Another "Final Battle" Reveal
Who was the anonymous New Yorker who spoke on Mary Lincoln's behalf in 1881?
During Mary’s battle for a pension increase, back in late 1881, one newspaper reporter that her physician, Dr. Lewis A. Sayre, had “advised her to seek aid in certain quarters, which she had positively refused to do for reasons which she had fully set forth to him, but which for personal reasons he did not feel at liberty to mention in this connection.”
This was probably a reference to asking her son—newly-appointed Secretary of War Robert Lincoln— for assistance, as indicated by the remarks of “another gentleman” who spoke “more fully . . . regarding the personal aspects of the case.”
The gentleman’s name was withheld at his request, but according to the reporter, “it is sufficient to say that he is one of the most prominent and influential citizens of New York.” (Which was not, in fact, sufficient to say!)
On being told by Mary that she lacked the means for her care, this amn told her that he would do “something for her,” if she would permit it. “Her son Robert was now Secretary of War, and I could see no reason why he should not be requested to give her some aid. I was sure he would do so, and would if he knew she was in need. Mrs. Lincoln begged me not to do so, saying her son had a large family and needed all he had.”[i]
This man related some interesting events:
"But I told her I would do it, and if he refused I would write to President Arthur. I know Mr. Arthur very well, and I proposed to lay the matter before him and to insist that if Lincoln didn’t assist his mother he should be turned out of the Cabinet. Mrs. Lincoln persuaded me not to do it, and I could not understand why she so persistently refused to approach her son on a matter that certainly affected her so vitally.”
It appears this happened not long after her arrival, as he says that before President Arthur’s party, including Mr. and Mrs. Robert Lincoln, left for Yorktown, he ran into the wife of Senator Pratt. “I laid Mrs. Lincoln’s case before her. She is a charming lady and full of sympathy, and she took a deep interest in the case. I am sure that she broached the matter in some way to President Arthur, for when the Presidential Party were on their way to Yorktown the subject came up some way — grew out of the Garfield subscription, I believe (Mr. Cyrus W. Field being one of the people on the steamer with President Arthur) — and Mrs. Robert Lincoln asked Mr. Field if something could not be done for her mother-in-law.”[ii]
President Arthur had spoken on October 19, and departed the next day. It would seem that he first met with Mary within days of her arrival.[iii] The informant continued confirming Mary’s motivations: “When the subscriptions for Mrs. Garfield were being received Mrs. Lincoln read the papers carefully and exhibited much feeling over the matter. She says she did not see why the people of the country could not also do something for her.”
When it was suggested she go to Congress, as she had apparently desired to do not long before, she revealed what may have resulted in her change of plans. She told him that “so long as Judge David Davis lived, nothing could ever be done for her in Congress.” Despite this, Mary evinced no intention to cut short the life Davis, now an Illinois Senator who had become President pro tempore of the Senate upon Garfield’s death. But she figuratively took a stab at him, noting that Davis’s opposition was especially offensive, as her husband had “in his life made Judge Davis.”
Mary had also explained her financial situation to him, which raised some interesting questions: “Mrs. Lincoln, I believe, had at one time some securities of some kind on which she derived an income of something like $1,400 a year. This, with her pension, gave her a comfortable sum. This has all, I am told, been made over to or absorbed in some manner by R. Lincoln — why or how I cannot state.” Another article quoted Sayre as saying “that Mrs. Lincoln has lost a part of her income derived from property not now in her possession, and is dependent upon her pension.”
This mysterious man had a very good understanding of her finances, like he had written up something for the reporter, which is supported by his reference to “R. Lincoln” and the use of parentheses. It seems likely that he took down basic notes on her financial condition to present “a case” to Mrs. Platt and others. He had now returned for a second visit.
