Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (83 page)

Kidd, who was joined on ship by his wife and family, responded with great relief to the news that the governor would take up his cause; and he guessed aloud that the East India Company must have heard of acts of piracy committed by Captain Robert Culliford, using the mutinied members of Kidd’s former crew. But, on July 1, 1699, when Kidd and his few remaining crew members sailed into Boston Harbor, Governor Coote promptly had them arrested.

England dispatched a Navy ship to ferry Kidd back to justice. The House of Commons sniffed a scandal and demanded that Kidd not be tried until it was back in session. Unfortunately for Kidd, that meant spending a year in Newgate Prison.

On March 6, 1701, the House of Commons began to examine Kidd’s papers. Included among them, as clearly stated in the Parliament papers, were Two French Passes from the ships Kidd had captured. Nonetheless, Kidd was ordered to stand trial in Admiralty Court—and it was specifically stated that his papers should be delivered there for his trial. The court then stunned Kidd by charging him not with piracy but with the murder of William Moore, the ship’s gunner.

Testimony from paid informants painted the following picture of the crime. While the ship was anchored off the coast of Africa, after more than a year without taking a single prize, Kidd called Moore a “lousy dog.” Moore replied: “If I be so, you have made me one.” Kidd, in a rage, swung an iron-hooped bucket, which caught Moore flush in the temple. Moore died the next day.

Lightning bolts are only about two inches wide.

Kidd claimed that he never meant to kill Moore, and that threat of mutiny had been strong at the time. Testifying for the Crown were two of Kidd’s crew who had mutinied, signed up with Culliford, and gone out on later pirate voyages; they were offered pardons in exchange for turning Crown’s evidence.

After one especially absurd statement, Kidd complained: “It signifies nothing to ask any questions. These rogues will swear to anything.” Then later, he asked: “Have you not been promised your life to swear away mine?”

The judge intervened: “He is not bound to answer that question. He is very fit to be made as evidence for the Crown.”

It took the jury an hour to bring in a guilty verdict.

As for the piracy charges, the judge, Lord Chief Baron, shaped the trial so that it all hinged on whether or not Captain Kidd received French passes from the captured ships, which apparently never found their way to the Admiralty Court. The lord chief summed up:

And as to the French passes there is nothing of that appears by any proof; and for aught I can see, none saw them but himself, if there ever were any. “Four respected British officers testified to Kidd’s valor during the French war in the Caribbean and one noted that Kidd had fought off a mutiny to prevent his ship from going ‘a-pirating.’ ”

But Kidd was convicted of piracy. When sentenced to death, he told the court: “My lord, it is a very hard sentence. For my part, I am the innocentest person of them all, only I have been sworn against by perjured persons.”

In prison, Kidd refused to confess to the chaplain and refused repeated requests to cast blame on the ministers that backed his mission. (Perhaps he was still hoping for a pardon.) On May 24, 1701, Captain William Kidd was brought to Execution Dock at Wapping. The noose about his neck, he kicked out unto eternity and the rope broke. Kidd would have to be re-hoisted up the ladder and turned off a second time. In the little waiting period, he told the chaplain at the gallows that his greatest sorrow was leaving his wife and children in New York without getting a chance to say good-bye.

Royal gossip: England’s Queen Elizabeth “does not like the smell of hamburgers cooking.”

The next day in Parliament, Lord Chancellor Somers admitted he had had a secret share in Kidd’s voyage but claimed there was nothing illegal in that. In fact, he pointed out that “owners of the said ship had lost their expenses and had not received any benefit from the grant.”

The East India Company soon after reported to the great mogul of India that the “evil pirate” Captain Kidd had been hanged. Britain’s inroads in India eventually led to conquering the entire subcontinent.

Robert Culliford, the pirate captain of the
Moca Frigate,
applied for pardon and, with a lawyer at his side, was granted amnesty by the Admiralty Court.

Kidd’s hard-earned estate was forfeited after his hanging, taken from his wife and children. Queen Anne used the money to found the Greenwich Hospital.

The British Admiralty dangled Captain Kidd’s dead body— encased in pine resin and bound by leather straps—for years from a specially constructed gallows over the Thames River to serve as a warning to other pirates.

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In 1 survey asking kids “Who’s the most important person in the world?”, God came in 19th.

Pop quiz: What does the U.S. Constitution say about political parties? Answer: Nothing—there were no political parties immediately after the American Revolution, and the Founding Fathers hoped there never would be. So how did the political parties come to be? Here’s how.

For all the diversity of opinion among the Founding Fathers in the 1770s, there was one thing that virtually everyone agreed upon: political parties were a
very
bad idea.

