And what if they were innocent?
I slammed the account book shut and put it back into the trunk as the notion sent a trickle of sweat down my spine. I remembered my father once saying how vile a knave he would’ve considered himself if he were to have accused my mother, and been wrong. It was entirely possible that Angelica’s last words were only confused mutterings mixed with her determination in hiding her illness from me. Not an affair. Entirely possible that my sister kept tokens of a beloved brother-in-law, just as I’d kept tokens of beloved friends. What if I’d allowed my own heart to blacken against a loving sister and an innocent husband who had already been so unfairly slandered by others . . .
I’d forgive you anything, so long as you loved me, Hamilton had once said to me.
I did love him. For all the good it had done me. Maybe I’d even loved him enough to forgive the unforgivable. Because my sister was right to say that love was a thing beyond reason . . . even if it were a crime.
Before we met, Hamilton loved a man named John Laurens. But that was not the crime with which I charged him. Instead, I asked, Did Hamilton love me?
In the heat of our courtship, when I suggested eloping, Hamilton claimed to worry he’d be thought a self-seeking, fortune-hunting seducer, angling for advantage. Was that what he really was, in the end?
I remembered—with a start—that the girl I was then had decided to love him, even if he were all those things. And that it was Hamilton who insisted it must all be done right. Hamilton who risked losing the fortune he told John Laurens he was after. The fortune I represented, if that was his aim . . .
I pulled from the trunk the bundle of letters more yellowed and faded with age than the first time I had read them more than ten years earlier. Touching that dark lock of hair belonging to the South Carolinian gentleman who’d haunted my life seemed to unlatch my sanity a bit. Or perhaps it was merely the heat rising to the attic and addling my senses. Whatever the cause, the next words, I spoke aloud. “Well, Mr. Hamilton, your friend Lafayette has offered you a defense. Let us see what you have to say for yourself.”
Straightening my spine and taking a deep bracing breath, I unfolded the pages. I’d committed the painful words to memory but was determined to give them a just reading.
Next fall completes my doom. 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—is rather handsome and has every other requisite of the exterior to make a lover happy.
That was as far as my heart had been able to see through my tears when I first read this letter. But now I noticed the next line.
And believe me, I am a lover in earnest.
I noticed the date on this letter and the ones before it, too. How curious that Hamilton should’ve waited four months to tell his friend that he was to marry. As if jilting a sweetheart. One didn’t, after all, praise a new lover to the one being replaced. One deprecated, made light of the new infatuation. And Laurens begged my husband not to withdraw from him the consolation of his letters. Perhaps he understood it was an ending.
How to balance this against all the letters Hamilton sent me? Since I didn’t have a scale, I read them again. All of them. Even the one I tore to bits, ten years before, in rage and anger and grief. I’d ripped apart the sonnet he wrote me in Morristown. Hamilton’s first declaration of love. I’d torn it up but—tellingly, I suppose—I’d kept the pieces.
Now, with a needle and thread, I sewed the fragile words back together. And with each stitch, I felt closer and closer to binding the wound.
My eyes swam with tears as I read the reassembled lines.
Before no mortal ever knew
A love like mine so tender, true
Did you mean it, Alexander? I asked myself as I pierced the final scrap of paper with the needle’s tip. Did you truly love?
Dear God, the indignity of being interrogated after death. Whatever else might come of this trial, I decided that I would never leave my own letters behind to be cross-examined and vivisected. Like the corpses in the bloody Doctors’ Riot so many years ago. Like Alexander’s motives, investigated by several inquests and the whole country. And by me . . .
Which brought me to the third charge. The one I scarcely allowed myself to acknowledge.
Was the duel with Burr a fight for the nation? A vainglorious exercise in futility? Or something worse? One, last, suicidal chariot ride across the sky?
I’d read the witness accounts. I knew both men. I’d even seen Burr recently—two years ago when, by happenstance, he slunk onto a ferry just as I was getting off, and the anxious crowd parted so we were face-to-face, leaving me to stare into those eyes in search of the truth. But seeing only the pathetic emptiness of his soul, I’d left Burr with a withering glare and without answers.
For there was nothing Burr could say to right one single wrong between us.
So maybe I could never know what Alexander intended that day at Weehawken. Because the people we love are not entirely knowable. Even to themselves. But we love them anyway.
The only other choice is to live without love, alone.
What then, is the verdict? the spiders seemed to ask, as if they were weaving a web of memories around me.
Studying the patchwork sonnet now repaired in my lap and my wedding ring beside it, I didn’t know what the verdict was. A judge and jury must deliberate, after all, so I adjourned the court. And the place I deliberated was in my garden, where I gathered the last blooms of purple hyacinths.
But a verdict was finally forced upon me by a calling card.
And by James Monroe.
Chapter Forty-Four
MONROE IS STANDING in my parlor at the Grange, and everything, my whole life it seems, comes full circle.
I should have expected it. Monroe is, after all, not so much a visitor as a closing argument . . .
