Page 39 of My Dear Hamilton

Chapter Thirty-Seven

I pray God that something may remain for the maintenance of my dear wife and children. But should it be on the contrary, probably her own patrimonial resources will preserve her from indigence.

— A LEXANDER H AMILTON IN HIS L AST W ILL

August 1804

Albany

L ET ME TAKE you home,” Angelica had urged when New York indicted Burr for murder. “Papa has been frantic to embrace and comfort you. He’s too old and sick to leave the house now, but I fear he’ll attempt it anyway if you don’t fly to his arms. And it may kill him.”

I’d won the first battle in my war against Burr, so I went. Because I was a dutiful daughter. Because I needed my father as much as he needed me. And because my sister convinced me it might do Ana some good.

Together, the three of us arrived at the Pastures, and my heart beat faster. And only belatedly did I realize why. Alexander and I married in this house. Philip had been born here. We’d started our life and our family here. And perhaps some part of me hoped to be reunited with him here, too. I longed to hear his laugh float down from the upstairs salon where he’d studied for the law and planned our future. But of course now our dreams and plans were nothing more than the dust that had collected on every surface.

Prince would never have allowed the dust in his day, I thought, running a finger over the sideboard beneath Mama’s portrait, who would have thrown a fit to find dirt in her house. Prince had died the previous summer and been buried on the plot of Schuyler land where slaves were laid to rest. Next to Jenny, and Dinah, who had perished without having experienced the freedom she had once tried to seize for herself.

Jenny, Dinah, Prince, Mama, Peggy, Philip, Alexander...

All ghosts, and the house was like a tomb. A lonely clock ticked in the deserted blue parlor. A faded green velvet chair propped open the door to Papa’s vacant study—a study we’d once made available to Aaron Burr.

And it made me remember that right from that first moment, Burr had wanted something from my family. He’d borrowed my father’s books for his own advancement. In repayment, he’d told me of my husband’s victory of Yorktown, and oh, I think he was jealous even then.

Burr was always clever. But what did he accomplish? He never penned any great treatises. Never signed his name to our founding documents. Never wrote a book that I knew of. Even the bank he created was birthed of trickery. He was never more than a crooked gun.

But Jefferson had aimed him against us and he struck true.

Bitterly I climbed the stairs as the memories washed over me, my fingers tracing the hatchet mark in the banister. Then I found myself standing outside the room where Alexander and I first made love.

Empty study. Empty parlor. Empty bed.

It took me a moment to compose myself.

Then I knocked upon my father’s bedroom door, where he was confined by his illness. “Is that you, my pretty pet?” Papa called.

My youngest sister, Caty, was the pet. Which had not stopped her from running off, in what was now fine Schuyler tradition, to marry her forbidden beau. So I replied, “No, Papa. It’s your obedient daughter.”

At the sight of me, my father’s eyes teared over, and then so did mine. He reached out his hands, and I went to him, where his badly damaged legs, cut and drained of gouty matter, were propped upon pillows.

Age had rendered my father smaller than I remembered. He’d let himself grow frail, stubbornly resisting the doctor’s orders and taking little in the way of food. Fortunately, as we exchanged greetings, it was clear his heart was unchanged.

“I don’t know, my dearly beloved child, in what condition Hamilton left you as to pecuniary resources, but I still have the power, attention, and determination to render you and my dear grandchildren perfectly comfortable.”

I kissed him tearfully. “Thank you, Papa.”

He pressed the point. “My fixed determination is to pass the rest of the days my creator has allotted me in promoting your happiness. So name a wish to me.”

Perhaps he thought I’d ask for money or land. But I knew my wish. “I must have Alexander’s letters.”

Papa nodded. “When your mother passed, I found comfort in her letters. But I promised her that I’d burn them to preserve her privacy and so I did.”

