The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (30 page)

Not long after they departed, Hamilton was visited by an attractive brunette who introduced herself as Maria Reynolds and blurted out a tearful story of neglect and abuse. She was a New Yorker, she said, a relative of the Livingstons, married to a man named James Reynolds, who had been in the Continental Army’s commissary department during the Revolution. Her husband had left her for another woman, and she hoped that Hamilton, as a fellow New Yorker, would give her enough money to get back to the Empire State and sympathetic relatives.

This, it should be emphasized, is Hamilton’s version of the story. Hamilton said he did not have much cash in his house (an oddity in itself) but would be glad to lend her the money later in the day. Maria gave him her address, 134 South Fourth Street, only a block away from Hamilton’s Third Street home, and departed. That evening, Hamilton put a thirty-dollar bank bill in his pocket and strolled to the Reynolds house. It was as expensive and comfortably furnished as the one Hamilton was renting—a fact that should have aroused his suspicions. A servant led him upstairs to Maria Reynolds’s bedroom, where she greeted him with effusive gratitude and accepted the money. They talked for a while and, as Hamilton later described it, he became aware that “other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.”

Unquestionably, if Hamilton’s version is true, this ranks as one of the easiest seductions on record. But his story raises far more questions than it answers. It seems unlikely that this was the first time Hamilton had met Maria Reynolds—unless he was ready to go to bed with almost any
woman who extended an invitation. It seems more than likely that she and her husband, who was a stock speculator, had managed to inject themselves into some part of Hamilton’s social life in New York or Philadelphia, where she had attracted his amorous attention.

Reynolds was a petty player, but he was not a complete nobody. During the Revolution, he did business with William Duer, later Hamilton’s right-hand man at the Treasury. In 1789, Robert Troup, Hamilton’s college roommate and still a close friend, had given Reynolds a letter of recommendation for a job in the Treasury department. On the record is also a Hamilton meeting with Reynolds in New York, when the speculator played the political ally and reported a Philadelphia smear campaign that portrayed Hamilton as a secret agent working to put one of George III’s sons on an American throne.

Among the Jeffersonians, Reynolds was a name that was synonymous with Hamilton’s supposedly corrupt influence. In 1790 the speculator had traveled to North Carolina and Virginia and bought up promissory notes given to former Continental Army soldiers in lieu of cash during the Revolution. He had conned these patriots into selling him their government paper for next to nothing, then hustled back to New York and made a killing when Hamilton announced his plan to pay the government’s debts at par—face value.

Reynolds had obtained lists of the ex-soldiers’ names from a crooked clerk in Hamilton’s Treasury office. This unsavory deed turned James Madison into a Hamilton opponent. It is hard to believe that this story, which swirled through Congress and became a key reason for Jefferson’s and Madison’s hostility to Hamilton, did not reach the secretary of the treasury’s ears.
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Did pity play a part in Hamilton’s seduction? Did Maria remind him of his mother’s travails with an angry husband and several lovers? Why didn’t the secretary of the treasury consider that he, the most powerful man in Philadelphia, except for President George Washington, might be the target of a plot to ruin his reputation? Was he so deep in his romance with fame that he considered himself invulnerable? Was Maria Reynolds a kind of damaged version of Angelica Church—a woman who made no secret of her attraction to men and her awareness that men desired her? That may be the best answer to Hamilton’s readiness to offer Maria “consolation”—a significant choice of words.

Somehow she must have represented a version of erotic love that fit Hamilton’s new vision of himself as a man of power, with the freedom to seek the kind of pleasure that his wife could not give him. This “grand passion,” as one biographer has called it, would be invoked by thousands of lovers in the dawning age of romanticism to justify their scorn for moral restraint. The ancient Greeks called it
eros
; they saw it as a force that virtually annihilated the self while simultaneously expanding it to mystical dimensions. But in Hamilton’s case, the energy—and not a little of the ecstasy—flowed from the dynamo of fame.
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Another connection to Angelica may also have been on Hamilton’s mind. Jefferson’s newly formed Republican Party had humiliated him in New York by defeating his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, in his bid for reelection to the Senate. The winner was a youthful politician who was emerging as a Hamilton rival: Aaron Burr. This failure may have damaged Hamilton’s relationship to both Betsey and Angelica—especially the latter. A rebuke from Angelica—even the thought of one—would have made Hamilton susceptible to Maria, who was appealing to him as a man of power, pleading for rescue from her abusive husband.

