The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers
Page 30
Alexander Hamilton wanted to be that man. So did Aaron Burr. Both knew that if Hamilton evaded Burr’s challenge by apologizing, he would never be acceptable to the nation’s soldiers. This irrepressible hunger for ultimate fame was why Hamilton refused to apologize to Burr for his largely ignored remarks and made a duel inevitable.
III
On July 4, 1804, with the time and place for the duel not yet chosen, Hamilton wrote a letter to his wife. It reveals a man struggling with terrific guilt. It also tells us how far Hamilton had traveled in his attempt to retrieve his lost Christian faith:
This letter, my dear Eliza, will not be delivered to you unless I shall first have terminated my earthly career; to begin, as I humbly hope from redeeming grace and divine mercy, a happy immortality.
If it had been possible for me to have avoided the interview, my love for you and my precious children would have been alone a decisive motive. But it was not possible without sacrifices which would have made me unworthy of your esteem. I need not tell you of the pangs I feel, from the idea of quitting you and exposing you to the anguish which I know you would feel. Nor could I dwell on the topic lest it would unman me.
The consolations of religion, my beloved, can alone support you; and these you have a right to enjoy. Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted. With my last idea I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world.
Adieu best of wives and best of women. Embrace all my darling children for me.
Ever yours,
AH
On the night before the duel, Hamilton wrote several letters that attempted to explain why he had accepted Burr’s challenge and how he planned to fight the duel. He was going to “throw away” his first shot, and possibly his second shot, if Burr’s first bullet missed him. The “scruples of a Christian” supposedly prompted this decision, he claimed. The real reason was Hamilton’s guilt for giving this advice to his son Philip. He felt compelled to take the same risk. But he also hoped his delope would enable him to triumph over Burr. If Hamilton survived, Burr would leave the dueling ground a humiliated, politically neutered man.
That same night Hamilton wrote another letter to Eliza, asking her to be generous to his mother’s aging needy cousin Ann Mitchell, who had tried to help him and his brother in St. Croix. To this request he added an impulsive postscript:
The scruples of a Christian have determined me to expose my own life to any extent rather than subject myself to the guilt of taking the life of another. This must increase my hazards & redoubles my pangs for you. But you had rather I should die innocent than live guilty. Heaven can preserve me and I humbly hope will, but in the contrary event, I charge you to remember you are a Christian. God’s will be done! The will of a merciful God must be good.
Once more adieu my darling
darling wife
AH
As the sun rose above the Weehawken dueling ground, Aaron Burr’s first shot struck Hamilton just above his hip and tore through his body to lodge in his spine. Hamilton convulsively clutched his trigger when the bullet hit, and his shot struck a tree limb high over Burr’s head. “This is a mortal wound, Doctor,” Hamilton gasped when Dr. Hosack rushed to his side. His friends brought him back to New York, where Hosack and several other doctors examined him; all agreed that Hamilton was right, the wound was mortal.
Hamilton asked his friend, merchant William Bayard, who had offered his riverside house on Jane Street to the dying man, to send for Benjamin Moore, Episcopal bishop of New York. The bishop responded, but he was unhappy to learn that Hamilton had been wounded in a duel, an activity Moore considered immoral. He was even more troubled when he learned that Hamilton had never joined the Episcopal Church, yet he wanted to receive holy communion. Moore declined to administer this central act of the Christian faith in such a situation. He feared it would imply that he condoned dueling. The bishop departed, declaring he wanted to give Hamilton “time for reflection.”
Hamilton sent for another clergyman, the Reverend John M. Mason, pastor of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, and asked him to administer communion. Mason regretfully informed Hamilton that his church did not believe in private communion. For them it was a public ceremony, available only on Sunday. He tried to reassure Hamilton that communion was not necessary to win God’s forgiveness for his sins if his faith in Christ was sincere. Hamilton shook his head frantically; he said he was aware of the power of Christ’s benevolence and that he wanted communion “only as a sign.”
Hamilton could not say more without revealing his real reason: he wanted to reassure and comfort Eliza. He knew that Mason would not consider this a sufficient reason to alter the regulations of his church; Mason might even have concluded Hamilton’s profession of faith was insincere.
A distraught Hamilton begged Bayard to persuade Bishop Moore to change his mind. At this point, Eliza arrived at the house. Knowing her emotional fragility, Hamilton had ordered the friend who brought her from The Grange to say nothing about his condition. She hurried to his bedside thinking he was suffering from stomach spasms. When Dr. Hosack told her the truth, she started to sob and gasp for breath. Hamilton writhed on the bed, wondering why either or both of those clergymen had refused him communion so he could offer Eliza proof that he had made his peace with God. Now all he could utter was a desperate reminder for her to seek the solace that had sustained her marriage: “Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian!”
At first the words did little good. Elizabeth began to unravel. Dr. Hosack and others tried to comfort her. Hamilton repeated the words several times as Elizabeth sobbed and shuddered with grief. Suddenly there was another woman in the room, tears streaming down her tormented face: Angelica Schuyler Church. Eliza flung herself into the arms of her older sister. Only she understood the pain of losing this unique, incomparable man. Whether the love between Angelica and Hamilton had ever been physical was irrelevant now.
