The Book of Bastards

by Brian Thornton

  While serving as its governor, Blount found that the territory treated him well. He moved the territorial capital to Knoxville and began building himself a mansion there. Like everyone else with any money to invest in the West during this period, Blount was making a fortune off of land speculation, and the mansion he built reflected his growing wealth. Blount's popularity grew with the territory.

  When Tennessee became a state in 1796 Blount chaired its constitutional convention. The state legislature promptly elected William Blount as one of its first U.S. Senators.

  Even Blount didn't lead a truly charmed life, though. Within a year, rumors of war with either the French or the British caused land futures in the West to tumble, and Blount lost nearly his entire fortune.

  So Blount schemed with the British. He offered the use of the contacts he had made with certain Indian tribes while serving as the Southwest Territory's Indian Agent. The plan: get the Indians to rise up and help the British conquer Florida, driving the Spanish out entirely. If the plan was successful, Florida would become a British colony, with William Blount as its first (very well-paid) colonial governor. Apparently he preferred working as a governor to working as a senator.

  You can guess what happened next. Before anything could be made of the plan, a letter Blount wrote outlining it came into the possession of President John Adams.

  Adams wasted no time turning the incriminating letter over to the Senate, and Blount had another big problem. As it turns out, not only is it against the law for American citizens to operate as agents of a foreign power, stirring up a convenient war on that foreign power's behalf is also illegal.

  BASTARD BY ASSOCIATION?

  One of William Blount's political protégés was future U.S. President Andrew Jackson. In fact Blount tried to bring Jackson into his scheme to turn Florida over to the British!

  So on July 7, 1797, just four days after Adams turned over the letter in question, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Senator Blount. The Senate voted 25 to 1 (and you can just guess who cast that single “no” vote!) to expel Blount on the very next day. Surprisingly, expulsion from the Senate was pretty much the extent of Blount's punishment. He wasn't even impeached, let alone put on trial for treason. The Senate began impeachment deliberations but never completed them after having determined that all they were truly empowered to do was expel him from the Senate.

  Instead Blount went back to Tennessee, where in 1798 he ran for and won a seat in the Tennessee State Senate. Within a year he was the speaker of the Senate (maybe he actually preferred senatorial hours after all?). Just a year after that, he died of natural causes in Knoxville, never having spent a day in jail.

  12

  JAMES WILSON

  Swindler, Yazoo Land Scammer, U.S. Supreme Court Justice (1742–1798)

  “Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.”

  — James Wilson

  James Wilson was a Scots-born lawyer; a judge; a Founding Father; a signer of the Declaration of Independence; and for a decade, one of the first Supreme Court Justices. But James Wilson was also a con man, a rascal, and an out-and-out thief largely responsible for the first post-colonial land-grab scandal in American history.

  One of the new nation's first scoundrels, Wilson's list of dastardly deeds stretches back into the late colonial period. As a lawyer practicing in Philadelphia, he defended a number of loyalist landholders trying to recover property confiscated by the new Patriot government. Needless to say, he was no one's favorite. Wilson was so widely detested that a group of Pennsylvania militiamen actually fired a cannon at his home!

  Like many of his fellow Americans, Wilson constantly speculated in frontier land. And like many other bastards, when he couldn't turn a profit, he spun a tale instead. He once fraudulently petitioned Congress for reimbursement for land he had supposedly bought from Indians in the Old Northwest Territory. In reality, he hadn't paid out a nickel. But Wilson's biggest money-grab by far was the one known as the Yazoo Land Scandal.

  The Yazoo Strip was a section of the Old Southwest that bordered Georgia, the Carolinas, and Spanish Florida. Named for the Yazoo River that formed part of its western border, the strip was part of what would become Alabama and Mississippi and included ancestral lands of the Creek Indians. In the late 1790s, the Yazoo Strip was worth $10 million on the land market (equivalent to over $124.5 million today). To Wilson, though, it had even more potential.

  In 1794 the state of Georgia owned much of the land to its west, including the Yazoo Strip. Wilson convinced Governor George Matthews that a land sale would bring in money and another term for the politically ambitious Matthews. In turn the governor persuaded the Georgia legislature to sell 40 million acres of Georgia's Yazoo lands to four different private land companies for the low, low price of $500,000. In retrospect, it's not at all surprising that Wilson had ties with each company in the deal. And as it turned out, several of the Georgia state legislators involved in the passage of the bill selling the land were bribed with stock in the companies buying the land. Talk about cutting out the middleman!

  Wilson's bold move didn't go unnoticed. The details of the deal were made public and Matthews lost his bid for reelection in the aftermath. Georgia wound up repealing the bill calling for the sale and rendering the deeds to the lands in question worthless. The state then bought back much of the land that in turn had been sold by the land companies to other investors, after which Georgia ceded all of its land claims west of its current borders to the federal government.

