Scandalmonger: A Novel

by William Safire

  On spelling, I have usually modernized, while leaving Adams’s derogation of Hamilton as “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,” rather than correct it to Scottish peddler. Because I think this century was mistaken to change partizan to partisan, I have left the old spelling, which is closer to the pronunciation. And though it offends logic, I have left the flavorsome politicks and arithmetick with a k while removing it from logick.

  To calculate yesteryear’s money in today’s terms, multiply Hamilton’s dollar by thirteen to get a rough approximation of buying power. Thus, the $200 fine for sedition that Callender demanded be remitted to him was not such a trivial sum, and the $8,000 levied against Cobbett in the libel suit was enough to break him.

  Quotations of Jefferson, Washington and Madison are almost verbatim, Hamilton and Monroe sometimes less so. I have taken long sentences from letters and broken them in half to simulate speech, and sometimes substituted proper names for pronouns to clarify a point. Although dramatic licenses were issued, I identify them back here; for example, in the scene in which Abigail Adams confronts Jefferson, all dialogue is from their exchange of letters, but they were not face to face. This dramatizes but does not distort history. In the same way, I delayed the return of William Cobbett to England by nine months because I needed him around as continuing counterpoint to James Callender, his ideological adversary and vituperative soulmate. The biggest infusion of fiction is the romance between Maria Reynolds and Callender; unfortunately for the lonely Scottish aginner, they never met, but the reader can witness some revelatory scenes through her eyes. (Madison’s letter about his falling in love with some Richmond lady is verbatim.)

  A short Bibliography is appended of those sources directly cited in this Underbook. These include the sources of the letters to and from Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Monroe. The hard-to-find books most useful to me were the two by Michael Durey, a professor of history in Australia: With the Hammer of Truth, his 1990 biography of Callender, and his 1997 Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic. (Like him, I began by writing about Cobbett until I came across the trail of Callender.) The best book on freedom of the press in the Federal period is fifty years old: James Morton Smith’s Freedom’s Fetters.

  To acknowledge a support system for this book: Michael Korda was the editor who understood from the start that my goal was to dramatize without distorting the origins of muckraking journalism in America. He encouraged me to research more thoroughly the background of Maria Reynolds and pressed the idea of illustrating a novel about real people with their portraits and surroundings from the Federal period.

  In the tracking-down of caricatures and engravings, some of them rarely published, I am grateful to my longtime amanuensis, Ann Rubin, and to Kathleen Miller, Natalie Goldstein and Shirley Green. Sometimes their assistance was subtle: the 1799 engraving by William Birch of Philadelphia’s Second Street, looking north from Market Street, which introduces the prologue, shows on the far right the building from which William Cobbett was printing and selling his Porcupine’s Gazette. It was there, opposite Christ Church, that he faced down a mob enraged by his inflammatory Toryism. A portrait of Matthew Lyon was tracked down to the Vermont State House and is published here probably for the first time.

  Only three characters in this book are bereft of illustration. One is John Beckley, the first Librarian of Congress; his successors grimly search for a portrait or sketch or caricature of him to no avail. Another is James Thomson Callender, the scandalmongering protagonist; his only graphic appearance was as a snake, or the tail of a lizard, at the bottom of a cartoon savaging Thomas Jefferson. The last is Maria Reynolds; though a stock line drawing of a woman in a hat was published in an edition of Hamilton’s Reynolds pamphlet, the image had nothing to do with the real woman. She is represented by a profile of an unknown woman created by a “physiognotrace,” a technique perfected by the French artist Charles de Saint-Memin while in America at the turn of the nineteenth century. The silhouette is appropriate to Maria’s mystery.

  Simon & Schuster’s Associate Director of Copyediting Gypsy da Silva assigned the task of wrestling with the prose of a word maven to copy editor Fred Wiemer, who helpfully fought me all the way and was right to insist on putting more cited sources in the Bibliography. (The title of one of my New York Times language columns, “Let’s Kill All the Copy Editors,” was a Shakespearean allusion not to be taken literally.) The design of type and layout that gives the book its period flavor was the work of Amy Hill.

