Alexander Hamilton (74 page)

On August 17, Hamilton wrote a tough-minded letter to Duer, reproaching him for his maneuvers and invoking the South Sea Bubble of 1720. He told Duer that people were whispering that he and his associates were rigging the price of bank scrip through “fictitious purchases” to dupe a gullible public into buying more shares. While adding tactfully that he knew Duer would do no such duplicitous thing, Hamilton made clear that he took these reports seriously: “I will honestly own I had serious fears for you—for your
purse
and for your
reputation
and with an anxiety for both I wrote to you in earnest terms.”
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Hamilton’s letter showed his usual integrity, displaying concern both for Duer as a friend and for the health of the securities market. Then Hamilton compromised himself by tipping his hand and suggesting to Duer an appropriate price for bank stock: “I should rather call it about 190 to be within bounds with hopes of better things and I sincerely wish you may be able to support it at what you mention.”
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It was one thing for Hamilton to employ the Bank of New York to prop up share prices and quite another to enlist a longtime friend and grand-scale speculator as his intermediary. Duer, of course, denied all wrongdoing. “Those who impute to my artifices the rise of this species of stock in the market beyond its true point of value do me infinite injustice,” he pleaded.
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Hamilton’s letter could only have emboldened Duer to believe that he might profit from inside information, and he continued to flaunt his association with the treasury secretary, leading unsuspecting investors to believe he was privy to government plans.

For the moment, Hamilton’s actions halted the slide in financial markets and averted a catastrophic break in prices. Scrip fell back to a more reasonable 110 share price before rallying to 145 in September. For the first time in American history, Hamilton had demonstrated how a financial regulator could steady a panicky market through deft, behind-the-scenes operations. Unfortunately, he had erred in confiding in William Duer, who remained deaf to Hamilton’s admonition that he restrain his speculation.

For Hamilton’s growing legion of critics, the financial mayhem showed the corrosive effect of his financial wizardry. New York merchant Seth Johnson deplored the behavior induced by prodigal trading in bank shares: “Those who gain play in hope of more, those who lose continue in hope of better fortune.”
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For Jefferson, scrippomania brought to the surface all his disgust for the Hamiltonian system, making imperative the need to preserve a pure, agrarian America. “Ships are lying at the wharves,” he wrote that summer, “buildings are stopped, capitals are withdrawn from commerce, manufactures, arts, and agriculture to be employed in gambling, and the tide of public prosperity almost unparalleled in any country is arrested in its course and suppressed by the rage of getting rich in one day.”
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For Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton was more than just dead wrong in his prescriptions. He was becoming a menace to the American experiment, one who had to be stopped at all costs.

NINETEEN

CITY OF THE FUTURE

B
y the summer of 1791, after his victories in his skirmishes with Jefferson and Madison over public credit, assumption, and a central bank, Hamilton had attained the summit of his power. Such stellar success might have bred an intoxicating sense of invincibility. But his vigorous reign had also made him the enfant terrible of the early republic, and a substantial minority of the country was mobilized against him. This should have made him especially watchful of his reputation. Instead, in one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment, he entered into a sordid affair with a married woman named Maria Reynolds that, if it did not blacken his name forever, certainly sullied it. From the lofty heights of statesmanship, Hamilton fell back into something reminiscent of the squalid world of his West Indian boyhood.

Philadelphia had its quota of sensual pleasures. Though French visitors dismissed it as quaintly puritanical, it enjoyed a livelier reputation among Americans. Hamilton and other government officials had access to a nocturnal medley of parties, balls, and plays. These social gatherings were often hosted by federalist merchants. The queen bee of local society was Anne Willing Bingham, wife of the extremely rich William Bingham, who presided over banquets at their opulent three-story mansion near Third Street and Spruce. Far from being prim, Philadelphia gatherings in the 1790s abounded in exposed arms and bosoms, if Abigail Adams is to be trusted. She was shocked by all the female flesh on display at parties: “The style of dress…is really an outrage upon all decency…. The arm naked almost to the shoulder and without stays or bodice…. Most [ladies] wear their clothes too scant upon the body and too full upon the bosom for my fancy. Not content with the
show
which nature bestows, they borrow from art and literally look like nursing mothers.”
¹

