Just a year into Burr’s Senate career, the patriot-physician Benjamin Rush enlisted Mr. John James Beckley—the multitentacled Republican functionary and close confidant of Jefferson who, Rush said, “possesses a fund of information about men and things”—to hand deliver to Burr a letter in which he declared that the man had a future. Burr’s “friends everywhere look to take an active part in removing the monarchical rubbish of our government,” Rush said. Friends, of course, that Burr might not have realized he had. Rush recommended Burr write to the old Boston revolutionary Samuel Adams, cousin of the vice president, to ask him to spread his name throughout the Federalist stronghold of New England.
Rush, however, could not know for sure if Burr was on his side. No one could. At a time when party affiliation was becoming nearly as fundamental as gender, Burr refused to make a public declaration. Writing to Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris likened an independent to an abstainer at a bacchanal: “You, who are temperate in drinking, have never perhaps noticed the awkward situation of a man who continues sober after the company are drunk.” In New York, the line between Federalist and Republican was not so bright as elsewhere, but that blurriness ended at the border. To Burr, being an “abstainer” posed certain advantages. He could keep his head while everyone else was losing theirs to radical party positions, retaining some healthy self-interest at a time of wild political excess. Uncommitted, he was sure to receive some highly enticing entreaties from each side. Finally, neutrality would leave him perfectly positioned for a chance at national office, something that would otherwise be inconceivable for a first-term senator of so little accomplishment. At a time when the country was almost perfectly split between the parties, Burr could see that electoral success would come only to the man who appealed to more than one side of the divide.
Maintaining his distance from the party barons, Burr kept his primary political affiliation to a small band of well-positioned political operatives who soon became known as Burrites. They extended Burr’s reach from his base in New York and into the Republican bastion of Virginia and even further south, as well as north into the Federalist enclave of New England. In an era when no one actively campaigned for office, every politician relied on so-called friends to perform the humiliating political service of asking for votes from the citizenry, but few were able to enlist so many who would die for him. Soldiers of the revolution, many of these Burrites, they saw themselves as the true keepers of the flame of 1776, but then, virtually every public man did. They were distinguished in selecting Aaron Burr, hero of Quebec and Westchester County, as their Washington. Not without a trace of jealousy, Hamilton derided the band as Burr’s “myrmidons,” referring to the select warriors of Achilles. No one else in politics—not even Washington—had such a crew. Besides Van Gaasbeck, they early on included such men as the vocal Anti-Federalist Melancton Smith; the onetime street brawler for the Sons of Liberty Marinus Willett; and the physician-politician Dr. Isaac Ledyard. They would soon be joined by the brass-knuckled lawyer John Swartwout, who would bring in his two brothers, and the printer Matthew Livingston Davis (later Burr’s first biographer), plus the freelance politicos Theodorus Bailey and David Gelston, and finally Burr’s stepson, Theodosia’s Bartow Prevost, and perhaps half a dozen others. All these men had one thing in common: They would do anything for Burr, and ultimately most of them did.
IT WAS DR. Ledyard who provided the first political service as a Burrite, and he did so just months into Burr’s term. Looking ahead to the next gubernatorial election in New York, Hamilton and Schuyler were plotting once again to topple Governor Clinton from his perch, and they were inclined to turn once again to supreme court justice Robert Yates to be their candidate. As if to demonstrate Burr’s malleability, Hamilton and Schuyler tipped the Burrite Ledyard to an electrifying piece of news: Yates wouldn’t run, or, as they put it, was “resigning his pretentions.” Ledyard had Schuyler convey to Hamilton a better choice: Why not Burr? He’d worked against Clinton once before, as Hamilton surely recalled, as he also surely recalled that Burr subsequently served in Clinton’s administration. This for-and-against quality of Burr’s would surely spell victory—a claim that Burr, and Burrites, would make again. Ledyard saw the race as basically even since Clinton had won by fewer than five hundred votes the last two times around. That provided Burr’s opening. Ledyard enlisted the Federalist James Watson to play up the virtues of Burr’s political independence: “The cautious distance observed by this gentleman toward all parties, however exceptional in a politician, may be a real merit in a governor,” Watson lectured Hamilton, unnecessarily. Anticipating Hamilton’s objection that Burr wasn’t enough of a Federalist for his taste, Ledyard claimed to have pressed Burr into an “artless declaration” of his political beliefs. It proved there were only two unshakable ones. Burr believed in the Union and in the “wisdom & integrity” of Hamilton.
