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

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  The pamphlet was a disaster. Alexander had done himself more damage than his political enemies ever could have managed, and he soon confessed to a family clergyman in despair that he regretted the publication. Watching Alexander twist in the wind as his pamphlet backfired was entertainment enough for his enemies. They patiently waited.

  For the moment, his opponents were busy adding to their storehouse of ammunition. Maria Reynolds continued to insist that there had been no affair, and, according to hints in the press, drew up the draft of her defense and turned it over to William Duane, the publisher of the Jeffersonian Aurora; the newspaper held the draft in reserve “in the event of certain political movements.” The implication was that if Alexander Hamilton ever considered a run for office, it would be used to reignite the scandal.

  And Alexander never did run for office. It was not a coincidence.

  Just as the worst of the scandal was crashing around Eliza, the family was thrown into a series of other crises.

  By the beginning of September, Eliza was back home in New York City, nursing baby William, when her eldest child, Philip, was struck down by one of the deadly summer fevers. When the rash spread across the teenager’s body, Eliza knew it was typhus. William Seton’s father-in-law was Dr. Richard Bayley, the city’s foremost expert in infectious fevers, and he advised the family to call in his former student, Dr. David Hosack.

  It was Dr. Hosack’s first introduction to the Hamilton family, and he remembered later how rattled Eliza was by the scandal. “Great distress then existing in [the] family,” Dr. Hosack recollected, “added to the anxiety pervading their numerous friends.” It was too much for Eliza, who broke down in hysterics. His “Mother, overwhelmed with distress,” Dr. Hosack recorded, Philip, “by my advice, was removed to another room that she might not witness the last struggles of her son.” Eliza was overwhelmed by the entire nightmare of the summer.

  Philip Hamilton narrowly survived the fever, and then, fresh on the heels of this family drama, came two others.

  Eliza’s brother Rensselaer, an indiscriminate risk taker since childhood, was among the men in the family caught up in gambling and speculation. Alexander had urged his father-in-law when he was in the Treasury not to let the Schuyler brothers, especially Rensselaer, “speculate in the public securities lest it should be inferred that their speculations were made upon information furnished by Hamilton; or were made in part on Hamilton’s account.”

  Rensselaer had been hiding immense gambling debts—and he gambled as much in stocks as in card games—for which he had taken out loans at up to five percent interest a month and had no hope of paying. His creditors now were dunning Eliza’s father, and even the reinvigorated Schuyler family fortune was not enough to cover the debts for Rensselaer. The debts “are too numerous,” Philip Schuyler wrote grimly. “No alternative is now left other than an attempt to procure the benefit of the Act for the relief of Insolvents.” The only thing that saved the twenty-four-year-old man now from languishing in a cell was a relatively new bankruptcy law, hastily enacted after the crash of 1792 put some of the city’s leading citizens in debtors’ prison. Rensselaer’s troubles did nothing to tamp down the controversy surrounding Alexander’s time in the Treasury.

  Then there was Eliza’s younger sister, Cornelia. She had met Washington Morton in June, and the two were still mutually enamored. He was not a steady young man, though he was undeniably a rich one. Washington Morton was one of the “young bloods” of his day and already had something of a reputation for making foolish bets and taking ludicrous wagers that saw him walking on a dare from New York to Philadelphia. He was not yet qualified to practice law and did not appear to have the temperament of a man ready to marry and support a wife and a family. But in September he was in love with Cornelia, she was in love with him, and he accordingly traveled up to Albany, where Cornelia had returned, to ask her father for permission to marry.

  The interview did not go well. Washington Morton managed to pick a fight with Kitty Schuyler almost immediately on arrival, and, as he put it, “Her mother and myself had a difference which extended to the father.”

