Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Privately, Kitty was also mourning. On July 29, 1761, as word of Philip’s adventures at sea were making their way back to New York, she gave birth to twins. The little boy, named John after his maternal grandfather and after a family friend, John Bradstreet, died at birth. The baby girl she christened Cornelia, after Philip’s mother. Philip would never meet his small daughter either. On August 29, a month after the infant’s birth, Kitty awoke to a dead baby. Angelica and Eliza were just old enough to remember later the loss of their baby sister.

  When their father returned home at last in 1762, it was to a freshly completed family home, with pretty gardens and a bright-blue front parlor. Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy would spend their childhoods shuttling between here and the family wild lands in Saratoga. Behind the house and the barns of the Pastures rolled eighty acres of farmland and woods. Beyond the front gardens, large windows and a portico faced east to the sunrise and the Hudson River. Despite the damage done to Philip Schuyler’s health by the sea voyages, Kitty was again pregnant in no time.

  One of Eliza’s childhood friends, Anne MacVicar, later left an account of growing up with the Schuyler girls and their cousins in Albany, and it is the story of a carefree and happy childhood, despite the conflicts and unsettled countryside around them. Anne, the daughter of a Scottish officer in the British army who had fought with Philip Schuyler in the battle at Ticonderoga, was eleven the year she met Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy, and for the next three years the girls were constant playmates.

  The world Anne MacVicar describes was full of laughter and freedom. Those who met the Schuyler family remarked, almost to a one, on the easy intimacy and emotional warmth they extended to each other and to strangers. Eliza’s parents were not bohemians, not in the least. Philip and Kitty were disciplined people and moderately pious. The Schuyler family were members of the Dutch Reformed Church and certainly religious, although their Calvinism was of the sort that fostered entrepreneurship and independence rather than social restrictions, and Eliza’s family was more English than Dutch when it came to playing cards or dancing. Eliza and her sisters also grew up on the frontier, surrounded by a wilderness that began less than a day’s journey from Albany. The keenly class-conscious Sir William Johnson, a friend of their father and an outsize presence in the valley, kept his teenage daughters locked up in a wing of his house and ordered an eagle-eyed governess to watch them, as was common practice regarding young aristocratic women in fashionable London. Philip and Kitty Schuyler found the idea repugnant. The Schuyler girls were to be integrated into the complex and sometimes dangerous world of war and politics that went on around them.

  It was a world that schooled a young Eliza in some hard realities. The death rate on the frontier was astonishingly high, and the Schuyler family was not spared those losses. Forty percent of children born in the 1760s died as infants or toddlers. A year after the death of the twins, Kitty gave birth again, to a long-awaited son and heir, whom they once again hopefully named John Bradstreet Schuyler. But the winter that year was particularly hard, with the first snows coming in early November, and the summer that followed was swampy, humid, and sickly. Between the biting cold and the summer putrid fevers, it was an unlucky year to be born, and this second John was no luckier than the first little John had been. He, too, died before his first birthday. By twenty-nine, Kitty Schuyler had given birth to six children and buried half of them.

  Smallpox continued to plague the Mohawk and Hudson Valleys that year, as well. Sir William Johnson built a new, bespoke mansion, named Johnson Hall, and the family there was struck down with the disease, which left those fortunate enough to survive disfigured and disabled. By late summer, New York and Philadelphia were in the grip of the fearsome yellow fever. American cities were small during Eliza’s girlhood, and the horror of contagion at close quarters was a predominant factor. Then there were the unexceptional deaths, the ones that resulted from childhood diseases like mumps and measles, from carriage accidents and bucking horses, from pleasure boats tipped into swirling rivers, and from age. Eliza’s grandmother, Cornelia, died in 1762, the year Eliza turned five, and the body was laid out in black crepe in the front blue parlor. Eliza missed the warm scent of her grandmother.

  Despite the loss and mourning that inevitably came with colonial life in America, Eliza and Anne both later remembered their childhoods as idyllic, pastoral. The children played on the rivers and in the forests, accompanied by Prince, Kitty’s most trusted African slave, to watch over them.

