Callender showed up at Beckley’s door with a copy of Porcupine’s Gazette under his arm. The former Clerk, whose career as a lawyer now looked most unpromising, was in his sleeping shirt and unshaven.
“I read it already. I’ve been expecting you.”
Newspaper delivery to the door before breakfast, a Cobbett innovation; another reason his Gazette was outselling the republicans’ Aurora. They sat down over a pot of tea in Beckley’s kitchen. After sympathizing as only a fellow victim of Cobbett’s could, Callender offered the immediate opportunity of vengeance. The assault on the Clerk’s integrity was rooted in Federalist politics and the counterattack had to be not personal but political. Callender assumed the subject of scandal had to be Hamilton because if it were Adams, it would have been used in the recent campaign. “Any assurances of secrecy given to Hamilton by any of our leaders no longer bind you, John. No man of honor, especially a Virginian, would expect you to suffer this slander in silence.”
“Jimmy, that history you’re writing,” Beckley said finally. “If I were to make available some historic material, how soon could you put it out?”
“How soon do you want it out?”
“It would be good to distribute at Monroe’s homecoming party at Oeller’s. You’d have to start writing around the clock right away.”
“If it has to do with Alexander Hamilton and wrongdoing at the Treasury Department,” Callender said eagerly, “I won’t have to sleep for a week. If even a part of what you give me sells, as I expect it to, I can put out the rest of the book later as Part Two.”
“Oh, this’ll sell, all right. And it will bring down a powerful man who would be President, maybe even King. But it’s not the financial scheme that you think.”
“Tell me what it is, then.”
“You won’t say who you got it from?” Beckley raised his right hand as if administering an oath. “Under any circumstances?”
“As God is my witness.”
“And no mention will be made of Thomas Jefferson or James Monroe as the original repository of this material?”
“My solemn oath,” Callender swore. “The Vice President, you know, is the first paid subscriber to my History of 1796. Fifteen dollars he put here”—he showed his palm—“in my hand. What is more, Jefferson promised he is going to help me in a pecuniary way later. But not a word of that can ever come out.” As proof of closeness to the great man, the Scot was sure, nothing could impress the practical Beckley more than real money passed and pledged.
“The time has ripened, Jimmy. Wait here.” He walked out of the kitchen in his bare feet and returned a few moments later in a robe and slip-pers, carrying a bundle. He unwrapped it, placing a sheaf of papers and letters, bound in ribbons of red-tape, on the table. “These contradictory documents need the interpretive eye of an historian.”
“I am that, as you well know, John.”
“And they also need the fine touch and the fearless nature of a genuine scandalmonger.”
“I can be that.”
Chapter 3
June 21, 1797
PHILADELPHIA
Never in the history of the press anywhere in the world, Callender knew, had anyone written such a scathing blast at a public figure and been able to buttress the charge with damning documents. The journalist profoundly engaged in public political struggle—Callender now knew himself to be that, more than mere historian or pamphleteer—felt he needed some justification for exploding this bomb. A simple lust for political vengeance by a broken Clerk would not do.
The higher-minded reason he chose was the Federalists’ recent vilification of America’s Minister to France. A farrago of their insults directed at James Monroe, Jefferson’s Virginia supporter, was crowned by his ignominious recall from Paris by President Adams. Callender had to ask himself: Would adopting this as his motive for exposing Hamilton make Monroe appear to be the source of his confidential documents? He shrugged that off; he owed Monroe nothing, and it was a good way of throwing Federalist hounds off the scent of Beckley. “The unfounded reproaches heaped on Mr. Monroe,” he explained, “are my motive for laying these papers before the world.” Tit for tat.
