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Abigail Adams, Matchmaker

Nothing cheered Abigail Adams so much as a wedding. During her lifetime of difficulty and sadness, she needed cheering. Her husband was often absent, a beloved son died young, a daughter lost a battle with breast cancer, another son became a dissolute alcoholic. Through it all, her family and servants came to view her as Abigail Adams, matchmaker.

She thought of her servants as family, kept their secrets and hosted their marriage ceremonies. She married off six pairs of them, five of them in her own home.

In 1801, that meant the White House.

1793 plans for the White House by James Hoban

Abigail Adams, Matchmaker

Abigail’s nephew, William Smith Shaw, knew how much she loved weddings. “I declare I wish you would have, Aunt, a wedding every night in the week, for I plainly see that it gives you better spirits and consequently better health, than all the medicine in the world,” he wrote to her in 1798.

“I am a great friend to Matrimony, and always like to promote it, where there is a prospect of happiness & comfort,” she replied.

Portrait of William Smith Shaw by Gilbert Stuart.

She had just hosted the wedding of her servant Abigail Hunt and a local farmer, Ebenezer Harmon, at her farm in Quincy, Mass. “I regaled them with a Glass of wine, & some cake and Cheese,” she wrote. Then she went to bed as the wedding party went off dancing. “I retired to rest at about nine, and with the pleasurable reflection of having made Several honest families happy & pleasd I enjoyd a comfortable nights repose.”

John Adams heartily approved of Abigail’s matchmaking among the servants. “I hope you will marry Louisa & Betcy Howard and all the single ones, who are ripe,” he wrote to her from Philadelphia in 1798.

The First Wedding

In 1784, Abigail Adams made her first match. John Adams was then serving as minister to Great Britain and she was about to sail for London to join him. She hired John Briesler, a local man, to accompany her across the Atlantic. Before she left, she wrote to her husband about him . She called Briesler “a steady frugal fellow, with a mind much above the vulgar.” The Adamses came to depend on Briesler. “As good a servant as ever bore the name,” she later wrote. If it hadn’t been for him, she wrote years later, she never would have gone into public life. He was “virtuous, handy and attentive.”

Briesler was especially attentive to Abigail’s 23-year-old ladies’ maid, Esther Field. In 1788, just a few weeks before they were to return to America, Esther came to Abigail in much distress. She confessed Briesler had gotten her pregnant.

“[P]oor Brisler looks so humble and is so attentive, so faithfull & so trust worthy, that I am willing to do all I can for them,” Abigail wrote to her sister, Mary Cranch.

abigail-adams-attacked-thomas-jefferson-portrait

Abigail Adams by Gilbert Stuart

Abigail Adams, matchmaker, got them married a few days later in St. Marylebone church in London. Abigail worried about Esther delivering the baby aboard the ship returning home. She arranged for a nurse to come with them to help with the childbirth. The baby, a girl, was born aboard the ship. “We got through this business much better than I feared we should. I had for the first time in my life, to dress the little animal,” she wrote to her daughter.

Over the years, Esther had more babies. Abigail, however, found ways to keep her employed.

In 1797, she hosted the wedding of another servant, Polly Doble Howard, and Jonathan Baxter, Jr.

The White House

Abigail had managed the farm and family during her husband’s long absences. She engineered the moves to join him. She set up official houses in London and Paris on his diplomatic missions; to New York when he served as vice president of the United States and to Philadelphia as president. Then, three years into his presidency she had to set up another house. This time, she did it in the Wilderness City – Washington, D.C. – where the seat of government had moved.

It was November 1800. Abigail was 56 years old and not looking forward to the move. She had stayed at her Quincy farm fighting off raging fevers as her husband fought off his political enemies. He moved into the President’s House a few weeks earlier than she.

John Briesler was with him. Abigail had also sent William Shipley ahead of her to help. Another of John Adams’ servants was also probably in Washington: Richard Dexter, an “honest and faithful domestick” who handled horses.

John Adams by Gilbert Stuart

White House Wedding

A week before Abigail was to leave for Washington, she sent two of her housemaids ahead. John Adams had called the White House “habitable,” but that may have been charitable. The staircases hadn’t been finished, the plaster hadn’t dried on the wall and none of the rooms had been furnished.

Rebecca Tyrell was one of the maids Abigail sent ahead. Rebecca had worked for Abigail since 1790 and nursed her through various illnesses. Abigail viewed her almost as a daughter. She called Rebecca “my most beloved domestic who was to me as a child in sickness and in Health.”

