The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  Throughout that humid Philadelphia summer of 1791, Hamilton repeatedly visited Maria in her bedroom—or invited her to join him in the bed he shared with the absent Betsey. In his later account of his infatuation, Hamilton confessed that most of his “frequent meetings” with Maria were “at my own house.” In all these encounters, Maria proved herself a consummate actress. She portrayed herself as a once naïve woman who had married the scoundrel Reynolds at the age of fifteen, had a child by him, and found herself trapped in an ongoing nightmare. He turned her into a prostitute who handed over all the money she received from her clients so he could gamble in the stock market. This victimized version of Maria’s marriage—she actually seems to have been closer to a partner in crime—only increased Hamilton’s passion, without arousing his suspicion.

  IV

  In the summer of 1791, Hamilton was riding the crest of the huge wave of public enthusiasm he had created by persuading Congress to approve his plan for overhauling America’s public credit. On June 20, when shares of the Bank of the United States went on sale, the first offerings in New York and other cities had sold out in a matter of minutes. Secretary Hamilton had attempted to check speculation in the bank’s stock by making it expensive to buy. A $400 share required $100 down, the rest to be paid in four semiannual installments. (In modern money, this was roughly $6,000 a share with $1,500 down.) But Congress, already demonstrating an eagerness to please as many people as possible, reduced the opening payment to $25. For this amount, the purchaser got a certificate, soon nicknamed “scrip,” which entitled him to buy the full share at par.9

  In less than an hour, the $8,000,000 first issue was oversubscribed by $1,600,000. In five weeks, the value of the scrip soared from $25 to $325. The low opening price enabled almost everyone to get into the game; “scrippomania” swept the nation. Newspapers began printing daily stock quotations. An agitated James Madison told Thomas Jefferson that no one in New York talked about anything but “stock jobbing.” Congressman Henry Lee reported that everyone he knew was investing in the bank. Hamilton, who could have made a fortune by buying shares for himself at far-below-market prices, remained financially pure. But this veritable explosion of fame redoubled his ardor for Maria Reynolds.10

  Interesting evidence of the psychological connection between Maria and Angelica is visible in the abrupt fall-off of Hamilton’s letters to his sister-in-law and the no-longer-rapturous expressions of affection in them. In one letter he almost offhandedly remarked that Betsey approved of his loving Angelica “as well as herself”—not the kind of extravagance she had come to expect. Soon he was writing, “I think as kindly as ever of my dear sister in law.” Betsey did not fare much better during these months. In several letters, after a perfunctory profession of love, Hamilton assured his wife there was no need to hurry back from Albany. When she complained that his letters were infrequent, he vowed that he had been writing her almost every day and wondered if sinister conspirators were intercepting his letters.11

  When Betsey returned from Albany with the four children, Maria’s visits to the Hamilton home ceased. By this time the treasury secretary had rented a house on Market Street, only a few doors from President Washington’s residence. But Hamilton continued to visit Maria throughout the fall of 1791, while he was deep in another battle with Congress about his proposal to create a major manufacturing metropolis, in part financed by the government, on the banks of the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey. It was part of his long-range program to make America an industrial rival to Great Britain. This vision of America as an economic powerhouse clashed violently with the Jefferson-Madison vision of a nation of virtuous small farmers, deepening their conviction that Hamilton was a menace.

  V

  Hamilton wrote two versions of his affair with Maria. In the first, which was never published, he described her as “play-acting” her love for him. In his second draft, he maintained that she had fallen in love with him and this made it extremely difficult to break off their relationship. He blamed his belief in her “real fondness” for him on his vanity. The two drafts probably describe the evolution of their relationship. As a man of the West Indian world with a mother who had slept with many men and may have discussed them in his earshot, he could have had no illusions about a woman’s ability to fake affection.

