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American Scoundrel: Love, War and Politics in 19th Century America
 
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American Scoundrel: Love, War and Politics in 19th Century America (Paperback)

by Thomas Keneally (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 416 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage; New Ed edition (6 Mar 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0099285991
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099285991
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.8 x 3.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 924,023 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description

On the last, cold Sunday of February 1859, Daniel Sickles shot his wife's lover in Washington's Lafayette Square, just across from the White House. This is the story of that killing and its repercussions. Charming and ambitious, Dan Sickles literally got away with murder. His protector was none other than the President himself, James Buchanan; his political friends quickly gathered around; and, Sickles was acquitted. His trial is described with all Thomas Keneally's powers of dash and drama, against a backdrop of double-dealing, intrigue and slavery. Enslaved, in her turn, by the hypocrisy of nineteenth-century society, his wife was shunned and thereafter banned from public life. Sickles, meanwhile, was free to accept favours and patronage. He raised a regiment for the Union, and went on to become a general in the army, rising to the rank of brigadier-general and commanding a flak at the Battle of Gettysburg - at which he lost a leg, which he put into the military museum in Washington where he would take friends to visit it. Thomas Keneally brilliantly recreates an extraordinary period, when women were punished for violating codes of society that did not bind men. And the caddish, good-looking Dan Sickles personifies the extremes of the era: as a womaniser, he introduced his favourite madam to Queen Victoria while his wife stayed at home, and he installed his housekeeper as his mistress while his second wife took up residence nearby. "American Scoundrel" is the lens through which the reader can view history at a time when America was being torn apart.


From the Publisher

On the last, cold Sunday of February 1859, Daniel Sickles shot his wife's lover in Lafayette Square, just across from the White House -. This is the story of that murder and its repercussions. Racy history from a master of story-telling. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Unbridled self-interest as a way of life., 10 Nov 2002
By Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: American Scoundrel: Love, War and Politics in 19th Century America (Hardcover)
Dan Sickles was a brilliant manipulator in mid-1800's America who managed to get his own way whenever it counted, pulling strings, bending the truth, ignoring the facts, and turning on his charm, full-force. Not content just to win, Sickles wanted also to convince those who opposed him that they were wrong, and to destroy whatever and whoever got in his way. Manipulating public opinion and the opinion of his superiors, including Presidents, he kept himself constantly in the limelight, and even when he went on trial for a cold-blooded murder, he managed to come out a popular winner, the first defendant ever to use temporary insanity as a defense in American courts.

Described as charming, bright, gregarious, eloquent, profligate with money (sometimes other people's), and sexually voracious, he also had a streak of cold-blooded cruelty, as his poor young wife discovered, when, after his countless infidelities, she sought solace with Barton Key (son of the composer of the Star-Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key), only to have Key waylaid by a Sickles friend and shot multiple times, point-blank, by Sickles. A Tammany Hall insider and New York politician, Sickles thrived on the excitement and debate in Washington in the years immediately before the outbreak of the Civil War. Here Keneally does a remarkable job of presenting complex issues clearly, and of personalizing the trauma of war and its emotional devastation.

Though some Civil War buffs have questioned a few details in Keneally's descriptions of battles in which Gen. Sickles participated, these scenes are not the major part of this book. His maltreatment of his wife, from her marriage at 16 until her death from tuberculosis at age 31, is also a focus, as are the murder of Key, Sickles's trial, and, after the war, his continuing involvement with Presidents and his missions to Panama, Colombia, and Spain. Sickles is an unlikable character, presented with all his flaws, and Keneally vividly illustrates this man's successes and their costs to others. Mary Whipple

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