Page 19 of My Dear Hamilton

Chapter Seventeen

December 1786

New York City

A BARREL OF HAM?” I asked with a long-suffering sigh, as my husband rolled his wages into the kitchen where I stirred a thin vegetable soup. With three children now—the youngest, seven-month-old Alex, upon my hip, it was becoming harder to make do, a situation resulting from the fact that my husband preferred to take on charity cases or those that established legal precedents instead of more lucrative but pedestrian disputes over trade.

“A barrel of ham is worth more than continentals,” Hamilton said in defense of himself. “Besides, we can’t eat a continental for dinner.”

That is true enough, I thought as he took the baby and held him aloft. “You make a persuasive argument, Colonel Hamilton. Tomorrow, I shall cook up some ham and potatoes for us with the butter Papa sent from the Pastures, and we’ll invite the Burrs for a feast before church service.”

At this, he frowned. “Does your father send food to all his daughters?”

I’d seen before how prideful he could be, and how much he chafed against anything that resembled dependence. So I said, “Well, Papa can’t very well send it to Angelica over the ocean or it would spoil, but he’s sent food to all his daughters before. Besides, without good butter I can’t replicate Mama’s cookies for the children this holiday.” Alexander didn’t seem appeased by this explanation, so I tried to subtly remind him that we were bickering about butter because he insisted on representing impoverished persons. “Which client paid in pork?”

“The spinster lady I mentioned.”

“The one caught stealing lace doilies, painted fans, and underclothes? Did she have some innocent defense?”

“No,” he replied with a hint of chagrin. “But I remember all too well what women must resort to when they’re destitute and desperate.”

At this declaration—at once so rare and revealing of the power his dead mother still held over him—I stopped stirring the soup and glanced over my shoulder. But the floridness of his complexion and his reluctance to meet my eyes warned me not to say any more about it. And I remembered that however spare our circumstances might have seemed to the daughter of Philip Schuyler, we lived comfortably. Far more comfortably than my husband had as an orphaned boy all alone in this world.

Our children were loved and cherished. They were fed and clothed and had a roof over their heads, thanks to Hamilton’s talents. I couldn’t call myself a Christian and resent him for using those talents to ease the suffering of others. Even the family in the West Indies of which he so seldom spoke. He’d made a loan to his estranged brother who was too disinterested in us to write except when desperate for money—money I was sure we’d never see again. Alexander even pleaded in vain for word from the father who abandoned him, so that he might render the old man assistance. That my husband also helped much more worthy persons, in my view, like impoverished spinsters, persecuted Tories, and downtrodden Negroes was a testament to his good heart—and I both loved and admired him for it.

In fact, I wished to be more like him.

***

A FEW MONTHS later, one of my husband’s troubled veteran friends came to our house in the middle of the night, drunk and unable to care for his motherless baby, a two-year-old named Fanny. “I’m sorry,” my husband said, when the knocking awakened me. But I wouldn’t let him apologize for the tender spot in his heart reserved for the soldiers he’d fought with.

Especially not since we’d so recently learned of Tench Tilghman’s death; Tench had never recovered from the cold he’d taken at the winter encampment of the army in New Windsor. It had festered into a lung ailment that killed him, leaving behind two daughters in Maryland, one of whom was orphaned before she was born. Alexander and I had wept together at the news. For if my husband would always have a tender heart for the soldiers he fought with, I did, too.

So now by candlelight and in sleeping cap, I went down with Alexander to help his army friend and the child. I took the wailing, red-faced girl to my shoulder, trying to console her. And some time later, after Alexander had seen his drunken friend to a sofa, I asked, “Will it be debtors’ prison for him?”

Alexander’s expression was bleak. “Worse. He’s taken leave of his senses. He broke down in my arms, sobbing like a child himself. He has nightmares of the war...”

I peered at little Fanny where she’d fallen asleep in my arms, dark lashes spread upon porcelain cheeks. And because I still had nightmares of the war, too, I couldn’t stand for her not to be cared for as she should. “Alexander, what if... we took her in?” We were too far away to render assistance to Tench Tilghman’s baby daughters, but perhaps we could help this one. “We could keep her. Just until her father can put his affairs in order.”

“Oh, Betsy .” My husband pressed a kiss to my temple and whispered, “You are the best of wives, the best of women, and the best part of me. But I can’t ask you to take on such a burden.”

“I want to.” As I stared at this man who’d once been an abandoned child, I became even more certain of my decision to take Fanny into our household. “All children need love, and we are blessed to have more than enough to spare.”

