Gallatin came over, shook his hand, and expressed his regret that not all the republicans supported one of their own.
“These damn fools in this House don’t realize it yet,” Lyon replied, “but we’ve won. The people are with us. I’m a damned martyr, is what I am, and there’s a new wind blowing. You keep pipin’ up for liberty of speech, Albert—I liked that part about no opinion can be proven false. Our press will report it through the length and breadth of the land, and the people will read and attend. You just hold our side together, and you’ll see how their side will split apart.”
Chapter 18
February 5, 1799
ALBEMARLE COUNTY , VIRGINIA
Buoyed by the news óf Matt Lyon’s triumphant jail-house campaign, Callender decided to borrow one of Senator Mason’s horses and ride from Raspberry Plain to Monticello. He would consult Thomas Jefferson about his future as one who reported history and was uniquely equipped to help make it.
His head had recovered from its battering three months before in Leesburg. His reputation, however, would not soon recover from the humiliation of being accused of public drunkenness. Recently, after only one article he had placed in the Richmond Examiner denouncing President Adams’s “conspiracy against the liberties of this country,” he had been threatened by the local Federalist gentry gathered in the Swan Tavern. They called themselves “the Richmond Associators” and conspired to visit the newspaper office and run the immigrant radical out of town. Senator Mason promptly went to the Mayor, who organized and armed a group of strapping young republicans. When the Richmond Associators found Callender well protected, the bullyboys turned and went home.
Mason’s elegant and extensive library had been a tonic to him. The Scot had never before had the leisure to browse through the wit of Swift, the rousing courage of Paine, the more recent Federalist Papers of Hamilton, Madison and Jay; also at hand, he was proud to note, was a volume of James Thomson’s poem The Castle of Indolence.
Although he could not afford more months of indolence, he was fearful of returning to Philadelphia. The war fever was beginning to subside, but the summer’s heat would soon bring back the yellow fever. Perhaps he could get a permanent writing assignment in Richmond and send for his children. He missed his boys and wrote them every other day; Thomas Leiper arranged for his own eldest daughter to help them write him back, and she had shown the youngest, Thomas, how to make the mark of a T, which wrenched the father’s heart. Much depended on Jefferson’s plans: if the Vice President was prepared to stand for the Presidency next year, Callender would have not just a patron to sustain him but a political cause to awaken his spirit and enliven his mind.
Ever since Jefferson had walked into his McCorkle print shop office in Philadelphia almost two years before, the Scot felt a political presence in his life that gave it an underpinning of meaning. Politics until then, both in Scotland and America, had been an interplay of injustice and resistance. Now he felt his political newsmongering could be ennobled by a leader—an accessible man, one that his own writing talent privileged him to get instruction from, offer ideas to, and take up his pen in support of.
Thanks to Jefferson’s personal interest in him, Callender could see himself as no common railer, but as the most vigorous voice in the press of a great movement enlightening the world to assert the rights of man. The Vice President, author of Virginia’s statute of religious freedom as well as the nation’s central document asserting the equality of man, validated Callender’s buffeted beliefs. That validation of his intellect’s long-ago choice of “red” philosophy, even more than the tangible sustenance he drew from the Virginian, made him a Jeffersonian to his core. He had little security, but felt secure in this: that the man he was going to see, and who would welcome him in his magnificent home as an intellectual equal, was the era’s personification of personal freedom.
Riding his elderly horse slowly down toward Monticello, Callender’s thoughts turned from hero-worship to heroine-analysis. He could not get Maria Reynolds out of his mind. Just thinking of her made him straighten up and try to appear taller. Was she, as Hamilton portrayed her, a demon capable of assuming any shape pleasing to the person she wished to manipulate? Or was she, as Callender alone had the temerity to have suggested in print, a virtuous and vulnerable wife and mother—used and betrayed by a venal husband and his high-level confederate, who blackened her reputation to cover their shady dealing?
Callender savored the time he spent thinking about her and evaluating the evidence on both sides of the conundrum. One fact was indisputable: all variety of men, from the most powerful like Hamilton and Burr to the ineptly crooked like Reynolds and the young Clingman—and even to himself, he had to admit, after one brief meeting—were drawn to her. That did not necessarily substantiate Hamilton’s claim that her mysterious attraction, and not his own greed and venality, was the cause of his late-night meetings with the crooked Reynolds. But it lent at least the color of truth to Hamilton’s smother-up story.
Certainly, Maria was literate and well bred; Callender had seen that with his own eyes, and tested it to his satisfaction. As a result, he had little doubt that the letters that Hamilton claimed to have received from her were forgeries. This judgment was reinforced by the inability of the former Treasury Secretary to produce the originals. Hadn’t the close friend to whom Hamilton claimed he gave the originals for safekeeping flatly denied possession, or ever having seen them? That was the gaping hole in Hamilton’s story.
Callender was glad he had not acted merely as a conduit for the documents Beckley gave him. When Monroe’s documents first came into Callender’s hand, the Scot had gone to the address in Philadelphia where Maria had lived before reuniting with her husband Reynolds. It was not a rooming house, as Hamilton has suggested, where adventurous women could have assignations; on the contrary, it was a residence in a good neighborhood, where people observed one another’s coming and going. The lady of the house remembered Maria and her daughter as respectable roomers.
