In the election, Washington was reelected unanimously with 133 votes as expected, but Adams came in second once again, this time with 77, to win another term of “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived,” as he put it. Hampered by his late entry into the race, and by the Burr diversion, Clinton came in third with just 50 votes. Burr secured a single vote, from an elector in South Carolina.
THIRTY
Other Than Pecuniary Consolation
THAT YEAR, HAMILTON was a balloonist at his height, admired by all who squinted up at him, commanding long views to distant horizons, imperious in his ether, but a man who would have to return to earth eventually. Descend Hamilton did, abruptly. The man who could do no wrong now could do no right.
When Hamilton moved with the capital to Philadelphia, he settled his family into a fine town house on elegant South Street. Still larger than New York, Philadelphia was in some ways faster, too. The puritanical New Englander Abigail Adams had been shocked to see all the women’s flesh on display at dinner parties. “The arm naked almost to the shoulder,” she complained to her husband. With his growing celebrity, Hamilton now seemed to expect the ladies’ attention, whereas he had simply hoped for it before. The Bostonian Harrison Gray Otis noted Hamilton’s “liquorish flirtation” with women at dinner parties, John Adams brayed at his “indelicate pleasures,” and the Capitol architect Benjamin Latrobe went so far as to lambaste him as “an insatiable libertine.”
In came the saturnine Mrs. Maria Reynolds. Hamilton met her early in the summer of 1791, when she was a fluttering beauty of twenty-three. Since fifteen, she had been married to a dubious character named James Reynolds, and they’d had a daughter, now eleven. During the war Reynolds had been a riverboat captain and an agent in the Commissary Department; with the peace, he’d taken a turn as a speculator, which had gone badly. For money, Reynolds had pushed Maria into prostitution, conducted in their marital bed, her gentlemen clients tacking their requests to the wall at the top of the stairs. It was for a more regular source of funds that James Reynolds thought of Hamilton. He was, by widening reputation, libidinous.
No physical description of Maria exists aside from Hamilton’s once terming her “a Beauty in distress.” If not fully beautiful, she was at least alluring, and it’s a fair guess that Maria Reynolds did not look much like the prim, matronly Betsey Hamilton. She had some social connections: She was related to the New York Livingstons, ironically enough, through her sister’s husband. The tortured grammar and hilarious spelling of her letters make it clear she was a long way from gentry. Rather, Maria was like a lot of women in a time of upheaval—poor, ill educated, unemployable, trapped in a bad marriage, and eager to improve her luck. But she had a slyness to her, one that was obscured by a jumpy manner that sometimes lurched into screaming hysteria. (Curiously, Hamilton had similar qualities, although his hysteria was manifest as furious indignation.) But Maria Reynolds’s quicksilver moods, shifting from light-fingered seduction to pounding rage, may have been part of the enchantment for Hamilton, even as they were part of the hazard, too. They allowed him to soothe her.
The long, tortured melodrama began one evening that summer of 1791 with a knock on the door of the Hamiltons’ fashionable brick house, not far from the cooling breezes of the Delaware River. Hamilton opened the door and discovered a young woman who, obviously in some distress, asked to speak to him, alone. Since his wife and children were home, Hamilton quietly ushered Reynolds into a side parlor off the entrance hall, and he closed the door. A telling gesture, that secrecy. He knew to keep this visitor from his wife. Once the two were secluded, Maria Reynolds introduced herself and then blurted out the story her husband had crafted for her—that James Reynolds had treated her “very cruelly,” presumably with his fists, then abandoned her, for another woman no less, and left her “destitute.” Was it raining that night—or does it only seem as though it was, since damp clothes, chilled skin, and dripping hair would do much to convey the sensual appeal of this beleaguered young woman. Hamilton immediately saw a woman in need; it didn’t occur to him until shortly afterward that she could be taken advantage of. Perhaps Hamilton saw his mother, another fallen woman who’d been treated harshly by fate. Hamilton’s grandson, the alienist Allan McLane Hamilton, sees his ancestor’s own sexual fall as a mark of distinction. Only men of the “highest order of intelligence [would] impulsively plunge into the underworld in obedience to some strange prompting of their lower nature.” More likely, Hamilton’s prompting was quite familiar.
