“SUCH A TORNADO”:

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JAMES THOMSON CALLENDER, SCANDALMONGER

_______________

A Dissertation

Presented to

The Faculty of the Department

of History

University of Houston

_______________

In Partial Fulfillment

Of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

_______________

By

Kelsie Jackson

August 2013
 “SUCH A TORNADO”:
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JAMES THOMSON CALLENDER, SCANDALMONGER

_______________

An Abstract of a Dissertation

Presented to

The Faculty of the Department

of History

University of Houston

_______________

In Partial Fulfillment

Of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

_______________

By

Kelsie Jackson

August 2013
 ABSTRACT

This dissertation focuses on the life, work, and historical importance of James Thomson

Callender, a scandalmongering journalist whose publications revealed the extramarital affair

of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson’s alleged sexual liaison with his slave, Sally

Hemings. This study seeks to offer a new examination and contextualization of Callender on

the American political stage. Callender was closely involved in two major personal

scandals: Alexander Hamilton’s adulterous involvement with Maria Reynolds and Thomas

Jefferson’s alleged long-term relationship with Sally Hemings. Moreover, Callender was

also a major force in the evolution of the early American party system and participated in

some of the young republic’s first growing pains, most notably the attempt of the Sedition

Act of 1798 to squelch the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press.

Generally dismissed as a hack journalist, a need remains for Callender to be presented in a

more accessible, narrative-driven manner that is grounded in sound historical methodology.

He lived in a moment of enormous change. During Callender’s brief life in America, the

United States struggled through two bitterly contested presidential elections, attempted to

find its footing in a volatile international community, and sought the balance between its

constitutional idealism and the overwhelming need at times for political pragmatism. This

dissertation demonstrates that Callender was an independent actor whose work impacted all

of these narrative strands. Through a reexamination of the journalist’s activities and

involvement in early American politics, a new voice is offered as part of a portrait of the

early republic’s political and ideological climate.

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“Let us go, then,” Virgil admonishes Dante in Canto IV of the Inferno, “for the

long road urges us forward.” While writing a dissertation is perhaps less arduous a

journey than the Poet’s, there is no doubt that the journey to and through this dissertation

has been a long one, and it is a privilege to take a moment and acknowledge the many

people who have urged me forward on this road.

It was in Wendy Phillips’s sixth-grade social studies classroom that I was first

introduced to a love of all things historical (especially ancient Greeks and Egyptians).

That I’ve ended up several thousand years in the future (and on a different continent, no

less!) is a testament to the deep and abiding love of history her classroom inculcated in

me from an early age.

To the history and music faculty of Wayland Baptist University, I note my

gratitude.

Various faculty members of the University of Houston’s Department of History

have played instrumental roles not only in developing this dissertation, but also more

importantly in developing my skills as a critically-thinking historian and a future teacher.

Dr. Todd Romero, Dr. Tyrone Tillery, Dr. John Moretta, Dr. Hannah Decker, and Dr.

Steven Deyle offered endless enthusiasm and patience in their classrooms and offices to a

still-maturing graduate student.

Along with the History Department, the UH School of Communications formed

up a critical part of my education as both a graduate student and as an individual, and I

would like to acknowledge my great debt indeed to the following members of the

iii
Communications School faculty: Dr. Zhiwen Xiao, Dr. William Douglas, and Dr. Martha

J. Haun.

On a more personal level, it is my privilege to acknowledge the particular debts I

owe the following:

My peers—Daniel R. LeClair, Joseph Thompson, and Natalie Schuster—have

endured an unending parade of drafts, redrafts, and “just made a few changes around

midnight before the group meeting” drafts. Their proofreading has been an invaluable

contribution to this manuskript.

Dr. Matthew Clavin gave generously of his time during the early months of

summer to review this manuscript and participate in its defense. The manuscript is a

richer and more diverse story thanks in large part to suggestions from Dr. Clavin’s

extensive experience in the field of Atlantic Community studies.

Dr. Garth S. Jowett’s propaganda course and conversation have never failed to

inspire and provoke in equal measure. Dr. Jowett’s enthusiasm and sustained interest in

my success as a professional historian have been a source of continual encouragement.

Dr. Eric H. Walther has been a tireless supporter and source of wisdom who very

graciously stepped in to fill a last-minute vacancy on my defense committee. From the

unenviable task of managing a young, untried teaching assistant who thought he had all

the answers to the seemingly interminable requests for reference letters, Dr. Walther is a

mentor whose guidance and friendship I will continue to treasure long after my time at

UH is over.

Dr. James Kirby Martin deserves far more appreciation than this brief note can

encompass. Without his support, counsel, and inspiration, this work would never have

iv
reached completion. Dr. Martin has been a friend whose wisdom has benefitted me well

beyond the classroom. I hope that in some small way he finds this work a fitting product

to bear his name.

Finally, the most personal of acknowledgements must go to the following:

Once again, to Johann Sebastian Bach, William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson,

and the artists of the Royal Opera and Ballet, for keeping me (mostly) sane throughout

the past four years and especially the recent several months.

This work and its degree are the fulfillment of the ambitions and hopes of my

grandparents, Kelsie and Ruby Jewel Mayfield and Merle Jackson. Although they are not

here to witness these final steps in my education, I am confident they would be proud of

what we have collectively achieved.

Everything I am is thanks to my parents, Steve and Teresa. This is as much their

work as it is mine, and to them it is offered with humble gratitude and love.

Last but certainly not least, Julie has lived with this dissertation for two years with

the kind of forbearance one can only expect from the truest of friends. Although she did

not write and will never read a word of this manuscript, she has seen it through from first

draft to final copy and proven that our best friends do indeed have four feet.

Kelsie Jackson

v
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements iii

Introduction viii

Chapter I: From Scottish Activist to American Refugee: Callender’s Early Life and 1
Works

1. Interesting Times – The Scottish Enlightenment 1

2. Birth and Baptism – Callender’s Early Life 2

3. “This world is buried in prejudice” – Callender’s First Political Works 6

4. “Grievous and intolerable oppressions” – English rule and taxation in 15

Scotland

5. “An abyss of taxes and blood” – The Political Progress of Britain 18

6. “I ask for nothing but a decent subsistence for myself and my family” – 26
Starting Over in America

Chapter II: Crossing the Rubicon: The Reynolds Affair 43

1. Alexander the Great? – James Callender, Alexander Hamilton, and 43

Historians

2. Heir Apparent – The Rise and Rise of Alexander Hamilton 45

3. Punch and Counterpunch: The Phocion Letters and the Historical Memoirs 49

4. “Other than pecuniary consolation” – The Reynolds Affair 58

5. “The faction is organized and a crisis is approaching” – Callender Strikes 64

Back

6. “A dishonourable infidelity somewhere” – Hamilton, Monroe, and Honor 73

7. “Condescending to give a public explanation” – The Reynolds Pamphlet, and 79

Afterward

Chapter III: Heights and Depths: From the Sedition Act to the Richmond Jail 96

vi
 1. Between the Elephant and the Whale – France, Britain, and the Adams 96
Administration

2. “The present dreadful situation” – Callender, Jefferson, and the Democratic- 99

Republican Press Machine

3. “Why is the President afraid to tell?” – The XYZ Affair 102

4. “A monster that must for ever disgrace its parents” – The Sedition Act 110

5. “I am entirely sick even of the Republicans” – Callender’s Flight from 115

Philadelphia to Richmond

6. “An occasional severity of expression” – The Prospect Before Us and 123

Callender’s Trial for Sedition

7. “The kennel of servility” – Imprisonment and the Fall from Jefferson’s Grace 138

Chapter IV: Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth: The Hemings Affair and the Politics of 156
Betrayal

1. “Betrayed by all parties” – Callender and the Jefferson Administration 156

2. “I am obliged to speak plain” – Seeking New Patrons: James Madison and 160
James Monroe

3. “He knows nothing of me” – Callender and Jefferson Call it Quits 170

4. “They will represent me as the patron of Callender” – Jefferson, Callender, 181

and the Art of Revising History

5. “How much has been gained or lost by attacking J.T. Callender” – The 194
Hemings Revelation

6. “To see him constantly drunk is nothing new” – The Last Days of James 200
Thomson Callender

Epilogue 211

Bibliography 220

vii
 INTRODUCTION

The man staggered and hiccupped, his hair disheveled, his gait unsteady in the

gathering heat of the morning. Alone for the moment on the street, he might have paused

to reflect on how he had arrived at this point: stumbling aimlessly around the quiet streets

of Richmond, Virginia, on a hot Sunday morning. It was July 17, 1803, and James

Thomson Callender had reached the bottom of the barrel, literally and figuratively. A

journalist and Scottish immigrant to America ten years before, Callender had spent the

intervening decade “firing through five port holes at once,” waging press wars and

pushing scandal campaigns against the likes of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton,

and Thomas Jefferson.1 The journalist had corresponded with many of the great names in

American political history while unleashing scandals that left the great and powerful in

fear of his muckraking gaze. At the apex of his notoriety, he accused President Jefferson

of interracial sex with a slave at Monticello, permanently ensuring himself a place in the

annals of history. The few residents who might have chanced to see Callender drunkenly

wandering around Richmond little suspected that this man’s pen had left on the hearts of

Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s reputations scars that would endure for more than two

hundred years.

Perhaps Callender himself reflected on his career in the United States while

sweating in the morning sun. Arriving as a penniless political refugee from Britain in

1793, his fortunes in America had teeter-tottered in the following decade like the

inebriated man to which they belonged. The 1797 revelation of Alexander Hamilton’s

adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds had catapulted Callender to the notice of

Hamilton’s implacable foe, Thomas Jefferson, and opened up new opportunities for the

viii
journalist’s advancement. Just four years later, however, relations between Callender and

Jefferson broke down so dramatically that Callender had turned his pen against his

former political idol, exposing Jefferson’s own adulterous connections with one of his

slaves at his Monticello home. Having angered the leading figures of both parties in the

first American partisan system, Callender quickly found himself friendless and

desperately poor. Not long after he was sighted shambling around Richmond’s streets, the

journalist was found drowned in three feet of turbid water, dead almost ten years to the

day after his arrival in Philadelphia.

Though Callender’s body had finally found rest, the battle for his reputation and

legacy was only just beginning. The very character of his work made him a difficult and

elusive figure. The two great revelations of his career—Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s

adulteries—present interpretational challenges that historians have grappled with for

virtually the entire development of American historiography. Sex scandals have always

been metal more attractive for journalists, historians and the general public, but

Callender’s tying of two leading American founders to adultery—in one case

interracial—has stigmatized him in the eyes of many scholars. Various academics have

dismissed him as a troublemaker, a scandalmonger, and a progenitor of the gutter press

and yellow journalism. For forcing scholars to confront the dark sides of the Founders he

has received opprobrium and often outright neglect.

In the decades after the American Revolution, the Whig and consensus practice of

upholding the Founding Fathers as near-demigods made of immaculate virtue left

virtually no room for someone like James Thomson Callender, who had dedicated much

of his work to pulling down such revered figures. Besides his high-profile attacks on

ix
Hamilton and Jefferson, Callender had printed vitriolic slanders of John Adams and even

the legendary Father of the nation himself, George Washington. As recently as the 1970s,

historians such as Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson condemned the Sally Hemings

revelation as an invention of Callender’s spiteful imagination.

Even for New Left and Neo-Progressive historians who sought a more critical,

less deified evaluation of the republic’s first generation, Callender held little appeal.

Fawn Brodie’s psychological biography, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, argued

for the truth of the affair while still dismissing Callender as an unreliable scallywag who

happened, in the case of the Hemings affair, to be right.2 In 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed

offered a new case for the veracity of the Hemings-Jefferson affair, but again

marginalized Callender’s role.3

For any historian, Callender remains a difficult figure to examine. His lack of any

substantial body of real writings (apart from his erstwhile correspondence with Jefferson

and much of his pamphleteering work) means that he is only approachable through his

propagandistic works and the admittedly slanted eyes of individuals such as Jefferson.

The journalist was essentially a semi-itinerant laborer; he left behind no large cycles of

papers or letters as Jefferson and Adams did.

Thanks to the inexorable march of time and advances in technology, however,

access to the widest possible array of sources related to Callender has made him more

accessible than ever to scholars. The ongoing publication of the great multi-volume

cycles of Thomas Jefferson’s and Alexander Hamilton’s papers has been a major, even

epochal, contribution to research efforts across innumerable fields. Most importantly,

thanks to the digitization of aging manuscripts and microfilm reels, some of Callender’s

x
pamphlets are now available to scholars for the first time in a usable form. This mass of

newly available source material means a more nuanced and complete portrait of

Callender as an historical actor independent of “great men” like Jefferson and Hamilton

is possible and needed.

The evolution of the historiography related to the early American republic and

many of its key figures owes a great debt to this still somewhat enigmatic journalist.

Because of James Thomson Callender, generations of Americans have confronted and

grappled with the need to accept the Founding Fathers’ faults as well as their virtues.

Because of Callender, American historians have constantly struggled with the ever-

present need to reach an objective, unsentimental appraisal of this still-young nation’s

past. The desire for perfect gods, for spotless Founders, for a national immaculate

conception, has kept Callender’s memory suppressed and hidden for too long. At the

same time, the academic iconoclasm of the New Left and Neo-Progressives has equally

threatened to usurp Callender’s narrative by transforming him into a muckraking hero

shorn of all his often-glaring faults.

Searching for the “true” James Thomson Callender requires not only reexamining

his writings and the key events of his career, but an evaluation of where and how he fit

into the larger narrative of the early republic’s political history. The search must also

extend beyond America to the coasts of Scotland and France. Scotland, where Callender

grew up, spent his formative years, and from which he eventually departed in hasty exile,

seeking to escape his turn on the gallows, inculcated the young refugee with values and

attitudes that he actively sought to import into the United States. Even more important,

however, were the passions and tensions the French Revolution unleashed not only on the

xi
European Continent, but also across the English Channel in Britain and the Atlantic in the

New World, where American politics underwent a dramatic transformation in response to

events in France. In short, the story of James Thomson Callender is more than the last

few years of his life spent smearing American politicians. His story is that of a man

whose life and work in America reflected his childhood as a Scottish Calvinist, his

hardship as an unwilling participant in the patronage system of Britain, and his idealistic

faith in radical republicanism as expressed in the French Revolution. Seeking out these

roots and tracing their branches into the New World is the goal of this reassessment of

James Thomson Callender’s life among America’s early national heroes.

xii
 NOTES

1
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, March 14, 1800, Julian P. Boyd, et al,
eds, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton University Press, 1950–), vol. 31, pp.
432-33. Henceforth abbreviated as TJ: Volume: pages.
2
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: W.W. Norton and
Co., 1974).
3
Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controvery
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).

xiii
 CHAPTER I
FROM SCOTTISH ACTIVIST
TO AMERICAN REFUGEE:
CALLENDER’S EARLY LIFE AND WORK

1. Interesting Times – The Scottish Enlightenment

Eighteenth-century Britain, in spite of its generally dreary weather, was alive and

bursting with the creativity of the Enlightenment. England and Scotland had given birth

to some of the greatest creative minds in history: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Isaac

Newton, Adam Smith, and David Hume bequeathed to their countrymen and to the

literate world a legacy that fired the imaginations of readers in the mother country and

New World alike. Also known as the “Age of Reason,” the Enlightenment was the

intellectual butterfly to the American Revolution’s hurricane: the first breeze that, thanks

to a combination of fortuitous circumstances, eventually built up into the gale of

revolution in America and continental Europe.

Philosophers across Europe, but particularly in Scotland, were embracing and

advocating bold new ideas that threatened the old hegemony of church and crown.

Scholars such as Adam Smith, David Hume, and London-settled Netherlander Bernard

Mandeville argued that the freedom and sovereignty of the individual and the polity as a

whole were the essential components in the advance of civilized society. Out of this

Scottish Enlightenment came some of the most important and influential pronouncements

of the eighteenth century. Most famously, Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral

Sentiments (1759), articulated a belief in the guidance of an “invisible hand”: “The

rich…are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries

of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions

1
among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the

interest of the society....”1 Individual self-interest, Smith argued, was the best guarantor

of the public good, and this radical concept became the Scottish Enlightenment’s most

famous contribution to political philosophy. The Enlightenment sowed the seeds of a new

revolution in thought—a revolution that arguably laid the foundations for the formation

of the United States of America near the end of the eighteenth century.

Scotland’s Enlightenment produced a dizzying variety of new ideas, but

prominent among them was an increased awareness among the people of their

individualism, their innate capacity for growth and advancement, and not least of all, the

oppressiveness of their present political and economic climate. The questions and debates

that arose during the Enlightenment emboldened generations of political thinkers and

philosophers, fueling what historian Charles Sellers would aptly refer to as a “republican

contagion” that reached its fullest extent in the early 1800s.2 From the mid to late-

eighteenth century, the first ideas of proto-republicanism began slowly infecting the

aging monarchies and societies of Europe, crossing the Atlantic Ocean in books,

pamphlets, and soon enough, radical exiles, to spread even further.

2. Birth and Baptism – Callender’s Early Life

It was in this milieu, already pregnant with possibilities, that an unremarkable

child made his entrance into the world. James Thomson Callender’s birth was so obscure

(and perhaps unimportant) that his birthday—the month and even the year—are not

known with any degree of certainty or precision. This child, whose reputation and

notoriety would one day cast a long shadow across American politics that chilled such

2
great men as Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, was born into the most obscure

of circumstances. To arrive at his likely birth year—1758—historians have only

Callender’s assertion in a 1796 letter to James Madison: “But I am now in my thirty-ninth

year….”3 The adult Callender, fueled as he was with populist, anti-aristocratic passion,

might have been pleased to know he shared his birth year with another fiery advocate of

populism: Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre.

Even less is known of Callender’s family. Given the journalist’s often-extreme

dislike of privilege and aristocracy, however, he was most likely the product of a modest

and even difficult upbringing. The sole potential connection between Callender and

anyone of reputation came in 1815 with Scottish author Robert Anderson’s Life of

Samuel Johnson. Anderson referred to “Mr Thomson Callender, nephew of Thomson the

poet,” the same poet who composed the popular song Rule, Britannia.4 This assertion,

however, remains essentially impossible to prove due to a lack of documentation or

extant records.

Growing up in Scotland, Callender would later acknowledge his having been

“bred up” as a member of the Presbyterian tradition. Even this assertion, however,

contains as much mystery as fact. Scottish Presbyterianism in Callender’s day was

divided into evangelical and moderate camps. The moderates held to a view of the

Church of Scotland—the state church and largest Presbyterian denomination in

Scotland—as subordinate to the state and embraced a more progressive form of religion

focused on attaining social goals rather than engaging in theological debate. Eschewing

dogma, the moderates were also key supporters of the Scottish Enlightenment, leading to

distrust and enmity between themselves and the more fundamentalist evangelicals. These

3
evangelicals embraced a strong commitment to, and a singular zeal for, doctrinal purity.

Theirs was a mindset of stark, unyielding choices between good and evil. Unlike the

moderates, evangelicals were firmly rooted in the fervor and fire of the Church’s original

Calvinism. In 1733 and 1761, tensions within the Church, developed largely along these

ideological fault lines, became so great that in both years large groups of clerics and

congregations seceded from the established Church, a division that continues to endure.

Although Callender left no definitive statement on exactly how he was “bred up” in the

Church, given his missionary zeal and frequent bursts of moral indignation, it is more

likely that he was brought up in the evangelical tradition of the Church of Scotland.

The Scottish education system of the time was, by contrast, in much better

condition than the Church of Scotland. From beginning to end, Callender’s work showed

the influence and benefit he derived from what was an almost universal educational

mandate in Scotland. His earliest publications—works of political commentary in 1782

and 1783—were composed in fluent English rife, as was the custom for political writings

of the time, with ornate classical allusions. As late as 1796, Callender was able to write to

James Madison: “I think myself capable of teaching what is commonly expected from a

country schoolmaster, viz. English grammar, writing, arithmetic, and if required Latin,”

albeit not with “eminent skill but not I think below mediocrity.”5

The importance of Scotland’s cultural context as an explanation, albeit partial, for

Callender’s later actions cannot be overstated. His was a childhood spent deprived of

privilege, yet surrounded in the whirlwind of the Scottish Enlightenment and fired with a

particularly ferocious form of Calvinism. Callender’s first true biographer, Michael

Durey, suggests that Calvinism was something “from which he never fully escaped.”6 It

4
is possible, even likely, that Callender did not seek to “fully escape” his religious/moral

training, but instead accepted and even embraced it. Calvinism gave the young man an

undeniably strong moral compass and a zest for righteous indignation, and united with his

difficult childhood, an enduring mistrust of the Scottish and English aristocracy.

Unbeknownst to him, these sentiments—especially those in opposition to a

privileged elite—had made the trans-Atlantic journey long ago. Callender would become

yet another apostle of anti-establishment politics and ideology exiled from Europe in the

coming conflagration of the French Revolution. In the beginning, however, he was

unremarkable to the point of anonymity, leaving much of his life and background

shrouded in the foggy weather of his homeland.

What is known about Callender begins in 1782, with the young man’s assumption

of duties as a clerk at the Sasine Office—a land registration agency—in Edinburgh. By

1782, Callender had already begun manifesting a flair for poetic and dramatic writing, a

skill that was, unfortunately, not welcome at his new job. As a subclerk, Callender was

responsible for the transcription and filing of such land records as titles, deeds, and other

paperwork. Despite the uninspiring and even mind-numbing nature of the position’s

work, Callender held the position for eight years. Alongside his work, the young man

found time to anonymously publish two pamphlets that demonstrated, among other

things, his capacity for literate expression, his contact with the work of the great writers

and thinkers of his day, and not least, his penchant for scathing character attacks, a

“talent” that would ultimately seal his reputation in the New World.

5
3. “This world is buried in prejudice” – Callender’s First Political Works

Showing a passionate talent for iconoclasm from the outset, Callender’s first

target was the well-known English writer and literary critic, Dr. Samuel Johnson.7

Popular in England, Johnson was equally unpopular in Scotland, not least for his strong

Anglican and Tory sentiments. Johnson had also made a series of disparaging and

derogatory remarks about Scotland and its contributions to the Enlightenment. Thanks to

these and other indiscretions, the venerable scholar had become a favorite target for

Scottish ire. Callender, attempting to find his footing in the world of Scottish letters, took

aim at Johnson, preparing to build a career from a literary knife sunk into the beloved

Englishman’s back.

The Deformities of Dr. Samuel Johnson, selected from his works, published in

1782, was Callender’s first printed work. In his preface, Callender stridently proclaimed,

“The world is buried in prejudice: Every department of knowledge is deeply infected by

its fatal poison. Thus we frequently respect or reprobate a book without a perusal, merely

on account of the Author’s name.”8 As would be common in his work, Callender was

determined from the outset of the Deformities to identify himself as an iconoclast, a non-

respecter of persons. Johnson might be loved and almost universally respected (in

England), said Callender, but this glowing reputation was altogether unmerited and the

product of an English bandwagon. “The public have long heard that a late English

Dictionary is a most masterly performance,” he wrote, in reference to Johnson’s famous

Dictionary of the English Language, “but is there a single man in England who ever read

it half through? No. [B]eing considered as a fashionable decoration in a closet of books, it

is bought without the least chance of being perused.”9

6
 This practice of purchasing and even revering items—especially books—simply

for the reputation each item carried and imparted symbolized in large part the rottenness

of the aristocracy as Callender saw it. “In learning, as in life, much of our happiness

flows from deception,” he claimed, and Johnson was one of the greatest deceivers.10

Callender decried Johnson as a man whose “abilities and learning are not accompanied

by candour and generosity” and whose Dictionary “displays many proofs of his ill-

nature, and evinces what I want to insist on…that he who despises politeness cannot

deserve it.”11 Johnson’s lack of politeness was evidenced in his often brusque, pretentious

elitism, an elitism Callender believed the aristocracy shared. “The Doctor is himself a

proof,” the Deformities claimed, “that a man may look upon almost all of his own

profession with scorn and malignity…. But I hope every heart revolts at this gross insult

on the characters of mankind.”12

The Deformities exhibited a number of talents Callender would continue to

develop into full maturity: a passionate vein of discourse, a penchant for personal attacks,

and a willingness to read and quote at length as a means of establishing veracity. His

wittiness and love of sarcasm, however, seemed to spring Athena-like, fully developed

from the outset of his professional writing career. In quoting a series of lengthy excerpts

from Johnson’s Dictionary, Callender wrote with melodramatic facetiousness: “Every

page, indeed, is so pregnant with superexcellent beauties, that in selecting them, the

critic’s situation resembles that of a schoolman’s ass between two bundles of hay; his

only difficulty is where to begin.”13 Another trait of Callender’s writing was to attach

ironic remarks to the writings he was criticizing: “[L]et it be told in Rome…to the honour

7
of the English nation, that her greatest philosopher has received £300 a year for

informing us that—Man is a ‘Human being. 2. Not a woman….’”14

The pamphlet concentrated on a theme that would be persistent in Callender’s

work: the critique of deference and privilege. In the world he lived and worked in, great

figures of established reputations such as Johnson were largely impervious to criticism. A

reputation for learning served as one shield, but equally important was the respectful

deference that pervaded in an aristocratically governed society such as that of Great

Britain in the eighteenth century. Criticism of one’s “betters” was anathema to most

Britons, English and Scottish alike. “Knowing one’s place” in the often rigid social class

structure of the day was itself a form of defense for the elites. Although Callender’s

language and prose were often colorful and somewhat overheated, his criticism of

England’s somewhat mindless deference toward Johnson—vis-à-vis the Dictionary he

alleged everyone revered but few if any had actually cracked open—was a largely

accurate observation.15

However correct (or not) Callender’s observations were, from the outset of his

writing career he faced a self-imposed handicap: his lack of self-control. The Deformities

showed him at his strongest and weakest. Forceful and persuasive when analyzing the

works of his target, he also encumbered his prose with long diatribes ensconced in the

purplest of prose, undermining his credibility as a political observer. The Deformities

concluded with a series of personal attacks on Johnson sure to arouse the anger of many

English readers: “[T]he world is long since weary of his arrogant pedantry, his officious

malice…his corruptions of our language; his very limited literature; his entire want of

general learning…his defiance of decency; and his contempt of truth.”16

8
 Ad hominem insults would color Callender’s writing for his entire life, but it was

his detestation of the aristocracy and its standard bearers he first displayed here that

would make him such a formidable adversary. Modern observers must recall that through

the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century, deference to one’s social superiors

was not only expected, it was outright demanded in Britain and throughout Europe. The

Enlightenment had unleashed a new strain of radical egalitarianism, however, that struck

the well-ordered society around Callender with the suddenness and fury of a tidal wave.

Callender’s proactive unwillingness to share in the reverence literary Britain accorded

Samuel Johnson threw his iconoclasm and oppositionist tendencies into sharp relief

against these shifts in cultural norms.

The young man’s wholesale assault on one of the most respected literary figures

in England of the day was sufficiently impressive to warrant a second printing. The

Deformities, originally published in Edinburgh, went through a second edition, this one

published in London. The subclerk hoped to gain the attention of a wealthy patron, or at

the least a degree of notoriety and infamy. Exactly when the Deformities appeared vis-à-

vis his career in the Sasine Office is not known, but the pamphlet was the clear product of

research and careful attention; the young subclerk was already attempting to advance

beyond his dreary office. By employing such fiery and provocative language, Callender

no doubt hoped that the Deformities would attract extreme, attention-getting reactions.17

Instead, the Deformities failed to generate any lasting impression. Its sales must

have been sufficient to garner the second edition, but, like many works of political

observation and critique even today, the pamphlet created little or no lasting impression

on its readers, nor did it serve to stimulate interest in its author. The pamphlet’s lack of

9
appeal did not rest on any one single reason, but even a cursory reading of it would have

revealed an impassioned, angry author with some degree of research discipline, but little

else. Callender’s first writings were essentially the same as his very last: little more than

character smearing propaganda pieces that, however well-researched, served primarily to

pander to and energize a specific audience.

A year later, still seeking to secure the attention and preferment of someone in the

aristocracy he so despised, Callender published a second anti-Johnson screed, A Critical

Review of the Works of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1783). In its first pages, Callender claimed,

“The observations [in the Deformities] were received, on both sides of Tweed, with some

degree of notice.”18 He alluded to the “late Lord Kaimes [sic],” a nobleman who

Callender had hoped would assist him in securing a better job.19 Kames died in 1782,

leaving the subclerk once again in need of patronage.

Unfortunately for Callender—and perhaps fortunately for Dr. Johnson’s Scottish

reputation—the Critical Review was met with indifference and disinterest. The 72-page

pamphlet dwelled on minutiae and the restatement of Callender’s old criticisms and

attacks from the Deformities. “It is entertaining,” he wrote, “to observe what difficulties

some writers are put to in mustering a decent number of words to make up a five shillings

volume.”20 That very criticism might well have been put to Callender himself, who was

certainly guilty in this work of practicing the “art of eking out,” of which he gleefully

accused Johnson of being a master.21

Despite these two publications, by 1783 it was clear to the young subclerk that for

the time being his position in the Sasine Office afforded him the best chance to pursue a

living. His pamphlets had not only failed to secure him a new job or preferment, they had

10
alienated many readers south of the border. Such strident and angry denunciations of a

prominent national writer could do little more than earn Callender the dislike of the very

class of people he sought to enter: the literati. The dejection he must have felt as weeks

and then months rolled by with little or no positive reaction to the Critical Review,

coupled with knowing all that remained for him was his unloved clerkship, engendered a

deeply felt enmity at the society and culture that surrounded him.

The Sasine Office itself would, in time, become less a burden to be shouldered

than an education to be absorbed and eventually translated into new directions for the

young man’s still largely directionless anger. Like most government and civil service

positions in Scotland and England, jobs at the Sasine Office were granted as part of the

system of patronage. The wealthy, landed aristocracy treated the government, from the

highest archbishoprics to the lowliest clerk, as one vast, well-oiled machine whose every

cog and gear turned only at their approval. To secure a position in this machine, a

prospective employee required the assistance of someone inside the aristocracy.

Callender himself likely secured his own paltry position at the Sasine Office through the

intervention of Lord Kames.

Under this system, unsurprisingly, something was rotten in the states of England

and Scotland. Patronage bred and fed corruption like the streets of London had rats and

fleas. The system was inescapable and firmly entrenched in a country dedicated to

traditions of deference and social class structure. The most glaring manifestation of

patronage’s effects was the generally poor quality of many appointees who owed their

positions less to the knowledge in their heads than to the suppleness of their knees. In the

11
Edinburgh Sasine Office, Callender quickly came into contact with one such individual:

his immediate superior, Chief Clerk Andrew Steele.

Steele was a social climber who was unafraid to take shortcuts, manipulate

figures, and commit some of the oldest sins in the newest ways to ensure the security of

his promotion in the ranks while enriching his personal finances on the side. The

governing architecture of the Sasine Office itself assisted Steele in this enterprise. As

Chief Clerk, Steele encouraged his subclerks to defraud the public in a variety of ways

while promising a share of the illicit profit in exchange.22 Steele’s ultimate goal was to

secure promotion as Keeper of the Sasines, a lifetime appointment that handed its holder

an excellent salary as well as control over the appointments to all subordinate positions—

the ideal patronage placement for a lifetime manipulator of the system like Steele.

Steele’s one impediment, however, was an irritating gadfly with a penchant for

attacking corruption: James Thomson Callender. Watching Steele’s corruption and

defrauding expand, by 1785 Callender was routinely writing detailed, damning

complaints to Steele’s superior, Keeper Andrew Stuart. In doing so, Callender ironically

(and unfortunately) resembled the very “novice” he had described at the outset of his

Deformities, who “unhappily presumes that…an assertor of public freedom will never

become the dupe of flattery, and the pimp of oppression…. That a preacher of morality

will blush to persist in vindictive, deliberate, and detected falsehoods….”23 In other

words, Callender, suffused with foolhardy idealism, was setting out to attack his superior,

Steele, confident that Keeper Stuart would discipline or even remove Steele for his

corrupt practices. Moreover, in his naiveté, Callender was equally confident he would not

suffer any personal consequences for his public allegations against Steele. With the

12
headstrong, righteous indignation that characterized him so strongly already, Callender

kept up a steady (and one-way) stream of correspondence to Steele’s superior,

documenting the Chief Clerk’s malfeasance.

In yet another harbinger of times to come, Callender failed to realize how gravely

he had miscalculated. Keeper Stuart, far from being a paragon of justice, was no more

than another cog in the great patronage machine that Callender’s furious cannon-shot was

threatening to break down. Stuart had shared the subclerk’s complaints with Steele, who

promptly “came over with pistols and a bludgeon” to Callender’s home, intending to

stamp out this annoyance once and for all.24 Nor did Callender’s co-clerks come to his

defense. The young man was not only challenging the immediate authority of his

superiors and disrupting the ordered tranquility (and equally ordered corruption) of the

Sasine Office, he was also pushing back against a century-old system rooted in the

aristocracy’s privileges and power—the very system his co-clerks expected to manipulate

in their turn for their own advancement.

Callender’s exit from the Sasine Office occurred sometime in 1790. Michael

Durey argues, “[Callender’s] attempts to defeat corruption had cost him both his future

prospects and his reputation.”25 A fair statement, but it would be equally fair to point out

that the now-former subclerk had done very little in the waning years of his career to

endear himself in any way to his co-workers or superiors. There is no evidence to suggest

that Callender was interested in much more than pushing Andrew Steele out of the office.

Certainly he had no delusions of reforming the corruption of the patronage system itself

(i.e., “defeating corruption”), or even that of the Sasine Office. Strict opposition was and

remains an easy path for the fiery rhetorician, and Callender found opposition to

13
everyone—his fellows in the Sasine Office, his supervisors, the patronage system—rather

easy. One might marvel that after the vitriol of his previous attacks, he did not attempt to

lay blame for his entire debacle in the office at the feet of Dr. Johnson!

Regardless of Callender’s culpability in his own fall from grace at the Sasine

Office, the young man left with something more valuable: an education. He entered the

office with the same attitude as his fictional “novice” in the Deformities: a green

newcomer unaccustomed to the multiplying villainies of the world and its inhabitants. He

exited as an embittered, hardened man who, when faced with the choice of either

compromising his career’s future or his moralistic zeal (however self-serving such zeal

was from time to time), ultimately decided that keeping his personal integrity was more

important than helping to advance his fortunes and those of his boss. The choice

consigned him to increased hardship, which only further nursed his bitterness and

resentment.

This pattern would come to dominate Callender’s life as he repeatedly chose to

defy rather than participate in what he perceived as systemic corruption blocking his

means of advancement. Importantly, however, his stance should not be confused as

“heroic” or otherwise based on principle. Although Callender’s Calvinistic streak

undoubtedly endowed him with a certain amount of moralistic zeal, his chief difficulty,

from the Sasine Office to his death in the streets of Richmond, Virginia, was his own

inability to ever gain entrance into the world of patronage, either as a dispenser or a

receiver. The lack of personal writings on Callender’s part puts a definitive answer to the

question of his motivations probably permanently out of reach, but he manifested a strong

sense of self-interest at odds with the attempts of some recent biographers (Durey among

14
them) to cast him as an idealized Christ storming into the temple of government and

casting out the moneychangers. He had his ideals, but Callender’s life would repeatedly

show him to be, above all else, politically pragmatic—willing to change horses in mid-

stream as the political fortunes of his friends and enemies ebbed and flowed. Regardless

of morals or money, however, he found holding a stable job difficult from the outset of

his working life.

4. “Grievous and intolerable oppressions: English rule and taxation in Scotland

Stumbling out of the Sasine Office, the now-unemployed man had by 1790

married and fathered children, although when and to whom he was married remains

completely unknown. Cast out in disgrace, he once again turned to his hopes of entering

the ranks of Scotland’s literati. In late 1790, with the patronage of Francis Garden, Lord

Gardenstone, Callender managed to secure a post as a messenger-at-arms (a paralegal in

modern parlance) with lawyer James Balfour.26 The work at Balfour’s firm, however,

was meager and gave the young man time to return to poetry. In 1792, he published a

series of poems and contributions of, at best, mediocre value, in Gardenstone’s collection,

Miscellanies of Prose and Verse. True to its name, the book was a hodgepodge of

unattributed writings some of which bore the hallmarks of Callender’s style. In the

satirical poem, Sketches of Celebrated Characters, Ancient and Modern, for example,

readers found themselves treated to a four-stanza tirade: “The vulgar very often praise /

With stupid fulsome adulation…. While every servile scribbler cries / That all the great

are wise and good….”27 The blunt, acerbic rage that typified Callender’s prose did not

15
suit the delicacies of poetry, however, and he published no further poetic work after

1792.

Callender’s first real piece of political writing finally appeared in 1791: the

Impartial Account of the Conduct of the Excise Towards the Breweries in Scotland. The

purpose of the pamphlet was “to point out to the public the grievous, and indeed

intolerable, oppressions under which a numerous, very useful, and important body of

men, labour at present; and to show, that through their oppression, the community at

large sustains a very considerable injury,” in reference to the heavy tax burden the British

Parliament had laid upon Scottish breweries.28 Here Callender first worked out some of

the themes that his later political ideology and activity in America would be based upon:

denouncement of corruption in government, espousal of an aggressive populism, and a

belief that taxation constituted a form of repression of one region by another, and of the

poor by the poor. “The prosperity of the country is the prosperity of each citizen,” he

argued, damning the taxation of Scottish breweries as “a course of oppression, by those

who call themselves executors of the law, but in truth pervert it to their own purposes.”29

The excise tax and its attendant office were an epicenter of corruption in

eighteenth-century Scotland. It was originally conceived as a means of ensuring

Scotland’s breweries remained at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis those of England.

Moreover, the agents responsible for collection of the tax had free reign to manipulate

and intimidate Scottish breweries while backed with the full authority of the state. Like

Prohibition in the twentieth century, the excise tax and its abuse encouraged the

proliferation of corruption and a black market in equal measure. Excise collection agents

regularly imposed massive fines for trivial violations or marginally enforced regulations

16
before abruptly storming into noncompliant breweries and imposing even larger fines on

owners. This method of see-sawing between salutary neglect and strict enforcement of

the excise left the Scottish brewery industry teetering on the brink of ruin. Worse still,

fines were constantly on the increase as more and more hands dipped into the trough for

their share of the illicit funds.

In response, Callender sharpened his pen. The Account of the Excise served as the

public debut of his particularly aggressive, melodramatic style of political writing that

would go on to make him both popular and reviled in the United States. He frequently

referred to the tax as an instrument of “oppression” and called for “unanimous and

strenuous” efforts “so that all ranks may unite in their endeavours for the removal of evils

of such enormous magnitude.”30 The pamphlet brought his often-paranoid imagination to

the forefront as well. He viewed the excise as an English attempt to abscond with

Scotland’s entire malt liquor industry, and did not blush at naming those he believed

responsible for such corrupt behavior.31 Scotland, “intoxicated with the idea that we are

the most free people in the world,” had chosen to “submit to see our constitutional rights

invaded, and our liberties daily trampled upon, by a set of designing and interested

men.”32 Clearly Callender was concerned with more than simply the taxation of Scottish

breweries; his anger ran much deeper, to the submission of Scotland to England itself.

Although important in the larger panorama of Callender’s career, the Account of

the Excise once again failed to garner the frustrated writer the public attention he thirsted

for. A precursor to Callender’s fierier, more developed writing style, the Account was by

comparison rather dull and esoteric, an economic treatise rather than a popular pamphlet.

In sharp contrast to his later life, Callender’s first attempt to excite interest with exposés

17
of “glaring and intolerable…scandalous and barefaced” government behavior was largely

met with disinterest.33 Despite yet another failure to succeed in print, Callender must

have nonetheless enjoyed composing this first pamphlet. The medium gave him the

perfect whetstone on which to sharpen and develop his talent for political commentary.

5. “An abyss of taxes and blood” – The Political Progress of Britain

In late 1792, Callender published what was to become the most significant work

of his early career: the Political Progress of Britain. The work would earn him the

notoriety he so desperately sought, but at the same time would serve as the final blow for

an English-dominated government in London already tiring of Callender and other

politically-active Scots like physician and Episcopal clergyman Dr. Charles Webster.

Thanks to this rather bulky “pamphlet,” Callender would face exile and ruin, forced to

flee the British Isles for the New World to escape arrest and likely execution for treason.

At the same time, the Political Progress would also attract new attention and patronage

in the United States. The pamphlet and the reputation it won for its author would

eventually gain Callender his greatest and longest patron: Thomas Jefferson.

The Political Progress of Britain was a synthesis of Callender’s critique of and

anger at the condition of politics and society in Great Britain. Prominent among his

targets, of course, was the persistence of patronage and privilege, the twin pillars of

British politics that he, Samson-like, intended to pull down. Stopping short of advocating

outright Scottish nationalism, the pamphlet did not eschew strident critiques of the British

imperial system as a whole, alleging that the expansionist wars of the British Empire, “in

only an hundred years, have deprived Europe of three millions of men…. The persons

18
destroyed, have in whole, certainly exceeded thirty millions, that is to say, three hundred

thousand acts of homicide per annum.” The purpose of this slaughter, Callender

passionately inveighed, was “the balance of power, and the balance of trade, the honour

of the British flag, the rights of the British crown, the omnipotence of Parliament, and the

security of the Protestant succession.”34 Scotland, Callender believed, had not benefitted

one iota from this carnage and indeed was harmed greatly due to its association with the

British Empire’s alleged brutalities throughout Europe and the wider world.

For Callender as for fellow Scotsman Adam Smith, the empire was little more

than a potentially fatal drain on national finances. Moreover, Callender viewed the

expansion of the empire as an “incessant scene of prodigality and of bloodshed,” arguing

that “such exertions cost us an hundred times more than these quagmire duchies are

worth.”35 The decadence of British society aroused the wrath of his Calvinist zeal. “[F]or

the sake of tea, and sugar, and tobacco, and a few other despicable luxuries, we have

rushed into an abyss of taxes and blood,” he fumed.36 The execrations of the British

Empire helped lay the foundation for one of the primary arguments of the work: that

Scotland’s subordination to England was repugnant and untenable.

“The people of Scotland are, on all occasions, foolish enough to interest

themselves in the good or bad fortune of an English prime minister,” he declared,

appealing to his countrymen that “[t]o England we were, for many centuries, a hostile,

and we are still considered by them as a foreign, and in effect a conquered nation.”37

Scotland’s representation in the Parliament in Westminster was nothing more than a sham

of democracy: “It is true, that an extremely diminutive part of us are suffered to elect

almost every twelfth member in the British House of Commons; but…every statute

19
proceeds upon the majority of the voices…. What, therefore, can forty-five persons

accomplish, when opposed to five hundred and thirteen?”38 Although the pamphlet

stopped short of directly advocating Scottish independence, Callender left no doubt in his

readers’ minds that an independent Scotland was preferable to one held in awe under

English dominion.

The pamphlet’s sustained attack on the British monarchy, however, was what

ultimately sealed Callender’s reputation and fate. For nearly ten years he had strenuously

courted an infamy that coyly remained just out of reach. With the Political Progress, he

finally captured the attention and notoriety he desired, albeit at a staggering cost to

himself and his family. The pamphlet’s attacks on the British monarchy made it infamous

in Britain and, equally, popular in the United States, where Callender would long be

known as the “author of the Political Progress of Britain.”

“England has been governed…by thirty-three sovereigns; and of these, two-thirds

were, each of them, by an hundred different actions, deserving of the gibbet,” he

ferociously proclaimed, exempting only three as “peaceable men”: Edward II, Richard II,

and Henry VI.39 Charles II came in for particularly scathing criticism. “The perfidy of

Charles…is forgot in the superior blaze of subsequent scoundrelism,” he declared, a clear

affront to reigning monarch George III’s Restoration-era ancestor. Most serious of all, the

Political Progress did not shy away from making brazen attacks on George III himself:

“At the present time (September, 1792,) it may be safely computed, that in one shape or

other, he [the King] has expended…eight hundred thousand pounds sterling…. On a

subject so hateful, there can be no pleasure to expiate.”40 Like the Roman historians of

antiquity, Callender seemed to delight in recounting the wanton extravagance of the

20
ruling family. The Prince of Wales, the future George IV, “appeared at court in a suit of

cloaths, which, including diamonds, cost eighty thousand pounds…[and] bought a race-

horse for fifteen hundred guineas…. For these inestimable services, the nation has paid

eight hundred thousand pounds; a sum lost in the bottomless pit of Carleton house,” the

Prince of Wales’s private estate.41

Most alarming for British authorities, however, were the pamphlet’s comments on

Scotland’s relationship with England. Callender viewed the union of the two kingdoms as

nothing more than predacious. England, he alleged, had labored hard to keep Scotland

subservient to and dependent upon the south. He saw conspiracies everywhere: the lack

of cultivation in the Hebrides, the parlous condition of Scottish fisheries, and especially

the ruinous effects of the excise taxes on the Scottish economy. “[S]ix or eight hundred

thousand Scots people [are] kept in a state of comparative beggary, by the payment of salt

and coal duties [the excise taxes]….”42 The wretchedness of Scotland’s condition,

Callender claimed, was the product of English arrogance and Scottish complacency: “Dr.

Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiment, remarks, that the great never consider their

inferiors as their fellow creatures. The British land-holders illustrate, on all occasions,

the veracity of this maxim.”43 With this work, Callender earned more than the notoriety

he had energetically sought. He also attracted the hostile attention of the British

government, which was already uncomfortable with the rise to prominence of Scottish

radicals like Callender.

The wider political and cultural context Callender’s pamphlet appeared in was

perhaps the critical element in sealing his fate vis-à-vis the government in London. Three

years before, in 1789, the French Revolution had ignited a tinderbox of anti-aristocratic

21
sentiment in France that by 1792 was already moving toward the Reign of Terror with all

the swift dispatch of a guillotine blade. In June 1791, King Louis XVI and his wife,

Marie Antoinette, were arrested while trying to flee Paris. On January 21, 1793, the

guillotine ended the king’s life and 525 consecutive years of Bourbon rule in France.

