The ominous music underlying “We Know” fittingly calls back James Reynolds' part in “Say No To This,” which gives us a good hint that something’s about to go down. Jefferson, Madison, and Burr approach Hamilton with apparent evidence of his embezzling government funds. Hamilton responds by revealing his affair with Maria Reynolds.

In November 1792, more than a year after Hamilton’s affair with Maria started, her husband James was arrested on charges of forgery and illegal speculation. Reynolds attempted to implicate Hamilton in the scheme he was accused of. In reality, it wasn’t Jefferson, Madison, and Burr who confronted Hamilton, but rather James Monroe, Frederick Muhlenberg, and Abraham B. Venable, who had visited Reynolds in prison. However, Miranda casting Jefferson, Madison, and Burr in a conspiratorial role isn’t without historical precedent either. Hamilton’s good friend Robert Troup wrote to him in June of 1791 warning of an alliance bent on his destruction:

There was every appearance of a passionate courtship between the Chancellor—Burr—Jefferson and Madison when the two latter were in Town. Delenda est Carthago I suppose is the Maxim adopted with respect to you.

Of course, Hamilton doesn’t do anything by half. Chernow writes:

Another man might have been brief or elliptical. Instead, as if in need of some cathartic cleansing, Hamilton briefed them in agonizing detail about how the husband had acted as a bawd [pimp] for the wife; how the blackmail payments had been made; the loathing the couple had aroused in him; and his final wish to be rid of them. When the three legislators realized that the scandal involved marital infidelity, not government corruption, at least one of them “delicately urged me to discontinue it as unnecessary,” Hamilton recalled. “I insisted upon going through the whole and did so.”

After Hamilton showed them details of Reynolds' extortion, the three men agreed to keep the details of Hamilton’s exculpatory affair secret.

Interestingly, when Hamilton confronted Monroe about leaking the original letters to Jefferson, an offended Monroe (who totally did it) challenged Hamilton to a duel, but it never happened because the tense situation between them was defused by—wait for it—Aaron Burr.

Burr also represented Maria in her divorce from James Reynolds. Like his own daughter Theodosia, Burr also helped secure an education for Maria’s daughter Susan.