Hamilton and Peggy!

by L. M. Elliott

  While she pirouetted lightly on her toes, guided expertly by His Excellency, Schuyler beheld Catharine with an adoration that made Peggy’s eyes well up. Her papa looked like he might burst with pride in his beloved Kitty. After twenty-five years of marriage, thirteen pregnancies, war’s losses and victories, public praise and ridicule, illness and disappointments, fear and jubilation, they were still in love, still partners.

  “My word, they are an inspiring pair,” murmured Stephen.

  Peggy nodded. “His Excellency is the most chivalrous of dancers.”

  “Actually, I meant your mother and father.” Stephen nodded toward Schuyler. “I mean, look at the way he gazes at her—in rapture.” He cleared his throat self-consciously. “I suppose I notice it since my father died when I was so young. I never saw him with my mother. I hope to be that in love with my wife when I am that age.”

  Peggy dared a sideways glance at him. He seemed totally sincere. Stephen felt her scrutiny and turned from watching the dance to smile at her. “Not even Molière, who can satirize anything, would be able to touch them.”

  “Ahhh.” Slowly, she smiled, remembering. “So you read the plays I suggested you take from Papa’s library.”

  “I did indeed. I have to admit that I prefer Shakespeare to Molière’s rather biting wit.”

  So this young man was the earnest type. “Julius Caesar, I would guess?”

  “Yes, of course. But I also like the comedies.”

  “Really?” She felt her eyebrow arch. “Which is your favorite?”

  “I’d say Twelfth Night.”

  Peggy eyed him suspiciously. “I suppose you enjoy what fools the lovers become, especially Olivia.” Peggy felt particular pity for that character, a lady who unwittingly fell in love with a fantasy—a young man who was poetic and courageous. But not what he seemed. Like Fleury. Little did Olivia know that the kind, thoughtful youth was actually a girl pretending to be a young man. And the audience was in on the joke. If Stephen laughed, Peggy would know to put him in the McHenry category. She waited.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No.” He grinned at her as General Greene asked Angelica to dance the minuet.

  “So what do you enjoy most about Twelfth Night?” Peggy asked as she watched her eldest sister circle the Quaker general, gliding smooth, calm, like a lily floating along a quiet pond.

  “Viola.”

  Peggy turned back to gape at him—incredulous. “The girl who protects herself after being shipwrecked by dressing and acting like a boy?”

  “Indeed yes,” Stephen answered. “She is so full of life, pluck, resourcefulness, wit. But what I really like is what she says about love.”

  Peggy just stared at him. Was this boy real?

  “How does Shakespeare put it?” Stephen paused a moment, closed his eyes, and recited, “That a lover should write loyal cantons of contemned love and sing them loud even in the dead of night. And that he should ‘halloo’ his lover’s name to the reverberate hills and make the babbling gossip of the air cry out her name until she takes pity on him.” He smiled down at Peggy, and shrugged. “I am too much of a romantic, I know. I suppose I shall be weaned from it when I leave university.”

  “Oh, I hope not,” said Peggy, shaking her head. “What’s the point of loving, if you don’t feel it utterly?”

  They fell silent, watching Hamilton stride onto the dance floor with Eliza. Peggy was flooded with the memory of their minuet at Morristown, when she had witnessed her sister give her loyal heart to him. There it was again—that look of insecure hunger from Hamilton, Eliza’s answer of shy acceptance and loving reassurance, the urgency of their touch, the bittersweetness of their turns away from each other.

  Peggy sighed.

  “Now that is courtship,” Stephen breathed, “as mellifluous as poetry.”

  She nodded.

  As Hamilton and Eliza left the dance floor and walked, arm in arm, toward them, Stephen bowed to her. “Miss Peggy, would you do me the great honor?”

  Surprised, she looked up into that beautiful face, unsure why she hesitated, annoyed that she felt fear.

  Stephen smiled, bashful, curious, hopeful all at once. “If music be the food of love . . .”

