Alexander Hamilton (110 page)

After years of frustrating delays, the Churches at last moved to New York in May 1797. John Barker Church soon established himself as a personage of staggering wealth and New York’s foremost insurance underwriter. “His equipage and style of living are several degrees beyond those of any other man amongst us,” Robert Troup marveled.
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Angelica began to throw extravagant parties at which guests dined on plates of polished silver. She usually glittered with diamonds and captivated many socialites. There was something racy about the Churches that seemed more reminiscent of London society than New York. Angelica scandalized local matrons by introducing risqué European fashions, while John was a compulsive gambler who often played cards into the wee hours. The Churches’ parties featured whist, loo, and games of chance. A guest at these soirees, Hamilton probably drew the attention of gossips who saw him mooning around Angelica’s adoring gaze.

This was not the only whiff of scandal that followed Hamilton during that summer of 1797. For four and a half years, the Maria Reynolds affair had remained a well-kept secret confined to Republican rumor mills and what Hamilton called “dark whispers.”
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By a curious coincidence, the Churches returned to New York just as that scandal was about to burst into print, so any gossip about Hamilton and Angelica would only have heaped fuel on the flames. In late June, Hamilton saw a newspaper advertisement for a series of pamphlets, subsequently published in book form, with the innocuous title
The History of the United States for 1796.
The notice promised that the series would publish documents pertaining to Hamilton’s conduct as treasury secretary. Hamilton soon laid his hands on pamphlet number five, which rehashed old charges of official misconduct and cited documents from James Reynolds and Jacob Clingman. On July 8, Hamilton published a letter in the
Gazette

of the United States
and admitted the authenticity of the papers but pointed out that their charges were false and misleading: “They were the contrivance of two of the most profligate men in the world to obtain their liberation from imprisonment for a serious crime by the
favor of party spirit.
”
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No copies of these pamphlets have survived, but number five or six brought the additional charge of adultery against Hamilton.

The author of this malice was the Scottish-born James Thomson Callender, an ugly, misshapen little man who made a career of spewing venom. He was a hack writer who had fled from Edinburgh a few years earlier after being charged with sedition by the British government. Having denounced Parliament as “a phalanx of mercenaries” and the English constitution as “a conspiracy of the rich against the poor,” he was fated to whirl into Republican circles in America and write for Benjamin Franklin Bache’s
Aurora.
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In later years, Jefferson condemned Callender as “a poor creature…hypochondriac, drunken, penniless, and unprincipled.”
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But at this time, when Callender flung his darts at the Federalists, Jefferson glorified him as “a man of genius” and “a man of science fled from persecution.”
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In late June 1797, Jefferson was so pleased with Callender’s handiwork that he stopped by his lodgings to congratulate him and to buy copies of his scandalous
History.

In the bound volume, Callender sneaked up on the Reynolds scandal, first reviewing other events of 1796 before pouncing on Hamilton: “We now come to a part of the work more delicate perhaps than any other.”
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Callender said that he was incensed by the way that Federalists and Hamilton in particular—the “prime mover of the federal party”—had treated James Monroe, who had just returned to Philadelphia after being recalled as American minister to France.
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Hamilton, among others, had pleaded with Washington to recall Monroe for his unabashed favoritism toward the French Revolution. Back home, Monroe had huddled with Jefferson, Burr, and Albert Gallatin and expressed indignation over his dismissal. “The unfounded reproaches heaped on Mr. Monroe form the immediate motive to the publication of these papers,” Callender declared.
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Indeed, Monroe’s connivance in Callender’s project was clear to Alexander and Eliza Hamilton, who became unalterably convinced that Monroe had reneged on his confidentiality vow and leaked the Reynolds documents.