Betsy Howard went with Rebecca. She was Polly Doble Howard’s sister, and one of the domestics John Adams considered “ripe.” She would sleep on the same floor of the President’s House as Abigail and John Briesler. Their rooms, wrote Abigail, were as “handsome and well-furnishd as any of my Bed chambers at Quincy.”

The other servants slept along the ground floor corridor, in the basement.

So why did Betsy Howard get special treatment? “[F]or Many reasons I chose to have her under my own Eye,” wrote Abigail to her doctor, Cotton Tufts.

Abigail was probably worried that Betsy might find herself in the same position as Esther Field had 16 years earlier. Or maybe she had.

In January 1801, Betsy Howard married William Shipley in the President’s House.

Abigail Adams, Matchmaker Twice More

Abigail Adams spent only four months in the cold, unfinished White House, where she had famously hung her washing to dry in the East Room.

Her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, would observe, “there is something in the climate and habits of this place very hostile to the happiness of New Englanders.” She and John had, in fact, been miserable in the White House.

Two weeks after Abigail Adams arrived in Washington, their son Charles died, a homeless alcoholic, in New York City. Two weeks after that they would learn John had lost the presidential election. During that time they had only 13 servants to do the work of 30 – furnishing the big house, hosting official entertainments and keeping the fires going to dry the plaster.

Abigail left Washington happily in February 1801. “My residence in this city has not served to endear the world to me. I am sick, sick and sick of Publick life,” she wrote as she left.

Peacefield, the Adams home in Quincy

She wasn’t sick of matchmaking. In 1802, Elizabeth Epps and Tilly Whitcomb married at the Adams’ farm in Quincy.

Rebecca Tyrell stayed with Abigail another three years after they left Washington. John Adams had brought Richard Dexter back with him to Quincy. In 1804, Rebecca Tyrell married him at the Adams farm. Abigail would remember Rebecca in her will, bequeathing her $30 and a gown.

After the ceremony, Abigail Adams, matchmaker, bragged of her love matches to her friend, Hannah Phillips Cushing.

“At the Wedding,” Abigail continued, “amongst other Guests were six couple who had lived with me during her residence with me all of whom had been married from me in that period & all but one married in my family. This I believe is rather a singular instance.”

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JFK One-Liners: Presidential Wit and More

President John F. Kennedy managed to seduce reporters with witty retorts to their questions during presidential news conferences. Many JFK one-liners are still remembered, such as his observation that “Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.”

His childhood friend Lem Billings remembered his sense of humor before he moved into the White House. “I’ve never known anyone in my life with such a wonderful humor — the ability to make one laugh and have a good time,” Billings once said.

Lem Billings and the future president. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Here, then, is a collection of JFK one-liners from well before and during his presidency.

Early JFK One-Liners

His mother, Rose, remembered him as a funny little boy. He once said to her, “Daddy has a sweet tooth, hasn’t he? I wonder which one it is.”

He also had a sharp tongue, which he directed at his mother. Rose didn’t show her children much warmth and took long trips away from her family. Just before she left on one journey, five-year-old Jack said, “Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone!”

JFK in his first Communion suit. Image courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

In Sickness

Throughout his life, he suffered through a series of illnesses. At Harvard, he was rushed to the hospital with an illness the doctors misdiagnosed as leukemia. He wrote to a girlfriend.

Took a peek at my chart yesterday and could see that they were mentally measuring me for a coffin.

He also had chronic back pain and several surgeries to correct it. After one unsuccessful operation, he wrote,

In regard to the fascinating subject of my operation, I …will confine myself to saying that I think the doc should have read just one more book before picking up the saw.

World War II

Kennedy joined the Navy during World War II and commanded a PT boat in the South Pacific.

The most famous JFK one-liner during his naval career wasn’t funny.

Kennedy aboard PT-109. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

A Japanese destroyer had rammed his boat in the Solomon Islands. Kennedy swam for five hours to an island, a wounded shipmate on his back. He held on to the man by clenching his lifejacket straps in his teeth. Kennedy carved a message for help in a coconut and sent it with a native.

NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY

Rescued after seven days on the island, he came home a hero. As president, someone asked him how he got to be a hero.

“It was involuntary,” he said. “They sank my boat.”

Before the Japanese sank his boat, he had already grown disillusioned with the war effort. In a letter, he expressed his cynicism. “We are at a great disadvantage–the Russians could see their country invaded, the Chinese the same,” he wrote. “The British were bombed, but we are fighting on some islands belonging to the Lever Company, a British concern making soap.” And then:

I suppose if we were stockholders we would perhaps be doing much better, but to see that by dying at Munda you are helping to secure peace in our time takes a larger imagination than most possess.

