The Book of Bastards

by Brian Thornton

  Broderick ruled the city with an iron fist, receiving kickbacks from every officeholder in need of his political muscle to get elected. He could be vindictive, even cruel, and he had a terrible temper.

  By the mid-1850s the California Democratic Party faced a huge rift between Southern Democrats (many of whom wanted to see slavery introduced into the state) and the Free Soil Democrats. In 1857 Broderick's unchallenged leadership of the Free Soilers led to his election to the U.S. Senate, fulfilling one of his lifelong dreams. He was only thirty-six years old.

  For two years Broderick served in the Senate. He returned home in 1859 during the Congressional late summer recess and helped defeat his former friend David Terry's bid for reelection as chief justice of the State Supreme Court. They were after all political opponents: Terry was a Southerner and a pro-slavery Democrat.

  STUPID BASTARD

  One month shy of the thirtieth anniversary of his killing of Broderick, Terry assaulted an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. This justice, a former friend (as Broderick had been) of Terry's named Stephen J. Field had not only just ruled against Terry and his wife in a suit they had filed against her supposed first husband, a silver millionaire, but had jailed the two for contempt of court. So when Terry encountered Field and his U.S. Marshal bodyguard on a train trestle in Lathrop, California, on August 14, 1889, he lost his famously bad temper. Terry advanced on Field and before anyone could intervene, slapped him hard across the face. The marshal shot him, and he died on the spot.

  At the state convention in Sacramento later that year Terry made some cutting remarks regarding Broderick's character. Broderick was livid when he read Terry's speech in a newspaper, and sent off an incendiary note in reply. In no time Terry had challenged Broderick to a duel and the latter had accepted.

  These two political titans fought at Lake Merced, outside of San Francisco's city limits on September 13, 1859. Broderick's pistol discharged prematurely. Terry's shot pierced Broderick's lung. Broderick lingered for three days before dying on September 16, 1859, not forty years old.

  35

  SIMON CAMERON

  Secretary of War Profiteering (1799–1889)

  “An honest politician is one who when he is bought stays bought.”

  — Simon Cameron

  There are all kinds of bastards, but some just rise above (or, if you prefer, “sink below”) most of the others. These include, but are in no way limited to, rapists, murderers, and slave traffickers. Right there in the pit with them are people who profit by stealing from the soldiers protecting their country. People like Simon Cameron, President Lincoln's first secretary of war.

  Born poor in Pennsylvania in 1799, Cameron charmed his way into a series of lucrative political posts. He then helped found the Northern Central Railway, sold it, and started a bank. Cameron was a wealthy man by the time he turned to politics full-time in his forties. By the election year of 1860 Cameron had been a Whig, a “Know-Nothing,” a Democrat, and of course, a Republican. He had also served two separate terms in the U.S. Senate and wanted to be president.

  At the Republican National Convention in Chicago Cameron didn't have the votes to get the nomination, so he parlayed his control of a substantial number of Pennsylvania votes into a place in the cabinet of the eventual nominee, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. In return for his support Cameron was only too happy to take over the War Department. He had barely taken his oath of office when the Civil War broke out.

  Cameron served as secretary of war for a little less than a year. During those ten months Northern newspaper after Northern newspaper reported widespread graft involving contracts given for both goods and services intended to support the Union war effort. Over-aged muskets were purchased that didn't fire. Blankets were purchased, paid for, and never received. Uniforms were threadbare. Horses were sold to the government, only to be found to be blind or lame, or some combination thereof. Barrels of salt pork were purchased and when opened, found to be empty, filled with salt water, half-full, or outright spoiled. And on top of all of this, the War Department was spending millions.

  How did Cameron avoid seeming as if he were personally profiting from this national disgrace?

  Railroads. Everything the government bought and shipped to the troops in the field went via rail.

  And if it ran through Pennsylvania, because of his railroad contracts, Simon Cameron got a piece of it. Merchants and traders Cameron rewarded with such lucrative contracts all overpaid for shipping on railroads in which he'd invested, creating Cameron's “cut.”

  By December 1862, Lincoln had seen enough. He unceremoniously told Cameron that he had decided to honor Cameron's previously expressed “desire for a change of position,” and was nominating him to serve as the new ambassador to Russia. Cameron had expressed no such desire. Regardless, he was out within a month.

  Cameron was eventually censured by the House of Representatives for his part in the scandal. It could have been worse. After the House Committee on Contracts made public the number of unfit horses and faulty weapons that were sold to the War Department on Cameron's watch, the House itself passed a bill making it tantamount to treason to pull these sorts of swindles.

  Cameron didn't stay in Russia for long. He was back in the United States within a year, and by 1866 was once again in the Senate, serving a third term. He held on to his office until he had received assurances that his son Donald would succeed him. J. Donald Cameron served in the Senate for twenty years.

