ladyinshiningarmor:

the more i dig into the history behind hamilton the weirder the details get

so the story behind the reynolds pamphlet is a little more complicated than made out to be in the play. the people who originally confronted hamilton about his presumed speculation were actually james monroe (another virginian *hint hint*) and a guy named frederick muhlenberg, which they did after james reynolds had been arrested. to clear his name, hamilton revealed all of the dirty details of his relationship with maria reynolds, including handing over all the letters between maria and himself to monroe. now monroe and muhlenberg are satisfied by this, and don’t charge hamilton with anything. the story could have ended there but monroe decided to be a douchebag and send the letters to a close friend for shits and giggles, who just so happened to be none other than thomas fucking jefferson. what does TJ do? he holds on to them and uses them five years later to start some shit, spreading rumors about hamilton. same year, a journalist named james callender (who was known as a “scandalmonger” and later reported on TJ himself and his possible relationship with his slave sally hemings aka the country’s second big sex scandal aka exactly what jefferson deserved after all this shit) starts printing all sorts of pamphlets about hamilton and maria, including some of the letters hamilton gave to monroe (gee, i wonder where callender got them from???). hamilton, being hamilton, confronts monroe, who was apparently a real dick, because he denies any responsibility for the leak. hamilton calls him a liar (and he was right) and monroe turns around and calls him a scoundrel and challenges him to a duel. at this point the story gets even more interesting because 1) it is now extremely obvious that our country was founded by 8 year olds, 2) hamilton was actually not the one who threw down the gauntlet, and 3) most importantly, the duel never happened because someone talked them down. guess who it was. fucking guess. it was aaron fucking burr

anyway hamilton then goes on and publishes a 95 page pamphlet (jfc alexander) explaining the situation, which of course is the one that the song in the play is about. another fun tidbit though is that maria and james reynolds were actually divorced by the time all of this came to light, and maria was represented in court by none other than aaron fucking burr