WILLIAM DUER PROVED TO BE A DISASTROUS FRIEND TO ALEXANDER.
THE WOMAN AT THE DOOR was young, just twenty-three. She said her husband had abused her and left her for another woman, and she didn’t have the money to return to New York. She knew, of course, that Alexander was a New Yorker. Perhaps he could help?
Alexander wanted to be of service ever so badly. His heart was no match for a woman in need. His mother had been treated badly by her first husband and then abandoned by Alexander’s father, after all. Men were meant to protect women. Honor—or something that felt like it—demanded it.
That night, he stashed money in his pocket and walked less than a quarter of a mile to her house at 154 South Fourth Street. He was shown upstairs, where Maria met him and led him into a bedroom. He fished the money out of his pocket. They chatted, and it became apparent to him quickly that she would be consoled by something a bit warmer than cash.
And so began an affair. He met with Maria Reynolds frequently. He even moved these trysts to his own house once Eliza and the children had traveled to Albany for the summer.
Little James, his three-year-old, was sick, and Alexander played up his concern in a letter to his wife. As usual, he had lots of medical advice for Eliza, urging her to keep flannel next to James’s skin. She should feed him barley water with a dash of brandy and prevent him from eating any fruit whatsoever. What’s more, he should drink water that had been boiled in an iron pot.
“I hope he will have had some rhubarb or antimonial wine,” Alexander wrote. “Paregoric at night in moderation will do him good & a little bark will not do him harm.”
Most important, she should stay away for a while. For her health, of course.
Meanwhile, he’d stay in Philadelphia. “I am so anxious for a perfect restoration of your health that I am willing to make a great sacrifice for it.”
He wrote letter after letter urging her to stay away for the sake of her health. He even sent one to his son Philip, suggesting he delay visiting until school holidays, even though Alexander had promised to welcome the boy: “A promise must never be broken…. But it has occurred to me that the Christmas holidays are near at hand, and I suppose your school will then break up for some days and give you an opportunity of coming to stay with us for a longer time than if you should come on Saturday.”
The affair didn’t end when Maria told Alexander her husband wanted to reconcile. Meanwhile, she let Alexander know her husband had important information about a scoundrel in the Treasury Department. Alexander, wary, sent for James Reynolds. When Reynolds came to Alexander’s office, he pretended to be reluctant to speak of corruption. But he rather quickly named William Duer as the rascal.
Duer was an old friend who’d married Alexander’s former crush Kitty Livingston. He’d written Federalist essays that weren’t up to snuff. He had in fact traded wildly in securities, but it was after he’d left the Treasury Department, and Alexander had already scolded him for it. A few months later, Duer had managed to ruin himself financially and go to jail, and Alexander refused to pull strings on his behalf, so adamant was he about the integrity of his department. Duer had been a disaster for Alexander, and more so for himself.
WILLIAM DUER PROVED TO BE A DISASTROUS FRIEND TO ALEXANDER.
Still, to keep relations good with the husband of his mistress, Alexander pretended to care about the irrelevant disclosures. Not long afterward, Reynolds asked Alexander for a job in the Treasury Department. Much as Alexander wanted to keep the peace on account of his situation with Maria, he deflected Reynolds’s request.
ALEXANDER AND HIS LOVER HAD THEIR AFFAIR JUST STEPS FROM INDEPENDENCE HALL IN PHILADELPHIA.
As time passed, Alexander wanted out of this mess. But Maria held on. By December, she sent him letter after hysterical letter, sometimes using her maid to deliver them. Her heart was ready to “Burst with Greef,” she wrote. “I can neither Eate or sleep I have Been on the point of doing the moast horrid acts at I shuder to think where I might been what will Become of me.”
Her writing, atrocious as it was, tugged at his heartstrings. She loved him, or seemed to, and this pleased his vanity. Some part of him always remained the boy abandoned by his father, the one who needed to prove himself in his adopted country, the one who was so often treated as an outsider. That part of him craved being loved. What’s more, he thought it better to let her down easy than break it off all at once.
Disaster struck on December 15, not long after he’d presented a groundbreaking Report on the Subject of Manufactures to Congress. Maria let him know that they’d been discovered by her husband. Worse, he was going to tell Eliza.
