by Ron Chernow
NINETEEN
CITY OF THE FUTURE
By the summer of 1791, after his victories in his skirmishes with Jefferson and Madison over public credit, assumption, and a central bank, Hamilton had attained the summit of his power. Such stellar success might have bred an
intoxicating sense of invincibility. But his vigorous reign had also made him the enfant terrible of the early republic, and a substantial minority of the country was mobilized against him. This should have made him especially watchful of his reputation. Instead, in one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment, he entered into a sordid affair with a married woman named Maria Reynolds that, if it did not blacken his name forever, certainly sullied it. From the lofty heights of statesmanship, Hamilton fell back into something reminiscent of the squalid world of his West Indian boyhood.
Philadelphia had its quota of sensual pleasures. Though French visitors dismissed it as quaintly puritanical, it enjoyed a livelier reputation among Americans. Hamilton and other government officials had access to a nocturnal medley of parties, balls, and plays. These social gatherings were often hosted by federalist merchants. The queen bee of local society was Anne Willing Bingham, wife of the extremely rich William Bingham, who presided over banquets at their opulent three-story mansion near Third Street and Spruce. Far from being prim, Philadelphia gatherings in the 1790s abounded in exposed arms and bosoms, if Abigail Adams is to be trusted. She was shocked by all the female flesh on display at parties: “The style of dress...is really an outrage upon all decency.... The arm naked almost to the shoulder and without stays or bodice....Most [ladies] wear their clothes too scant upon the body and too full upon the bosom for my fancy. Not content with the show which nature bestows, they borrow from art and literally look like nursing mothers.”1
The vivacious Alexander and Eliza Hamilton socialized with the Binghams and other affluent couples. Perhaps by that spring, Eliza had felt the strain of their social obligations and needed time to recuperate. In mid-May 1791, knowing that Hamilton was bogged down with work, Philip Schuyler begged Eliza and the four children (plus the orphaned Fanny Antill) to join him in Albany for the summer. To avoid epidemics, many people vacated Philadelphia and other large cities in sultry weather. “I fear if she remains where she is until the hot weather commences that her health may be much injured,” Schuyler confided to Hamilton about Eliza. “Let me therefore entreat you to expedite her as soon as possible.”2 So due to Schuyler’s tender concern, Eliza and the children left Philadelphia soon after the sensational offering of bank scrip on July 4 and stayed away for the rest of that torrid summer.
It was a dangerous moment for Eliza to abandon Hamilton. He was the cynosure of all eyes, and many people noted his enchantment with women. John Adams carped at his “indelicate pleasures,” Harrison Gray Otis told his wife of Hamilton’s “liquorish flirtation” with a married woman at a dinner party, and Benjamin Latrobe, later the surveyor of public buildings in Washington, branded him an “insatiable libertine.”3 Such descriptions, though hyperbolic, may have contained a grain of truth: Hamilton was susceptible to the charms of beautiful women. Like many people driven by their careers, he did not allow himself sufficient time for escape and relaxation. When Charles Willson Peale painted him in 1791, Hamilton had the air of a commanding politician, his mouth firm, his eyes narrowed with concentration. No trace of joy softened his serious face. He was a volatile personality encased inside a regimented existence.
Whenever he dealt with women, Hamilton shed his bureaucratic manner and reverted to the whimsy of bygone days. Right before the bank subscription, Hamilton received a volume of dramatic verse, The Ladies of Castille, from Mercy Warren, a Massachusetts poet, playwright, and historian. Hamilton sent a dashing note of thanks: “It is certain that in the ‘Ladies of Castille,’ the sex will find a new occasion of triumph. Not being a poet myself, I am in the less danger of feeling mortification at the idea that, in the career of dramatic composition at least, female genius in the United States has outstripped the male.”4 His wit with women was often flirtatious. When his friend Susanna Livingston inquired about Treasury certificates she owned, Hamilton apologized for his delay in responding and said that he held himself “bound by all the laws of chivalry to make the most ample reparation in any mode you shall prescribe. You will of course recollect that I am a married man!”5
As the son of a “fallen woman,” Hamilton tended to be chivalric toward women in trouble. The day after he complimented Warren, he wrote to a Boston widow named Martha Walker who had petitioned Congress for relief, contending that her husband had sacrificed valuable property in Quebec to enlist in the Revolution. With countless petitions coming before Congress, it is noteworthy that Hamilton plucked this one from the pile, assuring Walker that “I shall enter upon the examination with every profession which can be inspired by favorable impression of personal merit and by a sympathetic participation in the distresses of a lady as deserving as unfortunate.”6 These letters to Warren and Walker, written right before Eliza left for Albany, suggest that Hamilton was more than receptive to overtures from women.
Six years later, Alexander Hamilton found himself transported back to that summer of 1791 as he told a flabbergasted public about his extended sexual escapade with twenty-three-year-old Maria (probably pronounced “Mariah”) Reynolds, who must have been very alluring. She had arrived unannounced at his redbrick house at 79 South Third Street. He began his famous account thus: “Sometime in the summer of the year 1791, a woman called at my house in the city of Philadelphia and asked to speak with me in private. I attended her into a room apart from the family.” Reynolds beguiled Hamilton with a doleful tale of a husband, James Reynolds, “who for a long time had treated her very cruelly, [and] had lately left her to live with another woman and in so destitute a condition that, though desirous of returning to her friends, she had not the means.” Since Maria Reynolds came from New York and Hamilton was a New York citizen, Hamilton continued, “she had taken the liberty to apply to my humanity for assistance.”7 Her sudden listing in the 1791 city directory as the mysterious “Mrs. Reynolds”—she was virtually the only person to appear without a first name—seems to confirm her recent arrival in Philadelphia.
The thirty-six-year-old Hamilton never shrank from a maiden in distress, as Maria Reynolds must have known. He told her that her situation was “a very interesting one” and that he wished to assist her but that she had come at an inopportune moment (i.e., Eliza was at home). He volunteered to bring “a small supply of money” to her home at 154 South Fourth Street that evening. Hamilton recounted that meeting with a certain novelistic flair:
In the evening, I put a bank bill in my pocket and went to the house. I inquired for Mrs. Reynolds and was shown upstairs, at the head of which she met me and conducted me into a bedroom. I took the bill out of my pocket and gave it to her. Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.8
That encounter was the first of many times that Alexander Hamilton slipped furtively through the night to see Reynolds. Once Eliza had gone off to Albany, the coast was clear to bring his mistress home. After their first rendezvous, Hamilton recalled, “I had frequent meetings with her, most of them at my own house.”9 After a short period, Reynolds informed Hamilton of a sudden reconciliation with her husband, which Hamilton later claimed he had encouraged. But Maria Reynolds was no ordinary adulteress, and politics now entered into the picture. She informed Hamilton that her husband had speculated in government securities and had even profited from information obtained from Treasury Department sources.
When Hamilton met James Reynolds, the latter fingered William Duer as the source of this information. It is baffling that Hamilton, having worked to achieve a spotless reputation as treasury secretary, did not see that he was now courting danger and would be susceptible to blackmail. Maria Reynolds introduced Hamilton to her husband as her benevolent, disinterested savior duri
ng a time of desperation, and for this James Reynolds pretended gratitude. But when Reynolds said that he was going to Virginia, he asked whether Hamilton could secure a government job for him upon his return. Hamilton remained noncommittal.
In recollecting events, Hamilton admitted that the more he learned about the sleazy James Reynolds, the more he thought of ending the affair. He was in the midst of preparing his great Report on Manufactures, yet he was also in the grip of a dark sexual compulsion, and Maria Reynolds knew how to hold him fast in her toils by feigning love. “All the appearances of violent attachment and of agonizing distress at the idea of a relinquishment were played off with a most imposing art,” he wrote. “This, though it did not make me entirely the dupe of the plot, yet kept me in a state of irresolution. My sensibility, perhaps my vanity, admitted the possibility of a real fondness and led me to adopt the plan of a gradual discontinuance rather than of a sudden interruption, at least calculated to give pain, if a real partiality existed.”10 As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a “gradual discontinuance” only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.
In his later pamphlet, Hamilton was at pains to suggest that Maria Reynolds may have been sincerely smitten with him. His recounting of the affair suggests that at moments the relationship struck him as genuinely romantic. He could never make up his mind whether it had started honestly on her side and then turned to blackmail or whether she had conspired with James Reynolds all along. Perhaps, as Hamilton intimated, his vanity could not admit that he had been conned by a pair of lowlife tricksters. The man accused by his enemies of bottomless craft could be a most credulous dupe. Whenever his interest flagged, Maria Reynolds regained his sympathy by telling him that her husband was abusing her or, more pointedly, that he had threatened to spill the story to Eliza. For Hamilton, Maria Reynolds always remained a curious amalgam of tragicomic figure and confidence woman.
Whatever Maria Reynolds’s initial intentions, Hamilton must have seemed elegant, charming, and godlike compared to her vulgarian husband. It is hard to imagine that some genuine feeling for Hamilton did not enter sporadically into her emotions. She wrote him numerous letters—Hamilton ruefully called her a “great scribbler”11—notable for atrocious grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Some letters seemed to consist of a single run-on sentence. In these missives, Maria Reynolds portrayed herself as a wretched, lovelorn creature, desperate to see Hamilton again and pining away with loneliness. While such letters may have persuaded Hamilton that her emotions were sincere, their hysterical excesses should have alerted him that he was dealing with a perilously unstable woman.
We know very little about the background of Maria Reynolds. She was born Mary Lewis in Dutchess County, New York, in 1768, married James Reynolds at fifteen, and two years later gave birth to a daughter named Susan. (At some point, she switched her name from Mary to Maria.) She told Hamilton that her sister Susannah had married Gilbert J. Livingston, which endowed her with respectable Hudson Valley connections. One Philadelphia merchant, Peter A. Grotjan, described her as smart, sensitive, and genteel, but this picture conflicts with an affidavit from Richard Folwell, whose mother was her first landlady in Philadelphia. Folwell etched a portrait of Maria Reynolds that tallies more closely with Hamilton’s account of a mercurial personality prone to wild mood swings:
Her mind at this time was far from being tranquil or consistent, for almost at the same minute that she would declare her respect for her husband, cry and feel distressed, [the tears] would vanish and levity would succeed, with bitter execrations on her husband. This inconsistency and folly was ascribed to a troubled, but innocent and harmless mind. In one or other of these paroxysms, she told me, so infamous was the perfidy of Reynolds, that he had frequently enjoined and insisted that she should insinuate herself on certain high and influential characters—endeavor to make assignations with them and actually prostitute herself to gull money from them.12
After leaving the Folwell residence, Maria and James Reynolds lived on North Grant Street, where they occupied separate beds (or even rooms) while Maria dabbled in prostitution. Gentlemen left letters in her entryway, Folwell said, and “at night she would fly off as was supposed to answer their contents.”13
Folwell’s testimony confirms both the sincerity and the patent insincerity of the mixed-up Maria Reynolds. There seems little question that she approached Hamilton as part of an extortion racket, delivering an adept performance as a despairing woman. It was also clear, however, that she was too flighty to stick to any script. Since she despised her husband, she may have nourished fantasies that Hamilton would rescue her even as she preyed upon him. Fact and fiction may have blended imperceptibly in her mind. Hamilton later concluded of his paramour, “The variety of shapes which this woman could assume was endless.”14
Maria Reynolds was the antithesis of the sturdy, sensible, loyal Eliza. The more depressing then to survey the letters Hamilton sent to Eliza that summer to keep her at bay. On August 2, he expressed satisfaction that she had arrived safely in Albany and showed concern (“Take good care of my lamb”) for their three-year-old son, James, who was ill. At the same time, Hamilton pressed her to stay in Albany: “I am so anxious for a perfect restoration of your health that I am willing to make a great sacrifice for it.”15 At one point, when Eliza seemed about to return on short notice, Hamilton, worried that he might be taken by surprise, exhorted her to “let me know beforehand your determination that I may meet you at New York.”16 In late August, when her return seemed imminent, Hamilton advised that “much as I long for this happy moment, my extreme anxiety for the restoration of your health will reconcile me to your staying longer where you are....Think of me—dream of me—and love me my Bestsey as I do you.”17 Finally, in September, with Hamilton suffering from his old kidney ailment and taking warm baths to soothe it, Eliza decided to return with the children. One last time, Hamilton urged her, “Don’t alarm yourself nor hurry so as to injure either yourself or the children.”18
It is easy to snicker at such deceit and conclude that Hamilton faked all emotion for his wife, but this would belie the otherwise exemplary nature of their marriage. Eliza Hamilton never expressed anything less than a worshipful attitude toward her husband. His love for her, in turn, was deep and constant if highly imperfect. The problem was that no single woman could seem to satisfy all the needs of this complex man with his checkered childhood. As mirrored in his earliest adolescent poems, Hamilton seemed to need two distinct types of love: love of the faithful, domestic kind and love of the more forbidden, exotic variety.
In his later confessions, Hamilton tried to explain the mad persistence of this affair by citing his terror that James Reynolds might blurt out the truth to Eliza. As he phrased it, “No man tender of the happiness of an excellent wife could, without extreme pain, look forward to the affliction which she might endure from the disclosure, especially a public disclosure, of the fact. Those best acquainted with the interior of my domestic life will best appreciate the force of such a consideration upon me. The truth was that...I dreaded extremely a disclosure—and was willing to make large sacrifices to avoid it.”19 In the end, his desire to spare Eliza led him only to hurt her the more.
When Eliza returned to Philadelphia that fall, Hamilton could no longer receive Maria Reynolds at his residence and resorted to her home. (The Hamiltons had by now moved to Market Street, near the presidential mansion.) How he squeezed in time for these carnal interludes while compiling his Report on Manufactures is a wonder. That he inserted these trysts into such a tight schedule only strengthens the impression that Hamilton was ensnared by a sexual obsession. It was as if, after inhabiting a world of high culture for many years, Hamilton had regressed back to the sensual, dissolute world of his childhood. There is again a Dickensian quality to his story: the young hero escapes a tawdry life only to be lured back into it by a pair of unscrupulous swindlers.
If Hamilton thought he could commit adultery
without paying a penalty, he learned otherwise when James Reynolds materialized again late that fall. During the Revolution, Reynolds had worked as a skipper on a Hudson River sloop and supplied provisions to patriotic troops, meeting William Duer and other purveyors. He then went to sea before settling in New York, and he had sought employment at the new Treasury Department in 1789. Though he wangled a reference letter from Robert Troup, he was rejected for a job, possibly giving him an extra motive for vengeance against Hamilton. The following year, some New York speculators sent Reynolds south to buy up claims that the government owed to veterans in Virginia and North Carolina.
On December 15, 1791, ten days after Hamilton submitted his Report on Manufactures to Congress, his earlier charade of friendship with James Reynolds abruptly ended. “One day, I received a letter from [Maria Reynolds]...intimating a discovery [of the sexual liaison] by her husband,” Hamilton was to recall. “It was a matter of doubt with me whether there had been really a discovery by accident or whether the time for the catastrophe of the plot was arrived.”20 James Reynolds displayed a sure sense of timing: the hubbub over the manufacturing report made it an ideal moment to threaten Hamilton, who was much in the newspapers.
On the unforgettable afternoon of Thursday, December 15, 1791, Maria Reynolds warned Hamilton that her husband had written to him and that if he didn’t receive a reply, “he will write Mrs. Hamilton.” Maria, as usual, was overcome with emotion: “Oh my God I feel more for you than myself and wish I had never been born to give you so mutch unhappisness do not rite to him no not a Line but come here soon do not send or leave any thing in his power Maria.”21 Hamilton had indeed received a thinly veiled blackmail note from James Reynolds that began: “I am very sorry to find out that I have been so Cruelly trated by a person that I took to be my best friend instead of that my greatest Enimy. You have deprived me of every thing thats near and dear to me.” A master of crude melodrama, Reynolds told Hamilton that Maria had been weeping constantly, that this had made him suspicious, and that he had trailed a black messenger who carried one of her letters to Hamilton’s home. Upon confronting Maria, “the poor Broken harted woman” had confessed to the affair. Here James Reynolds worked himself up into self-righteous wrath:
