James T. Callender
James Thomson Callender (1758 – July 17, 1803) was a political pamphleteer and journalist whose writing was controversial in his native Scotland and later, also in the United States.
[citation needed] Callender campaigned against what he saw as the continued influence of monarchical ideas in American society, and claimed that Adams, Washington and Hamilton planned to impose a titled aristocracy and hereditary positions in the Senate and the Executive.
Callender's political writings were tinged with radical democratic egalitarianism, Scottish nationalism, and a pessimistic view of human nature.
His writing attracted the attention of some reform-minded members of the Scottish nobility: Francis Garden, Lord Gardenstone, became his patron.
[8] Over the next few years, while living by ghostwriting and piecemeal assignments, Callender became one of a group of radical Republican journalists who socialized together and held similar views on democracy and economic nationalism.
During this period, he produced a series of pamphlets in which he attempted to frame a comprehensive political theory, advocating for the government's duty to the poor (in the form of progressive taxation), economic independence from Europe, and the promotion of native industry.
His first pamphlet challenged the introduction of an excise tax into American commerce, but it was his invective against America's early national heroes – George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton – and against their policies and failings, that gained him notoriety.
Callender presented compelling evidence of adultery, but in the 1798 Sketches of the History of America, he wrote that the affair was a distraction from Hamilton's greater offense: partnering with Reynolds' husband in corrupt financial dealings.
The financial charges were never proven, and after the scandal somewhat subsided, in 1798 President Adams appointed Hamilton for a new public office, Major General of the Continental Army.
By 1798 his fortunes were in a downward spiral: he was forced to seek poor relief, his wife died of yellow fever, and his anonymously published political broadsides were exposed as his by a rival pamphleteer, William Cobbett, putting Callender in legal jeopardy and physical danger.
[13][14] Prior to the publication of the pamphlet, Callender was compelled to flee on foot from Philadelphia to Virginia, finding temporary refuge at the plantation of Senator Stevens Thomson Mason.
[21] After the Hemings controversy ran its course, Callender turned to publicizing Jefferson's earlier attempt to seduce a married neighbor decades before.
[22] Jefferson, wary of the controversy generated by the Adams administration's sedition prosecutions, had begun a selective campaign against individual newspaper critics.
One week after the People v. Croswell trial began, Callender drowned on July 17, 1803, in three feet of water in the James River, reportedly too drunk to save himself.
Together with the historical evidence, the biographers Joseph Ellis and Andrew Burstein, as well the National Genealogical Society, published their conclusions that Jefferson had a long-term relationship and several children by Sally Hemings.
"[27] In 2000, the journalist and author William Safire published a historical novel, Scandalmonger, about Callender's life in the United States that was based on letters of notable people of the time, including presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.
Forty-four pages at the end of the hardcover edition of the book are what Safire calls "the underbook", a section distinguishing the historical information from fiction and including notes and sources.
[28] In 2008, Kerwin Swint of CNN labeled Callender a "hatchet man" and credits his smearing of Adams as the critical factor that gave the presidency to Jefferson.
