Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Now, unbeknownst to Eliza, Alexander prepared his will and set aside for delivery to his friend Oliver Wolcott, in the event of his death, a packet of letters. Those letters were marked with the initials “J.R.,” and Alexander asked his friend to look after the papers carefully.

  “J.R.” presumably stood for “James Reynolds.”

  Friends worked behind the scenes, and this time a duel was averted, but news of it spread throughout New York City, reaching at least as far as Eliza’s Livingston cousins and some of the ladies who attended church with Eliza at Trinity. It was only a matter of time before Eliza learned of it.

  Alexander was trying. But just practicing law wasn’t enough. He was too long accustomed to the battle royal that was politics in the early republic and couldn’t bear to step away from the action, no matter what James McHenry counseled, no matter what serenity Eliza hoped for. And the greatest risk to their tranquility, Eliza knew, was Alexander’s pride and temper. Alexander was too easily provoked by the personal.

  By the next year, Alexander was back in the midst of politics and controversy. The presidential campaign of 1796 pitted Thomas Jefferson against John Adams, and, although Alexander disliked John Adams personally, he despised Thomas Jefferson’s policies. Alexander had for years been on the receiving end of scandalmongering and innuendo, but, thanks to Angelica’s tittle-tattle, he had his own arsenal of gossip. Alexander came out swinging against Jefferson and unwisely dropped hints that the candidate’s public veneer of “simplicity and humility afford but a flimsy veil to the internal evidences of aristocratic splendor, sensuality, and epicureanism,” this last insult a veiled reference to Jefferson’s sexual relationship in Paris with Sally Hemings. Alexander never forgot the stories Angelica had told him.

  What Alexander failed to appreciate was that James Monroe, who had been abroad for several years, had lodged his cache of documents regarding the James Reynolds affair, gathered in the course of the initial 1792 investigation, with a “friend in Virginia”—almost certainly Jefferson—for safekeeping on departure.

  John Adams won the race. Thomas Jefferson had every reason to blame Alexander. Before too long—no one ever could track how precisely it happened—a certain muckraking anti-Federalist journalist named James Callender ended up with copies of the Monroe papers. And James Reynolds was back on the agenda.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Scandal, 1796–97

  Eliza didn’t see it coming.

  She was too busy in the winter of 1796–97 and into the spring of 1797 with sick family members and, as always, children. Her sister Peggy buried another child, a seven-year-old little girl named Catherine, throwing, Alexander wrote, “a gloom upon the family.” Peggy had been extraordinarily unlucky as a mother. This was the second little Catherine she had buried. Only her son Stephen Jr., eight years old in 1797 and the third to bear that name, would survive childhood. Eliza’s father had an infection that threatened to turn gangrenous. Alexander came down with the flu, and by spring Eliza was once again pregnant. She would turn forty that summer, and this pregnancy was her seventh.

  On top of it all, Eliza had her hands full with a headstrong twenty-year-old, her younger sister Cornelia, who came to spend the winter, and whom Eliza tried without great success to chaperone. Cornelia had a reputation for being a terrible flirt and for having a sarcastic wit that rivaled that of her sister Peggy, and their cousin Robert Livingston bitterly complained that Cornelia was haughty with men she considered boring. He seems to have fallen into that unfortunate category. Cornelia’s best girlfriend was Catherine Westerlo, the half sister of the patroon Stephen Van Rensselaer, and the two girls were boy crazy. “I shall be so free to tell you I hate you for not acquainting me how the beaus in N York are and what handsom things they say of me,” Cornelia saucily wrote to her brother-in-law Stephen. “Should you chance to see my sweet heart Jones pray tell him I am well, and think myself twenty times handsomer than ever the men tell me.”

  Eliza and Alexander were regulars on the high-society ball and dinner-party circuit, and Eliza offered to give her unmarried sister a winter “season” like the one Aunt Gertrude had made possible for Eliza at Morristown. She soon regretted having made the offer. Eliza didn’t worry when Cornelia became friends with another young lady in the neighborhood, Eliza Morton, the sister of Alexander’s old school friend and war comrade, Jacob Morton, who lived just down the street from them on Broadway. But, in hindsight, perhaps she should have.

