Eliza Hamilton
Page 11
Somewhere in the back kitchen, Prince, their mother’s favorite servant, heard the tinkle of a latch and creak of wood and looked out to see a man at the gate to the garden. In any other time and place, the sight might have seemed pastoral, a stranger at the gate on a summer night in August in the hour after twilight. But in Albany in the summer of 1781, with a bounty on the head of General Schuyler, with the British making incursions up and down the countryside “carry[ing] off some of the most inveterate and active Leaders in the Rebellion” and executing them in retaliation for the hanging of Major John André, this was danger. Prince’s heart beat fast. He started running.
Prince burst through the parlor door, crying the alarm. Philip Schuyler jumped from his chair as papers scattered. He raced to the foyer and swung shut in a heavy arc the great wooden door and drew down the iron bars to lock it. The slam shook the plaster. The sentinels at the front of the house were on their feet now, reaching for their guns—but their guns were missing. By now General Schuyler’s would-be assassins were at the portico. Somewhere, someone screamed in terror. Just beyond the parlor windows, the groggy sentinels, still searching for the weapons that Angelica had moved out of the reach of the children, landed a few blows but were quickly overpowered and dragged away, still struggling, beyond the garden. Trussed and tied, they would be hauled away as captives. Inside, Kitty and the girls ran upstairs frantically with the toddlers, urging the other children on, and rushed into a second-floor bedroom. There, General Schuyler barricaded the door, dragging and pushing furniture, and took up a position at the window, pistol cocked, determined to fight to the end and to ward off his attackers.
Eliza never forgot the awful sound of the front door cracking as it broke open. “The attack and defense of the house was bloody and obstinate, on both sides,” British officer Barry St. Leger reported of the mission to capture General Schuyler later. The children were hysterical by now, and in that moment a terrible realization swept over Kitty Schuyler. She had forgotten baby Catherine downstairs in the cradle. Eliza watched as her courageous mother crumbled.
Kitty was on her knees. Angelica was crying. Eliza looked on in horror. Peggy took in the scene and, ever impetuous, acted. Someone needs to get the baby. Eliza read the thought on the face of her sister, but the wheels in her brain turned too slowly. Peggy swept her skirts up into a fist and, with a defiant flounce, turned on her heel and bolted down the staircase. Before Eliza could think to move, Peggy was already in the hallway.
With the assailants in the next room and the sound of crashing and the clank of silver, Peggy flew down the stairs and caught up her infant sister. Then she gripped the banister and prepared to lurch toward the landing. Before she could move, a burst of air blew past her. Only as she heard a dull thud and felt something tugging at her skirts did Peggy realize that a tomahawk had pinned her dress to the stair’s wooden railing. Jerking the fabric free and clutching her infant sister tightly, she turned to run and came instead face-to-face with Captain John Meyers—formerly a tenant farmer from the neighborhood and now a Loyalist assassin—coming out of the dining room where the raiders were stealing the family silver.
Peggy’s heart sank. She would be taken captive.
“Wench, wench, where is your master?” demanded John Meyers.
Wench, indeed, thought Peggy. But the fool had mistaken her for a servant and not the general’s daughter. Peggy, thinking fast, played along. “Gone to alarm the town,” Peggy quipped defiantly.
Listening at the top of the stairs, gun cocked and anxious for his daughter, General Schuyler took up the ruse and bellowed for the imaginary reinforcements.
“Come on, my brave fellows, surround the house and secure the villains, who are plundering.”
John Meyers stopped and stammered. Then he decided to hightail it. The attackers fled, taking the family silver and the three sentinels in the yard with them as bounty and captives. But they left Peggy and the baby.
When Alexander learned of the assault a week later, he wrote urging his father-in-law to beef up the protections. “Upon the whole I am glad this unsuccessful attempt has been made,” he wrote to Eliza. “It will prevent his hazarding himself hereafter as he has been accustomed to do.” It was suddenly occurring to Alexander as well that Albany might not be the safest place for his pregnant wife and unborn baby.
As their separation stretched into the end of August, Eliza and Alexander hadn’t seen each other for two months. Again. It felt like those long months of their courtship all over. The army was heading south for the coming battle at Yorktown, and Alexander would, at last, lead a fighting regiment, but being so far from Eliza when danger lurked on the frontier was distressing and triggered all Alexander’s old insecurities and obsessions. “I am unhappy my Betsey,” he wrote. “I am unhappy beyond expression, I am unhappy because I am to be so remote from you, because I am to hear from you less frequently than I have been accustomed to do.” No matter what she did, Eliza could never write enough, and it was worse when war and distance delayed their letters further. Alexander seemed not to understand that there was a house full of clamoring children and that the summer linen needed airing. He did not see that the garden was heavy with crops at the end of the summer or that it all needed curing and preserving. He knew she was pregnant, but what he could not see was how often she was tired. There were relatives who came for morning calls, and new arrivals in Albany.
