Page 32 of My Dear Hamilton
Chapter Thirty
Art thou a wife? See him, whom thou has chosen for the partner of this life, lolling in the lap of a harlot!
— T HE A URORA , A J EFFERSONIAN NEWSPAPER
August 1797
New York City
H OW COULD HE confess in such humiliating detail?” Angelica had come to my house, clutching my husband’s pamphlet with white knuckles, demanding we go out and buy up all the copies. “Fifty of the best pens in America could not have done more to put him in infamy!”
“You know why he did it,” I said, not wishing to go over it even once more. Ever since I’d confronted Monroe, I’d understood with a cutting clarity that Alexander would be forced to prove the affair to clear his name of worse charges. And, like a papist penitent, he’d done just that, donning a veritable hair shirt of irrefutable evidence and frank revelations, each more torturous than the next. My only regret was in refusing my husband’s offer to review his confession before he’d published it. It’d been the one time I’d had no interest in bearing witness to the inner workings of his mind, when I’d been too heartsick to persuade him to moderate his tone.
And the result? The Reynolds Pamphlet ran more than ninety pages, cataloging every possible aspect of the affair—as if he thought he could drown his opponents in words and wash himself clean.
“Hamilton’s pamphlet reads like one of Peggy’s tawdry novels.” Angelica groaned, as if she herself were the wronged wife instead of me. “Why, the letters his harlot sent him... children spell better! What could he have seen in her?”
His mother, I thought. It always came back to her. But I dared not say it, and I dared not fall back into the trap of dissecting the affair.
“Wine?” I asked instead, taking a bottle from an exquisite silver cooler. It was unlike me to drink in the middle of the day, but I took comfort where I could. Not only in the chilled wine against the August heat, but also in that the cooler was a gift from George Washington that had recently come with a note I treasured.
A token of my sincere regard and friendship. I pray you to present my best wishes, in which Mrs. Washington joins me, to Mrs. Hamilton and that you would be persuaded with every sentiment of the highest regard, I remain your sincere friend.
If the Washingtons stood with us in solidarity, how could I waver?
My sister took the proffered glass of wine and gulped it. “One word from you and Hamilton is ruined forever. I hope he knows it.”
She’d been his defender at first, but since reading his confession, she’d become mine. And I suppose that I needed one when the newspapers’ poisoned ink against him turned on me, too. I’d never been singled out for such public opprobrium before. Never bade to loathe the man I loved or be considered complicit in his sins. The insults from jeering Republicans didn’t wound me overmuch; I dismissed the lot of them as a knot of conspiring, godless scoundrels. Like my husband, I was even coming to take some perverse pride in being the object of their rancor and venom.
But the cruelty of our fellow Federalist friends did cut me.
It was confided to me that our new president’s lady, Abigail Adams, crowed to her friends that she’d always known my husband to be a lascivious debauchee, in whose wicked eyes she saw the very devil. As if I should’ve seen it, too, and made a better choice in husband. Society ladies I’d entertained on countless occasions crossed the street to avoid brushing skirts with me, lest scandal be contagious. For I was a wife who’d failed to inspire fidelity. And yet, my fidelity to him was now also to be counted against my virtue.
I could neither leave my husband nor love him without offending somebody. As the wronged wife, there was nothing whatsoever I could now do that might be counted appropriate, except, perhaps, to lay down and die of shame.
And I was not about to give anyone that satisfaction.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come back to me,” Hamilton admitted that night, rocking his infant son against his shoulder, and eyeing the two empty wine bottles on our table with a furrowed brow. “Unless...”
“Unless?” I asked, covering a hiccup.
“Unless you’ve returned to hire a divorce attorney.” His eyes crinkled at the corners, as if he’d said it in dark jest, but there was an edge of fear to it. He watched me carefully for an answer even as he continued, “As it happens, I’m acquainted with the best in the city if you should need a recommendation.”
Though I was a little tipsy and unsteady on my feet, I stood to embrace him. “I’m with you, Alexander.” And I was. For even though the world didn’t wish for us to put our troubles behind us, we’d done it. We’d survived.
And we’d become stronger for it.
