The Book of Bastards (9 page)

In 1843 the recently widowed president of the United States fell in love. John Tyler had lost his first wife, the mother of his first seven children, to the results of a paralytic stroke in September of 1842.

Within a year Tyler had lost his heart all over again, this time to a woman thirty years his junior!

The new object of the president's affection was a Long Island beauty named Julia Gardiner. Often called “the Belle of Long Island,” Julia was the youngest child of New York millionaire David Gardiner. Julia was pretty, smart, vivacious in ways that only the youngest daughter of indulgent parents can be; in other words, she was spoiled rotten.

Dazzled by the fact that she was being wooed by the most powerful man in the country, Julia returned Tyler's affections, in spite of their age difference. Her parents brought her to Washington on a number of occasions in order to get her “out” in Washington society, where she charmed men and women alike everywhere she went. It was only a matter of time before she began to have gentlemen callers, and one of them was the completely besotted president.

While an age difference this wide between would-be mates was certainly nothing new to human history in 1843, it certainly was new to the office of the president. Only one widower (Martin Van Buren) before Tyler had served as president, and that president had not chased after a woman nearly young enough to be his grand-child. As a result, there was considerable talk among the capital city's smart set.

The major obstacle to this May–December romance was Julia's father, David Gardiner. Tired of just being rich, Gardiner had begun to dabble in politics, serving a term in the New York State Senate. Now he had set his sights on a position in the Federal government, and he wasn't above using his daughter to get it.

The rumors flew fast and furious in the ensuing months: Gardiner wanted to be Comptroller for the Port of New York; he wanted a cabinet post; he wanted to be a United States Senator. The sky was apparently the limit. Whatever his asking price, it was obvious that Gardiner expected Tyler to help him get it, and in exchange for his daughter's hand in marriage.

For public consumption Gardiner adopted the posture that his daughter was too young for the fifty-three-year-old president. He arranged a series of social engagements for her with “safe” escorts such as closeted gay Senator James Buchanan of Pennsylvania.

It's anyone's guess how this would have all played out had Gardiner not died in an explosion onboard a U.S. Navy ship in February 1844. The obstacle so abruptly removed, Tyler made himself available to console the distraught Julia. Within a month the two were engaged, and they eloped in May of that year.

So who was the bastard of this piece: Tyler for coveting this beautiful young girl? Or Gardiner, for his willingness to use Julia, his own flesh and blood, for his own ends? You decide.

Currency speculation in one form or another is as old as the notion of currency itself. By the mid-nineteenth century investing in the future value of foreign money was a fairly lucrative activity in every major city in the world. This was especially true of Washington, D.C. An unofficial currency exchange took place day in, day out, on the northern end of Lafayette Square, within sight of the White House.

While speculating is perfectly legal,
manipulating
the value of currency is not. And that brings us to a guy you've never heard of named Abel P. Upshur. This former Virginia judge, congressman, and secretary of the navy exploited the system while working as John Tyler's secretary of state from 1843–1844.

In 1836, American settlers in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas rebelled and won their independence from Mexico. Texas immediately petitioned to join the Union as a slave-holding state. But by 1836 the slavery debate was heating up. So Texas remained a separate nation. And since sovereign nations require money in order to operate, the Texas government invented a currency note called the “redback.”

Texas, however, lacked the gold to back its own currency at anything close to full value. The Texans tried to counter the resulting inflation by simply printing more redbacks, but this just decreased the redback's relative value as a means of trade. By the early 1840s a Texas redback was worth eight cents to an American bank.

For the forward-thinking investor, though, redbacks were anything but worthless. After all, if the United States annexed Texas and made it a new state, Texas's currency system would be discontinued. The Texans would need to adopt the United States's monetary system, and the U.S. Treasury would have to retire all those redbacks at face value. A Texas redback purchased from someone changing them in the north end of Lafayette Square in 1843 would be worth $1 in American coin and currency to a U.S.-Treasury-backed bank after annexation. The potential profit was
twenty times
the purchase price.

Now imagine that you're the U.S. Secretary of State, secretly negotiating with the Texans to hammer out a treaty. You could use that information to turn a healthy profit by quietly and gradually speculating in Texas redbacks.

Upshur got halfway there. On the morning of February 28, 1844, he and Texan ambassador to the United States Isaac Van Zandt secretly signed a treaty of annexation. If Congress ratified the treaty, his redbacks were going to be worth a fortune.

The U.S. Senate, however, had other ideas. In April 1844, the Senate voted Upshur's treaty down. For the moment at least, Upshur's supply of redbacks was worth less than the paper on which they were printed.