One of those new arrivals was a law student who quickly made friends with the Van Rensselaer family and found his way into the sitting room at the Pastures at teatime with Eliza and her sisters. A slight young man with black eyes and thinning hair, he announced himself as Aaron Burr, but to Eliza he needed no introduction. Everyone knew the scandal about Lieutenant Colonel Burr. Her Livingston cousins said that he was carrying on an adulterous love affair with the wife of a British officer. Eliza looked at him curiously. What was so special about him that Theodosia Prevost was willing to gamble her reputation?
With distractions like this, it was easy to miss making the post when her father called, especially when the right words to say to Alexander in a letter came to her slowly and never carried the fullness of their meaning. And what were the words with which to say to Alexander that she was frightened? She wanted to be supportive. But she hated the idea of him fighting.
Alexander was excited about heading into battle. September was an anxious month on the front lines. Things looked dicey. But in October, the tide turned at Yorktown at last decisively in favor of the Americans. Alexander was jubilant.
Even in the midst of war, though, he could not help chiding Eliza yet again for not writing letters to him often enough. If she gave birth to a son, he joked, he might forgive her. A daughter, he wrote, would surely inherit all the charms of her mother and “the caprices of her father and then she will enslave, tantalize and plague one half the sex.”
And it wasn’t only war and the thought of losing Alexander that panicked Eliza. As her belly swelled, so did Eliza’s apprehensions. Marie-Charlotte had lost her two-year-old son John. Eliza wept at the thought of such a little casket. Every woman privately feared the agonizing and all-too-common death from childbed fever. Eliza had been with Angelica during the birth of her first two children in Boston. She now sat with her older sister in September as she delivered her third baby—named John, after his father—in their old bedroom in Albany, with nothing more to ease the racking pain than a generous slug of their father’s brandy.
As Alexander and Edward marched toward Yorktown, Eliza and Marie-Charlotte had another worry to consider. When camp fever took Martha Washington’s son at Yorktown, his twenty-five-year-old widow lost not only her husband but the custody of her two children. The law was not a friend to young widows, even to widows who were the daughters of wealthy families. Even for those lucky few, children and estates passed to the care of fathers and uncles, sons and brothers. For impoverished widows with children, Eliza shuddered to think about the desperate realities of penury an
d the poorhouse.
If something happened to Alexander, Eliza would not get to make the decisions about how to raise the baby even now growing inside her. The injustice left Eliza anxious—and indignant. Someday, someone would need to do something about it. No one yet had any inkling—herself included—that this someone would one day be Eliza.
CHAPTER 8
Peggy, 1781–84
In early November, Alexander made his way home at last to Albany and Eliza.
She had been watching for him. Her father read the military news. It would not be long, General Schuyler said each night at dinner. Alexander was ebullient now in his letters. His fondest wish had been granted: he had seen active service as a commanding officer. “Two nights ago, my Eliza, my duty and my honor obliged me to take a step in which your happiness was too much risked,” Alexander had written in one letter that autumn, assuring her the danger was past—but not wanting either to diminish too much the adventure. All the men said that the tide was turning in Yorktown.
At the wharf in the mornings on their way back from church, Peggy and Eliza would stop to ask for news of the schooner masters. When Alexander came at last up the broad avenues of trees from the river and swept her up in his embrace, Eliza could hardly believe the wait was finally over.
The Americans won their independence with the surrender at Yorktown in October, but in the autumn of 1781 the decisive nature of the victory was not yet apparent. It would take two years to hammer out the withdrawal of thirty thousand troops and a peace treaty, amid ongoing skirmishes and frontier raids. But the British were fighting too many wars, in too many foreign theaters, and Yorktown had the welcome effect of clarifying priorities. The campaign, at any rate, was over for the winter, and Alexander was back in Albany.
His arrival came not a moment too soon. Eliza was exasperated with spending so much time apart. She was weary, too, of living with her parents. Alexander reassured her that from here forward, her wish for the future would be what mattered. She had, he had written tenderly during his last weeks at Yorktown, “the assurance of never more being separated. Every day confirms me in the intention of renouncing public life, and devoting myself wholly to you. Let others waste their time and their tranquillity in a vain pursuit of power and glory; be it my object to be happy in a quiet retreat with my better angel.” That was all Eliza wanted. And for a little while, it seemed possible.
The news of that new winter season in Albany together was the death of Eliza’s great-uncle.
Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, the father of Eliza’s wayward younger cousin, Maria, was buried in December at a family funeral in nearby Rensselaerwyck, where the new heir and feudal patroon was the seventeen-year-old Stephen, a heavy-drinking and headstrong young lord of the manor fresh from his first term at Harvard. Alexander, who arrived home and promptly got sick with a cough that lasted for weeks, was not well enough to attend the service, but Eliza and Peggy went with the family. Aaron Burr, living by now with the Van Rensselaer family while studying to pass the bar examination in Albany and in and out of General Schuyler’s law library at the Pastures, was also almost certainly in attendance.
