Scandalmonger: A Novel

by William Safire

  As member after member stood to revile the horrid act, only Albert Gallatin, the anti-Hamilton representative from Pennsylvania, attacked Lyon’s attackers: “This whole proceeding,” he said in his Swiss immigrant’s French accent, “is nothing more than an affected cant of pretended delicacy, and the offspring of bitter party spirit.” But a member of the Connecticut delegation countered by calling the expectorating Lyon “a kennel of filth” to be expelled from the dignified halls of Congress “just as citizens removed filth from their docks and wharves.”

  After the Speaker gaveled the unruly House into recess, Callender joined Gallatin in quieting the furious Lyon. “This will play into Porcupine’s hands, Matt,” the Scot whispered urgently. “You must apologize.” Gallatin agreed: “There’s a move already afoot to expel you, and we cannot afford to lose your vote. I’ll get a Virginian to write your apology.” Matt Lyon, muttering under his breath at the hypocrisy of the native-born, said he would write his own with Callender’s help, and simmered down.

  The dominant Federalist majority in the House sought to expel the man who became known nationally in the week that followed as “Spittin’ Lyon.” Federalist cartoonists, urged on by Porcupine’s Gazette, pictured him as a lion with wooden sword in paw, trampling on scrolls labeled “Politeness,” edging away from a prickly porcupine and spitting at a stately politician. The republican press limited itself to reporting Lyon’s half-apology: “We do not always possess the power of judging calmly what is the best mode of resenting an unpardonable insult.” But Lyon told Callender he would not grovel: “Had I borne that accusation of cowardice patiently, I should have been bandied about in all the newspapers on the continent, which are supported by British money and federal patronage, as a mean poltroon. The district which sent me would have been scandalized.”

  “You know your constituency,” his new friend replied, “but look over your shoulder. I always do.”

  “I whipped the lawyers back home, you know. They hate me because I started no better than a slave and don’t have their social graces. These Federalists are a set of gentry,” said Lyon, “who consider the science of government to belong to only a few families. They think I can’t buy my way in with the money I’ve made in trade. You saw Porcupine today?”

  Cobbett had jeered at him in his Gazette as “our Lilliputian, with his dollars, gets access where—without them—he would not be suffered to appear.” Callender, who always read Porcupine’s Gazette first thing, said, “Nobody reads Cobbett any more.” The fact was that every one of his damned pro-Government, French-hating pamphlets sold copies by the tens of thousands, and his Gazette was also thriving.

  Meantime, Callender’s fortunes were headed in the opposite direction. His big sale had come six months before, in his vigorous response to Hamilton’s strange Reynolds pamphlet, and nothing had developed since. The public had largely accepted Hamilton’s “confession” as true and dismissed Callender’s refutation of that deliciously detailed account of adultery as that of someone spoiling its fun. Peeking through the keyhole of Hamilton’s bedroom was more satisfying than examining the contents of the Treasury counting house. The Scot was astounded that nobody, not even the most rabid anti-Federalist, was willing to pull aside the veil of lies about sex and shame to examine the evidence of Hamilton’s abuse of his Treasury position to line the pockets of his friends. Most people were content to take Maria to be a blackmailing whore and Hamilton to be too easily seduced, like so many other men, by a scheming adventuress. The Federalist leader had made his painful choice: he was willing to be seen to be a moral transgressor so long as he was known to be an upright public servant. Callender, alone in his contrary view, had gained no respect for having forced out such a ruination of reputation.

  From the money earned by sale of The History of 1796, Callender paid his outstanding debts. A much-welcome payment of fifty dollars from Thomas Jefferson supported him and his four boys and his wife. Bache paid him only a dollar for every piece he used in the Aurora, and that was limited to two or three a week. The Lyon spitting episode would be worth several more pieces, he estimated, especially if jousting with Cobbett about it kept reader interest up.

