Scandalmonger: A Novel

by William Safire

  “A superabundance of excretions? Too much semen? Adams said that about Hamilton?”

  “It’s true. Sometimes men in the same party despise each other.”

  Callender knew he couldn’t use that inflammatory phrase in a pamphlet; it would be denied and he’d be sued for libel, and lose. “But Maria is not a whore,” he insisted. He groped for the softer word: “She’s an adventuress, perhaps, ill used by powerful men. But we have to believe her if we are to refute Hamilton’s defense.”

  That would be hard. Everyone would want to believe Hamilton’s false confession of illicit sex because that was more delicious to gossip about than complicated Treasury theft. Hamilton had fashioned an effective defense, if his central concern was the probity of Treasury and not the feelings of his family or his future in politics. Even the President of the United States was taken in. “Did President Adams really say Hamilton suffered from ‘a superabundance of excretions’?”

  “Don’t repeat it, for God’s sake. I only tell you that so you know it’s in Adams’s interest to watch you destroy Hamilton, his rival next time. Don’t make a fool of yourself. You brought down the man who was General Washington’s right arm. You ruined the political future of the most brilliant political writer in the country, our Madison not excepted. Now let the matter lie.”

  Callender did not want to feel alone in his efforts. “We all brought him down together, John. You and me, and Monroe and Madison and Jefferson himself. I am the agent, the conduit, and proud to be—but not the principal here.”

  “When they come down on you, James, you cannot say you got anything from me.”

  Callender felt a chill. He made no pretense to himself or to the public, as Cobbett so often did, that he was a fearless voice for liberty. He had barely escaped being hunted down for sedition in Scotland, was still under indictment there, and had no desire to seek refuge elsewhere again. If Hamilton succeeded in changing the subject to sex, then it would be James Callender who would be identified as the man who revealed the most salacious scandal in the brief history of the Republic.

  That was not his purpose. Callender saw himself as the heroic exposer of serious violations of the public trust, not the chronicler of personal sin. Abuse of great power was his enemy, not a public man’s sneaking about with a private paramour. If Hamilton were believed, Callender would not be hailed for exposing crime in high office, but hated as the snitch that forced an honest man to reveal his weakness in betraying his marriage vow. Unless he refuted Hamilton’s daring smother-up with more facts about financial chicanery, the pamphleteer would find himself under the “just odium” of the Federalists—and at the same time secretly despised by his own kind.

  But Callender knew he was not totally naked to his enemies. He said nothing to Beckley about his personal contacts with Jefferson, or about the Vice President’s direct financial help and warm encouragement, oral and written. That was between the great man and himself.

  “Listen to this,” William Cobbett said to his wife. “This woman comes to Hamilton’s door, he says, and asks him for money. He says he will bring it to her house. Then, he writes: ‘In the evening I put a bank bill in my pocket and went to the house. She conducted me into a bed room. I took the bill out of my pocket and give it to her.’ Then comes a dash after the period, indicating an excision, I suppose because the printer was too embarrassed to offend the common decency with the next line in the manuscript. Then his printed confession picks up: ‘Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.’ Other than pecuniary consolation—do you hear that, Nancy? What a turn of phrase! That milksop!”

  “I think it cruel of him to burden his wife with the shame of a public confession,” said Nancy Cobbett. “Not to mention the pain to the harlot Maria, if such she is. The moral guilt is his, the man of wealth and power, even more than his unfortunate paramour. She was probably pushed into a life of sin by her miserable thief of a husband.”

  “Noah Webster agrees with you.” Webster, editor of New York’s Minerva, was a low Federalist, suitably anti-French, and—though egregiously permissive in his softheaded opinions about a bastard “American language”—was usually in alignment with Cobbett in lashing the republicans. He turned to that day’s Minerva and read aloud Webster’s opinion: “ ‘What shall we say to the conduct of a man who could deliberately write and publish a history of his private intrigues, degrade himself in the estimation of all good men, and scandalize a family to clear himself of charges which no man believed! Such a man is unfit to administer the government.’ Well said, I’m sorry to say, and from our side. Good English, at least, from Webster—that impudent vagabond juggler whose utmost exertion was the compilation of a school-book.”

  “Will you be writing about this awful affair, William?”

  “As little as I can. Even if Hamilton is telling the truth about his financial purity, and I presume he is, a claim of sexual immorality is no defense. Adultery is just a different manifestation of dishonesty. And his panicked assertion of it is a sign of weak character.” He felt, but would not admit to, a twinge of envy at Callender’s coup. The seditious little Scot had done some original reporting that provoked the great Hamilton into a terrible blunder.

  Cobbett decided to change the subject to moral abdication on a political level. He took up his pen: “When we view the second magistrate of the United States, Vice President Thomas Jefferson, erecting the standard of opposition to the Government; when we see him rallying around it a host of malcontents, and taking a position as the chief of a faction; when we see him openly vindicating the insults and aggressions of a foreign nation, France—when all these shameful and degrading circumstances are reviewed, what are we to think of Jeffersonian morals?”

  Determined to ignore the Reynolds pamphlet, he decided to follow that up with an attack on one of the host of republican malcontents. He had already characterized Matthew Lyon, an Irishman from the bogs of Hibernia elected Congressman, as “the beast of Vermont,” suggesting he needed caging by loyal Americans. Cobbett identified Lyon as having been an indentured servant in Ireland, no better than a slave. The arrogant Irisher had refused to join the formal procession marching in deference to the new President’s inauguration, claiming that such royalist ceremonies were not in keeping with a democratic republic. Peter Porcupine denounced that as the typical pap of French radicals. Lyon had also offended Cobbett by taking the side of the Society of Quakers protesting “the oppressed state of our brethren of the African race.” Porcupine considered such sowing of dissatisfaction among the slaves to be a sly way of helping France to conquer the United States: if the war between France and Britain spilt over to the New World, France would count on a slave revolt in America to help in its invasion of the South.

  Cobbett had learned from Robert Goodloe Harper, a Federalist Congressman who wanted to shut the door to aliens (and whose speeches Cobbett occasionally wrote in exchange for information), a nice tidbit about this low-life Irish England-hater. It seemed that Lyon had been abusing his franking privilege by sending out two hundred letters a week and enclosing in them copies of the Aurora, Bache’s radical red sheet. Nobody in Congress had dared do that much for Porcupine’s Gazette. But Cobbett had also been told that the strident anti-Federalist Lyon had a blemish on his record of service in the Revolution: “This is the redoubtable hero,” Porcupine then wrote, “who, a few years after he was sold for his passage from Ireland, was condemned for cowardice in the American war by General Gates to wear a wooden sword.”

  He paused. Libelous? Surely it was, since it brought the man into disrepute. But it was true. Cobbett hoped it would partly distract the public’s attention from Hamilton’s troubles. It would also remind the Jeffersonians bent on destroying reputations that their own dirty linen would need to be washed.

  ALBEMARLE COUNTY, VIRGINIA

  “Sweet vengeance for my recall,” said Monroe, “and for the partizan firing of Beckley—or s
o it will be interpreted by the Federalist press.”

  With Philadelphia in the grip of its dread summer epidemic of yellow fever—not as bad as the horror of ’93, but bad enough to empty the city of all those who could afford to leave—he and James Madison had called on the Vice President at his Virginia home. Madison at Montpelier, thirty miles away, and Monroe much closer at Ash Lawn, in Albemarle County, were Jefferson’s neighbors; the choice of Monticello as meeting place was a natural one. Even though Monroe was fully occupied with writing a memoir defending his embassy to Paris, he set his book aside to discuss the likely repercussions of the Reynolds pamphlet.

