My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

  Angelica cleared her throat. “Private asylums can provide the appropriate environment. She’ll be offered exercise, work, education, religious instruction.”

  I nodded, having read the work of Dr. Rush and others emphasizing humane treatment to those with disordered minds instead of restraint, exorcism, and punishment.

  How had it come to this? With a shiver, I admitted, “She could have killed Little Phil today.”

  “Yes. And she might succeed next time.”

  Next time. As much as I wanted to deny it, I knew there would be a next time. “But . . . she wasn’t aware, she didn’t know. It’s not her fault,” I managed, a knot in my throat. “She was always such a sweet girl before. You remember, don’t you? She was—”

  “I remember,” Angelica said. “And of course it’s not her fault. It’s not yours, either. Even if you kept watch over her every moment of every day, you couldn’t make her better. And your other children would suffer from your inattention. To say nothing of the burden on young Alex.”

  My eldest surviving son had taken up the practice of law to help support the family and felt the burden keenly. To add another worry upon his still slender shoulders . . .

  “You must make the only choice a loving mother can,” my sister concluded.

  I swallowed hard. “How do I . . . ?”

  Angelica pulled me into her embrace before I could sob. “Let me make the arrangements.”

  And she did.

  It was snowing when the doctor arrived a few mornings later to take my daughter to what Angelica assured me was a reputable private asylum about ten miles away, with bucolic views of forests, fields, and the East River. My sister had even arranged for Ana to have a new piano there—for Ana still played, singing the same songs—and only the songs—she’d sung before Philip died.

  To my surprise, Ana was amenable to going, assuming the doctor was a coachman meant to take her to visit her grandfather, as she’d done so many times before. I gathered my coat to join them, but the doctor held up his hand. “Madam. We find it is less disturbing to the patients to avoid upsetting parting scenes with family.”

  I froze at the threshold and gazed out at the carriage where my daughter already waited. “Oh,” I said, hollowly.

  “You can visit,” he reassured me. “When she’s settled. Certainly, you’ll want to visit.”

  “Yes,” I said. “As soon as possible.”

  The doctor smiled and doffed his cap.

  Meanwhile, I looked past him to my beautiful Ana, who would continue to age, but never grow old. My eyes saw her alive, but my heart felt like I was losing another child. I was losing another child. And heartbroken against relentless losses, I just stood there, numb against the cold, watching until I could no longer see my daughter’s retreating carriage.

  * * *

  March 1805

  New York City

  They wept for Aaron Burr.

  The story made all the papers. Far from shunning a man indicted for murder in two states, Jefferson invited Burr to dine at the president’s mansion. But then perhaps sensing that Burr could be of no further use to him in his second term, Jefferson replaced him as vice president. Thus, in Burr’s farewell address on the floor of the Senate chamber, he stood in front of God and country and dared to speak of law and order and liberty, and the need of the Senate to protect the Constitution from the silent arts of corruption and the sacrilegious hands of the demagogue.

  And, on their feet and applauding, the members of that body wept for the man who murdered my husband.

  Of course, afterward Burr suffered almost instantaneous political exile. I have ever thought that was too kind a fate by far. But he was now on the run, and that would have to satisfy me.

  For I had more pressing matters to attend. Namely, my conscience. Since giving over my eldest daughter to a doctor’s care, I couldn’t shake the guilt. Which was why—in what I think now was partly a desperate act of penance for having sent Ana away—I turned my attention back to the Society for the Protection of Poor Widows with Small Children.

  Still working with Widow Graham, her daughter, Mrs. Joanna Bethune, and several other pious ladies, I rededicated myself to raising funds, reviewing eligibility requirements, and visiting the homes of candidates for our assistance to determine whether they met the criteria. Which sometimes meant taking the ferry across the East River to Blackwell’s Island, location of one of the city’s most notorious almshouses.

