The Book of Bastards (4 page)

History is rife with examples of intelligent, able government servants brought low by scandals in their private lives. In the case of Alexander Hamilton, a brief scandal in his personal life likely cost him the presidency.

By the age of twenty Hamilton was serving as General George Washington's aide de camp with the rank of colonel in the Continental Army. By the age of thirty he was helping found New York's first bank. He was one of the driving personalities behind the Constitutional Convention, and served as America's first secretary of the treasury, both before he turned thirty-five. The “bastard from Nevis” was a classic overachiever.

Like most overachievers, Hamilton was constantly courting favorable attention from those around him. This was particularly true where attractive women were concerned. Happily married with four children, Hamilton was thirty-six and the second-most powerful man in the country when he first encountered a prostitute named Maria Reynolds in 1791.

Married to a con man and pimp named James Reynolds, Reynolds sought out Hamilton at his Philadelphia home with quite a story. She had contacted Hamilton, she said, because he was a fellow New Yorker who might assist her. Maria said she was in desperate straits after her louse of a husband abandoned her.

Because she was a
young
,
beautiful
fellow New Yorker, Hamilton listened. He agreed to help and sent her back to her boarding house, having agreed to help her. Later that same day he took her some money. In his own words, “Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary compensation would be acceptable.” Luckily for us, Hamilton wrote an extensive account of his trysts with this young woman in a remarkable pamphlet with a longwinded title; today it's known widely as the “Reynolds Pamphlet.”

For the next year Hamilton carried on with Maria Reynolds. Her husband likely had a hand in planning the whole thing and quickly began blackmailing Hamilton. It was only a matter of time before the whole thing came out.

When James Reynolds got caught in an unrelated swindle, he offered to give up a much bigger criminal if spared jail time. Of course, Hamilton was Reynolds's get-out-of-jail-free card. The resulting scandal quickly came to the attention of Democratic Republican Party boss (and future president) James Monroe. Monroe was a political rival of Hamilton's, so he approached Hamilton about his affair. Hamilton admitted it all while flatly denying any professional or political wrongdoing.

Monroe believed him, agreed not to make the matter public, and suggested Hamilton end things.

Hamilton did so. This was in 1792. Within a year Maria Reynolds had successfully sued for divorce from her husband; James Reynolds subsequently disappears from history. Hamilton resigned from Washington's government in 1795, and resumed his law practice in New York City.

Hamilton's publication of the Reynolds Pamphlet was his final attempt to “clear the air” on his affair. It blew up in his face. He never held political office again and died in an 1804 duel — that had nothing to do with the Reynolds affair — with Maria Reynolds's divorce lawyer (and fellow bastard) Aaron Burr.

John Rutledge sacrificed much for his country during its infancy. He was a Revolutionary War hero; the scion of a distinguished South Carolina family; a distinguished judge; a Founding Father; and one of the framers of the United States Constitution. Today, however, we're not likely to remember him for his contributions. Rather he's most likely to be remembered because he was kicked off the U.S. Supreme Court for being crazy.

Rutledge was a successful lawyer when the American Revolution broke out. He was so highly esteemed in his native South Carolina that he served as its “president” under an interim constitution and then as its first governor once a more permanent state constitution was in place. Rutledge even led the resistance against the British invasion in 1780. He helped oversee the defense of Charleston Harbor and organized the city's evacuation once it fell into British hands. British soldiers destroyed much of Rutledge's property during the resulting occupation; he was never fully compensated for that loss.

Rutledge's political successes and personal losses continued to pile up even after the Revolution ended. He signed the U.S. Constitution and served as chief justice of the South Carolina Court of Common Pleas and Sessions. But during the ensuing years Rutledge attempted unsuccessfully to recoup the financial losses he'd suffered during the Revolution. In 1792 his wife died. The blow to Rutledge, combined with the strain of trying to right his family's finances, pushed him to the brink emotionally. Clearly suffering from what we recognize today as clinical depression, Rutledge's behavior became by turns manic and morose.

In spite of the whispers about Rutledge's increasingly erratic behavior, he still enjoyed a formidable reputation as one of the country's leading jurists. President Washington selected Rutledge to succeed John Jay as chief justice when Jay was elected governor of New York in 1795. Because the Senate was in recess as the change was made, they were denied the opportunity to assess the validity of rumors about Rutledge's mental state before he was confirmed. Their decision would have to wait until the Senate reconvened. Rutledge took the oath of office as chief justice on July 1, 1795, rumors of his stability be damned.

Rutledge's appointment to the Supreme Court had an immediate and unforgettable impact. Before leaving the Supreme Court, John Jay had negotiated a treaty with the British as a follow-up to the one that ended the American Revolution in 1783. The “Jay Treaty” ignored issues that the Southern states considered delicate and vital. Many statesmen expressed their dissent with the terms of the treaty, but Rutledge went nuts over it.

In what one historian later famously called “an unfortunate display of oratorical excess,” Rutledge brutally condemned the treaty in a speech in Charleston soon after his appointment. At one point he even said “that he had rather the President should die than sign that puerile instrument.” Later in the same speech Rutledge made it clear that he “preferred war to adoption of it.” He gave his critics all of the ammunition they needed to add to Rutledge's growing list of faults. Rampant speculation that Rutledge had been drunk when he made the speech began soon afterwards, making public the fact that he was often “in his cups.”

Rutledge's speech rocked the boat so badly that it wrecked his chances of Senate confirmation. No one in their right mind would approve of a chief justice who ranted so carelessly, much less one that did it drunk. On December 15, the Senate voted to reject Rutledge's appointment.

A full-blown nervous breakdown and a January suicide attempt by drowning followed. Rutledge was never the same after the Senate rejected his nomination. He died in 1800, a thoroughly depressed and broken man. He is the only chief justice of the United States to be removed from office for any reason.

Did you know that one of the signers of the United States Constitution was actually the first United States Senator to be expelled from the Senate? It's true! The name of the rogue who won this dubious honor for even more dubious behavior? William Blount.

Blount was born in 1749 and raised in North Carolina. A trained lawyer, he served as a paymaster for various units of the state militia and the Continental Army. He never saw combat, but he earned the status (and the paycheck) of an officer.

Blount went on to represent North Carolina at the Constitutional Convention from 1787 to 1788. He was one of three delegates from North Carolina to sign the completed document. Before the ink was dry on the Constitution Blount had pulled up stakes and quit North Carolina for Tennessee. In 1790 President Washington appointed him governor of the new “Southwest Territory.” The new job gave him control of a sparsely settled, booming region that included parts of what are now the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi.

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.

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.

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.