It seems more likely that the informant misunderstood than that Mary represented things in so vague a manner, even if she was trying to attack Robert. When upset about her finances, she was usually excruciatingly specific, and had a plan of attack. This is almost certainly a reference to the fact that Robert had paid for the Chicago house in full, and so she no longer received the $1,500 rent money annually. She was undoubtedly unhappy about this, and it seems they discussed her bonds. As the $1,400 reference resurfaced, this seems to be a different loss, but it seems unlikely her bond interest ended up with Robert.
“There is not for some reason the best of feeling between Mrs. Lincoln and her son,” he said, which may have been rhetorical, but may have indicated ignorance of their recent history altogether. He had spoken with her “not long ago,” while she was “convulsed with paroxysm of grief.” If he recounted their conversation, he told the reporter, “you may be able perhaps to gain some faint idea of the family relations of these parties.” He recounted it: “Mrs. Lincoln was always wrapped up in her favorite son Tad, and the grief that came with is death has never left her heart. When he was dying she says he threw his arms about her neck and cried: ‘O mother, to think I must be taken away, and you left to live with Robert!”[iv]
After much research, I had given up hope of identifying the prominent and influential citizen, but in the process of spelling it out to ask someone for ideas, I came back to a someone I had earlier excluded: General Daniel E. Sickles—whose irrepressible energy has sustained nearly 200 years of controversy.
It is nearly impossible to summarize Sickles’s life. Technically, Sickles was, as Wikipedia introduces him, “an American politician, soldier, and diplomat.” This, however, does not capture Sickles’ essence. Early in life he was a secretary to the U.S. legation in Britain, where a lady-in-waiting of Queen Victoria described him as “both elegant and faintly savage.”[v] All of the descriptions of Dan Sickles are like this! To get right to the point, General Daniel E. Sickles “was always in some sort of crisis, be it financial, legislative, sexual, or homicidal.”[vi] That’s how his biographer put it, and another historian explained the consequences: “Dan Sickles inspired a moderate reaction from no one.”[vii]
In 1858, Sickles, then in Congress, was the first person in America to successfully use the temporary insanity defense, after he shot his much younger wife’s lover on the streets of Washington.[viii] While much of the public found it justifiable,[ix] elite Washington society sympathized with his victim’s prominent family. He caused further controversy when he took back his disgraced wife, though he had little to do with her after that.[x] He had gotten her pregnant when she was a teenager—having grown up in a convent, she was naive, and he was often out of town while she was home with her baby. Eventually, she took up with a local charmer, who happened to be the son of the author of the Star Spangled Banner. That man, Barton Key, was his victim.
With a background in law, politics and diplomacy, and high-level connections, Sickles quickly mounted a political comeback. It began when the assistant attorney general, his defense attorney, asked him to “persuade” a wavering President Buchanan to hold Fort Sumter after the Confederates seized it.[xi] Then, when war began, Dan Sickles proposed to President Lincoln that he could raise a regiment, promising to pay for it himself.[xii] A fighter who was earnest about winning the war, he was appointed a colonel and raised troops, but his desire to be promoted to a generalship met resistance due to his scandalous past.
His actions at Gettysburg, where he lost a leg, were and remain extremely controversial. A very brief summary: “Told by General George Meade to stay back in a glen, Sickles led his forces into what was referred to as The Peach Orchard, right in the forefront of Confederate General James Longstreet's attack. Sickles later claimed that his action saved the day for the Union, while Meade said that Sickles's disobedience obedience cost unnecessary lives.”[xiii] He was probably a sociopath, but it was never clear what was going on his mind. The age gave him so many opportunities to come back and succeed within the system that he stayed mostly inside it and put his energy to good use. It is difficult to conceive of how much more havoc he could have caused were this not the case.