Alexander swallowed, then, with our little William between us, pressed his forehead to mine. “You are infinitely dear to me, Eliza. And I am more in debt to you than I can ever pay. Please believe that I know you deserve everything from me. And my future life will be devoted to your happiness. I only wish I could stay...”
He was obliged to argue a federal case in Connecticut—one of the many cases he took on to make a fine future for our children and build the house he promised. Still, he worried, because our oldest boy, Philip, had taken ill on the boat as we’d sailed back from Albany.
A summer cold, we thought. Nothing serious. But days after my husband went off to Connecticut, as Philip tossed and turned feverish in his bed, the physician pronounced the dread verdict. Typhus . Typhus could leave our boy deaf or addled. Or it could kill him.
“Mrs. Hamilton, you must prepare for the worst,” the doctor said, his coat thrown over the chair by the bed where my son burned with fever. “Your husband must be sent for.”
“Send a courier by express,” I whispered. Then I sent the rest of the children and my servants away, lest the illness spread. Angelica insisted on staying with me, so it was me, my sister, and the doctor left to care for Philip as he slipped into a state of delirium, his pulse fading by the moment. I took Philip’s face in my hands and told him a truth that mothers ought never utter—that he would always be my firstborn and first in my heart.
Because Philip was too weak to move on his own, the three of us plunged him into a hot bath of Peruvian bark and rum. When he roused, I spooned wine whey into his mouth while his aunt Angelica covered him in dry blankets. But the nightmare continued as we waited for my husband’s return, listening with anxiety for every chime of the clock.
At length, my sister said, “Eliza, let me sit with him while he sleeps. You should rest so his mother can be with him when he awakens.”
I started to my room, stumbling away in a delirium of my own. Don’t take him, God, I prayed that night, and again the next morning. Not Philip, who’d brought joy to us since the day he was born. Not the boy who’d been my companion during those lonely early years when his father was seldom home.
Not my Philip . The best of me and Alexander combined. Our best and brightest hope.
I’d just finished uttering this morning prayer when boots thundered up the stairs, the door shaking at the noise of it. “Eliza!” I found Alexander in the hall, his hair plastered to his head in sweaty ringlets, his legs spattered in mud, eyes wild. “Is he—”
“Awake,” Angelica said from the doorway. “And it’s no wonder with all the racket.”
We rushed into our son’s room to find him revived, sensible as to where he was and who we were, and we knelt beside his bed and thanked God for his deliverance. Later, while Alexander cooled his forehead with a cloth, I thought nothing else matters but this .
Let the newspapers say what they would. Let every woman in the country giggle behind their hands and whisper behind my back. Our family mattered more. Our family meant everything. And so long as we were together, I could bear anything.
***
Hamilton is fallen for the present, but even if he fornicates with every female in New York and Philadelphia, he will rise again.
— D AVID C OBB TO H ENRY K NOX
Winter 1797
New York City
“We’ll never see her again, will we?” my daughter rasped as we watched the snow-covered carriage roll away from the front of our house, a tearful Fanny pressing her hand to the frosted window in farewell.
“Of course, we will,” I said, fighting back my own tears for my daughter’s sake. Fanny may not have been her sister by blood, but Ana had never known another. And the loss seemed to break her. She alternated between inconsolable sobs and dazed stupors, and it was all I could do to comfort her about something that broke a piece of me, too.
Because Fanny’s relations no longer saw fit to let her stay with us. Her married older sister wanted to take Fanny into her household. A respectable household, I was brusquely informed. Thus, we were forced to surrender the girl we’d loved as our own since the age of two.
We’d packed twelve-year-old Fanny’s trunks with new petticoats and pearled combs and every sort of frippery a girl should need. Alexander had vowed to the girl that she was always welcome back. We were all heartbroken at the loss.
And to comfort my twelve-year-old daughter, I said, “It’s no different than when your aunt Angelica went to live in London for a while. Fanny will come back one day and you’ll have each other’s company again.”
But Ana couldn’t be comforted. She’d always been a sensitive child, but lively and clever—eager to show off her accomplishments in dancing, music, and French. Now she withdrew to her room, complaining of illness. And I wondered if the danger to my children was never to end. The physicians could find nothing whatsoever wrong with her, but she would eat next to nothing but little bits of bread. Sometimes even then, she left the crumbs upon her windowsill for the birds.
