A Magnificent Fraud: the Defalcations of Robert Temple, Esq.

• Citation: Vol. 51 No. 1
• Year: 2025

"A Magnificent Fraud": The Defalcations of Robert Temple, Esq. Vol. 51 No. 1 Pg. 34 Vermont Bar Journal Spring 2025

“A Magnificent Fraud”: The Defalcations of Robert Temple, Esq.

by Gary G. Shattuck, Esq.

Around 5 PM, on Monday, Oct. 6, 1834, 51-year-old Rutland attorney Robert Temple walked from his home into a nearby field where he placed a rifle barrel to his chest. Then, without hesitation, he fired, dying instantly, "the ball having passed through the heart and out at the shoulder." While an inquest charitably attributed his death to "an accidental discharge," the evidence pointed elsewhere.^[1]

How, many asked, could such a person, one held in high esteem throughout the state, been moved to take his own life? After all, as the accolades Temple received in the next years proclaimed, he lived among a pantheon of notables, calling him "the excellency of dignity," "distinguished edifice," and one of the "eminent men."

Nice words, but they failed to acknowledge that Temple was living a dark lie. He may have appeared worthy, but now we know much more than what his contemporaries cared to admit for he was actually a low, conniving thief. As records from the National Archives reveal, he exploited the poor, the feeble, the elderly, and the insane, specifically some 200 Revolutionary War veterans, in the pursuit of monetary gain.^[2] His years-long scam leading up to his death allowed him to reap, at a minimum, $50,000 (approximately $1,800,000 in today's dollars), surreptitiously removed from a national pension system established to assist those destitute veterans and their kin. It was the largest defalcation of its kind at the time.^[3]

Background

Robert Temple was born in 1783 in Braintree, MA, tracing his lineage back to William Bradford, the first governor of Plymouth Colony (1621-1632). His family moved to Castleton at some point, where he studied law under the tutelage of a local attorney in 1803. The next year. Temple began his assent in the legal world with his admission to the Rutland bar, simultaneously being appointed clerk of the Rutland County court (a position he held until 1820). In 1807, he was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court. His career advanced steadily. In 1812, the Vermont legislature named him a prosecutor to investigate the failure of the Bank of Vermont. The following year, it elected him secretary to the Constitution-mandated Council of Censors. In 1816, he was entrusted with the onerous task of compiling the state's laws for publication. That same year, he was elected a justice of the peace; a position he held for many years. The legislature then elected him a Supreme Court judge in 1817 (he declined), but in 1820 he assumed the role of secretary to the Governor and Council (1820-1823). Temple was soon elected Rutland's representative to the legislature and named President of the newly-chartered Bank of Rutland (1824).

Respected by his peers, Temple's name appears repeatedly in other contexts: standing for election as governor, on committees to decide where to place the capitol, creating canals and railroads, and corporator of the Vermont Agricultural Society and Rutland Fire Society. Politically, he was an ardent anti-Jacksonian holding various local and national positions in the National Republican Party, merging with the Whig Party in the early 1830s.

Rubbing elbows with the state's elite in so many venues seems to have placed pressure on Temple to give the appearance of success; particularly when he and his second wife were raising three small children in the late 1820s. Apart from the family, he was described as "a large, well-formed and well-dressed gentleman, and a leader among the members of fashionable society at Montpelier," indicating a need for money exceeding the fees he obtained as a country lawyer on the make.^[4] Of all the roles Temple played in these years to generate that income, none offered him sufficient opportunity as acting as an agent for Revolutionary War veterans to obtain their pensions. That special relationship proved so lucrative that, as one Virginia newspaper wrote after its discovery, Temple turned it into "a magnificent fraud."^[5]

Pension Fraud

Temple began pension work for Rutlandarea veterans...