My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

  “He was planting thirteen sweet gum trees this morning—one for each of the original colonies. I’m not sure what he’s doing now.”

  “A garden is a very usual refuge of a disappointed politician,” he explained a few minutes later when we went outside to show him the news.

  For Angelica had been right. There was something we didn’t already know.

  That indecent creature, that reptile Callender, had been paid to destroy us.

  “Thirteen years ago, Jefferson hired him to print seditious libels,” I said, indignantly shaking the page before Alexander’s eyes. I wasn’t sure if we should frame it, set it afire, or bury it as fertilizer in the garden. But what I was sure of was that we’d been vindicated. “All those years ago, Jefferson paid Callender to write that Washington was a traitor, a robber, and a perjurer. Paid him to print foul slanders against President Adams and against you.”

  Dark eyes flashing, Angelica added, “And now that Jefferson is president, and won’t pay anymore, the serpent turns and bites the hand that fed him.”

  Alexander had always suspected as much but now seemed taken aback by our vehemence and heaved a great sigh. “We live in a world full of evil.”

  I blinked. That was all he had to say about it? The man who’d once designed governments had set his mind on our farm, deciding the ground of our orchard was too wet, that we must have grass, that we must plant watermelons, and that our cows must not be allowed to range.

  We’d kept our heads ducked since Jefferson took the presidency, and what had our reward been? A dead son. Our fears of guillotines in the streets were not realized—my husband had, perhaps, been right to believe Jefferson a more cautious man than I had supposed—but if we were going to live in this country, if we were going to remain vulnerable to his rabid followers, then I did not think we should passively endure it.

  And, truthfully, anger felt so much better than grief. “Alexander, you gave Jefferson the presidency. You and that horrific clause in the Constitution that allows slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation. Jefferson would have never been elected otherwise, and now he disgraces the place he unjustly fills and produces immorality by his example. If this bit about the scandalmonger is true, Jefferson must be abominably wicked and weak. I think you have a duty to the Constitution—”

  “Perhaps no man has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself,” Alexander said, bracing his hands upon the shovel’s pole. “I’ve labored to prop the frail and worthless fabric in spite of all my predictions that it will fail. Yet I have the murmurs of its friends no less than the curses of its foes for reward. Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me. What can I do better than withdraw?”

  I hated to see him in surrender. I’d married, after all, a soldier. A hero. Not a sad, fatalistic man, but a fractious firebrand. And I wanted him back.

  I wanted the Alexander I’d always known and loved.

  Later, when my sister went inside to fetch us cider, I told him, “You must engage the world again.”

  “I never stopped,” he protested, reminding me of the near-daily eighteen-mile round-trips he made to his new office on Garden Street in town. “My practice of law remains a vigorous undertaking.”

  But the cases he handled now were only of the mundane variety and of no great import. The kind that didn’t tax his talents or set precedents. He had, of course, almost as if in a compulsion, never stopped writing essays. Amongst them, the Examination, which tore apart all President Jefferson’s policies. And he had, at my repeated urging, finally assisted with the publication of a newly bound collection of The Federalist. But when our peg-legged friend, Mr. Morris, pleaded with Alexander to take a more active role—perhaps even to run for political office—my husband refused. And I’d been glad.

  But now I thought I’d been wrong. For all the years I’d complained of it, the squalid brawling of the public arena was part of Hamilton’s makeup, like hair, teeth, or bones. So I said, “I think you should defend the Federalist newspaperman Jefferson is now trying to imprison under the sedition laws he claimed to hate. And Papa agrees.” Out of a desire to shield my husband’s vulnerabilities from other eyes—any other eyes—I’d waited for Angelica’s departure to lobby for this idea, but I’d set my sister on him, too, if need be.

  Alexander laughed. “You want me to battle President Jefferson. In a courtroom.”

