Eliza Hamilton

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  On December 3, 1778, the verdict was announced at last. It brought both satisfaction and fury. Eliza and her sisters waited in the parlor until the word was delivered. Needlework was cast aside, and the girls watched at the window. When the message came, it was the news they hoped for—the news justice demanded. The court unanimously acquitted General Schuyler, with highest honors. It was a tacit acknowledgment of what the family had fumed about for a year in private: that these had always been vindictive, trumped-up charges. But Philip Schuyler, freed from shame and stress, was now nothing but angry and indignant, and he could not be mollified. He resigned from the army and, only after some arm-twisting, agreed to serve as the Indian commissioner. In the year that followed, his work in this capacity would bring Philip Schuyler’s relationship with the Mohawk agents in his spy network to a point of crisis.

  When the trial ended, Eliza and Angelica returned to Boston. Days passed as the sisters managed a wartime household, rocking baby Philip to sleep and haggling with merchants. At night, when John was home, there were rounds of dinner parties and assembly balls all winter. The idea of the flirtatious Angelica acting as the chaperone to her younger, steadier sister raised more than one astonished eyebrow. Angelica was known, especially, for her risqué fashion choices, and people tutted that it was the young Mrs. Carter who needed a chaperone.

  Despite the social whirl, despite the dances, no marriage proposals came for Eliza. Would she miss her chances? Some unlucky girls did end up old maids and spinsters.

  When John’s work as a military supplier called for him to move from Boston to Newport, Rhode Island, in the autumn of 1779, Eliza might have moved again with her sister, but her mother and father thought better of it. Perhaps having her live with Angelica and John was not the best way to get Eliza established with the right kind of partner. Philip Schuyler continued to hear stories about his son-in-law’s gambling and carousing.

  General Schuyler wrote instead to his sister Gertrude and her jovial husband, the army surgeon John Cochran, asking whether they might have need of Eliza’s help and companionship that winter in Morristown, New Jersey. Eliza was twenty-two already, and Aunt Gertrude grasped the situation immediately. It was high time Eliza found a husband. Of course, Eliza must pass the winter of 1779–80 with her aunt and military uncle at winter camp.

  Philip Schuyler knew that Tench Tilghman would be there. Soon, so did a delighted Eliza.

  Winter camp at Morristown, conveniently located between the British troops at New York and Philadelphia, was a lively place in the autumn of 1779 and into the winter and spring of 1780. Eliza was not the only young lady arriving for a round of balls and parties and to attend to the serious business of finding a husband. Senior officers brought their wives and children, including their eligible daughters, and the great landowning families of the area hosted thrilling winter balls and dance assemblies to bring the young people together.

  Tench Tilghman was an aide to General Washington and lived in rooms at headquarters with a number of other young officers in the general’s “family.” One of the men who bunked in his room—where late-night conversations were frank and, as Tench noted, “where all is under the secure lock and key of Friendship”—was Alexander Hamilton.

  Eliza Schuyler had come to Morristown to look for a husband. Alexander was also of a mind that winter to get married. Their finding each other, however, was far from certain. Some of the stiffest romantic competition, once again, would come from Eliza’s cousins.

  Eliza’s favorite cousin, Kitty Livingston, lived at a grand estate near Morristown, with her father, the governor of New Jersey. Kitty was considered something of a beauty, with thick, dark hair, fashionably high cheekbones, and wickedly expressive eyebrows. Kitty was irreverent. It made Eliza laugh to see and hear her cousin. Poking fun would never get Kitty a husband, but she didn’t care. She was young, and beaux were a dime a dozen. Marriage wasn’t everything anyway. There was one gentleman, though, who seemed intrigued by Kitty Livingston’s flirtatious mockery: Alexander Hamilton.

  There was just one problem. Caty Greene, the wife of General Nathanael Greene, had other plans in mind for Colonel Hamilton. Those plans did not include Kitty Livingston as the bride of her favorite bachelor.