  As the affair continued, Hamilton had to justify it by convincing himself that he had won Maria’s love. This illusion brought pity into play. Rather than break off the affair abruptly, he told himself a “gradual discontinuance” would be best. This self-deception enabled him to continue the affair for another year. Maria contributed to the illusion of heartbreak, Hamilton later ruefully recalled, by producing “all the appearances of violent attachment and of agonizing distress” at the merest hint that the affair would have to end.12

  In the late fall of 1791, reality came crashing into Hamilton’s imaginary romance. James Reynolds returned to his wife and professed shock and outrage to discover that she had been seduced. In an interview with Hamilton, he hinted that only a job in the Treasury Department would satisfy him. The secretary put him off with evasions, but in a few days Reynolds was back demanding money. The desperate Hamilton agreed to pay him $1,000 (the equivalent of 20,000 modern dollars) in two installments. This only led to more requests for cash, sometimes described as loans, which Hamilton often had to borrow from friends to pay. Meanwhile, the infatuated secretary continued to visit Maria, with Reynolds’s tacit consent.

  Reynolds had another reason for bearding Hamilton. He was in danger of doing jail time for fraud. He and a fellow speculator named Jacob Clingman had made $400 claiming that Clingman was the heir of a soldier on Reynolds’s list to whom the government owed money. Unfortunately, the soldier turned out to be alive and the comptroller of the treasury, Oliver Wolcott Jr., urged the state of Pennsylvania to arrest both crooks. Like most people, Clingman dreaded the prospect of going to prison; a stay in the vile jails of the eighteenth century was often a death sentence. Clingman expressed skepticism when Reynolds assured him that Hamilton would protect them. One day Clingman waited in the street while Reynolds entered Hamilton’s house and came out with a supply of dollars.

  Clingman professed shock at this revelation. He was a political ally of the Jeffersonians and saw Reynolds’s access to the secretary of the treasury as possible proof that Hamilton was using him as a front man to speculate in the market. Clingman turned to a Federalist congressman for whom he had clerked, Frederick A. C. Muhlenberg, briefly the speaker of the House of Representatives. A former minister whose brother had served with distinction as a general in the Revolution, Muhlenberg was a political moderate. He felt sorry for Clingman, who claimed the fraud charge was a misunderstanding; he thought the soldier had died and his claim against the government was legitimately for sale.

  Muhlenberg was far more concerned by Clingman’s claim that Reynolds had some sort of illicit connection with Hamilton. The congressman formed an impromptu committee to investigate it. He invited Virginia Senator James Monroe, a passionate ally of Jefferson, and Congressman Abraham Venable, also a Virginia Republican, to join him. They interviewed both Reynolds and his wife, and obtained from them unsigned but seemingly incriminating letters that Hamilton had written to them. Reynolds told them he could prove “the misconduct…of a person high in office.”13 Maria assured them that her husband could “tell them something that would make the heads of [government] departments tremble.”14

  Deepening their suspicions was the way Hamilton dealt with the fraud charge against Clingman and Reynolds. When they agreed to return the money and surrender Reynolds’s leaked list of veterans, Comptroller Wolcott dismissed the charge. Whereupon James Reynolds disappeared. Clingman maintained that Hamilton had paid the speculator a great deal of money to depart for some distant destination, perhaps the West Indies.

  This was explosive stuff, especially in the overheated atmosphere of December 1792. Jefferson had recently written a scorching letter to Pres
ident Washington, accusing Hamilton of plotting “to undermine and demolish the republic.” He had, the secretary of state claimed, “corrupted the legislative branch by dealing out Treasury secrets to his friends.”15

  At first, Muhlenberg was inclined to send the committee’s findings to the president. But after much discussion, they decided to confront Hamilton first. His initial response was furious indignation, but he swiftly calmed down when they showed him the incriminating letters in their possession. The secretary of the treasury said he would explain everything if they came to his house that evening.

