A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans

by Michael Farquhar

  Although she missed her family terribly and struggled to retain her native identity, Mary adapted well to the life of a Seneca woman. She tended crops, dressed game, and after several years was married to a Delaware chief by the name of Sheninjee. “The idea of spending my days with him at first seemed perfectly irreconcilable to my feelings,” she told Seaver; “but his good nature, generosity, tenderness, and friendship toward me soon gained my affection; and strange as it may seem, I loved him.”

  Mary’s contentment was made plain when she actively resisted being returned to the white world. The British offered a bounty on all those who had been taken captive during the French and Indian War, but when a Dutchman named John van Sice tried to redeem her, she ran away and hid for three days. Similarly, when a Seneca chief ordered her returned to the British, she disappeared with her child, a boy named Thomas, until it was safe to return to her tribe—the people she now considered her family. “With them was my home,” she said.

  A period of peace followed the French and Indian War, during which time (Sheninjee having died) Mary married her second husband, a Seneca warrior named Hiokatoo. The couple had six children, all named with a nod to their mother’s past and the relatives from whom she had been parted. Two boys named John and Jesse joined their half brother, Thomas, along with four daughters called Jane, Nancy, Betsey, and Polly. Mary described the Seneca people during the lull in hostilities (with what appear to be some of James Seaver’s linguistic flourishes tossed into the text):

  No people can live more happy than the Indians did in times of peace, before the introduction of spiritous liquors among them. Their lives were a continual round of pleasures. Their wants were few, and easily satisfied, and their cares were only for today—the bounds of calculation for future comfort not extending to the incalculable uncertainties of tomorrow. If peace ever dwelt with men, it was in former times, in the recess from war, among what are now termed barbarians. The moral character of the Indians was (if I may be allowed the expression) uncontaminated. Their fidelity was perfect, and became proverbial. They were strictly honest; they despised deception and falsehood; and chastity was held in high veneration, and a violation of it was considered sacrilege. They were temperate in their desires, moderate in their passions, and candid and honorable in the expression of their sentiments, on every subject of importance.

  The peaceful interlude lasted until the American Revolution, when the Seneca (among other tribes) were enticed by the British to help subdue the rebellious colonists. Mary Jemison had a unique perspective on the conflict and witnessed horrors committed by both sides. She described the ghastly execution by the Indians of an American officer named Thomas Boyd, who was stripped naked, tied to a tree, and menaced by tomahawks and scalping knives. An incision was then made in his abdomen, and his intestines were slowly drawn out. Finally the prisoner was beheaded, his head stuck on a pole, and the rest of his body was left to rot unburied. It was a brutal killing, but Mary also recalled the destruction of her village in western New York by American forces under Major General John Sullivan. “A part of our corn they burnt,” she said, “and threw the remainder into the river. They burnt our houses, killed what few cattle and horses they could find, destroyed our fruit trees, and left nothing but the bare soil and timber.” A number of Indians starved or froze to death as a result. Mary survived by working for two escaped slaves who hired her to help them husk corn on their farm.

  “I have laughed a thousand times to myself,” she told Seaver, “when I have thought of the good old negro who hired me, who, fearing that I should get taken or injured by the Indians, stood by me constantly when I was husking, with a loaded gun in his hand, in order to keep off the enemy; and thereby lost as much labor of his own as he received from me, by paying good wages.”

  After the Revolutionary War, Mary was given another opportunity to return to the white world—only this time without her oldest son, Thomas, who the Seneca leaders believed would one day make a great warrior. “The chiefs refusing to let him go was one reason for my resolving to stay,” she recalled; “but another, more powerful if possible, was that I had got a large family of Indian children that I must take with me; and that, if I should be so fortunate as to find my relatives, they would despise them, if not myself, and treat us as enemies, or, at least, with a degree of cold indifference, which I thought I could not endure.”

