By: Clarisa Colton
For my historical annotation project, I have chosen an excerpt from “The Reynold’s Pamphlet”. It was written by Hamilton himself for the press and published to the public. He wrote the document to clear himself of a false charge of “improper pecuniary speculation”(Hamilton). This charge came from a Mr. James Reynolds after he had been imprisoned and the man he had been imprisoned with, Jacob Clingman, told his lawyer that Reynolds and Hamilton had been involved together in some illegal dealings having to do with government funds. When Hamilton was confronted with these claims, he came clean, but not about anything to do with government funds, just that he had had an affair with Mr. James Reynolds wife, Maria Reynolds. This all went down in 1792, however it wasn’t until 5 years later in 1797 that Hamilton wrote and published “The Reynold’s Pamphlet”, which explained all that had happened in great detail in order to clear himself of these charges. What initially drew me to the document, I admit, was the fact that this is considered one of the first sex scandal’s in United States history, but as I’ve spent time reading it and researching it I have realized there is much more to it than that.
As far as research I’ve done so far, I have basically been looking through the library databases and google to try and find what will be useful to me. It has been pretty overwhelming and difficult for me though because there is SO much information out there and it’s hard for me to tell what is relevant and useful. I feel like something that happens to me a lot in assignments like this is a feeling of being stuck/blocked, but once I actually start writing things down and getting the hang of it, I feel like this project will go much more smoothly. I am going to try and go through the document I am annotating and make notes indicating what information I think would be helpful, which will hopefully help me narrow down sources to actual use in my annotations.
