Franklin and Washington loom large for civic virtue and disinterested patriotism, and Madison warned that good and wise statesmen would not always be at the helm, because many of their contemporaries were self-interested schemers and outright liars. We hear from Timothy Hemmis and David Head editors of A Republic of Scoundrels, which introduces us to the schemers, intriguers, and adventurers—such as Aaron Burr, Mathew Lyon, Benedict Arnold, James Wilkinson—who also helped create the new nation.
Franklin and Washington loom large for civic virtue and disinterested patriotism, and Madison warned that good and wise statesmen would not always be at the helm, because many of their contemporaries were self-interested schemers and outright liars. We hear from Timothy Hemmis and David Head editors of A Republic of Scoundrels, which introduces us to the schemers, intriguers, and adventurers—such as Aaron Burr, Mathew Lyon, Benedict Arnold, James Wilkinson—who also helped create the new nation.
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Hello, everyone.
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Welcome to the Revolution 250 podcast.
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I'm Bob Allison.
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I chair the Rev 250 advisory group.
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We are a consortium of 70 organizations in Massachusetts planning ways to commemorate the 250th anniversary of American independence.
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And our guests today are David Head from the University of Central Florida.
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He's also a faculty fellow at Kentucky Wesleyan, author of a book on privateers, as well as a book about Washington and Newburgh.
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And
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Timothy Hemmes, who is an associate professor at Texas A&M in Central Texas.
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And they have written, they've co-edited a new book, A Republic of Scoundrels, The Schemers, Intriguers, and Adventurers Who Created a New American Nation.
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And it's a collection of characters that will, you'll never think about the formation of the United States the same way again, once you've encountered this crew of characters that they put together.
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So Timothy and David, thank you for joining us.
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Well, thanks for the invitation to be here.
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I'm delighted to talk with everyone today.
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So we have great characters in the book, but actually it's kind of ironic that the idea came up when one of you was doing research in the Benjamin Franklin papers.
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Yeah.
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Yep.
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I was in Philadelphia doing research, working on this other project that I have going on.
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And I kept running across these names.
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And then, lo and behold, the pandemic hit and we were all shut down.
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And I, well, it was through this idea out on Twitter, because I've had this idea, like all these names, like there'd be kind of a cool project to work on as scoundrels of the early Republic or something like that.
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Yeah.
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And so I threw the idea out there on Twitter, then Twitter.
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And David responded saying, hey, I think this would be a good idea.
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And a bunch of others, some who actually ended up being our contributors, also joined in and spawned the project.
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Wow.
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Wow.
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So how did you choose the characters who are in the book?
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Well, some of them were obvious choices, like Aaron Burr, for example, and Benedict Arnold.
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Those are the guys you think of scoundrel right away.
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Yeah, and there's a beginning and the end of the book.
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It begins with Arnold and ends with Burr.
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Right.
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Oh, you're right about that.
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You know what?
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I never noticed the significance of that.
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But let's go back and say, of course, we have the symbolism of that.
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But some other ones came to mind.
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If you're a specialist in this area, people like James Wilkinson, you see everywhere.
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That's one of the guys that Tim just sees everywhere in the research.
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So some of them were just characters that the people know that Tim had been seeing a lot in the sources, especially.
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So we came up with some of those guys.
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William Augustus Bowles, who was active in the southeast area.
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That's something that comes up a lot on the borderlands.
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William Blunt in Tennessee, the first senator to be impeached for some of his land dealing and all that in the western part of the country.
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Then others chose us.
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We got to talking to people.
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Right.
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So once we start, you know, trying to put the project together and, you know, you need to get to a certain number, right?
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You can't do six or something.
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You got to get like, you know, 10 to 12, 13, somewhere there.
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And so we start talking to people and we got a couple of recommendations.
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Why don't you talk to this person?
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He's working on, you know, something in that area.
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See if he's interested.
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We had Gene Smith, who you may know, at TCU.
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He recommended a couple of his students, James Loomer and Jackson Pearson, and said, yeah, these guys are working on something good.
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See if they're interested.
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So that's how he got on to Philip Nolan.
