“You cannot say this about her, James.”
“The Negro whore? That she’s called ‘Luscious Sally’? Why on earth not?”
“First, because she is not called that. You just made that up.”
Callender looked sheepish. “Poetic license. My uncle in Scotland was a poet.”
“And second, why do you heap your hatred of Jefferson on her head? She’s a slave, not, as you say here, ‘a whore common as the pavement.’ She’s his property to use as he wishes. Sally has nothing to say about what he does with her.”
“You don’t understand.” Callender began pacing about the room, wringing his hands and pulling at his knuckles. “I was rushed just before the first story about Sally, and I’ve been told by someone who knows that some of the details were wrong. Sally did not go to France in the same vessel with Jefferson. He sailed first, with his elder daughter. The younger Miss Jefferson went afterwards, in another vessel, with the black—all right, ‘wench,’ if you prefer—as her waiting maid. I’ll have to straighten that out in the next Recorder.”
Maria nodded; “wench” would be better than “whore.” But she wanted him to stick to that word, which he had already used in his first article, and to stay away from the word that had been applied so cruelly to her after Hamilton’s Reynolds pamphlet. “Won’t those mistakes cast doubt on everything you’ve written?”
“No. My corrections will show I have more information coming in by courier and by post and by packet, which is true, you know. One must be scrupulous about correcting errors; it drives them crazy. And the readers get the feeling they are learning new facts along with you. They don’t expect me to be perfect, only honest with them.”
“But why cast blame on the poor woman? He’s the immoralist, not her.” Maria did not feel comfortable discussing morality, sinning on Saturdays as she was with this man in Richmond, while secretly enamoured of the Vice President in Washington, and while still renowned throughout the land for an illicit affair with a great man now in New York.
He changed the subject. “Beckley says that Madison called the miscegenation story ‘incredible,’ ” he said excitedly. “I’ll use that as their weak defense. Shows how fair I am. And I’ll also write that Harry Lee called my article a falsehood. Costs me nothing, and protects him. He’s worried that he’ll be blamed for being the one who told me.”
She refused to let him ignore her point. “None of this is the slave’s fault. She had no choice but to share his bed. If she did not submit to him, Jefferson could have her whipped.” She thought of her first husband. “Or he could beat her himself. He has the absolute right as her owner to make black Sally do anything he wants.”
“Talk about your ‘rights of man.’ I wonder what Thomas Paine thinks about his favorite American now.” Maria kept looking directly at him and Callender reluctantly had to address her objection. “But don’t you see? I have to give them something new. A description of Sally as ‘luscious’ is what the reader wants. And who knows, she may be as luscious as—”
She assumed he was about to say “as luscious as you” but wisely changed his mind. Hard work around the doctor’s house and in his garden was keeping her figure slim and she could still wear the clothes Burr had given her years ago.
“Sally can hardly be unattractive,” he observed, appealing to her mother wit. “Jefferson would not have her around all these years. I mustn’t call her ‘dusky Sally’ any more, or the ‘Sable goddess,’ because that’s a mistake—I’m told she’s not dark at all. But nobody can say she is not delectable, to him at least.”
“ ‘Luscious,’ then. But not a ‘whore common as the pavement,’ as you have here,” she said, tapping his manuscript. “He’s the villain in this, not her.” And she was not so sure about Jefferson’s culpability, either; if the man, twenty years a widower, wanted to bed the image of his long-dead wife, what was so villainous about that? Especially if he treated the slave well, and cared for their children, as she suspected Jefferson did. Sally was, after all, the daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law; that gave her family standing. Yet Maria was not ready to assume nobility in the man’s character; Hamilton had told her about another episode long ago with a neighbor named Betsey that reflected badly on the young Jefferson’s moral judgment.