  Trouble followed Caty Greene wherever she went, and that meant trouble followed Alexander. Flirtation was Caty Greene’s favorite pastime, and matchmaking was flirtation as an art form. Caty Greene loved arranging marriages for her favorites, which meant never mind Miss Kitty Livingston. Caty’s eye fell on Cornelia Lott, daughter of the wealthy but rather shady merchant Abraham Lott, the local estate manager of a rich Dutch West Indian planter. Cornelia, a young lady “of delicate sentiments and polite education,” was sixteen, and that was admittedly young even in the eighteenth century to be thinking about marriage. But the general’s wife didn’t trouble herself about details.

  Alexander Hamilton was looking for a bride. He turned to several friends for assistance in matchmaking and did not mind in the least Caty Greene’s officious involvement. He did have, as he explained to his friend John Laurens, a couple of particular requirements:

  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 . . . chaste and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness). . . . But as to fortune, the larger stock of that the better. . . . 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 extravagances.

  His wife did not need to be a great beauty, but he didn’t want a bride who was unattractive. Most important, she needed to be rich. That was crucial. While Alexander Hamilton played the lovestruck gallant for the crowd, he was also running a careful private calculus when it came to courtship and marriage.

  Marriage was an expensive business, and the cold, hard fact was that young men were wise to be picky. The camps offered an important opportunity for a man like Alexander Hamilton, a rare chance at social mobility. The great families tended to marry within their own circles, just as the Schuyler family had been connected for generations to the Van Rensselaer and the Livingston clans. Alexander Hamilton knew that for young men not in possession of a fortune the eighteenth-century marriage market was no less a matter of urgent thought and reflection than for Jane Austen’s heroines a generation later.

  Alexander had been pursuing Kitty off and on for two years already when Caty Greene began to play matchmaker. As early as the spring of 1777, Alexander penned to Kitty some decidedly amorous letters, and at that time a gentleman and a young woman engaged in private correspondence were considered already halfway to an engagement. Alexander gushed to Kitty in one wordy missive:

  After knowing exactly your taste, and whether you are of a romantic, or discreet temper, as to love affairs, I will endeavour to regulate myself by it. . . . You and I, as well as our neighbours, are deeply interested to pray for victory, and its necessary attendant peace; as, among other good effects, they would remove those obstacles, which now lie in the way of that most delectable thing, called matrimony;—a state, which, with a kind of magnetic force, attracts every breast to it, in which sensibility has a place, in spite of the resistance it encounters in the dull admonitions of prudence, which is so prudish and perverse a dame, as to be at perpetual variance with it.

  Eliza and her cousin Kitty were pen pals, and perhaps Eliza already knew something of the flirtation between her cousin and Alexander Hamilton when she first met him in Albany. When she gave him a sideways glance on the ride back to the Pastures at that first meeting, was she sizing up her cousin’s love interest? Nothing is more likely. The gi
rls exchanged all sorts of intimate chitchat in their notes to each other, from family gossip to dress patterns, and before Morristown Eliza likely thought of Alexander—if she thought of him at all—only as her cousin’s admirer.

  The love affair between Kitty and Alexander might have led to a proposal. Alexander certainly wanted to talk in his love letters of marriage. Her replies, however, frustrated the young colonel—she did not respond to him with the requisite counterdisplay of ardor. Kitty was a bit too cool and ironic. Her passion for Alexander Hamilton was tepid.

  Caty Greene knew just the girl instead: Cornelia. In her, Alexander found a more encouraging and fevered reception. By late autumn of 1779, Alexander was courting Cornelia Lott in particularly flamboyant and public fashion. No young lady likes being snubbed for a rival, but Kitty was not heartbroken. Alexander’s fellow officer and another aide-de-camp, Colonel Samuel Webb, to the delight of General Washington’s inner circle, penned some comic verses on Alexander’s passion for the young lady in January of 1780, verses that slyly noted other “shrines” at which Colonel Hamilton had previously worshipped. Samuel Webb joked, “What bend the Stubborn knee at last, / Confess the days of wisdom past, / He that could bow to every shrine, / And swear the last the most divine / . . . / Now feels the inexorable dart / And yields Cornelia all his heart!” It had not been the first time Alexander Hamilton had declared himself in love. It would not be the last time either.

