By this wench Sally, our president has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighbourhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it.… 16

  Annette Gordon-Reed describes Callender’s tack as his series of attacks progressed as “accusing Thomas Jefferson of something on the order of bestiality,” what with his reference to the supposed offspring of this liaison as a “litter,” his invocation of a “pigstye,” etc.17

  Callender in the end said that he would be happy to go to court (as defendant in a libel suit) to prove the truth of his allegations about Jefferson. For obvious political reasons Jefferson maintained a stony silence on the matter. He did, however, concede in a private letter that Callender had struck the target in relation to another issue, that Jefferson once had tried to seduce the wife of a friend.18 As the president wrote in mid-1805, “[W]hen young and single I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknolege its incorrectness. it is the only one, founded in truth among all their allegations against me.”19 Abigail Adams was more right than she knew. The embarrassment Callender inflicted on Jefferson must have been excruciating.

  She closed her letter by mentioning “one other act of your administration which I considered as personally unkind,” but forbore to name it, and with a claim that John Adams had not seen this letter. She bore Jefferson no malice, she said, but hoped to forgive and be forgiven, “in the true spirit of christian Charity.”

  Jefferson responded that he had not encouraged Callender in his scurrility any more than by giving a beggar money he encouraged him in “his vices.” Too, while prominent Federalist propagandists had levelled far more volleys at Jefferson than Callender had at Adams, Jefferson had never thought Adams to blame for them; he expected similar consideration. In fact the president said he had always vindicated Adams’s character even while disagreeing with his politics.20

  To Mrs. Adams’s charge that Jefferson had liberated a journalist imprisoned under the Sedition Act, the president noted that he had liberated everyone in prison for violating that law, which he considered as no more valid than would have been a statute by which “Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.…” He referred to that act as “the pretended Sedition law” because he considered it no law at all.21 He had no idea, he said, what unkind act of his she found objectionable. Having heard from Mrs. Adams that she was referring to Jefferson’s having fired John Quincy Adams from some minor post in the federal judiciary in Boston,22 Jefferson explained that Congress had transferred power to appoint particular low-ranking officials from the (all Federalist) judges to the president, and that if he had realized John Quincy was among the men in question, he would have kept him on. He had appointed a proportionate number of Federalists, and surely would have preferred John Quincy Adams to the fellow Federalists he had appointed to those positions.23

  In response to her continued complaints about his position on the Sedition Act, he now explained himself at length. “You seem to think,” he began, “it devolved on the judges to decide on the validity of the sedition law,” and that that should be the end of it. He had pardoned those convicted on the ground that while “The judges, believing the law constitutional, had a right to pass a sentence of fine and imprisonment,” he, “believing the law to be unconstitutional, was bound to remit the execution of it; because that power [had] been confided to him by the constitution.” His reading he based on the understanding that “[t]hat instrument meant that it’s co-ordinate branches should be checks on each other,” while her notion that the judges decided the question once and for all “would make the judiciary a despotic branch.”

  Having told her how he understood the respective constitutional duties of the three branches in respect to the others’ actions, he went on to say a word about the meaning of the first ten amendments to the Constitution:

  Nor does the opinion of the unconstitutionality and consequent nullity of that law remove all restraint from the overwhelming torrent of slander which is confounding all vice and virtue, all truth and falsehood in the US. The power to do that is fully possessed by the several state legislatures. It was reserved to them, and was denied to the general government, by the constitution according to our construction of it. While we deny that Congress have a right to controul the freedom of the press, we have ever asserted the right of the states, and their exclusive right, to do so.

