Scandalmonger: A Novel

by William Safire

  “Until I read Callender’s seventh letter,” she persevered, “containing your compliment to him as a writer, and your reward of fifty dollars, I could not believe that you resorted to such measures.” He blanched; were there seven letters? He had lost track. “This, sir, I considered as a personal injury.”

  The President felt small and tired. Did John Adams have to put up with this every day? “When he first began to write,” he assured her, “Callender told some useful truths in his coarse way. But nobody sooner disapproved of his writing than I did, or wished more that he would be silent.” Monroe had warned him about making such a disavowal, as it was unlikely to be considered credible. But that was Jefferson’s version of the facts, and he had repeated it often enough to come to believe it. “My charities to Callender were no more meant as encouragements to his scurrilities than those I give to the beggar at my door are meant as rewards for the vices of his life.”

  She swept that argument aside with a wave of her gloved hand. “And now he has published the letters from you. The serpent you cherished and warmed bit the hand that nourished it.” She leaned forward and tapped her finger on his desk. “In no country has calumny and falsehood stalked abroad more licentiously than in this. No political character is secure from its attacks. No reputation is so fair as not to be wounded by it—until truth and falsehood lie together in one undistinguished heap.”

  Enough. “I was as far as stooping to any approbation of the falsehoods that writers published against Mr. Adams as he was respecting those of Porcupine,” the President told her. “Cobbett published volumes against me for every sentence vended by Callender against Mr. Adams.” Many republicans were certain that Cobbett’s Porcupine’s Gazette was a favored outlet of the Federalist government. Jefferson made his next charge subtly, through indirection, that a mind like Abigail Adams’s would surely grasp. “But I never supposed Mr. Adams had any participation in the atrocities of that editor.”

  “How can you even equate your financial support of Callender with—”

  “I never supposed that any person who knew either of us could believe that either of us meddled in that dirty work.” That placed both Adams and Jefferson in the same boat, equally innocent of the slander uttered by their champions in the press.

  “You do Mr. Adams justice in believing him incapable of such conduct.” She emphasized the “him,” skewering Jefferson with what she left unsaid.

  “My motives for contributing to the relief of Callender might have been to protect, reward and encourage slander,” he told her slowly, so that she would remember his words and transmit them back to the former President. “But they may also have been those which inspire ordinary charities to those in distress. And my motive for liberating sufferers under the Sedition Law may have been from the obligation of an oath to protect the Constitution, violated by an unauthorized act of Congress. Which of these were my motives must be decided by a regard to the general tenor of my life—and not on the testimony of Porcupine.”

  Abigail Adams rose. “There is one other act of your Administration that I take as personally unkind, but I forbear to say it.” That, he knew, was the dismissal of her son John Quincy, but Jefferson was not about to change his mind and in any way advance the arrogant young Federalist’s career. “I bear you no malice. I cherish no enmity. I will not, sir, intrude any further upon your time.”

  That was fortunate, as the band had struck up again and made conversation difficult. The indomitable lady stopped before the birdcage on the way out and said, “And goodbye to you, Dick.” The startled mockingbird remained silent.

  Chapter 36

  August 1, 1802

  RICHMOND

  “I brought you a cafe óf the fineft Jamaican rum,” said John Beckley, standing in the doorway with his arms full, breathing heavily from the climb up the stairs. The printing shop was closed on a Saturday afternoon, but one of the burly devils told him the editor of the Recorder could be found in his room above.

  Behind the startled Callender he could see a comely woman. This did not surprise him because Madison had said that the reason Callender was so driven to seek money and a respectable position was that he was in love. Presumably, this was his affection’s object, wearing a light dress with bare arms on a hot day. Beckley judged her a more attractive woman than he ever thought his old political ally would be able to win, but Callender now had more to offer than a soulful poet’s eyes; he had become a successful editor at last.

  “This is my friend, Mary Clement,” he said, introducing him as “John Beckley, the man who made Jefferson President.” She went to the cupboard, brought two glasses to the table and the men sampled the gift. “I’m glad you wrapped these in the Northern newspapers. The new postmaster here holds up my deliveries.”

