A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans
PENGUIN BOOKS
A Treasury of
Foolishly Forgotten Americans
Michael Farquhar is the author of A Treasury of Royal Scandals, A Treasury of Great American Scandals, and A Treasury of Deception. A former writer and editor at The Washington Post specializing in history, he is coauthor of The Century: History as It Happened on the Front Page of the Capital’s Newspaper. His work has been featured in a number of publications, and he has appeared as a commentator on such programs as the History Channel’s Russia: Land of the Tsars and The French Revolution.
A Treasury of
Foolishly Forgotten Americans
Pirates, Skinflints, Patriots, and Other Colorful Characters Stuck in the Footnotes of History
Michael Farquhar
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Penguin Books 2008
Copyright © Michael Farquhar, 2008
All rights reserved
Frontispiece by Patterson Clark
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Farquhar, Michael.
A treasury of foolishly forgotten Americans : pirates, skinflints, patriots, and other colorful characters stuck in the footnotes of history / Michael Farquhar.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0206-7
1. United States—History—Anecdotes. 2. United States—Biography—Anecdotes.
I. Title.
E179.F29 2008
978—dc22 2007026997
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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In memory of my father,
Gerald William Farquhar
1929–2007
Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
—NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE
Contents
Introduction
1 John Billington: Mayflower Murderer
2 Mary Dyer: Quaker Martyr
3 Anne Bonny: Pirate of the Caribbean
4 Tom Quick: “The Indian Slayer”
5 Mary Jemison: “The White Woman of the Genesee”
6 William Dawes: The Other Midnight Rider
7 James T. Callender: Muckraker for the First Amendment
8 John Ledyard: The Explorer Who Dreamed of Walking the World
9 Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: Royal American
10 Stephen Pleasonton: The Clerk Who Saved the Constitution (and the Declaration of Independence, Too)
11 Richard Mentor Johnson: The Veep Who Killed Tecumseh
12 Zilpha Elaw: An Unlikely Evangelist
13 Edwin Forrest: American Idol
14 Rose O’Neale Greenhow: A Spy of Grande Dame Proportions
15 Clement Vallandigham: Copperhead
16 Mary Surratt: The Mother of Conspirators?
17 Tunis Campbell: Pillar of Reconstruction
18 Sarah Winnemucca: “Paiute Princess”
19 Alexander “Boss” Shepherd: The Man Who Made Washington “Worthy of the Nation”
20 Isaac C. Parker: “The Hanging Judge”
21 Hetty Green: “The Witch of Wall Street”
22 Oliver Curtis Perry: Outlaw of the East
23 Anna Jarvis: The Mother of Mother’s Day
24 William J. Burns: “America’s Sherlock Holmes”
25 Gaston B. Means: American Scoundrel
26 Louise Arner Boyd: The Socialite Who Conquered the Arctic Wilderness
27 Beulah Louise Henry: “Lady Edison”
28 Guy Gabaldon: “The Pied Piper of Saipan”
29 Elizabeth Bentley: “Red Spy Queen”
30 Dick Fosbury: Father of the Flop
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Introduction
“History is the essence of innumerable biographies,” Thomas Carlyle once wrote. However, only a relative handful ever get read, which is unfortunate because so many fascinating American lives are overlooked in favor of the nation’s more familiar icons.
Almost a century before Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream, Tunis Campbell acted on a nearly identical one. For fifty years the FBI was associated entirely with J. Edgar Hoover, but there were five directors before him. And one of them, William J. Burns, was such an esteemed detective that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dubbed him “America’s Sherlock Holmes.” Sitting Bull and Geronimo are universally identified as great Native American chiefs, but what about Sarah Winnemucca, a powerful Indian leader in her own right?
The murderous Pilgrim, the Quaker martyr, the socialite explorer, and all the other men and women chronicled here may not necessarily have shaped the American experience, but they undoubtedly added to its unique texture. And though the course of history would probably have continued to run unimpeded had Anna Jarvis not created Mother’s Day, before she went crazy, or had Alexander “Boss” Shepherd left the nation’s capital a muddy morass, somehow it would have been a little less American.
A Treasury of
Foolishly Forgotten Americans
1
John Billington: Mayflower Murderer
Not every passenger aboard the Mayflower was a God-fearing Pilgrim; one was a murderer in the making. His name was John Billington, an ornery fellow with a foul mouth, who, along with his badly behaved children, made the miserable journey across the Atlantic even more unbearable. He would go on to do far worse.
