Disturbing History - The Fourteen Men Before George Washington

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Everyone knows George Washington was the first President of the United States. Technically true. But it's also a sleight of hand, because fourteen men held the title of President before him, and almost no American today can name a single one.Tonight on Disturbing History, we walk through all fourteen, the men who chaired the Continental Congress and the Confederation Congress during the years the country was being fought into existence. This is not the marble version.This is slave traders and Tower of London prisoners. This is the general who walked an American army into the worst slaughter the United States ever suffered at the hands of Native warriors. This is the plot to throw George Washington out of command in the middle of the Revolution.This is the merchant who tried to invite a Prussian prince across the ocean to come be king. This is a major general accepting Washington's resignation after once helping scheme against him, then dying so broke the state had to bury him.These are the men the textbooks left out, and the reasons they got left out say almost as much about America as the founding itself. Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

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Gofundme.com. This is a commercial message brought to you, GoFund Me. Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive.

From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian. investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us.

And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. Over the last few weeks on disturbing history, we've been digging through the back rooms and locked drawers of American presidential history.

The men in the official portraits, the men on the money, the men whose names get carved into stone. We've been pulling those names down off the pedestal one at a time and looking at what they actually did when nobody was supposed to be watching. The dirty deals, the cover-ups, the hypocrisy, the moments that don't make it into the polished version we feed to school kids, and don't worry, that series isn't over. We've got plenty more of those nights ahead of us, but tonight isn't exactly the next episode in that line. Tonight is more like a chapter that should have come first, before any of this, a chapter that

almost nobody ever reads, because almost nobody knows it exists. Here's what I mean. You and I grew up with the same opening line. Every kid in America did. George Washington was the first president of the United States. We say it the way we say the sky is blue or water is wet. It feels like bedrock. It feels like one of those facts that doesn't even need to be checked. And in one very narrow technical sense, it's true. Washington was the first man to take the oath under the Constitution we still live under today. The Constitution we argue about and quote and bend and break, on who's in the room. Under that piece of paper, yes, Washington came first, but that's a slight of hand. That's a magic trick. And it depends entirely on you not asking the next question.

Because something happened before that constitution. A whole lot of something. Almost 15 years of something. The Continental Congress met. The Articles of Confederation got ratified. A war got fought and won against the most powerful empire on earth. And during all of that, every single year of it, somebody was sitting in a chair with a title in front of his name. That title was President. Not President of the United States the way we mean it now. Not Commander-in-Chief.

Not the executive branch. Because there wasn't really an executive branch yet. But still, president of the Continental Congress, of the Confederation Congress, the man who ran the room. The man who signed the documents. The man whose name went at the top of the page. There were 14 of them.

14 men, before Washington, who held that title. 14 men who, if you stretched the definition just a little, could fairly be called presidents of the United States, or at least of the loose, lurching, half-built thing the United States used to be, before it got its act together. And I would bet you almost anything that you can't name a single one. Don't feel bad about that. almost nobody can.

These men got erased. Their faces aren't on the money. Their birthdays aren't holidays. There aren't monuments. There aren't biopics. Most Americans, if you said the name John Hanson or Cyrus Griffin or Elias Boudinot, would stare at you like you were speaking Latin. So tonight we're going to fix that, at least a little.

We're going to walk through who these men were, what they did, what they didn't do, and in some cases what they did that should probably haunt us a little. because this is disturbing history. We don't do the marble statue version on this show. We don't do the white wig, soft-focused gentleman of honor version. If the truth is uglier than the story, we tell the truth. And the truth is this. These 14 presidents include slave traders, plural.

They include a man who got captured by the British and locked in the Tower of London. They include a man who later led an American army into the worst slaughter the United States Army ever suffered against native warriors. They include a man at the heart of a plot to throw George Washington out of command in the middle of the revolution. They include a man who tried with a straight face to invite a Prussian prince across the ocean to come be king of America. They include men who died broke, men who died young, men whose names got buried so deep that

finding them takes real work. It's all in here. The whole strange, tangled mess of it. So if you came tonight for the comfortable version, the gentle version, the version where the founding fathers float around in powdered wigs being noble and wise, you should probably click off and go find another podcast. Because that's not what we do here. That's not what tonight is. These are the 14 men nobody told you about. Before we get into the names themselves, I want to take just a minute to set the table.

Because if you don't understand what the title president actually meant in this period, none of the rest of this is going to land right. In the years we're talking about roughly 1774 through 1788, there was no executive branch the way we think of one now. There was no White House. There was no commander-in-chief in the modern sense. The whole structure that we live under now, where one elected person sits at the top of the federal government and signs bills and runs the military and shapes foreign policy. That structure didn't exist yet. The men who held the title of president during this period weren't presidents the way Lincoln was president, or Theodore Roosevelt, or anybody you could name from a textbook. The job was different. The president in this earlier sense was the presiding officer of the Continental Congress and later

of the Confederation Congress. He ran the meetings. He kept order on the floor. He signed documents on behalf of the body. He received foreign visitors. He stood at the top of the room. But he could not veto anything. He didn't command the army on his own authority. Most of the real decisions, still had to be hashed out by Congress as a group, with the president's vote counting for exactly the same as any other delegate. Now, having said all that, I want to be clear about something else. The title still mattered. The chair still mattered. Whoever sat in it was, in any honest sense, the head of the United States government for as long as he held it. Foreign diplomats addressed letters to the president of the Continental Congress. The signatures of these men appeared on treaties,

on official correspondence, on military commissions. When the new country needed somebody's name to stand at the top of the page, it was these men. The job was not nothing. That's why this list of 14 names is real. It's not a trivia trick. These men were not stand-ins or placeholders. They were the elected head of the United States government during the years they served. The Constitution of 1787 didn't create the idea of an American president out of thin air.