Hamilton said only that her situation was “very interesting” and offered to bring “a small supply of money” with him to her home a few blocks away, on South Fourth Street. They did not discuss what the money would purchase.
Then: “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.”
“Other than pecuniary consolation”—surely one of the more artful terms for adulterous sex, and comical for a treasury secretary. This passage appears in the Reynolds Pamphlet, Hamilton’s oddly unabashed account of the affair that he wrote years later when he needed to clear his name. For Mrs. Reynolds, of course, pecuniary consolation would be of primary interest. While she might profess otherwise, she did not live to be ravished by the treasury secretary. It was he who hoped there was more to it.
Hamilton provided the nonpecuniary sort of consolation over and over, first in her bedroom, separate from her vanished husband’s, and then, once Betsey took the children to her father’s in Albany in mid-July, in the Hamiltons’ bedroom upstairs at home. As the summer went along, Hamilton sent his wife a loving letter begging her to stay in the country for her health, or the children’s, all the while exclaiming how much he missed her. “I am so anxious for a perfect restoration of your health that I am willing to make a great sacrifice for it,” he told her.
If Hamilton had allowed himself to think that Maria was indeed all his, and that her husband had indeed fled the scene, he soon received a rude awakening when Maria gaily told him that she and her husband had affected a “reconciliation” and they would live together as man and wife once more. This could not have been good news, but Hamilton professed to be pleased.
His mood must have darkened when Maria told him that her husband traded on private information from sources in the Treasury Department. Things only got worse when James Reynolds showed up at Hamilton’s door. He is nowhere described, but the evidence suggests a blunt, rough-hewn sort of man who was not Hamilton’s type. Reynolds expressed no outrage at Hamilton’s relationship with his wife and made no immediate effort to exploit the connection but mentioned he had the name of the Treasury Department official who had fed him tips. Perhaps Hamilton would like to know who it was? Hamilton must have nodded, for Reynolds told him: the notorious speculator William Duer.
As it happened, Duer had left his office in disgrace almost two years before en route to far greater shames to come, making Reynolds’s information very much old news. Reynolds made a request anyway—for a job at Treasury. Not inclined to oblige him, Hamilton regretted to say that nothing was available. Reynolds left irritated.
Reynolds acted as if his wife and Hamilton were just good friends, but Hamilton couldn’t believe anyone could be so stupid. But then, he was foolish enough to believe Mrs. Reynolds was in love with him. If she was extracting money from him, he preferred to think it was only because she was being forced to by her husband. She herself had a different stratagem: She played up the desperation of her circumstances, knowing that Hamilton would respond to a woman in need. “I need not acquaint that I had Ben Sick all moast Ever sence I saw yo as I am sure you already no it Nor would I solicit a favor wich is so hard to obtain wer
e It not for the Last time,” Maria Reynolds began one wheedling letter. The lure is clear, and rather sophisticated. She isn’t going to ask for money; she is going to make Hamilton want to offer it. “Yes Sir Rest assurred I will never ask you to Call on me again I have kept my Bed those tow dayes and now rise from My polliow which your Neglect has filled with the sharpest thorns.” Her pain will be Hamilton’s. “I can neither Eat or sleep I have Been on the point of doing the moast horrid acts at I shudder to think where I might been what will Become of me.” Hamilton is killing her. “Let me Ingreat you If you wont Come to send me a Line oh my head I can rige no more do something to Ease My heart or Els I no not what I shall do for I cannot live.”