  He thought the states’ defamation laws generally made sense, though some likely had “gone too far” by not allowing truth as a defense in a libel suit.24

  Though she cannot have known either that Jefferson was the author of the first draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 or what he had said in the 1790 Cabinet debate over Hamilton’s bank bill, and thus probably would not have known—what she must have suspected—that Republicans’ federalism/states’-rights doctrine ran back to Jefferson, surely she was not terribly surprised by his position. What she thought of his assertion that his party and hers differed chiefly over the question of whether “the ignorance of the people” or “the selfishness of rulers independant of them” threatened America more, it would be nice to know. He concluded with an insinuation that he had never intended to break off his friendships with her and John and with “prayers for [their] health and happiness.”25 In reply Abigail told Thomas that she knew there was “not a more difficult part devolves upon a chief Majestrate, nor one which Subjects him to more reproach, and censure, than the appointments to office. and all the patronage which this enviable power gives him, is but a poor compensation for the responsibility to which it Subjects him.” She happily accepted his explanation of the Quincy Adams matter, then closed the exchange with an expression of wishes similar to his.26 Not until 1812 would Monticello and Quincy correspond again.

  7

  The second anomalous patronage scenario played out in the second state in which Republicans were riven by faction: the other Middle States battleground, Pennsylvania. The key figure in the drama there was Jefferson’s treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin.

  Within a short time of Jefferson’s inauguration, William Duane visited from Philadelphia to request certain patronage favors. Although overwhelmingly preponderant, Pennsylvania Republicans fell into two groups—one led by the journalist Duane, and the other, more aristocratic faction in the city aligned with Gallatin since his days as a state legislator. Duane, at the head of the popular group, rested his importunities on his tie to Benjamin Franklin and his services to the Republican Party during the Federalist era.1

  Gallatin in the earliest days of the administration counseled Jefferson against politically motivated appointments. This advice extended to Duane, whom Gallatin described as overcome by “the persuasion that he alone had overthrown Federalism.”2 Duane, in Gallatin’s telling, “thought himself neither sufficiently rewarded nor respected.” Meantime the pro-Jefferson governor of Pennsylvania, Thomas McKean, found himself in a patronage dispute with Michael Leib, whom Gallatin understood to be a tool of Duane. As editor of Pennsylvania’s leading newspaper, the Philadelphia Aurora, “he easily gained the victory for his friends.”

  As early as spring 1803, Duane’s paper began blasting away at Madison and Gallatin. Soon enough he leveled his guns at Alexander Dallas, the U.S. attorney for Philadelphia, and McKean. As a result of being understood to be (as he in fact was) sympathetic with McKean and Dallas in this intra-party feud, Gallatin found himself on the outs with Duane and Leib—that is, with the majority faction. Not one to concern himself overmuch with such matters when he thought himself in the right, Gallatin would in the end suffer significant indignities and disappointment at the hand of Leib—by then a leader of the Senate “Invisibles.”3 Duane’s allies in the U.S. Senate would prevent President James Madison from making Gallatin secretary of state, or even minister to Russia; Gallatin blamed them in addition for the death of the Bank of the United States in 1811.4

  After years of watching aghast, and even organizing formal protests,5 as federal judges and grand jurors descended into creatively partisan behavior and the lame-duck Federalist Congress and president created numerous new judicial posts to staff with their co-partisans, the president had arrived at a determination to appoint only Republicans to the non-judicial posts in the Judicial Branch. “The only shield for our Republican citizens against the federalism of the courts,” he insisted, “is to have the Attornies & Marshals republicans.” Recommendations for such posts should be of men “the most respectable & unexceptionable possible,” of course, but “especially let them be republican.”

  In the crush of business in his first days as president, Jefferson took a pair of steps that were to have considerable lasting moment. As he recounted it in a letter to his appointee Justice William Johnson a couple of decades later, soon after his inauguration he went to the secretary of state’s office at the State Department.6 On the secretary’s desk he found a stack of undelivered commissions for judges intended to be appointed pursuant to the lame-duck Federalist Congress’s Judiciary Act of 1801—the so-called Midnight Judges. Jefferson immediately decided not to deliver the commissions. Among the disappointed aspirants to office when this gambit became clear to the public would be Chief Justice Marshall’s brother James Markham Marshall, Adams’s choice for one of the new federal circuit court judgeships,7 and one William Marbury.

