My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

  “Out west!” I exclaimed, my disappointment replaced with excitement for him. We’d shared a longing to see more of the world, and as he explained his intention to attend an Indian Treaty in Ohio, then to explore the settlements in Kentucky, I could not help but long to see them, too.

  “But before I go,” Monroe added, “there are a few things that weigh on my mind.” Thereupon he stared at my sister, where she stood between her husband and mine, laughing with the grace of an angel. And I sighed with pity, counting him as one of the many men who fell so helplessly under my sister’s spell.

  “You need a distraction.” I laced my arm through Monroe’s, patting his hand with great familiarity—and he groaned as if I’d tortured him.

  “Betsy.” Some emotion seemed to catch in his throat and afflict his tongue. “I would never wish for you to suffer . . .” He stammered as if unable to spit it out, until he blurted, “There are still those amongst us who give a care for propriety.”

  I was beginning to form some vague notion that Angelica and my husband must have violated some rule of southern gentility.

  The always stiff Monroe never did understand our New York ways. Much less did he understand my gregarious family and our close-knit relations. I was grateful that my orphaned husband fit in so easily. Monroe—the man who nearly toppled Mama’s sideboard because I offered to nurse his wound—never would have, I thought. And realizing how badly the man needed to be set topsy-turvy, I began to laugh. “James Monroe, you need a wife, and I know just the introduction to make.”

  I’d spotted the Kortright sisters, with beautiful Elizabeth in their midst, as they made so brilliant and lovely an appearance as to depopulate all the other boxes of the genteel men therein. By the end of the evening, Monroe seemed at least a little intrigued by the young beauty I’d befriended at Trinity Church. And in making an introduction between them, I counted it a night’s good work done.

  I believed, perhaps foolishly, that whatever misunderstanding about my husband had worked itself into his friend’s mind was wiped out in that powerful flush of infatuation with the girl who was to later become his bride.

  But I hadn’t understood how stubbornly James Monroe could hold on to a thing—even a thing into which he had no business prying.

  No matter who it hurt.

  No matter whose life it destroyed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  December 1786

  New York City

  A BARREL OF HAM?” I asked with a long-suffering sigh, as my husband rolled his wages into the kitchen where I stirred a thin vegetable soup. With three children now—the youngest, seven-month-old Alex, upon my hip, it was becoming harder to make do, a situation resulting from the fact that my husband preferred to take on charity cases or those that established legal precedents instead of more lucrative but pedestrian disputes over trade.

  “A barrel of ham is worth more than continentals,” Hamilton said in defense of himself. “Besides, we can’t eat a continental for dinner.”

  That is true enough, I thought as he took the baby and held him aloft. “You make a persuasive argument, Colonel Hamilton. Tomorrow, I shall cook up some ham and potatoes for us with the butter Papa sent from the Pastures, and we’ll invite the Burrs for a feast before church service.”

  At this, he frowned. “Does your father send food to all his daughters?”

  I’d seen before how prideful he could be, and how much he chafed against anything that resembled dependence. So I said, “Well, Papa can’t very well send it to Angelica over the ocean or it would spoil, but he’s sent food to all his daughters before. Besides, without good butter I can’t replicate Mama’s cookies for the children this holiday.” Alexander didn’t seem appeased by this explanation, so I tried to subtly remind him that we were bickering about butter because he insisted on representing impoverished persons. “Which client paid in pork?”

  “The spinster lady I mentioned.”

  “The one caught stealing lace doilies, painted fans, and underclothes? Did she have some innocent defense?”

  “No,” he replied with a hint of chagrin. “But I remember all too well what women must resort to when they’re destitute and desperate.”

  At this declaration—at once so rare and revealing of the power his dead mother still held over him—I stopped stirring the soup and glanced over my shoulder. But the floridness of his complexion and his reluctance to meet my eyes warned me not to say any more about it. And I remembered that however spare our circumstances might have seemed to the daughter of Philip Schuyler, we lived comfortably. Far more comfortably than my husband had as an orphaned boy all alone in this world.

