Daniel Sickles: A Life

By Garry Boulard

The name Daniel Sickles and the word controversy are synonymous. Any student of 19th century American political history is familiar with Sickles’ 1859 murder of Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, who had seduced Sickles’ young wife.

That murder, because Sickles was at the time a New York Congressman and Key a district attorney for Washington, captured the country’s imagination, a front-page event that inevitably ensnarled President James Buchanan, a close Sickles friend, inviting in the process explorations of what was seen as a sordid Washington society of the late 1850s.

Civil War historians know Sickles as the General who led the men of the Union’s III Corps out onto the exposed expanse of the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg, a decision many scholars have regarded as disastrous, and one that nearly led to an overall Union defeat at the famous battlefield, while losing for Sickles his right leg from Confederate shelling.

But these two singular, if spectacular events, in a very real sense represent only two days out of an extraordinary lifetime of 94 years.

The rest of Sickles’ career was made up of his rise as a young stalwart of New York’s notorious Tammany Hall; his two terms in Congress leading up to the Civil War; his contentious service as a military governor of the Carolinas after the War; his newsworthy tenure as U.S. Minister to Spain in the late 1860s and early 70s; and even his stint, at the age of 70, as the sheriff of the county encompassing New York City.

Beyond the headlines were Sickles’ relationships with presidents ranging from Franklin Pierce to Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, not to mention an improbable friendship with Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the century.

Daniel Sickles: A Life is the first full-length published treatment looking in depth at the entirely of one man’s almost unbelievably colorful and contentious career.

Garry Boulard is the author of The Expatriation of Franklin Pierce—The Story of a President and the Civil War (iUniverse, 2006), and The Worst President—The Story of James Buchanan (iUniverse, 2015).

Boulard’s essays and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Journal of Ethnic Studies, Louisiana History, Journal of Mississippi History, and Florida Historical Quarterly, among many other publications.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532088445

Garry Boulard

Garry Boulard is an author whose reporting has appeared in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Louisiana History, the Journal of Mississippi History, and Florida Historical Quarterly. He is the author of The Expatriation of Franklin Pierce—The Story of a President and the Civil War (iUniverse 2006), and The Worst President—The Story of James Buchanan (iUniverse 2015).

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-8843-8 (sc)

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Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgement

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-One

Chapter Seventy-Two

Chapter Seventy-Three

Chapter Seventy-Four

Chapter Seventy-Five

Introduction

In the summer of 1913, Grace Carew Sheldon, a reporter, author, businesswoman, and political activist, rang the ground floor doorbell of a four-story red brick townhouse at Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street in New York, before being greeted by Frazier Moseley, who took her card and brought it into the house by the way of introduction.

The long-time black servant, a cultured man in his own right, then handed the card to 93 year-old General Daniel Sickles, sitting behind a desk cluttered with documents, unanswered mail, maps and books, gamely working on his memoirs.

I sit here day after day, holding off death with one hand as I write with the other, Sickles remarked amiably to Sheldon, once she was ushered by Moseley into the General’s parlor. ¹

In this quest, Sickles’s challenge was not unlike that of his old friend Ulysses S. Grant, who during the last year of his life, dying from throat cancer, was determined to complete his memoirs, remarking as he neared the end I have been adding to my book and to my coffin. I presume every strain of the mind or body is one more nail in the coffin. ²

In this, Grant proved more successful than Sickles, completing what would prove to be one of the greatest memoirs in military history less than a week before his death.

Sickles never saw the completion of his memoirs, and what actually happened to what he did write has been lost to history.

But Sickles, who had many friends who continued to visit him, as well as politicians, reporters, and members of a rancorous and clearly dysfunctional family, could be excused for being easily distracted.

The parlor Sickles tried to do his work in, Mark Twain had observed earlier, was a strange kind of museum where you couldn’t walk across the floor without stumbling over the hard heads of lions and things.

You couldn’t put out a hand anywhere without laying it upon a velvet, exquisite tiger-skin or leopard skin, Twain added, who nevertheless found himself strangely delighted with a museum that would delight and entertain little boys and girls. ³

A reporter for the Brooklyn Times Union saw this peculiar lair as filled to overflowing with bric-a-brac and curios. There were great armchairs of ebony; big chests with elaborate silk moldings with strange-shaped keys sticking out of them.

The chests looked as if they might have come from some baron’s castle in sunny Spain, the reporter continued, noting a profusion of oil paintings hanging from the walls, numerous portraits of Grant and Abraham Lincoln, and tables and shelves filled with revolvers, swords, daggers, and helmets. ⁴

Sickles greeted Sheldon, she later said, cordially with that unconscious courtesy which put me instantly at my ease. ⁵

Sickles’ right leg had been shot off half a century earlier at Gettysburg, not long after he had moved his men forward in preparation for the coming battle without the permission of his commander, General George Meade. It was a move that would never be forgotten, a move that endangered the men of his III Corps and threatened the fortunes of the entire Army of the Potomac.

It was also a move that Sickles would to the end of his life defend as the only practical one open to him. It was not his fault, Sickles forever insisted, that he made the move that he made at Gettysburg. It was Meade’s fault for not having given him clearer directions.

Sickles’ enemies, and they were legion, people who didn’t like his brashness, the way he cut corners, how he bended rules, the very fact, indeed, that he was a General in the first place without ever having gone to West Point, looked at what he did at Gettysburg as classic of a man who was in over his head, a political general, as the usually even-handed historian Bruce Catton would put it, of most moderate military capacity. ⁶

But Sickles could and did wave in any critic’s face the letter he received in 1902 from James Longstreet, the Army of Northern Virginia’s lieutenant general in command of the Confederate First Corps, who wrote that what Sickles did at Gettysburg saved the battle-field to the Union cause. ⁷

Besides, Sickles’ soldiers, aging men he still called my boys, continued to praise his leadership, sending him letters of admiration, cheering him wildly with tears in their eyes at every Gettysburg reunion.

Despite the loss of the leg, and Sickles’ subsequent inability or unwillingness to use a wooden leg any more than he had to, he got around on crutches, and still somehow moved about with a certain adroit grace, as Sheldon discovered when he so gallantly greeted her.

