My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

  A bundle of letters and a dark braid of hair . . .

  * * *

  MY HANDS SHOOK as I unfolded the pages, finding neither the scent of my sister’s perfume nor the feminine scrawl of her hand. But instead, the shock of a firm, masculine signature.

  John Laurens.

  A man I’d never met, whose death dealt to Alexander his worst wound of the war. Here were the letters between them. Not only the ones Laurens wrote, but also copies of what my husband wrote to Laurens as well. That both sides of the correspondence were so carefully preserved spoke volumes of its importance to my husband.

  And now I read them, with near incredulity.

  Cold in my professions, warm in my friendships, I wish, my dear Laurens, it might be in my power, by action rather than words to convince you that I love you.

  It was, in those days, the style for men to speak of love to one another. But it was not a style Alexander embraced in his letters. Not to any man I knew save, perhaps, Lafayette.

  And yet, these were different. Ardent. Complete with a lewd suggestion that John Laurens had intimate knowledge of Alexander’s body. Letters that indicated a liaison between Washington’s young officers for which they might both have been shot.

  And—quite beyond the capacity to be scandalized by anything now—I nearly laughed at my mind’s sudden opening to things that ought to have been perfectly obvious before.

  My husband had loved this man.

  Clutching a lock of dark hair that was not, after all, my sister’s, I remembered Alexander’s unnatural grief for Laurens. My husband’s attachment to the baron, whose handsome young male companions Theodosia Burr had once identified as sodomites. Perhaps my husband had been one of them, adopting the vice because it was forbidden.

  Forbidden, like another man’s wife.

  Forbidden, like his wife’s sister.

  If Hamilton could commit those sins, why not this one? Why not sate his lust with another soldier while the winter was cold and the war was harsh?

  Then, in a letter Alexander had written only months before we met, I found this:

  Such a wife as I want must be young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape) sensible (a little learning will do), well bred, chaste and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness). But as to fortune, the larger stock of that the better as money is an essential ingredient to happiness in this world.

  Well, then.

  Even sinners needed money, didn’t they?

  And hadn’t he found just what he wanted in me? I met his cold list of qualifications precisely. It hollowed out my heart to know it. Made of my soul a barren land. Surrounded by the detritus of my husband’s life, I didn’t think there were any new ways in which his letters could hurt me.

  But then they did.

  Next fall completes my doom, Hamilton wrote to Laurens before our wedding.

  I give up my liberty to Miss Schuyler. She is a good-hearted girl who I am sure will never play the termagant; though not a genius she has good sense enough to be agreeable, and though not a beauty, she has fine black eyes.

  A good-hearted girl. Not a genius. Not a beauty.

  Not enough . . .

  He wrote these things to John Laurens while whispering against my lips that I had bewitched him. While writing me sonnets. While buying me wedding gifts with John Laurens’s money . . .

  In spite of Schuyler’s black eyes, I have still a part for the public and another for you; so your impatience to have me married is misplaced; a strange cure by the way, as if after matrimony I was to be less devoted than I am now.

  The page slipped from my hand.

  Our courtship had merely been another scheme.

  Lies, lies, schemes and lies!

  When we danced together at that first winter’s ball in Morristown, I’d been wary of Hamilton because he reminded me of the watery Nix of Dutch legend, luring maidens to dangerous depths. And now, at long last, I was drowning. Wrenching my wedding ring off my finger, I threw it into the trunk with the rest of Alexander’s deceit, thinking to send all of it to the bottom of the river.

  Because, my God, this was to lose him again. A second kind of widowhood. One that obliterated the first. For I could have no hope of meeting with Alexander in heaven now; he was more likely to be found in hell. And I hoped . . . I hoped he burned there.

  For he never loved me. He was never mine. He made me vows before an altar and played the part, to the last. But Alexander Hamilton was as false a villain as his enemies claimed he was. He had cheated me of my whole life and got away with it.

