My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

Though Madison’s patient solicitude and my husband’s fiery passion had always seemed to make them an odd team, the two men used their differences to attack the same problems and achieve the same ends from different directions. I thought it a great partnership. Moreover, I was learning that my husband didn’t make friends easily with men outside of the army. And yet he’d taken to Madison straightaway.

  Now I worried for Mr. Jefferson to come between them.

  As the tulips and hyacinths bloomed all over the city, and Congress finally ratified the provisional peace treaty in mid-April, marking the end of eight years of hostilities, Alexander and Jemmy Madison—as I heard my husband sometimes call him—took to organizing a series of secret nighttime meetings with select members of Congress. The Quaker culture of Philadelphia meant that the streets, well lit by whale-oil lamps, tended to empty at night, creating a special challenge for men attempting to sneak about, yet secrecy was more urgently needed as rebellious troops threatened to march upon the city to get the pay long owed to them.

  I didn’t realize the seriousness of the situation until, on a rare summer night when he came home alone, Alexander said, “You must go, Betsy. You and the little one. First thing tomorrow.”

  At sixteen months old, our Philip was now a toddling, talking, curious boy who already promised to have his father’s good looks. “Why must we go?” I asked, handing Philip over as he reached out for his papa.

  Alexander showered his son’s little face with loud kisses that made Philip giggle. “Because the army is coming from Lancaster, and picking up men along the way, and the government of this state refuses to do anything to stop them or protect Congress.”

  Another mutiny, I thought, for lack of a better word to describe it. But it seemed much more serious than any of the others—with our own army ready to attack our fledgling government after having so recently toppled King George. How had it come to this? “What about you?”

  “I’m not afraid,” he said. “I’m a friend to the army, zealous to serve them, and espousing their interests in Congress. I trust that they know this, and will listen.”

  But I still remembered how my father’s soldiers turned on him, suspecting him of the blackest treason. “Alexander—”

  He embraced me then, little Philip between us, and tangled his hand in my hair as he brought our faces close. “You must go. Both of you. I can’t have you in harm’s way. Worry not about me, for if Pennsylvania won’t protect Congress, we’ll flee, too.”

  After a sleepless night, I set out the next morning with little Philip in a carriage of others fleeing the oncoming threat. During the journey to Albany, I had little idea what fate had befallen Alexander, Congress, indeed the country itself. And it was then that I realized just how fragile this thing called independence really was.

  * * *

  June 1783

  Albany

  “Peggy’s eloped!” Angelica said before I’d even alighted from the carriage in front of the Pastures. “After a fashion, anyway. Mama and Papa are in a state.”

  “Not again,” I said, recalling the turmoil Angelica’s elopement had caused all those years ago. “Did you speak to Peggy? What did she say?”

  Angelica took little Philip from my arms and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “Peggy said that since Papa had already given his blessing, she simply tired of waiting. And it’s a good match for both of them. Stephen’s to be the ninth patroon of Rensselaerswyck, after all.”

  That much was true. Peggy’s new husband stood to inherit a vast ancestral estate passed down from one of the founders of New Netherlands. I couldn’t help worrying over the scandal it might cause for two of Philip Schuyler’s daughters to have run off this way, but that wasn’t my greatest concern. I put a hand on Angelica’s arm. “Does she love him?”

  My sister’s expression softened. “She does.”

  That was enough for me. After all, I would’ve run off with Alexander if only he’d permitted it, so I had a keen sense of sympathy for Peggy’s need to fly to the man she loved. And I welcomed the distraction from worrying about my husband in Congress, facing off against angry veterans.

  Therefore, in the coming weeks, Angelica and I led a cautious campaign to win over our brooding parents. We exclaimed over how close Peggy would still be to the Pastures, for Van Rensselaer Manor stood just a few miles up the Hudson. And we excitedly imagined how soon it would be until Peggy began her own family, which being twenty-five already, she was ripe to do.

