Page 28 of My Dear Hamilton

Chapter Twenty-Six

You may judge how much Hamilton must be mortified at his loss of influence such that he would descend to the language of a street bully.

— E DWARD L IVINGSTON TO HIS MOTHER

Summer 1795

New York City

F LOWERS. I N THE five months since he’d left the government, my husband filled my world with flowers. Cut hot house hyacinths in winter. Sunny daffodils from Mama’s garden during our visits to the Pastures. Azaleas at the Pinkster festival. And now the riot of purple aster, red roses, and orange lilies of New York’s Vauxhall Gardens where we strolled with our children.

“Buy your sisters ice cream,” Alexander called after Philip while balancing three-year-old Johnny on his shoulders.

Running wild amongst the gravel paths between the flowers and sculpted shrubbery, our children were happy to have returned to New York. And I was, too. Some part of me would always long for the countryside, but my husband’s legal trade was a city occupation, and there could be no better city than this one.

To me, New York City was a more hopeful, energetic place than Philadelphia. Certainly, I felt better here—the riverside walks and musical concerts and frenetic pace had been a balm for and a distraction from my grief over our lost child.

I was not, of course, the first woman to lose a baby. My mother and my sisters had endured the same. But I’d lived so blessed an existence that it was, to that point, the worst pain of my life, and through it, Alexander had held me together, just as he promised. He’d let me rage. He’d let me cry. He’d let me question, even, the mercy of God. And it was through my husband’s unfailing strength that I forgave myself for having ever worried that another child would be too much burden.

When I save enough money, I’ll build you a country house, with a flower garden all your own, he promised. With room for all the children and more besides, if God should see fit to bless us with more.

Meanwhile I found contentment with what we had. And now, watching my husband spread a picnic blanket beneath the shade of a statue near the orchestra pit, I felt like a cat purring in a warm patch of sun. I unpacked our basket as the musicians tuned their instruments with “Yankee Doodle,” and I marveled at how well Alexander carried his forty years. Though his auburn hair had gone silver at the temples and his nose seemed a bit sharper, my husband was still handsome and distinguished, and mine in a way he’d never been before.

“Is there something wrong, my angel?”

“Nothing at all,” I answered, tearing off a chunk of bread for Johnny. “In this moment, I feel as if there is nothing whatsoever wrong in the world...”

“Then I’m doubly sorry to tell you that your boy is about to topple that wax figure of a Roman general,” said a familiar voice, and we looked up to see the wryly amused visage of Aaron Burr.

Sipping at a lemon ice, Burr accompanied his polite twelve-year-old daughter, Theodosia, who took so much after her mother that it allayed some of the wariness her father’s presence unleashed in me.

“James!” my husband shouted after our eight-year-old trouble maker, while Burr and his daughter settled onto a blanket beside us to wait for the sun to set and the fireworks to begin.

“Welcome home, Senator,” I said, determined to keep the conversation friendly.

Burr nodded in polite acknowledgment, having returned recently from a special session of Congress in Philadelphia, where he’d done his utmost to undermine President Washington and everything my husband had put into motion.

At least Washington remained to defend the Federalist cause. When we’d said our farewells to the Washingtons, my husband with true respect and affectionate attachment, me with a teary and grateful embrace for Martha and one of awe for the great man, I knew the president’s continuance in office was the one thing that allowed Alexander to retire. The reason he could be here with us now.

We remained on cordial terms with Burr if only because he still worked with the Manumission Society to help free blacks from being snatched up on the streets and sold back into slavery in the southern states. Still, I couldn’t keep myself from twitting him. “I’m afraid we missed you at the dinner in honor of my husband hosted by the Chamber of Commerce.”

“Ah, well, yes. I was sorry to miss it,” Burr managed, clearly attempting to play nice as well, though we all knew he’d have been pilloried by his own political party if he’d attended. The merchants of the city had given Alexander a hero’s welcome, celebrating us with champagne, a feast, and a ball. Well-wishers pressed into the overcrowded ballroom to listen to my husband’s mercifully short remarks on the virtues of the city’s businessmen. And they’d cheered, three times for Washington, three times for Adams, and nine times for Alexander Hamilton.

However vilified my husband might’ve been in Philadelphia, he was still New York’s favorite son. And I was quite sure Burr took my meaning.

Clearing his throat, he changed the subject, “I hear your law practice is thriving, Hamilton.”

“I’m kept quite busy, thank you,” Alexander replied, and he wasn’t boasting.