  Our children were loved and cherished. They were fed and clothed and had a roof over their heads, thanks to Hamilton’s talents. I couldn’t call myself a Christian and resent him for using those talents to ease the suffering of others. Even the family in the West Indies of which he so seldom spoke. He’d made a loan to his estranged brother who was too disinterested in us to write except when desperate for money—money I was sure we’d never see again. Alexander even pleaded in vain for word from the father who abandoned him, so that he might render the old man assistance. That my husband also helped much more worthy persons, in my view, like impoverished spinsters, persecuted Tories, and downtrodden Negroes was a testament to his good heart—and I both loved and admired him for it.

  In fact, I wished to be more like him.

  * * *

  A FEW MONTHS later, one of my husband’s troubled veteran friends came to our house in the middle of the night, drunk and unable to care for his motherless baby, a two-year-old named Fanny. “I’m sorry,” my husband said, when the knocking awakened me. But I wouldn’t let him apologize for the tender spot in his heart reserved for the soldiers he’d fought with.

  Especially not since we’d so recently learned of Tench Tilghman’s death; Tench had never recovered from the cold he’d taken at the winter encampment of the army in New Windsor. It had festered into a lung ailment that killed him, leaving behind two daughters in Maryland, one of whom was orphaned before she was born. Alexander and I had wept together at the news. For if my husband would always have a tender heart for the soldiers he fought with, I did, too.

  So now by candlelight and in sleeping cap, I went down with Alexander to help his army friend and the child. I took the wailing, red-faced girl to my shoulder, trying to console her. And some time later, after Alexander had seen his drunken friend to a sofa, I asked, “Will it be debtors’ prison for him?”

  Alexander’s expression was bleak. “Worse. He’s taken leave of his senses. He broke down in my arms, sobbing like a child himself. He has nightmares of the war . . .”

  I peered at little Fanny where she’d fallen asleep in my arms, dark lashes spread upon porcelain cheeks. And because I still had nightmares of the war, too, I couldn’t stand for her not to be cared for as she should. “Alexander, what if . . . we took her in?” We were too far away to render assistance to Tench Tilghman’s baby daughters, but perhaps we could help this one. “We could keep her. Just until her father can put his affairs in order.”

  “Oh, Betsy.” My husband pressed a kiss to my temple and whispered, “You are the best of wives, the best of women, and the best part of me. But I can’t ask you to take on such a burden.”

  “I want to.” As I stared at this man who’d once been an abandoned child, I became even more certain of my decision to take Fanny into our household. “All children need love, and we are blessed to have more than enough to spare.”

  * * *

  July 3, 1787

  New York City

  “This is a vile slander,” Alexander said, crumpling a newspaper in a fury.

  We’d joined the Burrs on a visit to the new African Free School that my husband and his fellow members of the Manumission Society had brought into being to educate black children. And on the walk back, Alexander had purchased a gazette from a passing newsboy and become incensed by what he read.


  “But no one of sense believes the rumor, my friend,” Burr said in an attempt to pacify him.

  In the hopes that our countrymen had finally suffered enough that they were ready to see the wisdom in forming a true government, my husband had gone to Philadelphia with James Madison in May to serve as delegate for a federal convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. What Alexander and Jemmy wanted, I knew, was more than to revise them. They wanted to draw up a new constitution altogether that would provide for a stronger central government. But after only two months, my husband had returned, more frustrated than before, complaining it was a waste of time and that he and Jemmy were thwarted at every turn.

  And now this newspaper article accusing him of conspiring to summon the Duke of York from England to start a new American monarchy.

  It was ridiculous. Burr was right that no one of any sense believed Alexander was trying to bring an English king over us again. But I already knew how much damage people with no sense could cause. And so did my husband.

  “Ladies,” Hamilton said abruptly to Theodosia and me. “Please excuse me. Burr, will you see my wife safely home?”

  “Where the devil are you going?” Burr asked before I could.

  “To find out who started this rumor,” Hamilton grumbled, waving the crumpled newspaper as he strode away on the cobblestone street.

