Excerpt from Scandalmonger by William Safire, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Did they ask you about us?"

She shook her head. "Only about Hamilton and my husband. They showed me the notes you gave them, and I said they were in Hamilton's writing, sometimes disguised."

"Did they ask about any relationship between you and Hamilton?" Clingman knew that the Treasury Secretary had taken advantage of her at least once, over a year ago. She had told him it was during her faithless husband's pursuit of another woman, when she found herself lonely and destitute, but she had a put in, "Which you paid?"

"I paid and paid and paid. This confession," Hamilton said, "is not made without a blush. I condemn myself because if this were ever to become public, it would inflict a pain upon my wife, who is eminently entitled to all my gratitude, fidelity and love."

"When did the extortion begin?" Monroe asked, ignoring Hamilton's expressions of sentiment about his wife.

"Sometime in the summer of last year a woman called at my house here in Philadelphia and asked to speak to me in private...."


June 17, 1791
Philadelphia

As Hamilton chose to remember it, the slender young woman standing in the sunlight of a summer Sunday afternoon, her face shadowed by a fashionable hat, appeared to be distraught. She was well dressed, obviously not a mendicant.

"Colonel Hamilton, could I have a few moments of your time?"

Hamilton asked if whatever was troubling her could not be better attended to at his Treasury office the next day. She seemed on the verge of tears and in a choked voice replied that it was a personal matter; she did not think it proper to disturb him at the Treasury Department.

"My family is in the drawing room," he said, motioning her in, "so let me attend you in my study over here."

After declining a glass of sherry, she folded her hands in her lap and introduced herself. "I am the daughter of Edgar Lewis of New York, and sister to Gilbert Livingston, whose family I believe you know."

Hamilton nodded his recognition of this distinguished lineage; one Livingston was Governor of New Jersey, another a political and financial ally of his in New York. By "sister," she undoubtedly meant "sister-in-law." She also identified a brother as a longtime sheriff of Dutchess County. He felt a fleeting urge to tell the wellborn young lady that, in contrast, he was an immigrant at seventeen from the Leeward Islands, the bastard son of a freethinking mother and a deserting father, and had spent the past twenty years in America as revolutionary warrior and creative banker living down his shameful family background. He let it pass; in her fragile emotional state, his statuesque visitor with the near-violet eyes was too appealing to interrupt.

"I was married seven years ago, Colonel Hamilton, to James Reynolds." She was now hardly more than twenty, he estimated, and might have been forced by necessity of pregnancy to marry that young. Few women of her class were as courageously amoral as Hamilton's mother, willing to bear and rear a child out of wedlock. "His father was in the Commissary Department during the war with Great Britain, in which you so valiantly fought."

"The name Reynolds is familiar." It was a common name, and he did not recall the man, but she evidently felt the need for further familial endorsement.

"My husband is a cruel and dishonest man. He has abandoned me, and my daughter, to live with another woman." She searched for a handkerchief in her purse, avoiding his eyes. "He has left us destitute."

His surge of sympathy for her distress was genuine. The man who abandoned a woman of such breeding and carriage, not to mention good looks, was not just a rogue but a fool. "How may I help?"

She looked up with hope. "I desire to leave Philadelphia to return to my friends and family in New York. The cost of such a move is at present beyond my means, and I cannot take a position in commerce because my young daughter requires my care." She took a deep breath. "Because I know you are a foremost citizen of New York, I have taken the liberty to apply to your humanity for assistance."

Copyright William Safire February 2000. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the publisher, Simon & Schuster