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1) Exaggeration, rather than fabrication, was Callender's chief journalistic flaw.
Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 62

2) James Thompson Callender is a name of note during these times, "notorious rather than famous. He, too, was a political refugee, forced to flee from punishment in Scotland for his radical utterances, and appearing in this country in a role new then to our manners," a soldier of fortune, wielding well a trenchant blade, under no concern on which side or for what cause he should draw it, but bargaining with the best bidder.
Benjamin Ellis Martin 285

3) To deny that during his brief moment on the American scene Callender figured significantly in the affairs of the early republic would be to deprive him of his just due. Liar and scoundrel he may have been, but he can be remembered for the hidden truths he uncovered as well as for the malicious falsehoods he circulated. As bad as Callender was, and he was at times viciously bad, in his role of professional troublemaker this embattled, self tormenting Scot performed with a stubborn devotion that was worthy of a finer cause.
Charles A. Jellison, "Human Nature" 69

4) Callender really does underestimate the camaraderie of honorable Southern gentlemen. These guys made discretion an art form. His mudslinging ultimately serves to diminish his own credibility and reputation. His obvious attention to profit clearly labels him as one who damningly aspires to radix malorum est cupiditas, and that's just how the honorable Virginian slave owners view him. Perhaps he was attacking something they knew festered inside each slave owner, and, as those who deny truth when it hits them in the face, the whites of Albermarle County united in silence and condemnation. Rothman's text describes their sentiments about "the libelous rants of a scandal-mongering, drunken, and disgruntled office-seeker." I'm thinking they're all saying, "you got stiffed, get over it." Callender's portrayal of Jefferson as a sleazy slave owner does not glean the results he seeks. His attacks smack of bitterness and greed. His angry attacks offend the reading public by refusing to adhere "to a cultural code of public silence." A nurse for many years, I recognize the club --" doctors who protect each other despite bad medicine, malpractice, and negligence. They simply do not squeal on or about other doctors. Callender is especially acerbic toward Sally, calling her a "wench, a slut as common as the pavement, negro wench, and a jolly tar." What is worse, he goes on to describe her children as "yellow litter." Callender goes too far, ignoring the basic rule of warfare, "know your enemies." He obviously did not know the Southern, slave-owning, white gentlemen.
Teresa Salvatore, Lehigh University

5) While propertied Virginians found Callender a "sad fellow" for violating what Joshua D. Rothman terms "a cultural code of public silence" about sex between masters and slaves and themselves remained silent in the face of Callender's weekly harangues over the course of four months in the Recorder, Federalists in the North filled their newspapers and magazines with poems and editorials about the president and Sally Hemings in the fall of 1802 and spring of 1803, thereby hoping to hurt Jefferson's chances for reelection. Much of the commentary issued from Philadelphia, a center of the publishing industry at the time and a hotbed of debate between the Federalists and the Republicans. Joseph Dennie's weekly Port Folio carried an item about Jefferson and Hemings in almost every issue during that period, including ten poems devoted exclusively to attacking Jefferson for his relationship with Hemings.
Elise Lemire 12

6) Modern-day journalists and social commentators have frequently claimed that candidates for national office during the last third of the twentieth century have been exposed to unprecedented scrutiny into their personal, especially their sexual, lives. While the proliferation of talk shows and tabloids has certainly intensified the appetite for scandal by making such stories readily available to a mass market, the primal urge to know about the sexual secrets of the rich or famous is apparently as timeless as the primal urge itself. Long before we learned about the sexual escapades of Presidents Kennedy or Clinton or, before them, Harding and Franklin Roosevelt, there was the story of Jefferson and Sally. Indeed the alleged liaison between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings may be described as the longest-running miniseries in American history.
Ellis, American Sphinx [1997] 303

7) They [Federalist press attacks] were ultimately designed to alienate northern voters from Jefferson, and were just one aspect of a general and largely personal critique of Jefferson that focused as much or more upon his Enlightenment-based religious and political beliefs as on the immorality of slavery. These criticisms, in part, originated in the Federalists' conservative views regarding property, hierarchy, and the social order, and thus contained little potential to become the basis of substantive social reforms.
John Kyle Day 1303-4

8) The poetry published to attack Jefferson and Hemings derisively mimics African American dialect. Written to elicit laughter, I was not amused at the mocking of African American physical characteristics. Lines like, "Sally's nose be flat /...tis harder to break" and "If on her lips no rubies glow, / Their thickness serves instead...wide spreading over half the face / Impossible to miss them" insulted me. Perhaps, if Sally was illiterate, missing these publications would have been merciful. Callender stopped at nothing; he was truly driven by revenge. It is no wonder the reading public, as well as Jefferson's constituents found his mudslinging sooo distasteful.
Lehigh University Student

9) Callender misread the silence among white male Richmonders. It did not necessarily mean that they were outraged or disgusted by the suggestion of interracial sex. Most white men, especially slaveowning whites, understood that the systematic sexual abuse of enslaved women helped bolster slavery by reminding all slaves that their masters held power over their bodies. Moreover, since slaves followed the condition of their mothers, all the children produced by liaisons between white masters and slave women, even if consensual, would still be slaves and hence far less potentially destabilizing to the social order than free people of color. Finally, what a man chose to do with his slave property was for the most part his business.
Joshua D. Rothman 105

10) With Hamilton's disgrace, Callender reached the apogee of his career as political propagandist.
Michael Durey 103

11) The Port Folio writers understood as well that this system of social and economic relations [Jeffersonian democracy], whatever else it might turn out to be, was a new and powerful ideological system, ominously threatening to annihilate Federalism and the surviving tradition of classical republican thought through the specific means of reconsecrating the demos of Aristotelian theory as "the people," the spurious source of a supposedly inexhaustible civic virtue.
William C. Dowling 6