  Unexpectedly, Mama was easily won over. In truth, she’d seemed so eager for Peggy to wed that I almost suspected, were it not for the scandal, she would have helped my sister climb out a window to run off with her betrothed, despite how angry she’d once been at Angelica for doing exactly that. And Mama was so swiftly reconciled to it that Papa behaved as if it was all done according to his wishes in the first place.

  So it was that our parents welcomed Peggy home with open arms and a reception that reminded me of the one Alexander and I had on our wedding day. This time, however, I’d helped arrange the festivities, working with Mama and Dinah to set the menu, and having Jenny pull together large vases of fresh flowers from the garden to brighten every room. Once again, all of Albany’s finest families attended, as well as some of its newer arrivals, like Colonel and Mrs. Burr. And even though I delighted in catching up with Peggy, welcoming Stephen to the family, and learning the latest gossip from Theodosia, it all made me miss my husband even more, especially given all the indignities he was being made to suffer as a congressman.

  Though I did not know it at the time, I’d fled Philadelphia just before our angry, unpaid soldiers seized the city arsenals and held my husband, Jemmy Madison, and the rest of Congress at bayonet point in a standoff. After that, Congress became a runaway government, fleeing from Pennsylvania, to New Jersey, then Annapolis.

  All summer long, our Confederation Congress was abused, laughed at, and cursed wherever they went, and I could scarcely imagine what Alexander—who’d done as much as anyone to resolve the disputes before it led to all of this—must have been feeling. It was almost as humiliating for our fledgling country as it was frightening.

  When Hamilton finally returned to me at my father’s house in August, he claimed to be done with it all. Frustrated and demoralized he said, “If the army’s mutiny didn’t convince our countrymen to replace the Articles of Confederation with a stronger government, nothing will. So, as for you and me and our baby boy, we’ll now settle into a purely domestic life.”

  His proclamation suited me just fine, especially when, as the crispness of fall crept into the evening air, Peggy announced after church services that she was expecting her first child.

  “Oh, we’re all to be mothers together,” I said, hugging her.

  Even our little ones joined the celebration when Angelica’s son pointed at his aunt Peggy’s belly and said, “Do you have a boy in there? I hope it’s a boy!”

  Peggy and I laughed. But Angelica didn’t. Mustering a forced smile, she said, “I have exciting news, too. Carter is taking me to Paris.”

  I blinked. “Whatever for?”

  “My husband is to be a U.S. envoy to the French government,” she said, her voice overly cheery.

  “When do you leave?” Peggy asked, her hand on her still-flat stomach.

  “Before winter.” Angelica sighed with a note of regret. “Months away! We’ll have plenty of time together before I go.”

  But those months passed far too quickly. And when November came, I worried at the damp lace kerchief in my hands as we said our farewells. I was fearful of the dangers of Angelica’s ocean journey and pained, as I always was, to be parted from my sisters. “I’m going to miss you both more than words can say.”

  “Poor Betsy,” Angelica said. “You’re taking it almost as hard as Papa.”

  “How else should I take it? You’ll both be so far from me.”

  “I’ll be just a short boat ride away,” Peggy said, blushing pink, as if she were quite ple
ased to see me weepy at the thought of parting with her. But even though Van Rensselaer Manor wasn’t far from the Pastures, Alexander and I were shortly destined for New York City, so that boat ride would require nearly a week to accomplish.

  “And I will also be just a boat ride away . . . albeit, a longer boat ride,” Angelica said, squeezing my hand.

  “How long will you be in Europe?” I asked, clutching her hand in return.

  “Not long enough to see everything that I’d like.” Angelica sniffed. “Which is why you shouldn’t envy me; I’m to have a taste of the fruit without being given the whole apple . . .”

  She was teasing to distract me from my sorrow, of course, but the fear that she might believe my sadness resulted from envy was enough for me to force a deep breath and calm myself. My sisters had both married wealthy men who could take them to the ends of the earth, whereas my own husband’s circumstances were nowhere as grand. Still, I would never wish to deny my sisters pleasures I couldn’t have for myself. “You’ll write me? Every day?”

