A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (6 page)

(and the Declaration of Independence, Too)

The Founding Fathers are revered for having created two of history's most enlightened testaments: the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. But no one seems to remember poor Stephen Pleasonton, who rescued the precious documents from almost certain destruction.

The sweltering languor of August in Washington gave way to a spreading panic in 1814. It was two years into America's second war with Britain, and the enemy was marching ever closer to the heart of her former colonies. Local residents, having heard of the terrible destruction already inflicted by the British on a number of towns along the Chesapeake Bay, were eager to escape the coming onslaught. The dusty roads leading out of the capital were filling with citizens carting out their most valued possessions, while the few government workers not serving in the local militia struggled at the same time to save what they could of the young Republic's most vital records and irreplaceable treasures.

It was in this atmosphere of escalating fear and tension that Pleasonton, a State Department clerk, went to work saving the Declaration and the Constitution from destruction. The War of 1812 was essentially a second declaration of independence, this time from British interference in U.S. trade and sovereignty, and Pleasonton ensured that these unique parchments of American principle would not become spoils of war—even if the nation's capital did. He was acting on instructions from his boss, Secretary of State James Monroe, who was out scouting British positions. Observing the enemy's advances and fearful of what lay ahead, Monroe sent a courier back to the department asking that someone attend to the safety of the historic books and papers kept there.

The task fell to Pleasonton. After purchasing quantities of coarse, durable linen, the clerk ordered the material made into book bags. He then gently packed the scrolled documents and prepared to haul them to safety. Before leaving the State Department, however, Pleasonton encountered Secretary of War John Armstrong, an officious character who had been stubbornly insisting for weeks that the British posed no threat to the capital. Just a month earlier, in fact, Armstrong had berated William Winder, the head of Washington's militia, for expressing concerns over enemy reinforcements sailing up the Chesapeake Bay.

“By God,” Armstrong bellowed, “they would not come with such a fleet without meaning to strike somewhere. But they will not come here! What the devil will they do here? No! No! Baltimore is the place, sir. That is of so much more consequence.”

The secretary of war had apparently not changed his opinion when he came across Pleasonton going about his task; he rebuked the clerk for being unnecessarily alarmed about the threat to the capital. “He did not think the British were serious in their intentions of coming to Washington,” Pleasonton later wrote to Winder. “I replied that we were under a different belief, and let their intentions be what they might, it was the part of prudence to preserve the valuable papers of the Revolutionary Government.”

After taking leave of Armstrong, Pleasonton ordered all the valuable papers he had collected sent two miles up the Potomac River to an abandoned gristmill on the banks of Virginia. But he was still uneasy. The mill was just across the river from Henry Foxall's Foundry, a munitions factory that had been supplying the nation's cannons and other heavy armaments throughout the War of 1812. If the British did attack Washington, Pleasonton reasoned, surely they would target the foundry that was less than a mile away from Georgetown. It would be only a matter of loose lips or deliberate treachery for the British to then discover the priceless hoard hidden at the mill. Determined to avoid this possibility, Pleasonton later reloaded the cargo onto several carts and took it farther inland, to Leesburg, Virginia. There the linen bags were locked in an empty house, the keys for which were given to the town sheriff. “Being fatigued with the ride, and securing the papers,” Pleasonton wrote, “I retired early to bed.”

Washington burned as he slept.

Earlier on that day of August 24, British forces had routed the Americans at the Battle of Bladensburg just outside Washington, scattering the city's defenders with a blizzard of heavy artillery and panic-inducing Congreve rockets. When they stormed the capital that same evening, the invaders found “the metropolis of our country abandoned to its horrible fate,” as navy clerk Mordecai Booth later wrote. The navy yard was already in flames, preemptively torched by U.S. officials who did not want its rich supplies to fall into enemy hands. With a veneer of civility that barely concealed their relish in laying waste to the American capital, the British assured those few residents remaining in the city that private property would be respected. Public buildings, on the other hand, were most assuredly to be destroyed. They started with the Capitol.

The magnificent structure rising high above the city still in its infancy was the pride of the new Republic. Enormous care and expense had been lavished on its design, construction, and artistic detailing—from the ancient Virginia freestone hauled in from an island on Aquia Creek to the crimson silk curtains, fluted Corinthian columns, and the fine marble statue of Liberty sitting on a pedestal in the House chamber. Now a great fire roared through both wings of the building, consuming not only the House and Senate chambers but also the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court, which were then housed at the Capitol. It was, Mordecai Booth wrote, a sight “so repugnant to my feelings, so dishonorable, so degrading to the American character, and at the same time so awful.”