I was glad Alexander had never asked such a thing of me because I could still hear his voice when I read his letters. Every word was both a balm and a wound that bled anew. But that wasn’t why I wanted them. When I explained myself, Papa’s puzzled expression melted to concern. “Eliza, remember that we owe duties to the living, and a humble resignation to the divine. A mind so pious as yours, so deeply impressed with the duties of a mother, will feel the force of my remarks.”

I did feel the force of his remarks. But I was in no way resigned . It couldn’t be God’s will that my husband’s life, and his life’s work, came to nothing.

I wouldn’t let it.

And so, the rest of that summer, while Vice President Burr fled from city to city like the villain he was, I tended to my father—who had to be carried to the dining table in the morning and back up to bed at night. Then each evening, I sat in his study sorting through sheaves of papers.

When the leaves turned, Papa was feeling stronger and able to walk about the house, so it was time to return to Manhattan. Burr had been indicted in New Jersey, as well as New York, each jurisdiction vying for the honor of hanging him. His property had been seized and was to be auctioned, and this I wanted to see with my own eyes.

On the day we were to depart, Papa said, “In your new house, you must render yourself perfectly comfortable, and call on me, my beloved child, without hesitation. I will send you butter and pigs’ feet sauce and truffles. Whatever you desire.”

He’d scarcely finished speaking when my eldest daughter burst into the dining room. “Philip is gone,” Ana cried.

My heart leaped to my throat at seeing her in such distress, tears in her eyes, her hair wild. I folded her into my embrace, wondering if we were to go again through her fresh grief or if she’d finally come back to herself. Wrapping my arms around her sturdy shoulders, I said, “My dear child, you know Philip—”

Ana pushed me violently away. “You always take his side.”

“Ana!” my father barked.

Her grandfather’s authority broke through to her, forcing her to hang her head as she wept. “But Philip promised we’d go swimming before we left on the sloop. Now he’s gone ahead of us. He broke his promise, and Papa says a promise must never be broken!”

It was all too much. For a moment, I felt myself spiraling down into weariness and despair. How long would my poor daughter live in a state of madness? And would she drag me there with her?

Bringing my hands to my face as I considered what to say, my sister swept in with her satchel. “It isn’t Philip’s fault,” Angelica snapped. Since learning of my daughter’s troubles, Angelica had made it her business to study every book she could find on derangements of the mind. And there were not many, for in those days, they were obscure and could only be had from Europe. She’d never approved of Alexander’s notion that we should go along with Ana’s delusions. But now she did just that. “It’s much too cold to swim and I told him to get the horses and go ahead of us so we can get an early start on our day.” I nodded gratefully as she insisted my daughter wipe her tears. “If you want to be angry with someone, be angry with me. Now kiss your grandpapa farewell.”

My daughter obeyed and let her aunt usher her out. Then, wearily, I stood at the window, staring out at a world in autumn decay. “Papa, I don’t know how to be both mother and father to my orphaned children.”

“You will not do it alone,” Papa said. “Your sister is devoted to you. And our children will have me, too. Yes, my beloved, I say our children, for may it please the Almighty to let me remain in life, you and they will have my constant love and tenderness.”

Deeply touched, I blinked away tears. “Oh, Papa...”

“You must promise to let your family be of aid and comfort to you now, Elizabeth.”

I nodded, pressing away the tears with my fingertips. “And you must promise to do as the doctor bids you.”

“I am much recovered!” Papa said, rising from the table on his own efforts to prove it. “Indeed, I am not without hopes of being able to visit you in the winter, if there should be sledding.”

I planted a kiss upon my father’s cheek, by his hairline, right where I used to kiss him when I was a small child returning from the wilds before he would haul me up into his arms. “Well, if you cannot come to us, we’ll return for the holiday.”

But my father didn’t live to see another Christmas.

***

January 1805

New York City

“I’m giving you part of my inheritance,” Angelica was saying while I pored over bills for meat, flour, and candles. “And I don’t want an argument.”