  A two-thirds vote was required for the banishment of a duly elected member of the House. Gallatin sought to hold his minority of forty-four anti-Federalists firm with a cogent argument: “Congress is not a fashionable club. It is a representative body which has no right to deprive the voters of Vermont their representation because it doesn’t like his manners.”

  Callender returned to Congress Hall to watch that vote. On the way, he noticed Griswold of Connecticut coming out of McCallister’s store on Chestnut Street, a new, yellow hickory walking stick in hand. Inside the hall, Callender watched the vote and double-checked the count, remembering how Cobbett last year had flayed Beckley in print for an error.

  Gallatin held his republican troops together. The vote to throw out Lyon achieved a majority but fell short of the necessary two-thirds. The Vermonter was humiliated but retained his seat. Though relieved at the majority’s failure to oust Lyon, the observing Scot remained nervous about the degree of rancor, the outright hatred of immigrants, exposed by the episode.

  After the failure to expel was solemnly recorded, Connecticut’s Griswold rose to say, “The House by its decision has sanctioned violence within these walls.” He then walked across the floor in front of the Speaker’s chair, walking stick gripped firmly, toward Lyon’s desk. The Vermonter did not see him approach.

  “Matt!” Callender shouted. “Watch out!”

  Too late. Griswold’s stout cane cracked Lyon on top of the head, then across his back, again and again. More than twenty heavy blows rained down on his victim, who was groping for help in escaping along the floor, blinded by the blood spurting down from his scalp. Callender looked around frantically for a weapon, saw a fire tongs near the fireplace and slid it down the aisle toward Lyon, now crouched on one knee, absorbing the punishment with nobody to stop his attacker. Lyon felt the iron slide against his leg, grabbed the tongs and with a roar swung it at Griswold, knocking the bludgeoning cane out his hand. Before the bloodied Vermonter could maim his attacker with the heavy iron weapon, other Congressmen interceded, the Speaker pounded his gavel for order and Callender rushed to help Lyon to a doctor’s house.

  There, two days later, Callender reported to a still-steaming Lyon, head wreathed in bandages, that a committee had been appointed on the spot to consider the expulsion of Griswold and Lyon together for turning the House into a “gladiators’ arena.” Though Gallatin argued angrily that the Federalist’s offense was significantly greater because the aggressor was the worse offender, the committee held along party lines that the two insults cancelled each other out, and the members agreed 73 to 21 to expel neither.

  “They equate my spittin’ in his eye after he called me a coward with his bashing me over the head twenty times with a hickory club?”

  “They have the votes,” Callender said. Reviled as a scandalmonger, now despised or feared by most, the editor was pleased to have made a friend.

  “It’s because those highborn lawyers call me an arriviste. They think they were born to rule. What are the people saying?”

  “You’re famous all across the land, Matt,” Callender replied, putting the best face on the general revulsion. Cobbett, with his knowledge of French, had translated the word arriviste as “the name applied to the unwelcome arrival of a moneyed boor.” Callender told the battered Congressman, “You’ll never go anywhere without being introduced as ‘the Spittin’ Lyon.’ ”

  “I’m thankful to you, James, for sliding down those fire tongs. Otherwise, I’d have been a dead man.”

  “We newspaper men have to stick together.” Lyon had started a weekly sheet to support his political campaign; that made him a newspaper man.

  The Vermonter rolled to his side in bed and reached for Callender’s arm. “I have a piece of news for you that will embarrass the bastards. You know that
delegation Adams sent to France after the French wouldn’t receive his replacement for Monroe?”

  Callender nodded. The Directory in Paris had ended the bloody revolutionaries’ Reign of Terror; supported by Napoleon Bonaparte and guided by the diplomat Talleyrand, the new French government had rejected the credentials of Adams’s ambassador as a Federalist too favorable to the British. The new American President, not wanting to become embroiled inthe war between Britain and France, had consulted Hamilton, who Callender was sure controlled the Adams Cabinet from behind the scenes. Hamilton suggested a delegation of three eminent Americans led by John Marshall be sent to Paris to assure Talleyrand of our neutrality. Adams took that advice and dispatched the delegation; the nation had been anxiously awaiting word from them for months.

