My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

  And he blamed himself for it. “You didn’t choose him, Papa,” I said, quite firmly. “You only approved him. The choice was mine. A choice I make anew every day. A choice I do not regret, no matter how unpleasant our enemies intend to make it for me.”

  My father, whose hair had gone white and wiry, whose strong arms had withered, and whose health had never been good, suffered from painful gout in his legs. I knew he was suffering now, as he took off his boots, lowered his feet into the water next to mine, and stared at the churning river. “Do you know what you’re facing with that choice?”

  After years in public life, I had some idea. “Yes, Papa. I’m not a child anymore.”

  “You are my child,” he said quietly. “Always.”

  The sentiment set off an ache in my chest, for as a mother myself, I understood the depth of his meaning. I felt it for my own children. No matter how tall Philip grew, I would always see him in my mind’s eye as the laughing little piglet with chubby legs.

  It took Papa a few moments, but when he looked up again, he said, “Do you recall that when you, Angelica, and Peggy were small, toddling about in pink ribbons, I went to London for a year on business?”

  “I recall something of it,” I said, for, at five years old, dolls from England seemed almost as marvelous as welcoming home the tall and fierce warrior of a red-coated father I scarcely knew.

  “While I was gone,” my father continued, “I asked my commander—Colonel Bradstreet—to watch over my family. At my request, he helped your mother build our new mansion here. And I returned home to find all of you living together here with Colonel Bradstreet . . . with whom your mother had formed an uncommon friendship in my absence.”

  An uncommon friendship.

  I remembered. Colonel Bradstreet was so fond of Mama that when he died, he left property to her. And all my life, I’d thought nothing of it until this excruciating moment. In shock, I whispered, “Surely you’re not intimating—”

  “I am intimating nothing but that the friendship was a subject of speculation.”

  My father’s jaw hitched and my belly roiled at the thought that he might have known the pain of adultery. Yet, everything I knew of my parents forced my mind to rebel. “Mama would never!”

  With more calmness than he perhaps felt, Papa puffed at his pipe. “There was gossip.”

  That I did not remember. That I’d never known. I was too young to have realized it. And I wondered if Angelica, who was older, had been more aware and if it accounted for her sometimes troubled relationship with our mother. “Surely Mama denied any impropriety.”

  A small, bittersweet smile tugged at his lips. “I did not ask her.”

  Indignation positively burned in my breast. “Why ever not?”

  Papa’s fingers drummed lightly upon his knee, as if he were counting. “If she were guilty, she might confess. And how should a gentleman respond? If I ran Bradstreet through with my sword, it would have gained me nothing but a momentary pang of satisfaction and a dead friend. It would not forestall the gossip of cuckoldry, nor the destruction of your mother’s fine name. It would have followed you, my dear children, and made you unhappy all your lives.”

  As the gossip about Hamilton would now follow my children all their lives.

  To his litany of horrific consequences, my father added, “And if your mama was innocent . . . as she surely was . . . then to insult her with an accusation would make me the vilest of knaves. I should consider myself condemned to hell-fires if I treated your mother with such rank suspicion—a woman who entrusted herself to me, risked her very life to bring my children into the world. A woman who defended my lands, served as wise steward over my household, and blessed my life with her wisdom, friendship, affection, and love. Such ingratitude would damn me in the eyes of myself and my god.”

  So, he would not ask, I thought. He would never ask. My father, like the mathematician he was, had added it all up—the sums of love and happiness and disappointments in a marriage—and come to the conclusion that it didn’t matter. Just as Maria Reynolds did not matter, regardless of what the papers said. Regardless of what anyone said.

  “What I decided to do,” Papa explained, “was to name my first son, born after there could be any question of his parentage, John Bradstreet Schuyler.”

  In defiance, I realized. My father had mustered the strength to defend his marriage with a thumb in the eye of anyone who would question it. Just as I would have to do now. And he was asking me if I had the stomach for it.

