Upon retiring at ninety-one, Eliza moved with her daughter permanently to Washington, DC, taking a house on H Street near the intersection with Fourteenth Street, not far from the White House. When the historian Benson Lossing met Eliza that year, he noted, “The sunny cheerfulness of her temper and quiet humor . . . still made her deportment genial and attractive.” But Eliza was a restless soul. Retirement did not mean retreat or inaction. Eliza instead threw herself full-time into the work of helping her old friend Dolley Madison raise donations to build a fitting monument to General Washington, and on July 4, 1848, in a grand ceremony, the cornerstone of the Washington Monument was laid.
Eliza sat beside George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of Martha and the general, and she could hardly believe that this was the little boy who, decades earlier, had gone to dancing lessons in Martha Washington’s coach with her own young children.
As fireworks burst over the city that night, a crowd of twenty thousand roared, and Eliza touched gently the burnished locket she wore around her neck and had worn since the week of Alexander’s funeral. It contained the scraps of a love poem and Alexander’s last letter to her. Did she think back, perhaps, to the fireworks on that summer night in 1780, when she and Alexander, in love and newly engaged, had celebrated the arrival of the French fleet? She did not regret the battles or the sacrifices she had made for Alexander to shape so profoundly the destiny of this republic.
Eliza and Dolley Madison, the last widows of the men who had fought beside George Washington for that liberty, could only smile at each other sadly as they remembered. They were the last of a passing generation. Once, they had danced at the same wartime balls as young belles and brides, when independence seemed like a dream. Now they were bent, and Eliza’s hands sometimes trembled.
Eliza went out very little as old age slowed her body. But the world came to Eliza. And Eliza remained keenly interested in young people. Two of Sidney Holly’s nieces, nineteen-year-old Elizabeth and her sister, Marianna, came to spend the winter social season of 1852–53 with their aunt and her famous mother, Mrs. General Hamilton. The girls’ chatty, vibrant letters home to family and friends describe a glittering social scene in the capital, with Eliza in the thick of it. One of the girls reported to an aunt, with some astonishment, that on New Year’s Day, Eliza had more than two hundred visitors. “Gentlemen brought their children to see Mrs. Hamilton, many called who went to no other place, and as you are fond of hearing all, I wish I had room to tell you the names of the most distinguished senators, members,” she wrote, but she noted that among the callers was the president of the United States, who “sat with Mrs. Hamilton some time and asked her to appoint some time to dine with him.”
And Eliza did. For dinner with the president of the United States, she made an exception to her life as a homebody. Millard Fillmore was not, after all, the first president she had dined with. She had spent quiet evenings with George Washington in her parlor, and laughed when he ducked behind a screen with a wink to escape the tedium of diplomats and society ladies to play with his grandchildren and her children. She had been at dinner parties where a young Thomas Jefferson sported an absurd electric-blue waistcoat, direct from Paris, and made eyes at her sister Angelica. Eliza understood too well how Alexander and her father and all their old friends had fought to make such a thing as the White House or the presidency possible. A few weeks later, in the year she turned ninety-six, Eliza and her daughter put on their finest evening wear and sat down, in the twilight days of the Fillmore administration, to an intimate dinner in the White House, where the first lady, Abigail Fillmore, insisted on Eliza taking the place of honor.
The year of 1853 had been a dazzling last season. When the spring came in 1854, Eliza felt time ebbing. She wanted to go home to New York City. She wanted to sit again in her old pew at Trinity Church, where she once sat with Alexander. She wanted to walk the old churchyard, where Alexander and Angelica and so many of her friends were buried. She wanted to see, too, her former home in Lower Manhattan, where they had lived in the heady days of the first inauguration when they were young and so much seemed possible.
