Villains, Scoundrels, and Rogues: Incredible True Tales of Mischief and Mayhem
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Villains, Scoundrels, and Rogues: Incredible True Tales of Mischief and Mayhem
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| ISBN-13: | 9781616149284 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Prometheus Books |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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VILLAINS, SCOUNDRELS, AND ROGUES
Incredible True Tales of Mischief and Mayhem
By Paul Martin
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2014 Paul MartinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61614-927-7
CHAPTER 1
MERCHANT OF MISERY
James DeWolf
On a soft, greening afternoon in late April 1807, forty-three-year-old merchant James DeWolf stood at the window of his brick and clapboard counting house on the busy waterfront of Bristol, Rhode Island. In his elegant colonial-era garb—stockings and breeches, long dress coat, silk vest and high-collared white shirt—the tall, gray-haired businessman presented an imperious figure. DeWolf gazed contentedly at the harbor below, where many of the ships loading or unloading their cargos were his own. This was a favorite time of year for DeWolf. For the first time in weeks there had been no need to light a fire in his office fireplace. On his morning carriage ride from home, he'd noticed some daffodils poking into the sunshine. After a long, dreary winter, the sight had cheered the normally taciturn New Englander.
DeWolf turned from the window, thinking of his beloved wife, Nancy, who, at this moment, was probably hovering over their servants as they prepared for this evening's guests. There would be a light supper—a chowder of local seafood no doubt, perhaps a warm apple crumble. Some of Bristol's best musicians were scheduled to provide the entertainment. The sounds of violin, flute, and harpsichord would fill the house, with candles and whale oil lamps providing a warm glow as family and friends relaxed with a glass of fine port in hand. DeWolf was just sorry that his grand new three-story mansion hadn't been finished by now. He'd already selected a name for the estate: The Mount. It had a solid, prosperous ring—entirely fitting for the home of Bristol's wealthiest and most influential citizen.
DeWolf returned to his desk and resumed the examination of his ledgers. He had so much to keep track of—ship manifests, the records of his Caribbean plantations, the family distilleries. Fortunately, he had an eye for detail. It was that attention to the smallest matter—along with his willingness to take chances and a streak of ruthlessness—that had carried DeWolf to success. He'd certainly come a long way since acquiring his first merchant ship less than twenty years earlier. The people hereabouts had even elected him to the state legislature. Yes, life was undeniably good for the Honorable James DeWolf. He seemed to be one of those rare individuals that fortune smiles on at every turn.
Several hundred miles to the south, the Bristol-based merchantman Seminarius leaned heavily on a port tack as it pounded through the Atlantic chop on its way to Charleston, South Carolina. Above the usual noises of a large sailing ship—the ceaseless rumble of breaking waves, the creak of planking, the rattle of wind-whipped lines, and the snap of taut canvas—a medley of unearthly sounds could be heard, a low moaning pierced now and then by wailing and shouts in strange foreign tongues. They were the sounds of human misery, a chorus of anguish raised by some of the unluckiest souls ever to walk the earth.
In a fetid, four-foot-high crawl space between the ship's main deck and cargo hold, 162 African slaves were chained fast to the wooden planking. Each slave was allotted a space roughly twenty inches wide. Unable to stand, the slaves could only sit or recline with their heads shoved between the legs of the next person in the tightly packed line of sweating bodies, forcing them at times to lie in each other's waste. No prison dreamed up by the Devil himself could have been worse than this dark, jostling hellhole, with its overpowering stench, oppressive heat, and claustrophobic crowding. Some of the captives went mad—or jumped into the ocean if given the chance, death being preferable to the conditions they were subjected to.
