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

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  You are my good genius; of that kind which the ancient Philosophers called a familiar; and you know very well that I am glad to be in every way as familiar as possible with you. I have formed a sweet project, of which I will make you my confidant when I come to New York, and in which I rely that you will cooperate with me chearfully. “You may guess and guess and guess again Your guessing will be still in vain.” But you will not be the less pleased when you come to understand and realize the scheme. Adieu best of wives & best of mothers. Heaven ever bless you & me in you.

  The letter is a rare peek at the heart of their marriage, and it is not a glimpse into a marriage struggling with betrayal. It is a letter that speaks of Alexander’s love, of their continued intimacy, and offers his thanks, in the private language of their relationship, for Eliza’s sacrifice and loyalty.

  Alexander’s secret plan was to make their renewed happiness that summer and into the autumn permanent and to find a way to capture forever this emotional place and the depth of their commitment. Their moments of greatest happiness together had come, over the years, when they retreated to life together in the country as a family: the early days in Albany after Yorktown, the months in Albany following his resignation from the Treasury, this pastoral idyll in Upper Manhattan.

  Alexander had found thirty-two acres of land for sale in Harlem Heights. He was buying it. They would build together their dream home in the country. Eliza’s father promised to send down by river from the Schuyler mills in Saratoga the wood to build their home, and Alexander imagined a beautiful garden for Eliza. They did not have the money for such an indulgence. It would take Alexander years of work to pay off the loans to finance it. But he dared to look ahead to the future.

  When Alexander signed his note calling her the “best of wives,” he was striking the theme that, privately, was at the heart of their marriage and of how both Alexander and Eliza understood her public sacrifice in the scandal. When, long ago, Alexander had talked of the Roman wife in his letters to Eliza, he had been thinking of the famous Latin funeral oration on the tombstone of a Roman wife named Turia, recounted in a law school text called Factorum et Dictorum Memorabilium by Valerius Maximus, a text that he knew well as an orator and statesman and that sat in General Schuyler’s law library at the Pastures.

  At the beginning of their marriage, it was the virtues of the Roman wife recounted by Valerius Maximus that Alexander was asking of Eliza—loyalty, obedience, affability, reasonableness, industry, religion without superstition, sobriety of attire, modesty of appearance, love for one’s relatives, devotion to one’s family. Alexander’s earliest letters to Eliza and to friends like John Laurens detailed his search for a wife with just those qualities.

  In the moment of their greatest crisis, Alexander knew that Eliza had not wavered in her promise. And now he could not help thinking of the second part of that familiar oration on the best of Roman wives. “Why,” that fortunate Roman husband asked,

  should I now hold up to view our intimate and secret plans and private conversations: how I was saved by your good advice when I was roused by startling reports to meet sudden and imminent dangers; how you did not allow me imprudently to tempt providence by an overbold step but prepared a safe hiding-place for me, when I had given up my ambitious designs, choosing as partners in your plans to save me your sister and her husband. . . . There would be no end, if I tried to go into all this. It is enough for me and for you that I was hidden and my life was saved.

  It was a sentiment remarkably near to the refrain of the “nut brown maid” in Eliza and Alexander’s old ballad, and it was the secret at the heart of the couple’s marriage. “Best of wives” was, increasingly, a private code in Alexander’s love letters.

  Having made the sacrifice of the Roman wife, Eliza doubled down on the role and its virtues, finding in them meaning and a mission. She embraced the identity. A new commitment to piety and to public works of charity was part of that change for the Hamilton family after 1799. Eliza and the older children—Philip, Angelica, and Alexander Jr.—attended church services on Sundays at Trinity, where Eliza soon began taking communion.

  Eliza longed for a quiet life out of the public eye and her faith deepened. Alexander, however, remained Alexander. He and the rest of the Schuyler girls and their husbands continued to test the bounds of decorum with their pranks and sense of humor. Eliza grew exasperated.

