The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (31 page)

Congressmen Muhlenberg and Venable departed expressing deep sympathy for Hamilton. Senator Monroe, Hamilton noticed, was “more cold.” Monroe could barely conceal his disappointment that Hamilton had apparently escaped unscathed. He wrote a full report of the confrontation for Jefferson and Madison and during the next several weeks met several more times with Jacob Clingman, who reiterated his belief that Hamilton was guilty of far more than infidelity. Clingman made a point of telling Monroe that Mrs. Reynolds had burst into tears when she learned that Hamilton had been exonerated.

When Hamilton had time to think about the confrontation, he began to wonder whether Senator Monroe and his friends would keep their word. He asked Monroe to give him copies of the letters the committee had shown him. They would be important if he ever had to defend himself against fresh accusations. Monroe agreed, and asked the clerk of the House of Representatives, John Beckley, to make the copies. Beckley was
a major behind-the-scenes political operator. The request was tantamount to sharing the secret with the entire Jeffersonian Republican Party. Beckley made copies for his own files, almost certainly hoping that that they would prove useful at some later political moment.

VI

While this drama was playing on a separate stage, Betsey Hamilton thought she had returned from Albany to a loving husband. In one sense of that term, she was correct. She welcomed an apparently amorous Hamilton into her bed and was soon pregnant with her fifth child. In the busy social world of Philadelphia, she proudly accompanied her husband to receptions at the president’s mansion and to dinners and balls at the even more splendid mansion where Anne and William Bingham entertained the city’s elite. Anne Bingham was the equal, perhaps even the superior, of Angelica Schuyler Church when it came to high style and witty conversation. Betsey never tried to compete with her; she was more than content to be Mrs. Alexander Hamilton. She let her husband manage the repartee and the flirtatious remarks.

At home, Betsey supervised the children’s education. Each morning at breakfast, the boys and their sister Angelica read aloud a chapter from the Bible. Betsey ran the house and servants with a masterful hand. Secretary of War James McHenry once teased Hamilton about how well Betsey supervised his household. He claimed she “had as much merit as your treasurer as you have as treasurer of the wealth of the United States.”
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Betsey had excellent taste. She decorated their various homes with Louis XVI–style chairs and portraits by the best painters. Her dresses were stylish and beautifully cut. Her model was Martha Washington. Betsey, too, felt that the demands of public life were distractions from the real source of happiness, her home and children. She agreed wholeheartedly with Martha’s comment that public occasions were mostly “a waste of time.” But Betsey later admitted that as a younger woman, she often enjoyed the parties and balls to which her famous husband escorted her. “I mingled more in the gaieties of the day,” she said.
¹⁷

Once she accepted her secondary role in Hamilton’s all-consuming pursuit of fame, the only thing that troubled Betsey was her husband’s lack of religious faith. He was not hostile to religion; as a young man he had been
devout. His college roommate, Robert Troup, recalled that Hamilton got down on his knees and prayed each night and morning. He had been more than agreeable when Betsey insisted on having their first three children christened at Trinity Church in New York. But he rarely accompanied her and the children to services on Sunday, and when he went, he never received communion. He may have been imitating George Washington, who also declined the sacrament when he went to church with Martha. It was a common practice among thoughtful men in this era. Many of them had been influenced by the renowned English scientist Joseph Priestley’s 1782 book,
The Corruptions of Christianity
, which called for a rational scientific approach to the Bible. Betsey never sat in judgment on Priestley’s book or its readers. Instead, in her quiet, steadfast way, she let Hamilton know more than once that she hoped he would someday regain his youthful faith in a Christian God.

