James T. Callender
Encyclopedia
James Callender was a political pamphleteer
and journalist
whose writing was controversial in his native Scotland
and the United States
. His contemporary reputation was as a "scandalmonger", due to the content of some of his reporting, which overshadowed the political content. In the United States, he was a central figure in the press wars between the Federalist
and Democratic-Republican parties, and reported on President Thomas Jefferson
's alleged children by his slave concubine Sally Hemings
. Callender's authority and veracity have been controversial, but his statements about Jefferson were confirmed by 1998 DNA analysis and the weight of historical evidence, as shown by the historian Annette Gordon-Reed
and others.
office, the equivalent of the Recorder of Deeds. While working in that office, Callender published satirical pamphlets criticizing the writer Samuel Johnson
. "Deformities of Samuel Johnson", published anonymously, appealed to populist Scottish sentiments. Later he wrote pamphlets attacking political corruption. Callender's political writings were tinged with radical democratic egalitarianism, Scottish nationalism and a pessimistic view of human nature, and were critical of the liberal notion of progress. An admirer of Jonathan Swift
, Callender sought to cut the wealthy and the powerful down to size in his writing.
After clashes with his employers, Callender lost his job in the Sasine office. In 1791 Callender wrote a pamphlet criticizing an excise tax, paid for by the brewers who resented it. His writing attracted the attention of some reform-minded members of the Scottish nobility: Francis Garden, Lord Gardenstone, became his patron. In 1792 he published The Political Progress of Britain, a controversial critique of war, imperialism and corruption. He fled to Ireland and to the United States to avoid prosecution. After Callender left Scotland, Lord Gardenstone exposed him as the author; the journalist's reputation was also marred by the rumor that he had implicated Gardenstone.
Over the next few years, while living by ghostwriting and piecemeal assignments, Callender became one of a group of radical Republican journalists who socialized together and held similar views on democracy and economic nationalism. During this period, he produced a series of pamphlets in which he attempted to frame a comprehensive political theory, advocating for the government's duty to the poor (in the form of progressive taxation), economic independence from Europe, and the promotion of native industry. These goals put him at odds with the Federalists, and with some of the more conservative and agrarian Republicans.
His writings attacked Federalist positions with a mix of reasoned argument, satire and personal invective. His first pamphlet challenged the introduction of an excise tax into American commerce, but it was his invective against America's early national heroes - Washington, Adams, and Hamilton - and against their policies and failings, that gained him notoriety. In his pamphlet History of 1796, he exposed the sexual relationship between Alexander Hamilton
and a married woman, Maria Reynolds
, the subsequent blackmail
against Hamilton, and Hamilton's alleged financial corruption. Callender presented compelling evidence of adultery, but in 1797's Sketches of the History of America, he wrote that the affair was a distraction from Hamilton's greater offense: partnering with Reynolds' husband in corrupt financial dealings. Hamilton denied being a party to any improper financial matter, although he confessed to the adultery. According to Callender, that was just a smokescreen. Although the financial charges were never proven, Hamilton never again held public office.
Callender's success was short-lived. By 1798 his fortunes were in a downward spiral: he was forced to seek poor relief, his wife died of yellow fever
, and his anonymously published political broadsides were exposed as his by a rival pamphleteer, William Cobbet, putting Callender in legal jeopardy and physical danger. He fled from Philadelphia to Virginia, leaving his children behind.
. This is due to his fleeing of the acts against him on sedition, after calling out Hamilton.
In Virginia, he completed The Prospect Before Us, whose subject was the pervasiveness of political corruption, particularly among Federalists and the Adams administration. His populist style had his targets permanently on the defensive. In June 1800, in retaliation for The Prospect, Callender was prosecuted under the Sedition Act by the Adams administration. His trial was presided over by Supreme Court
Justice Samuel Chase
, who was later impeached, in part due to his handling of the Callender trial. Callender was fined $200 and received the longest jail term of the journalists who had been prosecuted under the Sedition Act. He was released on the last day of the Adams administration, in March 1801. After his release, Callender and the others who had been prosecuted were pardoned by the new president, Thomas Jefferson.
of Richmond, Virginia
, warning that if Jefferson did not, there would be consequences. Callender believed erroneously that Jefferson was conspiring to deprive him of money owed to him by the government after the pardon, and that Jefferson did not appreciate his sacrifices. Jefferson refused to make the appointment: placing the ill-tempered Callender in a position of authority in the Federalist stronghold of Richmond would have been, in the words of the Jefferson biographer R.B. Bernstein, "like whacking a hornet's nest with a stick."