  Mary was rewarded for her decision to stay with an enormous tract of land around New York’s Genesee River. It was a munificent bequest, but she would find little peace there in her later years, thanks to murderous infighting among her sons. A lingering quarrel between Thomas and his half brother John came to a bloody conclusion in 1811, when John beat Thomas to death at their mother’s home while she was away. “I returned soon after, and found my son lifeless at the door, on the spot where he was killed,” she remembered. “No one can judge my feelings on seeing this mournful spectacle; and what greatly added to my distress was the fact that he had fallen by the murderous hand of his brother.” It was a terrible tragedy for any mother, but Mary had to endure it again when John killed his other brother, Jesse, in another drunken rampage. John himself was later killed by some companions. Mary blamed the booze, and reflected upon its destructive effects on her family and her community:

  To the introduction and use of that baneful article which has made such devastation in our tribes, and threatens the extinction of our people…I can with greatest propriety impute the whole of my misfortune in losing my three sons. But as I have before observed, not even the love of life will restrain an Indian from sipping the poison that he knows will destroy him. The voice of nature, the rebukes of reason, the advice of parents, the expostulations of friends, and the numerous instances of sudden death, all are insufficient to restrain an Indian who has once experienced the exhilarating and inebriating effects of spirits from seeking his grave in the bottom of a bottle.

  After a lifetime of adventure and heartbreak, Mary told her story to James Seaver in 1823. By then she was an old woman of about eighty, careworn but still lively and engaging. “When she looks up, and is engaged in conversation, her countenance is very expressive,” wrote Seaver. “But from her long residence with the Indians, she has acquired the habit of peeping from under the eyebrows, as they do, with the head inclined downward.” The book that followed was a best seller with numerous editions, and “the White Woman of the Genesee,” as Mary was called, became familiar to generations of readers. But there was more to Mary Jemison than Seaver was able to capture with his purple prose. As she later told a visitor before her death in 1833, “I did not tell them who wrote it down half of what it was.”

  6

  William Dawes: The Other Midnight Rider

  William Dawes had the misfortune of being at the right place, but with the wrong rhyme. While his fellow patriot and midnight rider, Paul Revere, was immortalized in verse by Henry Longfellow, Dawes is all but forgotten. It’s a grave injustice to a man whose efforts on that fateful April night in 1775 were every bit as valiant as Revere’s. So listen, children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of William Dawes.

  Tension between Britain and the American colonists in Massachusetts had reached a breaking point in the spring of 1775. Independent-minded rebels had repeatedly defied British authority with numerous acts of subversion like the Boston Tea Party, and now the mother country was determined to enforce some strict discipline. Colonial ringleaders John Hancock and Samuel Adams were to be arrested, and a large cache of arms and ammunition stored in the town of Concord destroyed. “Keep the measure secret until the moment of execution, it can hardly fail of success,” the Earl of Dartmouth assured the royal governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage. “Any efforts of the people unprepared to encounter with a regular force, cannot be very formidable.”

  Secrets were hard to keep in Boston, however. Word of British preparations buzzed around town throughout the day on April 18, and a network of informers within the tight-knit commun
ity kept leading citizens Paul Revere and Dr. Joseph Warren apprised of their every movement. A highly placed source among the British—some historians believe it was General Gage’s American wife—confirmed to Dr. Warren that plans were indeed underway to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were known to be in the town of Lexington, and then to destroy the weapons and ammunition stored at Concord. Armed with this information, Dr. Warren sent Revere and William Dawes, both established and reliable couriers, on an urgent mission to warn Hancock and Adams.

  Each man took a different route to Lexington to ensure that if one was intercepted by British regulars patrolling the region, the other could still relay the vital message. Dawes left town through the gate at Boston Neck, a narrow isthmus that provided the only land access to and from the mainland. He was “mounted on a slow-jogging horse,” according to his biographer Henry W. Holland, “with saddle-bags behind him, and a large flapped hat upon his head to resemble a countryman on a journey.” Accounts vary as to how Dawes actually got through the closely guarded gate. Some say he joined a group of farmers returning to the mainland from Boston; others that he knew the British sentries on duty because of his frequent travels as a tanner by trade. Whatever the case, it is said that no sooner had he passed through the gate than orders arrived to stop all movement out of town.