Her son John agreed to take her for a last visit. On a glorious and clear May morning, her son, his wife, and Eliza’s grandson, yet another Alexander, rode in silence to the corner of Broad and Wall Streets and were ushered into her old front parlor. Eliza’s heart pounded. The memories flooded back. It was so hard. So exquisite. She could feel Alexander’s presence. Turning to her grandson, Eliza mused, “I, with Mrs. Knox and other ladies, looked from this window over to Federal Hall and saw George Washington inaugurated the first President of the United States. Then we all walked up Broadway to St. Paul’s Chapel, Fulton Street. Washington, Chancellor Livingston, General Knox and your grandfather . . . went into the chapel and occupied the pew on the north side. We ladies sat just in back of them.”
Eliza stood for a long while looking out the window. She let her hand touch the mantel of the fireplace, where Alexander, coming in from the cold, stood and gaily recounted to her the day’s gossip and political machinations. She did not linger in their old bedroom. She couldn’t. When Eliza closed the door, she knew it was forever.
She guessed, as well, that it would be her last summer. Back in Washington, she stood as godmother to the infant daughter of the Reverend John French, named Eliza in her honor, and it was a final passing of the torch for the elderly woman. Something was unwinding inside her. On November 8, 1854, Eliza felt weak and called for the doctor. She knew that her heart was failing. A worn-out heart, tired of grieving, she thought to herself. To die of a broken heart seemed fitting.
Her daughter Betsey sent word immediately to her brothers. Only James, back in Manhattan, was close enough to travel to the capital. He set off that night and arrived bleary-eyed on the morning of November 9. The doctor told him bluntly: she is dying. Eliza had no illness and no pain, but she was tired. It is so long. I’m so tired. I want to see Hamilton. Those were the thoughts of her reveries. Those thoughts had been her companions now for decades.
“James, I sat up with mother last night,” his sister said. “I wish you do so to-night; I will sleep on the sofa in the next room; there is no medicine to be given her.” James and his mother needed to make their peace, after years of misunderstanding. There was little time left. In the dim bedroom, with the heavy curtains falling gently around them, James sat beside his mother, holding Eliza’s hand, and for two long hours, in silence, he felt it growing colder.
What thoughts went through Eliza’s mind in those quiet hours? Did she think back to her childhood at the edge of the wilderness? Did she think of her youthful passions and crushes, her bond with her sisters as they grew up together?
Or perhaps she thought, as she had for more than fifty years, only of Alexander.
Of the times she and her cousin Kitty Livingston rode, giggling and blushing, in Alexander’s sleigh to a ball at Morristown, of how she and her colonel danced together under the watchful eyes of George and Martha Washington, of their marriage and their happiness. Of her beloved sister Angelica. Of Alexander’s pranks and ghost stories. What a fuss those stories caused. Of their children. And of that moment, in a parlor in Philadelphia, when Alexander wept at the foolishness of men and their gambling. Wept at his missteps and asked for her loyalty and forgiveness, which she knew she had given him, at great cost, to its fullest measure. She had done her duty. She hoped that she had been both a Roman wife and an American one. This was what the Livingston and Van Rensselaer and Schuyler women were born for, and she had not shirked.
She was certain that when the veil parted, waiting for her would be her beloved sister Angelica and her beautiful lost son Philip. Her handsome boy William. And waiting for her would always be Alexander.
At just after eleven o’clock, Eliza spoke into the darkness. James leaned close. The bedsheets at my feet. They feel so heavy. She saw in James’s eyes his pain and disappointment as he bent to untangle them. He wanted more b
efore she departed. James had been a complicated son. Sometimes he had made her angry, but she loved him with all her heart, as she loved all her children—those she had borne, those she had adopted. Eliza took a deep breath and said in a clear, firm voice, as he leaned in to see if she was still breathing, “God bless you, you have been a good son.” She listened to his sharp breath. They were the words the boy needed.
And then she let go. She let her arm go limp, let her spirit flutter. A thin stream of blood spilled gently from the sides of her mouth. James leaned in again to hear if she would whisper something else, but Eliza had fled to Alexander.
