Free American Scoundrel by Thomas Keneally Page B

for artificial teeth. Allan had employed Job-son as a consultant and put him on a retainer of $100 a week to serve as an expert at the trial. Having disastrously lost his trial against his rival, Dr. Allan had not paid Jobson, who employed Dan to retrieve the sum of $1,500 owed to him.
    But shortly afterward, when visiting Dan’s law offices, Jobson found the defendant, Dr. Allan, privately closeted with Sickles’s clerk and, later, with Sickles’s father. Jobson sued both Allan and Dan Sickles, saying that Dan Sickles’s conduct was “so extraordinary, to say the least of it,” that he felt constrained both to institute the legal proceedings against him and to appeal to the Supreme Court of New York for his disbarment.
    Jobson told the court that “as a foreigner and a stranger,” he was well aware of the risk of Tammany vengeance for making this appeal— “a blow from the cowardly sling-shot or the nocturnal knife.” Fortunately for Dan, neither the legal proceedings nor the disbarment hearing came to anything. Jobson always maintained that he did not pursue his case against Dan Sickles because his new lawyer was also bribed by Allan and Sickles! Poor Dr. Jobson got a sound education in the ethics in power of the New York bar, particularly the side associated with Tammany. 23
    But the Jobson incident barely delayed Dan in his organizing of rallies, Democratic orators, and speeches to support Buchanan’s candidacy,and in the autumn of 1855, the dominant Hardshell wing of Tammany nominated Dan for the state senate. They and Dan knew that his candidacy would serve as a litmus test in New York for Buchanan’s candidacy. During Dan’s service to two campaigns, his own and Buchanan’s, Teresa and Laura received less than his already limited attentions to domesticity. In his efforts to be elected he was helped out by all the old gang—by the Grahams; by the charming and universally loved Irish-American lawyer James Topham Brady; by the Irish icon and escaped political prisoner handsome and oratorical Thomas Francis Meagher; by a handsome friend named Sam Butterworth, who had every reason to hope for a profitable post out of a Democratic victory; by the best-selling Chevalier Wikoff, who had now written a book on his courtship and Italian imprisonment; and by perhaps Dan’s most reliable friend and ally, Emmanuel (Manny) Hart, a former New York alderman and U.S. congressman. Dan was pleased to see that his much-publicized tweak-ings of Britannic dignity during his stay in London had done him no harm with passionate Irishmen like Judge Charles Daly and Meagher and those who shared their attitudes. And he was elected to the senate in Albany. He did not choose to take Teresa with him; indeed, she may not have wanted to go to the capital, since the railroad offered Dan the chance of adequate access to his wife and daughter and his friends in New York. 24
    During that spring, Teresa wrote to her confidante Florence about the familiar problem: the way the national scene took Dan away from her. “Dan is going to Washington this evening,” she said. After Washington he was going to Richmond, then back to Washington, and then home. He would be gone for a week or ten days. “He said last evening (rather late) I might go with him.” That “rather late” may have meant too late for her to do anything about it. But she cast a deliberately blithe light on her not accompanying him. She had much to look after at home; “what with dressmakers, seamstresses, shoemakers, etc. etc. I have my poor hands full.” Deprived of a place in his councils and at his side, she made what she could of shopping. But she was looking forward to the summer, when Dan would be free to spend time with her, andthey might go to see Florence in the White Mountains. Dan, however, was trying to find a summer house “this side of the Hudson,” and if he succeeded, that would be the end of the White Mountains for that year.
    As in the old days, before