My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

  “Our Livingston cousins never tire of reminding us that women have been granted the right to vote in New Jersey,” Peggy said conspiratorially.

  Angelica nodded and raised her glass, as if to toast. “So why not New York?”

  But I was entirely too distracted by my husband’s unexpected withdrawal to be drawn into even such an exciting conversation. “Please excuse me,” I said, forcing a polite smile. “I’ll rejoin you shortly.”

  I thought to find Alexander at his desk or, failing that, checking upon our child, as was his nightly habit. Instead, I found him seated on the edge of our bed, his head in his hands.

  “Alexander?” When I reached for him, he actually flinched. “What’s happened?”

  He didn’t look at me. He didn’t reply. My usually loquacious husband didn’t say a single word, which made me sure something was dreadfully, horrifically wrong. For answer, I was left to glance at a letter, discarded upon the pillow, that informed of the passing of John Laurens.

  Quickly grasping the loss, I reached for him again. “Oh, my love . . .” This time he didn’t pull away, but he also didn’t soften to my touch.

  Though I’d never met Laurens, I knew he was as dear a friend to my husband as any other member of Washington’s little military family. Since hearing them talk about Laurens at Morristown, he’d loomed large in my imagination as a man I would admire if only because everyone else admired him.

  “How tragic,” I whispered, reading the rest. Colonel Laurens had led a small force to attack a British foraging party in South Carolina, one of several footholds in America to which British forces still clung, but was himself ambushed and mortally wounded in the first volley of battle. He was, I would later learn, one of the last casualties of the war.

  An unspeakable, unnecessary tragedy.

  And though my heart ached for his family, it also ached for my husband, who still hadn’t moved or spoken. And he didn’t speak the rest of that night, even after Papa had seen out all of our guests. Nor did Alexander utter a word the next day.

  “You’re frightening me,” I finally said, when he wouldn’t hold our baby boy. “Won’t you speak to me?”

  It was a jest between us that my husband ran hot—his temper, his blood, his skin. And yet, when I reached for his hand that sweltering summer day, it was like ice.

  “I can’t,” Hamilton rasped, as if forcing just those two words was an agony.

  “Alexander, I’m your wife. I’m—”

  “You didn’t know him. You can’t understand.”

  He was right. I didn’t understand. John Laurens was not, after all, the first of my husband’s comrades to fall in battle. And though Hamilton always spoke of the fallen with grief and respect, their deaths had not made of him a shell of a man. Not like this. I thought perhaps it was because we believed the war to be finished, that all the sacrifices were now to be rewarded with glory, not loss. Or perhaps it was because, in the army, there hadn’t been time for grief and this was the outcome of Hamilton holding himself together for so many years.

  There was something else that alarmed me. Quite beside the pain at having my own attempts to comfort him rebuffed again and again, there was the bewildering realization that my husband had retreated someplace inside himself I couldn’t reach. Some dark place I hadn’t even known was there. And so instead of shaking him, I asked, “Who would understand, then?”

  Alexander turned, warding me off with an upraised hand, as if willing me to be silent.

  But I persisted. “Who will you talk to?”

  He merely went to the window and stared.

  Frightened and at a loss as to how I could help him, I again offered, “I’ll bring up tea. Or coffee. Or something to—” I cut myself off, realizing that he wasn’t listening.

  He had his back turned to me, maybe turned to the whole world.

  Perhaps what he needed was time to grieve in his own way, to make his peace with the sorrow. Perhaps Papa could make my husband see sense. I turned to the door, thinking to do just that, when I heard Alexander whisper, “Lafayette.”

  “What?”

  “Lafayette would understand.”

  And then, suddenly, so did I.

  My husband maintained friendships with all his fellow aides-de-camp. But none of them seemed to know the depths of his emotions as well as the Frenchman, who had warned me from the start that behind my husband’s mask was “great pain and loss.”

  If I could have summoned our friend to the house in that moment, I would have, but an ocean now separated us, because Lafayette had returned to France. So I went to my husband’s desk, intending, I suppose, to take the liberty of writing a letter to the marquis. But there already, to my surprise, was a letter from Lafayette, a fact that nearly startled me with its prescience.

  However silent you may please to be, I will nevertheless remind you of a friend who loves you tenderly and who by his attachment desires a great share in your affection.

  Though Lafayette had written before Laurens died, the marquis was, like me, faced with Hamilton’s silence and waiting for a reply.

  And that decided it for me. I took from the desk a blank sheet of paper, an inkwell, and a quill pen. Then I returned to the window where Alex stood and pressed the pen into his palm. “Write him.”

  “Betsy—”

  “If you won’t speak to me, speak to Lafayette,” I insisted.

  Then I left him.

  By the light of dawn, my husband had managed to scribble only two lines.

  Poor Laurens; he has fallen a sacrifice to his ardor in a trifling skirmish in South Carolina. You know how truly I loved him and will judge how much I regret him.

  Those two lines were enough.

  Though he didn’t send them to Lafayette for a few months—and even then, only as a postscript to a letter—it broke the dam open, allowing my husband to flow back to me and to our son.

  But he never again spoke to me of John Laurens.

