“ ‘The damning facts of your ingratitude’ ”: From the Richmond Examiner of Aug. 14, 1802. At that time, Coleman of the New York Evening Post and other Northern editors were reprinting JTC stories of subsidy by Jefferson for attacks on Washington and Adams. The New York Herald wrote: “It must be allowed that [Callender] certainly has a faculty at ‘hitting that particular knack, which is the soul of a newspaper.’ ” See Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, p. 155-156.
“It pays only two dollars a day”: From Berkeley and Berkeley, p. 239.
Maria was troubled by the surprise visit: The internal monologue of Maria Clement is my speculation about what took place in her life in 1791. In vol. 2, p. 142, of his Hamilton biography, Robert Hendrickson asks, “When and where did Hamilton first meet James and Maria Reynolds? When did his affair with her really begin?” He answers: “Circumstantial evidence places their first meeting well before her 1791 summer visitation to his house[,] the time Hamilton suggests.” Her association with both Hamilton and his political rival, Burr, may well have begun in New York, as her husband Reynolds first made contact with Hamilton there and followed him to Philadelphia.
Soon afterward, Burr also moved to Philadelphia, as New York Senator. Hendrickson does not agree with Jefferson scholar Julian Boyd that Hamilton forged Maria’s illiterate letters to conceal his dealings with her husband, but suggests instead (p. 157) that Burr helped the illicit romance along to ensnare Hamilton.
My interpretation makes Maria the victim of Hamilton’s need for a defense, and perhaps the willing subject of Burr’s manipulation. In light of the Grotjan memoir, excerpted later in these notes, it seems to me a more reasonable reading of the conflicting evidence than one that simplistically condemns her as a blackmailing whore.
“And massa Jefferson shall hab de black”: Port Folio, Philadelphia, July 10, 1802.
Chapter 37
“Letter IV to J. T. Callender”: William Duane’s letter to JTC in the Aurora, August 25, 1802.
“It’s from Thomas Leiper”: The letter from Leiper is fictional. The Callender children, however, did not join their father.
“In the summer of 1798”: JTC letter asking Dr. Reynolds to tell the truth about his wife’s terminal illness in Richmond Recorder, Sept. 22, 1802.
“To charge a man as a thief ”: Based on the May 28, 1803, Richmond Recorder, cited more specifically in chap. 44 excerpt from Recorder of that day.
Chapter 38
“It is well known”: Richmond Recorder, Sept. 1, 1802.
“Come forth thou hideous and fateful mortal”: Richmond Examiner, Sept. 25, 1802.
“Long ago he told me”: TJ wrote this to Samuel Smith on Aug. 22, 1798.
“Jones says there is some person”: Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, p. 161, citing Richmond Examiner, Sept. 1, Sept. 15, and Nov. 6, 1802. After Pace and Callender signed affidavits that Chief Justice Marshall had never been to their offices and was not a subscriber, the Examiner’s Jones hinted that Marshall himself was “not invulnerable” to charges of miscegenation similar to those Callender made against Jefferson.
Chapter 39
“You cannot say this about her”: The dialogue between JTC and Maria in this chapter is fictional.
“Depend upon it, sir”: Richmond Recorder, Sept. 22, 1802.
“The diminutive of Sara is Sally”: Brodie, p. 540. n. 28.
“Here’s a verse”: Brodie, pp. 540-541, n. 57. John Quincy Adams was embarrassed in the campaign of 1828 when his authorship of this verse was disclosed.
“When pressed by loads of state affairs”: From the Boston Gazette, n.d., reproduced in Peterson, p. 708.
Chapter 40
Monroe strode through the two-storied entrance hall: Room and furniture descriptions from Susan R. Stein, The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (New York, 1993), pp. 88-92.
“An excessive soreness all over”: TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, Oct. 7,1802.
“The day that France takes possession”: TJ to R. R. Livingston, April 18, 1802.
“With the aid of a lying renegade”: TJ to R. R. Livingston, Oct. 10, 1802.
“There cannot be a doubt”: Ibid.
“I shall take no other revenge”: TJ to Levi Lincoln, Oct. 25, 1802.
