Sickles Daniel Edgar - American scoundrel: the life of the notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles

International acclaim for Thomas Keneallys

A MERICAN S COUNDREL

Entertaining. Fast-paced.

The Wall Street Journal

An especially lively and compelling account of an extraordinary life.

The Seattle Times

Provocative. [Keneally] shows himself adept at biography. [He] breathes full and controversial life into a famous military engagement.

The Economist

Engaging. Keneally deftly conveys the atmosphere of fervent in preCivil War Washington. [He] has the advantage of a novelists sense of pace, a mellifluous prose style and a profound sympathy for both his main characters.

Sunday Times (London)

A fascinating look at a time when powerful men could get away with virtually anything.

Houston Chronicle

A memorable account of Sickles life, and the political, social and military world in which he lived. Keneally has given us an engaging biography.

The Oregonian

Keneallys writing is flawless. He tells Sickles story in a rich voice that is perfectly pitched for this tale of 19th-century excess.

San Antonio Express-News

Keneally is joyfully inquisitive. He deserves real praise. He enters naturally and sympathetically into the hearts of his protagonistshis own prose takes on the flavour of the period he invokes.

The Times Literary Supplement

Fast-paced, smooth-as-silk. Remarkable and colorful. Keneally is a gifted writer who captures the mood and manner of an age in succinct verbal portraits.

BookPage

[An] ambitious work encompassing nearly a full century of American political, financial, cultural and social life. [Sickless is] a life Keneally nails with sureness and scholarship.

Daily News (New York)

THOMAS KENEALLY

A MERICAN S COUNDREL

Thomas Keneally has won international acclaim for his novels Schindlers List (the basis for the movie and winner of the Booker Prize), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Confederates, Gossip from the Forest, The Playmaker, Woman of the Inner Sea, and A River Town, and for his work of nonfiction The Great Shame. He lives in Sydney, Australia.

ALSO BY THOMAS KENEALLY

F ICTION

The Place at Whitton
The Fear
Bring Larks and Heroes
Three Cheers for the Paraclete
The Survivor
A Dutiful Daughter
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
Blood Red, Sister Rose
Gossip from the Forest
Season in Purgatory
A Victim of the Aurora
Passenger
Confederates
The Cut-Rate Kingdom
Schindlers List
A Family Madness
The Playmaker
To Asmara
Flying Hero Class
Woman of the Inner Sea
A River Town

N ONFICTION

The Great Shame and the Triumph of the Irish
in the English-Speaking World
Outback
Now and in Time to Come
The Place Where Souls Are Born:
A Journey to the Southwest

F OR C HILDREN

Ned Kelly and the City of Bees

T O ALL MY A MERICAN K ENEALLY COUSINS

N EW Y ORKERS , N EW E NGLANDERS , M INNESOTANS ,

T EXANS, AND C ALIFORNIANS

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 societys Library Director, Margaret Heilbrun. Bruce Kirby, Manuscript Reference Librarian at the Library of Congress, helped me find ready access to the librarys 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 Diemens Land, todays Tasmania, with four other leaders of what was called the Young Ireland movement.

In 1852 Meagher made a celebrated escape from Van Diemens 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 Meaghers 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. Jamess, 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 everyones interest to let the United States acquire Cuba, either by purchase or force of arms.