Smertenko's account is unusual for a Hamilton biography, but academic scholars and biographers of other Founders have from time to time repeated the assertion that Hamilton was known for his sexual "adventurism." Martha Washington, it is sometimes noted in such portrayals, named her tomcat, Hamilton, after him.15 Other biographers similarly offer clues to a Hamilton who is almost unrecognizable from his general portrayal in public memory, which emphasizes that he was a man of human failings but also one of great moral integrity. Some of these indicators come through in biographies of Jefferson, who is often positioned in opposition to Hamilton. Jefferson biographer and historian Fawn Brodie, for example, declares that women "saw in Hamilton the potentially seductive lover," adding that "he had the reputation of being a rake" who "openly paraded affection for his wife's exquisite sister, Angelica Church."" Similarly, one other biographer tells us he was charming and attractive to women and during the Revolution was often visited in the camps.'? The connection to his sister-in-law, Church, for select few writers, qualifies as an "affair" itself. A mid-century biography by John C.Miller, for example, refers to the love shared between them as intense and lasting for decades-although he concludes that it was probably not consummated.18
But for most Hamilton memorializers, the adulterous affair looms so large that they often choose to overlook or downplay other relationships. The contrast with depictions of other Founders is most notable when one thinks back to the Washington and Jefferson biographies, so many of which expand discussions of early "loves" and devote entire chapters to individual romances. Virtually no twentieth-century biographers include separate chapters on Hamilton's alleged romances with women while in the Revolutionary War. None includes separate chapters on a loving relationship with Laurens. And none includes separate chapters on the alleged affair that some authors contend he had with his sister-in-law. Thus, they are able to portray Hamilton as virtuous and married-with one exception-rather than viewing the affair as typical of his romantic self. Indeed, the dominant view of Hamilton, firmly established by his memorializers, is that (as Smertenko put it) he was "not a successful philanderer."" Explains another biographer, "That Hamilton was a novice at marital infidelity is painfully obvious in the clumsiness with which he handled the affair."20 And even the affair with Reynolds is virtually never told as a story of love or romance-it is always couched as the "Reynolds Affair," a political scandal.
Bastard Founder
Initially, polite biographers try to omit the detail of his birth out of wedlock (something occasionally referred to in his own lifetime). One early biography authored by his son John C.Hamilton portrays Hamilton as decidedly not born to unwed parents. Hamilton, he writes, was the "offspring of a second marriage," his mother having "obtained a divorce" before she "married the father" "and had by him several sons, of whom Alexander was the youngest."21 Typical of nineteenth-century biographers, he leads readers to believe that Hamilton was in fact born to married parents. In 1840, engineer by training Henry Brevoort Renwick-like Hamilton, a New Yorker-and his father, James Renwick, a popular writer for such publications as American Quarterly Review and New York Review and a chemist by training, published their biography of Hamilton. They similarly note the background of Hamilton's parents and call him the "youngest child of this marriage."22 Likewise, Lewis Henry Boutell in 1890 describes Hamilton's mother and father without noting his illegitimate birth.23 Writing in 1890, William Graham Sumner, an economist and sociologist, notes Morris's declaration, but rather than endorse the characterization, he chooses to say, "Little is known about the birth and parentage of Alexander Hamilton."24 In 1898, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge writes, "On the eleventh day of January in the year 1757, the wife of a Scotch merchant in the island of Nevis gave birth to a son, who received the name of Alexander Hamilton."25
In the twentieth century, Hamilton's bastard status received much attention from friend and foe alike. The advent of psychology infused biographical interpretations of childhood and youth in new ways. Hamilton's birth status could be used to demonstrate either blameless victimhood (a powerful theme in Hamilton's biographies) or deep-seated corruption and immorality (a note his detractors love to sound).