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It was a scoundrel operating out of Texas, a horse dealer who I certainly had never heard of before.
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But he's fit exactly in the cast of characters we're looking for.
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And then Jane wrote about the Kemper brothers in West Florida, who I've heard about, but never really delved deep into their story.
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So, yeah, OK, let's do them, too.
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So it was a combination of, you know, those prime figures that we knew were scoundrels, right?
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Everybody would say, yeah, that guy is a scoundrel.
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As well as, you know, scholars who are working on more specialized fields knew of these kind of people who pop up all the time, and they had stories that were just as interesting.
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Right, right.
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This particular period, there's a lot going on that makes this a lot of opportunities for people who bend that way to make a quick buck and do it in an unscrupulous way.
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Do you have a favorite who emerged?
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Favorite's a tough one.
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In a lot of ways, the American Revolution opens up Pandora's box.
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It sets up this.
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I really think some of these, these guys are really, when I say guys, cause they're all men.
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Um, and I, I really, I keep leaning to James Wilkinson.
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He is, he is a fascinating character.
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And like there could be more on him.
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And I think a lot more going on with him, like scholarship on him.
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Yeah.
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But I mean, the fact that he's a,
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the Spanish informant and all these different things.
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He really truly is an opportunist.
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Oh yeah.
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Yeah.
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You know, Sam Watson writes, writes the chapter on.
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So he ends up being kind of, I don't know the one I gravitate to the most of scoundrel, but Aaron Burr is right there alongside.
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Sure.
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Sure.
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Neck and neck.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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For me, the one I really kind of latched onto was William Blunt in Tennessee.
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Yeah.
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I knew the name, I knew Blount County, and all of a sudden that name's all over Tennessee.
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A few times I've driven through there.
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And of course, the Senate, the first impeachment, that kind of trivia question.
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But when Chris Magra wrote about him over and over again, I went, whoa, what is this guy?
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This guy's just brazen in how he is defrauding Revolutionary War veterans, cheating Native American tribes, bullying them off their land.
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using his position as a territorial governor, right?
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Not on the side, but using his position as governor to gain more and more and more land for himself.
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And he's just open.
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Well, not open.
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He's publicly keeping things clamped down so that no one from Washington gets too curious.
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But he writes openly to his associates, to his brother, saying, his brother must have written him saying, well, how are we going to get legal title to these lands?
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And he writes back something like, don't worry about it.
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We'll find people who can swear falsely.
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No problem.
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He has all these false avatavits that he's filling out, these false... And just the brazenness of... And then he hears that Robert Morris had sold land to someone in Amsterdam.
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He's like, oh, that's a great idea.
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So he sends agents off to...
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Those guys in Europe, they won't know anything about it.
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I can tell them I have 20 million acres.
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I don't think America is so big.
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But just the brazenness and the vast scale of what he was doing is just really incredible.
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So that's the one who was reading that chapter.
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I was like, whoa, again and again.
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How could, that's further than I thought anyone could go.
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It really is.
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It makes us think too about the characters like Washington who looms so large about everyone for his moral probity that he's actually operating in a world filled with schemers, connivers, intriguers in a way that I don't think we appreciate.
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Sometimes we have this idea that the founders were actually better than us, but it's only some of the ones we remember, I think, who are.
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Right, that's a great point.
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Because we do get the version of, first of all, you have a very small cast of characters, right?
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We think of the founders as like six guys, right?
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Yeah, yeah.
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We forget all the secondary characters.
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tertiary characters yeah which is understandable because you know you can only remember so many names and so even if you're a specialist remember so many people um but uh yes it's a much larger cast of characters and as you said we expect them to be always well behaved because they talk about virtue so often and they look so solid in those pictures right yeah you know
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Well, it's like the Puritans who always talked about sin because they knew people who were sinning.
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It wasn't that they were better.
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They understood human nature.
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Madison certainly understood human nature because he knew a lot of these characters.
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Right.
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That's a great way to put it.
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Yeah.
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They don't talk about public virtue all the time because it's easy.
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Right.
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That's right.
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That's right.
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Because it's hard.