  Dawes made his way on his slow horse south across Boston Neck to Roxbury, and then west and north through Brookline, Brighton, Cambridge, and Menotomy (now Arlington) to Lexington—a nearly seventeen-mile journey that took about three hours. While his ride had none of the dazzle and flash of steeple lights that Revere’s did (at least none that’s known because, unlike his fellow messenger, Dawes didn’t leave a record), it was every bit as heroic. The countryside was crawling with redcoats determined to stop any alarms from reaching Lexington, and Dawes deftly avoided them to deliver his message. Although no record exists of his alerting people along the way, he almost certainly did. “I can’t imagine him riding mute,” says Bill Fowler, professor of history at Northeastern University and former director of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Still, Revere gets all the credit and, says Fowler, “poor Dawes sort of limps along.” Historian David Hackett Fischer and others say that’s because Revere was much better connected with the leaders of the towns along his route and thus better equipped to rally them. But the fact remains that both Revere and Dawes accomplished their mission, against great odds, by reaching Lexington and warning Hancock and Adams.

  After a brief rest in Lexington, Dawes and Revere set out together to warn the town of Concord about the British approach. They were joined by a third man, unheralded like Dawes, named Dr. Samuel Prescott. About halfway through their journey, during which they alerted a number of homesteads along the way, the riders were intercepted by four well-armed British Regulars. “God damn you! Stop!” one shouted. “If you go one inch further you are a dead man!” The three tried to push through the officers, but were overpowered. They were ordered off the road and directed at gunpoint to an enclosed pasture. The officers “swore if we did not turn into that pasture they would blow our brains out,” Revere later recalled. Prescott saw an opportunity for escape, however. “Put on!” he whispered to Revere, and both men spurred their horses to a gallop. Prescott turned left, jumped a low stone wall, and disappeared into the woods. He was the only rider to reach Concord that night. Revere was quickly surrounded and captured.

  Dawes escaped during the confusion and raced to a nearby farm with two officers in pursuit. Upon reaching the abandoned farmhouse, his horse was spooked and stopped abruptly. Dawes was pitched to the ground, and the horse ran off. Helpless now, he devised a clever feint. “Halloo, my boys,” he shouted into the empty house. “I’ve got two of them.” Unsure how many armed people might be inside, the British officers who had given chase rode off. Dawes then limped back to Lexington.

  With the revolutionary spark ignited, Dawes joined the army in the siege of Boston, fought at Bunker Hill, and won a commission as commissary to the Continental Army. Dawes family lore also has it that he later returned to the empty house where he had fooled the British soldiers and recovered the watch he lost in his fall. He died on February 25, 1799, at age fifty-three, and is buried at King’s Chapel in Boston. There he lies all but forgotten, a fate that might have been shared by Revere had it not been for Longfellow. The injustice of it all was captured in another, less-celebrated poem written by Helen F. Moore and published in Century Magazine in 1896:

  I am a wandering, bitter shade,

  Never of me was a hero made;

  Poets have never sung my praise,

  Nobody crowned my brow with bays;

  And if you ask me the fatal cause,

  I answer only, “My name was Dawes”

  ’TIS all very well for the children to hear

  Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere;

  But why should my name be quite forgot,

  Who rode as boldly and well, God wot?

  Why should I ask? The reason is clear—

  My name was Dawes and his Revere.

  WHEN the lights from the old North Church flashed out,

  Paul Revere was waiting about,

  But I was already on my way.

  The shadows of night fell cold and gray

  As I rode, with never a break or a pause;

  But what was the use, when my name was Dawes!

  HISTORY rings with his silvery name;

  Closed to me are the portals of fame.

  Had he been Dawes and I Revere,

  No one had heard of him, I fear.

  No one has heard of me because

  He was Revere and I was Dawes.

