The Book of Bastards

by Brian Thornton

  Pickering didn't do himself any favors when his Senate trial began in March 1803. As he had done so many times in his own courtroom, he failed to show up! His son came forward and pleaded to be allowed to present evidence that his father was insane and therefore not guilty (as if that would keep him from being removed from office!). The prosecution, made up of members of the House of Representatives, argued that Pickering was sane but drunk while presiding over court, an act which qualified as what the Constitution refers to as “high crimes and misdemeanors,” conduct serious enough to justify removing a federal judge from office. The proceedings went back and forth along these lines for a week, but the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

  On March 12, the Senate voted along party lines to convict and remove Pickering from his position as a federal judge, the first such case in American history. Pickering descended into full-on dementia afterward and died two years later.

  16

  SAMUEL CHASE

  “Old Bacon Face” — an Unimpeachable Bastard (1741–1811)

  “It is your lot to have the peculiar privilege of being universally despised.”

  — Alexander Hamilton to Samuel Chase

  Born in 1741, Samuel Chase was the only son of a Maryland minister and his wife. From these humble beginnings, he grew up to be one of the foremost lawyers of his community. Chase was also an early and ardent leader of colonial tax resistance during the 1760s and 1770s. A signatory of the Declaration of Independence, he also served as first a Maryland state judge and later as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

  And he was a bullying, war-profiteering bastard saddled with the nickname “Old Bacon Face” in part because of his irascible personality. Chase was even more anti-British than the most hardcore, true believer among the Sons of Liberty. Chase was elected to both the first and second Continental Congresses, and he kept himself busy twisting arms to ensure Maryland's legislature voted for liberty. He also tried to peel Britain's Canadian colonies away by luring them into the Patriot confederation.

  Chase possessed a first class intellect and a fine legal mind, but he was likely the most difficult man to get along with in the Congress. He made hair shirts like John Adams seem pleasant by comparison. So while his ability and passion made him indispensable, his personality made him unpopular.

  On top of that, he was a greedy bastard. He schemed to corner the bread market in the colonies during the first years of the war. When a Philadelphia newspaper broke this news in 1778, Chase resigned in disgrace from Congress.

  Within a few years he was back in the thick of things, though. Appointed a Maryland judge after the Revolution, he served with such fortitude that President Washington named him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1796.

  Chase's bad temper, bullying ways, and tendency to mouth off from the bench got him in fresh trouble once he took his seat on the Supreme Court. When Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic Republicans started culling their opponents from the courts, they also resolved to remove Chase from office. But in setting their sights on Chase, the Democratic Republicans chose one of the most competent jurists of the era. And Samuel Chase was determined not to be the next John Pickering.

  STAMP ACT BASTARD

  During the Stamp Act Crisis, the colonists protested British taxation levied in the form of government-issued stamps. Twenty-four-year-old Chase led the Annapolis branch of the Sons of Liberty in a smash-and-grab at the offices of the local printer who contracted with the British to make their stamps. Chase himself then burned the local tax collector in effigy, along with all of the stamps his gang had collected. That might have been enough to satisfy most Patriot hotheads; the fire-breathing Chase, however, wanted more. When Annapolis's mayor denounced Chase in one of the local newspapers, Chase boldly responded. Dismissing the mayor and other Maryland loyalists as nothing but “despicable tools of power,” Chase openly boasted about the break-in.

  Chase proved he was a superb lawyer in part by showing the good sense to hire other lawyers to defend him. He was acquitted and quickly proved that the Jeffersonian impeachment strategy wouldn't serve to pack their cronies into the federal courts. Even if the judges they targeted weren't good lawyers like Chase, they likely knew a couple they wouldn't be afraid to employ.

  Great strategy. Still a bastard.

  17

  JAMES WILKINSON

  A New and Improved Benedict Arnold (1755–1825)

  “The most finished scoundrel that ever lived.”

  — John Randolph

  Everyone has heard of Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr, neither of whom was very successful in his treasonous endeavors. But there were successful ones, too, villains like America's greatest traitor James Wilkinson. Wilkinson was born to a wealthy Maryland family in 1755 and was studying medicine in Philadelphia when the Revolution broke out. He eagerly set aside his studies and enlisted for service in the Continental Army. He took part in Washington's encirclement of Boston, and served as a staff officer with Arnold at the Siege of Quebec. He even jumped to General Gates's staff in time to take part in the victory at Saratoga in 1777.

  Wilkinson, however, also took part in the Conway Cabal against George Washington, which did nothing to endear him to his army superiors. Within a year even Gates had gotten fed up with Wilkinson and forced him to resign his commission. Wilkinson returned to active service as a supply officer in 1779. He was again forced to resign again, this time in the face of charges of corruption. It was the first of many times he would fight such allegations.