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They know that there are many people who are falling short.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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William Augustus Bowles is a fascinating guy because he starts off as a Tory and then he sees which way things are going.
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And then he winds up with this, trying to create this colony of Muskogee in Florida.
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Can you talk a little bit about Bowles?
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I know you didn't write the chapters, but you having edited it, you know more about these guys than I do.
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Go ahead, David.
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Okay, so yeah, you're right.
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William Augustus Bowles has this interesting arc where he's born in a Maryland family.
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He's a loyalist.
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He fights on the, you know, supports the British side during the revolution.
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But he comes to benefit from the Americans winning and gaining independence.
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Once the United States is independent, then the rules are all different.
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And there's a room for an ambitious person like Bowles, this happens with a number of other guys as well, to kind of
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Find out where the boundaries are, right?
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How much has changed?
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What exactly can I do now that I couldn't have done previously?
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So he ends up trying to carve out a kind of new nation, Muscogee, made up of Native Americans, right?
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So they'll be distinct from the other empires around them, not part of the United States or Britain or Spain, their own country.
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And that sounds pretty good, right?
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So that's kind of an amiable thing to do, to try to find a way that Native Americans could survive and thrive
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when the rules are changing and when the Americans are pretty clearly going to want to move and run over them.
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But there's a key part of this for Bowles.
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It's not just creating a new nation.
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It's creating a new nation that he is going to lead.
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And I think that's really the key part.
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I kind of imagine that if Bowles had been in a different place in the country, he would have found a different project that also had him in charge.
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Maybe breaking away one of the Western states that he could be in charge of it.
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So I think the details were flexible.
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The goal was that he would be in charge of this.
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Ed Bowles really played the part very well.
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He went to travel around the world, actually.
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He went to Canada to try to gain British support from the Canadian and Canada officials there.
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He traveled over to London to drum up support.
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And since he's such a far distance, he can present himself as pretty much anything he wants.
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Right.
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He can show up with the documents that appear to have him appointed as the leader of the Native American tribes.
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and say, yeah, this is what I'm doing.
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I'm the leader, right?
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They all trust me.
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I'm in charge.
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So, yes, it's a great example of improvising, acting the part, right?
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Fake it till you make it kind of thing.
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If he acts like he's in charge, then he is in charge.
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Another interesting part about it, I said he traveled around the world.
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Part of it willingly, part of it not so willingly.
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He's arrested at one point, especially by the Spanish, I think, and then transported to the Philippines and
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He makes his way back.
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He's in Africa for a while.
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That's not easy to do, to escape all the way back to the Atlantic there.
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He's in prison in Cuba, I think, for a while.
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Those are where his adventures take him.
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I think the key part is, again, he wants to use the Native American status in order to make himself to be their leader.
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That's what he really wants, is to be the leader.
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What happened?
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No, go on, Tim.
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Well, I was going to say that there's this idea of the frontier, right?
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Or the borderlands that allows this, because there's not a strong order or authority in those regions allowed for these individuals like Bowles or even Aaron Burr to start claiming these are our, I'm my own leader and this is my own territory.
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And
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Go ahead, David.
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Yeah, a guy I just thought of, Thomas Green, who is in Georgia, goes over the border into the Spanish territory.
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And the bottom line is, he basically says, Georgia is taking you over now.
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Deal with it.
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The Georgians are kind of like, what?
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What do you mean?
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We didn't go for that.
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And the Spanish are like, what do you mean?
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You can't just come over here and say this is your territory.
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But because he's aggressive and ambitious on the frontier there,
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Um, you know, and the authority figures are so far distant, he kind of has the room where he could get away with it.
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If things had fallen differently for him, um, he could have gotten away with just kind of, again, just making the assertion and daring anybody to stop them is a lot of what's going on along the borders because the borderlands are both distant from authority figures, but it's also the primary place where you're going to have conflict between, between, between nations.
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So some guys are able to use that as leverage to get what they want in between.
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Right.
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We're talking with Timothy Hemes and David Head about their book, Republic of Scoundrels, the schemers, intriguers and adventurers who created a new American nation.
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So it is two things to see him open this up.
