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

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  The snow fell thick and heavy all the next week, and when the night of the ball at last arrived the girls traveled by horse-drawn sleigh with their aunt and uncle to the Continental Store above the village green. The military storehouse had been commandeered for the festivities. Wrapped in thick cloaks, their hands protected in beaver muffs, the girls tucked the fabric of gowns neatly underneath them and wiggled just a bit to stop their stays from pinching. As they were handed down from the sleigh in a cloud of powdery snow, the sisters were in high spirits, and Angelica recognized among the gentlemen General Henry Knox, General Washington, General Greene, and Eliza’s old beau Tench Tilghman. Their cousin Kitty Livingston was there with her sisters. Eliza’s eyes searched for and quickly found Alexander. When their eyes met, her heart pounded.

  The wide-pine-board floors gleamed with polish, and Eliza saw that the doors along the length of the second-story veranda were thrown open to let in cold, fresh air when the dancing started. Would Alexander ask her to dance? Or had his interest already faded? Angelica had advised her all week in the coquettish arts of keeping a man’s attention. There were three times as many officers as ladies, and some of the girls would end up sad wallflowers.

  The ball opened with a dainty minuet, danced by a series of couples, one after the other, and Lucy Knox, the wife of General Knox, led off the dancing that night—a mark of her social superiority—with the famously handsome eligible bachelor General Walter Stewart, a heartthrob among the ladies. General Greene’s wife, Caty, fumed quietly, tired of being perennially ranked one notch below her archrival. The incongruity of the leading couple did not go unnoticed on the dance floor, and Caty Greene didn’t let pass the opportunity for snide, whispered commentary to members of her party, who included Cornelia Lott and her sisters. Lucy Knox’s waistline was bigger than ever, she snickered.

  Lucy was keenly interested in fashion, especially faddish and outrageous headdresses. The exaggerated styles of the day, Eliza had to admit, did not favor Lucy’s especially ample figure. As one particularly unsympathetic observer described Lucy Knox in the 1780s, “Her hair in front is craped at least a foot high . . . and topped off with a wire skeleton . . . covered with black gauze, which hangs in streamers hangs down her back.” Eliza liked Lucy. Still, the effect was ridiculous.

  Eliza touched her neck gently. The room was warm, and a lady’s fan could hide blushes. Had she and Angelica misjudged her artfully chosen fashion choices this evening? An extravagant beehive updo was the height of style in London and Paris, and American patriots added whimsical touches to the elaborate designs to include frigates of war that billowed under full sail on the dance floor and miniature cannons camouflaged by hair powder. Coiffures dressed à la Americaine featured thirteen fat curls at the back of the neck, in homage to the thirteen rebellious colonies, and a fluttering wake of red, white, and blue ribbons. Even Benedict Arnold’s wife, Peggy, had sat for a wedding portrait the previous year with her hair teased two feet tall and festooned with trailing ribbons, Angelica assured her.

  Eliza hadn’t gone quite that far—few went as far as Lucy Knox—but, in fairness to Lucy, she was not the only lady that winter to indulge in this whimsy. Eliza and Angelica, after all, had called in the hairdresser, and all afternoon he had teased their hair into high rolls, molded around pads of itchy cow hair. Eliza’s headdress that season was a dramatic and patriotic confection of ribbons and feathers, made up in the style à la Bostonne and sent to her as a gift from one of her father’s commercial agents in Paris. Eliza called it later her “Marie Antoinette coiffure.”

  Now, there was a moment’s hesitation. But when Eliza looked up to see Alexander making a little bow of greeting before her, any trace of worry was forgotten.

  She must have said yes, because the next thing she knew she was dancing.

