Enough of the republicans went along, in fear of popular revulsion against the French, to pass the bill as amended. They hardly noticed a small provision Harper included authorizing judges to bind the accused seditionist to “good behavior” during prosecution by posting bond. That was the only part of the bill that Cobbett would have changed. Fear of losing a large deposit would effectively keep indicted critics of government from further berating officials.
Porcupine scribbled a quotation from the poet Juvenal and had a page take it to Harper. The Federalist leader smiled at him, and used it to close the debate on the bill designed to end American disunion by making outspoken opposition a crime:
On Eagles’ wings immortal Scandals fly
While virtuous actions are but born and die.
PART II
The Sedition Scandal
Chapter 14
October 10, 1798
PHILADELPHIA
He was a widower now. Defpite the miniftrations óf Dr. James T. Reynolds, the medical man assigned to the case by Dr. Benjamin Rush, the frail mother of his four boys had succumbed to the yellow fever. Callender never felt more alone.
Though it ran against his Calvinist nature to see much good in anybody, the bereaved man thanked God for Thomas Leiper. At a time when “moderate” republicans in the Congress were shunning him; when too many republican editors saw fit to trim their sails in the patriotic storm, leaving him exposed to Federalist fury—here was a Scot blessed with an open heart.
As head of the St. Andrew’s Society, the tobacco merchant provided aid to Scottish immigrants in need. He provided his former countrymen a sense of pride, too, when he carried the tobacconists’ standard in the Grand Federal Procession in Philadelphia in 1788, celebrating the new United States Constitution. And the gray-haired, tall Scot had given Callender a much-needed financial lift even before either of them had met Thomas Jefferson, by getting his fellow merchants to sponsor Callender’s Short History of the Nature and Consequences of Excise Laws. In retrospect, Callender was satisfied that his pamphlet in criticism of sales taxation was well argued, because the tax not only fell on the poor, but also harmed small merchants and local manufacturers who needed tariff protection against imported British products. Even those who condemned Callender now as a scandalmonger had to admit he was capable of serious analysis of the government’s role in promoting domestic trade.
“I never needed you more than now, Thomas,” he said, his voice breaking, “my boys are motherless. And they’ll have to be fatherless, too, until I can make enough money to send for them.”
Leiper took his fellow Scot by his narrow shoulders and shook him gently, sharing the grief of the loss of a wife to the fever that had again decimated Philadelphia. Not even the personal care of Dr. Reynolds, at the direction of Dr. Rush himself, bleeding off her poisoned blood to balance her bodily humours, had been able to save her. As she lay dying, the agonized Callender, rocking the wasted woman in his arms, had made a deathbed promise that their four boys would be safe with him in Virginia. They would grow up far from the dread roar of the frogs in the mosquito-infested swamps near Philadelphia, and far from the fury of Federalist politicians who wanted to put their father in jail.
“You see I have thirteen of my own,” Leiper said to him, pointing across the expanse of his estate where the children of his first and second wives were playing. “What’s four more? They all take care of each other.”
At that poignant evidence of kindness, the writer could hold himself together no longer and broke down sobbing. After a time, the two Scotsmen, a generation apart but their political convictions akin, began to take the long walk toward their children. They talked of past times, when Callender as the poet “Timothy Thunderproof ” had urged independence for Scotland. When England’s prosecutors decided he was neither thunderproof nor arrestproof, their sedition indictment forced him to flee across the Atlantic. Now, even with his suddenly acquired American citizenship, he was being forced to run from a sedition law again.
“With the yellow fever and now the war fever, these are terrible times,” said Leiper. “You heard the sad news about Benny Bache?”
Callender nodded; the editor of the Aurora had been taken by disease as well. He was not so regretful at the death of Bache, who had often denied him credit for authorship of his articles and had failed to defend him when Porcupine denounced his books. Recently and more damagingly, Ben Franklin’s hot-tempered grandson put all the blame on Callender for bringing the public’s wrath down on the heads of republicans by forcing President Adams to release the XYZ papers. Worst of all, when Bache ran a foolish letter in the Aurora calling the President “old, querilous, bald, blind, crippled, toothless Adams,” the President’s partisans assumed Callender had been the author. That was untrue, but Bache did nothing to protect him by setting the record straight. Now, armed with the Sedition Act, the President had a personal reason to want to prosecute Callender.
He asked his merchant friend: “Will republicans keep the Aurora going?”
“Tom Jefferson himself told me we must try. Bache’s widow Margaret will be publisher and Bill Duane will write it. We hoped it could be you, but you’re a marked man, James. There’s no more safety for you in Philadelphia than in Constantinople.”
“I’m menaced by prosecution and imprisonment,” Callender agreed, “by the sorry understrappers of Federal usurpation, who have much in common with the savage Turks.”
