I, Eliza Hamilton

by Susan Holloway Scott

  “Please, my love,” I said seriously, and I didn’t smile. How could I? “They’ll judge you to be the petty and vindictive one, not him, no matter if that’s the truth or not.”

  He didn’t listen to me, preferring to trust the judgment of those faceless, noble voters over mine, and published it anyway in October 1800.

  As I feared, the pamphlet was widely regarded as one of the most powerful and influential pieces in the presidential campaign, but not in the way that Alexander had intended. It secured the presidency for Thomas Jefferson, and the vice presidency for Aaron Burr. It also destroyed the Federalist Party from within, and any hope that Alexander may have himself harbored of obtaining another political position for himself.

  He refused to see the connection, let alone admit it to me. Instead he felt evermore the outsider, and despaired that he no longer belonged in a world he’d helped create. The despair that I’d first glimpsed over the army’s demise seemed to have deepened and taken a firmer hold upon his thoughts. I worried for his health, and his welfare.

  Yet what he did soon after the election might have been perhaps a kind of apology. One afternoon he took me and the younger children, squeezed together into the chaise, on a long drive to the far end of Manhattan Island, in amongst the farmlands and forests of Haarlem and high above the Hudson and East Rivers. There was still enough color, red and gold and orange, remaining in the leaves of the trees to make a brilliant contrast to the blue sky overhead and the steep stone cliffs of the Palisades across the Hudson in New Jersey.

  I knew this to be one of Alexander’s favorite places, and he came here whenever he could spare the time to hunt. We had rented a house here last fall when yellow fever had broken out in the city, and together we’d come to love the peace of the area.

  He stopped the chaise near a walled pasture, telling the children that the farmer wouldn’t mind if they ran about the land. They promptly climbed the wall and scattered into the field, running and wheeling about and bellowing with delight in ways that were not permitted on our part of Broadway.

  Alexander and I sat on the wall ourselves, I with baby Elizabeth in my lap, and we breathed deeply of air that was free of the chimney smoke and soot of farther downtown. I shifted closer to him, and rested my head against his shoulder.

  “I wish that we could live here,” I said wistfully. “Away from the city, and away from the noise and racket.”

  He slipped his arm around my waist. “Do you think you’d be content here?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “I’ve always told you I’ve more the soul of a stout farmer’s wife than a lady of fashion.”

  He chuckled, running his hand fondly up and down my arm. “Would you like to try?”

  I glanced at him sideways, not considering his question with any seriousness.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “We’ll become that old couple we passed earlier down the road, each with a clay pipe as they sat on their stoop amongst the chickens.”

  “I’m not jesting, dearest,” he said, though his eyes twinkled. “This week I bought this land, and I don’t believe the farmer who sold it would be agreeable to returning my money.”

  “This land?” I repeated, shocked. “You bought this?”

  “From this road, here,” he said, turning to point, “to that stand of trees, there, and to those bluffs. It’s all General Hamilton’s property now.”

  I gasped, and pressed my hands to my cheeks. “We’ve never owned property like this. Oh, Alexander, can we afford it?”

  “Well enough,” he said. “It needs a few improvements, though. The farmhouse will do in a pinch, but I’d rather envisioned a fine country house, with tall windows and porches so we can sit outside and watch the boats on the river. A stable for the horses, and gardens. I’ve never had a garden, you know.”

  I flung my arms around him and kissed him, too overjoyed for words. I could envision a house for us and our children and our eventual grandchildren, too, far removed from the turmoil of the city, and it was a very fine vision indeed.

  * * *

  Once the Democratic-Republicans took possession of the government in February 1801, President Jefferson wasted no time in removing as much as he could of the Federalist legacy, especially anything that could be attributed to my husband. In his usual irksome manner, the new president claimed full credit for a peaceful nation and a happy economy. Neither were the result of his exertions or policies, but his inheritance from the previous Federalist presidencies that he had so desperately despised. Yet the common American seemed incapable of realizing these truths, and lavished President Jefferson and his party with the praise and reverence that their predecessors had deserved, but seldom received.

  It was a bitter time for Alexander, who could not resist writing more taunting essays and letters attacking the new president. But to my relief he also spent considerable time on the law, and on the construction of our new house, called The Grange, after a country house in Scotland that had belonged to one of his distant ancestors.

  He and I both took delight in our oldest son Philip’s accomplishments, too. He had graduated from Columbia rewarded with prizes and praised as one of the brightest scholars in his class, and he was now reading the law with the aim of joining Alexander in his office.

  At nineteen, Philip was tall and handsome and, like his cousin of the same name, a great favorite with the young ladies at balls and assemblies. I also guessed that he enjoyed himself with his friends in ways and places that young gentlemen his age often explore, and that on occasion he was party to certain small scrapes and misadventures that he and Alexander chose not to share with me. I was content to remain ignorant. So long as Philip dined regularly at our table, made sure his younger sister always had a partner at the assembly, and joined us for church on Sunday morning, I was content.

