OHN DICKERSON: From time to time, American presidents have fantasized about punishing journalists. John Adams went all the way. On this day in 1798, the second president signed the Sedition Act, a law he then used to jail a journalist. The man was James Thompson Callender, the most notorious writer of his day. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton didn't agree on much, but they both hated Callender. His lack of friends explain why an old law book describes Callender as “a scotchman, of whom nothing good is known.” They called him a “scandalmonger". His enemies said he drank too much and was crawling with lice. Callender broke the story of Alexander Hamilton's affair with a married woman, causing the downfall dramatized in the musical Hamilton. Callender targeted members of the Federalist Party, which is why Jefferson, a leader of the rival party, hired him to go after presidential candidate John Adams during the election of 1800. Callender labeled Adams a tyrant in writing that was so personal Adams jailed him, claiming Callender threatened national security, which is the kind of thing tyrants do: fabricating emergencies to justify repression. Jefferson won that election and pardoned Callender. But when you hire an attack dog, you must keep him fed. Jefferson didn't give Callender a job he thought he'd been promised, and Callender then turned his pen on the president. He poured forth against Mr. Jefferson “a torrent of scurrility and slander, of which no example had been previously afforded in the United States, not even by himself”, read one account. Callender wrote that Jefferson had a relationship with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, a claim that would later prove true. Callender's life of mayhem spun out in the James River, where he drowned, reportedly drunk. His death notice was short. No one mourned him. The Sedition Act had a bad end, too, seen as one of the clearest violations in American history of the Constitution's protections of free speech and a free press. One aspect of the story does live on, though the temptation to silence dissent endures in presidents- wherever they fear being questioned.
