TO MRS. ADAMS.

Washington, July 22, 1804.

Dear Madam,

Your favor of the 1st instant was duly received, and I would not again have intruded on you, but to rectify certain facts which seem not to have been presented to you under their true aspect.  My charities to Callendar are considered as rewards for his calumnies.  As early, I think, as 1796, I was told in Philadelphia, that Callendar, the author of the ‘Political Progress of Britain,’ was in that city, a fugitive from persecution for having written that book, and in distress.  I had read and approved the book; I considered him as a man of genius, unjustly persecuted.  I knew nothing of his private character, and immediately expressed my readiness to contribute to his relief, and to serve him.  It was a considerable time after, that, on application from a person who thought of him as I did, I contributed to his relief, and afterwards repeated the contribution.  Himself I did not see till long after, nor ever more than two or three times.  When he first began to write, he told some useful truths in his coarse way; but nobody sooner disapproved of his writing than I did, or wished more that he would be silent.  My charities to him were no more meant as encouragements to his scurrilities, than those I give to the beggar at my door are meant as rewards for the vices of his life, and to make them chargeable to myself.  In truth, they would have been greater to him, had he never written a word after the work for which he fled from Britain.  With respect to the calumnies and falsehoods which writers and printers at large published against Mr. Adams, I was as far from stooping to any concern or approbation of them, as Mr. Adams was respecting those of Porcupine, Fenno, or Russell, who published volumes against me for every sentence vended by their opponents against Mr. Adams.  But I never supposed Mr. Adams had any participation in the atrocities of these editors, or their writers.  I knew myself incapable of that base warfare, and believed him to be so.  On the contrary, whatever I may have thought of the acts of the administration of that day, I have ever borne testimony to Mr. Adams’s personal worth; nor was it ever impeached in my presence, without a just vindication of it on my part.  I never supposed that any person who knew either of us, could believe that either of us meddled in that dirty work.  But another fact is, that I ’liberated a wretch who was suffering for a libel against Mr. Adams.’  I do not know who was the particular wretch alluded to; but I discharged every person under punishment or prosecution under the sedition law, because I considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity, as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image; and that it was as much my duty to arrest its execution in every stage, as it would have been to have rescued from the fiery furnace those who should have been cast into it for