“Oh, Maria my love, it’s a wondrous thing to see. All of Jefferson’s friends in Richmond set out with a sturdy denial of Sally’s existence. They had been in Albemarle County their whole lives. They said they never heard a word of her. How then could Callender, that outsider, that fugitive from faraway Scotland, get hold of the story?” He put on a Virginia gentleman’s pompous voice: “Depend upon it, sir, the whole thing must be a lie. It cannot possibly be true, a thing so brutal, so disgraceful! A thing so foreign to Mr. Jefferson’s character! That scoundrel Callender has been disappointed and affronted, you know, and this is the slanderous way he seeks revenge.”
She noticed that the wave of hatred that had passed through Callender at the publication of Duane’s sacrilege about his boys’ mother had receded. Getting his own back by striking hard at Jefferson with what he liked to call “the hammer of truth” in print had tempered his mood; he was at home at the center of controversy again.
“Jefferson’s friends are still insisting your article is a lie,” she reminded him.
“Ah, but so much more carefully. And the great man himself, of course, says nothing because a denial would give it even greater currency. Yet there is another side to the coin of silence: many take his silence as confirmation that it is true.”
That did not seem to Maria to be fair; in Callender’s trap, Jefferson was damned if he denied, damned if he stood mute. She had been in a similar position herself in the Hamilton affair, unable to speak, relying on others to defend her. In that case, only “that scoundrel Callender,” as they all called him, had tried to clear her name. Now here he was, America’s leading calumniator.
“Jones in the Examiner,” he went on, still pacing, “with his own black whore on his conscience—and that’s what that one is, no doubt about it—is fairly crawling away from this subject. He cannot deny there is a Sally. Her five children are in the record of the census taker, and they live at Monticello. Visitors have seen the whole brood, with their light skin and Jefferson red hair.” He paused in thought. “I need to get their ages, and see if Massa Jefferson was at home nine months before each of their births. That may be difficult, but it’s worth it.”
“Where are you getting your information? You’ve never been near Monticello or anywhere in Albemarle County.”
“The trick, Maria m’love”—that was the second time he used that phrase lightly, but she noticed it, as she was sure he intended—“is to make yourself into a kind of magnet. That way you attract information, the way a magnet pulls in metal filings. Once you become known as the one with the courage to publish,” he said, looking out the printing-office window at a great maple tree turning gold, “and you are called ‘scandalmonger,’ people who are angry or oppressed come to you. Or more often they send you anonymous letters in the post. A scandal feeds on itself. Look here—” He took a letter out of his pocket. “Remember how I reprinted that Negro poem from the Port Folio? It was signed ‘Asmodio.’ ”
Maria had wondered about that. Usually, the writer who chose one of those mythical or historical names was giving a hint to his identity to those in the know. Hamilton did that all the time—Publius, Camillus—as did Burr.
“I can figure out every one of those ancient pseudonyms,” said Callender, “but that one in Port Folio was a mystery to me. But here’s a letter from a biblical scholar. It seems that the Hebrew word asmodeus in the Book of Job means ‘destruction,’ and in the legends of Solomon, Asmodio is the ‘evil angel.’ My correspondent says that in the Talmud, this evil spirit is represented as being in love with Sara, a beautiful woman who married seven times, and Asmodio killed each of her husbands on the wedding night.”
Maria made a horrified face. “What
is that supposed to mean?”
“The diminutive of Sara is Sally. And Asmodio, the writer of the ballad, is in a sense killing Sally’s ‘husband,’ Jefferson, by exposing this miscegenation.” He smiled in wonderment. “What this tells us is that the writer of the poem in Port Folio is an erudite person, probably a biblical scholar himself. Perhaps he’s a preacher in Albemarle County furious at Jefferson for being an atheist, or a deist, or whatever he is. Or maybe our Port Folio poet is also the writer of this letter, which would explain it all.” He examined the envelope for some evidence of its origin; there was none. “Damn,” he said. “It makes a good story anyway.”
“You should have been a teacher, James.” Maria meant it; her vision of contentment was one of a home with this man and his boys, and Maria and Susan together in the early evenings, reading and explaining poetry and ancient history. That studious side of him was directly contrary to his chosen life as feared and hated scandalmonger. She imagined how much he missed being able to teach his boys what a famous poet’s nephew had learned in his Scottish school and in his lifetime’s reading.
