Madison and Jefferson (76 page)

Dennie continued to needle the president into 1803, compiling a host of barbs he had used over the years, in another, intentionally mediocre, ode:

As the months passed, Republican newspapers were still smarting from Callender’s handiwork. One of these was New York’s
American Citizen
, which indulged in sexual smears itself, shamelessly calling Aaron Burr debauched—even homosexual. In July 1803 its aggressive editor, James Cheetham, saw fit to remind readers of the “foul slander about Sally,” as he compared Callender to one Richard Croucher, a convicted rapist and murderer whose name was known to all Manhattanites. “The whole federal party have looked up to Callender as the wretch deputed by Hell to overturn the present administration,” Cheetham wrote scornfully.
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On July 17, 1803, Callender drowned in the James River. According to the
Virginia Gazette
, “The water being shallow where it happened, ’tis supposed he was affected either by the cramp or a fit. He went into the water for the purpose of bathing, which was his regular practice.” The sensation-driven writer was, the paper assured, “decently interred” on the day that he
died. A letter from Richmond, published in New England, had something else to add to initial reports: Callender was seen on the morning of his death “much intoxicated.” While the coroner’s report declared the death “accidental,” the deceased had been embroiled in a very public argument over money at the time of his demise. This was all anyone knew. Apparently, whether or not his drowning was an accident, there were people other than supporters of the president who wished to see harm come to James Callender.
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Even afterward Jefferson haters posted occasional reminders of Callender’s work. The
Trenton Federalist
argued, in a religious tone, that what those who lived near Monticello said about Jefferson carried the weight of truth: “In the immediate neighborhood of the President, the same allegations against him, which are impudently contradicted at a distance, are still recapitulated in the most circumstantial manner. Does not this manifest the warmest confidence in their truth?” The New Jersey editor compared Jefferson’s neighbors to the apostles: they were as incapable of misrepresenting “Lord Jefferson” as the latter were of misrepresenting the character of Jesus.
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New England Federalists savored the poetic justice. Jefferson had previously attempted to deny or downplay his prior connection to Callender, when Callender was conveniently targeting President Adams. Jefferson the “virtuous philanthropist” had posed for citizens as something he was not—detached and disinterested. That is how the most eager of the Federalist editors viewed him. So from the pen of the once-trusted Callender, the two-faced politician had gotten his comeuppance.

People believed what they wanted. Many years later, when Jefferson was past eighty, an apologetic colleague of Callender’s bemoaned the “paroxysms of inebriety” that had elicited the mercenary writer’s most noxious stories. By then Jefferson undoubtedly believed that his private life would never again be the subject of lurid speculation. We, of course, know otherwise. Callender’s columns outlived not just their author but everyone else who was alive at the time of their publication, remaining so much a part of the nation’s tortured conversation about race relations that science finally turned to DNA to establish the paternity of Sally Hemings’s children.
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In 1789, the year George Washington became president, the Yazoo Company of Virginia, led by Patrick Henry, petitioned Georgia for land grants
to settle its western parts. Similar companies formed in South Carolina and Tennessee. Ignoring Washington’s displeasure with the plan, Georgia consented in 1794 to put millions of acres in private hands.

Three years later Congress reversed the sale and redefined the Mississippi Territory to encompass a considerable chunk of the Yazoo lands. By this time many would-be settlers had already paid the original speculators for their land, and no one could say who held valid title. The worst part of the business was what had happened in Georgia’s state legislature in 1794: the Yazoo land syndicate bought the votes of most of the representatives, so that investors could obtain land grants at an exceedingly low price. Georgians smelled a rat right away.

The Jefferson administration inherited this knotty problem. A fraud had taken place; no one was trying to deny it. When national attention turned to the Louisiana Purchase, relations with Spanish-held lands, and the future of the Deep South and Southwest, the cabinet took up the Yazoo matter. Madison, Gallatin, and Attorney General Levi Lincoln put their heads together and worked toward a resolution. In 1802 Georgia was compensated for its cession to the federal government of the millions of acres in question, in what is now Alabama and Mississippi. The three cabinet officers revisited the claims of private individuals and came up with a compromise that apportioned land and money, though no party was entirely happy with the result.