Callender promised readers that he would debunk Hamilton’s pretensions to superior virtue, stating that “we shall presently see this great master of morality, although himself the father of a family, confessing that he had an illicit correspondence with another man’s wife.”
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For posterity, the Callender disclosures were associated with Hamilton’s exposure as a libertine. For Callender, however, this was merely a collateral benefit. His real aim was to resurrect the shopworn myth, discredited by the Giles investigations, that Hamilton had secretly enriched himself as treasury secretary through improper speculation in government securities. In fact, Callender blithely repeated the very error that had initially misled Muhlenberg, Venable, and Monroe in December 1792: that the money Hamilton had paid to James Reynolds related to official misconduct, not to infidelity.

Callender’s diatribe had a specious air of deep research. He published the entire trove of papers that Hamilton had entrusted to Muhlenberg, Venable, and Monroe. “So much correspondence could not refer exclusively to wenching,” stated Callender. “No man of common sense will believe that it did…. Reynolds and his wife affirm that it respected certain speculations.”
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Callender scorned the very idea of a romantic liaison: “Even admitting that…[Maria Reynolds] was the favourite of Mr. Hamilton, for which there appears no evidence but the word of the Secretary, this conduct would have been eminently foolish. Mr. Hamilton had only to say that he was sick of his amour and the influence and hopes of Reynolds at once vanished.”
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Callender denied the authenticity of Maria Reynolds’s billets-doux to Hamilton and conjectured that Hamilton had forged them, filling them with spelling errors to make them seem plausible. Quite understandably, Callender could not conceive that someone as smart and calculating as Hamilton could have stayed so long in thrall to an enslaving passion. Hamilton could not have been stupid enough to pay hush money for sex, Callender alleged, so the money paid to James Reynolds
had
to involve illicit speculation. In fairness to Callender, it
is
baffling that Hamilton submitted to blackmail for so long.

The mystery of why Callender and his cronies disclosed the Reynolds scandal that summer is a tantalizing one. Callender mentioned the recall of James Monroe, but there were other reasons as well. The infamous exposé might never have been published if Washington had still been in office. For Republican pamphleteers, it was now open season on the Federalists. Callender wanted to prevent Hamilton from exercising the same influence over Adams that he’d had over Washington. He also wanted to besmirch Washington’s reputation by demonstrating that he had been a puppet mouthing words scripted by Hamilton. Callender contended that Hamilton had received private parcels from Washington with speeches for rewriting: “‘After opening such a parcel,’ said Mr. Hamilton, ‘what do you think were the contents?’ ‘DEAR HAMILTON,
put this into style for me.
’ [Then Hamilton supposedly commented:] ‘Some speech or letter has been enclosed, which I wrote over again, sent it back, and then the OLD DAMNED FOOL gave it away as
his own.
’”
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Evidently, Callender was aware of scuttlebutt that Hamilton had ghostwritten most of Washington’s farewell address.

Another compelling explanation for the timing of Callender’s exposé relates to Hamilton’s “Phocion” essays the previous fall, which had delved openly for the first time into Jefferson’s private life. On October 15, 1796, we recall, Hamilton had seemed to make reference to Sally Hemings. On October 19, indulging in more heavy breathing, Hamilton said that Jefferson’s “simplicity and humility afford but a flimsy veil to the
internal
evidences of aristocratic splendor, sensuality, and epicureanism.”
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Then on October 23, the Jeffersonian
Aurora
had published an anonymous response that referred discreetly, for the first time, to the Reynolds affair. The message was addressed to Treasury Secretary Wolcott and asked whether he had not been privy in December 1792 to “the circumstances of a certain enquiry of a very suspicious aspect, respecting real malconduct on the part of his friend, patron and predecessor in office, which ought to make him extremely circumspect on the subject of investigation…?”
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The author threatened to cite specifics: “Would a publication of the circumstances of that transaction redound to the honour or reputation of the parties and why has the subject been so long and carefully smothered up?”
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Hamilton got the message. In subsequent installments of “Phocion,” he fell silent abruptly on the subject of Jefferson’s sex life.