Up on the main deck of the Seminarius, Captain Charles Slocum sniffed the bracing salt air as he scanned the horizon. After months at sea, he could finally smell land once more. It had been a challenging voyage. Nineteen of the 181 Negroes he'd purchased from a slave trader's dungeon on the west coast of Africa had perished during the rough Atlantic crossing. And Slocum had been obliged to discipline a few of the more unruly males. As usual, iron muzzles and the lash had tamed them well enough. Fortunately, there had been no epidemics of smallpox, typhoid, or yellow fever, which might have necessitated tossing the sick over the side to prevent other valuable slaves from becoming infected.
The long, arduous voyage of the Seminarius was typical of vessels involved in New England's Triangle Trade—the slave-based commerce between North America and western Africa that flourished from the early 1700s to the early 1800s. During that period, Rhode Island merchants, who dominated the New England slave trade, underwrote nearly a thousand trips to Africa and transported more than one hundred thousand slaves to North America, chiefly to the Caribbean islands and America's southeastern ports. Although that number was tiny compared to the millions of Africans brought to the New World by European slave traders, dealing in human chattel earned immense fortunes for many prominent Northern families, a heritage that's unfamiliar to most Americans, who generally associate slavery solely with the South and equate New England with the noble cause of abolitionism.
The truth, however, is that it was New Englanders who owned America's largest slave-trading fleet at this time. Nearly every major New England port engaged in slave trafficking to some degree, although two towns—Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island—accounted for most of the voyages. Newport led the trade for much of the 1700s, with Bristol becoming the main port after 1790. For close to a century, tiny Rhode Island controlled 60 to 90 percent of America's slave-trading activities and may have been responsible for up to half of all slaving voyages originating in North America. (Between the 1820s and 1860, merchants outside New England led the final surge of American slave trafficking.)
The highly profitable Triangle Trade was woven into just about every part of the New England economy. It helped finance colonial governments and employed thousands of seamen, shipbuilders, merchants, craftsmen, and farmers. Local townspeople even bought shares in slaving voyages. Part of the vast proceeds from the traffic in human beings was used to fund venerable New England public institutions, some of which continue to wrestle with the stigma of their founding.
For the Seminarius, the first leg of the Triangle had begun in Bristol, where the ship's hold was filled with the hogsheads of extra potent rum that were traded for slaves in Africa. The return transatlantic crossing—the infamous Middle Passage—constituted the second leg of the Triangle. When the Seminarius reached Charleston, Captain Slocum would sell the ship's cargo of slaves and use the proceeds to buy commodities such as cotton, indigo, or rice. Such staples would be transported back to New England on the Triangle's final leg.
The majority of the slaving fleet, however, delivered cargos not to American ports but to the West Indies, the main source of the North's most vital import—molasses. Northern distilleries turned that molasses into rum, and the ugly cycle began once more, each time fattening the purses of the Yankee merchants who financed the slave-trading voyages. In the case of the Seminarius, the beneficiary of this commerce in human degradation was none other than respected businessman and civic leader James DeWolf. DeWolf bears the inglorious distinction of being the leading figure in the most active slave-importing family in American history, an elite Rhode Island clan whose members enjoyed lives of extreme luxury paid for by the suffering of others. As one historian unequivocally states, the DeWolf family fortune "was built on the backs of slaves."
The DeWolfs' slave-trading activities lasted half a century, from 1769 to 1820. The family owned four dozen other slave ships besides the Seminarius. The DeWolfs took part in some 60 percent of the Bristol Triangle Trade, either by themselves or with partners. During the busy years from 1784 to 1807, the family underwrote eighty-eight slave-trading voyages. The next two major Bristol competitors launched nineteen voyages combined during that period. James DeWolf became one of the wealthiest men in the country, so rich that he could afford to loan money to the United States government.
The accumulation of James DeWolf 's fabulous wealth is a paradoxical tale of ambition and business acumen coupled with moral blindness. Born in Bristol in 1764, DeWolf was the son of Mark Anthony DeWolf, a seagoing man who struggled to earn a living through the slave trade and privateering. The senior DeWolf sired fifteen children, eight sons and seven daughters. Five of Mark Anthony DeWolf 's sons—Charles, John, William, James, and Levi—along with Charles's son George, would become partners in a hugely successful business empire, one that used profits from the slave trade to expand into agriculture, manufacturing, and finance (to his credit, son Levi soon soured on slave trading and quit to pursue a religious life). Among the DeWolfs, James was always the leading man.
