In February 1867, Dan was suddenly called home to New York. Teresa had been ill and died on February 5 at the age of thirty-one. Dan was not there when she died, but he did arrive in time for the funeral on February 9. He attended with Laura (who was now thirteen years old), Teresa’s parents, and his own parents. For the first time since 1859, Teresa received recognition as Dan Sickles’ wife. But typically, the ceremony was more about Dan the War Hero than Teresa. Among the pallbearers were Dan’s new army family of Henry Tremain, Alfred Pleasonton, and Charles Graham. The pastor commented on the “irreparable loss sustained by the sorrowing parents and bereaved husband. He had given up all to go to the aid of his beloved country in the hour of her need.” As he and Laura followed the casket from the church, and as reported in the New York Herald,his step was “infirm and tottering.” Sickles broke down under the “intense feelings” of the occasion and the congregation rushed after him, “testifying in various ways the hold he had upon their hearts.… ” Dan was, as always, the center of attention, and one more reminder of the Key murder trial was gone.15
Laura eventually returned to Charleston with Dan, where (reportedly because of the Key stigma) she had trouble gaining admittance to a good school. Dan had been away for much of her life and as he tried to become a father to a teenage girl, whatever relationship that did exist eventually deteriorated badly. The extent of his guilt over Teresa’s isolation and his parental failure has been fodder for Sickles biographers. In the end, we really don’t know how Dan felt about Teresa and Laura. For the remainder of his life, when Dan looked back he almost always focused on the war years. Dan was increasingly viewed by himself and the public as a Civil War hero. Teresa, Laura, and the Key murder were not topics that he discussed publicly.16
Dan’s mourning did not prevent him from lobbying President Johnson on February 26 for a vacant brigadier general position in the Regular Army. “Not desiring civil office, I confess my ambition to deserve and attain a rank in the permanent Military Establishment corresponding to the grade I reached as a Volunteer officer.… ” Sickles had earlier, and finally, entered the Regular Army in July 1866, to the rank of colonel. In March 1867, he was brevetted brigadier general in the U.S. Army for Fredericksburg (where he saw little action), and then brevetted major general for Gettysburg. The Civil War’s most notorious amateur general had finally been recognized as a regular, if not a “professional.”17
By mid-March, Sickles was back in Charleston. As Sickles later described, part of his duties were to “begin the systematic education of the freed people in these two states” and to direct voter registration. White vigilantes, often ex-Confederates, murdered blacks and occasionally Federal soldiers. As a result, Sickles was called upon to declare martial law and other strict measures in towns where blacks were being terrorized. Complaints of his strict excessiveness frequently reached Washington. Four Carolinians were convicted by a military commission of murdering three of his soldiers, but a federal court issued a writ of habeas corpus in favor of the accused. Sickles refused the court’s order, so a federal judge ordered him in contempt and demanded his arrest. When Sickles simply refused this also, President Johnson decided that Sickles had overstepped his boundaries. The President and the Attorney General both agreed that Sickles’ authority did not supersede a federal court, so a frustrated Sickles asked to be relieved as he was unable “to protect life, property or the rights of citizens.… ” Outraged that Sickles would defy a court, Secretary of Navy Welles urged Johnson to “make short work with King Sickles.” Johnson finally dismissed Sickles on August 27 using the “alleged harshness and oppression which had characterized the military government of the Carolinas” as his justification.18
While the Charleston papers celebrated his departure, Sickles returned to New York, again, as a hero. He was “serenaded into evening…by his old comrades of the Excelsior Brigade, the Grand Army of the Republic, and officers and men of the old volunteer army generally.” Now motivated by his own dislike of Johnson, Sickles began to campaign for Ulysses Grant’s 1868 run for the Presidency. In the process, he temporarily abandoned the Democratic Party in favor of the Republicans. In May 1868, he was chosen chairman of the New York delegation to the Republican National Convention, despite Grant’s initial preference that he not attend. When he attended Grant’s inauguration in early 1869, Sickles was once again on friendly terms with yet another administration. Yet another remarkable professional turnaround.19
