Quieter again. Lyon strained forward to hear him. “To watch the progress of such sinister endeavors is the office of a free press. To give us early alarm is the office of a free press. To put us on our guard against the encroachments of men in power is the office of a free press. This cherished office, then, protects a right of the utmost importance, one for which, instead of yielding it up to any State’s law of seditious libel, we ought rather to spill . . . our . . . blood.”
Lyon whispered to his son, “My God, the man talks like Tom Paine.” This was the way the passionate young Hamilton must have sounded when they were all Revolutionary patriots, when he was fighting the King as General Washington’s aide-de-camp and then fought for a strong union in the Constitutional Convention, in the years before the bitterness set in.
Resuming a tone of calm reason, the man designated by Washington to be the effective head of the first standing army of the United States assured the jurors, “Never can tyranny be introduced into this country by force of arms. The spirit of the country is not to be destroyed by a few thousands of miserable, pitiful military. An army never can do it.
“It is only by the abuse of the forms of justice that we can be enslaved. Only a servile tribunal can crush down the popular spirit of enquiry. Our freedom can be subverted only by a pretense of adhering to all the forms of law—all the while breaking down the substance of our liberties.” Hamilton approached the jury box. “How would that subversion of our freedom begin? By making one wretched but honest man the victim of a ‘trial’ in name only. The subversion would continue by taking that citizen off to jail, and ultimately, in some cases, by public executions.
“The sight of this, of a fellow citizen’s blood, would at first beget sympathy. This abuse of the forms of justice, in good time, would rouse the people into action—and in the madness of their revenge, Americans would take up those chains destined for themselves and break them upon the heads of their oppressors!”
William Van Ness laid his hand on Hamilton’s arm and rose to stand beside him. “May it please the court, the defense places in evidence two letters to James Callender transmitting to him sums of money. These letters encourage him in his invaluable efforts to inform the public, first in the publication of his book entitled The Prospect Before Us, and later during his time in the Richmond jail writing for a newspaper. The letters to Callender are unsigned, in an attempt to becloud their authorship if intercepted in the post. But they are in the well-known and unmistakable handwriting of Thomas Jefferson.”
At Hamilton’s nod, the young attorney placed the letters in the hands of the marshal. “These we submit are proof of the truth in the statement originally printed in the Richmond Recorder,” said Van Ness. “They were wrongly called a libel when reprinted by Mr. Croswell in the Wasp. They are the late Mr. Callender’s proof that he was hired by Mr. Jefferson to at-tack—in a slanderous, scurrilous and indeed libelous manner—Presidents Washington and Adams.”
“And in consequence of this proof of truth,” concluded Hamilton, “we ask you, the jury, for an acquittal.”
With those words, the defense would ordinarily rest, but Hamilton, speaking beyond the courtroom and beyond the moment, had a last point to make. “The liberty of the press consists in publishing the truth, from good motives and for justifiable ends, no matter how severely it reflects on government, on magistrates, or individuals. That is the principle we defend here today.”
Maria was unsteady as her back pain flared up and she let the legislator help her down the four steps in front of the courthouse. “What do you think the jury will do?”
“They’ll take longer to convict than they would have,” the Assembly-man said, “but this jury was chosen with conviction in mind. I doubt the prosecution will ask for a jail term or much of a fine. That wouldn’t be popular at all.”
“Can’t Hamilton appeal?”
“He will, of course, but the appeals panel is split two to two, republicans and Federalists, so I imagine a guilty verdict will stand.”
“We’ve lost, then,” Maria said. “Hamilton and his client, and Callender, too.”
A florid man behind them on the steps, in a Western woodsman’s jacket, put in, “The hell they lost. What do you suppose will happen to your libel protection bill in the State legislature?”
“The press shield will pass, Congressman Lyon,” said the legislator. “It has my vote, after this, and the courtroom was filled with State legislators today, listening like me. You heard how Hamilton defined press freedom? ‘Publishing the truth from good motives and for justifiable ends.’ That means, I think, a jury has to find malicious intent, which isn’t there if the publisher thinks what he prints is true.”