VII

For the next three years Hamilton was engulfed day and night by the political battles of the decade. Again and again, Jeffersonian Republicans in Congress called for investigations of the Treasury Department that required immense labors by Hamilton and his staff. They submitted thousands of pages of documents for scrutiny. Each time, the investigating committee found not a scintilla of corruption to back up their vitriolic shouts and murmurs about Hamilton’s evil ways. But in the back of his mind throughout these years, the memory of Maria Reynolds and the meeting with the congressional investigating committee in 1791 loomed as a demoralizing threat. Some historians speculate that Maria was the reason why Hamilton never tried to push John Adams aside and run for president.
¹⁸

In his last years as secretary of the treasury, Hamilton was harassed not only by endless political attacks; Betsey continued to have children, and he was running short of money. The first time he tried to resign to return to the private practice of law, Washington grew so angry that the two men almost had a quarrel as potentially disastrous as their clash when Hamilton had been the general’s restless aide. Not until January 1795 did the president agree to let him go. But Hamilton continued to advise Washington by letter, and was constantly consulted by his successor at the Treasury, Oliver
Wolcott Jr., and by the new secretary of state, Timothy Pickering. As we have seen, President John Adams kept these men as well as Hamilton’s old friend, Secretary of War James McHenry, in his cabinet. Hamilton’s political power remained immense. He was still the leader of the Federalist Party, in charge of selecting candidates and orchestrating foreign and domestic policies.

The Jeffersonian Republicans were well aware of Hamilton’s central role. After John Adams became president and his detestation of Hamilton became virtually public knowledge, the Jeffersonians made their move. Their hatchet man, John Beckley, exhumed the Maria Reynolds papers from his files and gave them to the most scurrilous journalist in America, James Thomson Callender, abuser of John Adams and every other Federalist politician of note, including George Washington.

Callender was of course delighted with the Reynolds story. Maria had by this time obtained a divorce from her vanished husband, with the help of New York Senator Aaron Burr. She was living in Maryland with Jacob Clingman. Part of Callender’s motive, he claimed, was Hamilton’s pretensions to being “a master of morality”—a reference to his attacks on Jefferson as a secret sensualist. The journalist gleefully declared he would now reveal letters confessing that this “father of a family” had an “illicit correspondence with another man’s wife.” Whereupon Callender published the incriminating letters Hamilton had given Senator Monroe and his fellow investigators in 1791.

Callender and the Jeffersonians were not satisfied with exposing Hamilton’s adultery. “So much correspondence could not refer exclusively to wenching,” the newsman declaimed. “No man of common sense will believe that it did…Reynolds and his wife affirm that it respected certain speculations.” This was the heart of the matter as far as the Jeffersonians were concerned. Callender’s investigation led him to conclude that “there appears no evidence [of a liaison] but the word of the Secretary.”
¹⁹
He accused Hamilton of forging Maria’s misspelled love letters to him to conceal the real crime, James Reynolds’s speculations in the market with the money Hamilton surreptitiously “loaned” him.

What to do about this? Various friends urged Hamilton to ignore Callender. No one else had bothered to answer his abuse. Most Federalists were indignant and on Hamilton’s side. A close friend warned that opening a debate only played into Callender’s hands. He lived on controversy.
But two of the documents that Callender had published wounded Hamilton in a way he could not tolerate. One was the memorandum the Frederick Muhlenberg committee members had signed after their meeting with Hamilton, saying “we left him under an impression our suspicions were removed.” There was more than a faint implication of deception in those words. Even more inflammatory was a memorandum of Senator Monroe’s interview with Jacob Clingman, in which the con man claimed that Maria denied an affair with Hamilton and insisted the story was fabricated to conceal his speculations with her husband. These documents inflicted potentially fatal damage on Hamilton’s reputation as the creator of the nation’s financial system, the essence of his hope for fame.
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At first, Hamilton tried to obtain from the senator and the two congressmen a statement that they had fully believed his explanation of the Reynolds imbroglio. Muhlenberg and Venable promptly complied. But James Monroe was not inclined to do any favors for Hamilton. He was dealing with grievous political wounds of his own. President Washington, in an attempt to better relations with France, had sent Monroe to Paris as America’s ambassador. Monroe had performed unsatisfactorily, often siding with the French against his own government. Washington had recalled him—and Monroe had no doubt that Hamilton had persuaded him to do it.