  Beckley did not miss that reference to the political appointment that Callender thought he deserved. “I get all the papers in Washington,” he hurried on, “in my new job.”

  “I heard it was your old job, Clerk of the House,” Callender said, gathering up some sheets of paper with his crabbed writing on them and laying them aside. “I was disappointed for you. After all that work for Jefferson, carrying Pennsylvania for him twice, you deserved a greater share of the spoils than that make-work for Governor McKean.”

  True enough; but because Beckley had earned the hatred of the Federalists, Albert Gallatin, the Treasury Secretary who dealt out the patronage, had been reluctant to give him anything at all. After eighteen difficult months passed, republican House members took pity on him and let him have his old job back. Beckley tried to make light of it: “I was a factionalist, all right, and you know what the President says about the baneful effect of party spirit. Can’t blame him. Protecting the Federalist officeholders was part of the deal Gallatin made with Bayard to stop Burr.”

  “Didn’t Jefferson swear he made no deals?”

  “He didn’t make it; Gallatin did. And I suppose it’s best to cool all the old passions. But James, you’re worrying our friends. They say you’re a renegade, an apostate.”

  “That’s not all my former friends say.” Callender picked up a local paper and began to read aloud with great amusement. “ ‘The damning facts of your ingratitude, cowardice, lies’—this is Jones in the Examiner—‘venality and constitutional malignancy, Callender, glare you in the face with the petrifying lividness of an imp of the infernal regions.’ Imagine, John—me, God-fearing Calvinist that you know me to be, pictured as a demon right out of Hell. Poor Jones—not even his African mistress will talk to him any more.”

  That was one of the matters Beckley had been told by Monroe to prevail on Callender to stop stirring up. “Your interest in the mingling of the races doesn’t become you, Jimmy. It’s been going on for generations, and has nothing to do with politicks.”

  “It has everything to do with gambling, prostitution, miscegenation and a general moral decline.” At Beckley’s jaundiced look, Callender added a practical reason: “See what my exposure has done to Jones? I already have half his readers, and when he is forced to close down, I’ll get most of the rest.”

  Beckley decided not to pursue the racial argument. If the Scot thought a moral crusade would sell his newspaper, so be it; Beckley’s primary task was to dissuade him from harping on the political duplicity of Jefferson and Monroe. “I thought Examiner readers were republicans,” he said. “Do they want to read your attacks on other republicans?”

  Callender replied in the voice of a professional newsmonger. “Although they are republicans, Examiner readers will turn to a newspaper that brings them excitement. Revelations, like the news of Jefferson secretly supporting me when I was calling George Washington a debaucher of the republic.”

  Beckley knocked back his rum and poured himself another, noting that Callender was sipping slowly. Evidently, the tall woman with the long brunette hair and bare arms had a moderating influence on his old conviviality. “That’s what I came to talk to you about, James.” This was not going to be ea
sy; McKean and Monroe did not understand the long-smoldering resentment in this man. “It’s getting out of hand. I can understand your irritation, nine months in jail and all, and nothing to show for it, but remember your principles. You may not be happy with everything that people on your side do, but James—we are on the same side.”

  “ ‘We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans,’ you mean?”

  Beckley sensed the weakness in his argument, considering the way his own loyalty had gone unrewarded, but that made him press harder. “You don’t want to besmirch the political reputations of those who believe in the same things about the rights of man as you. You don’t want to stop us from picking up thirty of the new seats in the House this fall. For God’s sake, you don’t want to help the damned Federalists come back and create a monarchy.”

  “Be calm, Calm Observer,” Callender said, recalling the pen name Beckley once used. “Both parties require a great deal of watching. There is not a prodigious difference between the moral characters of the one and the other.”

  “Be sensible, James. You’re getting us all into a lot of trouble.”

