Beckley waited in the frigid barn on the docks where passengers of arriving ships passed through. He put up his sign—“Clerk of the House”—so they could recognize him.
First to appear was Cobbett. He was a robust, six-foot-tall Englishman, with ruddy face and close-set eyes, the beginnings of a paunch, and redolent with confidence. He warmed his hands on a pot of tea and, to Beckley’s “Tell me about yourself,” spoke proud and plain: “I am charged with being a troublemaker. The charge is true. As a lowly corporal and regimental clerk in His Majesty’s service in Newfoundland, I discovered that the officers were stealing much of the soldiers’ pay. I had read Thomas Paine’s pamphlet The Rights of Man, and I wrote one like it—The Soldier’s Friend—demanding the courts-martial of the corrupt officers. For that I was considered a snitch and made a pariah.”
“Are you a fugitive, Cobbett?”
“No, because I resigned the army before they could drag me before a drumhead court. I sailed to France, where I taught myself the language. But that land is filled with revolutionaries eager to cut the throat of King Louis and hot for war with Britain, and hardly the place for an Englishman. So here I am in the Colonies.”
“Family?” The imposing fellow appeared to be on the fair side of thirty, and respectably turned out in long jacket, bright red waistcoat, breeches and clean stockings.
“As soon as I could afford it, I brought my wife Nancy and our infant. The baby died.” He waved aside Beckley’s condolences with “No, no—she is with child again, and this time will be better. I propose to teach English to Frenchmen in this city, charging each of them six dollars a month, more than I can get in Wilmington.” He pointed to the sign above them: “What does a Clerk of the House do?”
“I take notes of the debates and votes, and distribute them to the members of Congress.” That was his position by day; at night, in the coffee-houses and taverns, Beckley plotted the political takeover of Pennsylvania by supporters of Jefferson. For that, he needed radical pamphleteers and newsmongers with a gift for writing in plain words.
They were interrupted by the arrival of Callender and family. The fugitive Scot appeared with his wan wife and three shivering boys, all too thinly clad for the snowy weather. Beckley judged the wiry Callender to be in his mid-thirties, a few years older and a few inches shorter than Cobbett—hungrier-looking, with dark hair and piercing eyes, dressed in what appeared to be the cast-off clothes of a sailor. The Clerk made the introductions and ordered some hot mulligatawny soup, a peppery stew from a recipe brought to the Philadelphia docks by emigrants from East India. Two of the boys sat on Callender’s knees, while the oldest hung on his neck from behind, looking up at Cobbett warily over his father’s shoulder.
“What sort of country is this, Mr. Cobbett?” asked Callender.
“This country is good for getting money, provided a person is industrious and enterprising. In every other respect,” Cobbett added, “the country is miserable, exactly the contrary of what I expected.”
“That’s not what we expect,” said Callender, taken aback.
“The land is bad; rocky. The houses are wretched, the roads impassable after the least rain. I was a farmer before I was a soldier, and I judge that America has fruit in quantity but not to compare with an apple or peach in England or France.”
“It’s cold, too,” said the boy behind Callender.
“Freezing!” Cobbett agreed heartily. “And the people are worthy of the country—a sly, roguish gang.”
“You’ve only been in America a month,” Beckley put in, “and this is your first day in Philadelphia.”
“You’ll see,” Cobbett assured Callender, “the natives are by nature idle and seek to live by cheating. But the industrious foreigner can do well here, for even rogues like to deal with an honest man.”
“I’m curious,” said Beckley, thinking of the materials he had under lock and key, “what you think of our newspapers.”
“Tupp’ny trash,” Cobbett snorted. “But the Americans who read, read nothing else. The fathers read the newspapers aloud to their children while the mothers are preparing breakfast.”
Callender’s youngest whimpered at the mention of food, and his father signaled to the waiter to hurry with the soup. “I saw copies of your Aurora in Edinburgh, when I was keeping from starving as a recorder of deeds,” the Scot said to Beckley. “It’s wonderful what you can say here about the government. In America, it is your happy privilege to prattle and print in what way you please, and without anyone to make you afraid.”
