“If you’re not going to start a fight with the republicans,” said Pace, “maybe you could start a fight with the Examiner?”
Callender considered the notion of a small war between newspapers. He could feel his competitive spirit—so long beaten down by the ungrateful Jeffersonians and then softened by his life with Maria—begin to rise like the head of a bear coming out of hibernation. Electoral politicks, and the ammunition he had saved for use in it, would await the coming of the next Presidential campaign. Now was the time to fight the local battle against the corrupt culture infecting the region, centered in Richmond.
What better way than to declare war on the owner of the competing newspaper? The Examiner’s Meriwether Jones, acting on what Callender was certain was the direct order of Governor Monroe, had threatened him with unemployment and ostracism when he dared to make his demand for the repayment of his fine and his claim on the postmastership. They paid him a pittance for articles as long as he behaved. Now that he had kept silent during his year in the political wilderness, they believed they could drop him with impunity. Let them think that. Their republican Examiner now had no officeholders to denounce; its readers subscribed largely out of habit from the anti-Federalist days. The Examiner was vulnerable to personal attack.
December 22, 1801
“Mistress Examiner” was the headline in the newly strident Recorder.
The lavish living and growing demands of publisher Jones’s black mistress, Callender charged, was causing financial embarrassment at his newspaper. Jones had set up the beautiful slave in an apartment of her own and had been seen at black dances and horse races with her on his arm. Callender placed himself as a witness in the article: “I have heard him, at his own table, and before his own lady, boasting that he never had any pleasure but in a certain kind of woman. And that it was the custom of his family to be fond of the ‘other color.’ Moreover, it is known that the sable wench wears a miniature portrait of the lascivious editor around her neck.”
Stunned by Callender’s attack, Jones in the Examiner responded by charging that Callender was a disgruntled Examiner writer, fired for drunkenness.
Next day, the newspaper war, as residents of Richmond called the action of their suddenly combative press, saw Callender deal decisively with Jones’s statement that the reason he had fired Callender was drunkenness. “My career at the Examiner ended,” he wrote, in a countercharge that was repeated all over Richmond, “when I mistakenly entered my employer’s bedroom and discovered that with Mrs. Jones out of town, ‘Mistress Examiner’ was occupying the room.”
January 3, 1802
Jones could challenge the truthfulness of only one of Callender’s charges: he claimed never to have given his black mistress a portrait of himself to wear around his neck. The denial of that detail was believed in the spirited conversations in Richmond’s taverns, casting some doubt on the more serious matter of the sexual intermingling of the races. Callender took that lesson to heart: henceforth, he would avoid publishing details he heard about in passing but was not fairly certain were true, or at least could not be proven untrue. Never stretch for a detail, he told himself, that could be used to discredit the rest of your accusation.
In less than a month, the Examiner was crumbling under the Recorder’s sustained attack. “Men disposed to sacrifice private confidence that was offered in a spirit of benevolence,” wrote Jones about Callender, his former occasional employee, in an anguished article, “to satisfy their revenge, and who array trifles in the harsh language of crimination, may always make unpleasant assaults.”
Callender shook his head in wonderment at the Examiner’s weak responses. “Pusillanimous. Jones lacks the talent of selecting, of combining, of charging home his information,” he told Pace. “He lacks the firmness that fights for the last inch of ground. Can you imagine how Porcupine would have reacted to an attack from another editor? It’s a good thing Cobbett’s far gone.”
“Jones has surrendered,” his partner noted happily. “Who do we make war on now?”
“No politicks.” Callender was firm. “I think we have awakened the good people of this city to the social evil under their noses. There are plenty of hypocrites yet to be found.”
“Do we have to name them by name?” asked his partner, apparently thinking about libel.
“Not the boys and the bachelors,” Callender replied. “They will take liberties. But every member of the set of wealthy plantation owners who has a white wife and a black concubine will have to buy a copy of the Recorder every week to make certain they and their African merchandise are not named in it.”
That did his Calvinist soul as much good as it did his newspaper’s circulation. The Recorder was now selling a thousand copies a week, taken from the republican Examiner as well as the two Federalist weeklies. Just as important, even without the postmastership that Callender thought he would need for social standing, the sheet was adding advertising. He wondered if the commercial interests merely wanted to sell their wares in the newspaper that all Richmond was talking about or were worried about exposure of their own moral lapses.
Chapter 34
February 8, 1802
RICHMOND
“Callender? I’m George Hay. Do you remember me?” The editor rose and extended his hand to one of the lawyers who defended him at his sedition trial. “You were good enough to accompany Governor Monroe to visit me in prison. Of course I remember you. Please have a seat.”
Hay ignored the outstretched hand, saying, “This is no social call. I think what you are doing to this city and state with your scurrilous sheet is a damnable disgrace.”
