Callendar, a lying renegado

[Below is a letter I wrote to Robert Livingston, October 10, 1802, where I refuted Callendar’s lying words of filth which accuse me of fathering children with a slave woman.]

You will have seen by our newspapers, that with the aid of a lying renegado from republicanism, the federalists have opened all their sluices of calumny. They say we lied them out of power, and openly avow they will do the same by us. But it was not lies or arguments on our part which dethroned them, but their own foolish acts, sedition laws, alien laws, taxes, extravagances and heresies. Porcupine, their friend, wrote them down. Callendar, their new recruit, will do the same. Every decent man among them revolts at his filth.