American Scoundrel (43 page)

A stretcher arrived, Dan had an NCO light his cigar, and that was how he was carried away, cap over his eyes, cigar in mouth, hands folded on chest. A little to the rear, bleeding heavily despite the strap around his upper thigh, but still not showing acute pain, he was placed in an ambulance with a medical aide, who began pouring brandy down his throat to counteract the shock. Tremain also got into the ambulance, since he thought Dan would expire on its bloody boards, and he did not want him to die without a face he knew. “Solemn words,” said Tremain, “not to be written in my story, were softly spoken to me amid the din of cannon.” Dan was pleased to see Father O’Hagen, chaplain of the 74th New York, ride up to offer spiritual comforts. There seemed to be a consensus that the general would die, but Dan did not appear oppressed by it.

Certainly he was now about to experience the mercy of a field hospital, of exactly the kind of place outside which Walt Whitman, hospital orderly, sighted a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, and hands—the mark of a site of horrors. The Third Corps field hospital consisted of a string of tents near the Taneytown Road, a little way behind the Round-tops. Light was fading, and the doctors inspected Dan by the illumination of candles stuck on bayonets. Tremain caught the odor of chloroform, which the more advanced Union surgeons were merciful
enough to use. After chloroform was administered to Dan, Dr. Thomas Sim, the corps’ medical director, using a new method of rounded amputation, cut off the leg at a third of the way up the thigh. He had just read that the Army Medical Museum in Washington was advertising for samples, and so, instead of throwing the limb into a heap, he had it wrapped in a wet blanket and placed in a small coffin for shipment to Washington. Dan’s shattered leg lived on as a museum exhibit and remains on display at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington.

Overnight, as the anesthetic wore off, the pain of Dan’s amputation became intolerable. He now felt at one with the thousands of agonized men of Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, and other nightmares, and he was filled with vague but deep anxieties. After he was given two opium pills for the pain, Sim believed it essential to get him away from the infections of the field hospital. In the morning he was placed on a stretcher and began the journey to the nearest Union-controlled railroad depot at Littlestown, twelve miles away. He had been moved to the hospital, following his wound, fairly deftly and without pain, but this time he could be transported only at a creeping pace. As well as Dr. Sim, who had left his deputy in charge of the Third Corps hospital, Tremain and two other aides, handsome Alexander Moore and plump Tom Fry, accompanied Dan, and ten shifts of four men each were used to transport him, with enormous care, over the difficult ground. Whenever cavalry came rattling past, Dr. Sim would cry out to them and to the stretcher bearers themselves to go steadily. “A stumble might kill the patient.” There were frequent rests, of an extent not afforded the wounded of other ranks, in secluded and shady places. They traveled only four miles that first day, as, at Gettysburg, the final Confederate assault on the center began, ending in the defeat of Lee’s army. At the Wheatfield, Mathew Brady would take a famous photograph of the already bloating young dead of Dan’s corps.

The next morning Dan at first felt well and insisted on shaving himself, and that day the railroad and its strings of rail coaches full of wounded was reached. Dan and his accompanying surgeon and aides traveled to Washington on what Tremain called “an ordinary passenger
car.” The jolting of the train pained Dan, and he was fed morphine. Two days after the battle, the party reached Washington. Dan could sense, that Sunday morning, even through his opium haze, the exhilaration of the capital, the excitement apparent on the faces of people at the train station. There were frantic cheers from those waiting for or arriving on trains as he was carried forth. Had he known, he would have been ecstatic to learn that the
New York Times
was already laying print for the next day that said, “New York State and City owe a debt of peculiar gratitude to General Sickles. He it is that, in the most signal manner, has proved what militia are capable of when led by a brave man.” There was hope, “amounting almost to confidence, that his life and services will be spared to the country.” The
Times
could not express more than “hope” because of the problems surgeons often had with amputations. Since such injuries were covered with lint scraped from materials not always sterile, the chance of gangrene and of an agonizing and fevered death was always present for the recent amputee.
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Rooms in a lodging house on Eighth Street had been organized for Dan. He continued to lie on the stretcher on top of a mattress placed on the floor, and a medical orderly kept the stump wet—what Surgeon Sim called “irrigating the wound.” There was discussion about lifting him off the floor and into a bed, but since Sim felt he might not be up to it, he was tended quietly where he was. He seemed to be alert and happy in a feverish way.

