The brutality of impoverishment at the prison was crushing. Criminal inmates were fed and clothed by their jailers, however abjectly. Not so debtors. They survived—or not—on whatever food and, in winter, firewood, family or friends delivered. Between Abraham Lott and starvation stood only the unlucky Cornelia and her still-unmarried sisters, none of whom had prospects or incomes.
When Eliza first stepped foot in the debtors’ prison that year, she pulled her thick cloak close around her and shuddered. As the lock clicked shut behind her, Eliza could only wonder what she and Alexander had been thinking. She decided there and then that she would move heaven and earth to prevent anyone in her family ending up in debtors’ prison. It was bad enough to be a visitor.
Eliza squared her shoulders. She was there on a charity mission.
Alexander heard from a friend and fellow brother of the Cincinnati fraternity of the plight of a portrait artist locked away that winter for debts that were shockingly modest. Such a fate was not uncommon. Of the 1,162 debtors in New York City prisons that year, more than seven hundred were languishing for debts of less than a pound—not quite a hundred dollars in modern figures.
Alexander thought he saw a better solution. The incarcerated artist, Ralph Earl, could paint his way to freedom. Would Eliza help him? As one of the Hamilton sons remembered later, their father asked their mother to go “to the debtors’ jail to sit for her portrait and she induced other ladies to do the same.” She was there that day for her first of several sittings.
In the most famous painting of her, Eliza sits before velvet curtains, her dark hair powdered white and veiled in a gauze of lace, her throat encircled by a black ribbon. Her lively brown eyes, which Alexander so admired, sparkle as they look out of the portrait. The background is a polite illusion. The reality was something starker. Eliza sat motionless in a dank cell and for weeks listened to the moans and cries of the desperate. Within the year, Ralph Earl was free, but Eliza never forgot what she had witnessed. Fear of financial ruin stayed with her after.
Life in New York City had a daily pattern by 1788.
Mornings began early for Eliza. The family was up before 5 a.m., and Eliza bustled the children off to school at the astonishing hour of six o’clock in the morning. A servant brought them home again at eight, and Eliza gathered the children around her while they ate warm milk and bread for breakfast. She didn’t mind that little fists left crumbs on her dresses. This was what she liked best about being a mother.
Philip, their eldest boy, was six in 1788, old enough for tutors and, soon, boarding school during the week on Staten Island. Alexander was already teaching him Greek and Latin. The little girls in the house, Angelica Hamilton and Fanny Antill, were learning their letters, and in the nursery Eliza’s toddler, Alexander Jr., was joined by another Hamilton brother, infant James. Eliza patiently watched the girls trace out their first, crooked letters.
When the weather was poor, Eliza read to the children from the Bible by the fireplace and contented herself with the endless sewing a growing family required. But if the weather were fine, Eliza put on a pretty gown and joined Aunt Gertrude and one of Eliza’s older cousins, the twice-widowed Judith Van Rensselaer Bruce, for morning weekday church services and, after, social visits. The ladies mostly attended the Episcopalian services at Trinity and St. Paul’s Chapel, but sometimes they attended the Dutch church of Eliza’s girlhood or went to hear a sermon at the Presbyterian church, where Eliza soon became friends with another newcomer to New York City, a Scottish woman in her forties named Isabella Graham, and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Joanna. Only Methodism, with its holy-roller enthusiasm, and Catholicism were seen as equally shocking.
The social visits were regimented affairs. New York high society at the end of the 1780s comprised a group of fewer than three hundred people and only a few dozen prominent families, most of them somehow related to each other and, more often than not, to Eliza. Society’s leading ladies each had an “at home” day to save the confusion of everyone being out visiting at once, and Eliza, whether she liked it or not, was one of those leading ladies.
She mostly didn’t like it.
