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

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  The undercurrent of gossip about Alexander, however, grew ever darker, especially in the aftermath of the death of John Church. Now there were tales that John, too, had challenged Aaron Burr to duel in Europe, again determined to avenge the murder of Alexander, and that Burr had shot him. It was almost enough to make one feel sorry for Aaron Burr, who had now been falsely accused of killing both John Church and Washington Morton.

  When Aaron Burr returned to New York City from his exile in Paris, those rumors took a dark turn in the mind of some prankster. Eliza’s sons were constantly in danger of being pushed into duels on account of their father, and now someone forged a note and sent it to Aaron Burr, hoping to foment a duel between Burr and Alexander’s children. The letter was purported to be from James Hamilton, and it read: “Sir: Please to meet me with the weapon you choose, on the 15th May, where you murdered my father, at 10 o’clock, with your second.”

  An indignant Burr sent a mutual friend, Robert Troup, to speak to James and reply to the challenge, and only Troup perceiving the prank and smoothing the waters prevented fighting. “It was done,” James put it later, “in the hope that I might be disgraced or destroyed.” Such a vicious joke—if it had been a joke—rattled Eliza.

  Throughout it all, Eliza worked tirelessly at the orphan asylum where, after the death of Isabella Graham, she took the leadership role as director. Shopkeepers in Greenwich tipped their hats and then smiled, watching General Hamilton’s widow, with her black lace cap and old-fashioned air, disappear around a street corner. More often than not, she was on her way to pick up a new young charge on her way to the orphanage. In the tidy orphanage books, the name of “Mrs. Hamilton” appears on page after page as the sponsor of new children. By 1820 the facility was home to more than a hundred children; Eliza saw that need continued to outpace resources. When the orphanage was full to capacity, Eliza couldn’t bear to turn a child away. So she brought them home with her. One little boy named Henry McKavit she took herself from the arms of the fireman who saved him from the burning house where his parents perished when he was five. When the time came in the next decade, despite her modest widow’s budget, she personally paid for Henry’s education. And that, too, got her thinking.

  Eliza had struggled to put her own sons through school on her meager resources as a widow. Alexander had risen in the world as an orphan only because some good-hearted souls had seen in the boy a talent worth caring about and had paid for his schooling. Education became a new charitable passion. So, through tireless fundraising and by herself donating a parcel of land on Broadway in Harlem, Eliza opened the first public school in Washington Heights. “Whole familys have been unbaptised some persons in their neighborhood have [taken] up by subscription a school,” she wrote modestly, while pressing for a donation, but “there is still about one hundred dollars wanted to complete the expenditure and to give benches and writing desks.” Before long, the Hamilton Free School was open.

  By the mid-1820s, Eliza’s sons were grown and her youngest daughter, Betsey, married, and the responses of the Hamilton children to their famous family divided them into those who stayed near and joined Eliza in her growing obsession with Alexander’s biography and those who cut themselves loose from their father’s saga.

  James stuck close and remained in the thick of his mother’s finances and her hunt for letters. He made a fortune in the mid-1820s as a land speculator and real-estate investor in New York and Brooklyn and later, after meeting the war hero Andrew Jackson, garnered a small role in the Jackson administration. Wealthy and dedicated to the memory of his father, even if he had not inherited his father’s brilliance, James had the money and the inclination to pursue his mother’s project, which sometimes took a fair bit of arm-twisting. Some of those in possession of Alexander’s papers did not relinquish them willingly, sometimes because they wanted to protect the reputation of George Washington. On at least one occasion Eliza, assisted by James, was compelled to bring a lawsuit against one of Alexander’s old friends to regain possession of the manuscript drafts of Washington’s iconic Farewell Address—which Alexander had written.

  Her son John—married and the father of three young children—wandered through a legal career and also dedicated himself to his father’s story. At the Grange on the weekends, Eliza filled the house with grandchildren, who made the trip by the stagecoach that left from the corner of Bayard Street and the Bowery on Saturday afternoons and stayed until Monday morning.