12) Reading this material made me grateful for the modern press and its code of journalistic ethics. Callender certainly comes off as a hack to the modern reader. If this is the "source" of the initial public accusation of Jefferson's affair, I can see why almost two centuries of historians discredited it. Callender's vitriolic style makes even relatively mild attacks seem outrageous. It would not surprise me to read that the response of Jefferson's political opponents to these articles would be to defend Jefferson. Rothman maintains that even though Callender was motivated by revenge, the story is, nevertheless, true. For me what is missing from Rothman's chapter is a complete explanation for the lack of outrage, or interest, from the voting public of the time. Was there a greater tolerance for the "misbehavior" of public officials in Jefferson's time, and when and why did we become intolerant of it? Or were the accusations simply disbelieved by everyone except Virginia slaveowners?
Lehigh University Student

13) Does having a motive for telling a story mean the story is false? No, people who are looking for truth in this matter are not absolved from the need to subject the substance of the statement to scrutiny.
Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 62

14) He [Callender] is better known, however, as the author of The Prospect Before Us: a thick pamphlet in three numbers, whose design it was to exhibit the multiplied corruptions of the Federal government, and more especially the misconduct of the President, Mr. Adams. It is, indeed, one long drawn curse on the living Adams and on the dead Washington, the basest thoughts put fitly into the bitterest words, an unequaled instance of insolence and ignoble imprecation.
Benjamin Ellis Martin 285

15) In a letter to Jefferson, Callender gloated: "If you have not seen it [Hamilton's pamphlet], no anticipation can equal the infamy of the piece. It is worth all that fifty of the best pens in America could have said against him." And doubtless Jefferson agreed. Callender had accomplished something that greater men had failed to do. He had unhorsed the mighty Federalist. He had reduced Alexander Hamilton to the level of common adulterer.
Charles A. Jellison, "Scoundrel" 298

16) To me, the Callender articles read like well-written tabloids of the 1800s. Everything the man writes about is seemingly based on hearsay. The brutal language posits these publications as pure trash. How can anyone take his words seriously when he uses such incredibly biased discourse. It's blatant propaganda written to taint Jefferson's admirable character. Essentially, this affair has nothing to do with Jefferson's policy, and, arguably, Callender is not even concerned with the contradictions between Jefferson's private and personal lives. Most likely, he simply wants Jefferson out of office and, like most tabloid writers, jumped on the first story that had any worth. Callender's goal was to find one thing that the public would cling to, and here, it happened to be the President's affair with a slave of 1/8 African descent. I tried to take on an objective mindset before looking at the newspapers in hopes that I would see some of Callender's true aims, but the language seriously hampered my ability to understand or relate to the journalist. I wonder if the readers of his time felt captivated by his ranting or turned off by his crude opinions?
Erica Prosser, Lehigh University

17) The print [James Akin's "The Philosophic Cock"] thus asks how the nation can trust a man whose philosophy serves to provide the justification for this sexual behavior. If all men are perceived as equal, thanks to Jefferson's political efforts, who is to say that a slave owner can't prefer to couple with a slave woman? And since Hemings is defined here by her skin color, her "tincture of skin," the question becomes a question of race. Who is to say that, if all men are perceived as equal, a white man won't prefer to have sex with a black woman? Since the rooster was also a symbol of the French Revolution, the print makes the point not only that Jefferson is a Jacobin, or misguided supporter of the French, a frequent Federalist accusation, but that to democratically have no preferences for certain complexions and thus perhaps to prefer a black person, is a kind of disastrous end on the same scale as France's. In other words, the print makes the point that liberal democratic rule is dangerous because the philosophy of equality that underwrites it leads to the traversal of a revered race boundary.
Elise Lemire 16-17

18) Where does that leave the matter? Well, unless the trustees of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation decide to exhume the remains and do DNA testing on Jefferson as well as some of his alleged progeny, it leaves the matter a mystery about which advocates on either side can freely speculate, and surely will. Within the scholarly world, especially within the community of Jefferson specialists, there seems to be a clear consensus that the story is almost certainly not true. Within the much murkier world of popular opinion, especially within the black community, the story appears to have achieved the status of a self-evident truth. If either side of this debate were to file for damages in a civil suit requiring a preponderance of evidence as the standard, it is difficult to imagine an impartial jury finding for either plaintiff. Jefferson's most ardent defenders still live under the influence of what might be called the Virginia gentleman ethos (i.e., this is not something that a Virginia gentleman would do), which increasingly has the quaint and charmingly naïve sound of an honorable anachronism. Meanwhile those who wholeheartedly endorse the truth of the story, either in Callender's original version as a tale of lust and rape, or in Brodie's later rendering as a tragic romance between America's premier biracial couple, have also allowed their own racial, political or sexual agenda to take precedence over the evidence. On the basis of what we know now, we can never know.
Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx [1997] 304-5

19) After the election of 1800, Federalist increasingly used the press to articulate their criticism of the Jefferson administration. The issue of the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings thus provided a sensational as well as scandalous topic for the nascent New England press to both attract readership and to criticize their archenemy.
John Kyle Day 1310

20) How do we define what is credible? It's interesting that we judge Callender's character (how does he act outside of his writings) in order to understand his words. But for Jefferson, we judge his words in order to understand his character. For example, Jefferson was known for his writing. That was how people knew him. But people didn't know Callender in this manner, they knew him as someone who tried to destroy people's reputations (first with Hamilton, then Adams, now Jefferson). I guess my question is this: what came first, the story or messenger? And are we going to believe the messenger if we don't believe his story? I'm calling to attention the fact that people need to do active research, gather information from all sides before formulating an educated opinion, much like we do for this class. At the time, though, I doubt people were able to reconcile the source with the story, which allowed for Callender's sensationalism to become so sensational.
Kristen Dalton, Lehigh University

21) That Callender got so much of the story right is a remarkable testimony to the extent and transmission of social knowledge about private interracial sexual affairs in Virginia communities.
Joshua D. Rothman 103

