Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  As a married woman, Angelica needed no escort, but she was sorely lacking for a dance and dinner partner without John to attend to her. Her brothers-in-law would look out for her, they promised. Some people said that it happened on the dance floor, when Alexander led Angelica there and stood up alongside Peggy and Stephen. As the dancers spun in their graceful motions, there was a small eighteenth-century calamity. One of Angelica’s frilly garters fluttered to the dance floor, and down with it came her silk stocking.

  Harrison Gray Otis, who was there, claimed that it wasn’t a garter but a shoe bow and that Angelica lost it not on the dance floor but in the salon after dinner, though his account bears all the hallmarks of a polite whitewashing.

  Whatever the case, in the 1780s, a lady losing a garter or a bow passed as a chivalric occasion. Peggy—still thought of as “a young wild flirt from Albany, full of glee & apparently desirous of matrimony” in the view of Mr. Otis, despite her marriage to Stephen—plucked her sister’s frippery from the floor and put it suggestively in Alexander’s buttonhole. To cover their blushes, Alexander hammed up the part of the knight and returned it to Angelica with a flourish, as legend said the gallant King Edward III had once done for his fair mistress. Angelica quipped her thanks and picked up the allusion. She did not know, she retorted gaily, that he had been made royal Knight of the Garter.

  Such merriment drew unfortunate attention. Peggy, a wit with a raunchy sense of humor, now chimed in acerbically that Alexander would be a Knight of the Bedchamber if he could, and the three rogues all thought it terribly funny. Eliza, long since inured to their tomfoolery, smiled and knew better than to take any of her sisters or her husband seriously. Those outside their circle, though, saw it differently, especially the wives of Alexander’s political enemies. Behind their fans, the sober society ladies pursed their lips and tut-tutted. They lived in full view of the public. “I had little of private life in those days,” Eliza remembered later. And not everyone who was watching was friendly.

  Life was about to get even less private. George Washington was elected the first president of the United States in the spring of 1789, and New York City was abuzz with plans for fireworks, parades, and balls to celebrate the inauguration. Alexander was already being mentioned as a likely candidate for the first secretary of finance, and his political star shone increasingly brighter, along with the stars of Eliza’s father and brothers. Eliza would learn to live with every action being scrutinized. Her sisters and Alexander took fewer precautions.

  At the inaugural ball in early May, all eyes were on Eliza as one of the few ladies asked to dance by President Washington. He was an old friend of her father, and George Washington liked the levelheaded Eliza. Martha Washington considered her a friend and kindred spirit. “I mingled . . . in the gaieties of the day,” Eliza recalled. “I was at the inauguration ball—the most brilliant of them all,” where the assembled guests included all of elite political society and more than a dozen of the Livingston cousins, some of whom Alexander was increasingly at political odds with that summer.

  Despite her position as one of New York’s leading socialites, Eliza did her best to keep out of the limelight. Angelica was the opposite, and that also set tongues wagging. Eliza wanted a purpose—and tribal devotion to family was one she could embrace willingly, even if she yearned for something larger. Angelica longed to join the world of men and politics and their liberty. She once wrote to her mother, on hearing of her brother John’s marriage and his inheritance of Saratoga, “I am glad to hear that my Brother is likely to be so well established. I wish to God I had been a boy, or an old maid.” In her marriage, Angelica had few choices, and perhaps, as her father had predicted, she now questioned the wisdom of running off with a scoundrel. In New York City, she was determined to enjoy whatever freedom she could grasp, for however long John let her stay in America. The clock was ticking. She was starting the fourth month of what John had expected would be a flying visit to make amends with her father.

  While Eliza danced with George Washington—the stately minuet, she later said, was a dance well suited to his dignity and office—some eyes flew elsewhere. Already rumors were spreading. No one was surprised now at who Alexander had chosen as his dance partner. What was going on between Mrs. Church and Mr. Hamilton? People were whispering the question. In March and April, Angelica lived with Eliza and Alexander. In early May, increasingly wary of the gossips and under the weather, she moved to a boardinghouse farther down Wall Street, which Alexander leased for her until October as John’s attorney, and where the girls’ mother promptly arrived for several weeks to visit.

