My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

  But Hamilton was, in those days, an unstoppable force of nature. Some said the most powerful man in the government, with Washington as a mere figurehead, just as my sister had predicted. It wasn’t true, but my husband did seem invincible. He’d bargained with Madison and Jefferson to bring his financial system into being. And now there was nothing anyone could do about it, except look for vulnerabilities and petty ways to undermine him.

  They found this in my father, Senator Philip Schuyler.

  “The antifederalists found a way to get their revenge,” Papa said quietly.

  Having moved with us to Philadelphia, quite confident in his reelection to the Senate, Papa now learned of the surprise upset. In the same election that brought James Monroe back into my life as a United States senator, my father had been defeated, and by, of all people, Aaron Burr.

  Between our move to Philadelphia, my husband’s ascendance in the government, and the colonel’s antifederalist leanings, we’d grown apart from the Burrs, but that didn’t make his opportunism at Papa’s expense any less cutting. And to think, my father had given Burr his start!

  “Another betrayal,” my husband raged, his temper as warm as my father’s was cool.

  And I could not soothe him because it had begun to feel, even to me, as if we were being abandoned by our friends. Monroe going over to the antifederalists. Madison’s reluctant support and increasing preference for Jefferson. Burr’s disloyalty.

  Alexander was not wrong to think this was a strike against him, a shot aimed to remove a solid ally in the Senate and wound him personally besides. But it was my father who was the casualty. Poor Papa, who’d already suffered so much indignity in his public career, was now to be discarded by his nation in the wreath of his venerable age. I was mortified that my father should have to suffer for my husband’s ambitions—and at the hands of Colonel Burr, whose wife I’d once counted as my friend and whose family I’d fed at my own table.

  From the doorway, my nine-year-old son, Philip, asked, “What will you do now, Grandpapa?”

  It was a question I’d dared not ask of my fifty-seven-year-old father who’d already fought enough battles—political and otherwise—for a lifetime. So I was surprised to see Papa smile as he summoned his grandson forth and ruffled his hair. “Why, I’ll return to Albany and wait for an opportunity to retaliate.”

  That was Papa’s way. He was as patient a politician as he’d been a general. Taking no time to brood over a lost battle, but slowly and steadily moving to gather allies about him and obstruct his enemies’ progress until he was ready for another fight.

  Unfortunately, patience was very much not my husband’s way.

  With the gratifying support of Madison in Congress, my husband had already moved to levy a tax on whiskey, much needed to fund the government’s debts. And we were all relieved that the two architects of the government were once again working in good harmony. But Madison’s support was no longer a thing upon which my husband could rely.

  When Alexander proposed chartering a Bank of the United States, Madison wouldn’t go along. Prickling with every word, my husband explained, “I think Jefferson has him convinced that by establishing a bank in Philadelphia, I mean to go back on the bargain to move the capital.”

  It was, of course, an affront to my husband’s honor to be thought to have negotiated in bad faith. And I wondered why Mr. Jefferson, so cordial in mixed company, claiming to view us as old friends, would suspect Alexander of perfidy. Perhaps Jefferson’s time in the French court had led him to look for intrigue behind every damasked curtain. But there seemed, to me, a remedy that ought to put Jefferson’s mind at ease about my husband’s intentions. “Why not, then, charter the bank on the Potomac?”

  “We need a bank now,” Alexander snapped. Each new loss of a friend and ally had set him ever more on edge, and made him dig in his heels until he was nearly insufferable. “Madison is a fool not to realize it.”

  I took a breath and cautioned, “If you express such sentiments in public, of course Madison will oppose your bank. It will be harder for southerners to invest if it’s located in a northern city.”

  “I don’t need Madison or the southerners.”

  It unnerved me to hear the hubris in his voice. “Remember, husband. Madison is the most important man in the Congress.”

  Hamilton’s mouth opened as if to list a hundred ways in which I was wrong. But then, all at once, his temper broke, and he laughed, drawing me into his arms. “My angel, you are too good, and innocent, and tender-hearted for me to burden you with this business.”

