the sums given to him were such, and even smaller than I was in the habit of giving to others in distress, of the Federal as well as the Republican party, without attention to political principles. Soon after I was elected to the government, Callender came on here, wishing to be made postmaster at Richmond. I knew him to be totally unfit for it; and however ready I was to aid him with my own charities (and I then gave him fifty dollars), I did not think the public offices confided to me to give away as charities. He took it in mortal offence, and from that moment has been hauling off to his former enemies, the Federalists. Besides the letter I wrote him in answer to the one from General Mason's, I wrote him another, containing answers to two questions he addressed to me. 1. Whether Mr. Jay received salary as Chief Justice and Envoy at the same time; and 2, something relative to the expenses of an embassy to Constantinople. I think these were the only letters I ever wrote him in answer to volumes he was perpetually writing to me. This is the true state of what has passed between him and me. I do not know that it can be used without committing me in controversy, as it were, with one too little respected by the public to merit that notice. I leave to your judgment what use can be made of these facts. Perhaps it will be better judged of, when we see what use the Tories will endeavor to make of their new friend. I shall leave this on the 21st, and be at Monticello probably on the 24th, or within two or three days of that, and shall hope, ere long, to see you there. Accept assurances of my affectionate attachment. TO GOVERNOr Monroe. WASHINGTON, July 17, 1802. DEAR SIR: After writing you on the 15th, I turned to my letter file to see what letters I had written to Callender, and found them to have been of the dates of 1798, October the 11th, and 1799, September the 6th, and October the 6th; but on looking for the letters, they were not in their places, nor to be found. On recollection, I believe I sent them to you a year or two ago. If you have them, I shall be glad to receive them at Monticello, where I shall be on this day se'nnight. I inclose you a paper, which shows the Tories mean to pervert these charities to Callender as much as they can. They will probably first represent me as the patron and support of the Prospect before Us, and other things of Callender's; and then picking out all the scurrilities of the author against General Washington, Mr. Adams, and others, impute them to me. I, as well as most other Republicans who were in the way of doing it, contributed what I could afford to the support of the Republican papers and printers, paid sums of money for the Bee, the Albany Register, etc., when they were staggering under the sedition law; contributed to the fines of Callender himself, of Holt, Brown, and others, suffering under that law. I discharged, when I came into office, such as were under the persecution of our enemies, without instituting any prosecutions in retaliation. They may, therefore, with the same justice, impute to me, or to every Republican contributor, everything which was ever published in those papers or by those persons. I must correct a fact in mine of the 15th. I find I did not inclose the fifty dollars to Callender himself while at General Mason's, but authorized the General to draw on my correspondent at Richmond, and to give the money VOL. III.-2 to Callender. So that the other fifty dollars of which he speaks were by order on my correspondent at Richmond.' Accept assurances of my affectionate esteem and respect. James Thompson Callender was a Scotchman by birth; was well educated; and possessed much coarse, vigorous ability. His talents and his previous history attracted a good deal of notice and sympathy from the party in the United States whose interests he so warmly espoused; but his course was steadily downward, owing to habits of inebriety and of consorting with vicious and degraded men. Even his mind seemed to fail rapidly with every succeeding effort, and as he sunk into the brutality he also sunk into the impotence of a common blackguard. He had been made the victim of an oppressive law-his private conduct was unknown to Mr. Jefferson-his increasing newspaper virulence was still of a milder type than that of a host of writers on the other side-and he was one of those pertinacious mendicants who having fastened themselves, by successful appeals to sympathy, on a respectable man, can only be shaken off at the expense of some disgusting quarrel. A picture of this transaction, which has been rendered familiar to all American readers, exhibits Mr. Jefferson as continuing to confer the gratuities we have recorded, on a writer who was indecently attacking the personal character of a rival candi Wrote to G. Jefferson & Co. to pay to J. T. Callender, 50 00 50 00 1801. May 28. Gave in charity to J. T. Callender, 50 00 These are all the entries where Callender's name occurs excepting two, which are memoranda of sums of money paid him for other persons, of less than five dollars each. Mr. Jefferson states that he was in the habit of giving to others in distress, without attention to political principles." Our eye now rests on an entry, near one of the preceding, of $50 sent to a superannuated Virginia officer, who we believe to have been an ardent Federalist. Entries of gratuities of equal amount to other individuals occur on several occasions, where we have no means of tracing the politics of the individual. The sums contributed by him to newspapers, and to aid in paying the fines under the Sedition Law, cannot be traced, because in some cases, probably, they were paid to third persons, and in others we are not acquainted with the names of the publishers. In 1799, he paid $25 to Senator Mason for "Lyon," and the same year sent "Lyon" $25 for "Staunton Gazettes." These are interspersed with entries (among the first that catches our eye) of $100 to an academy; $15 to an Episcopalian clergyman; $7 50 contribution at a sermon, etc., etc.; and daily ones, ranging from $1 to $20, to the old, the lame, the blind, etc. date. This is believed to be a purely gratuitous assumption. We confess we never have found our curiosity