Rubber and Glue

PETER ONUF: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN BALOGH: I’m Brian Balogh.

ED AYERS: And I’m Ed Ayers. Today on the show, we’re marking Banned Books Week with an hour on the history of censorship in the United States. Before the break we heard about the decades long attempt to censor anti-slavery messages. But that wasn’t the country’s first struggle over free speech.

PETER ONUF: In 1799, a journalist named James Thomson Callender published a pamphlet called “The Prospect Before Us.” His chosen target was the US President, John Adams.

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: He described Adams as having hands reeking with the blood of a poor, friendless Connecticut sailor.

PETER ONUF: This is historian Richard Bernstein.

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: And he’s a lawyer, whose office is the scene of profligacy and usury, and whose purpose is to embroil the country in a war with France.

PETER ONUF: John Adams and his Federalist party had recently passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which among other things, made it illegal to criticize the federal government. Bernstein says Callender wasn’t exactly the most high minded champion of the First Amendment.

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: And Callender is the kind of guy who publishes whatever he can find that’s as scurrilous and nasty and defamatory as he can. Because it sells papers.

PETER ONUF: Callender was thrown in prison, a move that would outrage journalists today. But Bernstein says there was a context for Adams’s heavy-handed response.

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: We are so used to the Constitution and the presidency and all the other institutions as being centuries old and sanctified in their legitimacy and all that other stuff, that we forget how fragile the government was in the 1790s.

Most people basically thought that the government was little more than the character and reputation of those holding office under it. See if you damaged the character and reputation, say, of the president or Congress, then you’re damaging the constitutional system itself. And you could, if you go too far, bring the whole thing down.

PETER ONUF: And how effective was the Federalist campaign against the Republican press?

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: Printers were indicted, tried, convicted, sentenced, jailed, and fined. Even those printers who were not indicted and so forth start to worry– what’s going to come over the hill next week? Is a federal grand jury going to indict me for violating the statute? I’d better be careful.

PETER ONUF: So this is a chilling effect of–

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: This is exactly the phrase I was thinking of. This is a way of keeping people from speaking their minds.

PETER ONUF: So we have this law on the books, creating new federal crime, and has a tremendous chilling effect, and potentially jeopardizing the future of the free press in America. But it does have a “sell by” date. It’s going to expire after a while. Tell us a little bit about the history of the Sedition Act.

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: Well, the Sedition Act has two odd features. One is if you look at the list of government officials that you can’t criticize, there’s one key player who’s missing. The Federalists list the president, Congress, and the government. But they omit the second ranking in the government, the vice president, who happens to be a Republican named Thomas Jefferson.

So all Federalists can slime Jefferson with impunity. Nothing’s going to happen to them under the Sedition Act.

The other feature of it is the Federalists built an expiration date into the Sedition Act. The expiration date happened to coincide with the end of John Adams’s term as president.

The Federalists thought, well, if Adams gets reelected, we will reenact the Sedition Act for another four years.

PETER ONUF: If not, they don’t have it.

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: If not, Adams’s opponents will not have it to use against us. And that’s pretty much what happens.

There’s what I might call unfinished business or loose ends. Even though the Sedition Act expires, there are still printers who are indicted, tried, convicted, jailed, and fined. And some of those guys are still in jail. So President Jefferson sets out to pardon them and remit their fines. And that’s supposed to tie up the whole business of the Sedition Act.

PETER ONUF: Let’s get back to James Thomsom Callender. What happened to him?

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: Callender was find heavily. I don’t remember how much. But it was a lot.

The problem was it took a while for the government to remit the fines. And that made Callender angry.

And Callender also felt that he had suffered quite a bit for the cause of Thomas Jefferson. And he wanted a goodie in return. He wants the postmastership of Richmond. And Jefferson didn’t want to do it, and wouldn’t do it.

At which point, Callender says, I’m going to attack everybody I can. And he does.

PETER ONUF: And that would include Thomas Jefferson, of course.

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: Very particularly.

PETER ONUF: Yeah, so tell us how he goes back at–

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: In specific particular, he notes that the man whom the people delight to honor is keeping– and I’m going to clean it up a little bit– an African American concubine named Sally. So in other words Callender is the first guy in the press to expose the alleged relationship– although I don’t believe it’s alleged– between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. And this, of course, is scandal.

And then James Thomsom Callender turns up drowned in a local stream.

PETER ONUF: Hmm. Well, Richard, I know you’re on the side of free speech because you speak freely all the time.

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: I try.

PETER ONUF: But when you think back on this period, it sounds as if– you mentioned– you called Callender, poor Callender. You’re sympathetic that he is for all his warts, and he was practically all warts. He’s the hero of your story. Or are you willing to be identified with that?

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: No, James Callender was a racist. One of the reasons he published the Sally Hemings story was he had a horror of interracial sex. And he was also a difficult, impossible, cantankerous, vicious, brutal human being.

And it’s not really great to have him as a symbol of free speech, except sometimes that’s what you get.

PETER ONUF: Right, but the First Amendment is a dead letter if there’s no United States of America, if the government falls apart. So there are limits even to your absolutism, aren’t there?

RICHARD BERNSTEIN: Well, I don’t know about that, because I don’t think that any abuse of free speech or free press that we have seen in our history gives any reason to believe that it would have brought the government down.

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PETER ONUF: Richard Bernstein lectures at the City College of New York and is a biographer of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. We’ll link to his books on our website, backstoryradio.org.