Marriage was still very much on the minds of the Schuyler sisters. Alexander called them simply “the Girls,” and the girls were furious with Alexander’s friend Major Nicholas Fish for jilting one young woman of their acquaintance. “I am told Miss is in great distress,” Alexander warned Fish, and “you must be cautious in this matter, or your character will run some risk, and you are sensible how injurious it might be to have the reputation of levity in a delicate point. The Girls have got it among them that this is not your first infidelity.” Peggy was also still man hunting.
The young teenage patroon Stephen Van Rensselaer, home at the estate in Albany for the funeral and holiday season, too, took one look at his sexy and sarcastic older cousin, the now twenty-four-year-old Peggy Schuyler, and became infatuated. Wiser heads quickly packed him back off to college. That would not, however, be the end of the story.
For Eliza, the beginning of 1782 was the last month of her pregnancy and was exhausting and uncomfortable. Alexander fussed solicitously, and she worried that his cough lingered. On January 22 she finally gave birth safely to a little boy, whom they promptly named Philip after her father.
After several weeks of rest, Eliza and Alexander then moved into a small farm owned by her parents, not far from the Pastures, where the new young family happily threw themselves into housekeeping. Alexander confessed to a friend, “You cannot imagine how entirely domestic I am growing. I lose all taste for the pursuits of ambition, I sigh for nothing but the company of my wife and my baby.” He cast aside his law books and his papers, sat by the fire rocking the cradle, and turned his mind to sorting out their glassware and china. He was putting together a little wine cellar and planned some elegant entertaining. Could an acquaintance help him find four pint-size wine decanters? A dozen wineglasses? Beer tumblers? Eliza sorted little jars of seeds and planned for springtime and their vegetable garden. There on their little farm, they spent the winter nesting.
Alexander retired from the military and found employment as a state tax collector. They were short of cash, and Eliza sometimes wondered how to make the household accounts come right, but she was happy. She loved being a mother, and Alexander was a devoted, doting father. Alexander had wondered in his letters before his marriage if she could live simply. He need not have worried about the good-natured Eliza. What more could she need except this?
All spring and into the summer, they lived quietly in Albany. Alexander was engrossed in studying for the bar examination, with an eye toward becoming qualified as a lawyer. General Schuyler had the second-finest law library anywhere in New York, and in the afternoons Alexander read in his father-in-law’s study. Also granted permission to use the law library and to live, for a time, at the Pastures, was the twenty-six-year-old Aaron Burr, who had been introduced to the Schuyler family by the good offices of General Alexander McDougall. Large estate homes frequently opened their doors to other members of the well-networked gentry, and the Pastures was no exception. But when Aaron Burr soon became fast friends with Stephen Van Rensselaer, Aaron confided in his amorous letters to Mrs. Prevost that the teenage patroon gallantly arranged for him to live instead with Schuyler and Van Rensselaer aunts in Albany. Aaron and Alexander, whose futures would someday be bound together so disastrously, studied side by side in companionable silence in the early 1780s.
In the evenings, Eliza and Alexander rode together along the lanes that Eliza had known as a girl, and Alexander shared her enthusiasm for fine horses and galloping. He listened with interest as Eliza and her mother talked about the deer in the garden and the plant specimens they were always hunting. Aaron Burr came for tea in the front parlor. Kitty sent her daughter gifts of fresh fruits to preserve for the winter, and new potatoes. Alexander wrote and studied, and they sat in church on Sundays in the family pew with her parents. “I have been employed for the last ten months in rocking the cradle and studying the art of fleecing my neighbors,” Alexander reported cheerfully to his friend the Marquis de Lafayette.
Changes came with the autumn. Alexander passed his bar examination and was honored with an appointment to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia as a New York representative. Now started the hard work of building a country. In November, Alexander went south ahead of Eliza and baby Philip to find a new home for the family. So much for Alexander’s promise to abandon ambition and a public life for domestic quiet.
Eliza understood. And she tried to be patient. She had promised to be a Roman wife, and she believed in the republic. But it meant time apart again, and Eliza hated it. Once again, Alexander could not help pressing Eliza for letters, however affectionately. “Remember your promise,” he wrote. “Don’t fail to write me by every post. I shall be miserable if I do not hear once a week from you and my precious infant. You both grow dearer to me every day. I would give the world for a kiss from either of you.”
As Eliza traveled south to Philadelphia at last in January, weeks later than planned, Peggy returned north to Albany to help their mother with the children, and there was one other addition to the Schuyler household in the winter of 1783. Their nineteen-year-old cousin, another Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, took a position as Philip Schuyler’s estate secretary. Cousin Kiliaen was especially close with their impetuous cousin Stephen Van Rensselaer, who was away until June at school in Harvard.
When Eliza returned home for a summer visit in June, not long after Stephen Van Rensselaer’s return to Albany, she walked into a household rocked by chaos.