“Some say,” Beckley offered, fishing, “that it gets too personal.”
“No man has a right to pry into his neighbor’s concerns,” Cobbett stated firmly, “and the opinions of every man are his private concerns—so long as he keeps them so. But! But when he makes those opinions public; when he attempts to make converts, whether it be in religion, politics or anything else; when he once comes forward as a candidate for public admiration—then, I say, his opinions, his motives, every action of his life, public or private, become the fair subject of public discussion.”
Beckley looked at Callender, who was looking with relief at the arriving bowls of steaming soup. “I agree,” he said. “The conduct of men in public stations is fair game.” He was solicitous about feeding his wife, who was apparently with child and in some distress after the long ocean journey. He reached behind him to scratch the back of his neck; Beckley remembered well that everyone who stepped off that ocean-crossing vessel must be afflicted with lice.
“But in your book The Political Progress of Britain,” Beckley said, “you did not discuss personal character when you were excoriating their laws.”
“You wrote that book?” Cobbett looked up sharply. “No wonder they threw you out. All that inflammatory nonsense about ‘the six or eight hundred years of botching to produce a constitution that is a conspiracy of the rich against the poor’? Never read such seditious drivel.”
“Glad you read the book closely enough to remember that line,” said Callender mildly, “and that it moves you so.”
“Wait.” Beckley was confused by Cobbett’s patriotism. “You’re afraid to go back to England,” he said to the bumptious British immigrant, “because you offended the British army’s officer corps and you may be arrested for sedition. Yet you think this man’s book, critical of British history, is seditious drivel?”
“I am an Englishman, a subject of King George III. His government may be in error, and his courtiers may be corrupt, but every loyalist knows he reigns over the greatest country in the world.” Cobbett broke off a piece of stale Philadelphia bread, looked at it coldly and set it back down. “In my brief stay so far in America, I have not met an American who, in his calm and candid moments, did not admit that his country was much happier before the rebellion than it ever had been since.”
“You have just met one happy to be independent of that damned tyrant,” Beckley said heatedly. “And I think what you have said is a bald-faced lie.”
Cobbett rose to his full height and reached for his greatcoat. “Sir, I have never lied in my entire life. I rue the day when I thought of writing to your Jefferson.” He bowed to Mrs. Callender. “Madam, your three boys are models of good behavior and I congratulate you on their proper upbringing. Unfortunately, their father and his new friend here are fools. Good-bye.”
“A prickly fellow,” Callender observed as the Englishman stormed off. “If he writes as vividly as he speaks, he’ll do well.”
“Not in Philadelphia. King George is seen here to be a great villain.”
“As well he is, but you Americans are free of his despotism. We Scots are not.”
The oldest boy looked up between spoonsful and asked, “You suppose the big man never lied, not once?”
“Let me tell you a story, boys.” Callender leaned back in his chair and looked at the high ceiling of the barn near the docks, the crowd now thinning out after the passengers had debarked. “Charles the Second of Engla
nd had an unruly horse. He proposed to give the horse away to any one of his courtiers who could tell the greatest lie.”
The children and their mother stopped eating to listen, as did Beckley. “During the competition among the members of the King’s court,” the Scot continued, “a country fellow came into the castle, for Charles was quite accessible. The man was told of the King’s challenge and invited to furnish the biggest lie he could think of. ‘May it please Your Majesty,’ the man said, all offended, ‘I never told a lie in my life.’ And the King said, ‘Give that man the horse! For that is the greatest lie that any man can tell.’ ”
The boys all laughed and banged their spoons. John Beckley reckoned that was the sort of anecdote that would register with readers of popular pamphlets like Tom Paine’s. “I know a family with rooms to let, Callender. We’ll take your wife and sons there, and then I want you to meet a printer friend on South Market Street. Matt Carey’s an Irishman, a good red republican from Dublin doing a new edition of Guthrie’s Geographical Grammar, in installments. Maybe you could do a section. Ask for twelve dollars a week, or two dollars a printed page. That’s the going rate, and it’s a start.”