The Billington family—John, his wife Eleanor, and their two sons—were among the majority of Mayflower passengers known as “Strangers,” who, unlike the Separatists, or “Saints,” were not necessarily seeking religious freedom in the New World. It is unclear how they came to board the ship, but once they did they were nothing but trouble. Pilgrim leader William Bradford, who became governor of the Plymouth Colony, called them “an ill-conditioned lot…unfit for the company,” and “one of the profanest famil
ies among [the Pilgrims].” John Billington was by some accounts the ringleader of an aborted mutiny aboard the Mayflower, while his son Francis almost blew up the ship when he fired a musket near several kegs of powder—“a rash act,” writes scholar Albert Borowitz, “that threatened to send them to colonize the ocean floor.” Things didn’t get much better when the Pilgrims reached Plymouth.
Billington was one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact, which was produced partly as a result of the shipboard rebellion. He and the other signers promised to work for “the general good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.” It became quickly apparent that he had no intention of keeping his part of the pact. As if disease and starvation weren’t difficult enough during that first harsh winter of 1620–21, the Pilgrims had to contend with Billington’s big mouth and bad temper. He bullied his neighbors and refused to honor a summons for the military service that was required of every able-bodied colonist. That was bad enough, but when he bad-mouthed the colony’s military chief, Myles Standish, making “opprobrious speeches against him,” as Governor Bradford wrote, it was clear that the time had come for some serious attitude adjustment—Pilgrim-style. He was sentenced to be bound by his neck and heels, an excruciating ordeal that made every muscle feel like it was on fire. Suddenly, all his bluster seemed to disappear. As the ropes were applied, he humbled himself and begged for mercy, after which the sympathetic magistrates released him. Billington, however, had not learned his lesson.
In 1624 he was implicated in a scandal involving two settlers named John Oldham and John Lyford, who were expelled from the Plymouth Colony for writing seditious letters critical of its governance. Billington weaseled his way out of that mess, but his obnoxious behavior continued. He was still nasty to his neighbors, and a feud with one of them—a recent colony arrival aptly named John Newcomen—would lead to murder.
The cause of the quarrel with Newcomen remains uncertain, but on a summer day in 1630 it culminated in a nearby wood when Billington ambushed his adversary and shot him. Though grievously wounded, Newcomen lived long enough to identify his attacker, who, after spending several days in the forest, was promptly arrested. What resulted was New England’s first murder trial. Billington, wrote Governor Bradford, “was found guilty of willful murder by plain and notorious evidence,” and condemned to hang. The sentence was stayed, however, because the colony’s leaders were uncertain whether they had the legal authority to execute him. They consulted with John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who replied that Billington “ought to die and the land be purged from blood.” And so that September, the Mayflower murderer met his fate.1
“This, as it was the first execution among [the Pilgrims]…was a matter of great sadness unto them,” Bradford wrote. Yet for the sake of peace and quiet, Billington’s demise may well have been cause for a second Thanksgiving.
2
Mary Dyer: Quaker Martyr
It was a cruel lesson in conformity—or a cruel joke, had the theocratic Puritans of Massachusetts been feeling the least bit frisky. Mary Dyer and two of her fellow Quakers were led to the elm tree on Boston Common, from which they had been condemned to hang. Each was fitted with a noose, and, as Mary watched, Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson were dropped to their deaths. Then it was her turn. She ascended the ladder, and the rope around her neck was looped over the tree branch. Just then, however, came word of a reprieve. The Puritans had planned it all along.
The Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, as they were commonly called, faced a hostile reception from their fellow Christians when they first came to Massachusetts in 1656. Whipping and mutilation; fines, prison, banishment, and even death by hanging were the instruments of persecution used against the pacifist sect that—along with so-called witches—the ruling Puritans found so threatening to their established order. Quakers were denounced as “open and capitall blasphemers, open seducers from the glorious Trinity,…and from the Holy Scriptures as the rule of life, open ennemyes of government itself as established in the hands of any but men of theire owne principles,…and malignant and assiduous promoters of doctrines directly tending to subvert both our churches and state.” All this because the Quakers dared to believe that it was the Holy Spirit who would lead them to righteousness, not the clerical authority that formed the basis of the Puritan power structure. Mary Dyer was determined to bear witness against this state of extreme intolerance, even if she had to lay down her life.
