by Ron Chernow
Another compelling explanation for the timing of Callender’s exposé relates to Hamilton’s “Phocion” essays the previous fall, which had delved openly for the first time into Jefferson’s private life. On October 15, 1796, we recall, Hamilton had seemed to make reference to Sally Hemings. On October 19, indulging in more heavy breathing, Hamilton said that Jefferson’s “simplicity and humility afford but a flimsy veil to the internal evidences of aristocratic splendor, sensuality, and epicureanism.”27 Then on October 23, the Jeffersonian Aurora had published an anonymous response that referred discreetly, for the first time, to the Reynolds affair. The message was addressed to Treasury Secretary Wolcott and asked whether he had not been privy in December 1792 to “the circumstances of a certain enquiry of a very suspicious aspect, respecting real malconduct on the part of his friend, patron and predecessor in office, which ought to make him extremely circumspect on the subject of investigation ...?”28 The author threatened to cite specifics: “Would a publication of the circumstances of that transaction redound to the honour or reputation of the parties and why has the subject been so long and carefully smothered up?”29 Hamilton got the message. In subsequent installments of “Phocion,” he fell silent abruptly on the subject of Jefferson’s sex life.
The man making these menacing noises in the Aurora may have been John Beckley, recently ousted as clerk of the House of Representatives. Perhaps he leaked the Reynolds documents to Callender as revenge against the Federalists, or maybe he no longer felt morally bound to silence after resigning his job. Monroe himself fingered Beckley as the culprit. “You know, I presume, that Beckley published the papers in question,” Monroe told Aaron Burr.30 It should be recalled, however, that Monroe had given the papers to Beckley in the first place, so Monroe was admitting to Burr that he had not insured the secrecy of documents entrusted to him and had known all along that confidentiality had been breached. In holding James Monroe responsible, Alexander and Eliza were not off the mark.
A shadowy operative, adept at intrigue, Beckley continued to move stealthily in the background of Republican party politics. He is a type familiar in political history: the aide who lurks in the cloakrooms of power, listening and absorbing valuable information. Beckley had started out as clerk of the Virginia House of Delegates; Jefferson, then the governor, called him the ablest clerk in the country. As first clerk of the House of Representatives, Beckley was a protégé of House Speaker Frederick Muhlenberg, which may also explain how he was drawn into the Reynolds scandal. Beckley’s humble title did not capture the enormous power he wielded. Madison, Monroe, William Branch Giles, and other powerful Republicans gathered for talks at his lodgings. According to Hamilton’s son, they once drank a mean-spirited toast to Hamilton when he was sick: “A speedy immortality to Hamilton.”31
Beckley had an unslakable thirst for political intelligence. Benjamin Rush said of Beckley that “he possesses a fund of information about men and things and, what is more in favor of his principles, he possesses the confidence of our two illustrious patriots, Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison.”32 Beckley was constantly trying to dig up derogatory information to satisfy the Republican fantasy that Hamilton and Washington headed a pro-British monarchical conspiracy. Jefferson never shed his intense admiration for Beckley. When elected president himself, he restored Beckley as clerk of the House of Representatives and, loading him down with still more honors, appointed him the first librarian of Congress.