  “I’m making a decent living for the first time in my life. In six months I should have enough to afford a place big enough to put up my boys, and the money to feed and clothe them. And I’m making a difference again, the way I did when I brought Hamilton down, thanks to you.”

  Wincing at that last note of gratitude, Beckley handed over a newspaper. “I want to show you what Hamilton’s editor, Coleman, is writing in his New York Evening Post. See? He republished all your articles accusing Jefferson of being your secret backer. And Coleman says that it was Jefferson who incited you to expose Hamilton and Reynolds, which turned the public against Hamilton and cleared Jefferson’s path to the presidency.”

  “I don’t know if this fellow Coleman will be a good editor,” said Callender, “but he sure is an accurate historian.”

  Beckley exploded. “Damn it, Callender, don’t be such a fool! Don’t you see the damage you’re doing? Don’t you realize that if public sentiment shifts back to the Federalists, and they win, you’ll be back in jail for the rest of your natural life? Jesus!” He took out a bandanna and mopped his face. “Excuse my language, madam. I cannot bear to see my friend here become a tool in the hands of our enemies. Believe me, Alexander Hamilton will stop at nothing.” At her sympathetic nod, he went on: “When he’s not stirring up mischief between Jefferson and Vice President Burr, Hamilton’s quoting James Callender. Never thought that day would come. Maybe he’s getting old. I hear he wears spectacles now.”

  Callender casually handed the Post over to his woman friend to read and said, “You have nothing to fear, John. I’ll never tell who gave me those documents six long years ago. That would truly go against my principles.”

  Beckley seized on the offer. “I have your word on that, then? If they ever did tie me to you, I’d never get a job in the government. It would look like a payment to me for helping you do in Hamilton.”

  “It would, that,” the editor agreed.

  “And I have my eye on a new position that Harper—he’s now on our side, you know—created just before he left Philadelphia. Librarian for the Congress. It pays only two dollars a day, but I could do it in my spare time. They don’t have many books.”

  “You have my word,” Callender assured him, “which has been good for all these years. Do you bring any more documents with you? I’ve shown you I can keep a secret about my source.”

  “No. I’m here as your friend, to call you back from the brink of destruction. There are men out there just as passionate as you, just as filled with vengeance as you, who can write and do terrible things.”

  “Gallatin? Or that gentleman dandy at the National Intelligencer, who was nowhere to be found in the years we were the Outs, who’s now getting all the government’s printing business?”

  “No, no, nobody close to Jefferson. I mean the fury of some of your own émigrés, the wild Irishmen and English who came from the old country and believe in what Paine wrote and took up the fight for the rights of man. Duane in particular at the Aurora.They’re furious with you, more than Porcupine ever was.”

  “I see you’ve rid America of Cobbett.”

  Beckley nodded. “Governor McKean promised Judge Shippen he’d make him Chief Judge of the State if he’d ruin Cobbett with the biggest libel judgment ever. He did, and now he’s Chief Judge, and Cobbett is back in England where he belongs.” Beckley had a hand in those judicial dealings and was proud of it, especially the way he assembled a republican jury. “But I want you to know this, James. Jefferson and Madison and Monroe dealt badly with you, I know that. But you got even with them. You’ve had your vengeance. Now the score is settled and that’s enough.”

  Callender twisted around and looked at the woman. “You think that’s enough, too, don’t you, Mrs. Clement?”

  “I have often pointed out the biblical injunction, ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,’ ” she said to Beckley. “That it is not for mortal man to seek revenge.”

  “Listen to her, Jimmy, she’s right.” Beckley was glad to see that she was not merely a good-looking woman but a sensible, God-fearing person who might be a restraining influence on the suddenly powerful editor. “We’ve got no more control over what some of the newsmongers on our side write than we ever had control over you.” He thought that was an especially strong point, not least because it was true; James had always gone his own way, usually too far, in Jefferson’s cause. He never needed to be told what to write or who to attack, not even in prison. Now that Porcupine had been silenced, nobody in the press was as adept at inflaming the public as James Thomson Callender. That’s the figure of speech Jefferson liked to use, too: “the flame of public opinion” needed to be lit by the incendiary newsmongers.