With his career and his social ambitions thwarted, Callender returned to newspaper work, as editor of a Federalist newspaper, the Richmond Recorder. In a series of articles attacking corruption on all sides, Callender targeted Jefferson, revealing that Jefferson had funded his pamphleteering. After denials were issued, he published Jefferson's letters to him to prove the relationship. Later, angered by the criticism by Jefferson supporters, who asserted that Callender had abandoned his wife to die of a venereal disease, Callender reported in a series of articles that Jefferson fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings
.
Callender's reporting on the Jefferson-Hemings relationship used racist rhetoric of the time. Although he had expressed anti-slavery views when he first arrived in the United States, he eventually adopted a position on slavery and race similar to that of Jefferson's in Notes on the State of Virginia
. After the Hemings' controversy ran its course, Callender turned to publicizing Jefferson's earlier attempt to seduce a married neighbor decades before.
Despite his popularity among newspaper readers, Callender had an uneasy situation. Former allies had turned against him: in a surprise attack in December 1802, George Hay
, one of his former defense attorneys, clubbed him in the head with a walking stick in retaliation for an article about an international incident to which Hay had ties. In 1803, Callender's children joined him in Richmond, perhaps removed from Philadelphia due to the Jefferson controversy; he had a falling out with the owner of the Richmond Recorder over money. In March, the offices of the newspaper were attacked by young Republicans from Hay's law firm. On July 17, 1803, Callender drowned in three feet of water in the James River, reportedly too drunk to save himself.
Meriwether Jones, a friend and supporter of Thomas Jefferson and James Callender, had published an open letter to Callender in December 1802:
In 1990, the Australian writer Michael Durey published a biography covering Callender's life. Durey noted that Callender's then-reputation as a liar, drunkard and scandalmonger had been uncritically based on the original attacks against Callender by his political targets and rivals in the press. He believed their attacks obscured Callender's message of democratic egalitarianism, his relevance to the early formation of Republican politics, and his role in the birth of political journalism.
In 1997, the historian Annette Gordon-Reed
published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, showing in detail how historians had traditionally discounted some of the evidence supporting the allegations of Jefferson's paternity of slave children. In 1998, a DNA analysis confirmed that Eston Hemings Jefferson's descendants were related to the Jefferson male line. Together with the historical evidence, the biographers Joseph Ellis
and Andrew Burstein, as well the National Genealogical Society
, published their conclusions that Jefferson had a long-term relationship and several children by Sally Hemings. In 2010 Gordon-Reed won a MacArthur Fellowship for "dramatically changing the course of Jeffersonian scholarship."
In 2000, the journalist and author William Safire
published a historical novel, Scandalmonger, about Callender's life in the United States and based on letters of notable people of the time, including presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. Forty-four pages at the end of the hardcover edition of the book are what Safire calls "the underbook", a section distinguishing the historical information from fiction and including notes and sources.
Pamphleteer
A pamphleteer is a historical term for someone who creates or distributes pamphlets. Pamphlets were used to broadcast the writer's opinions on an issue, for example, in order to get people to vote for their favorite politician or to articulate a particular political ideology.A famous pamphleteer...
and journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
whose writing was controversial in his native Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
and the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. His contemporary reputation was as a "scandalmonger", due to the content of some of his reporting, which overshadowed the political content. In the United States, he was a central figure in the press wars between the Federalist
Federalist Party (United States)
The Federalist Party was the first American political party, from the early 1790s to 1816, the era of the First Party System, with remnants lasting into the 1820s. The Federalists controlled the federal government until 1801...
and Democratic-Republican parties, and reported on President Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...
