ARTICLE: Devil Dan: An American Scoundrel

This one comes to you courtesy of Sam, who sent me a biography of a lunatic and demanded he become a substack. With good reason. Buckle up, they (probably thankfully) don’t make them like this anymore…

Daniel Edgar Sickles was born in New York City in 1819. Dad was a lawyer and a politician and so his upbringing was privileged. He seemed destined to follow in his father’s footsteps, and was admitted to the bar in 1843, before being elected as a member of the New York State assembly a few years later. So far, normal, not particularly entertaining. Don’t worry, it’s coming.

In 1852, by now in his early thirties, he decided to marry a teenager. Apparently she was sophisticated. Teresa Bagioli was the daughter of an Italian singing teacher, with a talent for languages, but there’s only so much sophistication someone who is as young as fifteen can wield and it’s even more creepy when you factor in that he’d known her since she was a baby. Within seven months of the wedding, she had had a baby, too. You could say that her age, factored in with his notorious womanising, meant that this was always going to end in disaster. When it did, it was spectacular in fashion. But we’ll come back to that…

(Wikipedia)