Scandalmonger: A Novel Read online

  BOOKS BY WILLIAM SAFIRE

  LANGUAGE

  Spread the Word

  In Love with Norma Loquendi

  Quoth the Maven

  Coming to Terms

  Fumblerules

  Language Maven Strikes Again

  You Could Look It Up

  Take My Word for It

  I Stand Corrected

  What’s the Good Word?

  On Language

  Safire’s New Political Dictionary

  POLITICS

  The First Dissident Safire’s

  Washington Before the Fall

  Plunging into Politics

  The Relations Explosion

  FICTION

  Sleeper Spy

  Freedom

  Full Disclosure

  ANTHOLOGIES

  Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History

  ( WITH LEONARD SAFIR )

  Good Advice on Writing

  Leadership

  Words of Wisdom

  Good Advice

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  This book is a work of historical fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are based on events in history or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2000 by The Cobbett Corporation

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-1205-3

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1205-2

  For

  Timothy Thunderproof

  and Peter Porcupine

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1792

  PART I

  The Hamilton Scandal

  PART II

  The Sedition Scandal

  PART III

  The Jefferfon Scandals

  PART IV

  The Libel Scandal

  EPILOGUE

  What Happened Later

  THE UNDERBOOK

  Notes and Sources

  Bibliography

  And there’s a Luft in Man no Charm can tame,

  Of loudly publishing our Neighbour’s Shame;

  On Eagles’ Wings immortal Scandals fly,

  While Virtuous Actions are but Born, and Dye.

  —Juvenal, Satire IX (C. A .D . 120)

  TO THE READER

  The reader of historical fiction wonders: “What’s true and what’s not?” As docudramas blur the line between fact and fiction, the reader is entitled to know what is history and what is twistery.

  In this novel, all the characters are real people who lived during America’s Federal period at the turn of the nineteenth century. Much of the dialogue, especially that attributed to past Presidents, is based on contemporary letters, diaries and newspaper accounts. Accounts of trials are drawn from transcripts made at the time. A central romantic relationship is fictional.

  For the reader interested in separating documented history from informed speculation and outright imagination, the author reveals his sources of all that’s true in the back of the book.

  PROLOGUE

  1792

  December 17, 1792

  PHILADELPHIA

  “The man now in jail who got me into all this trouble says he has enough on the Treasury Secretary to hang him.”

  The note from his former clerk startled Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg. Squinting at the familiar, crabbed handwriting, the member of Congress from Pennsylvania—about to begin his second term as Speaker of the House of Representatives—read on: “Reynolds claims to have proof showing that Hamilton secretly engaged in speculation in government securities.”

  Alexander Hamilton corrupt? Muhlenberg’s well-ordered Germanic mind refused to entertain the scandalous thought. President Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury had been General Washington’s courageous aide-de-camp in the War for Independence. He gave unity to the Union by having the Federal government assume the debts of the States. Everyone knew that Hamilton was the Cabinet officer that the great man would rely on most heavily in the second term soon to begin. To suggest that this exemplar of financial probity was enriching himself at public expense was to shake the very foundations of the new Republic. And with war brewing between England and France, such a damning charge against Hamilton, an avowed admirer of the British, would be grist for the mills of the new anti-Federalist faction so entranced by everything French.

  Muhlenberg was certain that Jacob Clingman, who had worked in his Philadelphia mercantile house and later served as his assistant in Congress, was honest at heart. The unfortunate young man had become involved with a ne’er-do-well from New York named James Reynolds in a scheme to buy up the claims for unpaid past wages of the Revolution’s veterans. After almost a decade, most of the old soldiers thought the claims would never be paid, and were selling them for 10 cents on the dollar. But some speculators, said to know of Hamilton’s plan to pay the old debt in full, were avidly seeking the government’s list of veterans and the amounts they were owed. Reynolds and Clingman were discovered impersonating claimants and jailed; only Muhlenberg’s intercession, attesting to the young man’s character, had allowed his former clerk to be free pending prosecution.

  The Speaker laid the accusatory note on his desk. Muhlenberg was a “low” Federalist, not as all-out for central power as the Hamiltonian Federalists, but loyal to President Washington. He was relieved that the Republic’s leader had consented to be re-elected, the month before, to a second term. Because the Pennsylvanian had long frowned on the emergence of a republican faction with ties to France, he was also glad that Washington was retaining that troublesome faction’s leader, Thomas Jefferson, in his Cabinet as Secretary of State. By holding both the pro-French Jefferson and the pro-British Hamilton close to him, Washington could keep the United States united and neutral. Muhlenberg was convinced that the nation, not two decades from its Revolution, was wholly unprepared to fight another war.

  But what if the outrageous charge that Hamilton was abusing the public’s trust turned out to be true, or even partially true? The stain would not only sully the President’s reputation but would discredit the entire new government. The farmers in Pennsylvania’s West had already been infuriated by Hamilton’s proposal for a whiskey tax, a scheme of Eastern moneymen that would punish Western growers of grain and distillers of its alcohol. The bankers in Boston did not seem to realize that whiskey was a more trusted medium of exchange than banknotes. A financial scandal in Hamilton’s department, by adding substance to the republican suspicion that the Treasury Secretary was a secret monarchist, would tear the new nation apart.

