Page 42 of My Dear Hamilton

Chapter Forty

June 1814

Harlem

H OW WILL YOU get on here by yourself, Mother?” William asked while I unlatched the shutters to let fresh air into the long-neglected house at the Grange.

On leave from the academy at West Point, my nearly seventeen-year-old son had worked himself into a lather carting chairs and lamps and personal items into the house. But now, red-faced and dripping with sweat, William looked ready to pack it all back into a wagon if I should change my mind.

None of my sons approved of my decision to move to the home we once more owned, away from the city, our friends, and my work at the orphanage. Yet in the aftermath of my sister’s death, I welcomed the isolation of the country where no one would see the darkness that had crept into my heart.

“I won’t be alone,” I reassured William. “I’ll have Lysbet and Little Phil. And there’s no reason to waste money paying rent in town.”

That much was true. Having only the youngest two children in my care now, I could undertake their education myself and hire back Mr. and Mrs. Genti to help me keep up the place. Because at least this house was mine, even if the man who built it was not...

Who was Alexander Hamilton?

A traitor or a patriot? A visionary or a fool? A gentleman or a fraud?

That’s what I wanted to know, and now it kept me awake all night reading the mountain of letters, pacing in fits and starts. Like Hamilton. Though my project was at once humbler and more ambitious than a pamphlet or a treatise or a book defending a new form of government. Mine was simply to learn the truth.

And there was more to read now than ever. Because I’d never stopped collecting my husband’s writings. For the biography and for myself, I needed them. And in the ten years since he’d died, I’d hunted down thousands of letters, pamphlets, and reports from everyone and everywhere. Political essays and financial treatises. And, of course, account books, in which I now found that in the year Angelica came to New York without her husband, Hamilton paid her expenses. Not just those I’d known about, for which Church was to have reimbursed him—but unspecified expenses, too, as if Angelica had simply presented him with receipts for her shopping trips. He’d also rented rooms for her, in addition to her house.

What rooms? Where were they? And why had she needed other rooms when she’d had that luxurious town house? I couldn’t fathom it.

And, then, in the very next entry in the ledger, I found that Hamilton had purchased himself a closed coach.

Ugly images rose to my mind.

I’d never been to Europe, where it was common for noblemen to keep mistresses, but I could guess how a gentleman might plan clandestine meetings. Secret rooms reached by a closed coach with curtains drawn. A beautiful woman inside whispering in French to a man hungry for her appreciation...

I remembered precisely how Hamilton was that year as secretary of the treasury. He’d likened himself to a veritable prime minister with all the powers and privileges. He’d believed himself in command of a whole nation, so why should he be denied the caresses of any willing woman?

But that was before the yellow fever, I told myself, trying desperately to salvage anything from our life together. Alexander was changed after the fever. A different husband. A better man. And Angelica, when she moved back to America, was a changed woman. The most reliable, generous, and loyal sister that any person could have.

Because they were guilty, the devil inside me whispered. And they lied to you. They lied to you all your life and all of theirs. To their very last breaths.

Blinking back acid tears, I realized these poisonous doubts could put the lie to my whole life. Yes, I had evidence, but it didn’t prove the case. Where, but in death itself, might I ever confront either my husband or my sister and have an answer?

I needed to stop this mad inquiry.

Like my father before me, I needed to exert the self-discipline Hamilton lacked, the ability to let a thing alone when pursuing it could end in despair.

But in the end, and perhaps inevitably, I’d become more like Hamilton than Papa.

For I carried Angelica’s box of letters, and my inquiry, up to the attic, where, assailed by a cloud of dust motes that floated in the light of my lamp, I made of the private space a makeshift office for my investigation. There, amidst crates of papers in the stifling heat, I sat hour after hour, hunched over yellowed pages, sneering at Angelica’s coquettish missives, taking satisfaction that at least Hamilton hadn’t bundled her letters in a sentimental ribbon.

Perhaps he hadn’t loved her. But had he loved me? Had either of them ever loved me? Or had Alexander and Angelica clung to each other in the fevered sweat of lovemaking, laughing at me all the while?

When there was nothing left to read, I spied the engraved wooden strongbox with leather buckles where Alexander kept his old military uniforms and ornamental swords.

His glory, I thought, with a contemptuous snort. And all at once, I wondered if that was where I’d find the definitive evidence I was seeking. Perhaps my husband kept some treasured token of his love affair with Angelica just as she’d kept that garter. Perhaps I’d find a matching ring, with a clipping of her hair, and then all my doubts would vanish.

