Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of campaign curiosities. I'm John Dickerson of Face the Nation.

I'm in Philadelphia, so I thought I'd do a Philadelphia-themed whistlestop this week.

Although arguably last week's whistlestop with Wendell, Wilkie, was Philadelphia-themed because he was nominated in Philadelphia.

But never mind, it's July 13, 1798, and a jechevelled man is walking the dusty road from Philadelphia

on his way to an undetermined location below the Potomac River in Virginia.

A widower who just lost his wife to yellow fever, the man was penniless,

reportedly feeding himself and his children on broken vittles from a wealthy neighbor

and relying on small donations from acquaintances to buy firewood and snuff.

Sometimes the donations would come

from people seeking political office. Uncamped with a haunted look, he might have seemed a pitiable

figure, but there seemed little to pity in this fellow, especially if he were a member of the

Federalist Party, which at the time controlled Congress and the White House.

The man's name was James Thomas Callender. He was a journalist working for the Republican

cause, and he was a drunker. His enemies called him a scandalmonger. He was a Scotsman

of whom nothing good is known, wrote John D. Lawson in American State trials, an account of

calendars celebrated prosecution under the Sedition Act in 1800. He had the pen of a ready writer

and the brazen forehead of a knave. That summer, calendar was on the run from the Federalist

enemies who had threatened him for savaging their cause. Assassins had visited his house on two different occasions, he said,

though given his reputation for befouling the truth, that could have meant nobody visited

at all. But it was true, however, that assassins would have had reason to visit his house

and poke a hole in that brazen forehead. Calendar had been responsible

for ruining Alexander Hamilton. You know him. He appears nightly at the Richard Rogers Theater.

...