It reshaped a job that had already existed for more than a decade, and it concentrated the power in a way the earlier version had not. Washington was the first to hold the new and more powerful version of the office. That's the honest truth, but he was not the first to hold the office itself. Okay, with that out of the way, let's get into the names. The first man we need to talk about is Peyton Randolph. If you've never heard of him, that puts you in the company of about 330 million of your fellow. Americans. Peyton Randolph has been thoroughly, almost surgically, scrubbed out of the national memory. And that's strange, because in his own time, he was a giant. He was, by every measure that

mattered to colonial Virginia, the most important man in the room, any room. He was born in 1721 into one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Virginia. The Randolphs were the kind of family where you didn't really need to introduce yourself. The name did the work. His His father had been the king's attorney for the colony. Peyton followed the same path. He went to William and Mary. He went to London to study law at the Middle Temple. He came back to Virginia and stepped into the same world his father had built, only bigger.

He served as the king's attorney general for Virginia for almost 20 years, 20 years working for the British crown. Drawing a salary from the same king, the colonies would eventually rise up against. And he kept that job for a long time, even in the United States. as the trouble started. He was, in other words, an establishment man, a loyalist by instinct, the kind of man who, you would have thought, would never turn against the empire that fed him. But that's the thing about Peyton Randolph. He turned. When the colonies started organizing, when the First Continental Congress was called to Philadelphia in 1774, Peyton Randolph showed up,

and the moment he walked into that room, the other delegates looked at him and they basically said, you, you're in charge. He was elected the first president of that first continental Congress almost unanimously. The room agreed. He was the man. Now here's where the disturbing part starts to creep in, the way it always does when you scratch the surface of these early American stories. Peyton Randolph owned people, a lot of them. He inherited enslaved men, women, and children from his father, and he added to that number over the course of his life. His wealth, His comfort, the fine clothes and the imported wine and the big house in Williamsburg, all of it sat on top of human beings he claimed to own as property.

He was, by the standards of his own time and by hours, a slaveholder of significant scale. And when he sat in that chair as president of the Continental Congress and helped set in motion the great American argument about liberty, he did it while owning other human beings. He died on October 22, 1775. He died at dinner. He was eating with friends in Philadelphia, having his evening meal, when something tore loose inside his head. The records say apoplexy, which is what they used to call a stroke. He collapsed, and within hours he was gone. He was 54 years old. The most respected man in the colonies, the first man ever to hold the title of president on American soil,

dying face down at a dinner table in the middle of a war that hadn't even fully started yet. yet. He never lived to see independence declared. He never knew how the experiment turned out. And almost immediately, the country he helped a midwife began to forget him. After Peyton Randolph, somebody had to take the chair. The man they picked was Henry Middleton of South Carolina. Henry Middleton was a different animal than Randolph. If Randolph was rich, Middleton was something past rich. He was, by some estimates, one of the wealthiest men in all of British North America. His landholding stretched across South Carolina in numbers that are hard to make sense of even now, around 50,000 acres in all, multiple plantations, and the engine that ran all

of that wealth was, again, human beings he claimed to own. The number that gets thrown around for Middleton's enslaved labor force is around 800 people, one man, claiming legal ownership of 800 other men, women, and children. The wealth of the Middleton family didn't come from being clever. It came from rice. And rice in colonial South Carolina came from forced black labor, specifically the kind of brutal, fever-soaked, water-logged labor that killed people fast and got them replaced faster. Middleton actually served as president of the First Continental Congress for only a handful of days, from October 22nd to October 26th of 1774, basically holding the seat for the closing sessions before that first Congress adjourned.

He's a footnote in the story of the presidency, but he is not a footnote in the story of American slavery, and you can't tell one part of his life and ignore the other. Here's where it gets even more complicated. When the revolution finally came, Middleton stayed in. He sided with the Patriot Cause. His son Arthur even signed the Declaration of Independence. The Middleton's looked on paper like a full-throated revolutionary family, and then Charleston fell. In May of 1780, the British took Charleston.

It was one of the worst American defeats of the entire war. And when the British marched in and started rounding up the wealthy patriots, Henry Middleton, the former president of the Continental Congress, the great patriot, signed a loyalty oath to the king. He swore allegiance to George III. He did it, by the historical record, to avoid imprisonment and to protect his estate and his family from the kind of confiscation other patriots faced.

which is also to say to protect the system of human bondage that his estate ran on. You can frame that any way you want to frame it. You can say he was an old man, in his 60s by then. You can say he was protecting his family. You can say everyone in occupied Charleston had to make hard choices. All of that is true. But the cold fact remains. A man who once sat in the president's chair of the Continental Congress

signed his name under the King's authority when the pressure got real. He died in 1784. He didn't live to see the new country settle into itself, and his name, like Randolph's, faded. Now we come to the one name on this list you probably do recognize. John Hancock. You know him because of the signature. Big, sweeping, defiant, front and center on the Declaration of Independence. The kind of signature designed to be seen across the room.

The kind of signature that became its own legend. People still say, you're John Hancock when they want you to sign something. 250 years later. The man got his name into the language. That's no small thing. What people don't know is most of the rest of him. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Imagine if today was the day your idea changed someone's life. Imagine if you could help someone pay for college. Help your community build a new playground or help a child make it to that dream competition. With GoFundMe it's all possible. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform

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by Gofund me. John Hancock was born in 1737 in Massachusetts. His father died when he was a small child, and he was taken in by his uncle Thomas Hancock, who happened to be one of the richest merchants in Boston. When the uncle died, the nephew inherited the whole operation. Practically overnight, John Hancock became one of the wealthiest men in the colonies. He was in his late 20s. He went from comfortable to obscenely rich in one stroke of a pen. Now what was that wealth built on? Trade. Imports and exports. And here's where the line between merchant and smuggler and Boston gets very, very blurry. There's no real doubt that a meaningful chunk of the Hancock fortune came from skirting British customs duties, from bringing in goods on the quiet, from paying off

the right officials. Hancock was, by the standards of British law at the time, a smuggler. Whether you call him a smuggler with a chip on his shoulder or a patriot resisting unjust taxation depends almost entirely on which side of the Atlantic you were standing on. In 1768, one of Hancock's ships, the Liberty, was seized by British customs officers in Boston Harbor. The seizure touched off a riot. The customs officers had to flee. It was one of the early sparks of the slow burning fire that would become the revolution, and John Hancock was right in the middle of it. By 1775, the British wanted him dead. Specifically, they wanted him and Samuel Adams. When General Gage sent troops out toward Lexington and Concord on the night of April

19th, part of the mission was to grab Hancock and Adams, who were hiding out in Lexington. Paul Revere's famous ride was, in part, a warning to those two specific men that the soldiers were coming. So when you hear the British are coming, remember, they were coming for John Hancock personally. He survived that night, made it to Philadelphia, and within weeks he was elected president of the Second Continental Congress. He held that chair through the Declaration of independence. That's why his signature is the biggest one. It's not actually a flourish or a joke. He was the president of the Congress. His signature went first, in the most prominent place, because that's where the president's signature was supposed to go. He served until 1777, then went

back to Massachusetts politics, where he eventually became the first governor of the state. The darker side of John Hancock is quieter than the legend. He was vain by all accounts. He cared a great deal about clothes, about appearances, about the carriage he rode in, about being seen. He had political enemies who thought he was a peacock. He suffered terribly from gout in his later years. A brutal disease that left him in such pain, he sometimes had to be carried into the room for his own official functions. He and his wife Dorothy lost both of their children young. Their daughter Lydia died as an infant in 1777.

Their son, John George Washington Hancock, died at age 8 in 1787, after a head injury suffered in an ice skating accident in Milton, Massachusetts. Hancock outlived them both and never recovered from those losses. He died in 1793. He was 56. He had outlived his own moment in history. The man whose signature defined a country's birth went out worn down, sick and grieving. The next man in the chair is one of the darkest figures on this entire list. His name was Henry Lawrence. Henry Lawrence was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1724. He grew up in the same world Henry Middleton grew up in, the world of plantations and rice and tobacco,

and the particular kind of wealth that the southern colonies produced. But Lawrence didn't make his money primarily from owning a plantation. Lawrence made his money from selling people. His firm, Austin and Lawrence, was one of the largest slave trading operations in all of North America. They didn't just own enslaved people. They imported them. They unloaded them off ships that had crossed the Atlantic from West Africa. They sold them at auction.

They took a percentage and built fortunes on the difference. For more than a decade, Henry Lawrence was, in the most direct and unvarnished sense, a slave dealer. He was at the dock. He saw the people come off the ships. He saw what condition they were in after the Middle Passage. He knew exactly what the business was. In the decade of the 1750s alone, the records show his firm handled the sale of more than 8,000 enslaved Africans.

The firm was active before and after that decade, too. The total number of human beings whose lives passed through Henry Lawrence' ledgers over the course of his career is well into five figures. Now, later in life, Lawrence did something a lot of his peers did not. He developed something close to a conscience about it. He started pulling back from the trade in the 1760s. He wrote letters to his son criticizing the institution. He never freed his own enslaved workforce in any sweeping way,

but he stopped trafficking new people, and he wrote some of the more honest words any prominent Southern man of that era ever wrote about the moral horror of what he had been doing. You can decide for yourself what to do with that. Whether a moral pivot late in life balances out years of trafficking human beings is a question for your own conscience. I'd argue it doesn't. But it's there, and it's part of the record, and we tell the whole record on this show. Lawrence was elected president of the Continental Congress in 1777, taking

over from John Hancock. He served through the brutal Valley Forge winter, the winter where Washington's army nearly starved and froze to death. Lawrence was a serious, dignified, somewhat stiff man. He didn't have Hancock's flash. He had a kind of grim Carolina gravity to him. And then the war reached out and grabbed him. In the summer of 1780, Henry Lauren, no longer president of Congress, was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Netherlands.

The new United States desperately needed money, and the Dutch were one of the few possible sources. Lawrence boarded a packet ship called the Mercury and sailed for Europe. On September 3rd of that year, off the banks of Newfoundland, his ship was intercepted by a British frigate called the H.M.S. Vestel. The British took him prisoner. They took his papers, which proved to the British that the Dutch had been working with the Americans, which gave the British the excuse they needed to declare war on the Dutch. The capture of Henry Lawrence literally triggered another war. And then they took Lawrence and locked him in the Tower of London,

an American who had been president of the Continental Congress, locked up in the Tower of London. The same building where Anne Boleyn had her head taken off. The same building where Walter Raleigh waited to be executed. Henry Lawrence was put inside it. He's the only American in history ever held there as a state prisoner. He spent 15 months in the tower. The conditions were rough.

He was by his own letters, in constant fear that the British might just decide to hang him for treason. He was finally released in late 1781 in exchange for the British General Lord Cornwallis, the same Cornwallis who had just surrendered at Yorktown. One prisoner for another. That's what Henry Lawrence was worth to the new United States. His son, John Lawrence, was a different story. John was a young officer in the Continental Army.