Papa’s death had been a cruel blow for both of us. But for me, one more catastrophe in a parade of them. All my life, I’d taken strength from knowing I might always seek refuge in my father’s strong and loving arms. In Philip Schuyler’s home, power, name, and wealth.

Now my father—my first hero, the first man I ever loved—was gone from this world. And there seemed no refuge for me anywhere. Except, perhaps, in my older sister, upon whose generosity I’d unquestionably presumed too much.

She’d already made it her habit to stop by each week with parcels of clothes, food, and other necessities—much as I’d once done for impoverished widows. And I felt humbled. “I cannot accept your offer, Angelica. You’re entitled to your share of Papa’s—”

“What am I going to do with little patches of dirt in the wilderness?” she asked, for our father’s wealth had been tied up in land that he’d divided amongst all his children—and little else, in the end. We knew Papa’s wish was to emulate George Washington, who had ordered the emancipation of his slaves upon Martha’s death. And so, though my father had not provided for it specifically in his will, we had directed the executors to release Papa’s few remaining slaves from bondage. And seeing that finally accomplished was more valuable to me than any inheritance.

As I swallowed with bittersweet emotion at the thought, Angelica coughed on the smoky haze of my parlor. The town house young Alex had procured for us was a bargain, but every sort of thing was wrong with it, from leaky roof to a neglected chimney flue.

“Take what I’m offering, my dear Eliza. If only to rent a better house. Besides, I want you to have something you own outright— something Hamilton’s creditors can have no claim upon. Even if you only sell it off, parcel by parcel, to pay a biographer.”

She knew the trouble I’d had in engaging a writer. And not only because of the disapproval of the executors, who didn’t seem to realize that no greater investment could be made than in memorializing Hamilton.

My husband’s name and reputation were the only patrimony he’d left my children, and it would determine their future prospects. Even if a biography hadn’t been a mission of love, it was a mission of survival. The work could be sold for a profit if written seriously by a man of letters. But the first writer I tried to engage had—upon one glance at the thousands of pages Alexander left behind—virtually fled, quitting the project before it was begun. “You know, the writer said the strangest thing to me. He actually mused out loud that there was more money to be had in refusing to write a biography of Hamilton.”

It’d seemed too odd a thing to mention before; I thought perhaps he meant only that he could find better-paying work. But it nagged at me.

Angelica narrowed her eyes. “You think someone is trying to thwart you?”

“I should like to think it sounds preposterous,” I replied, but having been the wife of a man so often conspired against, how could I dismiss it? “It’s been half a year since Alexander’s death, and what has Jefferson said about it? Nothing. Silence. Which is just what he wants. An eternal silence from Alexander Hamilton...”

Even knowing all we now knew of Jefferson’s duplicitous nature, Angelica didn’t seem quite convinced that the president of the United States would stoop to conspire against the widow of his dead nemesis, but she allowed, “There are plenty of others who have cause to worry about what might be revealed in your husband’s papers.”

That much was true. Alexander had tangled with nearly every powerful man in the country. What my overly frank husband might have written about any of them—or what they might have confided to him in a letter—meant that his entire record of correspondence had the potential to ruin political careers.

Not that this would stop me. “Then the writer must not only be a man of letters,” I began. “But an incorruptible—”

A scream cut off my words. In a household of children, I expected a degree of disorder. But what we heard was a shriek of pure terror.

And then it went chillingly silent.

I bolted from the parlor, Angelica close on my heels. We raced upstairs, cries and pleadings reaching us before we’d made it to the nursery. But inside, I found myself momentarily confused.

My five-year-old Lysbet sat in a ball on the floor, her head buried in her knees, sobs making her little shoulders heave. Meanwhile, my eldest daughter knelt on a tiny bed, tightly holding a pillow flat to the coverlet. And trying to make sense of the commotion, I planted my hands on my hips. “What in heaven’s name—”

A child’s desperate, choking gasp stole my words, my breath, what was left of my heart as I realized what was happening. Tiny feet kicked out from under the sprawl of Ana’s skirt. A terrifying understanding dawned, and I lunged for her.

