Boarding school was only one half of the Schuyler girls’ education, though. Eliza and her sisters were caught between two worlds, and each would have to decide which of those worlds they would make their lives in. The Schuyler girls belonged to a merchant family with deep roots in the Hudson, and their parents anticipated that all their daughters would marry someone from a similar background. Indeed, they might reasonably have expected that their daughters would marry into an extended network of family cousins and second cousins. So Eliza was also educated in the life of the frontier and equipped by her parents to succeed in building and managing an agricultural and entrepreneurial estate on the edge of the wilderness, and it was here that she shone. Eliza doled out her pin money carefully, on sensible, industrious girlhood purchases: a new set of strings for the guitar, a bit of fine muslin for her embroidery. Angelica was perfectly capable of blowing her entire allowance on a whim if a bit of finery in a window caught her eye. Eliza, a precocious little treasurer, shook her head at her sister’s impulsiveness, but there was no shadow between the girls. Angelica kissed her sister fondly and turned to her ribbons.
During the girls’ summers home in Saratoga, Kitty and Philip attended to the other half of their daughters’ education. Eliza lived for those summers. She wanted nothing more than to be outdoors and especially on horseback. She loved riding fast in the open countryside and the feeling of flying. She never minded dusty boots and did not always remember to wear a bonnet. Had they been living in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Angelica would have been Jane Bennet and Eliza, Eliza.
Philip Schuyler was a forbidding man, but the sight of his outdoorsy younger daughter made him smile, and he knew that if there were one of his girls he wanted with him on a military campaign, it was not the fussy and fine Miss Angelica but her tough-minded tomboy sister. In the summer of 1770, when Eliza was approaching her thirteenth birthday, Philip Schuyler planned to attend the grand Indian council of the Six Nations, where fifty Iroquois sachems, from all the clans of all the nations, would gather at a site two days’ travel farther west even than Schenectady. They would ride for days, through the great pine forests, and a young girl would need to be a steady horsewoman. When her father wanted to speak to her, Eliza’s heart sank. What had she forgotten? Her father did not have patience for disobedience and insisted on military order. When instead he asked if she thought she were old enough for an adventure, she hugged Papa and promised to be as brave as any soldier. Even the stern Philip Schuyler laughed. She was plainest of his three daughters, but when her dark eyes lit up with excitement, she turned into a beauty.
The grand council meeting was in July, and Eliza packed her satchel with the discipline of any general. She rolled her needles and some sturdy thread into a bit of cloth, tied neatly with a ribbon. There would be no time or place for heavy books, and anyhow Eliza didn’t care about reading. She cared about her riding gloves and extra bootlaces.
Eliza and her father, accompanied by at least one household slave, would travel by barge and then by horseback days through pine barrens and rough countryside. As they journeyed west along the Mohawk River, they almost certainly stopped overnight at Johnson Hall, the estate of Sir William Johnson, where Eliza met Sir William’s elegant and cloistered teenage Anglo daughters and perhaps some of Sir William’s half-native children. Sir William Johnson was also going to the grand council, and Eliza and her father probably made the final stages of the journey with Sir William and his entourage. Philip Schuyler went as both a major landowner and an elected member of the New York Assembly. He and Sir William joined more than two thousand representatives of the Iroquois and Cherokee nations and a delegation of British officers.
Eliza understood that Sir William was an important figure at these meetings. The natives trusted him, her father explained, to keep fair records of the council agreements with the settlers. Agreements were recorded on wampum belts among the Iroquois, and each design in colored shell- and beadwork told the story of a conversation. To accept the gift of wampum meant to accept an agreement as binding, and frontier girls learned to string wampum as readily as they could work samplers. Eliza, an especially accomplished needlewoman, made beautiful pieces of wampum that drew admiration.
Council meetings were exciting and deeply political, and it was not typical for a young woman like Eliza to attend them. If Philip Schuyler had had a son old enough, it is unlikely that Eliza would have accompanied her father. Her brother John, however, was only five, and her newest baby brother, Philip Jr., was still a toddler.
