GEORGIA PEACHES Chapter One

I have always been confused by Patrick Henry. He is famous for saying, “Give me liberty or give me death”, a bold statement that should have gotten a lot of press. Yet nobody at the time recorded him saying it.  

He also supposedly said “If this be treason, let us make the most of it”, another bold statement which, again, nobody wrote down at the time. What is fact is that he was always suspicious of the power of government. We largely have him to thank for the Bill of Rights, today a beacon of freedom for billions of people world wide. But he was also the CEO of the Virginia Yazoo Company, which sold swamp land to war veterans and unsuspecting tax payers. The Yazoo Company and its fellow scams shows that from the moment it was born the United States was a nation dedicated to the success of rich liars cheats and thieves. 

My guess is the Yazoo Indians were only joking with French explorer Robert de La Salle.   In 1682, la Salle asked about the water at the edge of their town and the Yazoos told him it was a river, A 180 mile long by 100 mile wide “river” which did not so much flow into the Mississippi River, as seep. It was a swamp.  But the last laugh was on the Yazoo Indians because La Salle named the “river” after them. And after the Revolution, that patriot Patrick Henry used his freedom to fleece a lot of unsuspecting would be capitalist by selling them Yazoo swamp land.

Now, even in 1789 nobody was interested in buying a swamp, So the American crooks decided to call their inventory the Yazoo Lands, instead.  Besides patriot and ex-governor Patrick Henry's Virginia Yazoo Company, there was the Tennessee Yazoo Company and the Carolina Yazoo Company. And together they formed the first American lobbying firm, what they called "The Combined Society".  It's stated purpose was  “By means of certain influences...to obtain from the State (of Georgia) large grants of land...for the end of making a large sum of money...” They were certain they could obtain a deed from Georgia, because although Georgia did not claim the swamp, Georgia was also flat broke.

Georgia had paid for its war of revolution by claiming lands westward to the Mississippi and beyond, and used them as collateral to borrow gold and silver. The problem was that land was mostly swamp during part of the year, and during the rest of the year was completely swamp. And sliver that was hardly ever swamp  was owned by native American tribes,  like the Yazoos, and claimed by the King of France.

The solution was first suggested by an ex-militia Colonel named Thomas Marston Green.  He'd been farming out in the Pine forests when a bunch of Spanish soldiers and surveyors showed up looking to inventory the lands they had just bought from the French. Colonel Green realized that after the inventory would come the taxes. And he hated paying taxes.  Luckily Green had no objection to collecting taxes. So in the fall of 1784 Green showed up in the state capital of Louisville, Georgia, suggesting the state take over his plantation as "Bourbon County".  It would be the largest county in the United States, and Marston Green would, of course, run it, selling the land he did not want and splitting the take with the state. And on 7 February, 1785, the rich white men running Georgia passed the Bourbon County Act, and waited for the money to roll in. 

Unfortunately, Green went home and told the Spanish to get out because Georgia was now running things. They threw him in jail. And as long as Georgia was taking that attitude, the Spanish decided Americans could no longer use the port of New Orleans to ship their produce to market. That made the settlers in western Georgia, very unhappy.  In 1788 the state of Georgia backed down and repealed the Bourbon County Act.  But that still left Georgia flat broke.

The next answer they tried in the fall of 1788 was the infamous Pine Barren Land Speculation, in which a dozen rich white men surveyed (badly) about thirty million acres of Georgia and sold it off (quickly), mostly to smaller speculators,  Everybody thought they were going to get rich. The problem this time was that Georgians occupied only about nine million acres. And for the new fast spaces claimed, there were a lot of duplicate titles, and five or six owners for every section of land. Over night land prices went from sky high to bargain basement,  inspiring a fake advertisement, offering, “ Ten millions of acres of valuable pine barren land in the province of Utopia, on which there are several very sumptuous air castles, ready furnished”.

This business model would later be called a Ponzi scheme, and the only people who got rich were the ones at the top, and none of that money trickled down to the state of Georgia. So in 1789, this time under the Governorship of an arrogant fire plug named George Mathews, they tried it for a third time,  only bigger. And this was when Patrick Henry got into the game.