Knowing he was to duel, Alexander would have hidden anything incriminating or entrusted it to someone to destroy if he died. Hamilton was too smart for me. Too smart for everyone, except Burr.

Nevertheless, I unfastened the latch and was struck by the arresting sight of the blue-and-buff military coat Alexander wore the first day I met him. The wool, rougher than I remembered when I first touched him. When we first kissed. And the pain, oh the pain of remembering that with now jaded eyes, sliced into me like the bayonet beside the uniform.

Like a wounded soldier, bleeding my heart out, I searched every item in the trunk until it was empty, running my hands over the velvet lining... to find the false bottom I somehow expected. And that’s where I found it.

A bundle of letters and a dark braid of hair...

***

M Y HANDS SHOOK as I unfolded the pages, finding neither the scent of my sister’s perfume nor the feminine scrawl of her hand. But instead, the shock of a firm, masculine signature.

John Laurens .

A man I’d never met, whose death dealt to Alexander his worst wound of the war. Here were the letters between them. Not only the ones Laurens wrote, but also copies of what my husband wrote to Laurens as well. That both sides of the correspondence were so carefully preserved spoke volumes of its importance to my husband.

And now I read them, with near incredulity.

Cold in my professions, warm in my friendships, I wish, my dear Laurens, it might be in my power, by action rather than words to convince you that I love you.

It was, in those days, the style for men to speak of love to one another. But it was not a style Alexander embraced in his letters. Not to any man I knew save, perhaps, Lafayette.

And yet, these were different. Ardent. Complete with a lewd suggestion that John Laurens had intimate knowledge of Alexander’s body. Letters that indicated a liaison between Washington’s young officers for which they might both have been shot.

And—quite beyond the capacity to be scandalized by anything now—I nearly laughed at my mind’s sudden opening to things that ought to have been perfectly obvious before.

My husband had loved this man.

Clutching a lock of dark hair that was not, after all, my sister’s, I remembered Alexander’s unnatural grief for Laurens. My husband’s attachment to the baron, whose handsome young male companions Theodosia Burr had once identified as sodomites. Perhaps my husband had been one of them, adopting the vice because it was forbidden.

Forbidden, like another man’s wife.

Forbidden, like his wife’s sister.

If Hamilton could commit those sins, why not this one? Why not sate his lust with another soldier while the winter was cold and the war was harsh?

Then, in a letter Alexander had written only months before we met, I found this:

Such a wife as I want must be young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape) sensible (a little learning will do), well bred, chaste and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness). But as to fortune, the larger stock of that the better as money is an essential ingredient to happiness in this world.

Well, then.

Even sinners needed money, didn’t they?

And hadn’t he found just what he wanted in me? I met his cold list of qualifications precisely. It hollowed out my heart to know it. Made of my soul a barren land. Surrounded by the detritus of my husband’s life, I didn’t think there were any new ways in which his letters could hurt me.

But then they did.

Next fall completes my doom, Hamilton wrote to Laurens before our wedding.

I give up my liberty to Miss Schuyler. She is a good-hearted girl who I am sure will never play the termagant; though not a genius she has good sense enough to be agreeable, and though not a beauty, she has fine black eyes.

A good-hearted girl. Not a genius. Not a beauty.

Not enough...

He wrote these things to John Laurens while whispering against my lips that I had bewitched him. While writing me sonnets. While buying me wedding gifts with John Laurens’s money...

In spite of Schuyler’s black eyes, I have still a part for the public and another for you; so your impatience to have me married is misplaced; a strange cure by the way, as if after matrimony I was to be less devoted than I am now.

The page slipped from my hand.

Our courtship had merely been another scheme.

Lies, lies, schemes and lies!

When we danced together at that first winter’s ball in Morristown, I’d been wary of Hamilton because he reminded me of the watery Nix of Dutch legend, luring maidens to dangerous depths. And now, at long last, I was drowning. Wrenching my wedding ring off my finger, I threw it into the trunk with the rest of Alexander’s deceit, thinking to send all of it to the bottom of the river.

Because, my God, this was to lose him again. A second kind of widowhood. One that obliterated the first. For I could have no hope of meeting with Alexander in heaven now; he was more likely to be found in hell. And I hoped... I hoped he burned there.

For he never loved me. He was never mine. He made me vows before an altar and played the part, to the last. But Alexander Hamilton was as false a villain as his enemies claimed he was. He had cheated me of my whole life and got away with it.

Cheated. That was how I felt, surveying all that remained of my husband’s legacy.

What was his legacy? Not the eternal bonds of love, not the earthly but enduring stone of monuments. Only paper. A worthless Constitution that the Republicans shredded with each successive administration. A few books filled with words he probably never meant in earnest. Just crates and crates of paper.

