Alexander Hamilton (75 page)

We know very little about the background of Maria Reynolds. She was born Mary Lewis in Dutchess County, New York, in 1768, married James Reynolds at fifteen, and two years later gave birth to a daughter named Susan. (At some point, she switched her name from Mary to Maria.) She told Hamilton that her sister Susannah had married Gilbert J. Livingston, which endowed her with respectable Hudson Valley connections. One Philadelphia merchant, Peter A. Grotjan, described her as smart, sensitive, and genteel, but this picture conflicts with an affidavit from Richard Folwell, whose mother was her first landlady in Philadelphia. Folwell etched a portrait of Maria Reynolds that tallies more closely with Hamilton’s account of a mercurial personality prone to wild mood swings:

Her mind at this time was far from being tranquil or consistent, for almost at the same minute that she would declare her respect for her husband, cry and feel distressed, [the tears] would vanish and levity would succeed, with bitter execrations on her husband. This inconsistency and folly was ascribed to a troubled, but innocent and harmless mind. In one or other of these paroxysms, she told me, so infamous was the perfidy of Reynolds, that he had frequently enjoined and insisted that she should insinuate herself on certain high and influential characters—endeavor to make assignations with them and actually prostitute herself to gull money from them.
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After leaving the Folwell residence, Maria and James Reynolds lived on North Grant Street, where they occupied separate beds (or even rooms) while Maria dabbled in prostitution. Gentlemen left letters in her entryway, Folwell said, and “at night she would fly off as was supposed to
answer
their contents.”
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Folwell’s testimony confirms both the sincerity and the patent insincerity of the mixed-up Maria Reynolds. There seems little question that she approached Hamilton as part of an extortion racket, delivering an adept performance as a despairing woman. It was also clear, however, that she was too flighty to stick to any script. Since she despised her husband, she may have nourished fantasies that Hamilton would rescue her even as she preyed upon him. Fact and fiction may have blended imperceptibly in her mind. Hamilton later concluded of his paramour, “The variety of shapes which this woman could assume was endless.”
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Maria Reynolds was the antithesis of the sturdy, sensible, loyal Eliza. The more depressing then to survey the letters Hamilton sent to Eliza that summer to keep her at bay. On August 2, he expressed satisfaction that she had arrived safely in Albany and showed concern (“Take good care of my lamb”) for their three-year-old son, James, who was ill. At the same time, Hamilton pressed her to stay in Albany: “I am so anxious for a perfect restoration of your health that I am willing to make a great sacrifice for it.”
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At one point, when Eliza seemed about to return on short notice, Hamilton, worried that he might be taken by surprise, exhorted her to “let me know beforehand your determination that I may meet you at New York.”
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In late August, when her return seemed imminent, Hamilton advised that “much as I long for this happy moment, my extreme anxiety for the restoration of your health will reconcile me to your staying longer where you are…. Think of me—dream of me—and love me my Bestsey as I do you.”
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Finally, in September, with Hamilton suffering from his old kidney ailment and taking warm baths to soothe it, Eliza decided to return with the children. One last time, Hamilton urged her, “Don’t alarm yourself nor hurry so as to injure either yourself or the children.”
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It is easy to snicker at such deceit and conclude that Hamilton faked all emotion for his wife, but this would belie the otherwise exemplary nature of their marriage. Eliza Hamilton never expressed anything less than a worshipful attitude toward her husband. His love for her, in turn, was deep and constant if highly imperfect. The problem was that no single woman could seem to satisfy all the needs of this complex man with his checkered childhood. As mirrored in his earliest adolescent poems, Hamilton seemed to need two distinct types of love: love of the faithful, domestic kind and love of the more forbidden, exotic variety.

In his later confessions, Hamilton tried to explain the mad persistence of this affair by citing his terror that James Reynolds might blurt out the truth to Eliza. As he phrased it, “No man tender of the happiness of an excellent wife could, without extreme pain, look forward to the affliction which she might endure from the disclosure, especially a
public disclosure,
of the fact. Those best acquainted with the interior of my domestic life will best appreciate the force of such a consideration upon me. The truth was that…I dreaded extremely a disclosure—and was willing to make large sacrifices to avoid it.”
¹⁹
In the end, his desire to spare Eliza led him only to hurt her the more.

