Cops have a saying: If someone’s story doesn’t make sense, it probably isn’t true. Keep that in mind while reading this archivist’s note on the controversial affair between Alexander Hamilton and Maria Reynolds in the National Archives: Despite the most rigorous scholarship and the best intentions, historians have been forced to leave the ‘Reynolds Affair’ in essentially the same enigmatic state in which they have found it.
Scholars find it difficult to make sense of the Reynolds Affair because they approach it like academics. If they studied the evidence like detectives or journalists, they’d know not to trust the key witness’s story before running him through the vetting process. When determining if a potential witness’s statements will hold up in court, investigators run a background check to help them answer these three questions: 1) Does this person stand to benefit from his testimony? 2) Has the witness’s story remained consistent over time? 3) Does the person have a reason to either deceive investigators, frame the person they’re testifying against, or any other conflict of interest that might undermine their credibility? In the case of Jacob Clingman, the key witness in the investigation into the affair led by James Monroe, the answer to the first question is “yes.” Clingman volunteered testimony that would “hang Hamilton” to escape prosecution for fraud and suborning perjury (it was not, incidentally, his first offense). Clingman, therefore, fails the first test in the vetting process. Now, for the second test: Did Clingman’s story change over time? The answer again is “yes.” At first, he named William Duer as his source inside the Treasury Department, but gave up a different name in the end. That person is now believed to be Simeon Reynolds, who worked from 1791 to 1792 in the office of the register of the Treasury. But if Simeon Reynolds, a clerk in the Treasury Department in 1791 and 1792, really was the leak, how did Clingman come by the intelligence he used to perpetrate his frauds against veterans in New York in 1793? And from whom did Reynolds get the list of government arrears and warrants before the Treasury Department moved to Philadelphia in 1791? The most probable candidate is Andrew G. Fraunces, who worked for the Treasury Department from 1789 to 1793 and was friendly with both Clingman and Reynolds. So, benefitted from his testimony and changed his story. Did he also have a motive to make Hamilton look guilty of speculating? He had two, actually, as his background check revealed. The first was his connection to John Beckley, a fellow clerk in the speaker’s office. Beckley was the chief underground operative in the plot against Hamilton hatched at a secret meeting between Jefferson, Madison, Burr, and Robert R. Livingston in early summer, 1791. Clingman and Beckley were known to socialize together, frequently with James T. Callender, one of the muckrakers on Jefferson’s payroll. But Clingman also had personal reasons to want Hamilton destroyed, as we see in the following excerpt from Profiles of Patriots: A Biographical Reference of American Revolutionary War Patriots and Their Descendants, Vol. II, which was published in 2016 by DAR’s Williamsburg Chapter: For years, John Michael Clingman engaged in merchant-banking in Philadelphia. In a bitter political fight with Alexander Hamilton, John Michael Clingman and other bankers were defeated. Being prosecuted and proscribed against by Hamilton, Clingman left his family in Northumberland County and fled alone to the Ohio Wilderness. John Michael Clingman was Jacob’s father, who, judging by the above, belonged to William Duer’s secret circle of bankers and speculators known as the Six Percent Club. All of them were ruined when Hamilton cracked down on “knaves and gamblers” in the securities market in 1792. So Jacob Clingman did have reasons to frame Hamilton, making him zero for three on the credibility scale. Clingman is, therefore, a patently unreliable witness no detective, defense attorney, or journalist would believe for a second. And yet, scholars continue to base their studies and descriptions of the Reynolds Affair on his claims. Let us hope that, after learning the truth about Clingman, they see his testimony for what it was: a contrived deception in the larger Jeffersonian plot to rid the world of Alexander Hamilton.