  Simon Cameron himself lived to be ninety years old. He died of natural causes, rich and by any measure, successful. And he never spent a day in jail for his part in profiteering from the republic's darkest hour.

  Bastard.

  36

  ULYSSES S. GRANT

  Drunk on Duty (1822–1885)

  “The vice of intemperance had not a little to do with my decision to resign.”

  — Ulysses S. Grant

  Ulysses S. Grant: master strategist who turned the tide of the American Civil War by re-writing the book on military strategy and tactics; two-term Republican president of the United States (more on that later!); bestselling author whose Civil War memoir stands up to comparisons to the work of such heavy-hitters in the field as Julius Caesar and Tacitus.

  Drunk.

  That's right: the man who would one day partner with President Abraham Lincoln to help preserve the Union was once drummed out of the same army he would later command as General-in-Chief for drunkenness. Not officially, of course. Officially he resigned his commission.

  As a young man, Grant had attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point at the behest of his successful businessman father, who worried that Grant had no ambition and felt that the security of a military career might be good for his “unfocused” son.

  Stationed in Missouri, Grant quickly met the love of his life, Julia Dent. He courted her ardently for years. The entire time he was away fighting in the Mexican War in the mid-1840s the young lovers exchanged frequent letters.

  During this time, Grant developed a reputation for having an affinity for the bottle. His appreciation for alcohol was unremarkable for the time: most soldiers in the mid-nineteenth century drank as often as they could get their hands on a supply of liquor. It's a truism that is nearly a cliché. Aside from notations about the generally unkempt manner of his uniform (one of his biographers has likened Grant's “military bearing” to that of a sack of potatoes, and in the spit-and-polish regular army, that could be the kiss of death for an officer's career), Grant's record was spotless during the Mexican War.

  BASTARD-IN-LAW

  We know for a fact that while Grant himself was personally honest, he was also a relatively guileless individual; he entrusted people of poor character with responsibilities they had no right to possess. This included his brother-in-law, a New York “businessman” named Abel Corbin who married Grant's sister Virginia. Not only did Corbin steal Grant blind by “investing” his money, he also introduced Grant to a su
ccession of swindlers bent on getting in on the action; some tagged along all the way to cabinet posts in his administration.

  After the war Grant went back to Missouri and at long last married his beloved Julia. By 1854 he had been promoted to captain (one of about fifty left in the army after the Mexican War). His new rank took him to Ft. Humboldt in California, and forced Grant to leave a very pregnant Julia behind in Missouri. His officer's salary was so low that they could not afford for her to join her husband on the West Coast. It was here that Grant — pining for his wife, worried about her health, and serving as the fort's paymaster — ran into trouble as a result of his drinking.

  Grant's commanding officer in California was a by-the-book career solider named Robert C. Buchanan. One evening Buchanan found Grant drunk on duty and offered him the chance to resign in lieu of being kicked out for his offense. Grant quit and remained in good standing, officially. In many ways it was probably a relief to him, as he never cared for garrison life anyway. He returned home to Julia and their children, and he set about being a failure at every single professional venture to which he turned his hand.

  But history was not finished with Grant. Opportunity knocked with the out-break of the Civil War in 1861. Within a month of volunteering Grant was a general.

  37

  WILLIAM MARCY TWEED

  Honest Graft and Dishonest Graft (1823–1878)

  “Everybody is talkin' these days about Tammany men growin' rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin' the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There's all the difference in the world between the two.”

  — George Washington Plunkitt, Tammany Hall machine politician, quoted in Plunkitt of Tammany Hall

  William Macy Tweed was not just any native New Yorker. He began his rise to power simply enough, serving as a volunteer fireman in 1848. But by the end of the Civil War, barely two decades later, this singular bastard and his henchmen (later known as the so-called “Tweed Ring”) virtually ran New York City through the Tammany Hall political machine.

  George Washington Plunkitt was the very prototype of the “ward heeler,” someone right out of a Damon Runyon short story, and was involved in big city machine politics. The colorful quotes from Plunkitt of Tammany Hall preserve his world perfectly:

  “Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I've made a big fortune out of the game, and I'm gettin' richer every day, but I've not gone in for dishonest graft — blackmailin' gamblers, saloonkeepers, disorderly people, etc. — and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics.

  There's an honest graft, and I'm an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin': ‘I seen my opportunities and I took 'em.’ Just let me explain by examples. My party's in power in the city, and it's goin' to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I'm tipped off, say, that they're going to lay out a new park at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before.”

  The ability of ward politicians — such as the men who ran the Democratic Party's Tammany Hall political machine in New York City — to give immediate attention to the problems of the poor in an era where social workers were unknown is arguable, but that sort of “attention” always came at a steep price. The dark underside of Tammany politics — the side that Plunkitt blithely dismissed as “dishonest graft” — still existed. And that less romantic style of political wheeling and dealing had an exemplar in Tweed, the man at the top of the Tammany power structure during much of its nineteenth century heyday.

