Scandalmonger: A Novel

by William Safire

  He despaired that America, supposed land of refuge and freedom, offered refuge no more and was ready to strip him of his freedom. He had run from prosecution for sedition in Scotland only to instigate prosecution for sedition here. Callender could not deny that many republicans held him responsible for his new country’s turn toward tyranny. If he had not revealed Hamilton’s secret passing of money to Reynolds and refused to accept, as most others did, the false excuse that it was merely blackmail to conceal adultery; if he had not hectored Washington as “debauched” and been on the staff of a newspaper that roiled the current President of the United States by deriding him as old, querulous, toothless, etc.; if he had not given the Federalists the excuse to publish the XYZ dispatches that led to the national anger at Talleyrand’s France—if, if, if—then he would not be running from arrest or assault today.

  No; such self-flagellation was foolish. He told himself his present sorry state was not his fault. He turned his hypotheticals around. If he and his fellow seditionists had not shown the courage to bring the men who controlled the government into disrepute; if a virtuous philosophy that rooted sovereignty in the people could not at least challenge the despotic notion that rooted it in the government—then the American Revolution, the hope of dissidents here and radicals in Scotland, Ireland and France, would have been for naught.

  But who would speak up for the opposition now that public sentiment, insulted by the French, had swung behind the government? Was popular government to be equated with government that was popular? Who would dare speak out against public sentiment now that even elected Representatives could be prosecuted for what they said in an election campaign? The victory of the revolutionaries in France degenerated into their Reign of Terror, a blow to radical democrats everywhere. Callender asked himself how it could be—only one generation after the victory of the revolutionaries in America—that opposition to government would lead to sedition trials of Congressmen, the silencing of the press, and a bloodless reign of terror.

  The reaction to the revolutionary victory in France was violently antipathetic to dissent. If that turned out to be true in America, the rule of the mob crying “order and unity” would be worse, and far bloodier, than the rule of an aristocracy.

  He decided that discretion dictated that this was a good time for dissidents to hide. The men in the saddle were never more arrogant in their power. Unlike Spittin’ Matt, who had a yearning to become a martyr, the “moderate” republicans had no heart for the fight. James Thomson Callender, with a talent for invective and a hunger for the truth, could offer a megaphone to a leader, even propound ideas to a leader, but had no illusion of being a leader himself. He would follow Jefferson, if that believer in liberty would come out into the storm and absorb the lightning. Meanwhile, a rejected and despairing Timothy Thunderproof would crawl under a Southern rock and hide.

  Chapter 15

  October 19, 1798

  ALBEMARLE COUNTY , VIRGINIA

  “You remember what Ben Franklin ufed to say about John Adams,” said Madison. “ ‘Always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes wholly out of his senses.’ He must be in the grip of that last phase now.”

  John Beckley agreed. He was tempted to recall another remark of Franklin’s—that America had cut into the apple of freedom and found the worm of slavery at its core—but he was back in Virginia where such sentiments were frowned upon. He had come to Monroe’s farm for this meeting with Madison and Thomas Jefferson because their gathering could not be kept secret if held at Monticello. Amateur spies were everywhere these days, even in Virginia, eager to curry favor with Hamilton’s high Federalists leading the charge for national defense. Jefferson had cautioned all his lieutenants not to use the postal service for fear that their messages would be intercepted and read by Federalist postmasters, who were chosen for their loyalty to the government that appointed them. As architect of the republicans’ unexpected victory in Pennsylvania in the last election, Beckley knew his presence at this meeting placed him in the inner circle of sedition and made him a prime target of Federalist prosecutors. It was worth the risk.

  As an accountant and lawyer, he also knew just how deeply he was in debt. Not even the republican Israel Israel, influential among merchants, had been able to find clients for him to replace the income lost when he was fired from his House clerkship. (Curious, he thought, that a man with a name like Israel Israel was not an Israelite. Probably descended from one.) Beckley was hard-pressed to afford a place his wife could stay outside of Philadelphia to have her baby safely away from the fever. His hope for financial salvation lay in Judge Tom McKean, whose campaign for Governor of Pennsylvania Beckley was organizing. That great jurist, whose attempt to break the savage Porcupine was applauded by all good republicans—with the untimely exception of Callender—would surely put some patronage Beckley’s way. Madison at his Montpelier estate was all but penniless, too, he had heard; Monroe and Jefferson, at least, were plantation owners with a valuable stock of slave property and had been able to keep up appearances.

  “The news from the North is bleak,” he reported to the Virginia triumvirate. Though twice elected Mayor of Richmond in his twenties, Beckley considered himself a Philadelphian now. “Four thousand dead in Philadelphia. John Adams left the city months ago and tries to stay in touch by mail from Massachusetts. I was a pallbearer at Benny Bache’s funeral, along with my friend Dr. Rush, but most of the bodies are carted away for burial without being shriven. Now it’s getting cold, thank God, and the plague is retreating, as it always does when the frogs stop croaking in the swamps. The government will soon return from Trenton. All the political talk there among our friends is about the conviction the other day of Lyon in Vermont.”