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One is the American Revolution with this idea of independence, not only for the nation, but for each individual, but then also
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as David was saying, these borderlands, which have lots of opportunities, as well as opportunities both to get rich potentially, but also for fraud, as well as to create conflict with Spain or with the Creeks or with other nations.
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And so these are guys really seeing opportunities and taking them.
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Yeah.
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One of the things that you have to think of, and David kind of referred to this earlier, is with the American Revolution, there's no...
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There's no set rules and regulations of morals and ethics.
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And so at some point you have to push the boundaries, you know, see where they are.
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And that's kind of helped shape.
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That's why we call it shaping the new republic.
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Right.
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Because you have to have those individuals that may be, you know, doing not so good stuff or self-interest stuff at the very least.
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to see where the boundaries are.
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That's really where this project really comes together to show that that's what these men were doing was pushing the boundaries and then it was helping shape that new nation.
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Whether they succeed, hit their schemes, it still shaped the nation.
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And then of course, Tim, you wrote the chapter on Aaron Burr.
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He certainly, he is pushing boundaries, but then of course the nation sets boundaries for him.
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And then the trial itself comes out, not the way Jefferson would have hoped, but probably best.
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I mean, imagine every time someone runs afoul of an administration, he's tried for treason.
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What kind of wouldn't really be the Republic as we know it.
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So that's can you talk a little bit about Burr and what's driving him?
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Well, I mean,
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we kind of know about burb, you know, recently, you know, because of, you know, the play Hamilton, the music.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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The musical just kind of everybody, but it doesn't talk about what happens afterwards.
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Right.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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Um, and so, um,
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the duel might not have been the big thing for yeah and so he is you know vice president he shoots hamilton he ends up going out west and starts he's angry at a lot of things there's a lot of he feels like he's lost capital and he wants the game and so he starts in these various schemes
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and it's very unclear because he goes to different people and tells them different things one he's telling people he's gonna you know create a frontier army and march on you know the capital um there's others where he's saying he's gonna go and filibuster in spanish territory um go down to new orleans and seize new orleans all these different things would end up ultimately
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at the very least, starting a civil war.
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And so there's a lot of things going on.
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And that's why I call him the American scoundrel.
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So he gets put on trial, and there's some, and I'm not a legal expert by any means, but
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I suspect there was some blunders, mistakes done by, well, probably more on the prosecution.
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They brought the wrong charges up.
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But it was really the trial of the century.
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And it really shapes the early republic.
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And the funny thing is, is now.
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Like when you get into, you know, the textbooks and stuff, it's just a little clip.
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Yeah, yeah.
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The Chief Justice presides over the trial, and the Chief Justice who actually hates the President, who's bringing these charges.
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I'm sorry, David.
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Tell him about the story about the Feast of Treason.
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Oh, yeah.
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It's not just the Chief Justice presiding.
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There's more to it.
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So during the trial, the trial itself is really just a circus.
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Yeah.
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I mean, there's multiple dual challenges between, for example, James Wilkinson and all these different things.
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Yeah.
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Then...
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Burr is out on bail, and he has literally the dream team of defense teams.
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Oh, yeah.
18:33.965 --> 18:36.107
I mean, Edmund Randolph is on his team.
18:36.547 --> 18:42.053
There's a guy, John Wickham, who's there, and he throws a party.
18:42.874 --> 18:44.796
And invites John Marshall.
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John Marshall, actually, I think his wife actually says something to him, basically saying, don't go.
18:50.921 --> 18:55.025
And he goes, well, it's not going to be too bad.
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And he goes and Aaron Bird at the party.
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And then all the partisan newspapers pick up on that.
19:00.149 --> 19:00.730
Yeah, yeah.
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Call it the Feast of Treason, which is a great name, by the way.
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It is.
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And so...
19:06.235 --> 19:14.117
it gets kind of thrown out into the media and it gets absolutely just, like you said, it's one of the, it is the trial of the Senate.
19:14.717 --> 19:14.877
Yeah.
19:14.897 --> 19:20.658
Because Burr is a very charismatic figure and he had been elected vice president, being a senator from New York.