After his boat sank, he had little use for the desk duty to which he was assigned.

“Once you get your feet upon the desk in the morning, the heavy work of the day is done,” he wrote to a friend.

His brother Robert joined the Naval Reserve in Boston while in his senior year of high school. Their parents had sent Jack a clipping of Robert taking the oath. He wrote to Robert, “The sight of you up there, just as a boy, was really moving, particularly as a close examination showed that you had my checked London coat on.”

Politics

After the war, Kennedy decided to run for Congress from the Massachusetts district once represented by John Quincy Adams.

His father spent lavishly on his House campaign and interfered with the decision making. When one of his campaign aides objected, Kennedy said, “I know you’re right about this, but Dad’s putting up the money and we have to let him win a couple.”

Congressman John F. Kennedy

On the campaign trail, he was late to a communion breakfast in Chicopee, Mass. He urged his driver to speed up, and he did. Kennedy than turned to his seatmate, Billy Sutton, and said,

Billy, if we get into an accident, you’ll have to remain conscious to that you can give our names, but more important than that, don’t forget to tell the reporters I was in a state of grace.

Once elected, he only lasted three terms in the House, which didn’t satisfy his ambition.

“We were just worms in the House–nobody paid much attention to us nationally,” he later said.

And so in 1952 he ran for Senate against incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the incumbent. It was a classic Boston grudge match: Lodge’s grandfather had defeated Kennedy’s grandfather for the seat in 1916. “Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names,” Kennedy once said.

Though considered a long shot, Kennedy beat Lodge by about 70,000 votes, helped by his father’s cash. He spent five times more than Lodge on the campaign. Joe Kennedy had a one-liner of his own:

It takes three things to win in politics. The first is money, the second is money, and the third is money.

The Senate

Even before he ran for Senate, Jack Kennedy had his eye on the White House. He knew he needed a wife, and in 1953 he married Jacqueline Bouvier. She fascinated the public as much as he did. Once, as president, he introduced himself during a press conference in Paris.

I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.

September 1953 Hammersmith Farm, Newport, Rhode Island Wedding of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier. Photograph in the Toni Frissell Collection, Library of Congress.

In the Senate, Kennedy grew into a political star.

Tip O’Neill once wrote that until Kennedy won election to the Senate, “You just couldn’t imagine that he was really going anywhere.”

In 1960, Kennedy announced his candidacy for president of the United States. He won the Democratic Party nomination, which prompted another JFK one-liner: “Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I’m the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House.”

His father again spent heavily on his son’s campaign. Kennedy acknowledge as much on the campaign trail.

“I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy,” he said: “’Dear Jack, Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide’.”

When asked his favorite song, he replied, “I think ‘Hail to the Chief’ has a nice ring to it.”

President JFK One-Liners

Kennedy didn’t lose his sense of humor as president.

He defended his choice of his 35-year-old brother as attorney general. “I see nothing wrong with giving Robert some legal experience as Attorney General before he goes out to practice law,” he said.

JFK and his brother Robert. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

He said he liked the job.

I have a nice home, the office is close by, and the pay is good.

However, he faced serious challenges.

“When we (The Democrats) got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were.”

He joked about his approval rating after a vacation in Florida.

“I’ve been back in touch with my constituents and seeing how they felt,” he said. “And frankly I’ve come back to Washington from Palm Beach, and I’m against my entire program.”

He had a rocky relationship with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. When asked why he didn’t fire Hoover, Kennedy said, “You can’t fire God.”

Last Words

Kennedy’s life ended on Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas.

The First Lady and President arrive in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

His last words before an assassin’s bullet struck him were mundane, but ironic.

Nellie Connally, the wife of Texas Gov. John Connally, was traveling in the open limousine with him. “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you,” she said.

“No, you certainly can’t,” he said.

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The Fabulous McLeans and Their Hoodoo Diamond

When Evalyn and Ned McLean got married in 1908, they seemed to have it all. A golden couple, they had wealth, connections and loving families. As a wedding present, the McLeans got a summer cottage (read “mansion”) in Bar Harbor, Maine. Bar Harbor had for decades been a magnet for Gilded Age show-offs.

That first summer was perhaps their happiest. But then their lives over the next 30 years would descend into madness, scandal and ruin. Their demise almost coincided perfectly with their ownership of the Hope diamond.

The Hope diamond

Was it bad luck, brought on by the Hope diamond, or their own recklessness and mental illness?

