The final lines of the musical Hamilton belong to Eliza: “Will they tell my story?”

A chorus of voices responds only with more questions: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” The life of Eliza Hamilton does sometimes seem to be more about questions than about answers.

In contrast, the life of Alexander Hamilton is familiar cultural ground as I put the final touches on this book in 2018. Since the turn of the new millennium alone, there have been, by my count, no fewer than a dozen full-length biographies of the most flamboyant of our Founding Fathers. The best known of those, of course, is the sweeping biography by Ron Chernow, adapted for the stage in the Broadway musical phenomenon known simply as Hamilton.

The musical was the first introduction for many people to the story of Hamilton’s wife, Eliza, who emerges on the stage along with Angelica and Peggy, as part of the spunky trio of Schuyler sisters. They captivate us just as surely as they captivated Alexander Hamilton. When Alexander’s infidelity with Maria Reynolds becomes public and the scandal prompts Eliza to burn her love letters in rage and defiance, she becomes the story’s heartbroken heroine.

The answer to the musical’s final questions, though, is that Eliza’s story has largely not been told in print. You hold in your hands the first full-length biography of Eliza Hamilton. And while there are rich sources, many of them untapped because they come before or after her life with Alexander, few of those sources are in Eliza’s own voice. As the world knows from Hamilton, she wrote herself out of history, and it seems clear that she did burn scores of letters, including her love letters to Alexander. Eliza being Eliza, though, she didn’t talk about that either.

Why did Eliza burn correspondence, all of her own and apparently some of Alexander’s? As her biography shows, the reasons are a bit more complicated than heartbreak.

Part of it was cultural: women’s lives were rarely documented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, unless those women were queens or the mistress of someone famous. Men had lives in the public square. Alexander’s letters were destined, Eliza hoped, for the national archives of Congress. She not only hoped for that, she expected it. But she could see no reason why history would be interested in her letters. Respectable women lived resolutely domestic existences and shuddered at the thought of exposing themselves in public.

Part of it is that Eliza also hated writing letters, something that boggled the fast-talking Alexander. She could not spell well and was embarrassed. In this, Eliza was not alone either. Only rarely did even an upper-class girl of the time get a formal, bookish education like her brothers. If there was one argument that Eliza and Alexander had throughout their long and overwhelmingly happy marriage, it was about Eliza and her discomfort with writing letters.

And part of it is the question of this affair with Maria Reynolds. That is the part that most needs unraveling.

I began this book with an epigraph written by Germaine de Staël, a celebrated French writer in Eliza’s time, published in the year before the scandal surrounding Alexander and Maria Reynolds broke. Madame de Staël, as she was known, observed that “love is the whole history of a woman’s life; it is an episode in a man’s.” This was not a recommendation but a statement of fact: whom a woman married in the eighteenth century shaped her life completely. Men had lives outside their marriages.

In the story of the life of Alexander Hamilton, the telling of his liaison with Maria Reynolds is a small blot on a larger, epic story. For Eliza Hamilton, it is the defining moment in a career as a wife and mother. And as I began drafting this biography of Eliza Hamilton, poring over what testimony she left behind, trying to make sense of what Alexander wrote and her reaction, this became part of what I puzzled over for months.

In the context of the life of Alexander Hamilton—the one who committed the infidelity and paid the price with a confession—nothing about the story of Maria Reynolds is jarringly out of character. Alexander was impulsive, flirtatious, intemperate, contradictory, and brilliant. He was a scrapper, who worked his way up from a start as an orphan on a remote island, marked by his illegitimate birth, to the highest reaches of American political life. He married into a family that was, for all intents and purposes, aristocratic. Like the husbands of Eliza’s sisters, he was one of life’s gamblers. The Schuyler sisters—not only Angelica and Peggy but also their next-youngest sister, Cornelia—all had a thing for men who, like their father, Philip Schuyler, were risk takers and fortune hunters.

Eliza’s story, however, is less straightforward.

