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

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  It had been, Eliza thought, a long winter. They had been thrust into the limelight, and Alexander’s opponents were stirring up all sorts of trouble. She could trace it all back to Alexander’s stunning political success over the creation of a United States federal bank in February.

  At the end of 1789, President Washington had appointed Alexander secretary of Treasury. With the appointment to the administration, Alexander became a national figure. The financial system of the United States had to be built from the ground up, and Alexander was in the position of chief architect. He had played an outsize role in founding the Bank of New York in 1784, and he was determined to expand the banking system. All winter he had advocated the establishment of a federal bank, funded through a public stock offering. Whispers flew in the city that it would be the greatest investment opportunity of the century.

  Alexander pushed hard for his federalist ideals and the creation of central banking. For Alexander, nothing less was at stake than the shape of the country. The opposition, though, was bitter and partisan. President Washington wavered. By the beginning of 1790, the moment of crisis and decision had arrived, and Eliza sat up until dawn with Alexander one night in February, reading drafts and making neat copies in her careful handwriting, as he hammered out a rationale for the bank. In the morning, the president read it. He signed the executive order. As Eliza described Alexander’s role and vision later, “He made your government. . . . He made your bank. I sat up all night with him to help him do it. Jefferson thought we ought not to have a bank and President Washington thought so. But my husband said, ‘We must have a Bank.’ I sat up all night, copied out his writing, and the next morning, he carried it to President Washington and we had a bank.”

  Some people stood to make a fortune from the changes. The stock market was booming, and speculation swept the new republic in the years after independence. The nation was gripped with what in another century might be called irrational exuberance. The trouble was that some of those most visibly benefiting included members of Eliza’s extended and powerful family.

  Eliza’s father, Philip Schuyler, was “one of the largest dealers in public papers” and was grasping at the chance to restore his failing fortune. In Britain, their old friend Gouverneur Morris was acting as an unofficial securities agent and raking in profits. John Church, ever the gambler, was caught up in American stock speculation with the French ambassador. Alexander was John’s agent and attorney in America, and to some the pair’s actions smacked of conflict and collusion. Political paranoia was rife, and not entirely without reason. The extended family of Schuyler men were as careless about financial appearances at the start as Alexander and Angelica had been about flirting and joking.

  Worst of all, Alexander had appointed William Duer, the wheeling-and-dealing husband of Eliza’s high-flying Livingston cousin, Catherine Alexander, as his financial deputy in the Treasury. Alexander had an easy tolerance of bounders and schemers, and the appointment of William as his number-two man gave Eliza pause. She knew the spendthrift Duer from long experience. The appointment would cause unimaginable heartache and doom Alexander’s ambitions for the presidency.

  Congressman Burke had only said aloud what others were thinking. More than one representative opposed to Alexander’s economic plans for the United States complained in his private journal or in the hallways to colleagues in a low voice that the secretary of Treasury was trying to ram through a financial program structured to benefit Eliza’s powerful relations and other members of the colonial aristocracy.

  William Maclay, the senator from Pennsylvania, fulminated in his congressional diary that Alexander Hamilton was engaged in “the most abandoned system of speculation ever broached in our country,” and many of Alexander’s enemies agreed with the senator’s judgment. There were those looking for an occasion to catch out the secretary of Treasury and to launch a congressional investigation. Few periods in American history had been as viciously partisan as the 1790s, and Alexander was a divisive figure and, for some, a high-value target.

  Alexander also made some rookie errors. Early on, he was not quick enough off the mark in understanding how the financial benefits flowing to Eliza’s family network during these boom times would shape appearances and hamstring his policy decisions. He made at least one misstep that winter. On February 24, 1790, Alexander at an opportune moment placed an order for the sale of some of John Church’s stocks—stocks the prices of which the secretary of Treasury had the power to influence. It wasn’t the particular details of the trade that rankled. It was the fact that Alexander acted at all for John in a financial transaction that was the central conflict. In time, such a misstep would be called insider trading. The 1790s were the crucible in which such financial restraints were fired and tested.