  Cheated. That was how I felt, surveying all that remained of my husband’s legacy.

  What was his legacy? Not the eternal bonds of love, not the earthly but enduring stone of monuments. Only paper. A worthless Constitution that the Republicans shredded with each successive administration. A few books filled with words he probably never meant in earnest. Just crates and crates of paper.

  And I wanted to set fire to it all.

  * * *

  I AWAKENED TO the whisper of papers falling like dead leaves upon a forest floor. And as I blinked against the bleary haze of shadow and cracks of sunlight, I couldn’t fathom where I was.

  The attic. I’d somehow fallen asleep there, in the heat, exhausted by an agony of the soul. And now I saw my son’s bare feet upon the wood planks, loose pages strewn by his toes. For one absurd moment in the delirium, I thought to scold William, as I’d done when he was a child, for walking about like a barefooted street urchin instead of a young gentleman.

  But then I saw the lace garter clutched in his hand.

  William was reading my sister’s letters, and I didn’t think the burning flush upon his cheek was exertion or summer heat. “I came up because I worried for you—but I didn’t want to wake you when I found you asleep. You haven’t slept much lately.”

  My heart jolted, and I shoved myself up. It was all I could do to resist pulling the paper and lace from his hands, but in doing so, I’d only expose myself. Expose everything. He couldn’t possibly attach any meaning to that garter, which had slipped off my sister’s thigh long before he was born, but oh, dear Lord, how much had he read?

  “I’m sorry to have worried you,” I managed, struggling for breath in the now hellish heat of the attic. Perspiration pooled at my nape, and my black frock clung to my back.

  William quietly nodded, but his expression was bleak and his eyes were a storm. “My father wrote these letters to Aunt Angelica?”

  Those were the words he spoke, but not what he truly meant to ask.

  And I could almost see it. Almost see William standing at the precipice of a suspicion that would shatter everything he believed about his father, and about himself. And what mother—especially one clinging to that same edge by her fingertips—could allow her child to fall?

  Forcing a smile, I said, “Oh, yes. Your father and Aunt Angelica were very good friends. It’s such a comfort to me to read their letters and remember it.”

  My son—the one born while his father confessed adultery to the world—swallowed hard. He scrutinized my face, and then his gaze fell to my hand. “You’re not wearing your ring.”

  As my mind raced, I thought I might be sick. Burr once said I wasn’t an actress of any talent. It was my sister who could bury her misery and heartbreak beneath pleasantries and a fan of playing cards in her hand. But now I called upon whatever powers of deception I’d ever learned from her to say, “The heat has swollen my fingers.” I kissed my boy’s cheek. “Or perhaps I’ve been eating too much. Speaking of, shall we go down and fix some breakfast?”

  “You haven’t eaten anything,” William said. “Not more than a nibble for days.”

  What a Hamilton he was—a dogged interrogator assembling proofs and challenging my testimony. But I determined then and there that he’d never find me out.

  “Well, that explains why I’m so famished,” I said, feigning a lightness of spirit I didn’t feel, and might
never feel again. “And thirsty. Will you fetch me a glass of switchel?”

  He nodded, slowly relinquishing to me the letters and his aunt’s garter. And I believed he was tricked by the mask I presented. I realized later that I was wrong.

  But I didn’t know that then, I only knew it was a mask I was determined to wear from that day forth. Because I couldn’t deprive my children of their cherished memories of their father. Not after I’d nursed them all on a reverence for Alexander that neared worship.

  I’d hoped that lionizing their father would compensate my children for the absence of his guidance, protection, and comfort. That it would somehow make up for the suffering he’d exposed them to. For the debts he’d left. And for the scandal he’d saddled us all with.

