Alexander Hamilton (87 page)

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.”
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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.
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Perhaps James Reynolds 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.”
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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.

Reynolds and Clingman ended up in a Philadelphia jail. Because the Treasury Department filed the charges, James Reynolds suspected that Hamilton was engaged in a vendetta. He wrote to Hamilton twice, asking for help, but received no assistance. Hamilton then learned from Wolcott that Reynolds was insinuating loudly that he could “make disclosures injurious to the character of some head of a department.”
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Hamilton saw exactly where this was heading and advised Wolcott to keep Reynolds imprisoned until the accusations were cleared up.

Released on bail, Jacob Clingman turned to the most powerful man he knew: his former boss, Congressman Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania. The former House Speaker agreed to intercede on behalf of Clingman but not Reynolds, whom he had heard was a “rascal.” He decided to speak with Hamilton in the company of New York senator Aaron Burr. At the interview, a circumspect Hamilton agreed to do everything consistent with honor to aid Clingman. Muhlenberg persuaded Oliver Wolcott to strike a deal: if Clingman and Reynolds refunded the money defrauded from the government, returned the stolen list of soldiers, and identified the Treasury employee who had leaked the document, then charges against them might be dropped. Evidently, the two men met these conditions by early December 1792. “It was certainly of more consequence to the public to detect and expel from the bosom of the Treasury Department an unfaithful clerk to prevent future and extensive mischief than to disgrace and punish two worthless individuals,” Hamilton later wrote.
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The matter might have ended there except that Clingman kept suggesting darkly to Muhlenberg that he harbored damning information about Hamilton. As Muhlenberg recalled, “Clingman, unasked, frequently dropped hints to me that Reynolds had it in his power, very materially, to injure the secretary of the treasury and that Reynolds knew several very improper transactions of his.”
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At first, Muhlenberg scoffed at this. Then Clingman told him that Hamilton was hip deep in speculation and had provided James Reynolds with money for that illicit purpose. What most impressed Muhlenberg was Reynolds’s contention that “he had it in his power to hang the secretary of the Treasury.”
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Muhlenberg did not believe that he could hide such information, and on Wednesday morning, December 12, he turned to two other Republicans, Senator James Monroe and Representative Abraham B. Venable, both of Virginia. Monroe’s entry into the drama was especially ominous for Hamilton, given his recent
National Gazette
pieces. It is not clear that Hamilton knew that Monroe was the author of these pieces, but he certainly knew of Monroe’s intimacy with Jefferson and Madison.

Thanks to Maria Reynolds, Clingman had some unsigned notes sent by Hamilton to James Reynolds, which Muhlenberg now showed to Monroe and Venable. Hardly reluctant to pursue the charges, the Virginians went straight to see James Reynolds in his prison cell. The prisoner teased them with vague but tantalizing hints that “he had a person in high office in his power and has had a long time past.” He further let drop that “Mr. Wolcott was in the same department” as this mystery person “and, he supposed, under his influence or control.”
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Though the allusion to Hamilton was patent, the wily Reynolds said that he would not divulge more information until he was freed.

Meanwhile, Maria Reynolds was scarcely idle. This artful twenty-four-year-old woman seemed able, on short notice, to secure appointments with high officials. She went to see Pennsylvania’s governor, Thomas Mifflin, who expressed sympathy with her plight. Maria Reynolds told Mifflin about, among other things, her love affair with Hamilton. She also took advantage of the situation to visit her illustrious former lover, who was trying to walk a fine line between official propriety and self-protection. On the one hand, Hamilton echoed Wolcott’s position that Clingman and James Reynolds should return the list of soldiers to the Treasury along with their ill-gotten money. On the other hand, according to Maria Reynolds, Hamilton also pressed her to burn his damaging letters to her husband. Fully aware of the value of these notes as an insurance policy, the siren of Philadelphia politics was smart enough to keep two or three.

Having no notion of any Hamiltonian adultery, Muhlenberg and Monroe visited Maria Reynolds at home on the evening of December 12, seeking more information about alleged financial collusion between Hamilton and her husband. At first, she was not communicative. Only gradually did she open up about business relations and about how she had burned a large number of signed notes that Hamilton had sent to James Reynolds. She said that Hamilton had promised to aid her and had urged her husband to “leave the parts, not to be seen here again…in which case, he would give [her] something clever.” She piqued her visitors’ curiosity by boasting that her husband “could tell something that would make some of the heads of departments tremble.”
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To boost her credibility, she showed them a letter she had received from Hamilton the week before.