Or was it just too much money? Evalyn, after their divorce, wrote that Ned’s problem was “unearned wealth in undisciplined hands.”

Pot, meet kettle.

The McLeans

Evalyn, born Aug. 1, 1886, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant carpenter, Thomas Walsh, and Carrie Bell Reed, his school teacher wife. During Evalyn’s early years, she and her brother traveled the west with her parents as her father prospected for gold. When she was 10, he came into her bedroom and said, “Daughter, I’ve struck it rich.” He had found the Camp Bird gold mine in Colorado, one of the most lucrative ever.

The family moved to Washington, D.C., where they ate off gold plates in their 60-room mansion. Evalyn went to school in her own coach with matched horses and a coachman who wore silk. If she wasn’t wearing jewelry, Evalyn said, you knew she wasn’t feeling well.

Ned McLean came from older money and more distinguished ancestors — military heroes, diplomats, explorers, capitalists. His mother, Emily Truxtun Beale, was the daughter of Edward Fitzgerald Beale, a prominent diplomat, explorer and military officer. His father, John Roll McLean, co-founded the Great Falls and Old Dominion Railroad in Virginia, and the town that grew up around it was named McLean. The elder McLean also owned the Cincinnati Post and part of the Cincinnati Red Stockings. Later he bought the Washington Post.

As Evalyn later observed in her autobiography, the Beale genes had weakened by the time they got to Ned.

Ned and Evalyn

Ned met Evalyn in dancing class when she was 11 and he was eight. He fell in love with her at first sight. He asked her to marry him a number of times, but she refused because of his heavy drinking.

Evalyn Walsh McLean

When she finally said yes in 1908, they eloped to Colorado. Their parents gave them $200,000 for a three-month honeymoon in Europe and the Middle East. They blew through it all and couldn’t pay their hotel bill in Paris.

They moved into a huge mansions called Friendship in Washington, D.C. From there they hobnobbed with heads of state, traveled the world and partied around the clock.

One of their lavish parties prompted a guest to remark, “This is what brings on revolutions.”

Ned befriended President Warren G. Harding, who Evalyn thought might be a good influence on Ned. It turned out that Ned was a bad influence on the president.

The McLeans Buy the Hope Diamond

In 1910 in Paris, the McLeans first saw the Hope diamond. Called the most expensive item you can hold in one hand, it’s now worth $200 million. Pierre Cartier sold it to them after telling them about the curse. A French gem merchant named Tavernier had stolen it from the eye, or maybe the forehead, of a statue of the Hindu goddess Sita. Then wild dogs tore him apart. Another owner, Princess de Lambale, died when a French mob beat her to death. Marie Antoinette owned it. In 1908, Sultan Abdul Hamid bought it and lost his throne. His concubine who wore it died young.

Few of the stories had any truth to them. Tavernier died of old age. Marie Antoinette, however, had owned the diamond.

Ned bought the gem for $154,000 in the offices of the Washington Post, where he worked as managing editor.

To be extra careful, Evalyn had the stone blessed in a church. As the minister said a prayer over it, a flash of lightning toppled a large tree across the street.

Evalyn said she didn’t believe the curse, though she never let her children or her friends touch it. But she let her dog wear it sometimes at parties.

Tragedy Strikes the McLeans

The blessing didn’t seem to work. Ned’s mother, who had told them not to buy the diamond, died within a year of its purchase. Evalyn’s father had died that year as well, and, grief-stricken, she lapsed into morphine addiction. Ned continued to rely on alcohol, sometimes using a sling to steady his drinking hand.

Evalyn’s mental health deteriorated to the point where she couldn’t recognize her party guests, and she started to hallucinate. Ned then had a sanitarium built for her on the top floor of their Washington mansion.

Their first son, Vinson, received quite a lot of publicity as the $100 million baby. The McLeans, fearful of kidnappers, hired bodyguards to keep watch over him. But at the age of nine, the boy slipped away from his minders and ran into the street, where a car ran over him. He died that night. Ned and Evalyn hadn’t been home; they’d gone to Louisville, Ky., to see the races.

Years later, the curse of the Hope diamond would claim another victim. The McLeans’ 19-year-old daughter, Evalyn, wore the gem at her wedding to 57-year-old Robert Rice Reynolds. He was an isolationist, a Nazi sympathizer and co-owner of a fascist anti-Semitic newspaper. Six years into their marriage, she committed suicide.

