My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

  “In times like these, it will not do to be overscrupulous,” Alexander said, still writing. “It’s easy to sacrifice the substantial interests of society by a strict adherence to ordinary rules. This is a matter of public safety.”

  Remembering Jefferson’s admiration for, and encouragement of, the Francophile mobs in Philadelphia, I agreed with him. That our fright drove us to consider radical and unsavory ideas in the few terrifying days after the election—what some were already calling the revolution of 1800—I don’t deny. But our fever-induced proposals were never adopted, whereas the worst, panic-struck ideas of President Adams were immediately put into action.

  Realizing he was likely to lose the election, the first thing Adams did was fire his entire cabinet—including the secretary of war.

  “But the president blames you, more than anyone, for his probable defeat, Ham,” McHenry said, having come straight from Philadelphia to report the news. He glanced at me, apologetically, as he pushed away his dinner plate, having apparently lost his appetite. “Adams thinks you brought about the loss of the election in New York intentionally.”

  The indignity of it, after all we’d done! My own appetite wavered.

  Mac added, “Adams shouted that you’ve been trying to control the government while posing as a private man. That you’re a man devoid of every moral principle—a bastard and a foreigner besides.”

  I flinched, because it was an insult designed to strike at my husband’s weakest points, and an unworthy and unbecoming thing for the president of the United States to stoop to say besides. But, worse, few men were more American than Alexander Hamilton, and yet the president proclaimed him a foreigner. The same president who had the power to deport foreigners he deemed dangerous to the peace . . .

  Alexander flung his napkin onto the table in disgust. “Not only the worst constructions are put upon my conduct as a public man, but it seems my birth must still be the subject of the most humiliating criticism!”

  I put a hand on my husband’s knee in comfort. His birth wasn’t his fault, and yet, no conduct of his could ever seem to change it. And even McHenry seemed sensible of the wound he’d opened. “My dear Hamilton, with respect to the legitimacy of your birth, not one of your friends would respect you less even if everything your enemies say on this head were true.”

  “Well, that is kind, Mac,” Hamilton allowed. “But my friends are precious few.”

  That was only partially true, I thought. Because even then, my husband still wore the aura of a victor. His star had dimmed but still blazed. And I confused followers for friends.

  I know better now.

  But at the time, I merely smiled at McHenry in gratitude.

  Mac gave a long sigh. “While I’m at it, you might as well know this, too. During his tirade against me, the president declared Mr. Jefferson an infinitely better man than you; one who, if president, would act wisely. He said he’d rather be vice president under Jefferson than indebted to you, a man who ruled George Washington, and would rule still if he could.”

  I understood what this meant, and chills raised gooseflesh on my arms. “John Adams is changing sides. He’s going to abandon the Federalists.”

  McHenry nodded. “You’re not the only one to think the president has cut a deal with Jefferson to save his own neck.”

  At that, Alexander abruptly rose from the table to pace behind the chairs and looked as if he wished to throw one of them out of our bow window into the street below. “The man is more mad than I ever thought him, which he just might force me to say.”

  I was inclined to agree. Adams was going to abandon us to the bloodthirsty clutches of the Republican mob, who blamed my husband for every unpopular act of his own administration. And, for the first time since the days of the revolution—the revolution of ’76—I began to consider that we might need to flee.

  McHenry did nothing to change my mind. “Certainly, the president spoke in ways to persuade me he’s actually insane.”

  “Very well, then.” Alexander drained his wineglass, as if for courage. “Then Federalist electors must withdraw their support of Adams for president. If we must have an enemy at the head of the government, let it be one we can oppose and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of foolish and bad measures.”

  I dismissed this as merely hot talk. No one could prefer that Jacobin, Thomas Jefferson, even to an insane John Adams. And I said as much to my husband later that night, in the darkness of our bed.

  His exhausted sigh crossed the space between us. “Mayhaps it makes no matter who becomes president, because four years from now I don’t expect to have a head still upon my shoulders. Unless it is at the head of a victorious army.”