  The subject remained closed for the rest of his life.

  How I wish it remained closed for the rest of mine.

  Part Two

  The War for Peace

  Chapter Fourteen

  February 1783

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  I WAS NOW A congressman’s wife.

  In the year since the fighting ended, Alexander had been elected to serve as one of New York’s five delegates to the Congress of the Confederation. We rented a little house in Philadelphia, and though I’d been there only a month, I’d already learned that it was the fate of a politician’s wife to find herself unexpectedly with guests.

  And sometimes even engaged in a bit of very irregular entertaining.

  Three quick raps upon the back door followed by two slow ones.

  That would be Mr. James Madison and the signal for me to answer the back door to the darkened alleyway that I’d never otherwise open past dusk. “Come in,” I said to the slight-statured Virginia congressman who’d become my husband’s unexpected ally within Congress.

  Dressed all in black, unprepossessing and bookish, Madison’s manner was somber and reserved to the point of being shy. In fact, he was my husband’s opposite in seemingly every way—except, I learned, in the most important way.

  Both men supported a strong union and believed that the Articles of Confederation required revision to ensure it.

  I did, too. I recalled too starkly—sometimes even in nightmares from which I woke in a gasping, cold sweat—the terrible conditions of the soldiers during the war. The gaunt faces. The bare feet blackened from frostbite due to exposure. The shrieks of amputees operated upon without medicines to dull the pain. Deprivations all caused by the unwillingness of the states to adequately support the national cause . . .

  Now, Alexander’s and Mr. Madison’s work to find a way to pay the army, fund the war debt, and bring the states together as a nation was being undermined at every turn by a faction in Congress more attached to state interests than to the federal. T
he only way to get anything done was to do it out of the public eye. Which was the reason for the subterfuge.

  And I was rather proud of the fact that the plan had been mine.

  My idea came when I’d awakened one night to discover the bed cold beside me and Alexander hunched over his desk, writing furiously in the light of a single candle. “What are you working on?” I’d asked, laying my hands upon his shoulders.

  He’d eased back into my touch, pulling my hand to that sensuous mouth and pressing a kiss to my knuckles. “I’ve been appointed chairman of peace arrangements. I’m to provide a system for foreign affairs, Indian affairs, a peacetime army, and naval establishments.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  He peered up at me with a weary chuckle. “Well, and also to help pacify the army—who would like, at long last, to be paid. One can scarcely blame them for being on the verge of uprising against Congress.” He shook his head, especially since he’d given up his own soldier’s pay for fear of appearing self-interested in the matter. “But what has pulled you from bed at this hour?”

  “In truth, thinking about all you’re trying to accomplish here.”

  He frowned. “I don’t wish my duties to disturb your peace of mind, my sweet girl.”

  I wanted to be more than a sweet girl to him, which was why I blurted, “Perhaps you can get more done if you conduct negotiations in private.”

  His brows raised over those blue eyes. “Something you learned watching your father at Indian conventions?”

  I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t discount those experiences. “If those who stand against you in Congress don’t realize the extent of your alliance with Mr. Madison, they’ll be less prepared to thwart you. If you make your strategies behind closed doors, you can take your foes unawares on the Congress floor.”

  His eyes narrowed with appreciation. “You are a general’s daughter,” he said approvingly, taking me back to bed.

  I shook my head and helped him lift my shift. “I’m a congressman’s wife.”

  “Yes, you are,” he said as he covered my body with his. And after bringing us together, he jested, “Perhaps I should recommend you for appointment for the New York delegation. You have more passion for it than those who actually hold the posts and who worry more about their own individual welfare than the common good.”

  His compliment pleased me, but even more satisfying was that Alexander took my advice.

  Which was how, a few days later, I came to be standing in a darkened kitchen of the house we’d rented near Independence Hall with my fussing one-year-old son on my shoulder, and a nervous Virginia congressman stomping snow off his boots by my hearth. “Colonel Hamilton will be home shortly,” I said, taking Madison’s snowy coat and hanging it upon a peg. “Can I offer you some hot tea?”

  “Oh, no, thank you,” Madison said softly, eyeing the little boy in my arms. “You have your hands quite occupied with young Master Hamilton. I couldn’t trouble you to serve me.” Perhaps because Madison was the owner of a vast plantation with many slaves, he seemed overly aware that we kept no servant with us—the work of caring for the baby and keeping our little household entirely mine. “It’s trouble enough that I’m dropping in on you so late.”

  “Nonsense. You’re always most welcome, Mr. Madison,” I said, wanting to put the congressman at ease, and taking more than a bit of pride in the modest feast I’d managed to keep warm. Beef tongue, peas, and potatoes in an herbed butter sauce. “Some wine at least?” I offered, leading him to the dining room, where the drapes were pulled tight against prying eyes from the street.

  “Yes, thank you,” Madison said, but as I began to pour, my discontented son kicked his feet, nearly toppling the glasses.

  “Careful little man!” Madison cried, catching Philip playfully by the toes. And when my son giggled, the congressman smiled and held out his hands. “May I?”