One of those gentry with a guilty conscience, Callender thought. “If you’d like to write a letter—”
“I have no intention of seeing my name in your filthy publication.” Hay took a seat across the wide writing table from Callender, hands on his walking stick set firmly between his legs. He fixed a glare on the editor. “I’m here on behalf of the many upright citizens of Richmond who don’t wish to see their names blackened and their families shamed and their lives ruined.”
“You were not this irate in Justice Chase’s courtroom, Mr. Hay.”
“I do not like the questions you have been asking about my friend, Peter Carr, or myself. What we do, who we do it with, and how we entertain ourselves and our friends is no business of yours.”
“Carr lives at Monticello, does he not? A nephew of Jefferson’s?”
“I am not here to answer questions, Callender. I’m here to give you fair warning.” He brandished the walking stick in the editor’s face. “A libel suit that would take years to cripple you is the least of your worries. I can get a recognizance from the court to keep you from publishing anything that defames the character of any Virginian.”
Callender whitened. “What virtuous character has ever been destroyed by this paper? If seduction and miscegenation and hypocrisy have become the South’s new code of morality and virtue—”
“Don’t talk of morality to me! You’ve been wallowing in the gutter all your life, you and all the other immigrant drunks that befouled the republican cause. We’re well rid of apostates like you.”
“The men presently in office,” Callender tried to explain, “are more dangerous than the remnant of the Federalists. That’s not apostasy. I still have my republican principles, uncorrupted by the seductions of high office.”
“You fugitive scum don’t know what principles are. And you think you’re safe because you’re not a man of honor and no gentleman will stoop to challenge you to a duel. We have another way to deal with the likes of you—horsewhipping.” Hay strode out, slamming the door.
Henry Pace and one of his beefier printers’ helpers appeared at the doorway, heavy clubs in hand. “Friend of yours?”
“Only my lawyer.” Callender was trying to treat it lightly, but he was shaken by the threat of physical abuse. “He’s the author of the ‘Essay on the Liberty of the Press.’ ”
“Do you suppose Governor Monroe sent him?”
“Hay came on his own, I think. He’s one of the gambling crowd.” Now that the confrontation was over, he felt his anger rising. “But I think it’s time to send Monroe and his friends in Washington a message. And time to stir up my old colleagues in the republican press.”
He would not give in to his fears. No editor or governor or great man was in control of him now. He had proven his impartiality, and enough time had lapsed to weaken the charge that he was a disappointed office-seeker. Though it was earlier than he had planned, Callender decided to put a shot across the republicans’ bow. He would make public some of Thomas Jefferson’s financial support of the Adams Administration’s most severe critic in the years before he became President. That was how the Recorder would reach out beyond Richmond to attract the attention of all the papers in the nation.
He planned it to unravel in two stages, much like his extended exposure of Hamilton. Nobody knew better than Callender how to hold back parts of a story until the target committed itself to answering the opening salvo. He would assert Jefferson’s sponsorship first, with no specifics. He would wait for the lapdog republican press to come at him. At the same time, he could count on the Federalist press to play with the charge that Jefferson, as Vice President and professing to be above all party wrangling, secretly collaborated in the hated republican newsmonger’s vilification of George Washington and John Adams.
Then, after a month or two in which Callender produced no damning proof, the Jeffersonians would assume he had none and issue their irate denials, which Duane would trumpet in his Aurora. And finally the editor of the Recorder would spring his trap: he would print his letters from Jefferson urging him on and giving him money through third parties. In that way, Callender figured, he could stretch the controversy out over three months, becoming once again the most feared and famous journalist in America.
The thought of Hamilton—the man who portrayed Maria as a blackmailing whore to save his financial reputation—reminded him of Cobbett, that former Treasury Secretary’s warmest admirer. Curious, the Scot observed to Maria when he took dinner with her that night, that James Thomson Callender, of all people, should be the one to take from the routed Porcupine the role of leading critic of the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson.
He returned to the Recorder’s print shop and, candle in hand, walked up the stairs to his room. He set a second candle on the writing table, reached for a knife in the drawer and slowly sharpened a quill.
Chapter 35
July 4, 1802
WASHINGTON , D . C .
A band was blaring “Yankee Doodle” outfide his window, giving him a headache, and Abigail Adams was the last person in the world Thomas Jefferson, at that moment, wanted to see. But she had appeared at the President’s house, where she had been the first hostess, and there was no denying a cordial reception to the former President’s wife.
He recalled that when John Adams served as America’s first Minister to London, at the time Jefferson was serving in Paris, the often-imperious Abigail had been not only gracious but motherly to his motherless daughter Martha and her companion Sally. The two never forgot that comfort in a difficult time, nor would he. Jefferson had never adequately expressed his gratitude to Abigail for that and her intelligent friendship when he came to London to collect the girls, and it was too late now. The estrangement that began in the early days of George Washington’s Presidency had widened.Jefferson and the Adamses, warm old friends in historic times, had not had a private chat in more than a decade.
The “Duchess of Braintree,” as the republicans liked to call her, had come to the capital to represent her family at an Independence Day celebration. Her husband, whom Jefferson had bade a strained farewell the year before when he first entered this house, did not accompany her.
