Part Two
Tearing Up Wall Street
12
American Honeymoon
The Hamilton Town House
New York, New York
December 1783
At last, after three years of marriage, winning the war for Independence, surviving the Battle of Yorktown, and finally leaving the comforts of the Pastures, Alexander and Elizabeth Hamilton stood in front of a handsome three-story brick-and-brownstone town house located at 57 Wall Street, in New York City. With a little help from Eliza’s dowry, well-informed family connections whispering about a fantastic deal on a pretty little piece of well-located property, and Alex’s quick decision-making to snap it up before someone else did, it was theirs. The young husband’s hands shook as he unlocked the front door with the key. His wife stood behind him, eager and impatient to see their new abode. With a flourish, he opened both doors and turned to his bride with a smile. “Voilà!”
Eliza clasped her hands in delight, and Alex’s eyes softened to see how sweet she looked in the late afternoon sunlight, the golden rays shining on the chestnut tendrils of her hair. This was home now, their home, his home. After years of living as a student and a soldier, and a guest at his in-laws’ sumptuous residence, he finally had a place to call his own. “Hold on,” he said, before Eliza could take another step.
With a huge grin, Alex literally swept her off her feet and carried her over the threshold. Eliza giggled in his arms, giddy to think that they were all alone at last—with no servants, sisters, little brothers, or parents in sight. So what if the house was practically empty! The lack of tables and chairs, china and silver, candles and ale and compote and even such banal necessities as salt and pepper were more than made up for by the blessed privacy she and Alex finally shared, not to mention that the one piece of furniture they did own was an enormous, overstuffed feather bed.
It was on this bed that he laid her down now, and Eliza felt almost coquettish, gazing up at Alex from her dark lashes as she slowly divested herself of all her layers, enjoying the ragged breathing coming from him as he quickly stripped down and joined her under the covers. His blue eyes glittered in the dim twilight, as he held his body above hers.
“Two years ago, when you were in Virginia, I was so worried,” she whispered, craning her neck upward to kiss him on his. “Part of me wondered if you would ever come back. I don’t think I ever told you that.”
“My dearest, bravest girl,” he murmured, bending down to kiss her on the soft spot near her ear. “I am home now. You are my home.”
“Yes,” she said, closing her eyes as he covered her mouth with his.
And then there was no more time or desire for conversation, as even the most articulate statesman in America found words paled in comparison to the sublime experience of being with his beloved.
*
THE MARRIED COUPLE spent the first two days strolling the frigid streets of New York, hand in hand, oblivious to the cold and marveling as the abandoned storefronts and town houses filled overnight with newly-minted Americans, some of them returning to a city they had thought lost forever, others taking advantage of the hundreds of empty houses and shops to establish a toehold in a major metropolitan area at prices that would never come around again.
By night they dined at the beautiful walnut table that had at last arrived from Albany, covered with a gorgeous muslin tablecloth whose delicate blue-and-gold tracery Eliza’s great-grandmother Rensselaer had embroidered more than half a century ago, set with the Crown Derby china dinnerware they had found at a local shop, along with a lovely set of silver that Stephen Van Rensselaer had given them as a wedding present, and that had slept in its velvet-lined case for the past three years.
For the first few days they drank from a pair of mismatched, battered pewter steins Alex had brought home with him from Yorktown (“That dent was caused by a bullet aimed at my heart,” he said with a twinkle in his eye), but on their third day of New York residence, he returned home with a pair of truly exquisite crystal goblets. The taller one was etched with a brilliantly lifelike depiction of Zeus visiting Danaë in the form of a shower of gold, while the shorter showed the hapless nymph Echo spying on Narcissus, who was too busy staring at his own reflection in a pool of water to notice her. They were the finest glasses Eliza had ever seen, let alone held in her hands—and she had taken many a meal in the Van Rensselaers’ magnificent manor house—and, though Alex could tell she didn’t want to seem ungrateful, she was unable to prevent herself from asking how much they had cost. Alex blushed, then pulled a potato out of his pocket and said, “Let’s just say we’ll be eating a lot of these for the next few weeks.” Fortunately, he had had a bottle of wine in another pocket, and Eliza’s momentary start of alarm was quickly ameliorated.