With the U.S. Capitol now an inferno lighting up the night sky over Washington, the British marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the President's House. They hoped to capture President Madison, but found the mansion empty. A table was still set for the evening, evidence of how quickly the building had been abandoned, and food and drink were abundant. The vandals gorged themselves. “Never was nectar more grateful to the palates of the gods than the crystal goblets of Madeira and water I quaffed off at Mr. Madison's expense,” Captain James Scott, a British officer, wrote in his memoir. After eating and drinking their fill, the soldiers ransacked the exquisitely appointed home, snatching souvenirs and setting small blazes. Soon the entire structure was engulfed, joined later by the Treasury Building next door. With all the fires that had been set, the eerie orange and red glow of the capital's skyline could be seen as far away as Baltimore. “You never saw a drawing room so brilliantly lighted as the whole city was that night,” one witness wrote. “Few thought of going to bed—they spent the night in gazing on the fires and lamenting the disgrace of the city.”

The destructive fury of the invaders had not been sated by the next morning, even as the city's finest buildings lay in smoldering ruin. The pillage continued throughout the day. Though Georgetown and Foxall's Foundry were not attacked as Stephen Pleasonton had feared, the State Department from where he had rescued the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution was put to the torch, along with the War Department that adjoined it on the west side of the President's House. As the British rampage continued, American onlookers seethed. “If General Washington had been alive, you would not have gotten into this city so easily,” one shouted at Admiral George Cockburn, who led the invasion. “No, sir,” Cockburn replied haughtily. “If General Washington had been president, we should never have thought of coming here.”

Twenty-four hours after storming the city, Cockburn and his army marched out. The goal of humiliating the upstart Americans by destroying their capital had been achieved. Returning residents were then confronted with the wreckage of their city. “I cannot tell you what I felt on re-entering it,” First Lady Dolley Madison wrote to a friend. “Such destruction—such confusion.” Richard Rush, a friend of Madison's, called it “the most magnificent and melancholy ruin you ever beheld.”

Many in Congress argued that the cost of rebuilding would be too great and that the capital should be moved back to Philadelphia. Ultimately, though, the battered and humbled city prevailed, and it was to there that the great documents Stephen Pleasonton had saved were returned.

The State Department clerk's mission had been heroic, but his name and deeds were lost in obscurity for almost two centuries until historian Anthony Pitch stumbled upon them in a little-read scholarly journal from 1907 while researching his book
The Burning of Washington: The British Invasion of 1814.
Though he hoped to create a full portrait of Pleasonton, Pitch found details of the unsung patriot's life frustratingly sparse. What is certain is that honor and fame eluded him,
¹
and that he was forced in his later years to beg to keep his government post in order to avoid an impoverished old age. “For saving these papers,” he wrote to future president James Buchanan in 1853, “the British government, had that been done for it, would probably have given me many thousand pounds.”

It remains unknown if Pleasonton got to keep his job, or if anyone even bothered to say thanks.

An American vice president is practically guaranteed obscurity, unless he reaches the highest office. (And even then there's no assurance of lasting fame—just look at Chester Alan Arthur.) “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” the first vice president, John Adams, wrote ruefully. John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt's veep, put it a bit more bluntly: The vice presidency, he said, “isn't worth a bucket of warm piss.” That was a sentiment no doubt shared by Richard Mentor Johnson, whose once promising political future—not to mention his place in history—was all but extinguished when he was elected to serve under a president with his own overlooked legacy, Martin Van Buren. Yet while Johnson is now mostly forgotten, his life was really quite memorable.

The future vice president was born under fire, in a hastily constructed fortress on the Virginia frontier, near what became Louisville, Kentucky. The Revolutionary War was still raging in 1780, and the frontier was under fierce Indian assault. Johnson family lore held that a flaming arrow landed in baby Richard's cradle and that he was only saved when his older sister Betsey pulled it away. The incident, if it really happened, foreshadowed a time when Richard Johnson would make his name fighting Indians in another war with the British, some three decades later.

The Johnsons emerged from the Revolution as a family of great wealth and influence. Richard's father was one of the largest landowners in Kentucky, with numerous commercial interests, and two of his brothers served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Trained as a lawyer, Richard preceded them to Capitol Hill in 1806. Amiable and hardworking, if undistinguished, the young congressman was described by Washington socialite Margaret Bayard Smith as “the most tender hearted, mild, affectionate and benevolent of men…whose countenance beams with good will to all, whose soul seems to feed on the milk of human kindness.” Nice qualities, but hardly sufficient to build an enduring reputation. That would take a war.