Britain and the Continent alike were plunged into dismay. Despite Maximilien de

Robespierre’s protestations to the contrary, the execution appeared peremptory and

spiteful, the work of radicals with no legitimate public mandate.44

At almost the same time as Louis’s head was rolling into a basket, Callender’s

Political Progress of Britain was rolling off the press.45 Copies in Edinburgh and London

sold quickly, and soon attracted the attention of Scottish magistrates. The pamphlet’s

vengeful denunciations of the crown and of British rule in Scotland landed on especially

paranoid ears in the months following the execution of Louis XVI. The French

Revolution was intensifying and, under Robespierre’s leadership, increased its national

bloodletting to the alarm of authorities across Britain, who hoped that the English

Channel would protect them from the revolutionary wildfire ignited on the Continent. In

the meantime, any Jacobin embers landing in Great Britain had to be smothered

immediately, doused with water only the courts could provide: sedition trials. Examples

had to be made, particularly in Scotland.46

Callender knew publication of the Political Progress would paint a target sign on

his back. He arguably welcomed such an extreme reaction, given his equally extreme

rhetoric. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man had only just been banned in Scotland, and the

Political Progress was nothing if not comparably offensive to the established authorities

in Edinburgh. Lord Advocate Robert Dundas accordingly set out to track down the author

22
of the pamphlet almost immediately after it began appearing in Edinburgh bookshops in

late 1792.47 Under Dundas’s orders, Edinburgh deputy sheriff John Pringle held informal

interviews with several individuals, including Callender’s cohorts, booksellers James

Robertson and Walter Berry, and newspaper printer James Anderson.

On January 1, 1793, Pringle questioned Callender regarding his involvement and

likely authorship of the pamphlet, but left the writer at liberty.48 By now the likelihood of

arrest was obvious to Callender, and he recognized the threat of personal ruination, if not

death, at the hands of an unfriendly court. Fleeing, however, presented a different set of

hardships. With France in turmoil and Britain unfriendly, there were few choices for

refuge. Compounding the question of where to flee was how. He had a family—his wife

and possibly two or three children—who would be sorely pressed to make a long and

potentially permanent journey to safety. Pringle’s visit, however, had made flight

imperative, and on January 2, authorities broke into Callender’s Edinburgh home to find

it empty. For the first and certainly not the last time, Callender had fled the long and

censorious arm of government. He had left just in time.

Records from the court proceedings of 1793 and 1794 attest to the furious

campaign the British government waged against any perceived expansion of Jacobin

influence in the kingdom. In 1793 alone, thirteen individuals were brought before British

courts on charges of sedition, libel, and treason. In most cases, the accused faced charges

of creating, printing, and/or distributing pamphlets espousing various radical doctrines,

such as overthrow of the monarchy and aristocracy. Scotland, and indeed all of Britain,

was caught in the grip of an eighteenth-century ideological witch hunt.

23
 The proceedings of these trials filled over one thousand double-columned pages

of court proceedings and speeches. Callender, although fled, faced his own trial in

absentia alongside James Robertson and Walter Berry, in whose shops the Political

Progress had appeared for sale. In words that eerily prefigured the Sedition Act of 1798

in the United States, the Scottish court accused the three men “of writing, printing,

publishing, and circulating a seditious pamphlet…containing false, wicked, and seditious

assertions, calculated to degrade and bring into contempt our present happy system of

government, and withdraw therefrom the confidence and affection of our subjects.”49 The

court’s indictment quoted at great length from the pamphlet, describing it throughout the

text as a “wicked and seditious pamphlet” full of “wicked and seditious passages.”50 The

two Edinburgh booksellers were indicted with similar charges. For fleeing, Callender was

proclaimed an outlaw: “[H]e, conscious of his guilt, and in order to evade the punishment

of the law, did abscond, and has been fugitate by a sentence of the high court.”51

Even without Callender’s presence, the legal proceedings that followed were

fiery. The trial resembled in many ways the 1798 sedition trial that would send

Callender’s life and career spiraling into oblivion. Lines of argumentation and debate

from both sides of the courtroom were notably prescient when compared to Callender’s

confrontation with John Adams’s anti-sedition measure. More importantly, the

prosecuting attorneys’ claims and arguments vis-à-vis Callender’s work and the principle

of a free press itself reveal a great deal about the anxieties dominating Britain following

the French Revolution, as well as the near-universal justifications states employed (and

continue to employ) in restraining and muzzling a dissentious press.

24
 Archibald Fletcher, the lead defense counsel opened his arguments with a

dramatic plea: “[T]he case now before the Court, involves in it no less than the liberty of

the press…. If the liberty of the press is affected, a total darkness in political knowledge

must ensue, the constitution must receive a mortal stab, and may, at last, perish.”52

Furthermore, Fletcher contended, both the writer and booksellers “sold [the

pamphlet]…merely for gain, and not by stealth, but openly and fairly.”53 Callender,

Fletcher urged, was not a seditious rogue but a reformer of singular zeal: “The coarseness

of the expressions are more striking than the sentiment, that the words used meant more

to mend the constitution than to bring it into contempt.”54 Moreover, “Every subject has a

right to canvass and examine the acts of the legislature, and to deliver their opinions….

[T]his publication seems to be written from benevolence to mankind in general;—not to

vilify, and calumniate, but with a wish to correct and reform….”55

The prosecution’s counterarguments showed the Jacobin fears of the aristocracy.

“The temper of the times,” Crown attorney James Montgomery contended, “must merit

consideration. The minds of the people may be inflamed to gross enormities by

publications…that [at one time] would have no bad effect at another, and the record of

the Court will show how ill-timed this publication was.”56 No explicit reference to the

turmoil on the Continent appeared, but such a connection was strongly implied in the

prosecutor’s statement. Berry and Robertson were convicted of “having wickedly and

feloniously published said pamphlet; thereby clearly connecting the printing and

publishing with a criminal or seditious intention.”57 The court sentenced Berry to three

and Robertson to six months’ imprisonment, with a further three years’ parole

afterward.58 Their appeal was rejected.

25
 This sentence, imposed essentially for selling a single title, no doubt stemmed in

part from the prosecutors’ anger at Callender’s escape. After fleeing Edinburgh, the

fugitive and his family had eventually found their way to Dublin, where Callender sailed

alone in mid-1793 for the American capital city, Philadelphia.59 He was part of a mass

exodus of Jacobin and other radical populists and thinkers who exchanged the perpetually

overcast, increasingly intolerant British Isles for the new republican experiment

unfolding along the humid eastern seaboard of North America. Only a year and a half

before Callender’s arrival, the Commonwealth of Virginia’s decision to become the

eleventh state to ratify the Bill of the Rights had enshrined the twin rights of free speech

and free press in a written, codified document. Unlike the unwritten and therefore highly

malleable English constitution, the cornerstone and foundation of the United States

government provided explicitly written guarantees to all citizens of the new republic.60

Such a promise of individual liberty attracted a steady flow of intellectuals who found

Europe increasingly unwelcoming.

6. “I ask for nothing but a decent subsistence for myself and my family” – Starting
Over in America

Once in Philadelphia, Callender wasted no time securing employment. Dubliner

and fellow exile Mathew Carey, who ran a bookstore in the capital, commissioned the

newly arrived Scot to write “an account of America generally,” paying him $12 weekly

in return. Carey, like Callender, held a radical vision of republicanism in line with that of

the French Revolution. He and Callender were kindred spirits.61 While working on this

larger project, Callender also contributed to Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, writing

26
his first political piece in the New World. The Advertiser closed, however, as the dreaded

yellow fever spread its wings over Philadelphia in the latter half of 1793, bringing the

city to a sudden halt. Many of the local newspapers closed their doors, some forever, in a

scene that would be repeated in 1797. Employment became difficult until December,

when the fever’s visitation finally ended.

In that same month Callender received what should have been the zenith of his

new life in America: a posting as a congressional reporter for the Federal (later

Philadelphia) Gazette. He was responsible for transcribing debates on the floor of the

House of Representatives for publication in the newspaper. Although the Constitution

required “Each House [to] keep a journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time [to]

publish the same,” there was as yet no formal means of making such records available to

the general public, nor would there be until 1873.62 The provision for public disclosure of

debate was limited only to the House, where ordinary citizens were allowed to observe

debates and floor proceedings firsthand. The Senate, by contrast, met in closed session,

excluding all but its own members.

Callender’s task was thus an important one in the life of the young republic. He

would serve as one of the filters through which the Congress’s words would reach the

people. To appreciate how uniquely powerful this position was, one must take note of the

severely partisan nature of the early American press. Newspapers played a key role in

shaping the emerging party system, and had also served as partisan advocates for the

revolution against Britain. The first true partisan division between newspapers in

America was arguably that between loyalists and patriots. Many of the nation’s most

important founding fathers—Samuel Adams, John Hancock, John Adams, and Benjamin

27
Franklin prominent among them—had either owned or actively published newspapers.

The task of presenting Congressional debates to the public via the newspapers was thus a

delicate matter regarding some degree of political acumen and even objectivity in an

industry accustomed to neither.

The logistics of late eighteenth-century transcription were also a daunting

difficulty. In an age before the ballpoint pen, let alone word processing, transcription was

done with a “pen” (usually a piece of animal bone shaved to a sharpened point on one

end), a small inkpot, and a furiously-writing reporter who was often forced to abbreviate

and even omit entire passages of debates and speeches.

The meeting space did not help matters, either. The House chamber in

Philadelphia’s Congress Hall was a well-appointed room that, despite its high ceiling and

tall windows, felt claustrophobic and packed. In the summer, the heat of over one

hundred individual bodies combined with Philadelphia’s notorious humidity to make the

room nearly unbearable. By the time Callender prepared to take up his new post, the

House had been meeting in Congress Hall for four years. In that time, Vermont and

Kentucky joined the Union in 1791 and 1792 respectively, cramming even more

representatives into the space. Voices often overlapped and were occasionally inaudible.

The journal—or “register,” as Callender would refer to his notes upon publication

in mid-1795—was less an accurate transcription of the floor activity in the House than it

was the reporter’s distillation of particular events and notable speeches, subjected, of

course, to that reporter’s own judgment. Much rested on the four men chosen to sit at the

rear of the House chamber and take down the debates. Trouble, however, was not long in

coming after the opening of Congress in December 1793.

28
 Callender’s reporting almost immediately fell under attack, though in fairness all

parties found deficiencies in the whole system of Congressional reporting. The first party

system in American history was rapidly developing; although not yet formally codified,

the political factions of the day would burst forth well before George Washington

completed his first term.63 Callender had by now fallen in with the nascent Democratic

Republicans, Thomas Jefferson’s budding political faction. He had many reasons for this

alignment, not least of which was the mistrust of Britain he and the party shared.

In the first debates of January 1794, Callender took the opportunity in his

reporting to accuse, albeit rather obliquely, Representative William Smith of South

Carolina of being a secret British agent.64 The reporter made this accusation with the sly

claim that it had originally emanated from a Republican representative of New Jersey.

Nowhere else in the remaining records of the debate, however, is this accusation

recorded. Callender was most likely fabricating it.

This incident, besides illustrating the weaknesses inherent in trusting

congressional reporting to the newspapers, also demonstrated the extent to which early

American political culture feared—and yet was still heavily influenced by—Britain and

the Continent. The Federalists, the party of George Washington, John Adams, and many

others of the founders, remained aligned toward the Mother Country.65 It was this

Anglophilia that so irritated and often outright enraged James Thomson Callender, who

had long since turned his back on Britain. The Republicans, by contrast, had embraced

much of the French Revolution’s idealism and anti-aristocratic agenda.66 These

Francophilic tendencies collided with the Federalists’ suspicion and outright fear of the

29
French Revolution to create an intensely partisan atmosphere in Philadelphia throughout

the 1790s and into the early 1800s.

Callender, who had arrived in the United States already fully espousing most of

the Republicans’ ideology, thus saw nothing untoward in exaggerating and perhaps even

fabricating an attack on a prominent Federalist member of the House, charging him with

acting as in effect a British spy. Early American politics were rife with accusations of one

party that the other was acting as the agent of its respective foreign power. The

Federalists feared the Republicans would, if allowed, ignite a French-styled revolution in

the United States that would tear apart the country’s economic and social fabric.

Conversely, Republicans accused the Federalists of preparing to either cede the United

States back to Britain, or worse, erect a British-styled monarchy in the New World,

negating the sacrifices of the hard-won War of Independence.

Accusing South Carolinian Congressman William Smith of being a subversive

agent of the British government was thus a serious charge. Callender alleged that, in the

midst of a debate on proposed retaliatory trade impositions against Britain, Smith had

been “far more rancorous than the other gentlemen collectively,” presumably railing

against the proposal of James Madison to inflict heavy trade duties on British

merchants.67 Here Callender’s characteristic recklessness and feverish imagination took

over: “During the debate on Madison’s resolutions, Mr. Abraham Clarke of New-Jersey

said…looking at Mr. William Smith, that a stranger in the gallery might suppose there

was a British agent in the house.”68 Looking back in 1797, Callender claimed that, as a

result of his accusation, “Mr. Smith was burnt in effigy in Charleston.”69

30
 The most obvious result of this style of reporting was a wave of complaints

against Callender. Although the incident with Smith occurred in January 1794, Callender

was back in November of that year for the second session of Congress, where the House

was embroiled in wrangling over, among other matters, what manner of reply it should

make to President George Washington’s recent address to Congress. Callender dutifully

attended every sitting day of the session and even sought out individual members for

clarifications and their personal notes to ensure accuracy in his reporting.70 Some

members even gave him their own manuscript copies of speeches and papers for

inclusion in the record.

Despite these overt demonstrations of approval, however, Callender never

managed to escape either his reputation for embellished reporting or his own proclivity

for snide, insensitive remarks and emendations. Complaints continued to mount. In early

March 1795, Representatives Samuel Dexter and William Smith, Callender’s old

nemesis, “arose and complained bitterly of the minutes in the Philadelphia Gazette.” 71

Had he stopped here, Callender’s reporting would have been nothing more or less than

the truth. Unfortunately, however, old habits not only survived, they thrived. Referring to

Smith and Dexter, the journalist snidely, if perceptively, remarked that “neither of them

durst say, that any thing of their own [i.e., their speeches/words on the floor] had been

misrepresented.”72 The pair of representatives closed “by proposing a resolution for

appointing a committee to examine a stenographer. It passed by twenty-eight votes

against twenty-six.”73

The narrow passage of the resolution suggested at least two things. First,

Callender’s reporting was not uniformly regarded as so poor that the situation warranted

31
change. He himself would go on to indicate that, when preparing his notes for publication

(The Political Register), “repeated notice was given in the Philadelphia Gazette, as well

as to several Members personally, that any corrections of incidental mistakes would be

carefully inserted,” but only “five or six were offered,” which Callender justifiably took

to mean “that the inaccuracies were neither numerous nor important.”74 Second, the

Congress was nowhere near unanimous in accepting the appointment of an official

recorder, as many members were adamantly opposed to having their speeches and

debates recorded for public view. Callender summed up their objections succinctly: “The

plan [for a stenographer] was attacked from every part of the house, as impracticable, if

useful; and useless if it could be practicable.”75 Callender’s embellishments were not

uniformly bad, but they were nonetheless unwelcome, as Congressman John Nicholas of

Virginia pointed out in describing a passage attributed to him: “’The language was much

better [as published] than I could have made,’ said Mr. Nicholas…‘but still the speech

was not mine.’”76

Despite their refusal to do anything about the parlous state of reporting from the

House floor, the anger from the representatives at the tone and distortions in Callender’s

records was enough to get him fired from his position with the Philadelphia Gazette.

Even Democratic Republican congressmen were angry with Callender. William Giles of

Virginia “complained, for the first time, of the inaccuracy of [the records of] the debates.

He had never before dropt a hint of that nature.”77 Giles had previously been supportive

of Callender, sharing notes and other materials with him to help in the reporting of

Congress’s deliberations.78

32
 This would be the first time—but certainly not the last—that Callender felt the

stabbing pain of the Democratic Republican knife in his back. Justified or not, he felt

betrayed and used. In his two years in the United States, he had already worked to

become a major exponent of republicanism in Philadelphia. He had also found an equally

fervent opposition counterpart: William Cobbett, better known by his pseudonym, Peter

Porcupine. Cobbett, born in the picturesque English county of Surrey, immigrated to the

United States in 1792, just before Callender’s own flight from England. Like Callender,

Cobbett was suspicious of governmental power and had initially fled England for France

in mid-1792 after criticizing the Westminster government too stridently. After arriving in

Philadelphia, Cobbett, aligned with the pro-British Federalist Party, quickly crossed

swords with fellow refugee James Callender. Published under the pseudonym “Peter

Porcupine,” Cobbett’s 1795 pamphlet, A Bone to Gnaw, for the Democrats, had savaged

Callender’s infamous work, The Political Progress of Britain. Cobbett claimed Callender

had “come a’ the wa’ from Edinborough [sic] to Philadelphia to make an attack on poor

old England” and compared him to “a cur howling at the Moon.”79 More importantly,

Cobbett alluded to Callender’s connections with the Republican elite: “[Callender] says

Mr. Jefferson, late American Secretary of State, spoke of his work, on different

occasions, in respectful terms; and that [Jefferson] declared, ‘it contained the most

astonishing concentration of abuses, that he had ever heard of.’”80

The date of Jefferson’s initial encounter with either Callender or his work remains

unclear. Callender first surfaced in Jefferson’s voluminous correspondence in a short

letter sent from Tench Coxe, a onetime Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental

Congress and currently a mid-level bureaucrat in Washington’s administration. Enclosing

33
what was likely a copy of Callender’s Political Progress, Coxe wrote, “I have the honor

to inclose to you…a pamphlet, which was left with me by a Mr. Callender. You will find

it amusing to read it.”81 Coxe, at the time a Federalist and assistant to Alexander

Hamilton, offered no other reaction to Callender’s writing. The pamphlet was originally

left with Coxe for James Madison—whether Jefferson actually did take the time to read it

remains unknown.82

What was clear was that by the beginning of 1796, Callender was once again

unemployed, thanks in part to the very character traits that had so successfully ejected

him from Britain, namely: a tendency toward extremism and an unwillingness to refrain

from savaging his opponents in print. Firing back at Peter Porcupine (William Cobbett),

he charged his Federalist nemesis with “neglecting truth and decency” and being

“distinguished by the wildest ferocity of reproach.”83 Subtitling his counterblast as a

response to the “universal applause” Cobbett had received in Philadelphia, Callender

angrily observed that “[p]olitical pamphlets are extremely apt to mislead those who put

implicit confidence in their contents…. Of the truth of this remark, the United States

afford a recent instance.”84

Cobbett’s popularity made the sting of betrayal even more painful. America—not

just the Federalists but also the country as a whole—had failed to embrace him. In mid-

1796, while in Baltimore seeking employment, Callender laid out his perceived

sufferings in a letter to James Madison that was alternately unctuous and supplicatory:

“Among the unexpected incidents of my life, it is one of the most singular, and partly one

of the most painful, that I am not intruding upon your time with a letter,” the journalist

said, but “You shall not be detained with any idle parade of words. I shall tell as shortly

34
as possible what I wish to say.”85 Madison might have been forgiven for feeling

Callender had already failed to uphold this promise.

The real reason for the letter soon became clear: Callender once again needed the

assistance of a benefactor—a great man. As much as Callender the idealist might have

hated the thought of abasing himself before a wealthy member of society’s elite,

Callender the realist knew he needed such help to survive. “I think myself capable of

teaching what is commonly expected from a country schoolmaster,” he said to Madison,

adding that “I mention this to shew that my present inclination [is] to try that plan…[and]

if you could find me any vacancy of this kind…I premise that I ask for nothing but a

decent subsistence for myself and my family….”86 Callender closed with a plea for

discretion: “I would not wish the most intimate friend whom I have in the world, to be

acquainted with the contents of this letter….”87 Madison, who even after Callender’s rise

in Thomas Jefferson’s grace manifested a strong dislike of the journalist, did not deign to

reply, despite Callender’s plea for “a mere acknowledgment of the letter.”88 Dispirited

and feeling more abandoned than ever, Callender returned to Philadelphia in mid-1796,

picking up odd writing jobs for publishers and congressmen alike.

The political scene, however, was alive with the fight between the Federalist

government and the Democratic Republican opposition over the Jay Treaty. Signed in

late 1794, the treaty’s first appearance in the United States in June 1795 mobilized the

opposition, who saw in it the culmination of the Federalists’ hopes to realign the new

nation with Great Britain. In Boston, citizens were so furious with the treaty’s namesake

that a famous piece of graffiti was soon found scrawled on the fence of a prominent

Federalist: “Damn John Jay! Damn everyone that won’t damn John Jay! Damn everyone

35
that won’t put lights in his windows and sit up all night damning John Jay!”89 All around

Callender, American politics had embraced an aggressive, even violent, form of

partisanship that took no prisoners and offered no quarter, a literal embodiment of

Maximilien Robespierre’s dictum, “Pity is treason.”

In such a highly charged political climate, Callender quickly found himself back

in his element. As the rhetoric on both sides of the partisan debate became sharper and

more combative, each side deployed its newspapers and pamphleteers to attack, often

personally and vindictively, the prominent leaders among their opponents. If in the

twentieth century political power truly grew out of the barrel of a gun, in the late

eighteenth century power grew out of the sharpened pen of the journalist, with his

capacity to shape the public’s opinion. As the first American party system matured, both

the Federalists and Democratic Republicans needed writers who could command public

support—in short, they needed journalists who could, by the force of their rhetoric,

compel people to listen.90 Although not corresponding with Jefferson directly yet,

Callender was nonetheless a fervent supporter of the pro-French, populist Democratic

Republicans, who needed his talent for crafting provocative, attention-getting prose to

help mobilize public support against their Federalist opponents. Callender was prepared

to answer that call, needing only an appropriately high profile target. Thus, at arguably

the darkest moment in his new American life, salvation came in the most unlikely of

forms as a dusty skeleton came tumbling out of former Secretary of the Treasury

Alexander Hamilton’s closet and right into James Thomson Callender’s waiting hands.

36
 NOTES

Abbreviations used in the notes:

TJ: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Julian P. Boyd, et al. 38

volumes to date. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–.

WCF: Thomas Jefferson and James Thomson Callender: 1798-1802. Edited by

Worthington Chauncey Ford. Brooklyn: Historical Printing Club, 1897.

1
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A. Millar, 1759; repr. New
York: Penguin, 2009), 215. The Theory is the only work of Smith’s that directly and
unambiguously addresses the concept of the invisible hand. For works in a similar vein,
see also David Hume, J.B. Schneewind, ed., An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of
Morals (Hackett, 1983); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Donald A. Cress, trans., Discourse on
the Origin of Inequality (Hackett, 1992);
2
Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 3. Sellers’s extended metaphor of republicanism as a
contagion at the outset of his monograph is perhaps equally appropriate as an image of
the Enlightenment’s ideas themselves.
3
James Thomson Callender to James Madison, Baltimore, May 28, 1796. WCF, 7.
4
Robert Anderson, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., with Critical Observations on his
Works (Edinburgh, 1815), 231fn.
5
James Thomson Callender to James Madison, Baltimore, May 28, 1796. WCF, 7.
6
Michael Durey, With the Hammer of Truth: James Thomson Callender and America’s
Early National Heroes (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 3.
7
Johnson was his age’s great celebrity. Numerous biographies of the man were
published, some of which went on to become classics in their own right. James Boswell’s
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)—with its seamless mixture of fact and fiction—is
generally regarded as an epochal work in the development of the biographical genre.
Johnson himself was famous for many works, not least of which was his Dictionary of
the English Language (1755), the reigning reference work on English until the advent of
the Oxford English Dictionary (1884). See also Simon Winchester, The Professor and the
Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
(HarperCollins, 1998).
8
James Thomson Callender, The Deformities of Dr. Samuel Johnson, selected from his
works (London: J. Stockdale, 1782), iii, emphasis added.
9
Callender, Deformities, iii.
10
Ibid., vii.
11
Ibid., 11, 13. Emphasis in original.
12
Ibid., 35. It is ironic that Callender, a man who would become reviled and hated
throughout the early United States for his vitriolic personal attacks on both John Adams
and Thomas Jefferson, began his career lamenting the lack of “candour” and “politeness”
on the part of Dr. Johnson.
13
Ibid., 51.
37
14
Ibid., 51.
15
In an ironic twist, Boswell’s Life of Johnson is far better remembered and read than
Johnson’s own Dictionary.
16
Ibid., 88.
17
“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” — Oscar
Wilde.
18
James Thomson Callender, A Critical Review of the Works of Dr. Samuel Johnson,
Containing A particular Vindication of several eminent Characters (Edinburgh: J.
Dickson and W. Creech, 1783), iii. The River Tweed divides England and Scotland.
19
Callender, Critical Review., iii.
20
Ibid., 24.
21
Ibid., 25. Emphasis in original.
22
Durey, 12-16, has a lengthy and somewhat complex breakdown of this system and its
workings, to which I have little to add. Callender’s perception and reaction to fraud—real
or perceived—in the Sasine Office is more important here than the actual methods the
bureaucracy employed in defrauding the public.
23
Callender, Deformities, vii.
24
James Thomson Callender to Andrew Stuart, December 12, 1789, quoted in Durey, 15.
25
Durey, 17.
26
Callender, as Durey points out, maintained a lifelong loathing of privilege and
patronage. However, it is mistake to assume, as Durey does infrequently, that this
loathing translated into a total, morally absolute rigidity. Callender was happy to
participate in patronage so long as he reaped the same rewards as everyone else:
preferment, job placement, career advancement, and so forth.
27
Francis, Lord Gardenstone, ed., Miscellanies in Prose and Verse; Including Remarks
on English Plays, Operas, and Farces, And on a Variety of other Modern Publications,
2nd ed. (Edinburgh: J. Robertson, 1792), 307-308.
28
James Thomson Callender, An Impartial Account of the Conduct of the Excise Towards
the Breweries in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1791), ii.
29
Callender, Account of the Excise, viii.
30
Ibid., xiii.
31
Ibid., 36-37.
32
Ibid., i.
33
Ibid., 61.
34
James Thomson Callender, The Political Progress of Britain: or, An Impartial History
of the Abuses of the British Empire, in Europe, Asia, and America. From the Revolution,
in 1688, to the Present time: The Whole Tending to Prove the Ruinous Consequences of
the Popular System of Taxation, War, and Conquest, 3rd edition (Philadelphia: Richard
Folwell, 1795), 10. The Political Progress was originally published in Edinburgh and
London in 1792, but went through at least two subsequent editions in the United States,
where it was highly popular among Jeffersonian Republican readers. The only
emendation appears to be a new preface attached to each edition.
35
Callender, Political Progress, 22.
36
Ibid., 23-24. Emphasis added.
37
Ibid., 28-29. Emphasis added.

38
38
Ibid., 29. This argument continues to resonate today, with a referendum scheduled on
Scottish independence for sometime this year (2013).
39
Ibid., 41 and 41fn. Callender—as was common then (and now) for propagandists—was
a less reliable historian than he was a polemicist. Richard II was a vain and weak ruler
whose decadence and vacillation on matters of state led to his overthrow by Henry
Bolingbroke (Henry IV) and the eventual outbreak of the Wars of the Roses.
Bolingbroke’s grandson, Henry VI, was a pious, emotionally-unstable child at the time of
his accession who was in later life routinely dominated by more powerful figures at court,
especially his imperious wife, Margaret of Anjou, and her lover, William de la Pole, the
first Earl of Suffolk. Under Henry VI’s maladroit rule, his uncle Richard of York laid
claim to the throne, igniting the Wars of the Roses and plunging the nation into civil
conflict that lasted until the death of Richard III at Bosworth Field and the accession of
Henry VII Tudor. See also Alison Weir, The Wars of the Roses (Ballantine, 2011).
40
Ibid., 45. In the same passage, Callender declares, “The task of recording his [George
III’s] exploits, must be reserved for the pen of some future Suetonius.” On the surface,
this appears to be nothing more than an allusion to a classical historian of some repute.
However, Callender had some talent as a practitioner of biting insinuations, and this
reference was one example. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (ca. 70 AD to ca. 130 AD) is
most famous for his De Vitae Caesorum (The Twelve Caesars), a colorful and rather
scandalmongering work that portrayed many of the twelve as megalomaniacal tyrants.
The Twelve Caesars damaged (perhaps justifiably) the reputations of several early
Roman emperors for centuries. Much of the infamy attached to Nero and Caligula, for
example, emanates from the pages of Suetonius’s work. Callender’s hope for a “future
Suetonius” essentially amounted to a call for a future scandalmonger to expose the dark
corners and closeted skeletons of the British monarchy, just as Suetonius had done for
that of Rome. See also G. Suetonius Tranquillus, trans. Robert Graves, The Twelve
Caesars (Penguin, 2007), compared to the more reverential, objective tone of Lucius
Cassius Dio, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert, The Roman History: The Reign of Augustus
(Penguin, 1987).
41
Ibid., 46.
42
Ibid., 62.
43
Ibid., 60. Emphasis in original. Callender is quoting from Adam Smith, The Theory of
Moral Sentiments: “[The man of rank and distinction] has an aversion to all public
confusions, not from the love of mankind, for the great never look upon their inferiors as
their fellow creatures…but from a consciousness that he possesses none of the virtues
which are required in such situations, and that the public attention will certainly be drawn
away from him by others.” p. 69, in the previously-cited edition. Callender’s citation,
buried as it is in the midst of one of the Theory’s more complicated sections, may serve
as partial proof of his literacy in the philosophical turbulence of his day.
44
Durey does not treat the possibility of an unforeseen dynamic between Callender’s
ideology and news from France in any detail. Instead, he enters into a lengthy discussion
on the politicking and maneuvering of a comparatively small set of people vis-à-vis
Callender’s ultimate decision to flee the British Isles. Unquestionably, however, there
was a movement among the aristocracy to have Callender arrested for his alleged
treasons against the Crown and state. The terrifying influence of the French Revolution

39
upon the English aristocracy cannot and should not be discounted, especially in light of
Scotland’s historic connections to France in anti-English intrigues.
45
The pamphlet on page 45 refers to “the present time (September, 1792,).” If we assume
that Callender required September and October to complete composition (p. 45 is slightly
less than half of the work) and the remainder of 1792 for printing and distribution
throughout Great Britain (an admittedly off-hand estimate), it is entirely likely that some
readers in the south of Britain were first unfolding pages of the Political Progress at or
very near the same time as news of Louis’s execution reached Britain.
46
Scotland and France shared a history that stretched back centuries. In his English
nationalist epic Henry V, Shakespeare alludes to England’s twin fears of France and
Scotland: “If that you will France win / Then with Scotland first begin.” The “Auld
Alliance” between the two countries dated from the late thirteenth to sometime in the
sixteenth century. Only the encroachment of the Reformation in the mid to late sixteenth
century dampened enthusiasm for the alliance. Speaking in Edinburgh in 1942, French
Marshal Charles de Gaulle claimed that the Auld Alliance was the oldest such alliance in
the history of the world.
47
The Lord Advocate is the equivalent of an Attorney General representing the Crown in
Scotland.
48
“Proceedings in the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh, against James Thomson
Callender, Walter Berry, and James Robertson, for Writing, Printing, and Publishing a
Seditious Libel, January 28th, February 18th, 19th, and 22nd, and March 18th: 33 George III
A.D. 1793,” pp. 80-116 in Thomas Jones Howell, Esq., A Complete Collection of State
Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the
Earliest Period to the Year 1783…Continued from the Year 1783 to the Present Time,
vol. 23 (London: T.C. Hansard, 1817), 83. Hereafter cited as Howell, State Trials.
49
Howell, State Trials, 81.
50
Ibid., 82-83.
51
Ibid., 86.
52
Ibid., 87.
53
Ibid., 88.
54
Ibid., 87-88.
55
Ibid., 88.
56
Ibid., 88. Emphasis added.
57
Ibid., 93.
58
Ibid., 115.
59
It is unclear why Callender’s wife and children did not sail with him, but cost was
likely a factor. Throughout his troubled life, Callender’s family would remain constantly
mute—bystanders of little or no importance to politicians, friends, or occasionally even
Callender himself. None of his family’s names are recorded.
60
For a more positive assessment of the English constitution vis-à-vis that of the United
States, see also Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (1867; repr. Oxford, 2009).
61
Edward C. Carter II, The Political Activities of Mathew Carey, Nationalist, 1760-1814
(Ph.D. dissertation, Bryn Mawr College, 1962).
62
U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 5, clause 3. The full clause reads: “Each house
shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting

40
such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy; and the Yeas and Nays of the
Members of either House on any question shall, at the Desire of one fifth of those
Present, be entered on the Journal.” This “journal,” however, did not come into existence
until 1873, with the first appearance of the Congressional Record. The Record offers
transcriptions—often with embellishments—of all debates, documents, and other
remarks, that take place in the ordinary proceedings of the Congress, subject to review by
individual members. Such a publication did not exist in the 1790s, however. See also
David F. Forte, “House Journal,” p. 77 in Edwin Meese III, ed., The Heritage Guide to
the Constitution (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2005); and Akhil Reed Amar,
America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2006), 82-83.
63
There are many excellent books on the rise of the first party system; among the best:
Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the
United States, 1780-1840 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1970).
64
James Thomson Callender, The History of the United States for 1796, Including a
Variety of Interesting Particulars Relative to the Federal Government Previous to that
Period. (Philadelphia: Snowden and McCorkle, 1797), 279-80.
65
See also John C. Miller, The Federalist Era, 1789-1801 (New York: Harper and Row,
1960); Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American
Republic, 1788-1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
66
See also Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French
Revolution, 1785-1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
67
Callender, 1796 History, 279.
68
Ibid., 279. Emphasis in original.
69
Ibid., 279-80.
70
James Thomson Callender, The Political Register, or, Proceedings in the Session of
Congress Commencing November 3d, 1794, and Ending March 3d, 1795, with an
Appendix Containing a Selection of Papers Laid Before Congress During That Period
(Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1795), vi-vii.
71
Callender, 1796 History, 280.
72
Ibid., 280.
73
Ibid., 280
74
Callender, Political Register, vii.
75
Callender, 1796 History, 280.
76
Ibid., 281.
77
Ibid., 281.
78
Callender, Political Register, vi-vii.
79
William Cobbett, David A. Wilson, ed., Peter Porcupine in America: Pamphlets on
Republicanism and Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 91.
80
Ibid., 91.
81
Tench Coxe to Thomas Jefferson, Philadelphia, July 7, 1794; TJ, 28: 101-102.
82
Scholars seem confident that Jefferson was familiar in some degree with both the work
and its author, and in any case purchased at least two copies of the Political Progress’s
second volume in 1795, when Callender was by that time well known.
83
James Thomson Callender, British Honour and Humanity; or, The Wonders of
American Patience, As exemplified in the modest publications, and universal applause of

41
Mr. William Cobbet [sic]; including a variety of Anecdotes and Remarks, personal and
political, and a survey of the modern state of American Newspapers: by A Friend to
Regular Government (Philadelphia: Robert Campbell, 1796), 2-3.
84
Ibid., 2.
85
James Thomson Callender to James Madison, May 28, 1796; WCF, 7-8.
86
Ibid. When Callender’s family finally joined him in the United States is unclear.
87
Ibid.
88
Ibid.
89
The treaty was formally known as the Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation,
Between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America. The most unpopular
aspect of the treaty in Virginia was its refusal to hold Britain financially accountable to
slaveholders whose human “property” had been lost or confiscated during the war.
90
This need remains, in totality, with the modern world today, where media in all its
forms—propaganda, advertising, news reporting, entertainment spectacles, and so on—
compete in a Darwinistic struggle to seize and hold the public’s attention. In a 1998
interview, David Miscavige—the current leader of the Church of Scientology—made a
candid observation: “I’ll tell you what power is. Power, in my estimation, is if people will
listen to you. That’s it.” In a nation where partisans on both sides of the political divide
have been and are increasingly concerned with the overwhelming role the media play in
each successive election, Miscavige’s remark rings particularly true. Quotation from
Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion (New
York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 156.

42
 CHAPTER II
CROSSING THE RUBICON:
THE REYNOLDS AFFAIR

1. Alexander the Great? – James Callender, Alexander Hamilton, and Historians

Philadelphia in August could be murderous. Sherman Edwards’s 1969 musical,

1776, famously described the city as “foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia.” The

capital’s proximity to the Delaware River and the Atlantic Ocean just sixty miles away

meant summers were often hot and infested with insects, July and August particularly so.

A sudden outbreak of yellow fever might close stores and clear streets for days and even

weeks, paralyzing the federal government and Pennsylvania’s most important port. No

one doubted that Philadelphia in August was a humid, hellish cauldron.

On August 25, 1797, the temperature in the already-boiling capital went up even

further as readers unfolded the pages of a new pamphlet written by none other than

former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton: Observations on Certain Documents

Contained in No. V & VI of “The History of the United States for the Year 1796,” In

Which the Charge of Speculation Against Alexander Hamilton…is Fully Refuted.1 What

the interested public found inside was shocking, to say the least: Hamilton, the nation’s

first Treasury Secretary and former aide-de-camp to none other than George Washington,

was frankly admitting to an affair with a married woman, Maria Reynolds, while also

denying all accusations of illegal financial dealing with the woman’s husband, James.

The new nation, little more than a year past its twentieth birthday, had its first

public ex scandal. Alexander Hamilton, doyen of the Federalist Party and close friend of

George Washington, had a besmirched reputation. While Hamilton and his Federalist

comrades stumbled through a defense of the former secretary’s character, Thomas

43
Jefferson, James Monroe, and their Democratic Republican cohorts smugly nodded to

one another: James Thomson Callender, Republican hack writer extraordinaire, had

struck again, dealing Hamilton’s public image a mortal blow from which this leading

Federalist figure would never fully recover. As Hamilton’s sexual admissions spilled out

in his own words, humid Philadelphia became steamier than ever. How, Hamilton must

have wondered, had it come to this?

Historians have likewise grappled with the same question: how did Hamilton fall

so precipitously from grace? The simple answer is that in the summer of 1797, James

Thomson Callender, Scottish immigrant and scurrilous journalist extraordinaire, drove a

sword made of newsprint squarely into Hamilton’s back through his allegation that the

ex-Treasury Secretary had confessed to adultery as a means of covering up more

insidious financial dealings. Here, however, the road has diverged. One interpretation

seeks to explain the Reynolds Affair scandal as the culmination of a political duel

between Alexander Hamilton and James Monroe. Hamilton, a leading Federalist, had a

longstanding antipathy toward the Democratic Republican Monroe and Monroe’s close

friend, Thomas Jefferson. In an effort to fatally wound Hamilton’s political stardom,

Monroe manipulated the journalist Callender into attacking Hamilton publicly, using

secret documents Monroe himself supplied. This interpretation, which reduces Callender

to the role of marginalized mouthpiece, remains the prevailing scholarly approach to

understanding the Reynolds scandal and Hamilton’s fall from grace.2

The road less traveled, on the other hand, focuses more on Callender as an

individual, rather than as a mere puppet dancing to unseen strings.3 The writer had fled to

the United States to escape much of what Hamilton espoused: Anglophilia, opposition to

44
the French Revolution, belief in the power of privilege, and a philosophy of centralized

government in the hands of the elite. Callender’s Calvinism, born of the passions of the

Church of Scotland and baptized in its evangelical fire, had combined with his political

persecution in Great Britain to create a personality of singularly unbending zeal and even

conviction that could not brook opposition.

The largely Anglophilic, elitist Federalist Party of Washington and John Adams

naturally attracted Callender’s ire, but Alexander Hamilton, whose friends and foes alike

widely acknowledged as the de facto most powerful man in the party, inspired

particularly vehement hatred.4 Hamilton’s attacks on Thomas Jefferson’s unconventional

religious beliefs had frustrated and infuriated Callender, who saw Hamilton’s attempt to

hide behind a pseudonym while launching those attacks as yet another example of upper-

class hypocrisy. These attacks prompted Callender’s first major propaganda piece for

Jefferson and arguably set in motion the train of events that led to the Reynolds Affair

scandal in the summer of 1797. Callender’s vilification campaign against Hamilton thus

had deep roots in Callender’s own beliefs and convictions, quite independent of his

alleged willingness to parrot information handed him from Democratic Republican elites.

Though Callender’s anti-Hamilton smears drew on documents that may have come from

Monroe himself, in the end the words and arguably much of the motivation would be

Callender’s and Callender’s alone.

2. Heir Apparent – The Rise and Rise of Alexander Hamilton

Throughout late 1796 and into 1797, Alexander Hamilton little suspected he had

such a venomous foe waiting in the shadows. The retired Treasury Secretary and co-

45
author of the Federalist Papers sparkled as one of the brightest stars in the Federalist

Party’s constellation. An imperious man with a commanding bearing that belied his

impoverished background, Hamilton was every inch the Federalist aristocrat. He served

with distinction as a military aide and confidant to General George Washington during

the War of Independence and sat as one of New York’s delegates to the Continental

Congress and later the Constitutional Convention. His co-authorship of the Federalist

Papers helped establish his reputation as a political thinker of the first order, and in 1787

he signed the Constitution. Shortly after Washington’s election he journeyed to

Philadelphia once again to serve as the first United States Secretary of the Treasury.

Like James Callender, Hamilton’s difficult, deprived childhood did not mark him

for future success or notoriety. He was born out of wedlock on January 11, in either 1755

or 1757—records were not kept. Orphaned around age 13, he worked a series of jobs for

his extended family before finally reaching King’s College in New York in 1773, where

he graduated with distinction while finding time on the side to engage in anti-British

advocacy. During the war, George Washington accepted Hamilton as part of his famous

military family, where the young man served as the general’s aide-de-camp during the

War of Independence.

Hamilton’s appointment as the new nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury

brought him into a celebrated rivalry with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. The two

men represented radically different visions of the nation’s future and were arguably the

chief architects of an emerging two-party system in American politics. Jefferson’s vision

of a rural, agrarian utopia and decentralized government collided with Hamilton’s dream

of a robust, urbanized society steered and united by strong federal authority.

46
 The conflict between the pair erupted behind the doors of Washington’s cabinet in

1791 when the president asked for their opinions on the constitutionality of creating a

new Bank of the United States. Hamilton strongly supported such a move, seeing it as a

means of asserting federal control over the economy, establishing the young republic’s

creditworthiness, and further tying the states to the power of the federal government with

the assumption of their war debts. Jefferson, conversely, viewed the creation of a national

bank as beyond the powers enumerated in the Constitution and an act of almost imperial

overstretch on the administration’s part. The two men engaged in a brief but ferocious

epistolary war, each penning famous letters to the president presenting their opinions.

Hamilton’s eventual victory—when Washington accepted his view and signed the Bank

Bill into law—stung Jefferson mightily and exacerbated partisan divisions even further.

The Treasury Secretary’s triumph in swaying Washington’s opinion marked a watershed

moment for his career.

In early 1796, however, Hamilton had publically entered semi-retirement.

Privately, he remained as politically active as ever, acting as an éminence grise to an

aged, exhausted President Washington. Prominent Democratic Republican leaders like

James Madison and Thomas Jefferson feared the New Yorker as a major threat to the

burgeoning opposition party’s chances in the presidential election of 1796. Opposition

leaders quickly began casting about for a means of turning the tide of opinion against

Hamilton and the Federalists as the clock slowly wound down on Washington’s second

term.

While the two nascent political parties squared off for the electoral showdown in

November 1796, James Thomson Callender stalked the streets of Philadelphia railing at

47
the outgoing President Washington with characteristic melodrama and bile. Succeeding

generations of historians and scholars, seeking to cement Callender’s reputation as a

smear artist of no integrity, have made much of his editorial in the Philadelphia Aurora

attacking Washington just before Christmas 1796. “If ever a nation was debauched by a

man, the American Nation has been debauched by Washington,” Callender declared,

going on to accuse the nation’s most revered living person of deceiving, exerting

“improper influence,” and various other “foul designs.”5 He even allegedly proposed a

toast while in Virginia to “a speedy death to General Washington.”6 The attacks stung

Washington, who lamented in early 1797 that “[i]f you read the Aurora of this city, or

those gazettes, which are under the same influence [i.e., Republican], you cannot but

have perceived with what malignant industry and persevering falsehoods I am assailed, in

order to weaken if not to destroy the confidence of the public.”7

Washington’s stature combined with Callender’s reputation for scurrility

magnified these character smears and made them difficult to justify or sustain. They

represented the darker side of Callender’s personality. On the one hand, his Calvinistic

upbringing and dedication to the egalitarian principles of the Scottish Enlightenment’s

vanguard naturally placed him in conflict with the Federalists who, while not quite

monarchical, did represent the “old order,” such as it was, in the New World. On the

other hand, the journalist’s offensive against Washington represented none of those

principles or characteristics in action.

The newspaper screeds Callender penned were little more than crude slanders that

the journalist did not even attempt to support with facts or evidence, dashed off almost

carelessly to be read in the same manner. This pattern typified Callender’s journalistic

48
work. While his pamphlets were often well researched and forceful in both language and

argument, his newspaper writing too quickly degenerated into flights of rhetorical,

occasionally even hysterical, fancy that stimulated attention while leaving critical

thinking behind. The reckless attacks Callender flung at Washington served as partial

proof of this penchant.

These newspaper attacks, although eye-catching, were not enough to sustain a

living for Callender and his family, especially as Washington’s departure from the capital

and politics for good was only weeks away. He needed a new target, and the system of

elections in the early republic was to help provide him with one. The month-long voting

process (November 4 to December 7) in 1796 represented the first true electoral contest

in the young republic’s history, pitting Federalist John Adams of New England against

Republican Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. Alexander Hamilton, the Federalists’ power

broker, could only watch as the party nominated his rival, Vice President Adams,

signaling the likely end to Hamilton’s dominance of the party’s ranks. Determined to

remain a leading voice in the Federalist Party, Hamilton turned to the newspapers as a

means of electioneering—if not for Adams, then at least against Jefferson. Callender’s

hyperbolic anti-Washington philippics may have also stung this de facto “son” of the

nation’s father.

3. Punch and Counterpunch – The Phocion Letters and the Historical Memoirs

From mid-October to mid-November, the Federalist Gazette of the United States

published a series of letters from “Phocion” offering lukewarm support for John Adams’s

candidacy but furiously blasting Thomas Jefferson’s character. The letters were then

49
collated in mid-November and published in a pamphlet that purported to expose “the

pretensions of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency.”8 Little, if any, effort was made to

conceal Phocion’s true identity: Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson’s old antagonist was

hard-hitting from the outset, deriding philosophers as “of all beings…[making] the worst

politician[s]” and all but directly accusing Jefferson himself of outright atheism.9 With

these forceful words, Hamilton had unwittingly walked directly into James Callender’s

line of sight.

Such an attack, coming in the middle of an election, was an obvious threat to

Jefferson’s candidacy. For Callender’s part, however, equally offensive was the pompous

intellectualism of the Federalist aristocracy: “[I]t is rather offensive that obscure

writers…should presume to christen themselves with celebrated and venerable names,”

he wrote, mocking Hamilton’s choice of Phocion—a noted Greek military leader and

politician—as his pseudonym.10

Jeffersonian supporters were quick to see the only semi-invisible hand of

Alexander Hamilton himself behind the pamphlet. Six years before, in 1790, Hamilton

had published two letters under the name Phocion in defense of American Tories in New

York.11 This new pamphlet, however, contained even more evidence of Hamilton’s

authorship and rancor, attacking Jefferson’s religion and even his private life at

Monticello. Callender, who saw little if any difference between the reviled Washington

and the ex-president’s majordomo, began sharpening his quill.