  I glared at him for laughing. “Someone has to.” When I was younger, I often asked why it couldn’t be someone else. Why did it always have to be Alexander Hamilton to jump into the fray? And I’d complained, on more than one occasion, of his obsessive need to be at the center of history in the making.

  I resolved now to never complain of it again.

  At my insistence, Alexander relented and took the case against the newspaperman who’d been brave enough to reveal that Jefferson had paid James Callender to print slanders against all manner of public and private men. The case hinged on two constitutional issues: freedom of the press and trial by jury.

  Alexander also, to my chagrin, waived the fee.

  But I didn’t mind so much when I saw our older boys gathered around their father as he explained his plan to establish a constitutional principle that truth must always be a defense against charges of slander and libel. And I could see that our boys all adored their father and wished to follow in his footsteps. Especially when he confided in them his intention to subpoena President Jefferson himself and confront him with testimony by the infamous James Callender . . .

  But on the morning I lined up our boys outside the courtroom in their Sunday best to listen to their father argue the case, Alexander whispered with a colleague, then sat down hard on the steps where I knelt, tying Johnny’s cravat, which he’d pulled loose again. “He’s dead,” Hamilton said, removing his top hat and holding it as if he’d never seen it before.

  “Who?” I asked, alarmed by my husband’s sudden gray pallor.

  “Callender,” he said. “Drowned, they say.”

  Before Alexander could transport Callender to the courtroom to give testimony that would have harmed the president, the scoundrel was found dead, floating in the James River near Richmond. Some said a victim of his own drunken excesses. Others said he’d been murdered to keep him quiet.

  And it was as sobering a reminder of how deadly politics could be.

  Alexander wasn’t permitted to subpoena the president. And he lost the trial. Regardless, my husband made an argument that moved men to tears—his voice thundering in the courtroom while he paced like the revolutionary lion he had once been, the spark of a young firebrand still flashing in his eyes and setting my heart aflame.

  Later, all the city’s leaders praised it as one of his greatest speeches. Perhaps his greatest. And I was so glad my boys were in attendance when Hamilton concluded his remarks by saying, “I never did think the truth was a crime. I’m glad the day has come in which it is to be decided. For my soul has ever abhorred the thought that a free man dare not speak the truth.”

  And that, I thought with inordinate pride, is Alexander Hamilton.

  That was who the history books should remember.

  Yet, now I think, in the end, it wasn’t my pride in him, or the trial, or his opposition to Jefferson’s presidency that brought him back to himself.

  It was Aaron Burr.

  * * *

  You have attributed to Burr the most atrocious and unprincipled of crimes. If he has not called upon you, he is either guilty, or the most despicable bastard in the universe, so degraded as to permit even General Hamilton to slander him with impunity.

  —JAMES CHEETHAM, EDITOR OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN

  Burr was a man without a party.

  By contesting the tie election in 1800, he’d gambled and lost. Jefferson despised him. He was vice president in name only. So, naturally, he was now running for governor of New York. And he was doing it against his fellow Re
publican—Morgan Lewis, the trial judge Alexander had argued before in the libel case—in a move that split that party in two.

  “Burr can’t win,” I said, nearly laughing at the preposterousness of it. Burr was universally detested as a lecher and an immoral cheat, even by those who’d voted for him.

  “Eliza,” my husband said, with an impatient tone he used only when a law clerk was slow to understand him. “Not a single Federalist has come forward to run against either of them.”

  That was the state of our party’s demoralization, given the mud that would inevitably be slung at anyone who dared to serve an ungrateful public. Perhaps democracy would always naturally devolve to a state when only a man like Burr—a greedy libertine without any care for what the world might say about him—would stand for election. For what gentleman could ever wish to expose his wife and children to the calumnies that had been visited upon us?

  “Do you mean to run for the governorship?” I asked, upon a hard swallow, bracing myself to support him wholeheartedly if he were to say yes.

  But Alexander barked a laugh. “And damn the state, if not the whole country, when I lose? No. You’ve seen how people greet me at polling stations.”