The man making these menacing noises in the
Aurora
may have been John Beckley, recently ousted as clerk of the House of Representatives. Perhaps he leaked the Reynolds documents to Callender as revenge against the Federalists, or maybe he no longer felt morally bound to silence after resigning his job. Monroe himself fingered Beckley as the culprit. “You know, I presume, that Beckley published the papers in question,” Monroe told Aaron Burr.
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It should be recalled, however, that Monroe had given the papers to Beckley in the first place, so Monroe was admitting to Burr that he had not insured the secrecy of documents entrusted to him and had known all along that confidentiality had been breached. In holding James Monroe responsible, Alexander and Eliza were not off the mark.

A shadowy operative, adept at intrigue, Beckley continued to move stealthily in the background of Republican party politics. He is a type familiar in political history: the aide who lurks in the cloakrooms of power, listening and absorbing valuable information. Beckley had started out as clerk of the Virginia House of Delegates; Jefferson, then the governor, called him the ablest clerk in the country. As first clerk of the House of Representatives, Beckley was a protégé of House Speaker Frederick Muhlenberg, which may also explain how he was drawn into the Reynolds scandal. Beckley’s humble title did not capture the enormous power he wielded. Madison, Monroe, William Branch Giles, and other powerful Republicans gathered for talks at his lodgings. According to Hamilton’s son, they once drank a mean-spirited toast to Hamilton when he was sick: “A speedy immortality to Hamilton.”
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Beckley had an unslakable thirst for political intelligence. Benjamin Rush said of Beckley that “he possesses a fund of information about men and things and, what is more in favor of his principles, he possesses the confidence of our two illustrious patriots, Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison.”
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Beckley was constantly trying to dig up derogatory information to satisfy the Republican fantasy that Hamilton and Washington headed a pro-British monarchical conspiracy. Jefferson never shed his intense admiration for Beckley. When elected president himself, he restored Beckley as clerk of the House of Representatives and, loading him down with still more honors, appointed him the first librarian of Congress.

Hamilton thought that Jefferson was one of the conspirators behind the Callender exposé. Jefferson’s secretary, William A. Burwell, said that around the time of the Maria Reynolds revelation, Hamilton had threatened Jefferson with public exposure of a shameful episode many years earlier in which Jefferson had repeatedly tried to seduce Betsey Walker, the wife of his friend and Virginia neighbor John Walker. Perhaps for this reason, the conflicted Jefferson both subsidized Callender and also urged him to refrain from further attacks on Hamilton. Callender reported that Jefferson “advised that the [Reynolds] papers should be suppressed…but his interposition came too late.”
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Once Callender’s charges were published, Hamilton faced an agonizing predicament: should he ignore the accusations as beneath his dignity or openly rebut them? Friends recommended tactful silence. Wolcott urged Hamilton to defer a response, telling him of the “indignation against those who have basely published this scandal.”
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Jeremiah Wadsworth thought any defense would be fruitless, warning that “it will be easy to invent new calumnies and you may be kept continually employed in answering.”
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Deaf to such advice, Hamilton decided to respond at length. When it came to major decisions, he always trusted to his inner promptings. Ordinarily, he told associates, he would have ignored the slander, but Callender was insinuating that Muhlenberg, Venable, and Monroe had refused to believe him in 1792 when he said that his payments to James Reynolds involved adultery and extortion. Callender upped the stakes by warning Hamilton that if he printed only extracts from his correspondence with those three men, he would be accused of shading the truth. In an open letter on July 12, he taunted Hamilton by saying the public “have long known you as an eminent and able statesman. They will be highly gratified by seeing you exhibited in the novel character of a lover.”
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Hamilton now reverted to lifelong practice: he would drown his accusers with words. In mid-July, he holed up in a Philadelphia boardinghouse with his friend Congressman William Loughton Smith of South Carolina among the tenants. As he confessed his sins, Hamilton probably did not want to face his family. One pictures him stooped over his desk, scratching away at a furious pace. According to Smith, Hamilton wrote with zest and a vengeful glee. He “was in excellent health and in very excellent spirits, considering his complicated situation.”
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Months earlier, Hamilton had complained to Smith of feeble health. Now, he burst forth in fighting trim, striking a note of bravado as he confronted his enemies.