Eliza’s eldest sons were now young men, and that meant they were of an age for war and dueling. Her oldest, Alexander Jr., in his mid-twenties, headed off for Europe to fight in the Spanish War of Independence. James, soberly practicing law in Saratoga County, where he looked after Eliza’s lands and collected rents from her tenants, was married.
The death of Washington Morton and the rumors of a second duel with Aaron Burr, however clearly fanciful, put Alexander’s legacy back in the spotlight, and with the renewed attention came a fresh round of political abuse of Alexander. One of the uglier attacks on Alexander’s reputation, retreading the same old ground about financial corruption and Maria Reynolds, came from an attorney in Albany, John Cramer, and, when the newspapers picked up the story, some of James’s friends most unhelpfully called for a duel to satisfy Alexander Hamilton’s honor. James had no option but to issue the challenge. To refuse was either to be branded a coward or, worse, to be seen to be conceding that his father was a scoundrel. Reading reports in the papers was agony for Eliza. She was saved from the horror of another son fighting only by John Cramer refusing the duel. The newspapers gleefully excoriated his cowardice in columns.
But war was the greatest threat to Eliza’s sons. All of the Hamilton boys except little Philip were old enough to be caught up in the War of 1812 before it ended. James, twenty-four when the war started, moved back to New York City with his young family in the spring of 1814. He remembered later that “at that time an attack on New York city, by the British, was considered imminent,” and he would protect his mother. He joined the New York militia and was made deputy quartermaster of an infantry regiment, then promoted to major of another brigade and inspector. James was the bossy oldest brother and Eliza’s estate manager, and he saw himself as the patriarch of the family, to the great annoyance of his younger siblings. Eliza’s adventurous second son, Alexander Jr., returned from the Spanish peninsula and served as a captain in the United States Army from August 1813 until the summer of 1815. The bookish and dreamy John enlisted as an aide-de-camp for Major William Henry Harrison, and William, fifteen, her rebellious and willful boy, with his father’s quick wit and impulsive temper, registered at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, although he abandoned the academy (or it abandoned him) short of graduation.
Eliza, however, was fighting a private war of sorrow. She could see that her sister Angelica was dying, probably of tuberculosis.
Angelica wheezed and could not shake a cough that had plagued her since at least as early as 1810. Once a beautiful woman, with her love of art and daring French fashions, she looked thin and haggard and much older than fifty-seven. Around her, the Church family fortune was collapsing, and soon there would be no more mansions or flashy carriages, no more stock-market bubbles and gambling. John Church was already broken in spirit, and by 1814 Angelica was tired of fighting.
Eliza walked through the snowy streets of New York all throughout February and into the first days of March to sit with her sister in the quiet. Outside the bedroom window, snow fell gently, and from the streets the sisters could hear the bells of carriages and the shouts of boys running errands. When bloody coughs racked Angelica’s body, Eliza held her and thought back on the years they had been best friends to each other. They had watched each other’s children be born and sometimes buried. They had faced the world together in unbreakable solidarity. But above all, they had both loved and been loved by Alexander. Eliza could not imagine a world without the ballast of Angelica. But that world was coming nonetheless.
On Sunday, March 13, 1814, Eliza sat with her sister for the last time. In the distance, the church bells of Trinity rang, and in the days to come Eliza would bury another part of her heart there in the graveyard. Angelica was laid into the vault of their Livingston relations, not far from the grave of Alexander. At the funeral, John Church looked beaten, and when Eliza shook his hand goodbye, she guessed that it would be the last time she would see him also. There was nothing to keep John in New York. He set off on the next packet to London, to see what he could salvage of his ruined finances. Eliza never saw him again. John Church died abroad in 1818, and if any letters of friendship and grief passed between them, Eliza did not save them.
Eliza culled much of her correspondence in that decade.