After a few months of riding and fishing and hunting with my father and our sons upstate, Alexander had decided that vacations disagreed with him entirely. In fact, he blamed this leisurely sojourn for the loss of his bank account book, which mortified him, since he’d created the bank that issued it. He’d since become convinced that he might lose his faculties altogether if he let them rest, so he’d thrown himself into the enterprise of paying off our debts and rebuilding our fortune.

“It’s a good strategy,” Burr said, sipping the last of his lemon ice.

“What is?” Alexander asked.

Burr stretched upon his checkered blanket. “Temporary retreat from the political arena. Retirement is very fashionable these days amongst men who wish to be president...”

How relieved I was to hear Alexander laugh. “That’s Jefferson’s game. As for me, I’m about the care of my family now. Congratulate me, friend, for I am no longer a public man.”

“Exactly what a man would say if he wanted to be president,” Burr replied. “You’re wise to let John Jay take the blame for this treaty of amity, commerce, and navigation he’s forged with the British. Then sweep in after it passes in Congress and reap the benefits.”

Almost in spite of himself, Alexander asked, “You think the treaty will pass?”

“Perhaps,” Burr said. “But I can’t vote for it. Not if I want to remain a senator. It’s too unpopular.”

Sensing a coming debate, I said, “ Gentlemen , I beg you not to spoil the evening.”

Reluctantly, they obliged me, and a lovely time was had by all. Philip, Ana, Fanny, and Theodosia—all four of them close in age—shared ice cream upon a blanket and stared up in marvel at the fireworks overhead. And nestled against Alexander’s side, I felt happy as I hadn’t felt in years.

Which was why, I think, I was so vexed the next evening to find Alexander pacing in the airy entryway of our rented town house on Broadway. “There’s a French flag flying atop the Tontine Coffeehouse.”

“A French flag over the Tontine?” I asked, in mock outrage. “Well then. Henceforth, we shall take our coffee elsewhere...” Which would be a trial, since I loved the Tontine.

Alexander, however, was not to be mollified. “A French flag hoisted blocks from my door! Next, I suppose, it will fly over the city instead of our Stars and Stripes.”

“I’m sure it is only a protest against Great Britain. If we must choose a side in the European war, the people would choose our first ally. France.”

“We mustn’t choose any side,” Alexander said, wearing a hole in the floor by the window. “It’s not our war. Even if it was, we can’t win another war. We can’t afford it. And war would prevent the Tontine from selling their coffee, the fools.”

Giving him a peck upon the cheek, I said, “Fortunately, it’s no longer your worry.”

We had plans for the theater, after all, and it was time to dress. Now that he’d returned to private practice, we could afford new clothes, and I was eager to see him in his new double-breasted white waistcoat and dark breeches, worn loosely as was now the fashion. But he continued to pace like an angry lion. “To see the character of our government sported with tortures my heart.”

“I know, my love,” I said, patiently guiding him toward the stairs.

He took two steps before stopping again. “Am I more of an American than those who drew their first breath on American ground? How can everyone else view this so calmly?”

As someone who drew first breath upon American ground, I defended myself. “I don’t view it calmly, but you cannot keep writing treatises for the president as if you were still in the cabinet.” He scowled, but since our marriage was now on a more equal footing, I dared to scowl back. “Oh, did you think you fooled me into believing the scribbling you’ve been doing late at night was for some legal case?”

For a moment, his eyes blazed with indignation, as if he meant to deny it. Then his bravado gave out. “You think I’m a fool—a romantic Don Quixote tilting at windmills.”

“I think you’ve already accomplished everything you set out to do.” It was not flattery. He’d fought and won a war and built a federal government. He’d created a coast guard, a national bank, and invented a scheme of taxation that held the states together. He’d founded a political party, smashed a rebellion, and put in motion a financial system that was providing prosperity for nearly everyone. In short, Alexander Hamilton was a greater man than the country deserved, and I wasn’t enough of a patriot to willingly give him back.

Especially not when I saw what my countrymen were doing to poor John Jay.

There was not a street corner one could pass without hearing some raving Jacobin denouncing the man for his controversial treaty, which antifederalists feared prioritized closer economic and political ties with the British monarchy over support for French republicanism and therefore repudiated American values. Damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t put up lights in the windows and sit up all night damning John Jay.