The later defense Callender offered for Jefferson against Phocion’s specific

charge of “impiety,” however, shed as much light on the journalist’s attempts to reconcile

his background with new ideas as it did on Jefferson’s own faith. Callender, it must be

50
remembered, had grown up in a strictly Calvinist society and church that tolerated little

theological dissent. The principal debates in the Church of Scotland during Callender’s

adolescence and early adulthood had centered on how to reconcile the church’s role vis-

à-vis the state and the Scottish Enlightenment. Callender’s parents had thrown their lot in

with the evangelical wing of the church, which looked with suspicion at the

Enlightenment and the increasingly accommodating tone many moderates adopted

toward secular influences.

As Callender matured, he embraced the more populist, political aspects of the

Enlightenment in Scotland. He had almost nothing to say on the question of how he

harmonized his religious beliefs with the Enlightenment, but historians can conjecture

that while he shed his childhood’s theological rigidity, he nonetheless maintained that

mindset of unyielding, uncompromising purpose. There is no evidence to indicate he ever

rejected religious faith, merely that such faith and orthodoxy took an increasingly

secondary role as he identified closer with the radical democratic principles the

Enlightenment unleashed.

Jefferson, conversely, had fully immersed himself in the Enlightenment from the

outset, despite not being terribly radical with respect to religion, even by the standards of

the “Age of Reason.” The French Revolution had unleashed a wave of anti-religious

despots like the ironically-named Jean-Baptiste Carrier, who oversaw the mass execution

of Roman Catholic clergy and despoiled hundreds of churches across France in the name

of the “Cult of Reason.”12 Jefferson, conversely, was merely the most prominent member

of the American political class to adhere to a mild form of Deism. In 1794, Thomas

Paine’s scathing denunciation of organized religion—the two-volume Age of Reason—

51
provoked admiration and damnation in equal measure across the nation with its author’s

blatant declaration: “I do not believe in the creed professed by…any church that I know

of. My own mind is my church.”13

As a man who chopped up his copy of the New Testament to exclude all parts

deemed “irrational,” Jefferson had much in common with Paine, to the consternation of

many critics among the Federalists. New England Puritanism despised the anti-religious

firestorm of the French Revolution and saw Deist Republicans like Thomas Jefferson as

potentially smoldering embers ready to ignite and burn down churches all across the new

nation. Hysterics aside, Jefferson was unconventional in his religious attitudes, as avant

garde as Callender’s upbringing had been conservative. Despite these differences,

however, Callender was prepared to soldier on in Jefferson’s defense, if only for the

excitement of dueling with the Federalist lion, Hamilton.

In January 1797, as Philadelphia shivered in the depths of winter, Callender

published his longest pamphlet yet in the United States, entitled The American Annual

Register, or, Historical Memoirs of the United States for the Year 1796. At a staggering

288 pages long, the pamphlet—like the earlier Political Progress of Britain—was more

akin to a book, and unlike Callender’s newspaper scribbles, the Historical Memoirs for

1796 contained a series of milestones in Callender’s development as an observer and

participant in American politics. The work also contained some of the first strains of

Callender’s eventually titanic pro-Jefferson symphony that would take him to the heights

(and depths) of the Sage of Monticello’s esteem.

Lengthy, rambling, and filled with political minutiae, the Historical Memoirs

primarily concentrated on details of debates in the Congress mixed in with attacks and

52
“defences” of various political figures. Most important, however, was Callender’s

extended defense of Thomas Jefferson’s character—particularly his religion—one of the

first of its kind, from the attacks Hamilton had made in his Phocion pamphlet. From the

beginning, the battleground was delicate and fraught with difficulty.

One must recall that the early United States was by no means religiously

homogenous. From the beginning of the new nation and even before, religious expression

had varied widely from Massachusetts Bay to Georgia. The Enlightenment polarized

American religious attitudes into two loose camps: those faithful who maintained the

orthodoxy of Christianity and the particular sect to which they belonged, and those like

Jefferson who sought to reconcile—or even discard—religious teachings with a

developing knowledge of science and rational thought. Jefferson recognized this hostile

climate and was loath to discuss his personal religious beliefs, even as a means of

defending them.

Callender suffered from no such social scruples or taboos. To Phocion’s assertion

that philosophers made poor politicians, the Historical Memoirs countercharged that “Mr.

Washington himself is a moral philosopher…. Did Phocion mean to insult the present

President by such objections to Mr. Jefferson, or are they merely imputable to his own

poverty of intellect?”14 The journalist knew this assertion would irritate Hamilton, who

revered and respected Washington enormously. Such clever turns of phrases

characterized Callender’s writing, but amusing readers with the occasional witticism was

not the principal aim of the Historical Memoirs.

What enraged Callender (and probably Jefferson as well) the most was Phocion’s

predilection for misquoting and outright falsifying through paraphrasing Jefferson’s own

53
words and sentiments. Callender offered as one example Jefferson’s argument,

“Difference of opinion is advantageous to religion. The several sects perform the office

of a censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men,

women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured,

fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one step towards uniformity.” Phocion,

in a clear act of misrepresentation, “quoted” Jefferson as asserting that, “Millions of

innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been

burnt, tortured, and imprisoned,” the changed italics twisting Jefferson’s intent into an

accusation against Christianity. Callender gleefully tore apart Hamilton’s attempt at

criticism: “Even the mutilated quotation is invulnerable to criticism,” he gloated, “It

states in a few plain words a fact as well attested as any historical fact whatever. Phocion

must have been at a very great loss for something to say.”15

Elsewhere, Phocion twisted Jefferson’s assertion that “it does me no injury for my

neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no gods—it neither picks my pocket nor breaks

my leg,” into something notably more insidious and provocative: “It does me no injury if

my neighbour is AN ATHEIST, because it does not break my leg.”16 While a technically

accurate interpretation of Jefferson’s words, Callender pointed out that “Phocion prints

the words AN ATHEIST in capitals…[and] asks, ‘Which our we to be the most shocked

at, the levity, or the impiety of these remarks?’”17 Callender simply counterargued that

Jefferson “vindicates, in a liberal stile [sic], the universal right of [conscience].”18 As a

landmark early work in Callender’s career, the Historical Memoirs showed his talent for

political writing at its best.

54
 Notably, however, Callender’s defense neither sought nor created a strong

assertion of Jefferson’s religious creed. It would be a topic that Callender would almost

never return to, preferring in the future to attack the religion of his enemies than defend

that of his friends. Callender likely found Jefferson’s quixotic religious beliefs as

perplexing and difficult as many of his contemporaries (to say nothing of future

historians). The journalist himself was the product of a Calvinist upbringing that would

have had little use for Jefferson’s unorthodoxy. Moreover, Callender was nowhere near

the intellectual caliber necessary to grasp the intricate nuances of Jefferson’s finely tuned

religious sensibilities.

A number of factors were at play that made Callender’s interaction with

Jefferson’s beliefs somewhat complex. While Callender consistently displayed the

sureness of purpose and passionate zeal of his childhood Calvinism, he was much less

firm on the question of religious orthodoxy and practice. His religious legacy, then, was

not the usual corpus of theological beliefs and practices—there is no record of him

attending a church, for example—that staunch believers espoused. For Callender, religion

had inculcated in him a specific frame of mind, a particular way of thinking. He had

soaked up his childhood religion’s penchant for firm, unyielding resolve and righteous

indignation while slowly leaving behind the more convoluted theological debates of the

Scottish Church. Callender left behind no reason to suspect him of atheism or even

agnosticism, but neither was he a fervent Christian.

More importantly, Jefferson’s religious beliefs were not of any real interest to

Callender. Even the elements of Jefferson’s ideology the two men shared—their

commitment to radical populism, espousal of the French Revolution, and Anglo-

55
skepticism—were of less importance to Callender in this specific instance than were

Alexander Hamilton’s perceived mortal sins. Jefferson could essentially believe what he

wanted. Callender was far more interested in taking the journalistic war to Hamilton than

he was in defending the Jeffersonian fortress from a Federalist siege. Callender’s

personal loathing and even hatred of Hamilton and what he represented—Anglophilia,

aristocracy, a vision of highly centralized government—outweighed all other concerns.

Furthermore, Hamilton’s Phocion attacks aroused Callender’s wrath with their elitist,

holier-than-thou tone that called to mind the injustices Callender had suffered as a young

man struggling at his first job. For Callender, Hamilton had proven himself a true

member of a hypocritical aristocracy, using a religion whose tenets Hamilton freely

violated to wage a personal, ad hominem war against Thomas Jefferson.

Dealing with this complicated issue, however, was still not easy for Callender (or

later scholars). In one of the more developed portions of the Historical Memoirs, the

journalist embarked on a rather tortured attempt to reconcile the general concept of

Deism with the prevailing morality of the day. “To accuse [the Deist] of blasphemy, that

is, of denying the existence, or moral attributes of the deity,” he stated, “is an act of gross

injustice. We might as well accuse a Jew or a Turk of blasphemy, because they adhere to

Moses or Mahomet.”19 The problem, Callender evidently did not reflect upon, was that

Jefferson’s detractors were perfectly happy to accuse Jews, Turks, and Jeffersonians of

blasphemy without a second thought.

Deism itself was a product of the Enlightenment that Callender could not

reconcile himself with, even as a means of defending and currying favor with Thomas

Jefferson. After mounting a tepid defense of Deism, Callender found himself forced to

56
admit, “The Deist does not believe anything which is false. His misfortune lies in not

believing all which is true. Deism, like other mistakes, is involuntary, and therefore to

punish it as a crime, must be the height of iniquity.”20 Callender was thus primarily

advocating the principle of religious freedom—of individuals to freely choose their own

beliefs without the need to meet a particular religious standard. By frankly calling out

Deism as a “mistake,” he clearly demonstrated his own espousal of more orthodox

theology.

Callender, in short, had declined to cast aside his personal religious convictions in

favor of more aggressively identifying with Jefferson. In later life Federalists,

Republicans, and historians alike would charge Callender with opportunism and a dearth

of moral principles. At the outset of his career, however, when he had the most to gain

from compromising, Callender chose to adhere to his religious convictions and

essentially call Thomas Jefferson’s religious faith flawed. This is not to say that

Callender always acted out of such pure conviction and motivation, but only to say that

the caricature of him as a marionette dancing to the whim of the highest bidder is

somewhat inaccurate.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the Historical Memoirs was not what it

said, but what it failed to say, in response to a far more insidious and dangerous attack

from Phocion. In 1787, Jefferson published a new edition of his Notes on the State of

Virginia (1781), the only true book this most bookish of presidents would ever write.21 In

his Notes, Jefferson had argued that blacks and whites were the product of “real

distinctions which nature has made” that “divide us into parties, and produce convulsions

which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”22

57
Now in 1796, Phocion took aim at the contrast between Jefferson’s beliefs as expressed

in the Notes and his current lifestyle: “At one moment [Jefferson] is anxious to

emancipate the blacks…. At another he discovers that the blacks are of a different race

from the human race and…must be instantly remove beyond the reach of mixture lest he

(or she) should stain the blood of his (or her) master….”23 The knife’s twist came in the

next sentence: “He must have seen all around him sufficient marks of this staining of

blood to have been convinced that retaining them in slavery would not prevent it.”24

Whether Hamilton was referring to Sally Hemings or not was not made clear, but

nonetheless this boldly challenging statement was the first public allegation of

miscegenation against Jefferson to appear in print. Callender, who usually delighted in

meticulously picking apart his opponent’s arguments, was momentarily speechless. He

had never visited Monticello and so could not comment on the truth or falsehood of the

claim, but such an aggressive attack on Jefferson’s character must have enraged the now-

devoted Jeffersonian journalist.25 In the meantime, the election itself was moving toward

an end. Callender’s revenge on Hamilton would have to wait—for now.

4. “Other than pecuniary consolation” – The Reynolds Affair

Due to the initial design of the Constitution’s presidential election framework,

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were both elected to serve in the same

administration—as President and Vice President, respectively—taking office on March 4,

1797. Perhaps it was because Jefferson had earned himself and his party a place in the top

echelons of the incoming government that Callender unusually muted his criticism of the

arch-Federalist Adams from Massachusetts, one of the more culturally Anglophilic

58
American states. The journalist was not totally silent, however. In a final attack,

Callender’s fury against Washington (and indirectly, Hamilton) rang out one last time on

the day of Adams’s inauguration: “Every heart, in unison with the freedom and happiness

of the people ought to beat high with exultation, that the name of WASHINGTON from

this day ceases to give a currency to political iniquity.”26 As Washington’s carriage

thumped along uneven roads south to white-columned Mount Vernon and the peaceful

gurgling of the Potomac in March 1797, he must have felt relieved to be leaving crowded

Philadelphia—and its venomous journalists—behind.

Back in Philadelphia, Hamilton’s future as a leading voice of the Federalist Party

after Washington’s departure was much less certain. New President John Adams had

little time for the New Yorker, believing him to be “a proud Spirited, conceited aspiring

Mortal always pretending to Morality [and] [a]s great an Hypocrite…in the U.S…. I

shall…maintain the Same Conduct towards him I always did, that is keep him at a

distance.”27 Callender, too, nursed an unchanged opinion and hatred of Hamilton,

knowing that even temporarily exiled from the Federalist elite’s graces, the former

Treasury Secretary remained a formidable opponent. Hamilton’s insinuation that

Jefferson was engaged in sexual relations with slaves at Monticello particularly galled the

journalist. As was so typical for his life already, Callender wanted revenge, and Hamilton

had already unwittingly set the stage for the propagandist’s first real coup: a piece of his

personal history he thought he escaped that now threatened to overlie him.

Six years before in 1791, at the height of his career as the first Secretary of the

Treasury, Alexander Hamilton stood in the door of his Philadelphia lodging at South

Third and Walnut streets to greet a panicked young woman flustered in the heat of a

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warm Sunday afternoon in June.28 Maria Reynolds, a fellow New Yorker, had come to

plead for Hamilton’s assistance. Her husband James, she claimed, had abandoned her and

their daughter in favor of another woman, and she needed Hamilton’s assistance to leave

Philadelphia and return to her family in New York. In fact, James and Maria Reynolds

were still very much married and were laying a well-planned trap at the Treasury

Secretary’s feet.29

James Reynolds was a rather well-known scofflaw in Philadelphia, usually

working in tandem with his sidekick, Jacob Clingman. What he needed in 1791, however,

was a job and ready cash. Applying for a position at the Treasury Department, he and

Maria evidently conspired to draw Hamilton into a web of romance and blackmail as a

means of securing James a job and the household a new source of funding. Fortunately

for the conniving duo, Hamilton’s first sight of curvaceous, dark-haired Maria was

enough to ensnare him. Taking the short walk to her home the next morning, Hamilton

handed Reynolds a bank draft for $30 to help meet her expenses, but she had a different

kind of help in mind. After “some conversation ensued,” Reynolds “made it quickly

apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would not be unacceptable.”30 “It required

a harder heart than mine,” Hamilton rather piously claimed in his admission, “to refuse it

to a Beauty in distress.”31

The trap snapped shut: James Reynolds quickly “returned” and feigned outrage

upon learning that no less than the Secretary of the Treasury was regularly auditing Mrs.

Reynolds’s substantial bedroom assets. Only money and a job would keep James

Reynolds’s mouth closed and the affair’s salacious details safely stored out of sight. In

the meantime, James was only too happy to encourage visits between Hamilton and

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Maria at both their homes, so long as the money continued to flow in equal measure. This

precarious situation could not last, however. When Reynolds and fellow vagabond Jacob

Clingman were thrown in jail in 1792 for fraud and perjury as part of a confidence

scheme, the blackmailer appealed to Hamilton for assistance. Exasperated with the

fraudster, Hamilton refused any assistance, and Clingman, free on bail, promptly told

anyone who would stop and listen that he and Reynolds possessed information that could

seriously damage Hamilton’s reputation and character.32

Clingman’s former boss, Speaker of the House Frederick Muhlenberg of

Pennsylvania, was particularly interested in anything that could deal the prominent

Federalist’s political future a powerful blow. Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg,

the solid, barrel-shaped son of German immigrants, was an ordained Lutheran minister,

the first signatory of the Bill of Rights, and the first Speaker of the House. Once a

supporter of the Federalist administration under Washington, he had since shifted to the

nascent Democratic Republican Party. Respected and even-tempered, he was perhaps the

best man to lead the informal inquiry into Hamilton’s alleged malfeasance.

Accordingly, on December 15, 1792, Muhlenberg and two other Republicans,

Representative Abraham Venable and Senator James Monroe, confronted Hamilton in his

own home with the accusations that he had engaged in speculation and fraud with

Treasury Department money. In a moment of almost stunning candor, Hamilton brushed

off these serious charges and instead declared, openly and fully to the three Virginians,

that he and Maria Reynolds had regularly slept with one another. He even insisted, over

their serious objections, that the three gentlemen read several pieces of correspondence

between himself and Maria revealing the strictly romantic nature of the affair.33 As a

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token of his respect and faith in the Republican politicians, Hamilton entrusted the troika

with his own originals of the correspondence between himself and Maria Reynolds to

Monroe.34 Meanwhile, Monroe’s clerk John Beckley made copies of the letters for

Hamilton’s own records.

The letters between Hamilton and Reynolds were strictly one-sided—Maria

writing to Hamilton—and they spoke to the stormy passion of the affair. “Oh my God I

feel more for you than myself,” Maria wrote to Hamilton after her husband discovered

their affair and threatened to reveal it.35 In early 1792, she wrote again, claiming, “your

Neglect has filled [my pillow] with the sharpest thorns…. I have been on the point of

doin [sic] the moast [sic] horrid acts as I shudder to think….”36 James Reynolds later

wrote to Hamilton ostensibly to apologize for “the imprudent language” of his wife’s

desperate plea for attention.37 In reality, he was likely reminding Hamilton that he still

possessed this potentially fatal blackmail tool against the Treasury Secretary.

Maria’s passion continued and even intensified. At 1:00 a.m. the morning after

her husband dispatched his explanation for her hysterics to Hamilton, she wrote again by

candlelight to her paramour. “In a state of mind wich [sic] know [sic] language can paint

I take up the pen but alas I know not what I write or how to give you an idea of the

anguish wich at this moment rends my heart yes my friend I am doomed to drink the

bittter [sic] cup of affliction….”38 By this point, Hamilton had realized the frenzied Maria

probably was in a state of mind “wich know language,” mangled or not, could express,

but she was only just getting started. “Inexorable heaven is deaf to my anguish and has

marked me out for the child of sorrow,” she declaimed. Then, in a massive single

sentence, she unclasped her heart—and her dress: “[O]h my dear friend wether [sic] shall

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I fly for consolation oh all all [sic] consolation is shut against me there is not the least

gleme [sic] of hope but oh merciful God forgive me and you my friend Comply with this

Last Request[:] Let me once more se [sic] you and unbosom myself to you.” Claiming

she needed “advice for once In an affair on wich [sic] depends my Existence Itself,”

Maria poured out a seemingly inexhaustible torrent of romantic adulation: “I beg you to

come gracious God had I the world I would lay It at your feet If I could only se [sic] you

oh I must or I shall lose my senses.”39 Hamilton could be forgiven for assuming she

already had.

The Treasury Secretary, for once in his life, wisely chose to remain silent, even in

the face of such letters filled “with the strongest professions of tenderness and grief.”40

Maria had demonstrated “the appearances of a violent attachment and…a genuine

distress at the idea of an interruption of the connection” between them.41 His silence only

drove her to further embarrassing displays. In June, she informed Hamilton, “I once again

take up the pen to solicit The favor of seing [sic] [you] again oh Col Hamilton what have

I done that you should thus Neglect me Is it because I am unhappy[?]”42 In this, her final

letter, she coyly tried to lure Hamilton back to her bed: “I am now A lone [sic] and shall

be for afew [sic] days I believe till Wensday [sic] though am not sartain [sic] and would

wish to see you this Evening I [sic] poseble [sic] If not as soon as you can make It

convenent [sic].”43 Having maintained a semblance of self control for a remarkable six

lines of text, she returned to her standard method of histrionic begging: “[O]h my dear

freend [sic] how shall I plealde [sic] Enough what shall I say Let me beg of you to come

and If you never se [sic] me again oh If you think It best I will submit to It and take a

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long and last adieu.”44 Either way, “for heaven sake keep me not In suspince [sic] Let me

know your intention[!]”45 Hamilton’s continued silence was response enough.

The correspondence between Hamilton and the Reynoldses was unquestionably

awkward and embarrassing, but it had no political relevancy of any kind. The Republican

deputation sent to investigate the matter was forced to admit Hamilton had done nothing

illegal. Finding, perhaps to their disappointment, that the Treasury Secretary and Mrs.

Reynolds’s congress had nothing to do with Congress, Monroe, Muhlenberg, and

Venable left satisfied that Hamilton had explained away the accusations Reynolds and

Clingman had leveled at him.46 The two schemers, having failed in their attempt to

blackmail George Washington’s right hand man, were later released with a fine and

disappeared from history’s notice. In a final twist of irony, Maria left James Reynolds

almost immediately after his release for Jacob Clingman, and the two lived quietly ever

after in Maryland. Hamilton had won. He had faced one of the greatest fears of an

eighteenth-century gentleman, the potential impugning of his honor, and survived. He

was eager to put the issue behind him.

5. “The faction is organized and a crisis is approaching” – Callender Strikes Back

The New Yorker had not, however, reckoned with James Thomson Callender.

Although months and then years—five in all—flew by, the connection of Hamilton’s

name to a sex scandal had potent appeal, especially for someone as desperate for eye-

catching headlines as Callender. The Phocion pamphlets throughout October and

November 1796 had stung Callender, leaving him playing defense against an aggressive

opponent and thirsting for a rematch. Moreover, as 1797 marched forward and the

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honeymoon between John Adams’s Federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic

Republicans wore thin, Republican leaders had begun plotting to remove Alexander

Hamilton from the political scene for good. Hamilton and Jefferson were already well-

known foes whose rivalry dated back to the opening years of Washington’s first term.

Although John Adams already had a poor opinion of Hamilton’s character, Republicans

feared Hamilton’s return to his customary place behind the throne of yet another

Federalist administration and were willing to contemplate any method of ensuring that

did not happen.47

Callender quickly saw the opportunity to do the Republican faction and Jefferson

in particular a favor while at the same time quenching his thirst for revenge on the hated

Hamilton, and sought a means of burying the former Treasury Secretary’s reputation

once and for all. Rumors of illicit sex and financial dealings had swirled around

Hamilton’s head since Reynolds’s veiled threats in 1792, and Callender sensed a weak

spot in his opponent’s armor. He began investigating the charges and turned to several

reliable gossips, including the former clerk of the House of Representatives, Virginian

John Beckley.48

Beckley remains a likely source for the scandal the journalist unleashed on

Hamilton. Beckley, a Democratic Republican, had lost his lucrative post as Clerk of the

House of Representatives after the Federalists won a majority in the 1796 congressional

election.49 More importantly, it was Beckley who made copies of the letters between

Reynolds and Hamilton that the then-Treasury Secretary had shared with Monroe. This

sum of strong, albeit circumstantial, evidence all points to Beckley as Callender’s source.

However, Callender himself vehemently denied he received anything from Beckley,

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possibly protecting his source and certainly throwing a wrench at future scholars. In the

preface to his History of the United States for 1796—the work that would publicize

Hamilton’s infidelity—Callender declared: “A report has been circulated, that Mr. John

Beckley is the author of this volume. He did not frame a single sentence of it.”50 Whether

this statement was designed to shield Beckley or ensure Callender alone received credit

for his scandalous revelations remains unclear. Beckley, by leaking documents taken

under Monroe’s own confidence, would have run a certain risk to his reputation and

future career prospects by cooperating with Callender at the risk of damaging Monroe’s

honor and reputation.

James Monroe himself was a possible source, as was Thomas Jefferson. As

Hamilton probably reflected, all the circumstantial evidence pointed to Monroe as

Callender’s ultimate source of insider information. Moreover, Callender himself had

personally admitted to possessing pieces of recent correspondence between Monroe and

Hamilton that could only have leaked from Monroe personally.

As for Jefferson, no documented contact between him and Callender appeared

until just after the period surrounding the revelations (August 1797). Jefferson and

Monroe both had, or were alleged to have, copies of the love letters and other material

Hamilton had turned over to Monroe in 1792. Either Jefferson or Monroe could have

independently passed documents to Callender. Moreover, it was also possibly Monroe

and Jefferson were complicit together in sharing sensitive information with Callender,

offering themselves and Callender some plausible deniability by sharing out

responsibility for their breach of Hamilton’s confidence. In any case, the question of

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exactly who was leaking documents to Callender was not resolved in the scandal’s

lifetime and remains beyond the possibility of definite proof.

Regardless of who did the leaking, exactly what was leaked is certain. In a series

of pamphlets that were later collated into a single volume, Callender laid bare Hamilton’s

infidelity, accusing him of lying about the affair as a means of covering up his true crime:

illegal financial speculation using public funds.51 With these words, Callender boldly and

perhaps recklessly stormed across the Rubicon. He must have savored the moment.

Hamilton had earlier accused Thomas Jefferson of illicit sex at Monticello. Suddenly, the

situation was reversed, and the hunter became the hunted. For Callender, the charge of

adultery on Hamilton’s part was yet another example of the upper class’s hypocrisy, its

double standards. The incongruity between Hamilton’s moralizing and his private actions

offended Callender in ways that had little to do with Jefferson or even party politics.

British society in the journalist’s eyes had been filled with characters such as Hamilton.

The ex-secretary had come to embody not just the Federalist Party, but the whole stench

of rotten corruption and privilege Callender had sought to escape when he fled Britain.

This tornado of indignation now set its sights squarely on Hamilton’s reputation, and as

the first copies of Callender’s exposé rolled off the presses, the retired New Yorker could

see the clouds darkening overhead.

The first accusations appeared sometime in June 1797. Oliver Wolcott, Jr., current

Treasury Secretary and a friend of Hamilton’s, wrote his beleaguered predecessor in

tones that suggested Hamilton was already familiar with Callender’s rumored screed. “I

inclose to you the pamphlet,” Wolcott dolefully announced, and “[y]ou will see that the

subject is…to establish an opinion that you was concerned in speculations in the public

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funds.”52 After asserting his belief that “no publication could have been made without a

breach of confidence pledged in my presence” by James Monroe, Abraham Venable, and

then-Speaker Frederick Muhlenberg, Wolcott closed with a sentence calculated to send

shivers down Hamilton’s spine: “The faction is organized, public business is at a stand,

and a crisis is approaching.”53 Wolcott, a Yale-trained lawyer and son of the Governor of

Connecticut, was not one to jump prematurely into histrionics. His was the first voice of

warning to reach Hamilton’s ear.

What had alarmed Wolcott so greatly were Callender’s explosive “remarks on

[Hamilton’s] connection with Reynolds.”54 In an effort to deflect future charges of

revenge-seeking impropriety, Callender argued that the Federalist treatment and recall of

Ambassador James Monroe from France on charges of corruption showed “no limits to

their rage and their vengeance,” and was particularly offensive “because [Monroe]

displayed, on an occasion that will be mentioned immediately, the greatest lenity to Mr.

Alexander Hamilton, the prime mover of the federal [sic] party.”55 In other words,

Hamilton had no one but himself and his Federalist compatriots to blame if he objected to

Callender’s scandalmongering. Monroe had been in Paris struggling to contain the French

government’s anger at the Jay Treaty into late 1796. When in a fit of pique France

recalled their ambassador to the United States, President George Washington issued

reciprocal orders for Monroe to return home as well. This type of tit-for-tat exchange was

(and remains) quite common between nations, but Republicans viewed it as a slight to

Monroe and to the Francophilic faction as a whole. Republicans saw in Monroe’s recall a

conspiracy to alienate France and align the new nation with Britain. When pro-France

Edmund Randolph stepped down as Secretary of State, Washington replaced him with

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the stridently Anglophilic Timothy Pickering.56 The Republicans’ fears were only

exacerbated. Their friends in the press began to mobilize in response.

Alexander Hamilton, as always, was a tempting target for his political enemies.

Callender first crafted an elaborate caricature of Hamilton as the vindication of

Republican nightmares, referring to him as “the promoter and primum mobile of the

greatest man in the world [George Washington]” and “the wind upon” Washington’s

“weather cock.”57 Having sufficiently attacked Hamilton’s character, Callender now

proceeded to the heart of his accusations. In full and unaltered copies, he reprinted all of

the correspondence Hamilton had handed over to Monroe, Venable, and Muhlenberg to

exonerate himself from charges of speculation. Also included in these documents were

letters between the three Republicans and Hamilton regarding the unfolding affair and

their own findings from crucial witnesses, including James Reynolds and Jacob

Clingman. In sum, it was a devastating set of revelations: Hamilton found himself yet

again accused of both speculation and adultery, this time in a highly visible, ruinously

public forum. Callender had succeeded in forcing Hamilton to confront his past openly

while scoring a major propaganda coup for the Democratic Republicans. If Jefferson’s

unorthodox religion had been fair electoral game in 1796, Hamilton’s scandalous sex life

and alleged financial misconduct were now fair political game in 1797.

Although Reynolds’s allegations against Hamilton were now six years old, they

fell on Hamilton’s reputation once more like a Sword of Damocles. In particular,

Reynolds’s bold claim—that “he had it in his power to hang the Secretary of the Treasury

[who was] deeply concerned in speculation”—left little doubt in Callender’s mind that

the former secretary’s weakness was in the bank, not the boudoir. The testimony

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contained in the documents only bolstered this assumption. In a document dated

December 13, 1792, Monroe and Muhlenberg recorded that Maria Reynolds had “with

difficulty” admitted to them “that since Colonel Hamilton was secretary of the treasury

[sic], and at his request, she had burned a considerable number of letters from him to her

husband, which, she believed, were from Mr. Hamilton…with an endorsement “from

secretary Hamilton, Esq.’ in Mr. Reynolds’s handwriting.”58

Furthermore, Jacob Clingman claimed “he saw Colonel Hamilton at the house of

Reynolds” and “that in a few days after, he (Clingman) was at Mr. Reynolds’s house,

with Mrs. Reynolds, her husband being then out,” when “some person knocked at the

door; he arose and opened it, and saw it was Col. Hamilton.”59 Hamilton allegedly

handed Maria Reynolds a piece of paper—possibly a bank note or draft—and “said he

was ordered to give Mr. Reynolds that.” Clingman then claimed that shortly after this

chance encounter, Reynolds personally informed him “that Col. Hamilton had made

thirty thousand dollars by speculation; that Colonel Hamilton had supplied him with

money to speculate,” presumably money skimmed from public accounts.60

That Callender had Clingman’s testimony in full was itself proof, in Hamilton’s

mind, of James Monroe’s involvement in bringing the scandal to public attention.

Monroe had questioned Clingman regarding the relationship between Alexander

Hamilton and James Reynolds, and at the end of the testimony Clingman signed an oath

attesting to the truth of the information he had provided: “The above contains the truth, to

the best of my knowledge and recollection, and to which I am ready to make oath.”61

Had the revelations ended here Hamilton would still have faced a politician’s

nightmare in the indiscretions already described. The trickle, however, had become a

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rainstorm, and now the thunder of insidious accusations was echoing from every public

corner of Philadelphia, where Callender’s publication of these hitherto secret documents

was met with Republican elation and Federalist dread. Clingman’s testimony was

particularly damning. He alleged that Reynolds “always told him [Clingman] that he

could always get [money] from Col. Hamilton, to repay [loans Clingman advanced

Reynolds].” Reynolds’s braggadocio knew few bounds. On another occasion, owing

Clingman $200—a considerable sum in 1797—Reynolds “promised to pay him thro’ the

means of Col. Hamilton, [and Clingman] went with him, saw him go into Col.

Hamilton’s;—[and] after he came out, he paid him one hundred dollars…and paid the

balance in a few days; the latter sum…was said to have been received from Col.

Hamilton….”62

When the long arm of the law finally brought its crushing fist down on

Reynolds’s head, however, the financial scofflaw found that Hamilton’s patience had

limits indeed. Reynolds, accused of attempting to defraud Revolutionary War veterans of

their unpaid pensions using confidential government documents, had acquired lists of

pensions and used the information to track down and prey upon veterans. He promised

the veterans large sums of money in exchange for their signing over their pension rights.

After Treasury authorities discovered his scheme, his luck ran out and he found himself

in prison. For Callender, Clingman’s testimony regarding Reynolds’s desperate attempts

to seek Hamilton’s assistance in bailing himself out of jail spoke to the strong grip

Reynolds had on the Treasury Secretary. According to Callender, Hamilton “advised

[Reynolds] to keep out of the way, a few days, and the matter would be settled.”

Reynolds remained imprisoned, however, and Hamilton took to refusing any further

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entreaties for assistance. Hamilton’s most damning action, from Callender’s point of

view, was to order Maria Reynolds “to burn all the letters, that were in his hand-writing,

or that had his name to them…. He pressed her to examine again, as she might not have

destroyed the whole….”63

Callender, piecing together these events, found Hamilton’s claim that he had gone

to such extensive lengths to disassociate himself with the Reynoldses simply over an

affair with Maria utterly implausible. Reynolds’s impertinence toward “Mr. Hamilton,

who, the President excepted, was the most powerful and dangerous enemy that he could

have met on the whole continent,” pointed to something more than mere adultery.64

Hamilton, Callender reasoned, “had only to say, that he was sick of his amour [Maria],

and the influence and hopes of Reynolds at once vanished.” Callender sarcastically

argued that “in the secretary’s bucket of chastity, a drop more or less was not to be

perceived,” thus inferring that Hamilton’s womanizing was an open secret and of little or

no value as an instrument of blackmail.

With these assumptions in mind, Callender concluded that Hamilton, whose

temper was “vindictive and furious,” would have only endured Reynolds’s depredations

for much more serious and palpable fears.65 After reviewing the correspondence,

Callender even went so far as to claim that Hamilton had forged the letters from Maria

acknowledging their affair, saying “[t]hese letters from Mrs. Reynolds are badly spelt and

pointed…. But waving such excrescences, the stile is…elegant. It does not bear the mark

of an illiterate writer…. Our ex-secretary admits that he has been in the habit of

writing…in a feigned character…. Mrs. Reynolds herself may have wrote these epistles

from the dictating of the colonel….”66 What Hamilton was covering up, Callender fumed,

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was not infidelity but his theft of perhaps “perhaps thirty, or thirty-five millions of

dollars” from public funds to cover his risky speculation in various forms.67 The monies

paid out to the Reynoldses stemmed from Hamilton’s having “entrusted such a being as

Reynolds” with these “secrets of speculation.”68 Lacking any substantiating

documentation, Callender’s charges were nonetheless a serious problem for the former

Treasury Secretary.

The accusations enraged and perplexed Hamilton and his Federalist supporters in

equal measure. How had Callender, a man of virtually no standing in Philadelphia’s elite

political circles, secured the damning information his pamphlets contained? How had this

Scottish rogue gained access to Alexander Hamilton’s darkest secrets, supposedly held in

trust for six years? While Hamilton knew James Monroe bore him little affection, the

Virginian had given his word—the word of a Southern gentleman, no less— to keep

Hamilton’s sexual faux pas in confidence. In a culture whose ethos of personal honor was

a visceral and even life-threatening element, such a breach on Monroe’s part was almost

unthinkable.69

6. “A dishonourable infidelity somewhere” – Hamilton, Monroe, and Honor

Nevertheless, the first person Hamilton trained his sights on was indeed James

Monroe. Setting a pattern that would dominate inquiries both contemporary and future

into these revelations, the enraged New Yorker immediately scribbled off an accusatory

letter to Monroe before the last Independence Day celebration had faded. “In a pamphlet

lately published…are sundry papers respecting the affair of Reynolds, in which you once

had an agency…” Hamilton angrily reminded Monroe, and “the peculiar nature of [the

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pamphlet’s attack] renders it impossible that you should not recollect it in all its parts and

that your own declarations to me at [that] time contradicts absolutely the construction

which the Editor of the Pamphlet puts upon the affair.”70 This breach of confidence,

allegedly on Monroe’s part, was “contrary to the course which was understood between

us to be proper and includes a dishonourable infidelity somewhere.”71 With this suspicion

stated, Hamilton slowed for a moment to temper his pen. Directly accusing Monroe, a

Virginian of high repute and standing, of breaching his honor as a gentleman would be to

throw down the gauntlet. Some forbearance was in order: “I am far from attributing it

either of the three Gentlemen [Monroe, Venable, and Muhlenberg]; yet suspicion

naturally falls on some Agent made use of by them.”72

Having fired a warning shot across Monroe’s bow, Hamilton now turned to the

Federalist press for assistance. Oliver Wolcott, Jr., had previously advised Hamilton to

remain silent, no doubt hoping that the attack would fade from interest. Writing to

Federalist newspaperman John Fenno, however, Hamilton made clear he could not

remain silent. “It is my intention shortly to place the subject more precisely before the

public,” the wounded ex-secretary declared, “But the [explanation]…is simply this—[the

allegations] were the contrivance of two of the most profligate men in the world to obtain

their liberation from imprisonment for a serious crime….”73 Fenno reprinted the letter,

which named Monroe, Muhlenberg, and Venable as the men to whom Hamilton had

turned over documents exonerating himself from charges of financial embezzling.74

At this point a furious exchange of letters among several individuals ensued. The

day after sending his letter to Fenno, Hamilton received from Wolcott another in

Callender’s series of pamphlet exposes detailing the affair, at which Wolcott professed

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himself “astonished at the villainy of Munroe—a more base, false, & malignant

suggestion…was never uttered.”75 Angered even further, Hamilton now began laying the

case for accusing Monroe directly of leaking evidence to Callender. “I request to be

informed,” he wrote in stiff, formal terms, “whether the paper [published in The History

of the United States for 1796]…and having the signatures of James Monroe, Abraham

Venable, and F A Muhlenberg is the copy of a genuine original.”76

Venable had already protested his innocence in the matter: “I do not possess a

copy of the papers at present, nor have I at any time had the possession of any of them, I

avoided taking a copy because I feared that the greatest care…might be defeated…and

that some person or other might improperly obtain [them].”77 The thirty-eight year-old

bachelor neither wanted nor needed a running feud with Alexander Hamilton and sought

to exculpate himself from any suspicion. “I appeal to your candour,” he wrote, “and ask

you if any part of my conduct in this whole business has justifyed [sic] such an

[accusation].”78 Fortunately for Venable, Hamilton was uninterested in him, preferring to

focus attention on Muhlenberg and especially James Monroe. At this point, with letters

from Hamilton, Monroe, Muhlenberg, and others flying between New York and

Philadelphia like avenging angels, a new voice chose to make itself heard. Hamilton,

fresh from castigating Monroe and Venable while laying plans for his own defense, was

probably surprised when a letter from none other than James Thomson Callender landed

on his desk sometime after July 10.

“Sir,” Callender wrote, “I have seen your letter of the 6th inst. in Mr. Fenno’s

Gazette. An answer seems requisite.”79 Quoting from the documents Hamilton had

entrusted to Monroe and others, Callender picked apart Hamilton’s attempts to distance

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himself from Reynolds. “This discharge [from prison] he expected and actually received

by your assistance,” Callender declared. With regard to Hamilton’s claim of an affair

with Maria Reynolds, Callender snidely remarked that the documents proving the affair

“consisted of a series of letters pretended to be written relative to your alledged [sic]

connection with Mrs. Reynolds. You told [Monroe, Muhlenberg, and Venable] a

confused and absurd story about her, of which they did not believe a single word, and

which, if they had been true, did not give a proper explanation as to your correspondence

with her husband.” The hearers of Hamilton’s “confused and absurd” story of the affair,

Callender snickered, “must have found it hard to help laughing in each other’s faces,

when you told your penitential tale of your depravity…. A more ridiculous scene cannot

be conceived.” As for Hamilton’s plans to “place the matter more precisely before the

public,” the journalist chuckled dismissively: “They will be highly gratified by seeing

you exhibited in the novel character of a lover” after having “long known you as an

eminent and able statesman.”80

Callender’s bravado and sarcasm aside, most alarming to Hamilton was the

journalist’s frank acknowledgement that he had received a copy of the letter Hamilton

had written to Monroe five days before, all but castigating the Virginian for leaking the

scandal. “Your letter of last week to Mr. Munroe regarding that and other precious

confessions have come to hand,” Callender remarked, “He has since gone to New-York,

where you can see him personally.”81 One of the confessions Callender referred to was

Hamilton’s plea with his accusers that the incriminating papers be concealed from

President George Washington.

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 How Callender received this letter, however, is not documented or clear. The

most obvious explanation is that Monroe simply handed it over to the journalist before

departing for New York. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to suggest any personal

connection between Monroe and Callender during this time. Certainly Callender felt

strongly that Monroe’s recall from France smacked of party politics, but he was not alone

in that assumption. For virtually all of Callender’s short time in the United States,

Monroe was in Paris and could not have had any contact with or even knowledge of

Callender’s work. That a leading Virginian statesman would simply hand over

confidential correspondence to a reputedly scurrilous journalist he barely knew

stretches—but does not break—the bounds of credulity. Short of new evidence surfacing,

however, we are forced to conclude that such an unlikely, if entirely possible, scenario

was the case. This assumption has in turn allowed historians to build on the portrait of

Callender as a hired hack writer who, having no convictions of his own, simply parroted

whatever was handed him. As has been previously discussed, however, Callender had

ample reason for smearing Hamilton’s reputation himself, and it is entirely possible that it

was Callender who manipulated Monroe by using some confidential documents (such as

Hamilton’s letter to Monroe) in his attacks on the ex-secretary.

Hamilton had reached the limits of his endurance. Here he had Callender frankly

admitting he was receiving hitherto confidential papers from Monroe, only further

establishing in Hamilton’s mind the Virginian’s culpability in the whole fiasco.82 Monroe

had sole possession of the incriminating documents duplicated back in 1792. Monroe’s

clerk John Beckley had written out the copies. Monroe’s continued leak of documents to

Callender appeared painfully obvious. Monroe, Monroe, Monroe! The refrain ran through

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Hamilton’s head endlessly, until he decided the time had come to deal directly with his

archenemy. In a hastily-scribbled note, Hamilton demanded “an interview with Mr.

Monroe at any hour tomorrow forenoon which may be convenient to him.”83 He also

ominously informed Monroe that “particular reasons” required him to “bring…a friend to

be present at what may pass. Mr. Monroe, if he pleases, may have another.”84 The stately

Virginian’s reply was prompt and just as terse: “Mr. Monroe readily consents to an

interview with Colo. Hamilton tomorrow…. He will bring whom he pleases.”85

Hamilton by this point was less concerned with the source of the allegations than

he was with Monroe’s alleged complicity in leaking them. Callender was thus relegated

to the sidelines and ignored. Hamilton did not acknowledge Callender’s letter, nor did he

ever mention the journalist by name. The morning of Tuesday, July 11, found Hamilton

and Monroe in a meeting so stormy that David Gelston’s minutes of the encounter

consisted of a jumble of sentences and incomplete thoughts, his hand probably cramping

as he tried to keep track of the conversation’s furious pace. “Colo. H[amilton] appeared

very much agitated upon his entrance into the room,” Gelston noted, and immediately

launched into a diatribe “at considerable length upon a former meeting in Philad[elphia]”

between himself and the three Republicans.86 As a sign of the tension in the room,

Monroe simply cut Hamilton off, curtly dismissing “all this history” as superficial.87 The

two men argued at length over Monroe’s alleged misconduct, but with no reference to the

actual allegations Callender had printed.

Relations between the two men declined even further when, eleven days later,

Hamilton frankly confronted Monroe with the declaration that “you have been and are

actuated by motives towards me malignant and dishonorable.”88 On August 4, still

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simmering, Hamilton threw down his gage and challenged his Virginian nemesis to a

duel.89 His honor impugned, his confidence broken, his reputation in tatters—the hot-

tempered New Yorker was fed up with Monroe’s machinations. If Monroe truly held to

his claim of innocence, he would have to put that faith to the ultimate test. Testy letters

between Philadelphia and New York quickly ensued.

Monroe did still cling to his claim of innocence, but facing Hamilton on the field

of honor to vindicate that claim was not his preferred course of action. Within a week of

Hamilton’s challenge, Monroe dashed off a “certificate” to Hamilton exculpating himself

from any involvement in or support of Callender’s revelations.90 Hamilton, in the

meantime, had also allowed a cooler head to prevail and backed down, asking Monroe

only for “a personal interview.”91 Perhaps Hamilton had realized Monroe did not

shoulder the primary blame for the whole fiasco, or perhaps he simply decided that the

matter was no longer worth the risk of a duel. Monroe, for his part, likely decided as well

that Callender’s accusations were not worth potentially dying for. In any case, by late

August Hamilton had decided to shift his focus away from Monroe and take his plea of

innocence directly to the public through his attacker’s same medium: the pamphlet.

7. “Condescending to give a public explanation” – The Reynolds Pamphlet and

Afterward

James Thomson Callender was still in humid Philadelphia when a new pamphlet

responding directly to the journalist’s claims landed in the capital’s bookstalls on August

25, 1797. Carrying a lengthy title, the work purported to be Observations on Certain

Documents contained in Callender’s History of the United States for 1796 that would

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“fully refute” the allegations of financial illegalities against Hamilton.92 Despite

Hamilton’s attempt to give his defense gravitas with such a formal title, it quickly

became known simply as the “Reynolds Pamphlet.”93 With this work, Hamilton had

taken the war directly to James Callender.

The journalist represented the “spirit of Jacobinism,” whose “[l]ies often detected

and refuted are still revived and repeated.”94 Hamilton regretted “condescending to give a

public explanation,” but “just pride with reluctance stoops to a formal vindication against

so despicable a contrivance.”95 At this point, Callender may have paused to savor his

victory. The ex-Secretary of the Treasury, a man regarded as the real power behind

Washington’s presidency and a major player in the Federalist Party, was “stooping” to

answer accusations from an immigrant refugee journalist. How the mighty had fallen.

The next sentences, however, brought a deluge of rain down on Callender’s

parade. “The charge against me is a connection with one James Reynolds for purposes of

improper [financial] speculation,” Hamilton admitted. “My real crime is an amorous

connection with his wife, for a considerable time with his privity and connivance, if not

originally brought on by a combination between the husband and wife with the design to

extort money from me.”96 Callender must have choked on his whiskey. Here was

Hamilton openly admitting to his amorous affair, something Callender, Reynolds, and

others were sure he was desperate to keep secret. Moreover, he was turning the tables on

his opponents with the claim that James and Maria Reynolds had conspired to use the

affair to extort money, rather than the opposite charge: that Hamilton had used the

(supposed) affair to hide his embezzling.

