Page 31 of My Dear Hamilton

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The public has long known you as an eminent and able statesman. They will be highly gratified in seeing you exhibited in the novel character of a lover.

— J AMES C ALLENDER IN AN OPEN LETTER TO H AMILTON

July 1797

New York City

A NGER HAD SOMEHOW given me a vim and vigor no pregnant woman in her ninth month ought to feel.

“Church,” I said with a nod as I came upon him sitting at his breakfast table when I arrived to collect my children.

My brother-in-law pinched the bridge of his nose, as if staving off a hangover from a late-night card game. He jolted at the sight of me, and though he was never a man for endearments, he cried with cheer that rang falsely in my ears, “Eliza, my dear! I hope you’re feeling well.”

I gave what I’m sure was a brittle smile. “I’m feeling as well as can be expected.”

“Good, good,” Church said, his gaze falling almost involuntarily to where, amidst polished silver trays, a bowl of sugar, and discarded floral teacups, a newspaper lay open. “You mustn’t let the opposition distress you. Not in your condition.”

I suppose he meant well.

After all, men could work themselves up into killing rages, but women must never be distressed . But if he thought our political parties were merely in opposition, trading places like the Tories and the Whigs in England, he was blind. “The men opposed to my husband are nothing but a knot of scoundrels. Their words make not the slightest impression upon me.” I snatched up the paper and pressed it into his hand. “And this is fit for nothing but use in the privy.”

Church barked with laughter as I went in search of my sister, bracing myself against her pity, or some inevitable story about licentious Englishmen or permissive French marriages that she might offer to comfort me.

Like her husband, Angelica was not an early riser. She was still in some elegant state of undress—a white gossamer chemise, a dark braid of hair over one shoulder—when I found her in the carefully sculpted English garden snipping roses so viciously that leaves dropped like rain.

“Were you never going to confide in me about Hamilton’s harlot?” she asked.

I’d braced myself against her pity. I had not anticipated wounded feelings. I suppose I should have. Not only because Angelica tended to put herself at the center of things, but also because I had wronged her, after a fashion. “I didn’t dare confide it in a letter,” I said, and that was true. For letters could be intercepted.

I’d been desperate for my sister’s comfort four years ago, but by the time she’d returned, I hadn’t any desire whatsoever to reopen the wound. And yet, there was another guilty truth. My sister had bared her soul to me about her troubled marriage, but I hadn’t wanted to reveal myself. She’d trusted me with her vulnerability, but I’d kept mine hidden. Perhaps I’d taken some satisfaction in thinking that though my sister was wealthier, more formally educated, and more beautiful by far, my marriage was happier. I’d finally bested her in something. I hated to think this about myself, but I couldn’t entirely deny it. Still, in the end, I’d chosen loyalty to my husband over loyalty to my sister. And that she would simply have to understand.

Perhaps she did, because Angelica put her hand atop mine. “My poor, sweet Eliza. All husbands stray .” A little dazed, I nodded as she uttered the words I’d imagined her saying all those years ago. “I know how tender your heart is, and how easily wounded you are, but—”

“I don’t believe I am easily wounded.” That was a different sister she remembered. I’d changed, and I wanted her to know it. So I told her the rest.

“Oh, to confront Monroe!” She put down her shears and the basket of roses and drew me down onto a marbled bench. “I would applaud if I didn’t know this will come to no good. That half-wit fancies himself to be a useful acolyte in Vice President Jefferson’s destructive ambitions.”

Her habitual contempt for Monroe didn’t surprise me, but her contempt for the vice president caught me by surprise. “I thought you counted Mr. Jefferson your friend.”

“ Semper Fidelis, Eliza. I am a Schuyler, too. I will always take my family’s part over that of even the most charming friend. If Mr. Jefferson wished to stay in my good graces, then he ought not to have set his partisan lackeys against your husband. Now it’s war.”

I laughed, a little darkly, but for once, she was the one in earnest.

“My dear, it is war. Other women have suffered the pain of infidelity. But you’re suffering the penalty of being the wife to the greatest man of his generation and perhaps the greatest of our age. You’d never have suffered this if you hadn’t married so close to the sun. But then you would have missed the pride, the pleasure, the nameless satisfactions.”