strong enough to vanquish our disinclination to go back and examine the writings of this man. But it is certain that Mr. Adams, afterwards, so far from complaining of personal attacks on himself, in his two Presidential contests with Jefferson, admitted that he was most handsomely used in this particular; and declared that his own party friends had specially contributed to the ruin of their cause by their entirely different conduct towards Mr. Jefferson. And nowhere have we, in our political investigations, found an allusion to any insulting imputations on Mr. Adams's private character, tracing back to or repeated by Callender. This lower deep of his infamy was undoubtedly reserved for new associations and new victims. But if these are erroneous conjectures, it will be very easy to demonstrate the mistake from printed records. If it should be proved that Callender was in the habit of denouncing Mr. Adams as a man destitute of personal veracity, as a suborner of perjury, as a foreign ambassador who attempted to procure a deliberate pecuniary fraud on a class of public creditors, as a man of wealth who obtained his property by cheating a widowed sister and her orphaned children out of their patrimony, as an atheist, as an open scorner of the Sabbath and all religious rites, as an indecent reviler of the Saviour,' as a parent who had brought shame and agony on his daughters, by converting his house into an African brothel—or of bringing kindred or analogous charges-then we shall blush to find that any considerations induced Mr. Jefferson to continue even that degree of countenance to the author implied by making him an object of charity;-though the "gentle quality" of a kind man's mercy will often induce him to drop a pittance into the hand of avowed infamy sooner than see anything of man or woman kind suffering for food or shelter. To such, even such straits, the improvidence of Callender had exposed him. 1 Saying that an old dilapidated church "was good enough for him who was born in a manger," etc.! We have at this moment lying before us some pretty well written lines, copied from a Philadelphia paper, and originally published in a Boston paper-(both of which received the personal and official patronage of the Federal party)-which represents Mr. Jefferson's daughters weeping to see a negress installed in the place of their mother. We hope to be excused these details, but it seems to us about time when such traditions as the story of Jefferson's connection with Callender are beginning to pass into psuedo "Listory," to call back attention to some of the facts. Mr. Jefferson did not explain another charge connected with his treatment of this man, which was also included by the political writers of the day among the "rewards" he had conferred on him for "libelling Mr. Adams"-namely, that he had pardoned him from prison and remitted his fine, as a victim of the Sedition Law. He probably supposed no such explanations were necessary to a friend, who knew that he took the same course towards all who had been condemned under what he regarded, and was determined in all cases to treat officially, as a wholly unconstitutional act. The post-office at Richmond (worth about $1,500 a year) refused to Callender, was held by a Federal editor. On receiving this refusal, the former thereupon connected himself with the Richmond Recorder, and commenced a foul outpouring of personal calumnies on the President. Every enemy the latter had in Virginia ready to descend to such employment, emptied into this ready conduit all the old gossip, exploded calumnies and base suspicions which can be picked up among low neighbors and unscrupulous enemies in regard to any prominent man; and they swelled the putrid stream with such new and monstrous fabrications as they chose-for the fear of libel prosecutions was no longer a "hangman's whip" to "haud" this class of persons "in order." Nearly every people have had a class who subsist by levying "black mail" on those ready to buy exemption for themselves or their families from dirty slanders, and by catering to the appetite for scandal in those who are beneath attack. The assailant is below contradiction; he is below the punishment of law. Personal chastisement he would delight in, because it would advertise him in his trade, and because he would gladly take kicks which could be coined into pence in an action for "assault and battery." Callender sunk into this avocation. When he demanded the Richmond post-office, the President acted the part of Charicles instead of Nicias,' and he took the consequences. Shall we declare the fact that the Richmond Recorder, 1 Plutarch quotes one of the comic poets of his day as saying: "Charicles would not give one mina to prevent my declaring that he was the first fruits of his mother's amours; but Nicias, the son of Niceratus, gave me four. Why he did it I shall not say, though I know it perfectly well. For Nicias is my friend, a very wise man besides, in my opinion." which before was an obscure paper, scarcely known out of the city, rapidly attained a circulation throughout the United States! Callender, elated by his success and provided with new means, plunged deeper in debauchery. Bloated and noisome, he reeled from one den of infamy to another when not engaged in collating or concocting attacks on Mr. Jefferson. This continued until he was drowned in the James River, into which he had gone to bathe in a state of intoxication. The President arrived at Monticello July 25th, on his usual visit during the unhealthy season. He was made happy by the conditions so fondly anticipated in his letters to Mrs. Eppes-the presence of his dearly loved children and grandchildren. The domestic details of the period are not specially interesting. His income for his first Presidential year did not meet his expenditures. We are tempted to give the heads of both of these as we find them analyzed in the account-book. The reader will not forget that the items of an unmarried man's establishment must necessarily considerably vary in kind from those of one surrounded by a family of both sexes: Secretary Analysis of Expenditures from March 4, 1801, to March 4, 1802. Charities [in cash] Contingencies. 978 20 557 81 |