When Grant was elected, Sickles felt entitled to some reward for his campaign efforts. In April 1869, Grant rewarded him with a full rank of major general (promoted from his brevet rank) and placed him on the retired list. But politically, Dan was disappointed when his first appointment offer was to the legation in Mexico City, which he declined. Secretary of War John Rawlins suggested, instead, that Sickles be appointed Minister to Spain and Sickles accepted the post in May. The assignment appealed to Sickles, in part, because bringing Cuba into the United States was a favorite topic of his. Newspapers attacked Sickles’ character on a level not seen since the Key murder, and certainly not since Gettysburg. The New York Worldcommented: “The claim that the man atoned for his hideous offenses against decency and good morals by his service during the war are utterly unfounded.” Nevertheless, Charles Graham was among 200 supporters who threw Dan a lavish party on June 30. Although the Senate delayed his confirmation for almost one year, Dan sailed for Spain with Laura and his mother in July. From 1869 to 1873, Sickles was in Spain, which (along with Cuba) dominated his professional attention.20
During the late 1860s, the veterans were mostly interested in rebuilding their lives, although the old wartime feuds occasionally flared up. For example, a suspiciously Historicus-like article, signed by “An Officer and Eyewitness” to Chancellorsville appeared in the New York Timeson June 3, 1867. Obviously intimately familiar with Third Corps movements at Chancellorsville, the author relayed a pro-Third Corps version of the battle. When a Federal counterattack was supposedly proposed following Hooker’s wounding, the article depicted a timid Meade who allegedly “sat quietly on his horse outside of Hooker’s tent, and declined to fight.… ” George Meade speculated that Henry Tremain was the author, causing no less a modern historian than Harry Pfanz to connect the dots between Tremain and Historicus.21
In 1869, John Watts de Peyster, a former Third Corps officer and fledgling military historian published an article: “The Third Corps at Gettysburg, July 2, 1863. General Sickles Vindicated.” De Peyster, primarily using source material favorable to Sickles, concluded that Sickles had acted correctly in advancing. Later in 1869, during a reunion speech in Vermont, Colonel William Grout also supported Sickles, whose corps “became unexpectedly engaged, to the great chagrin of Meade, who was still intent upon falling back to his favorite position near Taneytown.” Such statements would contribute later to the battle between Meade and Sickles partisans, but for the time being the debate remained relatively quiet.22
The most heated battles fought during this period involved the former Confederate officers. Perhaps no other Gettysburg participant, including Sickles, found himself (and made himself) the target of more heated Gettysburg attacks than Sickles’ Peach Orchard opponent, James Longstreet. Longstreet had, through a series of actions, become vilified by many of his former military colleagues. He had allowed some of his comments that were critical of Lee to appear in print and then aligned himself with the hated Republican Party. Longstreet openly supported his close friend Grant’s presidential campaign, and embarked on a long career of Republican political appointments. Particularly following Lee’s death in 1870, several ex-Confederate generals fiercely attacked his military record. Longstreet, in many ways, became the antithesis of Sickles. Dan had been a professional politician who, despite his controversial battlefield record, had managed to transform himself into a war hero. Longstreet was a professional soldier whose solid war record was muddied by a less than successful transition to politics. Both men had their supporte
rs and detractors, and both men would eventually cross paths in defending their Gettysburg performance.23
Unlike Sickles and Longstreet, George Meade had no political ambitions. Following Grant’s election, General in Chief William T. Sherman assigned Meade to his Philadelphia hometown where he took command of the Military Division of the Atlantic from Hancock. (Hancock was moved to the Department of the Dakota where he had a singularly unsuccessful stint as an Indian fighter.) Meade and his wife enjoyed being in Philadelphia with family and old friends, but he succumbed to illness and died on November 6, 1872. Significantly, Meade did not live to see the years when Gettysburg became a National Military Park and the veterans returned in large numbers to re-fight the battle. In death, George Meade continued to be attacked by Dan Sickles, and Meade would enjoy the distinct disadvantage of being unable to defend himself.24
