Needless to say, the lovers were eventually discovered when Mr. ‘I am so anxious for… your health that I am willing to make a great sacrifice…’” Hamilton with her children being absent on a visit to her father,” Hamilton wrote.Īccording to another biographer, Richard Brookhiser, during much of the time of the affair, Hamilton “wrote clumsily deceitful letters to Betsey, telling her how much he missed her, but that she should stay where she was. “After this, I had frequent meetings with her, most of them at my own house Mrs. Reynolds didn’t make it back to New York. That one strange evening turned into a months-long affair. Oh, you’re fine if I sleep with you, instead? Ok, let me put my cash away and I’ll meet you under the sheets.” Either way, it’s really something to imagine one of the architect’s of our great nation, one of the unparalleled geniuses in American history, not batting an eye when he found himself in a sequence of events that, by his own account, went a little something like “Hi, Mrs. Or maybe she was just a woman in need whose evening took a wild turn. Maybe she was in cahoots with her conniving husband or Hamilton’s enemies. Maybe Maria had designs on Hamilton from the beginning, as some said. Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.” I took the bill out of my pocket and gave it to her. Reynolds and was shown upstairs, at he head of which she met me and conducted me into a bedroom. Could he, perchance, meet her that evening to settle the matter?īy Hamilton’s own self-published account in what became known as the Reynolds Pamphlet, he arrived at her rooming house later that night and “inquired for Mrs. For whatever reason-he was busy, his wife was in the other room, he was feeling FOMO that he didn’t have plans for the evening-Hamilton told Maria he was willing to help her, but that exact moment wasn’t convenient (“which was the fact,” he later maintained). She was from a semi-prominent family in New York City, and she decided to appeal to a fellow New Yorker for financial help to travel back home. Her husband was a conman and abusive, and she claimed that he had also recently abandoned her. While many contend that Elizabeth (“Betsey”) Hamilton had already taken the kids to Albany to visit her family, Ron Chernow, who wrote the definitive biography on the Founding Father, suggests they may have still been at home.įor the sake of our story of romantic misadventure, and with no available weather records, we’re going to assume it was a sultry Pennsylvania day when 24-year-old Maria Reynolds came to the Hamilton residence with a request that was bizarre even by the standards of the time. Accounts differ as to his family’s whereabouts that day. By that time, he was 34 and married with four children. The infamous meeting occurred one day in the summer of 1791 when the then-Secretary of the Treasury was living in Philadelphia.
The best part of Hamilton’s affair was its utterly absurd beginning. An entire song is dedicated to the affair that ensured “well, he’s never gon’ be president now.”
And, to this day, his indiscretion is a key moment in every biography of the “Ten-Dollar Founding Father,” as the hit Broadway show Hamilton proves. Many historians believe that the Hamilton-Reynolds Affair, as the episode became known, squashed any chance he had at becoming president. Like so many of his philandering successors, Hamilton largely recovered from the scandal, but not without earning a permanent historical scar. He wrote the first entry in the “What Not To Do” playbook. In a twin distinction, he has also served as the cautionary tale for anyone who has found themselves in the spotlight for a high-profile impropriety ever since. Hamilton was the subject of the first political sex scandal in American history.
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