Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  It may have been Hamilton who sent a secret letter to Sir Henry Clinton on September 30, proposing a swap of André for Arnold. The author tried to disguise his handwriting and signed the letter “A.B.” (coincidentally, Aaron Burr’s initials). But Clinton had no doubt of its provenance and scrawled across it, “Hamilton, W[ashington] aide de camp, received after A[ndré] death.”56 Clinton refused to consider a trade, which would have meant instant death for Arnold at the hands of vengeful patriots.

  The decision to execute Major André was not the only time Hamilton regretted a choice by Washington, yet it was one time when he disagreed openly and consistently. “The death of André could not have been dispensed with,” Hamilton conceded to Major General Henry Knox nearly two years later, “but it must still be viewed at a distance as an act of rigid justice.”57 Hamilton’s dissent betrayed growing frustration with Washington’s inflexibility, frustration that was presently to flare into open rebellion.

  Major André faced his end with grace and valor. At five o’clock in the afternoon on the day after the board’s decision, he was led to a hilltop gibbet outside of Tappan. When he saw the gallows, he reeled slightly. “I am reconciled to my death,” he said, “though I detest the mode.”58 Unaided, he mounted a coffin that lay in a wagon drawn up under the scaffold. With great dignity, he tightened the rope around his own neck and blindfolded himself with his own handkerchief. Then the wagon bolted away, leaving André swinging from the rope. He was buried on the spot. Hamilton left a moving if romanticized description of his death:

  In going to the place of execution, he bowed familiarly as he went along to all those with whom he had been acquainted in his confinement. A smile of complacency expressed the serene fortitude of his mind....Upon being told the final moment was at hand and asked if he had anything to say, he answered, “Nothing but to request you will witness to the world that I die like a brave man.”59

  Hamilton’s description shows his abiding fascination with a beautiful, noble death. “I am aware that a man of real merit is never seen in so favourable a light as seen through the medium of adversity,” he concluded in his letter to Laurens. “The clouds that surround him are shades that set off his good qualities.”60

  Major John André represented some beau ideal for Hamilton. The reverse side of this adulation, however, was a lacerating sense of personal inadequacy that the world seldom saw. However loaded with superabundant talent, Hamilton was a mass of insecurities that he usually kept well hidden. He always had to fight the residual sadness of the driven man, the unspoken melancholy of the prodigy, the wounds left by his accursed boyhood. Only to John Laurens and Eliza Schuyler did he confide his fears. Right after André’s death, Hamilton wrote to Schuyler that he wished he had André’s accomplishments.

  I do not, my love, affect modesty. I am conscious of [the] advantages I possess. I know I have talents and a good heart, but why am I not handsome? Why have I not every acquirement that can embellish human nature? Why have I not fortune, that I might hereafter have more leisure than I shall have to cultivate those improvements for which I am not entirely unfit?61

  It was a peculiar outburst: Hamilton was expressing envy for a man who had just been executed. Only in such passages do we see that Hamilton, for all his phenomenal success in the Continental Army, still felt unlucky and unlovely, still cursed by his past.

  During the summer and fall preceding Hamilton’s wedding in December 1780, he sometimes mooned about in a romantic haze, very much the lovesick swain. “Love is a sort of insanity,” he told Schuyler, “and every thing I write savors strongly of it.”62 In frequent letters to “his saucy little charmer,” he reassured her that he thought about her constantly.63“ ’Tis a pretty story indeed that I am to be thus monopolized by a little nut brown maid like you and [am] from a soldier metamorphosed into a puny lover.”64 He would steal away from crowds, he told her, and stroll down solitary lanes to swoon over her image. “You are certainly a little sorceress and have bewitched me, for you have made me disrelish everything that used to please me.”65

  As the wedding approached, Hamilton succumbed to anxieties about the future, and he sent Schuyler the most candid letters of his life. He was now optimistic about the war and thought the Continental Army, backed by French naval power, might yet snatch victory by year’s end. Should the patriots lose, however, Hamilton suggested that they live in “some other clime more favourable to human rights” and suggested Geneva as a possibility. He then made a confession: “I was once determined to let my existence and American liberty end together. My Betsey has given me a motive to outlive my pride.”66 The sweet, retiring Schuyler would rescue him from the self-destructive fantasies that had long held sway over his imagination.