Mary was denounced early on for her “passion” for Daniel Sickles, which had gotten him appointed as a general, as the story goes.[xiv] Her influence saved the day, it was said, an idea which I would dismiss outright were he not the only high-level figure who seemed to believe she could secure his appointment. He thus sought her influence, but matter-of-factly, not in a way that indicated disrespect or insincerity. He wrote to a mutual friend, “I am exceedingly anxious to know what the Senate is doing [about his appointment] . . . Did Mrs. L. think of the senators? Remember me to her very cordially.”[xv] There is no doubt of Mary's sincere admiration and fondness, and I do not venture to vindicate her judgement. As his biographer, whose work is titled American Scoundrel, stated: “Those who knew him always were attracted to him; those who disapproved of him had the record of his fallibility as their guide.”[xvi] In any event, both before and after her reign, he had no problem getting presidential approval. He was “an accomplished comeback artist”—“an expert at reinventing himself and ingratiating himself with presidents and the public.”[xvii]
He certainly hit it off with Lincoln, Tad, and Mary, becoming “a personal favorite.”[xviii] They liked his type. What type of man was he? One who had “a tendency to embrace poles of behavior, to go from coolness to delirium in a second, and from statesmanship to excess. His tendency toward berserk and full-blooded risk was partly characteristic of . . . the age he lived in, and his own soul.”[xix] He has been described as one of the controversial (and colorful) men of the nineteenth century and “one of the most polarizing figures in a polarizing age.”[xx] That was the age Mary Lincoln was used to.
Of course, polarizing people have many fierce critics. The Lincolns had a distinct preference for people with dominating, entertaining personalities and never-failing nerve. This had a buoying and stabilizing influence, which became especially valuable during the war. Even the Springfield Republican, a Massachusetts newspaper never looking to credit Mary’s judgement, did not claim to be appalled by those who would associate with Sickles. Instead, it editorialized that it made no sense to single Sickles out for immorality. Confirmation was likely, as he was on good terms with Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, and “Why not? There is not a more persistent man in the world than Sickles, and he will triumph where other men would irredeemably fail.”[xxi]
It was reported that the Rochester Union also supported Sickles’ appointment, but, it clarified, “Not exactly.” What it had really editorialized was this: “If a leader for the Army of the Potomac is to be selected,” ignoring military training, which few people had, “there is not the superior of Dan. Sickles,” who had proved himself a better “fighter” than General Sickles. But that was not all. “Aside from this he is a man of the most indomitable will and perseverance—a man who has never yet failed in any undertaking,” even now, “with the whole Republican press and party dead against him,” minus the Lincolns. “But he went on and triumphed over the whole crew. After he had taken the field they followed him . . . Then his nomination for Brigadier General was rejected by the Republican Senate . . . But he only laughed at his persecutors. He proceeded to Washington, said he would triumph and did triumph . . . Sickles possesses one quality not vouchsafed to one man in ten thousand. In the midst of the most appalling danger he is an iceberg coolness. His presence of mind never forsakes him.”[xxii] This captures both his appeal and his success.
Mark Twain, who we must concede had good judgment as to these things, “admired Dan’s well-constructed sentences.” He found his talk “full of interest and bristling with points.”[xxiii] Mary Lincoln obviously felt the same. In February 1864, a foolish newspaper controversy arose over Mary giving the wife of copperhead politician Fernando Wood, some flowers from the White House conservatory. Mary wrote to him as the story broke, and the letter probably reflects their bantering conversations: “I am pleased to announce to you my entire innocence as to flowers . . . All of my friends, who know my detestation of disloyal persons will discredit the rumor―You know me too well to believe it.” Earlier in the war, she had written to him desiring a “social chat” about “Virginia affairs,” apparently military concerns she did not feel comfortable bothering Lincoln about.[xxiv] Her discretion was such that she made surprisingly few references to military campaigns or events, almost exclusively confining herself to expressing pleasure at a favorable result or the removal of an unpopular general. Her note to Sickles may be the only evidence that she took an interest in the details, though there is no doubt she did.
