Eliza Hamilton

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  James then traveled to Scotland, to see his father’s ancestral home, also called the Grange.

  James sent back glittering reports of his father’s fame from Europe; meanwhile, Alexander Jr. passed long evenings with his mother by their shared fire telling Eliza stories about the haunting swamps of Florida and how the moss from the branches touched the river. He told her about his travels to the American West and of seeing once again his younger brother.

  Eliza never heard from William. And she had some unfinished business.

  Eliza had made up her mind. The boys advised against it. Eliza straightened her frail old-lady shoulders. She was a Schuyler and the wife of a general. Wives of soldiers showed no fear. That was what her mother, on her way to burn the fields in advance of the British, told fleeing refugees and, throughout their childhood, General Schuyler’s daughters. There was no deterring her. Eliza was going to set off herself on a last adventure.

  CHAPTER 20

  Last Adventures, 1847–54

  Eliza wasted no time in setting off. Who knew at eighty how much time was left to her?

  Eliza had never been to Europe. The Old World did not tempt her. She had seen it all, decades before, through the eyes of her sister Angelica. What could a scuffed and tattered reality offer her that could rival the magic of a sister’s youthful letters? To break the magic would feel like losing Angelica all over.

  No, it was the American West, with its mighty rivers and broad, rolling prairies, that Eliza hankered after. She was part of this vast, striving continent, and rivers and mountains had been in her blood since her girlhood on the Hudson, when she had wondered what lay on the far side of the Catskills and the answer had come: the future. Eliza felt sure there were adventures ahead of her. When the train rattled along now toward Harlem and the fields rushed past her, Eliza sometimes asked the bewildered conductor to let her off at an empty junction, just for the pleasure of knowing she could still climb hills—and fences—at eighty.

  But she wanted to touch the past again, too, on this last great adventure. She would touch the past and pass the torch of her love and Alexander’s to the most wayward and independent of her children. How like his father. She wanted to see William, the boy who looked most like Alexander, too, and who carried with him most clearly the raw spirit of the Schuyler frontiersmen. She had not laid eyes on her son for more than fifteen years, and Eliza longed to embrace him as his mother once more before she died. She knew that he would not come home, and that she would need to set off to find him. His brother Alexander had already made a journey west to see William and had come back with wondrous tales that piqued even the steady Eliza’s curiosity. In Illinois, he met the up-and-coming state senator Abraham Lincoln, he exclaimed, “lying upon the counter in midday telling stories.” Her Alexander would never have believed that one day this odd thin man would be president.

  Eliza wanted to give to William a gift that he alone, perhaps, of her children could appreciate as his inheritance, and she wanted to give it to him in person. It was foolish and unnecessary, her sensible sons assured her. But was it foolish to want to hold a clod of earth in your palm and to tell your son to grow strong and rich and happy on it? As part of the tangle of his father’s unpaid pension, only recently settled with Congress, came a claim to a large parcel of public lands in Illinois and Wisconsin. William had wanted his freedom. She would bless him with it.

  Let her other boys fuss. James and John and Alexander: one of them was always fussing or quarreling with the other, to the annoyance of their sister. Drawing near to the fire, watching the heat rise with satisfaction, Eliza, alone in the afternoons, sometimes set aside her embroidery and thumbed the pages of well-worn river guidebooks, thinking and planning. In January, she set into a sturdy leather trunk her provisions and organized some pressing domestic matters. What to do with her daughter Angelica was a question she had lived with now for almost half a century. Dr. James MacDonald’s resignation from the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum had thrown the care of Angelica into question.

  When she set off, she had a solution. She did not depart for the West that winter, when the cold had settled. Eliza turned, instead, north over frozen ground by sleigh to her childhood home in the Hudson River Valley to the small-town bachelor residence of her mild-mannered and sweet-tempered youngest son, Philip. Her ghost boy. The one who could never take the place of his dead brother and who kept aloof to save his mother’s feelings. Philip had agreed to take charge of his sister during Eliza’s absence.

