THIRTY
That spring, Hamilton received a long overdue letter from Scotland—several decades overdue, in fact—that afforded him profound satisfaction. It came from William Hamilton, one of his father’s younger brothers, who amiably related news of his Scottish relatives. This marked the first time that Hamilton, forty-two, had any contact with his paternal family. Despite a lack of direct dealings with them, he had valued his Scottish ancestry, serving as an officer of the St. Andrew’s Society of New York State.
In a cordial reply, Hamilton included the only thumbnail sketch of his life that he ever set down. It provided the contours of his life without shading; as so often in personal matters with Hamilton, the letter was essentially evasive. He assumed that his uncle knew about his father’s early mishaps in the West Indies and the separation it had caused in the family. But Hamilton’s letter confirms that James Hamilton had subsequently lost touch with his family, since Alexander had to inform his uncle that James still languished on St. Vincent: “I have strongly pressed the old gentleman to come to reside with me, which would afford him every enjoyment of which his advanced age is capable. But he has declined it on the ground that the advice of his physicians leads him to fear that the change of climate would be fatal to him.”1 Hamilton gave the impression of being a worldly man, secure in his station, who could afford to downplay his own exploits. He struck a mellow note of personal contentment: “It is impossible to be happier than I am in a wife and I have five children, four sons and a daughter, the eldest a son somewhat past fifteen, who all promise well as far as their years permit and yield me much satisfaction.”2 He told of the pecuniary sacrifice that went with public office and the baneful spirit of faction that had weakened executive authority: “The union of these motives, with the reflections of prudence in relation to a growing family, determined me as soon as my plan had attained a certain maturity to withdraw from office.”3
Hamilton seemed eager to stay in touch with his reclaimed relatives. This eagerness has a certain pathos, for Hamilton did not fathom the self-interested nature of the sudden overture from Uncle William. The Scottish Hamiltons had never tried to rescue Alexander from an impoverished, orphaned state and had never congratulated him on his amazing ascent in the world. The only reason William now wrote to Hamilton was for selfish purposes. He had been a successful tobacco and sugar merchant, but his business had gone awry, and he needed help. Pretty soon, Hamilton had the odd sensation of receiving a reverential letter from his first cousin Alexander Hamilton, a Sanskrit scholar who had returned from India because of his father’s business troubles. The following year, the Scottish Alexander Hamilton disclosed the true reason behind the correspondence: the family had to find work for his brother, a sailor named Robert, who was prepared to become a naturalized American citizen if he could obtain an assignment with the U. S. Navy. The willingness of the Scottish Hamiltons to exploit their American cousin’s eminence seems shameless. Nevertheless, having lacked a family and suffered the taint of illegitimacy, Hamilton took Robert Hamilton into his home for five months, squired his young relative around New York, and landed him an appointment as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. The grateful Scottish kinsmen hung a portrait of Hamilton above their mantel—sweet vindication for a man who had started out as a castaway of the islands—but they never made an effort to aid Hamilton’s father on St. Vincent or showed the least curiosity about him. Hamilton continued to do favors for his Scottish relatives, who had never done any favors for him.
Even more satisfying than this new rapport with his Scottish clan was the return of John and Angelica Church to New York. For years, Angelica had yearned to return home and was held back only by her husband’s parliamentary career. “You and my dear Hamilton will never cross the Atlantic,” she lamented to Eliza. “I shall never leave this island and, as to meeting in heaven, there will be no pleasure in that.”4 After Hamilton resigned from the Treasury and set up house with Eliza in New York at 26 Broadway, he implored his sister-in-law to come home. “You know how much we all love you,” he wrote with accustomed gallantry. “’Tis impossible you can be so well loved where you are. And what is there can be put in competition with the sweet affections of the heart?”5Hamilton was preaching to the converted. Angelica wanted to rejoin the Hamiltons, reassuring Eliza that “I hope to pass with you the remainder of my days, that is, if you will be so obliging as to permit my brother [Hamilton] to give me his society, for you know how much I love and admire him. We will see each other every day.”6 Eliza advised Angelica on the fashions that she would find de rigueur in New York: “Remember that your waist must be short, your petticoats long, your headdress moderately high, and altogether à la Grec.”7
The Churches’ move to New York was slower than anticipated. In late 1795, they drafted Hamilton to scout luxurious mansions. Harried by a thousand duties, Hamilton found time to reconnoiter local real estate and bought his in-laws several lots on Broadway. “I am sensible how much trouble I give you,” Angelica wrote, “but you will have the goodness to excuse it when you know that it proceeded from a persuasion that I was asking from one who promised me his love and attention if I returned to America.”8Angelica still wrote to Hamilton in a coquettish style, anointing him “the arbiter of wit and elegance,” and he gladly reciprocated.9 “How do you manage to charm all that see you?” he asked her. “While naughty tales are told to you of us, we hear nothing but of your kindness, amiableness, agreeableness &c.”10 For all his intimacy with Angelica, Hamilton was a bond that still seemed to unite the sisters instead of divide them. As he awaited Angelica’s appearance in New York, Hamilton told her that the only rivalry he and Eliza had “is in our attachment to you and we each contend for preeminence in this particular. To whom will you give the apple?”11 (This intriguing image alludes to the Trojan prince Paris, who had to hand an apple to the fairest of three goddesses.) Eliza would never have harbored deep affection for her sister or allowed Hamilton to write to her so freely if she had been aware of any real transgressions. In one revealing letter, Hamilton said that Eliza “consents to everything, except that I should love you as well as herself and this you are too reasonable to expect.”12 Angelica was always careful to incorporate them both into a triangle of family love. “Embrace my dear Hamilton with all my heart,” she wrote to Eliza during the summer of 1796. “Give me leave to love you both affectionately in spite of my being sometimes a little saucy.”13
After years of frustrating delays, the Churches at last moved to New York in May 1797. John Barker Church soon established himself as a personage of staggering wealth and New York’s foremost insurance underwriter. “His equipage and style of living are several degrees beyond those of any other man amongst us,” Robert Troup marveled.14 Angelica began to throw extravagant parties at which guests dined on plates of polished silver. She usually glittered with diamonds and captivated many socialites. There was something racy about the Churches that seemed more reminiscent of London society than New York. Angelica scandalized local matrons by introducing risqué European fashions, while John was a compulsive gambler who often played cards into the wee hours. The Churches’ parties featured whist, loo, and games of chance. A guest at these soirees, Hamilton probably drew the attention of gossips who saw him mooning around Angelica’s adoring gaze.