He wished he had been asked to take charge of the Aurora, if only for the satisfaction of turning it down. Callender had been warned that enemies frustrated by his last-minute escape from alienhood were investigating his fraudulent new citizenship. “Duane will do,” he told Leiper. “Not much of a writer, and he doesn’t really understand political arithmetic, but at least he’s not afraid of Porcupine.” He had heard that the red-bearded Irishman had served time in a Calcutta prison for annoying the local British authorities, which spoke well for his courage. But as a troublemaking immigrant, Duane would now be vulnerable to the Alien Act. His predecessor at the Aurora, the late Benjamin Franklin Bache, had at least the protection of being his revered grandfather’s grandson.
A new wave of bitterness swept through the doubly exiled Scot-American. “I hope that this pestilence of yellow fever,” he told his benefactor, “so justly deserved by so many of the male adults of this sink of destruction, will prove a check on a much worse one—the black cockade fever.” He burned at the thought of the Adams mobs, parading in their cockade hats, reviling the ranks of persecuted republicans. “I mean the fever that, under the pretense of defending us from a foreign war, aims at promoting a civil one.”
Leiper tried to lift his spirits. “Jefferson also wanted you to know you won’t be friendless in Virginia. Stevens Mason will give you shelter in his plantation at Raspberry Plain.”
Callender knew that was intended to be comforting to a man, now forty and with no prospects, dependent on the dole of a dwindling band of politicians under fire, heading off into the unfamiliar territory of the Southland. Again, he was “alone in a land of strangers.” Virginia’s Senator Mason was an ally: The legislator proved his anti-British mettle by slipping the text of the Jay Treaty to Bache’s Aurora for publication even as President Washington was trying to keep it secret. Nothing so daring had ever been done in the press before.
“You will find Mason has fifty dollars there for you,” Leiper added, “from Jefferson’s correspondent in Richmond, his cousin George. And I was asked to give you this to help you keep body and soul together on your journey. As subscription for your next book, of course.”
Callender put the five $1 bills deep in his pocket, shamed at taking charity but murmuring his gratitude.
“We republicans are on the run up here,” Leiper said. “Some of the cowards in our ranks don’t want to know you. But Jefferson knows how valuable you are, and there’s hope and some protection where you are going.”
“He said that to you, that I was val
uable? You know him well, then?”
“I was his landlord when first he came to Philadelphia to be Washington’s foreign minister. He rented one of my houses on Market Street.” Callender, dreading the moment of parting soon to come, felt himself tearing up again and was glad that Leiper filled the moment with idle conversation. “He hung three of the paintings he brought home from Europe in the front parlor. Portraits of Sir Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke. He told me that one day Colonel Hamilton came to call, and asked who they were. Jefferson told him, and said they were the trinity of the three greatest men the world ever produced. And Hamilton said no, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar. Shows you the difference in the men’s vision of life, no?”
The writer, staring across the field, felt the tobacco merchant’s hand grasping his arm firmly to prepare him for the coming separation. Callender’s four sons, from age eight down to little Thomas, now three, came running toward them.
“Be brave now, James. No tears; tell them you’ll see them soon. A little lying can be a kindness.”
Callender admonished his sons to behave well on the Leiper farm while he made a home for them in a happier clime. “First, down in Virginia, as soon as I can settle in and get a home ready for you. And someday, I promise you, we’ll see a land and a seacoast and a people whose beauty will leave you breathless, as soon as matters clear up on the other side of the Atlantick.”
. . .
He started south on foot, figuring he could reach Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in two or three days’ walking. There he planned to use one of his dollars to buy a seat on the stagecoach to Richmond.
His left foot soon blistered. Limping along the dusty roadway, cutting across fields of late-summer corn to save steps, Callender reminded himself that he was a severe critic but not a commonplace railer. He had asked hard questions, and closely studied documents, and listened to debates in Congress, and then he wrote the truth. And then, by infusing the facts with his opinion, he conveyed a much deeper truth. Because he had a way with words, his truths hurt and angered the men in power who confused themselves with the government itself. And what was the result? He was a stranger in this country and not six people cared a farthing if he were gibbeted.
He was originally a poet, he reminded himself, and one day would be a poet again. Trudging along, favoring his blistered foot, he recited some of the couplets he wrote as Timothy Thunderproof in his youth: “Such is the in-born baseness of mankind / A grateful heart we seldom hope to find.” For every kind person like Leiper, he saw a score of cruel Cobbetts; for every political inspiration like Jefferson and Tom Paine, he saw the long shadow of Hamilton and the hateful Goodloe Harper. Nor did he expect fame from his poetry, writing then as he ruefully remembered now: “Modest Merit rarely meets her due / Happiness recedes as we pursue.”
What would his famed uncle think of those modest lines? James Thomson Callender firmly believed himself to be the namesake and nephew of the great Scottish poet James Thomson, though he had never met his uncle. That meant that running through his veins was the blood of the most celebrated poet of the century, Alexander Pope excepted. Although the sensuous imagery of his uncle’s work ran counter to Callender’s prudish upbringing, he remembered how one Thomson poem—Liberty—had the ringing theme that the freedom attained in ancient Greece, lost in the Dark Ages, was reborn in Britain. The great poet’s nephew, a fugitive from British justice, wished that it were so. Perhaps if he could bring his boys back to Scotland, they would live to see Scottish freedom’s day.
