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books: Scandal Monger by William Safire
Jefferson's Matt Drudge
by Evan Cornog
Evan Cornog, associate dean at Columbia’s Graduate School
of Journalism, is the author of The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and
the American Experience, 1769-1828.
James
T. Callender (1758-1803) was the leading editorial purveyor of sexual scandals
in the early days of the American republic. It was Callender who, in 1797, brought
about the exposure of Alexander Hamilton’s affair with Mrs. Maria Reynolds,
and Callender again who, five years later, trumpeted the story of Thomas Jefferson’s
presumed affair with his slave Sally Hemings. By thus tarnishing the reputations
of two of the principal architects of American government, Callender assured
himself of a poor historical reputation. William Safire, in this, his third
novel, has set himself the interesting challenge of making a reviled historical
figure sympathetic.
Callender’s career as a political writer began in his native Scotland, but early in 1793 he was indicted for sedition, and he eventually fled to America. The United States at this time was experiencing its first great party struggles, fanned by domestic reaction to the international struggle between Great Britain and revolutionary France. Jefferson’s Republicans, being Francophiles, welcomed Callender as an enemy of Britain.
Hamilton’s Federalist party denounced the excesses of the French Revolution and placed a high value on maintaining good trade relations with Britain. Hamilton’s affair with Mrs. Reynolds had been the subject of an inquiry in the fall of 1792, when members of the House and Senate investigated allegations that Hamilton had engaged in corrupt financial dealings with Mr. Reynolds. Hamilton told his interrogators that in fact he had been having an affair with Mrs. Reynolds, and that her husband had then blackmailed him, threatening to expose the adulterous relationship. Hamilton’s questioners decided to let the matter end there, and so it might have, had not the job of copying Hamilton’s papers on the subject gone to John Beckley, a staunch Jefferson partisan. Beckley kept a copy, which he showed to Callender in Philadelphia in 1797, and which Callender then made public, adding his own theory that the affair was merely a cover-up for shady financial dealings.
Callender’s scoop and other press attacks by Jefferson’s supporters prompted Federalists in Congress to pass the repressive Sedition Law, and Callender fled Philadelphia for Virginia, where with financial support (and in the expectation of political protection) from Thomas Jefferson he continued to publish criticism of Federalist leaders, including President John Adams. This led to his prosecution under the Sedition Law. He was convicted, fined $200, and sent to prison for nine months. Callender was granted a presidential pardon by Jefferson, but, upset over various slights he felt he had suffered, he published allegations that Jefferson had fathered several children with Sally Hemings.
Those allegations were long treated by historians as vicious gossip and the worst sort of partisan journalism. Jefferson’s reverent biographer Dumas Malone carefully examined the case, and although it was his research that placed Jefferson at Monticello at the time of conception of each of Sally’s children, he argued powerfully against Jefferson’s paternity. Even very recent works, like Joseph J. Ellis’s American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, published in 1997, dismissed the charge. Since then, however, DNA evidence has made Callender’s accusation seem much more likely to be true, and Safire takes off from this to construct a story of Callender’s life and motivation that presents him as a champion of probity in government, a puncturer of the pretensions of the high and mighty. Safire’s Callender embraces Jefferson’s radical vision, but on being confronted by the snobbery and hypocrisy of Virginia’s slaveholding egalitarians, chooses to blast Jefferson just as he did Hamilton. By working hard and by building up a reputation as a scandalmonger, Callender becomes a man to whom those with juicy secrets turn, an earlier incarnation of Drew Pearson, Bob Woodward, or Matt Drudge. The political hired gun is revealed as a champion of press freedom. A pleasant thought, perhaps, but the newspapers of Callender’s time were party organs, dedicated to advancing a faction’s program; "objective" journalism was not yet an ideal, much less a practice.
This James Callender is one whom most historians would not recognize, and that is the novelist’s prerogative. But Safire is trying to have it both ways, advertising the work as a novel while providing footnotes and bibliography to support his interpretations. The spirit of the work, however, is polemical, not interpretive or analytical, and the reader should not construe its scholarly trimmings as evidence of its validity as history. And if the novelist wishes to invent a love affair between Mrs. Reynolds and Aaron Burr, he need not try to excavate a historical justification for it.
In the end, the real problem is that the book simply fails as a novel. Because Safire, unfortunately, wants to instruct as well as to entertain, the reader must endure such passages as this: "After dinner with his wife and children, Hamilton announced he had an appointment at the George, a nearby tavern, and put a $30 bank bill in his pocket. He envisioned the day when banknotes would be issued throughout the nation by the United States Bank, backed by the full faith and credit of the Federal government, and not issued pell-mell by local banks that were all too often on the brink of insolvency."
It is probably a good rule of thumb for a novelist that when he finds himself using the phrase "full faith and credit of the Federal government," something has gone terribly wrong. Creaky foreshadowings of historical episodes litter the pages: "Madison knew Meriwether Lewis to be the former officer that Jefferson had in mind for a mapmaking study, perhaps leading to Western exploration." (And how can Safire the language pundit allow the mistaken "that" for "whom"?) When Mrs. Reynolds muses on the sexual adroitness of certain Founding Fathers — "nobody matched Burr, not even Hamilton" — the reader retreats in amused embarrassment.
Journalism needs heroes, God knows, and Callender, by serving nine months in jail as a victim of the Sedition Law, earned a place in the First Amendment pantheon. But historians have arrived at a view of Callender — "alcoholic and paranoid," according to Monroe’s biographer Harry Ammon; "wildly irresponsible and blatantly smut-seeking," in the words of Joseph J. Ellis — through careful and balanced examination of the evidence, and with due attention to the testimony of Callender’s contemporaries. As historical interpretation, Safire’s book is too insubstantial to win many converts. As fiction, it is too wooden to satisfy many readers. Safire’s gift is for political analysis and wit, and his abilities there are widely recognized. He serves the republic better by carrying on the tradition of James Callender than by attempting to reimagine it.