  I suspected one of these misadventures on a chilly Friday evening in November, when he and another friend appeared very late at our house to speak to Alexander. There had been some sort of scuffle—I could tell that from the disarray of their evening clothes—and likely some sort of difficulty involving the watch, for both young gentlemen had long, somber faces before they disappeared with Alexander into his office. I was pregnant with my eighth child—one more proof of the new contentment between Alexander and me—and because I was forty-five years old and often tired, I was reluctant to sacrifice so much as a moment of my sleep. I went back to bed, and thought no more of Philip’s mischief.

  I did note, however, that he seemed especially devout at his prayers on Sunday, and that after supper, he praised my apple pie as exemplary, and embraced me with more open affection than he usually before he left.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” I teased, ruffling his hair back from his forehead with a mother’s prerogative.

  He shrugged, his shoulders working restlessly beneath his coat. Most of the time now he seemed a grown man to me, but I still could glimpse moments when he was a boy again, a bit awkward and uncertain.

  “There’s nothing to it, Mamma,” he said solemnly, and swallowed. “Only that you are the best mother in Creation, that’s all.”

  “And I the most fortunate of mothers, to be blessed with such a son,” I said, touched by his words, “Now you’d best go, if you’ve so much more reading to accomplish today.”

  I hugged him again, and kissed him on his cheek so that he flushed. Then he loped down the steps two at a time, mounted his horse that the servant held for him, waved one last time to me, and departed. I watched him go, observing that he was riding too fast for the state of the road after last night’s rain, and that I’d have to scold him on the subject when I saw him next.

  On Monday afternoon I had just finished dusting the books in Alexander’s library (a task I never trusted to maidservants) when there was a frantic thumping on the front door. Because I was in the hall, I opened the door myself. One of the Churches’ servants was on the step, breathing hard from running. He bowed quickly to me, and handed me a terse, swi
ftly written note in Angelica’s hand.

  My dearest sister come at once. Your Philip has suffered a Terrible accident. ~ A.C.

  I cried out with alarm and fear just as one of my servants appeared. I told her to fetch my cloak and then to watch the younger children whilst I was gone to my sister’s house, and then left with the Church servant.

  “Can you tell me what has happened?” I begged of the man. “Did my son fall from his horse? Was he struck by a wagon in the street?”

  But the man only shook his head, his face wreathed with sorrow. “Mrs. Church told me not to tell you, Mrs. Hamilton,” he said. “Only to bring you as fast as I could.”

  I didn’t press him, but my fear grew with every hurried step. Angelica met me at the door, taking me firmly by the arm to lead me to a small bedroom at the back of the house.

  “What has happened to my boy, Angelica?” I demanded breathlessly. “What is wrong?”

  “My own dear sister,” she said, supporting me as she spoke. “There has been a duel.”

  If she said more after that, I do not recall it, for I was already in the room where my poor son lay, on a plain open bed without curtains. His handsome face was ashen and contorted with pain, his eyes blank and unseeing, and if not for the painful wracking that each breath caused him, I would have thought he was already lost to me. Although some attempt had been made to bind the wound in his side, there was blood everywhere, on the sheets, on the mattress, in a puddle on the floor. Also on the bed lay my husband, tears streaming from his eyes as he cradled our shattered boy in his arms.

  With a wordless cry of anguish, I rushed to them both, claiming my son’s other side. Heedless of how his blood stained me, I curled beside my boy, his father and I holding him as tenderly as we could while his young life slipped away. I could not help but think of how Alexander and I would lie together with our baby Philip between us, how we’d pet and kiss him and dream together of the fine future we were certain would be his.

  And now it had come to this instead.

  We remained with him until he died early the following morning. I knew the moment his soul left this life, and he belonged no more to us, but to his Savior, yet this knowledge brought no comfort to me.

  My grief was so black and consuming that I remember nothing more beyond that: not who else was with us in that little room, nor how I was conveyed home, nor how the awful news was delivered to our other children. I was too bereft to attend my son’s burial, and there was considerable fear that I would miscarry the child within my womb. It was the most terrible time of my life, and my only comfort came from Alexander, whose bottomless sorrow equaled my own. No one else could understand the depth of our sorrow, or comprehend the pain of our loss.

  But there was another.

  When told of her brother’s death, our daughter Angelica fell senseless to the floor with shock. All attempts to revive her failed, and instead she lay on her bed in a kind of twilight, neither awake nor asleep. When at last I was myself recovered enough to learn her plight, I crept to her side and did my best to rouse her, but failed, and I wept more bitter tears over her as well.

  In time she improved so that she could sit and stand and be led about, and on her best days she would play her brother’s favorite songs on her piano as if he were still in the room. But the bright and cheerful young woman she’d been before her brother’s death had vanished forever. Like an inanimate doll, her lovely dark eyes remained wide and staring, her voice mostly mute, and her beautiful face without emotion. She had left us with Philip, and she never returned.

  My husband was never the same again, either. In time he returned to his practice, but all his friends were shocked by the change that grief had wrought. He could now have been a man twenty years older than his true age, the change was that precipitous. He withdrew further from the wickedness of the political world, and turned to the Bible with a devotion that both surprised and pleased me.

