by Ron Chernow
Since Hamilton was de facto commander of the army, he had to handle the disorder, which became known as Fries’s Rebellion. He was handicapped by the lack of presidential leadership. “I get nothing very precise about the insurrection,” he complained to Washington. “But everything continues to wear the character of feebleness in respect to the measures for suppressing it.”48 Treasury Secretary Wolcott, despondent over the president’s improbable absence in the midst of a crisis, wrote to Hamilton from Philadelphia: “I am grieved when I think of the situation of the gov[ernmen]t. An affair which ought to have been settled at once will cost much time and perhaps be so managed as to encourage other and formidable rebellions. We have no Pres[iden]t here and the appearance of languor and indecision are discouraging to the friends of government.”49
To deal with the rebellion, Hamilton assembled a force that blended state militia and federal regulars. Believing, as always, that psychology was half the battle, Hamilton decided to stage a tremendous show of force. As in the Whiskey Rebellion, the army he sent into eastern Pennsylvania seemed disproportionately large and heavy-handed compared to the threat, which had already begun to wane. The troops took sixty prisoners back to Philadelphia, where the chief instigators were tried and convicted of treason. In the spring of 1800, against the unanimous advice of his cabinet, President Adams reversed position and pardoned Fries and two other convicted protesters, calling them “obscure, miserable Germans, as ignorant of our language as they were of our laws.”50 Adams thought treason too strong a charge to apply to the Pennsylvania rioters. The action was reminiscent of Washington’s clemency after the Whiskey Rebellion, though it may have been influenced by Adams’s fears that the German population would defect to the Republicans in the 1800 presidential election. Hamilton was dismayed by the pardon.
Adams worried increasingly about the militaristic tendencies and authoritarian side that had emerged in the frustrated, restless Hamilton’s behavior. He justly observed, “Mr. Hamilton’s imagination was always haunted by that hideous monster or phantom so often called a crisis and which so often produces imprudent measures.”51 In later years, he congratulated himself that he had restrained Hamilton, who “save for me would have involved us in a foreign war with France and a civil war with ourselves.”52 What Adams could not admit was that he had failed to exercise strong leadership and had allowed the feud with Hamilton and his cabinet to fester. Escaping to his home in Quincy was not the most effective way to deal with intramural clashes.
THIRTY-THREE
WORKS GODLY AND UNGODLY
On June 3, 1799, James Hamilton died on the small, volcanic island of St. Vincent, having left the even tinier nearby island of Bequia nine years earlier. He would have been about eighty years old. The fortunes of the
elder Hamilton had never improved, and he ended up trapped on a bloody island that had witnessed terrible atrocities during the previous four years. Starting in 1795, native Caribs conspired with French inhabitants to spark an uprising on the British island. Many settlers were massacred and sugar plantations burned before British troops brutally put down the insurrection. This must have provided a frightening backdrop for the last years of the feeble, aging Hamilton. Alexander’s failure to see James Hamilton during the last thirty-four years of his life raises anew the question of whether he was really Alexander’s biological father or whether Alexander simply felt alienated from a deeply flawed parent who had deserted the family and left him orphaned after his mother’s death. Perhaps Hamilton was too busy for a trip back to the islands. Whatever the truth of this fathomless story, Hamilton had dutifully provided his father with financial aid, approximately two remittances per year, right up until his last payment at Christmas 1798.
Like many self-invented immigrants, Hamilton had totally and irrevocably repudiated his past. He never evinced the slightest desire to revisit the haunts of his early life, and his upbringing remained a taboo topic. Yet childhood scenes may have continued to color the way he saw things, especially slavery. By the time he left the Treasury in 1795, slavery had begun to recede in New England and the midAtlantic states. Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut had decided to abolish it. Conspicuously missing were New York and New Jersey. So in January 1798, Hamilton resumed his association with the New York Manumission Society, his personal affiliation having lapsed during his Philadelphia years. Elected one of its four legal advisers, he helped defend free blacks when slave masters from out of state brandished bills of sale and tried to snatch them off the New York streets.
