It was not God who took my son from me.
It was a Jeffersonian.
Captain George Eacker, the violent Jacobin we saw ranting against my husband on the Fourth of July. Having come across the man at a playhouse, my son and a friend had confronted him. Captain Eacker had grabbed my son by the collar and called him a rascal. Rascal. A word which, when spoken by one gentleman to another, demanded bloodshed.
“Eliza,” Alexander now whispered, his hand upon my elbow, offering to help me rise.
I startled to realize that we were alone in the church. How long I’d knelt in desperate prayer amidst wooden benches and the scent of incense, I didn’t know. How long my husband had prayed beside me, I didn’t know either.
It seemed I didn’t know anything. I’d been at the Grange while my son negotiated his affair of honor. Blissfully unaware. But Alexander had been at his law office in the city.
Still on my knees, I peered at him. “Did you know?”
Hamilton swallowed and shook his head. He didn’t need to be told what I was asking. “Philip went to his uncle for advice.”
And for those pistols, I thought, bitterly. Philip should have come to us. I’d made plain my Christian opposition to dueling. Every parson and priest in the country decried duels. Even Alexander had issued a memo to curb the practice when he was general of the army.
But my son hadn’t come to us. He’d gone to his rich, swaggering uncle with his shining dueling pistols and a reputation for deadly aim.
No, no, no, I screamed inside my head. Bad enough that my son had involved himself in a duel that took his life. So much worse that he’d been the one to make the unholy challenge. I didn’t have to ask why. Church—our family expert on dueling—would have told my son that he couldn’t let an insult stand. Church would have told him he hadn’t any choice when it came to honor.
But what the devil did John Barker Church know about honor? He’d been born with it. He had the luxury as a young man to cast off a name and put it back on again as the circumstances suited him. He’d never had to scrape and claw to prove his worth.
Not like my husband, who took my hand in his trembling one, and tearfully said, “I learned of it only after Philip had issued the challenge.”
I gasped. Then he had known. He’d known before the deed had been done.
With desolate eyes, Alexander continued. “You must believe I tried to set him right. I told Philip it was ill-mannered to accost a man in the middle of a play and that he must apologize. I told him he wouldn’t want this man’s blood on his hands. I thought that would end the matter. I thought . . .” My husband’s head dropped. “Next I heard, the apology hadn’t been accepted and Philip was already rowing across the river to the dueling place. There was no time to do anything but race to find a doctor . . .” His voice broke off then, as if he could say no more. And yet, he did. “Why couldn’t I stop this from happening? I’ve stopped armies but I couldn’t stop a duel.”
My anger ebbed at the sight of his anguish. In its place, regret and pity rushed in for a father unable to save his son. My husband had led troops, advised a president, and built a nation, but he’d been powerless in that moment when it mattered most.
And now, from that prodigious mind, always spinning with plans and schemes, came an eerie vacancy. From that eloquent mouth, always arguing, proposing, and teasing, came a humbled silence. From those tireless hands, constantly scribbling out letters and essays and proposals, came only stillness.
And so, together, we were both vacant, silent, and still.
Our boy was dead. Dead for his own hubris, having initiated both a confrontation and a duel. I thought we’d taught him better. And it poured more sorrow into the bitter cup from which I was now forced to drink. All I had for consolation was the knowledge that he’d stood brave on that field, and that he hadn’t taken a life. Instead, he’d let a villain shoot him so he could keep his honor.
* * *
Never did I see a man so completely overwhelmed with grief as Hamilton has been.
—ROBERT TROUP
Winter 1801
Albany
“When is Philip coming home?”
The question came in the middle of the night, spoken by my seventeen-year-old daughter with a lantern in her hand. Disoriented and blinking against sleep, I was actually convinced for a moment that we’d come to the Pastures ahead of my eldest son. That he’d caught the next sloop, and would be with us by dawn. Then the crushing reality overtook me with all its accompanying heartbreak.
