“You will find Mason”: On Oct. 11, 1798, TJ wrote to Senator Stevens Mason: “I received lately a letter from Mr. Callender to which the inclosed is the answer . . . After perusing it, be so good as to stick a wafer in it and (after it is dry) deliver it. You will perceive that I propose to you the trouble of drawing for 50 D. for Mr. Callender on my correspondent in Richmond, George Jefferson, merchant. This is to keep his name out of sight.” Ford, p. 329.
“He hung three of the paintings”: The story about paintings in TJ’s front parlor and AH’s reaction are recounted by TJ to Benjamin Rush, Jan. 16, 1811.
First, down in Virginia: Callender’s intention or dream of returning to Scotland is in his letter to TJ of Sept. 22, 1798.
He started south on foot: JTC to TJ, Nov. 19, 1798.
“When the occasion requires”: Porcupine’s Gazette, June 1, 1798.
“people had better hold their tongues”: Austin, p. 106.
“The public welfare is swallowed up”: Ibid.
“old, querulous, toothless”: This characterization of Adams is complained of in Abigail Adams’s letter to Mary Cranch, April 28, 1798.
Chapter 15
“You remember what Ben Franklin”: Madison to TJ, June 10, 1798.
“The judge said that made it worse”: Beckley narrative based on J. M. Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, p. 238.
“This is an experiment”: TJ in Peterson, p. 611, unsourced.
“I don’t know what mortifies me more”: TJ to John Taylor, Nov. 26, 1798; quote not exact.
“Yet the body of our countrymen”: TJ to John Taylor, June 4, 1798.
a fine stone house: The Nourse house in West Virginia, “Piedmont,” outside of Charles Town, is now the home of Mr. and Mrs. Jim Lehrer.
“The right of freely examining”: Virginia Resolutions of Dec. 21, 1798; see Banning, p. 386.
“It’s not as if ”: The $2 million in internal property taxes proposed by Harper is discussed in Dall W. Forsythe’s Taxation and Political Change in the Young Nation, p. 53.
“Congress was not a party to”: TJ on nullification; see Banning, p. 387. TJ believed that the several States did not unite “on the principle of unlimited submission to the General Government.”
Madison’s substitution of “interpose” for TJ’s “nullify”: Ibid., p. 389.
Chapter 16
Mason the Senator: This article comes directly from Porcupine’s Gazette, not in October but the edition dated Sept. 8, 1798. See Cobbett, Porcupine’s Works, vol. 9, pp. 215-217. Some sentences have been shortened for clarity and a few phrases cut or added.
The long scene with Maria and JTC: Fiction; Callender never interviewed Maria Reynolds. The information underlying the dialogue is true.
Chapter 17
“It is quite a new kind of jargon”: Triumphal parade, Austin, pp. 115-127.
“I paid one thousand dollars”: Mason dialogue with jailer, who was Jabez Fitch, fictional.
“Come take the glass”: J. M. Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, p. 245. In 1840, Congress refunded Lyon’s fine to his family.
“Do gentlemen say opinions can be false?”: Gallatin and John Nicholas of Virginia presented the case for Lyon against Bayard of Delaware’s move to expel. Austin, p. 127. Gallatin pointed out that the Sedition Act included a provision that truth was a defense, which had been put forward by Bayard, who now argued that an opinion could be false. Conversation between Lyon and Gallatin, fictional.
Chapter 18
no common railer: “Not a commonplace railer” was Callender’s self-assessment to Jefferson.
JTC’s internal monologue: My speculation.
The north end of Monticello: Domeless Monticello described in Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, pp. 241-242.
“The violence mediated against you”: TJ to Callender, Sept. 6, 1798, in Ford, p. 447.
“I’m concerned about your welfare”: Ibid.
“sever ourselves from that union we so much value”: That sentence continued “rather than give up the rights of self-government which we have reserved.” TJ’s views on what he called “scission,” or secession, were expressed to Madison in a letter of Aug. 23, 1799, which included “The Alien and Sedition Acts is an exercise of powers over the states to which we have never assented.” Madison apparently thought it was too intemperate to answer in writing, because he noted on Jefferson’s letter that a visit “took the place of an answer to the letter.” He wanted to “leave the matter in such a train as that we may not be committed absolutely to push the matter to extremities.” See J. M. Smith, Republic of Letters, vol. 2, pp. 1109, 1072.
“I would dearly like to find fifty acres”: JTC to TJ, Sept. 26, 1799. TJ’s “I thank you for those proof sheets. Such papers as yours cannot fail to produce the best effect. . . . We have to inform the thinking part . . . When I correspond with you . . . keep myself out of the way of calumny”—all from TJ to JTC, October 6, 1799, in Ford, pp. 448-449. This was the most encouraging, personal and conspiratorial letter Jefferson sent to Callender.
“Georgia, North Carolina:” TJ’s political analysis and comment on New York on this and the following page is in his letter to Madison of March 8, 1800. He thought Burr and Livingston in New York too optimistic: “We must make allowance for their sanguine views.”
“I fear no injury”: TJ Anas, April 15, 1806, in Peterson, Writings.
“To preserve the freedom”: TJ to William Green Mumford, June 18, 1799, in Schachner, Thomas Jefferson, p. 624.
Chapter 19
PP’s conversation with Harper: Fictional.
“General Hamilton thinks the President”: From Page Smith, John Adams, vol. 2, p. 1000.
“Of the four grand departments”: The analysis of a press conspiracy to help overthrow the government is in Durey, Transatlantic Radicals, p. 252. He based it on JTC’s note on p. 130 of The Prospect Before Us, that “Duane and Cooper completed this imaginary triumvirate, who were said to have subdivided among themselves the direction of the presses of anarchy.” I have added a fourth: Matthew Lyon in the North.
“I started Porcupine’s Gazette”: Porcupine’s Gazette, Jan. 13, 1800.
“Is there no pride in American bosoms?”: Durey, Transatlantic Radicals, p. 256.
“He calls me a ‘precipitate old ass’ ”: Cobbett, Peter Porcupine in America, p. 34.
“But I will not take revenge”: Page Smith, John Adams, vol. 2, p. 1001. The Adams-Hamilton meeting in Trenton took place in October 1799; for ac-counts see Syrett, vol. 23, pp. 546-547; Stewart Mitchell, ed., New Letters of Abigail Adams, 1788-1801, pp. 224-225. See also McDonald, pp. 347-348; and Brookhiser, p. 144.
“a degraded wretch”: Cobbett, Peter Porcupine in America, p. 231, citing PP’s pamphlet, The Republican Judge.
“The style of Porcupine’s Gazette”: Rush-Light 3, in Porcupine’s Works, vol. 11, pp. 311-313.
“The Aurora printed something”: Aurora, Dec. 14, 1799, in Rosenfeld, p. 725.
Chapter 20
“The entire nation is in mourning”: The scene depicted in this chapter is fictional. Before these notes are finished, I will provide some fresh evidence to buttress my belief that Maria had a longtime, close friendship with Aaron Burr.
“first in war, first in peace”: These words were first spoken in the House by Rep. John Marshall, later Chief Justice, delivering the Congressional eulogy on the morning after Washington’s death. “The phrase, however,” writes Jean Edward Smith in her 1996 biography of Marshall, “was actually written by Henry [Light-Horse Harry] Lee, who had given it to Marshall the night before. Lee had anticipated speaking, but recognized that this would be inappropriate because of the rules of the House, so he deferred to Marshall who had the floor. Marshall, for his part, always did his best to see that Lee was credited for the words.”
“Cobbett says Dr. Rush is Dr. Death”: Cobbett, Peter Porcupine in America, p. 230. Burr’s explanation of how Presidents are chosen comes from McDonald, p. 348.
Chapter 21
it was surely Hamilton’s indiscreet over-reaction: In a letter to Burr, who was his potential second in a duel with Hamilton in 1797 after Callender’s accusations, Monroe wrote: “I had no hand in the publication, was sorry for it—and think he has acted, by drawing the publick attention to it, & making it an aff ’r of more consequence than it was in itself, very indiscreetly.” Cresson, p. 169.
“the flimsy, scurrilous papers of Scipio”: Letter to TJ from Monroe, cited in Cresson’s James Monroe but with no date. This was the pen name of Federalist Uriah Tracy. Scipio, the legendary Spanish commander who “dismissed the Iberian maid” in Milton’s Paradise Regained, fell in love with a captive princess, but when she wished to remain faithful to her betrothed, rewarded her fidelity by paying her ransom as a wedding present. They’re not using pseudonyms like that any more.