As artless declarations go, these were pretty slick. Regarding the latter, he must have assumed that Hamilton would fall for such flattery. As for the former, what did it mean to “believe in the Union”? Which union—Hamilton’s, Jefferson’s, or one of Burr’s own imagining? No fool, Hamilton could tell an artful declaration from an artless one, and he rejected the idea of Burr for anything. It was the first active breach between them. The two had no basis for an alliance, but the rejection confirmed their separation. Hamilton turned instead to his old friend the reliable Federalist John Jay, then serving as the chief justice of the United States, and persuaded him to take on Clinton.
And so it was on: Clinton versus Jay, the “Old Incumbent,” as the long-serving Clinton was known, and the sharp, angular Jay. Burr would be on the ballot too. For when the votes were finally tallied in early May, it appeared there were some serious irregularities in the three upstate counties of New York’s somewhat raucous western frontier. In one of them, Otsego County, the current sheriff had apparently not continuously overseen the sealed ballot boxes, as required by law, because there was no current sheriff, only a former one, Richard R. Smith, a Clinton appointee whose term had just expired. Nonetheless, he’d taken charge of the ballots—and then passed them on to his deputy, which only made a bad situation worse. The Federalists were in high dudgeon over the matter. But they had problems of their own, chiefly charges that the Federalist candidate for lieutenant governor, Stephen Van Rensselaer, the lordly upstate patroon who was Schuyler’s son-in-law, had coerced his many tenants into giving him their vote. To counter that charge, Hamilton had his old friend James Kent, loyal Federalist, assert that the loyal Clintonians, the Livingstons, had driven their tenants to the polls like “sheep to slaughter.”
Each side accused the other of trying to steal the election, and each side had its reasons. Under New York statutes, contested elections were left to the state’s two senators to resolve, and one of them, of course, was Aaron Burr. Given all the vitriol, and his own involvement in the election, this was not a plumb assignment, but for Burr, there was an extra hazard: It would force him to take sides and declare to the world whether he came down as a Republican or a Federalist. Impressively, New York’s other senator, Rufus King, managed to sidestep the politics and declared that virtually all the ballots should be accepted, regardless of whether they’d been properly overseen by a sheriff or whether there was the possibility of coercion, so long as their intent was clear. This benefited the Clintonians unduly. Burr was more selective in his reasoning. He drew on an obscure English precedent to decide that consistent and proper oversight of the ballot box was essential to the democratic process. And he recommended the tossing out of hundreds of Federalist ballots where continuity was compromised, enough to hand the election to Clinton.
“I was obliged to give an opinion,” he later declared, “and I have not yet learned to give any other than which my judgment directs.” Thus Burr exchanged the low moral ground for the high one. What’s more, he insisted that he expected no “friendship” from Clinton in return. “I have too many reaso
ns to believe that he regards me with jealousy and malevolence.” If he had, he had fewer reasons now. Republican potentates in Philadelphia could not have failed to take note that Burr had returned a loyal Republican to the governor’s chair of a large and pivotal state in time for a national election. In their happiness, party elders had another thought: that Aaron Burr might not make a bad vice president after all.
