Alexander Hamilton (88 page)

Equally unfortunate for Hamilton was that the man who retained the original papers was James Monroe. Later on, Monroe stated that he had “deposited the papers with a friend”—that friend being, in all likelihood, Thomas Jefferson.
³¹
On January 5, 1793, Monroe published his last installment of the “Vindication of Mr. Jefferson.” He used the piece to telegraph a warning to Hamilton that he would not hesitate, if necessary, to exploit his knowledge of the Reynolds affair: “I shall conclude this paper by observing how much it is to be wished [that] this writer [i.e., Hamilton] would exhibit himself to the public view, that we might behold in him a living monument of that immaculate purity to which he pretends and which ought to distinguish so bold and arrogant a censor of others.”
³²
Hamilton knew what the snide reference to “immaculate purity” meant. For the rest of his time as treasury secretary, he was shadowed by the awareness that determined enemies had access to defamatory material about his private life. This sword of Damocles, perpetually dangling above his head, may provide one explanation of why he never made a serious bid to succeed Washington as president.

The marriage of Alexander and Eliza Hamilton survived the affair but the marriage between James and Maria Reynolds did not. In May 1793, Maria, reverting to Mary, filed for divorce in New York and hired as her lawyer, of all people, Aaron Burr. She now tagged James Reynolds as an unprincipled scoundrel and accused him of having committed adultery on July 10, 1792, with a woman named Eliza Flavinier of Dutchess County, New York. The date is intriguing, since it follows by a little more than a month Hamilton’s refusal to pay more blackmail money to James Reynolds, suggesting that Maria may have outlived her usefulness to him. The same day that the divorce became official, Maria married Jacob Clingman. By representing Maria Reynolds in this case, Aaron Burr was vouchsafed a glimpse into the disorderly private affairs of Alexander Hamilton—a glimpse that might later have inflamed him when Hamilton raised questions about Burr’s own misconduct.

And how did Hamilton react to the consequence of his execrable lack of judgment? We have no letters between Alexander and Eliza Hamilton that refer even obliquely to the scandal. But a close reading of Hamilton’s writings offers his view of adultery in a most unlikely place: the middle of an unpublished essay, written months later, on the need for American neutrality in foreign affairs. In one passage, he reiterated his faith in marital fidelity and his knowledge that adultery damaged families and harmed the adulterer as well as the deceived spouse.

A dispassionate and virtuous citizen of the U[nited] States will scorn to stand on any but purely
American
ground…. To speak figuratively, he will regardhis own country as a wife to whom he is bound to be exclusively faithful and affectionate. And he will watch with a jealous attention every propensity of his heart to wander towards a foreign country, which he will regard as a mistress that may pervert his fidelity and mar his happiness. ’Tis to be regretted that there are persons among us who appear to have a passion for a foreign mistress, as violent as it is irregular—and who, in the paroxysms of their love seem, perhaps without being themselves sensible of it, too ready to sacrifice the real welfare of the political family to their partiality for the object of their tenderness.
³³

The Reynolds affair was a sad and inexcusable lapse on Hamilton’s part, made only the more reprehensible by his high office, his self-proclaimed morality, his frequently missed chances to end the liaison, and the love and loyalty of his pregnant wife.

TWENTY-TWO

STABBED IN THE DARK

E
ven as their feud worsened, both Hamilton and Jefferson pleaded with Washington to stand for a second term as president. It may have been the sole thing that now united these sworn antagonists. Both men knew their personal warfare could wreck the still fragile union and thought Washington the one man who could hold it together. “North and South will hang together if they have you to hang on,” Jefferson told the president.
¹
Hamilton had additional motives for seeking a second term for Washington. The president had been his indispensable patron, the steadfast supporter of his policies, granting him preeminent status in the cabinet. (In drafting his annual address to Congress that autumn, Washington solicited suggestions from all cabinet members, then assigned the speech to Hamilton.) A second term for Washington would aid another Hamiltonian objective: to strengthen executive power. His fears of legislative tyranny had only increased as congressional opposition to him had gathered force.