It was an eventful day in the life of Alexander Hamilton, who knew that influential legislators had grilled James Reynolds that morning. At some time after midnight, having been freed from prison hours earlier, James Reynolds sent a young female messenger to Hamilton’s house. Then he and Clingman paced outside, awaiting an answer. The girl emerged with a message that James Reynolds should call on Hamilton in the morning. Shortly after sunrise, Reynolds met Hamilton and left a vivid impression of the distraught treasury secretary, who “was extremely agitated, walking backward and forward [across] the room and striking, alternately, his forehead and thigh; observing to him that he had enemies at work, but was willing to meet them on fair ground and requested him not to stay long, lest it might be noticed.”
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Although any account from James Reynolds is suspect, the compulsive pacing and nervous gesticulations were typical of Hamilton. Once the interview was over, James Reynolds vanished from Philadelphia, fleeing either creditors or further prosecution. He had promised Monroe and Venable that he would reveal all at ten o’clock that morning, but the two Virginian legislators now discovered that he “had absconded or concealed himself.”
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The flight of James Reynolds only heightened the suspicions of Muhlenberg, Monroe, and Venable that Hamilton was guilty of official misconduct. They were ready to present their shocking findings to Washington and had already drafted a letter to him. Before sending it, however, they thought it their duty to confront Hamilton with the allegations. On the morning of December 15, the three-man delegation filed into Hamilton’s office, with Muhlenberg taking the lead. Hamilton recalled, “He introduced the subject by observing to me that they
had discovered a very improper connection
between me and a Mr. Reynolds. Extremely hurt by this mode of introduction, I arrested the progress of the discourse by giving way to very strong expressions of indignation.”
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Faced with Hamilton’s wrath, the three legislators reassured him that they were not making any accusations but felt honor bound to discuss the matter with him before reporting to Washington. When they showed Hamilton his own handwritten notes to Reynolds, he instantly—and to their amazement—acknowledged their authenticity. He said that if they came to his house that evening, he would clear up the mystery by showing them written documents that would eliminate all doubt as to his innocence. Oliver Wolcott, Jr., was also invited to attend the meeting.

At home that evening, Alexander Hamilton treated the three Republican legislators to a salacious tale dramatically at odds with the scandalous one they had expected to hear. He had gathered a batch of letters from James and Maria Reynolds and recounted the history of his extramarital affair. Another man might have been brief or elliptical. Instead, as if in need of some cathartic cleansing, Hamilton briefed them in agonizing detail about how the husband had acted as a bawd for the wife; how the blackmail payments had been made; the loathing the couple had aroused in him; and his final wish to be rid of them. When the three legislators realized that the scandal involved marital infidelity, not government corruption, at least one of them “delicately urged me to discontinue it as unnecessary,” Hamilton recalled. “I insisted upon going through the whole and did so.”
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They heard the impassioned, run-on letters from Maria Reynolds and the truculent demands for money from James Reynolds. It was as if Hamilton were both exonerating and flagellating himself at once.

The small delegation seemed satisfied with Hamilton’s chronicle, if not a little flustered by the awkward situation. They apologized for having invaded his privacy. In retrospect, Hamilton detected subtle but perceptible differences in their reactions: “Mr. Muhlenberg and Mr. Venable, in particular, manifested a degree of sensibility on the occasion. Mr. Monroe was more cold, but entirely explicit.”
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In a memo the next day, Monroe wrote, “We left [Hamilton] under an impression our suspicions were removed. He acknowledged our conduct toward him had been fair and liberal—he could not complain of it.”
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Their accusatory letter to Washington was shelved. On the sidewalk afterward, Muhlenberg had drawn Wolcott aside and, with genuine sympathy for Hamilton, said that he wished he had not been present to watch his humiliating confession in such an intimate matter. In contrast, Monroe continued to meet with Jacob Clingman. In early January, Clingman complained to him that Hamilton had been exonerated of charges of official corruption. “He further observed to me,” Monroe wrote afterward, “that he communicated the same to Mrs. Reynolds,
who appeared much shocked at it and wept immoderately.
”
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Muhlenberg, Monroe, and Venable had sworn they would keep the incident confidential. Given that the political world of the 1790s was one vast whispering gallery, Hamilton must have wondered if they would indeed honor their pledge. Two days later, upon reflection, he asked his three interlocutors for copies of the documents they had shown him. In allowing
them
to make the copies, Hamilton made a critical error, for Monroe entrusted the task to John Beckley, clerk of the House of Representatives. Beckley—the cunning, serviceable Jeffersonian loyalist who figured in so many intrigues against Hamilton—decided to preserve a set of papers for himself. For the rest of his life, Monroe refused to admit that he had violated his confidentiality pledge to Hamilton and provided the documents to Beckley. Thus, by December 17, 1792, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison knew about Hamilton’s confrontation with the three legislators. Jefferson chose to misconstrue what had happened, interpreting the event as proof not just of Hamilton’s love affair with Maria Reynolds but of his venal speculation in government securities—exactly what Hamilton had striven to refute. Beckley continued to ply Monroe and Jefferson with unsubstantiated rumors about the treasury secretary.