  Eliza Hamilton was seven months pregnant, uncomfortable, and weary by June, when Cornelia traveled down to Princeton, New Jersey, as a guest at the wedding of Miss Morton. Eliza Morton was marrying one of the catches of the season, a young man named Josiah Quincy, the scion of a wealthy Boston family. Cornelia, a “charming girl,” who wore her dark brown hair in waves and had blue eyes framed by impossibly long, dark lashes, immediately spotted Jacob Morton’s chubby, bad-boy younger brother, Washington, whose reputation as a hothead and a roué with a mean streak Cornelia dismissed far too quickly. She was smitten.

  Eliza might have paid more attention to what Cornelia was up to if she hadn’t had that month two other more important distractions.

  At the end of May—after years of hoping and pressure—Angelica and John Church returned at last, for good, to America. Eliza was jubilant. In June, she helped her sister settle into a freshly whitewashed rental house until a mansion could be built on a plot of land on Broadway, and they were full of plans for the future as neighbors.

  It should have been a happy summer of homecoming for the two sisters. Instead, a journalist named James Callender dropped a bombshell.

  New York City roiled with talk of the incendiary claims published that month in James Callender’s History of the United States for 1796. The work included an exposé that ran to pages and laid out, in devastating detail, charges that Alexander had engaged in financial speculation in office. It also broke the news that Alexander had confessed to an affair with Maria Reynolds—and included information from James Monroe’s secret dossier.

  The most damaging and persuasive charge that James Callender made was that the affair with Maria Reynolds was nothing more than a cover story for financial misconduct.

  “We now come to a part of the work, more delicate, perhaps, than any other,” the article teased readers. “This great master of morality [Alexander Hamilton], though himself the father of a family, confessing that he had an illicit correspondence with another man’s wife.” This was bad enough. But James Callender went on, “If anything can be yet less reputable, it is, that the gentlemen to whom he made that acknowledgement held it as an imposition, and found various reasons for believing that Mrs. Reynolds was, in reality, guiltless.”

  It tended to lend credence to Maria Reynolds’s claims that in 1793, long before the press got a hold of the story, she had quietly retained Aaron Burr to sue for a divorce from James Reynolds “in consequence of his intrigue with Hamilton to her prejudice.” Maria Reynolds had maintained from the start that her husband and Alexander had concocted the story of the affair to save their own skins, with little regard for the fact that it was her reputation that was ruined.

  Alexander spent the day of July 5, 1797, writing furious letters to Congressmen Muhlenberg, Monroe, and Venable—the gentlemen involved in the initial inquiry—demanding their public disavowal of the statement. Alexander understood clearly that if there was one thing that would make him look more base and more ridiculous than financial missteps or infidelity, it was having forged love letters and ruined the reputation of an innocent young woman—his wife’s relation, no less—in order to concoct a cover-up.

  Alexander would have been wise to have stopped to think. But instead he reacted and engaged the journalist. All it did was ratchet up the scandal.

  Alexander immediately published a letter of denial, reprinted in newspapers up and down the seaboard, promising to publish a pamphlet discrediting the story. James Callender published a counterrebuttal days later,
again floating the theory that Alexander had forged the love letters. He challenged Alexander to let the world see these purported letters and to submit them for forensic examination of the handwriting. “I have perused your observations,” James Callender expounded, and “the facts which you there bring forward, and the conclusions which you attempt to draw from them, do not appear Satisfactory.”

  By now, all of America was watching the breaking scandal. What would Colonel Hamilton do now? people wondered. He was being pressed to open shameful correspondence to public view, in order to defend himself against worse allegations. Anything Alexander said could only humiliate both him and Eliza further.