  “Convicted of sedition?” said Monroe, unbelieving. “A member of Congress?”

  “The judge said that made it worse for him—he said the defendant, as a Federal legislator, was fully aware of the law he violated. Matt was forced to defend himself. No lawyer would take the case on such short notice, and everyone knew the jury was packed with friends of the man who’s running for his seat.”

  “What defense did Lyon put forward?” Madison asked.

  “First, that the Sedition Act is unconstitutional.”

  “As it surely is,” said Jefferson hotly. The Vice President could not understand how most people seemed to placidly accept it: “This is an experiment on the American mind. If this is swallowed down, we shall immediately see another act of Congress declaring that the President shall continue in office for life.”

  “Matt conceded, Mr. Jefferson, that it was possible to defame a person or individual official and be tried for libel, but argued that there was no such thing in a free country as defaming a whole government.” Sedition, as Lyon and the republicans understood it, was libeling a whole government—a right of speech which the very first amendment of the Bill of Rights forbade Congress to abridge. “The judge threw that constitutional defense out right away,” Beckley reported, “because Congress, in its wisdom, decides what the Constitution means. Then Matt argued that he had no bad intent when he wrote that Adams had ‘an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.’ ”

  “That describes John Adams, all right,” Madison put in.

  “The judge directed the jury to find Lyon guilty of bad intent,” Beckley continued, “because he could not have had any other intent when he made the President appear odious and contemptible.”

  “Did anybody point out that what Lyon wrote was absolutely true?” Monroe wanted to know. “I think of the ‘Day of Humiliation,’ when Adams came out on the porch of the President’s house dressed in full military regalia, with sword and black cockade, to salute the ruffians demanding a war with France.”

  “Lyon tried using truth as a defense,” Beckley reported, “which Gallatin was able to include in the law, as you know. Matt even called the Federalist judge to be a witness to the fancy nature of the Adams dinner service, because the judge frequently dined with Adam
s.” Noting the beautiful silver service and crystal glassware from France in the Monroe home, Beckley was sorry he brought that up and hurried on. “But the judge testified that Adams lived plainly and simply. The jury found Matt guilty and sentenced him to a thousand-dollar fine and four months in jail. And then they threw him in the oldest jail in Vermont, in a cell with horse-thieves, runaway slaves, the worst kind of criminals.”

  “I don’t know what mortifies me more,” Jefferson said angrily, “that I should fear to write what I think—or that my country is forced to bear such a state of things. Lyon’s judge and his jury are striking fear in the heart of the nation.”

  “Sentenced to four months in that jail,” said Monroe, focusing on Congressional elections three weeks ahead. “That means he cannot campaign to keep his seat. And if we lose just a few seats in the House, Harper will have a huge majority. Then not just the Presidency, but the Senate and the House will be in the hands of the Federal party. And the courts, too.”

  “Yet the body of our countrymen is substantially republican through every part of the union,” a frustrated Jefferson said from the depths of his chair. “But we are completely under the saddle of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and they ride us very hard.” One of Monroe’s female slaves entered the room and gracefully served tea and biscuits. “Do you know what brought about this unnatural situation? It was the irresistible influence and popularity of Washington, played off by the cunning of Hamilton, that turned the government over to anti-republican hands.”

  Beckley nodded eagerly at his chief’s analysis. Not only had he supplied Callender with the documents from Monroe that ruined Hamilton’s reputation two years ago, but the political manager could point to a proud history of anti-Hamilton activity. Years before, Beckley—writing as “the Calm Observer” —had exposed Hamilton’s register of the Treasury, Joseph Nourse, as one who juggled the books, making Hamilton look good by ignoring the interest on the national debt. Now the corrupt Nourse lived in a fine stone house named Piedmont near Charles Town, where Washington and his wealthy family owned land, and Nourse had even entertained Washington there at dinner—while Beckley had no roof over his head. He broke off brooding about Fate’s injustice to direct an answer to Monroe’s despairing observation. “Matt Lyon has a strange plan that you should know about. He says he will continue to stand for election to keep his seat in the House.”

  “From a jail cell?” Madison asked.

  “Exactly. It’s never been tried before,” Beckley said. “But nobody’s been silenced for speaking his mind against the government before, either.”

  “But how will he make his views known to his constituents?” Jefferson asked. “He cannot speak to them. They cannot visit him.” The teacup rattled in his hand. “The right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people about them, is the only effectual guardian of every other right.”

  “He has started a newspaper and made his son editor,” Beckley answered, avoiding a mention of the name of Lyon’s new sheet, the Scourge of Aristocracy. He was sensitive to the deep split in the republican forces: one element was made up of the workers and small merchants of the North, including many recent immigrants, in alliance with the farmers and trappers of the West. The other element—of a much higher and different culture—was represented by those meeting here in Monroe’s elegant home. This was the aristocracy of the South that had its own local, ragtag scourges to worry about. Beckley knew the amalgam of these disparate elements made for awkward moments in a national party, but the republicans, rich and poor, did have a unifying theme: resistance to central Federal authority, and opposition to a standing army with the oppression and taxation it would bring.

