by John Ferling
During the rancorous special session of 1797, congressmen fought over every preparedness measure that Adams recommended, though in the end the president got nearly everything he wanted. In this white-hot environment, newspapers and pamphlets were filled with scurrilous attacks. No one was immune. Jefferson unwittingly contributed to the vehemence—and reaped the harvest—through yet another wayward private letter. Early the previous year, during his despair at the Jay Treaty, Jefferson had written to Philip Mazzei, a former neighbor who had moved to Italy, to bring him up to date on American affairs. He reported that “an Anglican, monarchical and aristocratical party has sprung up, whose avowed object is to draw over us the substance” of the British system. This was the staple of Republican rhetoric, and had Jefferson stopped there, his comments would not have caused a ripple. But he added: “It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.”15
Unfortunately for Jefferson, Mazzei had the letter published in a Florence newspaper. Just as the special session of Congress began, the letter appeared, as was inevitable, in a Federalist newspaper in New York, then in seemingly every Federalist paper in the land. Republican editors fought back, accusing the New York printer who had first made the letter public in America of having descended to the “Sink Pot of Malignity.”16 But the damage was done, and could not be repaired. Nearly everyone who read the letter reached the same conclusion: the “Samson in the field” whom Jefferson had accused of being partisan and an Anglophile—and anti-republican to boot—could be none other than George Washington. Jefferson had assailed the most sacrosanct of Americans.
Federalist screeds had a field day with Jefferson. It was now undeniable that he and his party were more loyal to France than to America, they said. Some even tossed around words such as “treasonable” and “traitorous.” Jefferson had a thick skin and was accustomed to attacks in the press, but he was mortified that his comments about Washington, whom he revered, had been made public. Washington was not a forgiving person. A full year before the Mazzei letter was made public, Henry Lee, the Federalist governor of Virginia and commander of the army sent out to crush the Whiskey Rebellion, had gossiped to Washington of Jefferson’s supposed antipathy. Jefferson got wind of it and asked Washington not to believe “the slander of an intriguer, dirtily employed in sifting the conversations of my table.”17 Washington believed Jefferson’s denials. But when the Mazzei letter hit the press, followed shortly thereafter by more tales of Jefferson’s alleged infidelity—malicious stories conveyed to the ex-president by Federalists—Washington would not be mollified and cut his ties with his former secretary of state. He never again invited Jefferson to Mount Vernon, nor did he write to him, and following her husband’s death, Martha Washington likewise would have nothing to do with Jefferson.
Jefferson had previously criticized Washington’s policies from time to time, beginning with his questioning of the general’s strategic thinking in the final troubled years of the war. But Jefferson had never doubted Washington’s abilities. Long years after the Mazzei letter incident, Jefferson continued to exalt Washington. Indeed, his praise of Washington exceeded the most favorable comments that Hamilton ever committed to paper about the general. Jefferson lauded Washington’s “great and powerful” mind, prudence, integrity, sound judgment, and above all his courage, asserting in 1814 that he was “incapable of fear.” Though declaring that Washington’s “heart was not warm in its affections,” Jefferson late in life wrote: “He was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man.”18
Hamilton was also a victim of the malice of the times during that steamy summer. To his horror, a Republican writer in 1797 published some details of Hamilton’s sordid involvement with Maria and James Reynolds, an episode that had occurred years earlier. The author was James Thomas Callender, a Scotsman whose scurrilous writings had forced him to flee from Britain to Ireland and eventually, in 1793, to Philadelphia. By means that were never ascertained, Callender came into possession of copies of the documents compiled by Frederick Muhlenberg, Abraham Venable, and James Monroe during their 1792 inquiry into Hamilton’s conduct. Callender published the material at very nearly the same moment that the Federalists were enjoying the bonanza made possible by the Mazzei letter. The revelations first appeared in pamphlets, then in a volume titled The History of the United States for 1796.
