American Connections

The Founding Fathers. Networked.

James Burke

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9780743298711
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

Using the unique approach that he has employed in his previous books, author, columnist, and television commentator James Burke shows us our connections to the fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence. Over the two hundred-plus years that separate us, these connections are often surprising and always fascinating. Burke turns the signers from historical icons into flesh-and-blood people: Some were shady financial manipulators, most were masterful political operators, a few were good human beings, and some were great men. The network that links them to us is also peopled by all sorts, from spies and assassins to lovers and adulterers, inventors and artists. The ties may be more direct for some of us than others, but we are all linked in some way to these founders of our nation. If you enjoyed Martin Sheen as the president on television's The West Wing, then you're connected to founder Josiah Bartlett. The connection from signer Bartlett to Sheen includes John Paul Jones; Judge William Cooper, father of James Fenimore; Sir Thomas Brisbane, governor of New South Wales; an incestuous astronomer; an itinerant math teacher; early inventors of television; and pioneering TV personality Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the inspiration for Ramon Estevez's screen name, Martin Sheen.

August 2, 1776

CHAPTER ONE

John Hancock

JOHN HANCOCK (MA) was thirty-nine. He was an egomaniac and nobody liked him. He signed first because he was presiding officer of the Continental Congress. You can tell from the size and flamboyance of his signature on the Declaration (biggest by far) why he was unpopular. When he left Congress to the automatic vote of thanks, none of his Massachusetts colleagues would sign it. Somebody called him “pompous, vain and self-important.”

Hancock got what he wanted because everybody owed him money. Thanks to whale oil trade, real estate, and most of all, government contracts he was a mover and shaker, so in 1785 he became seventh “President of the United States in Congress Assembled” (of the ten presidents under the Articles of Confederation). Illness caused Hancock to step aside for the eighth POTUSICA (as the Secret Service might have termed it), Nathaniel Gorham.

Gorham had spent some time on the wild side as a privateer attacking British shipping. What he lacked in public speaking he more than made up for in political smarts, even going so far (in 1786 during a brief, armed insurrection against the Massachusetts government) as to suggest the need for an American constitutional monarch to provide political stability. Gorham approached Prince Henry of Prussia with the offer. No, thanks. Others had the same idea and even major players like Monroe and Hamilton (and some say Washington himself ) sent a delegation to discuss an American royalty with the claimant to the British throne, Prince Charles Edward Stuart (aka “Bonnie Prince Charlie”).

However, long before things came to a regal pass the insurrection in Massachusetts subsided and republicanism looked as if it would survive. Besides, Prince Charlie felt obliged to decline on grounds of poor health—a euphemism for being permanently crocked and beating his wife. At this time Charlie (a legend in his own lunchtime) was living in Florence on overextended credit, playing bad cello, calling himself “Charles III of England” and being regularly visited by you-never-know aristos and various hangers-on with an eye to the main Stuart-comeback chance.

One such visitor was florid, bushy-eyebrows John Moore, ex-Glasgow doctor turned tutor and culture-vulture-tour-of-Europe companion to the umpteenth Duke of Hamilton. The duke dropped in on such eminences as Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, Emperor Frederick the Great of Prussia, and (inevitably) Voltaire. All of which went into Moore’s little notebook and ended up as a multivolume work (“A View of Society and Manners in…”) about what-was-hot-and-what-was-not in demimonde Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and France. Everything a traveling Brit wannabe had to know. The work flew off the shelves and gave Moore overnight literary cred even with such real writers as Dr. Samuel Johnson. And Johnson’s ménage à trois (some say sado-maso) lady friend Mrs. Hester Thrale.

Hester was a tiny, plump, witty Welsh twenty-five-year-old when Johnson met her. Minutes later he had moved in and was great pals with Eton-and-Oxford Mr. Thrale (with whom Hester had a platonic marriage). The lady herself (who had coarse hands but delicate writing) hosted dinner parties for Johnson and his literary cronies, made jokes in Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian, and generally enlivened the otherwise less-than-glamorous house in Deadman’s Place from which Thrale ran his brewery. Until the stroke that killed him and turned Hester into what the papers called an “amorous widow.”