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 The ex-secretary-turned-penitent continued in almost Promethean tones: “This

confession is not made without blush…. I can never cease to condemn myself for the

pang, which it may inflict in a bosom eminently entitled to all my gratitude, fidelity, and

love.” With his moral guilt firmly established, Hamilton now turned to Callender’s

argument that it was “morally impossible I should have been foolish…enough to employ

so vile an instrument as Reynolds, for such insignificant ends….” The accusation of

speculation, Hamilton responded, “was [part of] the efforts of Clingman and Reynolds to

get released from a disgraceful prosecution…[and] a vindictive spirit against me at least

on the part of Reynolds [with] Clingman as a coadjutor in the plan of Vengeance.”97

Regarding Mrs. Reynolds, “I had frequent meetings with her, most of them at my

own house; Mrs. Hamilton with her children being absent on a visit to her father.” As part

of Hamilton’s theory of collusion between the couple, he claimed James Reynolds used

these “frequent meetings” as leverage when asking for “employment as a clerk in the

treasury department.” In Hamilton’s testimony, James was an unstable man who “would

occasionally relapse into discontent [and] would treat her very ill [while] hinting at the

assassination of me.” Maria, meanwhile, was a chameleon as seductive as her husband

was deranged: “The variety of shapes which this woman could assume was endless.”98 It

is left for recent biographer Richard Brookhiser to give Maria the appellation Hamilton

may have contemplated but never wrote: “A plain statement of the facts is that Mrs.

Reynolds was a whore…[and] probably fond of everyone she slept with.”99 Hamilton did

accuse Callender of having “encouraged, probably bribed” the “most profligate men…to

become informers and accusers.”100 Perhaps in Hamilton’s eyes James Callender and

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Maria Reynolds, the mercenary writer and the blackmailing harlot, were little or no

different from each other.

Hamilton’s self-vindication closed with a return to the original matter at hand:

James Reynolds’s blackmail. “[T]hough in respect to my situation with his wife, I was

somewhat in Reynold’s [sic] power, I was not disposed to make any improper concession

to the apprehension of his resentment [or] the threats intimated in his letters,” he wrote. “I

dreaded extremely a disclosure [of the affair]—and was willing to make large sacrifices

to avoid it.” In the end, however, disclosure was unavoidable and even required. “My

desire to destroy this slander, completely,” Hamilton declared, “[has] led me to a more

copious and particular examination of it, than I am sure is necessary. The bare perusal of

the letters from Reynolds and his wife is sufficient to convince my greatest enemy that

there is nothing worse in the affair than an irregular and indelicate amour [and] [f]or this,

I bow to the just censure which it merits.”101 To bolster his explanations and defense to

the furthest extent possible, Hamilton appended to the pamphlet fifty-eight pages of

letters and other documents related to the controversy, including his full and often testy

correspondence with James Monroe.

Here the historical narrative of the Reynolds Affair usually ends: Hamilton

vindicated, Monroe silenced, and Callender invisible. Behind the scenes, however,

Callender was already laying the groundwork for his future with the Democratic

Republican Party. A letter dated September 28, 1797, marked the beginning of his formal

correspondence with none other than Thomas Jefferson.102 In it, Callender acknowledged

Jefferson’s purchase of his History of 1796 and urged Jefferson to peruse Hamilton’s

Observations, as “no anticipation can equal the infamy of this piece.”103 The letter

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implied that Jefferson had purchased several copies of the History (“your remaining

numbers of the History of 1796”) and that the two men had met at some point in the

recent past.104 Callender was in awe of this great man, whom he would later uphold as the

embodiment of republican virtues and values. Having established a degree of notoriety

for himself in Philadelphia, he was eager to make himself useful to Jefferson. “I have

begun,” he informed Jefferson, “another volume on American History; and it will be

ready for the press in about a month.”105

This new work was the Sketches for the History of America, a 263-page pamphlet

written in the same style as Callender’s previous work. With this pamphlet, Callender

undoubtedly hoped to further ingratiate himself with Jefferson through a rebuttal to

Alexander Hamilton’s Observations. The Sketches appeared in February 1798, and

lambasted Hamilton’s attempts to pass himself off as a “martyr of virtue, [an] exulting

object of persecution, [an] antagonist of falsehood….” There followed twenty-three pages

in a similar vein, rabidly attacking Hamilton, seeking to re-prove his culpability in an

alleged financial scandal. Importantly for those who sought the supposed invisible hand

guiding Callender and putting words in his mouth, the journalist attempted to exonerate

Thomas Jefferson from any suspicion of involvement in the Hamilton revelations. “Mr.

Jefferson had received a copy of these documents,” Callender wrote in reference to the

leaked letters he had reprinted, but “He never shewed [sic] them, nor ever spoke of them,

to any person.” In fact, when presented with a plan to publish the documents, Jefferson

“advised that the papers should be suppressed…but his interpolation came too late.”106

Assuming the truth of Callender’s claim—for which, it should be noted, there is no

corroborating documentary evidence—Jefferson may have feared being associated with

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Callender’s notorious screeds. The Sketches served as yet another example of Callender’s

tendency to produce seemingly endless quantities of political vitriol, something the

aristocratic Jefferson tended to shun.

Although this ranting ramble never transformed into a bestseller, the lengthy

diatribe did underscore one important facet of Callender for scholars: the Scotsman’s

continued reasons for attacking Hamilton independent of Monroe, Jefferson, and the

Democratic Republican Party. The journalist recounted a pair of anecdotes in an effort to

undermine further the public’s faith in the ex-secretary’s character, both of which focused

on issues that were near and dear to Callender’s heart.

He accused Hamilton of illegally intimidating and imprisoning a minor military

officer as part of a political intrigue, thereby in Callender’s eyes demonstrating a

willingness to use the levers of government itself to expand and sustain his own power.107

According to Callender, Hamilton had recalled a certain “Major Powers” to Philadelphia

and attempted to force testimony out of him that would incriminate one of Hamilton’s

greatest enemies: Pennsylvania Senator Albert Gallatin.108 Gallatin was a staunch

opponent of Hamilton who later succeeded him as Treasury Secretary under Thomas

Jefferson. Hamilton, Callender claimed, had “examined [Major Powers] concerning the

conduct of Albert Gallatin…. The answers were unsatisfactory, and an officer was

ordered to conduct him into another apartment, where he might, for an hour, refresh his

memory.”109 In the end, Major Powers never did provide Hamilton useful information

regarding Gallatin or anyone else, despite (according to Callender) being imprisoned and

even summoned before a military tribunal. Because these allegations only appear in

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Callender’s Sketches, however, it is impossible to corroborate the truth of the actual

account.

Of little import in itself, this accusation significantly demonstrated Callender’s

enduring antipathy for Hamilton based on his own beliefs and experiences. Callender had

no doubt witnessed the vagaries of the British justice system, where privilege too often

ran roughshod over the search for truth. Hamilton, whose pro-British tilt the journalist

already suspected and despised, was to Callender acting little better than an English lord

attempting to manipulate an ordinary, decent soldier to suit his own insidious goals.

While the rest of America (and succeeding historians) looked at this charge—just one

more in the endless train of abuses Callender had showered on Hamilton—and scoffed,

Callender saw Hamilton’s actions as indefensible and in the worst traditions of the

country he (Callender) had fled from nearly ten years before. The journalist likely

maintained his offensive against Hamilton partly as a means of currying favor with

Jefferson, but he also did so out of conviction. He genuinely believed Hamilton

represented the seed of the diseased ideological and cultural tree that had taken such firm

root in the Old World and that the French Revolution had tried with enormous energy to

cut down.

The financial and political reality in early 1798, however, was simple: the

Hamilton scandal had exhausted itself. As the new year opened and the United States

sailed toward another round of congressional elections, a new foe was appearing on the

horizon bearing formerly friendly colors. President John Adams’s election had

heightened tensions between the United States and the new Republic of France, where the

Directory—the new legislature governing the troubled nation—regarded the election of

85
the allegedly pro-British Adams as a slap in the face. The United States had already

angered revolutionary France with its signing of the Jay Treaty in 1795 and its default on

wartime debts owed to France on the grounds that the debts were owed to the crown, and

thus invalidated with the monarchy’s dissolution in 1789.110 The French responded to

these insults with a refusal to receive American representatives in Paris and an escalation

in the undeclared war on the high seas against U.S. shipping.

A formal war between the two former allies was becoming increasingly likely

with each day’s reports of new French depredations. The Democratic Republicans saw in

every Federalist foreign policy action a grand conspiracy to drive the United States

further away from the comfortable arms of Marianne and into the hungry jaws of John

Bull.111 Against this darkening sky the sins of one politician, however important, seemed

increasingly trivial. Callender needed a new cause to espouse, a new scandal to expose,

and above all, a new foe to square off against. Washington and Hamilton were spent, and

the next logical target was none other than President John Adams. As he prepared for a

fresh propaganda campaign against Adams, however, Callender could little have

suspected that this Massachusetts scion would lead him to the heights—and depths—of

his career in America.

86
 NOTES

Abbreviations used in the notes:

AH: Harold C. Syrett, et al, eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1974–).

TJ: Barbara S. Oberg, et al, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002 –).
1
Observations on Certain Documents Contained in No. V & VI of “The History of the
United States for the Year 1796,” In Which the Charge of Speculation Against Alexander
Hamilton, Late Secretary of the Treasury, is Fully Refuted. Written by Himself
(Philadelphia: John Bioren for John Fenno, 1797); in AH XXI: 238-285. Also known and
hereafter cited as the “Reynolds Pamphlet.”
2
Two early works erase Callender from the story entirely. Allan McLane Hamilton’s The
Intimate Life of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1911),
dismisses the entire affair in one sentence (48). Louis Hacker’s Alexander Hamilton in
the American Tradition (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1957) gives scant
more information, but omits Callender’s name, painting him instead as “a Republican
hack…[printing information] that could have been obtained only from Monroe” (223).
More recent scholarship has taken a more moderate approach. Noemie Emery’s
Alexander Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982) names
Callender as Hamilton’s attacker, but argues that he was “in the pay of Thomas
Jefferson,” something that is substantially incorrect at this point in Callender’s career
(160). In their work, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick offer a
strong overview of the Reynolds Affair, but ignore Callender entirely after giving him
brief credit for having “the whole story…spread before the world” (294). Richard
Brookhiser, in his brief biography, Alexander Hamilton, American (New York: The Free
Press, 1999), lays the credit for the attack squarely at Callender’s feet, identifying
Jefferson—not Monroe—as Callender’s “insider” (132). Jon Meacham’s recent work,
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York: Random House, 2012), dismisses the
affair in one paragraph without mentioning Callender’s name (267). Eric Burns’s
Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American
Journalism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006) offers perhaps the most slanted caricature of
all: “Callender…seems to have been a pen for hire…. [He] was more self-interested than
politically devout, more an opportunist than an ideologue…. His loyalties were for sale”
(305). Even Callender’s own biographer Michael Durey, in his With the Hammer of
Truth: James Thomson Callender and America’s Early National Heroes (Charlottesville:
87
University Press of Virginia, 1990), is more interested in who leaked confidential
information to Callender than he is in the journalist’s own reasons for publishing and
perhaps even seeking out that information (97-102).
3
Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004) is perhaps
the most even-handed treatment of the scandal in recent scholarship. Chernow traces
Callender’s desire to smear Hamilton back to Hamilton’s attacks on Jefferson. Chernow
in the end, however, still believes Callender was acting strictly as a hired gun of either
Jefferson or Monroe, discounting any independent motivation on the journalist’s part
(531-33).
4
The Federalists’ “Anglophilia” was simply a geopolitical stance that held Britain, not
France, as the natural ally of the new United States. Although the Revolutionary War had
shattered formal ties between Britain and her American colonies, the aristocratic,
primarily New England Federalist Party still saw the Empire and its formidable Royal
Navy as the best international friend and trading partner for the nascent republic. The
Democratic Republicans, on the other hand, were often radically egalitarian (ironic for a
party largely based in the slaveholding Old South) and committed to the overthrow of the
ancien régime in France and Britain. For the Republicans, France’s vision of “pure”
democracy shorn of aristocratic and privileged pretentions represented the fulfillment of
the American promise. The worsening relations between Britain and France throughout
the 1790s and 1800s only exacerbated these domestic tensions in Philadelphia, making
the foreign policy stances of the two parties important dividing points between their
supporters.
5
Philadelphia Aurora, December 21, 1796. Some historians have cited Callender’s
hyperbolic attack on Washington as proof of his alleged unreliability as a source. John C.
Miller, in his book Crisis in Freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts (Boston: Little,
Brown, and Co., 1951), accuses Callender of “fantasies [that] bore little resemblance to
reality: George Washington was not a cheat, a liar, and a would-be dictator who would
have gladly destroyed American liberty in his quest of power…. [Callender] was totally
innocent of any sense of responsibility; if he had a code of professional ethics, he
certainly did not live by it” (213). David Barton, in his widely-criticized work, The
Jefferson Lies (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012), argues Callender “resumed the
defamatory writing style that had landed him in trouble in Great Britain, only this time it
was against prominent Federalist Americans such as…George Washington. Callender
proved to be a troublesome hothead with no sense of discretion” (16-17). Eric Burns
(Infamous Scribblers, New York: PublicAffairs, 2006) dismisses Callender as “scathing,
insolent and two-faced” for “moving to the United States and turning his attention to
prominent federalists…. That mercenary side of his would regard such vilification as a
good career move” (307). Thomas Fleming’s Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers
(New York: HarperCollins, 2009) similarly condemns Callender as an “abuser of John
Adams and every other Federalist politician of note, including George Washington”
(239).
6
Fleming, Intimate Lives, 49, offers this quotation verbatim, citing a work written by
Rupert Hughes entitled George Washington, the Human Being and the Hero, vol. 1 (New
York, 1926). This quotation is conspicuously absent from Durey’s 1990 biography of

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Callender and Chernow’s enormous 2010 biography, Washington, A Life (New York:
The Penguin Press, 2010).
7
George Washington to Benjamin Walker, Philadelphia, January 12, 1797. From George
Washington, with Jared Sparks, ed., The Writings of George Washington, Being His
Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Public and Private, Selected
and Published from the Original Manuscripts, with A Life of the Author, Notes, and
Illustrations, vol. 11 (Boston: Russell, Shattuck, and Williams, 1836), 183. Curiously,
this letter does not appear in the Rotunda Digital Edition of the Papers of George
Washington.
8
James Thomson Callender, The American Annual Register, or, Historical Memoirs of
the United States, For the Year 1796 (Philadelphia: Bioren and Madan, 1797), 205-06.
9
Callender, Historical Memoirs, 206, 210-11.
10
Ibid., 205. In this case, “Phocion” was an Athenian military and political leader whom
Plutarch compared to Cato the Younger in his famous Lives of the Noble Greeks and
Romans. “Phocion’s” distaste for philosophers made for a peculiar choice of pseudonym,
given that the ancient Phocion was a student of Plato.
11
Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 196-97, includes a brief account of these letters,
arguing as well that Hamilton found much in common with the historical Phocion, “an
Athenian soldier of murky parentage who came from another country and became an aide
to a great general.”
12
Religious progressives and radicals in the United States were far more likely to find
common ground with more moderate (by the French Revolution’s standards, at least)
French thinkers, including Maximilen de Robespierre, whose Deist inclinations led him
to establish the “Cult of the Supreme Being.” David P. Jordan, in The Revolutionary
Career of Maximilien Robespierre (New York: The Free Press, 1985), argues that
Robespierre “wanted to stop the dechristianizers” and found the lurid festivals of the so-
called Cult of Reason “deeply offensive…with its strongly provocative tone, pagan
flavor, and calculated mockery of Christianity” (191, 193). Robespierre, Jordan contends,
loathed atheists and dechristianizers equally (193). See also H.W. Crocker III, Triumph:
The Power and Glory of the Catholic Church (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001),
347-48.
13
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and of Fabulous
Theology (1794); in Eric Foner, ed., Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (New York:
Literary Classics of the United States, 1955), 666. The negative response this work
received in America shocked Paine, who had “put the following work” under the
protection of “my fellow citizens of the United States of America” (665).
14
Callender, Historical Memoirs, 207.
15
Ibid., 210.
16
Ibid., 211.
17
Ibid., 211. The debate over Jefferson’s religion remains vibrant to the present time. In
2005, Bruce Braden published a collection of Jefferson’s correspondence with John
Adams on religion and philosophy entitled “Ye Will Say I Am No Christian: The Thomas
Jefferson/John Adams Correspondence on Religion, Morals, and Values (New York:
Prometheus Books, 2005). Despite glaring problems (the lack of any explanation of the
selection’s methodology or an interpretational apparatus of some kind), the anthology

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demonstrated the perennial need many readers and scholars feel to reexamine Jefferson’s
complicated relationship with religion. Editions of Jefferson’s “edited” Bible also appear
frequently, including two new editions in November 2011 alone. What can be stated with
certainty from these and other source materials is limited. Jefferson believed religion was
a private matter and that he endeavored to bring religion and emerging scientific inquiry
into harmony with one another, often by breaking with Christian orthodoxy. He was no
atheist, but he was not an orthodox Christian, either. His enormous second library
contained works critical of religion that emerged from the French Revolution, and it has
become somewhat bizarrely famous for containing a copy of the Koran. Above all,
Jefferson was a lover of and believer in universal knowledge at a time when many in the
upper echelons of American society refused to tolerate “heretical” ideas or a commitment
to free thinking. He was the American equivalent of Akhenaten, the visionary ruler of
Egypt who rebelled against a religious climate oppressive to innovation and scholarship.
Jefferson’s ethos, not just on religion but on the whole of human experience, was perhaps
best embodied in the great institution he almost literally built from the ground up: the
Library of Congress. Like Jefferson, the Library refused to be constrained by the taboos
and prejudices of one group or ideology and instead made universal inclusiveness into a
guiding mission. Jefferson’s attitude toward religion might well be said to be equally as
universally inclusive in its ambiguity.
18
Callender, Historical Memoirs, 211.
19
Ibid., 219.
20
Ibid., 219-220.
21
Merrill D. Peterson, in his introduction to The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York:
Viking Penguin, 1975), describes the Notes as “a guide to Jefferson’s mind. It reveals the
man of science eager to possess nature for the mind, but also the man of almost romantic
sensibility enraptured by the grandeur of the American environment even in his quest for
useful knowledge” (xxiii).
22
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787); in Peterson, Portable
Jefferson, 186-87.
23
Phocion II, The Gazette of the United States, October 15, 1796.
24
Ibid.
25
Hamilton’s bold insinuation of interracial sex at Monticello was the first high-profile
mention of what would eventually evolve into the full-fledged accusation (from
Callender) that Thomas Jefferson routinely had sex and had fathered children with his
slave Sally Hemings. It is possible (albeit unverifiable) that Callender’s later attack on
Jefferson had its roots in Hamilton’s original accusation.
26
Philadelphia Aurora, March 6, 1797. Cited in Edward Channing, A History of the
United States: Federalists and Republicans, 1789-1815, vol. 4 (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1920), 174. The Aurora article opened with a quotation from the
Nunc dimittis—the Canticle of Simeon (Luke 2:29-32): “‘Lord, now lettest Thou Thy
servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation’ was the pious ejaculation
of a man who beheld a flood of happiness rushing upon mankind. If ever there was a time
that would license the reiteration of the exclamation, that time has now arrived; for the
man who is the source of all the misfortunes of our country, is this day reduced to a level

90
with his fellow citizens, and is no longer possessed of power to multiply evils upon the
United States.”
27
John Adams to Abigail Adams, Philadelphia, January 9, 1797, in Margaret A. Hogan
and C. James Taylor, eds., My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams,
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 424-425. See also John
Ferling, John Adams: A Life (Nashville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 330-
31; 360-61.
28
William Safire, Scandalmonger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 31, gives the
date of Reynolds’s appearance at Hamilton’s home as June 17, 1791, but this date
appears conjectural. Safire’s account of this event, while somewhat embellished, is
nonetheless colorful and worth reading in conjunction with the source material. He
attempts to fill in the story’s gaps and give a readable account of what is usually a
convoluted political drama.
29
See also Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early
American Republic, 1788-1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 293-95;
Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 528-35; Harlow Giles Unger, The Last Founding Father:
James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness (New York: MJF Books, 2009), 130-32;
Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 236-37; Fawn McKay Brodie, Thomas Jefferson:
An Intimate History (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1974), 316-19.
30
Alexander Hamilton, Draft of ‘Observations on Certain Documents….’, AH XXI: 227.
31
Ibid. In the draft, the words “pretty woman” are struck out in favor of “Beauty.”
32
Hamilton, “Reynolds Pamphlet”, Appendix, xxix-xxxi.
33
Ibid., xxix.
34
AH XXI: 131 and 131fn.
35
Hamilton, “Reynolds Pamphlet,” Appendix, xi. AH XXI: 276, in a table of dates, gives
December 15, 1791, as the date of this letter. All other dates related to this
correspondence are taken from that table.
36
Ibid., xvi. This letter is impossible to date accurately, but falls between January 23 and
March 18, 1792. It should also be noted that Maria Reynolds’s written command of the
English language left much to be desired. Most of her letters are completely without any
but the most basic punctuation and resemble gigantic sequences of run-on sentences.
37
Ibid., xviii; dated March 24, 1792.
38
Ibid., xix; dated March 24, 1792, “Sunday Night on OClock.”
39
Ibid., xix-xx.
40
Hamilton, “Reynolds Pamphlet” draft, in AH XXI: 229.
41
Hamilton, “Reynolds Pamphlet” draft, in AH XXI: 228.
42
Hamilton, “Reynolds Pamphlet,” Appendix, xxiv; dated June 2, 1792, “Saturday
Morning”
43
Ibid., xxiv.
44
Ibid., xxiv.
45
Ibid., xxiv.
46
Ibid., xxx.
47
See also James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and
American Civil Liberties (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956). Hamilton’s vision for

91
the American government—one in which a wealthy, virtuous aristocracy ruled and
protected the nation (and themselves) from the masses—was directly antithetical to the
Republicans’ ideal of a populism based on the radical philosophy of the French
Revolution. Historians have themselves often been unable to stand apart from the
ideological conflict between these two parties. James Morton Smith, for example, derides
the Federalists’ philosophy as solely concerned with “political stability and the security
of society, [wedding] power and property” while simultaneously praising the
Republicans’ “faith in popular government, dedicated to the proposition that all men are
created equal” (10-11). Smith further gushes: “Fearing tyranny, [Democratic
Republicans] stressed liberty and the pursuit of happiness rather than authority and
security…” (11). This comparison of unlike terms (as the two parties’ philosophies as
presented here are not antithetical) reflects the continued passions the first party system’s
divisions sparked. We can only imagine how much more palpable the mutual fears of the
parties for each other were in the late eighteenth century, when the French Revolution
was still ablaze and Britain ruled as a seemingly-unstoppable maritime superpower.
48
AH XXI: 133.
49
Beckley had lost his privileged post as Clerk of the House at the behest of Federalist
representatives. He had helped campaign for Thomas Jefferson in Pennsylvania during
the 1796 election. His dismissal left him embittered and seeking revenge against the
Federalist Party, and thanks to his role as Monroe’s copier, he possessed, at the least, the
inside knowledge of Hamilton’s situation vis-à-vis Reynolds and charges of speculation.
Even if Beckley did not actually write the charges against Hamilton, he almost certainly
played an instrumental role in helping Callender base his own allegations in documentary
evidence. In any case, no documentation has surfaced yet that can definitively lay to rest
the question of Callender’s source.
50
James Thomson Callender, The History of the United States for 1796; Including a
Variety of Interesting Particulars Relative to the Federal Government Previous to That
Period (Philadelphia: Snowdon & McCorkle, 1797), viii.
51
The pamphlets have since been lost in their original, separate editions, but in any case
they are of little importance since Callender collated and expanded them in his History of
the United States for 1796. See also AH, XXI:121fn.
52
Oliver Wolcott, Jr., to Alexander Hamilton, Philadelphia, July 3, 1797. AH XXI: 144-
45.
53
Ibid., 145. Wolcott makes no mention of John Beckley—preferring to go above
Beckley to the man who had been Beckley’s boss, James Monroe. This interpretation—
whereby the “unimportant people” are treated as puppets of a “great man”—has arguably
altered the entire attitude of succeeding scholars toward the roles of those seemingly-
insignificant individuals, including Callender and Beckley.
54
Callender, History 1796, 189.
55
Ibid., 204-205. Many historians, including Callender’s principal biographer Michael
Durey, have alleged that Callender’s press assault on Hamilton stemmed entirely from
Monroe’s anger at his own recall from Paris. Durey even goes so far as to insinuate that
Callender was merely Monroe’s pawn and mouthpiece to whom the ex-ambassador fed
relevant documents. Other historians have claimed that Callender was the pawn of John
Beckley, incensed at his failure to retain the House clerkship thanks to Federalist

92
maneuvering. Jefferson is even a possibility as Callender’s prime mover: the then-Vice
President may have been seeking the final shot in the running feud with Hamilton dating
back to their time in Washington’s cabinet together. All of these interpretations, however,
overlook Callender’s formidable reasons for seeking to pull Hamilton down. Hamilton
was an Anglophilic, aristocratic Federalist who, despite similarities in upbringing with
Callender, embodied many of the traits Callender had come to hate.
56
See Harlow Giles Unger, The Last Founding Father, Chapter 7: “La Belle
Américaine”, for a fuller explanation of this set of events.
57
Callender, History 1796., 207-208.
58
Ibid., 211.
59
Ibid., 212.
60
Ibid., 212-13.
61
James Monroe, “Testimony of Jacob Clingman,” Philadelphia, December 13, 1792.
This document (as a series of digital images) is listed in Lehigh University’s archive as a
letter, but it does not bear any addressee. I have accordingly treated it as a record of
testimony. The archive’s original description appears here:
http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/remain/3240/index.html
62
Callender, History 1796, 213.
63
Ibid., 214-15.
64
Ibid., 221-22.
65
Ibid., 222-23.
66
James Thomson Callender, Sketches of the History of America (Philadelphia: Snowden
& McCorkle, 1798), 99-100.
67
Callender, History 1796, 224-25.
68
Callender, Sketches, 94.
69
The ethos of the time is best expressed thus: “Mine honor is my life, both grow in one /
Take honor from me, and my life is done,” William Shakespeare, King Richard II,
I.1.182-83. See also Kenneth Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996); Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s three books: Southern Honor: Ethics
and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Honor and
Violence in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and The Shaping
of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1890s (Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press, 2000).
70
Alexander Hamilton to James Monroe, New York, July 5th, 1797, AH XXI: 146-47.
71
Ibid., 146.
72
Ibid., 147.
73
Alexander Hamilton to John Fenno, New York, July 6, 1797, AH XXI: 149-50.
74
New York Gazette of the United States, July 8, 1797.
75
Oliver Wolcott, Jr., to Alexander Hamilton, Philadelphia, July 7, 1797, AH XXI: 151.
76
Alexander Hamilton to James Monroe, New York, July 8, 1797, AH XXI: 152.
77
Abraham B. Venable to Alexander Hamilton, Philadelphia, July 9, 1797, AH XXI: 153.
Venable was replying to a hitherto lost letter from Hamilton, presumably written in the
same tenor as Hamilton’s missive to James Monroe.
78
Ibid., 153.

93
79
James Thomson Callender to Alexander Hamilton, Philadelphia, July 10, 1797, AH
XXI: 154.
80
Ibid., 155-56.
81
Ibid., 156. Callender was referring to Hamilton’s plea with his accusers that the
incriminating papers be concealed from President George Washington. How Callender
received this letter, however, is not documented or clear. The most obvious explanation is
that Monroe simply handed it over to the journalist before departing for New York.
Unfortunately, there is no evidence to suggest any personal connection between Monroe
and Callender during this time. Certainly Callender felt strongly that Monroe’s recall
from France smacked of party politics, but he was not alone in that assumption. For
virtually all of Callender’s short time in the United States, Monroe was in Paris and could
not have had any contact with or even knowledge of Callender’s work. That a leading
Virginian statesman would simply hand over confidential correspondence to a reputedly
scurrilous journalist he barely knew stretches—but does not break—the bounds of
credulity. Short of new evidence surfacing, however, we are forced to conclude that such
an unlikely, if entirely possible, scenario was the case. This assumption has in turn
allowed historians to build on the portrait of Callender as a hired hack writer who, having
no convictions of his own, simply parroted whatever was handed him. As has been
previously discussed, however, Callender had ample reason for smearing Hamilton’s
reputation himself, and it is entirely possible that it was Callender who manipulated
Monroe by using some confidential documents (such as Hamilton’s letter to Monroe) in
his attacks on the ex-secretary.
82
Muhlenberg had already protested his innocence: “I do not hesitate to declare that I
regretted the Trouble and Uneasiness this Business had occasioned, & that I was perfectly
satisfied with the Explanation you gave at the same time….” Frederick A.C. Muhlenberg
to Alexander Hamilton, Philadelphia, July 10, 1797, AH XXI: 158.
83
Alexander Hamilton to James Monroe, New York, July 10, 1797, AH XXI: 157.
84
Ibid., 157.
85
James Monroe to Alexander Hamilton, New York, July 10, 1797. AH XXI: 158.
86
David Gelston’s Account of an Interview between Alexander Hamilton and James
Monroe, New York, July 11, 1797, AH XXI: 159-161.
87
Ibid., 160.
88
Alexander Hamilton to James Monroe, Philadelphia, July 22, 1797, AH XXI: 181.
89
Alexander Hamilton to James Monroe, New York, August 4, 1797, AH XXI: 200.
90
Certificate by James Monroe, Philadelphia, August 16, 1797.
91
Alexander Hamilton to James Monroe, New York, August 9, 1797, AH XXI: 208.
92
See fn. 1 for the full title. Cited as the “Reynolds Pamphlet.”
93
The draft and final copies of the work in the Papers of Alexander Hamilton are both
entitled “The Reynolds Pamphlet.”
94
“Reynolds Pamphlet,” 3.
95
Ibid., 9.
96
Ibid., 9. Emphasis added.
97
Ibid., 9-10, 14.
98
Ibid., 18-19, 25, 40.

94
99
Richard Brookhiser, Alexander Hamilton, American (New York: The Free Press,
1999), 99.
100
“Reynolds Pamphlet,” 4.
101
Ibid., 32-33, 36.
102
The letter marks the earliest surviving missive to pass between the two men. This
statement should not be taken, however, to exclude the possibility of future, earlier
correspondence surfacing as archival research continues.
103
James Thomson Callender to Thomas Jefferson, September 28, 1797, TJ 29: 536.
104
Ibid., 536 and 537fn. The editors of the Jefferson Papers indicate that Jefferson and
Callender “probably met for the first time in June 1797 at Callender’s publishers,
Snowden and McCorkle, when Jefferson made his first recorded payment to Callender
for the forthcoming History of the United States for 1796, the publication which made
Callender a celebrity for the Republican cause” (537fn). Alas, there is no documentary
evidence currently available to help substantiate or confirm this assumption. The tenor of
the letter, however, conveys a degree of familiarity that must have come from a personal
meeting, as Jefferson’s voluminous and well-documented correspondence does not record
any letter from Callender prior to this one in September 1797. In a letter dated October 8,
1797, however, Jefferson mentions that most of the copies of Callender’s work he had
published were for “some of my neighbors…which they have desired me to do for them.”
(Thomas Jefferson to John Barnes, Monticello, October 8, 1797, TJ 29: 544).
105
Ibid., 536.
106
Callender, Sketches, 91, 102-103.
107
Ibid., 108-109.
108
Ibid., 109.
109
Ibid., 109.
110
The Jay Treaty had, among other things, given Britain most favored nation access to
American trade, ensuring that London, not Paris, remained the dominant transatlantic
commercial center.
111
Marianne was and remains the national personification of France and has her origins
in the personifications of Liberty and Reason during the French Revolution.

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 CHAPTER III
HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS:
FROM THE SEDITION ACT TO THE RICHMOND JAIL

1. Between the Elephant and the Whale – France, Britain, and the Adams
Administration

On Thursday, June 21, 1798, the two houses of the United States Congress

received a message from President John Adams apprising them of the increasingly

unstable state of affairs between Philadelphia and Paris. The brief message closed with a

declaration: “I will never send another minister to France without assurances that he will

be received, respected, and honored as the representative of a free, powerful, and

independent nation.”1 With these words, Adams placed the United States, less than a

month from its twenty-second birthday, on a collision course with the French Republic

that sent shockwaves of paranoia and fear radiating up and down the eastern seaboard of

North America. Once the closest of wartime allies, the United States and France were

rapidly moving apart, thanks in large part to domestic politics in France itself.

Nearly a decade before, in 1789, the French peasantry had stormed the Bastille

prison, overthrowing the ruling Bourbon monarchy and inaugurating a bloodthirsty Reign

of Terror. As Americans watched across the Atlantic, France burned and bled for the next

decade in the maelstrom of the French Revolution. In the United States, reaction to the

revolution helped define the first party system in American politics. The pro-British

Federalists feared the embers of populist anarchy and chaos thrown up in the midst of the

French Revolution would cross the ocean and ignite a firestorm of similar bloodshed and

upheaval in the United States. Federalist paranoia quickly came to believe the opposition

agrarian Democratic-Republicans represented a French Trojan horse ready and waiting to

96
unleash a revolutionary Terror on the fledgling American Republic.2 The Democratic-

Republicans, for their part, were convinced that the Federalists sought to roll back the

enormous gains made during the Revolution and restore the trappings of monarchism and

dependence on Great Britain, corrupting the new nation before its first bloom. This

divide—or, rather, chasm—would only continue to grow at a rapid pace during the years

to follow.

In one of the most unusual electoral results in early American politics, the leaders

of these two bitterly opposed factions were elected president and vice president. Thomas

Jefferson was unexpectedly propelled into the vice presidency on a surge of votes from

his southern confreres, but John Adams, the first Vice President of the United States, won

election as the second American Chief Executive.3 Once the closest of friends, Adams

and Jefferson would find that friendship sorely tested and damaged in the years to come.

The new president had spent much of his professional life grappling with France.

At the outset of his presidency, Adams inherited the strong relationship the United States

had enjoyed with France, whose assistance in the War of Independence had drawn the

two countries closer together. Adams had also served briefly as an American minister in

Paris, where he had been singularly unimpressed by his French hosts and their culture. By

his inauguration in 1797, broader relations between the former wartime partners had also

begun to chill—a split that was embodied in the highest ranks of Adams’s administration

itself, where the pro-British president often found himself at odds with pro-French Vice

President Thomas Jefferson. A world war was brewing, and it would quickly touch off a

political civil war within Adams’s own government.

Geopolitically, the two great European superpowers of the day, Great Britain and

97
France, were locked in a titanic world war for supremacy of the oceans, and therefore of

Europe and the world. French involvement in the American War of Independence itself

was an outgrowth of this enormous conflict. The French at the time maintained the most

powerful army in the Western world, and with it their general Napoleon Bonaparte

prepared to subjugate much of Europe. Only Britain, with the English Channel and the

omnipresent “wooden walls” of His Majesty’s Royal Navy for defense, remained in his

way.

In between these two giants stood the United States, a coveted trading partner

possessing immense resources. Unsurprisingly, loyalties in the United States stood

sharply divided between those who favored relations, trade, and alliance with Great

Britain, and others who favored France. This division on the question of foreign policy

deepened the first organized American party system during the waning years of George

Washington’s presidency. Washington, as was well known then and now, had a

pronounced antipathy toward American involvement in international affairs. As pro-

British and pro-French elements mobilized, they created the first two true political parties

in the new Republic: the pro-British Federalists and the pro-French Democratic-

Republicans.4

The Jay Treaty of 1795 had only deepened these divisions at home, while creating

new ones abroad. Although the United States had publicly declared itself neutral in the

expanding conflict between Great Britain and France, the Jay Treaty between the U.S.

and Britain contained critical economic and commercial clauses opening markets in the

two countries to each other and binding the U.S. to British restrictions on maritime

commerce aimed at France. The treaty incensed the French government, which viewed its

98
terms as a breach of American promises of neutrality and, worse, an affront to a valued

ally.

The Jay Treaty built on the foundations of the first party system laid during the

extended debate on the Constitution’s ratification: Federalists and Democratic-

Republicans further defined themselves in part according to their support of or opposition

to the treaty. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams stood at the

vanguard of the Federalists, while Thomas Jefferson and James Madison led the

Democratic-Republicans. John Adams’s election came a few months after the Jay Treaty

entered into force on February 29, 1796.

From the outset, John Adams’s presidency set the American and French republics,

both still in their infancy, on a collision course.5 Abroad, the French regarded Adams’s

election as a direct slap in the face, a repudiation of the trans-Atlantic relationship

between the two republics. Domestically, Americans found themselves unable to resist

what Washington referred to as the “despotism” inherent in political parties. The partisan

press would play an active role in the events to come, and leading the way was none other

than James Thomson Callender, whose fortunes by mid-1798 were in dire need of

resurrection.

2. “The present dreadful situation” – Callender, Jefferson, and the Democratic-

Republican Press Machine

Thanks to his infamous press campaign against Alexander Hamilton, Callender

had enjoyed enormous notoriety and attention as a leader of the Republican newspaper

corps. Such triumphalism, however, could not long endure. The attacks on Hamilton

99
made the journalist a key target for Federalist ire. He soon found himself under virtual

siege, claiming that his home “was twice entered, and my family alarmed, by the

intrusion of an assassin.”6 This would not be the last time Callender’s wife and three sons

found themselves under duress thanks to his almost single-minded dedication to politics,

partisan causes, and political means.

Compounding the journalist’s problems was the greater collapse of the

Democratic-Republican press in Philadelphia throughout 1796 and into 1797. Callender’s

high profile assault on Alexander Hamilton had imperiled the entire opposition

newspaper corps in the capital. The Federalist press pushed back not only at Callender,

but at the Republican newspapers in general. As 1797 drew to a close, a final calamity

fell upon Federalist and Republican alike: the dreaded yellow fever again visited

Philadelphia, virtually shutting down the city and leaving Callender’s already precarious

finances on the verge of bankruptcy. In desperation, the journalist turned to Thomas

Jefferson for aid. In September 1797, near the height of the epidemic, Callender wrote to

inform the Vice President that “I have begun another volume on American History; and it

will be ready for the press in about a month.”7 Owing to the “present dreadful situation of

the town”—to say nothing of his own finances—the journalist asked Jefferson for an

advance of “5 or 10 dollars,” in the hope that he would “in a few months to be (if I escape

the fever) much less dependent that I have been upon my pen.”8

Unfortunately, the new year would only continue to worsen for Callender and his

Republican cohorts, at least for the first few months. John Adams and much of the

American public were girding up for a potential war with France. Adams’s own election

had provided the catalyst for France to abandon its secret campaign of fomenting

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domestic political divisions in the United States in favor of waging a commercial war on

U.S. shipping. In early 1797, the Directory implemented two new policies: the first

threatened all American ships carrying British cargo with confiscation; the second

branded any American sailor found aboard a British ship a pirate, regardless of that

sailor’s willingness (or not) to be on the ship.

Adams responded by invoking the Executive’s right to call a special session of

Congress—the first president to do so—for the authorization of large-scale military

preparations.9 He also opted to send a delegation of American plenipotentiaries to Paris in

an effort to mediate a solution between the U.S. and its former ally. Elbridge Gerry,

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and John Marshall duly traveled to Paris, where the wily

French foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand arranged to have three unnamed

French gentlemen meet the delegation. The French “negotiators” quickly informed the

Americans in Paris that a massive “loan” to the French government (and to French

foreign minister Charles de Talleyrand personally) was necessary before formal

negotiations between the two countries could commence. Identified only as Messrs. “X,”

“Y,” and “Z,” the French representatives found themselves outmaneuvered when the

three Americans flatly refused to pay the bribe.10

As the correspondence between the Americans in Paris and President Adams

flowed secretly, Thomas Jefferson surveyed the bleak landscape of collapsing

subscription revenues and an increasingly aggressive and bellicose Federalist party from

atop his little mountain near Charlottesville. Although he held rank in Adams’s

administration as the Vice President, Jefferson fiercely opposed the president’s policies

and alarmingly aggressive attitude toward France. The Vice President feared that a lack

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of funding and the scourge of fever would result in the destruction of the entire body of

Democratic-Republican newspapers and writers. In a letter to James Madison, he

claimed, “If these papers fail, republicanism will be entirely brow-beaten.”11 Jefferson

proposed a system of $16 subscriptions to sustain a number of Republican penmen,

including Callender.12 Jefferson had saved one of his most ardent disciples, just in time to

follow him into disaster.

As Philadelphia and the Democratic-Republican press recovered throughout early

and mid-1798, President Adams delivered a message to Congress on March 19: the

negotiations in France had failed. Keeping silent on the issue of the dispatches, the

president declared that the time had come to begin arming American merchant vessels on

the high seas. For the Republicans, such a declaration was a call to arms in defense of

France. Callender in particular set his sights on the Anglophilic President John Adams.

Furiously anti-British (and specifically anti-English), Callender, like most Democratic-

Republican faithful, viewed France as America’s best and most reliable ally, as well as a

beacon of revolutionary hope in Europe. He and his fellow Republicans believed Adams

had deliberately sabotaged the delegation to France as a means of providing the

administration with a casus belli that would justify the American military buildup and

lend aid to Britain in its war against France.

3. “Why is the President afraid to tell?” – The XYZ Affair

Upon learning that dispatches from the French had arrived in March 1798 and

were in the personal possession of President Adams, the opposition newspapers

mobilized to force Adams’s hand in revealing the messages’ contents. James Callender

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and Benjamin Bache, writing in the Philadelphia Aurora, lambasted Adams: “Mr. Adams

has it now in his power to do a most acceptable service to his country by retiring,” they

claimed.13 Callender taunted Adams openly: “Why is the President afraid to tell?”14 The

answer, Callender and his colleagues believed, was simple: the dispatches contained

information favorable to France and damning to the preparations for war Adams had

outlined before Congress.

In response to the president’s call for the arming of the American merchant

marine, Vice President Thomas Jefferson vented his anger to James Monroe, decrying

“the almost insane message sent to both houses of Congress.”15 To James Madison, the

Vice President lamented, “The insane message which you will see in the public papers

has had great effect. Exultation on the one side…while the other is petrified with

astonishment.”16 In a statement more prophetic than Jefferson could have realized, he

wrote that the actions of Adams’s administration and party served as “a new instance of

the inefficiency of Constitutional guards” against undeclared wars.17 Some historians

have even alleged that Jefferson helped plan the failure of the negotiations and the

consequent brinksmanship between Philadelphia and Paris. Given the results of the

Republican campaign against Adams on this matter, however, this possibility is

unlikely.18

With Jefferson’s encouragement, the Aurora, arguably the leading Republican

newspaper in Philadelphia, kept up a steady round of angry ripostes to the administration,

alleging that “[e]very act of our government has shewn their partiality for Britain in

preference to France…. Madness itself is the order of the day.”19 When word reached the

capital that President Adams was withholding dispatches from the American negotiating

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team in Paris, Callender and his opposition compatriots were appropriately angry, but

also somewhat relieved. Here at last, almost ready-made, was the situation needed to

revitalize the flagging fortunes and readership of the Republican newspapers, both of

which had suffered greatly under the scourge of the yellow fever and the increasing

assertiveness of the Federalist newspaper machine.

In the midst of Jefferson’s furious letter-writing on March 21, he had received a

note from Callender underscoring the journalist’s continued attempts to revitalize his

personal finances: “I will, if I Can…proceed immediately to print my proposals for the

next Volume; and the money I should raise by that [would] serve to protract the burden of

existence for a few months longer.”20 The letter, opening with a reference to financial

assistance from the Vice President, made clear that Callender needed Jefferson to use

“your good offices” to secure further funding for the journalist’s various propaganda

projects. The unfolding “XYZ Affair,” however, was soon to prove a boon—and a

curse—for the struggling journalist.

Meanwhile, despite the fulminations of Jefferson, Callender, and the whole of the

Republican press, Adams continued to hold the XYZ dispatches in confidence and

accelerated the preparations for potential war. Republican readers of the Aurora no doubt

shared its outrage when, on Tuesday, March 27, the president signed into law an act to

“complete and equip for sea, with all convenient speed, the frigates United States,

Constitution, and Constellation.”21 The next morning, the Aurora defiantly reported, “A

petition to be presented to Congress is in circulation for signatures in this city, praying

that every honorable and possible means may used to prevent the country from being

involved in the calamities of war.”22 Republican pressmen flooded the capital’s streets

104
with newspapers whose headlines decried the warmongering Francophobia of the

governing Federalists: “Mr. Adams…was careful in his extraordinary speech to make use

of such indecent and provoking language to a nation [France]…as would banish every

prospect of an immediate settlement.”23

By early April, the capital fairly simmered with anxiety over what was contained

in the diplomatic communiqués President Adams refused to share publicly. He had

withheld the dispatches from the Congress (and therefore the public) on the grounds that

their release could endanger the lives of the American emissaries. Some of the more

moderate members of the opposition Democratic-Republicans were prepared to accept

that explanation. The more radicalized elements of the opposition, however, cried foul.

Arguing that the president was hiding evidence favorable to France, the Republicans’

reinvigorated press machine began churning out attack pieces. The Aurora loudly

claimed that the dispatches “contain information that the French had taken great

exception at some of the speeches of our administration…as evidencing too much of a

partiality for Britain.”24 More ominously for the Republicans and Francophile element in

America, “the dispatches are further said to contain overtures…for money…to smooth

the way to reconciliation.”25 The charge that Adams’s speeches had alienated France,

however, was the chief animating factor for the Republicans: the president’s

unwillingness to publish the dispatches was his way of covering up his own

warmongering.

Further undermining Adams’s rationale was the return of two of the American

delegates, John Marshall and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, to the capital after their

deportation from Paris. For refusing to bribe the French government as a precursor to

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opening negotiations, the two men had been unceremoniously packed off back home. On

April 2, Republican Representative Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania moved a motion to

request that Adams turn the documents over to Congress. The motion passed, 65-27, with

duplicitous support from some High Federalists. Facing increased press opposition and

the undercutting of his justifications, the notoriously thin-skinned president, appearing to

bow to public pressure, agreed. The House went into executive session but initially

declined to unveil the messages’ content to the public. However, a few days later on a

Friday, April 6, the Aurora gleefully reported, “The senate [sic] have resolved to publish

the [dispatches] received from the president.”26

The Democratic-Republicans were ecstatic, none more so than the doyen of their

propagandists: James Callender. Once again, he had played an instrumental role in

pushing the Republican cause forward. Once again, he had proved his devotion to

Thomas Jefferson—but it was a path fraught with risk. Some moderate Republicans had

quietly deferred to President Adams’s explanation for keeping the dispatches

confidential. Their argument lost credibility, however, after Marshall and Pickney

returned and openly reported the French government’s disrespectful intransigence.

