Scandalmonger: A Novel

by William Safire

  “No,” Beckley said without equivocation. “This will be seen as a step toward secession and disunion.” Into the worried silence that followed, the politician added, “But such a powerful assertion of the rights of States will certainly draw close scrutiny. It is a warning that the Alien and Sedition Acts could lead to civil war, which nobody wants. This might embolden our candidates to criticize the government in these final weeks until the November elections.”

  Madison directed a correction of emphasis to Beckley, who assumed it was his way of instructing Jefferson: “These resolutions are not to assert the rights of the States,” he said, “as much as to assert the ideals of the Revolution.”

  It was agreed; Jefferson’s incendiary resolution challenging Federal authority would be copied in another hand, revised by Madison for Virginia, given to at least two state legislatures for passage. Jefferson’s authorship and Madison’s revision would remain secret. What was left of the republican press would be given the documents and told to disseminate the official—and therefore presumably not seditious—opinion of objecting States throughout the nation.

  Beckley wished he had Bache and Callender to lead the charge. One was dead, however, and the ardor of the other was dampened. He had heard that Jefferson had arranged for Stevens Mason, the Virginian who represented republican interests in the hostile Senate, to offer Callender sanctuary and the use of a library at his Raspberry Plain estate. He hoped that James was not drowning his despair in rum or otherwise abusing the good Senator’s hospitality.

  Jefferson closed with a warning about secrecy: “During the next twelve-month, I will cease to write political letters. A campaign of slander is now about to open upon all of us. The postmasters will lend their inquisitorial aid to fish out any new matter of slander they can to gratify the powers that be.”

  Beckley pledged to refrain from sending him correspondence that might cause embarrassment. “Our enterprise is risky,” he observed to his political superiors, “but with all dissent in Congress and the press about to be crushed, what is there to lose?”

  Chapter 16

  October 22, 1798

  PHILADELPHIA

  Mafon the Senator, and Callender the Runaway

  STEPHENS MASON the Senator is the man who, contrary to his duty and his oath, three years ago made a premature disclosure of the contents of Gov. Jay’s Treaty with the British. He caused the treaty to be published in the Aurora by a hireling of France, with the evident intention of exciting a clamour against it, in order to prevent its final ratification by the Senate. He has constantly, since that time, been of the French faction, and has uniformly opposed every measure calculated to protect this country against the infamous designs of the savage despots of Paris.

  JAMES CALLENDER on his arrival in America, boasted that he had escaped the gallows in Scotland, and that his comrades were then in Newgate Prison awaiting their final doom. The wretch, with the encouragement of JEFFERSON and others, throve for a little while; but his drunkenness, his rascality in every way, led him from den to den, and from misery to misery, till he, at last, took shelter under the disgraceful roof of BACHE , hireling editor of the Aurora, now deceased. Fearful of rightful prosecution for his sedition, this runaway alien with a false set of papers claiming United States citizenship has left the city. CALLENDER buried a poor, abused, broken-hearted wife and left behind four ragged, half-starved children, to be sent to the poor-house.

  “Birds of a feather flock together.” CALLENDER and MASON contracted such a friendship for each other that they were inseparable while the Senator was in this city. The Senator went home before this year’s fever struck, but hankering after his companion, he sent an invitation to come and pass the summer season at his house in Virginia. He forgot, however, to send a horse, for the poor rascal to ride upon; he was, therefore, like a true vagabond, obliged to tramp it.

  The wretch CALLENDER has a most thief-like look; he is ragged, dirty, and has a down-cast look with his eyes. Notwithstanding this appearance, his munificent friend received him with all the affection of a brother. Soon after his arrival, however, he was found drunk in the neighboring distillery. Judging from his villainous look, the people suspected him to be a felon who had made his escape from the convict wheelbarrow gang on the Baltimore roads. On that suspicion, they conducted him before a magistrate, where the scape-gallows declared his name, said he was a printer at Philadelphia (which was a lie), that he came into Virginia in consequence of an invitation from Stephens Thomson Mason, one of the Virginia Senators in Congress, and that he then resided at the Senator’s house, where his identifying papers were lodged.