He was writing his memoirs, he told Sheldon, because he was tired of the way in which his life had been chronicled in the nation’s press. My amusement for a time was to read my life history as it was written from day to day by the newspapers, Sickles said, wryly adding It was always news to me. ⁸

The reporting had consistently been sensational, because Sickles himself was a sensation. He had been endlessly portrayed as something of a rascal going back to his early days in New York when he was an enthusiastic stalwart for Tammany Hall and a fellow whose legal troubles and romances somehow just always seemed to be news.

The ongoing New York preoccupation with Sickles turned into a worldwide obsession in 1859 when, now serving as a Congressman in Washington, he shot dead on the street Philip Barton Key, the son of the author of the Star Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key.

The younger Key, a slippery man Sickles had thought was his friend, had seduced Sickles’ wife. Outed by an anonymous source, Key made so bold as to happily greet Sickles, who, coldly enraged, shot him three times with a single-barrel Derringer.

The murder, just a block away from the White House on a Sunday afternoon, proved the biggest news story of the day.

There was just something about it that people couldn’t get enough of: a prominent man of society, a New York Congressman, killing a man who was then serving as the District Attorney for the city of Washington.

The fact that the young woman at the center of the tragedy, 23 year-old Teresa Bagioli Sickles, was a first generation Italian-American of exquisite beauty and alluring charm, only adding to the public’s need to know more.

I’ve ceased recently to look into the papers, Sickles continued with Sheldon. Why should I, since they cannot tell me more than I know. ⁹

And what Sickles knew could admittedly fill the pages of several books. Not just the enormous events of Gettysburg or the killing of Philp Barton Key, but his years as a young New York machine politician, his terms in Congress as the country rushed towards civil war, his friendship with Lincoln, and his efforts harboring runaway slaves in his Northern Virginia camp once he became a Union General.

But there was more: His service as the Military Governor of the Carolinas after the war, and his successful move to end the racist Black Codes there, which included abolishing public whippings.

He could talk about his support of the Republican Grant for president, a support that in an unexpected way would haunt him forever, spurring as it did a libelous article from a prominent Democrat newspaper accusing Sickles of a multitude of sins, most of which were untrue, and all, sadly received as fact by future generations of historians.

There was his stormy 5 years in Madrid as U.S. Minister to Spain, during a time of frenetic regime change. There was also his entirely improbable stint as the Sheriff of New York County when he was 70 years old, and another term in Congress following that, and most unexpected of all, two years as a member of the New York Board of Aldermen when he was in his early eighties and now, almost absurdly, going to battle against the corruption of the same Tammany Hall that had given him his first taste of public life more than six decades earlier.

In-between all of this were his associations: Lincoln and Grant, of course, but also James Buchanan, destined to be listed by scholars as the nation’s worst president, the troubled and suspicious First Lady Mary Lincoln, who somehow always trusted Sickles, Andrew Johnson, the erratic president who hired and fired him, all of the great generals of the Civil War: McClellan, Hooker, and Burnside, and finally and perhaps most surprisingly, his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt in the last decade or so of his life, a man more than 40 years younger than Sickles, whose admiration for the General would prove without limits.

Sickles was writing his memoirs in long-hand, although in recent years he had also gotten used to ever so tentatively pecking on a typewriter.

He had been, he told Sheldon, a born fighter. As the years went along, he drifted from politics to diplomacy to arms and now, as he tapped his pen on the table, the pen is mightier than the sword, and I’m fighting my last battles with it. ¹⁰

He would keep writing, his vowed. He had so many stories to tell.

Introduction Notes

1.Grace Carew Sheldon, The Fascinating Story of Gen. Daniel E. Sickles, Buffalo Sunday Morning News, 17 May 1914, p. 30.

2.Ulysses S. Grant to J.H. Douglas, 23 June 1885, Ulysses S. Grant Papers, Reel 3.

3.Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 134-35.

4.Gen. ‘Dan’ Sickles Reminiscent at 85—His Picturesque Career, Brooklyn Times Union, 16 October 1909, p. 13.

5.Grace Carew Sheldon, The Fascinating Story of Gen. Daniel E. Sickles, Buffalo Sunday Morning News, 17 May 1914, p.30.

6.Bruce Catton, The Centennial History of the Civil War, Volume Three—Never Call Retreat (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1965), 152.

7.James Longstreet to Daniel Sickles, 19 September 1902, Papers of Daniel Sickles, Reel 1.

8.Grace Carew Sheldon, The Fascinating Story of Gen. Daniel E. Sickles, Buffalo Sunday Morning News, 17 May 1914, p. 30.

9.Ibid.

10.Ibid.

Acknowledgement

I am indebted to the following for their timely and helpful assistance: Chad Alpaugh, User Services Manager, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida; Barbara Bieck, Special Collections Librarian, The New York Society Library; Victoria Cardona, Reference Assistant, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries; Demaris Hill, Circulation Services Senior Manager, Alachua County Library District; Tammy Kiter, Manuscript Reference Librarian, New York Historical Society; Bruce Kirby, Reference Librarian, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Matthew Kruse, Processing and Political Papers Archivist, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida; Paul Losch, Head Librarian, Latin American and Caribbean Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida; John F. Marszalek, Executive Director, Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University; Edward O’Reilly, Curator and Head of Manuscripts, New York Historical Society; Gwen Thompson, Executive Director, Mary Todd Lincoln House; and Grace Wagner, Reading Room Access Services Supervisor, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries.

My thanks also to the following for their support and sympathy in the writing of this book: Mauricio Solis Avila, Max Gelber, Alexander Hong, Cameron Lahren, Brian Martinez, Mel Page, Curtis Quate, Nickolas Porraro, Andres Vergara and Rochelle Williams.

In memory of Mark Kermit Pierce

CHAPTER ONE

I n his mid-twenties, Daniel Sickles, wearing suits from Brooks Brothers, rings and watches from the best Manhattan jewelers, and enjoying the pleasures that always having a full pocketbook can afford, was in every way a New York gentleman.

Lean and muscular, with haunted eyes and an easy, winning smile, he stood in his boots at around 5 feet, 10 inches tall, sported a mustache and goatee that was by degrees darker than the reddish brown hair on his head, and almost always carried with him, concealed beneath a black broadcloth coat, a revolver, and sometimes even a fixed-blade fighting knife.