This was not the only whiff of scandal that followed Hamilton during that summer of 1797. For four and a half years, the Maria Reynolds affair had remained a well-kept secret confined to Republican rumor mills and what Hamilton called “dark whispers.”15 By a curious coincidence, the Churches returned to New York just as that scandal was about to burst into print, so any gossip about Hamilton and Angelica would only have heaped fuel on the flames. In late June, Hamilton saw a newspaper advertisement for a series of pamphlets, subsequently published in book form, with the innocuous title The History of the United States for 1796. The notice promised that the series would publish documents pertaining to Hamilton’s conduct as treasury secretary. Hamilton soon laid his hands on pamphlet number five, which rehashed old charges of official misconduct and cited documents from James Reynolds and Jacob Clingman. On July 8, Hamilton published a letter in the Gazette
of the United States and admitted the authenticity of the papers but pointed out that their charges were false and misleading: “They were the contrivance of two of the most profligate men in the world to obtain their liberation from imprisonment for a serious crime by the favor of party spirit.”16 No copies of these pamphlets have survived, but number five or six brought the additional charge of adultery against Hamilton.
The author of this malice was the Scottish-born James Thomson Callender, an ugly, misshapen little man who made a career of spewing venom. He was a hack writer who had fled from Edinburgh a few years earlier after being charged with sedition by the British government. Having denounced Parliament as “a phalanx of mercenaries” and the English constitution as “a conspiracy of the rich against the poor,” he was fated to whirl into Republican circles in America and write for Benjamin Franklin Bache’sAurora.17 In later years, Jefferson condemned Callender as “a poor creature…hypochondriac, drunken, penniless, and unprincipled.”18 But at this time, when Callender flung his darts at the Federalists, Jefferson glorified him as “a man of genius” and “a man of science fled from persecution.”19 In late June 1797, Jefferson was so pleased with Callender’s handiwork that he stopped by his lodgings to congratulate him and to buy copies of his scandalous History.
In the bound volume, Callender sneaked up on the Reynolds scandal, first reviewing other events of 1796 before pouncing on Hamilton: “We now come to a part of the work more delicate perhaps than any other.”20 Callender said that he was incensed by the way that Federalists and Hamilton in particular—the “prime mover of the federal party”—had treated James Monroe, who had just returned to Philadelphia after being recalled as American minister to France.21 Hamilton, among others, had pleaded with Washington to recall Monroe for his unabashed favoritism toward the French Revolution. Back home, Monroe had huddled with Jefferson, Burr, and Albert Gallatin and expressed indignation over his dismissal. “The unfounded reproaches heaped on Mr. Monroe form the immediate motive to the publication of these papers,” Callender declared.22 Indeed, Monroe’s connivance in Callender’s project was clear to Alexander and Eliza Hamilton, who became unalterably convinced that Monroe had reneged on his confidentiality vow and leaked the Reynolds documents.
Callender promised readers that he would debunk Hamilton’s pretensions to superior virtue, stating that “we shall presently see this great master of morality, although himself the father of a family, confessing that he had an illicit correspondence with another man’s wife.”23 For posterity, the Callender disclosures were associated with Hamilton’s exposure as a libertine. For Callender, however, this was merely a collateral benefit. His real aim was to resurrect the shopworn myth, discredited by the Giles investigations, that Hamilton had secretly enriched himself as treasury secretary through improper speculation in government securities. In fact, Callender blithely repeated the very error that had initially misled Muhlenberg, Venable, and Monroe in December 1792: that the money Hamilton had paid to James Reynolds related to official misconduct, not to infidelity.
Callender’s diatribe had a specious air of deep research. He published the entire trove of papers that Hamilton had entrusted to Muhlenberg, Venable, and Monroe. “So much correspondence could not refer exclusively to wenching,” stated Callender. “No man of common sense will believe that it did…. Reynolds and his wife affirm that it respected certain speculations.”24 Callender scorned the very idea of a romantic liaison: “Even admitting that…[Maria Reynolds] was the favourite of Mr. Hamilton, for which there appears no evidence but the word of the Secretary, this conduct would have been eminently foolish. Mr. Hamilton had only to say that he was sick of his amour and the influence and hopes of Reynolds at once vanished.”25 Callender denied the authenticity of Maria Reynolds’s billets-doux to Hamilton and conjectured that Hamilton had forged them, filling them with spelling errors to make them seem plausible. Quite understandably, Callender could not conceive that someone as smart and calculating as Hamilton could have stayed so long in thrall to an enslaving passion. Hamilton could not have been stupid enough to pay hush money for sex, Callender alleged, so the money paid to James Reynolds had to involve illicit speculation. In fairness to Callender, it is baffling that Hamilton submitted to blackmail for so long.
