Scandalmonger: A Novel

by William Safire

  He suddenly found himself at the address the Reynolds woman had given him. A pretty child, not more than five or six, opened the door to the modest Fourth Street home, silently pointed to the stairway, and disappeared into the kitchen behind it. His eyes swept up the stairs to see Maria Reynolds standing at the top, in a black dress that accentuated her slim waist and full bosom, beckoning him to come up. He bounded up the stairs and followed her into the master bedroom. More awkwardly than he would have liked, he took the bill out of his pocket and laid it on the dresser. She ignored it, stepping close to him with a look of excited expectancy that he was sure no gentleman could fail to fulfill.

  “I am glad you turned to me,” he said.

  “I read the articles you signed as ‘Publius.’ And ‘Catullus.’ Why do you use so many pseudonyms?”

  “A single voice is not enough. I am trying to appear to be a legion, a host of pamphleteers and newsmongers.”

  She laid the fingers of one hand lightly on the ruffles of his shirt. “You may remove your jacket if you wish. It’s a warm evening.”

  As he did so, he watched her step out of her shoes. Because that was not enough to bring their eyes to an equal level, she sat on the edge of her bed and looked up at him. There was none of the coquetry about her of his sister-in-law Angelica Church, his current vision of attractive womanhood, who liked to tease him with her passionate letters from abroad. He let himself believe that this woman, Maria Reynolds, desired his closeness more fervently than she needed his help. Perhaps his fame and appearance so attracted her that she used a request for carfare home as a ruse to become his friend.

  Stimulated by the directness of her gaze, even more than her evident willingness to follow wherever he led, he placed his hands on her arms, pulled her to her feet and turned her around to face the mirror. After a long moment reflecting on her figure over her shoulder, he unhurriedly worked his fingers down the long row of buttons on the back of her black dress. The elation he felt surging in him was the product of the discovery of a kindred soul, the aesthetic of a beautiful woman in the act of welcoming his intimacy, and the practical comfort of anticipating her total availability within a few blocks of home. He took his time with her; this was to be no transient or furtive affair. Only when he was certain she was quite ready for him did he commit himself. She took him into her with a long cry of unashamed delight, which pleasured him no end.

  The lovemaking was worthy of his passion; she inspired him to heights and depths he had never reached before in a life of no mean experience with women. After he dressed and was about to depart, Hamilton took her naked shoulders in his hands and looked profoundly into those memorably deep blue eyes. “I will give you my assistance, Maria. There is no need for you to leave Philadelphia. But I require your promise—now that you have made me your friend, you must apply to no one else.”

  She gave Hamilton her promise. He began to think of the excuse he would give at home for his lateness. On the way out, she introduced him to her daughter Susan, who curtsied and vanished.

  December 19, 1792

  “This was more than a year ago. Some conversation ensued,” Hamilton went on to tell his visitors in the study of his home, “from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable. And it would take a harder heart than mine to refuse a Beauty in distress.” The men nodded their understanding. “After this, I had frequent meetings with her.” He gestured at the walls. “Most of the meetings were here at my house, many right here in this room—Mrs. Hamilton with our four children often being absent on visits to her father.”

  Muhlenberg, slumped in the couch, closed his eyes and shook his head, as if feeling the presence of Hamilton’s paramour in the room.

  “She was, and is, a very pretty woman,” Hamilton observed, as if in partial expiation of his behavior. He instantly regretted saying that; the quality and power of Maria’s attraction was ill described as prettiness. This genuine beauty had brought back into his life the thrill of dangerous adventure. He regretted his need to strip away her privacy, but saw little danger to her reputation because his account would remain in this room. Certainly these men of honor would not want to cause pain to his family by revealing any of this.

  “Mrs. Reynolds did not indicate to us any amorous connection with you,” Monroe said.

  Hamilton nodded grimly. “The variety of shapes that this woman can assume is endless. In a few months, she told me her husband had solicited a reconciliation. I advised her to do it and she did, though we continued our intercourse. Her appearance of a violent attachment to me, and the pathetic importunings in her letters, made it very difficult to disentangle myself.” It was important to impress upon his visitors that the impetus to continue the affair, like its origination, came from her; Maria was the seducer, conspiring with her husband to blackmail Hamilton, their victim.