  From the outside, the almshouse was a series of sagging, decrepit, gray blocks surrounded by mud, filth, and excrement. Despite its location on an island, the air was stagnant and thick, unhealthful and miasmic. Inside was worse. The halls reeked of every manner of bodily function, and the few little ones with energy enough to spy on me around doorframes were so malnourished as to be frightening in their appearance.

  “Pardon me,” I said to the clerk sitting with boots propped upon the desk and a hat resting over his eyes.

  Lazily, he moved the hat, and his dark gaze cut up to the basket of victuals I carried. A sneer settled upon his bearded face. “God save me from do-gooders,” he murmured.

  I paid him no mind. “I’m here to see Widow Donohue.” He made no move to render assistance, but I was not easily put off. “Would you be so kind as to let her know that Mrs. General Hamilton is here to see her?”

  Suddenly, the man righted his chair and stood. “Mrs. . . . General Hamilton.” He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Right away. And please use the administrator’s office. He’s out just now.”

  “Thank you, good sir.” I smiled, for it was easier to forgive the man’s rudeness when his respect for my husband was so apparent.

  The Hamilton name still held power in New York, and I wasn’t afraid to use it in the service of protecting children—mine and those of the city Alexander helped build.

  “Mrs. Hamilton?” came a woman’s voice from the doorway, a babe on her hip, and a wisp of a girl clinging to her dirty, threadbare skirts. For a moment, I saw not the orphaned girls but my own Little Phil and Lysbet, who were not much older, and I yearned to set them all at ease.

  “Thank you for meeting with me. Please sit.” Smiling, I opened my basket and laid out a few pastries I’d baked. Hunger etched the faces of the precious little girls. I gave them a nod and watched in satisfaction as they ate their fill.

  “Now, Mrs. Donohue, if we might begin our interview . . . may I ask how old you are?”

  “Twenty,” she answered.

  Twenty. Just Ana’s age. Ana could have been married. Ana could have had children of her own . . .

  It didn’t take long to determine that Mrs. Donahue met the society’s criteria. She had a home, such as it was. She was mother of children under the age of ten. She had no income, didn’t beg or sell liquor, and appeared to be of good moral character.

  The assistance we could offer would help in her daily struggle for survival, exposed to the contaminating influence of the impious, immoral, indolent, and criminal. And she was grateful. But still, she asked, “What—what will happen to my children, Mrs. Hamilton, if I should die?”

  I had no good answer. Our charity was founded to benefit widows. Nothing in our charter allowed for us to help orphans. And it seemed to me quite an oversight.

  Upon taking my leave of the almshouse, I glanced at the clerk’s open ledger, listing children that had been admitted to this place—and copied it into my notebook.

  Brigit Fogarty, age 2 weeks, died of congestion of the brain

  Catherine Connor, age 6 months, died of marasmus

  Albert Smith, age 3 weeks, died of diarrhea

  Charles May, age 6 weeks, died of syphilis

  On and on it went.

  Children dead of overcrowding and disease and sheer misery.

  Were my own children so different from these little lost souls? What should happen to them if I should fall ill and die? Though Angelica promised she’d always care for my children as if they were her own, and I believed her, I f
eared for my little ones to be left alone in this world to fend for themselves as their father had been forced to do.

  No child should have to suffer what he did. Certainly not his own children. Left to the influence of unscrupulous persons. Left with scars and taint, and viewing themselves as having to claw up from a pit of mud. No one—not my children or anyone’s children—ought to suffer this, not in a country like ours with so many resources. In a civilized world, there should be some . . . some system to prevent it.

  And though I’d never had my husband’s genius for organizing military, financial, and political matters, I had ambitions for my own civic creations. Which was why, at the society’s annual meeting the following spring, I insisted, “We must do more.”

  I’d come to value my friendship with the serious-minded and zealously devout Mrs. Bethune. So I was delighted when she agreed. “What these children need is shelter, a refuge, an asylum of their own.”

  “I’ve long believed it,” Widow Graham said, wearing a plain black frock and white cap upon her thinning gray hair. “A place where they can receive religious instruction, moral example, and be trained up to be useful and productive.”