The Anchor Brewery (still going strong today) boasted that it sold ale “from Russia to Sumatra” thanks to Henry Thrale’s business acumen. Which failed him only once, when he tried making beer without hops or malt and lost so much money Hester’s family had to bail him out. But he was canny enough to recognize the value of new technology when he saw it and was the first to use the new hydrometer (introduced by the Excise to measure the alcoholic strength of booze so they could tax it appropriately—initially, to pay for the war against the American rebels; and then for some other excuse).

Hydrometers floated more or less deeply in a more or less alcoholic liquid, and in 1803 the hydrometer developed by Bartholomew Sikes was designated official. A year later, after Sikes had turned up his toes, his widow found that “official” meant an order for two thousand instruments. So she made sure her daughter’s husband, Robert Bate, got the contract. Everybody lived happily ever after. With that kind of backing, Bate was able to branch out and make telescopes, barometers, spectacles, theodolites, the official Troy pound for the U.S. Mint, and anything else required in a world crazy about measurement. Including one gizmo that measured nothing. A toy, really. In 1819 Bate built the kaleidoscope for its inventor, eminent Scottish science buff David Brewster.

Brewster’s little multimedia-before-multimedia was an instant rave. And then was pirated right and left. Story of the ingenious Brewster’s life, really. At a time when there was everything still to discover, Brewster discovered. He also set up the British Association for the Advancement of Science, became an honorary something everywhere, and wrote 299 scientific papers on arcana ranging from spectroscopy to refraction to polarization to crystals to photography. And 1,240 other articles (for the general public) on God, life on other planets, philosophy, railroads, physics, and whatever else was required by the editors of the slew of mags from which Brewster tried to make a living. Alas, all he’s remembered for today is the no-profit kaleidoscope.

On which in 1817 a serious dissertation was penned. “In the memory of man, no invention…ever produced such an effect,” enthused writer and physician Mark Roget, whose feelings of inadequacy drove him to wider interests, in one case, foreshadowing Hollywood. In 1825 Roget wrote that if you saw a moving carriage wheel through a window with a vertical Venetian blind the slats didn’t stop you seeing the wheel rotate persistence of vision being what the eye does to fill the gaps in between the frames of a movie). Roget also filled other gaps. His great Thesaurus, produced in 1852, answered the scribbler’s “tip-of-the-tongue” problem with an exhaustive list of synonyms (similar expressions) useful for every occasion (event).

Similarly useful was Roget’s Library of Useful Knowledge, which included an article on optics by Henry Kater. Who started life measuring large bits of India and was best known for his amazingly accurate pendulum. Gravity affects pendulum swing, and Kater showed that a one-second swing in London required a pendulum 39.13929 inches long. Kater also asked the classic question: “If the universe is infinite then everywhere you look you should see a star. So why is much of the sky dark?”

One answer came from the pen of a man better known for his grisly tales of murder. First thriller writer, poet, critic, and drunk (it killed him) Edgar Allan Poe’s last work, “Eureka,” suggested that if the universe were infinite then the darkness was where stars would be, if they weren’t so infinitely far away that their light never reached us. This was all part of Poe’s Big Bang theory (a hundred years before the Big Bang theory). Poe’s gee-whiz imagining was described by Poe’s editor Evert Duyckinck as “a mountainous piece of absurdity.” Poe wasn’t the only insultee. It was Duyckinck who also called Melville’s Moby-Dick “intellectual chowder.”