Meanwhile, Callender’s insistent hammering at the issue mobilized the radicals in

the party and press, overpowering the moderates. As excerpts of the dispatches began

seeping out before their official publication, the Aurora vehemently declared: “We think

it will appear from the above [excerpts] that the negotiation ought not be considered as at

an end.”27 Adams, in other words, was caught red-handed: guilty of breaking off

discussions with a valued ally as a means of pursuing his “insane” war. Callender must

have felt triumphant: he and his Democratic-Republican colleagues appeared ready to

106
score a major public coup against their political rivals. Throughout the weekend of April

7 and 8, the opposition press furiously studied the documents, confident that on Monday

morning, the treachery and double-dealing of both John Adams and the English-loving

Federalist Party would be revealed to the harsh light of public accountability and opinion.

On Monday, April 9, the hammer came crashing down—squarely onto the

Democratic-Republican Party’s head. The opposition party and its press had fallen almost

as a whole into a masterful political trap. President Adams had decoded the messages in

March, learning of the French insults to the American delegation in Paris, the constant

demands for bribes, and the refusal of the Directory to negotiate with or even treat the

United States as a sovereign nation worthy of such respect. Congressional Federalists,

who likely learned the outlines of the messages’ tone and content from Adams or his

confidants themselves, saw the perfect opportunity to lead the Democratic-Republicans

onto the gallows by joining in with House Republicans to demand the dispatches’ release.

On April 9, the executioners pulled the lever, and left the Republicans—prominent

among them James Callender—hanging, hoisted on their own petard.

The Aurora’s pages seemed to gasp in disbelief: “The bulk of the dispatches

relate to informal conferences…with our commissioners in which the sum of £50,000

sterling was asked for as [a bribe] to insure a reception.”28 Benjamin Franklin Bache,

grandson of the famous Benjamin Franklin and owner of the Aurora, was speechless.

Bache was a powerful voice in the community of Republican newspapers, owing to his

family’s reputation and his penchant, like Callender, for emotional and fiery reporting.

He and Callender desperately groped about in search of an excuse for such contemptible

conduct, settling on Messrs. X, Y, and Z themselves: “Curiosity next seeks...[to know]

107
whether these persons were agents of Talleyrand; and, if they were, whether they were

authorized by Talleyrand to demand the £50,000…. [W]ill not Talleyrand and the

Directory be justifiable in shewing some resentment for having been suspected for the

mis-doings of their inferior agents?”29 These feeble, ramshackle attempts to excuse the

French government’s rudeness were little more than spittle in the stiff wind now blowing

hard against the Republicans.

The dispatches’ content infuriated the American public, galvanized the Federalist

Party, and buried any hopes of an immediate reconciliation with France. While the

Aurora and Republicans in general tried to right their capsized ship, top Adams

administration officials were already moving to take advantage of the newly-favorable

political winds. Writing on the very same day, Secretary of War James McHenry urged

Congress to begin preparing for conflict, arguing that “[t]o forbear, under such

circumstances, from taking naval and military measures, to secure our trade, defend our

territory in case of invasion, and prevent or suppress domestic insurrection, would be to

offer up the United States [as] a certain prey to France.”30 The specter of a French-

inspired insurgency within the United States had only one root: the Federalists’ fear of the

Democratic-Republicans.

A week would pass before the Aurora managed to recover its equilibrium. On

Friday, April 13, the nation’s leading Republican newspaper declared that its writers and

editor “feel sensibly both the injury and the insults in the [French] refusal to receive and

treat with our ambassadors,” though, the paper claimed, “it [is] probable that both

proceeded from our having abandoned our neutral station by the British Treaty,” a

reference to the Jay Treaty.31 The paper also warned that “[t]o arm our merchant ships for

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defence would undoubtedly be proper if we could secure against their acting offensively

and bringing on a war….”32 This anemic warning was little more than an admonition to

avoid irritating France any further.

Callender had led the party into a disaster. Apart from arguing against arming

American merchantmen, he was almost totally silenced in the aftermath. The Federalists

had, in twenty-first-century parlance, a burst of political momentum. Flush with his

triumph, John Adams pressed ahead with greater urgency than before. On April 30, 1798,

he signed into law an act to create a Department of the Navy: the United States Navy was

born.33 While Adams basked in his victory, James Callender, financially destitute,

ostracized by moderate Republicans, and under constant attack from Federalists and

disenchanted Republicans alike, quietly withdrew from writing as the Democratic-

Republicans struggled to reassess their fortunes.

What Callender and his cohorts did not know, however, was that behind the

scenes, their effective (if ultimately ill-fated) press war against the Federalists had set in

motion a legislative battering ram poised to break down the First Amendment’s twin

guarantees of free speech and a free press, less than seven full years after the

amendment’s ratification. Acting independently and without the personal input or

encouragement of President Adams, Congressional Federalists began preparing

legislation that would ensure their party’s protection in the future from such vitriolic

attacks.34

In the meantime, outside the hushed chambers of Congress the press war

continued in earnest with the Federalist newspapers now capitalizing on their burst of

public support following the XYZ revelations. John Fenno, a friend of Alexander

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Hamilton and foe of James Callender, lashed out with particular force at Callender

personally, pleading with his Federalist readership: “In the name of justice and honor,

how long are we to tolerate this scum of party filth and beggarly corruption” whose

writings had provided “sufficient general slander on our country to entitle him to the

benefit of the gallows[?]”35

In an ominous portent of future events, Fenno urged Federalists and Americans at

large to consider their response: “Do not the times approach when it must and ought to be

dangerous for this wretch, and any other, thus to vilify our country and government, thus

to treat with indignity and contempt the whole American people…?”36 The Federalist-

controlled Congress agreed with such sentiments and responded on June 18, 1798, with

the passage of the Naturalization Act—the first of the Alien and Sedition Acts.37 The new

legislation mandated enormous, impractical residency requirements for citizenship and

also outright denied any path to it for many new immigrants with its provision

permanently banning citizenship for anyone from a nation with which the United States

was at war. This last provision, obviously, included France. Thus, for the vast majority of

immigrants whose involvement in the political crises of 1797-98 had so stung the

Federalists, citizenship—and the protections thereof—was a closed door. A few days

later, John Adams signed the Alien Act, giving the president power to deport any non-

citizen deemed hazardous to the nation’s health.38

4. “A monster that must for ever disgrace its parents” – The Sedition Act

All four of the Alien and Sedition Acts were deliberately crafted to strike at the

heart of the Democratic-Republican Party. The Naturalization Act, leading the salvo, laid

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the foundations for that strike with its stringent denial of citizenship to the Republicans’

foundational demographic: immigrants and political refugees—like James Thomson

Callender. James Madison called the Alien Act “a monster that must for ever disgrace its

parents” and lambasted President Adams for using language regarding the French

Revolution that was “the most abominable & degrading that could fall from the lips of

the first magistrate of an independent people, & particularly from a Revolutionary

patriot.”39 Jefferson, for his part, believed the Naturalization and Alien acts were both

designed to prevent “a deluge of the democrats” from both France and Britain from

landing on American shores.40 Such a mass influx of immigrants would likely bolster the

Democratic-Republicans’ already immigrant-heavy base—a prospect the Federalists

feared.

Unlike the power base of the Republicans, that of the Federalists was

concentrated in the upper Atlantic seaboard: the old bastions of New York and New

England. 41 Massachusetts Bay in particular was the original WASPs’ nest: here, many

families still easily traced their genealogies back to some of the first English settlers in

the New World.42 ). Clearly, the Federalists’ electoral base had little, if anything, to fear

from mass denial of citizenship to recent immigrants. Furthermore, by denying

citizenship on a large scale to recent immigrants, the Federalists sought to both erode and

systematically exclude the Republicans’ electoral base, and to ensure the protection of

their own base from being drowned in that “deluge” of unfettered immigration,

particularly from France. The commensurate Alien Act put an iron fist in the

Naturalization Act’s glove: making those excluded from citizenship vulnerable to forcible

expulsion from the country at the fiat of the president.

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 Callender, learning of these two acts, could see his own name spelled out in the

handwriting on the wall. Rumors filtered onto the streets as well that the next measure

would directly attack “sedition” as the Federalist government and president defined it.

Philadelphia had already become a city of unwelcome memories and unfriendly

neighbors; an anti-sedition law would only make the seat of government even more

uncomfortable.

Sometime in mid-1798, the journalist’s wife died, probably in the yellow fever

epidemic that haunted the city well into 1798. With his four children orphaned and the

new threat of deportation hanging overhead, Callender managed to acquire citizenship

before the two laws entered into force and prepared to leave the capital. He had lived in

Philadelphia since 1793, making him eligible for citizenship under the grandfathering

clause of the Naturalization Act and therefore protected from the odious effects of the

Alien Act. To James Madison, Thomas Jefferson noted, “Callender, a principal object of

[the Alien law], has eluded it by getting himself made a citizen.”43

Even this protection, Callender knew, would not be enough. Although the

Sedition Act had not yet been passed, federal agents claiming to operate under its

provisions had already seized the editor of the Aurora, Benjamin Franklin Bache, and

thrown him in jail on June 26. Two weeks before, the Aurora had issued a strident call to

arms against the coming law: “We ring the alarm. Papers of freedom, you that have not

sold yourselves, you that forget not your revolution and the constitution…take up the

sound before it dies, and let the peal rouse the spirit and reflection of the land.”44 The day

after Bache’s arrest the paper, likely with Callender filling in as editor, soberly declared:

“The Editor of the Aurora was yesterday arrested…on the charge of libeling the President

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& the Executive Government in a manner tending to excite sedition and opposition to the

laws by sundry publications and re-publications.”45 The same day, a mocking letter

signed “PLINY” appeared in the Federalist-aligned Gazette of the United States,

addressed to “Thomas Jefferson, Esq.”: “[R]ecollect that your friend Bache is just now

prosecuted for some of his false and scandalous stories concerning the Government of the

United States which he has published in the Aurora—the same newspaper which you

have seditiously endeavored to circulate….”46 “Pliny” then wrapped up with a piece of

barbed advice: “Let me entreat you not to leave the city at a time so interesting to your

friend, who you know is also a friend of Monroe…and the devoted friend of France. I

beg, I pray, I beseech you not to forsake him, but stay and assist him with your best

advice—a friend in need is a friend indeed.”47

On June 28, two days after Bache’s imprisonment, Maryland Senator James

Lloyd offered a draft of the Sedition Act to the Senate for debate and passage. The hairs

on Callender’s neck must have stood on edge as he read the proposed text: “Be it

enacted...That the government and people of France…are declared to be enemies to the

United States…and any person…giving them aid and comfort…shall suffer death.”48

Furthermore, “if any person shall, by writing, printing, publishing, or speaking, attempt to

defame or weaken” the government or President of the United States, “[he] shall be

punished by fine…and imprisonment.”49 The Aurora, probably from Callender’s own

pen, defiantly riposted, “[t]he people may be gagged by alien and sedition bills; but at

elections they will make their voice heard.”50 Despite these protestations, however, the

act proceeded swiftly through the Senate and moved to the House. Callender knew the

game was up. On July 13, the day before the Sedition Act officially passed Congress,

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Callender packed up his four sons and fled Philadelphia for friendlier, Republican

Virginia. He would never again set foot in the capital.

Twenty-four hours after Callender fled the capital for the countryside, John

Adams signed the Sedition Act. The new law was a dramatic circumscription of several

rights guaranteed in the First Amendment: free speech, free press, and free assembly. The

act essentially outlawed the Federalists’ opposition, giving the President a wide berth in

fining and imprisoning anyone who “shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or

procure to be written, printed, uttered or published…any false, scandalous and malicious

writing or writings against the government of the United States…or the President of the

United States, with intent [of defamation].”51 The Federalists’ fears of a resurgent

Republican press returning to propagandize in favor of France grew in the increasingly

bellicose atmosphere of late June-early July 1798. A week before the Sedition Act

entered into force, on July 7, 1798, the United States Congress formally annulled all

treaties then in force with the Republic of France. Two days later on July 9, Congress

followed up with an act authorizing President Adams “to instruct the commanders of the

public armed vessels which are…in the service of the United States, to subdue, seize and

take any armed French vessel, which shall be found within the jurisdictional limits of the

United States, or elsewhere, on the high seas.”52 The war, albeit undeclared, that the

Democratic-Republicans had fought so hard against had come at last, and the opposition

now found themselves outmaneuvered and largely silenced.

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5. “I am entirely sick even of the Republicans” – Callender’s Flight from
Philadelphia to Richmond

Meanwhile Callender, once again a political refugee fleeing a vengeful

government, must have felt little more than despair as he abandoned Philadelphia—the

heart of the American political scene—for the Virginia hinterland. Senator Stevens

Thomson Mason, a Democratic-Republican from Virginia and friend of Vice President

Jefferson, had offered the harried newspaperman a refuge on his Raspberry Plain

plantation near Loudon, Virginia. There, the former Republican writer waited for the

expected opposition to the draconian new laws and commensurate shift in public opinion.

Callender could not have imagined that among the consequences of these acts

would be the destruction of his relations with his patron, Thomas Jefferson. There were,

nonetheless, a handful of clouds on the horizon. In the lengthy letter to Jefferson dated

September 22, 1798, Callender had also complained that, “I am entirely sick even of the

Republicans, for some of them have used me so dishonestly, in a word I have been so

severely cheated…that I have the strongest inclination…for wishing to shift the scene.”53

Jefferson replied to “express my regret that any thing should have happened to withdraw

you from the place where above all others you have it in your power to render services to

the public liberty, and to add my hopes that the causes are not permanent.”54

At the same time, however, Jefferson was already quietly moving away from his

loyal and once useful devotee. In a separate, very different letter to Senator Mason,

Jefferson wrote briefly: “I received lately a letter from Mr. Callender to which the

inclosed is an answer…. You will perceive that I propose to you the trouble of drawing

50. D[ollars] for Mr. Callender on my correspondent in Richmond…. This is to keep his

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name out of sight.”55 Callender, attempting to ride out the political storm in Philadelphia

on Mason’s plantation, was completely unaware of Jefferson’s desire that he be kept “out

of sight.” From this moment forward, relations between the two men would only decline.

The Sage of Monticello, lionized for his visionary idealism, was also a shrewd

political manipulator who schemed to keep Callender’s voice silenced. Nor would these

be the last times Jefferson would try to deny his once warm relations with the

propagandist. As their friendship unraveled and then completely collapsed in 1801-02,

Jefferson would repeatedly deny that anything of note has passed between himself and

Callender after 1796, a clear case of either deception or attempted historical revisionism.

What Jefferson recognized was that the moderates were the future of the Democratic-

Republicans. Callender, whose demagogic writing, polarizing anti-aristocratic attitudes,

and fanatical belief in populist democracy, had fallen out of favor with the moderates

both before and after the disastrous XYZ Affair. The journalist had, quite deservedly,

taken on a great deal of opprobrium for leading the party into the unmitigated disaster of

the XYZ revelations. Jefferson’s duplicitous dealings with Callender seemed to indicate

that, while still useful, the journalist was becoming a major liability to both the vice

president and the Democratic-Republican Party.

After riding out the remainder of 1798 quietly in the countryside, Callender was

ready to return to Richmond and politics. Opinion had begun shifting against the

Federalists due to the Alien and Sedition Acts, and Callender hoped to return to public

life as a result. Virginia had also vigorously protested the acts, with James Madison

secretly writing the Virginia Resolutions to assert the right of states to circumscribe or

even nullify allegedly unconstitutional federal laws. Vice President Thomas Jefferson

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also clandestinely composed the Kentucky Resolutions, which were aimed, like those in

Virginia, at the discrediting of and even civil disobedience against laws enacted under the

authority of Adams’s administration, of which the Vice President was a part.

Thus confident in the support of public sentiment, Callender arrived in Virginia’s

capital on May 25, 1799, six months early for a job recording and reporting debates in the

Virginia House of Assembly. To pass the time before the Assembly’s session began, the

veteran Republican writer returned to his role as Jeffersonian advocate, supporting

himself through publications in the National Magazine, a local Republican mouthpiece in

Richmond. With a small, regional circulation, the Magazine was nothing like the Aurora,

but local Federalists nonetheless saw Callender’s byline as a major threat. Within a

month, the journalist had so aroused the ire of Richmond’s Federalists that they

mobilized and threatened a physical attack on the Magazine’s press. Callender and his

editor responded with preparations to defend the building, but both parties soon backed

down.56

Although this “welcome” left him shaken, Callender’s resolve remained high, and

he soon returned to extolling Jefferson and Jeffersonian ideals in preparation for the 1800

election. Central among those ideals were the opposition of Jefferson and the

Democratic-Republicans to the Alien and Sedition Acts and the presidential electability

of Thomas Jefferson himself. To that end, Callender began preparing an electioneering

propaganda piece that would test the limits of the Sedition Act while simultaneously

advocating Jefferson’s candidacy for the Chief Executive’s office. In a previous letter to

Jefferson on November 19, 1798, the newspaperman had already assured Jefferson he

was ready “to give our readers such a Tornado as no Govt ever got before,” believing that

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“no judge in this state will…dare to raise a process of sedition.”57 The storm clouds on

the horizon were gathering; the tornado was not far behind.

Other duties remained to be attended to, however, and the task of reporting and

recording the proceedings of the Virginia Assembly occupied much of Callender’s time.

By August 1799, he was also well underway in producing The Prospect Before Us, a

pamphlet designed to promote Jefferson at the expense of the Federalists and John

Adams. In a letter dated August 10, 1799, Callender wrote to Jefferson on the subject:

“As you are a subscriber to my next volume, and as it is the fashion on Virginia to pay

such things in advance…it would be particularly acceptable if your relation [George

Jefferson] here were ordered to pay it to me in course of post.”58 Jefferson replied from

Monticello, where he was spending the summer with, among others, Sally Hemings. He

assured Callender that “Mr. [George] Jefferson happens to be here and directs his agent

to call on you with this and pay you 50 dollars, on account of the book you are about to

publish.” More importantly, Jefferson requested of the journalist, “When it shall be out be

so good as to send me 2. or 3. copies, and the rest only when I shall ask for them.”59

Jefferson’s financial support, both of Callender and of The Prospect Before Us in

particular, would haunt him well into his first term as president, when his connection with

Callender had transformed into an almost inescapable political embarrassment. Despite a

substantial contribution of $50, however, Jefferson’s support was tinged with caution. As

an avid bibliophile, his request for “2. or 3. copies” of Callender’s book is

understandable, but there is no evidence to suggest that he ever requested the copies held

in reserve until he asked for them. Was this small transaction his way of keeping

Callender both operating and at a safe distance? Jefferson certainly knew of Callender’s

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worth as a propagandist, just as he was aware the next presidential election would be a

hard-fought contest in which he would need all the support he could get. Conversely,

Callender’s reputation as a potentially explosive liability had been only too clear in the

aftermath of the XYZ Affair. Jefferson himself, cautious and ambitious in seamless

alternation, opted to maintain his support, albeit distanced, for Callender, confident that

his own political acumen and maneuvering was sufficient protection.

The dual nature of Jefferson’s approach to Callender was evident in a brief

exchange of letters between the two regarding Callender’s new book. Writing in late

September 1799, Callender explicitly asked Jefferson for information from the vice

president’s private papers regarding negotiations with the French that Jefferson had

participated in after the War of Independence.60 In his response on October 6, Jefferson’s

scheming became even more apparent. He readily supplied Callender with information on

those negotiations, but followed up with a request of his own. “All who were members of

Congress in 1786,” he said, “may be supposed to remember this information.”

Accordingly, “if it could be understood to come to you through some such channel, it

would save the public from reading all the blackguardism which would be vented on me,

were I quoted.” Jefferson also quickly sought to defend himself against the perhaps

appropriate charge of political cowardice: “Not that this would weigh an atom with me on

any occasion where my avowal of either facts or opinions would be of public use; but…I

think it useful to keep myself out of the way of calumny.”61

The most important aspect of this exchange, however, was Jefferson’s closing

remarks. “You will know,” he said, “from whom this [letter] comes without a signature;

the omission of which has rendered almost habitual with me by the curiosity of the post

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offices.” This “curiosity,” Jefferson claimed, meant that “a period is now approaching

during which I shall discontinue writing letters as much as possible, knowing that every

snare will be used to get ahold of what may be perverted in the eyes of the public.”62

Nowhere else in Jefferson’s correspondence does such a threat (“I shall discontinue

writing letters”) appear. It is interesting to note as well that Jefferson did not encourage or

admonish Callender to stop sending letters through the supposedly unsafe postal service.

Although the early American postal service was a great deal less secure and confidential

than that of our own time, Jefferson’s correspondence by no means suffered from a lack

of security or confidentiality on the postman’s part.63

The vice president may have feared that despite his precautions, the leaking of

documents to Callender would be traced to him. He may have also feared overexposure

to the journalist once The Prospect Before Us brought down the might of the Federalist

government and its sedition law on Callender’s head. Regardless, a retrospective look at

the correspondence for the period of 1798-99 shows the tortured, often contradictory path

Jefferson attempted to navigate with Callender. In the writer, Jefferson had found a

willing and able aide whose effectiveness as a polarizing propagandist was indisputable.

Yet he also feared the effect a close association with Callender would have on his

standing in public and party opinion. As early as his October 1798 letter to Stevens

Mason, Jefferson was attempting to control and distance himself from James Callender.

After the implosion of their relationship, Jefferson would argue in mid-1801 that he

“knew him [Callender] only as the author of the Political progress of Britain…. I gave to

him from time to time such aids as I could afford, merely as a man of genius suffering

under persecution, and not as a writer in our politics.”64 As the election of 1800 loomed,

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however, the vice president saw renewed use for Callender’s acid pen and almost

unquestioning devotion.

Callender’s own correspondence throughout the waning months of 1799

demonstrated Jefferson’s interest in the number of references he made to copies and

pages sent to Jefferson from The Prospect Before Us, the local Republican newspaper,

the Richmond Examiner, and other writings. Callender enclosed draft passages and

newspaper copies with each of his letters dated October 7, November 16, and December

18.65 He also informed Jefferson in late 1799 that a Richmond printer, James Lyon, had

arranged to have The Prospect Before Us printed.66 As 1800 dawned, letters from

Callender to Jefferson indicated that the journalist continued sending regular copies of the

Richmond Examiner, unavailable to Jefferson in Monticello, along with ever-larger

excerpts from the Prospect.67

For his part, however, Jefferson remained silent, as he had promised (or

threatened) in October 1799. The campaign against Adams, he knew, was only just

beginning. If the vice president was also reading both Callender’s letters and the

accompanying excerpts from the Richmond newspapers and The Prospect Before Us, he

knew as well that Callender’s promise of giving the Federalist administration a “tornado”

unparalleled in the short history of American politics was coming to fruition in the pages

of the journalist’s newest work. Although direct documentary evidence is scarce,

Jefferson arguably knew the Prospect would violate the Sedition Act in a public, direct

manner very likely to draw a heavy-handed response from the Adams administration.

While this response presented an opportunity for the Democratic-Republicans to sway

public opinion against the Federalists and their draconian restrictions on free speech,

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Jefferson was personally interested in remaining as aloof as possible from the ensuing

political scandal and firefight. Like most politicians vying for power, the vice president

knew the value of a reputation clean of political entanglements and scandals.68

For Callender, his passionate rhetoric and provocative journalism was an

outpouring of his anti-aristocratic, radically republican beliefs against an allegedly

oppressive aristocratic regime. Writing in the Richmond Examiner, he argued that, “It is

time for Americans to cast aside that trimming tone of sycophancy, which is too well

calculated to oil the wheels of despotism.”69 For Jefferson and the Democratic-

Republicans, however, Callender’s work was less a passionate reassertion of principles

than it was the most direct challenge yet made against the Sedition Act. It was the

opening act, the Republican leadership hoped, in a political drama that would culminate

in the Sedition Act’s repeal as unconstitutional. Such repeal would free the Republican

press machine from the specter of imprisonment just in time to begin the 1800

presidential campaign.

Even if the law was not struck down outright, Republicans still looked forward to

using the trial process itself as a means of shaping public opinion against the Federalists.

Already in August 1799, a few months after Callender resumed writing in Richmond,

Secretary of State Timothy Pickering had instructed the Attorney General of Virginia to

scrutinize every issue of the Richmond Examiner. Callender and his Republican cohorts,

including Jefferson, knew they were under close scrutiny, and they plotted to take

advantage of the circumstances. With the vice president’s surreptitious encouragement,

the once and future king of the Republican press prepared to martyr himself on the altar

of the Jeffersonian cause.

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6. “An occasional severity of expression” – The Prospect Before Us and Callender’s
Trial for Sedition

At the dawn of 1800, Callender’s long-promised “tornado” was finally spinning

into action. By February, he had secured the services of Richmond printer James Lyon

for his new two-volume pamphlet. Soon, copies of The Prospect Before Us were

appearing on the doorsteps of booksellers across Philadelphia; a complimentary copy

even went to John Adams himself.70 The Federalists were prepared, however, and

immediately threatened legal action against any bookshop attempting to peddle this

“libel.” Meanwhile, the book’s notoriety rapidly spread and its author’s reputation

continued to grow. By March 1800, Callender had expanded his newspaper work beyond

the Richmond Examiner and was now writing for papers in two other Virginia cities, as

well as for the National Magazine and another Richmond paper, Friend of the People.71

The Prospect Before Us was Callender’s chief contribution to the already

overheated press climate of 1800. The work demonstrated Callender’s often-sycophantic

devotion to Jefferson alongside his vitriolic hatred of John Adams. The pamphlet’s

opening sentence said as much: “The design of this book is to exhibit the multiplied

corruptions of the Federal Government, and more especially the misconduct of the

President, Mr. Adams.”72 This bold, perhaps even foolish, statement was a clear taunt to

the Federalists’ sedition law, which totally forbade such criticism.73 The journalist

offered a sardonic “justification” for the book’s passion and rage: “[I]t is difficult to

avoid an occasional severity of expression,” which, the preface confidently stated, “will

be pardoned, if it cannot be defended.” Callender also attacked the very legitimacy of

Adams’s election. “Assuredly, he was not the choice of the real majority,” Callender

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claimed. In an accusation that still resonates with modern politics, the journalist baldly

accused Adams of stealing the election: “In Pennsylvania, he gained a vote [in the

Electoral College] by the trick of a postmaster…. [I]n Maryland, he gained a third

suffrage…by the wonted negligence of one side, and the wonted knavery of the other.”

“Putting these facts together,” he reasoned, “we shall see that Mr. Jefferson, and not Mr.

Adams, was the choice of America.”

Based on evidence in the correspondence between Callender and Jefferson, the

vice president almost certainly had these passages in hand before publication. Whether he

read them or not cannot be determined with finality, but if he did, he would doubtless

have concluded that such incendiary rhetoric could elicit only the harshest reaction from

the testy, easily-offended President Adams, whom Callender damned as an “inflexible

friend of England” whose “principles are monarchical.”74

In addition to lambasting President Adams, The Prospect Before Us was also

focused on building the case for Jefferson’s election in 1800. Like all electioneering

propaganda, the work demanded that readers make a choice between two extremes: “You

will then make your choice between paradise and perdition; you will choose between the

man who has deserted and reversed all his principles, and that man whose own example

strengthens all his laws, that man whose predictions…have been converted into history.”

Worked into a heady steam of emotion, Callender then unleashed yet another torrent of

anti-Adams rhetoric sure to arouse Federalist ire: “You will choose between that man

whose life is un-spotted by crime, and that man whose hands are reeking with the blood

of the poor, friendless Connecticut sailor: I see the tear of indignation starting on your

cheeks! You anticipate the name of John Adams! Take your choice, then, between

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Adams, war and beggary, and Jefferson, peace and competency!”75

Callender’s Prospect was written very much in the same vein as Thomas Paine’s

Common Sense. Like Paine, Callender employed a smooth, effortless vernacular that

remains immediately readable even after the passage of over two hundred years. As a

political pamphlet, the Prospect was, even by the standards of the time, quite large: the

first volume alone ran to almost two hundred pages divided into ten chapters.76 Callender,

like Paine and generations of propagandists running all the way to the present age, sought

to bolster his argument with the selective use of statistics and neatly-formed tables. He

was also eager to display his insider’s knowledge of Congress and its deliberations,

probably as a means of assigning himself credibility in the eyes of his readers. As an

example, he gives a “testimony” of his familiarity with “the motives upon which a

gentleman [Congressman] founds his vote” with an anecdote: “I have known a member

of congress [sic] who supported a question, in express contradiction to his own wishes,

only because he was certain of being left in a minority.”77 Pages 122-125 were wholly

given over to the journalist’s remarks about individual Congressmen: their personalities,

political beliefs, even their speaking habits and mannerisms. The material served solely to

establish in the reader’s mind the credibility of the author.

Callender also sought to vindicate and redeem himself in the pages of the

Prospect from the stigma he had incurred for leading the Republicans into the XYZ

debacle. The eighth chapter—thirty-six pages long—consisted of a lengthy defense of the

Republican position regarding France and the XYZ dispatches. In somewhat tortured

logic, Callender attempted to place the blame for the XYZ Affair squarely at John

Adams’s feet: “By sending these ambassadors to Paris,” he claimed, “Mr. Adams and his

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British faction designed to do nothing but mischief.” Appealing to the Republican

bandwagon, Callender declaimed, “This is, and it always has been, the universal opinion

of the republican [sic] party; and it seems very hard if one man may not print what an

hundred thousand profess themselves to believe.”78

The Prospect Before Us sought as much to animate Republicans as to infuriate

Federalists: “Our hen-hearted republican orators, and writers,” he angrily commented,

“are afraid of committing themselves.”79 Implied in such frustration was the pall of fear

the Sedition Act had cast over Republican newspapers and editors. The Federalists had

effectively silenced all but the most committed voices in the opposition press, frightening

them with imprisonment or loading them down with fines. By the time Thomas Jefferson

revoked the act, fourteen individuals had been arrested under its auspices, resulting in ten

indictments and convictions.80

Prevailing historiographical argument holds partisan advantage as the Federalists’

primary reason for the Alien and Sedition Acts as a whole.81 Although such advantage

was likely a boon for the Federalists, perhaps the most important factor in rushing such

draconian legislation into law was the overwhelming sense of paranoia that pervaded at

the time, coupled with the Federalists’ own belief that the American Republic faced an

existential threat in the form of the French Revolution and its Terror. The nation’s hard-

won independence, the Federalists believed, was at stake. Having gained that

independence from Britain, many Federalist partisans feared losing it to France.

Throughout the XYZ Affair and the succeeding Quasi-War with France,

Federalist newspapers projected an almost palpable sense of fear and dread throughout

Philadelphia and elsewhere: fear that the Republic was in danger of subversion from

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within, fear that France stood ready to overthrow the generally pro-British Federalist

administration from without, and fear that the Democratic-Republicans were prepared to

bypass completely the nation’s democratic institutions in favor of an anarchic mobocracy.

In the month prior to the passage of the Sedition Act, prominent Federalist newspapers

routinely “exposed” foreign conspiracies accused of planning insurrections. One article

ran thus: “DETECTION OF A CONSPIRACY FORMED BY THE UNITED

IRISHMEN…. I have long thought that the French have formed a regular plan for

organizing an active and effective force within these States….”82 As the Sedition Act

began claiming victims, a well-known Federalist newspaper, the Gazette of the United

States, claimed that “foreign emissaries”—Republican newspapermen who were

immigrants—had “at last been punished for their audacious attempts to involve the

United States in one scene of confusion and blood” and expressed its hope that “[this

action] will discourage those who sent them across the Atlantic from any further attempts

to destroy the government and independence of the United States.”83

Federalist justifications for the Sedition Act were quick to follow the act itself.

Once again, the fear of an existential threat to the stability of the United States manifested

itself clearly. The government’s arguments for the act centered not on arguments of

defamation or partisanship, but on appeals to the need for safety and to “ensure domestic

tranquility” and “promote the public welfare” as outlined in the Constitution’s preamble.

The Federalists interpreted this duty of the government as being the fostering of stability

and unity at home. Federalists viewed the willingness of certain factions to oppose the

government as not only an attack on the government’s opinions, but also a threat to the

security and domestic tranquility of the nation itself. In a 1799 pamphlet, Federalist

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author James Ross compared the rights of the government in this particular instance to

that of an individual. “To defame a private person and bring him into disrepute and

contempt is punished by the laws of every civilized state in the world,” Ross argued.84

“By the confederation [the Constitution], a new moral person was created; alike capable

of receiving injuries as an individual…that person was the government of the United

States.”85

Ross also articulated much of the Federalists’ appeal to the nation’s welfare and

stability as the defining justification for the Sedition Act. “If the government of our

country is…brought into contempt and the hatred of the people excited against the

persons who compose it,” Ross argued, “the best and wisest measures that can be taken

for the welfare of the people will be decried and opposed.” The author took this logic to

its inevitable end: “It is the nature of hatred to attach itself to every act of the hated

object, and sedition, insurrection anarchy, and ruin, will follow—not only the happiness

of ourselves will be destroyed, but that of millions yet unborn.”86

Into this climate of hostility, anger, and anxiety, the pages of Callender’s Prospect

began to flow. While writing to Jefferson in March 1800 to announce the imminent

publication of the second volume of the Prospect, Callender also alluded to increasing

troubles: “Every engine has been set at work to do me all kinds of mischief since I came

here [Richmond]; the satisfaction of knowing that they are exceedingly provoked is to me

a partial compensation for the inconvenience of being belied and stared at, as if I was a

Rhinoceros.”87 The mischief Callender referred to in part was a series of increasingly

intense Federalist attacks on Republican newspapers associated with his work. Editors of

the Scourge of the Aristocracy, published in the Shenandoah Valley town of Staunton,

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found themselves hauled before a local magistrate and threatened with the physical

destruction of their shop under the auspices of the Sedition Act.88 Staunton was also the

location of the printing press for the second volume of Callender’s Prospect.

That his work was proving effective was evident in a letter Callender penned to

Jefferson on March 14: “I am firing through five port holes, at once…. The Examiner

[sic] augments in circulation, and the Prospect is already more than half sold.”89 Busying

himself with this work, Callender’s correspondence with Jefferson lightened somewhat:

only two short letters passed between them in April 1800. All around the two men,

however, the nation was caught up in the fervid propaganda of the 1800 election. In the

pages of the Richmond Examiner, Callender poured out his passionate hatred for the

Federalists: “Let us, by one grand effort, snatch our country from that bottomless vortex

of corruption and perdition which yawn before us.”90

The Examiner also served as the outlet for the zenith of the journalist’s career as a

Jeffersonian partisan and a political gadfly. As word reached Callender that the

Federalists were intercepting and destroying copies of his work in other cities, he issued

an open, defiant challenge to the ruling party and its sedition law in the Examiner: “If the

author has afforded room for an action, do prosecute him. But do not take such pitiful

behind the door measures in order to stop the circulation of truth.”91 With these words,

Callender threw down his gauntlet, condemning the Federalists for making use of

underhanded tactics of suppression and daring them to instead take him to trial in a

public, open manner. Devotion to Jefferson and his confreres in the Democratic-

Republican press no doubt motivated this challenge, but the secure knowledge that

Virginia was a Democratic-Republican fortress was also a likely incentive.

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 Challenging the Sedition Act was the ultimate goal of The Prospect Before Us.

No one in 1800 could have published such an incendiary work without expecting the full

force of the Federalist-dominated government to strike back in equal measure. Federalist

partisans duly accepted Callender’s dare, and in a series of unfortunate events, the

journalist found himself facing not a Virginian jurist, but one Mr. Samuel Chase: a signer

of the Declaration of Independence from Maryland and Associate Justice of the Supreme

Court of the United States. Chase had a long record of opposition to the press,

particularly that of the Democratic-Republicans. In 1798 he wrote to George

Washington’s War Secretary James McHenry, “A licentious press is the bane of freedom,

and the peril of Society.”92 During a conversation in the spring of 1800 at a circuit court

in Annapolis, Chase had occasion to reiterate this belief. John Thomson Mason, the

Maryland Attorney General, recalled that during a conversation with the Associate

Justice, “[O]ne expression…that he used…occurs to my memory…that before he [Chase]

left Richmond, he would teach the people to distinguish between the liberty and

licentiousness of the press.”93 Mason also recalled an ominous portent of trouble to come:

“There was a sentiment [Chase] expressed…that if the commonwealth [of Virginia] or its

inhabitants were not too depraved to furnish a jury of good and respectable men, he

would certainly punish Callender.”94

While in Baltimore, former Republican and now ardent Federalist Luther Martin

had happened to pass a copy of Callender’s Prospect to the judge while the latter was

holding court just before departing to tour the southern circuit. Martin had even helpfully

underlined passages in the book he found particularly offensive, sparing Chase the task of

hunting down damning “evidence” of sedition for himself.95 Martin urged Chase to bring

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the author of the Prospect to trial: “I told him, I will put it [the Prospect] into your hands,

you may amuse yourself with it as you are going down, and make what use of it you

please.”96 Martin, even five years later, remained adamant as to what “use of it” he

expected Chase to make: “I am ready candidly to acknowledge that I did think it a book

that ought to be prosecuted; and I did not think that judge [sic] Chase would have an

opportunity of seeing it unless I gave him a copy of it.”97

The result was to have grave, although not entirely unforeseen, consequences for

Callender. Chase was furious at the book’s contents and resolved while still in Baltimore

to hunt down Callender and charge him under the Sedition Act. The lengthy ride from

Maryland to the heart of Virginia no doubt served only to increase his ire. Arriving on

May 21 in Richmond, he found the city’s two most prominent newspapers—the Virginia

Federalist and Richmond Examiner—already engaged in a heated war of words. Local

Federalists most likely also drew Chase’s attention to Callender’s brash challenge in the

May 9 Examiner’s pages. Chase, his agitation only increased in the interim, wasted no

time in fulfilling his promise to bring the journalist to trial.

On May 24, a grand jury convened under Chase’s direction and indicted

Callender on charges of violating the Sedition Act. A warrant for his arrest followed

immediately thereafter. Callender, in the meantime, was in nearby Petersburg arranging

for the publication of the second volume of his Prospect with printer James Lyon,

oblivious to the descent of this vengeful Federalist eagle. The Republican journalist was

duly arrested and hauled off to Richmond, where he found himself facing two charges.

The first count accused him of conspiracy to maliciously defame John Adams in print

with the goal of inciting hatred and contempt for the President’s character. The second

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count paraded a series of twenty excerpts taken from the pages of the Prospect and

accused Callender of writing and disseminating them. The indictment opened with a

thunderous declamation describing “James Thomson Callender…printer,” as “a person of

wicked, depraved, evil disposed, disquiet and turbulent mind and disposition, falsely and

maliciously designing and intending to defame the President of the United States.”98 The

indictment alleged that Callender “did wickedly and maliciously write, print, utter and

publish, a false, scandalous and malicious writing, against the said President of the

United States, of the tenor and effect following: ‘[T]he reign of Mr. Adams…has been

one continued tempest of malicious passions.’” Littered throughout the court’s citation of

Callender’s work were continual reminders to readers of Callender’s personal effrontery

against Adams: “As president, he (meaning the said President of the United States) has

never opened his (meaning the said President of the United States) lips, or lifted his (the

said President meaning) pen without threatening and scolding; the grand object of his

(meaning the said President of the United States) administration, has been to exasperate

the rage of contending parties….”99

However grim the situation for Callender may have looked at the trial’s opening,

it must be remembered that the indictment and trial were the principal, if not the only,

reasons for his publication of the Prospect. Callender had written the work in a manner

clearly calculated to motivate a Democratic Republican challenge to the constitutionality

of the Sedition Act, and above all, to argue publicly for Thomas Jefferson’s candidacy in

the upcoming election. While Callender and his lawyers began opening arguments before

Chase for a postponement of the trial (in hopes of better coinciding it with the 1800

election), Jefferson had left the secluded comfort of his “little mountain” to wade into

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Richmond and campaign himself. The presidential election was now mere months away,

and Jefferson, usually reclusive, was interested in buoying his own political fortunes.

Callender’s predicament now became useful to the Sage of Monticello in ways his

now-indicted acolyte could not have imagined. Previously, Jefferson had broached with

his compatriot James Monroe the possibility of departing for the summer on grand tour

from Philadelphia to Monticello as a means of boosting Republican morale.100 The

notion of a progress through the countryside akin to a Roman consul’s triumph struck

Monroe as distinctly un-republican, and Jefferson quickly retracted the idea, retiring

quietly for the summer to Monticello.101 The idea of a dinner in the presidential

candidate’s honor resurfaced later in the year with James Monroe musing that a great

“Union dinner” might be held for Jefferson during the latter’s passage through the city.102

The dinner was coincidentally planned for May 22, 1800, the same time Samuel Chase

arrived in Richmond. Monroe dropped the plan after Federalists threatened to hold a

rival, larger dinner, and especially after Chase’s swift indictment of James Callender.103

The trial, however, unexpectedly handed Jefferson the solution he had sought for

publicity. Court proceedings against such a prominent Republican newspaperman as

Callender would help fan “the flames of public opinion” while keeping Jefferson’s hands

clean.104 The Democratic-Republicans, in Jefferson’s scheme, would associate

themselves on the state level by committing themselves to Callender’s defense, while

Jefferson and the national leadership remained aloof.105 Thus, while Callender believed

he was standing trial for Jeffersonian ideals (principally that of a free press), Jefferson

himself was already counting the ulterior gains to be made from the incident.

In the courtroom, Callender’s request for a delay in proceedings was rejected, and

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he found himself before Samuel Chase on June 2, 1800, ready to be tried for willful

violation of the Sedition Act. The journalist’s defense team issued subpoenas for several

individuals, including Senator Stevens Mason and William B. Giles, the Democratic-

Republican Deputy House Leader in Philadelphia. Signs that the Republican leadership

had already begun insulating themselves from Callender, however, soon appeared. Giles,

a prominent Republican politician, had no intentions of journeying to Richmond in

defense of Callender.106 No letters poured forth from the pens of such Republican

luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, or James Monroe on their chief

propagandist’s behalf, although Jefferson had previously written that “[Callender] should

be substantially defended.”107

The actual courtroom drama had surprisingly little to do with Callender. His sole

role had been to bring the Sedition Act to a high-profile trial.108 The constitutionality of

the Sedition Act and the right of the states to defy federal regulations they disapproved of

were the centerpieces of the trial. Leading the Republican defense counsel was Governor

James Monroe’s son-in-law, George Hay. Hay’s first avenue of attack argued that the

Sedition Act served solely to counteract the appearance of deliberately misleading or

false information posed as facts, not to suppress the expression of opinion: “The object of

the law [is] to punish a man, not for abuse nor for erroneous deductions or opinions, but

for fact falsely and maliciously asserted.”109 In a blatant display of partiality, Chase

denied the validity of this argument, charging that Callender’s malicious, partisan

intentions constituted proof that the book was at its core false: “The traverser [Callender]

charges him [John Adams] with being a murderer and a thief, a despot and a tyrant! Will

you…excuse [this] by saying it is but mere opinion? Any falsehood, however palpable

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and wicked, may be justified by this species of argument.”110 Chase argued that what

Callender actually published was less important than the intention behind the published

words. “The question here,” Chase said, “is with what intent the traverser published these

charges? Are they false, scandalous, and malicious, and published with intent to defame?

It is for the jury to say, what was the intent of such imputations, and this is sufficiently

obvious.”111 In this line of argumentation, Chase was technically correct, as the Sedition

Act itself contained provisions that relied on subjective judgments of intent. These were

arguments, however, for the attorneys to debate, not the court’s presiding officer. Chase,

who had appropriated the role of prosecuting attorney to himself alongside that of judge,

had made clear his assumption of Callender’s guilt. The defense lawyers knew now they

would have to fight openly not only the Federalists’ attorneys, but also the judge himself.

Abandoning this first course, the Republican attorneys appealed to the jury to find

the Sedition Act itself unconstitutional and thus unenforceable. Responding to the

defense counsel, Chase stated, “If I understand you rightly, you offer an argument to the

petit jury [that] the…Sedition Law, is contrary to the Constitution of the United States,

and therefore void.” The summation accurately described the defense’s second line of

attack. However, this argument, Chase contended, “is irregular and inadmissible; it is not

competent to the jury to decide on this point.” Worked into a heady steam of righteous

indignation, Chase admitted, “[s]ince I came into the commonwealth [of Virginia], I

understood that this question would be stirred, and that the power of a jury to determine

the validity or nullity of a law would be urged.” In response, the judge declared, “I have

deliberately considered the subject, and I am ready to explain my reasons for concluding

that the petit jury have not a right to decide on the constitutionality of a law, and that such

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a power would be extremely dangerous.” “Hear my words,” Chase theatrically

declaimed: “I wish the world to know them,—my opinion is the result of mature

reflection.” In his lengthy opinion, Chase argued that allowing local juries to unilaterally

annul federal law would be a prelude to general anarchy, as juries across the nation began

striking down displeasing or disagreeable laws. Such a course would “violate my duty,

disregard the Constitution and law, and surrender up the judicial power of the United

States…to a petit jury.”112

Another of Callender’s defense team attempted to argue that “[juries] are sworn to

give their verdict according to the evidence, and the law is evidence; if the jury have no

right to consider the law, how is it possible for them to render a general verdict? …

Since, then, the jury have a right to consider the law, and since the Constitution is law,

the conclusion is certainly syllogistic, that the jury have a right to consider the

Constitution.” Chase declared the argument a non-sequitur. After he interrupted

Callender’s chief attorney, George Hay, “Mr. Hay folded up and put away his papers,

seeming to decline any further argument.” When Chase assured Hay “that you will not be

interrupted by me, say what you will,” Hay refused to continue. Chase then engaged in a

final interminable speech reiterating his previous arguments and summing up his refusal

to accept the argument of the law’s unconstitutionality: “I draw this conclusion, that the

judicial power of the United States [ie, the Supreme Court] is the only proper and

competent authority to decide whether any statute made by Congress (or any of the state

legislatures) is contrary to, or in violation of, the Federal Constitution.”113

Despite their spirited attempts, the Republican attorneys knew they had little

chance of actually achieving the destruction of the hated act in Samuel Chase’s

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courtroom. Rather, their intention was to make the inevitable Federalist victory as Pyrrhic

as possible. To that end, the defense counsel relentlessly repeated their arguments against

the act, hoping to hammer them into the public record while agitating the easily excitable

Justice Chase. Chase bore well-nursed antipathy and condescension toward Virginia’s

legal establishment; the defense counsel believed this contempt would inevitably

dominate public perception of both the trial and of the Federalists as a whole.