  As Jefferson explained the matter, he experienced not a moment’s pause in deciding not to deliver these commissions. An appointment, he held, took effect only upon the commission’s delivery. Withholding the commissions would be the end of it. Besides, the president and his supporters thought the outgoing Federalist congressional majority had passed this law and created the new judgeships entirely to throw up an obstacle to implementation of the incoming Republicans’ program. At least one prominent Federalist, Senator Gouverneur Morris, privately admitted that was true, saying the Judiciary Act of 1801 grew out of the fact that Federalists were “about to experience a heavy gale of adverse wind.” Since this was so, he asked, “Can they be blamed for casting many anchors to hold their ship through the storm?”8 As we shall see, Federalists’ public pose on this question was all one of injured virtue, and one of the men for whom John Adams had intended the commissions Jefferson held back, William Marbury, intended to make something of it.

  Also in the first flush of his inauguration, Jefferson halted a prosecution under, and pardoned everyone who had been convicted under, the Federalists’ Sedition Act of 1798.9 Those still in prison were released.10 Reimbursing them for their fines would be a more complicated matter.11 Perhaps of most interest in this connection were Thomas Cooper, former congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont (who had been reelected while in federal prison), and James Thomson Callender.

  Jefferson pardoned Callender on March 16th.12 His ground for doing so was the Sedition Act’s unconstitutionality—the case for which underlay the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, the latter secretly drafted by Vice President Jefferson.13 By the end of April, Callender had concluded he had a grievance against Jefferson: despite his badgering the president (“you will perceive the expediency of its being done as early as possible”), his fine had not been remitted.14 He wrote to Secretary Madison how happy he was to have someone in the Cabinet he felt “an attachment for” (Madison), and to express in rather vitriolic terms his unhappiness with Jefferson. “I now begin,” he said, “to know what Ingratitude is.”

  In a bit of heat Callender relayed to Madison the supposed observations of several prominent Virginia lawyers—Edmund Randolph, Governor James Monroe, and perhaps John Wickham15—who had expressed confidence that his fine would be reimbursed. “President as he is,” the journalist warned, “He may trust me, if he pleases, that I am not the man, who is either to be oppressed or plundered with impunity. Mr. Jefferson has said that my Services were considerable; that I made up the best Newspaper in America … with other things of that kind.… I had no more idea of such mean usage than that mountains were to dance a minuet.”

  Come to think of it, Callender added, there was something the president might do for him:

  I have just heard that Mr. Davis of Richmond has got notice that he is to quit his Situation in the Post office; that this in one of the few situations which I would think myself qualified to fill; and that it would just about afford a genteel living for an œconomical family. It Cannot be pretended that I am too late in application. But, indeed, my dear Sir, I have gone such desperate lengths to serve the party, that I believe your friend designs to discountenance and sacrifice me, as a kind of Scape Goat to political decorum, as a kind of compromise to federal feelings. I will tell you frankly that I have always Suspected that he would serve me so; and so rooted has been my jealousy Upon this head, that if ever I am to be the better of the new administration, I shall be much disposed to ascribe it entirely to you.

  We can only imagine how James Madison received this letter. Perhaps he gasped. Maybe it made him angry. Good-natured sir that he was, likely he laughed. The sheer affrontery of an assaultive demand that a pardoned felon’s fine be reimbursed him more quickly, followed immediately by the serious suggestion that the fellow be given a lucrative appointment, stands out among the dozens of requests for appointments in the surviving records of the Jeffersonian era.

  It seems that Callender had a bit of an inkling that he had taken the wrong tack, for backtracking, he immediately wrote a paean to Jefferson. He referred to “the high idea of the President’s wisdom … which I have always had,” and a president than whom “surely a wiser man … does not exist.” “His probity is exemplary. His political ideas, Are, to the minutest ramification, precisely mine. I respect and admire him,” Madison must have been pleased to learn, “exceedingly.” Yet, alas, Jefferson had “on various occasions treated [Callender] with such ostentatious coolness and indifference, that [Callender] Could hardly say that [he] was able to love or trust him.”