And I wanted to set fire to it all.

***

I AWAKENED TO the whisper of papers falling like dead leaves upon a forest floor. And as I blinked against the bleary haze of shadow and cracks of sunlight, I couldn’t fathom where I was.

The attic. I’d somehow fallen asleep there, in the heat, exhausted by an agony of the soul. And now I saw my son’s bare feet upon the wood planks, loose pages strewn by his toes. For one absurd moment in the delirium, I thought to scold William, as I’d done when he was a child, for walking about like a barefooted street urchin instead of a young gentleman.

But then I saw the lace garter clutched in his hand.

William was reading my sister’s letters, and I didn’t think the burning flush upon his cheek was exertion or summer heat. “I came up because I worried for you—but I didn’t want to wake you when I found you asleep. You haven’t slept much lately.”

My heart jolted, and I shoved myself up. It was all I could do to resist pulling the paper and lace from his hands, but in doing so, I’d only expose myself. Expose everything . He couldn’t possibly attach any meaning to that garter, which had slipped off my sister’s thigh long before he was born, but oh, dear Lord, how much had he read?

“I’m sorry to have worried you,” I managed, struggling for breath in the now hellish heat of the attic. Perspiration pooled at my nape, and my black frock clung to my back.

William quietly nodded, but his expression was bleak and his eyes were a storm. “My father wrote these letters to Aunt Angelica?”

Those were the words he spoke, but not what he truly meant to ask.

And I could almost see it. Almost see William standing at the precipice of a suspicion that would shatter everything he believed about his father, and about himself. And what mother—especially one clinging to that same edge by her fingertips—could allow her child to fall?

Forcing a smile, I said, “Oh, yes. Your father and Aunt Angelica were very good friends. It’s such a comfort to me to read their letters and remember it.”

My son—the one born while his father confessed adultery to the world—swallowed hard. He scrutinized my face, and then his gaze fell to my hand. “You’re not wearing your ring.”

As my mind raced, I thought I might be sick. Burr once said I wasn’t an actress of any talent. It was my sister who could bury her misery and heartbreak beneath pleasantries and a fan of playing cards in her hand. But now I called upon whatever powers of deception I’d ever learned from her to say, “The heat has swollen my fingers.” I kissed my boy’s cheek. “Or perhaps I’ve been eating too much. Speaking of, shall we go down and fix some breakfast?”

“You haven’t eaten anything, ” William said. “Not more than a nibble for days.”

What a Hamilton he was—a dogged interrogator assembling proofs and challenging my testimony. But I determined then and there that he’d never find me out.

“Well, that explains why I’m so famished,” I said, feigning a lightness of spirit I didn’t feel, and might never feel again. “And thirsty. Will you fetch me a glass of switchel?”

He nodded, slowly relinquishing to me the letters and his aunt’s garter. And I believed he was tricked by the mask I presented. I realized later that I was wrong.

But I didn’t know that then, I only knew it was a mask I was determined to wear from that day forth. Because I couldn’t deprive my children of their cherished memories of their father. Not after I’d nursed them all on a reverence for Alexander that neared worship.

I’d hoped that lionizing their father would compensate my children for the absence of his guidance, protection, and comfort. That it would somehow make up for the suffering he’d exposed them to. For the debts he’d left. And for the scandal he’d saddled us all with.

Was it comedy or tragedy that after all my husband had done to defend his name, there was not a corner of the country where Hamilton did not conjure up salacious gossip of harlots and infidelity? No place the name Hamilton did not rouse animosity amongst those who held political power. My sons had, each of them, felt compelled to become soldiers to prove themselves loyal, useful, and worthy of the country they’d been bequeathed. And given those circumstances, no mother who loved her children could ever wish to infect them with the contagion of doubt that now malingered inside my breast about what kind of man their father had been.

They knew him as the mythic hero who’d driven a carriage of the sun across the sky; they didn’t need to know he’d crashed it into my world, leaving me in fiery ruin.

So there was no one with whom I could share my bitter cup of poison. I would simply have to swallow the injustice down and lie about the taste until it killed me.

Or until the shame of it burned me alive.

***

I shall never forget the destructive majesty of the flames.

— H ARRY S MITH ON THE BURNING OF W ASHINGTON

The nation was on fire, and part of me wanted to watch it burn. To bear witness to the end just as I’d borne witness to its beginnings. Everything to which I had devoted my life, in flames...