Hamilton thought that Jefferson was one of the conspirators behind the Callender exposé. Jefferson’s secretary, William A. Burwell, said that around the time of the Maria Reynolds revelation, Hamilton had threatened Jefferson with public exposure of a shameful episode many years earlier in which Jefferson had repeatedly tried to seduce Betsey Walker, the wife of his friend and Virginia neighbor John Walker. Perhaps for this reason, the conflicted Jefferson both subsidized Callender and also urged him to refrain from further attacks on Hamilton. Callender reported that Jefferson “advised that the [Reynolds] papers should be suppressed ...but his interposition came too late.”33
Once Callender’s charges were published, Hamilton faced an agonizing predicament: should he ignore the accusations as beneath his dignity or openly rebut them? Friends recommended tactful silence. Wolcott urged Hamilton to defer a response, telling him of the “indignation against those who have basely published this scandal.”34 Jeremiah Wadsworth thought any defense would be fruitless, warning that “it will be easy to invent new calumnies and you may be kept continually employed in answering.”35 Deaf to such advice, Hamilton decided to respond at length. When it came to major decisions, he always trusted to his inner promptings. Ordinarily, he told associates, he would have ignored the slander, but Callender was insinuating that Muhlenberg, Venable, and Monroe had refused to believe him in 1792 when he said that his payments to James Reynolds involved adultery and extortion. Callender upped the stakes by warning Hamilton that if he printed only extracts from his correspondence with those three men, he would be accused of shading the truth. In an open letter on July 12, he taunted Hamilton by saying the public “have long known you as an eminent and able statesman. They will be highly gratified by seeing you exhibited in the novel character of a lover.”36
Hamilton now reverted to lifelong practice: he would drown his accusers with words. In mid-July, he holed up in a Philadelphia boardinghouse with his friend Congressman William Loughton Smith of South Carolina among the tenants. As he confessed his sins, Hamilton probably did not want to face his family. One pictures him stooped over his desk, scratching away at a furious pace. According to Smith, Hamilton wrote with zest and a vengeful glee. He “was in excellent health and in very excellent spirits, considering his complicated situation.”37 Months earlier, Hamilton had complained to Smith of feeble health. Now, he burst forth in fighting trim, striking a note of bravado as he confronted his enemies.
This writing spree resulted in a ninety-five-page booklet: thirty-seven pages of personal confessions, supplemented by fifty-eight pages of letters and affidavits. The volume is usually referred to as “the Reynolds pamphlet,” but the full title was Observations on Certain Documents Contained in No. V & VI of “The History of the United States for the Year 1796,” In Which the Charge of Speculation Against Alexander Hamilton, Late Secretary of the Treasury, Is Fully Refuted. Written by Himself.38 Before examining the specific charges against him, Hamilton placed Callender’s pamphlets in a political context, identifying the true enemy as the “spirit of Jacobinism.” To accomplish its evil deeds, American Jacobinism had descended to calumny so that “the influence of men of upright principles, disposed and able to resist its enterprises, shall be at all events destroyed.”39 Thus Hamilton tried to elevate his personal defense into another apocalyptic crusade to save the nation.
After years of monetary sacrifices in public office, Hamilton again found it ruefully funny that he was accused of avarice. He said that his character had been marked “by an indifference to the acquisition of property rather than an avidity for it.”40 Then he got to the nub of the matter in the frankest confession yet uttered by an American public official: “The charge against me is a connection with one James Reynolds for purposes of improper pecuniary speculation. My real crime is an amorous connection with his wife, for a considerable time with his privity and connivance, if not originally brought on by a combination between the husband and wife with the design to extort money from me.”41 Even at this late date, Hamilton wavered as to whether Maria Reynolds had colluded with her husband from the outset or only over time. If he had been a venal official, Hamilton jeered, he would have chosen a more important accomplice than James Reynolds: “It is very extraordinary, if the head of the money department of a country, being unprincipled enough to sacrifice his trust and his integrity, could not have contrived objects of profit sufficiently large to have engaged the cooperation of men of far greater importance than Reynolds.”42 And if he had conspired with Reynolds, he would not have passed along re
latively petty sums of fifty dollars.