  In consequence of this declaration, CALLENDER was allowed until five o’clock to produce his testimonials. At that hour, MASON appeared in his behalf, produced a certificate of his naturalization, and said he was a man of a good character!!! An account of this affair was published in the Columbian Mirror, an excellent paper published in Alexandria. MASON later denied some of its details, which gave his neighbours an opportunity of proclaiming him for an atrocious LIAR .

  —William Cobbett

  October 24, 1798

  CECIL COUNTY, MARYLAND

  Maria Clement, formerly Clingman, read of Callender’s arrest in the Virginia newspaper distributed in the Maryland town that she and Jacob (now calling himself James) temporarily called home. She promptly posted that Columbian Mirror to Colonel Burr in New York; she knew he had a continuing interest in the republican writer so despised by Alexander Hamilton, Burr’s longtime political rival in that state. So that he would know the truth of the matter about Callender, she included her own quite different account of the episode that she had heard from Cecil County neighbors.

  According to them, Callender, fleeing south from Philadelphia to escape the sedition police, was set upon by a gang of toughs in Leesburg, Virginia, and badly beaten. A couple of the gang’s confederates then “rescued” him, wiped the blood off his face and torn clothes and offered him alcoholic spirits to relieve his pain. When the writer was well liquored, his new acquaintances took him to the Federalist magistrate, ostensibly to help him complain about his assault. It was then that the staggering Callender was charged with vagrancy and public intoxication. The magistrate sent for Senator Mason, to embarrass him publicly by having to stand up in court for his drunken houseguest. At the same time, the toughs alerted a reporter for the Mirror, who came to court. The edition describing Callender’s disgrace was mailed to Federalist papers around the country—including, of course, Porcupine’s Gazette—as the varied election days approached.

  A week later, a somewhat battered-looking James Callender appeared at the door of the woman that he had made famous as Mrs. Reynolds.

  Maria was not surprised by his visit. Now that he was within a day’s ride of her home, she had assumed that he would probably want to meet the woman fiercely maligned by Hamilton as not just a loose woman but a blackmailing prostitute. Callender surely had some questions about the letters Hamilton claimed she had written. She had long been prepared with her answers.

  “My name is James Thomson Callender,” he introduced himself formally, looking up at her in unfeigned wonderment. She was surprised by his deferential and soft-spoken manner; from his writing she had supposed him to be strident and accusatory. He was of medium height, slightly shorter than Maria, eyes almost as dark as Burr’s, with a loose cap covering a bandaged head. He wore a black coat and trousers. “Do I have the honor of addressing Maria Reynolds?”

  She opened the door wide and smiled him inside. “Not many would consider it an honor, Mr. Callender. And Reynolds is not a name I use any longer since my marriage to Jacob Clingman. We are trying to put the past far behind us. Our name is now Clement.”

  “First, Mrs.”—he paused, getting it straight —“Clement, I want to apologize for any suffering that my writing may have caused you.” Her daughter Susan, now entering her teens but still fearful, peered at the stranger from behind the kitchen door, then slippe
d away. The writer added, “Or any embarrassment the public attention subsequently brought upon your daughter. Was that she?”

  “That is Susan. I do all I can to protect her.”

  “As well you should, Madam. I have four sons of my own. Mr. Clingman is—?”

  “Mr. Clement is traveling to New York. We are hopeful that he may be able to obtain suitable employment in England.” Jacob, friendless and at wit’s end, wanted to run away from his reputation as fraud and prisoner. Her friend Burr had consented to see him and send letters of introduction. Tired of the torrent of slander heaped on her after Hamilton’s excuses became public, Maria, too, was eager for a major change of scene. It would be especially good for Susan.