He was close friends with Alexander Hamilton. He was one of the most outspoken advocates in the entire war for actually freeing and arming enslaved black men as soldiers. a proposal that almost nobody else in the southern colonies would touch. John Lawrence was killed in August of 1782 in a small skirmish at the Combehee River in South Carolina. By that point the war was effectively over. The peace negotiations were already underway. He died in a fight that didn't have to happen,

in a war that was already won. Henry Lawrence came home from the tower to bury his son. He never really recovered. He died on December 8th, 1792. In his will, he gave a strange and very specific instruction. He wanted his body wrapped in cloth and burned. He had been terrified for years of the possibility of being buried alive. His own infant daughter Martha had once been laid out for burial during a smallpox epidemic and had only stirred at the last moment when cold air from an open window happened to revive her. The memory of that

close call never left him. So he wrote it into his will. Burn me. And don't take chances. Henry Lawrence became one of the very first prominent Americans to be cremated. His ashes were buried at his Mepkin plantation next to the grave of his son John. The next president on our list is a name some of you will at least half recognize, John Jay. Jay is one of the few men on this list who actually does show up in the history books, but usually for something else entirely. He's remembered as the first chief justice of the United States. He's remembered as one of the authors of the Federalist papers. He's remembered mostly with a wince for the J Treaty of 1794, which kept the United States out of war with Britain, but was so

unpopular at home that people burned him an effigy in the streets. Crowds in Philadelphia and Boston literally hanged dummies of John Jay from lampposts and set them on fire. What's mostly forgotten is that for a year, John Jay was the president of the Continental Congress. Jay was a president of the Continental Congress. Jay was a New Yorker. He was born in 1745. He was a lawyer by training, sharp, careful, and a little cold by temperament. He was not the kind of revolutionary who threw tea into harbors. He was the kind of revolutionary who wrote briefs and drafted resolutions and tried to be very, very careful about which lines got crossed and when. He was elected president of the Congress in December of 1778, replacing Henry Lawrence. His year as president, was largely consumed by the war and by the desperate attempt to keep the new country from falling apart financially. The continental currency was collapsing. Soldiers weren't being paid. States weren't sending their share of money. It was, in many ways, a worse year than most people realize. The revolution didn't move in a clean line from Lexington to Yorktown. There were long,

ugly middle stretches where the whole thing looked like it might just fall apart, and 1779 was one of those stretches. The disturbing part of John Jay's story isn't dramatic the way Lawrence is. It's quieter. It's the same disturbing fact that sits underneath so many of these men. John Jay owned enslaved people. Not many by Southern standards, but he owned them. He inherited some. He purchased others. He used their labor in his household. And here's the thing about Jay that makes it more complicated, not less. He did, in time, come to believe slavery was wrong. He became a founding member of the New York Manumission Society, which worked for the gradual abolition of slavery in New York. As governor of New York, he signed the bill that put the state on a path toward

ending slavery within its borders. He freed his own enslaved workforce, though he did it on his own timeline, in his own way, and not always quickly. So you have this picture of a man who held human beings in bondage for much of his adult life, while also being one of the more prominent early American voices for ending the institution. Both things were true at the same time. He sat in the president's chair as a slaveholder. He died decades later, having helped chip away at the system he had once been part of. He lived a long life by the standards of his time, longer than most of the men on this list. He died in 1829 at the age of 83. He out of his own. He out of his outlived almost everyone he had served with. After John Jay came Samuel Huntington, and Samuel

Huntington might be the most important president on this entire list that nobody has ever heard of. I'm not exaggerating. There's a real argument made by serious historians that Samuel Huntington was actually the first president of the United States. Not John Hanson, who gets the bumper sticker. Not George Washington. Samuel Huntington. And the reason is buried in a calendar. Here's the the situation. The Articles of Confederation, the first real written framework of the United States, were finally ratified on March 1, 1781. After years of arguing, after Maryland finally got dragged along, the articles became the law of the land. From that day forward, the country was not just a continental Congress hanging together by string. It was, technically and legally,

the United States of America, operating under its first constitution. And the man sitting in the president's chair on that day, March 1st, 1781, was Samuel Huntington. He had already been president for over a year by then. He just kept being president after the articles took effect. So if you want to be technical, Samuel Huntington was the first president of the United States under its first written constitution. Not John Hanson, who came months later. Huntington. But nobody talks about that, partly because Huntington himself was an extremely modest man. He was not a self-promoter. He wasn't a Hancock. He wasn't a Jay. He was a quiet, hard-working, careful Connecticut lawyer who had taught himself the law without ever going to college. He had pulled

himself up from nothing. He worked in the chair, did the job, and went home. Huntington stayed on as president for another few months after the articles took effect, until his health gave up. out. He had to step down in July of 1781 because he was sick. He went back to Connecticut, eventually recovered enough to serve as governor of his state, and he ran Connecticut for the rest of his life. He died in office as governor in 1796. He owned enslaved people too. Connecticut was a slave state. People forget that. The North had slavery for a long time, and quiet, modest, hardworking Samuel Huntington was a slaveholder in his own home, in his own state, even as he sat in the chair and oversaw the ratification of the document

that would supposedly define a free country. That contradiction. That stomach-turning contradiction. You're going to hear it again and again in this story. Because it was the central contradiction of the founding. Liberty was being declared on paper by men who claimed legal ownership of other human beings. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

Imagine if today was the day your idea changed someone's life. Imagine if you could help someone pay for college. Help your community build a new playground or help a child make it to that dream competition. With GoFundMe, it's all possible. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform trusted by over 190 million people. Every week, ordinary people meet their goals and do extraordinary things. Your ideas matter. GoFundMe isn't just for emergencies.

Want to raise money for your kids' soccer team or raise funds for a small business, a creative project or event? GoFundMe helps you turn ideas into reality. And help adds up. Fundraisers you start for someone else? Raise up to five times more. So think right now. Who could use your help? Change rarely comes from waiting.

It comes from someone deciding, today I'll start. Don't wait for someone else to bring change. Today start your fundraiser in just minutes at gofundme.com. That's gofundme.com to start your fundraiser. Gofundme.com. This is a commercial message brought to you by GoFundMe. After Huntington stepped down because of his health, the chair went to Thomas McKean. McKean is one of those founders who had a hand in just about everything, but somehow never became a household name.

He signed the Declaration of Independence. He helped draft the Articles of Confederation. He was a sitting state chief justice while also serving in Congress. The man was everywhere. And for a couple of months in 1781, he was the president. He came from Delaware originally, though he spent much of his career operating in Pennsylvania. He was a lawyer, sharp, ambitious, often abrasive. People who worked with McKean tended to either love him or want to throw him out a window.