Charles Conant, a turn-of-the-century journalist and author whose work focuses on banking and finance, comes close to noting Hamilton's bastard status: "A mystery hangs over his birth and parentage, which repeated inquiries have failed to clear away... but the fact that all these relatives remained so much in the background gave some color to the slanders of his enemies concerning his birth."26 In 1910, in The Intimate Life ofAlexander Hamilton, Hamilton's grandson Allan McLane Hamilton begins defensively, responding to what he calls "unnecessary speculation" regarding Hamilton's "antecedents" that began with Gouverneur Morris and others. Mustering family letters and records as hard evidence in the face of gossip, Allan Hamilton presents the longer genealogy of his ancestors. "The general ignorance that exists regarding Hamilton's origin and intimate life has prompted me to publish fully all I know about him," he explains. "There was no doubt of the sincerity and depth of their love for each other," he writes, dispelling the negative image of the "bastard" child as the product of sordid, unbridled lust.27 Hamilton, like other twentieth-century chroniclers, points out that in his funeral eulogy, Morris did not see the need to sugarcoat this aspect of Hamilton's extraordinary life and wrestled with how to address what he considered to be on people's minds. He includes Morris's statement: "`The first point of his biography is that he was a stranger of illegitimate birth; some plan must be contrived to pass over this handsomely.""' This tactic of not harping on these damaging aspects of his personal life served biographers well when Hamilton's legacy enjoyed popularity. In addition to explaining the reason for his bastard status, biographers would rail against those who made use of it to suggest something about his character. Hamilton's grandson does not use the potentially derogatory term in his account, and he takes pains to fully describe the legal bind that Hamilton's mother found herself in-asserting that the marriage was not simply unhappy but abusive. Hamilton's mother and father, according to the account, took a "bold step" and in doing so followed custom whereby marriage rites were often "informal" and also played on "local sympathy," given that her first husband was a "course man of repulsive personality." Another early-twentieth-century writer simply explains, "His father was a Scotch merchant and his mother was of Huguenot descent."29
But by the 1920s and 1930s, most biographers point out that those who knew Hamilton's parents understood why they could not marry and were sympathetic to her decision to leave her first husband. In his 1932 account, writer Smertenko defensively observes that "enemies of Hamilton stopped at no exaggeration. Callender, their foulest mouthpiece, called Alexander, `the son of the camp-girl'; and vindictive John Adams could not resist repeating his favorite scurrility, `the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,' in a letter to Jefferson written nine years after Hamilton's death."30 The following year, Ralph Edward Bailey's biography similarly contains a defensive explanation for his "bastard" status: "James Hamilton and Rachael Lavine loved each other and wished to be married. Insuperable hindrances, however, precluded their becoming husband and wife." Hamilton's mother, he writes, had been "utterly unhappy" in her first marriage, but the laws did not allow for free divorce: "The lovers, thus prevented from the desired conventionality of a wedding, agreed in the establishment of a home without marriage."3'
In the second quarter of the twentieth century, the influence of theorists who regarded early childhood development as psychologically central to adult characteristics is readily apparent in such accounts as Smertenko's. In the preface to his study, which makes use of "psychological interpretation," Smertenko explains to readers that Hamilton was a man of "flashes of genius as well as the lapses of frailty." Increasingly in the twentieth century, memorializers depict Hamilton's birth status as perhaps the most significant element in his life-a life, they argue, that he believed placed him at a disadvantage to oth
ers and generated an outsider status that drove him to succeed. Thus, Smertenko argues that Hamilton's birth out of wedlock was, indeed, significant: "His illegitimacy was both the secret problem of his life and the subconscious motive of his activity, even including the erotic episodes." He continues, "The decision of his biographers to dismiss the question of his parentage as trivial and irrelevant to the saga of his heroic deed is palpably disingenuous." Indeed, Smertenko's account sees the parentage issue as central to understanding Hamilton: "Hamilton was a warrior, statesman, lover, orator, and author, but first and foremost he was the illegitimate son of an unknown father seeking a place in the genealogical tables both of the past and of the future."32 The explanatory power of his birth status would endure through the twentieth century. For example, one mid-century writer sees his status as an outsider unconnected to the powerful families of New York as directly influencing his approach to marriage and leaving "little likelihood that he would throw himself away on a tavern keeper's daughter."33 A 1970s biography opens with the assertion that "much of Hamilton's makeup derived from his parents and his childhood."34 One late-twentieth-century account argues that even the famous duel stemmed from Hamilton's bastard status by postulating that he envied Burr's family background, thereby creating a "fatal friendship."35
More recent writers have dismissed Hamilton's extramarital affair as the product of his troubled childhood-in particular his bastard statusthereby absolving him of any responsibility. Combining this view with the view of him as virile, Chernow writes, "The problem was that no single woman could seem to satisfy all the needs of this complex man with his checkered childhood." Similarly, he explains, "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." As an outsider, Chernow's Hamilton is driven, and the affair is almost inevitable: "Like many people driven by their careers, he did not allow himself sufficient time for escape and relaxation."" This view positions Hamilton as blameless, not one who might be worthy of scorn.
Marriage and Affair
For biographers, Hamilton's very public adulterous affair, which threatened to ruin both his life and his legacy, has presented a double challenge: (1) how to characterize an extramarital affair when a Founding Father is supposed to be a moral and virtuous role model for Americans and (2) how to handle the fact that the affair became public by Hamilton's own detailed confessionthat he, himself, had so publicly humiliated his wife and family.