Like her father, she took loss hard. And my heart ached for her. I knew what it was to love a sister, how tight that bond could be. How difficult it was to understand one’s place in the world without it.
In Ana’s tenderness—the way only feeding these little birds could lift her spirits—I thought I recognized in her my own calling. Thus, one Sunday morning, I said, “Get dressed for church services, darling. Afterward, we’re going to help some children as needy as our dear Fanny once was...”
Thereupon we threw ourselves into a cause to which I was happy to lend my name—tainted though it was. The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, founded by the devout Scotswoman Widow Graham, supported at least a hundred destitute widows in the city. Together with Ana, I spent afternoons assembling baskets of food and clothing for the needy in the hopes of saving them from the poorhouse.
I’d always felt best when I was busy. Besides, the unfortunate situations of these widowed women reminded me that my troubles were comparatively few. How fortunate I was. How the Lord had made me rich in every way that mattered. I imagined that it made the same impression on Ana because, by summer, she was playing her piano again for our old friend James McHenry, the secretary of war. He came to visit in a show of loyalty and support, reciting poetry and recalling old war stories well into the evening.
“To Lafayette,” McHenry said, raising his glass. “The luckiest Frog alive.”
“To Lafayette,” we said, because the marquis was lucky, alive, and—after five years of imprisonment— free . Napoleon Bonaparte saw to Lafayette’s release from prison, the only thing of merit, by my estimation, that tyrant ever did. And when we learned of Lafayette’s release, Alexander wrote:
My friendship for you will survive all revolutions and all vicissitudes. The only thing in which our parties agree is to love you.
After we drank, McHenry sat back and put his knife on the edge of his plate. “This veal is delicious, Mrs. Hamilton—melts in the mouth like butter, it does. You serve as fine a meal as I remember from the old days.”
“You must be forgetting that dreadful wartime tripe stew...”
Mac patted a somewhat rounder belly than he’d had in those far-off days in winter quarters. “I was so hungry during the war, you could’ve baked me a sawdust cake and I’d have savored it. But this meal is exquisite. Have you a chef?”
“Oh, no,” I replied. “We’ve an Irish girl who scrubs the pots, but I do the cooking.”
McHenry seemed impressed. “Hamilton, my lucky friend, your wife is still as frugal and good a treasurer of your household as you were a treasurer for the country.”
“Better,” Hamilton said, smiling at me with warm affection. “After all, no one has ever demanded an investigation into her account books.”
We laughed, then Mac shook his head. “I worried, you know, all those years ago in Morristown. How the devil did a man like Hamilton see fit to marry such a saintly girl? Now I see, Mrs. Hamilton, that you were the only woman tireless enough to match him.”
Dear Mac. It was the sixth or seventh compliment he’d paid me that evening. And I was sure he did it out of a solicitousness of my feelings, to try to soothe the blows dealt by the newspapers. But he was also trying to soften the ground, because between the second and third courses, Mac revealed the true purpose of his visit—to recruit my husband back into the army. “The French have gone too far this time and it’s likely to be war.”
Offended by America’s proclamation of neutrality in the European war, the new French government had been attacking our ships and refused to speak to an American diplomatic delegation without a bribe. To make matters worse, a French ship plucked an American vessel right out of New York Harbor.
“The gall of it. Nay, the Gaul of it.” Mac guffawed, finishing his fourth glass of Madeira. “Not even Jefferson dares to defend the French for this. And we need you back in uniform, lad.”
How relieved I was when Alexander put his hand atop mine and said, without hesitation, “I’m a private man now. And considering the circumstances of—”
“Oh, damn the scandal sheets!” Mac cried.
I’d been certain that my husband was going to talk about the circumstances of our finances and growing family. But realizing that even our friends and champions were still thinking about our scandal made me rise abruptly. “ Dessert ?”