  At first, Jefferson seemed concerned that he would be identified as the source of the material Callender published. Monroe assured his mentor that no danger of exposure existed. “I told Burr that it was John Beckley who caused the publication of the papers in question,” he said. “By his assistant clerk they were copied for us. Five years ago, when Hamilton asked Beckley’s clerk whether others were privy to the documents, the clerk replied that only Beckley was. Hamilton told him to tell Beckley he considered him bound not to disclose them. Beckley sent back word that he was under no injunction whatever and that if Hamilton had anything to say to him it must be in writing. Of course he never replied to that.”

  “But you told Beckley to keep them secret, didn’t you?” Madison asked.

  “Most certainly. And I never heard of the documents afterwards till my arrival from Paris. That if necessary will be declared by all.”

  Jefferson was curious about what Callender would say.

  “Beckley says Callender will deny to his death Beckley was the source,” Monroe assured him. “It’s as if there were a code of honor among the pamphleteers. Its publication will never be traced to any Virginian.”

  “Are you in danger,” Jefferson asked, “of a challenge from Hamilton under the code duello?”

  “Burr thinks not.” Monroe hoped Burr was right, and in the presence of Jefferson acted more confident than he felt.

  “Burr inspires me with distrust,” said Jefferson. “I know he is a good friend to both of you, but I caution you not to trust him too much.”

  Monroe did not argue the point about his friend Burr but went to the reason he did not feel immediately threatened. “Hamilton’s aim in all this is not to kill me in a duel, but to force me to discredit Mrs. Reynolds’s claim that he has fabricated her documents. That I will not do.”

  “Do you suppose Hamilton did that?” Jefferson asked. “That he forged her letters, that his whole story of the adulterous affair was a covering up of speculation inside Treasury?”

  Monroe looked at Jefferson and shrugged. “We may never know. But we should never do the Federalists the favor of exculpating him. Indeed, Beckley tells me that Callender plans to attack Hamilton anew on the weakest point of his defense—the authenticity of Maria Reynolds’s notes to him. Callender will charge they’re all forgeries by Hamilton and—who knows?—he may be right. If Hamilton wanted to prove she wrote them, he would bring her forward and compare her handwriting with that on the notes. But he does not do that, which could be significant.”

  Madison suggested that the truth might lie somewhere in between: that Hamilton was an adulterer and a speculator as well. Monroe had to stop and think about that; it was not a possibility he had examined. “What do you think, Thomas?”

  “Finding the strait between Scylla and Charybdis too narrow for his steerage,” Jefferson said, “Hamilton has preferred running plump on one of them.” The Vice President pondered this a moment and came down on the side of the most serious and damaging conclusion: “But his willingness to plead guilty as to adultery seems rather to have strengthened than weakened the suspicions that he was in truth guilty of the speculation.”

  “The publication of this Reynolds pamphlet is a curious specimen of the ingenious folly of its author,” said Madison, shaking his head in wonderment. “First is Hamilton’s error of publishing at all. Next is his forgetting that simplicity and candor are the only dress which prudence would put on innocence.”

  “He did seem to go into great and unnecessary detail,” said Monroe. “Even I had trouble following some of it.”

  “Here we see every rhetorical artifice employed,” said Madison, his eye on Hamilton’s prose technique, “to excite the spirit of party to prop up his sinking reputation. While the most exaggerated complaints are uttered against the unfair and virulent persecution of himself, he deals out in every page the most malignant insinuations against others.”

  “Callender pointed out his pitiable notice of me,” said Jefferson.

  “The one against you is a masterpiece of folly,” Madison agreed, “because its importance is in exact proportion to its venom.”

  “We should exercise caution in our relationship to both Beckley and Callender,” Monroe said. Beckley was useful, but the pretensions of this immigrant to the stature of a Virginia gentleman were ludicrous to genuine gentlemen. Callender, a Scottish immigrant, was not even a citizen of the United States, and was said by Porcupine to have too great a reliance on the bottle.

