Madison pointedly looked at the clock on the wall. Callender seemed to take this as an additional affront.
“There’s a contrast between you and me,” said the editor, and Madison could not help but nod agreement. “Twelve years ago you wrote a book. The publication of your volume would have been of infinite service towards the resistance of Federal usurpation and rapine.”
Madison bridled; Callender was broaching a subject he found most personally sensitive. The extensive notes that Madison had scrupulously taken on the debates in the Constitutional Convention a decade before remained under lock and key. The time was not ripe for their publication.
“Maybe you were dissatisfied with the part you and your friends played in the course of your narrative,” Callender, who apparently knew too much, went on. “Or maybe you were afraid of provoking the revenge of the Federalist party. But as the result of your fear, your notes on the convention remain in your safe. You sacrificed the interest of your country to the wise but sordid consideration of personal tranquillity.”
Too much. “Your presumption is outrageous.” It was true enough that he did not want to become the object of criticism from his colleagues by making public who said what at that secret conclave. But Madison was simply holding those historical notes for publication at a more propitious time—perhaps a decade or two hence, when passions had cooled. He told himself with indignation that he felt no guilt whatever at the continued suppression of the debates at the formation of the Constitution. “What are you trying to say?”
“You must have despised the temerity of those writers like me who exposed themselves to the talons of the Sedition Act.”
“Do you forget the Virginia Resolution?” Madison snapped back. He did not want to admit to this man that he and Jefferson had written his State’s opposition to the Sedition Act, but his authorship of the courageous document was now a source of pride.
“You wrote that in the name of the General Assembly of Virginia,” Callender countered. “You knew you did not run the smallest chance of personal danger. You gratified your sensibilities without the peril of persecution or the chance of six months of imprisonment.”
Madison felt unfairly assailed. His place had always been as a voice of reason behind the scenes, and not, as the hot-eyed Callender wished, with the calumniators on the ramparts.
The writer lashed out again. “You would not take the chances that you wanted us to take. You suppressed the foul deeds and shameful compromises of the Convention that drew up your Constitution in secret. You shrink to this very day from your sacred duty both as a historian and a citizen. How can a man write what he durst not publish?”
Madison would not deign to answer the insulting question, nor would he allow his fury to show. Never before had he felt the slightest twinge of guilt at protecting the confidences of his colleagues making history at the Convention. He looked again at the clock.
Callender apparently realized he had overstepped and had harmed his own cause. He rose to take his leave. “I would also like to add that we in Richmond have a most wretched postmaster. The whole town is horribly tired of him.”
That was it; the purpose of the visit was not just to get back his fine, but to seek office. When Madison did not show any interest in pursuing that subject of patronage, a dispirited Callender said, “If my visit breathes an unbecoming asperity, sir, I entreat you to recollect what lengths I have gone to serve the Jefferson cause, and in what way it now appears to be serving me.”
The unwelcome visitor moved toward the door. “I am not going to set myself up in argument against you. There is something superior to argument, and that is the feelings and voice of mankind. What will be said of Mr. Jefferson’s promises when I return to Richmond without my money? The world will examine not your argument but the fact of your rejection.” His hand on the doorknob, Callender muttered words that the Secretary of State could barely hear: “I am not the man to be oppressed or plundered with impunity.”
“What was that?”
“Putting principles and feelings aside, it is not proper for Jefferson to create a quarrel with me.”
Madison and his wife Dolley were staying in the President’s house until they could find an agreeable country residence in the new District. He crossed the road from his State Department office to his temporary home, picking his way through the new furniture and draperies that Abigail Adams had ordered installed in the President’s light gray Virginia fieldstone palace. There he laid the matter of Callender’s unremitted fine before Jefferson.
He recounted his painful conversation with Callender in detail, leaving out only the interchange about his suppression of the notes of the Constitutional Convention. “It may take months for him to get the money,” the Secretary of State concluded, “to which he is entitled by law. He seems to be in genuine distress.”
When President Jefferson heard about Callender’s need for payment of board for his four boys, he was sympathetic, as Madison knew he would be. He called Meriwether Lewis into his office and asked for his account book. Madison nodded a greeting to Lewis, who came from Albemarle County, near Monticello and less than a two-hour ride from Madison’s Montpelier estate. Jefferson took the account book from him, made a notation about a charitable contribution, dug in his pocket and handed his secretary five $10 notes.
“Inform Mr. Callender, Captain, we are making some inquiries as to his fine, which will take a little time. Lest he suffer in the meantime, I’m sending him this.”
Madison didn’t know if the President’s personal advance was such a good idea, considering the veiled threat Callender had made about exposing his previous financial support. But Jefferson’s motive was pure and he had marked it down as a charity, which it surely was. Certain that nobody could fairly call the aid to the distressed supplicant any form of payment of blackmail, the Secretary of State said nothing.
