Hamilton and Peggy!

by L. M. Elliott

  Born in Southern France, Fleury joined the French Army at age nineteen, serving in Corsica before sailing to America. At first, Congress didn’t know what to do with the flood of idealistic French officers, but Fleury was soon a captain with the Continental’s corps of engineers. Well trained and a natural leader, Fleury eventually rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He served (and was wounded several times) at Yorktown, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, the horrific siege of Fort Mifflin, and Stony Point—the attack that earned him a Congressional Silver Medal of Honor. A British commodore wrote of Fleury’s charge, “The rebels had made the attack with a bravery they never before exhibited.” Fleury did indeed share his reward money with his foot soldiers and showed mercy to his enemy, “a generosity and clemency which during the course of the rebellion had no parallel,” wrote the commodore. “Instead of putting them to death, [he] called to them to throw down their arms” and they could expect to be given quarter—a humanity some British commanders had failed to show Patriots in several terrible instances that resulted in massacres of wounded Patriots who had surrendered.

  Ingenious as well as brave, Fleury wrote General Washington a marvelously enthusiastic letter, in awkward English, describing self-propelled, exploding fireboats he hoped to launch into the British fleet anchored in the Delaware River and threatened Philadelphia in 1778. (I pull directly from that letter for Henry’s dialogue in Chapter Fourteen.) Washington applauded Fleury’s “Zeal for the Public Service” and suggested using “some desperate fellows” and “the greatest Secrecy and Caution” to “make the experiment.” As far as history knows, nothing came of Fleury’s plans. (Perhaps they were discouraged knowing the failure of “the Turtle”—a fantastical eight-foot-long, one-man, egg-shaped submersible—technically the first submarine used in warfare—pedaled through the waters of New York Harbor to try to attach an exploding mine to the hull of a British warship.)

  By the way, each year since 1989, the United States Army has awarded individuals who have made significant contributions to army engineering the de Fleury Medal, a replica of the one presented the Frenchman in 1779.

  When Peggy met him, Fleury would have been thirty-one. His Newport host described him as “sociable, jocose, and very agreeable in conversation, of a free, liberal turn of mind in matters of religion.” It really bothered me that I could never resolve what happened between the two of them after Fleury mentioned his hopes of marrying Peggy in a letter to Hamilton. All I knew was that after the war, he returned to the French Army and fought in a variety of campaigns from South America to India to Europe.

  My stubborn quest to gather some hint of what killed their romance led me to heartbreaking letters sent twenty years later, in 1800, from Lafayette (then in France) to Hamilton on behalf of Fleury’s widow. While the brief biographies I could unearth about Fleury listed conflicting versions of his death—from being executed in the French Revolution to dying in battle, his body never found—her plea for a pension for his service in the American Revolution states that he committed suicide. I mourned when I learned it.

  I finally decided to write his and Peggy’s story to reflect the sudden, passionate friendships and love affairs often brought about in the heat of war; the mysteries surrounding what my adult children tell me is a known term used by millennials: “ghosting”; and what I came to believe was Peggy’s clear sense of self-possession and self-determination. I think Peggy had the sense to refuse to accept anything but complete and utter devotion. It’s what she seems to have offered those she loved. And she waited until she found it.

  In June 1783, Peggy married her distant cousin, Stephen Van Rensselaer. Some accounts have them eloping—perhaps because the match scandalized Albany since he was turning nineteen and she twenty-four years old. But her family seemed very pleased. Kindred souls in intellect and devotion to public service, Peggy supported his running for office and becoming lieutenant governor of New York in 1795. He also served as a state senator and US congressman. He inherited one of the largest fortunes in United States history, becoming Lord of Van Rensselaer Manor, the last Dutch land-granted patroon in America. Immediately, Hamilton teasingly nicknamed Peggy “Mrs. Patroon.”