If not for the manner in which he made his fortune, James DeWolf might be remembered as a swashbuckling American hero. He went to sea as a boy, serving aboard a privately owned combat vessel during the Revolutionary War. Captured twice by the British, he endured harsh conditions as a prisoner in Bermuda, which apparently turned him into a hard case. After the war, he followed his father into the slave trade. In 1786, at the age of twenty-two, he led a voyage to Africa aboard a ship owned by Providence slaver John Brown, a member of the wealthy family whose generosity to Rhode Island College prompted the school to change its name to Brown University. (The first Rhode Islander tried under the 1794 federal Slave Trade Act, John Brown footed half the bill for the college's original library, and his family provided slave labor to build the school's University Hall).
In 1788, James DeWolf purchased his first slave ship, the Polly. It didn't take long for him to show his attitude toward his living cargo. On the return leg of a 1790 trip to Africa, one of the females among the 122 slaves DeWolf was transporting to Cuba fell ill. Fearing that the woman had smallpox, DeWolf had her hoisted high onto the Polly's main mast in an attempt to prevent her from infecting others. When the slave's condition failed to improve, DeWolf ordered his crew to lash the woman to a chair. He then personally lowered her over the side and dropped her into the ocean. According to witnesses, DeWolf's only regret was the loss of the chair. The following year, a Rhode Island grand jury indicted DeWolf for murder, but he was never arrested and the charge was eventually dropped.
DeWolf quickly accumulated a sizeable fortune through slave trading, and he augmented his wealth in other ways. In 1790, he married the daughter of former Rhode Island deputy governor William Bradford, adding Nancy Bradford's dowry to his coffers. When the War of 1812 came along, DeWolf entered his own warships into the fight. His eighteen-gun brig Yankee became one of the conflict's most successful privateers, capturing forty British vessels and netting at least a million dollars in prize money—equivalent to $12.6 million today. (DeWolf later tried to save face by claiming that he made more money from privateering than from the slave trade.)
Along with their fleet of slave ships, the DeWolfs owned a Bristol bank, an insurance company, and at least three distilleries, all extensions of the slave trade. James DeWolf started a Rhode Island cotton mill, and family members bought five sugar and coffee plantations in Cuba—again, all intimately linked to slavery. As the money poured in, the DeWolfs built themselves showplace mansions in their hometown. (One of their palatial estates still stands, George DeWolf 's Linden Place; located near the Bristol waterfront, it's now open as a museum and is a popular stop on walking tours. James DeWolf's home, The Mount, burned in 1904.)
Paralleling his financial accomplishments, James DeWolf's political career hit one high point after another. Beginning in 1797, he served several terms in the Rhode Island legislature, including periods as speaker of the house. In 1820, he won a seat in the US Senate, where he served until 1825, resigning because of his aversion to life in Washington and business pressures at home. One biographer claimed that he quit because he was bored. That's easy to believe. For a man of action such as DeWolf, the endless debates in Congress must have been grating. There's little doubt he would have felt certain that his own convictions were correct. Honoring opposing views must have struck him as a waste of time.
At least that's the impression he gave in his business affairs. When Rhode Island outlawed slave trading in 1787 following a long campaign by Quaker abolitionists, DeWolf simply ignored the law. After the US Congress tightened restrictions on slaving voyages in 1794, DeWolf helped orchestrate the appointment of his brother-in-law, Charles Collins, as customs inspector for Bristol. A slave trader himself, Collins looked the other way while one ship after another departed Bristol on the way to Africa.