's alleged children by his slave concubine Sally Hemings
Sally Hemings
Sarah "Sally" Hemings was a mixed-race slave owned by President Thomas Jefferson through inheritance from his wife. She was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson by their father John Wayles...
. Callender's authority and veracity have been controversial, but his statements about Jefferson were confirmed by 1998 DNA analysis and the weight of historical evidence, as shown by the historian Annette Gordon-Reed
Annette Gordon-Reed
Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor noted for changing scholarship on Thomas Jefferson. Gordon-Reed was educated at Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. She is Professor of Law and History at Harvard, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe...
and others.
Scotland
Callender was born in Scotland. He did not gain a formal education, but secured employment as a sub clerk in the Edinburgh SasineSasine
Sasine is the delivery of feudal property, typically land.Feudal property means immovable property, and includes everything that naturally goes with the property. For land, that would include such things as buildings, trees, and underground minerals...
office, the equivalent of the Recorder of Deeds. While working in that office, Callender published satirical pamphlets criticizing the writer Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...
. "Deformities of Samuel Johnson", published anonymously, appealed to populist Scottish sentiments. Later he wrote pamphlets attacking political corruption. Callender's political writings were tinged with radical democratic egalitarianism, Scottish nationalism and a pessimistic view of human nature, and were critical of the liberal notion of progress. An admirer of Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
, Callender sought to cut the wealthy and the powerful down to size in his writing.
After clashes with his employers, Callender lost his job in the Sasine office. In 1791 Callender wrote a pamphlet criticizing an excise tax, paid for by the brewers who resented it. His writing attracted the attention of some reform-minded members of the Scottish nobility: Francis Garden, Lord Gardenstone, became his patron. In 1792 he published The Political Progress of Britain, a controversial critique of war, imperialism and corruption. He fled to Ireland and to the United States to avoid prosecution. After Callender left Scotland, Lord Gardenstone exposed him as the author; the journalist's reputation was also marred by the rumor that he had implicated Gardenstone.
Philadelphia
Callender quickly gained a position as a Congressional reporter in Philadelphia, and wrote anonymously for the partisan press. His first American article lambasted pro-war sentiment. Although he was frequently dogged by poverty and unemployment, by 1794 Callender was a regular freelance commentator on American politics. He remained at the epicenter of the new nation's political life until his death.Over the next few years, while living by ghostwriting and piecemeal assignments, Callender became one of a group of radical Republican journalists who socialized together and held similar views on democracy and economic nationalism. During this period, he produced a series of pamphlets in which he attempted to frame a comprehensive political theory, advocating for the government's duty to the poor (in the form of progressive taxation), economic independence from Europe, and the promotion of native industry. These goals put him at odds with the Federalists, and with some of the more conservative and agrarian Republicans.
His writings attacked Federalist positions with a mix of reasoned argument, satire and personal invective. His first pamphlet challenged the introduction of an excise tax into American commerce, but it was his invective against America's early national heroes - Washington, Adams, and Hamilton - and against their policies and failings, that gained him notoriety. In his pamphlet History of 1796, he exposed the sexual relationship between Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton was a Founding Father, soldier, economist, political philosopher, one of America's first constitutional lawyers and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury...
and a married woman, Maria Reynolds
Maria Reynolds
Maria Lewis Reynolds is best known as the mistress of Alexander Hamilton and wife of James Reynolds, and she played a central role in one of the first sex scandals in American political history.-History:...
, the subsequent blackmail
Blackmail
In common usage, blackmail is a crime involving threats to reveal substantially true or false information about a person to the public, a family member, or associates unless a demand is met. It may be defined as coercion involving threats of physical harm, threat of criminal prosecution, or threats...
against Hamilton, and Hamilton's alleged financial corruption. Callender presented compelling evidence of adultery, but in 1797's Sketches of the History of America, he wrote that the affair was a distraction from Hamilton's greater offense: partnering with Reynolds' husband in corrupt financial dealings. Hamilton denied being a party to any improper financial matter, although he confessed to the adultery. According to Callender, that was just a smokescreen. Although the financial charges were never proven, Hamilton never again held public office.