  As the night went on, the band played faster, and the formal minuet soon gave way to reels and quadrilles, and there at camp, in the midst of an uncertain war and a hungry winter, everyone sang along to the refrain of tunes like “The Liberty Song,” with lyrics that went “Come join hand in hand, brave Americans all.” In front of fifteen ladies and nearly sixty officers, the romance between Eliza and Alexander blossomed. When he asked her to dance a second time, the other officers exchanged glances. Just a hint of a smile passed between Angelica and their cousin Kitty. Colonel Hamilton would find himself engaged if he weren’t careful. When he found his way to Eliza and Angelica’s side for supper, it was clear that Alexander was indeed a “gone man,” as Tench Tilghman had predicted. So, the field belonged after all to Miss Schuyler, the gentleman chuckled.

  If Alexander didn’t propose that night, he proposed the next morning. Dancing twice with the same unmarried lady was tantamount to a declaration. By the time Angelica left camp the following week, to join her husband, John, at his new post in Newport, Rhode Island, Alexander and Angelica were fast friends, and John Cochran thought it wise to send off a hasty note to the general, advising him of Colonel Hamilton’s respectful attentions to his daughter. Within days of the ball, Alexander sent off a gallant letter introducing himself to their younger sister Peggy, declaring his love for Eliza and affection for all this charming family. He wrote that Eliza was all “good natured affability and vivacity unembellished with that charming frivolousness which is justly deemed one of the principal accomplishments of a belle.” Time after time, those who knew Eliza best would say the same things. Those who loved her did so for these reasons.

  The young people were making their plans, talking, their hands brushing, for hours in Aunt Gertrude’s front parlor. Aunt Gertrude was a hopeless romantic and found all sorts of reasons to leave Alexander and Eliza whispering alone in front of the fire. But, her aunt reminded her, Alexander would need to speak to her father before these castles in the air had any real foundation.

  Alexander was more than a little anxious. Alexander knew he was nothing but an upstart. His background was distinctly checkered, and he had too much good sense to be anything other than completely honest with General Schuyler. Alexander was the illegitimate son of a woman who had abandoned her husband for a lover, and he had grown up an orphan in impoverished circumstances on the West Indian island of Nevis. Precious few in America were privy to the story of his origins, but Alexander was determined to come clean with the general. His background was not the kind of thing you let a man discover after you married his daughter—especially when that man already had one duplicitous son-in-law. Alexander might have been born out of wedlock, but he was a gentleman and meant to act like one.

  That Alexander had completed university with a law degree and risen to the rank of colonel in America spoke to his immense intelligence, but he did not possess even a small fortune either. There was hardly any point in trying to hide that from the general. They would need to depend on some of Eliza’s family inheritance in the beginning to make it. Not all parents from Eliza’s elite background were likely to accept talent and promise as sufficient. As Alexander candidly put it to his friend John Laurens, “I am a stranger in this country. I have no property here, no connexions.”

  Whatever else they talked about, head bowed together by the fire, the couple never considered eloping. Eliza had witnessed firsthand the hurt and anger that Angelica’s elopement had caused, and Eliza was not the family rebel. So when General Schuyler passed through camp briefly in early March, not entirely by chance, Alexander jumped at the chance to speak to him in person. What would Alexander say that could persuade her father? Eliza was on tenterhooks. She hoped Alexander would find the right words, because she already knew that she would not disobey her father. If her father said no and told her to break off the connection, it would be the last time she would see Alexander.

  The clock in Aunt Gertrude’s parlor ticked relentlessly. At last, Alexander emerged stunned and bewildered, sooner than Eliza had dared to imagine. To Alexander’s great surprise, General Schuyler had taken his hand as though Alexander were his son and had welcomed him wholehe
artedly into the family without hesitation.

  Alexander Hamilton was a rising star, and for Philip Schuyler his acumen and ambition far outweighed the young colonel’s small purse and modest background. He could see clearly that his daughter was in love with a young man whom he liked and respected. Why throw up obstacles when the young people had gone through the proper and dutiful motions? Besides, even the general was not so old a relic that he couldn’t see that Alexander was any young lady’s idea of extremely handsome. He could only shake his head in wonder and wish for the best for the young people. “You cannot, my dear sir,” Philip Schuyler wrote to Alexander in the days that followed,

  be more happy at the connexion you have made with my family than I am. Until the child of a parent has made a judicious choice, his heart is in continual anxiety; but this anxiety was removed on the moment I discovered it was you on whom she had placed her affections.