  The journalist had the bit in his teeth, though, and published another long public letter, quickly reprinted in newspapers, that further mocked Alexander for the logical holes in his story about Maria Reynolds. “According to my information,” Callender informed the world, “these written documents consisted of a series of letters pretended to be written relative to your alledged connection with Mrs. Reynolds. You told the members a confused and absurd story about her, of which they did not believe a single word, and which, if they had been true, did not give a proper explanation as to your correspondence with her husband.”

  Then Callender egged Alexander on about his promise to “place the matter more precisely before the public” in a pamphlet. “You are in the right” to promise such an explanation to the world, Callender sarcastically announced, “for they have at present some unlucky doubts. They have long known you as an eminent and able statesman. They will be highly gratified by seeing you exhibited in the novel character of a lover.”

  On July 11, Alexander demanded a meeting with James Monroe, accompanied by John Church, and the meeting at James Monroe’s Wall Street home devolved predictably enough into a heated confrontation that left both men and their friends swapping letters threatening a duel for several weeks after.

  Unfortunately, on July 12, Alexander read Callender’s second installment in his exposé, which included a document that escalated the forgery issue and included “the very derogatory suspicion, that [Alexander] had concerted with Reynolds not only the fabrication of all the letters and documents under his hand, but also the forgery of the letters produced as those of Mrs. Reynolds—since these last unequivocally contradict the pretence communicated by Clingman.”

  A duel had been averted. It was now back on. The more Alexander thought about it, the more convinced he was that Monroe was behind it all and that getting the retraction of the congressmen was an affair of honor. Monroe, though, was convinced that Alexander was lying and said so. He would not back down and steadfastly refused to state that he accepted the truth of the affair or the letters. Friends again worked behind the scenes to cool tempers so the two men didn’t kill each other.

  Leaving friends to pressure Monroe in New York City, Alexander set off in a huff the next morning for Philadelphia, planning to meet in person with his other accusers in Congress. His arrival in Philadelphia was greeted with snide commentary in the anti-Federalist Aurora newspaper that “Alexander Hamilton has favoured this city with a visit. He has certainly not come for the benefit of the fresh air. . . . Perhaps, however, he may have been called to town for the purpose of clearing up the mysterious business.” The nation was riveted by this extraordinary drama.

  On the morning of July 13, Eliza sat quietly in her front parlor and read in the newspaper the second of Callender’s letters. She read the sentences about the affair with Mrs. Reynolds. She read the sentences that claimed that the love letters were a forgery. She rested her hands on her swollen belly. What did all this mean for the children, her family? How long she sat there we can only imagine, but there is no doubt that she knew the thing she feared the most was finally happening.

  Her response to the news of Alexander’s “affair” with Maria Reynolds suggests more than anything else that she was in on the secret of the cover story from the beginning.

  “How is my Dear Eliza? We are anxious to know,” her father wrote from Albany. How does Eliza take it? Alexander also wanted to know from Philadelphia.

  John Church went around to see Eliza that afternoon. He expected tears, maybe a tantrum. For a lady to learn of her husband’s peccadilloes in the papers was a hard thing, and it was difficult for John to see what he could do. He shuddered to think how Angelica would take such a newspaper article.

  When John stepped into the parlor, Eliza was restless, but there was no crying. The summer air was hot and sticky, and Eliza moved awkwardly and slowly at eight months pregnant. She was calm and defiant. When Eliza saw John, she didn’t say a word, but turned to pick up the newspaper and handed it to him. Then she waved her hand dismissively. The whole knot of those opposed to Alexander are scoundrels, her gesture seemed to say.

  “Eliza is well,” an astonished John Church assured Alexander. “It makes not the least Impression on her.” Her reaction was extraordinary. Unless, of course, Eliza already knew that Alexander’s affair with her cousin was a fabrication. The other choice is that Eliza was Alexander’s dupe, and nothing that came afterward supports that picture of Eliza and their marriage. Alexander, hemmed in on all sides by political enemies, betrayed by Duer and having overstepped the mark financially, had told a fib, confidentially and among gentlemen, five years earlier. Now he would have to defend the cover story. Already, the cover-up was proving the worst part of the scandal. Eliza knew, too, that the worst was not yet over. But she was determined to defend their secret and Alexander.