“Just fixing the State libel law won’t do,” said Lyon. “Laws can be repealed overnight.”
“You’re right. I’ll introduce an amendment to the New York Constitution beginning ‘the legislature shall make no law abridging . . .’ May take a while, but that will pass, too.”
Spittin’ Matt handed him a card with his Congressional business address written on it. “When you get that amendment drafted, send it down to me in Kentucky. I’ll pass it around.” He turned to the young man following him and said, “The man saved my life once, and they drowned him in three feet of water.” He punched his son affectionately in the arm. “Now I’m about the only man alive in America served jail time for sedition.”
The young attorney Maria had met in Burr’s office, Van Ness—the one who arranged for her seat at the trial—came hurrying up to her.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Clement, but General Hamilton asked me to say he would like a word with you, if you have a moment, to express his appreciation.”
Maria stared at him through her reddened eyes and, as if uncomprehending, shook her head no.
“As you wish,” Van Ness said. “In a different regard, I know that our mutual friend in the District of Columbia is eager to learn your impressions of the trial.”
She shook her head again, with more certainty this time, as the tension in her spine began to ease. “Tell the Vice President I am going to take the packet to Boston. There I will remove my daughter Susan from the seminary. Then she and I will go home.”
EPILOGUE
WHAT HAPPENED LATER
A brief hiftory óf what happened later to the characters in Scandalmonger:
ADAMS, JOHN. After his split with Hamilton and his outreach to France made a second term as President impossible, the energetic Adams retired to Braintree (now Quincy) Massachusetts to twenty-five years of quiet reflection and correspondence.
Though he thought it served no purpose to blacken President Jefferson’s reputation, his letters show Adams accepted Callender’s story about Sally Hemings without question, calling it “a natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character—Negro slavery.” In 1805, he wrote to Dr. Benjamin Rush, a republican he had appointed to be head of the Mint, of his interest in reconciliation with former friends and political adversaries. That led to a remarkable, extended correspondence that brought the two founders, Adams and Jefferson, close in their declining years.
He died on the Fourth of July in 1826; his last words reportedly were “Thomas Jefferson still lives.” The second President was mistaken; his successor, Jefferson, also died on that day, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
BECKLEY, JOHN. Blocked from an appointment in the Jefferson Administration because its main patronage dispenser, Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, considered him too partisan a republican, Beckley returned to his post as Clerk of the House of Representatives. Madison supplemented his income with a job as the first Librarian of Congress at $2 a day. He owned some heavily mortgaged acreage in western Virginia; a town is named after him in that area of what is now West Virginia. He died in 1807 at the age of fifty, disappointed at his treatment by the Jeffersonians.
BURR, AARON. When his bid to take charge of the Louisiana Territ
ory was turned down by a distrustful Jefferson, Vice President Burr ran for New York Governor as an independent in 1804. Hamilton disparaged him to Federalists and was instrumental in his defeat. As a result, Burr challenged his life-long adversary to a duel, and at Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 11, 1804, after Hamilton discharged his gun into the air, Burr shot Hamilton in the mid-section and he died the next day.
Indicted for this crime in New York and New Jersey, he fled southwest and pursued a plan his accusers later called “the Burr Conspiracy.” This was supposedly to establish an independent nation out of several of the United States and to then invade Mexico and seize Spain’s possessions in America, including Florida. He was captured in 1807 while leading troops down the Mississippi, and tried for treason in Richmond in a trial presided over by Chief Justice John Marshall; to Jefferson’s chagrin, Burr was acquitted.
Burr went to Europe for five years and was befriended by William Cobbett, who wanted him to stand for Parliament, but Burr’s application for British citizenship was denied. He tried to enlist Britain and France in further adventures in Mexico; when that failed, Burr returned to New York and lived twenty-four years in disgraced obscurity, short of funds and long on enemies. He claimed vindication when Sam Houston defeated the Mexicans in 1836 and established the independent Republic of Texas: “What was treason in me thirty years ago is patriotism now.”