  Whatever his crimes in the army, Wilkinson had big plans for profit on the civilian front. In 1784 he met with the Louisiana Territory's Spanish governor, Esteban Rodriguez Miró. They plotted to seize a trade monopoly on the Mississippi River for Kentucky. Wilkinson took bribes from the Spanish and promised to help Kentucky declare its independence. He argued that an independent country of Kentucky could act as a buffer between Spanish colonies and the land-hungry United States. The citizens of Kentucky might even consent to union with the Spanish territories.

  By the late 1790s Wilkinson was back in the army. This time he was a commissioned general stationed on the Southwestern frontier. Still a Spanish spy, he passed much information along to the Spanish regarding American aims on New Orleans.

  It was years before any of this came to light. Seen as a loyal career officer, Wilkinson was eventually appointed Louisiana's first territorial governor. He ruled from New Orleans as a virtual military dictator. A number of prominent citizens complained about his methods to the national government. President Jefferson then ordered a full investigation of Wilkinson's conduct. Wilkinson, however, was more than prepared. He turned over information about the territorial ambitions of former Vice President Aaron Burr as a way of saving his own skin.

  It worked. Burr went on trial for treason and Wilkinson testified against him. Wilkinson's testimony made such an impression that Virginia Democrat and prosecutor John Randolph said, “Wilkinson is the only man I ever saw who is from the bark to the very core a villain!”

  Wilkinson served without distinction in the War of 1812 and then retired to write his memoirs (which should have been shelved in the “fiction” section). He died in Mexico in 1825, hoping to make a fortune bringing American settlers into the sparsely populated Texas region.

  It is fitting that one of America's most successful traitors died and was buried outside of the country. It is especially ironic in light of the fact that Wilkinson was never caught in his lifetime. His involvement with the Spanish did not surface until the 1850s, when his letters to the Spanish governor in New Orleans were published.

  This is, of course, why Wilkinson was more successful than any other traitor on an enemy payroll. When James Wilkinson died in Mexico at age seventy, he had been suspected of all manner of corruption. But no one in the government or out-side of it suspected his long association (for pay) with the Spanish. That is the very definition of a successful spy, and one of the definitions of an outright bastard.
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  “[Wilkinson was] a general who never won a battle or lost a court-martial.”

  — Robert Leckie, historian

  18

  AARON BUR

  Successful Duelist and Failed Secessionist (1756–1836)

  “Burr is sanguine enough to hope everything — daring enough to attempt everything — wicked enough to scruple nothing.”

  — Alexander Hamilton

  In 1800 Thomas Jefferson won the presidency by the thinnest of margins in a vote that had to be settled in the House of Representatives. He almost lost the presidency to a brilliant, restless polymath named Aaron Burr, who became vice president according to electoral law at the time. Before the end of Jefferson's second term Burr would stand trial for treason; he was the only member of the U.S. executive branch to ever do so.

  Burr was born in New Jersey in 1756, the grandson of the great Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards. His legal studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the American Revolution. Like many he volunteered for service with the Continental Army. By the end of the Revolution, Burr had distinguished himself by rising to the rank of colonel. He held a number of political offices in short order, then in a senatorial election 1791 he defeated one of New York's incumbent senators Phillip Schuyler. Burr and Schuyler's son-in-law Alexander Hamilton had been friends up to that point, but after the election became bitter enemies.

  Their falling-out helps explain Hamilton's public support for Jefferson during the election of 1800. In Hamilton's view, Jefferson placed the public good before his own interests. He saw Burr, on the other hand, as a dangerous opportunist who placed his own interests before anyone else's.

  Burr eventually grew bored by the vice presidency, and in 1804 he decided to run for governor of New York. Shortly afterward Hamilton made some cutting remarks about Burr's character. Burr then challenged his former friend to a duel.

  The two fought in Weehawken, New Jersey, and Hamilton was killed. Burr faced murder charges in both New York and New Jersey for a time. The allegations forced him to hide out while the hullabaloo over Hamilton's death blew over. Eventually the charges were dropped, and Burr went back to his normal routine.

  When Burr's term of office as vice president ended in 1805, he headed west. He had leased 40,000 acres of land in Texas, and claimed that he planned to build on that initial piece of land.

  The truth wasn't so simple.

  Burr's plan did include building, but he also intended to “filibuster” (lead a private military expedition) into Mexico. Though his design was illegal, it may not have actually been treasonous. And he might have managed to take the land he wanted had he not told so many people the secret. Burr had traveled far and wide, mentioning different bits of the plan to a host of people, many of whom he hoped to involve in his plot (including a Tennessee militia general named Andrew Jackson).

  So when James Wilkinson claimed that Burr in fact intended to also peel off a number of the Western states in the Union and produced letters written by Burr to that effect, the accusation didn't seem unfounded. Burr once again found himself in hot water. Just as he had done after he killed Hamilton, Burr went to ground. This time, however, a federal arrest warrant issued by President Jefferson himself caught up with Burr, and he was arrested in what is now Alabama.