  Her son Alexander Jr. fled. Perhaps his bearing his father’s name had always made that inevitable. A brief stint as New York state representative to Congress gave him a taste of bitter partisanship, and Alexander traveled instead to the new American territory of Florida, ultimately becoming the United States attorney, a land commissioner, and a colonel.

  William, having qualified as an attorney like his brothers, also threw off the family legacy and went West. Of all the children, he looked the most like his father, and those who knew him described William as “a man of great intellectual powers” but “unsteady in his habits.” Not, perhaps, unlike his father either. William lived a bachelor’s life as a frontiersman, speculator, and woodsman, and, despite a brief stint in the state legislature, too, few who met him would have guessed that he was the son of the famous General Hamilton. By mid-decade, he was driving cattle for the federal government from Illinois to Wisconsin, where he fought as a captain in the Winnebago War, staked a mining claim, and struck it rich at a place he named Hamilton’s Diggings.

  Then there was Philip, Eliza’s youngest. She had not been able to give her last child the same private education as the older boys, and, of all the children, he had suffered most from her reduced widow’s income. She couldn’t afford to send him to college. But young Phil, six feet tall, strikingly handsome, and carrying with him the legacy and the burden of his namesake and brother, was perhaps the most cheerfully resilient and the sweetest of her children, and he was the most like his mother in his passion for good works and in his native modesty. He diligently studied law books at night and quietly passed the bar exam, under his own steam, qualifying as an attorney. Then he moved upstate and enjoyed a quiet life far from the limelight. It was a life Eliza herself might have chosen.

  Her youngest daughter, Betsey, and her husband, the wealthy New York merchant Sidney Augustus Holly, joined Eliza in the family project of the biography and helped in caring for the unfortunate Angelica. Angelica Hamilton had been lost to reason already for more than a decade, and she lived in a twilight world of madness, where her father had never died and the Hamilton tragedy had never happened.

  By the 1830s, Eliza was approaching eighty.

  James, long accustomed to being in charge and having his mother’s ear as a confidant, made her feel like an old lady. The property in Harlem, he insisted, was too much for her. He pressed Eliza to sell. He had long managed her rents and finances, and he was sure he knew what was best. His younger brother John, never a forceful personality, was not one to mount any objections. Eliza must live with him and his wife, James insisted now, and, though she knew his motives were good-hearted, he started to annoy Eliza.

  When her son Alexander Jr. swept back into New York City in the early 1830s, everything shifted. Alexander, who soon established a position as a wealthy Wall Street real-estate investor that rivaled his brother’s, took stock of the situation and asked his mother what she wanted. Eliza didn’t want to live with James, and she didn’t want to be bossed around either. She was ready to give up the Grange—it was too far out of town and too expensive to manage—but she wanted a place in Greenwich Village near the orphan asylum. And she needed to figure out what to do about Angelica.

  New luxury town houses were planned on a pretty street nearby called St. Marks Place, and Alexander Jr. asked if she possibly wanted a home there. That Eliza could imagine. So she sold the Grange for $25,000 and put the money toward the purchase of a five-story brick home. All that James would not have minded. But sibling relations were n
ot improved when he learned that Eliza planned to live there with Betsey and Sidney, Alexander Jr. and his wife, and the latter couple’s young Spanish-born nephew. James could be forgiven for feeling cut out of the family.

  Eliza placed Angelica under the medical supervision of Dr. James MacDonald, who specialized in mental illness, and, in a sign of how far advanced her illness was now, Angelica does not seem to have lived with the family at St. Marks Place. She likely resided instead at the progressive lunatic asylum that Dr. MacDonald directed in Bloomingdale, in Upper Manhattan, and that might explain why, in the 1830s, Eliza selected a large parcel in Bloomingdale as the future home of a new and growing orphanage campus.

  For Eliza, the townhome on St. Marks came as a relief and a joy. They had merry times now at number four, and when the next spring their distant cousin James Fenimore Cooper and his family took up residence at number six, Eliza was the center of attention. Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans was not yet a decade old, but, set in 1757, in the Hudson River Valley during the French and Indian War, it had made famous the world of Eliza’s girlhood.