We’d buried Philip in the yard of Trinity Church, where, in dropping a handful of dirt onto our son’s casket in farewell, Hamilton faltered and was kept upright only by our friends. That was weeks ago. Since then, Papa had sent a coach to fetch us to Albany where he might care for us himself. In truth, I think it eased his own grief in the loss of Mama to tend us in our grief for Philip, a grief which Papa of course shared and, as a father who himself had survived several of his children, one which he understood.
But even as Alexander and I struggled to pull ourselves from bed and force small morsels of food down our throats, Ana now seemed to be caught in some blissful waking dream in which she believed Philip was still very much alive.
Throwing the blankets aside, Alexander rose from the bed to embrace her. “Philip has gone to heaven, my darling girl. A haven of eternal repose and felicity.”
Ana’s expression crumpled. “No. He’s only gone riding just this morning. I made a pie for his breakfast. Remember?”
She didn’t know where we were. She didn’t know when we were. She didn’t remember that Philip was dead. Truly, she didn’t. So for the next hour, she sat on our bed and asked question after question about how Philip died, her grief as fresh and raw as if she was reliving the nightmare.
And we lived it all again with her.
Worrying for my health and that of our unborn baby, Alexander insisted I go back to sleep and led Ana out of the room. But I awakened to the sound of splashing water in the upstairs hall, my daughter singing with her aunt Angelica. In coming with us to the Pastures, my sister had left her own husband and children behind to offer comfort to mine; now I found that Angelica had Ana in a copper tub and was brushing her hair as if she were still a very little girl. “You’ll feel better soon, my darling. Especially after a fresh, clean bath.”
“But when is Philip coming home?” Ana asked, and I put a hand to my mouth, grateful for my sister’s help and wondering how many times I would have to remind my daughter that Philip was dead.
Standing beside me, his face strongly stamped with grief, eyes downcast, as if staring into a bottomless pit of despair, my husband put a hand on my shoulder. “Let her believe whatever she must. Her mind has become disordered by the wound. We must let it heal.”
The disordering wasn’t entirely new or caused only by this wound. Now I saw Ana’s distress when Fanny had been taken from us in a new light. The depth and intensity of my daughter’s confusion was so much worse now than it was then, and in my grief and despair, it was terrifying. But because I felt as if my own mind had become disordered by the wound of Philip’s loss, I could scarcely gainsay my husband. None of us would.
My father—my beloved, devoted, kind father—tread as if upon the shells of eggs trying to comfort us. And my siblings followed his example.
Only Angelica, over a melancholy Christmas breakfast, was brave enough to venture, “Do you not think we should summon a physician for Ana—?”
“I’ll not have my daughter locked up in an asylum,” Alexander interrupted.
He said this quietly, but with such resounding authority, it stunned us all into silence. Plainly stung by his tone, if not the injustice of the accusation, Angelica sat up straighter. “Why, my dear brother, I’m only suggesting that a doctor examine her.”
Alexander didn’t answer, and his silence on the matter scared me more. For he was rarely silent on anything, and it meant he was scared, too. Instead, he cared for Ana with saintly fortitude�
�singing with her at the piano and taking her for walks to watch for the birds she loved so well—but she got no better. And I feared my husband took too much pleasure sharing that fantasy in which she dwelt, where Philip was alive, rather than the reality we faced together without him.
At the turn of the new year, I found Alexander in my father’s blue parlor. The very place we married, with the same snowy view of the river. That day, I’d been so hopeful, but it all seemed hopeless now. “Are you certain we shouldn’t send for the doctor—”
“They’ll lock her away.” Hamilton folded his arms as he stared out at the frozen river. He seemed so very far from me, and his hair had turned snowy as if overnight.
“We won’t permit it,” I reassured him, confused by what seemed an irrational response from an otherwise rational man. “We could choose a trusted doctor. Any you prefer; we could write Dr. Stevens, or Dr. Rush, or—”
“They locked up my mother. I will never let it happen to Ana.”