“Oh my God I feel more for you than myself and wish I had never been born to give you so mutch unhappisness do not rite to him no not a Line but come here soon do not send or leave any thing in his power,” she wrote.
The same day, Reynolds sent a letter of his own. He told Alexander that Maria had been weeping, and curious about the reason, he’d watched her hand a letter to a man on Market Street. Reynolds followed that man to Alexander’s door. Alexander, not keen to admit guilt if he didn’t have to, invited him to visit at the office.
Reynolds was cagey, and Alexander smelled a plot. He made an offer to help Reynolds find a job as best as he could. This mollified Reynolds, but only for a couple of days. That’s when another letter arrived. “I find the wife always weeping and praying that I wont leve her. And its all on your account. for if you had not seekd for her Ruin it would not have happined.”
The gist of Reynolds’s letter was that Alexander had seduced Maria, made her fall in love with him, stolen her from Reynolds, and done him harm.
Alexander, fearing he was the subject of a most serious plot, visited Reynolds and demanded to know what the man really wanted. Two days later, Reynolds’s answer came. He’d feel much better if Alexander gave him $1,000. Reynolds would take the money and his daughter, and leave Maria for Alexander.
Alexander, short on funds, had to pay Reynolds in two installments, the first, of $600 on December 22, and the second on January 3, 1792.
Reynolds didn’t leave town, though. Two weeks after Alexander had paid the second lump, he received yet another letter, this one inviting him to start visiting Maria again—as a friend. Alexander didn’t accept right away. Then Maria started begging.
“I have kept my Bed those tow dayes and now rise from My pillow wich your Neglect has filled with the sharpest thorns…. Let me Intreat you If you wont Come to send me a Line oh my head I can rite no more do something to Ease My heart or Els I no not what I shall do for so I cannot live Commit this to the care of my maid be not offended I beg.”
James Reynolds followed two months later with a letter of his own, begging Alexander to visit, because his visits kept her cheerful. Reynolds mentioned he had no desire to cause Alexander’s family pain, a doubtful claim. Maria, meanwhile, wrote again and again. Her bosom was tortured and she couldn’t believe Alexander wasn’t visiting. “If my dear freend has the Least Esteeme for the unhappy Maria whos grateest fault is Loveing him he will come as soon as he shall get this and till that time My breast will be the seate of pain and woe.”
P.S., she wrote, with no subtlety whatsoever: her husband would be away that evening.
Meanwhile, James Reynolds hit Alexander up for more money. For months, the couple continued to badger Alexander for money and visits, essentially blackmailing him, else they’d expose the affair.
Eventually, Alexander stopped paying Reynolds. The situation reeked of a setup. And it may well have been. Back in the days of the Constitutional Convention, someone had sent a letter suggesting that the delegates were conspiring to bring King George’s second son to rule the United States. Alexander’s political enemies consistently accused him of being a closet monarch, and that letter was no doubt meant to smear him in particular.
Its author? James Reynolds.
MEANWHILE, ALEXANDER’S CONTROVERSIAL whiskey tax had taken effect around the time Maria Reynolds first came to call. As he expected, it wasn’t popular. But it was the government’s best bet for revenue because it wasn’t a direct tax on citizens. Instead, it taxed the producers of alcohol, who could pass the burden of the fees down the line by charging consumers a bit more.
Farmers didn’t go for this, particularly the ones on the frontier who made whiskey from their surplus corn. They were short on actual money (a problem Alexander was also trying to solve), so they sometimes used whiskey as literal liquid currency. Federal taxes got in the way. What’s more, frontier prices were lower, so the tax represented a greater portion of the product and felt unfair.
A rebellion began brewing.
And then there was his Report on the Subject of Manufacturers. He’d presented this in December 1791, as things with Maria were unraveling spectacularly. The report landed with a thud. This was the final major program he devised as Treasury secretary. He’d prevailed with his first two reports: the federal assumption of state debts and the creation of the Bank of the United States. His political foes, especially Jefferson and Madison, were itching to hand him a defeat.