  “Hamilton,” Burr called after my hot-tempered husband to no avail.

  “Will you go with him?” I asked, exasperated, but hoping that Burr’s measured approach to life would keep Alexander from trouble.

  When Burr hesitated, Theodosia reassured him, “Oh, go, for goodness’ sake. Betsy and I can find our way without a guardian.”

  Burr chuckled, kissed his wife’s cheek, then rushed after my husband.

  Watching them go, Theodosia sighed. “With rumors like that in the papers . . . sometimes I fear people are looking to start a civil war.”

  “I fear it, too,” I replied. With Shay’s rebellion, there already was a civil war in Massachusetts. It was spreading to other states. And it could happen here, too, especially with Congress in session in the city.

  “Don’t worry,” Theodosia said. “Burr will look out for your husband. He has a very good nose for the prevailing winds.” It’s painful now to recall how reassured those words had made me feel, but they truly did, especially when she looped her arm through mine and said, “And in the meantime, we’ll look out for each other.”

  That night, having slammed back into the house and awakened our sleeping children, Alexander was only mildly apologetic.

  “And did you hunt down the source of this rumor?” I asked after putting the baby back to sleep.

  Alexander surprised me by saying, “I did. And it was a nobody. Just another indebted drunkard—a ne’er-do-well named James Reynolds.”

  There was nothing to be gained in quarreling with a man like that. Instead, Hamilton spent the days that followed directing his anger at our antifederalist governor Clinton, accusing him in a series of essays of poisoning the people’s minds against reform, and against the convention in Philadelphia to which my husband would again return.

  “Are you sure that you should publish this?” I asked, reading over his shoulder. “You’re drawing battle lines. Governor Clinton is a powerful man and you—”

  You’re a revolutionary, I thought, watching my husband scribble some note as if he hadn’t heard me at all. He’d already gone against a king and won. He’d quarreled with George Washington and prevailed. He wouldn’t be stopped by a governor.

  He wouldn’t stop until he’d changed the world. And I wanted to help him do it.

  * * *

  October 1787

  En Route to New York City

  We went to battle in the bowels of a ship.

  Returning from a visit to my parents, we’d taken a cabin on a sloop bound for New York—and this narrow berth, with its single table secured to the wooden planks of the deck and one porthole, would be our war room for the week-long trip. There was just enough space for the children and their bedrolls, the gentle rocking of the single-masted boat lulling them fast to sleep.

  During the day Alexander worked, and I took the little ones above deck to enjoy the passing scenery of towns on the shoreline, green pastures, and blazing red autumn foliage. As I watched the children play and laugh and even bicker, my heart was torn between joy at their innocent hopefulness and sorrow at having learned the terrible and unexpected news that Peggy’s little son, Stephen, had died in his sleep. Her husband had written that she was too indisposed to travel or receive visitors, so I hadn’t had the chance to see her during our visit, and I ached to offer her what comfort I could.

  But by night, beneath the light of two lanterns swinging from the joists above us, I joined Alexander amidst his letters, treatises, newspapers, paper, ink, and quills. “My arms and ammunition,” he quipped.

  “And who are we to fight?”

  “Almost everyone,” he said, ruefully. “The foes of the new Constitution are many.”

  A few weeks earlier, my husband had returned from Philadelphia, where he affixed his signature to a blueprint for an entirely new government. He hated the plan—which he thought a hodgepodge of ideas and bitter compromises, particularly between the northern and southern states on the issue of slavery. But he’d said that “without these compromises, no union could possibly have been formed, though Washington does not think this Constitution will last twenty years.”

  Twenty years. Long enough for my sons to grow into men and get their educations. Long enough for my daughter to fall in love, marry, and have children of her own. Long enough for the new baby growing in my belly to get a good start in life. It had been only ten years since my sister climbed out a window to elope with John Church and that felt like a lifetime ago.

  Twenty years of peace and stability would be enough, I thought. We could fix the rest. We could keep working to end the injustice of slavery and make the new nation live up to the ideals of the revolution. But first we needed a nation.