  She served tea properly, as befitted a member of the New York Livingston clan, using a silver pot and her best bone china, complete with slop bowl. She took her time about it, assuming he would want a strong brew with sugar and milk, and did not show her amusement at his evident discomfort. “You’re not at all what I suspected ‘that scoundrel Callender’ to be,” she told him lightly.

  “I am more fierce in print than in person,” Callender admitted, making an effort to stop fidgeting. “It is easier to wield the hammer of truth from afar than to brandish it in someone’s face.”

  “You were the only one to write the truth about Maria Reynolds. Why does nobody else believe my account of what happened between Colonel Hamilton and me?”

  “Perhaps because they have not taken tea with you,” he said, sipping awkwardly from the small cup, “served from a silver pot. All they know of you is from those half-literate letters he says came from you. They are not the letters of a lady of your breeding. And your accuser is believed because he is a great general now, on a high horse again, soon to be at the head of a powerful army.” As Callender talked politics, she noticed that the tightly coiled writer became more at ease. “It is more convenient for most people to believe Hamilton’s story that you seduced him, Mrs.—”

  “Maria,” she said. She knew that he, and the rest of the world, would always think of her as “Mrs. Reynolds” and of Hamilton’s long, misleading apologia as “the Reynolds pamphlet.”

  “—Maria, than it is for them to believe what you say. Which is, that he is using you to conceal his thievery of the public purse.”

  “But you are certain that Hamilton is lying and I told the truth.” She leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms, glad that she happened to be dressed so chastely and had her long hair braided and pinned tightly back. “Why, Mr. Callender? You are famous as a fearless pamphleteer, suspicious of everyone. Does service from a silver teapot, and a modest daughter behind that door, persuade you that I am not a common slut?”

  “I was hoping you could help me persuade others of that,” he said. “That is why I left the safety of Senator Mason’s library to come here.”

  “James. I call you by your Christian name because I think of you as a friend, surely my only friend in the press. You may ask me anything, however indelicate. I will hold nothing back.” She had much to hold back about her relationship with Hamilton and with Burr as well, but relied on his apparent courtesy not to pry too deeply.

  “There is a writer and printer in Philadelphia named Richard Folwell,” he began. She remembered the man well. “He reprinted my book, The Political Progress of Britain, which you may have heard of. And last year he wrote a Short History of the Yellow Fever.” He paused. “The disease that recently claimed my wife.”

  Maria reached across the tea table and squeezed his arm in sympathy. “Your children?”

  “Four boys boarded with a friend near Philadelphia. I miss them.” He came back to his line of questioning. “Folwell says you boarded with his mother when you first came to Philadelphia. True?”

  “Yes. I came to that city to find Reynolds, who had deserted us. I found him just released from jail. He developed some habits of brutality in prison and turned out to be impossible to live with.”

  “Folwell says that you—with the most innocent countenance —told his mother that so infamous was the perfidy of Reynolds, that he insisted that you insinuate yourself into the confidence of influential men.” Callender looked closely at her, as if seeking permission to go on. Maria braced herself. “He says you told Mrs. Folwell that your husband wanted you to endeavor to make assignations with them.” He breathed deep. “I know this is indelicate, and it comes third- or fourth-hand. But Folwell says, that his mother said, that you told her that your husband Reynolds was trying to get you to prostitute yourself to gull money from men of influence. Did you tell her that? ”

  She shook her head vigorously, no. “I stayed for a week with Mrs. Folwell. I left when her son, who tells you this terrible story, tried to force his way into my bed.” She remembered vividly how she had jabbed her knee sharply into his groin and almost crippled the odious little man, but did not pass along that memorable detail to Callender. “He hates me, and this is his way of striking at me.”

  “Folwell is also an ardent Federalist, and wants to work for a newspaper Hamilton may be starting,” said Callender. “He was honest in his dealings with me, but I had the impression he hated immigrants. He thinks cheap white labor from abroad would undermine the institution of slavery.”

  “Would it?”