  One of those family pranks set off a new scandal in February 1799. Alexander, Angelica, and Angelica’s eldest son, Philip Church, now in his early twenties, came up with a joke to play on John. Along with the help of a Polish gentleman, Count Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, they went along with a gag to pretend that ghostly spirits of the dead were speaking to Alexander.

  News of the haunting spread throughout the city, terrifying the credulous, and, as Peter Jay, the son of Eliza’s cousin Sarah Livingston Jay, told the story,

  Aided by our natural credulity and the respect paid to the names of the persons concerned, it obtained very general belief, gave rise to many very curious descriptions, and caused an interest and agitation of mind not easy to be conceived.

  The story grew and grew and with each telling became more ghoulish and outlandish, and eventually Alexander was forced to stop the panic by admitting that it had all been a contrivance “to frighten the family for amusement, and that it was never intended to be made public.”

  The society ladies were not amused, and when the truth came out the reputations of the pranksters suffered, especially Angelica’s for being party to a trick on her husband. Another of Eliza’s cousins in the city, Elizabeth De Hart Bleecker, noted in her private journal, “It seems it was a plot laid by General Hamilton, Mrs. Church, young Church, & [Count Niemcewicz], to deceive Mr. Church, which they did most completely—It was soon blazoned abroad & given credit to by many. Ann [i.e., Angelica] Church is mortified exceedingly.” Alexander and Angelica continued to set tongues wagging with their tomfoolery, fueling the old rumors. Following on the heels of the Maria Reynolds scandal, their behavior added gasoline to a fire.

  This same cousin also noted in her journal that in September, John Church and Aaron Burr had fought a duel at Hoboken after a quarrel over business.

  The duel was a turning point in Alexander Hamilton’s relationship with Aaron Burr. More than anything else, it set in motion the succession of tragedies ahead of Eliza. The duel brought to a head two events that had convinced Alexander that Burr was definitively a villainous scoundrel. The first had to do with a low trick that Burr had played on Alexander in securing his support for a proposed water company in Manhattan. In the summer of 1798, the yellow fever had swept New York City again, and this time doctors thought they understood the reason for the pestilence: dirty city water. Alexander threw his weight behind a plan to found a company to install safe city infrastructure. When he learned that it was a bait-and-switch deal and that the real plan was to fund a competing bank to his New York project, Alexander was furious. Worse, the company put in wells “dug in the filthiest corners of the town,” which made the city’s citizens sicker. The second involved a real-estate deal, a company called the Holland Land Company, and some shameless stock market speculation. Alexander, who had made some genuine but relatively modest missteps during his time in the Treasury and paid an excruciating price for them, understandably objected to what he saw as Burr’s flagrant abuse of his elected office in the New York legislature for profit. John Church, repeating what he had heard from his brother-in-law Alexander, “in some company intimated that Burr had been bribed for his influence whilst in the legislature,” prompting Burr’s challenge to a duel.

  John Church, who took a dim view of Burr and was more than a bit brash in his actions, accepted the challenge, and four gentlemen—the combatants and their seconds—were rowed across the river to New Jersey one September afternoon before sunset. One shot missed. Another shot tinged off a coat button. John Church, thinking better of the affair after a first round of shots, promptly of
fered an apology, which Aaron Burr accepted. Alexander, though, was not satisfied. The subtext of the duel—in which he and his old enemy Congressman Aedanus Burke were the seconds—nodded to Alexander’s time in the Treasury and to the debacle of the Reynolds scandal. Once, Alexander and Aaron had studied law side by side in the library of General Schuyler and attended Van Rensselaer family events together in Albany. They had worked in the same field as attorneys for years, sometimes on the same side, sometimes as opposing counsel, but had maintained cordial relations. Since the 1790s, Alexander had had his doubts. He had doubts no longer. Burr, Alexander was convinced, was a weasel of the first order. He would move heaven and earth from this day forward to thwart Burr’s ascent in public office. Alexander would not always succeed. In fact, in the election of 1800 his failure would be spectacular. But the die was cast now, and the stage was set for what in a few short years would be a disaster for the Hamilton family and a tragedy for Eliza.