When Eliza returned to Philadelphia that fall, Hamilton could no longer receive Maria Reynolds at his residence and resorted to her home. (The Hamiltons had by now moved to Market Street, near the presidential mansion.) How he squeezed in time for these carnal interludes while compiling his
Report on Manufactures
is a wonder. That he inserted these trysts into such a tight schedule only strengthens the impression that Hamilton was ensnared by a sexual obsession. It was as if, after inhabiting a world of high culture for many years, Hamilton had regressed back to the sensual, dissolute world of his childhood. There is again a Dickensian quality to his story: the young hero escapes a tawdry life only to be lured back into it by a pair of unscrupulous swindlers.

If Hamilton thought he could commit adultery without paying a penalty, he learned otherwise when James Reynolds materialized again late that fall. During the Revolution, Reynolds had worked as a skipper on a Hudson River sloop and supplied provisions to patriotic troops, meeting William Duer and other purveyors. He then went to sea before settling in New York, and he had sought employment at the new Treasury Department in 1789. Though he wangled a reference letter from Robert Troup, he was rejected for a job, possibly giving him an extra motive for vengeance against Hamilton. The following year, some New York speculators sent Reynolds south to buy up claims that the government owed to veterans in Virginia and North Carolina.

On December 15, 1791, ten days after Hamilton submitted his
Report on Manufactures
to Congress, his earlier charade of friendship with James Reynolds abruptly ended. “One day, I received a letter from [Maria Reynolds]…intimating a discovery [of the sexual liaison] by her husband,” Hamilton was to recall. “It was a matter of doubt with me whether there had been really a discovery by accident or whether the time for the catastrophe of the plot was arrived.”
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James Reynolds displayed a sure sense of timing: the hubbub over the manufacturing report made it an ideal moment to threaten Hamilton, who was much in the newspapers.

On the unforgettable afternoon of Thursday, December 15, 1791, Maria Reynolds warned Hamilton that her husband had written to him and that if he didn’t receive a reply, “he will write Mrs. Hamilton.” Maria, as usual, was overcome with emotion: “Oh my God I feel more for you than myself and wish I had never been born to give you so mutch unhappisness do not rite to him no not a Line but come here soon do not send or leave any thing in his power Maria.”
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Hamilton had indeed received a thinly veiled blackmail note from James Reynolds that began: “I am very sorry to find out that I have been so Cruelly trated by a person that I took to be my best friend instead of that my greatest Enimy. You have deprived me of every thing thats near and dear to me.” A master of crude melodrama, Reynolds told Hamilton that Maria had been weeping constantly, that this had made him suspicious, and that he had trailed a black messenger who carried one of her letters to Hamilton’s home. Upon confronting Maria, “the poor Broken harted woman” had confessed to the affair. Here James Reynolds worked himself up into self-righteous wrath:

instead of being a Friend. you have acted the part of the most Cruelist man in existence. you have made a whole family miserable. She ses there is no other man that she Care for in this world. now Sir you have bin the Cause of Cooling her affections for me. She was a woman. I should as soon sespect an angiel from heven. and one where all my happiness was depending. and I would Sacrefise almost my life to make her Happy. but now I am determed to have satisfation.
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Hamilton summoned Reynolds to his office that afternoon. He did not know whether Reynolds had proof of the affair or was bluffing, so he played it cagey. He later wrote that he neither admitted nor denied the affair, telling Reynolds “that if he knew of any injury I had done him, entitling him to satisfaction, it lay with him to name it…. It was easy to understand that he wanted money and to prevent anexplosion, I resolved to gratify him…. He withdrew with a promise of compliance.”
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Hamilton was a rank amateur in adultery. By allowing James Reynolds to be seen in his office, he had given the blackmailer the upper hand.

