[EL] Query -- mudslinging in early elections

Tue Jan 21 06:46:47 PST 2020

For the Founders' era, I might suggest Michael Durey's "With The Hammer of Truth: James Thomas Callender and America's Early National Heroes," a biography of the Jefferson acolyte who turned on his leader and became the most visible proponent of the Sally Hemings charges. That book's doppelganger is "Peter Porcupine in America: Pamphlets on Republicanism and Revolution," an anthology of William Cobbett's broadsides. And then there is William Safire's "Scandalmonger," the rollicking novel which introduced me to both of these books.

=B.
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From: Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> On Behalf Of Smith, Bradley
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2020 9:25 AM
To: Gardner, James <jgard at buffalo.edu>; Election Law Listserv <law-election at uci.edu>
Subject: Re: [EL] Query -- mudslinging in early elections

See if your library has a copy of Kerwin Swint, Mudslingers: The 25 Dirtiest Political Campaigns of All Time.

David McCullough has some good tidbits and quotes from the campaign of 1800 in his Adams biography.

The Johny-Cake Papers, published in 1879,  quote one anti-Jeffersonian describing TJ as "nothing but a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father, as was well known in the neighborhood where he was raised, wholly on hoe-cake (made of course-ground Southern corn), bacon, and hominy, with an occasional change of fricasseed bullfrog, for which abominable reptiles he had acquired a taste during his residence among the French in Paris, to whom there could be no question he would sell his country at the first offer made to him cash down, should he be elected to fill the Presidential chair." However, the Monticello
Society has not been able to find contemporary reports of this alleged speech.

Bradley A. Smith

Josiah H. Blackmore II/Shirley M. Nault

   Professor of Law

Capital University Law School

303 E. Broad St.

Columbus, OH 43215

614.236.6317

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From: Law-election [law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] on behalf of Gardner, James [jgard at buffalo.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2020 8:53 AM
To: Election Law Listserv
Subject: [EL] Query -- mudslinging in early elections

   ** [ This email originated outside of Capital University ] **
Dear Colleagues:

I'd like to acquaint my students as vividly as possible with the fact that mudslinging and character destruction were common tactics in the early history of the republic.  Can anyone point me to a source that lays out some of the juicy details?  I'm not looking for a historical source that describes these elections as dirty; I want the actual insults!

Thanks for any help.

Jim
___________________________
James A. Gardner
Bridget and Thomas Black SUNY Distinguished Professor of Law
Research Professor of Political Science
University at Buffalo School of Law
The State University of New York
Room 514, O'Brian Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260-1100
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