22) The so-called Reynolds affair has been the source of controversy ever since Callender breached the wall of silence surrounding it. It is amenable to three possible interpretations: that Hamilton had a long-running extramarital affair with James Reynolds's wife, Maria, for which he was blackmailed (Hamilton's own version); that Hamilton fabricated evidence of an affair in order to hide his involvement in illegal speculation (Callender's preferred version); and an interpretation that no one, except perhaps James Monroe, has suggested, that Hamilton had an affair with Maria Reynolds at the same time as indulging in speculation with her husband. Historians sympathetic to Hamilton have leaned toward the first interpretation; Jefferson sympathizers have chosen the second. Neither group has suggested that Callender performed a public service by publishing the evidence in 1797.
Michael Durey 97

23) Thomas Jefferson emerges for the Port Folio writers as a symbolic figure precisely because they are so convinced that dark or mysterious energies of social transformation are at work in the background of his political ascendancy. The very act of taking Jefferson as their symbol, thereby bestowing on modernity at least a visible presence and a recognizable voice, is for the Federalist writers a means of coming to terms with forces otherwise impersonal and unfathomable.
William C. Dowling 6

24) The part where AGR [Hemingses of Monticello] begins to discuss the nature of Jefferson and Hemings's relationship is where it got a little confusing. She refuses to fully commit to stating that their relationship is rape and spends much of her time supplying various examples with different contexts that imply a likelihood of rape because of the position of black slave women. As Alexandra said, she puts forth the idea of a "no-possible-consent rule," which basically states that, because of female slaves' positions in society and the restrictions of their freedom that accompanied this, they were never in a position to give consent. The legal contingencies surrounding the situations completely prevented them from having the ability to give consent. Because AGR fluctuates back and forth and dances around the admission of stating her belief that it was rape, the section wavers back and forth and becomes a bit muddled. I can't say that I fully agree with her, based on the interpretations we've seen that imagine the power that Sally may have had over Jefferson. Based on the information (or lack thereof) that is provided and the heavy reliance on assuming and surmising, I find myself completely unable to categorize their relationship.
Katie Prosswimmer, Lehigh University

25) To discredit a Jefferson-Hemings liaison, it is necessary to discuss James Callender as though he invented the story and as though none of Callender's contemporaries looked into the matter and, in their view, substantiated the charges. This characteristic makes it easier to present the story as something fantastic and without foundation that it is unworthy of a second thought. Callender is the story, the story is Callender. That can be the only reason that most commentary on this subject begins, not with the information that Jefferson's neighbors had been gossiping about the alleged affair for some years before Callender knew about it and that another editor had considered using the story several years before Callender's reports, but with the assertion that the story had its origins in the imagination and writings of one man.
Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 65

26) I am unable to find one good word to speak of this man [Callender], with all his great ability. He was a journalistic janizary, his pen always for sale on any side, a hardened and habitual liar, a traitorous and truculent scoundrel; and the world went better when he sank out of sight beneath the waters of the James River to his grave in congenial mud.
Benjamin Ellis Martin 285-86

27) In the short time that remained before his death, [Callender] would succeed in making his own unique and everlasting contribution to the Jefferson legend. So effective, in fact, was his pen in besmirching his former patron, that historians have tended to agree with the late James Truslow Adams that to Callender belongs the ultimate credit to blame for "almost every scandalous story about Jefferson which is still whispered or believed."
Charles A. Jellison, "Scoundrel" 304

28) Callender is extremely abrasive and, because of his extreme diction, I am less likely to see his point of view. Although he does bring in the need to question Jefferson's published literature on the inferiority of the black race, Callender's harsh language forces me to question his motivations.
Caroline Nype, Lehigh University

29) For while Northern Federalists may have considered enslavement unjust, there is no sympathy in Akin's print ["The Philosophic Cock"] for Hemings. Hemings is simply a means to attack Jefferson because sex with her is viewed as deviant. The Federalists were arguing that the nation should be wary of liberal democracy because the natural rights philosophy underpinning it was creating a forum for inter-racial sex.
Elise Lemire 17

30) As far as most white Virginians were concerned, Jefferson acted with propriety in his liaison with Sally Hemings, and when Callender published his information and directly challenged Jefferson before the nation, he violated an unwritten cultural rule by bringing the story out of the realm of gossip. If people were at all shocked by Callender's reports, the fact that the story appeared in the newspaper was probably at least as significant as the story itself.
Joshua D. Rothman 90

31) This means that for those who demand an answer the only recourse is plausible conjecture, prefaced as it must be with profuse statements about the flimsy and wholly circumstantial character of the evidence. In that spirit, which we might call the spirit of responsible speculation, after five years mulling over the huge cache of evidence that does exist on the thought and character of the historical Jefferson, I have concluded that the likelihood of a liaison with Sally Hemings is remote.
Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx [1997] 305

32) When you hand me a newspaper, I read it like a journalist. When I printed out the Ricmond Record, it looked like a newspaper. The stories were presented as newsworthy articles, despite being written in more editorial form, but I took that as a product of the time. As a journalist myself, however, there were certain phrases that set off alarms in my mind. The first: "The establishment of this single fact would have rendered election impossible." This statement is of course referring to the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and the detrimental effects it could have on Jefferson's political career if proven true. The word "fact" is used very loosely here, because as I read through the material I found very little facts, more a lot of accusations, mud-slinging, and name calling at the expense of Sally Hemings. The second: "By this wench, Sally, our president has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it." This phrase screams trashy tabloid. I can imagine seeing this in the pages of a paper I would pick up in the check-out line of the grocery store. I question if Callender was able to ask all of the members of the Charlottesville neighborhood about this, and if so why he could not get a single one to make a statement about the relationship. It's sloppy journalism to say the least. The final statement that jarred my journalistic roots was "If friends of Mr. Jefferson are convinced of his innocence, they can make an appeal of the same sort. If they rest in silence, or if they content themselves with resting upon a general denial, they cannot hope for credit." Once again . . . lazy journalism. A man is innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. Jefferson and his company's refusal to dispute Callender's allegation does not give them credibility but rather decreases Callender's. Overall, while I think Callender's publication is vital to gaining a perspective on the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings at the time, it does not prove or disprove it, only reinforce that the rumors existed.
Sarah Freeman, Lehigh University