It was enough to make you wonder why the American people continue to have such childlike faith in capitalism, considering how often they keep getting screwed by it. It's a morality play, of sorts, if the moral is "There's a sucker born every minute".

Patrick Henry had never been much of a business man. When he was 18, the “indolent, dreamy (and) procrastinating...ill-dressed young man” impulsively married the equally impulsive, plump and buxom Sarah "Sallie" Shelton.  He went to work for Sarah's father in his Hanover Tavern, but after a few months as a barkeep Patrick decided on a career which would not require so much physical labor. With only six weeks of study he passed the Virginia bar. The parents of the bride were so thrilled, they set the fecund couple up with some land and slaves – an instant entrance into Virginia's upper class. It was the perfect foundation for a politician. But, alas, Patrick would be short of money his whole life. Which is why he formed the Virginia Yazoo company.

The 53 year old Patrick Henry assembled a slightly odd group of investors. At 53, droll and humorless, Paul Carrington was a long time member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and a judge of the Court of Appeals. At barely 30 years old, Abraham Venerable was an up-and-comer in Virginia society, while 50 year old Francis Watkins was the clerk for the local courts.

But the key investor, the actual money behind the original Virginia Yazoo Company was David Ross, who had already assembled 100,000 acres in Virginia, buying up plantations and farms abandoned by loyalists during and after the revolution.  Ross also owned 200,000 acres of Kentucky, and several thousand more in what would become Tennessee (claimed at the time by North Carolina). He was a very land rich young man. And, oddly, he was Scottish

See, after the 1746 battle of Culloden, Scotland was under the royal lash, and David Ross stood to inherit nothing from his father's now looted Scottish estates. So in the middle of the 1750's he joined the horde of Scots emigrating to the American colonies. But where most Scotsmen chose the less settled Carolinas, and arrived with little but the clothes on their back, David Ross chose Virginia and arrived with contacts in the colonial government, and with cash,  Almost immediately he invested in the Oxford Iron Works along the Potomac River and the Antietam Iron Works in Maryland. He then began buying land and planting tobacco. It is hard to escape the suspicion that David Ross's family had sold out their fellow Stuart supporters, perhaps his own cousins. It is what the losing side of a rebellion often has to do to save the family fortunes.

Most years the iron works struggled to get by, and the tobacco barely covered operating expenses.  To really build a fortune, Colonial Virginia planters - such as the gout ridden George Mason - used their large plantations as collateral to buy cheap Indian land north of the Ohio River. The new owners then surveyed it quickly, subdivided it in haste and sold it off in 100 to 600 acre sections to land hungry farmers at inflated prices.  To quote from Wood Holton's 1994 paper in 'The Journal of Southern History:  “Land speculation was a principal source of income for the Virginia gentry, the 2-to-5 % of families who stood atop the colony's pyramid of wealth and power...During the frontier years, absentee landholders owned three-quarters of the region's total acreage...little acreage was left for residents. ”

The only draw back was that the invasion of English farmers set off the French and Indian War, which brought the sale of western lands to a halt for nine long years.  Then  in 1763, after the peace was signed, King George III issued a Royal Proclamation that henceforth no colony could lay claim to any land west of the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. Individual farmers were still free to negotiate with tribes for acreage on Indian lands, but their property rights would not be recognized by the English crown, meaning the land could be handed down father to son but could not be resold, ending speculating in Indian lands.  Wood Holton argues it was this loss of income which spurred Virginians, like the “great land-monger” George Washington, and speculators Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and Patrick Henry, to support the American Revolution

Even before the American victory at Yorktown, in June of 1779, Virginia and her governor Patrick Henry, joined the other southern colonies in reviving virtually all of the land claims rejected by George III's government. George Mason rehired his old employee Daniel Boone to began “exploring” new lands to the west of Boonesborough, paying him in land -  from which Boone earned $20,000, a hefty fortune during the revolution. And on 20 November, 1789, the Virginia Yazoo Company, headed by Patrick Henry and David Ross,  along with the Tennessee Company and the Carolina Company, formally applied for land grants from the state of Georgia for tracts along the Yazoo River/swamp.  

To the wealthy speculators who were also the founding fathers, this is what they meant by the word “freedom”. And that is the morality play we shall now follow.