  Reluctantly, I admitted, “You have, perhaps, a character too frank and independent for a democratic people. At least in the present climate.”

  “Unfortunately, my angel, you have the right of it. But something must be done.” He shook his head and thumped his hand on the table.

  In the days that followed, it became increasingly clear that Alexander was right. Something must be done. Because Burr wasn’t merely running for governor, he was also encouraging a new movement in northern states angered by Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory. Northerners feared that the new lands would favor slavery. And their solution was secession.

  “Burr won’t be satisfied until he breaks this union.” Alexander raged inside the little room by the front door that he’d commandeered as his office and painted an incongruously cheerful shade of green. “How quickly people forget all that for which we fought!”

  Even though I feared he’d disturb Ana where she sat peacefully stitching a pillow, or awaken the baby upstairs in the nursery, I was pleased to see that leonine spark return to his eye. It was as if he believed himself, again, a winter soldier, fighting frightening odds in a war for the country itself. “Which is why you must remind them by recruiting a Federalist to run against Burr.”

  So we hosted a dinner party. A lavish one, where, having banished the children upstairs, we threw open the doors and hired musicians to play on the grounds. We accepted the compliments of everyone as they entered the front hall and saw the elegant painting of Washington and the bust of Alexander when he was secretary of the treasury, carved in the style of a Roman senator.

  I worked the men’s wives, trying to detect if any of their husbands should be willing to stand as a candidate for governor. And Angelica, still beguiling in a gown of blue satin with a golden belt, embroidered in the pattern of a Greek key, tried to recruit promising men to the cause.

  Amidst the clink of glasses and forks upon my pink and yellow floral china plates, I overheard my husband say to his old faithful Federalist lieutenants, “For God’s sake, cease these threats about a separation in the Union. It must hang together as long as it can be made to!”

  If Burr got in, there’d be no more United States, he believed. Just North and South. But still no Federalist would run, leaving Alexander with an unthinkable alternative. Once again, he’d have to champion a Republican. First Jefferson. Now Morgan Lewis.

  Finally, he set his mind to do just that, and the campaign against Aaron Burr began in deadly earnest. Alexander made speeches against Burr, held forth at dinner parties, and used whatever sway he still possessed to argue against Burr’s candidacy. As if, unable to save our son, Alexander became determined to at least save the union.

  The newspapers joined in, accusing Burr of all manner of disgraceful debauchery—consorting with prostitutes and other men’s wives, seducing fine ladies and enslaved women alike, fathering bastards, and even hosting a Negro ball to court the free black vote. Alexander was not responsible for the calumny thrown Burr’s way, but many suspected him of it—and they were entertained.

  But the newspapers were in earnest with their blood sport.

  Our son Alex had seldom shown interest in politics—that had been his older brother’s fiefdom. Alex was now nearing college graduation, and because he had a head for numbers like his grandfather, we wished to place him in a countinghouse to be a merchant. He already had an offer to work in Boston after his graduation, which pleased my mother’s pride. But now his brow furrowed. “The papers are trying to goad Father and Colonel Burr to fight.”

  I took the papers from him. “Worry not. Your father is too wise now to be lured into such a trap.”

  * * *

  May 1804

  Harlem

  Burr lost the governorship by a great majority, which gave my husband satisfaction. He’d worried that he was washed up, helpless, and without any influence in the country he helped found. This victory proved otherwise, for Hamilton’s campaigning had ensured Burr’s defeat.

  To celebrate, we took our children to the now raucous Pinkster festival in the city, where we mingled amongst our black citizens with a measure of gratification that though more must be done to achieve the freedom of all, every child born in New York was now born free.

  We also hosted a dinner party for Jérôme Bonaparte, a nineteen-year-old naval officer of middling rank who currently stood in defiance of his conquering brother, Napoleon.