CHASE, SAMUEL. The Federalist Supreme Court Justice, in his partisan charge to a Baltimore grand jury in 1803, opined that universal suffrage would “destroy all protection of property” and cause the Constitution to “sink into a mobocracy.” This was too much for President Jefferson, who wrote a House leader: “Ought this seditious and official attack on the principles of our Constitution . . .go unpunished?” Republican House members, who thought Chase’s intemperate and biased conduct of the Callender trial was “indecent and tyrannical,” responded to the President’s wish by launching an inquiry into impeaching Chase. Hamilton’s Evening Post, to protect the Federalist Justice, denounced the “Inquisitorial Committee.”
During the inquiry, a witness swore that he heard Chase discussing the case in the lobby of Stelle’s Hotel in Washington with Bushrod Washington (the late President’s nephew) and John Marshall, and that Chase said if he had known Callender would turn out later to be such an enemy of Jefferson, “he would scarcely have fined him so high.” Chief Justice Marshall deposed that the conversation had taken place but was not to be taken seriously; Federalists were disappointed that their champion was more interested in judicial independence than in convicting an abusive republican judge.
The Chase impeachment was tried in the Senate in February 1805, Vice President Aaron Burr presiding in his last official appearance. By the time the impeachment came to trial, however, the Jefferson men considered the long-dead Callender a vicious turncoat and the other radical republicans an embarrassment. Albert Gallatin, following the Jefferson-Madison policy of conciliating with Federalists, passed the word that the impeachment of Chase was unduly partisan. On the single Baltimore jury count, a majority of the Senate voted to convict, but well short of the two-thirds needed. On the five counts voted by the House accusing Chase of abuses at Callender’s trial, the hard-to-define phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” was construed narrowly and not a single Senator voted to convict Chase. Acquitted, the chastened Chase became temperate and nonpartisan on the bench. He died in 1811.
COBBETT, WILLIAM. The most despised Tory in Philadelphia became the most feared and despised radical in London. Spurning government aid, he started the weekly Political Register in 1802 and denounced Pitt’s peace treaty with France signed at Amiens. He exposed the corruption of rotten-borough elections, railed with the Luddites at the spread of industry into the rural countryside, vilified the government of Ireland and denounced the cruel flogging of soldiers who had protested the thievery of their officers.
This last landed him in Newgate Prison from 1810 to 1812, but he came out as a radical champion of the poor and unemployed. To avoid the heavy taxes that controlled newspapers, he put out an irregular “two-penny trash” publication that reached an astounding circulation of 70,000; the essayist William Hazlitt later wrote that Cobbett’s mutton-fisted style and common touch made him “a kind of Fourth Estate in the politicks of the country.”
Threatened by further prosecution for sedition as a “leading malcontent,” he fled to Long Island in America in 1816. From there, he continued to write and edit his Register, turned out a best-selling English grammar, treatises on gardening and the cultivation of corn, and a fond memoir of an America he came to appreciate. He also wrote a short biography of General Andrew Jackson, envisioning that future President as fearlessly populist and more representative of American democracy than Jefferson or Madison.
He returned to England in 1819 with the bones of Thomas Paine in a box to call attention to his unabashed radicalism. He toured the countryside writing pieces that infused his opinions with firsthand observations of life that had not been reported, which became his masterpiece, Rural Rides. After flaying and being jailed by the Tories, he turned on the Whig government when farmworkers rioted and was again prosecuted for sedition; as his own counsel, he argued his way to acquittal. Cobbett’s long fight for parliamentary reform succeeded in 1832; he was among the reformers who won election to Parliament.
He died in 1835 at age sixty-nine, remembered as a fearless oppositionist, a wildly inconsistent thinker, a colorful and freewheeling stylist, and the first media giant.
