| Episodes |
Executing Callender: Henry Randall's Role
Brian Day and Jason Pitonyak
[1] In today's media a political scandal of semi-serious proportions can come and go in a news cycle. Even new information will only extend its life for a short while. However, the founding fathers of our nation did not interact with today's media. News took time to travel, and, unfortunately for our presidents, politics was always center-stage. Scandals did not die so quickly. And while many political figures of the time could attest to this, none so much as Thomas Jefferson.
[2] During his presidency, Jefferson became the object of the attack journalism of James Thompson Callender, a man who fled Scotland to escape persecution for his writing. In 1802 Callender leaked the story of Jefferson having a relationship with and fathering children on one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. His publication picked up steam and talk of it lasted for months. The father of the Declaration of Independence and the words "all men are created equal" was also the father of mulatto children. Even despite winning his reelection in a landslide, the scandal persisted with James Callender as its leader.
[3] Eventually, however, Jefferson biographer Henry Stephens Randall, in tandem with later biographer James Parton, helped to silence the scandal. In only a few pages in the third and final volume of The Life of Thomas Jefferson (1858), Randall attacks Callender and the accompanying controversy. By bolstering the already glorious image of Jefferson and devaluing Callender, all the while appealing to the reader's emotions, Randall is able to launch the one-two punch with Parton, whose work appeared in 1873, that squelched the Jefferson-Hemings Controversy till the middle of the twentieth century.
[4] Randall begins his attack by presenting the reader with two letters from Jefferson, both of which he gives in full because they have "been the subject of many historical misstatements" (16). Jefferson begins his first letter, written to Governor Monroe, by bluntly laying out his disgust for Callender, saying, "I am really mortified at the base ingratitude of Callender." He then proceeds to present the reader with his initial impression of Callender, which stands in stark contrast to the current perception of the man, writing that "I considered him of a man of science fled from persecution, and assured my friend of my readiness to do whatever could serve him" (16).
[5] Randall, like Jefferson, recognized Callender's fall from grace and sought to dramatize the story. After the letters, when Randall himself begins to speak, the first thing he does is reiterate this story with charged words and phrases in order to appeal to emotion. He commences by describing Callender as a man "possessed by much coarse, vigorous ability" and ends with him "plunging deeper into debauchery" and dying in "a state of intoxication" (18-21). By turning Callender into a fallen angel, Randall is able to generate serious contempt for the man. However, Randall did not only seek to belittle Callender but to create pity and sympathy for Jefferson. The letters from Jefferson, as well as his initial reputation, made this an easy task. In these letters Jefferson talks of his repeated charity to the man, emphasizing the fact that it was indeed charity, as Callender's later writing never rivaled his first piece. By eliciting these emotions in the reader, Randall adds fuel to his argument, turning otherwise weak points into a solid case.
[6] Randall's next tactic, and perhaps his most effective, is to again shatter Callender's image by playing up his foolish interpretation of Jefferson's charity. While it is true that Jefferson's early payments were out of reverence for the journalist, the president himself remarks in his second letter that he began to help all the newspapers he could "when they were staggering under the sedition law" (17). By showing that later donations to Callender were to combat the effects of the Sedition Act and not in support of Callender specifically, Randall (and Jefferson) starts to paint the man as a fool. This idea is only furthered by statements from Jefferson's first letter, in which the president says: "He [Callender] considers these as proofs of my approbations of his writings, when they were mere charities" and "It is known to many that these sums given to him were such, and even smaller than I was in the habit of giving to others in distress" (16-17).
[7] Nonetheless, the attacks on Callender do not stop there. Randall goes on to characterize Callender as a ruthless political mercenary defunct of morals. He first does this by bringing attention to the fact that Callender "would revel in personal chastisement […] because it would advertise him in his trade" (19). He also mentions that Callender did this very same thing to try to ruin President John Adams' reputation, a political enemy of Jefferson. In doing this, Randall not only implies but also proves that Callender wrote to kill and without any loyalty. Furthermore, he shows that self-respect and morals were no longer of importance to him. This dehumanization of Callender helps Randall in his attempt to appeal to the reader's emotion and, most importantly, kills the controversy, for now it would be near impossible for an intelligent reader to put any faith in Callender and, by extension, into the Jefferson-Hemings controversy.
[8] After all of this, it would not seem necessary to say any more about the controversy, and, in fact Randall does not, at least in his biography. Still, he did later write a letter to Parton, knowing that its contents would likely become public. In this letter, Randall employs a time-tested strategy and points the finger of blame at somebody else. He tells of how he talked to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson's oldest grandson, and how Randolph told him that the Hemings children were likely fathered by one of the Carr brothers, Peter and Samuel. The fact that Randall was able to get this information from a white descendant of Jefferson gives a real impact to the point. The only reason it is absent from Randall's biography was that Randolph requested it so.
[9] These basic and by no means novel attacks on Callender proved immensely effective. By provoking the emotions of the reader, Randall gives all his arguments an added fire, and the ingenious combination of strategies does the same. Moreover, he made it so that the goodness of Callender and the veracity of the Jefferson-Hemings controversy were dependent on one another. In a one-two punch, the official biographies on Thomas Jefferson coming from Randall and Parton helped to tear down Callender and effectively dismantle the controversy, at least until the Civil Rights Era, leaving Callender, to play on his own words, scum "as common as the pavement."