  Madison nodded agreement, but Jefferson did not seem concerned. Monroe assumed his reason was that there were too few champions of the republican cause willing to risk their livelihoods in this time of domination by Federalist leaders, unrestrained by Washington’s even hand. Faction, so deplored by Madison in his contribution to The Federalist Papers he wrote with Hamilton and John Jay a decade before, was now a fact. Because the triumvirate of Virginians could not yet show their hand publicly, they had to depend to considerable degree on the denizens of the distasteful newsmongering world. But Monroe doubted that Jefferson could always explain away his support of Callender as purely charitable. It would not bear close scrutiny.

  Chapter 8

  January 30, 1798

  PHILADELPHIA

  Callender was at the Aurora, dropping off a couple of paragraphs about the way the Jay Treaty was enriching British bankers at the expense of American farmers, when a messenger came in with news of a ruckus about the press brewing in Congress Hall. He slipped and stumbled through the snowbound streets of Philadelphia to State House Square to see the spectacle for himself.

  Matthew Lyon was denouncing the Federalist representatives from Connecticut. “You are acting in opposition to the interests and opinion of nine-tenths of your constituents,” the Vermonter proclaimed in his rolling brogue. “You know the American people stand with the free people of France in their war against the subjects of the English King. We remember who fought on our side in the Revolution against English tyranny.” Callender nodded vigorously; he was certain that American popular sentiment, certainly in the South but even in the North, was with the red republican French. All of President Washington’s popularity and prestige could not make popular the treaty his envoy, Chief Justice Jay, brought home from London, knuckling under to British interests. Washington had been ashamed to make the treaty public; Callender was proud that the Aurora editor, Benny Bache, surreptitiously obtained a copy and printed it. At the time, that flexing of the muscles of the opposition press caused an uproar of republican protest against the Federalists and the British bankers.

  The people of the not-so-united States, in Callender’s view, were dividing among North and South and West, and within those sections between rich and poor, religious and irreligious, early and late arrivals, and most divisive of all, between the governing and the governed. On that last score, he believed that the petulant and self-important Adams, the Federalist President saddled with the likes of Hamilton’s Oliver Wolcott as Treasury Secretary, was out of touch with the sentiment of the majority of the people. That majority voice could be heard in the fierce tone and Irish accent of the radical Congressman from Vermont.

  Lyon shook an admonitory finger at the Connecticut delegation, representing the hotbed of the American elite. “You are pursuing your own aristo-Tory private views without regarding the interests of the people of your d
istricts, whose lackey press deprives them of another point of view. If I should go into Connecticut and manage a press there for six months, I could effect a revolution and turn you out.” He could, too, Callender thought; the Farmer’s Library in western Vermont, run by Lyon’s seventeen-year-old son, made possible his own upset election victory.

  “If you go into Connecticut, Matt Lyon,” Callender heard one of the Congressmen fire back, “you had better wear your wooden sword.” That he knew to be a snide reference to the item in Porcupine’s Gazette calling into question Lyon’s courage during the war. Lyon ignored the interruption and went on with his speech about the lapdog press in that Nutmeg State. Representative Roger Griswold, one of his targets, rose and went over to Lyon and laid his hand on his arm to make sure he would hear the gibe: “I asked if you intend to fight the people of Connecticut with your wooden sword.”

  Lyon, accused of cowardice, turned to Griswold, reared back his head, worked his mouth and spit in his tormentor’s astonished face.

  After gasps echoed through the hall, a Massachusetts member rose: “I move to expel Matthew Lyon for his gross indecency.” Callender heard a shout from the gallery near him: “Throw the Irish scum out!” The Scot doubted that in the four previous Congresses there had ever been a breach of parliamentary decorum as egregious as this.

  “I rise to express my abhorrence,” said a New York republican, eager to dissociate himself from his colleague Lyon’s action, “of such abusive insinuations. At the same time, I condemn the indecent reaction to indecent language.” An angry man in the gallery stood up to say, in a loud voice that carried to the floor, “I feel grieved that the saliva of an Irishman should be left upon the face of an American.” Callender—a fugitive from sedition court in Scotland but still a Scot—winced at the depth of the anti-immigrant feeling and wished Lyon had held his temper in check.