American Scoundrel American Scoundrel American Scoundrel by Keneally Thomas

Author:Keneally, Thomas [Keneally, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Biography, War
ISBN: 9781400075546
Amazon: 1400075548
Goodreads: 7188083
Publisher: Knopf Group E-Books
Published: 2002-04-25T07:00:00+00:00

As it was, he had produced in Dan a condition in which “every drop of his blood carried with it a sense of his shame . . . a realization that . . . the future which opened to him so full of brilliancy, had been enshrouded perhaps in eternal gloom.” Insane or not, he was bound to do what he had done, said gentle Brady. “If he had done anything more or less than became a man . . . whatever may have been the intimacy of our past relations, I would have been willing to see him die the most ignominious death before I would venture to raise anything on his behalf but a prayer to Heaven for the salvation which after death might come.” Again, the resonating New Yorker drew vigorous applause from the crowd.

Yet as apparently justified as Dan was in what he had done, Brady referred to the last report of the lunatic asylums of Pennsylvania, which showed that one of the inciting causes of insanity was domestic affliction. Well, Dan’s friends had such an acute sense of his affliction that many of them had come here voluntarily, and without fee or reward, to offer on his behalf the affection and devotion he had once tendered to them. One in particular, a man from New York, was working as counsel for the defense on that basis. At this stage, Brady nodded to the eminent Thomas Francis Meagher, former prisoner of the Queen of Great Britain, who had given the same dignity to the criminal dock of his native country, where he had been charged for his defiance of British policy during the Famine, as Mr. Sickles gave to this American one. Meagher had recently written a manuscript on the Sickles case, from which Brady now quoted rhetorical measures that dampened many a manly cheek in the court. “Then may we well say to the jury,” Meagher had written and Brady now intoned, “if your love of home will suffer it—if your genuine sense of justice will consent to it . . . if your pride of manhood will stoop to it—if your instinctive perception of right and wrong will sanction it, stamp ‘murder’ upon the bursting forehead. . .. Do this, do it if you can, and then, having consigned the prisoner to the scaffold, return to your homes, and there, within those endangered sanctuaries, following your ignoble verdict, set to and teach your imperiled wives a lesson in the vulgar arithmetic of a compromising morality. And let them be inspired with a sense of womanly dignity by a knowledge of the value you attach to the sanctity of the household, to the inviolability of the wife, to the security of the hospitable roof, and last of all, and above all, to the inherited tradition of an innocent but ruined offspring.”

A moment of awe, a burst of applause, followed. Now, to the citizens of the District of Columbia, said Brady, Mr. Sickles committed his life, his character, and all that was to elevate and keep him in existence.

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