[bigtoona]

You think this presidential race is nasty? The Founding Fathers had it beat. In the race between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson for president in 1800, Jefferson called Adams “a blind, bald, crippled, toothless man who is a hideous hermaphroditic character with neither the force and fitness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

In turn, Adams called Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”

Compare these with the relative politeness of today.

http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/richard-russell/if-you-think-this-presidential-race-is-nasty

[Big Red Badger]

Jefferson and Adams,,,

that’s rich!

[central_va]

They were so gentle with that monkey Lincoln during the 1863 election campaign:

[Olog-hai]

That site is on the top of the Google search. The ultimate source is this CNN article that I had to find in the wayback machine; the smears were attributed to a campaign writer called James Callendar, who according to the article spent time in jail for slandering Adams and exposed Jefferson’s affair with Sally Hemings as payback for lack of support. As for historical record, the author of the CNN article, Kerwin Swint (a “political scientist”), appears to have no citations.