  7

  James T. Callender: Muckraker for the First Amendment

  The United States had barely emerged as a new nation before it was rent by what George Washington called “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.” Ideological factions clashed fiercely, often using newspapers and pamphlets as the vehicles to promote their agendas. Writers for these blatantly partisan publications savaged politicians with whom they disagreed, and few of the founding fathers—not even Washington—were spared their venomous quills. A scandalmonger by the name of James T. Callender was among the most vicious of these literary character assassins who roamed the early Republic. During his brief but colorful career, Callender relentlessly hounded the nation’s first leaders and published a number of salacious stories about them that endure to this day. In the process, he ran afoul of one of the most odious laws ever enacted by the U.S. government.

  A fugitive Scot from British sedition laws, Callender arrived in America in 1792 and soon established himself as a rabid anti-Federalist whose screeds against the party in power attracted the attention of the Republican opposition. Thomas Jefferson secretly funded and encouraged him, while others fed him the dirt that fueled his vituperative rants. Alexander Hamilton was an early target: Callender learned that in 1792 this leading Federalist had been investigated by James Monroe and others for alleged financial improprieties involving a scoundrel named James Reynolds while serving as the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. Hamilton had denied any pecuniary misdeeds, explaining to the investigators that he was actually guilty of adultery with Reynolds’s wife, Maria, and that the couple had blackmailed him.1 The money he had given Reynolds was not for any illegal speculation with public funds, as had been charged, but from his own pocket as hush money for his sexual sins. Monroe took Hamilton at his word, with reservations, and the matter was concluded.

  Five years later, however, documents from the investigation were leaked to Callender, probably by John Beckley, a former clerk of the House of Representatives who had been assigned by Monroe to copy them.2 Callender gleefully published the papers, neglecting to include Hamilton’s humiliating explanation of his dealings with Reynolds and Monroe’s note of the same. With all the hyperbole typical of his trade, Callender grossly exaggerated Hamilton’s supposed corruption and excoriated him for his abuse
of the public trust: “The funding of certificates to the extent of perhaps thirty-five millions of dollars, at eight times the price which the holders had paid for them, presents, in itself, one of the most egregious, the most impudent, the most oppressive, and the most provoking bubbles that ever burlesqued the legislative proceedings of any nation.”

  Faced with Callender’s damning charges, Hamilton did something few politicians would ever dare: He publicly confessed his affair with Maria Reynolds to save his reputation. “The charge against me is a connection with one James Reynolds for purposes of improper pecuniary speculation,” he wrote in a ninety-seven-page pamphlet. “My real crime is an amorous connection with his wife Maria, for a considerable time with his privity and connivance, if not originally brought on by a combination between the husband and wife with the design to extort money from me. This confession is not made without a blush.”

  Hamilton’s revealing pamphlet titillated the nation and absolutely thrilled Callender, who continued his assault on the founder and dismissed his tortured admission as a flimsy cover for his real crimes. “If you have not seen it, no anticipation can equal the infamy of this piece,” he wrote to Jefferson. “It is worth all that fifty of the best pens in America could have said against him.”

  Having demolished Hamilton’s reputation, or so he believed, Callender set his sights on the Federalist president John Adams—a friend of British tyranny, Republicans claimed, with kingly pretensions of his own and an enduring enmity for freedom-loving France. Why, Callender demanded to know in an editorial for the Republican organ the Aurora, was Adams withholding information about a failed U.S. diplomatic mission to France? Could it be that the president, so favorable to Britain in its war with France, had deliberately undermined it? What Callender didn’t know was that the American envoys had been insulted by French officials—identified in coded dispatches as X, Y, and Z—who had demanded significant cash bribes before they would deign to meet with the U.S. delegation. Fearing the XYZ Affair, as it came to be called, would provoke a war that the United States could ill afford to fight, Adams wanted to keep secret the dispatches that detailed the French outrages. His hand was forced, however, by a Republican-led demand from Congress that the dispatches be released. Predictably, anger over France’s affront to American pride was sharply aroused, and the cries for war were resounding. It was in this belligerent atmosphere that Callender and his Republican cohorts found themselves threatened not only by angry mobs, but by the law.