  While tongues wagged, in truth, Angelica and Alexander barely saw enough of each other alone to carry on a secret liaison, at least not in the Hamilton home on Wall Street. Alexander passed his days in his law office, and Angelica and Eliza were constant companions.

  When Angelica and Alexander did see each other, they were crammed into a small house with Eliza, filled with children, servants, and usually one or the other of their parents.

  Angelica once joked to Eliza that she should share her husband. “I love him very much and if you were as generous as the Old Romans,” she teased, “you would lend him to me for a little while.” It was part of the inside joke at the heart of Eliza and Alexander’s marriage. Eliza prided herself on being the Roman wife and told herself that all the annoyances of life in the public eye and Alexander’s political enemies were her sacrifices to family and the republic. Angelica was jestingly asking the Roman wife to make the ultimate sacrifice.

  But Angelica did wish that she had a husband like Alexander. John was far more imperious, far less tender. He spent weeks in London at his club, carousing with the lads. She had retreated to their country estate near Windsor. Angelica and Alexander’s friendship was deep and abiding. There was love and heartfelt care for each other. There was some teasing mixed with flirtation. That was true also. All of it was mixed with a shared sense of the ribald Schuyler family humor.

  Context is everything. The letters that passed among the three of them—because Eliza was always party to the reading, even if she hated writing—strike the modern eye as clandestine and amorous. To those raised in a culture of sensibility and sentiment, however, they were not proof of anything except deep and intimate affection.

  By early June, their runaway younger brother and his bride had made peace with Eliza’s parents, and General Schuyler was pressing all his children to come home together for the summer. Eliza and Alexander planned to stay in the city, barring perhaps a short holiday, but Angelica could not refuse her mother, who needed a travel companion back to Albany. Angelica and Kitty traveled together up to Albany early in the month, stopping to fetch Philip and Sarah at Rhinebeck, and Angelica stayed there until July, helping her brother mend fences with their parents.

  Angelica discovered that month a terrible family secret. The wealth of the Schuyler family, her father confided, was vastly overrated. What there was of it was precarious. The war and the economic aftermath had been the ruin of their fortunes, and just paying the bills was a challenge. General Schuyler put his head in his hands. He was determined to find a solution. Angelica was certain John could advise her father. If John knew one thing, it was money.

  The immediate problem was a house in New York City. General Schuyler, newly elected as state senator, needed a townhome for the legislative season, but he was short on funds, and space was cramped with Alexander and Eliza. Angelica insisted on making arrangements and drew Alexander and Eliza into the secret. “If papa requires money I hope that he will draw on Col. Hamilton who will supply him if he has any monies belonging to Mr Church, at my particular desire,” Angelica pressed her parents. “Let not then my dear parents be under the least embarrassment whilst their Angelica has so much.”

  In mid-July, Angelica swept back into New York City to begin house hunting. She seems to have decided that she and John would set up a second residence there and throw open the doors to her paren
ts. Perhaps she wrote to John, too, urging their return to America, citing his business acumen and the financial need of her father. Whatever the case, Angelica quickly scouted out a house on Broadway that would be, she believed, “an eligible situation, and if my Brother [Hamilton] should be appointed to the finance Eliza will be your neighbor.” When that house fell through, her father traveled down on the sloop with Peggy to keep looking, and they soon arranged to take a different house on Broadway from the first of November, where Angelica planned to stay through the winter at least with her parents. “On the first floor there are two rooms,” Philip Schuyler reported to his wife, “a parlor in front and dining room back with a good pantry. . . . On the Second floor, a drawing room in the near the whole breadth of the house, a large bedroom in front and a small one besides a closet between the two rooms sufficiently large for a bedroom for the Children.”

  As soon as that was settled, Angelica and Peggy took the sloop back upriver, for an August visit to spend some more time with Philip and Sarah. Alexander and Eliza remained in New York City, Alexander now caught up in all the excitement of the presidential administration and working late hours. Eliza, under the weather for most of the month, was left alone at home with the children for long periods in July and August. She and Martha Washington, both of whom understood public pressures and how they grew wearing and who shared a love of sober, simple pleasures, passed quiet summer evenings together stitching needlework in the sunset. Martha Washington missed her rural home. Eliza understood her longing. They talked of the Pastures and of Mount Vernon and gardens.

  By September, the city was returning to life after the summer recess, and Eliza looked ahead happily to a winter with Angelica and her parents no more than a few minutes’ distance. Angelica dared to hope that John would arrive with the children in the spring, for a permanent return to America. In fact, she seemed to be counting on it. There would be dinner parties and family celebrations, and Angelica was proud to know that Alexander and her father would be among the men shaping the country’s direction.

  When the courier arrived, John’s letter was already a month old. One of the children was sick in London. Angelica’s presence was required. Any plan that Angelica had of her family returning to America was canceled. John was exasperated at his wife’s long absence and demanded she take an immediate return passage. She had not seen her children in seven months, and John was not happy.

  Whatever John wrote in his letter—and it was likely blunt and angry—sent Angelica into a panic. Servants in a mad rush threw dresses into trunks and banged them down the hallways, leaving the landlady to fume at the damages. Angelica abandoned the two fine horses that pulled her sleek carriage; Alexander ultimately auctioned them off at John’s instructions. Worst of all, her departure would throw her parents’ living plans into chaos, but she did not have time to travel upriver to tell them in person. She wrote a hasty, heartbroken letter, apologizing for everything. She made certain, too, that she was aboard the next ship with passage, as John expected.

  On November 6, Alexander went alone to the wharf to see Angelica on board, while Eliza cried at home, comforted by her aunt Gertrude and cousin Judith Van Rensselaer Bruce. Angelica’s greatest fear was that her parents would think of her in anger, and Alexander promised he would make peace for her as a brother. Then, disconsolate, Alexander walked home through the streets of New York, back to a sleepless Eliza.

  In her cabin that night, anchored just beyond New York City, Angelica wrote a last letter, which the pilot crew leading the ship out to sea promised to deliver back in the harbor. “I am completely at sea and my poor heart unravels at quitting you all,” she wrote to Alexander,

  Do my dear Brother endeaver to sooth my poor Betsey, comfort her with the assurances that I will certainly return to take care of her soon. Remember this also yourself my dearest Brother and let neither politics or ambition drive your Angelica from your affections. . . . Adieu my dear Hamilton, you said I was as dear to you as a sister keep your word, and let me have the consolation to beleive that you will never forget the promise of friendship you have vowed. A thousand embraces to my dear Betsy, she will not have so bad a night as the last, but poor angelica adieu.

  So that Angelica would have a letter from them quickly after her arrival, and because they could think of nothing else to soothe their great sorrow, Alexander and Eliza wrote a letter to Angelica and sent it off on a ship leaving immediately after. “After taking leave of you on board of the Packet,” Alexander wrote,

  I hastened home to sooth and console your sister. I found her in bitter distress. . . . After composing her by a flattering picture of your prospects for the voyage, and a strong infusion of hope, that she had not taken a last farewell of you . . . little Phillip and myself, with her consent, walked down to the Battery; where with aching hearts and anxious eyes we saw your vessel, in full sail, swiftly bearing our loved friend from our embraces. . . . I shall commit this letter to Betsey to add whatever her little affectionate heart may dictate. Kiss your children for me. Teach them to consider me as your and their father’s friend. . . . Adieu Dear Angelica! Remember us always as you ought to do—Remember us as we shall you.

  Eliza added only a postscript:

  My Very Dear beloved Angelica—I have seated my self to write to you, but my heart is so sadned by your Absence that it can scarsly dictate, my Eyes so filled with tears that I shall not be able to write you much but Remember Remember, my Dear sister of the Assurences of your returning to us, and do all you can to make your Absence short. Tell Mr. Church for me of the happiness he will give me, in bringing you to me, not to me alone but to fond parents sisters friends and to my Hamilton who has for you all the Affection of a fond own Brother. I can no more Adieu Adieu. heaven protect you.

  It would be at least two months—a month there and a month back for a letter—before they would hear anything from Angelica in London.

  Historians have long speculated as to whether there was any truth in the rumors that were bandied about that year that Alexander had taken his wife’s sister as his lover and mistress.

  Eliza dismissed the gossip.

  Politics in 1789 were bitter and divisive, and Alexander was already a lightning rod in the new government. Eliza saw that clearly. His ideas about finances and the role of the federal government set him at odds with some of the republic’s other Founding Fathers, especially one of the powerful factions led by Eliza’s kinsman Robert Livingston. They talked about it late into the night by the fire, after Alexander would come home exhausted and frustrated. Eliza hated the conflict with the Livingston clan, but she left such matters to Alexander and her father. All of them saw it as a fight for the heart and soul of America, she knew, and Alexander wielded a fierce power. He was appointed by President Washington in the autumn of 1789 as secretary of Treasury, which placed him in charge of the national economy. His political enemies were keen to destroy his reputation and to stop his agenda. Alexander didn’t treat them with kid gloves, either, and in the next few years an ugly situation was about to get a whole lot uglier. If Eliza had known how much uglier, she might have worried more about the gossip.

  But Eliza understood the stakes and the contours of this battlefield. She shrugged off whatever she heard of the tall tales that Alexander was having affairs both with Angelica and with Peggy. Benjamin Latrobe, who knew Alexander in the 1790s, snidely remarked that Alexander “went to church from the bed of the wife of his friend” and told his correspondent, “If you ever get to the East Indies . . . you will see little Hamilton . . . standing in the temple of Lingam (the Hindus Priapus) . . . in eternal and basaltic erection.”

  Alexander’s lack of discretion did nothing to quash the rumors. In his swaggering way, Alexander liked to make jokes among the men about prostitutes, conquest, and the impressive size of his member. A youthful Alexander once advised his friend John Laurens in a crude joke to pass along to any interested ladies considering his hand in marriage the “size, make, quality of
mind and body . . . do justice to the length of my nose.” The length of the nose was a euphemism for “the size of the penis.” He also wrote to John Laurens letters ardent and suggestive enough to make generations of historians wonder whether the two young men were lovers. It’s unlikely, but it’s not hard to see why joking talk about “intercourse . . . with my friend” led scandalized Victorian editors of his writing to scratch out whole passages. It was not much different from his jest about the camp minister whoring. Jokes like this were common enough and were never meant to be shared outside the eighteenth-century political boys’ locker room, but those who despised Alexander seized upon the jokes as a confession.

  Eliza half heard, half intuited some part of this gossip about her sisters and developed the firm and indignant conviction that rumors of her husband’s infidelity were crass political attacks. The gossip also had the effect of pulling the Schuyler family even closer. They were a tight-knit bunch, no more so than when attacked, and Eliza, more than any of them, was staunchly, stubbornly, some said blindly loyal. That loyalty would be tested.

  CHAPTER 11

  Speculation, 1790–91

  In the spring of 1790, Alexander was consumed with work, and the bruising politics and manic pace were taking a toll on both him and Eliza. Eliza almost certainly heard in late March of the public attack on Alexander’s character and of the accusations of financial misconduct made in the House of Representatives by Congressman Aedanus Burke of South Carolina. The insults would have to end in a duel, the pundits whispered, and Eliza’s kinswoman and friend Elizabeth De Hart Bleecker confided to her journal that all the society ladies knew that it might end with pistols in Weehawken, New Jersey. The matter was so widely discussed in the city that Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania noted in his diary on April 4, “So many people concerned in the business may really make the fools fight.”