He enjoyed cigars and whiskey, spending nights in local pubs with fellow imbibers who included young attorneys, politicians, reporters, and, when he was in town, the darkly brilliant Shakespearean Edwin Forrest.

He also read history and novels, particularly loving adventure stories, spoke fluent Spanish and French, and was studying law under the elderly New York attorney Benjamin Butler, a former Attorney General under President Andrew Jackson. ¹

Sickles was exciting: he had a talent for easily making friends among those who found his quick-moving, unpretentious mannerisms appealing. That he was additionally the butt of his own jokes was irresistible.

But he also seemed preternaturally coiled, poised for battle, any battle, quick to anger, quick to action, a fountain of deep-felt passions that could explode at any moment, possessing the dangerous habit, perhaps spirited by his youth, of responding to events and emotions with unthinking impetuosity.

It was his father, George Sickles, who introduced him to the world of business, instructing his son to sit in his comfortable office on Nassau Street, on a block populated with bookstores and doctor’s offices. There he would absorb everything as the father bought and sold increasingly larger tracts of land, eventually owning thousands of undeveloped acres in New York and beyond, not to mention dozens of boarding houses, shops, and taverns.

George Sickles, a descendent of the Dutch Van Sicklens family, and married to Daniel’s mother, Susan Marshall Sickles, was a man who almost always got what he wanted. When he was 81 years old and about to marry his second wife, who was 48, the old man was visited by a reporter who noted that he moved his arms like a rooster clapping its wings, and crowed lustily, amid the laughter of the children who were gathered about him. ²

The father handed down to his son the same spirited determinism, later remarking with some pride that Daniel Sickles was by biology and inheritance defined by patience and perseverance to go ahead, which is a Sickles trait that cannot be wiped out and which is one of the inborn characteristics of the family. ³

To go ahead. In the Sickles family tradition, that also meant politics. The father regularly brought his son with him on frequent visits to the Ancient Society of Tammany, or Tammany Hall, headquartered in a five-story brick building at the corner of Nassau and Frankfort streets.

With roots reaching back to the 1780s, Tammany was a multi-layered political association successfully fielding candidates for the city’s boards of supervisors and aldermen, the state legislature, and all of the state’s top executive offices.

By the early 1840s, Tammany Hall had at least 10,000 city employees in its membership, enjoying an influence that grew throughout the decade as it provided a ready naturalization service to the arriving Irish, whose numbers would exceed 1 million by 1850. ⁴

Although the organization endeared itself to New York’s working class by securing for them low-paying city jobs, handing out free coal, and obtaining bail for jailed constituents, Tammany’s leadership was made up of conservative men who were bankers, brokers, and like George Sickles, realtors.

The group’s power was maintained by the candidates it elected to state and local office, an ongoing quest that kept the organization constantly on the lookout for young, attractive and conservative men to run for office, replenishing with new blood what was popularly thought to be only an old man’s club.

The Tammany sachems took in George Sickles’ son and decided that, confident, well-spoken, and, through his father, capable of financing his own campaign, Daniel Sickles was exactly the kind of rawly ambitious young man who could do the organization credit.

The younger Sickles would first prove his worth to the Tammany elders by demonstrating that he even had an interest in public affairs. At the age of 16, he had taken part in a successful public campaign to secure for lower Manhattan a new post office. Several years later he was editing, inside his father’s office, a newspaper named the Sober Second Thought supporting the presidential candidacy of Democrat James Polk. ⁵

Even more importantly, he was soon speaking for the Democratic presidential nominee and various Tammany candidates in rallies throughout the city.

Did Daniel Sickles want more? It was a question the sachems, particularly enjoying his literate public presentations, inevitably asked. Sickles did indeed want more and soon found himself, at the age of 27, winning Tammany’s backing for a seat in New York’s General Assembly, campaigning on the streets and public squares, gamely fielding hostile questions and challenges in a tough working class district, and ultimately winning 52 percent of the vote. ⁶

At some point during this race, Sickles even felt secure enough about his election chances to campaign for one of his drinking pals, 26 year-old David Broderick, the son of an Irish stonecutter who was running for Congress. Although Broderick lost, he never forgot Sickles’ generosity, writing to him after the election and displaying the kind of loyalty that Sickles had a way of engendering: If you ever need me, call me, and I will be your slave. ⁷

Boarding a train for icy Albany during the first week of January 1847, in plenty of time for the opening gavel of the 70th New York State Legislature, Sickles could look out the window at the barren, white, snowy landscape and imagine a future that was nicely being laid out for him: a term or two in either the General Assembly or Senate, then perhaps a run for Congress, and maybe at some point even a seat in the U.S. Senate. After that, who knows? Martin Van Buren, another Democrat from New York, had already proven that a Dutchman could be elected president.

Sickles, his ears still ringing from the shouts of supporters on the street, recalling with delight what it felt like to first see his name printed on a large poster or ballot, loved every minute of it.

But he had an amorous side that at any point threatened to unravel his momentum, frequently visiting a well-known prostitute by the name of Fanny White, who was born as Jane Augusta Funk.

A story, which would be repeated for decades, that he was censured by his fellow lawmakers for bringing White into the Assembly chamber was just that: a story. There is no record of any such censure in the official Journal of the Assembly of the State of New York, 70th Session. Nor is the incident mentioned in the New York Herald, New York Tribune, or Albany Argus, three papers that provided their readers with daily, detailed coverage of the Legislature. The source for the tale is the New York World, a Democratic newspaper whose owner in the 1860s never forgave Sickles for supporting the likes of Republicans Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. ⁸

Still, Sickles did visit White often, and was frequently seen with her in lower Manhattan, willfully ignoring talk that what he was doing was scandalous. In fact, he could even reason, his consorting with White had been public knowledge for several years and didn’t seem to matter to the working class people who voted for him.

By lottery, Sickles was given a seat on the left side of the Assembly chamber, towards the rear, which afforded him a sweeping view of his fellow lawmakers from all the other parts of the state, studying them as they spoke in the chamber or huddled in whispers on the floor.

Almost instantly he found himself in the thick of things, winning an assignment to the five-member Committee on Engrossed Bills. This was hardly exciting stuff: his task was to keep track of every formal legislative proposal made by his colleagues. But it proved excellent training for a new lawmaker trying to get a first-hand understanding of how the chamber worked, why some bills were intended only for show and relegated to various committees where they died a quiet death, and others were swiftly debated and voted on by the full Assembly.

