Eliza Hamilton

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  He wished Eliza had a bit more book learning. Her response to the rather tactless suggestion that she might think about some intellectual self-improvements has not survived. But when Alexander’s letter arrived, she knew instantly the sight of his elegant and easy hand and eagerly looked forward to the pleasure of reading words of longing and devotion in private.

  When she folded up the thin sheet of paper, her heart must have raced. Alexander’s words cut her to the quick. They struck at the heart of Eliza’s greatest insecurity—that she was tongue-tied in speech and clunky and halting in her letters. That she was dull and stupid. Eliza knew she had in her heart a world of feelings. But she could never find the words to express them. Alexander pushed. He wanted to know everything. But her love didn’t work like that. She felt like a failure. When Eliza was hurt or angry or even just worried, she retreated. In time, Alexander would come to understand that he should worry most when Eliza’s voice grew quiet.

  More embarrassed than angry, she retreated now. Alexander’s letter sat unanswered in Eliza’s wooden writing box, and she searched for the words to apologize for how she stumbled in the arts of courtship and conversation. She tried to turn her mind to one of the thick history books Alexander had recommended. The words swam, and she felt like crying.

  Alexander waited days for Eliza’s reply. None arrived. Soon, Alexander was in a panic. “It is an age my dearest,” he wrote, “since I have received a letter from you; the post is arrived and not a line.” Alexander spoke too fast, wrote too fast, sometimes without fully considering. He knew it. It was slowly dawning on him that he had upset Eliza.

  “I know not to what to impute your silence; so it is I am alarmed with an apprehension of your being ill,” Alexander wrote,

  Pardon me my lovely girl for any thing I may have said that has the remotest semblance of complaining. If you knew my heart thoroughly you would see it so full of tenderness for you that you would not only pardon, but you would even love my weaknesses. For god’s sake My Dear Betsey try to write me oftener and give me the picture of your heart in all its varieties of light and shade. Tell me whether it feels the same for me or did when we were together, or whether what seemed to be love was nothing more than a generous sympathy. The possibility of this frequently torments me.

  Eliza melted. In the next week, she cheerfully wrote Alexander three letters. And she had been thinking of him: she enclosed as a gift a bit of embroidered neckwear that she had passed her afternoons patiently making for him. Eliza showed her love through small acts of work and patience. The subject of letters, though, would remain a touchy point between Eliza and Alexander as they started their life together. Letters, lost and found, written and unwritten, would define, too, how their marriage unfolded.

  Letters—and money. Despite the wealth of Eliza’s family, or perhaps because of it, Alexander was also at pains during their months apart before the wedding to explain to Eliza that he did not have a fortune and could not promise her the lifestyle of her parents or, indeed, even the lifestyle of the free-spending John and Angelica Carter. A happy marriage did not include the bitter complaints of a wife who would later regret that she hadn’t married someone richer. “Do you soberly relish the pleasure of being a poor mans wife?” he quizzed her:

  Have you learned to think a home spun preferable to a brocade and the rumbling of a waggon wheel to the musical rattling of a coach and six? Will you be able to see with perfect composure your old acquaintances flaunting it in gay life, tripping it along in elegance and splendor, while you hold an humble station and have no other enjoyments than the sober comforts of a good wife? . . . If you cannot my Dear we are playing a comedy of all in the wrong, and you should correct the mistake before we begin to act the tragedy of the unhappy couple.

  Alexander dreamed, too, of a career building a republic, if they were to win their independence, and he warned Eliza that this would also come at a price in their life together. Was Eliza prepared to sacrifice to the republic in ways that were not only financial? “I know too you have so much of the Portia in you,” he wrote, “that you will not be out done in this line by any of your sex, and that if you saw me inclined to quit the service of your country you would dissuade me from it. I have promised you, you recollect, to conform to your wishes, and I persist in this intention. It remains with you to show whether you are a Roman or an American wife.”