  Philip Schuyler advised the young man that any talk of marriage to his daughter would need to wait until Washington had “slackened his pace to the sober rate befitting a steady-going married man.” The young gentleman, rather than biding his time, argued with General Schuyler as well, who did not take kindly to an impertinent suitor challenging him in his library. His impression of Washington Morton as a hothead hopelessly confirmed, Philip Schuyler marched his guest personally down to the dock and made sure he was on a boat heading southward. Striding back up the lawn, he encountered an anxious Cornelia:

  “Come into the library,” he directed, and he explained to his daughter in no uncertain terms that, based on the conduct of her suitor, he was not only denying consent for the marriage but was ordering that she break off all contact with Washington.

  “My wishes will, of course, be respected. Promise me to have nothing hereafter to do with him, either by word or letter.”

  “I cannot, sir,” Cornelia retorted.

  “What! Do you mean to disobey me?”

  “I mean that I cannot bind myself by any such pledge as you name, and—I will not.”

  The quarrel between the father and his equally stubborn daughter upset the entire household, and Cornelia, having already braved her father’s rage, was now determined to be with Washington. The young suitor persuaded a servant to smuggle a note to Cornelia, proposing the time and the method for an elopement, and the following week Washington Morton and a school friend arrived at midnight outside the Schuyler mansion with a rope ladder. Down climbed Cornelia, and they made their escape first by rowboat across the river and then by horseback rode thirty miles to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. As Washington bragged later to his family, “I got my wife in opposition to them both. She leapt from a Two Story Window into my arms and abandoning every thing for me gave the most convincing proof of what a husband most Desire to Know that his wife Loves him.”

  Kitty and Philip Schuyler were worried for their daughter, and by late November they came to the conclusion that Cornelia needed sympathy more than anger. Philip Schuyler now confided to Eliza that he wished Cornelia happy, “if she can possibly enjoy it, with a man of such an untoward disposition as her husband—I apprehend very much that he will render her miserable, and increase my affection.”

  When her parents invited Cornelia and Washington to Albany to make the peace, however, they abandoned hope. “His conduct, whilst here has been as usual, most preposterous,” Philip Schuyler reported, in despair for his daughter. “Seldom an evening at home, and seldom even at dinner—I have not thought it prudent to say the least word to him . . . as advice on such an irregular character is thrown away.” Sadly, her father’s predictions were not unjust. Cornelia had years to regret her youthful impulse, and the marriage was rocky from the beginning.

  Alexander published his ill-advised pamphlet in August, and, while the press gnawed on the scandal all autumn, Eliza let herself hope that the worst of it was behind them.

  James Callender, however, was not finished muckraking. Not long after the new year in 1798, he published another long, forensic exposé, and he made in excruciating detail the case for the Maria Reynolds letters—which Alexander had unwisely published in his pamphlet—being forgery. Callender’s piece was a two-pronged attack on the credibility of Alexander, and the journalist was eager to urge Alexander on to more reckless action.

  First was the question of why Alexander would not release the handwritten documents he claimed were in his possession. “If the letters published by Mr. Hamilton in the name of Maria are genuine,” James Callender opined, “it would be very easy to obtain her attestation of the fact.” And if—as Callender knew she would—Maria Reynolds claimed they were fabrications, why would Alexander not produce the letters and agree to allowing a judge to make a handwriting comparison? Maria Reynolds was quite willing.
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  Second, Callender drew the public attention to the many internal consistencies in the transcriptions Alexander had published in the pamphlet. “These letters from Mrs. Reynolds,” Callender noted,

  are badly spelt and pointed. Capitals, also, occur even in the midst of words. But waving such excrescences, the stile is pathetic [i.e., moving] and even elegant. It does not bear the marks of an illiterate writer. The construction of the periods disagrees with this apparent incapacity of spelling. . . . A few gross blunders are interspersed, and these could readily be devised; but, when stript of such a veil, the body of the composition is pure and correct. . . . The whole collection would not have required above an evening to write. . . . You speak as if it was impossible to invent a few letters.

