Alexander Hamilton

by Chernow, Ron

  In a new tack, Hamilton carried the battle into enemy territory: the pages of the National Gazette itself. Two days after telling Washington that he could not stop his polemics, he appeared twice in Freneau’s paper. As “Civis,” he warned of a Jeffersonian cabal trying to win power at the next election. In “Fact No. I,” he corrected the continuing Jeffersonian distortions of his belief that a national debt could be a national blessing. He denied that government debt was a good thing at all times and held that “particular and temporary circumstances might render that advantageous at one time, which at another might be hurtful.”78 He also charged the Jeffersonians with hypocrisy for opposing both taxes and debt: “A certain description of men are for getting out of debt, yet are against all taxes for raising money to pay it off.”79

  Within a week, Hamilton had returned to his ideological home, Fenno’s Gazette of the United States, publishing a new series under the name “Catullus.” He had the cheek to praise himself handsomely, saying that the treasury secretary feared no scrutiny into his motives: “I mistake however the man...if he fears the strictest examination of his political principles and conduct.”80 As before, Hamilton limned Jefferson as a despot in disguise, masking political ambitions behind republican simplicity. He contended that Jefferson had first opposed the Constitution, then adopted it from expediency. Hamilton didn’t stop with politics and now slashed at Jefferson’s personal reputation. Hinting that he possessed darker knowledge of his subject’s life, Hamilton intimated that Jefferson was a closet libertine: “Mr. Jefferson has hitherto been distinguished as the quiet, modest, retiring philosopher, as the plain simple unambitious republican. He shall not now for the first time be regarded as the intriguing incendiary, the aspiring, turbulent competitor.” “Catullus” said that Jefferson’s true nature had not been exposed before:

  But there is always “a first time” when characters studious of artful disguises are unveiled. When the vizor of stoicism is plucked from the brow of the Epicurean; when the plain garb of Quaker simplicity is stripped from the concealed voluptuary; when Caesar coyly refusing the proffered diadem is seen to be Caesar rejecting the trappings, but tenaciously gripping the substance of imperial domination.81

  Hamilton was pointing to some deeper knowledge of Jefferson’s private life, perhaps his knowledge of Jefferson’s liaison with Sally Hemings, based on reports from Angelica Church. Notably, Hamilton again used Julius Caesar as an example of the worst sort of tyrant, not as history’s greatest man.

  In responding to Washington’s call for toleration, the only difference between Hamilton and Jefferson was that Hamilton wielded his own pen while Jefferson employed proxies. Between September 26 and December 31, 1792, six essays entitled “Vindication of Mr. Jefferson” came out in the American Daily Advertiser. Jefferson’s protégé from Virginia, Senator James Monroe, wrote five of them and Madison the sixth. The two men had conferred at length with Jefferson at Monticello, and Jefferson sent seven letters to Madison, which Monroe drew freely on in his articles. Monroe tried to exculpate Jefferson from charges that he had opposed the Constitution and wished to repudiate the national debt. In one essay, “A Candid State of Parties,” Madison described the Hamiltonians as “more partial to the opulent than to the other classes of society” and said they wanted to conduct government by “the pageantry of rank, the influence of money and emoluments, and the terror of military force.”82 Before writing the article, Madison received word from John Beckley, clerk of the House of Representatives, that Hamilton had declared unequivocally that Madison was “his personal and political enemy.”83 Things had reached a frenzied state that would have been inconceivable to Hamilton and Madison five years earlier, when they started The Federalist.

  Before breakfast on the morning of October 1, 1792, Jefferson met with George Washington at Mount Vernon and again tried to convince him that Hamilton headed a monarchist plot. According to Jefferson, Hamilton had told him that the “Constitution was a shilly-shally thing of mere milk and water, which could not last and was only good as a step to something better.”84 Washington now lost all patience with Jefferson and his obsessive belief in a nonexistent plot. He told him that “as to the idea of transforming this government into a monarchy, he did not believe there were ten men in the United States whose opinions were worth attention who entertained such a thought.”85 Washington also made it plain that he supported Hamilton’s funding system because it had worked. “That for himself, he had seen our affairs desperate and our credit lost, and that this was in a sudden and extraordinary degree raised to the highest pitch,” Jefferson later wrote.86 Washington said that it did not bother him that some legislators owned government debt, because some self-interest was inescapable in any government.