  Peggy gave birth to three children, but by 1801, at age forty-three, she was chair-bound, crippled with gout and suffering what might have been stomach cancer. Hamilton was in Albany on legal business when her condition deteriorated. Hamilton remained in the city for three weeks, visiting her sickbed almost daily. True to her brave, witty self to the very end, Peggy “was sensible to the last and resigned to the important change,” Hamilton wrote Eliza at their New York City home. He seems to have been by his little sister’s side as she drew her last breath.

  Even then, Hamilton remained loyal to his Peggy, their fates intertwined. He threw his energy into supporting her husband’s campaign for New York governor. This pitted Hamilton against Aaron Burr, who promoted Van Rensselaer’s opponent. The competition fueled their political animosity. Three years later, Hamilton died in their infamous duel.

  I like to believe Peggy was waiting for him on the other side.

  There are many anecdotes—funny, touching, astounding—about the people surrounding Peggy and fighting the Revolution that I wish I could have included. But please see my bibliography for wonderful, deeply humanizing biographies of Hamilton; Washington and his devoted wife, Martha; his aides-de-camp; Arnold; Lafayette; and Philip Schuyler—who truly was an important “supporting” founding father.

  I’m sharing two stories about a younger Philip Schuyler because they reveal so much about him, the close bonds the Americans and the British, Patriots and Loyalists, had before the Revolution, the very international complexion of the new nation, the fortitude of its women, and the largesse enemy officers could show one another in the midst of carnage.

  During the French and Indian War, Schuyler became great friends with his commander, British General John Bradstreet, eventually even naming his firstborn son for him. Bradstreet remained in America, becoming a surrogate father/grandfather to the Schuylers. So much so, Schuyler was willing to sail to England on business for him, leaving Catharine to oversee the building of their Albany mansion, with three daughters all under the age of five. She was pregnant, too, with twins who perished shortly after their birth while Schuyler was absent.

  On that voyage, the captain of Schuyler’s ship died. Schuyler took over the navigation, because he was quite smart mathematically. That put him at great peril of being executed when the next mishap occurred—French privateers, or pirates really, captured the ship. But Schuyler managed to negotiate for his life and for the lives of the other British-born passengers because he spoke French so fluently.

  Once, during the French and Indian War, Schuyler and his unit had flushed the enemy off a tiny island in the watery regions of upstate New York. The French and American Indians retreated. They mounted a counterattack as Schuyler and his men were canoeing back to the main shore to join their company. In the midst of the crossfire, Schuyler heard a badly wounded French Canadian crying out in agony and begging not to be left there to die. The British soldiers with Schuyler ignored their enemy’s pleas. But Schuyler plunged into the waters, swam back to the island, lifted the enemy onto his back, and found a place he could wade across the stream, carrying him. The French Canadian lived. Years later, during the Revolution, he became a spy for the Americans out of gratitude for Schuyler saving his life.

  Of course, like so many of our founding fathers, not all about Philip Schuyler is admirable. He bought, sold, and owned fellow human beings, even while he fought to liberate himself. He had as many as twenty-seven enslaved people working in his Albany and Saratoga houses, including two who are documented as having run away, desperate for freedom. Those I mention by name in the narrative are factual, such as Prince and Lisbon, who Schuyler clearly trusted to protect his family, home, and expensive property like horses that were critically necessary to their survival during a war. And while Schuyler fought
to protect and supply the Oneida and Tuscarora—often at his own expense—he did support the Continental Army’s raids through enemy Iroquois settlements, which devastated their crops and villages, leading ultimately to the collapse of their tribal society and independence.

  A brief word about the perplexing marriage of Angelica and John Barker Church, alias John Carter during the Revolution: despite his devolving into a bragging, carousing dullard, when Church met Angelica—if an early portrait of him is to be believed—he was quite handsome, with enormous eyes and thick wavy hair. For a whip-smart, passionate young woman—who had grown up in New York City’s lively society and as a constant, pampered guest of the royal governor, Lord Henry Moore—Church’s cosmopolitan aura would have been quite alluring. Perhaps his secretive past—gambling debts, a romance gone wrong, a duel—was exciting to her as well. After all, when an impressionable teenager, Angelica had witnessed the elopement of Lord Moore’s daughter and its aggrandizing romanticism.