Ned McLean

Evalyn’s real curse, however, seems to have been her husband. At 22, Ned’s father made him managing editor of the Washington Post. He turned the newspaper into a reactionary, juvenile newspaper viewed with disdain by journalists.

Ned McLean

Even his pets were dissipated. Ned owned a trained seal and fed it a fifth of whiskey every day. Once he brought a trained bear to a Florida whorehouse, where it mauled two women inside.

While visiting his friend President Harding at the White House, he infuriated the First Lady by urinating into an East Room fireplace.

The McLeans owned two houses near the executive mansion, one of which they rented to Attorney General Harry Daugherty. Daugherty held a round-the-clock party at the house, called the Love Nest. One night, Ned brought call girls and prostitutes to the Love Nest. Things got out of hand and people started throwing things. A bottle struck one of the women in the head, and she died a few days later. An FBI agent who took her to the hospital recalled Harding leaning on the fireplace.

Ned then got implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal. His friend, Interior Secretary Albert Fall, had accepted a bribe to lease oil reserves without asking for bids. Ned, at first, agreed to say he had loaned Fall the money. But the senator who led the investigation into the scandal figured correctly that Ned couldn’t have loaned Fall the money. He was broke.

The Lindbergh Kidnapping

In 1929, Ned left Evalyn for another woman and they divorced. But four years later, Evalyn had her ex-husband committed to an insane asylum, where he once danced the hokey-pokey with Zelda Fitzgerald.

On March 1, 1932, a kidnapper took Charles and Anne Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son from their home in New Jersey. Evalyn, remembering her fears for her young son Vinson, hocked the Hope diamond to raise ransom money for the baby. She gave the money to a rogue FBI agent, who kept the money for himself. The Lindbergh baby was found dead, and the FBI agent went to prison.

Ned died of a heart attack in the insane asylum in 1941, leaving what little money he had left to his common-law wife.

Evalyn never got over the death of her daughter. She had to lease her Washington mansion to the government for office space. In 1947, she died of pneumonia, as the plaster falling from the walls of her home.

Aftermath

Evalyn left the Hope diamond to her grandchildren. In 1947, they sold it to jeweler Harry Winston to pay her estate taxes. In 1958, Winston donated the gem to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where you can see it today.

This story, updated in 2022, is based on a chapter in Bar Harbor Babylon by Dan and Leslie Landrigan. Click here to see Leslie Landrigan talk about the book on a podcast.

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Abe Lincoln’s Puritan Ancestors (Cavaliers and Baptists, Too)

Abraham Lincoln, the Great Unifier, didn’t talk much about his Puritan ancestors. Nor did he talk much about his ancestors from Virginia, where the original Anglican settlers were known as Cavaliers.

He had good reason to hide the fact that his ancestor Samuel Lincoln had come to Hingham, Mass., during the Great Migration. Lincoln also downplayed his Anglican, or Cavalier, ancestors who settled in Virginia.

Abraham Lincoln, 1858

“Exposing either of the ancestral strands could have been politically risky,” wrote David S. Reynolds, in his recently published Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times.

Lincoln had to try to unify the country. So he hid his Cavalier and Puritan ancestors and claimed dubious Quaker roots. The North and the South found Quakers an acceptable compromise, something that would have astonished the early Puritans.

Puritan Ancestors vs. Cavaliers

During Lincoln’s presidency and afterward, people viewed the Civil War as a contest between Puritans and Cavaliers. More recently, Kevin Phillips in his book, The Cousins’ Wars, made the same argument. He maintained the American Civil War was merely an extension of the English civil wars.

The argument has some truth to it. Puritans from eastern England largely settled New England. Anglicans, or Cavaliers, from the west fled Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan uprising and settled in Maryland and Virginia.

The Puritan Northerners prized liberty, innovation, education, reform and hard work. From the southern point of view, they were fanatical, narrow-minded, money-grubbing commoners who disturbed the peace.

Prince Rupert of Rhine, considered the quintessential cavalier

In contrast, the Cavalier southerners thought of themselves as hospitable, chivalrous, traditional and aristocratic. Northerners called that oppressive, decadent and unjust – especially in regards to slavery.

In the late 1850s, The New York Herald wrote, “The people of the North and those of the South are distinct and separate.” They think differently, wrote the Herald, and they spring from a different stock. Different in every way, they cannot coalesce.

“The Puritan and the Cavalier…will always fight when they meet. There is nothing in common between them but hate.”

Lincoln’s Puritan Ancestors

Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, was born out of wedlock to a poor young woman who’d been taken advantage of by a plantation owner. Lincoln proudly described his mother as “the daughter of a nobleman…so-called of Virginia.” He told a friend he had inherited through his mother his brains and ambition from his Virginian grandfather.