  Eliza regaled her younger kinsman with stories of the past, and perhaps they talked as well of the news from her son William, who had fought in the bloody Indian wars in the Midwest, leading native allies from the Winnebago and Menominee bands in battles against the Sauk chieftain Black Hawk and his “British Band,” whose massacres and scalping raids horrified the nation.

  One of the most famous of the Sauk attacks took place just five miles from William’s land, when a scalping party raided a nearby farm, setting off a national incident. William’s mining operation at Hamilton’s Diggings—quickly renamed Fort Hamilton—had played a central role in the skirmish, and it was here that families and the militia retreated.

  When Black Hawk and his handsome son were captured, Andrew Jackson ordered the chieftain brought east to impress upon the natives the futility of fighting against the American nation. Crowds turned out to gawk at the vanquished chief and the young brave. The New York Courier reported, “Wherever they go, great numbers are sure to follow them, wherever they stop, hundreds and sometimes thousands, besiege them.” Fashionable ladies swooned at the romance and thrilled to the encounter. Eliza was sanguine. Somewhere, she still kept the beads placed around her neck as a girl by the sachem during her initiation at the grand council.

  The socialites flocked to catch a glimpse of the chieftain, but Black Hawk was less impressed with the New York ladies of fashion. He was recorded to have muttered, “What in the devil’s name do these squaws want of me!” When the chieftain told his story to a government translator, who in 1833 published the account under the title Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, the book was an instant bestseller. And the scruffy, gruff woodsman, black sheep of his family, “Billy” Hamilton, was now lauded as the son of Alexander.

  That year, another piece of history resurrected itself.

  If there were two men whom Eliza blamed for the death of Alexander, they were James Monroe and Aaron Burr. If Eliza hated one man more than the other, it was actually the former, but she had already had her final showdown with James Monroe one weekend in Harlem.

  She had always blamed James Monroe for the Reynolds scandal and for the rumors that Alexander was engaged in insider trading and speculation. That political agenda had brought about Alexander’s “confession.”

  She had been in her garden, talking with a teenage nephew, when a maid brought her the card of a visitor. “What has that man come for?” she asked, rising, and her nephew remembered later how her voice got very quiet when she was angry. Eliza strode determinedly to the front parlor and glared at James Monroe, already a former president. She notably did not ask him to make himself comfortable.

  “It has been many years since we have met, the lapse of time has brought its softening influences. We are both nearing the grave when past differences might be forgiven and forgotten . . .” James Monroe faltered.

  “Mr. Monroe,” Eliza promptly interrupted, “if you have come to tell me that you repent, that you are sorry, very sorry for . . . the slanders . . . you circulated against my dear husband . . . no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.”

  Then Eliza turned on her heel and marched back out to her garden.

  And now Aaron Burr was getting his comeuppance. Not only did Eliza have the satisfaction in 1834 of seeing the first volume of Alexander’s biography published at last—written finally not by any of the clergymen or by the old colonel but by her bookish son John Hamilton—but Burr’s rich new wife, Eliza Jumel, wanted a divorce and she wasn’t being quiet about the reasons. Mrs. Burr had discovered her randy husband in flagrante and asked Eliza’s son Alexander Jr. to act as her divorce attorney. Alexander Jr. not only accepted, he filed the motion on the anniversary of his father’s murder, setting tongues in New York City wagging.

  Alexander Jr. and his wife were still living with Eliza and the Holly family in the townhome on St. Marks Place, and, sitting in the front parlor with her needlework, Eliza chuckled at news of how the case proceeded. Eliza Jumel, the daughter of a prostitute, was a survivor if ever there were one, and she had traded on her beauty and intelligence to marry first a rich merchant and then, in 1833, the seventy-seven-year-old former vice president. After just four months of living with the notoriously unfaithful Aaron Burr and suspecting he was squandering her hard-earned fortune on trysts in New Jersey, where, according to one newspaper report, “many a night he wandered around the hillside, breathing in [his young mistress’s] ear love and devotion,” his stout fifty-eight-year-old bride followed him on one nocturnal adventure and caught him red-faced and red-handed. After giving Burr and his young lady companion a tongue-lashing that harkened back to her bawdy house origins, Eliza Jumel decided she’d had enough.