  When John Church handily “won” election later that spring as the member of Parliament of a rotten borough, purchasing the votes for the astonishing sum of 6,000 pounds—the modern equivalent of $750,000—Alexander’s role as his financial agent took on in retrospect an even darker aspect. John Church was now the agent of a foreign government. What, precisely, was his relationship to his brother-in-law? And was the secretary of Treasury loyal to the Americans or to the British? Alexander had made his legal career defending the property rights of ousted Loyalists. He was an immigrant from the British West Indies. The Hamilton family was Scottish. What if his own allegiances were in question?

  By late spring, a new controversy gripped Congress—one that also had at its heart questions of money and power. Alexander once again was in the thick of it and drew political fire. Would Congress move to Baltimore or Philadelphia or remain in New York for the next session? More important, where would the nation’s capital and the presidency be located? The decision was tied up with questions of public debt, and that led straight to the Treasury.

  On Sunday, June 20, Alexander joined the politically influential James Madison and Thomas Jefferson for a small dinner at the latter’s cramped bachelor pad at 57 Maiden Lane, in Manhattan, and over brandy, the three men hammered out a bargain. The horse-trading was less than entirely transparent. Alexander would support the capital moving south to what would become Washington, DC, if Madison would support public credit reform that Alexander believed was critical for the nation. Later, Alexander and the financier Robert Morris met, “as if by chance,” on the Battery seawall, where there was a further agreement to propose Philadelphia as the capital for ten years and then a move southward. By the end of the summer, the location of the temporary capital and the permanent establishment in Washington were approved in Congress, along with the public credit measures, and Alexander once again celebrated a political victory.

  A fresh wave of land speculation engulfed rural Maryland, the site of the future capital.

  Eliza and Alexander were caught up in that postwar real estate craze as much as anyone. They were not rich, but Eliza’s share of her mother’s Van Rensselaer legacy especially included considerable property. Alexander—whose concerns for their personal finances were acute—noted in his account books that Eliza’s property included more than a dozen farms in Saratoga, variously ranging from forty to 140 acres. Alexander was also swept up in the land-buying frenzy. He was one of a dozen or so speculators in the purchase of a large tract of land along the Saint Lawrence River, and his partners in the venture included Philip Schuyler, their old friends Henry Knox and Gouverneur Morris, and Peggy’s husband, Stephen Van Rensselaer.

  Owning and capitalizing on Eliza’s farms would also get a bit trickier following one other important piece of legislation from the 1780s—the Pennsylvania Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. Eliza understood immediately what the establishment of the new capital would mean: they would have to leave the house in New York and relocate to Philadelphia in the autumn. With them would go their property. But slaves arriving in Pennsylvania could be freed.

  Alexander and many of the other men in his political milieu were members of “manumission” societies t
hat advocated for the end of slavery in America. Most of those men, however, were also slaveholders. Eliza’s father in 1790 owned thirteen enslaved people, and in early June two of them, Jacob and Cutt, were stirring up enough trouble on the estate that Philip Schuyler advised his wife, Kitty, “I believe it would be best to part with them, and if you approve of it I wish you to advertise them for sale and to get what you can for them.” Eliza’s brother John owned fourteen people, and Peggy and Stephen owned another dozen. Alexander and Eliza were not an exception. They owned both enslaved people and indentures.

  Eliza listened to politics and followed the ins and outs as Alexander explained them in the evening before the late-spring fire. But her day-to-day life was consumed with caring for children and nursing sick family members. Everyone seemed to be ill in the spring and into summer of 1790. While the Senate was in session in New York, General Schuyler—a state representative—lived in town with Eliza’s younger sister Cornelia, now fifteen and old enough to manage some housekeeping. When their father was struck with a high fever, Eliza and Cornelia spent several sleepless nights at his bedside.

