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

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Albany to Saratoga was forty miles, through country lanes and a trail through the pine forest. When Kitty was less than a half-dozen miles from her destination, panicked refugees rushing in the other direction blocked the roadway. Families living farther north up the river were fleeing the advance of the British troops and their Iroquois allies. Farmers and their wives begged Kitty to turn back. Ahead, only a savage death awaited her. She would have to travel through two miles of dense forest on the last approach to the house, risking an easy ambush, and Kitty’s heart was racing. She had lived with war her entire life on the frontier, though, and Kitty knew how small things could tip the outcome in a battle. She squared her shoulders and announced, “The wife of the General must not be afraid,” before she swished the heavy reins and urged the carriage forward.

  The Saratoga house in late July was in full midsummer beauty. Her orchards were heavy with green fruit, which would ripen in autumn, and the carefully tended gardens were blooming. In the distance, the mountains rose up from the valley floor, and Kitty knew that somewhere to the north the patriots were fighting. She turned and ordered the household staff to begin packing up the family silver. When an army rider raced into the courtyard, her heart stopped. She took into her hand another message from the general. The situation was worse than he had feared. He had received her message. There was one more thing he needed her to do before she returned to the children and the safety of Albany.

  Burn everything in the fields. Those were the instructions. Kitty must destroy everything they had worked all summer to produce. They had to hope the local tenants would follow suit if she led by example. If they did, when General Burgoyne came down the Hudson River with his troops, he would find scorched earth all around him. Everyone in the valley knew precisely how hard it could be to survive a hungry New York winter. General Schuyler wanted that aching hunger for the British.

  Horses were of immense value in the midst of battle. As a soldier’s wife, Kitty saw that Philip and his officers would need the animals, now that the tide was against them. Kitty ordered the post rider to take back to the general at Fort Edwards all four of her mounts and a reply letter, promising that she would do instantly what he requested. The servants were to hitch oxen instead to her carriage for her return trip in the morning.

  Then Kitty Schuyler walked out into the wheat fields in the fading sunshine. One of the family slaves carried a torch, but when she told the man to set the fields on fire, the frightened servant refused. To burn a crop was a serious thing, and a slave who did such a thing on purpose might easily swing from the gallows. “Very well,” Kitty sighed. “If you will not do it, I must do it myself.” Lighting one stick after another, lifting each high overhead before she flung it from her, taking care that the sparks did not fall into the fold of her skirts, Kitty set the fields alight corner by corner. When she finished, her hands were black with soot, and she watched as the flames swept across the dry earth and as smoke billowed up from the cornfields. As night fell, the ground shimmered red with embers.

  As the sun rose the next morning, she was ready. Kitty set off past the blackened fields driving a heavy ox-drawn carriage. The household servants walked behind for the slow, long journey back to the girls and Albany, where the story of the general’s courageous wife quickly became a legend. A century later, when people came to tell the story of small acts that helped to win the American Revolution, the tale of Catherine Schuyler burning her fields was still being repeated and depicted in illustrations.

  When the battle finally came at Ticonderoga, the Americans suffered a stunning defeat. Philip commanded the northern army, and the blame fell on him as the general. He was stripped of command amid politicized charges of dereliction of duty; incensed by the humiliating allegations, Philip demanded a full court-martial to clear his name of the trumped-up charges. As political infighting threw the American campaign into further disarray, British troops were battling their way down the Hudson. General Burgoyne was determined to drive the king’s army through New York, dividing the northern colonies from the southern colonies, with an eye to conquering both and destroying the American uprising. In the summer of 1777, that all looked increasingly possible. John Church’s professional charge as an army commissioner, assigned to audit the account books of the Northern Department at the moment of his father-in-law’s embarrassment, did nothing to ease tensions at home between a newly unemployed Philip Schuyler and his spendthrift son-in-law.

  In the Schuyler home as the summer came to a close, everyone was angry. Kitty was still fuming silently, John bristled, and Angelica was caught in the middle. Eliza retreated to work in her gardens and lamented that the countryside was too dangerous now for fast horseback riding. By September, “wearied out with the Disputes and Bickerings,” John had had enough. The young man decided once again to flee an uncomfortable position of his own creating. “I have determined to remain no longer in Commission,” he informed friends, “and have this Day sent my Resignation.” The next morning, John and Angelica set off for a new life in Boston. Both Angelica and Kitty were pregnant.

  When General Burgoyne reached Saratoga with his troops, Kitty Schuyler’s charred fields and an empty mansion awaited him. The British officers took possession of the family mansion, and, after a brief period of riotous revelry, during which Philip Schuyler’s wine cellars were emptied and the house looted and vandalized, General Burgoyne ordered the mansion and all the farms and mills on the property torched too. Richard Varick, Philip’s military secretary and the man Kitty was still hoping Eliza might marry, reported to General Schuyler, “No part of your buildings escaped their malice except a small outbuilding, and your upper sawmill, which is in the same situation we left it. Hardly a vestige of the fences is left except a few rails of the garden.” Losing her childhood home was a blow that hit Eliza keenly.