In fact, the goblets, like everything else they bought for the house, had been a steal. But when you had six large rooms to furnish, and food to be purchased at black market prices, plus rent on top of that—and no income coming in!—the debts were starting to pile up. Alex’s valise was stuffed with bills of sale and IOUs and promissory notes for dozens of different vendors. Fortunately, conditions were tough all over the island, so that pretty much everyone was living on credit and willing to be generous in their terms. Even so, Alex knew he needed to find clients soon, or their first stab at independence would be over before it had ever really begun.
Eliza decided not to chide Alex for his expenses. He would set up his law practice soon enough, and soon everyone would want him as their counselor. She had great faith in her husband, and her frugal nature would serve them well until he was established.
As their habit, in the morning of the second week of their residence, they headed out for their daily walk, arm in arm. The air was cold but crisp, and pleasantly tinged with the smell of wood smoke and, faintly, the salt of the sea. Just a few doors up from their new house they came to a much larger building, a handsome Palladian edifice with a four-columned portico jutting out from the second floor. The street was relatively quiet, and what traffic there was centered around the building, where official-looking men marched determinedly in and out, trailed by retinues of assistants and clerks. A simple plaque affixed to the building’s white stone front told the reason for so much activity:
CITY HALL
Eliza stared across the street at the building, which was on a par with the Van Rensselaers’ manor house in size and grandeur. Yet, unlike the country mansion on its wide lawns and manicured gardens, this was surrounded by other buildings, from the two-hundred-foot-tall spire of Trinity Church up the street, to the upright elegance of town houses like the one she now occupied with her husband.
“It is strange to me, who grew up surrounded by acres and acres of garden and field,” she said, “to live in a house that is located not just on the same street but the same block as a municipal building, let alone City Hall.”
Their talk was interrupted by the squeal of a pig dashing down the street. “That is municipal life,” Alex said, laughing. “It has everything the country has, only it’s all smaller, and on top of each other.”
Indeed, after a lifetime spent on the outskirts of a modest enclave like Albany, Eliza had been nervous about moving to a city as large and cosmopolitan as New York. She had been surprised to find a landscape that reminded her a lot of her native village. The southern tip of Manhattan was crisscrossed with a few dozen streets of three-and four-story brick town houses, not unlike the streets that crowded Albany’s riverfront. Their dense, truncated perspectives felt a little mazelike to someone raised with the vistas from the top of a hill in a mansion surrounded by gardens and orchards. But the houses themselves were handsome and generously proportioned, and within a few blocks gave way to more familiar, shingled houses with Dutch gables enclosed by white pickets or rustic zigzagged logs containing well-tended kitchen gardens and chicken coops and rabbit hutches (and, it must be admitted, the occasional pigsty).
About a mile north of the Battery, t
hese close-knit plots surrendered to open farmland. Here, Bayard’s Hill, with its small fort atop it, overlooked the sprawling calm waters of the meandering bays and inlets of Collect Pond, which, she was told, would be covered with ice skaters as soon as its forty-six acres of becalmed water had frozen fully through. To the west was the same Hudson River that bordered Albany 150 miles north. It was wider here, and choppier, thanks to the Atlantic tides. Mirrored on the opposite side of Manhattan was the so-called East River (which Alex had explained to her was not a river at all, but rather something called an estuary, a channel connecting two bodies of salt water, in this case Long Island Sound and New York Harbor). But whatever it actually was, it looked just like a river to her.
And then, of course, there was the ocean itself. Eliza had been as far south as Morristown, New Jersey (where Alex proposed to her), but had not made the trek to the coast because marauding British troops had made the area too dangerous. (She still shuddered to recall how close Alex had come to death when he rode north to persuade her parents to let her marry him rather than the odious Henry Livingston.)
