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

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  The tragedy started stupidly. Philip and a fellow Columbia classmate named Price—possibly Stephen Price, although the young man’s identity is uncertain—went out drinking on the night of November 20, 1801, before heading off for a raucous night at the Park Theater in Lower Manhattan. A Friday night at the Park in the early 1800s was not a staid affair and largely did not involve watching a great deal of onstage drama. Prostitutes strutted in the cheap seats in the third-floor balconies, seats where young college lads, not coincidentally, also tended to congregate, and rowdy partiers threw peanuts at the actors. The real action was always offstage, though, and Philip and Mr. Price were carousing.

  The previous summer a local attorney named George Eacker, twenty-seven years old and a supporter of Aaron Burr and his Republican party, had made a Fourth of July speech at Columbia that attacked Alexander and suggested that, during Alexander’s time in the Treasury, he and John Church had colluded stealthily to bring back the monarchy. The relationship between Alexander and Burr had deteriorated further when Alexander, skirting the edge of his promise to Eliza to stay out of politics, had intervened in the presidential election. Such was Alexander’s contempt for Burr that, faced with a choice between Burr and his ancient enemy, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander had supported Jefferson as president. But what stung Philip Hamilton most was the attack on the character of his father and his uncle.

  The wine had been flowing, and the lads were foolish and rowdy. When Philip Hamilton spotted George Eacker in one of the next boxes on the balcony, in the company of one of the Hamilton cousins, a Miss Livingston, it seemed like a good idea to the impetuous young man to mock Eacker for the benefit of his fair relation. Young Philip Hamilton’s loud commentary was, one witness recalled, “replete with the most sarcastic remarks.” George Eacker was, unsurprisingly, irritated. Soon, all eyes were on the quarrel, and the show was forgotten. The three men took the argument outside, and on the pavement the situation degenerated. Eacker complained, “It is too abominable to be publicly insulted by a set of rascals,” and made to throttle Philip Hamilton. Philip had it coming.

  “Rascal” was a fighting word, and George Eacker knew it. That was an escalation. Circa 1801, “rascal” retained its original sense: the insult implied that a gentleman conspicuously lacked a certain virile organ. A contemporary vulgar translation would be something along the lines of calling a man a eunuch or a castrato. Philip Hamilton, with all the blustering machismo of youthful testosterone and certainly not prepared to give ground on the subject of his amours with the theatrical “ladies,” responded with a furious, “Who do you call damn’d rascals?”

  “We insist on a direct answer,” pressed Price.

  George looked from one to the other and shrugged. What a choice. “Well, then, you are both rascals,” came the exasperated answer.

  Friends urged the three to have a drink and try to resolve matters calmly. Further aspersions on each other’s manhood and on the character of Alexander Hamilton continued in a nearby tavern. Whatever else was said in that tavern, no one ever recorded precisely, but there can be little doubt that some of what was said touched on the delicate subject of financial speculation, Maria Reynolds, and Philip’s famous father. Then Eacker announced that he was going back to the theater with his friends and that he expected a challenge to duel, unless they were too much the cowards.

  Rascals. Cowards. The young men were having none of that. Price immediately dashed off a letter challenging Eacker to a duel, and had it delivered to him dramatically mid-show in his box at the theater. Philip Hamilton named a second and then, as it was his first duel, rushed off first to speak to his cousin, Philip Church, and his uncle, John Church, about protocol and what to write in his letter. His challenge followed, just before midnight.

  George Eacker, reasonably enough, indicated he could only fight one duel at a time and agreed first to meet Price, since he had sent the earliest letter. On Sunday afternoon, with pistols drawn, they fought a bloodless duel, shook hands, and returned to the city together. Now, he informed Philip, he was prepared to deal with his challenge. The young man turned again to John Church, who now advised his impetuous nephew that he had in fact been the aggressor. As such, finding a solution was his responsibility. John Church, having seen enough action to know, was wary of fighting when it wasn’t necessary. Philip did offer to apologize and end the matter. But only if Eacker would retract the insult about his father.