There wasn't a lot of middle ground. He had a temper. He had opinions. He didn't suffer fools, and he made sure everyone in the room knew it. His presidency lasted only about four months, from July to November of 1781. But those four months happened to include one of the most important moments in American history. While Thomas McKean was president on October 19, 1781, Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. The Revolutionary War, for all practical purposes, was over.

The British would hang on for a while longer, but the back of the empire's effort in America had been broken. and the man sitting in the president's chair when the news came in was Thomas McKean. You'd think that would buy him a chapter in every history book. It didn't. The darker thread in McKean's life isn't a single dramatic event. It's a slow grind. Because he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and an active patriot, his family was a target during the war. He had to move his wife and children repeatedly to keep them ahead of British forces. They lived for stretches in hiding. In a letter to John Adams, he described being hunted like a fox by the enemy,

compelled to remove my family five times in three months, and at last fixed them in a little log house on the banks of the Susquehanna. That's the language from his actual letter, hunted like a fox. So while he was up in Philadelphia presiding over Congress, while he was helping draft the framework of a country, his own wife and small children were being shuffled from town to town, packing up at a moment's notice, trying not to be the people the British wanted to make an example of.

That's a kind of pressure most of us can barely imagine. He held the chair anyway. McKean lived a long time. He went on to be Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, then governor. Eventually he became a bitter retired political fighter who feuded with everyone he could find. He died in 1817 at the age of 83. Even by the end, nobody could quite agree whether they liked him. And now we come to John Hanson.

If any name on this entire list has had a strange afterlife, it's John Hanson. There are people out there right now who will tell you with a straight face that John Hanson was the actual first president of the United States. There are statues of him. There's a state representing him in the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol. There are bumper stickers. There are conspiracy theories. There's a whole little cottage industry built around the idea that the country has

buried the truth about John Hanson on purpose. Some of that is overstated. A lot of it is overstated. But here's the actual, real factual story. John Hanson was a Maryland politician, born in 1721. He came from an old Maryland planner family. He served in the Maryland legislature for years. He was a senior, respected, fairly conservative patriot, the kind of man you sent to Philadelphia when you needed someone steady, not someone showy. He was elected president of the Confederation Congress in November of 1781, replacing Thomas McKean. And here's the legitimate, real reason people sometimes call him the first president of the United States. He was the first man to serve a full one-year term under the Articles of Confederation, from November of 1781 to November of

1782. Samuel Huntington had been in the chair when the articles took effect, but Huntington left because of illness. Thomas McKean took over, but only briefly. John Hanson was the first to actually do the full term, as defined by the new articles. That's the kernel of truth. The myth that gets built on top of that kernel is much bigger than the colonel deserves. Hanson did not have anything like the power of a modern president. He didn't have an executive branch. He didn't command the army. He didn't shape foreign policy single-handedly. He chaired meetings. He signed papers. He kept Congress running. That was the job. There's also another piece of the Hansen legend that needs to be put down once and for all. There's a long-running, widely circulated claim, especially

online, that John Hanson was a black man, and that the real first president of the United States was black, and that this fact has been deliberately hidden by the American establishment. That is not true. It comes from confusion with a different person also named John Hanson, a man who immigrated to the United States from Liberia in the 1820s and became a senator there. The American John Hanson, the man who was president of the Confederation Congress, was a white Maryland planner who, like so many men on this list, owned enslaved black people on his own land. That's the unromantic truth. There's no hidden black founding father here. There's just the same old story. There's just the same old story. Hansen did the job for a year and went home. He was an old tired man by then.

He died on November 15, 1783. Less than a year after leaving the chair, he was gone. The next man up was Elias Boudigno. Budino is one of those founders who lived a long, busy, multi-chapter life that doesn't fit neatly into any single label. He was a New Jersey lawyer. He was a member of Congress. He was president of the Confederation Congress for one year, from November 1782 to November 1783. Later in life, he served as the director of the United States Mint, under three different presidents. His year in the chair was actually a heavy one. The peace treaty with Great Britain was being negotiated and finalized while Boudigno was president. The Treaty of Paris, the document that officially ended the Revolutionary War and recognized American

independence was finalized in September of 1783. Budeno was the president of Congress when it was signed. The end of the war, the official end, happened on his watch. There was also a darker moment that year. In June of 1783, the Army, which had not been paid for years, finally lost its patience. A group of soldiers, mostly from Pennsylvania, marched on Philadelphia where Congress was meeting and surrounded the building. They were armed.

They were furious. They wanted their back pay, and they wanted Congress to listen. The Pennsylvania state authorities refused to call out the militia to disperse them, partly because they sympathized with the soldiers. So Boudigno, as president, made the call to evacuate the entire Congress out of Philadelphia. They fled in the night. They reconvened in Princeton, New Jersey. That's the only reason the United States Congress, for that one year, met in Princeton.

They had been driven out of their own capital, by their own army. Imagine the picture. The president of the United States Congress, slipping out of Philadelphia in the dark, with the country's own veterans circling the building demanding to be paid. That's the founding. That's what it actually looked like. The other thing worth saying about Elias Boudinot is that he spent the back half of his life on a very particular religious mission. He was a deeply devout man. He helped found the American Bible Society and served as its first president. He believed very seriously that Native Americans were descended from the lost tribes of Israel, and he wrote a book trying to prove it. He spent significant amounts of

his personal money trying to convert Jews to Christianity. None of that quite rises to the level of disturbing in the bloody sense, but it's a strange, fervent, intense kind of legacy, and it tells you something about the kind of man he was. There was no off switch on Budinot. He died in 1821. He died in 1821, at the age of 81. After Budinneau came Thomas Mifflin, and Mifflin's story is one of the strangest on the entire list. It's also one of the saddest. Thomas Mifflin was born into a wealthy Pennsylvania Quaker family in 1744.

Quakers, as you may know, are pacifists. They don't fight. They don't soldier. Violence for a Quaker is supposed to be off the table. So when the revolution came and Thomas Miflin not only joined the fight, but became a major. Major General in the Continental Army. His Quaker meeting did what Quaker meetings do in those situations. They threw him out. He was formally disowned by his own religious community for

becoming a soldier. He was a good officer in some ways, and a disaster in others. He served as Washington's first aid to camp at the very start of the war. He was charming, energetic, popular with the troops. He had a real political talent for keeping morale up, but he was also vain, ambitious, and by the end, a serious drinker. The Quaker preacher's son with the Major General's commission and the brandy on his breath. That's roughly the picture. The dark moment in Mifflin's life, the moment that should disqualify him from sainthood in anyone's history book, came in the winter of 1777 and into 1778.

This was the winter of Valley Forge. Washington's army was freezing, starving, deserting, dying. And during that exact winter, a group of officers and politicians began, in private letters and quiet conversations, to talk about whether it might be time to replace George Washington as commander-in-chief. The candidate they had in mind was Horatio Gates, the general who had just won the huge American victory at Saratoga. This is the thing history calls the Conway Cabal. Whether the Conway Cabal was a real coordinated plot or just a loose, ugly drift of grumbling among certain officers, is something historians have argued about for two centuries. The honest answer is probably somewhere in the middle. But what's not in question is that Thomas Mifflin was up to his eyeballs in it.

He was friends with Conway. He was friends with Gates. He was writing letters. He was complaining about Washington. He was in the worst possible moment of the war when the army was literally freezing to death in the snow, helping to whisper that maybe Washington wasn't the man for the job. Washington found out. Of course he did. Washington was not a fool. And the whole thing collapsed, mostly under the weight of Washington's own popularity and the obvious fact that Gates had no business being commander in chief. But Mifflin's reputation never quite recovered with the people who mattered. Years later in 1783 after the war was over, Mifflin got the chair. He was elected president of the Confederation Congress. And here's the ironic, almost cinematic part of that. The man who had once helped scheme against George

Washington was the man sitting in the president's chair when George Washington, at the end of the war, came to Annapolis to resign his commission as commander-in-chief. Washington walked into that room, surrendered his sword, gave a short and famous speech, and handed his power back to the civilian government. The man he handed it to, the man who accepted that resignation on behalf of the United States, was Thomas Mifflin. There's an enormous painting of that scene that hangs in the United States Capitol. If you ever go, look at it. The tall, dignified man in the middle is Washington. The man accepting the sword is Mifflin. The man who had once tried more or less to push him out. History is a funny thing. The end of Mifflin's life is rough. He continued in politics, served as

governor of Pennsylvania, but his drinking got worse and worse. By the end, he was broke. He owed money everywhere. When he died in 1800, his estate was so insolvent that the state of Pennsylvania had to pay for his burial. The former president of the United States Congress, the man who had accepted Washington's resignation, the major general who had served from the beginning, died in such poverty that a state had to bury him. That's not a footnote. That's a verdict. After Mifflin came Richard Henry Lee, and Lee is the man who probably should be more famous than he is. Why? because Richard Henry Lee is the man who actually proposed independence. On June 7th, 1776, almost a month before the Declaration of Independence was signed,

Lee stood up on the floor of the Second Continental Congress and offered what became known as the Lee Resolution. The text is short and brutal. These united colonies are and of right ought to be, free and independent states. That's it. That's the moment the formal motion was put on the table to, a break with Great Britain. Lee said it out loud. Jefferson then went off and wrote the longer document explaining why. But the actual motion, the actual legal vote that turned 13 colonies into a country, started with Richard Henry Lee from Virginia. He was a tall, thin, sickly aristocrat. He came from

one of the most powerful families in Virginia, the Lees of Stratford Hall. The same Lee family that would generations later produce Robert E. Lee, the Confederate General. He was a pack of A passionate, slightly theatrical speaker, and he had a particular trademark on the floor. He wore a black silk glove on his left hand at all times. He never took it off in public. In 1768, while Lee was out hunting, his gun exploded in his hands. The barrel burst. He lost all four fingers on his left hand in that one terrible second.

The wound was cauterized with a hot iron to stop the bleeding, and what was left healed into a scarred stump. He spent the rest of his life hiding it with a black silk wrap or glove. So every speech he ever gave on the floor of Congress, including the speech that proposed American independence, was given by a man waving around a damaged hand that he kept carefully covered. Lee was president of the Confederation Congress from November of 1784 to November of 1785. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after these messages. His term was relatively quiet. quiet. The country was settling into peace, slowly and badly. The articles of Confederation were starting to show their cracks. Trade between the states was a mess. The currency was a mess. Lee, like everyone else in the chair during this period, did what he could to hold things together. He was a Virginia planner. He owned enslaved human beings. He spoke about liberty and ringing eloquent terms on the floor of Congress while owning people back home. He did, at points in his career, advocate for limiting the slave trade, but he never took the step of freeing his own

enslaved workforce. He died in 1794 with his property, including the people he claimed to own, still in his name. That's the thing about so many of these men. They could speak the language of universal freedom in one room and live as slaveholders in the next. They saw no contradiction. Or if they saw it, they buried it. That moral failure is at the heart of the entire American founding, and we don't get to ignore it just because the words on paper were beautiful. After Lee came Nathaniel Gorham, and Gorham's story has one of the strangest single anecdotes in this entire history. Gorham was a Massachusetts merchant, born in 1738 in Charlestown.

He was self-made. He didn't have the inherited wealth of a Hancock or a Lee. He came up through trade and finance and politics, and by the 1770s, he was a significant figure in Boston. He served in the Massachusetts legislature, in the Continental Congress, and he was eventually elected president of the Confederation Congress in June of 1786. He served as president for only a few months, basically through the summer and fall of 1786, while the country was sliding into a real crisis.