“I’m firing through five portholes at once!”: JTC to TJ, March 14, 1800, in Ford, p. 451. He added, “They cannot blame me, if the most enlightened people in the world are as ignorant as dirt.”
“To the downfall of His Majesty”: Callender, The Prospect Before Us, cited by John Chester Miller in The Wolf by the Ears, p. 151.
“I am always afraid of saying a great deal”: Callender, The Prospect Before Us, pp. 3, 4.
“the curiosity of the post offices”: TJ to JTC, Oct. 6, 1799: “You will know from whom this comes without a signature; the omission of which has rendered almost habitual with me by the curiosity of the post offices. Indeed a period is now approaching during which I shall discontinue writing letters as much as possible, knowing that every snare will be used to get hold of what may be perverted in the eyes of the public.”
Earlier in that letter, TJ supplied JTC with detailed answers to questions about the Barbary negotiations for use in The Prospect Before Us, and added: “All who were members of Congress in 1786 may be supposed to remember this information, and if it could be understood to come to you through some such channel, it would save the public of reading all the blackguardism which would be vented on me, were I quoted; not that this would weigh an atom with me on any occasion where my avowal of either facts or opinions would be of public use; but whenever it will not, I then think it useful to keep myself out of the way of calumny.” This later became known as “not for attribution.”
“I’ll raise such a tornado”: JTC to TJ, Nov. 19, 1798, in Ford, p. 333. “I would then be ready to give our readers such a Tornado as not Govt ever got before, for there is in American history a species of ignorance, absurdity, and imbecility unknown to the annals of any other nation.”
Chapter 22
“The reign of Mr. Adams”: From JTC’s The Prospect Before Us, cited on pp. 339-342 of J. M. Smith’s Freedom’s Fetters, taken from U.S. v. Callender, in Wharton, State Trials, pp. 688-690.
“You will choose in this election”: Ibid.
“Marcellus”: Ibid.
“If the author has afforded room”: Ibid.
“They should have hanged him”: From J. M. Smith, p. 343, drawn from The Answer and Pleas of Samuel Chase . . . to the Articles of Impeachment (Washington, D.C., 1805), pp. 44, 63-64, 219-223.
Dialogue between JTC and attorneys: Fictional dialogue, but the scene took place at the jail with JTC and the three named lawyers.
“The Governor asked the Vice President”: Monroe to TJ, May 25, 1800: “Will it be proper for the Executive to employ counsel to defend him, and supporting the law, give an éclat to a vindication of the principles of the State?” TJ replied the next day that Callender “should be substantially defended, whether in the first stage by public interference”—that is, by State counsel—“ or private contributions.”
“I know that sometimes it is useful”: TJ to Monroe, March 16, 1800.
Callender trial: “The Trial of James Thompson [sic] Callender, for a Seditious Libel. In the Circuit Court of the United States for the Virginia District. Richmond 1800” can be found in Wharton, pp. 688-721. A good summary of the trial is also in the Report of the Trial of the Hon. Samuel Chase . . . Before the High Court of Impeachment (Baltimore, 1805). Another summary is in Frederick Trevor Hill’s Decisive Battles of the Law (Harper, 1907), which concludes: “Five years later Chase was impeached before the Senate for oppressive and vexatious conduct during the trial, and indecent solicitude for the conviction of the accused.” (Chase was acquitted by the Senate.) A contemporary account of Chase’s sentencing lecture was in the Virginia Gazette of June 1800, reprinted in Ford, pp. 453-455. The most complete summary of Chase’s abusive sedition trial of Callender is in J. M. Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, pp. 343-358.
Historian Henry Adams wrote in 1880 that “so far as license was concerned, ‘the Prospect Before Us’ was a mild libel compared with Cobbett’s . . . cataracts of abuse” against Jefferson. Over a century later, Chief Justice William Rehnquist told a C-Span interviewer that “the third basis for Chase’s impeachment was his conduct at the trial of a fellow named James Callender . . . a kind of poison pen artist who had a most unappealing character, and he wrote a book called ‘The Prospect Before Us’ . . . Whatever the opposite of a page-turner is, that was it . . . Callender over and over again charged John Adams, who was then President, with being a toady to the British monarchy. Under the Sedition Act, a person could be tried for that. It’s unthinkable today with our First Amendment rulings.”