When not performing his commission chores, Sickles proved himself a reliable Democratic vote in a chamber where the Whigs enjoyed a 72-56 majority. He voted with his fellow Democrats in favor of a bill providing for the clothing of a New York regiment fighting in the Mexican-American war, and backed a symbolic resolution prohibiting slavery in any territory acquired as a result of that war. This was the party line response to charges that the Democrats were for the war as a means of expanding slavery to the west and south, and Sickles adhered to it. ⁹

He actually, at this point in his career, had no interest in slavery as an issue. In fact, he regarded the abolition movement as nothing more than an annoyance and threat to regular party order.

But, there was no getting around it, the idea of American soldiers carrying the U.S. flag into battle in places like Palo Alto, Buena Vista, and Vera Cruz, more than 2,000 miles away, excited the young man’s imagination in a way that the slavery issue never could. In his off hours as a legislator, Sickles volunteered his services as an aide-de-camp with the rank of captain to Brigadier General George Morris, in charge of the Second Brigade of the New York National Guard.

Absurdly, during a review of the cavalry company on the fashionable block of Park Place in Manhattan, Sickles nearly got a crowd of well-dressed residents mowed over by the cavalry’s horses.

I knew how to ride and keep my saber from getting between my legs and tripping me up, Sickles later told a reporter for the New York Sun. But when asked by a Major to order a company of soldiers on review to execute a maneuver, Sickles was stumped.

For the life of me, I didn’t know any more about cavalry evolutions than I knew about canals in Mars, Sickles said. Not wanting to disappoint the Major, Sickles ordered that the men should charge. They did just that, with the horses suddenly breaking into a mad gallop down the one-block Park Place, plunging into a crowd of terrified onlookers who were nearly flattened against the house fronts in their efforts to escape from heels and hoofs.

The soldiers finally succeeded in reining in their horses at the end of the street. Sickles, relieved to see that no one was hurt, later admitted that he learned something that day about the danger of trying to maneuver horses in cramped quarters. ¹⁰

Tammany members of the General Assembly were traditionally not invited to stand for re-election, but were instead slated to run for the State Senate, if that seat was not currently held by a Democrat. Sickles, in the fall of 1847, was nominated by Tammany to run for a new seat in the 5th District. The larger state election that year would prove one of the greatest disasters in history for the Democrats of New York, with Whig candidates sweeping the state in district after district. The trend was no different in the 5th, where Sickles lost to Whig businessman Samuel Frost by a nearly 10-point margin. ¹¹

Was his career, one year after election to the Assembly, over?

Sickles may have thought so, but wiser and older heads, undoubtedly his father and various Tammany sachems, counseled instead that he had a bright future. The 5th District race, for the Democrats, had seemed impossible from the start. The Tammany elders liked the fact that Sickles got out and gave the campaign everything he had. They especially liked that he spoke intelligently, with no small amount of humor, and offered an attractive face to the local Democratic cause.

But Sickles had another talent that soon made itself apparent to both the sachems and the Democratic state party: he loved to strategize, thinking in broad brush strokes of how national events and policy impacted a party’s fortunes. Not for him the dreadful work of getting the garbage collected or hiring police officers and firemen that typically absorbed the time and energies of the average Tammany leader.

He was much more interested in how politics intersected with purpose and was particularly challenged by the emerging divisions within the New York Democratic Party represented by the Barnburner and Hunker factions, all centered around the issue that, ironically, colossally bored him: slavery.

The Barnburners were indeed willing to burn down a barn, the barn of the Democratic party, if it didn’t soon advance a more enlightened position on at least containing the spread of slavery. The Hunkers were more to Sickles’ liking, primarily Tammany men who valued simply getting elected to office, damn the slavery issue one way or the other.

For the presidential campaign of 1848 Sickles naturally gravitated to Michigan Senator Lewis Cass, a man who hoped to fudge the slavery issue entirely with his declaration that the people of each territory should decide for themselves whether to permit or prohibit slavery’s expansion.

Although the 65 year-old obese Cass’s best years were behind him as the former Governor of the Territory of Michigan, Sickles nevertheless repeatedly urged his fellow New York Democrats to rally to his banner, arguing that Cass’s candidacy presented the party with its best opportunity to unite the Barnburner and Hunker factions.

He hosted Cass on his visits to New York, and urged his election at a noisy Tammany rally once Cass had officially received the Democratic nomination, sharing the stage with such national luminaries as Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton and Texas Senator Sam Houston. ¹²

Despite his best efforts to effectuate a marriage between the two factions, Sickles was at first astonished and then deeply angered when the Barnburners lent their support to former president Van Buren, now running as the nominee for the Free Soil Party.

Now it was out in the open: the Barnburners really did care more about slavery than they did the Democratic party. When Cass lost the election due entirely to defections to Van Buren, Sickles had had enough.

In the months to come he urged Democrat leaders throughout New York to resist any new and unwise moves to unite the two factions, eventually giving his name to a petition appearing in the New York Herald just days before the 1849 state elections, declaring No compromise with Traitors and the results of next Tuesday’s election will sound the death-knell of barnburnism and leave the political skeletons of infamous advisers hanging gibbeted in chains, as a warning to all future malefactors and traitors. ¹³

Embracing at this very moment a rather different perspective, George Downing, a prominent African-American political leader and abolitionist, declared just hours before that same election during a Church Street rally that the Barnburners were better off without the likes of Sickles, adding that any members of the faction even thinking of breaking bread with him degraded themselves.

Downing thought he knew the real Sickles. This was a go-along to get-along young wretch who cared nothing about the enslavement of more than 3 million of his fellow Americans.

Sickles, Downing continued, was the lowest of the low. Laying it on for effect, Downing added that Sickles had no more principle than a beast, and nothing can be lower than that. ¹⁴

So it was to be war. After the Democrats lost four of the top five state races in the 1849, Sickles decided to launch a frontal assault not just on the Barnburners, but, sadly, African-Americans in general, and the abolitionists in particular.

Appearing before a huge Tammany Hall rally, Sickles revealed racist views that may not have been out of the ordinary for a man of his station and time, but were nevertheless incendiary because of his growing prominence and fame.