Callender suddenly looked bleak at the thought of the life of scholarship and teaching that he never had. Then he shook off the shadow and plunged ahead. “You remember I told you about Jefferson’s secretary, Captain Lewis, who passed me the fifty dollars and called it charity? The one who became all offended when I called it not charity but hush money? Well, Jefferson got Congress to appropriate twenty-five hundred dollars and sent him off with much fanfare to find the Pacific Ocean or something.” He displayed another letter enclosing a cutting. “Here’s a verse the Boston Review prints about this fellow Lewis, our new Columbus: ‘Let dusky Sally henceforth bear / the name of Isabella; / And let the mountain, all of salt / Be christen’d Monticella.’ ”
He slapped her knee in delight. “And do you know the best part? This fellow says the anonymous writer of that doggerel is John Quincy Adams, the President’s son, the young Federalist that Jefferson fired from his government post in Boston. Oh, delicious. I’ll reprint that, too, though I mustn’t say young Adams wrote it until I can be sure. You see? Even the reverberations of the article become part of the continuing saga, carrying it along.” He spotted some children walking along the street. “Come quick, follow me.” They hurried outside and Callender asked one of the boys, no more than ten: “Have you and your friends heard of Sally?”
The boy looked at his friends and giggled.
“You don’t read the newspaper. You didn’t learn about her there.”
“From the song,” the boy said. To the tune of “Yankee Doodle,” and joined by the others, he sang:
“When pressed by loads of state affairs
I seek to sport and dally,
The sweetest solace of my cares
Is in the lap of Sally.”
Callender clapped his hands and joined in the verse:
“Yankee doodle, where’s the noodle?
What wife were so handy?
To breed a flock, of slaves for stock,
A blackamoore’s the dandy!”
Maria stamped her foot and shut them up. She took James by the arm and marched back into the printer’s shop. “You ought to be ashamed.”
“I didn’t teach it to them. It’s all over, a dozen verses. You want to hear my favorite—”
“No. Ridiculing the President this way is dangerous.”
He became subdued. “I suppose it is. But I’ll bet my own boys are singing it now.”
She worried about his safety. “You’ll be careful, James?”
He seemed not to hear. “Our circulation is up to fifteen hundred, thanks to Luscious Sally, America’s foremost—”
“Wench.”
He scratched his head and suggested a compromise. “Slut?” She shook her head firmly and he shrugged and smiled. “Wench, then. A favorite word in Shakespeare’s plays. No, wait. I can do better than ‘wench.’ ” He wrote out a line with a flourish, and showed it to her. “Officiating as house-keeper at Monticello is THE AFRICAN VENUS.”
Her disapproving look did not discourage him. As she strode off to go back to work, she could hear him humming “Yankee Doodle.”
Chapter 40
October 22, 1802
ALBEMARLE COUNTY , VIRGINIA
Monroe guided his horse across his field of corn stubble to the neighboring plantation of Thomas Jefferson. He knew that Madison was already at Monticello for this meeting before the President and Secretary of State returned to Washington. There in the nation’s capital they would learn the results of that fall’s congressional elections.
One problem to be discussed was Napoleon Bonaparte. Monroe had reason to suspect that the ever-more-powerful Frenchman was making a secret arrangement with the weakening Spaniards to take over Spain’s possessions in the Floridas and the vast Louisiana Territory. The jewel in this crown of retrocession was the port of New Orleans. That spelled danger for America.
Our Minister to Paris, Robert Livingston, was in the dark about this; he spoke no French, and even if he did, that would have done little good because he was deaf. His unhappy selection had been necessary; with it, Jefferson broke the influential Livingston family away from Burr in New York. But Napoleon was known to have dreams of world empire and the military genius to make them come true. He had already sent 20,000 troops to the island of Hispaniola and used a flag of truce to trick the leader of the slave revolt, Toussaint L’Ouverture, into surrendering. Once he gained New Orleans, Napoleon would control trade on the Mississippi River. He could then use his force, now based in the Indies—though reduced by yellow fever—to take over much of the New World.
