Michael Durey

William Wickham (1761-1840) was Britain's master spy on the Continent for more than five years during the French Revolutionary wars. He was the creator and head of a small and highly organized secret service unit, and was sent on missions to Europe and Ireland. He is the only important political figure of the period not to have been the subject of a modern biography. Durey sees in Wickham a peculiarly eighteenth-century, whiggish patriotism: he served king and country, but he also bore loyalty to a political family that was based around his Christ Church connections.

In the transatlantic world of the late eighteenth century, easterly winds blew radical thought to America. Thomas Paine had already arrived on these shores in 1774 and made his mark as a radical pamphleteer during the Revolution. In his wake followed more than 200 other radical exiles--English Dissenters, Whigs, and Painites; Scottish "lads o'parts"; and Irish patriots--who became influential newspaper writers and editors and helped change the nature of political discourse in a young nation. Michael Durey has written the first full-scale analysis of these radicals, evaluating the long-term influence their ideas have had on American political thought. Transatlantic Radicals uncovers the roots of their radicalism in the Old World and tells the story of how these men came to be exiled, how they emigrated, and how they participated in the politics of their adopted country. Nearly all of these radicals looked to Paine as their spiritual leader and to Thomas Jefferson as their political champion. They held egalitarian, anti-federalist values and promoted an extreme form of participatory democracy that found a niche in the radical wing of Jefferson's Republican Party. Their divided views on slavery, however, reveal that democratic republicanism was unable to cope with the realities of that institution. As political activists during the 1790s, they proved crucial to Jefferson's 1800 presidential victory; then, after his views moderated and their influence waned, many repatriated, others drifted into anonymity, and a few managed to find success in the New World. Although many of these men are known to us through other histories, their influence as a group has never before been so closely examined. Durey persuasively demonstrates that the intellectual ferment in Britain did indeed have tremendous influence on American politics. His account of that influence sheds considerable light on transatlantic political history and differences in religious, political, and economic freedoms. Skillfully balancing a large cast of characters, Transatlantic Radicals depicts the diversity of their experiences and shows how crucial these reluctant emigres were to shaping our republic in its formative years.

James Thomson Callender earned an infamous reputation as one of the first muckraking journalists in America, resulting largely from his character assassinations of George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson. As the journalist who broke the story of Jefferson's suppossed affair with his slave Sally Hemmings, Callender has become a fixture in Jeffferson studies. Yet Callender always considered himself a champion of liberty. Until now, no historian has fully examined the life of this man whose impact remains a source of controversy.Through uncovered correspondence, public records, and published writings by and about Callender, Durey traces Callender's early years in Scotland, showing the strong influence of his early Calvinist education and his admiration for Swift. He demonstrates how these experiences affected his career as a journalist in the United States. His research places Callender in a new perspective as one of the leaders, with Bache, Duane, Beckley, and Dr. Reynolds, of a team of hired pens who helped stem the Federalist tide in Philadelphia in the 1790s.