A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans Read Online Free PDF Page B

armed people might be inside, the British officers who had given chase rode off. Dawes then limped back to Lexington.
    With the revolutionary spark ignited, Dawes joined the army in the siege of Boston, fought at Bunker Hill, and won a commission as commissary to the Continental Army. Dawes family lore also has it that he later returned to the empty house where he had fooled the British soldiers and recovered the watch he lost in his fall. He died on February 25, 1799, at age fifty-three, and is buried at King’s Chapel in Boston. There he lies all but forgotten, a fate that might have been shared by Revere had it not been for Longfellow. The injustice of it all was captured in another, less-celebrated poem written by Helen F. Moore and published in Century Magazine in 1896:
    I am a wandering, bitter shade,
    Never of me was a hero made;
    Poets have never sung my praise,
    Nobody crowned my brow with bays;
    And if you ask me the fatal cause,
    I answer only, “My name was Dawes”
    â€™ TIS all very well for the children to hear
    Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere;
    But why should my name be quite forgot,
    Who rode as boldly and well, God wot?
    Why should I ask? The reason is clear—
    My name was Dawes and his Revere.
    WHEN the lights from the old North Church flashed out,
    Paul Revere was waiting about,
    But I was already on my way.
    The shadows of night fell cold and gray
    As I rode, with never a break or a pause;
    But what was the use, when my name was Dawes!
    HISTORY rings with his silvery name;
    Closed to me are the portals of fame.
    Had he been Dawes and I Revere,
    No one had heard of him, I fear.
    No one has heard of me because
    He was Revere and I was Dawes.

7
James T. Callender: Muckraker for the First Amendment
    The United States had barely emerged as a new nation before it was rent by what George Washington called “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.” Ideological factions clashed fiercely, often using newspapers and pamphlets as the vehicles to promote their agendas. Writers for these blatantly partisan publications savaged politicians with whom they disagreed, and few of the founding fathers—not even Washington—were spared their venomous quills. A scandalmonger by the name of James T. Callender was among the most vicious of these literary character assassins who roamed the early Republic. During his brief but colorful career, Callender relentlessly hounded the nation’s first leaders and published a number of salacious stories about them that endure to this day. In the process, he ran afoul of one of the most odious laws ever enacted by the U.S. government.
    A fugitive Scot from British sedition laws, Callender arrived in America in 1792 and soon established himself as a rabid anti-Federalist whose screeds against the party in power attracted the attention of the Republican opposition. Thomas Jefferson secretly funded and encouraged him, while others fed him the dirt that fueled his vituperative rants. Alexander Hamilton was an early target: Callender learned that in 1792 this leading Federalist had been investigated by James Monroe and others for alleged financial improprieties involving a scoundrel named James Reynolds while serving as the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. Hamilton had denied any pecuniary misdeeds, explaining to the investigators that he was actually guilty of adultery with Reynolds’s wife, Maria, and that the couple had blackmailed him. 1 The money he had given Reynolds was not for any illegal speculation with public funds, as had been charged, but from his own pocket as hush money for his sexual sins. Monroe took Hamilton at his word, with reservations, and the matter was concluded.
    Five years later, however, documents from the investigation were leaked to Callender, probably by John Beckley, a former clerk of the House of Representatives who had been assigned by Monroe to copy them. 2 Callender gleefully published the papers,