  At the same time, the jittery Hamilton was beset by serious doubts about the wedding. All along, he had saluted Schuyler’s beauty, frankness, tender heart, and good sense. Now he wanted more. “I entreat you, my charmer, not to neglect the charges I gave you, particularly that of taking care of yourself and that of employing all your leisure in reading. Nature has been very kind to you. Do not neglect to cultivate her gifts and to enable yourself to make the distinguished figure in all respects to which you are entitled to aspire.”67 As he tutored Schuyler in selfimprovement, there was a Pygmalion dimension to his wishes, but he also worried that her love might cool and scuttle the wedding. In one letter, he related to her a dream he’d had of arriving in Albany and finding her asleep on the grass, with a strange gentleman holding her hand. “As you may imagine,” he wrote, “I reproached him with his presumption and asserted my claim.”68 To his relief, Schuyler in the dream awoke, flew into his arms, and allayed his fears with a convincing kiss.

  Those who saw Hamilton as shrewdly marrying into a great fortune would have been surprised that he did not count on the Schuyler money and beseeched Eliza to consider whether she could endure a more austere life. Referring to the subscription fund set up by his St. Croix sponsors, he lamented the “knavery” of those managing his money. “They have already filed down what was in their hands more than one half, and I am told they go on diminishing it.” Thus, Schuyler should be prepared for anything: “Your future rank in life is a perfect lottery. You may move in an exalted, you may move in a very humble sphere. The last is most probable. Examine well your heart.” Pressing the matter further, he then asked her:

  Tell me, my pretty damsel, have you made up your mind upon the subject of housekeeping? Do you soberly relish the pleasure of being a poor man’s wife? Have you learned to think a homespun preferable to a brocade and the rumbling of a wagon wheel to the musical rattling of a coach and six? Will you be able to see with perfect composure your old acquaintances, flaunting it in gay life, tripping it along in elegance and splendor, while you hold a humble station and have no other enjoyments than the sober comforts of a good wife?...If you cannot, my dear, we are playing a comedy of all in the wrong and you should correct the mistake before we begin to act the tragedy of the unhappy couple.69

  There is no hint here that Eliza was the daughter of a man whom Hamilton described as a gentleman of “large fortune and no less personal and public consequences.”70 Hamilton was too proud to sponge off the Schuylers—who would turn out, in any event, to be less affluent than legend held.

  Hamilton’s prenuptial letters to Schuyler hint at a young man exposed to deprivation at an early age. He had seen too much discontent to approach marriage optimistically. In one letter, he delivered a cynical view of both sexes and asked whether she could endure a hard life:

  But be assured, my angel, it is not a diffidence of my Betsey’s heart but of a female heart that dictated the questions. I am ready to believe everything in favour of yours, but am restrained by the experience I have had of human nature and the softer part of it. Some of your sex possess every requisite to please, delight, and inspire esteem, friendship, and affection. But there are too few of this description. We are full of vices. They are full of weaknesses[,]... and though
I am satisfied whenever I trust my senses and my judgment that you are one of the exceptions, I cannot forbear having moments when I feel a disposition to make a more perfect discovery of your temper and character....Do not, however, I entreat you, suppose that I entertain an ill opinion of all your sex. I have a much worse [opinion] of my own.71

  Throughout this correspondence, George Washington’s exacting presence hovered in the background. “I would go on, but the General summons me to ride,” Hamilton ended one letter.72 Since both he and Washington frowned on laxity during military campaigns, he refused to take a leave of absence to visit Schuyler. When Hamilton rode off to Albany in late November 1780 for the wedding, it was the first vacation he had taken in nearly five years of warfare.