  “If I were to write every day, I should have even less time to see the sites,” Angelica protested with a blasé expression her sniffles belied. “But I’ll try to see everything as if through my darling Betsy’s eyes, for that is the kindest and most enjoyable way to see everything.” I smiled through my tears because like Alexander, my sister had a way of rendering me helpless to her charms. “In the meantime, you’ll have an adventure setting up housekeeping for my amiable brother-in-law and your darling little one.”

  “I know,” I said, and the idea filled me with pleasure and anxiety in equal measure. We’d be in New York City before year’s end, where Alexander intended to set up his law practice and serve as the agent looking after Mr. Carter’s business interests while he was away.

  It was a time for building anew. A family. A home. A country.

  So it was in New York City that I finally said a tearful farewell to Angelica. With her little brood of children, she climbed aboard a ship to cross the sea, leaving me with a fear for her safety and an ache even greater than when she’d slipped out that back door of Papa’s house so many years before.

  And she was not the only one to go.

  At long last, the Treaty of Paris had been signed, granting America her independence—and having won it, we were all eager for the British soldiers to leave. Leave they finally did, and with them went almost thirty thousand Loyalist merchants and citizens, refugees from all over America, who fled that winter to start new lives elsewhere—not to mention thousands of slaves to whom the British had promised freedom, an uncomfortable reminder that our enemy had maintained its promise of liberty to the enslaved much better than had my own country.

  We were there in the crowds down at the Battery on that cold but glorious evacuation day as the British boarded their ships and sailed away from New York, making way for Washington’s coming procession with the American army to retake the city. I jogged little Philip in my arms, showing him the sails of our enemies receding, so proud that tears sprang to my eyes. “See what we’ve done?” I whispered in my son’s ear. “We’ve chased a king back across the sea, darling.”

  Even the final trick of the departing British could not bring down my jubilation. The British had left their flag flying, tied high to a greased pole. And I laughed that it was a Hollander who gave his wooden cleats to be nailed as rungs to the pole so that it could be climbed and the flag torn down. The crowd’s roar when that Union Jack finally fell to the mud was something I will never forget. A roar that grew to deafening volume when the retreating British fired one final defiant shot and our bold Stars and Stripes were raised before the fleet sailed out of sight.

  Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!

  The war was over. It was finally over.

  And I let out a breath that seemed to come from the very core of me, as if I had been holding it for years. Perhaps I had been. But even that moment couldn’t compare to the crowd’s eruption when our victorious commander in chief and his officers marched into the city. We waved flags and cheered and wept . . .

  We were Americans, now. Every one of us.

  And I think not a single person there had ever felt it more than when General Washington passed by upon his cantering gray-white horse. Amidst the revelry, still I saw the signs of the sacrifice that’d been required to bring us to this moment. Mothers who had lost sons. Widows who had lost soldier husbands. Soldiers who had lost limbs and eyes and years of their lives to the fight. I felt those losses to the core of me as well, because I knew I could have lost my husband.

  I closed my eyes and offered a prayerful thanksgiving that Alexander stood at my side now, that we were together, and that the danger was behind us. Drums, cannon shots, bells, and song filled the air, and celebratory bonfires burned well into the night.

  It wasn’t until the morning that we were reminded of how much there was still to be done. In my childhood visits to the city, I remembered the bustling wharf, the grand buildings, and the broad tree-lined avenues. What we found in the wake of the long British occupation was a shelled city of scorched and burned-out edifices now unrecognizable. Livestock roamed freely amidst trash and weeds, fences long gone, and nary a stick in sight. In addition to the looting and the burning, the British had cut down trees and stripped manor houses of wood, burning nearly anything they could find for fuel. And the stench from the mud-choked wharfs and excrement in the streets . . . I couldn’t describe it if I tried.

  “It should all be torn down and replaced,” Hamilton said of the hovels that remained.