The mystery of why Callender and his cronies disclosed the Reynolds scandal that summer is a tantalizing one. Callender mentioned the recall of James Monroe, but there were other reasons as well. The infamous exposé might never have been published if Washington had still been in office. For Republican pamphleteers, it was now open season on the Federalists. Callender wanted to prevent Hamilton from exercising the same influence over Adams that he’d had over Washington. He also wanted to besmirch Washington’s reputation by demonstrating that he had been a puppet mouthing words scripted by Hamilton. Callender contended that Hamilton had received private parcels from Washington with speeches for rewriting: “‘After opening such a parcel,’ said Mr. Hamilton, ‘what do you think were the contents?’ ‘DEAR HAMILTON, put this into style for me.’ [Then Hamilton supposedly commented:] ‘Some speech or letter has been enclosed, which I wrote over again, sent it back, and then the OLD DAMNED FOOL gave it away as his own.’”26 Evidently, Callender was aware of scuttlebutt that Hamilton had ghostwritten most of Washington’s farewell address.
Another compelling explanation for the timing of Callender’s exposé relates to Hamilton’s “Phocion” essays the previous fall, which had delved openly for the first time into Jefferson’s private life. On October 15, 1796, we recall, Hamilton had seemed to make reference to Sally Hemings. On October 19, indulging in more heavy breathing, Hamilton said that Jefferson’s “simplicity and humility afford but a flimsy veil to the internal evidences of aristocratic splendor, sensuality, and epicureanism.”27 Then on October 23, the Jeffersonian Aurora had published an anonymous response that referred discreetly, for the first time, to the Reynolds affair. The message was addressed to Treasury Secretary Wolcott and asked whether he had not been privy in December 1792 to “the circumstances of a certain enquiry of a very suspicious aspect, respecting real malconduct on the part of his friend, patron and predecessor in office, which ought to make him extremely circumspect on the subject of investigation…?”28 The author threatened to cite specifics: “Would a publication of the circumstances of that transaction redound to the honour or reputation of the parties and why has the subject been so long and carefully smothered up?”29 Hamilton got the message. In subsequent installments of “Phocion,” he fell silent abruptly on the subject of Jefferson’s sex life.
The man making these menacing noises in the Aurora may have been John Beckley, recently ousted as clerk of the House of Representatives. Perhaps he leaked the Reynolds documents to Callender as revenge against the Federalists, or maybe he no longer felt morally bound to silence after resigning his job. Monroe himself fingered Beckley as the culprit. “You know, I presume, that Beckley published the papers in question,” Monroe told Aaron Burr.30 It should be recalled, however, that Monroe had given the papers to Beckley in the first place, so Monroe was admitting to Burr that he had not insured the secrecy of documents entrusted to him and had known all along that confidentiality had been breached. In holding James Monroe responsible, Alexander and Eliza were not off the mark.
A shadowy operative, adept at intrigue, Beckley continued to move stealthily in the background of Republican party politics. He is a type familiar in political history: the aide who lurks in the cloakrooms of power, listening and absorbing valuable information. Beckley had started out as clerk of the Virginia House of Delegates; Jefferson, then the governor, called him the ablest clerk in the country. As first clerk of the House of Representatives, Beckley was a protégé of House Speaker Frederick Muhlenberg, which may also explain how he was drawn into the Reynolds scandal. Beckley’s humble title did not capture the enormous power he wielded. Madison, Monroe, William Branch Giles, and other powerful Republicans gathered for talks at his lodgings. According to Hamilton’s son, they once drank a mean-spirited toast to Hamilton when he was sick: “A speedy immortality to Hamilton.”31
Beckley had an unslakable thirst for political intelligence. Benjamin Rush said of Beckley that “he possesses a fund of information about men and things and, what is more in favor of his principles, he possesses the confidence of our two illustrious patriots, Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison.”32 Beckley was constantly trying to dig up derogatory information to satisfy the Republican fantasy that Hamilton and Washington headed a pro-British monarchical conspiracy. Jefferson never shed his intense admiration for Beckley. When elected president himself, he restored Beckley as clerk of the House of Representatives and, loading him down with still more honors, appointed him the first librarian of Congress.
Hamilton thought that Jefferson was one of the conspirators behind the Callender exposé. Jefferson’s secretary, William A. Burwell, said that around the time of the Maria Reynolds revelation, Hamilton had threatened Jefferson with public exposure of a shameful episode many years earlier in which Jefferson had repeatedly tried to seduce Betsey Walker, the wife of his friend and Virginia neighbor John Walker. Perhaps for this reason, the conflicted Jefferson both subsidized Callender and also urged him to refrain from further attacks on Hamilton. Callender reported that Jefferson “advised that the [Reynolds] papers should be suppressed…but his interposition came too late.”33
Once Callender’s charges were published, Hamilton faced an agonizing predicament: should he ignore the accusations as beneath his dignity or openly rebut them? Friends recommended tactful silence. Wolcott urged Hamilton to defer a response, telling him of the “indignation against those who have basely published this scandal.”34 Jeremiah Wadsworth thought any defense would be fruitless, warning that “it will be easy to invent new calumnies and you may be kept continually employed in answering.”35 Deaf to such advice, Hamilton decided to respond at length. When it came to major decisions, he always trusted to his inner promptings. Ordinarily, he told associates, he would have ignored the slander, but Callender was insinuating that Muhlenberg, Venable, and Monroe had refused to believe him in 1792 when he said that his payments to James Reynolds involved adultery and extortion. Callender upped the stakes by warning Hamilton that if he printed only extracts from his correspondence with those three men, he would be accused of shading the truth. In an open letter on July 12, he taunted Hamilton by saying the public “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.”36
Hamilton now reverted to lifelong practice: he would drown his accusers with words. In mid-July, he holed up in a Philadelphia boardinghouse with his friend Congressman William Loughton Smith of South Carolina among the tenants. As he confessed his sins, Hamilton probably did not want to face his family. One pictures him stooped over his desk, scratching away at a furious pace. According to Smith, Hamilton wrote with zest and a vengeful glee. He “was in excellent health and in very excellent spirits, considering his complicated situation.”37 Months earlier, Hamilton had complained to Smith of feeble health. Now, he burst forth in fighting trim, striking a note of bravado as he confronted his enemies.
