Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton — Tilar Mazzeo
A refreshing read that provides a compelling theory on the infamous “Reynolds Affair”
This is the second review in an ongoing series I call The Hamilton Project. For more information and to read others in the series, click here.
There are many reasons I like to read history, and Tilar Mazzeo’s new (2018) biography of Eliza Hamilton reminded me of pretty much all of them. Reading about commonly-marginalized characters and their thrilling stories, taking a head-first dive into the notes because of a thought-provoking assertion, connecting threads from other pieces of history to my current read, and sifting through different points-of-view to ascertain the motivations and reliability of each. This is real history. Despite the terrible history class you had in high school that was just an unrelenting torrent of names and dates, history is about more than that. It is about causes, effects, perspectives, and drama. History didn’t have to turn out the way it did, and history might not actually be, in absolute truth, the way we see it in textbooks or in history books. It might be a little bit different when you see it from a different angle. I was reminded of all of this as I read Eliza Hamilton, and even as a history teacher I need (and am grateful for) that reminder.
I don’t like everything about Mazzeo’s Eliza Hamilton. I do, on balance like it very much, and I will (spoiler alert) recommend it highly. But there are some issues that I found with the book that, in my opinion, are semi-important. For this reason, even though I hate “compliment sandwiches”, that’s how I’m going to approach this review because that’s what works in this case. You can expect it to be very heavy on the compliments and easy on the filling. (Isn’t the filling the best part? If the compliments are the bread, wouldn’t the sandwich be worse if you give more compliments? This is one of the reasons I don’t like them. Oh well.)
Mazzeo mentions in the “Author’s Note” at the end (a necessary read in this case) that although in the last 20 years there have been “no fewer than a dozen full-length biographies of the most flamboyant of our Founding Fathers (Alexander Hamilton)” this is “the first full-length biography of Eliza Hamilton”. As such, this is a necessary and important work. It portrays Eliza as a frontier woman with strength and independence, with aspirations of her own and accomplishments galore. While Eliza is lovable and admirable in both the musical Hamilton and in Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, she is still a cypher. Mazzeo has cracked the code, making Eliza understandable and all the better a character for it. The reasons for that are numerous, but a big one is how she interprets the “Reynolds Affair”, which I discuss at length below. Having read Ron Chernow’s Hamilton biography, it sometimes floored me to see Eliza’s perspective of a familiar event or time period. For example, when the Hamiltons moved to the temporary capital of Philadelphia for Alexander to work in Washington’s cabinet, Mazzeo writes that “Philadelphia had been a disaster from Eliza’s perspective. Sickness, scandal, and slander dominated their lives for three years, and Eliza had borne them patiently for as long as she could stand to.” This is a significant and refreshing shift from Alexander’s perspective, as Philadelphia marked the most productive time of his career in terms of creating a legacy.
(Note: I would normally never refer to Washington as “George” in one of these reviews, just as I did not refer to Hamilton as “Alexander” in my review of Ron Chernow’s book, but I will refer to Eliza Hamilton as simply “Eliza” this time simply because of the relative fame of the two Hamiltons. For clarity, I will also refer to her husband as “Alexander” here.)
Eliza Hamilton is not the only well-investigated character in Mazzeo’s book. Her entire family, from her father Philip Schuyler to her mother Kitty Schuyler and her sisters Peggy and (especially) Angelica, were more human and relatable as Eliza’s family than as Alexander’s in-laws. This makes intuitive sense, but it is also evidence of Mazzeo’s proficient grasp of her subject. For example, Philip Schuyler’s story is much more dramatic than I realized, having encountered, on one transatlantic voyage, a “ghost ship” — “an abandoned and crippled slaver, whose fleeing crew had left behind their still-chained human cargo”, then French bounty hunters who captured his ship, then a sea battle in which his ship was recaptured by the British. If that wasn’t enough, he was almost murdered in his bed by an assassin during the American Revolution, if not for “a household slave catching a glint of metal reflected in the light of the fireplace, and with great presence of mind, calling out for help from imaginary sentinels”.
The women in the Schuyler family are not to be forgotten either. Kitty, Eliza’s mother, became a legend during and after the Revolution for setting fire to her own fields as part of the American “scorched earth” policy when the British were invading the Hudson River Valley. And Angelica, a necessary and fruitful character in any biography of Alexander, comes into even sharper focus in Eliza’s narrative. Mazzeo even makes great sense of one of the most confounding passages in Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, when Angelica writes to Eliza and says of Alexander:
I love him very much and if you were as generous as the Old Romans, you would lend him to me for a little while.
This sounds risque, if playful, to the modern ear. (Lin-Manuel Miranda even paraphrases this line in Hamilton, when Angelica says to Eliza “I’m just sayin’ if you really love me you would share him”.) However, Mazzeo’s explanation clears up any confusion:
It was part of the inside joke at the heart of Eliza and Alexander’s marriage. Eliza prided herself on being the Roman wife and told herself that all the annoyances of life in the public eye and Alexander’s political enemies were her sacrifices to family and the republic. Angelica was jestingly asking the Roman wife to make the ultimate sacrifice.
I had two significant issues with Eliza Hamilton. First, based on Ron Chernow’s almost-constant references to Eliza’s Christian faith, I expected it to be a major theme in the first-ever full-length biography of Eliza. It was not. There were notably few references to her faith at all, and even those that appear are superficial. After his mortal wound in the duel, Alexander says “Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian.” But instead of exploring what this moment means to Eliza’s faith, Mazzeo adds “His eyes said, Be Roman.” This repeats the earlier theme of Eliza being the Roman wife, constantly making sacrifices for the good of family or for the republic, but that makes no sense here. What does make sense is Alexander telling Eliza, I am about to die, but our beliefs tell us we will not be separated forever. But instead, she takes the opportunity to ignore explicit Christian themes in the documents and substitute her own. I felt that this was a disservice to Eliza as a character, if Chernow is to be believed about her strong Christian faith.
The use of speculative imagery around Eliza’s thoughts and feelings, such as “His eyes said, Be Roman”, is necessary for a biography of Eliza Hamilton because of the lack of documents from Eliza herself. (She burned almost all of her correspondence some time after Hamilton’s death.) This makes Eliza Hamilton read somewhat like historical fiction sometimes, but in a good way. It brings life to her character in a way that would not otherwise be possible. However, it creates a problem when it is difficult to ascertain which details are being creatively reimagined and which are true to life. That brings me to the ever-exciting topic of endnotes. Almost all biographies today use endnotes, and most of the time they put a number at the end of the sentence or paragraph to reference the endnote in the back of the book where you can find the source for that information. Common practice. Mazzeo uses a less common (and in my opinion, annoying) method of endnotes where there are no references to the endnotes in the text itself but within the endnotes it references back to the page and quotes a snippet of the text to which it refers. Here is an example:
This makes tracing evidence for a claim more difficult, and it obscures the wealth of evidence Mazzeo has for her arguments. You may be thinking Oh that doesn’t matter dude, but the legitimacy of Mazzeo’s research is important because she makes claims about the Reynolds Affair that run counter to most historians’ narratives. She has done the research, and it is clear, but you have to do a lot of diving in the notes to see it. Not everyone will do that.
[I am not alone in my feelings about these endnotes. After I took to Twitter to get historians’ thoughts on Mazzeo’s Reynolds Affair argument, I said I was going to do some notes-diving and someone told me “Good luck — (The endnotes are) a mess”]
*End of the terrible-tasting middle of this compliment sandwich*
What I loved the most about Eliza Hamilton was Mazzeo’s central argument, which I have alluded to but have not outlined yet. This argument is that Alexander Hamilton’s sexual tryst with Maria Reynolds, which features prominently in any story of his life, never actually happened. This, as I said, runs counter to almost every historian’s take on the subject (Mazzeo mentions several historians in the “Author’s Note” that at least mention the ambiguous nature of the evidence), and I was initially extremely skeptical because Mazzeo is not a historian by trade. However, I was compelled by Mazzeo’s case and I am now a believer. I don’t think we will ever be able to know for sure, but at the moment I think it is more likely than not that Alexander Hamilton never had an affair with Maria Reynolds. Take that Ron Chernow.
I am about to get into some details that will be less interesting to those not already entranced with the Reynolds Affair, and it will also contain spoilers for the central theory of the book, so many may want to stop reading now. If so, know that I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in Alexander Hamilton, women’s history, or the complicated business of writing history. My wife and I had extended conversations about how history, like science, can never fully provide us with truth. A deep conversation for a biography to bring about, but that is what you can expect from this one.
Major spoilers after the jump.