  “In the matter of Hamilton,” Papa concluded, “your family’s view of this unfortunate episode will be guided by your calculation, Elizabeth. And only yours.”

  I’d always admired his ability to swallow bitter injustices for the greater good. But could I follow his example? Whatever I’d told myself in coming here, I knew the real reason Hamilton had sent me to my father.

  Eliza, if you stand beside me the public will eviscerate you.

  Stand by him or renounce him. Hamilton wanted me to have that choice. But I’d already made it. And taking a deep breath, I determined to begin defending my own marriage right here in this moment. “Then forgive him, Papa. As I have done. Truly. The Bible tells us no man is without sin. No man is righteous, not even one.”

  My father nodded. Then not another word was said about it. My family never behaved, in word or deed, with anything but devoted affection to my husband. And because of it—and because I was my father’s daughter—I found within myself the strength to face the storm.

  Chapter Thirty

  Art thou a wife? See him, whom thou has chosen for the partner of this life, lolling in the lap of a harlot!

  —THE AURORA, A JEFFERSONIAN NEWSPAPER

  August 1797

  New York City

  HOW COULD HE confess in such humiliating detail?” Angelica had come to my house, clutching my husband’s pamphlet with white knuckles, demanding we go out and buy up all the copies. “Fifty of the best pens in America could not have done more to put him in infamy!”

  “You know why he did it,” I said, not wishing to go over it even once more. Ever since I’d confronted Monroe, I’d understood with a cutting clarity that Alexander would be forced to prove the affair to clear his name of worse charges. And, like a papist penitent, he’d done just that, donning a veritable hair shirt of irrefutable evidence and frank revelations, each more torturous than the next. My only regret was in refusing my husband’s offer to review his confession before he’d published it. It’d been the one time I’d had no interest in bearing witness to the inner workings of his mind, when I’d been too heartsick to persuade him to moderate his tone.

  And the result? The Reynolds Pamphlet ran more than ninety pages, cataloging every possible aspect of the affair—as if he thought he could drown his opponents in words and wash himself clean.

  “Hamilton’s pamphlet reads like one of Peggy’s tawdry novels.” Angelica groaned, as if she herself were the wronged wife instead of me. “Why, the letters his harlot sent him . . . children spell better! What could he have seen in her?”

  His mother, I thought. It always came back to her. But I dared not say it, and I dared not fall back into the trap of dissecting the affair.

  “Wine?” I asked instead, taking a bottle from an exquisite silver cooler. It was unlike me to drink in the middle of the day, but I took comfort where I could. Not only in the chilled wine against the August heat, but also in that the cooler was a gift from George Washington that had recently come with a note I treasured.

  A token of my sincere regard and friendship. I pray you to present my best wishes, in which Mrs. Washington joins me, to Mrs. Hamilton and that you would be persuaded with every sentiment of the highest regard, I remain your sincere friend.

  If the Washingtons stood with us in solidarity, how could I waver?

  My sister took the proffered glass of wine and gulped it. “One word from you and Hamilton is ruined forever. I hope he knows it.”

  Sh
e’d been his defender at first, but since reading his confession, she’d become mine. And I suppose that I needed one when the newspapers’ poisoned ink against him turned on me, too. I’d never been singled out for such public opprobrium before. Never bade to loathe the man I loved or be considered complicit in his sins. The insults from jeering Republicans didn’t wound me overmuch; I dismissed the lot of them as a knot of conspiring, godless scoundrels. Like my husband, I was even coming to take some perverse pride in being the object of their rancor and venom.

  But the cruelty of our fellow Federalist friends did cut me.

  It was confided to me that our new president’s lady, Abigail Adams, crowed to her friends that she’d always known my husband to be a lascivious debauchee, in whose wicked eyes she saw the very devil. As if I should’ve seen it, too, and made a better choice in husband. Society ladies I’d entertained on countless occasions crossed the street to avoid brushing skirts with me, lest scandal be contagious. For I was a wife who’d failed to inspire fidelity. And yet, my fidelity to him was now also to be counted against my virtue.