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The image above is a folk art painting by an unknown artist. The article below appeared in The New Yorker on Sept. 22, 2008. In 1852, when Harriet Beecher Stowe finished “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she wrote to a congressman, Horace Mann, who happened to be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s brother-in-law, to beg a favor. Might he know how to get a copy of her book to Charles Dickens? “Were the subject any other I should think this impertinent & Egotistical,” Stowe wrote, making of demurral a poor cloak for presumption. But she had reason to expect Dickens’s sympathy. A decade earlier, upon completing an unhappy tour of the United States, Dickens judged the country “the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty.” Seeing slavery at first hand left him sick. “I really don’t think I could have borne it any longer,” he confessed, after riding a train whose passengers included a mother and her weeping children, sold away from their father by a fiend whom Dickens satirized as yet another American “champion of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”It would be going too far to say that Charles Dickens had it in for the original champion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Still, he rarely missed an opportunity to throw a dagger in Thomas Jefferson’s general direction, slurring, in his American novel, “Martin Chuzzlewit” (1844), that “noble patriot . . . who dreamed of Freedom in a slave’s embrace.” Discerning readers knew which patriot he meant. Dickens was quoting the Irish poet Thomas Moore, who visited the United States soon after a scurrilous Scots journalist named James Callender published, in the September, 1802, Richmond Recorder, long-standing rumors that Jefferson, who was President at the time, had fathered children by one of his slaves: “Her name is SALLY.” Moore, inspired, wrote a poem-- The weary statesman for repose hath fled From halls of council to his negro’s shed, Where blest he woos some black Aspasia’s grace, And dreams of freedom in his slave’s embrace! —onto which Dickens, appalled, tacked an epilogue: “and waking sold her offspring and his own in public markets” Hamilton’s adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds came to light on Nov. 16, 1792, when her husband and one Jacob Clingman were arrested on charges of “having Employed, Aided and abetted a certain John Delabar to defraud the United States of a Sum of money value near Four hundred Dollars, and having Suborned the said Delabar to commit a wilful and corrupt Perjury before George Campbell Esq. register for the probate of wills and Granting Letters of Administration.” Here’s what went down: On April 23, 1792, Delabar, Clingman, and Reynolds filed a document in Campbell’s office swearing they were the “Heirs, Executors, and Administrators” of one Ephraim Goodenough, who was from Massachusetts, but had been living in Virginia since the war. A note in the margins of the forged document states that the administrator (Delabar) claimed to be the brother-in-law of the deceased. As you can see in the document below--the actual one used to commit the infamous fraud--Delabar used his real name while his accomplices assumed the aliases of Isaac Hfty (signed Huty), blacksmith, and William Gurdin (signed Gurtin), cooper. Delabar also listed his occupation as cooper—one who builds barrels, for those unfamiliar with the crafts of yore. Goodenough’s name had been chosen from a confidential roster of former soldiers in Virginia and North Carolina to whom the government owed arrears, land grants, and pensions—a list obtained underhandedly from a contact inside the Treasury Department. The document shown herein is the actual one used to perpetrate the infamous fraud against Goodenough. The signatures below Delabar’s were forged by Reynolds and Clingman. The sloppiness of Hufty’s autograph suggests it was probably the one written by Reynolds, who was uneducated and, therefore, only marginally literate (as his letters confirm). The forger of Hufty’s signature did slightly better on a like document dated May 8, 1792. This time, the alleged administrator was one Edith McKee of Dover, Delaware (Maria Reynolds, perhaps?). The purported deceased was Samuel Hodgings, who the government had granted 200 acres of military land to reward his seven years of service on the Virginia Line. John Delabar also signed the application, making its unauthenticity assured. A warrant transfer found in the military archives verifies that, on Sept. 3, 1792, Edith McKee, whoever she really was, laid claim to one hundred of Hodgings’s allotted acres. Both falsified documents are shown herein. Delabar’s signature appears on yet another Letters of Administration application, this one dated May 14, 1792 and naming Elizabeth Bennet (who signed a triangular mark instead of her name) as the executor of one William Morgen’s estate. The third signatory in that claim was Henry Spengler, a country blacksmith married to a Mary Delabar, likely a relation of John’s. Because Isaac Hufty was a real person (a blacksmith late of the Pennsylvania Militia’s Sixth Battalion), the crooks might well have forged Spengler’s signature as well. Elizabeth Bennet, also claiming to be from Dover, pretended to be the sister of Morgen, a pensioner who fought in the Virginia Militia. According to census and pension records, Morgen died in 1840, not 1782. The warrants for the arrests of Clingman, Reynolds, and Delabar were sworn out by Oliver Wolcott Jr., the comptroller for the Treasury, who apprehended Clingman and Delabar first. Clingman then set up Reynolds by having a merchant whose books he once kept (and who’d refused to bail him out earlier that day) summon Reynolds to the house of Alderman Hilary Baker, where he, too, was taken into custody. Thereafter, Reynolds and Delabar remained in jail while Clingman, free on bail, provided by an unknown benefactor, tied up the loose ends in his scheme to frame