Exiled Courts and Private Empires
Bonapartes in New Jersey, Rockefellers and Rosicrucians, French land and Irish Chicago: how dynastic habits survived inside a republic.
- 1No Kings: Exiled Courts, Private Empires, and the Architecture of Power in the American Republic
There is an old American instinct that becomes visible whenever somebody reaches for a crown. Wealth causes remarkably little alarm by comparison. A man may own a mountain, a railroad, a newspaper chain, a thousand-acre estate, a…
- 2The Kings of America
How much do you really know about the "first" president of the United States? Did you know that he was actually the 15th president? There were 14 other presidents that came before him that were the head of something called the…
- 3Napoleon’s American Shadow: Joseph Bonaparte’s American Empire
There is a strange piece of European history buried in New Jersey. Less than forty miles from Philadelphia, on high ground above the Delaware River at Bordentown, the older brother of Napoleon Bonaparte spent more than twenty…
- 4America’s Two Bonaparte Courts: Baltimore, Point Breeze, Freemasonry, and the Strange Road to Rockefeller’s New Jersey
There were really two American Bonaparte centers in the nineteenth century, and looking at them together changes the story. The obvious one was Point Breeze, Joseph Bonaparte’s extraordinary estate outside Bordentown, New Jersey…
- 5Lady Rebecca and the Fraternal Republic: How Pocahontas Became America’s Princess
From the Jacobean court to Virginia genealogy, the Degree of Pocahontas, Eastern Star, and Rainbow Girls, Americans spent three centuries constructing a form of female royalty inside a republic that supposedly had none.
- 6The Maxwell House Circuit: The Klan, the Bonaparte Shadow, and the French-Indian Road to the Wabash
The old Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville survives in popular memory mostly as a coffee label. That memory is almost comically harmless next to what happened inside the building during Reconstruction.
- 7Before Standard Oil: Bonaparte, Rockefeller, and Rosicrucians
The Rockefeller story is usually told as an industrial story. It begins with Cleveland, kerosene and John D. Rockefeller, passes through railroad rebates and pipelines, and culminates in the Standard Oil Trust. That version…
- 8Rockefeller and the Rosicrucians: The Inheritance of Power
In the twelfth century, Adélaïde de Roquefeuil married into the House of Anduze. The Roquefeuil family’s published history describes a condition attached to the marriage: their children were to preserve the Roquefeuil name and…
- 9Chicago and the Irish Kingdom
Chicago is easy to misunderstand because the city looks so young on paper. Its great explosion belongs to the nineteenth century: canals, railroads, slaughterhouses, grain elevators, immigrant wards, skyscrapers, organized labor…
- 10The American House of Delano: Opium, Railroads, and The Making of an American Dynasty
In 1926, a man whose father had made a fortune selling opium arrived in Persia to investigate how the country might grow less of it. Frederic Adrian Delano had run railroads and helped launch the Federal Reserve. Now the son of a…
- 11How France Held America
At the negotiations that produced the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, Little Turtle challenged an American account of the country around him. General Anthony Wayne pointed to the places where French and British posts had stood as…
- 12The Portable Empire
How the Bonapartist state broke apart—and how its people, routes, and methods reassembled from Spain and Russia to Manila, Washington, and Chicago.
- 13The Red Feather and the Shadow Heir
In 1751, a Saxon nobleman named Karl Gotthelf von Hund began building a Masonic order whose authority depended upon a man he would not identify. Hund said that in Paris in 1743 he had been received into a surviving Order of the…
- 14The St. Louis Connection
On October 23, 1873, Charles W. Ford died while away from St. Louis. President Ulysses S. Grant had known him since his own days as an army lieutenant at Sackets Harbor, New York. Their friendship had survived Grant’s difficult…
- 15Private Networks and Public Fortunes: The Rockefeller–Hughes Connection
The Cleveland directory for 1857 puts three entries on the same page. John J. Rockafellow sells coal at the Cleveland and Pittsburgh Railroad’s coal pier. John D. Rockefeller is a bookkeeper. William Rockefeller is a physician…