  The duel between John Church and Aaron Burr ended with a jolly shaking of hands and laughter, even if Alexander stewed in private. All four of the combatants, in fact, were lucky. These showdowns ended badly as often as not, and dueling was against the law in Manhattan. Should death result, the man who fired the deadly shot faced charges of willful murder, and all the seconds charged as accessories.

  Dueling had long been a problem in the United States, and in 1799 duels disturbed the peace of the wives and mothers of New York with upsetting regularity. Eliza was probably unaware that Alexander and John Church were caught up in a number of challenges over insults and allegations.

  Some of those challenges were absurd and seemed designed to provoke Alexander. General John Skey Eustace, a political adventurer, informed Alexander early in 1799 that “a gentleman called this instant to tell me a duel was to take place between General Hamilton and myself—in the first place—and two successive combats with the Mssrs. Church, if I survived the first affair. As this report has arisen from some reflections I have sent to a printer . . . you may give the most prompt and efficient check to this more than ridiculous story.”

  Alexander, who had no interest in giving Eustace a platform for or satisfaction regarding this invention, replied coldly, “You are perfectly right, Sir, in calling the story you mention a more than ridiculous one. To confirm this conclusion, it is not necessary for me to tell you that I had not the most distant idea of your having written any thing which could give me displeasure.” Alexander refused to be drawn back into combat with the press and judged that Eustace was an attention seeker. Renewing the controversy would distress Eliza.

  There were still implications. Seventeen-year-old Philip Hamilton, raised in this milieu, was unfortunately inclined to view dueling as part of the ritual of manhood. His older cousin, Philip Church, told a riveting story, and Philip Hamilton admired his rich and rakish uncle John, as well. This was what it meant, then, to the teenager to be a gentleman. What came next had been set already in motion.

  For most of the spring of 1800, Eliza was alone again with the children. Construction had begun on a large family home on the property in Harlem that they would call “the Grange,” and Eliza and the younger children spent the summer living in a small farmhouse on the property, while Alexander traveled to court sessions across New York on business; when he could make it home, he camped with the older boys in tents, as Eliza and her sisters had done as children in Saratoga. Alexander “measured the distances [for the building] as though marking the frontage of a [military] camp,” one of the boys remembered later. “When he walked along, his step seemed to fall naturally into the cadenced pace of practiced drill.” They thought of their father, as Eliza had of hers, simply as the general.

  Roughing it, though, wore on Eliza. Rheumatic gout, the effect of a kidney damaged by repeated fever and infections, had left Eliza’s knees swollen and aching. It didn’t help that she was heavily pregnant with their seventh child already that sticky summer, a daughter, another Elizabeth, born toward the end of November.

  Eliza was lonely, and letters with her cousins sustained her. She was especially close with her cousin Gertrude Livingston, and their correspondence was frank and affectionate. One of Gertrude’s letters added a postscript that hinted at some of the challenges Eliza faced with her eldest son, who people already said was as talented and as reckless as his father. Philip Hamilton had completed his studies at the recently renamed Columbia College and was being groomed by Alexander for a brilliant career as a lawyer. He was his father’s golden boy, and Alexander adored him no less than Eliza did. But Alexander was too inclined to be soft on his son, even as the world praised the boy. “Tell the Renowned Philip,” Cousin Gertrude wrote, “I have been told that he has out stript all his Competitors in the face of Knowledge and that he dayly gains new Victorys by Surpassing himself.”

  The world had high expectations for Philip Hamilton. And Philip was cocky.

  Everyone seemed to struggle with bad health in the winter of 1800–1801. The new baby, Betsey, was sickly, and Eliza’s sister Catherine couldn’t shake a chest infection. Philip Schuyler’s gout was painful enough in February 1801 that Alexander sent General Schuyler’s sleigh down from Albany to fetch Eliza’s sister Catherine home. “Don’t be alarmed that Kitty is sent for,” Alexander wrote. “Your father is much better and I am persuaded in no manner of danger. But he shews an evident anxiety to have your Sister Kitty with him. She is the pet.”

