Page 23 of My Dear Hamilton
Chapter Twenty-One
November 1790
Philadelphia
O VER A SECOND, private dinner of just the three of them, they’d struck a bargain.
A grand compromise.
Madison yielded, agreeing to get my husband the votes he needed for his financial plan. And on the heels of his victory, Alexander brimmed with excitement, swooping little James into his arms to spin him around. But I was too much the daughter of a Dutchman to think such a victory would come without a price. “And what do the Virginians want in exchange?”
Alexander was suddenly, decidedly less giddy. “I agreed to use my influence to move the capital city from New York to the wilderness of the Potomac.”
Already imagining the uproar it would cause amongst our New York friends, I tried to reconcile myself to the news. “It will take time to build a new city. Surely, in the meantime, we’ll remain here?”
Hamilton shook his head, more than a little frustrated at the outcome. His enemies had whispered that the capital city was to be called Hamiltonopolis, so he’d been forced to give New York up even as a temporary home for the government, lest he appear to be self-interested. “All of us—the congressmen, the senators, the cabinet officers and their wives—are to pack up and migrate to Philadelphia.”
I didn’t relish upending our life on Wall Street, but there was nothing for it but to close up the house, pack up the children, and sell the chickens.
But that autumn, with the move entirely in my command, I was inconsolable.
Not to leave New York—but because our faithful Jenny fell prey to yellow fever.
It’d started as a fever and some aches, and though she insisted she felt better, I sent her back to the Pastures for a rest and a visit with her mother. She never made it there. She died on the sloop, it was reported to me, bleeding from the mouth, nose, and eyes, screaming in pain. And I grieved as much that she had died alone, without me to tend her, as I would have for a member of my family. Which made me deeply ashamed.
For I had not treated her with the love and respect someone ought to treat family. Instead, I’d told myself polite lies to disguise the fact that I’d “borrowed” Jenny. I’d taken her away from her mother at the Pastures and I’d taken her labor and kindness as if I had a right to them.
Jenny had been a servant, yes. Why say it politely, even if it was the custom? She was a slave. She’d been my children’s nursemaid, and they loved her. She’d also been my helpmate, and I considered her a friend. I should have told her that. No, I should have treated her like a friend. I should have treated her like a per son, with the same God-given rights as any other.
I should have seen to her freedom. And now it was too late.
Papa had joined the New York Manumission Society; he wasn’t insensible to the injustice of slavery. He meant to do away with it at the Pastures as soon as he could afford to. But even if Papa wouldn’t have released Jenny from bondage, I should have paid her a wage.
In guilt and grief over her death, I wanted nothing more to do with slavery.
Now I vowed never to own, rent, or borrow another human being.
That wasn’t enough, of course. Not enough to wipe away the stain on my soul or the everyday injustices of the institution. But I kept true to my vow.
I’d been born and raised on a plantation; my happiness had been built on the subjugation of others. My past was tainted with it, no matter what excuses I made for myself. But I could change. The country could change. So I put slavery—and New York—behind me in the hopes of bringing about a government that would help guarantee that all men, and perhaps all women, would be treated as equals before the law.
Determined to make a fresh start in our new capital, we found ourselves renting a home in Philadelphia on the corner of Walnut and Third streets, not far at all from the theater. Our neighbors were thee-and-thou Quakers, including Mrs. Dolley Payne Todd, who welcomed us with a warm apple pie from her kitchen. Like my husband, I admired Quaker morals and their antislavery stance, but upon hearing of our move Peggy had complained about Quakers having humorless pretensions to gravity and ostentatious plainness . I thought she’d change her mind if she ever met the vivacious young Mrs. Todd, who, even then, had such an impeccable sense of style that her dark workaday frock gave the impression of good fashion, its somber hues lightened by a smattering of whimsical Swiss dots.
In any case, I was grateful for the pie and the knowledge of a friendly face only a block away on Walnut Street where, rising up from the red-bricked streets, our snow-dusted stylish new abode was enclosed by a wrought iron gate, leading to a yard that provided more than enough elbow room for children, chickens, or even monkeys if we should want them.