Nettie Colburn, who claimed to have been a medium whose spiritual communication during séances guided Lincoln’s decisions, published a much-discussed memoir in 1891. Sickles entered the discussion, as he had been named as a participant in an 1863 séance in which Lincoln “was encouraged to appoint a committee to investigate the condition of the freedmen.”[xxv] He “was not present at the time she alleges,” but he had been at other times, as Mary had become interested in spiritualism, and Lincoln went along “to please his wife.” “Mrs. Lincoln was devoted to her boy [Willie] . . . and his death was great blow to her. I believe that event preyed upon her mind, naturally superstitious, to such extent that she was led to believe that she could receive messages from the dead child.”
It is often reported that Lincoln sent Sickles, and others, to “look after her” at such meetings. This was probably not the case—these things were so common, and likely done with friends, that there was no need to have a monitor if she did leave the White House. She wanted neither a caretaker nor a yes-man. It was Mary herself who invited Sickles, specifically because she was never quite taken in and also liked the challenge. “I was particularly hostile to spiritualism, and for that reason Mrs. Lincoln wanted me to be present. I cannot say positively that President Lincoln entertained the same views that I did . . . But in tender consideration of his wife, whom he always called ‘Mother,’ he did not ridicule her belief as openly or in such a gruff way as I did.”
“Nevertheless he made sport of it and chaffed Mrs. Lincoln about her belief,” Sickles said, remembering one White House séance in which Lincoln “sat in his chair, half doubled up, listening, and at frequent intervals Mrs. Lincoln would address her husband or me in a way to show her firm belief in the spiritual origin of the words . . .” Mary sought his approval on this matter—his real approval—because she found him particularly reassuring.
Sometimes he had had to seek her approval, as in the case of the most well-known Lincoln-Sickles anecdote, repeated to staleness by him (and his associates) well into the twentieth century.[xxvi] In April 1863, the Lincolns and had visited the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, where the only accommodations were tents. “I went over and invited Lincoln and his family to visit the Third Army Corps, under my command.” Sickles knew how to get in good with them, and gave Tad a pony, telling his bugler “act as Tad's orderly and do whatever Tad wished done.” Mary did not feel well, so only Tad and his father went to Sickles’ camp. She would regret her decision. Another general recalled, “He was worn down by the responsibilities of his place, and it was a refreshing change to come to us . . . We exerted ourselves to make it pleasant for him . . . Sickles, for example, did not parade his men, but let them know he was coming to visit them, and they gathered along the streets of their camps, and gave him a hearty greeting.”
Sickles’ arranged a dinner and reception, “to which the officers’ wives were invited. Among them was the Princess Salm-Salm.” Sickles remembered, “The Princess Salm-Salm was a charming woman, the American wife of Prince Salm-Salm, an officer in the Prussian Army.” One of the thirty women who had assembled, “anxious to see the President,” came up to Sickles and said, “The President seems to have a very sad look.'' Sickles replied, “Maybe we can do something to make him more cheerful. Suppose you form a line of ladies and each of you give him a kiss."
However, “That proposition did not receive much favor, as there was no one willing to take the lead. I spoke to the Princess Salm-Salm about it, and she agreed to lead off, but she did not see how she could reach the President, as he was so very tall . . . I said: ‘Maybe the President will meet you halfway, that is, I think he will lean down a little.’” “After I had formed the ladies in line, she went up to him, and sure enough he leaned down a little, and the other ladies followed her example with broad smiles and laughter. Lincoln was “helpless,” and “confused,” but laughed.
But, Sickles explained, “this did not end so very well as Little Tad carried the story over to the camp where his mother was,” and, as noise carries among tents, it was soon known by everyone that Lincoln had been called to account. He tried to cover himself on both sides, saying “Now, Mother, that’s all right; or if it is not, we’ll fix it up after we get back.” To which she responded, “Don’t mother me, and as for General Sickles, he will hear what I think of him and his lady guests. It was well for him that I was not there at the time.”