  Steeling herself against the biting cold and pulling her woolen petticoats and buffalo wraps tightly around her and her eldest daughter, Eliza wondered. She had wanted to be a good mother—a republican mother—but she knew herself at eighty. There had been wounds. She, like Alexander, had favorites among the children. And somehow her favorites were the distant ones, the ones with wild streaks of independence. Eliza settled back and smiled to herself. Alexander would have liked that.

  When Angelica was settled with her bachelor brother, Eliza turned her sights westward, waving goodbye to Philip at the wharf in the first days of March. Her father used to have just that same habit. The ground was still cold, but the river ice had broken, and Eliza felt her spirit carried along with the rush of waters. She didn’t know precisely where the current would take her, but she was ready to welcome it.

  Eliza rattled along for nearly three weeks, over rickety plank turnpikes and swaying in barges dragged along by horses across the shallows, wondering for the first time what she had been thinking. It was hard going. As hard as anything she remembered from those bygone days of the revolution. In her narrow cot, she cursed the cold until dreams came to her, and in the morning the corn mush gruel was lumpy and unpalatable, just as she remembered. At mid-month, as reward for her privations, Eliza reached the ugly town of Pittsburgh, which she found “gloomy from the use of coal” and generally hideous.

  She planned to set off immediately for Cincinnati, though, and her tone was jubilant. Never mind what had passed. The continent and William were before her. Besides, steamboat packets were floating grand hotels, and the captain warmly welcomed the small, elderly lady he soon discovered was Mrs. General Hamilton. She must dine at the captain’s table and drink his Madeira. He would not brook opposition. “Adieu!” she wrote to Philip in high spirits before the steamboat pulled away. “Write to me and let me know how Angelica is.”

  Traveling with only a maidservant, Eliza was on an adventure that few women half her age would have braved in the 1830s. Some of the dangers were real. Steamships snagged and sank with alarming regularity. Eliza wrote letters home describing the muddy waters of the turbulent springtime river and a difficult navigation. But it was the fear of the wilderness that kept most women and most men, too, confined to the salon and the parlor, and Eliza was having none of that. She was still the same fearless tomboy.

  And so, mostly, her letters home at each riverside village were filled with descriptions of the great beauty of the frontier and the awesome power of the river that carried her. On warm evenings, as winter turned to spring, Eliza settled comfortably into a deck chair and let time and the shore slip past her. How she wished Alexander were here beside her. Who could blame an old lady if she sometimes closed her eyes and spoke aloud her greetings? April saw her as far as Louisville, Kentucky. In May, they were gliding past the wilderness of forest into what Eliza thought was the very beautiful city of St. Louis.

  There, for the first time, the disastrous news from the East reached her. Urgent voices asked, “Have you heard? Have you heard?” Eliza did not know what the men were talking about, but she had seen enough of stock markets and the Treasury to guess that it was bad business. Eliza called over to the boys along the docks to ask for word from New York, and when the eager reply came back, “Crash, madam, crash in the city,” as word trickled west of the great financial collapse that would destroy the fortunes of both her sons James and Alexander and lead to the bank foreclosing on the St. Marks Place proper
ty, Eliza calmly sent her maid off to find newspapers.

  Eliza took it all in stride. She had been poor before, and her only true home had been the Grange and Alexander. Cutting her trip short was not going to restore the family fortunes. Eliza wrote back home to the children, warning them that her business with the land claims would not allow her to return immediately, news from the city or no, and she carried on toward the far horizon. By June 5, 1837, she had passed the great junction where the Ohio River met the Mississippi and was on her way to the Wisconsin Territory, the river coming to life all around her.

  The truth was, Eliza didn’t wish to return any time soon. The trip was exciting. She was done with men and their financial crises. She felt like that same girl who had once scampered over rocks and up waterfalls and left the fussy, helpless Miss Lynch and the other ladies crying out in terror at her courage. God knew that courage had in the years since sustained her. But when Eliza saw William at last—a “cultured gentleman, speaking French and having his cabin shelves filled with books . . . his furniture a rude bedstead with some blankets and buffalo robes for bedding, and oak table, wood stools”—smiling out at her with his father’s eyes, it was still hard not to cry a little.

