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

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  The question of whether Eliza cheated the estate by hiding a gift of $6,000 poisoned even the simplest financial conversations with Samuel Malcolm and made working together as siblings and tenants in common impossible. Eliza learned in January from the Albany attorney managing the estates that she was due income of $62.35 from her share of the estates, but that the payment couldn’t be released because of the conflict with her siblings. Eliza was mortified—not least because she desperately needed the sixty-two dollars.

  Her brother Philip Jr., at wits’ end, tried to broker the family peace with a compromise and saw clearly that Eliza was not the problem. “My Dear Brother,” Eliza wrote him,

  Thus is our family situated, differences have arisen, and neither can recollect how much it is encumbent on them to be at peace, but ill will must prevail, against all the claims that goodness, and Religion Demand. . . . Mr. Church has read your letter to me and as it is my sincere wish that all differences should be done away, and your requests be complied with, I have called on all around and proposed a meeting at my house to endeavor to affect what you mention in your Letter but have no hopes.

  Eliza had tried to bring all Philip Schuyler’s children together and find a solution. But her siblings and Samuel Malcolm, especially, were determined, it seemed, to quarrel. Eliza was exhausted, and it all seemed hopeless. She considered that the only silver lining in any of this was that it had brought her and her younger brother Philip Jr. closer. Nearly a decade separated them in age, and they hadn’t grown up together as children. But the stress of the past year and her brother’s calm, steady demeanor drew them into a deep adult friendship.

  The stress overwhelmed Eliza. Was it perhaps better to sell up, rather than quarrel? Eliza considered it. “I am told a farm has lately been sold at the rate of six dollars per Acre,” she wrote to Philip in March; “my mother expected a handsome Inheritance and certainly their was a considerable tract. . . . With respect to the Saratoga property, the selling of it at present must be at a Considerable.” But the estate limped on encumbered.

  After it was all said and done, by spring Eliza was left with an inheritance of $15,000—less than $300,000 today. It was nowhere near enough to allow her to dream of buying back the Grange from Alexander’s creditors. Their home went on the auction block at last and sold for $30,000. Eliza took the news calmly, but her heart ached when she turned her back for the last time and walked away from the home she and Alexander had built together.

  What she did not know was that behind the sale lay a marvelous secret.

  Alexander’s friends knew how hard she and the children had taken leaving the Grange, and they had searched for a way to show their affection, too, for Alexander and his family—a way that would give the family back some kind of equilibrium. So a group of them, including her brother-in-law Washington Morton, banded together, and, when the Grange went under the hammer, put up the money together to buy it. They wanted to sell it back to Eliza. They would take for a price the $15,000 she had in her savings. Eliza was humbled and deeply grateful.

  The summer of 1805 marked the first anniversary of Alexander’s death. It was a hard rite of passage, made all the harder by the yellow fever epidemic that once again devastated New York City, with a virulence the locals compared only to the fevers of the 1790s.

  Her son James graduated from Columbia, and Eliza and the smallest children spent the summer in Harlem. Home. Eliza smiled at the thought and walked again for a long time in her garden, where she and Alexander had strolled together on their last weekend. Her oldest daughter, Angelica, stronger and better as well, accepted an invitation to spend the summer in the countryside outside Boston with the minister John Mason, who had been with Alexander at his deathbed and whom Eliza and her father had considered engaging to write Alexander’s biography. Angelica remained with the Mason family until the start of autumn. “Dear Madam,” John Mason wrote to Eliza on September 23,

  We have this moment parted with your daughter Angelica with much regret. . . . This good girl of yours has made herself extremely acceptable to Mrs. Mason & my daughter—& we shall anticipate with pleasure some future opportunity to enjoy her society in Boston—If she is spared to you, I most sincerely think, you have in her a promise of great consolation & Comfort, & a companion that will alleviate & soothe the sorrows, which probably never can be removed.