  When some of the investors who bought their parcels from the fraudulent land companies refused to sell their properties back to either the state or federal governments, the whole thing wound up in court. It eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the land sales (aside from the initial ones to the land companies that were bribing state officials) were deemed valid. The few people who bought titles to Yazoo land and stubbornly refused to sell did get their acreage for a song. But Wilson wasn't one of them.

  He didn't really profit from even this far-ranging scheme. By the mid-1790s he owed so much money to so many people whom he had defrauded in one way or another that this serving U.S. Supreme Court Justice decided to work “on the run” as a circuit court judge (Supreme Court Justices did this until well into the nineteenth century). In Wilson's case he served continually for years, never staying in one place long enough for his creditors to catch up with him. He died broke and still running, in 1798.

  13

  JOHN ADAMS

  “His Rotundity” and the Alien & Sedition Acts (1737–1826)

  “Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.”

  — John Adams

  John Adams was a truly impressive man. A guiding light of the American Revolution and one of the intellectual forces behind the Declaration of Independence. He was the second president of the United States and founder (along with his beloved wife Abigail) of the Adams family dynasty.

  Adams was also thin-skinned, ill tempered, abrupt, given to bouts of depression and not above bullying anyone in order to get his way. And he used the law in a ham-handed attempt to bypass Constitutional rights in the name of security and power.

  After all, the American Revolution had ended barely fifteen years before Adams took office and more strife was brewing. A continent-wide war threatened to tear through Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, and the British and French were mainly to blame. During Adams's presidency, the United States struggled to maintain neutrality between its European business interests, and from 1797 to 1801 the United S attempted to trade with both countries.

  But Americans repeatedly found themselves pushed to take sides in the fray. Both of these nations seized American ships carrying cargoes for their enemies. The United States called for both sides to respect its neutrali
ty rights, but to no avail. Things got so bad that the United States rebuilt its decommissioned navy and fought an undeclared naval “Quasi-War” with France from 1797 to 1799.

  Inside the United States, pro-British and pro-French sympathies pitted the American public against itself. Many worried that a civil war would start over European discord. Adams and his Federalist Party hurried to assert control. With Adams's blessing, Congress passed four laws known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts in an early attempt to head off trouble. These laws empowered the president to deport any noncitizen who showed too much sympathy to a foreign country. They also made it tougher for foreigners to become citizens and made it a crime to publish anything derogatory about any federal employee, from the president on down.

  WHAT'S IN A (NICK) NAME?

  Adams had a love of both good food and fine clothes. Given his incipient pomposity, these traits served to set Adams up for his fair share of ridicule. His predecessor George Washington was an impressive physical specimen who at 6´4. towered over most men of his day and had been addressed as “His Excellency the President.” In comparison, Adams's short, stockier figure lent itself to him being referred to as “His Rotundity the President” both in print and behind his back.

  Adams's support of the Sedition Act was particularly ironic. The British government passed several similar laws in the 1760s, and Adams had fought them as a younger man. Both acts also directly violated the First Amendment. The crackdown on free speech was intended to stifle dissent among those who opposed the Federalists. Vice President Thomas Jefferson and his new Democratic Republican party had often been strongly, even brutally critical of Adams in the press.

  But the new laws failed to completely silence Jefferson and his followers. Instead they simply found new, less direct means of slamming Adams and the Federalists.

  In the end the move was a flat failure.

  Although Adams never actually deported anyone, many foreign citizens got the point and left the country. Adams rarely had opposition newspaper editors jailed, but in the public eye the damage was done. Many Americans viewed his actions as a dangerous precedent barring free speech. In 1800 public distrust helped make Adams a one-term president. The people elected Adams's former friend and Vice President Jefferson in his place.

  Adams left town the night before rather than attend Jefferson's inauguration. Later in life the two would rekindle their remarkable friendship, but at the time John Adams's inherent pettiness made that impossible.

  “I should be deficient in candor, were I to conceal the conviction, that [Adams] does not possess the talents adapted to the administration of Government, and that there are great and intrinsic defects in his character, which unfit him for the office of Chief Magistrate.”

  — Alexander Hamilton

  14

  THOMAS JEFFERSON

  The Slave Who Bore His Children (1743–1826)

  “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.”

  — Thomas Jefferson

  Thomas Jefferson penned some of the most famous words about equality and freedom in American history. The same man owned slaves, inherited slaves from his father and his father-in-law, and left slaves to his heirs in his will. But the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson, great American politician, philosopher, and scientist, does not end there. In keeping with established custom in eighteenth century America, Jefferson took a slave concubine and had children by her. By our modern standards, that qualifies him as something of a bastard to say the least.

  Jefferson married young, but became a young widower. His wife Martha died in her early thirties after giving birth to six children, only two of whom survived infancy. On her deathbed Martha begged Jefferson to swear that he would never remarry. He gave her his word he wouldn't. And he never did.