They jailed your mother for adultery, I thought. Not a disordered mind. Why should he be so fearful? No one would do anything to Alexander Hamilton’s daughter without his consent. He was no longer a helpless, penniless boy in the West Indies. He’d commanded armies. A nation.
He could protect his daughter. But perhaps he didn’t believe it, because he hadn’t been able to protect our son. And I didn’t broach it again, because I felt as if suspended on the thinnest ice, afraid to make the smallest misstep.
Lest we all should fall.
* * *
May the loss of one be compensated by another Philip. May his virtues emulate those which graced his brother, and may he be a comfort to his tender parents.
—GENERAL PHILIP SCHUYLER TO HIS DAUGHTER ELIZABETH HAMILTON
June 1802
Harlem
Flowers again. Yellow daffodils. Purple hyacinths. Red tulips. Then Pinkster azaleas when the weather turned warmer.
In the days before and after Little Phil’s birth, my husband filled my room with a rainbow of blossoms—my new room, in the house he built for me at the Grange, with its delicate fanlight in the entryway, the extravagance of eight fireplaces, and the mirrored doors of our octagonal dining room that could be thrown open to the parlor to form a rather grand ballroom.
Though I couldn’t imagine we might ever host a ball.
“We will, my angel,” Alexander vowed, laying a bouquet of fiery lilies across the bed. “That I promise. And a promise must never be broken . . .”
He treated me now as if I were quite a fragile thing. As fragile as our newborn babe. As fragile as our poor unfortunate daughter, whose mind remained disordered.
And, oh, the money he spent trying to make us all happy again.
He spared no expense in the marble Doric columns, verandas, and bay windows. Walnut side-chairs, silver oil lamps, and gilded mirrors. Wages for Mr. and Mrs. Genti, the couple he hired to serve as our cook and housekeeper. Then there were books and smart suits for our boys—especially our auburn-haired Alex, who found himself now, at sixteen, in the position of the eldest son with all its expectations. And there were little parakeets for Ana, who seemed to grow younger every day.
“She only needs tenderness and attention,” Alexander reassured me as we took a summer stroll together on the sylvan grounds. “She will recover in time.”
“And if she does not?” I asked, quietly.
For a long moment, he didn’t respond. So long that I feared he might not at all. “Then we will care for her here at the Grange where she cannot be exposed to the cruelty of onlookers.”
I nodded, for it was the thing I loved best about the Grange. It was far from prying eyes. It was a refuge. If ever we might be healed of our loss, it would be here. And yet, our boys must have their schooling. “But how will Alex and James and—”
“I’ll take them with me into the city during the week,” Alexander said. “I’ll stay with them while you and Ana and the littlest ones remain here so that none of them will ever be without one parent or another.”
It would be a terrible sacrifice to be apart from my husband half the week. But I, too, feared for any of them to be alone.
Alexander was with the children every day, sometimes even leading them in prayer. He’d never expressed any liturgical curiosity, but now he sought out the friendship of Reverend Mason, the Federalist pastor of the Scotch Presbyterian Church near our rented house on Cedar Street. And my husband prayed, before sleep and upon rising, scribbling notes into the margins of the Bible. So I was not surprised to hear him say, “Someday, I will build a chapel for the children. Right here, in our very own grove.”
For him to come more fully to God had always been my hope. But there seemed to me something sinister in it now, as if, despairing of this world, he pined for another. And I remembered another time when my husband had cared for me while hiding that he himself was falling to pieces.
What I wanted now was for us to take care of one another.
I didn’t feel as if I could ever be compensated for the loss of my son, but with another babe at the breast, I felt powerfully reminded of the sacred obligations Alexander and I had undertaken in starting a family. Our children deserved from us a celebration of life. And so I said simply, “You must forgive yourself.”
My husband took a breath, as if my words had cut him, then glanced off at some fixed spot on the horizon. “Philip needed me. And yet, I failed him as surely as my own father failed me.”
“No. You were his hero.”
