Jefferson’s friends took a tone of apology about the letter to Paine, implying that he acted without reflection. They treated the letter as a formal civility, such as might without complaint have been extended to Gates or Conway or Charles Lee,[76]—a reminiscence of Revolutionary services which implied no personal feeling. Had Jefferson meant no more than this, he would have said only what he meant. He was not obliged to offer Paine a passage in a ship-of-war; or if he felt himself called upon to do so, he need not have written a letter; or if a letter must be written, he might have used very cordial language without risking the charge of applauding Paine’s assaults on Christianity, and without seeming to invite him to continue such “useful labors” in America. No man could express more delicate shades of sympathy than Jefferson when he chose. He had smarted for years under the lashing caused by his Mazzei letter, and knew that a nest of hornets would rise about him the moment the “Maryland” should arrive; yet he wrote an assurance of his “high esteem and affectionate attachment” to Paine, with a “sincere prayer” that he might “long live to continue” his “useful labors.” These expressions were either deceptive, or they proved the President’s earnestness and courage. The letter to Paine was not, like the letter to Mazzei, a matter of apology or explanation. Jefferson never withdrew or qualified its language, or tried to soften its effect. “With respect to the letter,” he wrote[77] to Paine in 1805, “I never hesitated to avow and to justify it in conversation. In no other way do I trouble myself to contradict anything which is said.” Believing that the clergy would have taken his blood if the law had not restrained them, he meant to destroy their church if he could; and he gave them fair notice of his intention.

Although the letter to Paine was never explained away, other expressions of the President seemed to contradict the spirit of this letter, and these the President took trouble to explain. What had he meant by his famous appeal in behalf of harmony and affection in social intercourse, “without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things”? What was to become of the still more famous declaration, “We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists”? Hardly had he uttered these words than he hastened to explain them to his friends. “It was a conviction,” he wrote to Giles,[78] “that these people did not differ from us in principle which induced me to define the principles which I deemed orthodox, and to urge a reunion on those principles; and I am induced to hope it has conciliated many. I do not speak of the desperadoes of the quondam faction in and out of Congress. These I consider as incurables, on whom all attentions would be lost, and therefore will not be wasted; but my wish is to keep their flock from returning to them.” He intended to entice the flock with one hand and to belabor the shepherds with the other. In equally clear language he wrote to Governor McKean of Pennsylvania:[79]—

“My idea is that the mass of our countrymen, even of those who call themselves Federalist, are Republican. They differ from us but in a shade of more or less power to be given to the Executive or Executive organs.... To restore that harmony which our predecessors so wickedly made it their object to break up, to render us again one people acting as one nation,—should be the object of every man really a patriot. I am satisfied it can be done, and I own that the day which should convince me to the contrary would be the bitterest of my life.”

This motive, he said, had dictated his answer to the New Haven remonstrants,—a paper, he added, which “will furnish new texts for the monarchists; but from them I ask nothing: I wish nothing but their eternal hatred.”

The interest of Jefferson’s character consisted, to no small extent, in these outbursts of temper, which gave so lively a tone to his official, and still more to his private, language. The avowal in one sentence of his duty as a patriot to restore the harmony which his predecessors (one of whom was President Washington) had “so wickedly made it their object to break up,” and the admission that the day of his final failure would be the bitterest of his life, contrasted strangely with his wish, in the next sentence, for the eternal hatred of a class which embraced most of the bench and bar, the merchants and farmers, the colleges and the churches of New England! In any other man such contradictions would have argued dishonesty. In Jefferson they proved only that he took New England to be like Virginia,—ruled by a petty oligarchy which had no sympathies with the people, and whose artificial power, once broken, would vanish like that of the Virginia church. He persuaded himself that if his system were politically successful, the New England hierarchy could be safely ignored. When he said that all were Republicans and all Federalists, he meant that the churches and prejudices of New England were, in his opinion, already so much weakened as not to be taken into his account.

At first the New Englanders were half inclined to believe his assurances. The idea of drawing a line between the people on one side and the bulk of their clergy, magistrates, political leaders, learned professions, colleges, and land-owners on the other did not occur to them, and so thoroughly Virginian was this idea that it never came to be understood; but when they found Jefferson ejecting Federalists from office and threatening the clergy with Paine, they assumed, without refined analysis, that the President had deliberately deceived them. This view agreed with their previous prejudices against Jefferson’s character, and with their understanding of the Mazzei letter. Their wrath soon became hot with the dry white heat peculiar to their character. The clergy had always hated Jefferson, and believed him not only to be untruthful, but to be also a demagogue, a backbiter, and a sensualist. When they found him, as they imagined, actually at work stripping not only the rags from their religion, but the very coats from their backs, and setting Paine to bait them, they were beside themselves with rage and contempt.

Thus the summer of 1802, which Jefferson’s hopes had painted as the term of his complete success, was marked by an outburst of reciprocal invective and slander such as could not be matched in American history. The floodgates of calumny were opened. By a stroke of evil fortune Jefferson further roused against himself the hatred of a man whose vileness made him more formidable than the respectability of New England could ever be. James Thompson Callender, a Scotch adventurer compared with whom the Cobbetts, Duanes, Cheethams, and Woods who infested the press were men of moral and pure life, had been an ally of Jefferson during the stormy days of 1798, and had published at Richmond a volume called “The Prospect before us,” which was sufficiently libellous to draw upon him a State prosecution, and a fine and some months’ imprisonment at the rough hands of Judge Chase. A few years later the Republicans would have applauded the sentence, and regretted only its lightness. In 1800 they were bound to make common cause with the victim. When Jefferson became President, he pardoned Callender, and by a stretch of authority returned to him the amount of his fine. Naturally Callender expected reward. He hastened to Washington, and was referred to Madison. He said that he was in love, and hinted that to win the object of his affection nothing less than the post-office at Richmond was necessary for his social standing.[80] Meeting with a positive refusal, he returned to Richmond in extreme anger, and became editor of a newspaper called “The Recorder,” in which he began to wage against Jefferson a war of slander that Cobbett and Cheetham would have shrunk from. He collected every story he could gather, among overseers and scandal-mongers, about Jefferson’s past life,—charged him with having a family of negro children by a slave named Sally; with having been turned out of the house of a certain Major Walker for writing a secret love-letter to his wife; with having swindled his creditors by paying debts in worthless currency, and with having privately paid Callender himself to write “The Prospect before us,” besides furnishing materials for the book. Disproof of these charges was impossible. That which concerned Black Sally, as she was called, seems to have rested on a confusion of persons which could not be cleared up; that relating to Mrs. Walker had a foundation of truth, although the parties were afterward reconciled;[81] that regarding the payment of debt was true in one sense, and false only in the sense which Callender gave it; while that which referred to “The Prospect before us” was true enough to be serious. All these charges were welcomed by the Federalist press, reprinted even in the New York “Evening Post,” and scattered broadcast over New England. There men’s minds were ready to welcome any tale of villany that bore out their theory of Jefferson’s character; and, at the most critical moment, a mistake made by himself went far to confirm their prejudice.

Jefferson’s nature was feminine; he was more refined than many women in the delicacy of his private relations, and even men as shameless as Callender himself winced under attacks of such a sort. He was sensitive, affectionate, and, in his own eyes, heroic. He yearned for love and praise as no other great American ever did. He hated the clergy chiefly because he knew that from them he could expect neither love nor praise, perhaps not even forbearance. He had befriended Callender against his own better judgment, as every party leader befriended party hacks, not because the leaders approved them, but because they were necessary for the press. So far as license was concerned, “The Prospect before us” was a mild libel compared with Cobbett’s, Coleman’s, and Dennie’s cataracts of abuse; and at the time it was written, Callender’s character was not known and his habits were still decent. In return for kindness and encouragement, Callender attempted an act of dastardly assassination, which the whole Federalist press cheered. That a large part of the community, and the part socially uppermost, should believe this drunken ruffian, and should laugh while he bespattered their President with his filth, was a mortification which cut deep into Jefferson’s heart. Hurt and angry, he felt that at bottom it was the old theological hatred in Virginia and New England which sustained this mode of warfare; that as he had flung Paine at them, they were flinging Callender at him. “With the aid of a lying renegade from Republicanism, the Federalists have opened all their sluices of calumny,” he wrote;[82] and he would have done wisely to say no more. Unluckily for him, he undertook to contradict Callender’s assertions.

James Monroe was Governor of Virginia. Some weakness in Monroe’s character caused him more than once to mix in scandals which he might better have left untouched. July 7, 1802, he wrote to the President, asking for the facts in regard to Jefferson’s relations with Callender. The President’s reply confessed the smart of his wound:[83]—

“I am really mortified at the base ingratitude of Callender. It presents human nature in a hideous form. It gives me concern because I perceive that relief which was afforded him on mere motives of charity, may be viewed under the aspect of employing him as a writer.”