Jefferson and Hamilton (47 page)

In September, after a two-month absence, Betsey and the children returned home. Hamilton continued his extramarital affair, simply meeting Maria at her apartment when her husband was elsewhere. In December, Maria confided that her husband had learned of their affair. Two days later, James Reynolds confronted Hamilton and demanded “satisfaction.” He wanted one thousand dollars. If he did not receive it, Betsey and the world would learn of Hamilton’s affair with Maria. Hamilton paid the hush money. Yet, incredibly, he continued his relationship with Maria, and for five additional months he made more and more blackmail payments. All the while, Betsey was pregnant with their fifth child. Reynolds made his final stab at extortion in August 1792, but by then Hamilton had at last quit seeing Maria and refused to make further payments. The blackmail ended, at least for a time.

The world might never have known of Hamilton’s tawdry behavior had not James Reynolds and a companion, Jacob Clingman—once a clerk to the former Speaker of the House, Pennsylvania’s Frederick Muhlenberg—been arrested in November 1792 and charged with perjury and defrauding the U.S. government. As they were being prosecuted by Oliver Wolcott, the comptroller of the treasury, Reynolds and Clingman plotted a possible way to make the government abandon the case. Through the intercession of Muhlenberg, Clingman was released on bail, after which he obligingly advised the congressman that Reynolds and Hamilton had been partners in illegal speculation in treasury securities. Clingman passed along some enigmatic letters that Hamilton had sent to Reynolds, but the biggest potential bombshell was his suggestion that Reynolds possessed sufficient evidence to “hang the secretary of the Treasury.” Muhlenberg knew the charges had to be looked into, and he easily persuaded Abraham Venable, a fellow representative, and Senator James Monroe—both Virginians and, like the former speaker, opponents of Hamilton—to help him investigate.

The threesome spoke with Reynolds in his jail cell and interviewed his wife at her residence. Three days later, they confronted Hamilton at his home. The treasury secretary immediately told the story of his extramarital affair and the blackmail he had paid Reynolds, showing them his letters to the husband-and-wife embezzlement team. Convinced that Hamilton was blameless with regard to misusing public money, the three congressmen not only dug no further but also pledged not to go public with the story. However, they brought in John Beckley, another Virginian and the clerk of the House, to make copies of the documents that Hamilton had provided. Hamilton believed the matter would never come to light. The congressmen had given him their word. Besides, they had readily agreed that the matter was nothing more than what Hamilton himself later called “a plain case of a private
amour,” and this was not an age when sexual escapades were fodder for partisan politics.
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But four individuals, none friends of Hamilton, were privy to sensational information about one of the most powerful men in America. Today, such information would in all likelihood not remain secret for very long. Nor did it remain under wraps in 1792. Jefferson appears to have heard the news within forty-eight hours of the congressmen’s conversation with Hamilton. He probably was told of it by Beckley, who was a cog in his machine of informants.
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Jefferson remained silent about Hamilton’s illicit affair and blackmail, but the astonishing news of his adversary’s improper behavior left him more certain than ever that the treasury secretary was utterly corrupt. Already convinced that Hamilton had turned the nation into a casino, replete with malicious repercussions for its institutions and the habits of its citizenry, it was not much of a leap for Jefferson to think the man himself must be dishonorable. With a bit of digging, Jefferson expected that further evidence of Hamilton’s malfeasance would turn up. He must also have hoped that when faced with the threat of a formal inquiry, Hamilton would resign in order to prevent word of his affair with Maria Reynolds from being made public. Working behind the scenes with William Giles, a young, blindly loyal Virginia congressman, Jefferson helped craft a set of resolutions designed to compel Hamilton to make an accounting of America’s loans, which in turn would initiate a House investigation into the treasury secretary’s conduct. It was a fishing expedition in search of Hamilton’s financial improprieties, outright misconduct, or questionable behavior. Jefferson must have been certain that he could not lose. He might be rid of Hamilton, but even if that did not occur, the hearings would awaken the citizenry to the “extent of their danger.” Jefferson had previously tried to stop the advance of Hamiltonianism. Now, he sought its rollback.
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The congressional inquiry that Jefferson hoped for never took place. Hamilton answered five of the resolutions, easily disposing of the questions of improper procedures. He also tutored friendly congressmen, enabling them to run circles around their congressional foes in the debates on the remaining nine charges. It was over by late winter 1793, with Congress having repudiated Giles’s resolutions by heavy majorities. Hamilton had eluded an in-depth investigation.