  Because the president sided with his much younger rival, Jefferson concluded grumpily that the president’s brain must be enfeebled by age and that his opinions showed “a willingness to let others act and even think for him.”87 In despair, Jefferson repeated his intention to retire from the State Department at the end of Washington’s first term (March 1793), though he was to linger until the end of that year. Hamilton had flowered in office and found his identity there, while Jefferson hated the paperwork, had wearied of contesting administration policies, and daydreamed about a return to more peaceful pursuits at Monticello. The job had trapped him among political enemies, and he knew it would be easier to build up his following outside of office. There was no longer any point in trying to convert George Washington. Alexander Hamilton had won.

  TWENTY-ONE

  EXPOSURE

  The turbulent events of 1792—the rise of political parties, the newspaper wars, the furious intramural fights with Jefferson—should have made Alexander Hamilton extra vigilant about threats to his reputation. Now at

  the apex of his power, the thirty-seven-year-old treasury secretary had enemies ready to exploit his every failing. Despite this vulnerability, he continued his affair with Maria Reynolds and went on paying hush money to James Reynolds. His moral laxity and absurd willingness to risk exposure at such a moment remain a baffling conundrum.

  Adding danger was the sudden appearance of a menacing new spectator: Jacob Clingman, a friend of James Reynolds and a former clerk of the erstwhile House Speaker Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania. Arriving at the Reynolds home one day, Clingman was stunned to discover Alexander Hamilton leaving. Several days later, Clingman beheld another dreamlike tableau. He was alone with Maria Reynolds when someone rapped at the door and the treasury secretary entered. Perhaps startled by Clingman’s presence, Hamilton pretended, ridiculously, that he was delivering a message. He handed Maria a slip of paper, explaining that he had been “ordered” to give it to her by her husband, and left. The stupefied Clingman wondered how James Reynolds could boss around America’s second most powerful man. Responding to his inquiries afterward, Maria Reynolds boasted that Hamilton had paid her husband “upwards of eleven hundred dollars.”1 James Reynolds likewise bragged to Clingman that he had gotten money from Hamilton for speculation. An archcritic of Hamilton’s policies, Clingman was predisposed to see such payments as proof of Hamilton conniving with speculators in government securities. On one occasion, Clingman accompanied James Reynolds to visit Hamilton, waited outside, then watched his companion emerge with one hundred dollars. This certified his suspicion of Hamilton’s venality.

  Hamilton claimed that he had tried to terminate his liaison with Maria Reynolds. Whenever he told her that he wanted to break off the relationship, this femme fatale responded with sighs, groans, and weepy theatrics. She would beg to see him one last time and hint that, if denied her wishes, frightful consequences might ensue:

  Yes Sir Rest assuirred I will never ask you to Call on me again I have kept my Bed those tow dayes and now rise from My pillow wich your Neglect has filled with the sharpest thorns I no Longer doubt what I have Dreaded to no but stop I do not wish to se you to say any thing about my Late disappointments No I only do it to Ease a hear
t wich is ready Burst with Greef I can neither Eate or sleep I have Been on the point of doing the moast horrid acts at I shuder to think where I might been what will Become of me. In vain I try to Call reason to aide me but alas there Is no Comfort for me2

  Maria’s maid was kept busy bustling through the night, relaying such erratic notes. One can only imagine Hamilton’s cold sweats and unremitting horror at the thought of discovery by Eliza, who was now pregnant with their fifth child.