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PAY BACK - Martin Van Buren Takes a Dump

I should point out that when Martin Van Buren (above) was dumped into an Indiana hog wallow, ruining a very expensive pair of pearl gray trousers and coating his elegant frock coat with everything a happy swine leaves behind in a porcine sauna, he deserved it.  Of course “The Red Fox of Kinderhook” was far too crafty a politician to admit he had been humiliated. That would just draw more attention to his humiliation. As the venomous Virginia politician John Randolph observed, Martin Van Buren always “rowed with muffled oars.” But everybody knew this traffic accident had been staged as payback for Van Buren's insult to Hoosiers. What goes around comes around. And it was useless to point out that the insult to Hoosiers had mostly come from Van Buren's predecessor, the still popular Andrew Jackson.

Even the frail shadow of federal authority which existed in 1828 was too much for President Andrew Jackson. Over his two terms, he did his very best to weaken the Federal government, in all its endeavors except the ones he approved of. The ideology that argues against "big government" is still powerful in American politics today. Jackson vetoed a new charter for the National Bank - precursor of the Federal Reserve - which left the entire banking system unregulated. He streamlined the sale of public lands, which energized the speculators who were overcharging the yeoman farmers. He cut entire programs out of the Federal budget, and insisted the states take over many others. And at the same time he backed the Seminole Indian nation into a war.

But it was not until three months after Van Buren's inauguration in March of 1837 that these pigeons came home to roost. The massive real estate bubble suddenly popped. Over half of the nation's unregulated banks suddenly failed. And by January of 1838 half a million Americans were unemployed. Or to put it more simply, suddenly it was prom night and Martin Van Buren was Carrie. And like Carrie, Van Buren then made things worse by slashing out at everything in sight. Oh, he continued the unending expensive Seminole war. But he insisted on killing Federal funding for the National Road, which had reduced mail time between Washington and Indianapolis from several months to less than a week. Van Buren was so doctrinaire he even sold off the construction workers' picks and shovels. And for frontier farmers trying to get their produce to market, that made any economic recovery that much harder.

See, once across the Ohio border, the $7,000 a mile construction costs for the National Road was supposed to be supplied by land sales. But when the real estate bubble popped in 1837, that funding evaporated. Maintenance for the 600 mile road was paid for by the tolls of four to twelve cents (the equivalent of $2.50 today) for each ten mile long section, paid by the 200 wagons, horseback riders, farmers and herds of livestock that used each section of the road every day. But after 1837 that $36,000 a year (almost a million dollars today) had to do double duty, finishing the road and providing maintenance for the road already finished.  And it was not enough money.

Particularly in Indiana, there were long sections beyond the two urban centers, ((Indianapolis and Richmond) where farmers using the road to drive their livestock to market faced forests of 14 inch high tree stumps. These provided clearance for the farmers' and emigrants' high riding Conestoga wagons, but between the stumps, the road bed was in such bad shape that constant repairs to their equipment bankrupted many of the 200 stagecoach lines trying to survive in Indiana. And every frontier farmer and businessman knew exactly who was to blame for all of this –“President Martin Van Ruin”.  As a result, in the election of 1840, in Hendricks County, (just southwest of Indianapolis), and along the National Road, Van Buren received 651 votes, while Whig candidate William Henry Harrison received 1,189 votes. Nationwide, Van Buren carried just 7 of the 26 states.

Normally this Hoosier hostility would not have mattered much, but just six months after taking office, the new President Harrison died of a pneumonia, and all previous assumptions had to be rethought . The Whigs had picked John Tyler as Vice President, mostly to get rid of him. Now, disastrously, he was the head of their party. The overjoyed Democrats began referring to Tyler as “His Accidency.” The adroit and dapper Martin Van Buren began thinking he could avenge his defeat and take the road back to the White House in 1844. All he needed was a cunning plan, which he just happened to have.

In February of 1842, Van Buren (above) journeyed to Nashville, Tennessee, for an extended visit with his mentor, Andrew Jackson, hoping some of Old Hickory’s popularity would rub off on him. It did not. Heading north, Van Buren then set off for a tour of the frontier states. He was well received in Kentucky, and the pro-slavery areas around Cincinnati, Ohio, but the closer he got to Indiana the more reserved the crowds became.