Callender did not care much about Hamilton’s sexual escapades. Indeed, he was skeptical of the story that Hamilton had told the congressmen about having had an affair with Maria Reynolds, even believing that the treasury secretary had forged her supposed letters. Instead, Callender was persuaded that Hamilton, privy to insider information, had used Treasury Department funds to speculate in government securities. He had, to use today’s terminology, laundered the money through James Reynolds. To Callender’s way of thinking, Hamilton’s yarn about paying blackmail was a smokescreen to mask his improper conduct at the Treasury.
Needless to say, Hamilton was furious, and mortified. His answers in the congressional inquiries had long since satisfied most fair-minded observers that suspicions of his financial misconduct were baseless. Now, yet again, charges of his supposed peculation were being ginned up. Worse still, Hamilton’s “wenching,” as Callender alluded to it, had become public knowledge. Among those who learned of his infidelity for the first time were Betsey Schuyler Hamilton and the children.
In an instant, Hamilton understood that Callender’s publication threatened him with enormous personal and political damage. He yearned for public vindication. Consumed with the need for respect, Hamilton feared being seen as not only “unprincipled but a fool.”19 In addition, he was clearly worried that the allegations, and revelations, would ruin his public aspirations. Hamilton had always had a propulsive ambition, and nothing in his correspondence or behavior—unlike that of Jefferson’s in the first years following his departure from Washington’s cabinet—suggests that it had slackened. Economic necessity had contributed to both men’s decision to return to private life, but Jefferson quite obviously relished time with his family and longed for greater freedom for intellectual pursuits. Those were not discernable factors in Hamilton’s abandonment of office, and given his voracious appetite for polemics and the energy he expended to control the Adams presidency, it appears that his political ambitions were unchecked.
Having spent years at the highest level of the national government, Hamilton would not have been tempted by many political offices. However, he had always yearned for military glory, and his behavior in years to come demonstrated that those dreams remained alive. Given his avidity for power and fame, it is likely that in moments of reverie Hamilton thirsted for the presidency. He was still quite young. In 1804, the earliest moment that Hamilton could have imagined that the presidency was a possibility, he would be only forty-nine years old, eight years younger than Washington had been when he became president. Even at the time of the election of 1816, Hamilton would be the same age that Adams had been in the recent presidential contest. In the summer of 1797, Hamilton was desperate to thwart the damage that might be caused by Callender’s malice. An air of madness characterized his behavior, as he fought yet again to lay to rest all suspicions of financial malfeasance. His inability to do so marked this as a watershed event for him, leaving him more fearful than ever that the door to his further political ascendancy had been impenetrably sealed against him.
Silence would have been his best option. That was what Wolcott advised, in essence telling Hamilton to simply say that the congressmen who conducted the inquiry had at the time acknowledged finding nothing that could “affect [his] character as a public Officer or impair the public confidence in [his] integrity.” Hamilton was accustomed to directing others, not to taking advice. He did not listen. As with so many other choices made by the impulsive Hamilton, a man driven inexorabl
y by a compelling need for esteem, his response was ill-judged. “I am obliged to publish every thing,” he said, and he did just that.20
Hamilton answered the “Jacobin Scandal-Club,” as he put it, by offering his account of his tawdry relationship with Maria and James Reynolds in a lengthy pamphlet, hoping to convince the public that his part in the affair had been driven by carnal lust, not by greed. He pointed out that on three occasions, members of Congress had absolved him of financial misdeeds. To this, he added that had he stolen from the Treasury, he would have pilfered more than the few hundred dollars that had passed from him to James Reynolds. Then came the bombshell: “My crime is an amorous connection with his wife.” Reynolds’s “design [had been] to extort money from me,” Hamilton confirmed, saying he had become the “dupe of the plot.” He had been ensnared by their “most imposing art.” Maria had seduced him. He had been moved by her supposed plight, though he all but said that he had been swept off his feet by her many charms.
