Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Reynolds and Clingman ended up in a Philadelphia jail. Because the Treasury Department filed the charges, James Reynolds suspected that Hamilton was engaged in a vendetta. He wrote to Hamilton twice, asking for help, but received no assistance. Hamilton then learned from Wolcott that Reynolds was insinuating loudly that he could “make disclosures injurious to the character of some head of a department.”18 Hamilton saw exactly where this was heading and advised Wolcott to keep Reynolds imprisoned until the accusations were cleared up.

  Released on bail, Jacob Clingman turned to the most powerful man he knew: his former boss, Congressman Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania. The former House Speaker agreed to intercede on behalf of Clingman but not Reynolds, whom he had heard was a “rascal.” He decided to speak with Hamilton in the company of New York senator Aaron Burr. At the interview, a circumspect Hamilton agreed to do everything consistent with honor to aid Clingman. Muhlenberg persuaded Oliver Wolcott to strike a deal: if Clingman and Reynolds refunded the money defrauded from the government, returned the stolen list of soldiers, and identified the Treasury employee who had leaked the document, then charges against them might be dropped. Evidently, the two men met these conditions by early December 1792. “It was certainly of more consequence to the public to detect and expel from the bosom of the Treasury Department an unfaithful clerk to prevent future and extensive mischief than to disgrace and punish two worthless individuals,” Hamilton later wrote.19

  The matter might have ended there except that Clingman kept suggesting darkly to Muhlenberg that he harbored damning information about Hamilton. As Muhlenberg recalled, “Clingman, unasked, frequently dropped hints to me that Reynolds had it in his power, very materially, to injure the secretary of the treasury and that Reynolds knew several very improper transactions of his.”20 At first, Muhlenberg scoffed at this. Then Clingman told him that Hamilton was hip deep in speculation and had provided James Reynolds with money for that illicit purpose. What most impressed Muhlenberg was Reynolds’s contention that “he had it in his power to hang the secretary of the Treasury.”21 Muhlenberg did not believe that he could hide such information, and on Wednesday morning, December 12, he turned to two other Republicans, Senator James Monroe and Representative Abraham B. Venable, both of Virginia. Monroe’s entry into the drama was especially ominous for Hamilton, given his recent National Gazette pieces. It is not clear that Hamilton knew that Monroe was the author of these pieces, but he certainly knew of Monroe’s intimacy with Jefferson and Madison.

  Thanks to Maria Reynolds, Clingman had some unsigned notes sent by Hamilton to James Reynolds, which Muhlenberg now showed to Monroe and Venable. Hardly reluctant to pursue the charges, the Virginians went straight to see James Reynolds in his prison cell. The prisoner teased them with vague but tantalizing hints that “he had a person in high office in his power and has had a long time past.” He further let drop that “Mr. Wolcott was in the same department” as this mystery person “and, he supposed, under his influence or control.”22 Though the allusion to Hamilton was patent, the wily Reynolds said that he would not divulge more information until he was freed.

  Meanwhile, Maria Reynolds was scarcely idle. This artful twenty-four-year-old woman seemed able, on short notice, to secure appointments with high officials. She went to see Pennsylvania’s governor, Thomas Mifflin, who expressed sympathy with her plight. Maria Reynolds told Mifflin about, among other things, her love affair with Hamilton. She also took advantage of the situation to visit her illustrious former lover, who was trying to walk a fine line between official propriety and selfprotection. On the one hand, Hamilton echoed Wolcott’s position that Clingman and James Reynolds should return the list of soldiers to the Treasury along with their ill-gotten money. On the other hand, according to Maria Reynolds, Hamilton also pressed her to burn his damaging letters to her husband. Fully aware of the value of these notes as an insurance policy, the siren of Philadelphia politics was smart enough to keep two or three.

  Having no notion of any Hamiltonian adultery, Muhlenberg and Monroe visited Maria Reynolds at home on the evening of December 12, seeking more information about alleged financial collusion between Hamilton and her husband. At first, she was not communicative. Only gradually did she open up about business relations and about how she had burned a large number of signed notes that Hamilton had sent to James Reynolds. She said that Hamilton had promised to aid her and had urged her husband to “leave the parts, not to be seen here again...in which case, he would give [her] something clever.” She piqued her visitors’ curiosity by boasting that her husband “could tell something that would make some of the heads of departments tremble.”23 To boost her credibility, she showed them a letter she had received from Hamilton the week before.