“A hero?” Alexander laughed bitterly, pressing his back against the trunk of a tree, lost in a hell of self-recrimination. “I once fancied myself powerful. What has become of my arrogance now? How humble, how helpless, how contemptible I am. A vile worm. A presumptuous fool to offend God, whose nod alone was sufficient to crush us into pieces.”
So he believed Philip’s death to be some manner of divine punishment. “No man or woman is righteous, Alexander. Not even one. A merciful God forgives. He doesn’t visit the sins of the father upon the son.”
Alexander straightened up from the tree and walked for the fence, as if he meant to escape me, his torment, or both. “Our boy died defending my name.”
Yes, he did. And I knew that at Philip’s age, if I could have, I’d have done the same. I’d have dueled for my father’s honor, too. Semper Fidelis. It was in our Schuyler blood. And it was the first, most important lesson I ever taught him. “You gave him a name worth defending. A name in which to take pride and solace and the shape of his character,” I said, reaching for my husband. “You gave him that. You gave him what you never had. And you gave me your name, too. If Philip died for a name, it was for our name—”
“Eliza,” Alexander interrupted, as if to fend me off, one hand to his eyes to shield me from seeing the tears gathering there.
But I would not be fended off. “You were alone as a child, but Philip never was. Not a moment of his entire life did he feel abandoned or unloved. That’s why he loved to laugh—”
“He died because of me.”
“He died because a Jacobin murdered him,” I replied, with complete conviction. My son hadn’t been the only one to quarrel with George Eacker, after all. One of Philip’s friends had also been caught up in the same incident. Captain Eacker let that other boy—the son of nobody in particular—go unharmed.
But he shot the son of Alexander Hamilton. He shot Philip dead.
He would never face justice for it. In Jefferson’s America, he’d be applauded. We had long feared the blade of a guillotine, but a bullet had done the job just as well.
“I need you,” I said, and Alexander came at once to my embrace.
“Then you shall have me. Wife, children, and hobby are the only things upon which I permit my thoughts to run. Because I need you as well, my dear Eliza. More than you shall ever understand.”
We stood there, holding one another in love and mutual comfort until our hearts beat in time. And I wish I could say that was the en
d of it. That, with those words, with that embrace, with that understanding, we healed each other’s wounds.
But any parent who has lost a child will tell you that grief is a monster less vanquished than held at bay. That, like love, survival is a choice to be made anew every morning, and sometimes one must pretend at being healed just to get through the day.
Alas, my husband was not a man who could comfortably pretend at anything . . .
Chapter Thirty-Four
The African Venus is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.
—JAMES CALLENDER
September 1802
Harlem
HAVE YOU SEEN this?” Angelica cried, bursting into our house with a stack of newspapers. I knew it must be important for her to have made the trip from the city, especially when she didn’t bother to remove her coat or hat before racing into the parlor. My stomach knotted the moment she lay the papers before me because they were copies of the Richmond Recorder, where that despicable scandalmonger, James Callender, plied his vicious trade.
How many years had he hounded us? How cruelly he’d aimed his poison pen at my family in exposing the Reynolds Affair. And even though Angelica’s expression was peculiar—something between fury and glee—I told myself that I mustn’t be surprised by the depths to which the papers might sink to hurt us now.
But I was surprised.
For the article was not aimed at us, but at Thomas Jefferson, the president of the United States, who, it breathlessly revealed to the world, had for many years kept an enslaved woman for his mistress.
We’d known this, of course. Given my sister’s intimacy with Jefferson, she was privy to a number of his secret liaisons, including one with this enslaved mulatto, Sally Hemings—and whispers said she was the half-sister of his dead wife, besides.
I took some petty satisfaction that Jefferson might suffer for this, but it was all very unseemly and uncomfortable to see anyone’s intimate life splashed across the papers again. When I said as much, Angelica shook her head. “Keep reading. Where is Hamilton?” She went to the tall windows overlooking the veranda and squinted. “What the devil is he doing out there in the dirt?”
My Dear Hamilton Page 46