  As second directress of the society, I sat at the head of the table next to our venerable founder and her daughter. Placing my hand upon the table as if a Bible sat thereon, I added my voice to the cause.

  So the Orphan Asylum Society was born. Because some life must grow up from amongst all this death and sacrifice. And I was done with losing things.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  August 1807

  New York City

  WONDERFUL WORK YOU ladies are doing,” Pendleton said as I gave him and a small group of benefactors a tour of the new orphanage. “Just wonderful work. You must be quite proud of what you’ve accomplished.”

  “It’s God’s work, indeed,” Reverend Mason added.

  I beamed at their praise, for I was proud. We’d purchased a two-story frame house on Raisin Street in Greenwich Village for the children, and even though it had sixteen beds, we’d been flooded with applications in heartbreaking numbers—over two hundred in all.

  In every story, in every name, I saw Alexander.

  We would need another facility to help them all. It wasn’t enough, but it was progress. And as I showed the group one of the bedrooms with its small beds all in a neat row, I said, “It’s a start.” But there was a cause more dear to my heart that I was even more eager to see under way.

  Three years had passed since my husband’s death, and not a word of his biography had yet been written. Partly due to my difficulty finding someone to write it, and partly due to the disorder in which my husband’s papers were left. At least this was the excuse given by Pendleton, who still held back certain documents from me, claiming they had to do with ongoing legal matters. And now, whenever I found myself in the presence of the thin-lipped barrel-chested jurist who’d been my husband’s law partner, I was plagued by conflicting emotions.

  Pendleton had stood by his testimony that my husband threw away his fire. Pendleton had also loaned us money and taught my newly graduated son James the practice of law. I was certainly grateful to him.

  But I felt resentment, too. For I could never see the man without wondering, You were his second, his law partner, and his friend. Why didn’t you stop him from taking part in a duel?

  It wasn’t a fair question. Perhaps nothing but a bullet could have stopped Alexander Hamilton. But he ought to be remembered—which was the point I hoped to make when I gifted Pendleton with a ring I’d made with a clipping of Alexander’s hair, set beneath glass. He still wore it in friendship, something I admired as everyone offered their congratulations at the end of the tour.

  I stopped Reverend Mason and Pendleton before they, too, departed, and took the opportunity to remind them, “Every day, every hour, every moment that passes without my dear Hamilton’s story being told is another memory lost to history.”

  Pendleton gave a regretful smile while pretending not to glance impatiently at his gold pocket watch. “Perhaps there’s an advantage in waiting. For the Federalists shall soon sweep back into office. We are the party of Washington, and our success shall make the people remember that.”

  I bit my tongue, for if the Federalists were the party of Washington, they were even more the party of Hamilton. But it would do my cause here today no good to push the matter.

  Thankfully, the reverend did it for me. “The general’s biography will take some years to prepare and not a moment ought to be wasted.” He smiled at the younger man. “Which is why I’ve agreed to write it, with Mrs. Hamilton’s permission and encouragement.”

  “Isn’t that wonderful?” I asked, smiling at the revelation of my achievement. I’d finally secured a scholar to write Hamilton’s biography. He was not only a man of letters, but an incorruptible man of God. When I made requests to borrow or look at letters my husband sent other men in government, my requests were often ignored. But they were unlikely to ignore a man of the cloth.

  And that suspicion was borne out when Pendleton cleared his throat and said, “Indeed. Well, you’re welcome to anything at the office, Reverend.”

  “The only impediment now is resources,” I said, first meeting Mason’s eager gaze, then Pendleton’s recalcitrant one. “For there will be expenses. We might have to travel—to Mount Vernon, certainly, to transcribe letters Alexander once sent to Washington.”