After the treaty was signed, Jay was—as he told us himself—burned in effigy in so many cities that he could’ve traveled the country at night with nothing to guide him but the light of his own flaming form. My poor cousin Sarah Livingston Jay had reason to fear leaving the house. And this could’ve been our fate, I knew. My husband had narrowly missed being sent to negotiate in Jay’s place, had already resisted an attempt to make him a chief justice, and was daily forced to dismiss rumors that he should throw in to be the next president of the United States.

So, I was unspeakably grateful that my husband no longer held any office. And yet, he was still giving speeches. Which was how, while I sat trying to mend a pair of Philip’s shoes he’d outgrown, my now nearly fourteen-year-old son came to ask, “Can I go watch Father speak in favor of the Jay Treaty?”

Quite against the idea, I said, “Your father isn’t likely to say anything that you haven’t already heard at the supper table. And I dislike for you to be by yourself in a crowd.”

Philip made a sound of exasperation. “At my age, my father was his own man, in command of a trading firm.”

Your father was an abandoned boy trying to make his way in the world with any job he could get . This is what I wanted to say. But Alexander never wanted his children to know the scars of his youth; he only ever wanted them to see him as heroic. And I wanted them to see him that way too. Especially Philip.

So, if my son wanted to see his father give a speech, I could scarcely deny him. Besides, it was only a five-minute walk to Federal Hall from our new lodgings. “We’ll go together. There’s a new shoemaker near Wall Street,” I said, giving up on mending the old leather. “If we leave now, we’ll be in time to see your father’s speech on the way back.” When Philip grinned beneath the down of a burgeoning mustache upon his lip, I added, “Now change clothes so you look like the fine young gentleman you’re becoming instead of an urchin.”

While my eldest donned his best shirt, I found my straw bonnet with its white ribbon, and, leaving the younger children with our newly hired governess, we were off.

It was a fine, clear, summer day and I was astonished at the size of the crowd. Thousands packed into the square. Not just dockworkers in knit caps and young toughs in homespun jackets, but the better sort of people, too, including ladies with colorful lace parasols and gentlemen in top hats from the finest families. There, too, upon a stoop near our old house, stood my husband, surrounded by half-a-dozen impeccably dressed Federalist lawyers like Robert Troup and Nicholas Fish.

It was nearly impossible to push closer, given the throng. But at the toll of the clock bell, my husband’s voice boomed out to ask who had convened the assembly. And that’s when I first realized that Alexander hadn’t so much as come to give a speech as to stop one. The gathering was for the apparent purpose of condemning the Jay Treaty, and my husband wasn’t about to let it happen. “By what right does Livingston speak before me?”

Almost as a rebuke, a quick, spontaneous vote determined that Livingston should speak first. But I stood agape as the rest of the crowd began to heckle . There, on the same hallowed ground where we’d once gathered to watch George Washington take his solemn oath of office, erstwhile respectable members of the business community shouted down the hapless Mr. Livingston, who, now red-faced, suggested a new meeting place where he could be heard. “Come then, all foes of this cowardly treaty, away to Trinity Church.”

It seemed to me a very wise idea to break up what was swiftly becoming a mob, and I myself searched for some avenue of retreat, prodding my boy up onto the sidewalk in the shade of a buttonwood tree. All the while, my husband was shouting, “There is the necessity of a full discussion before citizens should make up their minds about this treaty!”

As the former secretary of the treasury, he was used to being obeyed. But this time, he was treated to a chorus of hoots and hisses. My husband’s Federalists had shouted down Livingston, but now the Republicans, slowly but surely coalescing into a party of their own thanks to this treaty, returned the favor, insensible to my husband’s demand to be heard.

My son was appalled. “The rascals !”

A gentleman in riding boots clapped Philip on the back, perhaps recognizing him as his father’s son. Meanwhile, to my right, a bearded man in a beaver cap stooped to pull a loose cobble from the street.

Not again, I thought, prodding Philip toward the fence encircling the nearest yard. I’d been witness to too much disorder in my life not to recognize the danger. “We’re going.”

I’d learned, after hard experience, to head for the edges, moving diagonally against the crowd. But I didn’t get very far before the man with the cobblestone pulled his arm back and launched it. After that was pandemonium.

“Angloman! Corrupt Tory!” they shouted at my husband.

Alexander shouted back, with pugnacious bombast, calling them wicked Jacobins. “ Liberté, égalité, fraternité say the French you admire. But what patriot could ally with those who executed the kinswomen of our own imprisoned General Lafayette?”

To those words he was greeted with a hailstorm of bricks and stones, and I watched, in horror, as my husband staggered, fell, and disappeared into the crowd. I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see anything over the blur of heads and shoulders.

