In American presidential history, the intense political and personal rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson has played out in the field of biography. When Hamilton has been in, Jefferson has been out, and vice versa. As the musical phenomenon testifies, this is a Hamilton moment. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the groundbreaking research was on Jefferson, led by the world’s foremost expert, Professor Julian Boyd at Princeton University, who happened to be the editor of the papers of the third president of the United States.
In Alexander Hamilton’s own time, the authenticity of Maria Reynolds’s letters and the truth behind Alexander’s pamphlet were hotly debated and questioned. Julian Boyd asked the simple question: What if we took seriously the claims of Alexander’s doubters? What is the evidence in the archives? He argued, in long, scholarly notes, that taking Alexander Hamilton’s word against the word of everyone else posed some thorny problems.
If manuscript letters from Maria Reynolds existed—because the only evidence that they did were the transcriptions published by Alexander in his printed pamphlet—why would Alexander not produce them? Maria Reynolds was alive and well when the scandal broke, and it would have been an easy thing to obtain a writing sample. The newspapers suggested it. An indignant Maria Reynolds was willing. But Alexander refused to release the documents and claimed to have lodged them with a gentleman friend in Philadelphia, who later professed bewilderment at the idea of having ever seen them, making far more plausible the charges of forgery brought against Alexander by his political enemies.
And why, Alexander’s contemporary critics asked in the newspapers, were the transcriptions that were published such strange, chimerical compositions? Why does Maria Reynolds consistently use and spell complex words and phrases correctly but change the spelling of the simplest words, sometimes correctly, sometimes not, from paragraph to paragraph, in ways that don’t make any sense in respect to the phonetics? It looks, Boyd grimly concluded after reconsidering the evidence, a lot like what a well-educated man might imagine to be the misspellings of a woman’s love letter. As one of Alexander Hamilton’s biographers in the late 1970s observed, more than this, the published letters bear more than a passing resemblance to the letters between Alexander and Eliza. Is it possible that Alexander used some of the things Eliza wrote, too, as the basis for those published transcriptions of Maria Reynolds’s putative love letters? If so, there might be another reason Eliza burned them.
There were only two people who ever knew for certain whether Alexander Hamilton and Maria Reynolds shared a passion, and the truth can only rest with one of their stories. One of the two of them was lying. Alexander said that they were lovers. Maria Reynolds was prepared to testify to Congress that they weren’t. The further evidence that might have proven the case conclusively, one way or another—Alexander asserted as proof of his claims that there were blackmail notes and love letters—was burned by someone. That someone was most plausibly Eliza.
While there is no smoking gun to prove that Alexander fabricated his affair with Maria Reynolds to distract congressmen from an investigation into the Treasury, neither has evidence emerged to prove that Alexander’s contemporaries were wrong or that Maria Reynolds was lying. Julian Boyd, in effect, makes the case for the veracity of Maria. Others argue that we should take the word of Alexander.
As the editors of the Hamilton Papers at the National Archives of the United States judiciously note, it remains very much an open question. “Many historians like to view themselves as experts,” the archivists observe,
and as such they are reluctant to admit that at times they encounter questions for which they can find no satisfactory answers. But such questions exist, and the “Reynolds Affair” poses not one such question but a host of them. Despite the most rigorous scholarship and the best intentions, historians have been forced to leave the “Reynolds Affair” in essentially the same enigmatic state in which they have found it. . . . In this respect historians, both past and present, are little better than Hamilton’s contemporaries, for what they have been wont to call conclusions are in reality little more than acts of faith.
And where the book in question is a biography of Alexander Hamilton, few of us would not place our faith in the word of our subject. The stakes, anyhow, are not vast ones. Whether Alexander Hamilton took a tumble between the sheets with a woman about whom history remembers nothing else, after all, is hardly the most important part of his story. In the life of Alexander, Maria Reynolds happens in square brackets, as an unfortunate lapse in a brilliant career, something that damaged his chances of higher political office, to be sure, but not definitive of the man or his life story. And, so, few contemporary biographies of Alexander Hamilton raise the questions of whether Alexander might have been fibbing. The best biographies—Ron Chernow’s notably among them—mention them only in the footnotes and then proceed to tell the story of the Maria Reynolds affair as if we are certain that it did happen, because that is the only way to write a life story.
But the story here is of the life of Eliza Hamilton, and their shared history looks differently from the perspective of her character and reactions. If Alexander Hamilton fibbed about an affair with Maria Reynolds and flirted, instead, with insider trading, the story of the life of Alexander gets a bit murkier for certain.
And if he fibbed and asked for loyalty and devotion, the story of the life of Eliza Hamilton suddenly becomes coherent.
Biographers, this one included, are inclined to take the word of their subjects. “Taking the word” of Eliza Hamilton, however, means reading not what she wrote—and burned—but reading the outlines of her convictions and character in her actions and how others described them. It also means acknowledging that Eliza, more than any other person, was responsible for making knowing impossible and that more than anything she cared about protecting Alexander. That was the principle at the heart of their marriage.
The story I tell here is the story in which there was no breach of faith between them.