He charged before a rapt audience that the abolitionists were zealots who, in displaying what he called an over-sensitive philanthropy for the black race, overlooked what time and events, under the control of Providence, are doing for that race.

Two centuries ago the African race were brought in large numbers to this continent, by the English and Spanish, who found them savages in all except the qualities which gave dignity even to the savage, said Sickles.

Their career on this continent has exhibited as remarkable a degree of progress as ever attended any race. No longer barbarian, they are now demi-civilized, they speak the language of a polished people, Sickles continued. They share some of the ideas of an advanced civilization, they know how to labor, they may worship God in the light of revelation and reason.

May not the abolitionists be satisfied with the silent working of time and destiny? Sickles added. ¹⁵

Just two months later, Sickles was even more tied to anti-abolitionism when he was charged with trying to physically intimidate speakers during an abolitionist meeting at the Broadway Tabernacle featuring speeches by abolition leader William Lloyd Garrison and the nationally known ex-slave Frederick Douglass. Eyewitness reports of the meeting’s disruption fingered both Sickles as well as Tammany insider Isaiah Rynders and his notorious Sluggers gang of thugs for the disruption.

I have never attended an abolition meeting in my life, and never heard of one of sufficient consequence to disturb, Sickles protested dismissively in a letter to the New York Tribune.

He probably protested too much: I hold no fellowship with the persons who are said to have molested the fanatics at the Tabernacle, Sickles continued, while making sure to add that anyone who violently interrupted a public meeting should only expect to be met with resistors who would administer the law to the intruders with the best weapons at hand. ¹⁶

Once again, Sickles was slated by Tammany Hall for the 5th District Senate, and throughout the 1851 contest he continually reaffirmed his Hunker sentiments, while also declaring that the abolitionists should stop harassing the South with their endless quests to end slavery.

And, once again, Sickles lost. ¹⁷

There were in the New York of the 1840s at least 16,000 African Americans living in a city of more than 500,000 people. The blacks Sickles encountered during this time would have been overwhelmingly either ex-slaves themselves or members of the servant class. With the rare exception of men like George Downing and Frederick Douglass, blacks in the New York of the pre-Civil War decades were largely invisible to a white man of the world like Sickles.

They were there to serve, at best. And the fact that most African-Americans of this era were either current or ex-slaves kept fresh in Sickles’ mind their connection to a system of servitude he felt was of their own doing anyway. In other words, if black people hadn’t been so weak, or as he put it, savage, they would have never been forced to be slaves in the first place.

It would be many years, in fact, more than a decade, before Sickles finally came to understand the true dimensions of slavery and its enormous tragic consequences for generations of African-Americans. And it would be an awakening that would change him forever.

Interestingly, during this same time, Sickles was emotionally engaged with the struggles of oppressed people in other places.

He helped to raise funds for famine-struck Ireland and rallied against oppression in Germany. He was also particularly taken with the battle for rights in Hungary, embracing Hungarian freedom fighter Louis Kossuth, who visited New York in December of 1851 on a fund-raising tour.

There are millions in the United States who are with you, Sickles declared at a lavish dinner party held at the Irving House for Kossuth, who sat next to him on the dais. These cannot give thousands, or hundreds, or tens, but they can and will give their dollar.

Sickles then handed Kossuth a one dollar gold coin, as, so he put it, my contribution to the treasury of freedom. ¹⁸

Sickles’ participation in the Kossuth tribute was a little too much for George Templeton Strong, a New York attorney, several months younger than Sickles, who would shortly turn out to be a life-long Sickles critic, relegating him to the filthy sediment of the profession, and laying somewhere in its lower strata.

Perhaps better to say that he’s one of the bigger bubbles of the scrum of the profession, Strong continued, swollen and windy, and puffed out with fetid gas. ¹⁹

As the 1852 presidential campaign dawned, Sickles was once again determined to return New York to the Democratic column. And once again, he tried to drum up support for Lewis Cass. Getting little positive response, Sickles also let it be known that he liked the 39 year-old Stephen Douglas, the first term U.S. Senator from Illinois, who was actively pursuing the nomination.

It is not known exactly when Sickles and Douglas became friends, but the New Yorker’s admiration for the young fireball would remain a constant throughout the 1850s.

In order to improve Douglas’ chances, Sickles first needed to do what he could to diminish the chances of former New York Governor William Marcy, who very much seemed on the verge of enjoying the support of a united New York delegation at the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Baltimore.

The prestigious Marcy, who had also served as Secretary of War under President Polk, certainly looked good on paper. But Sickles, early on, decided to do what he could to torpedo Marcy’s chances, most likely worried that if the former governor should prove victorious his own influence might be curtailed as the Marcy men became the men to see in New York.

To this end, Sickles announced he was ending his quest to destroy the Barnburner movement, a position that more nearly coincided with Marcy’s own conciliatory approach. There has been a return of good sense, and all sections are now found uniformly patriotic and devoted to sound Democratic principles, Sickles publicly declared in late 1851 in a message that may have well been intended for Marcy’s appreciation. ²⁰

During the early weeks of the new year, Sickles and Marcy met several times, with the older man increasingly admiring what he thought was Sickles’ earnestness and appreciation of the bigger picture.

Soon, Sickles had talked Marcy into selecting delegates to the upcoming national convention by direct election, rather than through the traditional vehicle of a state convention.

By going the direct election route, Marcy ended up with a slate of delegates, many of whom he didn’t even know personally, that were only nominally for him, ready to jump ship at the convention to any other candidate if a trend revealed itself.

For a man of Marcy’s august reputation and years as a practicing politician, it was almost impossible to think that a novice like Sickles could deceive him, Jerome Mushkat, a Tammany Hall historian, would later write. ²¹

Sickles’ treachery was seen in the fact that only 25 or so of New York’s 35-member delegation at any point remained loyal to Marcy at the convention. But Sickles’ manipulations were only so effective. While Marcy, in fact, never did attract enough votes to be a serious contender for the nomination, neither did Douglas, who was bested on the 49th ballot by a sudden surprise surge for former New Hampshire Senator Franklin Pierce, one of history’s greatest dark horses.

