“The Governor himself? You know me too well to suppose I am puffed up by all of this. When I was last in Halifax,” the somewhat puffed-up Englishman recalled, “I helped, as a soldier on fatigue duty, to drag the baggage from the wharf to the barracks. And when my Nancy was there last, she was employed in assisting her poor mother to wash soldiers’ shirts.”
Nancy Cobbett stood dutifully beside her husband on the wharf, her hands holding those of her son and daughter. She thought of Halifax, their first stop on the trip back to England, and that called to mind the first time she laid eyes on her husband-to-be. He was twenty-four, already a sergeant-major, stationed at Saint John in New Brunswick, keeping the company’s books and teaching himself the rudiments of English and French grammar. She was thirteen, daughter of a sergeant in the Royal Artillery. It was in the dead of winter, with the snow several feet deep on the ground, at first light in the morning. He was walking briskly up the hill to the barracks with two friends, and saw her standing in the snow scrubbing out a washing-tub. Their eyes met for a long moment, and as the men walked past, she heard him say, “That’s the girl for me.”
Years later, William told her he never had a thought of her being the wife of any other man, “any more than I had thought of you being transformed into a chest of drawers. I formed my resolution at once to marry you as soon as I could get permission,” he said in his unwavering way, “and to get out of the army as soon as I could.” They had to part when her father was transferred back to England, and William gave her 150 guineas, all his savings, to keep her from doing heavy work as a housemaid while they were separated.
That separation lasted four long years, whilst she never looked at another young man; when William finally was discharged and came across the Atlantic to claim her, she was able to hand him back the money unbroken, as she had drudged to save for their first home. Although she could then neither read nor write, in loyalty and industriousness she felt they were much alike. She knew his mixed feelings today about leaving America, where he had succeeded and yet failed, and where they had heartbrokenly buried two infants but happily could bring two healthy children back with them.
Her husband had a few remarks ready for the crowd on the dock. About fifty Tories, twice that number of hooting republican ruffians from Tammany Hall, and fifty police protectors had come to the shipside to await the Arabella’s sailing.
“As I have long felt the perfect indifference to the majority of the people here”—Cobbett’s opening met with a chorus of catcalls—“I shall spare myself the trouble of a ceremonious farewell. Let me, however, not part from you in indiscriminating contempt.” More boos.
“If no man ever had so many and such malignant foes, no one ever had more faithful friends. If the savages of the city have scared the children in their cradle, these children have been soothed and caressed by the affectionate, gentle and generous inhabitants of this country.” Nancy drew the children closer to her, and the noise stopped.
“In a very little time,” he said in his gruff voice, “I shall be beyond the reach of your friendship and your malice. But being out of your power will alter neither my sentiments nor my words. As I have never spoken anything but truth to you, so I will never speak anything but truth of you. The heart of a Briton revolts at an emulation of your baseness, and although you have as a nation treated me most unjustly, I scorn to repay you with injustice.”
He turned to the Tories whose loyalty he shared. “To my friends, I wish that peace and happiness which I greatly fear they will not find. And to you lot”—he faced the surly Tammany crowd—“I wish you no greater scourge than that which you are preparing for your country.
“With this I depart for my native land, where neither the moth of Democracy nor the rust of Federalism doth corrupt, and where thieves do not, with impunity, break through and steal five thousand dollars at a time.”
As the crowd applauded and jeered, Consul Thornton, standing near her, said something that struck Nancy as curious: “And the hungry wolf trots back to the woods.”
Chapter 32
August 15, 1801
RICHMOND
Callender was relieved that Maria took the initiative to put their time together on a regular schedule.
“I could spend every Saturday here with you, James,” she said, drinking her tea in his room, a candle on the writing table between them. “And most evenings during the week, you would be most welcome to take dinner with me in the kitchen of the doctor’s house.”
At the nadir of his harsh existence, Callender found it hard to comprehend such gentle stroking of good fortune. A beautiful and statuesque woman, raised in gentility but accustomed to hard work, had unaccountably befriended him. Though the world had believed the slander of her name by a man of great power, Callender was one of the few who believed that she had been unfairly maligned. He had championed her cause before they had ever met, for reasons of his own, but now was more certain than ever that she was courageously honest. He began to let himself think of her as an experienced mother who could one day provide a loving home for his long-boarded children. This unknown presence from the heyday of his career had appeared, like an unfrightening apparition, to rescue him from the helplessness of despair. Maria was offering to share her company, her good food—and, once a week, he hoped, his bed—in an association with a solitary, itinerant writer who had no friends in power or prospects of success. The notion that she requited his love, or at least shared his need for affection and companionship in a place of refuge, stunned and exhilarated him.
“I will never take a glass of rum alone again and I will bathe in hot water every week,” he volunteered in all sincerity. “I will give up newsmongering for good work like teaching, or the law. I am also a fair carpenter.”
Maria Lewis Reynolds Clingman, now going by the name of Maria Clement, formerly of New York and Philadelphia and London, smiled. Her smile, less an expression of mirth than an overcoming of sadness, stirred his hopes and made him feel less like a man standing on a trapdoor. She did not take up his promise to change.