***

July 3, 1787

New York City

“This is a vile slander, ” Alexander said, crumpling a newspaper in a fury.

We’d joined the Burrs on a visit to the new African Free School that my husband and his fellow members of the Manumission Society had brought into being to educate black children. And on the walk back, Alexander had purchased a gazette from a passing newsboy and become incensed by what he read.

“But no one of sense believes the rumor, my friend,” Burr said in an attempt to pacify him.

In the hopes that our countrymen had finally suffered enough that they were ready to see the wisdom in forming a true government, my husband had gone to Philadelphia with James Madison in May to serve as delegate for a federal convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. What Alexander and Jemmy wanted, I knew, was more than to revise them. They wanted to draw up a new constitution altogether that would provide for a stronger central government. But after only two months, my husband had returned, more frustrated than before, complaining it was a waste of time and that he and Jemmy were thwarted at every turn.

And now this newspaper article accusing him of conspiring to summon the Duke of York from England to start a new American monarchy.

It was ridiculous. Burr was right that no one of any sense be lieved Alexander was trying to bring an English king over us again. But I already knew how much damage people with no sense could cause. And so did my husband.

“Ladies,” Hamilton said abruptly to Theodosia and me. “Please excuse me. Burr, will you see my wife safely home?”

“Where the devil are you going?” Burr asked before I could.

“To find out who started this rumor,” Hamilton grumbled, waving the crumpled newspaper as he strode away on the cobblestone street.

“ Hamilton, ” Burr called after my hot-tempered husband to no avail.

“Will you go with him?” I asked, exasperated, but hoping that Burr’s measured approach to life would keep Alexander from trouble.

When Burr hesitated, Theodosia reassured him, “Oh, go, for goodness’ sake. Betsy and I can find our way without a guardian.”

Burr chuckled, kissed his wife’s cheek, then rushed after my husband.

Watching them go, Theodosia sighed. “With rumors like that in the papers... sometimes I fear people are looking to start a civil war.”

“I fear it, too,” I replied. With Shay’s rebellion, there already was a civil war in Massachusetts. It was spreading to other states. And it could happen here, too, especially with Congress in session in the city.

“Don’t worry,” Theodosia said. “Burr will look out for your husband. He has a very good nose for the prevailing winds.” It’s painful now to recall how reassured those words had made me feel, but they truly did, especially when she looped her arm through mine and said, “And in the meantime, we’ll look out for each other.”

That night, having slammed back into the house and awakened our sleeping children, Alexander was only mildly apologetic.

“And did you hunt down the source of this rumor?” I asked after putting the baby back to sleep.

Alexander surprised me by saying, “I did. And it was a nobody. Just another indebted drunkard—a ne’er-do-well named James Reynolds.”

There was nothing to be gained in quarreling with a man like that. Instead, Hamilton spent the days that followed directing his anger at our antifederalist governor Clinton, accusing him in a series of essays of poisoning the people’s minds against reform, and against the convention in Philadelphia to which my husband would again return.

“Are you sure that you should publish this?” I asked, reading over his shoulder. “You’re drawing battle lines. Governor Clinton is a powerful man and you—”

You’re a revolutionary, I thought, watching my husband scribble some note as if he hadn’t heard me at all. He’d already gone against a king and won. He’d quarreled with George Washington and prevailed. He wouldn’t be stopped by a governor.

He wouldn’t stop until he’d changed the world. And I wanted to help him do it.

***

October 1787

En Route to New York City

We went to battle in the bowels of a ship.

Returning from a visit to my parents, we’d taken a cabin on a sloop bound for New York—and this narrow berth, with its single table secured to the wooden planks of the deck and one porthole, would be our war room for the week-long trip. There was just enough space for the children and their bedrolls, the gentle rocking of the single-masted boat lulling them fast to sleep.

During the day Alexander worked, and I took the little ones above deck to enjoy the passing scenery of towns on the shoreline, green pastures, and blazing red autumn foliage. As I watched the children play and laugh and even bicker, my heart was torn between joy at their innocent hopefulness and sorrow at having learned the terrible and unexpected news that Peggy’s little son, Stephen, had died in his sleep. Her husband had written that she was too indisposed to travel or receive visitors, so I hadn’t had the chance to see her during our visit, and I ached to offer her what comfort I could.

But by night, beneath the light of two lanterns swinging from the joists above us, I joined Alexander amidst his letters, treatises, newspapers, paper, ink, and quills. “My arms and ammunition,” he quipped.