Hamilton’s strategy was simple: he was prepared to sacrifice his private reputation to preserve his public honor. He knew this would be the most exquisite torture for Eliza. Hadn’t he just told William Hamilton that he could not be happier in a wife? And now here he was subjecting her to a nightmarish narrative of his betrayal. He wrote angrily of his accusers, “With such men, nothing is sacred. Even the peace of an unoffending and amiable wife is a welcome repast to their insatiate fury against the husband.”43 We do not know whether Hamilton discussed his pamphlet with Eliza beforehand. After admitting to adultery, he made the following statement: “This confession is not made without a blush....I can never cease to condemn myself for the pang which it may inflict in a bosom eminently entitled to all my gratitude, fidelity, and love. But that bosom will approve that even at so great an expence, I should effectually wipe away a more serious stain from a name which it cherishes with no less elevation than tenderness.”44
The steadfast Eliza may have sympathized with Hamilton’s wish to cleanse his name. Yet readers of the pamphlet must have wondered why, instead of settling for a brief apology and a convincing mea culpa, Hamilton insisted upon telling the story in almost picaresque detail. He described Maria Reynolds coming to his door during the summer of 1791, of going around to her house that evening, and of being invited into her bedroom. Such descriptive touches, however much they gratified public curiosity, could only have mortified Eliza. All of Hamilton’s breast-beating— “I have paid pretty severely for the folly and can never recollect it without disgust and self condemnation”—could not disguise that he was exposing Eliza to public humiliation.45
Why did Hamilton make this long, rambling confession? He was disgusted by the monstrous slurs upon his character and decided he would expose them once and for all. He intended to construct an account that would encompass all known facts and remove any room for misinterpretation by enemies. Moreover, Callender had already warned of the danger of publishing only extracts of the story. Far from being the subtle Machiavellian of Jeffersonian legend, Hamilton again suffered from excessive openness. “No man ever more disdained duplicity or carried frankness further than he,” Fisher Ames said.46 Hamilton was incapable of a wise silence. He probably imagined that the best way to prove the philandering and refute the corruption charges was to overwhelm his readers with details. As in all political battles, Hamilton was seized by an overmastering compulsion to counterattack with all the verbal weapons at his command. He viewed himself less as the guilty party than as the righteous one, unfairly maligned by scheming opponents, and he decided to turn the tables on his adversaries.
Hamilton’s antics had dazzled and appalled the country for years, and never more so than with the Reynolds pamphlet. His friends were agog at his faulty judgment. “Humiliating in the extreme,” was the verdict of Henry Knox.47 Robert Troup observed that Hamilton’s “ill-judged pamphlet has done him inconceivable injury.”48 William Loughton Smith thought Hamilton had rebutted Callender, “yet it is afflicting to see so great a man dragged before the public in such a delicate situation and compelled to avow a domestic infidelity to an unfeeling world.”49 Noah Webster wondered why someone of Hamilton’s stature would “publish a history of his private intrigues, degrade himself in the estimation of all good men, and scandalize a family to clear himself of charges which no man believed.”50 Small wonder that Hamilton’s family later tried to buy up and destroy all copies of the pamphlet left on the market.
The Republican press had a field day with the pamphlet and battened off it for years. Henceforth, Hamilton would be viewed as the oversexed treasury secretary. Callender rejoiced at Hamilton’s indiscretion, telling Jefferson, “If you have not seen it, no anticipation can equal the infamy of this piece. It is worth all that fifty of the best pens in America could have said ag[ains]t him.”51 Drawing on this material, Callender wrote mockingly that the “whole proof in this pamphlet rests upon an illusion. ‘I am a rake and for that reason I cannot be a swindler.’ ”52 The Aurora responded similarly when it paraphrased Hamilton as saying, “I have been grossly ...charged with...being a speculator, whereas I am only an adulterer. I have not broken the eighth commandment....It is only the seventh which I have violated.”53
In sacrificing his private virtue, Hamilton had imagined he would at least preserve a spotless public record. He would have been disheartened by Jefferson’s reaction. Writing to John Taylor, a Virginia politician, the circumspect Jefferson said that Hamilton’s “willingness to plead guilty to adultery seems rather to have strengthened than weakened the suspicions that he was in truth guilty of the speculations.”54 Madison’s reaction was more perceptive: “The publication . . . is a curious specimen of the ingenious folly of its author. Next to the error of publishing it at all is that of forgetting that simplicity and candor are the only dress which prudence would put on innocence.”55