  Eliza understood the reference to Portia. The classical history of Valerius Maximus was a staple of a young man’s education and one of the sober, improving books in her father’s library that Eliza was especially determined to finish. Her preference inclined toward romance novels. Portia was the Roman wife of Caesar’s assassin, Brutus, and showed herself strong enough to bear any pain to keep the secrets of her husband. Alexander and Eliza spoke often of the sacrifice and loyalty of the Roman wife in service to the republic. Was Eliza courageous enough to be a Roman wife? She promised herself she would rise to the challenge.

  By “an American wife,” Alexander meant someone like Angelica—always dressed in the latest fashion, her carriage lined with satin and velvet, her lifestyle extravagant. Eliza didn’t long for that. She had found the social whirl of Morristown exhausting, and it was her growing friendship with the older Martha Washington that most inspired her. Martha Washington—with her homespun dresses and quiet modesty—was Eliza’s ideal. Eliza had loved the afternoons when she and Martha sat together at camp, chatting quietly over tea and patiently working on their embroidery, a shared passion. Theirs was a friendship that would sustain Eliza more and more in the times ahead of them, though Eliza yet had only a dim inkling of the sacrifices that would be required of her. At the hardest moments, Martha would be there for her. If a life of modest domestic tranquility was all Alexander feared he could offer her, she teased him in her letters, she could manage. Could Alexander? That was the real question.

  That Eliza didn’t constantly write him letters, even after they had made up their lovers’ tiff, unnerved Alexander, though he had the grace to laugh at his insecurities. Eliza was home in Albany throughout the summer, and in August, having written three letters to her one—and having obstinately counted—Alexander warned her playfully, “When I come to Albany, I shall find means to take satisfaction for your neglect. You recollect the mode I threatened to punish you in for all your delinquen[c]ies.” Eliza responded teasingly by sending Alexander a cockade she had sewn for his hat and a now-lost satirical poem, set to music by Peggy, on the subject of what ridiculous things they would do together in their happy poverty. But Eliza’s promise that money would never come between them was one of the other bedrock foundations of their marriage.

  In September, after three months apart, the scandal of Benedict Arnold’s treason broke, rocking the army. At General Washington’s headquarters, Tench Tilghman raged at the dawning realization that his cousin’s husband had played him a fool, at Peggy Shippen’s urging. Benedict Arnold slipped behind British lines and quickly fled for London. Eliza’s youthful crush, the British major John André, the spymaster, was not so fleet-footed and was captured behind American lines.

  Benedict Arnold had conspired to deliver the American troops into the hands of their enemies for a bounty of a mere 20,000 pounds—a couple of million dollars today—and luckily had failed, but his betrayal brought home to everyone how fragile a thing was their revolution. “If America were lost,” Alexander assured Eliza, “we should be happy in some other clime more favourable to human rights. What think you of Geneva as a retreat?”

  Alexander also acknowledged what all the Schuyler women understood: more likely than not, if the campaign failed, General Washington’s officers would fall in battle. Death was a constant presence, always possible. “I was once determined to let my existence and American liberty end together,” Alexander told Eliza. “My Betsey has given me a motive to outlive my pride, I had almost said my honor; but America must not be witness to my disgrace.” Eliza and her family had made him feel that he had a tru
e home in America. That was everything to Alexander, an orphan and an immigrant. More than anything now, he wanted to live and to start a life with Eliza. The Schuyler family, for their part, drew him into their circle.

  There was one other deeply personal betrayal awaiting the Americans that autumn and Philip Schuyler especially, and it was part of the wall of silence that encircled the Schuyler family. It would place the life of Eliza and her family in even greater personal danger as the war unfolded.

  John André wasn’t the only spy risking his life. The patriots also maintained spy rings buried deep in the rural communities up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and their operations were crucial to the Americans’ progress. Eliza’s father led the espionage network embedded in upstate New York, with the help of his native mistress, a high-ranking Mohawk woman named Mary Hill. What Philip Schuyler did not yet know was that Mary had betrayed him and his network to the enemy that autumn. All he knew was that the Indian raids were growing closer and closer. The Schuyler house was already a fortress. The general had to warn Alexander of the chances. “I have no body between me and the Enemy except two poor famalies and about one hundred militia with me,” Philip wrote now to Alexander. “We are surrounded from every quarter and the Inhabitants flying down the Country. I believe my turn will be in a few days unless troops are sent.”

