The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote: “If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.” It is a testament to the duality of human nature that notions such as “good” and “evil” have little meaning without their opposite number to lend them context.
It is also true that human beings tend to be mixed bags. Evil people can acknowledge truth and beauty, and of course be moved to acts of kindness: the Roman emperor Nero loved the arts, Adolf Hitler adored children and dogs, and so on. The opposite is also the case. You'll find among the thoroughgoing bastards who populate the pages of this book some truly “Great Men” in the classical meaning of the phrase.
And while it's true that J. Pierpont Morgan was a silver-spoon-sucking son-of-a-bitch who cheated his own government by selling them defective rifles
during wartime
, he also helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art so that people who could never dream of purchasing one of the statues that populate that institution's Greek and Roman wing could enjoy these testaments to human creativity as he did.
In many cases the tales of bastardry contained herein will titillate, perhaps even scandalize the reader. In others, where the “bastard” in question has an otherwise positive image, the revelation of that person's “bastard” side will hopefully offer some context to the character of the “bastard” in question.
After all, everyone loves hearing about an out-and-out bastard. That's likely because everyone has a little bit of the bastard in them: and some of our greatest leaders have allowed their “inner bastard” to inform their decisions for both good and ill. In this book you'll find some outright bastards with no redeeming qualities. You'll also find some otherwise good people who let their “inner bastard” get the better of them.
Devils or angels, in the end it's all about the choices.
“A more damned crew hell never vomited.”
â George Sandys, Virginia Company treasurer, on the quality of the settlers at Jamestown in 1623
One of history's most time-honored ways to acquire property is to simply take it from others. Depending on who tells the story, this is usually described as either “conquest” or as “theft.” No country lacks a land grab story, and the United States is no exception. With this longstanding tradition in mind, it only makes sense to start off a book documenting corrupt practices in America with the burn-and-kill tactics of Jamestown governor Lord De La Warr.
In a matter of three short years, England's Jamestown colony lost all but sixty of its original settlers to disease, starvation, and more frequent Indian attacks. Only the timely arrival of newly appointed governor Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, kept the original colonists from leaving the site. Our first bastard landed with provisions and backup, ready to save the New World.
In the centuries before Columbus, Native Americans fought for the best land, pretty much like anyone else. The Celts, Romans, Aryans, and Persians are just a few Old World counterparts known for taking what wasn't rightfully theirs. By the time Europeans began to explore the Americas, stealing land was a normal part of human history. The first English settlers, however, weren't your typical honest, hard-working colonists. Most of the five hundred men who came to the New World were so-called “gentlemen,” second sons (if that) of landed aristocrats. In reality this bunch of lazy, mean-spirited bastards were only interested in finding hoards of Indian gold as the Spanish had in Mexico and Peru. These first English settlers were brutal, ignorant, and land-hungry, scornful of the “inferior” Indians; the Indians for their part returned the compliments. You can guess what happened next.
Lord De La Warr proved to be Jamestown's salvation, but the surrounding Native American tribes bore most of the heavy costs involved. De La Warr learned how to take land when he fought in England's ongoing battles with the Irish. His methods were similar to the ones Indians used in their wars with the English and each other, but history gave De La Warr's version a special name. He freely employed these so-called “Irish tactics” against the Powhatans and the other local Algonquian tribes. Under De La Warr's command, the colonists raided Indian towns, stealing crops, burning cornfields. They set a scene that replayed itself along the American frontier over the next three centuries.
We can find plenty to dislike about the prime movers on both sides of this long struggle between early American bastards. It is worth noting, though, that the man who started the trend was De La Warr, the English lord and military man. In one of history's ironies, De La Warr failed to profit from his ruthlessness in securing the future of the Virginia Colony. His mission of saving Jamestown from extinction accomplished, De La Warr set sail for England in 1618. He died during the return voyage, and no one is quite sure what became of his body.
“And here in Florida, Virginia, New-England, and Cannada, is more land than all the people in Christendome can manure, and yet more to spare than all the natives of those Countries can use and cultivate. The natives are only too happy to share: If this be not a reason sufficient to such tender consciences; for a copper kettle and a few toyes, as beads and hatchets, they will sell you a whole Country.”
â Captain John Smith
“But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection.”