When he went to headquarters the next morning, he was “advised to keep away from Mrs. Lincoln, as she had been informed that I was the one who had suggested the kissing performance.” According to one version, she actually turned her back on him. The exact details were unclear, but it is a safe bet Sickles was the instigator. Sickles told this story at army reunions for decades.
When the Lincolns were getting ready to return to Washington the next morning, General Hooker suggested that Sickles’ friend General Daniel Butterfield escort them back. Butterfield suggested, “in the spirit of deviltry,” that Sickles be given that assignment. Hooker thought this was a great idea. Sickles ended up trapped on the steamer, “Mrs. Lincoln still wrathful and monosyllabic.” Lincoln kept up a conversation, which she would not join.
She was “barely noticing him and refusing to laugh at any of Mr. Lincoln's witty sallies at the table, until at last, he turned to Sickles and said, “General, I have made an interesting discovery covering you on this trip to the army.”
Sickles asked what it was, and the reply was “I have discovered that you are a very religious man.”
“Well,” said Sickles, “I have been called good many things doing my life, but that is the first time I ever heard that said of me. What leads you to say that?”
“‘Well,’ said Mr. Lincoln, ‘I have discovered that you are not only a psalmist, but a Psalm-Psalmist.’” Evidently, Lincoln had learned this was a good way to redirect her, and she burst out laughing and snapped out of the mood. This was apparently the way to get along with Mary Lincoln—and the men who knew this found the whole thing rather hilarious. Mary, however “never again called her by her title of ‘Princess,’ always referring to her as ‘that Mrs. Salm.’”
It is unclear whether she corresponded with Sickles after Lincoln’s death. He had been busy trying to reconstruct the south—to mixed reviews. “One friend described him at this stage as ‘a wise, sagacious commander, placed in a most delicate and responsible position among a touchy, testy, fiery people’ and praised him for possessing ‘the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, the astuteness of Talleyrand and the audacity of the Devil.’”[xxvii] He had since spent most of his time in Europe, appointed by President Grant as minister to Spain, where he had gone to assume his ministerial duties around the same time she arrived in Europe. During her pension battle in 1869, his confirmation was still pending, having drawn resistance. For once, she paused her lamentations to sympathize with someone else: “Poor Gen Sickles I suppose, he, too, is watching & waiting. It cannot be---that he will not be confirmed.”[xxviii]
Not long after, she wrote Sally Orne in her typical vein: “My husband was above all in his country service yet his family are the only ones left out of benefits we are considered unworthy of grateful recognition.”[xxix] However, she immediately veered to a more cheerful mood: “I am pleased to learn that Gen Sickles has been confirmed.”
“You need not visit Spain without your husband,” she told Sally, a comment that may well refer to his womanizing, “but do write the Gen’l a letter of congratulation. It will please him for he is certainly very kind hearted.” This suggests that she had done the same. Sally Orne had social connections in the network of high-status Americans abroad, as Mary asked her “Is Laura going to school in Spain? What changes---time, brings to us all. I sometimes feel as if I had lived a century.”[xxx] Laura was going to school in Spain. And time did bring many changes. What happened in Spain is unclear, but she and her father had a permanent falling out. She returned to America, moving in with her maternal grandmother and forming a close relationship with her paternal grandfather. Some say the problem was that he forced her to end a courtship with a man he disapproved of while he took up with a woman only a few years older than she was, and soon married her. Another, that when she approached her father in shock after hearing gossip about the family scandal, Sickles, “with all the frantic gesture and picturesque words he is so fond of using, told her the miserable truth, and held before a daughter the image of a mother steeped in sin.” He would not let her return to the convent, “and she became reserved and melancholy to morbidness.”[xxxi] She became a drifter, but one “with a pride considered indomitable.”[xxxii]
From then on, “she behaved as though she had deliberately chosen to besmirch her father’s name,” which was probably true—or at least to protest against the choices he had made and the destruction he had wrought. At the moment, Laura drinking and cavorting with wealthy but “worthless” men, with the Sickles shamelessness. Perhaps as a rebuke to society’s treatment of her mother, she held her head high and pursued this lifestyle until she wore out, plagued by alcoholism and other health problems. It was reported that she never expressed any regrets, and it would be characteristic for neither she nor her father to have regretted a thing. She died at age 38, her will directing that she buried next to her mother and a $500 monument be placed over their graves.[xxxiii]
V.