The vivacious Alexander and Eliza Hamilton socialized with the Binghams and other affluent couples. Perhaps by that spring, Eliza had felt the strain of their social obligations and needed time to recuperate. In mid-May 1791, knowing that Hamilton was bogged down with work, Philip Schuyler begged Eliza and the four children (plus the orphaned Fanny Antill) to join him in Albany for the summer. To avoid epidemics, many people vacated Philadelphia and other large cities in sultry weather. “I fear if she remains where she is until the hot weather commences that her health may be much injured,” Schuyler confided to Hamilton about Eliza. “Let me therefore entreat you to expedite her as soon as possible.”
²
So due to Schuyler’s tender concern, Eliza and the children left Philadelphia soon after the sensational offering of bank scrip on July 4 and stayed away for the rest of that torrid summer.

It was a dangerous moment for Eliza to abandon Hamilton. He was the cynosure of all eyes, and many people noted his enchantment with women. John Adams carped at his “indelicate pleasures,” Harrison Gray Otis told his wife of Hamilton’s “liquorish flirtation” with a married woman at a dinner party, and Benjamin Latrobe, later the surveyor of public buildings in Washington, branded him an “insatiable libertine.”
³
Such descriptions, though hyperbolic, may have contained a grain of truth: Hamilton
was
susceptible to the charms of beautiful women. Like many people driven by their careers, he did not allow himself sufficient time for escape and relaxation. When Charles Willson Peale painted him in 1791, Hamilton had the air of a commanding politician, his mouth firm, his eyes narrowed with concentration. No trace of joy softened his serious face. He was a volatile personality encased inside a regimented existence.

Whenever he dealt with women, Hamilton shed his bureaucratic manner and reverted to the whimsy of bygone days. Right before the bank subscription, Hamilton received a volume of dramatic verse,
The Ladies of Castille,
from Mercy Warren, a Massachusetts poet, playwright, and historian. Hamilton sent a dashing note of thanks: “It is certain that in the ‘Ladies of Castille,’ the sex will find a new occasion of triumph. Not being a poet myself, I am in the less danger of feeling mortification at the idea that, in the career of dramatic composition at least, female genius in the United States has outstripped the male.”
⁴
His wit with women was often flirtatious. When his friend Susanna Livingston inquired about Treasury certificates she owned, Hamilton apologized for his delay in responding and said that he held himself “bound by all the laws of chivalry to make the most ample reparation in any mode you shall prescribe. You will of course recollect that I am a married man!”
⁵

As the son of a “fallen woman,” Hamilton tended to be chivalric toward women in trouble. The day after he complimented Warren, he wrote to a Boston widow named Martha Walker who had petitioned Congress for relief, contending that her husband had sacrificed valuable property in Quebec to enlist in the Revolution. With countless petitions coming before Congress, it is noteworthy that Hamilton plucked this one from the pile, assuring Walker that “I shall enter upon the examination with every profession which can be inspired by favorable impression of personal merit and by a sympathetic participation in the distresses of a lady as deserving as unfortunate.”
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These letters to Warren and Walker, written right before Eliza left for Albany, suggest that Hamilton was more than receptive to overtures from women.

Six years later, Alexander Hamilton found himself transported back to that summer of 1791 as he told a flabbergasted public about his extended sexual escapade with twenty-three-year-old Maria (probably pronounced “Mariah”) Reynolds, who must have been very alluring. She had arrived unannounced at his redbrick house at 79 South Third Street. He began his famous account thus: “Sometime in the summer of the year 1791, a woman called at my house in the city of Philadelphia and asked to speak with me in private. I attended her into a room apart from the family.” Reynolds beguiled Hamilton with a doleful tale of a husband, James Reynolds, “who for a long time had treated her very cruelly, [and] had lately left her to live with another woman and in so destitute a condition that, though desirous of returning to her friends, she had not the means.” Since Maria Reynolds came from New York and Hamilton was a New York citizen, Hamilton continued, “she had taken the liberty to apply to my humanity for assistance.”
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Her sudden listing in the 1791 city directory as the mysterious “Mrs. Reynolds”—she was virtually the only person to appear without a first name—seems to confirm her recent arrival in Philadelphia.