THIRTY-TWO
I Have Been So Cruelly Treated
THE LAST FEW months of 1791, after Burr joined the Senate, were a frantic time for Hamilton even by his own hyperkinetic standards. He had promoted a Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures to create a demonstration project that developed an elaborate British-style manufacturing plant, harnessing the power of the surging Passaic River in New Jersey to produce state-of-the-art goods from sailcloth to beer. Hamilton was convinced that such innovation would ignite an American industrial revolution that would create economic independence just as the war had achieved a political one. It was to be backed by private interests with the blessing of the government—and it depended on some connivance, as it meant securing closely guarded industrial secrets that had been smuggled out of England by several spies who had skulked about the British factories, made precise mental models of the proprietary machinery, and returned to re-create them in America. Now, in December, he delivered his monumental Report on Manufactures, detailing the conceptual framework for such an initiative, and why it was so essential to American prosperity. Hamilton could see that America would never rise as a nation of farmers; it would only become a world power by industry. Of course, Republicans like Jefferson and Madison found such talk abominable. To them, it was not just contrary to the spirit of America, but positively hellish—dark Satanic mills looming over the sylvan paradise of America. Like assumption, like his national bank before it, Hamilton’s plans for American manufacturing pounded a wedge between the parties.
While that disagreement smoldered, Hamilton’s other duties continued. Thursday morning, December 15, 1791, he met with George Hammond, the first British minister to the United States, to discuss the Indian wars on the western frontier; and, in response to a letter from Jeremiah Olney, the collector of taxes in Providence, Rhode Island, considered the exact duty to be leveled on imported coffee beans.
Then came another piece of business: an urgent note from Mrs. Reynolds that revealed her husband was threatening to reveal everything to Hamilton’s wife.
Dear Sir
I have not tim to tell you the cause of my present troubles only that Mr. has rote to you this morning and I know not wether you have got the letter or not and he has swore that If you do not answer It or If he dose not se or hear from you to day he will write Mrs. Hamilton he has just Gone oute and I am a Lone I think you had better come here one moment that you May know the Cause then you will the better know how to act 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
The letter was a thicket of contradictions—deploring her husband’s threats and endorsing them; pitying Hamilton and threatening him; wanting him and giving him all the more reason to stay away. But that was the least of it. What would come of this nightmare? By then, her husband’s note had likely already arrived, giving Hamilton a first look at the hell that awaited him. If Maria’s was all quivering anxiety, James’s was one massive imposition, as if the man himself had burst into Hamilton’s office and started shouting: “I am very sorry to find out that I have been so Cruelly treated by a person that I took to be my best friend instead of that my greatest Enimy.”
And, to squeeze Hamilton a little more, he explained how he’d found out, although surely he’d known from the beginning. He’d come home to find his wife crying over a letter from Hamilton. His wife had written one back. He’d copied it surreptitiously and then secretly followed hers on its journey to Hamilton’s door. Then came the confrontation and her tearfully revealing “everything.”
Reynolds rounded on the treasury secretary. “And there Sir you took advantage a poor Broken harted woman. instead of being a friend, you have acted the part of the most Cruelist man in existance, you have made a whole family miserable.” Lest Hamilton miss the point, he added in his next letter, “it shant by onely one family that’s miserable.”
As if to show Hamilton that he was dealing with a lunatic—surely a terrifying prospect for a paragon of reason—he goes on to make clear his family has been the one to suffer, and he is now determined to make everything worse.
“I am Robbed of all happiness in this world I am determed to leve [Maria]. and take my daughter with me that She shant see her poor mother.”
With some sangfroid, Hamilton invited Reynolds to come see him. When Reynolds arrived at Hamilton’s Treasury office, Hamilton asked him what evidence he had of any affair. Reynolds produced none, although surely they both knew the truth of the matter, just as they both knew that the only question was the price at which it was to be resolved. Hamilton’s impatience mounting, it took several more meetings, one at the George Tavern, for Reynolds to settle on the sum. For one thousand dollars, Reynolds would leave town with his daughter and go “where my Friend Shant here from me.” For a secretary of the treasury who made only thirty-five hundred dollars a year, a thousand dollars was a substantial sum. Still, it was cheaper than the alternative. “To prevent an explosion,” Hamilton agreed to pay it in two installments and put a “plaister on his wounded honor.”