“Much more in keeping with the style to which you grew ac customed as General Schuyler’s daughter,” my husband boasted as he showed me into the drawing room, where some expensive French chairs were already invitingly arranged by the fireplace. “And best of all, only a block from the new treasury. Such as it is.”
Alexander was so very proud of himself that I couldn’t help but set down my bags, straighten my bodice, and give him a very proper kiss. “Well, then, what is to prevent you from tumbling from our bed straight into the chair at your office without so much as running a comb through your hair?”
I said it only to twit him, but it wasn’t far from the truth in the months that followed, where our lovely new house became little more than the place Alexander Hamilton slept—when he slept at all. My husband’s mind was filled with the details of establishing American commerce. At breakfast he muttered about lighthouses, beacons, and buoys. At lunch—if he came home for lunch—it was talk of coins, candlewicks, wool, and manufactures. And before bed, it was banks and paper instruments and international trade.
Yet, despite the demands of his position, the gay social life of Philadelphia seemed poised to bring us happiness, especially when we were joined in the new capital, just in time for the holiday, by James Monroe, who now served as a senator from Virginia.
I ran into Monroe, almost quite literally, at a coffeehouse, which made us both laugh.
With the rich scent of beans making our mouths water, he gave me a flourishing bow. “Can it really be you, Miss Schuyler, still bundled up against the cold, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed as you were all those years ago when I served you swill in a military camp?”
Grinning, I nodded. “Yes, but I remind you that I’m Mrs. Hamilton now, as you well know, and as a mother of five I fear I am very much changed from those days.”
Monroe kissed my hand in courtly and proper fashion. “Well, I do declare, you are as lovely as ever. Second only to my own Elizabeth.”
A moment later, the beautiful Elizabeth Kortright Monroe emerged from a circle of ladies to join us at a table decorated with candles, holly bush, and pine. Together we watched the snow fall and shared gossip. “The fashions in Philadelphia are so daring, ” Mrs. Monroe said, a little bit scandalized and a little bit delighted. “It’s all bare arms and bare bosoms—I hesitate to guess what will be bared next!”
I laughed. I liked the Monroes. I liked them very much. Together we visited Philadelphia’s famed statehouse bell in the tower over Independence Hall. We shopped for baubles at the arcaded market on High Street. We admired the architecture of the new courthouse. We took our children to the circus together, where acrobats tumbled and clowns made us laugh.
And I insisted on having them to the house for dinner, even though my husband grumbled that Monroe had fallen in with the antifederalists. That was true. He’d led them in Virginia, arguing that the Constitution ought not be ratified without a bill of rights. But now we had a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, and none of it changed the fact that Monroe was our longtime friend.
Besides, I held fast to my policy that no man’s politics should be held against him at our dinner table. Or I tried to. But circumstances in the months that followed made that increasingly difficult as the antifederalists coalesced into a political party intent on opposing my husband.
But Hamilton was, in those days, an unstoppable force of nature. Some said the most powerful man in the government, with Washington as a mere figurehead, just as my sister had predicted. It wasn’t true, but my husband did seem invincible. He’d bargained with Madison and Jefferson to bring his financial system into being. And now there was nothing anyone could do about it, except look for vulnerabilities and petty ways to undermine him.
They found this in my father, Senator Philip Schuyler.
“The antifederalists found a way to get their revenge,” Papa said quietly.
Having moved with us to Philadelphia, quite confident in his reelection to the Senate, Papa now learned of the surprise upset. In the same election that brought James Monroe back into my life as a United States senator, my father had been defeated, and by, of all people, Aaron Burr.
Between our move to Philadelphia, my husband’s ascendance in the government, and the colonel’s antifederalist leanings, we’d grown apart from the Burrs, but that didn’t make his opportunism at Papa’s expense any less cutting. And to think, my father had given Burr his start!
“Another betrayal,” my husband raged, his temper as warm as my father’s was cool.
And I could not soothe him because it had begun to feel, even to me, as if we were being abandoned by our friends. Monroe going over to the antifederalists. Madison’s reluctant support and increasing preference for Jefferson. Burr’s disloyalty.