  Angelica Hamilton might never marry. Both Eliza and Reverend Mason saw that. Angelica was childlike and sometimes simple and was perhaps a better companion than wife and mother. But Eliza had prayed for the return of her reason, and for the moment that prayer had been answered.

  All summer, the smallest children ran riot at the Grange, and Eliza was glad to hear the house full of life and little people. Her three youngest—Betsey, William, and Philip—ranged from three to eight, but the house was also full of other motherless children.

  Eliza was once again collecting around herself waifs and orphans. Sarah, the thirty-five-year-old wife of her brother Philip, died in September, leaving behind two sons under the age of ten, Eliza’s nephews Robert and John Schuyler. Would Eliza mother the boys? Philip asked his sister. Eliza did not hesitate. She was a warm and gentle mother, and nothing gave her as much pleasure as children. For the next year, her two young nephews lived with their aunt and cousins at the Grange, while their father courted a suitable stepmother. It was the third time that Eliza had taken motherless children into her home, beginning as far back as the adoption of Fanny Antill, now a young woman of twenty. Alexander, too, had been an orphan.

  And that started Eliza thinking. When the next opportunity came along, she embraced it.

  Eliza wanted to live up to Alexander’s vision of her as the “best of wives and best of women.” Too many times, she had been cross or impatient. She had not always borne the burden of sacrifice or public abuse, she knew, with complete equanimity. In his final words, Alexander had asked her to trust in religion and reminded her of the Roman ideal—piety, stoicism, charity, loyalty, motherhood—at the foundation of their marriage. Eliza was determined now not to fail Alexander.

  Through church circles, Eliza had been friends with a small group of women, most of them widows, for years already. There was the widow Isabella Graham and her married daughter, Joanna Bethune, whom Eliza knew from the 1780s. There was Elizabeth Seton, the young and pious widow of Alexander’s old friend from the Treasury days William Seton, who died of tuberculosis in 1803. There was Sarah Clarke Startin, Elizabeth Seton’s godmother, and another Seton family relation, Sarah Hoffman, the widow of Nicholas Hoffman, whose nephews were Alexander’s legal partners.

  These five women—Isabella Graham, Joanna Bethune, Elizabeth Seton, Sarah Hoffman, and Sarah Startin—had all been involved for a number of years as the leading lights in the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, led by Isabella Graham and Elizabeth Seton and organized as a Christian response to the yellow fever devastation of the 1790s. Eliza was already a casual member and subscriber.

  When Alexander’s friend William Seton gasped his last in Italy, where doctors had hoped the weather could cure him, his wife embraced Catholicism. It was, all the ladies said, a shocking and “barbaric” thing to do in Protestant America. Her horrified godmother broke off all contact, and the ladies agreed that Elizabeth Seton would not carry on in the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows, based out of Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan. Elizabeth Seton, ironically, would go on to become the first Catholic saint born in America.

  Elizabeth Seton’s departure—from their society and, to their view, from her senses—would need to be filled by some other strong woman of devout purpose. Ideally someone prominent. Ideally a widow. Eventually, the ladies asked Eliza Hamilton to take Elizabeth Seton’s place in their evolving social mission.

  Eliza was not a saint and didn’t strive to be one. But she did want to be a widow Alexander would admire. And in 1806, after the massive outpouring of grief at Alexander’s funeral, she was already New York Cit
y’s most famous and most cherished widow.

  So when Sarah Hoffman discovered in a shabby tenement the heartbreaking scene of five young children weeping over the body of their dead mother and proposed the establishment of a society for orphans, she spoke to Isabella Graham. Isabella, who had been reading about the seventeenth-century church father August Hermann Francke, the founder of an innovative orphanage in Germany, proposed an American “ragged school” on his model. Orphanages did not yet exist in New York. The idea was revolutionary.