The President welcomed her in his writing room. As soon as the lady was seated, she heard a chirping coming from the corner and said, in the bright and forthright way he had always admired, “What in the world is that?”
“That’s my mockingbird,” Jefferson told her, indicating a large cage in the corner. “It keeps me company here. Its name is Dick.”
She gave the bird a curious look, made the proper inquiries about Jefferson’s daughters, and reported the good health of her husband John. He was now carrying on extensive correspondence with a variety of friends from their home in Massachusetts, but Jefferson had not received any communication from him and was not inclined to initiate any. Their parting, after the acrimonious election and the midnight judges, had been too painful.
“One act of Mr. Adams’s life, and one only, ever gave me a moment’s displeasure,” he told her regretfully, taking the offensive lest she bring up his dismissal of John Quincy Adams, their son, from a political post in Boston. “I did think his last appointments to office personally unkind.”
After Jefferson’s election by the House, and just before he was sworn in as President, Adams had surprised and dismayed the incoming republicans with the appointment of judges that threatened to bedevil the government for decades. That provided sinecures for a host of Federalists, many of whom would now oppose Jefferson from the Judiciary. Worst of all was the new Chief Justice of the United States—his longtime rival in Virginia, the Federalist John Marshall—who connived with Adams by candlelight to pack the Federal courts. According to Jones at the Richmond Examiner, “General Barbecue”—his sobriquet for the socially active Marshall—had been seen at the offices of Callender’s Recorder, hatching a conspiracy to vilify Jefferson. The President hoped that was just another falsehood generated in that fierce newspaper war, but he did not trust Marshall.
“Those appointments,” he told her, “made at the last minute, were from my most ardent political enemies.”
“This was done by President Washington equally,” she replied levelly, “in the last days of his Administration so that not an office remained vacant for his successor to fill. No personal unkindness was intended. Mr. Adams had no idea of the intolerance of party spirit at the time he left office.”
That last was surely untrue; party spirit was intolerant of Adams even within the Federalist ranks. But Jefferson remained silent, suspecting what brought her to him.
“I have never felt any enmity towards you, sir,” she said, “for being elected President of the United States. I considered your pretensions much superior to Colonel Burr’s, to whom an equal vote was given.”
“I am glad to hear that, madam.”
“But the instruments you made use of, and the means by which you brought about the change of administrations, have my utter abhorrence and detestation. For they were the blackest calumnies and the foulest falsehoods.”
The woman never minced words, he had to admit. “Perhaps there are certain facts,” Jefferson said mildly, “that have not been presented to you under their true aspect.”
She paid no attention to that. “And now, sir, I will freely disclose to you what has severed the bonds of our former friendship.”
He sighed and nodded for her to go on.
“One of the first acts of your Administration was to liberate a wretch who was suffering the just punishment of the law.”
She meant Callender, of course. He dreaded hearing more of this.
“This person had committed crimes of writing and publishing the basest libel, the lowest and vilest slander, which malice could invent against the character of your predecessor.”
“I didn’t ‘liberate’ Callender; he had already served his sentence,” the President pointed out. “And I discharged every person under punishment under the Sedition Law, because I considered that law to be a nullity, as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.”
“The power that makes a law is alone competent to its repeal. If a Chief Magistrate can by his will annul a law, where is the difference between a republican and a despotic government?”
He was unaccustomed to such
direct argument. If the President did not have the power to challenge the constitutionality of an act of Congress, who held that power? The President took an oath to protect the Constitution, and no power of any branch of government could be unchecked. “I tolerate with the utmost latitude the right of others to differ from me in opinion without imputing to them criminality.” He swung back to the main subject in the newspapers that caused his personal embarrassment. “I realize that my charities to Callender are considered as rewards for his calumnies, but—”
“The remission of Callender’s fine was your public approbation of his conduct,” she said, driving home her point about the pardon and remission. If she only knew the trouble that $200 owed to that rascal had caused him, and the time it took from himself and the Secretary of State and the Governor of Virginia when they all had more important matters to attend to.
“If you, as Chief Magistrate of the nation,” she pressed, “give countenance to a base calumniator, are you not answerable for the baleful influence that your example has upon the manners and morals of the community?”
“As early, I think, as 1796, I was told in Philadelphia that Callender was in the city, a fugitive from persecution and in distress,” he explained wearily. After Callender revealed his financial support from Jefferson in his Recorder a few months before, the tale had been explored at great length in the nation’s newspapers. As Jefferson had remained silent, the agitation was worsened by his friends’ denials of letters from Jefferson—which the rascal then unexpectedly produced and spread before the public. Callender entrapped them all. “I had read and approved his book. I considered him as a man of genius, unjustly persecuted in Scotland. I knew nothing of his private character and expressed my willingness to contribute to his relief and to serve him.” Lest she catch him out in an incomplete explanation, he added, “I afterward repeated the contribution.”
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 36