  Peggy caught Hamilton’s eye as he and Eliza approached, a few feet behind Stephen. Instantly, looking into her face, Peggy’s brother-in-law sized up the situation. Hamilton smiled encouragingly and nodded at her in a fond, unspoken way: “Your turn, little sister.” Peggy’s turn to sweep out into the center of those blue-coated, battle-tested, idealistic Patriots. Her turn to partake in the Revolution’s victory, to have all eyes on her—just for a moment.

  If music be the food of love?

  Taking a deep breath, Peggy put her hand in Stephen’s, and whispered to complete the quote: “Play on.”

  Afterword

  In a man’s letters, you know, Madam, his soul lies naked . . . whatever passes within him is there shown undisguised . . . nothing is inverted, nothing distorted. . . .

  This is the pleasure of corresponding with a friend, where doubt and distrust have no place, and every thing is said as it is thought . . . I have indeed concealed nothing from you, nor do I expect ever to repent of having thus opened my heart.

  —Samuel Johnson (author, journalist, wit) to Mrs. Thrale, October 27, 1777

  WE HAVE ONLY TWO LETTERS FROM ALEXANDER Hamilton to the youngest of the famed Schuyler sisters trio—his introduction and playful plea for Peggy’s help in courting Eliza, plus a long postscript attached to a note from her sister right after their marriage. But scattershot throughout his love letters to Eliza are passing references and tidbits of gossip about his soon-to-be little sister, and fond, teasing messages he asks Eliza to pass along to Peggy. Pieced together, they reveal much about the younger Schuyler’s high-spirited personality and the quick, intuitive, and affectionate friendship between Peggy and Hamilton. He almost immediately began referring to her as “my Peggy.”

  To walk through Hamilton’s letters is to stroll a lush verbal garden of the most glorious scents and colors: profuse, intoxicating—also full of thorns and stings if he were displeased! I’ve quoted them and others from the Schuyler circle throughout my novel—misspellings and all, and with signature lines, dates, and locations appearing as they do on the original documents—so you can experience these letters’ immediacy firsthand. Within them, you will feel for yourself in vivid descriptions and pleas the palpable heartaches, hardships, and hopes of the people fighting our Revolution. (Also in homage to the epistolary novel tradition of the time, for all you English majors who groaned through Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded.) In the eighteenth century, people spoke of and to their friends in far warmer and adoring ways than we do today. Their letters are filled with tenderness, compliments, longings to see one another, love advice, and gentle jests. Personas are laid bare in the most delightful ways.

  Hamilton’s poeticism, insecurities, bluster, and passion rise off the pages of his letters and handed me much of his dialogue in this novel and my ideas for its plot and characters. I immediately knew how to write Peggy’s uncle, Dr. John Cochran, when reading his letter calling a fellow officer a “nincompoopa!” And Lieutenant Colonel Varick’s constant “please to give my best to Miss Peggy” in his letters from the Saratoga battlefield led me to suspect the earnest Dutchman had quite a crush on the youngest daughter of his commanding general.

  Sadly, no letters written by Peggy during this novel’s time period survive. What we do know of her is gleaned from what other people have said, including the appearance and disappearance of Marquis de Fleury as a suitor. But what a wondrous skeleton of her life and of her vibrant and savvy personality they gifted me. Carefully cross-referenced, those letters also helped me track her whereabouts, showing she was indeed in the right place at the right time to witness some of the most momentous events of the American Revolution. Given what people said of her, it also felt totally plausible that she could ha
ve actively participated in several crucially important war efforts—like her father’s spy rings.

  Contemporaries called Peggy “lively,” “charming,” “bright, spirited, and generous,” “the favourite of dinner-tables and balls,” even “wild” (according to Benjamin Franklin), and possessing “a wicked wit.” Hamilton obviously considered her confident enough, possessed with enough charisma and appreciation for satire, to jokingly promise to write a play about matters of the heart in which she would star. In 1795, a French aristocrat who escaped the guillotine to settle in the United States described Peggy as “endowed with a superior mind and a rare accuracy of judgment for both men and things.” Madame de la Tour du Pin was not at all impressed by the intellect or sophistication of most Americans she met. But she admired Peggy.