Late that Sunday afternoon, an aide came into the room with the news that the President and his son Tad were downstairs. If many professional soldiers were blaming Dan for taking his corps forward, the President, an advocate of “forward,” did not fret much about the matter. Lincoln, aware that Dan, right or wrong, had given spirited aid to the survival of the United States, was willing to leave his sick wife at the White House to spend time with Dan. He had been following Meade’s dispatches and, concerned, as so often before, by the man’s excessive caution, was planning to urge him to pursue Lee. “You have given the enemy a stunning blow at Gettysburg. Follow it up, and give him another before he can reach the Potomac.”

No visitor could have been more welcome to Dan in his semidelirious state, alternating between euphoria and fretfulness, than the President. Lincoln walked in, bent over, shook hands with Sickles, asked him about his wound, and then sat in a chair at the side of the mattress while Tad stood by, no doubt amazed at the pallid transformation of this man he had seen around the White House. Sickles had a cigar lit up for the occasion, and was eager to answer the President’s questions about the battle. That very afternoon, with his hold on life tenuous, Dan began his campaign to discredit the dilatory Meade before Meade discredited the rash Sickles. Meade himself would not lose much time arguing his point. In his official dispatch he would state, “General Sickles, misinterpreting his orders, instead of placing the Third Corps on the prolongation of the Second, had moved it nearly three-quarters of a mile in advance, an error which nearly proved fatal in the battle.” But Meade, Dan implied or said outright to the President that afternoon, had had no plan of battle for Gettysburg. Sickles explained now to the nation’s father how he had seen it as a matter of necessity to advance to the high ground. According to one of his aides, he spoke of the general impact of the battle itself, and its probable political consequences, “with a lucidity and ability remarkable in his condition. . .. Occasionally he would wince with pain and call sharply to his orderly to wet his stump with water. But he never dropped his cigar nor lost the thread of his narrative. . .. He certainly got his side of the story of Gettysburg well into the President’s mind.” Lincoln gravely thanked Dan, asked if there was anything he needed, was thanked in return, and departed.
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Before the day was out, Henry Wikoff called in. Not only was the chevalier still a favorite of Mary Todd Lincoln’s, but, although he was too old now for military service, his entrée to the various embassies of Washington inevitably made him a useful source of intelligence to the Union. In Dan’s sickroom, he almost certainly asked if Dan at last wanted Teresa at his side. For whatever reason, Dan still didn’t. Wikoff sent off telegrams to the
Herald
and to Teresa so that she would not have the shock of reading the first definitive news of Dan’s wound in the next day’s paper. Other visitors to Dan were War Secretary Edwin Stanton
and James Topham Brady, of Dan’s old legal team, and General Thomas Francis Meagher, who came down from New York bringing confections and wine. Dan asked Brady’s help with a fund to buy delicacies, medicines, and comforts for the nearly three thousand wounded of the Third Corps. Brady returned to New York and made a speech in the Stock Exchange, raising a considerable sum, which was sent to General Birney, who had inherited Dan’s corps.

Dan had become more subject to depression and anxiety. He blamed them not on his wound or on what he had witnessed, but on his having been anesthetized. One of his recurrent concerns was how he and his men would survive the controversy over the forward position he had taken at Gettysburg. He was also haunted by the feverish idea that the remains of his corps had been involved in a new military disaster following Gettysburg. He must have expressed this concern to Stanton and others, who told the President about it, so that, on July 10, Lincoln took the trouble to write a note of reassurance to him. “I understand you are troubled with some reports that the Third Corps has sustained a disaster or a repulse. I can only say that I have watched closely, and believe I’ve seen all the dispatches of the military telegraph office up to a half hour ago . . . and I have heard of no such disaster or repulse. I add that I do not believe there had been any such. Yours truly, A. Lincoln.”

Indeed, Lincoln wished that the Third Corps and all the other corps
had
been involved in some military expedition. For on July 14, Meade let Lee recross the Potomac unmolested and go home. When the President visited Sickles the next day, Tremain heard Lincoln groan and tell Sickles that this failure to get Lee was the greatest disaster of the war.

