“Attempt an electoral coup,” Beckley found himself saying. So that was why the Federalist caucus in Philadelphia had voted to demand that all Federalist electors from every state vote for both the party’s candidates. It had seemed so fair-minded that the republican caucus had done the same. But there was a plot at its core—a plot to arrange a tie within the party and then to have the second man win in the House. Beckley had to shake his head in wonderment at the chicanery in store.
But he had a specific task to perform for Gallatin in coming to New York. “You mentioned former Governor George Clinton. You indicated how widely respected he is here. There’s republican talk of him, you know, as the possible candidate for Vice President with Jefferson.”
Burr turned cold. “Not around here, sir. You are misinformed. The elderly Mr. Clinton—he must be past sixty now—is enjoying a well-earned retirement. Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Madison might like to know that the talk here is of Aaron Burr.”
“You would be interested in the Vice Presidency, then.”
Burr rose from his chair, picked up a long silver letter-opener, and examined it closely. “No, Mr. Beckley, you may tell your principals that I do not seek the Vice Presidency. Indeed, a far more important office, Governor of New York, might afford me a chance to do greater service.”
Beckley expected such routine coyness from political figures, but thought it wise to probe for this practical man’s purpose in holding back. “There has to be good reason for your reluctance, Colonel.”
Burr was frank. “In ’96, when I stood for national office, I was misled by the republican electors of Virginia and South Carolina. They promised they would cast their ballots for me, but reneged. Before I would accept any offer this time, I would have to be assured at the highest levels that the republicans of the South would not betray me again.”
Beckley remembered well how the Virginians embarrassed Burr in 1796, at Jefferson’s direction. “I will convey that to my colleagues in Philadelphia with absolute clarity,” he assured the Colonel.
Walking to the door, Burr said, “What happened to Peter Porcupine down there? I read his Gazette, but he seems to have lost his Federalist fervor.”
“That evil British agent has not been the same since his former hero Adams moderated the war fever against France,” Beckley reported with relish. “Cobbett spends most of his time now railing at Dr. Benjamin Rush for bleeding George Washington to death.”
“I see he’s arguing with Noah Webster of the Commercial Advertiser here about Adams’s peacemaking with France. It’s good to see, with the election coming up, the Federalist editors fall out.”
Beckley had an amusing piece of gossip to pass along. “Cobbett and Webster, though on the same side, bear each other some kind of grudge about the English language. Cobbett offered to pay for a new portrait of Webster at the front of his spelling book—said the present one is so ugly it scares the children from their lessons.” The vain Webster had turned purple at that thrust, Beckley heard, and didn’t know how to respond to the Porcupine’s ridicule. “But the best news is that our new Governor, Tom McKean, is out to close down Porcupine’s Gazette, with a libel suit.”
He did not forget the last part of his mission. “Speaking of the newspapers, Colonel, I noted your reference to a role I may have played in the public exposure of Hamilton’s peculation, or as he prefers it, peccadillo.”
“Maria Reynolds was my client in her divorce, you know.” Beckley did not know. “She tells me that you were the one who passed Monroe’s copies of the Reynolds documents to Callender. True? I’m asking because I was the one who had to avert a duel between Monroe and Hamilton.”
A thought crossed Beckley’s mind: Did Burr have anything to do with an entrapment of Hamilton, using the Reynolds woman? The two political leaders were said to despise each other—Hamilton was known to have said it was his “religious duty” to oppose Burr’s career. The roots of such fierce enmities often ran deep into men’s pasts and involved women. He put that aside and dealt with the question at hand: “Let’s just say I have friends in the press, but would never pass them private documents.” He then exploited the opening. “One of them has asked me if I knew of a very recent letter, perhaps in the form of a printed pamphlet, that Hamilton is privately circulating to his wide circle of high-Federalist leaders. Have you heard anything about such a letter?”
“What does it look like? How thick?”
From that question seeking a better description, Beckley suspected that Burr had a spy in Hamilton’s house—a faithless servant or clandestine visitor—who could be directed to find a specific item. “My guess is the size is octavo, same as his previous pamphlets under various pen names, perhaps twenty or thirty pages. My further guess is that the document has to do with his rift with Adams and what Federalists should do in the election. I stand ready to be the conduit to the press of any such document, which cannot be truly private if printed. Especially if it proves embarrassing to the writer.”
Beckley enjoyed seeing Burr’s conspiratorial smile. It was a pleasure to deal with a genuine political savant.
Chapter 24
September 28, 1800
RICHMOND
Callender, incarcerated in the Richmond jail, envied the Aurora’s William Duane. He was still at large in or near Philadelphia and avoiding his arrest for sedition, while Benny Bache’s widow, soon to be the new editor’s wife, published the paper. Unlike the imprisoned Scot, the fugitive Duane was still at the center of political action. He could be the recipient of John Beckley’s confidences, including private documents that embarrassed Federalist politicians and made the journalist the center of controversy.