But Jefferson was not terribly disappointed. Things had taken a turn his way. He rejoiced that the outcome of the congressional elections had been “favorable to the republican candidates” from Pennsylvania southward. The “Monocrats (who are few tho’ wealthy and noisy) are
au desespoir
,” he exclaimed, as the Republicans’ victory will “turn the balance” in Congress. He
thought the election results “turned out to be what was expected.” Jefferson was also convinced that his faction’s victories over the Federalists, as the devotees of Hamiltonianism were calling themselves, were the result both of the opposition press he had established and the spadework he and Madison had done with their botanizing tour. The people, once given “faithful accounts of what is doing here,” had made the right choices. Jefferson was reassured. As 1793 began, Jefferson predicted that “the tide of this government … will … subside into the true principles of the Constitution.”
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Jefferson believed that Hamilton had been stopped and that he had won.

Chapter 11
“A little innocent blood”

To the Mountaintop and to the Top of the Mountain

Early in 1792, Jefferson informed Washington of his plans to retire after one more year, and at the same time he told Patsy that the “ensuing year will be the longest of my life.” Not only would he have served three years as secretary of state, a post he had never aspired to, but also he had spent little time at Monticello since he entered Congress nearly a decade before. Jefferson was eager to exchange “labour, envy, and malice, for ease, domestic occupation, and domestic love and society.” In the spring, and again in the fall, he reminded the president that he was “bent irresistibly on the tranquil enjoyment of my family, my farm, and my books.” But in February 1793, when Jefferson told Washington that he would be leaving office in six weeks, the president pressed him to stay on. Reluctantly, Jefferson consented to serve “perhaps till summer, perhaps autumn.” In mid-summer, he wrote to Washington that September 30 would be a “convenient” moment for his retirement, whereupon the president took an extraordinary step. He called on the secretary of state at his residence, which may have been the only time that Washington paid a visit to the home of one of his cabinet officers, and yet again asked Jefferson to stay on longer. Remain in office through the end of the year, he pleaded, by which time the “affairs of Europe would be settled.” As if to sweeten the pot, Washington confided that Hamilton had informed him of his intention of retiring in the spring of 1794. Jefferson pondered the request for five days before consenting, though on the condition that he be permitted to return to Monticello to tend to private matters in the fall.
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By 1793, events in Europe, and especially in France, had gone in directions that Jefferson could not have imagined at the time he left Paris. In 1789, he had believed that the establishment of a constitutional monarchy had nearly brought the French Revolution to an end. He rejoiced in what had occurred,
and so did most Americans, who believed the French revolutionaries had been inspired by the American Revolution. Washington proudly and prominently displayed the key to the Bastille, sent to him by Lafayette, at Mount Vernon, and Hamilton supposedly remarked that the electrifying events in Paris had moved him as had nothing else since Lexington and Concord. Well into 1792 the French Revolution remained so popular in the United States that some Americans referred to themselves as Jacobins—the name adopted by a faction in France—and some even followed the practice of the French revolutionaries by addressing one another as “citizen” and “citess,” a deliberate stab at blurring class distinctions. When several conservative nations allied against republican France and invaded the country, nearly every American prayed for a French victory, and when word arrived in December 1792 that the French had repelled the invasion, spontaneous celebrations erupted throughout the United States.
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But enthusiasm waned among the more conservative Americans when they learned of terror, bloodshed, and social upheaval in France. Hamilton became alarmed when France’s aristocratic ruling class lost power. Thereafter, he warned that French “excesses” and “enormities” put at risk “the foundations of right security and property, of order, morality and religion.”