Alexander was not wrong to think this was a strike against him, a shot aimed to remove a solid ally in the Senate and wound him personally besides. But it was my father who was the casualty. Poor Papa, who’d already suffered so much indignity in his public career, was now to be discarded by his nation in the wreath of his venerable age. I was mortified that my father should have to suffer for my husband’s ambitions—and at the hands of Colonel Burr, whose wife I’d once counted as my friend and whose family I’d fed at my own table.
From the doorway, my nine-year-old son, Philip, asked, “What will you do now, Grandpapa?”
It was a question I’d dared not ask of my fifty-seven-year-old father who’d already fought enough battles—political and otherwise—for a lifetime. So I was surprised to see Papa smile as he summoned his grandson forth and ruffled his hair. “Why, I’ll return to Albany and wait for an opportunity to retaliate.”
That was Papa’s way. He was as patient a politician as he’d been a general. Taking no time to brood over a lost battle, but slowly and steadily moving to gather allies about him and obstruct his enemies’ progress until he was ready for another fight.
Unfortunately, patience was very much not my husband’s way.
With the gratifying support of Madison in Congress, my husband had already moved to levy a tax on whiskey, much needed to fund the government’s debts. And we were all relieved that the two architects of the government were once again working in good harmony. But Madison’s support was no longer a thing upon which my husband could rely.
When Alexander proposed chartering a Bank of the United States, Madison wouldn’t go along. Prickling with every word, my husband explained, “I think Jefferson has him convinced that by establishing a bank in Philadelphia, I mean to go back on the bargain to move the capital.”
It was, of course, an affront to my husband’s honor to be thought to have negotiated in bad faith. And I wondered why Mr. Jefferson, so cordial in mixed company, claiming to view us as old friends, would suspect Alexander of perfidy. Perhaps Jefferson’s time in the French court had led him to look for intrigue behind every damasked curtain. But there seemed, to me, a remedy that ought to put Jefferson’s mind at ease about my husband’s intentions. “Why not, then, charter the bank on the Potomac?”
“We need a bank now, ” Alexander snapped. Each new loss of a friend and ally had set him ever more on edge, and made him dig in his heels until he was nearly insufferable. “Madison is a fool not to realize it.”
I took a breath and cautioned, “If you express such sentiments in public, of course Madison will oppose your bank. It will be harder for southerners to invest if it’s located in a northern city.”
“I don’t need Madison or the southerners.”
It unnerved me to hear the hubris in his voice. “Remember, husband. Madison is the most important man in the Congress.”
Hamilton’s mouth opened as if to list a hundred ways in which I was wrong. But then, all at once, his temper broke, and he laughed, drawing me into his arms. “My angel, you are too good, and innocent, and tender-hearted for me to burden you with this business.”
His kisses, which rained down upon my face, ought to have been enough to distract me, but something in the way he brushed my concerns aside made me insist, “You need Mr. Madison. You brought the Constitution into existence together. And now you must govern together. You need him.”
Hamilton’s eyes gleamed with triumph. “I don’t. I have the votes. Even without your papa in the Senate.” More kisses trailed down my neck. “So, you see, I don’t need Madison. Or Monroe. Or Jefferson. Or Burr. I don’t need any of them.”
His sense of power and confidence was a heady erotic thing, and I would be lying to say I didn’t feel its intoxicating pull. In truth, my husband seemed drunk on it, turning me in his arms so that I was forced to brace myself against the table.
Then he raised my skirts.
What he wanted, I knew. I wanted it, too.
It was not only out of a reluctance for more children that I stopped him. I told myself it was also a concern for decency, that he should try to make love in the middle of the day. But there was something else, too—an instinct that he was attempting to master me, and not only for mutual pleasure. I felt suddenly as if, in bending me over this table, I stood in place of all the other frustrations and obstacles in his way.
A part of me wished to give in, to be for him a relief and comfort.
Certainly, it was my duty as a wife to do so.
But I felt some inexplicable assault to my dignity to be taken this way, by him, in such a mood. I don’t need any of them . There was a recklessness in his words that I felt in his hands, and both unleashed a foreboding in my heart that I wished I’d better heeded.