  * * *

  December 1800

  New York City

  President Adams declared peace with France and dissolved the army. Too late to stave off his ignominious defeat at the polls.

  Nationwide, the presidential election was a tie.

  Not between Jefferson and Adams, whose erratic actions sealed his own fate. But a tie between Jefferson and Burr.

  The presidential candidate and the vice presidential candidate had, through a quirk of our system, received the same number of electoral votes. But the people plainly meant for Jefferson to be president and wished that Burr would simply accept the vice presidency as intended.

  I hoped for something else altogether. Because popular reason doesn’t always know how to act right, nor does it always act right when it knows. Fortunately, the choice would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where my husband’s Federalists reigned.

  Alexander would choose our new president. And in this, I sensed our salvation.

  Nearly laughing at the absurdity of Burr as president, I nevertheless felt a glorious relief. Burr was a trickster and a maker of chaos to be sure, but he was also a man we knew well. Burr might be a libertine, but he wasn’t a chilly zealot like Jefferson, musing about the desolation of the earth in the pursuit of liberty.

  In Burr, I felt certain we were to be delivered from our worst Jacobin nightmare of Jefferson unleashing the French Revolution on our shores.

  So I was both stunned and dismayed to find myself in a heated argument about it when I passed by Alexander’s study and overheard him telling our eldest son, “Upon every virtuous and prudent calculation, Jefferson is to be preferred over Burr.”

  Philip and I both gasped at the same time. “Jefferson?”

  Alexander scarcely looked up from his writing table. Perhaps he dared not look at us for fear he’d lose his nerve or his lunch. Rubbing at his kidney, which had troubled him recently with spasms, he said, “There is no fair reason to suppose Jefferson capable of being corrupted, whereas Burr is bankrupt beyond redemption. His private character is not defended even by his most partial friends.”

  That Burr was corruptible, I had no doubt. Everyone knew he was in debt. “That only means he can be bought,” I said. “And a man who can be bought can be bargained with.”

  Now my husband did look at me, his eyes widening, as if I’d sprouted two heads. I suppose he’d looked to me for moral direction only to find that I, too, had been compromised by this wicked world. “This is no time for saints, Alexander.”

  He shook his head and gathered his papers. “Nevertheless, Burr cannot be bargained with. Because no agreement with him could ever be relied upon.”

  Shamelessly, I blocked his exit. “Even so, you cannot prefer a radical theorist like Jefferson to Burr, a—a mere opportunist.”

  “Is it a recommendation to have no theory?” Alexander asked. “Can a man be an able statesman who has none? I believe not. Burr is far more cunning than wise, far more dexterous than able. In my opinion, he is inferior in real ability to Jefferson.”

  “As if ability matters,” I argued, in frank disbelief. “As if these were ordinary times and not ones in which you tell me you stand to lose your head!”

  It was exactly the wrong thing
to say, and I realized it even before my husband stiffened. I shouldn’t have appealed to his sense of self-preservation over the good of the nation. I was speaking, after all, to a man who’d been willing to fight and die for it. And I’d just questioned his willingness to do just that in the presence of our proud, patriotic son.

  Fortunately, and to my surprise, Philip was on my side. “Father, the country won’t survive Mr. Jefferson.”

  Alexander held up his hands to fend us both off. “I’m not an apologist for Jefferson. His politics are tinctured with fanaticism and he’s a contemptible hypocrite. But he’s vain. He isn’t zealot enough to do anything that will destroy his popularity or our union. By contrast, Burr will disturb our institutions to secure permanent power and wealth. He’s an American Cataline.”

  Cataline. Another accursed old Roman who’d plotted to overthrow the republic. I remembered perfectly well a time when Burr jested that the Constitution was nothing but a miserable paper machine, but I said, “You’re allowing your resentments to get the better of your reason.”

  After all, though Jefferson always seemed to loom large, he’d been gone from our daily lives a long time, whereas Alexander had more recently tangled with Burr, been embarrassed by Burr, and been bested by Burr. My husband was too proud now to let Burr win. But I was not that proud. “Give Burr what he wants and you might win him to the Federalist point of view.”

