The Recorder, Or, Lady's And Gentleman's Miscellany

Now I will, this soft:-

I will find him when both asleep,

And scream and howl. Callender

Nay. I'll have a darling slip; be raught:

Nothing but Callender, and give it him

To keep his shame alive

From the Gazette of the United States

Callender has given us to understand that Mr. Jefferson read in beets his well known Sketches of the History of America; and that he paid twenty FIVE Dollars towards defraying the expense of publication.

We are at a loss to know in what terms to couch our conceptions of the meanness of the acts imputed to Mr. Jefferson. When a man betrays his country, we call him traitor, and consign him at once to the execration of posterity. When a man, by artifice and fraud, obtains our property, we call him Swindler, and thereby designate his character. When a man, whose services, in a time of peril, are demanded by his country, dastardly quits his post, and shrinks from danger and the conflict, we call him coward; and sometimes commiserate his weakness. For the midnight robber, for the petty plunderer of the purse, for the seducer of female innocence, for the slave of intoxication, for the hellish incendiary, and for the common assassin of reputation, we are at no loss for names which will designate their characters and describe their atrocities: but who will tell us what epithets, what terms, what name, what words multiplied upon words, are adequate to portray a character, and to give to it an appropriate name, upon the facts thus set before us? The chosen chief and ruler of the freest, most enlightened, and most virtuous people on God's earth, depicted as coolly, covertly, meanly, and malignantly buying, with paltry ore, and with the lowly prostitution of his personal countenance and support, the damnation of superiors, whose lofty merits he despairs of obtaining, and as then rising upon the wreck of fair reputation, made by malice and by cunning. The weapons are falsehood and calumny: the price of the purchase is gold, condescension, and craft,

- The purse opened;

the president stoops to the sycophancy

an-

hireling; the shaft

h to honest fame

-Its of office and

24

a the means or c-

..i

The Democrats are in a woful dilemma; respecting their former friend Callender. For he is either an honest and true man, and must be believed; or he is a liar and a scoundrel; and his words deserve to have no credit attached to them. Take your choice, ye mild lovers and supporters of the new philosophy. If Callender be an honest and true man, then he is to be believed in his representation, and that representation sinks your chief to a level with the meanest and basest of created beings. Your cause goes with your chief, for as he has risen, so have you risen, and as he sinks, so must you sink. If Callender be a lying scoundrel, then how stand ye? Did ye not cherish him and support him, did ye not draw slanders and lies from his pen and disseminate them? Did not individuals among you swear to his moral character, support him with your purses, receive him into your houses, and propagate his falsehoods? Did not the last administration fall, and have not you risen, in consequence of the calumnies which Callender has been eager to invent, and active to disseminate? And must you not have known him, when you were proud of his talents, and zealous for his services, to have been a liar; and has not your cause thus flourished and been perfected by the basest means?

In the one case, it is fair to say, that if Callender is honest and worthy of belief, Mr. Jefferson is sunk below the reach of even a mean man's commiseration: In the other case, if Callender is false, the whole world may see, that ye knew him to be a liar, that ye used his lies and profited by the deadly injury they wrought, that your system has been a lie from the beginning, that your ascendancy is founded on a lie, and that like a lie and the works of the father of lies, your glory will be dissipated by the rays of truth.