Alexander Hamilton (82 page)

he 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.”
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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 heart 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 me
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.