Shays' rebellion was breaking out in western Massachusetts. Farmers weighed down by debt and taxes were taking up arms against the state government. The Articles of Confederation had no real mechanism to deal with it. Massachusetts had to put down the rebellion essentially on its own, and the spectacle of an American state crushing its own farmers with militia made it very clear to a lot of serious people that the current government was not strong enough to survive. That's the context for the strangest thing about Nathaniel Gorham. Around this period with the country looking shaky and the articles obviously failing,

the idea apparently got floated in private of inviting a European prince to come be king of America. Specifically, the prince in question was Prince Henry of Prussia, the younger brother of Frederick the Great. There's a letter supposedly written by Gorham himself that asked Prince Henry if he would be willing to come across the ocean and rule the United States as a constitutional monarch. Now, the historical record on this is murky.

The original letter Gorham supposedly wrote is law. The whole story rests primarily on a contemporary account by Rufus King, a young Massachusetts politician who claimed to have heard about it, and on a draft response letter that was discovered in Prussian archives in the early 20th century, in which Prince Henry, writing in cautious and coded language, declined the offer and said in essence that the Americans had fought too hard against one king to one another. So we have an apparent reply but no surviving copy of the original act. ask. Historians still argue about how serious the proposal was, who exactly was behind it, and whether Gorham himself put pen to paper. What is not really in dispute is that something along these lines did happen, in some form, during Gorham's term as president. Less than 10 years

after declaring independence from one king, some of the most prominent men in the New Republic were quietly asking another king to come over and run the place. That's not the version of the founding you got in third grade. Gorum's later life was rough. He invested heavily in land speculation. The famous Phelps and Gorum purchase, where he and Oliver Phelps bought a massive tract of land in western New York from the state of Massachusetts. They over-extended. The deal collapsed under them. Gorham lost most of his fortune. He died in 1796, broke and disappointed. Another one of these men who held the chair and then lost everything. The next president on the list is Arthur St. Clair. And if you remember nothing else from this episode, remember this name. Because Arthur

St. Clair is connected to one of the worst single days the United States Army has ever lived through. We'll get there. St. Clair was born in Scotland in 1737. He came to America as a young British officer, fought in the French and Indian War, settled in western Pennsylvania. And when the revolution came, He chose the American side. He served as a Continental Army General with mixed results. He was the man in command at Fort Ticonderoga in 1777, when the British took it back from the Americans. He was court-martialed for that loss, but eventually exonerated. He served on Washington's staff for the rest of the war and came out of the conflict with his honor more or less intact.

He was elected president of the Confederation Congress in February of 1787. His term coincided with one of the most important events in American history, an event that happened just down the street while he was in the chair. The Constitutional Convention. The whole reason he is in this story is that he was president of the Continental Congress during the summer when the Constitution was being drafted in Philadelphia. The very document that would, two years later, make George Washington the first president of the United States under the new system. Arthur St. Clair was the man holding the chair on the old side.

even as the new framework was being built right under him. After his presidency, St. Clair was appointed governor of the Northwest Territory, the huge expanse of land that would eventually become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And it's there, in that role, that the disaster happens. The new United States was determined to push white settlement westward. The native nations of the Ohio country, the Western Confederacy, led by men like Little Turtle of the Miami and Blue Jacket of the Shawnee, were just as determined to stop it.

The result was war, a brutal war fought in dense forests and along river valleys. In 1791, President George Washington ordered Arthur St. Clair to lead an army into the Ohio country and break the Western Confederacy once and for all. St. Clair, by this point, was old, sick, in his 50s, suffering badly from gout, sometimes unable to mount his own horse. He had no business commanding an army in the field, but he was the governor of the territory, and he was given the job.

The army he commanded was a disaster from the start. Most of the men were untrained. Many were six-month enlistees who had no idea what they were doing. They had bad supplies, bad weather, and bad discipline. They moved slowly northward through the wilderness. By early November, they were camped on a high ground near the headwaters of the Wabash River in what is now Mercer County, Ohio.

On the morning of November 4th, 1791, just before dawn, the Western Confederacy attacked. What happened in the next three hours is hard to describe without using language that sounds like a horror movie. The American camp was caught completely by surprise. The militia broke first and ran straight back into the regular troops, creating chaos. The native warriors under Little Turtle and Blue Jacket,

were not just brave fighters. They were tactically brilliant. They targeted the artillery crews first. Once the cannons fell silent, they moved through the camp in a coordinated way, killing officers, killing soldiers, killing the camp followers, the women and children who had been traveling with the army. The fighting was at close range, often hand-to-hand. Tomahawks, knives, muskets fired into faces. Out of an American force of about a thousand soldiers, more than 600, were killed outright. Hundreds more were wounded. Some estimates put the total dead, including camp followers, somewhere around 830. Native American casualties on the other side were around 21 killed and 40 wounded. It was, in absolute numbers and in percentage terms,

the worst defeat the United States Army has ever suffered at the hands of Native American forces. It still is, to this day. Custer at Little Big Horn was a much smaller engagement. St. Clair's defeat dwarfed it. Arthur St. Clair himself survived. He had several horses shot out from under him. He had bullets passed through his clothing. He stayed on the field long after most other officers were dead, trying to organize a retreat. When he finally pulled back, the remnants of his army were a panicked, broken mob running through the forest for their lives. Washington, when the news reached him at the president's house in Philadelphia, reportedly lost his temper in a way nobody had ever seen before.