Samuel Chase did not disappoint. From start to finish, the trial was a tumultuous,

rancorous event. The Supreme Court Justice’s performance was so astonishing that a

historian decades later would observe of him, “[His] peculiar recklessness of manner

during the trial, can only be explained on the principle that…he was determined to do all

that he could do, to humiliate and degrade the spirited bar which was called around

him.”114 Chase repeatedly interrupted, lectured, and belittled Callender’s Virginia

lawyers. The defense counsel had marshaled their message and motives into a single,

tightly focused line of argumentation designed to seize the moral high ground while

waiting on Chase to inevitably explode. He did soon enough, issuing a scathing final

condemnation of the Virginia legal team as “disrespectful, irritating, and highly

incorrect.”115 A number of witnesses the defense counsel expected to call found their

testimony ruled inadmissible from the bench. Near the end of the trial, Callender’s

counsel staged a melodramatic walkout in protest of their treatment before Chase’s

court.116 Although such a demonstration did nothing for Callender, it handed the

Democratic-Republicans the moral weather gauge in the overall battle for the Sedition

Act’s destruction.

To no one’s surprise Chase’s jury, after a two-hour deliberation, found Callender

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guilty of both charges under the Sedition Act. The unfortunate journalist, who had not

uttered one word in his own defense at the trial, entered the Richmond prison on June 3,

1800, to serve his sentence.117 For Chase, the victory proved truly Pyrrhic: in 1804, the

now-Democratic-Republican House served Chase with eight articles of impeachment,

including two that related directly to his handling of the Callender case.118 The

Democratic-Republicans predictably flogged Chase in print, damning him as

“ungenerous and relentless” and his actions as “extremely reprehensible.”119 Callender’s

old newspaper, the Philadelphia Aurora, was even more strident: “Cursed of thy father,

scum of all that’s base / Thy sight is odious and thy name is [Chase].”120

7. “The kennel of servility” – Imprisonment and the Fall from Jefferson’s Grace

Callender, loaded with a $200 fine, found himself in the Richmond Jail, the last

victim of the Sedition Act. If the Federalists believed prison would silence his pen,

however, the redoubtable Republican proved their hopes in vain. From prison, he

continued work on the second volume of The Prospect Before Us, adding Samuel Chase

to his list of targets. He blasted the Supreme Court Justice as “the most detestable and

detested rascal in the state of Maryland.”121 When Chase, in a direct letter to Callender

that has not survived, threatened to physically beat the journalist in retaliation, Callender

ferociously declared, “I have advertised that, in case of an attack, I’ll shoot him.”122

Prison also failed to slow his steady flow of correspondence to Jefferson, but

intimations of future troubles began to filter in. Callender’s lengthy letter dated October

11, 1800, indicated that “for some time past,” he had “regularly sent to you

[Jefferson]…the Sheets of the 2d volume of The Prospect…[and] although neither the

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stile nor matter could be exactly conformable to your ideas, or taste, yet that upon the

whole they would not be disagreeable.” Somewhat unhappily, however, Callender noted,

“[w]hether I was right or wrong, or whether indeed you received my letters, I do not

know.” He concluded with a similar petition: “I should be much obliged to you for

sending me a few lines, at first or second hand, merely to let me know that the packets

have, or have not, reached you…. I by no means, wish to take up time devoted to

purposes so much more important, but just a few lines, if not improper, would be very

welcome.”123 Despite these plaintive solicitations, Jefferson did not reply.

Later in October, Callender, perhaps beginning to feel a chill of anxiety, offered

his first hints toward what he hoped to gain for his service to Jefferson and the

Democratic-Republican Party. “Certainly,” he argued, “a people thus buried in the kennel

of servility require very much the aid of a political apostle,” and that apostle was Thomas

Jefferson. The newspaperman then laid out a brief plan by which he could assist Jefferson

once free: “I have contemplated, for some time, the setting up, next summer, or autumn, a

printing office in Richmond providing we succeed in turning out the aristocracy.” Such a

press “would not only get the work much more easily, and thankfully, but much more

cheaply done.” For a tidy sum of “2 or 300 dollars,” Callender would purchase a press

and set about continuing his crusade on Jefferson’s behalf.124 The imprisoned

propagandist also included a brief calculation of the profits he expected to reap from this

new venture. Callender arguably expected Jefferson to offer a loan “2 or 300 dollars” to

get the new press started, after which Callender would repay him out of the new

publications’ profits.

Once again, Jefferson did not answer. The vice president had earlier implied that

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the postal service was reading his letters and that eventually he would be forced to stop

sending them altogether.125 Now he appeared to be fulfilling that promise. Here, the Sage

of Monticello’s careful scheming came once more to the fore. Far from stopping his letter

writing altogether, Jefferson was writing and campaigning like never before. Unlike

1796, candidate Jefferson made extensive use of friends and special messengers to stay in

touch with key supporters and allies throughout his political circles.126

Toward Callender, however, Jefferson was rapidly cooling, and the inevitable gulf

between the two was widening rapidly. Between November 1, 1800, and January 9, 1801,

four brief letters passed from Callender to Jefferson, accompanied by excerpts of the

Prospect’s second volume and other miscellaneous newspaper writings. Callender

received no indication Jefferson read or even received the letters or their accompanying

documents.127 In all, the jailed propagandist sent nineteen consecutive unanswered letters

from October 1799 through his term of imprisonment. In such an epistolary age as the

early Republic, this treatment was a literally complete social break between the two men.

Moreover, the hollowness of Jefferson’s threat to cease letter-writing altogether must be

noted. As the Vice President of the United States and a man of many social connections,

Jefferson was for many reasons unable to carry out such a threat even had he actually

wanted to. Jefferson arguably had good reasons for wanting to distance himself from any

further association with the journalist. Callender had, after all, had played a major role in

leading the Democratic Republicans into an utter disaster in the XYZ Affair and had

shown himself to be an unreliable hothead. The journalist, nonetheless, continued to lay

hopes on the strength of his bond with his former friend.

In late January, Callender again wrote from his Richmond jail cell, this time more

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insistently direct: “I wish to be freed from this cramped stile of publication; and for that

purpose, I mentioned some time ago to General [Stevens] Mason a berth which I want to

apply for to the new President.”128 The “berth” Callender sought was likely the printing

press he had already mentioned to Jefferson in October. He concluded with a restatement

of his faith in Jefferson: “I place unlimited confidence both in the sincerity of your good

wishes for me, and in the correctness of your judgment, which, for reasons that I have not

adverted to, may probably differ from mine.”129 The direct, unambiguous nature of

Callender’s appeal likely signaled the deepening anxiety that must have begun preying on

his mind, tempered nonetheless with confidence in Jefferson’s character and

remembrance. The old flame of Callender’s faith still burned bright, but a chill wind was

blowing north from Washington, D.C., that would soon snuff it out.

On February 17, 1801, the House of Representatives voted to hand Thomas

Jefferson the Presidency of the United States. That a Democratic-Republican would hold

the Chief Executive’s office was not in doubt—the question was simply one of which

Republican: Jefferson or his Vice-Presidential candidate, Aaron Burr.130 Despite fighting

the election valiantly, John Adams had suffered a major defeat to his own vice president,

and the post-election wrangling centered on untangling the Electoral College vote

between Jefferson and Burr, with Adams going down to certain defeat. In the

background, the Federalist majority in the Senate was destroyed, while the Republican

majority in the House of Representatives increased dramatically. The Republicans had

swept into office on a wave of public discontent with the Federalists, and chief among

that discontent was the polarizing Sedition Act. Callender’s trial had helped galvanize the

public against Adams and the draconian measures the Federalists had taken to protect

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their administration from opposition. The suppression of the Republican press had played

an enormous role in delivering Virginia’s 21 and New York’s 12 votes in the Electoral

College to Jefferson. The newly minted president’s star shone brighter than ever,

burnished in part with the real personal sacrifice James Thomson Callender made on his

behalf.

As the District of Columbia prepared to welcome the nation’s third Chief

Executive, Callender waited in the darkness of his Richmond cell for release. He still

owed the $200 fine imposed on him after his trial. To Jefferson, he poured out his

anxieties this imposition caused him: “I am to get out of this place in ten days, upon my

having paid a fine of two hundred dollars. The money is ready; but if I am to pay it, I

shall be so much reduced in my finances, as hardly able to go to Philadelphia.”131 He then

made clear to Jefferson the reason for his parlous finances: “I should not have been so

bare of money, but that I paid for the print and paper of the two pamphlets [the Prospect

and one other] you have seen.”132 Callender then plaintively recorded his decision “to

state the matter to you, with reference to a remission.”133

The train of correspondence stretching from Callender’s first forays into pro-

Jeffersonian propaganda to these final pleadings for financial assistance presents a simple

but fundamental question: were Callender and Jefferson truly collaborators, or did

Callender’s admittedly fevered imagination conjure up a friendship where none existed?

With the evidence fully laid out, these questions deserve careful consideration. On the

one hand, Jefferson did unilaterally and completely terminate all correspondence with

Callender in October 1799, as the journalist was preparing to unleash his Prospect Before

Us in a potentially damaging (for Jefferson) blitzkrieg of anti-Adams propaganda. The

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prospect before Jefferson—association with this incendiary man and even potential

implication in his piece of seditious libel—may have been unbearably risky to the

reclusive Virginian. If the two men had never been friends or even political

acquaintances, dumping Callender would have been a relatively simple decision for

Jefferson. This interpretation remains appealing, especially for scholars seeking to

present Callender as an unreliable, politically-motivated smear artist.134

Having extensively viewed and discussed virtually all of the evidence connecting

the two men up to the eve of Callender’s “betrayal,” however, the argument for a

collaborative relationship between the pair remains based on important observations.

Jefferson played an active role in financing and distributing Callender’s work, and even

leaked documents to the journalist on one occasion. Significantly, Jefferson did not

correspond with any other journalist to the extent that he did with Callender. Although

other names, including those of Republican journalists and Callender’s old cohorts at the

Aurora William Duane and Benjamin Franklin Bache, appear from time to time in

correspondence, Callender was the lone journalist to whom Jefferson actively handed

cash and documents. This distinction alone is a powerful argument in favor of viewing

Callender and Jefferson as, at the least, temporary allies who recognized each other’s

political value.

For Callender’s part, his writings made clear from the beginning of his time in

America that he viewed Jefferson as an apostle of radical republicanism and a bastion of

Francophilia in the United States. That Jefferson himself was aristocratic and a

slaveholder to boot was immaterial to the zealously devoted Callender. The journalist’s

devotion to Jefferson matched his antipathy toward the Federalists and their pro-British

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tendencies. This factor was another ideological link strengthening Callender’s

connections to Jefferson. The two men were vastly different and their collaboration was

short-lived, but while it lasted, Callender played a real role in propelling the reclusive

Jefferson to the heights of power—and his assistance grew out of a real sense of shared

purpose between the two.

By 1801, however, Jefferson’s shift away from radical republicanism, coupled

with Callender’s own egregious mistakes in the XYZ Affair and continued tendencies

toward extremist rhetoric, had driven a wedge between the two. Moreover, the simple

reality was that Jefferson no longer needed Callender or the journalist’s now-annoying

tendency to rock the political boat. What the new president wanted was stability from

which to take advantage of his party’s enormous victory in 1800. He would likely have

been happy for Callender to step aside quietly, recognizing the achievement of what had,

after all, been a central goal of the journalist himself: Jefferson’s election.

Unfortunately, Callender’s situation would not allow him to merely ride into the

sunset. He had incurred a massive financial obligation in being the monkey’s paw for the

Democratic Republicans against the Sedition Act, and his prospects for future careers

were, to say the least, dim. Out of the depths of his prison cell, he had called for help one

last time to his political idol. In light of his service to the Democratic Republicans and to

Jefferson personally, the journalist’s request was a reasonable one that should have

caused Jefferson little inconvenience or trouble. Instead, it would be the beginning of the

end, the prelude to an enduring scandal and the last act of Callender’s life.

144
 NOTES

Abbreviations used in the notes:

JM: The Papers of James Monroe: Selected Correspondence and Papers, 1796-1802.
Edited by Daniel Preston, et al. 4 volumes. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2012.

TJ: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Julian P. Boyd, et al. 38 volumes to date.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–.

WCF: Thomas Jefferson and James Thomson Callender: 1798-1802. Edited by

Worthington Chauncey Ford. Brooklyn: Historical Printing Club, 1897.
1
Ralph Adams Brown, The Presidency of John Adams (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1975), 57.
2
Some historians have opted to make much of this “paranoia,” seeming to argue that the
Federalists were primarily concerned with the maintenance of their power and the
concomitant social order sustaining that power. In Perilous Times: Free Speech in
Wartime, From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2004), law professor Geoffrey R. Stone argues that “A central mission of the
Federalist Party was to save the nation from the perils of democracy…. Republicans, by
contrast, held an ardent faith in popular government. They feared tyranny more than
anarchy, and valued liberty more than security” (25). Moreover, Stone argues that the
Federalists stoked the fire of war paranoia as a means of suppressing the Republicans’
“ardent faith” in popular government, with the result that “in this atmosphere, the
nation’s commitment to civil liberties was quickly rationalized out of existence” (25).
The merits of this rather idealistic characterization of a political party based in the
slaveholding, plantation South are, at the least, questionable. James Morton Smith’s
earlier Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Liberties (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1956), in a small insidious analogy, also casts the Federalists in
an anti-democratic, power-hungry light: after discussing the Federalists’ commitment to
property rights and stability as the primary ends of government, Smith goes on to argue
that the Republicans, by way of contrast, were “dedicated to the proposition that all men
are created equal. Fearing tyranny, they stressed liberty and the pursuit of happiness,
rather than authority and security” (10-11). This contention appears to ignore one obvious
fact: the Republicans counted the majority of slaveholders between two parties. Most
importantly, what these two (of many) examples demonstrate is a prevalent bias against
the Federalists that seeks to cast their motivations in the worst of lights. Scholars,
however, should also remember that John Adams took power at a time when the nation’s
future was by no means secure, and in a geopolitical climate in which threats to the
republic’s survival menaced from all sides. While preservation of power was and remains
one of the oldest ends of political activity, objective scholarship should not be so quick to
fall into generalizations that comfortably fit with the present’s comfortable, preconceived
ideas of what forms “acceptable” or “correct” political motivations and activities. No less
a figure than John Locke, the father of political liberalism, would have found much to
defend in the Federalists’ philosophy of government: “Political power [is] a right of
145
making laws…for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force
of the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defense of the commonwealth
from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good” (Civil Government [The First
Treatise of Government], Chapter I.3, in Saxe Commins and Robert N. Linscott, eds., The
World’s Great Thinkers, Man and the State: The Political Philosophers (New York:
Random House, 1947), 58).
3
The Constitution originally decreed, “The Person having the greatest Number of Votes
shall be the President…. [A]fter the Choice of the President, the Person having the
greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President.” The Twelfth
Amendment (1804) was passed to update this framework after the rise of a fiercely
partisan political system in the late 1790s-early 1800s. Adams, in the republic’s third
presidential election, won by three electoral votes. Geoffrey Stone attempts to imply that
some of Adams’s actions were designed to put this narrow margin of victory behind him:
“With the approach of war, the man who had won the presidency by only three electoral
votes became a national hero. Whenever he appeared in public, he was greeted with
huzzas. The nation was on war footing” (Stone, Perilous Times, 23).
4
Obviously these were not the only reasons for division along such lines. The Federalists
had organized to support the ratification of the Constitution in 1787, and generally served
as advocates for a strong, centralized national government; the Democratic-Republicans
arose out of Thomas Jefferson’s belief in the U.S. as an agrarian utopia—the Republicans
also generally favored devolution of powers to the states in a manner reminiscent of the
Articles of Confederation. The British/French divide did, however, help accelerate and
cement these divisions. By the turn into the nineteenth century, foreign policy concerns
had come to dominate the identifications of the parties’ members.
5
So great was Federalist hatred for France (and Thomas Jefferson) that during the debate
over whether or not to accept Jefferson’s offer of his personal library to Congress as a
replacement for the one the British burned in 1814, Federalist Cyrus King of
Massachusetts strenuously objected to Jefferson’s proposed gift. The library was
unacceptable, King reasoned, because “it might be inferred from the character of the man
who collected it, and France…that the library contained irreligious and immoral works.”
Even more offensive to King, among the books were “works of the French philosophers,
who caused and influenced the volcano of the French Revolution which had desolated
Europe and extended to this country.” Cited in Mark Dimunation, “’The Whole of
Recorded Knowledge’: Jefferson as Collector,” in Robert C. Baron and Conrad Edick
Wright, eds., The Libraries, Leadership, and Legacy of John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson (Golden: Fulcrum Publishing, 2010), 22; 27-28.
6
Michael Durey, “With the Hammer of Truth”: James Thomson Callender and
America’s Early National Heroes (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990),
103. The original source for this quotation is unclear.
7
James Thomson Callender to Thomas Jefferson, September 28, 1797, TJ: 29:536-37.
8
Ibid. There is no documentation of Jefferson’s reply or decision to grant the money
requested, but the continued stream of Callender’s correspondence with the Vice
President and Jefferson’s later enthusiastic backing of The Prospect Before Us seems to
suggest that he likely obliged.

146
9
Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009) offers an account of this turbulent moment in its
seventh chapter: “The Crisis of 1798-1799.”
10
The XYZ Affair lacks a comprehensive historiography, but Alexander DeConde’s The
Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966) offers a good introduction. Because the XYZ Affair led
directly to the naval Quasi-War, most histories of the U.S. Navy also treat the affair in an
introductory manner (see note 33 below).
11
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, April 26, 1798, TJ, 30:299-302.
12
Durey, With the Hammer, 106. Again, the source for this quotation is unclear, even
after an extensive search of the Jefferson and Madison papers for the relevant time
period.
13
Philadelphia Aurora, March 21, 1798.
14
William Safire, Scandalmonger (Simon and Schuster, 2000), 103-104.
15
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Philadelphia, March 21, 1798, TJ: 30:191-92.
16
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, Philadelphia, March 21, 1798, TJ: 30: 189-191.
17
Ibid.
18
James Grant, in John Adams: Party of One (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
2005), argues, “Vice President Jefferson was advising the French consul general to the
United States, Joseph Letombe, on how best to foil President Adams’s envoys.
Temporize, counseled Jefferson; the longer the negotiations dragged on, the better it
would be, for both France and for the American friends of France” (389). What
correspondence exists to substantiate this rather bold claim of subversion, however, is
unclear from the book or its notes. Two factors render this scenario unlikely: first, the
failure of the negotiations took the Democratic-Republicans almost totally by surprise;
second, Jefferson’s well-recorded correspondence only records one letter from the vice
president to the consul general: a request for a passport for one of Jefferson’s friends.
19
Philadelphia Aurora, March 23, 1798.
20
James Thomson Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Philadelphia, March 21, 1798, TJ:
30:188-89.
21
U.S. Congress. Annals of the Congress of the United States. 5th Congress, 2nd session,
1798. 3717. These were half of Joshua Humphreys’s original six heavy, or “super,”
frigates—the nucleus of the United States Navy.
22
Philadelphia Aurora, March 28, 1798.
23
Philadelphia Aurora, April 2, 1798.
24
Philadelphia Aurora, April 4, 1798.
25
Ibid.
26
Philadelphia Aurora, April 6, 1798.
27
Philadelphia Aurora, April 7, 1798. Emphasis added.
28
Philadelphia Aurora, April 9, 1798.
29
Ibid.
30
Secretary of War James McHenry to the Honorable Samuel Sewall, Chairman of the
Committee for the Protection of Commerce and Defence of the Country of the House of
Representatives, Philadelphia, April 9, 1798; quoted in Charles Washington

147
Goldsborough, ed., The United States’ Naval Chronicle, Vol. 1 (J. Wilson, 1824), 82-83.
Emphasis added.
31
Philadelphia Aurora, April 13, 1798.
32
Ibid.
33
The U.S. Navy traced its lineage back to the Continental Navy of 1775-1783, but
Congress dissolved that force at the war’s end when it sold off all the ships and released
all sailors and officers from their obligations. It is often erroneously believed that this
defunct force was the first U.S. Navy, but in fact it was not. The United States
government as an organized state did not exist until 1787 with the ratification of the
Constitution, an act that brought the “United States of America” into de jure existence.
Thus, a fighting force called the “United States Navy” did not exist. until the
establishment of the Department of the Navy on April 30, 1798. For excellent accounts of
the U.S. Navy’s fiery baptism in the Quasi-War (which was totally maritime in nature),
see also Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793-1815 (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2007); George C. Daughan, If By Sea: The Forging of the American
Navy—From the Revolution to the War of 1812 (New York: Basic Books, 2008); and Ian
Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2006). Toll’s work also recounts an interesting incident in 1796 in which
Benjamin Franklin Bache, the editor of the Aurora and Callender’s immediate superior,
was invited aboard the USS United States, then under construction. Staunch Federalist
Joshua Humphreys, the frigate’s designer, was an object of considerable scorn and
contempt in the pages of Bache’s Aurora, and his son, Clement Humphreys, took this
opportunity to exact revenge. While admiring the view from the stern windows of the
captain’s cabin, Bache was violently beaten by a gang of “12 or 15 workmen” in “an act
of cowardly assassination” perpetrated by “HUMPHREYS, son of the builder of the
frigate” (75). It is unlikely that the editor or his friends would have forgotten this incident
a year later, when the elder Humphreys’s ships were being called into service at the
behest of President Adams for a possible war against France. The standard work on the
political background and diplomatic aspect of the Quasi-War is Alexander DeConde’s
The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France, 1797-
1801 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966).
34
The Federalists undoubtedly looked to the British Parliament, which in 1795 passed the
Seditious Meetings and Treason acts to curb unauthorized assemblies and to protect the
person and dignity of the monarch. The ban on meetings was a direct response to the
presence of Jacobin partisans in England and the Parliament’s fear of a French-style
revolution taking root on the island. The Treason Act came out of an attempt of a crowd
to attack King George III during the State Opening of Parliament. Jeffrey A. Smith’s
Printers and Press Freedom: The Ideology of Early American Journalism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988) offers a brief discussion on the links between these two
sets of sedition acts in its fifth chapter (84).
35
Gazette of the United States, April 24, 1798.
36
Ibid.
37
Congress, House, An Act supplementary to and to amend the act, intituled “An act to
establish an uniform rule of naturalization; and to repeal the act heretofore passed on
that subject,” 5th Congress, 2nd Session, 18 June 1798. The Naturalization Act was
148
actually an amendment to the previous piece of legislation referenced in its title. That act,
“to establish an uniform rule of Naturlization,” was itself a 1795 revision of an even older
act from March 1790. What a reading of these three successive acts demonstrates is the
degree to which immigration into the United States was gradually tightened amid
increasing fears that the new nation would be swamped with refugees of all sorts from
Europe. Thus, in 1790, two years’ residency in the United States was sufficient to
establish citizenship. By 1795, that time span had increased to five years, and the 1798
act drove the required residency period up to a mind-boggling fourteen years (the five
most recent of which had to be spent in the same state or territory), theoretically making
some individuals who had come to the United States before the adoption of the
Constitution ineligible for citizenship. The act attempted to exempt such individuals with
provisions for grandfathering in citizens under the 1795 statute, but the provision was
subjective and itself designed to exclude individuals the Federalists deemed undesirable
with the following clause: “no alien, who shall be a native, citizen, denizen or subject of
any nation or state with whom the United States shall be at war [i.e., France], at the time
of his application, shall be then admitted to become a citizen of the United States”
(emphasis added). The residency requirement alone was a fatal demand for many
itinerate immigrants.
38
Congress, House, An act concerning Aliens, 5th Congress, 2nd Session, 25 June 1798.
39
James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, May 20, 1798, TJ: 30:358-60.
40
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, June 14, 1798, TJ: 30:408-09.
41
It would be these states as well who, so disenchanted with the Democratic-Republican
ascendancy and “Mr. Madison’s war,” would go on to ignite the first real secessionist
crisis in the Union at the Hartford Convention in 1814. Thomas Jefferson offered an
interesting, if unintentional, comment on this already rapidly-evolving divide between
North and South in a letter to John Taylor on June 4, 1798, warning against too radical a
division: “[I]f to rid ourselves of the present rule of Massachusets [sic] and Connecticut,
we break the union, will the evil stop there? … [A]re we not men still to the South…?”
42
Richard Sewall—in his magisterial Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1980)—points out, for example, that the family of Emily Dickinson in
Amherst, Massachusetts, traced its lineage to John Winthrop’s 1630 “Great Migration”—
and the Dickinson clan was by no means an exception among families and genealogies
(xiii-xiv).
43
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, June 7, 1798, TJ: 30:393-95.
44
Philadelphia Aurora, June 13, 1798.
45
Ibid.
46
Gazette of the United States, June 27, 1798.
47
Ibid. As Ira Stoll points out in his Samuel Adams: A Life (New York: The Free Press,
2008), pseudonyms in early newspapers usually carried some degree of weight and were
chosen for specific reasons (Samuel Adams, for example, writing under the name
“Vindex”—a Roman senator who led a revolt against the tyranny of the emperor Nero). It
is unclear who “Pliny” really was, but the choice of this name—which could refer to two
historical people—is an interesting side-note given the controversy and debate both in the
1790s and beyond regarding Jefferson’s religion. Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the
Elder), commander of the Roman Navy, died in AD 79 during the eruption of Mount
149
Vesuvius. In his only surviving work, the Natural History, he controversially claimed
that “I think it is a sign of human weakness to try and find out the shape and form of
God,” a Deist worldview that Jefferson likely held as well. Pliny’s nephew, Gaius Plinius
Luci (Pliny the Younger), left behind a meticulous selection of his personal
correspondence that is perhaps most well-known for its descriptions of the younger
Pliny’s persecution of a then-emerging religious cult in the far reaches of the Empire:
Christianity. “Pliny,” in both cases, was thus associated to some degree with an
agnostic/deist perspective Jefferson (and others, including Thomas Paine) held and
endured some degree of opprobrium for. Perhaps “Pliny,” appearing in the guise of a
“friend,” was attempting to demonstrate a connection between Jefferson and these two
early-humanist Romans. See also Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., Prelude to Revolution: The
Newspaper War on Britain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 35, 61; Pliny the Elder,
trans. John F. Healy, Natural History: A Selection (New York: Penguin, 1991), 12; Pliny
the Younger, trans. Betty Radice, The Letters of the Younger Pliny (New York: Penguin,
1963), 293-95.
48
Richard N. Rosenfeld, American Aurora: A Democratic Republican Returns (New
York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997), 172. Emphasis added.
49
Ibid. The last two acts—the Alien Enemies and Sedition acts—expanded the
president’s power to deport citizens of belligerent nations and restrain the press,
respectively.
50
Philadelphia Aurora, June 28, 1798.
51
Congress, House, An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes against the United
States, 5th Congress, 2nd Session, 14 July 1798.
52
Congress, House, An Act further to protect the commerce of the United States, 5th
Congress, 2nd Session, 9 July 1798.
53
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Philadelphia, September 22, 1798, TJ: 30:521-
23.
54
Thomas Jefferson to James Callender, Monticello, October 18, 1798, TJ: 30:558-59.
55
Thomas Jefferson to Stevens Mason, Philadelphia, October 11, 1798, TJ: 30:559-60,
emphasis added.
56
Durey discusses this incident, but apparently Callender was not sufficiently alarmed to
raise it with Jefferson. The brief tumult may have emboldened Callender, convincing him
that despite the failures and difficulties of the past few months, he still had the ability to
evoke severe and extreme reactions from his opponents.
57
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Raspberry Plain, November 19, 1798, TJ:
30:580-85.
58
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, August 10, 1799, TJ: 31:163-65.
59
Thomas Jefferson to James Callender, Monticello, September 6, 1799, TJ: 31:179-82.
60
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, September 26, 1799, WCF: 17-18.
61
Thomas Jefferson to James Callender, Monticello, October 6, 1799, TJ: 31:200-202.
62
Ibid.
63
At precisely the time Jefferson was informing Callender that he was contemplating
winding down his correspondence, his actual volume of letters was on the dramatic
increase. In Princeton’s Papers of Thomas Jefferson, for example, all of Jefferson’s
correspondence and other documents for the years 1794-96 fit into a single volume (Vol.
150
28). By 1801, the volume had increased such that vols. 32-36 are necessary to encompass
his papers from that year. Even after taking into account the presence of non-
correspondence documents in these volumes, the amount of Jefferson’s correspondence
remains staggeringly large.
64
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Washington, May 29, 1801, JM: 4:516-17,
emphasis added.
65
On October 7, Callender’s letter indicated he was sending Jefferson eight more sample
pages from the Prospect to go along with the eight he had sent previously. Another
sixteen pages followed on November 18, and a letter dated December 13 references
Callender’s plan to “take the freedom of sending you 50 or 60 additional pages of the
Prospect” alongside copies of the Examiner. In all, Jefferson received at least one
hundred sample pages from Callender’s explosive new work.
66
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, November 16, 1799, TJ: 31:238-39.
67
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, February 15, 1800, TJ: 31:376-77.
68
This statement is not meant as a pejorative condemnation of Jefferson’s character. He
was a worldly, learned man who, like most worldly, learned men, was also ambitious in a
culture that discouraged outward shows of ambitiousness. To that end, it should surprise
no one that he often worked to advance his own interest, even at the expense of lesser
individuals like James Thomson Callender. That this facet of human character is arguably
timeless (and therefore not unique to “dead white men”) is amply demonstrated in some
of the world’s oldest extant literature: Aesop’s fable of the cat’s paw.
69
Richmond Examiner, February 11, 1800.
70
Durey, With the Hammer, 123. Adams’s reaction to this bit of daring political
provocation is not recorded.
71
James Morton Smith, “Sedition in the Old Dominion: James T. Callender and The
Prospect Before Us.” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May 1954), p.
163. Hereafter referenced as Smith, “Sedition.”
72
James Thomson Callender, The Prospect Before Us, vol. 1 (Richmond: M. Jones, S.
Pleasants, Jun., and J. Lyon, 1800), 1. Actual copies of this book are extremely difficult
to come by. All page numbers here correspond to the Eighteenth Century Collections
Online edition of the first volume, which is a direct facsimile taken from microfilm of the
original document at the Library of Congress. All page numbers for the second volume
correspond to the microfilmed edition created under the aegis of the American
Antiquarian Society. The inability to acquire the complete, two-volume work in one form
or the other is curious and warrants future attention. Hereafter referenced as Prospect,
vol. x.
73
The Prospect Before Us specifically challenged the Sedition Act’s proscription against
“any person [who] shall write, print, utter or publish…any…scandalous and malicious
writing or writings against…the President of the United States, with intent to
defame…the said President….”
74
Callender, Prospect, vol. 1, 3-4, 23-25, 28.
75
Ibid., 84.
76
By contrast, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was only forty-six pages in length.
77
Callender, Prospect, vol. 1, 120.
78
Ibid., 141.
151
79
Ibid., 105.
80
James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American
Civil Liberties (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956), 185-86. The number of original
arrests tends to fluctuate between 14 and 25: under the Alien and Sedition Acts as a
whole, 25 arrests were made, 14 of which were specifically under the Sedition Act.
81
This interpretation is the one taken in Smith, Freedom’s Fetters; and John C. Miller,
Crisis in Freedom (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1951); and Stone, Perilous Times.
82
Richard N. Rosenfeld, American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns (New
York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), 112.
83
Ibid., 810.
84
James Ross, Observations on the Alien and Sedition Laws, &c. (Colerick, Pa., 1799),
38.
85
Ibid., 38. Governments are people, too!
86
Ibid., 39.
87
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, March 10, 1800, TJ: 31:427-28.
88
Durey, With the Hammer, 126.
89
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, March 14, 1800, TJ: 31:432-33.
90
Richmond Examiner, May 2, 1800.
91
Richmond Examiner, May 9, 1800.
92
Samuel Chase to James McHenry, Baltimore, December 4, 1798, cited in Maeva
Marcus and James R. Perry, eds., A Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the
United States, 1789-1800: Vol. 3: The Justices on Circuit, 1795-1800 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990), 403.
93
Testimony of John Thomson Mason, taken in Trial of Samuel Chase, An Associate
Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Impeached by the House of
Representatives. For High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Before the Senate of the United
States. Taken in Short-Hand by Samuel H. Smith and Thomas Lloyd, Volume I
(Washington: Samuel H. Smith, 1805), 193. Hereafter referenced as Chase Trial, Volume
I (Smith and Lloyd).
94
Ibid., 193.
95
Ibid., 193.
96
Testimony of Luther Martin, in Chase Trial, Volume I (Smith and Lloyd), 233.
97
Ibid., 233.
98
U.S. v. Callender, Indictment, in Report of the Trial of the Honorable Samuel Chase,
One of the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, Before the High
Court of Impeachment, Composed of the Senate of the United States, for Charges
Exhibited Against Him by the House of Representatives, In the name of themselves, and
of all the People of the United States, for High Crimes & Misdemeanors, Supposed to
Have Been By Him Committed, taken in short hand, by Charles Evans (Baltimore:
Samuel Butler and George Keatings, 1805), Appendix, 48. This book appears materially
different from the two-volume report of the trial taken in shorthand by Samuel Smith and
Thomas Lloyd. Hereafter referenced as Chase Trial (Evans).
99
Chase Trial (Evans), Appendix, 48. Emphasis in original.
100
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Philadelphia, March 26, 1800, JM: 4:354-55.
101
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Philadelphia, April 13, 1800, JM: 4:361.
152
102
James Monroe to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, May 25, 1800, JM: 4:372-73.
103
Ibid.
104
Ibid.; Durey, 130.
105
Durey, 130; This theory is Durey’s. He argues as well that Jefferson did not to become
too closely associated with Callender lest popular agitation in Callender’s favor swell out
of control and discredit all those linked to him.
106
Durey, 132.
107
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Eppington, May 26, 1800, JM: 4:373.
108
Durey, 134.
109
Francis Wharton, State Trials of the United States During the Administrations of
Washington and Adams. With References, Historical and Professional, and Preliminary
Notes on the Politics of the Times (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1849), 692.
110
Wharton, State Trials, 694-95.
111
Ibid., 695.
112
Ibid., 695, 709-10, 712.
113
Ibid., 710, 712, 716.
114
Ibid., 718fn. Wharton’s “footnote” is a generously-sized essay nearly three pages in
length recounting Chase’s “coarse manner” and condescending, even grandstanding
approach to the Virginian courtroom.
115
Ibid., 694-95.
116
Smith, “Sedition,” 174-76.
117
Ibid., 178n.
118
Although the Republican-controlled Senate declined to convict him, Samuel Chase
remains the only Supreme Court Justice ever impeached. Importantly (for historians),
Chase’s impeachment trial necessitated a reexamination of his conduct in the Callender
case, with the result that the transcripts of Chase’s trial have provided a sound material
record of Callender’s own trial—an event that was not documented with anything
approaching the exhaustiveness of Chase’s impeachment proceedings.
119
Richmond Examiner, June 6, 1800.
120
Philadelphia Aurora, August 8, 1800. The couplet was left deliberately “unfinished.”
121
James T. Callender, The Prospect Before Us, vol. 2, p. 47.
122
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond Jail, October 27, 1800, TJ: 32:236-
37.
123
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, October 11, 1800, TJ: 32:211-213.
124
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, October 1800, WCF: 29; no day is
given in the original, but given its place in the collection, the letter was likely sent
between October 11 and October 27, 1800.
125
See Jefferson to Callender, Monticello, October 6, 1799, quoted above (TJ: 31:200-
202).
126
Durey, With the Hammer, 139. It is also worth informally noting that from the point
Jefferson announced he would contemplate ceasing correspondence altogether in October
1799, to mid-February 1801, the Papers of Thomas Jefferson (ed. Barbara Oberg, et al.)
encompasses two volumes and over 1,500 pages of correspondence between the Vice
President and others.

153
127
The letters’ inclusion in the Papers of Thomas Jefferson would seem to suggest that
Jefferson at least received them, but whether or not they were read is an entirely different
(and unanswerable) question.
128
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, January 23, 1801, WCF: 31-32.
129
Ibid.
130
See also note 3. The election of 1800 remains one of the hardest-fought presidential
contests in American history, comparable to Rutherford B. Hayes v. Samuel Tilden
(1876) and George W. Bush v. Albert Gore, Jr. (2000). For excellent sources on the
broader electoral panorama in 1799-1801, see John Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson: The
Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); James Roger
Sharp, The Deadlocked Election of 1800: Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance
(Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2010); Chapter 10 of Andrew Burstein and
Nancy Isenberg, Madison and Jefferson (New York: Random House, 2010); Chapter 8 of
Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Part VII (chapters 27-31) of Jon Meacham,
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York: Random House, 2012).
131
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, February 23, 1801, TJ: 33:46-48.
132
Ibid. This particular sentence was a direct reminder to Jefferson that much of
Callender’s financial hardship was derived from the expenses he had incurred in
Jefferson’s support—a factor in this situation much previous historical scholarship has
either marginalized or outright ignored.
133
Ibid.
134
The two landmark works on the Sedition Act—Miller’s Crisis in Freedom and
Smith’s Freedom’s Fetters—espouse this rationalization for the relationship between
Callender and Jefferson. Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson likewise marginalize
Callender and his connection with Jefferson. Even Annette Gordon-Reed, in her 1997
Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, while arguing for the
veracity of Callender’s accusations and his penchant for being accurate, contends that
Callender’s connection with Jefferson was tenuous at best and solely a relationship
between a wealthy man and a momentarily useful writer.

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 CHAPTER IV
SHARPER THAN A SERPENT’S TOOTH:
THE HEMINGS AFFAIR AND THE POLITICS OF BETRAYAL

1. “Betrayed by all parties” – Callender and the Jefferson Administration

Monday, March 2, 1801, was a busy day in the annals of American politics. That

morning, lame-duck President John Adams sent a message from the recently-completed

Executive Mansion down a muddy District of Columbia road to the half-finished Capitol

Building asking the Senate to ratify the Convention of Mortefontaine and end the

undeclared Quasi War between the United States and France. Adams, in his last twenty-

four hours as Chief Executive, was also busy mounting a last-ditch effort to preserve the

bureaucracy and power base his party had seeded and nourished through final

appointments to the federal judiciary, including that of an undistinguished Marylander

named William Marbury.1

Elsewhere, Vice President Thomas Jefferson was in town, ready and waiting for

his inauguration at twelve o’clock sharp on March 4.2 The Sage of Monticello and his

Democratic-Republican Party had won a landslide victory in the first truly contested

election in American political history. The Constitution’s process for allocating votes in

the Electoral College—designed before the rise of a partisan system the framers could not

have foreseen—had unexpectedly pitched Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr,

into a deadlocked election to be decided in the House of Representatives. After thirty-six

ballots and staunch opposition from many lame-duck Federalist congressmen, the tie was

broken, and in the eyes of Democratic-Republicans, the Apostle of American Democracy

now took power as its messiah.

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 Jefferson had sacrificed much to reach this point, exchanging his intense privacy

and penchant for seclusion for the trials and rigors of the public life he had consistently

shunned. The election had also severely damaged his longstanding friendship with that

formidable New England pairing: John and Abigail Adams. The protracted divisions

produced after the deadlocked election had shaken the party’s unity. March 2, however,

was the beginning of the Jeffersonian Moment, the culmination of his career and the

triumph of his party.

Amid the curious combination of triumph and sorrow in Washington, March 2

also found James Thomson Callender in Richmond, Virginia, where he was finally

leaving his prison cell as a free man. The journalist, his $200 fine paid with loans, the odd

charitable contribution, and from his own pocket, stepped out into a country his mentor,

Thomas Jefferson, and a strong Democratic-Republican majority in the Congress now

governed. The election of 1800 had dramatically realigned the nation’s political system,

much to Callender and his fellow radicals’ joy. However, at the same time the election

had reorganized the power structure within the Democratic-Republicans’ own ranks.

Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and others had become markedly more

moderate as their own accession to leadership became imminent. David McCullough, in

his biography John Adams, notes that Jefferson’s critics and exponents alike found their

predictions thwarted.3

The new president’s opponents, who believed his election amounted to the

probable collapse of the republic into anarchy, were surprised at the tone of moderation

he adopted from the outset of his administration. Likewise, his supporters, who hoped to

usher in a “second American revolution” with his election, were disappointed when he

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failed to maintain the radical populism that had catapulted him and the Democratic

Republican Party to prominence. The electoral campaign had required the new president

and his party to shed the more radicalized elements of the party faithful, and prominent

among those elements was the pen of James Callender.

The journalist, unaware of such a sea change within the ranks and mind of his

party and mentor, exited prison full of high hopes for his future. Besides the printing

press he hoped to open with Jefferson’s support,4 he had indicated to others his desire for

a lucrative patronage appointment to the Richmond postmastership. Thomas Leiper, a

fellow Scotsman and prominent Republican, wrote to Jefferson almost immediately after

Callender’s release regarding this new ambition: “James Thomson Callender is casting a

wishfull eye towards the Postmasters office at Richmond but he does not know how to go

about it…. I had no doubt but you would do something for him.”5

Indeed, Jefferson had great latitude in which to “do something” for Callender.

Within its first months, the new administration had dismissed hundreds of civil servants

solely on partisan grounds, as the Democratic-Republicans sought to replace as many

Federalist bureaucrats and judges as possible with their own men, thus breaking the

backbone of the Federalists’ power.6 Despite the aggressiveness of the administration in

appointing its own political hacks and hangers-on, however, Callender failed to benefit

one iota from this largesse; he actually found himself in significantly worse straits after

Jefferson’s election than before. Although free from prison, he remained indebted and,

without Jefferson’s preferment, unable to secure a job.

Trouble immediately began between the two men after the journalist’s release

from prison. Callender expected Jefferson to reimburse him the full $200 of his fine.

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Callender himself needed the money for his own pocket and for payment on loans he had

incurred while in prison. He had handed the cash over to Virginian authorities as part of

his sentence.7 With this payment made, Callender now fully expected the new president

to see to it that the money was refunded—a reasonable request in light of the situation:

Callender had incurred the fine (and gone to prison, to boot) for and with the approval of

Thomas Jefferson. As he walked out of prison, he was dismayed to find that the situation

regarding a reimbursement of the money was nowhere near resolution or results.

To mollify the now-freed journalist somewhat, Jefferson had already issued “the

said James Thomson Callender, a full, free and entire pardon of the misdemeanor or

misdemeanors aforesaid, and of the conviction and Judgment of the said Court

thereupon.”8 Jefferson also incorrectly assumed that the pardon would also nullify the

$200 fine. This seemingly trivial point of division—how the pardon affected the fine—

promptly blew up, as outgoing Federalist marshal David Randolph, who took the fine,

refused to return the monies to Callender on the grounds that he had paid the fine before

the pardon, and thus was not owed a refund. As such, the seemingly magnanimous

pardon on Jefferson’s part overlooked reality: Callender had already served his full term

of imprisonment and paid the $200 fine. The pardon was practically useless. Adding

insult to injury, Jefferson consistently ignored Callender’s pleadings and refused, as

usual, to reply to his letters. The newspaperman, perhaps for the first time, realized that

Jefferson was gradually abandoning his devoted acolyte.

By April, as the administration passed from the heady days of taking power to the

more sober task of actually exercising it, the situation was becoming clearer to Callender:

he could expect little, if anything, from Jefferson. The journalist’s letter dated April 12,

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1801, carried a tone of wounded exasperation: “You may not suppose that I, at least, have

gained anything by the victories of Republicanism…. I have been equally calumniated,

pillaged, and betrayed by all parties. I have only the consolation of reflecting that I had

acted from principle.”9 From this point the one-way flow of correspondence from

Callender to Jefferson, which had already slowed to a trickle, stopped altogether; their

friendship was at an end.

For Jefferson, the break was arguably a year and a half old, dating back to his

October 1799 unilateral termination of their correspondence. For Callender, the

separation was rudely abrupt and smacked of exactly what it was: a politically expedient

abandonment. He and his press compatriots had led a quasi-insurgency against the

Federalist administration of John Adams, with the ultimate goal of achieving a

Democratic-Republican president and Congress. Throughout the course of 1798-1801,

Callender had doggedly cast his lot beside Thomas Jefferson. At the end, however,

Jefferson abandoned Callender at the earliest convenient moment. The new president had

proven himself to be a scheming politician and, worse, a fair-weather friend to both

Callender and Callender’s deep-seated anti-aristocratic convictions.

2. “I am obliged to speak plain” – Seeking New Patrons: James Madison and James
Monroe

Despite his evident loss of Jefferson’s patronage, Callender still wanted

desperately to partake of the largesse the new administration stood ready to dole out.

More than this desire, Callender needed a preferment of some kind. Apart from his labor

lost while languishing in prison, the journalist was increasingly anxious regarding the

future. He had closed his final letter to Jefferson with the postscript, “For some weeks

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past, the state of my nerves does not permit my writing in my own hand,”10 indicative of

the stress he was experiencing. Jefferson’s silence only compounded Callender’s

frustration.

The journalist now sought a different avenue for his advancement: Jefferson’s

new Secretary of State, James Madison. The “Father of the Constitution” was then at the

beginning of a rise to power that would eventually ensconce him in the Executive

Mansion as the fourth president of the United States. Madison was also a close

compatriot and collaborator of Thomas Jefferson. Together, the two men had helped

forge the first organized opposition party in American politics: the Democratic-

Republicans. Madison had also worked alongside Jefferson to ghost-write the Virginia

and Kentucky Resolutions articulating Republican opposition to the Federalists’ 1798

Alien and Sedition Acts.11 Callender reasoned that if anyone could help advance his

fortunes through the generosity of the new governing party apart from Jefferson, it was

Madison.

Five days before Madison took the oath of office as fifth Secretary of State,

Callender penned a lengthy, rambling letter to the secretary-designate to both lobby for

his desired appointment (the Richmond postmastership) and pour out the anger he felt at

his treatment from Jefferson. Desperate for any means of advancement, Callender was

not above flattering and toadying prose: “I was extremely happy to hear that you had

accepted of an office [as Secretary of State] under the new presidency; because….I was

interested in having one person…whom I could without hypocrisy profess to feel an

attachment for, and to whom I could address myself without a suspicion of being

suspected.”12 These clumsy attempts to flatter also served as blatant appeals for Madison

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to keep their conversation private, a hope that Madison had no intention of gratifying.

Callender recounted for Madison’s benefit the efforts to which he had gone to secure

Jefferson’s promised remittance of the fine the journalist had paid as part of his

prosecution and imprisonment. Anxious to prove beyond any doubt his good intentions

and mild manner, Callender claimed that his final letter to Jefferson was “both guarded

and explicit. It had not one syllable which could give ground for offence.”13 He included

an excerpt from a letter sent to fellow Republican Thomas Leiper, in which the wounded

writer had openly declared: “Mr. Jefferson has not returned one shilling of my fine. I now

begin to know what Ingratitude is.”14

Callender virtually begged Madison for the pity Jefferson refused to give: “I

described the treatment which I had received in Richmond, and the situation into which

my exertions in the cause brought me, [and] I think the story should have reached the

heart of a millstone.”15 Jefferson’s neglect, in the face of such piteous entreaties, thus

placed Callender in a position from which “I am obliged to speak plain, for necessity has

no law.”16 From this point—approximately one-third of the way into the letter—

Callender, having reasoned that necessity justified his actions, turned distinctly more

aggressive and offered, for the first time, portents of the storm he stood ready to unleash

on Jefferson’s triumphal parade.