Hamilton for speculating. His first step in this process was to call upon another former employer, Speaker of the House Frederick A. C. Muhlenberg. When Muhlenberg, accompanied by Aaron Burr, took Clingman’s case to Hamilton and Wolcott, he was told they’d be more disposed toward leniency if the accused would pay back the stolen money, surrender the list of veterans he’d used to commit the fraud, and give up the name of his contact inside the Treasury Department. Muhlenberg later explained (truthfully or not) that, over the next three weeks, Clingman frequently dropped hints to him, “that Reynolds had it in his power very materially to injure the Secretary of the Treasury.” The Speaker, despite pronouncing Reynolds to be “a rascal,” enlisted two hard-core Jefferson allies in congress to help him conduct an “inquiry” into the accusations. These men were James Monroe, a “general” in the Jeffersonian conspiracy against Hamilton, and Abraham Venable, a boot-licking lapdog of “Old Uncle Tom’s.” America's third president was “a brutal, creepy hypocrite,” according to Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School and the author of Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson.” who shared the ugly truth about Thomas Jefferson in the New York Times on Nov. 30, 2012. “...Jefferson was always deeply committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of blacks, slave or free," Finkelman wrote. “His proslavery views were shaped not only by money and status but also by his deeply racist views, which he tried to justify through pseudoscience. Finkelman's op-ed, which can be found here, continues as follows: There is, it is true, a compelling paradox about Jefferson: when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, announcing the “self-evident” truth that all men are “created equal,” he owned some 175 slaves. Too often, scholars and readers use those facts as a crutch, to write off Jefferson’s inconvenient views as products of the time and the complexities of the human condition. But while many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the revolution — inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration — Jefferson did not. Over the subsequent 50 years, a period of extraordinary public service, Jefferson remained the master of Monticello, and a buyer and seller of human beings. Rather than encouraging his countrymen to liberate their slaves, he opposed both private manumission and public emancipation. Even at his death, Jefferson failed to fulfill the promise of his rhetoric: his will emancipated only five slaves, all relatives of his mistress Sally Hemings, and condemned nearly 200 others to the auction block. Even Hemings remained a slave, though her children by Jefferson went free. Nor was Jefferson a particularly kind master. He sometimes punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time. A proponent of humane criminal codes for whites, he advocated harsh, almost barbaric, punishments for slaves and free blacks. Known for expansive views of citizenship, he proposed legislation to make emancipated blacks “outlaws” in America, the land of their birth. Opposed to the idea of royal or noble blood, he proposed expelling from Virginia the children of white women and black men. Jefferson also dodged opportunities to undermine slavery or promote racial equality. As a state legislator he blocked consideration of a law that might have eventually ended slavery in the state. As president he acquired the Louisiana Territory but did nothing to stop the spread of slavery into that vast “empire of liberty.” Jefferson told his neighbor Edward Coles not to emancipate his own slaves, because free blacks were “pests in society” who were “as incapable as children of taking care of themselves.” And while he wrote a friend that he sold slaves only as punishment or to unite families, he sold at least 85 humans in a 10-year period to raise cash to buy wine, art and other luxury goods. Destroying families didn’t bother Jefferson, because he believed blacks lacked basic human emotions. “Their griefs are transient,” he wrote, and their love lacked “a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation.” Jefferson claimed he had “never seen an elementary trait of painting or sculpture” or poetry among blacks and argued that blacks’ ability to “reason” was “much inferior” to whites’, while “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” He conceded that blacks were brave, but this was because of “a want of fore-thought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present.” A scientist, Jefferson nevertheless speculated that blackness might come “from the color of the blood” and concluded that blacks were “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.” Jefferson did worry about the future of slavery, but not out of moral qualms. After reading about the slave revolts in Haiti, Jefferson wrote to a friend that “if something is not done and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children.” But he never said what that “something” should be. In 1820 Jefferson was shocked by the heated arguments over slavery during the debate over the Missouri Compromise. He believed that by opposing the spread of slavery in the West, the children of the revolution were about to “perpetrate” an “act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world.” If there was “treason against the hopes of the world,” it was perpetrated by the founding generation, which failed to place the nation on the road to liberty for all. No one bore a greater responsibility for that failure than the master of Monticello. |
Hi, I'm Nina Mason, an author, investigative journalist, history buff, and self-professed Hamilton fan (not the musical, the historical figure). Herein, I will share interesting tidbits related to my investigation into my belief that the Reynolds Affair and duel with Aaron Burr were part of a larger conspiracy against Hamilton directed by Thomas Jefferson.
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