In early June he was met at the Indiana border by 200 loyal Democrats. Van Buren gave them a speech at Sloan's Brick Stage House on Main Street (the National Road) in Richmond, Indiana. But the vast majority of the local Quakers remained skeptical. And while Van Buren was speaking, noted the Richmond Palladium newspaper, “...a mysterious chap partially sawed the underside of the double tree crossbar of the stage...so that it would snap on the first hard pull…”

The next morning the stagecoach and its distinguished passenger headed for Indianapolis, the “Capital in the Woods”. But just two miles outside of Richmond, while bouncing over ruts and stumps, the carriage splashed into a great deep mud hole. And when the horses were whipped to yank the carriage out, the weakened cross brace snapped. Dressed in his silk finery, Martin Van Buren was forced to disembark into the foul waters and wade to shore.

There was no indication of any further sabotage on Van Buren's 74 mile ride across the mostly open prairie, which took the better part of three days because of the road's condition. And the ex-President and candidate made it to the Hoosier capital in time to keep his appointments and make his speeches over the weekend of June 9-10. He took two more days to make political contacts, shaking hands and trading confidences, before, on Wednesday, June 13, he boarded yet another mail coach for the 75 mile journey to Illinois. But just six miles down the road, Van Buren had to pass through another Quaker bastion, this one called Plainfield, Indiana.

The town earned its name from the “plain folk” who had laid out the town ten years earlier on the east bank of White Lick Creek. This Henricks county town was straddled by the National Road, which provided Plainfield's livelihood. Less than a quarter mile up Main Street from the  ford over the "crick", amidst a stand of Elms, the Quakers had built a camp ground and a meeting house. And here, that Wednesday morning, were gathered several hundred Democrats and Wigs (mostly Quakers in their “Sunday, go to meeting clothes”), to see the once and maybe future President ride past. The crowd may have even been increased because the driver of this particular leg of the President's journey was a local boy, twenty-something Mason Wright. Soon, the crowd heard the blast of the horn from Mason's lips, warning of the VIP's bouncing approach down the gentle half mile slope toward White Lick Creek.

The disaster occurred abruptly. The coach rushed into view, with Van Buren's arm waving out of the coach's open window, while Teamster Wright whipped the horses to move faster. Faster? Shouldn't he be slowing down to let people get a view of the President?  And then, just as the carriage came abreast of the center of the campground, the coach was forced to veer to the right to avoid a large "hog waller" mud hole in the very center of the dilapidated National Road. And as if  it had been planned, the right front wheel bounced over the hard knuckle of an exposed bare elm root. The carriage teetered for an instant until the rear wheel clipped the same root. The teetering coach then careened past the point of no return.  Mason Wright leaped free while the coach crashed heavily onto its side into the very center of the smelly, sticky, hot black hog waller. Martin Van Buren had been dumped upon. Again.

A Springfield Illinois newspaper would note a few days later, “He was always opposed to that road, but we were not aware that the road held a grudge against him!” Wrote a more bitter Wig newspaper, “the only free soil of which Van Buren had knowledge (of) was the dirt he scraped from his person at Plainfield.”  The driver and witnesses blamed the Elm (above), which could not defend itself. Van Buren was uninjured, but once again had to extricate himself from his injured coach. After pouring the mud and other unidentified muck from his boots, Van Buren made his way on foot further west along the National Road to Fisher’s Tavern, at what is now 106 E. Main Street. There, Mrs. Fisher helped the President clean up his pants and coat, and wash the mud from his wide brimmed hat.

Back at the campground. the honest Quakers helped to right the stage, re-attach the horses, and carefully and respectfully deliver the coach to Fishers to collect the President. But it is hard to believe that, as Mr. Van Buren splashed across White Lick "crick" many of those Quakers were not smiling with the sly satisfaction of a job well done.

 A few days later Teamster Mason Wright was awarded a $5 silk hat, although it was never explicitly stated it was for his skill in staging a stage crash - call it political slapstick. But the tree who's root had provided the fulcrum for the prank would forever more be known as the Van Buren Elm.  In 1916 (above) the Daughters of the American Revolution even gave the tree a wooden plaque of its own.