The Hamilton children’s mother was dead, and all that was left for James was to wake his sister. In the days to come, the siblings would gather together, one last time, to bury Eliza in the grave in Trinity Church cemetery next to their father. She had lived fifty-five years waiting to see Alexander.
Author’s Note
Her Story
The final lines of the musical Hamilton belong to Eliza: “Will they tell my story?”
A chorus of voices responds only with more questions: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” The life of Eliza Hamilton does sometimes seem to be more about questions than about answers.
In contrast, the life of Alexander Hamilton is familiar cultural ground as I put the final touches on this book in 2018. Since the turn of the new millennium alone, there have been, by my count, no fewer than a dozen full-length biographies of the most flamboyant of our Founding Fathers. The best known of those, of course, is the sweeping biography by Ron Chernow, adapted for the stage in the Broadway musical phenomenon known simply as Hamilton.
The musical was the first introduction for many people to the story of Hamilton’s wife, Eliza, who emerges on the stage along with Angelica and Peggy, as part of the spunky trio of Schuyler sisters. They captivate us just as surely as they captivated Alexander Hamilton. When Alexander’s infidelity with Maria Reynolds becomes public and the scandal prompts Eliza to burn her love letters in rage and defiance, she becomes the story’s heartbroken heroine.
The answer to the musical’s final questions, though, is that Eliza’s story has largely not been told in print. You hold in your hands the first full-length biography of Eliza Hamilton. And while there are rich sources, many of them untapped because they come before or after her life with Alexander, few of those sources are in Eliza’s own voice. As the world knows from Hamilton, she wrote herself out of history, and it seems clear that she did burn scores of letters, including her love letters to Alexander. Eliza being Eliza, though, she didn’t talk about that either.
Why did Eliza burn correspondence, all of her own and apparently some of Alexander’s? As her biography shows, the reasons are a bit more complicated than heartbreak.
Part of it was cultural: women’s lives were rarely documented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, unless those women were queens or the mistress of someone famous. Men had lives in the public square. Alexander’s letters were destined, Eliza hoped, for the national archives of Congress. She not only hoped for that, she expected it. But she could see no reason why history would be interested in her letters. Respectable women lived resolutely domestic existences and shuddered at the thought of exposing themselves in public.
Part of it is that Eliza also hated writing letters, something that boggled the fast-talking Alexander. She could not spell well and was embarrassed. In this, Eliza was not alone either. Only rarely did even an upper-class girl of the time get a formal, bookish education like her brothers. If there was one argument that Eliza and Alexander had throughout their long and overwhelmingly happy marriage, it was about Eliza and her discomfort with writing letters.
And part of it is the question of this affair with Maria Reynolds. That is the part that most needs unraveling.
I began this book with an epigraph written by Germaine de Staël, a celebrated French writer in Eliza’s time, published in the year before the scandal surrounding Alexander and Maria Reynolds broke. Madame de Staël, as she was known, observed that “love is the whole history of a woman’s life; it is an episode in a man’s.” This was not a recommendation but a statement of fact: whom a woman married in the eighteenth century shaped her life completely. Men had lives outside their marriages.
In the story of the life of Alexander Hamilton, the telling of his liaison with Maria Reynolds is a small blot on a larger, epic story. For Eliza Hamilton, it is the defining moment in a career as a wife and mother. And as I began drafting this biography of Eliza Hamilton, poring over what testimony she left behind, trying to make sense of what Alexander wrote and her reaction, this became part of what I puzzled over for months.
In the context of the life of Alexander Hamilton—the one who committed the infidelity and paid the price with a confession—nothing about the story of Maria Reynolds is jarringly out of character. Alexander was impulsive, flirtatious, intemperate, contradictory, and brilliant. He was a scrapper, who worked his way up from a start as an orphan on a remote island, marked by his illegitimate birth, to the highest reaches of American political life. He married into a family that was, for all intents and purposes, aristocratic. Like the husbands of Eliza’s sisters, he was one of life’s gamblers. The Schuyler sisters—not only Angelica and Peggy but also their next-youngest sister, Cornelia—all had a thing for men who, like their father, Philip Schuyler, were risk takers and fortune hunters.
