A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans

by Michael Farquhar

  During what became known as the Quasi-War with France, President Adams, enjoying widespread support from an inflamed public, signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts. They were “rightly judged by history as the most reprehensible acts of his presidency,” writes David McCullough, Adams’s biographer. The Alien Act gave the president the legal right to expel any foreigner he considered “dangerous.” And while Callender’s Republican supporters helped him avoid the consequences of this law by arranging for his citizenship,3 the Sedition Act was another matter. Clearly unconstitutional and aimed at people like Callender, it made any “false, scandalous, and malicious” writing against the government, Congress, or the president, or any attempt “to excite against them…the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition,” crimes punishable by fines and imprisonment.

  Callender was determined to take a stand against the Sedition Act, and, if necessary, become a martyr to it. He left his young sons in Philadelphia, which in the midst of war hysteria had become dangerously hostile to him, and moved to Jefferson’s home state of Virginia. There he penned The Prospect Before Us, a scorching blast against the president—that “repulsive pedant” and “gross hypocrite” who was to face Jefferson in the upcoming election of 1800. “The reign of Mr. Adams has hitherto been one continued tempest of malignant passions,” Callender wrote. “The grand object of his administration has been to calumniate and destroy every man who differs from his opinion.” He called the president “a hoary-headed incendiary” determined to make war on France, and “in his private life, one of the most egregious fools upon the continent.” There were a number of other seditious epithets guaranteed to provoke the president. Callender described him as “that strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and wickedness,” a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman,” and “a wretch whose soul came blasted from the hand of nature…a wretch that has neither the science of a magistrate, the politeness of a courtier, nor the courage of a man.”

  Jefferson was pleased by Callender’s toxic tract. “Such papers cannot fail to produce the best results,” he assured the author. Adams was decidedly less enthusiastic, and Callender was promptly arrested for sedition. His subsequent trial was a sham presided over by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, who was later impeached (and acquitted) for his conduct during the proceedings.

  “James Thomson Callender, by his writings attached hereto, has maliciously defamed the President of the United States, John Adams,” declared prosecutor Thomas Nelson. “The accused is a person of wicked, depraved, and turbulent mind and is disposed toward evil. He has written and caused to be published these words with the bad intent of bringing him into contempt, and to excite the hatred of the people against him and their government.”

  All efforts by the defense to argue on their client’s behalf were thwarted by Chase, a Federalist who was determined to see Callender convicted. In one typical exchange, Nelson referenced a sentence from The Prospect Before Us: “So great is the violence of the President’s passions, that under his second administration, America would be in constant danger of a second quarrel.”

  “This is the same as saying, ‘Do not re-elect the present President, for he will involve you in a war,’” Nelson declared. “It predicts the future. How can that be true? Therefore, it must be false, scandalous, and uttered with malicious intent.”

  “It is an opinion,” countered defense attorney George Hay. “A political opinion does not purport to be a fact. It can neither be true nor false.”

  “Your objection is irrelevant,” Chase snapped.

  “Your Honor,” Hay responded, “are you ruling that it is against the law to have an opinion, to speak your mind during the Presidency of John Adams?”

  “Your argument is disrespectful, irritating, and highly incorrect,” Chase said sharply. “I will have no more of that, young man.”

  The outcome of the case was almost preordained, and Callender was convicted. “If your calumny, defamation, and falsehood were to be tolerated,” Chase lectured after the verdict was announced, “it would reduce virtue to the level of vice. There could be no encouragement to integrity, and no man, however upright in his conduct, could be secure from slander.” Concluding his speech, the justice gave the convicted man an opportunity to speak. “Do you have any contrition to express that might bring about a diminution of your sentence?” he asked. Callender remained defiant. “I may be insolent,” he said. “I have written some words that may be abusive. But the insolence and abusiveness of liberty, sir, are far preferable to the groveling decorum of the Court and the funereal silence of despotism.”

  Sentenced to nine months in prison and a $200 fine, Callender became a martyr for the First Amendment and the Republican cause, as perhaps he had intended all along. Adams was defeated in the election that followed (one of the most bitter in American history, and the only time a president and vice president ever ran against each other). It was in the wake of this victory, however, that the nation’s preeminent muckraker did something astonishing: He turned on the man who had silently supported him and who was now president.

  Callender expected to be rewarded for all the services he had rendered Jefferson and the Republicans—not the least of which had been his defiance of the Sedition Act, which contributed to the public’s disenchantment with Adams—and the $50 the new president gave him as “charity” simply wouldn’t suffice. At the very least, he wanted to be reimbursed for the $200 fine that had been levied against him as part of his sentence, and he wanted to be Richmond’s postmaster as well. Callender simmered with resentment when his requests were ignored. “I now begin to know what Ingratitude is,” he wrote to Secretary of State James Madison in 1801. Driven now by this festering sense of betrayal, Callender intimated to Jefferson’s secretary, Meriwether Lewis, and others that he had compromising information about the president and was prepared to publish it. The $50 he had received was not charity, he said, but his due—hush money, in fact, for all he knew about Jefferson’s secret machinations against the Federalists.

