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Callender's Charges against Jefferson
Brandi Klotz
[1] James Thomson Callender "made a career by specializing in invective and character assassination" (Rothman 88). He was a voracious man, and the meat that sated his appetite was those "unfortunate enough to be caught in his journalistic sights" (Rothman 88). Jefferson, however, was one of the unfortunate ones to be prey to Callender's blood-thirsty talons. Callender attacked Jefferson with accusations of heinous acts producing five children with his slave Sally Hemings, acts fit to destroy any man's political career.
[2] Whether or not Callender's motives were pure or vengeful, he laid out several claims against Jefferson in the Recorder. His first charge is hypocrisy: "'Tis supposed, that, at the time when Mr. Jefferson wrote so smartly concerning negroes, when he endeavored so much to belittle the African race, he had no expectation that the chief magistrate of the United States was to be the ringleader in shewing that his opinion was erroneous; or, that he should chuse an African stock whereupon he was to engraft his own descendants" (Sept. 1, 1802). Jefferson engages in a sexual relationship with an African, even after writing about their extreme disagreeable differences in the chapter "Laws" of his Notes on the State of Virginia. Callender writes that after hearing of this relationship with Black Sally "much matter of entertainment may be now collected" from Jefferson's writings (Sept. 29, 1802):
Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species . . . . They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. (Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia)
Jefferson has claimed that Africans are incapable of showing the emotions that white men can, that they produce a foul odor far surpassing that of a white man, but yet he chooses to enter into a relationship with one. How did his actions not contradict his own writings? Could the man, who wrote the immortal words that have been the spirit of our country since the day they were written be capable of such opinions, having a relationship with a woman he kept as his property, as well as fathering children with her that would be his slaves? Jefferson might just have been a "practice what I preach" type of person, incapable of doing what he knew was right.
[3] In another issue, Callender suggests a series of prints about the ongoing relationship of Jefferson and Hemings. In the second print, he sets the scene as such that "the widower appears sitting at a table, with ‘the Notes on Virginia' lying before him. The book is shut and part of the leaves folded inwards. The folding is conjectured to be at those passages where the writer has described the interior and degraded state of an African intellect; and the ruinous and infamous consequences of the importation of that people into Virginia. The words on the label are: ‘I cannot but remember such things were that were most dear to me'" (Sept. 15, 1802). Jefferson the hypocrite has become entangled in a relationship that goes against his own ideas, as written in his acclaimed Notes on the State of Virginia.
[4] Callender, however, goes on to raise far more detrimental charges against Jefferson than hypocrisy. He finds Jefferson guilty of crimes against paternity. "Mr. Jefferson was a man of fortune! . . . A man, who had been in possession of a virtuous and amiable wife! He was a man, who had daughters to be educated, and who can hardly have forgot the name of their mother! He could almost have commanded whatever his utmost ambition desired, as to the female sex, in the state of Virginia. He plunged at once into a connection, from which, the debauchee, that prowls St. Giles, would have shrunk with horror" (Sept. 29, 1802). Jefferson has daughters who still remember their mother, who are impressionable. Jefferson, as their father, holds the main hand in molding them into what they will become, and, instead of setting the example that Callender believes he should have by becoming engaged to a white woman, he picked a black slave: "As Jefferson before the eyes of his two daughters, sent to his kitchen, or perhaps, to his pigstye, for this mahogany coloured charmer" (Sept. 29, 1802). Callender finds it despicable for Jefferson to engage in such acts in front of his daughters, showing them that such behavior was acceptable.
[5] In the first print of the series mentioned above, Callender suggested, "It is supposed his attention is particularly impressed by the lamentations of the bard of Morven, for the death of his spouse, Evirallin. From his mouth issues a label, with this inscription: ‘Our hearts were one. Our souls grew together, and how can I survive, when they are now divided.' In the background of the picture, there appears a stout African wench, with a complexion, which in the original canvas, halts, between a mahogany colour and a dirty greasy yellow" (Sept. 15, 1802). Jefferson is overcome by the loss of his wife, but in the background there is the possibility of Hemings, which he eventually does take full advantage of. It is horrid to think of the "love" between Jefferson and an African slave replacing that of Jefferson and his beautiful, white wife; at least it is so in Callender's mind.
[6] Callender doesn't end his vicious invective with charges of hypocrisy and failed paternity. Thirdly, he goes so far as to consider Jefferson a racial traitor. By Jefferson engaging in sexual acts with an African slave, he would create more African slaves, as he did. However, because Jefferson was so influential, by engaging in such acts he could lead others to believe that it was an acceptable thing to do. Callender states that if "every white man in Virginia had done as much as Thomas Jefferson has done towards the utter destruction of its happiness, that eighty thousand white men had each of them, been the father of five mulatto children. Thus you have four hundred thousand mulattoes in addition to the present swarm. The country would no longer be habitable, till after a civil war and a series of massacres" (Sept. 22, 1802).
[7] Callender claims that Jefferson's acts, if followed, would cause the color balance to be skewed. The white race would no longer be such an overwhelming majority, and the culture as Callender knew it would be completely changed. The civilization Callender embraced would be in ruins from the overwhelming new numbers of the uncivilized barbarians that he considered Africans to be. Callender felt, however, that Jefferson did not have the same feelings towards such happenings: "A reinforcement of four hundred thousand mulattoes to the population of this state would indeed be a valuable thing. At least, Mr. Jefferson is of that opinion. His personal exertions have produced his proportion of the number. And the man who has gone such lengths towards the ruin of his country is himself, the very flower and gem of republic principles" (Sept. 22, 1802). Jefferson, in Callender's mind, is a disgrace to the white race. Jefferson is no longer fit for the title white because of his actions with Sally Hemings and the outcomes Callender thought it could produce.
[8] Despite the fact that Callender vehemently ravaged Jefferson's character and choices, it did not make any significant political difference. Even though Callender's facts were mostly all the truth, at least in Rothman's findings, it did not sway the public against Jefferson. Jefferson remained a highly regarded political figure in the public's eye. Rothman found Callender's facts to be true, but Callender's attacks on Jefferson have been "casually and categorically dismissed as unreliable" by both historians and contemporaries (Rothman 89). They view his attacks as "the libelous rants of a scandal-mongering, drunken, and disgruntled office-seeker" (Rothman 89). The opinions concerning the truth of Callender's statements vary greatly -- some like Rothman view them as truths, and then others view them as impossibilities. However, it is the way in which he delivers them that is always thought of in the same way: harsh as well as racist.
