HEMINGS, SALLY. For three decades after Callender’s stories first appeared about her lifelong liaison with Thomas Jefferson, the most famous non-white woman in America lived quietly at Monticello. Callender’s report that she had five children appears to have been accurate. One (called “President Tom” by Callender) may have died, or run away, or been banished after the publicity broke, or never existed; two, Beverly and Harriet, were allowed to leave when they reached twenty-one; the two youngest, Madison and Eston, remained as slaves on the estate. On Jefferson’s death in 1826, Madison was freed and his nineteen-year old brother’s manumission soon followed, some say as a part of a promise he made to Sally Hemings when she agreed to return with him from Paris. No other slave family on the plantation was as favorably treated.
Probably because Jefferson did not want to draw further attention to Sally, he did not set her free or otherwise mention her in his will; if he had, he would have had to petition the Virginia legislature to allow her to remain in the state. A couple of years after his death, Martha Randolph, his daughter, freed Sally Hemings, who went to live with her sons in a rented house in Charlottesville. A census taker in 1830 listed the three of them as white. She died in 1835, described then as a “quadroon” but officially a free white woman, at the age of sixty-two. Recent DNA evidence indicates a strong probability, though not a certainty, that Thomas Jefferson’s genes were passed on to her descendants.
JEFFERSON, THOMAS. “The artillery of the press has been leveled against us,” the re-elected President said in his Second Inaugural Address in 1805, “charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses . . . might, indeed, have been corrected by the wholesome punishments reserved to and provided by the laws of the several states,” and although he had no time for that, “he who has time renders a service to public morals and public tranquillity in reforming these abuses by the salutary coercions of the law.” As for himself, he said he preferred “the censorship of public opinion.”
His first term was marked by the nation-doubling Louisiana Purchase and its related Lewis and Clark Expedition, and he extended American power globally by sending a naval force to pursue the Barbary pirates “to the shores of Tripoli.” His second term, less successful, was spent avoiding being drawn into the war between England and France. His Embargo Act, using American trade muscle to apply “peaceable coercion” to Britain, failed and was repealed by Congress.
In 1809, he turned the reins over to his friend and chosen successor James Madison, and retired to Monticello to write, to collect books and works of art and furniture, and to create a center of learning in Charlottesville. He placed a life-sized marble bust of Alexander Hamilton facing a larger-than-life-sized bust of himself in Monticello’s entrance hall, and liked to say to visitors “opposed in death as in life.” In life, Jefferson opposed the tyranny of monarchy and central power as Hamilton opposed disunion and anarchy.
Before his death at eighty-three in 1826, the founder with the most careful eye to his place in history chose the epitaph for his grave site. He avoided the obvious “first U.S. Secretary of State” and “third President of the United States” and chose instead three themes that go to the heart of the American Dream: “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American independence, of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.”
LEE, HENRY. The cavalry leader Light-Horse Harry’s land speculation left him financially ruined during the Jefferson years, and he was confined in debtors’ prison in 1808. Defending an anti-war editor during a riot in Baltimore in 1812, he was severely injured, left Virginia and moved to the West Indies to regain his health. He died on the way home in 1818. However, his major contribution to American history came in 1807, when his second wife gave birth to a boy they named Robert Edward.
LEWIS, MERIWETHER. Jefferson’s personal secretary, who read the President’s State of the Union message to Congress in December 1801, was given the assignment to explore an overland route to the Pacific. With William Clark as co-leader of the expedition, Lewis set out in 1804 to examine and map the recently purchased Louisiana Territory. The two-year expedition was a stunning scientific, geographical success and supported claims to the Oregon country. Lewis died in 1809, possibly by his own hand. Jefferson, told of the death, wrote, “Lewis had from early life been subject to hypochon driac affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family.”