  There, a mournful Hamilton admitted he had written the letters. But they had nothing to do with illegal speculation. Reynolds was blackmailing him for his affair with Maria. The senator and two congressmen expressed surprise at this confession. Hamilton went into painful detail about the way Reynolds had tolerated and even encouraged his later visits to Maria. Within minutes, the embarrassed politicians were saying they had heard more than enough to convince them that the situation had nothing to do with corruption in the Treasury Department. But Hamilton insisted on sharing other intimate letters between him and Maria. By the time he finished, his accusers were all but begging his forgiveness for their invasion of his privacy. As gentlemen, they all agreed that Hamilton’s adultery would remain a secret they would share with no one. The treasury secretary said he was deeply grateful for the way they had handled the humiliating incident.

  Congressmen Muhlenberg and Venable departed expressing deep sympathy for Hamilton. Senator Monroe, Hamilton noticed, was “more cold.” Monroe could barely conceal his disappointment that Hamilton had apparently escaped unscathed. He wrote a full report of the confrontation for Jefferson and Madison and during the next several weeks met several more times with Jacob Clingman, who reiterated his belief that Hamilton was guilty of far more than infidelity. Clingman made a point of telling Monroe that Mrs. Reynolds had burst into tears when she learned that Hamilton had been exonerated.

  When Hamilton had time to think about the confrontation, he began to wonder whether Senator Monroe and his friends would keep their word. He asked Monroe to give him copies of the letters the committee had shown him. They would be important if he ever had to defend himself against fresh accusations. Monroe agreed, and asked the clerk of the House of Representatives, John Beckley, to make the copies. Beckley was a major behind-the-scenes political operator. The request was tantamount to sharing the secret with the entire Jeffersonian Republican Party. Beckley made copies for his own files, almost certainly hoping that that they would prove useful at some later political moment.

  VI

  While this drama was playing on a separate stage, Betsey Hamilton thought she had returned from Albany to a loving husband. In one sense of that term, she was correct. She welcomed an apparently amorous Hamilton into her bed and was soon pregnant with her fifth child. In the busy social world of Philadelphia, she proudly accompanied her husband to receptions at the president’s mansion and to dinners and balls at the even more splendid mansion where Anne and William Bingham entertained the city’s elite. Anne Bingham was the equal, perhaps even the superior, of Angelica Schuyler Church when it came to high style and witty conversation. Betsey never tried to compete with her; she was more than content to be Mrs. Alexander Hamilton. She let her husband manage the repartee and the flirtatious remarks.

  At home, Betsey supervised the children’s education. Each morning at breakfast, the boys and their sister Angelica read aloud a chapter from the Bible. Betsey ran the house and servants with a masterful hand. Secretary of War James McHenry once teased Hamilton about how well Betsey supervised his household. He claimed she “had as much merit as your treasurer as you have as treasurer of the wealth of the United States.”16

  Betsey had excellent taste. She decorated their various homes with Louis XVI–style chairs and portraits by the best painters. Her dresses were stylish and beautifully cut. Her model was Martha Washington. Betsey, too, felt that the demands of public life were distractions from the real source of happiness, her home and children. She agreed wholeheartedly with Martha’s comment that public occasions were mostly “a waste of time.” But Betsey later admitted that as a younger woman, she often enjoyed the parties and balls to which her famous husband escorted her. “I mingled more in the gaieties of the day,” she said.17

  Once she accepted her secondary role in Hamilton’s all-consuming pursuit of fame, the only thing that troubled Betsey was her husband’s lack of religious faith. He was not hostile to religion; as a young man he had been devout. His college roommate, Robert Troup, recalled that Hamilton got down on his knees and prayed each night and morning. He had been more than agreeable when Betsey insisted on having their first three children christened at Trinity Church in New York. But he rarely accompanied her and the children to services on Sunday, and when he went, he never received communion. He may have been imitating George Washington, who also declined the sacrament when he went to church with Martha. It was a common practice among thoughtful men in this era. Many of them had been influenced by the renowned English scientist Joseph Priestley’s 1782 book, The Corruptions of Christianity, which called for a rational scientific approach to the Bible. Betsey never sat in judgment on Priestley’s book or its readers. Instead, in her quiet, steadfast way, she let Hamilton know more than once that she hoped he would someday regain his youthful faith in a Christian God.