  Peggy indeed spoke French fluently, painted, and clearly was just as interested in politics and philosophies as her more famous oldest sister, Angelica. James McHenry’s calling Peggy a “Swift’s Vanessa” in a letter to his fellow aide-de-camp, Hamilton, was eighteenth-century code for a woman who was well-read, articulate, and passionate in talking about philosophy and political ideas—conversations at that time deemed more “masculine” than feminine. (McHenry’s dialogue in Chapter Seventeen was taken directly from that letter.) Tragically, McHenry dubbed her a Vanessa disparagingly, displaying his own discomfort with a smart, strong woman as well as the societal constraints that must have so frustrated Peggy. If McHenry is to be believed, Angelica was saved from the same negative label because of her lighter, more flirtatious touch, and her ease with other women.

  It says a lot about Hamilton that he had such an affinity for intelligent and articulate women. The same can be said of Peggy’s father, General Philip Schuyler. All visitors to his Albany mansion, The Pastures, praised the lively and well-informed conversation among his amiable, dark-eyed daughters. Clearly, Schuyler encouraged their learning and discourse. In many ways, he was quite progressive, dividing his primogeniture (his legal right as firstborn son to inherit his parents’ entire estate) with his brother and sister. His letters to his daughters typically began with “My beloved child . . .”

  Schuyler family documents also unveil a gutsy and loyal young Peggy—detailing her saving her baby sister during the Loyalist kidnapping raid and traveling through the wilderness of upstate New York to help nurse Schuyler. She appears an unflinching caretaker. General John Bradstreet, a father figure and close family friend, is said to have died in the comforting arms of a teenage Peggy, who had stayed by his sickbed. Her younger siblings were often left in her care, even after she married. And, according to a letter from Schuyler to General Heath asking he safeguard his daughters’ passage, Peggy accompanied Angelica on the dangerous trip to Yorktown to rejoin her husband—most likely to help tend to her newborn nephew and his young siblings.

  Such devotion among sisters was commonplace in the eighteenth century—think Jane Austen novels a few decades later—but seems especially beautiful and symbiotic among the Schuyler trio. Their back-to-back births clearly made them playfellows. Eliza was only eighteen months younger than Angelica, and Peggy thirteen months younger than Eliza. As much as she clearly loved them, and possessed traits of each older sister, Peggy must have struggled for notice given the dazzling, intellectual Angelica, “the thief of hearts,” and Eliza, “the little saint” of the Revolution. Hence the theme of Peggy’s coming-of-age and finding her own sense of self and agency within this novel.

  I speculate the real-life Peggy had a particularly strong, empathetic bond with her father. Madame de la Tour du Pin, for instance, stated that Peggy had learned to speak French so well by “accompanying her father to the general headquarters of the American and French armies.” Peggy also suffered the same physical ailments that plagued Schuyler. Plus, she simply seemed to be at home more than her sisters. School bills show Angelica and Eliza in New York City together (without Peggy), and in the letters of 1777 I can find no mention of Eliza being in Albany. Angelica, of course, was already in Boston at that point with her new husband.

  All the family events, battles, spies, visits (of Iroquois, French, and Patriot delegations), plus the “celebrity” appearances in this novel are factual. The details of my scenes were gleaned from journals, letters, and news accounts of the time. Much of the dialogue spoken by the novel’s real-life characters comes straight from words they wrote themselves—such as George Washington’s love advice to Peggy at the end of the novel, which I pulled from a letter he wrote to his grandniece.

  Out of their Albany home, Schuyler did run a critically important “black chamber operation” network of Canadian, Iroquois, and New Yorker informants, spies, and double agents. He gathered information on enemy movements and intentions through his scouts and informants and by intercepting British communiqués. He and his staff would open, copy, and reseal these letters and then send them on to their intended recipients, who’d never know the information was compromised. Schuyler also fed his enemies false information and fake letters between him and George Washington. He was probably the Revolution’s most skilled military intelligence and counterintelligence officer.

  In many ways, Schuyler was Washington’s right-hand man—detecting conspiracies for surprise attacks in New York, Canada, and adjacent northern states; guarding our vulnerable back door at the Canadian border; and finding ways to supply the Continental Army when others left its soldiers to starve and freeze. He continued to do so even after his honor was so publicly maligned by Congress and the New England delegates, chiefly John Adams. Besides serving as the commander of the Northern Army from 1775 to mid–1777 and as a New York delegate to Congress, Schuyler was also the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, responsible for negotiating war alliances with the six Iroquois nations.