LYON, MATTHEW. After Jefferson’s victory, Lyon took his family and Vermont mechanics to the Kentucky frontier. Thanks to his republican political connections, he became the Commissary-General of the Western Army, making his fortune in barge traffic and shipbuilding while becoming a Congressman from Kentucky and furiously rejecting newspaper criticism of his conflicts of interest. He had a brush with Burr’s “conspiracy” and agreed with fellow Congressman Andrew Jackson that Burr was unjustly prosecuted by Jefferson for treason.
By 1812, “Spittin’ Matt” had turned against President Madison and opposed war with Britain, which cost him his republican seat. His commercial fortunes also turned awry, as one of his ships sunk in the Mississippi, bankrupting him. He was driven to petition Congress to remit the fine imposed on him under the Sedition Act but, unlike Callender, had no leverage and did not succeed. President Monroe in 1820 took pity and assigned him a minor post supervising trade with the Cherokees in Spadre Bluffs, Arkansas, where he soon agitated for a cotton gin to help develop Indian farming. Lyon soon ran for Congress from that territory but lost because voters considered him too sympathetic to the Cherokees.
MADISON, JAMES. The mind that matched Hamilton’s in shaping the U.S. Constitution and creating the Bill of Rights was that of a thinker, not a leader. Madison was only an adequate Secretary of State to Jefferson and inherited the Presidency against little opposition in 1809. An agreement with Napoleon on neutral rights led him, unprepared, into war with Britain, and he turned to Monroe for needed, practical executive support in his Cabinet. In his second term, Madison abandoned Jeffersonian principles and embraced Hamilton’s idea of a national bank and protective tariffs. When he returned to Montpelier in 1817, Washington sorely missed its popular hostess, Dolley Madison.
MARSHALL, JOHN. As President Adams intended in his final major appointment, Marshall remained a force for Federalism against the Jeffersonians, and remained so throughout the twenty-four years of the Virginia republican dynasty of Presidents Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.
When in 1803 one of Adams’s “midnight appointments,” William Marbury, sued Secretary of State Madison for delivery of a duly signed commission as justice of the peace, Marshall’s Court ruled against the Federalist, giving Jefferson’s men a seeming victory; but the grounds for Marshall’s ruling was that the 1789 Judiciary Act under which the suit was brought was unconstitutional. By giving his longtime Virginia adversaries their minor triumph, Marshall seized for the Supreme Court the power to decide which branch was to interpret the Constitution.
He presided over the controversial treason trial of Aaron Burr in 1807 in which Burr was acquitted by a jury that could find no overt treasonable acts. In McCulloch v. Maryland, taking up Hamilton’s argument that Congress had powers implied though not enumerated in the Constitution, he upheld its creation of the Bank of the United States. More than anyone, he established the Judiciary as the third co-equal branch of government in the U.S. He died at eighty in 1835.
MCKEAN, THOMAS. As Governor of Pennsylvania, the former jurist introduced the spoils system to American politics. He carried out fellow republican Jefferson’s suggestion to use State law to crack down on press licentiousness, but that caused a cleavage in republican ranks. He won re-election to a third term in 1805, but radical republicans urged on by William Duane of the Aurora launched impeachment proceedings. With Jefferson’s support he fought them off and staggered into retirement.
MONROE, JAMES. After auspiciously resuming his diplomatic c
areer with the Louisiana Purchase, he negotiated a treaty with the British that Jefferson rejected. After Madison became President in 1809, Monroe resumed the Governorship of Virginia. When “war hawks” felt Madison was too weak, Monroe joined his Cabinet as Secretary of State and was Secretary of War during the less-than-successful War of 1812 against the British. Elected President in 1816 against a disappearing Federalist minority, Monroe presided over an “era of good feeling” that capped the Virginia dynasty of twenty-four years. With Secretary of State John Quincy Adams eager to block Spain from Latin America, the dour Monroe declared that the American continent was no longer open for colonization and that the United States would not interfere in Europe, a policy many Europeans believed doctrinaire.
MORRIS, GOUVERNEUR. The peg-legged dealmaker of 1801 remained a high Federalist after leaving the New York Senate and became a driving force behind the construction of the Erie Canal. He condemned the War of 1812 as “Mr. Madison’s War,” supported the idea of New England’s secession and died in 1816.
