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Maria Reynolds (née Lewis; March 30, 1768 – March 25, 1828) was the wife of James Reynolds, and was Alexander Hamilton's mistress between 1791 and 1792. She became the object of much scrutiny after the release of the Reynolds Pamphlet and central in America's first political sex scandal.
During summer and fall 1791, Maria and Hamilton continued the affair while Hamilton's wife, Eliza, and their children were in Albany, visiting her parents. A short time into the affair, Maria informed Hamilton that her husband had sought a reconciliation with her, to which she agreed without ending the affair with Hamilton. She then obtained an interview for James Reynolds, who applied to Hamilton for a position in the Treasury Office, which Hamilton refused. After Hamilton had shown unequivocal signs that he wanted to end the affair on December 15, 1791, Maria sent him a letter warning of Reynolds's anger over the supposed discovery of the affair:
I have not the time to tell you the cause of my present troubles; only that Mr. Reynolds has wrote you this morning and I know not whether you have got the letter or not and he has swore that if you do not answer, or if he does not see or hear from you today, he will write to Mrs. Hamilton. He has just gone out and I am alone. I think you had better come here one moment that you may know the cause, then you will the better know how to act. Oh, my God, I feel more for you than myself and wish I had never been born to give you so much unhappiness. Do not respond to him; not even a line. Come here soon. Do not send or leave any thing in his power.From December 15 to December 19, 1791, Reynolds sent threatening letters to Hamilton, and after a personal meeting instead of seeking from , he asked for financial compensation. Hamilton complied, paying to Reynolds the requested $1,000 () and discontinuing the affair, as he had wished to do for some time. However, on January 17, 1792, Reynolds wrote to Hamilton inviting him to renew his visits to his wife. Maria, most likely manipulated into the scheme, also began to write to Hamilton whenever her husband was out of the house and seduced him anew. After each of these exchanges, Reynolds would write to Hamilton under the guise of being friends, and Hamilton would, in return, send $30 (). Hamilton's last "loan" of the $50 () to James Reynolds, and possibly the end of the affair, dates in June 1792.
In November 1792, James Reynolds, after illegally purchasing Revolutionary War soldiers' pensions and back-pay claims, was imprisoned for forgery with Virginian Jacob Clingman, his partner in crime. Reynolds wrote to Hamilton, who refused to help and likewise rejected Maria's letters and requests for further money. Clingman then informed Hamilton's Democratic-Republican rivals that Reynolds had information against the Treasury Secretary. James Monroe, Frederick Muhlenberg, and Abraham Venable visited Reynolds in jail, where Reynolds hinted at some unspecified public misconduct on Hamilton's part whose details he promised to expose after coming out of prison, only to disappear immediately after his release on December 12, 1792. The congressmen also personally interviewed Maria who corroborated her husband's accusations of speculation against Hamilton by producing the notes in Hamilton's disguised hand that had accompanied his payments to Reynolds.
On December 15, 1792, Monroe, Venable, and Muhlenberg went to Hamilton with the evidence they had gathered and confronted him on the possible charge of speculation. Fearful of what a scandal could do to his career, Hamilton admitted to the affair with Maria, proved with the letters from both Maria and James Reynolds that his payments to Reynolds related to the blackmail over his adultery, and not to treasury misconduct and asked them to keep the information private as he was innocent of any public wrongdoing. They agreed, although Monroe created copies of the letters and sent them to Thomas Jefferson. John Beckley also created copies of the correspondence. Clingman, on January 1, 1793, declared to Monroe that Maria claimed that the affair had been invented as a cover for the speculation scheme., chapter "Too near the sun" However, the letter from Colonel Jeremiah Wadsworth to Hamilton dated 2 August 1797 relates how during Reynolds's detention in November–December 1792 Maria had applied to both Wadsworth and Governor General Thomas Mifflin. In the attempt to convince them to help her obtain her husband's release from prison, Maria spontaneously told both of them the story of her first acquaintance and following "amour" with Hamilton in words that match Hamilton's description of their first encounter as reported in both the first draft of the Reynolds Pamphlet of July 1797 (before Wadsworth's letter) and the printed version, also dated July 1797, as well as James Reynolds’ first letter to Hamilton.
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