  As intellectual and committed a Patriot as her little sister, Angelica must have thought Church would become an important player in the Revolution. He did, indeed, provide critical aid to the cause by finding supplies for the French army. But he also profited as that commissary, making a large fortune for himself. As such, he was a controversial character. At one point, Washington said that all profiteers should be hanged.

  In 1783, Angelica and Church left for Paris so he could collect payment for his services to Rochambeau’s forces. They then settled in London, where Church became a member of the British Parliament and Angelica a famously charming hostess. She became something of a muse to Thomas Jefferson (then ambassador to France) as well as to her brother-in-law, writing letters to both that were filled with impassioned philosophy and political ideas, doled out in dazzling and affectionate language. She came back to New York on frequent visits, and her close, intellectually intimate relationship with Hamilton was always subject to gossip. Still, she and Church had five sons and three daughters, and Angelica seemed to delight in being a mother. Sometimes she refused to receive visitors if she were in the middle of a card game with her children.

  It is said Church owned the pistols Hamilton carried to the duel that killed him—the same pair Hamilton’s son Philip died by. Ironically, Burr and Carter had dueled in 1799, both of these men surviving that confrontation.

  The double agent Moses Harris is fact—tracked in Washington’s and Schuyler letters and verified by his later application for a pension. Much of his dialogue I culled from a wonderful 1878 article (see my bibliography), in which his grandchildren detailed the stories he’d told them, including the rather amazing lifesaving Masonic sign of distress! According to his gravestone in the Harrisena Cemetery, in Queensbury, New York, Harris lived to be eighty-nine years, eleven months, and twenty-four days old.

  True, too, is the story of the little fifer, Richard Lord Jones, who also survived to old age, treasuring that three-dollar bill Martha Washington gave him, kept folded exactly as she handed it to him.

  The winter of 1779–1780 is still one of the most brutal recorded in America. Snows began falling in the first week of November and didn’t stop until April. For the only time in recorded history, all of the saltwater inlets and harbors of the Atlantic coast, from North Carolina to Maine, froze over and for more than a month remained closed to ships. The ice in the Hudson River just above New York City was measured at eighteen feet thick. The red fox that now inhabit our continent are said to be descended from a brace brought to the Eastern Shore by British landowners that were able to walk across the wide Chesapeake Bay frozen solid during that time.

  From July 1781 to December 1783, when the war was officially ended, Richard Varick served as George Washington’s recording secretary. He stayed in Poughkeepsie, organizing and editing thousands of Washington’s letters, dispatches, journal entries, and battle proposals that arrived in trunks under escort of His Excellency’s personal guard. It is entirely fair to say that Varick and the scribes he diligently oversaw to produce the forty-four volumes of Washington’s wartime papers housed in the Library of Congress are responsible for our knowing what we do about our Revolution. He married Maria Roosevelt, was mayor of New York City from 1789–1801, and lived until 1831.

  When describing how Arnold broke the 1777 Siege of Fort Stanwix, I couldn’t find a place to tuck in the bodacious defiance of the Patriots inside that ramshackle fortification. Told they would all be summarily massacred when the fort eventually fell if they didn’t surrender immediately to the far superior British forces outside their walls, a young Peter Gansevoort refused to yield. Then he and his sick, starving, and ammunition-depleted troops tore up their shirts and stockings to raise a makeshift American flag as the ultimate thumbing of their noses at the British Empire.

  I can’t help but wonder if his future grandson, Herman Melville, thought of Gansevoort’s valiant tenacity when writing his masterpiece Moby-Dick.

  Ann Bleecker and the death of her baby is also fact, a tragic example of the cost to civilians in any war, particularly for refugee families facing exposure, hunger, dangerous terrain, and unsanitary water. She is also one of those largely forgotten trailblazers in our history. Ann Eliza Schuyler Bleecker was one of America’s first published female poets. She wrote about the raw beauties of the wilderness and the devastating tumult of the Revolution. But she also dared to cry out the agonies of loss—the first female poet to acknowledge and therefore raise female anguish to the legitimacy and dignity of grief that epic bards like Homer granted their male warrior-heroes. Her poem “Written in the Retreat from Burgoyne” is haunting in its honesty.