  Madison could rest confident that Callender would not breathe a word of his discontentment to anyone (well, other than Randolph, Monroe, Wickham, or, finally, Madison—besides, if the chance recurred, Jefferson again). At last having vented all of these feelings, Callender concluded by telling Madison that he could take his time responding to the idea about the Richmond post office. Madison wrote to Governor Monroe that “Callender I find is under a strange error on the subject of his fine, and in a strange humor in consequence of it.” Madison said that Jefferson shared Madison’s appraisal of the situation.16 Monroe looked into the matter and answered, “The fine was paid by the Marshall, by subscription, and when it was heard that the money was with-held from Callendar as above, some of the same pe[r]sons who had contributed to raise that sum, were willing to contribute to raise a like sum a second time” to remit his fine. Callender had actually been paid, though he apparently had mistaken the payment for “a loan only.”17

  Madison knew that Monroe had been present at Callender’s June 1800 trial. Callender must have been aware of the governor’s attendance as well. By Monroe’s account the presiding judge in the Richmond Federal Circuit Court, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, had essentially fixed the Republican newspaperman’s case. An attorney himself, the governor gave an account of cruel judicial behavior. First Chase asked Callender how much he had in assets, to which Callender replied that he had no notable debts and approximately $200 to cover expenses for himself and two children; upon conviction, Chase handed down a sentence of imprisonment until March 4th (the last day of John Adams’s presidential term and the day the Sedition Act expired) and a fine of … $200.18

  “It is impossible to give you an adequate idea,” Monroe’s account began, “of the violence, illegality & injustice of the Judge’s conduct thro the whole of the tri[al]. He dictated & imposed new rules of evidence never heard of before, insulted the council for the prisoner & I may say [si]lenc’d them…, and hurried the trial to the a[bove] conclusion with a precipitation wh: seem[e]d to confound [every]one, even the boldest advocate of the adm[inistratio]n.” Callender had not borne his ordeal well. Republicans, and Americans at large, would not forget Justice Chase’s conduct of the Callender trial. President Thomas Jefferson would see to it.

  Callender visited Governor Monroe in Richmond again. Monroe noted the poor man’s seemingly irrational, personal animosity toward President Jefferson, whom he blamed for the delay in reimbursing him his fine. Callender “intimated his services in support of the republican cause, spoke of the ingratitude of the republicans who after getting into power had left him in the ditch.” Monroe now held it a poor idea to raise the money by subscription, as Callender seemed unlikely to “acquit the Executive tho’ five times the sum shod. be advanc’d him, and that in case he attacks the Ex: he might state these circumstances or advances, to the discredit of the govt. & its friends.” Wisely, Monroe allowed that “the President & yrself cannot be too circumspect in case he comes to Georgetown in yr. conversations with him; for I think nothing more doubtful than his future political course.”19

  The delays in Callender’s reimbursement continued. The federal marshal at Richmond found himself $2,000 in arrears in his official account, and thus could not give Callender the money.20 Eventually Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin also had a role in the drama.21 The journalist became increasingly agitated, as became perfectly clear to the three extremely high officials involved. At some point along the way, Madison came to the obvious conclusion that Callender’s “imagination & passions ha[d] been … fermented.” Whatever efforts had been made in Callender’s behalf, Madison estimated, he appeared likely “not to be satisfied in any respect, without an office.” Madison at least had divined the source of the pestiferous wannabe-postman’s urgency: he had been smitten with a Richmond woman “in a sphere above him” and had “flattered himself & probably been flattered by others into a persuasion that the emoluments & reputation of a post office, would obtain her in marriage.” Despite imploring, hectoring, and threatening everyone at the pinnacle of the Republican Party and the Federal Government, however, “he is sent back in despair.” Madison could only regret that “[i]t has been my lot to bear the burden of receiving & repelling his claims.” Certainly Madison did not know the significance of his own confessed inability to say how Callender would respond to the blunt treatment he had dealt him.22