If mankind were to agree to no institution of government until every part of it was perfect, society would become a scene of anarchy and the world a desert, my husband wrote.
Echoed by Mr. Madison’s simpler, If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
On and on, working late hours between courtroom trials and congressional committee meetings, and nearly killing themselves doing it, they wrote the most enduring explanation of government ever put to paper before or since.
As winter melted to spring, I witnessed their ideas grow like the child in my womb, day by day, and it made me bolder, as if I, too, were on the verge of becoming.
Which was why, one morning, looking over Hamilton’s cramped shoulder, I ventured to say, “Does that—does that not seem . . .”
My husband turned to eye me, his brow raised. “Yes?”
Fearing I was about to make quite a fool of myself, I bit my lip. “Well, it’s only that what you’ve written sounds quite identifiably like you.”
Hamilton’s brow rose higher. “How?”
It was dramatic. A little dark. And altogether too complicated.
But what I said was, “Well, in the first place, you’ve used a great many more words to express that thought than Mr. Madison would.”
For a moment, his mouth dropped open, as if he took great insult. As if he were about to say something—perhaps something extremely cross. But his mouth snapped shut again. And all at once, he crumpled what he’d been writing into a ball and threw it to the floor.
Crestfallen, I tried to retrieve it. “Oh, no! Alexander, I didn’t mean for—”
“Let it not be said I cannot see through a veil of vanity,” he said, grumbling as he started fresh.
Thereafter, I noticed their writing styles became much more similar, an achievement made easier by the fact that they were both so much in agreement about what remained to be written that it was no longer necessary to plan each morning. Anyway, there was no time to. As twenty-nine essays expanded into eighty-five, they burned through foolscap, parchments, quills, and slate pencils. Often one of them was still writing while the other’s essay was being fit for type at the printer. There were days Hamilton didn’t even have the chance to read over his own work before sending it off to press.
And I myself scarcely had time for childbirth. Two days after celebrating the delivery of a little boy we named James—after my husband’s father and the man at whose side Alexander was now doing battle—my happiness was profoundly disturbed by my six-year-old coming inside from a game of hopscotch with tears of rage streaking his cheeks.
“They’re calling me a quadroon,” Philip cried.
I knew precisely why. Once, it was the question of whether one was Patriot or Tory that divided families, ruined friendships, and made nearly every outing confrontational. Now it was the question of whether one was a federalist or an antifederalist—for or against a strong central government.
Despite our best efforts, the authors of the Federalist essays had become an open secret. And even if the public didn’t know which essays my husband wrote, they knew he was writing them. Which was why Governor Clinton sent his minions to retaliate in the papers, accusing Alexander of being a superficial, conceited, upstart coxcomb. They’d also called him Tom Shit—a reference to his illegitimate birth that implied he was a Creole bastard with Negro blood.
And now, as I tried to comfort my crying firstborn son—a child of such sunny temperament that he almost never cried—it became deeply personal. Hamilton had warned me. He’d warned me when he proposed marriage that our children might one day suffer for the ignoble circumstances of his birth. Just as I’d warned him not to pick a fight with the governor.
But now it was war, and I wanted nothing but the governor’s complete surrender.
To that end, I decided to take the latest essay to the print shop myself instead of waiting for the printer to come to the house to pick it up. I’d never been one to lay abed for long after childbirth, and I was convinced that activity was the only way to relieve cramps. Now, I wanted my little boy to walk the streets of this city with his head held high. And I needed to show him how to do it.
So after nursing my newborn, I left him in Jenny’s capable hands and took Philip for a short but painful stroll to the printer, then up Broadway past the hospital to the nearby apothecary shop. “Mrs. Hamilton,” the apothecary said in a scolding tone, his bushy brows knitted behind the counter. “You’re so soon out of childbed. I’d have come to you if you’d sent a servant or Colonel Hamilton to fetch me.”
“I just needed some fresh air, raspberry leaves for my cramps, and a little lavender oil for my aching head.”
While I kept my curious boy from reaching for one of the many fascinating corked glass jars on the counter, the apothecary rummaged through the drawers and we chatted about the various states that had ratified the Constitution—six by my count, five by his.
“You forgot Massachusetts,” I said, just as the roar of angry voices reached our ears.
We both looked up toward the street to see a horde of angry men marching from the direction of the battery. A mob. I’d once seen a group of men like this armed with feathers and tar. This time, they had sticks and, as I was about to learn, a far more righteous rage. “Grave-robbing bastards!” someone shouted, just before a brick sailed through the glass window, sending a spray of shards at my feet. Instinctively, I grabbed my son and pulled him behind the counter. But from where I crouched, I saw the swarm move right past us on the street.
I could guess their destination.
The hospital. For the Constitution was not the only divisive thing in the newspapers that year. It had been reported that medical students, in need of cadavers to dissect, dug up bodies in the Negro Burial Ground outside the city. No one of prominence had seemed to care until the corpse of a white woman from Trinity Churchyard was also dug up and stolen.
Now the public was in an uproar.