As she and her father arrived at council, all around Eliza were Indian families setting up camp along the banks of the river. All day, there were long speeches with debating. At family meals on the late summer nights, the Iroquois women pounded out summer corn, and boys pulled wriggling fish from the Hudson.
Her father was well known and well regarded among the Iroquois, and so Eliza tried to remember to act like a lady. She tried to be like the Iroquois girls, who listened carefully to everything that was said at council. The Schuyler family’s political ties with the native clans went back already generations, and it was Eliza’s first serious introduction into that world of politics. Philip Schuyler explained now to his daughter why some matters were easy and others were so difficult and contentious.
Philip Schuyler also explained that Eliza herself was part of an old network of ties and alliances. Her father and her grandfather had both been initiated into the Mohawk and Onondaga tribes as honorary members. Now, the sachems welcomed Eliza in a naming ceremony. With her brown hair tied in braids like that of the Indian girls, she stood tall and quiet when the tribal elder in his robes and feathers placed a string of beads around her neck. Eliza was now a member of the Iroquois family, and she was proud of her Indian name, which her father said meant “One of Us.” Eliza liked the idea that she belonged to the frontier and to the Onondaga. Eliza was a girl of the woods, who could scramble over rocks as fast as any of the Mohawk girls, and who learned to speak some of their language. Philip Schuyler knew, but probably did not explain yet to Eliza, that these rituals of allegiance might someday preserve the safety of his daughter and her family on the frontier. He knew that relations with the Iroquois were dangerously fragile.
In New York City and at school again come autumn, Eliza felt the stark contrast between her two worlds, and was homesick. The Schuyler girls were too young to stroll across the Kissing Bridge or dance at the Governor’s Ball in June, but there were “routs,” where Eliza practiced dancing with the other young people from the colonial upper classes. She tried not to wriggle as a servant teased and pulled her hair into a dramatic updo for parties, and she learned how to wear high-heeled satin shoes on cobblestone streets without spraining an ankle. She wore, in the fashion of the day, satin and brocade dresses cut low enough to raise modern eyebrows and tucked bits of fine lace into her swelling teenage bosom in cold drawing rooms during the winter. On Sundays, she and Angelica sat primly in a family pew at Trinity Church, alongside their Van Cortlandt and Livingston cousins, attended by the slave their father had sent with them. The family owned at least five slaves during these years, including Eliza’s mother’s favorite, Prince, who stood behind Kitty’s chair every night at dinner; additionally, there were Cutt, John, Peter, and Bett. The girls were not alone in having an African servant. Slaves made up roughly a quarter of the population of New York City in the fall of 1770.
Before long, their younger sister Peggy joined the two older girls at school in the city, and each girl had her own family role and personality. Angelica was the most sophisticated and socially ambitious of the three sisters, and she thrilled to the romances she discovered in novels and poetry. “A very Pretty Young Lady,” as one visitor noted emphatically, she looked the most like their mother, who had been a beauty. Angelica was also a flirt and obsessed with the social graces and accomplishments that would make her a fine lady. Peggy, on the other hand, was dark-haired, plump, and, some said, the prettiest of all th
e three sisters, with a sarcastic sense of humor that intimidated those less clever and less witty. She possessed the lion’s share of family musical talent, and played the guitar with real skill and sang moving ballads in a clear soprano. She also inherited her father’s imperious demeanor, and she and Philip Schuyler clashed on more than one occasion. She was his willful child and, with her saucy tongue, his most exasperating daughter.
Eliza was the classic middle sister and the peacemaker. She took after her father, with a strong-boned face a bit too thin and angular to be called beautiful on a young woman. She had an enviable figure and a healthy, athletic build from hopping over fences and riding horses fast. But she also had a stubborn independence and a native modesty that made it easy to overlook her amid her flashier sisters. Eliza was, someone who knew her said, “a Brunette with the most good-natured, lively dark eyes . . . which threw a beam of good temper and Benevolence over her whole countenance.” Angelica was the socialite, and Peggy could be a bit of a laddish rebel. Eliza was a quiet force who kept the three sisters together.