While veterans such as Sickles were busy getting on with their lives, efforts slowly began to commemorate battlefields such as Gettysburg. Perhaps no one individual deserves more credit for preserving the battlefield for posterity than Gettysburg native David McConaughy, a local attorney and Republican. McConaughy thought “that there would be no more fitting and expressive memorial of the heroic valor and signal triumphs of our army…than the battlefield itself.… ” Within two weeks of the end of the fighting he began purchasing key battlefield locations. On April 30, 1864, the Pennsylvania legislature granted a charter to his Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association (GBMA) to “hold, and preserve the battlegrounds of Gettysburg.”25
Although both McConaughy and Dr. Theodore Dimon (who had arrived in Gettysburg to care for New York’s wounded and dead) had earlier proposed similar ideas, it was another local attorney, David Wills, who pushed through the establishment of Gettysburg’s Soldiers’ National Cemetery. Wills received Governor Curtin’s approval to purchase seventeen acres of Cemetery Hill, where internments of 3, 512 Union dead began in the fall of 1863. Although President Lincoln’s “few appropriate remarks” during the November 19 dedication have been remembered as the “Gettysburg Address,” acclaimed orator Edward Everett actually gave the keynote address. In Everett’s lengthy oration, Sickles moved forward to “gain a commanding position from which to repel the Rebel attack” and “after a brave resistance on the part of his corps, he was forced back, himself falling severely wounded. This was the critical moment of the second day.… ” but Everett considered the “most important service” to have been rendered by General Crawford in his counter-attack through the Plum Run valley. It was later within the grounds of the new National Cemetery that the first monuments were placed at Gettysburg. In July 1865, the cornerstone was laid for what would become the Soldiers’ National Monument. Then in 1867, veterans of the 1st Minnesota placed a memorial urn in the cemetery to honor their fallen comrades. The precedent was set for placing monuments to commemorate the battle.26
A New Hampshire-born artist named John Bachelder had also arrived in Gettysburg shortly after the battle, and would eventually spend the remainder of his life associated with studying and mapping the battlefield. Thus, the GBMA, a National Cemetery, and fledgling historians such as Bachelder formed the groundwork to ensure that the world would, as Lincoln said, “never forget what they did” at Gettysburg. By June 1864, the GBMA owned seventy acres. However, over the next ten to fifteen years, there was a lull in a war-weary population’s Civil War interest, and McConaughy’s ability to raise funds and preserve land for the GBMA decreased.27
Meanwhile, Sickles’ work at the legation in Madrid kept him in the news. The question of Cuba’s future remained hotly debated, and his political enemies at home watched with interest. Commenting on a March 1871 speech regarding Cuban emancipation, the New York Worldeditorialized (under the headline “The Scoundrel Sickles Speaks”) that he compared most unfavorably to the other speakers. “There is no reason to suppose that any of them had been a thief, or a forger, or a dependent upon outcast women, or a murderer.”28
He regained his reputation for entertaining lavishly, well above his estimated $16, 800 salary. Dan began a romantic affair with the deposed Queen Isabella II in Paris, and the French press sarcastically dubbed him the “Yankee King of Spain.” But in November 1871, he married one of Isabella’s twenty-something attendants, Caroline de Creagh. Edgcumb Pinchon’s researcher believed that Isabella arranged the marriage, while the widow of New York Governor William Sulzer later insisted that both parties “married in the belief that the other party had plenty of money, or rather, the marriage was arranged. But they were temperamentally unsuited to each other, and never agreed on any subject.… ” The service was rather small (by Sickles standards) and hastily arranged, although daughter Laura served as a bridesmaid. Dan and the new Mrs. Sickles then boarded a steamer for New York. The New York Heraldwas mystified at his reason for coming home, but speculated: “Some of Minister Sickles’ friends say he will not return to the Spanish capital.”29