It was a sordid, and salacious, confession, and he begged for forgiveness, crying out: “I can never cease to condemn myself.”21 But in all of American political history, perhaps no figure ever acted as unwisely as did Hamilton in coming clean. His was a tale of having been a slave to passion, a disclosure of having been bamboozled by a couple of unsavory con artists, and a shocking admission that he had persisted in sleeping with Maria even after her husband was aware of what was occurring. Friends stuck by him, but many others greeted his avowal with ridicule. Callender gushed ecstatically that Hamilton’s admission was “worth all that fifty of the best pens in America Could have said against him.” In no time, Hamilton was spoofed in a New York theatrical production. Many thought the revelations raised troubling questions about his character and judgment. Others, like Jefferson’s financial agent in Philadelphia, thought it tawdry of Hamilton to air his story in such a manner that “poor Mrs. H … must be severely injured.”22 (They might have found it even more shocking had they known that Hamilton drafted his pamphlet at the moment that Betsey was giving birth to their sixth child.) What is more, his story struck many as so wildly implausible as to lend credence to Callender’s charges. Jefferson, for instance, concluded that Hamilton’s “willingness to plead guilty as to the adultery seems rather to have strengthened than weakened the suspicions that he was in truth guilty of the speculations.” Others said that Hamilton had sought “to creep under Mrs. R’s petticoats” in order to hide what he had really been up to.23
Skepticism would have been even more widespread had the public known the circumstances under which Hamilton drafted his confession. He hurried to Philadelphia, where he composed his pamphlet while lodging in a rented room in a boarding house. It had never been his practice to leave home to draft his essays and pamphlets, and this departure in his behavior raises questions. Hamilton’s best biographer attributed his uncustomary conduct to an unwillingness to “face his family” as he “confessed his sins.”24 Another explanation is that Hamilton wished to peruse the Treasury Department’s ledgers. It is unlikely that the slavish Wolcott would have objected, and there was little danger that he would blow the whistle should emendations be made.
Hamilton wanted redemption, but he was also determined to find who had leaked the documents to Callender. He knew that Muhlenberg and his colleagues who had investigated the matter in 1792 had made copies of the materials they turned up in their probe. Within a few weeks of that initial investigation, Hamilton also knew that “whispers” were circulating in Virginia about the affair, and he must have suspected that William Giles’s investigation, launched merely three months after Muhlenberg’s inquiry, stemmed from knowledge of the payments he had made to Reynolds.25 Someone in Virginia who knew of the affair was talking. Both Venable and Monroe, who had joined with Muhlenberg to look into the matter, were Virginians. Of the two, Monroe had a motive for retribution. The year before, President Washington had recalled Monroe as American minister to France, a humiliating end to his embassy. The president had acted on the advice of an entirely Federalist cabinet, and he had dispatched a Federalist in Monroe’s stead.
Actually, there was another possible suspect. Venable told Hamilton that he did not know how “these papers got out, unless by the person who copied them,” John Beckley, at the time the clerk of the House of Representatives, and a Virginian. Wolcott said the same thing to Hamilton. But from the outset Hamilton focused exclusively on Monroe. Of the three congressmen who had investigated the matter in 1792, Monroe was the most important politically, and he was close to Jefferson. Hamilton burned with desire to secure his absolution, but at the same moment he wanted to harm Monroe by revealing that he had been the culprit who leaked the documents to Callender.26
Hamilton immediately called on Monroe, who by happenstance was visiting relatives in Manhattan. Though Hamilton had long dominated others through his combative manner, it did not work when he confronted Monroe, a gritty Southerner. Like Hamilton, Monroe had soldiered for several years, first in the infantry, where he saw considerable combat (and received a life-threatening gunshot wound in the attack on Trenton), before serving as an aide-de-camp to General Stirling. Hamilton and Monroe had met during the war, and in fact Hamilton had recommended him for a field command in the African American regiment that Colonel Laurens hoped to raise. But they split in the partisan 1790s. Monroe, a Republican senator, fought tenaciously against what he called the “monarchy party.” The Federalists’ payback came when they induced Washington not only to recall him from France—it was Hamilton who had actually persuaded the president to summon Monroe home—but to do so in a letter so harsh that it threatened his political career.27 It is not likely that Monroe would have truckled to anyone, especially any Federalist in the summer of 1797, and he most certainly was not going to permit Hamilton to push him around.