  “The ship with their report to the President will soon arrive,” Lyon confided. “The documents are in code. A seaman just in from France, a member of the United Irish, tells me the report contains a great shock.”

  “If it’s good news for Adams,” Callender said, worried, “making him look like a great diplomat avoiding a war, he’ll make it public right away.”

  “That’s my thought, too. But if it’s bad news, he’ll keep it secret. Our good French ally complained bitterly about the way we’ve been helping the damned English in their war, with Hamilton and the New York bankers makin’ money on the side. I can’t be certain, but I’m bettin’ Adams will want to keep Marshall’s report quiet because it makes our friends in France look good and his friends in Britain look bad. You be the first to find out what’s in those dispatches, James me boy, and you’ll have yourself grist for your mill.”

  Chapter 9

  March 4, 1798

  PHILADELPHIA

  Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott, like all of Adams’s Cabinet a holdover from service with President Washington, had never seen a Chief Magistrate so visibly upset. The agitated Adams smacked his fist on the deciphered documents, strode about the room set aside by Congress for the President’s office, and fulminated at the insulting French.

  “To me there appears no alternative—none!—between actual hostilities on our part and national ruin.”

  At this angrily expressed intention of asking for a declaration of war, Wolcott wondered what Hamilton would want him to advise. He suggested a middle course: “Perhaps we could adopt a policy of qualified hostility.”

  Adams wasn’t listening. “What an insult! You know, the republicans brought this on us,” the President said. “By professions of unqualified devotion to the French Republic, Jefferson and Monroe and that crowd encouraged Paris to believe a majority of Americans preferred the French government to their own. They’ll be terribly embarrassed by this, and deservedly so.”

  Wolcott nodded agreement; that was the long-held opinion of Hamilton, whose idea it had been to send the Virginia Federalist John Marshall, accompanied by Charles Pinckney and Elbridge Gerry, to France on this mission of amelioration. Anticipating France’s continued arrogance, Hamilton had even suggested sending Jefferson’s man Madison, but that intellectual worthy wanted no association with the Adams Administration.

  “Those French,” Adams went on, bounding about the room, “with their cabals and corruptions, their employment of profligate printers and prostituted newspapers here. I tell you, if war is not to be declared, then we should at least pass a law prohibiting all commerce, intercourse and correspondence with France and all its dominions in every part of the world, upon penalty of treason!”

  With his step back from war, Adams was apparently calming down. “I like that approach,” said Wolcott, reflecting what he assumed would be Hamilton’s moderate view, “because a recommendation to Congress for a declaration of war would require us to make public these extremely embarrassing documents. If we did that, France’s Directory would surely react and perhaps endanger the lives of our commissioners.”

  Adams sat down glumly. “Abigail compares the three of them to Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, sitting in the fiery furnace. Yes, they are potential hostages. We have to consider their safety if all this gets out.” He flicked at the decoded documents with nervous fingers. “By God, it’s humiliating.”

  “Let me draft a statement expressing your disappointment and resolve,” Wolcott offered.

  “Sure. Say the correspondence offered no expectation that the mission can be accomplished on terms compatible with the honor or essential interests of the nation, some pap like that.”

  “Exactly,” said Wolcott, relieved.

  “You know, it’s a very painful thing for me to hold back these dispatches,” Adams said. “The people deserve to know the baseness of the French behavior.”

  Wolcott recognized that making public the commissioners’ report would inflame public sentiment against the French. It recounted how three French intermediaries—identified mysteriously as X, Y and Z—had sought huge bribes from the American envoys before they could even begin negotiations with Talleyrand. The arrant corruption would surely cause great consternation among the Jefferson men and their lackeys in the press who had been foolishly hounding Adams to favor France. But France’s Directory had already announced its intention to seize all neutral ships carrying goods made in England, which had devastated American shipping out of Boston and New York. This latest insult would pour salt in the wound, offending the nation’s pride in all regions. Wolcott considered the moment ripe to put forward the first element of Hamilton’s plan: “We could respond to France’s seizure of our ships by arming our merchant vessels.”