It was all I could do to wrestle Ana off the bed, off my three-year-old boy whose raw, desperate gasp for air sounded like sandpaper rasping across a rough plank of wood. I had Ana by the arms, but at twenty years old she was strong and in a state of raving frenzy, screaming and fighting. It was left to my sister to comfort my poor red-faced Little Phil.

Meanwhile, Ana flailed at me, so strong in her fury, it was as if a demon possessed her. I struggled to reason with her, much less defend myself from her blows as she dragged me to the floor. “Ana, please. You’ll hurt yourself, my love. Please .”

“Je ne vous connais pas!” Ana spat at me.

My sister helped me pin her namesake’s shoulders to the floor while I held her wrists down. Sympathy carved a frown into Angelica’s reddening face as Ana struggled. “She said she doesn’t know you.”

And in that devastating moment, I finally faced the reality that my beautiful daughter was lost—to me, to herself, to time itself.

The loss had been a steady one, like a tree losing its fall foliage one fiery leaf at a time, so that you didn’t notice the falling away until the tree was nearly, and suddenly, bare.

When the fight bled out of Ana and her muscles went lax, she curled against my sister’s knees and sobbed. “He’s an imposter, Aunt Angelica,” Ana wailed between hitching breaths. “If he goes away, the real Philip can come home.”

“If who goes away?” Angelica asked, rubbing my daughter’s back.

“Little Phil!” Ana cried. “He stole my brother’s name and his place in our family. And the real Philip wants to come home to us.”

I cupped my hand to my mouth, believing it entirely possible that I might be ill. I hadn’t ever thought Ana could be a danger to the other children. I’d even relied upon her to look after them. But now my beautiful, talented daughter had tried to suffocate her youngest brother... to bring back her oldest.

Dear God. Dear God, no more.

It was true that I’d had a double share of good fortune and blessings in my life, but had that happiness not yet been repaid many times over in grief? When I recounted all the losses—my sister, my son, my mother, my husband, my father—I wanted to scream at God that my ledger must now be balanced.

Seeing me near to breaking, Angelica nodded to the door. “Go. Take the little ones.”

Dragging myself off the floor, I was a disheveled wreck—bruised, tendrils of hair askew, a tear in my sleeve. I righted myself and ushered Little Phil and Lysbet into the hall, grateful beyond measure that the rest of the boys were at school. “Are you hurt?” I asked my little boy.

“No, Mama,” he said, being brave despite his quivering lower lip. I pulled him into my arms and held him tight against me in gratitude. Then reached for Lysbet and cuddled her, too.

“This can’t go on,” Angelica said, later. After she’d finally calmed Ana, who’d fallen into a troubled sleep, my sister had locked the door to her room. But when she put the door key beside me where I stood, staring out at a bleak winter world, I shuddered, hearing my husband’s voice.

They will lock her away.

Angelica’s hand rested upon my shoulder. “You’ve done all you could for as long as you could, Eliza. My niece needs more care than any one person is capable of giving.”

But years of charitable visits to hospitals and almshouses had left me with a horrifying knowledge of the conditions. “I cannot tolerate the thought of Ana...” I shook my head and searched for another answer, another way. What kind of mother cast out her own daughter?

They locked my mother up. I will never let it happen to Ana.

“I know what you’re thinking,” my sister said, taking my hand.

But I didn’t think she did. Alexander’s voice didn’t echo for her, as it did now for me.

But you aren’t here, Alexander, I thought. You aren’t here to take care of her or of any of us. You aren’t here or anywhere I can find you.

Angelica cleared her throat. “Private asylums can provide the appropriate environment. She’ll be offered exercise, work, education, religious instruction.”

I nodded, having read the work of Dr. Rush and others emphasizing humane treatment to those with disordered minds instead of restraint, exorcism, and punishment.

