Jefferson and Hamilton (56 page)

As the spring dragged on, the crisis deepened. Between his inauguration and the convening of the special session of Congress in May, Adams learned
that France had refused to accept Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, whom Washington had dispatched to Paris—much as he had sent Jay to London. Adams required no coaching from his cabinet to greet Congress with a pugnacious speech, and he asked for all that Hamilton had urged as part of a military preparedness campaign, save for enlarging the army. But Adams wished to give negotiations one more chance. He proposed sending a three-member commission to Paris that included the rebuffed Pinckney, together with John Marshall of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. The cabinet exploded when Adams suggested Gerry, a Republican, and pushed instead for Rufus King, whom Hamilton wanted. But in the end, the secretaries acquiesced. Two of the three were Federalists, just as Hamilton had wished.
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Jefferson, who was unaware of what had transpired between the president and his advisors, was satisfied with Adams’s handling of the crisis. Moreover, Jefferson appeared contented with his decision to return to public life. As he had expected, the vice presidency was a “tranquil and unoffending station” that enabled him to spend up to eight months each year at Monticello.
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With ample free time, he accepted the presidency of the American Philosophical Society, which Franklin had created to encourage scientific inquiry. The vice president corresponded and met with others who were interested in science, and even prepared a paper that contrasted the size of European and American animals, a study based on fossil remains. In Philadelphia, Jefferson lived in Francis’s Hotel, where he rented a suite of rooms, and dined twice daily at a common table with several congressmen and senators, both Republicans and Federalists. (Jefferson said he “never deserted a friend for differences of opinion.” Were people to mingle only with those of like mind, he said, “every man would be an insulate being.”)
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From his residence, Jefferson had only a short walk to Congress Hall, where he presided over the daily meetings of the Senate, sitting behind a desk in a red morocco chair atop the dais. Hour after hour, he listened to speech after interminable speech, saying nothing. He could vote only in the event of a tie, and as the Federalists held a lopsided majority in the Senate, voting was not in the offing.

But Jefferson’s experiences were not entirely pleasant. As the political battles grew more passionate, he remarked that unlike previous days when friendships had persisted despite “warm debates and high political passions,” now “Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the streets to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hat.” Jefferson grieved that many had erected an impenetrable “wall of separation” between themselves and former friends, and sadly noted
that numerous old acquaintances now “declined visiting me.” He lamented the changed atmosphere. It “is afflicting to peaceable minds,” he declared, adding, “passions are too high … to be cooled in our day.”
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The incendiary political atmosphere grew from a sense that the choices to be made in the 1790s were life changing. For instance, many who had long enjoyed a privileged social standing feared the loss of their elite status if French Jacobinism—supposedly embodied by Jefferson and espoused by the Republican Party—triumphed in America. There were businessmen, and those who clung parasitically to them, who were certain that their prosperity was inextricably tied to Britain’s victory in the European war. Against them, at least half the population prayed for a French victory, fearful that a triumphant Britain would result in the slow, steady erosion of American independence, and also that London’s victory would ensure that the conservative elements predominant in America before 1776 would reestablish their mastery.

During the rancorous special session of 1797, congressmen fought over every preparedness measure that Adams recommended, though in the end the president got nearly everything he wanted. In this white-hot environment, newspapers and pamphlets were filled with scurrilous attacks. No one was immune. Jefferson unwittingly contributed to the vehemence—and reaped the harvest—through yet another wayward private letter. Early the previous year, during his despair at the Jay Treaty, Jefferson had written to Philip Mazzei, a former neighbor who had moved to Italy, to bring him up to date on American affairs. He reported that “an Anglican, monarchical and aristocratical party has sprung up, whose avowed object is to draw over us the substance” of the British system. This was the staple of Republican rhetoric, and had Jefferson stopped there, his comments would not have caused a ripple. But he added: “It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.”
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Unfortunately for Jefferson, Mazzei had the letter published in a Florence newspaper. Just as the special session of Congress began, the letter appeared, as was inevitable, in a Federalist newspaper in New York, then in seemingly every Federalist paper in the land. Republican editors fought back, accusing the New York printer who had first made the letter public in America of having descended to the “
Sink Pot of Malignity
.”
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But the damage was done, and could not be repaired. Nearly everyone who read the letter reached the same conclusion: the “Samson in the field” whom Jefferson had accused of being partisan and an Anglophile—and anti-republican to boot—could be none other than George Washington. Jefferson had assailed the most sacrosanct of Americans.