â John Winthrop
Don't confuse the Pilgrims and Puritans: these English religious sects were more different than their names would lead you to believe. The first group arrived in North America and treated the local Indians civilly. The others treated the native people as an obstacle to be removed, conquered, or converted.
The Pilgrims, outsiders that they were, left England for Holland, but soon after decided that their children would be less likely to lose their “Englishness” in a new land than in the Low Countries. A large group of them departed for the New World in 1620. They founded Plymouth Plantation that same year. The Puritans followed them soon afterward, founding Boston in 1630, and quickly outnumbering their separatist neighbors.
In no time at all the Puritans ran into trouble with the native peoples. They were determined to convert the locals into Christian, “Praying Indians.” The neighboring Pequot, Narragansett, and Wampanoag tribes were naturally reluctant to change their ways of life for the strangers. The Puritans, of course, met resistance with violence. In 1637, just seven years after the founding of Boston, the Puritans went to war with the most numerous tribe in the region at the time, the Pequots. Within the year, more than 1,500 Indians were dead and the Pequots had all but ceased to exist as an independent tribal entity.
The Puritans repeated this cycle with the Wampanoag in the 1660s and 1670s. The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag sachem (chief ) Massasoit had gotten along very well. But Massasoit's son Metacomet, known as “King Philip” by the Puritans, fought the Puritans in King Philip's War from 1675â6.
Both sides in the war favored fire as a weapon. Indians retreating into their great walled towns quickly learned that the Puritans had no compunctions about burning their homes down around their ears. One group of Praying Indians was murdered when their church was burned down with them still inside. The culprits? Not other Indians taking revenge on religious traitors, but Puritan settlers, their own coreligionists! It is not surprising that many Indian attacks on Puritan settlements resulted in similar treatment.
The Pilgrims and the Puritans were both groups of English Christians who were dissenters from the mainstream Church of England. The Pilgrims were separatists, in other words, people who sought freedom to worship apart from the Church of England and to establish their own church. Today, they are known as the Congregationalists. The Puritans, on the other hand, didn't want to leave the church. They wanted to “purify” it from within: hence their nickname. The Puritans believed they needed to purge anything related to Catholicism from their Protestant faith and lifestyle in order to avoid eternal damnation.
By the time it had run its course this war resulted in nearly four thousand deaths (three thousand of them Indians, including King Philip), an incredibly high toll considering the number of colonists at the time. The Wampanoag and their allies were wiped out. Those Indians not killed by disease, bullets, or torches were sold into slavery in places such as the West Indies and Bermuda. And this included most of the Praying Indians. The native population crippled, the Puritans claimed lands now open to settlement as God-sent blessings for their piety.
Pious Bastards.
“William Penn was a wise and good man, but Thomas was a miserable churl.”
â Benjamin Franklin
William Penn, the founder of the colony of Pennsylvania (Latin for “Penn's Woods”), was a nonconformist. A man both of peace and of his word, Penn dealt straightforwardly with the local Indians. He treated them as he would have any other human being and paid them for lands they relinquished to the settlers of his new colony. The Lenape, the largest and most powerful of these tribes, enjoyed particularly good relations with Penn. They referred to him as their father and honored him as they would their own chiefs.
William Penn died in 1718, struggling to make ends meet after spending a great deal of money on his colony. He was succeeded as “proprietor” of Pennsylvania by his second son, Thomas. Thomas Penn turned out to be a very different man from his father. He was proof that, in the case of the Penn family, the old adage “the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree” hardly applied. Where the elder Penn had been determined to build something admirable and not all that concerned with profit, his son was determined to profit and not all that concerned with being admirable. No other example spells out the difference between William Penn and his son than that of the infamous Walking Purchase of 1737.
Most of the Pennsylvania colony's settlements were restricted to the Delaware River Valley's west bank, stretching no more than a few miles inland. Penn's agents produced an unsigned and likely forged treaty supposedly dating back to 1688 that would change Pennsylvania for good. According to the “treaty,” Lenape chiefs had agreed to sell the Penns a parcel of their lands from the junction of the Lehigh and Delaware Rivers and continuing “as far west as a man could walk in a day and a half.”
Left land-rich but cash-poor by his father, Thomas Penn married the daughter of an earl, and styled himself as an aristocrat. That sort of “lifestyle” didn't come cheap. The sale of the land stolen in “Ye Hurry Walk” helped make Penn a millionaire, and financed the sort of “lifestyle” to which he thought himself entitled.