In his farewell address as president, George Washington referred to political parties as “the worst enemy” of democratic governments, “potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will… subvert the power of the people.” Alexander Hamilton equated political parties with “ambition, avarice, and personal animosity.” And Thomas Jefferson could hardly agree more: “If I could go to heaven but with a party,” he wrote, “I would not go there at all.”

The Founding Fathers’ abhorrence of political parties was in response to the partisan politics that characterized England’s House of Commons. The Commons was supposed to serve as a check on the power of the monarch, but successive kings had been able to use their vast wealth, power, and control of public offices to create a party of royalists. Thus, it had been reduced to members fighting among themselves instead of working together to advance the common good.

This was what the Founding Fathers were trying to avoid in the United States: warring factions that would pursue selfish interests at the expense of the nation.

But what exactly
was
the national interest? And if the Founding Fathers couldn’t agree on what the national interest was, who among them got to decide? These fundamental questions caused the first factions to form in American political life.

Grover Cleveland got more popular votes in the 1888 presidential election, which he lost, than he got in the 1884 presidential election…which he won.

Bringing the original 13 colonies together to form the United States had not been easy. The Founding Fathers drafted the first U.S. Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, in 1777, but it was flawed. The Americans had just won independence from one central government—England—and they were reluctant to surrender the power of the individual states to a new central government, so they intentionally made that government weak.

But it soon became obvious that the federal government established by the Articles of Confederation was too weak to be effective at all. The most glaring problem was that it had no power to tax the states, which meant that it had no means of raising money to pay for an army to protect its territories from encroachment by Britain and Spain. In 1787 a constitutional convention was held in Philadelphia to draw up an entirely new document.

It was during the debates over the creation and ratification of the new constitution that some of the first and most significant political divisions in American history began to emerge. Those who supported the idea of strengthening the federal government by weakening the states were known as “Federalists,” and those who opposed the new constitution became known as the “Anti-Federalists.”

The Federalists won the first round: 9 of the 13 states ratified the U.S. Constitution, and Congress set March 4, 1789 as the date it would go into effect. Elections for Congress and the presidency were held in late 1788. George Washington ran unopposed and was elected president.

Washington saw the presidency as an office aloof from partisan divisions and hoped his administration would govern the same way. But by 1792, Washington’s cabinet had split into factions over the financial policies of Alexander Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury.

Perhaps because he was born in the British West Indies and thus did not identify strongly with the interests of any particular state, Hamilton was the foremost Federalist of his age. He strongly believed in using the power of the federal government to develop the American economy. In 1790 he proposed having the government assume the remaining unpaid Revolutionary War debts of the states and the Continental Congress. This would help establish the creditworthiness of the new nation, albeit by enriching the speculators who bought up the war debt when most people thought it would never be repaid. Hamilton’s plan also meant that states that had already paid off their war debt would now be asked to help pay off the debts of states that hadn’t, which added to the controversy.

Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson supported the new Constitution but had Anti-Federalist leanings. He grudgingly agreed to support Hamilton’s plan, on one condition: Hamilton had to support Jefferson’s plan to locate the new capital city on the banks of the Potomac River. Hamilton agreed.

Hamilton got his debt plan, and Jefferson got Washington, D.C. (Jefferson later regretted the deal, calling it one of the greatest mistakes of his life.)

Then in December 1790, Hamilton proposed having Congress charter a Bank of the United States as a means to regulate U.S. currency. This time Jefferson thought Hamilton had gone too far. He vehemently opposed the idea, arguing that a national bank would benefit the commercial North more than the agricultural South (Jefferson was a Southerner), and would further enrich the wealthy while doing little to help common people.

Hamilton’s financial policies, Jefferson said, were intended to create “an influence of his [Treasury] department over the members of the legislature,” creating a “corrupt squadron” of congressmen and senators who would work “to get rid of the limitations imposed by the Constitution [and] prepare the way for a change, from the present republican form of government, to that of a monarchy, of which the English constitution is to be a model.”

Columbus traveled at an average speed of 2.8 mph on his first voyage across the sea.

Like Jefferson, Hamilton deplored political parties. But he and his supporters were also adamant about chartering a national bank and strengthening the powers of the Federal government. Faced with the determined opposition of Jefferson and his allies, they began to organize what became known as the Federalist Party. Jefferson also began to organize. In May 1791, he and fellow

Virginian James Madison made a trip to New York to meet with State Chancellor Robert Livingston, New York governor George Clinton, and U.S. Senator Aaron Burr.

“The meetings among the New York and Virginia leaders, however informal, were among the most fateful in American history,” A. James Reichley writes in
The Life of the Parties.
“The first links were formed in an alliance that was to last, in one form or another, for almost 150 years and that was to be a major shaping force in national politics from the administration of Jefferson to that of Franklin Roosevelt.”