  His kisses, which rained down upon my face, ought to have been enough to distract me, but something in the way he brushed my concerns aside made me insist, “You need Mr. Madison. You brought the Constitution into existence together. And now you must govern together. You need him.”

  Hamilton’s eyes gleamed with triumph. “I don’t. I have the votes. Even without your papa in the Senate.” More kisses trailed down my neck. “So, you see, I don’t need Madison. Or Monroe. Or Jefferson. Or Burr. I don’t need any of them.”

  His sense of power and confidence was a heady erotic thing, and I would be lying to say I didn’t feel its intoxicating pull. In truth, my husband seemed drunk on it, turning me in his arms so that I was forced to brace myself against the table.

  Then he raised my skirts.

  What he wanted, I knew. I wanted it, too.

  It was not only out of a reluctance for more children that I stopped him. I told myself it was also a concern for decency, that he should try to make love in the middle of the day. But there was something else, too—an instinct that he was attempting to master me, and not only for mutual pleasure. I felt suddenly as if, in bending me over this table, I stood in place of all the other frustrations and obstacles in his way.

  A part of me wished to give in, to be for him a relief and comfort.

  Certainly, it was my duty as a wife to do so.

  But I felt some inexplicable assault to my dignity to be taken this way, by him, in such a mood. I don’t need any of them. There was a recklessness in his words that I felt in his hands, and both unleashed a foreboding in my heart that I wished I’d better heeded.

  So I turned him away.

  And perhaps if I hadn’t, everything would have been different.

  * * *

  February 1791

  Philadelphia

  “I won’t be coming to bed tonight,” Alexander said, scarcely looking up from his desk.

  He’d been gruff since the afternoon I rebuffed his advances—as if no woman had ever refused him anything before. Or perhaps it was simply that he assumed his wife never would.

  “In truth, I doubt I’ll come to bed any night this week,” he added. He had an excuse in that President Washington had given him only a week to write up an argument for the necessity and constitutionality of a national bank. “The president knows perfectly well the necessity,” my husband had fumed. “Yet he’s allowed the Virginians to shake his resolve.”

  It seemed, to me, that it was my husband who was shaken.

  By Mr. Jefferson, most of all.

  Though our tall Virginian secretary of state spoke eloquently about the ideals of liberty, he was proving to be a stubborn opponent of any practical reforms. “He’s a landed aristocrat who waxes poetic about the virtues of the common man,” Hamilton complained. “Which might be admirable did he not do it seated in his whirligig chair, sipping the finest wine his inherited wealth can buy, toasting French rioters who shout, ‘Death to the rich.’”

  My husband didn’t trust men who spoke of the glory of the revolution without having fought in it. Even Madison had volunteered, briefly, in the militia. But soldier or not, Mr. Jefferson was a formidable foe whose strengths were my husband’s weaknesses.

  Jefferson knew how to employ a wise silence and patience.

  Meanwhile, my husband took too much for granted that he would have everything his way. He’d even taken for granted his own sta
ggering capacity for hard work. For in writing The Federalist, he’d drawn strength from the collaboration; he’d pushed through his own exhaustion and agonies because he had Madison to commiserate and suffer alongside him. He’d had Madison’s intellect to challenge him and Madison’s friendship to encourage him.

  But now he worked alone, almost as if to punish himself for having allowed anyone to share his burdens. As if to remind himself of the stern lesson of his childhood: he ought never trust or depend upon anyone.

  Which was why, I think, he refused even my help, except to say, “Bring me a pot of strong coffee.” Some nights, it was the only thing he said.

  At least until, in exhaustion and defeat, he confessed that he wouldn’t finish before the president’s deadline—a thing that had never happened to him before.

  I went to where he sat with shoulders bunched in pain and gently took the pen from his palsied hand. “Betsy, what are you doing?”

