James T. Callender

Who was James T. Callender?

James Thomson Callender was a political pamphleteer and journalist whose writing was controversial in his native Scotland and the United States. His contemporary reputation was as a "scandalmonger", due to the content of some of his reporting, which overshadowed the political content. In the United States, he was a central figure in the press wars between the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, and reported on President Thomas Jefferson's alleged children by his slave concubine Sally Hemings. Callender's authority and veracity have been controversial, but his statements about Jefferson are thought by some to have been confirmed by a 1998 DNA analysis and the weight of historical evidence, as shown by the historian Annette Gordon-Reed and others. The testing showed that a male of the Jefferson family fathered at least one of Sally Hemings' children.