The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  To disappoint men who had labored so hard to make him a Presbyterian and to select a school they despised for its British sympathies shows a remarkable willfulness in one so young. It was a pattern that Hamilton would replicate all his life—first charming fathers, then repudiating them. He was his mother’s son in his determination to have his own way. At a deeper level, unconscious anger was probably at work.

  V

  At King’s College, Hamilton worked his youthful magic on the president, ruddy-faced Myles Cooper, charming him as he had charmed Boudinot and Livingston. He was soon a regular guest at Cooper’s table, at which Anglo-American politics was discussed with a vigor that more than equaled the Livingstons’ intensity. But here the talk was on the other side of the quarrel. The genial Cooper was a king’s man to the core. Hamilton displayed his Presbyterian influences by stoutly resisting his arguments. Worse, he wrote a pamphlet demolishing the royalist reasoning of Cooper’s friend and predecessor, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had written a tract warning the rebellious Americans of retribution if they went too far in their defiance of the mother country.

  Cooper stirred a filial response in the young West Indian. It may have had something to do with the president’s lavish hospitality. At Cooper’s table, sherry, port, and Madeira flowed freely. In the idealized spirit of academia, he tolerated Hamilton’s contrary opinions. A year later, when the quarrel between England and America had exploded into bloodshed at Lexington and Concord, Hamilton demonstrated his filial feelings in a dramatic way.

  America was aflame with anger and not a little of it was directed at men like Myles Cooper, who had been outspoken supporters of George III. On the night of May 10, 1775, a mob of four hundred torch-carrying self-styled Sons of Liberty showed up at the gates of King’s College, determined to tar and feather and perhaps kill the Tory president. Hamilton and his roommate, Robert Troup, met them at the door of the main building, which stood at what is now Barclay and Church streets.

  Leaping up on the stoop, Hamilton began haranguing the mob. The terrified Cooper, looking out the window in his nightshirt, screamed: “Don’t listen to him. He’s a crazy man!” As Hamilton’s words reached him above the hubbub, Cooper realized the young man was trying to save him. He was urging the crowd not to disgrace the struggle for American liberty by mobbing a defenseless man.

  Leaving Troup on the steps to continue his exhortation, Hamilton dashed upstairs and urged Cooper to dress and flee. They went out the back door and over a fence as the mob brushed aside Troup and stormed upstairs in search of their prey. Hamilton and Cooper scurried downtown along the bank of the Hudson and eventually made their way to the home of Cooper’s friend Peter Stuyvesant. The next day, Cooper slipped aboard a British ship and retreated to London.8

  War between England and America grew inevitable. A month after Cooper’s flight, the Battle of Bunker Hill made the situation clear to everyone. Hamilton joined a military company with his college classmates and began drilling regularly under the guidance of a former British officer, Edward Fleming. By March 1776, the West Indian youth was a captain in command of an artillery company. He served his guns throughout the disastrous early battles of 1776, following George Washington and the collapsing Continental Army in their retreat across New Jersey to the far side of the Delaware. When Washington made his Christmas night strike at the exposed royal garrison in Trenton, Hamilton and his guns played a key role in the attack. His cannon swept the main street of the town with grape shot, breaking up every attempt by the enemy to form a battle line.

  With the Revolution’s spirit revived, the Continentals retreated to Morristown. There, perhaps at the suggestion of William Livingston, who had become governor of New Jersey, Washington invited Captain Hamilton to become his aide. It was the beginning of a relationship with an ultimate father that would last for the rest of Hamilton’s life. The job meant an instant promotion from captain to lieutenant colonel, and a chance to shine at the very top of the American hierarchy. The combination of hurricane and war was sweeping Hamilton up the high road to fame.