The plan envisioned a manufacturing base that could compete with England’s. This would diversify the American economy and leave the country less dependent on British imports. It wasn’t a trivial matter. It was necessary. American soldiers had gone shoeless during the war because of a lack of American manufacturing—something Jefferson and Madison hadn’t witnessed from their distant perches safe from combat.
The plan called for industries that produced necessities such as coal, wool, and cotton to be subsidized. It lowered tariffs on some imports used as raw materials. And it imposed import tariffs to give American manufacturers an edge against overseas competition, as well as government subsidies designed to boost production.
Alexander challenged Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian economy, which depended on the labor of enslaved people. “It has been maintained, that Agriculture is, not only, the most productive, but the only productive species of industry. The reality of this suggestion … has, however, not been verified by any accurate detail of facts and calculations,” he wrote.
What’s more, manufacturing and agriculture weren’t competitors. They were allies in creating a stronger national economy. Each segment would bolster the other.
No matter how forward-thinking his argument was, elected officials from slave states bristled. The idea of reorienting an economy away from slavery felt too threatening. Plus, the way speculation had roiled the economy left some people wary of more from Alexander.
Madison and Jefferson sharpened their rhetorical knives. For Madison, Alexander’s influence from the executive branch over the legislature was eroding the separation of powers established in the Constitution. Jefferson also disliked the bounties for certain industries the report called for. He thought these subsidies were ripe for abuse.
Newspapers got into the fray. A Republican Party paper, the National Gazette, printed editorials by Madison that pummeled Alexander.
Madison also tried to edit some technical aspects of a speech of Washington’s so that it would sound as though Washington supported Jefferson’s views on the makeup of coins, and not Alexander’s. The editing was subtle enough that Washington wasn’t even aware until Alexander pointed it out to him.
Jefferson tried behind the scenes to turn Washington against Alexander using so-called evidence that Alexander was a monarchist. Jefferson hadn’t been in Washington’s family during the war, though, and couldn’t fully appreciate the faith the president had in Alexander. Washington never wavered.
By May 1792, despite the support of Washington, Alexander’s burdens felt heavy. The secret Reynolds business clotted his conscience, and he felt under siege from Jefferson and Madison. He never would have taken the Treasury job in the first place had he known Madison would not only abandon their partnership but set it ablaze with increasingly strident rhetoric.
Madison and Jefferson weren’t Alexander’s only political enemies. When political chatter suggested John Adams might lose the vice presidency, Aaron Burr’s name came up as someone Jefferson might back for the job. Alexander couldn’t stomach that prospect, especially after Burr had endorsed another Clinton governorship, so he started writing friends confidential letters eviscerating Burr. Alexander considered it a “religious duty” to oppose Burr’s career.
One letter read, “As a public man he is one of the worst sort—a friend to nothing but as it suits his interest and ambition…. In a word, if we have an embryo-Cæsar in the United States ’tis Burr.”
It was a restless, unhappy time for Alexander, and there was unrest and misery in the world as well. In August 1792, just as Eliza gave birth to a baby boy, radical French revolutionaries—the sort of mob Alexander loathed and feared—had ordered Lafayette’s arrest. He fled France but was captured in Austria and thrown into a brutal prison.
Then, in mid-November, Reynolds and an associate were arrested on charges they’d defrauded the U.S. government of $400. It wasn’t Reynolds’s first run-in with the law. He’d been charged earlier in connection with speculating on the IOUs but was never convicted. This time, though, he’d had a friend perjure himself, and he got caught, along with a man named Jacob Clingman, who’d worked for Congressman Frederick Muhlenberg.
Oliver Wolcott Jr., the comptroller of Alexander’s Treasury Department, brought the charges. As he did, Reynolds revealed he had information that could damage someone in the Treasury. Wolcott, having no idea what Reynolds was getting at, asked Alexander for advice. Though he knew the stakes, Alexander didn’t hesitate: Reynolds should be held until the charge was investigated.
In a meeting on December 13, 1792, with Alexander, Muhlenberg, and Aaron Burr, Wolcott agreed to drop the charges if Clingman and Reynolds surrendered the list of names they’d used for their crimes, paid back the money, and turned over the person who’d given them the list in the first place.
If Alexander thought he’d dodged a bullet with this tidy resolution, he was wrong. Clingman had continued to pester Muhlenberg with the promise of scandalous information about someone in the Treasury. Finally, Muhlenberg consented to listen.