  Burr was charged with treason in a federal court in Virginia in 1807 and faced death for his intended crimes. President Jefferson had publicly declared that Burr was guilty, thereby attaching the president's personal prestige to the widely held belief in Burr's guilt. But the evidence against Burr was largely circumstantial, and his lawyers destroyed Wilkinson's credibility as a witness. Once again found not guilty, he walked.

  Burr spent most of the rest of his years roaming the world, a restless spirit for the remainder of his long life, fleeing creditors and chasing opportunity. At age seventy-seven he married a wealthy widow whose inheritance he quickly ran through, just as he had any money that had ever come into his hands. Burr died, on the day his divorce from his second wife became final, aged eighty, a bastard to the end.

  19

  THE FEDERALISTS

  The Hartford Convention and the Lousy Timing of Treason (1814)

  Secession movements don't play well in this country. Just look at what happened to the Southern gentlemen who voted to secede from the Union in 1860 and 1861. The national government fought a long and bloody war in which more Americans died than in all of the other wars in which Americans have served and fought combined.

  And to think, that civil war could well have been fought four decades earlier, beginning in 1814, if the pack of bastards who convened the infamous “Hartford Convention” had gotten their way. Here's what happened.

  In 1800 Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans swept the Federalist Party from power. The Federalists lost both the White House and Congress to their mostly Southern and Western rivals. At the same time, the United States was fighting to prosper as the Napoleonic Wars raged across Europe. Both the British and the French had violated American neutrality time and time again. As soon as he was in office, Jefferson began to retaliate against both sides of this conflict with a trade embargo of all European goods. The United States, he said, would prosecute an “economic war” and deny the British and the French one of their largest emerging markets.

  Since shipping and shipbuilding were New England's largest industries, the embargo was an unqualified disaster for the region. As a result the state governments of all five New England states were soon solidly Federalist. Jefferson's successor James Madison stepped into office in 1809. He extended Jefferson's economic policies so far as that he actually started the War of 1812 with Britain over the issue. He also curtailed the defensive abilities of New England's state governments. These five troubled states were seen by most of the rest of the country (especially the South) as being potentially disloyal.

  Turns out the rest of the country was right.

  By late 1814, New England's economy was in shambles, and no end to the war was in sight. A group of prominent Federalists led by Harrison Gray Otis called for a convention of delegates representing all five New England states to meet in secret in Hartford, Connecticut, in December 1814.

  BASTARD PROPOSAL

  The delegates wrote up a proposal that called for the national government to pass the following constitutional amendments:

  1. Limit all embargoes to less than sixty days.

  2. Revoke the Southern right to count slaves as three-fifths of citizen for the purpose of determining representation in the Congress.

  3. Limit future presidents to a single term.

  4. Require a two-thirds Congressional majority for declaration of war, disruption of foreign trade, or admitting a new state to the Union.

  5. Bar incoming presidents from being from the same state as their immediate predecessors (All of the presidents to that point, with the brief intermission of John Adams's administration from 1797–1801, had been Virginians. This was intended to end the so-called “Virginia Dynasty”).

  There was no way that the Republican-controlled Congress would have passed any of the amendments the Convention advocated. This proposal was only intended to be a bargaining chip to get the rest of the country to take New England seriously. The New Englanders wanted other states to negotiate with their state governments, as opposed to continuing to ignore their collective concerns.

  A month later the Hartford Convention adjourned and sent representatives to Washington, D.C. By this time, word of Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans, and the signing of the treaty that ended the war, had reached the District of Columbia.

  Could their timing have been worse?

  The Hartford Convention finished what the election of 1800 had started and signaled the death (by suicide) of the Federalist Party. After the brief honeymoon of the Era of Good Feeling, sectionalism in America would return with a vengeance. Over the next forty-five years internal bickering would help drag the country spiraling into the Civil War so
narrowly avoided in 1815.

  The Federalists: proof that if you can be a bastard, “Timing” can be a bitch!

  20

  HENRY CLAY

  The “Corrupt Bargain” and the Election of 1824 (1777–1852)

  “I'd rather be right than president.”

  — Henry Clay

  If ever Kentuckian Henry Clay told a lie, it was in the above quote. The man wanted to be president with every fiber of his being. Charismatic, shrewd, several times U.S. Senator and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Clay spent decades seeking the Oval Office, running for president three different times, the first time in 1824.

  By 1824 President James Monroe was facing retirement. He had no like-minded Virginia aristocrat serving as his secretary of state and positioned to continue the “Virginia Dynasty.” The unnerving (for other states, especially in New England) and steady flow of Virginians through the executive branch began with Thomas Jefferson, was carried on by James Madison, and seemed destined to end with Monroe himself. Thus the election of 1824 promised to be the most open one so far in the short history of the young republic.