Throughout that humid Philadelphia summer of 1791, Hamilton repeatedly visited Maria in her bedroom—or invited her to join him in the bed he shared with the absent Betsey. In his later account of his infatuation, Hamilton confessed that most of his “frequent meetings” with Maria were “at my own house.” In all these encounters, Maria proved herself a consummate actress. She portrayed herself as a once naïve woman who had married the scoundrel Reynolds at the age of fifteen, had a child by him, and found herself trapped in an ongoing nightmare. He turned her into a prostitute who handed over all the money she received from her clients so he could gamble in the stock market. This victimized version of Maria’s marriage—she actually seems to have been closer to a partner in crime—only increased Hamilton’s passion, without arousing his suspicion.

IV

In the summer of 1791, Hamilton was riding the crest of the huge wave of public enthusiasm he had created by persuading Congress to approve his plan for overhauling America’s public credit. On June 20, when shares of the Bank of the United States went on sale, the first offerings in New
York and other cities had sold out in a matter of minutes. Secretary Hamilton had attempted to check speculation in the bank’s stock by making it expensive to buy. A $400 share required $100 down, the rest to be paid in four semiannual installments. (In modern money, this was roughly $6,000 a share with $1,500 down.) But Congress, already demonstrating an eagerness to please as many people as possible, reduced the opening payment to $25. For this amount, the purchaser got a certificate, soon nicknamed “scrip,” which entitled him to buy the full share at par.
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In less than an hour, the $8,000,000 first issue was oversubscribed by $1,600,000. In five weeks, the value of the scrip soared from $25 to $325. The low opening price enabled almost everyone to get into the game; “scrippomania” swept the nation. Newspapers began printing daily stock quotations. An agitated James Madison told Thomas Jefferson that no one in New York talked about anything but “stock jobbing.” Congressman Henry Lee reported that everyone he knew was investing in the bank. Hamilton, who could have made a fortune by buying shares for himself at far-below-market prices, remained financially pure. But this veritable explosion of fame redoubled his ardor for Maria Reynolds.
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Interesting evidence of the psychological connection between Maria and Angelica is visible in the abrupt fall-off of Hamilton’s letters to his sister-in-law and the no-longer-rapturous expressions of affection in them. In one letter he almost offhandedly remarked that Betsey approved of his loving Angelica “as well as herself”—not the kind of extravagance she had come to expect. Soon he was writing, “I think as kindly as ever of my dear sister in law.” Betsey did not fare much better during these months. In several letters, after a perfunctory profession of love, Hamilton assured his wife there was no need to hurry back from Albany. When she complained that his letters were infrequent, he vowed that he had been writing her almost every day and wondered if sinister conspirators were intercepting his letters.
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When Betsey returned from Albany with the four children, Maria’s visits to the Hamilton home ceased. By this time the treasury secretary had rented a house on Market Street, only a few doors from President Washington’s residence. But Hamilton continued to visit Maria throughout the fall of 1791, while he was deep in another battle with Congress about his proposal to create a major manufacturing metropolis, in part financed by the government, on the banks of the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jer
sey. It was part of his long-range program to make America an industrial rival to Great Britain. This vision of America as an economic powerhouse clashed violently with the Jefferson-Madison vision of a nation of virtuous small farmers, deepening their conviction that Hamilton was a menace.

V

Hamilton wrote two versions of his affair with Maria. In the first, which was never published, he described her as “play-acting” her love for him. In his second draft, he maintained that she had fallen in love with him and this made it extremely difficult to break off their relationship. He blamed his belief in her “real fondness” for him on his vanity. The two drafts probably describe the evolution of their relationship. As a man of the West Indian world with a mother who had slept with many men and may have discussed them in his earshot, he could have had no illusions about a woman’s ability to fake affection.