JTC’s inner dialogue: My speculation about what may have been going through Callender’s head at the trial.
“blacker colors than Sejanus himself ”: Sejanus, title-role villain of Ben Jonson’s 1603 play, was the commander of Rome’s Praetorian Guard under Tiberius who killed all of the Emperor’s children and grandchildren as his route to power, but who was strangled and thrown into the Tiber.
“I understand that government officers”: Callender did not say this at the trial; he wrote it in the Richmond jail in Jan. 1801, in The Prospect Before Us, bk. 2, pt. 2, pp. 36, 96.
Chapter 23
Gallatin-Beckley dialogue: The conversation is fictional, set about two months before the events occurred. The Berkeleys write in their biography of Beckley that “someone in New York, probably Burr, had sent him a copy of a ‘letter, ’ actually a pamphlet, with the title ‘The Political Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States,’ written and signed by Hamilton . . . On October 22, the Aurora began publishing a series of excerpts from Hamilton’s pamphlet, even before some of its intended recipients had obtained their copies.”
“Cursed of thy father”: Aurora, Aug. 8, 1800.
his “religious duty”: AH wrote to George Washington, Sept. 26, 1792, about Burr: “Embarrassed, as I understand, in his circumstances, with an extravagant family, bold, enterprising and intriguing, I am mistaken if it be not his object to play the game of confusion, and I feel it to be a religious duty to oppose his career.” This was during the time AH was having an affair (later admitted) with Maria Reynolds—which, I suggest, may also have been the case with Burr.
Burr and the pamphlet: How did Burr obtain the pamphlet in advance? Writes Lomask in his Burr biography, p. 257: “One of several unsubstantiated tales attributes his procurement of the copy to the good offices of an agreeable young woman well known to both him and Hamilton. According to another, the colonel, an early riser, was out walking one morning when he saw a boy heading for Hamilton’s house carrying a basket with a cloth over its contents. ‘What’s in the basket, son?’ ‘Only papers, sir,’ was the reply. Burr asked to have a look, and a second later a copy of Hamilton’s letter-contra-Adams was in his hand. However he got it, he knew what to do with it. He released extracts to the press.”
Chapter 24
JTC and Bowler: Callender wrote to Jefferson from the Richmond jail about his talk with Bowler, who was a lieutenant of Gabriel, the free black who planned a slave insurrection on the night of Aug. 30, 1800. “The plan was to massacre all the whites . . . then march off to the mountains with the plunder of the city.” JTC to TJ, Sept. 13, 1800. Unlike mo
st of the radical immigrant writers, Callender blamed the blacks for corrupting the morals of the whites who fraternized with them. He favored transplantation of the slaves to “a sequestered part of the continent” where they might live “without intermingling with the whites.” Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, p. 138.
Monroe-Callender dialogue: Fictional; Monroe did visit Callender in jail.
Chapter 25
The Cannibal’s Progress, had reached 100,000: Sales of 100,000 in a population of 4 million is equivalent to 7 million copies in today’s U.S. population of 270 million. But it was paperback, and there was no other mass medium than print.
Cobbett-Hamilton dialogue: The scene is fictional, though Cobbett did meet with Hamilton in New York.
“I am a farmer’s son”: Daniel Green, in Great Cobbett, p. 170, cites this passage from Cobbett’s “Peter Porcupine,” The Democratic Judge (also published as The Republican Judge—the words were synonymous). PP noted that “every farmer’s son is, in some degree, a practical phlebotomist.”
“If there be a man in the world”: Syrett, vol. 25, p. 275.
“No man has a right”: Cobbett, Observations on the Emigration of Dr. Priestly, preface (1794), in Cobbett, Peter Porcupine in America, p. 52.
Chapter 26
“The contrivance in the Constitution”: TJ to Tench Coxe, Dec. 31, 1800.
“Maybe we could get Burr”: Madison to TJ, Jan. 10, 1801. Madison did not use those introductory words; he wrote that though “not strictly regular” under the Constitution, a joint proclamation calling the new Congress into session might work: “the irregularity will be less in form than any other adequate to the emergency.”
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 54