Monroe, Muhlenberg and Venable left convinced that Hamilton was innocent of all except adultery, and supposedly promised not to say anything more to anyone. To their surprise and embarrassment, Hamilton came clean about his extramarital affair, even sharing the letters he received from both Mr. With two colleagues from Virginia, James Monroe and Abraham Venable, Muhlenberg visited James Reynolds in jail and Maria Reynolds at her home, then went to Hamilton’s to confront him in person about these suspected illegal dealings. While out on bail, Clingman approached his former employer Frederick Muhlenberg, a congressman from Pennsylvania, and claimed that Reynolds had been involved in illegal speculation with none other than Alexander Hamilton. In November, James Reynolds and an associate, Jacob Clingman, were arrested and imprisoned for their involvement in a scheme to defraud the government by posing as the executors of deceased Revolutionary War veterans to get their back pay. That spring, Reynolds repeatedly asked Hamilton for smaller amounts in “loans,” until finally Hamilton stopped seeing Maria for good in the summer of 1792. He even encouraged Hamilton to resume the affair with his wife, who claimed to be devoted to her powerful lover. Hamilton paid the full amount in two installments by January 1792, but Reynolds stayed in Philadelphia despite his promise to leave town. Soon enough, Maria’s husband, James Reynolds, confronted Hamilton via letter and demanded $1,000 (the equivalent of nearly $25,000 today) to keep quiet about the affair. She led him upstairs, where, in his words, “it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.” They began a sexual relationship, meeting often at Hamilton’s own home after his devoted wife, Eliza, took their children to visit her father in Albany.Īlexander Hamilton’s wife, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton. His outspoken style earned him many enemies, which as biographer Ron Chernow has written “should have made him especially watchful of his reputation.”Īnd yet that night, Hamilton took a 30-note bill to the rooming house where Maria Reynolds was staying. Maria said she was destitute, and asked for money to help her get to friends in New York.Īt the time, Hamilton was at the height of his influence as treasury secretary, and could be considered the second most powerful man in the United States. The 23-year-old blonde presented herself as a damsel in distress, telling the treasury secretary that her abusive husband, James Reynolds, had left her and their young daughter to run off with another woman. Maria Reynolds Approaches Alexander HamiltonĪccording to Hamilton’s version of events, which he shared with the world in 1797, Maria (probably pronounced “Mah-rye-ah”) Reynolds came to his family home in Philadelphia in the summer of 1791, and asked to speak to him in private. In fact, as any fan of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster hip-hop musical Hamilton knows, Hamilton torpedoed his own presidential ambitions for good in 1797, when he published a tell-all pamphlet about the sordid details of his earlier affair with a married woman, Maria Reynolds, and the blackmail payments he made to her husband to cover up the affair.Ĭomplete with illicit meetings, payments of “hush money” and allegations of corruption, the Reynolds Affair had all the trappings of a modern-day political sex scandal, and was all the more shocking for being the first such drama in U.S. president-not only because he died in a duel by the hands of Aaron Burr. Yet unlike Washington, and unlike his longtime nemesis Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton never served as U.S. Treasury, Alexander Hamilton built the foundations of the national banking system and wielded more power in the earliest years of American democracy than any other man beside George Washington.
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