  That was all Alexander needed to know. “Alone, a banished man.” Did the errant-knight’s refrain in their old ballad come to him now? Eliza’s abiding loyalty filled his heart with gratitude, and he poured out his love in letters. A week later, Alexander was still in Philadelphia, and Angelica and Eliza were riding out the gossip storm in New York City together. “The affair, My Dearest Eliza, upon which I came here has come to a close,” Alexander wrote,

  But unavoidable delays in bringing it to this point & the necessity of communicating the result much very much against my will keep me here till the departure of the mail stage tomorrow, which will restore me to my Betsey on the day following. I need not tell her how very happy I shall be to return to her embrace and to the company of our beloved Angelica. I am very anxious about you both, you for an obvious reason, and her because Mr. Church mentioned in a letter to me, that she complained of a sore throat. Let me charge you and her to be well and happy, for you comprize all my felicity. Adieu Angel.

  Alexander would be gone at least another week more, and sympathetic letters arrived regularly from her father, who was unaware that Eliza might have known already the full story. “I apprehended the vile calumny of my Dear Hamilton’s villainous enemies might disturb your peace of mind,” Philip Schuyler wrote in one letter, “but your husband’s reputation is too well established to suffer in the public opinion from anything his wretched enemies can do.” Eliza had more sympathy than she knew, even among strangers. Even Alexander’s political opponents felt on “poor Mrs. H. Account whose feelings on the Occasion must be severely injured, if not expressed.”

  On August 4, Eliza gave birth in New York City to a son named William, just a week shy of her fortieth birthday. She might have in front of her another half decade of childbearing. Her mother had delivered their last sibling, Catherine, at forty-seven, and the Schuyler women were famous for their reproductive stamina.

  The acrimony in the city was intense. John, Alexander, and Angelica agreed that Eliza should escape for a few weeks to Albany to take care of herself and the baby. But the climate everywhere was ugly. One man, recognizing Eliza, unleashed on her a storm of contempt and accusations, upsetting Eliza and depressing Alexander, who left it to John Church to manage. Eliza also fumed about James Callender.

  Walking home from the wharf after seeing her off, melancholy and embarrassed, Alexander stopped to see Angelica, and the next morning Angelica wrote her sister a consoling letter:

&nbs
p; When my Brother returned from the sloop, he was very much out of spirits and you were the subject of his conversation the rest of the evening. Catherine played at the harpsichord for him and at 10 o’clock he went home. Tranquillize your kind and good heart, my dear Eliza, for I have the most positive assurance from Mr. Church that the dirty fellow who has caused us all some uneasiness and wounded your feelings, my dear love, is effectually silenced. Merit, virtue, and talents must have enemies and is always exposed to envy so that, my Eliza, you see the penalties attending the position of so amiable a man. All this you would not have suffered if you had married into a family less near the sun. But then the pride, the pleasure, the nameless satisfactions, etc. . . . Adieu with all my heart and redoubled tenderness.

  The press storm, however, was far from over.

  Alexander himself would initiate the next volley. At the end of August, Alexander published his long-promised pamphlet, composed during Eliza’s absence and without her moderating influence. Perversely, he turned his entire and formidable intellect toward proving that his affair with Maria Reynolds was not invented. “I have been [charged],” he insisted, “with being a speculator, whereas I am only an adulterer.”

  Downplaying Maria Reynolds’s connections to the Livingston family, Alexander cast her as a strumpet and a prostitute and offered salacious details of bedroom romps. He cast himself as a rogue and a villain and, by emphasizing that his wife was out of town and that those romps took place in their bedroom, unwittingly turned the spotlight on Eliza. The press speculated as to how any woman could stay with this man. “Art thou a wife?” the newspapers mocked Eliza. “See him, whom thou hast chosen for a partner of this life, lolling in the lap of a harlot.” Eliza knew that her absence from Philadelphia that summer was exaggerated, and even she couldn’t understand why Alexander was telling this story. She did not doubt Alexander’s loyalty. But even those who loved him most questioned now his judgment.