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”
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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. Like all men, even the greatest among them, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Aaron Burr were not without their human foibles. Hamilton was gratingly arrogant, thin-skinned, emotionally volatile, and quick to go on the defensive. He was a statesman, not a diplomatic, and while he was brilliant and extremely persuasive in his arguments, he allowed himself to be governed too often by his passions—often to his own detriment. Jefferson, in contrast, was the model of diplomacy. Mild-mannered and plain-spoken, he won popularity with his masterful manipulation of words and ideas. Beneath that genteel exterior, however, beat the heart of a ruthless passive-aggressive who plotted against his enemies behind their backs. And then there is Burr, an unprincipled, self-serving, and power-hungry sensualist by all accounts who thumbed his nose at social and religious mores. When the presidential election of 1800 resulted in a deadlock between Jefferson and Burr, Hamilton, after considerable soul-searching, conducted a furious letter-writing campaign to urge fellow Federalists to vote for Jefferson, even though their visions for America were opposed. His reasons? While Jefferson’s principles were misguided, at least he had some. “In a choice of Evils let them take the least,” he wrote to a fellow Federalist at the time. “Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr.” Yes, these great men had their flaws—negative traits that earned all three numerous enemies, including each other. Their intense dislike for one another eventually led to tragedy for all but Jefferson, whose cunning and well-planned attacks destroyed the reputations and political careers of the other two. While Hamilton and Burr enjoyed center stage, Jefferson preferred to watch from behind the scenery. He had a brilliant and calculating mind and he thrived on intrigues. He understood that his opponent’s secrets and faults were valuable political capital he could use to his advantage--and he took great care to collect and record what he heard in the diary he called Anas. “Gossip was everywhere,” wrote Joanne B. Freeman in “Slander, Poison, Whispers, and Fame: Jefferson’s Anas and Political Gossip,” which appeared in the Journal of the Early Republic in 1995. “Jefferson fumed against Hamilton’s slanders, and Hamilton raged against Jefferson’s whispers.” Jefferson would have heard or observed that Hamilton was a determined flirt with a weakness for women (especially pretty, vampy ones like Maria Reynolds). Whether true or not, rumors of the treasury secretary’s extramarital affairs abounded. Jefferson also knew his sworn enemy would defend his honor to the death, despite his claims of religious and moral opposition to the practice of dueling. Hamilton had made his views on the subject clear when he nearly challenged Jefferson’s pal James Monroe to a duel in 1797 over the leak of the Reynolds Affair. As for Burr, Jefferson knew very well what sort of man he was long before he became his vice president. Burr, being devoid of morals or principles, would do anything for money and/or increased political clout. Did Jefferson exploit this intelligence to eliminate his political enemies? If he did, it was a plan of such evil genius, no one suspects Jefferson’s involvement, despite the political stronghold he gained in the aftermath. Yes, the possibility that Jefferson bargained with Burr to assassinate Hamilton tampers with national myths passionately held, but sometimes our idols must be smashed in the quest for truth. “Most Americans as well as a majority of historians regard Jefferson as something of a saint, Hamilton as a martyr, and Burr as an outright villain,” wrote Arnold A. Rogow in Fatal Friendship: Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr (Hill & Wang, 1998). “If, however, the tampering which follows has any credence, all three characterizations are somewhat exaggerated. This is not to deny that Jefferson, in writing most of the Declaration of Independence and insisting upon the addition of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution, achievements of much greater importance for the American political tradition than any accomplishment of his presidency, insured that he would be remembered forever by those who cherish freedom. Nor can it be doubted that Hamilton, intellectually brilliant, perhaps a genius, contributed more than any other American of his era to the economic stability of the new Republic by restoring confidence at home and abroad in the nation’s credit, and by founding the banking system.” Burr, on the other hand, “achieved little and contributed nothing of lasting value to his country,” in Rogow’s estimation. Some historians in recent years have attempted to defend Burr’s honor, pointing to the enlightened way in which he raised and educated his daughter, Theodosia. He was a man ahead of his time, they insist, a pioneering feminist in an age of misogyny. Still others (most notably Gore Vidal) have insinuated that Burr’s relationship with his daughter was more incestuous than progressive. If that is true, it would not have been the first time in history a widower expected his eldest daughter to assume her mother’s duties, not excluding those of a conjugal nature. Nevertheless, it seems far more likely the outlets for Burr’s pedophilic tendencies (if indeed he had any) were the many orphans and young refugees he took under his wing. That, at least, was the rumor of the day—and quite possibly the “despicable” thing Hamilton said that led to his death. Whatever Burr’s crimes or contributions might or might not have been, gossip, rumors, and accusations followed him throughout his life. He was said to consort openly with prostitutes, seduce genteel virgins, have affairs with women of high and low birth, and exploit public office for private gain. Burr also fathered two illegitimate children by his East Indian servant Mary Emmons (a.k.a. Eugénie Bearhani) and did many favors for Maria Reynolds, including handling her divorce and finding her employment after she split from her second husband. Did they have an affair? Knowing both their reputations for licentiousness, it seems likely. Hamilton frequently described Burr as “profligate” and “a voluptuary in the extreme,” suggesting it might have been more than Burr’s frequent affairs to which he objected. Doing so, after