“I find that the lapse of time brings its softening influences,” Monroe is saying, in that deceptively sweet southern accent. “Now we are both nearing the grave, when past differences can be forgiven and forgotten . . .”
Forgiven and forgotten, he says. And my eyes drift to the dappled light of the entryway, where a bust of my husband has sat for more than twenty years. I’ve put Hamilton on trial. And now, here in the flesh, stands one of my husband’s many enemies and accusers.
“I remember a time, Mrs. Hamilton, when we counted one another as friends,” Monroe continues, wistfully, as if he is remembering. And, of course, I am remembering, too. Remembering with a bittersweet pang how we met, the friendship we shared in war, in peace, over games of backgammon and sight-seeing in Philadelphia with our young families while building a new world.
But I remember also that James Monroe was a man who gave me his word of honor and broke it. A man who hurt me and exposed me to humiliation. He isn’t the only person I’ve cared about who betrayed me. There have been so many others. But he’s the only one I can face now. And so I do. Using my silence as a weapon, forcing him to continue speaking until he finds the words that might reach me. Because as I once said to Monroe, life, like backgammon, is a game of perseverance in which you’re forced to choose the best move, even if it is only a choice between evils.
I face such a choice now.
“Despite our differences, I’ve tried to look after your sons,” Monroe says.
Alex, he means. He named my son a U.S. attorney and a land commissioner—and I ought to be grateful. My sons are grateful. James especially has found a way to ingratiate himself with the Republicans. All James had to do was say that his father’s policies were wrong, and pretend it was the Jeffersonians, instead of the Hamiltonians, who brought this government into being.
Perhaps I could pretend, too. Accepting this lie and making amends would raise the stature of our family. Perhaps I would even be considered a stateswoman for reconciling with Monroe. After all, they say that in t
he end, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson made friends again. And that was after having savaged one another in a presidential election.
So in truth, there is no good reason to hold myself aloof from Monroe anymore. Not when the man has come to my house, hat in hand. And I soften a little, remembering a time when Monroe offered me comfort and compassion when I desperately needed both.
I remember, too, what he said in defense of himself when I blamed him for exposing me to the Reynolds scandal.
It was the scoundrel to whom you pledged your troth who exposed you to this. Not me.
That is the plain truth at the bottom of it. I know this now better than I knew it then.
But when offering comfort, he also said, You are a kind, lovely, and charming woman and you deserve much better than—
I cut him off then, because he was going to say that I deserved better than Alexander Hamilton. Monroe was going to say that I ought to have married someone like him. A gentleman of honor born on the right side of the blanket. Monroe thought he was the better man.
No doubt he thinks it still. That is why he’s standing here now in my parlor offering what might pass, to the uninitiated political novice, as an olive branch. He’s still trying to prove that he’s the better man.
But he’s not offered an apology and he owes one. Not just to me, but to the country.
This is, after all, a man who was president of a nation he never wished to come into being. Monroe had opposed the Constitution. And he helped Jefferson oppose damned near everything else. The debt, the bank, the Jay Treaty, and a standing army that would’ve prevented the nation’s capital from being burned to the ground. In short, James Monroe set himself against nearly every good measure bound to bring about the more perfect union of which he was now considered a founder.
That he was a true hero in the Revolutionary War, I will never deny. That he finally came round to seeing good sense in some matters, I will grant. I can even give grudging admiration for his political genius in wrapping himself in the flag in an attempt to prevent the nation’s disunion.
But James Monroe is not now and never was the better man.
None of them were.
Not Jefferson. Not Adams. Not Burr. Not Madison. Not Monroe.
And for him to speak of our differences as if, instead of taking opposite sides in great moral questions, we’d all merely quarreled about how many lumps of sugar to take in tea! Oh, no.
If Alexander had lived, he’d have never let that stand. He’d have challenged Monroe just as he challenged me, and everyone else, every day of his life. And I am a better person for it.
I live in a better world because of Alexander Hamilton.
And so do we all.
It’s the promise he fulfilled while other men took credit for it. Men like Monroe.
I see all of them in Monroe’s gray eyes. Jefferson. Burr. Adams. Every man who spread lies about us or tried to climb up a bloody ladder of political power, the rungs of which were made from my family’s bones.
Which is why I won’t surrender.
They cannot have my country. They cannot have my flag.
And they cannot have my dear Hamilton.
He was mine, even if he was not only mine. Just like the country and the flag. They don’t belong to anyone else to define as they please without my say. Neither does Hamilton. I will not politely agree to lies about my husband’s legacy and call it history.
A marriage is like a union of states, requiring countless dinner table bargains to hold it together. There may be irreconcilable differences brewing below the surface that can come to open rupture. And there is, in a marriage, as in a nation, a certain amount of storytelling we do to make it understood. Even if those stories we tell to make our marriage, or country, work don’t paint the whole picture, they’re still true. But to leave Alexander Hamilton out of the painting entirely is a lie.
I know the truth. Which is why I realize now—or perhaps I’ve known it all along and been too proud to admit it—that whatever secrets my husband kept were born from fear of losing me.
