A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans

A Treasury of
Foolishly Forgotten Americans

Michael Farquhar is the author of
A Treasury of Royal Scandals, A Treasury of Great American Scandals,
and
A Treasury of Deception.
A former writer and editor at
The Washington Post
specializing in history, he is coauthor of
The Century: History as It Happened on the Front Page of the Capital's Newspaper.
His work has been featured in a number of publications, and he has appeared as a commentator on such programs as the History Channel's
Russia: Land of the Tsars
and
The French Revolution.

Introduction

1
     John Billington:
Mayflower
Murderer

2
     Mary Dyer: Quaker Martyr

3
     Anne Bonny: Pirate of the Caribbean

4
     Tom Quick: “The Indian Slayer”

5
     Mary Jemison: “The White Woman of the Genesee”

6
     William Dawes: The
Other
Midnight Rider

7
     James T. Callender: Muckraker for the First Amendment

8
     John Ledyard: The Explorer Who Dreamed of Walking the World

9
     Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: Royal American

10
     Stephen Pleasonton: The Clerk Who Saved the Constitution (and the Declaration of Independence, Too)

11
     Richard Mentor Johnson: The Veep Who Killed Tecumseh

12
     Zilpha Elaw: An Unlikely Evangelist

13
     Edwin Forrest: American Idol

14
     Rose O'Neale Greenhow: A Spy of Grande Dame Proportions

15
     Clement Vallandigham: Copperhead

16
     Mary Surratt: The Mother of Conspirators?

17
     Tunis Campbell: Pillar of Reconstruction

18
     Sarah Winnemucca: “Paiute Princess”

19
     Alexander “Boss” Shepherd: The Man Who Made Washington “Worthy of the Nation”

20
     Isaac C. Parker: “The Hanging Judge”

21
     Hetty Green: “The Witch of Wall Street”

22
     Oliver Curtis Perry: Outlaw of the East

23
     Anna Jarvis: The Mother of Mother's Day

24
     William J. Burns: “America's Sherlock Holmes”

25
     Gaston B. Means: American Scoundrel

26
     Louise Arner Boyd: The Socialite Who Conquered the Arctic Wilderness

27
     Beulah Louise Henry: “Lady Edison”

28
     Guy Gabaldon: “The Pied Piper of Saipan”

29
     Elizabeth Bentley: “Red Spy Queen”

30
     Dick Fosbury: Father of the Flop

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgments

“History is the essence of innumerable biographies,” Thomas Carlyle once wrote. However, only a relative handful ever get read, which is unfortunate because so many fascinating American lives are overlooked in favor of the nation's more familiar icons.

Almost a century before Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream, Tunis Campbell acted on a nearly identical one. For fifty years the FBI was associated entirely with J. Edgar Hoover, but there were five directors before him. And one of them, William J. Burns, was such an esteemed detective that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dubbed him “America's Sherlock Holmes.” Sitting Bull and Geronimo are universally identified as great Native American chiefs, but what about Sarah Winnemucca, a powerful Indian leader in her own right?

The murderous Pilgrim, the Quaker martyr, the socialite explorer, and all the other men and women chronicled here may not necessarily have shaped the American experience, but they undoubtedly added to its unique texture. And though the course of history would probably have continued to run unimpeded had Anna Jarvis not created Mother's Day, before she went crazy, or had Alexander “Boss” Shepherd left the nation's capital a muddy morass, somehow it would have been a little less American.

Not every passenger aboard the
Mayflower
was a God-fearing Pilgrim; one was a murderer in the making. His name was John Billington, an ornery fellow with a foul mouth, who, along with his badly behaved children, made the miserable journey across the Atlantic even more unbearable. He would go on to do far worse.

The Billington family—John, his wife Eleanor, and their two sons—were among the majority of
Mayflower
passengers known as “Strangers,” who, unlike the Separatists, or “Saints,” were not necessarily seeking religious freedom in the New World. It is unclear how they came to board the ship, but once they did they were nothing but trouble. Pilgrim leader William Bradford, who became governor of the Plymouth Colony, called them “an ill-conditioned lot…unfit for the company,” and “one of the profanest families among [the Pilgrims].” John Billington was by some accounts the ringleader of an aborted mutiny aboard the
Mayflower,
while his son Francis almost blew up the ship when he fired a musket near several kegs of powder—“a rash act,” writes scholar Albert Borowitz, “that threatened to send them to colonize the ocean floor.” Things didn't get much better when the Pilgrims reached Plymouth.

Billington was one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact, which was produced partly as a result of the shipboard rebellion. He and the other signers promised to work for “the general good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.” It became quickly apparent that he had no intention of keeping his part of the pact. As if disease and starvation weren't difficult enough during that first harsh winter of 1620–21, the Pilgrims had to contend with Billington's big mouth and bad temper. He bullied his neighbors and refused to honor a summons for the military service that was required of every able-bodied colonist. That was bad enough, but when he bad-mouthed the colony's military chief, Myles Standish, making “opprobrious speeches against him,” as Governor Bradford wrote, it was clear that the time had come for some serious attitude adjustment—Pilgrim-style. He was sentenced to be bound by his neck and heels, an excruciating ordeal that made every muscle feel like it was on fire. Suddenly, all his bluster seemed to disappear. As the ropes were applied, he humbled himself and begged for mercy, after which the sympathetic magistrates released him. Billington, however, had not learned his lesson.

In 1624 he was implicated in a scandal involving two settlers named John Oldham and John Lyford, who were expelled from the Plymouth Colony for writing seditious letters critical of its governance. Billington weaseled his way out of that mess, but his obnoxious behavior continued. He was still nasty to his neighbors, and a feud with one of them—a recent colony arrival aptly named John Newcomen—would lead to murder.

The cause of the quarrel with Newcomen remains uncertain, but on a summer day in 1630 it culminated in a nearby wood when Billington ambushed his adversary and shot him. Though grievously wounded, Newcomen lived long enough to identify his attacker, who, after spending several days in the forest, was promptly arrested. What resulted was New England's first murder trial. Billington, wrote Governor Bradford, “was found guilty of willful murder by plain and notorious evidence,” and condemned to hang. The sentence was stayed, however, because the colony's leaders were uncertain whether they had the legal authority to execute him. They consulted with John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who replied that Billington “ought to die and the land be purged from blood.” And so that September, the
Mayflower
murderer met his fate.
¹

“This, as it was the first execution among [the Pilgrims]…was a matter of great sadness unto them,” Bradford wrote. Yet for the sake of peace and quiet, Billington's demise may well have been cause for a second Thanksgiving.