Altogether, it is quite a plea—and it plays on all of Hamilton’s sensitivities. However ferocious he may have been in political circles, he was kittenish in domestic ones, especially where women and children were concerned. But now any kindness to Mrs. Reynolds, of course, was an unkindness to Mrs. Hamilton. He vowed to forswear the pleasures of the lady, but whenever he tried to disentangle himself, she voiced such noisy, tear-stained hysteria that Hamilton had to hurry to her, if only to keep her quiet. “All the appearances of violent attachment, and of agonizing distress at the idea of a relinquishment, were played with a most imposing art,” Hamilton complained later, too late. At the time, Hamilton couldn’t believe a woman would be so calculating. But he couldn’t stay away. “My sensibility, perhaps my vanity, admitted of real fondness,” he admitted. He was determined to withdraw, but cautiously.
THIRTY-ONE
Sober Among the Drunks
THEODOSIA’S WORSENING ILLNESS deterred her from leaving New York to join her husband in Philadelphia that December of 1791, when Hamilton’s tawdry affair had been going on for six months, so Burr lodged alone with an elderly mother and her daughter, both widows, who must have made poor company. The mother was so utterly stone-deaf, Burr wrote Theodosia, that the woman had asked him not to bellow to make himself heard—“for fear of injuring [his] lungs.” He found greater sociability in a circle of illustrious wives who were aglow over the dashing new senator’s clever insights and sly humor, and he quickly became so popular with the ladies that Theodosia grew alarmed when she got wind of it. He tried to reassure her that the “reports of my life style are . . . much too absurd to gain belief.” But the truth was, as he admitted, that he had received “many invitations to dine &tc.” For a man so skilled at deception, whom he was hiding, and what, she could not have guessed. For during this period he was using his reputation as a gallant as cover for far more shadowy activities than romantic ones. For he sent, via a certain “Mrs. Gilbert,” a number of light, teasing letters to his friend Peter Van Gaasbeck detailing a variety of frolics with different women in town. Anyone who intercepted such a letter would simply assume that, since this was Burr, it was about some harmless romantic misadventures. But a closer look would reveal that Burr’s tone, ordinarily mellifluous, turns oddly stiff in places, and no “Mrs. Gilbert” was known to exist in his orbit. More likely, these letters hid behind Burr’s caddish reputation to convey coded messages directing Van Gaasbeck to engage in financial speculations of the sort that Burr was increasingly keen on as his finances grew ever more desperate. And if these meant investing in the Hamiltonian banks that his Jeffersonian colleagues decried—who would ever know?
When Theodosia finally did visit early the following year of 1792, she brought a “companion,” Mrs. Mary Allen, known to all the Burrs as “Mama,” who likely doubled as a nurse for the increasingly frail Mrs. Burr, and the two were installed with her husband at the widows’. Whether it was the rigors of her illness, the agonies of a long, jolting trip, her prejudice against the dour Quakers, or her growing resentment of the gay social life her husband enjoyed without her, Theodosia responded to Philadelphia with a loathing unusual for her, calling it “the most inhospitable region that ever was inhabited.” She complained bitterly about everything from the tedious streets to the dull parties that might glory in displaying a “footman with a silver breadbasket.” Anticipating this reaction, Burr had offered to have her stay at his cousin’s house ten miles out of town, but Theodosia wouldn’t hear of being closeted away in the woods. Still, the whole prospect of her visit, combined with the “absurd and irrational way of life,” had shaken her husband’s own delicate health and left him “sitting with my feet in warm water, my head wrapped in vinegar and drinking chamomile tea.” When Theodosia departed with her “Mama,” she never returned. The next time she saw her husband, months later, it was in Trenton, New Jersey.