How had it come to this? With a shiver, I admitted, “She could have killed Little Phil today.”

“Yes. And she might succeed next time.”

Next time. As much as I wanted to deny it, I knew there would be a next time. “But... she wasn’t aware, she didn’t know. It’s not her fault,” I managed, a knot in my throat. “She was always such a sweet girl before. You remember, don’t you? She was—”

“I remember,” Angelica said. “And of course it’s not her fault. It’s not yours, either. Even if you kept watch over her every moment of every day, you couldn’t make her better. And your other children would suffer from your inattention. To say nothing of the burden on young Alex.”

My eldest surviving son had taken up the practice of law to help support the family and felt the burden keenly. To add another worry upon his still slender shoulders...

“You must make the only choice a loving mother can,” my sister concluded.

I swallowed hard. “How do I... ?”

Angelica pulled me into her embrace before I could sob. “Let me make the arrangements.”

And she did.

It was snowing when the doctor arrived a few mornings later to take my daughter to what Angelica assured me was a reputable private asylum about ten miles away, with bucolic views of forests, fields, and the East River. My sister had even arranged for Ana to have a new piano there—for Ana still played, singing the same songs—and only the songs—she’d sung before Philip died.

To my surprise, Ana was amenable to going, assuming the doctor was a coachman meant to take her to visit her grandfather, as she’d done so many times before. I gathered my coat to join them, but the doctor held up his hand. “Madam. We find it is less disturbing to the patients to avoid upsetting parting scenes with family.”

I froze at the threshold and gazed out at the carriage where my daughter already waited. “Oh,” I said, hollowly.

“You can visit,” he reassured me. “When she’s settled. Certainly, you’ll want to visit.”

“Yes,” I said. “As soon as possible.”

The doctor smiled and doffed his cap.

Meanwhile, I looked past him to my beautiful Ana, who would continue to age, but never grow old. My eyes saw her alive, but my heart felt like I was losing another child. I was losing another child. And heartbroken against relentless losses, I just stood there, numb against the cold, watching until I could no longer see my daughter’s retreating carriage.

***

March 1805

New York City

They wept for Aaron Burr.

The story made all the papers. Far from shunning a man indicted for murder in two states, Jefferson invited Burr to dine at the president’s mansion. But then perhaps sensing that Burr could be of no further use to him in his second term, Jefferson replaced him as vice president. Thus, in Burr’s farewell address on the floor of the Senate chamber, he stood in front of God and country and dared to speak of law and order and liberty, and the need of the Senate to protect the Constitution from the silent arts of corruption and the sacrilegious hands of the demagogue.

And, on their feet and applauding, the members of that body wept for the man who murdered my husband.

Of course, afterward Burr suffered almost instantaneous political exile. I have ever thought that was too kind a fate by far. But he was now on the run, and that would have to satisfy me.

For I had more pressing matters to attend. Namely, my conscience. Since giving over my eldest daughter to a doctor’s care, I couldn’t shake the guilt. Which was why—in what I think now was partly a desperate act of penance for having sent Ana away—I turned my attention back to the Society for the Protection of Poor Widows with Small Children.

Still working with Widow Graham, her daughter, Mrs. Joanna Bethune, and several other pious ladies, I rededicated myself to raising funds, reviewing eligibility requirements, and visiting the homes of candidates for our assistance to determine whether they met the criteria. Which sometimes meant taking the ferry across the East River to Blackwell’s Island, location of one of the city’s most notorious almshouses.

From the outside, the almshouse was a series of sagging, decrepit, gray blocks surrounded by mud, filth, and excrement. Despite its location on an island, the air was stagnant and thick, unhealthful and miasmic. Inside was worse. The halls reeked of every manner of bodily function, and the few little ones with energy enough to spy on me around doorframes were so malnourished as to be frightening in their appearance.

“Pardon me,” I said to the clerk sitting with boots propped upon the desk and a hat resting over his eyes.