That the journalist still had some vestiges of his dignity remaining was evident in

his forceful statement that “I neither demean myself to ask the remission [the

postmastership] as a favor nor [do] I think it proper to claim it as a right.” Having

established the rightness and propriety of his request, Callender then lent his entreaty

some teeth: “Does the president reflect upon the premunire into which he may bring

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himself, by the breach of an unqualified, and even a volunteer promise? .... Does he

reflect how his numerous and implacable enemies would exult in being masters of this

piece of small history? … President as he is, he may trust me if he pleases, that I am not

the man, who is either to be oppressed or plundered with impunity.”17

Callender’s reference was probably unclear to Madison, who may have assumed

the journalist was indicating the presence of prior correspondence and monetary

contributions linking him with Jefferson. What was clear from this passage and from the

letter as a whole was Callender’s increased sense of desperate need: claiming a sinecure

of some–any–kind was his only viable path. No one, including the President, could

consider himself safe from the consequences of a denial.

Of particular note in the letter was Callender’s restlessly changing attitude toward

and tone regarding Thomas Jefferson—something that only reinforced Madison’s and

others’ belief in the journalist’s mental (not to mention moral) instability. After claiming

maltreatment at the hands of Jefferson and then issuing a clear and present threat against

the new president’s reputation, Callender went on to further exercise his often-paranoid

imagination: “I believe your friend [Jefferson] designs to discountenance me and

sacrifice me, as a scapegoat to political decorum as a kind of compromise to federal

feelings.” With his imagination now drunk on paranoia and insistent on leading,

Callender impoliticly asserted, “I will tell you frankly that I have always suspected that

he would serve me so,” although no intimation of these suspicions had ever crept into

Callender’s correspondence with Jefferson. Crudely, Callender groveled before Madison

instead: “[S]o rooted has been my jealousy upon this head [suspicion] that if ever I am

able to be the better of the new administration, I shall be much disposed to ascribe it

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entirely to you.”18 Madison, unsurprisingly, was distinctly uninterested in plaudits from

the disgraced journalist.

Curiously, and in a demonstration of his mercurial temperament, Callender then

immediately moved from vengeful Fury to a latter-day Job, simultaneously pleading with

and praising his afflicter: “I cannot reconcile this non-remission with the high idea of the

president’s wisdom which I have always had; for surely a wiser man…does not exist. His

probity is exemplary. His political ideas are, to the minutest ramification, precisely mine.

I respect and admire him exceedingly.”19 Yet, “…although I have exhausted all my

humble arts of insinuation, he has on various occasions treated me with such ostentatious

coolness and indifference, that I could hardly say I was able to love or trust him.”20

Most importantly, the letter repeatedly highlighted Callender’s deep and, despite

the best efforts of Jefferson and others, abiding ties to the Republican party and its

success. After arguing that a remission for his fine and a patronage position were the best

remedies to “the situation into which my exertions in the cause [has] brought me,”

Callender added, “Mr. Jefferson has repeatedly said that my services were considerable;

that I made up the best newspaper in America….”21 He urged Madison “to recollect what

lengths I have gone to serve the cause,” and, frankly, “in what way it is likely to serve

me.” After assuring Madison that “I would pay the strictest attention to every party of the

duty [the Richmond Postmastership],” Callender, with a mixture of confidence and

menace, asserted, “many syllogisms cannot be necessary to convince Mr. Jefferson

that…it is not proper for him to create a quarrel with me.”22 The veiled threats returned,

as Callender struggled, rather unsuccessfully, to provide both a velvet glove and an iron

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fist, an appropriately humble supplication backed with the sharpened teeth of promised

threats.

Intimating that he would soon visit Madison in Washington, D.C., to further plead

his case—“unless something occurs in the meantime, to render it improper, or

superfluous”23—Callender offered this letter as his final real attempt to ingratiate himself

with the new administration, his final appeal for the recompense he believed his efforts

and sacrifices on behalf of the party and of Jefferson personally had earned him.

Although he wrote to Madison briefly a week later, his mighty outpouring of resentment,

anxiety, and hope of April 27, 1801, was his last truly substantial exchange of

correspondence with anyone in the new administration.24 Madison made no reply. Having

unanimously decided to render the former Republican disciple little or no assistance, the

party’s elite relegated Callender to the outskirts of their attention, hoping that by ignoring

him, he would slink back into the shadows from whence he had come.25

With correspondence failing to produce the necessary results, Callender turned to

appeals in person. Accordingly, he presented himself to James Monroe on the morning of

Friday, May 22, in Richmond, where the journalist’s appearance was so agitated and

disturbing that “I requested him to call again, hoping he might be more composed.”26 The

intervening time, however, did nothing for Callender’s nerves or composure: “[H]e

returned in the evening in the same temper.”27 Imagining the reasons for Callender’s

anxiety is not difficult: he was almost three months out of prison, unemployed, and

deeply in debt. His four children were in the care of Revolutionary War veteran and

sympathetic Republican Thomas Leiper, who employed them in picking tobacco, an

arduous task often—though not always—delegated to slaves. The Republican elite who

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had only months before sung Callender’s praises for martyring himself on behalf of the

“cause” were now fleeing him with a kind of speed and anxiety usually reserved for the

dreaded yellow fever.

On the eve of Callender’s sedition trial in 1800, Thomas Jefferson had written

Monroe that “I think it essentially just and necessary that Callender should be

substantially defended.”28 Unfortunately for Callender, his personal appeal to Monroe

was unable to persuade the Virginia Governor that either Jefferson personally or the party

as a whole owed a moral obligation to live up to the words of Jefferson’s promise a year

to the day prior. After the journalist faulted Jefferson for failing to repay the $200 prison

fine, Monroe counterpunched, saying Callender “ought not censure the Executive. He

[Callender] ought to recollect it was doubtful after the money was paid…whether the

President could repay it.”29 This assertion—a double denial, both of Jefferson’s promise

to ensure the fine was not paid at Callender’s expense and a virtual denial of any

possibility that such assistance was or could be forthcoming—was too much for the

already overwrought journalist. With his mental state now falling into a tailspin,

Callender “[s]hook his head at that intimation, spoke of letters without tone, intimated his

services in support of the republican cause, spoke of the ingratitude of the republicans

who after getting into power had left him in the ditch.”30 At this point, the journalist’s

emotional stresses and wounded feelings exploded out of all control, a carronade whose

aim was fixed on Thomas Jefferson. According to Monroe, Callender “shed tears

abundantly, and seemed disposed to attribute all his disappointments relative to the fine

to the Executive [Jefferson].”31

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 With Monroe unwilling to extend any assistance, the wounded and now furious

journalist now prepared to fulfill his promise to James Madison and visit the Secretary of

State at his offices in Washington, D.C. Before he could set out, however, he needed

money to make the trip. Monroe, aware of the consternation and undesired attention a

loose cannon like Callender would cause in the federal city, pleaded with him to stay in

Richmond a little longer, presumably on the promise that funds would be made available

later: “He asked the loan of some money to enable him to go on the next day to

Washington. I advised and prevailed on him to stay a few days.”32 Callender agreed to

delay his departure for Washington, and in the meantime Monroe struggled to secure a

refund of the $200 fine to Callender. The man who originally received the fine, Virginia

Marshal David Meade Randolph, refused to return the money. Randolph, an embittered

Federalist appointee who was facing financial difficulties of his own and had just lost his

job to the new Jefferson Administration, argued that a refund was illegal, since

Callender’s pardon had come after he had paid his fine.33

In any case, Monroe wrote, a refund was unlikely to calm the passionate anger he

had observed in Callender toward Jefferson. The situation had advanced well beyond the

point where even a complete reimbursement of the $200 would suffice: “I do not think he

would acquit the Executive tho’ five times the sum should be advanc’d him.” Regardless,

the propriety of such payments also concerned Monroe, as any cash given to Callender

would only create and cement new and existing connections between the journalist and

the Republican elite at a time when Jefferson and his compatriots wanted no connections

at all. Monroe speculated that, “in case he [Callender] attacks the Executive he might

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state these circumstances or advances, to the discredit of the government & its friends.”34

Taking this risk—paying Callender off—was meaningless to begin with.

Governor Monroe recommended standing firm and pushing back at Callender,

whatever his threats: “Unless I saw an absolute propriety in ordering the reimbursement I

most certainly would not do it. I would rest on the ground of principle & meet his attack.”

The extremity of the Republican leadership’s attempts to baptize themselves clean of

James Thomson Callender was starkly clear in Monroe’s final pieces of advice. To the

Secretary of State, he warned: “[T]he President & yourself cannot be too circumspect…in

your conversations with him; for I think nothing more doubtful than his future political

course.”35 Monroe believed that Callender, now beginning to grasp the enormity of his

fall from grace and the singular desperation of his personal circumstances, would be little

better, if not considerably worse, than a violently political enemy to Madison and

Jefferson.

The situation was best resolved, Monroe believed, with a total dismissal of

Callender and “his” problems. If, however, the charitable impulse managed to grab hold

of Madison or Jefferson and either of them advanced Callender money, Monroe

counseled, “it merits your consideration whether he ought to know from whom it came. If

he is at bottom an honest man, it ought to produce a good effect & remove his present

irritation, but if he is not, every act of that kind will be attributed to improper motives,

and perverted hereafter to the injury of the benefactor.”36 These sentiments almost

immediately proved to be prophetic.

Farther north, in Washington, D.C., President Thomas Jefferson was also anxious

to see the Callender fracas laid to rest. To Monroe, Jefferson lamented that his

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disgruntled kinsman and former Virginia Marshal, David Meade Randolph, had arranged

to have the $200 Callender had paid to settle his fine “in such a situation that I find we

could not lay our hands on it without giving room for specious criticisms.”37 Making

clear his desire to see Callender silenced promptly, Jefferson stated that, “[T]o take from

Callender particularly all room for complaint, I think with you we had better refund his

fine by private contributions.”38 To get the process started, Jefferson even included a note

drawn on his cousin George Jefferson’s firm, Gibson & Jefferson, “for 50. D[ollars]

which I believe is one fourth of the whole sum.”39 In the manuscript copy of this letter,

Jefferson originally wrote the words “as my” after noting the amount of money he was

sending. He later scratched out the two words. Whether Jefferson was attempting to

protect himself from a direct, personal connection to the journalist or simply desired that

the money appear to be a “gift” from the Democratic-Republican leadership as a whole is

not clear. By sending only one-quarter of the $200 fine, the president was not only

leaving open (and even directly hinting at) the possibility of other Republican leaders

helping to bail out “their journalist,” he was also ensuring his protection should Callender

or anyone else attempt to use the payment as political ammunition against the new

president.

In any case, although Monroe received the letter, the enclosed note disappeared

and may not have been sent. This development was likely due to Callender’s arrival three

days later in Washington, D.C., where events began unfolding as Monroe had previously

foreseen. Jefferson wrote to Monroe on May 29: “Callender is arrived here. he [sic] did

not call on me.”40 Callender’s decision to avoid the Executive Mansion was a telling one

and may have prompted some of the events that happened next. Ignoring Monroe’s

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advice regarding financial contributions, Jefferson, “understanding he [Callender] was in

distress,” reached out to the journalist. “I sent Capt Lewis to him with 50. D[ollars] to

inform him we were making some enquiries as to his fine which would take a little time,

& lest he suffer in the mean time, I had sent him &c.”41 The fifty dollars, in all likelihood,

was the contribution Jefferson had originally intended to help start the fund among

Republicans for repayment of Callender’s fine. Sent directly, however, this type of open

charity—regardless of motivation—was exactly the circumstance Monroe had warned

against, and Callender quickly proved the Virginia Governor’s prescience: “[Callender’s]

language to Capt Lewis was very high toned. he [sic] intimated that he was in possession

of things which he could & would make use of in a certain case: that he received the 50.

D[ollars] not as a charity but a due, in fact as hushmoney.”42 This threat, Callender had

informed Captain Lewis, arose because Jefferson “knew what he expected, viz a certain

office [the Richmond postmastership].”43

3. “He knows nothing of me” – Callender and Jefferson Call it Quits

Callender’s anger had finally gotten the better of him. Whether Jefferson’s

intentions were truly charitable or carried undertones of a payoff is not clear from the

extant documents. Either way, Callender opted, as Monroe knew he would, to see the

money as a paltry payoff: a miserly sum of $50 (leaving $150 of his original fine amount

still lost to him) and Jefferson’s “assurances” that the matter was being “looked in to” in

exchange for much of the past two years’ of his life spent in prison, disgrace, or both.

Even if the fine was repaid, Callender remained unemployed and, to a large extent,

unemployable. Jefferson’s own stinginess, charitable or not, had only compounded his

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problem. The threat to Jefferson’s integrity and reputation, which had first surfaced in

Callender’s oblique references to a “piece of small history” in a letter to James Madison,

had struck closer to home and taken on more aggressive overtones this time.

Stung (or possibly worried), Jefferson chose this moment to play the martyr

himself: “[S]uch a misconstruction of my charities puts an end to them for ever.”44 These

were strong words, to be sure, but again Jefferson underscored the ultimate problem

dogging his relationship with Callender, an inability to see situations and actions from

either one another’s perspectives or from that of what Adam Smith called the “impartial

spectator.”45 Viewed objectively, both men had defensible claims on the other. On the

one hand, Jefferson had issued a full public pardon for Callender and had made

considerable contributions to Callender’s work in the past. Given the turmoil and

workload that undoubtedly came with the first real change in administrations in American

political history, Jefferson and his compatriots could perhaps be excused for not attending

to Callender’s case instantly. To have a “gift” of $50 unexpectedly accepted in a

deliberately malicious spirit was surely frustrating and infuriating. Jefferson’s original

plan—to have his $50 contribution spur other similar private donations from Republican

leaders—would have elicited a decidedly different reaction from the now-desperate

journalist than did the money on its own, with no promises or assurances for future

contributions. Consistently, Jefferson referred to his contributions in both the past and

present as “charities,” continuing that argument even into 1804, when Abigail Adams

challenged those contributions in a flurry of letter-writing between herself and the

president. If Jefferson actually believed his own rhetoric, he had good reason, from

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certain perspectives, to feel slighted and even insulted at Callender’s angry, arrogant

reaction.

The obverse argument, however, was also true: Callender had taken an enormous

risk on Jefferson’s behalf: goading the Federalist administration and bureaucracy of John

Adams, undergoing what was essentially a show trial, serving a prison sentence and

paying a fine, all to help ensure the brightest possible future for both the Republican

cause and for Thomas Jefferson personally. While it would be overstating the case to

insist that Jefferson would not have triumphed in the 1800 election without Callender, the

journalist nonetheless played a key role in defending the Jeffersonian sapling from the

ever more aggressive encroachment of Federalist brambles. As Callender himself

reminded Monroe, Madison, and Jefferson separately, he had performed many tasks and

undergone many difficulties that did deserve some kind of remuneration, especially in

light of what the Jefferson administration was capable of in the immediate post-election

period. In the first true turnover of the presidency from one party to another, Jefferson

replaced many appointees of Federalists Washington and Adams with members of his

own party. Callender thus had an arguably realistic expectation that somewhere in this

largesse he could reasonably expect a new position.

Jefferson’s anger, however, quickly reared its head to compete with Callender’s.

The President, having accorded himself total sincerity and goodwill, found Callender’s

insinuations of a payoff in exchange for silence both insulting and hurtful. He likely did

not know the exact nature of the information Callender claimed to possess, or dismissed

the threat as despairing bluster from a man dancing on the very tip of a sword, about to

fall off. After angrily asserting an end to his “charities,” Jefferson then sought to divest

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himself entirely of Callender, both present and past: “I knew him [Callender] first as the

author of the Political progress of Britain, a work I had read with great satisfaction, and

as a fugitive from persecution for this very work.”46 Jefferson’s next claim rang

particularly hollow in light of the lively letter exchanges he and Callender had

periodically engaged in: “I gave to him from time to time such aids as I could afford,

merely as a man of genius suffering under persecution, and not as a writer in our politics.

[I]t is long since I wished he would cease writing on them, as doing more harm than

good.”47

The exclusionistic appellation “our” in “our politics” signaled how far Jefferson

had moved away from his old disciple: Callender was now a persona non grata in

Republican ranks, cast out beyond the pale. Jefferson may have even implied the Scottish

immigrant’s exclusion from American politics, a departure of sorts from the Republicans’

record of fostering the participation of new immigrants in domestic politics.48 Of course,

Jefferson knew Callender for far more than simply his work on the Political Progress of

Britain. Apart from the anti-Hamiltonian History of the United States for the Year 1796,

there was, of course, the incendiary Prospect Before Us—a work Jefferson had supported

financially.49

Addressing Callender’s threats, Jefferson boldly asserted, “He knows nothing of

me which I am not willing to declare to the world myself.”50 Such confidence implied

that Jefferson probably had no real conception of what inside knowledge Callender was

claiming to hold. Given the societal mores of the day, especially in Virginia, Jefferson

may have also regarded his alleged liaisons with Sally Hemings as either a known fact or

a secret that would be kept in perpetuity beneath the Southern code of silence on such

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relations.51 Regardless of what he construed from Callender’s words, Jefferson’s sense of

security in his own position, a sense that at times bordered on euphoric arrogance, was

unshakeable. He and Callender were finished—for now.

More than anything else, Jefferson believed his own prescient caution buttressed

his defenses against any attack from Callender. John C. Miller, in The Wolf By the

Ears:Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, points out that “Jefferson was the more inclined to

reject Callender’s demand…because he believed that he had carefully prepared his

defenses against all the accusations of wrongdoing Callender was likely to bring.” The

rejection also stemmed from fear: “Jefferson knew that if it ever became public

knowledge that he had used a federal office to purchase Callender’s silence, the

consequences were likely to be worse than anything Callender could do to him.”52 The

primary problem with Miller’s interpretation—among the most even-handed treatments

Callender has received—is its assumption that from the beginning Jefferson and

Callender both knew Callender would resort to betrayal and blackmail against Jefferson.

Nothing in the pair’s correspondence during the mid and late-1790s—the height of their

collaboration—appears to suggest on Callender’s part a conspiracy to ensure damning

information remained as the journalist’s insurance against a rainy day. It was only after

Jefferson had made clear his total abandonment of Callender that the journalist, in a fit of

desperation, turned to thoughts of blackmail and revenge.

Miller argues, “[T]he president clearly expected that Callender would accuse him

of complicity in the publication of The Prospect Before Us and other writings judged

libelous by the federal courts.” Although true, the argument glosses over the reality:

Jefferson’s complicity was known by all concerned, especially John and Abigail Adams.

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In an angry exchange of letters between herself and Jefferson in mid-1804, Abigail

Adams poured out her fury regarding Callender to her husband’s successor: “One of the

first acts of your administration was to liberate a wretch who was suffering the just

punishment of the Law due to his crimes for writing and publishing the basest libel, the

lowest and vilest Slander…against the Character and reputation of your predecessor.”53

The tidal wave of Abigail’s fury cast light on the understanding she and her husband had

of Jefferson’s role in subverting the very administration he served in: “This was the

Sword that cut assunder [sic] the Gordian knot, which could not be untied by all the

efforts of party Spirit, by rivalship by Jealousy or any other malignant fiend. The serpent

you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him.”54

In responding to these accusations, Jefferson relied on his time-worn excuses: “I

considered him [Callender] as a man of genius, unjustly persecuted. I knew nothing of his

private character…. My charities to him were no more meant as encouragements to his

scurrilities than those I give to the beggar at my door are meant as rewards for the vices

of his life.”55 Abigail quickly fired back, catching Jefferson in his lie: “Your statement

respecting Callender…and your motives for liberating him, wear a different aspect as

explaind [sic] by you, from the impression which they had made, not only upon my mind,

but upon the minds of all those, whom I ever heard speak upon the subject.”56 Abigail

was reminding Jefferson that his connection to Callender went well beyond the

journalist’s first appearance in Philadelphia as a political refugee. She remembered well

Jefferson’s generosity and open support for this propagandist whose work had made her

husband’s presidency such a burden.

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 This tempest in a teapot (or an inkpot, as the case may be), though three years in

the future, affords a glimpse into both Jefferson’s consistent counterarguments against

those linking him to Callender and the clarity with which his opponents recalled those

connections. As the journalist adopted an increasingly adversarial stance versus Jefferson,

the president would struggle harder than ever to ensure his former ties with Callender

were downplayed and denied. As the journalist stormed around the federal city in May

1801, Jefferson began fine-tuning his personal exoneration from Callender’s plight.

Meanwhile, despite not calling on the Executive Mansion while in Washington,

Callender did make good on his promise (or threat, depending on one’s point of view) to

meet with Secretary of State Madison and plead for both his fine’s remission and the

Richmond postmastership. Madison’s letter of June 1, 1801, to James Monroe lamented

that the unemployed journalist “[is] not to be satisfied in any respect without an office.”57

After complaining, with some justification, that “it has been my lot to bear the burden of

receiving & repelling his claims,” Madison, who had considerably less patience for

Callender’s woes than Monroe, went on to argue that Callender’s desire for an office

under the new administration stemmed from “the tyranny of that of love.”58 Madison

claimed “this came out, under a charge of secrecy, in a way that renders the fact

unquestionable. The object of his flame is in Rich[mond] I did not ask her name; but

presume her to be young, beautiful in his eyes at least, and in a sphere above him.”59

Madison further alleged that Callender “has flattered himself & probably been flattered

by others into a persuasion that the emoluments & reputation of a post office would

obtain her in marriage.”60

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 At the very least, these allegations contained questionable veracity; at the worst,

Madison had resorted to the lowest form of ad hominem attack: outright lies. Nowhere

else in the remaining historical record on Callender and his last years does a love interest

appear, in either direct or oblique reference. Michael Durey’s 1990 biography, With the

Hammer of Truth, is also silent on this question. Madison’s allegations also failed to

resurface in the correspondence top Republican leaders exchanged privately on how to

handle and suppress the disgruntled journalist.

For his own part, James Monroe had already written his friend, Thomas Jefferson,

approving of Jefferson’s decision to cut ties with Callender, but offering a warning

alongside: “Your resolution to terminate all communication with him is wise. Yet it will

be well to prevent even a serpent doing one injury.”61 Monroe tacitly referred to

Jefferson’s smug assurances that Callender “knows nothing of me which I am not willing

to declare to the world myself.”62 Monroe, apparently unaware of Jefferson’s alleged

covert dalliances at Monticello, was simply exercising prudence and caution. Callender,

after all, had more than proven himself to be an agitator and destroyer of reputations par

excellence.

Monroe’s hopes for a future free of the fear of Callender became clearer in the

response he wrote to James Madison’s speculation-rich letter. To Madison, the Virginia

governor documented yet another visit from Callender, this time as the journalist returned

from his unsuccessful lobbying mission to Washington, D.C. Monroe recounted his

attempts to “reason” with Callender: “I retrac’d the commencement of his acquaintance

with the person on whom his displeasure chiefly rested [Jefferson], to show there was no

period at which the attentions of that person were not friendly to him, and prompted by

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disinterested, friendly & humane motives.” Monroe also hinted at Jefferson’s own change

of ideological heart—his moderation and move to the center of his own party—when he

recounted another line of reasoning with Callender: “That this [Jefferson’s continued

goodwill] was true prior to a late political change, and was equally so since.” Notably,

Monroe recorded no reference whatsoever from Callender to his alleged “love” in

Richmond, Rather, Monroe wrote that Callender said “He [Callender] was independant

[sic] had served the cause from principle…[and] that some little office would greatly

accommodate him, and without one he did not know how he should subsist.”

Nonetheless, the governor was tight-lipped with the journalist: “On the point of his

[Callender’s] future subsistence or course of life I would say nothing.”63

Monroe then entertained some speculation of his own, writing that Callender had

indicated legal training might serve as a means of securing his future financial security,

hoping “some eminent practitioner would direct his studies,” to which Monroe affably

noted, “It is probable he might succeed in the law. I see no objection to his making the

experiment, especially if his friends would contribute a fund to defray the expense of his

board & clothing for a year.”64 Monroe clearly hoped that the pursuit of training and

respectable employment in the legal profession would improve Callender’s finances,

distract his mind from the revenge he had already clearly begun plotting against

Jefferson, and ultimately remove altogether the now-dimmed journalistic star from the

Republican constellation, which shined brighter than ever in mid-1801.

But it was not to be. Whether Callender’s remarks about pursuing a legal career

were sincere or not, he evidently made no formal attempts to embark down that path. As

in previous correspondence, Callender was seeking alternate paths for the future that

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involved long-term career prospects, rather than short-term financial gains through the

“charities” of Jefferson and others. Even through the somewhat unfriendly recollection of

Monroe, Callender’s desires appear modest: he asked for “some little office” and sought

to increase his suitability by a willingness to undergo legal training. These aspects cast

his later behavior against Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party in a light quite

different from that of succeeding generations of historians, who have largely ridiculed

Callender’s “revenge” against Jefferson as motivated by greed or mere anger.65

The problems Callender faced needed immediate remedies and solutions; he

simply could not afford to think in such distant terms. Instead, as his disconnection with

the new Republican government continued to grow, Callender found himself slowly

drawn back to what he did best: scandalous, sensational journalism. Time would have to

pass, however, before Callender was able to regain his footing in the still-heady world of

partisan political journalism.

The newspaperman needed time to heal, both his own, personal wounds and those

between himself and partisans from both political parties. He was understandably

depressed and inactive for months after leaving prison, and the added sting of Jefferson’s

betrayal coupled with the realization that he was destitute and in no better condition, if

not outright worse, than he had been when first landing in America was more than

sufficient cause to keep a low profile. More than ever, though, Callender thirsted to strike

back at the Republican aristocracy—these New World elites who had proven themselves

no better than the Old World elites who had sent him packing into exile nearly a decade

before. Monroe was right: better to have prevented this seething serpent from doing the

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party or the president injury than to have given him deep personal cause for grievance

and hatred.

Callender’s first concern, however, was not revenge, but employment, and

securing a new job was understandably difficult for a person as encumbered with

reputation and ill will as Callender. In Richmond, he found himself once again the target

of local Federalists, who made much of his fall from grace and parlous personal situation.

In response, he penned an unsigned letter that was published in his old paper, Meriwether

Jones’s Richmond Examiner, appealing for peace: “Whether the writer of the Prospect is

one of the righteous the public may judge…. He has not, for many months, wrote one line

with a design to offend them [Richmond’s Federalists]. He wished old scores to be, as far

as possible, forgotten.”66 This wish, however, had gone unrequited: “In prose and verse,

his name continues to be bandied about through a shoal of newspapers. In the spirit of

charity, he wishes these good folks to let him alone.”67

Jones, whose Examiner had experienced a sharp drop in subscriptions thanks in

part to the loss of Callender’s attention-grabbing pen, managed to encourage Callender’s

return to political journalism under the aegis of the paper. Callender took the opportunity

to respond to his many critics, but his writing lacked the vigor and conviction of former

days. In short, the journalist was largely spent. With the sting of the Republicans’

abandonment still strong, Callender had no desire or incentive to rush back to the defense

of Jefferson and the party. Worse, his mind was already bending toward a new obsession:

revenge the party and particularly on the president whose success had come partly at the

expense of Callender’s failure.

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4. “They will represent me as the patron of Callender” – Jefferson, Callender, and
the Art of Revising History

The American Old South at the dawn of the nineteenth century was a complex

place of many curious dichotomies. Part of a democracy based upon documents and ideas

enshrining the freedom of the individual as sacrosanct, the South nonetheless embraced

slavery on a scale that would only continue to increase in the decades after one of its own

scions wrote the words, “All men are created equal.” The South’s literate upper class

found in the ideas and imagery of classical antiquity a model worth emulating, yet its

basic unit of society—the family—was anything but democratic or egalitarian.

Individualism, not democratic communalism, typified the not only the Southern mindset,

but also that of the north as well, where slavery remained alive and well in New York,

New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

A major player in maintaining the future promise of American economic

prosperity, many of the Southern elite entrenched themselves in a social hierarchy and

economic system that hearkened back to the great manors of the European Middle Ages,

with the wealthy planter class replacing the barons and squires of old. The antebellum

South, in short, was a place where the past and future blended together to form a complex

and often contradictory present.

For many historians of Thomas Jefferson—author of the Declaration of

Independence, architect and founder of the University of Virginia, and the third President

of the United States—the allegations that the walls of Monticello regularly watched

moments of illicit passion transpire between two races present the ultimate contradiction.

The claims have excited a whole range of emotions, from condemnation of James

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Thomson Callender for publicly making the allegations, to carping over Jefferson’s mea

culpa, to psychological analyses of the President himself. The Jefferson and Hemings

affair itself is an intersection of a host of influential factors: the formerly inviolate nature

of the Founding Fathers and their characters; the evolution of academic attitudes toward

the presence and extent of interracial sex; the question of trustworthy sources and of

James Thomson Callender as a reliable or unreliable accuser; and the restless interplay

between historians of the early Republic and the contemporary circumstances they wrote

and worked in. The ensuing scandal regarding the affair is also the product of the death

throes of James Thomson Callender’s friendship with Thomas Jefferson—a death

Jefferson arguably perpetrated equally, if not more so, than did Callender.

After failing to make a comeback as a political writer in June 1801, James

Callender rode the rest of the year out quietly in Richmond. Apart from infrequently

contributing to his friend and fellow British exile Henry Pace’s Richmond Recorder: or

Lady’s and Gentleman’s Miscellany, Callender silently bided his time. Like Callender,

Pace was a political dissident forced out of Britain in 1798 on accusations of sedition

who had come to the New World in search of his future and fortune. Unlike his

countryman, however, Pace did not seek to use his newspaper as a mouthpiece for

American political views or attacks. Richmond in 1801, however, already had three

newspapers serving a population of less than 6,000 people. Although the city had more

than doubled in size from 1790 to 1800, Richmond in 1801 was still a small community

when compared to the great port cities of Boston (24,937), Philadelphia (41,220) and

New York (79,216). Pace thus quickly found himself and his paper in difficult financial

straits and in need of a fresh infusion of cash and, more importantly, journalistic acumen.

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James Thomson Callender, his ego’s wounds now healed and his acid pen sharpened and

anxious for revenge, knew events had come full circle. The two men quickly joined

forces and in February 1802, they entered a formal business partnership with Pace’s

financing and Callender’s journalistic mastery.68 This time, Callender had Jefferson’s

reputation firmly in his sights.

Further north in the federal city, President Thomas Jefferson and his

administration were settling into their first year of government, cheerfully ignorant of the

storm clouds gathering over Richmond. After vehemently denying all but the most

rudimentary familiarity with the person and work of James Thomson Callender, Jefferson

in January 1802 found himself entangled in his own deceptions and, once again, unable to

escape the specter of his connection to the journalist. Although trivial in itself, this small

incident threw glaring light on Jefferson’s patronage of Callender as well as his personal

culpability in fostering and assisting Callender’s work.

In early January, the President received a letter dated December 29, 1801, from

James Cheetham, the owner and editor of New York’s Republican newspaper, the

American Citizen. Cheetham called the President’s attention to a new Republican book:

“a history of the administration of John Adams, late President of the United States,

written by John Wood, of this city.”69 Cheetham asserted that the new book, “will in all

probability, be suppressed,” as at the time New York’s Democratic Republicans were

engulfed with infighting and as eager to damage each other as they were the Federalists.70

The soon-to-be suppressed new book about Adams was yet another salvo in this partisan

civil war. What Cheetham wanted was to respond in kind: “My friends think it would be

Desirable to anticipate the intended new copy [of Wood’s book], by an impartial History

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of the administration of Mr. Adams, and by so Doing, Defeat the views of the

Suppressors of the present one.”71 For this enterprise, however, “there are Several

Documents necessary to connect events which Cannot be had but from the Departments

of State.”72 Cheetham then proceeded to a full description of what he needed: confidential

records of George Washington’s secret instructions to John Jay during the latter’s service

as American envoy in Great Britain. Only Jefferson, who had served as Washington’s

Secretary of State during Jay’s assignment, could provide Cheetham with such

documents. Jefferson’s lengthy reply time spoke to his anxieties over such a handover.

Unbeknownst to Cheetham, his request was not the first time Jefferson had been

confronted with such a request for “leaked” information.

Two years before, Jefferson had handed over his notes of Washington’s secret

discussions with Jay, the same documents Cheetham needed, to none other than James

Thomson Callender, with the caveat that Callender was to make it clear he had received

the documents through an anonymous Congressional source.73 Confronted with the same

type of request, Jefferson was once again full of the typical excuses: “[I]t is little in my

power to entitle myself to…regular correspondence on my part. [I]n fact it is rare I can

answer a private letter at all.”74 Jefferson then deftly skirted the issue of Cheetham’s

request. First recommending he “visit this place [i.e., Washington], at your own

convenience, for the information you desire as to a particular document,” Jefferson then

went on to inform Cheetham there was an alternate source—and therefore a means of

keeping the President’s hands clean: “I can assure you that I have compared that

document with the extract from it in Callender’s history of 1796. pa. 172. to 181. and find

the latter, not only substantially, but almost verbally exact.”75

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 This sentence was astonishing for several reasons: it confirmed Jefferson’s

patronage of Callender’s work (after all, how did Callender receive a document only

accessible to the government?); it confirmed Jefferson’s continued ownership of

Callender’s books; and it brought to the forefront the president’s continued insecurities

regarding Callender’s legacy to the Republican Party and to Jefferson personally.

Tellingly, Jefferson strongly admonished Cheetham at the end: “I must pray you, after

reading this, to destroy it, that no accident happening to it may furnish matter for new

slanders.”76 Even safely ensconced in the Executive Mansion at the pinnacle of power,

Jefferson found himself haunted still by the dogged ghost of journalists past.

If Jefferson felt an occasional chill as Callender’s specter passed over his desk, by

February 1802, Callender was consumed with a white-hot passion and even rage as he

turned his past injustices and betrayals from Jefferson and the party over and over in his

memory. The need for revenge roasted steadily on the spit of his mind’s eye. Now

partnered with Henry Pace, he was ready at last to repay the Republicans for his

perceived abuses in kind. Pace’s Recorder would host the journalist’s devastating

counterblasts against the Republicans. Histories and historians past have held this

moment as the one in which Callender set Jefferson on an inescapable collision course

with scandal, the overture to some kind of great operatic tragedy documenting Jefferson’s

fall from grace.77

Unfortunately, this narrative—Callender the lone journalistic rogue (or hero,

depending on one’s perspective) setting himself against the might (or innocence) of the

Philosopher King and, all alone, making an accusation to last the ages—is almost totally

incorrect. Whether one accepts or rejects the accusation as truth, the accusation itself

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likely pre-dated James Thomson Callender—Alexander Hamilton had hinted at it in

1792—and was not even atypical of accusations white Southern males often faced during

the period.78 The casual dismissal of the journalist as a libelous scoundrel leaves an

important component of the story uninvestigated. To address this issue through the lens

of Callender’s life is to synthesize and respond to much previous scholarship while

contributing a new perspective usually ignored, marginalized, or denigrated: that of

Callender himself.

Michael Durey, Callender’s lone true biographer, summed up the journalist’s

tempestuous existence in one succinct phrase: “Callender was an oppositionist, tout

court”—nothing else.79 Perhaps. This characterization, however oversimplified, contains

some elements of truth: the journalist certainly derived a great deal of pleasure from

seeing his opponents squirming in discomfort. His ability to move from fiercely

supporting Jefferson and the Republicans to attacking them with equal ferocity has

sparked a large amount of historical debate and discussion. Many pro-Jefferson scholars

have claimed that Callender’s apparent ease in making this ideological shift proved his

duplicitous nature and lack of character.

However, Callender also claimed in May 1802, just months before the Hemings

revelation, that they “were known to be not merely republican, but…of that sort which

invites and challenges tyranny to inflict its utmost.”80 Disassociating himself with strict

adherence to the party, the journalist was making clear that the source for his political

expression was his own inner ideology, not the allegiance he had once owed to any party

or party leader. With these tenets in mind, Callender emerges as less an oppositionist tout

court than he was a person of absolute, inflexible principles. If he was anything tout

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court, he was the “fanatic” Eric Hoffer describes in his work, The True Believer:

“[P]assionate attachment is the essence of his [the fanatic’s] blind devotion and

religiosity, and he sees in it the source of all virtue and strength…. He sacrifices his life

to prove his worth. It goes without saying that the fanatic is convinced that the cause he

holds onto is monolithic and eternal—a rock of ages.”81 This unyielding character was

the nemesis Jefferson would very quickly find himself facing down.

Re-establishing himself in Richmond’s newspaper world, Callender and Henry

Pace set out to transform the Richmond Recorder into a new voice for those opposed to

the Jeffersonian government in Washington. Importantly, Callender did not embrace his

old nemesis, the Federalist Party. At least one of Callender’s twenty-first-century critics

has charged that he “actively sought a job with the Recorder, a Federalist newspaper in

Richmond.”82 In fact, as we have seen, the reverse was true: Callender had sought to

avoid politics altogether, and Henry Pace did not initially begin the Recorder as a

political organ. Moreover, for Callender to cling for dear life to those he had hitherto

dedicated enormous efforts to destroying would have created an incredulous, almost

impossible situation for everyone involved.

The Recorder’s initial forays into political commentary focused on allegations of

political corruption in the Republican establishment ruling Virginia. During elections to

the state legislature in 1802, Callender pointedly offered his support, not to the Federalist

or Republican candidates, but to independent candidate James Rind.83 Waging an

increasingly bitter and ferocious press war with the Republican newspaper machine he

had once served, Callender moved closer and closer to open attacks on Jefferson himself.

In one of his most direct indictments of the president, Callender made clear the financial

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backing and moral support he had received in equal doses from Jefferson during the

writing of his incendiary work, The Prospect Before Us, claiming that Jefferson’s

supportive cash donations “attest, beyond a thousand letters of compliment, [to] how

seriously the president was satisfied with the contents of the book,” and, moreover, “how

anxiously he felt himself interested in its success.”84 However much Jefferson might try

to deny it, Callender claimed, the truth was simple and direct: the then Vice President had

liberally supported and identified with Callender’s work at undermining the very

administration in which he had then been a chief lieutenant. Something was rotten in the

city of Washington.

Although Callender could not have guaranteed it, he would have no doubt been

gratified to learn that Governor James Monroe was keeping President Jefferson abreast of

the new developments in the Richmond press, including the unfolding war between the

newspapers. In July, Monroe sent “some columns of a paper here edited by Mr.

Callender” to Jefferson, warning that, “it was whispered sometime since that the

federalists knew he was possessed of some letters from you, and were endeavouring to

bring them before the publick.”85 Monroe, ever loyal to Jefferson, remarkably proceeded

to offer himself up as a mouthpiece to counterattack against Callender: “Perhaps it will be

best that nothing [should] be said in reply by any one…[but] it may be of use to state to

me the periods when the sums he mentions were advanc’d, & the circumstances wh[ich]

lead to it….. If any reply is proper, he may be drawn to state facts correctly, by a person

knowing them, without it appearing that you gave a hint.”86 In other words, Jefferson

could trust Monroe with the information needed to parry Callender’s accusations while

keeping himself out of the fray.

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 Before Jefferson even received Monroe’s letter, he had already sat down to add

yet another chapter to his book of lamentations. Writing in the tone of wounded

righteousness begun during Callender’s first intimations of trouble, he opened his

complaint to Monroe: “I am really mortified at the base ingratitude of Callender.”

Jefferson also began sharpening up his excuses in preparation for the implications he

knew Callender stood ready to unleash on him. “I considered him as a man of science

fled from persecution,” Jefferson claimed, covering up his obvious financial support

toward the publication of The Prospect Before Us in a passage that is worth quoting in

full to preserve the president’s carefully obstructive tone:

[Callender] wrote to me that he was a fugitive, in want of employ…that he had

materials for a volume [the Prospect], & if he could get as much money as would
buy the paper, the profit of the sale would be all his own. I availed myself of this
pretext to cover a mere charity, by desiring him to consider me a subscriber for as
many copies of his book as the money inclosed (50. D[ollars]) amounted to; but to
send me two copies only…[and] I discouraged his coming into my neighborhood.
his [sic] first writings here had fallen far short of his original Political progress
[Political Progress of Great Britain], and the scurrilities of his subsequent ones
began evidently to do mischief. as [sic] to myself no man wished more to see his
pen stopped.

Despite all of these hindsight misgivings, however, Jefferson “considered him still as a

proper object of benevolence,” proper enough for the then Vice President to respond to

another alleged letter from Callender begging for money to buy paper with by “giving

him another 50. D[ollars].” The president sought to head off Callender’s argument: “He

considers these as proofs of my approbation of his writings, when they were mere

charities, yielded under a strong conviction that he was injuring us by his writings.”87

Jefferson was thus attempting to navigate two difficult, opposed courses: he

wanted to cultivate his image as an altruistic man of charity, while denying that his

“charities” constituted real, tangible support to their recipients. He was sufficiently

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pleased with himself regarding his string of “charities” toward Callender to recount them

in extensive detail through this letter to Monroe, but he simultaneously wanted Monroe to

believe that the charities were given strictly as charities, not as subsidies to works

Jefferson allegedly did not view as useful or even beneficial to the Democratic-

Republican cause.

Jefferson then cued up the next movement in his symphony of sad songs: “[S]oon

after I was elected to the government, Callender came on here, wishing to be made

postmaster at Richmond. I knew him to be totally unfit for it: and however ready I was to

aid him with my own charities (and I then gave him 50. D[ollars]) I did not think the

public offices confided to me to give away as charities.” The falsehood of this statement

was already evident: Jefferson and his party were only too happy and even eager to

replace many Federalist appointees with their own cronies and hangers-on.

Unfortunately, Jefferson said, “he [Callender] took it in mortal offence, & from that

moment has been hauling off to his former enemies the federalists.”88 Again, this

allegation is untrue. That Callender was waging a fierce and successful battle against the

Republican press machine in Richmond was true, but he was doing so in the pages of his

own independent paper, not under the auspices of a Federalist organ. Callender and Pace

made a bold statement in the paper’s pages addressing precisely this issue: “[We] have no

personal obligations to either party…[but] are willing, if necessary, to contend

occasionally for political principles,” nor would the new paper ever “prostrate itself to the

fanaticks of either party.”89

Jefferson quickly warmed to this new tactic of implicating Callender as a latter-

day Federalist. Two days after penning his lengthy missive to Governor Monroe, the

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president again expressed this argument: “Callender, who came on here immediately on

my election, to get the Postmaster’s place at Richmond, for which I knew him

unqualified, was so mortified with his disappointment, that he began to haul over

immediately to federalism, and is now an open enemy.”90 Jefferson’s assumption that

Callender blatantly deserted the Republicans and immediately went over to the

Federalists was a more insidious accusation than it perhaps appeared on initial reading.

The accusation first made Callender’s motives suspect, casting doubt on the claim and

absolving Jefferson of most need to refute it. A cursory reading of Callender’s activities

during the time, however, is clear: he did not desert Jefferson for the Federalists.

After Monroe’s communications crossed his desk, the president stepped up his

attempts to play an offensive defense: “I inclose [to] you [Monroe] a paper which shews

the Tories mean to pervert these charities to Callender as much as they can. they will

probably first represent me as the patron & support of the Prospect before us, & other

things of Callenders, & then picking out all the scurrilities of the Author…[and] impute

them to me.”91 As August 1802 rolled on, James Monroe was feeling more confident than

his compatriot. “An attack from Callendar [sic] is a harmless thing unsupported by any

document from yrself [sic],” Monroe said, while outlining his plan for Jefferson’s

defense: “I shall give such hints as to prevent any thing whatever being done at present,

or if any thing is, to give as far as in my power the true direction to the affair.”92

Monroe’s promise, backed by his political acumen, likely salved Jefferson’s conscience

and quieted his fears. Neither man could have known, however, that Callender was less

interested in attacking Jefferson as a politician than he was in attacking Jefferson as a

hypocritical member of an aristocracy the journalist perceived as corrupt and ultimately

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no better than the one he had fled Britain to escape. This reality largely negates the

attacks Callender suffered from both his opponents in the press and some later historians

who attempted to portray Callender as a “converted” Federalist.

By late 1802, Jefferson was in need of the small peace of mind Monroe’s political

machinations could provide. Monticello’s shadow life was growing at a fast pace as Sally

Hemings continued to bear children who distinctly resembled the mulatto children so

common on many antebellum Southern plantations. In 1801, she bore a girl named

Harriet Hemings, possibly named for one of Jefferson’s favorite in-laws, Harriet

Randolph. Two years previously, in 1800, an unnamed daughter some scholars believe to

be Jefferson’s with Sally had died after living less than one year. How personally

Jefferson felt this death is unknown, but the name of “Harriet” for Sally’s fifth child may

signify a degree of personal involvement on Jefferson’s part with both Sally and their

illegitimate children.93

Washington and its leader may have found solace in Monroe’s assurances, but in

Richmond, the governor’s backyard, the newspaper war was escalating. By the beginning

of August 1802, Callender was squaring off against none other than his old newspaper,

Republican William Duane’s Philadelphia Aurora. Duane was an old compatriot of

Callender’s from the heady days of 1800 and 1801. He had previously purchased one

hundred copies of Callender’s Prospect—in the end he failed to sell them and left

Callender holding the bill for their printing and distribution. Although by 1802 the two

old friends had long since parted ways, Callender was initially not interested in leading

attacks against Duane and the Aurora. Instead, as the year wore on, the Richmond

Recorder published a series of screeds against others of Callender’s old friends and

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former employers, especially Meriwether Jones of the Richmond Examiner. When Duane

intervened on Jones’s behalf, the resulting press war transformed into the catalyst of the

Hemings revelation.

Callender and Jones shared a close friendship and partnership for most of the

journalist’s career, with Jones’s Richmond Examiner serving as the principal forum for

Callender’s political writing. After his release from prison, Callender had contributed to

the Examiner, and Jones printed the journalist’s plea for civility and peace in the paper’s

pages. After Callender returned to the newspaper world with a quiver of sharpened pens

ready for firing at Thomas Jefferson, Jones, still a staunch Republican, found himself in a

furious war of words with his old colleague. Callender, whose journalistic instinct,

acumen, and vitriol remained unmatched even among his former fellows, soon

overwhelmed Jones’s defense of both the Republicans and of himself with a tidal wave of

negative press, culminating in Callender’s accurate implication of Thomas Jefferson in

funding and supporting his (Callender’s) work.