When we look at the letters and documents that survive, when we track the story of Eliza Hamilton from her girlhood through her death nearly a century later, it is hard to make sense of her reaction. In the musical Hamilton, she burns with anger and indignation and sends Alexander off to sleep in his office. In private Schuyler family correspondence and in Alexander Hamilton’s surviving letters to her, she steadfastly refuses to accept that Alexander has betrayed her and places the blame squarely and exclusively on the shoulders of his political enemies. Behind closed doors, she and Alexander did not pull apart either. They drew ever closer, into a universe of two, precisely at the moment of a spectacularly public breach of trust between them. For this, Alexander’s letters breathe his gratitude. “A thousand blessings upon you,” he wrote to her in the months after. “While all other passions decline in me, those of love and friendship gain new strength. . . . In this I know your good and kind heart responses to mine. . . . Heaven bless you My Dear Wife & reward you with all the happiness you deserve,” he offered her.

In Eliza’s case, it is harder to square the circle. Here is a young woman—passionately in love, fiercely loyal, relentlessly pragmatic, and deceptively strong-minded and independent, for all her self-effacing modesty—who, confronted with the affair of her husband, in fact does not get angry and kick him to the couch. Instead, if the story of the affair is true, she apparently clings to him, makes excuses, and insists to her dying day that he was an admirable husband. She does this despite Alexander having published an entire pamphlet as “evidence” of his infidelity, offering up sordid details of sex in their marital bed and publishing transcripts of another woman’s love letters.

What makes it hard to reconcile the life of Eliza Hamilton with her response to Alexander’s infidelity is that we have to posit a personality change occurring suddenly in the summer of 1797. We have to believe that the affair crushed her spirit and turned her from a feisty child of the frontier to a victim of her own self-deception. We have to posit that Eliza simply could not handle the reality of Alexander’s affair and would do anything to keep him. When he dies, in a duel fueled at least in part by the scandal, she carries on for decades insisting that Alexander has been maligned, idolizing him and insisting on his virtue.

In short, when it comes to Alexander, Eliza begins to look a bit foolish.

But Eliza Hamilton was nobody’s fool. After Alexander’s death, in all the other aspects of her long life, she carries on being just as strong-minded, pragmatic, and independent as always. She raises children as a single mother who is strapped for cash. She takes in the children of others. She builds a formidable charitable institution that still exists today as her living legacy, and, in her eighties, with energy and resources that astonished those around her, she set out for the new frontier, the American West, just because she still relished an adventure and didn’t trust her boys with her business interests.

What if the piece of history that doesn’t fit the puzzle of this life story is not Eliza but the publicly accepted story of Alexander’s affair with Maria Reynolds?

As her biographer, I struggled to write the chapters that came after the publication of the pamphlet, because I couldn’t make sense of how the person I had come to know as Eliza up to that point—as a biographer I was spending more time each day “with” Eliza than with anyone in my family—suddenly changed in her essential character.

So I went back to the scholarship and the archives, and I found something astonishing and eye-opening. There exists a completely different version of this story. It is not a story that is a belated, modern invention either. It’s the story that in the 1790s was splashed all over the newspapers, and it’s the version of the story that was believed by James Monroe and any number of men in Congress. It’s the story Maria Reynolds told.

It is also a story that makes perfect sense of Eliza’s reaction.

Eliza and Alexander, though, wanted to bury it.

What if Alexander Hamilton never had an affair with Maria Reynolds? That is the crux of what I found in the scholarship and in the newspapers from the 1790s. What if something else—something to which infidelity was preferable—happened?

The idea that Alexander Hamilton’s relationship with Maria Reynolds and her husband, James Reynolds, is more complex than it appears is an idea with a long history, and there is no evidence that an affair with Maria Reynolds ever happened, apart from Alexander Hamilton’s sole say-so. Everyone else connected with the scandal—from Maria Reynolds and James Monroe, who investigated the matter in Congress, to muckraking newspaper journalists—said it was a convenient cover story for a bigger, financial scandal that went to the heart of the government.