On December 15, the anniversary of Alexander’s report on America’s future as a manufacturing country, three congressmen presented themselves at his office: Muhlenberg, Abraham Venable, and James Monroe. The men were concerned about what seemed to be an improper connection between Alexander and James Reynolds.
When Alexander objected to a suggestion he’d violated the public trust, the men backpedaled. It wasn’t that they thought he was guilty of such things. They wanted to let him know, though, that this information had come to them unsolicited. They’d even thought about telling President Washington, but they wanted to give Alexander a chance to explain first. This wasn’t personal; it was their duty.
The men presented notes gathered while interviewing Reynolds, Clingman, and Maria. Alexander admitted he’d written them in disguised handwriting. But the situation wasn’t what they thought. He hadn’t committed financial impropriety, and he had proof of this at home.
They agreed to meet him there that evening along with Oliver Wolcott. When the men came to call, Alexander confessed the truth: He’d never engaged in speculation of any sort. He’d had an adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds.
At that mortifying disclosure, the men told him they’d heard enough. Any more detail would be unnecessary. But Alexander wanted to make an exhaustive case for himself, so he told them everything. After he concluded, all three men indicated that they understood the situation and believed him, even if Monroe acted coldly.
HE’D HAD AN ADULTEROUS AFFAIR WITH MARIA REYNOLDS.
Alexander hoped the thorough confession would be the last of this sordid business. He didn’t realize Monroe had sent a copy of the documents to “a Friend in Virginia.” That friend was Thomas Jefferson, who had shared their contents with Madison and a few other key Republicans. The fuse was long, but it was lit.
That same month, Washington was elected unanimously for a second term, and Adams beat out George Clinton for vice president. Washington usually aligned politically with Alexander, but now in his second term, he wanted his two most important cabinet members to lay off each other. Neither Jefferson nor Alexander complied. Longtime grudges with others erupted, too. A Maryland politician who’d worked for General Charles Lee accused Alexander of all sorts of things, nearly provoking a duel.
Alexander was also hit by requests from Representative William Branch Giles to account for foreign loans. Even as he dealt with the Reynolds business, he labored under the pressure of producing report after report to meet the heavy demands of Giles and the House. The effort jeopardized his health. But the reports didn’t satisfy Jefferson, who asked Washington for an official inquiry into Alexander’s financial dealings. Washington declined, so Jefferson took the matter back to Giles, who advanced nine resolutions, one of which demanded Alexander’s removal from office.
After investigation, eight of nine were shot down by the House, foiling the Republican plot. The House on March 1, 1793, did find that Hamilton had too much power to shift money from accounts when juggling interest payments, but there wasn’t a shred of proof that he’d benefited personally from his office. His enemies pressed on, and into darker corners. His friend Henry Lee wrote him a sympathetic letter in May lamenting all that Alexander was going through, ending on an ominous note: “Was I with you I would talk an hour with doors bolted & windows shut, as my heart is much afflicted by some whispers which I have heard.”
Alexander knew exactly what this cryptic message meant. Word of the Reynolds affair was out. But he couldn’t stop to fret about this looming disaster; the world at large had demands of its own.
The revolution in France had taken a disturbing turn. Louis XVI, who’d helped the Americans in their revolution, was beheaded to the thudding of drums on January 21, 1793, and then his head was held up as a souvenir by a young guard, who gestured rudely as he brandished it. This sort of barbarism gave some people pause.
LOUIS XVI, AN ALLY DURING THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, LOST HIS HEAD.
After France declared war on much of Europe, Alexander recommended American neutrality. The president agreed. Madison and Jefferson grumbled, as they thought the revolution was a continuation of the American one.
Washington received a direct challenge to neutrality in European wars when France’s new ambassador, Edmond Charles Genêt, arrived in April 1793, aiming to bring Americans into the war. He recruited men to fight in French militias. He tried to recruit merchant ships to become pirates and attack British vessels—the polite name for them was privateers because they had written permission from France to plunder. When Genêt finally traveled north to Philadelphia, he officially asked for the United States to suspend its neutral stance and provide food and supplies.