Monroe told Hamilton he would confirm the first statement (“Our suspicions were removed.”), but he curtly declined to say he disbelieved Clingman. An enraged Hamilton accused Monroe of breaking his solemn promise and leaking the documents. Vitriolic letters flew back and forth, and the two men came close to fighting a duel. Only the intervention of Senator Aaron Burr, who said he believed Hamilton’s version, averted an exchange of gunfire.

Still infuriated, Hamilton decided to do what he had repeatedly done with his critics during his years as secretary of the treasury: silence them with an avalanche of facts. Retreating to Philadelphia in July 1797, he began working sixteen hours a day on a refutation of Callender’s slurs. The result was a mini-book, ninety-five pages long; about a third was a detailed history of his obsession with Maria; the rest was letters and affidavits confirming the truth of what he had said and done.

In its wild-eyed way, the pamphlet was a masterful example of Hamilton’s thrust-and-parry style. He opened his case with a crucial question:
if he had been a crook, out to make a fortune, why would he choose such a penny-ante operator as James Reynolds as a confederate? He claimed the whole story was the result of a “conspiracy of vice against virtue.” The virtue was on the side of the Federalist Party, the vice on the side of the Jeffersonian Republicans, whom Hamilton called “Jacobins”—the French radicals who had guillotined twenty thousand mostly innocent people during their infamous reign of terror.

Seldom, if ever in the history of politics had any man been pursued with such rancor and venom for so little cause, Hamilton declared. But he was sustained by his “proud consciousness of innocence.” He was, of course, referring to his financial integrity—the bulwark of his fame.
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A genuine confession of the heart—if not the head—lay semiconcealed beneath these bellows of defiance: “This confession is not made without a blush…I can never cease to condemn myself for the pang which it may inflict in a busom eminently entitled to all my gratitude, fidelity and love.”

These touching words went unnoticed by most people. Hamilton’s friends were almost unanimously appalled by his interminable narrative. Jefferson, Madison, and their fellow Republicans were delighted. Madison called it “a curious specimen of the ingenious folly of its author.” Jefferson maintained that the narrative “strengthened rather than weakened the suspicions that Hamilton was guilty of the speculations.” James Thomson Callender mocked the author with practiced savagery. He said Hamilton was whining that he was grossly charged with being a speculator “whereas I am only an adulterer.” He again accused Hamilton of forging the Reynolds letters, pointing out inconsistencies in Maria’s supposed misspellings and her unusual vocabulary. Some historians have been inclined to agree with him.
²²

One reader of the pamphlet had a very different reaction. Within a week of its publication, a package containing a silver wine cooler arrived at the Hamilton home on Cedar Street in New York City. The gift was from George Washington. The ex-president said he was sending it “not for any intrinsic value the thing possesses, but as a token of my sincere regard and friendship for you and as a remembrance of me…I pray you to present my best wishes, in which Mrs. Washington joins me, to Mrs. Hamilton and the family, and that you would be persuaded that with every sentiment of the highest regard, I remain your sincere friend and affectionate honorable servant.”
²³

These astonishing words—every one of them carefully chosen—were Washington’s way of saying that he was still a believer in Hamilton’s integrity and his patriotism. There are biblical overtones here—the American father is forgiving his prodigal son.

VIII

The ostensible reason for Washington’s gift was the birth of another Hamilton son. But the baby went unmentioned in the ex-president’s note—underscoring his deeper reason for the present. For Hamilton, Elizabeth’s pregnancy had been an additional complication in these months of political and emotional upheaval. In 1794, she had suffered a miscarriage when Hamilton rode off to western Pennsylvania to crush a tax rebellion that many people feared would escalate into a civil war. Hamilton was concerned that his Maria Reynolds confession might trigger another possibly fatal miscarriage. He seems to have delayed the publication of his booklet until his wife gave birth to a sturdy boy on August 4, 1797.

Another complication in Hamilton’s life was the presence of Angelica Schuyler Church. Angelica had persuaded her husband to return to America with her. Church was immensely wealthy by now. They bought a magnificent house in New York and began entertaining with royal panache. Angelica’s stylish gowns and dripping diamonds reminded more than one New York Jeffersonian Republican of British arrogance. When the Reynolds confession exploded, Angelica was fiercely loyal to Hamilton.