  It was an eventful day in the life of Alexander Hamilton, who knew that influential legislators had grilled James Reynolds that morning. At some time after midnight, having been freed from prison hours earlier, James Reynolds sent a young female messenger to Hamilton’s house. Then he and Clingman paced outside, awaiting an answer. The girl emerged with a message that James Reynolds should call on Hamilton in the morning. Shortly after sunrise, Reynolds met Hamilton and left a vivid impression of the distraught treasury secretary, who “was extremely agitated, walking backward and forward [across] the room and striking, alternately, his forehead and thigh; observing to him that he had enemies at work, but was willing to meet them on fair ground and requested him not to stay long, lest it might be noticed.”24 Although any account from James Reynolds is suspect, the compulsive pacing and nervous gesticulations were typical of Hamilton. Once the interview was over, James Reynolds vanished from Philadelphia, fleeing either creditors or further prosecution. He had promised Monroe and Venable that he would reveal all at ten o’clock that morning, but the two Virginian legislators now discovered that he “had absconded or concealed himself.”25

  The flight of James Reynolds only heightened the suspicions of Muhlenberg, Monroe, and Venable that Hamilton was guilty of official misconduct. They were ready to present their shocking findings to Washington and had already drafted a letter to him. Before sending it, however, they thought it their duty to confront Hamilton with the allegations. On the morning of December 15, the three-man delegation filed into Hamilton’s office, with Muhlenberg taking the lead. Hamilton recalled, “He introduced the subject by observing to me that they had discovered a very improper connection between me and a Mr. Reynolds. Extremely hurt by this mode of introduction, I arrested the progress of the discourse by giving way to very strong expressions of indignation.”26 Faced with Hamilton’s wrath, the three legislators reassured him that they were not making any accusations but felt honor bound to discuss the matter with him before reporting to Washington. When they showed Hamilton his own handwritten notes to Reynolds, he instantly—and to their amazement—acknowledged their authenticity. He said that if they came to his house that evening, he would clear up the mystery by showing them written documents that would eliminate all doubt as to his innocence. Oliver Wolcott, Jr., was also invited to attend the meeting.

  At home that evening, Alexander Hamilton treated the three Republican legislators to a salacious tale dramatically at odds with the scandalous one they had expected to hear. He had gathered a batch of letters from James and Maria Reynolds and recounted the history of his extramarital affair. Another man might have been brief or elliptical. Instead, as if in need of some cathartic cleansing, Hamilton briefed them in agonizing detail about how the husband had acted as a bawd for the wife; how the blackmail payments had been made; the loathing the couple had aroused in him; and his final wish to be rid of them. When the three legislators realized that the scandal involved marital infidelity, not government corruption, at least one of them “delicately urged me to discontinue it as unnecessary,” Hamilton recalled. “I insisted upon going through the whole and did so.”27 They heard the impassioned, run-on letters from Maria Reynolds and the truculent demands for money from James Reynolds. It was as if Ham
ilton were both exonerating and flagellating himself at once.

  The small delegation seemed satisfied with Hamilton’s chronicle, if not a little flustered by the awkward situation. They apologized for having invaded his privacy. In retrospect, Hamilton detected subtle but perceptible differences in their reactions: “Mr. Muhlenberg and Mr. Venable, in particular, manifested a degree of sensibility on the occasion. Mr. Monroe was more cold, but entirely explicit.”28 In a memo the next day, Monroe wrote, “We left [Hamilton] under an impression our suspicions were removed. He acknowledged our conduct toward him had been fair and liberal—he could not complain of it.”29 Their accusatory letter to Washington was shelved. On the sidewalk afterward, Muhlenberg had drawn Wolcott aside and, with genuine sympathy for Hamilton, said that he wished he had not been present to watch his humiliating confession in such an intimate matter. In contrast, Monroe continued to meet with Jacob Clingman. In early January, Clingman complained to him that Hamilton had been exonerated of charges of official corruption. “He further observed to me,” Monroe wrote afterward, “that he communicated the same to Mrs. Reynolds, who appeared much shocked at it and wept immoderately.”30

