Sophie, and Lizzie Collins, and Aaron Burr kept them up on the gossip of the capital, sending them clippings from newspapers and, as Sophie phrased it, reports on the gales in various tea-pots around town. It was Sophie who sent them the tracts published by James Callendar entitled The History of the United States for the Year 1796, which detailed Alexander Hamilton’s 1792 affair with a certain Mrs. Maria Reynolds, whose husband was involved in speculation with Hamilton’s Treasury funds to the tune of thirty thousand dollars. So much correspondence could not refer exclusively to wenching, Callendar wrote of the letters which he claimed Hamilton had helped Mrs. Reynolds forge. No man of sense can believe that it did.

Hamilton, livid, had challenged Jim Monroe to a duel on the grounds that Monroe, to whom Mrs. Reynolds’s husband had sent proof of the affair in an effort at blackmail back in ’92, had, after four years, passed along the details to Callendar. After words like “liar” and “scoundrel” had been exchanged, the two opponents had been talked out of bloodshed by Aaron Burr. Instead, Hamilton published a confession in the Gazette of the United States: The charge against me is a connection with one James Reynolds for purposes of improper pecuniary speculation, he wrote. My real crime is an amorous connection with his wife.

Alexander Hamilton, who had already retired as Secretary of the Treasury, never held public office again, which as far as Dolley was concerned was just as well. Sophie noted—goodness knew what her sources were—that when Hamilton’s books were examined, his assistant (a cousin of his wife) was found to be $238,000 short.

Sophie related all this with a kind of relish, as if profoundly entertained by the murderous infighting of men who had begun their careers as traitors to the King. “The Constitution gives your friend every right to laugh at us to our faces,” sighed Jemmy, as he laid down the letter that contained the Gazette confession. “God help this country, if she could not say of us whatever she wished.”



But Jefferson’s letters were first disquieting, and then frightening. In May of 1797, in response to the treaty Washington had negotiated with England, France started seizing American ships and cargoes. The new President Adams sent a delegation to Paris to iron things out, and mortally offended his Vice President and half the Congress by requesting “measures of defense.”