Tensions between the fledgling United States and its former motherland had been festering for years over Britain's oppressive interference with American shipping and its encouragement of Indian hostilities toward settlers in the Northwest frontier.
¹
Johnson joined other vociferous young congressmen like Henry Clay and John Calhoun, known collectively as “the War Hawks,” who demanded an aggressive response to the British outrages. What resulted was the War of 1812. Not wishing “to be idle during the recess of Congress,” as he wrote, Johnson raised two regiments of Kentucky volunteers, and in the fall of 1813 led them north to join the army of his future rival, General William Henry Harrison. Their quarry was British general Henry Procter and his Indian allies under the leadership of the famed Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh. “Oh, how I did want to catch that fellow [Procter],” Johnson later wrote. “I never thirsted for a man's blood but Procter was a monster.”

The fateful clash came along the Thames River on the lower Ontario peninsula. Procter had been attempting to retreat after an American naval victory on Lake Erie made his position untenable, but Tecumseh shamed him into making a stand. On October 5, 1813, British forces were formed in a line of battle at Moraviantown, while Tecumseh's warriors took up flanking positions along a swamp on the British right. Johnson's brother James smashed through the British line, which sent Procter scurrying away to safety, but Tecumseh remained in position and kept fighting. It was then that Richard Johnson led a group of volunteers, known as “the Forlorn Hope,” into a nearly suicidal assault on the Indian flank. Tangled in briar and under a relentless volley, fifteen members of the Forlorn Hope were killed instantly and four more were wounded. Johnson himself was shot through the hip and thigh, but pressed on with the rest of his regiment. He received several more wounds and had his horse shot from beneath him, yet he still managed to kill Tecumseh
²
and thus break the back of the Indian confederacy that had long plagued the Northwest Territory.

Richard Johnson returned to Congress in 1814 as a war hero, with the wounds that disabled him for the rest of his life to prove it. The Battle of the Thames had been one of the most decisive in the War of 1812, and Tecumseh's death boosted his political fortunes considerably. “Rumpsey, Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh!” his supporters would chant during many campaigns to come. Johnson's newfound status probably saved him from the furor that erupted over a bill he sponsored in 1816 that granted members of Congress an annual salary. (They were previously paid only for the days when Congress was in session.) Many of his colleagues lost their seats in the aftermath of the unpopular measure, and Johnson himself repudiated it the next year. He was also left unscathed by what historian Robert V. Remini called a “colossal boondoggle” involving the construction of a series of fortresses along the Missouri River to the Yellowstone. Johnson, who was chairman of the House Committee on Expenditures in the Department of War, secured for his brother James the contract to supply materials for the new outpost. Only problem was, the steamboats James Johnson had built to transport men and supplies couldn't navigate shallow water. The ill-fated venture cost the government a fortune, but as President James Monroe noted, “the people of the whole western country” considered the project a worthy measure “to preserve the peace of the frontier.” The Johnsons were celebrated rather than derided.

Throughout the rest of his term in the House, which lasted until 1819, and then in the Senate, Johnson's popularity was enhanced by his consistent advocacy of veterans and war widows relief, as well as his efforts to end imprisonment for debtors. In a speech before the Senate in 1823, he declared, “the principle is deemed too dangerous to be tolerated in a free government, to permit a man for any pecuniary consideration, to dispose of the liberty of his equal.” Johnson's principles drew him to a coalition emerging under the leadership of Senator Martin Van Buren that eventually became the Democratic Party. And to its future standard-bearer, Andrew Jackson, he offered his unswerving loyalty. Johnson vigorously defended the Hero of New Orleans over charges that he had overstepped his authority by invading Spanish Florida in 1817, and supported him in the 1824 presidential election, which was decided in favor of John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives, despite Jackson winning the popular vote.

Four years later Old Hickory defeated Adams to become the first “populist” president. Johnson lost his Senate seat at the same time, but was promptly reelected to the House, where he served as a powerful ally of the administration throughout both of Jackson's terms in office. Having “the rare quality of being personally liked by everyone,” as John C. Calhoun's biographer, Charles M. Wiltse, notes, Johnson often found himself in the role of mediator—particularly in the disputes between Jackson and Vice President Calhoun over such issues as nullification.
³
But it was in a social-political fracas dubbed by Secretary of State Martin Van Buren as “the Eaton Malaria” that his conciliatory talents were most sorely tried.
⁴

Essentially, the society women of Washington decreed that Margaret “Peggy” Eaton, wife of Secretary of War John Eaton, was a woman of questionable virtue and thus unfit for their company. Men of the day were expected to follow their wives' decisions on such matters and ostracize whomever they were told to ostracize. Accordingly, most of Jackson's cabinet, as well as Vice President Calhoun, rejected Mrs. Eaton. This enraged the president, who personally liked the shunned woman and also viewed the social assault on her as a political attack on him—a conspiracy to make John Eaton's position in the cabinet untenable, therefore destabilizing the administration and undermining his decisions.