He loved me.
Doubt thou the stars are fire. Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.
A verdict. At last. And I am, at long last, ready to deliver it.
“Mr. Monroe,” I finally say, my voice clear, cold, and resolved, my spine straight as an Indian arrow. “If you’ve come to tell me you repent—that you’re sorry, very sorry, for the misrepresentations and slanders you circulated against my dear husband—if you’ve come to say this, I understand. But otherwise, no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.”
Monroe blinks, plainly stunned. But I rejoice at the truth of my words.
No lapse of time, no nearness to the grave or distance from it makes any difference.
For I find inside myself love where I’d not expected it to be. Both for a flawed nation and a flawed man. Love. A thing so powerful it can overcome the divide of time and death. It’s still there inside me, like an eternal flame, though the light it casts is different now.
As Monroe strides out of the room without another word, much less an apology, I realize I’ve been asking the wrong questions and examining the wrong evidence. I’ve asked myself who Alexander Hamilton was. I ought to have asked who I am. And now I know.
I am a Schuyler. Semper Fidelis.
Always faithful. Always loyal. And I will never again let my dear Hamilton be forgotten.
Epilogue
March 1837
On the Ohio River
HAMILTON ALWAYS DID have to have the last word. And so, it seems, do I.
For the past decade, I’ve fought to make sure my husband isn’t written out of the history of the country he helped found. I’ve fought and won.
In the end, I filed a lawsuit to retrieve the papers Nathaniel Pendleton stole from me and the Federalists tried to keep from ever seeing the light of day—drafts of President Washington’s Farewell Address in Alexander’s hand that proved his authorship. And seeing those old scribblings—the notes we made together—I was overcome with emotions.
For that address defined what this nation is, has been, and what it shall ever be. It also defined us. Alexander and me. Sitting together, matching wits as partners and patriots and parents seeking to build a better future for our children, and their children, too.
I’m gratified now that I’ve finally held Alexander’s biography in my own hands. The first volume anyway. Written by my son Johnny, the whole work will be long, wordy, thorough, and in multiple parts. Just as it should be. Having shouldered the great weight of it for more than three decades, I feel as though I can finally take a deep breath.
And now, like more and more of my countrymen, I am westward bound.
I may not have a long time remaining, but I resolve to see as much of this country as I can. And set one last matter to right. With both triumph and trepidation, I travel with Lysbet and her husband, Sidney Augustus Holly, the curly haired customs inspector she met at Lafayette’s ball. He’s not a man of great means, but their happiness together is evident, which is why I gave my blessing. And they both wish to accompany me partly out of curiosity and the desire for adventure, and partly because my children feel the need to chaperone me, at eighty years old—as if I haven’t outlived nearly everyone I once knew, including my enemies.
Monroe passed away only a few years after our final reckoning—a heart ailment, they say.
Destitute and alone, Aaron Burr died with a grimace. His death mask is kept as an object of amusement in a museum that brags of the busts, casts, and skulls, human and animal, of some of the most distinguished men that ever lived, along with those of pirates, robbers, and murderers.
I know the category to which Burr belongs.
Yes, I have outlived them all. Even Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the Jacobin and the madman, who saw fit to die on the very same day, and upon the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence at that.
In his eulogy for them, Daniel Webster said that no two men had given a more lasting direction to our country.
Webster was then and remains now, quite simply, wrong.
I give credit to Jefferson for the power of his Declaration. Even I can grant him that. And there’s an argument to be made that we’d never have declared our independence at all without Adams. But otherwise, the two men who most shaped America did not die together on the fiftieth anniversary of that heralded declaration.
One died nearly thirty-three years ago. And the other survived until just recently.
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.
Those two men made America.
I learned of Jemmy’s recent passing with a bolt of unexpected grief. Now, remembering how warmly he and Dolley received me at the White House, I feel the keenest sympathy for her loss. I wonder if I shall ever see her again to convey such sentiments in person.
I’d like to. But there’s a more important reunion I must bring about.
I must see my son.
I must have William home again from the wilds of America, where he fled in the wake of my suspicions about his father. I’ve made peace with Alexander. More importantly, I’ve made peace with myself. And I believe that all my husband’s sacrifices and contributions—all our sacrifices and contributions—outweigh our personal, private failings.
I need William to see that, too.
Thus, at the first signs of spring, Lysbet, her husband, and I set off on a four-day stagecoach trip from New York to Pittsburgh, then down the wide Ohio. Weeks we steam along that waterway, and it seems only right that, despite how far William wandered, I’m still able to reach him by river, as if, all this time, we’ve been connected by the thread of life stitching through this great land.
The farther west we go, towns give way to villages, which give way to mere wharfs. And I’m struck by the spirit of the American people, by the bravery and ingenuity of those intrepid enough to build new homes and communities. I can’t help but wonder what my husband, who once crossed an ocean to find a new land of opportunity, would think of these new lands.
My Dear Hamilton Page 59