“Why are you doing this for me, may I ask?”
“Writers are needed for the anti-Federalist cause. There may come a day when you’ll want to help us.”
PART I
The Hamilton Scandal
Chapter 1
June 19, 1797
James Callender was seething. “Peter Porcupine,” five years after their first confrontation on the Philadelphia docks, was after him again. The newspaper written and published by the Englishman William Cobbett, Porcupine’s Gazette, shook in his hand as the Scotsman read it.
It was not enough for Cobbett to call him “Newgate Callender,” a pun on the schedule of trials put out by London’s Newgate Prison. Nor was Cobbett satisfied with ridiculing “this abandoned hireling, Callender” as afflicted with mania reformatio, a fictitious disease caused by an empty purse: “When the purse is full, the intestines are in a correspondent state,” wrote Porcupine, “and the body is inclined to repose and the mind to peace and good neighborhood: but when the purse becomes empty, the sympathetic intestines are immediately contracted, and the whole internal state of the patient is thrown into insurrection and uproar.” To top it off, Porcupine issued an invitation to Callender’s hanging: “If this malady is not stopped at once, by the help of an hempen necklace, it never fails to break out into Atheism, Robbery, Swindling, Massacres and Insurrections.”
As the target of Cobbett’s gleeful vituperation, Callender could almost feel the “hempen necklace” around his neck. Nor was the favorite editorial defender of the Federalists and their British allies finished with him. Porcupine went on to vilify “a mangy little Scotsman who has a remarkably shy and suspicious countenance; loves grog; wears a shabby dress, and has no hat on the crown of his head; I am not certain whether he has ears or not.” Callender, object of this vitriol, was particularly infuriated by Cobbett’s attack on his personal appearance: “He leans his head toward one side, as if his neck had a stretch, and goes along working his shoulders up and down with evident signs of anger against the fleas and lice.”
“It’s a pack of damned lies,” he said to the paper clenched in his hands. Callender had not been troubled with lice since he stepped off the ship from Edinburgh and met the pompous Cobbett on their first day in Philadelphia, five years before. And if he cocked his head to the side when he was thinking, what was wrong with that?
More damnable, in the Scot’s eyes, was the way everybody who counted for anything, on both sides of every controversy, read the British loyalist. Even republicans—who could read Callender’s frequent paragraphs in Benny Bache’s publication, the Aurora—surreptitiously bought Cobbett’s new journal. They wanted to have a laugh at their own kind and to see what the other side was saying in such plain and mutton-fisted words of inspired ridicule.
The 3,000 paying subscribers to Porcupine’s Gazette far surpassed the numbers for the staid Federalist Gazette, and worse, journals all up and down the nation reprinted Cobbett’s colorful fulminations about France’s conspiracies to undermine the government. In five years, as Callender struggled to write, usually with no byline, in newspapers owned by others, the irrepressible Englishman Cobbett had marched from irregular pamphleteer to writer-editor of the most influential daily sheet of news and opinion in America. Though the first census in 1790 showed fewer than 4 million people in all of the United States, this Englishman’s twenty pamphlets had sold a half-million copies.
Particularly galling to Callender about Porcupine’s success was that he knew from personal experience that Cobbett often stretched, squeezed and tortured the truth. The Scot was not mangy; he bathed as often as he could, considering that the hot water was needed for his family. Nor was his countenance suspicious, as Cobbett claimed; he thought the more accurate word for his expression was skeptical. He remembered how women in his youth in Scotland—when he was the passionate poet who signed his name “Timothy Thunderproof ”—told him his face was darkly handsome and his nose aristocratic. True, he wore no hat, but neither did he wear any man’s collar. His hatlessness was by choice—it made him feel free—and if his habit of dress was not that of a dandy, it was only because the needs of their boys kept Callender and his wife from buying new clothes for themselves. And though he liked his ration of rum as much as the next man—perhaps a little more because writers needed a freedom of spirit—he felt it unfair to write that “he loved grog,” as if he were a common drunk.