A few hours later, Bishop Moore returned to the Bayard house. Hamilton’s friends pleaded with the prelate to change his mind. The bishop had another talk with the dying man, who told him he had been planning to join the Episcopal Church “for some time past.” He declared that he detested dueling and bore “no ill will” toward Aaron Burr. He had gone to Weehawken “with a fixed resolution to do him no harm.” The bishop gave him holy communion, and Hamilton’s head fell back on the pillow. In spite of his agonizing pain, a faint smile played across his lips. He had achieved the only gift he could offer Eliza now: his reborn faith in the mysterious God who had allowed so much grief to engulf their lives.
IV
Alexander Hamilton died peacefully the following day with a weeping Eliza and Angelica at his bedside, along with at least a dozen other friends. Gouverneur Morris found the scene so unendurable that he fled to the garden of the Bayard House. New York City gave Hamilton a public funeral replete with orations and a huge crowd of spectators. When his friends examined the will Hamilton had left among his papers, they realized he was penniless. His only meaningful investments were in western lands that would take years, perhaps decades, to appreciate in value. Meanwhile, he had debts that amounted to almost a half million dollars in modern money. It was unarguable proof that Hamilton had never dipped into the millions of dollars he had handled for the federal government or used his insider’s knowledge to speculate on Wall Street.
The friends, led by wealthy Gouverneur Morris, raised enough money to enable Eliza to keep The Grange. But contributions lagged, because many people thought she could turn to her wealthy father for support. Four months later, when Philip Schuyler died, they learned that he, too, was close to bankruptcy. He had lost a great deal of money in unwise investments during the 1790s.
Over several years, Hamilton’s friends managed to raise about $80,000 for Eliza—more than a million and a half dollars in the inflated currency of our time. She was able to live in reasonable comfort and dignity. In the first few years, she sometimes expressed near despair. She spoke of her “wou
nded heart” being unequal to the burdens cast upon it. But she found strength in Hamilton’s deathbed conversion. She spoke of him as “my beloved sainted husband and my guardian angel.”3
The words were not chosen casually. She believed Hamilton’s faith had been reborn and that he had joined the ranks of the “sainted” in eternity. She also believed, like Episcopalians and Catholics today, in the “communion of saints,” which enabled the dead to protect and nurture those they loved who were still on earth—the role of the guardian angel. Knowing that her prayers and example had played a part in this transformation was enormously meaningful to her. Gradually, she began to see that Hamilton’s early death had given her a mission in life. She would devote herself to protecting and even enlarging Alexander Hamilton’s reputation as one of the founders of the American republic.
This was a task that needed doing. Hamilton’s tragic death did not change the Jeffersonian Republicans’ opinion of him. John Beckley, the man who had given the Reynolds story to James Thomson Callender, gloated openly at Hamilton’s fall. He mocked the magnificent funeral and the eulogies that Hamilton had received. “Federalism has monumented and sainted their leader up to the highest heavens…. The clergy, too, are sedulously trying to canonize the double adulterer as a moralist, a Christian and a saint.”4
As the Jeffersonians saw it, Hamilton was a menace, a perpetual threat to the republic’s political purity, and Burr could and did gun him down without an iota of blame or remorse. Proof that this conclusion was not confined to a few politicians of Beckley’s stripe was the way Burr was treated by Jeffersonian Republicans, especially in the South, after the duel. He fled to Saint Simons island off the coast of Georgia to escape the threat of a show trial concocted by his New York enemy, Governor George Clinton. Burr’s host, wealthy Republican Senator Pierce Butler of South Carolina, lavished hospitality on the fugitive. On his way back to Washington, D.C., for the next session of Congress, the vice president was feted in Savannah, Georgia, and Petersburg, Virginia, by Republican admirers as if he were a general returning from a triumphant campaign.5
Other ex-revolutionaries were equally unsympathetic to Hamilton. Thomas Paine wrote a mocking satire asking Christian believers why their God had arranged to have Hamilton killed in a duel. John Adams, brooding in Quincy, wrote that “a caitiff had come to a bad end.” He would only concede a hope that Hamilton was “pardoned in his last moments.”6
V
Eliza Hamilton set herself the task of collecting her husband’s papers. She devoted many hours to retrieving copies of the hundreds of letters he had written to friends and supporters. She even persuaded the Washington family to let her borrow and copy Hamilton’s letters to the president. She interviewed politicians who had worked with Hamilton and added memoranda of their memories to her files. For the next twenty years, she tried to persuade one of Hamilton’s friends or admirers to write his biography. She met with one frustration after another. Various prominent politicians and writers studied the papers for years at a time and then returned them, pleading ill health or advancing age.
A climactic disappointment was the failure of former secretary of state Timothy Pickering. He kept the papers for almost a decade. When he died in 1829, his heirs found only a few disjointed, unfinished chapters. By this time Eliza’s second-oldest son, John Church Hamilton, was ready to undertake the task, and he began his seven-volume History of the Republic as Traced in the Writings of…Hamilton, which would consume the next thirty years of his life.