Federalist screeds had a field day with Jefferson. It was now undeniable
that he and his party were more loyal to France than to America, they said. Some even tossed around words such as “treasonable” and “traitorous.” Jefferson had a thick skin and was accustomed to attacks in the press, but he was mortified that his comments about Washington, whom he revered, had been made public. Washington was not a forgiving person. A full year before the Mazzei letter was made public, Henry Lee, the Federalist governor of Virginia and commander of the army sent out to crush the Whiskey Rebellion, had gossiped to Washington of Jefferson’s supposed antipathy. Jefferson got wind of it and asked Washington not to believe “the slander of an intriguer, dirtily employed in sifting the conversations of my table.”
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Washington believed Jefferson’s denials. But when the Mazzei letter hit the press, followed shortly thereafter by more tales of Jefferson’s alleged infidelity—malicious stories conveyed to the ex-president by Federalists—Washington would not be mollified and cut his ties with his former secretary of state. He never again invited Jefferson to Mount Vernon, nor did he write to him, and following her husband’s death, Martha Washington likewise would have nothing to do with Jefferson.

Jefferson had previously criticized Washington’s policies from time to time, beginning with his questioning of the general’s strategic thinking in the final troubled years of the war. But Jefferson had never doubted Washington’s abilities. Long years after the Mazzei letter incident, Jefferson continued to exalt Washington. Indeed, his praise of Washington exceeded the most favorable comments that Hamilton ever committed to paper about the general. Jefferson lauded Washington’s “great and powerful” mind, prudence, integrity, sound judgment, and above all his courage, asserting in 1814 that he was “incapable of fear.” Though declaring that Washington’s “heart was not warm in its affections,” Jefferson late in life wrote: “He was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man.”
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Hamilton was also a victim of the malice of the times during that steamy summer. To his horror, a Republican writer in 1797 published some details of Hamilton’s sordid involvement with Maria and James Reynolds, an episode that had occurred years earlier. The author was James Thomas Callender, a Scotsman whose scurrilous writings had forced him to flee from Britain to Ireland and eventually, in 1793, to Philadelphia. By means that were never ascertained, Callender came into possession of copies of the documents compiled by Frederick Muhlenberg, Abraham Venable, and James Monroe during their 1792 inquiry into Hamilton’s conduct. Callender published the material at very nearly the same moment that the Federalists were enjoying the bonanza made possible by the Mazzei letter. The revelations first appeared in pamphlets, then in a volume titled
The History of the United States for 1796
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Callender did not care much about Hamilton’s sexual escapades. Indeed, he was skeptical of the story that Hamilton had told the congressmen about having had an affair with Maria Reynolds, even believing that the treasury secretary had forged her supposed letters. Instead, Callender was persuaded that Hamilton, privy to insider information, had used Treasury Department funds to speculate in government securities. He had, to use today’s terminology, laundered the money through James Reynolds. To Callender’s way of thinking, Hamilton’s yarn about paying blackmail was a smokescreen to mask his improper conduct at the Treasury.

Needless to say, Hamilton was furious, and mortified. His answers in the congressional inquiries had long since satisfied most fair-minded observers that suspicions of his financial misconduct were baseless. Now, yet again, charges of his supposed peculation were being ginned up. Worse still, Hamilton’s “wenching,” as Callender alluded to it, had become public knowledge. Among those who learned of his infidelity for the first time were Betsey Schuyler Hamilton and the children.