  “Then she told me that her husband had been engaged in speculation in claims on the Treasury,” Hamilton recounted. “She said he could give me useful information about the corruption of some persons in my department. That was when I sent for him and he came to see me.”

  When neither investigator asked the reason, Wolcott put in, “What did Reynolds want from you?”

  “Employment in the Treasury Department. I may have used vague expressions which raised his expectations. My situation with his wife naturally inclined me to conciliate this man, but the more I learned of him, the more inadmissible his employment in public service became. I hazarded his resentment by refusing. Whatever the impropriety of my private behavior, my refusal to put him on the public payroll demonstrates the delicacy of my conduct in its public relations.”

  “I think we need proceed no further,” said Muhlenberg, his discomfort obvious at prying into a man’s private passion.

  “On the contrary, Mr. Speaker, I insist that you see everything, to lay this to rest once and for all.”

  Hamilton proceeded to lay out letter after letter, written in a feminine hand and with egregious misspellings, that he said had come from Maria importuning him to meet her, professing her love, confiding her misery: “Let me once more see you and unbosom myself to you. . . .”

  He interspersed these purported cries for his affection with near-illiterate notes from James Reynolds pleading for money. One proclaimed he had discovered their affair and forgave them, wanting only $90 for his pain, another that “she is determined never to be a wife to me any more” because of her love for Hamilton. Reynolds then in effect offered to sell his estranged wife’s exclusive affections to her lover.

  “This proves that they acted in concert, from the start,” Hamilton concluded, “to entrap me.”

  Wolcott, eager to believe his friend, was not sure that such collusion in entrapment was proven; it would be fairer to say it was indicated. He hoped the investigators would be too stunned by the sexual revelations to pursue this point, and was relieved when they did not.

  “They tried to use my own vile weakness,” Hamilton concluded, “to extort from me the employment of Reynolds in a position where he could debauch the public trust. Not only that, but they tried to bleed whatever money they could from my personal funds, which they mistakenly thought were limitless.”

  Muhlenberg was shocked into an apology. “We need trouble you no more, sir.”

  Monroe, however, was not completely persuaded. “There is the matter of Reynolds’s visit to you after his release from jail and then his disappearance,” he said. “His note to Clingman, the one with the part erased, says you were providing money for his flight.”

  “Nonsense,” Hamilton retorted, “and the ‘part erased’ casts suspicion on the note itself. How am I responsible for his disappearance? Isn’t it probable Reynolds fled to avoid detection and punishment in other cases, and was deeply in debt? What more natural than after being jailed for a crime, to run from creditors as fast and as far as possible?”

  “That’s only logical,” Muhlenberg agreed.

  “M
y crime is moral, not pecuniary,” Hamilton said in summation. “I have cheated my wife, and am profoundly ashamed of my behavior, but I have never cheated the public by engaging in or permitting speculation based on advance information of Treasury actions.” He paused. “Do you think this indelicate amour—deserving personal censure, but not involving the public monies—is a fit subject to be brought before President Washington?”

  “No,” said Muhlenberg.

  “I am inclined not to trouble him with it,” Monroe agreed, to Hamilton’s evident relief. “But I want to put together the complete record before making that decision final.” He gathered up all the letters on the table. “May we have your notes as well?” Hamilton, determined to demonstrate that he had nothing to hide, offered up his original notes, asking only that copies be made and returned to him. “Your privacy will be respected,” Monroe assured him. They were all, after all, men of honor. “The copying will be done by the Clerk of the House and given only to us.”

  “Your conduct toward me has been fair and liberal,” Hamilton said.

  In the vestibule, as the visitors were getting into their overcoats, Wolcott with appropriate casualness approached the subject Hamilton wanted him to raise with Monroe for ultimate transmission to Jefferson. “You defeated John Walker in your election to the Senate last month, did you not?”