Monroe’s political sense told him that such a move by France’s dictator would surely revive anti-French furor from the XYZ affair, wounding republicans here and giving the Federalist party new life. On top of that, a thrust by Napoleon would strike fear into the republicans in Kentucky and Tennessee, farmers and trappers dependent on the Mississippi River for their trade. The frontiersmen would then turn to Aaron Burr, long popular in the West with his notions of expansion southward through Mexico. Vice President Burr could then use his new frontier influence to counter the Livingston and Clinton interests in his native New York, and to join with Federalist New England to defeat Jefferson in the election of 1804. That presumed that Jefferson, who had to be heartsick at all this newspaper furor, would want to expose himself further by standing for re-election.
Another concern to Monroe was the growing spiritual movement that called itself “the second Great Awakening.” This was a surge of religious enthusiasm among the more Calvinistic of the Congregationalists, along with the “gospel” Methodists and Baptists. They resented the secular deism of the Jeffersonians, and indeed suspected the President of being a secret atheist allied to the infamously irreligious Tom Paine. Monroe made a mental note to urge Jefferson to begin to be seen attending church regularly in Washington.
More immediately, there was the matter of Callender. His reports of payments to him by Jefferson to support the slashing attacks on Washington and Adams had stung; not even republicans believed the feeble answer that monies passed to the writer had only been charity to a starving artist. Then came Callender’s sensational accusation of Jefferson’s breeding of a mixed-race family. Seemingly overnight, “Luscious Sally” had become the most famous woman in America. Studiously ignoring the scandal—and the Governor had to admit to himself that “scandal” was not too strong a word—had not stopped its spread. Not with Callender’s savagery being distributed by post to every anti-republican paper in the land, stimulating the caricature of “a philosophic cock” and an adoring black hen, inflaming his Calvinist cohort with its indictment of Virginia’s hypocrisy about the rights of man and the rank immorality of its leading citizens.
The boy who took his horse as he arrived at Monticello was white enough to pass for white. One of Sally’s? The Governor tried to put that thought out of his head. It could not be the one know
n as Young Tom, Sally’s eldest, for Beckley had reported he was not at the plantation. Either he never existed or had been safely removed; Monroe did not want to know. But that was as far as Jefferson was willing to go in defense of his reputation; how would any close friend of Jefferson’s suggest that this handsome family of house-trained slaves be sent to the fields, hidden or even quietly sold? There was no doubt in Monroe’s mind that Sally’s children were uniquely favored among Jefferson’s hundred slaves. His wife had told him that two months ago, during the outbreak of measles that swept Virginia, Jefferson—fearful of his daughter Maria’s baby becoming infected—had ordered all slave children removed from the area. All but Sally’s.
Monroe strode through the two-storied entrance hall, with its busts of the French economist Turgot and the philosopher Voltaire, and terra-cotta plasters of Washington, Franklin, and Lafayette. He made his way through the dining room to the adjacent tearoom. It was the coolest room in the house, its bow windows facing north and offering a commanding view from atop the six-hundred-foot hill. Monroe was familiar with the surroundings; Jefferson used this room often for writing and small gatherings. His revolving Windsor chair on rollers with its attached writing arm was in a corner; in that, visitors were told, he wrote his draft of the Declaration of Independence. Madison was already seated at the square tea table, looking worried. Jefferson lounged on the upholstered Burling sofa and looked terrible.
“Are you all right, Thomas?” He was sometimes afflicted with the sick headache, a recurrent malady that felled him for days at a time.
“An excessive soreness all over,” the President replied, “and a deafness and ringing in the head. From riding in the fog, I suppose. You’ll have to speak up.”
“New Orleans,” said the Secretary of State to the Governor. “We wanted your thoughts, as the former Minister to Paris, about what Napoleon and Talleyrand are up to.”
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 40