  The final battle at Saratoga came in early October, and the tide now turned in favor of the rebels. When the British surrendered, General Burgoyne was captured, and Philip Schuyler’s moment for revenge arrived. Word of admiration for Eliza’s father spread as far as Britain when he refused to take it.

  Baroness Frederika Riedesel was there with her military husband at the capitulation, and, as she put it later, “I must candidly confess that I did not present myself . . . with much courage to the enemy.” The baroness trembled as she stepped from her carriage at the American camp. She had never been a prisoner. Her eyes met those of a tall man who held out his hand to her. “Do not be alarmed,” he assured her, and he lifted her three little girls carefully down from the carriage. The man, she learned soon after, was General Schuyler.

  It was the turn of General Burgoyne, who had destroyed Philip and Kitty’s summer mansion, to be astonished next, when General Schuyler offered him and his men accommodation in the family home at Albany along with the baroness. They would be his prisoners, it was true. But Philip assured General Burgoyne that he would be welcomed as a fellow officer.

  “You are too kind to me—who have done you so much injury,” he told Philip.

  “Such is the fate of war,” Philip replied gallantly. “Let us not dwell on this subject.”

  “This gentleman,” General Burgoyne recounted later, “conducted me to a very elegant house and, to my great surprise, introduced me to Mrs. Schuyler and her family.”

  Baroness Riedesel recorded, “Our reception from General Schuyler, and his wife and daughters was not like the reception of enemies, but of the most intimate friends,” and the generosity and civility of the Schuyler family in the midst of war would be remembered long after the war was over. Among those who made the most charming impression on the officers and their wives was General Schuyler’s eldest unmarried daughter, Eliza. Later, there were toasts to the beauty and graces of Eliza and her sister Peggy at boozy dinners behind British lines by some of their new admirers. Those toasts to Eliza and Peggy would carry on throughout the conflict.

  General Burgoyne and his entourage stayed three days with the
Schuyler family in Albany. The baroness and her husband stayed longer, until the prisoners were transported to Boston and placed on parole—essentially under town arrest—in the sleepy river village of Cambridge. British men were barred from leaving Cambridge or entering Boston, but the wives of the captured officers could request passes for social visits and shopping. Few had the temerity. The reception among the patriots’ wives and daughters was not friendly. Baroness Frederika Riedesel, though, felt sure that she would find a gracious reception in at least one American household. She had yet to meet Angelica, now a socialite in Boston. She would shortly.

  In the midst of all the hustle and bustle of war, sometime in November 1777, something else important transpired.

  One of the officers fighting in the campaign was a young man dispatched to deliver an urgent letter to General Schuyler at his residence in Albany. The officer rode a fine horse along the country lane that led in the direction of his duty and considered himself lucky when he spotted coming toward him a young lady with lively dark eyes and cheeks flushed from fast riding, accompanied by a family slave for protection. With a handsome bow, he introduced himself as General Washington’s aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, and dared to wonder whether the lady could direct him to the Schuyler mansion.

  Eliza smiled at the gallant courtesy and twisted a bit in her saddle to get a look at this gentleman. She could never say what it was afterward, but something about him made her want to tease him gently. He took himself so seriously. She certainly hoped she could help, Eliza quipped lightly, seeing that the man he wanted was her father.

  Come on then, her look said, as she set off toward the Pastures. Wisps of dark hair blew in the wind. She was not a beauty, the young man noticed, but when Miss Schuyler laughed something wonderful happened.

  CHAPTER 5

  Hamilton, 1778–80

  It was not love at first sight.

  Apart from this brief encounter in Albany, it would be more than two years before Eliza would see Alexander Hamilton again.

  While the Revolutionary War continued to unfold on the northern front, Eliza was not there to witness the campaign or to meet with any of the young officers fighting it, although Alexander was a frequent presence. By the end of December 1777, Eliza had moved to Boston, where she was living with Angelica and John, helping her sister through her first pregnancy.

  When Eliza had time to dream of romance during those next two years she would spend in New England, she thought still of Tench Tilghman. Tench had not proposed. Her father, though, she was certain, would not refuse the match if he did. Tench, with his connections to their shared Livingston kin and his comparable wealth and status in colonial America, was just the kind of man a girl like her could expect to marry. He was a far more eligible bachelor, say, than the impoverished immigrant Colonel Alexander Hamilton.

  Mostly, though, Eliza was too busy in Boston to think much at all about the future. Angelica was struggling as a new bride. She had married at twenty-one. Her husband was thirty, and Angelica was learning that life as the young wife of a scoundrel was not always easy. John dressed in the latest styles, sparing no expense on his embroidered waistcoats and neck stocks, and he wanted to be surrounded by opulence at home also. Angelica’s dinner menus, the sisters quickly learned, were not up to her husband’s exacting standards. “I entreat you to purchase for Mrs. Carter,” John requested of an agent, “one or two of the best cookery books, as she is a young Housekeeper and wants to gain Experience.” Not that Angelica or Eliza did a great deal of the actual cooking. John and Angelica owned at least one slave, a young African man named Ben, and they almost certainly owned at least one or two female domestics. Angelica, however, was responsible for managing the housekeeping budget and directing the menu, and in wartime Boston procuring food and supplies was a constant struggle. Budgets were never Angelica’s strong point. Eliza wrote down the figures for her sister in careful columns and tried to make sense of Angelica’s impulsive orders to tradesmen.

  John Carter, as he still styled himself, spent his days hustling for new business opportunities, with projects that included a bit of banking and shipping insurance and, more to his liking, some high-risk currency and land speculation. When cash was tight, he made up the difference by gambling.

  John was not liked by many. When the Baroness Riedesel arrived in Cambridge, still on parole with her husband, she quickly obtained a city pass, and one of her first visits was to Angelica, “who, with her sister Betsy, was living in Boston.” “Curiosity and desire urged me to pay a visit to Madame Carter, the daughter of General Schuyler,” the baroness wrote later, “and I dined at her house several times.” The baroness quickly came to the same conclusion as Philip Schuyler with respect to his son-in-law’s character. “Madame Carter,” the baroness decided, “was as gentle and good as her parents, but her husband was wicked and treacherous.”

  The British officers who invited him to their parties also grew wary. John Carter quickly gained a reputation in Boston as a skillful card shark. Baroness Riedesel’s husband tried to warn General Burgoyne: gambling with John was a good way to lose a fortune. At first, the general laughed off the baron’s advice. Later, chagrined, Burgoyne confessed, “I did not understand you . . . in what you mention’d in your note about Carter. But [General John] Anstruther, who is just now come in to dinner, tells me of Carter’s gambling—I was not of the party nor out of my house all day yesterday which was lucky, for I hear the little man carried off money in all his pockets.”

  John and the baroness quickly squared off as bitter antagonists, and the dinners where they exchanged pointed barbs were exhausting. Eliza hated conflict. Her brother-in-law’s humor was crass and combative, his demeanor entirely unlike that of her disciplined father. John took great pleasure in shocking the baroness. If she were discouraged from visiting his wife as a result, so much the better. It would save him instructing his wife to cut her. John Carter gleefully informed the baroness on one memorable occasion that he was advising the Americans to chop off the heads of the British generals and their allies, her husband’s noble head included, “salt them down in small barrels, and send over to the English one of these barrels for every hamlet or little town [the British] burned down.” The baroness, whose command of irony was limited, flushed red, then white, and stammered in fury. John thought it was hilarious.

  While John flitted about Boston, carousing and gambling with the increasingly wary officers, Eliza tended to her sister, now ungainly and swelling heavy with pregnancy. In mid-April, when Angelica’s labor pains started, Eliza pressed cool, wet cloths to her sister’s forehead during the worst of the long hours when the sisters clung to each other. Childbirth did not always end happily, and the sisters had looked on as their mother buried one child after another. Women, too, died in labor. The thought of losing Ann—as her sisters called her—put knots of fear in Eliza’s stomach. Eliza put on a brave face and murmured quiet words to Angelica when the pain carried her, but both sisters wished for their mother. When the baby gave a throaty cry and the ordeal was over, Eliza felt more relieved than celebratory and left John as the proud father to announce the news to her parents. John, tickled that the child was a son, informed the family in Albany that “the little Fellow of two Days old ‘grows finely.’ ”

  Angelica and John, hoping to consolidate the peace with her father, who was still footing bills for household luxuries, named the boy Philip. When his sister was born a year and a half later, they strategically named her Kitty. Their first missteps with Eliza’s parents had come at a price. They were learning.

  Eliza stayed on with Angelica and John in the year that followed, too, during her sister’s second pregnancy. Only their father’s court-martial in October 1778 interrupted those first years of the war in Boston. They were years that bound Eliza and Angelica to each other more tightly than ever.

  Their father’s trial was unmitigated misery and sorrow. General Schuyler’s court-martial for dereliction of
duty at Ticonderoga set off a fresh storm of gossip that wounded everyone in the family old enough to understand it. By now, the household included several younger siblings—Eliza’s three brothers, John, Philip, and Rensselaer, and another sister, too, little Cornelia, named after her late grandmother—but the eldest of these siblings was barely thirteen and Cornelia just a toddler. Eliza’s sister Peggy, however, was twenty that year and still living at home, and she bore an especially heavy share of the emotional burden with her parents. Eliza would have felt guiltier had she not been away, managing the domestic whims and caprices of John Carter.

  The Schuyler family was tight-knit and clannish, and they drew together in moments of crisis. They had rallied before, when the British swept through the Hudson Valley and when they had witnessed the aftermath at Saratoga. They would all gather for the trial, and they would survive together, whatever happened, behind a wall of silence that, despite the family’s friendly, easygoing demeanor, did not readily admit outsiders. Angelica and Eliza set off from Boston in late September to join their parents and Peggy in support of their father. The outcome—especially if General Schuyler were found guilty—would profoundly affect all their future prospects.