In 1799, the society enjoyed a magnificent victory when the largely Federalist Assembly, voting along party lines, decreed the gradual abolition of slavery in New York State by a vote of sixty-eight to twenty-three. (Aaron Burr, though he retained his own slave entourage for many years, defected to the Federalist majority.) By 1804, New Jersey had followed New York’s example, assuring that the north would extirpate the practice over the next generation, helping to set the stage for the Civil War. In the southern states, with their fast-growing slave population and the invention of the cotton gin, slavery became more ineradicable. Those founders bewitched by the fantasy that slavery would slowly fade away were being proved wrong. Twenty years after New York decided to end slavery, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe still clung to such rationalizations, saying, for instance, that if slavery were extended into the new western states, it would weaken and die.
Hamilton’s name cropped up unexpectedly in the Manumission Society minutes for its March 1799 meeting. The society was trying to win the freedom of a slave named Sarah, who had been brought to New York from Maryland. It turned out, to Hamilton’s embarrassment, that she belonged to his brother-in-law John Barker Church. The minutes flagged this awkward circumstance without editorial comment: “A[.] Hamilton was agent for Church in the business.”1 John and Angelica Church had pressed Hamilton to purchase slaves for them before their return to New York. At the next meeting, it was reported that the Churches had suddenly given Sarah her freedom. This incident strengthens the hunch that one or both of the apparent references to slave purchases in Hamilton’s cashbooks for 1796 and 1797 referred to purchases for the Churches, not for himself. By late 1795, we recall, Hamilton was already hunting for housing for his returning relatives.
The Manumission Society’s work was far from over. It ran a school for one hundred black children, teaching them spelling, reading, writing, and arithmetic. It also protested an increasingly common practice: New York slaveholders were circumventing state laws by exporting slaves to the south, from where they were transferred to the West Indian sugar plantations that Hamilton had known as a boy. Hamilton refused to drop his involvement in the Manumission Society even as his renown grew and his commitments vastly multiplied. He kept up his connection as a legal adviser until his death. Was this perhaps his personal way of acknowledging the past by rectifying the injustice that had surrounded his early years?
... Hamilton’s antislavery work in the late 1790s was paralleled by Eliza’s growing activism on behalf of marginal and downtrodden people, work that was to dominate the last half century of her life. Because Eliza Hamilton was a modest, self-effacing woman who apparently destroyed her own letters and tried to expunge her presence from the history books, the force of her personality and the magnitude of her contribution have been overlooked. Her son Alexander, Jr., once described her as “remarkable for sprightliness and vivacity.”2 Her pioneering work to relieve the suffering of the poor has been all but forgotten. “She was a most earnest, energetic, and intelligent woman,” said her son James. “Her engagements as a principal of the Widows Society and Orphan Asylum were incessant.”3
The story of Eliza Hamilton’s charitable work is inseparable from that of a remarkable Scottish widow named Isabella Graham, who came to New York in 1789 after her husband died of yellow fever in Antigua. A devout Presbyterian with three daughters, Graham decided to dedicate her life to “godly work” and befriended
two clergymen in the Wall Street area who had stood among Hamilton’s first American contacts, John Rodgers and John Mason.4 Aided by these church leaders, Graham set up a school to inculcate Christian virtues and a sound education in fashionable young women. She was assisted by her daughter Joanna, who then married a wellto-do merchant, Richard Bethune. This marriage freed Graham from the need to run her school and enabled her to consecrate her efforts to the poor. In December 1797, mother and daughter launched a groundbreaking venture, the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children. This missionary society, composed of Christian women from various denominations, may rank as the first all-female social-service agency in New York City. Bearing food parcels and medicine to indigent widows, the Widows Society volunteers saved almost one hundred women from the poorhouse during its first winter of operation alone. Eliza appeared on the membership rolls as “Mrs. General Hamilton,” and the Widows Society served as her entryway into a broader universe of evangelical social work. Joanna Bethune’s son remembered Eliza thus: “Her person was small and delicately formed, her face agreeable and animated by her brilliant black eyes, showing and radiating the spirit and intelligence so fully exhibited in her subsequent life.”5
In the late 1790s, the unceasing demands of a growing family prevented Eliza from a full-scale commitment to Christian charity work. On November 26, 1799, she gave birth to her seventh child, Eliza, but she continued to shelter strays and waifs, a practice that she and Alexander had started in adopting Fanny Antill. In 1795, Eliza’s brother, John Bradstreet Schuyler, had died, leaving a son, Philip Schuyler II. During the week, the boy attended school on Staten Island with the Hamilton boys and then spent weekends with Uncle Alexander and Aunt Eliza. So Eliza’s home was always bursting with youngsters demanding attention.
