American Scoundrel Read Online Free PDF

more than a mere girl. Dan was enchanted by her. He courted her with a sensibility of being a friend of her parents, and he must have suspected that he loved her with a fated and exclusive love. 23
    His passion for Teresa did not diminish his hectic devotion to the tribe of Tammany. It betrayed him into behavior that in other political jurisdictions would have led to his arrest and disbarment, but that was much admired by Democrats in New York. He was engaged in supporting a friend, Robert J. Dillon, for the elective office of corporation counsel, when the supporters of the opposing candidate prepared a circular against Dillon and enclosed it with a ballot in envelopes addressed to all the voters on the electoral rolls. Thousands of these circulars were taken to the Broadway post office for delivery. Informed of this, Dan gathered the cohorts of Captain Wiley’s and Captain Rynders’s gangs and drove with them in several carriages to the post office. There, in the words of one newspaper, the Tammany legionnaires “captured” the building, ripped open the mailbags, gathered all the offending letters into a pile under Dan’s supervision, and set fire to them on the post office floor.
    Dan was, of course, prosecuted for robbing and interfering with the mails, but John Graham was able to delay indefinitely his appearance before Justice Osborne in federal court. Indeed, one of his rewards was to be elected a delegate to the Democratic Convention of 1852 in Baltimore, where he supported the ultimate victor, a handsome Mexican War hero from New Hampshire named General Franklin Pierce. And though the
Sun
would six months later urge President Pierce to give Dan short shrift in Washington, “and then forward the gentleman by the first train to the disconsolate and despairing justice,” Dan was correctly confident that he would never come to trial for his act of electoral enthusiasm. 24
    Though living so far north, in New Hampshire, Pierce was a pro-Southern Hard Hunker or, as people now said, Hardshell Democrat of the variety Dan liked. Many other Americans liked him too, and Pierce would sweep the country in the coming November, 254 electoral votes to 42. For the first time Dan had the heady experience of looking up to a President who acknowledged a measure of obligation to the young delegate from New York. Dan would, with a mixture of grace and directness, trade on this debt. He had a New York friend, a fire commissioner named Gus Schell, and Dan wrote to the new President to petition forthe appointment of Schell, “the fireman’s man in New York,” as collector of the Port of New York, a position that had always carried with it the most handsome fees and rewards. “I would venture to comprise all that I am permitted to ask from the present administration in one desire—that Augustus Schell may be appointed Collector of the Port of New York.” 25
    Now the story gets beyond its most significant element. A month or so before Pierce’s election, Dan had proposed marriage to Teresa Bagioli. It was not uncommon in that age for a fifteen-year-old girl to marry, though it was not particularly the practice of the world Dan and Teresa moved in. But Teresa was, in her way and for someone her age, uniquely qualified. Dan believed she possessed the gravity to be a successful lawyer’s wife, and her education and rearing in an exceptional family, as well as her frankness of feeling, better equipped her for marriage than were most American women in their twenties. She would always like older, apparently sager, and accomplished men, and was bedazzled by this mature, worldly, sympathetic New Yorker. We do not know the scene of her seduction—his rooms, a hotel, or a house of assignation, that is, one of the special hotels where polite women could go, wearing a veil, to meet their lovers. It may have been a tumult at home while her parents were away—although since Antonio had his studio at home, his absences were not frequent.