There’s gratitude for you! Colonel Swan had been one of the original Tea Partiers (the early iteration, the ones who dressed as Indians and got on the boats), a veteran of Bunker Hill and other life threatening engagements during the revolution, a firm revolutionary from the beginning. Once in the money, he acted as surety for privateers, doing well by doing good. And for this James Monroe calls him a rascal?
Swan was born in Scotland and came to Boston at age eleven. He worked in an accounting house. He was diligent and studious and even principled; at eighteen, he wrote A Discussion of Great Britain and Her Colonies from the Slave Trade. (He was against it.) Continue reading