  A charge of corruption in the Cabinet should be brought directly to the attention of the President, Muhlenberg was certain, but not until the allegations were examined. This brief note slandering Hamilton could be merely a false accusation by some panicked wrongdoer. Did not a brave patriot, a national hero with a financial reputation as spotless as Hamilton’s, deserve the benefit of the doubt—especially against the self-serving hearsay of an accused speculator?

  But the letter from young Clingman required urgent action. “Reynolds’s threats have borne fruit,” his former assistant wrote. “Hamilton’s Comptroller, Wolcott, has signed the order for Reynolds’s release tomorrow morning. He will take his wife Maria and their child and sail for England. I have some letters you must see today.”

  That forced Muhlenberg to move quickly. A financial scandal, if such there were, would not vanish with the disappearance
of one of its agents. The new pamphleteers, often working for the publications of what Washington himself disparaged as “self-created societies,” were sowing disunity. They would see to it that every suspicious whisper and outright calumny would be repeated in print, breathing fire into the growing spirit of faction. Reynolds had to be interrogated before he got out of jail tomorrow morning, and his charge against Hamilton corroborated or put to rest.

  The portly Speaker pushed himself out of his chair and buttoned his waistcoat. His political sense told him that one man alone could not conduct the investigation. He would need a companion to give at least the appearance of factional and geographical impartiality. Because Muhlenberg’s own background was in the Lutheran clergy and the mercantile trade, he would need a colleague versed in the law.

  John Adams, the Vice President? He had been known to call Hamilton “the bastard son of a Scotch pedlar.” While that ancestral slur was true enough, it was unfair to hold Hamilton’s low birth in the West Indies against him, and Adams’s angry remark indicated he would have a personal prejudice.

  Aaron Burr? Muhlenberg considered his friend Burr, Senator from New York, to be the sort of shrewd lawyer ordinarily perfect for such a mission. A good friend of Jemmy and Dolley Madison, too; indeed, Burr had introduced the longtime bachelor to the sunny widow. But a month before, when the Speaker had prevailed on the republican Burr to take him to see the Federalist Hamilton, the Senator’s fellow New Yorker, to recommend leniency for the young clerk, Muhlenberg sensed a tension between the two. They were not only of opposing political factions but seemed to dislike each other in a personal way.

  What about Jonathan Trumbull, who had replaced him as Speaker in the past term? No; “Brother Jonathan” was too close to President Washington, too ardent a Federalist, and was from Connecticut, which was too far north. Needed for balance in confronting Hamilton was a man of the Senate; a Southerner or Westerner, preferably a Virginian; a lawyer but not a sitting judge; someone trusted by Jefferson and the other anti-Federalists gathering around him.

  James Monroe. The perfect choice. Muhlenberg knew the youthful Virginian had been Jefferson’s law student, his political acolyte and the man Jefferson was even now urging Washington to appoint as his Minister to France. “Cool and collected,” as Jefferson liked to say, prudent and correct, Monroe was not personally amiable, but had a reputation of being both high-minded and hardheaded.

  The Pennsylvanian snatched up the troubling note and set out across the chambers for the Virginia Senator’s office.

  Monroe, the accusation from Reynolds’s confederate in hand, was hardly able to hide his delight at what Muhlenberg, in his rich German accent, was telling him. Jefferson’s break with Hamilton was absolute; the Secretary of State saw the Treasury Secretary as twisting the Constitution into a device for snatching power from the States and individuals in the name of “empire.” For months, in general terms, Jefferson had been warning President Washington that Hamilton was guilty of dealing out Treasury secrets among his financier friends. The Treasury Secretary had countered that Jefferson was an incendiary promoting national disunion and public disorder. Now here was a specific case supporting Jefferson’s suspicions of Hamilton’s character to lay before the Chief Magistrate.

  “The President must be made aware of this,” Monroe told the Speaker firmly. “There is no offense more reprehensible, in an officer charged with the finances of his country, than to be engaged in speculation.”

  “Of course.” But Muhlenberg hesitated. “Don’t you think we should see Hamilton first, in case he has some logical explanation?”

  Though eager to use the evidence to undermine Hamilton’s influence with Washington, Monroe agreed. He considered it important to give the fair-minded Speaker every impression of his own impartiality. “And before we do,” he suggested, “perhaps we should see the judge who ordered tomorrow’s release of Reynolds. To see if Hamilton had a hand in that.”

  Muhlenberg shook his head, no. “The Attorney General of Pennsylvania signed the release order. I know the man. If we go to him, the news will be all over Philadelphia in a matter of hours.”

  Monroe reluctantly accepted the need for discretion. “The young man who wrote this note—when he was your clerk, was he reliable? Do you trust his word?”

