My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

  “Congress will take a hard line against you,” Dolley said thoughtfully, as if the president had little influence with Congress.

  Perhaps he did not. Madison was not, like Jefferson, a tall and handsome politician of immense if wily charm. And he seemed, already, to be having trouble steering Congress. Madison was once my husband’s most fierce opponent in the establishment of a national bank, but he’d since come to realize its necessity, yet partisans in Congress were determined to let it lapse. Perhaps it was ill-advised for me to ask the president to use his influence on a private matter when he was fighting larger battles. But he wouldn’t have had to fight them if he hadn’t thrown in with Jefferson in the first place.

  “I’m a widow of a war hero,” I said, stoutly. “And more than that. General Hamilton might have made a fortune in private life, but he gave his best energies to his country.” And because I believed that Dolley, as a political wife, would understand, I added, “We both spent the better part of our lives in service to this nation, and what do I have to show for it?”

  The expression of the president’s wife melted in unmistakable sympathy, but before she could reply, someone called to her.

  A jowled woman who mimicked Dolley’s fashion sense, wearing a fur-lined cape and turban, charged our way. It was Margaret Bayard Smith, the not-so-secret author of her husband’s influential Washington newspaper, the Daily National Intelligencer.

  “I shouldn’t neglect her,” Dolley said.

  But before Dolley took her leave, I whispered, “Is my cause hopeless?”

  “Not if you know the right ears to whisper into,” she said. “And, fortunately, I do.” Then, excusing herself, she left my side. And I didn’t blame her. I could easily imagine what mischief might be sown for the Madisons—and for myself—by a report that the wife of a Republican newspaperman had been snubbed in favor of Hamilton’s widow.

  Relief stole over me, and hope, too—until I found myself staring across the room into the startled gray eyes of the man just recently appointed as secretary of state.

  James Monroe.

  Haltingly, Monroe made his way through the press of bodies to stand before me. “Mrs. General Hamilton,” he said, that infuriating dimple still upon the chin of his now thinner face as he awaited acknowledgment at our unexpected reunion.

  But what could I possibly have to say to this man?

  A decade had passed since I’d left Monroe searching for his conscience. And as best as I could tell, he’d never found it. He’d lost it to ambition. Not hollow ambition, like Burr’s—for that assassin never had a conscience to lose in the first place—but a weighty ambition, that grew heavier in the shadow of his fellow Virginians—Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. James Monroe hungered for the presidency and became even more of an embittered partisan when Jefferson promoted Madison, and not himself, as heir apparent.

  What did you expect from a man like Jefferson? I wanted to say. You gave your friendship and loyalty to a man who didn’t cherish it.

  Not as I once cherished it.

  A thing I remembered with clarity when, as if unsteadied by my presence, Monroe dabbed sweat upon his upper lip with an embroidered kerchief. This kerchief was finer than the one he’d given me all those years ago. That one I’d kept as a talisman against insecurity and sadness when I first learned of my husband’s infidelity. And even after Alexander and I reconciled, I’d kept Monroe’s kerchief as a sentimental token of friendship. In truth, I’d quite forgotten it until this moment, because after our last confrontation over his role in the exposure of the Reynolds Affair, I’d not wished to remember Monroe at all.

  But now here he was, waiting for me to say something polite, such as, “Why hello, Mr. Monroe. It’s been too long. I hope your family is well.”

  I told myself it wouldn’t cost me very much to say it. In fact, it might help me. If James Monroe were to take up my banner, Congress might reinstate my husband’s benefits. After all, Monroe was a veteran and a favorite son amongst the rank-and-file Republicans. They might listen to him more than the president. And after having broken his word of honor to me as a gentleman, didn’t Monroe owe me a debt?

  Perhaps that’s what I should say to him, I thought.

  But in the end, I was a Schuyler as much as I was a Hamilton. And though words had been my husband’s weapon, silence had often been mine.

  So I said nothing at all to James Monroe.

  Instead, I gave him the cut direct—and turned to find my son.

  “Alexander?” I called, making rare use of his full name.

  “Yes, Mother?” Alex asked, rushing to my side.

  I glanced back at Monroe and enjoyed the flinch of recognition that settled onto the Virginian’s face at seeing my boy, as if seeing a ghost.

  “I think we’ve accomplished our purpose here,” I said, letting Alex escort me away.

  And I vowed that I’d burn Monroe’s forgotten kerchief upon our return home.

  It would take years before my husband’s benefits were finally, and quietly, reinstated. But I knew, without question, who I had to thank for it. Madison had been our friend. Madison had been our partner. And Madison was good to his word about my husband’s papers, too, sending copies for the biography.

  I had tilted at a windmill and won.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  I would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station. I wish there was a war.

  —ALEXANDER HAMILTON

  October 1810

  New York City

  MY SONS WERE all in rebellion.

  I returned from Washington City triumphantly, with arms full of notes and documents for the biography, only to learn that, in defiance of my wishes, twenty-two-year-old James had decided to marry his sweetheart. I suppose it was the Schuyler in him.