  “A groundless hope,” said my husband. “No, Burr is one of the worst men in the community. Sanguine enough to hope everything, daring enough to try everything, and wicked enough to scruple nothing. From the elevation of this man, may heaven preserve us!”

  Philip and I remained in mutinous disagreement. In fact, the argument in our household went on almost as long as it did in Congress, through thirty-five rounds of ballots. And while Congress debated, so did we. Upon waking and sleeping. At breakfast and dinner. Before church and after church. And never in my life did I see anyone hector Alexander more relentlessly, or effectively, than my son did that winter.

  While I sliced bread for the younger boys one morning after prayers, Philip argued, “By denying Jefferson the presidency and throwing support to Burr, we could split the Republican vote in the next election. The Federalists must support Burr.”

  Alexander might have made it out the door if he could have resisted an argument. But of course, he couldn’t. Another father—perhaps any other father—might’ve resented Philip’s arguments as the insolent yappings of a young pup. But Alexander was proud of our son’s political passion and afforded him the same respect he’d give any other man in a political argument.

  That is to say, he went on at length, ruthlessly smashing every argument Philip made, as if they were no more than a swarm of buzzing gnats.

  “There is no circumstance,” Alexander concluded, “not in the entire course of our political affairs, that has given me so much pain as the mere idea that Mr. Burr might be elevated to the presidency by the means of the Federalists. Jefferson is by far not so dangerous a man and he has, at least, pretensions to character. Let the people have their choice.”

  With this, Alexander looked to me, as if to applaud the superior merit of his argument, but I thought Philip had the right of it. That’s why I said, “We know Burr. He isn’t the sort of cold-blooded man who would murder his political enemies.”

  Oh, how it chills me now to remember the way Alexander replied, “He is precisely that cold-blooded.”

  Part Four

  The War for History

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Spring 1801

  Harlem

  IN A LITTLE rowboat upon the Hudson, the rising tide pushed us away from our old life toward the site of our new home, our place of respite, and of our exile . . .

  For Jefferson was the president. And there was nothing to do but survive the outcome.

  Alexander was never able to convince me, Philip, or his Federalist Party that Jefferson was for the best—but he’d managed to convince a single elector from Delaware to switch his vote, and that had been enough.

  I could only hope his gamble paid off—especially since Martha Washington called Jefferson’s election “the greatest misfortune our nation has ever experienced.”

  But since my husband had helped him win the election, we were cautiously optimistic that Jefferson would not seek reprisals against us for my husband’s long and vociferous political opposition.

  “There it is,” Alexander said as he rowed us to shore, his eyes shielded from the sun by a straw hat that looked nearly comical atop his general’s head. He nodded at a bucolic spot on a forested hilltop. I looked up, a glint of sunlight off the dark green water momentarily blinding me, then I saw it.

  Our new home upon this river along which I’d lived so much of my life. But unlike the Pastures or the little house at De Peyster’s Point or our rented town houses, this home was ours.

  Thirty-five acres. Barns, sheds, stables, gardens, orchards, chicken houses, duck ponds, and all.

  The existing little farmhouse was to be replaced by a much grander mansion that my husband wished to call the Grange, after the lands of his supposed noble ancestor in Scotland. And Alexander was trying to turn a mind long attuned to the architecture of government to the simpler architecture of a house. “What say you about black marble for our fireplaces?”

  As we floated pleasantly along the muddy shoreline, alone together for the first time in a while, I smiled. “I say marble will be beautiful, but expensive.”

  “I’ll take on new clients,” he replied. “Besides, your father is giving me timber. And what price is too great to pay for pure and unalloyed happiness with my excellent wife and sweet children?”

  I wasn’t sure my husband could be happy away from the bustle of the city, where all the most important decisions were made. But now that Jefferson’s Jacobins had come to power—and my husband had decided to start a newspaper to point out their follies—it behooved us to get some small distance away from the inevitable riots and enraged mobs.

