The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers by Thomas Fleming

Author:Thomas Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

IV

In the summer of 1791, Hamilton was riding the crest of the huge wave of public enthusiasm he had created by persuading Congress to approve his plan for overhauling America’s public credit. On June 20, when shares of the Bank of the United States went on sale, the first offerings in New York and other cities had sold out in a matter of minutes. Secretary Hamilton had attempted to check speculation in the bank’s stock by making it expensive to buy. A $400 share required $100 down, the rest to be paid in four semiannual installments. (In modern money, this was roughly $6,000 a share with $1,500 down.) But Congress, already demonstrating an eagerness to please as many people as possible, reduced the opening payment to $25. For this amount, the purchaser got a certificate, soon nicknamed “scrip,” which entitled him to buy the full share at par.9

In less than an hour, the $8,000,000 first issue was oversubscribed by $1,600,000. In five weeks, the value of the scrip soared from $25 to $325. The low opening price enabled almost everyone to get into the game; “scrippomania” swept the nation. Newspapers began printing daily stock quotations. An agitated James Madison told Thomas Jefferson that no one in New York talked about anything but “stock jobbing.” Congressman Henry Lee reported that everyone he knew was investing in the bank. Hamilton, who could have made a fortune by buying shares for himself at far-below-market prices, remained financially pure. But this veritable explosion of fame redoubled his ardor for Maria Reynolds.10

Interesting evidence of the psychological connection between Maria and Angelica is visible in the abrupt fall-off of Hamilton’s letters to his sister-in-law and the no-longer-rapturous expressions of affection in them. In one letter he almost offhandedly remarked that Betsey approved of his loving Angelica “as well as herself”—not the kind of extravagance she had come to expect. Soon he was writing, “I think as kindly as ever of my dear sister in law.” Betsey did not fare much better during these months. In several letters, after a perfunctory profession of love, Hamilton assured his wife there was no need to hurry back from Albany. When she complained that his letters were infrequent, he vowed that he had been writing her almost every day and wondered if sinister conspirators were intercepting his letters.11

When Betsey returned from Albany with the four children, Maria’s visits to the Hamilton home ceased. By this time the treasury secretary had rented a house on Market Street, only a few doors from President Washington’s residence. But Hamilton continued to visit Maria throughout the fall of 1791, while he was deep in another battle with Congress about his proposal to create a major manufacturing metropolis, in part financed by the government, on the banks of the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey. It was part of his long-range program to make America an industrial rival to Great Britain. This vision of America as an economic powerhouse clashed violently with the Jefferson-Madison vision of a nation of virtuous small farmers, deepening their conviction that Hamilton was a menace.

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