Silly as it all may seem now, the Eaton Malaria consumed the first two years of Jackson's presidency and had tremendous political ramifications. The president was determined to have Peggy Eaton welcomed into society and sent Johnson as an emissary to three of his more recalcitrant cabinet members. Johnson, on friendly terms with all three, cordially advised them that Jackson was in earnest and was prepared to fire anyone who continued to snub John Eaton's wife. This would be persuasive enough, or so Johnson believed. He was stunned, therefore, when his diplomatic entreaties were rejected. Even the president of the United States could not force them into company their wives had determined was unworthy, the cabinet members declared. Defeated, Johnson went back to the president, who, he noted, was “like a roaring lion” upon hearing the news. In the end, the entire cabinet was dismissed—the only such event in American history.

Given his own domestic situation, Johnson's role in the Eaton affair is interesting. He was all but married to one of his slaves, a woman named Julia Chinn, with whom he had two daughters. They were his family, and he wanted them accepted as such. But that was asking way too much in the antebellum South. It was one thing to sleep with a slave, which many a master considered a perquisite of ownership, but to try to introduce her or the offspring of such miscegenation into white society was simply intolerable. George Prentice, editor of the
Louisville Journal,
reflected the hypocrisy of such standards when he lambasted Johnson in an editorial. “If Col. Johnson had the decency and decorum to seek to hide his ignominy from the world, we would refrain from lifting the curtain,” Prentice wrote. “His chief sin against society is the publicity and barefacedness of his conduct; he scorns all secrecy, all concealment, all disguise.”

Notwithstanding his unusual living arrangements, Johnson enjoyed wide support in the West (which then extended only to the Mississippi River), as well as among workingmen in the urban centers. Furthermore, he was close to the president and had every reason to expect that Jackson would select him as his running mate in the 1832 election after John Calhoun resigned from the vice presidency. This would in effect make Johnson the president's heir apparent. But Jackson chose Martin Van Buren. “The Little Magician,” as Van Buren was sometimes called, had cast his spell over the president and had made himself indispensable.

Though deeply disappointed, Johnson still had faith in his own political future. Just a month after Jackson's second inauguration, the
Political Register
reported that “the western States are flooded with handbills nominating Col.
Richard M. Johnson,
of Kentucky, as a candidate for the Presidency in 1836.” That same year William Emmons published his political hagiography,
The Authentic Biography of Colonel Richard M. Johnson,
which was followed by the laudatory play,
Tecumseh, or the Battle of the Thames, a National Drama in Five Acts.
After attending one well-received performance of the play, Johnson happily exclaimed, “I have now more friends than ever by the hundreds.”

Certainly Johnson was well regarded in some quarters, but Van Buren was still Jackson's man and the one chosen to inherit his mantle. “It didn't strike [the president] as odd that he, the champion of the people's right to choose their leaders, should essentially appoint his own successor,” writes historian H. W. Brands. Van Buren would be the Democratic candidate, but as a sop to the ever-loyal Johnson, Old Hickory bestowed upon him the second spot on the ticket. It wasn't a universally acclaimed decision: “I pray you to assure our friends that the humblest of us do not believe that a lucky random shot, even if it did hit Tecumseh, qualifies a man for the Vice Presidency,” John Catron, chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court, wrote to Jackson. Catron predicted that “the very moment Col. J. is announced, the newspapers will open upon him with facts, that he had endeavored often to force his daughters into society, that the mother in her life time, and they now, rode in carriages, and claimed equality.”

Delegates at the 1835 Democratic convention in Baltimore did as Jackson demanded and nominated Van Buren for president. But some balked at Johnson for vice president. Virginians wanted William Cabell Rives, who had served as minister to France during Jackson's first term, and withheld their votes in protest. That left Johnson without the required two-thirds majority. Because Tennessee had not sent any delegates to the convention, the problem was solved when a random Tennessean by the name of Edmund Rucker was plucked off the street to deliver that state's fifteen votes to Johnson. Virginia's delegates “hissed most ungraciously,” according to one report, and stormed out of the convention. It was an unpleasant preview of the bitter campaign to come.

Just as John Catron had predicted, Johnson's open relationship with Julia Chinn became the target of venomous Whig attacks. “It may be a matter of no importance to mere political automatons whether Richard M. Johnson is a
white
or a
black
man,” wrote Duff Green in the
United States Telegraph
, “whether he is
free
or a
slave
—or whether he is married to, or has been in connection with a jet-black, thick-lipped, odoriferous negro wench, by whom he has reared a family of children whom he has endeavoured to force upon society as…equals…. But thank God, to the great majority of the people of the United States we may with safety address ourselves on this subject, with a full conviction that in their breast we shall find a response to…patriotic feelings.”