  “Taking you to bed. In the morning, tell the president that you need another day, and I’ll help you.” He thanked me with loving gratitude. And when I helped him copy it out the next night, he said all the right words to make me believe he was sincere.

  He convinced the president.

  He got his bank.

  But I think I sensed in him, even then, resentment. Resentment that he hadn’t been able to do it himself. That he did need someone, even if it was me. And I believed that’s why he sent me and the children away from the heat and bustle of Philadelphia that summer.

  He insisted, actually. And in those days, my husband was not to be denied. Not by Congress, not by the president, and certainly not by me. I’d lived with the consequences of having done it once, and I didn’t want to attempt it again. So I spent the summer with my father.

  That summer.

  What did Eliza know?

  That’s what everyone wonders. Though no one has ever had the gall to ask. If they did, I’d say I knew nothing. And remembered nothing. That it was all, entirely, beneath my notice. But now, questions bite at me like insects in the night.

  Before I left for my father’s house, was I there, at the table, slicing bread for my children to take on our journey when the woman came to our door with her sad story? Perhaps I was in the kitchen, setting a kettle to boil. I may have looked up over the wrought iron garden fence to wave to our Quaker neighbor, Dolley Todd, as she passed, and I glimpsed instead an ostentatious woman with golden curls.

  To explain our unexpected visitor, surely my husband said, “Just a poor unfortunate woman. Abandoned. In desperate straits.”

  “And you sent her away?” I would have asked. “Is there nothing to be done to help her?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he would have replied, kissing our children atop their heads. “But after dinner.”

  That’s how it started, if the story he told was true. So banal a beginning it would have escaped my memory. But sometimes I fear that I don’t remember it because it never happened the way he said it did. That it never happened that way at all . . .

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  September 1791

  Philadelphia

  AFTER A BLISSFUL summer with my family in Albany, I returned to a new house. Situated just across the street from the president’s mansion in Philadelphia, it was bigger and more majestic in every way with Corinthian pilasters, dentil molding, and arched windows. My new drawing room alone was twenty-five feet square, and Lady Washington’s voice echoed in its empty confines. “How lovely.”

  It was lovely. It was also more than I thought we could afford on my husband’s paltry government salary. But when I expressed this worry, Alexander said he’d take a loan from Angelica’s husband, and that we must keep up appearances.

  Perhaps Lady Washington agreed, because she leaned in to confide, “I shall be so grateful for you to entertain here, in my place.”

  “I could never take your place,” I said.

  Though I knew she was weary and longed for the quiet solitude of Mount Vernon when she confided, “They call me the first lady in the land and think I must be extremely happy, but they might more properly call me the chief state prisoner.”

  I laughed. “Then I certainly would not wish to take your place, even if I could.”

  A sparkle came to her eye. “Oh, but you’re too young to deny yourself the pleasure. When I was your age, I enjoyed the innocent gayeties of life. Thanks to the kindness of our numerous friends, my new and unwished-for situation is not too much a burden. That is why I am delighted we are closer neighbors. With a little bit of furnishing, this fine new house shall become the social center of the city.”

  Should that prove true, I would rise to the occasion. I’d learned from my mother how to set a fine table and behave with decorum. I’d learned from my sister how to dress and to flatter. I now knew how to preside over a grand salon, and Hamilton expected no less from me.

  “It will need lights,” I said, fretfully, hoping that my sister could send me elegant chandeliers and torchères from London. Rustic lights and lanterns would not do for the secretary of the treasury, for whom our previous abode had become suddenly unbearable. Too small for a growing family, my husband said. Too small for a man of his stature, he meant, a man whose portrait now hung in City Hall. A man whose department of government was growing every day, and whose power grew larger with it.

  Certainly my husband’s physical stature had become somewhat larger. Sedentary toil had taken its toll. But I rather liked the softer lines of Alexander’s face, and the new weight of his arms around me, as if it somehow made his need for me more substantial. In truth, I liked it so well that when the winter’s snow came, I wasn’t surprised to discover I was again with child. And my husband startled at my suggestion for a name, should it be a boy. “John?”