I knew how much my sister admired Hamilton. How the two of them shared the same interests and more traits of character than a casual observer might expect. I’d predicted she’d take his part. And I thought I might bristle when she did, but in the balance of things, she was quite right.

She took my hand. “Let the children stay with me a while longer. You should go home to Papa. Away from the heat of this city. Away from the malice of society. Trust me, you don’t want to be here while tongues wag in every coffeehouse, people tittering behind the pages of their gazettes as you pass by.”

As the days passed, the thought of escape became ever more tempting, especially when Hamilton rode off to Philadelphia to chase down Monroe, all to no avail. My husband felt forced now to make a public confession and therefore wished for me to have our baby in Albany.

“It’s for the better,” Alexander said. “As I imagine that you cannot much like the sight of me at present.”

I settled beside him on a trunk he kept at the foot of the bed. “You imagine wrong.” After all, it seemed as if some different man had broken my heart. And in any case, that heart was four years mended. Alexander and I had each grown, together, into new people. Better people. Though I would never reconcile myself to the cause of the change, I couldn’t be sorry for it. We’d made of our marriage vows a more sacred thing than when we first spoke them. And this child in my womb, who would join us in only a few weeks, was the living proof of that. “Though, Angelica thinks it would be easier for me to explain to Papa.”

At the mention of my father, Alexander actually shuddered. “How glad General Schuyler will be for setting aside his reservations in giving his daughter in marriage to a man of low birth...”

I wanted to reassure him that my father would forgive him, but I couldn’t be sure of that. What I said instead was, “Perhaps we mustn’t explain anything to Papa. Or to anyone. Your accusers are not entitled to a reply.”

Hamilton nodded, folding his hands together. “And yet, the country deserves to know its system is not a corrupt scheme to line my pockets, otherwise these Jacobins will dismantle it and the American experiment will fail.”

He’d convinced himself this was one more sacrifice he must make for his country. But I thought, Give the mob this drop of blood and it will only whet their appetite .

Before I could say as much, he added, “If I don’t answer these charges of corruption, they’ll take my name. I cannot save my private reputation, and perhaps I don’t deserve to, but at least my public honor may be preserved. Which is all I have to give our children. Our children ought to always be able to hold their heads high with pride.”

“And they shall,” I said, though I fretted at the chime of the clock that announced Philip was quite late in coming home from an outing with his friends. “Whether or not you dignify this with a response.”

My husband rubbed at his cheek, which was darkened by a shadow of stubble. Circles darkened his eyes, too. “I would like to believe that, but I remember what happened when my mother was accused in court of whoring and she did not see fit to dignify it with a response...”

All at once the specter of a woman long dead rose between us again. His mother had condemned her children to a life of illegitimacy by letting the accusation pass. Perhaps that is why Hamilton never, ever, let anything pass...

And knowing this, I would not ask him to.

He caught my fingers between his and sighed. “The rest of the children can stay here with their governess, but let Philip take you to the Pastures. For your sake and his. He’s almost a man grown, now. His friends will have heard the gossip. I do not wish for him to feel compelled to defend me. Or maybe, I cannot bear to face his disappointment...”

Downstairs, we heard the door open and close, then footsteps trudging up the stairs that could only belong to a troubled boy. Perhaps my husband was right. “But I worry to leave you now, Alexander. Especially now.”

My husband took a breath. Then another. “Eliza, if you stand beside me the public will eviscerate you. With such men as those hounding me, nothing is sacred. Even the peace of an unoffending and amiable wife. They will hurt you because of their fury against me.” He took my face in his hands and stroked my cheeks tenderly. “No man who loves his wife could wish this upon her. No loving father could wish his child born into such circumstances. I realize that I have forfeited my right to command you as a husband, but I command you in love to go. To take care of yourself, to keep up your spirits, and to remember always that my happiness is inseparable from yours.”

Stand by him and die, renounce him and live.