For John and Abigail Adams, who already considered Hamilton a debauchee, their suspicions were fully confirmed. Before the pamphlet appeared, Abigail told her husband of Hamilton, “Oh, I have read his heart in his wicked eyes. The very devil is in them. They are lasciviousness itself.”56 Timothy Pickering, the secretary of state, recalled that soon after Adams became president, Abigail called on Mrs. Pickering and “took her to ride with her in her carriage.... [M]y wife afterwards told me that Mrs. Adams dwelt on the licentiousness of Hamilton’s character in regard to the female sex.”57 When the scandal broke, the Adamses were probably less shocked at Hamilton’s behavior than at his candor in admitting it. After they returned to Philadelphia in November 1797, fresh from a four-month absence, Abigail wrote of the Reynolds pamphlet, “Alas, alas, how weak is human nature.”58 John Adams traced Hamilton’s roguish deeds back to his days on Washington’s staff, followed by “debaucheries in New York and Philadelphia” at which he had made “his audacious and unblushing attempts upon ladies of the highest rank and purest virtue.”59
It is difficult to figure out if the charges of sexual profligacy made against Hamilton all trace back, ultimately, to Maria Reynolds. There are only scattered references to his amorous ways in contemporary documents between the time of the affair (1791–1792) and its exposure (1797), then a tremendous increase after Callender performed his dirty work. That Hamilton loved the ladies and had a high libido seems clear. But was his adult life really a rake’s progress of sexual conquests? For all the innuendoes about adultery, he did not engage in indiscriminate sex, and we can connect him with only Maria Reynolds for certain. There was plenty of understandable speculation about Angelica Church, but she was mostly abroad between 1783 and 1797, and we will never know whether her mutual enchantment with Hamilton was sexually consummated. One strong argument against such outright adultery was that Eliza and the entire Schuyler family adored Hamilton until the day he died. Would they have tolerated Hamilton if he had been sleeping with Eliza’s sister? After Hamilton’s death, the ever vigilant John Beckley referred to Hamilton as a “double adulterer”—presumably referring to Maria Reynolds and Angelica Church—but he named no one else.60 Alexander Hamilton was the most controversial public figure of his era. If he had other women, why didn’t the scandal-loving Republican press refer to these other romances? It seems unlikely that, if other women abounded, their identities would have been so well concealed for two centuries. And why, if Hamilton was so promiscuous, did he father no illegitimate children that we know of?
For all the tongue clucking and finger wagging at Hamilton, the Reynolds scandal diminished but scarcely destroyed his political stature. Though the Reynolds pamphlet provided the Jeffersonian press with fodder for satire, it did not lead to a wholesale abandonment of Hamilton by the Federalists. As David Cobb, a Federalist judge from Massachusetts, told Henry Knox, “Hamilton is fallen for the present, but if he fornicates with every female in the cities of New York and Philadelphia, he will rise again, for purity of character after a period of political existence is not necessary for
public patronage.”61 In later years, John Adams conducted a revealing exchange of letters with William Cunningham, who said that Hamilton’s friends had not abandoned him for straying from his wife. He offered an analogy from Roman history, the patriot Cato:
Cato valued himself on his integrity and was, it is said, addicted to intemperance. But the friends of Cato prized him so highly for his main excellence that they looked upon his occasional intoxication with indulgence. Thus I have understood it of Hamilton. He set the estimation made of his uprightness against that which might be formed from the confession of his lewdness and he determined that the weight of his cardinal virtues would preponderate over every defect and forever keep that scale immovably down.62
Perhaps the most telling reaction to Hamilton’s troubles came from Washington, who knew Hamilton better than any other public figure. On August 21, from out of the blue, he sent his beleaguered friend a gift along with a note that made no reference to the scandal.
Not for any intrinsic value the thing possesses, but as a token of my sincere regard and friendship for you and as a remembrance of me, I pray you to accept a wine cooler for four bottles....I pray you to present my best wishes, in which Mrs. Washington joins me, to Mrs. Hamilton and the family, and that you would be persuaded that with every sentiment of the highest regard, I remain your sincere friend and affectionate honorable servant.63