With direct financial support from Monticello, Callender was finishing Volume II of The Prospect Before Us. He was certain it would become the bible of the republicans supporting Jefferson for President. The sales of Volume I had been boosted by his famous sedition trial three long months before: in republican papers around the nation, Chase was the villain and Callender the hero. Advance excerpts from Volume II were being printed in the Richmond Examiner, and when offered for sale elsewhere were being snapped up by eager anti-Adams editors.
He did not like his surroundings at all. After the first few days, the exhilaration of writing from a prison cell, with its sense of being a martyr to the Jeffersonian cause, evaporated. Contrary to his expectations, writing in this monastic atmosphere was far from ennobling. The Africans in the cells downstairs, arrested for drunkenness or rebelliousness, made an awful racket with their Baptist hymns at all hours of the night. And the drunks: “I can hardly go on for the bellowing of the banditti downstairs,” he wrote to Jefferson, “who should have been carried directly from the bar to the gallows.” Through the hot summer months in the oppressive heat of Richmond, the stink from the ill-ventilated prison toilets often made him ill. An early autumn cold snap brought surcease from that, but caused other discomforts: the frigid nights in the jail with no fireplace or stove brought on chills and fever.
His writing hand frequently shook. Fleabites—not the imaginary kind that Cobbett had charged him with constantly scratching, but the damnable real things—mottled his skin. The febrile Callender prose, however, never wavered or cooled. Sweet indeed were the uses of adversity, he told himself, writing page after page, except for the noise and the smell and the itching.
For the past week, he had to suffer the close proximity of a black giant named Jack Bowler. The heavily fettered slave, blood and mud still caked on his freshly scarred skin after his recapture, was one of the ringleaders of an aborted insurrection. The warden, fearful of leaving him in the large cell with the other blacks lest he organize a riot and jailbreak, put him in Callender’s cell upstairs.
“You really thought a slave uprising could succeed?” the Scot asked him. “Against all the guns of the Virginia militia?”
“Toussaint won his war,” said the Negro on the floor. Callender had heard that slave quarters throughout Virginia were stirred
by the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture, who had led a bloody uprising against their white rulers in Haiti and crowned himself Emperor. He threw out the British and allied himself with France’s Jacobin faction, but the black leader now had another war to fight against Bonaparte, who wanted to enslave the islanders again. This fellow Bowler apparently thought he could be another Toussaint, establishing a black empire in America, perhaps with whites as slaves. No wonder Governor Monroe would want to hang him. “We could have taken Richmond,” said the rebel, “but we were betrayed.”
“I read that your conspiracy got caught in a downpour and it flooded you out,” said Callender. His Richmond Examiner, taking the side of the alarmed white population, had given the matter two columns on the front page.
“Wasn’t the storm. Slave named Pharaoh was the traitor, told the masters.”
Callender tossed his cellmate a piece of hard-baked dough and watched him consume it angrily. “What do your people say about the American government?” the Scot asked. “Do you just think of us as whites, or do you know that there’s a difference between us?” When the black, swallowing the dry food, did not answer, he added, “Federalists against republicans. Abolitionists up north and”—he groped for a neutral phrase to describe slave-owners—“the plantation people around here. Have you heard of Thomas Jefferson?”
Bowler nodded, his neck iron tilting. “Heard of Jefferson. Heard of Marshall. Talk about freedom, but they beat us and use our women.”
“Not cruelly, though.” A look at the man’s wounds caused him to modify that. “At least they don’t beat the women.”
That drew a bitter laugh. “Jefferson uses one of our women to breed with, make new slaves, get richer. Marshall, too. Ever’body knows that.”
“You’re a liar. And you’d better not talk that way or you’ll swing for sure.” Callender thought of the way the white plantation youths had their choice of the black women at the barn dancing. He condemned such mixing of the races, but could not close his eyes to the sexual “use” of the female slaves by the white owners. Not Thomas Jefferson. The gossip might be directed at the Federalist John Marshall, the Virginian now serving Adams at State, maybe, but not Jefferson. He refused to listen to Bowler’s taunts about the man who wrote the Declaration of white Independence while owning hundreds of slaves and ordering those he liked into his bed. Callender put the repugnant thought out of his mind and was half-glad the slandering insurrectionist would soon be permanently silenced.
October 1, 1800
Governor Monroe himself came to visit Callender in his cell, a newspaper in hand. The issue of the Aurora carried a full report of a secret document that Hamilton circulated to other Federalist leaders. The prisoner read the title and it made his newsmonger’s mouth water: “Letter from Alexander Hamilton Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams.”
“You will note,” said the Governor, his thin lips exhibiting a small and unaccustomed smile, “what Colonel Hamilton has to say about the President of the United States there on page three.”
Callender read it avidly. “He calls Adams ‘a man of disgusting egotism, liable to paroxysms of anger, which deprive him of self-command and produce very outrageous behavior.’ ”
“Hamilton is trying to write the way you do, Callender.”
“I welcome his emulation.” He read more deeply into Hamilton’s extended tirade: it dissected every mistake Adams ever made, demeaning his character throughout. Its unintended publication in the gleeful Aurora would, Callender was sure, rip asunder the Federalist party.
One twist at the very end, however, struck Callender as curious. The long letter seemed to have no conclusion, no clarion call to action. The vengeful Hamilton seemed about to condemn the President’s candidacy for re-election, but then swerved away. He argued instead that “to support Adams and Pinckney equally is the only thing that can save us from the fangs of Jefferson,” whose election, he warned, would subject the country to “a revolution after the manner of Buonaparte.”
Why—if John Adams was as deranged and disgusting as he said—did Hamilton continue to urge his Federalist followers to support Adams for President, along with Pinckney for Vice President? Callender suspected the New Yorker had a scheme in his devious mind to advance his private interests. Did Hamilton expect his private letter to be discovered and published? Did he arrange for it to find its way instantly to the press—and did he insert that ostensibly loyal line at the end to protect himself from charges of political apostasy? And what did “support Adams and Pinckney equally” mean? He wished he could write to Beckley in Philadelphia to ask about this, but the mails were not safe.
“I would like to entrust this letter and package to you for delivery to your neighbor, Thomas Jefferson,” he said to Monroe. Because the letter was already sealed, he said, “In it I express my thanks for his unfailing encouragement and attach the latest pages of my book. And I tell him, frankly, that the thing that vexes me most in this business is my being prevented from seeing my four boys. I am not free to get up to Leiper’s farm in Pennsylvania, and I would not want them to see me in these circumstances here.”
Lest he become sentimental in front of the resolutely unemotional Governor, Callender skipped to another subject of his concern. “The people here in your Virginia, Monroe”—he would continue to address his fellow henchman that way, despite his high and mighty new title—“seem to me buried in a kennel of servility. Richmond needs the aid of a local political apostle, a newspaper that can carry the Jefferson message day in and day out. If we succeed in turning out the aristocracy, I contemplate starting a press of my own. It could not fail of plenty of business. But I would need some capital to start, and a sinecure on which to build.”
The part-time political sinecure Callender had in mind was Richmond postmaster. The job was currently held by a hack writer for the Federalists who rarely showed up to fill his official position, and whose main responsibility was to intercept and read the letters of prominent republicans. If power changed hands, it would be only right and proper to replace the Adams appointee with a republican loyalist. He would not only do the postmastering better but—supported by the public salary and with plenty of time to write—could advance Jefferson’s cause.
There was surely precedent for it. After election as Governor of Pennsylvania, the good republican Tom McKean had punished all the Federalist officeholders by throwing them out of office. Not only did McKean take care of John Beckley at Jefferson’s personal request, but that forthright tormentor of the evil Cobbett studded the state’s government with other loyal republicans. Official recognition of his connection to the Chief Magistrate would help Callender’s new paper attract advertisers. He knew that on his own, with his strong, vituperative style and well-known signature, he could attract and hold readers.
“Certainly, Richmond could make good use of a man of your talents, Mr. Callender,” said Monroe. “Continue to take up your pen, as the Vice President likes to tell us—indeed, redouble your efforts. We will know the results of the election in two months. Nobody will ever forget all you have done for your adopted country.”
The Governor took the letter and book pages and signaled to the jailer to open the door. “About your boys. If someone in authority were to explain to them the noble reason for your being incarcerated, I should think they would be quite proud of your political martyrdom. We’ll see what Mr. Jefferson can do.”
Afterward, Monroe evidently had a word with the warden. The celebrated prisoner was moved from his cell into a small apartment, allowing him to work and sleep in different rooms, and pace back and forth for exercise between chapters. No more unwanted cellmates like the hulking black Bowler bleeding all over the floor and sullying the atmosphere with his heinous imaginings.
The barred windows of his improved quarters were still a source of melancholy, but the forced solitude and regular food enabled him to do what the Governor and Jefferson urged. He took up his pen.
Callender se
t about turning out a stream of informed and stirring polemics that he was certain would be avidly read by everyone eager for ammunition to denounce the Adams Administration. Electors were being selected in different states on different days, and the voters needed to be exhorted by a writer unjustly denied his freedom. He did not have much time; on the first Monday in December, the Electoral College would cast its ballots for President and Vice President, as the Constitution directed.
In the light of two candles, he contemplated his pot of ink. He thought it could be considered the wellspring, in a sense, of rational argument and emotional fervor to be printed in Richmond and reprinted in newspapers up and down the country. By his example of martyrdom and through his written cry from jail, he saw himself as an historian helping make the history that he would later write. It was almost enough to make a man forget the fleas and lice and criminal company.
Chapter 25
October 15, 1800
NEW YORK CITY
Cobbett had promifed long ago to quit the state óf Pennsylvania if the libel-driven republican judge, Tom McKean, was elected Governor. As always, the proprietor of Porcupine’s Gazette was true to his word. He had established a newspaper with the largest circulation in the nation. That was accomplished without any of the base and parasitical arts by which government patronage was generally obtained. He then closed down the paper.
“I congratulate myself,” he declaimed to his wife Nancy, “on being persistent.” He took a deep breath. “In spite of calumny, threats, prosecutions and savage howlings of the republicans on the one side; and in spite of the praises, promises, caresses and soothing serenades of the Federalists on the other side—in spite of all these, I have persisted in openly avowing my attachment to my native country and my King.”
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