The story that gets told, which traces back to a much later second-hand account by Washington's secretary Tobias Lear, and which we should treat as the dramatic retelling that it is, has Washington pacing the room, shouting that St. Clair had been warned, that he had been told to beware of surprise, and that he had let the army be cut to pieces anyway. Then, in the same telling, Washington composes himself and says, says, in a quieter voice, this must not go beyond this room. Whether those exact words were ever spoken, we don't know. What is clear from the documentary record is that Washington was furious, but in public, Washington never destroyed St. Clair. There was a congressional investigation,

but St. Clair was eventually cleared. The damage to St. Clair, however, was permanent. He served out his time as governor of the Northwest Territory, fell out with the rising Jeffersonian political movement, and ended his life in something close to total poverty. He had spent his own money on the war effort years earlier and was never properly reimbursed by the government. He died on August 31, 1818, in a small log cabin in the hills near Greensburg, Pennsylvania at the age of 81. The man who had once been president of the United States Congress, the man who had been governor of an entire territory the size of several modern states, died in a one-room cabin, owing money, half-forgotten. And the men he had led into that Ohio forest in 1791 were still out there, in unmarked graves,

scattered across the ground where they fell. The last man on our list is Cyrus Griffin. Griffin was a Virginian, born in 1748. He had studied law in London, married a Scottish noblewoman, Lady Christina Stewart, the daughter of the Earl of Trequare. So unlike most of the men on this list, he had married up into actual European aristocracy. They had several children together. He was elected president of the Confederation Congress in January of 1788. He held the chair for the entire year. And while he was doing that, history was rolling right past him.

The Constitution had been finished. The states were ratifying it one by one. By the time Griffin's term ended, the old Articles of Confederation System was essentially dead. The new constitution was about to take effect. George Washington was about to be elected the first president under the new system. The country was in the middle of a slow motion transfer of power from one form of government to another. Cyrus Griffin sat in the chair through that whole transition. And then, in November of 1788, the chair effectively went away.

There was no immediate success. as president of the Confederation Congress, because the Confederation Congress itself was being phased out. Griffin was the last man to hold the title, the last of the 14. After his time in the chair, he was appointed a federal district judge in Virginia, where he served for the rest of his career. He's mostly remembered today, when he's remembered at all, for one of his judicial cases, because he sat alongside Chief Justice John Marshall during portions of the trial of Aaron Burr for treason. That trial, where the former vice president of the United States, stood accused of plotting to break off a chunk of the country into his own private empire, is one of the strangest moments in American legal history. Cyrus Griffin was on that bench.

The last president of the Confederation Congress, in his black judge's robes, hearing testimony about the treasonous schemes of the man who had killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. You could spend a whole second podcast just out of that one detail. Griffin died on December 14th, 1810, at the age of 62. His name went into the same quiet drawer as all the others. So that's the 14. Slaveholders. Slave traders. Schemers.

Survivors. Failures. Drunks. This is the foundation of the country. Not the marble version. Not the white wig version. This rough, contradictory, hypocritical, blood-stained, sometimes brave, sometimes ugly tangle of,

human beings. They wrote noble words and they owned other human beings. They risked their lives for liberty and they died broke. They built a country and then watched the country forget them. The reason these 14 men got erased isn't an accident. It's not a paperwork problem. It's not because no one bothered to write their names down. They got erased because their story makes the founding messier than the founding is supposed to be. The clean version, the George Washington version, The marble version. That one fits on a coin. The actual version, with Henry Lawrence trading human beings on the Charleston docks before he

ever sat in the chair, with Henry Middleton signing a loyalty oath to the king to keep his slaves, with Arthur St. Clair leading hundreds of men into a forest to die. With Thomas Mifflin scheming against Washington in the snow at Valley Forge, that version doesn't fit on a coin. That version forces a conversation a lot of people would rather not have. so they got buried. But buried isn't gone. They were here.

They held the chair. They signed the papers. The country we live in now stands on top of what they did and what they failed to do. And the only thing worse than the ugly version of the truth is the lie that the ugly version doesn't exist. That's why we do this show. There's one more thing I want to say before we close this out. And it's about why these particular names get to stay buried, while other names from the same era get carved.

into mountains. Part of it is power. Washington had the army. Jefferson had the pen. Hamilton had the treasury. Franklin had the printing press and a worldwide reputation as a scientist and a wit. These were men who controlled the machines of memory. They knew how to tell their own story. They wrote letters that they expected to be read by historians. They sat for portraits. They planted seeds for their own legacy while they were still alive. Most of the men we talked about tonight didn't do that. Somebody else got to control it for them. And the somebody's who controlled it picked the version that fit on a coin. But you and I sitting here together tonight, we don't have to take the coin version. We can look at the whole thing. That's what

history is supposed to do. It's not supposed to make us feel comfortable. It's not supposed to confirm the version we already knew. It's supposed to crack things open. It's supposed to be a little disturbing sometimes. So that's what we tried to do tonight. The next time somebody tells you George Washington was the first president of the United States. You tell them well, technically. But there were 14 men in that chair before him. And every single one of them has a story. Before we wrap this one up, let me say something directly to the people who keep coming back episode after episode. I see you. I appreciate you. And I don't take for granted the fact that you choose to spend your time here with this show. When you listen, when you follow, when you download,

when you share an episode with somebody else, all of that matters, more than most people ever realize. Independent shows don't grow the way big corporate shows do. We don't have giant ad campaigns pushing us into everyone's feed. We grow because real listeners tell real people, this is something you should hear. That kind of recommendation means more than any ad ever could. So if there's someone in your life who would enjoy this show,

maybe a friend, someone in your family, someone you work with, or that one person you always end up swapping stories with, send them an episode. Mention the show. Tell them why you listen. And while you're here, make sure you're following or subscribed wherever you get your podcasts. Turn on auto downloads too, so every new episode is ready for you when it drops. But the biggest thing you can do is simple.

Keep spreading the word. That is how this community grows. One listener, one conversation, one. one recommendation at a time. Thank you for being here. Thank you for believing in what we're building. And thank you for helping this show find the people who haven't discovered us yet.