Contradicting that was what Folwell, the printer and writer, had said about the tall woman with the level violet eyes: that she revealed to his mother schemes to entrap men of high station into liaisons and then blackmail them. Callender turned over in his mind his recollection of her appearance when he had confronted her with this assertion. The slightest furrow had appeared in her brow and her neck colored; she stiffened in pain—something may be wrong with her back—but the expression of her eyes and the set of her mouth did not change as Maria suggested Folwell was a resentful rejected suitor, almost a rapist. But Callender knew Folwell had no such reputation; in his dealings with Callender publishing his annual register, the printer and writer—although a Federalist and friend of Hamilton—had shown himself to be trustworthy enough.
Callender then considered the visit he paid Folwell after Hamilton alluded to him in the Reynolds pamphlet. What was it the printer said about Colonel Burr? Something about bad blood between Burr and Hamilton tracing back to 1791, when the Treasury Secretary began to tell friends that Burr was “not to be trusted in public or private affairs.” That was when Hamilton’s affair with Maria supposedly began; Callender had the impression that the printer was hinting that the two New York political leaders might have been competing at that time for Maria’s adulterous affections. If that were the case, it would help explain one cause for the genuine distaste the two men had since shown for each other. More to the point, it would lend credence to Hamilton’s story that she was a manipulative slut.
Callender shook his head. He considered himself a fair judge of people, and Maria struck him as a fine woman done evil by powerful men. He sensed passion in her but dignity and probity as well. Moreover, as a pamphleteer and newsmonger, he had a major stake in her version of what had happened. He had every professional reason to continue to believe her; she bolstered his theory of the case. If she were lying, then Hamilton would be innocent of improper speculation and guilty only of the adultery he admitted—nay
, asserted. That would make Callender a dupe and a laughing-stock. Porcupine would crow for months, and Jefferson and his allies would be forced to distance themselves from the easily duped journalist.
He came to a crossing and stopped his horse to consult a rough map. One road led to Monroe’s plantation, the other to Monticello, and he directed his mount to the latter.
It all struck him as most unfair. Though regularly denounced by Federalists as a “scurrilous scandalmonger,” the scandal that interested him was financial and not sexual; the revelation of adultery was Hamilton’s doing, not his.
He faulted himself, however, for not being an aggressive digger-up of information. Openly invited by the candid Maria to ask the most indelicate of questions, Callender had not been able to bring himself to probe into any relationships that might have begun the friction between Hamilton and Burr. He faulted himself further for not pressing his question about her earliest meetings with the man who became her divorce lawyer. And he had failed completely to ask if Hamilton’s account of their sexual encounter on the day they met was true. Callender kicked himself for that failure to probe, because if Hamilton was telling the truth about that, it was at least possible that the Treasury Secretary was indeed being blackmailed.
ALBEMARLE COUNTY , VIRGINIA
The north end of Monticello was without a roof. “It seems as if I should never get this house habitable,” Thomas Jefferson told his visitor, steering him to the study and a strange-looking chair that Callender presumed he had designed himself.
“The violence mediated against you,” said the republicans’ leader, “excited a very general indignation in this part of the country.”
Pleased at this show of concern, Callender told the Vice President, “I am in danger of being murdered when I go out of doors.” He touched his scalp; his hair hid the scar of the wound inflicted by the ruffians of Leesburg.
“I’m concerned about your welfare,” Jefferson said. “Those who attacked you tried to take out of the hands of the law the function of declaring who may, or may not, have free residence among us.” That struck him as most un-Virginian: “Our State of Virginia, from its first plantation, has been remarkable for its order and submission to laws.”
Two large dogs with white and gray markings ambled their way into the library and settled at their master’s feet. Their hair covered their eyes; Callender wondered how they could see at all. “Sheepdogs,” said Jefferson, stroking one. “I brought the breed back from France.” He quickly returned to his subject. “I can recollect only three instances of organized opposition to law in Virginia. The first was Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion against the British overlords a century ago. The second was our Revolution. The third was this Richmond Associators club-law to deny you residence here.”
It dawned on Callender that what offended Jefferson most was not the actual attack by ruffians in Leesburg, but the aborted attack by respectable gentry in Richmond. He saw the first as a nasty trick by hooligans, but the second as a serious conspiracy by the sons of plantation owners to deny him his freedom to live where he liked. The Leesburg beating, which hurt him, was politically insignificant; but the Richmond threat, which did not harm him physically, had meaning he had not before imagined. Jefferson’s historical perspective made Callender feel he had a place in the long line of American patriots.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Jefferson, you and I were about the only ones outraged by the reversion to club-law.” He had not heard the expression “club-law” before and would make use of it one day. For the present, however, he wanted to guide this angry sympathy into an offer of employment as a writer. “Yet the re-election of Spittin’ Matt”—he corrected himself—“of Congressman Lyon—”
“Wasn’t his majority great?”
