Free A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans by Michael Farquhar

rebuilding would be too great and that the capital should be moved back to Philadelphia. Ultimately, though, the battered and humbled city prevailed, and it was to there that the great documents Stephen Pleasonton had saved were returned.
    The State Department clerk’s mission had been heroic, but his name and deeds were lost in obscurity for almost two centuries until historian Anthony Pitch stumbled upon them in a little-read scholarly journal from 1907 while researching his book The Burning of Washington: The British Invasion of 1814. Though he hoped to create a full portrait of Pleasonton, Pitch found details of the unsung patriot’s life frustratingly sparse. What is certain is that honor and fame eluded him, 1 and that he was forced in his later years to beg to keep his government post in order to avoid an impoverished old age. “For saving these papers,” he wrote to future president James Buchanan in 1853, “the British government, had that been done for it, would probably have given me many thousand pounds.”
    It remains unknown if Pleasonton got to keep his job, or if anyone even bothered to say thanks.

11
Richard Mentor Johnson: The Veep Who Killed Tecumseh
    An American vice president is practically guaranteed obscurity, unless he reaches the highest office. (And even then there’s no assurance of lasting fame—just look at Chester Alan Arthur.) “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” the first vice president, John Adams, wrote ruefully. John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s veep, put it a bit more bluntly: The vice presidency, he said, “isn’t worth a bucket of warm piss.” That was a sentiment no doubt shared by Richard Mentor Johnson, whose once promising political future—not to mention his place in history—was all but extinguished when he was elected to serve under a president with his own overlooked legacy, Martin Van Buren. Yet while Johnson is now mostly forgotten, his life was really quite memorable.
    The future vice president was born under fire, in a hastily constructed fortress on the Virginia frontier, near what became Louisville, Kentucky. The Revolutionary War was still raging in 1780, and the frontier was under fierce Indian assault. Johnson family lore held that a flaming arrow landed in baby Richard’s cradle and that he was only saved when his older sister Betsey pulled it away. The incident, if it really happened, foreshadowed a time when Richard Johnson would make his name fighting Indians in another war with the British, some three decades later.
    The Johnsons emerged from the Revolution as a family of great wealth and influence. Richard’s father was one of the largest landowners in Kentucky, with numerous commercial interests, and two of his brothers served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Trained as a lawyer, Richard preceded them to Capitol Hill in 1806. Amiable and hardworking, if undistinguished, the young congressman was described by Washington socialite Margaret Bayard Smith as “the most tender hearted, mild, affectionate and benevolent of men…whose countenance beams with good will to all, whose soul seems to feed on the milk of human kindness.” Nice qualities, but hardly sufficient to build an enduring reputation. That would take a war.
    Tensions between the fledgling United States and its former motherland had been festering for years over Britain’s oppressive interference with American shipping and its encouragement of Indian hostilities toward settlers in the Northwest frontier. 1 Johnson joined other vociferous young congressmen like Henry Clay and John Calhoun, known collectively as “the War Hawks,” who demanded an aggressive response to the British outrages. What resulted was the War of 1812. Not wishing “to be idle during the recess of Congress,” as