  But in Virginia at the time it was not uncommon for widowers to take up with slave women owned by them. In fact, Jefferson's own father-in-law had done so.

  One of the results of that union was a slave girl named Sally Hemings. When Jefferson's father-in-law died, Sally, her many siblings, and her mother all became Jefferson's property.

  Sally was three-quarters white (her mother had been half white), but because of the law at the time, children of slaves took their legal status from their mothers: if the mothers were slaves, so were the children, and they too became the property of their mother's master.

  Sally Hemings had at least six children (there were possibly more). None of the Hemings family worked as field hands on Jefferson's plantation, but none of them were ever freed during Jefferson's lifetime. He ensured that all of Sally's children were educated and taught a variety of skills; several of the children even played the violin as he did. Still others learned carpentry, spinning, and other trades that could support them once they were no longer his slaves. Does Jefferson's apparent involvement in their lives explain why he never freed Sally or any of their children during his lifetime?

  LE BATARD?

  By the time Jefferson and his family returned from France and resumed residence on his estate at Monticello, he had likely begun his affair with Sally. Much has been made of the fact that slavery was illegal while she lived in France, and she could have petitioned for her freedom and didn't. For some this is a measure of the fact that she returned Jefferson's affections. Whether she did or didn't care about Jefferson, she didn't have much in the way of options other than submitting to his advances. A female, emancipated, multiracial, foreign, ex-slave had even fewer choices in life than a female slave did in 1790s Revolutionary France.

  No. Jefferson freed Sally's children in his will, but he made no provision for Sally beyond willing her to his oldest daughter. It was up to Martha to free the mother of most of her half-siblings.

  Perhaps Jefferson couldn't bear the thought of his daughter, her family, or the public finding out about his siring these children?

  That's unlikely. Rumors about Jefferson siring the children of one of his slaves first emerged in print as early as 1802, and the whispers continued throughout his lifetime and afterward. Plus, the family resemblance between Jefferson and the children he had with Sally Hemings was remarkably strong. In the words of his own grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Sally Hemings' children resembled Jefferson “so closely that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins.”

  Sally Hemings (and her children) never had a say, never had a choice, and never had real options, when it was within Jefferson's power to grant them. Call it callous, call it ignorant, but it is what makes our third president a bastard, “Great Man” or not.

  15

  JOHN PICKERING

  JWI (Judging While Impaired) (1737–1805)

  “The enclosed papers tended to show that Judge Pickering, owing to habits of intoxication or other causes, had become a scandal to the bench, and was unfit to perform his duties.”

  — Henry Adams

  America has had a long love-hate relationship with its judiciary. This is especially true of federal judges. Their rulings often impact the average American directly. We tend to either celebrate or detest our federal judges depending on whether or not we agree with their decisions. So when judges get caught having affairs or taking bribes, the public outrage ratchets up a notch. And when judges do something bad enough, it can even cost them their places on the bench.

  IMPEACH THE BASTARDS!

  Judges are rarely forced from the bench, but it does happen. In our country's history, only fourteen federal judges have had impeachment proceedings brought against them. Of those fourteen, only seven were convicted and removed from office. Four were acquitted, and three resigned before their trial in the Senate could take place.

  Who was the first bastard on the short list of federal judges to lose his job? Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Judge John Pickering of New Hampshire.

  Pickering was a Revolutionary War hero who also helped draft New Hampshire's state constitution. Over the course of his long career in state politics he
served on the state supreme court and built a formidable reputation.

  But by the time Washington appointed Pickering to the federal bench in 1795, he had also developed problems with overusing alcohol and under-using his sanity.

  Over the course of the next eight years, Pickering showed up drunk for court numerous times. On a number of occasions he interrupted the proceedings by raving, swearing, tearing at his hair, and screaming at the top of his lungs. And this was when he showed up for court at all. His absenteeism from the bench was a more serious blow to his reputation as a jurist. But since a bastard's fate often boils down to politics, the real problem for Pickering turned out to be his party affiliation.

  Pickering was a Federalist. His party initially controlled the U.S. federal court system, and packed it with party members before Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans took power in 1801. The new majority needed ways to get more of their own people appointed. A vague Constitutional clause outlined impeachment and the Jeffersonians were happy to have even a loosely legal way to get the job done.

  Pickering made the battle easy for his opponents. By 1803, he stopped coming to court altogether, forcing his staff to request a replacement judge until he “recovered his health.” Pickering was a Federalist, at least a habitual drunk, and quite likely deranged; the Democratic Republicans used these reasons to attempt to remove a sitting federal judge who had committed no actual crime. They wanted to be able to use “odd behavior” as an excuse for ridding the courts of as many Federalist judges as possible. Pickering's conviction and removal would set that precedent.