Abraham Lincoln’s father, Thomas, had qualities associated with his Puritan ancestors: piety, honesty and lack of pretension.

Lincoln learned that his ancestor, Samuel Lincoln, had settled Hingham, Mass., during the Great Migration in 1637. He had come from Hingham in Norfolk County, a hotbed of anti-Anglican sentiment. His pastor arrived a year later, excommunicated for his radical views. Samuel Lincoln helped fund and build the Old Ship Church in 1681.

In 1848, Lincoln spoke in Dorchester and mentioned his Puritan ancestors, describing himself as one of the “Hingham Lincolns.”

Samuel had two brothers, and he and his wife had 11 children, so within the first generation Hingham had 60 Lincolns. Another Massachusetts Lincoln with Puritan ancestors from Hingham was Levi Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson’s attorney general and governor of Massachusetts. His son, Levi, Jr., also won election as governor of Massachusetts, and another son, Enoch, served as governor of Maine.

Samuel’s son Mordecai moved to Scituate and brought smelting furnaces to Massachusetts. Mordecai’s son, also Mordecai, married Hannah Saltar. Their son, John, was Abraham Lincoln’s great-grandfather.

Obadiah Holmes

Significantly, Hannah Saltar was descended from Obadiah Holmes, a Baptist and therefore a heretic in Puritan eyes. The Puritan leaders of Massachusetts in 1651 ordered him whipped 30 times in public.

An engraving of Obadiah Holmes about to be whipped.

News spread about the savage whipping and the persecution of the Baptists in Massachusetts. Baptist minister John Clarke turned the persecution of Baptists into an international cause celebre with a book that included a description of Holmes’ whipping. That put pressure on the Puritans to allow more religious freedom.

But Lincoln had no interest in summoning the memory of his illustrious Baptist ancestor. Baptists in Lincoln’s time reminded people of the divisions over slavery. The Baptist church in 1845 split apart into northern and southern conferences over the issue.

So Lincoln didn’t tell people during his campaign for president about his Puritan ancestors. Or about his Baptist or Cavalier forbears. He said he came from Quakers who left Berks County, Pa., for Virginia.

Mordecai’s son Mordecai had moved to Berks County, Pa. But it’s unlikely they were Quakers.

Everyone Likes Quakers

In the run-up to the Civil War, Quakers had broader appeal than Baptists, Cavaliers/Anglicans or Puritans/Congregationalists. Both southerners and northerners could tolerate them. The North saw Quakers as opponents of slavery, the South as a group unlikely to go to war over slavery.

By 1886, the perception grew that Lincoln served as a bridge between Puritans and Cavaliers. A Georgia newspaper editor named Henry Grady described Lincoln as both:

From the union of colonists, Puritans and Cavaliers, from the straightening of their purposes and the crossing of their blood, came he who stands as the first typical American…Abraham Lincoln. He was the sum of the Puritan and Cavalier, for in his ardent nature were fused the virtues of both, and in the depths of his great soul the faults of both were lost. He was greater than the Puritan, greater than the Cavalier, in that he was American.

With thanks to David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln and His Times, published in September 2020.

Images: Samuel Lincoln sign By Timothy Valentine – https://www.flickr.com/photos/el_ramon/3232950290/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5821709. This story last updated in 2022.

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George Dilboy, Greek Lad, Wipes Out a German Machine Gun Nest

Gen. John Pershing called him one of the 10 greatest heroes of World War I. The City of Somerville, Mass., remembers him with a bust, an athletic field and a stadium. Three presidents honored him. So who was George Dilboy?

He was a 22-year-old Greek-American who died heroically at Belleau Wood in France. He had already fought in four wars on three continents when he fell while wiping out a German machine gun nest.

His commanding officer called the feat one of the most impressive sights he had seen. And the desecration of his grave created an international incident.

George Dilboy

George Dilboy was born Feb. 5, 1896 in Alatsata near Smyrna in what is now Turkey. He had six brothers and two sisters. As his father later said, they felt Turkish persecution. The family began immigrating to the United States.

George and one of his brothers arrived in Somerville, Mass., in 1908, to join their father. George went to school, and got a job in the laundry at Massachusetts General Hospital. He also worked as a busboy at the Georgian Café. At the age of 16 he returned to his native land and fought for Greece in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.