RUSH, DR. BENJAMIN. Although an ardent republican supporting Jefferson, the Philadelphia physician who had signed the Declaration of Independence was appointed treasurer of the Mint of the United States by President Adams and served in that sinecure until his death in 1813. Through his mediation, former Presidents Adams and Jefferson were reconciled. Dr. Rush’s son Richard became Treasury Secretary in the administration of President Adams’s son, John Quincy.
Although Dr. Rush’s notions on the efficacy of bleeding were later discredited, his 1812 book Medical Inquiries and Observations on the Diseases of the Mind was the pioneering work on the subject, in the United States, which is why some call him the “father of psychiatry.” John Adams wrote him approvingly that his book proved “us all to be a little cracked.”
VAN NESS, WILLIAM PETER. The New York City attorney, under the pen name of “Aristedes” (after Aristides the Just), late in 1803 wrote a widely read pamphlet defending his friend Aaron Burr from accusations that he had intrigued to steal the 1800 election from Jefferson. In 1804, as Burr’s second at Weehawken, he probably loaded the gun with which Burr killed Hamilton. The republicans later named Van Ness to a Federal judgeship.
WOLCOTT, OLIVER. Hounded out of his Treasury office in 1800 by attacks in the republican press, Hamilton’s loyal friend became a business leader in New York until 1815, then returned to his home in Litchfield, Connecticut, to run for Governor as head of the “Toleration Republicans.” Like his father, Oliver Sr., and his grandfather Roger, he served as Governor of that state, emphasizing its economic growth. He died in New York City in 1833, a Hamiltonian to the end.
REYNOLDS, MARIA LEWIS. After Aaron Burr arranged for her 1793 divorce in New York from James Reynolds, she married Jacob Clingman. They lived in Alexandria, Virginia, until after Callender broke the story of Hamilton’s shady dealings with Reynolds and the former Treasury Secretary countered with his “Reynolds pamphlet.” Maria and her daughter probably accompanied Clingman to Hull in Britain where he became a chartered accountant. An unpublished memoir by a Philadelphia merchant who befriended her in 1802, when she was thirty-two years old, recounted roughly the rest of her life story:
When her marriage to Clingman ended and Maria returned to the United States, she sought help again from Aaron Burr. He supported her, discreetly arranged for the education of her daughter Susan in a Boston seminary, and obtained employment for Maria Clement, a name she adopted, as housekeeper and nurse in the home of the Philadelphia physician Dr. Thomas Mathew, whom she married in 1807. (Maria Reynolds and James Callender never met.) Her daughter Susan married twice, drank heavily and came to an impoverished end in New York, leaving her daughter Josepha to her mother to bring up. Maria Lewis Reynolds Clingman (Clement) Mathew, a respectable and religious lady of Philadelphia, died in 1832 at the age of sixty-two. Her memoir, which she claimed she gave William Duane of the Aurora to publish, never saw print and disappeared.
Historians sympathetic to Hamilton rely on his pamphlet and a supporting letter from one of his friends to condemn Maria as at least an adventuress, probably a blackmailer and possibly a whore. However, Julian Boyd, the compiler of the Jefferson papers, in a detailed analysis found Hamilton’s account a cover-up and her disputation of it credible. If that recent interpretation is true, the notorious subject of “the Reynolds pamphlet” has been unduly maligned by defenders of Hamilton for two centuries.
CALLENDER, JAMES. After his body was found in three feet of water in the James River on July 17, 1803, his death at age forty-five was attributed by the coroner to accidental drowning as a result of inebriation. For nearly two centuries, historians denounced him as “the most outrageous and wretched scandalmonger of a scurrilous age” and, slightly more even-handedly, as “drunken, vicious and depraved, albeit talented.”