As the affair continued, Hamilton had to justify it by convincing himself that he had won Maria’s love. This illusion brought pity into play. Rather than break off the affair abruptly, he told himself a “gradual discontinuance” would be best. This self-deception enabled him to continue the affair for another year. Maria contributed to the illusion of heartbreak, Hamilton later ruefully recalled, by producing “all the appearances of violent attachment and of agonizing distress” at the merest hint that the affair would have to end.
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In the late fall of 1791, reality came crashing into Hamilton’s imaginary romance. James Reynolds returned to his wife and professed shock and outrage to discover that she had been seduced. In an interview with Hamilton, he hinted that only a job in the Treasury Department would satisfy him. The secretary put him off with evasions, but in a few days Reynolds was back demanding money. The desperate Hamilton agreed to pay him $1,000 (the equivalent of 20,000 modern dollars) in two installments. This only led to more requests for cash, sometimes described as loans, which Hamilton often had to borrow from friends to pay. Meanwhile, the infatuated secretary continued to visit Maria, with Reynolds’s tacit consent.

Reynolds had another reason for bearding Hamilton. He was in danger of doing jail time for fraud. He and a fellow speculator named Jacob Clingman had made $400 claiming that Clingman was the heir of a soldier
on Reynolds’s list to whom the government owed money. Unfortunately, the soldier turned out to be alive and the comptroller of the treasury, Oliver Wolcott Jr., urged the state of Pennsylvania to arrest both crooks. Like most people, Clingman dreaded the prospect of going to prison; a stay in the vile jails of the eighteenth century was often a death sentence. Clingman expressed skepticism when Reynolds assured him that Hamilton would protect them. One day Clingman waited in the street while Reynolds entered Hamilton’s house and came out with a supply of dollars.

Clingman professed shock at this revelation. He was a political ally of the Jeffersonians and saw Reynolds’s access to the secretary of the treasury as possible proof that Hamilton was using him as a front man to speculate in the market. Clingman turned to a Federalist congressman for whom he had clerked, Frederick A. C. Muhlenberg, briefly the speaker of the House of Representatives. A former minister whose brother had served with distinction as a general in the Revolution, Muhlenberg was a political moderate. He felt sorry for Clingman, who claimed the fraud charge was a misunderstanding; he thought the soldier had died and his claim against the government was legitimately for sale.

Muhlenberg was far more concerned by Clingman’s claim that Reynolds had some sort of illicit connection with Hamilton. The congressman formed an impromptu committee to investigate it. He invited Virginia Senator James Monroe, a passionate ally of Jefferson, and Congressman Abraham Venable, also a Virginia Republican, to join him. They interviewed both Reynolds and his wife, and obtained from them unsigned but seemingly incriminating letters that Hamilton had written to them. Reynolds told them he could prove “the misconduct…of a person high in office.”
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Maria assured them that her husband could “tell them something that would make the heads of [government] departments tremble.”
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Deepening their suspicions was the way Hamilton dealt with the fraud charge against Clingman and Reynolds. When they agreed to return the money and surrender Reynolds’s leaked list of veterans, Comptroller Wolcott dismissed the charge. Whereupon James Reynolds disappeared. Clingman maintained that Hamilton had paid the speculator a great deal of money to depart for some distant destination, perhaps the West Indies.

This was explosive stuff, especially in the overheated atmosphere of December 1792. Jefferson had recently written a scorching letter to President Washington, accusing Hamilton of plotting “to undermine and
demolish the republic.” He had, the secretary of state claimed, “corrupted the legislative branch by dealing out Treasury secrets to his friends.”
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At first, Muhlenberg was inclined to send the committee’s findings to the president. But after much discussion, they decided to confront Hamilton first. His initial response was furious indignation, but he swiftly calmed down when they showed him the incriminating letters in their possession. The secretary of the treasury said he would explain everything if they came to his house that evening.

There, a mournful Hamilton admitted he had written the letters. But they had nothing to do with illegal speculation. Reynolds was blackmailing him for his affair with Maria. The senator and two congressmen expressed surprise at this confession. Hamilton went into painful detail about the way Reynolds had tolerated and even encouraged his later visits to Maria. Within minutes, the embarrassed politicians were saying they had heard more than enough to convince them that the situation had nothing to do with corruption in the Treasury Department. But Hamilton insisted on sharing other intimate letters between him and Maria. By the time he finished, his accusers were all but begging his forgiveness for their invasion of his privacy. As gentlemen, they all agreed that Hamilton’s adultery would remain a secret they would share with no one. The treasury secretary said he was deeply grateful for the way they had handled the humiliating incident.