  Was it comedy or tragedy that after all my husband had done to defend his name, there was not a corner of the country where Hamilton did not conjure up salacious gossip of harlots and infidelity? No place the name Hamilton did not rouse animosity amongst those who held political power. My sons had, each of them, felt compelled to become soldiers to prove themselves loyal, useful, and worthy of the country they’d been bequeathed. And given those circumstances, no mother who loved her children could ever wish to infect them with the contagion of doubt that now malingered inside my breast about what kind of man their father had been.

  They knew him as the mythic hero who’d driven a carriage of the sun across the sky; they didn’t need to know he’d crashed it into my world, leaving me in fiery ruin.

  So there was no one with whom I could share my bitter cup of poison. I would simply have to swallow the injustice down and lie about the taste until it killed me.

  Or until the shame of it burned me alive.

  * * *

  I shall never forget the destructive majesty of the flames.

  —HARRY SMITH ON THE BURNING OF WASHINGTON

  The nation was on fire, and part of me wanted to watch it burn. To bear witness to the end just as I’d borne witness to its beginnings. Everything to which I had devoted my life, in flames . . .

  In our capital, British soldiers had put a torch to the naval yard, the congressional library, and burned the President’s Mansion right down to Dolley Madison’s bright red curtains. Our president was a fugitive in his own country, having been forced to flee his supper—his wife at least prescient enough to steal away with famous portraits and national treasures before it all went up in smoke.

  “These blundering Republicans have led our country defenseless and naked into this lake of blood!” Alex shouted, thumping one fist on the window frame while his other hand gripped the sword swaying at his hip, and I was pained by how much like his father he looked in uniform.

  My soldier sons had stopped at the Grange on their way to take up defense of New York Harbor, two of them seated by the open windows in the parlor. All of us sweltering in the heat, as if the flames engulfing Washington City reached us here, too, even where I sat with my embroidery upon one of the old, faded chairs.

  “If President Madison loses this war, we lose the country,” James said.

  And I bit back a bitter laugh.

  Hamilton had warned that the country needed a standing army and had been vilified for it. Even by Madison. Now the fate of the nation was left largely to a gutted navy and militias who had, under the direction of Secretary Monroe, already run from the fight.

  “So they’ve finally done it,” I said, startling my sons with my venomous tone as I stabbed my needle into the cloth. “The Republicans have finally wrecked it all.”

  The Federal City that Hamilton had negotiated to bring into existence was now burned to the ground. It was quite possibly the end. The end of the Republic. The end of our American experiment. The end of the United States of America.

  What had been the point of any of it, I wondered.

  The Revolution. The Federalist. The Constitution. The Farewell Address. The bank charters. The legal precedents . . . all Hamilton’s accomplishments worthless and dismantled and soon to be forgotten. Perhaps I should, with diabolical glee, burn his papers to save the King of England the trouble!

  Except those weren’t only Alexander Hamilton’s accomplishments. Other people had sacrificed to see those things brought about. They were our accomplishments, too.

  Perhaps alarmed at the bleakness of my words, Alex folded his arms over his uniformed chest—a uniform his father had designed with my help—and said, “The war isn’t over yet, Mother.”

  But it is for me, I thought. Because as everything turned to ashes in my mouth, I was too tired to fight anymore. Tired of fighting Jefferson and Burr and Monroe, fighting the Republicans and the Federalists, fighting grief and loneliness and bitterness and the British besides.

  Fortunately, a new generation took up the call in defense of their country.

  While my old friend Mac lay paralyzed upon a sickbed from which he would never again rise, the soldiers at his Fort McHenry fended off a stunning bombardment of rockets and mortar shells in Baltimore Harbor, giving the British just enough time to reconsider whether subduing America was really worth the fight.

  And so, the three-year-long War of 1812 ended in a stalemate that allowed Republicans to pretend to have achieved something other than bankrupting the nation and destroying the Federalist Party.

  Though perhaps it could be more properly said that my husband’s Federalist Party killed itself as ingloriously as its founder had. My husband had thrown away his life, whether he’d intended to or not. A question that kept me up many nights. And his party dashed itself to pieces with a failed and potentially treasonous attempt at secession in the midst of a war.

