Betsey’s portrait was painted in 1787. By that time, Alexander Hamilton had closed his military career by persuading George Washington to give him command of a light infantry regiment at the siege of Yorktown, where he led a charge that made him a popular hero. After the war he emerged as one of New York’s most successful lawyers and a political thinker of formidable stature. He played a crucial role in persuading Americans to junk their unworkable first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and create a new national charter.
Riding this political whirlwind absorbed most of Hamilton’s waking hours. When he was not talking politics with thinkers such as James Madison of Virginia or economics with merchant kings such as Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, he was persuading a reluctant George Washington to become the nation’s first president. Meanwhile he was churning out brilliant essays defending the Constitution and urging its ratification, and waging an uphill fight against popular Governor George Clinton to win New York’s approval of the disputed charter. Elizabeth Hamilton slowly realized that she was destined to play a minor role in the central drama of her husband’s life—his pursuit of fame.
An additional reason for the melancholy and uncertainty that stained Betsey’s sensitive face was the presence of another woman in her life—and in her husband’s life: Angelica Schuyler Church. Her portrait reveals a dramatically different personality from shy, submissive Betsey. Angelica had an angular face with mocking dark eyes and a sensuous mouth that seems poised to make a witty—or a seductive—quip. Sophistication, worldliness, and even a certain recklessness emanate from Angelica. She had charmed bluebloods in Paris and London and New York. Gouverneur Morris, Gotham’s best-known rake, had been so dazzled that he claimed Angelica could have whatever part of his body she preferred. But there seemed to be only one man who aroused this temptress’s deepest feelings. It was not her fat, stolid, monosyllabic British husband, who had made a fortune during the Revolution supplying the American and French armies. The man was her brother-in-law, Alexander Hamilton.
Angelica made no secret of her passion when she wrote to Betsey. In 1784, when she was in Europe with her husband, she mentioned Hamilton’s name no less than fourteen times in a single letter. In another letter she rather abruptly told Betsey to stop sending her fruit, which was spoiled by the time it reached her. What she wanted was newspapers—especially “those that contain your husband’s writings.” She ordered Betsey to tell Hamilton how much “I envy you the fame of so clever a husband, one who writes so well; God bless him and may he long continue to be the friend and brother of your affectionate…Angelica.”1
Angelica’s husband bought a palatial country estate near London and became part of the circle around the Prince of Wales, a social whirl in which the men gambled themselves into near bankruptcy and drank themselves into insensibility and the idea of marital fidelity drew guffaws. Almost everyone imitated the prince and had a mistress. Whether Church was one of these sexual adventurers remains uncertain. He seems to have had only two passions, business and gambling. As early as 1785, Angelica was telling Hamilton that “he no longer hears me.” Ignoring her advice, Church bought himself a seat in Parliament, where his inadequacy as a speaker left him a nonentity. In one letter, Angelica lamented to Hamilton that he lacked “your eloquence.” Clearly, she was an unhappy woman.
By 1787, Angelica was writing letters to Hamilton that contained a subtle code of endearment. She played games with commas, inserting them where they gave special meaning to certain words. “Indeed my dear, Sir,” she wrote. Hamilton was deep in composing The Federalist Papers, the brilliant commentary that persuaded thousands of voters to support the new constitution. But he instantly noticed Angelica’s misplaced comma and was stirred: “There was a most critical comma in your last letter. It is in my interest that it should have been designed; but I presume it was accidental.” Still, he had a high opinion of her “discernment.” (He underlined the word.) That tempted him to hope that she would read his reply in a certain mood that would enable her to “divine that in which I write it.”