  The constant presence of enslaved people must be noted as a historical fact, too, in Eliza’s girlhood story. The Schuyler family owned as many as a dozen slaves during the lifetime of Eliza’s parents, men and women born in the New World but whose bloodlines had their origins in Africa, the native peoples of North America, and, especially, Madagascar.

  Cousins piled into canoes for summertime trips to harvest wild berries, and Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy learned from the local Indian girls who camped in the fields near their home, heading to and from summer council meetings each year, how to make willow baskets and string belts of brightly colored wampum from beads and shells to tell a story. Needlework was an essential part of a young girl’s education, and the Schuyler girls, like their parents and their aunts and uncles, all spoke at least bits and pieces of the Iroquois languages. They took lessons from a dancing master in Albany, learning the intricate steps of the minuet and how to rise and fall on the balls of their feet while turning in circles. From their mother, they learned to cut out patterns for clothes and how to preserve strawberries for winter. The girls read Shakespeare and the Bible aloud to their great-aunt, Margarita Schuyler, and learned to speak French, as well as English and their family’s native Flemish; in the winter, when the river froze, the girls eagerly pulled on their warm fur muffs and the smart beaver caps that their father had ordered especially for all the children and went for skating parties and sleigh races.

  Soon, that childhood would also include long, wild summers in what seemed to Eliza and her sisters a magical forest kingdom. The French and Indian War was behind them now, and, upon the death of Eliza’s grandmother Cornelia Schuyler, another sizable inheritance passed to the girls’ father, including more land in Saratoga and the money Philip would need to commercialize and develop it. Kitty gave birth at last to a healthy son, whom they again named John Bradstreet, the third infant to bear the name and the first survivor. Philip Schuyler already dreamed of the day he would leave his son and, in smaller shares, his daughters a great legacy in Saratoga.

  CHAPTER 2

  Fine Frontier Ladies, 1765–74

  If Eliza swung high enough, she could nearly touch the branches. When Angelica scolded, she pulled back on the ropes and swung higher.

  If she’d looked out from the treetops, she could have seen her mother directing the family slaves as they planted lilac bushes along the new foundation. Mother had promised them a strawberry garden, where they could eat their fill, and the girls had a great swing in a tree on the lawns, which Prince had made for them.

  The Schuyler family spent the summer of 1765 not at the Pastures, but camping on Eliza’s father’s new lands in Saratoga. They lived, army style, in roomy canvas shelters that snapped in the breezes, while work was going on all around them. Father oversaw the laborers, who brought down great virgin pines that shuddered and fell, and the men next raised up a sawmill and planed the logs into timber with which Mother said they would build a home. It would have two stories and such pretty flowers.

  For Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy, this frontier plantation was a second childhood home, just as much as the grand riverfront compound in Albany, and the family increasingly spent all but the harshest months of the winter at the edge of the wilderness in Saratoga.

  Eliza was nine in 1766, the summer when the house at Saratoga was completed. By now her father was a rich businessman with contracts running the ferry trade from Albany to New York City and on his private fleet of schooners, and he would soon be pro
moted to the rank of colonel. After Stephen Van Rensselaer and James Duane, both relations of her mother, Philip Schuyler was the third-richest man in the Upper Hudson, and all around them at Saratoga that wealth was growing.

  These were working estates, where much of the family’s food and income was produced, running to large acreages, and dozens of tenants and slaves provided the grand landowning families like the Schuylers with the income that allowed them to live like the colonial aristocracy of which they considered themselves part.

  The privilege did not go uncontested. Periodic uprisings, by tenants and, later, by slaves, preoccupied men like Philip Schuyler throughout New York and New Jersey. That spring, the plantation owners were especially edgy after an upstart Westchester County manorial tenant named William Prendergast incited a rent war that unsettled estates all along the Hudson River as far north as Albany. A thousand angry farmers or more stormed the countryside, demanding that the doors of the landlords’ debt prisons be thrown open, and at the estate of Kitty’s father, John Van Rensselaer, fisticuffs gave way to bullets. At Rensselaerwyck, the Albany County sheriff, Harmanus Schuyler, laid siege to a farmhouse, and large landowners scrambled to the frontier to assess the mood among their own distant tenants.

