Maria Reynolds a.k.a. Hamilton's Whore

Alexander Hamilton was an intelligent man.  He was General Washington's aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War and the Secretary of Treasury under President Washington.  He wrote the Federalist Papers, created the National Bank, founded the New York Stock Exchange and created an economic plan for the fledgling country that impacts us to this day.  With the ladies however, Hamilton was not sharpest tack in the shed.  Maria Reynolds was a 23 year old blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty who approached Hamilton claiming that he abusive husband had run off with another woman and left her penniless.  Hamilton decided to console her in a horizontal fashion and thus began the Reynolds Affair.  The "relationship" lasted 13 months total and began with Hamilton only seeing Maria at her house.  After Hamilton's wife Betsy became pregnant again (yes, he had children with his young wife), she went further north for the summer months and Maria moved in.  Even after Betsy returned home in the fall, Hamilton continued to see Maria.  You may wonder, why is Maria a whore and not simply an adulteress?  First off, Maria's husband James shows up on the scene when Maria claims he had discovered their affair.  James then decided to blackmail Hamilton for $1,000 or he would tell his wife Betsy.  After that James urged Hamilton to continue seeing Maria if he would regularly "loan" him money.  Thus, James was a pimp, Maria a prostitute and Hamilton a fool for love.

So how did all this play out?  Supposedly Hamilton began to wise up to the situation and break off the affair, but Maria threatened suicide and he would give in.  Finally, after over a year, Hamilton worked up the courage to end the affair.  In his surprise, the requests for money came to an end.  Potentially, no one ever had to know about the Reynolds Affair, but in 1792 James was arrested for treasury fraud and when Hamilton refused to have the charges dropped, James told a Democratic-Republican congressman about the sordid affair.  For awhile the Democratic-Republicans decided to sit on the information as Hamilton had not technically committed a crime.  In 1796, however, Vice President Thomas Jefferson decided to leak the story in order to lessen Hamilton's power and influence.  The leak was an attempt to not only place a stain on Hamilton's character, but also to allude to the possibility that Hamilton's economic plan was corrupt as he had potentially been part of a larger conspiracy with James to defraud the government. In order to save his economic plan and help his country, Hamilton decided to come clean about his cash for sex arrangement with Maria and denounce any possibility of fraud.  As the journalist James Callender stated of Hamilton's defense of himself, "I am a rake and for that reason I cannot be a swindler."  Hamilton's confession damaged his personal reputation but allowed him to remain a leader of the Federalist Party.

Thus, America's first sex scandal was over and Maria Reynolds became just another harlot in history.