I knew the importance of cadavers to the field of medical science, but I couldn’t help but shudder at the gross indignity of having anyone I loved violated and dissected in such a way.
As we heard the crash of more windows farther down the street, the apothecary rose to wrap a sheltering arm around my shoulder. “I’ll get you and the boy home,” he said, rushing us out the back. Across the way, furious citizens broke the hospital door to splinters and overran the hospital, sending young medical students running in every direction. Over my shoulder, I saw a young doctor climbing from a window. And my son stared as shouting men hauled cauldrons of dismembered body parts out of the hospital, the stench of it recalling the war immediately to my mind.
We saw a bloody foot, a swollen human head in a bottle, and some poor fellow’s pickled genitals hanging from a string before we fled up Broadway, only to come against hundreds more furious men blocking our way. The jostling crowd swept us up like a tidal wave, separating us from the apothecary and nearly tearing Philip’s hand from mine. Breathless and frightened, having quite forgotten about aches and pains, I realized the mob was descending upon the original nearby buildings of the old King’s College—which had been recently renamed the more republican Columbia College.
“Bring out the butchers!” someone in the mob cried, and I knew they were looking for medical students to punish.
“Keep walking,” I whispered to Philip. But my son made of himself a dead weight, pointing with one hand at something I couldn’t see. And then the crowd parted to reveal my husband on the college stairs, pleading with the mob to see reason.
Hamilton was a great orator, and his military voice could just be heard over the fray. “The mayor has already jailed the culprits. Allow the law—”
The mob pushed past him, breaking open the doors to the chapel, the library, and the dorms of the college he’d recently helped reopen.
Then he caught sight of us and dodged the rioters until we were all together, and he tugged us into his arms. “Dear God, Betsy, what the d
evil are you doing here?”
The chaos gave me no time to answer. Save to issue commands as he guided us through streets strewn with debris and damage—stop, wait here, run!—Alexander said no more until we’d made it into the safety of the Burrs’ entry hall. Was that how my husband had led men across the battlefield at Yorktown—fearless and relentless and cunning?
Escorted by Colonel Burr, we finally made it the rest of the way home. Having no concern for our audience, Alexander took me into his arms so tightly that I could barely breathe. “When I saw the two of you, there, amongst the rioters . . .”
“God willing, it’s over now,” I said, returning his embrace. But by morning, the mob had swollen to five thousand—a veritable army. Double the number of men Washington had with him at the Battle of Trenton. Not that it kept Alexander nor John Jay—who’d just recovered enough to start writing Federalist essays again—from trying to reason with the mob. Jay got his skull cracked with a brick for his trouble. Likewise, the Baron von Steuben had been trying to persuade the militia not to fire at the rioters when he was struck by a stone and promptly changed his mind. “Fire! Fire!”
I learned all of this when the baron returned to our house bleeding through a bandage hastily fastened upon him. “Mein Gott. Twenty dead!” the baron roared, almost as angry about that as he seemed to be about the ruined lace of his shirt. My newborn was just as angry in his cradle, crying for the milk only I could give him while the baron’s greyhound licked my baby’s face. “How many more wounded no one can guess. This chaos. This anarchy.”
This was why the Constitution had to be ratified.
An entire generation was growing up in a world without sure principles by which to live in peace. And I couldn’t help but wonder, would my own son, after what he’d seen in the streets, come of age believing that there was no way to solve any problem but with a club or a pistol?
Chapter Eighteen
Summer 1788
Albany
NEW HAMPSHIRE MAKES nine states!” Peggy cried, clapping her hands with glee. With Alexander in the New York Assembly arguing for the adoption of the Constitution, I’d taken the children home to the Pastures to await news. And now Peggy prodded me. “Why aren’t you smiling? You said the Constitution only needed nine states to ratify it.”
“Officially,” I said, swallowing hard against hope, knowing how happy this news would make Alexander, and how devastated he would be if all our efforts came to naught. “But it means nothing without Virginia and New York. If the largest and wealthiest states don’t join this union, there won’t be one.”
Our only hope was Jemmy Madison. If—half dead of exhaustion and a bilious fever—Madison could convince his state to ratify, New York would be forced to follow suit or lose influence. Which was why Hamilton’s strategy in the assembly was to delay, delay, delay and hope we were saved by Virginia.
“In the meantime,” Peggy said, “let’s go shopping.”
Which was how, a few days later, we found ourselves coming home from the dressmaker on Market Street when riders came galloping through in a cloud of dust shouting, “Virginia has ratified! Virginia has ratified!”
Peggy and I ran almost the whole way home where my brothers Johnny and Jeremiah—grown men now—popped the corks on bottles of Papa’s best sparkling wine in the main hall under the chandelier. I worried it was ill luck to celebrate prematurely, but inside, some part of me began to believe. Peggy grabbed a glass and raised it. “To Virginia!”
“To Virginia,” I agreed, laughing, never realizing it would be the last time I ever had reason to celebrate that accursed state.