  Sarah and Isabella went straight to Eliza. Would “Mrs. General Hamilton” join them in the radical project of building a home especially for orphaned children? Eliza only had to think of her two small nephews and how they cried at night for their mother. She thought of Fanny Antill, whom she had loved as a daughter, and how she saw in her the face of Marie-Charlotte and Edward. She thought of a young Alexander and the scars he’d carried with him in private, left alone to survive as an island orphan, and of the note in which he’d asked her to care for the woman who’d saved him. But above all, Eliza thought of her own children still mourning the death of their father, and thought what it would be to leave them without any parents. She knew instantly in her heart the answer. She immediately accepted.

  And Eliza needed the society as much as they needed her. In the darkness of grief, she needed a focus. The fate of widows and children spoke to her and let her remember that, even in the loss of Alexander, she was fortunate. Eliza was also a natural organizer.

  She threw herself into the society with the same determination and efficiency with which she regulated her household. All these women had been born and bred, in one fashion or another, to manage estates, and running a charitable institution was well within their skill set. At society meetings, Eliza and the other society widows considered and deliberated. They planned their projects. And then, in an act of faith, they signed a lease on a small two-story house on Raisin Street in Greenwich Village, hired a respectable man and his wife to care for the children, and gave a name to their new organization.

  On March 15, 1806, the Orphan Asylum Society—the first charitable orphanage in New York—was founded. Eliza and her compatriots put out a public call for other society ladies to join them, and a dozen showed up at their first meeting at the City Hotel. By the time the meeting was over, “Mrs. General Hamilton” had been elected the second directress, essentially the organization’s founding vice president. Among the trustees were more society women, almost all of whom had long been part of Eliza and Alexander’s inner circle. These friendships were not new to Eliza; rather, they represented a deepening of old ones.

  The aim of the asylum, the ladies proclaimed in their public statement, was to educate indigent and orphaned children, teach them to read the Scripture, and place them in apprenticeships or indentures. The asylum took in twelve orphans in the first few months, and by the time the ladies met again in January of 1807, with rather less fanfare and acrimony than the Founding Fathers, to ratify their constitution, it was already clear that they would need to find space for more children.

  By April, twenty clean and well-fed children appeared before the board for applause and inspection. The names of those children were neatly recorded in the asylum record books, today preserved in the New-York Historical Society archives, and they were boys and girls with names like Thomas Birch, John Wilkinson, or—the only death among their children—Sarah Ann Morrison, who died as a four-year-old from illness. Most of the children were between the ages of three and ten when they arrived at the orphan asylum, and they went on to be mantua makers, bakers, and farmers. One girl joined the household staff of Sarah Startin as a housemaid. A little boy went on to become the gardener at the estate of Eliza’s kinsman Philip Livingston.

  They had taken in twenty children that first year. But they had turned away nine times as many. The need was immense, and Eliza felt sure that this was her calling. Growing the orphanage quickly was a risk and a challenge, and the finances were daunting. But when the secretary asked Mrs. General Hamilton which way she voted on the question of pushing ahead, Eliza gave her resounding yes to the project. The ladies were determined to build a new, bespoke orphanage, large enough to accommodate more children, and, in the spring of 1807, they started fundraising. Sarah Startin donated a one-acre parcel of land on Bank Street, in Greenwich Village. Johanna Bethune’s husband said he would guarantee the $25,000 loan the widows would need to take out to finance the construction of a three-story orphanage able to accommodate fifty children. The women turned to the local churches and newspapers, asking ministers to encourage donations in their sermons and journalists to spread the word in their columns, and twisting the arms of their rich friends and neighbors. Eliza’s sons, watching her trudge out in even the worst weather when she heard of an orphaned child or saw the chance of rounding up a donation, teased her that she worked not like a lady of leisure but like a peasant.

  They were on their way, but the ladies had not yet raised all the money to complete the project. On June 5, the New-York Evening Post gave the society a plug, advising that “the attention of the public is most respectfully solicited to the merits, the importance, the wants of a recent but valuable institution, ‘The Orphan Asylum of New-York.’ ” “In the space of fourteen months,” the editors gushed, “many of the children who knew not the alphabet when they entered, can now read the Bible fluently, and their progress in writing is also considerable.” The public was urged to contribute. By the end of June, church donations had reached $873.38. It was a long way off from $25,000. So Eliza and the ladies turned to their rich network of connections in government and convinced the legislature of the State of New York to donate the last $10,000 toward the building.

