“You take pleasure in this, don’t you? You enjoy meddling in the private lives of public men.”
“Not at all,” Callender dared to insist. “It never was my serious intention to meddle with Mrs. Walker, but the President’s felo-de-se defenders insulted the public with denials of the fact. That compelled me to knock down those denials with the hammer of truth.”
The Librarian made an effort quickly to enumerate in his head the scandals to come, lest he forget any in reporting to Madison: (1) the atheism letter; (2) the mysterious message from his secretary Lewis; (3) the Executive Council financial accounts; (4) the Jefferson debt during the Revolution repaid in devalued currency; (5) another neighbor’s wife seduced; and almost as an afterthought (6) “Dusky Sally’s” several husbands.
Perhaps he had nothing more than rumors. But if Callender wrote one of those half-dozen half-truths every other month, letting the reverberations and denials play themselves out each time, that would take him right through the presidential election next year. Presumably, the publication of those scandals would encourage others resentful of Jefferson to come forward with other truths or hard-to-deny falsehoods. No wonder there were angry men in Washington, and especially on Virginia’s plantations, who, like Monroe’s acolyte Hay, felt strongly that Callender was a dangerous scoundrel who had to be stopped.
“I cannot impress upon you too strongly, James,” Beckley told him with fervor, “that you are playing with fire. I warned you before Duane wrote that terrible lie about your wife, remember?” He was careful to add, “Though I didn’t know exactly what that damn fool was going to do before-hand, of course. Now I’m warning you again. There are violent men out there.”
Callender took a moment to digest that. “I do not like to see my idols of recent years revealed to have feet of clay,” he said finally. “But if there is one thing I have learned, Calm Observer, it is that Paine was right: with authority comes corruption. Republicans, it seems—even the noblest of them—are just as corruptible as the rest of mankind.”
Beckley would not sit still for that pretentious self-justification. Callender was besplattering greatness with his mud to satisfy his insatiable rage and to sell his damnable sheet. “You are using that high-minded nonsense to conceal your own lust for notoriety. These scandals you are mongering do not even rise to the level of sedition, bringing government into disrepute. They are personal matters you are using to blacken the name of one great and good man, who may be as human as you or me.”
“He has blackened his own name by his actions,” said the editor. “I only make them public, as I am at liberty to do.”
“Don’t you understand the difference between liberty and license?”
“Licentiousness is nothing more than a ricketty, or dropsical, species of liberty,” Callender said. “I will grant you that licentiousness—that’s what you mean, not mere license—is defined as liberty swelling beyond its proper limits. But if you ask the first ten men you meet, you will find it hard to find four that will agree where such limits are to be placed.”
“And so you admit of no limits at all. Every foul rumor comes under your beloved ‘hammer of truth.’ ”
“The public are entitled to know the personal character of the men who would lead them. Jefferson used to say that he refused to believe that there was one code of morality for a public man, and another for a private man.”
“Circumstances change and a man’s opinions with them, as you well know. Madison tells me the President now thinks he’s become a fair mark for every man’s dirt. You scandalmongers make a mockery of your liberty of the press, and by so doing endanger it. You’re drawn to all this tittle-tattle only to sell your newspapers.”
Callender shrugged. “If there were no buyers of newspapers,” he replied, “there could be no sellers.” He picked up a strange-looking hat and ran his fingers along the brim, turning it as he ruminated. “Have you stopped to think, John, how little difference there is between Hamilton and Jefferson?”
Beckley had the answer and it had little to do with domestic politicks or Britain versus France or personality clashes. “All the difference in the world. Hamilton thinks that man’s nature is evil and that he needs strong government to control his passions. Jefferson sees man as essentially good and needs to protect his freedom from the monarch’s domination. From that flows all the dissension of our time.”
Callender tilted his head in thought.
“And you used to be on our side,” Beckley pressed, “with Jefferson and Paine and Locke and the enlightenment of mankind. What’s happened to you?”
“I am in neither camp now,” Callender said. “It is not that man is inherently good or bad. It’s when a man climbs up into the saddle, he is corrupted by the height. It happened to Hamilton, and I fought to bring him down, and now it’s happened to Jefferson, and I have to do the same.”
“Why, for God’s sake? Nobody elected you to be the Savonarola who expels the Medicis.”
“True, and as I recall, the Florentines tortured and burned him at the stake for his reforms. John, I do not relish the thought of returning to the jail you built when you were Mayor here, so long ago. Or being run out of this self-satisfied country to face a gibbet in Scotland. Or suffering another attack from Monroe-once-removed, from which this stout hat kept my brains from being beat out. I just think, John,” he concluded, “that those on high who have the power to strike fear into people’s hearts should live with the risk of having fear struck into their own.”
“You’ve enjoyed your vengeance. You’ve built up your circulation. That’s enough. If you go ahead with this hateful besmearment,” Beckley warned him, “tearing down our leaders and making people in this very neighborhood ashamed of the way they live, there will be those who think jail or exile is too good for you.”
He left him to think that over, but was fearful that the stubborn Scot would never learn.