  “You mustn’t let this get out of hand,” Beckley pressed. “When they react and lash out at you, as some of our old firebrands in the press are bound to do, just tell yourself you’ve already won and let that be an end to it. Don’t blame Jefferson.”

  “If that’s what the President of the United States sent you down here to tell me, my old friend, I’ve heard you. He ought to give you a better position for riding all the way down here and delivering this rum.”

  “Wasn’t him sent me.” That was true.

  “Monroe, then, on his behalf.”

  Beckley chose silence.

  “General Washington spoke of his ‘hatchet men,’ ” Callender went on, “the Indian scouts who would cut a path through the thickest woods so Washington’s troops could follow. Monroe is Jefferson’s hatchet man.”

  Beckley upended his glass of rum, nodded to Callender’s sensible companion who seemed absorbed in the Evening Post, and trotted down the porch steps to his horse. He would be able to report little or no progress with this quietly angry man. He hoped, for everyone’s sake, that Callender’s wrath, soon certain to be rekindled, would be somehow contained.

  “Be sure my books are in your library,” Callender called after him.

  Maria was troubled by the surprise visit. Her anonymity was important to her. Callender’s visitor from Washington had never seen her before and could not identify her as Maria Reynolds, but if he were to describe the woman in the editor’s room to Monroe or someone else who had interviewed her, a suspicion might arise and her identity might no longer be secret.

  Callender kept unwrapping the bottles of rum. She was pleased to see he was not interested in the liquor but in the wrapping, glancing quickly over the latest newspapers, tearing out items of interest, passing the remainder of the papers on to Maria when he was finished.

  “Why didn’t they reward Beckley, James?”

  “John grew up in Virginia and the gentry let him be Mayor of Richmond, which gave him pretensions of aristocracy. But he came over to America as an indentured servant when he was a boy, and no matter how he puts on airs, the gentry will never let him into their set. They use him but they wash thei
r hands afterwards.”

  She took up the open rum bottle and screwed in the cork. “Hamilton came here from the Indies,” she said. “He never knew his father, an itinerant ne’er-do-well, and they tell mean stories about the morals of his mother. And yet he’s considered an aristocrat.”

  “He’s handsome. He is a brilliant orator. He carries himself like a gentleman. And Hamilton’s a rich lawyer now, or at least he lives as if he’s rich, and he looks down on other aristocrats, which intimidates them. Even so, everybody knows Adams called him ‘the bastard son of a Scotch pedlar.’ It sticks.”

  She returned to the new newspaper and pretended to read the Evening Post. It gave her the chance to ruminate privately about something Beckley said about Hamilton wearing spectacles. They were all getting older.

  Maria remembered Colonel Hamilton’s boy, Philip, and his sister, Angelica. They played in a grassy commons in New York City near Hamilton’s home, not far from the cramped quarters James Reynolds provided for his new family. The Hamilton children were about six and five years old when her daughter Susan was an infant. Maria’s handsome husband was doing some financial work for the Colonel and had introduced her to Hamilton one day in the park with all the children. She spent the mornings there regularly; the Colonel took to accompanying a servant on walks to the commons with Philip and Angelica.

  She was then not yet seventeen and was desperately unhappy. She loved James Reynolds and had broken with her family when they refused to countenance him, but after financial mishaps he had taken to drink and then to beating her. She remembered how the handsome young Hamilton, though a great and famous man, took a sincere interest in her welfare. That led to a meeting without the children and a dinner in a fine tavern with rooms upstairs. He seduced her. Maria felt that was a fair statement of what had taken place, though she may have shown an interest that he interpreted as encouragement. She recalled clinging to him for what seemed like hours afterwards, in her shame at becoming an adulteress. He was a lover as she had never known, his mood flickering from fierceness—when he discovered bruises inflicted on her body by Reynolds—to tenderness, when he said she reminded him of his lonely and courageous mother in Jamaica.