19:20.719 --> 19:22.779
I mean, he had this great career.
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He almost became president in 1800 and he's now on trial for treason.
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And he has, as you said, Edmund Randolph, former governor of Virginia, Luther Martin, who is known as the bulldog of federalism, is another of his
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lawyers and way overmatch the federal prosecutors in this case.
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Where does it happen?
19:43.334 --> 19:46.255
It happens in Richmond, Virginia.
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And then James Wilkinson, who's also a character in the book, is a witness for the prosecution.
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And some of the observers are astounded that this guy that they know to be so flagrantly corrupt is now testifying against Aaron Burr.
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I think it's Washington Irving that reports talking about the guy that wrote Sleepy Hollow.
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He comments, because he's actually a reporter covering the trial, reports that Wilkinson struts in like a cocked turkey.
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I mean, that's the quote.
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The trial itself is a circus.
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It would have been a must-see TV.
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It would have been.
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Too bad we didn't have court TV then to cover the Burr trial.
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It would be much more than a blip in the textbooks.
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Correct.
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Because it's a very important story, too.
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I mean, legally, constitutionally, it's an important story, as well as this idea that Burr is, is he scheming to break off the West?
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Or is it, he says, Jefferson told me, I have support to go take over Mexico.
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I mean,
20:54.853 --> 21:14.905
there is so much plausible deniability that burr was burr was also a very good lawyer oh i i call him a legal genius um yeah yeah he's defending himself oh yeah yeah yeah you mentioned that that he in a couple places he's interrogating witnesses and i also and there's this kind of one of those sub arguments there that
21:16.770 --> 21:19.775
I call him one of the first populists.
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And I truly think he is.
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What I didn't get into...
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Again, there's a tie to Andrew Jackson later on, and there's one line at the end of the chapter that talks about that because of that populism.
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And Andrew Jackson is loosely connected to the conspiracy, but not enough for me to bring him into this chapter.
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He certainly connected with William Blunt in Tennessee.
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I don't know, I'm not trying to introduce Jackson now as a character for the book on scoundrels, but it's someone like Burr who really sees the way the political winds are blowing.
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And in fact, in Gore Vidal's novel,
22:06.451 --> 22:13.655
Burr is the, he is actually Martin Van Buren's father through some illegitimate relationship.
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So Vidal certainly saw that connection between Burr and populism, which Burr, different sense of politics, I suppose, than Jefferson had.
22:26.302 --> 22:29.584
What about, you know, Wilkinson is such an interesting
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and you wonder how someone who was so flagrantly corrupt could have survived, not only survived so long, but been held in positions of power for so long.
22:40.946 --> 22:42.186
Yeah, that's a great question.
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If everybody has so many suspicions about this guy, why do they keep giving him a job?
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I think that's really the question that the author of that chapter, Sam Watson, picked up on.
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That's the question he explores, right?
22:55.990 --> 22:58.511
So why did this guy get away from it so long?
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Is it simply that he was such a skilled liar?
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Is it something that he can just fake it for how many years?
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And he's around, right?
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Sam, I thought this was really insightful.
23:14.016 --> 23:17.777
He's around very skilled politicians, right?
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Washington, Jefferson, Madison.
23:19.298 --> 23:20.979
These are not naive guys, right?
23:20.999 --> 23:21.639
Yeah, yeah.
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And yet they keep going back to him.
23:25.249 --> 23:34.855
So part of it seems to be that in addition to all the scheming and trying to enrich himself personally and the spy for Spain and all that kind of thing, he was also an effective general.
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He was good at his day job, which helps, right?
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Which throws a lot of pressure off of you.
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And I think when it came down to it, he did not go all the way with Burr, right?
23:50.979 --> 24:01.044
Now, you could ask, is that because of some late patriotism or is it self-interest that he was going to throw Burr overboard rather than stick with him?
24:02.245 --> 24:06.708
So whatever it was, Wilkinson came to a turning point and didn't turn.
24:07.288 --> 24:10.530
He didn't ultimately go against the United States.
24:11.470 --> 24:12.571
And, you know, I...
24:13.717 --> 24:18.200
I wonder about how valuable the information he was giving the Spanish really was, right?