  Monroe nodded yes. Wolcott knew that on Jefferson’s order the compliant Virginia legislature had chosen Monroe to represent the state. It had rejected the sitting Senator, John Walker, who was Jefferson’s lifelong friend and Monticello neighbor. As a result, Jefferson and Walker were now estranged.

  “We hope you will tell your friend in Virginia,” Wolcott added, “that the matter of Mrs. Walker need never see the light of day.”

  “I don’t deal in cryptic messages,” Monroe snapped. “What does it mean?”

  “To be honest, I don’t know,” Wolcott said lightly. “But your friend may know.”

  Outside, Muhlenberg said, “I see no need to burden the President with this. Reprehensible behavior by all concerned—Gott in Himmel, right in his own home, maybe on the couch I was sitting on!—but not affecting the public business.” He added angrily, “What a Jezebel that woman is!”

  “His explanation is plausible,” Monroe said. It could be that their intercourse had been sexual and not commercial, but if that were true, why had Hamilton been so eager to make certain the male Reynolds could not be questioned? Because Muhlenberg was so obviously convinced by Hamilton’s seeming candor, Monroe chose his words with care: “We left Hamilton under the impression our suspicions were removed. That’s just as well, because he did not ask that all the correspondence, and his notes, be destroyed.”

  That removal of suspicion may have been Hamilton’s impression, but Monroe chose to remain doubtful. The blackmail story was persuasive to the easily shocked Speaker, perhaps, but it was self-serving, effectively cutting off further inquiry. Moreover, it was contradicted by Mrs. Reynolds and therefore not conclusive. Were those incriminating letters in her own hand, or forged? Their egregious misspellings did not befit her well-bred manner.

  He handed Muhlenberg the thick file. “Have your man Beckley deliver a copy of these to Hamilton and the originals to me. If I am assigned the embassy to Paris, I’ll leave them with”—he did not want to say Jefferson, and so picked up the phrase used by Hamilton’s man Wolcott—“my friend in Virginia.” Muhlenberg would understand that to mean Secretary Jefferson.

  “And I’ll ask Senator Burr to keep an eye on that Reynolds woman,” the Speaker said, “in case her husband returns.” He took the file from Monroe, agreed to have it copied and returned to him for safekeeping at Monticello, and pressed again: “But it’s not for Washington’s eyes, I trust. He loves Hamilton like a son, even now calls him ‘my boy.’ This would sadden him unnecessarily.”

  “The draft report to the President, with these exhibits, will not be completed or sent,” Monroe promised.

  He was determined to be as good as his word. First, he would send for the clerk, Beckley, a man with loyal republican instincts and a legible hand, to make a copy of the letters Hamilton had been induced to give them, and to return the copies to Hamilton. Next, before sailing for France as Washington’s Minister, Monroe would deposit his report of the investigation, with the original letters attached, in confidence with Thomas Jefferson, who would be identified in this business only as a “friend in Virginia.”

  He asked himself the central questions: Was Hamilton telling the truth about being seduced and blackmailed? Or was the confession of adultery an ingenious tale, perhaps with a salacious germ of truth, to cover up the nefarious abuses of the public trust by the Treasury Secretary or some of his friends?

  Monroe was glad he did not have to make a decision on that, which would have required a prompt and full report to President Washington. Undoubtedly, James Reynolds was a scoundrel and Clingman his dupe, but Monroe was ambivalent about Maria Reynolds. She was either a duplicitous Jezebel, as Hamilton had convinced Speaker Muhlenberg she was, or the mysterious young woman was a pawn in an elaborate scheme of concealment her husband and Hamilton had concocted.

  What about Hamilton? Although Monroe suspected that he might have passed along information that made possible profiteering by his Federalist allies, the Treasury Secretary’s confession of adultery and blackmail provided a plausible explanation for his payments to Reynolds. Evidence of financial dealing by Hamilton for his own profit was far from conclusive enough to take to President Washington; indeed, the President, who treated Hamilton as the son he never had, might associate Monroe’s patron, Jefferson, with the unproven charges that led to the embarrassing revelations. That would never do.