Angelica had thanked him for strewing so many “roses” (compliments) in her path in a previous letter. Hamilton told her that these pretty phrases had become “only a feeble image” of what he now wanted to convey to her. Whereupon he closed this confession of love with a misplaced comma of his own: “Adieu, ma chere, soeur. A. Hamilton.”2
In 1789, as the new federal government began to operate, Angelica persuaded—or perhaps browbeat—her husband into financing a trip to New York. She came alone—a statement in itself. Hamilton, who functioned as John Barker Church’s American business representative, handled the money he sent with her. Mrs. Church stayed five months, from May to November. One biographer has found the financial records that Hamilton kept for her in his office ledger very revealing. For an unknown reason, the cash was divided into “Monies paid to Yourself” and “For You.” Certain sums were destined for a “last” landlady—not the one with whom Angelica stayed and whom John Barker Church paid. Was this “last” landlady in charge of another set of rooms, where the lovers secretly met?
It may not be entirely coincidental that during these months, Hamilton’s political enemies launched a savage attack on him. He had infuriated a great many politicians who had opposed New York’s ratification of the new constitution. Hamilton replied in equally ferocious style, under the pseudonym “H.G.” One attacker, writing under the pen name William Tell, replied by taking the low road: “Your private character is still worse than your public one, and it will yet be exposed by your own works, for you will not be bound by the most solemn of all obligations! *******.” Insiders had no trouble reading the seven asterisks: wedlock.3
When Angelica was summoned back to England by her husband, her letter revealed an anguish that transcends the pain of parting from a mere brother-in-law and favorite sister. “Me voilà très cher bien en mer and le pauvre coeur bien efflige de vous avoir quitte.” [Here I am, my precious darling, all at sea and my poor heart so distressed at leaving you.] In a burst of defiance, she added: “I have almost vowed not to spend [more than] three weeks in England.”
Angelica shifted her attention to Betsey—a pattern that became habitual in her letters to Hamilton. Her sister was ill, and Angelica felt guilty that she would not be able to stay and care for her. She vowed to return soon, and urged Hamilton “to remember this yourself, my dearest brother, and let neither politics nor ambition drive your Angelica from your affections.”
Another letter went from her ship as it headed into the wintry Atlantic. Angelica wondered how she could be content when she was parting with “my best and most valuable invaluable friends.” (Again there is the hint of a coded message. Were some of her friends valuable and one invaluable?) She begged Hamilton to remember that he had told her she was “as dear to you as a sister.” She hoped he would “keep your word” and “never forget the promise of friendship you have vowed.” Then came the inevitable “A thousand embraces to my dear Betsey.” Angelica hoped she would not have “so bad a night as the last.”
Ailing Betsey had not accompanied Hamilton to the ship to say goodbye to Angelica. Back home, Hamilton reported to Angelica that he found Betsey “in bitter distress” but “much recovered from the agony in which she had been.” He “composed her” by assuring her that Angelica would survive the voyage. Then he and his oldest son, Philip, and Revolutionary War hero Baron Friedrich von Steuben, whom Angelica had apparently charmed, strolled to the Battery at the tip of Manhattan Island, where “with aching hearts and anxious eyes” they watched her ship depart. “We gazed, we sighed, we wept; and returned home,” Hamilton wrote, “to give scope to our sorrows and mingle without restraint our tears and our regrets.”4
This can be read as a perfectly honest and deeply affectionate tribute to a remarkable sister-in-law. It can also be read as evidence that Betsey had by this time become aware of Hamilton’s passion for Angelica, and thinking about it had made her ill. The imputat
ion is supported by Hamilton’s enemies’ gibe about wedlock. But it is disputed by a tender letter that Betsey wrote to Angelica, which Hamilton enclosed with his own impassioned epistle.
Betsey was too overwhelmed by grief at losing “My very dear beloved Angelica” to write more than a few lines. She begged her to tell Mr. Church that he must bring her back to America as soon as possible for the sake of her (Betsey’s) happiness—and the happiness of “my Hamilton who has for you all the affection of a fond brother.”5 The emotions expressed on both sides seem to go far beyond the amitié amoureuse of a Benjamin Franklin with Madame Brillon. These people were in their thirties, in the full vigor of love and desire. Put another way—did Hamilton’s head control the obvious longings of his heart? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
II
Hamilton’s program to rescue the newly constituted United States of America from national bankruptcy and economic stagnation stirred enmity in Thomas Jefferson and many other people, who took seriously if not literally the claim in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal. Hamilton’s proposals, which were aimed at persuading—and rewarding—the rich to invest their capital in the United States seemed unwise and often unjust to these men—a betrayal of the Revolution’s ideals. These feelings were exacerbated by the turmoil of the French Revolution and its denunciations of aristocrats and kings.