By the time I returned with chocolate creams in fluted crystal glasses and a silver tray of caraway comfits, McHenry was still talking about the military. “As you say, General Schuyler has not been well. Gates is a bitter old woman. Knox is too stout to ride a horse. And if you didn’t know it already, let me be the first to tell you that the great man won’t come out of retirement unless you do, Ham.”
Washington. Always, George Washington was needed at the head of our armies. But even with my husband at his side, could the old, venerable soldier truly mount up for war yet again?
Mac eyed me frankly and turned the screws. “I appeal to the inextinguishable love you bear your country. That you both bear your country.”
I dropped into a chair with a sigh, stabbing a long spoon into my chocolate cream, and digging out a giant bite, because I knew where this would end. Hamilton could never refuse military glory or a genuine call to patriotism, and this was both.
Darkly amused but wanting to break things, I said, “To think I once harbored such a fondness for you, McHenry...”
Both men slanted apologetic glances my way, then Alexander squinted. “What rank would I be offered?”
“Major general.” McHenry reached for a few caraway comfits.
But I snatched the tray away. “Yes, I was quite fond of you, Mac... now I shall go get that sawdust cake for you after all.”
Mac laughed, merriment in his eyes. “But you were born to be a general’s wife, my dear.” Then to my husband he added, “And you might wish to send a note of appreciation to President Adams. T’would be a good deal easier to make you inspector of the whole army, if he didn’t hate you quite so much.”
Adams was an honest but irascible man who paled in stature beside George Washington. Which was why my husband had supported another candidate in the presidential election instead of John Adams. But Adams had a long memory and in backing the wrong horse, Alexander had made another enemy.
An enemy who’d now be his commander in chief.
***
March 1799
New York City
“You’re a shameless woman, Eliza Hamilton.”
Standing beneath an umbrella in a drizzle of rain, Kitty Livingston tried to fend me off. After she’d come to warn me about Alexander that time, we’d come to a sort of a rapprochement, and since then, Kitty had been amongst the first New York ladies to receive me back into polite society, despite her family’s political feud with mine. But now, caught in a spring shower that was getting her shoes wet outside the Tontine, she wanted nothing more than to escape.
I stood stubbornly in her path. “Surely you can spare more for a worthy cause, Kitty. Not so long ago, you were a widow with a small child yourself...”
“I’ve already given you every coin in my handbag!”
I smiled sweetly. “And I promise to record that in the charity’s membership roll, which we’ll publish, as thanks and recognition.”
“As extortion, ” Kitty protested. “I’ll be made to look like a miser compared to your sister.”
Kitty had the right of it. I’d learned from Hamilton, after all. Long ago, he’d arranged the order of the states in voting for the ratification of the Constitution, playing one against the other. Well, the same principle applied to raising funds for the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children.
And Angelica was my Delaware, always first to ratify.
Knowing just how large my sister’s donation had been, Kitty’s hands tightened on her purse strings. “You’re a brigand .”
“I think of myself as a foot soldier for the Lord.”
She pursed her lips. “Well, I suppose that if General Hamilton gets the war against France he wants, we’ll all have to adopt the martial spirit.”
General Hamilton . After four months, I was still adjusting to the idea, much less the unspoken, but very real, responsibilities of being a general’s wife. My mother. Lucy Knox. Martha Washington. These were my examples. And with those excellent ladies in mind, I said, “We’re already at war with France. An undeclared war, but a war nonetheless.”
Lacking any military experience of his own to draw upon, President Adams had called George Washington out of retirement. The old soldier, tired to his very bones, agreed to serve as a figurehead if Alexander was named his second in command, his inspector general .
And no one could deny Washington.
The Republican newspapers screeched against “Hamilton, the man who published a book to prove he was an adulterer.” But such objections seemed stale, if not quaint, when weighed against the threat of Napoleon Bonaparte. Matrons might clutch their pearls, and the Jeffersonians might spit, but in the end, the country still needed Alexander Hamilton.
Which meant that we were, again, ascendant.
Even the Livingstons knew it, which was why Kitty sighed with surrender, promising a large bank note for the charity. With that, she took her leave but not before muttering, “I still say you’re a brigand .”
“Brigands resort to pistols.” Aaron Burr doffed his cap as he splashed across the street to us. “Whereas you, Mrs. Hamilton, have somehow managed to loot the pockets of every New York notable with only the force of your will.”