The one Cobbett charge he could not deny or ameliorate was the permanent emptiness of his purse. Callender was habitually short of money. At this moment, he was on the very edge of bankruptcy and was dyspeptically aware that his “internal state” was in the uproar that Porcupine so vividly described.
But he never doubted his ability to survive. In the five years since he came to America, Callender had survived the loss of intermittent newspaper jobs as well as Matt Carey’s patronage. He survived the loss of his one regular job as stenographer making a record of Congressional debates. Most important, he survived, with his wife and now their four boys, the scourges of yellow fever that had killed every sixth person in Philadelphia.
Through all that, and added to his unfortunate habit of making enemies in every endeavor, he had been forced to suffer the sustained abuse directed at him from the established Federalist press. After John Beckley had arranged the publication here two years ago of Callender’s anti-British history, that pro-British pack determined to discredit him was led by Porcupine, who branded him “Citizen Callender”—using the honorific assumed by bloodstained French revolutionaries. Cobbett took particular umbrage when Callender was the first to dare criticize George Washington’s expense account and his curious advances on salary, along with the revered President’s undue deference to Hamilton and his New York banker friends.
Now, on a muggy Philadelphia June day in this first year of the rule of the Federalist President John Adams, the Scot sat glumly in the borrowed upstairs office of Snowden & McCorkle’s print shop. He was stung more painfully than he would admit by his rival’s invective.
Callender had completed writing the first four parts of his projected History of the United States for the Year 1796 but had not found enough subscribers to persuade the printers to set type. Because of this uncertainty of publication, he was too discouraged to write further. Callender’s despondency had reached the point a month earlier at which he had written to James Madison, who had just quit the Federalist-dominated Congress, for help in finding a position in Virginia as a country schoolmaster or a journeyman carpenter. Today’s blast from Cobbett had deepened the sorrow he felt for himself.
McCorkle, in a folded-paper printer’s hat, used a hand blackened by ink to push his door open. “You have a visitor.”
Callender expected no visitors because nobody thought enough of him to come. He did the calling on others, an
d had already called on everybody he knew to subscribe to his projected book. “Send him up,” he said.
“Maybe you ought to come down and bring him up, if he is who he says he is. He claims he’s Tom Jefferson.”
Hope surged, mingled with panic. “No, you go down and send him up.” He used the thirty-second delay to clean away the dirty cup and mess of old newspapers and dust off the unused side chair. He wanted to be seen working at the manuscript of his History of 1796.
He greeted the tall, redheaded Vice President of the United States at the door and awkwardly ushered him in. Jefferson had run second to John Adams in the Electoral College vote for President; the prize for coming in second was the Vice Presidency. Like Adams before him in Washington’s Administration, the newly elected Vice President had nothing to do but let others prepare to back him for President again four years hence. He, of course, could not appear to be interested. That would be unseemly and only confirm Federalist accusations that he was motivated by personal ambition.
Jefferson interrupted his effusions of what a great honor it was. “I thought you might be somewhat melancholy today, because Porcupine’s quills are sharp, and this would be a good time for us to meet. I admire your writings.”
Callender put on a modest smile; he was happily aware of that. He had already made much of a remark Jefferson was reported to have said about the abuses of English power recounted in the Scot’s Political Progress of Britain after its publication in America: “The work contained the most astonishing concentration of abuse I have ever heard of.” Jefferson’s overheard remark was phrased confusingly—the abuse was by Britain, of course, not by Callender—and Callender didn’t bring it up for fear Jefferson would deny having said it, or complain about Callender’s self-serving use of his commendation in print. But praise from the writer of the Declaration of Independence provided an opening that cried out to be followed up.
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 5