  I could neither leave my husband nor love him without offending somebody. As the wronged wife, there was nothing whatsoever I could now do that might be counted appropriate, except, perhaps, to lay down and die of shame.

  And I was not about to give anyone that satisfaction.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come back to me,” Hamilton admitted that night, rocking his infant son against his shoulder, and eyeing the two empty wine bottles on our table with a furrowed brow. “Unless . . .”

  “Unless?” I asked, covering a hiccup.

  “Unless you’ve returned to hire a divorce attorney.” His eyes crinkled at the corners, as if he’d said it in dark jest, but there was an edge of fear to it. He watched me carefully for an answer even as he continued, “As it happens, I’m acquainted with the best in the city if you should need a recommendation.”

  Though I was a little tipsy and unsteady on my feet, I stood to embrace him. “I’m with you, Alexander.” And I was. For even though the world didn’t wish for us to put our troubles behind us, we’d done it. We’d survived.

  And we’d become stronger for it.

  Alexander swallowed, then, with our little William between us, pressed his forehead to mine. “You are infinitely dear to me, Eliza. And I am more in debt to you than I can ever pay. Please believe that I know you deserve everything from me. And my future life will be devoted to your happiness. I only wish I could stay . . .”

  He was obliged to argue a federal case in Connecticut—one of the many cases he took on to make a fine future for our children and build the house he promised. Still, he worried, because our oldest boy, Philip, had taken ill on the boat as we’d sailed back from Albany.

  A summer cold, we thought. Nothing serious. But days after my husband went off to Connecticut, as Philip tossed and turned feverish in his bed, the physician pronounced the dread verdict. Typhus. Typhus could leave our boy deaf or addled. Or it could kill him.

  “Mrs. Hamilton, you must prepare for the worst,” the doctor said, his coat thrown over the chair by the bed where my son burned with fever. “Your husband must be sent for.”

  “Send a courier by express,” I whispered. Then I sent the rest of the children and my servants away, lest the illness spread. Angelica insisted on staying with me, so it was me, my sister, and the doctor left to care for Philip as he slipped into a state of delirium, his pulse fading by the moment. I took Philip’s face in my hands and told him a truth that mothers ought never utter—that he would always be my firstborn and first in my heart.

  Because Philip was too weak to move on his own, the three of us plunged him into a hot bath of Peruvian bark and rum. When he roused, I spooned wine whey into his mouth while his aunt Angelica covered him in dry blankets. But the nightmare continued as we waited for my husband’s return, listening with anxiety for every chime of the clock.

  At length, my sister said, “Eliza, let me sit with him while he sleeps. You should rest so his mother can be with him when he awakens.”

  I started to my room, stumbling away in a delirium of my own. Don’t take him, God, I prayed that night, and again the next morning. Not Philip, who’d brought joy to us since the day he was born. Not the boy who’d been my companion during those lonely early years when his father was seldom home.

  Not my Philip. The best of me and Alexander combined. Our best and brightest hope.

  I’d just finished uttering this morning prayer when boots thundered up the stairs, the door shaking at the noise of it. “Eliza!” I found Alexander in the hall, his hair plastered to his head in sweaty ringlets, his legs spattered in mud, eyes wild. “Is he—”

  “Awake,” Angelica said from the doorway. “And it’s no wonder with all the racket.”

  We rushed into our son’s room to find him revived, sensible as to where he was and who we were, and we knelt beside his bed and thanked God for his deliverance. Later, while Alexander cooled his forehead with a cloth, I thought nothing else matters but this.

  Let the newspapers say what they would. Let every woman in the country giggle behind their hands and whisper behind my back. Our family mattered more. Our family meant everything. And so long as we were together, I could bear anything.