I cannot prove Sickles was the man interviewed, but his diction, the issues he was familiar with and highlighted, his proximity to her at the time, and his general outspokenness seem to point pretty clearly in that direction. I think this also diminishes the likelihood that this was an attack by Mary. This “citizen” seemed to be acting more from blunt thoughtlessness than from calculated malice. In 1875, Sickles was so absorbed in affairs abroad that he may well have been altogether unaware of her commitment and release, and the resulting tension between mother and son. In the interim, he had become permanently estranged from his oldest daughter. Therefore, Sickles was likely to be less shocked and delicate about the situation, when he picked up his crutches and walked a few feet to Mary’s hotel.
I could not understand why he would hide his identity, but he was mounting a political comeback and probably did not want to divert attention to something like this. Sickles had been a democrat in the House of Representatives when Lincoln was inaugurated—he was one of two Democratic members who approached Lincoln when he entered the floor—the rest conspicuously ignored him. “Being about the youngest men in the house thought we would set the older ones a good example, and so we went forward.”[xxxiv] Lincoln appreciated this—and Sickles’ control over his rowdy constituency, which meant the ability to raise much-needed troops—and Sickles eventually became a Republican. Now, Sickles had returned to his original party. Based on their past relationship, it would be natural that she cried on his shoulder about Tad and the events of her sad life, including what Tad had said—possibly as a statement of fact rather than an insult— and he attached more significance to it based on the obvious but unexplained tension between Mary and Robert, whom he did not know well. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Sickles’ polarizing nature is the aspect relevant here. He seems utterly tactless, unable to restrain himself—but his admirers did not argue this was outweighed by his strengths. Instead, they actually praised him for his coolness, calculation, discretion, and tact. He was a diplomat.[xxxv]
He made comments in the interview that suggest a long familiarity with her, even in her European years. “She has no doubt been extravagant in her day, and a woman of peculiarities; but her living abroad, which many have criticized, has not necessarily entailed upon her a very largely increased expenditure. She says she could live there cheaper than she lived in America, but nevertheless I know she retained the old idea that she was the representative of a martyred head of the Nation, and she tried to keep up appearances there with people whom she had known when at the White House, and this was a pretty hard matter to do with her resources, provided she had no more than the $3,000 pension.’”[xxxvi] In response to the reporter’s questions about her finances, he said he knew nothing about the $75,000 voted to her by congress. He had never conversed with her about it—“but if she had it, it would be in order to find out where it has gone.” Had they conversed about it, she would have told him in the most emphatic manner that she had never been voted $75,000, but that she considered this amount still due her. He had been loyal in his own way until the end. Still, there were some he could never win over. When Sickles died many years later--1914, aged ninety-four— the World made the rather extravagant claim that “it is saying nothing unkind of the dead” to say that it would have been better for him to have died at Gettysburg.[xxxvii]
[i] Chicago Daily Tribune, November 23, 1881
[ii] This has shades of the Bradwells’ 1875 strategy, in which they claimed Robert’s cooperation before securing it. This made it hard to back out, but also gave him an easy exit by indicating he wished to do whatever he could consistent with her happiness and that there was no wrongdoing or conflict. Perhaps Sickles was somehow playing them—Senator Platt, whose wife Sickles had laid the issue before, had resigned with Senator Roscoe Conkling in a controversy over patronage earlier that year. His story deviates from N.W. Miner’s, who does not indicate Robert Lincoln and his wife played a role, but does mention Field’s involvement. Naturally, each man’s story claims most of the credit for himself, but Miner is the more trustworthy of the two. Of course, Sickles could still have called attention to it. See N.W. Miner, Letter to the Editor, “Mrs. Abraham Lincoln/A Letter of Vindication,” New-York Tribune, April 15, 1888. When this was published, one paper reprinted it with the remark that one of its prominent citizens knew Miner well, and said he would “vouch for every word uttered,” in the letter, described as “splendid.” Silver Cliff Rustler, May 31, 1888.
