853 Sheet – American State Trials 1918 Volume X Leo Frank Document

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Here is the translated text as follows:

The Trial of James Thompson Callender for Seditious Libel, Richmond, Virginia, 1800

The Narrative

This was the last of the great trials under the Federal Sedition Act and the most celebrated. The libel was directed against the President of the United States, and the tempest which the trial excited, as Dr. Wharton notes, can now hardly be understood. Virginia had joined Kentucky in declaring the law void within her borders, viewing it as a menace to the freedom of the press and a breach of the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. There was no popular sympathy for Callender, who was a brilliant, drunken, unscrupulous individual.

*See Trial of Matthew Lyon, 6 Am. St. Tr. 687.
Trial of Anthony Haswell, 6 Am. St. Tr. 695.
Trial of Thomas Cooper, ante, p. 774.*

James Thompson Callender was a Scotsman of whom nothing good is known. He had the pen of a ready writer and the brazen forehead of a knave. In Scotland, he wrote a pamphlet called "The Political Progress of Great Britain," which led to his expulsion from the country. He fled to the United States, where, like Freneau, Duane, and John Wood, he was taken up and helped by Jefferson. Callender became, in short, what might be called a Jeffersonian hack. His business was to gather all the political scandal, foul abuse, libels, and mean lies circulating through the press, to distort Congressional speeches, misinterpret good acts, attribute false motives, and digest the scurrility of publications like the Aurora, the Argus, and the Independent Chronicle. Once a year, he would send out the whole mass in the form of a book.

Callender belonged to a class of men long common in England but, until his arrival, little known in the United States. He was a fine specimen of a Grub Street hack. As destitute of principle as of money, his talents, which were not despicable, were ever up for sale. The question with him was never what he wrote, but what he was to be paid.