In an instant, Hamilton understood that Callender’s publication threatened him with enormous personal and political damage. He yearned for public vindication. Consumed with the need for respect, Hamilton feared being seen as not only “unprincipled but a fool.”
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In addition, he was clearly worried that the allegations, and revelations, would ruin his public aspirations. Hamilton had always had a propulsive ambition, and nothing in his correspondence or behavior—unlike that of Jefferson’s in the first years following his departure from Washington’s cabinet—suggests that it had slackened. Economic necessity had contributed to both men’s decision to return to private life, but Jefferson quite obviously relished time with his family and longed for greater freedom for intellectual pursuits. Those were not discernable factors in Hamilton’s abandonment of office, and given his voracious appetite for polemics and the energy he expended to control the Adams presidency, it appears that his political ambitions were unchecked.

Having spent years at the highest level of the national government, Hamilton would not have been tempted by many political offices. However, he had always yearned for military glory, and his behavior in years to come demonstrated that those dreams remained alive. Given his avidity for power and fame, it is likely that in moments of reverie Hamilton thirsted for the presidency. He was still quite young. In 1804, the earliest moment that Hamilton could have imagined that the presidency was a possibility, he would be only forty-nine years old, eight years younger than Washington had been when he became president. Even at the time of the election of 1816, Hamilton would be the same age that Adams had been in the recent presidential contest. In the
summer of 1797, Hamilton was desperate to thwart the damage that might be caused by Callender’s malice. An air of madness characterized his behavior, as he fought yet again to lay to rest all suspicions of financial malfeasance. His inability to do so marked this as a watershed event for him, leaving him more fearful than ever that the door to his further political ascendancy had been impenetrably sealed against him.

Silence would have been his best option. That was what Wolcott advised, in essence telling Hamilton to simply say that the congressmen who conducted the inquiry had at the time acknowledged finding nothing that could “affect [his] character as a public Officer or impair the public confidence in [his] integrity.” Hamilton was accustomed to directing others, not to taking advice. He did not listen. As with so many other choices made by the impulsive Hamilton, a man driven inexorably by a compelling need for esteem, his response was ill-judged. “I am obliged to publish every thing,” he said, and he did just that.
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Hamilton answered the “Jacobin Scandal-Club,” as he put it, by offering his account of his tawdry relationship with Maria and James Reynolds in a lengthy pamphlet, hoping to convince the public that his part in the affair had been driven by carnal lust, not by greed. He pointed out that on three occasions, members of Congress had absolved him of financial misdeeds. To this, he added that had he stolen from the Treasury, he would have pilfered more than the few hundred dollars that had passed from him to James Reynolds. Then came the bombshell: “My crime is an amorous connection with his wife.” Reynolds’s “design [had been] to extort money from me,” Hamilton confirmed, saying he had become the “dupe of the plot.” He had been ensnared by their “most imposing art.” Maria had seduced him. He had been moved by her supposed plight, though he all but said that he had been swept off his feet by her many charms.

It was a sordid, and salacious, confession, and he begged for forgiveness, crying out: “I can never cease to condemn myself.”
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But in all of American political history, perhaps no figure ever acted as unwisely as did Hamilton in coming clean. His was a tale of having been a slave to passion, a disclosure of having been bamboozled by a couple of unsavory con artists, and a shocking admission that he had persisted in sleeping with Maria even after her husband was aware of what was occurring. Friends stuck by him, but many others greeted his avowal with ridicule. Callender gushed ecstatically that Hamilton’s admission was “worth all that fifty of the best pens in America Could have said against him.” In no time, Hamilton was spoofed in a New York theatrical production. Many thought the revelations raised troubling questions about his character and judgment. Others, like Jefferson’s financial
agent in Philadelphia, thought it tawdry of Hamilton to air his story in such a manner that “poor Mrs. H … must be severely injured.”
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(They might have found it even more shocking had they known that Hamilton drafted his pamphlet at the moment that Betsey was giving birth to their sixth child.) What is more, his story struck many as so wildly implausible as to lend credence to Callender’s charges. Jefferson, for instance, concluded that Hamilton’s “willingness to plead guilty as to the adultery seems rather to have strengthened than weakened the suspicions that he was in truth guilty of the speculations.” Others said that Hamilton had sought “to creep under Mrs. R’s petticoats” in order to hide what he had really been up to.
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