  The real health worry in the family, though, was Peggy.

  Alexander was in Albany at the state court, and Eliza hoped to travel upriver in February to see him. But the roads were too sloppy for the carriage, and heavy clay in the soil was causing flooding at the Grange that she had to stay to manage. Alexander planned to be home before the end of the month, but when the time came it was clear to everyone that Peggy was dying. She had been failing for years due to complications of gout, a disease that plagued the Schuyler family.

  Peggy asked if Alexander would stay a few days longer with her. He could not refuse the request of his beloved sister-in-law. Peggy’s husband the patroon, Stephen Van Rensselaer, asked someone to fetch their young son from boarding school in New York City so he could see his mother. Eliza wished that she could have gone with the boy, but she couldn’t leave her small children. She would have liked, though, to have said goodbye to her sister. She would have to trust Alexander to tell Peggy that she loved her. When the letter arrived, edged black with mourning, Eliza held it for a long moment, already knowing what it meant. “On Saturday, My Dear Eliza, your sister took leave of her sufferings and friends, I trust, to find repose and happiness in a better country,” Alexander wrote. “Viewing all that she had endured for so long a time, I could not but feel a relief in the termination of the scene. She was sensible to the last and resigned. . . . Tomorrow the funeral takes place. The day after I hope to set sail for N York. I long to come to console and comfort you my darling.”

  But Alexander was seldom at home any longer.

  Eliza’s frustration was growing. Even when Alexander was in the city now, there were increasingly occasions when the three-hour journey back and forth from Wall Street to the Grange was too much, and he sent home by courier instead guilty notes to Eliza and presents of marbles for the boys and dolls for little Betsey. But what Eliza needed most was Alexander’s help with the two oldest. Philip was drinking and partying. Their daughter Angelica was moody and erratic.

  Alexander and Eliza had weathered together the crisis of public scandal. The numbing daily routine of middle age, chronic aches and pains, and marriage was a bigger challenge. They were apart again, and they had never done well long-distance as a couple. Alexander wrote defensive and irritable letters, and Eliza hated reading them and knowing he was unhappy with her. She was never a scribbler and found it harder than ever to write the letters he wanted when they were at odds with each other. It was an old pattern in their relationship and Alexander often repeated the refrain he had been iterating since the first
days of courtship, but now his tone was less cajoling and wounded than scolding and paternal. “I was extremely disappointed, My Dear Eliza,” Alexander wrote in early October, “that the Mondays post did not bring me a letter from you. You used to keep your promises better. And you know that I should be anxious to hear of your health. If the succeeding post does not rectify the omission of the former I shall be dissatisfied.”

  Eliza complied, but she was cross and unhappy.

  Alexander was home briefly at the farmhouse in Harlem in October. Eliza finally lost her temper, and there was a bitter quarrel. Eliza didn’t feel well, Alexander was never home, yellow fever was again terrifying New Yorkers, and there was always the looming humiliation of the Maria Reynolds gossip. She had two children under five, including a sickly one-year-old whom she was still nursing. On their weekends home from school, she looked after their three younger boys, her late brother John’s fatherless son Philip, and now her late sister Peggy’s motherless son Stephen.

  And Philip was exasperating his mother. “Naughty young man,” Alexander sympathized, adding uselessly to Eliza, “But you must permit nothing to trouble you and regain your precious health.” She did worry about her eldest son’s carousing, though. Word made its way back to Eliza that the boy was acting the part of the young buck in the city with friends, frequenting the theaters, drinking too much in the public houses, and debating politics with a venom that soon made even Alexander uneasy. And Eliza knew that if this was what was making its way back to his mother, things were probably worse than she imagined.

  Eliza was not wrong in her supposition.

  Philip Hamilton, with all the swagger of the handsome son of a famous father, was acting up. He was, in the words of one of his father’s friends, a “sad rake” and something of a hooligan. Things were sure to end in disaster.

  And then they did.