GENÊT MADE ENEMIES IN THE UNITED STATES—AND THEN SOUGHT ASYLUM THERE.
He had little regard for Washington’s answer. Genêt thought the president was a ceremonial position, as it had been under the Articles of Confederation. This was not so. And even as Jefferson and Madison sympathized with the French revolution, Genêt’s behavior was so outrageous that Jefferson, who loved France, was repulsed. Washington asked Alexander and Jefferson for advice, and the men for once set aside their differences and helped the president draft an extremely long letter.
Genêt remained obstinate, and Washington’s cabinet asked France to recall him on August 23, 1793, about three months after he’d arrived. Things in France became more extreme, though, and Genêt ended up seeking asylum in the United States instead of going home—and his chief defender in that pursuit was Alexander.
As this was happening, a massive outbreak of yellow fever rolled through the nation’s capital. The deadly sickness, which spread from the wharves across the city, turned its victims’ skin yellow, caused black vomit, and sent waves of fear through the city. The State House itself had been empty since a doorman dropped dead there. Many perished, more fled.
One victim told his brother, “You can not immagin the situation of this city…. They are a Dieing on our right hand & on our Left…. great are the number that are Calld to the grave, and numbered with the silent Dead.”
No one was certain what caused it. Rotting coffee beans on the dock were a leading suspect, but all the same, people avoided one another for fear it was catching, and they dosed themselves with pungent garlic and vinegar, hoping to ward off the menace.
By September, the most cosmopolitan and diverse city in the United States was a ghost town. When ships arrived at the docks, there was no one to sign for the goods. The only people walking the sweltering, late-summer streets were those looking for a doctor, a nurse, a bleeder, or someone to help bury the dead.
As many as a hundred people died each day. In all, at least five thousand of the city’s forty-five thousand citizens perished, and another seventeen thousand fled. Corpses putrefied rapidly in the heat, so it was urgent that they be buried swiftly. All day and night, the bereaved wailed in graveyards. The city’s two thousand black residents—incorrectly assumed to be immune to the fever—provided a great deal of care for the dying.
The traditional treatment for the disease, and one offered by the acclaimed physician Benjamin Rush, was severe. He bled his patients and dosed them with mercury to purge their bowels. He even treated himself this way when he fell ill.
His method was controversial, and when Alexander and Eliza contracted the fever in early September, they evacuated their children to Albany and turned elsewhere for treatment. Their physician was none other than Alexander’s best friend from childhood, his lookalike Ned Stevens, who’d become a prominent doctor in town.
Instead of bleeding the Hamiltons, who were violently ill, Stevens treated them with cold baths, spirits, and quinine, and he gave them nightly sedatives. They recovered in five days. Alexander, thrilled, sent a letter about his treatment to the city’s College of Physicians. This touched off a round of political sniping. Rush wasn’t just a doctor; he was a signer of the Declaration, he’d attended the Constitutional Convention, and he was a friend of Jefferson and Madison.
Jefferson relished Alexander’s suffering. On September 8, he wrote Madison: “Hamilton is ill of the fever as is said. He had two physicians out at his house the night before last. His family think him in danger, & he puts himself so by his excessive alarm…. A man as timid as he is on the water, as timid on horseback, as timid in sickness, would be a phaenomenon if his courage of which he has the reputation in military occasions were genuine. His friends, who have not seen him, suspect it is only an autumnal fever he has.”
BENJAMIN RUSH DIDN’T LIKE ALEXANDER QUESTIONING HIS TREATMENT METHODS.
It was a ridiculous posture. Not only had Alexander survived a near drowning during the war while he was being fired upon, he’d fought valiantly on horseback several times, and he’d had his horse shot out from under him. This was in contrast with Jefferson’s own truly timid wartime performance.
Alexander had been infected, as had his wife. What’s more, the city was in misery and panic, and Jefferson knew it. Only a few days later, the mayor warned that Philadelphia was close to anarchy. It would have been a good time to rise above politics, but Jefferson wasn’t capable, perhaps because he was frequently bothered by diarrhea and migraines.