Sickles quickly accommodated himself to Pierce’s win, rather oddly hailing him in a subsequent Tammany Hall rally as modest and unobtrusive. ²²

But his anti-Marcy manipulations had not been forgotten. When members of Tammany Hall’s general committee gathered in August for what was supposed to be a routine meeting, Sickles suddenly found himself confronted with a strange combination of Barnburners and Marcy men, as well as what a New York Herald reporter characterized as a strange mass of human beings who appeared to be collected from all parts of the city. ²³

Some of them, looking like demons and wild beasts, rushed Sickles. Feeling for the revolver in the breast of his coat and the Bowie knife in his pocket, Sickles considered defending himself, before thinking better of the idea and climbing out a second floor window onto Frankfort Street where he jumped to the ground below and foreswore his political activities for the night. ²⁴

This is but a specimen of the proceedings of the harmonious Democracy of Gotham, the Pittsburgh Gazette sneered several days later. ²⁵

Sickles undoubtedly didn’t appreciate the assault or the laughter that that the assault engendered.

But for the moment, in the fall of 1852, he had other things on his mind: his upcoming marriage to a stunningly beautiful dark-skinned 16 year-old Italian girl whose short life would intersect with his in a tragedy of unimagined consequence.

CHAPTER TWO

B y the time she entered her teens, Teresa Bagioli was a catch who mesmerized boys her own age as well as adult men.

Cultured, multi-lingual and a student at the elite Manhattanville Convent of the Sacred Heart, the young lithe girl was made up, thought a reporter who would come to know her well, of buoyant spirits, a joyous disposition, an intrepidity of character almost unfeminine, a girlish love of sport that made every form of pastime acceptable,[and] an utter freedom from affectation or vanity.

All of this united with a kind nature and excellent sense, the reporter added. ¹

How Sickles met the young girl would someday be a tale familiar to millions of newspaper and magazine readers around the world who would endlessly wonder and talk about the themes of passion and debauchery that would eventually consume them both.

It would also prove a tale that Sickles could never remove himself from, no matter how much time went by or how professionally accomplished he became. He would, once and forever, be connected to her, even well past his own mortal time on earth, living in people’s imaginations with her for the ages.

Working a farm in New Jersey that his father had purchased, and then later learning the printing trade at a small rural weekly, the Glen Falls Messenger in Glen Falls, New York, Sickles in his late teens one day took off for Philadelphia. The farm work and the Glen Falls job were done upon his father’s orders. The trip to Philadelphia was not, and seemed an act of rebellion against George Sickles.

After securing a job as a printer at Burton’s Magazine, a weekly soon to sign up the 29 year-old Edgar Allen Poe as an assistant editor and contributor (it seems fairly certain that he and Poe were not at the publication at the same time), Sickles was tracked down by his father who talked him into beginning a tutelage back in New York in the household of the legendary librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte.

As it turned out, Da Ponte’s home was only a mile to the north of George Sickles’ real estate office on Nassau Street and two miles from the Sickles family home. It would eventually become an accepted fact in future Sickles lore that Dan actually moved into the Da Ponte household. But given the close proximity of that place to where his parents lived, it’s possible that the younger Sickles only regularly visited the Da Ponte residence.

In any event, his association with the great librettist and his son, Lorenzo L. Da Ponte, would prove a transformative experience.

The elder Da Ponte, also a poet and the founder of the Italian Opera House in New York, was a newsworthy figure whose life was regularly touched by romantic scandals, lawsuits, and bankruptcies. Yet, chaos never seemed to negatively impact his output. In the span of a career lasting some 60 years he wrote fifty librettos, staged dozens of productions in New York and other cities along the East coast, and saw the publication, in 1823, of his critically-acclaimed memoirs. ²

The Da Ponte home at 91 Spruce Street (the most recent of half a dozen residences he had lived in during the past decade, the frequent changes of address reflecting his financial instability) was a boisterous place filled with stray relatives, singers, musicians, and writers, including Antonio Bagioli, a composer and music teacher.

While writing the score for Da Ponte’s ambitious Hymn to America, the 39 year-old Bagioli married Da Ponte’s 15 year-old daughter Maria. Two years later Maria gave birth to Teresa.

Sickles, at the age of 17 or 18, soon found himself caring for the young girl during his time at the Da Ponte household.

It would one day be suggested that Sickles seduced Teresa’s mother, although no went so far as to say that Teresa was really his daughter. Others would more widely speculate that Sickles had more than likely seduced Teresa herself when she was an adolescent, a charge that even author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who usually detested malicious gossip, pondered. ³

One thing was certain: by the time she was an adolescent, Teresa, by now accustomed to the attentions and flattery of almost every boy and man she met, had fallen very much in love with Sickles.

The elder Da Ponte’s death at the age of 90 in the summer of 1838 was a shocking development for those convinced the grand old man would live forever. But it was the subsequent death of his son that devastated Sickles. He had been taken by the younger Da Ponte’s scholarly devotion, and, as New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley later put it, his optimistic faith that one day all people everywhere would partake in the privileges of civil and religious liberty. ⁴

It was the younger Da Ponte, in fact, who in his 1833 masterpiece, A History of the Florentine Republic, talked, among other things, of the works of Niccolo Machiavelli, noting pointedly that Nothing speaks more loudly or more distinctly in all his writings than the contempt with which he beheld the instability of the political conduct of the Florentines during the latter period of the republican rule. ⁵

It is not a stretch to imagine Da Ponte, enamored with Machiavelli, imparting to Sickles the wisdom of a great political thinker known for his theories on political purpose and manipulation. It is also not a stretch to imagine Da Ponte, who conducted a Brooklyn Lyceum seminar emphasizing grammar and rhetoric, lecturing the young Sickles, who would soon prove a compelling and eloquent public speaker, on the finer points of elocution. ⁶

Lorenzo L. Da Ponte was probably the only true idealist that the young Sickles had ever met. The world of social justice and equality, as attained through political strategizing, enervated the young scholar as it inspired Sickles. Someday, in fact, Sickles would be seen by both friends and foes as a classic exemplar of the Machiavellian way.