In American presidential history, the intense political and personal rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson has played out in the field of biography. When Hamilton has been in, Jefferson has been out, and vice versa. As the musical phenomenon testifies, this is a Hamilton moment. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the groundbreaking research was on Jefferson, led by the world’s foremost expert, Professor Julian Boyd at Princeton University, who happened to be the editor of the papers of the third president of the United States.

In Alexander Hamilton’s own time, the authenticity of Maria Reynolds’s letters and the truth behind Alexander’s pamphlet were hotly debated and questioned. Julian Boyd asked the simple question: What if we took seriously the claims of Alexander’s doubters? What is the evidence in the archives? He argued, in long, scholarly notes, that taking Alexander Hamilton’s word against the word of everyone else posed some thorny problems.

If manuscript letters from Maria Reynolds existed—because the only evidence that they did were the transcriptions published by Alexander in his printed pamphlet—why would Alexander not produce them? Maria Reynolds was alive and well when the scandal broke, and it would have been an easy thing to obtain a writing sample. The newspapers suggested it. An indignant Maria Reynolds was willing. But Alexander refused to release the documents and claimed to have lodged them with a gentleman friend in Philadelphia, who later professed bewilderment at the idea of having ever seen them, making far more plausible the charges of forgery brought against Alexander by his political enemies.

And why, Alexander’s contemporary critics asked in the newspapers, were the transcriptions that were published such strange, chimerical compositions? Why does Maria Reynolds consistently use and spell complex words and phrases correctly but change the spelling of the simplest words, sometimes correctly, sometimes not, from paragraph to paragraph, in ways that don’t make any sense in respect to the phonetics? It looks, Boyd grimly concluded after reconsidering the evidence, a lot like what a well-educated man might imagine to be the misspellings of a woman’s love letter. As one of Alexander Hamilton’s biographers in the late 1970s observed, more than this, the published letters bear more than a passing resemblance to the letters between Alexander and Eliza. Is it possible that Alexander used some of the things Eliza wrote, too, as the basis for those published transcriptions of Maria Reynolds’s putative love letters? If so, there might be another reason Eliza burned them.

As the editors of the Hamilton Papers at the National Archives of the United States judiciously note, it remains very much an open question. “Many historians like to view themselves as experts,” the archivists observe,

and as such they are reluctant to admit that at times they encounter questions for which they can find no satisfactory answers. But such questions exist, and the “Reynolds Affair” poses not one such question but a host of them. Despite the most rigorous scholarship and the best intentions, historians have been forced to leave the “Reynolds Affair” in essentially the same enigmatic state in which they have found it … In this respect historians, both past and present, are little better than Hamilton’s contemporaries, for what they have been wont to call conclusions are in reality little more than acts of faith.

And where the book in question is a biography of Alexander Hamilton, few of us would not place our faith in the word of our subject. The stakes, anyhow, are not vast ones. Whether Alexander Hamilton took a tumble between the sheets with a woman about whom history remembers nothing else, after all, is hardly the most important part of his story. In the life of Alexander, Maria Reynolds happens in square brackets, as an unfortunate lapse in a brilliant career, something that damaged his chances of higher political office, to be sure, but not definitive of the man or his life story. And, so, few contemporary biographies of Alexander Hamilton raise the questions of whether Alexander might have been fibbing. The best biographies—Ron Chernow’s notably among them—mention them only in the footnotes and then proceed to tell the story of the Maria Reynolds affair as if we are certain that it did happen, because that is the only way to write a life story.

But the story here is of the life of Eliza Hamilton, and their shared history looks differently from the perspective of her character and reactions. If Alexander Hamilton fibbed about an affair with Maria Reynolds and flirted, instead, with insider trading, the story of the life of Alexander gets a bit murkier for certain.

And if he fibbed and asked for loyalty and devotion, the story of the life of Eliza Hamilton suddenly becomes coherent.