April 7, 1801
After making inquiries at several rooming houses that were newly built and already run down, Captain Lewis consulted a rude map he had drawn of the District. Near the President’s mansion was the building housing the State and War Departments and the square brick Treasury building. To the east, a half-dozen houses were grouped close together for safety’s sake, because there were robbers in the new city but no police. Southward through rows of stumps and swamps was Georgetown. Roughly northward, a stone footway ran a mile and a half alongside the rutted Pennsylvania Avenue up to the Capitol. Approaching it, only the avenue named for New Jersey, headed south, suggested a city a-building, but the steep drop down toward the Anacostia River made it difficult for wood and coal carters to bring the loads up to the offices of the Congress. That was not good planning. After walking briskly up the stone footway for less than a half-hour, Captain Lewis found James Callender in a pub designated for their meeting near the Capitol.
“The President has sent me to you, sir, with his compliments,” he began. Callender, behind a bottle of rum, glared at him through bloodshot eyes and murmured a form of greeting or curse.
“President Jefferson has been expediting the remission of your fine, as you know. Secretary Madison spoke with him after your visits—”
“Three visits,” said Callender, “one night after the next. I traveled a hundred and fifty miles, a painful and expensive journey, in search of performance of Jefferson’s promise.” He shuddered, though it was warm in the tavern. “Where was Little Jemmy’s pen when we needed it? Too frightened of Adams to put words to paper, and now Little Jemmy is high and mighty. He seems to think he’s become a sort of semi-divinity, and that I’m not worthy to be his footstool.”
“—and the President was concerned lest you suffer in the meantime,” Lewis persisted. “Therefore, he sent me along to find you and give you this fifty dollars, in the spirit of charity.”
“Charity?” Callender grabbed the extended bills and jammed them in his pocket. “Charity? This is my due, young man. This is nothing but hush money.”
Lewis did
not know what to say and so remained silent. But he was familiar with the phrase “hush money”: it was what you paid a blackmailer, just as Alexander Hamilton had paid to an extortionist in a famous case a few years before. “It’s given to you to alleviate your suffering,” he said with emphasis, though avoiding the incendiary word “charity” lest the man be insulted to be considered a beggar.
“I’m in possession of things,” the editor said, his words slurred, “which I can make use of if need be. Three separate solicitations of the disdainful Little Jemmy, and Black Sally was fluttering on my tongue’s end, but with difficulty I kept her down.” He patted his pocket. “And this’ll shut me up for a few days, hush me up like they want, but it’s not the whole two hundred dollars.”
“I doubt whether you can expect more from this source,” said Lewis, choosing his words with care. “It’s from the kindness of his heart.”
“You tell old Kindheart that he knows full well what I expect. A certain office down in Virginia that handles the mail. Held today by a damned Federalist politician. Intercepted our letters and handed them over to Adams and Marshall, he did. We all had to be cir—circumspect. You couldn’t tell what we meant half the time from just reading the letters.”
The President’s secretary listened to the writer rail about Jefferson’s sudden remoteness and Madison’s lack of generous feelings for a few more moments. As one who knew the black moods of the hypo himself on occasion, Lewis was inclined to be sympathetic; the man was surely in the depths. But when Callender began claiming that the Secretary of State was “hiding behind the hedge of hypocrisy, like the bull frog in the bottom of the ditch,” Captain Lewis had enough.
“I’ll be leaving you now, Mr. Callender. Is there any message of thanks you would like me to deliver?”
“I lost five years of labor. Gained five thousand personal enemies. Got my name inserted in five hundred libels. And in the end got in trouble with the only friend I had in Pennsylvania, now holding my boys hostage, practically. All for your Tom Jefferson, who sought me out in the first place at McCorkle’s print shop. Tell him that. Tell him I’d be a better postmaster than the Federalist spy in Richmond would today. Tell him—”
Lewis about-faced and marched out of the bar. He would tell the President plenty about the danger in doing a good deed for this miscreant.
Chapter 30
April 9, 1801
WASHINGTON, D. C.
Governor James Monroe dropped his duties in Richmond and rushed to the President’s house in Washington as soon as he received Jefferson’s worried message about Captain Lewis’s interview with Callender.
He found the President steaming, more in a rage than he had ever seen. “I am really mortified at the base ingratitude of Callender. It presents human nature in a hideous form. Hideous!” Jefferson could not stay seated; the normally languid man paced the room in unconcealed agitation. “He told Lewis in very high-toned language that he received my fifty dollars not as charity but as his due, in fact as hush money.” He almost choked on the last words and flung himself into a chair. “Such a misconstruction of my charities as ‘hush money’ puts an end to them forever.”
Monroe was dubious about Jefferson’s characterization of monies paid to Callender as charity: that generous explanation was a flimsy cover for the years of subsidy to the most savage attack dog the republicans had found to set on their powerful enemies. “Callender didn’t make any threats to you directly, did he? He didn’t say anything, or write you anything, that could be construed as a warning?”
“Well, yes. To Madison, both in person and later in writing. In no uncertain terms. Even so, Madison thought that a longtime supporter in distress deserved some help.”
