During those enchanted few months together, another politician accosted Maria who seemed to have some reason to suspect she was seeing Hamilton. That was Colonel Burr, whose agents sometimes followed Hamilton. She knew that he, too, sought her affections, and she rebuffed his advances until Burr told her the terrible truth about Hamilton and her husband. Burr told her the equally terrible truth that Reynolds knew full well that his wife was secretly seeing the powerful financier but did nothing to stop it; indeed, he was using the fact of their sinful relations to extract concessions from Hamilton in various financial deals. It was not overt blackmail, Burr explained to her, but merely a case of taking advantage of a man who was taking other advantage of him. Maria, learning the ways of that world, said nothing to either her husband or her lover, but began to see Burr regularly as well. Reynolds stopped beating her; Hamilton gave her money; Burr promised nothing but offered a genuine friendship.
Her involvement with three quite different men at the same time ended when President Washington called Hamilton to serve him as Treasury Secretary in Philadelphia. In parting, Hamilton told her he knew of her acquaintance with Burr and warned her that he was both a trimmer and a voluptuary. She dared to disagree, and was glad now that she had; Hamilton had no right to be angry that the woman he lured into adultery would engage in that sin with a political rival.
Reynolds, within weeks of Hamilton’s departure from New York, promptly abandoned her and their child and followed the new Treasury Secretary to Philadelphia. Maria was grateful to this day that Burr, a widower, took care of her and Susan in New York when her family turned them away. But she missed Reynolds, and forgave the drunken beatings as the result of his financial defeats and melancholy. When she heard that the father of her child was becoming wealthy, she decided to move to the nation’s capital and find him. That was a great mistake; he had fallen in with a fallen woman and a gang of thieving financiers.
That was when she paid a visit to Hamilton’s home on the sunny afternoon that changed her life again. She had really only wanted enough money to return to New York with Susan and pick up the remnants of her life there. She knew that Hamilton’s wife was at home and assumed he had money in his house. He had no need to arrange to see her later. But then when he bounded up the stairs, they could not stop themselves.
She had trusted him to help her, and presumed he would have, for years. But then his true beloved—not his mistress or his wife, but his cherished financial integrity—was challenged, and he chose to use Maria as a human shield. At their final meeting, Hamilton tried to explain that only because he was a patriot had he been forced to concoct the story that she and her husband were blackmailing him. To reassure the new nation’s public that its Treasury was above reproach, Hamilton had been willing to embarrass himself to his political rivals—never thinking they would use it to ruin his future. He had been certain none of it would come out. He persuaded her that he concocted the tale of blackmail because he assumed Monroe and Muhlenberg were gentlemen of honor and would never reveal a sordid affair that would embarrass a man’s family. He had sacrificed his moral reputation with two presumably discreet men to save the financial reputation of the nation. He told her he had never meant to shame his wife or publicly blacken Maria’s name.
That was all very logical and understandable, but the result was precisely what he had not intended. Thanks to the equally intense, less good-looking, usually impoverished, vengeance-driven man whose affections she now shared—and to today’s visitor who brought the rum and the warning—Hamilton’s false story had been forced out. As a result, Hamilton felt the need to bolster it with forged letters, and Maria Reynolds was now the best-known blackmailing whore in these United States.
She looked over at the writer who was both her exposer and defender. Callender was avidly consuming the papers in which the bottles had been wrapped. Maria was surprised at the way she had come to have a genuine affection for the brilliant and vulnerable Scot. Thanks to her, he had cut down his drinking and reduced his level of hatred for the world, and she prided herself on that visible improvement. He was more like a son to her than a lover—nobody matched Burr, not even Hamilton—but he could satisfy her, and she enjoyed the way he worshipped her. But when James Thomson Callender found some inviting target in his sights, and became consumed with the need to bring down the reputation of the high and mighty, his passion transformed him, if just for a few hours, into the man of power that she had come to dread.
Though she feared its consequences, Maria Lewis Reynolds Clingman Clement took pleasure in the rejuvenation of the man she had met as a suspicious reporter and came to know was a frightened and lonely newsmonger. Thanks to the additional money he took home from his much-talked-about Recorder, he would soon be able to afford the rental of a house with rooms for his sons. As a woman forced to hide her daughter in a seminary to protect her, she felt a deep void in her life; his boys would need a mother.
Callender broke her reverie by shaking the paper in his hand. “Maria, listen to this. From last month’s Port Folio, a Federalist literary sheet in Philadelphia. It’s a ballad, in Negro dialect, unsigned, sung by a black named ‘Quashee.’ Starts out with ‘Massa Jefferson’ saying all men are born free, and then a few verses down, it says:
“For make all like, let blackee hab
De white womans . . . dat be de track!
Den Quashee de white wife will hab
And massa Jefferson shall hab de black.”
He dropped the paper. “Somebody’s onto it.”
“On to what?” She did not understand the dialect. “What does it mean, ‘Jefferson shall hab de black’?”
“Somebody’s onto a secret I’ve kept for years, ever since that black told it to me in jail, before Monroe hanged him.” There was a glint in Callender’s eyes that she did not admire. “I knew it when I went to see little Jemmy Madison for that postmastership, and I had to bite my lip to keep from warning him I’d use it.”
