"Yankee King of Spain"

DAN SICKLES -- Edgcumb Pinchon --Doubleday, Doran ($3.50).

In the winter of 1859, Washington was rocked by the greatest scandal in its history. Negroes living on slovenly West 15th Street reported that a white gentleman, handsomely dressed in riding clothes, had rented one of their houses, and that when he flew a white string from one of the top windows a heavily veiled lady soon came tripping down the street and slipped into the house by the back door.

Before long, everybody knew that the signaling gentleman was U.S. District Attorney Philip Barton Key, son of the famed composer of The Star-Spangled Banner. They knew, too, that the lady was Teresa Sickles, daughter of an Italian opera conductor and lovely wife of the distinguished young Daniel Edgar Sickles, U.S. Representative from New York, lawyer, "Father of Central Park," Tammany man, former First Secretary of the U.S. Legation in London, and a descendant of one of New York City's most respected Dutch families.

Teresa's lover was Dan Sickles' dearest friend. But when the rumor of the affair was confirmed, Sickles sought out Key in a Washington park and methodically shot him to death with a pistol, a Derringer and a revolver.

"The Washington Tragedy," as it came to be called, kept the name of Sickles green for a generation; the tragedy and its actors have been long forgotten. Edgcumb Pinchon revives them again, in the first biography of one of the 19th Century's most eccentric and notorious U.S. characters. Like many recent biogra--phies, Dan Sickles is partly straight fact, partly imaginary reconstruction of likely facts (especially in the bedroom scenes). It suffers from writing so thick with emotion that Hero Sickles often emerges from obscurity only to be buried in gush. But it leaves clear the fact that Daniel Sickles is the season's rarest historical find.

In a day when Congressmen brandished pistols on the floor of the House, Representative Sickles' trial for murder was more than a dramatic sequel to a romantic tragedy. It also raised the crucial question of whether U.S. law was ready to condone the savage, individualistic law of the frontier. The nation was beside itself with debate. New York's famed criminal lawyer James T. Brady sped to his friend's defense with a battery of assistants. Two hundred talesmen were examined before twelve unprejudiced jurymen could be found. "You are here to fix the price of the marriage bed!" roared Associate Defense Attorney John Graham, in a speech so packed with quotations from Othello, Judaic history and Roman law that it lasted two days and later appeared as a book. The jury gave little heed to the prosecution's plea that the case before the court was not adultery but murder. Sickles was acquitted--a national hero.

But almost overnight he became a national disgrace. He had always been a voracious Casanova; for his wife's one sin he had committed scores. Now he calmly restored her to his household. "I am not aware of any statute or code of morals," he wrote in an icy "open letter" to the howling public, "which makes it infamous to forgive a woman." Few knew that, when alone, Daniel and Teresa had nothing to do with each other. But everyone agreed that "The Washington Tragedy" had ended the brilliant Congressman's career at 34.

A Scholarly Sort. Everyone agreed, that is, but Sickles himself. He resumed his seat in the House. When Abraham Lincoln, first Republican President of the Union, strode awkwardly into the House and the other Democrats kept their seats in stony silence, Representative Sickles broke ranks to shake the new President's hand. "Why, Mr. Sickles!" exclaimed Lincoln, laughing and delighted, "from what I have heard of the doings at Tammany Hall, I expected you to be a giant of a man, big and broad-shouldered, tall as I am. But instead I find you are quite a scholarly sort of fellow." So began a friendship that lasted until Lincoln's death.

On the very day of the new President's first call for volunteers, Sickles resigned his seat, enlisted as a private. A few months later he raised, singlehanded, New York's "Excelsior Brigade," and became, by Lincoln's order, its colonel. By war's end he was a major general.

Admiring Author Pinchon believes that but for Sickles, Chancellorsville would have been not a defeat, but a rout. He quotes Stines's History of the Army of the Potomac: "If Sickles had not brought up his command in time to strike Jackson's right and rear, there is no telling where [the] disaster might have ended. . . . His subsequent night attack against Jackson was one of the most brilliant actions in military history." But General Sickles' major achievement was his stand against Longstreet at Gettysburg. It also cost Sickles his right leg from the thigh down. His military career was over.