DUANE, WILLIAM. The New York-born editor of the Calcutta Indian World, who returned to America in 1796 to succeed Benjamin Bache as editor of the Aurora, in Philadelphia, was by the turn of the century Callender’s rival as foremost republican writer. When the Federalist Senate in 1800 sought to try him for contempt of Congress, Duane defiantly refused to appear, despite Monroe’s wish that the editor, like Callender, martyr himself for the cause by being convicted and suffering imprisonment.
Duane remained a Jefferson supporter despite the radical Aurora being replaced by the temperate National Intelligencer as the favored republican newspaper in 1801. Duane sought a Pennsylvania Congressional seat in 1807, though his long sojourn overseas in his youth placed his citizenship in doubt. Because he strongly supported Irish immigration, nativists who thought cheap white labor would undermine slavery joined moderate re-publicans to overwhelm him. Jefferson gave him a lieutenant-colonel’s commission in 1808 and he served as adjutant-general in the War of 1812. He stepped down from the Aurora in 1822 and took a sinecure as Chief Clerk of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court until his death in 1835.
HAMILTON, ALEXANDER. When Burr ran for Governor of New York as an independent in 1804, it appeared he would take enough Federalist votes to win. Even the editor of Hamilton’s New York Evening Post defected and editorially supported his owner’s nemesis. But Hamilton vigorously urged enough Federalists to vote for Morgan Lewis, the State’s republican Chief Justice who had ruled against him in the Croswell libel case. After Burr lost, never to run for office again, he challenged Hamilton to a duel over a published remark that Hamilton held a “despicable opinion” of Burr.
On July 11, 1804, at Weehawken, New Jersey, near the spot where his eldest son Philip had fallen in a duel, the despondent Hamilton met on the “field of honor” Aaron Burr, whose second was William Van Ness, Hamilton’s co-counsel in the Croswell case. Hamilton shot first, and as he wrote for posthumous delivery to his wife, missed intentionally; Burr’s answering bullet made a mortal wound. By his death, which he may have sought in this fashion, he killed Burr’s political future.
Many decades later, an aged former President James Monroe visited Betsey Hamilton, who lived into her nineties. He said that since both were nearing the grave, he hoped past differences could be forgiven and forgotten. Hamilton’s widow replied: “Mr. Monroe, if you come to tell me that you repent, that you are sorry, very sorry, for the misrepresentations and the slanders and the stories you circulat
ed against my dear husband; if you have come to say this, I understand it. But otherwise, no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.” Her nephew, who was in the room with them, reported, “Monroe turned, took up his hat and left the room.”
HARPER, ROBERT GOODLOE. He chose not to run for re-election to the House from South Carolina in 1800, where he faced certain Federalist defeat, and began a practice of law in Baltimore, aided by his friend, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. Heavily in debt, he courted and married Catherine Carroll, daughter of the Marylander of great wealth who signed the Declaration of Independence as “Charles Carroll of Carrollton.” His fortunes improved in 1805 when he served as chief defense counsel in the Senate impeachment trial of Chase.
Though the former Federalist leader opposed Madison in entering the 1812 War against the British, Harper became a general, comported himself admirably in the defense of Baltimore and was given a suitable parade when he died in 1825.
HAY, GEORGE. Hay’s assaults on Callender, both physical and in a pamphlet urging libel prosecution titled “Essay on Liberty of the Press,” earned him Jefferson’s appointment in 1803 as U.S. Attorney in Richmond. This gave him the opportunity four years later, with Jefferson’s approval, to prosecute Aaron Burr for treason, but with meager evidence and inadequate legal skill he failed to win a conviction. He lost his standing with the local republican leadership, known as the Richmond Junto, when he supported James Monroe against James Madison for the presidency in 1808, the same year he married Monroe’s daughter Hortense. During Monroe’s presidency, George and his wife lived in the White House. In 1822, Hay ran for Governor of Virginia and lost. Though his father-in-law refused on ethical grounds to give him a political appointment, his successor, John Quincy Adams, granted him a Federal judgeship. The vindictive and pompous Hay occupied that post until his death in 1830.
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 50