“And who are we to fight?”

“Almost everyone,” he said, ruefully. “The foes of the new Constitution are many.”

A few weeks earlier, my husband had returned from Philadelphia, where he affixed his signature to a blueprint for an entirely new government. He hated the plan—which he thought a hodgepodge of ideas and bitter compromises, particularly between the northern and southern states on the issue of slavery. But he’d said that “without these compromises, no union could possibly have been formed, though Washington does not think this Constitution will last twenty years.”

Twenty years . Long enough for my sons to grow into men and get their educations. Long enough for my daughter to fall in love, marry, and have children of her own. Long enough for the new baby growing in my belly to get a good start in life. It had been only ten years since my sister climbed out a window to elope with John Church and that felt like a lifetime ago.

Twenty years of peace and stability would be enough, I thought. We could fix the rest. We could keep working to end the injustice of slavery and make the new nation live up to the ideals of the revolution. But first we needed a nation.

And nine states would have to ratify the Constitution before it would become law.

Alexander had a plan to make that happen. A secret plan.

“We must defend the Constitution,” he said, shuffling papers. “We must overwhelm the opposition with evidence and arguments. The Constitution is as flawed as some of my clients, but like them, it deserves a fair trial. At least in the court of public opinion.”

Resting a stack of books in my lap, I helped him clear a space upon which to write. “And how are you going to make that happen?”

“With a series of essays,” he said, the scratching of his pen competing with the creaking of the boat and the sloshing of the river against the hull. “Anonymous essays. Maybe thirty in all.”

“Thirty?” I wondered how he’d manage such a thing, given the other demands on his time. “So many?”

“There will be other writers, of course. Though our identities must remain secret.”

Not a secret from me, I hoped. “Who will help you?”

“I don’t know yet,” he replied. “I intend to recruit John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and William Duer.” Jay was an experienced statesman and judge. Morris, a peg-legged bon vivant—the penman of the Constitution. And Duer, a wealthy New York legislator.

“Not Burr?” I asked.

Alexander frowned. “Not Burr. He’s not a man to commit himself to paper, even secretly.” I sensed, even then, there was more to it, but my husband was too caught up in his idea for me to interrupt. “The trick will be to coordinate the essays without anyone catching wind of it. How to make our writing similar enough that no outsider can deduce who wrote what, and no single man can be vilified or lionized for it.”

“Ambitious,” I said. But I didn’t realize how ambitious until we were at home, on solid ground, and I was awakened before dawn by the faint sound of knocking downstairs. Very familiar knocking.

Three quick raps followed by two slow ones.

I sat up in bed to find my husband dressing in the dark. “Is that... ?”

“Jemmy Madison,” my husband said, grinning. “He’s hurried back from Philadelphia to join the project.”

I was confused because I thought the project was to be by New Yorkers for New Yorkers. “But he’s a Virginian.”

“Exactly. And we need Virginia to ratify, too,” Hamilton replied, having adjusted the scope of the work by an order of magnitude. But I understood that if he was to build a whole country, he was going to have to persuade a whole country.

By the time I’d dressed and seen the children down to the kitchen for a bleary-eyed breakfast of porridge under Jenny’s watchful eye, I found the two men in the dining room, a stack of books and papers between them. It was a scene I’d witnessed a hundred times. “Does my husband have you skulking about in subterfuge at strange hours of the day and night again, Mr. Madison?”

The pale little man smiled. “I owe no small apology for waking you and your servant, Mrs. Hamilton. But I received a message last night—”

“We think we can deliver four essays a week now, instead of two,” Hamilton interrupted, slapping his hand on the table to punctuate that happy fact before looking squarely at me. “With your help...”

They explained that they desired me to act as a sort of courier to collect the essays from the other men’s wives, then deliver them to confidential intermediaries who would pass them to the publisher in secrecy. What thrill I felt to play a part in such a vast conspiracy!

But in the end, it was not so vast. Morris begged off. Duer’s first essay was so disappointing my husband didn’t wish for him to write more. And Jay fell terribly ill in early November after I fetched his fifth essay at a tea party with his wife, Sarah.

That left just two men to write The Federalist .

Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.

And most of it would be accomplished at my dining room table.