This writing spree resulted in a ninety-five-page booklet: thirty-seven pages of personal confessions, supplemented by fifty-eight pages of letters and affidavits. The volume is usually referred to as “the Reynolds pamphlet,” but the full title was Observations on Certain Documents Contained in No. V & VI of “The History of the United States for the Year 1796,” In Which the Charge of Speculation Against Alexander Hamilton, Late Secretary of the Treasury, Is Fully Refuted. Written by Himself.38 Before examining the specific charges against him, Hamilton placed Callender’s pamphlets in a political context, identifying the true enemy as the “spirit of Jacobinism.” To accomplish its evil deeds, American Jacobinism had descended to calumny so that “the influence of men of upright principles, disposed and able to resist its enterprises, shall be at all events destroyed.”39 Thus Hamilton tried to elevate his personal defense into another apocalyptic crusade to save the nation.
After years of monetary sacrifices in public office, Hamilton again found it ruefully funny that he was accused of avarice. He said that his character had been marked “by an indifference to the acquisition of property rather than an avidity for it.”40 Then he got to the nub of the matter in the frankest confession yet uttered by an American public official: “The charge against me is a connection with one James Reynolds for purposes of improper pecuniary speculation. My real crime is an amorous connection with his wife, for a considerable time with his privity and connivance, if not originally brought on by a combination between the husband and wife with the design to extort money from me.”41 Even at this late date, Hamilton wavered as to whether Maria Reynolds had colluded with her husband from the outset or only over time. If he had been a venal official, Hamilton jeered, he would have chosen a more important accomplice than James Reynolds: “It is very extraordinary, if the head of the money department of a country, being unprincipled enough to sacrifice his trust and his integrity, could not have contrived objects of profit sufficiently large to have engaged the cooperation of men of far greater importance than Reynolds.”42 And if he had conspired with Reynolds, he would not have passed along relatively petty sums of fifty dollars.
Hamilton’s strategy was simple: he was prepared to sacrifice his private reputation to preserve his public honor. He knew this would be the most exquisite torture for Eliza. Hadn’t he just told William Hamilton that he could not be happier in a wife? And now here he was subjecting her to a nightmarish narrative of his betrayal. He wrote angrily of his accusers, “With such men, nothing is sacred. Even the peace of an unoffending and amiable wife is a welcome repast to their insatiate fury against the husband.”43 We do not know whether Hamilton discussed his pamphlet with Eliza beforehand. After admitting to adultery, he made the following statement: “This confession is not made without a blush…. I can never cease to condemn myself for the pang which it may inflict in a bosom eminently entitled to all my gratitude, fidelity, and love. But that bosom will approve that even at so great an expence, I should effectually wipe away a more serious stain from a name which it cherishes with no less elevation than tenderness.”44
The steadfast Eliza may have sympathized with Hamilton’s wish to cleanse his name. Yet readers of the pamphlet must have wondered why, instead of settling for a brief apology and a convincing mea culpa, Hamilton insisted upon telling the story in almost picaresque detail. He described Maria Reynolds coming to his door during the summer of 1791, of going around to her house that evening, and of being invited into her bedroom. Such descriptive touches, however much they gratified public curiosity, could only have mortified Eliza. All of Hamilton’s breast-beating—“I have paid pretty severely for the folly and can never recollect it without disgust and self condemnation”—could not disguise that he was exposing Eliza to public humiliation.45
Why did Hamilton make this long, rambling confession? He was disgusted by the monstrous slurs upon his character and decided he would expose them once and for all. He intended to construct an account that would encompass all known facts and remove any room for misinterpretation by enemies. Moreover, Callender had already warned of the danger of publishing only extracts of the story. Far from being the subtle Machiavellian of Jeffersonian legend, Hamilton again suffered from excessive openness. “No man ever more disdained duplicity or carried frankness further than he,” Fisher Ames said.46 Hamilton was incapable of a wise silence. He probably imagined that the best way to prove the philandering and refute the corruption charges was to overwhelm his readers with details. As in all political battles, Hamilton was seized by an overmastering compulsion to counterattack with all the verbal weapons at his command. He viewed himself less as the guilty party than as the righteous one, unfairly maligned by scheming opponents, and he decided to turn the tables on his adversaries.
Hamilton’s antics had dazzled and appalled the country for years, and never more so than with the Reynolds pamphlet. His friends were agog at his faulty judgment. “Humiliating in the extreme,” was the verdict of Henry Knox.47 Robert Troup observed that Hamilton’s “ill-judged pamphlet has done him inconceivable injury.”48 William Loughton Smith thought Hamilton had rebutted Callender, “yet it is afflicting to see so great a man dragged before the public in such a delicate situation and compelled to avow a domestic infidelity to an unfeeling world.”49 Noah Webster wondered why someone of Hamilton’s stature would “publish a history of his private intrigues, degrade himself in the estimation of all good men, and scandalize a family to clear himself of charges which no man believed.”50 Small wonder that Hamilton’s family later tried to buy up and destroy all copies of the pamphlet left on the market.