AFTER HIS WIFE’S departure, Burr moved to a boardinghouse run by Mrs. Mary Coles Payne, whose toothsome daughter Dolley lived nearby with her husband, the lawyer John Todd, and their two small boys. Bright and curvaceous, she was the sort of woman who would command any man’s attention, and she took a firm hold of Burr’s. When the vicious yellow fever epidemic burned through Philadelphia in 1793, Todd and one of the boys both died of it. A murderous disease of black vomit and jaundiced skin, it killed twenty Philadelphians a day, leaving corpses in the street, and, after the statehouse doorman was found dead one morning, scattering the members of the state legislature who’d assembled to reassure the citizenry that all was well. Hamilton came down with the fever, and he immediately retreated with Betsey and the children to a summer residence on a hill outside of the city. There, in a startling twist of fate, he was attended by Ned Stevens, Hamilton’s doppelgänger from Saint Croix, now a distinguished Philadelphia physician. Like the newspapers, dress, and so much else, the treatment of the disease took a political cast. Hamilton had little faith in the esteemed Republican doctor Benjamin Rush, who dashed about the city, treating the afflicted with what Hamilton considered the feudal techniques of bleeding and purging, which offered few cures. Stevens addressed Hamilton’s case more benignly, letting the body heal itself, as he prescribed only gentle sedatives and an antiemetic of chamomile flowers. It worked. While Hamilton convalesced, Washington sent a note of paternal concern, plus six bottles of “vintage wine.” Jefferson snickered to Madison about how the “timid” Hamilton surely suffered only from “autumnal fever.” The Federalists received a lift when, after Hamilton recovered in just five days, he publicized Stevens’s methods—an implicit rebuke to Rush, who fired back that Hamilton’s “remedies” were no more popular in Philadelphia than his “funding system” was in Virginia. He likewise refused to believe Hamilton had ever had yellow fever at all. From Hamilton’s perspective, the yellow fever had one unquestionably good result: It so disrupted the city’s economy that it wrecked the finances of the National Gazette and put its sharp-quilled editor, Philip Freneau, out of work as a political saboteur.
Burr took his own advantage of the scourge. He provided legal services, gratis, to the distraught widow, Mrs. Todd, and became her “trusted friend and advisor,” as he put it, and possibly more, as well. The intimacy was such that she named Burr the sole guardian of her surviving son in the event of her death. Burr introduced her to his party leader, James Madison, whom Hamilton by now could not abide. But Burr could see the service could be helpful. Madison was known to be in the market for a wife, but he was still embittered by the humiliating rebuff of Kitty Floyd, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a New York congressman, after they’d become engaged a decade before. Thomas Jefferson had pushed Floyd on his acolyte as possessing “every sentiment in your favor which you could wish.” For all his intellect, Madison was rather stony—a “gloomy, stiff creature,” one political wife termed him, “the most unsociable creature in existence.” Floyd’s rejection had cut Madison so deep, he expunged every reference to the courtship from his correspondence. But Burr had reason to think he was ready to attempt matrimony once more, this time with the greater confidence of a statesman. Not only did Burr press Madison’s case, but so did Martha Washington, and the young widow could not help but be dazzled by all the attention. As she scribbled excitedly to her friend Eliza Collins, “Aa
ron Burr says that the great little Madison has asked to be brought to me this evening.” They met by candlelight, and they were both enthralled, although he perhaps a little more. He was forty-three, she twenty-six. They were married in September. Since Jefferson was widowed, Dolley Madison served as hostess for a range of presidential events during his administration. And when her husband was elected president, Dolley played the role for real, setting the elegant standard for first ladies that would survive for generations.
WHILE BURR DIDN’T bother much with governance, he was fascinated by politics, and brilliant at it, divining where the real power lay and then grabbing some of it for himself. He could tell who was on the rise and who was set to fall and could sense the seismic shifts in the electorate before they were evident to anyone else. And, with his gift for common speech and his unforgettable black eyes, he knew how to attract attention from powerful men who thought they could advance their cause by advancing his. Burr knew it wouldn’t hurt his prospects to furnish Madison—second to Jefferson as the most powerful man in the emerging Republican Party—with a curvaceous young bride and was brazen in doing so. And there was something about the way Burr conducted himself—so poised, and yet so self-contained—that had the look of a comer.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 25