  The president was furious when he received the reports of Callender’s threats. “Such a misconstruction of my charities puts an end to them forever,” he announced, a bit disingenuously, having actively (albeit secretly) supported and funded Callender’s crusades against Adams and others. “He knows nothing of me which I am not willing to declare to the world myself,” Jefferson continued. “I knew him first as the author of The Political Progress of Britain, a work I had read with great satisfaction, and as a fugitive from persecution [in Britain] for this very work. I gave him from time to time such aides as I could afford, merely as a man of genius suffering under persecution, and not as a writer in our politics. It is long since I wished he would cease writing on them, as doing more harm than good.” Callender gave lie to the president’s pretensions when he published the letters Jefferson had written him encouraging his attacks. It was merely an opening salvo, to be followed by an explosive story that shocked the nation and remains part of the third president’s legacy.

  “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves,” Callender wrote in the September 1, 1802, edition of the Richmond Recorder. “Her name is Sally. The name of her eldest son his Tom. His features are said to bear a striking though sable resemblance to those of the President himself…. By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it.”

  By exposing the president to contempt and ridicule with the Sally Hemings story, Callender effectively banished himself for good from the party he had once so stoutly supported. He was vilified in the Republican press, and even bludgeoned nearly to death by the same lawyer who had defended him in his sedition trial. Drinking heavily now,
but unbowed, Callender continued his assault on Jefferson and Hemings, whom he referred to as “Dusky Sally,” with all the signature vitriol he had used against the Federalists. And he dredged up other scandals from the president’s past as well, including his attempted seduction of his best friend’s wife.

  It was only a drunken misadventure that finally silenced James Callender forever. On July 17, 1803, his bloated corpse was found floating in three inches of murky water on the James River. His many enemies may have delighted in the irony of his drowning in the muck. But it is a tribute to this unlikely hero of the First Amendment that, in the face of egregious laws, physical intimidation, and prison, it was the only thing that could keep him quiet.

  8

  John Ledyard: The Explorer Who Dreamed of Walking the World

  The weary traveler arrived in Russia battered and bloody, his clothes in shreds and his only companion, a dog, dead. For two months he had trudged on foot across the frozen expanses of northern Sweden and Finland with only a wool cloak to protect him from the sub-Arctic winter and an iron will to propel him forward. He still had far to go.

  Long before Lewis and Clark set out on their historic journey across North America, John Ledyard tried to walk around the world. It was an audacious undertaking by a man “of fearless courage and enterprise,” as Thomas Jefferson described him; a restless wanderer propelled by the romance of discovery. Already he had circumnavigated the globe as part of Captain James Cook’s famed third voyage, and in the process became the first American to see Hawaii, Alaska, and the Pacific Northwest. “Behold me the greatest traveler in history,” he wrote, a bit immodestly. “An eccentric, irregular, unafraid, unaccountable, curious & without vanity, majestic as a comet.”

  In the end Ledyard fell short of his quest, intercepted in Siberia by order of Catherine the Great and escorted out of Russia. Still, he managed to traverse a third of the earth’s land mass (though not all on foot)—a feat that inspired the Lewis and Clark expedition two decades later. And ultimately, his failure didn’t matter. It was Ledyard’s bold adventures and ambitious dreams, of which there were many, that left a resounding legacy. “[He] forged a new, American archtype,” writes his biographer James Zug: “the heroic explorer.”

  The wanderlust that would define John Ledyard’s life was evident early, when he dropped out of Dartmouth College after his first year and took a dugout canoe on a solo journey down the Connecticut River. It was a foolhardy venture for the inexperienced young man to explore a river no one had been recorded running before, and it nearly cost him his life when the canoe capsized close to the fifty-foot drop of Bellows Falls. Just before he was sent hurtling over, the sputtering youth was pulled to safety by villagers along the shoreline and resumed his adventure embarrassed but unbowed.

  Ledyard returned home to Connecticut restless and without any real prospects. After a failed attempt to become a minister, he joined the crew of a merchant vessel that sailed to Europe, Africa, and the West Indies. “I allot myself a seven year’s ramble more,” he wrote to his cousin, “altho the past has long since wasted the means I had, and now the body becomes a substitute for Cash and pays my travelling expenses.”

  Unsatiated when he returned—it had only been a year into his “ramble,” after all—Ledyard joined another crew and sailed to England in 1775. There he either enlisted with, or was forced into,1 the British army. He wrote that he “was ordered to Boston in New England [during the American Revolution]: to this your memorialist objected being a native of that country & desired he might be appointed to some other duty, which ultimately was granted.” He was allowed to switch from the army to the navy and became a marine. It was in that capacity Ledyard sailed with Captain James Cook on one of the greatest voyages of discovery the world had ever known.