  It wasn’t that I disapproved of his young lady. It was simply that, as a law clerk, James wasn’t yet established in the legal practice he was pursuing. Fortunately, Mary was a sweet girl who claimed to relish the position of wife to an impoverished young man. And I saw the wisdom in my father’s old admonition that it was sometimes best to frown, make them humble, and forgive.

  Besides, it wasn’t only James who was in rebellion.

  At Christmas, Alex told me he would sail to Europe. “You needn’t worry about the expense. My cousin Flip and I are going together, and Uncle Church has loaned us the money.”

  Having denied my eldest surviving son the opportunity to make a merchant’s career in Boston, I wouldn’t now prevent him from exploring across the sea. For years, Alex had remained at my side, dutifully and uncomplainingly toiling in the law to support me and his siblings. No mother could ask more, and he’d earned a respite.

  But what he said next chilled me to the bone. “I’m going to volunteer with the Duke of Wellington to fight Napoleon Bonaparte on the Peninsula.”

  Alex wanted to go to war. For England. Horrified, I said, “You’re an American.”

  His spine stiffened. “I haven’t forgotten. But when we were in Washington City, President Madison said I should take the opportunity to write to him. If I can report back to him on the goings-on in Europe—”

  “Alex,” I said, more upset by the moment.

  He took my hand. “Mother, there’s no way for a Hamilton to make his name in American politics. Business was foreclosed to me once I abandoned my position in Boston. That leaves only the battlefield. My father was a general. My grandfather was a general. Heroes, both of them, you’ve always told me. How can I want to be anything else?”

  How could he want to be anything else, indeed? Alex had the right to determine his own fate. His father had fought for that principle, and I would uphold it. So, the following spring, I stood bravely next to Angelica at the docks as we tearfully saw our sons off to a war on foreign shores, grateful that they were, at least, together.

  Just as we’d always been.

  And a year later, Angelica and I were still together, worrying about our
sons and taking coffee at the Tontine, as was our habit, while all the talk around us was of the war coming to our own shores. Because the British had never stopped visiting humiliations upon American ships—seizing them and impressing our soldiers. Behaving as if we’d never won our war of independence and were still merely a rebellious set of colonies.

  This was the chatter of passersby that swirled around us while we warmed our hands against our coffee cups at the curbside table. My sister took hers with sugar and cream and always ordered a pastry that she never touched, saying she’d eaten too large a breakfast before offering it to me.

  “I’m not a starving urchin,” I said, though those were, indeed, lean times. “If anything, you’re the one growing too thin.” There was a fragility to her delicate features that had never been there before. Worry over Flip, no doubt. Our fear for our boys was always present, even when we gave it no voice. Maybe especially then.

  “I don’t want to grow as stout as Mama did,” Angelica said, pushing the plate to me. “I intend to fight for my beauty to the bitter end.”

  Surrendering, I savored a sweet morsel of the pastry. “I believe your vanity is overcoming good sense.”

  “You’re one to speak of good sense. You forget I have spies in your household.”

  She did. My children told their beloved Aunt Angelica everything. “And what do they report?”

  “That you’re considering a foolhardy trip into the wilds of western New York to visit an Indian school.”

  It wasn’t just an Indian school, as she had good cause to know. It was the Hamilton-Oneida Academy that my husband helped to found for the advancement of our Indian allies, the plight of whom was always dear to my heart. “It’s soon to be chartered as Hamilton College, and I don’t see why I should not be present for its christening.”

  “Because it’s a ghastly journey,” Angelica said, with a sniff. “The only way my son could persuade me to visit western New York was to name a town after me.” Before he left for England, Flip had done that, to the not-so-secret delight of his mother. “Of course, your wanderlust is far less concerning than the other report I’ve received that you spend hours upon your knees, sorting through boxes of dusty papers like a madwoman.”

  I gulped at my coffee and shrugged. “I’m looking for Alexander’s draft of Washington’s Farewell Address. It’s as important a contribution as anything else he ever wrote and if I can find his notes, I can prove it.”

  “Maybe he didn’t keep notes,” Angelica said. “Or perhaps he sent them to someone for safekeeping.”

  “I think someone took them,” I replied. But I couldn’t stay to elaborate, because a glance down at the timepiece suspended from my needlework chatelaine told me I ought to leave soon to interview a new teacher for the orphanage.

  My son Johnny was to escort me, and he was seldom late. But on that day, he sauntered to our table slowly and sat beside us with a certain gravity.

  At nineteen, Johnny was a gentle, bookish student of literature. Of all my sons, he was the last I might ever suspect would announce that he was to join the military. But he said, “As the son of Alexander Hamilton, I cannot shirk my duty.”

  So it was that I lost my eldest sons all at once to the Hamiltonian desire to rise up on the tide of war.

  * * *

  March 1814

  New York City

  It was called the War of 1812, though most of the fighting took place after that year. They also called it the second war for independence, and a new generation of Hamiltons were fighting it. My battle-hardened Alex returned from Europe to serve as a captain in the U.S. infantry. James commanded a New York militia brigade. Johnny served as aide-de-camp to Major General William Henry Harrison. And seventeen-year-old William—a wild and lanky mischief maker whose indifference to his studies, and to wearing shoes, would’ve snapped even his indulgent father’s patience—now trained to be an officer at West Point.