When the 20 year-old Sickles subsequently alarmed mourners by pacing violently at Lorenzo L. Da Ponte’s burial site on the cold winter day of his funeral in January of 1840, Sickles may well have been overwhelmed that the one person who had aroused his better angels, so far from the pedestrian concerns of the Tammany sachems, was suddenly gone. ⁷

After the younger Da Ponte’s sudden death, Sickles spent less and less time visiting the home on Spruce Street. Yet he remained in touch with Teresa, who, according to Sickles’ first biographer Edgcumb Pinchon, soon bloomed into a sprig of vivacious loveliness. ⁸

When exactly what had started out as a paternal relationship turned into a romance of man and girl, no one could say. The two rode horseback together and spent endless, pleasant hours doing nothing more than being in each other’s company.

Teresa was only 11 when Sickles had been elected to the General Assembly, and 16 when he tried to outmaneuvered William Marcy in his bid for the 1852 Democratic presidential nomination. How much any of this she understood, or even cared about, is unknown. But it is known that she loved dogs, poetry, and nature.

Clearly, for Sickles, Teresa was in every way a good thing. Yet the problems that would later infuse their marriage can be suspected from the start: Teresa, whose beauty seemed almost ethereal, was accustomed to attention and adoration. How much of that she would get from a man incessantly busy in the male-only worlds of politics and law was open to question. But it most likely would not be a lot.

This vibrant, curious and learned young woman, whose horizon would be virtually cloudless in another, much later era, was almost instantly shunted to the side when she married Sickles. In a time when the overwhelming majority of wives were similarly marked for an unthinking daily oblivion, Teresa’s married life with Sickles would hardly have been seen as unusual.

Yet in the case of someone as alluring as Teresa, what would eventually prove to be the increasing inattentiveness of her husband, coupled with hours of emptiness for the wife, could only lead to trouble.

On a cool and sunny September 27, just weeks shy of his 33rd birthday, Sickles and Teresa were married in a brief City Hall civil ceremony officiated by a smiling Ambrose Kingsland, the Whig Mayor of New York. Five months later, perhaps to the better satisfaction of the parents in both families, the couple repeated their vows in a more stately St. Patrick’s Cathedral ceremony overseen by Archbishop John Hughes. ⁹

CHAPTER THREE

F our weeks after his marriage to Teresa, Sickles decided to do an old friend a favor.

Robert Dillon, a New York lawyer and founding member of the Irish Immigration Society, was running for re-election to New York’s Corporation Counsel, which was tasked with representing the legal interests of New York City. Dillon at some point told Sickles his race was uncomfortably close, and Sickles, as a friend, decided to lend his help.

On the night of October 30, Sickles, along with a small group of men, possibly members of Isaiah Rynders’ thug brigade, stormed into a post office at 442 Broadway.

In what proved to be, at the least, an ill-advised but also comically executed raid, Sickles and friends attempted to steal some 80,000 campaign circulars belonging to Nelson Waterbury, Dillon’s opponent in the election. Ripping open canvas bags of mail, the Sickles men seized nearly half the circulars before abruptly running out of the station and into the street.

Later reports indicated that Sickles opted for a quick exit after station post master James Harriott suddenly appeared on the scene and confronted him. According to some accounts, a fight may have taken place resulting in injury to another post office employee who was also working that night.

In a statement issued two days later by Harriott it was said that up to 36,000 circulars were missing. Such an outrage cannot and will not, of course, be permitted to stand without a legal investigation, declared the New Yok Sun, which would shortly mount a vigorous campaign to have Sickles arrested. Harriott himself promised an energetic investigation with an eye towards pursuing criminal charges against Sickles. ¹

Harriot’s vow startled Sickles. If the postmaster was serious, Sickles would find himself hauled before Third District Police Court Judge Barnabas Osborne, one of the few justices in the city not in debt to Tammany Hall. In fact, Osborne was a Republican and reformer. Sickles might not only be arrested and imprisoned, but could even lose his license as a lawyer.

Then, an interesting thing happened: Harriott decided not to pursue charges against Sickles. Even more, he said he would dismiss any post office staffer even thinking of testifying in the matter. ²

Obviously someone had gotten to Harriott. But what happened next was even more telling. Three days after Sickles’ post office invasion, the New York Tribune charged that far from being arrested, Sickles was now expectant of an important city office. ³

In early 1853 Dillon, who had won re-election after all, offered Sickles a job as a staff attorney with the Corporation Counsel, at a salary in excess of $10,000.

The lesson must have been clear to the climbing Sickles: good connections were a good thing.

Before the post office matter was disposed of, in early February 1853, Sickles boarded a train that took him from New York to Boston and then onto Concord, New Hampshire. Once there, he checked in at the Eagle Hotel and prepared for a visit with President-elect Franklin Pierce.

It may have seemed strange to outsiders that the man who just a month later would lead the entire country would have time for a one-term member of the New York General Assembly. But the truth was that the 48 year-old Pierce, a virtual unknown nationally, had reached out to Democrats across the country as he began the arduous process of forming his cabinet, asking for ideas and suggestions.

Every day the Eagle was booked with governors, mayors, state lawmakers and sheriffs from any number of states, with sometimes comic results. A reporter for the London Times, noting that thousands of men have gone to Concord, contended that Pierce was being dogged everywhere he went, in particular from his office to his house, from his house to his barn and from his barn to his kitchen. ⁴

Pierce’s landslide November 1852 election surprised the country as did the tragic death of his last surviving son, Bennie, two months later, who was killed when a single passenger car he was riding in with his parents broke loose from the rest of the train, falling off an embankment from the tracks and breaking into pieces. Bennie, slender and probably not weighing more than 100 pounds, fell from his seat to the floor of the car as it rolled down the embankment, his head, crushed between the vehicle’s walls and floor, partially severed.

The horrific accident only naturally dealt a crippling blow to the President-elect and his wife Jane. Inaccurately described as a morose religious zealot, when in fact she was a gentle woman with a dry New England wit, Mrs. Pierce wondered if somehow her cherished son’s death was a sign that her husband’s imminent presidency was cursed. Pierce himself, in a letter to Jefferson Davis on January 12, declared How I shall be able to summon up my manhood and gather up my energies for the duties before me is hard for me to see. ⁵

There is no record of Sickles’ visit to Pierce, but it can be safely assumed from Pierce’s later comments that the President-elect was impressed with the New Yorker. For his part, Sickles could not have helped but take note of Pierce’s good looks: upon taking office he was repeatedly described by Washingtonians and reporters as America’s most handsome president to date. Pierce, who had served as a brigadier general in the Mexican-American War, also bore an impressive military bearing. His close friend, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, thought he looked most in his element riding a horse and commanding a regiment. ⁶

After his meeting with Pierce, Sickles disclosed to a reporter that the President-elect had settled on placing former New York Governor William Marcy in his cabinet, although he didn’t indicate in what position. It’s hard to believe that an ambitious Sickles would have willingly betrayed the President-elect’s confidence. More likely Sickles had made the announcement upon Pierce’s suggestion as a trial balloon. ⁷

One thing was certain: when, days later, Pierce did in fact announce Marcy as his Secretary of State, it gave Sickles the patina of an insider.