  When the women triumphantly laid the cornerstone to start the construction of the new orphanage, Eliza, dressed still in the black of mourning, was there. But her heart felt so much lighter.

  CHAPTER 18

  Legacies, 1807–27

  Family quarrels plagued Eliza still, but they touched her less now.

  The Schuyler family was fracturing, Cornelia’s health was failing, and Eliza didn’t see her or her sister Catherine much any longer. Catherine’s husband, Samuel Malcolm, who still nursed old grievances and guarded jealously his share of the Schuyler fortune, took his family upstate to take personal control of his wife’s farmland inheritance. Washington Morton, caught up in a second fatal duel, fled New York one step ahead of an arrest warrant. The thirty-two-year-old Cornelia and their children followed him to Philadelphia, where she died of illness months later.

  Angelica remained Eliza’s stalwart, but Angelica and John had troubles now, too, with money. After years of easy speculation and fast living, John Church’s finances were collapsing as a result of the trade embargo of the winter of 1807–8, as tensions again ratcheted up with Britain, and of being caught out short at last speculating in real-estate investment. Eliza felt badly for her nephew Philip Church, who paid the price of his father’s financial disaster. The young man scrambled to try to save his father’s worst real-estate gamble by moving to the edge of the wilderness with his society bride. When that didn’t work, Philip left his hapless bride to hold down the fort upstate while he headed off to London to try to collect on unpaid gambling debts owed his father. His actions smacked of desperation.

  Eliza understood Angelica’s panic. The farms in the Hudson Valley continued to cause endless squabbles, and Eliza was sometimes so short of cash that she was forced to cadge a loan to make ends meet. Their spendthrift and high-rolling brother Rensselaer was once again in financial trouble, and Washington Morton put the cat among the pigeons afresh when he asked to be bought out of Cornelia’s share of the family land in Saratoga as a widower. The siblings couldn’t agree on the value of the land, and the lawsuit that followed ended up in the newspapers. How she would raise her share of the money caused Eliza sleepless nights.

  It was also becoming increasingly difficult to deny that her twenty-
six-year-old daughter, Angelica, was once again unraveling. Her illness had come and gone before, terrifying the family for a time after the death of her brother and resulting in her, as one of Eliza’s friends remembered, again “losing her reason amid the sudden horrors of her father’s death.” Angelica Hamilton disappeared from society after 1806 and this time did not mend, although Eliza and her sister clung to hope for another decade. The rest of the family shook their heads. Angelica and Eliza’s optimism was plainly false. As one sister-in-law confided in a letter to Catherine sometime after 1810, “I have returned home my jaunt to the city was more fatiguing than pleasant I was there only a few days—saw all our friends however & left them well excepting poor Angelica Hamilton who remains far from rational, though they flatter themselves she is recovering.”

  Years of financial instability had taken their toll on Eliza, and early in 1810 she was determined to take action. She scrimped and saved the money to travel to Philadelphia and then on to Washington, DC, accompanied by her son John, now seventeen, to petition Congress in person and ask them to restore Alexander’s veteran’s stipend, which he had gallantly—but foolishly—waived at the end of the American Revolution. The annual income of a pension would mean the difference between living on the edge and being economically safe, and Eliza needed an answer. She was tired. Congress, however, was in no hurry. Action on any legacy regarding the family of Alexander Hamilton languished.

  Some relief came, as unkind as the thought might be, with the death of Washington Morton that spring in Paris, where he was vacationing. With him died the pressure to buy out his share of Cornelia’s farm inheritance; when his will was read, it turned out he was dead broke as well. Wild rumors made their way back from France that he had died there in a duel with the exiled Aaron Burr, intending to avenge the death of Alexander.