  Tom Ray, senior cataloger of the Virginia Newspaper Project at the Library of Virginia in Richmond, was invaluable in digging up copies of the long-defunct Richmond Examiner and Richmond Recorder. Laura Beardsley at the Pennsylvania Historical Association, at my request, went through the 250-page unpublished manuscript of a Philadelphia merchant who revealed the untold story of the life of Maria Reynolds and her daughter after they seemed to disappear from history. Selections from that memoir are published here at the end of the Underbook and cast a new light on her extended relationship with Aaron Burr. It may also enrich the mystery surrounding Hamilton’s account of her adulterous affair with him, which was probably true, and of her supposed blackmail, which I think was untrue.

  Now to the backup of each chapter.

  Prologue: 1792

  The three main primary sources concerning the “Reynolds affair” are these:

  James T. Callender’s History of the United States for the Year 1796, published in June and July 1797, which charged former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton with speculation in government securities in conflict of interest;

  Alexander Hamilton’s 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, published in August 1797; and

  Callender’s surrebuttal in his Sketches of the History of America, published in 1798, in which the disbelieving editor wrote, “So much correspondence could not refer exclusively to wenching” and “that Mrs. Reynolds was, in reality, guiltless.”

  That frames the central question raised in the Prologue: Did Hamilton fall for the seductive charm of the twenty-two-year-old Maria Reynolds, only to be roped into a scheme to blackmail him, as he contended? Or, when caught in a financial conspiracy with James Reynolds, did the former Treasury Secretary concoct a blackmail story around an affair with his co-conspirator’s wife—and by confessing to a phony sin, hope to conceal a real crime?

  The most extensive historians’ analyses of the still-mysterious affair are:

  Broadus Mitchell, in his 1962 Alexander Hamilton, The National Adventure, 1788-1804, pp. 399-422, with notes on pp. 704-714, was inclined to believe Hamilton that the letters he quoted from Maria in his “Reynolds pamphlet” were authentic, partly because the historian found Maria’s appeals so irresistibly fetching.

  Harold C. Syrett et al, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 21, pp. 121-285, is agnostic: “No one has yet devised a way to put together an account that not only answers all the questions that have been asked but also even meets the standards that are usually required for research papers submitted by college seniors.”

  Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 18, pp. 611-688, “Appendix: The First Conflict in the Cabinet.” Boyd makes the scrupulously detailed case that Callender had it right and that Hamilton fabricated letters from Maria to conceal his shady dealing. “Even the confession of private guilt remains in doubt, with the word of Hamilton balanced against that of Mrs. Reynolds and the scales perhaps tipped in her favor because the documents he brought forward in proof of adultery do indeed sustain her charge of fabrication.”

  Sources in detail:

  “The man now in jail”: This is based on the memorandum written by Speaker of the House Frederick A. Muhlenberg in the second week of December 1792, reporting on the beginning of an investigation into alleged
speculation in securities by Alexander Hamilton. He wrote that his former clerk, Jacob Clingman, frequently dropped hints to him that James Reynolds, presently in jail pending prosecution, “said, he had it in his power to hang the Secretary of the Treasury; that he was deeply concerned in speculation . . . I conceived it my duty to consult with some friends on the subject.” See pp. 209-210 of Callender’s History of the United States for 1796, in which the first charge against Hamilton was made.

  “Reynolds claims to have proof ”: This is based on Clingman’s memo of December 13, 1792: “Mr. Reynolds also said, that colonel Hamilton had made thirty thousand dollars by speculation . . .” and both James and Maria Reynolds had told him Hamilton “had book containing the amount of the cash due to the Virginia line [of former soldiers] at his own house at New York, with liberty to copy, and were obtained through Mr. [William] Duer,” a corrupt Treasury official, later jailed.

  For months, in general terms: Boyd, p. 638. “The Treasury Secretary countered that TJ was an incendiary promoting disunion.” Boyd, p. 640.

  “Is this man one of the Virginia Reynoldses?”: Monroe was careful to record that he thought the jailed man was a constituent. “Being informed . . . Reynolds, from Virginia, Richmond, was confined . . . we immediately called on him . . . We found it was not the same man we had been taught to believe, but a man of that name from New-York. Being there, however, we questioned him . . . ” Callender, History of 1796, p. 210.

  “I verily believe him to be a rascal”: Boyd, p. 632.

  “ ‘It is utterly out of my power’ ”: Hamilton, Reynolds pamphlet, app., p. vi.

  “I am Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg”: The Congressman who accompanied Monroe to the interview with Reynolds in jail was Abraham Venable, not Muhlenberg; I have eliminated Venable, the third member of the investigating team, for simplicity’s sake. Hamilton, Reynolds pamphlet, app., p. iii.