Their meeting was stormy. An observer described Hamilton as “very much agitated” when he entered the house. He wasted little time before accusing Monroe of turning over the documents to Callender. Both men spoke with “some warmth.” At one point, Monroe said that if Hamilton “would be temperate or quiet for a moment,” he would “answer him candidly.” That silenced Hamilton long enough for Monroe to point out that he had only returned from France two weeks earlier. He acknowledged that Muhlenberg and Venable had asked him to keep the sealed packet containing the papers from their inquiry, and he added that he had entrusted it to a “friend in Virginia.” Hamilton responded by calling him a liar, and Monroe in turn replied that his accuser was a “Scoundrel.” Hot-tempered as always, Hamilton shot back: “I will meet you like a Gentleman.” Monroe did not flinch. In a flash, he replied: “I am ready get your pistols.” Only the intervention of friends who were present prevented an immediate duel.
Hamilton, who remained “extremely agitated” while Monroe was “quite cool,” shifted gears. If he could not persuade Monroe to acknowledge his role in passing along the documents to Callender, then Hamilton demanded that the Virginian at least repudiate the remarks made in a deposition he had taken from Jacob Clingman, Reynolds’s confederate, back in 1792. Clingman had stated that Hamilton’s supposed romance with Maria Reynolds was an artifice designed to conceal the treasury secretary’s crimes. Monroe had copied the statement and passed it on to Venable and Muhlenberg without comment. Callender had made it public. Indeed, for Callender, it was the heart of his case against the former treasury secretary. Hamilton pressed Monroe to discredit Clingman’s allegation. Monroe was evasive. He agreed only to ask Muhlenberg and Venable to join him in a letter acknowledging that their inquiry had produced no evidence of financial impropriety by Hamilton.28
Within a week, Hamilton had such a letter, but he thought it insufficient.29 During the next half year, he deluged Monroe with letters demanding that he formally refute Clingman. Monroe demurred. This was his retaliation against an old political foe, one who had repeatedly insulted him. In letter after letter, the desperate Hamilton charged Monroe with responsibility for Callender
’s publications, alleged that the Virginian had done so from a “design to … drive me to the necessity of a formal defense”—which, if true, was successful, for Hamilton did not publish his account of the Reynolds affair until six weeks after his confrontation with Monroe—and assailed him as “malignant and dishonourable.” In December, Monroe came close to formally challenging Hamilton to a duel, and announced that Aaron Burr would be his second. But Burr thought a duel pointless, especially as Monroe never believed, or charged, that Hamilton had acted illegally while treasury secretary. Furthermore, by refusing to deliver some of the correspondence between Monroe and Hamilton, Burr prevented the rhetoric from mushrooming to an intemperate level that would have made a duel inevitable. In the end, the imbroglio withered away. No duel was fought. Burr, in 1797, may have saved Hamilton’s life.30
At the outset of 1798, Adams asked his cabinet to consider what steps he should take if the news from the three envoys he had sent to France was bad. McHenry immediately turned to Hamilton for direction, then passed along the advice to his colleagues, each of whom recommended to the unsuspecting president what the former treasury secretary had outlined. Hamilton desired military preparations, including the augmentation of the army, which he had failed to obtain in 1797, and the suspension of the treaties with France, which he had unsuccessfully sought in 1793. He wanted the regular army increased to twenty thousand men and an additional, or “provisional army” of thirty thousand also to be raised. Hamilton told the cabinet that he did not want war, as the United States was not prepared for hostilities with a major power and there was “a strong aversion to war in the minds of the people.” Besides, there was nothing to gain—neither trade nor territory—from a war with France. He coached his minions to tell Adams that the military build-up would induce France to negotiate, and he even encouraged them to advise the president to declare a national day of prayer, which he said would be “very expedient” politically.31