Philip broke away from me, rushing to his father’s defense, elbowing his way into a knot of red-faced, meat-fisted men.

“Philip!” I cried, trying to stop him, pushing forward past a brine-scented sailor and shoving a carpenter with sawdust on his apron. “Philip!”

I couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from the furious men. Close enough to see Alexander pop up out of the sea of people, holding his head with one hand even as he spat contemptuous laughter. “Well, if you use such knock-about arguments, I must retire!”

Almost comically, my husband bowed and ducked away while the crowd broke apart. Some following the Livingstons to Trinity Church. Some marching to the battery, where they promised to burn the treaty and, presumably, another effigy of Jay.

“Dear God,” I said, reaching my husband’s side, not knowing whether I should tend his head or give it another thump. “What, in the name of prudence, could you—”

“It only grazed me,” my husband said, wiping blood away with his now-torn sleeve.

Meanwhile, my son shouted after the retreating assailants, “No doubt you want to knock out my father’s brains! It’s the only way you blockheads could ever win an argument with him.”

“ Philip .” Having barked his name in a fashion so like my mother that I was secretly appalled, I then rounded on my husband, hissing, “Fine things you teach your son.”

Hamilton had no reply to that. Fetching his now dusty black hat from the ground and straightening his coat, he made ready to walk us home, a number of his friends following us down the block, making me feel less that he was the head of a political party and more that he led a street gang.

More and more, I wondered if there was much difference between the two.

We’d only gone a little way before coming upon some lawyers in an altercation on Wall Street. “Gentlemen,” Alexander said, stepping between them. “Why don’t we resolve this matter between us at Fraunces over some glasses of brandy?” Now this suggestion was more in keeping with the conduct I expected, but Alexander said, “Philip, I bid you escort your mother home.”

As I was in high dudgeon with the both of them, I exclaimed, “By no means! Stay with your father and make no more mischief.” Either of you, my eyes said.

And with that, I returned home, grateful that my husband had escaped his latest brush with the mob with no more than a scrape on the head. That evening, he said he counted it a price worth paying for having disrupted the protest, but four days later, I was to learn just how high a price he’d been willing to pay...

“ Kitty, ” I said, startled to find my one-time companion upon my doorstep wearing a broad-brimmed black hat and clutching a black lace parasol. We’d not spoken a word in the six years since the inaugural ball, and the feud between the Livingston family and mine had only worsened since then. Still, I found myself glad to see her, especially since I knew she’d recently been widowed. “Please, come in.”

She gave a delicate shake of her head. “I should rather—well, I would prefer if we spoke in your garden.”

This was becoming curiouser by the moment. Nodding, I led her to my herb garden. “I was so sorry to learn of your husband’s passing.”

She self-consciously smoothed the bodice of her widow’s weeds. “Thank you. Amongst many other sorrows, I’m afraid widowhood has deprived me of fashion. Do you find me much changed?”

“You look just the same,” I said, though black did not flatter her and her skin no longer glowed. “I didn’t realize you’d returned to New York. Are you visiting?”

“I’m here to stay. I’m to be married again in the coming year to my cousin, John Livingston.”

Another Livingston, of course. “I congratulate you.”

“Thank you,” she said brusquely. “But I’ve come on a matter of more interest to you. Namely, to speak about the man you married. You see, I’m of the opinion that Hamilton is trying to get himself killed.”

I’d stooped to pluck some flowers for the dinner table, but now stood up abruptly. “Kitty, just because a man expresses an opinion—even an unpopular one—doesn’t justify your family’s faction stoning him in the street.”

Kitty’s lips thinned. “I’m not speaking of the mayhem at Federal Hall. It’s what happened afterward that has forced me to deliver a warning. Your husband is embroiled in an affair of honor. Two, actually.”

Affairs of honor . That meant my husband had either challenged or been challenged to a duel. Two of them, if Kitty was to be believed. But I stiffened because experience had taught me not to believe anything from the unholy Jefferson-Livingston-Clinton alliance. “With who?”

“With my cousin, for one. I know you may not be disposed to believe me but I heard it from your own husband’s mouth when we crossed paths outside his law office.”

Now I definitely didn’t believe her. “My husband told you he was going to duel with a Livingston?” I asked, dubiously. Men didn’t tell women such things. It wasn’t gentlemanly. It would cause alarm in a man’s family. And that family might persuade a man to forgo pistols, thereby risking his honor.