By 1773, the Schuyler girls’ formal educations—such as they were—were over. New York City, however, was increasingly where Eliza’s parents and her family spent time during the 1770s, thanks to Philip Schuyler’s burgeoning political and military career. When the family was at home in Albany or Saratoga in the summers, handsome young captains were also increasingly frequent visitors, as the word spread that Philip Schuyler had a particularly fine wine cellar and three entertaining and lively daughters. Social conventions on the frontier were famously relaxed, and Kitty and Philip Schuyler understood from personal experience how one thing might lead to another and how carts can come before horses. Philip Schuyler cast a discerning, fatherly eye over the callers, and on more than one occasion showed a young gentleman to the end of the wharf, pointing in the direction of downriver. Visitors to the Pastures, after all, might fall as easily in love with the family’s wealth as with one of his daughters, and Philip was wary of these bounty hunters. His concern was not unwarranted. Officers remarked in their private journals that Philip Schuyler lived like a prince in a veritable woodland palace, and his property ran to the tens of thousands of acres. With three increasingly boy-crazy country girls and, by 1773, three young sons now to contend with—John, Philip Jr., and baby Rensselaer—Kitty Schuyler was feeling beleaguered and understandably tired.
Romance was on the mind of all three of the Schuyler sisters. In the summer of 1766, their cousin Mary Watts had come to stay for the Saratoga season. Then, Mary—known to everyone just as Polly—had been a rare, “china doll” beauty. Now “Lovely Polly,” as she was known, was nineteen and more striking even than she had been as a girl. She was also high-strung, snappy, and snobbish. “Rich and nervously irritable” was how one person who knew Mary put it, and now, it seemed, she had found a perfect partner: Colonel Sir John Johnson, the careless and randy son and heir of Philip Schuyler’s friend Sir William. John quietly jettisoned his common-law wife, a local working-class Dutch girl, packed off their two small children, and proposed to Mary Watts. The Schuyler girls found the idea of their glamorous cousin marrying a baronet very romantic.
The wedding took place at the end of June in New York City, and in July the Schuyler girls watched the river eagerly each morning for the newlyweds’ arrival. What would Lady Mary wear? How long would the bride stay in Albany on her wedding visit to their common aunt, Judith Van Rensselaer? When would she and Sir John call on Father? In their bedroom at the Pastures, the girls debated these fine points, and when Lady Mary and Sir John arrived in Albany, Mary was pleased to be given a celebrity reception.
Already, however, family tensions were brewing. Talk of revolt and tyranny and taxes still occupied the gentlemen in the public houses and around the fireplace after dinner. Increasingly, cousin Mary’s new husband was staking out a position that placed her on a collision course with kinsmen like Philip Schuyler and Aunt Judith.
When, in the year that followed, Sir William Johnson died and Sir John inherited, the newlyweds found themselves at the center of a powerful political network, just at the moment a new war was on the horizon. This time, the war would not be between the British and the French but between the British and the “American” settlers. Everyone in the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys would have to choose sides in the coming bloody conflict.
Philip Schuyler already knew that, when the time came, he would throw in his lot with the Sons of Liberty and the patriots, and he was already laying down the contacts that would make him an important Revolutionary War spymaster. Eliza and Angelica would act as his eyes and ears in the Hudson Valley and gather sensitive military intelligence to forward to General Schuyler. They weren’t spies exactly. But they weren’t not spies either.
Behind enemy lines, their recently married cousin Mary Watts would get drawn into espionage, as well. She, too, would have to choose sides and decide whom to spy for.
CHAPTER 3
First Romances, 1775–77
For the moment, though, boys were what mattered.
Eliza was afraid of the coming war. But the times were also thrilling for the young ladies. War meant the arrival of officers, who were dashing and sometimes handsome. Everyone knew, too, that officers threw balls for entertainment. While General Schuyler’s thoughts in August were on the campaign and his fragile Mohawk alliances, the thoughts of Eliza, Angelica, Peggy, and another of their cousins, the fifteen-year-old Maria Van Rensselaer, turned to new romances.