  Angelica’s son had returned to fight for America, too. “When our boys come for a visit, we’ll have a veritable army at our table,” she said. We’d just left Sunday service at Trinity Church to stroll, taking our exercise in the brisk air. And I remembered a long-ago night when I’d had another veritable army around a platter of steaming waffles at my table—Alexander, Monroe . . .

  And Aaron Burr.

  Which brought me to my purpose in haunting the occupant of a little office on Nassau Street. It’d come to our attention that the tiny tin placard on the door reading MR. A. ARNOT, ESQUIRE was actually an assumed name for Burr, who’d returned to the city after a decade of exile.

  After so many years, the criminal charges against him had been dropped, and now, it seemed the younger generation didn’t remember him. Or what he’d done.

  But I remembered.

  Burr might have chosen any other city in America. But he’d chosen to return to mine. So whenever I passed Burr’s shabby little door, and saw any person about to knock, I’d call, “Oh! Is that your solicitor? You should know that he murdered my husband.”

  Soon after I made a habit of this, Burr changed the placard on his door to MR. EDWARDS. And I wondered what name I’d force him to adopt next. If I could take satisfaction in nothing else, I smiled to think I’d deprived him of a name—the thing my husband died for.

  “If it’s your purpose to make him a miserable recluse,” Angelica said as we walked. “I’m told you’re succeeding . . .”

  Burr’s grandson had died of a childhood illness the previous year. Then his daughter was lost at sea. He was left alone. Without family. Severed from the human race. I wasn’t monstrous enough to take joy in these tragedies.

  Somedays I even wondered if these tragedies may have shaken loose some morsel of a soul, so that Burr now understood what he’d inflicted upon me. Other days, I had the absurd thought he might open his office door as we passed and beg my forgiveness.

  But he never did. He was hiding from the world. He was hiding from me.

  On this day, I peered at the bare snow-dusted window, in search of a glimpse of that crooked man in the shadows. But while I was looking, I felt my sister grasp my arm. “Betsy,” she whispered, and I turned to see her go pale as death. Then, before I could steady her, my sister’s knees buckled and she collapsed onto the icy street.

  “Angelica!” I cried, dropping to my knees beside her. As she sprawled, gasping and staring at the sky, I feared that she’d knocked her head or broken a bone. I called for help—and some part of me dreaded that Burr might emerge from his office to lend assistance. But it was actually the Reverend Mason who happened by and helped me convey Angelica back to the warmth of her own house.

  “All this for beauty?” I asked, furious when she confessed that she’d simply not eaten that day, hunger the probable reason for her swoon.

  “Anxiety of the war leaves me no appetite,” she protested weakly.

  But two days later, in a state of delirium, her hair plastered with sweat to a ghostly white face, she whispered, “Don’t tell Betsy.”

  I’d come to tend her with a basket of tonics and herbs, but my brother-in-law, in shirtsleeves and dishevelment, stood stone-faced in the entryway of her bedroom. “She’s been unwell. She didn’t wish for you to know.”

  “Unwell? What can you mean?”

  “Cancerous tumors,” Church replied stiffly.

  It was several agonizing moments before I could take a breath. “Where have the tumors arisen?” I finally had the clarity to ask. Sometimes tumors could be surgically removed—a painful and gruesome procedure, but one with a chance for survival.

  As if he knew what I was thinking, Church shook his head and rubbed his unshaven jaw. “They can’t be cut away.”

  Which meant . . . Angelica was dying. My gaze flew past him to where my once vivacious sister lay withered and frail in her bed, moaning softly in pain. And I could do nothing to help her. I was again to lose someone I loved better than myself. And the crushing weight of our impending separation made me grasp at t
he doorframe for balance. Helplessly, I looked into the eyes of my brother-in-law. “How long has she been suffering?”

  “Quite some time.”

  Quite some time. She’d been sick, and fearful, and hadn’t told me. She’d told her husband, but not me, and I resented him, though I had no right. “Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “She didn’t wish you to see her this way, with her mind lost to the laudanum and—”

  “I don’t care,” I hissed. “You will not dare keep me away. You do not dare.”

  He didn’t. Especially since Angelica was soon out of her bed, making little of her illness, putting off my tearful enquiries with teasing. But now that my eyes were open, I saw the laudanum glitter of her eyes, the exhaustion of her thinning body. She quipped that she would be dancing at a ball in no time, but that attack of weakness in the street had been some catalyst of a terrible kind, because she was soon bedridden—and I found it both a cruelty and a mercy that my irrepressible sister was not long bound in the struggle of dying.

  When she awakened one morning to find me at her bedside, she took my hand and kissed it. “My dear Eliza. It’s only right that I die before you. I’m the oldest. I should have gone before Peggy. I should go before you. Besides . . . I am a sinner, and you are a saint.”

  “No, Angelica,” I said, shaking my head in denial and anger at the Lord himself. My sister had been my touchstone—before and after my husband’s death. In the worst days of my grief, I couldn’t have remained standing without her steadfast support. And now the only pain worse than the knowledge she was to be taken from me was pity that she should suffer so much.