Monroe’s heart sunk. Madison knew how to write drafts of a Constitution, and might yet turn out to be a capable Secretary of State, but as a political operative with some grasp of potential scandal, he was an innocent lamb to be led to slaughter by the press. For him to suggest the President of the United States to pay any money to a man who had just made threats to reveal past subsidies was naïve to the point of stupidity. Hamilton’s Reynolds pamphlet immediately sprang to mind: the attempt to smother up payments to Callender with another payment would be seen as more troubling than the original act.
“It gives me concern,” Jefferson added, “because I perceive that the monetary relief which I afforded him on mere motives of charity may be viewed under the aspect of employing him as a writer.”
That was putting it gently. Because he did not want his friend to feel he had handled the situation wrongly, Monroe did not ask the obvious question: then why pay him more money after his broad hint of extortion? To assess the republican vulnerability, the Virginia Governor began to probe the Jefferson-Callender relationship. “How did you first become aware of this man’s existence?”
“When The Political Progress of Britain first appeared in this country,” Jefferson recounted, “it was in a periodical publication called the Bee. That’s where I saw it. I was speaking of it in terms of strong approbation to a friend in Philadelphia, when he asked me if I knew that the author was then in the city. He was a fugitive from persecution on account of that work and in want of employ for his subsistence. That was the first I knew that Callender was author of the work.”
“That must have been about four years ago,” Monroe estimated, “soon after you became Vice President. And you expressed a willingness to see him?”
“I considered him a man of science fled from persecution, and assured my friend of my readiness to do whatever could serve him.”
Monroe, respecting Jefferson’s circumspection, did not ask who the friend was. He assumed it was John Beckley, their political operative who used Callender to great effect as the outlet for the Reynolds papers Monroe had left in Jefferson’s safekeeping before sailing for France to be Minister in Paris.
“And when did you and Callender meet?”
“Probably not until years later, in 1798. I think I was applied to by Mr. Leiper to contribute to his relief. The next year, Senator Stevens Mason applied for him, and I contributed again. Callender had by this time paid me two or three personal visits.”
Monroe, from his conversations with Callender in the Richmond jail, knew that recollections would differ. According to the Scot, it was Jefferson who paid him the first personal visit, in the summer of 1797, and he had vividly remembered the place: witnesses could probably attest to that meeting above the printing plant of Snowden & McCorkle. Journalists in the hire of Federalists could make much of the way Jefferson, then serving as Vice President to Adams and always striving to appear above the political battle, was secretly supporting the most virulent newspaper diatribes and pamphlets inveighing against the Federalists.
“You exchanged occasional visits over the years,” was the way Monroe rephrased the meetings of statesman and scrivener. “Would he have any physical evidence of getting money from you? I know we used your cousin George as a conduit, which was wisely discreet, but might you have written Callender any letters mentioning money?”
“Two, I think. One in answer to the supplication for his relief from Senator Mason, enclosing fifty dollars. The other in answer to questions Callender addressed to me.”
Monroe presumed the questions were to elicit scandalous information about Adams’s men. If that correspondence ever came to light, it would show Jefferson’s complicity in the newsmonger’s abusive writings. “About—?”
“Whether Mr. Jay received salary as Chief Justice and envoy to Britain at the same time,” Jefferson recalled with evident difficulty, “and something relative to the expenses of an embassy in Constantinople.” Both had been hawked in the press as embarrassments to the Federalists in power, and both could now be traced directly to Jefferson as the source.
“No letters from you privately praising his attacks on Adams, or Washington?” Monroe felt Jefferson did not grasp the seriousness of the danger, and so he used specifics, as surely the newsmonger would.
“Nothing from you that he could twist into praising him for calling President Washington a traitor or Adams a ‘hoary-headed incendiary’?”
Jefferson winced at the vivid phrase, which Monroe thought all too accurately described Adams, and could not recall any. “I think those were the only letters I ever wrote him in answer to the volumes Callender was perpetually writing to me.”
Monroe found some slight encouragement in that. He would pass the word if necessary that any claims by Callender of written encouragement of the most vicious of his writings were false. The contention that all the payments were meant only as charity, though patently a lie, was internally consistent. It could be maintained as true, and those who wanted to believe their President would believe it.
Jefferson put forward something else that might be seen as exculpatory. “Callender’s writings last year in Richmond had fallen far short of the quality of his original Political Progress and the scurrility of his subsequent work began to do us mischief. As to myself, far from wanting to encourage his writing, no man wished more to see his pen stopped, even though I considered him still a proper object of benevolence. It is long since I wished he would cease writing about politicks, as he was doing more harm than good.”
Monroe shook his head. Nobody would find credible the notion that Jefferson, in the heat of such passions as the XYZ affair, would have wanted to see Callender’s much-needed pen stopped. And everyone who could read knew how much damage that pen had inflicted on the Federalists. Calling the years of subsidy “charity” was stretching credulity, but pretending to have wished he would cease his writing would snap it completely.
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 33