Callender's success was short-lived. By 1798 his fortunes were in a downward spiral: he was forced to seek poor relief, his wife died of yellow fever
Yellow fever
Yellow fever is an acute viral hemorrhagic disease. The virus is a 40 to 50 nm enveloped RNA virus with positive sense of the Flaviviridae family....
, and his anonymously published political broadsides were exposed as his by a rival pamphleteer, William Cobbet, putting Callender in legal jeopardy and physical danger. He fled from Philadelphia to Virginia, leaving his children behind.
Prosecution for sedition
Thomas Jefferson, impressed with Callender's attack on Hamilton, and eager to create a counterforce to the Federalist press, sought to use Callendar's talents against John Adams. Subsequent to meeting him in Philadelphia, Jefferson financially supported Callender and provided feedback on early proofs of Callender's anti-Federalist pamphlet The Prospect Before Us. Prior to the publication of the pamphlet, Callender was compelled to flee on foot from Philadelphia to Virginia, finding temporary refuge at the plantation of Senator Stevens Thomas MasonStevens Thomson Mason (Virginia)
Stevens Thomson Mason was a Colonel in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, a member of the Virginia state legislature and a Republican U.S. Senator from Virginia .-Early life and military career:...
. This is due to his fleeing of the acts against him on sedition, after calling out Hamilton.
In Virginia, he completed The Prospect Before Us, whose subject was the pervasiveness of political corruption, particularly among Federalists and the Adams administration. His populist style had his targets permanently on the defensive. In June 1800, in retaliation for The Prospect, Callender was prosecuted under the Sedition Act by the Adams administration. His trial was presided over by Supreme Court
Supreme court
A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of many legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, instance court, judgment court, high court, or apex court...
Justice Samuel Chase
Samuel Chase
Samuel Chase was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court and earlier was a signatory to the United States Declaration of Independence as a representative of Maryland. Early in life, Chase was a "firebrand" states-righter and revolutionary...
, who was later impeached, in part due to his handling of the Callender trial. Callender was fined $200 and received the longest jail term of the journalists who had been prosecuted under the Sedition Act. He was released on the last day of the Adams administration, in March 1801. After his release, Callender and the others who had been prosecuted were pardoned by the new president, Thomas Jefferson.
Attacks on Thomas Jefferson
Out of jail, Callender asked Jefferson to appoint him PostmasterPostmaster
A postmaster is the head of an individual post office. Postmistress is not used anymore in the United States, as the "master" component of the word refers to a person of authority and has no gender quality...
of Richmond, Virginia
Richmond, Virginia
Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...
, warning that if Jefferson did not, there would be consequences. Callender believed erroneously that Jefferson was conspiring to deprive him of money owed to him by the government after the pardon, and that Jefferson did not appreciate his sacrifices. Jefferson refused to make the appointment: placing the ill-tempered Callender in a position of authority in the Federalist stronghold of Richmond would have been, in the words of the Jefferson biographer R.B. Bernstein, "like whacking a hornet's nest with a stick."
With his career and his social ambitions thwarted, Callender returned to newspaper work, as editor of a Federalist newspaper, the Richmond Recorder. In a series of articles attacking corruption on all sides, Callender targeted Jefferson, revealing that Jefferson had funded his pamphleteering. After denials were issued, he published Jefferson's letters to him to prove the relationship. Later, angered by the criticism by Jefferson supporters, who asserted that Callender had abandoned his wife to die of a venereal disease, Callender reported in a series of articles that Jefferson fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings
Sally Hemings
Sarah "Sally" Hemings was a mixed-race slave owned by President Thomas Jefferson through inheritance from his wife. She was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson by their father John Wayles...
.
Callender's reporting on the Jefferson-Hemings relationship used racist rhetoric of the time. Although he had expressed anti-slavery views when he first arrived in the United States, he eventually adopted a position on slavery and race similar to that of Jefferson's in Notes on the State of Virginia
Notes on the State of Virginia
Notes on the State of Virginia was a book written by Thomas Jefferson. He completed the first edition in 1781, and updated and enlarged the book in 1782 and 1783...