[iii] President Arthur gave the keynote speech at Yorktown, Virginia, celebrating the centennial, on October 19, 1881. He departed on the steamer October 20, 1881. Kale, Wilford. Yorktown, Virginia: A Brief History. Arcadia Publishing, 2018, 112.
[iv] Chicago Daily Tribune, November 24, 1881. It appears this may have been delayed, as it was dated November 21, and the reporter said he had wired it to the Tribune the night before, and that the New York Times had published it that day, which would have been November 21 or 22. It appears the New York Times published a piece, “Mrs. Abraham Lincoln in Need,” on November 22. The “Broad Denial” response from Springfield dated November 23 was above it, like they had given them a chance to respond.
[v] Keneally, Thomas. American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group), 36. Kindle.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Gary W. Gallagher, Chancellorsville: The Battle and Its Aftermath (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 18.
[viii] Emilee Hines. Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Washington, D.C., History. Kindle.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Pomeroy’s Democrat, May 29, 1875.
[xv] Keneally, American Scoundrel.
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] “Daniel Sickles (1819-1914).” Mrlincolnandnewyork.Org (blog). Accessed June 20, 2019. http://www.mrlincolnandnewyork.org/new-yorkers/daniel-sickles-1819-1914/.
[xviii] Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Knopf, 1972), 133, n 5.
[xix] Keneally, American Scoundrel.
[xx] Ibid.
[xxi] Washington correspondence of the Springfield Republican, quoted in Buffalo Evening Courier and Republic, April 15, 1862.
[xxii] Rochester Union & Advertiser, May 21, 1863.
[xxiii] Keneally, American Scoundrel. Sickles enjoyed winning over others, and not just to take advantage of them—his success in diplomacy came from his general impulse to win and conquer, and take pride in his ability to do so.
[xxiv] Mary Lincoln to Daniel E Sickles, September 31, 1862, in Turners, Life and Letters, 133-134.
[xxv] Rome Semi-Weekly, October 24, 1891.
[xxvi] The National Tribune, June 13, 1889; Tennessean, May 29, 1899; Keneally, American Scoundrel, 263.
[xxvii] Keneally, American Scoundrel.
[xxviii] Mary Lincoln to Sally Orne, December 5, 1869. Incomplete letter. Emphasis in original.
[xxix] Mary Lincoln to Sally Orne, April 3, 1870.
[xxx] Mary Lincoln to Sally Orne, December 5, 1869. Incomplete letter. Emphasis in original.
[xxxi] “Cress,” “New York Correspondence,” quoted in Chanute Weekly Times, December 4, 1879.
[xxxii] Ibid; Hamilton County Democrat, December 27, 1879.
[xxxiii] “Her Wrecked Life Ended,” New York World, quoted in The Indiana State Sentinel, June 29, 1892.
[xxxiv] Boston Daily Globe, February 12, 1902.
[xxxv] The fact was “Those who met, knew, trusted, and loved Dan Sickles swore by his loyalty, discretion, and effectiveness.” Keneally, American Scoundrel. “Nevertheless, even so perceptive an observer as skeptical New York attorney George Templeton Strong observed that ‘there are judicious men who rate Sickles very high.’” http://www.mrlincolnandnewyork.org/new-yorkers/daniel-sickles-1819-1914/
[xxxvi] Chicago Daily Tribune, November 23, 1881
[xxxvii] Appropriately, Sickles is one of the featured subjects in Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Washington, D.C., History. Emilee Hines. Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Washington, D.C., History Kindle Edition.