Some readers will be understandably curious to learn more about the tangled and fascinating history of the Reynolds crisis, which also riveted newspaper readers in the 1790s. For any reader who wishes to track the historians and to draw his or her own conclusions, two comprehensive sources are the extensive introductory note provided by Harold C. Syrett, editor of the twenty-seven-volume Papers of Alexander Hamilton, to a letter of Oliver Wolcott Jr. dated July 3, 1797, published in volume 21 and available online, along with all the relevant primary source material related to the Reynolds investigation and pamphlet at the United States National Archive’s website Founders Online; and the detailed appendix, titled “The First Conflict in the Cabinet,” provided by Julian P. Boyd in volume 18 of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.
This book is not a scholarly dissertation. The life of Eliza Hamilton is too lively and exciting for that, and, apart from the author’s note here and my extensive citations at the end of the book, I proceed to tell her story without equivocation or hedging. The only liberties that I have taken with her story are instances in which, where her voice is absent, I have used other historical sources—mainly Alexander’s replies to her lost letters, in which he alludes to specific content—or have extrapolated from her character or from the letters of others to offer a glimpse into what I believe was Eliza’s lived experience of her story. Those are instances of historical triangulation and inference, however, and not invention.
In telling Eliza’s story, I am persuaded from what I know of Eliza Hamilton and her character, as reflected in the testimony of her life and the lives of those who loved her, that the affair with Maria Reynolds was fabricated by Alexander in an attempt to end a political inquisition that would damage him and several of their extended family members. I am persuaded that Eliza knew and that she swore to keep the secret.
Whether Alexander was guilty of financial indiscretion or whether it was only that the appearances were so strongly against him that he felt cornered is impossible to
know for certain. The fact that money passed between Alexander and James Reynolds tends to suggest that Alexander was speculating, at least in a small way, probably on army pensions. What is certain is that Alexander was surrounded by men who were making huge financial bets at the peak of a bubble and playing fast and loose with inside information, and that some of that information led back to the Treasury. It is not impossible that he was trying to protect some of those other men, including John Church and Philip Schuyler, from being taken down in a financial investigation.
And when the story of the affair with Maria Reynolds broke, Eliza vowed to protect Alexander and her family, even if it meant the world believing Alexander had betrayed her. Her loyalty was ferocious. Alexander was profoundly grateful and was determined to make this up to her.
What was Eliza’s motivation?
Believe in me, Alexander had asked implicitly of Eliza in their letters. I am flawed, and I am not worthy. Love me. Forgive me. That was what he meant when he called her his “nut brown maid” and when he called her “the best of wives, the best of women.” He had poured out his heart in the earliest days of their courtship, with a raw need that made Eliza love him. He had asked her to let it be them against the world, come what might. She had promised, and she would go on promising.
Eliza would keep her promise all through the decades of her widowhood. Among Alexander’s surviving papers is a letter composed in advance of a duel he nearly fought as the scandal was crashing over them in 1795. All his most interesting papers, Alexander wrote, were in a small leather trunk. Inside the trunk was a sachet of letters, bound in a ribbon, and marked with the initials of James Reynolds.
Eliza set this letter aside when it came time for biographers to write the story of Alexander’s life, with a note in firm handwriting, “to be retained by myself.” As far as anyone knows, the little leather trunk and the bundle of letters sealed “J.R.” also made their way, in the end, to Eliza.
Then the letters disappear from history. Historians have scoured the archives and have never found a trace of them. Their fate is also speculative and circumstantial. But it is not hard to imagine an elderly widow, with a trembling hand, tracing one last time the ink from his pen with her finger, and consigning them to a winter fire.
This, and all that came before and after, is Eliza’s story.
Stephen Van Rensselaer III, husband of Peggy, c. 1794, by Gilbert Stuart. Oil on canvas.
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
James Monroe, c. 1819, by Samuel F. B. Morse. Oil on canvas.
White House Historical Association (White House Collection)
William Duer, c. late 1790s, by Max Rosenthal.
Thomas Addis Emmet, et al., The Republican Court, vol. 2, n.p., n.d.
Portrait miniature of Alexander Hamilton, c. 1780, by Charles Willson Peale. Watercolor on ivory.
Courtesy of Columbia University Libraries
William Hamilton, son of Eliza and Alexander Hamilton.
Allan McLane Hamilton, The Intimate Life of Alexander Hamilton: Based Chiefly Upon Original Family Letters and Other Documents, Many of Which Have Never Been Published, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1911
Engraving after a portrait of Angelica Schuyler Church, c. 1790, by Richard Cosway.
The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, vol. 89, 1914
Angelica Schuyler Church with her son, Philip, and a servant, c. 1785, by John Trumbull. Oil on canvas.
Private collection
Cornelia Schuyler.
Courtesy of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation
The Grange.
Courtesy of the New York Public Library
Washington Morton.
Courtesy of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation
Portrait miniature of Margaret Schuyler Van Rensselaer, c. 1796, by James Peale.
Courtesy of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation
John Church Hamilton.