The Republican press had a field day with the pamphlet and battened off it for years. Henceforth, Hamilton would be viewed as the oversexed treasury secretary. Callender rejoiced at Hamilton’s indiscretion, telling Jefferson, “If you have not seen it, no anticipation can equal the infamy of this piece. It is worth all that fifty of the best pens in America could have said ag[ains]t him.”51 Drawing on this material, Callender wrote mockingly that the “whole proof in this pamphlet rests upon an illusion. ‘I am a rake and for that reason I cannot be a swindler.’”52 The Aurora responded similarly when it paraphrased Hamilton as saying, “I have been grossly…charged with…being a speculator, whereas I am only an adulterer. I have not broken the eighth commandment…. It is only the seventh which I have violated.”53
In sacrificing his private virtue, Hamilton had imagined he would at least preserve a spotless public record. He would have been disheartened by Jefferson’s reaction. Writing to John Taylor, a Virginia politician, the circumspect Jefferson said that Hamilton’s “willingness to plead guilty to adultery seems rather to have strengthened than weakened the suspicions that he was in truth guilty of the speculations.”54 Madison’s reaction was more perceptive: “The publication…is a curious specimen of the ingenious folly of its author. Next to the error of publishing it at all is that of forgetting that simplicity and candor are the only dress which prudence would put on innocence.”55
For John and Abigail Adams, who already considered Hamilton a debauchee, their suspicions were fully confirmed. Before the pamphlet appeared, Abigail told her husband of Hamilton, “Oh, I have read his heart in his wicked eyes. The very devil is in them. They are lasciviousness itself.”56 Timothy Pickering, the secretary of state, recalled that soon after Adams became president, Abigail called on Mrs. Pickering and “took her to ride with her in her carriage…. [M]y wife after wards told me that Mrs. Adams dwelt on the licentiousness of Hamilton’s character in regard to the female sex.”57 When the scandal broke, the Adamses were probably less shocked at Hamilton’s behavior than at his candor in admitting it. After they returned to Philadelphia in November 1797, fresh from a four-month absence, Abigail wrote of the Reynolds pamphlet, “Alas, alas, how weak is human nature.”58 John Adams traced Hamilton’s roguish deeds back to his days on Washington’s staff, followed by “debaucheries in New York and Philadelphia” at which he had made “his audacious and unblushing attempts upon ladies of the highest rank and purest virtue.”59
It is difficult to figure out if the charges of sexual profligacy made against Hamilton all trace back, ultimately, to Maria Reynolds. There are only scattered references to his amorous ways in contemporary documents between the time of the affair (1791–1792) and its exposure (1797), then a tremendous increase after Callender performed his dirty work. That Hamilton loved the ladies and had a high libido seems clear. But was his adult life really a rake’s progress of sexual conquests? For all the innuendoes about adultery, he did not engage in indiscriminate sex, and we can connect him with only Maria Reynolds for certain. There was plenty of understandable speculation about Angelica Church, but she was mostly abroad between 1783 and 1797, and we will never know whether her mutual enchantment with Hamilton was sexually consummated. One strong argument against such outright adultery was that Eliza and the entire Schuyler family adored Hamilton until the day he died. Would they have tolerated Hamilton if he had been sleeping with Eliza’s sister? After Hamilton’s death, the ever vigilant John Beckley referred to Hamilton as a “double adulterer”—presumably referring to Maria Reynolds and Angelica Church—but he named no one else.60 Alexander Hamilton was the most controversial public figure of his era. If he had other women, why didn’t the scandal-loving Republican press refer to these other romances? It seems unlikely that, if other women abounded, their identities would have been so well concealed for two centuries. And why, if Hamilton was so promiscuous, did he father no illegitimate children that we know of?
For all the tongue clucking and finger wagging at Hamilton, the Reynolds scandal diminished but scarcely destroyed his political stature. Though the Reynolds pamphlet provided the Jeffersonian press with fodder for satire, it did not lead to a wholesale abandonment of Hamilton by the Federalists. As David Cobb, a Federalist judge from Massachusetts, told Henry Knox, “Hamilton is fallen for the present, but if he fornicates with every female in the cities of New York and Philadelphia, he will rise again, for purity of character after a period of political existence is not necessary for public patronage.”61 In later years, John Adams conducted a revealing exchange of letters with William Cunningham, who said that Hamilton’s friends had not abandoned him for straying from his wife. He offered an analogy from Roman history, the patriot Cato:
Cato valued himself on his integrity and was, it is said, addicted to intemperance. But the friends of Cato prized him so highly for his main excellence that they looked upon his occasional intoxication with indulgence. Thus I have understood it of Hamilton. He set the estimation made of his uprightness against that which might be formed from the confession of his lewdness and he determined that the weight of his cardinal virtues would preponderate over every defect and forever keep that scale immovably down.62
Perhaps the most telling reaction to Hamilton’s troubles came from Washington, who knew Hamilton better than any other public figure. On August 21, from out of the blue, he sent his beleaguered friend a gift along with a note that made no reference to the scandal.
Not for any intrinsic value the thing possesses, but as a token of my sincere regard and friendship for you and as a remembrance of me, I pray you to accept a wine cooler for four bottles…. I pray you to present my best wishes, in which Mrs. Washington joins me, to Mrs. Hamilton and the family, and that you would be persuaded that with every sentiment of the highest regard, I remain your sincere friend and affectionate honorable servant.63
The letter was eloquent for what it did not say. It confirmed that Washington thought Hamilton was being persecuted and that he wanted to express solidarity with him. The wine cooler would always be treasured by Eliza Hamilton. That she cherished this gift so much tells us something about her view of the Maria Reynolds scandal.
For Hamilton and his descendants, the villain of the piece was always James Monroe. Hamilton’s grandson blamed the exposure of the Reynolds affair on “the mean traps laid for him, principally by Monroe.”64 During the summer of 1797, Hamilton figured out pretty quickly that Monroe had made the Reynolds papers available to John Beckley in 1792. In The History of the United States for 1796, Callender had reproduced a statement by Muhlenberg, Venable, and Monroe about their dramatic confrontation with Hamilton on December 15, 1792, but now quoted them as saying that they had left Hamilton that evening “under an impression our suspicions were removed.”65 This implied that they had not really believed Hamilton. Still more damaging was a private memo, published by Callender, that Monroe had written on January 1, 1793. It reported on a meeting at which Jacob Clingman told Monroe that the putative romance between Hamilton and Maria Reynolds was a mere “fabrication” to cover up Hamilton’s wrongdoing at Treasury. By reporting this conversation without comment, Monroe seemed to lend tacit credence to its contents.