  Interview with Maria Reynolds: Mitchell, p. 404; Boyd, p. 635.

  Dialogue in scene with Maria and Clingman: Deduced from Clingman affidavit, Callender, History of 1796, pp. 213-215, and Monroe’s addendum, p. 218.

  Dec. 18 scene with Clingman showing note from Wolcott: Boyd, p. 641, changed by a day.

  “Hush money,” attributed to Muhlenberg: A phrase in common use, cited later in TJ letter to Monroe, May 29, 1801. “Blackmail” was not then current in America; “extortion” was the term. The President was then called the Chief Magistrate, not the Chief Executive.

  He was determined: from AH letter, March 19, 1789.

  who Hamilton was convinced: See TJ memo, 1792, 17, Dec. including details crossed out by TJ, in Boyd, p. 649.

  AH and Maria dialogue: Fictional, but Clingman on p. 215 of Callender, History of 1796, quotes Maria quoting AH.

  Description of Maria: Boyd, p. 628 notes that in the printed version of AH’s Reynolds pamphlet he gives neither her appearance nor the sum he gave her. In AH handwritten draft, he wrote, “I put a thirty dollar bill in my Pocket and went to the house . . . It required a harder heart than mine to refuse [other means of consolation] to a pretty woman Beauty in distress.” In this editing, Hamilton moved away from the particular pretty woman to a general “Beauty” in distress. AH’s “the variety of shapes that this woman can assume is endless” is in A. Hamilton, Observations on Certain Documents (here after, the Reynolds pamphlet), p. 31, and is his most vivid assertion of her talent in duplicity.

  “difficult to disentangle myself ”: In AH draft of pamphlet but not in printed version. “. . . demonstrates the delicacy of my conduct in its public relations,” on p. 19 of A. Hamilton, printed Reynolds pamphlet. This may be the earliest use of the phrase “public relations,” though not quite in its current sense.

  TJ and Mrs. Walker: TJ later told William Burwell, his secretary, that AH sent word to him through Monroe that he knew of Mrs. Walker. Burwell wrote in a memoir that “Hamilton about the time he was attackd [sic] for his connection with Mrs. Reynolds had threatened him—with a public disclosure.” Boyd, vol. 21, p. 134, n. 49.

  Monroe internal dialogue: My speculation. When I have him wondering if the blackmail story was a cover-up of “nefarious abuses of the public trust,” it should be noted that Hamilton was, in historian Richard B. Morris’s estimation, “without question the least affluent man to hold the office of Secretary of the Treasury in American history.” In Alexander Hamilton and the Founding of the Nation, Morris recounts on p. 587 a remark attributed to the French diplomatist Talleyrand, who happened to pass former Secretary Hamilton’s law office one night on the way to a party and saw him drafting a legal paper by the light of a candle. “I have just come from viewing a man,” said the amazed Frenchman, “who had made the fortune of his country, but now is working all night in order to support his family.” (Keep this amazement at integrity in mind when we come to Talleyrand’s corrupt role in the XYZ affair.)

  “screwing the hard earnings out of poor people’s pockets”: Austin, p. 68. Cobbett (from now on, sometimes “PP” for Peter Porcupine) note to TJ, in Spater, vol. 1, pp. 42-43.

  Scene on dock: Fictional, though both JTC and PP arrived at about that time.

  “You’ll see”: Green, p. 122.

  “It’s wonderful what you can say”: Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, p. 91.

  “No man has a right to pry”: Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, p. 93.

  “ ‘the six or eight hundred years of botching’ ”: Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, p. 37.

  “I am an Englishman”: Green, p. 131.

  JTC story about Charles II’s horse: Callender, American Annual Register, 1796, also known as The History of the United States for 1796, pp. 218-219.

  PART I: THE HAMILTON SCANDAL

  Chapter 1

  PP’s call for a “hempen necklace” for “a mangy little Scotsman”: In his best-selling pamphlet “A Bone to Gnaw, for the Democrats, reproduced in Cobbett, Peter Porcupine in America, pp. 92-93.

  “He leans his head toward one side”: Cobbett, Porcupine’s Works, vol. 9, p. 216.

  “Citizen Callender”: This epithet hung around the Scot by Cobbett in his 1795 pamphlet A Kick for a Bite, in Porcupine’s Works, vol. 2, p. 92.