So I turned him away.
And perhaps if I hadn’t, everything would have been different.
***
February 1791
Philadelphia
“I won’t be coming to bed tonight,” Alexander said, scarcely looking up from his desk.
He’d been gruff since the afternoon I rebuffed his advances—as if no woman had ever refused him anything before. Or perhaps it was simply that he assumed his wife never would.
“In truth, I doubt I’ll come to bed any night this week,” he added. He had an excuse in that President Washington had given him only a week to write up an argument for the necessity and constitutionality of a national bank. “The president knows perfectly well the necessity,” my husband had fumed. “Yet he’s allowed the Virginians to shake his resolve.”
It seemed, to me, that it was my husband who was shaken.
By Mr. Jefferson, most of all.
Though our tall Virginian secretary of state spoke eloquently about the ideals of liberty, he was proving to be a stubborn opponent of any practical reforms. “He’s a landed aristocrat who waxes poetic about the virtues of the common man,” Hamilton complained. “Which might be admirable did he not do it seated in his whirligig chair, sipping the finest wine his inherited wealth can buy, toasting French rioters who shout, ‘Death to the rich.’”
My husband didn’t trust men who spoke of the glory of the revolution without having fought in it. Even Madison had volunteered, briefly, in the militia. But soldier or not, Mr. Jefferson was a formidable foe whose strengths were my husband’s weaknesses.
Jefferson knew how to employ a wise silence and patience.
Meanwhile, my husband took too much for granted that he would have everything his way. He’d even taken for granted his own staggering capacity for hard work. For in writing The Federalist, he’d drawn strength from the collaboration; he’d pushed through his own exhaustion and agonies because he had Madison to commiserate and suffer alongside him. He’d had Madison’s intellect to challenge him and Madison’s friendship to encourage him.
But now he worked alone, almost as if to punish himself for having allowed anyone to share his burdens. As if to remind himself of the stern lesson of his childhood: he ought never trust or depend upon anyone.
Which was why, I think, he refused even my help, except to say, “Bring me a pot of strong coffee.” Some nights, it was the only thing he said.
At least until, in exhaustion and defeat, he confessed that he wouldn’t finish before the president’s deadline—a thing that had never happened to him before.
I went to where he sat with shoulders bunched in pain and gently took the pen from his palsied hand. “Betsy, what are you doing?”
“Taking you to bed. In the morning, tell the president that you need another day, and I’ll help you.” He thanked me with loving gratitude. And when I helped him copy it out the next night, he said all the right words to make me believe he was sincere.
He convinced the president.
He got his bank.
But I think I sensed in him, even then, resentment. Resentment that he hadn’t been able to do it himself. That he did need someone, even if it was me. And I believed that’s why he sent me and the children away from the heat and bustle of Philadelphia that summer.
He insisted, actually. And in those days, my husband was not to be denied. Not by Congress, not by the president, and certainly not by me. I’d lived with the consequences of having done it once, and I didn’t want to attempt it again. So I spent the summer with my father.
That summer.
What did Eliza know?
That’s what everyone wonders. Though no one has ever had the gall to ask. If they did, I’d say I knew nothing. And remembered nothing. That it was all, entirely, beneath my notice. But now, questions bite at me like insects in the night.
Before I left for my father’s house, was I there, at the table, slicing bread for my children to take on our journey when the woman came to our door with her sad story? Perhaps I was in the kitchen, setting a kettle to boil. I may have looked up over the wrought iron garden fence to wave to our Quaker neighbor, Dolley Todd, as she passed, and I glimpsed instead an ostentatious woman with golden curls.
To explain our unexpected visitor, surely my husband said, “Just a poor unfortunate woman. Abandoned. In desperate straits.”
“And you sent her away?” I would have asked. “Is there nothing to be done to help her?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he would have replied, kissing our children atop their heads. “But after dinner.”
That’s how it started, if the story he told was true. So banal a beginning it would have escaped my memory. But sometimes I fear that I don’t remember it because it never happened the way he said it did. That it never happened that way at all...