Now Hamilton promptly wrote and asked the three legislators to repudiate Callender’s interpretation of the December 1792 meeting. Muhlenberg sent a friendly reply, regretted publication of the Reynolds papers, and confirmed that he had trusted Hamilton’s account at the time. Venable’s response, if a bit testier, agreed that the trio had accepted Hamilton’s explanation. He also imparted the key piece of information that the Reynolds documents had been entrusted to James Monroe: “I do not know any means by which these papers could have got out unless by the person who copied them [i.e., John Beckley].”66
Monroe received Hamilton’s letter just as he was preparing to visit his New York in-laws, the Kortrights. Before replying, Monroe wanted to huddle with Muhlenberg and Venable. Miffed by what he saw as stalling, Hamilton flew into a rage when he heard that Monroe was staying near him, on Wall Street. On July 10, he sent Monroe a terse note: “Mr. Hamilton requests an interview with Mr. Monroe at any hour tomorrow forenoon which may be convenient to him. Particular reasons will induce him to bring with him a friend to be present at what may pass. Mr. Monroe, if he pleases, may have another.”67 Beyond its cold formality, the note’s reference to bringing witnesses signified the potential onset of an affair of honor. Faced with this challenge, Monroe consented to have Hamilton come to his lodgings at ten o’clock the next morning. It was to be one of the most emotional encounters of Hamilton’s tumultuous life.
James Monroe was a tall, handsome man with piercing blue eyes and a rather awkward manner. Unlike the quick-witted Hamilton, Monroe was a plodding speaker and a middling intellect. Jefferson and other companions valued his sincerity. “Turn his soul wrong side outwards and there is not a speck on it,” Jefferson once told Madison.68 Like Hamilton, Monroe, a carpenter’s son who had fought courageously in the Revolution, came from humble origins. He had crossed the Delaware with Washington, and his lung had been pierced by a bullet at the battle of Trenton. By war’s end, Monroe was a protégé of Jefferson, who urged him to study law and enter politics. The two Virginians shared a belief that emancipation should be postponed, with the freed slaves someday transplanted to Africa. As a member of the Confederation Congress in the early 1780s, Monroe drew close to Madison but voted against ratifying the Constitution at the Virginia convention.
In the Senate, Monroe had exhibited special fervor in the Republican cause, just as Madison did in the House. He dismissed Britain as a corrupt, tottering state, saw the Federalists as their spineless lackeys—he denounced Hamilton’s programs as “calculated to elevate the government above the people”—and favored an outright military alliance with France.69 For Monroe, the “enemies of the French Revolution” were likewise “partisans for monarchy” in America.70 Five days after Monroe arrived in Paris as American minister, Robespierre was executed, but all the carnage did not cool Monroe’s infatuation for the Revolution. He frequently sided with the French government, advised it to ignore Washington as an “Angloman,” and opposed the Jay Treaty. After two years of such disloyal bungling, Monroe was recalled by Washington and chastised as “a mere tool in the hands of the French government.”71
Hamilton arrived on the morning of July 11 with John B. Church, while Monroe invited along David Gelston, a New York merchant and Republican politician. Gelston left a graphic account of the showdown between the ex–treasury secretary and the future president. From the second he entered the room, Hamilton seemed beside himself with rage. In Gelston’s words, he “appeared very much agitated” and launched into an extended monologue about the December 1792 meeting. Even in Gelston’s neutral chronicle, one can feel the extreme tension throbbing in the air. The two antagonists were visibly offended by each other. Hamilton pointed out that he had written to Monroe, Muhlenberg, and Venable and had “expected an immediate answer to so important a subject in which his character, the peace and reputation of his family were so deeply interested.” Monroe replied that if Hamilton “would be temperate or quiet for a moment…he would answer him candidly.”72
Hamilton asked if Monroe had leaked the Reynolds papers or failed to guarantee their security. Monroe replied that he thought the documents had “remained sealed” with a Virginia friend, that he had not intended to publish them, and knew nothing of their appearance until his return from Europe.73 At this, Hamilton dropped any pose of civility and chastised Monroe, saying “your representation is totally false.”74 According to Gelston, the two men rose instantly. Monroe called Hamilton a “scoundrel,” whereupon Hamilton immediately adopted the ritual language of dueling, saying, “I will meet you like a gentleman.” To which Monroe retorted, “I am ready, get your pistols.”75
The two men, like a pair of squabbling schoolboys, nearly came to blows, and Gelston and Church had to pry them apart, urging moderation. Although they soon sat down, Gelston observed that Hamilton was still “extremely agitated,” while Monroe adopted an icy tone of contempt, telling Hamilton he would explain what he knew if the latter would just calm down.76 Gelston brought the hourlong meeting to a close by saying that Hamilton should wait until Monroe met with Venable and Muhlenberg in Philadelphia. Hamilton agreed reluctantly.