Lazily, he moved the hat, and his dark gaze cut up to the basket of victuals I carried. A sneer settled upon his bearded face. “God save me from do-gooders,” he murmured.

I paid him no mind. “I’m here to see Widow Donohue.” He made no move to render assistance, but I was not easily put off. “Would you be so kind as to let her know that Mrs. General Hamilton is here to see her?”

Suddenly, the man righted his chair and stood. “Mrs.... General Hamilton.” He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Right away. And please use the administrator’s office. He’s out just now.”

“Thank you, good sir.” I smiled, for it was easier to forgive the man’s rudeness when his respect for my husband was so apparent.

The Hamilton name still held power in New York, and I wasn’t afraid to use it in the service of protecting children—mine and those of the city Alexander helped build.

“Mrs. Hamilton?” came a woman’s voice from the doorway, a babe on her hip, and a wisp of a girl clinging to her dirty, threadbare skirts. For a moment, I saw not the orphaned girls but my own Little Phil and Lysbet, who were not much older, and I yearned to set them all at ease.

“Thank you for meeting with me. Please sit.” Smiling, I opened my basket and laid out a few pastries I’d baked. Hunger etched the faces of the precious little girls. I gave them a nod and watched in satisfaction as they ate their fill.

“Now, Mrs. Donohue, if we might begin our interview... may I ask how old you are?”

“Twenty,” she answered.

Twenty. Just Ana’s age. Ana could have been married. Ana could have had children of her own...

It didn’t take long to determine that Mrs. Donahue met the society’s criteria. She had a home, such as it was. She was mother of children under the age of ten. She had no income, didn’t beg or sell liquor, and appeared to be of good moral character.

The assistance we could offer would help in her daily struggle for survival, exposed to the contaminating influence of the impious, immoral, indolent, and criminal. And she was grateful. But still, she asked, “What—what will happen to my children, Mrs. Hamilton, if I should die?”

I had no good answer. Our charity was founded to benefit widows . Nothing in our charter allowed for us to help orphans . And it seemed to me quite an oversight.

Upon taking my leave of the almshouse, I glanced at the clerk’s open ledger, listing children that had been admitted to this place—and copied it into my notebook.

Brigit Fogarty, age 2 weeks, died of congestion of the brain

Catherine Connor, age 6 months, died of marasmus

Albert Smith, age 3 weeks, died of diarrhea

Charles May, age 6 weeks, died of syphilis

On and on it went.

Children dead of overcrowding and disease and sheer misery.

Were my own children so different from these little lost souls? What should happen to them if I should fall ill and die? Though Angelica promised she’d always care for my children as if they were her own, and I believed her, I feared for my little ones to be left alone in this world to fend for themselves as their father had been forced to do.

No child should have to suffer what he did. Certainly not his own children. Left to the influence of unscrupulous persons. Left with scars and taint, and viewing themselves as having to claw up from a pit of mud. No one—not my children or anyone’s children—ought to suffer this, not in a country like ours with so many resources. In a civilized world, there should be some... some system to prevent it.

And though I’d never had my husband’s genius for organizing military, financial, and political matters, I had ambitions for my own civic creations. Which was why, at the society’s annual meeting the following spring, I insisted, “We must do more.”

I’d come to value my friendship with the serious-minded and zealously devout Mrs. Bethune. So I was delighted when she agreed. “What these children need is shelter, a refuge, an asylum of their own.”

“I’ve long believed it,” Widow Graham said, wearing a plain black frock and white cap upon her thinning gray hair. “A place where they can receive religious instruction, moral example, and be trained up to be useful and productive.”

As second directress of the society, I sat at the head of the table next to our venerable founder and her daughter. Placing my hand upon the table as if a Bible sat thereon, I added my voice to the cause.

So the Orphan Asylum Society was born. Because some life must grow up from amongst all this death and sacrifice. And I was done with losing things.