  Against the wishes of the French dictator, Jérôme had married an American girl, Elizabeth Patterson, the Belle of Baltimore as some called her. And presented with the opportunity to make mischief for the French tyrant by befriending his willful younger brother, Alexander was delighted, laughing and conversing in French, and telling stories of the Marquis de Lafayette that kept young Bonaparte rapt. Hamilton toasted old friends and new with a case of Papa’s fine Madeira we’d had shipped from Albany for the occasion. And being the gracious and solicitous host who greeted every guest by name, he recalled with each one a fond memory of how they’d met or some battle they’d fought.

  Watching Alexander entertain, I took my first deep, easy breath in as long as I could remember. Was that happiness that had finally crept back after the losses of recent years?

  As the season turned and the weather warmed, I was struck by a new mildness in my dear Hamilton and was sure that he felt it, too. A peacefulness, even. Our victory over Burr had imparted to Alexander an eased mind and a lightened heart. Why, at the annual Fourth of July celebration of the Society of the Cincinnati, my nearly fifty-year-old husband led the men in singing old songs while standing atop a table!

  But spending time with other sons of the revolution, recalling all that they’d sacrificed and all that we’d won, had always had a salutary effect upon him. Which was why, when he proposed that we host a lavish ball at the Grange and produced a guest list of over seventy people, I could only find myself delighted.

  “I promised you a ball, my darling girl,” he said. “And a promise must never be broken.”

  Excited by the prospect of such a grand affair—much grander than any entertainment we’d hosted before—I didn’t mind the work involved, even with two-year-old Phil, four-year-old Lysbet, and six-year-old William underfoot. Happily, in that, Ana was a help, directing them in making garlands of silk ribbon, rosebuds, marigolds, and day lilies snipped fresh from our gardens. Ana might not remember what year it was or which of her relations dwelt in this world or the next, but she was still my beloved daughter, and she had a sweet, attentive way with the little ones. Meanwhile, having taken their height from their grandfather, our tall Alex, James, and Johnny strung the garlands between the house and the trees, and carried chairs out of doors because their father wished this ball to be alfresco in the French fête champêtre style.r />
  The help of my darlings, and a French servant Angelica sent for the occasion, freed me to see to the menu with the assistance of our inestimable Mr. Genti, whose cooking using the produce of our garden always brought the highest praise. I anticipated raspberry tarts and fresh strawberry jam shortbread cookies, and the children wished to make their father a cherry pie, so I made sure Mr. Genti included it on the menu.

  My gown for the occasion was an oyster-colored silk satin, with an embroidered bodice and hem in a leaf design and a beaded overskirt, an extravagant purchase Alexander insisted upon.

  How many years had passed since I last dressed in such finery? I couldn’t recall. And examining myself in the mirror of my toilette, I found myself pleased. Bearing eight children had not spoiled my figure entirely. At the age of forty-six, and having nursed eight children, my breasts had lost their shape and my hips were wider than I would have liked. But my waist was still slender and my hair was only a little silvered. If I were to have met the woman in the mirror as a stranger, I might think her dignified and handsome.

  As I gazed at my image, Alexander stole upon me to fasten my necklace. “Best of wives and best of women,” he whispered, kissing my nape below the graying-brown curls of my upswept hair. “As beautiful as the day we met. At a different ball, as I recall it . . .”

  I turned in his arms and smoothed my hands over the lapels of his pinstriped silk taffeta dress coat. “And you, even more charming now. You were, after all, a little insufferable in those days.”

  He laughed, leaning his forehead against mine. “How I love you and our precious children.” Oh, to still have this tender affection between us after all these years. There was a serenity about him as he held out his arm. “Come, let us join the revelry.”

  And what a gay revelry it was!

  The late-day air was perfect—warm without being hot, breezy and refreshing for strolls through our gardens. Wandering musicians delighted our guests, a special touch upon which Alexander had insisted. When the sun set, lanterns and flowers hung from the trees, creating a colorful, fragrant ballroom under the purple heavens.