  Aaron Burr, for his part, resented that his bride was, in the words of one of his biographers, “overbearing and domineering beyond human endurance and . . . a devil incarnate.”

  The couple retained dueling lawyers. The aggrieved wife, showing a laudable, if perverse, sense of humor, wanted a showdown with Alexander Hamilton Jr. in her corner. When Burr shortly thereafter had a stroke that left him half paralyzed and broken, Eliza Jumel cared not one whit. She insisted they carry on with the proceedings.

  Home at St. Marks Place, Eliza tried to feel pity. But it was hard not to see the hand of God and divine retribution.

  Eliza Jumel was awarded her divorce in 1836, and Aaron Burr died the day the judgment was awarded. And that year, Eliza’s children, all middle-aged now, were beginning to scatter again in different directions.

  Her son James gave up his family home on Varick Street and purchased a large rural property in Irvington, New York, called, in honor of his father’s childhood home, Nevis. While raising the grand estate was left in the hands of contractors, the family spent the winter at the City Hotel, below Liberty Street, in preparation for a voyage in the spring to Europe. Not far away, in the New York Merchants’ Exchange, stood a statue of Alexander Hamilton, which Congress in 1826 had approved to reside there as a testament to his legacy as the first secretary of Treasury.

  Just after 11 p.m. on the night of December 16, when gale-force winds were whipping across the city in the grip of a cold snap, a loud knock and frantic voice calling out fire woke James. The whole area was ablaze.

  James set off to try to save the statue. By midnight, the entire financial district was a conflagration and boats on the wharfs were in flames. Witnesses remembered heat so intense that the copper fittings from the roofs melted down the sides of the buildings. The frigid weather froze the water supplies, and James joined a group of men determined to battle the inferno.

  At St. Marks Place, Eliza and her daughter paced the floors as the sentries wailed out the news on the street corners.

  One of James’s group of men set off in an open boat in the midst of the storm to fetch gunpowder from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, so they cou
ld explode buildings in the path of the fire to create a containment barrier. They would have to deprive the fire of fuel by sacrificing buildings. By dawn the fire had spread to more than five hundred buildings and nearly twenty blocks and could be seen on the horizon as far away as Philadelphia. When the gunpowder arrived, James lit one of the fuses and watched as buildings exploded. The strategy was a success and ultimately confined the losses to seven hundred buildings. “My cloak was stiff with frozen water,” James remembered later, and “I was so worn down by the excitement that when I got to my parlor I fainted. The scene of desolation and demoralization was most distressing.”

  When James and his family sailed for Europe following the great fire, Eliza asked him to call on her old friend Charles Maurice de Talleyrand in Paris and to see Jérôme Bonaparte, whom she and Alexander had entertained at the Grange in the last weeks before the death of Alexander. James dutifully “took a letter from my dear mother to Prince Tallyrand, which was left at his hotel in Paris,” and when the men met, the prince told a story of how, years earlier, he had encountered by chance at an inn a homesick American man, whom he learned at parting was Benedict Arnold and who took him to his rooms and showed him a portrait miniature, given to him during the Revolutionary War and carried by him ever since, of his former friend Alexander Hamilton. The prince promised to send James the portrait.

  In Paris, he also met another of his mother’s old acquaintances, Louis Philippe d’Orléans, now the king of France, and his sister Adélaïde, who had spent part of their exile during the French Revolution in the 1790s in New York and Philadelphia, where they became friends with Alexander, Eliza, and the Churches.

  In Florence, Italy, Eliza’s name was again a passport to the royal houses. “King Jerôme [Bonaparte], who was living there, hearing my name, [talked] about my father and the courtesies he had received at his country-house” and “of the dinner at my father’s house” in those last days of Eliza’s marriage, James later noted.