33) When Federalist periodicals did comment upon the Hemings scandal, the tone was more of sarcastic humor and bitter jest than any public outrage and/or moral condemnation of Jefferson's treatment of a female slave.
John Kyle Day 1311

34) Callender's most significant and most persistent error was his insistence that Jefferson's and Hemings' oldest child was a boy named Tom, who resembled Jefferson and was living at Monticello in 1802.
Joshua D. Rothman 102

35) Contrary to the opinion of Jefferson's admirers, Callender was not an incorrigible liar. His interpretations of facts frequently were strained and exaggerated, but there is little, if any, evidence of his purposeful invention of stories or falsification of facts. When his published facts, rather than opinions, were found to be false, he usually publicly corrected them. In the Hamilton-Reynolds affair his facts were correct, if his interpretation was possibly misplaced. Of the four major accusations he threw at Jefferson, only the Sally Hemings affair is in any doubt. What is surprising is not Callender's penchant for falsification, but his ability to uncover facts that have later been found to be true.
Michael Durey 160

36) After reading the assortment of poetry, I began to feel some measure of pity for Jefferson that I haven't felt since the beginning of the course. Once I encountered "The Metamorphosis" by A Jacobin, however, I felt that some of it might have been merited. The craftiness of this poem helped bring back all of the reasons why I've felt frustrated and a little repulsed by Jefferson. The fact that every piece of satire in the poem directly corresponded to one of Jefferson's racist points lessened my pity for Jefferson. Though "The Metamorphosis" may have been racist itself, it fairly pointed out all of Jefferson's flaws.
Katie Prosswimmer, Lehigh University

37) Interracial sex became scandalous, however, only when it was made public, meaning that whites involved in such liaisons had to rely on others to adhere to a cultural code of public silence. Such reliance, in turn, made exposure the ultimate weapon for anyone with an ax to grind against a white participant in interracial sex.
Joshua D. Rothman 96

38) Although some of what he presented as true now appears false, considering that he pieced together his stories from gossip and rumor, what stands out is not that he made some mistakes but that for the most part Callender's reports were essentially accurate. It is obvious not only that he researched the matter but also that he talked to numerous people, primarily from Jefferson's own county and class, who had reliable information, even if they did not necessarily know every detail about life at Monticello. To brand Callender reckless in his journalistic style regarding Jefferson and Hemings, then, is to overstate the case. He was purposefully sensationalistic, to be sure. But with respect to the facts he presented, his tone was more cautious and variable. He used strong and definitive language when he believed in the reliability of his sources, but he also occasionally corrected incorrect information he had first reported as fact, and when he printed stories he considered dubious he noted that they were merely rumors. James Callender was a lot of things, but he was not usually a liar.
Joshua D. Rothman 89

39) When scholarly defenders like Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson claimed that Jefferson was "not the kind of man" to engage in illicit sex with an attractive mulatto slave, they were right for reasons that went deeper than matters of male gallantry and aristocratic honor. Jefferson consummated his relations with women at a more rarefied level, where the palpable realities of physical intimacy were routinely sublimed to safer and more sentimental regions. He made a point of insulating himself from direct exposure to the unmitigated meaning of both sex and slavery, a lifelong tendency that an enduring liaison with Sally Hemings would have violated in ways he found intolerable. He obviously knew about the ongoing miscegenation at Monticello, but his powers of self deception and denial protected him from facing these facts, and his urge to remain oblivious was considerably stronger than his sexual drive.
Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx [1997] 305-306

40) Gallagher asked what actor could play the role of Callender in a movie. I could not think of one, but a fictitious character came to mind who has a lot of similarities to Callender: Rita Skeeter from Harry Potter. Rita Skeeter is a journalist who portrays people in the worst possible ways and is always up for gossip. Her columns constantly cause a stir in society, and people love to hate her. I think the Callender is like this too. He doesn't write objectively, and he puts is own opinion in his journal. He also loves causing chaos and pandemonium. At the same time, both start off with facts, and while they write rudely, there are certain points that can't be argued, if one does the research. Society also complains about the articles but keeps up with it anyway. If nobody cared about what Callender had to say, they wouldn't have taken the effort to disclaim him and make his activities illegal. The biggest similarity I saw between the Skeeter and Callender, however, is that they take a local hero and expose dark secrets. Rita writes a book about the beloved Albus Dumbledore, defender of muggles (non-wizards), and an amazing wizard who always fought for good. Jefferson is a beloved President, a founding father, the writer of the Declaration of Independence, and an overall role model from Americans. Skeeter and Callender make the fans of these two people second-guess everything when they expose that the heroes are not perfect. Both have skeletons in their closets, and it takes gutsy journalists like Skeeter and Callender to open the jar of worms. While they add their own flavor and sarcasm, both journalists use hard evidence to start their case against the heroes. Callender is not pleasant to read, is obnoxious a lot of the time, but I still bought a lot of his arguments.
Elizabeth Guzzo, Lehigh University

41) In early national and antebellum Virginia, standing sexual affairs between white men and African American women were nearly always open secrets. Divorce petitions in Virginia involving accusations of interracial adultery, for example, amply demonstrate that neighbors, friends, and relatives -- although rarely saying anything publicly until called on by the petitioner to provide testimony in court -- "always knew, sometimes for many years, about the illicit sexual conduct of both men and women in their families and communities.
Joshua D. Rothman 96

42) The story of Jefferson's supposed long-term relationship with his slave Sally Hemings has echoed down the years since Callender first published it. An ideal subject for partisan exposition, it was used by British visitors to denigrate American democratic society in the 1830s, by abolitionists in the period around the Civil War, and by blacks during the early civil rights campaign. As the story was repeated, it became burdened with more and more implausible embellishments, so that Callender's original and rather prosaic comments have been submerged in a welter of imaginative hypotheses.
Michael Durey 157

