Eliza Hamilton

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  CHAPTER 17

  The Widow, 1805–6

  The scandal of Alexander’s death consumed the city. Aaron Burr fled, as much to avoid a beating at the hands of a mob as to evade arrest. In the weeks to come, a grand jury would indict Burr on charges that, “not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the Instigation of the devil,” he “feloniously and willfully did Murder” General Hamilton.

  Eliza was deaf to all of it. She retreated into her family circle and turned to her sister. Eliza and the younger children traveled up the Hudson to visit her father at the end of July. When she returned to New York City a few weeks later, she felt more steady. She and the older children resumed regular Sunday church services and visited Alexander’s grave after the sermon. Eliza and her daughter now made a habit after church of visiting Elizabeth De Hart Bleecker, her brother Andrew Bleecker, and his young wife, Frances. Here, Eliza could talk about Alexander with those who knew and admired him. As a Christmas gift for one of Elizabeth’s sons Eliza tenderly wrapped a miniature statuary bust of Alexander.

  The frequent references in Elizabeth’s journal to “Miss Hamilton,” who visited with her mother but also came alone for tea and parties with the other young people, show that, in the immediate aftermath of her father’s death, Angelica Hamilton’s mental state remained in balance. That was a relief. Eliza had enough troubles. Her greatest worry was for the future of her oldest boys—especially when she understood the appalling state of her finances.

  By the end of August, still caught up in the dreadful business of responding to heartfelt letters of condolences, Eliza was only beginning to grasp the full extent of the financial catastrophe bearing down upon her.

  Alexander had drawn up a list of assets and debts, and the plain facts were that the latter significantly outstripped the former. There was a large mortgage on the Grange and precious little in savings. Alexander—like Eliza, only in his late forties—had counted on another decade of working. Or more.

  His friends, left to unravel the estate for his widow, were more concerned even than they let on to Eliza. And Eliza already knew enough to panic. Alexander had left his widow in a very difficult position. Letters went back and forth among the friends in July, debating what should be done, and a group of Alexander’s friends “immediately set about the execution of the plan suggested . . . to raise a competent sum of money to relieve General Hamilton’s family from the possibility of embarrassment and to provide a fund for their support.” On August 6, a sultry Monday morning in New York City, Oliver Wolcott called to order a meeting, “on the Subject of Gen. Hamilton affairs . . . at the election room in the Bank of N.Y.,” attended by a half-dozen men, including Edward and William Tilghman, to discuss the matter with some urgency. Among other plans to provide for Eliza and the children, more than thirty-five men donated to a trust of income-producing lands in Pennsylvania. John Church took a lead in arranging matters and added his contribution.

  But Angelica was left to break the news to Eliza that she still could not afford to return permanently to her home in Harlem. John advised that carrying on alone at the estate, without Alexander’s income, would be difficult, even with her father’s offer to send down in the fall from Albany any supplies of beef, pork, and butter that Eliza and the children wanted. The Grange had been an extravagance they could barely afford, even when Alexander was furiously working. “Your brother[-in-law] deems it the most prudent,” Angelica wrote Eliza, “that you remain where you are, as it is utterly impossible for you to be at the Grange without horses, and their expense will pay for your house rent. He thinks the Grange might be let.” But renting the Grange would just delay the inevitable. Eliza’s heart broke to think of losing her last ties to a home with Alexander under the gavel at public auction, but there was no other choice. She rented a small home on Warren Street in the city, and toward the end of October Eliza began moving special items from the Grange into the city. Her father encouraged her not to stint, at least, on her rental accommodation. He would make up any shortfall. Philip Schuyler urged her to find a place “sufficiently large that you may not be in the least crowded, for remember, that it is my intention that you should be well accommodated, and make Every want immediately known to me that I may have the pleasure of obviating it.”