By that point Upshur was beyond caring about Texas, redbacks, currency speculation, or anything else, for that matter. He was killed (along with the secretary of the navy and several other VIPs) by a freak explosion during the test-firing of a new naval cannon on the afternoon of February 28, 1844. It was the very day on which he signed the treaty of annexation.

Our fifteenth president, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, was one of the most experienced and capable of nineteenth century diplomats. He was also a disaster as a president: his paralysis in the face of mounting Southern pressure to protect slavery helped lead to the Civil War, which began during his term. In a more social context, he was the only bachelor to ever occupy the White House and our first gay president.

William Rufus deVayne King was Buchanan's longtime friend. The scion of a well-to-do North Carolinian family who won election to Congress while still in his twenties, King eventually moved to Alabama, where he helped found the city of Selma. King served as a U.S. Senator for decades before retiring and taking the post of minister to France. He was elected as Franklin Pierce's vice president in 1852. He was also our first gay vice president.

Buchanan met King in the 1820s while the two served together in Congress. From that moment on they were inseparable and eventually began sharing a house. The time they spent living together raised no eyebrows. But their behavior together and apart certainly did.

No matter how discreet the two might have thought they were, their relationship was an open secret, and the cause of much coarse humor around the nation's capital.

President Jackson often referred to King as “Aunt Fancy”; a Buchanan biographer more politely noted that King was “fastidious about his appearance.” And Tennessee Congressman Aaron Brown even called Buchanan “Miss Nancy,” which was the nineteenth century's slang equivalent of calling someone a “fag” today. In one famous letter, Brown wrote about observing “Senator and Mrs. Buchanan” (e.g., King) in the midst of a quarrel that closely resembled a lover's spat.

As much as their bond shocked polite society, the two remained devoted to each other for the rest of King's life. In 1852, when Buchanan lost out to Senator Franklin Pierce for the Democratic presidential nomination, he was mollified by the selection of King as Pierce's running mate. They won the election, but King was ill with tuberculosis. A special act of Congress allowed King to be sworn in as vice president in Cuba, where his doctors had advised he go for his health; he was the only American vice president to take the oath of office outside of the country. It was too late: King died just over a month after taking office. He never returned to the United States.

How Buchanan reacted to this tragic news is, of course, unrecorded. And in retrospect the very pretense so central to the lives of both of these men, the need to keep up appearances (as much as possible in a gossipy town like Washington, D.C.)just seems sad.

Born in Nashville in 1824, William Walker trained in Philadelphia as a doctor, but seems never to have practiced medicine. Instead he traveled throughout Europe during the next two years, then moved to New Orleans to study law. In 1849, he caught gold fever and moved to San Francisco along with thousands of others. It was there that he conceived and carried out his first attempt at a “filibustering” expedition.

In 1853 Walker and a small force of men took the city of La Paz, declaring it the capital of the new “Republic of Lower California.” But when he ran out of money, supplies, and ammunition, Walker abandoned this “republic” and fled back to California one step ahead of the Mexican army. Walker next set his sights on tiny Nicaragua in Central America. In 1855 he led a well-financed, well-armed force of over three hundred men (most of them Americans) into the war-torn country.

Within a year Walker had himself “elected” president. Having seized power, his methods for holding on to it were effective and brutal. At one point he ordered one of his officers, the English-born adventurer Charles Frederick Henningsen, to sack and burn the city of Granada. Henningsen torched the place, killed many of the residents, ran off the rest, and then decamped, hotly pursued by several thousand Honduran soldiers. He supposedly left behind a sign marking the smoking ruin of the city that read “
Aquí fue Granada
” (“Here was Granada”).

By 1857 Walker had worn out his welcome. Not only had he made local enemies, he had also irritated American millionaire “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt had made his fortune in shipping. In Nicaragua his company used short rail lines and lake steamers to transport people and goods from the Gulf of Mexico, across immense Lake Nicaragua, thence to Pacific steamboats, which were ready to take travelers the rest of the way to California.

When Walker nationalized Vanderbilt's lake steamers, the “Commodore” set his agents to oust Walker and get Vanderbilt's property back. Realizing it was time to get while the getting was good, Walker surrendered to the captain of an American warship, returned to a hero's welcome in New York, and wrote a book about his exploits. Within a year he had begun hatching another scheme to return to power in Nicaragua.

This time Walker's famous sense of timing failed him. He landed in Honduras in 1860, and instantly found himself in the custody of the British navy. Rather than return Walker to the United States, the British — who controlled Honduras's neighbor British Honduras, now Belize — turned Walker over to the Honduran government as a gesture of good will. A firing squad executed the last filibuster on the site of what is now a hospital in the port city of Trujillo, on September 12, 1860. Walker was just thirty-six years old; he missed the American Civil War by a mere three months.