George Dilboy

Then he came back to the United States, where he went to work at the Copley Square Hotel. However the summer heat forced the hotel to close. So he found a job working in a shoe factory in Keene, N.H. There he enlisted in the New Hampshire National Guard in June 1916. As a guardsman he served in the Mexican border campaign. Then in 1917, he joined the Army’s 103rd Infantry Regiment, 26th Division.—known as the Yankee Division.

George Dilboy undoubtedly had more battlefield experience than most of the men who enlisted as National Guardsmen in the Yankee Division.

The Western Front

Sent to France in the fall of 1917, the Yankee Division fought German attacks in the spring. On July 18, 1918, his company had orders to control the Bouresches railway station as part of the Allied counteroffensive at Belleau Wood.

Marines fighting in Belleau Wood

According to the New York Times, Nov. 5, 1923, German machine guns were punishing Dilboy’s platoon. His lieutenant started to go to the front to see how this nest could be flanked. A young lad with an automatic rifle jumped up and said: “Lieutenant, I can wipe out these men.”

The lieutenant answered, “Go ahead.”

Dilboy threw himself flat and wriggled through a wheat field, killing several machine gunners with automatic fire. A German sniper shot him twice, but he kept going. When he reached the machine gun nest he found two remaining Germans. He then stood up and received a burst from the machine guns, which cut off his right leg. Dilboy fell on his back and pushed himself forward with his left foot. He turned his head, aimed and killed the two men.

“Lying on his back, with his right hand uppermost, the lad motioned to his platoon to go forward, and died with a smile on his face,” the Times reported.

They buried his body on the battlefield, now the Aisne-Marne Cemetery, along with 2,000 marines and soldiers who gave their lives in the victory at Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood.

Aisne-Marne Cemetery

Medal of Honor

Col. S.M. Shumway, his commanding officer, said,

It was one of the most impressive sights I experienced in the War. George Dilboy died facing the enemy, carrying on as long as there was the faintest whiff of breath in his body. He routed the enemy alone. He was as fine a soldier as ever served under the Stars and Stripes.

President Woodrow Wilson signed the authorization to award George Dilboy the Medal of Honor. In January 1919 the medal was presented to his father, Antonios Dilboy. “We came to this country from Smyrna, where my boy and other children were born,” he said. “We know and have felt the persecutions of Turkey.”

At his father’s request, George’s body was moved to his home town of Alatsata. Seventeen thousand people were said to have lined the streets watching his coffin carried into the church.

Desecration

But in 1922, Turkish troops occupied Alatsata. They broke open his coffin, scattered his bones and stole the flag.

The grave desecration infuriated President Warren G. Harding, who sent the USS Litchfield to bring back Dilboy’s remains. Harding also demanded an apology from Turkey. A Turkish guard of honor brought the boy’s remains to the battleship, with a new U.S. flag.

On Nov. 12, 1923, he was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. President Calvin Coolidge presided at the ceremony.

Headstone of George Dilboy at Arlingtonn National Cemetery.

Somerville named an athletic field and stadium after him. The stadium fell into disrepair, so the city rebuilt it in 2008. A bust honoring him stands in front of Somerville City Hall. VFW posts in Keene and Somerville were named after him.

He is believed to be the first Greek-American to win the Medal of Honor.

With thanks to Carved in Stone: The Story of George Dilboy by Richard Rozakis.

Aisne-Marne Cemetery By US gov – https://web.archive.org/web/20050405022608/http://www.abmc.gov/images/am1w.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6986605. George Dilboy headstone: By Arlington National Cemetery – http://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/ANCExplorer, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44946194. This story last updated in 2022.

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Brahmin Anti-Semites Fight the Brandeis Nomination to the Supreme Court

Louis Brandeis didn’t become one of the greatest Supreme Court justices ever without a dogfight. The bitter battle over the Brandeis nomination to the high court in 1916 exposed a virulent strain of anti-Semitism among Boston’s elite.

But it was really his support of ordinary people against concentrated wealth that made the fight over Louis Brandeis’ nomination the most contentious in U.S. history.

Louis Brandeis

Not until the nomination of Robert Bork 71 years later would the Senate engage in such furious debate.

Brandeis believed the law should reflect social change and the real concerns of the world. The courts didn’t exist just to defend property rights, he thought.

His adversaries fought him tooth and nail. Over four months, witnesses, pundits, reporters, opponents and supporters joined the standing-room-only crowd in the Senate chamber during the nomination fight. His opponents feared he would bring his radical new ideas to the court.

They had good reason.