  It was the end of October before Eliza could face the Grange. How painful it would be, her father perceived, to return to “a place where the Sweet Smiles, the Amiable affability, the Chearful and enduring Attentions of the best of men had been wont to meet your Eyes.” There was nothing for it but to start packing. “I have removed the Bust [of Alexander],” she wrote her father the next week, “from that habitation that I had expected it would have been for a length of time you will easily imagine my dear papa my feelings.”

  How to launch her older sons into adulthood was her greatest concern. Eliza was the mother of seven children, ranging from two to twenty, and she needed urgently to find a career position for her now eldest son, Alexander Jr., who had graduated in August from Columbia. He was away in the autumn, traveling through the New York frontier as far as Montreal in the age-old coming-of-age Schuyler tradition, but when he returned, he would need suitable employment. Alexander’s second, Nathaniel Pendleton—indicted as an “accessory before the fact” in the murder of Alexander and still dealing with the fallout of his role in the duel in Weehawken—looked for a place for the young man in a merchants’ accounting house in New England. Eliza’s father and Oliver Wolcott had other ideas for the young man, and Eliza found herself in the unenviable position of having a half-dozen bossy and opinionated men, each with a different idea, all taking charge simultaneously of her future.

  She was determined to make her own decisions, especially about the children. This was not easy to do and was met with opposition. She needed help, both with the boys and with money, and women without husbands were not encouraged to be independent. When Eliza resisted one of the men’s plans for her children, she softened the blow by playing to the hilt the role of the hapless, helpless widow. In time, it became a habit.

  What she wanted more than anything else, in the end, was to have the children near her. She had never wanted to be apart from them or from Alexander. Now, the thought was unbearable. “The Grievous Affliction I am under,” Eliza wrote, rejecting the plan for Alexander Jr.’s prospective move to New England, “will be added [to] the trembling mother’s anxiety for her child least he should fall in to evil. I have every assurance from him that he will be careful of himself but [even] New York has a thousand snares for an unprotected young man.” She was thinking of her eldest son and George Eacker. “Do I not owe it to the memory of my beloved Husband,” she pressed Nathaniel Pendleton, “to keep his children together? It was a plan he made in his last arrangement of his family that they should not be with out a parents care at all times. A plan in which I made the greatest sacrifice in my Life, it was that of being one half the week absent from him to take care of the younger while he took care of the Elder.”

  Eliza got her way, as she always intended. Alexander Jr. entered into a merchants’ house in New York City. Then she set about securing a place for her third son, John, at Columbia, where he would join his brother James, already a student.

  Philip Schuyler was a constant support now, support that was importantly financial but also emotional. The idea to write a biography of Alexander—a book that would set straight libelous attacks on his reputation and character and tell the story of the man, the father, and the hero of the American Revolution—was one that Eliza and General Schuyler first began to discuss together in November. For Eliza, the dream of someday telling her story of her husband was a lifeline, and she and her father were already deep in discussions about who would be the best author. “My dear papa,” Eliza wrote, “I have not said anything to Mr. [John] Mason respecting the subject that you and my self wished he should undertake. It is doubted weather his mode of writing would be equal to it. There is a Mr. [John] Johnston
thought of and tis said is desirous of it. Judge [James] Kent is acquainted with him and perhaps could give you an opinion.”

  Already, Eliza was beginning to imagine the day when she would have the courage to read again Alexander’s letters and to gather up anecdotes of her husband. Philip Schuyler had piles of correspondence, too, and decades of memories of a man whom he unreservedly admired. In warm, loving letters, Eliza and her father together laid out their modest plans for a future.

  Those plans were interrupted on November 18, 1804.

  Philip Schuyler had suffered for years from gout, and the Schuyler siblings considered it the family affliction. That autumn, it had flared badly, but Philip assured his daughter that his most recent bout was no worse than usual and mending.

  He had sent her on November 3, 1804, a sympathetic, heartwarming letter, assuring Eliza that her sorrow was not a burden. “That your afflictions, my dear, dearly beloved child, had added to mine,” he wrote, “was the natural result of a parent’s tenderness for so dutiful and affectionate a child, as he invariably experienced from you.”