Biographers, this one included, are inclined to take the word of their subjects. “Taking the word” of Eliza Hamilton, however, means reading not what she wrote—and burned—but reading the outlines of her convictions and character in her actions and how others described them. It also means acknowledging that Eliza, more than any other person, was responsible for making knowing impossible and that more than anything she cared about protecting Alexander. That was the principle at the heart of their marriage.

The story I tell here is the story in which there was no breach of faith between them.

Some readers will be understandably curious to learn more about the tangled and fascinating history of the Reynolds crisis, which also riveted newspaper readers in the 1790s. For any reader who wishes to track the historians and to draw his or her own conclusions, two comprehensive sources are the extensive introductory note provided by Harold C. Syrett, editor of the twenty-seven-volume Papers of Alexander Hamilton, to a letter of Oliver Wolcott Jr. dated July 3, 1797, published in volume 21 and available online, along with all the relevant primary source material related to the Reynolds investigation and pamphlet at the United States National Archive’s website Founders Online; and the detailed appendix, titled “The First Conflict in the Cabinet,” provided by Julian P. Boyd in volume 18 of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.

This book is not a scholarly dissertation. The life of Eliza Hamilton is too lively and exciting for that, and, apart from the author’s note here and my extensive citations at the end of the book, I proceed to tell her story without equivocation or hedging. The only liberties that I have taken with her story are instances in which, where her voice is absent, I have used other historical sources—mainly Alexander’s replies to her lost letters, in which he alludes to specific content—or have extrapolated from her character or from the letters of others to offer a glimpse into what I believe was Eliza’s lived experience of her story. Those are instances of historical triangulation and inference, however, and not invention.

In telling Eliza’s story, I am persuaded from what I know of Eliza Hamilton and her character, as reflected in the testimony of her life and the lives of those who loved her, that the affair with Maria Reynolds was fabricated by Alexander in an attempt to end a political inquisition that would damage him and several of their extended family members. I am persuaded that Eliza knew and that she swore to keep the secret.

Whether Alexander was guilty of financial indiscretion or whether it was only that the appearances were so strongly against him that he felt cornered is impossible to know for certain. The fact that money passed between Alexander and James Reynolds tends to suggest that Alexander was speculating, at least in a small way, probably on army pensions. What is certain is that Alexander was surrounded by men who were making huge financial bets at the peak of a bubble and playing fast and loose with inside information, and that some of that information led back to the Treasury. It is not impossible that he was trying to protect some of those other men, including John Church and Philip Schuyler, from being taken down in a financial investigation.

And when the story of the affair with Maria Reynolds broke, Eliza vowed to protect Alexander and her family, even if it meant the world believing Alexander had betrayed her. Her loyalty was ferocious. Alexander was profoundly grateful and was determined to make this up to her.

What was Eliza’s motivation?

Believe in me, Alexander had asked implicitly of Eliza in their letters. I am flawed, and I am not worthy. Love me. Forgive me. That was what he meant when he called her his “nut brown maid” and when he called her “the best of wives, the best of women.” He had poured out his heart in the earliest days of their courtship, with a raw need that made Eliza love him. He had asked her to let it be them against the world, come what might. She had promised, and she would go on promising.

Eliza would keep her promise all through the decades of her widowhood. Among Alexander’s surviving papers is a letter composed in advance of a duel he nearly fought as the scandal was crashing over them in 1795. All his most interesting papers, Alexander wrote, were in a small leather trunk. Inside the trunk was a sachet of letters, bound in a ribbon, and marked with the initials of James Reynolds.

Eliza set this letter aside when it came time for biographers to write the story of Alexander’s life, with a note in firm handwriting, “to be retained by myself.” As far as anyone knows, the little leather trunk and the bundle of letters sealed “J.R.” also made their way, in the end, to Eliza.

Then the letters disappear from history. Historians have scoured the archives and have never found a trace of them. Their fate is also speculative and circumstantial. But it is not hard to imagine an elderly widow, with a trembling hand, tracing one last time the ink from his pen with her finger, and consigning them to a winter fire.

This, and all that came before and after, is Eliza’s story.