American Scoundrel

• About the Author
  
• Other Books By This Author
  
• Title Page
  
• Dedication
  
• Acknowledgments
  
• Author’s Note
  
• Chapter I
  
• Chapter II
  
• Chapter III
  
• Chapter IV
  
• Chapter V
  
• Chapter VI
  
• Chapter VII
  
• Chapter VIII
  
• Finale
  
• Last Word
  
• Notes
  
• Bibliography
  
• Copyright
  

I
N ASSEMBLING THE MATERIALS FOR THIS TALE
, I
RECEIVED
the best of help from the New York Public Library, especially from Elizabeth Deifendorf, Director of the General Research Division, and Mary Bowling, Curator of the Manuscripts Division, and their respective staffs. I must make special mention of Ruth Carr and her genial personnel in the History and Genealogy Room at the library.

Sickles documents held by the New-York Historical Society were made available through the kind offices of the society’s Library Director, Margaret Heilbrun. Bruce Kirby, Manuscript Reference Librarian at the Library of Congress, helped me find ready access to the library’s relatively large holdings of Sickles-related materials.

As ever, my wife, Judy, and my daughter, Jane, working with an efficiency the author could rarely aspire to himself, helped assemble both original and secondary Sickles material. And I cannot put down my pen without thanking my agent, Amanda Urban, for her support of the project, and my editor and publisher, Nan Talese, who made the editorial process a delight.

M
Y FASCINATION WITH THE TALE RECOUNTED IN THESE
pages began with Australia and Ireland, and specifically with an Irish political prisoner named Thomas Francis Meagher, transported on a life sentence to Australia in 1849. Meagher was young, famous, eloquent, wealthy, and charming. He had brought back to Ireland from the French republic of Lamartine the tricolor, now the flag of the Republic of Ireland. For his involvement in an Irish uprising that was, in part, a protest against the removal of the Irish harvest to market in the midst of a starving population, he was sentenced to death for high treason and was transported to Van Diemen’s Land, today’s Tasmania, with four other leaders of what was called the Young Ireland movement.

In 1852 Meagher made a celebrated escape from Van Diemen’s Land aboard an American vessel and, upon arrival in New York, was subsumed at once, like many a humbler immigrant, into the Democratic Party apparatus named Tammany Hall. Meagher would have an exceptional career as orator, lawyer, Civil War general, and political activist before he perished, possibly at the hands of vigilantes, in the Missouri
River while serving as governor of Montana. I outlined his career, and that of other Irish agitators, comprehensively in a recent book,
The Great Shame.
But one aspect of Meagher’s friendships that I did not have room to explore in
The Great Shame
was his relationship with a notable Tammany figure named Dan Sickles, and his association as a lawyer in the tragedy of Dan Sickles, his wife, Teresa, and Philip Barton Key, the federal district attorney of Washington, D.C., and son of Francis Scott Key, creator of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It seemed that this calamity and the careers of Dan and Teresa served as a mirror of the marital, political, and even military morality of the day, at a time when the most notable political experiment of the new world was under its severest test. In these pages the story of the Sickleses is examined in, the author hopes, some of the piquant detail it deserves.

I
N 1853, AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-THREE
, Daniel Edgar Sickles was appointed first secretary to the United States legation in London, at a time when there was much dispute between Britain and the United States. Sickles, known as an eloquent yet tough-minded figure in the politics of New York, had been chosen by the new minister to the Court of St. James’s, a crotchety Democrat elder named James Buchanan. Dan Sickles was to work with Buchanan in London on a number of important American objectives, not least of which was convincing the British government that it was in everyone’s interest to let the United States acquire Cuba, either by purchase or force of arms.

Those who met, knew, trusted, and loved Dan Sickles swore by his loyalty, discretion, and effectiveness. He was urbane, intellectually gifted, a skillful
lawyer. He had already served a political apprenticeship as a New York State assemblyman, and no one doubted that a seat in Congress lay ahead. For the moment, he had given up the choice post of attorney to the New York Corporation to serve his nation at Buchanan’s side in Britain. Some said he was escaping debts in New York, but they were predictably Republicans. A trim-waisted, neatly made fellow of just under average height, he carried in his luggage excellent suits and, for use at the British court, the uniform of a colonel of New York militia. He was a promising Yankee, a man with a future, on his way to show the British a thing or two. Yet there was in this stylish New Yorker 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 city he had grown up in, the age he lived in, and his own soul.