John Jay returned to New York in July 1784. He had been in Paris, helping Benjamin Franklin negotiate the peace treaty with Great Britain, which had been signed the preceding September, the last of a series of tasks that had kept him abroad for five years.
Jay planned to retire to private life and resume the practice of law. But he discovered on his arrival that, in May, Congress had appointed him secretary of foreign affairs, an office invented in 1781 and first filled by Robert R. Livingston. Livingston is said to have given it up because it didn’t pay enough. Jay was above this, but he had other objections. He believed that the office should be something different and something more than it had been under Livingston, who had contented himself simply with obeying the directions of the Congress. Jay held that if his was to be the voice of a new nation dealing with foreign governments, that voice should be respected. He wanted a degree of autonomy and, above all, the right to choose his own clerks, a right which Congress had reserved to itself. He won his point and accepted the job in December.
Once in office he put some order into its affairs. He established a coherent filing system for the mass of documents and demanded that correspondence from abroad come first to him. Under Livingston all the mail relating to foreign affairs had gone directly to the Congress.
Livingston had had a lot to do. He arranged treaties of commerce with Prussia and Morocco and discussed such possibilities with Austria, Denmark, and Portugal. And there were still the British to deal with; in defiance of the peace treaty they maintained armed garrisons on American soil. Jay could not know this, but the day before the peace treaty was signed, George III’s government had, in fact, sent secret orders not to evacuate them.
Jay remained in office until March 1790, when Thomas Jefferson replaced him to become the first secretary of state, for now—the Constitution having been adopted—there was a state.
1884 One Hundred Years Ago
No longer at the head of an army, no longer President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant found himself in need of an occupation: “… one thing is certain; I must do something to supplement my income, or continue to live in Galena or on a farm. I have not got the means to live in a city.” One of the things he decided to do—“a spectacularly bad choice”—was to get involved in the affairs of a banking and brokerage firm known as Grant and Ward.
His son, Buck, had met Ferdinand Ward a few years before and become his partner. Ward was a fairly imaginative, utterly dishonest man who had done well in his early days on Wall Street and then succumbed to dreams of glory.
The firm of Grant and Ward, as one of Grant’s biographers has written, “existed solely for the purpose of supplying him [Ward] with means to break the back of the Wall Street stock market.” Buck had put up $100,000; now the general came in for another $100,000. In one way was Grant not only astute but prophetic: Ward wanted to get some government contracts, but on this point Grant was adamant: “I did not think it was suitable for me to have my name connected with government contracts, and I knew that there was no large profit in them except by dishonest measures.” Ward yielded but of course hinted to banks that, with Grant in the business, these contracts would be forthcoming.
Ward’s elaborate pyramid of paper finally collapsed early in May. He told Grant he needed $150,000 to meet his obligations. Grant didn’t have it but offered to go his friend, W. H. Vanderbilt, for a loan. Vanderbilt, a sufficiently shrewd financier to be wise to the ways of Ferdinand Ward, said to Grant: ”… as for Grant and Ward —what I’ve heard about that firm would not justify me in lending it a dime. But I’ll lend you $150,000 personally.” And did so on the spot.
Grant gave Vanderbilt’s check to Ward; Ward cashed it and put the money in his pocket. Two days later Grant went to the office and was told by his son that it was all over, there was nothing in the till and Ward had disappeared. When they found him, Ward told a few more lies and eventually went to jail. Grant, who had assumed he was a millionaire, took stock with his wife. He had $80 dollars in his pocket, she had $130 in the house. When he at last came to understand the extent of Ward’s duplicity, Grant sighed, “I don’t see how I can trust any human being again.”
The public entirely exonerated Grant from complicity in the fraud; friends came to his aid, and he turned at last to the memoirs he had long been urged to write. Mark Twain offered the best contract among the competing publishers, on behalf of Webster & Co., which was in the process of publishing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Grant died before he could learn what a gigantic success the memoirs were, but he left his family well provided for—Julia Grant is said to have received between $420,000 and $450,000.
1934 Fifty Years Ago
Frank Hamer, a former Texas Ranger, got a tip that the bank robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker would be coming down a road near Arcadia, Louisiana. Hamer had been after them for six months. On May 23 he set up an ambush, on top of a little hill, with a handful of fellow lawmen. Among them was R. F. Alcorn, who knew the pair by sight. “That’s them, boys,” Alcorn said as the car approached. They shouted for Barrow to halt, but he and Parker went for their guns; the posse produced a lethal fusillade, and fifty bullets hit the bank robbers. Bonnie Parker was found with a machine gun in her lap, Barrow with a sawed-off shotgun in his hand. There were two more machine guns, another shotgun, six automatic pistols, and a revolver in the car. Among Bonnie Parker’s effects was a poem she had written:
Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow gang,
I’m sure you all have read
How they rob and steal
And how those who squeal
Are usually found dying or dead.
If they try to act like citizens
And rent them a nice little flat,
About the third night they are
Invited to fight
By a submachine gun rat-tat-tat.
Some day they will go down together,
And they will bury them side by side,
To a few it means grief,
To the law it’s relief,
But it is death to Bonnie and Clyde.
A year earlier John Dillinger had read of their exploits in his prison cell and given his opinion: “They’re giving bank robbing a bad name.”
The pair were not buried side by side, because their mothers objected.