  James Reynolds followed current events, and his threatening letters often coincided with key episodes in Hamilton’s public life. Reynolds thought that Hamilton was an unscrupulous official who had given William Duer money for speculation and secretly made thirty thousand dollars from their illicit relationship—false information that he passed along to Clingman. So in late March 1792, as Hamilton grappled with financial panic in New York, James Reynolds forced him to grapple with turmoil in his private life. The day after Duer was imprisoned, both James and Maria Reynolds wrote to Hamilton and tightened the noose. They acted their roles to perfection: James, the strong but aggrieved husband, who had lost his wife’s affections because of Hamilton; and Maria, the fickle, confused wife, hopelessly smitten with her lover, who gave way to operatic ravings and invocations of her cruel fortune. Did Hamilton find it poignant or merely grotesque that she still addressed him in writing as “Colonel Hamilton” and “Sir”?

  In the letters sent after Duer’s arrest, Maria Reynolds spouted poppycock about how she was “doomed to drink the bitter cup of affliction” and how “death now would be welcome.” She renewed her pleas for another visit.3 Simultaneously, James Reynolds told Hamilton that he had no wish to harm him but demanded satisfaction for his loss of domestic felicity. “I find when ever you have been with her. she is Chearful and kind,” James Reynolds explained to Hamilton. “But when you have not in some time she is Quite to Reverse. and wishes to be alone by her self.” This disturbed him, of course, as a loving husband. Maria had told Hamilton that her husband wished to meet him the next evening, so James Reynolds explained, with elaborate mock courtesy, that he hoped to convince Hamilton that “I would not wish to trifle with you And would much Rather add to the happiness of all than to disstress any.”4

  Whatever happened at this meeting, it only emboldened James Reynolds to demand more money. At first, he did so with a cringing humility. A week later, this master of malapropisms wrote to Hamilton, “Sir I hope you will pardon me in taking the liberty I do In troubling you so offen. it hurts me to let you Know my Setivation. I should take it as a protickeler if you will Oblige me with the loane of about thirty Dollars....I want it for some little Necssaries of life for my family, sir.”5 To give a thin veneer of legality to his extortion, Reynolds pretended to be a proud family man who needed loans to tide him over tough times. He even gave Hamilton receipts and promised to repay the “loans.” Four days later, Reynolds again requested money, this time forty-five dollars; the blackmailer was becoming more brazen. In a reply written without salutation or signature, Hamilton told Reynolds of his “scarcity of cash” and informed him with mounting anger, “Tomorrow what is requested will be done. ’Twill hardly be possible today.”6 The man who felt no need to placate Thomas Jefferson or James Madison had to grovel before the raffish James Reynolds, whom he later described bitterly as “an obscure, unimportant, and profligate man.”7 He was so frightened of Reynolds that he wrote to him in disguised handwriting, lest Reynolds use it as “the engine of a false credit or turn it to some other sinister use,” Hamilton said.8

  On April 17, 1792, Reynolds informed Hamilton that his adulterous romance with Maria had destroyed their marriage: “She has treated me more Cruel than pen cant paint out. and Ses that She is determed never to be a wife to me any more.” In his most self-effacing mode, Reynolds said that he would not chide Hamilton: “I Freely forgive you and dont wish to give you fear or pain a moment on the account of it.”9 On the other hand, he continued, it lay in Hamilton’s power to make some amends, and he said that he would come to Hamilton’s office—which must have made the latter quake. Six days later, Reynolds demanded another thirty dollars and said he would await an answer at Hamilton’s office.10 In his letters, James Reynolds began to dispense with the fake, effusive professions of friendship and got straight down to business.

  On May 2, 1792, James Reynolds sent Hamilton a letter that fully awakened him to the dire threat to his career. Hamilton already had political troubles enough: he was about to attend an emergency meeting to rescue the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures from William Duer’s embezzlement. In this letter, Reynolds explained that he had hoped Maria’s infatuation for Hamilton would gradually subside. Since this had not happened, Reynolds declared, he would prohibit Hamilton from visiting her. Reynolds also reproached Hamilton for always sneaking in the back door of their house, as if he was ashamed to visit them. With a flamboyant show of self-pity, Reynolds asked, “am I a person of Such a bad Carector. that you would not wish to be seen in Coming in my house in the front way.”11 It now dawned on Hamilton belatedly that the blackmail scheme might have a political dimension: he remembered the “accidental” encounter with Jacob Clingman at the Reynolds house. Were his enemies trying to entrap him? Years later, Hamilton described the May 2 letter as a masterpiece: “The husband there forbids my future visits to his wife, chiefly because I was careful to avoid publicity. It was probably necessary to the project of some deeper treason against me that I should be seen at the house. Hence was it contrived, with all the caution on my part to avoid it, that [Jacob] Clingman should occasionally see me.”12 It is strange and almost inconceivable that a man of Hamilton’s cynical worldliness should have taken so long to fathom this danger.

  Sadly, it was the perceived threat to his career, not regret over his pregnant wife, that restored Hamilton to his senses. He finally mustered sufficient willpower and steeled himself against Maria Reynolds’s further entreaties. Her last attempt came on June 2, 1792: “Dear Sir I once take up the pen to solicit The favor of seing again oh Col hamilton what have I done that you should thus Neglect me.”13 This garbled note was followed by a fresh letter from James Reynolds, asking for three hundred dollars to invest in shares of the new Lancaster Turnpike.

  Instead of appeasing Reynolds, Hamilton replied tersely, “It is utterly out of my power I assure you ’pon my honour to comply with your request. Your note is returned.”14 Rebuffed, Reynolds reduced his demand to fifty dollars and threw in a frightening new touch, saying that he would stop by Hamilton’s house that evening. The treasury secretary paid up, but it was the last time Reynolds extorted money from him.

  Hamilton probably thought the whole nightmarish episode had ended when it had only just begun. Incredibly, he had allowed this affair, enacted in the heart of the nation’s capital, to proceed for almost a year. In a letter to a Federalist politician that September, Hamilton continued to present himself as a paragon of virtue, saying, “I pledge myself to you and to every friend of mine that the strictest scrutiny into every part of my conduct, whether as a private citizen or as a public officer, can only serve to establish the perfect purity of it.”15 The treasury secretary, it turned out, did protest too much.

  During the summer of 1792, Hamilton was preoccupied with exposing Freneau’s link with Jefferson and Madison and winning the internecine cabinet warfare. He had neither the time nor the inclination to dally with Maria Reynolds, and this ruined James Reynolds’s plans. The blackmailing couple had moved to a large house on Vine Street, near the corner of Fifth, and hoped to cover costs by renting rooms to “genteel boarders,” as James phrased it. The only snag was that they lacked cash to furnish the rooms.

  As always, James Reynolds exhibited a keenly sadistic sense of timing. On August 22, Eliza Hamilton gave birth to the couple’s fifth child, John Church Hamilton. “Mrs. Hamilton has lately given me another boy, who and the Mother are unusually well,” Hamilton told Washington’s secretary, Tobias Lear.16 Perhaps James Reyn
olds thought that, with a newborn baby, Hamilton might be more easily coerced. On August 24, he wrote and tried to touch him for another two hundred dollars. A week later, he wrote again, lamenting that he had received no reply. Since Hamilton had stopped seeing his wife, James Reynolds seemed to have surrendered all power over him. Perhaps feeling guilty over Maria Reynolds, Hamilton stuck close to home, and in one letter that fall referred to his “growing and hitherto too much neglected family.”17

  The Reynolds affair might never have come to light if James Reynolds and Jacob Clingman had not been charged in mid-November with defrauding the U.S. government of four hundred dollars. The two swindlers had posed as executors of the estate of a supposedly deceased war veteran, Ephraim Goodenough, who had a claim against the government. In their scheme, Reynolds and Clingman prevailed upon one John Delabar to perjure himself and corroborate their story. Goodenough’s name had been selected from a confidential list of soldiers owed money by the government—a list purloined from the Treasury Department. The man who prosecuted Reynolds and Clingman was Oliver Wolcott, Jr., who had been named comptroller of the treasury the previous year. An admirer of Wolcott’s integrity and knowledge, Hamilton had persuaded Washington to appoint him over a competing candidate touted by Jefferson.