  In Alexander’s defense, it was hard not to get caught up in the wartime enthusiasm for romance. Camp weddings were frequent and fashionable. Tench Tilghman’s cousin, Margaret “Peggy” Shippen, threw over the handsome Major John André—the same John André who had caught Eliza’s fancy a few years earlier—and married Major Benedict Arnold in a wedding that had everyone talking. Soon, Benedict Arnold would go down—and not in a good way—as a legend of the American Revolution. What no one at Morristown knew yet was that Peggy Arnold was already an enemy informant and an agent for the British spymaster John André. Within months, she would bring her disgruntled husband into the network, culminating in a stunning betrayal.

  At the end of January, despite the public courtship, Alexander suddenly jilted Cornelia Lott, just before Eliza’s arrival at Morristown. Maybe the passion fizzled—Alexander was famously fickle. There was probably more to the story, however. Colonel Abraham Lott was a wheeler-dealer with a taste for high living and financial gambles, and he had already been hauled up in front of Congress to account for more than 20,000 pounds—several million dollars in modern values—that had mysteriously vanished. If Alexander inquired further into the finances of Cornelia’s father, as he surely would have done before proposing marriage, he would have learned that Abraham Lott was hopelessly indebted, embroiled in a situation that would soon see him imprisoned as a bankrupt. A dowry for his daughter was out of the question. Cornelia and her sisters remained, unsurprisingly, unmarried for decades.

  Alexander Hamilton now turned his eye instead to Tench Tilghman’s eighteen-year-old cousin Mary, known as “Polly,” the daughter of Colonel Edward Tilghman. The abrupt shift in his affections set tongues at camp freshly wagging, and a smitten Polly seemed certain that a marriage proposal was imminent. At just this juncture—as Alexander Hamilton was assiduously courting Polly—Eliza arrived at Morristown.

  Eliza traveled to Morristown under military escort and carrying letters from her father to General Washington and General Friedrich von Steuben sometime in late January or early February of 1780, with plans to spend the winter season with her aunt and her Livingston cousins. Home would be the small cottage that her aunt and uncle shared with General Washington’s personal physician, Dr. Jabez Campfields, on the road between the headquarters and the village.

  Eliza’s journey down to Morristown was cold and blustery. A blizzard in January left snowdrifts up to six feet high across the roads, and, as she rattled toward New Jersey, the wind swept into the cracks in the carriage door and the coachman sometimes slowed for icy sections. Travel conditions were difficult throughout January and February, and the winter of 1779–80 was not only the worst winter of the war, it was among the worst winters in an entire century. The ice on the Hudson River froze a dozen feet deep, worsening inflation made the cost of basic supplies beyond the reach of many, and the snow simply kept coming.

  Eliza arrived at Morristown with little fanfare, and within days had seen Tench Tilghman. Tench, however, was not interested in romance with Miss Schuyler. The situation was hopeless.

  Tench Tilghman was madly in love with another young lady. The object of his desire was his twenty-five-year-old cousin, Anna. Anna Tilghman was a young lady who knew precisely how to manage her skittish bachelor relation. When Tench proposed, she turned him down smartly. There were delighted letters among the Tilghman cousins, applauding Anna for not “surrendering at the first Summons.” Nothing could have more inflamed Tench’s passion. Tench was determined to marry only Anna. And Anna was determined to keep him wondering and waiting.

  For Eliza, it was a painful start to life at Morristown. Then, unexpectedly, Alexander Hamilton appeared on her uncle’s doorstep.

  Alexander had not come looking for Eliza. Or, at least, that was not his ostensible errand. He had been sent from headquarters to deliver some papers to her uncle Cochran, he explained, excusing his sudden appearance in Aunt Gertrude’s parlor. Eliza gave him a friendly welcome. There was her smile again, he noticed.

  Eliza had an appraising eye as well. Alexander, as one nineteenth-century biographer observed, “was evidently very attractive and must have possessed a great charm of manners, address, and conversation.” He had beautiful deep-blue eyes, and, as someone who knew him reported, “his complexion was exceedingly fair and varying from this only by the almost feminine rosiness of his cheeks. His might be considered, as to figure and colour, an uncommonly handsome face.”