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Word of the “September Massacres” in 1792 was especially important in transforming conservative friends of the French Revolution into foes. Well over a thousand executions had occurred in Paris, and perhaps four hundred others died in regional capitals. Many of the victims were clergy, and the frenzied killing spree was followed by a campaign of de-Christianization that included the spoliation of churches and desecration of sacred relics. By the spring of 1793, around the time of Washington’s second inauguration, Americans learned that Louis XVI, who had befriended them during the War of Independence, had died on the guillotine. By then, Americans also knew that France’s revolutionaries were out to overturn not just the monarchy but also society itself. Titles that had set apart the nobility from the commoners were banished. Soon, the knee britches and silk stockings that had distinguished elite males from those who were not well born were replaced by long trousers, a fashion revolution that instantly obliterated discernable signs of rank. Formal bowing fell out of favor as well, and was replaced by handshakes. Many American conservatives were aghast at what John Adams decried as France’s “democratical hurricane.” Traditionalists took umbrage at the disappearance of the familiar, scorning what they labeled as the “hugging and rugging … addressing and caressing” that was the new custom in France. Hartford’s Chauncey Goodrich, a devotee of Hamilton’s, worried that America’s “noisy set of demagogues” would imitate the Parisian “contagion of levelism” that
threatened to make French aristocrats the “equal to French barbers.” Above all, America’s conservatives feared that the French example would inspire rampant democracy within the United States.
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Washington may have hung the key to the Bastille in the hallway of his mansion, but from the beginning he feared that the revolution would unleash radical change. Once it commenced, he had nothing good to say about events in France.
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Nor did Hamilton. He insisted that the “horrid and disgusting scenes” and the “atrocious depravity” of the French “assassins” caused every person of “reason and humanity [to] recoil.” He publicly defended Louis XVI following word of his execution, calling him “a humane kind-hearted man” whose “magnanimous policy” had helped the Continental army win the Revolutionary War.
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Jefferson saw things differently. Years later, Jefferson said that had he been a member of the French assembly, he would not have voted to kill the king and queen.
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But at the time, early in 1793, he defended regicide, asserting that the experiment in constitutional monarchy had failed and that “despotism” would have been reinstated had the king not been executed. He added that sending Louis XVI to the guillotine might “soften” royal rule elsewhere by demonstrating that monarchs were “amenable to punishment like other criminals.” Jefferson was personally gentle and pacific, but he was also a true revolutionary. He had sought political and social changes in America and longed for the republican ideology of the American Revolution to spread throughout Europe. Change in America had come with relatively little social upheaval, but Jefferson understood that given its ancient and entrenched ruling classes, reform in Europe would inevitably be accompanied by radical revolutionary upheaval. He did not shrink from the bloodshed that would ensue. To him, it was like a just war. Some had to die in pursuit of a worthy cause.

Jefferson believed that if the oppressed in France succeeded in improving their lot, the liberation of “the whole earth” would follow. But if the French Revolution failed, unwelcome consequences would be the result even in the United States, where a “falling back to that kind of Half-way-house, the English constitution” would be the least of the unfortunate results. Liberty was worth a “little innocent blood,” he declared. Indeed, even if “half the earth [was] desolated,” the destruction would be worth it in order to bring an end to monarchy’s victimization of the great mass of humanity. “Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is,” he said. Jefferson’s defense of killing to attain ideological ends has shocked many in subsequent generations, but truly radical change seldom occurs bloodlessly. The Founders had spilled blood in the American Revolution, and some among them understood that carnage would inevitably accompany
the French Revolution. Even the humane Franklin, who was alive when the earliest bloody mob violence occurred in Paris, thought the “disagreeable” savagery was justifiable “if by the struggle she [France] obtains and secures for the nation its future liberty, and a good constitution.”
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