  Tweed knew how to work the urban poor: he gave them money, employed their relatives, and bought them drinks. He never had a problem purchasing their votes, and by 1870 it seemed his power was unassailable. Tweed skimmed a healthy bit of taxpayers' money off the top of city revenues (to the tune of approximately $30 million per year). He even managed to get himself named to the board of directors for the Erie Railroad (by doing political favors for such fellow bastards as financiers Jay Gould and “Diamond Jim” Fisk).

  Tweed began to run into trouble when the New York Times ran a huge exposé on his activities in and outside of Tammany Hall. The political cartoons by muckraking journalist Thomas Nast, who made his reputation in part at the expense of Tweed's public image, especially galled the “Boss.”

  Tweed was tried on graft charges on two separate occasions, the second time fleeing to Cuba, only to be extradited and returned to serve his sentence. He died in prison in 1878, having served only two years of a six-year-long sentence.

  A fitting end for a greedy bastard of his caliber.

  “As long as I count the votes what are you going to do about it?”

  — William Marcy Tweed

  38

  JAY GOULD

  The Bastard Who Caused “Black Friday” (1836–1892)

  “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

  — Jay Gould

  Jay Gould was a financier who rose from humble origins to command a vast fortune. Personally honest, a loving husband, and father devoted to his family, Gould was also a first-rate bastard whose efforts to corner the gold market helped trigger a devastating economic depression.

  During the Civil War, the US government had issued paper money backed by no specie, just the government's assurances. Many people speculated in greenbacks, believing that the government would eventually pay the full face value in gold “double eagle” coins for these bank notes. And as always, some of the speculation was far less than legal.

  Gould and his business partner “Diamond Jim” Fisk hatched a scheme that would allow them to use this situation to corner the gold market. In order to carry this out, the two men needed someone working within the Treasury Department to tip them off about imminent buy-backs. Gould and Fisk pulled political strings to get President Ulysses S. Grant's fellow Civil War general Dan Butterfield into the plot and got him appointed assistant treasurer of the United States. In that position Butterfield would have knowledge of when the government planned a large buy-back of greenbacks and could tip off Gould and Fisk so they could drive up the price right beforehand, thereby maximizing their profit potential.

  The scheme also required access to Grant in social situations. That was where his brother-in-law Abel Corbin came in. Corbin provided that access at numerous dinner parties throughout much of early 1869. During these informal meetings, Gould and Fisk would urge the president to buy back all of the outstanding greenbacks, saying that it would make for a more sound post-war economy.

  At first, Grant agreed and ordered government buy-backs to begin. But by the late summer of 1869 he began to grow suspicious of Gould, Fisk, and Butterfield. In September of that year Grant had the government sell $4 million worth of gold on the stock market (thereby causing a glut and driving prices down) without letting Butterfield in on the secret.

  The gold market crashed as a result on September 24, 1869, the date known ever afterward as “Black Friday.” Gould and Fisk had been buying up gold and hoarding it in the weeks before the government's action, causing the price to rise dramatically. People who had bought gold at Gould and Fisk's engineered and inflated prices scrambled to dump their gold stock, and within minutes the premium paid on gold shares plummeted to a fraction of what it had been just twenty-four hours earlier. This turmoil dragged down the entire market and resulted in a devastating stock market crash.

  WHAT ABOUT THAT OTHER BASTARD?

  Whereas Gould weathered his legal troubles, his partner Big Jim Fisk didn't live long enough to be sued. In 1871 he got into a dispute with a former business partner who had recently married Fisk's mistress. The man was frustrated that he had been unsuccessful in his attempts to blackmail Fisk. So on January 6, 1872, he tracked Fisk down and shot him in the office where he'd stolen so many people's money and had
so many trysts with his killer's future wife.

  Gould and Fisk lost relatively little in the crash because they got out early enough to stave off too much of a loss. Corbin was wiped out, as were countless other investors.

  But this is not one of those stories wherein the bastards in question get off scotfree. Gould — who had already been pilloried in the press for his association with Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall — paid out millions in the lawsuits that resulted from the failure. He went on to die much poorer, merely the ninth richest man in America. Black Friday cost him, dearly.

  39

  OAKES AMES

  The “King of Spades” and the Crédit Mobilier of America Scandal (1804–1873)

  “The road must be built, and you are the man to do it. Take hold of it yourself. By building the Union Pacific, you will be the remembered man of your generation.”

  — President Abraham Lincoln to Oakes Ames, 1865

  Imagine that the government sets up a corporation to produce something important and risky to build. In order to make the project attractive to investors, the government sweetens the pot with mineral and water rights to already valuable land in return for the completion of this project. Is that how sly businessmen lose their shirts? No. That's how the first American transcontinental railroad got built.

  It's easy to picture one of the ass-hats running this “sure thing” company deciding that he was not making enough money in return for the miniscule amount of risk he was taking. The question left to answer: how does the bastard further maximize his profits?