  Eacker declined to take back his criticisms of Alexander. He was of the view, in general, that Philip Hamilton deserved a sound thrashing. A duel was, he concluded, the only polite alternative to beating the young whippersnapper senseless. The showdown was set for the afternoon of Monday, November 23. Philip borrowed his uncle’s dueling pistols for the occasion, and sometime around midday the news of what was happening reached a startled Alexander.

  “On Monday before the time appointed for the meeting between E, & H,” wrote one of Philip Hamilton’s friends, Thomas Rathbone, “General Hamilton heard of it and commanded his Son, when on the ground, to reserve his fire ’till after Mr E, had shot and then to discharge his pistol in the air.” If he had to fight, he told his son, throw away the shot. No one would get hurt, and it would discharge the debt of honor. But Alexander urged his son and his friends, as well, to find another settlement.

  Alexander assumed the lads would find a solution. He only heard that the duel was going ahead as planned when Philip was already on his way to Powles Hook, New Jersey. Gripped with anxiety and a terrible sense of foreboding, Alexander rushed to the home of their family physician, Dr. Hosack. He planned to ask the doctor to accompany him out to the dueling grounds, just in case there were an injury.

  Alexander arrived too late. His son’s friends had already summoned the doctor, who was even now on his way to Greenwich Village. Alexander, filled with horror, fainted in the doctor’s parlor from sheer terror. He realized too late that Eliza had been right to worry about Philip. When he came around, Alexander set off at a breakneck speed on horseback.

  On a sandy bank just a mile from New York City, the two young men had faced off, after pacing out the distance. Perhaps nineteen-year-old Philip meant to follow his father’s instructions and had simply misunderstood the ritual. Perhaps he was acting with his customary bravado and machismo. But form gave George Eacker the first shot, and, instead of giving any hint of his intention to throw away his own shot, at the word “present,” Philip had aimed his gun carefully and held steady. For a full minute, nothing happened.

  Then George Eacker pulled the trigger.

  The shot rang out and an instant later the bullet struck, tearing through the groin, shattering Philip’s right hip on its hot path through the body, and lodging in his left arm as he fell.

  Friends carried a bloodied and half-conscious Philip as far as they could, to John and Angelica’s country home in Greenwich Village, and that was where Alexander found them. Alexander knew the moment he saw his son. The faint pulse in Philip’s wrist and the quantities of blood lost told him it was hopeless. Dr. Hosack stood by the bed. Alexander grasped his hand and whispered in agony, “Doctor, I despair.” The doctor could only shake his head.

  Angelica sent word for Eliza to come the moment the men arrived with her nephew’s broken frame. Eliza knew something terrible had happened when she saw her sister’s message. Fear made it hard to breathe, but there was no fast way to reach Philip or Alexander. To cross Manhattan in 1801 was already a slow and laborious process, and by the time Eliza arrived from Harlem, darkness had fallen. Angelica’s ashen face warned her, and she ran up the stairs to find Alexander. She could only think of what she saw after as a scene of horror.

  Alexander stood at the side of a bed. The slump in his shoulders scared her. Standing vigil beside him was one of Alexander’s oldest friends, his college roommate Robert Troup, and her son’s friend Thomas Rathbone. Eliza looked. Between them was the pale and delirious body of her eldest baby.

  The men remembered afte
rward, too, the terrible moment Eliza entered the room. Alexander, racked with quiet sobs, could barely stand as his eyes met Eliza’s. Philip was incoherent and in agony, and there was no question that he was dying. “Never did I see a man so completely overwhelmed with grief as Hamilton has been,” Robert Troup wrote after. “The scene I was present at, when Mrs. Hamilton came to see her son on his deathbed (he died about a mile out of the city) and when she met her husband and son in one room, beggars all description!”

  Thomas Rathbone’s description of how Eliza and Alexander passed that night is even more heartrending: “On a Bed without curtains lay poor Phil, pale and languid, his rolling, distorted eye balls darting forth the flashes of delirium—on one side of him on the same bed lay his agonized father—on the other his distracted mother.” Holding their son between them, their hands touching, Eliza and Alexander lay together until just before dawn, when Philip stopped breathing.