However, three of the scandals he unearthed were confirmed contemporaneously. First, Hamilton was forced to explain his payoffs in his Reynolds pamphlet; second, copies of Jefferson’s letters transmitting money to Callender were produced; third, Jefferson was forced to admit in writing having “offered my love to a handsome lady” who was married and admitted its “incorrectness.”
Callender’s Sally Hemings series was angrily derided through two centuries and was the source of most historians’ loathing for the journalist. However, recent scholarship accepts that Jefferson may well have fathered at least one of her children. This substantial vindication of his reporting, along with a sympathetic biography by the Australian historian Michael Durey, suggests that a reassessment of the first American muckraker is in order.
One of Callender’s sons, Thomas, became a tobacconist and later a newspaper editor in Nashville, Tennessee; a grandson, John Hill Callender, served as a surgeon in the Confederate army and married a great-grandniece of Thomas Jefferson. A living member of the Callender family in the United States informs the author that the descendants of the “scurrilous, scandalmongering scoundrel” are numerous and thriving.
THE UNDERBOOK
N O T E S A N D S O U R C E S
Welcome to the place usually labeled “Notes.” Here is where this novelist levels with the reader about what parts he has imagined, and here I cite sources for specific quotes and add facts to back up my judgments about characters and events.
In this book, as in Freedom, my novel about Lincoln and the evolution of the Emancipation Proclamation, the approach is somewhat different from most historical fiction. I am not placing characters of my imagination in a historical setting or mixing real and fictional characters. Rather, I am trying to use a dramatic form to simulate past events and to bring long-ago lives to life. When I use a novelist’s privilege to manipulate the timing of an event, or place a character in a scene to be the reader’s witness, my aim is to present a close look at what I conjecture was actually going on among those real people.
Historians try mightily to get inside their subjects’ minds. They enliven the written record with intuitive judgment after subjecting it to rigorous professional discipline. I adopt much of that discipline, but use the fiction writer’s freedom to take an occasional speculative leap in hopes of getting so “inside” as to re-create reality.
In this Underbook, the reader has access to what we know happened, what we can legitimately guess happened, and what we know did not happen. In my book, departures from fact must have a reason: for example, the purpose of the fictional romance in this book between Maria Reynolds and James Callender is to present my view of their real characters. Most historians do not share my largely sympathetic view of both; on the contrary, the somewhat judgmental words most used by otherwise sobersided scholars is “scurrilous wretch” for him and “blackmailing whore” for her. Readers who check out my sources can come to their own conclusions.
Slanted or sensationalized docudramas disserve history. Perhaps this way of dramatizing documents more fairly represents the participants in our past and better illuminates an era. And frankly, tweaking history’s
plot with a little imagination (fully disclosed in this Underbook) makes a serious look into the long-ago more fun to write and more interesting to read.
A note about style in prose, spelling and punctuation. In the narrative about life in the generation after the American Revolution, I generally try to avoid anachronism. Therefore, nobody talks about “running” for election; rather, the British usage of “standing” for election is preferred, especially because the pose struck by candidates at the turn of the nineteenth century was that of a man modestly making himself available, not of an ambition-driven man racing after a prize. Because “Congress” was construed as plural, characters may be quoted saying “Congress have.” Newspapermen, who often called themselves “newsmongers,” did not write “stories,” but articles. Because news was not separate from opinion, the noun “editorial” was not used.
On capitalization, I have for the most part embraced the modern style and dropped many capitalized words to lowercase. However, in the case of “Negro,” then not capitalized, I have moved in the opposite direction. Because the modern reader would find the older style disconcerting, I changed all the “negroes” to “Negroes” with one majestic keystroke on the word processor. The Federalist and anti-Federalist parties are capitalized, but “republican” and “democrat” are usually not, as they were descriptions of a new ideology and not yet party names.
On archaic words, I have left a few in for spice: contumelious was a favorite Hamilton synonym for “slanderous” and flagitious for “villainous,” and Callender used poetaster to mean “an inferior poet” who dabbled in doggerel. Some seeming anachronisms are not out of time’s joint at all: “boozy” and “tipsy,” for example, were common at the time.
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 51