In the spring of 1816, Congress—after years of struggle and privation—passed at last An Act for the Relief of Elizabeth Hamilton, awarding her “five years’ full pay for the services of her deceased husband.” With thirty-two years and 165 days of interest, the total sum was $10,609.64, and for Eliza it was life changing. She was not a wealthy woman. But she would be able to live in quiet comfort as a widow and provide for her daughter Angelica’s care and for the education of her three youngest children.
Her petition to Congress was based on the financial documents that Alexander had left for safekeeping before his duel with Aaron Burr. “Shortly after the death of General Hamilton,” Nathaniel Pendleton, his dueling second, swore to Congress,
I received a packet, Sealed and addressed to me, which inclosed a note from him, in substance among other things importing that that packet would only be delivered to me in the event of his death. It inclosed also his will, and three other papers, in his own hand writing. In one of them, containing some observations upon his pecuniary affairs, he declared among other circumstances that he had never received the half pay for life, nor the equivalent for it, which other officers, who had served in the Army, in the Revolutionary War had received.
Among those letters had been Alexander’s last love letters, which Eliza cherished. Lately, however, she was determined to resume a project that had languished since the death of her father, when they’d talked together of publishing Alexander’s biography. John Mason, one of the clergymen at Alexander’s deathbed, had been talked of as the writer, but Eliza had been uncertain of the reverend’s abilities as a writer. Against her better judgment, she’d given him the project. She’d been right to hesitate. Eliza had gathered together Alexander’s papers and passed them—albeit carefully edited—to the clergyman. But John Mason dithered. He had an inability to get started.
Among the papers Eliza did not pass to Reverend Mason were the papers contained in a small leather trunk and marked with the initials of James Reynolds.
A good deal of ink has been spilled over the mystery of the trunk and its letters. It was at the heart of the story about Maria Reynolds and of the allegations that had riveted the nation and said that Alexander, to cover up financial indiscretions, had forged blackmail notes and love letters.
The papers traveled a circuitous route, the details of which even now are murky. What is known for sure is that Alexander, in advance of a threatened duel in 1795, at the height of scandal, asked a friend to look after the contents of the leather trunk and, especially, to take care of something inside that trunk: a “small bundle inscribed thus—J R To be forwarded to Oliver Wolcott Junr. Esq.” “I entreat that this may be early done by a careful hand,” Alexander emphasized. “This trunk contains all my interesting papers.”
Assuming “J.R.” stood in 1795 for “James Reynolds,” the papers may have been the same documents lodged with a friend in Philadelphia, which Alexander proclaimed in the infamous pamphlet could be reviewed by any “gentleman” who doubted the authenticity of Maria Reynolds’s adulterous love letters. Gentlemen, however, by definition, did not doubt the word of other gentlemen, and when the journalist James Callender asked to see them, he was smartly refused. So the papers remained sealed, apparently as late as the summer of 1801, when Alexander and Eliza’s Philadelphia neighbor, the land speculator William Bingham, wrote to Alexander, returning at Alexander’s request “a Packet of Papers . . . which were deposited.”
That Eliza knew of the existence of this mysterious bundle is certain. On Alexander’s 1795 letter documenting the importance of the “J.R.” packet, Eliza wrote the words “to be retained by myself” and removed the letter about the bundle fr
om the biographer’s resources. What precisely happened to those “interesting papers” no one ever recorded. Historians have searched for and never found them.
But there is one person who destroyed large parts of Eliza and Alexander’s most private correspondence. Eliza.
Eliza was determined by 1817 to bring the biography of Alexander to press. She was growing increasingly weary of nagging John Mason. “I have been so disappointed by the promises of Mr. Masson in writing the life of your brother[-in-law],” Eliza wrote to her sister Catherine in 1818, “that I have requested his papers to be returned to me and have been very much occupied in endeavouring to obtain all the correspondence that I can.” The new author “who will devote himself to it [is] a Mr [Joseph] Hopkinson now in Congress,” and Eliza made uncomfortable trips to Long Island and New Jersey, even traveling as far as George Washington’s Mount Vernon in Virginia to gather up Alexander’s far-flung letters.