  His gout, he assured her, too, was much better: “Since my last letter to you I have no gout; [and] although the ulcers in my feet and above my knee have been extensive, they bear a most favorable aspect of healing.” He was unable to walk about, but he had no pain, and as far as he was concerned, things were looking up.

  The trouble was not gout per se. It was the kidney damage caused after decades of the disease’s progress and the infected wounds in a seventy-year-old body. Peggy had died when gout went to her stomach. Faster than anyone in Albany thought possible, Philip Schuyler now succumbed, too, to organ failure.

  By the time Eliza got the news in New York City, her father had already been buried. The ulcerous sores and cankers urged a hasty service in the Schuyler family parlor followed by a speedy interment.

  The letter fell to the floor. Eliza was untethered.

  The death of her father was the beginning of a bitter inheritance dispute that would further devastate Eliza. She would not have believed that autumn that further devastation was possible.

  The passing of Philip Schuyler also meant that Eliza’s financial situation quickly went from precarious to dire. At those rare moments when her grief receded, worries about money and the children rose up instead to consume her.

  The crux of the family debate—also the subject of public commentary and more of the gossip Eliza hated—revolved around claims that their father had made generous financial provisions for Eliza after Alexander’s death, provisions that her siblings now viewed as an advance on her share of the inheritance.

  Alexander’s powerful friends had unwittingly fueled the rumor. When they’d met to untangle Alexander’s estate and had brought up the issue of raising money for a trust fund to support Eliza and the children, no one wanted to insult a rich man like Philip Schuyler by suggesting that he couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of his daughter. No matter what kind of a hash Alexander had left his finances in, surely, the men said, her wealthy father would support her.

  And, if Philip Schuyler had lived, there is no doubt that he had planned to help Eliza with the children’s college fees and promised to fill gaps in her ongoing household expenses. Her other siblings were all on firm financial ground, and, with the marriage of the youngest sister, Catherine, to a rich, if rather unpleasant, man named Samuel Malcolm, Philip Schuyler’s other daughters were provided for. Alexander’s death had left Eliza alone without a good income.

  The truth, however, was that the Schuyler fortune was smaller than the public at large imagined. Angelica, John, Alexander, and Eliza may have been the only ones in the family who knew the truth, and even Angelica assumed that the boom times of the 1790s had repaired some of her father’s earlier misfortune. What wealth existed was not only modest but largely illiquid, tied up in the family properties and real-estate investment. In the will recorded in early December at the Albany courthouse, the estate of Philip Schuyler showed a value of only $30,000 or $40,000, split among a half-dozen grown children and some grandchildren. Alexander’s debts were above $50,000, and Eliza’s share of the inheritance was nowhere near enough to provide her with a steady widow’s income, never mind the kind of windfall that might allow her to save the property in Harlem. Eliza accepted the inevitable, but it broke her heart to lose the house that had been Alexander’s family vision. The Grange would go on the auction block come springtime.

  It was too much. Eliza tumbled into the darkness of depression.

  She found herself now in the painful situation of also having to defend herself against accusations that she was double-dipping on her siblings. The family communications were tense and deeply complicated. Doubting Eliza’s integrity most openly were her brother Rensselaer, her sister Catherine, and Catherine’s husband, Samuel Malcolm. Cornelia and Washington Morton wavered. Angelica and John, who knew Alexander’s household affairs and finances intimately, sided with Eliza. The family divide left Eliza and her remaining brother, Philip Jr., as the eldest surviving son and an executor of his father’s will, to negotiate a wounding—and woundingly public—conversation that felt to Eliza a great deal like airing family laundry.

  She wished nothing more than that the earth would swallow her. She wished that she were dead, so she could be with Alexander. “A report has prevailed,” Eliza wrote her eldest brother somewhat hysterically,

  that my father gave me six thousand Dollars before I left it, let me assure you it is an untruth, it has given me some pain that I should be held up to the public in so unfavorable a point of view as on the one hand to request you to make provision for me, by some arrangement, and on the other, (as it is said) to be so amply provided for by my father. What but ill intent toward me could have been the motive to have given such an idea to the world and to my sisters and brothers? But this world is a world of evil passions, and I thank my God He strengthens my mind to look on them as steps to an entire resignation to His will, which I pray may fast approach me.