For over thirty years Duyckinck ruled the editorial roost in New York, publishing anybody who was anybody (Hawthorne, Melville, Longfellow, Cooper, Irving, et al.) and frightening the rest. And helping to move American literature out from under Eng. Lit. In 1860 Duyckinck produced an anthology of poetry illustrated in England by the Dalziel family of engravers. Back in 1840 they’d done the first edition of Punch magazine and then in 1841 that of the Illustrated London News. The Dalziels kicked off the Victorian mania for the pictorial press and their gilt-embossed Fine Art Gift Books (the original coffee-table adornments) were deemed collectibles while the the Dalziels were still alive.

The Dalziels also reproduced the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who aimed to go back to the simplicity of art-before-Raphael with painting that was so detailed it was photographic, none more so than the work of Holman Hunt, who even dressed up in Arab costume (in his studio) to paint when he was working in Cairo. He and his fellow traveler Thomas Seddon, both devout Christians, then moved on to Palestine and were so blown away by their first view of Jerusalem on June 3, 1854, that they spent months on works about Jesus that made them both a fortune.

Seddon had arrived in Egypt ahead of Hunt and bumped into (and painted) another great cross-dresser, Richard Burton (on the way to his third Forbidden City, in disguise as an Arab sheikh). Explorer Burton (who claimed to speak forty-six languages and dialects) wrote more travel books than the Blue Guide and his Great Idea was to find the lake that was the source of the Nile. He found the wrong lake but made the front page anyway. After which, in 1861, he became consul in Fernando Po (small dot off West Africa) and then hit the big time with Santos (smaller dot, deepest Brazil).

On cabin-fever escape trips out of Santos to Rio Burton met and conversed in Arabic with Brazilian emperor Pedro II, aka Dom Pedro de Alcantara João Carlos Leopoldo Salvador Bibiano Francisco Xavier de Paula Leocadio Miguel Gabriel Rafael Gonzaga de Bragança e Borbón. A plump bookworm with a dumpy wife (and enjoying the occasional side affair), Pedro aimed to modernize Brazil. To which end he spent years elsewhere looking at police precincts, city waterworks, trains, schools, and (in 1876) the U.S. Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Where he was transfixed by Bell’s telephone (“My God! It talks!”) and spent four hours a day for two weeks looking at every exhibit with Brazilian potential. He missed the lecture by Brit surgeon and antiseptic freak Joseph Lister (of “Listerine”), who was visiting Philadelphia to publicize operating-theater use of his new carbolic antiseptic spray.

In Lister’s audience (as much transfixed by carbolic as Pedro was by telephones) sat Robert Wood Johnson, apprentice pharmacist, who realized there might be a market for a more individualized application of Lister’s idea. Within ten years Robert and his brothers were Johnson & Johnson. Within a century they were a multi-billion-dollar international company. And “Band-Aid” was in the dictionary.

By the 1990s the company was a major supporter of the new National Marrow Donor Program. In 1991, with the aim of increasing public involvement in the program, retired U.S. admiral Elmo Zumwalt established the Marrow Foundation. In 1996 the Zumwalt Community Award went to a Charlotte, North Carolina, radio talk-show host for above-and-beyond work on the bone-marrow drive.

The name of the radio host was JOHN HANCOCK.

CHAPTER TWO

Josiah Bartlett

JOSIAH BARTLETT (NH) was forty-six. A redhead, doctor, judge, and a fine figure of a man who dressed posh (ruffles, silver buckles), Bartlett threw himself into revolutionary matters by stealing Brit gunpowder, after which his militia rank was removed by the royal governor. A year later the governor was out and Bartlett was in. And on every major congressional committee.

Between doctoring (great bedside manner), soldiering (field surgeon), fathering (twelve), administrating (president, New Hampshire), having his house burned down, and losing his wife (most of which he dealt with on horseback or by guttering candle), small wonder he died worn out. But not before his Marine Committee had commissioned the American navy’s first vessel.