  It was the better part of a year before Eliza set foot back in New York City, a spectacle of financial ruin, and she had not forgotten her projects or the orphans on her travels. While Eliza was away, carpenters had been busy breaking ground for new buildings for the orphan asylum in Bloomingdale, on a gentle slope that looked down over the Hudson River, with fundraising thankfully behind them.

  Construction was completed at last three years later, in 1840, near what is now Seventy-Fourth Street and Riverside Drive. On July 4, at a grand celebration covered in the New York press, Eliza Hamilton, the orphanage’s sprightly directress, was the lady of the hour. That year, her John would publish, too, the long-awaited second volume of the life of Alexander, the second of a four-volume planned series. It was the perfect homecoming.

  Her journey to the West and the news of the financial crash had given Eliza time to consider. Her boys were men and had careers and lives ahead of them. Women had no prospects. When that wicked man had murdered Alexander, what options had been left before her except dependence and charity? She had two daughters. One, Betsey, was by now twice a widow. One would spend her life, Eliza accepted, in an asylum. Eliza was determined that neither of her daughters should have to rely on the prudence and wisdom of their brothers for their survival. Eliza could remember all too easily how, after the death of their parents, her siblings had turned on her in inheritance battles.

  On her return from the West, with her land business settled and worried about Angelica’s future, Eliza set about changing her will and quarreled with her son James, who continued to exercise a heavy hand over his mother’s finances and his father’s legacy. She was determined now to leave Betsey the sole executrix not only of her estate but also of her father’s papers, which they hoped to sell to the United States government to fund the care of Angelica. James, who possessed power of attorney, intervened and set about attempting to rewrite his mother’s will, provoking a confrontation. On February 15, 1841, Eliza wrote to him an angry letter. “I am much dissatisfied,” Eliza reprimanded her son. “My first intention in requesting you to take charge of the papers was to make a codicil to my will. You objected. . . .” Now she wanted the legal papers surrendered. “I have looked for you day after day and with the expectation of your bringing that paper with you, and cannot rest until I have received it and seen it destroyed,” her letter instructed.

  James had long been her most challenging child, but now she feared his motive was “an illegal one.” She was certain that his goal was to prevent his sister from having financial independence. That rankled mightily. James had suffered devastating losses in the crash, and Eliza knew enough of financial speculation and panic to have a clear idea of the lengths to which a man and a father might be driven. Eliza was sensitive to the ways in which the men around her managed finances, for reasons that should have needed no explanation to any of Alexander Hamilton’s children. They had read the papers and knew what was said about their father. Eliza didn’t mean the change to her will as a criticism of Alexander and the position in which he had placed her as a widow. Never that. But Alexander Hamilton’s untimely death had left her and the children in dire straits, and she did not forget. She preferred to trust her steady, sensible, widowed daughter. She left to her sons—James, John, Alexander Jr., Philip, and William—a mother’s love. Everything else she left to her widowed daughter, in trust for the care of the orphaned Angelica, who would live “lost to her herself,” as those who knew her put it, for decades.

  James, hurt and angry, set off for Europe in a fit of pique and stayed away for the better part of the next half decade. With the house at St. Marks Place lost to the bank following the crash, Alexander Jr. and his wife left as well again for Spain, and in 1842 Eliza’s youngest son, Philip, married at last, to a young woman of abolitionist sympathies named Rebecca McLane. Philip and Rebecca, alongside Eliza’s “orphan” daughter Fanny Antill and her husband, Arthur Tappan, joined the secret resistance movement known by the 1830s as the Underground Railroad. Years later, Philip’s young boys remembered discovering a “very black and ragged man in the cellar who was being fed by my father himself.”

  By the 1840s, Eliza and her daughter Betsey— now living together in a rented house on Prince Street in New York City and considering what to do next—had also embraced the cause of the abolitionists and spoke out against slavery.