To make matters worse, Alexander and Eliza had a hard time reuniting with their children in Albany. Alexander and Eliza missed them horribly. Once the Hamiltons were well, they packed their bags, taking care to wash any linens that had been used while they were infected. They also brought winter clothes that hadn’t come into contact with germs. Nonetheless, people in other towns didn’t want to admit travelers from Philadelphia, and the Hamiltons were shunned as if they were carriers of the plague.
Across the river from Albany on September 23, doctors gave them a clean bill of health. But after the Hamiltons took a ferry to the other side, people went berserk. Someone even started a rumor that Eliza’s father had swabbed his mouth with vinegar after he’d kissed her, implying he was afraid she’d make him ill.
The townspeople wanted to be certain that Eliza’s father had taken the precautions he’d promised before their visit, and they ran the Hamiltons through a wringer. They wanted Schuyler to pay for another medical examination. They wanted the Hamiltons to bring no baggage, burn their clothes, ride only in an open carriage without servants, and engage in no communication with anyone in Albany. To make sure this happened, the town also wanted the Schuylers to pay for a guard outside their house. Insulted to the bone, Alexander fired off a scathing letter to the mayor. It felt as though the world were conspiring against him. Some people had even spread rumors that he’d died.
IT FELT AS THOUGH THE WORLD WERE CONSPIRING AGAINST HIM.
For months afterward, he suffered effects of the illness. In mid-December, still struggling and far from happy with his job, he asked the Speaker of the House, Frederick Muhlenberg, to conduct a full investigation into his conduct as Treasury secretary. Alexander had already been cleared, but he wanted to be cleared again, at length, to silence his critics at last.
He confided the frustrations of his situation to Angelica in a letter: “I am just where I do not wish to be. I know how I could be much happier; but circumstances enchain me. It is however determined that I will break the spell. Nothing can prevent it at the opening of the Spring, but the existence or the certainty of a war between this Country and some European Power—an event which I most sincerely deprecate but which reciprocal perversenessess, in a degree, endangers.”
The year had brutalized him, and he would quit his post when he could do it with honor. Good news did come on the last day of the year, though: Thomas Jefferson resigned as secretary of state, ostensibly to retire to private life and philosophy. Alexander suspected Jefferson would be back someday to run for president. He was not wrong.
FOR THE FIRST FIVE MONTHS OF THE NEW YEAR, the House investigated Alexander. Ultimately, it found no wrongdoing. As for those frequent accusations that he’d used the Bank of New York and the Bank of the United States to enrich himself personally, the May 22, 1794, report said it looked as though “the Secretary of the Treasury never has, either directly or indirectly, for himself or any other person, procured any discount or credit, from either of the said Banks, upon the basis of any public monies which, at any time, have been deposited therein under his direction.”
He didn’t have time to savor his vindication. The war he worried about with Angelica had become a distinct possibility when the British fleet in the West Indies captured more than 250 American merchant ships, stole their goods, and claimed American sailors on board were British deserters.
“War may come upon us, whether we choose it or not,” he told Washington in March.
He urged the fortification of ports and the raising of twenty thousand troops. The executive branch needed to take leadership in this first potential international conflict since the Revolution ended. For all the pains they’d taken to preserve peace, they had an equal responsibility to be prepared for war.
His political enemies loved to accuse him of being an incorrigible British puppet. In reality, he was hard at work pondering the best course of action against England. War was such a threat to the country’s prosperity that it ought to be a last resort, he counseled Washington. The president knew this, of course. But Alexander wanted him to impress this on the country as well. Meanwhile, he also wanted to strike at England financially, cutting off direct and indirect imports.
Alexander relinquished his chance to be a special envoy to Britain—he was seen as being too political, and he knew it. He recommended John Jay, his Federalist coauthor and chief justice of the Supreme Court, instead. Jay left in May to hammer out a new treaty with England if at all possible.
The potential war abroad wasn’t the only one that pre-occupied Alexander. On the western frontier in Pennsylvania, men took up arms to protest Alexander’s despised whiskey tax. And at home, one of his children was seriously ill, and Eliza was pregnant and struggling. Alexander asked Washington for some time off so he could take his ailing toddler to the country for fresh air. The president was sympathetic and urged Alexander to take care of his little son.