  This time, the spark between them was instantaneous.

  Alexander went back to headquarters late and in the days that followed promptly threw over Polly Tilghman. He dashed off a letter instead, inviting Eliza and her cousin Kitty Livingston to go sleighing—though when work at headquarters forced him to cancel, he cajoled Tench into taking out the ladies.

  Embarrassed and miffed at her lover’s sudden desertion, the unlucky Polly fled home. Cousin Tench felt badly for her, writing to his brother:

  “Alas poor Polly! Hamilton is a gone man. . . . She had better look out for herself and not put her trust in Man. She need not be jealous of the little Saint—She is gone to Pennsylvania and has no other impressions than those of regard for a very pretty good tempered Girl, the daughter of one of my most valuable acquaintances.”

  The “little Saint” was Tench’s teasing nickname for Eliza, and everyone understood that the change of heart was entirely in character for Alexander.

  Word of Hamilton’s newest infatuation traveled quickly in Morristown circles—not least because Alexander talked of nothing now but Eliza. John Cochran noticed that Colonel Hamilton was drinking gallons of tea and spending a great many hours in his front parlor. When, returning to headquarters one night from a late evening spent there with Eliza, the giddy Alexander forgot the password at the checkpoint and was accosted by an overzealous young sentinel alert to the dangers of political assassination, there was great merriment in General Washington’s household at the newest love interest. But few were prepared to lay bets on whether it would all end at the altar. It was not the first time the young colonel had abandoned himself to his passion for a young lady, after all. It was the third time in the space of a month, actually. This might not be the last time this winter, either, some of his fellow officers wagered.

  Would Miss Elizabeth Schuyler meet the same fate as Cornelia and Polly when Alexander Hamilton’s attention wavered? And would Eliza have him?

  Some of the wiser heads at camp asked another question too. Alexander came from nothing and nowhere. Eliza was the daughter of a colony aristocrat. He was a lowly knight.
She was a baron’s daughter. Why would General Schuyler ever agree to such a marriage?

  CHAPTER 6

  The Winter Ball, 1780

  Angelica arrived on the scene in New Jersey at a crucial moment.

  The first winter ball of the season was just a week away, on Wednesday, February 23, timed to celebrate the birthday of George Washington a day earlier, and no one at camp was laying great odds on the chances that the fickle Alexander Hamilton would still be courting Miss Schuyler so many days in the future.

  True, Alexander talked of nothing now but Eliza. His fellow officers groaned when he waxed poetic after a few tankards in the Morristown tavern and teased him for his “cavalry-like advances on the latest feminine arrival.” This week, the colonel was in love with Miss Schuyler and her eyes. But only a few weeks ago it had been Miss Lott’s dark tresses. The other fellows felt for the girls and especially for poor Polly Tilghman. Still, the lads supposed, it was up to the ladies in the end to catch a husband. But it would take a rare lady, indeed, to catch and to keep a playboy like Alexander, and the good-natured Eliza Schuyler did not yet strike any of them as a ruthless tactician.

  It turns out they were underestimating the Schuyler sisters.

  Angelica swept into camp with her usual dramatic flair on her way to Philadelphia in the second part of February, bringing her little boy Philip, her three-month-old baby Kitty, and more trunks of extravagant French fashion than was strictly decent in wartime. The sisters quickly closeted themselves for a long talk—Angelica wanted to hear at once all the gossip—and Eliza poured out her heart. Angelica quickly assessed the situation. Her sister was in love. So was the colonel. Tench Tilghman was no more. Well, then, they would have to see to it that there was a marriage, n’est-ce pas? Angelica couldn’t get through a sentence these days without dropping in some French expression or another, Eliza noticed. There was a ball to plan for and the small matter of arranging a marriage proposal. Angelica laid out gauzy silk ball gowns and their strategy, and they quickly drew their sharp-witted cousin Kitty Livingston—Alexander’s old friend and love interest, a strategic advantage—into their lively war council. Then, behind closed doors, the girls put their heads together, laughing.