  “Of course not. How many whites would work in the hot sun picking cotton?” He focused on the matter at hand. “And now to the letters that Hamilton says you wrote to him pleading for money.” Callender took the infamous Reynolds pamphlet out of his jacket pocket and opened it to a page he had dog-eared. “He printed them in his pamphlet, but showed nobody, not even the printer, the originals. I spoke to the printer and he said he worked from copies.”

  “There were never any ‘originals,’ ” she said. “The printed letters are forgeries. And they make me out to be a low-class woman with the education of a scullery maid. Just the sort to seduce an innocent Treasury Secretary.”

  “Do you have a pen and a jar of ink, Mrs.—Maria? And some writing paper? We can conduct an experiment.”

  “You don’t believe me,” she teased.

  “I am the only one who does,” he replied seriously, “but I need your help to make others believe.”

  “I can give you samples of my handwriting easily enough,” she said. “But what letters of mine, supposedly held by Hamilton, do you have to compare them with?”

  “None. I wrote to Hamilton asking permission to examine the originals of your letters to him, which he said he lodged with William Bingham, a trusted friend. My letter was polite, not polemical. I promised that if the originals appeared genuine, I would publish an apology to him. You know what Hamilton wrote across my letter? I’m told he wrote ‘Impudent Experiment’ and then in capital letters, ‘NO NOTICE.’ ”

  “Then you went to his friend Bingham,” she assumed. Callender was a newsmonger; she had heard that was the sort of thing they did. “You pretended you had Hamilton’s permission, and asked Bingham to show you the originals of my letters supposedly in his keeping.”

  “Of course,” Callender smiled conspiratorially. “You would have made a good pamphleteer. But Bingham said he never had them. He told Hamilton the same, which caught the Colonel in a palpable lie.”

  “Then why do you need to see the way I write, James?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Indulge me, madam.”

  She rose to her full height, arched her back and stretched, unconcerned about that movement’s effect on her visitor. Her lower back gave her pain, a trouble that began soon after the publication of Hamilton’s pamphlet and returned during moments of tension. She brought back the writing materials and looked directly at him, waiting.

  “Write these words for me,” he said, dictating “Write, much, most, pillow, knees, greatest, alone.” She did, handed him the sheet, and he put the sheet of paper to one side. “Take a new page, harder words this time. Anguish, inexorable, insupportable, adieu.” She wrote them down and handed that page to him. She hoped
that would be the end of the experiment; paper was expensive and she did not have much left.

  He studied them and then compared them to what had been printed in Hamilton’s Reynolds pamphlet. “Here—see where the letters he claims come from you have mistakes in the simplest words. ‘Write’ is ‘rite.’ ‘Much’ comes out ‘mutch,’ ‘most’ is spelled ‘moast,’ and ‘pillow’ is ‘pilliow.’ And ‘alone’ is printed as two words—‘a Lone.’ But here, in the list you just did for me—all the spelling is correct. Hamilton was trying to make you seem uneducated, almost illiterate.”

  “What about the list of difficult words?”

  “Those words were spelled correctly in his printed pamphlet, which struck me as odd. How could a person who ignorantly wrote ‘ mutch’ for ‘much’ also spell ‘inexorable’ correctly? ” Callender cocked his bandaged head in a way that struck her as appealing. “Even I have trouble with ‘inexorable.’ ”

  “If the hard words were spelled correctly in the forgeries,” she asked, “why did you just have me write them out?”

  “It was a way of making doubly sure.” He smoothed the bandage on his head and contemplated the pamphlet on the table.

  “You didn’t trust me, James.” She liked that skepticism in him. He made certain, but not in a sneaky way.

  “Most times I don’t trust myself. But do you see what our experiment shows us? Hamilton had only one night to forge these letters from you— Monroe and Muhlenberg were coming to see him the next day. So he misspelled the easy words but had neither the wit nor the time to make deliberate spelling mistakes in words he regularly used. Literary words, the words of a writer. Let me ask you—what would you call something that could not be stopped, that just kept coming on and on?”

  “Unstoppable?” That seemed obvious, so she reached for another word. “Relentless?”