The 23-year-old blonde presented herself as a damsel in distress, telling the treasury secretary that her abusive husband, James Reynolds, had left her and their young daughter to run off with another woman.
Maria Reynolds Approaches Alexander HamiltonĪccording to Hamilton’s version of events, which he shared with the world in 1797, Maria (probably pronounced “Mah-rye-ah”) Reynolds came to his family home in Philadelphia in the summer of 1791, and asked to speak to him in private. In fact, as any fan of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster hip-hop musical Hamilton knows, Hamilton torpedoed his own presidential ambitions for good in 1797, when he published a tell-all pamphlet about the sordid details of his earlier affair with a married woman, Maria Reynolds, and the blackmail payments he made to her husband to cover up the affair.Ĭomplete with illicit meetings, payments of “hush money” and allegations of corruption, the Reynolds Affair had all the trappings of a modern-day political sex scandal, and was all the more shocking for being the first such drama in U.S. president-not only because he died in a duel by the hands of Aaron Burr. Yet unlike Washington, and unlike his longtime nemesis Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton never served as U.S.
Treasury, Alexander Hamilton built the foundations of the national banking system and wielded more power in the earliest years of American democracy than any other man beside George Washington.
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