Eliza’s story, however, is less straightforward.
When we look at the letters and documents that survive, when we track the story of Eliza Hamilton from her girlhood through her death nearly a century later, it is hard to make sense of her reaction. In the musical Hamilton, she burns with anger and indignation and sends Alexander off to sleep in his office. In private Schuyler family correspondence and in Alexander Hamilton’s surviving letters to her, she steadfastly refuses to accept that Alexander has betrayed her and places the blame squarely and exclusively on the shoulders of his political enemies. Behind closed doors, she and Alexander did not pull apart either. They drew ever closer, into a universe of two, precisely at the moment of a spectacularly public breach of trust between them. For this, Alexander’s letters breathe his gratitude. “A thousand blessings upon you,” he wrote to her in the months after. “While all other passions decline in me, those of love and friendship gain new strength. . . . In this I know your good and kind heart responses to mine. . . . Heaven bless you My Dear Wife & reward you with all the happiness you deserve,” he offered her.
In Eliza’s case, it is harder to square the circle. Here is a young woman—passionately in love, fiercely loyal, relentlessly pragmatic, and deceptively strong-minded and independent, for all her self-effacing modesty—who, confronted with the affair of her husband, in fact does not get angry and kick him to the couch. Instead, if the story of the affair is true, she apparently clings to him, makes excuses, and insists to her dying day that he was an admirable husband. She does this despite Alexander having published an entire pamphlet as “evidence” of his infidelity, offering up sordid details of sex in their marital bed and publishing transcripts of another woman’s love letters.
What makes it hard to reconcile the life of Eliza Hamilton with her response to Alexander’s infidelity is that we have to posit a personality change occurring suddenly in the summer of 1797. We have to believe that the affair crushed her spirit and turned her from a feisty child of the frontier to a victim of her own self-deception. We have to posit that Eliza simply could not handle the reality of Alexander’s affair and would do anything to keep him. When he dies, in a duel fueled at least in part by the scandal, she carries on for decades insisting that Alexander has been maligned, idolizing him and insisting on his virtue.
In short, when it comes to Alexander, Eliza begins to look a bit foolish.
But Eliza Hamilton was nobody’s fool. After Alexander’s death, in all the other aspects of her long life, she carries on being just as strong-minded, pragmatic, and indepe
ndent as always. She raises children as a single mother who is strapped for cash. She takes in the children of others. She builds a formidable charitable institution that still exists today as her living legacy, and, in her eighties, with energy and resources that astonished those around her, she set out for the new frontier, the American West, just because she still relished an adventure and didn’t trust her boys with her business interests.
What if the piece of history that doesn’t fit the puzzle of this life story is not Eliza but the publicly accepted story of Alexander’s affair with Maria Reynolds?
As her biographer, I struggled to write the chapters that came after the publication of the pamphlet, because I couldn’t make sense of how the person I had come to know as Eliza up to that point—as a biographer I was spending more time each day “with” Eliza than with anyone in my family—suddenly changed in her essential character.
So I went back to the scholarship and the archives, and I found something astonishing and eye-opening. There exists a completely different version of this story. It is not a story that is a belated, modern invention either. It’s the story that in the 1790s was splashed all over the newspapers, and it’s the version of the story that was believed by James Monroe and any number of men in Congress. It’s the story Maria Reynolds told.
It is also a story that makes perfect sense of Eliza’s reaction.
Eliza and Alexander, though, wanted to bury it.
What if Alexander Hamilton never had an affair with Maria Reynolds? That is the crux of what I found in the scholarship and in the newspapers from the 1790s. What if something else—something to which infidelity was preferable—happened?
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