  To get the money, I could sell off some of the land Papa left to me, but this country owed a great debt to my husband that hadn’t been paid. Other war widows received a pension, but I had none. In a fit of high-mindedness, Alexander had renounced the benefits he was due as an officer in the war. Now that the Republicans insisted upon destroying the country’s commerce with their idiotic trade embargo, breaking up my husband’s national bank, and emptying the treasury—they at least ought to be made to pay for it.

  But I couldn’t lobby for the pension while Jefferson was still president. I was told that upon a pedestal in the entryway of Monticello, Jefferson kept a bust of my husband across from a bust of himself, and quipped to guests that he and my husband were “opposed in death as in life.”

  That icy hypocrite wouldn’t just thwart me but laugh in my face as he did it. In a very genteel, southern fashion, I’m sure. Just as he was likely doing to Aaron Burr, whose downfall that summer became something of a spectacle in which I must admit to taking pleasure.

  For Burr had finally been arrested—though not, as one might have imagined, for the murder of my husband. Instead, Burr had been apprehended in Alabama on charges of plotting to annex, possibly by military force, Spanish territory in Louisiana and Mexico to establish an independent republic.

  Treason!

  I didn’t find it difficult to believe that, denied acceptance, power, and influence in our country, Burr had resolved to create a new one. Just as Alexander warned, Burr was willing to dismantle the Union for which we’d all sacrificed. And I hoped to see him hang for it.

  It had taken years to see some manner of justice brought to bear upon Aaron Burr. It might take years for Mason to complete my husband’s biography or for me to ever have the opportunity to collect his pension.

  But I knew how to use patience as a political weapon.

  And I could bide my time.

  * * *

  March 1810

  Baltimore, Maryland

  “Are you certain you know what you’re about?” McHenry asked, seated in the closed coach beside me as it jerked and jostled along the country roads.

  Mac had long since retired from politics to his Maryland estate, which he named Fayetteville, after our old French friend. Mac had also long since gone from stout to portly, and his health was not good. He devoted his time entirely to domestic pursuits—his wife, their delightful children, and writing a novel.

  Or at least he had been thus engaged until the former president, John Adams, published a series of letters in the paper purporting to tell
the real history of his administration—the failure of which he laid squarely at the doorstep of my dear Hamilton, with McHenry in a conspiring role.

  That put Mac in a fighting mood, so much so that he agreed to accompany me and my eldest son, Alex, to the nation’s capital, where I intended to petition my government for redress.

  Now that I had a biographer, I wanted my husband’s pension. Finally, there would be recognition for Alexander’s accomplishments.

  Still, Mac couldn’t seem to stop warning me against it.

  Not even after Alex, serving as our driver, had taken the reins and got us under way.

  Inside the carriage, I told Mac, “Washington City can’t be that frightening a place.”

  He snorted. “Last I spent time there it was a swampy, malarious wilderness. And you’ll find a friendly face even more rare than an honest man.”

  “But Jefferson is gone,” I said, because that was the important thing. After eight years as commander in chief, our third president bowed to the tradition set by George Washington and withdrew to his mountaintop plantation of Monticello.

  Hopefully for good.

  But McHenry wasn’t nearly as relieved. “You remember that the Federalists still lost the election?”

  My husband’s party did more than lose. We’d been obliterated. Still, I waved his concern away. “Nevertheless, Jefferson is gone and the new president is a different man.”

  “You think so? These Virginians are all the same.”

  “Washington was a Virginian,” I reminded him. “Besides, I know James Madison.”

  Of course, I’d also known Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe. And at some point, I’d believed the best of each of them.

  There was no reason to believe Madison was different. It was more of a feeling. Some instinct that I derived from the fact that Madison had, after all these years, remained publicly coy on the authorship of the individual Federalist essays, tentatively honoring the pledge we’d made decades before.

  Then, too, there was the letter. I’d found it in one of the locked cupboards of my husband’s desk at the Grange—the last letter Madison ever wrote to him, three years before Alexander died. Short and businesslike, about some matter of state, Madison had closed the letter with this line: I have the honor to remain, sir, your obedient servant.