  In his last love letter to her, Alexander implored Eliza to turn to religion and the hope that they would meet again in heaven. Eliza clung to faith now like a drowning woman. She carried on in those darkest months only by remembering that she was the mother of Alexander’s small children.

  John Church acted in the estate matter for Eliza and Angelica, infuriating Samuel Malcolm and pitting the younger generation of Schuyler siblings against their two older sisters. John and Samuel butted heads, and things did not go smoothly. Some of the most hurtful accusations against Eliza were fueled by Samuel’s personal animosity toward Alexander and Philip Schuyler. Samuel and Catherine, like so many of the Schuyler girls before her, had eloped, but Philip Schuyler’s doubts about Samuel Malcolm had gone deeper than this ceremonial irregularity. The couple would not have needed to elope if the general had endorsed the marriage or this particular son-in-law. He must have wondered, at the end of his life, why so many of his daughters chose such dubious husbands. Alexander had been the exception.

  Politics were, as ever, part of the conflict. Samuel Malcolm’s staunch allegiance was to John Adams, and John Adams had not taken kindly to Alexander savaging his character and public conduct in an open letter in 1800. Adams was among Alexander’s most vituperative enemies, and that he helped to spread and likely believed some of the most scurrilous of the rumors about Alexander did not help family matters. More than a decade after the death of General Schuyler, years yet in the future, Samuel Malcolm could still be found complaining to Thomas Jefferson—another of Alexander’s political opponents—of the injustice of Alexander’s promotion and of the damage to his career when “my marriage with the youngest daughter of General Schuyler, invited me to Separate myself, from all public Services.” He had felt pressured to resign in the wake of the family scandal. But Samuel was also in the newspapers himself in 1805, facing accusations of fraud and financial misdealing, making Catherine’s inheritance and money a sensitive issue.

  Cat
herine, naturally, took the side of her husband, although her siblings tried to remember that she had little choice in the matter. Where Samuel led, she followed. When John Church tried to see Catherine to go over the will, she cut him and curtly sent word back with her housemaid that she was not “at home.” She also stopped calling on her older sisters and avoided her family.

  “Dear Sister,” Angelica wrote to Catherine on December 8, hoping to smooth things over, “Mr Church waited on you to deliver the enclosed paper, but you were not at home. I have not sent it before expecting every day to have the pleasure to see you—any other papers respecting my Father’s Estate in Mr. Church’s possession you may recall whenever it suits your leisure to call.” Catherine still kept her distance, although she felt guilty. Eliza was deeply hurt. She and Alexander had opened their home to her youngest sister for years so she could enjoy society and life in the city with her cousins, and Catherine’s betrayal felt intimate.

  The squabble about the inheritance went on for the better part of a year, but reached its lowest point in January of 1806. The terms of their father’s old-fashioned will left the largest portions of the estate to his sons. The lion’s share went to the young son of their late first-born brother, John, and much of what remained was left to Eliza’s brothers, Philip Jr. and Rensselaer. The will, written before the two youngest girls were settled into marriages, left legacies of $2,000 for Cornelia and $5,000 for Catherine. Otherwise, the surviving sisters, along with Peggy’s young son, Stephen, were left to inherit, as tenants in common, one-fifth shares of a partition of farms and land in the Saratoga Patent. Theirs was a modest inheritance.

  The question of whether Eliza cheated the estate by hiding a gift of $6,000 poisoned even the simplest financial conversations with Samuel Malcolm and made working together as siblings and tenants in common impossible. Eliza learned in January from the Albany attorney managing the estates that she was due income of $62.35 from her share of the estates, but that the payment couldn’t be released because of the conflict with her siblings. Eliza was mortified—not least because she desperately needed the sixty-two dollars.