  “Matt’s son, editor of his newspaper, tells me,” Beckley relayed to the triumvirate, “that Congressman Lyon will not be talking to the voters about the folly of war with France. He won’t appeal to national pride, or the unfairness of the Alien Act to the Irish, or the unconstitutionality of the Sedition Act in his case, or the theoretical danger of central power to what was a compact of states.”

  “What is there left?” asked Madison.

  “Lyon will be campaigning against one thing—taxes.”

  The Virginians looked at each other in dismay. Beckley assumed they were concerned that the high-minded concerns of political philosophy—the human freedom through representative government for which the Revolution was fought—were being slighted in Lyon’s unprecedented jail-based campaign.

  “I know it seems simplistic and a crass appeal to self-interest. But in New England,” Beckley recalled to them, “the stamp tax imposed by King George was a source of great resentment. And in western Pennsylvania, the Whiskey Rebellion that Washington and Hamilton and Harry Lee repressed was about taxes on grain.” The experienced politician added a fact he knew would hit home to Virginia planters: “It’s not as if we’re putting a tariff on goods from England. Harper in the House proposes to raise $2 million with internal taxes—direct taxes on property, especially land and slaves.”

  Monroe, in Beckley’s eyes the most coldly practical of the three, was first to catch the national significance of Lyon’s thrust. “The prospect of taxation to pay for warships may cool some warlike ardor. But John, ‘Spittin’ Matt,’ as they call him, stands accused of cowardice during the Revolution and his wooden sword is the butt of every Federalist caricaturist. Will he make a suitable political martyr for the republican cause?”

  Beckley wanted very much to associate himself with his wellborn superiors, though he avoided the presumption of calling them by their first names. “Lyon is hardly one of our kind,” he said as snobbishly as he safely could, “and I would not make much of his plight here in the South. But as a victim of arrogant government, this naturalized citizen—a properly elected official—could prove useful in arousing public sentiment, even in defeat.” He could see that thought registered with Jefferson, who had a keen sense of the public mind.

  The Vice President explained that the reason he had assembled his closest aides, and the necessity for utmost secrecy in their gathering, went to the essence of power in a democracy. It had to do with an issue not addressed in the Constitutional Convention: When a dispute arose between the Executive and Legislative Branches, or between the several States and the Federal government, about the meaning of the Constitution, who shall decide?

  Though he had been serving in Paris and had not been at that convention, as Madison had, Jefferson seemed certain of the answer: “The States did not unite on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government,” he said, laying a draft of a resolution in his handwriting on the table. “Nor was the government created by the States’ compact made the final judge of the powers delegated to itself.

  “Congress was not a party to, but merely the creature of the compact that is our Constitution,” Jefferson went on. “When it exceeds its power, every State has a natural right to nullify such assumption of power.”

  Talk like this, Beckley was aware, would be taken by Federalists as not just sedition but treason. He looked at Madison, who knew more about what had been in the minds of the writers of the Constitution than any of them. Madison shifted his slight build in his chair and said he was uncomfortable with the word “nullify.”

  Jefferson ignored that and pressed on. Such Congressional abuses as the Sedition Act of that compact among the States were, in Jefferson’s view, “not law, but utterly null, void, and of no force and effect.”

  He had a plan to carry out his bold proposal of State nullification of Federal action. It was to give his draft of a resolution secretly to friends in North Carolina or Kentucky and back it up with a similar resolution, to be put in different words by Madison, which would be passed by the Virginia legislature. Those resolutions overturning the Alien and Sedition Acts would then be presented to every other state. Beckley estimated that the Pennsylvania legislature, which would not take the lead in this unprecedented challenge to Feder
al authority, might well go along.

  Madison slowly shook his head. He said he was certain that the Sedition Act was not only expressly forbidden by the First Amendment, but transgressed the Tenth Amendment’s limitation on the power of the Federal government. Even so, he was not prepared to go as far as outright nullification, directly pitting individual states against the central government. Perhaps, Beckley thought, Madison was thinking of General Alexander Hamilton at the head of an army recruited mainly in the north enforcing Federal law in Virginia. Perhaps Madison could envision the dangerous notion of nullification leading one day to wars among the States, or civil war between a group of States and the Federal Union.

  “Not ‘nullify,’ ” the little Virginian said. He searched for a milder term. “Perhaps ‘interpose.’ We should say that the states have the right, or even the duty, to interpose themselves between the people and the tendency to transform the present republican system of the United States into an absolute monarchy.” That would make a State government appear to be peacefully standing between its aroused populace and a national government reaching for absolute power. It was the first time Beckley had seen Madison resist the leadership of Jefferson, but the Vice President was all but inviting Hamilton’s army to march on Richmond.

  Jefferson, to Beckley’s relief, deferred to Madison’s caution. “We need not commit ourselves absolutely to push the matter to extremities,” the Vice President allowed, but refused to close off that option if Adams and Harper drove him to the wall: “We should remain free to push as far as events render prudent. ”

  Monroe asked Beckley, as the one among them who best read public sentiment in the North, if he thought New England States would follow the lead of Virginia and perhaps Kentucky.