This began an interminable correspondence between Hamilton and Monroe that lasted the rest of the year and never gave Hamilton satisfaction. After Monroe conferred with Muhlenberg in Philadelphia (Venable having left for Virginia), the two men drafted a joint letter to Hamilton. They agreed that in December 1792 they had credited his story about Maria Reynolds and had dropped their suspicions about Treasury misconduct. This letter removed one bone of contention and took Muhlenberg out of the picture. But it left Hamilton brooding about another piece of evidence: the January 1, 1793, statement in which Monroe seemed to endorse Jacob Clingman’s wild allegation. Hamilton followed Monroe to Philadelphia and peppered him with brief, pointed letters, trying to get him to renounce that statement. “Alexander Hamilton has favored this city with a visit,” the Aurora reported with hearty pleasure. “He has certainly not come for the benefit of the fresh air.”77 Because Monroe had been responsible for the documents surfacing, Hamilton lectured him that it was incumbent upon him “as a man of honor and sensibility to have come forward in a manner that would have shielded me completely from the unpleasant effects brought upon me by your agency. This you have not done.” Hamilton then employed language that again presaged a duel: “The result in my mind is that you have been and are actuated by motives towards me malignant and dishonorable.”78
Monroe was enraged by Hamilton’s truculence. He told Hamilton that if he wanted to convert this dispute into a personal affair—in other words, a duel—he was fully prepared to oblige him. He took refuge behind a hairsplitting distinction. He said that while he had recorded Clingman’s statement without comment, he had not endorsed it. In a stinging rejoinder, Hamilton pointed out that for Monroe to have “recorded and preserved in secret” this accusatory statement was scarcely a friendly action. At this juncture in late July, Hamilton was weighing whether or not to publish his pamphlet. Monroe’s obstinacy apparently pushed him over the edge. “The public explanation to which I am driven must decide, as far as public opinion is concerned, between us,” Hamilton told him. “Painful as the appeal will be in one respect, I know that in the principal point it must completely answer my purpose.”79
In early August, the feud between Hamilton and Monroe took on the formality of an affair of honor. Both men denied wanting to duel but stood ready if necessary. What are we to make of all this blowing and bluster? In their endless exchange of letters that summer, Monroe could have let Hamilton off the hook by stating that the veracity of the Clingman memo rested on Clingman’s credibility alone. But Monroe was still smarting over his ignominious recall from Paris and did not wish to make life easy for Hamilton. On the other hand, it is equally noteworthy that Hamilton was intransigent and made it hard for Monroe to compromise without losing face.
On August 6, Monroe sent Aaron Burr a copy of his correspondence with Hamilton and tried to enlist his aid to avert a duel. Obviously, he thought Burr was friendly enough with Hamilton to act as a mediator. Monroe made it plain that while he would not shrink from a duel, he would gladly avoid one if done “with propriety.”80 Just as Hamilton thought Monroe was motivated by partisan purposes, so Monroe thought Hamilton goaded on by “party friends.” “In truth I have no desire to persecute this man,” Monroe told Burr, “though he justly merits it…. I had no hand in the publication, was sorry for it, and think he has acted, by drawing the public attention to it and making it an aff[ai]r of more consequence than it was in itself, very indiscreetly.”81 Monroe did not understand just how upset the illegitimate Hamilton was about anything that affected his reputation. In a letter delivered by Burr, Monroe told Hamilton that he had no intention of challenging him to a duel. At this, Hamilton temporarily backed down, saying that any further action on his own part would be improper.
The most fair-minded advice in the dispute came from Aaron Burr, who seemed devoid of the petty, vindictive spirit that actuated the chief adversaries. Unlike the Jeffersonians, he did not doubt Hamilton’s integrity. That August, he told Monroe that he hoped his correspondence with Hamilton would be burned. “If you and Muhlenberg really believe, as I do and think you must, that H[amilton] is innocent of the charge of any concern in speculation with Reynolds, it is my opinion that it will be an act of magnanimity and justice to say so in a joint certificate…. Resentment is more dignified when justice is rendered to its object.”82 Had he already hated Hamilton, Burr could have egged on Monroe and engineered a duel in which Hamilton might have died. Instead, he had the grace and decency to plead for fairness toward Hamilton. He was the one upright actor in the whole affair.
In late August, the appearance of Hamilton’s Observations pamphlet revived the feud with Monroe, which sputtered on for months. After poring over the pamphlet, Madison reassured Monroe that it did not threaten his honor. Monroe would not listen. In early December, he reactivated the dormant feud by sending a provocative letter to Hamilton. “In my judgment,” he told Hamilton, “you ought either to have been satisfied with the explanations I gave you or to have invited me to the field [of honor].”83 Burr was authorized to act as a second in any duel but let the matter quietly lapse. Among other things, Burr did not think that Hamilton would actually fight, a misperception that may have influenced his later decisions in his own encounter with Hamilton. In fact, Hamilton drafted a letter to Monroe in January 1798, accepting a duel if necessary. Fortunately, the confrontation petered out, and Hamilton never sent the note. As a result of this and other dealings with him, Burr came away with a lower opinion of Monroe. When Monroe’s name later surfaced as a possible presidential candidate, Burr jotted down this scathing assessment of him:
Naturally dull and stupid; extremely illiterate; indecisive to a degree that would be incredible to one who did not know him; pusillanimous and, of course, hypocritical; has no opinion on any subject and will be always under the government of the worst men; pretends, as I am told, to some knowledge of military matters, but never commanded a platoon nor was ever fit to command one…. As a lawyer, Monroe was far below mediocrity.84
The first advertisement for Hamilton’s pamphlet appeared in the Gazette of the United States on July 31, yet it was not actually published until August 25. Why this curious hiatus after Hamilton had rushed to complete his defense? Some time may have elapsed as Hamilton rounded up affidavits, but the paramount reason was probably simpler: Eliza was pregnant with their sixth child. Because of her earlier miscarriage, it would be their first child in five years. Hamilton must have dreaded that exposure of his actions might provoke another miscarriage, as had occurred when he rode off to the Whiskey Rebellion three years earlier. Hamilton’s delay in issuing his pamphlet gave Eliza the necessary reprieve. On August 4, 1797, she gave birth to a healthy baby, William Stephen Hamilton, who was baptized by the Reverend Benjamin Moore at Trinity Church. “Mrs. Hamilton has lately added another boy to our stock,” Hamilton told Washington in late August, after receiving the wine cooler. “She and the child are both well.”85 The name may have celebrated Hamilton’s new rapport with his Scottish uncle and paid tribute to his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Governor Stephen Van Rensselaer, then grieving over the death of his eldest daughter.