  Muhlenberg, Monroe, and Venable had sworn they would keep the incident confidential. Given that the political world of the 1790s was one vast whispering gallery, Hamilton must have wondered if they would indeed honor their pledge. Two days later, upon reflection, he asked his three interlocutors for copies of the documents they had shown him. In allowing them to make the copies, Hamilton made a critical error, for Monroe entrusted the task to John Beckley, clerk of the House of Representatives. Beckley—the cunning, serviceable Jeffersonian loyalist who figured in so many intrigues against Hamilton—decided to preserve a set of papers for himself. For the rest of his life, Monroe refused to admit that he had violated his confidentiality pledge to Hamilton and provided the documents to Beckley. Thus, by December 17, 1792, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison knew about Hamilton’s confrontation with the three legislators. Jefferson chose to misconstrue what had happened, interpreting the event as proof not just of Hamilton’s love affair with Maria Reynolds but of his venal speculation in government securities— exactly what Hamilton had striven to refute. Beckley continued to ply Monroe and Jefferson with unsubstantiated rumors about the treasury secretary.

  Equally unfortunate for Hamilton was that the man who retained the original papers was James Monroe. Later on, Monroe stated that he had “deposited the papers with a friend”—that friend being, in all likelihood, Thomas Jefferson.31 On January 5, 1793, Monroe published his last installment of the “Vindication of Mr. Jefferson.” He used the piece to telegraph a warning to Hamilton that he would not hesitate, if necessary, to exploit his knowledge of the Reynolds affair: “I shall conclude this paper by observing how much it is to be wished [that] this writer [i.e., Hamilton] would exhibit himself to the public view, that we might behold in him a living monument of that immaculate purity to which he pretends and which ought to distinguish so bold and arrogant a censor of others.”32 Hamilton knew what the snide reference to “immaculate purity” meant. For the rest of his time as treasury secretary, he was shadowed by the awareness that determined enemies had access to defamatory material about his private life. This sword of Damocles, perpetually dangling above his head, may provide one explanation of why he never made a serious bid to succeed Washington as president.

  The marriage of Alexander and Eliza Hamilton survived the affair but the marriage between James and Maria Reynolds did not. In May 1793, Maria, reverting to Mary, filed for divorce in New York and hired as her lawyer, of all people, Aaron Burr. She now tagged James Reynolds as an unprincipled scoundrel and accused him of having committed adultery on July 10, 1792, with a woman named Eliza Flavinier of Dutchess County, New York. The date is intriguing, since it follows by a little more than a month Hamilton’s refusal to pay more blackmail money to James Reynolds, suggesting that Maria may have outlived her usefulness to him. The same day that the divorce became official, Maria married Jacob Clingman. By representing Maria Reynolds in this case, Aaron Burr was vouchsafed a glimpse into the disorderly private affairs of Alexander Hamilton—a glimpse that might later have inflamed him when Hamilton raised questions about Burr’s own misconduct.

  And how did Hamilton react to the consequence of his execrable lack of judgment? We have no letters between Alexander and Eliza Hamilton that refer even obliquely to the scandal. But a close reading of Hamilton’s writings offers his view of adultery in a most unlikely place: the middle of an unpublished essay, written months later, on the need for American neutrality in foreign affairs. In one passage, he reiterated his faith in marital fidelity and his knowledge that adultery damaged families and harmed the adulterer as well as the deceived spouse.

  A dispassionate and virtuous citizen of the U[nited] States will scorn to stand on any but purely American ground....To speak figuratively, he will regard his own country as a wife to whom he is bound to be exclusively faithful and affectionate. And he will watch with a jealous attention every propensity of his heart to wander towards a foreign country, which he will regard as a mistress that may pervert his fidelity and mar his happiness. ’Tis to be regretted that there are persons among us who appear to have a passion for a foreign mistress, as violent as it is irregular—and who, in the paroxysms of their love seem, perhaps without being themselves sensible of it, too ready to sacrifice the real welfare of the political family to their partiality for the object of their tenderness.33

  The Reynolds affair was a sad and inexcusable lapse on Hamilton’s part, made only the more reprehensible by his high office, his self-proclaimed morality, his frequently missed chances to end the liaison, and the love and loyalty of his pregnant wife.