  Situated on a bluff above the Hudson River, Albany was still a rough-hewn town of four thousand inhabitants, about one-tenth of them slaves, and was enclosed by stands of virgin pine. Even as English influence overtook New York City, Albany retained its early Dutch character, reflected in the gabled houses. Dutch remained the chief language, and the Schuylers sat through long Dutch sermons at the Reformed Church every Sunday. In many respects, Eliza, who loved to sew and garden, was typical of the young Dutch women of her generation who were domestic and self-effacing, thrifty in managing households, and eager to raise large broods of children.

  We have little sense of what Hamilton truly thought of his mother-in-law, Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler. Not long after marrying Philip Schuyler during the French and Indian War, she sat for a portrait that shows a striking, dark-eyed woman with a long, elegant neck and broad bosom. One contemporary described her as a “lady of great beauty, shape, and gentility.”73 By the time of Hamilton’s wedding, however, she had settled into being a stout Dutch housewife. When the marquis de Chastellux visited the Schuylers that snowy December, he left with an indelible impression of Mrs. Schuyler as a dragoness who governed the house, intimidating her husband. The wary Frenchman decided that it was “best not to treat her in too cavalier a fashion” and concluded that General Schuyler was “more amiable when he is absent from his wife.”74 If Mrs. Schuyler, forty-seven, was less than hospitable, it may have been because she was seven months pregnant with her youngest daughter, Catherine, the last of twelve times she endured childbirth. She was visibly pregnant at the time of her daughter’s wedding.

  Hamilton had few people to invite to the wedding. His brother, James, was still alive, probably on St. Thomas, but he didn’t come. Hamilton contacted his father, who was on Bequia in the Grenadines, but he didn’t show up either, possibly because of problems posed by wartime travel for British subjects. Before the wedding, Alexander told Eliza:

  I wrote you, my dear, in one of my letters that I have written to our father but had not heard of him since....I had pressed him to come to America after the peace. A gentleman going to the island where he is will in a few days afford me a safe opportunity to write again. I shall again present him with his black-eyed daughter and tell him how much her attention deserves his affection and will make the blessing of his gray hairs.75

  Whether from shame, illness, or poverty, James Hamilton never met Eliza, the Schuylers, or his grandchildren, despite Alexander’s sincere entreaties that he come to America.

  At noon on December 14, 1780, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-five, wed Elizabeth Schuyler, twenty-three, in the southeast parlor of the Schuyler mansion. The interior of the two-story brick residence was light and airy and had a magnificent curving staircase with beautifully carved balusters. During the ceremony, the parlor was likely radiant with sunshine reflected from the snow outside. The ceremony followed the Dutch custom of a small family wedding in the bride’s home. At the local Dutch Reformed Church, the clerk recorded simply: “Colonel Hamilton & Elisabeth [sic] Schuyler.”76 After the ceremony, the guests probably adjourned to the entrance hall, which was nearly fifty feet long and twenty feet wide and flanked by tall, graceful windows. Except for James McHenry, Hamilton’s friends on Washington’s staff were too busy with wartime duties to attend. For all the merriment and high spirits, few guests could have overlooked the mortifying contrast between the enormous Schuyler clan, with their Van Cortlandt and Van Rensselaer relatives, and the lonely groom, who didn’t have a single family member in attendance.

  The newlyweds spent their honeymoon at the Pastures and stayed through the Christmas holidays. They were joined by four French officers from Rochambeau’s army who crossed the ice-encrusted Hudson and arrived in sleighs. Even the fussy French officers complimented the food, the Madeira, and the engaging company. Nothing marred the perfection of the experience for Hamilton. A few weeks later, he wrote to Eliza’s younger sister Peggy, “Because your sister has the talent of growing more amiable every day, or because I am a fanatic in love, or both... she fancies herself the happiest woman in the world.”77

  Hamilton probably felt, for the moment, that he was the happiest man in the world. The wedding to Eliza Schuyler ended his nomadic existence and embedded him in the Anglo-Dutch aristocracy of New York. His upbringing, instead of making him resent the rich, had perhaps made him wish to reclaim his father’s lost nobility. Through marriage, he acquired an important base in a state in which politics revolved around the dynastic ambitions of the foremost Hudson River families. For the first time in his life, Alexander Hamilton must have had a true sense of belonging.