Since Washington’s victory seemed almost foreordained, the focus shifted to the vice presidential race. Unable to target the popular president directly, Republicans turned to the vice presidency as a referendum on Washington’s first term. Hamilton never wavered in supporting John Adams as vice president, a fact obscured by their later row. (Even Abigail Adams, we have seen, cheered on Hamilton as treasury secretary.) Writing to a Federalist congressman in October 1792, Hamilton conceded that “Mr. Adams, like other men, has his faults and his foibles”—faults and foibles that Hamilton himself eventually exposed. He admitted they held some differing views. For all that, Adams was “honest, firm, faithful, and independent, a sincere lover of his country, a real friend to genuine liberty…. No man’s private charactercan be fairer than his. No man has given stronger proofs than him of disinterested and intrepid patriotism.”
²
Such glittering adjectives seldom flowed from Hamilton’s captious quill.

By nature, Hamilton was a busybody and could not refrain from offering Adams unsolicited advice. The vice president was a Federalist more by default than conviction—he prided himself on his grumpy independence and freedom from “party virulence”—and saw no need to make common cause with Hamilton.
³
Distressed by rumors that Governor Clinton might challenge Adams for the vice presidency, Hamilton took it upon himself in June 1792 to warn Adams of “something very like a design to subvert the government.”
⁴
Among Adams’s many quirks was a penchant for extended absences from Philadelphia. By early September, Hamilton feared that Adams’s prolonged sojourn at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, might mar his reelection chances, and he sent him a tactfully worded note, urging him to return to the capital. His stay in Massachusetts “will give some handle to your enemies to misrepresent. And though I am persuaded you are very indifferent personally to the event of a certain election, yet I hope you are not so as it regards the cause of good government.”
⁵

Adams was far from indifferent to the election’s outcome. John Ferling has noted, “There can be little doubt that Adams saw the vice-presidency as his best means by which to succeed President Washington. To further that end, he soon eschewed his powdered wig, ceremonial sword, and handsome coach.”
⁶
Irked by Hamilton’s advice, Adams did not rush back to Philadelphia. He was vain enough to tell Abigail that it was inconceivable that George Clinton, his inferior in knowledge and government service, could pose a serious political threat. Such was Adams’s self-regard that he told son John Quincy during the campaign that his own life story had been one of “success almost without example.”
⁷
But the election was to vindicate Hamilton’s sense of urgency instead of Adams’s complacency.

Shortly after Hamilton sent his missive to Adams, he was alerted to an even greater menace than George Clinton. Aaron Burr was letting it be noised about that he was prepared to challenge Adams as the Republican candidate for vice president. The thirty-six-year-old Burr had avid backers in the north, such as Benjamin Rush, who told him that “your friends everywhere look to you to take an active part in removing the monarchical rubbish of our government. It is time to
speak out
or we are undone.”
⁸
For many in the south, Burr’s entry into the race was an unwelcome intrusion. He lacked the depth and experience to oust someone of Adams’s stature, and they had lined up regional support for Clinton. Burr’s sudden trial balloon created suspicions among prospective southern allies that were to be confirmed nearly a decade later.

It was New York’s other senator, Rufus King, who first informed Hamilton that Burr was rounding up key supporters in New England. King feared that Burr might shave ten votes from Adams’s electoral total and that, with his delicate ego, Adams might then feel so degraded by the results that he would decline to serve. “If the enemies of the government are secret and united, we shall lose Mr. Adams,” King warned Hamilton. “Nothing which has heretofore happened so decisively proves the inveteracy of the opposition.”
⁹

Hamilton was determined to have Washington
and
Adams back for a second term. Events of the previous year had taught him to cast a wary eye on Aaron Burr, whom Adams described as looking “fat as a duck and as ruddy as a roost cock.”
¹⁰
Burr hadn’t endeared himself to Hamilton by defeating Philip Schuyler for the Senate seat. And Burr was a lone operator, a protean figure who formed alliances for short-term gain. In the Senate, he was loosely allied with the Jeffersonians and was an enthusiast for the French Revolution—a stand that irked Hamilton. Then in early 1792, Burr had decided to test the waters for New York governor and challenge George Clinton’s bid for a sixth term. His strategy was to enlist disaffected Clintonians and Federalists and reshuffle the political deck in New York. Afraid to adulterate his own party, Hamilton spiked this coalition and became an immovable obstacle in the path of Aaron Burr’s ambitions—a position he was to occupy so frequently in future years that it finally drove Burr into a frenzy.