  The Schuyler plantation at Saratoga was at the crossroads that summer of several especially important land patents, many of which were owned by the Schuyler family’s relations. Eliza and her sisters listened quietly in front of the fireplace on cool summer nights that year, while the grown-ups talked passionately and sometimes angrily of danger from their tenants and, increasingly, about bitter politics. Eliza’s Van Cortlandt, Van Rensselaer, and Livingston cousins all made the trip upriver to Saratoga to stay with the family in late June and to check on property. Eliza and her sisters, along with their constant playmate Anne MacVicar, raced to meet younger cousins on the docks as the sloops arrived from downriver. Twelve-year-old Mary Watts, a china-doll beauty and a De Lancey cousin, was one of those arrivals, and she may have come alone for the summer because her family was already quarreling with the Livingston relations. Angelica and Eliza also became fast friends sometime this summer, or one soon after, with their cousin Kitty Livingston, from a New Jersey branch of the family, and Eliza and Kitty sent each other gossipy letters as teenagers.

  There was a great deal to discuss urgently in the political realm, and it wasn’t only the prospect of revolting tenants that had the grand landowners like Eliza’s father so agitated. Resentment toward the British crown was also part of what the adults discussed in the evenings. Eliza heard terms now like the “Stamp Act” and understood that the new law made her father and her uncles angry. Eliza also heard now words like “tyranny” and “taxes.” Soon, the tenants were not the only ones beginning to murmur of revolution. Some of her visiting kinsmen talked of something now called the Sons of Liberty, a secret movement whose motto was “No taxation without representation.”

  William Prendergast would have to pay for his treacherous rent war. All the visitors agreed with Philip Schuyler and Eliza’s angry Van Rensselaer relations. Prendergast stood trial at the end of that summer, facing down a court whose judges were primarily landowners.

  Unsurprisingly, the landlords found against a tenant revolution. The sentence, when it came down, was gruesome: Prendergast was ordered “hanged by the neck, and then shall be cut down alive, and his entrails and his privy members shall be cut from his body, and shall be burned in his sight, and his head shall be cut off, and his body shall be divided in four parts, and shall be disposed of at the king’s pleasure.” This was the price of rebellion against the British crown a decade before the American Revolution.

  Angelica, who had been invited to New York City at the end of the summer for a stay with new British governor Sir Henry Moore, his wife, and their teenage daughter, Henrietta, had a front-row seat for some of the drama of the Prendergast trial. The wife of William Prendergast, a woman so beautiful that jurors at her husband’s trial were sternly cautioned not to let that influence proceedings, roared up to the front courtyard of the governor’s mansion on a steed and pleaded with Sir Henry to commute her husband’s terrible death sentence. Angelica watched agog with excitement. Sir Henry, moved as much by Mehitable Prendergast’s beauty as by her speech, gallantly overturned the verdict and immediately issued William Prendergast a full pardon.

  It was a disastrous misstep with the great landowners of New York. The governor’s pardon turned William Prendergast into a tenant folk hero, fueled resentful talk of counter-revolt, and unleashed fresh complaints about years of British mismanagement among the wealthy of the colony, including Philip Schuyler. The governor had just unwittingly helped to light one of the fuses of the coming revolution.

  It was another minor revolt, though, that captured Angelica’s imagination that fall, during her first grown-up visit to New York City. The governor’s wife doted on the ten-year-old social butterfly, and for her part Angelica idolized the governor’s haughty and impulsive daughter. The stylish seventeen-year-old Henrietta promptly added a dose of great excitement to Angelica’s trip when, disobeying the dictatorial commands of her father, she climbed over the garden wall and ran off with a young captain in one of the society scandals of the season. Her impulsive actions would forever define Angelica’s idea of the romantic.