Eliza’s at-home day was Wednesday. On that day, each week, from eleven to three, she prepared to welcome sometimes as many as two dozen callers in the front parlor on Wall Street. The servants in the kitchen prepared refreshments to be passed around on silver trays, arranged the chairs around the edges of the room, and stoked a cozy fire. Eliza dreaded those hours. The conversation was studiously trivial.
Over cups of fine Chinese tea, ladies and the occasional gentleman critiqued sermons and traded news of family sickness, ominous reports of the spread of yellow fever, and the safe arrival of babies and boats from Europe, and rated their chances in the New York lottery—the prizes for which sometimes ran as high as $10,000, a veritable fortune in the eighteenth century.
Eliza shook her head along with the other ladies at the frequent reports of duels between young men across the river in Hoboken, though the ladies discussed this more discreetly in low voices. Even the son of the bishop was guilty of dueling, to the great embarrassment of his pious father. As another of Eliza’s numerous kinswomen, Elizabeth De Hart Bleecker, put it sarcastically in her journal from those years in New York City, “Unfortunately neither of the children had the pleasure of receiving an honorable wound.” Eliza Hamilton shared in the general view among the ladies that dueling was immature and foolish. Among the men, though, it was the fashion.
In between the social calls, Eliza walked along the seawall at the Battery or scoured the shopwindows for frippery and dress trimmings with her aunt and cousins. And in the afternoons, even a rich housewife oversaw the servants cleaning and baking. Bed curtains came up and down constantly with the season, and there was always mending. After supper, when Alexander came home, evenings often saw more callers, who stayed for games of whist and glasses of Madeira. Women like Eliza and her cousins confided to their journals the pain of toothaches they tried to ignore, worries about sick children, and their private annoyance at guests who stayed too long, kept them up past midnight, and bored them with what Eliza’s cousin and friend Eliza De Hart Bleecker confided to her journal could be “rather a stupid visit.”
On weekends, the entire family went to church services, at least once and sometimes twice on Sunday, although few of the men and women whose daring philosophical beliefs had fomented the American Revolution embraced rigid church hierarchies. Eliza and Alexander, like their friends in the Cincinnati fraternity, did not take communion at the altar. After morning church, a solicitous husband or father might hire a coach for a country drive, and balls and concerts made up part of the whirl of the social season. A married woman with children like Eliza attended gala events a few times a year, however, and not weekly, like the girls who were courting.
Eliza knew that this was the role of a wife and mother. She did not wish for a place in Alexander’s busy world of law, finance, and increasingly New York–centered politics, where ratification of the Constitution was bitterly debated. By 1788, Alexander had already served in Congress, in the New York State legislature, and as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Eliza did resent the unflattering gossip about Alexander that sometimes made its way back to her, intimations about his easy gallantry, unfounded rumors of his mixed-race “Creole” blood and more accurate rumors about his bastard origins, which she tried to accept stoically as part of the rough-and-tumble of politics. Alexander sometimes came home exercised about backroom deals or thickheaded policies that imperiled the new republic. Eliza listened patiently and tried to steer Alexander toward moderation, but in the end politics was a man’s business.
Still, Eliza longed for some role larger than morning social calls and fashion. She and her family had dedicated themselves to the building of the American republic and had sacrificed for the revolution. She wanted to do something useful. Her cousin Sarah Livingston Jay, with whom Eliza traded regular morning visits in the 1780
s, privately expressed the same wish to her sisters and Eliza’s cousins, Kitty and Susan Livingston, when she found herself writing of liberty and America: “But whither, my pen, are you hurrying me?” she chided herself. “What have I to do with politicks? Am I not myself a woman & writing to Ladies? Come then, ye fashions to my assistance.”
Above all, Eliza longed for the return of Angelica. In 1788, a bitter rift in the Schuyler family spread to both sides of the Atlantic and suddenly made that wish possible.
The second wave of Schuyler children was now coming of age—the younger siblings of Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy—and, thanks to her sisters, runaway weddings were already a touchy subject for Eliza’s parents.
