who did hamilton cheat on eliza with

Alexander Hamilton cheated on Eliza with Maria Reynolds, a married woman who lived in Philadelphia in the early 1790s.

Quick Scoop

• The affair began when Maria Reynolds approached Hamilton claiming she needed financial help, and he later went to her boarding house, where their relationship turned sexual.

• Maria’s husband, James Reynolds, soon discovered the affair and started blackmailing Hamilton, demanding money in exchange for keeping the relationship secret.

• The relationship with Maria continued on and off until around mid‑1792, during which James and Maria were both involved in extracting repeated payments from Hamilton.

• Years later, when political rivals suspected Hamilton of financial corruption, he publicly released the “Reynolds Pamphlet,” admitting the affair with Maria to prove the payments were personal, not government embezzlement.

• Eliza was deeply hurt; in both history and the musical Hamilton , she separated from him for a time and burned at least some of his letters, though they eventually reconciled and stayed married until his death.

Why people sometimes ask about Angelica

• Modern fandoms and essays sometimes speculate about a romantic tension between Hamilton and Eliza’s sister, Angelica Schuyler, especially because of Hamilton the musical, but there is no solid historical proof that he “cheated” with Angelica.

• Most historians treat the confirmed affair as the one with Maria Reynolds, while any Hamilton–Angelica “love triangle” is usually framed as interpretive or speculative drama rather than documented infidelity.

In short: the historically documented cheating was with Maria Reynolds, not Eliza’s sister.

TL;DR: Hamilton’s known affair was with Maria Reynolds, whose husband then blackmailed him and eventually helped trigger the scandal that led to the infamous Reynolds Pamphlet and a serious rift with Eliza.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.