“Nothing can now be believed”: TJ to John Norvell, June 11, 1807
“Sometimes accident gives us”: This statement was written by TJ in January 1776 about King George III, and it is a fictional stretch to put it in his mouth in October 1802, but the ironies are in the fire. See Boyd, vol. 1, pp. 283-284, and 284 n.
Chapter 41
Staggering up the path: For an account of George Hay’s bludgeoning of JTC, see Steven H. Hochman’s “On the Liberty of the Press in Virginia” article in Virginia Magazine of History (1976), pp. 437-440; the Richmond Examiner, Dec. 29, 1802; and Aurora, Jan. 5, 1803.
“If the torch of the press”: Callender, Richmond Recorder, Dec. 29, 1802
“For three months now”: Callender, Richmond Recorder, Sept. 1, 1802. This was in response to Duane’s charge in the Aurora of infecting his wife with a loathsome disease, and appeared in the issue in which JTC broke the story of Sally Hemings. The metaphor “artillery of the press” was picked up by Jefferson in his Second Inaugural Address.
JTC-Maria dialogue: Fiction.
Chapter 42
Maria Clement at Betsey Walker’s: A fictional scene; Maria and Betsey never met. The first mention of the Walker affair appeared in Bronson’s Gazette of the United States, and was picked up and developed into a national scandal by Callender.
The account of young Jefferson’s attempt to seduce his best friend’s wife, an act he later admitted was “incorrect,” is in Brodie, pp. 73-79, and 374-375,which includes John Walker’s complete 1805 letter to Harry Lee telling his story of TJ’s years of harassment of Betsey Walker. In Charles Royster’s 1981 biography Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution, the historian writes: “He drafted John Walker’s first-person narrative of Mrs. Walker’s charges that Jefferson had propositioned her repeatedly for eleven years . . . In later years, when John Marshall tried to explain the sources of ‘the bitterness displayed’ toward Lee in Jefferson’s writings, Marshall included among its causes ‘the part he took in the affair of Mrs. Walker.’ ”
Dumas Malone, in Jefferson the Virginian, (Boston, 1950), p. 97, and in the later Jefferson the President, First Term, pp. 216-219, derided the Walker letter as “a disgusting tale which bore the marks of wilful exaggeration . . . all we can be sure of is that Jefferson made advances of some sort to his neighbor’s wife . . .” Schachner, Thomas Jefferson, has a balanced account, pp. 762-766.
Chapter 43
“When Muhlenberg and I were investigating”: William Armistead Burwell, who succeeded Meriwether Lewis as Jefferson’s secretary, wrote a memoir in 1808, on file in the Library of Congress, in which he noted that Jefferson “told me the affair had long been known & that Hamilton about the time he was attacked for his connection with Mrs. Reynolds had threatened him with a public disclosure.” See Gerard W. Gawalt, “Strict Truth: the Narrative of William Armistead Burwell,” Virginia Magazine, Jan. 1993, p. 120.
“he never should have transmitted money”: Based on Madison to Monroe, Nov. 2, 1801: “General Mason has just requested me to forward the enclosed 100 dollars to be put in the hands of Mr. S. Pleasants for Mr. Callender.”
“I plead guilty to one of his charges”: Burwell memoir, Library of Congress, p 119.
“These people,” said the President: TJ to John Walker, April 13, 1803.
Chapter 44
Recorder article: This chapter is taken 85 percent verbatim from the Richmond Recorder of October 27, 1802.
PART IV: THE LIBEL SCANDAL
Chapter 45
“a concealed voluptuary”: Sept. 29, 1792, Syrett, vol. 12, p.504.
“whispers that I have heard”: Hendrickson, vol. 2, p. 401.
“Which you will display prominently”: Ibid., p. 591.
“There is not a syllable”: A. Hamilton, Federalist Papers, 84.
Chapter 46
The gathering at Madison’s: The action in this episode stretched to 1806 but is telescoped here to a scene in 1803. Most documents concerning the Walker affair were destroyed, but Harry Lee kept some records; his son, Robert E. Lee, four decades later, recounted the matter to President Tyler.
“I think the affair”: Madison to Monroe, April 20, 1803, parts in code.
“I have been used”: TJ to Peregrine Fitzhugh, Feb. 23, 1798.