Their eldest little brother and heir to the largest share of the family’s fortune, John Schuyler, dutifully married the patroon’s nineteen-year-old sister, Elizabeth Van Rensselaer, in a grand society wedding.
The next two boys, Eliza’s brothers Philip and Rensselaer, however, exasperated their father. Rensselaer was ungovernable and had been since he was seven. Eliza’s brother Philip Jr. was either too busy partying or too dull to pass his college courses at Columbia—nobody quite knew which was the problem. He was the only one of the Schuyler boys to go to college, and his father was determined to see through the investment. But it had not turned out with the boys as General Schuyler expected. Eliza’s father candidly confessed to Angelica that her brother Philip Jr. was a disappointment, and Angelica sympathized with her father’s concerns about gambling especially. In London, she confided to Alexander, John Church was making staggering bets at the horse races. He was also hobnobbing with a passion, while Angelica retreated to their country estate in Windsor with the children. John wanted a seat in Parliament. His “head is full of politics, he is so desirous of making one in the British House of Commons,” that Angelica hardly saw him.
Just when General Schuyler’s patience was completely exhausted, young Philip Schuyler made another rash decision and ran off to marry a local eighteen-year-old beauty and heiress. Philip Jr. didn’t know which way to turn for family support, but he knew that Rensselaerwyck was not far enough away for him to escape the wrath of his father. So the newlyweds ran all the way to London and Angelica. Surely, Philip Jr. must have reasoned, his sister Angelica would know how to manage their parents’ anger. But it looked as if Angelica had been party to the plot, and that brought up all the old hurt. Angelica was in the hot seat along with her wayward brother.
The transatlantic family quarrel that followed had just one silver lining, Eliza thought afterward. Philip Jr. needed to go home and face his father. Angelica had been pressing John to let her travel to America to see her family, but he had not been inclined so far, she wrote to Eliza, to “indulge me in returning to my family and my country, when he is intimately persuaded that no woman in London leads an happier or easier life.” He knew, however, that her father would be furious. John—whose own insight into rifts and family peacemaking had matured since his youthful flight from London and impetuous elopement—now agreed that Angelica should travel home to America alone for a few months in the spring and fall of 1789, returning with her brother and his anxious bride to Albany. She would need to remember: it was to be a short visit. Make the peace with General Schuyler and return home to London and the children. That was as far as John was willing to go.
Eliza didn’t care if it were only for a week. She wanted to see her sister.
In New York, Alexander’s law career was at its postwar zenith. His political star, too, was on the rise, and he was celebrated as a prominent attorney and war hero. He had long since forgotten those early promises to Eliza that he was done with taking risks and chasing ambitions.
With fame, increasingly, came enemies. That was one of the prices Alexander and Eliza paid now. An ugly power struggle was unfolding in elite political circles, and Alexander’s reputation flew so high in some camps that in other camps people wished for his complete destruction. In the newspapers, in private letters and gossip, wild assertions about his illegitimacy, dubious parentage, immigrant status, aristocratic tendencies, secret allegiance to the crown, and, increasingly, infidelities and sexual perversions swirled around him. John Adams was decidedly partisan, but even he would later repeat the crude tittle-tattle that said that Alexander Hamilton possessed “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off.” What upset his political enemies were Alexander’s words, which were elegant, powerful, and persuasive. They hated his mind. So what they talked about was the corruption of his body.
Alexander, who surely knew the gossip, shrugged it off while it remained bawdy talk among the gentlemen. Sometimes he had been too flippant. He had once during the war recommended an elderly minister for a camp post with a letter that read, “He is just what I should like for a military parson except that he does not whore or drink,” though he meant it to be funny. But words had a life of their own after you wrote them, and, besides, like most elite men of the 1780s, Alexander Hamilton was probably not a stranger to so-called ladies of pleasure. Taverns doubled as brothels, and New York was a teeming seaport.