“You will continue to be the man you are,” she told him. “You believed me when nobody else did, long before you befriended me. Now we will protect each other, and my daughter and your sons.”
He had absorbed the story of her life into his own. Her second husband, Jacob Clingman, had fallen in with a swindler in London as predatory and clumsy as James Reynolds had been in America. The weak young fellow was now in Newgate Prison and Maria was well and truly finished with him. She had brought her daughter back with her the year before and again sought the aid of her attorney and friend, Colonel Burr. That generous man had arranged for the religious education of young Susan at a Boston seminary and found a respectable position for Maria with Dr. Mathew as his housekeeper and factotum in Richmond.
“You know I sent the whole two-hundred-dollar fine they finally repaid me up to Francis Leiper.” His snuffmaker friend had fallen into financial difficulty with the drop in the price of tobacco, and that money, plus Jefferson’s fifty dollars, did not cover the board for the four boys for the two years. Even if it had, his room above Henry Pace’s printing shop did not have living space for his youngsters. “And little, pasty-faced Jemmy Madison, our great Secretary of State, told me to forget about being postmaster. He said I made too many enemies while fighting for Jefferson, and my appointment would upset the Federalists here.” He embellished the rejection a little. “He gave me to believe they look down on me as a radical immigrant who has never been to a dancing master.”
“I won’t tell you not to be bitter, James.”
He understood that was her way of telling him not to be bitter. She had as great an occasion for bitterness as he, but did not seem to hate anybody, not even Hamilton. On impulse, he leaned across his writing table to kiss her cheek, and she turned her head slightly to meet his lips with her own. In all his married years and after, he had never done anything so romantically impulsive. He prided himself on being a dour Scot and Calvinist
moralist, in whose world such impulsive expressions of pleasure were frowned upon. He was determined to maintain, cherish and refine his political bitterness, because the ingrates for whose cause he went to jail had, on assuming power, betrayed him. And a ready supply of spite would add necessary pungency to his prose. But Callender vowed to force back his bile for the time being: above all, he would make an effort not to let it show to the woman who had re-introduced tenderness into his life.
Callender was hopeful, however, that Maria’s suggestion meant that they would be living in sin. That both excited and troubled him. Not that he cared what Virginians thought of his morals, because the sexual carousing of the Virginia gentry with their slave women after the lascivious dances made hypocrites of them all. But living together out of wedlock for any length of time would offend God’s law, invite the hellfire, and set a bad moral example for his boys and Maria’s daughter.
Two weeks before, here in this room, they had consummated their love. He had never dared to imagine himself entwined with a woman so beautiful, passionate and gentle. Though embarrassingly clumsy the first time he had made love since his wife’s death, he improved on the second Saturday and tonight he felt comfortable that his manliness would match her womanliness. Though he was not sure he deserved her, he was sure that neither of them deserved to be alone; besides, they were old friends in an odd way because their lives had intersected long before they met. Marriage to Maria, of course, was not possible now; any divorce from a man across the ocean would surely take years and more expense than they could afford.
“I will not be bitter,” he said. He was ready to promise anything.
“ ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,’ and is not for mortal man to seek on earth.”
“Your writing is best when you are angry,” she said. He was glad she did not take his no-bitterness pledge too seriously. “And the Federalist press still blames you for bringing down Hamilton and President Adams. You won’t respond to the terrible things they write?”
“I have declared a truce. The battle is over. I’ll forget old scores.” At least until the next election campaign. Or until the time he had a newspaper of his own, when his work would not be under the control of editors like Bache or Duane of the Aurora in Philadelphia, or Jones of the Examiner here.
“Your enemies may not be so forgiving,” she said. “You know Hamilton as well as I do. He has a newspaper now.”
The New York Evening Post had already suggested that Jefferson had been the source of Callender’s exposé of Hamilton. That speculation, though annoying, was true. But what bothered Callender more now was what was untrue: Hamilton’s pretense four years ago that he had been seduced and then blackmailed by Maria in 1792. That was a screen of smoke to conceal his financial dealing with her husband Reynolds, but the clinging stigma of shame was the reason Maria lived under an assumed name and her daughter had to be cloistered in a seminary. He put out of his mind the possibility that any assignation between Hamilton and Maria might have taken place.
“I shall place another article in the Richmond Examiner,” he decided. Meriwether Jones was still paying him a pittance for his writing, but it was the only money he could earn. Jones had made plain to him that any whisper of his support by Jefferson through the years would end even that small stipend; that meant he was being paid for what he tacitly agreed not to write. “It will be an open letter to my old foes, even more conciliatory than the one I wrote a little while back. I will quote Scripture: ‘The righteous shall rest from their labors, and their works shall follow them.’ The Federalists are determined that my works, righteous or not, follow me, and they bandy my name about. In the name of charity, I will ask those good folks to let me alone.”
“And if they do, James—unlikely, I fear—what will there be for you to be angry enough to write about?”