Hamilton defended his ideas in the newspapers, claiming his policies were the only alternative to the anarchy and mob rule that were sweeping France. Like his political clashes with Governor Clinton in New York, the contest with Jefferson soon grew personal. Supporting the French Revolution left a man open to the accusation that he was an atheist. From that gibe, it was only a few steps to viewing him as a libertine, preaching amorality and sexual license to everyone. The widower Jefferson was a natural target for such allegations.
In the midst of this imbroglio, Hamilton did not forget Angelica. On January 7, 1790, while he was working twenty hours a day to prepare his financial program for submission to Congress, he found time to tell her he was “very busy and very anxious.” But he could not let the London packet sail without a letter telling her that “no degree of occupation can make me forget you.”6 Angelica would remain beyond Hamilton’s reach in London and Paris for the next six years, the zenith of Hamilton’s career. But the intensity of his attraction to her remained a spiritual force in his life, slowly eroding his feelings for Betsey. There was a side of Hamilton’s personality that wanted more drama, more ecstasy, than Betsey could inspire with her devotion and fidelity. Sexuality became intermingled with his political triumphs and his growing fame—a phenomenon that would be repeated by more than one American politician in future decades.
III
The first years of Hamilton’s service as George Washington’s secretary of the treasury were a series of political victories over his critics. In the no-holds-barred partisan style of the day, Jefferson inspired—and sometimes hired—newspapermen who began printing violent attacks on Hamilton and his policies. The treasury secretary was portrayed as a would-be despot, ready to assert his power in every imaginable way—in Congress, the courts, the voting booth, and the bedroom. The Jeffersonians saw him as a truly dangerous man who had to be destroyed before he corrupted America. Hamilton’s West Indian birth, with its overtones of illegitimacy, added spice to the accusations.
Hamilton accepted the rules of this rough game and responded in kind. Writing as Catullus, he assailed Jefferson’s character. There would soon come a time, he predicted, “when the visor of stoicism is plucked from the brow of the epicurean, when the plain garb of Quaker simplicity is stripped from the concealed voluptuary.” Allies joined him in castigating Jefferson’s concealed hunger for power—and his even more secret sensuality. Two centuries later, the “you’re another” quality of the accusations are obvious and almost tiresome. But Americans of the 1790s, experiencing their first immersion in partisan politics, were enthralled.
In the early stages of this brawl, Hamilton prevailed. He won Congress’s approval to create the Bank of the United States, which assumed the $40 million Revolutionary War debt and sold its shares to eager, mostly wealthy, investors. Soon there was an embryo stock market flourishing on Wall Street, another British innovation that Jefferson and his friends deplored. As we have seen, in return for tolerating this financial program, the Jeffersonians demanded that Hamilton agree to move the capital to Washington, D.C. While the federal city was under construction, Philadelphia would be the temporary capital. Like John and Abigail Adams, Hamilton had no enthusiasm for this transfer. New York was his hometown and New York State the base of his political power. But he made the personal sacrifice to rescue his financial program. He was convinced that the nation’s salvation depended on it.
Thus, Hamilton and Betsey and their four children found themselves in the City of Brotherly Love in 1791. As the summer began, a letter arrived from Betsey’s father confessing that he and Mrs. Schuyler were worried about their daughter and their grandchildren. Philadelphia was infamous for its outbreaks of yellow fever during the warm months. Betsey and the children were soon on their way to Albany.
Not long after they departed, Hamilton was visited by an attractive brunette who introduced herself as Maria Reynolds and blurted out a tearful story of neglect and abuse. She was a New Yorker, she said, a relative of the Livingstons, married to a man named James Reynolds, who had been in the Continental Army’s commissary department during the Revolution. Her husband had left her for another woman, and she hoped that Hamilton, as a fellow New Yorker, would give her enough money to get back to the Empire State and sympathetic relatives.