  And nine states would have to ratify the Constitution before it would become law.

  Alexander had a plan to make that happen. A secret plan.

  “We must defend the Constitution,” he said, shuffling papers. “We must overwhelm the opposition with evidence and arguments. The Constitution is as flawed as some of my clients, but like them, it deserves a fair trial. At least in the court of public opinion.”

  Resting a stack of books in my lap, I helped him clear a space upon which to write. “And how are you going to make that happen?”

  “With a series of essays,” he said, the scratching of his pen competing with the creaking of the boat and the sloshing of the river against the hull. “Anonymous essays. Maybe thirty in all.”

  “Thirty?” I wondered how he’d manage such a thing, given the other demands on his time. “So many?”

  “There will be other writers, of course. Though our identities must remain secret.”

  Not a secret from me, I hoped. “Who will help you?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he replied. “I intend to recruit John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and William Duer.” Jay was an experienced statesman and judge. Morris, a peg-legged bon vivant—the penman of the Constitution. And Duer, a wealthy New York legislator.

  “Not Burr?” I asked.

  Alexander frowned. “Not Burr. He’s not a man to commit himself to paper, even secretly.” I sensed, even then, there was more to it, but my husband was too caught up in his idea for me to interrupt. “The trick will be to coordinate the essays without anyone catching wind of it. How to make our writing similar enough that no outsider can deduce who wrote what, and no single man can be vilified or lionized for it.”

  “Ambitious,” I said. But I didn’t realize how ambitious until we were at home, on solid ground, and I was awakened before dawn by the faint sound of knocking downstairs. Very familiar knocking.

  Three quick raps followed by two
slow ones.

  I sat up in bed to find my husband dressing in the dark. “Is that . . . ?”

  “Jemmy Madison,” my husband said, grinning. “He’s hurried back from Philadelphia to join the project.”

  I was confused because I thought the project was to be by New Yorkers for New Yorkers. “But he’s a Virginian.”

  “Exactly. And we need Virginia to ratify, too,” Hamilton replied, having adjusted the scope of the work by an order of magnitude. But I understood that if he was to build a whole country, he was going to have to persuade a whole country.

  By the time I’d dressed and seen the children down to the kitchen for a bleary-eyed breakfast of porridge under Jenny’s watchful eye, I found the two men in the dining room, a stack of books and papers between them. It was a scene I’d witnessed a hundred times. “Does my husband have you skulking about in subterfuge at strange hours of the day and night again, Mr. Madison?”

  The pale little man smiled. “I owe no small apology for waking you and your servant, Mrs. Hamilton. But I received a message last night—”

  “We think we can deliver four essays a week now, instead of two,” Hamilton interrupted, slapping his hand on the table to punctuate that happy fact before looking squarely at me. “With your help . . .”

  They explained that they desired me to act as a sort of courier to collect the essays from the other men’s wives, then deliver them to confidential intermediaries who would pass them to the publisher in secrecy. What thrill I felt to play a part in such a vast conspiracy!

  But in the end, it was not so vast. Morris begged off. Duer’s first essay was so disappointing my husband didn’t wish for him to write more. And Jay fell terribly ill in early November after I fetched his fifth essay at a tea party with his wife, Sarah.

  That left just two men to write The Federalist.

  Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.

  And most of it would be accomplished at my dining room table.

  Every morning Madison would walk from his boardinghouse on Maiden Lane to take an early breakfast, bouncing my children on his knee as he compared notes with Hamilton over strong coffee to sketch out the new work for the day. Together, they wrote words that became weapons in the fight to create a real union, fired off at a dizzying and stupefying pace to meet their weekly publication deadlines. My husband hunched over a desk scribbling until his shoulders knotted and his lower back throbbed with pain. And many mornings Madison’s small hands literally shook with exhaustion as he tried to revive himself with my coffee after another sleepless night. I’d never before seen men exert themselves to the point of collapse by writing alone. But in those months I witnessed just that. And in every spare moment I could find between housework, prayer, and looking after four unruly children, I read each word they wrote.