She was spurred on now by the increasingly preposterous rumors that were being publicly bandied about in regard to Alexander. There was something petty and ungenerous about insulting someone after his death, it seemed to Eliza, but his political enemies were as insistent as ever. Eliza was furious watching them attack Alexander’s reputation. She had defended him in life, and she would defend him no less loyally in his death. Someday, in the afterlife, she was certain she would see him.
Behind the rumors, Eliza noted with disgust, were the same old players. As early as 1816 and with an increasing tenacity by 1818, Alexander’s longtime political rival, Thomas Jefferson—the “friend” in Virginia with whom James Monroe had deposited his notes of the Reynolds scandal—was revisiting the debate from a generation earlier about the federal bank and Alexander’s time in the Treasury. Jefferson’s view, espoused snidely in publications, was that “the more debt Hamilton could rake up, the more plunder for his mercenaries.” As Eliza’s son James succinctly put it, “The charge against Hamilton is, substantially, that he enabled his myrmidons to amass fortunes by informing them of the measures to be pursued by him.” In other words, the allegation was that Alexander was guilty of insider trading. Eliza was dismayed that the old charges of financial corruption—the very charges that had driven Alexander to publish his pamphlet, the charges that had led to the scandal of Maria Reynolds—were being levied again when he was not alive to rebut them.
Thomas Jefferson, however, was not the worst of the gossips, not by a long shot. There were whispers, bandied about by John and Abigail Adams, that Alexander had left behind a string of bastard children in Philadelphia and New York City, and John Adams—whose close relationship with Catherine’s now also recently deceased husband, Samuel Malcolm, gave him the air of having direct family knowledge—spoke privately of his disgust at Alexander’s “debauchery of all the Sisters of his Wife.”
So vile and outrageous was John Adams’s scandalmongering in the 1810s that even his cousin William Cunningham felt compelled to warn him,
Should you now refuse to recal the calumny you have spread of Hamilton in secret; or to supply the evidence of your heinous charges, will you not oblige his friends to strip from your hands, before you slip out of life, the poisoned chalice whose contents you have infused into the minds of many around you[?]
Something of these slanders surely made their way back to Eliza and her children long before the unguarded letters between John Adams and his cousin—detailing all manner of attacks on Alexander’s character and churning up again the Reynolds controversy—were published in 1823 in a book that became an instant succès de scandale. Alexander’s old friend Colonel Timothy Pickering took up the pen a year later, in the midst of the 1824 presidential election, and published a devastating “review” of the correspondence that demolished Adams’s reputation and was so hotly contested that, as one nineteenth-century commentator put it, “no publication of the kind ever produced a deeper or wider sensation.” The political classes might have found it all titillating. Eliza, of course, found it infuriating and deeply painful.
Colonel Pickering had staunchly defended Alexander’s name to the world. Pickering, Eliza decided, was clearly the man who should write the biography. It would take Eliza the better part of a decade to convince him to do it, but in 1827, when the Joseph Hopkinson biography also failed to materialize, the colonel finally agreed to take on the project and spent several months in New York City with “Mrs. Hamilton and her children.” In the contract drawn up between them, Eliza promised to pass to the author “all the papers relating to the subject.”
And, strictly speaking, Eliza probably kept that promise.
Whether it happened in 1818 or 1827, the result was the same, and the scene is all too easy to imagine. Eliza, whose loyalty to Alexander was as passionate and fierce as ever, filled with righteous indignation at the calumny and taunts of enemies and scandalmongers, lifted each aging sheet gently.
She heard again Alexander’s voice in the letters.
Some she would set into a growing pile for his biographer and for her children, documents showing his rectitude and passion, his brilliance and his wisdom, his place among the pantheon of the men and women who had fomented and won the American Revolution and built a new republic on a classical foundation.