Eliza was never allowed to forget the Reynolds affair, since the Republican press refreshed the public’s memory at every opportunity. In December 1799, the Aurora pointed out gleefully that General Hamilton had arrived in Philadelphia after some recent sightings of his former mistress, implying that the affair continued: “Mrs. Reynolds, alias Maria, the sentimental heroine of the memorable Vindication, is said to be in Philadelphia once more. In the early part of last year, she was in town and had the imprudence to intrude herself on women of virtue with a relation of her story that she was the Maria.”6 In fact, Hamilton had never again set eyes on his quondam mistress. The ever-shifting Maria Reynolds had re-created herself as a widow named Maria Clement. In an attempt to gain respectability in Philadelphia, she ran the household of a French doctor. Nevertheless, the Republican papers continued to ride their favorite hobbyhorse, intimating that her romance with Hamilton still flourished.
Hamilton found increasing pleasure at home at 26 Broadway. One senses that he and Eliza clung to each other with a deep sense of mutual need. “I am well aware how much in my absence your affectionate and anxious heart needs the consolation of frequently hearing from me and there is no consolation which I am not very much disposed to administer to it,” he told Eliza in one letter. “It deserves everything from me. I am much more in debt to you than I can ever pay, but my future life will be more than ever devoted to your happiness.”7 The more despairing he became about politics and human nature—and his worldview was never very rosy to begin with—the more he appreciated his sincere, unpretentious wife. From Philadelphia, he wrote to her, “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.” He concluded: “Adieu best of wives and best of mothers.”8 Even a rugged soldier’s life, once his sovereign remedy for all ills, no longer possessed its curative powers. “I discover more and more that I am spoiled for a military man,” he told Eliza. “My health and comfort require that I should be at home—at that home where I am always sure to find a sweet asylum from care and pain in your bosom.”9
Hamilton never stopped doting on Angelica Church. During one stay with his in-laws in Albany, he found himself seated at dinner opposite a John Trumbull portrait of her and her son Philip. Hamilton sent Angelica a witty letter, describing how he had dined in the mute presence of a special lady friend:
I was placed directly in front of her and was much occupied with her during the whole dinner. She did not appear to her usual advantage and yet she was very interesting. The eloquence of silence is not a common attribute of hers, but on this occasion she employed it par force and it was not considered as a fault. Though I am fond of hearing her speak, her silence was so well placed that I did not attempt to make her break it. You will conjecture that I must have been myself dumb with admiration.10
Hamilton was approaching his mid-forties and perhaps feeling his age. His high-pressure life was still packed with plenty of responsibilities. As inspector general, he bore single-handedly the weight of an entire army, while trying to retain his restive legal clients. “The law has nearly abandoned him or rather he has forsaken it,” Robert Troup told Rufus King. “The loss he sustains is immense!”11 Hamilton’s life began to lose some of its clockwork precision, and the darkness of depression again invaded his mind. While staying with Oliver Wolcott, Jr., in November 1798, Hamilton watched the emaciated Mrs. Wolcott wasting away from a terminal disease. He confessed to Eliza that he was haunted by despondent thoughts that he could not shake: “I am quite well, but I know not what impertinent gloom hangs over my mind, which I fear will not be entirely dissipated until I rejoin my family. A letter from you telling me that you and my dear children are well will be a consolation.”12 During one trip, he told Angelica Church of “a sadness which took possession” of his heart after leaving New York.13 These confessional remarks leap off the page because Hamilton seldom admitted to anxiety in this candid manner and tended to shield his innermost thoughts.
Now an invalid crippled by gout and abdominal troubles, Philip Schuyler worried about the punishing demands that his son-in-law made on himself. In early 1799, he again exhorted Hamilton to relax.
Mrs. Church writes me that you suffer from want of exercise, that this and unremitted attention to business injures your health. I believe it is difficult for an active mind to moderate an application to business but, my dear sir, you must make some sacrifice to that health which is so precious to all who are dear to you and to that country which rever[e]s and esteems you. Let me then entreat you to use more bodily exercise and less of that of the mind.14
Schuyler discreetly exhorted Eliza to saddle Hamilton’s horse every day and get him to ride in the fresh air. Hamilton did engage in some outdoor recreation. He had recently bought a rifle and liked to go out hunting with a retriever dog named Old Peggy. With his “fowling piece” in hand—a light gun with “A. Hamilton, N.Y.” carved into its stock—he sometimes roamed the Harlem forests, searching for birds to shoot. At other times, he prowled the Hudson, fishing for striped bass.15 He was still a habitué of the theater, whether classical tragedies or lighter fare, and he attended the Philharmonic Society concerts at Snow’s Hotel on Broadway. Hamilton’s problem was never a shortage of interests so much as the time to cultivate them.
On occasion, Hamilton gave evidence of a prankish spirit at odds with the image of the sober public man. While on a visit to Newark, Hamilton’s aide Philip Church met a Polish poet, Julian Niemcewicz, a friend of General Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Niemcewicz insisted that Kosciuszko had entrusted him with a magic secret that permitted him to summon up spirits from the grave. Hamilton, intrigued, invited the Polish poet to a Friday-evening soiree. To give conclusive proof of his black art, Niemcewicz asked Hamilton to step into an adjoining room so that he could not see what was going on. Then one guest wrote down on a card the name of a dead warrior—the baron de Viomenil, who had seen action at Yorktown—and asked the Polish poet to conjure up his shade. Niemcewicz uttered a string of incantations, accompanied by a constantly clanging bell. When it was over, Hamilton strode into the room and “declared that the Baron [de Viomenil] had a
ppeared to him exactly in the dress which he formerly wore and that a conversation had passed between them wh[ich] he was not at liberty to disclose,” related Peter Jay, the governor’s son.16 That Hamilton had communed with a fallen comrade attracted exceptional attention in New York society, so much so that he had to admit that it was all a hoax he had cooked up with Philip Church and Niemcewicz “to frighten the family for amusement and that it was never intended to be made public.”17
The yellow-fever epidemic of 1798 that had claimed the lives of Benjamin Franklin Bache and John Fenno had also given fresh urgency to the work of the Widows Society, as many women lost their family breadwinners. “None but eyewitnesses,” Isabella Graham wrote, “could have imagined the sufferings of so many respectable, industrious women who never thought to ask bread of any but of God.”18 This same scourge led the more profane Aaron Burr to create quite a different sort of institution in New York: the Manhattan Company.
To understand this pivotal moment between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, one must fathom the severity of the epidemic that had struck the city that autumn. In September, as many as forty-five victims perished per day, and Hamilton and his family even briefly took rooms several miles from town. Robert Troup described the terrifying paralysis that gripped New York: “Our courts are shut up, our trade totally stagnant, and we have little or no appearance of business....I call in once a day at Hamilton’s and we endeavour to fortify each other with philosophy to bear the ills we cannot cure.”19 Wealthier residents escaped to rural outskirts, while the poor were exposed to a disease spread by mosquitoes that multiplied around the many swamps and stagnant ponds. Almost two thousand New Yorkers died, and a fresh potter’s field was consecrated in what is now Greenwich Village.