“We now come to a part of the work,” Callender wrote, “more delicate, perhaps, than any other.” He could hardly hold his quill for wanting to rub his hands. “In the arts of calumny and detraction, the publications of the Federal party exceed, beyond all proportion, those of their adversaries. Hireling writers like William Cobbett, whose shop is so often secretly visited by the British Ambassador, describe Mr. James Monroe, our late envoy to France, as ‘a traitor who has bartered the honor and interest of his country to a perfidious and savage enemy.’ The friends of order, for such they call themselves, set no limits to their rage and their vengeance. They cannot expect to meet with that tenderness that they refuse to grant.”
They started it, he told himself, the British agent Cobbett and the rest of the stock-holding Federalist press. Now he, James Callender of British-enslaved Scotland, would give them back a taste of their own. Callender assured his readers with consummate delicacy that he would not tamper with the text of the long-secret memoranda and letters, despite his personal aversion to invective and expressions that harshly convey disgust. “They are here printed from an attested copy, exactly conformable to that which, at his own desire, was delivered to Alexander Hamilton himself.”
With documents in hand, Callender could almost let the story tell itself. He began, slowly, with Speaker Muhlenberg—the Lutheran minister who carried great weight with the many Americans of German stock—printing his statement of how Jacob Clingman came to him with allegations of improper transactions of Treasury Secretary Hamilton. Then to Monroe’s account of an interview in prison with James Reynolds and that culprit’s false promise to tell the whole story to Congress’s investigators as soon as he was released the next day. Next, Callender placed before the reader Muhlenberg’s memo of the visit to Maria Reynolds, revealing her possession of notes from Hamilton. That included her testimony that she had burned many letters from Hamilton to her husband, the Secretary’s offer of “something clever”—money, of course—if the Reynolds couple would just go away. Especially damning was Maria’s expression of strong doubt that Hamilton would be found to be “immaculate” in his Treasury dealings. The editor wondered: Was that merely intuition on her part, or did she know something about him that did not appear in the documents?
He let the drama in the Hamilton papers unfold. Clingman’s affidavit reported that Reynolds had told him Hamilton had made $30,000 by speculation, and had paid thousands to Reynolds for his help over eighteen months of secret communication. Most damaging was Clingman’s report that the vanished Reynolds claimed to have the list of Virginia veterans whose claims were being bought up by the speculation ring conspiring with the dishonest Treasury Secretary.
Callender allowed himself some hyperbole in his summation of how Hamilton and his ring had bilked the public by taking advantage of a too-trusting Congress: “The funding of certificates to the extent of perhaps thirty-five millions of dollars, at eight times the price which the holders had paid for them, presents, in itself, one of the most egregious, the most impudent, the most oppressive, and the most provoking bubbles that ever burlesqued the legislative proceedings of any nation.”
Callender, writing for the first time with exclusive documentary evidence of wrongdoing in hand, was satisfied he had made the most of what he had. “Are there more letters?” he asked Beckley, who had joined him in his office above the printers’ shop.
“Not in the packet I had.”
“Where is Reynolds now? Can I talk to him?”
“Disappeared. Hasn’t been heard of for years.”
“Did he take Maria Reynolds with him?”
Beckley said no. “I think she and Clingman are down in Maryland or Virginia. Don’t confuse the readers with all that. Publish what you have.”
“You mean she left Reynolds and ran off with Clingm
an?” Callender recalled the young man’s testimony that he had been alone with Mrs. Reynolds late one night when Hamilton came to the Reynolds house with a message. “There’s more to this, isn’t there?”
Beckley was evasive. “Colonel Burr knows a lot about what happened to our fair Maria. He arranged for her divorce from Reynolds. But you have all I can give you, Jimmy. Make the most of it.”
“But is there anything,” Callender pressed, “any document you know of, that exculpates Hamilton? I don’t want to be accused of suppressing anything. That’s why I didn’t cut a word out of the documents. Too much is at stake here.”
“Are you worried about going to jail?”
Callender considered that. Nothing he wrote went beyond the evidence in the documents. But were the copies made by a clerk authentic? He was forced to trust Beckley, his only source, who was using him as a conduit without telling all he knew. “Who has the original letters, in the original handwriting?”