In anticipation of our own state’s ratification, the celebrations continued in New York City. Bricklayers and wig makers rallied on Broadway with colorful ribbons, banners, and flags. Bakers marched a giant federal loaf of bread down the street. Brewers rolled a massive cask of ale. Sailmakers carried a twenty-foot flag depicting my husband with a laurel leaf and his Constitution. And when New York finally ratified, Hamilton was so celebrated that, as fireworks lit the skyline under a bright moon, the people of Manhattan suggested the city be renamed Hamiltoniana.
At last—the honors and glory my husband craved.
The legacy he’d made for a name he wasn’t deemed fit to carry. The base-born orphan from Nevis who might have toiled in poverty and obscurity if God hadn’t bestowed upon him a giant intellect and ambition to match. And the honors were no more than his due.
He’d done it. He’d vanquished Governor Clinton and all our antifederalist foes. More than that, he’d battled back the forces of ignorance and anarchy with his pen and the power of his ideas. He was, at that time, perhaps more than any other, my conquering hero. Like the son of an ancient god who’d driven that chariot of the sun after all. And when we were finally reunited, I wrapped my arms around his neck and teased, “The people love you. But remember, thou art but mortal.”
It’s what the old Romans whispered to conquering heroes so that they might never fall victim to hubris. And Alexander laughed. “So you did read those books I gave you.”
Not well enough. Because if I’d studied the ancient stories, I’d have known that the same people who could lift a hero and his family out of obscurity could also tear them to pieces.
* * *
March 1789
New York City
We had a new Constitution, a new government, and a new baby.
It was everything for which we’d worked for so long.
And then, to make my happiness complete, my sister returned home from London for what she promised, this time, would be a long visit.
Oh, Angelica. Her dark hair, worn in a chignon beneath her fashionably plumed bonnet, smelled of rosewater. Cinched beneath her bosoms, her muslin gown was perhaps more fitting for the boudoir than the docks of New York. I felt drab and shabby in comparison but couldn’t get enough of looking at her. We embraced again and again as her servants carried her boxes into her new dwelling.
“You should stay with us,” I said again, even though I knew she’d insisted Hamilton rent for her very handsome lodgings nearby, so as not to burden us. As if having my sister at my side could ever be a burden.
“Oh, my sweet, generous Betsy,” Angelica said, kissing my nose, as if she still thought of me as her baby sister. “No doubt you’d give up your bed to make room for me, but where would the servants sleep?”
In London, she was accustomed to a great many servants and a great many rooms. No doubt our narrow little abode with five children underfoot and chickens in the yard would scarcely suit. “I suppose we would have trouble stowing your luggage . . .”
“I brought only eight trunks,” Angelica said, laughing. “How else was I to carry gifts for your cherubs?”
At the prospect of gifts, my children danced around their aunt Angelica excitedly. I was only sorry that their cousins—safely stashed in the best European schools—hadn’t made the journey with their mother. But we consoled ourselves with Angelica’s undivided attention, and already my head was full of plans for her visit. What’s more, my husband seemed to bask in my happiness.
Eyeing the mountain of my sister’s luggage, Alexander teased, “Given how little you’ve carried from Europe, sister, I worry you’ll have nothing to wear.”
Angelica laughed. “Well, I must tell you, brother, that in some parts of Europe, it’s very much the fashion to go out in the state of nature!” This comment made me gasp, which only encouraged her. “Mr. Jefferson told me that when we were in Paris together. He heard it from Mrs. John Adams. Oh, you have no idea the exalted and interesting people I met across the sea, but none could make up for your company. How I’ve missed you both! My dearest beloved sister and the great man she lured into our family.”
Preening at her praise, my husband fiddled with what appeared to be a broken latch on one of her apartment doors and promised to have someone out to repair it in the morning. Then, with regret, he said, “Ladies, I console myself to know you can f
ind ways to amuse yourselves while I’m gone. Alas, I must rush to an appointment . . .”
“So soon?” I asked, not wishing to lose him again to his books and papers. “You’ve worked so hard. Too hard . . .”
“You both work too hard,” Angelica said, grasping my hand in her soft, manicured, bejeweled fingers, as if horrified to find mine rough, dry, and reddened from scrubbing linens, sewing clothes, and keeping house alongside Jenny. “My dear Hamilton, my servants will prepare dinner for all of us. I’m going to take care of you, my darlings. You shall have a holiday when home. I insist that you dine with me tonight.”
“Oh, please, Alexander.” I wanted nothing more than to be around the same table with the two people whose company I loved best in the world.
But my husband sighed with regret. “I’m afraid I’m to dine with some gentlemen at Fraunces Tavern.”
“Invite them here,” Angelica said, and a look of panic flittered over the faces of the servants who’d just emerged, half seasick, from the bowels of an oceangoing ship, and were not even settled into a new home in a new city. I couldn’t think how they might be ready to entertain on a moment’s notice. But that didn’t stop my sister from making the offer.
Nor did it discourage Alexander. “How can I resist my two brunette charmers?” With that, he kissed me, then grabbed his coat and embraced the children, making the older ones promise to behave while he was gone.
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