“What story?”
He seemed on the verge of telling her, then drew back. “It’s something I’ve wanted to hold until the next Presidential campaign. That miserable Marshal Randolph, who wouldn’t give me back my two-hundred-dollar fine, first let it slip to one of my friends. I’m not sure of all the details yet, but I’ve been picking them up little by little. Nobody will believe it—not even you, Maria—unless I have the details.”
She knew better than to press for an answer. He would tell her in due course, when he needed to confide in someone, and when he trusted her completely. Perhaps she would pass it on to Burr in advance. When Callender strode out of the house to walk off his worry, she picked up the Port Folio and read it again:
Den Quashee de white wife will hab
And massa Jefferson shall hab de black.
Chapter 37
August 15, 1802
RICHMOND
Callender had firft heard rumors óf lafcivious goings-on at Monticello from the condemned black in the Richmond jail. Years before, he had seen a hint of the white fathering of slaves in Jefferson’s house in Rind’s Federalist. At the time, as the foremost expositor of republican thought, Callender had been infuriated at the depths to which the Tory hirelings in the press would sink in the attempts to vilify the republican leader. In the Richmond jail, he at first had dismissed what he heard from the doomed slave. The editor had thought it likely that the talk of the offspring of sexual debauches at the Jefferson plantation was directed at Peter Carr, Jefferson’s nephew who lived at Monticello. He was a habitué of the black dances, along with the excitable lawyer George Hay.
But one night at the City Tavern, Callender had a few drinks too many with General Henry Lee, the former Virginia Governor, who let slip some high-gentry gossip about “Dusky Sally,” one of Jefferson’s slaves, and her white son Tom. The editor knew that Lee’s reputation had fallen far down from the gallant “Light-Horse Harry,” eulogizer of Washington as “first in war, first in peace” and the rest of it. The form
er Revolutionary cavalry leader was in financial trouble on some land speculation and loudly blamed Jefferson and Monroe for failing to help him in his hour of need.
In his cups that night, the embittered Lee spilled a detailed confirmation of the black rebel’s story to Callender. Though he had to match his companion glass for glass and became tipsy himself, he remembered enough to add the substance of names to his bits and pieces of gossip about miscegenation. Not for immediate use, of course, with Jefferson’s popularity on the rise in mid-term, the result of his muddying of differences and carrying out his deal with Bayard to protect Federalist officeholders. But it was wise to accumulate ammunition for exploding a good scandal in 1804, when Jefferson would be standing for re-election.
In his Recorder office above Pace’s print shop, the Scot worried about someone else getting the juicy details about Jefferson’s black offspring and publishing the information prematurely. The trick was to hit with a charge, built around some kernel of truth—and especially a charge that could not be readily disproved—in the heated final months of a political campaign. He also wanted the accuser of Jefferson to be not some literary Federalist editor who might panic and retract at the first heated denial or visit from an angry advertiser. He wanted the accuser to be James Thomson Callender, the sedition-scarred editor whose previous revelations had been at first denied and then shown to be accurate. Callender’s new charge, he was sure, would soon be reprinted by Federalist newspapers around the country, and then given greater currency by the furious denials in the republican press.
Were the reports of mixing blood true? He had no way of knowing. Nor was he so impetuous as to go to the neighborhood of Monticello himself, where Carr and his highborn fellow ruffians would probably thrash him. He had to wonder: What about the literary set in Philadelphia who published the verse in the Port Folio? Whoever wrote that doggerel had picked up the Virginia gossip about Jefferson having a black “wife,” but Callender assumed the dialect poet had only a suspicion. And nobody, not even he, would have the gall to inflict such a libel on the President of the United States unless at least a few undeniable details were available to make the charge credible.
He decided to let the hint in the Port Folio pass and hope it would not be taken up by anybody else. For the next year or so, he would keep his ears open, watch for any sales of slaves from Monticello, make acquaintance with other gentry in the area. Light-Horse Harry Lee, who despised Jefferson, was an entry point. Callender would pick up bits of the string of gossip and tie them together until they could be rolled into a large ball. Besides, it would not do to mar the homecoming of his four young sons with the explosion of a controversy. He would, as his Scottish mother used to say, “possess his soul in patience.”
That resolution lasted until the courier came into the office that day with a copy of Duane’s Aurora.
He looked at the masthead of the Philadelphia newspaper that had once employed him: “Aurora General Advertiser, published (daily) by William Duane, successor of Benjamin Franklin Bache, Eight Dollars per Annum, Wednesday, August 25, 1802.” Eight dollars for a daily; Callender’s Recorder charged about the same, two dollars a year for twice a week, and his circulation was now over a thousand. But where the Recorder could boast commercial support, the Aurora was thin. Duane surely was pleading for government advertisements; Callender was sure the Aurora editor had expected much more support than a three-inch notice from Tench Coxe, U.S. supervisor for Pennsylvania, warning drivers of carriages to pay the tax on their vehicles on pain of penalties. He smiled at the advertisement for “A striking likeness of Thomas Jefferson, President of the U. States, on a Silver Medallion.” Every good republican home should have one.
