American Scoundrel Stephen Wallace Dorsey

True Crime Historian

Richard O Jones

True Crime, Documentary, Arts, Society & Culture, Performing Arts

4.4 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2026

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Gilded Age Washington, 1876. Senator Stephen W. Dorsey and the Second Assistant Postmaster General ran a bid-rigging racket that bled the Post Office of millions — fake mail routes, real money. Two trials, two acquittals, one stolen castle on the New Mexico prairie. The jury said not guilty. The record disagrees.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Del Monaco's New York City, February 11, 1881.
0:11.1	The oysters came in on ice.
0:13.3	The champagne came in on rivers.
0:15.7	In the ballroom of the finest restaurant in the Republic, some hundred men in tailcoats rose
0:20.6	to toast Stephen Wallace
0:22.1	Dorsey, and at the head of the center table sat former President Ulysses S. Grant on one side of
0:27.5	the guest of honor, and vice president-elect Chester Arthur on the other. Somewhere between the
0:32.9	sweetbreads and the cigars, Arthur got to his feet, already half in his cups, and began to speak about how
0:39.3	the late election had been won. He meant to thank Dorsey for it. He began talking about soap,
0:45.6	which was what the boys in the back rooms called bribe money that year, and he was doing it in
0:50.9	front of reporters. Grant shot him a look. Dorsey smiled a small and careful
0:55.7	smile. The Republic was learning in real time what a swindler looked like at the very top of his
1:01.4	arc. Stephen W. Dorsey had not started out a swindler. Nobody does. He was born in February of
1:08.2	1842 on a dairy farm in Benson, Vermont, to Irish immigrant parents
1:13.5	who had about a hundred head of reason to believe that hard work was its own reward.
1:18.9	He grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, where the family moved while he was still a boy, and he
1:24.1	learned the trades of a republic on the rise, machine shops, tool works, the kind of labor that left oil under a man's fingernails and made him think of himself as honest by definition. When the war came in 61, Dorsey enlisted as a private in the first Ohio light artillery and came out the other end a colonel. He could shoot,
1:45.7	he could lead, he could talk. When the war was done, he went back to Sandusky and worked his way up
1:51.1	to the presidency of the Sandusky Tool Company. He was, at this point in the story, a perfectly
1:56.8	serviceable American. What ruined him was opportunity. In 1871, he accepted the presidency of the
2:03.9	Arkansas Central Railway and left Ohio for Helena, Arkansas, with his wife, Helen, and their two
2:10.4	small children in tow. In the Reconstruction South, a northern Republican with capital and a union
	...

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