“Hamilton pretended to let it slip,” Kitty said with a fleeting smirk. “I still remember perfectly well what he’s like when he wants something. And in this case, he wanted me to warn my cousin’s wife that he’d shoot her husband dead unless she put a stop to it.” Kitty’s smirk now became more than fleeting. “So I thought to myself, turnabout is fair play. Which is why I’m warning you.”

I sobered as my doubts were swiftly replaced with the cool chill of dread. “Fair play? Dueling is not a game, Kitty.”

“Tell that to your husband,” Kitty replied. “Because after leaving Federal Hall on Saturday, he not only embroiled himself in two affairs of honor in the space of an hour. He’d also thrown up his arms and declared himself ready to fight my family’s whole ‘ detestable faction ’ one by one.”

The heat of shame it brought to my cheeks to imagine my husband stooping to the level of a street brawler! He, who’d been George Washington’s secretary of the treasury!

But, of course, now he was not.

And maybe he didn’t know what he was anymore if not that.

***

“ A RE YOU MAD?” I asked Alexander. I had accosted him in the carriage house, where the heat gave rise to the scent of horse. And though my husband preferred that we have the conversation inside, I didn’t want to give him time to formulate a jury argument. “Aren’t you the same man who toiled to make this country a nation of laws? Yet, you resort to threats of duels and fisticuffs? And in front of Philip? It’s barbarism.”

He gave a little sigh. “It won’t come to a duel.”

Remembering that Angelica’s husband had been all but exiled from England for having nearly killed a man in a duel, I asked, “How can you be certain?”

“Because I’ve been involved in affairs of honor several times before without a shot ever being fired.” This staggering bit of news I’d scarcely digested before he continued, “I manage them to my satisfaction, and my opponents withdraw, which is why I tipped my hand to Kitty.”

“So you did tell her.” Given the color that darkened his cheeks, this embarrassed him, but not enough. What an incurable schemer!

“I expected Kitty to warn the womenfolk of her family, who would, in turn, exert pressure upon Livingston to come to terms with me. I never predicted she’d take license to alarm you .”

“Well, as always, you are too clever by half.”

“Eliza, this is the way of honor with gentlemen.”

“If it’s honor that you value, then perhaps you ought to guard the esteem your country still has for you by not offering to brawl in the streets like a madman.”

“I am not mad.”

“No?” I asked, thinking his behavior erratic. To prove it, I held up three different scribblings I’d found on his desk. “What do I see here? An essay in defense of the Jay Treaty that you wrote for the papers under one pen name. A second, written under a different name in which you anonymously praise yourself for writing the first. And then a raving third, pretending to add to the imaginary choir! It’s madness.”

“I am not mad ,” he repeated, kicking at a bit of straw on the floor.

“Then what in blazes is wrong with you? Because issuing the challenges, threatening fistfights, breaking up protests, and throwing yourself into gazette debates with such duplicity... all of this seems as if you’re half out of your mind!”

“I am out of my mind!” he suddenly shouted, and then he pressed his fist to his mouth, his eyes going shockingly glassy. “I... I lost a child, Eliza,” he choked out. “I lost a child, too.” He threw down the leather satchel he carried with him nearly everywhere, and sank down onto a bale of hay. He stayed there, silent, as I nearly quaked at the revelation. He’d lost a child. Of course he had. But consumed in a mother’s grief, I’d thought only of the fact that I had lost a child.

I will hold you together, he’d promised in the darkest hour. He’d done that with tenderness, patience, and devotion. But he’d suppressed his own grief so long that now he was the one flying to pieces, and I’d neither seen the cracks forming, nor done anything to heal them.

“Oh, Alexander,” I said, going to his side and realizing he always kept something of himself hidden from everyone. Even in the grips of yellow fever, thinking he was soon to die, he’d been unable to reveal himself completely.

He was not the sort of man to accept pity, not the sort of man to give himself over to a woman, but I wrapped my arms around him anyway. “Let me hold you together, now. Let us both hold each other together from now on.”

Alexander took a great shuddering breath. “What would you have me do? I should let them call me a coward, let them accuse me, there in the street, of treason, of stealing from the treasury with the connivance of Britain. Is that what you want me to do?”

“I want you to remember that you’re a father, and that you promised never to leave me alone or desperate again.”

He was quiet a long time, but then he nodded. “And a promise must never be broken.”

In the end, one man was persuaded to deny casting aspersions on my husband’s manhood. The other was persuaded to issue a lukewarm apology. My husband was persuaded to say that he was satisfied.

And I was persuaded I would never again hear another word about duels.