  This might be a matter for another day, to be pursued only if Hamilton’s Federalists stifled the rise of republican government. The secret investigation of Alexander Hamilton, Monroe believed—whether rooted in an adulterous affair, as Hamilton shamefully asserted, or in corruption he so vociferously and perhaps creatively denied—was a sword best kept in the scabbard, to be drawn only at a time of political danger.

  December 20, 1792

  John Beckley sanded down the sharp tip of his quill slightly so as to lay a strong stroke of ink on paper, easily read. The Clerk of the House, as directed by the Speaker, made a copy of the fascinating letters to and from Hamilton and delivered them to Muhlenberg overnight, to be given to the Treasury Secretary.

  As instructed, he deposited the original documents with Senator James Monroe for safekeeping with his friend in Virginia. The Senator was a republican with whom Beckley was well acquainted, though one was a highborn Virginian and the other an immigrant Englishman who arrived at the age of eleven as an indentured servant. Monroe and he, Beckley liked to think, were joined by a dedication to the defense of the American citizen’s right to be free of taxes, Federal restraints, and forced service in armies that would surely be required if the government were to follow the call of Hamilton’s empire-building high Federalists.

  As not instructed, Beckley made another copy of the letters, along with Monroe’s unsent memorial to the President, for himself. That was not because he thought of himself as a librarian at heart, a safe repository of documents that deserved to be preserved in archives. On the contrary, he made the copies because he knew it would give him a guilty thrill to re-examine them. The notion that men in high places could fall prey to the basest impulses of sex or greed—or both—fascinated him. And who knew what use could be made of such deep secrets one day?

  With a length of red-tape imported from England, the Clerk of the House tied his copies of the documents into a neat bundle and locked them in his official safe. He looked out the window to see the nation’s representatives hurrying back to the House after lunch as snow was beginning to fall. Beckley wrapped a scarf around his neck, pulled on his woolen greatcoat and put on a fur hat given him by a republican candidate for Congress in Vermont, Matthew Lyon. That republican Vermonter had little cha
nce of winning but had ringingly denounced the Hamiltonians for “screwing the hard earnings out of the poor people’s pockets to enable government to pay enormous salaries and vie with European courts in frivolous gaudy appearances.” Beckley liked that kind of oratory in campaigning and had sent Lyon one of the few useful anti-Federalist pamphlets to help him in his speeches. Wearing the losing Vermonter’s gift hat, he set out for the Philadelphia docks.

  He wanted to greet two arrivals, each of whom might be helpful in articulating the republican cause. One was an Englishman, William Cobbett, who had written Secretary of State Jefferson a few months before from Paris. The letter, nicely phrased, had been passed to Beckley: “Ambitious to become a citizen of a free State, I have left my native country, England, for America: I bring with me youth, a small family, a few literary talents and that is all.” Jefferson’s reply had been politely dismissive: “Public offices in our government are so few, and of so little value, as to offer no resource to talents.” True enough—the total employment of the State Department was seven, including the Secretary—but Cobbett, undiscouraged, had come to America anyway. He was in Wilmington, teaching English to Frenchmen, and had written to say he was coming to Philadelphia today on the packet. Beckley wondered what trouble had caused him to leave England. He hoped it had been plenty; writers angry with Britain and friendly to France were what the republicans needed.

  The second writer Beckley set out to meet at dockside had a more urgent reason for running to America: James Thomson Callender was a fugitive from Scottish justice. Not for his scholarly excoriation of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, or for the anti-British screed The Political Progress of Britain, a polemical history by the Scot that Beckley had enjoyed. He was on the run for writing a pamphlet that urged his fellow Scots to rise up and throw off England’s chains. The warrant for Callender’s arrest on the charge of sedition had been passed on to Beckley by one of the immigrant radicals as a perverse recommendation. It read that the rebellious Scot was “an Outlaw put to his highness’s horn, and all movable good and gear were escheat and inbrought to His Majesty’s use.”