  “President Washington didn’t want to do that.”

  “But you’re President now and circumstances have changed.”

  Adams paced back and forth, looked out the window at the rain, returned to his writing table and smacked his palm down on it. “We cannot do nothing if they seize our ships. We’ll arm the merchantmen. Put that in the statement.”

  Wolcott went on: “The second step would be to buy and build warships. And then, if the threat continues to grow from a Europe at war, you could create a standing army.”

  Adams winced. A navy would require new taxes, but the people might hold still for the building of ships to protect the nation’s interest on the high seas. But Americans did not like the idea of a standing army; soldiers too close to home reminded many of the British occupiers. “That would require money. Taxation. Public opinion would have to be prepared.”

  Wolcott presumed Adams was thinking that the only way Americans would tolerate a standing army would be under the command of General Washington, now retired to Mount Vernon. Adams, who had spent a lifetime in Washington’s shadow, would not want to be further beholden to him.

  “You could send an emissary to Mount Vernon,” he suggested tentatively.

  “You know I love and revere the man,” Adams said. “But it is his humanity only that I admire. In his divinity I never believed.” The President seemed to force himself to be calm. “He possesses the gift of silence. One of Washington’s precious talents is a great self-command. To preserve so much equanimity as he does requires a great capacity.” He as much as admitted it was not in him.

  Wolcott knew what lay behind Hamilton’s plan. The need for a standing armed force, requiring General Washington at its head, would surely lead to the General’s appointment of a man with military experience in the Revolution to be his chief of staff. That man would be Alexander Hamilton, always Washington’s favorite. That would be the New Yorker’s way to breathe new life into his political fortunes. By patriotically answering the call of military duty, he would wash away the sins of the Reynolds affair.

  Adams, deflated, his coat unbuttoned, stared at the pile of decoded dis patches. He recalled to his Treasury Secretary how closely guarded the text had been of the treaty with Britain negotiated by John Jay. Only a few Senators were allowed a copy, but its ensuing appearance on the pages of the republican sheet Aurora had caused an outcry that only George Washington’s prestige could overcome. Adams did not have su
ch standing with all the people, or even with all his fellow Federalists.

  The President silently gathered up the pages and put them under his arm to place them in a locked file. Lest France’s slap in America’s face inflame the unarmed nation with war fever, he determined that the public would not see his envoys’ account of the XYZ affair. He passed up the temptation to embarrass Jefferson, Monroe and all the other Francophile republicans. Wolcott, often troubled by Adams’s tendency to explode in anger, in this case had to admire his statesmanship and good sense.

  “But I shall resist a recommendation that Hamilton be commissioned,” Adams, as if reading his Treasury Secretary’s mind, made clear. “This shall not be made the headquarters of fornication, adultery, incest, libeling, and electioneering intrigue.”

  Wolcott withdrew, shaking his head. He had heard all the others for years, but incest? What rumor had Abigail Adams heard and told her husband about Angelica Church, Hamilton’s beautiful and flirtatious sister-in-law? Wolcott rejected the idea out of hand; that would be too much. And Adams, if Washington insisted on Hamilton as his chief aide, would surely come around.

  March 11, 1798

  PHILADELPHIA

  Benjamin Franklin Bache, the editor that Cobbett had dubbed “Young Lightning Rod” to demean both the young man and the scientific findings of his philandering grandfather and namesake, took ill. He placed James Callender in charge of his Aurora for all of March 1798. Jefferson’s friends supplied Bache the money to pay him.

  Fully employed for the first time in nearly a year, Callender not only reported the shipping news and edited the incoming correspondence from abroad, but wrote the opinion editorials as well, with no one to restrain him. Busy, productive, earning $10 a week for engaging in provocative polemics, he was in his element.