  Then one of the Hamilton household servants caught the yellow fever that was spreading up and down the seaboard that summer. In the small, hot attic bedroom of the Wall Street town house, the delirious servant vomited forth black bile in agony and died while Eliza watched, helpless and frightened. The toll it took on her was greater than she let on. Eliza was rattled. When Eliza succumbed herself at the end of July to chills and fevers of malaria, the household was in turmoil for weeks. Just as she was beginning to recover, her father succumbed to another infection, and she went back to late-night nursing.

  It seemed to Eliza like an evil visitation by late summer. She tried to remember that resignation was her Christian duty. Philip Schuyler was still weak and bedridden when fresh disaster struck. The infant son of her brother John was also dying. Her father Philip composed a shaky letter to his wife explaining why he could not come to Albany to the deathbed of his small grandson. “Little as the prospect is that I should find My Dear Child Alive,” he wrote, “I would set out immediately, but I am so weak that it is with difficulty I can write.” By the time he was regaining strength and back in Albany, the baby had been buried. Even Alexander was suffering from kidney troubles, the result of his own untreated malaria. The infection would turn out to be chronic, and would trouble Alexander every autumn.

  Manhattan itself was clearly part of the problem. The city was sticky and humid in the summer, and open sewers and rainwater sitting stagnant in barrels bred pestilence. The fearsome yellow fever was a modern plague in early America, and it hit New York City hard in the summer of 1790. Eliza’s father said that everyone knew the island was a miasma, and he pressed her to bring the children to Albany for the summer to escape the fevers. “The accounts we have of the prevalence of the Yellow fever at N York and of its progress tho every part of the city,” he wrote to her,

  have excited the most painful sensations, Citizens are quitting the city, to fly from the effects of this fatal disorder, and as yet I cannot learn that any preparations are making on your part to leave. . . . I have written to my Dear Hamilton, I have urged him not to remain, but with you, the Children & Family to come up, use all your influence my dear Children to prevail on his to accompany you.

  But Alexander would not go. Government business consumed him. The work in the Treasury was too compelling, too important. And if Alexander would not go, neither would Eliza. She was determined for them not to be apart as a family. Too many times an absence of weeks turned into months, and Eliza hated the idea of being stuck alone again without Alexander in Albany. It brought back memories of the earliest years of their marriage. Memories came to her of waiting at the wharf and quarreling about letters.

  While they stalled, the health of both suffered. Finally, during the first week of September, Alexander gave in to General Schuyler’s demands and the dictates of reason and accepted that the city was simply too unsafe for the children. Eliza, he explained to her gently, would have to go up to Albany at least until the cold weather came in the end of October. He was her husband, and those were his wishes. He asked her obedience in this matter, and, by law and by custom, Eliza had no choice as a wife but to give it.

  She did not, however, have to like it. When Eliza was angry, her voice grew quiet. She did not want the family separated. Alexander pressed, Eliza resisted, and they ultimately negotiated a marital bargain. Eliza would go as he asked, for the sake of the children, but Alexander promised he would immediately follow them. Eliza also stood firm on the backup plan. She placed a time limit on the end of their separation. If Alexander did not come to her in September, she was coming back to the city by the end of October.

  And, as she had known would happen, Alexander did not arrive in Albany. Alexander hoped to travel up the following week for a monthlong vacation together. Politics kept interfering. Britain and Spain were on the brink of war, threatening to involve the United States in a new conflict, and the administration was shorthanded. What else could he do? he asked in his frequent letters. Eliza didn’t argue, but she wasn’t surprised either. Work sometimes seemed to be Alexander’s greatest passion. Forced to choose, would he choose the Treasury or Eliza and the children? It hung a painful and unspoken question.

  In Albany, there was one bright spot. Eliza took pleasure in reuniting Edward’s orphan daughter, little Fanny Antill, with one of her older sisters. Eliza and Peggy sat in the parlor after dinner working on embroidery, just like old times, and laughed at the antics of the children. But three weeks at home was the limit of Eliza’s patience, and she would draw that line brightly in summers afterward. Eliza fretted about Alexander alone in the city, not only about his health and safety from fevers but also about the rabid tone of politics and the cumbersome logistics of house moving. Her elderly parents, with their gout pains and her father’s fussy military-style habits, also drove her a little bit crazy.