all, would have made him a hypocrite, given his own established and rumored transgressions. These included his sister-in-law, Angelica Schuyler Church, who also maintained a bosom friendship with Jefferson, and Eliza Bowen Jumel, who later married and divorced Burr after he murdered Hamilton. Jefferson, too, had unsuitable liaisons—with Betsy Walker, the wife of a close friend, and his slave, Sally Hemings, who bore him several bastard children (DNA results confirm his fatherhood of all but one of her children). While serving as the U.S. Minister to France, he also forged intimate (and perhaps sexual) bonds with two other married women: Maria Cosway and Angelica Church, with whom he exchanged affectionate correspondence for many years thereafter. Their cross-over relationships with Mrs. Reynolds and Madame Jumel suggest that Burr and Hamilton might have had similar taste in women—one of the few things these two political and professional rivals had in common apart from their brilliant minds, shrewd cunning, and persuasive verbal skills—traits Jefferson also possessed in abundance. All three also shared a psychic wound inflicted early in life by the death or abandonment of their parents. The scar this left on their psyches manifested itself differently in each man, but can be seen in the actions and ambitions of them all. In Jefferson, the wound showed itself as a need to be loved. That is the underlying reason he pursued public office and public approval throughout most of his life—and also why he resigned his posts whenever he felt unappreciated. In Hamilton, his parental abandonment fueled an insatiable thirst for fame and glory—not because he craved approval and popularity to fill the inner void the way Jefferson did, but as a means to overcome his humble and illegitimate beginnings. At that time in colonial America (and long after the revolution) all men were not perceived as equal. Because the British class system was still very much in force, the quickest way someone born out of wedlock in the Danish West Indies could rise above his station was by distinguishing himself in the service of his country, either as a soldier or statesman. In the era of the American Revolution, “fame” had a special meaning having little to do with celebrity. For Hamilton and the other founders, fame was inextricably linked with honor and a special kind of achievement. In the Essays of Sir Francis Bacon, which the young Hamilton studied assiduously (as did Jefferson, Burr, and many other learned men of the day), the English philosopher and organizer of knowledge dismissed the praise of the common people as irrelevant to seekers after true fame. Winning fame, Bacon maintained, meant winning the praise not of the masses, but from persons of judgment and quality. In Bacon’s model, there are five rungs on the ladder of fame. On the lowest are Fathers of the Country, who “reign justly and make the times good wherein they live.” Next are Champions of Empire, leaders who enlarge their country through conquest or defend her against invaders. On the next rung up are Saviors of Empire, who deliver their country from the miseries of tyrants or the chaos of civil wars. Then come the Great Lawgivers, such as Solon, Lycurgus, and Justinian. Finally, at the summit, are Founders of Empires—men like Julius Caesar and Cyrus of Persia who were at once great generals and wise legislators. This is the kind of “fame” to which Hamilton aspired—greatness rather than celebrity. And that was undoubtedly why he was so punctilious about keeping his honor and integrity squeaky clean. Yes, he had at least one affair, but attitudes about infidelity were different back then. Men, it was widely believed, required regular ejaculation to maintain good health and, if their wives were unable to accommodate their needs, they were obliged to seek another vessel for their release. Most men went to prostitutes to fill their unmet needs—unless, like Jefferson, they owned slaves who would do as well, without the risk of the pox. And while we’re on the subject of Sally Hemings, forget Hollywood’s romanticized portrayals of the relationship between her and Jefferson. She probably meant no more to her master than the bucket of ice-water he soaked his feet in every night—also for the sake of his good health. Southern slave-owners back then impregnated their female slaves, often by force, both to purify the African race, which was considered inferior to whites, and to increase their slave holdings. Despite his inspiring passages on liberty and equality in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was hardly enlightened on matters of race. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he admitted his repugnance to the color, hair, physiques, and smell of Africans. Accepting the “deep-rooted prejudices” of his day and age, Jefferson also believed blacks to be slow, lazy, oversexed, less capable than whites of reasoning, and on the whole an inferior race. [Source: Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson]. Jefferson, therefore, probably chose Sally as his “mistress” because she was a quadroon (three-fourths white) and, therefore, nearly Caucasian in appearance. Contemporary accounts describe her as having "dusky" skin and straight black hair. Her children by her master were seven-eighths white. Some even had their father’s signature red hair. Hamilton, conversely, despised the institution of slavery, advocated for the recruitment of black soldiers in the Continental Army, and was a founding member of the New York Manumission Society, an organization devoted to the abolition of slavery. The Society, founded by John Jay in 1785, kept up a relentless pressure of economic intimidation, including hectoring newspaper editors against advertising slave sales, pressuring auction houses and ship-owners to abandon the import and sale of slaves, and providing legal aid to slaves suing their masters. Though a slave-owner himself, Burr also promoted the abolition of slavery. Working closely with the Manumission Society, he introduced an amendment into the New York Assembly calling for the immediate emancipation of slaves in New York. The amendment failed, but eventually resulted in the passage of a bill sanctioning the gradual emancipation of slaves in New York. The above is excerpted from my work-in-progress, All-Out Warfare: The Jeffersonian Conspiracy to Destroy Alexander Hamilton. |
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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