Though her impact was profound, only the barest sketch of her life survives. She was described by the Quaker chronicler George Bishop as “a Comely Grave Woman, and of Goodly Personage, and one of good Report, having a Husband of an Estate, fearing the Lord, and a Mother of Children.” Mary and her husband, William, had come to the Massachusetts Bay Colony from England in 1635 seeking religious tolerance. Little did they know that such freedom of belief was reserved only for the Puritans who ran the place.
Even before she joined the Society of Friends, Mary offended the Massachusetts authorities because of her close association with Anne Hutchinson—“the instrument of Satan,” as Governor John Winthrop called her—who was banished from Massachusetts for having dared challenge Puritan orthodoxy and who went on to cofound the colony of Rhode Island. Hutchinson stressed the individual’s intuition as a means for reaching God rather than the observance of institutionalized beliefs and the precepts of ministers.1 Her approach appealed to Mary and closely resembled the Quaker tenets she would later adopt. As a result, the two women formed an enduring bond.
During the course of their friendship, Hutchinson, a midwife, helped deliver Mary’s stillborn baby—a girl with severe defects—then secretly buried the child to avoid the superstition and controversy that would have been aroused at a time when even the slightest abnormality might be considered the mark of the devil. Mary, in turn, stood by Anne’s side during her heresy trials, and eventually followed her to exile in Rhode Island.
The relationship between the two women prompted Governor Winthrop, once an admirer of Mary’s, to condemn her as a woman “notoriously infected with Mrs. Hutchinson’s errors, and very censorious and troublesome (she being of a very proud spirit, and much addicted to revelations).” That, he was convinced, was what caused Mary to deliver the “monster” he never actually saw but vividly described in his journal:
It was so Monstrous and Mis-shapen as the like that scarce been heard of. It had no Head but a Face, which stood so low upon the Breast, as the Ears, which were like an Ape’s, grew upon the Shoulders.
The Eyes stood far out, so did the Mouth. The Nose was hooking upward. The Breast and back was full of sharp prickles, like a Thornback [an ocean dweller with thorny spines]. The Navel and all the Belly with the distinction of the Sex were where the lower part of the Back and Hips should have been, and those back parts were on the side the Face stood.
The Arms and Hands, with the Thighs and Legs, were as other Children’s, but instead of Toes it had upon each Foot Three Claws, with Talons like a young Fowl.
Upon the Back above the Belly it had two great Holes, like Mouths, and in each of them stuck out a piece of Flesh.
It had no Forehead, but in the place thereof, above the Eyes, Four Horns, whereof two were above an Inch long, hard and sharp, the other two were somewhat shorter.
The Dyers were counted among Rhode Island’s leading citizens after following Anne Hutchinson and her family into exile there in 1638. William held a number of high offices and was, in fact, one of the signers of the Portsmouth Compact that established the new colony. In 1652 Mary accompanied him on business to England, where she converted to the Quaker doctrines recently established by George Fox. Five years later, when she returned to Boston en route to her home in Rhode Island, she was promptly arrested. The first Quakers had arrived in Massachusetts the year before, and since that time the Puritans, under Governor John Endecott, had enacted harsh measures against them. Mary was only released from prison when
her husband, who had not converted, promised on pain of great penalty to usher her out of the colony and not allow anyone to speak to her along the way.
She was not home for long before she ventured back to Massachusetts in 1659 to visit Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson, two fellow Rhode Island Quakers who had been imprisoned for having entered the colony to bear witness against the persecuting spirit that existed there. Mary was arrested as well. That September she and the others were brought before the Court of Assistants and banished from Massachusetts. Failure to leave carried an automatic death sentence. Mary did return to Rhode Island, briefly, but Stephenson and Robinson remained in Massachusetts “to try the bloody laws unto death.” Mary soon rejoined them, resulting in the farce that was played out on Boston Common. It was merely a dress rehearsal for what was to come.
If the Puritans believed they had frightened Mary Dyer into submission with the mock execution, they underestimated her religious zeal, which rivaled their own. She was every bit as willing to die for her faith as they were to kill for theirs. “My life is not accepted,” she wrote to the authorities after her reprieve, “neither availeth me, in comparison with the lives and liberty of the Truth and Servants of the living God, for which in the Bowels of Love and Meekness I sought you; yet nevertheless with wicked Hands have you put two of them to Death, which makes me to feel that the Mercies of the Wicked is cruelty; I rather chuse to Dye than to live, as from you, as Guilty of their Innocent Blood.”