government after the pardon, and that Jefferson did not appreciate his sacrifices. Jefferson refused to make the appointment, as placing the ill-tempered Callender in a position of authority in the Federalist stronghold of Richmond would have been, in the words of the Jefferson biographer R.B. Bernstein, "like whacking a hornet's nest with a stick." With his career and his social ambitions thwarted, Callender returned to newspaper work, as editor of a Federalist newspaper, the Richmond Recorder. In a series of articles attacking corruption on all sides, Callender targeted Jefferson, revealing that Jefferson had funded his pamphleteering. After denials were issued, he published Jefferson's letters to him to prove the relationship. Later, angered by the criticism from Jefferson supporters, who asserted that Callender had abandoned his wife to die of a venereal disease, Callender reported in a series of articles that Jefferson fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings. The first of those articles, printed on September 1, 1802, contained this excerpt: It is well known that the man, Whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. The name of her eldest son is Tom. His features are said to bear a striking though sable resemblance to those of the President himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age. Callender's reporting on the Jefferson-Hemings relationship used racist rhetoric of the time. Although he had expressed anti-slavery views when he first arrived in the United States, he eventually adopted a position on slavery and race similar to that of Jefferson's in Notes on the State of Virginia. After the Hemings controversy ran its course, Callender turned to publicizing Jefferson's earlier attempt to seduce a married neighbor decades before. Death and legacy By some accounts, Callender was slated to provide testimony for a New York trial, The People v. Croswell, which involved libel charges against a publisher, Harry Croswell, who had reprinted claims that Thomas Jefferson paid Callender to defame George Washington. Croswell's lawyer was Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson, wary of the controversy generated by the Adams administration's sedition prosecutions, had begun a selective campaign against individual newspaper critics. Despite his popularity among newspaper readers, Callender had an uneasy situation. Former allies had turned against him. In a surprise attack in December 1802, George Hay, one of his former defense attorneys, clubbed him in the