And now they were walking down Pearl Street—so-named for the nacreous shells of the oysters that thrived in the waters surrounding Manhattan. Eliza had seen no sign of their shells, let alone pearls (though a slight odor of fish was discernible in the stiff breeze that blew off the water). In truth, she had turned her gaze out to the vast gray horizon, dotted here and there by anchored ships, a combination of trading vessels waiting for normal commerce to renew so they could fill up their holds before heading back across the Atlantic to the new nation’s trading partners. And, here and there, an American military frigate kept watch for British ships whose captains might not have learned of the peace during the four weeks it had taken them to cross the Atlantic.
Eliza found the endless expanse of water both soothing and alarming. It was the first time she had ever contemplated just how large the world was. It was difficult to conceive that there was land on the other side of all this water—not one continent but three—Europe, Asia, and Africa, whose vastness, she had seen on maps, was far greater than both North and South Americas. Her whole life had been spent in a single town of a few thousand souls, with just a couple of journeys of a few hundred miles to broaden her knowledge of the world. One of those trips—the journey to Morristown in 1777—had resulted in her marriage to Alex, which only underscored that the strangeness of the world wasn’t to be avoided, let alone feared, but to be sought out for the treasures it could bring. She stared out at the white-frothed swells for several minutes, contemplating the journeys that were ahead of her, some physical, some emotional, and then she took Alex’s arm in hers and said, “Come. We have work to do.”
Their path today led away from the water, but they were still close enough that Eliza could feel its wind at her back, the dampness, the omnipresent smell of salt that she was coming to associate with her new home. A coastal winter could be harsher than one farther inland, but Mrs. Schuyler had seen that Eliza went off with two quilted petticoats and a new wool coat with a sable collar, so she was more than warm enough.
As she and Alex strolled farther up the street, she nodded at another town house, nearly identical to theirs (though she couldn’t help noticing that its parlor windows were already adorned by lovely curtains in a rich blue brocade).
“Have I told you about our new neighbors?” she asked her husband.
“You have not,” Alex answered. “How is it that you have made their acquaintance already? We have only been in the city for a week, and all that time was spent interviewing servants and buying necessaries. How have you possibly managed to meet anyone?”
Eliza petted his arm in hers. “Never discount a lady’s network for efficiency of communication.”
“So who are our new neighbors?”
“I suppose it is proper to say that we are their new neighbors, since they have been here for some months, as the sumptuousness of their draperies suggest. It is Mr. Aaron Burr that was colonel, and his new wife, Theodosia, the former Mrs. Prevost.”
She felt Alex start. “You do not mean the wife of General Augustine Prevost, the British officer?” he asked, astonished. Prevost was well-known to Alex as the man who had led British forces during the Siege of Savannah in 1779, when American forces had been decimated when they tried—and failed—to retake the great Georgia city. “I did not realize he had died, or divorced.”
“No, not Augustine, but his brother, Jacques Marcus, who was a colonel, and died in the Indies. You met her, you know,” Eliza continued. “You told me that you dined at her estate, the Hermitage, in New Jersey.”
Alex’s face lit up with the memory. “So I did! With them both, in fact. Colonel—I mean, Mr. Burr was quite flirtatious, as I recall. And she married at the time! And a decade older! And a passel of children besides!”
Eliza didn’t know if her husband was scandalized or amused. On the one hand, Alex had been so ardent about putting aside the differences between patriots and loyalists. On the other, Burr had been, like Alex, a colonel in the Continental army, and was, if anything, even more keen to assume a leadership role in the new government than Alex was. Women may not have been allowed to vote or serve in government, but everyone knew that a society wife controlled her husband’s social calendar, and thus his social circle. A somewhat disgraced loyalist wife did not seem like the kind of choice that played well for an ambitious patriot like Burr.
But then, she told herself, since there were no more Schuyler daughters for Mr. Burr to marry, I guess he had to make do.
“Five,” Eliza said out loud, “to which they added a daughter of their own this spring, also called Theodosia.”
“Well, who would have guessed! The great patriot Aaron Burr, marrying a loyalist!”