“Not politicks.” Now that the smoke of the campaign had cleared, he was beginning to think that the difference between the factions was not as important as he had thought. The weakness and moral ambiguity of men in the seat of power—whether radical commoners or royalist aristocrats—was more at the root of the trouble with government. Men as much as measures needed constant monitoring. “Tom Paine wrote that government, at best, is a choice of evils, a complex constable hired to keep the peace and nothing more. He argued that government is to society what a bridle is to a horse, or a dose of salts to the human body.” What a pleasure it was for him to talk like this to a woman who understood it.
Maria rose and cleared their cups off the table, placing them on the pewter lining of his dry sink. She moved toward the sleeping alcove and motioned for him to wait before following her.
He waited for her to undress, explaining, “That is why both parties bear a great deal of watching, but it is not something that I have to do. There is not a prodigious difference between the moral characters of one party and the other. Individual leaders matter more. Washington, despite what I wrote at the time, was a great—that is, necessary—man.” That reminded him of Dr. Rush and the bleeding of the General. Another thought followed of Cobbett’s warning not to let Rush’s associate, Dr. James Reynolds, no kin to Maria’s husband, treat Callender’s dying wife for the yellow fever. Wrong memory for the moment.
“When I do get back to writing for newspapers,” he said, blowing out the candle and stripping off his clothes, “it will be about the wrongs being done all around us. The gambling, for example.” He climbed into the narrow bed beside her, feeling the warmth of her skin and the length of her legs in the darkness against his hard body. “Do you have any idea how much these people gamble, and how many duels it causes? Can you imagine what all the evil associated with gambling debt does to their morality?” He felt her fingers on his lips and he quieted.
Chapter 33
December 17, 1801
RICHMOND
“I cannot make a success óf my Recorder,” its editor, Henry Pace, told Callender. “There are not enough Federalists here any more to support a newspaper. Jones at the Examiner, with all his crowing about the wonders of Jefferson and republican government, is driving me out of business. You must help. I need readers.”
The Scot was pleased at the compliment. Pace had come from England two years before, running from sedition charges there, a good credential for a newsmonger. Callender thought him to be a capable enough printer but with no idea of the soul of a newspaper. His Richmond Recorder, or Lady’s and Gentleman’s Miscellany was lifeless. Its columns lay inert on the page, creating no talk among its readers, no response from its subjects. Nobody felt required to read it lest they miss news that their neighbors would know. The Recorder lacked the spice of controversy and, unlike Jones’s Examiner, shied away from personalities.
“I’m no Federalist, as you are, Henry,” Callender said, glad to be starting a negotiation. He needed the work. An occasional item to pay for the right to sleep upstairs was no longer enough.
The Examiner had cut him off. Callender presumed that its editor, Jones, a longtime admirer of Jefferson, no longer thought he posed a threat to the new administration. Perhaps Monroe had passed the word that the rejected Scot was so impressed with the popularity of the new regime that he no longer needed subsistence as a writer, much less his due reward of postmaster. Though Callender had a score to settle with the republican leaders, he was not about to adopt Federalist principles that he had fought against so fiercely for so long.
“I just want to sell enough newspapers,” said Pace, “to let me make a profit on my printing business. Everybody knows your name and you can write like Porcupine himself. Become my partner in the Recorder.”
They struck what Callender considered his first fair deal in business: each would draw $15 dollars a week and share any profit from the newspaper. Pace, who put up all the capital, would keep all the additional printing profit that the newspaper would bring to his press.
“We shall neither calumniate nor flatter men in office,” Callender said, sitting at a table to writ
e his opening announcement. “We shall neither defame nor worship men who are out of office.”
His new partner was dubious at the careful balance. “What will we do, then, to gain a readership?”
“The public will soon see,” his new partner assured him, “that from whatever political or commercial quarter deceit and falsehood may come, it shall be our ambition to blast them with—” He paused: The hammer of truth? He had used that metaphor before, but you did not blast with a hammer. “—blast them with the lightning of truth.” He swung into a rhythm of rhetoric long familiar to him. “We have no personal obligations to any party, though we are willing, if need be, to contend for political principles. We shall never prostrate ourselves to the fanaticks of either party.”
“That’s good to say,” said the printer, “but don’t we have to ally ourselves to readers on one side or the other?”
“The game is in the middle now,” Callender instructed, “and each side offers little to oppose except in the way they use their power. I’m known to be a republican, but of the sort that challenges tyranny from any source to inflict its utmost, and never to flinch.” If an angry mob came around with torches to burn down the press, Callender knew, he would flinch soon enough—physical bravery was for soldiers and fools—but in the Recorder, he would invite attacks in print from other newsmongers. Those angry builders of circulation he would prominently reprint, and wear the most vituperative of them as a badge of honor. “If we seem to bear hardest on the men presently in office,” he wrote fluidly, “it is only because they are more formidable and dangerous than their defeated adversaries.” He thought a moment and penned a line that expressed his new credo: “Neither the Ins nor the Outs ever deserve implicit confidence.”
First as a pamphleteer, and later as an occasional writer for the Aurora and the Examiner, he had always been restrained by an owner’s hand. Now, with the printer Henry Pace needing him and giving him carte blanche, he could express himself freely every week. He was no longer merely the submitter of copy, but the editor who decided what would appear.
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 35
