Page 46 of My Dear Hamilton

Chapter Forty-Four

M ONROE IS STANDING in my parlor at the Grange, and everything, my whole life it seems, comes full circle.

I should have expected it. Monroe is, after all, not so much a visitor as a closing argument...

“I find that the lapse of time brings its softening influences,” Monroe is saying, in that deceptively sweet southern accent. “Now we are both nearing the grave, when past differences can be forgiven and forgotten...”

Forgiven and forgotten, he says. And my eyes drift to the dappled light of the entryway, where a bust of my husband has sat for more than twenty years. I’ve put Hamilton on trial. And now, here in the flesh, stands one of my husband’s many enemies and accusers.

“I remember a time, Mrs. Hamilton, when we counted one another as friends,” Monroe continues, wistfully, as if he is remembering. And, of course, I am remembering, too. Remembering with a bittersweet pang how we met, the friendship we shared in war, in peace, over games of backgammon and sight-seeing in Philadelphia with our young families while building a new world.

But I remember also that James Monroe was a man who gave me his word of honor and broke it. A man who hurt me and exposed me to humiliation. He isn’t the only person I’ve cared about who betrayed me. There have been so many others. But he’s the only one I can face now. And so I do. Using my silence as a weapon, forcing him to continue speaking until he finds the words that might reach me. Because as I once said to Monroe, life, like backgammon, is a game of perseverance in which you’re forced to choose the best move, even if it is only a choice between evils.

I face such a choice now.

“Despite our differences, I’ve tried to look after your sons,” Monroe says.

Alex, he means. He named my son a U.S. attorney and a land commissioner—and I ought to be grateful. My sons are grateful. James especially has found a way to ingratiate himself with the Republicans. All James had to do was say that his father’s policies were wrong, and pretend it was the Jeffersonians, instead of the Hamiltonians, who brought this government into being.

Perhaps I could pretend, too. Accepting this lie and making amends would raise the stature of our family. Perhaps I would even be considered a stateswoman for reconciling with Monroe. After all, they say that in the end, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson made friends again. And that was after having savaged one another in a presidential election.

So in truth, there is no good reason to hold myself aloof from Monroe anymore. Not when the man has come to my house, hat in hand. And I soften a little, remembering a time when Monroe offered me comfort and compassion when I desperately needed both.

I remember, too, what he said in defense of himself when I blamed him for exposing me to the Reynolds scandal.

It was the scoundrel to whom you pledged your troth who exposed you to this. Not me.

That is the plain truth at the bottom of it. I know this now better than I knew it then.

But when offering comfort, he also said, You are a kind, lovely, and charming woman and you deserve much better than—

I cut him off then, because he was going to say that I deserved better than Alexander Hamilton. Monroe was going to say that I ought to have married someone like him . A gentleman of honor born on the right side of the blanket. Monroe thought he was the better man.

No doubt he thinks it still. That is why he’s standing here now in my parlor offering what might pass, to the uninitiated political novice, as an olive branch. He’s still trying to prove that he’s the better man.

But he’s not offered an apology and he owes one. Not just to me, but to the country.

This is, after all, a man who was president of a nation he never wished to come into being. Monroe had opposed the Constitution. And he helped Jefferson oppose damned near everything else. The debt, the bank, the Jay Treaty, and a standing army that would’ve prevented the nation’s capital from being burned to the ground. In short, James Monroe set himself against nearly every good measure bound to bring about the more perfect union of which he was now considered a founder.

That he was a true hero in the Revolutionary War, I will never deny. That he finally came round to seeing good sense in some matters, I will grant. I can even give grudging admiration for his political genius in wrapping himself in the flag in an attempt to prevent the nation’s disunion.

But James Monroe is not now and never was the better man.

None of them were.

Not Jefferson. Not Adams. Not Burr. Not Madison. Not Monroe.

And for him to speak of our differences as if, instead of taking opposite sides in great moral questions, we’d all merely quarreled about how many lumps of sugar to take in tea! Oh, no.

If Alexander had lived, he’d have never let that stand. He’d have challenged Monroe just as he challenged me, and everyone else, every day of his life. And I am a better person for it.

I live in a better world because of Alexander Hamilton.

And so do we all.

It’s the promise he fulfilled while other men took credit for it. Men like Monroe.

I see all of them in Monroe’s gray eyes. Jefferson. Burr. Adams. Every man who spread lies about us or tried to climb up a bloody ladder of political power, the rungs of which were made from my family’s bones.

Which is why I won’t surrender.

They cannot have my country. They cannot have my flag.

And they cannot have my dear Hamilton.

He was mine, even if he was not only mine. Just like the country and the flag. They don’t belong to anyone else to define as they please without my say. Neither does Hamilton. I will not politely agree to lies about my husband’s legacy and call it history.

A marriage is like a union of states, requiring countless dinner table bargains to hold it together. There may be irreconcilable differences brewing below the surface that can come to open rupture. And there is, in a marriage, as in a nation, a certain amount of storytelling we do to make it understood. Even if those stories we tell to make our marriage, or country, work don’t paint the whole picture, they’re still true . But to leave Alexander Hamilton out of the painting entirely is a lie.

I know the truth. Which is why I realize now—or perhaps I’ve known it all along and been too proud to admit it—that whatever secrets my husband kept were born from fear of losing me.

He loved me.

Doubt thou the stars are fire. Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.

A verdict. At last. And I am, at long last, ready to deliver it.

“Mr. Monroe,” I finally say, my voice clear, cold, and resolved, my spine straight as an Indian arrow. “If you’ve come to tell me you repent—that you’re sorry, very sorry, for the misrepresentations and slanders you circulated against my dear husband—if you’ve come to say this, I understand. But otherwise, no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.”

Monroe blinks, plainly stunned. But I rejoice at the truth of my words.

No lapse of time, no nearness to the grave or distance from it makes any difference.

For I find inside myself love where I’d not expected it to be. Both for a flawed nation and a flawed man. Love . A thing so powerful it can overcome the divide of time and death. It’s still there inside me, like an eternal flame, though the light it casts is different now.

As Monroe strides out of the room without another word, much less an apology, I realize I’ve been asking the wrong questions and examining the wrong evidence. I’ve asked myself who Alexander Hamilton was. I ought to have asked who I am. And now I know.

I am a Schuyler. Semper Fidelis .

Always faithful. Always loyal. And I will never again let my dear Hamilton be forgotten.