  The idea of Eliza in danger gnawed at Alexander. Everyone knew the story of the scalping of poor Jane McCrea, Eliza’s neighbor. All autumn, Alexander searched for any chance to travel north, even for a few days, to hold her and to know she was safe and still loved him. But the war made it impossible. General Washington could not spare officers. Alexander urged her to be careful, urged her father to take greater precautions. He promised Eliza in long letters that he would arrive in Albany by the first of December for their marriage.

  Could he keep that promise? Eliza, the daughter of a general, knew as well as anyone that in the midst of a war that had not gone well that year for the Americans, anything could happen. They kept loaded guns by the thick oak door, and all night shadowy sentinels stood watch in the garden.

  At night, as she drifted off to sleep, Eliza listened to the creak of the wood beams, moaning and settling in the cold autumn air, and wondered if the falling snow beyond her window had been loosened by the breeze or if it heralded the start of the attack they dreaded. With any luck, December would come and bring Alexander.

  In the meantime, as her pragmatic mother briskly reminded the girls each morning, there was nothing to do but hope for the best. They needed to get to work planning a Schuyler family wedding.

  CHAPTER 7

  All the Girls Together—and Peggy, 1780–81

  On Wednesday, December 13, 1780, the Schuyler, Livingston, Cuyler, and Van Rensselaer clans gathered, and in the large back kitchens of the Pastures the family slaves were unwrapping a wedding cake for the next day, spiced with molasses and brown sugar, stuffed with raisins, and aged for weeks in generous lashings of rum and brandy, in accordance with an ancient Schuyler family recipe. Eliza and her mother had been tending the cake since early autumn. Pickled oysters by the barrelful sat in their salty brine, and cured hams and great shanks of venison waited in the larder, well out of the reach of the exasperatingly disobedient seven-year-old Rensselaer Schuyler, Eliza’s little brother. As evening fell, the house rang with laughter and the clink of glassware, but in the waiting darkness beyond armed sentinels stood careful watch against the war parties. General Schuyler remained a high-value target for kidnapping or assassination, and he was not the only high-ranking officer at his daughter’s wedding.

  Upstairs, a pregnant Kitty Schuyler looked in on a feverish four-year-old Cornelia, while servants put the final touches on Eliza’s bouffant hairdo, dusting it white with powder, a gift from Martha Washington. Eliza had time alone with her thoughts to consider.

  In the morning, she and Alexander would be married quietly before lunchtime, afforded all the dignity of a Dutch religious service, in the cheerful front parlor where Eliza had stood so many times in the preceding months, reading Alexander’s love letters.

  Now, Alexander was here at last, and her sober pearl-gray silk gown was already waiting in the bedroom. Tomorrow, they would be married. They would share a bed. It was hard to think of everyone in the family knowing that about them. Eliza fingered gently a piece of fine linen embellished with her painstaking embroidery; she had made Alexander a matching kerchief as a wedding present. She would tuck hers along the low-cut neckline of her gown as a modest shawl in the morning.

  Tonight, her sister Peggy was having none of that. Peggy tended toward the rambunctious and irreverent. This evening, their mother was going to have the party that Angelica’s elopement had denied her, and Peggy was determined that they were all going to kick up their heels a little. Little surprise that Eliza’s younger sister quickly became a favorite with Alexander.

  The tables were heavily laden with rich foods and treasures from Philip Schuyler’s wine cellars. Everything was ready. They waited only for Eliza. At the bottom of the staircase, as Eliza descended, Alexander was waiting on the landing to take her elbow. It was a perfect beginning.