Callender came to a brook and was able to bathe his sore foot. He believed he was born to defend the unfairly attacked: after Dr. Samuel Johnson derogated the great Thomson in his Lives of the Poets, Callender excoriated the critic as “Pomposo” in a reply critique. Nursing that grudge, he later wrote a pamphlet exposing Johnson’s Dictionary as a collection of stolen definitions and confused judgments. Such a passion of loyalty to his family, his nation, his political beliefs, was at his heart’s core. Callender hoped he would never forget that. Like his satiric hero Jonathan Swift, he trusted the individual man but suspected the motives of all collections of men, including his own set of browbeaten Philadelphia republicans. Tom Paine would call these cautious trimmers “summer soldiers and sunshine patriots”; Porcupine would call them milksops.
As a professional polemicist, Callender recognized that he took more than a little pleasure in delivering a stinging riposte. At the same time, he knew himself to be no fearless Porcupine, reveling in the cut and thrust of literary political combat. Cobbett had even placed a picture of King George III in his Philadelphia bookshop window and then stared down the infuriated republican mob that Beckley had sent to intimidate him. Callender would never go out of his way to taunt a crowd like that; on the contrary, in the flesh he was as privately fearful as on the page he was fierce. But he told himself that it took more courage for a mild and medium-sized man like himself to be seditious than it did for Cobbett, born pugnacious and grown tall and strong.
Thus it was, when he arrived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and went to the shop of Barton & Hamilton, printers he knew, looking for a recent newspaper, he felt the familiar twinge of anxiety. He picked up a copy of Porcupine’s Gazette of a few days before and saw the news he dreaded: “Vermont Representative Arrested for Sedition. ‘Of Depraved Mind and Wicked and Diabolical Disposition,’ says Indictment. Matthew Lyon Incited Hatred Against Government and President.” He read Porcupine’s ominous urging: “When the occasion requires, the Yankees will show themselves as ready at stringing up insurgents as in stringing onions.”
Callender had not expected the Federalists to move immediately on the elected opposition in Congress. Lyon accurately predicted that everyone not in favor of the mad war with the French was to be branded with the epithet of Opposer of Government, Disorganizers, Jacobins, and if not silenced, jailed. As soon as the Sedition Act was passed, he had warned that “people had better hold their tongues and make toothpicks of their pens.” Gallatin was right in underscoring Harper’s purpose: to enable the dominant party to strangle nascent opposition in its crib. But Callender had presumed the first to be silenced would be the pens of the Aurora and not the tongues of men duly elected to the legislature.
Lyon was standing for re-election as Vermont’s representative in Congress against the Federalist editor of the Rutland Herald. When that editor-candidate charged Lyon in print with disloyalty and refused to print a letter from his opponent defending himself, Lyon started a newspaper of his own. He called it the Scourge of Aristocracy, which Callender thought was a fine name for a newspaper. Cobbett quoted that republican paper’s announced list of targets, proud that his Porcupine led Lyon’s list: “Every aristocratic hireling from the English Porcupine at the summit of falsehood, detraction and calumny in Philadelphia, as they vomit forth columns of lies, malignant abuse and deception.”
Cobbett enjoyed quoting fulsome attacks on himself, Callender knew; it was a good way to call attention to yourself while posing as impartial. But the Sedition Act concerned itself with more than newsmongers savaging each other. Further down in the report, he saw the words in Lyon’s new newspaper that had asked for trouble: “The public welfare is swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation or selfish avarice. When I see the sacred name of religion employed as a State engine to make mankind hate and persecute one another,” wrote Lyon, the frequent target of bigotry, “I shall not be this Administration’s humble advocate.”
That was sedition, plain and simple, in the act’s definition: a statement intended to incite the hatred of the people toward their government leaders. And it was not spoken on the floor of Congress, where the Constitution guaranteed Lyon would be safe. Callender assumed he was deliberately challenging the law, inviting his arrest and trial. Didn’t Spittin’ Matt realize that these Federalists were serious about crushing the opposition? Couldn’t he imagine how delighted they woul
d be to make an Irish-born Catholic Congressman their first case?
He saw that several men in the print shop recognized him. When one of the printers pointed to the report of the Sedition Act and said, “Callender, they must mean you,” a customer who seemed more like a ruffian left hurriedly, presumably to spread the word that a prime object of the Sedition Act was in town. The printer suggested that his plan to await the stage to Richmond might be dangerous for him.
Callender never pretended to himself that he was as personally courageous as the Vermont curmudgeon. He had no appetite for a confrontation with a mob urged to string up seditionists like onions, or a group of Federal lawmen at the depot ready to arrest him. Having been beaten senseless more than once in Scotland for what he had dared to write, he did not look forward to such heavy corporal punishment in America.
He asked directions for his journey southward. He was told to take the road to York, down to Hagerstown in Maryland, then to the new town named for Washington where the Federal capital was being built. There he could get a ferry across the Potomac River to Alexandria, walk a day or two back up to Leesburg, finally out to Virginia’s Loudon County where he could ask the way to Senator Mason’s home at Raspberry Plain. Exchanging his valise for a backpack, he set out again on foot.
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 17