America Afire by Bernard A. Weisberger

Author:Bernard A. Weisberger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

POLITICS WERE BECOMING harsher throughout 1797. While Adams summered in Quincy, Hamilton—the other giant of federalism— suffered the unexpected exposure of the affair with Maria Reynolds that he thought was buried. In June a gossipmongering newspaperman named James Callender—who, like many of his journalistic colleagues of the era, would be deeply and unapologetically enmeshed in partisan campaigns—published a set of pamphlets carrying the self-inflating title A History of the United States in the Year 1796. One of them revealed the whole story, including Hamilton’s 1792 confession to Senator Monroe and Representatives Venable and Muhlenberg, with all the damning corroborative correspondence. Worse, Callender insisted that the original charges were true—that the sums handed over to Reynolds were not mere hush money but were meant for disguised speculation on Hamilton’s account.

Hamilton went into an agonized rage. He was making money at the bar again; a sixth child was on the way; and he had three disciples in the cabinet helping to set administraton policy, with which he had no quarrel at that point. Now this disaster! Who had broken the gentlemen’s agreement to keep those letters secret? Hamilton fired off notes to Monroe, Venable, and Muhlenberg, insisting that they now say publicly what they had assured him then—-there was no evidence whatever of any official wrongdoing. Monroe, who was visiting New York, stalled in replying/Hamilton, along with his brother-in-law and a friend, called on him on July 11 and, “very much agitated,” accused him of being the source of the story. Monroe denied it. Hamilton said the denial was “totally false.” If you say that, Monroe answered, “you are a scoundrel.” “I will meet you like a gentleman,” Hamilton shouted back, and Monroe snapped in return: “I am ready, get your pistols.”13 The two other men present calmed them down, but it was not quite over. In the next few days Hamilton found out that Monroe had never been totally convinced of his story, and letters passed with more demands for clarification and more refusals and mutual accusations, until it looked as if pistols at dawn were the only possible outcome. But things were diplomatically smoothed over by the friend whom Monroe chose as his possible second. That was Aaron Burr, who himself, seven years later, would have the most celebrated duel in American history, with Hamilton. What would have been the result if a fatal exchange of shots had taken place between Hamilton and Monroe instead?

Hamilton believed that only partisanship kept Monroe and the other two from doing the right thing and clearing him—that by now the Republicans were simply determined to color him corrupt, no matter what the facts. He was correct in that, but he had the wrong culprit. The most likely “leaker” was the Republican man-of-all-work John Beckley, to whom Monroe had given copies of the incriminating letters for safekeeping. The Federalist-controlled House of Representatives of the Fifth Congress had, in May 1797, thrown Beckley out of his eight-year-old post as clerk. The job was supposedly nonpartisan, but

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