5 Stories That Prove The Founding Fathers Were Total Maniacs

Over the next year, Jefferson kept badgering his colleagues back in America to stop doing all that unimportant statecraft and bag him a moose. Eventually they put the governor of New Hampshire on the case, and he sent out hunters to shoot the biggest moose bull they could find. Which they did. 20 miles from the road. In the middle of winter. But if Thomas Jefferson needed a moose, by god would he get one. The hunters dragged the beast through towering snow for 14 days to deliver it to civilization, had it spruced up a bit by a taxidermist, and shipped it off for a year-long-voyage to Europe.

Naturally, by the time the moose arrived in Paris, it was a putrid, stinking mess with no antlers -- though the governor had included spare parts from other animals, in case Jefferson wanted to "mix and match as he saw fit." Yet bold Jefferson was unfazed, presenting the rancid moose to his French critics and simply telling them to use their imagination to fill in the blanks. If nothing else, he proved that Americans do have one thing (well, a pair of things) that's pretty big.

Undeterred, Franklin eventually managed to successfully electrify the life out of a gobbling victim, making all this electro-murder worth it when he noted that "the birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tender."

However, the contempt Franklin showed to his wobbly friends came back to peck him in the butt when one experiment resulted in self-electrocution. Describing the incident in a letter from 1750, Big Ben recalled that he was distracted by a bystander and zapped himself instead of the bird: "I then felt what I know not how well to describe; an universal Blow thro'out my whole Body from head to foot ... that part of my hand and fingers which held the Chain was left white as tho' the Blood had been Driven Out." Sadly, unlike the birds, this didn't make Franklin more tender, and he continued to happily fry fowl for the rest of his days.

In order to get the clout he deserved, JPJ went out and scored several major victories for the Russians. But when being a crack commander wasn't getting him enough recognition, he decided to get attention the same way a rebellious teenager does: by spray-painting his name in big letters. During one scouting mission, Jones had a Cossack warrior row him right up to a Turkish dock. There, he wrote on one of the Turkish hulls in chalk "TO BE BURNED. PAUL JONES." And like Washington, Jones could not tell a lie, because the next day, he used that graffiti to hunt the ship down and sink it.

Unfortunately, that showboating only made him more hated among his Russian colleagues, who plotted to have the American rear-admiral kicked out. One of his rivals bribed a 12-year-old girl to claim that Jones had raped her. Jones vehemently denied the charge, putting forth the legit 18th-century defense that he had in fact paid that 12-year-old for perfectly legal consensual sex. Nonetheless, he was run out of Russia, and Jones died in France soon after, never having sailed again.

But this wasn't some battle wound from the War of Independence, though it did involve him getting some action. One night, the 28-year-old was caught red-handed bedding another man's wife. The husband chased Morris out onto the street, where the unfortunate future statesman got run over by a four-wheeled carriage, breaking his leg in several places. Doctors had to amputate the leg below the knee, replacing it with a wooden prosthetic -- a stark reminder to always look both ways when having an affair with a married woman.

You'd think that after losing a leg, Morris would learn a lesson not to play around. But the wooden leg didn't slow him down one bit, even when he hobbled away on it after getting caught cheating again. For decades, the peg-legged Morris kept screwing around, until he finally settled down and stopped chasing women at the age of 58, much to the relief of his remaining leg and other lower-body appendage.

A few years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Rush declared that he had finally figured out the holy grail of bad '80s stand-up comedy: the real difference between white people and black people. Black people, according to Rush, were merely white people who are suffering from a weird form of leprosy that turns skin black, lips big, and hair "woolly" -- an illness he coined as "negritude." And there was only one cure for negritude: becoming white. Even if that meant burning off the black skin and curly hair with dangerous acid to reveal the natural, godly whiteness underneath.

Despite this -- and it's not often you can say this of a guy who thinks you should "burn away the black" -- Rush was one of the most progressive founding fathers. He was against the death penalty and championed women's higher education (to a point). Most ironically, Rush was also strongly anti-slavery, condemning the capture of these poor sick whites as evil. Which makes him the only guy to say ethnic minorities were a "disease" that must be "cured" who wasn't being ghoulishly metaphoric, but ghoulishly literal.

Christian Markle is a cool dude. Hit him up on Facebook. E. Reid Ross has a couple books, Nature Is The Worst: 500 Reasons You'll Never Want To Go Outside Again and Canadabis: The Canadian Weed Reader, both available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. R.G. Jordan is not big on social media, but he is big on working and eating food, so you can contact him at RGJordan4@gmail.com if you think his words are funny or insightful.

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