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