“Are you shocked?” Eliza asked. She didn’t bother to keep her voice down. By now they were well past the house, and she had no fears of being overheard, if Mr. and Mrs. Burr were, in fact, at home.
“No, not at all,” Alex said. “The divisions between patriot and loyalist are not nearly as great as war would make them seem. You mark my words, once the United States has established itself, it will renew cordial relations with England. We have far more in common than we do in opposition. But Mr. Burr was always rather … stiff in his views. I wonder that he overcame them.”
“Perhaps it was simply love,” Eliza said.
Alex took a moment to lift her gloved fingers to his lips and kiss them. “Well, perhaps it was,” he said in a musing tone. “In which case, there is hope for us as a species. Still, I don’t suppose we’ll be having them over for dinner any time soon.”
“What, you do not approve of the union?” she asked.
“Oh, not at all. I approve. I approve heartily.”
“I take it you do not care for Mr. Burr?”
“Not particularly,” Alex shrugged. “The few times I met him he struck me as being rather too impressed with himself, when his success seems to me to have more to do with family connections than any great ability on his part.”
Eliza passed over this in silence. As the daughter of a Schuyler and a Van Rensselaer, she would have a hard time blaming someone for exploiting their pedigree, especially if they put it to good use. And it was important that she and Alex begin to build a network of friends, acquaintances, and others who would prove useful as they climbed the social ladder.
“Mr. Burr was quite helpful to my family during the war,” she confessed finally. “I never told you what happened at the Pastures while you were at Yorktown.”
He turned to her in surprise. “You have kept something from me?”
Eliza turned pink. “I did not want you to worry, and when we were reunited I was so happy it slipped my mind.”
She told Alex the story of the redcoat invasion and Mr. Burr’s role in their rescue. He listened intently, holding her even closer as if afraid to lose her to the enemy even as she was safe in his arms.
“I am so thankful,
my angel,” he whispered, not caring who could see him nuzzle her hair with his nose as he kissed her forehead. “But alas, we cannot have the Burrs to dinner.”
“Why not?”
Alex laughed. “Have you forgotten? We only have a chair each and no servants to serve at table!”
“Oh, you!” Eliza said, swatting him with a gloved hand. “You mustn’t tease me!”
*
WHEN THEY RETURNED home, they worked in one room or another—shelving Alex’s law books in his study, moving a portrait of Catherine Schuyler from the front parlor to the dining room to shield it from the strong light that came in the south-facing windows, since they had no curtains yet (“Mama does like to be close to food,” Eliza couldn’t help quipping as Alex centered the picture over the fireplace), or rearranging the small but growing number of silver serving dishes in the glass-fronted hutch as new pieces came in.
But at a certain point the serious business of decorating would always give way to more playful rearranging, as Eliza stood all the forks and knives on the mantel like couples dancing a reel, or Alex took the squashes from the larder and laid them on the dining table draped in Ipswich lace like so many sleeping infants. One or the other of them would pretend to be upset by the other’s mischief, and then the perpetrator would be forced to make it up with kisses and sweet-nothings, until finally the misbehaver would grab a candle and say, “Let me make it up to you upstairs.”
13
Hamilton by Her Side
Fraunces Tavern and the Hamilton Town House
New York, New York
December 1783
After six years of British occupation, the great city of New York was a shell of its former self. Before the war, it had been the third-largest city in the northern colonies, with more than twenty-five thousand residents. It trailed only Philadelphia and Boston in size, and was on course to overtake both. But after the British conquered Manhattan in 1777, that number dropped by half as thousands of patriots fled the invaders. During the six years of British rule, the city’s population gradually recovered as loyalists from all over the colonies left the island for safe haven. Their numbers were swelled by thousands of redcoats shipped over from England, who used the city as their base of operations for the war. The once-vibrant metropolis was transformed into a massive army base, replete with all the vices one expects when large numbers of pent-up young men cluster together for months at a time. It seemed that every other storefront had been transformed into a drinking house—or a house of ill repute.
Love & War_An Alex & Eliza Story Page 13