  Elizabeth De Hart Bleecker reported sadly in her journal, “Philip Hamilton linger’d of his wound till about five o’clock this morning when he expired in the arms of his afflicted Mother—the cause of the unhappy affair was a few words that passed between Mr Eacker, Mr Hamilton, and young Mr Price at the Theatre.”

  Philip had been all their pet, since his first arrival. It was a tragedy for the entire Schuyler family.

  Friends supported Alexander as he followed his son’s coffin to the Trinity Church graveyard. Eliza was too distraught to attend the funeral. Then, Eliza and Alexander had no choice but to turn their attention to their daughter Angelica. She was descending into madness.

  Angelica’s moods had been volatile for years, although no one spoke of this publicly.

  Rather, it is the fact that Angelica did not circulate in society like her Church cousins or her young aunt, Catherine Schuyler, that speaks most clearly of Alexander and Eliza’s struggles with their eldest daughter. Her cousin Catherine Church danced at balls and lived in high society. Aunt Caty, as Catherine Schuyler was called in the family, went on visits and to house parties. But Angelica Hamilton stayed close to home, near her parents or her grandparents and her pianoforte. She was shy, and some described her as extraordinarily modest and simple. She relied—more perhaps than was healthy—on her eldest brother, Philip.

  Eliza’s grandson Allan McLane Hamilton wrote decades later that “upon receipt of the news of her brother’s death in the Eacker duel, [Angelica Hamilton] suffered so great a shock that her mind became permanently impaired” with something he called “insanity.” But the truth was sadder and more complicated. Philip’s funeral and the family’s despair tipped the scales in what had already been a precarious balance, and the underlying condition was probably schizophrenia. What is certain is that the trauma of her brother’s death triggered psychosis and sent the seventeen-year-old young woman into a spiral.

  Sometimes Angelica lived in a world in which Philip had not died, and Eliza listened, heart heavy, as she played the same old songs from their childhood obsessively. Sometimes she became withdrawn and catatonic, and Eliza could not reach her daughter. Other times, Alexander and Eliza caught glimpses of the old Angelica and dared to believe things would get better. And sometimes, for a while, they did. Hope was agony for Eliza.

  Eliza was not managing well into the winter either, as grief consumed her. She struggled with depression and despair, and her father wrote her loving but stern letters, reminding her that she still had a husband and other children who needed her and that resignation was her Christian duty. “Considerations like those my Child,” he urged, “will produce such a degree of calmness in Your mind, as that your health may not be injured and ultimately, with the favor of indulgent heaven, restore you to peace and give happiness to your heart to your beloved Hamilton, to Your children and relations.” And religion now did help to console her.

  Horseback riding was one of her great pleasures, too, and her father pressed Eliza to rouse herself. “Exert therefore my dearly beloved child that energy, which was so conspicuous in you Ride out frequently,” Philip Schuyler advised, “and collect estimable friends about you, that your thoughts may be diverted from painful reflections.” By March of 1802, though, Eliza was once again six months pregnant. Now the worry was that her despair would cause her to lose the baby. It certainly would prevent her from fast horseback riding.

  Eliza was sick in spirit. Behind the sadness also burned a small, hot flame of anger. Eliza knew as well as anyone that her son had died trying to protect the reputation of his father in the aftermath of scandal. It tore at her that he would never know that his father had not broken faith with her or with any of them. She realized now that she would never be able to tell the unvarnished story to any of the children. They would live in a world where their father was reflected back at them through the eyes of a hostile public. It seemed like a poor inheritance.

  When Eliza gave birth to another little boy on June 2, they named him Philip after his lost brother. “May the loss of one be compensated by another Philip,” wrote her father. “May his virtues emulate those which graced his brother, and may he be a comfort to parents so tender.” But one child could never replace another.

  The next blows came in such a rapid succession that Eliza could barely catch her breath. She certainly had no chance to get her bearings. As Alexander said of those next few years, “In the later period of life misfortunes seem to thicken round us.”