Generally the very earliest accounts, for the sake of decorum and in deference to his memory, make little of the indelicate personal matter. To some extent, the popularity of Hamilton's legacy at this point in time discouraged extensive explanation of the affair. Some writers, such as his son, say very little about the Reynolds affair. When Henry and James Renwick mention it in their 1840 biography, they do not mention Reynolds by name and cast the event as a political scandal that places Hamilton in a favorable and understandable light: "Hamilton valued his character as a public servant beyond his domestic peace; and, rather than leave any imputation on his official purity, exposed frailties which he was not suspected of. The temporary aberration of passion which was thus laid open may lower the opinion which we might otherwise entertain of the absolute spotlessness of his moral character, but his avowal serves to enhance our estimate of his delicate sense of official purity."37
In the wake of the Civil War, Hamilton's views on strong central government again added another aspect to an already-developing positive national memory of him. As political theorist Stephen Knott explains, the contrast set up between the Republican Jefferson and the Federalist Hamilton dominates nineteenth - and twentieth-century depictions of the men.38 Pro-Hamilton accounts, of course, depict their subject in a positive light. For a typical negative portrayal of the Reynolds affair, we must turn to a biography not of Hamilton but of Jefferson. Thus, James Parton's 1874 biography of Jefferson includes a chapter entitled "Hamilton's Amour with Mrs. Reynolds" on the Hamilton-Reynolds affair, deeming it a personal failing. As if tearing the cloak off the successful treasurer and exposing the true scoundrel beneath, the author concludes, "The sinner in the case was not the Honorable Secretary of the Treasury, but only a weak, vain, and limited human being, named Alexander Hamilton."39
Parton penned these revelations about the adulterous Founder at about the same time as the scandalous news of Henry Ward Beecher's adultery riveted public attention. Beecher, a minister and author who had achieved fame as a political and moral force in the nation, became infamous for a yearslong affair with his wife's friend, Elizabeth Tilton. When word of this liaison got to free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull, whom Beecher had publicly excoriated as an immoral woman, she vowed to expose him. In 1872, she printed "The Beecher-Tilton Scandal Case" in her paper, Woodhull and Claflin s Weekly. The story of his hypocrisy became a sensation, and within days, 150,000 copies had been printed and sold. When Mr. Tilton was excommunicated from the church because of the scandal, he sued Beecher, and the adulterous affair continued to make national headlines, despite bringing no conviction. Parton writes, therefore, in a climate of scandal that immediately associated adultery with political and moral outrage.40 When Parton draws on the original gendered depiction of Hamilton as a man who erred doubly-not only by violating his marital vows but also by making the transgression public-he also may have been weighing in on the Woodhull controversy: "It is a highly interesting fact," he sarcastically begins, "that, A.D. 1797, one of the foremost men of the United States, a person who valued himself upon his moral principle, and was accepted by a powerful party at his own valuation in that particular, should have felt it to be a far baser thing to cheat men of their money than to despoil women of their honor. In this pamphlet he puts his honorable wife to an open shame, and published to the world the frailty of the woman who had gratified him.""
While his nineteenth-century detractors rail against him as a "weak" man who "could be false to women," Hamilton's memorializers place the blame elsewhere 42 Writing in 1877, just two years after the famous trial, George Shea concedes that "Hamilton's name is not free from reproach for libidinousness." But, echoing what Hamilton himself had established as his characteristic defense, they point out that Hamilton was virtually victimized "by an artful and illiterate adventuress called Maria Reynolds, the reputed wife of a depraved and mercenary man." And in contrast to his detractors, for his memorializers the confession is the defining moment of the affair. Highlighting it, they believe, enables them to dress Hamilton, in true Founding Father fashion, as extraordinary in private life and public accomplishments. Thus, Shea continues, "He himself, curiously and characteristically, confessed it publicly.... He admitted this frailty: but so as to enable him to defend his honor." His "candor, the absence of feigned regret... commended him to the sympathy even of his political opponents, and gained a popular absolution not readily given in this country to like offenses.""
Biographers also defend Hamilton by noting the social and political climate of early America. In 1882, John T.Morse notes, "Very few of those great men whose public virtues adorned the earlier period of our national existence numbered a strict chastity among their private excellences. And some of the most revered among them fell into opposite extremes." He continues, "The fault which he committed was no uncommon one; that he was no worse than his contemporaries." Indeed, in the short list of famous political leaders of the American Revolution, virtually all the men with the exception of Adams had been publicly linked to rumors of extramarital affairs. And for Morse, only Hamilton suffered so exquisitely: "But they were never brought up for public castigation; it was only Hamilton who had the misfortune to live in a glass house into every cranny of which the full noon-tide sunshine seemed to be ever pouring." For Morse, Hamilton was "so unfortunate" as "to be led into an intrigue" (italics mine) 44
Such tactics, marshaled in his defense, would become standard in Ham ilton biographies. At the end of the nineteenth century, Republican Sen
ator Lodge musters all of them, placing blame on Democrat Monroe for the scandal and deflecting blame from Hamilton by railing against those who would sully his name: "The miserable Reynolds affair has cast a shadow upon the honor of James Monroe, and its wretched details have found a place in one of the biographies of Jefferson." Moreover he seeks to use the scandal to shore up Hamilton's image as a man of integrity: "No one can desire to rake over the ashes of this miserable scandal, but in its effect it showed the courage of Hamilton in a most striking manner." Lodge, similarly, emphasizes the status of Reynolds, calling her "a worthless woman." And he frames the publication of Hamilton's confession as evidence of his Founding Father status: "The manliness of the act, the self-inflicted punishment, and the high sense of public honor thus exhibited, silenced even his opponents; but the confession was one which must have wrung Hamilton to the quick, and it shows an amount of nerve and determination for which our history can furnish no parallel."45
Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies) Page 17