  * * *

  Hamilton is fallen for the present, but even if he fornicates with every female in New York and Philadelphia, he will rise again.

  —DAVID COBB TO HENRY KNOX

  Winter 1797

  New York City

  “We’ll never see her again, will we?” my daughter rasped as we watched the snow-covered carriage roll away from the front of our house, a tearful Fanny pressing her hand to the frosted window in farewell.

  “Of course, we will,” I said, fighting back my own tears for my daughter’s sake. Fanny may not have been her sister by blood, but Ana had never known another. And the loss seemed to break her. She alternated between inconsolable sobs and dazed stupors, and it was all I could do to comfort her about something that broke a piece of me, too.

  Because Fanny’s relations no longer saw fit to let her stay with us. Her married older sister wanted to take Fanny into her household. A respectable household, I was brusquely informed. Thus, we were forced to surrender the girl we’d loved as our own since the age of two.

  We’d packed twelve-year-old Fanny’s trunks with new petticoats and pearled combs and every sort of frippery a girl should need. Alexander had vowed to the girl that she was always welcome back. We were all heartbroken at the loss.

  And to comfort my twelve-year-old daughter, I said, “It’s no different than when your aunt Angelica went to live in London for a while. Fanny will come back one day and you’ll have each other’s company again.”

  But Ana couldn’t be comforted. She’d always been a sensitive child, but lively and clever—eager to show off her accomplishments in dancing, music, and French. Now she withdrew to her room, complaining of illness. And I wondered if the danger to my children was never to end. The physicians could find nothing whatsoever wrong with her, but she would eat next to nothing but little bits of bread. Sometimes even then, she left the crumbs upon her windowsill for the birds.

  Like her father, she took loss hard. And my heart ached for her. I knew what it was to love a sister, how tight that bond could be. How difficult it was to understand one’s place in the world without it.

  In Ana’s tenderness—the way only feeding these little birds could lift her spirits—I thought I recognized in her my own calling. Thus, one Sunday morning, I said, “Get dressed for church services, darling. Afterward, we’re going to help some children as needy as our dear Fanny once was . . .”

  Thereupon we threw ourselves into a cause to which I was happy to lend my name—tainted though it was. The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, founded by the devout Scotswoman Widow Graham, supported at least a hundred destitute widows in the city. Together with Ana, I spent afternoons assembl
ing baskets of food and clothing for the needy in the hopes of saving them from the poorhouse.

  I’d always felt best when I was busy. Besides, the unfortunate situations of these widowed women reminded me that my troubles were comparatively few. How fortunate I was. How the Lord had made me rich in every way that mattered. I imagined that it made the same impression on Ana because, by summer, she was playing her piano again for our old friend James McHenry, the secretary of war. He came to visit in a show of loyalty and support, reciting poetry and recalling old war stories well into the evening.

  “To Lafayette,” McHenry said, raising his glass. “The luckiest Frog alive.”

  “To Lafayette,” we said, because the marquis was lucky, alive, and—after five years of imprisonment—free. Napoleon Bonaparte saw to Lafayette’s release from prison, the only thing of merit, by my estimation, that tyrant ever did. And when we learned of Lafayette’s release, Alexander wrote:

  My friendship for you will survive all revolutions and all vicissitudes. The only thing in which our parties agree is to love you.

  After we drank, McHenry sat back and put his knife on the edge of his plate. “This veal is delicious, Mrs. Hamilton—melts in the mouth like butter, it does. You serve as fine a meal as I remember from the old days.”

  “You must be forgetting that dreadful wartime tripe stew . . .”

  Mac patted a somewhat rounder belly than he’d had in those far-off days in winter quarters. “I was so hungry during the war, you could’ve baked me a sawdust cake and I’d have savored it. But this meal is exquisite. Have you a chef?”

  “Oh, no,” I replied. “We’ve an Irish girl who scrubs the pots, but I do the cooking.”