24:18.241 --> 24:20.742
Was this really stuff they couldn't have gotten anywhere else?
24:21.263 --> 24:31.711
Or is this stuff that they, um, you know, that he was just telling them things that, things that they already knew or that they, if they had just been more creative, they could have found out themselves.
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Yeah.
24:32.391 --> 24:39.177
Remind us again, David, what his position was when he was, um, giving information to the Spanish or selling information to the Spanish?
24:39.637 --> 24:40.778
What was his job?
24:41.581 --> 24:43.021
He's a general.
24:43.682 --> 24:46.923
He's stationed for a period in New Orleans.
24:47.903 --> 24:50.544
He had moved to... Is he from Maryland originally, I think?
24:51.524 --> 24:53.085
He had moved to Kentucky.
24:53.125 --> 24:58.087
He's one of the founders or one of the early leading citizens of Frankfurt.
24:59.747 --> 25:06.930
He was stationed at the Army position there in New Orleans for a while.
25:07.010 --> 25:09.430
A crucial military and diplomatic position.
25:09.470 --> 25:11.251
He's the highest ranking...
25:11.764 --> 25:34.783
general at the time the wow he was the second rank second ranking general behind anthony wayne and then in 1796 wayne dies in erie yeah and he is then promoted now wayne wayne and wilkinson had a huge rift which is alluded to in the chapter yeah
25:35.866 --> 26:04.072
um and so wilkinson is definitely out for himself he's an opportunist and i think that's what sam really points out yeah he's even a true an american right yeah yeah yeah but it's what's interesting is the folks that were claiming had the claims against him that he was a spy during his lifetime was a guy named daniel clark and this is not in the book per se but
26:05.051 --> 26:13.556
Daniel Clark was an American that lived in New Orleans and joined the Spanish for a time.
26:13.937 --> 26:19.920
New Orleans was controlled by the Spanish and then came back to the United States.
26:20.601 --> 26:28.405
And so he was very in tune with who was showing up and who was doing stuff in New Orleans with the Spanish.
26:28.846 --> 26:29.326
Interesting.
26:29.690 --> 26:32.692
So that, that lent credibility to the claims again.
26:32.712 --> 26:32.972
Yeah.
26:33.352 --> 26:33.492
Yeah.
26:34.252 --> 26:41.076
You certainly, and Spain is certainly interested in, I mean, they're, they are paying off a number of these folks in the Western country.
26:41.096 --> 26:53.242
And then you get, uh, Don Diego, the Spanish minister of the United States during the revolution is truly, you know,
26:55.389 --> 26:56.590
Oh, yeah.
26:56.710 --> 26:57.031
Sure.
26:57.251 --> 26:59.233
He's a Spanish minister to the United States.
26:59.413 --> 27:00.073
Exactly.
27:01.254 --> 27:08.720
But as soon as the war is over, Spain and the United States become rivals.
27:08.760 --> 27:10.302
And that's one of the things we forget.
27:10.322 --> 27:14.665
The United States and Spain has a border for 40 years.
27:15.226 --> 27:15.526
Oh, yeah.
27:16.568 --> 27:22.399
And that's the part in, like, Spain is meddling on the American frontier, especially in the 1780s.
27:22.499 --> 27:27.909
They're trying to get with James Wilkinson, who had designed his position in the army.
27:30.593 --> 27:34.354
trying to separate Kentucky from from the United States.
27:34.414 --> 27:35.834
Right.
27:36.174 --> 27:41.575
Oh, then you have George Morgan, who was a witness against Burr in the trial.
27:41.595 --> 27:42.296
That's what I write about.
27:42.316 --> 27:48.237
But before that, he was why Burr shows up at his house trying to recruit him and his family.
27:49.117 --> 27:53.578
Morgan had been trying to he worked with the Spanish for about 40 days.
27:54.478 --> 27:57.699
and set up the colony of New Madrid in present-day Missouri.
27:58.619 --> 28:06.581
So it's at the end of the Articles of Confederation, that period, where people don't know what's going on and they're trying to fix their bets.
