In recent years, many of us have bemoaned the rampant posting of extreme memes, misinformation, and outright lies ad nauseum on social media platforms, especially during an election season. Many among us may worry that the development of these platforms and their technology have altered the way in which we receive and digest news and opinions, and that the spread of misinformation and accusations of scandal perpetuated on these platforms are almost certainly a threat to our democracy and fair elections.
An example of an early newspaper in the United States
In fact, a remarkably similar atmosphere, created by the exponential growth of technology occurred in the years of our early elections, when newspapers throughout the colonies grew in great number, some of them published by party affiliates to forward their political agenda, others printed independently, and thus prone to publish and republish any titillating piece of political gossip or stories with a hint of scandal that would increase readership.
As a result, newspapers of the day were crammed with political opinion, both from local writers and national “correspondents”, as well as stories of the candidate’s personal lives, real or imagined; and rumors that sought to compromise not only a candidate’s integrity, but sometimes threatened the new country’s national security.
As our first president, Washington was mostly immune from direct criticism in the press. His cabinet members however, and fellow founders of the union were not immune. Their actions and behavior both in government and in their private lives would come under scrutiny, often to create a scandal among both the readership and the social scene that evolved around the political elite in Philadelphia, and elsewhere throughout the young nation.
Alexander Hamilton was first targeted by anti-Federalist publisher James Thomas Callender in 1797. The newspaper publisher and printer had been sitting on a story for some years, ever since the revelation of an affair that Hamilton had undertaken with Marie Reynolds, a woman married to James Reynolds, a financial speculator, while he was Secretary of the Treasury. Reynold’s husband had known of the affair all along, later attempting to blackmail Hamilton. He would later make use of the tryst when he was investigated by Federal agents for an unrelated financial scandal. Reynolds not only revealed the affair, but also accused the Secretary of being involved in illegal financial dealings.[i]
Hamilton had been forced to confess the affair to members of the cabinet, showing them love letters from Madam Reynolds to exonerate himself of any illegal activity. The matter was placed under the carpet for some years, until the letters were conveyed by unknown persons to the publisher Callender, who printed them in a pamphlet. Embarrassed by the letters published and the unflattering light in which these cast his character, Hamilton penned and published a pamphlet of his own in response, against the advice of cabinet members and allies, admitting his “amorous connection” with Maria Reynolds, but refuting all claims of financial impropriety.
The pamphlet saved his political career, but the stain of infidelity would never quite fade from his reputation. It would not be the first time that Hamilton would refuse the advice of colleagues and print for public consumption what might have been better left to private correspondence.
Callender for his own efforts would later be arrested and charged with sedition for these and other stories he published, after the passage of the Aliens and Sedition Act, and serve nine months in prison.
As the nation moved beyond the presidency of Washington, the mantle of the office being above any attacks from the press fell away, especially as the nation’s capital moved from the refined streets of Philadelphia to the swamp ridden outlands of Washington, D.C. where the muckraking began in earnest.
As re-examined in Lindsey M. Chervinsky’s recent biography of President John Adams, the election of 1800 pivoted on the war between the Federalist and Republican parties in the press.
The election process was quite different then, to summarize; candidates were put forward by parties for voters to choose as now, but the election process was more like today’s primaries, stretched out over several months rather than voting on one day[ii]. There might be three candidates on one ticket, two on another. Voters chose two candidates from either ticket. The popular vote-getters among the white property owners who could vote, were then turned over to the State legislatures. The dominant party in the legislature would then decide the candidates who would receive the votes in the Electoral College.
As it remains now, the Electoral College was a factor from early on, and much effort was devoted to winning those “swing states” that could propel one party’s candidate over another. The candidates themselves did not “campaign” as we know it today. They might make appearances at parades and memorials, but generally left the politicking to allies in Congress and in their home states.
This meant that local elections were all important to control the outcome of the national election. While candidates might receive a popular vote in one state, the electors might be told to cast their votes for the candidate of the party that controlled the state legislature. It also meant that candidates from both parties could and did serve as President and Vice-President within the same administration.
The political machinations of the 18th century were all performed by letter. Correspondence was the means by which any criticism of a politician or their policies was conveyed. Usually, such letters were passed along to several influential individuals who would in turn make sure its contents were passed to others, and that those contents or a summary thereof, would appear in local newspapers.
As he looked towards running for a second term, President John Adams faced what seemed to be an uphill battle. Plagued with a cabinet that held several Federalists who attempted to undermine his policies, namely, maintaining neutrality in the war between Great Britain and France; he was also the victim of backlash from the Aliens and Sedition Act of 1798.