  Alexander knew the pamphlet had been a mistake and confessed now that he wished to recall it, aware of how badly it had damaged his reputation. The Schuyler family rallied around him and tried to buy up all the copies of the pamphlet to destroy them. Alexander’s critics responded with a rogue reprinting, adding a sarcastic title page with the note, “Copy Right not secured according to the Act of Congress.”

  Thomas Jefferson’s view was that the pamphlet and the debate about the forgeries “strengthened [rather] than weakened the suspicions that he was in truth guilty of the speculations.” Senator Maclay summed up neatly what everyone was saying about the letters and the financial gossip: “No Body can prove these things, but every body knows them.” The pamphlet smacked of “the gentleman doth protest too much.”

  This time, Alexander exercised better judgment and kept quiet—in part at Eliza’s urging.

  By spring, Eliza wasn’t living in daily fear of what the newspapers might say, and with Alexander out of public office the intensity of the gossip and the animosity abated.

  But it never disappeared. Eliza lived with the knowledge that there was always the possibility of it returning to haunt them. The editors of the Aurora never let Alexander forget that they had something on him. Every so often, for years to come, the press wondered aloud about the scandal surrounding “a certain head of a department” and asked, “Why has the subject been so long and carefully smothered up?” Hanging overhead also, too, was always the possibility of Maria Reynolds or James Reynolds talking. Both had gone to ground and stayed out of sight and quiet. That could change at any moment.

  Eliza knew whom she blamed for all the heartache, and it was not Alexander. She laid the responsibility for igniting the controversy about Maria Reynolds and the letters squarely at the door of James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson.

  She would not forget. There were few things that made the even-tempered Eliza shake with fury and long for revenge. This was one of them.

  CHAPTER 15

  A Roman Wife, 1797–1802

  Eliza had borne it silently, but the humiliation of it all was unbearable.

  She did not regret the cover-up. Because no matter what happened or did not happen in the bedroom, financial indiscretions had been urgently swept under the carpet. She would have thrown her weight behind anything that prevented Alexander and the other men in her family from ending up like William Duer, who was still languishing in prison. The story had not been her invention, and she had been given few options in the matter anyhow.

  If this story is the true one, Alexander and James Reynolds concocted the tale of the affair to explain the transfer of money, as Maria Reynolds claimed, and they had all believed that the fallout would be confined to snide gossip in government circles. Part of the deal in their marriage was that Alexander would leave politics. He had done that. But now, the story had hit the national papers, and Alexander had been forced to defend a years-old hasty invention.

  Retreat from the glare of the spotlight seemed impossible, too. The return of Angelica from Britain had brought joy and consolation. But it also dashed any hopes that Eliza had of withdrawing from public attention. Angelica was the city’s leading socialite and threw herself into the limelight. As the wife of one of the city’s wealthiest citizens, Angelica flaunted European manners and the latest Parisian fashions. Even Harrison Gray Otis, a sympathetic Federalist politician, found Angelica “the mirror of affectation,” and the former Loyalist turned Federalist Walter Rutherford complained of “a late abominable fashion from London, of Ladies like Washwomen with their sleeves above their elbows, Mrs. Church among them.” Even Josephine DuPont, a French émigré and one of Angelica’s friends, noted that Angelica “makes it a habit of receiving while lying down in her bedroom, which I cite to show how she flaunts this country’s customs.” Cornelia and Washington Morton continued to party conspicuously, too, and Peggy was as wild and sarcastic as ever.

  Eliza’s sisters kept the Schuyler girls firmly in the center of New York society, and Eliza felt the embarrassment keenly. “I rely on your promise to compose your dear heart,” Alexander wrote her, and then he left town for extended legal business in Albany, leaving Eliza to manage a small baby and the gossip created by his pamphlet. On the weekends, when her house was filled with a passel of young boys, home from school on the island, Eliza was too busy to think about what the world said. Those were the days she felt most contented. But Alexander being away at such a difficult moment filled her with sadness and hopelessness. Eliza was struggling. Her heart ached.