Callender was more shaken by Beckley’s warning than he had let on. Hay’s beating had him looking over his shoulder whenever it grew dark. He always wore the helmet-like hat Maria had given him. He was less worried about the angry republicans than about the fury of the young rakes in town who blamed him for the curtailment of the black dances. It seemed to him that every man’s hand was turned against him.
But not every woman’s. He locked the door of the printing shop and walked up the muddy street to the tavern near Dr. Mathew’s house where he and Maria now regularly took dinner. She was seated at their table near the window where they could smell the honeysuckle. She held a letter in her hand.
“Read this,” she said after their kiss.
It was from Aaron Burr in Washington, enclosing a letter from his friend at the Boston seminary where Susan Lewis was being educated. The girl was expressing a desire, almost a desperation, to see her mother again. However, any meeting of the two had to be arranged with discretion lest their relationship be exposed; the seminary would never put up with the notoriety. In his letter of transmittal, Vice President Burr wrote that he had arranged for Susan to sail to Washington for a week’s stay at a respectable rooming house in the capital. He presumed that Dr. Mathew would excuse Maria from work that week, and he had arranged board for her also at a separate place in Washington.
“You’re going, of course,” said Callender. “When do you leave?”
“Day after tomorrow on the packet. I hope she’s all right. It’s been over a year.”
He understood. “It must be wonderful to have a child who wants to see you.”
“Oh, James. You and your boys will be reunited one day soon, I know it.”
He had come to doubt that. Even if they showed an interest in coming to Richmond, he could not provide a home that guaranteed their safety. George Hay and all his friends were on his mind.
“You look worried,” she said. “Was it anything Beckley told you today?”
Callender shrugged. “Pack your bag in the morning. Stay with me tomorrow night, and I’ll to tak
e you to the wharf and see you off.” He stared at the letter from the Vice President and handed it back to her. “You’ll be seeing your friend Burr?”
“Probably. I mean yes, of course, to thank him for all he’s done for Susan and me.”
“Tell him I wish now he’d been more active in snatching that election.” That was true; like Jefferson and Hamilton, Burr’s past offered a rich subject for a scandalmonger. Callender had a suspicion that Hamilton and Burr were rivals for Maria’s affections when one or both seduced her back in 1791, and each despised the other as a voluptuary ever since. But that was a matter too painful for him to ever ask her about lest she tell him a truth he did not want hammering at him every time he touched her. She had been very young; her husband was a rogue and a brute; her lover or lovers were men of wealth and power and good looks. He would judge them but not her. He let himself hope that Burr was now no more than her friend.
Maria smiled at his suggestion of political support of the outcast Burr and then became serious again. “You’ll be careful while I’m gone?”
“By that you mean not too much drinking. I’ll be careful.” He already felt profoundly alone.
Chapter 48
July 1, 1803
NEW YORK CITY
“If we try this cafe on the law, General Hamilton,” Richard Harison told his famous law partner, “we would surely lose.”
They sat on this late-spring afternoon at the great bay window facing the Harlem River; the window behind them had a view westward of the sunset across the Hudson River. Harison knew that Hamilton had bought thirty acres on a $5,000 loan and hired the architect of City Hall to draw up the plans for the Grange. He named the country house after the family seat in Scotland, skipping back a generation past his improvident father and free-spirited mother in the West Indies.
“We would lose,” Harison explained, “because our client has clearly printed a libel on Thomas Jefferson.”
“The Zenger precedent?”
“In the seditious libel trial of the printer John Peter Zenger,” Harison recited, “a jury ignored the judge’s reading of the law. The jurors accepted Zenger’s unprecedented contention that truth is a defense against libel, and found him not guilty. That was seventy years ago.” Ever since, that runaway jury’s verdict had been portrayed by publishers as a great victory for liberty of the press. But it was not, in terms of the law. “As we established in your libel suit against the editor of the now-defunct New York Argus”—Harison had helped put out of business the republican publication that enraged Hamilton—“it was the judge’s charge in the Zenger case, and not the jury’s verdict, that confirmed the legal precedent set by Judge Coke in England.”
“The common law is plain?”
Harison was sure of it. “It matters not if a libel is true or false; it matters only that its publication defamed and damaged the plaintiff. Blackstone defines libel as ‘any scandalous publication that tends to breach the peace.’ ”
“Even so, we have undertaken the defense of Croswell of the Wasp pro bono publico,” said Hamilton, steepling his fingers. “I intend to win it, Richard. But win or lose, I intend to expose a foul act that sought to demean President Washington. How do you suggest we proceed?”
Harison presumed that his partner had a dual purpose in taking time from his lucrative law practice to defend the hapless Columbia County editor. The political purpose was to spread far and wide the accusation that Jefferson had hired James Callender to vilify and distract President Washington; that is what Callender had alleged and Croswell reprinted. The second, nobler purpose was to build public support to stimulate the New York State legislature to pass a bill, already pending, to change the libel law and enshrine well-motivated truth as a defense.
An element of Hamilton’s self-interest was present even in that nobility of purpose: a new judicial precedent or a new law that discouraged libel suits would build a wall of protection against the spate of State prosecutions that Jefferson’s men were launching against opposition newspapers across the country. Everyone in the Hamilton firm knew that the coordinated republican use of State libel actions to suppress the nation’s unfriendly press would ultimately reach the General’s New York Evening Post. Harison saw the ironic symmetry in the reversal of roles: just as the Jeffersonians had exploited the public’s outrage at the Federalist’s Sedition Act, Hamilton would try to whip up public resentment against republican State libel laws. It was not that most of the American people trusted the press more, but that they trusted government—any government—less.
“My recommendation is to do what Zenger’s counsel did,” Harison advised. “That is, to make a dramatic appeal to the jury to defy the judge’s instructions and to nullify the law.”
Hamilton nodded and waited.
“The drama would have to be more than oratorical,” the experienced counsel continued, knowing that not even Hamilton’s renowned skills as a courtroom advocate would likely carry the day without an additional strong element of theater. “You would need to call the one witness that nobody would expect you, General, to call. A witness who would make everyone on the jury gasp with astonishment.”
“James Thomson Callender,” said Hamilton with relish, “the most scurrilous scoundrel of them all.”
Harison allowed his partner a few moments to consider the use of his Nemesis, the writer who ruined a great statesman’s career in politicks. Everyone in the courtroom would remember the Reynolds affair, a national titillation that eclipsed even the current Walker affair because the adulterer had so publicly confessed. To see the scandalmonger at the root of exposing both cases joining with the object of his first attack to defend a sacred principle of liberty might well inspire the most timid juror to depart from a judge’s pettifogging instructions.
“Harry Croswell is charged with”—here Harison looked at New York State’s indictment—“ ‘deceitfully, wickedly, maliciously, and willfully traducing, scandalizing, and vilifying President Thomas Jefferson and representing him to be unworthy of the confidence, respect and attachment of the people of the United States.’ The key word is the first word—‘deceitfully.’ ”
He picked up a copy of the Wasp, the unimportant weekly that was chosen by the State Attorney General to become an example to any editor who dared to heap obloquy on republican leaders. “The prosecutor will introduce as evidence this article in the Wasp, reprinted from the Richmond Recorder. In it, Callender accuses Jefferson of having paid him hundreds of dollars over a four-year period to subsidize his pamphlets, books and newspapers. It includes copies of letters from Jefferson encouraging these publications and enclosing money—”
“—Including slanderous attacks on President Washington,” Hamilton chimed in, “calling him a traitor, a robber, and a perjurer, which may have contributed to the rapid decline of his health. I can recount to the jury, firsthand, Washington’s reaction to the vicious attacks that Jefferson hired Callender to level at him. I saw with my own eyes how debilitating it was to that great man in his final years.”
“That would be persuasive. The indictment also says,” Harison pointed out, “that Callender also called President Adams ‘a hoary-headed incendiary.’ ”
That last did not seem to bother Hamilton, who permitted himself a small smile. “The scoundrel has a way with a phrase.”
“We will stipulate that Croswell did indeed print Callender’s account,” Harison suggested, “and treat that central element of the prosecution case as insignificant. We will never put Croswell on the stand. Instead, we—you—will call Callender as our witness.”
“The State will object, of course, at our attempt to use him to establish the truth,” Hamilton said. “And the judge will rule that ‘truth is no defense.’ ”
“We can assume the prosecution will do everything to prevent Callender from taking the stand. We don’t know who the judge will be, but the Attorney General chose the Claverack, New York, venue to get a republican jurist, I’m sure. As you suggest, the judge w
ill probably refuse to allow Callender to testify.”
“We sit that scoundrel Callender in the front row facing the jury for the whole trial,” Hamilton said, smiling at the prospect. “I could say, ‘That man—whose contumelious lash I can still feel on my back—was not allowed to confirm the truth in this case to you.’ ” He liked the sound of it. “Yes, it would outrage the jury.”
“Perhaps not ‘contumelious.’ ” Harison feared that Hamilton’s vocabulary went beyond the understanding of the average juror.
“You’re right. ‘Vicious.’ ‘Savage.’ ”
“And Callender would write his account of the trial in a manner censorious of the prosecution—”
“Oh, he’ll vilify the judge in letters of vitriol,” Hamilton was certain.
“—which Croswell could then reprint locally, as the poor young fellow has little more to lose. And there would be other members of the press in the courtroom to talk to the famous Richmond scandalmonger.”
“Assume on the other hand, Richard, that the judge does allow us to put Callender on the stand—”
“The witness, under oath, would then go into great detail about how Jefferson, even while serving as Washington’s Secretary of State, supported his attacks on the revered late father of our country.” Harison stopped. “You know, as I think about this, General, I suspect that the prosecution would drop the case at the first sign that Callender might be our witness.”
Hamilton agreed. “Our strategy has to be, first, to assert the truth of the published information as a defense against prosecution for libel.”
“You’ll be overruled on the law.”
“Right, but I’ll challenge that. Second, we will argue that for libel to be a crime, it must be maliciously committed. No intent of malice, no crime.”
“Overruled,” said Harison, playing the judge.
“Let him. Finally, we will argue that the jury has a say in the interpretation of the libel law.”
“Overruled again. The jury decides the facts, but the judge rules on the law.”
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 46