This devotion to her husband’s memory was by no means the only thing that occupied Eliza Hamilton. Long regarded as a fragile, dependent woman, she began demonstrating an independence and originality that amazed everyone. All her life Eliza had been dominated by strong-willed men, first her father, then her husband. Now that she was free to act on her own, she joined a group of equally religious women who founded The New York Orphan Asylum Society.
Eliza was perpetuating for friends and family another memory of Alexander Hamilton, the orphaned West Indian boy. She became a hardworking member of the board, with the title of deputy director. Over the years she devoted an immense amount of time to the rescue of New York children who had met a similar fate. In 1821, with her own children grown and launched on respectable careers, Eliza became the asylum’s director. She learned to know and care about each of the 158 children then in residence in the building the society had erected in Greenwich Village. She helped them get jobs and persuaded a New York politician to recommend one boy for West Point. Later she persuaded the New York state legislature to give the school annual grants. In 1836, she presided over a ceremony that began the construction of a larger and more permanent orphanage at Riverside Drive and 73rd Street.
On the side, in 1818 Eliza founded the Hamilton Free School on land she owned between 187th and 188th streets in Washington Heights. It was the first school in that developing part of Manhattan Island. She enjoyed all this hard work immensely. Once, she told a son how grateful she was to God for “point[ing] out this duty to me and giv[ing] me the ability and inclination to perform it.”7
A portrait of Eliza Hamilton in her later years is the most telling evidence of how profoundly she had changed. The mouth is now a strong emphatic line and the dark eyes are bright with self-confidence—and kindness. The anxiety and uncertainty of her married years have vanished. A woman friend described her face as “full of nerve and spirit.” As she grew older, the same friend marveled at how she “retains to an astonishing degree her faculties and converses with…ease and brilliancy.”8
In 1848, at the age of ninety-one, Eliza Hamilton moved to Washington, D.C., to live with her widowed daughter, Eliza Holly, who had a comfortable house only a few doors from the White House. Here, Mrs. Hamilton launched a new career as a celebrity. Politicians of all ages and parties rushed to meet her. Southerners may have been dismayed by her brisk interest in the politics of the day: she was a critic of slavery. But everyone was charmed by the “sunny cheerfulness of her temper and quiet humor.” She was a frequent guest at the White House, where presidents from Polk to Fillmore were fascinated by her still-vivid memories of chatting with George and Martha Washington and John and Abigail Adams.9
Perhaps the most startling of Eliza’s Washington, D.C., activities emerged from her friendship with another woman who shared many of her memories of the republic’s early years—Dolley Madison. Dolley came to her one day proposing to do something about the stalled monument to George Washington. For the better part of a decade, the proposed 855-foot obelisk had remained nothing more than an embarrassing idea. Eliza Hamilton called on the know-how she had acquired in her forty years of lobbying and fundraising for New York’s orphans.
Together these two remarkable women loaned their names to a campaign to raise enough money to begin the huge task. Their appeal inspired startling numbers of people to open their wallets, and on July 4, 1848, the city fathers laid the cornerstone of the great marble pillar that would declare George Washington’s singular greatness. Among those at the ceremony were President James K. Polk and his wife, Martha Washington’s grandson George Washington Parke Custis, and an obscure congressmen named Abraham Lincoln.
Elizabeth Hamilton died in 1854 at the age of ninety-seven. In a small pouch she wore around her neck, her daughter found the letter Alexander Hamilton had written to her on July 4, 1804, testifying to his wounded, wounding, but ultimately transcendent love.
BOOK FIVE
Thomas Jefferson
ROMANTIC VOYAGER
The first woman close to his own age who stirred Thomas Jefferson’s affection was his older sister, Jane. She shared his enthusiasm for music and books, which was not widespread in the Jefferson household. In later years, Jefferson described Jane as “a singer of uncommon skill and sweetness.” Often on summer nights, he would play songs on his violin and the two would sing together. Even in his old age, Jefferson spoke of her to his granddaughters “in terms of warm admiration and love.”
Ah! Joanna puellarum optima!
Ah! Aevi virentis flore praerpta!
Sit sibi terra laevis!
Longe, longeque valeto!1
(Ah! Jane, best of girls!
Ah! Plucked too soon from your blooming youth!
Why was your native soil so unfavorable!
Long, long shall I bid you farewell!)
II
Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson, was another rural strong man, on the model of Augustine Washington. His main interest in his son seems to have been figuring out how to toughen the skinny, dreamy youth to qualify him for manhood, Virginia style. Peter died when Tom was fourteen, probably suspecting he had not succeeded. At an early age, Tom was sent into the woods with a gun to bring back a wild turkey. He blazed away but hit nothing until he found a turkey trapped in some sort of pen. He pinned the bird in place with a garter and shot him at point-blank range. We can be fairly sure that his father was not pleased by this performance. Tom continued to spend most of his time with his head in a book—or practicing his violin as many as three hours a day.