  “I think I prefer white,” I decided. “Italian marble. Roman, if you will.”

  “Then you will have it.” He laughed, leaning forward so that our knees touched inside the little dinghy. “For it has always been my creed that a lady’s pleasure is of more importance than a gentleman’s.”

  And thereupon we lost an hour to conduct that surely scandalized the fishes.

  Having run our little boat aground, Alexander laced up his breeches. Where his hat went, we didn’t know or care. “If this is how we’re to spend our days in the country,” he said, “I believe I shall quite enjoy the leisurely life of a gentleman farmer . . .”

  Rearranging my petticoats, all soaked with river water at the hem, I blushed like a girl half my age. “You won’t think it’s so leisurely when you must plow a field or feed the animals and slaughter pigs for dinner. There are no patisseries or coffeehouses for miles.”

  “Ah, my belle of the frontier,” he teased. “I shall have to take instruction from you. For I am as unfit for my new role as country farmer as Jefferson is to guide the helm of the United States.”

  Then perhaps you shouldn’t have handed him the presidency, I wanted to say, but I was in far too good a humor to spoil the moment. So instead I said, “It’s peaceful here. It will be good for the children. Especially Ana.” Our daughter never fully recovered from the loss of Fanny from our household. She’d seem better for a time but lapse again into strange tempers. My husband tried to assure me this was quite normal for a girl of sixteen, and having been a girl of sixteen, I saw his point. “Perhaps here, in the country, she can have a pet.”

  “What’s wrong with our hunting dog?” Hamilton asked.

  “She’s your dog. Ana needs something pretty to cuddle. Perhaps a ginger tomcat,” I said, playfully ruffling his hair, which was much less ginger now. “Mine did wonders for me . . .”

  He gaped, as if both simultaneously offended that I should liken him to a pet, and also ma
rveling that I could jest about such a thing.

  But we’d come far enough that I could.

  “I worry more for Philip,” my husband said.

  “Philip?” Our eldest was the only one of our children I didn’t worry about. He’d grown from a sunny child into a charming young man of nineteen who could talk his way out of nearly anything. Just like his father.

  “If he wants a career in the law, he needs to more seriously apply himself to his studies,” Alexander grumbled, like a curmudgeon. “Without the distractions of the city.” Without the young ladies of the city, I thought, and nearly laughed. But my husband added, “I don’t entirely approve of his friends. I think they’re gamblers and hooligans and mischief makers.”

  “At least they’re not Republicans,” I said.

  That broke the clouds over my husband’s brow as he chuckled.

  In the days and weeks that followed Jefferson’s inauguration, we settled into the farmhouse at the Grange. And Alexander did take more clients. Which meant traveling, during the week, at least three hours a day to his office in lower Manhattan. Then there were the trips to court in Poughkeepsie. And I was reminded of our early marriage, when he was so often gone with the city’s gaggle of young lawyers riding in stagecoaches with circuit judges.

  While packing his satchel for a journey upstate, he said, “Don’t overtax yourself with the garden or with getting cedar shingles upon the ice house.” Grabbing up his hat, then remembering his coat, he added, “Leave to Philip what you cannot accomplish yourself.”

  Poor Philip. More comfortable in velvet coat, tailored trousers, and starched shirt collar turned up fashionably around his cravat than he was in a hunter’s shirt and breeches, he preferred life in the city, studying his law books, and debating politics with his friends in the taverns. But Philip understood how important it was that we embrace our new situation with good cheer, so he didn’t balk at working on the farm with his younger brothers.

  I wished I could’ve said the same for Ana, who complained that the farmhouse was too dark. Too crowded. And the night she heard the howl of a wolf, she whimpered with fright as if she were a much younger child. For a wolf to cause such fright! At her age, I was more terrified of Mohawk scalping parties. Her fears kept her inside, laboring beside me in the sooty old kitchen. At least until her father came into the kitchen, satchel in hand, making ready to kiss us good-bye.