Charles Hammond (1779–1840), attorney, journalist, and court reporter, was born near Baltimore. His family left Maryland in 1785, ultimately settling near Wellsburg (later in West Virginia). Hammond was first educated by a private tutor and then studied law. He joined the office of Philip Doddridge in 1800 and was admitted to practice in Virginia courts in 1801 before moving to the Northwest Territory in what later became Ohio, where the territorial court appointed him prosecuting attorney for Belmont County. Hammond moved to Wheeling (later in West Virginia) in about 1804. Returning to Ohio in 1810, he lived first in Belmont County and then moved to Cincinnati in around the beginning of 1823. Hammond emerged as a leader of Ohio’s Federalist party, serving in the state senate, 1813–15, and the state house of representatives, 1817–19 and 1820–21. Starting in 1823, he became the first reporter of the Ohio Supreme Court, producing nine volumes of Ohio Reports covering sessions through 1839. Hammond had a parallel career in journalism, as a contributing writer to numerous newspapers, including the Chillicothe Scioto Gazette in around 1801, as publisher of the Saint Clairsville Ohio Federalist, 1813–17, as a writer for the Cincinnati Gazette beginning in 1823, and as its editor from 1825 until his death. He actively backed Henry Clay’s political ambitions and used his publications to support Clay and attack Andrew Jackson, going so far as to author a pamphlet on the irregularities of the latter’s marriage. Hammond died in Cincinnati (DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, repr. 1968, 20 vols. in 10 description ends ; Francis Phelps Weisenburger, “A Life of Charles Hammond: The First Great Journalist of the Old Northwest,” Ohio Archæological and Historical Quarterly 43 [1934]: 338–427; George Irving Reed and others, eds., Bench and Bar of Ohio: A Compendium of History and Biography [1897], 2:43–5; Brigham, American Newspapers description begins Clarence S. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690–1820, 1947, 2 vols. description ends , 2:814; DNA: RG 29, CS, Ohio, Belmont Co., Richland, 1820, Cincinnati, 1830; Clay, Papers description begins James F. Hopkins and others, eds., The Papers of Henry Clay, 1959–92, 11 vols. description ends ; Jackson, Papers description begins Sam B. Smith, Harold D. Moser, Daniel Feller, and others, eds., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 1980– , 10 vols. description ends , 6:314–5; Columbus Ohio State Journal, 8 Apr. 1840; Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 9 Apr. 1840).

On 20 July 1821 (not the 21st) the editors of the Washington Daily National Intelligencer republished TJ’s Recommendation of John Taylor’s Construction Construed, [ca. 27 June 1821], stating in their introduction that “We are glad to see this letter from the Republican Patriarch, and we place it before our readers, as a just but gentle rebuke of the anticonstitutional doctrines of the State of Ohio, &c.”

Ohio’s attempt to tax the Second Bank of the United States involved it in a controversy with the bank. After the state adopted a law mandating such a tax, its auditor, Ralph Osborn, seized funds from the Chillicothe branch of the bank in 1819. When the bank sued Osborn and other state officials, Hammond acted as their counsel in the circuit court trial and the eventual appeal to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled against them in 1824 in Osborn v. Bank of the United States (Marshall, Papers description begins Herbert A. Johnson, Charles T. Cullen, Charles F. Hobson, and others, eds., The Papers of John Marshall, 1974–2006, 12 vols. description ends , 10:36–41).

An editorial commentary on TJ’s Recommendation of Construction Construed, published in an unlocated issue of the Zanesville (zaneville) Ohio Muskingum Messenger, and Democratic Republican, and subsequently quoted in the Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 8 Aug. 1821, directed “the serious attention of our readers to an extract of a letter in a subsequent column, by the revered Thomas Jefferson, on the subject of the powers vested in the federal and state governments. With what irresistible force does his mild and conciliatory language apply to the conduct of the state of Ohio in seizing on the U. S. money in the Branch Bank at Chillicothe—wherein he says each party should prudently shrink from all reproach to the line of demarcation, instead of rashly overleaping it, or throwing grapples ahead to haul to hereafter. It is to be hoped that our future legislators will profit by this sage politician’s admonition—and no longer suffer the state of Ohio to disgrace itself, or get farther involved into difficulties through the machinations and management of such infamously corrupt and factious politicians as ———.”

When another Ohio newspaper republished TJ’s review of Taylor’s work, it included a further editorial statement that “we learn from a source to which every man in the community would attach credit, but which we are not at liberty to divulge, that Mr. Jefferson approves of the course that the state of Ohio has taken, in relation to the United States’ Bank—and that he has expressed himself in the highest terms of the report made to the last general assembly upon this subject, commonly called Hammond’s report. He considers it one of the ablest state papers that has been promulged, since the formation of our government” (Western Herald & Steubenville Gazette, 11 Aug. 1821).