Free American Scoundrel by Thomas Keneally

drafting it. The manifesto declared that if the United States decided that its security depended on acquiring Cuba, and if Spain would not pass on sovereignty in the island to the United States by peaceful means, including sale, then, “by every law, human and Divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain.” Soulé and Dan had made sure that a large contingent of the European press was waiting in a lounge at the conference hotel to receive copies of the startling manifesto and to send them out to London, Paris, and Madrid.
    There was an instant and hostile reaction to the document not only in Europe but in many sections of America. One newspaper called it “the Manifesto of the Brigands.” Antislavery and abolitionist opinion saw the acquisition of Cuba as an extension of Southern power, not as a liberation of an enslaved province. President Pierce had already been punished for supporting legislation that effectively made Kansas a slave territory; he lost nearly two-thirds of Democratic representation in the Congress in the 1854 elections. Now, for the sake of winning back the North, he was under pressure to denounce the work of his three most senior diplomats, and he did so, distancing himself from the manifesto, as much as he would have supported it had the reaction and the times been different. 19
    Dan was personally disappointed at this failure to seize the grail of Cuba. He never lost faith in the idea, but in the autumn of 1854, with the wrapping-up of the matter for the present, he completed his contracted two years as legation secretary. Again, reports on Dan in the New York press were split. Some journalists claimed that Buchanan was pleased to see the back of his embarrassing legation secretary. A less hostile section of the press gave a more credible reason for Dan’s return to the United States; it was “in order to prepare the way for the subsequent nomination of his warm personal friend, Mr. Buchanan, for the Presidency.” The same newspapers suggested that in Dan, Buchanan had a most competent electoral aide.
    In truth, Dan was eager to start on Buchanan’s candidacy. Even if it failed, the process itself would challenge, vivify, and reward him. Not that Old Buck would be easy to promote. Given his white hair, the aged and crooked way he hung his head, and the tremors of his face, he would obviously be having his last tilt at the highest American post. There were a number of younger and more attractive men seeking the nomination—Franklin Pierce himself, and Stephen Douglas of Illinois, as well as Marcy, the aged Secretary of State. 20
    Back in New York, the Sickleses took a house in Lower Manhattan, to which Teresa welcomed her multitude of friends and had much to tell them about the Court of St. James’s. She must have wondered whetherDan’s relationship with Fanny White would resume, and may not have known, except through gossip, that Fanny had found a new man-in-chief, a wealthy, older fellow named Jake LeRoy, who appeared with her at the theater and drove up Broadway with her in his “flashy carriage.” Jake had greater resources than Dan, but he also had venereal disease, which he would in the end pass on to both his young wife and Fanny, rendering her no longer “a clean girl.” 21
    Economic difficulties began to bite soon after the return to New York. Dan had passed on to the U.S. Treasury many of his outstanding British bills, which Secretary of the Treasury James Guthrie refused to pay. This left Dan’s London creditors howling. But Dan did not mind so much; he was beyond their reach. His future was an American one. Slotting back into Tammany politics and into his law offices at Nassau Street, he found “my park scheme dead and all my illusions vanished.” He was anxious to get the report of the park commissioners confirmed by the New York Superior Court. Although Dillon, the corporation counsel, told him he must know it was impossible, and that all the leading members of