Captain of the good ship USS Ranger was John Paul, a sexually hyperactive Scots pirate on the run from a Caribbean murder charge and calling himself Jones. In 1778 Jones took Ranger across the Atlantic to attack Scotland. There followed much hit-and-run stuff up and down the British coastline that included the famous encounter when in response to, “Give up?” Jones did not say, “I have not yet begun to fight,” but something (in French) more like, “Not me. How about you?”

By this time Jones’s exploits (ably puffed by Jones) had made him the darling of French pro-American aristos, and their wives, most notably that of Jacques Donatien le Ray de Chaumont, who held open house for Americans in Paris. Le Ray gave Jones a bigger ship and persuaded the French king to support the American rebels (by doing so Louis XVI bankrupted France and lost his throne). Après la révolution with writing on the wall for the nobility, Le Ray’s son James hightailed it to American citizenship and ditto wife.

In his adopted land he bought large bits of New York state around Otsego (not to be confused with Oswego), became pals with the great and the good (not difficult with a family friend named Ben Franklin), and introduced the locals to French essentials such as merino wool, vines, and silkworms. Key facilitator in all this agribusiness was Judge William Cooper, Le Ray’s land agent and wrestler extraordinaire. For whom Le Ray’s business affairs were a mere bagatelle. Over the years Cooper bought more than 750,000 acres and then sold them to more than forty thousand settlers. Cooper died one of the richest men in America, leaving behind a son (Fenimore) who would become one of the country’s first major novelists by writing about his father’s lifestyle.

Judge Cooper’s sidekick had been fur trader George Croghan (obscure beginnings in Ireland), who used his Native American languages to relieve the natives of their land at knockdown prices even when he was superintendent of Indians under the colonial Brits. Croghan’s technique was remarkably modern: borrow scads of money so as to buy millions of acres, then do the absolute minimum to develop them and sell off the land in highly profitable small bits. So long as the game went your way this was a license to print money. Alas for Croghan, the game in question was the short-lived Brit plan to establish the new colony of Vandalia (see elsewhere) on the banks of the Ohio. When the plug was pulled on the scheme just before the War of Independence, in a flush of foreclosures Croghan went out with the water.

Early on, Croghan’s boss had been commander of U.K. forces in North America General Jeffrey Amherst, who had taken Canada from the French in 1760 and then hired Croghan to deal with the Native Americans. After germ-warfare attempts (giving the tribes smallpox-infected blankets) had failed, the French and Indian War followed and Amherst went home to glory he expected but didn’t get (“a man of incapacity,” it was said). After being made governor of this and that he bumbled his way up to field marshal and sir, stopping only to put down (“bungle,” it was said) the 1780 Gordon Riots in London.

Riot cheerleader Lord George Gordon was a rabid anti-Catholic who led sixty thousand Protestant rioters on an orgy of burning, looting, and prison-breaking in opposition to a new act outlawing discrimination against Catholics. Five days of turmoil saw the mob breaking into distilleries and torching Catholic chapels. Then they headed for the Bank of England. It was time for Amherst to bring in ten thousand troops, who shot and bayoneted the crowd into rapid submission.

Just before the fun and games, the sight of troops bivouacking in Hyde Park was so mind-boggling as to warrant recording by watercolor whiz Paul Sandby. Who had turned the genre into a must-have with his early pix of bucolic Scotland. Returning to London in the 1760s his career went: Royal Academy, views of Windsor Castle, meteoric rise to fame and fortune with “Select Views” of places as unfashionable as Wales. And some (like Ireland) he hadn’t even visited. No matter. Nor had the buyers.

Chief of whom was John Stuart, third earl of Bute, who also got Sandby to immortalize his new stately home, Luton Hoo House (designed by latest-rave architect Robert Adam). Bute retired to books and botany at Luton after a brief and acrimonious career in politics. With more titles and money than you could shake a coronet at,...

Table of contents

• COVER
• COLOPHON
• ALSO BY JAMES BURKE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• AUGUST 2, 1776
• FALL 1776 AND LATER
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX