James Thompson Callender

James Thompson Callender was a Scottish-born journalist and pamphleteer who emigrated to Philadelphia in 1793 after being indicted in Edinburgh for sedition. In the United States he wrote for the Philadelphia Aurora and Richmond Examiner and produced a series of acid pamphlets attacking the Federalist Party. His 1797 pamphlet The History of the United States for 1796 first publicly exposed Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's affair with Maria Reynolds and the hush-money payments to her husband.

In 1800 Callender published The Prospect Before Us, a long pamphlet attacking President John Adams. He was indicted under the Sedition Act in May 1800, tried before Justice Samuel Chase in Richmond — the same judge whose conduct of the Cooper trial weeks earlier would form part of his impeachment — and convicted. He was sentenced to nine months in the Richmond jail and a \$200 fine. President Jefferson pardoned him after taking office in March 1801. Embittered when Jefferson refused to appoint him postmaster of Richmond as a reward, Callender turned on his former patron: in September 1802 he published in the Richmond Recorder the first allegations that Jefferson had fathered children with the enslaved Sally Hemings. He drowned, drunk, in the James River in Richmond on July 17, 1803.