The Book of Bastards (5 page)

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 neutrality 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Pickering didn't do himself any favors when his Senate trial began in March 1803. As he had done so many times in his own courtroom, he failed to show up! His son came forward and pleaded to be allowed to present evidence that his father was insane and therefore not guilty (as if that would keep him from being removed from office!). The prosecution, made up of members of the House of Representatives, argued that Pickering was sane but drunk while presiding over court, an act which qualified as what the Constitution refers to as “high crimes and misdemeanors,” conduct serious enough to justify removing a federal judge from office. The proceedings went back and forth along these lines for a week, but the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

On March 12, the Senate voted along party lines to convict and remove Pickering from his position as a federal judge, the first such case in American history. Pickering descended into full-on dementia afterward and died two years later.

Born in 1741, Samuel Chase was the only son of a Maryland minister and his wife. From these humble beginnings, he grew up to be one of the foremost lawyers of his community. Chase was also an early and ardent leader of colonial tax resistance during the 1760s and 1770s. A signatory of the Declaration of Independence, he also served as first a Maryland state judge and later as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

And he was a bullying, war-profiteering bastard saddled with the nickname “Old Bacon Face” in part because of his irascible personality. Chase was even more anti-British than the most hardcore, true believer among the Sons of Liberty. Chase was elected to both the first and second Continental Congresses, and he kept himself busy twisting arms to ensure Maryland's legislature voted for liberty. He also tried to peel Britain's Canadian colonies away by luring them into the Patriot confederation.

Chase possessed a first class intellect and a fine legal mind, but he was likely the most difficult man to get along with in the Congress. He made hair shirts like John Adams seem pleasant by comparison. So while his ability and passion made him indispensable, his personality made him unpopular.

On top of that, he was a greedy bastard. He schemed to corner the bread market in the colonies during the first years of the war. When a Philadelphia newspaper broke this news in 1778, Chase resigned in disgrace from Congress.

Within a few years he was back in the thick of things, though. Appointed a Maryland judge after the Revolution, he served with such fortitude that President Washington named him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1796.

Chase's bad temper, bullying ways, and tendency to mouth off from the bench got him in fresh trouble once he took his seat on the Supreme Court. When Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic Republicans started culling their opponents from the courts, they also resolved to remove Chase from office. But in setting their sights on Chase, the Democratic Republicans chose one of the most competent jurists of the era. And Samuel Chase was determined not to be the next John Pickering.

Chase proved he was a superb lawyer in part by showing the good sense to hire other lawyers to defend him. He was acquitted and quickly proved that the Jeffersonian impeachment strategy wouldn't serve to pack their cronies into the federal courts. Even if the judges they targeted weren't good lawyers like Chase, they likely knew a couple they wouldn't be afraid to employ.

Great strategy. Still a bastard.