Some went into another pile, and it was not a small one. Into that stack went her letters, the ones she’d written to him, speaking of love and fear, longing and desire for her husband, letters written in her faulty spelling and in a style that still, decades later, embarrassed her and showed how unworthy she had been, with her rudimentary education and halting way with words, of such a husband.
Hers were letters, too, that showed clearly what Alexander thought the letters of a woman in love looked like. They were not entirely unlike those Alexander had published in the name of Maria Reynolds. Perhaps the echoes came too near. Perhaps the spelling errors, a turn of phrase here or there, even had something in common. Even if Eliza had wanted to write herself into the history of their life in her own voice, could she risk giving Alexander’s opponents any ammunition?
Into that pile, too, went Alexander’s 1795 letter, alluding to the existence of a packet with the initials “J.R.,” the one with her note on it. And in went, almost certainly, that bundle of letters, wrapped in paper, tied by Alexander’s hand with a ribbon—the packet that had once sat in that mysterious leather trunk.
Eliza remembered it all too well, remembered how Alexander had begged for her forgiveness. She could not know how long she would still live. Eliza turned seventy in the 1820s. Those around her were dead or dying. Among her siblings, only Rensselaer, Philip, and Catherine were still living, and all of them were more than a decade younger. The Schuyler children of her generation were gone. Angelica. Peggy. John. Even Cornelia. She could not risk it.
Placing a tremulous hand on a thick pile of papers, taking up the most private and most dangerous among them, Eliza drew a chair close to the fire, alone in the parlor. One by one, she placed each gently into the flames and watched the fire consume them and the floating ash settle. It was like saying goodbye again to Alexander, and she wept as she burned them. She hated to destroy anything that spoke of him.
But she had kept his secret then. She would keep it now and forever. No one would ever be able to examine the papers that exposed Alexander’s rash cover story, even if it meant she went down in history as a woman betrayed by a husband she knew had loved her. Even if it meant the world thought he had not cherished her enough to be faithful. Her loyalty was to her family and, above all, to Alexander.
And she did not question that he had kept faith with her either.
CHAPTER 19
Twilight, 1827–46
Although Eliza could not have known it, her death was still a long way in the future.
Among her siblings, only her youngest sister, Catherine, nearly twenty-five years her junior, would outlive her. Quarrels over their parents’ estate had come between Eliza and Catherine, and Eliza laid much of the blame at the foot of Cath
erine’s husband, Samuel Malcolm. But when he died in 1817, Eliza reached out to her sister, and Catherine, living in the Hudson Valley, gladly responded. A sisterly correspondence blossomed again between the only two remaining Schuyler sisters. It was with Catherine, now, that Eliza shared her news and her confidences.
She wrote to Catherine with the news that her son Alexander Jr. was engaged, and she fretted over the departure of her son William, tired of life at West Point, for adventure in Illinois, America’s westward frontier. She sent word throughout the 1820s of the steady stream of children born to her son John and his wife, Mary, now living in a little two-story house on Varick Street, and shared news of the death of John Church in London.
Eliza also increasingly pressed “big sister” invitations on a cash-strapped and widowed Catherine, urging her sister to bring her small children and spend the winter at the Grange, where “I can make it agreeable to you as we have an excellent clergyman near us let me intreat you to come down.” When Catherine delayed, “[Come] with them and live with me,” Eliza followed up tenaciously,
and let my wishes be complied with in making you and your Children comfortable. . . . [Come here] to live as soon as you can. Adieu my beloved and remember we are to be together as long as we live Sister and Comply with my Earnest request yours always Affectionately.
The loss of Angelica had left a hole in Eliza’s heart, and she missed the confidences of a sister.
Thoughts of the biography still consumed Eliza too. She pressed members of the family and people who had met Alexander for information to pass to the biographers, for “domestic anecdotes” and recollections of his bearing, his character, “style of conversation—and indeed everything which will illustrate the elasticity of his mind, variety of his knowledge, playfulness of his wit, excellence of his heart, firmness, forbearance, virtues, &c.”
Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton Page 27