Returning to New York to take up his new duties with the Corporation Counsel, Sickles contemplated his future, pondering whether to mount one more try for the state legislature, or make a run for Congress. The future, indeed, seemed full of promise.

But not for James Buchanan, who was morosely thinking about the past.

The 62 year-old former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, and member of Congress, had made a concerted attempt to win the Democratic nomination in 1852 only to see Pierce emerge triumphant in later convention balloting. I am rapidly becoming a petrification, Buchanan, with some exaggeration, declared to a woman friend, Eliza Watterson. If the young Pierce proved a popular president and was re-elected in 1856, Buchanan reflected, the next best chance to run for the White House would be in 1860 when he would be nearly 70 years old—too old, most likely, to mount a convincing campaign. Disingenuously, Buchanan, from his wooded Wheatland estate in Pennsylvania, added that he had seen enough of public life to satisfy a wise man, not admitting that he still yearned to be president. ⁸

Given his mood, Buchanan was only naturally taken aback in the early spring when Pierce asked him to serve as his Minister to England. A door had opened—but was it one in which the always-cautious Buchanan would enter? After thoughtful consideration, Buchanan decided that Pierce’s offer was lousy. He was certain that Marcy, as Secretary of State, would be the one calling the shots when it came to important negotiations between the U.S. and Great Britain.

Hardly relishing the idea of serving as a mere figurehead, Buchanan nevertheless listened when Pierce in a meeting on April 8 tried to convince him that he would have a real say in trade and policy matters regarding Britain. For the next several weeks, Buchanan wavered. But after Pierce besieged him yet one more time during a noisy public dinner in Philadelphia in early July, Buchanan decided that because his name had been repeatedly floated in the nation’s press as Pierce’s choice for the post, most likely by Pierce himself, it would it prove a serious offense to turn down the job without danger of an open rupture with the administration. ⁹

As he began preparations for his journey to Britain, Buchanan fished around for a capable, hard-working man to join him as Legation Secretary. Buchanan’s long-time friend and campaign adviser, John Forney, who was also the publisher of the influential Pennsylvanian newspaper, had met Sickles previously and wondered if he would be interested in the job. When told by Forney that the post would pay $2,500 a year, Sickles said that salary would hardly pay for my wine and cigars, adding that his current income was in excess of $37,000. ¹⁰

Those figures may have well been on the conservative side. Factoring in whatever money he made from his private practice as well as the land investments mostly managed by his father, Sickles at the age of 33 was an immensely wealthy young man who could afford the best in dining, clothing, and residence. Even so, despite the drastic decline in income that would come with the Legation job, Sickles soon had second thoughts about the offer. His reasons were never stated. But it seems clear in retrospect why an ambitious politician of Sickles’ stripe would suddenly regard the secretary’s post as an intriguing one: It would broaden his perspective, instruct him in the intricacies of statecraft, and might be a pleasant lark, thought Sickles biographer, W. A. Swanberg. ¹¹

It also went without saying that Buchanan, despite his own protestations to the contrary, remained a significant national figure. Yes, he had lost the 1852 nomination to Pierce. But next to Pierce and perhaps Illinois Senator Stephan Douglas, Buchanan was still regarded as one of the most important leaders of the party, and a man who, should the Pierce presidency fail, would naturally be seen as a major candidate in 1856.

Sickles also perceived that working closely with Buchanan would provide access to the kind of national and even international figures whom he could never expect to meet as a Tammany stalwart and New York lawyer. Even more, and thinking big, if Sickles had any plans for national office himself, a stint serving his country in London could only burnish his credentials.

Sickles arrived in Wheatland on July 29. How these two men, whose lives over the course of the next 8 years would constantly intersect, initially regarded each other, is not hard to imagine.

Historians in later decades would, with varying degrees of success, contend that the bachelor Buchanan was gay. He had lived for several years with another bachelor, Alabama Senator William King. But Buchanan, sometimes derided by contemporaries as having the temperament of a fuss budget, would not have been overly impressed by Sickles’ raw masculine presence: from all accounts King, who had just died two months earlier from tuberculosis after serving as Pierce’s vice-president for less than seven weeks, was a gentle, almost fey presence. More likely, Buchanan instantly liked Sickles instead for the same reason nearly everyone did: he carried himself well, was intelligent, graceful, and if possible for man of only 33 years, even distinguished.

Almost certainly Buchanan uncorked a favorite bottle of madeira as he and Sickles talked in the mansion’s library—two ambitious men, separated by more than three decades and worlds of experience (Sickles knew nothing of the international arena, but Buchanan’s knowledge of the kind of hard-knuckle New York street politics that was Sickles’ province was equally lacking).

During the conversation Sickles advanced his cause when he intimated that Pierce wanted him to be Buchanan’s secretary. It is not certain how Sickles knew this, or whether he was just anticipating Pierce’s response based on his favorable Concord meeting with him in February. Either way, by late afternoon, Buchanan was convinced, undoubtedly at some point learning that Sickles was also fluent in Spanish and French, that he had found a man refined and intelligent enough to carry out the sensitive Legation duties in London.

Sickles returned to New York knowing that Buchanan would ask Pierce to appoint him to the job. Buchanan, too, was happy, until he went through his afternoon mail, which contained a short message from Pierce suggesting that he appoint Donn Piatt, a young lawyer in Cincinnati, as his secretary. Buchanan penned a quick response, noting that he had just met with Sickles and was very much pleased with him.

Buchanan continued: "He had been highly & warmly recommended to me; but as I would not favor the appointment of any man who was to become a member of my family, without a personal acquaintance,