  When Angelica returned from her city sojourn, the other girls jealously and sometimes suspiciously noted the change. When Eliza ran across the lawns down to the river to meet the boats, Angelica cringed with embarrassment and would no longer race her. Angelica practiced mincing daintily down the gravel path and lifting her skirts above the dust like Henrietta instead. Angelica sat primly on the edge of the seat when company came and fussed in the mornings longer with her bonnet ribbons. This or that was all the New York fashion, she solemnly informed her sisters. She shrugged off Eliza’s urgent whispers to hurry or Papa would be cross. Eliza and Anne MacVicar still joked together decades later over “Angelica’s early air of Elegance & dignity when she first returned from New York.” When Kitty and Philip Schuyler noticed the change, they decided it was time to send both the older girls off to boarding school. They had on their hands budding young ladies. Those early airs and graces would need to be honed and disciplined at school if in a few years’ time the girls were to become eligible young brides and, as Philip Schuyler insisted should be the case, obedient daughters.

  Eliza may have gone away to school earlier than the fall of 1768, but she was definitely in New York City by the autumn of the year she turned eleven. Mrs. Grant, a fussy, respectable widow living on Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan, agreed to board “two of the children for 50 a year, two pounds of tea, one of loaf sugar each, their stockings & shoes mended, but new work must be paid for the making.” Their father, as a man on the rise in the world of New York politics now, was in and out of the city, but Eliza’s parents primarily entrusted the girls to the care of her mother’s cousins, Elizabeth and John Livingston, who soon reported back to the girls’ parents that “the young ladies are in perfect health and improve in their education in a manner beyond belief, and are grown to such a degree that all the tucks in their gowns had to be let out some time ago.”

  The education of wealthy colonial girls like Eliza and her sisters had a clear and definite focus: that of training young women in the social graces and household skills that would make them desirable wives and estate mistresses. Angelica and Eliza already knew how to read. Aunt Gertrude had seen to that and had insisted that the girls practice reading Shakespeare aloud while she did her needlework. Music was an essential element of a family’s private entertainment, and all three of the Schuyler girls learned to play the English “guittar,” although Eliza had to admit that her sisters were more skillful, no matter how long she practiced. Peggy was the one with real musical talent.

  Writing and penmanship, especially, set clever upper-class girls apart from the middle classes. It was expected that, like their mother, Angelica, Eliza, and Peg
gy would someday manage large household accounts, so clear, neat penmanship and basic arithmetic were important skills. Very young girls learned their first numbers and letters by embroidering samplers, and needlework was a universal skill among ladies. Mastery of the subtler points of grammar and spelling, though, was considered particularly “elegant,” and only a young woman who was an unusually “fine scholar” would consistently spell correctly.

  In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson would write a letter to his eleven-year-old daughter, Polly, offering a glimpse of the education of girls in elite colonial circles. He advised:

  With respect to the distribution of your time, the following is what I should approve:

  From 8. to 10. o’clock practise music.

  From 10. to 1. dance one day and draw another.

  From 1. to 2. draw on the day you dance, and write a letter the next day.

  From 3. to 4. read French.

  From 4. to 5. exercise yourself in music.

  From 5. to till bedtime, read English, write [i.e., practice penmanship], &c.

  . . . Write also one letter a week. . . . Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word, consider how it is spelt, and, if you do not remember it, turn to a dictionary. It produces great praise to a lady to spell well.

  The education the Schuyler girls received closely mirrored that which Thomas Jefferson wanted for his daughter a decade later, and Angelica flourished as a young scholar and bloomed as a fine young lady.

  Eliza struggled. She was never good at spelling, and she found writing awkward. She was self-conscious of her letters. Angelica danced more prettily. The French master despaired of Eliza’s accent and how she stumbled on her verbs, while Angelica chattered like a native. Angelica found her introduction to New York society thrilling. Eliza, whose great talent was the careful, intricate embroidery that Angelica didn’t have the patience for, longed to be home in the country.