The thirty-six-year-old Hamilton never shrank from a maiden in distress, as Maria Reynolds must have known. He told her that her situation was “a very interesting one” and that he wished to assist her but that she had come at an inopportune moment (i.e., Eliza was at home). He volunteered to bring “a small supply of money” to her home at 154 South Fourth Street that evening. Hamilton recounted that meeting with a certain novelistic flair:

In the evening, I put a bank bill in my pocket and went to the house. I inquired for Mrs. Reynolds and was shown upstairs, at the head of which she met me and conducted me into a bedroom. I took the bill out of my pocket and gave it to her. Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.
⁸

That encounter was the first of many times that Alexander Hamilton slipped furtively through the night to see Reynolds. Once Eliza had gone off to Albany, the coast was clear to bring his mistress home. After their first rendezvous, Hamilton recalled, “I had frequent meetings with her, most of them at my own house.”
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After a short period, Reynolds informed Hamilton of a sudden reconciliation with her husband, which Hamilton later claimed he had encouraged. But Maria Reynolds was no ordinary adulteress, and politics now entered into the picture. She informed Hamilton that her husband had speculated in government securities and had even profited from information obtained from Treasury Department sources.

When Hamilton met James Reynolds, the latter fingered William Duer as the source of this information. It is baffling that Hamilton, having worked to achieve a spotless reputation as treasury secretary, did not see that he was now courting danger and would be susceptible to blackmail. Maria Reynolds introduced Hamilton to her husband as her benevolent, disinterested savior during a time of desperation, and for this James Reynolds pretended gratitude. But when Reynolds said that he was going to Virginia, he asked whether Hamilton could secure a government job for him upon his return. Hamilton remained noncommittal.

In recollecting events, Hamilton admitted that the more he learned about the sleazy James Reynolds, the more he thought of ending the affair. He was in the midst of preparing his great
Report on Manufactures,
yet he was also in the grip of a dark sexual compulsion, and Maria Reynolds knew how to hold him fast in her toils by feigning love. “All the appearances of violent attachment and of agonizing distress at the idea of a relinquishment were played off with a most imposing art,” he wrote. “This, though it did not make me entirely the dupe of the plot, yet kept me in a state of irresolution. My sensibility, perhaps my vanity, admitted the possibility of a real fondness and led me to adopt the plan of a gradual discontinuance rather than of a sudden interruption, at least calculated to give pain, if a real partiality existed.”
¹⁰
As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a “gradual discontinuance” only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.

In his later pamphlet, Hamilton was at pains to suggest that Maria Reynolds may have been sincerely smitten with him. His recounting of the affair suggests that at moments the relationship struck him as genuinely romantic. He could never make up his mind whether it had started honestly on her side and then turned to blackmail or whether she had conspired with James Reynolds all along. Perhaps, as Hamilton intimated, his vanity could not admit that he had been conned by a pair of lowlife tricksters. The man accused by his enemies of bottomless craft could be a most credulous dupe. Whenever his interest flagged, Maria Reynolds regained his sympathy by telling him that her husband was abusing her or, more pointedly, that he had threatened to spill the story to Eliza. For Hamilton, Maria Reynolds always remained a curious amalgam of tragicomic figure and confidence woman.

Whatever Maria Reynolds’s initial intentions, Hamilton must have seemed elegant, charming, and godlike compared to her vulgarian husband. It is hard to imagine that some genuine feeling for Hamilton did not enter sporadically into her emotions. She wrote him numerous letters—Hamilton ruefully called her a “great scribbler”
¹¹
—notable for atrocious grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Some letters seemed to consist of a single run-on sentence. In these missives, Maria Reynolds portrayed herself as a wretched, lovelorn creature, desperate to see Hamilton again and pining away with loneliness. While such letters may have persuaded Hamilton that her emotions were sincere, their hysterical excesses should have alerted him that he was dealing with a perilously unstable woman.