New York was a much smaller place in those days, and we were always running into old friends and enemies on the street. Burr, in particular, was always out and about. He had never remarried after Theodosia’s death, and more often than not he had a trollop on his arm—two, if the mood struck him. He’d earned a reputation as a great seducer of women, and it was no wonder, since Burr still retained roguish good looks.
So much so that even I could scarcely deny him a smile. Nor did I want to when he took money from his pocket and pressed it into my hand. “For your widows and small children...”
“How generous,” I said, surprised.
“On the condition that you don’t record my name in your ledger.”
“It’s a respectable charity, sir, and entirely without partisan bent.”
“Yes, I’ve heard all about your widows.” By way of explanation, he added, “I spend a great deal of time lately on Slaughterhouse Street, raising mugs in the Bull’s Head Tavern with the immigrants your husband’s party is trying to chase out of the country.”
He was referring to the Alien and Sedition Acts, which authorized President Adams to deport any foreign-born resident deemed a danger to the peace. These were wartime measures. And given what I’d seen—riots, uprisings, and American cities nearly burned to the ground—regrettably necessary, I thought. Even though I worried it set a dangerous precedent.
But I said none of this to Aaron Burr. I merely adjusted my bonnet, upon which I proudly wore a black cockade that signaled my support of this Federalist administration.
Burr must’ve seen that I was suppressing an argument, because he gave a wicked grin. “I intend to make Hamilton regret these unconstitutional laws.”
It was Congress who passed these laws and the president who signed them; my husband was merely the general who would defend the nation. But affecting amusement, I said, “ Unconsti tutional ? I don’t remember your having championed that document when my husband was helping to write it...”
Burr laughed. “Touché. It’s a miserable paper machine. I told your husband that as the commander of an army, he owes it to the country to demolish it.”
I withheld my gasp because his expression was so droll I couldn’t decide if he was toying with me or suggesting the overthrow of the government. Exasperated, I shook my head. “I won’t allow you to bait me further, sir. And I shall happily take your donation. But why should you desire to keep it a secret?”
“Because I mean it for charity and not social advancement.”
Did Burr suspect me of using good works to erase the taint of scandal? It was perfectly in keeping with the way his mind worked, so I supposed I couldn’t be angry about it. The truth was, despite Burr’s capacity to scandalize, needle, or otherwise irritate me, I couldn’t hate him. In truth, I even liked him. A little. As much as anyone could like a man whose sole fixed characteristic was that he had none. Perhaps it was because he’d kept his silence about my husband’s adultery. “Even if you insult me, I’m not too proud to take your money on behalf of children who are grateful for every scrap of bread.”
“I mean no insult whatsoever. Though, if I did, I suppose I should fear being clasped in irons or sued into penury, under the new Federalist Reign of Terror.”
At that, my jaw dropped. “It’s your Republicans who aspire to guillotines. You might be glad of the new laws if you ’ d been persecuted so relentlessly by the newspaper as I—”
“Say no more,” Burr replied wryly, holding up a hand in surrender. “I’ve taken endless amusement watching the way you’ve spent the past year and a half hectoring the buttoned-up society ladies who had the temerity to shun you. I admire it. Hamilton has, in you, a very well-matched wife. As I intend to tell him at this evening’s meeting of the Manumission Society.”
I softened to hear this reminder of his antislavery work. Especially as our political parties seemed often now on the verge of civil war; just last year, two congressmen had come to blows with cane and fire-iron tongs on the floor of the House of Representatives. It was heartening to remember that there were men like Burr in the opposing camp who could still find common cause on great moral issues. And it made me forgive his taunts, because it seemed he did, in fact, have some moral scruples. “My husband seems quite hopeful that New York will soon eliminate the practice of slavery. Do you share his optimism?”
Burr’s smile was enigmatic. “I suspect it would go better to first eliminate slavery a little closer to home. At least, it would spare your husband some embarrassment.”
“We keep no slaves,” I said, with perhaps more pride than I ought to have, given that more than half the members of the society did own slaves, including my father.