  I’ll end with admitting that I kind of fell in love with George Washington as I researched. His legendary stoicism and calm was not natural to him. He evidently had quite a volatile temper during his youth that he learned to muffle—mostly. Therefore, his composure was hard-won and a practiced, stunning act of self-control, especially given his huntsmen-soldiers’ lack of training and supplies, and the betrayals, jealousies, and constant backbiting among his officers and Congress.

  “My old man,” Martha Washington affectionately called him—obviously he did not take himself too seriously! He loved, he hurt, he laughed, he joked, he feared, he faltered, but he stubbornly held to his convictions and dragged a new nation to its feet. He did indeed love to dance for hours at a time, to play catch, and to romp with his herd of dogs. And when he loved people he was absolutely devoted to them. He was heartbroken at the death of his stepdaughter, just as Martha describes to Peggy in Chapter Nineteen.

  I highly recommend your dipping into the wonderful website Mount Vernon runs (http://www.mountvernon.org/digital-encyclopedia/#personal) to experience for yourself the anecdotes related there that so humanize the “father of our country” we too often represent in cold marble.

  Paraphrasing the brilliant Lin-Manuel Miranda, George Washington recognized that history had its eyes on him and all those daring to rise up for freedom. Thank God for those who stubbornly fought on—no matter the disasters, the naysayers, the daunting size and power of the empire they fought, the battles, winters, starvation, and diseases that decimated them, nor the improbability and absolutely unprecedented audacity of their ideas. All of them—including Peggy and her big sisters.

  Author Gratitudes

  “I have more than once compared [Lin-Manuel Miranda] to Shakespeare, and I do it without blushing or apologizing. Lin, in Hamilton, is doing exactly what Shakespeare did in his history plays. He’s taking the voice of the common people, elevating it to poetry—in Shakespeare’s case iambic pentameter, in Lin’s case, rap, rhyme, hip-hop, R & B—and by elevating it to poetry, ennobling the people themselves. He is bringing out what is noble about the common tongue. And that is something that nobody has done as effectively as Lin since Shakespeare. Yeah, I said it.”

  —Oskar Eustis, artistic director of New York’s Public Theater

  LIKE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, I FEEL AS IF I KNOW Tony Award�
�winner Lin-Manuel Miranda because he is that open, that passionate about his work—the emotion of his lyrics so palpable. But I have not had the honor of meeting him. Still, I feel I must thank him for his brilliant integration of genres that has revolutionized theater for audiences and artists who follow him, and how his wondrously clever, quick-paced lyrics recount so much history in such a humanizing and compelling way. I hope—just as he says he was inspired after reading Ron Chernow’s bestselling biography of Alexander Hamilton to create a musical about an historical figure—that he will take as a compliment my being intrigued enough by Peggy Schuyler’s untold story, hinted at in his staggeringly beautiful Hamilton, to research and write this novel.

  It turns out Peggy was a fascinating woman.

  The next bow goes to my wondrous editor, Katherine Tegen, who recognized the thirst for more in lovers of Alexander Hamilton’s story, and then entrusted me to do it. She is stunningly astute in recognizing a good story; nurturing and creative in her thinking; and loyal to those she believes in. Her sensitive and adroit editing so strengthened this narrative.

  I am particularly indebted to the generosity and enthusiasm of Ian Mumpton and Danielle Funiciello, Historical Interpreters with the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historical Preservation at the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in the city of Albany. They graciously responded to my constant questions with their expertise and analysis of the Revolution, sharing first-person, primary documents they’ve unearthed and their clear empathy and understanding for the Schuyler family whose lives they curate—all of which so enriched this novel. They also were kind enough to read the finished manuscript for accuracy in general and the veracity of nuanced meanings I drew from bare-bones historical facts. If you’re interested in learning more about the Schuylers, the mansion hosts tours, an active Facebook page, and a fascinating blog: http://schuylermansion.blogspot.com/.