The Sunday after Gettysburg, Lincoln came to see his friend in a hospital. Sickles told him hollowly: "[The doctors] tell me ... that I had better put my affairs in order." "I am in a prophetic mood today," answered Lincoln, "and I prophesy that you'll live to do many an important service." Eighteen months later he made Sickles his personal envoy, sent him off to Latin America on a mission so confidential that to this day it remains a State Department secret. On his return, President Johnson appointed Sickles to be Military Governor of the Carolinas. In 1869, President Grant named him Minister to Spain.

The Queen's Lover. It was the beginning of the most colorful period of Sickles' astonishing life. His wife, who had slowly died of shame, sorrow and tuberculosis, was carried to her grave by four embarrassed major generals. Sickles arrived in Madrid a free, amorous, impetuous man. His government hoped he could persuade impoverished Spain to sell Cuba to the United States--a deal that could be put through only by a stable, efficient Spanish government. To get advice, Sickles promptly visited Spain's recently deposed Queen Isabella, whose son, Alfonso, aspired to the shaky throne.

Isabella received Minister Sickles in her negligee, her huge breasts half-bare, her mane of hair hanging down to her waist. She had had as many men in her life as Sickles had had women--an indiscriminate series of ambassadors, footmen, Italian tenors, cabinet ministers, army privates. Sickles and Isabella reacted like magnet and iron. As a sop to convention, Isabella forthwith converted him to Catholicism, arranged for him a marriage of convenience with one of her ladies in waiting. In Madrid they began to call him "Yankee King of Spain." It was all very perplexing to his friends back home, who knew him as a staunch, republican, Tammany Dutch-Protestant.

But there was no stopping Sickles. When Isabella moved her "court" to Paris, Minister-to-Madrid Sickles moved there too, played host at her salon to Gustav Flaubert, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Gambetta and the French Monarchists. He decided that France, too, needed a king, and began to intrigue vigorously on behalf of his friend the Comte de Paris, whom he had met as a French observer in the Civil War.

But Sickles soon found that kingmaking was the most expensive hobby in the world. He was deep in debt when he was approached by a group of Britons who, like Sickles himself, had bought shares in the Erie Railroad and now feared the loss of their investments. Sickles made a sudden dash to New York, and in a lightning coup deposed the corrupt, redoubtable Jay Gould from the presidency of Erie. When the flabbergasted tycoon suggested that in future they team up together, Sickles knocked him senseless with his crutch, hurled him through a window (Gould landed in a bed of violets). Then Sickles rushed back to Madrid with a small fortune in his pocket, the gift of Erie's grateful British investors.

Resigning his Madrid appointment, Sickles worked feverishly for his mistress and her son. Came the day when the young man was triumphantly crowned as Alfonso XII and Isabella, henceforth bound to more conventional behavior, sadly said goodbye to her lover. Sickles returned to New York and resumed his long-forgotten law practice.

Lusty Hero. But the sight of a maimed Union soldier changed his plans. He became a passionate supporter of homes and pensions for disabled veterans. He tore the field of Gettysburg from the hands of souvenir hunters, made it a national shrine. He arranged the famed Gettysburg reunions of Blue and Grey. General Longstreet became his bosom friend. "[Your stand at Gettysburg]," wrote Longstreet, "was the sorest and saddest reflection of my life for many years; but today I can say . . . that it was . . . the best that could have come to us all."

Sickles was now in his 80s. To William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, says author Pinchon, he was a valued counselor; to veterans an adored hero. ("It is my guess," observed Sickles' friend Mark Twain, "that if the General had to lose a leg, he'd rather lose the one he has than the one he hasn't.") And, incredibly enough, he was still the terror of matrons with unmarried daughters. The great bureau in his bedroom was stuffed with silk stockings, lingerie and perfume; to a lady who said she would prefer to be rewarded with a lion cub, Sickles gave a litter of six.

But though he retained his virility, the aging Sickles seemed to lose his head. One day, to the horror of the public, he was haled into court, half-blind and in a wheel chair, on the charge of misappropriating the Civil War Monuments Fund. For the second time in his life he was acquitted, amid roars of popular applause. "Your old grandpa is very ill," he wrote soon after to his favorite grandson, adding: "I see big clouds in Europe." Then, at 93, he died. It was May, 1914.

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