But the hard winter of 1926 brought the Van Buren Elm down, and a local doctor lamented, “The many friends of the old historic tree are loath to have it removed from their midst.”

Van Buren (above) made it safely to Illinois without further accidents. He was  met a few miles outside of Springfield by a small delegation of legislators, including the young Abraham Lincoln. But Mr. Van Buren was never elected to public office again. The judgement of Hoosiers stood firm.

The Quakers' Meeting House still stands among the stand of Elms at 256 East Main Street (corner of Vine) in Plainfield.  After the original Van Buren Elm fell, a replacement was planted, and in memory, the old tree received a bronze plaque (above).  This inspired a local grade school to be named for the dapper Democrat who stumbled in their town, and a street was named after him as well. But in Plainfield the National Road (now U.S. Route 40), is still called Main Street. That is true of many Midwestern towns bisected by the National Road. They truly were America's Main Street. And Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson had both been wrong about that. But it was Van Buren who took the fall.

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ANGER MANAGEMENT - Wanting To Kill Kennedy

 

I’ll bet Officer Lester Free had no trouble spotting the ten year old bulbous, toothy Buick Roadmaster, even in the press of holiday traffic.

It boldly appeared at the peak of the bridge across Lake Worth (above), and passed him, sulking onto the palm tree lined boulevard of Royal Poinciana Way.

As the patrol car blended into traffic under the warm December sun, Officer Free (above)  noted the interloper’s New Hampshire plates matched the alert, and he called it in. Once his back up arrived, Free judged where best to make his standard traffic stop. What Officer Free could not know was that he was already four days too late.

Five days earlier, on Saturday, 10 December 1960, the old man spent almost an hour in the parking lot of his West Palm Beach motel (above), wrapping seven sticks of dynamite around four large cans of gasoline. He then inserted blasting caps into the sticks, and wired the infernal machine to the Buick's cigarette lighter. When he pushed the lighter in, the bomb would be powerful enough to, as a Secret Service Agent  later admitted, “level a small mountain.”

Early the next morning, Sunday, 11 December, the old man crossed the nearly deserted bridge and drove quietly across the narrow island (above). He pulled his Buick into the brush flanking Monterey Road. Ahead of him was the nondescript intersection with North Ocean Boulevard, and the hidden entrance to the estate at 1095.

The old man knew that beneath its clay tile roof and white stucco walls (above), there were 7 bedrooms in the two-story 11, 000 square foot home. And although he could not see the Atlantic Ocean, the 73 year old knew it was just a few hundred feet beyond the house. People who could afford ocean front property on Palm Beach Island were not interested in sharing what they had, not even the view. And the man the old man had come here to kill, was living in that estate.

The old man was  Richard Pavlick. He knew his target would be going to Sunday Mass. It was Richard’s intention to crash his car into the target’s car, and then set off his infernal machine, killing them both. Richard was thus ready, just before ten that morning, when the target car edged out of the driveway from 1095. The would be killer's hand was on the Buick’s ignition key.

But as Kennedy's  car edged onto the street, in the back seat of the limousine, Richard saw a woman with dark hair.  It had to be the target’s wife, which meant the target’s two children were probably in the car too. Richard waited. What stopped him at that crucial moment was not the police nor the Secret Service, but some shred of sanity floating free in Richard’s unhinged mind.  He hated Kennedy because he was Catholic. And yet, in his morality, Richard reflected the Catholic adoration of Mary.

There would be another time. Not today, but soon. Soon, this target must die. In Richard’s eyes, this man had used his privilege and wealth and the influence of the church to steal the office of President of the United States.

In a nation that seems obsessed with being more partisan than ever before, the presidential election of 1960 shouts for attention. According to the history books, the election was settled on Tuesday, 8  November. But in fact, the decision dragged out for weeks, with Republican lawsuits in 11 states.

On Tuesday, 11 December,  a Federal judge in Texas rejected a Republican lawsuit asking for a recount, and two hours later the state awarded all 27 of its electors to Kennedy. That put John Fitzgerald Kennedy over the top, and it was not until the next day, 12 December, that the state of Illinois rejected a similar Republican lawsuit, and awarded its 24 electors to Kennedy.