Every morning Madison would walk from his boardinghouse on Maiden Lane to take an early breakfast, bouncing my children on his knee as he compared notes with Hamilton over strong coffee to sketch out the new work for the day. Together, they wrote words that became weapons in the fight to create a real union, fired off at a dizzying and stupefying pace to meet their weekly publication deadlines. My husband hunched over a desk scribbling until his shoulders knotted and his lower back throbbed with pain. And many mornings Madison’s small hands literally shook with exhaustion as he tried to revive himself with my coffee after another sleepless night. I’d never before seen men exert themselves to the point of collapse by writing alone. But in those months I witnessed just that. And in every spare moment I could find between housework, prayer, and looking after four unruly children, I read each word they wrote.

If mankind were to agree to no institution of government until every part of it was perfect, society would become a scene of anarchy and the world a desert, my husband wrote.

Echoed by Mr. Madison’s simpler, If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

On and on, working late hours between courtroom trials and congressional committee meetings, and nearly killing themselves doing it, they wrote the most enduring explanation of government ever put to paper before or since.

As winter melted to spring, I witnessed their ideas grow like the child in my womb, day by day, and it made me bolder, as if I, too, were on the verge of becoming .

Which was why, one morning, looking over Hamilton’s cramped shoulder, I ventured to say, “Does that—does that not seem...”

My husband turned to eye me, his brow raised. “Yes?”

Fearing I was about to make quite a fool of myself, I bit my lip. “Well, it’s only that what you’ve written sounds quite identifiably like you .”

Hamilton’s brow rose higher. “How?”

It was dramatic. A little dark. And altogether too complicated.

But what I said was, “Well, in the first place, you’ve used a great many more words to express that thought than Mr. Madison would.”

For a moment, his mouth dropped open, as if he took great insult. As if he were about to say something—perhaps something extremely cross. But his mouth snapped shut again. And all at once, he crumpled what he’d been writing into a ball and threw it to the floor.

Crestfallen, I tried to retrieve it. “Oh, no! Alexander, I didn’t mean for—”

“Let it not be said I cannot see through a veil of vanity,” he said, grumbling as he started fresh.

Thereafter, I noticed their writing styles became much more similar, an achievement made easier by the fact that they were both so much in agreement about what remained to be written that it was no longer necessary to plan each morning. Anyway, there was no time to. As twenty-nine essays expanded into eighty-five, they burned through foolscap, parchments, quills, and slate pencils. Often one of them was still writing while the other’s essay was being fit for type at the printer. There were days Hamilton didn’t even have the chance to read over his own work before sending it off to press.

And I myself scarcely had time for childbirth. Two days after celebrating the delivery of a little boy we named James—after my husband’s father and the man at whose side Alexander was now doing battle—my happiness was profoundly disturbed by my six-year-old coming inside from a game of hopscotch with tears of rage streaking his cheeks.

“They’re calling me a quadroon,” Philip cried.

I knew precisely why. Once, it was the question of whether one was Patriot or Tory that divided families, ruined friendships, and made nearly every outing confrontational. Now it was the question of whether one was a federalist or an antifederalist—for or against a strong central government.

Despite our best efforts, the authors of the Federalist essays had become an open secret. And even if the public didn’t know which essays my husband wrote, they knew he was writing them. Which was why Governor Clinton sent his minions to retaliate in the papers, accusing Alexander of being a superficial, conceited, upstart coxcomb. They’d also called him Tom Shit—a reference to his illegitimate birth that implied he was a Creole bastard with Negro blood.

And now, as I tried to comfort my crying firstborn son—a child of such sunny temperament that he almost never cried—it became deeply personal. Hamilton had warned me. He’d warned me when he proposed marriage that our children might one day suffer for the ignoble circumstances of his birth. Just as I’d warned him not to pick a fight with the governor.

But now it was war, and I wanted nothing but the governor’s complete surrender.

To that end, I decided to take the latest essay to the print shop myself instead of waiting for the printer to come to the house to pick it up. I’d never been one to lay abed for long after childbirth, and I was convinced that activity was the only way to relieve cramps. Now, I wanted my little boy to walk the streets of this city with his head held high. And I needed to show him how to do it.

So after nursing my newborn, I left him in Jenny’s capable hands and took Philip for a short but painful stroll to the printer, then up Broadway past the hospital to the nearby apothecary shop. “Mrs. Hamilton,” the apothecary said in a scolding tone, his bushy brows knitted behind the counter. “You’re so soon out of childbed. I’d have come to you if you’d sent a servant or Colonel Hamilton to fetch me.”

“I just needed some fresh air, raspberry leaves for my cramps, and a little lavender oil for my aching head.”