Courtesy of the Smithsonian
Eliza Hamilton.
Courtesy of the Smithsonian
John Barker Church.
Courtesy of the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site, New York
Eliza Hamilton.
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York
Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields on the Approach of the British, 1852, by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. Oil on canvas.
Los Angeles County Museum, bicentennial gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. M. Schaaf, Mr. and Mrs. William D. Witherspoon, Mr. and Mrs. Charles C. Shoemaker, and Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society
Felix T. Sharples, Alexander Hamilton (c. 1755–1804), c. 1806–1810. Pastel on brown paper, 95/8 × 75/8 in.
Gift of Dr. Samuel Akerly, New-York Historical Society
Unidentified artist, after Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), Alexander Hamilton (c. 1755–1804), late 18th or early 19th century. Oil on canvas, 22 3/4 × 19 in., 1841.2.
Gift of Duncan C. Pell, New-York Historical Society
Thomas McIlworth, Mrs. Philip John Schuyler (1734–1803), 1762–1767. Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in., 1915.11.
Bequest of Philip Schuyler, New-York Historical Society
John Trumbull, Major General Philip John Schuyler (1733–1804), 1792. Oil on wood panel, 37/8 × 3 in. 1915.13.
Bequest of Philip Schuyler, New-York Historical Society
John Vanderlyn, Aaron Burr (1756–1836), 1802. Oil on canvas, 221/4 × 161/2 in., 1931.58.
Gift of Dr. John E. Stillwell, New-York Historical Society
Anne-Marguérite-Joséphine-Henriette Rouillé de Marigny, Baroness Hyde de Neuville (1771–1849), Woman and Child; Mrs. John Cochran (1724–1813), 1808. Watercolor, graphite, and black ink on paper, 71/4 × 133/8 in., 1953.223.
Purchase, New-York Historical Society
Henry Inman, Mrs. Alexander Hamilton (Elizabeth Schuyler, 1757–1854), 1825. Watercolor on ivory, 31/8 × 21/2 in., 1978.58.
Gift of Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, New-York Historical Society
Acknowledgments
I owe debts, large and small, to those who helped in the process of bringing this book to completion.
I would like to extend a particular thanks to Selby Kiffer and his associates at Sotheby’s in New York City and especially to the owner(s) of the major collection of Hamilton and Schuyler family materials sold at auction in January 2017, just as I was completing the research for this book, for permission to conduct research in and to quote from this important historical collection of materials on the life of Elizabeth Hamilton prior to sale. It was a rare and final chance for a scholar to work with those materials as a single collection and added immeasurably to my sense of Eliza Hamilton as a person.
I am grateful as well to the librarians at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the New-York Historical Society, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library, all of which hold archival materials that are not published and, unlike many of the Hamilton papers, are not available online. I wish to thank particularly Dr. Mary Tibbetts Freeman at Columbia for her efforts in tracking down family correspondence, and a particular thanks as well to the senior staff at the New York Public Library who assisted in arranging access to the Schuyler-Malcom family papers in the midst of digitalization; their efforts were heroic and hugely appreciated. Thanks as well at the New York Public Library to Melanie Locay, who helped to arrange space in the Allen Room, and to the retired librarian David Smith, who was an invaluable research assistant. I am likewise indebted for research assistance to Rachel Betts and Derek Frasure, in New York and Michigan, respectively, and would like to acknowledge their work in helping to hunt down unpublished sources and the help of Catherine Delannoy in fact-checking the manuscript.
Finally, a thanks to all the staff at the National Arts Club in New York City for all those small kindnesses toward the perennially distracted and occ
asionally disheveled writer up in the garret. Without all their assistance, this book could not have been completed in a timely manner, especially in the midst of my teaching responsibilities at Colby College.
Harry Berberian and his colleagues at Graham Windham in Brooklyn—Eliza’s orphanage—generously shared not only their archives and knowledge but also their enthusiasm for this project. It is a small, private wish that readers might consider sharing their enthusiasm for Eliza’s story by supporting her legacy; Eliza would have loved that, I am certain. Fellow Eliza enthusiast Chelsea Geiger shared leads and a passion, and my thanks to her and, once again as well, to Mark Lee, slayer of obstacles, for that most important of gifts between writers.
I was fortunate enough to have two fabulous editors on this book. My thanks to Karen Kosztolnyik for making Eliza’s story happen and for continuing to support this project after her move to Grand Central. And very warmest thanks to my second editor at Gallery, Natasha Simons, for wise counsel on all things Eliza. I am grateful at Gallery Books, as well, to Jennifer Bergstrom and Meagan Harris; to Polly Watson for her keen eye as copyeditor; to Hadley Black at the Simon & Schuster speakers bureau; and, as always, to my literary agent, Stacey Glick, and my film agent, Lou Pitt, for clearing the space for a good story.
Above all, my abiding love to Robert Miles, who is not a man of many words (Eliza would approve) but who, among his other acts of kindness, without fail brought coffee at dawn to a cranky and irascible writer and quietly closed the door behind him. I steal from Alexander the only fitting words for my gratitude and devotion: best of men and best of husbands.
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