The newlyweds arrived in New York on December 22, 1871. Sickles insisted that he was only on a three-month vacation, but on behalf of shareholders whom he represented, he directed an overthrow of financier Jay Gould’s corrupt management of the Erie Railroad. The episode was very public and he received more newspaper coverage than any time since Gettysburg. Sickles then moved onto Washington, where by February the papers were circulating rumors that there was “pending a serious personal difficulty” between Sickles and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish. There were rumors that one of the two men was about to “retire” from his position. But Sickles instead went to Albany to officially mediate a state political dispute. There were then press hints that Sickles intended to make a run for state governor. When opponents in the New York Worldcontinued to remind readers of his past indiscretions by calling him a “pimp,” Sickles threatened libel, causing diarist George Templeton Strong to famously comment, “One might as well try to spoil a rotten egg as to damage Dan’s character.”30
Sickles finally sailed back for Spain in late April, but as he had in the Carolinas, his lack of tact had worn out its welcome. By late 1872, he was eager to return home, complaining to Secretary Fish, “I confess I’m tired of my useless work here and of these vacillating people.” Even worse, his second marriage had not cured his chronic philandering. In May 1873, one anonymous American complained of Sickles to Secretary Fish, “While in Madrid his conduct with women has been simply disgraceful.” Caroline was already said to be “heartily sick of her bargain, poor girl.” Dan was accused of living in adultery with another woman prior to the marriage and of using “child virgins for the purpose of prostitution. His conduct with lewd women of the town was, and even is, shocking. Are we to have another Philip Barton Key affair in Spain?”31
Like most aspects of Sickles’ life, what started promisingly ended badly and his diplomatic career reached an ugly conclusion in October 1873. An American blockade runner, the Virginius,was captured illegally sneaking arms and men into Cuba to aid insurrectionists. Although the Americans were legally wrong, Secretary Fish had Sickles dutifully remind the Spanish government not to execute the crew without trial. A local official ignored the plea however, and executed fifty-three of the men. An outraged American public called for war with Spain. Fish had Sickles give Madrid a series of demands along with a twelve day deadline, after which Sickles would close the legation and depart Madrid, a clear step toward war. Sickles had an ugly exchange with the foreign minister and after only five days he urged Fish to close the legation. Fish became suspicious that his diplomat seemed too eager for war, and as in past Sickles escapades, Dan’s correspondence began to appear anonymously in newspapers. Sickles became exceedingly unpopular in Madrid and rumors of his assassination circulated. Fish and the Spanish government eventually went around him and negotiated a settlement without his knowledge. Sickles was humiliated and became the butt of jokes in Madrid. He resigned in as much disgrace as he was capable of, and as in the Carolinas, his departure was welcomed in all corners. Once again, he had a
llowed emotions and his temper to overstep his abilities, but had he been more persuasive the United States and Spain could have entered into war two decades before the Spanish-American War. His tenure abroad had not benefited him financially. He had been forced to give up his army salary of $5,625 and later claimed that he spent $30,000 annually from his own pocket to “keep up the dignity of the office.”32
Now on the outs with Grant’s administration, Sickles’ career seemed dead once again. With no political or military assignment for the first time in years, Dan moved to Paris with Caroline, Laura, and his aging mother in February 1874. However, relations with Laura broke down permanently, reportedly over her affair with a Spanish military officer. Laura moved back to New York to live with Teresa’s mother, and was permanently banished from Dan’s life. Dan’s mother also died while in Paris. On the positive side, Caroline bore a daughter (Eda) in 1875. The following year, a son (George Stanton) was born. Approaching fifty-seven years old, and with a significant physical disability, Sickles was starting a new family at an age when most men were preparing to retire. But he still found time to return to America. In May 1878, he attended a reunion with Hooker and Joe Twichell of the Third Army Corps Union in Newburgh, New York. Finally, probably unable to miss the excitement of the upcoming 1880 presidential election, Sickles decided in late 1879 to return home to New York permanently. Caroline refused to go, so leaving his new family behind, he set sail for the United States.33
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