  We forget that the almost decade-long Revolution was also a horrifyingly bloody civil war between neighbors. A third of Americans were committed Patriots, a third were Loyalist Tories, and another third were basically neutral, trying to survive the back-and-forth violence, desperate to keep their farms or small shops operating so they could feed themselves. But there was no avoiding the war and its arguments in the state of New York. Raids on Tory and Patriot strongholds were constant and could be vicious from both sides.

  Rangers and marauding “cowboys” and “skinners” attacked any and all travelers and isolated farms. (Those terms came originally from a Loyalist irregular cavalry raised by Colonel James De Lancey, which stole cattle and other livestock from civilians and took them to the British Army in New York City. “Skinners” belonged to a battalion of British refugee volunteers commanded by the former attorney general of New Jersey, Brigadier General Cortlandt Skinner. Eventually the phrase became more indiscriminate, describing all manner of guerilla bands and highway robbers.)

  As was true with Patriots, Loyalists were motivated by both idealistic philosophy and self-interested hope for profit and social advancement. Many Loyalists still had family in England and took pride in being part of the British Empire and the constitutional rights it granted its citizens. They feared what they saw as anarchy in the Patriots’ actions—especially in Boston with its famous tea party and its mob tar-and-feathering of royal officers and sympathizers—and distrusted what kind of government people who had promulgated such violence could create. Some were xenophobic, fearing the influx of foreigners and radical Protestants who tended to flock to the cause of liberty.

  The political rifts could be heartbreaking. During the series of battles at Saratoga, for instance, firing ceased for a moment so that two brothers could wade across a stream to embrace each other, before going back to their opposing sides and the resumed fight.

  Tragically, our Revolution ended a peaceful and democratic confederacy that had endured for centuries among neighboring American Indian tribes—the Oneida, Tuscarora, Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—known as the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy or the Hau de no sau nee (meaning: people who build). Their longstanding league
disintegrated into civil war as well, when four of the tribes decided that allying with the British and Loyalists would better help them keep their native lands, culture, and sovereign autonomy. Colonists had repeatedly violated boundaries established in treaties between the ruling British and the Iroquois—poaching or farming on territory guaranteed to the tribes, lands the Iroquois had traditionally hunted or inhabited. The four “Loyalist” tribes anticipated that a Patriot-controlled government might allow even more encroachment.

  They joined the British as scouts and forward raiding parties, greatly helping the British navigate the wilderness of upstate New York. Burgoyne, for one, knew that years of skirmishes, hostilities, and the recent bloodbath that was the French and Indian War had imbedded a visceral fear of Iroquois warriors that he fanned with outrageous proclamations and threats—hoping to cow Patriots and rally Loyalists. Eventually, trying to undercut their ability to fight, Continental troops raided tribal villages, decimating the Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca societies. The Oneida and Tuscarora villages had been similarly destroyed by the British and their allied Iroquois.

  I don’t know that Peggy met Hamilton by Benedict Arnold’s hospital sickbed, but it is a legitimate possibility. All three were in Albany at that time. (Legend holds that Hamilton met Eliza during his official mission to General Gates, but there are no records of such an encounter. Schuyler was indeed in Saratoga rebuilding his house.) It is fact, however, that Peggy’s father was a friend and admirer of Arnold’s, frequently intervened on his behalf with Congress, and supported his taking command of West Point. Arnold’s betrayal would have hit the Schuyler family hard as a result.

  Tracking Hamilton’s mentions of her in his letters to Eliza, Peggy must have met Marquis Francoise-Louis Teissedre de Fleury in Newport, Rhode Island, where it makes sense that she was staying with Angelica and her husband, then commissary for the newly landed French army. I had to really dig to learn much about Fleury. Like Lafayette, he came to the States on his own to volunteer with the Continental Army. And like hundreds of other Frenchmen whose names are lost to history, his enormous contributions to the Patriot cause are largely forgotten—even though Fleury was one of only eight individuals honored during the American Revolution with a commemorative medal (described in Chapter Thirteen).