This, it should be emphasized, is Hamilton’s version of the story. Hamilton said he did not have much cash in his house (an oddity in itself) but would be glad to lend her the money later in the day. Maria gave him her address, 134 South Fourth Street, only a block away from Hamilton’s Third Street home, and departed. That evening, Hamilton put a thirty-dollar bank bill in his pocket and strolled to the Reynolds house. It was as expensive and comfortably furnished as the one Hamilton was renting—a fact that should have aroused his suspicions. A servant led him upstairs to Maria Reynolds’s bedroom, where she greeted him with effusive gratitude and accepted the money. They talked for a while and, as Hamilton later described it, he became aware that “other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.”
Unquestionably, if Hamilton’s version is true, this ranks as one of the easiest seductions on record. But his story raises far more questions than it answers. It seems unlikely that this was the first time Hamilton had met Maria Reynolds—unless he was ready to go to bed with almost any woman who extended an invitation. It seems more than likely that she and her husband, who was a stock speculator, had managed to inject themselves into some part of Hamilton’s social life in New York or Philadelphia, where she had attracted his amorous attention.
Reynolds was a petty player, but he was not a complete nobody. During the Revolution, he did business with William Duer, later Hamilton’s right-hand man at the Treasury. In 1789, Robert Troup, Hamilton’s college roommate and still a close friend, had given Reynolds a letter of recommendation for a job in the Treasury department. On the record is also a Hamilton meeting with Reynolds in New York, when the speculator played the political ally and reported a Philadelphia smear campaign that portrayed Hamilton as a secret agent working to put one of George III’s sons on an American throne.
Among the Jeffersonians, Reynolds was a name that was synonymous with Hamilton’s supposedly corrupt influence. In 1790 the speculator had traveled to North Carolina and Virginia and bought up promissory notes given to former Continental Army soldiers in lieu of cash during the Revolution. He had conned these patriots into selling him their government paper for next to nothing, then hustled back to New York and made a killing when Hamilton announced his plan to pay the government’s debts at par—face value.
Reynolds had obtained lists of the
ex-soldiers’ names from a crooked clerk in Hamilton’s Treasury office. This unsavory deed turned James Madison into a Hamilton opponent. It is hard to believe that this story, which swirled through Congress and became a key reason for Jefferson’s and Madison’s hostility to Hamilton, did not reach the secretary of the treasury’s ears.7
Did pity play a part in Hamilton’s seduction? Did Maria remind him of his mother’s travails with an angry husband and several lovers? Why didn’t the secretary of the treasury consider that he, the most powerful man in Philadelphia, except for President George Washington, might be the target of a plot to ruin his reputation? Was he so deep in his romance with fame that he considered himself invulnerable? Was Maria Reynolds a kind of damaged version of Angelica Church—a woman who made no secret of her attraction to men and her awareness that men desired her? That may be the best answer to Hamilton’s readiness to offer Maria “consolation”—a significant choice of words.
Somehow she must have represented a version of erotic love that fit Hamilton’s new vision of himself as a man of power, with the freedom to seek the kind of pleasure that his wife could not give him. This “grand passion,” as one biographer has called it, would be invoked by thousands of lovers in the dawning age of romanticism to justify their scorn for moral restraint. The ancient Greeks called it eros; they saw it as a force that virtually annihilated the self while simultaneously expanding it to mystical dimensions. But in Hamilton’s case, the energy—and not a little of the ecstasy—flowed from the dynamo of fame.8
Another connection to Angelica may also have been on Hamilton’s mind. Jefferson’s newly formed Republican Party had humiliated him in New York by defeating his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, in his bid for reelection to the Senate. The winner was a youthful politician who was emerging as a Hamilton rival: Aaron Burr. This failure may have damaged Hamilton’s relationship to both Betsey and Angelica—especially the latter. A rebuke from Angelica—even the thought of one—would have made Hamilton susceptible to Maria, who was appealing to him as a man of power, pleading for rescue from her abusive husband.
The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers Page 27