  TWENTY-TWO STABBED IN THE DARK

  Even as their feud worsened, both Hamilton and Jefferson pleaded with Washington to stand for a second term as president. It may have been the sole thing that now united these sworn antagonists. Both men knew their

  personal warfare could wreck the still fragile union and thought Washington the one man who could hold it together. “North and South will hang together if they have you to hang on,” Jefferson told the president.1 Hamilton had additional motives for seeking a second term for Washington. The president had been his indispensable patron, the steadfast supporter of his policies, granting him preeminent status in the cabinet. (In drafting his annual address to Congress that autumn, Washington solicited suggestions from all cabinet members, then assigned the speech to Hamilton.) A second term for Washington would aid another Hamiltonian objective: to strengthen executive power. His fears of legislative tyranny had only increased as congressional opposition to him had gathered force.

  Since Washington’s victory seemed almost foreordained, the focus shifted to the vice presidential race. Unable to target the popular president directly, Republicans turned to the vice presidency as a referendum on Washington’s first term. Hamilton never wavered in supporting John Adams as vice president, a fact obscured by their later row. (Even Abigail Adams, we have seen, cheered on Hamilton as treasury secretary.) Writing to a Federalist congressman in October 1792, Hamilton conceded that “Mr. Adams, like other men, has his faults and his foibles”—faults and foibles that Hamilton himself eventually exposed. He admitted they held some differing views. For all that, Adams was “honest, firm, faithful, and independent, a sincere lover of his country, a real friend to genuine liberty....No man’s private character can be fairer than his. No man has given stronger proofs than him of disinterested

  and intrepid patriotism.”2 Such glittering adjectives seldom flowed from Hamilton’s captious quill. By nature, Hamilton was a busybody and could not refrain from offering Adams unsolicited advice. The vice president was a Federalist more by default than conviction—he prided himself on his grumpy independence and freedom from “party virulence”—and saw no need to make common cause with Hamilton.3 Distressed by rumors that Governor Clinton might challenge Adams fo
r the vice presidency, Hamilton took it upon himself in June 1792 to warn Adams of “something very like a design to subvert the government.”4 Among Adams’s many quirks was a penchant for extended absences from Philadelphia. By early September, Hamilton feared that Adams’s prolonged sojourn at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, might mar his reelection chances, and he sent him a tactfully worded note, urging him to return to the capital. His stay in Massachusetts “will give some handle to your enemies to misrepresent. And though I am persuaded you are very indifferent personally to the event of a certain election, yet I hope you are not so as it regards the cause of good government.”5

  Adams was far from indifferent to the election’s outcome. John Ferling has noted, “There can be little doubt that Adams saw the vice-presidency as his best means by which to succeed President Washington. To further that end, he soon eschewed his powdered wig, ceremonial sword, and handsome coach.”6 Irked by Hamilton’s advice, Adams did not rush back to Philadelphia. He was vain enough to tell Abigail that it was inconceivable that George Clinton, his inferior in knowledge and government service, could pose a serious political threat. Such was Adams’s self-regard that he told son John Quincy during the campaign that his own life story had been one of “success almost without example.”7 But the election was to vindicate Hamilton’s sense of urgency instead of Adams’s complacency.

  Shortly after Hamilton sent his missive to Adams, he was alerted to an even greater menace than George Clinton. Aaron Burr was letting it be noised about that he was prepared to challenge Adams as the Republican candidate for vice president. The thirty-six-year-old Burr had avid backers in the north, such as Benjamin Rush, who told him that “your friends everywhere look to you to take an active part in removing the monarchical rubbish of our government. It is time to speak out or we are undone.”8 For many in the south, Burr’s entry into the race was an unwelcome intrusion. He lacked the depth and experience to oust someone of Adams’s stature, and they had lined up regional support for Clinton. Burr’s sudden trial balloon created suspicions among prospective southern allies that were to be confirmed nearly a decade later.