Once, I wondered what I would have done if I’d been caught in such a conundrum. I did not face death, of course, but the choice before me seemed strangely similar, and the answer no clearer or easier now.

***

August 1797

Albany

The river washed over my bare feet with a pleasant coolness, my petticoats bunched up at my knees. Seated on the dock next to Papa, who held a fishing pole in his hand and wore a broad straw hat upon his head, I squinted into the bright sun and imagined I was a girl again. Perhaps my father was imagining it, too, because, puffing his pipe, he put a worm onto the hook for me, as if I didn’t remember how to do it.

A week before, Hamilton had seen me and Philip off at the sloop, simultaneously solicitous and morose. And Angelica dashed off a note that same night to tell me that my dejected husband had gone to her house thereafter and stayed well into the night, unable to speak of anything but me.

Meanwhile, we all tried to speak of anything but him.

On the deck of the sloop, my fifteen-year-old son treated me as if I were made of glass. Philip had become a man already, I’d realized with a motherly pang. He took his quick wit and devilish smile from his father, but the rest of him was all Schuyler. Tall, dark, and loyal. Having been commanded by his father to watch over me in my delicate condition, my son carried my bags, fetched lemonade, and played games of backgammon with me in our berth at night.

My family was even more solicitous in Albany. Mama had everything ready for me—sweet herbs for my pains, pastries for my cravings, and the Bible from which she read to me. Peggy came to help me birth the babe and told my son what great things were expected of him at Columbia College, where he was soon to enroll. Papa tried to distract me with talk of canal projects and the Indians.

Even Prince, now a bit bent with age, said to my son, in a whisper meant for me to hear, “Master Philip, of all these Schuyler daughters I helped bring up in this house, your mama was the one who gave me the fewest white hairs.”

Philip always cringed to be called Master, as it did not rest easy with him that his otherwise heroic grandfather still kept a few plantation slaves in his service. And so he took the extra pillows from Prince’s arms and said, “Well, my mother wouldn’t want to give you any more white hairs climbing those stairs, so let me get her settled.”

On the night that my labor pains began, my father finally raised the subject. Bending to kiss me, he whispered into my hair, “My dear beloved child... rest easy in knowing that no one of merit believes this filth in the newspapers.”

I dreaded to tell him the truth, and weeks after birthing a wondrously healthy little boy named William, I still did not know how. Finally, sitting beside Papa on the ferry dock with fishing poles, I blurted, “I’ve forgiven Hamilton.”

My father bit the clay pipe between his teeth, his lips thin ning as understanding dawned that Alexander was guilty. At the prospect of my father learning the truth, my husband had shuddered. The censure of the country, he believed he could withstand. My father’s judgment was another matter altogether. And I began to fear it, too, because for a few moments, the only sounds were the rush of the water. The cry of a peregrine falcon hunting overhead.

“Elizabeth,” Papa finally said. “When you were born, I was an officer in the king’s army—a young soldier of three and twenty. I knew next to nothing about little girls. Less of nursing, or lullabies, or medicines. That was your mama’s domain.”

I smiled a little to think he’d ever felt ill-equipped.

But my father didn’t smile. Instead, he shook his head. “I knew only that as a father, it was my duty to protect you. With sword or musket or my own life if it should come to it. And this I have tried to do. When I gave you to Hamilton, I thought I had secured for you a life of security, love, and happiness. I chose a man I believed would defend you, and your heart, as I have always tried to do.” His mouth tightened, ruefully. “I did not choose your sisters’ husbands. But I chose Hamilton.”

And he blamed himself for it. “You didn’t choose him, Papa,” I said, quite firmly. “You only approved him. The choice was mine. A choice I make anew every day. A choice I do not regret, no matter how unpleasant our enemies intend to make it for me.”

My father, whose hair had gone white and wiry, whose strong arms had withered, and whose health had never been good, suffered from painful gout in his legs. I knew he was suffering now, as he took off his boots, lowered his feet into the water next to mine, and stared at the churning river. “Do you know what you’re facing with that choice?”

After years in public life, I had some idea. “Yes, Papa. I’m not a child anymore.”