43) By May 1802 a full-scale newspaper war was underway between Callender at the Recorder and his former employer, Meriwether Jones of the Richmond Examiner. Jones accused Callender of apostasy, relentlessly antagonized him, and baited him to reveal whatever damaging information he claimed to have on Jefferson. For his part, Callender hurled epithets and accusations of his own at Jones, including the claim that Jones entertained a black mistress in his home whenever his wife was away. The personal salvos flew back and forth and escalated in the degree of their vitriol. Editors of newspapers in other major cities got involved. On 25 August 1802, William Duane, editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, accused Callender of infecting his wife with venereal disease and of getting drunk in the next room while she languished and died and while his children went hungry. This charge was too cruel even for Callender. In the next issue of the Recorder, under the heading "The President Again," he wrote that it was "well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY."
Joshua D. Rothman 95-96

44) After reading Callender, I question his morals as I do Jefferson's. Through his choice of words, it seems as though Callender is trying to persuade people to overlook all of Jefferson's positive attributes (Dec. of Independence, Louisiana Purchase, etc) with his negative attributes (his affair with Sally, slavery, etc), by persistently trying to prove the truth of Jefferson's supposed affair and by overly criticizing it. Also, Callender's attacks on Sally are unjust, because she has no voice, so she can't fight back. He calls her horrible names and ascribes typical African American stereotypes to her. However, I'm not sure who I dislike more at this point--Jefferson for not practicing what he preaches or Callender's consistent pursuit of attempting to find the truth behind the supposed controversial affair and his consistent criticism of it.
Samantha Gerstein, Lehigh University

45) He was, to be sure, capable of living with massive contradictions, but his psychological dexterity depended upon the manipulation of interior images and personae; he was not that adroit at the kind of overt deviousness required to sustain an allegedly thirty-eight year affair in the very center of his domestic haven. One could plausibly argue that his famous fear of racial mixing gathered its intensity from his personal encounters with its sensual attractions. But nothing that we know about Jefferson supports the linkage between sex and sensuality. His most sensual statements were aimed at beautiful buildings rather than beautiful women. In sum, the alleged relationship with Sally Hemings, if it did exist, defied the dominant patterns of his personality.
Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx [1997] 306

46) Callender's reasons for making the Jefferson-Hemings connection public deserve reassessment, for they illustrate perfectly why and when awareness of sexual affairs across the color line went from being common knowledge in particular communities to public knowledge available to anyone. Any student of interracial sexual relationships in the early republic and antebellum periods quickly realizes not only their ubiquity and variety, but also their notoriety. Such matters were rarely secrets. Most people in the small communities that composed much of Virginia's landscape knew precisely who was engaged in such illicit sexual conduct, and they gossiped among themselves accordingly. Despite legal and cultural sanctions against such connections, however, whites almost never exposed them to open public or legal discussion, except when useful as a means of gaining personal advantage. Especially when financial interests were at stake, evidence of interracial sex was a strategic weapon sometimes utilized to undermine one's opposition. A public accusation of an interracial sexual affair frequently had its foundation in a larger set of calculations, part of a battle between conflicting white parties over other issues. So too in the dispute between Thomas Jefferson and James Callender.
Joshua D. Rothman 88

47) Federalist writers did not demonstrate sympathy and/or support for slave women in general and Hemings in particular. Rather, Federalist editors seemed susceptible to describing Hemings as a "nasty wench," and chided Jefferson for his alleged miscegenation. Despite their absolution of Jefferson, they nevertheless insinuated that Jefferson would be embarrassed if all facts of his private life were revealed, stating, "should all be made known, he would not . . . exultingly exclaim ‘Look at my children'" They professed that other aspects of Jefferson's life were sufficient "for finishing the character of any man," even if "Sally, and her five mulatto children, and her fifteen or thirty gallants of all colours, could at once be expunged from existence -- that all memory of them . . . could be obliterated from recollection." The tone of these criticisms was of satirical punditry, not moral outrage.
John Kyle Day 1312

48) In reading the various poems published in the Portfolio regarding the relationship between Sally and Jefferson, I found myself reacting to them in a surprising manner. While throughout the course thus far I have often felt somewhat disdainful of Jefferson and the way he seemingly approached the relationship with Sally, I found myself growing increasingly defensive of him and Sally and the relationship they had while reading these poems. I think this defensiveness stems from the fact that many of the poems seem to be passing judgment on their relationship simply because Sally was black. She is constantly being shot down as either physically unattractive, unintelligent, or overall inferior. In this light, I am almost eager to believe that Jefferson and Sally did have a loving relationship just to hope that maybe he was able to see Sally for herself rather than be hung up on all the stereotypes his contemporaries were so eager and enthusiastic to embrace.
Mary O'Reilly, Lehigh University

49) Just as he failed to appraise accurately how most Virginians were likely to respond to his revelations about Jefferson, Callender never understood that in Virginia and in other parts of the South there were honorable and dishonorable ways of sharing information about the interracial sexual affairs of elite men. Consequently, he never foresaw that even people who believed Jefferson's sexual behavior was less than admirable might very well feel that Callender's own behavior in publishing the story was at least distasteful.
Joshua D. Rothman 106

50) Thus, as editor of the Recorder, Callender found himself for the first time in the United Stated unencumbered by political debts, free to develop those suspicions of power and the powerful that has always been implicit, and frequently explicit, in his writings since the 1780s. It was no coincidence that in 1802-3 his essentially destructive talents reached fulfillment, for now his personal resentments, unchecked by the moderating influence of a mentor, fueled his habitual rhetoric. In the last months of his life Callender did not turn his coat; he merely gave free rein to the spirit of Old Testament vengeance and the eighteenth-century oppositionist, Antifederalist features latent in his thought. His treatment by Jefferson had confirmed his long-held conviction that political power always was used despotically. Filled with hatred, Callender systematically set out to pull down the pillars of society.
Michael Durey 151

51) By supporting Republicans, Callender wrote, "I have lost five years of labor; gained five thousand personal enemies; got my name inserted in five hundred libels. . . . In a word I have been equally calumniated, pillaged, and berated by all parties. I have only the consolation of reflecting that I had acted from principle, and that with a few individual exceptions, I have never affected to truth with the one or the other."
Joshua D. Rothman 93

52) Jefferson is simply being accused of the "crime" of being with Sally, which in effect is not a crime at all. Rather, Callender is attacking Jefferson's character. He has every right to attack his character; that is the essence of freedom of the press, if he so desires to make it that way. However, he is irresponsible in the sense that he lays his claim out as if building a case against him. Even if "guilty," what is he guilty of? It is not illegal to have an affair with a slave, perhaps hypocritical, but not illegal. It is maybe even fair to say, then, that Callender is just as political and hypocritical as Jefferson. Whereas Jefferson has the audacity to preach one thing to the country that he represents but practice another, James Callender has the ability to condemn this man on completely unfounded grounds -- and to do it effectively! They're both good at what they do, but in my opinion, that simply further detracts from any sense of morality that they do have.
Brian Cohen, Lehigh University

53) This is not to deny Callender's reputation as a scandalmonger, for he evidently obtained most of his information secondhand and published what most others would have ignored. But he did sift his material before publishing it, even if most of the mesh he used was wide. Perhaps more attention ought to be given to the sources of Callender's information. Undoubtedly these were members of Virginia gentry, some living close to Monticello.
Michael Durey 160

54) To Dennie and the Port Folio writers, the preeminent example of a mystified society, an order of the basest self-interest hiding behind the noblest protestations of liberty and equality, was the slave owning South in general and, in particular, the Virginia of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. For in the Virginia of the great slave owning plantations, in a class of wealthy landowners professing a vocal and unwavering sympathy with revolutionary France, The Port Folio saw a society in which nothing was as it seemed, a world of unreality with its inhabitants so taken in by their own rhetoric that they dwelt as though in a delusion or a dream. This is the context in which the familiar themes of anti-Jeffersonian polemic in The Port Folio -- "attacks on slavery as an institution, assaults on the three-fifths rule giving slave owners representation in Congress for Negroes owned as property, hints of a growing sectional antipathy between New England and the South" -- must always be taken as the most urgent of warnings about mystification as such, a world in which the national existence threatens to become as delusional as it already is in Jefferson's Virginia.
William C. Dowling 16

55) Callender became increasingly hostile to most Republicans in 1789 and 1799. He perceived -- quite accurately, in fact -- that they looked down their noses at him, using him when he served their interests and leaving him to face Federalist anger and threats of physical assault alone when his work got him into trouble.
Joshua D. Rothman 91

56) When Prof. Gallagher refers to Callendar as a "political hitman," I think he strikes the nail right on the head. That's exactly what Callendar is. He was clearly quite the journalist, because he very cleverly uses rhetorical devices in order to persuade readers to believe his argument. On at least two occasions, he calls into question the intellect of his readers if they are skeptical of his allegations against Jefferson. When Callendar recounts that Sally was on the same boat as Jefferson and his two daughters on their voyage to Paris, he says "the delicacy of this arrangement must strike every person of common sensibility" (16). Another thing I noticed Callendar did a lot was pose questions he knew the opposing side would ask, or give their perspective and put a sarcastic spin on it, making it seem invalid.
Samantha Feinberg, Lehigh University

57) Above all, however, it was the apparent desertion by Jefferson, his father figure, that embittered Callender. He had opened his soul to the president and had suffered long silence from Monticello while he was in prison, Callender had not doubted his mentor's continuing support. That Jefferson might find it politically expedient to abandon him was unthinkable, yet this was the conclusion to which Callender was inexorably drawn.
Michael Durey 145

58) Despite legal and cultural sanctions against such connections [slave owner liaisons with slave women], however, whites almost never exposed them to open public or legal discussion, except when useful as a means of gaining personal advantage. Especially when financial interests were at stake, evidence of interracial sex was a strategic weapon sometimes utilized to undermine one's opposition.
Joshua D. Rothman 88

59) While in Philadelphia, Jefferson had a closer relationship with Callender than [Worthington] Ford, and most historians, are willing to admit. Their correspondence from September 1798 to April 1801 clearly shows that the bond forged between them in Philadelphia was strengthened in the years leading up to Jefferson's election victory and that Callender in his activities as a Republican propagandist in Virginia with good reason believed he had the support and encouragement of Jefferson.
Michael Durey 111

60) Jefferson is simply being accused of the "crime" of being with Sally, which in effect is not a crime at all. Rather, Callender is attacking Jefferson's character. He has every right to attack his character; that is the essence of freedom of the press, if he so desires to make it that way. However, he is irresponsible in the sense that he lays his claim out as if building a case against him. Even if "guilty," what is he guilty of? It is not illegal to have an affair with a slave, perhaps hypocritical, but not illegal. It is maybe even fair to say, then, that Callender is just as political and hypocritical as Jefferson. Whereas Jefferson has the audacity to preach one thing to the country that he represents but practice another, James Callender has the ability to condemn this man on completely unfounded grounds -- and to do it effectively! They're both good at what they do, but in my opinion, that simply further detracts from any sense of morality that they do have.
Brian Cohen, Lehigh University

61) If there ever such a thing in white eyes as the ethical amalgamator, Thomas Jefferson was the prototype.
Joshua D. Rothman 106

62) Callender's analysis of the Constitution, scattered throughout his writings, confirms his commitment to two basic principles: a long-held fear of the inevitability of corruption and a more recent allegiance to the popular voice being heard frequently, loudly and unequivocally.
Michael Durey 90

63) I'm not saying I like Callender, but I think he's gutsy. I feel like he wouldn't put himself out there like that if he didn't have enough evidence to prove it.
Elizabeth Guzzo, Lehigh University

64) The point of the Sally Hemings episode thus has to do with a political culture based on illusion and empty rhetoric, and the mystery dwelt upon by The Port Folio is how Jefferson, as the representative of such a culture, can be taken by so many Americans as the very symbol of a new and attractive democratic order.
William C. Dowling 19

65) Reading the poems, the letters, and Callender's readings really made me dislike Callender. In my mind, his situation is like a baby whining because something didn't go his way.
Kimbrilee Weber, Lehigh University

66) As part of the development of his republican principles, Callender elaborated on his Philadelphia Republican colleagues' economic nationalist views in several pamphlets published between the end of 1795 and Jefferson's electoral victory in 1800. Together, these writings belie the opinion of many historians that Callender was no more than an amoral party hack, the unprincipled conduit for scandalous gossip and billingsgate. One cannot ignore that side of his career, but there was another dimension "his vision of America's future as a freedom-loving, independent, egalitarian republic" that also needs to be addressed if his career is fully to be appreciated.
Michael Durey 79

67) What a weasel! With its elevated levels of pettiness and self-righteousness, Callender's work reads like a modern-day gossip column. The sheer lack of anything even remotely resembling journalistic integrity and objectivity is almost impressive. This was truly a bitter, bitter man. His line "When Mr. Jefferson has read this article, he will find leisure to estimate how much has been lost or gained by so many unprovoked attacks upon James T. Callender" reveals the breadth of Callender's paranoia; he actually believes that he has personally and repeatedly been wronged by the then president of the U.S. It was this paranoia that propelled him towards his goal of "burying" Jefferson's political career. Callender appears to care very little about Sally herself. It seems to me that she is nothing more than a means to an end in his mind. Yes, he refers to her in unflattering ways several times, but I do not see this as a result of any personal distaste for her. By painting her as a "popular whore" he is giving additional teeth to the story. It would be pretty bad to have the nation know you've been having relations with one of your slaves, but it would certainly be worse to have that same slave perceived as sexually prolific. Lastly, however, I must give some credit where credit is due. Callender, no matter how questionable his morals may be, seems to have an uncanny knack for digging up dirt on whomever he sets out to. He systematically moved through the ranks of our founding fathers, leaving a forest of political tombstones in his wake. The very fact that he was able to, without fail, expose the lascivious side present in the lives of so many men commonly viewed as heroes is stunning. It gives me even more cause to doubt the accuracy of my high school history lessons . . .
Eric Edgerton, Lehigh University

68) In contrast, Callender's misanthropy was so thoroughgoing as to be egalitarian. Neither wealth, nor learning, nor family background could create an elite superior to the mass of mankind. His was the egalitarianism of a common depravity, premised on the belief that no social group had the moral requirements to exercise authority. With Callender as with Swift, only a few individuals could display moral qualities worthy of respect. Callender's was thus an intensely negative conception of equality, a perversion of the ideal which ensured his permanent opposition to whoever controlled government. In 1793, it brought him, by a very singular route, into the orbit of the Republican opposition, whose egalitarianism by contrast was established on "faith in the virtue of republican peoples." The seeds of future tensions, therefore, were present from this very early stage.
Michael Durey, qtd. in McMurry and McMurry 2

69) Vanity, the enemy of self-doubt, also played its role in fashioning [Jefferson's] darker side. His amour-propre prevented him from checking an illiberal act once begun or from admitting his error after the event. . . . When caught in a flagrancy as when it was revealed that he had hired the journalistic prostitute Callender to poison the reputations of political opponenta, or when he was accused of permitting the sedition prosecutions in Connecticut, he denied the truth. In deceiving others, as John Quincy Adams said, he deceived himself. In deceiving himself he denied himself insight into his abridgments of liberty, though he was acutely perceptive of abridgments by others. Perhaps the chief explanation of his darker side was his conviction that the great American experiment in self-government and liberty was in nearly constant danger. He completely identified with that experiment, to the point that an attack on him or on the wisdom of his policies quickly became transmuted in his mind as a threat to the security of the tender democratic plant.
Leonard W. Levy 167

70) To what extent we might compare the ethical behavior of Thomas Jefferson and Bill Clinton regarding their sexual activities is debatable. Examining how a presidential sex scandal played out in the public sphere of the early republic, however, suggests a stark contrast between our own political environment and that in which Jefferson functioned, because in his own era, Jefferson's involvement with Hemings was hardly a scandal at all. When journalist James Callender wrote a series of articles for the Richmond Recorder in the fall of 1802 detailing the rumors about Jefferson and Hemings, he hoped readers would be so revolted and so scandalized by the revelation of Jefferson's private immorality that it would ultimately destroy Jefferson's political career. He could not have been more wrong.
Joshua D. Rothman 102-3

71) Yet even most Federalists did not intimate that Jefferson's sexual involvement with Hemings had or ought to have any impact on his ability to act as president, and they largely dropped the matter after just a few months, by which point voters had bolstered Jeffersonian Republican congressional majorities. . . . Still, that the Hemings matter failed to become a full-scale political debacle for Jefferson suggests that in the early republic, the relationship between the moral character and the political stature of an individual was somewhat indeterminate.
Joshua D. Rothman 102-3

72) In an era filled with editors who specialized in what the catchphrase-inclined today might call "the politics of personal destruction," James Callender was a master of the art. An angry, bitter, and cynical man who made a career out of invective and character assassination, Callender ruthlessly and often crudely savaged anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in his journalistic sights. Many of his contemporaries, especially those he attacked and their supporters, tried to dismiss him as nothing but a libelous scandalmonger. Scholars largely followed suit and used Callender's reputation to bolster their own assertions that the sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings never existed.
Joshua D. Rothman 102-3

73) Callender was purposefully sensationalistic, but with respect to the facts he presented, his tone was cautious and variable. He used strong, definitive language when he believed in the reliability of his sources, but he also sometimes corrected inaccurate information, and when he printed stories he felt were of questionable veracity he noted that they were merely rumors. Callender was a lot of things, but he was not usually a liar. He knew Jefferson's supporters would deny the Hemings story. But if the story was to have the catastrophic consequences for Jefferson's political career that he desired, Callender also realized he had to be absolutely sure that they could not refute it, and he repeatedly dared them to do so. They never did.
Joshua D. Rothman 104-5

74) That Callender's articles failed to have the impact he hoped for had only little to do with his own established pattern of journalistic scurrility. Under slavery, sex across the color line was both ubiquitous and notorious. Usually, interracial sexual relationships (using the word in its broadest sense) entailed rape of enslaved women by their owners. Even when they occupied ambiguous positions between coercive and consensual, sexual relationships between blacks and whites generally and masters and slaves specifically were supposed to be carried out discreetly. Such an ethic restrained public discussion of the normalization of radicalized sexual assault in the South, but it hardly made interracial sex a well-kept secret. Most people who lived in the small communities that composed much of the southern landscape knew precisely who was engaged in such illicit sexual conduct, and they gossiped among themselves accordingly. Jefferson and Hemings were no exception, a reality Callender understood and exploited to his advantage.
Joshua D. Rothman 104-5

75) No matter how much they may have personally disapproved of his sexual behavior, as far as most white Virginians were concerned, Jefferson acted with propriety in his relationship with Hemings both publicly and in front of his white family, and what he did behind closed doors with his own slave property was largely his prerogative. Similarly, no matter how much they might have gossiped privately, few would have ever considered exposing and criticizing Jefferson publicly, given the implicit challenge such an action would entail both to Jefferson's honor and to the systematic racial (and, when it came to black women, sexual) domination that constituted slavery itself. If Callender had thoroughly understood these kinds of unwritten cultural rules, he might have realized that the biggest scandal his articles would produce was not that the president of the United States had children by one of his own slaves, but his own distasteful decision to put that fact in the newspaper for widespread public consumption.
Joshua D. Rothman 104-5

76) Gossip was politics, and Jefferson was hardly the only political giant oh his era to be implicated in a sexual scandal. Just a partial list of others accused of sexual malfeasance would include George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall in a political environment where personal enmity was integral to and inseparable from partisan warfare and where the line between private and public realms was blurry, it is unsurprising that Callender thought releasing a story about the president's personal life would inflict the maximum damage to Jefferson's political career.
Joshua D. Rothman 104-5

77) But Callender did more than simply fail to grasp the subtleties of southern attitudes toward interracial sex. In a broader sense, he also did not seem to realize that although revelations of a public figure's moral hypocrisy might be extraordinarily embarrassing and might provide a source of great mirth for a man's enemies and great prurience for a journalist's readers, humiliation did not necessarily translate into political disgrace. Such was especially the case if, as was true of Jefferson's involvement with Hemings, the private actions in question seemed to bear no direct relevance to the performance of public duties.
Joshua D. Rothman 104-5

78) Callender was a radical egalitarian who detested the pretension and condescension he saw in wealthy and powerful men. Once in the United States he was drawn to Jeffersonian Republican politics for their antielitist, anticorruption, and anti-English overtones, and he began working for the Philadelphia Gazette, reporting the proceedings of Congress. Most leaders of the Republican Party were ambivalent about Callender from the outset of his U.S. career. Some found his journalistic style unpalatable; others feared the extremism of his advocacy. But the Republicans of the 1790s were a party struggling desperately to get into power, and, in the words of his biographer, Callender "could be guaranteed to diminish the public stature of his opponents."
Joshua D. Rothman 106

79) Although Callender would be the first editor to put any specifics of the story in print, he was not the proximate source of the information. Jefferson's political enemies hinted at the affair even before the election of 1800, with William Rind, editor of the Virginia Federalist, claiming allusively in June of that year that he had "damning proofs" of Jefferson's "depravity." Vulgar poems intimating Jefferson's sexual involvement with black women appeared in newspapers months before Callender ever linked the president to any particular woman. Shortly after Callender published his report of the story, the Gazette of the United States announced that it would not print the story without greater corroboration from its own sources, but acknowledged that it had "heard the same subject freely spoken of in Virginia, and by Virginia Gentlemen." That Jefferson and Hemings had some kind of sexual association can hardly be said to have been common knowledge nationally by the time Callender got hold of it, but some people clearly had already ground it in their gossip mill.
Joshua D. Rothman 109

80) On January 18, 1805, an unsigned article constituting a wide-ranging and sweeping attack on Jefferson's private morals and public actions appeared in the New England Palladium, a Boston newspaper. Entitled "The Monarchy of Federalism," the piece recounted charges dating back to the 1780s, among them that Jefferson had acted in a cowardly fashion when he was governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, that he was a religious infidel, that he had defrauded one friend on a debt repayment and attempted to seduce another friend's wife, that he had undermined the strength of the navy, that he threatened the independence of the judiciary, and, of course, that he had "taken to his bosom a sable damsel." The owners of the Palladium were also the official printers for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, prompting a Jefferson supporter in the Massachusetts House of Representatives to introduce a resolution that the state's contract with the printers be terminated for their "indecent and libellous publication against the personal character of the President of the United States."
Joshua D. Rothman 119-20

81) Politicians of Jefferson's era gossiped about one another as a means of demonstrating their own stellar reputations and of sullying those of their opponents. And because the personal and the political were so deeply intertwined, a ruined reputation could potentially mean a ruined career. If the voters cared. And in 1804, the voters decided that they did not care that Thomas Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. Even in Federalist strongholds, the revelations seem to have had a negligible impact on Jefferson's reputation, and certainly had none whatsoever on his electoral fortunes. Jefferson had lost the popular vote in every New England state in 1800 and gained the presidency only after the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. In the 1804 election, however, he won every state in New England except Connecticut, and his victory overall was so over-whelming that it can hardly even be considered a contest.
Joshua D. Rothman 124