“As will be discussed at tonight’s meeting, your husband is the purchaser of record for a slave the Manumission Society is seeking to help gain her freedom.”
I shook my head, dismissively. “I’m sure there’s been some mistake. We have no slaves.”
“But your sister does,” Burr replied.
***
E NSCONCED AMONGST HER perfumes and cosmetic pots in her toilette, Angelica admired her reflection in an ivory-handled mirror. “Did Kitty wave the white flag?”
“She promised a bank note,” I replied, cooing a bit over my sister’s ten-month-old baby in his ornate walnut bassinet, the child being ample proof that whatever had broken between my sister and her husband had indeed been mended.
Angelica waved away a little yawn. “I’d forgotten how exhausting a baby can be, even if you give them over to a nursemaid.”
As gently as one could possibly suggest such a thing, I ventured, “Perhaps if you hosted fewer parties...”
“But Church lives for parties. He’s rich and has no place in politics, so he has little to do and time hangs heavy on his hands.”
I couldn’t imagine having little to do. Indolence wasn’t in our Dutch blood. And I sensed Angelica was annoyed by it, too. But I hadn’t come to criticize either of them. I’d come to ask, nay, to demand, “You must let Sarah go free.”
My sister startled. “Sarah?”
“Your lady’s maid,” I replied, stiffly. “I am informed today that Alexander purchased her for you.”
“Oh, yes,” Angelica said, as if only vaguely recalling it. “When I knew we were returning to America, I asked Hamilton to ensure I’d have a servant when I disembarked the ship, and he did me that favor.”
My husband never purchased slaves for our household. Yet his entanglement with my slave-owning family had put him in difficult positions, and pushed him to compromise his moral stance more than once. It did not sit well with me that he might have done this, for me, in order to make my sister more apt to stay in New York—which he knew would make me happy. “You must emancipate her. She’s gone to the Manumission Society for help. They mean to argue her cause publicly.”
A sense of indignation leaped to my sister’s wounded expression at the idea she should be thought a bad mistress. “Why should Sarah wish to leave me? I’ve never treated her harshly for even a moment. And to beg the Manumission Society’s help! This is mortifying.”
“Yes,” I said, because slavery was mortifying.
We’d grown up with Prince guarding our door, and Dinah cooking our meals, and Jenny fixing our hair. We’d told ourselves we loved Papa’s servants as if they were family. And I might still argue that we did—but not with an eye to their humanity, with all the pain and possibility that entailed.
Anger does not obliterate love.
And love does not obliterate cruelty.
Slavery was cruel. A sin against God and a betrayal of the principles of our revolution besides. And if we were ever to end it, the effort would have to begin with families like ours. When I said as much, Angelica sat back in her gilded armchair and closed her eyes. “I suppose that if it were to be publicly known your husband purchased slaves, it would be another hypocrisy for the newspapers to complain about.”
“More importantly, it would impede his efforts to abolish slavery in New York.”
Angelica finally lifted her long lashes to slant me a glance. “I don’t know how you stand it.”
“How I stand what?”
“ Hamilton, ” she replied. “His vanity. His outrageous zeal. He never stops.”
This from the same woman who complained her husband had nothing to do. Though she still treated Alexander with affection and remained politically loyal to him, she was much more apt now to take my side in any disagreement.
She plainly believed that I’d been sent on another mission to protect my husband’s reputation and resented him for it. But Alexander hadn’t sent me. My responsibility as the general’s wife was not, I knew, just to the general. It was also to set a moral example for the country he meant to defend. And even if I had no standing to do that in the matter of adultery, slavery was a more guilty sin by far. “I’m not asking you to emancipate Sarah for my husband. Nor for me. I ask you to free her—and all your slaves—because slavery violates the rights endowed to us by our creator.”
I used Mr. Jefferson’s words to make an impression. And at this little bit of manipulation, she apprehended me, almost as if for the first time, giving me the strangest feeling of a shift in our relationship, in which she’d always been, hitherto, of superior rank. I was sure that she would do as I asked. But she wasn’t happy about it. “Why, Mrs. General Hamilton, they say two people married long enough to one another might slowly become more alike, but I never did predict it. You are becoming him .”