28:07.702 --> 28:11.983
And they see the Spanish as a, hey, this might be a better opportunity for us.
28:12.583 --> 28:15.344
Stable economy, free trade on the Mississippi.
28:16.664 --> 28:19.905
And then it kind of all falls apart.
28:20.285 --> 28:20.465
Right.
28:21.440 --> 28:28.803
I mean, you have to imagine the likelihood that the United States would be able to control this territory all the way up to the Mississippi River.
28:29.323 --> 28:31.184
And that's a big speculation.
28:31.304 --> 28:35.165
And these guys are betting, and some of them betting on both sides.
28:35.465 --> 28:37.926
Yeah, oh, definitely.
28:37.946 --> 28:48.210
We're talking with David Head and Tim Hemes, who have edited a great book, A Republic of Scoundrels, The Schemers, Intriguers, and Adventurers Who Created a New American Nation.
28:48.750 --> 28:49.711
I'm just wondering...
28:51.525 --> 28:54.986
if you have ideas, I know it's hate to ask someone who's just finished a book.
28:55.006 --> 29:01.729
If you have ideas now for a second volume, if there are people you left out that you really think should be in this cast of characters.
29:03.389 --> 29:03.510
Yeah.
29:03.550 --> 29:19.335
Well, one of the parts of getting the book together is that I had to, I had to restrain Tim from getting like, you know, three dozen guys, you know, like we're not going to be able to have a 500,000 word book here.
29:19.375 --> 29:20.756
No publisher is going to go for that.
29:21.294 --> 29:28.239
But yes, Tim definitely has a number of guys that we could do a sequel to.
29:28.960 --> 29:29.120
Yeah.
29:29.640 --> 29:30.741
You want to mention something, Tim?
29:31.581 --> 29:40.007
Oh, well, there's Dr. John Conley on the frontier, who's a loyalist who's disrupting, probably most known for his involvement in the Dunmore War.
29:40.468 --> 29:41.368
Right, yeah.
29:42.389 --> 29:43.170
You have...
29:43.957 --> 30:05.565
you know the the folks with the holland land company i know you talked about robert morris earlier yeah i was thinking about the that whole scandal with the holland land company in western new york um kind of a little bit of part of my roots there okay growing up in chautauqua sure um so there's a bunch of different ones minor players
30:06.625 --> 30:12.352
If there's the State of Franklin guys out there, that would be good.
30:13.353 --> 30:17.818
Citizen Jeunet was somebody that we didn't quite work out.
30:18.319 --> 30:19.580
James Reynolds, it seems.
30:19.620 --> 30:20.822
James Reynolds, yes.
30:22.378 --> 30:27.723
Once you start looking, you see these kind of characters all over the place.
30:28.323 --> 30:30.385
The other question is, are there enough sources?
30:30.465 --> 30:33.908
Is there somebody who has enough expertise?
30:33.988 --> 30:41.895
One of the things that led us to do this as an edited volume was just the variety of characters there are.
30:41.915 --> 30:50.462
It was just too much to expect any one person or any two people to become expert in all these different things, especially when some of these guys are doing things secretively.
30:51.022 --> 30:52.563
You really have to dig and unearth it.
30:53.003 --> 31:00.567
So the approach of asking individual experts, right, to draw from their research, I think was really effective.
31:00.627 --> 31:05.850
So yes, if you have a scoundrel that you've always wanted to write about.
31:07.751 --> 31:08.451
Yeah.
31:08.491 --> 31:16.595
Has this made you think differently about the founding and about the birth of the Republic, looking at these particular characters?
31:18.929 --> 31:27.852
I think one of the things, and this is an idea that I've had for a while, but is really that the founding is not just the founders, but it's a founding generation.
31:27.972 --> 31:28.232
Right.
31:28.992 --> 31:31.232
And it's all cast of characters.
31:32.533 --> 31:41.815
And I think it's a more complete picture of the revolution and the early republic.
31:42.556 --> 31:43.796
Yeah.
31:43.896 --> 31:47.177
It's also, it's even more remarkable that,
31:48.069 --> 31:51.870
you know, that this is all stuck together, right?