At this moment John Randolph of Roanoke, a Virginia planter with a rich genealogy, made himself heard. Tall, awkwardly formed, and boyish in appearance owing to a genetic condition, he was noticed even before he opened his mouth—which he did often and for hours at a stretch. He happened to be in Georgia at the time the scandal broke, and the display of corruption forever marked him. Randolph’s standard of republican purity was impossibly high; he could not consent to any administration that compromised on such an issue. For some years friendly toward Gallatin, and as yet unready to see Jefferson as a betrayer, the theatrical young congressman with the high-pitched voice directed his criticism toward the generally unassailable Madison, whom he knew less well.

Randolph was one of the most temperamental persons ever to serve in Congress. He was trained for Virginia politics from early on, because the field was open to any Randolph, certainly one of such ambition. In 1790 he studied law with then–Attorney General Edmund Randolph in Philadelphia. His forensic talent was legend: he knew instinctively how to apply his splendid memory when he felt inspired to cite classical verse or unleash
spontaneous invective. He treated hyperbole as an obligatory first step in any argument. Randolph also had the tendency, once he formed an objection to someone, to allow the feeling to fester and grow; there was no turning back for him. In identifying Secretary of State Madison as a “Yazoo man,” Randolph refused to let go of the image in his mind. It would color his actions for years to come, as his power as a provocateur increased and placed him front and center in the sensationalizing columns of the American press. In Randolph’s lexicon, once you were a “Yazoo man,” you could not be a real republican anymore.
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It hardly matters why he identified Madison as corrupt or at least complicit in a fraud. In an age of malcontents, Randolph was arguably the most malcontented; in a time of Republican ascendancy, he held out impossible expectations of political purity, which ultimately served to marginalize him. The movement he started took Virginia provincialism to unprecedented lengths and complicated the lives of Madison and Jefferson—precisely what the pesky congressman intended.

The year 1804 was one of mixed emotions for President Jefferson. In April his younger daughter was in failing health. “Our spring is remarkably uncheary,” Jefferson wrote to Madison from Monticello on the day he turned sixty-one. “A North West wind has been blowing for three days. Our peach trees blossomed on the 1st. day of this month, the poplar began to leaf … But my [flower] beds are in a state of total neglect.”

He was watching Maria, at twenty-five, succumb to the effects of a difficult childbirth, as her mother had done when she was a toddler. She had been a charming and delicate child and, over the years, the recipient of her father’s most indulgent letters. Now she was the wife of her cousin, the thirty-one-year-old first-term Virginia congressman John Wayles Eppes. Maria’s death on April 17 left Jefferson bereft. It meant that the only surviving child of his ten-year marriage was Patsy, also thirty-one, and the mother of six living children. His old friend John Page wrote a letter of condolence, and in his response Jefferson lamented their having outlived so many beloved friends and family: “When you and I look out on the country over which we have passed, what a field of slaughter does it exhibit.” Thinking toward final retirement, the president acknowledged that Patsy
was “the slender thread” on which his “evening prospects” now hung, and he tempted fate by questioning whether she would outlive him.
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Maria’s death led to one of the most moving of epistolary exchanges in the literal republic of letters. On reading of Jefferson’s personal loss in a newspaper, Abigail Adams opened a straightforward dialogue with the man who had ousted her husband from office. She had adored nine-year-old Maria in 1787, caring for the child in London while she and her husband were residing there and Maria was en route from Virginia to Paris to rejoin the father she had not seen in three years. Maria had clutched her when it was time to leave, crying out: “O! now that I have learnt to Love you, why will they tear me from you?” That memory was why the former first lady put pen to paper now, in spite of the ill will she harbored toward Jefferson the president.