Alexander helped settle Eliza and some of their children in Albany, and he returned to Philadelphia with his older boys. He needed to be in the city to focus on the tax protests, which had turned violent. On July 16, a group of angry farmers marched on the home of a tax collector in western Pennsylvania, where they had a shootout with him and his slaves. The next day a force of five hundred returned, firing on the house and burning the buildings to the ground. What’s more, an army of rebels several thousand strong had gathered on Braddock’s Field near Pittsburgh by the end of July, threatening to vanquish any army that would take them on.
Alexander assembled a long list of heinous things tax protestors had done since 1791. They’d burned effigies. They’d broken into people’s homes and terrorized their families. A mentally ill man who’d claimed to be a tax collector was stripped naked, tarred, and feathered. One witness said the incident “exceeded description and was sufficient to make human nature shudder.”
It was lawful to protest a law. But it wasn’t lawful to disregard one that had been enacted according to the Constitution. Alarm was high in the administration. The threat of overthrowing the government from the western frontier was palpable. Alexander intended to do everything he could to ensure that the government and the nation it served survived.
EVERY LETTER FROM ALBANY HE OPENED WITH TREMBLING HANDS.
Around this time, Henry Knox, the secretary of war, asked for a leave to take care of some real estate business in Maine. Washington let him go and put Alexander in charge of the army. As he managed the Treasury Department and the army, the health of his darling boy worried him to the extreme, and he fretted about Eliza’s pregnancy. Every letter from Albany he opened with trembling hands.
He regretted he could only send her his best wishes. “They are all I can now offer—Hard hard situation.”
After weeks of worry, he got good news at last about his darling Johnny in late August. A couple of weeks later, Washington decided it was time to send troops to Pennsylvania from New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia. Alexander, still performing Knox’s duties, set out to supply the militia with everything they’d need: clothing, blankets, weapons, kettles, medicine. Alexander decided that as the man who’d devised the tax strategy, he ought to be part of the expedition against the insurgents. He asked Washington’s permission, taking it for granted that General Knox would be back on the job soon.
Reassuring his sons Philip and Alexander that he would face no danger, and possibly would even enjoy health benefits from the ride, Alexander set off with Washington on the last morning of September, reaching the militia troops in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on October 4. After the 12,950 troops reached Bedford, the sixty-two-year-old president felt confident enough to return to Philadelphia, leaving Alexander and General Henry Lee, the governor of Virginia, to take the army through the mountains to the rebellious counties.
By October 23, it was clear to Alexander that the military outing was prudent, even as there were some stragglers and drinkers in the force. He sent Angelica a cheerful letter about his journey “to attack and subdue the wicked insurgents of the West…. A large army has cooled the courage of those madmen & the only question seems now how to guard best aganst the return of the phrenzy.”
The arrival of nearly thirteen thousand troops was enough to squelch the Whiskey Rebellion, and by mid-November it was over. It was no small achievement. Bloodshed and death were minimal, and Washington pardoned the men who’d been found guilty of treason. Alexander didn’t think the president should have gone soft on scofflaws, but Washington had wisdom and unbeatable political instincts. The public admired how the mess was handled by the new federal government, but Jefferson and Madison continued to grouse about Alexander, and now even Washington.
IN LATE NOVEMBER, AS HE WAS HEADING HOME, Alexander received an urgent letter from Henry Knox, sent ahead at the insistence of the president. Eliza was not well. She was either in danger of losing their baby or already had. Guarded by six soldiers, Alexander raced to his family in Philadelphia.
When he arrived, he found a family in great distress. He quit his job that day. He could simply take no more. His last day as Treasury secretary would be January 31. A week later, he wrote to Angelica with the news. He put a positive spin on his resignation:
“Don’t let Mr. Church be alarmed at my retreat—all is well with the public. Our insurrection is most happily terminated. Government has gained by it reputation and strength, and our finances are in a most flourishing condition. Having contributed to place those of the Nation on a good footing, I go to take a little care of my own; which need my care not a little.”
He was circumspect when it came to the real reason he was quitting politics. He’d let Angelica know that Eliza had been very ill. She’d recovered but was still weak. What he did not tell his beloved sister-in-law was the truth that pained him most about his absence and its cost:
He wasn’t there when Eliza needed him, and she’d lost their baby.