The Republican press made the Reynolds exposé as hellish as possible for Eliza. “Art thou a wife?” the Aurora asked her. “See him, whom thou has chosen for the partner of this life, lolling in the lap of a harlot!!”86 Eliza never commented publicly on the Reynolds scandal, but we can deduce her general reaction from several snippets of information. On July 13, while Hamilton was in Philadelphia, John Barker Church sent him a letter that described Eliza’s response to the open letter just published by Callender: “Eliza is well. She put into my hand the newspaper with James Thomson Callender’s letter to you, but it makes not the least impression on her, only that she considers the whole knot of those opposed to you to be [scoundrels].”87 This drives home several points: that Eliza was outraged at Hamilton’s critics; that she agreed that a conspiracy was afoot; and that her faith in her husband’s integrity was unshaken. Of course, at this point Hamilton had not yet published his own pamphlet, spilling out lurid details of his adultery. TheAurora later screamed, “He acknowledges…that he violated the sacred sanctuary of his own house, by taking an unprincipled woman during the absence of his wife and family to his bed.”88 But already Eliza showed flashes of the militant loyalty to her husband that was to distinguish her widowhood. Church also mentioned to Hamilton that Angelica was sick: “My Angelica is not very well. She complains that her throat is a little sore. I hope it will not be of long duration.”89
While Hamilton was pouring out his confessions in Philadelphia, he showed a special solicitude for Eliza. He knew that his pamphlet, at least temporarily, would shatter her heroic image of him, and he must have trembled with apprehension. He wrote to Eliza that he eagerly looked forward “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 comprise all my felicity. Adieu angel.”90 Two days later, Hamilton wrote again and said he would return to New York the next day. “Love to Angelica & Church,” he wrote. “I shall return full freighted with it for my dear brunettes.”91
Eliza decided to have the baby in Albany. A guilt-ridden Hamilton escorted her to the sloop that transported her up the Hudson, but he did not join her. Probably his presence was then too distressing. Angelica saw Hamilton right after he returned from the boat, and she sent Eliza a consoling note. Angelica always wrote to her as the worldly, protective older sister, often calling her “my dear child.” She knew Eliza was pure hearted and easily wounded. On the other hand, Angelica was willing to make allowances for her brother-in-law.
When [Hamilton] 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 [Angelica’s daughter] 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 [are] 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 [you would have missed?] the pride, the pleasure, the nameless satisfactions.92
Angelica signed the note, “With all my heart and redoubled tenderness.”93 Eliza did not buckle under the strain. One imagines that she had tolerated some discreet philandering from Hamilton before but not such open scandal. Did she see life with Hamilton the way Angelica did—that marriage to such an exceptional man entailed a large quota of pain and suffering that was abundantly compensated by his love, intelligence, and charm? The rest of her life suggests that this was indeed the case. The publication of Hamilton’s pamphlet must have been inexpressibly mortifying to Eliza when she discovered how vulgar and uneducated Maria Reynolds was and how breezily Hamilton had deceived her during the affair, urging her to stay in Albany for her health. Whatever pain she suffered, however, Eliza never surrendered her conviction that her husband was a noble patriot who deserved the veneration of his countrymen and had been crucified by a nefarious band. Her later work for orphans, the decades spent compiling her husband’s papers and supervising his biography, her constant delight in talking about him, her pride in Washington’s wine cooler, her fight to stake Hamilton’s claim to authorship of the farewell address—these and many, many other things testify to unflinching love for her husband. And the most convincing proof of all was the undying hatred that she bore for James Monroe.
Just a couple of weeks after Hamilton published the Reynolds pamphlet, he experienced a medical scare with his eldest son, Philip, that may have seemed like heavenly retribution for his wayward conduct. The fifteen-year-old Philip, an uncommonly handsome and intelligent boy, was the most promising of the children. In early September, he “was attacked with a severe, bilious fever, which soon assumed a typhus character,” said Dr. David Hosack, a professor of medicine and botany at Columbia College, who was summoned to attend the boy.94 Hamilton had to leave for Hartford, Connecticut, to represent New York State in a case in federal court. As soon as he reached Rye, thirty miles north of New York City, he wrote to his wife in a state of distress: “I am arrived here, my dear Eliza, in good health, but very anxious about my dear Philip. I pray heaven to restore him and in every event to support you.” He recommended a cold-bath treatment not unlike the one used by Edward Stevens to cure him of yellow fever: “Also, my Betsey, how much do I regret to be separated from you at such a juncture. When will the time come that I shall be exempt from the necessity of leaving my dear family? God bless my beloved and all my dear children. AH.”95
As Philip’s condition worsened, Hosack began to despair of his survival. Eliza grew so distraught that the good doctor banished her to another room so “that she might not witness the last struggles of her son.”96 He sent an express courier to fetch Hamilton from Hartford so he would arrive before the boy died. Meanwhile, Philip grew delirious, lost his pulse, and became comatose. Hosack managed to revive him by immersing him in hot baths of Peruvian bark and rum, then wrapping him in warm, dry blankets. Hosack later described Hamilton’s return as one of his most gratifying moments as a physician:
In the course of the night, General Hamilton arrived at his home under the full expectation that his son was no more. But to his great joy he still lived. When the father knew what had been done and the means that had been employed…he immediately came to my room where I was sleeping, and although I was then personally unknown to him, awakened me and taking me by the hand, his eyes suffused with tears of joy, he observed, “My dear Sir, I could not remain in my own house without first tendering to you my grateful acknowledgment for the valuable services you have rendered my family in the preservation of my child.”97
Hosack paid tribute to the “tender feeling” and “exquisite sensibility” that Hamilton showed as he assumed the role of maternal care. In tending his son, Hamilton was both nurse and physician, leaving the doctor amazed by both his medical knowledge and his tenderness toward his children.98 Hosack recalled, “From that moment, he devoted himself most assiduously to the care of his son, administering with his own hand every dose of medicine or cup of nourishment that was required. I may add that this was his custom in every important case of sickness that occurred in his family.”99 This was not a family that Hamilton was prepared to abandon, and whether from penance for the Reynolds affair or from his usual paternal dedication, he was very attentive to Eliza and the children in the coming years.