  Cook had already completed two exploratory ventures around the globe, but this, his third, would be the most ambitious by far—the longest circumnavigation in history, and the one upon which he would meet his demise. The goal was to find the elusive Northwest Passage. But Ledyard saw the voyage as an excellent opportunity to “free himself forever from coming to America as her enemy,” as he put it, as well as a way to satisfy his boundless curiosity.

  The expedition set sail from Plymouth, England, on July 12, 1776, just eight days after Ledyard’s countrymen declared their independence from Britain. It seems strange that at such a momentous time, a loyal American would be sailing under an enemy flag as a British marine, but Ledyard saw no incongruity. “For no State’s, no Monarch’s Minister am I,” he later declared, “but travel under the common flag of humanity, commissioned by myself to serve the world at large.”

  Humanity’s ambassador was in for an extraordinary trip: a four-year, 80,000-mile odyssey that took him from the beautiful beaches of Tahiti to the frozen Arctic. Along the way he met native peoples whose lives and customs fascinated him, and upon whom he looked with the kind of respect that was rare for the age. Many joyfully greeted the Cook party, though some in time turned on them with savage ferocity.2 Beautiful women gave themselves freely to the fair-haired Ledyard, and on more than one occasion left him with a wicked case of the clap.

  During the journey, Ledyard became the first American citizen to visit Alaska and Hawaii, and described how it felt to be the first to step foot upon the west coast of the North American continent. “Though more than two thousand miles distant from the nearest part of New England I felt myself plainly affected: All the affectionate passions incident to natural attachments and early prejudices played round my heart, and indulged them because they were prejudices. It soothed a home-sick heart, and rendered me very tolerably happy.”

  The pelts the expedition collected in the Pacific Northwest and then sold in China at exorbitant prices inspired Ledyard with dreams of a lucrative fur trade in the East. The idea eventually became an obsession, and Ledyard later formed various partnerships with Revolutionary financier Robert Morris and naval hero John Paul Jones to establish a trading company. Nothing ever came of the efforts, but James Zug and others credit Ledyard’s ambition for the eventual launch of the China trade and the opening of the Pacific for the United States.

  After four years at sea and a world of discovery (though not of the Northwest Passage), Ledyard and the other surviving members of the Cook expedition returned to England in October 1780. A year later the navy sent him to America, where he promptly deserted and set about documenting his grand adventure in the popular book A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage. The work is notable for the relatively enlightened and balanced accounts of the native cultures Ledyard encountered, as well as for establishing the size of North America for the first time. It also inspired American copyright protection after Ledyard asked the Connecticut assembly for “the exclusive right of publishing this said Journal or history in the State for such a term as shall be thot fit.” (Ironically, the book was heavily plagiarized from other sources.)

  By 1784, Ledyard was off to Europe again. A master of self-promotion, he took to calling himself “John Ledyard the Traveler,” and cut a rather eccentric figure with his exotic clothes (which he could ill afford) and his sometimes manic disposition. But it was his intellect that most impressed people. Thomas Jefferson, then serving as U.S. ambassador to France, called him “a man of genius” and “a person of ingenuity and information. Unfortunately,” he added, “he has too much imagination.” Yet in spite of that express reservation, it was Jefferson who enthusiastically backed Ledyard’s most outlandish ambition of all: to walk around the world. The plan was to go from Europe through Siberia and then across North America. It was the opportunity to explore his native land that seemed to excite Ledyard most:

  I die with anxiety to be on the back of the American States, after having either come from or penetrated to the Pacific Ocean. There is an extensive field for the acquirement of honest fame. A blush of generous regret sits on my Cheek to hear of any Discovery there that I have not part in, & particularly at this auspicious period: Th
e American Revolution invites to a thorough Discovery of the Continent and the honor of doing it would become a foreigner. But a Native only could feel the pleasure of the Achievement. It was necessary that a European should discover the Existence of that Continent, but in the name of Amor Patria. Let a native of it Explore its Boundary. It is my wish to be the Man. I will not yet resign that wish nor my pretension to that distinction.

  At the end of November 1786, John Ledyard the Traveler set out on his quixotic march. The first leg of his journey was miserable. “Never did I adopt an Idea so fatal to my happiness,” he wrote after the brutal two-month trek through northern Sweden and Finland in the bitter cold. Yet he was unstoppable. “The bruises, the sleeplessness, the dirty-fingernail poverty, the sweat and mud-soaked clothes were real,” James Zug writes of Ledyard’s astonishing resilience. “Yet it was if his sufferings were happening to another person. Staggeringly buoyant, he brushed aside his pains and talked of trying again. He would leave on a moment’s notice. He would promise a new destination, despite the lack of money, clothes, prospects or good sleep. His imagination remained unassailable.”