Adams as portrayed by John Trumbull 1798
This was a measure forwarded by Adams and the Federalists for fear of a popular uprising in the young nation. Fueled by unparalleled immigration, republican enthusiasm for the French Revolution in the press, and the published suspicions that Adams wanted to install a monarchy and name his son John Quincy as heir to the throne; the law soon became a tool for personal vendettas.
When Secretary of State Thomas Pickering took the act to its most extreme and began arresting newspaper publishers, Republicans established another fifteen broadsheets around the nation.
As early as June of 1800, the party had resuscitated the claims of Adams favoring a monarchy. In response, Federalist papers championed the Republican candidate as more attached to France than his own nation.[iii]They accused him of turning the Republican party into a “French party in America”, and viewed him as “the greatest villain in existence.”[iv] As Jefferson was famously tolerant of religions differing from Christianity, and supported the separation of any church and the state, Republicans called into question his own beliefs and morality. During the “election warfare” months of September and October, the leading Federalist newspaper published each day an article with the headline “The Grand Question Stated” which challenged Americans to swear “allegiance to GOD – AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT; or if they would dare shed their faith, and vote for JEFFERSON – AND NO GOD!!!”
Federalists also spread fears that if Jefferson were victorious, the Republicans planned to raid people’s homes and seize their Bibles. Writers urged the God-fearing populace to bury their religious texts to protect them from being confiscated.[v] Substitute Guns for Bibles in today’s rhetoric, and you begin to see the similarities.
official presidential portrait of Jefferson by Peale
Republicans on their part, produced an extraordinary political organization to promote their agenda and distribute anti-Adams propaganda. They set up committees of correspondence as had been instituted in the Revolutionary War, with which to pass correspondence, pamphlets, and newspapers. By 1800, the party owned forty percent of the nation’s news publications, which would guarantee wide distribution of their strategic attacks against the Federalists and Adams in particular.
The Republican’s leading newspaper the Aurora, centered on the influence of Thomas Pinckney, Washington’s former ambassador to London, and Charles Cotesworthy Pinckney, the present envoy. The president’s relationship with the family was called into question, especially after the newspaper printed a letter Adam’s had written while Vice-President expressing his concern about the “long intrigue” the family had waged with Washington to obtain a diplomatic posting, and the “British influence” evident in choosing Pinckney for that posting. The paper asserted that Adams and Pinckney had cemented their relationship through licentious behavior, alleging that Adams had dispatched the envoy to find four “pretty Girls two of them for my Use, and two for his own.”
Republicans also saw danger in those Arch Federalists, like Alexander Hamilton who had favored war with France, built up a large standing army under his influence, and favored the taxes the Federalists had imposed on the people. In short, they viewed the Alien and Sedition Act, the standing army, and imposition of taxes as evidence that the Federalists had trampled upon those liberties fought for in the American Revolution and betrayed the Constitution. If the Federalists remained in power, America was sure to see an increasing aristocracy, with a tyrannical president supported by a standing army.
In fact, the greatest threat to Adam’s bid for a second term came from within his own party, and in the form of General Alexander Hamilton. Having received little aid from the President in building the formidable Army he wished for, Hamilton had seethed as Adam’s attention had focused on the build-up of the American Navy, the prospect of war with France notwithstanding. Hamilton, while often prone to public displays of indignation, penned his grievances as a gentleman, and circulated them among friends. Those friends urged caution, and advised he put the sentiments aside, but Hamilton believed the better idea to have those thoughts published in a damning pamphlet.
On October 24, 1800, the New York newspaper the American Citizen included a notice that they had printed copies of “A letter from ALEXANDER HAMILTON, concerning the public CONDUCT and CHARACTER of JOHN ADAMS Esq. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”
The advertisement advised readers they could purchase a copy at 136 Pearl Street in the city.
Other newspapers like the Aurora began immediately to publish a series of excerpts from the fifty-five-page diatribe.
In the fall that year, as elections were being held in New England States, the General of the Army of the United States made a tour of the region, openly outspoken in his dislike of Adams as a candidate. He personally put forth the name of the recently fired Secretary of State, Thomas Pickering; but his efforts to dislodge the president as candidate were met only with open disdain by fellow Federalists.
In Rhode Island, chasing the chance of an electoral vote, he was scolded by Governor Thomas Fenner for his meddling in the election. The Governor knew Adams personally and was not to be swayed to another candidate. Furthermore, any attempt to undermine the President was an attempt to sway the election toward Jefferson, whose policies might well revive the once popular Agrarian party, whose tactics had fought taxation and federal oversight for years in the State’s formative years.
When the votes were counted in the National election of 1800, the Republican candidates Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr were tied with forty-seven electoral votes each. Adams had lost his bid for a second term, but his present term ended in March, and Congress was officially not scheduled to return until the fall of 1801. Adams as president, called back the Congress in spring to settle the outcome.
After weeks of negotiation and back-door meetings, Jefferson was declared president. To his eternal credit, Adams immediately placed into motion the peaceful transfer of power once Congress had determined the winner.
For perhaps the first time in our history, the press had altered the course of an election.
Jefferson himself would fall under the same scrutiny as President, and face a scandal raised by the same individual the Adam’s administration had imprisoned. As noted earlier, Jefferson and the Republicans were outraged at the wide berth Secretary of State Pickering had been given in applying the law. One of his first acts as president had been to pardon James Brown, a boy convicted under the Act for the crime of erecting a liberty pole, and a sign that harkened back to the days of pre-revolutionary protest.[vi]
In March of 1801, he sought to pardon James Thomas Callendar, who had served the entirety of his nine-month sentence, and also been forced to pay a $200.00 fine before his release. On March 16th, Jefferson signed a formal pardon, and the Attorney General Levi Lincoln dispatched a letter to the Federal Marshall in Richmond, Virginia, instructing him to refund the fine paid by Callendar.
Unfortunately for Callendar and the President, the Federal Marshall was a man named David Randolph who detested Jefferson and balked at carrying out the Administration’s orders. Callender, meanwhile, was convinced that Jefferson himself was behind the delay, and became further infuriated when letters he had written to the President went unanswered.
The publisher had put those long weeks of waiting to good use, digging deeper into a story that had first surfaced in 1797, of an enslaved mistress of Jefferson’s who had given him several children.
By April of 1801, he had gathered enough information about the President’s “black family” in Monticello to demand, through James Madison, the position of Postmaster of Richmond, in exchange for keeping the considerable information he had gathered under wraps.
Jefferson should have been concerned. His mistress Sally Hemings was heavily pregnant at the time of Callender’s demands. In May 1801 she would give birth to another daughter. The child was quickly named Harriet in honor of an earlier daughter who had died in 1797 as the first rumors of then Vice-President Jefferson’s dalliance with a woman enslaved in his home first came to light.
Such arrangements in Virginia and other Southern states were not uncommon, and even more popular among the plantation owners in Barbados and other West Indian isles. In fact, the rumor caused little stir among the planter elites who supported Jefferson politically. A number came to his defense, vehemently denying the charges in letters to Republican papers. Almost no one was deceived, though there were still few details that the press could print beyond speculation.
Over a year would pass before Callender published the material he had. The publisher had received his refund by then, and had been hired by the Richmond Reporter, a Federalist paper begun by publisher Henry Pace the previous year.
Believing he had been unfairly cast as a common blackmailer, Callender now printed the material he had held in secret for many months. On September 1, 1802, the first of a series of article’s began:
Illustration depicting Jefferson as a “cock philosopher” circa 1804
“It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is Tom. His features are said to bear a striking resemblance to those of the president himself…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…”[vii]
Once more, Republican loyalists defended the president and swore the story wasn’t true. Meriwether Jones in his letter to the Richmond Examiner put forward the notion that another person was responsible for fathering Sally Heming’s children, a defense later taken up by Jefferson’s descendants for many years, before the irrefutable documentation published in the 20th century by Fawn Brodie and more extensively by Annette Gordon Reed in her work The Hemings of Monticello.
Newspapers since that era have both striven as in this case, to expose the truths about a candidate’s hidden life beyond public office, and to increase readership with stories both true and questionable that stir some degree of controversy. To a large degree, mainstream media outlets have followed this pattern to accomplish ratings in an ever-challenging market. The truth often seems more difficult to discern when bombarded with the smoke and fog of edited sound bites and video designed to convey only part of the story, or support one point of view.
The good news is that Americans remain highly literate, and highly engaged in the debates. If we feel that social media is overwhelming us, it may ease our mind to know that only 9 % of adult social media users post or repost political content, or posts about social issues.
That means many of us are still engaged in the debate over the important issues and concerns that should motivate one to vote in each election.
[i] Andrews, Evan 8 Early American Political Scandals History blog, October 18, 2023, http://history.com/news
[ii] Voting began in September and ended with votes expected to have been delivered from all the states to Congress by December 2,1800.
[iii] Chervinsky, Lindsay M. Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic Oxford University Press 2024 p. 181
[iv] Ibid, p. 182
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Brodie, Fawn M. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History W.W. Norton & Co. 1974 pp. 339-340
[vii] Ibid. p. 349