“It says, ‘Time, silence’ ”: TJ to John Walker, copy certified on May 13, 1806 by James Madison (for Jefferson) and John Marshall (for Walker). The copy is at the Virginia Historical Society; the original, as well as other letters about this affair, were destroyed, probably deliberately.
“If Callender of the Recorder”: Ibid.
“With respect to the New England Bee”: Ibid.
“The present occasion, however”: Ibid.
“When young and single”: On July 5, 1805, TJ wrote the agreed-upon letter to his Attorney General, Levi Lincoln, with a copy to Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith. The original letter disappeared or was destroyed, but the covering note to Smith remains: “The enclosed copy of a letter to Mr. Lincoln will so fully explain its own object, that I need say nothing in that way. I communicate it to particular friends because I wish to stand with them on the ground of truth, neither better nor worse than that makes me. You will perceive that I plead guilty to one of their charges, that when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknowledge its incorrectness. It is the only one founded in truth among all their allegations against me.”
Although some historians include the Sally Hemings charge among “all their allegations,” and thus construe it to mean that Jefferson denied his relationship with her, a narrower construction holds that he referred only to the several charges made by John Walker, including an accusation that TJ forged a letter about an old debt to Walker’s father, his guardian. TJ admitted only making a pass at Betsey Walker, and did not admit any other of Walker’s charges. He was silent about the Callender story of Sally Hemings, which was no part of this business.
See also his secretary William Burwell’s memoir, Library of Congress: “what Mr. J. declared to me.” TJ told him, “It however gave him great pain, & it was only by his knowledge that Mrs. W. herself countenanced the publication in the N.P. [the New-England Palladium in 1806] his sensibility ceased.”
“You know how I feel”: TJ to Judge Tyler, 1804, Foley, p. 717.
“Then why is it”: TJ to William Short, Jan. 23, 1804.
“That is why I have never contradicted”: TJ to Thomas Seymour, Feb. 11, 1807.
“We have come to a dangerous state”: TJ to Thomas McKean, Feb. 19, 1803. TJ wrote the republican Governor of Pennsylvania whose judiciary had successfully driven Cobbett out of the country: “The press ought to be restored to its credibility if possible. The restraints provided by the laws of the states are sufficient for this if applied. And I have therefore long thought that a few prosecutions of the most prominent offenders would have a wholesome effect in restoring the integrity of the presses. Not a general prosecution, for that would look like persecution, but a selected one . . .”
He enclosed a paper that seemed to him “to offer as good an instance in every respect to make an example of.” Dumas Malone suggests, in Jefferson the President, First Term, p. 230, it was the Port Folio of Philadelphia, which was ultimately charged with a libel. That was the magazine that first hinted in dialect poetry at his miscegenation. Malone, a most sympathetic biographer, wrote “the counsel he gave Governor McKean marked the lowest point of his faith and the highest of his fears in his first term.”
Chapter 47
“Cobbett appears to be attacking”: Most of the quotations attributed to JTC in this part of the chapter are from the Richmond Recorder of Nov. 17, 1802.
felo-de-se: Latin for “a crime against oneself,” or suicide.
“one code of morality for a public man:” TJ to De Feronda, Oct. 4, 1809, in Mott, p. 24.
“a fair mark for every man’s dirt”: TJ to Peregrine Fitzhugh, Feb. 23, 1798.
JTC and Maria: This final scene in the chapter is fictional.
Chapter 48
Harison and Hamilton at the Grange: Richard Harison (one r), a Tory loyalist during the Revolution and former U.S. Attorney for New York, was the Hamilton law partner who worked with him on the Croswell defense.
With the exception of p. 402—“Surely it is not an immaterial thing . . . It will be a glorious triumph for truth,” which is from the Croswell trial record—all the dialogue in this chapter is fictional. Its purpose is to provide the reader with the reasoning behind the arguments later presented at trial.
Hamilton worked behind the scenes with William Van Ness, lawyer for Harry Croswell, editor of the Wasp, in the trial; later, Hamilton appeared as lead counsel in the appeal. To intensify the drama and to save space, I telescope trial and appeal into one scene.