  JTC letter to James Madison to find schoolmaster job: May 28, 1796, in Ford, p. 325.

  TJ and JTC meeting: When the Virginia Gazette in Nov. of 1802 wrote, “When Mr. Callender introduced himself to Mr. Jefferson, with his Political Progress of Britain as his passport for favor,” JTC responded in the Richmond Recorder of Nov. 1802: “It was Mr. Jefferson that introduced himself to me. He called at the office of Snowden and McCorkle in Philadelphia, in June, or July 1797, asking for me. I was then printing the History of 1796. Whatever may since have passed between Mr. Jefferson and myself, it is only doing him justice to say that he did not excite me to begin to write on American politicks, although, from the date above mentioned, he was one of my warmest supporters.”

  “The work contained”: Cobbett, A Bone to Gnaw, in Peter Porcupine in America, p. 92.

  His plea to Madison: JTC to Madison, May 28, 1796, in Ford, p. 325.

  “I’m concerned that the republican press”: TJ to Madison, April 26, 1798, in Ford, p. 9.

  “In my note I tell Adams”: TJ to Madison, May 9, 1791, in Boyd, vol. 20, p. 293.

  “And perhaps there is some assistance”: JTC to TJ, Sept. 28, 1797, in Ford, p. 326.

  “the first of the bricks”: Cobbett, Porcupine’s Works, vol. 5, p. 420.

  “I’m staying at Francis’s Hotel,”: TJ to Madison, May 18, 1797; and see JTC to TJ, Sept. 28, 1797, “when I had the honor of seeing you at Francis’s hotel,” in Ford, p. 326.

  “He gave me a joe!”: JTC’s account of this first meeting is not disputed by the many historians who otherwise denounce him as a “vile wretch.” Two months earlier, in the Richmond Recorder of Sept. 22, 1802, JTC wrote: “In the summer of 1797, the vice president called at the office in Philadelphia, where I was then printing the History of 1796. He gave me a joe.” A �
��joe” is a shortening of “Johannes,” a Portuguese gold coin then worth about $16. This is corroborated by a notation by TJ in his June account books of payment to Callender of $15.14 for copies of his History of 1796.

  Chapter 2

  “Put James Madison down for twelve copies”: Berkeley and Berkeley, p. 164. On June 25, 1798, Madison marked “without authority” on the bill and refused to pay.

  “Washington could no longer be viewed as a saint”: Aurora, August 22, 1795. JTC added, in the wake of the Jay Treaty, “Instead of being viewed as the father of his country, we behold him as a master.” JTC on a “nation . . . debauched by Washington,” Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, p. 95.

  “ ‘Calm Observer’ ”: Berkeley and Berkeley, p. 129. PP: “fretful moans of a weak mind,” Berkeley and Berkeley, p. 161, from Cobbett, Porcupine’s Works, vol. 5, pp. 419-420. See also Syrett, July 1797, p. 132.

  Beckley as a source of material: A survey of most historians’ judgment that Beckley was the probable source is in Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, pp. 99-100. JTC, in 1798 still an avid Jefferson supporter, absolved TJ as his source of the Hamilton documents: “Mr. Jefferson had received a copy of these documents” but “never shewed them, nor ever spoke of them, to any person. In summer 1797, when the vice president heard of the intended publication, he advised that the papers be suppressed . . . but his interposition came too late.”

  Chapter 3

  “We now come to a part of the work”: Callender, History of 1796, pp. 220-223, condensed.

  Beckley said yes: On December 17, 1792, two days after Monroe’s meetings with AH, TJ wrote: “The affair of Reynolds and his wife.—Clingham Muhlenb[erg]’s clerk, testifies to F. A. Muhl[enberg,] Monroe[,] Venable—also [Oliver] Wolcott and [Jeremiah] Wadsworth. Known to J[ames] M[adison], E[dmund] R[andolph]d.d[John]Beckley and [Bernard] Webb.” Crossed out in TJ’s journal was the next paragraph: “Reynolds was speculating agent in the speculations of Govt. arrearages. He was furnished by [William] Duer with a list of the claims of arreages [sic] due to the Virga. and Carola. Lines and brought them up, against which the Resolutions of Congress of June 4, 1790 were leveled. Hamilton advised the President to give his negative to those resolutions.”