In our capital, British soldiers had put a torch to the naval yard, the congressional library, and burned the President’s Mansion right down to Dolley Madison’s bright red curtains. Our president was a fugitive in his own country, having been forced to flee his supper—his wife at least prescient enough to steal away with famous portraits and national treasures before it all went up in smoke.

“These blundering Republicans have led our country defenseless and naked into this lake of blood!” Alex shouted, thumping one fist on the window frame while his other hand gripped the sword swaying at his hip, and I was pained by how much like his father he looked in uniform.

My soldier sons had stopped at the Grange on their way to take up defense of New York Harbor, two of them seated by the open windows in the parlor. All of us sweltering in the heat, as if the flames engulfing Washington City reached us here, too, even where I sat with my embroidery upon one of the old, faded chairs.

“If President Madison loses this war, we lose the country,” James said.

And I bit back a bitter laugh.

Hamilton had warned that the country needed a standing army and had been vilified for it. Even by Madison. Now the fate of the nation was left largely to a gutted navy and militias who had, under the direction of Secretary Monroe, already run from the fight.

“So they’ve finally done it,” I said, startling my sons with my venomous tone as I stabbed my needle into the cloth. “The Republicans have finally wrecked it all.”

The Federal City that Hamilton had negotiated to bring into existence was now burned to the ground. It was quite possibly the end. The end of the Republic. The end of our American experiment. The end of the United States of America.

What had been the point of any of it , I wondered.

The Revolution. The Federalist . The Constitution. The Farewell Address. The bank charters. The legal precedents... all Hamilton’s accomplishments worthless and dismantled and soon to be forgotten. Perhaps I should, with diabolical glee, burn his papers to save the King of England the trouble!

Except those weren’t only Alexander Hamilton’s accomplishments. Other people had sacrificed to see those things brought about. They were our accomplishments, too.

Perhaps alarmed at the bleakness of my words, Alex folded his arms over his uniformed chest—a uniform his father had designed with my help—and said, “The war isn’t over yet, Mother.”

But it is for me, I thought. Because as everything turned to ashes in my mouth, I was too tired to fight anymore. Tired of fighting Jefferson and Burr and Monroe, fighting the Republicans and the Federalists, fighting grief and loneliness and bitterness and the British besides.

Fortunately, a new generation took up the call in defense of their country.

While my old friend Mac lay paralyzed upon a sickbed from which he would never again rise, the soldiers at his Fort McHenry fended off a stunning bombardment of rockets and mortar shells in Baltimore Harbor, giving the British just enough time to reconsider whether subduing America was really worth the fight.

And so, the three-year-long War of 1812 ended in a stalemate that allowed Republicans to pretend to have achieved something other than bankrupting the nation and destroying the Federalist Party.

Though perhaps it could be more properly said that my husband’s Federalist Party killed itself as ingloriously as its founder had. My husband had thrown away his life, whether he’d intended to or not. A question that kept me up many nights. And his party dashed itself to pieces with a failed and potentially treasonous attempt at secession in the midst of a war.

If they break this Union, they will break my heart, Alexander had said upon his deathbed.

But I couldn’t seem to care, because when he broke our union, he’d broken my heart, too. He’d promised that he was mine forever, that he’d never leave me alone or desperate. But then he’d rowed across the Hudson River at dawn to meet an empty vessel of a man who wasn’t worth his spit, let alone his life. He’d gone knowing he might never return. He’d planned it. And he’d kept it from me. How could I ever forgive him?

All that mattered now was that my sons had survived the ordeal of their own honorable battles in the War of 1812. And so did the country, though I might be excused, if, in the ten years that followed, I scarcely recognized the nation as my own.

We were all Republicans now. Like it or not.

No one disagreed or dared to. Our new Virginian president, James Monroe—a recent convert to the Hamiltonian idea that we needed a strong regular army even in peacetime—declared it the Era of Good Feelings.

He’d actually run unopposed for the presidency, for there were no more political parties and we were not to have partisanship in the nation. We were to live in a perpetual state of patriotic oneness .

It was, after all, a decade of deceit.

Republicans pretended there was nothing whatsoever hypocritical about their newfound embrace of a national bank and federal institutions. Never mind that they’d destroyed my family for championing those very things.

A retired Thomas Jefferson was now the so-called Sage of Monticello, the prophet of democracy, while to hear people tell it, George Washington had been a mere general in the cause...

... and Alexander Hamilton had never existed at all.

A whole generation of Americans came of age without hearing my husband’s name, unless it was in diminishment or a curse. And I could scarcely blame them. Hamilton was safely dead and forgotten. We survivors of the founding of the country all let him be forgotten.

Even me.