“When Monroe went to France, he left them with a friend. A respectable resident of Virginia.”
Presumably, Jefferson himself. Callender came at his question obliquely: “Was Jefferson informed about all this five years ago, when it happened? Has he been keeping evidence of corruption in the Treasury to himself all this time?”
Beckley said yes, Jefferson had been kept fully informed at the time. He added that the copies were true copies of originals that he had personally seen.
Callender began to feel uneasy. Hamilton was a formidable figure in the world of power, a crafty player unlikely to crawl into a hole when Callender published. He would lash back with everything he had to make the journalist appear to be a vicious, libelous hireling of radical, seditious political enemies. The documents showed that five years ago, when Hamilton had only two days to prepare a defense, he had been able to persuade Monroe and Muhlenberg not to take the matter to the President, and indeed to cover up the entire episode. Who knew what sort of defense the articulate New Yorker would present now that he had these five years to prepare?
“I’m going to hold a little something in reserve,” Callender decided. “We’re going to publish in installments anyway, so let me keep this Monroe memorandum about his suspicions to myself for a while. Let’s see how Hamilton reacts, and then we can return his answering fire with another broadside.”
“You’re holding back the juiciest part.”
The memo he would hold back was Monroe’s account of the evening at Hamilton’s house. Part of it read: “Hamilton informed us of a particular connection with Mrs. Reynolds; the frequent supplies of money to her and her husband on that account; his duress by them from the fear of a disclosure.”
Monroe was being discreet, Callender suspected, by referring only to a “particular connection.” If Maria Reynolds had been committing adultery with Clingman, she could also have been committing it with Hamilton. Or not; perhaps Hamilton had deceived the investigators by falsely claiming that his sin was merely wenching with Mrs. Reynolds, not making great sums of money secretly with Mr. Reynolds. Callender suspected that might be how, on that night five years ago in Hamilton’s mansion, the target of the investigation had been able to conceal the abuse of his Treasury powers—by appealing to the male code of discretion in an illicit affair. By throwing the dust of adultery in their eyes.
“Your friend Monroe was being a gentleman at the end, wasn’t he, John?”
“A man of honor, but not a fool. Look at this line”—Beckley was intimately familiar with every nuance in the documents—“where it says, ‘We left Hamilton under the impression our suspicions were removed.’ That says to me Monroe was unconvinced by Hamilton’s story. When the Colonel sees that, he’ll go off like a bomb.”
The best part of Callender’s strategy of holding back the memo was that it boxed Hamilton in. No political figure in his right mind, he was certain, could claim publicly to be betraying his wife as a defense against betraying the public trust. How could he face his supporters? How could he face his wife and her whole influential Schuyler family? Callender did not want to be the one to suggest a peccadillo in this case, which might divert attention from the more serious matter. Financial wrongdoing, not adultery, was his focus.
“I would let all the documents out at once,” Beckley advised. “Let the gossips do their work.”
“No, no. Let’s see what he says. And then we’ll be in a position to hit back.” More to the point, he could make more than double the money on a second installment. “Everybody who buys The History of ’96 will want to buy the supplement, if he takes the bait.”
“Ah, Jimmy,” said Beckley, the Calm Observer, “you’re becoming a man of trade.”
Chapter 4
June 30, 1797
NEW YORK CITY
When Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott read the booklet that was Part V of The History of the United States for the Year 1796 by James Thomson Callender, he saddled his horse and set out on the three-hour ride to the New York home of his mentor and predecessor. No messenger would do; Wolcott, who had been a witness to the confrontation five years before, knew he had to be at Hamilton’s side when he read the publication that was being perused by every public man in Philadelphia.
“There’s not a word in here about my explanation that it was all a blackmail plot,” Hamilton snapped when he finished reading the detailed account, with many documents reprinted in full, of the secret investigation of five years before.