After 1807, when the federal government banned all importation of slaves, the DeWolfs shifted the center of their slaving activities to Cuba. They did, it seems, begin to slow their involvement in the trade, although apparently they didn't abandon it completely until 1820, after Congress passed a law that redefined slave trading as an act of piracy punishable by death. Even then, the DeWolfs continued to import cotton, molasses, and other slave-produced commodities for use in their Rhode Island factories.
The unbroken record of financial success enjoyed by the DeWolf family ended in 1825 when George DeWolf's Cuban sugar crop failed, causing him to default on several loans. In addition to pushing a number of banks to the brink of collapse, George DeWolf's difficulties rippled throughout Bristol, affecting everyone from farmers to tradesmen, along with members of his own family. The situation became so bad that George DeWolf stole away from his mansion in the dead of night, taking his wife and six children to his Cuban estate. When his creditors discovered that he'd left town, they broke into Linden Place and made off with everything they could find, right down to the chandeliers.
Although James DeWolf suffered a setback because of his nephew's bankruptcy (probably a major factor in his decision to leave Washington and return to Bristol), he wasn't wiped out. When he died in December 1837 at the age of seventy-three, he was still a millionaire, having long ago diversified his fortune into real estate and manufacturing. On the whole, however, the DeWolfs struggled financially for decades, although they retained their elite social status. Members of the family continued to hold positions of respect—as legislators, Episcopal ministers, writers, scholars, artists, and architects. They clung proudly to their heritage, sometimes glossing over the clan's deep involvement in the slave trade.
One contemporary DeWolf ancestor who chose not to continue looking the other way is Katrina Browne. A former social worker and seminarian, Browne has produced a moving documentary that closely examines her family's past (called Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, the film aired on PBS in 2008). In the film, Browne and nine other DeWolf descendants make a spiritual pilgrimage that re-creates the route of the notorious Triangle Trade. The group journeys from Bristol to a former slave dungeon in Ghana to the ruins of a DeWolf sugar plantation in Cuba. Browne and her relatives find themselves wrestling with a combination of guilt and uncertainty about what they and other white Americans could, or should, do to help heal the emotional scars left behind by America's involvement in slavery.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from VILLAINS, SCOUNDRELS, AND ROGUES by Paul Martin. Copyright © 2014 Paul Martin. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
CAST OF CHARACTERSVILLAINS:
Merchant of Misery—James DeWolf
The Cutthroat Captain of Cave-In-Rock—Samuel Mason
Architect of a Tragedy—John Chivington
The Late, Unlamented Little Pete—Fong Ching
The Killer They Called Hell’s Belle—Belle Sorensen Gunness
Partners in Perfidy—Isaac Harris and Max Blanck
Chicago’s Florist-Mobster—Dean O’Banion
A Huckster’s Rise and Fall—John Brinkley
Hitchcock’s Hideous Inspiration—Ed Gein
SCOUNDRELS:
Salem’s Rabid Witch-Hunter—William Stoughton
Uncle Daniel the “Speckerlator”—Daniel Drew
Unleashing the James-Younger Gang—James Lane
Lincoln’s Missing Bodyguard—John Parker
Squirrel Tooth Alice—Libby Thompson
The Lawman Who Went Bad—Burt Alvord
The Very Mellow Yellow Kid—Joseph Weil
You Bet Your Life—Alvin Thomas
Keeper of the Immaculate Sperm—Charles Davenport
The Silken Voice of Treachery—Mildred Gillars
ROGUES:
Who’s that Rapping On My Floor?—Maggie and Kate Fox
The Witch of Wall Street—Hetty Green
King of the Cannibal Islands—David O’Keefe
Master Salesman of a Dubious Legend—Herbert Bridgman
The Consummate Gold Digger—Peggy Hopkins Joyce
The Mad, Sad Poet of Greenwich Village—Maxwell Bodenheim
The Bifurcated Congressman—Samuel Dickstein
The Frugal Counterfeiter—Emerich Juettner
Imperfect Pitch—Don Lapre
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