  VII

  For the next three years Hamilton was engulfed day and night by the political battles of the decade. Again and again, Jeffersonian Republicans in Congress called for investigations of the Treasury Department that required immense labors by Hamilton and his staff. They submitted thousands of pages of documents for scrutiny. Each time, the investigating committee found not a scintilla of corruption to back up their vitriolic shouts and murmurs about Hamilton’s evil ways. But in the back of his mind throughout these years, the memory of Maria Reynolds and the meeting with the congressional investigating committee in 1791 loomed as a demoralizing threat. Some historians speculate that Maria was the reason why Hamilton never tried to push John Adams aside and run for president.18

  In his last years as secretary of the treasury, Hamilton was harassed not only by endless political attacks; Betsey continued to have children, and he was running short of money. The first time he tried to resign to return to the private practice of law, Washington grew so angry that the two men almost had a quarrel as potentially disastrous as their clash when Hamilton had been the general’s restless aide. Not until January 1795 did the president agree to let him go. But Hamilton continued to advise Washington by letter, and was constantly consulted by his successor at the Treasury, Oliver Wolcott Jr., and by the new secretary of state, Timothy Pickering. As we have seen, President John Adams kept these men as well as Hamilton’s old friend, Secretary of War James McHenry, in his cabinet. Hamilton’s political power remained immense. He was still the leader of the Federalist Party, in charge of selecting candidates and orchestrating foreign and domestic policies.

  The Jeffersonian Republicans were well aware of Hamilton’s central role. After John Adams became president and his detestation of Hamilton became virtually public knowledge, the Jeffersonians made their move. Their hatchet man, John Beckley, exhumed the Maria Reynolds papers from his files and gave them to the most scurrilous journalist in America, James Thomson Callender, abuser of John Adams and every other Federalist politician of note, including George Washington.

  Callender was of course delighted with the Reynolds story. Maria had by this time obtained a divorce from her vanished husband, with the help of New York Senator Aaron Burr. She was living in Maryland with Jacob Clingman. Part of Callender’s motive, he claimed, was Hamilton’s pretensions to being “a master of morality”—a reference to his attacks on Jefferson as a secret sensualist. The journalist gleefully declared he would now reveal letters confessing that this “father of a family” had an “illicit correspondence with another man’s wife.”
Whereupon Callender published the incriminating letters Hamilton had given Senator Monroe and his fellow investigators in 1791.

  Callender and the Jeffersonians were not satisfied with exposing Hamilton’s adultery. “So much correspondence could not refer exclusively to wenching,” the newsman declaimed. “No man of common sense will believe that it did…Reynolds and his wife affirm that it respected certain speculations.” This was the heart of the matter as far as the Jeffersonians were concerned. Callender’s investigation led him to conclude that “there appears no evidence [of a liaison] but the word of the Secretary.”19 He accused Hamilton of forging Maria’s misspelled love letters to him to conceal the real crime, James Reynolds’s speculations in the market with the money Hamilton surreptitiously “loaned” him.

  What to do about this? Various friends urged Hamilton to ignore Callender. No one else had bothered to answer his abuse. Most Federalists were indignant and on Hamilton’s side. A close friend warned that opening a debate only played into Callender’s hands. He lived on controversy. But two of the documents that Callender had published wounded Hamilton in a way he could not tolerate. One was the memorandum the Frederick Muhlenberg committee members had signed after their meeting with Hamilton, saying “we left him under an impression our suspicions were removed.” There was more than a faint implication of deception in those words. Even more inflammatory was a memorandum of Senator Monroe’s interview with Jacob Clingman, in which the con man claimed that Maria denied an affair with Hamilton and insisted the story was fabricated to conceal his speculations with her husband. These documents inflicted potentially fatal damage on Hamilton’s reputation as the creator of the nation’s financial system, the essence of his hope for fame.20