On Saturday evening, December 17, James Reynolds wrote to Hamilton and charged him with alienating Maria’s affections: “I find the wife always weeping and praying that I wont leve her. And its all on your account, for if you had not seekd for her Ruin it would not have happined.”
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Reynolds demanded some compensation for his ruined marriage and arranged to meet with Hamilton the next day. Hamilton was so alarmed that he sent a note to an unnamed correspondent stating, “I am this moment going to a rendezvous which I suspect may involve a most serious plot against me…. As any disastrous event might interest my fame, I drop you this line that from my impressions may be inferred the truth of the matter.”
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At their meeting, Reynolds was very businesslike, and Hamilton asked him to name his price. The day after, Reynolds said that one thousand dollars would be a proper salve to his “wounded honor.”
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He contended that he could never regain his wife’s love and that he planned to leave town with their daughter. Hamilton was forced to pay the now considerable blackmail money in installments, making one payment on December 22 and a second on January 3. James Reynolds, if poor at spelling, was able to fathom Hamilton’s insatiable sexual appetite for his wife and his dread of exposure.

At this point, Hamilton tried to terminate the shabby affair, which formed such an odd counterpoint to the splendor of his public life. Briefly, he ceased all contact with Maria. This frightened James Reynolds, who saw future income fast fading away. On January 17, 1792, he wrote to Hamilton and urged him to visit the house and regard his wife as a “friend.” Suddenly, he was no longer the wronged spouse but a philanthropist concerned with his wife’s welfare, not a grief-stricken husband but a shameless pimp for his wife. It is hard to believe that at this juncture Hamilton did not abruptly end this hazardous affair. Of Reynolds’s invitation, Hamilton wrote: “If I recollect rightly, I did not immediately accept the invitation, nor till after I had received several very importunate letters from Mrs. Reynolds.” Subsequent letters from husband and wife were “a persevering scheme to spare no pains to levy contributions upon my passions on the one hand and upon my apprehensions of discovery on the other.”
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Even as Hamilton had indulged his lust for Maria Reynolds, his imagination was conjuring up a futuristic industrial city, a microcosm of the manufacturing society that he envisioned to counter Jefferson’s nation of citizen-farmers. At a time when nineteen of twenty Americans tilled the soil, Hamilton feared that if America remained purely agrarian, it would be relegated to eternally subordinate status vis-à-vis European societies.

It was already an age of scientific wonders that promised to reshape economies and boost productivity. From the first steam engine that James Watt built in Great Britain in the 1760s to the hot-air balloons that floated across French skies in the 1780s to Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin and the use of interchangeable parts in the 1790s, it was a time of technological marvels. No industry was being transformed more dramatically than British textiles. Sir Richard Arkwright had devised a machine called the water frame that used the power of rushing water to spin many threads simultaneously. By the time Hamilton was sworn in as treasury secretary, Arkwright’s mills on the Clyde in Scotland employed more than 1,300 hands.

As much as the Bank of England, the British Exchequer, and the Royal Navy, these industrial breakthroughs had catapulted Britain to a leading position in the world economy. The British treated such economic discoveries as precious state secrets, which they guarded jealously against rival nations. Laws were passed to outlaw the export of textile machinery, and ships were stopped midocean if they contained such contraband cargo. Skilled mechanics who worked in textile factories were forbidden to emigrate upon pain of fine and imprisonment—for even if they couldn’t smuggle out blueprints, they could memorize methods and peddle this valuable information abroad. All of this Hamilton watched with rapt fascination. “Certainly no other man in America saw so clearly the significance of the change that was taking place in English industrialism,” Vernon Parrington wrote of Hamilton, “and what tremendous reservoirs of wealth the new order laid open to the country that tapped them.”
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The treasury secretary intuited that the future strength of nation-states would be proportionate to their industrial prowess, and he celebrated the early growth of American industry, whether it was entrepreneurs making wool hats or glass in Pennsylvania or watchmakers in Connecticut.