  When October came, Alexander knew better than to protest. He encouraged her to stay in Albany longer, where the air was fresher, but he knew Eliza well enough to know she hated being hemmed in and for their family to be apart. “I leave the matter to yourself,” he wrote. “If you feel anxious or uneasy you had better come down.” Coming down now meant to the new house that Alexander had rented for them all in the capital of Philadelphia. Eliza and the children arrived there in the first days of November, only a few days later than she had sworn to Alexander. She was a woman who prided herself on keeping a promise.

  Home now was a three-story redbrick row house on 79 South Third Street in the nation’s temporary capital, just around the corner from the grand mansions that ran along Walnut Street. Looking at the house with a domestic eye, Eliza despaired. It was light and airy, and that was the critical thing she appreciated in this swampy city. But it was also in urgent need of some redecorating. Angelica—how she missed her sister!—would have laughed at something so hopelessly unfashionable. Alexander’s colleague and their friend in New York City, the merchant banker William Seton, went searching at Eliza’s request for yards of imported French upholstery. There would need to be fresh drapes, fresh paint, and a careful scrub and polish.

  It was an elite neighborhood, but Eliza was still as ambivalent as ever about her role as a leading society lady. She found hosting so many visitors during her at-home morning each week tedious and a bit exhausting. But she didn’t want to embarrass Alexander. As a political power couple in the new capital, Alexander and Eliza quickly struck up friendships with other political couples who lived nearby, and they were caught up in the whirl of balls and dinners. Alexander was often the vivacious life of the party. They were soon socializing especially with Anne Bingham, whose husband, William, was, like Alexander, involved in government finances. Like Angelica, Anne was sophisticated, worldly, and passionate about politics, and her evening salons soon became the favorite meeting place of Alexander and his political compatriots.

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p; Down the road from them on Third Street, south of the intersection with Walnut, was the large home of Benjamin Chew and his daughters. Alexander, enthusiastic as always in his attention to beautiful ladies, set tongues wagging again that autumn with his indiscretions. He pressed his flattery on one of the Chew daughters so passionately that people later said he had “designs” on the young woman’s chastity. No one would quite say afterward exactly what happened, and the young lady and her father brushed it off as idle gallantry. But Alexander had unwisely given his political opponents more ammunition. They squirreled away this rumor, alongside the ones about his “incest” with Angelica and Peggy.

  If Alexander’s favorite retreat was the salon of Anne Bingham, Eliza felt most at home in the salon of Martha Washington. The company was glittering and the power brokers still came and went, but the first lady always gave Eliza a secret smile that said, one old friend to another, she would rather be sitting quietly with some embroidery and her husband. Eliza shared the sentiment wholeheartedly. “Do you live as pleasantly at Philadelphia as you did at New York?” Angelica asked Eliza in her letters. “Or are you obliged to bear the formalities of female circles, and their trifling chit chat? To you who have at home the most agreeable Society in the World, how you must smile at their manner of losing time.”

  Beyond the salons and political dinner parties, the gala balls and the morning visits that Eliza endured with all the good grace she could muster, there was the hustle and bustle of Philadelphia all around her. Philadelphia was the second-largest city in the nation, although its population was under thirty thousand. By modern standards, everything in America in 1790s had a small-town feeling. Visitors to American cities remarked with astonishment on the feral pigs that ran wild in the streets, forcing parks to be fenced off to keep out the animals, and only a short walk from Eliza and Alexander’s new town house the streets opened up to pasture. Merchant ships swept in and out of the city along the Delaware River, and a market arcade ran for nearly a mile up High Street. Prostitutes frequented the market in the area running west from Second Street and blithely approached gentlemen with offers. The penalty for the prostitute, if caught, was thirty days’ hard labor. Not for the putative gentleman.