31:52.050 --> 31:54.031
It's even more remarkable that the whole thing worked.
31:54.611 --> 32:11.037
You know, so many people actively undermining the effort to stay together as a country when you have, you know, European powers like the British and the Spanish who, you know, their determined policy is for the United States to be broken up.
32:11.758 --> 32:13.558
Smaller countries, they'll be easier to deal with.
32:14.359 --> 32:15.099
How many people
32:15.618 --> 32:18.461
are saying, you know, forget this public virtue stuff.
32:18.622 --> 32:20.083
I'm going to go get what's mine.
32:20.103 --> 32:23.047
Yeah, there's so many pieces.
32:23.067 --> 32:28.533
There's so much just kind of pulling it apart, how it all stuck together in the end.
32:28.753 --> 32:32.958
It's just so remarkable when you think about the cast of characters.
32:32.998 --> 32:33.138
Yeah.
32:34.676 --> 32:45.305
It's also reassuring knowing that they weren't creating the new nation, the Constitution for the virtuous, but that they understood human nature in a really profound way.
32:45.925 --> 32:50.429
I'm now talking about the Washingtons, Madisons, as opposed to the Wilkins.
32:50.469 --> 32:54.032
Wilkinson certainly understood human nature, and that's how he benefited.
32:54.924 --> 32:55.104
Right.
32:55.124 --> 32:55.945
That's a good point.
32:56.785 --> 33:00.928
You don't want to have a system that works only if there are good people, good, competent people in charge.
33:01.028 --> 33:01.288
Right.
33:01.408 --> 33:01.668
Right.
33:01.768 --> 33:09.573
And it would be a system which you could have incompetent, corrupt people in charge and it still works.
33:10.114 --> 33:11.154
Yeah, that's true.
33:11.194 --> 33:12.315
That's much harder to do.
33:13.115 --> 33:16.518
But yeah, that's a good point about, you know, if you only...
33:18.058 --> 33:20.600
It's Madison's old line about men being angels, right?
33:20.640 --> 33:23.103
Yes, if men were angels, no government would be necessary.
33:24.124 --> 33:26.366
Good and wise statesmen will not always be at the helm.
33:27.093 --> 33:27.553
Exactly.
33:27.894 --> 33:29.315
Yeah.
33:29.355 --> 33:30.696
Not, not, not, not always.
33:30.976 --> 33:38.421
It is kind of optimistic there.
33:39.502 --> 33:40.482
Well, thank you both.
33:40.502 --> 33:50.910
We've been talking with David Head and Tim Hemes, who are the editors of a Republic of Scoundrels, the schemers, intriguers, and adventurers who created a new American nation.
33:50.990 --> 33:51.970
So thank you for joining us.
33:51.990 --> 33:53.912
Thank you for writing the book, putting this together.
33:53.952 --> 33:54.132
And I'm,
33:54.721 --> 34:18.495
glad that uh tim had the idea and that the pandemic made it possible and you two guys have actually never met in person you were saying yes that's one of the uh that's one of the strange but also wonderful things about the the way that we work now is that you can do all this uh electronically virtually and on the phone well thank you thank you so thank you so much for joining us i want to thank jonathan lane our producer and our
34:19.019 --> 34:20.420
you know, listeners around the country.
34:20.500 --> 34:24.103
We have people tuning in regularly in all parts of the world.
34:24.183 --> 34:26.165
So every week I thank some of them.
34:26.225 --> 34:34.471
And if you are in one of these places, send Jonathan Lane an email, jlane at revolution250.org, and he'll send you some of our Revolution 250 swag.
34:35.252 --> 34:46.561
So this week, those who are in Boston, Lexington, and Taunton here in Massachusetts, as well as Houston, Delhi, Frankfurt, Germany, Franklin, Tennessee,
34:47.076 --> 34:53.440
That's Davenport, Florida, Los Angeles, Long Beach, all places between and beyond.
34:53.500 --> 34:54.380
Thanks for joining us.
34:54.440 --> 34:57.382
Now we will be piped out on the road to Boston.
34:57.462 --> 34:58.103
Thank you so much.