  But Eliza’s mother would also have to be asked, the general warned Alexander. If “she consents to Comply with your and her daughters wishes,” then Philip Schuyler would bless the marriage. If. Men may have ruled over women as a matter of law in the eighteenth century, but Philip and Kitty Schuyler enjoyed a long and happy marriage, in part because he did not undercut her household authority as either mistress or mother. Philip knew how wounded Kitty had been by Angelica’s elopement and deception. He also knew that the main issue was that she wanted the confidence of her daughters and the pleasure of a family wedding. “You will see the Impropriety of taking the dernier pas [final step] where you are,” Philip warned Alexander and Eliza sternly. Don’t spoil it all now by jumping the gun and upsetting your mother. That was the gist of the message. Getting married in a hasty “do” at Morristown was simply not an option. “Mrs. Schuyler did not see her Eldest daughter married. That also gave me pain, and we wish not to Experience It a Second time.” When her next daughter married, Kitty Schuyler wanted a proper hometown wedding. A big one. With white paper chains on the tables and the Schuyler-family wedding cake, made according to a recipe passed down for generations. A wedding where all the neighbors could see how finely the Schuylers did things.

  Kitty Schuyler had never met Alexander Hamilton, and she was less immediately certain about the wisdom of this match. She took a full month to give her answer. But if Eliza’s mother had seen the ardent love letters passing between the couple, she would have known that it was already far too late to ask her daughter to end things with Alexander. The romance was passionate, and they were already laying out together the foundations of what would be an extraordinary marriage.

  They had to write letters, because General Washington sent Alexander away on assignment for several weeks in mid-March, tasking the young colonel with arranging an exchange of war prisoners with the British. Perhaps the thought occurred to General Washington that his old friend General Schuyler might appreciate a bit of distance between the ardent young lovers. General Washington knew from firsthand experience that Alexander was not a young man who easily took no for an answer.

  The Schuyler sisters had long been favorites among the British officers, as Alexander soon discovered at the British camp. The redcoats and the Americans might be on opposite sides now, but Eliza and her sisters had grown up with many of these officers in and out of their father’s house before the Revolution. “If I were not afraid of making you vain,” Alexander wrote to Eliza, “I would tell you that Mrs. Carter, Peggy, and yourself are the dayly toasts of our table; and for this honor you are chiefly indebted to the British Gentlemen.” Sometimes Alexander couldn’t help feeling a bit jealous. He depended on Eliza’s letters to assure him of her love and devotion.

  When Eliza’s letters arrived, all was well, and Alexander was happy. “I cannot tell you what extacy I felt in casting my eye over the sweet effusions of tenderness [your letter] contains,” Alexander enthused in one missive. “My Betseys soul speaks in every line and bids me be the happiest of mortals. I am so and will be so. You give me too many proofs of your love to allow me to doubt it and in the conviction that I possess that, I possess every thing the world can give.”

  His letters to his male friends were boastful and far more laddish. Eliza might have been less swept off her feet had she seen them. “Have you not heard that I am on the point of becoming a [newlywed],” Alexander asked his friend John Laurens,

  I confess my sins. I am guilty. Next fall completes my doom. I give up my liberty to Miss Schuyler. She is a good hearted girl who I am sure will never play the termagant; though not a genius she has good sense enough to be agreeable, and though not a beauty, she has fine black eyes—is rather handsome and has every other requisite of the exterior to make a lover happy.

  Not a beauty. Not a genius. Alexander’s friends thought he was underrating Miss Schuyler.