  “After your friend,” I said, gently, hoping to please him. But instead of it drawing him closer to me, he stared into the distance. To prevent the complete retreat that any mention of John Laurens inevitably occasioned, I quickly added, “And after my brother-in-law. If Church brings Angelica home, I could forgive him everything. It cannot hurt to remind the man of his family bonds in America . . .”

  Hamilton nodded, slowly. “Clever. I fear I have finally corrupted you and turned you into a politician.”

  “Never,” I replied, for I was still sometimes too earnest for the insincerity and idle gossip that served as currency amongst politicians and their wives. I disliked immensely the game I called Who Is Out of Fashion, in which the ladies of the town seemed to collectively decide who must be shunned for some embarrassing faux pas, exaggerated sleight—or even for wearing the wrong gown. Lady Washington’s dignity was such that she transcended the game, and my dear Hamilton teased that I was too much of an angel to know the rules. But I did know the rules of the game. I just didn’t wish to play.

  Especially not now, when my husband was a man of fraying nerves.

  Darting in and out of the house for meetings at irregular hours. Short-tempered with the children—even the girls, whom he doted on. If I didn’t know his urgency about the country’s business—and a vengeful obsession with keeping Aaron Burr from running for governor of New York—I might have suspected something nefarious afoot.

  Especially when, one afternoon in December of 1792, my husband advised me not to answer the door to strangers when he wasn’t at home. “Are we in some danger?” I asked.

  Snapping open a gazette, Alexander said, “It’s only that I have enemies in this city who would be happy to abuse my wife’s ears. And you’re too far gone with child to risk any unhappiness.”

  I didn’t doubt that he had enemies. A new partisan newspaper had been started, with, as its sole aim, the destruction of my husband and his policies. And there were whispers that the paper was funded by none other than Mr. Jefferson, though I disbelieved he’d stoop to it.

  All my husband’s plans, all his schemes, were working—the promises of stability and prosperity finally being realized by our
countrymen. And yet, the antifederalists saw in him some manner of corrupt, power-hungry upstart intent upon crushing the rights of our states and enriching the North at the South’s expense. They used pseudonyms, but we knew the identity of at least one of the writers because perhaps no one else in the world had better cause to know Madison’s writing than we did.

  And it had crushed Hamilton’s spirits to see our old friend’s formidable pen turned against us. Still, I didn’t fear little Jemmy Madison coming to my door to berate me. I couldn’t even imagine such an absurdity, and if it came to pass I should have no difficulty driving him off with a frying pan. So I couldn’t fathom my husband’s fears. “You’re sure it’s not more than that? When loyalists came to abduct Papa, we were better off for having been forewarned. If I should need to fear a tomahawk splintering our stair rail, I’d rather you tell me.”

  Hamilton grimaced, as if not realizing I was making a jest. “Just don’t open the door to strangers.”

  * * *

  December 12, 1792

  Philadelphia

  I shouldn’t be able to remember the chill in my bones that wintry night. Or the little mewling cries of my newborn, who awakened me for milk. But I do remember. I remember how I climbed from our bed and took the candle into the nursery—only to find my daughter Ana already there, staring out the window that overlooked the street.

  “Bad men are coming to get us, Mama,” she whispered, standing at the window. With a freckled nose and dark auburn hair, she was an imaginative child who invented beautiful songs and countless ways to amuse herself. But like her father, she was easily agitated.

  “Why are you awake, my darling? No one is coming. It’s only your dreams.” I shooed her back to bed before I saw them—two shadowy men lingering across the way near the president’s house.

  They stooped in the darkness against a low brick wall, the light of a lantern between them, their breaths puffing into the air. Then a newcomer joined—a lady—though no woman of good reputation would be on the streets alone with two men at this hour. They bent their heads, motioning toward our house.