Alright, so the conventional narrative goes like this:
Alexander Hamilton started a torrid affair with Maria Reynolds when Mrs. Reynolds came to his house one night in distress, and very quickly he began to be extorted by her husband James Reynolds. Hamilton paid James Reynolds over $1,000 (maybe around $30,000 in today’s money) because Reynolds said “pay me or I’ll tell Eliza or maybe even release it to the public”. Then Congress stumbles onto these payments that Alexander has been making to James Reynolds and starts wondering if he is doing what we now call insider trading, giving money to someone else to put into stocks, bonds, securities, notes, etc. Hamilton, as Treasury Secretary, knows and has an effect on what is going to happen with these markets, so he could stand to make a lot of money on this. It’s also illegal, then and now. So these Congressmen (which include Aaron Burr and future president James Monroe) come to Alexander and ask him what’s going on. Alexander tells them that he’s not doing any insider trading, he’s having an affair with James Reynolds’ wife and getting extorted because of it. The Congressmen say they’re going to keep it hush hush, they leave. Hamilton stops the affair. A few years later, it leaks to the partisan newspaper editor James Callender. James Monroe is responsible for the leak, probably indirectly. Callender doesn’t believe Hamilton’s story (Monroe didn’t either, by the way) and writes about how he confessed to having an affair BUT it’s probably a cover story for his insider trading. Hamilton releases the Reynolds Pamphlet, telling everyone he is an adulterer but did not under any circumstances do any insider trading. This, of course, is very hurtful to Eliza, who might have found out about her husband’s affair in the press, and now her marriage is front page news. Everyone believes Alexander, because who would lie about that, and Alexander keeps his position in the government while losing credibility in his personal life.
Now… for the more alternative narrative proposed by Mazzeo. I’m not going to go into detail because she does it better than I ever could and I want you to read the book, but here is the gist:
Alexander Hamilton never had an affair. He was already helping Eliza’s family make money (Philip Schuyler, Angelica’s husband John Church, and many others made lots of money in the markets while Alexander was Treasury Secretary) and he wanted to get in the game himself. Maria Reynolds was a third cousin of Eliza’s, so he knew James Reynolds and asked him to make some purchases for him. It was small amounts to make a little bit of money on the side. Once it starts to come out, Alexander Hamilton and James Reynolds come up with a plan to say Alexander was having an affair with Maria. Alexander brings Eliza in on the plan. Eliza supports him because the Schuylers always close ranks and support each other when there is a family emergency, and Eliza wants nothing more than to avoid debtors’ prison, where her cousin and Alexander’s former assistant Treasury Secretary William Duerr is already languishing for doing the exact same thing. Therefore, Eliza knows that the story isn’t true and no harm is done until the story is eventually released to the public. This explains why Maria Reynolds denied the affair the rest of her life. It explains why Maria and James divorced soon after it was made public and not before then (because she didn’t know about the cover story until then). It explains Eliza’s strange reaction to the affair (Mazzeo: “In private Schuyler family correspondence and in Alexander Hamilton’s surviving letters to her, she steadfastly refuses to accept that Alexander has betrayed her and places the blame squarely and exclusively on the shoulders of his political enemies.”). It explains why, when the Congressmen came to meet with Alexander, he told them the story in his living room. As Mazzeo writes, “A man who intends to keep a secret from his wife doesn’t invite his accusers to meet in his family living room on a Saturday evening.” It answers so many questions, and Mazzeo argues her case exquisitely. I was compelled to accept it by the end.
Mazzeo, in her “Author’s Note” (required reading, as it sums everything up), mentions that Jefferson and Hamilton fall in and out of favor with historians in alternating fashion. We’re in a Hamilton moment right now, but not too long ago it was a Jefferson moment. The Jefferson biographers are more likely to talk about the questions behind the Reynolds Affair because Jefferson himself had questions. However, Mazzeo writes:
Few contemporary biographies of Alexander Hamilton raise the questions of whether Alexander Hamilton might have been fibbing. The best biographies — Ron Chernow’s notably among them — mention them only in the footnotes and then proceed to tell the story of the Maria Reynolds affair as if we are certain that it did happen, because that is the only way to write a life story.
She’s exactly right. It’s common practice for biographers to take their subjects at their word. Alexander Hamilton’s biographers take him at his word that he had the affair and never did any insider trading. Jefferson’s biographers take Jefferson at his word that he didn’t find Alexander’s story entirely reliable. And while we don’t have many of Eliza Hamilton’s words, her first biographer does a great job at using her character and personality before and after the Reynolds affair to show that it is more than likely that Alexander was covering for something he saw as having much greater consequences.
Yes, there are competing theories. Yes, we will never know for sure. But I believe Mazzeo. I believe Eliza.
I believe you should check it out for yourself and see what you think. You won’t regret it.
I borrowed a copy of Eliza Hamilton from my local library. Borrow it, request it, or consider donating to your library today.