  While a handful of happy family events punctuated the calamities—the wedding of Angelica’s oldest daughter, Catherine Church, in the spring to a prominent city lawyer, and the completion of the house at the Grange chief among them—the next few years were a constant train of sorrows. Peggy’s widowed husband shocked the family with a hasty remarriage, and, in August, Angelica’s eleven-year-old boy, Alexander, came down with the influenza that swept the city that summer. For two weeks, the doctors bled the little boy in a futile attempt to drain the fevers, until he finally perished. Eliza sat for a long time in darkened rooms with Angelica after the men carried away the small body.

  Then a letter arrived in early March that shattered any equilibrium Eliza had managed. Her mother had suffered a massive stroke on March 7, 1803. She died within minutes. Eliza again could not stop crying.

  Angelica and Eliza set off immediately for Albany by coach, with the young Philip Church driving, intent on returning to the Grange with Philip Schuyler and their sister Catherine.

  Alexander had his doubts about Eliza going. “Remember that the main object of the visit is to console him,” he urged Eliza, “that his own [burden] is sufficient, and that it would be too much to have it increased by the sorrows of his Children.” Alexander wasn’t sure Eliza could hold it together well enough to offer anyone else comfort. Alexander stayed behind with their smallest children and tried to buoy Eliza with tender, reassuring news, reporting that their little daughter “pouts and plays, and displays more and more her ample stock of Caprice,” and “my two little boys John & William . . . will be my bed fellows.” Eliza lived in constant fear of something happening to one of the other children.

  If there was one silver lining, for Eliza it was only that her daughter Angelica seemed to be improving. Eliza’s father wasn’t ready to leave Albany, “after giving and receiving for nearly half a century a series of mutual evidences of an affection and of a friendship which increased as we advanced in life.” Eliza and her sister Angelica stayed a few weeks longer, but by April both were eager to get home to their small children. Staying behind, though, to cheer up her father was his favorite daughter, Catherine, and two granddaughters, Betsey Church and a much more stable Angelica Hamilton. Soon, the two older Hamilton boys, James and Alexander, would travel upriver to join them.

  On the long journey home, Eliza and Angelica clung to each other. Just like always.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Duel, 1804

  The death of Philip Hamilton had come at a low point in their marriage, but mourning him and rebuilding together had drawn Alex
ander and Eliza closer. Now, the death of Eliza’s mother in 1803 bound them even more tightly. It was their pattern. At a distance, they faltered. In crisis, they turned to each other. Setting off for home, Alexander now wrote Eliza flirtatious letters again from the road. “I shall be glad to find that my dear little Philip is weaned, if circumstances have rendered it prudent,” Alexander teased her. “It is of importance to me to rest quietly in your bosom.”

  The yellow fever hit New York City again that summer, and the children spent the season between Albany and the Grange. By autumn, with the baby weaned and their marriage closer and stronger, Eliza and Alexander spent a quiet Christmas season together. Alexander went shooting on crisp mornings with the older boys and the family dog, Peggy, while Eliza worked on embroidery by the fire with the babies. All was not perfect. Their daughter Angelica had gotten a bit better in her mind and then faltered, and gloomy thoughts possessed Alexander, especially when he looked at his eldest daughter and thought of their lost Philip. But Eliza dared to hope, as 1804 began, that the hardest times were behind them.

  So did Alexander. He struggled to shake off the depression that gripped him, and he knew that, compared to what might have been, his troubles in the first months of that year were petty ones. That did not make them, though, the less annoying. Colonel Aaron Burr, ending a term as vice president of the United States under President Thomas Jefferson and planning a run for the New York State governor’s office, continued to irritate Alexander, and in legal correspondence between the two men they took little jabs at each other. Alexander wrote in one a snarky postscript: “I observe in your warrant of Attorney a new error. You add the Shillings & pence to the penalty whereas they belong to the condition. The penalty is simply 〈–〉.” The tone was professional but glacial, and buried beneath the pokes was mutual contempt that had been growing since the duel with John Church in 1799.