He turned the page and his eye caught his own name. Smiling, he sat back to read Duane’s “Letter IV to J. T. Callender.” He and his former friend had been exchanging diatribes in print, enlivening both publications and delighting the Scot, whose barbs were envenomed with embarrassing facts. Duane was on the defensive, vainly trying to explain Callender’s accusations of support by Jefferson of his years of vilification of Washington and Adams. “There is nothing to be found in your paper concerning me,” wrote his rival up North, “but such scurrilous ribaldry as you have applied to every man who has chanced to fall in your way. You are found uniformly at war with your species, hateful to yourself, and impious even to your Creator.”
That was typical of Duane, sounding off with no facts to entice the reader. At the next paragraph, however, Callender sat up.
“A case occurs to me of a person caught in the act of stealing mahogany,” wrote Duane. “You know the person.”
The person, of course, was Callender. When he left Philadelphia for Virginia, having entrusted his children to Leiper and paid his final rent, he had been accused falsely by his landlord of taking some mahogany furniture. “He who detected the theft conceived it to be his duty to send the culprit to saw marble in prison,” went the Aurora charge, “for which his muscular frame was better calculated than for a life of laziness and intemperance.”
Duane regularly accused Callender of drinking too much, just as Porcupine used to concentrate on imaginary fleas. This annoyed but did not seriously bother the Scot, and the charge of stealing the furniture amounted to little. He rather liked the “muscular frame” reference. “But the man who caught the robber Callender was a republican, and the robber had attached himself to that party, and the honest man hesitated.”
The next paragraph pulled Callender out of his seat. “He found that the poor wretch Callendar had a wife at that time overwhelmed by a created disease”—that meant a venereal disease—“on a loathsome bed, the disease given to her by her carousing, drunken husband.” His jaw literally dropped. He could not believe anyone would make such an infamous, disgraceful charge, let alone print it.
“Their numerous children,” Duane went on, “were all in a state next to famishing, actually existing on the private contributions of the charitable, while the wretch Callender himself took daily for his morning beverage a pint of brandy.” He found it hard to comprehend the print before his eyes. “Pity for such a combination of wretchedness and vice,” Duane concluded, “and the discretion of a political partizan, suffered the thief of mahogany to escape.”
Callender flung the paper against the wall and howled in rage. “He lies! He lies!” He felt himself choking and felt pain in his chest.
He raced downstairs and cried to Henry Pace, his partner: “My dear wife died of the yellow fever. Dr. James Reynolds, Rush’s man, knows that. To say that I befouled her bed with a loathsome disease, and watched her die in filth—how can, how can—” He could not finish the sentence. “I’ll get those blackguards—”
Pace sat him down lest he have a seizure, flung open the window and told him to take deep breaths of air. He tried, but a wave of nausea overcame him and he vomited out the window, then slumped to the office floor. His partner lifted him into a chair, murmuring silly soothing like “It’s too outrageous to be taken seriously” and “Nobody reads the Saturday Aurora.”
As soon as he could speak, Callender said, “That’s why that bastard Beckley came down here. They sent him to warn me that Duane would do this if I didn’t mend my ways. They wanted me to think it was all Duane’s idea, but that’s a lie—he just writes what they tell him. Thomas Jefferson and his lickspittle Jemmy did this.” The vision of his faithful, loving wife, dying a lingering death in his arms, overpowered him, and he began to sob. That people should remember her as infected by him with the disease God sent to punish sexual sinners was too much to take.
Soon after he regained his breath, their apprentice arrived from his daily run to the post office. Henry Pace took the mail and found a letter in it that he hesitated to hand to Callender. “It’s from Thomas Leiper in Philadelphia, James. I’ll open it.”
Callender heard him say, “Oh, my God,” and then “this had better wait until tomorrow.”
“Read it,” Callender said dully.
“He writes, ‘Your children have read with great dismay and horror the article about your terrible misdeed that resulted in the shameful death of their mother.
“ ‘They have decided, and I cannot blame them, not to move to Richmond to live with you. The years may assuage their anger, but I advise you not to communicate with them now by letter or in your scurrilous sheet.’ The scum. He finishes, ‘I acknowledge receipt of your 100 dollars for past board, and am required to raise the rate to 125 for the coming year, as their appetites increase with age.’ ”
Benumbed, he took the letter from his partner’s hand and stared at its words. Leiper, the Jefferson ally, would make certain that the minds of his children were poisoned by the lies of republican editors assigned to vilify their father. “They’ve stolen my boys,” Callender said.
“What will you do?”
“I need to talk to Maria first.”
She cradled him in her arms as, for the first time since she had known him, he cried. After a bit, he stopped and sat bolt upright. “I’ll write to the doctor who treated her,” he said. “I’ll prove it a lie.”
“Do you have his address?”
“No, no, I won’t write him a letter; he’d ignore it. He’s a Rush acolyte, a Jefferson appointee to some medical board. God, Porcupine was right about the damned bleeders. I’ll write him a letter he can’t ignore. Maybe somebody will show it to my boys.”
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 38