gettysburg, he made a memorable oration for other dead, the young masses killed in the first three days of July, twenty-eight years past. He declared that the haphazard, state-by-state management of this holiest of battlefields should be now given to the undivided control of the federal government, and he resolved that he would stand for Congress with this issue as one of his chief platforms. To coincide with the unveiling of the monument, he was awarded the Medal of Honor for his part in the battle, for having displayed “most conspicuous gallantry on the field, vigorously contesting the advance of the enemy and continuing to encourage his troops after being himself severely wounded.”
The conditions that had made him a Union Democrat in the Civil War and a Democrat for Lincoln and Grant—the next worst thing to a Republican, in some Democrats’ eyes—no longer existed in 1892, when he stood again for Congress as a Democrat. It was a chance for him to attack the pernicious proposition that it was the Republicans who had won the war. “Gettysburg was the decisive battle of the war, as admitted on all sides, and who fought it? On the right wing was General Slocombe commanding an army corps, a Democrat; on the left was General Reynolds, till he was killed, a Democrat … in the Devil’s Den was a man named Sickles, a Democrat.”16
In 1893, then, in his seventy-fifth year, Dan went off to Washington as a legislator under the Republican presidency of Benjamin Harrison. The last time he had been here, Congress had rung with the rancor of secessionists, the outrage of abolitionists. In the 1850s he had been considered a dangerous man; now he was an old, avuncular soldier with special issues and no broad agenda. If his sexual appetites were still exorbitant for a man his age, the world was not as likely to detect or be outraged by them. Representative Champ Clark would describe the relationship between his little boy, who played around the House a great deal, wearing kilts, and a number of members of Congress, but particularly Sickles. “Frequently he would go over to the old soldier’s seat, climb upon his lap, toy with his spectacles, crutches and watch-chain. He generally came back with his pockets bulging with candy, apples, oranges, and other gimcracks.”
Dan left Congress in 1894, having been defeated in his reelection bid. The House had been something of a disappointment to him compared with the old days, when he had served on the Foreign Affairs Committee and had had the ear of the President.17
He still practiced the law, chaired the New York Monuments Commission, went to the theater, and spent his summer on energetic holidays at Lake Placid or in the Adirondacks. From there, in his mid-seventies, he told a friend, Horatio C. King, “If I had a girl or two with me I wouldn’t return at all.” But he could not stay away from politics and, in 1896, turned away from another Democrat candidate, William Jennings Bryan, and campaigned for a handsome young Republican politician from Ohio by the name of William McKinley. He joined one-armed General Oliver Howard and a number of other aging heroes of the war in McKinley’s rail car across the United States. At this advanced age, too, he traveled to Cuba, and brought back a fifteen-foot boa constrictor for the Central Park Zoo.
As disenchanted as Caroline de Creagh remained with her marriage, she ensured that her children dutifully and affectionately wrote to Dan. Eda and George Stanton Sickles (Stanton to friends) were cultivated Euro-American children who could correspond easily in French, Spanish, and English, and their letters told him of leg injuries, colds, and the travails and enthusiasms of childhood. In 1897, Eda, whom he had not seen for seventeen years, arrived in New York with her new husband, a British diplomat. She was very beautiful, twenty-two years of age, and any trace of Laura that showed in her face did not depress the general at all. He took her down to Old Point Comfort, Virginia, where the Third Corps was having its reunion, and showed her off to all his old comrades, then took her to Washington, introduced her to dignitaries, and attended a reception at the British embassy with her. He would not, however, see Caroline or son Stanton until eleven years later, in 1908, a fact that bespoke no urgency on his part.18
In that time, at the end of one century, with the beginning of an apparently limitless one imminent, Dan’s sense of association was strongest not with his children but with men like former Confederate general James Longstreet. In Atlanta one year early in the 1890s, the two old men were guests at the Irish Society’s St. Patrick’s Day banquet. Afterward, unable to get a cab, they walked together to Sickles’s hotel, Dan still on his preferred crutches. At the hotel, a somewhat tipsy Sickles said, “Longstreet, the streets of Atlanta are very dark and it is very late, and you are somewhat deaf and rather infirm; now I must escort you to your headquarters.”
Longstreet said, “All right, come on and we’ll have another handshake over the bloody chasm.” So they returned to Longstreet’s hotel, hobbling along together and perhaps enjoying a libation at the end of the journey. Then Longstreet said, “Sickles, the streets of Atlanta are very dark and you are lame, and a stranger here, and do not know the way back to your hotel. I must escort you home.” And so they struggled out into the night again.
“Old fellow, I hope you are sorry for shooting off my leg at Gettysburg. I suppose I will have to forgive you, for it’s Sunday.”
“Forgive me? You ought to thank me for leaving you one leg to stand on, after the way you behaved to me.”
Many were deeply touched at the Gettysburg reunion of 1893 when these two old generals helped each other up one of the hills named Roundtop, arriving, despite their age, w
ith an alacrity Longstreet had not shown on the day itself. “Sickles,” said Longstreet, “you can well afford to help me up here now. If you had not kept me away so long … on the 2nd July 1863, the war would have lasted longer than it did….”19
The two were iconically matched again in March 1901, at the second inauguration of President McKinley, then at the West Point Centennial, and in 1902, on May 30, reviewing the veterans of the Spanish-American War from the same platform as President Theodore Roosevelt. It was their last meeting, for Longstreet would die of old age in 1904.
Sickles remained an ally of the Confederate general’s young second wife, Helen Longstreet, acquiring for her a postmastership in Georgia and providing several Longstreet-redeeming quotations for her book on the relationship between Lee and Longstreet. Indeed, said Dan improbably, given General Meade’s uncertainty, if Longstreet had delayed another hour before making his attack, he might have found the Union Army pulled out to Pipe Creek, the position chosen by General Meade on June 30. Even in defending Longstreet, Dan raised the old proposition he had been uttering for forty-one years—that Meade meant to retreat and did not intend to fight at Gettysburg, and that it was his subordinates, including Dan, who made the battle occur!20
In the early twentieth century, Dan was looked after at his home in New York by two black servants, Moseley and Sarah, and by a middle-aged widow, Eleanor Wilmerding, who was said to have loved the general “with a jealous, undying, and devoted affection.” Though there seems to have been a sexual component in the relationship, there was, as in all Dan’s relations with women, a lack of reciprocated devotion from Dan. The aging general’s meals were cooked by a former soldier named Captain Denton, and it was Denton who explained Dan’s lack of total emotional dependence upon Mrs. Wilmerding. He would tell a researcher nearly four decades later that he had seen in the general’s chamber dresser a whole drawer filled with lady’s black stockings and another with lady’s gloves. They had been left behind over time by lovers and were testimony to Dan’s erotic capacity in his advancing years. But his gastronomic tastes were shrinking, for in those last years, said Denton, he liked plain, wholesome meals, not the Delmonico and Maison Dorée style of food he had relished for most of his life. Now it was oyster stew, lamb stew, fried oysters, rice pudding—the straightforward, the sustaining.21
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