“Reasons of various kinds withheld my pen,” she admitted, until “the powerfull feelings of my heart, have burst through the restraint.” Jefferson responded feelingly, and with the assurance that “the friendship with which you honoured me has ever been valued.” He assigned responsibility for the ugliness of politics to unnamed others and expected her to appreciate his version of his history with her husband when he said, “We never stood in each other’s way.” Jefferson’s letter was twice the length of hers and professed near the end: “I feel relief from being unbosomed.” Then he asked her forgiveness for turning from subjects of grief and loss to the unkind nature of politics.
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Mrs. Adams answered promptly, in a letter nearly twice the length of his, which picked apart much of what Jefferson had said. She introduced matters he had failed to bring up that continued to gnaw at her, and told him exactly how she felt as the election of 1800 unfolded. Her phrases contained no softness and nothing of Jefferson’s apologetic tone. “I have never felt any enmity towards you Sir for being elected president,” she affirmed. “But the instruments made use of, and the means which were practised to effect a change, have my utter abhorrence and detestation.” And then she announced: “I will freely disclose to you what has severed the bonds of former Friendship.”

Dropping all affectation of politeness, she confronted Jefferson directly. The subject was Callender. “One of the first acts of your administration,” she charged, “was to liberate a wretch who was suffering the just punishment of the Law due to his crimes for writing and publishing the basest libel, the lowest and vilest Slander, which malice could invent, or calumny
exhibit against the Character and reputation of your predecessor, of him for whom you profess the highest esteem and Friendship.” She devoted three paragraphs to the man she termed “the serpent you cherished and warmed,” finding ways to vary her epithets and reminding Jefferson that the spiteful snake had “bit the hand that nourished him.” Having scolded him enough, she concluded her letter with charitable lines—“I bear no malice I cherish no enmity”—leaving Jefferson seriously wounded, as she put down her pen.

His reply on the Callender matter was weak. He claimed to have cared no more for the adjudication of Callender’s case than for that of anyone else who had been imprisoned under the Sedition Law. “I knew nothing of his private character,” he wrote, clearly hoping that she would see his relationship to Callender’s attacks on her husband as no different from John Adams’s relationship to the poisoned arrows aimed at Jefferson by Federalist newspaper editors “Peter Porcupine” or John Fenno.

The exchange continued. Her next letter addressed the state of parties concretely and contained some harsh words that Jefferson could not but have agreed with: “Party spirit is blind malevolent uncandid, ungenerous, unjust and unforgiving.” It was no more welcome for her in Federalist papers than in Republican papers. “Party hatred by its deadly poison blinds the Eyes and envenoms the heart … It sees not that wisdom dwells with moderation.”

Jefferson ended his part in this flurry of letters with one political and one personal sentiment. The political sentiment was his decided belief that both parties pursued the public good, differing because the Federalists feared the ignorance of the people at large, whereas the Republicans feared the selfishness of rulers not accountable to them. The personal sentiment was his appreciation for her “candour” and “sincere prayers for your health and happiness that yourself and Mr. Adams may long enjoy the tranquility you desire and merit.”

Abigail Adams had opened their correspondence, and she would bring it to a close. It was six months now since Maria’s death. “Affection still lingers in the Bosom, even after Esteem has taken flight,” she wrote, disliking Jefferson less yet standing at a distance from any more yielding embrace. As to the distinction he drew between the two political parties, she had an effective rejoinder: “Time Sir must determine, and posterity will judge with more candour, and impartiality I hope than the conflicting parties of our day, what measures have best promoted the happiness of the people.” To
show Jefferson—who must have been wondering—that the second president had had no hand in any of the preceding compositions, John Adams scrawled at the bottom of the final letter: “The whole of this Correspondence was begun and conducted without my Knowledge or Suspicion. Last Evening and this Morning at the desire of Mrs. Adams I read the whole. I have no remarks to make upon it at this time and in this place.” And so things would stand for another seven and a half years.
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