  Surprised at Madison’s change in demeanor—for though there was often kindness in his eyes, the soft-spoken congressman rarely smiled—I surrendered my babe into his arms. “You must be a father, Mr. Madison.”

  “Unfortunately, no,” the man replied wistfully. “I’m a confirmed bachelor, as fate would have it, but children take to me.” And it was true. While I poured wine, Madison whispered something into Philip’s ear that made him laugh and laugh.

  “Whatever did you say to him?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid it’s a secret,” Madison replied, bouncing my son in his arms. “Between gentlemen.”

  Just then my husband came in the front entrance. “Betsy, I’m home,” Alexander called, slamming the door shut. “Is Madison—”

  “In here, charming our child,” I said, and my husband appeared in the archway, blowing warm air into his hands.

  I finished setting plates and silver, then took the baby as the men settled at the table and dug into their meal as if they hadn’t eaten all day. And given what I knew of Alexander’s schedule, there was some likelihood that was true. Even as they ate, they spread letters and ledgers out on the table between them. And afterward, I brought them a tray of tea and my mother’s shortbread I’d saved in a jar, for I’d learned to always keep a supply of some baked goods on hand for just such occasions.

  While I poured tea, Madison pulled a well-used notebook from his pocket and began to write. As the two men collaborated, Alexander stabbed at a page with his fingers. “Our debt stands at forty million. The state of our finances has never been more critical. There are dangerous prejudices in particular states opposed to giving stability and prosperity to the union, thereby weakening us in our peace negotiations with Britain, which could yet fail. It is the first wish of my heart that this union may last, but feeble as the links among our states are, what prudent man would rely upon it?”

  Madison listened intently as my husband then rattled off all our problems at length, and then nodded and said, simply, “All of this can be solved with a federal tax. Congress must have power and autonomy in financial matters.”

  Alexander opened his mouth as if to protest that the matter was more complicated but then seemed content with Madison’s simplification. Their personal friendship and political alliance worked well because if Alexander was a born orator, able to lay siege with a barrage of impregnable arguments, Madison was skilled at quickly and quietly cutting through the weeds.

  Moreover, as I was later to learn, Madison could have a dry and wicked sense of humor when it was just the three of us. Or four of us, more truly. “What is your magic formula?” I asked one night when Madison was able, with more whispering, to lure my son to sleep.

  “Bawdy jokes,” Madison quipped with a wink of which I would not have thought such a shy little man capable. “As I said, secrets between gentlemen.”

  In the weeks that followed, Madison’s nighttime visits to our home became more frequent, and I found myself enjoying the company, as the bachelorhood of many of the other delegates meant that I hadn’t yet found much society of my own despite the size and affluence of this city. In Albany, I’d had my sisters and our friends from our childhood troop of Blues, not to mention the Burrs, with whom we’d had the pleasure of becoming close.

  But in Philadelphia, my society was all politicians—which was how I came to meet the primary author of the Declaration of Independence for the first time.

  On short notice, Alexander asked if I could host a small dinner party for a friend of Madison’s, a widower who temporarily resided with his young daughter in the same boardinghouse where Madison stayed. I thought nothing more of it until Mr. Madison’s friend stood before me in my parlor. Tall with fiery ginger hair and a refined southern accent, the man gave me a soft smile and a graceful bow. “Thomas Jefferson, at your service, madam.”

  Oh, my husband. Some friend, indeed! It was not yet widely known that Jefferson had penned the immortal lines of our Declaration, including all men are created equal. But because of my father’s service in the war and Congress, I did know of Jefferson’s powerful contri
bution. I also knew that as one of our foremost statesmen, he’d been chosen to help negotiate the peace proceedings in France. And I managed a curtsy despite my shaking hands and trembling knees. “Mr. Jefferson, it’s an honor to welcome you to our home.”

  “Thank you. May I introduce my daughter, Patsy?” the Virginian asked. “I fear she is too infrequently in the company of ladies, as I’ve dragged her from seaport to seaport searching for a ship that might take us to Paris despite enemy vessels still in the waters.”

  A tall, strapping girl of about ten stepped near her father. In a yellow calico frock with white bows, she shared her father’s coloring and had his intelligent eyes. She gave a quick curtsy. “Madam.”

  “Hello, Patsy. You must be having quite an adventure with your father.”

  She smiled with an adoring gaze at Mr. Jefferson. “Oh, indeed. Papa and I have been everywhere searching for a ship. I have seen Baltimore, New York, and even Boston.”

  Her enthusiasm was charming, and her presence eased my surprise in hosting the voice of our independence at my little dining table. “Well, you’re already much better traveled than I am,” I said, extending a hand that she took when her papa gave her an approving nod. “You must tell me everything.”

  As they were wont to do, the men turned to politics over dinner. Alexander spoke candidly about the need for federal revenue and standing armies and permanent navies, and I didn’t think I imagined the way Jefferson’s lips pursed and his brow furrowed, even though his replies were always polite and measured. I sensed, in Jefferson, a fundamental disagreement about the nature of our country’s government, citizens, and future. Worse, I noticed the way Madison deferred to Jefferson’s thinking as the conversation progressed.

  And it made me worry.