Hamilton was determined to have nothing further to do with Mrs. Reynolds. But then James wrote again a few weeks later. His wife, he wrote, “wish to see you. And for My own happiness and hers. I have not the Least Objections to your Calling, as a friend to Boath of us.” But he let Hamilton know that he would appreciate anything he had to “offer” for this pleasure.
Hamilton stayed away, and continued to, even as the entreaties mounted. Maria missed him, she was sleepless, she was agonizingly sick, sure to die, and if not from illness, by her own hand.
Finally, in March of 1792, Hamilton could stay away no longer, and he went to Mrs. Reynolds. The next morning, Mr. Reynolds wrote to express his horror at what Hamilton had done with his wife. At his request, Hamilton offered a check for ninety dollars. When good sense prevailed, and Hamilton shied away again, Mrs. Reynolds, her spelling suddenly improved, wailed that “all consolation is shut against me.” That visit cost forty-five dollars, the next thirty.
Whenever his ardor ebbed, she would send him a wailing love note, her words a cacophony of high emotion and bad spelling: “I shal be miserable till I se you and if my dear freend has the Least Esteeme for the unhappy Maria whos greateest fault Is Loveing him he will come as soon as he shall get this and till that time My breast will be the seate of pain and woe adieu.”
Then, a practical note. “P. S. If you cannot come this Evening to stay just come only for one moment as I shal be Lone.”
And on it went: Hamilton’s resistance provoked Maria’s entreaties, which led to his acquiescence, James Reynolds’s outrage, and Hamilton’s payment. The carnival continued all through the fall of that year, and then bad became a lot worse when Jacob Clingman joined the Reynolds conspiracy. If Reynolds had been a worry, Clingman was a fright. For he was not only disreputable; he was politically connected, having been a clerk of Frederick A.C. Muhlenberg, a Pennsylvania congressman who had served as the first Speaker of the House. More audacious than the Reynoldses, but no more competent, Clingman persuaded Reynolds to join him in a hopeless scheme to pass themselves off as the executors of the estate of a Revolutionary War soldier named Ephraim Goodenough in order to divert its funds to their own account. That plot was soon discovered and the culprits remanded to jail. Clingman played his Muhlenberg connection to get out that very afternoon, but Reynolds was left to rot, much of the time spent deciding how to play
the only card he had: “disclosures injurious to the head of a Department.” Curiously, he did not have Hamilton in mind, but another unnamed source of privileged information in the department. When the claims came to the attention of Oliver Wolcott Jr., Hamilton’s subordinate at Treasury, he arranged for Reynolds’s release in exchange for his testimony.
The charges against Clingman were still pending, and, to save himself, Clingman offered up Hamilton to Muhlenberg, as someone he might “injure, very substantially.” The prospect of bringing down the genius behind the Washington administration, the titular head of the Federalist Party, and the source of all the economic plans—it was irresistible, and Muhlenberg hurried the news to James Monroe. After Madison, he was the third most powerful Republican, and a tall but generally uninspiring Virginian, who drew his power from his association with the two more powerful Republicans, starting with Jefferson. Muhlenberg then shared the word with Representative Abraham Venable, a rare Virginian of the Federalist persuasion, to make any inquiry seem less of a partisan inquisition than it was. Monroe and Venable immediately had a talk with Clingman. “He affirmed he had a person in high office in his power, and has had a long time past,” Monroe and Venable later reported. “That [Hamilton] had written to him in terms so abusive that no person should have submitted to it, but that he dared not to resent it.” Reynolds said his information would cause the secretary to “hang.”
The Virginians went to see Mrs. Reynolds, the beauty at the center of all the drama. She mentioned receiving many letters from Hamilton but did not offer them. The gentlemen assured Mrs. Reynolds that Hamilton’s reputation for probity was “immaculate.” She must have smiled as she replied that she “rather doubted it.”
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 26