  “He’s easily misled and I believe was duped by Reynolds. But in the years he worked in my store, Jacob Clingman never stole a thing. I’d vouch for him to that extent. I arranged for his release on bail, but I refused to do the same for Reynolds.”

  Monroe believed he could do with more evidence, particularly letters in Hamilton’s handwriting, before he confronted the Treasury Secretary, who would surely deny everything. And he felt a need for some political basis for interceding in this affair. “The name Reynolds is familiar,” he said, frowning as if to remember. “Is this man one of the Virginia Reynoldses?”

  “He’s a New Yorker, but I suppose it’s possible he has family in Virginia.”

  “Could be a constituent of mine in trouble, then.” He rose. “Let’s see what letters your informant Clingman has. Then we can interview Reynolds.” Monroe presumed that if Reynolds had incriminating documents from Hamilton, they would probably be at his home. Because this was to be his last night in jail, there might be an opportunity to visit the Reynolds domicile and speak to his wife or housekeeper without his presence, perhaps even to search his desk. “After we hear what this Reynolds says, then we can visit Hamilton.”

  The Speaker nodded his agreement. “At that point,” he said, “we would be in a position to lay this before the President.”

  Jacob Clingman, coatless—it was a mild winter in Philadelphia—was brought into the Congressional office. He was genuinely glad to see Speaker Muhlenberg, the only man of power who had ever befriended him. He did not recognize the tall, sharp-nosed, cold-eyed man with him, introduced by the Speaker only as “my colleague.” Probably a lawyer, Clingman thought.

  “I vouched for your good character, Jacob,” said his business mentor, who had once been his Lutheran pastor, “but not that of Reynolds. I verily believe him to be a rascal.”

  “He is that and worse, sir. Reynolds says that he has it in his power to injure the Secretary of the Treasury, and I think that is why he is to be released tomorrow.”

  “That cannot be the reason Comptroller Wolcott gives,” said the lawyer with the cold eyes.

  “No. Wolcott is in a tight place,” Clingman told his interrogators. “He was doing his job, investigating a fraud, and tripped over this much bigger speculation scandal involving Reynolds and the Secretary. Then, to save his superior any embarrassment, Comptroller Wolcott had to find reasons not to prosecute us. So Reynolds made full restitution of the money, and gave him the list of veterans that we used. He even told the Comptroller which Treasury clerks in New York had slipped him the list. That’s when his case was dropped, and Reynolds gets out tomorrow all free and clear. But my case is still pending and I don’t know why.”

  “Do you have any personal knowledge,” the unidentified interrogator asked, “of a direct connection between Reynolds and Comptroller Wolcott’s superior?”

  “Hamilton, you mean?” When the lawyer kept looking silently at him, Clingman blurted out more than he had wanted to say. “In January, not quite a year ago, I went to Reynolds’s house, and just as I came in, Colonel Hamilton was leaving. I knew it was him. It’s a face everybody knows who does business with the Treasury.”

  “The colonel cuts a memorable figure, true. Do you recall any other time you saw them together?”

  “Not exactly together.” Now he was wading into deeper water. Clingman looked to Speaker Muhlenberg for reassurance, and received a friendly nod. “A few days after that, I was at the Reynolds house with Maria, Mrs. Reynolds, Mr. Reynolds being out.” Hoping he would not be asked to explain that, he hurried on. “It was late at night and somebody knocked at the door. I got up and opened it and saw it was Colonel Hamilton. He looked surprised.
staris came up behind me. Colonel Hamilton handed her a paper and said something curious.”

  When he hesitated, trying to call up the exact words, Muhlenberg barked a quick, guttural, “Vot?”

  “What Colonel Hamilton said was, ‘I was ordered to give this to Mr. Reynolds,’ and he turned and left.”

  “Why did you find that curious?”

  “Because who could ‘order’ the Secretary of the Treasury to give anybody anything?” Clingman quickly retreated to his respectful demeanor. “That’s the very question I asked Mrs. Reynolds, sir, and she said she supposed Colonel Hamilton did not want to be recognized. This was late at night.”

  “Did you see what was written on the paper?” the lawyer asked.

  “No, it was in a blank envelope.”

  “Then why did you say it was a paper?”

  Clingman felt his heart clutch into a tight fist. “I don’t know. It was an envelope with a paper in it, I guess. It wasn’t thick.” At least they weren’t asking him what he was doing late at night in the Reynolds house, alone with Maria.

  “Surely you asked Mrs. Reynolds about Hamilton’s visits?” Congressman Muhlenberg observed.

  “She said he had been assisting her husband for some months. Only a few days before, her husband had received eleven hundred dollars from Colonel Hamilton.” He had no cause to hold back: “She said her husband told her that the Treasury Secretary had made thirty thousand dollars by speculation, thanks to him.”

  “That is a very serious charge to repeat, young man,” said the lawyer.

  Clingman was eager to substantiate it. “When I must have looked as if I didn’t believe her, Maria said her husband had applied to Colonel Hamilton for money to subscribe to the turnpike road at Lancaster, and received a note from him saying no.”