. After the Hemings' controversy ran its course, Callender turned to publicizing Jefferson's earlier attempt to seduce a married neighbor decades before.
Death and legacy
By some accounts, Callender was slated to provide testimony for a New York trial, The People vs. Croswell, which involved libel charges against a publisher, Harry Croswell, who had reprinted claims that Thomas Jefferson paid Callender to defame George Washington. Croswell's lawyer was Alexander Hamilton. President Jefferson, wary of the controversy generated by the Adams administration's sedition prosecutions, had begun a selective campaign against individual newspaper critics.Despite his popularity among newspaper readers, Callender had an uneasy situation. Former allies had turned against him: in a surprise attack in December 1802, George Hay
George Hay
George Hay may refer to:*George Hay, 7th Earl of Erroll*George Hay , United States politician and judge*George Hay , Member of Parliament and Dean of the Arches...
, one of his former defense attorneys, clubbed him in the head with a walking stick in retaliation for an article about an international incident to which Hay had ties. In 1803, Callender's children joined him in Richmond, perhaps removed from Philadelphia due to the Jefferson controversy; he had a falling out with the owner of the Richmond Recorder over money. In March, the offices of the newspaper were attacked by young Republicans from Hay's law firm. On July 17, 1803, Callender drowned in three feet of water in the James River, reportedly too drunk to save himself.
Meriwether Jones, a friend and supporter of Thomas Jefferson and James Callender, had published an open letter to Callender in December 1802:
The James River you tell us, has suffered to cleanse your body; is there any ' menstrum [solvent] capable of cleansing your mind... Oh! could a dose of James river, like LetheLetheIn Greek mythology, Lethe was one of the five rivers of Hades. Also known as the Ameles potamos , the Lethe flowed around the cave of Hypnos and through the Underworld, where all those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness...
, have blessed you with forgetfulness, for once you would have neglected your whiskey.
In 1990, the Australian writer Michael Durey published a biography covering Callender's life. Durey noted that Callender's then-reputation as a liar, drunkard and scandalmonger had been uncritically based on the original attacks against Callender by his political targets and rivals in the press. He believed their attacks obscured Callender's message of democratic egalitarianism, his relevance to the early formation of Republican politics, and his role in the birth of political journalism.
In 1997, the historian Annette Gordon-Reed
Annette Gordon-Reed
Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor noted for changing scholarship on Thomas Jefferson. Gordon-Reed was educated at Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. She is Professor of Law and History at Harvard, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe...
published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, showing in detail how historians had traditionally discounted some of the evidence supporting the allegations of Jefferson's paternity of slave children. In 1998, a DNA analysis confirmed that Eston Hemings Jefferson's descendants were related to the Jefferson male line. Together with the historical evidence, the biographers Joseph Ellis
Joseph Ellis
Joseph John Ellis is a Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College who has written histories on the founding generation of American presidents. His book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation received the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2001.-Background and teaching:He received his B.A...
and Andrew Burstein, as well the National Genealogical Society
National Genealogical Society
The National Genealogical Society is a genealogical interest group founded in 1903 in Washington, D.C.. Its headquarters are in Arlington, Virginia....
, published their conclusions that Jefferson had a long-term relationship and several children by Sally Hemings. In 2010 Gordon-Reed won a MacArthur Fellowship for "dramatically changing the course of Jeffersonian scholarship."
In 2000, the journalist and author William Safire
William Safire
William Lewis Safire was an American author, columnist, journalist and presidential speechwriter....
published a historical novel, Scandalmonger, about Callender's life in the United States and based on letters of notable people of the time, including presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. Forty-four pages at the end of the hardcover edition of the book are what Safire calls "the underbook", a section distinguishing the historical information from fiction and including notes and sources.
External links
- Internet Archive listings for works by James Thomson Callender- A list of links to free digital copies to some of Callener's works.