The New York gubernatorial contest in the spring of 1792 had been one of special venom. Once Burr saw that his attempt had miscarried, he switched back, without evident discomfort, to supporting Governor Clinton. On the other side, the Federalist ticket, likely crafted by Hamilton, consisted of Chief Justice John Jay for governor along with Stephen Van Rensselaer, Hamilton’s brother-in-law, for lieutenant governor. The Federalist ticket was so identified with Hamilton that the race turned into something of a poll on his policies. The election culminated in a helpless stalemate. When votes in three upstate counties were disputed, Aaron Burr and Rufus King were asked to give opinions about the disputed ballots. Burr came down decisively on Clinton’s side and handed him a controversial victory. Hamilton’s friend Robert Troup was so irate that he called Burr a Clinton tool and denounced the “shameful prostitution of his talents…. The quibbles and chicanery made use of are characteristic of the man.”
¹¹
Such reports only reinforced Hamilton’s sense of Burr as an unscrupulous opportunist eager to exploit popular turmoil.

In now opposing Burr’s ambition to become vice president, Hamilton viewed him as a possible stalking horse for Governor Clinton and dispatched letters to dissuade people from backing him. Hamilton was a man of such deep, unalterable principles that Burr was bound to strike him as devoid of any moral compass. In writing to one correspondent, Hamilton even found sudden virtues in George Clinton, describing him as a “man of property” and “probity” in his private life. He couldn’t say as much for Burr:

I fear the other gentleman [i.e., Burr] is unprincipled both as a public and private man. When the constitution was in deliberation…his conduct was equivocal…. In fact, I take it he is for or against nothing but as it suits his interest or ambition. He is determined, as I conceive, to make his way to be the head of the popular party and to climb…to the highest honors of the state and as much higher as circumstances may permit…. I am mistaken if it benot his object to play the game of confusion and I feel it a religious duty to oppose his career.
¹²

Hamilton denounced Burr in language similar to that he employed against Jefferson, warning that “if we have an embryo-Caesar in the United States ’tis Burr.”
¹³
But if Jefferson was a man of fanatical principles, he had principles all the same—which Hamilton could forgive. Burr’s abiding sin was a total lack of principles, which Hamilton could
not
forgive.

Hamilton’s anxieties about Burr proved premature. On October 16, a Republican caucus in Philadelphia bestowed unanimous approval upon George Clinton’s candidacy for vice president. As a professional politician, Burr was ready to concede defeat and fight another day; he graciously stepped aside. Students of the period point to this meeting as one of the first examples of party organization in American elections, though the participants were skittish about calling themselves a party. But the group’s multistate composition did reflect a new degree of political cohesion among like-minded politicians.

The ringleader was the seemingly omnipresent House clerk John Beckley. Soon after the Republican caucus, Beckley described to Madison Hamilton’s growing influence in electoral politics. In the vice presidential race, Beckley said, the treasury secretary’s efforts both “direct and indirect are unceasing and extraordinary…. [T]here is no inferior degree of sagacity in the combinations of this
extraordinary
man. With a comprehensive eye, a subtle and contriving mind, and a soul devoted to his object, all his measures are promptly and aptly designed and, like the links of a chain, depend on each other [and] acquire additional strength by their union.”
¹⁴
Beckley retained an unwavering belief in Hamilton’s wickedness and suggested to Madison that he had explosive new proof that might bring down the treasury secretary: “I think I have a clue to something far beyond mere suspicion on this ground, which prudence forbids a
present
disclosure of.”
¹⁵
Beckley’s letter hints at early knowledge of the Reynolds affair.