Hamilton participated in planning to bring Callender up to New York to testify to the truth of the matter charged as a libel. Thomas J. Fleming, writing “Verdicts of History IV: ‘A Scandalous, Malicious and Seditious Libel’ ” in American Heritage, Dec. 1967, noted: “The defense now made a most significant motion—a request for postponement in order to bring from Virginia James Callender himself, who would testify to the truth of the libel. Attorney General Spencer sprang to his feet, quivering like a wire. Under no circumstances would he tolerate such a procedure.”
The description of the Grange and its financing: From Brookhiser 1999 biography of AH, p. 204.
“And he sent those Carolina paroquets”: Ibid.
Chapter 49
More distressing to him: This is my analysis of the political choices available to Burr in mid-1803. His own papers were later lost at sea, and after his exile in England and his return to the U.S. he wrote no memoir. That is one reason that so much of his biography is guesswork. Judgments about his character during the period of this novel (1792-1803) were largely based on Washington’s coolness toward the youthful Burr’s “intrigues,” Jefferson’s suspicion of his passivity in the 1801 election, and Hamilton’s unalloyed hatred of a personal and political rival. Through these years, Madison and Monroe regarded Burr highly, but because of Jefferson’s antipathy, not publicly.
The deal was struck for 80 million francs: Napoleon’s distress sale of Western America was a property blunder greater than the apocryphal sale of Manhattan Island by the Indians.
“The James River packet”: Fictional dialogue, with comments about her daughter Susan’s enrollment in a Boston seminary based on the recollections in the Grotjan memoir at the end of these notes. William Van Ness, then twenty-seven, was a Burr partner and protégé. He worked with Hamilton on the Croswell libel case and later served as Burr’s second in a duel at Weehawken, N.J.
Maria, Burr, Van Ness meeting: Fiction.
Chapter 50
Circumstances of JTC’s drowning and burial: Historical conjecture. Hamilton biographer Hendrickson writes in vol. 2, p. 600: “A hastily impaneled coroner’s jury found that James Thomson Callender had been drowned—in water three feet deep. His many enemies did not mind saying that the corpse was found face down ‘in congenial mud.’ They added that it had been drunk. He was buried the same day in Richmond Churchyard, though if any burial record were made, it has disappeared . . . No one in town seemed to give much credence to the coroner’s verdict of accidental death by drowning. Most seemed to take it for granted that Callender’s sudden demise had been hastily arranged and hushed up as some kind of a cover-up.”
Callender biographer Michael Durey disagrees, finding the murder theory unlikely. “Callender’s life was certainly miserable enough by then to suggest suicide as a possibility,” he writes me from Australia, “but on balance I prefer the obvious (non-conspiracy theory) answer: he drowned while dead drunk. He was cert
ainly seen wandering around drunk earlier that night.”
“He was endowed by nature”: This and subsequent quotes of Meriwether Jones, from the Richmond Examiner, July 27, 1803.
Chapter 51
“The People versus Harry Croswell”: The most detailed account of the Croswell appeal in Claverack, Columbia County, New York, was by George Caines, associate counsel to New York State Attorney General Ambrose Spencer. He printed his own prepared remarks verbatim and summarized the arguments of the others in a pamphlet titled The Speeches At Full Length of Mr. Van Ness, Mr. Caines, the Attorney General, Mr. Harrison [sic] and GENERAL HAMILTON in the Great Cause of the PEOPLE against Harry Croswell, on an indictment for LIBEL on THOMAS JEFFERSON. President of the United States. It was printed in 1804 and reprinted by the Arno Press in 1970 from a copy in the Rutgers University Library Rare Book Collection.
For dramatic simplicity’s sake, I have incorporated Mr. Caine’s remarks in the speeches of Attorney General Spencer. An even greater liberty with the facts was taken in compressing the Croswell trial and subsequent appeal into one scene. Judge Morgan Lewis presided at both. William Van Ness represented Croswell at the trial, though Hamilton and Harison helped in his preparation; after the trial jury found Croswell guilty of libel, Hamilton, with Harison and Van Ness, argued the appeal.
No verbatim transcript exists of this historic appeal. Caine’s notes (excepting his own speeches, herein put into Spencer’s mouth) are summaries. Because Hamilton spoke for hours longer than a reading of these notes indicate, I have felt free to set Hamilton’s arguments in a more organized sequence, and to rearrange some sentences. I do not add to Hamilton’s words nor tamper with the substance of his speech before the court.
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 56