  Of course, Alexander saw possibility in all this destruction. He thought much opportunity was to be had in engineers who would make stately homes for the city’s new residents. He was already making plans to rebuild the city to its former glory, but for the time being, my husband rented a three-story house on Wall Street, where the best merchants made their homes, though we could only afford to live at the eastern end, where houses with crumbling mortar, fading paint, and sagging roofs huddled amongst shops and taverns. In fact, our new home was quite near the Queen’s Head Tavern, run by a West Indian tavern keeper named Samuel Fraunces. And it was that very tavern that became the epicenter of our first marital quarrel.

  We quarreled not because my husband stayed there drinking all hours of the night, as so many wives were apt to complain. But instead because, when the occasion called for it, my husband simply refused to go to the tavern at all.

  “General Washington is leaving the army,” I said, broaching the subject for the third time in as many days. But since the invitation had arrived, Alexander’s mood had turned dark. “He’s saying farewell to his officers at the tavern, and were you not first and foremost amongst them?”

  Though I believed right down to the marrow of my bones that my husband had been the best and brightest of Washington’s officers, I still expected him to modestly protest that generals like my father, Nathanael Greene, Lafayette, or Henry Knox had been more instrumental to the victory. But modesty was never one of Alexander’s virtues. Instead, he complained, “Congress has not seen fit to recognize me as such.”

  “Alexander—”

  “I’m not going.”

  Something had changed in him, I thought.

  Something ate at him, night and day, and I didn’t think it was Congress.

  I wished I understood it.

  “But Washington is laying down his sword,” I said. “Such a moment will surely be recorded in the annals of history, Alexander. Shouldn’t your name be noted as one of those in attendance?”

  It was then, for the first time, that I learned what it was like to truly stand in opposition to Alexander Hamilton. For what followed was not an indulgent remonstration. Nor even a small lecture on all the reasons he should not—would not—attend.

  It was, instead, an onslaught of arguments, stinging in tone as if I were not merely a nagging wife but also an enemy to be destroyed. Raising every objection I had made or might make as a target, Alexande
r fired off ten, twelve, twenty points in rapid succession. Not just vanquishing my opinion, but also snapping even at the fly-wisp ideas that might have still buzzed around its corpse in my brain.

  When, stunned, I finally opened my mouth to reply, he snapped his paper open. “No more, Betsy.”

  I cannot decide whether my rebelliousness was stoked by the lawyerly tenaciousness with which he harangued me, or the high temper with which he did it, or simply the knowledge that my own mother would never have allowed such an episode to pass in her parlor without exacting a heavy price from my father’s peace of mind.

  The truth was that in refusing to say farewell to Washington, I believed my husband to be doing something enormously foolish that he might one day regret. Sitting there beside him, Mrs. Washington’s advice came suddenly to mind. “Sometimes we encourage, sometimes we challenge, and sometimes we manage . . .”

  And so, instead of staying silent, I challenged him with the one thing I knew to be unutterably true. “George Washington is a great man.”

  My husband’s intense eyes fixed on me with dark, stormy disapproval. An edge of contempt and enmity I’d never before imagined could come from the expression of a man as dear to me as life. “I told you, ‘No more.’ A certain indulgence must be afforded a Dutchman’s daughter in matters of hearth and home, but I’ll teach you the absolute necessity of implicit obedience if I must.”

  It was not the first time my husband warned of discipline. He had, in fact, written similar words in love letters. But those were playful threats, embellished with a courtier’s wit. This time, he seemed in earnest.

  Would he dare raise a hand to me? Though the Bible might have confirmed his right to, my fists balled with a sudden urge to turn my back, summon a carriage, and return with our baby boy to Papa’s home in Albany at once.

  Other fathers would refuse to step into a quarrel between a daughter and a husband, but I didn’t doubt even for a moment that my father would shelter me and his grandson, nor that he would take my part in any quarrel. And for Alexander, a breach with my father—one of the foremost men in the state—would dash his ambitions forever. So I felt a gratifying, if discomforting, satisfaction that I held a greater power of happiness and misery over my husband than he held over me. Except for one single, solitary thing.