  By April, the engagement was official, and Kitty Schuyler quickly arranged a house for the Schuyler family in Morristown. The wedding would be a gala affair in Albany come December. Kitty was determined to see to it that no early infant arrival or swelling belly would force a rushed marriage before then. She wanted that wedding.

  For one glorious season, Eliza was given free rein to shine as one of the belles of the ball, even if she was “not a beauty,” and throughout the spring and summer Eliza and Alexander danced at a round of assemblies, laughed late into the night at parties. Eliza bounded out of bed each morning happy, knowing that before the morning was out, Alexander would come to call or would send a note. She spent her afternoons making social calls and busily planning her trousseau and wedding with her mother.

  For everyone at camp, it was a brief season of celebration, at least among the officers and their wives. Eliza’s mood matched the mood of those around her. For the enlisted men, life was harsher. But the officers were jubilant that spring. The war was hard going, but the French were joining the fight. That would turn the tide. Everywhere, everyone said so. When the French troops arrived, amid splendid fanfare, the sky above Morristown was lit with fireworks, and, as one of their fellow camp officers, Captain John Beatty, remembered of that season, we “kicked up a hell of a dust” until June, when the party ended.

  As the spring drew to a close, Eliza’s mood shifted. The war began again in earnest with the summer, bringing with it a dawning new reality: Eliza was in love with a colonel caught up in a war that the Americans would not win for several years still, at a moment when, despite the French intervention, an American victory was not guaranteed. As the winter camp broke up and Eliza and her mother bent over leather trunks, folding away the ball gowns and satin slippers, Eliza’s heart was heavy. Who knew how long it would be before she saw Alexander again? It might not be until December.

  At the end of June, the women set off in the coach that would take them along the bumpy roads to the boats that would bear them north to Albany. Eliza craned her neck for as long as she could to keep Alexander and her father in sight, and held close to her heart, carefully folded into a locket, a love poem Alexander had written.

  If that poem is any evidence, not only was Alexander Hamilton not a great poetic talent, but Eliza had heeded her mother’s warning and not consummated their relationship before the wedding:

  A love like mine so tender, true

  Completely wretched—you away,

  And but half blessed e’en while you stay

  . . .

  Deny to you my fond embrace

  No joy unmixed my bosom warms.

  Alexander professed a love “tender, true,” but he did want to point out that she was refusing his “embrace” and denying him a lover’s pleasure.

  In coarse, private letters to John Laurens, Alexander bemoaned his sexual frustration more bluntly. “I intend to restore the empire of Hymen [i.e., marriage] and that Cupid [i.e., erotic love] is to be his prime Minister,” Alexander wrote. “I wish you were at liberty to transgress the bounds of Pennsylvania. I would invite you after the fall to Albany to be witness to the final consummation.” A ménage à trois or a mere
witness to the marriage? Alexander was not blind to the double entendre.

  Alexander loved Eliza, but she did have two other flaws as a bride he felt he needed to point out to her: her conversation skills and her letter writing. Alexander couldn’t help but try to mold Eliza and press her to be a bit more sophisticated in her book learning. A bit more, say, like her sister Angelica. “I love you more and more every hour,” Alexander told her,

  The sweet softness and delicacy of your mind and manners, the elevation of your sentiments, the real goodness of your heart, its tenderness to me, the beauties of your face and person, your unpretending good sense and that innocent simplicity and frankness which pervade your actions; all these appear to me with increasing amiableness and place you in my estimation above all the rest of your sex.

  But then he added:

  I entreat you my Charmer, not to neglect the charges I gave you particularly that of taking care of your self, and that of employing all your leisure in reading. Nature has been very kind to you; do not neglect to cultivate her gifts and to enable yourself to make the distinguished figure in all respects to which you are intitled to aspire. You excel most of your sex in all the amiable qualities; endeavour to excel them equally in the splendid ones. You can do it if you please and I shall take pride in it. It will be a fund too, to diversify our enjoyments and amusements and fill all our moments to advantage.