As Dan’s health improved, Teresa may have harbored a hope that this new incapacity would make her husband dependent on her. That he had not sent for her certainly cast doubt on the idea, but, with only one leg, he would have to lead a less restless and peripatetic life and a more domestic one. So she might yet become what she passionately desired to be: a helpmeet. Dan did not seem averse to going back to New York and Bloomingdale. He was practicing on crutches in his room for a train journey there. On July 22, he turned up by slow carriage at the White
House and went in. He was moving without the approval of his doctor, and an erratic motion, like that of a coach, could cause agony in his only partly healed wound. But he managed to look dashing on crutches and would all his life prefer them to any prosthetic device. Cynics said that he preferred to proceed in this painful manner, with his trouser leg pinned up, to ensure that no one who met him could forget that he had placed his body in intimate peril for the Union.
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Having said goodbye to the President, Dan went home by train. The journey caused him difficulties, but he and his aides safely reached Jersey City, where a revenue cutter waited to take him in triumph to New York. As he tottered toward the gangplank, bystanders cheered. His New York friends Brady and Meagher, Hart and Wikoff, were aboard the cutter, as were many others. The cabin had been laid out as a dining room, and a splendid meal was served while the cutter made directly for Ninety-first Street on the Hudson. On the way, speeches were made, with Brady acting as toastmaster.

This was a dangerous time for the city, since in the days following Gettysburg there had been a crisis over conscription. It had begun on Monday, July 13, when German and Irish rioters had organized a protest against the draft. The situation had degenerated, so that at the climax of a week of riot and resistance, masses of New Yorkers fought a force of the Union Army, with high but unspecified casualties among the civilians. The Board of Councilmen thought that legless Sickles might serve as a chastening example to the rebellious city, and they were quick to proffer thanks to him and to order a gold medal struck in his honor.
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B
UT ANY RESIDUAL HOPE THAT TWENTY-
six-year-old Teresa may have harbored of Dan’s becoming a private man was soon dispelled. At home, he was as restless and irritable as other soldier husbands. He clumped about the house with an absorbed air, and in his postwound edginess, he experienced swings of mood. He had already confessed to one of his officers, in a letter written from Bloomingdale, that he wanted to be back with the corps the very first day his strength would permit. His stump was extremely painful, particularly when a storm approached, and while it was in progress. Because it had not yet shrunk to its natural size, he could not yet be measured for an artificial leg. “Nor has it acquired sufficient hardness to enable me to ride in a carriage faster than a walk over any but a park road.” He still insisted on catching carriages down to the city, either
to be feted or to spend time in George Sickles’s office on Nassau Street. Short of his brothers in the field, he felt most at ease with his father.
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After less than two weeks, he sat down in his study at Bloomingdale and wrote an energetic letter to Edwin Stanton. “It will not be long before I am ready for work again—can you give me a command? . . . Meanwhile, please do not permit General Meade to break up my corps—which I hear he contemplates.” He became obsessed about his friend Charles Graham, captured while wounded in the Peach Orchard, and pleaded with Stanton to expedite the prisoner exchange, since some evil stories had arisen from Confederate prisoner-of-war camps around Richmond.

Obviously, it would be forever impossible for Dan to become a private man dependent on his wife. He did not especially seek her company, and his pain and her persistent cough and occasional prostrations separated them further. On August 11, he departed Bloomingdale and its humid summer and made for Lake George in the Adirondacks, accompanied not by Teresa but by two young captains, brilliantly accoutered. When Dan turned up, helped in and out of the carriage by his officers, at the Fort William Henry Hotel, the affluent guests fibrillated with excitement. By now, he understood that his old capacity to charm people and to appeal to women sexually had not vanished with his leg. Nor did he fall back upon his disability as a means of avoiding a hyperactive country vacation. He played tenpins and billiards, negotiating his way up and down the green and the billiard table on his crutches, by now familiar implements. He went hunting and fishing almost every day, and shot two deer. He sent the head of a buck to Lorenzo Delmonico, with whom the Excelsior Brigade had built up such a debt in the conflict’s early days.