  It worried Alexander. But finances were tight, he was hustling to build his legal practice, and the work was in Albany. Alexander was away most of the spring of 1796, living upstate with Eliza’s parents while traveling the legal circuit. Eliza stayed in New York City during the school year with the children, so they had somewhere to come home to on the weekends. They hardly saw each other all spring, and Eliza was under the weather. By the time he returned home, Eliza felt obliged to travel up the Hudson with the younger boys on the summer holiday to see their elderly grandparents. The older children would stay in the city during the break with Alexander.

  Three weeks in Albany was a summer tradition, and it mattered a great deal to Philip and Kitty Schuyler, but when Eliza set off in early June she didn’t want to leave Alexander or the older children and was close to a breakdown. Perhaps in the back of her mind were thoughts of what had happened the last time she’d left Alexander alone for a few weeks in the summer. The pamphlet had caused no end of heartache, and surely if she had been with Alexander she could have convinced him not to publish it.

  When the time came to go, Eliza wept at the wharf. “I have been extremely uneasy, My beloved Eliza, at the state of health and state of mind in which you left me,” Alexander wrote to her after her sloop departed upriver. “Let me entreat you as you value my happiness to tranquillize yourself and to take care of yourself. You are infinitely dear to me. You are of the utmost consequence to our precious Children.”

  A few days later, Alexander wrote Eliza again, assuring her that the “dear boys & myself continue in good health & that they thus far behave well. I hope they will continue to do so—for in our mutual love & in them consist all our happiness.” The scandal regarding the Reynolds affair had drawn Alexander and Eliza into a tighter bond of family loyalty than ever, but circumstances had forced them to be apart for too long, and it was more than Eliza could handle. She did her duty. Then, exactly three weeks later, Eliza made her way home, where Alexander was anxiously waiting. There had been no new disaster.

  In the summer of 1797, the United States was once again facing the possibility of war, as the French Revolution yielded to the imperial ambitions of Napoléon Bonaparte, and, at the end of July, Alexander’s name was once again in the papers. This time, the coverage was less uniformly antagonistic and noted that Alexander Hamilton had been promoted to the rank of major general and inspector, making him second in rank in the military only to General George Washington. Angelica and John’s eldest son, Philip Church, now nineteen, was eager to join the infantry as the American military mobilized, and Alexander wrote to President John Adams directly, requesting a commission for the young man, despite his inexperience.
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br />   Eliza refused to go to Albany for the summer this time. Over and over again, the letters Alexander wrote to Eliza during this period reveal in detail the unhappiness and anxiety these trips caused her. Now, more than ever, her commitment to staying together and protecting her family was tribal. When Eliza and Angelica proposed the two families rent a summer house together in the increasingly fashionable Harlem Heights during the fever season, instead of living apart in Albany, Alexander agreed readily. He was desperate to make Eliza happy and to return some measure of her devotion.

  By the late 1790s, the Harlem Heights area was a popular summer retreat for the city’s wealthy, and the socialite Josephine DuPont was one of their neighbors. Josephine found Harlem crashingly dull and dryly noted that the men mostly stayed in the city and left the women, bored, stuck on rural country estates with children. Angelica came to the same conclusion. Eliza, however, flourished. Far from the gossip, unburdened by tedious social calls and the dictates of city customs, she laughed with their children and spent long, delightful hours riding through the fields again and growing flowers.

  Unlike the other city husbands, Alexander joined his wife there. In those days, the Bloomingdale Road extended as far as modern-day West 147th Street, and large summer homes straddled knolls of farmland, where the cool breezes came in from the river. Work took him a great deal to Philadelphia that summer, but when he was in the city, Alexander rode the dozen-odd miles out from Wall Street to Harlem to have dinner with Eliza. For the first time in years, Alexander saw her relaxing.

  And so he struck upon a surprise for her in November. In a buoyant and flirtatious letter, Alexander wrote to Eliza: