First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

by Thomas E. Ricks

Jefferson pardoned Callender, the muckraking Scottish journalist who had been jailed under the Sedition Act.16 But Callender wanted much more, something like a nice, well-paid government job. He hoped to be rewarded for his efforts and imprisonment by being named postmaster of Richmond, Virginia. When the president did not do that, Callender turned on Jefferson, darkly warning that “he was in possession of things which he could & would make use of in a certain case.”17 When Jefferson shunned him, Callender published those “things,” which were the rumors—confirmed by DNA tests centuries later—that Jefferson kept an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, as his mistress, and had fathered children with her.