Eliza, as yet, knew nothing of any of this.
But Alexander Hamilton had always been known as something of a rogue, and his current situation had explosive potential. Into that situation arrived the fuel to the fire that was Angelica.
CHAPTER 10
Family Indiscretions, 1789
When Angelica’s ship crept into the New York City harbor in early March, Eliza was waiting.
Philip Jr.’s new bride, Sarah Rutsen, was eight months pregnant and wanted to go home to have her baby. The young couple set off immediately up the Hudson as far as Rhinebeck. It would take Philip Jr. nearly two months to screw up his courage and travel to Albany to make his peace with his mother and father.
Angelica, meanwhile, came home to Alexander and Eliza.
She arrived in New York City dressed to the nines in Paris fashion, giddy and full of gossip. She had come alone, without John or the children, and Angelica wanted to cut loose. Stephen and Peggy had a pied-à-terre in Manhattan, not far from Alexander and Eliza’s residence on Wall Street, and Angelica entertained them all with rumors and funny stories of human folly. Alexander laughed the hardest. One of the stories that Angelica shared with Alexander privately was the scandalous account of the private life of her new continental friend, Thomas Jefferson, whose dalliance in Paris with Sally Hemings, a fair-skinned African slave from his plantation, had resulted already in mixed-race children. Alexander tucked that story away in his memory.
The three older Schuyler girls maintained a tight sisterly friendship, and Eliza and Peggy had grown closer in New York City. Alexander found Peggy’s irreverent sense of humor refreshing. The sisters closed the domestic circle around themselves ever tighter. There was a deep and abiding sense of family loyalty that made them appear clannish. The jocular easiness of their manners with each other was discussed and noted. Alexander and Stephen, welcomed into the family as brothers, were part of the merriment, and a fair bit of horseplay was common. Peggy knew the words to some bawdy drinking songs, and Alexander sang along. There were juvenile pranks, off-color jokes, and amateur theatrics.
Angelica, Alexander, and Peggy were all flirts who sometimes overstepped the bounds of decorum. Angelica took pleasure in raising eyebrows with her embrace of outlandish fashion. A decade earlier, the French Marquis de Chastellux had noted wryly in Newport that “Mrs Carter, a handsome woman,” paraded about town in “rather elegant undress” that earned from those passing by shock and censure. Her time in Paris and London had not exercised a moderating influence.
It was well known, too, that John Church was a rake and a gambler, whose interests ran from the hazard table to speculative stock trading. Gambling had bankrupted him once in the 1770s, and there were fresh ugly rumors now circulating. Each ship that arrived, it seemed, brought more news about John’s debauched existence in London. John ran with a fast set there t
hat included members of the government and the Prince of Wales, and their private entertainments included brothels, hellfire clubs with salacious mock masses, and high-stakes betting.
Angelica had the reputation of the wife of just such a husband. One of Alexander’s colleagues and friends, Robert Morris, reported that in London Angelica turned away her morning callers one day “because she [was] engaged at cards with her children” and teaching them to gamble, shocking even the most jaded society figures. Morris told tales, as well, of their provocatively pretty French governess—“young enough and handsome enough” to arouse commentary—whom he suspected John was openly bedding.
Within weeks of Angelica’s arrival, the rumors about her and Alexander had started. Angelica, Alexander, and Peggy were all responsible for setting tongues wagging.
It happened at a society event sometime in late March or early April. The Schuyler clan were in high spirits. As the girls crowded into the carriage, there were cries to Alexander and Stephen not to crush the flounces of their gowns or their towering headdresses of ostrich feathers. Sleeves cascaded in lace at the elbows, and stockings in the style of 1789 were embroidered silk, worked in fanciful patterns, and, in an age before the invention of elastic, tied just above the knee with frilly garters, topping shoes festooned with bows. Either garters or shoe bows proved to be the fashion accessory that started the scandal. No one knew afterward quite which object started tongues wagging.
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