“Yes, but the injustice done him by the Sedition Act would not have caused public indignation without a local newspaper voice. His newspaper roused Vermonters against the tyrannous law. An outraged public begins with an outraged editor.”
Jefferson, to his surprise, was more outraged by the Sedition Act than anyone suspected. “We must rally the people around the true principles of our federal compact,” Jefferson said, “or we may have to sever ourselves from that union we so much value.”
Callender could hardly believe his ears. Did the Vice President from Virginia really say “sever ourselves from that union”? The ultimatum struck the Scot as deliciously close to treason. Could Jefferson actually be thinking of dissolving the federal compact formed at the Constitutional Convention?
“The Alien and Sedition Acts,” Jefferson reminded him, “is an exercise of powers over the States to which we have never assented.”
Callender was in no mood even to discuss civil war, especially with Hamilton at the head of a Federal army. Jefferson would surely back away from such an extreme position on the rights of States after Monroe and Madison had a chance to reason with him. He wanted to steer Jefferson back to his personal needs.
“If I could move down to the James River near Richmond,” he said, “which I take to be one of the paradises of nature, perhaps I could write in safety.” Because Jefferson had seemed receptive to personal confidences, and had sent him $50 on account of a future book, the writer felt he could indulge in sharing his fond dream of philosophizing in a bucolic setting. “I would dearly like to find fifty acres of clear land, and a hearty Virginia female that knows how to fatten pigs and boil homminy, send for my four little boys and then adieu to the rascally society of mankind.”
That was intended to get his leader to urge him not to retire. As Callender hoped, Jefferson waved aside such unrealistic detachment in a time of crisis. He asked what newspapers in Richmond could carry the sort of writing that Callender had recently sent him for his next book. “I thank you for those proof sheets. Such papers as yours cannot fail to produce the best effect.” There was earnest encouragement in Jefferson’s voice. “We have to inform the thinking part of the nation and set the people to rights.”
His guest expressed the hope that republicans could soon get guidance in writing—in public prints or private letters—from the cause’s leader himself. Jefferson shook his head and explained why he could not take up his own pen publicly: “When I correspond with you, Callender, the letters will come without a signature. The curiosity of the post offices makes that almost habitual with me. Indeed, a period is now approaching during which I will discontinue writing letters as much as possible. That’s because I know that every snare will be used to get hold of what may be perverted in the eyes of the public. I think it useful to keep myself out of the way of calumny.”
Jefferson’s reference to “a period now approaching” meant the election of 1800, and Callender wanted to find out if the Vice President was conversant with the details of politicking. “For my information, sir, what was the mode adopted by the several States in choosing the electors at the last Presidential election?”
Jefferson leaned forward and became quite professional. “Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania choose their electors by the people directly. In New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Delaware and South Carolina, the legislature names electors. In Massachusetts, entitled to sixteen electors, the people chose seven last time and the legislature nine.” Callender was impressed; the scholar of philosophy was certainly versed in the details of politicks, apparently having learned the tactics from his narrow loss to Adams in 1796.
Callender knew that in Pennsylvania, Tom McKean—the republican judge who tried Cobbett and was threatening to have him tried again—was now Governor, making it easier for John Beckley to organize support for Jefferson throughout that key state. The writer was aware, too, that Jefferson had ordered Monroe to take the Governorship of Virginia, which he dutifully did. With fear of French invasion and a slave insurrection fading, the rest of the South was at last turning anti-Federalist. In New England, Lyon of Vermont could now deliver at least half of that stat
e’s electors. John Adams’s Massachusetts was hopelessly Federalist, but Jefferson felt that Hamilton’s New York might be vulnerable.
“I declined the editorship of the New York Argus,” Callender said, which stretched the truth only a little. “Hamilton and Adams will surely use the Sedition Law to jail whoever takes that job, and I was not about to suffer through that. You say that in New York, the legislature, not the people, decide on Presidential electors. Who do we have to split New York’s electoral votes?”
“Burr,” said Jefferson. His Tammany Society was becoming a political force in the city. “If the city of New York is in favor of the republican ticket, the victory will be republican.”
He surely grasped the details; Callender suspected he had in mind a grand design to rally public sentiment. In the elections of 1798, Matt Lyon had shown politicians in Congress the way to marshal new support; his dramatic acceptance of punishment had turned many against a regime determined to suppress free speech in the name of quashing scurrility. In next year’s Presidential election, Callender suspected that Jefferson, both in his idealistic exhortation and practical financial support, would ask him to show the way for America’s journalists by risking prosecution for sedition.
The French sheepdogs heard a noise outside, roused themselves and bounded out of the room. Callender came to the point of his visit. Meriwether Jones, a Jefferson friend, was starting a new Richmond newspaper, the Examiner. And Matt Lyon’s son James was on his way down from Vermont to start a southern edition of Scourge of the Aristocracy. Should Callender take on the job of building a Southern version of the Aurora? Would he have Jefferson’s blessing?
“Take up your pen.” Jefferson would not only bless him but, if need be, back him with subscriptions.
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 21