  On the morning of December 14, the day of the wedding, the sun didn’t rise over the horizon until after seven o’clock, but the girls had already been awake for hours. Some of the gentlemen, perhaps, found that last night’s Madeira had left them a little bit less chipper. They would be up, the ladies supposed, before too much longer. Eliza, Peggy, and Angelica—home only briefly and without John or the children—dressed in darkness, happily chattering in low voices, helping each other with their gowns as they had always done. Downstairs, household servants were shifting logs in the fireplaces to stoke the fires and Eliza’s father, the general, was already waiting. The Schuyler family and Alexander began the morning with prayers and a quiet wedding breakfast. Alexander had no relations with him, but his friend and fellow aide-de-camp, the Irish-born surgeon James “Mac” McHenry, had traveled up with Alexander as a representative of the young men who called themselves General Washington’s “family.”

  At noon, Eliza’s father gave the signal, and the din of the guests grew quiet. The small group of friends and family—nearly all of them Schuyler connections—gathered silently in the reception room; Eliza once again made her way down the staircase, for her bridal entrance. Eliza saw that Aunt Gertrude and John Cochran were beaming. It was in their home that their love affair had first started, and kindly Aunt Gertrude deserved some of the thanks and credit. On a pale, flowered carpet in front of the large window overlooking the garden, Eliza took her place, just as she had practiced. Alexander stood beside her. From the window, she could see the icy river and the pines and the landscape of her childhood. Alexander’s childhood tropical island, Nevis, would have been so different. It was her world he was entering. Eliza turned and faced Alexander.

  The minister read the vows and the service, and then Alexander slipped onto her finger a small gold ring, engraved simply ELIZABETH, which bore a secret notch where her ring could join his own in an interlocking, infinite puzzle. Onto his finger, she slipped its twin, marked ALEXANDER &. Alexander leaned to kiss her, and just like that, Eliza realized she was Mrs. Hamilton.

  George and Martha Washington had sent a courier with a note of good wishes. The luncheon passed with toasts and laughing, and Mac read a poem he’d composed as a wedding present for Alexander. Mac had come quickly to the conclusion that his friend Hamilton was a luckier man than the lads back at camp imagined. The roguish Tench had called Eliza a “little saint,” affectionately mocking her pleasure in attending church and her naïve, housewifely good nature. Mac took the measure of Eliza more deeply and more accurately. “Hers,” he said, “was a strong character with its depth and warmth, whether of feeling or temper controlled, but glowing underneath, bursting through at times in some emphatic expression.” Eliza said little of what she felt, but she felt life deeply.

  The first week of married life was
a whirlwind. Couples didn’t get away for honeymoons in the eighteenth century. Eliza’s extended family was large and spread out around the Albany region, and social custom required wedding visits. By the end of the week, Alexander might have wished the Schuyler family were slightly less extensive. Eliza and Alexander passed what remained of December bundling themselves into heavy cloaks, tucking their feet up against hot bricks wrapped in flannels, and setting off through the bitter cold in a horse-drawn sleigh to do their duty by her relations.

  But it was still romantic, and Eliza didn’t wish for anything different. She was with Alexander. In between the cups of tea and polite chitchat, there were long hours when she and Alexander leaned close against each other in the bright winter weather while the horse kicked up snowy powder. Alexander warmed her fingers. In the evenings, the Schuyler family gathered together in the parlor, where Alexander accompanied Peggy in singing Scottish ballads. At night, when the bed curtains were drawn closely against the drafts, he held her under the thick down coverlet. Eliza drifted off to sleep, happy.

  Eliza and Alexander would stay in Albany until the New Year. Angelica, probably escorted by Mac, returned south before Christmas, to Newport, Rhode Island, where the French navy was blockaded and where John Carter, as he still styled himself, was raking in a fortune as a broker. John and his partner, Jeremiah Wadsworth, managed the supply chains for the French military in America, and John took a generous cut out of each transaction. Angelica couldn’t stay for the holiday with the Schuyler family, but she did send them a present to enliven their quiet domestic circle in Albany—although her mother was less than delighted with the present’s timing. Just before Christmas, several French officers, including François de Beauvoir, the Marquis de Chastellux, arrived by schooner at the wharf of the Pastures, friends of Angelica’s. Eliza’s father sent a sleigh to meet the houseguests.