“You are my child,” he said quietly. “Always.”

The sentiment set off an ache in my chest, for as a mother myself, I understood the depth of his meaning. I felt it for my own children. No matter how tall Philip grew, I would always see him in my mind’s eye as the laughing little piglet with chubby legs.

It took Papa a few moments, but when he looked up again, he said, “Do you recall that when you, Angelica, and Peggy were small, toddling about in pink ribbons, I went to London for a year on business?”

“I recall something of it,” I said, for, at five years old, dolls from England seemed almost as marvelous as welcoming home the tall and fierce warrior of a red-coated father I scarcely knew.

“While I was gone,” my father continued, “I asked my commander—Colonel Bradstreet—to watch over my family. At my request, he helped your mother build our new mansion here. And I returned home to find all of you living together here with Colonel Bradstreet... with whom your mother had formed an uncommon friendship in my absence.”

An uncommon friendship .

I remembered. Colonel Bradstreet was so fond of Mama that when he died, he left property to her. And all my life, I’d thought nothing of it until this excruciating moment. In shock, I whispered, “Surely you’re not intimating—”

“I am intimating nothing but that the friendship was a subject of speculation.”

My father’s jaw hitched and my belly roiled at the thought that he might have known the pain of adultery. Yet, everything I knew of my parents forced my mind to rebel. “Mama would never!”

With more calmness than he perhaps felt, Papa puffed at his pipe. “There was gossip.”

That I did not remember. That I’d never known. I was too young to have realized it. And I wondered if Angelica, who was older, had been more aware and if it accounted for her sometimes troubled relationship with our mother. “Surely Mama denied any impropriety.”

A small, bittersweet smile tugged at his lips. “I did not ask her.”

Indignation positively burned in my breast. “Why ever not?”

Papa’s fingers drummed lightly upon his knee, as if he were counting. “If she were guilty, she might confess. And how should a gentleman respond? If I ran Bradstreet through with my sword, it would have gained me nothing but a momentary pang of satisfaction and a dead friend. It would not forestall the gossip of cuckoldry, nor the destruction of your mother’s fine name. It would have followed you, my dear children, and made you unhappy all your lives.”

As the gossip about Hamilton would now follow my children all their lives.

To his litany of horrific consequences, my father added, “And if your mama was innocent... as she surely was... then to insult her with an accusation would make me the vilest of knaves. I should consider myself condemned to hell-fires if I treated your mother with such rank suspicion—a woman who entrusted herself to me, risked her very life to bring my children into the world. A woman who defended my lands, served as wise steward over my household, and blessed my life with her wisdom, friendship, affection, and love. Such ingratitude would damn me in the eyes of myself and my god.”

So, he would not ask, I thought. He would never ask. My father, like the mathematician he was, had added it all up—the sums of love and happiness and disappointments in a marriage—and come to the conclusion that it didn’t matter. Just as Maria Reynolds did not matter, regardless of what the papers said. Regardless of what anyone said.

“What I decided to do,” Papa explained, “was to name my first son, born after there could be any question of his parentage, John Bradstreet Schuyler.”

In defiance, I realized. My father had mustered the strength to defend his marriage with a thumb in the eye of anyone who would question it. Just as I would have to do now. And he was asking me if I had the stomach for it.

“In the matter of Hamilton,” Papa concluded, “your family’s view of this unfortunate episode will be guided by your calculation, Elizabeth. And only yours.”

I’d always admired his ability to swallow bitter injustices for the greater good. But could I follow his example? Whatever I’d told myself in coming here, I knew the real reason Hamilton had sent me to my father.

Eliza, if you stand beside me the public will eviscerate you.

Stand by him or renounce him. Hamilton wanted me to have that choice. But I’d already made it. And taking a deep breath, I determined to begin defending my own marriage right here in this moment. “Then forgive him, Papa. As I have done. Truly. The Bible tells us no man is without sin. No man is righteous, not even one.”

My father nodded. Then not another word was said about it. My family never behaved, in word or deed, with anything but devoted affection to my husband. And because of it—and because I was my father’s daughter—I found within myself the strength to face the storm.