Jones, unable to mount an effective riposte to this barrage, turned to the savvier

William Duane for assistance. Soon, Duane’s Aurora was also launching counterattacks

on Callender, and on August 25, readers of the Aurora were treated to a lurid and

sensationalized account of Callender’s abandonment of both his diseased and now

deceased wife and his children. Duane claimed Callender had essentially abandoned

them, “having his usual pint of brandy at breakfast” while leaving his family “in a state

next to famishing.”94 This charge, a blatant attack on the journalist’s personal character

and integrity, was the final straw. Writing feverishly and with resolution, Callender now

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unleashed his final and most devastating salvo against the font and source of all his

disappointments and tribulations: Thomas Jefferson.

5. “How much has been lost or gained by attacking J.T. Callender” – The Hemings
Revelation

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson advised in 1872.95 Seventy

years earlier, James Thomson Callender already beat her to the punch. The allegations he

published, thanks to the efforts of DNA analysis and the investigatory work of Annette

Gordon-Reed and others, have been largely vindicated96—but in 1802, Callender was less

concerned with “telling all the truth” than he was with “telling it slant.” As later scholars

have repeatedly pointed out, Callender’s talent was in shrouding the truth beneath a fog

of sensationalism and embellishment. On September 1, 1802, that was precisely what

Callender sat out to do in the pages of the Richmond Recorder.

The now-infamous article, ironically, opened with an attempt to shift the burden

of “revealing” the affair away from Callender: “It is well known,” Callender boldly

claimed, “that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many

years has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.”97 From the

very outset, the article raises the question: just how well was the allegation of interracial

sex at Monticello known prior to Callender’s “unveiling”? Twenty-two years after the

Recorder blared this headline to readers, Thomas Jefferson would recall Callender’s sin

as one of “unwarrantable indiscretions”—not, pointedly, one of outright deception.98 By

arguing that the story was “well known,” Callender cast himself in the role of simply

codifying common knowledge, something many succeeding historians have attempted to

refute or have ignored altogether.

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 Callender never visited Monticello.99 His friendship with Thomas Jefferson was

carried out almost exclusively through correspondence, a typical feature of most

friendships at the time. How Callender came into possession of evidence linking

Jefferson with Hemings is thus elusive and unlikely to ever be known with any degree of

certainty. What can be gauged independent of Callender himself, however, are the

informal reports, gossip, and rumors regarding the affair, as well as the broader degree to

which such affairs were commonly present and just as commonly covered up in the

Southern aristocracy.

The presence and treatment of interracial sex was a key contradiction in the early

Republic’s society, and here a unique facet of Southern culture came to the forefront with

glaring intensity. In perhaps the most famous quotation from her edited antebellum diary,

Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote of the conundrum interracial sex presented the Southern

woman: “God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system wrong iniquity…. This only I

see: like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives their

concubines, the Mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children –

every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in every body's

household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so

to think.”100

Kenneth Greenberg’s Honor and Slavery (1996) examined this peculiar Southern

habit of hiding interracial sex in plain sight.101 Masters, possessing the ultimate power of

coercive force over their slaves, enjoyed the protection of the state itself, which did not

recognize slave rape as a crime. Sexual relations between masters and slaves were an

internal affair between a master and his “property.” As distasteful and even illegal as

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miscegenation was, Southern elites knew that to prosecute or expose one instance would

be to expose them all.

The result of this large-scale deception was that interracial sex, despite being

taboo in a society so rigidly segregated, was widespread—and virtually ignored.

Historiographical acceptance of this reality, though long in coming, has shed additional

light on the meaning these relations across the color divide had for Southern society as

well. Previous historians had all but written off interracial sex as contrary to the often-

extreme racism white planters exhibited, particularly through their strict adherence to an

ideology of “white purity.” A primary cog in this historical fog machine was likely

Southern culture itself. As Mary Chesnut pointed out, Southerners—men and women

alike—lived in a state of perpetual denial regarding interracial sex akin to what George

Orwell termed “doublethink.”102 That it occurred was known, and that it was known was

vehemently denied.103

Rumors of bi-racial children romping around Monticello’s grounds had swirled

for years by the time Callender published his own accusation. Historian Marshall

Smelser’s 1968 book, The Democratic Republic: 1801-1815, argues that for his

sensational accusation, “Callender was reaching back more than thirty years for a ‘news’

story” that, according to Smelser, Jefferson had “frankly and humbly” confessed as early

as 1768.104 Smelser, however, offers no evidence to substantiate this rather bold claim. In

any case, how Callender came into possession of this particular piece of gossip is less

important than what he did with it. The rumor was merely a spark; what it ignited was the

gunpowder of Callender’s fevered, revenge-bent imagination, and the scandalous ball

was fired directly at the heart of Jefferson’s reputation.

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 Callender’s article was the first to do two things: it was the first to name Sally

Hemings specifically, and it was the first to accuse Jefferson of regularly sleeping with

one of his slaves in an open, public manner.105 The journalist charged that Hemings’s

oldest son was named “TOM. His features are said to bear a striking although sable

resemblance to those of the president himself…. By this wench Sally, our president has

had several children…. THE AFRICAN VENUS is said to officiate, as housekeeper at

Monticello.” “Behold the favorite, the first born of republicanism,” Callender carped,

“the pinnacle of all that is good in great! in the open consummation of an act which tends

to subvert the policy, the happiness, and even the existence of this country!”106

Working into an all-too-familiar steam of heady enthusiasm, Callender insisted,

“’Tis supposed that, at the time when Mr. Jefferson wrote so smartly concerning negroes,

when he endeavored so much to belittle the African race, he had no expectation that…he

should chuse an Afircan stock whereupon he was to engraft his own descendants.”

“Mute! Mute! Mute! Yes very mute!” the journalist crowed, “will all those republican

printers…be upon this point…. [T]hey must feel themselves like a horse in a quick-

sand.” Nor did Callender intend to leave himself open to Jefferson’s preferred

countercharge: that he had sold himself out to the Federalists. “The writer of this piece

has been arraigned as capable of selling himself to a British ambassador,” Callender

declaimed, a lie that “was made by a printer, who is in the confidence of Mr.

Jefferson.”107

Attesting to his own credibility through appeals to other Republicans, Callender

then struck at Jefferson again: “If they [Jefferson’s supporters] rest in silence, or if they

content themselves with resting upon a general denial, they cannot hope for credit. The

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allegation is of a nature too black to be suffered to remain in suspence [sic].”108 Clever

punning aside, Callender’s razor-like writing was clearly designed to incense and

surround his Republican opposition and their arguments, defeating their countercharges

before they could be made. The Jeffersonians might well have looked at him as living

proof of just how much sharper than a serpent’s tooth it was to have a thankless former

insider.

The journalist then concluded with a thunderous peroration on his own justified

righteousness: “When Mr. Jefferson has read this article, he will find leisure to estimate

how much has been lost or gained by so many unprovoked attacks upon J.T.

Callender.”109 Here Callender’s justifications largely ran aground on the shoals of past

facts. Jefferson, as the documentary record showed, had not waged a campaign of

“unprovoked attacks upon J.T. Callender.” Although the president’s neglect of and

outright chilliness toward his ex-devotee was the accelerant that initially fueled the fire

he now found himself confronting, Jefferson had truthfully taken few, if any, proactive

steps to ensure Callender remained unemployed and in the bad graces of both the

Democratic Republicans and society at large.

Jefferson’s immediate reaction to the publication of the story is not recorded. The

day after the story appeared, Jefferson received a letter from John Barnes, who helped

manage the president’s finances, calling his attention to “recent publications” full of “the

breath of Slander—so prevalant, basely scandalous, & disgracefull to society.”110

However, Governor Monroe had also written to Jefferson the day before Callender’s

publication, making no reference to any potential eruption in the Richmond press. A

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steady stream of correspondence between Jefferson, Monroe, and Secretary of State

Madison also remained silent on the question of Callender’s latest scandal.

Jefferson could spare little time to deal with an irksome journalist and the brewing

scandal. On his watch, the United States was engaged in its first confrontation with state-

sponsored Islamic terrorism, in the form of the Barbary pirates, whose decidedly non-

spontaneous actions were part of an orchestrated campaign against American maritime

commerce originating in, among other places, Libya. Not until October did a reference to

Callender creep into Jefferson’s extensive correspondence: “You will have seen by our

newspapers that with the aid of a lying renegade from republicanism, the federalists have

opened all their sluices of calumny…. Callender, their new recruit, will do the same.

[E]very decent man among them revolts at his filth.”111

If Jefferson was stonily silent, Callender was feverishly vocal. From September to

the end of the year, he continued to embellish his story, perhaps confident that Jefferson’s

lack of action implied a guilty conscience. He claimed that Jefferson had freed Sally’s

brother, who then went on to hawk fruit in Richmond, while one of Sally’s daughters—to

whom Callender, in an act of mock generosity, exempted from Jefferson’s lineage—

served as a servant elsewhere in the capital.112 As 1802 wound down, Callender further

claimed, “Other information assures us, that Mr. Jefferson’s Sally and their children are

real persons…[and] that her intimacy with her master is well known.”113

A flood of satirical poetry, news articles, and at least one infamous political

cartoon quickly followed. James Akin, a Massachusetts caricaturist, depicted Jefferson’s

head atop a strutting rooster proudly standing alongside a dark-hued hen with Sally

Hemings’s face, all beneath the proclamation: “A Philosophic Cock.”114 In the Richmond

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Recorder, new lyrics to the tune of “Yankee Doodle” surfaced: “When pressed by load of

state affairs / I seek to sport and dally / The sweetest solace of my cares / Is in the lap of

Sally.”115 Jefferson, a deeply private man, must have been mortified.

6. “To see him constantly drunk is nothing new” – The Last Days of James
Thomson Callender

With this scandal, James Thomson Callender had reached the apotheosis of his

journalistic infamy, leaping upon the fleet-footed steed of revenge to ride it into the

sunset, and the sunset was closer than even he could have imagined, or Jefferson could

have hoped. At the time the Recorder published the journalist’s first exposé, Callender

had little more than ten months left to live.

The fallout from the revelation was initially intense, but quickly betrayed the

reality: Callender was not a Federalist, nor would he reap rewards for his scandalous

reporting from the defeated opposition party’s hands. Moreover, Jefferson suffered little

political damage as a result of the “revelation.” In elections to the 8th United States

Congress, the Democratic-Republicans managed to pick up seventy-two new seats in the

House, handing them control of nearly three-quarters of the lower chamber and a similar

percentage in the Senate.

Jefferson himself would go on to win reelection in 1804 by a landslide, carrying

162 electoral votes and fifteen states, including Federalist stronghold Massachusetts, to

Federalist candidate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney’s 14 votes and two states. Most voters

were less interested in Jefferson the private sinner than they were in Jefferson the

victorious president who restored American honor by crushing the Muslim bandits along

Africa’s northern shores. The “scandal” thus had little, if any, appreciable effect on

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Jefferson’s career, regardless of how many succeeding iterations of academics may have

found themselves consumed in the steamy heat of the affair.116

Callender continued to spin out political diatribes, but nothing with the force and

show-stopping drama of his September articles. His revelations drove up subscriptions to

the Recorder, hitting over one thousand by December 1802. Federalist editors took

pleasure in reprinting his screeds across the nation.117 Callender had become so

successfully irritating (or irritatingly successful, depending on one’s perspective) that in

late December 1802, Republican and former Callender defender George Hay beat the

journalist with a walking stick at a Richmond store. Hay had previously served as a part

of the legal team defending Callender during his trial for sedition. The beating failed to

silence him, however, and subscriptions to the Recorder continued to rise.118

The final curtain appeared with a chorus of infighting between Callender and

Henry Pace over nothing more or less than money. By early and mid-1803, with the

paper more profitable than ever, Callender proved himself unable to serve both

partnership and Mammon: he promptly insisted that he receive an even half of the paper’s

profits. His sons had left Thomas Leiper’s Philadelphia home to join him in Richmond,

increasing his own financial burden. Pace refused, and Callender petulantly withdrew

into the protecting fog of drunkenness.119 Writing in the Examiner, Pace claimed that

Callender was only capable of being sober “seldom…more than three or four weeks at a

time…. [T]o see him constantly drunk…is nothing new.”120 Without him, however,

Pace’s paper could not long maintain its success, and it soon faded into obscurity.

Callender had succeeded in unleashing a controversy that would stand the test of

time. At two hundred years old the scandal, vampire-like, stubbornly refuses to die,

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though it was and is often hidden away in the dark basements of Jeffersonian

historiography. Callender, however, was a mere mortal—and a drunk one at that.

Alcoholism had shadowed his ever step for his entire professional career. Now, after

making one spectacular comeback to the political press scene and failing to gain an

iota—financially, professionally, or otherwise—from it, the final curtain on the

tempestuous life and times of James Thomson Callender was ready to fall.

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 NOTES

Abbreviations used in the notes:

JM: The Papers of James Monroe: Selected Correspondence and Papers, 1796-1802.
Edited by Daniel Preston, et al. 4 volumes. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2012.

TJ: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Julian P. Boyd, et al. 38 volumes to date.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–.

WCF: Thomas Jefferson and James Thomson Callender: 1798-1802. Edited by

Worthington Chauncey Ford. Brooklyn: Historical Printing Club, 1897.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Of Marbury v. Madison fame.
2
A handwritten letter exists from him to the President pro tempore of the Senate,
indicating his intention to take the Constitutionally prescribed oath of office on
Wednesday, March 4, at noon in the Senate chamber.
3
David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 577.
4
Callendar had made reference to his desire for a printing press in a letter (ca. October
20, 1800) sent to Jefferson while in jail.
5
Thomas Leiper to Thomas Jefferson, Philadelphia, March 8, 1801. TJ: 33:215-17.
6
Michael Durey, With the Hammer of Truth: James Thomson Callender and America’s
Early National Heroes (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 143.
7
Ibid, 145.
8
Thomas Jefferson, Pardon for James Thomson Callender, March 16, 1801. TJ: 33:309-
310.
9
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, April 12, 1801. Emphasis in the
original. TJ: 33:573-575.
10
James Callender to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, April 12, 1801. TJ: 33:573-575.
11
Jefferson “ghost-wrote” the Kentucky Resolutions; Madison, the Virginia Resolutions.
12
James Callender to James Madison, Petersburg, April 27, 1801. WCF, 35-37.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid. Callender’s letter to Madison is apparently the only surviving copy of this
particular excerpt; the original letter to Leiper is gone—or, at the least, I can’t track it
down via any work that cites it.
15
Ibid. Callender’s “exertions in the cause” included his intense newspaper war in
Jefferson’s favor during the 1799-1800 campaign against President Adams, and his work,
The Prospect Before Us, which had landed him in jail while serving as a critique of
Adams’s presidency and an electioneering piece for Jefferson. With this plea, Callender
was asking that Madison recall that virtually all of his (Callender’s) career in the United
States had been at Jefferson’s service.
16
James Callender to James Madison, Petersburg, April 27, 1801. WCF, 35-37.
17
Ibid. “Premunire” (italics in original) is an archaic French word meaning “danger” or
“warning.”
18
Ibid.

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19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid., emphasis added. Critics might give a wry grin at the (unintentionally) implied
pun in the words “made up the best newspaper.” Jefferson had, in fact, made such
statements in the past. In 1798, for example, the then Vice President had lamented
Callender’s flight from Philadelphia in the face of increasingly violent Federalist
opposition thus: “I can only express my regret that any thing should have happened to
withdraw you from the place where above all others you have it in your power to render
services to the public liberty, and to add my hopes that the causes are not permanent”
(Thomas Jefferson to James Thomson Callender, Monticello, October 11, 1798). A year
later, Jefferson was still supportive and approving: “I thank you for the proof sheets you
inclosed me. such papers cannot fail to produce the best effect. they inform the thinking
part of the nation; and these again…set the people to rights” (Thomas Jefferson to James
Thomson Callender, Monticello, October 7, 1799; TJ: 31:203-204).
22
James Callender to James Madison, Petersburg, April 27, 1801. WCF, 35-37.
23
Ibid.
24
The letter of May 7, 1801 to James Madison, was a complaint regarding the continued
nonpayment of his $200 fine.
25
This letter, although included in such anthologies of documents as Worthington
Chauncey Ford’s important Thomas Jefferson and James Thomson Callender: 1798-1802
(Brooklyn: Historical Printing Club, 1897), is a key component in coming to a greater
understanding of Callender’s motivations, defenses, and interactions with other major
figures in this story. Michael Durey’s biography dismisses most of its content, arguing
that Callender’s letter showed his “naïve view” that his lack of social grace was what
barred him from preferment under the Republican regime. The letter, in fact, is
significantly more important as a demonstration of Callender’s pleading of his case in
generally legitimate terms before one of Jefferson’s top lieutenants, as well as a
foreshadowing of what was eventually to come (the Hemings revelation).
26
James Monroe to James Madison, Richmond, May 23, 1801. JM, 511-13.
27
Ibid.
28
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Eppington, May 26, 1800. TJ: 31:590-91.
29
James Monroe to James Madison, Richmond, May 23, 1801. JM, 511-13.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid. Durey does not discuss this exchange between Monroe and Madison, which again
constitutes an important source in constructing Callender’s personality and his arguments
for support from the party and Jefferson personally. These arguments are a critical
element in coming to a fuller understanding of Callender’s motivation for the actions he
eventually took. Omission of letters such as these effectively silences Callender’s voice.
Durey’s assumption that Callender believed his lack of social graces was the sole reason
for the Republicans’ refusal to extend aid is undercut somewhat in Monroe’s account to
Madison—it seems clear from this letter in particular that Callender at least strongly
suspected if not outright believed there was a plot afoot within the party’s highest
echelons to silence him.
32
Ibid.
33
Durey, 144-47; the whole sorry episode is retold in these pages.

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34
James Monroe to James Madison, Richmond, May 23, 1801. JM, 511-13.
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid.
37
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Washington, May 26, 1801. TJ: 34:185-86.
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid.
40
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Washington, May 29, 1801. TJ: 34:205-206.
41
Ibid. “Capt Lewis” is Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark fame.
42
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Washington, May 29, 1801. TJ: 34:205-206.
Emphasis added.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid.
45
Adam Smith (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759) argued, “Before we can make
any proper comparison of [others’] interests, we must change our position. We must view
them, neither from our own place nor yet from his, neither with our own eyes nor yet
with his, but from the place and with the eyes of a third person, who has no particular
connexion with either, and who judges with impartiality between us.”
46
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Washington, May 29, 1801. TJ: 34:205-206.
47
Ibid.
48
A habit, it bears repeating, that was so pronounced and that the Federalists regarded
with such hostility that the first of the Alien and Sedition Acts specifically targeted these
immigrants.
49
Noble E. Cunningham’s monograph, The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power: Party
Operations, 1801-1809 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), provides
a succinct summary of the at-times rather cozy relations between the two men: “On
several occasions Jefferson, while Vice-President, had answered Callender’s appeals for
support by sending him money—fifty dollars at two different times—and he had given
encouragement to his writings by reading some of Callender’s proof sheets and confiding
to him that ‘such papers cannot fail to produce the best effect. They inform the thinking
part of the nation…’” (250). In Jefferson’s Notes on John Jay’s Mission to Great Britain
(TJ: 29:605-629), editor Barbara Oberg notes that “[I]n June 1797 he [Jefferson] paid for
multiple copies of Callender’s work, probably to help subsidize its publication…” (630).
This support predated the substantial contributions already noted previously to Callender
as part of support for The Prospect Before Us.
50
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Washington, May 29, 1801. TJ: 34:205-206.
51
In her work, Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), Historian Annette Gordon-Reed
notes, “James Callender was not the first person to have said that Thomas Jefferson had a
slave mistress. He was only the first to put the specific allegation on paper” (77). Such a
public display violated what Kenneth Greenberg, in his Honor & Slavery (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), described as the Southern code of “masks”—a form of
willful ignorance that Southern gentlemen perpetrated, in which they mutually ignored
each others’ indiscretions (such as the arguably widespread nature of interracial sex
between white masters and black slaves) as part of a quid-pro-quo social transaction.

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52
John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York:
The Free Press, 1977), 153.
53
Ibid., 153; Abigail Adams to Thomas Jefferson, Quincy, July 1, 1804. WCF, 41-43.
54
Abigail Adams to Thomas Jefferson, Quincy, July 1, 1804. WCF, 41-43..
55
Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, Washington, July 22, 1804. WCF, 43-44.
56
Abigail Adams to Thomas Jefferson, Quincy, August 18, 1804. WCF, 44-45. Emphasis
added.
57
James Madison to James Monroe, Washington, June 1, 1801. JM, 518-519.
58
Ibid., emphasis in original.
59
Ibid., emphasis in original.
60
Ibid.
61
James Monroe to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, June 1, 1801. TJ: 34:229-230.
62
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Washington, May 29, 1801. TJ: 34:205-206.
63
James Monroe to James Madison, Richmond, June 6, 1801. JM, 519-520. Emphasis
added.
64
Ibid.
65
This lack of follow-up on Callender’s part might account in part for Durey’s omission
of these sentiments from his biography. However, once again these hopes—however
weak—for a future of financial and career independence on Callender’s part constitute an
important component of the journalist’s voice. Given that Callender himself is only
“heard” through his sparse correspondence with others (and their letters in turn to each
other about him), ignoring or omitting such passages as this one prevents contemporary
historians from either painting a complete portrait of the journalist’s inner motivations or
from coming to fuller conclusions regarding those motivations. Here, Callender was
arguably not under the naïve assumption that his social abrasiveness was the bar to his
advancement (as Durey argued previously), but rather was seeking Monroe’s assistance
in acquiring a place to live and some funding to attain a legal education.
66
Richmond Recorder, September 18, 1801.
67
Ibid., emphasis added.
68
Durey, With the Hammer, 149.
69
John Cheetham to Thomas Jefferson, New York, December 29, 1801. TJ: 36:228-229.
70
Ibid. Cheetham had previously written at great length to Jefferson regarding this matter
(December 10, 1801). The New York Republicans were engaged in a ferocious
“pamphlet war” between “Jeffersonian” and “Clintonian” factions—splits created during
the tumultuous 1800 election.
71
John Cheetham to Thomas Jefferson, New York, December 29, 1801. TJ: 36:228-229.
72
Ibid.
73
Thomas Jefferson to James Thomson Callender, Monticello, October 6, 1799. TJ:
31:200-202. Jefferson’s intrigue is made clear in the following observation/request
regarding the documents: “All who were members of Congress in 1786,” he argued,
“may be supposed to remember this information.” Accordingly, “if it could be understood
to come to you through some such channel, it would save the public from reading all the
blackguardism which would be vented on me, were I quoted.”
74
Thomas Jefferson to James Cheetham, Washington, January 17, 1802. TJ: 36:386-387.

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75
Ibid. Jefferson here is referring to Callender’s History of the United States for the Year
1796, famous as the forum for his accusations of infidelity against Alexander Hamilton.
76
Thomas Jefferson to James Cheetham, Washington, January 17, 1802. TJ: 36:386-387.
77
This view was especially prevalent in earlier works of historiography, specifically the
large biographical cycle of Dumas Malone, Fawn Brodie’s (to an extent) monograph—
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History—and John C. Miller’s Wolf by the Ears. As our
understanding of interracial sex’s presence in Southern aristocratic culture continues to
evolve, however, most scholars have agreed that, true or not, the allegations against
Jefferson did not originate strictly with Callender. Some Jeffersonian apologists,
nevertheless, remain committed to this sola scriptura view, notably David Barton: The
Jefferson Lies.
78
Gordon-Reed, 77. In work after work, however, scholars have consistently pushed
Callender aside—content to write him off as a “scandalmonger” unworthy of a voice in
the matter he helped to unleash. Clarence E. Walker’s recent work on Jefferson and
Hemings, Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally
Hemings (University of Virginia, 2009), addresses the paradox of Callender’s “unsavory
character” alongside his “way of being substantially correct in what he wrote” thus: “The
truth can be told by a scoundrel and still be truth” (187-88). With that, Walker moves on,
as though the grudging concession to the journalist’s role is sufficient to address his
whole involvement in the affair. Admittedly, Walker’s book is not concerned with the
gestation of the affair or even the affair itself, but the legacy it left behind.
79
Durey, 150.
80
Richmond Recorder, May 5, 1802, emphasis added.
81
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New
York: Harper & Row, 1951). This distinction between Callender as an oppositionist vs.
Callender as a fanatic is an important, if somewhat semantic, argument. Durey casts
Callender as an oppositionist—a personality style dominated largely by the inclination to
challenge prevailing sentiment and opinion. This word, however, defines Callender’s
personality as a negative reaction to his environment. That is, Durey is essentially
arguing that Callender saw prevailing political trends and consciously chose his views as
diametric opposites. He was thus defined almost entirely by external forces, his sole
response being to move in opposing direction. I would argue, however, that Callender
was a fanatic: his almost maniacal adherence to radical republicanism placed him in
opposition to even those who espoused the more moderate political views of the
Democratic-Republicans.
82
David Barton, The Jefferson Lies (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012), 20.
83
Durey, 151.
84
Richmond Recorder, July 5, 1802.
85
James Monroe to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, July 7, 1802. TJ: 38:36-38.
86
Ibid.
87
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Washington, July 15, 1802. TJ: 38:72-74.
88
Ibid.
89
Richmond Recorder, March 6, 1802
90
Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Macon, Washington, July 17, 1802. TJ: 38:89-92.
91
Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Washington, July 17, 1802. TJ: 38:92-93.

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92
James Monroe to Thomas Jefferson, July 26, 1802. TJ: 38:131-132.
93
Annette Gordon-Reed and Jon Kukla are among the chief exponents of this belief.
Harriet Hemings (1801-ca. post-1822) was the second child borne by Sally and attributed
to Jefferson to bear that name. An earlier Harriet Hemings was born in 1795 and died in
1797. See also Annette Gordon-Reed: Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2008); Jon Kukla: Mr. Jefferson’s Women (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2007); and Virginia Scharff: The Women Jefferson Loved (New York: Harper,
2010). Gordon-Reed’s 2008 work in particular offers a wealth of information about the
lives of the Hemingses as a shadow family subsumed into Jefferson’s own family.
94
Philadelphia Aurora, August 25, 1802.
95
Emily Dickinson, ed. Ralph W. Franklin, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 494, poem 1263.
96
Largely vindicated. Jefferson still has his ardent defenders and Callender his equally
passionate detractors. For spirited defenses of Jefferson in this matter, see David Barton,
The Jefferson Lies and William G. Hyland, Jr., In Defense of Thomas Jefferson.
97
Richmond Recorder, September 1, 1802.
98
Andrew Burstein, Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello (New York:
Basic Books, 2005), 160. Burstein quotes Jefferson as laying off Callender’s
“unwarrantable indiscretions” on “paroxysms of inebriety,” but does not cite the
letter/document in which these statements appeared. William Hyland’s In Defense of
Thomas Jefferson cites this passage from Burstein almost verbatim, but does not include
any reference to sources other than Burstein’s work. Thus, it has been impossible so far
to verify the quote as accurately attributable to Jefferson. In any case, Annette Gordon-
Reed’s charge that Callender was not the first person to accuse Jefferson of interracial
sex—but was the first to print those charges publicly—seems particularly accurate given
the evidence.
99
Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805 (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1970), 212. See also John C. Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: “Callender made his
charges against Jefferson without fear and without research” (154). Fawn Brodie, in
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974), speculates that
Callender, “sometime before April 1801,” journeyed to Charlottesville to question
Jefferson’s neighbors following his release from prison and failure to secure the new
president’s favor. This fact-finding trip, though possible, seems highly unlikely for
several reasons. Callender was financially destitute, having just been released from
prison. He was also still coming to grips with Jefferson’s abandonment—the full
ramifications of their ended friendship and the journalist’s consequent anger were still
growing in March-April 1801. Callender still hoped Jefferson would hand over a
patronage appointment out of generosity or reward. Thomas Leiper, for example, had
written to Jefferson in early March that Callender “is casting a wishfull eye towards the
Postmasters office at Richmond but he does not know how to go about it—he desires me
to get the Governor and Major Butler to write you in his favor” (Thomas Leiper to
Thomas Jefferson, Philadelphia, March 8, 1801). Lastly, after his experiences both during
and after imprisonment, he was probably not in a physical state to travel. In April, he
closed his final letter to Jefferson with a brief postscript: “For some weeks past, the state
of my nerves does not permit of my writing in my own hand” (James Thomson Callender

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to Thomas Jefferson, Richmond, April 12, 1801). This passage suggests an emotional
breakdown of some kind that James Monroe’s personal observations during the
journalist’s visit to him later (May 23, 1801) seem to confirm: “He shook his
head…spoke of letters without tone…[and] shed tears abundantly.”
100
C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, eds., The Private Mary Chesnut: The
Unpublished Civil War Diaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 30-33.
101
See Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, pp. 37-38.
102
For Southerners living at the time, doublethink consisted of “the power of holding two
contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” For
many succeeding historians, it consisted of a different, but strongly related, tenet: “[I]t is
also necessary to remember that events happened in the desired manner. And if it is
necessary to rearrange one’s memories…then it is necessary to forget that one has done
so.” Both quotations from George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Harcourt, 1949; repr.
Penguin, 2003).
103
Again, Kenneth S. Greenberg’s Honor and Slavery is a key component in my
interpretation and argument. Greenberg’s “masks” thesis is too lengthy to insert into the
narrative, however. Additionally, Joshua Rothman’s Notorious in the Neighborhood
offers an extensive discussion on the topic of interracial sex in the South.
104
Marshall Smelser, The Democratic Republic: 1801-1815 (New York: HarperCollins,
1968), 50fn. In his Jeffersonian historiography, Merrill D. Petersen also acknowledged,
“the beginnings of the tale are obscure. Federalists whispered it in the bitter campaign of
1800” but it was Callender, Petersen argued, who made the “tale” public knowledge.
David Barton’s spirited (but largely conjectural) polemic, The Jefferson Lies (Nashville:
Thomas Nelson, 2012), does not even bother with attempting to trace Callender’s
sources, considering Callender himself as the source.
105
Historians have made much about Callender’s personal attitudes toward both race and
miscegenation, with the result that this discussion has often overshadowed and even
hijacked the narrative of the “revelation” as a whole. In his biography, Michael Durey
acknowledges Callender’s latent racism as manifested in the journalist’s various beliefs:
“Blacks were inherently inferior to whites; the black was ‘too stupid for acute reflection;’
had no sense of shame, and was concerned only with cramming food into his belly”
(137). Durey argues that Callender’s beliefs were rooted in several factors: his integration
into Southern society, his work as an advocate for the planter class, and a puritanical
streak that manifested itself in his dislike of the supposedly bottomless lustiness of the
African race (138). Historians have seized on these racist sentiments as proof that the
Hemings scandal was the product of Callender’s racism, not Jefferson’s betrayal. In her
groundbreaking study, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,
Annette Gordon-Reed believes the original article in the Recorder “brought the full force
of his [Callender’s] hatred for black people to bear” in the language of the article (61).
Joshua Rothman’s Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color
Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)
expands on this argument, stating that “James Callender detested African Americans and
found the notion of sex across the color line repulsive” (30). He accuses the journalist of
describing Hemings “in the most racist terms” as being a “wench” and a “slut”—despite
the obvious fact that these words, however pejorative, are not necessarily racist. The

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attitude many scholars have taken, however, is that Callender’s racial attitudes dominated
his need to “reveal” this story. This line of argumentation, while valid, overlooks an
important riposte: if Callender was so deeply racist, why did he not unleash this attack far
earlier? Furthermore, given that scholars now believe interracial sex was widely
prevalent, why did Callender not publish more on this topic during his last campaigns
against the Democratic Republicans and their elite? One can conclude that while
Callender’s racist attitudes undoubtedly informed his rhetoric and work, they did not
dictate or inspire his revelation of the Hemings scandal. Jefferson’s duplicity and
hypocrisy, not his miscegenation, touched off Callender’s anger.
106
Richmond Recorder, September 1, 1802.
107
Ibid., emphasis in original.
108
Ibid., emphasis in original.
109
Ibid.
110
John Barnes to Thomas Jefferson, Georgetown, August 31, 1802. TJ: 38:323-325.
111
Thomas Jefferson to Robert Livingston, Washington, October 10, 1802. TJ: 38:476-
477.
112
Richmond Recorder, November 10, 1802.
113
Richmond Recorder, December 8, 1802, quoting the Frederick-town Herald, date
unknown.
114
The cartoon is readily available online under its title. The American Antiquarian
Society offers both a high-quality image of the cartoon and a brief historical synopsis:
http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Exhibitions/View/8/fig8_16.htm
115
Richmond Recorder, November 17, 1802.
116
There are numerous excellent studies both for and against the veracity of the affair,
and it is neither my intent nor the narrative’s necessity that I offer my own treatment of
the scandal’s truth or falsehood. For a representative sampling of the literature, the
following are suggested: Annette Gordon-Reed: Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:
An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997) and The
Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008); Fawn
Brodie: Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974); Merrill
D. Petersen: The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1960); Andrew Burstein: Jefferson’s Secrets (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Jon
Kukla: Mr. Jefferson’s Women (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Joshua D. Rothman:
Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia,
1787-1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); David Barton: The
Jefferson Lies (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012); William G. Hyland, Jr.: In Defense of
Thomas Jefferson (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2009); John Chester Miller: The Wolf By
the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York: The Free Press, 1977); William
Wells Brown, Robert S. Levine, ed.: Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter (New York:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000).
117
Durey, 163-64.
118
Ibid., 164, 168.
119
Ibid., 169-70.
120
Richmond Examiner, July 6, 1803.

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 EPILOGUE

“Oh! could a dose of James river, like Lethe, have blessed you with forgetfulness

for once you would have neglected your whiskey,” lamented Meriwether Jones to

Callender in an open letter from November 1802.1 Perhaps these words drifted slowly to

the surface of Callender’s inebriated mind on the morning of Sunday, July 17, 1803, as he

staggered drunkenly around Richmond. With an imagination as overheated as Callender’s

could be, it seems at least possible that, like Richard III, the journalist may have

summoned to mind the ghosts and voices of those whose political lives and careers he

had dedicated his own life and career to pulling down: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams,

Alexander Hamilton, and others. If so, they tormented him for only a short period. A few

hours into the afternoon, his body was fished out of the James River, the victim of an

accidental drowning in three inches of muddy water.2 What John Adams and Thomas

Jefferson could not accomplish in nearly ten years, the James River had accomplished in

ten minutes: James Thomson Callender’s acid pen and vengeful indignation were finally

silenced.

History, however, has not been silent. Even in death Callender would not find the

peace that had so eluded him for most of his life. In a 2008 book entitled A Treasury of

Foolishly Forgotten Americans, journalist Michael Farquhar—himself something of a

scandalmonger3—concludes his brief chapter on James Thomson Callender with a

paragraph on the journalist’s death:

It was only a drunken misadventure that finally silenced James Callender forever.
On July 17, 1803, his bloated corpse was found floating in three inches of murky
water on the James River. His many enemies may have delighted in the irony of
his drowning in the muck. But it is a tribute to this unlikely hero of the First

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 Amendment that, in the face of egregious laws, physical intimidation, and prison,
it was the only thing that could keep him quiet.4

Very different are the next two accounts, the first from attorney and ardent Jeffersonian
apologist William G. Hyland’s account of Callender’s demise:

The rotting corpse bobbed up and down in a muddy, shallow stretch of the James
River. Through peeling flesh and hair matted like seaweed, the man’s gray face
was still recognizable. He was the eighteenth-century version of a tabloid
reporter, devoid of honor or decency…. Amid rumors of foul play, the formal
inquest noted that the deceased had been drunk, his waterlogged body recorded as
drowned in three feet of water on a Sunday in July 1803. The coroner then
scrawled a name on the death certificate: James Thomson Callender.5

The second, from John Chester Miller’s Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery,

is even more lurid:

[Callender] did not long enjoy the exhilarating sensation of having raised a
political tempest that threatened to topple the president of the United States.
Falling upon evil days, he took to drink and sodomy, disgusting even his
Federalist colleagues on the Richmond Register. In 1803 the Republican “martyr”
met his end: he fell from his horse, apparently in a drunken seizure, and drowned
in three feet of water in the James River. He died, as he lived, in the congenial
muck.6

From these diametrically opposed attempts to define Callender’s legacy in death,

one can discern the difficulty the journalist presented and continues to present to the

historian, as well as the different reactions varying parts of his life and work elicit. As

deeply divisive in death as he was in life, Callender, like the leaders and politicians he so

ardently supported and opposed, continues to attract extreme reactions and emotions. A

charlatan to some, a hero to others, Callender remains a polarizing figure.

The “real” Callender must surely contain elements of both extremes. An often

spiteful journalistic gadfly, he was a controversial, even unappealing figure. He thrived

on controversy, embracing it and ultimately becoming it as part of the now more than two

hundred year-old debate on the Hemings/Jefferson affair. He was a divisive character

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whose willingness to attack his opponents below the proverbial belt excited his

supporters and infuriated his enemies in equal measure. When it became clear Jefferson

had spurned him, Callender, never a great respecter of persons, wasted no time in

resorting to thuggish personal threats and even intimations of blackmail against the

president’s character that horrified the polite gentry who had only months earlier served

as some of Callender’s greatest cheerleaders. In the indefatigable pursuit of his own

career and advancement prospects, he did not even hesitate to leave his own children

behind, laboring on a plantation picking tobacco.

Yet this same man, however “devoid of honor or decency” he might have been,

was an anti-aristocrat of unusually strong convictions who first stepped foot in the United

States as a political refugee from Great Britain. Callender’s opposition to Hamilton and

support for Jefferson both stemmed from his personal espousal of strongly anti-

aristocratic and anti-establishment rhetoric. Moreover, one of the chief reasons for his

and Jefferson’s inevitable separation was Callender’s inability to reconcile himself with

the Republican elite’s seeming embrace of themselves as the new “governing class.”

Callender had put his fortune and livelihood on the line for his cause—enduring

imprisonment and impoverishment to help bring down the Sedition Act—while Jefferson

cautiously offered him support from behind the curtain of plausible deniability. For

Callender, this hypocrisy was intolerable and brought to mind fresh memories of his first

struggles against the British patronage system in Scotland. If he was “devoid of honor

and decency,” he was not devoid of strong convictions ingrained from his earliest days as

a working adult.

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 Ultimately, Callender has endured as a subject of debate thanks to his press

attacks. “The Truth,” Emily Dickinson claimed, “is Bald, and Cold.”7 If so, Callender

was the early American politician’s Jack Frost, his attacks having the irritating habit of

usually being true. Annette Gordon-Reed, in her widely acclaimed work, Thomas

Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, pointed out that “Callender, the

journalist, had a good record in reporting the basic truth of matters.”8 However much the

journalist may have indulged a penchant for exaggeration (and he indulged it frequently),

his accusations were usually grounded in solid evidence. As a journalist, then, he had

something few of his compatriots from the period shared: a degree of integrity as a

political writer. Callender the person, however, was much less admired or even tolerated.

His outbursts and emotional rhetoric won him far more enemies than friends among his

contemporaries and later scholars alike.

It is the union of these two Callenders—the unstable, passionately emotional man

and the often-accurate, inquisitive journalist—that has presented succeeding generations

of historians with such difficulty in assessing both the man and his work. The difficult

task of finding balance between the two Callenders presents scholars with the

historiographical equivalent of the Straits of Scylla and Charybdis: the man is so

polarizing, it is tempting to fall into one of two polarized views of him that are both

inaccurate in different ways.

In the rush to vilify John Adams for the Sedition Act or absolve Thomas Jefferson

of adultery, most historians have sidelined Callender, confining him to a peripheral role

while declining to treat him as a figure independent of the great men he attacked. He has

served as a tool or a scapegoat, depending on which issue a particular historian is

214
debating. In the still quite passionate debate over the Hemings scandal, historians on both

sides of the issue have thoroughly sidelined and denigrated Callender.

Conversely, the minority of scholars seeking to explain Callender’s real

importance to the political life of the early republic have fallen prey to the opposite

temptation. Callender has become a canonized populist, a prophet of radical democracy

and testator to the “power of the people” who made the mighty to stoop low. This rather

whitewashed interpretation suppresses the distasteful aspects of Callender’s character.

Like those scholars who treated the founders as demi-gods, many of Callender’s

apologists seem to want pristine heroes with pure motives and intent. What is needed,

then, is a middle road: a new approach to Callender.

Arguing that Callender was an individual worthy of study independent from the

scandals he propagated aids in constructing a more comprehensive, accurate, and perhaps

more balanced portrait of this important figure in early American political life. This

reexamination does not necessarily detract from the body of historical literature already

written on Callender and his scandalous revelations. If anything, a new evaluation of

Callender confirms much of what previous historians have argued. However, while recent

scholarship has shed considerable light and invested a great deal of time and energy into

the debate over what Callender opposed and/or revealed, more fruitful inquiry has

remained untapped over both who Callender was and why he fought the battles he chose.

Simple dismissals of these questions are common: Callender was a propagandist,

one of many trans-Atlantic agitators who fled to America in the late eighteenth century,

and a ne’er-do-well whose primary motivation was revenge. These allegations are true—

or, at the least, not necessarily false—but as with many things, the story runs far deeper

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than trite observations. Accusing James Callender of vengeful or impure (by present-day

standards) motives seems to suffice as a justification for confining him to the margins.

On the other hand, portraying him as a public hero strictly dedicated to transparency

equally obscures and twists his personal reasoning for penning the scandals. What

emerges, then, from an examination of Callender’s justifications and reasoning is a

considerably more nuanced portrait of the journalist, many of the founders, and of the

time in which they all lived.

A second and more insidious interpretational issue has been the historian’s

penchant for viewing Callender’s entire legacy through the lens of the Hemings scandal

and the debate on the scandal’s truth or falsehood. His significance, however, stretched

farther back than the destruction of his friendship with Jefferson, and his participation in

the various political stories of his day stemmed as much from his own inner beliefs as it

did from a desire to serve any party or leader. The Sedition Act brought out the

journalist’s Calvinistic moral inflexibility long before Thomas Jefferson decided to coopt

him into the ultimately successful attempt to use the Act as an electoral weapon. That

same streak of moralistic indignation was a major part of Callender’s later “betrayal” of

Jefferson, whatever role revenge may have played alongside. The disclosures of the

Hamilton/Reynolds and Jefferson/Hemings affairs alike were the product, yes, of political

maneuvering, but also of the indignation this former Briton felt at seeing a decadent,

hypocritical aristocracy indulging in the siren call of adultery while stuffing their ears

with the wax of piety and propriety. These are important, even elemental, observations

regarding Callender as a person that historians have largely failed to address in the rush

to debate the scandals, rather than the scandalmongerer.

216
 The highly and almost universally negative appraisal those succeeding

generations have given Callender is also proof of the dangers in allowing an individual,

however great he or she might be, to shape and define a particular narrative for decades

afterward. Although Hamilton was sharply critical of the journalist, it was Jefferson’s

ascription of evil motives and double-dealing to Callender that held sway among scholars

for well over two hundred years. In the broad view of American history, this perception is

only beginning to crumble under the sustained tide of revisionism breaking against the

Jeffersonians’ formerly impregnable ideological walls.

The narrative of Callender’s life is also of notable relevance in the twenty-first

century. Presidential scandals, the difficulties of a stubbornly resilient racial divide, and

especially the role of a partisan, political press in a time of deep national divisions and

conflict—all of these were issues Callender’s America and twenty-first-century America

share in common. Indeed, the post-Monica Lewinsky, post-USA PATRIOT Act world is

perhaps one of the best vantage points from which to launch a reevaluation of Callender’s

controversial work. He himself would be surprised to see the rise of a partisan television

media industry that is, if anything, even more ferocious than were the newspapers of the

late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He would also find kindred spirits in the

muckraking political reporting that brought the Watergate, Iran Contra, and Monica

Lewinsky scandals to light despite, in many cases, the best efforts of the governing

political elites of the day. Above all, Callender would likely admire the continuing efforts

of citizen journalists such as himself to hold the great and powerful of the day to account.

In an era when history has increasingly become preoccupied with moving away from the

individual and toward sometimes ill-defined groups organized along various collective

217
criteria, James Thomson Callender’s life and work serves as a powerful reminder that one

seemingly-insignificant person can exert tremendous influence over each succeeding

generation’s perception of its forebears.

The spirit of Callender’s oppositionist ethic and political scandalmongering forms

an indelible link between past and present. Rather than a figure of contempt or

irrelevance, he embodies many of the qualities journalists in the United States have come

to revere, if not always practice: a commitment to principles above personalities, a belief

in the need for transparency and accountability in public life, and a critical attitude

toward the differences between what politicians say and do. Callender is a reminder that

history does, in some cases, truly repeat itself; that the past is, after all, prologue.

Emperor Marcus Aurelius, writing around 170 AD, provides what is perhaps the most

appropriate ending of all: “Constantly reflect that all the things which happen now have

happened before: reflect too that they will happen again in the future…. All the same as

now, just a different cast.”9

218
 NOTES

1
Meriwether Jones to James Thomson Callender, November 3, 1802. In ancient Greek
mythology, the Lethe was a river in Hades whose waters, when imbibed, completely
wiped the drinker’s mind, erasing their memories forever.
2
Given that contemporaries repeatedly referred to Callender as a “serpent”, it is
interesting to place his manner of death against a passage from the far older Proverbs of
Solomon regarding alcohol: “Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? Who hath contentions?
Who hath babbling? Who hath wounds without cause? Who hath redness of eyes? They
that tarry long at the wine…. At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an
adder” (vv. 23:29-32, KJV).
3
Michael Farquhar, A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans: Pirates, Skinflints,
Patriots, and Other Colorful Characters Stuck in the Footnotes of History (New York:
Penguin, 2008). Farquhar’s other books include, A Treasury of Royal Scandals, A
Treasury of Great American Scandals, and (coauthored) The Century: History as it
Happened on the Front Page of the Capital’s Newspaper. He is a former writer and
editor of the Washington Post.
4
Farquhar, 37.
5
William G. Hyland, Jr., In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex
Scandal (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2009), 9. Italics in original. Hyland refers to
“three feet” of water, rather than three inches.
6
John C. Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York: Free
Press, 1977), 200. The passage is not footnoted, and it is thus unclear what supports
Miller’s allegation of sodomy. This paragraph perhaps best illustrates the depths to which
respectable academics would descend in an attempt to slander the slanderer, as it were.
Miller’s prose is already sufficiently purple; the baseless accusation of sodomy is merely
thrown in because, at this point, Miller has little to lose by lobbing one further shell at a
man he clearly despised.
7
Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols.
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955), I, 201.
8
Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 62.
9
Marcus Aurelius, trans. Martin Hammond, The Meditations (New York: Penguin,
2006), 100.

219
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