The Lenape chiefs weren't happy about the treaty, but felt they had no choice but to agree to what they called “Ye Hurry Walk.” They assumed they would sell as much as could be traced by following the Lehigh River along its course westward. Penn, however, had already calculated his claim and sold off parcels of the land he expected to receive in the deal. He hired three professional runners and had his agents clear a road for them to run on. Rather than following the Lehigh River trail, the road would lead the runners due west, deep into Lenape territory. Penn took great care to turn “as far west as a man could walk in a day and a half” into “as far west as I can reach.” What followed was the single largest land swindle in colonial American history.
On September 19, 1737, the three runners set off from present-day Wrightstown, Pennsylvania. Only one of the three runners managed to run for the entire allotted time, but he finished seventy miles inland. In one thirty-six-hour period, Thomas Penn stole from the Lenape a land tract the size of the state of Rhode Island (about 3,000 square miles).
As if that weren't enough, Penn later tried to suspend Pennsylvania's colonial assembly and rule by decree. Luckily for the colonists, Benjamin Franklin, already a celebrated American leader, foiled him. Penn retaliated by hiring Franklin's “illegitimate” son as Pennsylvania's governor: a case of a metaphorical bastard hiring an actual one.
“Here! Shoot me, foregod, fair mark shoot!”
â William Berkeley, Virginia governor, as he confronted Nathaniel Bacon and his band of five hundred rebels, June 22, 1676
Think about it. A group of settlers â nothing more than freehold farmers, really â stood up for their individual rights and shook their collective fists at the landed interests of the British crown and the rich Loyalists. They showed the “Spirit of â76” and took up arms in order to see to it that their families were looked after.
Sounds like the American Revolution, right?
Wrong. The conflict described above played out not in 1776, but a century earlier, in
1676
.
We're talking about Bacon's Rebellion. Bearing the name of the man who provided the lit match to the tinder pile of class resentment and land disputes in late seventeenth-century Virginia, the upheaval both lived and died with its leader and namesake: Nathaniel Bacon. Bacon was a charismatic leader, a brave man under fire, clever politician, and, of course, an absolute bastard.
Bacon's true bastardry began when he moved to Virginia. He used his father's money to purchase two estates right on the James River. With land came instant respectability. A few months later, Bacon had been fully accepted into Virginia society. Lord Berkeley, the husband of Bacon's cousin, had given him a seat on the Governor's Council. But it couldn't last.
By 1674 the cousins-in-law had alienated each other over the question of the direction of the colony's growth. Berkeley favored keeping the frontier where it currently was and not acquiring any more of the lands from the neighboring Indians.
Bacon agreed with the frontier farmers. Together they advocated expanding Virginia's borders westward by driving tribes such as the Pamunkey and Susquehannock off of their native lands. Berkeley just wouldn't relent. So in 1676 Bacon assembled a group of four hundred followers willing to make war on the neighboring tribes. He insisted Berkeley give him an official directive to kill or drive off as many of the Indian residents as possible. When Berkeley refused, Bacon accused Berkeley of corruption. Bacon turned his troops on Jamestown in a full revolt.
By birth Nathaniel Bacon was the most unlikely of rebels. His family were wealthy members of the local gentry in Suffolk, England, thus Bacon was born a gentleman. By 1672 he developed a reputation as a hothead and a troublemaker. After Bacon was caught trying to cheat a neighbor of his inheritance, his father stepped in and offered Bacon a way out. He would back his son's business venture in one of the New World colonies. The catch: Bacon would have to leave England and go to America if he wished to receive his father's backing. He did so, immigrating to Virginia in 1672.
Berkeley got wind of Bacon's impending attack just in time to flee across Chesa-peake Bay to the Eastern Shore county of Accomack. Bacon responded by ordering his followers to burn the governor's palace to the ground, then headed west to make war on the Pamunkeys, Appomatucks, and Susquehannocks. Much blood was shed on both sides.
It was at about this time that Bacon's luck ran out. Stricken down with dysentery (referred to at the time by the charming appellation of the “Bloody Flux”), he died in October, 1676, less than a month after torching the governor's residence.
Without Bacon to lead his rebellion it collapsed. Berkeley returned from Accomack County and quickly restored order. Before the year was out, he had hanged twenty-three of the rebels: the last of the many lives lost on account of that bastard Nathaniel Bacon.