  His friendship with Philip Schuyler was to prove of inestimable value to Hamilton’s career. At one point, when asking for Eliza’s hand, Hamilton evidently told the general of his illegitimacy. “I am pleased with every instance of delicacy in those who are dear to me,” Schuyler wrote in response, “and I think I read your soul on that occasion you mention.”78 Having come from opposite ends of the social spectrum, the two men had arrived at similar political conclusions and proved steadfast allies. Like Hamilton, Schuyler chafed at the impotence of Congress and the Articles of Confederation and wanted to invest George Washington with “dictatorial powers,” if necessary, to win the war.79 He distrusted the yeomen and artisans who had elected the populist George Clinton as New York’s first governor instead of him. Having felt scapegoated for the fall of Fort Ticonderoga, Schuyler urged Hamilton to respond emphatically to personal attacks. “A man’s character ought not to be sported with,” he once wrote, “and he that suffers stains to lay on it with impunity really deserves none nor will he long enjoy one.”80 Such a man was not likely to curb Hamilton’s predilection for feuds and duels.

  Hamilton’s wedding may have heightened the frustrations that he was quietly experiencing with Washington. The general could be a tetchy boss, and Hamilton witnessed the anger he choked down in public. One observer remarked, “The hardships of the revolutionary struggle... had shaken the masterly control Washington had gained over his passions, and the officers of his staff... had to suffer, not unfrequently, from the irritable temper and punctilious susceptibility of their commander.”81 Hamilton was too proud and gifted, too eager to advance in rank, to subordinate himself happily to anyone for four years, even to the renowned Washington.

  Hamilton still hungered for a field command. He wanted fluttering flags, booming cannon, and bayonet charges, not a desk job. That October, as Lafayette prepared to mount a raid on Staten Island, he had asked Washington if Hamilton could lead a battalion. Washington vetoed the idea, saying he could not afford to give up Hamilton. Right before the wedding, Hamilton applied to lead a charge against British posts in northern Manhattan. “Sometime last fall when I spoke to your Excellency about going to the southward,” he reminded Washington, “I explained to you candidly my feelings with respect to military reputation and how much it was my object to act a conspicuous part in some enterprise that might perhaps raise my character as a soldier above mediocrity.”82 Again, Washington spurned Hamilton.

  Then Alexander Scammell tendered his resignation as adjutant general. Two generals—Nathanael Greene and the marquis de Lafayette—lobbied to have Hamilton replace him. Washington again bal
ked, saying that he could not promote the young lieutenant colonel over full colonels. Washington’s predicament was clear. He had plenty of combat officers, but nobody could match Hamilton’s French or his ability to draft subtle, nuanced letters. After almost hourly contact with Washington for four years, Hamilton had become his alter ego, able to capture his tone on paper or in person, and was a casualty of his own success.

  It would be a time rich in political disappointments for Hamilton. Right before his wedding, Congress decided to send an envoy extraordinary to the court of Versailles to join Benjamin Franklin in raising a substantial loan and expediting supply shipments. General John Sullivan nominated Hamilton, who had been a proponent of such a loan; Lafayette also took up the cudgels for him. Three days before Hamilton’s wedding, John Laurens was unanimously chosen instead, even though he stubbornly maintained that Hamilton was better qualified. Laurens thought Hamilton’s nomination faltered only because he was insufficiently known in Congress. Earlier in the year, when Laurens had tried to secure Hamilton a post as secretary to the American minister in France, Hamilton had analyzed his own rejection thus: “I am a stranger in this country. I have no property here, no connections. If I have talents and integrity . . . these are justly deemed very spurious titles in these enlightened days.”83 These disappointments only buttressed his belief in meritocracy, not aristocracy, as the best system for government appointments.