  VI

  Becoming a member of Washington’s official family also meant unremitting toil. “I give in to no kind of amusement myself,” the American commander wrote. “So those around me can have none.” All day every day, aides slaved at their desks, drafting letters for Washington’s enormous correspondence. Hamilton’s gift for language swiftly made him the champion in this department. As time went on, the General would simply tell Hamilton the overall direction of a reply and Hamilton would draft it for his signature. Sometimes Washington copied Hamilton’s drafts in his own hand, word for word. Slowly, steadily, he became Washington’s ghostwriter—and to some extent, his alter ego.

  Washington gave Hamilton amazing responsibilities for such a young man. He dealt with congressmen and with Washington’s potential military rivals, such as General Horatio Gates. He operated as an “intelligencer”—running several spies inside British-held New York. He wrote essays denouncing war profiteers in and out of Congress and flayed another rival general, Charles Lee, who had tried to undermine Washington. For a pen name, Hamilton chose Publius, after a first-century B.C. Latin writer who had been born a slave in distant Syria and brought to Rome, where his literary gifts won him the favor of his master and his eventual freedom. The choice suggests Hamilton had not forgotten he was an outsider in this American world.

  In spite of Washington’s stern description of an aide’s life, the younger members of his military “family” did not work twenty-four hours a day. Most of them were in their twenties, and wherever they camped, they lost no time discovering the prettiest young women in the neighborhood. Hamilton was apparently a champion in this department. Martha Washington, observing him in action with the experienced eye of a former Virginia belle, nicknamed the headquarters tomcat “Hamilton” as an oblique compliment to his charms.

  In Morristown, for a while Hamilton wooed Cornelia Lott, daughter of a wealthy farmer, then shifted his attention to someone named Polly, whose last name has escaped the records. He also continued to pay compliments in letters and in person to Kitty Livingston and her sister Susannah, who visited the encampment to nurse sick soldiers. Married officers imitated Washington and brought their wives to winter quarters—and their grown daughters if they had any. Vivacious young ladies were often guests at dinner, where Hamilton displayed a gift for making flattering toasts to their beauty.

  In 1779, Hamilton began thinking of his future. The war was far from won, but with France as an ally, it was hard to believe that the Americans would lose if they “stayed in the game,” as Washington sometimes put it. When Hamilton’s closest friend among the aides, John Laurens, departed for a visit to his native South Carolina, “Ham” dashed off a frolicsome letter, asking him to find a wife for him:

  Such a wife as I want will, I know, be difficult to be found, but if you succeed, it will be the stronger proof of your zeal and dexterity. Take her description—she must be young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape), sensible (a little learning will do), well-bred (but she must have an aversion to the word ton [fashionable]), chaste, and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness), of some good nature, a great deal of generosity (she must neither love money nor scolding, for I dislike equally a termagant and an economist). In politics I am indifferent what side she may be of. I think I have arguments that will easily convert her to mine. As to religion a moderate stock will satisfy me. She must believe in God and hate a saint.

  Next he added words that some people have found crass, others poignant:

  As to fortune, the larger stock of that the better. You know my temper and circumstances and will, therefore, pay special attention to this article in the treaty. Though I run no risk of going to Purgatory for my avarice, yet as money is an essential ingredient to happiness in this world—as I have not much of my own and as I am very little calculated to get more either by my address or industry; it must needs be, that my wife,
if I get one, bring at least a sufficiency to administer to her own extravagancies.

  One can see more than a little evidence that the young Hamilton was trying to avoid some of the mistakes that had ruined his mother’s two marriages. His modesty about his own ability to earn money also suggests that he carried within him wounding memories of his father’s ineptitude in this department. After all these revelations, Hamilton recoiled from any serious commitment and assured Laurens he was only joking:

  I am ready to ask myself what could have put it into my head to hazard this jeu de folie. Do I want a wife? No—I have plagues enough without desiring to add to the number that greatest of all [Hamilton’s underlining].9

  VII

  Within a few months of writing this anti-romantic epistle, the swaggering soldier fell in love with a young woman who satisfied many of the specifications he had laid down. Elizabeth Schuyler came to the Morristown winter camp with her father, Congressman (and Major General) Philip Schuyler, and her sister Margarita. Schuyler was part of a committee that Congress sent to improve communications between the national legislature and the army. He was one of the richest men in America, owner of great swaths of land along the Mohawk and Hudson rivers.

  Was it a love match? Fellow aides, such as Tench Tilghman, seemed to think so. “Hamilton,” Tilghman wrote a mutual friend, “is a gone man.” By February 1780, Hamilton was writing to Margarita Schuyler that “by some odd contrivance or other your sister has found out the secret of interesting me in everything that concerns her.” In fact, he had become so absorbed, he was forced to insist on the basis of military necessity that she be “immediately removed from our neighborhood” so he could concentrate on winning the war.

  To his friend Laurens, he described Betsey in terms that revived the themes of his wife-search letter: “She is a good natured girl who I am sure will never play the termagant; though not a genius she has good sense enough to be agreeable, and though not a beauty, she has fine black eyes—is rather handsome and has every other requisite of the exterior to make a lover happy…Believe me, I am a lover in earnest.”10

  He was soon writing letters to Betsey that were little short of impassioned: “You engross my thoughts too entirely…You not only employ my mind all day, but you intrude on my sleep. I meet you in every dream.” In another letter he praised “the sweet softness and delicacy of your mind and manners, the elevation of your sentiments, the real goodness of your heart.”11

  But the lover was not above a lecture on self-improvement to further perfect his beloved. He urged Betsey to devote more of her leisure to reading. He wanted her to excel her sex in “distinguished qualities” as well as amiable ones. This urgent request betrayed a slight uneasiness about Betsey in Hamilton’s mind. It is perhaps worth noting that his friend Tilghman referred to her somewhat sarcastically in one of his letters as “the little saint.”

  In the Schuyler family, Betsey was the good girl who obeyed her domineering father in all things—while her two beautiful sisters, the older Angelica and the younger Margarita (called Peggy), made a practice of defying him. Angelica had already eloped with an Englishman, John Barker Church, and Margarita would later follow her example, scampering into the night with a rich American, Stephen Van Renssalaer. Hamilton’s choice of the less beautiful, more docile sister again reveals his desire to steer a course that would avoid the disasters of his father’s marriage to his tempestuous mother.

  Hamilton’s French friend the Marquis de Fleury saw the marriage as something less—or perhaps more—than a love match. He wrote Hamilton congratulating him on his engagement “for many reasons.” The first reason was the undoubted fact that henceforth Hamilton would have the backing of the Schuyler family’s “influence.” Second, it should put him in “a very easy situation, and happiness is not to be found without a large estate.” Third, the Marquis hoped to be Hamilton’s brother-in-law. He was pursuing Margarita Schuyler.

  This European, even cynical view of the marriage is belied by other evidence. After the engagement was announced, Hamilton’s anxiety about money and marital happiness surfaced almost uncontrollably in his letters. No matter how docile Betsey was, he could not forget that she was the daughter of a rich man. “Do you soberly relish the pleasure of being a poor man’s wife?” he asked. He urged her to consider “the dark side” of their coming marriage and worried that they might be playing a comedy of deluded lovers. He wondered whether Betsey should “correct the mistake before we begin to act the tragedy of the unhappy couple.”12

  Betsey reassured Hamilton and remained his fiancée. He agreed to curb his impatience and wait until December 1780 for the wedding. Hamilton had pressed for an immediate ceremony in Morristown, but the Schuylers wanted to see Elizabeth married in their Albany mansion, The Pastures, to make up for the pain they had suffered over Angelica’s elopement. As usual, Betsey succumbed to her parents’ wishes, and Hamilton had little choice but to go along.

  The illegitimate boy who had resented being a “groveling clerk” overcame his fears and married the rich man’s daughter on December 14, 1780. A month later, Hamilton wrote a letter to Margarita Schuyler that again reveals he considered marriage a perilous venture. Betsey had written a note to Margarita telling her how happy she was, ending with: “Get married, I charge you.” To it, Hamilton added a postscript that Betsey may not have seen.