Still, the margin of victory was slim; by one tenth of one percent of the 68 million votes cast. It is still accepted by many partisans that the election was stolen by voter fraud in Chicago and Texas (both Democratic strongholds in 1960) and even earlier, when Joe Kennedy spent the equivalent of $100 million to secure the election of his second son, John.

But even if Kennedy had lost Illinois, he still would have won where it really counted, in the electoral collage. And in Texas, which Kennedy carried by only 46,000 votes, 2% of all votes cast, there were at least two precincts which showed more Democratic votes than registered voters. But an examination of all Texas voting records (as well as Illinois) show similar errors for both candidates through out most states.  In an election casting, counting and recording 68,000 million votes in one day, errors will always occur.

So, in an election in which six states were decided by less than 1%, and 3 more states by less than 2%, and seven more states by less than 3% of their totals, partisan conspiracy theories were certain to spring up.  In every case, a second look at the evidence shows that no fraud actually occurred. 

But, in the opinion of the partisan Richard Pavlick, there was another reason to suspect John Kennedy of stealing the election that trumped all others.

Kennedy was the first Catholic elected president of the United States. Writing for the newspaper The Texas Baptist Standard, L.R. Elliot warned, that Catholicism followed “a consistent pattern of seeking and using all the power and control it can gain to advance its agenda"  – a charge strikingly similar to later charges laid against Muslims.

And Richard Pavlick was well known, in his home town of Belmont, New Hampshire - “The best town by a Dam site” - for his anti-Catholic rants at public meetings. He was also a rabid letter writer to the local paper on the same issue, and obsessed with proper etiquette in displaying the American flag. One of Richard's few friends in Belmont had been Thomas Murphy, Richard’s old boss and the Postmaster for Belmont. And it had been Postmaster Murphy who had warned the Secret Service about Richard’s behavior since the election.

After the November election, Richard had signed over his farm to a neighboring youth camp, packed up his remaining belongings in his car, and left town. Murphy later received a card from Pavlick postmarked Hyanis Port, on Cape Cod, where the Kennedy family had an estate. And when Murphy received a similar card from Pavlick post marked from Palm Beach, where he knew Kennedy was staying during the post election transition, Thomas Murphy immediately notified the Secret Service.

The Secret Service were charged with the security of the President, but not yet with protecting candidates or the President-elect,. Still they began interviewing people around Belmont. They learned Richard had bought dynamite, and once had a rifle confiscated after threatening a water meter reader.  This inspired them to alert to the Palm Beach police chief Homer Large. And upon hearing Officer Free’s call for back up, Chief Large ordered that all units to converge on the suspect’s car.

They stopped the Buick in the middle of the street, and asked the driver to step out. They found Richard to be pleasant and cooperative, readily producing his New Hampshire drivers license.

Richard explained that he had been living out of his car since he got to Florida, and that this morning he was headed for St. Edward’s Catholic Church (above), on North Country Road, because, he said, he wanted to see where the new President went to church. The conversation was going along pleasantly, and the officers’ had begun to drop their guard, when Officer Free called out the single word, “Bomb”. That ended the polite conversation.

In some ways Richard Pavlick seemed relieved that he had been caught. He watched impassively while the bomb was disabled, and his car carefully searched. And later, when questioned at the police headquarters on South County Road, Richard explained, “I had the crazy idea I wanted to stop Kennedy from being president.” But he also added, “The Kennedy money bought him the White House. I wanted to teach the United States the presidency is not for sale.”

At the end of January 1961, Richard was committed to Public Health Service Hospital in Springfield, Missouri.   In March he was indicted in Palm Beach for threatening the life of John Kennedy. It would not be a federal offense to threaten the life of the President until after 22 November, 1963. Charges against Richard were still pending at that time, but they were dropped in December of 1963. However Richard was not released from the hospital until 13 December, 1966. He died unnoticed to the public, at the V.A. hospital in Manchester, New Hampshire on Veterans Day, 1975.

It can be argued that his mad man was inspired by the anti-Catholic rhetoric of politicians, or the bigotry of the pundits of his day. But that is the way it is with madmen. They receive far too little discouragement, until we actually see them coming over the rise in the bridge. By then it is often too late.

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