While I kept my curious boy from reaching for one of the many fascinating corked glass jars on the counter, the apothecary rummaged through the drawers and we chatted about the various states that had ratified the Constitution—six by my count, five by his.

“You forgot Massachusetts,” I said, just as the roar of angry voices reached our ears.

We both looked up toward the street to see a horde of angry men marching from the direction of the battery. A mob . I’d once seen a group of men like this armed with feathers and tar. This time, they had sticks and, as I was about to learn, a far more righteous rage. “Grave-robbing bastards!” someone shouted, just before a brick sailed through the glass window, sending a spray of shards at my feet. Instinctively, I grabbed my son and pulled him behind the counter. But from where I crouched, I saw the swarm move right past us on the street.

I could guess their destination.

The hospital. For the Constitution was not the only divisive thing in the newspapers that year. It had been reported that medical students, in need of cadavers to dissect, dug up bodies in the Negro Burial Ground outside the city. No one of prominence had seemed to care until the corpse of a white woman from Trinity Churchyard was also dug up and stolen.

Now the public was in an uproar.

I knew the importance of cadavers to the field of medical science, but I couldn’t help but shudder at the gross indignity of having anyone I loved violated and dissected in such a way.

As we heard the crash of more windows farther down the street, the apothecary rose to wrap a sheltering arm around my shoulder. “I’ll get you and the boy home,” he said, rushing us out the back. Across the way, furious citizens broke the hospital door to splinters and overran the hospital, sending young medical students running in every direction. Over my shoulder, I saw a young doctor climbing from a window. And my son stared as shouting men hauled cauldrons of dismembered body parts out of the hospital, the stench of it recalling the war immediately to my mind.

We saw a bloody foot, a swollen human head in a bottle, and some poor fellow’s pickled genitals hanging from a string before we fled up Broadway, only to come against hundreds more furious men blocking our way. The jostling crowd swept us up like a tidal wave, separating us from the apothecary and nearly tearing Philip’s hand from mine. Breathless and frightened, having quite forgotten about aches and pains, I realized the mob was descending upon the original nearby buildings of the old King’s College—which had been recently renamed the more republican Columbia College.

“Bring out the butchers!” someone in the mob cried, and I knew they were looking for medical students to punish.

“Keep walking,” I whispered to Philip. But my son made of himself a dead weight, pointing with one hand at something I couldn’t see. And then the crowd parted to reveal my husband on the college stairs, pleading with the mob to see reason.

Hamilton was a great orator, and his military voice could just be heard over the fray. “The mayor has already jailed the culprits. Allow the law—”

The mob pushed past him, breaking open the doors to the chapel, the library, and the dorms of the college he’d recently helped reopen.

Then he caught sight of us and dodged the rioters until we were all together, and he tugged us into his arms. “Dear God, Betsy, what the devil are you doing here?”

The chaos gave me no time to answer. Save to issue commands as he guided us through streets strewn with debris and damage— stop, wait here, run!— Alexander said no more until we’d made it into the safety of the Burrs’ entry hall. Was that how my husband had led men across the battlefield at Yorktown—fearless and relentless and cunning?

Escorted by Colonel Burr, we finally made it the rest of the way home. Having no concern for our audience, Alexander took me into his arms so tightly that I could barely breathe. “When I saw the two of you, there, amongst the rioters...”

“God willing, it’s over now,” I said, returning his embrace. But by morning, the mob had swollen to five thousand—a veritable army. Double the number of men Washington had with him at the Battle of Trenton. Not that it kept Alexander nor John Jay—who’d just recovered enough to start writing Federalist essays again—from trying to reason with the mob. Jay got his skull cracked with a brick for his trouble. Likewise, the Baron von Steuben had been trying to persuade the militia not to fire at the rioters when he was struck by a stone and promptly changed his mind. “Fire! Fire!”

I learned all of this when the baron returned to our house bleeding through a bandage hastily fastened upon him. “ Mein Gott . Twenty dead!” the baron roared, almost as angry about that as he seemed to be about the ruined lace of his shirt. My newborn was just as angry in his cradle, crying for the milk only I could give him while the baron’s greyhound licked my baby’s face. “How many more wounded no one can guess. This chaos. This anarchy .”

This was why the Constitution had to be ratified.

An entire generation was growing up in a world without sure principles by which to live in peace. And I couldn’t help but wonder, would my own son, after what he’d seen in the streets, come of age believing that there was no way to solve any problem but with a club or a pistol?