All the girls had crushes that summer, including Eliza. The trouble was that Eliza had not one but two rivals for the affections of the gentleman whose eye she hoped to catch.
Eliza turned eighteen in the summer of 1775. The older girls had stayed on in New York City to gain a bit of polish while Peggy finished school, but now all three of the Schuyler sisters were coming to the end of their educations. Eliza returned home to Albany to be tutored by Kitty and her aunts in what everyone expected would be the real life’s work, as practiced by other young women from her background: estate management.
She would have to learn to do this work, like her mother before her, in the midst of a war being fought in the countryside. By 1775, the American colonies were in open revolt against their British colonial rulers, and a great conflict was coming. Philip Schuyler, a seasoned officer from the days of the French and Indian War, joined the patriots at the First Continental Congress and was given command of the Americans’ entire northern army. He served under a man who quickly became a friend, George Washington.
Eliza’s father was in and out of Albany, sometimes away with the army patrolling the valley, sometimes home with a bevy of young captains and lieutenant colonels in tow, plotting defense strategy. Dispatches were constantly sent from and received at the Schuyler family’s riverfront estate, which quickly became command central, especially after the patriots in Massachusetts sent a man on horseback to warn the Americans in April that shots had been fired at Lexington and Concord. As her father put it in the days before the revolution began, it was a matter of principle and passion for the colonists: “Much as I love peace,” Philip Schuyler wrote to a friend,
much as I love my own domestic happiness and repose, and desire to see my country-men enjoying the blessings flowing from undisturbed industry, I would rather see all these scattered to the winds for a time, and the sword of desolation go over the land, than to recede one line from the just and righteous position we have taken as freeborn subjects of Great Britain.
In June, Philip was promoted to major general of the Continental army. When he led the American troops into Albany, bonfires lit the streets; red, white, and blue ribbons streamed from ladies’ bonnets; and Eliza joined her sisters and their neighbors in welcoming home the patriots and their local hero, General Schuyler.
Ahead of the boys was war. Philip and his troops marched north that summer, and Kitty and the girls traveled with the men as far north as Saratoga. They planned to say their goodbyes at dawn and to
watch the army set off with the sun for outposts farther upriver.
Just after midnight, the urgent shouts of the sentinels and the heavy clatter of boots and her father’s booming voice jolted Eliza from sleep. Heart pounding, Eliza rushed to pull her gown over her linen shift, and in the dark she and Angelica fumbled as they quickly tied each other’s dress laces.
Eight hundred Iroquois were coming down the valley on the warpath. Many suspected that Sir John Johnson was behind this. Saratoga lay in their path. There would be no retreat to country estates that summer. Papa and the troops marched to stop the rogues, and Eliza’s mother promptly packed the family back to the presciently fortified Pastures.
It was there at the Pastures that Eliza first set sight on a flirtatious, slightly paunchy southern officer in his early thirties named Tench Tilghman. His family owned a large plantation in Maryland, and Tench came as an envoy to the summer Indian council as part of the converging American political delegation.
Tench Tilghman met the Schuyler girls within days of his arrival on the scene in Albany. Angelica—“Ann”—he described as a “brunette with dark eyes, and a countenance as animated and sparkling as I am told she is.” Eliza—“Betsy”—also charmed Tench. “I was prepossessed in favor of this Young Lady the moment I saw her,” he noted in his diary. “Mr. [Walter] Livingston informed me that I was not mistaken in my Conjecture for that she was the finest tempered Girl in the World.” This was high praise from her cousin. Tench also met, however, the very elegant Miss Lynch, a confection of feminine elegance and helplessness and the daughter of a visiting military commander from South Carolina. Miss Lynch was the first of Eliza’s rivals. The second of Eliza’s rivals was her richer and prettier younger cousin, Maria Van Rensselaer.
Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton Page 3
