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Summary: General Sickles responds to a quotation, supposedly from Badeau, in General John A. Logan's recently-published The Volunteer Soldier of America. Sickles denies ever having criticized Lincoln, and denies that he called for a dictator to run the war. On stationery of the New York Board of Commissioners, Gettysburg Monuments, of which Sickles served as chairman at the time. Daniel E. Sickles (1819-1914). Autograph Letter Signed (“D Sickles”), New York, August 26, 1887. To Adam Badeau. 2 p.
Inventory# 20340.1 & Inventory# 20340.2 $1,800
Partial Transcript
An Army friend writes me about some passages in Logan’s “Volunteers of America” touching the talk of a “Dictator” in ’64- and he states that “When Badeau joined Grant in 1864 he reported to the staff in conversation that in an interview with Sickles & others at his Head Quarters not long before his (Badeau’s) departure for the front, Sickles had said in substance that Lincoln was not pushing the war with the proper Energy & that the time would come soon when he would have to be deposed and a Dictator put in his stead.
Do you remember anything of such a conversation with me? I do not. ...In '64 I was strongly advo- [2] cating the renomination & reelection of Abraham Lincoln. My relations with him were intimate and confidential during that year. I made speeches for him in New York, Chicago, Detroit & Elsewhere in the Summer & Autumn of 64 claiming that his reelection would do as much as a Successful Campaign in putting down the rebellion because it would be a declaration of the people of the North to prosecute the war . . . I never heard anything in the Army about a Dictator .... [With] General Badeau Denies that he made the Comment about General Sickles Adam Badeau (1831-1895). letter, Southampton, Long Island, New York, 29 August 1887. To Daniel E. Sickles. 2 pages, single 4to sheet.
Inventory# 20340.2
A true copy of Badeau's reply to Sickles, denying giving the quote and stating that Logan was mistaken. Partial Transcript
I am this day in receipt of your note of the 26th inst. in which you speak of the statement [illegible] Logan’s book that “when Badeau joined Grant in 1864 he reported to the staff in conversation that in an interview with Sickles and others at his Head Quarters not long before his (Badeaus) departure for the War, Sickles had said in substance that Lincoln was not pushing the war with the proper energy and that the time would come soon when he would have to be deposed and a Dictator put in his stead.
I have not seen General Logan’s book, but I am very sure that if this quotation is literal, his memory or that of his informant was greatly at fault. I never was at your head quarters during the war, [2] and I never heard you discuss criticize Mr Lincoln unfavorably. I never had any conversation with you in which you or any one else discussed the possibility or desirability of a dictatorship.... Daniel Edgar Sickles, New York state senator and U.S. Representative, volunteered for the U.S. Army during the Civil War, advancing in rank from colonel to major general. After the war he was minister to Spain and was re-elected to one term in the House. Adam Badeau worked as a newspaper correspondent, author and diplomat. During the Civil War he was an aide de camp to Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Sherman, and military secretary to Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, receiving the brevet rank of brigadier general. After the war he served as a U.S. Consul General in London and Havana.
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