  If they break this Union, they will break my heart, Alexander had said upon his deathbed.

  But I couldn’t seem to care, because when he broke our union, he’d broken my heart, too. He’d promised that he was mine forever, that he’d never leave me alone or desperate. But then he’d rowed across the Hudson River at dawn to meet an empty vessel of a man who wasn’t worth his spit, let alone his life. He’d gone knowing he might never return. He’d planned it. And he’d kept it from me. How could I ever forgive him?

  All that mattered now was that my sons had survived the ordeal of their own honorable battles in the War of 1812. And so did the country, though I might be excused, if, in the ten years that followed, I scarcely recognized the nation as my own.

  We were all Republicans now. Like it or not.

  No one disagreed or dared to. Our new Virginian president, James Monroe—a recent convert to the Hamiltonian idea that we needed a strong regular army even in peacetime—declared it the Era of Good Feelings.

  He’d actually run unopposed for the presidency, for there were no more political parties and we were not to have partisanship in the nation. We were to live in a perpetual state of patriotic oneness.

  It was, after all, a decade of deceit.

  Republicans pretended there was nothing whatsoever hypocritical about their newfound embrace of a national bank and federal institutions. Never mind that they’d destroyed my family for championing those very things.

  A retired Thomas Jefferson was now the so-called Sage of Monticello, the prophet of democracy, while to hear people tell it, George Washington had been a mere general in the cause . . .

  . . . and Alexander Hamilton had never existed at all.

  A whole generation of Americans came of age without hearing my husband’s name, unless it was in diminishment or a curse. And I could scarcely blame them. Hamilton was safely dead and forgotten. We survivors of the founding of the country all let him be forgotten.

  Even me.

  Chapter Forty-One

  September 1824

  New York City

  MAMA, WE HAVE a visitor!” Lysbet whispered loudly from outside my office door at the orphanage. I peered up from the account books I kept as the society’s First Directress, my hand cramped around a quill after hours of recording and resolving the entries.

  At nearly twe
nty-five, Lysbet had declared herself a spinster, quite contentedly on the shelf, which was why she often assisted my work at the orphanage’s Bank Street headquarters, where there were now beds for two hundred of the city’s neediest children.

  Lysbet reminded me of myself when I was about her age, convinced that I, too, would be a spinster. But more than me, she still resembled a more subtle Angelica, except for her unadorned hair and the spectacles she wore upon her nose whenever it was buried in a book—which was often. Lysbet was a serious and sensible young woman, without girlish caprice, so I couldn’t fathom her excitement as she hovered in the doorway, positively vibrating with giddiness.

  “What visitor?” I asked, not remembering any appointments.

  “See for yourself,” Lysbet said, stepping aside to reveal two distinguished-looking gentlemen. One, a middle-aged Frenchman.

  The other, the last living general of the revolutionary war . . .

  I rushed to my feet, and the familiar sight of him filled my eyes with tears.

  Though I’d never seen the Marquis de Lafayette out of uniform before, he was instantly recognizable to me as a hero of a bygone age. And as my friend. Stouter than I remembered, and bent with age and whatever torments he’d suffered all those years he was held in a dungeon during the French Revolution, but still the slope of that forehead and that patrician nose were unmistakable.

  “Madame Hamilton,” Lafayette said, making a formal bow with cane and top hat in hand.

  “General Lafayette,” I whispered, rounding the desk. And that’s when I realized the taller man at his side was his son. “Georges?”

  Georges smiled and stepped forward swiftly to kiss my cheeks. “How it fills my heart to see you again. I’ve never forgotten what you did for me all those years ago, when I was in hiding.” He ducked his chin, as if he couldn’t say more without being unmanned.

  On instinct, my hands went to his cheeks as if he were still a boy. But in truth, his hair was shot through with silver, and I couldn’t help but think that my Philip would’ve been about his age now, if he’d lived.