The Brandeis Nomination

President Woodrow Wilson, like Louis Brandeis, distrusted corporate bigness. He was the strongest supporter of antitrust laws among the three men who ran for president in 1912—himself, Theodore Roosevelt and President William Howard Taft.

Brandeis, a prominent Boston attorney known as the “People’s Lawyer,” supported Wilson for president. Brandeis had led public fights to improve workers’ safety, curb corporate power, break up railroad monopolies and expose insurance fraud. His campaign on behalf of Wilson took some of the progressive vote from Roosevelt and helped usher Wilson into the White House.

Several years later, as Wilson looked toward reelection, he needed to shore up his progressive credentials. So when Justice Joseph Lamar died in January 1916, Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis, 59, to the Supreme Court.

Brandeis in 1915.

“I am not exactly sure that I am to be congratulated,” Brandeis wrote his brother. He probably had an inkling of the swift and furious response his nomination would inspire.

Brahmins in Arms

In 1890, with a reputation as a brilliant and promising young corporate lawyer, Brandeis had accepted an invitation to spend a weekend at the summer home of Brahmin financier Henry Lee Higginson. A year later, Mrs. Higginson was the first to visit Brandeis’ wife, Alice, on her return from their honeymoon.

Henry Lee Higginson

But Higginson changed his views about Louis Brandeis after he fought J.P. Morgan’s effort to monopolize New England’s railroads. In 1916, Higginson from behind the scenes financed the battle against the Brandeis nomination to the Supreme Court.

The Wall Street Journal denounced Brandeis as “super-extreme” and “rabid.” The Los Angeles Times called him a “dangerous demagogue.”

Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, an open anti-Semite, circulated a petition to oppose the Brandeis nomination. Fifty-five influential people signed it with Brahmin last names like Gardner, Peabody and Adams, as in Charles Francis. Seven of the 16 presidents of the American Bar Association signed a letter that called Brandeis unfit.

Former President Taft called the Brandeis nomination “one of the deepest wounds” he had ever suffered as an American. He called Brandeis a muckraker, an emotionalist, a socialist, a hypocrite, utterly unscrupulous, a man of “infinite cunning” who had “much power for evil.”

Later, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, Taft came to like and respect Louis Brandeis.

The Fight

It took four months of charges and countercharges for Brandeis to win the nomination. He did not defend himself personally–not the custom of the time. His enemies excoriated him.

His opponents charged him with unethical behavior. One detractor accused him of breach of faith as counsel to the Interstate Commerce Commission because he supported a big rate increase for the railroads. His defenders took the witness stand to say he’d done no such thing.

Another witness, Clarence Barron, called himself a farmer and testified to Brandeis’ unfitness for the high court. Barron, a journalist, had actually attacked Brandeis during his fight against Morgan’s attempted railroad takeover.

The Rev. A.A. Berle testified that Boston’s Brahmins had enjoyed such total control of Massachusetts for so long they believed anyone who disagreed with them is “ipso facto a person who is either ‘dangerous’ or lacking in ‘judicial temperament’.”

Or as Justice William O. Douglas later put it,

… the fears of the Establishment were greater because Brandeis was the first Jew to be named to the Court.

Justice Brandeis

Ironically, Brandeis did not actively practice his religion. He did not belong to a synagogue, he celebrated Christmas and he enjoyed ham.

Brandeis had graduated from Harvard with a goal of making a lot of money as a lawyer so he could devote his time and energy to progressive reforms.

He and his college friend Samuel Warren formed a law firm, now Nutter, McClellen & Fish. Warren married a wealthy anti-Semite who refused to invite Brandeis to their wedding, despite their friendship and business ties.

But Brandeis didn’t complain of anti-Semitism before, during or after his nomination battle, according to his biographer, Melvin Urofsky. He probably understood the unsettling nature of his challenge to the settled thinking of the conservative Establishment.

On June 1, 1916, his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court was official. He then sat on the court for 23 years. As his opponents had feared, he changed the direction of the high court.

Impact on the Court

Brandeis interpreted the Constitution to guarantee the right to privacy, which he described as “the right to be left alone.” He created the Brandeis brief, legal arguments that depend on facts and figures from the real world, not just legal principles. Civil rights lawyers used Brandeis briefs to argue and win the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case that ended legal school desegregation.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1925. Brandeis is on the right, bottom row.

Louis Brandeis sat on the court for 23 years. He did not change his mind about the threat posed by corporate monopoly. In 1933, his friend and confidante Edward Keating quoted him saying,

We can have democracy, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

With thanks to Louis D. Brandeis: A Life by Melvin Urofsky. This story updated in 2022.

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