“That explanation, because of its delicate nature, was not recorded in the documents, if you recall,” said Wolcott. “Apparently, this man Callender was given the papers but is not privy to what you told the investigators actually happened.” That was just as well, he thought; he had never liked the notion of using one scandal to obscure another. Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Treasury Secretary and architect of its financial system, stood accused of meeting secretly with thieving speculators and having enriched himself while in public service at the expense of veterans of the War. It seemed to Wolcott, his successor in that office in the Adams Administration, that such a charge was damaging enough without being compounded by a desperate defense that revealed a sordid marital infidelity.
Callender’s booklet shook in Hamilton’s hand. “This is James Monroe’s doing. He gave me his word that night that it would all be kept confidential, and the scoundrel broke his word.”
“The Minister must surely be angry at his abrupt recall from France,” Wolcott conceded, “and he has cause to blame all Federalists, you in particular, for his humiliation by Adams. But Monroe arrived back from Paris only this morning. There wasn’t time for him to give the documents to Callender and have them in print today. Do you suppose James Madison—”
“It was Monroe’s doing, Oliver, whatever the timing. Madison is weak and somewhat honorable. He wouldn’t have the stomach for this sort of thing. Monroe, with Burr and John Marshall and Lafayette, all served with me in New Jersey in the Revolution. He’s as stiff and stubborn now as he was then. I wish we were still on the same side.”
“What about Jefferson himself? He’s probably the ‘friend in Virginia’ Monroe left the papers with when he went to France.”
“No, Jefferson never dirties his hands. James Monroe has the motive and knew where the copies were.” Hamilton paced the floor of the library of his elegant home, slapping the Callender booklet against his leg. “That night in ’92—did you tell Monroe afterward that we knew about John Walker’s wife, and direct him to inform Jefferson of that?”
“I remember passing along such a message.” Wolcott was on the verge of asking what the reference had been to Jefferson’s Monticello neighbor, but decided it was probably information that was better not to know.
Wolcott felt that Hamilton’s initial reaction did not deal with the problem at hand. “How do you want to respond to that book you’re holding? Not publicly, I hope.” His own reputation, as Treasury’s Comptroller under Hamilton at the time, was in jeopardy. Wolcott did not
want to be tainted with any imputation of impropriety, of which he was totally innocent, especially since he was the one who first wanted to prosecute Reynolds. He was vulnerable to criticism only in one respect: letting the villainous Reynolds go to save embarrassment to his Treasury superior.
“First, I’ll respond through you to Monroe,” Hamilton said. “Go to him and demand a declaration from him now equivalent to that he made to me that night—that I was totally innocent of any financial wrongdoing.”
“He’ll say that his memory has faded,” Wolcott said, being realistic.
“Then refresh it with a memorandum by you of exactly what transpired that night.”
Wolcott frowned, trying to remember having written such a memorandum.
“Which we will write right now.” He sat Wolcott at his desk and pushed forward a quill, ink and paper.
In the month of December 1792, I was witness to an interview of Alexander Hamilton . . .
The conference commenced with Senator James Monroe reading certain Notes upon which suspicion rested. Mr. Hamilton entered into an explanation and by a variety of written documents, ready fully evinced, proving that nothing in the transactions had any relation to speculations in claims on the United States, or any official transactions whatever.
“Now say how absolutely convinced they were.”
This was rendered so completely evident that Speaker Muhlenberg asked Mr. Hamilton to desist from exhibiting further proofs.
“But I wouldn’t let up,” Hamilton reminded him.
Mr. Hamilton insisted upon being allowed to read such documents as he possessed, for the purpose of obviating every shadow of doubt respecting the propriety of his official conduct.
“Until they said I was completely exonerated.”
Wolcott wrote on:
After Mr. Hamilton’s explanation terminated, Messrs Monroe and Muhlenberg acknowledged
Scandalmonger: A Novel Page 7