  What to do next? They were, mother and daughter, two widows, not rich but not poor now either, and the world was before them. Eliza was unsteady sometimes when she walked, though, and her gout ached in the biting weather. Like her father, she had inherited the family malady. Winters in New York City were cold and painful. The ladies decided to live a little. They would spend the cold months farther south, in the new capital city of Washington, near the heartbeat of the republic. Eliza missed those days when everything was still beginning, and Alexander was shaping the future. She missed Alexander.

  In the capital—the capital Alexander had helped to found, she could not help but remember—Eliza quickly became friends with a spunky and already famous young woman named Jessie Benton Frémont, the daughter of a United States senator and the wife of one of her generation’s foremost military explorers, a man whose guide, a certain Kit Carson, was already a legend. Jessie Frémont had turned her husband’s army notes into a book, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains (1843), and it enthralled the country. Eliza recognized something in this slight and vibrant young woman and delighted in her company. The older woman could see a new era breaking, and she knew she wouldn’t be there to see it. She was already in her nineties and, though her mind was sharp as ever, her body was failing. But Eliza knew that whatever was coming, Jessie would be part of it.

  For her part, Jessie Frémont reached out to take the torch from a woman who seemed to many Americans already mythical, part of the pantheon of men and women who had stood beside George Washington and sparked the revolution. Jessie’s books had opened the West to the American imagination. But she would tell the world, too, of the day in 1845 when Eliza Hamilton went to church in the morning, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the orphan asylum, where Eliza remained directress.

  Eliza attended the newly founded Church of the Epiphany in the capital, but her bones ached with pains that came and went, and she was too frail to sit through an entire sermon. Come for whatever part you can, the preacher assured the devout old lady. Eliza and her daughter arrived this day at the close of the service. What Eliza did not know was that the sermon that day had been on the vast decency of the small group of women who decades ago had founded and built the orphan asylum. The “work and its greatly extended good were told over” to the congregation, Jessie recalled, and “our minds and hearts were filled with the good work of
this gentle lady when she entered—a very small, upright little figure in deep black.”

  “As she moved slowly forward supported by her daughter, Mrs. Holley, one common feeling made the congregation rise, and remain standing until she was seated in her pew at the front.” Eliza held her daughter’s hand tightly.

  Eliza’s mind remained as clear as ever, even as her body failed her, and increasingly visits to the parlor of Mrs. Hamilton became a living history lesson for a new generation of Americans in the capital. President James Polk recorded in his diary a dinner party in her company in the winter of 1845, noting that “Mrs. General Hamilton, upon whom I waited at table, is a very remarkable person.”

  When gold-rush fever swept the nation, Eliza’s heart traveled with her son William when, following in the footsteps of Jessie Frémont’s husband, he set off for California, driving a “spanking black team hitched to a bright new red wagon.” William landed up in Sacramento, which he described as a “miserable hole,” and, finding no gold, opened a store selling supplies to other hopeful miners. His younger brother, Philip, still an ardent abolitionist now like his mother, followed after William to the gold rush not long after.

  William would not return or again see his mother. He died of “mountain fever”—cholera—in a place he hated. Eliza cried for her darling boy with his father’s eyes the way she had not wept in fifty years. She wept for him and for his lost father and brother.

  Eliza had turned ninety-one in 1848, and she supposed that it was time, at last, to pass stewardship of the orphan asylum to another generation of women that year. The orphanage she cofounded exists still today in New York, under the name of Graham Windham, carrying on the work of Eliza’s living legacy.

  Upon retiring at ninety-one, Eliza moved with her daughter permanently to Washington, DC, taking a house on H Street near the intersection with Fourteenth Street, not far from the White House. When the historian Benson Lossing met Eliza that year, he noted, “The sunny cheerfulness of her temper and quiet humor . . . still made her deportment genial and attractive.” But Eliza was a restless soul. Retirement did not mean retreat or inaction. Eliza instead threw herself full-time into the work of helping her old friend Dolley Madison raise donations to build a fitting monument to General Washington, and on July 4, 1848, in a grand ceremony, the cornerstone of the Washington Monument was laid.