  He advised Margarita not to let Betsey make her “marriage mad.” Marriage was a “very good thing when their stars unite two people who are fit for each other.” But it was a “dog of a life when two dissonant tempers meet, and ’tis ten to one but this is the case.” He advised Margarita to wait for “a man of sense, not ugly enough to get pointed at—with some good-nature—a few grains of feeling—a little taste—a little imagination—and above all a good deal of decision to keep you in order, for that I foresee will be no easy task.”13

  VIII

  Rachel Lavien’s banishment of James Hamilton left his son with another problem: he found it difficult to deal with substitute fathers—including George Washington. Living and working intimately with the general, Hamilton proved the adage that no man is a hero to his valet. Exhausted by the seemingly endless war, Washington was often irritable and impatient. Exacerbating Hamilton’s feelings was his hunger for fame. The General had permitted other aides to escape his military family and return to leading troops. But he refused to part with Hamilton—a tribute to his talents, to be sure. Hamilton discounted the compliment. In the shadow of the Great Man—a phrase that Hamilton began to use derisively in private letters—an aide would always be a cipher.

  On February 16, 1781, at Washington’s headquarters in New Windsor, north of New York, Hamilton dashed downstairs with an important letter that fellow aide Tench Tilghman was to rush to the Commissary Department. On his way upstairs, he met the Marquis de Lafayette, and they paused on the landing to discuss another piece of business. At the head of the stairs he found a fuming Washington, who said, “Colonel Hamilton, you have kept me waiting these ten minutes. I must tell you, sir, that you treat me with disrespect.”

  “I am not conscious of it, sir,” Hamilton replied. “But since you have thought it necessary to tell me so, we part.”

  “Very well, sir,” Washington said. “If it be your choice.”

  Hamilton retreated to his room. Within ten minutes, Tench Tilghman knocked on the door bearing an apology from Washington. He said the General wanted “to heal a difference which could not have happened but in a moment of passion.” He added that Washington retained full confidence in Hamilton’s abilities and integrity.

  Hamilton stonily declined to accept Washington’s apology or his offer to meet with him and apologize in person. He was determined to leave the General’s “family.” He would stay only until Washington found a replacement. It would be up to the commander in chief to continue dealing with him as if nothing had happened.

  “Thus we stand,” Hamilton told his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, having described
in explicit detail how the breach occurred. He added that he had always disliked the “personal dependance” [sic] of an aide-de-camp and had accepted the job on the crest of patriotic enthusiasm in 1777 and “an idea of the General’s character which experience soon taught me to be unfounded.” For the past three years, Hamilton declared, “I have felt no friendship for him and professed none.”

  His rage building, Hamilton continued: “The truth is our dispositions are the opposite of each other & the pride of my temper would not suffer me to profess what I did not feel…You are too good a judge of human nature not to be sensible how this conduct in me must have operated on a man to whom all the world is offering incense.”14

  This portrait of Washington, reaching out to Hamilton as a father figure and sensing but not understanding his rebuff—and resenting it—is all too clear. Also painfully clear is the pleasure Hamilton took in inflicting this discomfort on the Great Man. Hamilton’s memories of his failed father made him as wary of being a surrogate son as he was of becoming a husband. Rachel Fawcett Lavien and James Hamilton had inflicted grievous wounds on the soul of this enormously gifted young man.

  THE WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE

  The only portrait of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton painted during her husband’s lifetime is rich in psychological interest. The artist was Ralph Earl, a hard-drinking New Englander who was no genius but had a knack for creating a good likeness. He had studied under the far more famous American painter, Benjamin West, in London. Earl saw Betsey as an attractive women, with deep-set dark eyes under thick brows. She is stylishly dressed and coiffed. But her tentative smile conveys an impression of insecurity, even melancholy. There is not a trace of the energy and self-confidence that emanates from almost every portrait of her husband.