  Most of all, we turned to each other. No one else could comprehend our loss; no one else could share the depths of our despair, or feel the harrowing pain that had come from our son’s senseless death. With Alexander, I didn’t have to explain, or struggle for words that didn’t exist. He felt the same, and shared the same unending sorrow and sadness.

  Nothing would again be as it had been. We both knew that. But together we would continue for the sake of our other children. As each day somehow followed the next, we drew comfort from one another, and from the love we shared.

  * * *

  By the spring of 1801, our new house was completed, and we closed up the Broadway house and moved to Haarlem. Early each morning, Alexander would drive the chaise down Bloomingdale Road to his office on Garden Street, and each evening he would return to us at The Grange. We both found a melancholy peace there that was lacking in the city, and I’m sure that Alexander’s old associates from the Treasury would have been stunned to see the interest he now took in planting trees and arranging gardens, his days of taxes and foreign tariffs forgotten.

  Soon after we moved, in July, I gave birth to my final child, a boy. We named him Philip, and though he became Little Phil to set him apart, his older brother was never far from our thoughts.

  And yet there was fresh grief in the years ahead. In early 1802, my younger sister Peggy sickened and died with little warning. My only solace was that Alexander, who had been in Albany on business, was able to see her in her final days.

  In May of 1803, my dear mother was taken all of a sudden by a stroke, and her death left an emptiness at The Pastures that would never again be filled. Now that my father was alone, his health deteriorated rapidly. I spent as much time with him in Albany as I could, while Alexander remained at The Grange with our children.

  Yet amidst all this, Alexander had still retained an interest in New York City politics, the only place where he felt he’d still be welcome. He’d also watched from afar—and with considerable satisfaction—as his old nemesis Colonel Burr had failed to find favor with President Jefferson and the other Democratic-Republicans in the new capital city of Washington.

  To Alexander, it was a rare kind of justice, that a man who had turned his back on one party to join another for a better chance at victory had now been shunned by both. He would, I think, have respected Colonel Burr far more if he’d lost as a Federalist, than won, as he had, as a Democratic-Republican. For a man who prized truth and trust as much as my husband did, a perpetual turncoat like the colonel was a vile and loathsome anathema to him. It was difficult to recall how, at one time, the two had been friends, and how the colonel’s daughter Theodosia had attended dancing lessons with our daughter Angelica.

  With the possibility for another national post effectively blocked by the Democratic-Republicans, Colonel Burr announced that he would run for governor of New York, Alexander was livid, and all his old outrage at political indignities gathered again with fresh force. I urged him to ignore it, and reminded him that old quarrels were best left in the past. Yet at dinners with friends, and especially at the end of the meal when the bottle was passed around, he would launch into scandal-laden denouncements of Colonel Burr that often shocked others not with their detail, but with their vehemence.

  Both behind the scenes and in the newspapers, Alexander worked relentlessly to make sure that the world remained aware of Colonel Burr’s numerous faults and duplicities, of his lack of character and conviction, and of his deceitful part in the creation of the Manhattan Company.

  “Burr must not win, Betsey,” he argued when I found him at his desk late one night, composing yet another polemic against the colonel. “You know as well as I what an evil, ruinous man he is.”

  “But he cannot hurt you any longer, dearest,” I urged. “Plotting another man’s ruin, no matter how deserving, is never a wise course. You’ll make yourself ill, and to what end?”

  “I’d gladly suffer any illness in exchange for keeping Burr permanently from office and from influence,” he said with fresh vehemence. “A man w
ith as few scruples as Burr has no place determining the course of any government, large or small.”

  I sighed, placing my hands on his shoulders; I could feel the tension in his muscles, bundled tight beneath my palms.

  “Why can you not trust to the will of the people in regards to the colonel?” I asked. “Surely the voters by now will recognize him for what he is.”

  “They will,” he agreed, dipping his pen once again into the well. “Especially once they have been provided with a few more judicious facts.”

  Whether because of my husband’s facts or not, the result of the election showed that the people did indeed possess a remarkably low opinion of the colonel. When the last votes were counted in April, he was shown to have been soundly beaten. His supporters placed the entire blame for the loss on my husband—which he happily accepted.

  Nor was he done. At a small supper, Alexander and several old friends indulged in declaiming the colonel, the sort of conversation that gentlemen often have when the cloth is drawn and the bottle passed. But on this particular evening, one of the company was so exhilarated by what my husband had said that he repeated it to the editor of the New-York Evening Post. Soon all the city and most of the state had read that Alexander had called Colonel Burr “a dangerous man, and one not to be trusted with the reins of government,” and a good many other things besides. It was all things I’d heard him say a thousand times before, but to have those same words in print was an entirely different matter. Printed words could not easily be explained away, and the fact that they were reprinted again and again in other papers only increased their power.

  All this I knew, and it worried me no end. I couldn’t imagine that the colonel would let such a slander pass unanswered. Disappointed in his career in Washington and his hopes of being the governor of New York crushed, I imagined him as a wounded animal, all the more dangerous on account of his injuries. Each day I pored over the various rebuttals and explanations in the newspapers, hunting in vain for word of his reaction. Even my aged father joined the fray on Alexander’s behalf, accusing the original statement of being a complete fabrication.